Bob James, They Call Each Other Brother: Secret Societies and the Strange Slow Death of Mateship in Australia, 1788-2010: The Authentic History.

Patmore, Greg

Bob James, They Call Each Other Brother: Secret Societies and the Strange Slow Death of Mateship in Australia, 1788-2010: The Authentic History, Self-Published, 2010. pp. 238. $25.00 paper.

The author's main purpose in writing this book is to highlight the significance of fraternal societies in Australian history. His primary focus is on the nineteenth century, where he focuses on the foundation and growth of Masons, the Loyal Orange Lodge, the Hibernians and other fraternal societies in Australia. James details the importance of their rituals for the formation of trade unions and their importance in highlighting sectarian differences in Australia. While the friendly societies provided assistance to members through a range of benefits, their emphasis on rituals created controversy and in some cases heightened divisions within Australia particularly on sectarian lines between Catholics and Protestants. He emphasises the significance of the membership and influence of these organisations at their peak, but argues that state surveillance and managerialism 'eventually brought Freemasonary and all the fraternities which followed to their knees' (p. 10).

One weakness with the book is that it deals only relatively briefly with the 'slow death' of the fraternities in the twentieth century. The rise of the welfare system could have been dealt with in more depth and the role of the societies in dealing with state sponsored schemes such as workers' compensation and Medibank could have explored. One group missing from the discussion is the employers, particularly in the public sector, who established funds for sickness, accident and superannuation. While the author is aware of the role of the fraternal organisations in the fight between Groupers and Communists, it would have been interesting to explore this in more detail. He notes the presence of occupation-based Masonic lodges in groups such as teachers, bus drivers and steel workers (p. 192). This could have been further explored as there were Masonic groups at the workplace level, which gave support to the Communists in preference to the Groupers.

While the author does engage with labour historians, it is selective. The discussion of mateship, for example, overlooks some of the recent interesting work by Nick Dyrenfurth. The author also contests the claims by labour historians that some organisations were trade unions, noting instead that they were 'trade orientated societies' with their emphasis on rituals and benefits (p. 10). In attempting to differentiate these fraternal societies from other organisations, he faces similar issues in drawing clear lines between them. Whether the US Knights of Labor was simply a fraternal society could be disputed: the Knights of Labor went further than the Masons and other Groups, whom the author notes primarily focused on 'material gain and competitive pragmatism' (p. 171), called for the transformation of capitalist society through worker co-operatives, and were engaged in major strikes in the USA. By the time the Knights had reached Australia in 1889 (pp. 148-9), they had already discarded their initiation rituals in 1881.

There are other minor questions that arise with the book. While the book does provide detailed footnoting, some points could have been sourced to provide information for other researchers. For example, the author makes the significant point that as many as 90 per cent of street parades in Australia between 1840 and 1940 'were staged by fraternal societies or dominated by them' (p. 59), but provides no source for this claim. It would have been also helpful if the author had consolidated the data on the membership of these organisations over time into an appendix and provided a bibliography to assist further research. Overall, this book assists labour historians in recognizing the importance of these fraternal organisations in Australian history and provides a basis for further research and debate.

GREG PATMORE

The University of Sydney