Representative lives? Biography and labour history.

Hearn, Mark ; Knowles, Harry

We cannot afford wantonly to lose sight of great men and memorable lives, and are bound to store up objects of admiration as far as may be.

Lord Acton (1)

There has been perhaps no more repudiated notion in historical practice than the idea of exulting the role of the great man in history. An assertion of the conceit of personal greatness, the exaggeration of the role of the individual in the historical process, and perhaps most of all the fact that this greatness was attributed to males, have all been rejected by self-respecting historians. Suspicion--or fear--of the 'delusional emphasis on "great men" and their deeds', as the American social historian and biographer Nick Salvatore has observed, or at least the unreasonable exaggeration of the role of the individual, has also encouraged suspicion of biography itself. (2) Geoffrey Elton informed historians that they 'should not suppose' that as writers of biography they were writing history. Timothy Blanning and David Carradine were clear that biographers do not produce anything which could be considered 'serious history'. Others have been equally dismissive of biography as a 'suspect enterprise' or as something which is 'outside' history. (3) Lois Banner surmises that these critics may see biography as inherently limited because it revolves around only one life, and is derived from a belles-lettres tradition often written by non-academic historians who lack the rigour of university scholars. (4)

Bidding farewell to the inappropriate or simply inaccurate celebration of greatness, we are left with at least a couple of nagging doubts: why do so many biographies, of both men and increasingly women, continue to be published, and a number of them written by perfectly respectable historians? Even more problematically, how should historians account for the role of the individual, without at least in part acknowledging that individual actors may play a significant role in the context of their historical moment?

These problems are particularly relevant to Australian labour history, which has maintained a consistent fascination with the role played by a range of individual leaders and activists. The founders of Labour History were mindful of this tradition. Robin Gollan set the parameters of the specialism in an editorial in the first issue of the journal in 1962. Gollan thought labour history should encompass

   a study of the working class situation taken in terms of health,
   leisure ... social history in the fullest sense, including politics
   ... class relations, the impact of other classes and class
   organisations on the workers ... economic history of labour .
   individual histories of major unions, the history of ideas and
   opinion and the history of popular culture. (5)

Gollan was careful to point out that the traditional form of labour history, 'confined largely to biography and political history [left] plenty of room for different interpretations'. From the outset the founders saw a place for labour biography in the study of labour history, a view that mirrored the well-established biographical tradition within Australian labour historiography.

Early work in Australian labour biography had been as much autobiographical as biographical. These books focused on the individual and the existence of any broader insights into the historical context of time and place was more by accident that design. New South Wales Labor Premier Jack Lang published his Why I Fight in 1934. In 1939 E.H. Lane, the left-leaning labour journalist, former AWU official and the brother of William Lane, published his memoirs in Dawn to Dusk: Reminiscences of a Rebel. Around the same time, Lloyd Ross self-published William Lane and the Australian Labor Movement (1935). H.V. Evatt's biography of former NSW Premier William Holman emerged in 1940; by the early 1960s, biographies of the former Labor prime ministers W.M. Hughes (1964) and Ben Chifley (1961), as well as trade union leader Harry Holland (1964), were on the shelves.

Labour biographies proliferated from the 1970s. Amongst these were D.J. Murphy's biographies of former Queensland Labor premier T.J. Ryan (1975), John Robertson's biography of former Labor Prime Minister James Scullin (1974), Heather Radi and Peter Spearritt's edited biographical collection on Jack Lang (1977), Lloyd Ross' biography of former Labor Prime Minister John Curtin (1977), and Colm Keirnan's biography of the former federal Labor leader Arthur Calwell (1978). Since the 1980s, the trend has continued with the emergence of biographical studies of a succession of Labor political identities such as former prime ministers Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, and more recently two biographies of the much neglected Andrew Fisher. There have also been biographies of a number of State premiers, along with biographies of Labor parliamentary identities, including Ted Theodore, and the prominent and controversial Labor front benchers in the Whitlam government, Clyde Cameron and Tom Uren. (6)

These diverse biographies reflect a common theme: how Labor created a place for the working class within the nation-state, and often formed the national government; tasks requiring the exercise of leadership, from the high offices of the state through to the perseverance of union organisers and political activists. Labour biography highlights a narrative of action that might obscure or disregard those elements unconducive to promoting a teleology of progress. Biographers are inclined to impose a symmetry of progress on their subjects, recounting the story of a life fulfilled, a commitment vindicated. Labour biography may be prone to this tendency by the nature of the labour movement's intervention in politics, and its desire to seek justice for its constituency.

Prominent Labor leaders are sometimes also presented by their biographers as Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'representative men'. Significantly, Emerson referred to 'the uses of great men'--alluding to the meanings the public or the reader invests in the biographical subject, as Barbara Caine observes: '[Andrew] Jackson served to embody the American frontier spirit, while [Benjamin] Franklin with his many talents and interests exemplified American ingenuity'. (7) In the Australian context, we may draw symbolic representations from a trinity of Labor Prime Ministers: Andrew Fisher reflects Labor's early national purpose; John Curtin, the nation's wartime sacrifice; Gough Whitlam the emergence of a more independent nation, a people transforming itself.

Labour biography also reflects a teleology of male purpose; of men 'at the centre of things. They--the workers and unionists--were the dynamic force in history. They made things happen'. Women, Marilyn Lake observes, 'had no place in the construct "labour history"'. And hence not much of a place, until comparatively recently, in labour biography. (8)

Lake argues that 'the representation of the worker as a man of action operates in a symbolic system in which action, confrontation and aggression are coded as masculine; passivity, idleness and submission as feminine'. Lake extends this point by observing that women have a distinctive class subjectivity from men, and cites Rosemary Pringle: 'Women, defined relationally, are more aware that unified subjectivity is an illusion: they are familiar with the experience of being "decentred" and do not need to feel at the centre of the universe to feel whole'. (9) This suggests that the alienation produced by class and socialisation prompts marginalised men to crave an identity formed and expressed in the public sphere. As historical actors, and perhaps vicariously as supporters or readers, only on the stage of public representation may men feel whole.

Biography is an expression of a range of privileged and subordinated subjectivities. The fact that both biographies and their readers may 'store up objects of admiration' should not necessarily be interpreted as crassly exulting greatness; it may fulfil a need to understand the meaning that these lives have played in their own context, and continue to play in our minds--that is, in the minds of the biographer and his or her readership. We take the lives of others as guides to our own action, whether that might be the conduct of our daily lives or our engagement with politics and the public sphere.

Following its publication in 2002, Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, sold over 50,000 copies and won a number of major literary awards, including The Age Book of the Year and the National Biography Award. This extraordinary reception draws attention to a powerful engagement that labour biography may generate in the public sphere. Robert Manne described Recollections of a Bleeding Heart as 'an excursion into political phenomenology'. (10) Watson's probing study of Keating, drawn from his experience as speechwriter in the Prime Minister's office, attracted a wide audience by offering readers an incisive engagement with the subjectivity of Labor leadership and the broader forces of change and resistance:

   He is a pre-Vatican II Bankstown tyke. Wholly secure in faith and
   family, he was made for fearless adventure. A parallel may be seen
   in his scheme for Australia: secure and strong in its domestic
   life, the cords of affection all wrapped around, the nation could
   boldly go abroad ... The notion of 'openness' as the guiding
   principle of Australian economic and foreign policy was by no means
   an exclusively Keating idea, but psychologically no-one was better
   suited to pursue it. (11)

In turn, the reader is offered a place within an experience of historic opportunity and human frailty, helping to construct an understanding of their own historical subjectivity. In Watson's study, the history of labour emerges as a shared human experience, transmitted through the empathetic connection between biographer and subject:

   I met Paul Keating in the doorway of his office on 9 January. He
   was wearing one of those famous suits and patent leather shoes.
   Before I went in someone from the media office told me how
   inspiring it was to work for him; but he didn't look capable of
   inspiring anyone. He stood front-on and gave me his little
   short-arm handshake, and a look with his famous brown eyes. The
   first impression was tiredness, languor, withdrawal. By the time I
   left half an hour or so later it was sadness, melancholy. It would
   remain the dominant impression. It's why I liked him and knew at
   once that I wanted the job. (12)

This article will proceed by considering the biographical treatment of Labor leaders, which has formed the central concern of Labor biography since the mid-twentieth century. Rather than exult great men, it is our intention to probe the reasons why biographers and readers were drawn to certain 'uses' of several of these leaders lives, and why particular narratives of Labor's success, failure or betrayal were associated with these leaders. This line of inquiry will be contrasted with the alternative subjectivity of women labour activists as represented in both their absence from the narration of Labor lives, and more recent efforts to both highlight the role of women, and just as importantly, and as Lake suggests, to try to understand how women's 'distinctive class subjectivity' might be drawn into recasting the terms of not only describing the role of women in the labour movement, but also recasting our wider understanding of Australian labour history, and the men and women who made it. Finally, we conclude by broadly surveying the efforts by labour historians to construct a 'history from below' through labour biography, and in so doing helping to fulfil the mission of labour history as identified by Robin Gollan in 1962.

The Uses of the Great: Australian Labor Leaders

Don Watson's need to invest meaning in Keating's leadership is a recurrent theme in Australian labour biography, and the best of the biographies of Australian Labor leaders have tended to be sensitive to the tension of the individual engaged in the process of helping to represent or advance Labor's cause. These tensions were evident from the earliest period of organised labour's intervention in politics. In many respects, H.V. Evatt's 1940 study of NSW Labor premier William Holman, Australian Labour Leader, is an extended meditation on the meaning and consequences of labour solidarity; what happens when you attempt to impose, over a period of years or decades, the solidarity of caucus and pledge on an individual, and, in Holman's case, an often wilful individualist? How did Evatt himself feel about this test of loyalty? The evidence of Australian Labour Leader suggests a degree of ambiguity. (13)

Evatt's biographer Kylie Tennant observed that prior to the publication of Australian Labour Leader there had been few Australian political biographies published, and none 'so comprehensive and well documented'. (14) Evatt was poised to enter federal politics as a Labor MHR, leading to ministerial office and the Party leadership in a career that spanned the period from the war until 1960. Holman seemed to offer lessons of a life of high talent and ambition, and fraught with contradiction as Holman negotiated the labour movement's fractious culture. Evatt's empathy with Holman's struggles is apparent throughout the work, and this elevated his biography to a level of achievement not previously seen in Australian labour biography. According to Evatt, William Holman was 'a statesman of great gifts ... possessed of genius. His early pioneering work for the Labour movement was done under almost every imaginable handicap'. (15) In the 1890s Holman had helped shaped the structure and identity of the Labor Party around the principle of solidarity, expressed in the pledge to abide by the decisions of the caucus, a principle enforced only after a bitter struggle at Labor conferences. Evatt was sensitive to the fact that the consequences of this hard-won achievement shadowed his subject's progress: 'But the truth was that in the great solidarity crisis of the nineties, both Hughes and Holman had forged a sharp weapon which was thereafter available whenever there arose disputes which were not readily settled by the express wording of Labour's platform.' (16)

In the 1916 conscription crisis Holman and Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes were judged to have failed their own test of solidarity. In his concluding 'Judgment' on Holman, Evatt struggled to resolve the role of the leader with his duty to party and nation. Evatt acknowledged Holman's personal ambition and attempted to rationalise it: 'But little can be done in the absence of that noble ambition which truly seeks to serve the people, although convinced that the way of service is also the way of personal achievement and supremacy.' (17) Yet empathy with Holman enabled Evatt to identify the 'bitterness' and 'resentment', and a stubborn refusal to conciliate, that often characterised the anti-conscriptionist stance, and which contributed to Labor lapsing from 1916 into 'a long era of powerlessness and futile opposition'. (18)

Evatt's empathetic connection with his subject produced a nuanced and even ambiguous assessment of Holman, which was not always appreciated, even by some of Evatt's biographers, a point explored further below. For many Labor supporters, it was simply appropriate that Holman should join the damned list of Labor 'rats' identified in the study of federal Labor rather self-consciously entitled True Believers. (19) John Iremonger's chapter on 'Rats' duly records the exemplary villains, amongst whom Billy Hughes takes a leading role, given the decision by Hughes and his supporters to privilege the cause of empire over class and Party in the conscription crisis. Hughes, a significant figure in the labour movement and national politics from the 1890s until the 1920s, has attracted relatively little attention from biographers, with the exception of L.F Fitzhardinage's comprehensive study. (20)

True believers need rats; it justifies the believers and their codes of loyalty and behaviour. (21) That Iremonger's chapter represents a useful mythology may be illustrated by drawing attention to a significant absence from his narrative. Entirely forgotten is Hughes' fellow pro-conscriptionist, the first Labor Prime Minister John Christian Watson, who was also expelled from the Labor Party in 1916.

It became something of a habit for biographers to refer to Watson and even his successor as Labor leader, Andrew Fisher, as forgotten or underestimated men; (22) figures lost in the passage of time, and a sense of their strange ordinariness, reinforced in a lack of recall of memorable speeches, or legendary triumphs or divisions associated with them. Barbara Caine wondered why otherwise unremarkable figures come to play influential roles. Caine cites Janet Browne's conclusion of her chosen subject, Charles Darwin, and the naturalist's relationship with his times: 'Darwinism was made by Darwin and Victorian society'. The Origin of Species was the product of a 'social process', developed in collaboration with Darwin's peers in the context of mid-nineteenth century Britain. (23) Watson, briefly Prime Minister in 1904 and leader of the world's first national Labor government, provides a case of class and nationalist needs producing an individual who represented Labor's aspirations in its formative period. Contemporaries in politics and the press drew attention to how Watson seemed to embody the emerging Labor Party, and its projection of pragmatic responsibility; he was a safe pair of Caledonian hands, the Bulletin reassured readers in 1904 of Watson's fiscal responsibility, although Watson, born in Chile of German and Irish descent, had not a Scots bone in his body. Watson carefully concealed the truth of his family background, so that he might reflect the image Labor sought to project onto the nation: white and British national identity, and politically stable, inclusive social progress. (24)

The studies of Watson by Al Grassby and Silvia Ordonez, and Ross McMullin, published respectively in 1999 and 2004, did not really succeed in rescuing their subject from obscurity. (25) The first account was too eccentric and the latter too narrowly focused on the brief Watson government. Little attention was paid in either work to Watson's relatively long service as federal Labor leader, and the emphasis he placed on White Australia and defence policy, themes which he reiterated in speeches and articles and in which he helped to define the character, and the stresses, that shaped the federal Labor Party until the crisis of World War I exposed the contradictions of empire and nation, voluntary recruitment and conscription. Recalling the narrative of white nationalism cultivated by this particular Labor 'rat' would complicate a simplistic memorialisation of the world's first Labor Prime Minister. When Labor celebrated the centenary of Watson's government in 2004 not a word of Watson's views were cited; he was relegated to a mute symbolism. (26)

It is not clear whether the recent biographical interest in Andrew Fisher entirely clarifies the significance of this diffident and elusive figure. (27) It is certainly instructive to read the biographies of Fisher by David Day or Peter Bastian and then turn again to Evatt's Australian Labour Leader, the work of a man who had closely observed Australian Labor politics during and after the turmoil of World War I. In Evatt's account, Fisher barely exists, marginalised by the ambitious rivalry of what Evatt describes as the two dynamic leaders of the labour movement in the period 1901-16: William Holman and Billy Hughes. It is not simply a matter of domineering personalities; for Evatt, Holman and Hughes embodied the creative tension of Labor in the period before the conscription split. As Evatt concludes of the competitive duo's vigorous clash over federal Labor's 1911 referenda proposals to increase Commonwealth power at the expense of the states:

   As the referendums were a setback to Hughes at the height of his
   prewar reputation, so they were the means of focusing the attention
   of all of Australia upon Holman ... From this time forward, there was
   much interplay and no little conflict between Holman and Hughes.
   All this had a considerable effect upon the history not merely of
   the Labour movement but of Australia. (28)

To such uses are great men put.

Day's and Bastian's biographies offer new narratives of Fisher's significance, particularly in leading Labor to office in 1910. In this task Day is more successful, not least in observing the complex interaction between personality and politics. Fisher's often-noted reserve was, Day suggests, a manifestation of the stress of his responsibilities as Labor leader and Prime Minister, which Fisher seems to have acutely felt, and exerted an influence on Labor's performance in office. By August 1910, only a matter of months after the historic election victory that had delivered Labor control of both houses of Parliament, Fisher's private secretary recorded that the Prime Minister was 'showing signs of severe strain'. (29) Yet in order to sustain a narrative of Fisher's dogged sense of duty and probity under the demands of office Day tends to reduce Billy Hughes, the Attorney-General in the Labor government, to the role of stock villain. Prior to describing the 1916 conscription crisis, Day editorially prompts the reader with assertions of Hughes' 'insatiable hunger for power', and his capacity for 'divisiveness and authoritarianism', although little evidence is offered in support of these claims in relation to Hughes' pre-war role. (30) By Day's own account, Hughes' activism was at least partly encouraged by Fisher's withdrawal.

The tendency to overstate the significance of the subject may flow from an instinctive unwillingness by biographers to avoid subjects with whom they do not empathise or share a mutual political outlook. Conversely, some biographies are written from a motive of denunciation that may yield useful if harsh insights, but may also construct a legend of venality as misleading as a tendency to exaggerate the qualities of the subject. One of the few sustained biographical denunciations in Australian labour history is Bede Nairn's 1986 study of NSW Premier Jack Lang. Nairn could not find much sympathy with Lang; his policy achievements were few and his Depression financial strategy 'reckless and finally disastrous'. Lang's historical importance, Nairn concluded, 'is linked to the negative results of his drive for Party power when the cult of personality had a comparatively large, if credulous and potentially diminishing, following'. (31) Nairn provided a corrective to the legend of the 'Big Fella' and Lang's iconoclastic stand against the British banks, which had led at times to a serious overstatement of Lang's radicalism and political acumen, although some of this correction had previously been undertaken by Heather Radi and Peter Spearritt's 1977 edited collection. (32)

A need to unambiguously establish the moral supremacy of their subject seems important for some biographers. Evatt's biographers have reflected a degree of unease at his apparent indulgence of William Holman's political treachery. Tennant's 1970 biography records the discomfort of 'the "boys" at the Trades Hall at being confronted with a generous study of a Labor rat'. (33) In Doc Evatt, published in 1994, Ken Buckley, Barbara Dale and Wayne Reynolds also note that Australian Labour Leader was not 'enthusiastically greeted by everyone in the labour movement'. Doc Evatt criticised Evatt for failing, in his portrayal of Holman, to appreciate the resistance to conscription felt by the native-born working class. (34) The reluctance by Buckley, Dale and Reynolds to accept Evatt's tolerance of Holman was perhaps framed by the somewhat defensive aims of their own study, as they insisted on restating the greatness and loyalty of Evatt--'patriot, internationalist, fighter and scholar', as the biography is sub-titled--to the Labor cause, in the face of a then recently published biography of Evatt by Peter Crockett, which they claimed unduly emphasised Evatt s human frailties. (35) Unambiguously defending Evatt required condemning Holman, otherwise it left open the possibility that Evatt might be found guilty of at least some degree of ambiguity or contradiction, and this seems to be anathema to the stubborn defence of Evatt's actions and reputation offered in Doc Evatt:

   H.V. Evatt was a man of many talents, demonstrated in the fact that
   he had not one career but several. He was a barrister; a High Court
   judge; a writer and a scholar who was also a significant patron of
   literature and the arts; an international statesman; and a Labor
   leader with a very meaningful role, especially in the preservation
   of freedom in Australia. (36)

The idealism that Evatt's career and writings did consistently reflect is thoughtfully explored in Crockett's Evatt: A Life, a biography which demonstrates that an empathetic engagement can also function at a critical remove, and does not necessarily require a defence of the subject's every action. Crockett argues that Evatt gravitated towards his study of Holman as a development of the liberalism that Evatt embraced as a young man. Australian Labour Leader was 'located strongly within the liberal tradition ... returning to many of the themes encountered in his student piece [Liberalism in Australia, Evatt's first publication, in 1918]'. (37) In seeking a sympathetic understanding of Holman's contrary individualism, Australian Labour Leader 'conformed to the liberal tradition of justice and the protection of individual rights'. The Holman biography reflected the spirit of the public engagement embraced by the barrister, High Court judge and political activist: 'Evatt's professional activity in industrial law and his defence of Labor and radical figures unites in thought and action an expression of Labor politics and law that was pragmatic liberalism.' (38) Evatt's pragmatic liberalism could be deployed in opposition to the Communist challenge to the values and institutions which he cherished, reflected in his vigorous pursuit as Attorney-General of communist union officials during the 1949 Miner's strike. Evatt's liberalism could also be turned to a defence of the fundamental right of communists to express their politics in a liberal democracy, a right Evatt defended by leading opposition to the Menzies government's 1951 referendum proposal to ban the Communist Party. Evatt was fated to express his liberalism in the intensely combative atmosphere of the Cold War, and Crockett concludes that this may have suited him: '[A]s a libertarian, Evatt would have been misplaced in a liberal climate, for he would have been denied the antagonistic conditions in which his spirit thrived ... he showed a need to be vexed by oppression, which gave identity and equanimity to his ambition.' (39)

Crockett's assessment could in some respects be applied to Evatt's political contemporaries John Curtin and Ben Chifley, the Labor prime ministers who served across the 1940s and who were certainly vexed by the oppression of their political enemies, although it seems unlikely that they thrived on antagonism. Curtin's career and sacrifice on behalf of the nation--he died in office in July 1945--has attracted a number of biographies and memoirs, of which those by Lloyd Ross and David Day provide the authoritative accounts. (40) Perhaps the most compelling feature of Day's biographies of both John Curtin and Ben Chifley is their empathic focus on the relationship between personality and politics. Of Curtin's leadership, Day observes 'it was his patent integrity and humility which helped to clothe Curtin with a hard-won moral authority'. (41) The merits of Ross's biography of Curtin, and Fin Crisp's biography of Ben Chifley, flowed from their role as participants in the Labor governments of the 1940s, and both brought to their studies their experience not only of key individuals but also the processes of Party and government.

Understanding the fractious course of Party and policy can yield an appreciation of character, as Crisp found in his account of Chifley's speech in 1947 when the Commonwealth Parliament voted to ratify the Bretton Woods Agreement. Jack Lang, by then an isolated and bitter critic of Chifley and the government as an independent parliamentarian, unleashed a spiteful attack on Chifley and ratification. Typically, Chifley replied by ignoring the invective:

   Perhaps the experiment will fail; but no country which has any
   regard for the cause of humanity can, for some selfish reason ...
   refuse to become parties to this agreement. If we have any love of
   mankind and a desire to free future generations from the terrible
   happenings of the last thirty years, we must put our faith in these
   organizations ... to attain a reasonable and decent standard of
   living to which every human being, black or white, is entitled.
   (42)

Chifley, Crisp observed, 'did not usually wear his heart on his sleeve ... but under his own business-like and very Australian bent there was [a] human sympathy which knew no frontier'. For Crisp, the debate illustrated how Chifley, who might have settled back into the parochial isolationism of the pre-war years, responded to the need for a transformation of both policy and human feeling. (43) Drawing the reader's attention to the transformative potential of leadership, often realised under conditions of stress and conflict, is perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of biographies of Labor leaders, powerfully illustrating the human experience, and the relationship between personality and policy.

Crockett's assessment of Evatt might be applied with greater justice to Gough Whitlam, who often seemed to thrive on antagonism and was certainly vexed by the oppression of his political enemies--both within the labour movement and beyond. Whitlam's dedication to public service and his political philosophy were also grounded in the Australian tradition of interventionist liberal governance. Jenny Hocking's Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History, cultivates a sense of Whitlam's destiny towards directing the national government and the implementation of Labor's program in 1972. Whitlam's identification with the nation evolved from an early age, encouraged by his father Frederick's role in nation building as Commonwealth Assistant Crown Solicitor under the patronage of the nation's first public servant, Robert Garran, and in helping to develop the civic life of the new Canberra community, to which the Whitlam family moved when the capital was established in 1927. 'It would have been difficult for any child of Canberra to emerge unaffected by its sense of national identity, civic pride and community spirit.' (44) The influence of the liberal tradition was reflected in the 'respective interests' of father and son 'in constitutional ideas, the powers of the national parliament and universalised political and human rights as constituting the post-war notion of democratic citizenship intersected'. (45) As a 28 year old RAAF pilot officer Gough Whitlam had this interest sharply focused by the defeat of Labor's 1944 referendum proposals to expand Commonwealth power; 'he would eventually come to consider the twenty-eight years between the referendum and the advent of his government as lost time'. (46) Labor was the only possible vehicle for the interventions required for national development and social justice. When he became active in the Labor Party in the mid-1940s, Whitlam contrasted the decline of the non-Labor parties into shallow cynicism with Labor's idealism, which he found eloquently expressed in Chifley's 1947 Bretton Woods speech. 'For me those words remain a light on the hill'. (47)

The fulfilment of destiny is a theme that touches Don Watson's study of Paul Keating, and certainly characterises Blanche d'Alpuget's biographies of Bob Hawke. (48) In this cause Hawke required little encouragement. 'The Hawkes accepted the popular meaning of the name Robert: "Of Shining Fame"'. Bob's father Clem recalled that from birth his son seemed special. 'We thought he was destined for a great future'. (49) Like Paul Keating, Bob Hawke was nurtured in familial security and encouraged to embrace a confident sense of self. d'Alpuget's biographies track the path of Hawke's destiny towards high office increasingly based in a belief in an empathetic connection between the Australian people and himself, and which manifested in an almost biblical appeal for reconciliation at the 1983 election, and in the search for harmony between government, unions and employers pursued in the subsequent Prices and Incomes Accord.

It is too soon to tell if biographers will construct a narrative of destiny around Australia's first woman Prime Minister, Labor's Julia Gillard. Her elevation as a consequence of the political execution of Kevin Rudd in June 2010 attracted intense media and public interest, and was interpreted as fulfilling a political logic, if not a prediction of shining fame. Jacqueline Kent's biography was published prior to Gillard's elevation, but it tenuously prepared the ground with testimony that may at least describe a certain reflected destiny: 'If Gillard's political style is to be compared with anyone's, it is probably Bob Hawke's ... both are extraordinary people who know the value of appearing ordinary'. (50) In launching d'Alpuget's Hawke: The Prime Minister in July 2010, Gillard pointedly identified herself with the subject, and his legend of consensual political success: 'I take Bob Hawke as a role model. In his commitment to bringing people together and building consensus for reform, he has been a model for all of us'. (51) Kent may have also unintentionally helped prepare the ground for a narrative that follows the pattern bestowed on the biographies of Gillard's male predecessors:

   It is difficult to believe that if [Rudd] were politically wounded
   to the point of becoming a liability and his current stratospheric
   popularity ratings plummeted, it would be Gillard who delivered the
   coup de grace. She is no Paul Keating: there is no evidence that
   for the sake of her own ambition she would be willing to
   destabilise the party. (52)

However reluctantly, Gillard proved willing to strike, and nor did she 'blink' when later confronted by journalists if she 'welshed' on a last minute deal to save Rudd's leadership. 'Our Lady of Altona is no shrinking violet', concluded journalist Katherine Murphy, fuelling a legend of Gillard's steely resolve. (53) The narrative of Julia Gillard's destiny may well resemble that cultivated by and about both Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, including an account of the necessary ruthlessness required for self-creation. Destiny sometimes requires a nudge.

Shaping the Self: Gender and Subjectivity

In her discussion of 'biography as history' Lois Banner referred to Joan Scott's 'pathbreaking' 1986 analysis of '"subjective identity" and its relationship to social organizations and cultural representations as a central way to proceed in understanding gender, with biography an effective tool'. (54) As Marilyn Lake has also argued, feminist and gender history not only offer a means of bringing women into history, but also of recasting our conceptions of the relationship of the subject with their historical context.

In acknowledging the role that biographies of women activists have played in advancing feminism and feminist history, Joy Damousi asserts that many have been restricted by being trapped within a fixed empirical model. Mere descriptive biography, she claimed, has had the effect of marginalising women's voices and their experience. By contrast Damousi identified a useful political purpose in uncovering the lives of women agitators and writers 'whose organisations, endeavours and utopias have been rendered irrelevant by masculinist history'. (55)

Damousi's model of a feminist biography is one in which empirical study is accompanied by an examination of women's political subjectivity. In her study of women activists and agitators within the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) during the 1920s, (56) she examined how these women made sense of the world through Communist discourse as well as describing the role they played within the Party. By this means, she was able to provide a broader understanding about why they joined, why they stayed in such a masculinist Party and why they resisted other groups. In a wider dimension, Damousi saw this relationship between experience and political subjectivity as increasing our historical understanding of the ways in which women negotiate their world in particular time and places. (57)

Notwithstanding the pitfalls of empiricism, there remains a need to continue to expand the field of women's labour biography, particularly when the lives of pioneering activists such as Muriel Heagney, Eileen Powell and Edna Ryan lack sustained biographical analysis. Other recent biographies of women labour movement activists have addressed the need not only to include women in the history of the labour movement, but to clarify how they have helped to shape and change its character and purpose, as may be found in Pam Young's Proud to be a Rebel: The Life and Times of Emma Miller, Bobbie Oliver's Jean Beadle: A Life of Labor Activism, and Among the Chosen: The Life Story of Pat Giles. (58) The emphasis placed by Lekkie Hopkins and Lyn Roarty on both the political activism and family life of Labor Senator Pat Giles reflects Marilyn Lake's observation of women's distinctive class subjectivity. Kate Deverall has recently helped overcome the neglect of Kate Dwyer and her sister Annie Golding, not least in observing how their political activism within the NSW labour movement in the early twentieth century, and the subjective experience that framed that activism, challenged 'the nascent solidarities of both the women's movement and the labour movement'. (59) Deverall's analysis shows how the immersion in a life directs us to the particularities of historical experience, disrupting settled assumptions and prompting new and more complex lines of research inquiry.

The particularities of historical experience sustain the compelling narrative of Zelda D'Aprano's Kath Williams: The Unions and the Fight for Equal Pay, and with intense effect in the chapter entitled 'Kath and male structures'. Within the structure of the Communist Party of Australia, in which Kath Williams was active from the 1930s until the late 1960s, the reality of women's distinctive subjectivity was measured in the terms of a ruthless exclusion, and which paradoxically manifested in a narrow solidarity of 'sameness':

   Equality meant sameness with men while negating the specificity of
   women's oppression and experience within a dominant masculinist
   culture. Women were expected to work with men, in unity and equity.
   Difference of interest was minimised, and 'sameness' was the only
   basis on which equality was claimed. 'Equality' within the Party as
   in society, maintained inequalities rather than challenged them and
   women's issues which were different to those of men were
   subordinate. (60)

The trade union movement mirrored the terms of the CPA's gender exclusions, and constrained the identification of women activists such as Kath Williams as feminists: '[I]n the 1950s and 1960s, no trade union would have employed her had she been a feminist. Like all male institutions, the trade unions and political parties demand total loyalty to the structure'. (61) Progress to address the cause of equal pay, to which Kath Williams dedicated such energy, was also frustrated by the ideological divisions of the labour movement:

   My research reveals no evidence of co-operation between Muriel
   Heagney and Kath Williams despite their many years of activism.
   There was no documentation of any approach being made to seek the
   support of each other. It would seem that their allegiance to their
   male-dominated political parties--Muriel to the ALP and Kath to the
   CPA--prevented them from combining their efforts in the campaign
   for pay justice for women. (62)

Kath Williams went to her grave eulogised by a senior male Party elder as a woman who was not a feminist. (63)

Williams life, and the lives of women labour activists yet be explored, need to be read not only in the context of the broad discriminations at work in Australian society, but also in terms of the specific organisational and cultural restraints placed on women active in the labour movement. (64) The male structures and culture of union solidarity are sharply observed in Barbara Pocock's Strife, Sex and Politics in Labour Unions. Pocock argues that a focus on women, when discussing the issue of gender and unions,

   has hidden the culture of unionism--all its habits and
   practices--from public view, so that they are rarely named as men's
   practices, belonging to a men's movement. In the discourse of
   unionism, 'worker' often has meant, in fact, 'male worker',
   'member' has stood in for 'male member', and identities like 'shop
   steward' have been saturated with masculinity. (65)

Zelda D'Aprano's life of Kath Williams helped to bring the hidden representations of union culture and its gendered consequences vividly into focus.

Lois Banner suggests that the subject's negotiation of time and place may reflect what 'the new biography' stresses as 'the shifting and multifaceted nature of individual personality'. The poststructuralist approach advocated by Joan Scott has been developed, Banner argues, in The New Biography by Jo Burr Margadant, who asserts that 'there is no such thing as a "coherent self", no unified "I." The only "selves" that exist, according to Margadant, are those that individuals "perform" to create an impression of coherence'. (66) We may share Banner's reluctance to accept that the human subject is merely a 'Babel of voices'. However, the roles that subjects have created for themselves, or have had imposed upon them, and the uses that biographers and readers have sought to draw from those subject lives, also suggests 'the power of culture in shaping the self', a power clarified by a focus on gender and subjectivity. (67)

Labour Biography and a 'History from Below'

Traditionally drawn to the study of male political leaders, Australian labour biography has been over-represented in the field of political rather than industrial labour. Less attention has been paid to a range of working-class political activists, union officials, or working-class lives, despite the dedication of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History to encouraging research and writing on all facets of working-class experience.

Many labour-movement identities, particularly journalists and editors of labour newspapers, have been overlooked, a reflection of the relative neglect of the vital role the labour press has played in the development of the movement since the late-nineteenth century. There have been some biographical studies of labour radicals including Fred Paterson and Tom and Audrey McDonald, and trade union leaders Lloyd Ross, Laurie Short and Tas Bull. (68) Stuart Macintyre's study of Western Australian labour leader Paddy Troy departed from the standard biographical model to produce a work which is as much a labour history of that state's dockyard workers as it is a biography of Troy. By situating his subject in a wider historical context, his study provides a useful window into issues such the conditions of dockyard work and the impact on workers and the industry of technological change. (69)

The journal Labour History has mirrored the fluctuations in the popularity of labour biography since the 1960s. In its first two decades, there was an average of around one article per issue dedicated to an individual or an individual's contribution to historical events. The 1980s saw a rapid decline in interest in the individual with only five articles which could be classified as biographical in 20 issues of the journal. The 1990s was little better, with just eight biographical articles appearing, three of which were published in the last issue for the decade. The genre's position has more recently been enhanced by the publication of a thematic issue on biography in 2004. (70) These scholarly articles have enriched labour history by either illuminating neglected lives or reconsidering the meanings of apparently peripheral figures whose activism is not only worthy of recall, but recasts our understanding of the nature of the labour movement. Such is the contribution provided by Paul Strangio's examination of the early union career of the Labor MP Stan Keon, who split from the Labor Party in 1955. (71)

So far, there has been no attempt in Australia to directly replicate the British initiative to provide biographical dictionaries as reference works for the study of labour history. The first volume of the Dictionary for Labour Biography was published in 1972, edited by John Saville and Asa Briggs. The latest, and thirteenth volume, was published in 2010. Contributions take the form of biographical essays drawn from a range of primary and secondary sources on a diverse range of individuals, and which engage with recent historiographical developments in British labour history. (72) In Australia work is underway in the compilation, by John Shields and Andrew Moore, of The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement 1788-1975. The Register will incorporate brief biographical entries of over 2000 men and women whose contribution to Australian labour history has, until now, been either unrecognised or under-documented. (73)

Conclusion

Robert Rotberg argues that historians need to recognise that social forces act on and through individuals: 'The hands of individuals are everywhere, usually visible but equally often buried beneath the detritus of economic, social or climatic consideration'. (74)

One example of how labour historians might employ biography lies in the work of British sociologist Bill Williamson. (75) Williamson wrote about the life of his grandfather, a Northumberland miner. Despite the focus on one man and his family, the central purpose of this work was to provide an account of the changes that occurred in the society and community in which his grandfather lived. For Williamson, the book's key objective was to demonstrate that biography is a form of analysis 'appropriate to the study of social change and representing a way of reconciling the work of historians and sociologists'. (76)

As Williamson explained, his work was concerned with 'several interlocking trajectories of change and two major historical transitions'. The trajectories involved the rise of the organised labour movement and the decline of British liberalism, movements in the character of trade unionism in mining, and structural changes in the mining industry itself. At a community level, the growth of local institutions, the co-operative store, the chapels and the working men's club were investigated, as were the more abstruse changes in the meaning and significance of community for the people who lived in the mining village. (77)

What Williamson sought to achieve reflects the value of biography as a device in the writing of a history whose wider meanings unfold from the focus on one life. As Banner points out, biography raises many of the issues which history reveals: sexuality, ethnicity, race, class, health and medicine, domesticity, religion, education, workforce participation and architecture. It is also connected with matters of dress and appearance. Equally, says Banner, biography can intersect with new historical fields, such as transnational histories, by exploring the lives of individuals who journeyed across continents and oceans as adventurers or slaves. (78) This has a particular relevance in Australian labour history with the high incidence of convict transportation and later immigration. The transnational exchange of ideas, political strategies and organising tactics have also been vitally significant in the development of the Australian labour movement, and have often been transmitted by individual initiative and networks of like-minded activists. It is important for historians to recognise that although many biographies may be written in a conventional life narrative, they need not be; methods which are problem-based or thematically-focused are just as effective. (79)

It is worthwhile pondering Rotberg's point that biographers, as historians, are able to locate their subjects in the context of their social, political and economic times. They also have the ability to rescue the often-forgotten force of human agency and the role of individuals in the dynamic of historical change. The story of Australian labour history, without biography and biographers, would lack the spark of life, be less informed and provide a much less complete representation of a profoundly important social movement and its people. (80)

Endnotes

(1.) Barbara Caine, Biography and History, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010, p. 16.

(2.) Nick Salvatore, 'Biography and social history: An intimate relationship', Labour History, no. 87, November 2004, p. 187.

(3.) Cited in Robert Rotberg, 'Biography and historiography: Mutual evidentiary and interdisciplinary considerations', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 40, no. 3, 2010, pp. 317-18.

(4.) Lois Banner, 'Biography as history', American Historical Review, vol.114, no.3, June 2009, p. 580.

(5.) R. Gollan, 'Labour History', Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 1, January 1962, pp. 3-5.

(6.) David Day, Chifley, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2001; David Day, John Curtin: A Life, Harper Collins, Sydney, 1999; Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: The Biography, Miegunyah, Press, Melbourne, 2008; Blanche d'Alpuget, Hawke: The Prime Minister, Melbourne University Press, Parkville, 2010; Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, Random House Australia, Sydney, 2002; David Day, Andrew Fisher, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2008; Kate White, John Cain and Victorian Labor 1917-1957, Hale and Iremonger Sydney, 1982; Bede Nairn, The 'Big Fella': Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891-1949, revised edition, Melbourne University Press, Parkville, 1995; Peter Golding, They Called Him Old Smoothie: John Joseph Cahill, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2009; Marilyn Dodkin, Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader, UNSW Press, Kensington, 2003; Ross Fitzgerald, 'Red Ted': The Life of E.G. Theodore, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1994; Daniel Connell, The Confessions of Clyde Cameron 1913-1990, ABC Enterprises, Sydney, 1990; Tom Uren, Straight Left, Random House Australia, Sydney, 1995.

(7.) Caine, Biography and History, pp. 13-14.

(8.) Marilyn Lake, 'The constitution of political subjectivity and the writing of labour history', in Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History, UNSW Press, Kensington, 1994, p. 76.

(9.) Ibid., pp. 77, 80.

(10.) The Age, 13 May 2002.

(11.) Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, p. 76.

(12.) Ibid., p. 19.

(13.) H.V. Evatt, Australian Labour Leader: The Story of W.A. Holman and the Labour Movement, Angus and Robertson Ltd, Sydney, 1940.

(14.) Kylie Tennant, Evatt: Politics and Justice, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1970, p. 114.

(15.) Evatt, Australian Labour Leader, p. 564.

(16.) Ibid., p. 567.

(17.) Ibid., p. 568.

(18.) Ibid., pp. 566, 574.

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

(20.) L.F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 2 vols, 1964-79. See also Donald Horne, In Search of Billy Hughes, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1979.

(21.) For a discussion of labour 'rats', see Jacqueline Dickenson, Renegades and Rats: Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations in Britain and Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2006.

(22.) Al Grassby and Silvia Ordonez, The Man that Time Forgot: The Life and Times of John Christian Watson, Australia's First Labor Prime Minister, Pluto Press, Sydney 1999; Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Man, UNSW Press, Kensington, 2009; Edward W. Humphreys, Andrew Fisher: The Forgotten Man, Sports and Editorial Services Australia, Teesdale, 2008.

(23.) Caine, Biography and History, pp. 118-21.

(24.) Mark Hearn, 'Cultivating an Australian sentiment: John Christian Watson's narrative of white nationalism', National Identities, vol. 9, no. 4, 2007.

(25.) Ross McMullin, So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the World's First National Labour Government, Scribe Publications, Carlton, 2004.

(26.) Hearn, 'Cultivating an Australian sentiment', pp. 351-52.

(27.) Aside from Bastian and Humphreys, cited above, see also David Day, Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia, HarperCollins, Pymble, 2008; W.K. Anderson, 'Andrew Fisher: "a proud, honest man of Scotland"', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 87, no. 2, 2001.

(28.) Evatt, Australian Labour Leader, p. 276.

(29.) Day, Andrew Fisher, p. 201.

(30.) Ibid., pp. 198, 218.

(31.) Bede Nairn, The 'Big Fella': Jack Lang and the Australian Labor Party 1891-1949, Melbourne University Press, Parkville, Vic., 1986, p. 316.

(32.) Heather Radi and Peter Spearritt (eds), Jack Lang, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1977; see also Miriam Dixson, Greater than Lenin? Lang and Labor 1916-1932, Melbourne University Press, Parkville 1977; Harry Mayfield, Jack Lang, the Big Fella!, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, 1984; Frank Cain, Jack Lang and the Great Depression, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2005.

(33.) Tennant, Evatt: Politics and Justice, p. 119.

(34.) Ken Buckley, Barbara Dale and Wayne Reynolds, Doc Evatt: Patriot, Internationalist, Fighter and Scholar, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 133-34.

(35.) Ibid., p. 410; Peter Crockett, Evatt: A Life, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993.

(36.) Buckley et al., Doc Evatt, p. 417.

(37.) Crockett, Evatt: A Life, p. 58.

(38.) Ibid., pp. 59-60.

(39.) Ibid., p. 305.

(40.) Day, Curtin: A Life; Lloyd Ross, John Curtin: A Biography, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1977.

(41.) Day, Curtin: A Life, p. 583.

(42.) Quoted in L.F. Crisp, Ben Chifley: A Biography, Longmans, London 1961, p. 210.

(43.) Ibid., pp. 210-11.

(44.) Jenny Hocking, Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton, 2008, p. 47.

(45.) Ibid., p. 71.

(46.) Ibid., pp. 101-2.

(47.) Ibid., pp. 120-21.

(48.) Blanche d'Alpuget, Robert J. Hawke: A Biography, Landsdowne Press, Melbourne, 1982; Blanche d'Alpuget, Hawke: The Prime Minister, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton, 2010.

(49.) d'Alpuget, Robert J. Hawke: A Biography, pp. 1-2.

(50.) Jacqueline Kent, The Making of Julia Gillard, Viking, Camberwell, 2009, p. 4.

(51.) 'Gillard praises "role model" Hawke at book launch', ABC News [website] http://www.abc.net. au/news/stories/2010/07/12/2951535.htm

(52.) Kent, The Making of Julia Gillard, p. 284.

(53.) The Age, 15 July 2010.

(54.) Banner, 'Biography as history', p. 579; Joan W. Scott, 'Gender: A useful category of historical analysis', in Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988.

(55.) Joy Damousi, 'Feminist biography', in Richard Broome (ed.), Tracing Past Lives: The Writing of Historical Biography, History Institute, Carlton, Vic., 1995, pp. 34-35.

(56.) Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890-1955, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994.

(57.) Damousi, 'Feminist biography', pp. 40-41.

(58.) Pam Young, Proud to be a Rebel: The Life and Times of Emma Miller, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1991; Bobbie Oliver, Jean Beadle: A Life of Labor Activism, University of Western Australia Press, 2007; Lekkie Hopkins and Lyn Roarty, Among the Chosen: The Life Story of Pat Giles, Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2010.

(59.) Kate Deverall, 'They did not know their place: The politics of Annie Golding and Kate Dwyer', Labour History, no. 87, November 2004, p. 44.

(60.) Zelda D'Aprano, Kath Williams: The Unions and the Fight for Equal Pay, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne, 2001, p. 217.

(61.) Ibid., pp. 219-20.

(62.) Ibid., p. 219.

(63.) Ibid., p. 221.

(64.) See Patricia Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation, Penguin Books, Sydney, 1996.

(65.) Barbara Pocock, Strife: Sex and Politics in Labour Unions, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1997, p. 3.

(66.) Banner, 'Biography as history', p. 581.

(67.) Ibid., p. 581.

(68.) Ross Fitzgerald, The People's Champion: Fred Paterson: Australia's Only Communist Party Member of Parliament, University of Queensland Press, 1997. Tom McDonald and Audrey McDonald, Intimate Union: Sharing a Revolutionary Life, Pluto Press, Annandale, 1998; Stephen Holt, A Veritable Dynamo: Lloyd Ross and Australian Labor 1901-1987, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1996; Susanna Short, Laurie Short: A Political Life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1992; Tasnor Bull, Life on the Waterfront: An Autobiography, Harper Collins, Sydney, 1998.

(69.) Stuart Macintyre, Militant: The Life and Times of Paddy Troy, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984.

(70.) 'Struggling for recognition: The individual in labour history', a thematic in Labour History, no. 87, November 2004. We have included in the survey only those works which could be classified as articles. The survey does not include research notes or obituaries.

(71.) Paul Strangio, '"Young, ambitious and eager": Stan Keon and the Victorian Public Service Association', Labour History, no. 87, November 2004, pp. 167-86.

(72.) Keith Gildart and David Howell, (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2010.

(73.) Andrew Moore and John Shields, Collective Biography and Labour History: The Case of The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, 1788-1975, unpublished paper presented to the AAHANZBS Conference, University of Sydney, 2009.

(74.) Rotberg, 'Biography and historiography', p. 305.

(75.) Bill Williamson, Class Culture and Community: A Biographical Study of Social Change in Mining, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982.

(76.) Ibid., p. 1.

(77.) Ibid., pp. 2-3.

(78.) Banner, 'Biography as history', p. 582.

(79.) Rotberg, 'Biography and historiography', pp. 323-24.

(80.) Ibid., p. 324.

Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles *

* The authors wish to thank Labour Historys two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Mark Hearn teaches Australian history in the Department of Modern History, Macquarie University. His research interest in the role of the individual in history is reflected in articles published in National Identities, Gender and History and Rethinking History. <mark.hearn@mq.edu.au>

Harry Knowles is an Honorary Associate with the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney and has published in the areas of both labour and business history. He has a particular interest in biography's role in the writing of history. <harry.knowles@sydney.edu.au>