'The benefits of industrial organisation'? The second fisher government and fin de siecle modernity in Australia.

Hearn, Mark

The developing modernity of Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterised by unprecedented industrialisation and technological change, forces that stimulated the development of the Australian labour movement. The election of a federal Labor government on 13 April 1910 was a victory that reflected, as Prime Minister-elect Andrew Fisher declared three days after the ballot, 'the benefits of industrial organisation'. (1) Labor's organisation was akin to a 'machine', as Labor's political rivals and conservative press critics ruefully lamented, that mobilised its constituency by mirroring the industrialisation of emergent modern economy and society. (2) Fisher claimed that winning control of both houses of Parliament confirmed Labor as Australia's only genuine national political movement. Labor was the first political party since Federation in 1901 able to govern without an alliance or coalition with another party. (3)

Although Fisher believed that Labor stood poised to achieve its historic mission, his post-election speeches and interviews revealed that he remained troubled by two dilemmas: whether Labor could effectively control both the transmission and the interpretation of its message in the public sphere; and the degree to which Labor could impose its legislative agenda to profoundly recast the terms of the nation-building project pursued by Alfred Deakin's liberal protectionists, with Labor support, since Federation. If Labor was to identify itself as the leading progressive political force within the nation, spreading the benefits of prosperity equitably across the community, then those two pressing and deeply interconnected problems had to be addressed.

During the immediate post-election period Andrew Fisher stressed the first of these priorities: the need for Labor to establish a network of labour movement newspaper dailies within three years. Labor also committed to conducting a referendum in April 1911 to radically increase Commonwealth power to intervene in the economy. In turn, these priorities had to be managed within the context of fin de siecle modernity, the extraordinary global forces of capital and culture that framed Labor's interventions in politics and the public sphere. As John McKenzie has argued, if modernity may loosely be described as 'all phenomena flowing from the industrial revolution and its precursors', there is also a need to closely observe its manifestations in specific time and place, including the intensification of the forces of technological, industrial and cultural change underway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (4) This introduction outlines the nature of fin de siecle modernity, and Labor's relationship with the public sphere and industrial capitalism in this period of turbulent change.

Developing Australian modernity was complicated by the tensions of the fin de siecle in the period 1890-1914, reflecting a questioning of traditional belief systems in religion, science, social values and politics. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst observe the fin de siecle as 'an epoch of endings and beginnings'. The collision of the old and new 'that characterised the turn of the century marks ... an excitingly volatile and transitional period', which included the impact of self-consciously 'new' formations--the new woman, the new journalism, new human sciences such as psychology, psychical research, eugenics; extraordinary technological advances including wireless telegraphy, the X-ray and cinematography, the motor car. The excitement of the new was also cast against anxiety at the intensifying pace of urban life, and a fear of biological degeneration. The emergence of subversive political formations in the fringe radicalism of anarchists and socialism, and the mass political mobilisation of social democratic parties in Europe and Australia, also intimidated the conservative and liberal political establishment. (5)

Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter's Fin de siecle and its Legacy observes a gradual transition to the cultural and industrial onset of modernity by incorporating contributions on economic issues and technology, themes often overlooked in fin de siecle studies, which 'privileged considerations to its cultural-literary and artistic manifestations, to the relative neglect of other elements'. (6) Alice Teichova argues that a significant legacy of fin de siecle capitalism was 'the giant firm' of cartels and trusts such as the mergers which produced the American and German oil, steel and chemical combines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'relentlessly integrating the processes of mass production with those of mass distribution' on a global scale. (7)

Alfred Chandler describes the technological innovations of the period that helped produce a 'second industrial revolution' that in turn facilitated capitalist expansion and the growth of giant firms. It was a 'three-pronged investment in production, distribution and management that brought into being the large managerial enterprise'. (8) While resisting a description of 'a new phase of capitalist development', Eric Hosbawm acknowledges an extraordinary concentration of market competition and the rise of corporations with a tendency towards oligopoly and monopoly, particularly 'in industries generating and distributing new forms of energy', and in the production of mass consumer goods. (9) A key aspect in terms of this development is distribution, which included, as Chandler observes, an 'international marketing and distributing network so that the volume of sales might keep pace with the new volume of production'. (10) Efficient distribution required a commercialised public sphere to stimulate sales; in the early 1900s this predominantly meant newspapers. Keeping pace with an accelerating volume of production both reflected and intensified the speeding up of life at work and in social life.

The industrial and technologically driven turbulence of modernity also stimulated new ways of perceiving and experiencing time and space, as Stephen Kern observes: 'It was an age of speed but, like the [hand cranked] cinema, not always uniformly accelerated. The pace was unpredictable, and the world, like the early audiences, was alternatively overwhelmed and inspired, horrified and enchanted.' (11) The labour movement was sensitive to the insecurity of the white working class in the exposed territory of Australia, and the potentially sudden interventions across time and space posed by new coalitions of global capital. In 1910 Mary Gilmore alerted Sydney Worker readers to the emergence of the International Shipping Federation 'combine', and a threat of non-white strike-breaking labour: 'It's avowed intention is to supply labour to its members in times of strike ... in any part of the world ... can they be brought here as non-resident servants to do the work usually done by [Australians]?' (12)

By 1910 the globalising forces of industrial modernity had generated a new consumer culture and a highly commercialised public sphere in Australia. The mass consumer market was reflected in the development of large-scale department stores, and a new mass media. The commercialised editorial and marketing techniques of the New Journalism, focused on 'bold headlines, shorter articles, human interest stories and celebrity interviews', created, as Patrick Brantlinger has argued, 'the modern structure of the press as an industry and an expression of market relationships with the "mass reading public"'. (13)

The public sphere was the space, as Geoff Eley notes, that 'mediates between society and the state'. The public sphere also reflected, in Jurgen Habermas's formulation, the growth of urban culture and 'a new universe of voluntary association'--such as the rise of mass membership, working-class political parties during the late nineteenth century. However, Eley argues that by then the development of monopoly capitalism, and the process of commercialisation of daily life and culture had eroded 'a clear distinction between public good and private interest'. The imperatives of mass marketing threatened to erode the integrity of public discourse as organised labour mobilised. Yet as Eley insists this hegemony provided opportunities 'for contesting as well as securing the legitimacy of the [prevailing] system'. Hegemony, 'characterized by uncertainty, impermanence, and contradiction', allowed the Australian labour movement to carve out a space to articulate its mission, and clarify the forces assembled against the Labor party and its constituency. (14)

These transnational developments transformed the public sphere in which Labor intervened, as it sought to pursue the urgent strategic aim of establishing a daily labour press from 1910. The transformed public sphere was signalled with the establishment of the Sydney Sun, a new mainstream capitalist press title launched with an aggressive marketing campaign in July 1910. Brief articles focused on crime and human interest stories; the Sun's layout featured bold headlines, an emphasis on photography and editorial content displaced advertising on the front page, which now dramatically focused on news stories and attracting readers. 'This was a visual revolution and the Sun has been seen as the beginning of modern popular journalism.' (15)

Significantly, the Sun rose, as Robin Walker observes, as the Australian Star sank. The NSW labour movement had unsuccessfully sought to acquire the Star, a supporter of protectionist policies, in the early 1900s. The Star succumbed in 1910 to cost pressures as it struggled to find a more relevant and appealing editorial voice in the new century. (16) Labor understood that just as the trade union based journals such as the Brisbane and Sydney Workers must bow to the commercial imperatives of the new consumer culture in order to remain in production and reach a broad audience--and not restricted to trade unionists--so must any project to establish a daily newspaper with substantial market penetration.

Labor's attempts to manage the forces of modernity also manifest in the need to develop an effective policy response to the forces of intensifying capitalist industrial production signalled in the rise of corporate 'trusts and combines' in the period. Labor proposed to restrict the rise of monopoly or oligopoly capital in Australia by seeking an unprecedented increase in Commonwealth power. At a referendum conducted on 26 April 1911 Labor unsuccessfully sought greater Commonwealth power over industrial relations, trade and corporations, including the power to nationalise industry. The priority Labor placed on pursuing these increased powers was reflected in the Party's determination to put the questions to the Australian people again at the 1913 federal elections.

As a consequence of Labor's attempts to tame the trusts and combines, the period of the second Fisher government 1910-13 witnessed a contest over the terms and the direction the young Commonwealth should take. Labor proposed that the liberal nation-building project, enacted since Federation and characterised by a restrained liberalism, and limited forms of government intervention, should be radically recast by constitutional amendment to provide for intensified government intervention in the lives of the people, and national direction of the economy and society. (17) This desire for greater control would not only enable Labor to more effectively address the needs of its predominantly working-class constituency: it would relieve the fear of the predatory domination of the trusts and combines, one of the anxieties exercising the fin de siecle imagination in Australia.

A fear of the oppressive rise of the trusts and combines was regularly rehearsed in the Australian labour press. In November 1910, the Sydney Worker described the control of the industry by Colonial Sugar Refining (CSR) as 'the worst monopoly in Australia', a 'combine' that had 'taken hold of an industry' and turned 'the people's need to profit'. CSR ruthlessly exploited its workforce: 'No one who works for the C.S.R. Company's mills is free'. Freedom could only be won for a 'sweated' workforce by the establishment of a government-owned 'National Refinery'. (18) By November 1910 Commonwealth Labor policy had settled on a course of seeking constitutional change to address the injustices and anxieties generated by the power of monopoly capital, although Labor knew such a course carried political risks, not least drawn from the hostility of some state Labor figures to the 'centralising' tendencies represented by Commonwealth control of economic and industrial relations. (19)

Although the non-Labor parties could be expected to oppose Labor's referendum proposals, the Deakinite New Protection nation-building agenda was not immune from a concern that international competition could cripple the development of emerging Australian industries. Justice Higgins' 1907 Harvester judgement in the Commonwealth Arbitration Court was not only a response to the need to provide a 'fair and reasonable' minimum wage for the working-class male breadwinner, but was also framed, as Justice Higgins observed in his judgement, to protect innovative Australian manufacturing. The Sunshine Harvester works production of agricultural implements was threatened by cheaper imports manufactured by International Harvester, the American firm that had grown through mergers to dominate the agricultural implements market in the United States and Europe. (20) New Protection provided a tariff barrier behind which Sunshine Harvester flourished, although the company resisted state and union attempts to pay its workers a fair minimum wage. (21)

The 1910 federal election victory provided Labor with the opportunity to contest the hegemony of capital in policy and the public sphere. The campaign and the immediate post-election period also reflected the intensifying pressures of modernity. The non-labour forces found themselves intimidated by the gathering strength of the Labor machine, which by 1910 seemed to have reached a stage of refined production that threatened to crush its opposition.

'Express Campaigning': Labor and the 1910 Federal Election

During the 1910 election campaign references to the Labor 'machine' took on an added anxiety, as the success of Labor's mobilisation since the early 1890s and particularly since Federation in 1901 seemed to be closing in on Labor's opponents, and poised at a moment of unprecedented political success. 'Whither Australia?' the Herald asked in a troubled editorial on 9 April, four days prior to the ballot. 'Mr Fisher represents ... an Opposition vitally unlike any other Opposition of which we have had experience hitherto in the workings of British Parliamentary institutions ... it is an Opposition that stands for all the energy of a definite political creed', leading to the 'dark political unknown', which even the more 'mellowed minds' of the Labor party would admit, 'did they dare to run counter to the remorseless political machine of which they are the bondsmen'. The pledge to submit to decisions taken by the caucus of Labor parliamentarians seemed to dramatically clarify Labor's machine-like nature, build on the mechanisms of union organisation and tight Party structure, each stage reinforced with a doctrine of solidarity. The 'energy' of Labor's creed, and its machine, was itself a fearful manifestation of the mobilising force of organised labour. The Herald hoped that the remorseless progress of Labor's 'caucus machine' might yet be arrested by the united Liberals led by Deakin. The Liberals, the Herald claimed, stand against the 'excesses' of both organised labour and organised capital, giving 'free scope' to the Australian people. (22)

The Herald's discourse of freedom should not be too quickly dismissed as overheated bias; within a year, it would be successfully deployed against Labor during the April 1911 referendum. In April 1910, the energy unleashed by Labor's mobilisation of its working-class constituency, and the electoral process itself, intensified as the election date approached. On polling day Herald readers were confronted with exhaustive and perhaps exhausted reports of the final days and hours of the campaign. There had been 'torrents of speeches' around Sydney, as candidates flew in 'express campaigning' from one hotel balcony to another, before speeding off in motor cars to another engagement. Candidates in country New South Wales had been 'living in railway stations', desperately trying to canvas in as many towns as possible across the vast rural electorates. Labor's headquarters in the Sydney Trades Hall reflected 'a gigantic amount of activity. Labor is pressing forward its hosts in solid ranks'. The election results were posted on the large board erected on the wall of the Herald building in Hunter Street, to 'give the earliest information available'. Apparently, electioneering and reporting had to be fast, reflecting the intensifying pace of politics and modern life. (23)

The results were quickly transmitted across the nation: by the evening of 13 April it was clear that Deakin's Fusion government had suffered a 'rout'. Labor had captured 49.97 per cent of the vote, attracting an unprecedented level of popular support. (24) Fisher was immediately gripped by the significance of the result, and the opportunities it offered to fulfil Labor's agenda--provided Labor could effectively project its message in the public sphere. In his first major post-election public speech, held in Brisbane's Exhibition building on 22 April 1910, Fisher told a 'monster' rally of Labor supporters that he hoped that within three years, that is, by the time the government's first term in office had expired, there would be six daily labour newspapers established in Australia. (25) Fisher emphasised a need for labour daily newspapers because he knew that his government would immediately be seeking controversial new Commonwealth powers. Fisher's sensitivity to the question of increasing Commonwealth control over the economy and business activity was indicated in an interview conducted on 24 April. Asked if Labor intended to nationalise monopolies, Fisher 'became slightly restive', the reporter noted, and asserted that 'the fears of the public ... have been needlessly preyed upon'. Fisher observed that in Victoria, coal mines had been nationalised: 'It appears to have been accepted by the people as a sound and businesslike proposition', Fisher defensively added. (26) The needless fears that were stirred in the minds of the public by a conservative press, hostile to the new government's agenda, could only be relieved by the establishment of a daily labour newspaper.

Speeding through Time: Establishing a Labour Daily

In July 1910 the Sydney Worker's cartoonist Fred Brown provided a large cover illustration of the 'benefits of Labor Party legislation' disappearing from view, hidden by the devious misrepresentations of the 'Fat Man' capitalist press, unless 'the need for a Labor daily' was addressed. (27) Labor's unparalleled political opportunity as a national movement following the 1910 elections could remained unfulfilled unless it more effectively influenced the terms of public debate. This anxiety lent urgency to Labor's determination to establish its own daily newspapers. There had been fitful attempts to achieve this aim in the first decade of the twentieth century, in Victoria and with greater success in South Australia. (28) Immediately following the 1910 elections this ambition focused upon Labor Papers Limited, a company established by the Australian Workers Union (AWU) to publish a daily newspaper, The World. The context of the establishment of a labour daily was the development of a consumer-oriented mass media in Australia, which replicated a global phenomenon. As Eric Hobsbawm observes, 'the extraordinary transformation in the market for consumer goods' in the period generated a novel range of goods and services from gas cookers to bicycles to the cinema, and particularly 'the creation of mass media which, for the first time, deserved the name. A British newspaper reached a million-copy sale for the first time in the 1890s, a French one around 1900'. (29)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Labor felt an increasing pressure to project an effective voice in this new media and consumer culture, and a voice that, like the mainstream capitalist press, could reach its audience rapidly on a daily basis: another form of express campaigning. Even the weekly production of the Sydney Worker, which had a reasonably high circulation across New South Wales with a print-run of 80,000 copies in 1910 (compared with approximate 100,000 circulation for the major Sydney dailies, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph), (30) and was widely available to the general public, was apparently insufficient to provide an effective voice in a culture driven by not only increasing production schedules, but by a daily news cycle, as the directors of Labor Papers conceded in 1910: the Worker had 'done good work', but no weekly 'can reach and mould public opinion as effectively as can a daily'. (31)

To reach and mould public opinion Labor's political discourse was filtered through a visually stimulating and distracting competitive culture, defined not only by the evolution of the mass media but an intensifying consumerism represented in the advent of the department stores, pioneering new services and marketing strategies developed in Europe in the 1890s and reflected in the opening of Mark Foy's vast emporium in Sydney in 1908: '[a]lways the innovator, Foy introduced Sydney's first escalator and motor delivery service'. (32) By 1910 the rapidly popular and successful film industry had also 'tapped a new, egalitarian market' in Australia. (33) The cinema provided a 'continuous show' for an 'ever-flowing human tide' that packed the theatres night and day, demanding 'the new thing every time'. (34) These new forms of consumerism and entertainment that emerged in Australia's major capitals in the period were driven by technological innovation and an industrial scale of marketing, distribution, product display in cinemas and industrial-style 'departments'.

The public sphere was not a site where Labor policy proposals could be debated in isolation from the realities of production and commerce. Philipp Blom echoes Eley's observation of the erosion of the distinction between 'public good and private interest', through the commercialisation of culture that created a society of individual consumers. Blom identifies a closer relationship between industrialisation and organised labour's intervention in the fin de siecle public sphere: 'The engine of these choices, industry and its mass-produced goods, had asserted itself in people's daily lives with discrete but formidable force.' Part of this process was the way in which '[p]olitical ideologies transmitted themselves via large party networks and newspapers. Hundreds of thousands organised themselves in trade unions and in political parties corresponding to the social realities of industrialised societies'. Blom links the political mobilisation of labour with the spread of a commercial, consumer oriented capitalist economy on a global scale. (35)

Frank Bongiorno has observed the narrowing of editorial focus in the labour press in the early twentieth century, from a heterogeneous radicalism encompassing 'ethical, Fabian, Utopian, Marxist, cooperative and state socialist strands ... to a narrower view of socialism' that favoured 'a clear party line' and minimised 'editorial conflict'. (36) This privileging of a single editorial voice reflected the requirements of the disciplined mobilisation of mass in an industrial capitalist culture. Labor was compelled to project a clear and sustained message in a culture increasingly saturated with information, and against a mainstream press whose political content was only united in one theme: opposition to Labor's cause. The commercialised public sphere also colonised the pages of the labour press. The reports and opinion pieces published in the labour press and dedicated to facilitating the self-improvement and the good citizenship of the working class and the unionist were often squeezed within the extensive space reserved for display advertising, for bicycle tyres and pianos, kidney pills and confectionary, Resch's ales and King tea, and the sales at Mark Foy's. (37) The front cover of the Brisbane Worker was entirely allocated to advertising. (38) On 13 October 1910 Labor's intention 'To Fight the Trusts' with new federal legislation protecting Australian industry was allocated somewhat less than one of the five columns that structured each page of the Sydney Worker--the rest of the space was devoted to advertising, which hemmed the narrow column of text on both sides. A one in five distribution of space between editorial and advertising, favouring the latter, was not unusual. (39)

The facade of the Worker building in Bathurst Street, Sydney, completed in 1905, reflected the tensions of commercialism in contest with the labour movement's nation-building ambitions. A relief of the Australian coat of arms crowned the facade beneath the inscription 'Advance Australia'. State of the art printing presses were visible through large plain glass windows from the street, so the public could admire an expression of Australia's busy and productive commercial culture, and the site of a general printing and engraving business, as the facade also recorded in chiselled stone. The jobbing printery was an attempt to cover the costs of producing the Worker, a source of persistent tension at the AWU's annual conventions, reflecting the pressures transmitted from the commercial public sphere to the task of maintaining and developing union organisation. (40)

From 1910 John Christian Watson was tasked with reconciling Labor's political ambitions with the requirements of a profitable, self-sustaining daily newspaper. Watson became the manager of Labor Papers Limited and the leading advocate for The World. Resigning from Parliament, Watson was not retiring from politics so much as moving to a new strategic role on behalf of Labor in the public sphere. Requiring, as Watson explained to one mass union meeting in support of the project in Sydney during November 1910, a 'minimum' capital investment of 100,000 [pounds sterling], Labor Papers represented an enterprise of unprecedented scale for the labour movement. The AWU was the only trade union with sufficient resources to function as a platform for the project, although it lacked the capital required to both develop and sustain such an enterprise. The AWU pledged to contribute 30,000 [pounds sterling], raised from a special levy of the union's membership. Other unions expressed support but were often slow to invest--more intimidated by the cost than concerns over AWU empire building. (41) Unlike journals such as the Sydney Worker, the establishment of The World required the creation of a proprietary limited company to accumulate capital, and the managerial and financial skill to conduct a capital-intensive enterprise. (42)

Watson's first task was to deploy his prestige as a former Party leader and Prime Minister to market the project to the unions and the community. A daily newspaper was 'the most powerful weapon of modern times', Watson argued, equipping the labour movement to challenge the lies perpetrated by the capitalist press and enabling working men and women to speak with their own voice in the public sphere. 'No sacrifice was too large for the working man to make in order to voice his desires', he declared, urging union and rank-and-file financial support for the ambitious scheme, in which the movement's hopes were invested. (43) As the Brisbane Worker editorialised, the development of a labour daily press reflected 'the evolutionary process of working-class emancipation. It leads the way to a new civilisation--to a new science, a new literature, a new art, and a new happiness'. The Worker understood that of itself, '[t]he Labour Daily won't bring all this to pass. But it will bear us forward in that direction on electric wings. It will speed us through time swifter than the airplane cleaves the air, and carry us in a day many years nearer to the epoch of the People Triumphant'. (44)

Political engagement had to reflect a broader culture of consumerism and mass entertainment, and was reported in similar terms of speed, excitement and tension. A labour daily was imagined as an instrument of modernity, speeding through time to a new space conceived not only as a reformed nation but the world emancipated. A future tantalisingly suggested by the Vanguard, a daily newspaper temporarily established to support Labor's campaign in the October 1910 New South Wales elections and which Watson edited. The Vanguard was the 'forerunner of the union-owned Labor Daily', as its masthead proclaimed, and which, mimicking the design of the Sydney Sun, routinely devoted its front page to 'WHAT THE WORLD IS DOING', as sourced from 'our independent cable service'. (45)

Labor was sensitive to the interconnectedness of the Australian working class with the turmoil and opportunity of the globe represented in the title and logo of the projected labour daily. An anxious optimism reflected in the Vanguard's front page reports of a coming 'Reign of Reason and Justice' predicted by an American journalist and signalled by the rise of Labo(u)r parties around the world, of which the Fisher government was a leading example. A hope set against another troubling account of the activities of the 'Wily Chinese', and their cunning evasion of Canadian immigration restrictions laws. (46)

The establishment of an independent source of cabled international news was a crucial factor in the successful establishment of a labour daily, providing both an alternative and affordable news source to that provided by the capitalist dailies. From 1895 international news cable traffic entering Australia had been control by the United Cable Association (UCA), a 'combine' dominated by the major newspaper proprietors, and which demanded subscribers pay a high rate per word for each cabled item. The labour movement had agitated for government action to restrain the UCA's monopoly, and in August 1910 the Fisher government agreed to subsidise competition. Labor Papers Limited, and other labour movement groups and publications--including Watson himself--became shareholders in the Independent Cable Association (ICA), and through which the Vanguard sourced its international reports. (47)

Watson also became the project manager of constructing a building for The World, to provide for the newspaper's editorial, production and distribution needs. The construction of Macdonnell House at a cost of 106,000 [pounds sterling] represented a significant commercial enterprise in itself, completed at 321 Pitt Street, Sydney, by 1914. The ground floor of the building featured a loading dock for distribution of the paper, and was also fitted out with imported, state of the art printing presses at a further cost of 30,000 [pounds sterling]. According to the company's prospectus, The World's high start-up and production costs would be increased by significant labour costs--hundreds of staff in editorial, advertising, production and distribution. The World would have to quickly generate a substantial return on investment, but it would be nearly two decades before an edition of the paper rolled off the presses. The outbreak of World War I delayed the imminent publication of The World, collapsing the advertising market and restricting access to newsprint. The subsequent conscription crisis and labour movement divisions also frustrated its launch. The ICA also lapsed in 1916, unable to compete with the market power of the UCA. (48)

Watson's role in The World reflected a career that was a product of the 'managerial revolution' of industrial modernity. Alfred Chandler identifies the managerial revolution as a critical element of the new large-scale corporations developing in the period. The 'combined capabilities' of this new managerial cohort 'can be considered those of the organization itself. These highly product-specific and process-specific organizational capabilities and skills affected, indeed often determined, the direction and pace of the continuing growth of the industrial enterprise and of the industries and the national economies in which they operated'. (49) Bede Nairn noted Watson's skill in managing people in organisations, a characteristic that developed from the early years of Party mobilisation in the 1890s, through to his role as Commonwealth Labor leader 1901-07, and in his post-political career in Labor Papers, other commercial enterprises and industry peak councils. In the 1880s Watson had learnt the typesetter's trade as it began to adapt to the introduction of new industrial technologies; his precocious organisational skills were acknowledged when the 22 year old was elected by his fellow unionists as the father of Typographical Association's chapel at the Australian Star in 1889. (50) Watson's managerial skills were cultivated by the process of industrial production forced upon Labor by the needs of class mobilisation, and the need to compete in the commercial public sphere.

'Scorching!' The 1911 Referendum

Alfred Deakin and his Fusion allies were unable to arrest the energy of Labor's machine at the 1910 elections, as the Sydney Morning Herald had plaintively hoped in its pre-election editorial. They had another opportunity in April 1911, even as Attorney-General Billy Hughes drove the motor car of Australia 'full speed ahead' at a 'Scorching]' rate of acceleration, according to Claude Marquet's cover illustration for the Sydney Worker in November 1910. The edition appeared as the debate over Labor's enabling legislation for the Commonwealth referendum, introduced by Hughes, proceeded in Parliament. (51) This pursuit of new Commonwealth power over trade, corporations and industrial relations was contentious and unprecedented, both in the conduct of a stand-alone referendum, and in the application of these powers if the referendum was approved by the people.

In extending the reach of the Commonwealth government, which had been already rapidly developed since 1901, the Fisher Labor government was literally industrious, passing more legislation than all previous administrations. Fisher's government established new institutions and processes, new forms of government intervention in economic and commercial activity, including the Commonwealth Bank (with branches in every post office in the country), a system of graduated land tax, and the first state-issued bank notes--reforms which Marquet illustrated in the Sydney Worker: the fat, bewildered figure of capital confronted with the juggernaut of Labor's achievements in a single parliamentary session. Labor's energetic production subjected the Fat Man to the anxiety at rapid change and concentrated power that capital had imposed on the working class. (52)

These initiatives reflected a transnational phenomena that accompanied the expansion of global capital in the period: an increase in the role of government reflecting 'the growing convergence between politics and economics', as governments struggled to both accommodate and exert some control over the forces of capital, and the new urban and industrial constituency produced by economic growth. (53) The need to tame the oppressive global force of capital was reflected in the Sydney Worker's support for Labor's referendum proposals, which would assert 'full control' over 'trade and commerce, companies, corporations and industrial matters. These are so linked together as to present in the aggregate the whole problem with which every country in the world is faced to-day'. (54)

During the referendum debate Billy Hughes argued that Commonwealth power was insufficient for the needs of Australia's 'rapidly growing and lusty communities', and to suppress the 'powerful and menacing' trusts and combines. Hughes argued that Australians lived in an 'amazing age' of changing methods of production and distribution, and intensifying aggregations of wealth; 'the public and the laborer have no longer to deal with the individual employer, or even with the company, but with the trust or combine'. (55)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

To the wider concerns over the menacing reach of global capital the High Court of Australia had already provided Labor and the unions with a sharp reminder of the consequences of limited Commonwealth power. In July 1910 the High Court found that the Commonwealth Arbitration Court could not make a 'common rule' for its industrial awards. The benefits of the Boot Trades award could only be applied to the immediate parties to the dispute, and could not be 'flowed on' to workers across the industry. The Sydney Worker argued this denial of 'natural justice' undermined Parliament's intention to settle industrial disputes through compulsory industrial arbitration, and justified Labor's referendum proposals. 'The Australian Parliament should have the fullest power to legislate as it thinks best in the interests of Australian industry and of the Australian people.' (56)

In response to Labor's proposals, Opposition Leader Alfred Deakin argued that the alleged menace of the trusts and combines would be replaced with the insidious oppression of 'every act of daily life' represented by Labor's 'shadowy' and nationalising socialism: 'one will not be able to buy a pennyworth of lollies, to drive a nail into a boot, to shear a sheep, to sow grain, to pick fruit, or to carry a hod, in any part of this continent without coming under the operation of Commonwealth laws'. (57)

Labor's referendum proposals became a debate about liberty, and the reach of government into the people's lives under the terms of the federal system established in 1901. By seeking such an extensive and generalised increase in Commonwealth power--providing the Commonwealth, for example, with the power to 'create, dissolve, regulate and control corporations, and to control wages and conditions of employment in any trade, industry or calling'--Labor was effectively proposing to radically renovate the nature of the liberal nation building mission, designed to provide for a measure of security while safeguarding their freedom to conduct their lives within a realm of essentially private economic relationships. (58)

By proposing such sweeping and generalised changes, Labor succeeded in generating new forms of political opposition. Within the labour movement, the NSW Labor Treasurer William Holman led a states-rights campaign to challenge federal Labor's proposals. The non-Labor forces also mobilised with unprecedented effectiveness, drawing together a coalition, including a number of conservative and liberal women's political groups, who united to comprehensively defeat Labor's proposals at the April referenda. Only one state, Western Australia, approved the proposals in 1911; every other state recorded substantial 'no' majorities. Overall, the yes vote attracted less than 40 per cent of the vote. (59) The scorching progress of Labor had stalled. Many Australians may have shared Labor's anxiety about the threat posed by trusts and combines in 1911, but perhaps could not relate to the often rather technical claims that Labor made in support of its referendum proposals. Labor had been unable to have the benefit of a number of labour daily newspapers to help explain its case more effectively to the general public.

Labor's failure in 1912 to persuade the High Court to restrain either CSR's sugar monopoly or the Coal Vend on the northern New South Wales coalfields--a cartel that set the price of coal--encouraged the Party to persist with its attempts to increase Commonwealth powers. (60) Labor repeated the questions at the 31 May 1913 elections, which seems to have contributed to its narrow defeat at the polls. So driven was Labor to seek these increased Commonwealth powers that it sustained two referenda losses and a federal election defeat. After winning the 1914 federal elections Labor planned to put the questions to the people for a third time on 11 December 1915.61 The war intervened, and Hughes' resolve to pursue the cause he had once championed faltered before the strength of opposition and a disingenuous undertaking by the states to cede the powers to the Commonwealth for the duration of the war. Hughes' decision to withdraw the referendum writs in November 1915 aroused the anger of Labor's left-wing.62 Foregoing the opportunity to fulfil this ambition suggested that Labor was leaving its constituency prey to an industrial capitalism it had vowed to tame.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Conclusion

In Modern Times Modern Places Peter Conrad discusses the development of modernity in the period before World War I, and notes that in 1913 one writer acknowledged the implications of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity by observing that 'speed has given us a new notion of space and time'. (63) The whole process which Labor represented was the production of a labour movement, a cycle of intense propulsion within the evolving industrialisation of Australian society and which reflected a new organisation of space and time that Labor strove to control. The labour movement's propulsion was fuelled by aspiration and anxiety, and lent Fisher's government its impatience to equip the Commonwealth with sufficient powers to command industrial modernity, and shield the working class from its worst excesses and injustices.

During the debate on the 1913 referendum, Labor's opponents pointed out that unions could be regarded as combinations exerting a restraint of trade. Billy Hughes retorted that '[i]t has been said ... that I approve of combinations, and so I do ... All that is wanted is not to destroy combinations, but to control them. Let us take them over and control them'. (64) Labor's problems in exerting control over the forces of modernity were manifest in trying to wrest control over forces in which it did not stand apart from, but was enmeshed within. Labor was itself a combine, reflecting the organisational strategies of the industrial corporation. The caucus and the pledge were the instruments of Labor's political machine that relied upon the disciplined mobilisation of mass. This discipline produced an effective machine, but one that had to engage in the heterogeneous and transnational conditions of the Australian public sphere and industrial capitalist modernity.

Fitzhardinage observed that Labor's difficulty in persuading Australians to support its referendum proposals reflected the fact that '[m]ost of the agitation against monopoly in Australia was in fact generalized and theoretical, based rather on the American literature than on the local experience', where there was 'little evidence that their operations caused serious hardship'. (65) Workers employed in the boot trades or by CSR might not have shared Fitzhardinge's complacency. Yet it is also the case that the fin de siecle anxieties generated by transnational capitalism seemed all the more threatening because of their apparently imminent yet uncertain and threatening impact. Labor's attempts to project its mission in the public sphere through the establishment of a labour daily reflected the cultural dynamics and anxieties at work infin de siecle modernity, and which in turn generated the pressure within the labour movement to more dynamically and rapidly intervene in time and space, in a public sphere driven by intensifying cycles of technology and industry. Labor's mission to master the benefits of industrial organisation was colonised by the forces of industrial and commercial modernity, to which Labor found itself required to adapt.

Endnotes

* The author would like to thank the anonymous referees of Labour History for their comments and suggestions.

(1.) David Day, Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2008, p. 194.

(2.) Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 9 April 1910.

(3.) SMH, 18 April 1910.

(4.) John McKenzie, 'Some Reflections on Aspects of Modernity', in Trevor Harris (ed.), Art, Politics and Society in Britain (1880-1914): Aspects of Modernity and Modernism, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009, p. 2.

(5.) Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. xiii.

(6.) Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter (eds), Fin de Siecle and its Legacy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 3.

(7.) Alice Teichova, 'A Legacy of Fin de Siecle Capitalism: The Giant Company', in Teich & Porter, Fin de Siecle and its Legacy, pp. 11-12.

(8.) Alfred Chandler, 'Fin de Siecle Industrial Transformation', in Teich & Porter, Fin de Siecle and its Legacy, p. 28.

(9.) Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, Abacus, London, 2002, p. 44.

(10.) Chandler, 'Fin de Siecle Industrial Transformation', p. 29.

(11.) Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 130.

(12.) Worker (Sydney), 28 April 1910; 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.

(13.) Patrick Brantlinger, 'Mass Media and Culture in Fin de Siecle Europe', in Teich & Porter, Fin de Siecle and its Legacy, pp. 104-5. See also Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2004, pp. 76-77.

(14.) Geoff Eley, 'Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century', in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, pp. 291, 293, 323-24.

(15.) Robin Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803-1920, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976, pp. 108-9.

(16.) Ibid., pp. 106-7.

(17.) Mark Hearn, 'Examined Suspiciously: Alfred Deakin, Eleanor Cameron and Australian Liberal Discourse in the 1911 Referendum', History Australia, vol. 2, no. 3, 2005, pp. 87.1-87.20.

(18.) Worker (Sydney), 3 November 1910.

(19.) See H.V. Evatt, Australian Labour Leader, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1940, ch. 38, 'Holman versus Hughes'.

(20.) 2 CAR (Commonwealth Arbitration Reports), pp.17-18; Chandler, 'Fin de Siecle Industrial Transformation', pp. 35-36.

(21.) Sandra Cockfield, 'McKay's Harvester Works and the Continuation of Managerial Control', Journal of Industrial Relations, September 1998, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 387-88.

(22.) SMH, 9 April 1910.

(23.) SMH, 13 April 1910.

(24.) Day, Andrew Fisher, p. 191.

(25.) Brisbane Courier, 23 April 1910.

(26.) SMH, 25 April 1910.

(27.) Fred Brown, 'The Need for a Labor Daily', Worker (Sydney), 20 July 1910. For a discussion of representations of the capitalist 'fat man', see Nick Dyrenfurth and Marian Quartly, 'Fat Man v. "the People": Labour Intellectuals and the Making of Oppositional Identities, 1890-1901', Labour History, vol. 92, May 2007, pp. 31-56.

(28.) Frank Bongiorno, 'Constituting Labour: The Radical Press in Victoria, 1885-1914', in Ann Curthoys and Julianne Schultz (eds), Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture, University of Queensland Press in association with the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland, and the Journal of Australian Studies, 1999, p. 75; 'Daily Herald', SA Memory entry, State Library of South Australia, http://samemory.sa.gov.au/site/ page.cfm?c=2683 accessed 14/11/2011.

(29.) Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, p. 53.

(30.) Walker, The Newspaper Press, p. 100.

(31.) To the Trade Unionists of Australia, Labor Papers Ltd, Sydney, 1910, p. 3; Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union, Cambridge University Press Melbourne, 1996 p. 102.

(32.) G.P. Walsh, 'Mark Foy', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1981, pp. 570-71; The Romance of the House of Foy, Harbour Newspaper & Publishing Co., Sydney, 1935; Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914, Phoenix, London, 2008 pp. 320-23.

(33.) Graham Shirley and Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, Currency Press, Sydney, 1989 p. 23.

(34.) Lone Hand, 1 July 1911.

(35.) Blom, The Vertigo Years, pp. 328-29.

(36.) Bongiorno, 'Constituting Labour', p. 81.

(37.) Worker (Sydney), 3 February 1910.

(38.) Worker (Brisbane), 29 January 1910.

(39.) Worker (Sydney), 13 October 1910.

(40.) Worker (Sydney), 2 September 1905; Hearn & Knowles, One Big Union, pp. 101-2.

(41.) Worker (Sydney), 24 November 1910; Walker, The Newspaper Press, p. 142.

(42.) Memorandum of Association, Labor Papers Ltd, Sydney, 1910.

(43.) Worker (Sydney), 20 October, 24 November 1910.

(44.) Worker (Brisbane), 22 January 1910.

(45.) The Vanguard, 16 September 1910.

(46.) The Vanguard, 5 October 1910.

(47.) Walker, The Newspaper Press, pp. 205-8.

(48.) Ibid., p. 142; Memorandum of Association, Labor Papers Ltd.

(49.) Chandler, 'Fin de Siecle Industrial Transformation', pp. 28-29, 32.

(50.) Bede Nairn, 'John Christian Watson', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 12, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1990, pp. 400-5.

(51.) Claude Marquet, 'Scorching!', Worker (Sydney), 17 November 1910.

(52.) Day, Andrew Fisher, p. 277; L.F. Fitzhardinge, That Fiery Particle: William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography, Volume 1, Angus & Robertson Publishers, Sydney, 1978, p. 249; Worker (Sydney), 1 December 1910.

(53.) Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, pp. 53-54.

(54.) Worker (Sydney), 27 October 1910.

(55.) Worker (Sydney), 9 March 1911.

(56.) Worker (Sydney), 14 July and 20 October 1910.

(57.) Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 19 October 1910, pp. 4803, 4825, 4827.

(58.) Hearn, 'Examined Suspiciously', p. 87.2. For other recent accounts of the 1911 referendum campaign, see Edward W. Humphreys, Andrew Fisher: The Forgotten Mian, Sports and Editorial Services Australia, Teesdale, Vic., 2008, ch. 3; Peter Bastian, Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Mian, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009, pp. 249-54.

(59.) Papers with Reference to the Referendum and its Working in Australia, Commonwealth of Australia, Government Printer, August 1911, p. 4.

(60.) Fitzhardinge, That Fiery Particle, Volume 1, pp. 266, 269-70.

(61.) Official Report of the Sixth Commonwealth Conference of the Australian Labor Party: Opened at the Trades Hall, Adelaide, May 31st, 1915, Worker Trade Union Printery, Sydney, 1915, pp. 10-11; Commonwealth of Australia, Amendment of Constitution: Federal Referendums: The Case For and Against, Melbourne, September 1915.

(62.) Fitzhardinge, That Fiery Particle, Volume 2, pp. 51-56.

(63.) Peter Conrad, Modern Times Modern Places, Thames and Hudson, London, p. 92.

(64.) Fitzhardinge, That Fiery Particle, Volume 1, pp. 288-89.

(65.) Ibid., p. 264.

Mark Hearn *

Mark Hearn teaches Australian history at Macquarie University. He is currently researching the fin de siecle imagination in Australia, 1890-1914.

<mark.hearn@mq.edu.au>