Labour and politics.

Dyrenfurth, Nick

In 1888, a hitherto unthinkable book appeared in the Australian colonies. Edited by the radical journalist John Norton, the first history of the antipodean labour movement was published as the grandiosely titled The History of Capital and Labour in All Lands and Ages. Norton's 943 page tome--featuring contributions from leading unionists such as former Melbourne Trades Hall secretary W.E. Murphy--was a new edition of an American work, prefaced with about 300 pages sketching developments in the antipodes. With one eye fixed firmly on the present, Norton's introductory stanza explicitly praised the 'high and honourable part which labour has taken in the formation of national character':

   Labour from the first marked Australia for its own. It is the
   country upon which the old European systems have had the least
   influence; as it is the country where the new institutions of
   democracy have taken the firmest hold in the national character and
   life of the people. (1)

Norton's heroic New World thesis wasn't particularly original. This radical nationalist story was being propagated by the likes of the Sydney Bulletin and the William Lane-edited the Brisbane Boomerang. Such publications were instrumental to the construction of a narrative whereby labour embodied Australia's innately democratic, egalitarian temper. As Lane editorialised in March 1889:

   Labour Day is Australia's holiday, for Australia is the
   labour-land, her thoughts are yet labour-thoughts and her reforms
   labour-reforms. It was from the diggers that she conceived
   nationality ... It was for the rights of labour to produce wealth
   and to enjoy the wealth it produces that they floated the starry
   cross at Eureka. (2)

Progressively nationalist and proudly un-objective, such writing aimed to legitimate tentative moves being made towards union-sponsored labour-in-politics during the late 1880s, notwithstanding Lane's dubious historical interpretation. And while Norton's comparative method proved to be an altogether rare beast, the tone of such activist scholarship proved a hardy perennial over the course of the next century.

The purpose of this article is to survey the shape of labour-in-politics historiography; to give a sense of its leading works and major trends over the course of the past one hundred and twenty years. It does so by tracing developments across four periods.

The first period comprises two distinct phases. It begins with the foundational, labour movement-based studies of labour-in-politics, pioneered by the likes of Norton and Labor politicians George Black and William Guthrie Spence. The contribution of these writers has arguably been historiographically under-analysed--later scholars not only drew upon their work (as both primary and secondary source material) but were also clearly influenced by the tone of their intellectual exertions. The latter phase covers the period following the social and political trauma associated with the end of the Great War, the Great Depression and the conclusion to the World War II. Exemplified by the scholarship of Vere Gordon Childe and Brian Fitzpatrick, a far more critical historical appraisal of Labor, and the utility of parliamentary politics more generally, emerged to challenge the heroic earlier interpretation.

The post-World War II era constitutes the second period. In tandem with the establishment of labour history as a specialised academic discipline, Old Left writers such as Bob Gollan and Ian Turner drew upon and updated the radical nationalist account, in the process producing a body of activist-minded, Marxist-orientated scholarship. Considered alongside the parallel and altogether more sympathetic Labor histories of non-Marxist historians, this period undoubtedly represents one of the genre's antipodean high-water marks.

The Old Left interpretation came under sustained assault during the late 1960s from the New Left, ushering in a third period that destabilised traditional approaches to writing labour-in-politics. Combined with the rise of social history--with its emphasis upon supra-class categories of historical analysis, most prominently those of race, gender and sexuality--and the influence of the new social movements, labour-in-politics lost its rank as the dominant historiographical marker, notwithstanding some heated debates surrounding the nature of the 'Labor tradition' during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The fourth and final period, running from the mid-1990s until the present day, is one characterised by contradiction. As the new millennium approached many scholars feared that labour history was in its death throes, chiefly owing to the rise of postmodernism within the academy but also as a result of the disorientation and global retreat of labour movements in the post-Cold War world. Such fears have proven to be unfounded. Indeed, the influence of the postmodernist inspired linguistic and cultural 'turns' has arguably enlivened the historiographical relevance of labour-in-politics, which, though it has struggled to regain its once privileged position, is to be found in rude health as the first decade of the twenty-first century closes.

Across my survey, three recurring themes will be discerned. First, labour-in-politics studies have been fiercely partisan affairs orientated towards contemporary endeavours. Few scholars working in the field can be described as apolitical spectators: the past is a crucial battlefield for the Left and, indeed, a terrain over which struggles for its ideological soul are fought. Labour history is political by definition. (3)

Second, as a corollary, the ALP is undoubtedly the major combat zone that scholars have sallied forth across the past century. This occurred for a very good reason: comparatively speaking Labor enjoyed internationally precocious success and has since proved a very resilient institution. Moreover, its larger than life personalities and drama-filled schisms somewhat naturally drew scholars into its historiographical orbit. Yet, at least until recently, academic writers have historically interpreted Labor in Government in pejorative terms, swaying between a Marxian understanding of the capitalist state and a lament of Labor's alleged anti-intellectualism.

Third, the genre of labour-in-politics has displayed a remarkable ability to regenerate despite several existential threats. This is not to suggest that the subdiscipline does not face an ongoing fight for relevance. Thus, I conclude by suggesting a number of potential avenues for further innovation and renewal.

'Dully on the Ear of the Fat Man and the Greasy Rags which Champion Him': The Foundational Period of Labour-in-Politics Historiography

The first period of labour-in-politics historiography ironically began before the colonial Labor parties made their first appeals to electors. Norton's The History of Capital and Labour was the first such publication and involved a clear commemorative impulse. 1888 was the centenary of white settlement and 'Australian trade unionists saw it as their duty to document the success of their labor movement for others'. (4) For Norton, the labour movement's contribution to building Australian democracy was an augury for the successful movement of unionists into parliament. Indeed, Australia's innately egalitarian spirit made this evolution inevitable. Yet we are inclined to underestimate the intellectual challenge to the prevailing powers this radical account constituted in its day. Moreover, this interpretation was to prove a hardy perennial. As Norton erroneously put it (strictly speaking no 'labour party' existed), 'The history of Australia cannot be written without reference to the past actions and policy of the labour party; nor can the future be foretold without reference to the present attitude of the workers ... Australia is pre-eminently a labour state'. (5)

Such history was simultaneously designed to service and celebrate the labour movement, what Bob Gollan later termed labour history's 'immediate practical value'. (6) Norton's work emerged in the context of the increasing political orientation of colonial unionists during the late 1880s. And over the course of the next two decades, the emergent genre's thematic preoccupations and narrative tone matched the travails of working-class and radical politics. Instructively this body of work was wholly produced from outside the academy--Australian history, let alone labour or political history, would not find a state-sponsored institutional home for decades to come. (7) Rather these writers were labour intellectuals, working within labour institutions: parties, trade unions, newspapers, and educational organisations. This genre was all the more necessary because the few political histories written before World War I tended to be generalist, top-down narratives detailing the development of Australian self-government and associated democratic institutions, often within an imperial or liberal Whiggish perspective that consciously downplayed labour's contribution.

This activist strain hastened following the creation of the colonial Labor parties, beginning with the NSW Labor's contest of the 1891 election. It was penned by figures drawn almost entirely from the movement; George Black, a former Bulletin journalist and serving NSW Labor politician, was a leading light. In 1894 Black, famous for enunciating the party's ethos of 'support in return for concessions', penned a pamphlet entitled Labor in Politics: The New South Wales Labor Party. It was, in Black's words, a 'defence' (but not 'an apology') of NSW Labor's record in the context of two serious internal schisms. Black optimistically argued that Labor was the driving force for progressive social change. Further, Labor MPs had 'exercised an educational effect on ... Parliament', but one that had fallen 'dully on the ear of the Fat Man and the greasy rags which champion him'. Black's tract would be updated and in 1910 enlarged into a somewhat self-serving history of NSW Labor. Aside from Black, more journalistic and less consciously partisan texts emerged during the 1890s, as per T.R. Roydhouse and H.J. Taperell's short history of Labor's spectacular electoral arrival. (8)

Black's writing skills were honed as a journalist with the Barrier Truth and Australian Worker. Unsurprisingly then the emergent genre he helped craft appeared in their pages. Black's history was extracted in the Worker and it was the STLC-operated Australian Workman who published his historical pamphlets. For the most part this writing was tailored to an internal audience of activists and wider working class readership. Yet Labor's precocious success stirred the intellectual interest of outsiders, such as British Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, keen to observe first-hand the so-called 'antipodean social laboratory' or 'workingman's paradise'. Following personal study tours during the 1900s, the Frenchman Albert Metin and Canadian Victor S. Clark each discerned a deeply pragmatic quality to antipodean social democracy. Owing to its Benthamite foundation, continental theories of socialism were anathema. 'The practical objectives of the labour party are not so much socialist as social-democratic', noted Clark. 'Australian labour leaders know little or nothing of Marxian theories ... [and] there is little social idealism among the rank and file of the working classes'. Nonetheless, in Metin's words, the country had 'gone further than any other along the road to social experimentation'. (9) This interpretation would henceforth be deployed as a means of lauding Labor as the 'party of initiative' or condemning its alleged non-socialist anti-intellectualism.

For their part Labor propagandists continued to wield a celebratory, internally-focussed form of history. This genre reached its apogee in 1909 with the publication of W.G. Spence's quasi-autobiographical history of the labour movement, Australia's Awakening. By now a federal Labor politician Spence was arguably the nation's longest serving and most well-known unionist, having played a prominent role in the 1890 maritime strike as well as the formation of the influential Australian Workers' Union (AWU). Australia's Awakening was an unashamedly partisan read. As Spence argued, 'If the Socialist Movement of the world is helped, encouraged, and stimulated by this record of our success in Australia, I shall have ample reward'. (10) Bede Nairn paints Spence's book as merely self-serving mythology 'to disarm growing opposition in the AWU to his presidency and to defend the union from the Industrial Workers of the World'. (11) But Spence--and figures such as then Opposition Leader Andrew Fisher (12)--was convinced of the historical need to document the movement's achievements. 'The Labor Movement has now become an almost dominant factor in the political life of the community', noted Spence, 'hence its history, its character and aims should be studied by every citizen of the continent'. By taking ownership of Australia's past, Labor could potentially control its future. Spence thus portrayed Labor as the inheritor of a glorious tradition of radical nationalism, extending from the gold miners of the 1850s to its contemporary battle against the recently consummated 'fusion' of anti-Labor parties: 'Labor has forced them into one camp, and the country can see that they were really one crowd all the time'. (13) Hyperbole aside, in 1910 Fisher's party became the world's first stand-alone national Labor government.

Spence's optimistic outlook would be cruelled by the onset of the Great War. Like Black he was expelled from Labor for supporting conscription. In the meantime other party insiders penned celebratory short histories. (14) As the war destabilised Fisher's administration, the first properly Marxist account of the ALP appeared--discounting Lenin's (posthumously popular) continental observations. Socialist journalist W.R. Winspear's 1915 pamphlet Economic Warfare denounced Labor's backsliding: 'Between the conduct of the Party of 1891-94 and that of 1912-13, there is a mighty difference, a deplorable falling off, much of which can only be credited to the influence of environment.' In order to win government Labor 'placate[d] both the workers and the small capitalists and shopkeepers'; once ensconced in office Labor politicians 'commenced to babble about representing all classes'. There was an inherent contradiction to this argument overlooked by Winspear's later admirers. To win over so-called non-working class voters, a priori Labor claimed to represent 'all classes', styling itself as 'the people's party'. Still, according to Winspear, Labor had achieved one thing 'in-so-far as the Labor Party had been instrumental in compelling [fusion] it was the greatest achievement of the party up to that time. The party succeeded in driving its opponents all into one party, in unmasking them, and disclosing their identity of interests'. (15)

Winspear's ideological slight set the template for twentieth century far-left critiques of the ALP. Within the Labor Party however, the war's prosecution opened up a vigorous debate as to the merits of its reformist parliamentary strategy. Following the 1916 ALP split over conscription, the remaining Laborites continued to use history as a weapon, as per party powerbroker Ted Holloway's valorisation of the anti-conscription campaign. Others sought to defend Labor from charges of legislative indolence. (16) However the dissatisfaction felt by many as regards the conduct of Labor governments would lay the groundwork for the emergence of a more critical, introspective scholarship.

'A Vast Machine for Capturing Political Power': From the Deserts Labor's Critics Come

As has been well-documented, in the war's immediate aftermath Labor lurched decidedly Left. Some turned away from the ALP altogether, attracted to 'One Big Union' (OBU) syndicalism or, inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution, founded the Communist Party of Australia in 1920. Likewise, historians adopted a more radical critique of Labor's achievements. One such critic was university trained Labor activist Vere Gordon Childe, who had also worked as private secretary to NSW Labor premier, John Storey. Informed by Labor's disastrous wartime experience and the internecine conflux that rocked its NSW branch during the early 1920s, Childe's How Labour Governs (1923) diagnosed Labor's failings as a parliamentary working-class party--a strategy he termed 'politicalism'. Echoing Winspear's analysis, Childe claimed that once Labor MPs made their Faustian-like entrances into the comfortable, 'middle-class atmosphere of Parliament', (17) their allegiance to their own class inevitably waned so that Labor failed to implement its anti-capitalist platform. Childe also implicated the party's unionist machine:

   the Labour Party, starting with a band of inspired Socialists,
   degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but
   did not know how to use that power when attained except for the
   profit of individuals; so the OBU will, in all likelihood, become
   just a gigantic apparatus for the glorification of a few bosses.
   Such is the history of all Labour organisations in Australia, and
   that not because they are Australian, but because they are Labour.
   (18)

For Childe, in order to win and hold onto office, Labor appealed beyond its trade-unionist, working-class base--to small farmers, shopkeepers and other non-working class groupings--and in non-socialist, often highly nationalist rhetoric. In Childe's words, 'Labour Governments ... followed a vacillating policy and ... tried to govern in the interests of all classes instead of standing up boldly in defence of the one class which put them in power'. Again, there was a certain amount of reverse causation at play. While possessing a working-class base was indeed crucial to Labor's electoral success, this heterogeneous constituency had to be won in the first place and, in any case, many of its members did not identify as socialists. Nonetheless How Labour Governs remains the first and most valuable analysis of what Childe dubbed Labor's 'novel theory of democracy'; the organisational mechanisms of caucus, pledge and conference supremacy that sought to compel parliamentary solidarity. According to Childe, upon taking office Laborites 'under [went] a mental transformation'; subsequent disciplinary measures proved futile, often resulting in a formal split, and inexorably, electoral defeat. (19) Childe's analysis was to prove extremely influential, establishing what historian F.B. Smith later characterised as the 'Doctrine of Primal Socialist Innocence and the Fall'. (20)

Childe's work did not immediately cultivate a full-blown academic discipline. The 1920s witnessed few labour histories, although influential liberal W.K. Hancock did produce his pioneering Australia (1930), hailing the nation-building role played by Labor's 'practical men'. (21) ALP state branches published some sporadic activist-histories of a fairly defensive tone. For instance, Queensland ALP politician James Larcombe wrote some nine histories of his party between 1925 and 1944. (22) It was not until the late 1930s however that a non-party authored history appeared: journalist and ALP sympathiser Warren Denning's tale of the Scullin Labor government's calamitous fall, Caucus Crisis (1937). Shortly afterwards, perhaps the first properly biographical study appeared, future ALP leader Bert Evatt's study of W.A. Holman (1940). (23) But the Depression further convinced many that the existence of Labor governments was a futile exercise. Academically trained socialist activist Lloyd Ross penned a scathing critique of Labor's ideological frailties and a series of Communist Party of Australia (CPA) commissioned histories condemned Labor's alleged betrayal of the working class, as per books by L.L. Sharkey (1944) and E.W. Campbell (1945). In the view of these authors, it was not Labor but the revolutionary CPA who constituted the truest expression of the Australian working class. In the teleological words of party chairman Sharkey, the CPA's formation was 'one of the historical milestones on the road of the Australian working class toward its liberation'. (24)

Around this time another figure moulded by the events of the Depression emerged to produce the most sustained labour history hitherto written. Brian Fitzpatrick, variously a journalist, socialist, economic historian and civil libertarian, consciously built upon Childe's interpretation. Fitzpatrick grew disillusioned with the ALP (in fact he was expelled from its ranks in 1944). Having published the first volume of his anti-British imperialist history of Australian capitalism in 1939, two years later Fitzpatrick produced his Short History of the Australian Labour Movement. This was the most explicit statement of the radical nationalist interpretation. For Fitzpatrick national independence was intimately linked to working class liberation and his book drew a lineage from colonial democracy and unionist activism through to the early years of the commonwealth. Fitzpatrick mocked scholarly impartiality:

   The history of the Australian people is amongst other things the
   history of a struggle between the organised rich and the organised
   poor, and the usual aim of the belligerents has been to keep or win
   political and economic power ... But I discriminate between the
   belligerents. I take the view that the effort of the organised
   working class has been an effort to achieve social justice. (25)

While Fitzpatrick's sympathies lay with 'the Labor effort' because it happened 'to coincide with an effort towards social justice' he denied Labor a golden age. (26) The party that emerged amidst the 1890s economic Armageddon was born into the 'original sin' of reformism. Rather than pursuing socialism, Labor sought 'nation-building through a capitalist economic system'. (27) Fitzpatrick's study was institutionally focussed but he was keenly attentive to shifts in political discourse decades before the so-called linguistic turn made its appearance; he noted the emergence of a class-based language of 'capital' and 'labour' during the 1880s, which anticipated the so-called 'class war' of the 1890s. (28) Never able to secure university tenure himself, Fitzpatrick's melancholic reading would soon find a sympathetic home within the ranks of official academia.

'Written with Answers to Present Problems in Mind': Labour-in-Politics and the Hegemony of the Australian Old Left

The critical interpretation of labour-in-politics strengthened following World War II as the so-called Old Left emerged to turn labour history into an acceptable form of academic scholarship during the 1950s and 1960s. Its most prominent members were the ex-Communist activists and World War II servicemen, Gollan, Turner and Ward. Informed by a populist Marxism that deployed theory for practical purposes, the Old Left were proud nationalists intent upon asserting Australia's cultural, economic and political independence. Following the lead of their movement-based forbears, the Old Left conceived of their scholarly task in explicitly activist and utilitarian terms, in their case heightened by the Cold War ascendancy of Menzian conservatism and the relentless intellectual offensive against the Left. Stressing Australia's egalitarian past was viewed as a key means of creating a progressive future; likewise lessons gleaned from the labour movement's past endeavours would provide guidance for political struggles ahead. Like Childe, the Old Left stressed Labor's so-called 'fall from grace', arguing that the workers' party turned away from its socialist roots from the early 1900s onwards, courting non-working class voters for electoral purposes. Nonetheless, the Old Left maintained that Labor had initiated substantial democratic change and thus contributed to Australia's egalitarian temper. Apart from their important scholarly exertions, Gollan, together with Eric Fry (and non-Marxist Bede Nairn), was largely responsible for creating the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History in 1961, and the next year the first edition of Labour History appeared. It is no exaggeration to say that this golden era of institutional development and scholarly output shaped the contours of the subsequent historiographical terrain.

Perhaps the most important Old Left monograph was Gollan's revised doctoral thesis, Radical and Working Class Politics (1960), a history of Australian left-wing politics between 1850 and 1910. The book's central contention held that mid-to-late nineteenth century Australia boasted a proud 'record of democratic political and social advance' and the major initiator of that progressive change was the labour movement. Labor, originally the product of socialists and militant unionists, turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. Gollan's account of Labor's transformation from a working class to a nationally-orientated party argued that the electoral giant-killer that bestrode federal politics in 1910 was informed by 'liberal rather than a socialist theory'. (29) In more cultural terms two years earlier, Ward's famous study The Australian Legend traced a radical egalitarian lineage from the convicts and nomadic bushworkers of the mid-nineteenth century to the fin de siecle labour movement. Others associated with the Old Left grouping also wrote politically-themed works, such as Miriam Dixson's series of articles on the NSW labour movement that would culminate in her 1977 biography of controversial Labor premier, Jack Lang. (30)

The other landmark Old Left work was arguably Ian Turner's 1965 Industrial Labour and Politics, again the revised product of a doctorate. Turner traced the ideological temper and struggles (both internal and external) of the labour movement across the first two decades of the twentieth century, although he overwhelmingly concentrated upon the Great War. Like Gollan, Turner noted Labor's increasingly populist, cross-class appeal to the electorate during the 1900s as militant rivals emerged in the pre-war period. For all the later criticism of the Old Left's institutionally focussed approach, Turner was in fact espousing the same 'history from below' ethos as the more famous English social historian E.P. Thompson. In Turner's words, labour history was that of 'a new kind' whereby the 'masses' rather than 'elites' constituted the dominant forces of historical progress. Turner did not conceal his partisanship:

   Labour history has a special attraction because of the high
   aspirations of the movement, which traditionally seeks not just to
   change governments but to change society ... not only are the
   historian's sympathies engaged, but his work affects present
   circumstances and is often written with answers to present problems
   in mind. (31)

Turner's radical sympathies did not prevent him from reaching iconoclastic conclusions. For instance his detailed survey of the 1916 conscription referendum noted that the ultimate defeat of Billy Hughes's proposals was won not by the labour movement's appeal to class loyalties but the self-interested motives of small-scale farmers and middling businessmen fearful of losing their workforces.

It would however be misleading to paint the Old Left as the only source of labour-in-politics scholarship in this period. In 1955, before Gollan and Turner had even put pen to paper, Fin Crisp, a non-Marxist political scientist and former Director-General of the Commonwealth Department of Post-War Reconstruction, published The Australian Federal Labour Party 1901-1951, a comprehensive history of the federal Labor's organisational culture. Crisp stressed the working class--but not necessarily socialist--origins of Labor's parliamentary and extra-parliamentary institutions: 'only a solid front based on agreed purposes and collective decisions and sustained by unswerving mutual loyalty could succeed'. (32) A decade later, Don Rawson, also a more ALP-friendly scholar, produced Labor in Vain, a sympathetic, if still pessimistic historical survey of Labor's structures and achievements. Indeed, he openly wondered whether the party could survive another decade of electoral failure. Foreshadowing the rise of the Whitlamite modernising project, Rawson urged Labor to jettison its ossified ideological thinking. Like the Old Left, Rawson's work can be seen as activist-scholarship, albeit from a social democratic, Fabian perspective. Around this time, other less ideologically-inclined scholars wrote biographies of Labor's leading lights, such as L.F. Fitzhardinge's two volume study of Labor 'rat' Billy Hughes, Crisp's political biography of Ben Chifley and Coral Lansbury's short piece on Spence for Labour History in 1967. (33)

'No Solution ... Other than the Establishment of a Communist Society': The New Left and the Challenge of Social History

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Old Left interpretation came under sustained critique from the self-styled New Left, a generation of young, radical activist-historians. Then secondary school teacher and revolutionary socialist Humphrey McQueen's swashbuckling polemic, A New Britannia (1970), excoriated the so-called Old Left 'legenders'. In McQueen's view Australia had always functioned as a capitalist society and was not, as the Old Left would have it, 'possessed by some natural socialist ethos (mateship)'. For the ALP, there was no fall from socialist grace. Labor reformism, what McQueen, borrowing from British New Leftists, pejoratively termed 'labourism', constituted 'the highest expression of a peculiarly Australian petit bourgeoisie'. Labourism stunted the proper revolutionary class consciousness of workers; indeed he fantastically claimed that no working class took shape in colonial Australia, a view later recanted. Far from constituting a progressive force, for McQueen, early Labor was characterised by racism, militarism and subservience to imperialism.

Not only was the Old Left's view of Australia's radical past overly romantic, they had failed to develop an adequate form of class analysis. (34) McQueen was hardly alone in holding this view. At a symposium held in 1968, Terry Irving alleged that 'Australian labour historians have not produced one jot or tittle of evidence ... to show that they understand the concept of class'. (35) However, no one took the old guard to task quite like McQueen. In his opinion, the Left had to escape its (bourgeois) past; rather than informing twentieth century militants, radical nationalism inhibited the Left. (36) And yet McQueen was simply continuing the activist strand of labour history, albeit from an avowedly revolutionary standpoint. Concluding his frantic 'dash from one battlefield to another', he brazenly asserted that the contemporary 'proletariat' possessed 'no solution to its problems other than the establishment of a communist society'. (37) McQueen's book was and remains enormously influential--it has been reprinted and revised on numerous occasions, the last occasion in 2004.

Other New Left writers drew a similarly caustic picture of labourism. Terry Irving and R.W. Connell's Class Structure in Australian History, perhaps the zenith of New Left scholarship, saw institutions such as the ALP as containing forms of working-class mobilisation. (38) Connell's intellectual interests would drift away from labour history; Irving later developed a more complex portrait of parliamentary socialism. Stuart Macintyre developed a clearer yet still critical perspective of the concept as 'a set of institutions and practices rooted in a specific social formation at a particular historical juncture' that 'accepts both the economic relations of the capitalist mode of production, and the legitimacy of the capitalist state'. However, Macintyre, tilting at McQueen, suggested that 'this acceptance is qualified by a limited but powerful class consciousness--labo[u]rism forges its own associations, institutions and practices which are generally subordinate to, but nevertheless distinct from, bourgeois society'. (39) For Macintyre, labourism constituted the strategic modus operandi of the trade union based working class, while socialism was the ideology of the white-collar clerical salariat and petit-bourgeoisie. Macintyre made the important function of Laborite culture and ideology apparent, but it would be more than a decade before his lead was fruitfully explored.

One important exception in the meantime was John Rickard's Class and Politics (1976), a political history tracing the development of the two-party system that incorporated a Thompsonian-cultural ethos. As such, Rickard shone new light upon how this class-based dichotomy took shape. In particular, he perceived a shift away from radical liberal language of 'the classes versus the masses' towards a more strictly class-based language based upon Labor's largely populist appeals to 'the workers' across the period 1890-1910. (40) For Rickard, Australian working-class consciousness was a largely cultural phenomenon and decidedly non-militant. However, works such as Rickard's were increasingly rare, given the post-politics, often post-class concerns of social history and the increasing tendency for political history to be now written by political scientists--see below.

Concomitant with the New Left onslaught, traditional approaches to writing labour history were challenged in other ways during the 1970s. Fuelled by the emergence of the new social movements, with their emphasis upon identities based upon race, gender and sexuality, and later environmental concerns, studies of labour institutions became less popular as historians increasingly turned towards so-called 'history from below'. Henceforth, explorations of racism acquired a central place in labour historiography, as in the 1978 special issue of Labour History edited by Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus, Who Are Our Enemies. Although they were by definition political, these works largely avoided the political usages of racism. (41) Around the same time, feminist labour historians interrogated the gendered nature of the labour movement, charging that political historians had privileged the activities of men and masculine institutions. Miriam Dixson took aim at Wardian mateship's supposedly egalitarian dimensions, suggesting that the ideal deliberately excluded women. During the 1980s Marilyn Lake expanded upon this notion in her critique of labour movement masculinism. (42) As a measure of the social turn's influence, Labour History altered its sub-title in 1981 to 'A Journal of Labour and Social History'.

Ironically just as the New Left experienced its heyday, non-Marxist studies of labour-in-politics enjoyed their own golden era during the 1970s as the discipline of political history itself sighted the Promised Land. Determined to defend the ALP's record from politically motivated attack, this genre was also a form of activist scholarship. The first and most ambitious study was Queensland ALP figure and academic Denis Murphy's edited volume Labor in Politics, a history of the state-based Labor parties between the 1880s and 1920, ironically featuring a relatively apolitical chapter on Victoria by McQueen. Murphy's introduction celebrated Labor's pragmatic 'workingman's reformism'; in his opinion the pre-World War I party carried forth a nineteenth century radical liberal tradition. Before his premature death, Murphy edited two further collections chronicling the travails of Queensland Labor, as well as penning a sympathetic biography of the state's first elected Labor premier, T.J. Ryan. (43)

Elsewhere, Bede Nairn's Civilising Capitalism (1973) provided a positive account of the beginnings of NSW Labor. In Nairn's view, the party emerged to mollify the worst aspects of capitalism and never intended to institute a socialist society. Nairn insisted that NSW Labor was a pragmatic beast from the outset owing to its colonial environs, shunning dogmatic continental theories. Nairn's defence of the ALP against some of the highly-charged New Left attacks was well overdue but to disclaim any socialist heritage or ideological influence during the twentieth century was tendentious. The preface to his biography of Jack Lang pushed the nonideological thesis even further: 'class', he argued, was 'irrelevant' to the course of Australian history. Despite or precisely because of this outlandish assertion, Nairn's account later served as the basis for more celebratory books. Nairn's thesis was refined by Jim Hagan's The History of the ACTU (1981) which turned the New Left's pejorative model of labourism on its head. Hagan approvingly defined labourism as the non-socialist belief that 'the capitalist state could be managed to the advantage of the working class by a combination of a strong trade union movement with a Parliamentary Labor Party'. (44)

Other commemorative histories, biographies and documentary collections appeared during the late 1970s and early 80s. Brian McKinlay wrote a positive yet critical history of the ALP upon its 90th anniversary and two years earlier edited a rich documentary history; biographies of Labor leaders, Jim Scullin, John Curtin and Arthur Calwell all appeared within the space of a few short years; and Weller and Stevens documented the major institutional, organisational and ideological themes of the federal ALP's history up until Gough Whitlam's dismissal in 1975. Sober accounts detailed ignoble if dramatic Labor events, such as Robert Murray's The Split (1970), while Paul Reynolds told the resultant story of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party (1974). (45)

Apart from studies of the ALP, as the CPA slowly began a process of destalinisation, or splintered off into Maoist directions, revisionist histories emerged. Then party member Alastair Davidson and ex-member Bob Gollan both wrote histories of the CPA, in addition to a number of large number articles of published in Labour History. Following the dominant Aarons line of the period, Davidson was critical of the Sharkey-led organisation and its slavish adherence to the Moscow-dominated Comintern line: 'The history of the CPA before 1950 can be understood better as a move away from Australian traditions into an alien tradition, which made the CPA inappropriate in Australia. After 1950 its history becomes a stumbling, groping, limping move back to Australian traditions.' Examining the non-revolutionary socialist tradition, Geoffrey Hewitt produced a fine unpublished master's thesis, in 1974, on the influential Victorian Socialist Party (VSP). Strangely enough the Victorian ALP, which the VSP came to profoundly influence in the early part of the twentieth century, has managed to avoid a sustained treatment, although a history written by Jim Cairn's biographer, Paul Strangio, is forthcoming. (46)

Although labour-in-politics studies diminished during the mid-1980s, some important historiographical interventions were made. Two books on the ALP responded to Nairn's account. Bruce O'Meagher's edited collection, The Socialist Objective (1983), insisted that socialism had indeed exercised a significant influence over the party. Writing from a more critical perspective, Verity Burgmann's 1984 book, In Our Time made a similar claim in regards to the late nineteenth-century labour movement. In her view Labor's socialist roots were disowned by pragmatic politicians and like-minded unionists who led the labour movement down the fruitless parliamentary path. However, Burgmann's critique of parliamentarianism meant that she downplayed labourism's cultural agency and ideological content. (47)

As ideology became a topic of genuine historical inquiry two significant studies of Labor 'populism' were produced. Peter Love's Labour and the Money Power (1984) examined the period between the 1890s 'bank crashes' and Chifley's attempt to nationalise the banks during the 1950s, while the attentions of Ray Markey (The Making of the Labor Party in NSW, 1988) were more narrowly focused upon pre-federation NSW Labor. Both accounts highlighted the salience of race in shaping Labor's populist vision, one which idealised the struggles of 'the people' against a conspiratorial collection of bankers and financiers known as the 'Money Power'. Love illuminated the role of labour publicists, newspapers and MPs such as Frank Anstey, in fostering this populist ethos; conversely Markey stressed the economic and social context and the important function of the AWU with its connections to lower middle class intellectuals and small farmers. Other more traditional institutional accounts appeared; non-party sponsored histories of Tasmanian (the most electorally successful state party) and South Australian Labor (in the latter Jim Moss covered the broader movement), as did a highly narrative history of Queensland Labor written by Ross Fitzgerald and Harold Thornton. (48)

'Socialist Ideals which They Never Believed In': The Hawke/Keating Labor Governments and the 'Betrayal' Debates

If labour-in-politics lost its historiographal pre-eminence during the 1980s, important and controversial works still appeared, although many tended to be written from outside the academy. It was from those ranks that a new stream of activist scholarship emerged. Taking their cue from Nairn, the NSW ALP's Whitlam Conference of Labor Historians (1985) and the Labor Council of New South Wales LIoyd Ross Forum (1990) both launched concerted defences of Labor's record. Explicitly rejecting the 'fall from grace' thesis Whitlam himself declared that the 'true' and 'authentic' Labor 'tradition' was its rejection of the impotent 'purity' for the 'central relevance of power'. (49) Instructively, Nairn's book was reissued in 1989 with a revised title, The Beginnings of the Australian Labor Party, complete with a new epilogue that excoriated Labor's critics. In 1991 Whitlam's former speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg published an official centenary history of the NSW ALP, with the celebratory title, Cause for Power (1991). However this revisionary tract reiterated a central theme of the Old Left; in Freudenberg's words, Labor was 'the authentic expression of Australianism'. (50)

The labourist inversion reached its celebratory zenith when then-unionists Michael Costa and Mark Duffy argued that free trade and, more controversially, non-compulsory arbitration were 'forgotten strands of the rich labour tradition'. Not all centenary histories rewrote history in such an outlandish manner. Hagan and Ken Turner's sympathetic history of NSW Labor broke new ground by stressing the socio-economic dynamics and regional distinctiveness underpinning the party's emergence and heterogeneous, often rural electoral base. Ross McMullin's epic narrative, The Light on the Hill (1991), focussed largely on the parliamentary party and its oft-colourful leadership and activists. Yet McMullin did not shy from highlighting Labor's socialist roots and gloss over more ignoble aspects of its past. (51)

The celebratory yet defensive tone of these commemorative writings was given added intellectual piquancy by the continued electoral success of the iconoclastic federal Labor administrations of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and the onset of the robust 'betrayal debates'. The so-called discontinuity theses alleged that these governments had broken with a reformist tradition often characterised as 'socialist'. Perhaps the most prominent version was political scientist and ALP member Graham Maddox's critique of the Hawke government's 'consensus' politics. Maddox argued that Labor tradition had been 'betrayed' by the pursuance of neoliberal policies. Others such as Maddox's sometime collaborator Tim Battin pursued a similar argument in a series of journal articles highlighting the importance of social democratic Keynesian economics. In the case of political scientists Andrew Scott and Dean Jaensch, structural factors were used to explain Labor's transition into a 'catch-all' party of government. (52)

Conversely, the continuity thesis asserted that the Hawke-Keating governments had maintained the tradition of labourism. In one of the more subtle presentations of the continuity argument, R. Neil Massey promoted a convincing interpretation which captured labourism's 'historically contingent nature', its relationship with ideas and the practical ability of the State to technologically enact social change. Labourism was seen as a 'strategic thread' that balanced the bread and butter needs of the industrial wing with the political wing's electoral imperatives. (53) Writing from a neo-Marxist perspective, Carol Johnson traced a continuum of 'social harmony' through the Curtin/Chifley, Whitlam and then Hawke and Keating governments. Labourist discourse insisted that all Australians, wage earners and business alike, benefited from the creation of a humanised capitalist society. For Johnson there was little point 'criticiz[ing] Labor governments for 'betraying' socialist ideals which they never believed in'. Rather, she drew attention to the inherent problems of reforming capitalism within a liberal democratic polity. (54) And yet both continuity and discontinuity theorists could be criticised for their shared 'three great epochs' methodology. For a party which has held federal office only sporadically over the past 116 years, an empirical analysis of Labor government is a fairly narrow method of drawing out some 'essential' tradition.

Pejorative or celebratory, labourism had seemingly won the day. However, as Terry Irving pointed out in a thoughtful article on 'parliamentary socialism' a year later, the dichotomous model of socialism and versus labourism tended to downplay Labor's complex relationship with socialism and, furthermore, 'it was difficult to draw out in any precise way the actual ideas and practices of labourism'. (55) Not the least of which concerned the important role of 'labour intellectuals'--a concern Irving subsequently took up with more vigour and which is alluded to in my summary of recent developments below.

Subsequently, historians develop a more satisfactory model of labourism. In his 1994 study Transforming Labour, Peter Beilharz deployed poststructuralist insights to argue that labourism was 'the culture of the labour movement as it is articulated politically'. Beilharz argued that those scholars positing a 'betrayal' mistook this phenomenon for the 'exhaustion' or 'emptying out' of the labourist tradition. (56) Nonetheless Beilharz, like Irving, insisted that histories of labourism had to be understood of as constituting part of the history of modern socialism. (57) Beilharz was writing as the aftershocks from the political earthquake that was the end of the Cold War and the downfall of Communism reverberated across the political spectrum. The impact upon socialist and social democratic parties was profound, in turn possessing implications for the scholars who studied them.

'Its Ability to Undermine the Illusion that We are All in the Same Boat': The Revival of Labour-in-Politics?

During the mid-1990s, labour-in-politics studies appeared in terminal decline. As early as 1990, an Irving-penned Labour History editorial questioned why labour historians were 'so indifferent to studying the Labor party?' He criticised the demarcation between 'history from below' and 'institutional' studies; 'politics', he insisted, must be 'at the core of the discipline'. A year later, perhaps with a touch of irony, Burgmann dramatically argued that labour history had experienced a 'strange death'. Certainly the raw numbers were of concern. In the first 33 editions of Labour History published between January 1962 and November 1977, nearly a quarter of all articles were politically-themed; during the next third (March 1978 to November 1993) that figure fell to 16 per cent. (58)

This trend was arguably caused by four interrelated phenomena. First, a well-documented (if at times overstated) ideological convergence between the major Australian political parties, the related implosion of mass membership organisations, declining party identification and the reduced standing of the broader labour movement, arguably denuded such writing of its purpose and ipso facto a potential readership. The struggle for the past, while not totally irrelevant, was no longer perceived to be a politically pressing task.

Second, a vicious cycle of decline took root. On the one hand, publishing avenues collapsed as publishers grew reluctant to print books that might sell only a few hundred copies. The conversion of a politically-themed masters or doctoral thesis grew more unlikely. Yet, on the other hand, budding and even existing scholars were further disinclined from the subject as the writing of political, social and cultural history grew ever more compartmentalised. These trends in turn made it more difficult to locate employment in schools of history. As Bongiorno comments, 'the identity of "political historian" remains barely available in the Australian historical profession, especially if measured in terms of up-take by younger historians'. (59)

Third, the information-age society encourages a form of writing political history that steers away from seemingly mundane institutional studies. Biography, particularly of up and coming Laborites--witness the flurry of accounts chronicling Kevin Rudd's life following his ascension to the federal Labor leadership in late 2006--is increasingly perceived by the public to be a more accessible and immediate form of historical writing, along with self-serving memoirs. (60)

Finally, many labour historians perceived the postmodern-inspired 'turns' towards language and culture to be antithetical to their discipline and the broader social sciences, if not an attack on the modus operandi of the labour movement itself. There is little need here to rehash the bitter debates that characterised the Anglo-American historiography--see my detailed Labour History article on this subject. Despite, or precisely because of the resultant theoretical stalemate, it now appears that most historians are employing a practical synthesis or subconsciously adapting such insights. Even defiantly Marxist historians such as Neville Kirk have produced admirable studies by paying close attention to discourse. (61)

Far from occasioning the death of political labour history, then, the rise of social and cultural history has done much to revitalise the vitality of the genre. (62) Between May 1994 and the most recent edition of Labour History in November 2010, said articles actually increased by a couple of percentage points compared to the previously cited tercile. (63) There are some extremely encouraging signs not only in relation to crude volume--which of course is no indication of significance--but the quality and innovativeness of such studies, an argument I and Bongiorno have pursued elsewhere in relation to the broader political history discipline. Bongiorno made the case for social history's inherently political contribution, stressing:

   its capacity to bring us out of ourselves and to imagine what the
   lives of others have been like; its democratic impulse to recover
   the voices of those who were poor, powerless or marginalised; its
   ability to undermine the illusion that we are all in the same boat,
   on the same national journey, with our political leaders as masters
   and commanders. (64)

Bongiorno's scholarship is at the forefront of this trend. In his revisionist 1996 study of early Victorian Labor party, Bongiorno argued that labourism 'remains useful as a label for a particular set of political attitudes, centring on support for an independent Labor Party committed to constitutional methods and the modification of market outcomes to the advantage of the working class and other productive but disadvantaged members of society'. (65) While paying close attention to the material circumstances of working Australians and (often gendered) institutional developments, he insisted that the ALP was not some passive 'thing' but a 'process'. By examining Laborite discourses, scholars might consider the party's active role in 'constructing collective identity' of which social class was just one, if a central historical form. (66) New insights were gleaned regarding the relationship between Labor and Victoria's colonial liberal tradition, and the complex dynamic between the party and electors, not the least of which involved Labor having to build alliances within the working class.

Other recent histories of the ALP likewise demonstrate that a close attention to political culture and discourse, and sensitivity to the role of gender and race therein, enliven labour-in-politics rather than superseding the genre altogether. Bruce Scates's A New Australia (1997) deployed insights from both cultural studies and feminist theory to bring new life to the well-traversed decade of the 1890s; anarchists, socialists, feminists, single taxers, republicans and other radicals both coalesced and competed with each other as they sought to remake Australian society. (67) Other recent additions to the field underline the desirability of a well-contextualised study of Laborite discourse, as demonstrated by Scalmer's perceptive article on the ALP's long-running discourse of practicality', (68) Jackie Dickenson's comparative monograph of the language of betrayal in British and Australian Labor and radical politics, (69) and some tantalising forays by several of the contributors to the edited centenary collection on the FPLP, True Believers. (70) Scalmer and Irving's work on Australian labour movement intellectuals has likewise brought new insights to bear on the political role of ideas and publicists; the propagandists of the labour press, men such as Henry Boote, writers and activists of the ilk of V.G. Childe and Labor politicians including Ben Chifley, and, in the eyes of some, even labour historians, belatedly earned this appellation. (71) Finally, Nick Dyrenfurth has recently written a cultural history of the early ALP. (72) Far from downplaying the historically significant role of class, he details why it resonated so powerfully in Australian politics. Nonetheless, Labor's cultural and linguistic peculiarities warrant far greater attention.

Even studies of communism and the CPA's activities have been enlivened by combining an institutional focus with attentiveness to supra-class themes, for instance Joy Damousi's gender sensitive study of Australian socialism and communism. The benefits of writing party history from 'below' and of incorporating gender analysis were also evinced in the first of a planned two-volume study of the CPA undertaken by Stuart Macintyre. (73) That said there remains a tendency, as Marilyn Lake once pointed out, to simply add women to the mix; to declare that they too were there, alongside the men, and feminist scholars remain barely identified as 'political historians'. (74)

One of the most promising if fledgling fields of endeavour is transnational and comparative history. Several Labour History special editions have yielded some excellent surveys essays on Australian labour-in-politics in comparison with Canada, Britain and New Zealand. Ray Markey and Greg Patmore in particular have been at active participants. Monographs by Neville Kirk, James Bennett and Robin Archer have placed antipodean labour-in-politics within a transnational framework that fleshed out themes of native exceptionalism. For instance, Archer's fascinating comparative study of the development of Labor politics in the USA and Australia was distinguished by close attention to the discourse of each country's labour movement in the context of what he termed their shared liberal political cultures. (75)

Closer to home, another pleasing development is the trend towards localism and regionalism opened by Hagan during the early 1990s; for instance Michael Hogan, Rodney Cavalier and Tony Harris's studies of the inner-city Sydney Labor branches, or Colin Cleary's twin-histories of Bendigo and Ballarat Labor. (76) Such scholarship, in tandem with the influence of the turns, has arguably contributed to a collective rethinking of what labour-in-politics is. As Bongiorno notes, political history is now written about pubs and the street, amongst other non-institutional phenomena, a tendency illuminated by Irving's recent account of the democratic movement in New South Wales before 1856. (77)

And yet for all this historiographical innovation, more traditional modes of writing political history, such as institutional and commemorative works, continue to play an important role. Bobbie Oliver's study of the uniquely constituted Western Australian ALP is one such example, as is a 2005 edited collection dealing with Labor's disastrous Cold War schism. In the 2000s a commemorative impulse also furnished a study dealing with J.C. Watson's world first minority Labor government and a flurry of biographical works on Andrew Fisher. Nonetheless, several important figures--I think here of Spence, 1920's federal leader Matthew Charlton, Boote and a swathe of Labor premiers--remain without biographies. (78)

Conclusion

These historiographical green shoots point towards a more satisfying approach towards writing political labour history. New or under-researched aspects abound. Environmentalism and its relationship to the parties of the Left is a sub-genre of historical inquiry still in its infancy. Laborite discourse is a genre only beginning to emerge from its historiographical nappies. A study of the ALP's appeal to 'working families' at the 2007 federal election, for instance, merits a properly historical, comparative and detailed discursive treatment.

Older historiographical concerns and time-periods might still benefit from a linguistic and cultural approach, such as the grossly neglected field of electioneering. Likewise another chronically under-researched aspect of Labor politics, factionalism and the relationship of the rank and file to the 'machine', has only slowly attracted the attention of historians. (79) While the impact of television and also talkback radio has begun to be mined as a serious source of evidence, perhaps even more enticing to future scholars might be the new audio-visual technologies associated with the rise of the Internet and its impact on political campaigning, something borne out by the 2007 election campaign.

Perhaps labour historians would be wise to follow the lead of the scholarly journal, History Australia which has recently introduced sound bite/video technology. (80) The prospects of such multimedia technology driving innovative scholarly research in political history (and perhaps attracting new students to the field) are tantalising, particularly given the trend towards e-publishing. This is not to suggest that the older style political history will ineluctably crumble under the weight of some technologically determinant trend; rather, one might envisage new directions in comparative research.

These suggestions in no way obviate the need for advocates of a cultural and linguistic approach to more fully integrate their concerns with the long-standing interest of labour historians in power and institutions. And whatever particular mineshafts labour historians might choose to descend into during the next one hundred issues of this journal, the partisan dimensions of its politically-themed subject is unlikely to dissipate any time soon. Indeed, this years' 120th anniversary of the ALP's foundation is likely to bear witness to a renewed conflict over the party's past. (81) This is a good thing. For labour history without an overt political purpose is almost certain to engender less hope in building a progressive future.

Endnotes

Nick Dyrenfurth, The author wishes to thank the two anonymous referees who reviewed this article for their constructive criticism.

(1.) John Norton, 'Introduction', in John Norton (ed.), The History of Capital and Labour in All Lands and Ages, Oceanic Publishing, Sydney and Melbourne, 1888, p. ix.

(2.) Boomerang, 2 March 1889 (original emphasis).

(3.) Eric Hobsbawm makes a very similar point in regards to British historiography ('Labor history and ideology', Journal of Social History, no. 7, 1974, p. 371).

(4.) Greg Patmore, 'Australian labor historiography: The influence of the USA', Labor History, vol. 37, no. 4, p. 526.

(5.) Norton, History of Labour and Capital, pp. v-ix.

(6.) Robin Gollan, 'Labour history', Labour History, no. 1, 1962, p. 4.

(7.) Frank Farrell, 'Labour history in Australia', International Labor and Working Class History, no. 21, Spring 1982, p. 1. For an argument about history work in the labour movement during the earliest period see Terry Irving, 'Rediscovering radical history', Hummer, vol. 6, no. 2, 2010, pp. 15-29.

(8.) George Black, Labor in Politics: The New South Wales Labor Party: What It Did and What It Prevented, 3rd edition, Workman Print, Sydney, 1894, pp. 3, 5; George Black, The Labor Party in New South Wales: A History from its Formation in 1891 until 1904, Worker Trades Union Printery, Sydney, 1904. A decade after being expelled from Labor for his pro-conscription views during World War I, Black developed his book into a seven-part series, on this occasion bearing a more caustic sub-title; George Black, A History of the N.S.W. Political Labor Party from Its Conception until 1917: A Critical Review, George A. Jones, Sydney, ca. 1926-30. Of the intended 12 monthly parts, only numbers 1 to 7 were published. Thos. R. Roydhouse and H.J. Taperell, The Labour Party in New South Wales: A History of its Formation and Legislative Career Together with Biographies of the Members, and the Complete Text of the Trade Disputes Conciliation and Arbitration Act, 1892, Edwards Dunlop, Sydney, 1892.

(9.) Victor S. Clark, The Labor Movement in Australasia: A Study in Social-Democracy, Henny Holt & Co., New York, 1906, pp. 118-19; Albert Metin, Socialism without Doctrine, trans. Russel Ward, Alternative Publishing Co-operative, Chippendale, 1977 [1904]. See also W. Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, 2 vols, Grant Richards, London, 1902.

(10.) W.G. Spence, Australia's Awakening: Thirty Years in the Life of an Australian Agitator, Worker Trustees, Sydney, 1909, 'Preface'. Two years later Spence wrote the History of the A.W.U., Worker Trustees, Sydney, 1911.

(11.) See Coral Lansbury and Bede Nairn, 'Spence, William Guthrie (1846-1926)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 6, Melbourne University Press, 1976, pp. 168-70.

(12.) See his 1908 presidential address to the ALP's triennial federal conference urging the labour movement to write its own history; 'Fourth Interstate Political Labor Conference Report', cited in Worker (Sydney), 23 July 1908.

(13.) Spence, Australia's Awakening, 'Preface'; pp. 264, 278.

(14.) T.H. Smeaton, The People in Politics: A Short History of the Labor Movement in South Australia, Including Biographical Sketches of its Representatives in Parliament, Cooperative Printing and Publishing, Adelaide, 1914; John D. Fitzgerald, The Rise of the Australian Labor Party, Worker Print, Sydney, 1915.

(15.) V.I. Lenin, 'In Australia', Pravda, 13 June 1913; W.R. Winspear, Economic Warfare, The Marxian Press, Sydney, 1915, pp. 34-35.

(16.) E.J. Holloway, The Australian Victory over Conscription, Anti-Conscription Jubilee Committee, Melbourne, 1917 (1966); N.J.O. Makin, A Progressive Democracy: A Record of Reference Concerning the South Australian Branch of the Australian Labor Party in Politics, The Daily Herald, Adelaide, 1918.

(17.) Ibid, p. 23.

(18.) V. Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers' Representation in Australia, 2nd edition, Carlton, 1964 [1923], pp.180-81. On Childe's writings, see Terry Irving, 'New light on How Labour Governs: re-discovered political writings by Vere Gordon Childe', Politics, vol. 23, no. 1, May 1988 and Terry Irving, 'How labour governs: Lessons for today', Hummer, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009.

(19.) Ibid, pp. 17, 85.

(20.) F.B. Smith, 'Introduction', in Childe, How Labour Governs, p. vii. Irving criticises Smith's interpretation as a misreading of Childe.

(21.) W.K. Hancock, Australia, Ernest Benn, London, UK, 1930 (reprinted by Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1961), pp. 202-3, 212.

(22.) See, for instance, James Larcombe, Notes on the Political History of the Labor Movement in Queensland, Worker Newspaper, Brisbane, 1934; G.M. Prendergast, Labor in Politics: Its Influence on Legislation, Australian Labor Party, Victorian Branch, Melbourne, 1922; Australian Labor Party, South Australian Branch, Labor's Thirty Years Record in South Australia: A Short History of the Labor Movement in South Australia, including Biographical Sketches of Leading Members, 1893-1923, Daily Herald, Adelaide, 1923; Australian Labor Party, Western Australian Branch, Labor's Unique Record: A Brief History of the Administrative and Legislative Achievements of the Collier Government, Worker Print, Perth, 1927.

(23.) Warren Denning, Caucus Crisis: The Rise and Fall of the Scullin Government, Cumberland Argus, Parramatta, 1937; H.V. Evatt, Australian Labour Leader: The Story of W A. Holman and the Labour Movement, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1940.

(24.) Lloyd Ross, 'Australian labour and the crisis', Economic Review, vol. 8, December 1932; E.W. Campbell, A Short History of the Australian Labour Movement, Current Books, Sydney, 1945. See also Lloyd Ross, The Development of the Australian Labor Movement, Australian Railways Union, Sydney, c. 1935 and 1940; L.L. Sharkey, An Outline History of the Australian Communist Party, Australian Communist Party, Sydney, 1944, p. 17. Ross also wrote a biography of William Lane (William Lane and the Australian Labor movement, Forward Press, Sydney, 1935) and, as we shall later see, one of John Curtin.

(25.) Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Rawson's Bookshop, Melbourne, 1944, 'Preface'.

(26.) Ibid, p. 39.

(27.) Brian Fitzpatrick, The Australian People, 1788-1945, 2nd edition, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1951, p. 41.

(28.) Fitzpatrick, Australian Labor Movement, p. 105.

(29.) Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850-1910, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1960.

(30.) Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1958, in particular ch. 8; Robert Noel Ebbels (ed.), The Australian Labor Movement, 1850-1907: Extracts from Contemporary Documents, Noel Ebbels Memorial Committee in association with Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1960; Miriam Dixson, Greater than Lenin?: Lang and Labor 1916-32, University of Melbourne, Political Science Dept, Parkville, 1977.

(31.) Ian Turner, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Dynamics of the Labour Movement in Eastern Australia, 1900-1921, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, pp. xvii-xviii.

(32.) L.F. Crisp, The Australian Federal Labour Party, 1901-1951, Longmans, London, UK, 1955, p. 5. See also L.F. Crisp and S.P. Bennett, Australian Labor Party: Federal Personnel 1901-1954, Canberra University College, Canberra, 1954.

(33.) D.W. Rawson, Labor in Vain? A Survey of the Australian Labor Party, Longmans, Croydon, 1966, p. 123; L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography, Vol. 1: That Fiery Particle, 1862-1914; P.J. O'Farrell, Sydney, 1964; L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography, Vol. 2: The Little Digger 1914-1952, John Robertson, Sydney, 1979; L.F. Crisp, Ben Chifley: A Biography, J.W. Button, Melbourne, 1961; Coral Lansbury, 'William Guthrie Spence', Labour History, no. 13, 1967, pp. 3-10.

(34.) Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1970, pp. 12, 15, 236. Consult also Humphrey McQueen, 'Laborism and socialism', in Richard Gordon (ed.), The Australian New Left: Critical Essays and Strategy, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1970.

(35.) Terry Irving, 'Symposium: What is labour history?', Labour History, no. 12, May 1967, p. 77.

(36.) See also Terry Irving and Baiba Berzins, 'History and the New Leff, in Gordon, The Australian New Left, and Stuart Macintyre, 'Radical history and bourgeois hegemony', Intervention, no. 2, October 1972, pp. 47-73.

(37.) McQueen, A New Britannia, pp. 12, 236.

(38.) R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narrative and Argument, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980.

(39.) Stuart Macintyre, 'The concept of class in recent labourist historiography: Early socialism and labor', Intervention, no. 8, March 1977, pp. 82, 86. See also Stuart Macintyre, 'The making of the Australian working class: An historiographical survey', Historical Studies, vol. 18, October 1978, pp. 233-53.

(40.) John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890-1910, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, pp. 297-310.

(41.) Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus (eds), Who are Our Enemies?: Racism and the Australian Working Class, Hale and Iremonger in association with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Neutral Bay, 1978; Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California, 1850-1901, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1979.

(42.) Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788-1975, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1976. See also the Labour History special issue, 'Women at Work', no. 29, 1975; Marilyn Lake, 'Socialism and manhood: The Case of William Lane', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, pp. 54-62.

(43.) D.J. Murphy (ed.), Labor in Politics: The State Labor Parties in Australia, 1880-1920, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1975; D.J. Murphy, R.B. Joyce and Colin A. Hughes (eds), Prelude to Power: The Rise of the Labour Party in Queensland 1885-1915, Jacaranda, South Melbourne, 1970; D. J. Murphy, R. B. Joyce and C. A. Hughes (eds), Labor in Power: The Labor Party and Governments in Queensland, 1915-57, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1980; and D. J. Murphy, T.J. Ryan: A Political Biography, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1975.

(44.) Bede Nairn, Civilising Capitalism: The Labor Movement in New South Wales, 1870-1900, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1973; Jim Hagan, The History of the A.C.T.U, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1981, p. 45; and Bede Nairn, The 'Big Fella': Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891-1949, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 1986, p. xiii.

(45.) John Robertson, J.H. Scullin: A Political Biography, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 1975; Lloyd Ross, John Curtin: A Biography, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1977; Colm Kiernan, Calwell: A Personal and Political Biography, Thomas Nelson, West Melbourne, 1978; Robert Murray, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1970; Paul Reynolds, The Democratic Labor Party, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1974. See also Paul Ormonde, The Movement, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1972.

(46.) Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History, Hoover Institution Press, California, 1969, p. 179; Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement, 1920-1955, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1975; G.C. Hewitt, A History of the Victorian Socialist Party, 1906-1932, unpublished MA thesis, La Trobe University, 1974. See also Frank Farrell, International Socialism and Australian Labor: The Left in Australia, 1919-1939, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1981. Paul Strangio, Neither Power nor Glory: A Hundred Years of Victorian Labor, 1856-1956, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne [forthcoming].

(47.) Bruce O'Meagher (ed.), The Socialist Objective: Labor and Socialism, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1983. See, in particular, the chapters by O'Meagher and Terry Irving; Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor 1885-1905, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985.

(48.) Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890-1950, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1984; Ray Markey, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880-1900, UNSW Press, Kensington, 1988; R.P. Davis, Eighty Years' Hard Labor, Sassafras, Hobart, 1983; Jim Moss, Sound of Trumpets: History of the Labour Movement in South Australia, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1985; Ross Fitzgerald and Harold Thornton, Labor in Queensland: 1880 to 1988, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989.

(49.) Cited in Stuart Macintyre, 'Who are the true believers?', Labour History, no. 68, May 1995, p. 161.

(50.) Graham Freudenberg, Cause for Power: The Official History of the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Labor Party, Pluto Press in association with the NSW ALP, Leichardt, 1991, p. 3.

(51.) Michael Costa and Mark Duffy, Labor, Prosperity and the Nineties: Beyond the Bonsai Economy, Federation Press, Sydney, 1991, p. viii; Jim Hagan and Ken Turner, A History of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1891-1991, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991. See also B. Ellem, J. Hagan and K. Turner, 'The origins of the Labor Party in the southern wheatbelt of New South Wales, 1891-1913', Labour History, no. 55, November 1988, pp. 22-38; Ross McMullin, The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992.

(52.) Graham Maddox, The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition, Penguin, Ringwood, 1989, p. 8; Tim Battin, 'A break from the past: The Labor Party and the political economy of Keynesian social democracy', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 28, 1993, p. 222; Tim Battin and Graham Maddox, 'Australian Labor and the socialist tradition', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 26, no. 2, July 1991, pp. 181-96; Andrew Scott, Fading Loyalties: The Australian Labor Party and the Working Class, Leichhardt, Pluto Press, 1991; Dean Jaensch, The Hawke/Keating Hijack: The ALP in Transition, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1989.

(53.) R. Neil Massey, 'A century of labourism, 1891-1993: An historical interpretation', Labour History, no. 66, May 1994, pp. 45-71.

(54.) Carol Johnson, The Labor Legacy: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1989, pp. 1-2.

(55.) Terry Irving, 'The roots of parliamentary socialism in Australia, 1850-1920', Labour History, no. 67, November 1994, p. 102; see also Terry Irving, 'Labourism: A political genealogy', Labour History, vol. 66, May 1994, pp. 1-13.

(56.) Peter Beilharz, Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 5.

(57.) Beilharz, Transforming Labor, p. 51.

(58.) Terry Irving, 'Editorial', Labour History, no. 59, November 1990, pp. v-vii; Verity Burgmann, 'The strange death of labour history', in Bob Carr et al, Bede Nairn and Labor History (Labor History Essays, vol. 3), Sydney, 1991, pp. 69-81. See however Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, 'Is labour history dead? The verdict in 1992', Australian Historical Studies, no. 100, April 1993, pp. 470-82; Ann Curthoys, 'Labour history and cultural studies', Labour History, no. 67, 1994, pp. 12-13. The estimated figures, based on my analysis of the journal's contents, are: January 1962-November 1977 (51/214 or 24 per cent); March 1978-November 1993 (36/223 or 16 per cent).

(59.) Frank Bongiorno, '"Real solemn history" and its discontents: Australian political history and the challenge of social history', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 56, no. 1, March 2010, p. 19.

(60.) See Sean Scalmer, 'The rise of the insider: Memoirs and diaries in recent Australian political history', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 82-104.

(61.) See the chapters by Terry Irving and Andrew Wells in Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1994; Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor tradition: Synthesising discourse and experience', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 184-85; Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914, Merlin Press, London, 2003; Neville Kirk, '"Australians for Australia": The Right, the Labor Party and contested loyalties to nation and empire in Australia, 1917 to the early 1930s', Labour History, no. 91, November 2006, pp. 95-111.

(62.) Nick Dyrenfurth, '"Never hitherto seen outside of a zoo or a menagerie": The language of Australian politics', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 56, no. 1, March 2010, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 38-54.

(63.) 63/348 or 18 per cent.

(64.) Bongiorno, 'Australian political history and the challenge of social history', p. 20.

(65.) Frank Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition, 1875-1914, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1996, p. 5. See also Frank Bongiorno, 'Labourism', in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 374.

(66.) Ibid, p. 9.

(67.) Also Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997.

(68.) Sean Scalmer, 'Being practical in early and contemporary Labor politics: A labourist critique', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 43, no. 3, 1997, pp. 301-11.

(69.) Jacqueline Dickenson, Renegades and Rats: Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations in Britain and Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2006. See also, Mark Hearn, 'Cultivating an Australian sentiment: John Christian Watson's narrative of white nationalism', National Identities, vol. 9, no. 4, 2007, pp. 351-68.

(70.) See, in particular, John Iremonger, 'Rats', in John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre, (eds), True Believers: The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001.

(71.) Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving, 'Labour intellectuals in Australia: Modes, traditions, generations, transformations', International Review of Social History, vol. 50, no. 1, April, 2005, pp. 1-26; Sean Scalmer and Terry Irving, 'Australian labour intellectuals: An introduction', Labour History, no. 77, November 1999, pp. 1-10.

(72.) Nick Dyrenfurth, Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2010. See also his twin-chapters in Nick Dyrenfurth and Paul Strangio (eds), Confusion: The Making of the Australian Two-Party System, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2009.

(73.) Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Communism, Socialism and Gender in Australia 1890-1955, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards, 1998.

(74.) Marilyn Lake, 'Labour history and the constitution of political subjectivity', in Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1994, p. 79; Kate Murphy, 'Feminism and political history', Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 56, no. 1, 2010, p. 21.

(75.) Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins; James Bennett, 'Rats and Revolutionaries': The Labour Movement in Australia and New Zealand 1890-1940, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2004; Robin Archer, Why is there No Labor Party in the United States?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007. See also Andrew Scott, Running on Empty: Modernising the British and Australian Labour Parties, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000. Surveys include: Terry Irving and Allen Seager, 'Labour and politics in Canada and Australia: Towards a comparativist approach to developments to l960', Labour History, no. 71, November 1996, pp. 239-77; Leighton James and Ray Markey, 'Class and labour: The British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party compared', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 23-43; Ray Markey, 'An antipodean phenomenon? Comparing the labo(u)r party in New Zealand and Australia', Labour History, no. 95, November 2008, pp. 69-96. Erik Olssen and Bruce Scates, 'Class formation and political change: A trans-Tasman dialogue', Labour History, No. 95, November 2008, pp. 3-24.

(76.) Michael Hogan, Local Labor: A History of the Labor Party in Glebe, 1891-2003, Federation Press, Sydney, 2004; Tony Harris, "'Primal Socialist Innocence and the Fall"?: the ALP Left in Leichhardt Municipality in the 1980s', Labour History, no. 86, May 2004, pp. 53-73; Rodney Cavalier, 'The Australian Labor Party at branch level: Guildford, Hunters Hill and Panania Branches in the 1950s' in Gough Whitlam et al, A Century of Social Change, Pluto Press, Leichhardt, NSW, 1992, p. 93; Colin Cleary, Bendigo Labor: The Maintenance of Traditions in a Regional City, C. Cleary, Epsom, 1999; Colin Cleary, Ballarat Labor: From Miner Hesitancy to Golden Age, C. Cleary, Epsom, Vic, 2007.

(77.) Bongiorno, 'Australian political history and the challenge of social history', p. 18; Terry Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty: The Democratic Movement in New South Wales before 1856, The Federation Press, Leichhardt, 2006.

(78.) Bobbie Oliver, Unity is Strength: A History of the Australian Labor Party and the Trades and Labor Council in Western Australia, 1899-1999, Perth, API Network, Australia Research Institute, Curtin University, 2003; Brian Costar, Peter Love and Paul Strangio (eds), The Great Labor Schism: A Retrospective, Scribe, Melbourne, 2005; Ross McMullin, So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the World's First National Labour Government, Scribe, Melbourne, 2004; David Day, Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia, Harper Collins Australia, Sydney, 2008, pp. 512; .Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Man, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2009; Edward W. Humphreys, Andrew Fisher: The Forgotten Mian, Sports and Editorial Services Australia, Teesdale, Victoria, 2008.

(79.) See, however, Michael Hogan, 'Template for a Labor faction: The Industrial Section and the Industrial Vigilance Council of the NSW Labor Party, 1916-19', Labour History, no. 96, May 2009, pp. 79-100; Nick Martin, 'Bucking the machine: Clarrie Martin and the NSW Socialisation Units 1929-35', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007, pp. 177-96.

(80.) See, for instance, Julie Holbrook Tolley, '"Gustav got the winery and Sophie got the soup tureen": The contribution of women to the Barossa Valley wine industry, 1836-2003', History Australia, vol. 2, no. 3, December 2005, 86.1-86.8, available at http://publications.epress.monash.edu/doi/full/10.2104/ ha050086?cookieSet=1

(81.) Two general histories of the ALP are scheduled for release: Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn, Labor's Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2010, and Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno, A Little History of the Australian Labor Party, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2011. See also Nick Dyrenfurth, 'It's the culture, stupid!', in Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasane (eds), All That's Left: What Labor Should Stand For, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2010.

Nick Dyrenfurth is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. He is the editor or author of several books on Australian history and politics including Heroes and Villains: The Rise and Fall of the Early Australian Labor Party, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2011, and A Little History of the Australian Labor Party, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2011 (with Frank Bongiorno). <nick.dyrenfurth@sydney.edu.au>