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Book Review
R.D. Walshe, The Great Australian Goldrush and Eureka Stockade, Literary Productions, Sydney, 2005. pp. 96. $19.95 paper.
Tom O'Lincoln, United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia, Red Rag Publications, Carlton North, Victoria, 2005. pp. 128. $20.00 paper.
Rick Kuhn (ed.), Class and Struggle in Australia, Pearson Education Australia, Sydney, 2005. pp. vii + 224. $41.95 paper.
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| Bob Walshe's book about Eureka is the product of a lifetime's labour of love. It's a much expanded version of the pamphlet Walshe wrote for the hundredth anniversary of Eureka in 1954 when he was member of the Communist Party. One of the redoubtable generation of ex-servicemen Communist student leaders, he was expelled from the CPA in 1956 as the main Australian distributor of Kruschev's Secret Report on Stalin which the then CPA leadership was trying to suppress. He subsequently became a high school history teacher and has written many successful books on teaching methods, and how to study. He has remained politically active on the Left. Walshe's book is more or less the full story about Eureka. It's a bit repetitive because it includes speeches made by Bob Walshe at several 2005 celebrations of Eureka. It is organised in a form useful to serious high school teachers with a series of points and questions to be discussed. Walshe's frame of reference remains the one that he adopted in 1954, a combination of the struggle for democracy and the beginnings of the emergence of the working class as a major social force. This reference point is effective and useful, as an underpinning for a serious history of the Eureka events. It's got a lot of entertaining colour illustrations and primary documents. It's self published. One small defect a bit unaccountable to me, is the omission in the bibliography of Rafaello Carboni's eyewitness account of the events. It is an extraordinarily useful little book, and a fitting culmination to Bob Walshe's lifetime preoccupation with Eureka. |
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The second book, United We Stand, is also rather short. It's a summary account of the emergence of the working class and the labour movement in colonial Australia. It's a polemical little book, one thrust of which is to refute the widely held view on the Left that it was the working class which was the source of nineteenth century racism. In my view O'Lincoln effectively demolishes that view and establishes the contrary construct that racism in Australia was primarily the emanation from the ruling class of the time and the ideology of the British Empire and that the working class were not the prime agents in the development of racism. I have to say at this point that I share O'Lincoln's view on this question so it's better to reveal my bias. Nevertheless, O'Lincoln's book in my view has some weaknesses. It does not engage in any direct way with the debate on class in Australian labour history that developed in the 1970s between Russell Ward, Ian Turner and Bob Gollan on the one hand, and Stuart MacIntyre and Humphrey McQueen on the other. Nowhere does it come to grips with the model of the emergence of class consciousness in Australia presented by Russell Ward in the enormously influential book, The Australian Legend. The emergence of a rather egalitarian national consciousness tends to be conflated in O'Lincoln's book with crude nationalism. The book would benefit from a short summary of the exchanges on these questions in labour history in the 1970s. A very useful feature of O'Lincoln's book is an extremely comprehensive bibliography, the only striking defects of which are the omission of Russell Ward's The Australian Legend, Vance Palmer's The Legend of the 90s, and Sylvia Lawson's useful book about Archibald and The Bulletin. Despite these caveats O'Lincoln's book is a very useful addition to the literature on the emergence of the Australian working class. |
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The third book edited by Rick Kuhn is a more tertiary academic collection. The political and intellectual context in the book is that these days, the writing of labour history is largely dominated by an uncritical laborism. Every year there are a fair number of books published describing rather uncritically the minutiae of Labor parliamentary politics both historical and recent. These days, the only significant group of young historians working in the field of labour history and sociology who dissent much from this uncritical laborite consensus, are a grouping of younger academics involved in the International Socialists tradition emanating from the UK, the main theoretical mentor of which is the late Tony Cliff. This book is a collection of essays by this grouping. As an extended statement of a Marxist approach to Australian labour history argued very concretely, with a considerable amount of original research, it is a very useful book indeed. It's obviously intended as a primary introduction to the field of Marxist analysis in the Australian context for students and is a breath of fresh air compared to the prevailing bland narrative predominant in history and sociology in academe at the moment. The most useful essay is Dianne Fieldes' account of the structure of the modern working class, but all the essays in this collection are useful in their own right. |
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A problematic part of this book from my point of view is a sustained, rather postmodern assault on the idea of the existence of national states and national consciousness in favour of vague references to globalisation. As in Tom O'Lincoln's book, Australian national identity and national consciousness are conflated with rabid Australian imperialist nationalism, when, in fact, they are not the same thing. Another defect of the book in my view is it's overly self referential quality. All the significant pointers are to texts written by the authors themselves or to texts within their own cultural political framework. For instance in discussing socialism and political consciousness in the Australian working class they don't engage at all with the kind of ethos of the older socialist movement described by Bruce Scates, Frank Bongornio, Ian Turner, Frank Farrell, Russell Ward, Bob Gollan and others. These essays tend to read like the early Humphrey McQueen without Humphrey's robust social history, which gives Humphrey's books their readability. Karl Marx was very fond of saying 'history is whole cloth' and the 'whole cloth' aspect is kind of absent in this collection of essays. Tom Bramble's essay in particular effectively describes the evolution and functioning of the bureaucracies that dominate the labour movement, but it is marred by a rather moralising tone which doesn't pay sufficient reference to the obvious fact that the bulk of the people active in unions, even amongst the bureaucracy, devote their lives to the interests of the working class as they see it. This platonic moralising tends in the whole collection to be extended back into history which doesn't help much in understanding how we got from that to this. Despite these caveats this collection is a very useful book and deserves a wide audience. |
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These three books sharpen in my mind the importance of developing an interaction between all of those interested in preserving and developing a socialist or Marxist or Leftist approach to labour history. It seems to me to be a fairly appropriate moment to try to organise some kind of extended seminar in which all the contributors to these three books plus people like Humphrey McQueen, Frank Bongiorno, Bruce Scates, Ray Francis, Shirley Fitzgerald and a number of others might possible interact in an attempt to re-invigorate a serious interest in labour history from a radical point of view. |
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