From National Hero to National Problem The Image of the Worker in Pix 1938-1954 (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Review of Social History, 2005
The article begins with a discussion of labour intellectuals as knowledge producers in labour institutions, and of the labour public in which this distinctive kind of intellectual emerges, drawing on our previously published work. Next we construct a typology of three ‘modes’ of the labour intellectual that were proclaimed and remade from the 1890s (the ‘movement’, the ‘representational’, and the ‘revolutionary’), and identify the broad historical processes (certification, polarization, and contraction) of the labour public. In a case study comparing the 1890s and 1920s we demonstrate how successive generations of labour intellectuals combined elements of these ideal types in different ways to develop traditions of intellectual work. The article concludes with a sketch of the labour public after the crisis of the 1920s. It considers the rise of the “militant” intellectual in the 1930s, the role of publicists, planners and experts in the 1940s, the skill of “generalship” in the polarized 1940s and 50s, the failure to meet the challenge of the new social movements in the 1970s, and the decline of the agitational, movement-identified intellectual.
The heroic/shameful role of labour: mythology in the making of White Australia
Legacies 09 Conference, 2009
For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the Labor Party boasted that the labour movement had played a central role in creating the White Australia policy, and the popular media legitimised that claim. But when historians and activists decided that White Australia had been a racist policy, labour's triumph was simply converted into labour's shame. This paper will contest the mythology of White Australia as a labour movement creation, focusing on the famous Seamen's strike of 1878-79 against the replacement of European crews with Chinese sailors. It will look at both ruling class opinion in general and the conservative press in Queensland in particular. ONE of the enduring themes of Australian political history is the supposed responsibility of the labour movement for exclusionary racism in Australia. It is, in my view, a myth, but a myth that sections of the labour movement, and the Labor Party itself, were very keen to promote for nearly a century. James Scullin, Labor's Depression Prime Minister, declared that 'Labour is solid for a White Australia, and no amount of political propaganda will shake the people's faith in our party on that big national question.' According to wartime federal Labor minister, 'Stabber' Jack Beasley, 'We inherited the White Australia policy from our fathers and our grandfathers-It is our responsibility to see that it is there to be handed down by the great-grandchildren of our great-grandchildren.' 1 However, when opinion on the White Australia policy turned from the 1950s, Labor's boasting rapidly became labour's shame. As historian and activist, Ann Curthoys, put it, 'A major issue in the 1960s and 1970s…was whom to blame for its existence in the first place. The most common answer from historians had been the working class, the trade unions, and the Labor Party.' 2
Developing a national employment policy : Australia 1939-45 / Carol Susan Fort
2000
Bibliography: leaves 378-400.x, 400 leaves ; 30 cm.Studies the development of national employment policy in wartime Australia. This experience encouraged the establishment of a centrally controlled employment service as a lynch pin of Australian federal government's post-war reconstruction policy.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of History, 2000
Workers' Welfare: Labour and the Welfare State in 20th-Century Australia and Canada
Labour History, 1996
ANALYSING THE NATURE and effects of labour's relationship to the welfare state has been a vexed enterprise. On the one hand, labour has long been suspicious of the welfare state as a weapon to undermine working-class radicalism. On the other hand, labour has sought to support the welfare state as a means of easing the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation. This ambivalence, in part, reflects conflicting labour traditions -one committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the other to die "civilising" of capital. And it is these diverse traditions that have allowed labour to play an active role in both contesting and shaping important features of the modern welfare state. In recent years, however, labour's relationship to the welfare state has become more problematic; indeed, its status as a progressive and radical critical voice has been questioned by the emergence of alternative political movements such as feminism, gay rights and queer politics, movements of indigenous peoples, ethnic communities, environmentalism, and disability groups in both Australia and Canada. And while sections of the labour movement have sought to find common cause with these movements, these alliances have sometimes disturbed, even alienated, labour's traditional constituency. Moreover, these different politics have challenged many aspects of labour's compact with the welfare state. Additionally, extensive new right critiques of the welfare state, trade unions, and labour parties have forced labour to defend the hard won gains of a century of welfare state development, blunting any critical labour position. Labour's relationship to the welfare state is being questioned from all sides. An historical understanding of the development of this relationship may illuminate some of these contemporary dilemmas, especially if we escape from a narrow national exceptionalism. A focus on particular national or regional developments obscures broader
2000
This paper takes up two arguments which have been made about the political conditions of sustained full employment: (1) that full employment requires an incomes policy to compensate for the loss of unemployment as a discipline over labour, and (2) that institutions and policies sustaining full employment imply the ‘increased power of the working class.’ How did the Labor government of 1944-5 consider these issues when drafting the White Paper Full employment in Australia? Drawing on archives of the Department of Postwar Reconstruction, this paper depicts a debate among politicians and officials about whether the White Paper should consider alternative systems of wage fixation in Australia. The immediate political value of the White Paper to the Curtin government — assuaging trade unions’ objections to Labor’s demobilisation policies — did not favour such frankness.
When I was writing The Southern Tree of Liberty (2006), developing an argument about the early years of working-class politics in Australia, I relied heavily on articles by Michael Quinlan and his collaborators (Irving, 2006; Quinlan et al., 2003). Before they appeared, historians of early labour had to work with measly information: some incidents of pre-modern convict resistance, a few tiny unions, a few short strikes, a few 'immature' workingmen's organisations. The result was, in his words, a set of 'fractured accounts' of worker activity. The new approach in Quinlan's articles knitted the fractures and dazzled us with data. Let's not focus just on the narrow, formal aspects of worker organisation, he said, let's see how much informal activity there was. Answer: a hell of a lot. Let's also use a concept that makes sense of this activity, and that places it in the context of state and capitalist power, the idea of a class in formation – the working class. This is why his book is called The Origins of Worker Mobilisation – to put the stress on a class process rather than on the usual fare of labour history, strikes and unions, cultures and ideologies. The title is also a pointer to its significance, which is far greater than its impact on those of us working in the field of early Australian labour history. Throughout the research that went into this book, Quinlan kept in mind the question that underlies all others in labour history namely, how and why do workers come together?
Feelings of community, cultural definition and memory were kept alive through the soldiers’ mass circulation tabloid, the Aussie, examined here in the light of theorisation of memory and representation, applied to both text and cartoons. The publication’s aim for veterans’ values to become shared national values is analysed in the light of its high-profile usage of soft cartoon humour and also of nostalgia—highlighting the limitations as well as the effectiveness in terms of Australia’s evolving national identity. When the post-war economic situation worsened, deeper issues of national tension were glossed over by the use of scapegoats such as “profiteers” and “lazy workers”. The armed forces were obliged to take on a political role of lobbying for their cause, but the Aussie as “cheerful friend” experienced its own identity crisis that proved to be terminal.
‘ “To Revolutionize Australia” – The Surprising History of Early Working Class Politics’
Illawarra Unity, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 5-15, 2008
Imagine a place of political violence and naked class rule. Riots are commonplace and people are killed or injured during them, some as a result of policemen and soldiers firing into the crowd. The government bans party processions and even the right of political organisations to hold meetings in pubs. From their headquarters, known as the Red House, the radicals organise the resistance. Revolutionary flags are flown, and effigies of the leading politician are burnt in the street. Agitators tell the crowd to rise up against their oppressors. Police stations are attacked and prisoners released. In the harbour, naval ships train their guns on a huge protest meeting on the waterfront. This is New South Wales in the 1840s and early 1850s, with a history of class conflict of a kind many of us never thought existed in Australia.