94  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
May, 2008
Previous
Next
Labour History

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 
 
 

R.A. Gollan, E.C. Fry, and the Canberra Years of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History

John Merritt

I happened to be in Canberra in late 1960 when Asa Briggs spoke to a group of historians at the Australian National University (ANU) about the British Society for the Study of Labour History. At the end of his talk a committee, consisting of Bob Gollan, Eric Fry and Ian Turner, was elected to take the first steps towards forming an Australian society. Because of the recognition Bob had won through his chapter in Gordon Greenwood's textbook, Australia: A Social and Political History (1955), and his book Radical and Working Class Politics (1960), he was the obvious choice to write the letters and chair the meetings that, a year later, resulted in the formation of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH). Bob was elected president. There is an account of the process of formation in the first issue of the Society's journal.1 1
      Bob remained president until 1966, stepping aside only when he was satisfied that the ASSLH's future was secure. By then he had been at the ANU for over ten years and largely as a result of his efforts there was an extensive and still growing collection of union records in the ANU's archives of business and labour – which we now know as the Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC). That collection, too, as many of us can attest, is part of his legacy to Australian labour history and to the Society. 2
      In my view, however, it was Bob's books that did most to ensure that the Society would succeed. I am thinking particularly of Radical and Working Class Politics and The Coalminers of New South Wales (1963). These works startled the arrogant and the ignorant in the history profession who hitherto had been inclined to regard labour history as a form of politically biased antiquarianism. Above all, they were an inspiration to left leaning history students, many of whom were the sons and daughters of working-class parents. There is irony here. The conservative Menzies governments of the 1950s made it possible, for the first time in our history, for working-class children to attend Australian universities on a full time basis. Those who did so, and who chose to take history courses, read Radical and Working Class Politics. Menzies himself, however, did not share their enthusiasm for Bob Gollan. 3
      The impact of the cold war on left-wing academics has been well documented, although I suspect that anyone who lived through the 1950s and 1960s might still wonder if the full extent of the harassment and persecution will ever be fully comprehended by later generations. Because of his involvement with the Communist Party of Australia, Bob was constantly under scrutiny by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). That he remained relatively unmolested by 'Red scare' zealots is attributable to the support he received from Sir Keith Hancock, Professor of History at the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS) at ANU. Hancock had appointed Bob to the RSSS and held him in high regard. (That respect was reciprocated, Bob believing that Hancock had no equal among Australian historians.) Hancock's work on the British economy during World War II and on the South African general and politician Jan Smuts had given him unimpeachable political credentials. It had also left him well schooled in the art of managing ministerial egos. On at least one occasion he used his skills to stymie a Commonwealth government attempt to sever Bob's connection with the RSSS.2 4
      By keeping Bob at ANU, Hancock opened the way for a remarkable surge in labour history writing in the 1960s. I am not sure whether Bob had any say in bringing Eric Fry and Russel Ward to ANU, but I know that he helped Eric with his thesis. Ian Turner, Edgar Waters, Miriam Dixson, James Hagan and Bruce Mitchell were Bob's students and owed their PhD scholarships to him. I was another. And Bob also had a part to play in the granting of scholarships in Economic History to Peter Macarthy and Tom Sheridan. All these people were to contribute to the Australian labour history corpus, Turner, Hagan and Sheridan most substantially. The ASSLH and its journal benefited as a result. 5
      Eric Fry was so important to the running of the Society during its first 25 years that we might be excused for thinking of him solely as an administrator. That would be a mistake. Eric, too, drew students to labour history through his own research and writing. Peter Macarthy's thesis on the Harvester Judgment is the most borrowed of all ANU history PhD theses, but Eric's thesis on the condition of the urban wage-earning class in Australia in the 1880s, completed in 1956, might run a respectable second. It is a great shame that it was not published. Eric wrote several articles and two monographs while at ANU. He also did some editing. If this output might be thought modest, it was of high quality. That was recognised by the numerous students who wanted him as a supervisor. Alastair Davidson, Andrew Wells, Verity Burgmann, Peter Love and Joy Damousi were all Eric's students and together they did as much for labour history, in terms of the quantity and quality of their publications, as did Bob's students. 6
      That Eric did not write more can be attributed in large measure to the demands that others made on his time. As a key all-rounder in a busy teaching department he was often called upon to fill in for colleagues on leave, which he did uncomplainingly. He served terms as Dean of the Arts Faculty and as Dean of Students. He was a soft touch for postgraduate students who were in trouble, either because they could not find an appropriate or sympathetic supervisor, or because they had been asked by their examiners to re-write. Eric never turned any of them away when they knocked on his door. And interstate students also called on him when they came to Canberra, urged to do so by some grateful former student or admirer. It was typical of Eric that he kept in touch with them when they returned to their home universities. By such actions he became the public face of the ASSLH, to the Society's great benefit. 7
      Nonetheless, it is true that his greatest service to the Society was as an administrator. No one could truthfully say that administration was Bob Gollan's strength, and by the time I joined the executive in 1965 Eric had assumed the dual roles of anchor-man and Mr Fix-it. He organised numerous membership drives, targeting particularly academics, union leaders and Labor politicians, federal and state. He established interstate contacts to help publicise the Society and distribute the journal and he always arranged the working bees for posting days or for collating special issues. And he did not forget the small gestures that helped publicise the Society and win it acceptance – for example, complimentary copies to the ANU Library, the NBAC and to the British Society. Manning Clark, who agreed to give some departmental support to the Society, also received complimentary copies. 8
      In those early years the journal was sometimes short of articles. It was Eric who sniffed out potential contributors. I can remember receiving a letter from him when I occupied a very junior position at the University of Queensland. I wondered how he knew about me. When he could not come up with contributors he would produce a bibliographical piece on labour history sources in colonial parliamentary papers. He must have done four or five. These articles kept the journal going and, because of their intrinsic value for post-graduates, ensured that its early issues were often consulted. 9
      In mid-1965, the Society faced a major crisis. The ANU Labor Club, through its broadsheet The Crucible, alleged that Bob and Eric had made the ASSLH a Communist Party front. There was some consternation in labour movement circles in both Sydney and Brisbane. Bruce Shields, the secretary-treasurer of the Society, resigned. But the crisis was soon over. The Sydney and Brisbane members accepted the executive's assurances that the allegations had no substance, Bede Nairn playing a decisive role in getting the Sydney members on side. Eric asked me to take over from Bruce Shields, which I was pleased to do, and aided by Bruce McFarland and James Hagan, Bob and Eric got on with producing the journal and building the membership. A year later, Bob judged that he could safely step aside.3 10
      The executive's decision to become an incorporated association provided another test for Eric. An article in Labour History had led to threats of legal action from a Victorian member of the House of Representatives, and the prospect of an unincorporated body being sued for libel concentrated the executive's collective mind. Incorporation required a constitution that would satisfy Australian Capital Territory (ACT) legislation, and the Society needed something more elaborate than the default constitution that the legislation provided. The executive approached a local legal firm, but it wanted over $300 to draft a suitable constitution, a sum we could not afford. So I persuaded a recent law graduate and bright third year law student to do the drafting for us. After burning some midnight oil they came up with a constitution that met all our needs and was acceptable to the ACT authorities. We sent the constitution off to our members as quickly as we could and equally quickly, understanding our predicament, most gave their approval. The only objections came from the members of the Victorian labour history group that had formed around Sam Merrifield, MLC (Member of the Legislative Council). 11
      There are always likely to be problems for a federal body when its executive operates under one jurisdiction and its branches under another. The Merrifield group, which had been formed before the ASSLH, liked to think of itself as our Victorian branch, and it feared that we were aiming to take it over. Eric tried by mail to explain as politely as he could that no one in the ACT would want to take over a mob of Victorians, but he was unsuccessful. Eventually a meeting was arranged to thrash out the matter. It was held in Canberra and I was there, but I can't now remember much about the proceedings except that they went on all day and that Sam Merrifield was very cross. Eric needed to be at his diplomatic and conciliatory best. Eventually the Victorians were satisfied that we had no intention of interfering with them or attempting to undermine their autonomy, although they remained worried about their legal situation. There were a few rumbles in the next year or so before the tension finally evaporated. As a result of incorporation, Eric added the role of Public Officer to his various duties. Fortunately the threatened libel proceedings did not eventuate.4 12
      In the 1970s and 1980s when the Society had upwards of 800 members, Eric was still performing his dual roles, regardless of whether he was president or just a member of the executive. He recruited a large number of people to help with the work of the Society. Many were PhD students, the most notable being Leanne Kerr who by dint of unrelenting pressure during her term as secretary actually took membership to over 1,000. I remember an unwritten law that forbade PhDs from working for the ASSLH in the final year of their theses, but it was seldom observed. Departmental tutors and research assistants, I am thinking in particular of Jill Waterhouse, Moira Scollay, Susan Allen and Christine Wise, with the blessing of Manning Clark and his successors, Mick Williams and John Molony, also made significant contributions. These people constituted Eric's army and they deserve our thanks. If ever a history of the Society is written they must not be forgotten. Out of respect and affection for Eric they gave willingly of their time. For his part Eric always made his 'volunteers' feel welcome at executive meetings, and he encouraged them to participate fully in policy discussions. Many of the ideas that led to improvements in our administrative and editorial work came from people whose active association with the executive lasted only for a couple of years. 13
      Bob and Eric always wanted the journal to be recognised for its scholarly qualities. That meant articles submitted for publication had to be critically evaluated and, when published, had to carry the usual scholarly accoutrements. There were other options. They could have settled on a trade journal that carried conference reports, work in progress reports and book reviews. The British Society had gone down that path. Another option was to concentrate on recording the personal histories of long time labour movement activists. Examples of both are contained in journals published during the Society's Canberra years. But the emphasis on articles by trained historians was pronounced, largely, I think, because Bob and Eric were so anxious to establish labour history's scholarly credentials in the hostile cold war environment. The result was a bias towards academics in the Society's membership, together with accusations from some of our labour movement members that 'historians don't write for us, they write for themselves – specifically for their own career advancement'. There is a deep-seated problem here that I was unable to resolve while I was editor. Had I given our labour movement members what they wanted – although I have to say it was never clear to me just what they did want – the journal risked losing the support of academics, which in turn would have dried up our supply of articles and severely limited our membership, the source of our funding. I concluded that Bob and Eric were right. The survival of the journal was dependent upon its ability to win support among university teachers and post-graduate students. 14
      Another early decision, flagged in the editorial Bob wrote for the first issue of the journal, was that membership of the ASSLH had to be open to all who had an interest in writing or reading labour history. Eric to my knowledge never preached a sermon on this policy, but he made his adherence to it clear through his actions. Everyone was welcome to join the Society who wished to write or to read labour history. While I was secretary-treasurer, the first name in the S's on our membership list was Santamaria, B.A.; the second was Sharkey, L.L.. Neither stayed with us for long. 15
      When labour historians came under attack from the New Left in the early 1970s – actually from several New Lefts – Bob, and the institutional history that he had encouraged, attracted most of the fire. A public flogging of Gollan and Ian Turner in a journal article or a review became, it seemed, a rite of passage for young left historians. Inasmuch as the New Left critics were demanding a broader class-based labour history they had a point, or at least a desirable goal. Bob, when I first met him, was a pragmatic Marxist influenced by the British Communist historians' group and by E.P. Thompson in particular. He agreed that histories of class relations would be an advance on histories of unions. If you have read the editorial I have just mentioned you will know that his vision for labour history encompassed much of what he was accused of overlooking. But he was never prepared to concede that institutional studies, in particular histories of unions, were worthless, as the most extreme of the New Left critics claimed. Partly this was because he knew that the best union histories were firmly placed within a societal context. But he also believed that they were an important preliminary to richer studies of social formations, social relations and social change. He never spoke in terms of creating a data base, but I think something like that was one of his objectives. This speculation gains a little more credence when we remember the important role he played in collecting union records. 16
      More important, though, Bob could not see much of value in the theoretical perspectives advocated by the various New Lefts, believing them too narrow to encompass historical processes and the lived experience of past generations. He made that point at the time in reviews and seminars, and the article he wrote for the book on Canadian and Australian labour history, edited by Gregory S. Kealey and Greg Patmore, contains an accurate, if brief, summary of his views. 17
      The New Left soon ran out of steam. Only Humphrey McQueen and Terry Irving, the latter working with R.W. Connell, produced works that had a noticeable effect on labour history. Of the rest, those who survived as historians did so by abandoning what they had preached – as Bob had predicted they would have to do. They ended up writing in much the same mode as the historians they once criticised. Subsequently they came under attack from post-structuralists and post-modernists. 18
      By the early 1970s, too, feminist historians were demanding a new form of Australian history. Soon after, historians of both sexes began to call for an Australian version of British social history. Contemporaneous with both developments was a growing interest in the history of indigenous Australians. The prospect of exploring these new dimensions to Australia's past had great appeal for postgraduate students and for younger historians. Feminist history journals sprang up, and there was some talk in Canberra of starting a journal of social history. If the ASSLH were to maintain its membership and continue to attract a healthy flow of articles from young historians the journal's editorial board had to move with the times. Bob understood the need for preservation measures, but also he acknowledged the significance of what was being advocated. His support for the editorial board's decision to broaden the scope of the journal was based both on a recognition that women and Aboriginal people had been neglected by his generation of historians, and on a conviction that labour historians should attempt to establish links with the new work that was being done. Thompson's notion of history from below had always appealed to him and he saw the new dimensions to Australian historiography as moving towards that goal. In recent years, Mark McKenna's Looking for Blackfella's Point (2002), a history of a small area of land on the south coast of New South Wales, may have been the history text he enjoyed most. 19
      Eric never made his views on the New Left challenges to labour history as clear as Bob did. Humphrey McQueen, a close friend of Eric's, would know more than I about what Eric thought. My opinion, however, is that he largely shared Bob's position. I remember him making a strong statement at an ANU seminar, though typically balanced and restrained, in support of the work that had already been done by Bob and Bob's students. Like Bob, Eric was essentially a Marxist, but within that framework he seemed content to align himself with established forms of historical inquiry – the positivism so derided by the New Left. Eric knew that the relationship between theory and facts was problematic, but, in the manner of E.H. Carr, I think he was fairly confident that a well-read and careful historian could establish plausible or highly probable causal connections. 20
      On the other developments of these years, Eric's position was similar to Bob's. While he, too, understood the need for expediency, his convictions allowed him to welcome the editorial board's attempt to broaden the journal's appeal. Both as a supervisor and a lecturer he was sympathetic to feminist aspirations and perspectives, and he was one of the first Canberra-based supporters of the Aboriginal Embassy. Moreover, as was widely acknowledged in the 1980s, his PhD thesis had taken him much of the way towards the social history that had now become fashionable. 21
      T.A. Coghlan, V.G. Childe, H.V. Evatt, Brian Fitzpatrick and various others had written Australian labour history before Bob and Eric became postgraduate students. Bede Nairn was a contemporary of theirs. It can't be said that they started labour history in this country. What they did was establish the ASSLH and nurture it through its early years – in Eric's case through its first 25 years. By their writings and teaching, they also inspired an interest in, and a commitment to, labour history that was to contribute to the Society's success and to its longevity. I am also inclined to think that the high regard in which they were held gave the Society immunity, after the Communist front fracas of 1965, from the faction fights and take over attempts that so often bedevil labour-oriented organisations. I would have to acknowledge, though, that Canberra's relative isolation could have been more significant. Of course, neither hypotheses can be tested, nor assessed one against the other. It is far less speculative to claim, and I do so with confidence, that Bob and Eric's standing in our profession accounts for the fact that when the Society left its Canberra base it did so voluntarily and on its own terms 22
      By then, the mid-1980s, Bob had retired from ANU and was living at Bermagui. The RSSS had moved away from labour and economic history and the supply of PhD students who might be persuaded to help with the Society's administration had shrunk dramatically. ANU's bean counters had got rid of all the research assistants, a couple of secretaries and half the tutors. There were no more potential recruits for Eric's army. John Molony, who had worked cheerfully on the executive for many years, was now a senior member of the University and had little time to devote to the Society. And Eric's own retirement was imminent. I put it to him that if the ASSLH and its journal were to remain in Canberra it would be to the detriment of both. He agreed with me, if a little reluctantly, and, with his customary attention to detail, set about organising a transfer to Sydney. In the end he was pleased with the way things worked out. 23
      I have concentrated in this paper on my recollections of the contributions Bob and Eric made to the ASSLH during its Canberra years. That seemed an appropriate focus for someone who was there for 20 of those 25 years. I will leave it for others to talk of Bob and Eric's scholarship and political activism. I would like, however, to conclude by saying they are the two men I have admired most during my lifetime. In their dealings with others, they were kind, tolerant and sensible. Their keen intelligence and their wit and humour, made their company stimulating and always enjoyable. They enriched my life. I was most fortunate to have known them. 24


John Merritt served on the Executive of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History from 1965 until 1986, and was Editor of the journal Labour History from 1976 to 1986. He has written four books on Australian history including The Making of the AWU.
<jme59581@bigpond.net.au>


Endnotes

1. Labour History was initially called The Bulletin of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. The first issue came out in January 1962.

2.  In his letter to the minister concerned, Hancock set out the Government's case for not renewing Bob's contract, saying that initially he had found it persuasive. But, he went on, after giving the matter more thought he had become concerned. He then gave a careful exposition of his reasons for giving priority to Bob's scholarship rather than to his prior association with the Communist Party of Australia. The result was a firm rejection of the ministerial advice that, nevertheless, kept ruffled feathers to a minimum. I think Hancock may have shown Bob the letter. Certainly Bob knew of its structure and contents. I heard the story from him.

3.  There is a file in Eric Fry's papers (held in the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University) on the Communist front allegations and the consternation it caused.

4.  I have written my account of this incident from memory. I am unaware of any surviving documentation.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

 



May, 2008 Previous Table of Contents Next