Nick Dyrenfurth, Kate Murphy and Marian Quartly

CONFERENCE REPORT

Mateship: Trust and Exclusion in Australian History

The Mateship conference was held at Victorian Trades Hall, 16-17 February 2006.	1
A conference addressing the issue of 'Australian Values' was timely in early 2006, following closely on the heels of the Parliamentary House 'mate' fiasco when Security Staffers were banned and then unbanned from using the salutation, the nationalist-soaked race riots at Cronulla, and the public interventions of Education Minister Brendan Nelson and Prime Minister John Howard into the teaching of Australian history. Amidst this fracas, Paul Keating's former speechwriter Don Watson declared in September 2005 the swansong of the mateship ideal and all it stood for, an intervention logically followed in late January by the Australian Republican Movement's launch of the much-maligned and ill-fated 'Mate for a Head of State' campaign.	2
The conference 'Mateship: Trust and Exclusion in Australian History' was co-organised by postgraduates Nick Dyrenfurth and Kate Murphy with the support of the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, History Australia and the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Victorian Trades Hall was a fitting venue, lending historical gravitas while being an appropriately nostalgic scene for discussions of how the discourse around 'mateship' had been hijacked from (or abandoned by) the Left/labour movement. This was a theme threaded through the first session. Keynote speaker Mungo MacCallum's 'Mates and the Mafia' gave a witty commentary on the repeated hijacking of the ideal across the sweep of Australian history and beyond. Pursuing this theme of hijack more specifically, Nick Dyrenfurth explored the political skill and practical effects of John Howard's linguistic appropriation. Michael Leach gave an informative and lively paper on one of the first hijackings, that of prominent labour propagandist William Lane. Lane, Leach argued, was interested in espousing a mateship sans larrikinism.	3
The friendly and dynamic group which attended over two days was particularly interested in the emptying out of the term and the possibility (there was admittedly little optimism on this point) of its rehabilitation. Eva Cox criticised the 'Mate for a Head of State' campaign, highlighting the wider problematic nature of the term with its inherent exclusions. In the context of the Australia Day release of the film Brokeback Mountain, John Rickard interrogated the inherent – though often oblique – homoeroticism of mateship. Richard Waterhouse returned to more traditional concerns, arguing that bush workers' popularisation of the ethos was based in a pejorative culture of consolation. Following this revisionist theme, Melissa Bellanta argued that the feminist-inclined Forward Movement of late nineteenth-century Adelaide was not evidently ambivalent to the masculinist tones of the dominant ethos of the 'brotherhood of man'.	4
Whether speakers considered the ethos of mateship in war, the workplace, politics or 'culcha', gender was a recurring focus of the debates. Leo Coucacaud discussed the 'commodification' of mateship in Australian beer and car advertisements. Madeleine Hamilton looked at the role of female pin-ups in fostering state-sanctioned bonds of (heterosexual) mateship during the service of Australians in World War II.	5
More traditional labour history approaches explored the role and erosion of the ethos in workplaces. Rory O'Malley took us into the shearing shed to examine the 1983 'wide comb dispute'. Barbara Webster examined the nature of mateship in the dangerous work environment of the Rockhampton Railway Workshops from the 1940s to the 1980s, tracing the decline of traditional mateship with changes in the employment conditions and in wider society. Furthering the contention that mateship has been particularly significant in work environments where physical danger is a factor, Lenore Layman's paper explored the theme in accounts of accidental deaths among goldminers in Western Australia between 1889 and 1905.	6
The conference was at once diverse and remarkably coherent. Presenters included a good mix of postgraduate and more established scholars, from an eclectic range of disciplines and theoretical approaches. The audience covered the same broad academic range, plus a strong presence of old and young lefties from outside academia. The range of voices produced a stimulating conversation.	7
Papers from the conference will be published in dedicated sections of the journals History Australia and ERAS, while negotiations are continuing for a book-length publication.	8
<Nick.Dyrenfurth@arts.monash.edu.au>

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