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Struggling for Recognition : the Individual in Labour History
Struggling for Recognition : Reading the Individual in Labour History
Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles*
The articles drawn together in the thematic section, 'Struggling for Recognition: the Individual in Labour History', reveal the diversity of experience and interpretation that opens before the historian seeking to understand and explain how often marginalised historical actors engaged in political or industrial activism, or simply coped with their circumstances. Struggles for security, justice and recognition formed a constant preoccupation and stimulus to action for the subjects under discussion. This article addresses the issue of how historians are to stand in relation to their chosen biographical subjects, and explores various forms of innovative methodology that may assist historians to construct a rigorous analysis. A focus on gender also clarifies that the construction of identity is a crucial element in the subject's response to class, nation and race, and biography can play an important role in exploring how these dynamics are developed and expressed. Finally, the article focuses on the relationship between Australian labour historiography and the study of the individual.
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| How should historians examine the lives of the people of labour history — workers and their parliamentary representatives, radicals and trade unionists? The articles drawn together in this thematic edition of Labour History reveal the diversity of experience and interpretation that opens before the historian seeking to understand and explain how these often marginalised historical actors engaged in political or industrial activism, or simply coped with their circumstances. As a device for cautiously imposing some thematic unity over the restless heterogeneity of working class lives, struggling for recognition acknowledges that their struggles were only not designed to overcome exploitation, but involved a tacit or explicit plea for recognition — of personal identity and value as a citizen, in cultures that often denied these elementary yet vital forms of acceptance. |
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Bourdieu argued that 'struggles for recognition are a fundamental dimension of social life'. The desire to gain 'honour in the sense of reputation and prestige' is a process of accumulating 'symbolic capital'.1 Struggles for security, justice and recognition formed a constant preoccupation and stimulus to action for the subjects whose lives are explored in these articles. The feminist and radical Rose Summerfield and the dreaming seafarer Frank Anstey cultivated a sense of their identities in their stories of fighting injustice and struggled to live out those identities, challenging their fellow workers to imagine themselves liberated; the outspoken unionist Stan Keon carved out a space for himself and his neglected members, liberating an innate militancy that seemed to become an end in itself. Agnes Milne radicalised the role of the factory inspector, investing its scrutiny with a memory of her own experience on the shop floor; the sisters Annie Golding and Kate Dwyer could only conceive of recognition for themselves that included the wider sisterhood of women workers. The colonial matron Bathesheba Ghost made no plea on behalf of herself, yet she demands recognition of her 'unwearied personal exertion' to relieve the suffering of others. All his life Arthur Rae demanded recognition while obstinately determined to accept it only on his terms, and as a result remained an admonishing figure at the fringe of the labour movement, identifying himself with a spirit of independent dissent he saw fading in the disciplined compromises of union and party. Esmonde Higgins observed the discipline of the Communist party and could not recognise himself in it. Of the subjects observed here only George Lansbury succeeded in rising to the highest levels of the labour movement, as the leader of the British Labour Party between 1931–35; yet his own form of iconoclastic marginality seemed to reassert itself in this most prestigious of labour roles. That Lansbury had also accumulated abundant symbolic capital as a principled labour figure, and as a human being, is evident in the life story warmly recounted by John Shepherd. |
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How are historians to stand in relation to their chosen subjects? In a thoughtful concluding commentary to this thematic collection leading US historian and biographer Nick Salvatore argues that we must engage with the complexity of the historical subject. Munslow suggests the choice of subject is revealing in itself; rescuing the deluded followers of Joanna Southcott from the condescension of posterity, E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class created 'an inspirational, wistful but ultimately tragedic proletarian narrative', rediscovering lost lives 'for a humanist Marxist purpose'. Munslow adds that this mingling of creative, politically-charged empathy and available evidence is 'perfectly legitimate'. Historians 'create a meaning more complex than the paper trail will allow'.2 Biographers of working class lives are often left with little choice. In biography, like all history writing, there is a kind of conjuring at work, which is neither a crass lapse into fiction nor the more fey conceits of postmodernism. Judith Godden summons Bathesheba Ghost from historical silence by an impulse of empathy, and finds a subject with whom she can share a dialogue — not by inventing a story or a character, but by a forensic reading of the available evidence, by immersing herself in this life and its meanings. |
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The biographer must conduct a sympathetic interrogation. Why did Rose Summerfield complain of women as 'the weaker sex'? Why did she express disgust at non-Europeans? What do these attitudes reveal about how Summerfield felt about herself? These are difficult questions that cannot always be answered; the biographer must ask them, although not to crudely label or judge the historical subject: empathy requires recognition of all the aspects of personality, behaviour and belief that may be uncovered from the evidence, and a willingness to face the complex and at times contradictory meanings that flow from a life and its clamorous, demanding context. |
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New Ways of Reading a Life | |
| The limitations of the evidence demand that the historian develop skills to yield as much as possible from it. In recent decades the rich diversification of biographical and historical methodology offer new ways of uncovering the experience and context of working lives. Biography offers a means of exploring the complexities of gender, race and class, and discovering what these broad categories mean in individual lives; how history happens.3 In a life these and other categories of identity jostle for relief and attention, as the subject pursues justice and recognition and negotiates the daily grind. The characteristics that Levi identifies with microhistory — 'the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved' — well apply to the apparently narrow focus of studying a single life: microhistory follows the individual's constant negotiation of a normative reality, which though pervasive, offers many possibilities for personal interpretation and expression. Clarifying the discrete experience of a life illuminates the wider social and political context.4 |
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The relationship between the individual and society can be chartered through the 'biographical socialization' of the individual, the process by which, as Hoerning and Alheit outline, the individual constructs biographical experience, negotiating the 'layers of knowledge' he or she has inherited, and those which have accrued through social interaction.5 This restless process is continually built and modified as the individual negotiates new experience. As Joan Scott observes, 'Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted'.6 |
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Several recent works demonstrate new ways of reading the individual in history. That they do not always constitute biographical studies in a conventional sense stresses both methodological diversity and an impulse to closely interrogate the experience and values of the historical actor in the context of time and place. In Democratic Subjects Patrick Joyce explores the history of identity in nineteenth century England through the lives of working class poet Edwin Waugh and the middle class radical John Bright. Nick Salvatore's We All Got History sensitively clarifies the terse entries of Amos Webber's journals, demonstrating that a significant study of the life of a nineteenth century Afro-American activist and worker, and its context, can be realised from apparently slender source material. Fairhall's James Joyce and the Question of History addresses the 'central problem in James Joyce's life' — how Joyce situated himself in relation to history and ideology. Two very different works, Macintyre's A Colonial Liberalism and Dening's Mr Bligh's Bad Language reveal through their structure and themes fresh approaches to drawing links between the individual's behaviour, the acquisition of tradition and ideology, and the relationship with their social or professional context. Al Gabay's The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin explores the linkages between Deakin's experience, private spirituality and public career and offers significant insights into the complex life of his subject, notwithstanding the prior publication of La Nauze's impressive and apparently comprehensive study.7 |
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Biographers of working class subjects may lack access to personal papers to help clarify the subject's sense of identity or the formation of values; often the biographer must work from public documents — speeches, reports, articles, tracts or books by or about their subject. Narrative theory suggests a number of ways of interrogating these public documents for what they may reveal of the subject's identity and beliefs. Narrative identity has been defined as the process by which individuals construct a personal identity and a relationship with the culture they inhabit; it may also serve, as Poiana argues, the pursuit of claims for justice or recognition and recognition of needs and aspirations.8 We construct social relationships through the narrative codes of language, gestures, dress, all the techniques available to render us comprehensible to ourselves and the world. As Kerby observes, 'much of our self-narrating is a matter of becoming conscious of the narratives that we already live with and in'. The formation of personal and social identity is a time-based, historical process, an unceasing dialogue of the self and the social:
I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point.9
From these starting points the impulse to social participation or political action develops. As Polkinghorne has argued, narratives provide individuals with 'purposeful engagement' drawing together 'diverse events, happenings, and actions of human lives into thematically unified, goal-directed processes'.10 |
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Frank Anstey returned to narrative throughout his life to give meaning to his experience and stimulate action. As Peter Love sensitively outlines, it was through skillful narratives that Anstey came to forge a public reputation as a political radical; these narratives not only prescribed modes of action but also seem to define a sense of self, which he wished to share with others — a sense of identity which collapsed with his dreams of political and social transformation in the 1930s depression. The strong relationship between narrative and the exchange of communal myths between the individual and society is also evident in Anstey's elaboration of the predatory regime of 'the money power' for his Australian and at times international audience. Rose Summerfield's narratives also stirred resentment of capital, and rehearsed the fear she shared with many of her working class contemporaries of the threat posed to economic security and identity by non-northern European migration.11 |
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Innovative biographical analysis can also be found in the variety of techniques Simon Schama utilised in his work, Dead Certainties.12 Schama adopted an unconventional approach, not only in respect of his choice of biographical subjects (neither of whom knew each other) but in his method. He used art, in this case paintings, to illuminate significant perspectives of a person's life by employing techniques of 'fragmentation, echoes, variations of narrative perspectives, parodies and pastiches'. Importantly for the more sceptical historians, Schama also provided an explanation of what part of his work is based on primary sources and what is purely imagined fiction.13 |
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Historians have also shown that biography can be employed to illuminate the social, economic and political environment of a particular historical period. Barbara Tuchman described biography as a 'prism of history', She argued that it attracted and retained the interest of the reader in the broader issues. Indeed, there is no better example of this than her use of the composer Richard Strauss as a vehicle to encapsulate Imperial Germany on the eve of the First World War.14 |
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Jonathan Spence, an historian of China, employed a biographical technique in writing an account of the origins and development of the Chinese Revolution from 1895 to 1980. His book, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, is constructed around a small number of individuals, including a scholar, a soldier-academic and two writers.15 His subjects played no central role in the events of revolution but were chosen because their individual experiences assisted in outlining the character of the times through which they lived. While this approach can cause confusion to the reader, continuously changing between the 'public' time of events like the 1949 Revolution and the 'private' time of the chosen historical actors, Spence was able, nevertheless, to illuminate the experience of living through a time of such social and political upheaval in a clear and stimulating fashion.16 |
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An approach with particular relevance to labour historians lies in the work of a British sociologist, Bill Williamson.17 Williamson wrote about the life of his grandfather, a Northumberland miner. Despite the focus on one man and his family, the central purpose of this work was to provide an account of the changes which occurred in the society and community in which his grandfather lived. For Williamson, the book's key objective was to demonstrate that biography is a form of narrative and analysis 'appropriate to the study of social change and representing a way of reconciling the work of historians and sociologists'.18 |
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As Williamson explained, his work was concerned with 'several interlocking trajectories of change and two major historical transitions'. The trajectories involved the rise of the organised labour movement and the decline of British liberalism, movements in the character of trade unionism in mining and structural changes in the mining industry itself. At a community level, the growth of local institutions, the co-operative store, the chapels and the working men's club were investigated, as was the more abstruse changes in the meaning and significance of community for the people who lived in the mining village. The historical transitions which concerned Williamson were the shifts from paternalistic capitalism to corporate capitalism and the welfare state.19 |
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The 'gender turn' in labour history, as identified by recent contributors to International Labor and Working-Class History, has opened a number of ways of reinterpreting gender roles at work, in unpaid labour and in the public sphere. A focus on gender helps to clarify that the construction of identity is a crucial element in the subject's response to class, nation and race.20 Biography can play an important role in exploring how these dynamics are developed and expressed. |
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Joy Damousi convincingly employed a collective biographical methodology in her study of female activists and agitators within the Communist Party of Australia during the 1920s.21 She examined how these women made sense of the world through communist discourse as well as describing the role they played within the Party. By this means, she was able to provide a broader understanding about why they joined, why they stayed in such a masculinist Party and why they resisted other groups. In a wider dimension, Damousi saw this relationship between experience and political subjectivity as increasing our historical understanding of the ways in which women negotiate their world in particular time and places.22 |
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Addressing the issue of 'what counts as work?' Tabili notes the historical marginalisation of women's work and why 'women's labor outside the privatized domestic sphere so often resembles housework'.23 Several articles in this thematic — the studies of Agnes Milne, Rose Summerfield, Kate Dwyer and Annie Golding — illustrate that women participated in a wide variety of nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian workplaces, and struggled to overcome marginalisation and injustice both in the workplace and the wider sphere of public debate and agitation. Tabili's focus on women's work as being historically organised as 'an endless round of menial tasks that were low-tech, allegedly unskilled, and under-remunerated', is reflected in Bathsheba Ghost's experience.24 Godden not only 'rescues' Ghost from historical condescension, but demonstrates that with the focus on her experience comes an illumination of her context — her Sydney Hospital workplace — and how Ghost and her fellow workers and patients adapted its institutional rules to their needs, exerting a degree of control over both work and health care and, in Ghost's case, attracting the respect of her peers. |
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Biography and the New Social History | |
| In its most common form, biography encompasses the chronological narrative of a life. In traditional modes of history writing these lives were generally those of historical actors who comprised social elites. Thus, biography became inextricably associated with the traditions of writing history from above. In labour history, prior to the specialism's mid-twentieth century historiographical transformation, most biographies were written about the leaders of labour both industrial and political. However, by the early 1970s biography, formerly one of the largest categories after political and religious history in many conventional history journals, had lost its place to economic and social history.25 |
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The 'new' social history saw a move away from descriptive narratives of history writing towards a greater use of analysis. It was also more open to crossing disciplinary boundaries in the search for new analytical tools, for example in disciplines such as anthropology and historical sociology.26 The use of biographical method had been a feature of sociological research in the 1920s and 1930s. Interest then faded for a decade or so until the emergence of new ideas, particularly that of C. Wright Mills' conception of the 'sociological imagination' and the connection between biography and the social structure, revived interest in the method in the late 1960s and early 1970s. |
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There was no such enthusiasm for biography as a form of historical methodology amongst the 'new' historians — including labour historians. Since the 1970s, there have been a series of historiographical debates in the field of labour history located around the question of the discipline's future direction. The genesis for these debates was the emergence in the 1960s of the 'new social history' which evolved from the French Annalist School and Marxism and influenced by structuralism. While there had been some oblique references to 'the people' in nineteenth century histories, the 'new' social historians were committed to rescuing the lives of ordinary people — peasants, workers, servants and the like — from historical obscurity. Implicit in the approach of Marxist and Annalist versions of the 'new social history' was the rejection of the traditional historical concerns of political leaders, ideas and institutions.27 |
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This change in cast members in historical productions was accompanied by a change in the way the historical script was written. Traditional historians thought of history as a chronological narrative of events which offered a view from above. The 'new' history concerned itself primarily with the analysis of structures which offered a view from below. Thus, in labour history circles, the 1960s and 1970s saw a trend away from writing about the institutions of industrial and political labour and their leadership and towards writing about worker experience. |
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Despite the potential that the 'new' labour history offered for biographical research, biography has rarely featured in the debates. Rather, the rumblings within the profession in both the United States and Great Britain centred around arguments that the 'new' labour history approach from below, focused around issues such as gender and race, had retarded, if not excluded, research into the institutional forms of labour. This prompted some calls for the reinstatement of trade unions and political institutions on the historical agenda28 In Australia, the debate ranged from apprehension about the labour history's transformation into a social history of labour and the parlous state of the discipline to arguments that talk of a 'crisis' had been exaggerated and that the influence of the 'new' social history had actually enriched the state of the discipline. |
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Australian Labour Biography | |
| Australian labour history has tended to marginalise the study of the individual, relegating it to standard biographies of prominent labour identities. The individual in the historical experience has often been presented as an adjunct to institutional studies, or an analysis of social phenomena. Subsuming the individual into broader stories has often had the effect of presenting a narrow and regulated view of the working class historical actor — a strange outcome for a project so driven by a determination to unearth the buried histories of the poor and the working class. |
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Despite the focus on prominent identities, one area of biographical neglect within Australian labour historiography has been in the field of union leadership. It is inconceivable that the history of any trade union could be written without reference to individual leaders, including significant rank and file activists. Whilst leaders might be mentioned, their institutional lives are rarely used in any explicit manner to provide insights into how the trade union functioned or developed or how they, as individuals, may have shaped the development or the culture of the institution. Conversely, trade union histories often fail to demonstrate how the behaviour or conduct of leaders might have been shaped or influenced by the culture or development of the institution. |
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Where leadership within trade unions has been more comprehensively explored, it has been in the form of biographies of individual leaders. Even here, there have been relatively few published biographies of leaders of Australian trade unions, although there are a number of biographies of political Labor leaders who began their careers in trade union leadership positions.29 Separate stand-alone biographies which make some effort to explore the historical traditions of trade union leadership outside the boundaries of mainstream labour historiography are in no way to be demeaned. However, seeing biography as something that occurs externally to historiography seems to ignore the opportunities biographical research offers as a methodology for writing labour history.30 |
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The comparative methodology developed by Kevin Theakston in the field of public administration leadership offers an innovative approach to the study of labour movement leadership.31 He argued that biography — particularly comparative biography — is 'unduly' neglected as a political science methodology and has immense potential for the study of leadership. In undertaking nine biographical case studies of British civil service mandarins Theakston demonstrated that there are different ways in which leadership can be exercised within an institution and that it was possible to analyse the opportunities for and the constraints on leadership encouraged or imposed by the organisational internal and external political environment. Moreover, the biographical case studies provide material and a viewpoint from which to assess change over time in the character and workings of the institution.32 |
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Theakston's model has recently been adopted in a comparative biographical study of the careers of five long-serving leaders in the Australian Workers' Union.33 The biographical model employed here permitted insights into how leadership was exercised in the Australian Workers' Union over time, and the extent to which the dynamic of leadership either shaped the union's development or was itself shaped by the institutional environment. In this thematic Knowles' study of AWU leader and dissident Arthur Rae investigates the broader issue of leadership within the labour movement during the first half of the twentieth century, and his role in the dissemination of the socialist message in the period, while seeking to illuminate Rae's personal struggles and aspirations. |
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Recent biographies of Labor leaders have reflected mixed success in exploring the complexities of their subjects, or their relationships with party, class and nation. David Day's biographies of Ben Chifley and John Curtin reassert the need for further debate and reflection of these important figures, not least in observing that the robust Australian nationalism, often retrospectively asserted by modern Labor as an almost century-old tradition, was in fact profoundly compromised by lingering loyalties to empire and white Australia — which conspired to keep Australia and Labor looking back to Britain as a cultural and racial touchstone well into the mid-twentieth century.34 Meaney has cogently addressed this theme, exploring these ambiguous values at work in the speeches of Curtin, Chifley, Calwell and Evatt; Day's biography of Curtin, notwithstanding some cogent criticisms by Meaney, outlines Curtin's attitude towards empire and White Australia and why Curtin came to reassert the emotional ties with Britain during World War II — notwithstanding the brief and hastily conceived appeal to the United States.35 |
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Curtin did not singlehandedly draw Labor towards these contradictions; the federal Labor Party had embraced White Australia, strong defence policy and a mix of 'Australian sentiment' and empire loyalty since federation. Labor's first federal leader, John Christian Watson, emerged as a persuasive champion of Labor's empire nationalism. Yet two recent works on Watson — a biography by Grassby and Ordonez and a study of Watson and his brief 1904 government — hardly engage with a word that Watson spoke or wrote, or explain Watson's progress from an idealised Labor leader to his emergence as the first chairman of the Nationalist Party in January 1917, following Labor's disastrous conscription split.36 Watson, like many of his Labor contemporaries, was quite literally an ambiguous child of the colonial diaspora, impelled by class marginalisation and the insecurities of racial and national identity.37 Watson's experience seems to reflect the wider instability of the Australian Labor Party in the period from the 1890s until 1916, when the Party could no longer reconcile its tensions. Curtin's experience suggests that Labor was unable to resolve the ambiguities of empire nationalism in the post-World War I period. |
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Yet much remains to be done, even at the basic level of empirical research. We have only begun to map the biographical contours of Australian labour activism. One of the most significant projects working to overcome the neglect of Australian labour movement identities is the Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement, a project diligently pursued since the late 1980s by John Shields and Andrew Moore, and now moving towards publication. The register represents the first systematic attempt to employ a collective biographical approach to flesh out the historical shape and texture of the Australian labour movement. The aim is the publication of a collective biographical research aid containing brief cross-referenced entries on 2,000 individuals, selected on the basis of their particular contribution to the history of organised labour in Australia down to 1975. In the great majority of cases, the main qualification for inclusion is active involvement in a trade union or other workplace, community or political organisation, as either a union official or as a prominent rank-and-file union member.38 |
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The Working Lives web site is another initiative designed to promote biographical studies. An activity of the Business and Labour History Group in the School of Business, University of Sydney, Working Lives is an online project that promotes research into the role of the individual in labour and social history. Drawing on contributions from academics and professional historians, the site features research papers and articles on biographical methodology, labour intellectuals and a range of working class and labour movement activists, including an extensive report on the Biographical Register.39 |
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Conclusion | |
Biography emphasises the importance of studying the interaction between the individual and his or her historical context. Bailyn identifies this interrogation as the historian's central task:
the essence and drama of history lie precisely in the active and continuous relationships between the underlying conditions that set the boundaries of human existence and the everyday problems with which people consciously struggle. The goal of history is not to separate out events of these different dimensions at a particular point in time but to show their continuous interaction in an evolving story. The drama of people struggling with conditions that confine them through the cycles of limited life spans is the heart of all living history.40
Drawing on the work of the American historian Oscar Handlin, who 'saw each individual joining a social play in progress', Broome argues that it is just as important to have a history of individuals as it is to have the history of social forces and structures to understand the past. Broome reminds us that all historians deal in biography — 'we all populate our histories with individuals albeit in mere fragments, as we use people to support and colour our generalisations'.41 |
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Narrative theory, the study of leadership or other forms of innovative methodological practice are not ends in themselves for the historian and biographer. Methodology must serve our attempts to collapse the barrier between the history of the individual and the history of society, to reveal the conditions that incited the individual's struggle for recognition, and inspired their dreams of personal and social transformation. |
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Endnotes
* The authors wish to thank the anonymous referees of Labour History for their comments.
1. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words, Polity Press, London, 1992, p. 22.
2. Alan Munslow, 'History and Biography: an Editorial Comment', Rethinking History, vol. 7, no.1, 2003, pp. 5–6.
3. Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens, 'Complicating Categories: an Introduction', International Review of Social History, vol. 44, 1999, p. 4.
4. Giovanni Levi, 'On Microhistory', in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives in Historical Writing, Polity Press, London, 1991, pp. 97–110; see also Istvan Szijarto, 'Four Arguments for Microhistory', Rethinking History, vol. 6, no. 2, June 2002.
5. Erika M. Hoerning and Peter Alheit, 'Biographical Socialization', in 'Trend Report: Biographical Research', Current Sociology, vol. 43, no. 2/3, Autumn/Winter 1995, p. 12.
6. Joan Scott, 'The Evidence of Experience', Critical Inquiry, vol. XVII, Summer 1991, p. 797.
7. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992; James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. xii; Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; John La Nauze, Alfred Deakin, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965; Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: the Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991; Al Gabay, The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992; Nick Salvatore, We All Got History: the Memory Books of Amos Webber, Times Books, New York, 1996.
8. Peter Poiana, 'Narrative Identity', Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 9 October 1999, p. 99. See also Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, 'Reclaiming the Epistemological "Other": Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity', in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1998; Joyce, Democratic Subjects, p. 153.
9. Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1991, p. 6.
10. Quoted in Brian Roberts, Biographical Research, Open University Press, Buckingham, UK, p. 117.
11. For a discussion on myth and narrative see ibid., pp.124–128.
12. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), Granta in association with Penguin, London, 1991.
13. Carole Lambert, 'Postmodern Biography: Lively Hypotheses and Dead Certainties', Biography, vol. 18, no. 4, 1995, p. 308.
14. Barbara W. Tuchman, 'Biography as a Prism of History' in Stephen B. Oates, Biography as High Adventure, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986, pp. 93–94; Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower, Bantam Books, New York, 1985, ch. 6.
15. Jonathon Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Faber, London, 1982.
16. Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Polity Press, London, 1991, pp. 243–244.
17. Bill Williamson, Class Culture and Community: a Biographical Study of Social Change in Mining, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982.
18. Ibid., p. 1.
19. Ibid., pp. 2–3.
20. Eileen Boris, 'From Gender to Racialized Gender: Laboring Bodies That Matter', International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 63, Spring 2003, p. 10.
21. Joy Damousi, Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia 1890–1955, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994.
22. Joy Damousi, 'Feminist Biography' in Richard Broome (ed.), Tracing Past Lives: the Writing of Historical Biography, The History Institute, Victoria Inc., Melbourne, 1995, pp. 40–41.
23. Laura Tabili, 'Dislodging the Center, Complicating the Dialectic: What Gender and Race Have Done to the Study of Labor', International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 63, Spring 2003, p. 16.
24. Ibid., p.15.
25. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1995, p. 84.
26. See Theodore Rabb and Robert Rotberg (eds), The New History, the 1980s and Beyond: Studies in Interdisciplinary History, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1982.
27. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth About History, pp. 80–84.
28. See David Brody, 'Workers and Work in America: the New Labor History' in James B. Gardner and George Rollie Adams (eds), Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on the New Social History, The American Association for State and Local History, Tennessee, 1983, pp. 139–159 and the chapters by Leon Fink Brody, Michael Reich, Mari Jo Buhle, Alan Dawley, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Sean Wilentz in Carroll J. Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris (eds), Perspectives on American Labor History: the Problems of Synthesis, Northern Illinois Univeristy Press, De Kalb, Ill., 1989. Also David Brody, 'Reconciling the Old Labor History and the New', Pacific Historical Review , vol. 62, 1993, pp. 1–18.
29. Some in this category include H.V. Evatt's Australian Labour Leader: the Story of W.A. Holman and the Labour Movement, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1940; L. F. Fitzhardinge, William Morris Hughes: a Political Biography, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1964, 1979; L.F. Crisp, Ben Chifley, Longmans, Green & Co., Melbourne, 1961; Lloyd Ross, John Curtin, MacMillan, Melbourne, 1977.
30. Stuart Macintyre's biography of the Western Australian trade union leader and militant, Paddy Troy, is a good example of how biography and historical explanation can be synthesised.
31. Kevin Theakston, 'Comparative Biography and Leadership in Whitehall', Public Administration, vol. 75, Winter 1997, pp. 651–667. See also Kevin Theakston, Leadership in Whitehall, Economic Social & Research Council, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hamps, 1999.
32. Ibid., p. 652.
33. Harry Knowles, Comparative Labour Biography: an Historical Study of Leadership in the AWU, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2003.
34. David Day, John Curtin: a Life, Harper Collins, Sydney, 1999; Ben Chifley, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2001.
35. Day, Curtin, pp. 229–230, 243, ch. 38; Neville Meaney, 'Britishness and Australia: Some Reflections', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 31, no.2, May 2003, pp. 125–128.
36. Al Grassby and Sylvia Ordonez, The Man That Time Forgot: the Life and Times of John Christian Watson, Australia's First Labor Prime Minister, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1999; Ross McMullin, So Monstrous a Travesty, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2004.
37. Mark Hearn, 'Long Shadow of a Forgotten Man: John Christian Watson, Labor's First Prime Minister', Workers Online, July 2004. http://workers.labor.net.au/features/200407/c_historicalfeature_watson.html
38. John Shields and Andrew Moore, 'The Biographical Register of the Australian Labour Movement: a Progress Report', Working Lives, http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/wos/workinglives/register.html
39. Visit Working Lives at: http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/wos/workinglives
40. B. Bailyn, 'The Challenge of Modern Historiography', in William McKinley Runyan (ed.), Psychology and Historical Interpretation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988, pp.42–43.
41. Broome (ed.), 'Introduction' in Tracing Past Lives, p. ix.
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