Book Review

Given the strong tradition of comparative Australian-Canadian labour history, Australian labour historians will find much of interest in three recent Canadian books. All engage with concerns central to the writing of labour history and each (in its own way) offers striking (if not always intended) parallels with developing Australian scholarship. 1       Labouring the Canadian Millennium is the product of the desire of the editors of Labour/Le Travail (Canada's journal of labour history) to mark the new millennium. This collection of essays combines reflective and historiographical pieces with research articles which illustrate innovative approaches to the meanings of work in Canadian society. Thus we have Desmond Morton reflecting on generational differences in the writing of Canadian labour history; Anthony Giles surveying shifts in the discipline of Industrial Relations as it moves to define itself as 'employment relations'; Ian McKay charting 'four distinct formations' in the history of Canadian socialism; Joan Sangster exploring the uneven success with which labour historians have integrated analyses of class with those of gender and ethnicity; Cynthia Comacchio providing an overview of the historiography on family; Becki L. Ross identifying the ambiguities in the status of erotic dancers as workers; Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker reinterpreting the role of liberal pluralism in shaping the Canadian labour market and employment relations. Jacques Rouillard takes a fresh look at the famous 1949 Asbestos Strike in the light of his research into the role of Catholicism in enterprise reform; Murray E.G. Smith traces the evolution of the 'New Canadian Political Economy' from the 1960s and challenges the nationalist preoccupations of this school of thought; Ralph P. Guntzel examines the relationship between Canada's three major trade union peak bodies and the issue of Quebec sovereignty; David Frank looks at the representation of Canadian workers on film and Michiel Horn analyses the changing relationship between academics and left-wing politics over the last three decades. 2       All the articles, in their different ways, conform to the high standards we have come to expect from Labour/Le Travail. What one takes from this collection will, of course, depend on one's particular interests. Becki Ross's approach to the history of erotic dancing as sex work is especially welcome and suggest the extent to which our definition of 'work' has been challenged and expanded. Likewise, Joan Sangster's discussion of feminist labour history engages many issues also faced in the Australian context, in particular, the relationship between Canadian feminist historiography and British and US trends and the impact of postmodernist/poststructuralist theories. In the first instance, the need to develop different projects based on different political histories, rather than slavishly following agendas set in other contexts, is as relevant in Australia as it is in Canada. (Which is not to say that we should adopt a parochial approach either). In the latter case, Sangster warns against the dangers of feminist scholarship being engulfed in a 'dense fog of indifference and scepticism' as a result of the influence of postmodernism. Her conclusion is equally applicable to Australia: Without some political renewal, theoretical shifts, and new utopias, our project of creating a feminist working-class history may languish, and all that we will be left with are the complex accommodations of our negotiated postmodern, 'post-feminist' age. 3      Desmond Morton also cautions against complacency, despite the notable achievements of labour history. He makes the sobering observation that in the 1990s there were more doctoral theses underway on military history than on industrial relations and working-class history. It would be interesting to conduct a similar survey for Australia. 4      This volume as a whole makes an enormous contribution to labour history, not just in its valuable stocktake of past achievements but also in its identification of current issues. It is perhaps asking too much to lament the absence of more precise guidance for future directions. 5      Citizens and Nation is a very different sort of book. Gerald Friesen's project is to offer a new history of Canada from the 'perspective of those who feel that they are responding to events around them rather than initiating changes.' It is a cultural history, which is as concerned with issues of time and space, and people's relationship to and understanding of them, as it is with more conventional measures of power, such as political and military might. It is an innovative approach. His central concern is not new—the issue of Canadian identity—but he pursues the answer through a close analysis of the testimonies of 'ordinary' individuals. In so doing, he rewrites the periodisation of Canadian history, defining eras by dominant forms of communication—'epochs of time-space dimensions'—rather than more familiar political/economic events. Thus we have the era of oral-traditional societies, followed by textual-settler societies, print-capitalist national societies and, lastly, screen-capitalist societies. In each case he has tried to find testimonies which illuminate the ways in which individuals negotiated issues of identity, community, ethnicity, language, religion, work, place and history. For the first epoch, he relies on a 'memorable documentary film', Gradon Mcrea's Summer of the Loucheax: Portrait of a Northern Indian Family, which follows the lives of four generations of a Gwich'in (Dene) family for four days as they go about their daily lives at their camps on the Mackenzie and Tree rivers in the subarctic lands of northern North America. He uses the film to explore the ways in which genealogy and a distinctive Aboriginal economy contribute to the deep connection between Aboriginal people and the land. His major purpose in doing this is to argue that 'there was in the past and there remains today an element in Canadian life that is Aboriginal in character', and to suggest ways in which Canadians might understand what this contribution is, especially in regard to the legacy of Aboriginal cultures and politics, particularly through language and connection to place. 6      The second era—that of textual-settler societies—focuses on the memoirs of a woman of mixed Innuit and British descent, born in 1902, who led a tough life as first the daughter, then the wife, of a Labrador trapper. Friesen uses her testimony to unravel the simplistic categories in which Canadian history is often understood. He seeks to demonstrate, through this life story, the fundamental importance of the Metis in the evolution of Canadian society, especially as intermediaries between the indigenous and settler cultures. 7      For the print-capitalist era, Friesen draws on the memoirs of a woman who emigrated from Germany in the 1920s and became part of the Vancouver working class. He argues that such 'common people' 'rebuilt Canada' by forging new institutions through their literacy-based skills, their weekly newspapers and adult education programs, and their socialist analysis. 8      'Screen-capitalism' is the term Friesen coins to describe the more recent past in the era of electronic communication. The generation which grew up with this culture is, of course, for the most part too young to have left memoirs. For this section, Friesen relies on interviews with a man and a woman, both of whom, he argues, belong to the 'insecure fraction' of Canadian society. He also uses the memoirs of a middle-aged Quebecoise to explore the different meanings of 'nation' in the Canadian context. 9      This is an ambitious book, which offers a cultural approach to the understanding of issues of identity. It seeks to promote a better understanding of Canada based on a greater appreciation of its inter-racial and cross-cultural history as a basis for a more hopeful future. Does it succeed? Though it may be a comment on the readers rather than the book, neither of us was entirely convinced. Friesen's discussion is hard to assimilate. His case studies are so rich that we were left wishing for more of his actual texts. While his style might engage and persuade some academic readers, it is difficult to see how his book could reach a wider audience. Perhaps there is even a case for a companion volume, with DVD of the documentary and interviews, alongside the text of the memoirs—a format which might speak more forcefully to the 'screen-capitalist' generation. His insights into the 'shared history' of people of various ethnic origin certainly deserve a wide audience, both in Canada and elsewhere. 10      The third project is perhaps the most ambitious of all and it has a direct bearing on the pattern of labour history in Australia. Here, as in Canada, the Great Depression has preoccupied historians of poverty and unemployment. By contrast we still know surprisingly little of the economic calamity of the 1890s, a depression which proved as devastating to the 'labouring classes' of Canada as for working people in Australasia. 11      Focusing on six Canadian cities (Victoria, Vancouver, Winnepeg, Hamilton, Montreal and Halifax). Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager examine the causes, nature and extent of unemployment in the late nineteenth century. They begin with a study of the discourse of unemployment, what did contemporaries mean by the phrases 'out of work', and 'idle', what heavy ideological prescription did the language of want and improvidence carry. But unlike so many post-modernist projects, Baskerville and Seager 'do not forget the many ways in which culture intersects with the material conditions of life' (p. 6). Their reconstruction of where the unemployed lived, the industries in which they worked and a remarkable demographic profile are central to the concerns of the book. There is also an illuminating discussion of space and community, and a culturalist reading of an 1891 census, lending new insight into the condition of the unemployed. 12      As we see it, some of the most successful chapters in the book focus on the living standards and survival strategies of those thrown out of work. Baskerville and Sager resist the easy temptation to depict the unemployed solely as victims, their discussion of the painstaking economies of the household economy and the myriad means whereby the families in poverty generated some sort of income restore a sense of agency and grim determination. In this regard, Unwilling Idlers builds on the pioneering scholarship of such accomplished social historians as Bettina Bradbury, John Bullen and Paul Johnson. Their debt to such work is generously acknowledged; Unwilling Idlers is a truly interdisciplinary study which draws on the work of historians, geographers and sociologists. Finally, Australian historians will find the discussion of state responses to unemployment alarmingly familiar. There is the same measured strategy of dispersal, repression, grudging 'relief' and (contested) containment. 13      We can make no substantial criticisms of this project and look to it as a model by which similar Australian work might be attempted. What strikes us, though, in all these projects, is how historical scholarship is so often undertaken in isolation. Again, so many of the concerns of Unwilling Idlers find an echo here in Australia, including Desley Deakin's critique of the political arithmetic of census material, Lee and Fahey's inquiry into seasonality and work patterns and our own studies of work process and the politics of unemployment. The potential of comparative histories between Australia and Canada seem enormous. In an age of globalisation, labour historians do well to engage in such a conversation. 14   University of New South Wales RAELENE FRANCES AND BRUCE SCATES

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