Bradon Ellem and Peter Sheldon

Jim Hagan and Apprentice Historians

Reflecting on what we learnt from Jim Hagan about 'being a historian' is a difficult task. To start with, it involves reflecting on dramatic changes in university life since Jim established the union history project at Wollongong University in the early 1980s. Secondly, Jim was a larger-than-life supervisor, and it is easy for us to be caught up in the mystique that we have constructed around our teacher-student relationship we had with him. Then there are the more profound intellectual effects of our association with Jim: how we and others of our cohort transmit elements of Jim's legacy through our own research practice and in our own work as thesis supervisors. This mystique was evident in discussions at and following Jim's wake. It is instructive that a bunch of middle-aged academics – who, in many cases, had not seen each other for many years – would have so much to say to each other about their former supervisor rather than the more usual confidences regarding their latest project or local work gossip.	1
So much has changed over these 30 years: the sites of academic production, namely the history discipline and the university sector itself, as well as the political economy of which unions are a part. Changes in the former help explain why most of the labour historians who Jim supervised are not to be found in history departments. Most are certainly employed by universities, though most often in former industrial relations departments which have now all but transformed into component parts of business schools. Of course this is not particular to our cohort; more institutionally-focused labour historians of many varieties and places have found jobs in business schools. Humanities faculties have suffered from an array of externally imposed difficulties since the 1990s. Yet, for their part, history departments appear to have been more welcoming towards labour historians who are primarily concerned with social history, social movements, or identity politics, than the sorts of materialist, institutional history that Jim's trade union history project encouraged.	2
If Jim's approach made his apprentices particularly adept at moving into departments of industrial relations or even management, there was a good reason. Without ever discussing it with us or perhaps even realising it, much of Jim's work during those years was, in fact, industrial relations history and we tended to follow in his footsteps. This meant paying greater attention to employers and management – matters that Jim took very seriously – as well as developing some passing familiarity with theories about them. This placed institutional labour history closer to more overtly theoretical social sciences. Perhaps more than any other historian at that time, Jim remained in close working contact with leading industrial relations scholars who regularly invited him to provide the historical introductory chapters to their edited books on contemporary industrial relations.	3
The union movement is the second area that has undergone dramatic change since the early 1980s; the landscape it operates in is unimaginable from that time. Jim himself had come from a background which valued the connection between those who used to be styled 'workers by hand' and others 'workers by brain'. At the time, Jim was an Associate Professor in the History Department and its longest-serving member. Through his own widespread union contacts, Jim drew on those who thought as he did and established a series of union scholarships to fund works of union history. Jim had two laudable goals for this initiative: to increase the number and accelerate the production of union histories in Australia; and to build Wollongong's History Department into a national centre of union and labour history. Some scholars might have doubted the importance of unions as an area for historical investigation; fortunately, however, some union officials could see it, and appreciate the importance of history for unions. Those of us who took up those scholarships thought, like Jim, that the relationship between history and unions could be reciprocally beneficial.	4
Jim wanted us to work intensively with relevant archives but he also fostered our interaction with 'our' union, its officials and activists. He insisted that we go out and interview those who had been most active in the union but also relevant employers or government officials – not that we had any formal instruction in the ways of oral history or theorising about it. As with much of our apprenticeships with Jim, knowledge development was heavily tacit; the carrying out of sequentially delimited, defined tasks. He would just indicate the task and explain why we needed to complete it. Thus, if our union had a presence in the Illawarra, Jim always knew veteran and retired activists living in the region and would point us in their direction. Similarly, there were the implicit review and feedback mechanisms as well as the more formal ones he engaged in. It was with some pride – and trepidation – that we awaited the presence of union officials and activists – who Jim had invited to hear us deliver progress reports on our theses to departmental research seminars. Those were history research seminars like no others! The courtesy and respect that Jim paid to those visitors – often manual workers with limited formal education – was itself an important lesson for doctoral students sometimes a little self-satisfied with our own cleverness.	5
The two of us arrived at the University of Wollongong within a few months of each other in 1982, each to take up a union-funded scholarship, following periods of study and work abroad. We found Jim had a large number of PhD students, most of similar vintage to us, a few of whom also had the advantage of similar scholarships. Some worked on union history, others on labour history or on local and regional history. Most had more than the expected workforce experience, and also involvement in unions or politics. All this made us a few years older and perhaps a little more worldly-wise than many of the PhD students whom we encountered in other history departments in Australia at the time.	6
We came to these scholarships through competitive selection but Jim had had a major role in that process. It was never clear whether our educational attainments to that point, or our life experiences, had made us more plausible candidates for these projects than recently completed honours graduates. It was not Jim's style to enter into discussions of 'the personal' with his students. Convivial while socialising (particularly over beers), at work he was entirely task-focused. Nevertheless, this demographic profile of Jim's students perhaps made us a more difficult cohort to deal with within the department, and, as Andrew Wells points out in his piece, also for Jim. As Andrew indicates, Jim had an implicitly hierarchical, even patriarchal image of his role. Challenges to his authority, his approach to history writing or his intellectual vision made him uncomfortable. This was evident in the ways he responded, fusing elements of restrained, quiet insistence and pained patience. He always wanted to have the final word.	7
Many of the debates which surrounded the writing of institutional labour history have dulled with the passage of time. In a sense, the debate was old even then. For many people, in the wake of the New Left, it seemed to have been settled on the side of different kinds of history from those which Jim championed. And yet younger researchers came to him and embraced the writing of union histories. Although undertaken in varying ways and, sometimes amid great tension with our supervisor, we shared a belief that union history did matter; that, to put this differently and to exaggerate only slightly, how something was written was as important as what it was. Indeed, the 'how' could make – and unmake – the merits of the subject of study. In retrospect, Jim's approach now looks more substantial and enduring than some of those that were more fashionable at that time.	8
Whether it was union history, or political history, industry, Indigenous or regional history, the methods that Jim sought to instil in students were the same. They were also more complex than might have seemed to be the case to outsiders – or even to some of us at times. For, if Jim could be regarded as a traditionalist, an Old Left historian, this did not mean his work and teaching methods were atheoretical; if his approach to union history was institutional, this did not mean there was no grander vision. Theory did matter but it was to be worn lightly. Writing history was about a narrative first and foremost but a narrative shaped by questions and a context. And, you could not develop question and context without some kind of theorisation.	9
Neither this theorisation nor its attendant methods were always explicit; many of us thought they should be more so. This remained a fault-line between Jim and a couple of his students who openly aspired to being E.P. Thompson rather than J.S. Hagan. Jim's History of the ACTU and Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class are both very big books. Thompson's book met rapturous approval from PhD students. Too often – and perhaps unfairly – Jim's ACTU encountered the reaction that Andrew Wells felt when preparing for his job interview! Unfair perhaps in the sense that the response overlooked the size, scope and ambition of Jim's project and the paucity of research in the field in which he developed the project. Indeed, as a senior industrial relations academic once confided, The History of the ACTU would remain a monument to Jim's career.	10
In meetings with his students and in seminars, Jim articulated his own positions more fully than in his writing. To read the introductions to Jim's books is to read only the most truncated of these positions. Interestingly, they became somewhat more developed in his later work and in work intended more obviously for a non-academic audience. (Compare, on the one hand Printers and Politics and The History of the ACTU with, on the other, the history of the ALP in NSW which he co-authored with Ken Turner and his two-volume edited history, People and Politics.)	11
In the introduction to A History of Wollongong, one of his later pieces which he wrote with Andrew Wells, Jim suggested that his kind of historical method was indeed 'rarely explained'. Nonetheless, there was something which distinguished the professional historian from the 'industrious amateur', and that was the historian's method. The introduction described this method as a set of 'complex activities, "the mysteries of the craft"' [page 1]. In this term lay echoes of Jim's own background as the son of a printer and as a historian of print unions. In that book (Printers and Politics), the first section of chapter one has the title 'The art and mystery of printing'. It seems fitting that Jim described his own approach to history in precisely the same way that nineteenth century craftsmen had, not least when they were confronted by change. As Jim's doctoral students, we were being inducted us into these mysteries by a master craftsman. That we have chosen the word 'apprentices' in the title of the present article is not accidental.	12
This invites some thought as to what Jim would have made of the contemporary world of annual candidate performance reviews and completion metrics introduced, in part, on the assumption that either the student or the supervisor or both are not doing their job properly – and measurably. Jim was an astoundingly busy person during the 1980s, as Rob Castle's piece attests, and he was often away from Wollongong for his various roles. It could be hard to get to see him at short notice and he had limited time even then. Nonetheless, at any meeting, he made every minute count. He would have read relevant drafts, made minute corrections or added questions to the text. His feedback mixed attention to the bigger picture, the scope and flow of argument, with close scrutiny of the mechanics of better drafting. It was here we learnt the power of the active voice in sentence construction; Jim did not like the passive voice in writing – a trait that has stayed with us.	13
What, then, was this kind of work, what kind of history? First, the task was to write history; it was not antiquarianism. However, at the same time, it was not meant to be obscure. We were to make our purpose and prose clear. In the sorts of words that made Jim both famous and infamous among different groups of students, the work, as narrative, should be clear to 'the educated layman'. The crucial tool was the thesis question. A thesis came from a question that had come from a theme and that had come from a topic. This lay at the centre of our learning experience. PhD students would often tell Jim, and each other, about their topics: 'But what's your question?' would be Jim's invariable response. In seminar after seminar, meeting after meeting, we would go over this matter: there had to be a question worth asking and worth answering. That question had to make sense and seem important also to people outside our own area of specialisation.	14
We often insisted that we wanted to address 'big topics'. Jim would insist that those topics needed equally big questions and of course that those big questions needed subsidiary questions. From these would emerge some kind of organising theme and a schema for marshalling the thesis into chapters and then sections. He was inducting us into the mysteries of intellectual project planning, but did so without ever really telling us what was happening. Andrew refers playfully to the near mythic proportions that 'Jim's Big Question' took on at Wollongong. We think that Jim would be pleased to know that his research students have passed down this mantra and it has proved one of the most useful and productive intellectual tools with which one can help one's 'apprentices'.	15
Second, the history writing that Jim aspired for us to do was most definitely modernist and materialist; this history was a history of the mobilisation of interests, the defence of positions, the creation of expectations, needs and wants. None of this could be understood without a context. It was here that the theorising was most distinct, albeit in what may seem conventional ways: the most important aspect of the historical context was the economic. It was not the only important element nor it did not shape everything – but it was primary.	16
However, we need to be careful how we understand this. Jim's approach was much more nuanced and because he wore his theorising so lightly, it was often easy to miss the sophistication of his published work and his supervisory guidance. For Jim, people made history as individuals, groups, organisations and classes (but not in conditions entirely of their own choosing). Economic conditions shaped interests and needs of people, however aggregated, grouped or aligned. More particularly, it shaped their aspirations, expectations, and understandings of all this by creating collective identities that stood in relation to other collectivities and institutions. These collective identities and their attachments could be relatively fleeting as was the adherence of dairy farmers or small selector farmers to the Labor Party cause, or enduring, like unions' involvement in Labor – to pick two important areas of Jim's work during the 1980s.	17
What mattered to Jim and what he wanted to have matter to his students, was that historians should put themselves in their subjects' shoes so as to understand human responses to conditions that manifested in a particular time and place, and in the context of those peoples' own biographies. If, as Andrew Wells says, Jim had no time for explicit sociologising, Jim implicitly imparted a feel for historical work that brought together structural and action-oriented approaches from sociology. Without ever mentioning those phrases – it was entirely contrary to his style to engage in types of theoretical discourse that might need referencing – he encouraged Thompson's 'history from below', as well as that from above. It seemed that Jim's own stylistic preferences and professional pride made him eschew such referencing. As a result, people who did not look closer or listen more attentively tended to underestimate him and his contribution.	18
These ways of thinking and working that Jim encouraged had obvious intrinsic strengths. Crucially too, they provided us with a highly functional set of skills for managing the particularly long time frames demanded of our theses by our sponsoring unions. These time frames, sometimes nearly a century, covered bewildering patterns of continuity and change and involved a plethora of historical subjects. Current pressures to have students finish in much shorter time-frames, while laudable, also make it less likely that students will attempt such temporally challenging theses.	19
This brings us to the third element: what was this kind of history – whatever its subject – trying to explain? That is, was there something that held together the 'big question' posed in each book and his approach to supervision? If there was, it was something ambitious, as good history is. It was about change and continuity and the conditions that provoked or hindered each. Working over the long time-frames Jim encouraged made these challenges almost unavoidable.	20
Fourth, this kind of training was of a sort that was both old and widespread in the history discipline at the time. We were learning how to write, how to write in particular ways. For the most part, this meant writing as an individual sole author and as one concentrating, initially and exclusively, on the doctoral thesis itself. In this apprenticeship we were thus learning – at times without knowing it – how to plan, research and write books which would cover large time spans. This required care, rigour and careful explanation. Authors could not go beyond what the sources let them say. This approach engendered diligence alongside a professional modesty before the evidence. Jim's students do not appear to have found fame as 'revisionist' historians.	21
This made it all the more important, then, to know what questions we were answering and what themes were holding the manuscript together. Many PhD students are paralysed by the imagined scope of their work or their own unrealistic ambitions for their thesis. Jim's often repeated view was that a PhD thesis was the first thing we would write, not the last. It was the apprentice's task to complete their training before developing larger ambitions. This remains a simple but vital truth in getting the job done. Once it is done, we and others could say, 'yes, I can write history'. Happily too, Jim was big enough to recognise that we had come of age. Subsequent collaborations would be as colleagues rather than as master-apprentice or teacher-student.	22
Bradon Ellem teaches in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney and is co-editor of the Journal of Industrial Relations. His most recent research has examined the impact of changes in industrial relations policy on workers and collective bargaining. He is trying to find the time to be a historian again, writing about employment relations in the Australian iron ore industry. <bradon.ellem@sydney.edu.au> Peter Sheldon is an Associate Professor in the School of Organisation and Management at the University of New South Wales. He has a long-term engagement with labour history and also publishes on contemporary employer associations, industrial relations policy and international employment relations. Apart from his work on Australian topics, he is collaborating on projects concerning Italy, South Korea and China. <p.sheldon@unsw.edu.au>

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