Retooling the Class Factory : Response 3
Family, Childhood and Identities: Working Class
History from a Personalised Perspective

Lucy Taksa

Liz Faue's overview of perspectives on US Labour History over the past generation provides us with a valuable opportunity to contemplate our own circumstances and to envision our own scholarly future. Some of the issues she has raised here have significant implications for us, particularly insofar as they sketch out some of the paths we might take in our own studies of working class experiences and identities. Liz's paper not only indicates how we might broaden our perspectives on and approaches to class, but also how we might deal with decreasing student interest in labour history.	1
The most exciting thing I found in this paper was the use of family stories and treasured artefacts as tools for rethinking the origins, meaning, and consequences of 'class' in history. Through them Liz draws our attention to the 'subjective dimension of the working-class past', to the manner in which class is culturally and materially transmitted and the ole played by cultural origins and identities, families, childhood experiences and contingent relationships and outcomes. The second important aspect of the paper, to my mind, is its contemporary framework; that is, its appreciation of the current circumstances in which labour historians find themselves and also of the disjuncture between the sort of heritage we personally bear as individuals and the labour history we teach and write about. In what follows I will examine the implications of both of these points for Australian labour history and for our own teaching of the subject in the academy.	2
Of the many issues or conundrums raised in the paper, I would isolate four for specific attention. The first centres on the traditional neglect of the private underpinnings of working class life in the family, home, and community. As Liz shows, personal associations and subjective experiences play a critical ole in shaping identities generally and class identity specifically. The second problem addressed is the contingent nature of opportunities and outcomes and their effects on social elationships, working class experience, identity and class 'feeling'. It is here we find an important link to the first point because as Liz points out, while	3
work experience and sporadic workplace organization and resistance have been for the most part episodic and non-continuous for most working class people ... community origins and family identities persist and retain continuity.
The third issue centres on the malleability of class identity and its capacity to absorb 'central contradictions', not only in the form of simultaneous 'aspirations for mobility and loyalty to the labour movement' but also in terms of its ability to accommodate a multiplicity of sometimes complimentary and sometimes competing associations. As Liz puts it, 'individuals can be trans-class' and can 'have loyalties and experiences that put them in the liminal space between classes'. Finally, the fourth key point emphasised is the value of labour heritage. Memory, material culture or artefacts, according to this paper, provide us with useful sources for reconsidering the fluidity of the class experience. As presented here labour heritage is not simply a celebratory device for working class people, radicals, labour politicians and historians but rather a medium through which people engage with the past and draw meaning from it. All four issues traditionally fell outside the boundaries of the old institutional labour history and I would argue that they were never fully integrated into the new social history of labour. Still today they remain under-investigated.
This is not to deny that certain labour historians engaged with the private underpinnings of working class life during the 1970s, when labour history's subject-matter was expanded to include the private sphere, marginalised workers and community. Indeed, some studies quite self-consciously tried to tease 'out the social intimacies that were once the hallmark of the working class'. 1 These addressed the influence of lifestyle and respectability, neighbourhood, locality and religious ties on class relations and political activism, all of which helped to refine traditional approaches to class. But despite this and the concurrent study of women, immigrants, indigenous Australians, recreational pursuits and other social aspects of workers' everyday lives, for the most part labour history remained fixated on macro developments and structures. Investigation of the non-institutional dimensions of working class life was generally driven by the desire to throw light on the social and political contexts in which labour institutions operated, as well as on hegemonic processes and class structure, rather than on the personal dimensions of the private sphere. 2 As Liz suggests in elation to American labour history, many Australian labour historians were threatened by the growing interest in gender and race, and cultural analysis because it challenged the prevailing emphasis on a well-defined industrial working-class past. We have only to recall McKibben's claim that women's labour history represented a 'dissident' tradition and that the 'powerful critique of classical labour history ... from feminist historiography' damaged the field because it shifted attention away from men-at-work to the family and 'often denied the centrality of class'. 3	4
Yet when we look closely at the studies produced in this genre by labour historians, we find little to sustain McKibben's argument. Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon's early study of women at work, much like the special issue of Labour History on this subject, both of which appeared in 1975, focused on women vis-à-vis the institutions of the labour movement. Amongst other important books on women's history, these studies opened up debate on the relationship between class and gender. 4 They led the way forward for studies of women in elation to trade unions, politics and arbitration, as well as of the gendered nature of the labour process. 5 But they shared the terrain occupied by the more traditional studies of work and industrial relations that had privileged men. Contrary to McKibben's claims, feminist labour historians strengthened the field's existing foundations and orientations. Even though they recognised that working class women's lives did not accommodate the dichotomy between the public and private spheres, they continued to emphasise the public sphere, albeit from a gendered perspective. A greater blurring of boundaries came much later, with studies of women convicts and prostitution. These drew attention to the interstices between free and unfree labour and to the hidden aspects of sexuality. 6 With these studies labour history finally began to enter the intimate realm. But progress through this particular doorway has been extremely slow. Although a few labour historians followed the footsteps of Stuart Macintyre and Janet McCalman into the territory of working class localities and communities, it would take almost two decades before a concerted collective effort was made to examine the complex nature of community vis-à-vis class and the immense variations between working class communities in different regions. 7	5
Such tardiness did not prevent major headway in elation to perspectives on class. On the contrary, from the 1980s most labour historians, implicitly or explicitly, recognised the way that race, ethnicity, gender and locality 'cut across class elationships' and that class is a culturally specific phenomenon and not simply an economic one. 8 But the more recent work on community and locality has produced a more nuanced understanding of working class experiences and elationships during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries through its emphasis on the relationship between production and consumption and between work and home. It has drawn attention to the overlap between the private, parochial and public realms, where the private is 'characterized by ties of intimacy' based in the household and friend and kin networks, 'the parochial realm. is the world of the neighborhood, workplace, or acquaintance networks' and the public realm. is 'the world of strangers and the "street"'. 9 It is in the overlap between these realms that we find a nexus between the experience of exploitative working conditions and of poor living conditions. It is here that we find the sources of class 'feeling' and class identity that inspired ordinary people to engage in industrial action and working class politics. 10	6
Bruce Scates' recent study of working class politics from a non-institutional cultural perspective, from the bottom up, as it were, provides a good example of an effort to deal with the complex and varied ways in which the industrial, social and political realms overlapped in the daily lives of working class people. 11 Yet the resulting insight into how working people became and proclaimed themselves as political beings continues to place emphasis on public rather than private spaces, and public rather than private interactions. Personal life in the home, among family and friends, and the way it has contributed to the formation of class identity continues to form a rather shadowy backdrop to the main drama of labour history. This is not simply a question of focus but also one of approach.	7
Liz has provided us with some tools for entering this private space. Her family origin stories indicate the value of biography and genealogy. Unfortunately, biographies of ordinary people are difficult to construct because, unlike their more illustrious and prominent industrial and political representatives, they rarely leave behind detailed accounts of their lives. This is precisely where oral history and family stories come into their own; through these sources we can gain access to the subjective world, personal elationships and experiences and also class identity. But despite decades of interviewing, few labour historians have used oral testimonies to consider how family members, and especially mothers, influenced class identity or how children were politicised in the home. It is for this reason that the tracing of intimate family relations and patterns of occupational and social mobility, combined with oral history, make it possible to examine the way class is experienced and transmitted over time. The combination of these two methods can, in my view, enhance our ability to investigate the 'relations of social reproduction' and the way they 'shape individual class as much as productive relations'.	8
Through the use of value of genealogy, biography and oral history we can begin to get at how al people experienced personal connections and how they negotiated their personal and their class identities and elationships. We need to investigate this level of personal experience and identity not only because it can enhance our understandings of class but also because it can provide new avenues for engaging with students and perhaps extend the pool of those who choose to study labour history.	9
In my experience few are now drawn from what we would think of as the traditional Anglo or Celtic Australian working class. As importantly, the ones I have taught at the University of NSW have rarely had the sorts of exploitative work experiences that naturally lead to an interest in unions, strikes and political parties - the traditional subject matter of labour history. With the exception of one male Aboriginal student, most of my students over the last couple of years have been from migrant backgrounds. The majority have also been women. Not surprisingly, their interest has tended towards women's history, the history of immigration and also the migrant experience, migrant communities, personal and collective memories and heritage. In fact, they often look to labour history as a means of discovering more about their own family origins, experiences and changed material circumstances both through the process of migration and later through the process of settlement and social mobility.	10
The problem I've found in teaching them is that we have few home-grown labour histories that address these areas of interest. Certainly, there is a large amount of literature on Australian racism, White Australia and immigration policies generally. There are even some, although not a lot of studies on the relationship between unions and migrant workers. But with very few exceptions, generally labour historians have not undertaken the work being produced on migrant communities. 12 On the one hand, labour historians have shown little interest in the migrants themselves. As James Jupp ecently pointed out, because 'Marxist historians tended to see ethnicity as a form of "false consciousness"', the experience of ethnicity was not an issue addressed by the scholars of the Old Left. And while their intellectual heirs, the New Left historians, expanded the field by examining racism and government policies and union attitudes, they too avoided the working class lives and communities of the new arrivals. 13 On the other hand, studies of the larger ethnic groups in Australia have traditionally been undertaken by community historians who are often participant-observers or by scholars from a range of disciplines, who have little interest in labour history. Because of the strictures of scholarly boundaries few connections have been made between these groups and this has resulted in little attention being given to the complex connections between ethnic identity and class formation and class identity.	11
This void has serious implications for students of labour history who are interested in the working lives of migrants, their experiences and elationships in daily life, in the workplace, in trade unions and even politics. For those who undertake oral histories with migrants and their communities, there is little conceptual and methodological guidance from an Australian perspective. And this has two negative results. First, students have little opportunity to elate the literature on class generally and the working class specifically to their own experiences and interests. And second, in order to make sense of their own personal and family experiences and stories such students tend to shift their studies away from labour history to other disciplines, particularly cultural studies.	12
This connection between personal experience, interest and scholarship is a crucial one, which labour historians really need to take seriously if we are to ensure a new generational pool and a meeting point between everyday life in the present and the sort of labour history that is taught, written and known. If you think the point I'm making is too much located in the politics of identity and therefore opposed to the universalism that Hobsbawm has described as 'the necessary condition for understanding the history of humanity, including that of any special section of humanity', it's worthwhile remembering that from its very inception labour history was based on the politics of identity - that is, on the interest working class people have shown in their own identities and subjective as much as material experiences. 14 As Terry Irving pointed out some time ago, labour history is not just an intellectual activity but also a political one centred on the urge to legitimate working class identities, experiences and aspirations. It was such interest, and the conceptual frameworks and rhetoric that informed it, which sold working class newspapers and journals.	13
Of course, I totally agree with Liz's concern about uncritical acceptance of the accounts contained in such mediums. This is not the point I want to engage with though. Rather, what I'm getting at is that labour history now needs to connect with a whole set of new experiences, identities and needs, ones that have become patent as a result of the recent Tampa crisis and continued ill-treatment of asylum seekers in this country. The social divisions that ecently emerged in the wake of the media sensationalism surrounding both issues have of course been lying dormant for some time; probably since the advent of multi-cultural policies by the Whitlam Government in the early 1970s. These certainly led to the formal acceptance of multiple identities within the body politic. But it could be argued that they had a minimal effect on Australian labour history. The experiences of migrant workers have yet to be given the attention they deserve.	14
Australia has not produced a Herbert Gutman, 15 and comparatively fewer Australian labour historians have undertaken studies of ethnic diversity in specific industries or industrial localities. 16 While we now celebrate cultural diversity, we have been extremely slow to investigate the extent of Australia's multicultural past. It is worthwhile recalling that despite Australia's assimilation policies and history of racism, people from outside Britain were among the earliest immigrants. They worked here, joined unions and political parties, and struggled for a better life. But the tensions they experienced, the ways in which they negotiated their past identities and experiences in a new place have not been effectively addressed by labour historians. As Jupp says, the 'main challenge for the future is to incorporate ethnic history into the mainstream of Australian history'. 17	15
The family, the home and the community provide important sites for the formation of class and other identities. For this reason we need to give them serious attention. As Liz points out, these sites offer new ways of considering the impact of contingent elationships and outcomes and of personalising past experiences of class. They can help us understand the connections between people's everyday lives and their involvements, or perhaps even their lack of involvement, with labour movement institutions. In short, they provide us with the possibility of retooling labour history in a way that produces more complex and rich understandings of class and new routes for attaining the field's traditional political and social objectives.	16
Endnotes 1. Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900-1965 , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, p. 1. 2. Eric Fry, 'The writing of labour history in Australia' in Eric Fry (ed), Common Cause: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Labour History , Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, Sydney and Wellington, 1986, pp. 139-155; Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, 'Is Labour History Dead?', Australian Historical Studies , no. 100, April 1993, pp. 470-81. 3. Ross McKibbin, 'Is it still possible to write labour history?' in Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History , University of NSW Press, Sydney, 1994, pp. 35-6, p. 38. 4. Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work, 1788-1974 , Thomas Nelson (Australia), Melbourne, 1975; A. Curthoys, S. Eade and P. Spearrit (eds), Women at Work , Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Canberra, 1975; Fry, 'Writing Labour History', pp.150-1. 5. Bradon Ellem, In Women's Hands? A History of the Clothing Trades Unionism in Australia , University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1989; Edna Ryan, Two-Thirds Of A Man: Women & Arbitration In New South Wales 1902-08 , Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984; Laura Bennett, 'Job Classification and Women Workers: institutional practices, technological change and the conciliation and arbitration system 1907-1972', Labour History , no. 51, November 1986, pp. 11-23; Chilla Bulbeck, 'Manning the Machines: Women in the Furniture Industry 1920-1960', Labour History , no. 51, 1986, pp. 24-31; Raelene Frances, 'No More Amazons: Gender and Work Process in the Victorian Clothing Trades 1890-1939', Labour History , no. 50, 1986; Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880-1939 , Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1993; Melanie Nolan, 'Female White Collar Factories? Braverman and Interwar Victoria', Labour and Industry , vol. 5, no.1 & 2, 1993, pp. 49-66; Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally. Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890-1955 , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; Joy Damousi, 'Gendered meanings and actions in left-wing movements' in Irving (ed), Challenges to Labour History , pp. 150-168; Desley Deacon, 'Taylorism in the Home: The Medical Profession, the Infant Welfare Movement and the Deskilling of Women', The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology , vol. 21, no. 2, 1985, pp. 161-173; Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia , George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 92-96. 6. Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia , Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996; Joy Damousi, 'Beyond the "origins Debate": Theorising Sexuality and Gender Disorder in Convict Women's History', Australian Historical Studies , no. 106, April 1996, pp. 59-71; Raelene Frances, 'Australian Prostitution in International Context', Australian Historical Studies , no. 106, 1996, pp. 127-141; Raelene Frances, 'Sex Workers or Citizens? Prostitution and the Shaping of "Settler" Society in Australia' in Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens (eds), Complicating categories: gender, class, race and ethnicity , International Review of Social History, Supplement 7 , pp. 101-122. 7. Stuart Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-Class Militancy in Inter-War Britain , Croom Helm, London, 1980; McCalman, Struggletown ; Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (eds), Making a Life: A People's History of Australia since 1788 , McPhee Gribble/ Penguin, Melbourne, 1988; Andrew Metcalfe, For Freedom and Dignity: Historical Agency and Class Structures in the Coalfields of NSW , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988; Greg Patmore, 'Community and Australian Labour History' Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History , pp. 178-84. See further: Special Thematic Issue on Locality in Labour History , vol. 78, May 2000. 8. Ann Curthoys, 'Labour History and Cultural Studies', Labour History , no. 67, 1994, pp. 12-15. 9. Lyn H. Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the City's Quintessential Social Territory. Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1998, p. 10. 10. Greg Patmore, Australian Labour History , Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991, pp. 1-20; Lucy Taksa, 'Toil, struggle and repose: oral history and the exploration of labour culture in Australia', Labour History , no. 67, 1994, pp. 111-13; Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney 1870-90 , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987; Lucy Taksa, 'The 1917 Strike: a case study in working class community networks', Oral History Association of Australia Journal (OHAAJ) , no. 10, 1988, pp. 22-38. 11. Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the New Republic , Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 8-11, 203-4; Lucy Taksa, 'Pumping the life-blood into Politics and Place': Labour Culture and the Eveleigh Railway Workshops', Labour History , no. 79, 2000, pp. 11-34. 12. Shirley Fitzgerald and Garry Wotherspoon (eds), Minorities: Cultural Diversity in Sydney , State Library of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1995. 13. James Jupp, 'Ethnic History', in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 224. 14. Eric Hobsbawm, On History , Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1997, pp. 268-71, 277. 15. Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-class and Social History , Knopf, New York, 1976. 16. A good American example is: Jeremy Brecher, Jerry Lombardi, Jan Stackhouse, Brass Valley: the story of working people's lives and struggles in an American industrial region , Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1982. Some notable Australian studies include: Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales: A History of the Union 1860-1960 , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1963; Peter Cochrane, 'The Wonthaggi Coal Strike, 1934', Labour History , no. 27, 1974, pp. 12-30; E. McEwen, The Newcastle Coalmining District of NSW, 1860-1900, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1979; Claire Williams, Open Cut: The Working Class in an Australian Mining Town , George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981; Andrew Reeves, 'Damned Scotsmen': British Migrants and the Australian Coal Industry, 1919-1949', in Fry (ed.), Common Cause , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986; Peter Cochrane, Winifred Mitchell and Geoffrey Sherington, 'Port Kembla Workers' in Bill Gammage and Peter Spearritt (eds), Australians 1938 , Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987; Beverley Burgmann, 'Working in Steel City' in Burgmann and Lee (eds), Making a Life , pp. 282-291; Metcalfe, For Freedom and Dignity ; Julia Martinez, Plural Australia: Aboriginal and Asian Labour in Tropical White Australia, Darwin, 1911-1940, Unpublished PhD, University of Wollongong, 1999. 17. Jupp, 'Ethnic History', p. 224.

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