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'A Greater Concentration of Purpose': The Intellectual Legacy of Eric Fry and Robin Gollan
Verity Burgmann
| Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer argue that the establishment of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH) in 1961 and commencement of Labour History in January 1962 symbolically marked the 'second generational moment' of labour history. The first generation of Australian labour historians had produced significant work, but the second generation proceeded with 'a greater concentration of purpose' than their predecessors and so labour history 'arrived' as a complex and rewarding intellectual project.1 Eric Fry and Robin Gollan were central figures of this second generation and their concentration of purpose is manifest. In assessing their intellectual legacy, it is interesting to reflect on the nature of their sense of purpose and how it nourished and nurtured a labour history that was distinctive. |
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Firstly, Fry and Gollan encouraged labour history that was sympathetic to the subjects under scrutiny; and this commitment to the working class and labour movement, in the Cold War circumstances of the time, required courage. Secondly, it was rigorous in its attention to empirical research and exacting standards of scholarship. Thirdly, it was critical and sceptical, not slave to accepted wisdoms of any school of thought, whether conservative or progressive. Fourthly, it aspired from the outset to breadth of scope and orientation and became increasingly wide-ranging. These distinguishing attributes, which were causally connected and mutually reinforcing, enabled labour history to arrive, survive and flourish – and then adapt to subsequent historiographical trends and political developments. |
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Commitment and Courage | |
Labour historians produce labour history – but not under conditions of their own choosing. Politically, the time was out of joint for embarking upon an intellectual project that valorised class as a category of analysis and the working class as a subject of sympathetic scrutiny. Reminiscing in 1995 about the decision to establish the ASSLH, Gollan stated:
We really didn't know what we were doing but we thought it was a good idea. I ask you to think of the circumstances that existed then. We have already lived through a decade of ...the Menzies Ice Age. The Cold War was at a very dangerous stage. The ALP [Australian Labor Party] was weakened by schism. The Communist Party, so long as it retained its attachment to the Soviet Union, could no longer command any moral authority.2
Gollan was President of the Society; Fry was Vice-President of the Society and Editor of its journal. The precarious moment at which they acted as midwives to the ASSLH and Labour History is significant. Their commitment to the cause of labour was made at a deeply conservative moment in Australian history: as John Merritt observes, the atmosphere was so affected by 'cold war attitudes' that the labour history project was unwelcome in the academy, because the labour movement's contributions to Australian institutions and living standards were being downplayed by historians who could not overcome conservative prejudices and anachronistic assumptions.3 Fry recalls the fringe-dwelling nature of the founders' academic location:
The founders of the society were mostly outsiders in the Australian academic world and members of a left-wing minority in Australian society. The leaders, men, had typically been activists in the labour movement, many of them Communists in the short period of communist success in Australia, had grown up in the depression of the 1930s and served in World War II. After tertiary training, perhaps under programs for returned soldiers, they had found posts in schools and universities as they expanded ... The driving force came from self-professed Marxists whose interest in history was dictated in part by their desire to find socialist answers for the future, and from committed members of the Labor Party who wished it to combine practice with theory in the form of historical knowledge.4
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Frank Bongiorno emphasises that the Old Left historians who began to research the history of the Australian labour movement in the 1940s and 1950s – principally Robin Gollan, Eric Fry, Ian Turner, Miriam Dixson, Noel Ebbels and Lloyd Churchward – were all members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) who brought to their work 'a high level of political commitment'.5 In the case of Fry and Gollan, this sense of commitment was because of who they were and the lives they had led. Communist Party membership did not produce the commitment; it was just one of the ways they expressed it – and the labour history project was the most important other way. |
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Bob explains he became interested in history as a child because he wanted to find out why things were as they were and the things he wanted to understand were 'pretty grim'. He came from an impoverished rural family in the south coast area of New South Wales and went to school in Wollongong, where he witnessed marches of the unemployed during the Depression and the poverty of the miner's family with whom he boarded during the week.6 Eric, an engineer's son, was born in Broken Hill, whose family also endured tough times. Both were the products of Sydney's selective state high schools: Bob spent his last three years of school at Fort Street and Eric attended North Sydney. Bob joined the Communist Party in 1936 because 'it seemed to me to be the only party in Australia fully committed to a struggle for socialism and against fascism'.7 Eric likewise was politicised by the events of the 1930s. He joined the Party some time before 1938 when he took up a scholarship for a free place to study Economics part-time in the evenings after day work as 'a hopeless, useless junior clerk with no career' in the public service.8 After serving in the army and airforce during the war, the Ex-Services Training Scheme provided Eric with the financial support to complete an Arts degree at Sydney during the late 1940s – and involvement in CPA branch work, party activity and study groups. Eric gravitated towards the History department, where Bob had completed his degree a few years earlier with first class honours and University Medal. During his undergraduate years, Bob had mixed with the followers of John Anderson, but was out of place even in this radical milieu.
Generally middle class, they had no personal experience of what I saw as the general crisis of capitalism. I knew what it was like to wonder where the next meal was coming from. I believed that we needed a revolutionary change in Australia ...9
Bob, like Eric, served in the RAAF during the war. Bob then won an Australian National University (ANU) scholarship to study for his doctorate at the London School of Economics, where he was supervised by Harold Laski.10 |
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The Society's founding parents might have been fathers – but they were never patriarchs within the history profession. Fry and Gollan did not hail from establishment or educated professional backgrounds whose offspring could slide easily into academic leadership positions; both were low on cultural capital and both were young radicals politically conditioned by the 1930s and 1940s and with serious commitments to the cause of labour. |
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Gollan's founding editorial in the first issue of the journal posed and answered the question: why write labour history?
Firstly, it can be of immediate practical value to the labour movement ... past experience, of successes and failures, can provide guide posts for present and future actions ... It is the task of the historian to try to ensure that the picture of the past is accurate.11
Fry explained in 1995:
labour history has always been sparked by its activists ... labour historians ... are activated by belief in doing good, in making changes ... they want to understand the past so that they can understand the present and have an effect on shaping the future.12
Gollan's second reason was that history provides for any society a vision of its past, which constitutes one of the most important components of its culture: 'The role of the labour movement and the men who made it should have their proper place in that culture'.13 Fry similarly affirmed the value of 'turning away from the rulers to ruled, from victors to victims', to study those who confronted the powerful authorities of their day. He introduces his rebels and radicals of nineteenth century Australia thus:
They and the people for whom they stood had their effect on the shaping of Australia, for dominant classes are always restricted by the forces opposing them. They do not rule untrammelled, their power is always constrained by a web of conflicts. Fortunes ebb and flow, changes may be long delayed, but out of the resolution of one struggle another is born. Once we recognise that our past, like our present, is a process of contradictory forces we can see that the rebels and radicals are the other side of the coin and an indispensable part of our history.14
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Labour History was therefore neither a journal primarily to facilitate academic advancement nor one concerned with chasing academic fashion. So it was most unusual. It was a journal against the grain, in opposition to the conservative mainstream. However, from what Gollan described as 'a nondescript bulletin', it grew to one of the most important history journals in the country.15 It became a significant force in the writing of history in Australia, because its sense of purpose gave it integrity and vitality; political commitment rendered up a coherent historiographical project. All historical writing, Gollan insisted, has political implications; and unless it contributes to our understanding of the present it is likely to be 'trivial'.16Labour History was not. In bringing forth the journal, Merritt describes as an 'advantage' the fact that Fry and Gollan approached the past politically.17 |
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And they did so in their own researches. For example, Fry rescued two significant radical individuals from the condescension of posterity. Monty Miller was a carpenter, a veteran of the Eureka Stockade who devoted his adult life to confronting 'the enemies of his class'.18 Tom Barker was the leading figure in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – the Wobblies – in Sydney during World War I, before being deported to South America in 1918.19 Fry's capture of Barker's extraordinary story was a pioneering venture into oral history, which has remained a valued component in the labour history repertoire of primary source materials, and one indicated as such in Gollan's founding editorial. |
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Fry observes that Barker retained an abiding conviction that the working class must rely fundamentally on the strength of its industrial organisation to defend and advance its interests.20 With similar respect, Gollan rescues a union, the Coalminers of New South Wales: 'I had been interested in miners ever since my brother and I had lived with the miners in Wollongong'.21 Their union
has not only been an instrument of social cohesion but also a weapon of war. It has linked the members of the community in struggle against their employer; it has linked the many separate communities together in struggle against the organized employers; and, in the long run, it has joined the miners with other workers in struggle against the employers as a class.22
Major demands of this union failed, but there was a gradual improvement in working conditions; 'there can be little doubt that a hundred years of industrial militancy is always a factor, whether admitted or not, in successful negotiation'.23 Gollan's study of the CPA is critical of its methods but moved by the motives of most of its members: 'Communists, often at the cost of the destruction of their own lives, fought many brave and selfless battles for a more satisfactory way of life for the majority of Australians'.24 |
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Commitment to the cause has meant that links with the actually existing labour movement became a hallmark of our sub-discipline. Though never as extensive as we would wish, labour history in Australia has been rather more successful in this respect than elsewhere.25 Fry and Gollan were influential here. The first Annual General Meeting of the Society in August 1962 included Lloyd Ross, Secretary of the Australian Railways Union in Sydney; Sam Merrifield, Victorial Labor Member of the Legislative Council (MLC); and A. McDonald, Secretary of the Trades and Labor Council of Queensland. The branch structure that has flourished, and which is particularly important in maintaining connections with labour activists, was prefigured at this time with the setting up of corresponding committees in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Launceston, Armidale and Newcastle, to supplement the work of the Canberra-based Executive Committee.26 |
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ASIO monitored meetings of this highly subversive Executive Committee and successive Menzies governments pressured ANU to terminate the contract of national security risk Robin Allenby Gollan.27 Gollan acknowledged his debt to the powerful men at the ANU who believed passionately in academic freedom and who therefore 'resisted the pressures of the secret police and reactionary politicians'. This was not the case, he notes, at some other Australian universities.28 It is worth remembering the anti-labour Cold War atmosphere of the time to appreciate the depth of academic courage on the part of those who established the Society and its journal. |
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Empirical Richness | |
| Commitment to the cause of labour in the Cold War period was clearly fraught with danger. Gollan and Fry were acutely aware that labour historians were only grudgingly permitted into the academic establishment and that discrimination against them within history departments was discreet yet tangible. (As late as 1980, when I completed my doctoral research under their joint supervision, both Bob and Eric cautioned me that I would not find it easy to secure academic employment as a labour historian and advised me to emphasise my political science qualifications instead.) Fry records that the labour history project accepted from the outset that their subject would not be recognised unless it was studied by the orthodox methods pursued within other sub-disciplines: 'The suspect field had to be defended by the most meticulous observance of canons of scholarship'.29 Gollan's founding editorial confronted directly the issue of partisanship: 'A sympathy with, or support for, the purposes of the labour movement, so long as it is combined with a scrupulous regard for evidence, can provide the creative drive necessary to the writing of good history'.30 The concepts of class and class struggle were at the centre of his thinking about history, Gollan explained, but emphasised these were not categories but 'hypotheses to be tested against the empirical evidence'.31 He recalled subsequently that the Society decided it must be 'devoted to work which met the best scholarly standards'.32 In practice, these were those deemed best at the time. |
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In 1972 Stuart Macintyre criticised Australian radical historians, including Gollan and, by implication, Fry, for precisely this; for accepting what he called 'the barren methods of conventional history', that is, attachment to empiricist modes, which resulted in 'theoretical inadequacy'.33 In the case of the labour historians, the emphasis on the history of labour alone could not provide the total analysis of society necessary for transforming that society. The primary task of any Marxist historian, he proclaimed, should be the analysis of the full complexity of class oppression and this cannot be achieved by considering a class by itself – it must involve a consideration of class relations: 'Their concentration on the experience of the labour movement and their omission to relate this to its full social formation has frequently lapsed into commiseration and celebration of the movement's very shortcomings'.34 Thus conservative Australian historians wrote exploration and settlement history while radicals wrote the history of the labour movement: 'Rather than confronting conservative history, radical history simply by-passes it while remaining within the same problematic'.35 |
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However, Macintyre was writing ten years later from the vantage point of the previous ten years of historical production: for example, the work of E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Herbert Gutman and Gareth Stedman Jones. Later journals were to benefit. A comparison with Labour/Le Travail is instructive. Because it emerged as late as 1976, Labour/Le Travail was self-consciously new labour history' from the outset. It also bore the birthmarks of the new social movements that had stimulated academic interest in race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. It started life with a theoretical bang, thanks to the interesting intellectual conjuncture at which it appeared.36 The early 1960s were not so interesting: Cold War hysteria did not encourage intellectual adventurousness. Merritt has made the important point that the 1960s in history generally was a time of specialisms, 'and labour history was seen by many as one of the specialist areas'.37 Moreover, Macintyre was criticising the labour historians for conventional empiricism from pastures made considerably safer by those who had earlier prepared the ground. 'It became almost de rigeur to criticize my work', Bob later recalled, with customary good humour, while noting that the criticisms ranged from plain abuse to sophisticated argument. In the category of plain abuse was the person who called him an 'incubus', a description Bob could not recognise, given that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary defined 'incubus' as 'a feigned evil spirit or demon, supposed to descend upon persons in their sleep, and especially to seek carnal intercourse with women'. Macintyre's intervention he graciously placed in the category of sophisticated argument.38 |
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Gollan and Fry had deduced in the historical moment they inhabited that unorthodox political commitment rendered orthodox forms of academic inquiry imperative; and so they guided labour history in this direction. If a certain defensiveness was the motive for this 'scrupulous regard for evidence', a capacity for encouraging such scruples was necessary. Institutional historical circumstances provided the opportunity for an empirically rich – if not theoretically challenged – labour history to develop under the guidance of Fry and Gollan. In this respect, the time was not out of joint. Labour History began life at that moment in Australian higher education when universities had recently started awarding PhDs. Eric helped break this new ground. In 1952 he accepted a PhD scholarship to the ANU where he completed his 1956 doctoral thesis on The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class in the 1880s, supervised initially by L.F. Fitzhardinge and Noel Butlin, and later by Bob Gollan.39 |
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Though Gollan subsequently expressed reservations about the PhD regime encouraging unadventurous scholarship and conceded that much of the New Left criticism of empiricist methodology was 'fully justified', he staunchly defended the importance given to empirical evidence: 'Much of the earlier labour history was careless of evidence and was little more than wish fulfilment ... It was clearly important that history should not be written in this way'.40 He also made the observation that many of the Old Left were wary of theory for a good reason: 'They had lived too long with a version of Marxism which purported to explain all, but when confronted with evidence to the contrary, asserted the primacy of theory'.41 In reviewing Humphrey McQueen's A New Britannia, he defends the Marxist model taken from the Communist Manifesto, and commonly used by Australian Left historians, but 'with modifications made necessary by the empirical evidence'.42 |
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The graduate research that commenced in the 1950s did give the journal a scholarly depth, albeit of an empirical nature. The books and articles in Labour History were nearly all based on research for postgraduate theses, which, as Fry emphasises, was a novelty in Australia: 'Labour history arrived with university research'. The progress of the society and its journal was, he notes, as much consequence as cause of the development of labour history in Australia.43 Another important institutional development in which Fry and Gollan played a major role, and which expressed their enthusiasm for evidence, was the expansion of Noel Butlin's business archives to include trade union and other labour records, establishing the Archives of Business and Labour that subsequently became the Noel Butlin Archives Centre.44 With the ANU housing these Archives and leading the way in the production of doctoral and masters theses, it became the hub of labour history. The presence of Bob and Eric on staff encouraged would-be labour historians to take up the opportunities for postgraduate research at ANU and created a continuing gravitational pull of labour historians towards the staff. |
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Fry's doctoral thesis was painstaking in its attention to empirical detail and constituted a major pioneer work in Australian labour history, as Andrew Wells has observed.45 Fry was explicit about the need for such rigour:
It is a sound principle for the social as well as the economic historian to look first at his subject matter 'in terms of number, weight or measure', as Petty put it. Such bare bones do not make a living picture but in default of a skeleton the too, too yielding flesh may slip into the unrestrained shapes of fantasy. The numbers of urban wage earners, the industries in which they were employed, their occupations in those industries, the size and type of the establishments where they worked, provide an essential field of reference for an explanation of the wage earners' working conditions, living conditions and outlook. This is the framework which gives coherence, unity and meaning to the detail of urban wage earners' lives.46
His remorseless interrogation of the statistics, for example in the careful tabulation of the evidence in relation to the increasing size of workplaces in the 1890s, is justified because it matters to the working class.
It makes a great deal of difference in many ways whether a pair of trousers is the product of a single worker in a back room, or of many hundreds of workers in a factory. This circumstance affects not the trousers, but the worker. At all levels of industrial organisation size of industrial units is a fundamental consideration in the conditions and the outlook of wage earners.47
Fry's dedication to exhaustive research was apparent too in his edited memoir of Tom Barker. Alerted to Barker's continuing radical existence in London by Gollan, Fry visited Barker in 1963 and spent many hours interviewing and recording his memories then converting this to written form, with the help of Barker's personal archives of articles, manuscripts and papers.48 Fry's presentation of Barker's oral testimony is an invaluable resource, given the paucity of such material; the memories of Wobblies are almost invariably interred with their bones. |
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On the other side of the ANU campus in the Research School, Gollan was starting to produce the books that became important tomes in the developing Australian labour history canon: Radical and Working Class Politics in 1960; The Coalminers of New South Wales in 1963; and Revolutionaries and Reformists in 1975. The deep learning embedded in these works, as Peter Love remarks, inspired students and expressed Bob's conviction that politically engaged scholarship could be both academically rigorous and socially constructive.49 His 1968 history of The Commonwealth Bank of Australia was not, strictly speaking, a work of labour history, though the Bank was established by the Fisher Labor Government. However, it is a good place to start consideration of the critical scepticism characteristic of Fry and Gollan, a scepticism informed, but never dictated, by a Marxist framework. |
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Critical Scepticism | |
In his history of the Commonwealth Bank, Gollan remarks:
within a capitalist economy reforms intended to benefit the workers may give a greater benefit to employers; or in broader terms the creation of government institutions in the name of advance to socialism may strengthen capitalism.50
Gollan is not deceived by instances of ruling-class opposition to the Bank into believing the Bank was a threat to existing banks or established financial procedures; he affirms it was neither: 'Nor was it a bank that would puncture the "fat men" and bring about a redistribution of income to the advantage of the poor'.51 Rather, he argues, it was a bank that, like the Bank of England, would act as a financial fortress that might aid the private banks in the event of a crisis.52 He had written this book at the request of Nugget Coombs, who wanted someone who would bring out 'whatever of socialism there was' in the Bank's history'. Gollan explains that he tried, but could not find much.53 He presents the Bank as being established in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole – despite its reservations and even some opposition. |
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The same Marxian scepticism informs Gollan's writing about the causes and effects of arbitration. He states that arbitration emerged as the answer to the militant demand of trade unionism to share in framing the conditions of labour:
Arbitration was regarded as a means of disarming and controlling militant trade unionism without continuous resort to industrial warfare ... Linked with the 'new protective' legislation, arbitration acquired a legislative function and became the means by which the state attempted to distribute between workers and employers the product of a protected economy. Substantially, it failed to satisfy the working class in this respect, but it succeeded to some extent in changing the emphasis of trade-union activity. For a time dependence on arbitration and the political labour party resulted in policies of moderation by the union movement.54
Indeed, Gollan characterises the first decade of the century as one in which important changes were made in the function of the state, aimed essentially at preservation of the system, in response to the experience of the 1890s in which Australian society had been so divided in class conflict that the very basis of the capitalist system had been brought into question. Gollan writes:
If the system were to be preserved, ways had to be found to stabilize it, to satisfy the working class, and at the same time bring about far-reaching changes in the new class structure of Australian society. The 'new protection', regulation of industry, social service legislation, and industrial arbitration were intended to restore prosperity and satisfy the workers, a state encouragement of a class of independent farmers was to bring about a change in the class structure.55
For Gollan, then, arbitration was a device geared towards containment of working-class militancy, initiated by both middle-class liberals and their Labor Party supporters.56 |
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Gollan also exhibits a critical distance in relation to the aspirations and achievements of the Labor Party. In his essay on 'The Ideology of the Labour Movement', he writes:
While rejecting some of the particular methods advocated by Labor and making much of supposed differences between themselves and Labor, successive Liberal governments pursued policies very similar to those of Labor. The differences between them were of degree and not of kind ... since they were both committed to the preservation of a capitalist economy, there were no basic differences between them on matters of economic policy.57
Elsewhere, he notes that the economic policies put into effect by the wartime and post-war Labor governments, and followed generally by their Liberal successors, have had a stabilising influence on the economy and encouraged its growth.58 |
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Similarly, Fry acknowledges the role of liberal manufacturers, liberal newspapers and the radical wing of liberal parliamentarians in the state's increasing role during the 1880s, for example in factory legislation. He does not belittle the role of working-class agitation and trade union activity in securing regulation to improve working conditions, but nor does he exaggerate it. He points to the interest of larger-scale manufacturers in state regulation of workplaces, because this would in effect limit competition from enterprises more likely to exploit and better able to conceal this from public view:
The good employer should be protected from the unfair competition of his greedy and unprincipled rival ... regulation of industrial conditions, including factory legislation, is a necesssary accompaniment to the growth of large scale industry. The profitable operation of heavily capitalised large scale industry requires certain standards of working conditions, limitation of hours, stability and skill in the labour force. These standards and their application could always be in dispute; but while industry grew, so would the regulation of it.59
And regulation encouraged regulation, in the interests of larger employers in particular. He explains that, once any kind of regulation was in operation, there was a demand that the conditions of competition be equalised by applying it to all.60 |
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The Marxism that encouraged their critical scepticism was also subjected to critical skepticism; it was not straitjacketed. Though Gollan confesses that the main theoretical influence on him in the late 1930s was the increasingly Stalinist version of Marxism-Leninism, he had also been affected by having Guido Baracchi as tutor to his Communist Party study group – and at a time when Baracchi was accused of having 'Trotsky-like thoughts' and expelled from the Party. And there was the 'countervailing influence' also of Professor John Anderson at Sydney University. Bob talked and drank with the Andersonians, because he found them the most interesting people.
I defended my position but there were nagging worries. What was the truth about the purges? Was it simply bourgeois propaganda? Had Stalin betrayed the principles of the revolution ... Of course I was wrong to shut out the contrary evidence.61
In response to McQueen's Maoist Marxist-Leninism, Gollan wrote:
In rejecting the base-determines-superstructure model McQueen ... has thrown out the base entirely... Marx did not employ this model in any work of analysis as a simple cause and effect relationship. For him it was always a dialectical one in which the base affected the superstructure as well as being influenced by it.62
Gollan's treatment of Trotskyism in his history of Australian communism is scrupulously fair and he mocks the Stalinist mantra in relation to 'Trotskyist wreckers'.63 The two working-class warriors retrieved from the past by Fry were both syndicalist wreckers: members of IWW. |
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Gollan describes the ASSLH as being similar to the Labour History Society in Britain: a kind of popular front, politically and intellectually, because the decline of the Communist Party after 1956 had encouraged dialogue between Marxist and non-Marxist labour historians.64 In his founding editorial he applauded the fact all the trends of opinion within the labour movement itself were represented by people writing labour history. It went further than that, too: 'There are also some interested in labour history who are opposed to labour. This is as it should be for it imposes on all the need to work conscientiously'.65 His recalled later that at this founding moment 'we decided that our Society must be ideologically pluralistic'.66 |
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It is hardly surprising that Gollan was one of the left-intellectuals who left the Communist Party in the wake of the events of 1956. Having joined because it was the only party committed to socialism and against fascism, he left with regret in 1957, 'because this no longer seemed to be the case'.67 The final straw for him was not simply Kruschev's secret speech but the refusal of the Party leadership to permit discussion of it.68 His personal trauma can be glimpsed in his history of the Party: 'the methods of secrecy and ruthless machine action repelled many, who felt that the means adopted were in conflict with the social objectives of the party';69 intellectuals in the Party were 'expected to accept and expound an increasingly narrow and inelastic ideological orthodoxy which cut them off from fellow intellectuals and often deeply disturbed their basic assumptions about the nature of intellectual activity';70 therefore most of the intellectuals severed their connections with a Communist Party 'far gone in dogmatism and dependence upon truth as revealed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union'.71 In his review of A New Britannia he likewise distances himself from 'the mechanistic marxism which had its hey-day in what passed for marxist scholarship at the height of Stalinism'.72 Eric never left the Party; it left him when it disbanded in 1991. However, it was Bob not Eric that wrote about the Party. |
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Revolutionaries and Reformists pulls no punches in its critique of the Party's authoritarianism and subservience to Moscow, to which he attributes the Party's decline after World War II.73 Gollan points to the especially ludicrous application during the post-war boom of Stalinist policies, which continued to predict the imminent collapse of capitalism.74 And during this period: 'Its blind acceptance of the leadership of the Soviet Union was continuing evidence of its abandonment of any credible internationalist alignment'.75 The publication in Communist Review in February 1947 of Zhdanov's 'brutal and vulgar criticism of a number of sensitive writers' marked the beginning of the drive for narrower conformism in matters of literature and art, and paralleled the similar drive in all other questions of ideology.76
Socialist realism, as interpreted in the Soviet Union, was a political demand made on left-wing and communist writers. Most of them did not respond, to the disappointment of the communist political leaders and to the great good of Australian literature.77
The general trend in the Party was towards 'authoritarianism, illiberalism, and a belief in realpolitik'.78 His concluding words were: 'by 1955 it was clear that any triumphs which it had had (to vary the words of J.K. Galbraith) reveal many of the characteristics of Jonah's triumph over the whale'.79 |
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Most significantly for appreciating the historiographical location of the Society's founders, Gollan also deplores the Communist Party's post-war infatuation with radical nationalism:
The nationalising of communism was a negative consequence of the abandonment of all but verbal internationalism by the Soviet Union ... Under these conditions it seemed natural to Australian communists that they should be the leading proponents of an aggressive, militant, democratic stance which was believed to be the most characteristic quality of Australian workers. Thus they looked for origins in those who had resisted the authority of the upper classes: convicts, bushrangers, gold-diggers, and the unionists who had fought the bitter battles of the 1890s. In doing so they idealised the past and censored out or muted those parts of it, in particular the xenophobia and racism which were inherent in the Australian working-class outlook, which were in conflict with basic communist ideology.80
This scepticism about radical nationalism is closely related to a long-standing critical stance in relation to working-class racism. Of course, Revolutionaries and Reformists is a post-McQueen text, so it might be imagined that Gollan had tidied up his act in response to A New Britannia. Indeed, after a strident critique of how McQueen 'makes nonsense of class analysis',81 his review generously concedes his own shortcomings.
What is new in A New Britannia and which gives great importance to the book is the centrality accorded to racialism in Australian nationalism. I think McQueen is right in saying that the historians whom he criticises, including myself, have underplayed racialism – they have understated it less than he would allow, but they have understated it.82
Much less than McQueen would allow. Gollan had never demonstrated a particular interest in racism but had deplored its existence wherever and whenever it emerged in his research on the working class and its organisations and institutions – and in publications long before A New Britannia. |
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In 1960, in Radical and Working Class Politics, Gollan regretted: 'Racial prejudice, brutal and at times fanatical, was perhaps an inevitable aspect of Australian nationalism ...'83 And he chastises the Australian Labor Party (ALP) for emerging as the party of intransigent Australian nationalism, particularly in connection with the 'racial policy' of White Australia'.84 He details with regret how this racist fear of the 'yellow peril' changed the ALP's policy of opposition to militarism to support for compulsory military service (except for the left-wing of party):85 'Notably absent ... was any idea of the internationalism of the working class'.86 |
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Breadth | |
The labour history nurtured by Fry and Gollan aspired to broadness of scope and orientation. In his Chairman's Report to the Inaugural Meeting of the ASSLH on 31 May 1961, Gollan stated:
Until the present labour history, so far as it has been written, has been largely political. It needs to be expanded into the fields of economic, social, and cultural, as well as political history. The Society should foster developments in all of these fields.87
One thing was clear, he later recalled of this moment: that the institutional history of the labour movement was not enough to lead to an understanding of the life experience and ideas and action of working people.88 His founding editorial noted that good work had already been done in Australian labour history 'but it is all within quite narrow limits ... confined largely to biography and political history'.89 Citing Asa Briggs, he called for a broader approach that included 'study of the working class "situation" taken in terms of health, leisure, etc... social history in the fullest sense, including politics'; 'studies which focus attention on class relations, the impact of other classes and class organisations on the workers'; 'and a strictly economic history of labour'. To Briggs' list Gollan added 'histories of major unions, the history of ideas and opinion, and the history of popular culture'.90 |
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When Gollan wrote this editorial he himself was writing a history of a major union; and he stressed the limitations of union history when it appeared a year later. His book, he explained, is not a history of the New South Wales miners but simply of their union, an instrument of their struggle to achieve a better life: 'A full history of the miners would follow them from the pits to their homes. It would be concerned with how they lived, what they thought about life, how they spent their working time and their leisure'.91 He felt strongly that his history of the union 'should have been something more'.92 Its influence on labour history was nonetheless substantial. Macintyre's obituary for Gollan describes this book as 'the first research-based study of an Australian union and one that established a model for the genre' – it was written with the co-operation of the union and with full access to their records, but does not shrink from criticism.93 |
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Merritt has observed that the strong commitment at this founding moment to rescuing the working-class people of the past 'largely meant rescuing the trade union movement and the early labor parties'.94 However, it is apparent that Fry and Gollan intended the rescue attempts to range further than restoration of unions and parties. Fry's thesis explicitly criticises such restricted histories of working-class lives:
While the writers and painters of this time have received some of the attention which is their due, the carpenters, blacksmiths, shop assistants, labourers and people of a thousand and one other callings, whose lives were the life of the city, appear in the history of the time only as trade unionists, voters, readers, or parts of a process. This thesis is based on the belief that the conditions under which they passed their lives have an important bearing on their actions and therefore the events to which historians have devoted their attention.95
Wells has described Fry's orientation in his doctoral thesis as 'obsessively materialist'.96 Yet Fry follows the workers into their homes and emphasises also the importance of ideas, of understanding how workers thought and why and, in particular, what made working-class activists tick:
If one's attention is confined to the formal and institutional, then the changes in the labour movement following 1890 seem inexplicable, as indeed does the fervour of the Maritime Strike itself. It was the prior changes in men's ideas which made possible the organisational changes required by new conditions.97
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Its breadth notwithstanding, Fry's Preface states that a comprehensive study of the urban wage earning class in Australia in the 1880s would be 'nothing less than a detailed survey of workplace, home, leisure, interests, attitudes, or the economic, political and social life, of a numerous and scattered class'. He considered his thesis 'a more restricted enquiry', which did not set out to be a complete social history; it 'scarcely touches on manners or morals, for example'.98 His mental benchmark was a multidimensional form of history, but one constructed with caution and precision:
The same person may be observed from many, indeed an infinity of viewpoints. The rounded whole can be built up only by impressing on top of each other the many single, two dimensional studies of aspect of the subject's life ... all these separate studies are inter-related, depend upon each other in the most intimate and complex way.99
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Fry's thesis also shows an unusual sensitivity to gender for its time. His examination of the twenty per cent of wage earners who were female is no less rigorous and serious as his treatment of the other eighty per cent. He deplores the especially low wages paid to female employees and their disproportionate experience of 'sweating'.100 Especially peculiar for a male historian in the 1950s, he describes the clothing of the more affluent women in the 1880s, 'in their voluminous skirts and ornate hats followed the dictates of second hand British fashion through bunched drapes, the bustle and all the variations which vied with each other in the amount of material used'.101 |
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Gollan later remarked of the ambitious program for labour history that he outlined in this founding editorial that only part of that program was realised in the following decade and a half.102 He observed that awareness of the need to follow the workers into the workplace, the church, the pub and the home as well as the union meeting was largely aspiration, expounded in forewords and prefaces rather than in the body of the books. He insists, however, that this awareness nonetheless did bring about 'minor qualitative changes in the written history'.103 Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates would insist the changes were major rather than minor: they carefully identify a large number of works in Australian labour history that succeeded in embracing the concerns of the new social history and the new social movements from the early 1970s onwards.104 |
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Fry and Gollan actively encouraged submission and publication of articles that sought to follow the workers beyond their workplaces and which expanded into or firmly touched the edges of economic, social and cultural as well as political history. Even if supply never matched demand, it was significant that such articles were known by labour historians to be desired and valued. From the mid-1970s John Merritt and Susan Magarey continued this emphasis in explicit response to the new social history, while making it clear it would neither neglect the older style labour history, which had always covered far more than labour parties and unions, nor jump on a social history bandwagon.105 The special ASSLH publications were also motivated by the editorial board's recognition that it should, in Gollan's words, 'take a leading part in broadening the span of labour history'.106 One of these –What Rough Beast?– was so broad in form as well as content that it was edited, as a matter of bizarrely participatory principle, by all contributors under a collective nom de plume, to the great distress of Allen & Unwin's marketing department. |
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Feminist history was another development to which the Society and journal, with its aspiration to breadth, responded swiftly. From the early 1970s feminist historians – Ann Curthoys, Susan Magarey (formerly Eade) and others – found it easy to establish an intellectual dialogue with the Labour History men. They considered Labour History accessible and interesting, worth getting involved in; and their involvement was enthusiastically welcomed. Labour History was thus earlier and more easily feminised than most mainstream journals. The male bias in the early days of Labour History rapidly dissipated. In the first ten issues of the journal there had been only nine contributions from women; in the third ten issues (21–30) between 1971 and 1976 there were 23 contributions from women and 14 articles of obvious feminist interest; in issues 41–50 there were 31 contributions from women and 23 articles of feminist interest.107 By the mid-1970s Susan Eade/Magarey was assistant editor and Ann Curthoys was review editor. Other women were on the editorial board. Labour History moved faster than most journals to improve representation of women at this level.108 |
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The 1975 special publication, Women at Work, was produced the same year or the year before the ovarious texts of Anne Summers, Bev Kingston, Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, and Miriam Dixson, which heralded the coming of age of Australian feminist history. If any proof is needed that Labour History men were more open to feminism than other male historians, the acknowledgements to Women at Work are instructive: Eric Fry made the initial suggestion; David Walker helped with the early plans; John Iremonger designed the cover; John Merritt worked as a typist for it; and Bob Gollan as a post-man. It is difficult indeed to imagine a similar scenario in the 1975 Historical Studies board room. In their recollections at the ASSLH conference in 1995, both Bob and Eric spoke enthusiastically about the importance and impact of women's history and feminist modes of historical inquiry.109 |
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Another significant special publication was Who Are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class, edited by Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus in 1978. Since McQueen's frontal assault on the tendency of labour history to ignore or excuse working-class racism, labour historians had reflected long and deeply on his accusations; and Who Are Our Enemies? was a serious reexamination of these weighty matters. There was intense debate, too, about the relationship between racial ideas and the expression of working-class prejudices against allegedly cheap non-white labour. It is worth noting here that in 1960, Gollan had used inverted commas for reporting the concern with 'unfair' competition when discussing workers' anti-Chinese sentiments; and, in reference to William Lane, he wrote of 'the racialism that had made him a violent opponent of Chinese immigration'.110 He seems clear, unlike most historians of his day, that racism could not justify itself by pointing to its own consequences. |
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In 1981 a sub-title was added to the journal, officially deeming it what it had in practice become: 'A Journal of Labour and Social History'. Broadness had enabled labour history to respond to the challenges for historical inquiry posed by the new social history and the new social movements that appeared long after the Society's foundation. The circumstances in which Fry and Gollan founded the Society and the journal had shaped labour history. However, the labour history they chose to encourage with such concentration of purpose was not prisoner to that historical moment but instead revealed a remarkable capacity over the ensuing years for regeneration and renewal. |
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Verity Burgmann is Professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne. Her publications include Power, Profit and Protest; Unions and the Environment; Green Bans, Red Union; Revolutionary Industrial Unionism; Power and Protest; 'In Our Time': Socialism and the Rise of Labor and the four-volume co-edited A People's History of Australia. With ARC funding, she has established a website of primary source documents of the history of Australian radicalism at <www.reasoninrevolt.net.au>.
<vnb@unimelb.edu.au>
Endnotes
1. Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer, 'Labour Historians as Labour Intellectuals: Generations and Crises', in David Palmer, Ross Shanahan and Martin Shanahan (eds), Australian Labour History Reconsidered, Australian Humanities Press, Adelaide, 1999, pp. 234–6.
2. Bob Gollan, 'Writing Labour History: Transcript of Symposium', ASSLH National Conference, University of Adelaide, 1995, p. 5.
3. John Merritt, 'Editorial', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, p. viii.
4. Eric Fry, 'The Writing of Labour History in Australia', in Eric Fry (ed.), Common Cause: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Labour History, Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, Wellington, Sydney, London, Boston, 1986, p. 146.
5. Frank Bongiorno, 'Labour History', in Graeme Davidson, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Revised Edition, Melbourne, 2001, p. 373.
6. Robin Gollan, 'Looking Back', in Bain Attwood (ed.), Labour Histories, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne, 1994, p. 1.
7. Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement 1920–1955, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975, Preface.
8. Andrew Wells, 'From Workshop to Factory', in Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells (eds), The Maritime Strike: A Centennial Retrospective. Essays in Honour of E.C. Fry, Five Islands Press in association with the University of Wollongong Labour History Research Group and the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Wollongong, 1992, p. 2.
9. Gollan, 'Looking Back', pp. 2–2.
10. Gollan, 'Looking Back', pp. 2–3; Peter Love, 'Vale Eric Fry', Recorder, no. 255, October 2007, pp. 1–2.
11. R.A. Gollan, 'Labour History', Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 1, January 1962, p. 3.
12. Eric Fry, 'Writing Labour History: Transcript of Symposium', ASSLH National Conference, University of Adelaide, 1995, p. 11.
13. Gollan, 'Labour History', p. 3.
14. Eric Fry, 'Introduction', in Eric Fry (ed.), Rebels and Radicals, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, London, Boston, 1983, p. xi.
15. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 9.
16. Ibid., p. 12.
17. John Merritt, 'Editorial', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, p. viii.
18. Eric Fry, 'Australian Worker, Monty Miller', in Fry (ed.), Rebels and Radicals, p. 193.
19. E.C. Fry (ed.), Tom Barker and the I.W.W., Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Canberra, 1965, p. 27.
20. Fry (ed.), Tom Barker, p. 2.
21. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 6.
22. Robin Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales: A History or the Union, 1860–1960, Melbourne University Press in association with the Australian National University, Melbourne, 1963, p. 2.
23. Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales, p. 238.
24. Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 288.
25. Andre LeBlanc, 'Labour/Le Travail Reader Survey: A Report', Labour/Le Travail, no. 18, Fall 1986, p. 317.
26. Irving and Scalmer, 'Labour Historians as Labour Intellectuals', p. 236.
27. Peter Love, 'Vale Bob Gollan', Recorder, no. 256, December 2007, p. 1.
28. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 3.
29. Fry, 'The Writing of Labour History in Australia', p. 148.
30. Gollan, 'Labour History', p. 4.
31. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 12.
32. Robin Gollan, 'Writing Labour History', in David Palmer, Ross Shanahan and Martin Shanahan (eds), Australian Labour History Reconsidered, Australian Humanities Press, Adelaide, 1999, pp. 231–2.
33. Stuart Macintyre, 'Radical History and Bourgeois Hegemony', Intervention, no. 2, October 1972, p. 47.
34. Ibid., p. 66.
35. Ibid., p. 73
36. Verity Burgmann, 'Labour/Le Travail and Canadian Working-Class History: A View From Afar', Labour/Le Travail (Canada), no. 50, Fall 2002, esp. pp. 74–77.
37. John Merritt, 'Labour history', in Graeme Osborne and W.F. Mandle (eds), New History: Studying Australia Today, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982, pp. 120–21.
38. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 5.
39. Wells, 'From Workshop to Factory', pp. 3–4; Love, 'Vale Eric Fry', p. 2.
40. Robin Gollan, 'Australian Labour History', in Gregory S. Kealey and Greg Patmore (eds), Canadian and Australian Labour History: Towards a Comparative Perspective, ASSLH/Committee on Canadian Labour History, Griffith University, 1990, p. 11.
41. Gollan, 'Australian Labour History', p. 12.
42. Bob Gollan, 'An Inquiry into the Australian Radical Tradition: McQueen's "New Britannia"', Arena, no. 24, 1971, p. 35.
43. Fry, 'The Writing of Labour History in Australia', pp. 146–7.
44. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 6.
45. Wells, 'From workshop to factory', p. 1.
46. E.C. Fry, The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class in Australia in the 1880's, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1956, p. 42.
47. Ibid., p. 55.
48. E.C. Fry (ed.), Tom Barker and the I.W.W., Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Canberra, 1965.
49. Love, 'Vale Bob Gollan', p. 2.
50. Robin Gollan, The Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Origins and Early History, ANU Press, Canberra, 1968, p. 104.
51. Gollan, The Commonwealth Bank, p. 107.
52. Ibid., pp. 113–14.
53. Gollan, 'Looking Back', pp. 11–12.
54. Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, 1976 [1960], p. 152.
55. Ibid., pp. 152–3.
56. Ibid., p. 153.
57. Robin Gollan, 'The Ideology of the Labour Movement', in E.L. Wheelwright and Ken Buckley (eds), Essays in the Political Economy of Australian Capitalism, ANZ Book Co., Sydney, 1975, vol. I, p. 221.
58. Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 286.
59. Fry, The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class, p. 192.
60. Ibid., pp. 166, 514–15, 191.
61. Gollan, 'Looking Back', pp. 2–3.
62. Gollan, 'An Inquiry into the Australian Radical Tradition', p. 33.
63. Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 163
64. Gollan, 'Australian Labour History', in Kealey and Patmore (eds), Canadian and Australian Labour History, p. 8.
65. Gollan, 'Labour History', pp. 4–5.
66. Gollan, 'Writing Labour History', in Palmer et al (eds), Australian Labour History Reconsidered, p. 231.
67. Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, Preface.
68. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 3.
69. Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 171.
70. Ibid., p. 248.
71. Ibid., p. 254.
72. Gollan, 'An Inquiry into the Australian Radical Tradition', p. 33.
73. Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists, p. 171.
74. Ibid., pp. 165–69.
75. Ibid., p. 204.
76. Ibid., p. 248.
77. Ibid., p. 252.
78. Ibid., p. 255.
79. Ibid., p. 284.
80. Ibid., p. 196.
81. Gollan, 'An Inquiry into the Australian Radical Tradition, p. 34.
82. Ibid., p. 36.
83. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, p. 117.
84. Ibid., p. 195.
85. Ibid., pp. 196–9.
86. Ibid., p. 196.
87. 'Formation of the Society', Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 1, January 1962, pp. 62–63.
88. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 8.
89. Gollan, 'Labour History', p. 3.
90. Ibid., p. 4.
91. Gollan, The Coalminers of New South Wales, Preface.
92. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 6.
93. Stuart Macintyre, 'Robin Allenby Gollan', Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November 2007.
94. John Merritt, 'Editorial', Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, p.viii.
95. Fry, The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class, p. 11.
96. Wells, 'From workshop to factory', p. 11.
97. Fry, The Condition of the Urban Wage Earning Class, p. 506.
98. Ibid., p. 1, 2.
99. Ibid., p. 83.
100. Ibid., esp. pp. 36–41.
101. Ibid., p. 13.
102. Gollan, 'Looking Back', p. 8.
103. Gollan, 'Australian Labour History', in Kealey and Patmore (eds), Canadian and Australian Labour History, p. 12.
104. Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates, 'Is Labour History Dead?', Australian Historical Studies, no. 100, April 1993, pp. 470–81.
105. John Merritt, 'Editorial', Labour History, no. 40, May 1981; Susan Magarey, 'Labour History's new sub-title: social history in Australia', Social History, vol. 8, no. 2, May 1983, p. 222.
106. Gollan, 'Australian Labour History', p. 14.
107. Verity Burgmann, 'Feminism and Labour History' in 'A look at the journals', Australian Historical Association Bulletin, no. 52, October 1987, pp. 41–42.
108. Barbara Dale, 'Labour History' in 'A look at the journals', Australian Historical Association Bulletin, no. 52, October 1987, p. 40.
109. Gollan, 'Writing Labour History: Transcript of Symposium', p. 7; Fry 'Writing Labour History: Transcript of Symposium', p. 12.
110. Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics, pp. 162, 174.
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