Labour Traditions: Proceedings of the Tenth National Labour History Conference

Verity Archer completed a PhD at the ANU in 2006. Her doctoral thesis is titled ‘In search of the Australian dole bludger: constructing discourses of welfare, 1974–83’. Her current research interests include ‘Third Way’ welfare discourses and the language of social justice in Australia.

Nikola Balnave is a Senior Lecturer in Employment Relations at the University of Western Sydney. She is investigating (with Greg Patmore) a history of Rochdale co-operatives. In 2006, she was elected secretary of the federal Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.

Anne Beggs Sunter lectures in Australian History and Heritage at the University of Ballarat. She has taken a special interest in Victorian colonial history and in particular the political, social and cultural implications of the Eureka Stockade.

Peta Ellen Belic is a Master of Philosophy (Research) student at the University of Newcastle. Her honours thesis was titled ‘No Village So Where are the People: Finding and Understanding a Coal Mining Community in the Turbulent 1980s’. In 1996 Peta won the Alex Dowling Prize for Labour History 2006. Email:peta.belic@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au

Yossi Berger holds a PhD from La Trobe university and a BSc(Hons) from Monash university. He is a state registered psychologist and has worked for unions for the past 18 years, first as a research officer for the ACTU/VTHC OHS Unit and later for the Australian Workers’’ Union where he now heads their national OHS Unit. Whilst involved in many riveting OHS-related committees the bulk of his work is inspecting workplaces around Australia in many industry sectors. It’s this activity that makes him very popular with employers.

Robert Bollard is a postgraduate student at Victoria University. He is currently completing a PhD on the Great Strike of 1917. His email address is [email protected].edu.au.

Brian Boyd is Secretary of the Victoria Trades Hall Council.

Verity Burgmann is Professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne. Her publications include Power, Profit and Protest; Unions and the Environment; Green Bans, Red Union;Revolutionary Industrial Unionism; Power and Protest; ‘In Our Time’: Socialism and the Rise of Labor and the four- volume co-edited A People’s History of Australia. To Andrew Bolt’s annoyance, she and two other ‘old- time Marxists’ have established a website of primary source documents of the history of Australian radicalism at www.reasoninrevolt.net.auas a useful resource to help spread ‘left-wing poison’.

Rowan Cahill has worked as a teacher, historian, journalist, and recently finished a three-year stint as an agricultural labourer.

Frank Cain teaches Australian History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra and his research interests are in Labour History, Economic History, Intelligence History and Cold War History. His two most recent books areJack Lang and the Great Depression (Melbourne, 2005) and Economic Statecraft: European Reactions to the US Trade Embargo (London, 2007).

John Cain was Premier of Victoria for three terms from 1982 to 1990 and is currently a professorial associate in the Centre for Public Policy at the University of Melbourne and a regular political commentator. He remains active in the affairs of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party. In 2006 he was appointed to the presidency of the Library Board of Victoria.

Phil Cleary taught history in Melbourne’s western suburbs from 1976 until 1989. In 1992 he won the seat of Wills in a by-election. He won it again at the federal election in 1993 before losing it in 1996 after an electoral redistribution. He was written extensively on the criminal justice system and politics, and is the author of three books. He has been a regular contributor to The Age and Herald Sun newspapers and has contributed to Overland. He currently manages communications for the Electrical Trades Union.

Robert Corcoran was ‘a child of the Depression’. He joined the Labor Party as a teenager more than sixty years ago and has remained active in support of the ALP ever since – despite painful awareness of recurrent internal party problems. Since retiring from work as a civil engineer, he has devoted much of his time to political research and writing. He is the author of Australian political dictionaries and has presented papers at previous National Conferences of the ASSLH.

Drew Cottle is a senior lecturer in Politics at the University of Western Sydney. He has an abiding interest in capital history, and has published books on the Brisbane Line, and the experience of Sydney’s wealthy in the Great Depression. His research and writing embraces international political economy, Asian studies, political ecology and labour history.

Diana Covell helped to organise the Wollongong Jobs for Women Campaign from 1980-91, working for several of those years as a labourer and crane chaser in the Port Kembla steelworks and as an elected union delegate. She then attended university, graduating with BA Honours in Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney in 1996. She has worked in advocacy, policy, dispute-resolution and community development roles mainly in the non-government community sector and is now a fulltime PhD (History) candidate at the University of Sydney.

Margaret Creagh is a member of the IWW.

Wally Curran has long been a significant player in the labour movement. After working as a labourer at various jobs during the late 1940s and ‘50s, he was elected Assistant Secretary of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees’ Union in 1958, and from 1973 until his retirement in 1997, was Secretary of the Union. In that job he made a difference to the lives of his union comrades and their families: including workers’ health services; a founder of their superannuation fund and an enthusiastically effective organiser of community arts ‘Youth’ projects as well as serving on major arts boards, such as the Australia Council and the Melbourne International Arts Festival. His contribution to the labour movement and the Arts was acknowledged with an AOM in 1997 and a Centenary Medal in 2001. Over his working life, Wally has been a member of the Communist Party and now the Labor Party.

Phillip Deery is Professor of history at Victoria University, Melbourne. He has written extensively on the early Cold War. Recent publications have focused on the Cold War odyssey of an American liberal intellectual (Cold War History 6:2, 2006), Britain’s ‘Asian Cold War’ in Malaya (Journal of Cold War Studies 9:1, 2007), and on Australian security service activities (Intelligence and National Security22:3, 2007). Email: [email protected]

Mark Derby is a Wellington historical researcher, and the secretary of New Zealand’s Trade union History Project. He contributed to the bookRevolution - the 1913 Great Strike in NZ (edited by Melanie Nolan), and in November 2006 organised the first seminar on New Zealand’s role in the Spanish Civil War. He is now editing a book based on the seminar presentations.

Wendy Dick is a PhD student in the School of History, University of Melbourne.

Jackie Dickenson is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her postdoctoral project is a historical study of political accountability in Australia.

Tony Duras is currently undertaking a PhD on ‘Globalisation, Technology and Unions in Australia’ at Deakin University, Melbourne and is employed as industrial officer with the Community and Public Sector Union, State Public Sector Federation Group, Victorian Branch. His research interests include trade unions, networked computers, the Internet, globalisation, industrial democracy, workplace surveillance and labour internationalism.

Tim Dymond completed a PhD thesis on the political and intellectual history of the ‘new class’ concept at the University of Western Australia. A chapter based on his work has appeared in Us and Them: Anti-elitism in Australia. He has previously completed a dissertation on ‘Zionism in the Perth Jewish Community to 1950’. Currently a Field Organiser for the Community and Public Sector Union, he has also lived and worked on Kibbutz Baram in northern Israel. The views expressed by Tim Dymond represent his personal perspective only and are not those of the CPSU.

Nick Dyrenfurth is a lecturer and doctoral candidate in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University. His doctoral thesis is entitled ‘Heroes and Villains: the Cultural Politics of Australian Labor’ and explores the cultural politics of the early Australian labour movement. He has published in journals such as the Australian Journal of Political Science, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Australian Studies, Labour History, Overland and Arena. His most recent article, ‘Fat Man v. the People’ (with Professor Marian Quartly), is an analysis of Australian labour cartooning and appeared in the May edition of Labour History.

Bradon Ellem is an associate professor in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published books and articles on unionism in the clothing trades, the labour split, peak unionism and regional industrial relations. His major research interests now are geographies of work, union strategy, industrial relations policy and Pilbara unionism. Bradon is an associate editor of Labour History and co- editor of the Journal of Industrial Relations.

John Faulkner is the National President of the Australian Labor Party. He entered the Senate in 1989 and was leader of the Opposition in the Senate from 1996 to 2004.

Peter Franks was a trade union official for over 20 years. He now works as an industrial mediator. He has published numerous articles on NZ labour history. His history of the New Zealand printing trades unions, Print and Politics, was published in 2001.

Paddy Garrity started his working life as a seaman. When, in the mid 1970s, Paddy became Secretary of the Hobart Unemployed Workers Union he organised art and printing classes, bands, a street theatre group and various other publications. Since then, he has been at the forefront of the arts in working life. He has been variously, an Arts and Education officer with the Painters and Dockers; involved for many years in the Labour Day/Moomba celebrations; a board member of the Footscray Community Arts Centre; organised concerts (including a Union welcome to Nelson Mandela); and in the last decade, established and ran, with Jim Rimmer and others, Union Promotions, that turned Trades Hall into a cultural and social centre. Paddy was awarded the Australia Council Ros Bower award in 1991 for his work in cultural democracy in Australia.

Paula Geldens is a lecturer in Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology and member of the Australian Centre for Emerging Technologies and Society (ACETS) based at Swinburne. Her research interests focus on the intersections between identity, place, youth and technology. Having worked as an inserter and a publisher for 7 years with a regional newspaper, and married to a printer of 14 years, Paula has had a keen interest in exploring and mapping the shifts within this industry.

Ian Harriss is employed in the School of Business at the Charles Sturt University campus in Albury/ Wodonga. With Bill Robbins, he has been researching the Harvester case for a number of years and they have published several articles on this topic. Ian has published in the area of emotional intelligence. Email: [email protected]

Gerard Hill was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and after leaving school worked for a couple of seasons in the freezing industry. Before going to sea he was involved in the maritime industry for 25 years as, variously, steward, cook, and chief steward. Gerard was elected to the national executive of the Federated Cooks and Stewards Union and the New Zealand Seafarers Union from 1984 to 2000. He currently serves on the scholarship fund of the Seafarers Union. An active recorder of history and related activities, Gerard and his partner now run a boutique hotel in Ponsonby, Auckland.

John Hirst is an emeritus scholar at La Trobe University. As one of Australia’s leading historians, he has written extensively on Australian social and political history, democracy and civic culture.

Stephen Holt is a freelance Canberra historian.

John Hughes is a film director, producer and writer, based in Melbourne.

Terry Irving was for many years the editor of Labour History and is widely recognised for his pathbreaking work on class in Australian history. Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Sydney. Email: [email protected].au

Paul Jones is an honorary associate of the School of History at the University of Melbourne who has worked at five Melbourne-based universities and at three abroad. A former ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, he has an avid interest in maritime labour, 1850s to 1980s. His research and writing interests extend to China, Australia and Japan, and the historical relationships between them.

Dave Kerin was an activist during the Vietnam War. Radicalised by this process he entered the building industry in the 1970s where he was involved with early Green Ban initiatives in Victoria and New South Wales. Dave has remained an activist, campaigning for the union movement, the environment and peace. He is the co-ordinator of Union Solidarity, and is involved with the Manufacturing Co-operative, a venture that aims to create avenues for manufacturing green technology in Australia owned and controlled by workers.

Angela Keys is a PhD candidate with the Centre for Rural Social Research at Charles Sturt University. She has co-authored articles for the Journal of Australian Political Economy,Labour History, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, the Journal of Chinese Australia, Sporting Traditions, Z Magazine, and co-wrote a chapter on the political economy of Tonga in The Eye of the Cyclone: Governance and Stability in the Pacific (2006). Her most recent publication is a co-authored chapter on eviction struggles in Sydney during the Great Depression in Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia (2007).

Tommy Khoshaba is a legal consultant and a part-time teacher and researcher with the School of Management at the University of Western Sydney.

Diane Kirkby is Reader in History at La Trobe University where she teaches Australian and US history. She has many publications in labour history particularly on the work of barmaids and is currently completing a history of the SUA.

Harry Knowles lectures in the Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies in the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Sydney. He is co-author (with Mark Hearn) of One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union 1886-1994 (1996) and has a particular interest in labour biography and trade union leadership. Harry became an associate editor of the journal Labour History during 2006.

Michael Lyons works in the Employment Relations Group, School of Management, at the University of Western Sydney.

Sigrid McCausland is an archivist and labour historian. She was University Archivist at ANU from 1998 until 2005 and feels fortunate to have been part of the successful battle to save Australia’s most extensive collection of labour archives there some years ago. Her paid employment these days is as Education Officer for the Australian Society of Archivists. Her research interests centre on opposition to nuclear power and uranium mining in Australia, which was the subject of her PhD thesis.

Laurence Maher is a graduate of the law schools of the University of Melbourne and ANU. A practising lawyer in Melbourne for over 30 years, he taught at the University of Melbourne law school from 1989 to 1994. He has published widely on aspects of Australian Cold War legal history.

Greg Mallory is a tutor and adjunct lecturer in the Department of Industrial Relations, Griffith University and President of the Brisbane Labour History Association. He is also a member of the Federal Executive of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. His book Uncharted Waters: Social Responsibility in Australian Trade Unions was launched in 2005. He is currently working on a history of the Queensland Coal Miners’ Union for the Mining and Energy Queensland Division of the CFMEU. He is also a sports historian and is currently working on a history of Rugby League competition in Brisbane. He was awarded the Tom Brock Scholarship in 2001 for his rugby league studies.

Ray Markey is Professor of Employment Relations at Auckland University of Technology. His main research interests are in employee participation, regional employment relations, comparative employment relations and labour history. He is author of The Life and Times of the Labor Council of NSW 1871-1991 (1994) and The Making of the Labor Party in NSW, 1880-1900 (1988).

Grace Millar was the union organiser at Reading Cinemas from 2003-2006. She completed her MA in history in 2003, which examined the women’s liberation movement in New Zealand. She is no longer working for Unite, and is planning to begin her PhD.

Andrew Moore is an associate professor of history at the University of Western Sydney and is currently researching the Fitzpatrick-Browne privilege case. With the support of an ARC Discovery Grant he is also researching the social composition of inter-war fascism in Australia.

Max Ogden retired in 2004, after having established and worked in the ‘Foundation for Sustainable Economic Development’ within the Department of Management, University of Melbourne. He remains involved with the Foundation’s current ARC funded research project: ‘Work & Social Cohesion Under Globalisation’. His long credentials in the union movement include roles as a tradesperson, shop steward, union activist; Victorian AMWU Education Officer; AMWU National Officer with responsibility for

workplace change and industrial democracy; and as an ACTU Industrial Officer.

Bobbie Oliver is senior lecturer in Social Sciences at Curtin University. From 2000-2004, she was first-named Chief Investigator of the ARC-funded Midland Railway Workshops History Project, which collected interviews and documentary materials from past employees. Dr Oliver is co-editor (with Dr Patrick Bertola) of The Workshops: A History of the Midland Government Railway Workshops (2006), in which she has written on apprenticeship training, and she is also the author of several published papers on aspects of the Workshops.

Michele O’Neil is the Victorian State Secretary and National Assistant Secretary of the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA). She has organised and campaigned with workers in the textile, clothing and footwear industry for 18 years and has held a variety of union positions in her own union and in the broader movement. She has been active in many union and community campaigns in Australia and internationally aimed at improving workers’ rights including ending the exploitation of home-based outworkers.

Mikael Ottosson is a senior lecturer and researcher at the School of IMER, Malmö University, Sweden. His main research field is social and labour history. He has a PhD in history and wrote his thesis (1999) on the change of culture and group identities among the glass workers in a local Swedish community, 1820 to 1880. His wide-ranging research topics include the Swedish volunteer militia 1860-1880; the consolidation of Sweden during the nineteenth century; the media picture of the labour movement and different aspects on working time. His current research focuses upon the ‘lazy-bones’ history and the conceptual history of human work.

Greg Patmore is chair of Work and Organisational Studies and director of the Business and Labour History Group at the University of Sydney. He is editor of Labour History. He is currently working on an ARC funded project with Ray Markey on the history of non-union forms of union representation in Australia, a history of Rochdale co-operatives (with Nikola Balnave) and a history of Citigroup in Australia (with John Shields and Harry Knowles).

Robert Ray was elected to the Senate for Victoria in 1980 and a delegate to the ALP National Executive 1983-98. He has held several ministerial appointments, including Minister for Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs (1988-90) and Minister for Defence (1990-96).

Jeannie Rea researches in labour history, and teaches at Victoria University, Melbourne, in Public Advocacy and Action, and also in Public Relations. She was once a union communication officer, formerly a member of the ACTU Executive and currently a member of the national executive of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). Contact: [email protected]

Peter Riley is a member of the IWW.

Bill Robbins is employed in the School of Business at the Charles Sturt University campus in Albury/ Wodonga. Together with Ian Harriss, he has been researching the Harvester case for a number of years and they have published several articles on this topic. Bill is also active in researching the management of colonial convict. Email: [email protected]

Geoff Robinson is lecturer in Australian Studies and Politics at Deakin University’s Warrnambool campus. His book When the Labor Party Dreams; class conflict, politics and policy in New South Wales 1930-32 is to be published in late 2007. Before taking up his position at Deakin he worked in higher education policy development and research management. His website is http://geoffrobinson.info.

Calle Rosengren is a PhD student in Working Life Science at Kristianstad University, Sweden. His area of research is temporal aspects of work and organisation. His research focuses upon how time was treated as a resource in working life debates during the twentieth century. The main materials in his study are the protocols of the Swedish national working time committees, 1918, 1963 and 2001.

Lisa Sacksen completed her first degree with majors in English and History at Victoria University, Wellington, in the early 1980s. With her family, she moved to the United Kingdom where in the late 1990s she began work on a BA in archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Unfortunately the family moved back to New Zealand before Lisa could complete this. Hungry for stratigraphy, she took a number of geology courses before enrolling in History Honours. Her thesis, ‘Dr Theodore Grant Gray

and the Mental Defectives Amendment Act 1928’, examined the effects of eugenics on New Zealand’s mental health policy. Lisa is currently researching an MA thesis entitled ‘Expressions of Resistance: Communist Organisations in New Zealand from the 1960s to the 1990s’.

Andrew Scott is a senior lecturer in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT University. His publications include ‘Social Democracy in northern Europe: Its Relevance for Australia’, Australian Review of Public Affairs, 7:1, October 2006; and two books: Running on Empty: ‘Modernising’ the British and Australian labour parties (2000); and Fading Loyalties: The Australian Labor Party and the Working Class (1991). In January-February 2007 he visited Sweden and Norway as a guest researcher of the Institute for Contemporary History at Södertörn University College in Stockholm.

Joanne Scott is an associate professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She has published in the fields of Australian and Queensland history, labour history, gender and race relations, oral history, popular culture, urban studies and higher education. She is co-author of The Engine Room of Government and A Class of Its Own. Joanne is a former visiting professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo. She is a member of the Australian Historical Association’s Executive, the Council of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland and the Queensland working group for the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Chris Sheil is the president of the Evatt Foundation. His books have been published by Allen & Unwin, Pluto Press and UNSW Press, and he was a columnist for the Australian Financial Reviewfrom 2001 to 2003. A long-time cabinet official under many Labor and Coalition governments and the author of many public policies, since 2002 he has been based in the School of History at UNSW. Chris also holds adjunct appointments with the University of Sydney and Boston University and is a member of the Australian Society of Authors.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine, the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History

and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within and the author of Communism: A Love Story.

Bill Shorten is National Secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), Australia’s oldest continuous union, which represents 125,000 workers from industries as diverse and oil and gas, fruit picking, manufacturing and horse racing. In 1994, he joined the Victorian Branch of the AWU as an organiser, and was elected Secretary of the Branch in 1998. In 2001, he was elected AWU National Secretary.  He is President of the Victorian Branch of the ALP and a member of the ALP National Executive, Mr Shorten also serves on the ACTU Executive and is a director of AustralianSuper, the Victorian Funds Management Corporation and the Victorian Jockeys’ Association. He holds an Arts and a Law degree as well as an MBA. In March 2006, he was pre-selected as the Labor candidate for the federal seat of Maribyrnong, Victoria.

Judith Smart is a principal fellow at the University of Melbourne and an adjunct professor at RMIT University. She has published on Australian women’s organisations in the first half of the 20th Century, as well as on women and political protest, women and religion, venereal diseases, labour youth organisation, the impact of war, the Miss Australia beauty contest and the Billy Graham crusade in Australia in 1959. Current projects include a study of Melbourne during World War I, stressing its role as the national capital, and (with Professor Marian Quartly) a history of the National Council of Women of Australia. She is a past editor ofAustralian Historical Studies and present editor of the Victorian Historical Journal.

Kathryn Steel is a postgraduate student in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University with an interest in regional trades and labour councils.

Paul Strangio is a senior lecturer in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. An historian and biographer, he has written widely on Australian and Victorian politics. He is the author and editor of several books, including Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns (2002), The Great Labor Schism: A Retrospective (2005) and The Victorian Premiers, 1856-2006 (2006).

Jonathan Strauss is a postgraduate student at James Cook University in Cairns. His research topic is The Accord and Working Class Consciousness, under which he is considering politics in the working class during the years of the Hawke and Keating governments. He has been a workplace delegate in the CPSU and a branch committee member in the NTEU, and has recently published a series of articles in the journal Links.

Jessica Tatham-Thompson is a research assistant working with Dr Paula Geldens on their study of

printers. Her recent research activities have included a project at Monash University exploring teenage mothers’ perception of pregnancy.

Kerry Taylor is a senior lecturer in History at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. He works mostly on the history of the radical political movement in New Zealand, especially the Communist Party of New Zealand, of which he is writing a history. He is co-editor of Culture and the Labour Movement: Essays on New Zealand Labour History (1991, with John Martin) and On the Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand (2002, with Pat Moloney). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Labour History.

The Victorian Trade Union Choir was formed in Melbourne in 1990 as part of a revival of trade union choirs throughout Australia. Traditionally, songs have played a vital role in progressive social movements worldwide, and they are maintaining and developing this tradition in Victoria. The choir is a group of union members who come together to sing and provide a musical voice to the union message. The aims of the choir include encouraging trade union membership and the promotion and celebration of the philosophy of the trade union movement and social justice through song. URL: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~vtuc/

Jess Walsh is Assistant Secretary of the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU) in Victoria, heading up the Property Services Division, organising cleaners and security guards. She is responsible for the Clean Start Campaign which is an international industry-wide campaign to organise cleaners.

Paul Williams is a PhD history student at the University of Ballarat. He is also an executive member of the Eureka Stockade Memorial Association, and has published a history of the Shearers’ Union.

Fay Woodhouse is an historian, researcher and writer with experience in the university, public and private sectors. She has a strong background in Australian history with experience writing local and shire histories, institutional histories, Victorian heritage and biography. Her PhD thesis was a study of student political engagement at the University of Melbourne, 1930-39. Current research interests include the history of early Melbourne, 19th and 20th century Australian social and political history, the physical and built environment and Australian culture. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne.

Clare Wright is an historian and author who has worked in politics, academia and the media. She holds a PhD in Australian Studies from the University of Melbourne and an MA in Public History from Monash University. Her PhD thesis won the inaugural Geoffrey Serle award for the best postgraduate contribution to Australian history and is the subject of her debut book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans (Melbourne University Press, 2003). Clare is a regular Opinion writer the Age, is a frequent contributor to ABC Radio and a regular member of The Brains Trust on ABC TV’s The Einstein Factor. Clare is currently an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at La Trobe University. She is researching a book that retells the Eureka Stockade story from a female perspective. This research allowed Clare to make a major contribution to the official ‘Eureka 150’ commemorations in 2004 and her work has been cited in Victorian and ACT Parliaments.