| Book Review | Labour History, 96 | The History Cooperative

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BOOK REVIEW

*A.W. Martin, The 'Whig' View of Australian History, and Other Essays,* Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2007. pp. xvi + 271. $39.95 paper.**
These days the Whig view of history is but a dim memory in the history profession. Some readers of this journal will remember it from the 1970s. At that time it was the banner raised by historians who challenged what they saw as the dominance of Australian history by labour history – or more precisely by an understanding that the forces of political and industrial labour were the crucial forces for progress in Australian politics and society. In political history the charge was led by Peter Loveday and Alan Martin's edited volume, The Emergence of the Australian Party System; in social history by John Rickard's Class and Politics.	1
In his introduction to this volume, John Hirst identifies Martin's essay 'The "Whig" View of Australian History' as a crucial weapon in the 'demolition' of the view that the Labor Party 'alone was the vehicle for realising Australia's progressive destiny' (p. ix). Martin characteristically put his case more subtly than that; he concluded the paper with the proposition that 'new research' should not be 'prejudged by the assumption that some readily identifiable class or party or cause can mysteriously hold in its keeping the only truth essential for understanding the whole society' (p. 26).	. . .

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