TEACHING LABOUR HISTORY

An E-Interview with Rae Frances and Bruce Scates

Erik Eklund and Melanie Oppenheimer

The future of labour history partly rests on the skills and resources of university and school teachers. In the following interview we showcase two talented historians who have won prestigious university teaching awards. Rae Frances and Bruce Scates from the School of History, University of New South Wales have brought their own committed and effective stye of teaching to that university's first year Australian history course with remarkable results.	1
Many labour historians would argue, much like Bruce and Rae do in the interview that follows, that teaching and research are vitally linked, and that 'scholarly teaching' is central to the modern University despite any federal government plans to create teaching-only institutions. With that central relationship in mind the editorial board of Labour History is planning a thematic edition on teaching labour history.	2
Associate Professors Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates from the School of History, University of New South Wales receiving an Australian Award for University Teaching presented by professor John Hay, Vice Chancellor of the University of Queensland and Chair of the AAUT Committee, Canberra, 3 December 2002
The journal Labour History is a primary resource for teaching material, yet from the early 1980s journal articles became longer, more intellectually demanding and perhaps less suited for teaching purposes. Articles for Labour History explicitly address an audience of peers and colleagues — both inside and outside the academy — making them somewhat hard going for students who are new to the discipline. This development is compounded by the absence of a general textbook for Australian labour history, since Greg Patmore's Australian Labour History is now out of print.	3
We offer this interview with two successful teachers as the first step in generating interest and discussion on this important topic. Do we need a new textbook for Australian labour history? If so what form should it take and what topics should be covered? What teaching strategies have been successful in the past? Should the journal publish more articles specifically written for students? Does the World Wide Web offer new ways to deliver resources to students? As co-convenors of the forthcoming thematic edition, we would be pleased to hear expressions of interest at this early stage, and we congratulate Bruce and Rae on their fine achievement.	4
What does it mean to win one of these 2002 Australian University Teaching Awards?
$40,000 and an immediate improvement in our mortgage statement! Just joking — all the money goes into a university account for teaching development. Really, though, it's not the money that makes this award important. It's the acknowledgement of the importance of teaching. We remember being told early in our careers to try to avoid teaching, especially first years, and that it was really only research that the university valued. We hope this award signals a change in academic culture. We don't believe you can or should separate teaching and research and we believe teaching is one of the most important functions of the university.	5
You co-teach survey courses on Australian history on both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How do you balance the content of the courses, do you include significant labour history topics? And how do students react to the topics which are obviously labour history focussed?
Our training as labour historians means that class analysis permeates our teaching. Labour history isn't confined to certain topics — it's something that is central to the way we approach our subjects. For example, on the colonial period, we spend a great deal of time examining the master-servant relationship. We visit Vaucluse House and as we ask students to reflect on the different spaces allocated to masters and servants, men and women, bond and free. As they move around the house and gardens we encourage them to think not just about class relationships, but about the ways in which these are reflected in and structured by spatial geography. Similarly, when we look at gender relations, we naturally consider the way in which class and work intersect with, for example, issues of sexuality and reproduction. Class is not an optional theme in all this: it is enmeshed in wider social relations.	6
Of course, we also do other more obviously 'labour history' topics. In our course on the late nineteenth century, we examine the great strikes, unemployed politics and the rise of the Labor Party. We don't find it hard to spark student interest in these topics. It's not just because they are obviously so central to this period but also because these events so clearly laid the foundation for the political and social world they live in today.	7
Does the broader political climate affect student perceptions of labour history? For example, were students somewhat more amenable to labour history topics when there was a federal Labor government in Canberra?
Yes, but the connection is somewhat different to that implied in your question. We have found, for example, that there is more interest in class analysis under the Howard government, which is clearly engaging in class war, especially so far as organised labour is concerned, than there was under the period of the Hawke and Keating Governments. Take the Maritime Strike of 1998, for instance. It wasn't at all hard to convince students of the ongoing relevance of the call to 'freedom of contract' put out by employers and governments in the 1890s.	8
In your experience, are labour history topics being taken up by students at honours and postgraduate levels?
We've had some wonderful honours and postgraduate students working on labour history, in recent years in particular. But it is sometimes labour history broadly defined. For instance, a student of ours recently published an article from her honours thesis which dealt with the intersections between work, sport, community and political activism in the Redfern area. But maybe a downside to our being so heavily involved in undergraduate teaching is that we don't get to do as much supervision at this level as we would like. We also think more could be done to encourage progression, and this is something we hope to address in the future. We are also keen to make the most of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History's connections with the labour movement to foster more collaborative research at honours and postgraduate level.	9
How do you engage students in the various topics — I mean, Australian history is considered in some circles to be 'boring'; 'uninteresting'?
This reminds us of the report we had from our daughter just last week when her history teacher announced that they were about to embark on the mandatory part of the syllabus dealing with Australia in the Federation period. 'I know it's boring', said the teacher, 'but Bob Carr says we have to do it'. Our daughter, who seems to have inherited her tact from her parents, replied that 'It's not the topic that's boring, it's the teacher!' And there is something in this, as all students will tell you. The fact that we believe so strongly in the importance of what we teach, and communicate that to our students, seems to be the critical factor in exciting their interest. We think the key to engaging students' interest is to point out the contemporary relevance of what you are teaching, whether it be leasehold conditions in the 1840s and the current land rights situation, or the historical degradation of the environment. It's not hard in Australia to make these connections. If students see the past as informing and shaping the present, they can't possibly consider it boring or irrelevant.	10
What teaching techniques do you use?
Depends on the situation. Strategies we employ in large group teaching will not necessarily be appropriate in smaller groups, and vice versa. The key to success is versatility and adaptability. And we're prepared to try just about anything, to take a few risks, from role-plays, to brainstorming, to inviting Australia's leading folk singers to perform convict ballads and traditional songs for our students. What we want to emphasise is that we don't have a magic formula: when a strategy doesn't succeed we try another, and we try never to be discouraged.	11
What we always try to do is to make the past seem immediate. History has to be something students can touch, feel and imagine. The way to recapture a sense of the past could be through an excursion, through poetry or song, and most important of all through immersion in primary sources. This isn't just an abstract intellectual exercise. In our experience, successful teaching also engages the emotions. It's about appealing to the whole person.	12
Do you think 'team teaching' is the way to go?
We began our appointment as a job-share, and the team teaching was really a product of that. But we are convinced that for us it is the best way to teach. It's a continuous dialogue — an exchange of ideas and energy, making 'the total more than the sum of the parts' as one colleague put it. And we think it's very much in keeping with the collaborative traditions of labour history. Indeed, our teaching team is not just confined to ourselves, but draws on the expertise of many of our colleagues.	13
You have both been teaching for some time now — how do you keep the material 'fresh' both for yourselves and the students?
We find the students invigorating. There's a buzz about the first weeks of session that never fails to infect us. And there's always some new perspective on every issue, whether it be the Windschuttle/Reynolds debate or new scientific findings dating the human occupation of the continent. History's agenda is always changing, and the challenge for us is to address that. Of course, sometimes teaching exhausts us, as it probably does everyone. And we really believe the university needs to keep a better check on class sizes and workloads if it really values successful teaching.	14
Labour history resides primarily in two disciplinary locations in universities — history departments or their restructured equivalents, and industrial relations. Is this a strength or a weakness? Does this fragment our endeavour or give it greater breadth?
We think the latter. Labour historians tend to bring an intense passion to their subject, regardless of where they are actually teaching. We think every department should have at least one labour historian! We hope that IR students benefit from a historical perspective, and we certainly see many who subsequently take up the study of history. And regardless of where we teach, whether it's in IR, history or some other school, we all come together in the Society [for the Study of Labour History] and the journal. These provide a meeting place for all kinds of ideas and perspectives, and a wonderful opportunity for collaborative endeavours.	15
Both of you have been involved in community and public history projects outside of Universities. How would you assess the strength of labour history in the general community?
One of the projects we are currently working on is an ARC Linkage Grant to write the history of the 1998 Maritime Dispute. The industry partners are the Maritime Union of Australia and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and we are lucky to be working alongside some very committed labour historians. That's a clear illustration of the value placed on labour history by the labour movement and the wider community. And there are many other examples of such outreach in the work of labour historians across Australia, whether it's advising heritage bodies and museums, conducting oral history projects or providing leadership to the broader historical community (through AHA or the History Council). The enormous success of the recent labour history tour (and historic pub crawl) reported on in this issue is another good example of the interest in history there is in the labour movement. And perhaps that's something very special about Australia: overseas visitors often comment with envy on the vibrant relationship between academic labour historians and a wider public audience.	16
Finally, we read that you intend to use the $40,000 prize money on a specific project connected with the Anzac tradition — can you tell us more about that?
There's a real need at this particular time for historians to engage with the Anzac tradition. It's something we can't afford to leave to the conservatives. What we plan to do is take a small group of students and tutors to Istanbul and the Gallipoli Peninsula. It will be an opportunity for on-site teaching: the peninsula is a storied place and embodies a great human tragedy, but it is also a practical gesture of reconciliation. With the western world increasingly intolerant of Islam, we would like to use this opportunity to expose our students to another history and culture. And in a world that seems poised on the brink of war, we hope that visiting the cemeteries of the peninsula will evoke something of the cost and futility of military conflict, for both sides. That's one of the most important lessons you can learn from history.	17

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