Erik Olssen and Bruce Scates | Class Formation and Political Change: A Trans-Tasman Dialogue | Labour History, 95

Class Formation and Political Change: A Trans-Tasman Dialogue

Erik Olssen and Bruce Scates^*

The retreat from aggregate representations of class has opened the way for a reassessment of its role in both Australia and New Zealand's history. This article focuses on two recent New Zealand research projects to review our traditional interpretations of class-based coalitions, interpretations that have often been deeply shaped by the Australian and British scholarship.¹ The first and oldest of these projects has related political change nationally and locally to analyses of demographic class formation in New Zealand's oldest industrial suburbs and its most densely populated urban region, southern Dunedin; the second set out to explain the dominance of conservative parties for most of the twentieth century by investigating electoral behaviour in ten provincial towns.² The article concludes with some comparative remarks on how this 'class work' might inform similar studies in Australia.

Labour in New Zealand: The Historiographical Inheritance

Just three decades ago, most scholars in New Zealand thought that the major social, cultural, and political fault-lines ran along a rural-urban axis, but that within the towns, as if in a minor key, social class generated the most significant and enduring divisions.³ As early as 1948, R.M. Chapman set out to provide a sociological taxonomy of electorates. A number of his points are relevant to this article. First, within the towns, he categorised working-class electorates – for he was mainly interested in explaining electoral behaviour – by their poverty, although he was rather vague about defining it, and separated the four largest towns from the fast-growing provincial ones. Dunedin, the smallest of the main towns by 1928, had five electorates, whereas the largest provincial town in that year straddled two electorates, each of which contained some rural ridings. He also distinguished farming from rural electorates and introduced a category for those rural seats dominated by extractive industries such as coal mining or forestry.⁴

It was axiomatic, of course, that New Zealand was a capitalist society and that the stratification or class structure of all towns was rooted in the industrial division of labour. This was the conventional wisdom and nobody doubted that from 1840 onwards New Zealand had been but an outpost of British capitalism with a 'normal' class structure.⁵ How to characterise family farmers occasionally caused a problem, but much of the best work ignored them and focused, as W.B. Sutch did in The Quest for Security (1966), on the colonists' attempts to remove the sources of insecurity and the consequences of poverty. That the colonial economy came to be dominated by the owners of the largest runs and estates, and those who financed them, remains indisputable. The origins and aspirations of this colonial bourgeoisie remains both under-researched and contentious, but we cannot ignore those arguments. The large number of relatively unskilled seasonal labourers on which this economy depended have been largely ignored. So have the semi-subsistence modes of production that were transplanted around the world. The local census, anxious to measure the extent and pace of industrial growth, ignored such aspects of the local economy just as it also ignored the Maori.⁶

Labour's Mobilisation in New Zealand, 1888–98

The trend towards land monopoly, together with rapid industrialisation of the southern towns as commodity prices fell, became marked during the so-called 'Long Depression'. It hit the South Island in 1878 and slowly spread north during the next eight years. According to the received view this crisis became the midwife, as it were, to the birth of a modern political system in which electoral alignments were based on social class.⁷ A wave of unrest swept rural New Zealand, especially in those areas where land monopolists or Maori blocked settlement, and in the towns workers mobilised into unions to protect their wages and conditions. And then, following the defeat of the Maritime Strike, they took their political revenge on the colony's ruling class by voting strongly in favour of radical and pro-union candidates. This was, of course, an Australasian phenomena, and in Dunedin (still the colony's major port for trans-Tasman shipping) as in Brisbane and Sydney, the working-class mobilisation was most effective.⁸ As John Angus showed many years ago, Dunedin's unionists formed a Labour Party which swept the city and exerted significant influence in other South Island towns. Throughout the colony six unionists and some 20 radical Liberals were elected. All aligned themselves with the Opposition, several of whose leaders had long wanted to organise colonial politics on an ideological basis, akin to that in Britain, in which they would become the Liberals and their opponents, by definition, would become the Tories. This is pretty much what came to pass.

The traditional story is mainly true of Dunedin and Christchurch, where trade unionism exploded in 1888–90, and in smaller South Island towns, such as Invercargill, where the strength of railway unionism on the state-owned railway system helped elect unionists and radicals. In Dunedin, if not Christchurch, unionists and non-unionised men in handicraft trades, together with many masters, led the campaign for reform.⁹ The political history of the North Island is not easily subsumed within this narrative and has not yet really been told. Suffice to note that pastoralism scarcely existed outside Wairarapa and the Hawkes Bay, unionism was weak, and the railways few and local. In many areas issues relating to Maori and their land remained central.¹⁰

It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the Liberal-Labour government's sweeping reforms except to note that in executing this advanced programme of reform the new government appears to have mobilised most of the working class both in the towns and in country districts regardless of whether they had a tradition of unionisation. This is consistent with the conclusions reached by Miles Fairburn and Stephen Haslett in their analysis of a subsequent period.¹¹ To what extent the strength of unionism explains the variations is unclear but their work shows that the Opposition to the Liberals, later known as Reform, also had a loyal constituency among the manual working class. But we run ahead. While the heartlands of the mobilisation of 1888–90 sustained unionism during the lean years which followed the rout of 1890, elsewhere the urban liberals and various radical organisations such as the Knights of Labour became the political expression of the organised working class. At the organisational level skilled tradesmen and artisans, many of them self employed or small masters, many of them also small land-owners with a cow and a pig, mediated between their crafts and communities and the loosely articulated political coalition known then and now as the Liberal Party.¹² Even Irish Catholic voters swung behind the Liberals as it became obvious that they were guided more by that great encyclical, 'Rerum Novarum' (1893), than by any continental socialist ideas with their animus against the church and religion and even the Knights of Labour. It was not for nothing that Seddon returned from Queen Victoria's Jubilee via Rome and obtained an audience with the Pope.¹³

From 1893 until 1911 most workers voted Liberal even when they did not belong to a union. Even the small but noisy band of Socialists, mostly Clarionites from northern England who formed the New Zealand Socialist Party in 1901, thought New Zealand a virtual paradise. As the skilled unions took advantage of the Arbitration Act (1894) to re-form, many union activists became more and more critical of the Liberals. In 1905 some unionists, many of them avowed socialists, formed a Political Labour League, modelled on that of New South Wales. Some hoped that they could scare the Liberals into more vigorous action on issues important to unionists, but others believed that the working class needed its own party. As became clear in the elections of 1905 and 1908 most workers, whether unionised or not, remained loyal to the Liberals.¹⁴ That party's radical MHRs, many of whom had been unionists in the 1880s and 1890s, commanded passionate loyalty in most urban working-class seats, and were often more effective as an opposition within the House of Representatives than the Opposition itself. The 'left-Liberals were concentrated in Christchurch and profoundly shaped by that city's powerful traditions of craft unionism, Non-Conformity and Christian Socialism.¹⁵

The Fall of the Liberals and the Start of New Zealand Labour

The most influential accounts of the rise and fall of the Liberals, and the rise of Labour, assumed that within the main towns organised labour, the fledgling Labour Leagues and Parties, and the working class were synonymous. Such solipsisms were not peculiar to New Zealand. They shaped the work of Richard Shannon and Richard Newman, who tracked the decline of the Liberals, and Desmond Crowley and Barry Gustafson who tracked the rise of Labour.¹⁶ Those influenced by them, especially perhaps G.D.H. Cole (who borrowed heavily from Crowley for his chapter on New Zealand) and Keith Sinclair, who worked closely with Shannon , also tended to treat the terms if not the phenomena as interchangeable.¹⁷ Here as elsewhere a form of unreflective Marxism saw teleology justify solipsism. The pervasive influence of this unreflective solipsism prompted W.H. Oliver to his celebrated riposte, 'Reeves, Sinclair and the Social Pattern', in which he deftly disentangled some of the confusions and claimed, in a memorable passage, that if 'men with money and men in debt felt cold' at the sound of tramping boots, as Sinclair claimed, 'it was not the hobnails of the proletariat on the way to a socialist utopia [that scared them], but the gumboots of cow cockies entering a capitalist society'.¹⁸ Sinclair also assumed, as everyone else had, that labour's mobilisation largely explained both the rise of the Liberals, and then the rise of Labour and the fall of the Liberals, and that these processes occurred at pretty much the same time and at the same speed everywhere. Barry Gustafson, whose account of the Labour Party's origins and early years remains unchallenged if not definitive, also subscribed to this variant of uniformitarianism.¹⁹ Nobody asked where women voters fitted into this picture or whether they considered the issues that roused male unionists of any great interest.²⁰

The shortcomings of the Arbitration Court thus proved useful as a deus ex machina that explained the decline of the Liberals in Chapman's working-class seats and Labour's success in establishing a foothold, while also explaining the history of industrial relations in the period 1905–15, a particularly turbulent period thanks to the rise of the 'Red Feds'.²¹ Yet as James Holt showed, the Court was not the catalyst for revolt and some measures, widely excoriated then and since by those on the left, actually ensured the system's survival.²² As Olssen argues in The Red Feds, the shortcomings of the arbitration system were not as significant as rising expectations, the influx of new immigrants (many of them industrial unionists and revolutionary socialists from the industrial battlegrounds of Australia and Britain), and the coming of age of a younger generation of manual workers whose only knowledge of the traumatic events of the early 1890s came from ageing cohorts of men who thought themselves entitled to more deference and authority. Not only that, but the mobilisation of 1908–13 was most intense and influential in the newer mines, many of them founded since 1890, and in the main towns of the North Island, especially Wellington and Auckland, which had supplanted Dunedin and Christchurch as the fastest-growing cities. Indeed it was a mobilisation of the unskilled that developed such momentum that it realigned not only the labour movement throughout the country but industrial relations and, eventually, national politics.²³

The mobilisation of the unskilled, and the formation in the main towns of a working class conscious of its own identity and historic mission, dominated the period 1908–22.²⁴ As The Red Feds argues, the mobilisation of the unskilled was a complex interplay and convergence of industrial, demographic, cultural, psychological, institutional and political trends and events. And what the book revealed was how little was known about the skilled. Although usually portrayed as dinosaurs of the industrial world, not least by revolutionary socialists, the skilled comprised a majority of trade unionists, most unions remained organised on the basis of skill, and the skilled played a decisive role in founding and sustaining the Labour Party. The visions of the Red Feds, by contrast, remained unfulfilled, if not unfulfillable.

A Micro-Historical Perspective

The community of Caversham offers a case study of occupational mobility in New Zealand. Once a borough in Dunedin, it provided a centre for the concentration of handicrafts and small-scale manufactories. Skilled men abounded. The presence of one of the country's state-owned railway workshops – by New Zealand standards a large industrial factory – helped to ensure the investigation of a wide variety of skilled men and not merely union activists. The advantage of a sharply focused case study is, among other things, that it allows the actual processes of class formation and mobilisation to be more precisely identified, and that knowledge can then help in analysing the relationship between demographic class formation, unionisation, labour process, class mobilisation, and political change at the national level.²⁵

Although this project has focused on the meaning and role of both class and gender in the structuration of New Zealand's most densely populated urban region, which includes two of the oldest industrial suburbs, from the start it was assumed that such a micro-study would identify the social changes that explained the decline of the Liberals and the rise of Labour (for this national theme had been played out locally). Guided by a mixture of archival research and sociological theory the Caversham researchers expected to find that working-class class consciousness grew as opportunities for working men shrank, whether one looked at worklife mobility, marital and intergenerational mobility, home ownership, or residential segregation (the term we used initially). The results suggested other possibilities. To our surprise we have established that neither occupation nor class explains the propensity to geographical movement, residential differentiation, or home ownership.²⁶ We have also established that marital and intergenerational rates of mobility were high across the entire period, thus reconstituting smaller strata and classes quite rapidly, but that demographic class formation occurred among the largest strata, the skilled and the unskilled. Moreover, changes in the volume and pattern of worklife mobility correlated with political change.²⁷

The Caversham researchers also expected to find similar levels of residential segregation by class to those found by urban historians and sociologists in Canada, the United States, and Britain. Australian historians claim similar levels historically but the claims have never been based on empirical work. We knew that there had never been tenements or row houses but were surprised to find labourers as likely to own their own homes as merchants, that labourers lived on every street and in every neighbourhood, and that large employers and professionals were also to be found scattered across the urban landscape. Nor did we find any tendency to increased rigidity across the period 1890–1940. The proportions varied, of course, usually in ways consistent with conventional wisdom. Hence Kensington, an industrial suburb, had a higher proportion of labourers and small cottages and a lower proportion of professionals and large houses than St Clair, long considered a watering hole for the well-to-do. We also found complex patterns of mixing in the membership of voluntary organisations, including churches.²⁸ Nor was there much tendency to clustering on the basis of religion or ethnicity. Even Catholics, Jews and Maori scattered, and in time so did Lebanese and Chinese. We also found very high rates of cross-class intermarriage, low rates of intergenerational inheritance, and that the white-collar stratum was recruited overwhelmingly from the working class through both worklife and intergenerational mobility. These levels of upwards movement and cross-class mixing help explain the speed with which the achievements of the Lib-Lab governments, and later Labour, came to be accepted, if not the pragmatic radicalism of Dunedin's conservatives.

Whether similar levels of mixing and mobility would be found in more affluent suburbs or in the other cities remains unknown. James Watson's work on Christchurch, supposedly the most English and class-riven of New Zealand's main towns, certainly indicates high levels of self-employment among the skilled and high levels of working-class home ownership among both the skilled and the unskilled.²⁹ Michael Smith's more recent work on residential differentiation in Christchurch also suggests more complex processes of mixing than historians previously believed possible. In so far as we have evidence, Christchurch confirms the results for southern Dunedin.³⁰ One suspects that a careful analysis of suburban Wellington and Auckland would come to similar conclusions, but the inner-city district in Auckland certainly differed in the early part of the century because of the concentration of single young male immigrants, boarding houses, and pubs.³¹

In southern Dunedin, one of Chapman's poor working-class electorates, worklife mobility rates appear to have been decisive in framing the political mobilisation of working men. In the period 1902–11, the unskilled alone failed to enjoy the opportunities for worklife occupational mobility that all other strata enjoyed. It is not coincidental that this was the very period in which southern Dunedin's unskilled both unionised and swung their votes to Labour or Socialist candidates instead of radical Liberals. Although we lack comparably precise data relating to the availability of housing and the prospects for home ownership, the very fact that the inability of working men to buy homes of their own became a political issue in these same years – and one that the Liberals tried but failed to solve – suggests that the inaccessibility of home ownership, if not the rising costs of renting, compounded the sense of grievance created by the fact that the unskilled alone failed to enjoy the opportunities that were so abundant in this period.³²

The barriers confronting the unskilled help explain (a) their mobilisation into unions, and (b) the enthusiasm of those unions for socialist rather than Lib-Lab strategies. Although we have no comparable studies of worklife mobility for other communities in this period, the result for southern Dunedin is consistent with the findings of Fairburn and Haslett (who have analysed the working-class vote for Labour in ten provincial towns between 1911 and 1951). The evidence from southern Dunedin helps to explain why the unskilled throughout New Zealand became more susceptible to appeals based on class; it also indicates the need to undertake similar studies of other communities.³³

The evidence from southern Dunedin and from Fairburn and Haslett's conservatism project suggest that the older view that the working class defected from the Liberals and began voting for Labour needs substantial revision. Further, as Steve McLeod has shown, outside the odd rural electorate dominated by mining or forestry, the rural working class gave little support to Labour before 1935. As Fairburn and Haslett have shown, even in the provincial towns, where unionism was usually weak, both the skilled and the unskilled remained pretty much in the Liberal camp, as did many masters and artisans, professionals and managers, and the great majority of Catholics.³⁴ (Maori remained overwhelmingly rural in this period but usually voted Liberal and ignored appeals based on class.)³⁵ Even in the main towns it seems clear, based on southern Dunedin, that men in un-unionised skilled trades, mostly concentrated in the handicraft sector, where few trades were large enough to sustain any form of union (although it took only 15 men to form one), continued to support the Liberals, the party that had largely accomplished their political mobilisation in the first place. Small masters and skilled men also dominated the local Liberal Party's electorate committees. As several issues weakened loyalty to the Liberals, such as reform of the public service, Fairburn and Haslett's evidence indicates that Reform rather than Labour-Socialist benefited most.³⁶

In short, the evidence from southern Dunedin and Fairburn and Haslett's working-class conservatism project suggests that the electoral base for independent and socialist Labour in the period 1908–16 tended to be the unionised unskilled men in the main towns and miners. A minority of unionised skilled men aligned themselves, especially those in crafts being destroyed by technological change and 'dilution'. Thanks to the dominance of small product markets, if not the Arbitration Court, such crafts were few in number. It also needs to be remembered that Massey and his Reform Party appealed to manual workers or 'sane labour', to use Massey's term. Reform's promise of 'A Square Deal for Labour' echoed faithfully the platform of the great Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Progressives, the most radical pro-labour party in the United States save the tiny Socialist Party.³⁷ Armed with such a policy Reform made substantial inroads into the Liberal's working-class electoral base. Most workers were un-unionised. Even in industries with strong unions in a strongly pro-union city like Dunedin, such as the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, rarely recruited more than 50 to 60 per cent of their potential members. Outside the main towns, where unionism was weaker and class differentiation more blurred (Timaru and Napier apparently excepted), Massey made even more extensive inroads into the Liberals' manual working-class base. In 1911–19, Fairburn and Haslett found, Reform out-performed Labour in winning manual working-class votes from the Liberals. Even in the 1920s, when economic issues often dominated the political agenda, Labour only out-performed Reform in its bid to win manual working-class votes in six of the ten provincial towns.³⁸ It was even more dramatic in southern Dunedin. The highest worklife mobility rates of the period 1890–1940 occurred in 1919–28, the years 1922–25 being especially fluid, and this time the unskilled supped at the table. Labour's forward march come to an abrupt halt in Dunedin. That it came to a halt throughout urban New Zealand suggests that similar shifts may have occurred elsewhere.³⁹

The Caversham project's analysis substantially modifies the older interpretation and at the same time compels us to be more self-conscious in using the term working class let alone assigning it explanatory power. Class remained a significant dimension of society but in southern Dunedin it was less rigid and constraining than it had been in England, Scotland or Ireland. Our analysis of intergenerational and marital mobility rates has established the fluidity of urban-industrial society in New Zealand. By and large class was about one-third as important in structuring your choice of spouse or job than it was in England at that time. Once you had chosen a job, of course, it largely determined your income, life-style, and life chances, although thanks to a comprehensive system of free education and the porous nature of most trades and professions your children enjoyed opportunities that remained the stuff of day dreams in the Old World. Not that anyone wanted this opportunity to generate new inequalities comparable to those of the United States. That, indeed, became one of Labour's most effective political mantras during the war years and helped create the common ground on which revolutionary socialists teamed up with Fabians, radical Lib-Labs and Christian socialists to form the second New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP).⁴⁰

The diffusion of socialist ideas also legitimised the politics of class. In the 1890s the word came to represent an explanation for, and an indictment of, inequality, seen as the inevitable consequence of capitalism and a justification for the Liberal Party's policy of state socialism. Only in the 1890s did a few Fabians and Christian socialists deny the centrality of the working class to the social transformation they all hungered for. By 1910 class had become a potent idea and a source of identity as well for a sizeable minority of people. Middle-class men and women who believed in the revolution now joined the proletariat. One thinks of E.J.B. Allen, the Oxbridge linguist, or F.P. Walsh, a dairy farmer's son; in his case justice for Ireland served in part as the catalyst for his conversion. Small masters, on the other hand, now often felt like imposters within the labour movement.⁴¹

The defeats of 1912–13 consolidated a powerful sense of class, especially among the unskilled and the miners of the North Island. The Reform Government's use of armed specials to smash the strike and the Red Fed unions began two critical processes: rapprochement within the unionised working class and polarisation between Labour and Reform. The political polarisation is well understood, although Reform's success in wooing working-class voters has remained a well kept secret. Rapprochement within the unionised working class has been better understood but few realise either how partial it was or that it resulted in the isolation and then ostracism of the Wobblies on the syndicalist left and their most bitter enemies on the anti-syndicalist right. Industrial Unionist⁴² and Voice of Labour⁴³ both collapsed at about the same time. Only within this context did the War provide the catalyst, and the United Federation of Labour⁴⁴ the organisational means, for finally laying the foundation for unity.⁴⁵

The New Zealand Labour Party and its Slow Rise to Power

In Easter 1916, with conscription just around the corner, the leaders of most factions on the left gathered in Wellington to form the second New Zealand Labour Party. According to Jack Vowles, Guild Socialism allowed the warring tendencies that had fought so bitterly in the previous decade to reach rapprochement. This may have been true among many activists, but it was not the whole story. De Leonite activists, such as Harry Holland, only joined the NZLP because of their belief that the War had made capitalism's final collapse imminent and working-class unity therefore imperative. During the post-war wave of industrial unrest the revisionist syndicalism of that great theorist of revolutionary industrial unionism, E.J.B. Allen, was much more influential among rank-and-file De Leonites than either G.D.H. Cole or guild socialism. Some old De Leonites, Harry Holland being the best known in part because he became leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, reaped where Allen sowed, for most of his old ideological bed-fellows ended up in Marxian Associations or the embryonic Communist Party.⁴⁶

While historians long engrossed themselves in the Labour Party's ideological struggles from 1916 until 1940, and particularly the debates about land policy and arbitration, it has long been overlooked that the manual working class in the four main towns had already created itself. Indeed in Dunedin and Christchurch that process had been largely completed by 1911. In Wellington and Auckland, too, the process was well advanced by 1911, although the dominance of the Red Feds in the northern cities divided their local movements and thus made it difficult to achieve local, let alone national, unity.⁴⁷ Despite various factional fights, the processes of demographic class formation erased most of the distinctions between skilled and unskilled, distinctions still central in England in that period. In southern Dunedin, the great strike of 1913 ushered in a period of very low upwards worklife mobility and very high downwards mobility, particularly for the skilled and unskilled. Precisely why this was the case is not entirely clear, but if this was a national trend it helps to explain: (a) the further surge in union growth that occurred over the next ten years until the country almost rivalled Australia as the second most unionised society in the world⁴⁸ and (b) the labour movement's politicisation around issues relating to equality of opportunity, symbolised (in part) by attacks on war profiteering, 'Mr Fat', etc. In these years, in short, the labour movement moved sharply left while continuing to grow.⁴⁹ The last years of the War and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution accelerated this process.⁵⁰

Coincidentally from 1916 onwards the Irish Catholics began aligning more closely with Labour. Partly this was because Sir Joseph Ward, a devout Catholic as well as the Leader of the Liberals, entered a coalition with Massey, thus siding with the class and the religious enemy. (Massey was an Ulster Orangeman and farmer before he became the hammer of the Red Feds.) The introduction of conscription, and especially the conscription of the Catholic teaching orders, rekindled ancient paranoia about persecution. The British government's brutal reaction to the uprising of Easter 1916, together with the explosion of anti-Catholicism, hastened the process of re-alignment.⁵¹ There is no evidence of this process in southern Dunedin, although Dunedin itself was a hot bed of Sinn Fein influence.⁵² The appointment of yet another bishop from Sydney to the Dunedin diocese doubtless consolidated the alliance of Catholic church and Labour Party, an alliance that the Parliamentary Labour Party's leaders actively sought to consolidate in the period 1916–22. What proportion of Labour's increased electoral strength came from Irish Catholics we cannot tell, but that many of them moved their political allegiance seems clear. In the dioceses for Auckland and Dunedin the relationship was especially close.⁵³

The rest of the story can be told more quickly. Between 1919 and 1928 southern Dunedin enjoyed the highest levels of occupational worklife mobility of the entire period from 1902 to 1938. Labour's forward electoral march, as we noted earlier, halted.⁵⁴ There seems little doubt that the close fit between low worklife mobility rates and support for Labour suggests that W.H. Oliver was right, many years ago, to argue that voters usually responded to issues of class in terms of opportunity (even if he failed to identify the actual mechanisms at work).⁵⁵ The most visible frontiers of opportunity were two: the chance to own one's own home and the opportunity to set up on one's own account. The building trades, forgotten by God and overlooked by the first industrial revolution (and largely overlooked by the second one as well), boomed in the 1920s. The relative ease with which the men of the building trades could short-circuit the stratification system, either by setting up on their own account or buying their own homes, served as a clear marker of opportunity. By 1928 home ownership had risen from c. 45 per cent in 1916 to almost 60 per cent in South Dunedin and over 80 per cent in St Kilda.⁵⁶ This was a national trend, strongly encouraged by Reform, and it confirms Miles Fairburn's explanation for Labour's failure to advance in the 1920s.⁵⁷

And then the storm came. Rising unemployment, although not high compared to such industrialised societies as New South Wales or Massachusetts, hit the least skilled, the young and the unmarried first. By 1932–33 unemployment's cruel sweep had begun to hurt the skilled, the married family men, and even white-collar and professional men. Unemployment and the fear of unemployment, not to mention the government's apparent refusal to solve the problem, strengthened the commitment of the fast-shrinking ranks of the unionised to Labour. More significantly it politicised the unorganised whether in handicrafts or industries. As Steve McLeod has shown, it was not the dairy farmers who carried so many farming seats for Labour in the 1935 election but the unorganised rural workers. It was the same in the provincial towns and even in some suburban seats. Men in small handicraft trades, even many white-collar men, also often swung to Labour even if they retained their hostility to unionism.⁵⁸ Fear of unemployment galvanised men and women too. So also did the sense of a growing gulf between the rich and the poor. These shifts in political alignment, combined with the split in the ranks of the Coalition government, allowed Labour its victory in 1935. That split multiplied Labour's success in winning more votes than any other party into a massive Parliamentary majority.⁵⁹

Labour in office quickly won the support of the unorganised manual working class and developed new policies, notably in housing and social security, which appealed both to the wives and daughters of workers and to women more generally.⁶⁰ Through its radical and dramatic policies, and by means of compulsory unionism, Labour extended and strengthened its political base. As Melanie Nolan has remarked, the centralisation of power, both in the union movement and within the party, marginalised women within the party even more than had been the case, although whether that began to impact on Labour's ability to win votes from women is not known.⁶¹ By dint of its reforms, and compulsory unionism, together with the formation of a unified Federation of Labour, the party also made inroads into the National Party's working-class support (and to a lesser extent its middle-class support). As Fairburn and Haslett show, National's rising popularity during the 1940s reflected its ability to recapture that broader base of support that Reform had commanded in 1911–19 and again in 1925–28. By contrast Labour, unlike National, did best when it became 'more of a working-class party'. It was not a haemorrhage of dairy farmers or even middle-class voters that weakened Labour in the 1940s, as Chapman argued, but the loss of working-class voters. We do not have data from southern Dunedin to use, unfortunately, except to note that the unpopularity of the aggressively militant unions in the late 1940s saw St Kilda – the new name for Dunedin South – swing from Labour to National for the first and last time in its lengthy history. That suggests confirmation of the Fairburn-Haslett thesis.⁶²

A New Understanding of Class

Thanks to the first Labour government, class-based voting became more important than it had ever been before and underpinned the urban electoral system for another 50 years. As we have seen, however, this outcome reflected the complex interplay of cultural, psychological, institutional, economic, social and political variables, and the way in which local, national and even international events impacted. Across the period from the 1880s until the 1930s, class by itself, even in the main towns, only possessed explanatory power when we disentangle or disaggregate the following: the occupational structure; the degree of demographic class formation; the extent of occupational and social closure; the level of unionisation, if not the nature of those unions, itself not unrelated to the local or regional product and labour markets. All need to be kept analytically distinct while allowing for personal and ideological influence to affect outcomes, and indeed for events such as strikes, changes in government or public policy, and not least such global events as wars and depressions. Less expected, perhaps, is the remarkable variability in the relationship between class and voting behaviour in the first half of the twentieth century. Even within the ten provincial towns marked and enduring differences existed, the class basis of voting being weakest in Hastings and strongest in Napier, adjacent towns. Less surprising were the variations over time and between parties, although the strength of Reform and then National among manual workers will compel some to dust off their tool kits relating to false consciousness. Others will find support for their belief that New Zealand was a classless society although, in truth, the electoral alignment created between 1935 and 1938 survived as the stable basis for New Zealand politics until the 1980s.

To emphasise complexity and variability is not to deny class, any more than the identification of high levels of mobility disproves the existence of stratification. As a rule even in the ten provincial towns, the higher the class the greater the proportion of votes for the right; the lower the class the higher the proportion of votes for the left. This became even more marked during that long period (1946–72) when social class largely explained electoral behaviour in towns larger than 8,000 persons, a period of unparalleled party and parliamentary stability.⁶³ Across that same period, of course, both parties shrank in size, electoral support for the two main parties fell, whether measured as a proportion of valid votes cast, the proportion of voters who registered, or the support of the country's age-eligible population. And these trends gathered momentum from 1975 onwards although first-past-the-post continued to deliver two entrenched parties and stable government.⁶⁴

The declining legitimacy of the two party system also saw a sharp decline in class-based party identification and electoral behaviour. In part this reflected the re-structuring of the class structure as old industries such as mining declined, and the service class or salariat rapidly expanded. Not only did some industries that had long sustained a vigorous tradition of unionism virtually disappear, but in others, notably shipping and waterfront work, technological change greatly reduced the size of the workforce and the political muscle of those unions. Consumption also began to rival production as a source of social differentiation and education increasingly determined both life-styles and life chances, if not status and class. A demographic re-structuring also occurred. Urbanisation of Maori and an influx of Pacific Islanders re-made the unskilled. Married women also poured into the workforce. None of these groups was well represented either in the union movement or the Labour Party. Briefly the Communist Party and the Socialist Unity Party flourished, arming Muldoon's populist appeal to anti-union elements. The rise of feminism and the Maori renaissance challenged older left-wing identities and ideologies. So did the growing salience of environmental issues (the Values Party which contested the 1972 election with some success, was the world's first green party.) The class system, no less than the division of labour in industrial-capitalist societies, ceased to be seen as the only significant source of inequality and oppression. The decline in class politics culminated in the 1990s, according to Jack Vowles, when occupational 'class effects' became 'quite modest'.⁶⁵

Perhaps it was always the case, as Giovani Sartori pointed out many years ago, that political parties had been crucial to the creation of a sense of class consciousness, especially at the national level, a conclusion recently reinforced by the comparative analysis of Australia and Britain conducted by Leighton James and Ray Markey.⁶⁶ Here, as elsewhere, it was the unionised unskilled who first found such parties attractive, and because of their numbers, not to mention their concentration in certain large industries, they became the dynamic that forged a sense of class and in doing so re-shaped industrial relations and the nation's political history for almost a century (1890–1987). The skilled – even the unionised skilled, and even men in general purpose unions such as the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, did not always follow suit, and it took the 'Great Depression' to convince the un-unionised manual workers, whether skilled or unskilled, to vote Labour. Although syndicalists and communists were often influential, especially within the union movement, non-unionised manual workers were more significant in determining both the extent of Labour's support and the speed of its advance to office. Only in 1935–38 did Labour finally create a political system centred on class, but short-term victory came at the expense of long-term failure, for the party won only two of the 12 elections between 1949 and 1981. Simultaneously Labour ceased to be a party of the manual working class and class-based voting declined.⁶⁷ The dismantling of the first Labour government's command economy, largely carried out by a Labour government (1984–90) more influenced by new Left perspectives than old Left certainties, created the basis for a new political system in which class was but one of several significant potential sources of cleavage.

The View from Across the Ditch

In the first decade of the last century, a series of authors, William Pember Reeves and Robert McNab amongst them, explored the connections between Australia and New Zealand. Engaging as these commentaries are, they often take the form of assigning various roles to junior and senior partners. McNab asserted New Zealand began its European history as a fragment of New South Wales, a claim met with indignation by those protective of Wakefieldian heritage and disdainful of Australia's convict stain. In Reeves' seven colonies of Australasia, New Zealand's role is sometimes (though certainly not always) reactive, mirroring the initiatives of a larger and more powerful neighbour.⁶⁸ In part, the Australian section of this article is intended to redress that historiographical imbalance. Erik Olssen's nuanced study of 'the complex interplay of cultural, psychological, institutional, economic, social and political variables' which shaped the making of the New Zealand working class deserves to stand alone, and not just for the insights it offers. The fact of the matter is that Australian historians have not embarked on detailed analysis of worklife mobility, home ownership, or residential segregation attempted by the Caversham project. Indeed, such careful demographic studies are usually abdicated to sociologists, Janet McCalman's vivid portrait of Richmond, or Bradley Bowden's window into working-class Brisbane notwithstanding.⁶⁹

There is simply not space in this essay to chart the way class was formed and reconfigured in Australia's colonial or 'postcolonial' history. Rather, this part of the article will take the form of a commentary, identifying Australian points of intersection with New Zealand scholarship and cautiously canvassing areas of further inquiry. Olssen's study suggests four major points of reference all of which are central to the way Australians and New Zealanders have understood the role of class and its role in shaping social formations; namely 'the under researched and contentious role' of the colonial middle class; the need to view the unskilled 'apart from the working class' and to investigate the class allegiance of 'skilled tradesmen and artisans many of them self employed or small masters'; the labour party's complex relationship with liberalism and its attempts to mobilise rural workers; and finally 'the shortcomings of the Arbitration Court', an institution Australia and New Zealand have uniquely held in common.

These four areas of discussion will be centred on four decades bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The period 1880–1920 is generally considered formative of working-class culture and politics in Australasia, but of course the relationship between Australia and New Zealand is far older and enduring. There has been, as Reeves first suggested, a constant exchange of ideas, institutions and individuals across the Tasman. From as early as the 1820s, sealers and whalers plied the waters of Australia and New Zealand; salty pioneers of what Rollo Arnold called 'the world of Trans Tasman Labour'. They were followed by miners and shearers, pursuing a near continuous rush across Australasia or working the season from Queensland to Otago. One wave of trans-Tasman migration after another has proved a sensitive barometer of economic opportunity and decline on either side of the Tasman.⁷⁰ In the process Australians and New Zealanders have built 'a social and cultural unity', forging many of the institutions that bind our respective histories together, or tore us apart for that matter. Recent work on the Great Strike of 1890 explores the powerful calling of class, gender and community that committed Australian and New Zealand unions to common struggle and common defeat.⁷¹ Having said that, difference as well as similarity has always defined the trans-Tasman relationship. It is marked from the opening paragraphs of Erik Olssen's discussion. 'It was axiomatic that New Zealand was [founded as] a capitalist society ... an outpost of Britain with a normal class structure'. Such a statement could never be made of Australia. Our origins as a penal economy, the quasi-feudal nature of assignment and the coercive apparatus of the state hardly fostered a 'normal class structure'. Indeed, in one of the more tortuous New Left panegyrics, Humphrey McQueen denied the existence of a working class altogether – and not just for the convict period either. From the moment of white foundation, Australia has followed a parallel but divergent historical trajectory from New Zealand, a different pattern of pastoralism and land holding, metropolitan dominance in Australia (as opposed to rural/small town nature of New Zealand) the earlier development of manufacturing and servicing industries, the different gender and ethnic composition of the workforce, the creation of industries unknown in Aotearoa/New Zealand all bear witness to different destinies and a different experience of class relations. Even so the salient themes of Erik Olssen's essay merit revisiting; they signal common areas of interest and inquiry for Australasia's labour historians.⁷²

As is the case in New Zealand, the middle class has long eluded Australian labour historians. Partly this is a reflection of Marxian orthodoxies at the centre of our discipline. In conventional Marxist schema there is not a sizable or stable middle class at all, but a working and a ruling class, defined by their relationship to the means of production and locked in inevitable opposition. The term 'middle class' sits more comfortably with Weberian theories of status and social stratification. Inclined to mechanistic Marxism and keen to interpret Australian history as an epic struggle between the haves and the have nots, much of this was anathema to the Old Left.⁷³ The middle class appears as a descriptive rather than theoretical category in their writings and is usually attended by inverted commas.

The finest historical study of the middle class in Australia remains John Rickard's Class and Politics. An ambitious survey of class mobilisation from the late nineteenth century to the early commonwealth, it consciously shifted the focus away from the union movement (too long a staple of labour history) towards employer groupings that combined to crush the 1890s strikes.⁷⁴ But class for Rickard is no simple dichotomous paradigm. His exploration of the social and intellectual wellsprings of liberalism anticipates more recent historiography; his subtle handling of divisions within the middle class belied a conception of labour's opponents as a single monolithic bloc.⁷⁵ Recent contributions by McCalman and Moore in particular, have again alerted us to the fraught role played by the middle class in the shaping of class relations but this arguably remains a neglected area of labour history. It is clear (as Rickard himself observed) that 'the middle class is a problem, both historically and theoretically ... a problem that will not go away by ignoring it'.⁷⁶

A second problem, or rather challenge, facing labour historians is the relative contribution skilled and unskilled workers have made to labour politics. Skill itself is a problematic concept, raising issues of historical contingency, class and gender signalled by Olssen's discussion.⁷⁷ Nonetheless skill has remained an organising motif for labour history, and the rise of unskilled and craft unionism a particular focus of study.

Again the earliest labour historiography evoked a simple but persuasive dichotomy. Borrowing from the work of British scholars, Robin Gollan, Eric Fry and others in the 1950s and 1960s divided the labour movement into the old and new unions. The former was dominated by what was called a 'labour aristocracy': craft unionists working for the most part in the building, printing and metal trades, these men enjoyed better wages, conditions and prospects than the ranks of unskilled labour. Like any aristocracy they were conscious of their privileges and traditions. Conservative, 'complacent and self satisfied', they were either indifferent to politics or a timid ally of middle-class liberals who presumed to represent the 'working man'. The new unions, by contrast, were the moving force behind labour's 'turn' to politics. Mass unions, based in the pastoral, maritime and mining industries, they lacked the crucial monopoly of skill which awarded craftsmen a bargaining power in the workplace. Instead they organised as widely as possible within and across occupations, adopting a militant program of strike action to improve conditions for their members and recognising the potential of political action. In the canons of labour history they became the bearers of a radical, egalitarian, and stridently nationalistic tradition.⁷⁸

Olssen's work (and the Caversham project in particular) invites us to revise these simplistic dichotomies, as do a new generation of Australian labour historians. Ray Markey's monumental study of labour and industry in New South Wales confirms that the aristocracy of labour retained few of the benefits it may have enjoyed in Britain. Conversely, it has been argued that the privileges they held dear gave them something to defend, fostering a form of class pride and militancy. In any event, the age of the labour aristocrat was over. By the beginning of the 1890s, the introduction of new technology and changes to the productive process eroded the very skills on which their status depended. In an era of rapid change and conflict, craft unionists certainly came to question many of the social arrangements of colonial society.⁷⁹ Just as the old unionism is in need of re-evaluation, so too is the new. Its most celebrated attributes are open to serious question. The work of Markey and Merritt, in particular, suggests that the new unions were neither more 'political' nor more militant than the 'old': some even retained the benefit functions associated with an older style of unionism. More importantly, mass unions like the shearers were not entirely the vanguard of the Australian working class. Free selectors struggling to 'make a go of it' on the land made up much of the Shearers Union membership. Land ownership and an independent working life elevated these bush men to an indeterminate social strata poised between wage labour and self-employment.⁸⁰ The role of skill in shaping class-consciousness was again revisited in a series of papers presented to the Australian Society for the study of Labour Histroy's most recent national conference in Melbourne.⁸¹ As we develop an understanding of class alert to its 'complexity and variability' this will remain a vital area of inquiry.

Studies like the Caversham project suggest ways to recover the social complexity of class and looking 'outside the labour movement' (as Olssen puts it) also signals new areas of inquiry. In his plenary lecture to the Ninth National Labour History Conference in Sydney, Marcel van der Linden drew our attention to a largely forgotten workforce, those outside or even antagonistic to the claims of organised labour, the 'lumpen proletariat'. Labour historians have barely begun the exploration of the intermediate economy, a 'twilight world' of scavenging, recycling and theft poised on fringes of the paid workforce .⁸² Nor do we have a very good understanding of that vast and impoverished reserve army of labour who have continuously threatened wages and condition on both sides of the Tasman. Olssen noted that in New Zealand the unskilled are too often portrayed as the 'dinosaurs of the industrial world', cut adrift from their class and community. By much the same token Australia's lumpenproletariat has had until now a strangely classless character and (as van der Linder argues) only a broader, more inclusive class analysis (akin perhaps to the Caversham project) will restore them to our vision.⁸³

Australian historians have been more attentive to the conflicting claims of liberalism and populism on the character of the labour movement. Both movements have a long and often contested lineage in labour history but two important studies have a direct bearing on this discussion.⁸⁴ The first is Frank Bongiorno's reappraisal of the debt the Victorian labour movement owed to the liberal tradition. From this it drew a whole political vocabulary, carrying 'the old populist idea of a union of the productive and enlightened classes against class privilege' into a new political context. Bongiorno's study reminds us that labour historians have 'often paid insufficient attention to the role of language in the construction of social and political identity [and the processes of] class formation'.⁸⁵ One finds an echo of that argument in Olssen's careful analysis of the lure of liberalism for working class New Zealanders. Ray Markey's study of populism in NSW is less concerned with the politics of language than 'the distinct social and economic trends' that fostered labourism and shaped the character of working-class politics. Like Olssen's study it brings a complex social mix into consideration, recreating the struggles and alliances of displaced urban intellectuals, and small rural landholders ('bearers' of an 'agrarian populist radicalism'), centred around the AWU. Despite different methodological approaches all three authors reach essentially the same conclusion. 'Labor ... had to build alliances within 'the working classes' as well as between labour and other classes. Its core constituency was not delivered to it ready made; it had to be won'.⁸⁶ Arguably this strong sense of historical contingency will inform all subsequent work on labour politics. It addresses many of the shortcomings of older (and narrower) 'institutional' perspectives.⁸⁷

One of the labour movement's greatest victories in the late nineteenth century (though one shared with its liberal allies) was the emergence of an arbitration system unique to Australasia. At the time, many welcomed it. Created in the bitter aftermath of the strikes and lockouts of the nineties, arbitration promised to 'ameliorate and institutionalise' class conflict; it was (as William Pember Reeves remarked at the time) a vindication of the labour movements' faith in the state.⁸⁸ That faith has sometimes proved misplaced. Labour movements on both sides of the Tasman have often (though certainly not always) bemoaned the 'shortcomings' of the arbitration system. It is not just that arbitration curbed industrial militancy or that it served to professionalise a labour leadership increasingly distant from its rank and file.⁸⁹ A host of feminist historians have alerted us to the way arbitration institutionalised male privilege, ensuring that in both Australia and New Zealand the labour movement represented the gendered interests of men.⁹⁰ It seems remarkable that a hundred years after the Harvester Judgement, so crucial a state experiment and so powerful an expression of class, gender and for that matter racial interests, should still lack an extended history, one not just of the tribunals but also of the wider social and industrial implications of arbitration. Perhaps that is a project to which labour historians on both sides of the Tasman should now turn.

In conclusion, Erik Olssen's work (and that of his collaborators) invites us to reconsider institutions and ideologies that shape and express the objective conditions of class in Australia and New Zealand. But it does more than that. Studies of communities like Caversham widen the canvas of labour history, presenting class (as Elizabeth Faue recently put it) as 'a subjective experience', malleable and complex, and set deep in the 'private' world of home, family and neighbourhood. This 'subjective dimension of the working class past' is a world labour historians have yet to fully recover: the 'complex patterns' Olssen has uncovered at Caversham has helped equip us for that task.⁹¹

Erik Olssen, ONZM, PhD (Duke), FRSNZ, is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Otago. He has published extensively on labour history in the United States and New Zealand, including John A. Lee (1977), The Red Feds (1988), Building the New World (1995), and (with Maureen Hickey), Class and Occupation (1995). A co-authored book on marital, worklife, and intergenerational occupational mobility, which explains the high levels of class formation within an open social structure, entitled An Accidental Utopia?, is forthcoming from the University of Otago Press. He is currently working on a history of New Zealand.
<Erik.Olssen@stonebow.otago.ac.nz>

Bruce Scates holds the chair of history and Australian Studies at Monash University. He is the Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies and has written widely on trans-Tasman relations. A former lecturer at the University of Auckland, he will deliver the Keith Sinclair Memorial lecture there in 2008.
<Bruce.Scates@arts.monash.edu.au>

Endnotes

^*� This article is a combination of two essays. The first is a revised version of a paper delivered by Professor Olssen to the comparative labour history conference held in Auckland in 2007. The second paper, prepared by Professor Scates, provides a reflective commentary. The combined essays were peer reviewed for Labour History by two anonymous referees and both authors thank these and other readers for their comments.

^1.� Leighton James and Raymond Markey, 'Class and labour: the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party compared', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 23–41.

^2.� Both projects are more fully discussed in Miles Fairburn and Erik Olssen, 'Introduction', in Miles Fairburn and Erik Olssen (eds), Class, Gender and the Vote: Historical Perspectives from New Zealand, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2005, pp. 9–12.

^3.� This viewpoint owed much to the remarkable synthesis written by the first Fulbright Fellow, a political scientist, Leslie Lipson, The Politics of Equality: New Zealand's Adventures in Democracy, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1948.

^4.� R.M. Chapman, The significance of the 1928 General Election: a study in certain trends in New Zealand politics in the nineteen twenties, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1948 and several published works in which he deployed his typology, especially The Political Scene, 1919–1931, Heinemann, Auckland, 1969 and 'From Labour to National', in W.H. Oliver and B.R. Williams (eds), The Oxford History of New Zealand, Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1981, pp. 333–7.

^5.� This had been implicit in the belief that New Zealand constituted a new and 'Better Britain', but was spelt out explicitly and caustically by J.C. Beaglehole, New Zealand: A Short History, Allen & Unwin, London, 1936. The language of class was often used but rarely in a systematic way. There were occasional exceptions: see Stevan Eldred-Grigg, A Southern Gentry: New Zealanders Who Inherited the Earth, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1980 and Jim McAloon, 'Class in colonial New Zealand: towards a historiographical rehabilitation', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 38, no. 1, April 2004, pp. 3–21.

^6.� The best overview was written by two sociologists, see David G. Pearson and David C. Thorns, Eclipse of Equality: Social Stratification in New Zealand, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983, chs. 2–3. For more on the occupational census see Erik Olssen and Maureen Hickey, Class and Occupation: The New Zealand Reality, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2005, ch. 2.

^7.� An impressive body of work undertaken by Keith Sinclair and several outstanding students established this view: Sinclair summarised this work in 'The Significance of the Scarecrow Ministry', in R.M. Chapman and Keith Sinclair (eds), Studies of a Small Democracy: Essays in Honour of Willis Airey, Paul's Book Arcade, Hamilton, 1963, pp. 102–26.

^8.� The Maritime Strike and the mobilisation still cry out for an Australasian approach. For examples of what is possible see Bruce Scates, 'Mobilizing Manhood: Gender and the Great Strike in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand', Gender & History, vol. 9, no. 2, August 1997, pp. 285–309 and James Bennett, 'Rats and Revolutionaries': The Labour Movement in Australia and New Zealand 1890–1940, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2004, ch. 1.

^9.� Dunedin's small size in itself and in relation to the colony, where it was but one of four major towns, together with the weakness of 'bush' unionism, made the local Labour Party (later the Workers Political Committee) unable to achieve a national presence. See also Ray Markey, The Making of the Labour Party in New South Wales, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 1988, ch. 1 and J.B. Dalton, 'An interpretative survey: the Queensland labour movement', in D.J. Murphy, R.B. Joyce and Colin A. Hughes (eds), Prelude to Power: The Rise of the Labour Party in Queensland 1885–1915, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1970, pp. 3–27.

^10.� The best synthesis remains David Hamer, The New Zealand Liberals: The Years of Power, 1891–1912, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1988, especially chs. 1–2 but for the role of unions J.D. Salmond, New Zealand Labour's Pioneering Days, Progressive Books, Auckland, 1950, ch. 9 has yet to be superseded. For developments in Otago as well as Dunedin see John Angus, City and Country, PhD thesis, University of Otago, 1977, vol. I , and Erik Olssen, Building the New World Work: Politics and Society in Caversham, 1880s-1920s, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1995, pp. 158–99. For Christchurch see Jim McAloon, 'Radical Christchurch', in John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall (eds), Southern Capital: Christchurch, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2000, pp. 164–70.

^11.� Miles Fairburn and Stephen J. Haslett, 'How far did class determine voting in New Zealand general elections, 1911–1951?', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 39, no. 2, Oct. 2005, p. 221.

^12.� Fairburn and Haslett wrongly infer from Olssen's discussion of the importance of artisan radicalism within Liberalism that only artisans or skilled workers voted Liberal; Fairburn and Haslett, 'How far did class determine voting?', p. 220.

^13.� For the claim about the decisive importance of the knights see Robert E. Weir, 'Whose left/who's left? The Knights of Labour and radical progressivism', in Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (eds), On the Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2002, pp. 21–38. For Seddon's visit to Rome see R.M. Burdon, King Dick: A Biography of Richard John Seddon, Whitcomb &Tombs, Christchurch, 1955, pp. 204–5.

^14.� See Barry Gustafson, Labour's Path to Political Independence: The Origins and Establishment of the New Zealand Labour Party 1900–1919, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1980, ch. 1; H.O. Roth, 'The New Zealand Socialist Party', Political Science, vol. 9, no. 1, March 1957, pp. 51–60; and V.J. Smith, 'Gospel of hope or gospel of plunder': socialism from the mid-1890s up to and including the Blackball Strike of 1908, BA (Hons) dissertation, Massey University, 1976.

^15.� The best study of them remains R.K. Newman, Liberal policy and the left wing, 1908–11: a study of middle-class radicalism in New Zealand, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1965, although he provides little on Christchurch. McAloon, 'Radical Christchurch', virtually ignores the 'left Liberals. The best study of Non-Conformist radicalism and socialism in Christchurch remains Jane Tolerton, Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout, Penguin, Auckland, 1992, chs. 3–6; R.M. Burdon, Scholar Errant: A Biography of Professor A.W. Bickerton, The Pegasus Press, Christchurch, [1956]; and Melanie Nolan, Kin: A Collective Biography of a New Zealand Working-Class Family, University of Canterbury Press, Christchurch, 2005, especially pp. 115–20.

^16.� Richard Shannon, The decline and fall of the liberal government: an aspect of New Zealand's political development, MA, University of Auckland, 1953; Newman, Liberal policy and the left wing, 1908–11; Desmond W. Crowley, The New Zealand Labour Movement, 1894–1913, MA thesis, University of Otago, 1946, and Gustafson's updated thesis, Labour's Path. See also Olssen and Len Richardson, 'The New Zealand labour movement, 1880–1920', in Eric Fry (ed.), Common Cause: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Labour History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986, pp. 1–15.

^17.� G.D.H. Cole, 'New Zealand', in his History of Socialist Thought, Vol. III, Pt. 2, The Second International, 1889–1914, Macmillan, London, 1956, pp. 885–908.

^18.� W.H. Oliver, 'Reeves, Sinclair and the social pattern', in Peter Munz (ed.), The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, A.H. & A.W. Reed for Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 1969, p. 167.

^19.� For uniformitarianism's origins and power see Peter J. Bowler, The Environmental Sciences, Fontana Paperback, London, 1992, pp. 239–45 and passim.

^20.� Some evidence suggests that temperance and prohibition interested women more; see Mary Lee, The Not So Poor, introduced and edited by Annabel Cooper, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1992 and Olssen, Building the New World, pp. 182, 188 and 193 and Erik Olssen, 'Working gender, gendering work', in Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper and Robin Law (eds), Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890–1939, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2003, pp. 85–90.

^21.� F.M.J. Irvine, The revolt of the militant unions: a survey of the trade union revolt against the arbitration system ... 1906–1913, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1937; R.C.J. Stone, A history of trade unionism in New Zealand, 1913–37, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1948; and Noel S. Woods, Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration in New Zealand, Government Printer, Wellington, 1963, chs. 3–5.

^22.� James Holt, Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand: The First Forty Years, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1986.

^23.� Erik Olssen, The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour, 1908–14, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1988.

^24.� Dealt with in two articles: Erik Olssen, 'The origins of the Labour Party: a reconsideration', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 21, no. 1, April 1987, pp. 79–96 and Erik Olssen, 'The Case of the Socialist Party that failed, or further reflections on an American dream', Labor History, vol. 29, no. 4, Fall 1988, pp. 416–49.

^25.� On Caversham and its handicraft trades see Olssen, Building the New World, chs. 3, 5 and 6. For the occupational structure and the project's classification system see Olssen and Hickey, Class and Occupation, chs. 3 and 5, and for the wider social context, with particular attention to the gendering of society, see Brookes, Cooper and Law (eds), Sites of Gender. The following discussion is largely based on analyses forthcoming in Erik Olssen and Clyde Griffen with F.L. Jones, An Accidental Utopia? Social Mobility and the Social Foundations of an Egalitarian Society in Southern Dunedin, 1880–1940, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, forthcoming, chs. 4 and 5.

^26.� See Tom Brooking, Dick Martin, David Thomson and Hamish James, 'The ties that bind: persistence in a New World industrial suburb, 1902–22', Social History, vol. 24, no. 1, January 1999, pp. 55–73; Clyde Griffen, 'The new world working-class suburb revisited: residential differentiation in Caversham, New Zealand', Journal of Urban History, vol. 27, no. 4, May 2001, pp. 420–44; and Penny Isaac and Erik Olssen, 'The justification for Labour's housing scheme: the discourse of the "slum", in Barbara Brookes (ed.), At Home in New Zealand: History, Houses, People, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2000, pp. 115–22. For a summary see Erik Olssen, An Accidental Experiment? The Social Bases of an Egalitarian Society, Hocken Lecture, Dunedin, 2008.

^27.� Olssen, Griffen and Jones, An Accidental Utopia, chs. 5–7, and Erik Olssen and Hamish James, 'Social mobility and class formation: the worklife social mobility of men in a New Zealand suburb, 1902–1928', International Review of Social History, vol. 44, pt. 3, December 1999, pp. 419–49.

^28.� On churches see John Stenhouse, 'Church, occupation and class in Southern Dunedin, 1890–1940', in Fairburn and Olssen (eds), Class, Gender and the Vote, pp. 51–74.

^29.� James Watson, 'An independent working class?', in John E. Martin and Kerry Taylor (eds), Culture and the Labour Movement, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1991, pp. 184–96.

^30.� Michael Smith, 'Residential segregation and the inter-war Christchurch experience', in Fairburn and Olssen (es), Class, Gender an the Vote, pp. 35–50 and for even more conclusive evidence see Smith's thesis, Counting between the willows: measuring residential segregation in Christchurch, 1919 to 1938, MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 2004. Not one out of his 162 calculations met the customary international standard for defining residential segregation.

^31.� Olssen, Red Feds, pp. 108–10.

^32.� See Stephen Kennedy, 'Really concerned men': a history of the Dunedin labourer and his union, 1905–11, BA (Hons) dissertation, University of Otago, 1978, for the best account of the Government's local housing scheme for workers.

^33.� Miles Fairburn and Stephen Haslett, 'Cleavage within the working class? The working-class vote for the Labour Party in New Zealand, 1911–51', Labour History, no. 88, May 2005, pp. 183–214.

^34.� Steve McLeod, 'Did farmers really "lurch towards the Left" in 1935? Reassessing the election of New Zealand's first Labour Government', in Fairburn and Olssen (eds), Class, Gender and the Vote, pp. 143–58, and Fairburn and Haslett, 'Cleavage within the working class?'. Professor Fairburn discussed the evidence relating to Catholics in his keynote address to the conference of W.F. Massey, Massey University, December 2006.

^35.� For later appeals to Maori see Kerry Taylor's innovative essay, '"Potential allies of the working class": the Communist Party of New Zealand and Maori, 1921–1952', in Moloney and Taylor (eds), On the Left, pp. 103–16, and also his earlier one, co-authored with Tom Murray, Joe Tepania and Nora Rameka, 'Towards a history of Maori and trade unions', in. Martin and Taylor (eds), Culture and the Labour Movement.

^36.� Olssen, Building the New World, ch. 6 for the men of the Hillside workshops in Caversham and the union's debt to the Liberals.

^37.� George Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, Harper & Row, New York, 1960. Eugene Debs ran for the Socialist Party in 1912 and scored its highest ever vote.

^38.� Fairburn and Haslett, 'Cleavage within the working class?', p. 228.

^39.� Erik Olssen and F.L. Jones, 'Worklife mobility and class formation', in Olssen, Griffen and Jones, An Accidental Utopia?, ch. 5.

^40.� The rapprochement that resulted in the formation of the second New Zealand Labour Party has attracted considerable attention. See P.J. O'Farrell, 'The formation of the New Zealand Labour Party', Historical Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, May 1962, pp. 190–202; Gustafson, Labour's Path, ch. 8; and Jack Vowles, 'From syndicalism to guild socialism: some neglected aspects of the ideology of the labour movement, 1914–1923', in Martin and Taylor (eds), Culture and the Labour Movement, pp. 283–303.

^41.� For Allen see Olssen, 'W.T. Mills, E.J.B. Allen, J.A. Lee and Socialism in New Zealand', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 1976, pp. 117–21, and for Walsh, see Graeme Hunt, Black Prince: The Biography of Fintan Patrick Walsh, Penguin, Auckland, 2004, chs. 1–3.

^42.� Weekly paper of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

^43.� A hysterically anti-Red Fed paper.

^44.� Formed in the aftermath of the Waihi strike and unifying almost the entire union movement.

^45.� Erik Olssen, 'The long quest to create a stable federation of labour', in Melanie Nolan and Peter Franks (eds), The New Zealand Federation of Labour, 1937, forthcoming.

^46.� Vowles, 'From Syndicalism to Guild Socialism' and Jack Vowles, 'Ideology and the formation of the New Zealand Labour Party: some new evidence', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 16, no. 1, April 1982, pp. 39–55; Olssen, Red Feds, ch. 17 and Olssen, 'W.T. Mills, E.J.B. Allen'; and for the main body of De Leonites see Kerry Taylor, '"Our motto, no compromise": the ideological origins and foundation of the Communist Party of New Zealand', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 28, no. 2, Oct. 1994, pp. 160–77.

^47.� Olssen, 'The origins of the Labour Party reconsidered', pp. 82–5. For Christchurch see Jim McAloon, 'Workers' control and the rise of political labour, Christchurch 1905–1914', in Martin and Taylor (eds), Culture and the Labour Movement, pp. 142–63 and Libby Plumridge, 'The necessary but not sufficient condition: Christchurch Labour and working-class culture', New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 19, no. 2, Oct. 1985, pp. 130–50.

^48.� Figures for Australia and the United Kingdom are fairly reliable and widely used. Most comparisons that include New Zealand use the totals reported by unions registered under the Arbitration Act, but exclude public-sector unions, most white-collar organisations, and any unions registered under the Trade Union Act (before it was amended in 1913). See the comparative data presented by J.D. Stephens, The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, Macmillan, London, 1979, p. 117.

^49.� Erik Olssen and Hamish James, 'Social mobility and class formation', International Review of Social History, vol. 44, pt 3, December 1999, pp. 419–49. For the concept of demographic class formation see Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies, The Clarendon Press, Cambridge, 1992.

^50.� For the Bolsheviks' impact see P.J. O'Farrell, The Russian Revolution and the labour movement in Australia and New Zealand, 1917–1922', International Review of Social History, vol. 8, no. , 1963, pp. 177–97; Taylor, 'Our motto, no compromise', pp. 171–73; and Alex Trapeznik, ' "Grandfather, parents, and little brother": a study of centre-periphery relations', in Alexander Trapeznik and Aaron Fox (eds), Lenin's Legacy Down Under: New Zealand's Cold War, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2004, pp. 57–72.

^51.� The best account of the Protestant Political Association (PPA) remains Harold Moores, The rise of the Protestant Political Association: sectarianism in New Zealand politics during World War I, MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1966.

^52.� See Max Satchell, Pulpit politics: the Protestant Political Association in Dunedin from 1917 to 1922, BA (Hons) dissertation, University of Otago, 1983 and Séan Brosnahan, '"Shaming the Shoneens"; the Green Ray and the Maoriland Irish Society in Dunedin, 1916–22', in Lyndon Fraser (ed.), A Distant Shore: Irish Migration & New Zealand Settlement, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2000, pp. 117–34.

^53.� R.P. Davis, 'New Zealand Labour's Irish campaign 1916–1921', Political Science, vol. 19, December 1967, pp. 13–23, and Nolan, Kin, pp. 42–5. For the rapprochement between Labour and the church in New South Wales see P.J. O'Farrell, The Catholic Church in Australia: A Short History 1788–1967, Thomas Nelson (Aust) Ltd., Melbourne, 1968, pp. 190–92 and 224–26. See also P.S. O'Connor, 'Protestants, catholics and the New Zealand Government, 1916–1918', in G.A. Wood and P.S. O'Connor (eds), W.P. Morrell, A Tribute: Essays in Modern and Early Modern History, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 1973, pp. 185–202.

^54.� The best overall account remains Miles Fairburn's brilliant article, 'Why did the Labour Party fail to win office until 1935?', Political Science, vol. 37, no. 2, December 1985, pp. 101–24, in which (among other things) he uses home ownership as an explanatory variable. The traditional view, for the record, was that the party failed to win over small farmers and middle-class folk; Fairburn and Haslett, 'How far did class determine voting', pp. 227–8.

^55.� Oliver, 'Reeves, Sinclair and the social pattern', pp.163-80.

^56.� Isaac and Olssen, 'The justification for Labour's housing scheme', pp. 116–17.

^57.� Fairburn, 'Why did the Labour Party fail to win office until 1935?', pp. 119–24.

^58.� McLeod, 'Did farmers really "lurch towards the Left" in 1935?'

^59.� Chapman, 'From Labour to National', in Oliver and Williams (eds), The Oxford History of New Zealand, pp. 333–37, provides the best brief account of the electoral revolution, but McLeod's results now need to be taken into account.

^60.� For an adventurous attempt to use the available data see Linda Moore, 'Was gender a factor in voter participation at New Zealand elections?', in Fairburn and Olssen (eds), Class, Gender and the Vote, pp. 129–42.

^61.� Melanie Nolan, 'Gender and the politics of keeping Left: Wellington Labour women and their community, 1912–1949', in Barbara Brookes and Dorothy Page (eds), Communities of Women: Historical Perspectives, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2002, pp. 147–62. I [Erik Olssen] think she over-states women's power and influence in the inter-war period, however: see Olssen, 'Working gender, gendering work'.

^62.� Sylvia E. Fraser, The 1949 general election, MA thesis, University of Otago, 1967, and for the Dunedin seats pp. 97–100, 179–80, 182, 185.

^63.� John R. Barnett, The evolution of the urban political structure in the North Island, 1945–66, MA thesis, University of Otago, 1968, demonstrated that class-based voting was then normal in all towns larger than 8,000 persons.

^64.� For the decline in branch membership and the growth of white-collar/service class membership see Barry Gustafson, Social Change and Party Reorganization: The New Zealand Labour Party Since 1945, Sage Publications, London, 1976, and for changes in ideology and support see Jack Vowles, 'The Fourth Labour Government', in Jonathan Boston and Martin Holland (eds), The Fourth Labour Government: Radical Politics in New Zealand, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1987, pp. 15–35.

^65.� For example, Jack Vowles and Clive Bean, 'Electoral politics: does globalisation matter?', Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 41, no. 2, June 2006, especially pp. 279–82.

^66.� Cited by Erik Olssen, 'The case of the socialist party that failed', Labor History, vol. 29, no. 4, Fall 1988, p. 422, and James and Markey, 'Class and labour'.

^67.� See Gustafson, Social Change and Party Reorganization; Vowles, 'The Fourth Labour Government'; and Vowles, Peter Aimer et al, Towards Consensus? The 1993 Election in New Zealand and the Transition to Proportional Representation, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1995, pp. 138–50.

^68.� For the respective strengths of progressive legislation in Australia and New Zealand see the treatment of 'The land question', 'the labour question' and 'pensions', William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902), McMillan, Melbourne, 1969; Robert McNab, Historical Records of New Zealand Vol 1, John McKay, Wellington, 1908; for a rewarding discussion of the changing patterns of such historiography see Erik Olssen, 'New Zealand-Australian relations', in Graeme Davison, John Hirst, Stuart Macintyre (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 466–7.

^69.� Janet McCalman, Struggletown: A Portrait of a Working Class Community, Penguin, Ringwood, 1988; Bradley Bowden, 'Transience community and class: a study of Brisbane's East Ward, 1879–1891, Labour History, no. 77, November 1999, pp. 160–189. Labour history has also generated rewarding discussions of how localism forged (or undermined) a sense of class/community loyalty, see (for example) articles by Greg Patmore, Lucy Taksa, Erik Eklund, and others in the thematic on 'Labour History and Local History', Labour History, no. 78, May 2000, pp. 95–6. For a necessary prelude to Olssen's work on Caversham see his History of Otago, chs 8–10.

^70.� Robert McNab, The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830–1840, Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd, Christchurch, 1913; Rollo Arnold, 'The dynamics and quality of Trans Tasman Migration 1885–1910, Australian Economic History Review, vol 26, no 1. p 4; 'The Australasian peoples and their world 1888–1915', in Keith Sinclair (ed.), Tasman Relations New Zealand and Australia, 1788–1988, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1988, p 64; 'Yeoman and nomads New Zealand and the Australasian shearing scene 1886–1896', New Zealand Journal of History, vol 18, no 2, October 1984, pp 117–142; for the Australian shearing circuit see John Merritt, The Making of the AWU, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986.

^71.� Olssen, 'New Zealand-Australian relations', p. 467; Bruce Scates, 'Gender, household and community politics: the 1890 Maritime Strike in Australia and New Zealand', Labour History, no.61, November, pp.70-87; Scates, 'Mobilising manhood'; see also Olssen, A History of Otago, p. 111.

^72.� Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 2004. For an earlier tentative sketch of similarity and difference see Eric Fry's introductory remarks in Common Cause, pp. xii-xvi; In addition to Rollo Arnold's work see Erik Olssen's foundational inquiry, 'Lands of sheep and gold: the Australian dimension to the New Zealand past, 1840–1900', Sinclair, Tasman Relations, ch 2.

^73.� For a revealing discussion of these themes and a foundational article on class in labour historiography , see Stuart Macintyre, 'The making of the Australian working class: an historiographical survey, Historical Studies, vol 18, no 71, October 1978, pp. 233–253; cf

^74.� John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976.

^75.� See respectively Frank Bongiorno, The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996; R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narrative and Argument, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980.

^76.� See John Rickard's contribution to a review article of Class Structure in Australian History, Historical Studies, vol 19, no 71, October 1978, p. 447, Janet McCalman, Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle Class Generation, 1920–1990, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995; Andrew Moore, The Right Road? A History of Right Wing Politics in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995. Moore's discussion of why right wing movements have been largely overlooked by labour historians are equally germane to considerations of the middle class, 'Writing about the extreme Right in Australia', Labour History, no. 89, November 2005, pp. 1–15.

^77.� See the historical debate following the publication of Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974. The best Australian examples would be Laura Bennett, 'The construction of skill: craft unions, women workers and the Conciliation and Arbitration Court', Law in Context, vol. 2, 1984; Rae Frances, 'No more Amazons: gender and work process in the Victorian clothing trades 1890–1939, Labour History, no 50, November 1986; for useful review see Ben Maddison, 'Skill. Maurice Godlier and labour history', in Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1994, pp. 113–135 and John Shields, 'Dekilling revisited: continuity and change in craft work and apprenticeship in late nineteenth century New South Wales, Labour History, no. 68, May 1995, pp. 1–29.

^78.� For this foundational historiography see Robin Gollan, The political theory of the Australian labour movement between 1880 and 1910, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1948, pp 1–6; Eric Fry, Condition of the urban wage earning class, PhD thesis, ANU, 1956, pp. 328,368, 507–8; cf Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1979, p. 273.

^79.� Ray Markey, The Making of the Labour Party in New South Wales, Sydney, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1988, ch. 1. The complexities of artisan radicalism are explored in T.R. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England, Columbia University Press, NY, 1977; Geoffrey Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840–1880, Croom Helm, London, pp 135–6; I.J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth Century London, Dawson, Folkestone, 1979, p. 20 and in Australian context, Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

^80.� Markey, Making of the Labour Party; Merritt, Making of the AWU; Mark Hearn and Harry Knowles, One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers Union 1886–1996, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, ch. 1.

^81.� See in particular papers presented by Nick Dyrenfurth and Jonathan Strauss, in Julie Kimber, Peter Love and Philip Deery (eds), Labour Traditions: Papers from the Tenth National Labour History Conference, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Melbourne, 2007.

^82.� Marcel van der Linden, 'Labour history: an international movement', Labour History, no. 89, November 2005, pp. 225–233 ; Bruce Scates '"Knocking out a living": survival strategies and popular protest in the 1890s depression', in S. Margary, S. Sheridan and S. Rowley (eds), Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993, pp. 47–64; 'The case of Clarinna Stringer: strategic options and the household economy in late nineteenth century Australia', in Jan Kok (ed.), Rebellious Families: From Household Strategies to Collective Action, Oxford, Berghahn, 2002, pp. 58–77; and (for a trans-Tasman context), Scates, 'Gender Household and Community Politics'.

^83.� Van der Linden, 'Labour History', p. 320–231; for one of the few inquiries into the social origin and cultural perception of scab labour see Dyrenfurth, '"No more fit for use than a wax work image would be for a gas stocker": "Scabs" and the cultural politics of late Nineteenth-Century Australian Unionism', in Kimber, Love and Deery (eds), Labour Traditions, pp. 95–101.

^84.� See for example, Robin Gollan, Radical and Working Class Politics: A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850–1910, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 1960; Peter Love, Labour and the Money Power: Australian Labour Populism 1890–1950, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984, Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: the Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991.

^85.� Bongiorno, The People's Party, pp. 5, 22; for comparable comment see Ralph Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The Labour Party and Social Democracy', Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1982; Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983.

^86.� Markey, The Making of the Labour Party, pp3–15, Bongiorno, The People's Party, p. 22.

^87.� See, for example, Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Rethinking Labor tradition: synthesising discourse and experience', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 177–200 and Melissa Ballanta's recent inquiry into the provisional and unstable nature of class identity amongst Labor leaders, 'Transcending class? Australia's Single Taxers in the early 1890s, Labour History, no. 92, May 2007, pp. 17–30; also Terry Irving's inquiry into the labour ideology, 'Labourism: a political genealogy', Labour History, no. 66, May 1994 and his introduction to Challenges to Labour History.

^88.� Stuart Macintyre and Richard Mitchell, Foundations of Arbitration, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989; G. Brennan and F. Castles (eds), Australia Reshaped: 200 Years of Institutional Transformation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002; Reeves, State Experiments, vol. 2, ch 1.

^89.� For a revealing case study of the complex and contradictory impact arbitration had on workplace industrial relations see Sandra Cockfield, 'Arbitration and the Workplace: A Case Study of Metter's Stovemakers, 1902–22', Labour History, no. 90, May 2006, pp. 43–60

^90.� See, for example, Patricia Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 200–201; Marian Sawyer, 'Waltzing Matilda: gender and Australian political institutions' in Brennan and Castles, Australia Reshaped, This is not to deny the advantages Arbitration and wage fixing generally unintentionally offered women. As Frances and Nolan argue elsewhere in this issue, trade unionists advocated higher wages for women to protect 'male' jobs and a series of equal pay decisions in the 1960s and 70s advanced women's pay equity. Comparable experience overseas suggests women would not have fared as well under an unregulated labour market. See Raelene Frances and Melanie Nolan, 'Gender and the trans-Tasman world of labour: transnational and comparative histories', Labour History, no. 95, November 2008 (this issue); see also Jacqueline Scutt, 'Inequality before the law: gender, arbitration and wages', in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Sydney, 1992.

^91.� Elizabeth Faue, 'Retooling the class factory: United States labour history after Marx, Montgomery, and postmodernism', Labour History, no. 82, May 2002, pp. 109–119; see also subsequent commentary by Bradon Ellen, Melanie Oppenheimer, Lucy Taksa and Claire Wright in that issue.

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Class Formation and Political Change: A Trans-Tasman Dialogue