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Sifting the Evidence: Labour History and the Transcripts of Industrial Arbitration Proceedings
Mark Hearn*
Coinciding with the centenary of the Harvester judgement handed down by Justice Henry Bournes Higgins on 8 November 1907, this thematic section highlights the rich history of Australian working-class experience as revealed in the transcripts of Commonwealth and state industrial arbitration proceedings. The transcripts record the intensively unfolding and changing patterns of work and enterprise, and provide a powerful record of the immediacy of human experience, not least in working-class demands for recognition and justice. The thematic articles illustrate how arbitration transcripts may contribute to a richer appreciation of the development of Australian working-class life, business enterprise and the labour process. Articles also focus on how the transcripts may be brought to bear on the history of Australian liberalism, and labour movement relations with the liberal state. In recognition of the Harvester centenary, this introduction reflects on the meanings that may be yielded from the transcripts by reference to Higgins' practice as president of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court in the period 1907–21.
We all make mistakes, and we have to learn by our mistakes. The man who makes no mistakes, it is said, generally makes nothing. Industrial tribunals are doing their best for human life, the only wealth. It is the noblest objective. We work and learn. Henry Bournes Higgins.1
This thematic section highlights the rich history of Australian working-class experience as revealed in the transcripts of Commonwealth and state industrial arbitration proceedings. The publication of these articles in Labour History coincides with the centenary of the Harvester judgement, handed down by Justice Henry Bournes Higgins on 8 November 1907. Harvester clarified Higgins' intention to use the Court to play a role in Australian nation building and to uphold managerial prerogative while acknowledging a selective range of rights for a predominantly white male workforce, an approach that was followed by Higgins' successors in the Commonwealth and state jurisdictions.2 In recognition of the Harvester centenary, this introduction reflects on the meanings that may be yielded from the transcripts by reference to Higgins' practice as president of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court in the period 1907–21. |
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The Harvester judgement's symbolic role in establishing the terms of work and citizenship in the new Commonwealth of Australia cannot be underestimated. Since Macarthy's pioneering 1967 reconsideration of Harvester, where he argued that by the 1920s Higgins' Harvester formula had become 'the starting point for all calculations of the Basic Wage', historians have accepted the decision's powerful influence on the terms of Australian industrial relations and politics.3 Stuart Macintyre argues that 'The Harvester judgement was quickly established as a landmark of Australian social democracy'.4 Higgins' biographer John Rickard described Harvester as 'the rock on which he built his Court' and ensured 'the immutability of the basic wage'.5 Charles Fahey and John Lack stress that the Harvester hearings provided a space for the agency of working-class men and women.6 Harvester provided these men and women with an unprecedented opportunity to express their demands for justice and the hardships of their working and family lives in the public sphere, and before the seat of Commonwealth authority. |
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Higgins sought to govern his jurisdiction with a spirit of inclusion so vital to the principle of social democracy, even if at times Higgins failed to extend that spirit to all those who appeared before him, particularly women workers. Higgins' central claim was asserted in Harvester: it was his mission to provide for 'the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community'.7 He would provide for a fair and reasonable wage for the needs of the male breadwinner, his wife and three children. The minimum wage Higgins established was just seven shillings a day, barely providing for basic subsistence, as the evidence of household budgets tendered before the Court so starkly illustrated. Yet that evidence was placed on the public record in the transcript of the case, and found its lessons conveyed into the judgement, to be acknowledged and contested - and Harvester was struck down by the High Court on an appeal lodged by Hugh McKay, the owner of the Sunshine Harvester Works. |
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In the Harvester judgement Higgins established a principal of justice in Australian public discourse, to be applied to one of the most basic of civic relationships – the terms governing those between employer and employee. Higgins elevated this pragmatic and often harsh relationship in the realm of civic discourse by imposing an ethic of fairness, calling the parties to both a higher spirit of justice and a sense of service to the emerging nation.8 This citizenship was circumscribed by crucial gender and racial exclusions, and Marilyn Lake has provided a significant reconsideration of Harvester and its key function in facilitating the creation of a 'white, manly "civilisation"' in Australia following federation by privileging the white male breadwinner, both as economic producer and civic participant.9 |
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The Commonwealth arbitration system has attracted considerable research attention from labour historians, ranging from biographies of Higgins, W.R. Kelly and Richard Kirby;10 workplace studies such as Rae Frances' pioneering The Politics of Work (which also included a considerable focus on the Victorian state system);11 the relation between arbitration and the state at various key moments of Australian history, notably Tom Sheridan's Division of Labour;12 and institutional histories such as Isaac and Macintyre's recent centenary history of The New Province for Law and Order.13 The Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court has endured several transmutations; it may now be in the twilight zone of its final manifestation as the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. The Labor Opposition has declared it redundant to future requirements; Prime Minister John Howard's Coalition Government has surrounded it with a cumbersome superstructure of its preferred and allegedly deregulated alternatives, and may also move to extinguish the AIRC if it wins the 2007 federal elections. |
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The various state systems find themselves threatened by the apparently inexorable force of centralism, a takeover of state industrial relations power by the Commonwealth government sanctioned by the High Court of Australia in the 2006 WorkChoices case.14 Despite the crucial role played by the state systems (particularly in Queensland, historically so resistant to federal industrial intervention), they have attracted relatively little comprehensive scrutiny of their impact, an absence in part overcome and also highlighted by the recent publication of Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice, consisting of biographical studies of the presidents of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission since 1902, and a comprehensive essay from Greg Patmore charting the Commission's history.15 By their nature these studies of state and federal arbitration, with the exception of Frances, have treated the industrial transcripts as incidental to their narratives; biographical studies must range widely for the sources of a life. Yet as the thematic articles establish, a focus on the transcripts of evidence may significantly alter the interpretative perspective and challenge prevailing assumptions about the nature and influence of Australian industrial arbitration. |
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Working with Industrial Arbitration Transcripts | |
| The Harvester case also revealed the forensic interrogative approach that was adopted thereafter by the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, and which had developed in the various state jurisdictions, producing resonant and compelling accounts of working-class experience and business enterprise available in few other sources and rarely in such comparable detail. The articles in this thematic highlight the transcripts of Commonwealth and state industrial arbitration proceedings as a vital source for labour history too often neglected by historians and social scientists. The transcripts have often been used in an incidental way in research articles and trade union histories, with some notable and recent exceptions, including research inspired by the Harvester judgement and the Sunshine Harvester works.16 |
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Like all primary sources, arbitration transcript partly uncovers the historical truth, but does so with a compelling immediacy, and with a focus on individual agency rarely available from other sources, particularly those recording working-class experience. As the exchanges cited in this introduction and throughout the thematic articles indicate, arbitration transcript also provides a rare insight into the relationship between those exerting state and employer power and those subjected to its rule, a relationship vividly explored for its detailed exercise and effects as the tribunals sought to uncover the terms of work. Workers demanded attention and redress of their grievances, or at least plainly described the terms of their work and its impact upon them. Worker appeals may not have always produced justice or reform, but their testimony stands in the record as our witness to their experience, the achievements and ambiguities of the tribunals' response, and a record of vanished realms of production and industry. These diverse manifestations of power and experience present abundant research opportunities for the historian. |
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The thematic articles illustrate how arbitration transcripts may contribute to a richer appreciation of the development of Australian business. As Robbins and Harriss indicate in their thematic contribution, reading George McKay's evidence in Harvester provides a vivid sense of enterprise. McKay, brother of the owner Hugh McKay and the Factory Superintendent (manager) of the Sunshine Harvester Works, was the star witness in Harvester, subject to long examination by Higgins. His evidence about the trials and capacities of the Works captured Higgins' imagination as an exemplar of 'enterprise, energy and pluck' that Higgins consistently admired and sought to sustain in his judgements.17 |
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The Sunshine Harvester Works was established on what would now be described as a 'greenfield' site on the western fringe of metropolitan Melbourne to produce an innovative stripper harvester and other agricultural implements. Faced with strong foreign competition, the firm provided a narrative of production and the benefits of hard work, of entrepreneurship and risk, and the possibilities it seemed to suggest for nation building – and which Higgins assumed that he should help to protect, partly by restraining wage claims, and by promoting managerial prerogative.18 Charles Fahey and John Lack argue that in Harvester, Higgins challenged McKay's managerial prerogative in relation to increased wages for improvers and helpers.19 Higgins' consistent defence of managerial prerogative is clarified by focusing on key decisions that followed Harvester, as is Higgins' consistent irritation at what he perceived to be employer exploitation of improvers – predominantly male youth labour - whom he felt should be allowed to develop their healthy manhood for future service to the nation. In the 1910 Whybrow judgement for the Boot Trades, Higgins expressed similar outrage about the treatment of 'boys' while upholding the view that employers should be left free to manage their businesses, so long as they maintained industrial peace.20 |
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The transcripts of evidence may also be brought to bear on the history of Australian liberalism, and the history of the labour movement and working-class relations with the liberal state. A form of governance which required not only the broad intentions of policy expressed in parliamentary speeches, but had to fulfil and extrapolate the intentions outlined in legislation. The Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 provided remarkably vague instruction for such a contentious innovation as compulsory industrial arbitration enacted by state intervention. The Act both fulfilled and challenged the first principle of liberal governance: to constrain state intervention in the lives of the citizenry -and this reluctance to intervene in part accounts for Parliament's hesitation in providing precise instruction of how to maintain industrial peace. |
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As Higgins' testimonial, A New Province for Law and Order, indicates, he proved creatively adept at finding the balance between intervention and restraint, and in filling the space left open for the operation of the Court, creating interpretations and precedents based on the evidence generated in such exhaustive detail.21 Each case ran into hundreds and at times thousands of pages of transcribed evidence, tendered applications and affidavits, and the subsequent production of the judgement and the award that detailed the wage rates for each employment classification and prescribed a range of working conditions and entitlements. It was this 'empire of fact' that Higgins and his peers in the industrial tribunals sought to master in the name of social and national progress, an aggressive mastery that represented, Gay argues, one of the great achievements of the liberal social reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 The forensic inventory of skilled tasks and products described in the 1919 Clothing Trades Award's 'Log of Wages and Conditions of Work' recreates that world of work for us in stunning detail. The log literally created that rigorous and discursive tabulation for the purposes of liberal governance in 1919, for the precise description and control of industry, gender relations and culture, for the classification of female 'Body and dress coat hands, namely, females employed making any part of frock coats of all descriptions, dress coats, dress lounge, inverness, morning coats, liveries, coatees, military officers' coats, cassocks, pulpit and bar gowns'.23 The log, which provided the basis for the Award, runs for 40 pages of single-spaced type in the judgement published in the Commonwealth Arbitration Reports (CAR), and demonstrates how the applicant union had assimilated the state's requirement to precisely classify its members and their productive capacities. The CAR recorded the judgements and awards distilled from the transcript and stood as authoritative precedent, capable, like all the instruments of liberal governance, of reconsideration and adaptation, but only by exhaustively replicating the procedures which created the first judgement. |
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The hearing rooms of industrial arbitration were 'laden with qualities', as Foucault observed of the 'ensemble of relations' embedded within our spaces.24 The tribunals filled with advocates, the press and the public – anyone who cared to take an interest in the proceedings could attend, inviting the participation of the citizenry in their own government, if only to observe the spectacle of identifying the truth. As Nikolas Rose argues, the strategies of liberal governance became 'enmeshed with regimes of truth concerning the objects, processes and persons governed', to impose codes of order and normality.25 In the Commonwealth Arbitration Court presided over by Higgins, the witnesses were not only constrained to the task of expressing the truth by a sworn, formal oath, but by the structure of the presiding bench, the witness dock, the bar table for the advocates, the benches for journalists and the assembled public, and in the verbatim transcription of evidence, with the witness aware that their words were being taken in shorthand by stenographers industriously working in shifts. Through verbatim transcription, the spatial and symbolic structure of the Arbitration Court generated its own unique archive, employing a nineteenth century technology developed by Isaac Pitman in 1837 and which facilitated the drive by liberal modernity for 'scientific' exactitude and scrutiny. Shorthand provided a technology capable of capturing even the subtle and at times clumsy or contradictory nuance of rapidly expressed human speech, and the tense play of cross-examination and interruption. The archival construction of evidence that had been decreed, by the sworn oath provided by the witness, to be a truthful and exhaustive account, formed the basis of the modern liberal governance of work relations, codifying particular types of previously unexamined experience.26 |
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Higgins was often frustrated with the quality of the evidence – 'this is no good to me at all,' he irritably interrupted an anecdotal submission, demanding that the parties 'get good evidence, strong evidence' collected 'with more care than this'.27 Liberal governance could not be constructed by whimsical anecdote, rumour or untested assumption; the kind of ignorance that government had been trying to defeat since the Enlightenment, and in creating his province Higgins saw himself as an agent of scientific modernity, constructing from elaborate inquiry, with frequent reference to expert opinion, strict and reliable precedents and formulas. As an expert arbiter of the truth, the demand for the truth from witnesses was significant; it rendered the witnesses complicit in the process of constructing the judgement, and in his judgements Higgins was prone to enlist witness evidence to his preferred reading of the truth. Once gathered and transcribed Higgins felt free to 'sift' the evidence, a word he liked to employ in hearing and judgements, creating meanings, interpretations and silences, sifting out the evidence that did not conform with his preferred interpretation.28 In both the 1912 Fruitpickers case and the 1919 Archer case, which dealt with workers in the clothing trades, Higgins had to develop a disingenuous interpretation of the evidence presented to him by women witnesses. Higgins felt constrained to construct a plausible rationale for the wage discrimination against women workers that he first outlined in 1912 and confirmed in his 1919 judgement, while in both decisions granting some women access to equal pay - in the belief that employers would prefer men. Open dissent to his decisions was usually acknowledged only for the purpose of exposing and condemning illegitmate conduct, as he editorialised against officials of the United Labourers Union who resisted the Court's arbitration in the Fruitpickers case.29 |
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The Transcripts and Higgins' Court | |
| Given some freedom to operate in ways unacceptable in a traditional court, Stuart Macintyre notes that Higgins relaxed the formality of court procedure, dispensing with judicial robes and a degree of court ritual.30 Such gestures of informality may not have made a strong impression on witnesses subject not only to the sceptical cross-examination of the employer's advocate, but to searching interrogation from the bench. Frequently, Higgins would seize upon a statement or remark made by a witness and pursue its implications. As I argue in my thematic contribution 'Making Liberal Citizens', Higgins vigorously pursued clothing trades worker Florence Wootten in the Archer case to reveal her failure to conform to the basic precepts of citizenship that he sought to uphold.31 |
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Higgins wanted scientific evidence to award the basis of civilised life. The evidence often provided him not only with clear accounts of inequitable working conditions, but difficult choices. Confronted with a witness complaint about poor workplace ventilation in the Archer case, Higgins revealed a pragmatic finesse for managing the conflicting interests brought before him:
I am not going to give reduced hours because the employers do not give decent ventilation. The proper remedy is to insist upon him giving good ventilation. I have not to provide for individual employers, but to provide for a whole body of 488, and I must assume that the conditions are all right.32
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How could the union or employees 'insist' upon good conditions without resort to the Court? By disturbing industrial peace? Assuming conditions were 'all right' meant setting aside the evidence he interrupted – coat maker Nellie Ryan's complaint of the 'terrible' heat that she suffered for 47 1/2 hours a week in her workplace during summer. In order to impose a uniform decision he had to assume uniformity; it was all he could do, confronted with the problematic experience expressed by his witnesses. Higgins could not compel employers to renovate their factories and shops, but he might ease the women's exposure to hardship. In his judgement he cited working conditions - and alluded to problems of ventilation - as the key factor in reducing hours from 48 to 44 per week: the 'girls ... cannot be made victims of the Juggernaut of industry without permanent loss to the nation'.33 |
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Higgins struggled to decide how women workers, these 'gentle invaders', should be incorporated into the nation and the realm of paid work; generally he preferred that they serve society in the home as mothers.34 Non-white workers also suffered emphatic forms of marginalisation and outright rejection. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which Higgins had championed in the Commonwealth Parliament, sanctioned that all forms of non-white employment in Australia were either completely unacceptable or at least to be discouraged.35 |
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Higgins rarely expressed his views on race in his judgements; the transcripts provide insight into how his racial views filtered into his verdicts, if only as a form of blank exclusion that mirrored the terms of White Australia. In the 1911 pastoral industry award proceedings Higgins accepted the Australian Workers Union's prohibition on the enrolment of Chinese as union members. AWU organiser W.J. Dunstan told the Court that he had not enrolled a Chinese gardener working at a Darling Downs station: 'we are not supposed to, according to our rules', Dunstan replied to Higgins, who had asked if 'Chinamen' were allowed to be AWU members.36 |
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Higgins also accepted the marginalisation of aboriginal workers. Evidence from an employee at Cordillo Downs station in South Australia illustrated the power and racial hierarchies in the pastoral industry. Station cook John Virgo observed that of the employees at Cordillo Downs, there were 'seven whites in the government house' - his description of the station manager's house - 'where the bosses live'. About twenty 'black fellows' and 'gins' worked in the wool scour. He cooked for an average 12 'black fellows' and 12–15 whites; asked by Higgins 'did you feed the blacks the same as the other people?' Virgo replied, 'No. All they get is boiled or baked meat – a piece of meat and a bit of bread and quart pot of tea and piece of brownie cake'.37 |
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Evidence provided by the AWU's organisers suggested that the decision to enrol aboriginal workers as union members, and to therefore offer them industrial protection, was left to the discretion of local organisers. Dunstan, who would become one of the union's leading officials in Queensland, told Higgins that at one pastoral station two 'blackfellows' worked as station hands; he had not enrolled them.38 |
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These submissions were discussed in a matter of fact manner, a brief digression to satisfy the Court's mild curiosity about non-white labour in the pastoral industry. Despite evidence that suggested a long-standing and reasonably substantial indigenous workforce in the pastoral industry, Higgins made no recommendations about their pay or working conditions in his judgement, nor any comment on their treatment by either employers or the union. |
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It was the male breadwinner who was intended to benefit from the basic wage system symbolically represented in Harvester's description of the frugally comforted worker in a civilised community.39 From the early twentieth century the labour movement generally welcomed their chance to participate in the nation that was provided by state intervention in the regulation of work, even as unions periodically complained of arbitration's cost and its constraints on militancy. As William Guthrie Spence, president of the Australian Workers Union and Labor member of the Commonwealth Parliament observed:
The working man is now a thinker, and takes an active interest in all public affairs; indeed, one of the objections raised to his having an efficient Arbitration Court, untrammelled by lack of jurisdiction, is that he takes part in politics.
These remarks were, in part, Spence's reflections on the hearings in the Fruitpickers case which he expressed in the Commonwealth Parliament in November 1912, and reflected his fascinated admiration for the innovative procedures and technologies of compulsory arbitration.40 Industrial arbitration was part of the process of developing the intelligent self-government of working-class citizens, as Spence also acknowledged in his triumphant narrative of nation building, Australia's Awakening, in 1909.41 Spence argued that part of the Commonwealth arbitration system's success was the provision it made, unlike the state wages Boards, for 'sworn testimony ... tested by cross-examination', even if the parties had 'to pay for the shorthand writing and typewriting of the evidence'. Commonwealth industrial arbitration was quite literally a system of self-examination and regulation, presided over by a 'rare ... and finely balanced mind'.42 Higgins won such praise from the labour movement by his willingness to recognise a place for unions within his system and within the nation, and attracted their admiration when he memorably rounded on BHP management in 1909, assuring the company that if it felt unable to pay his minimum wage it would be better to close its Broken Hill mine. The living wage was a thing 'sacrosanct', Higgins declared, by which he meant his commitment to building a nation in which the rewards of work were shared with at least a modest notion of equity.43 |
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The Thematic Articles | |
| While Spence articulated the idealistic aims of the labour movement's embrace of state intervention, the articles assembled in this thematic testify to a more complicated reality. Robbins and Harriss argue that reading the transcript of the Harvester proceedings 'adds remarkable layers of understanding and interpretation'. Evident in the text are Higgins' 'complex' commitment to nation building, and discourses of contract law, management, labour, and civilisation, underscored by latent discourses of race, gender, modernity and globalisation. Thalia Anthony's searching investigation of the transcript of the 1965 'Equal' Wage Case for Aboriginal Station Workers reveals how the casual exclusion of indigenous workers displayed in the 1911 Pastoral Industry case developed over the century into elaborate rationalisations of injustice, holding out the promise of equality while fashioning legal and workplace structures that denied that promise. |
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Many of the articles focus on the state and Commonwealth regulation of work in the early twentieth century. Sandra Cockfield discusses the 'uneven and contradictory' impact of the industrial tribunals in New South Wales and Victoria, with reference to the Sunshine Harvester Works, and two Sydney businesses, the stove manufacturer Metters and Mort's Dock company, providing a detailed picture of production and workplace relations issues in these enterprises. Cockfield seeks to redress a lack of research into the impact of industrial tribunals on workplace relations and 'the capacity of workers to mobilise for collective action'. In demonstrating the impact of the tribunals in the two states, Cockfield draws our attention to the problem of historians ignoring the important distinctions between state and federal arbitration systems.44 |
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Ben Maddison develops an impressive analysis of NSW arbitration transcripts to explore the impact of the industrial modernity that was fitfully contested and embraced in the early twentieth century. Maddison focuses on how the contradictions and uncertainties of terms such as 'skilful unskilled labourer' or 'skilled labouring' captured wider social and industrial contradictions, 'as the new order of industrial capitalism sought to eradicate the older artisanal practices and meanings of skill, and replace them with industrial meanings and practices that facilitated the intensification of labour commodification'.45 |
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Peter Sheldon uses NSW Wage Board transcripts to throw attention on those neglected workers who maintained the Sydney Water Board's supply and sewerage infrastructure during the early twentieth century. These workers' stories are largely unavailable in other historical sources, and the transcripts provides us, as Sheldon argues, not only with a portrait of their working lives, but 'with compelling insights into the perceptions and realities of broader life chances among the formally unskilled in the decade or so on either side of 1900'.46 Naomi Segal takes us across the Nullarbor to examine the role of arbitration in the gold mining industry in Western Australia, in the period 1900–14 to document the change in collective relations from arbitrated to unmediated conflict as the organisational, market and political power of labour grew, and arbitration, rather than resolving conflict, became the focus of disputes. |
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Christine Yeats provides an invaluable and comprehensive research note on NSW industrial arbitration transcripts and related sources in NSW State Records, covering the period 1902–91. Yeats provides a usefully clarifying history of the various changes to NSW industrial arbitration over the course of the century, and some vivid vignettes of early twentieth century working life. Just as Spence lamented that the parties had to pay for their own transcription services in 1912, Yeats notes that the science of transcription was slow to evolve in New South Wales: there was no court reporting service before 1911. 'Presiding judges and the like recorded evidence in longhand (some developed their own shorthand). In some cases parties would employ private secretaries or shorthand writers to take down the evidence at their own expense'.47 |
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Conclusion | |
| Spence was right to celebrate Higgins' 'rare ... and finely balanced mind' in 1912. Asked in that same year to recommend 'useful and entertaining' books for the readers of Lone Hand, Higgins characteristically took 'useful' to mean books which 'inspire to action', and 'entertaining' to refer to those which 'concentrate ... intellectual interest'.48 Working and learning, Higgins had brought a passionate intellectual curiosity and determined self-government to his task as president of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court. He drew inspiration from Homer and Plato, and the poet Robert Browning, whom he quoted: 'Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?' Higgins' quest for inspiration and validation can be found in the wealth of works he cited in his judgements, from the Webbs to the pioneer sociologist, Seerbohm Rowntree; in Harvester it was not scientific statistical data but the poet Walt Whitman's 'divine average' which assisted him to settle on a family of five as a basis for determining the minimum wage rate.49 Higgins strove not only against union frustration or employer resistance but to exceed his own imaginative limits to create a new province for law and order. In the 'theatre' of the Court, as Robbins and Harriss describe it, Higgins' inspiration and contradictions may be found on display, and there is often a palpable honesty and directness in their expression, and in the exposed struggle of a man born in the mid-nineteenth century adapting to the demands of the modernity that he is helping to make. |
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The history of Australian nation building in the early twentieth century may be found in many sources. The transcripts of industrial arbitration offer that history in the competitive voices of workers and employers, advocates and judges. Cross-examination, claim and rebuttal, may not have produced a perfect dialectic of the truth; it was a process that expressed the intensively unfolding and changing patterns of work and enterprise, and provide a powerful record of the immediacy of human experience, not least in working-class demands for recognition and justice. Higgins declared his ambition to create the terms of a civilised community. For all of his contradictions and wilful exclusions, Higgins helped to shape a polity whose inclusiveness grew from the terms he set forth in Harvester and which remain an indictment of those who would sacrifice workplace fairness to the juggernaut of industry. |
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Mark Hearn teaches Australian history at Macquarie University. He is currently researching the Fin de Siècle imagination in Australia, 1890–1914.
<m.hearn@humn.mq.edu.au>
Endnotes
*This article has been peer-reviewed for Labour History by two external referees.
1. H.B. Higgins, A New Province for Law and Order, Dawsons of Pall Mall, London, 1968, p. 168.
2. Mark Hearn, 'Securing the Man: Narratives of Gender and Nation in the Verdicts of Henry Bournes Higgins', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 37, issue 127, April 2006, pp. 1–24; Marilyn Lake, 'On Being a White Man, Australia circa 1900' in Hsu Ming Teo and R. White (eds), Cultural History in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2003, pp. 98–112.
3. P.G. Macarthy, The Harvester Judgement: An Historical Assessment, Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1967, p. 14; see also P.G. Macarthy, 'Justice Higgins and the Harvester Judgement' in Jill Roe (ed.), Social Policy in Australia, Cassell Australia, Stanmore, NSW, 1976, pp. 41–50.
4. Stuart Macintyre, 'Arbitration in Action', in Stuart Macintyre and Joe Isaac (eds), A New Province for Law and Order: 100 Years of Australian Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. 63.
5. John Rickard, H.B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, p. 175.
6. Charles Fahey and John Lack, 'Harvester Men and Women: The Making of the Harvester Decision', in Julie Kimber and Peter Love (eds), The Time of Their Lives: The Eight Hour Day and Working Life, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Melbourne, 2007, p. 67.
7. Vol. 2 Commonwealth Arbitration Reports (CAR) p. 3.
8. For the debate about Harvester, its precedents and reactions to it, see Hearn, 'Securing the Man', pp. 7–12.
9. Marilyn Lake, 'White Man's Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project', Australian Historical Studies, no. 122, 2003, p. 362. See also Lake, 'On Being a White Man'; Marilyn Lake, 'Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation: Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts', Gender & History, vol. 4, no. 3, September 1992, pp. 305–322; Marilyn Lake, 'The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century and the Advent of White Australia', History Workshop Journal, no. 58, Autumn 2004, pp. 41–62.
10. Rickard, H.B. Higgins; Braham Dabscheck, Arbitrator at Work: Sir William Raymond Kelly and the Regulation of Australian Industrial Relations, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1983; Blanche d'Alpuget, Mediator: a Biography of Sir Richard Kirby, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1977.
11. Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work, Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880–1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York, 1993.
12. Tom Sheridan, Division of Labour: Industrial Relations in the Chifley Years, 1945–49, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989.
13. Macintyre and Isaac (eds), A New Province for Law and Order.
14. Mark Hearn, 'Vitiating the Federal Principle: An Historical Perspective on the High Court Work Choices Case, 2006', Labour History, no. 92, May 2007, pp. 129–138.
15. Greg Patmore (ed.), Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice, Federation Press, Sydney, 2003.
16. Frances, The Politics of Work; Sandra Cockfield, 'McKay's Harvester Works and the Continuation of Managerial Control', Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 40, no. 3, September 1998, pp. 383–400; Charles Fahey and John Lack, "'A Kind of Elysium where nobody has anything to do': H.B. Higgins, H.V. McKay and the Agricultural Implement Makers, 1901–26', Labour History, no. 80, May 2001, pp. 99–119; Ruth Ford, '"I am not satisfied": Identity, Unionism and Rural Women's Labour in 1912 Australia', History Australia, vol. 2, no. 1, December 2004, pp. 07.1–07.12; Fahey and Lack, 'Harvester Men and Women'.
17. 2 CAR 17.
18. Hearn, 'Securing the Man', p. 12.
19. Fahey and Lack, 'Harvester Men and Women', p. 83.
20. Hearn, 'Securing the Man', pp. 12–15.
21. Higgins, A New Province.
22. Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred, Fontana Press, London, 1995, pp.447, 461.
23. 13 CAR 649.
24. Michel Foucault, 'Different Spaces', in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Essential Works Vol.2, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, London, 2000, pp. 177–78.
25. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 30.
26.Ibid., p.52
27. Transcript of Proceedings of the Federated Clothing Trades Union of Australia v J.A. Archer and others, B1958/1 66/1918, National Archives of Australia, (hereafter cited as Archer Case Transcript), p. 120.
28. Archer Case Transcript, pp. 154–5; 13 CAR 693.
29. Hearn, 'Securing the Man', p. 22.
30. Stuart Macintyre, 'Arbitration in Action', in Macintyre and Isaac, A New Province for Law and Order p. 64.
31. 13 CAR 701–2.
32. Archer Case Transcript, p. 110.
33. 13 CAR 709.
34. Hearn, 'Securing the Man', pp. 15–20.
35.Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), 6 September 1901, pp. 4657–8.
36. Transcript of the 1911 Pastoral Industry Award case, Australian Workers Union Collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Canberra, N117/541 p. 111.
37.Ibid., p. 233.
38.Ibid., p. 41.
39. 2 CAR, 3–4.
40.CPD, 20 November 1912, p. 5733.
41. W.G. Spence, Australia's Awakening, The Worker Trustees, Sydney, 1909, p. 377.
42.CPD, 12 November 1912, pp. 5724–5.
43. Higgins, A New Province, p. 143.
44. Sandra Cockfield, 'Mobilising at the Workplace: State Regulation and Collective Action in Three Workplaces, 1900 to the 1920s', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007.
45. Ben Maddison, '"The skilful unskilled labourer": The Decline of Artisanal Discourses of Skill in the NSW Arbitration Court, 1905–15', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007, p. 73.
46. Peter Sheldon, 'The Dirtiest of Jobs: Maintaining Sydney's Sewers 1890–1910', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007, p. 130.
47. Christine Yeats, [Research Note] 'Industrial Arbitration Transcripts and Related Sources in the NSW State Archives, 1902–91', Labour History, no. 93, November 2007, p. 146.
48.Lone Hand, November 1912.
49. Higgins, A New Province, p. 6.
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