Rob Castle

TRIBUTES TO JIM HAGAN

Jim Hagan: A Memoir

Jim Hagan died suddenly on 20 October 2009, three days short of his eightieth birthday. He was one of the last of a group of left-wing Australian historians whose world view was formed by the Depression of the 1930s. Its impact influenced his intellectual development, his focus as an historian and his wider political and social activities.

James Seymour (Jim) Hagan (23.10.1929 – 20.10. 2009)
Jim Hagan at the launch by Premier Bob Carr of A History of Work and Community in Wollongong edited by Jim Hagan and Henry Lee, in NSW Parliament House, c2001.
Photographer: Cat Sparks – used with permission.

In some ways, Jim was shielded from the worst of the Depression. He was an only child; his father was a skilled tradesman, a printer on the Daily Telegraph and Jim had opportunities to develop his talents within the public school system at Bondi Primary and later Sydney Boys High School. Other members of the family, scratching out a living on small holdings near Campbelltown, were hard hit by the Depression and when Jim's father lost his job for a time they moved back to the farm. The experience made Jim suspicious of capitalism, deeply aware of inequalities in society and left him with a drive to do what he could to assist workers to understand and improve their lives.

His political views were further developed at the University of Sydney where he completed an honours degree in history on a Teachers College scholarship. He was a founder of the Trainee Teachers Association and at one point led a demonstration outside the university in Parramatta Road, halting all traffic and making front page news.

Jim taught at a number of high schools including Parramatta Intermediate High and Sutherland High School. He was seconded to Sydney Teachers College and it was during this period that he wrote a series of vignettes on Australian history which appeared on the back of packets of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. His experience as one of the foundation members of the long running radio show, the Quiz Kids, gave him a confidence in his ability to explain concepts and ideas to a wider audience and this was a feature of much of his work.

In 1961, Jim and a group of friends who were teaching history at Sydney Teachers College and in the high schools, published the first of a series of textbooks to provide a new approach to the study of history in schools. World History Since 1789 (1961) was the first, but Modern History and Its Themes (1966) was the most successful. It was re-published about 20 times and encouraged generations of high school students to study history. Former NSW Premier, Bob Carr, is one who remembers its impact well and often referred to it when meeting Jim.

The book contained in its introduction a description of the method which was to remain at the heart of Jim's work for the next 45 years.

At the beginning of each of its three parts, there is an introduction which sets out the themes of the period. Following this, there is a chapter which expands economic themes and relates them to technological development and political change.

In 1962, Jim moved to the Australian National University (ANU), with his wife Lois and sons Jim and John, where he took up a PhD scholarship supervised by Bob Gollan. The topic 'Printers and Politics' was not surprising, given that both his father and Lois's father were printers, and his interest in the role that unions could play in mitigating the effects of capitalism on workers, their families and communities. The emphasis was on skilled workers, the work process and technology but within the wider economic and political processes within which the Printers Union operated. At ANU, Jim interacted with lecturers and students who were to dominate Australian labour history for the following two decades – including Bob Gollan, Eric Fry, John Merritt and Tom Sheridan – as well as historians such as Noel Rutherford, Noel Butlin and Eric Andrews whose interests were outside labour history.

In 1966, Jim obtained a lectureship in History at the Wollongong University College, then a small outpost of the University of New South Wales (UNSW). There were only about 700 students and Arts subjects had only been taught since 1965. UNSW was suspicious of those with leftist views – Eric Fry had been passed over for the Chair in History because, as legend had it, he was too far to the left. Jim, however, settled into the job and the community, especially the Thirroul Branch of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) of which he remained a member until his death. At the University, Jim became involved in the Staff Association and was a leader in the campaign for an autonomous university, separate from UNSW. This was a bitter struggle which divided the small staff and exposed Jim, Alan Healy and John Steinke to the wrath of the then administration. A timetable for autonomy was announced in 1970 and the University of Wollongong achieved its independence in 1975.

Jim's leisure activities often revolved around his love of nature. He was a keen bushwalker and for over 30 years he had a small farm on the north coast of NSW where he raised cattle, grew kiwi fruit and planted trees. The proposal by Clutha Ltd to establish a coal loader in the northern Illawarra region in 1971 provoked a grass roots protest campaign that Jim led through the local ALP by forming SCOOP, South Coast Organisation Opposing Pollution. Jim combined his political skills, activism and oratorical skills to prevent a multinational company from destroying the Illawarra coast line. A revolt by Liberal members of the NSW Legislative Council killed the proposal, and gave people power a rare victory. On behalf of the Wran Labor government, Jim later chaired the Committee to establish an Education Commission in NSW. His contacts in the ALP and the unions remained important for him throughout his life.

I joined the staff at the University of Wollongong in 1970 and I met Jim on my second day when he appeared at the door of my room brandishing the Union membership book and inviting me to join. That began a 40-year friendship and collaboration over a whole range of projects. As an economist, I could initially complement Jim's work as an historian and answer questions about the economic forces which shaped workers' lives and which were so central to Jim's work in labour history. Our first joint publication was in a school text Australia and the Modern World in the Twentieth Century which Jim planned as a Year 10 prequel to Modern History and its Themes. In 1973 we began to work together on a project developed by Philip deLacey, establishing pre-schools for Aboriginal children in Bega and later Bourke. Our role was to provide background about jobs and unemployment amongst the parents of children in the pre-school, but it quickly became a history of Aboriginal employment in various regions of New South Wales. This later developed into research on Aboriginal employment in the Northern Territory and Queensland, and ultimately became a part of a global history project on unfree plantation labour in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Working with Jim had some set rituals. We would meet at least twice a week in the Austinmer Bowling Club – 'the Bowling Green University' – Jim called it. There we would set ourselves up in a corner of the bar, over a few beers, discussing various projects we were working on jointly or individually, reading drafts that had just been written (Jim wrote everything on A4 writing pads in double-spaced, minute longhand) as well as discussing a wide range of political and other issues. There we hatched many projects on arbitration and labour regulation, the history of the dairy industry and other rural industries such as beef, the plantation labour project, the history of politics in regional NSW as well as many other projects which we did not get to. These included a history of contracting and sub-contracting and its effect on the Australian labour movement.

From the 1980s, Jim began to get a stream of funding for himself and scholarships for students which continued until his death. Funding came from the Australian Research Council (ARC), trade unions, governments (Federal, state and local), the Reserve Bank and a variety of other sources. This funding enabled Jim to expand his academic productivity despite his increasing involvement in academic governance as a Head of Department, Senate and Council Member and ultimately as the first Dean of Arts at Wollongong University.

With the financial support, Jim was able to employ research assistants. Mmany people filled that role over the years but Bill Leslie, who worked with him on the History of the ACTU and later on the plantation labour project stands out, along with Alan Twomey, Rob Hood and Craig Clothier. Despite using research assistants to find and photocopy large amounts of material, Jim tried to mould his academic life around time he could spend on fieldtrips to interview people and archives. Nowhere was he happier than in archives finding nuggets of information..

The History of the ACTU encapsulated many of the key features of Jim's academic work. The work can only be understood in the context of the economy and politics, and most importantly by analysing the actions and motivations of employers. The History of the ACTU contains an incidental history of employer associations and illustrated Jim's desire to understand the forces which shaped workers' lives and not just the individuals and politics which operated within the organisation.

One of the major influences on Jim's work was his many periods of study leave in the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. His interactions with Royden Harrison and Tony Mason led to contacts with international scholars such as Takao Matsumura. His time at Warwick impacted not only on his own work, but also on labour history at Wollongong. Chris Fisher, whom Jim mentored when he was an outstanding student at Wollongong, went on to do his PhD at Warwick, while other Wollongong staff members such as Josie Castle, Ray Markey and Andrew Wells also spent productive study leaves at Warwick. The link with Matsumura, a Japanese scholar who studied British labour history, led to a later project on comparative labour history between Japan and Australia as well as a conference and a book edited with Andrew Wells.

The international focus in Jim's writing increased markedly in the 1990s. Working with scholars at Wollongong's Centre for Multicultural Studies led to projects on Italian migration to Australia. Several periods as a Visiting Professor in the Australian Studies program at the University of Lecce in southern Italy deepened this interest. Jim had learned Italian from the early 1970s, regularly informing anyone in his vicinity about articles he had translated from La Fiamma about Italian politics, society and, above all, the lives of Italian workers who had migrated to Australia.

Jim also developed contacts with scholars at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and his friendship with Marcel van der Linden, Jan Breman and others there provided a key reference point for his developing interest in unfree labour and labour history in Asia. Jim regularly attended conferences and workshops organised by the Institute, as well as the Indian Society for Labour History which he joined at their inaugural conference.

A long-term interest in unfree labour initially centred on Aboriginal workers in the cattle industry in Australia. The legal framework for many of the so-called Aboriginal Protection Acts in Australia stemmed from Bengali legislation to regulate the employment of workers on tea plantations in India. Following this trail led to a major study of tea workers in India and later rubber workers in Malaya. As always, these studies were contextualised in the economic situation underlying the industry, but these forces were now global rather than national, as beef, tea and rubber were all commodities whose prices were set on world markets. It was no longer enough to study the actions of employers in one country but also the actions of boards of directors in the imperial capitals and their links with banks, financiers and governments.

This led to a question about how much these influences were British and the extent to which international market forces transcended national and imperial boundaries. Working closely with Andrew Wells and Roger Knight, the work extended to French interests in rubber in Indochina and Dutch investments in sugar in Indonesia. Access to French records in Vietnam and France encouraged Jim to learn French again so that he could save on the cost of translation and use the archives more efficiently. Although the project was still to be finalised when Jim died, he had been a major player in a two-day workshop in Amsterdam in 2008 dedicated to the project.

The international focus in these projects did not diminish Jim's interest in local and regional labour and political history. Retirement from the position of Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 1995 gave Jim time to follow many of his interests. He obtained funding for a two-volume history of Wollongong: A History of Wollongong (1997); and A History of Work Labour and Community in Wollongong (2002). This drew together many of Jim's ex-students and colleagues in a project that bore all the hallmarks of the Hagan methodology. Even in a local history, context and the big questions were everything.

The sesquicentenary of the NSW Parliament commissioned a number of publications on the history of politics of New South Wales. Jim edited two volumes on politics in regional NSW (People and Politics in Regional NSW Vols 1 & 2), and either wrote or co-authored a dozen chapters. The focus was on the development of the local economy, communities and the struggle between city and country. These volumes follow the rise and fall of rural industries and the workforces required for them. In addition, Jim contributed to the volume on the Premiers of NSW as well as to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and wrote short biographies of several senators for the Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate.

One of the features of Jim's work was his long-term collaborations with co-authors. Ken Turner worked with Jim on numerous political studies from the History of the Labor Party in NSW (1991) to the sesquicentenary project. Andrew Wells worked with Jim on a number of projects. These included a volume honouring Eric Fry in 1992, and then Industrial Relations in Australia and Japan (1994), A History of Wollongong (1997) and the plantation labour project. Former students such as Henry Lee, Glenn Mitchell and Bradley Bowden made contributions to many of the local and regional histories.

These collaborations enabled Jim to work on a range of projects but it was his discipline and focus, especially once he was formally retired, which enabled him to get funding for the projects, assemble a team and follow through to publication. Jim would write 1,500 to 2,500 words a day, sometimes on trains or planes, at other times at home or work. It was this dedication which enable him to produce so much despite his many other roles at the University of Wollongong, Charles Sturt University (Deputy Chancellor), the Archives Council and on numerous other committees.

Jim's contribution – over nearly five decades – was substantial. In many ways, he had come a long way from his origins as a gifted working-class child growing up in Sydney in the 1930s and 1940s. The shift in his focus from traditional institutional labour history to comparative labour history and ultimately international and global history indicates his growth and development over that time. Jim knew a lot about a lot of things as he demonstrated in his days on the Quiz Kids.

However, there were areas where Jim's attitudes became increasingly out of step with the discipline. His focus was, from beginning to end, men at work. Feminism in the 1970s and 1980s had little impact on his world view and this often distanced him from female colleagues. His lack of interest in popular culture, and indeed his disdain for spectator sport - even though he played rugby - made him more remote from later post-modernist influences in labour history. He had an idealised view of communities, more suited to an age before the motor car and mass communication when workers and their families interacted locally at work, leisure and in their unions and political parties. At a macro level, this perspective continued to evolve and grow but, at another level, the Depression and its aftermath continued to colour his approach.

From my long association with Jim, I would say that the basis of his work was his constant seeking of new evidence, in archives and other sources, as well as interviewing large numbers of people who had played a role in whatever project he was working on, then putting this evidence together in a theoretical and practical framework. It was this constant questioning, trying out explanations, and seeking further evidence to tie down a particular point, which made working with Jim so stimulating.

Jim was able to combine prodigious publication output with his administrative and political interests and to be an activist on a number of causes over his lifetime. His family and his wide interests in bushwalking and industrial archaeology completed a rich life which contributed to our greater understanding of the social, labour and political history of Australia. His legacy continues through his students and colleagues.

Rob Castle is a Professor of Economics and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the University of Wollongong. He worked with Jim Hagan on projects about Aboriginal labour, plantation labour, the rural workforce and economic and political histories of regional Australia.
<rob_castle@uow.edu.au>

Select Bibliography of Monographs and Reports by Jim Hagan

James Hagan (ed.), World History Since 1789, Longmans, Green, Melbourne, 1961.

James Hagan (ed.), Europe and the World Since 1815, Longmans, Green, Croyden, Vic, 1963.

James Hagan, Printers and Politics; A History of the Australian Printing Unions, 1850–1950, Australian National University Press [in association with the Printing and Kindred Industries Union], Canberra, 1966.

James Hagan (ed.), Modern History and its Themes, Longmans, Croydon, Vic., 1966.

J.S. Hagan (Chairman), Second Interim Report of the Working Party for the Establishment of an Education Commission, New South Wales Working Party for the Establishment of an Education Commission, Government Printer, Sydney, 1977.

James Hagan The ACTU: A Short History on the Occasion of the 50^th Anniversary 1927–1977, Reed, Terry Hills, 1977.

J.S. Hagan (Chairman), Working Party for the Establishment of an Education Commission: Final Report by New South Wales Working Party for the Establishment of an Education Commission, Government Printer, Sydney, 1978.

Jim Hagan, The History of the A.C.T.U., Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1981.

Jim Hagan, Australian Trade Unionism in Documents Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1986.

Jim Hagan and Ken Turner, A History of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1891–1991, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1991.

Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells (eds), Industrial Relations in Australia and Japan Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1994.

Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells (eds), A History of Wollongong, University of Wollongong Press, Wollongong, 1997.

Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells (eds), Australian Labour & Regional Change: Essays in Honour of R.A. Gollan, University of Wollongong in association with Halstead Press, Wollongong, 1998.

Jim Hagan and Craig Clothier, The New South Wales State Election, 1988, NSW Parliamentary Library and Dept of Government, University of Sydney, Sydney, 2000.

Jim Hagan and Henry Lee (eds), A History of Work and Community in Wollongong Halstead Press in Association with the University of Wollongong, Rushcutters Bay, [2001 or 2002].

Jim Hagan (ed.), People and Politics in Regional New South Wales: Vol. 1, 1856–1950s; Vol. 2, 1950s-2006, Federation Press, Annandale, 2006.

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