A selection of some of the books by Australian radical historians that have meant a lot to us as scholars and activists writing and exploring radical history for ten years together, and for much longer separately. The books selected have either never made it into the academic history canon or, if they did, are now neglected.
by
Rowan
Cahill and Terry Irving
These are some of the books by Australian radical historians that
have meant a lot to us as scholars and activists writing and exploring radical
history for ten years together, and for much longer separately. We have
selected books that either never made it into the academic history canon or, if
they did, are now neglected. In the neo-liberal university the production model
of research and post-modern theoreticism have deadened the feeling that drove
the authors in our selection - the sense of agency and engagement, of being
able to make socially useful knowledge in a creative and passionate way. It is
hard for scholars on a treadmill, their heads full of buzzwords, to recognise
the value of the kind of books we have chosen; hence the neglect.
The books in our selection share some or all of six features that have
drawn us to radical history. First, a tradition: over 80 years of radical historical
writing, from the 1930s to the present. Second, a method: a history of the
common people, and the historical dynamic of struggle in movement. Third, a
connection with social movements: of writing within movements, of publishing by
movements, of addressing movements. Fourth, a breaking of new ground, as in pioneering
studies of events, themes and movements disdained by the ruling historical
culture and the leading academic history professionals. Fifth, a battle waged
by the authors against indifference on the part of commercial publishers,
political parties and leading historians. Sixth, and most importantly, an
approach to writing that inspires us to think and act: the authors are partisan
and passionate, moved by feelings as well as ideas.
This is our personal selection, deliberately focused on earlier
writings so as to establish the existence of a tradition. Others will no doubt
have different favourites. That said, it should be understood there are many
present day intellectuals in Australia carrying on the radical history
tradition, and we follow their work closely. We have in mind people like: Mick
Armstrong, Sandra Bloodworth, Rob Bollard, Bob Boughton, Tom Bramble, Verity
Burgmann, Carole Ferrier, Di Fieldes, Gary Foley, Heather Goodall, Sarah
Gregson, Phil Griffiths, Di Kelly, Julie Kimber, Rick Kuhn, Humphrey McQueen,
Tom O’Lincoln, John Rainford, Judith Smart, Jeff Sparrow, Nathan Wise.
We offer this selection to those intellectuals continuing the
tradition of radical history in this country.
**********
Keith
Amos, The New Guard Movement 1931-1935,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1976. This small
book (142 pages) was ground breaking, published at a time when the NSW New
Guard tended to be regarded as an eccentric, aberrant and isolated rightist
response to the Labor government of NSW Premier J. T. Lang in the 1930s. In the
hands of Amos however, the New Guard emerged as a highly organised, well
financed, and serious fascist organisation, one of a number of right wing secret
‘armies’ that developed between the wars in Australia. The book was well researched
drawing on a wide range of materials including official sources, private
papers, and interviews. Amos was a public school teacher at the time of his
book’s publication, and he opened the way for subsequent sustained studies of
rightist secret ‘armies’ in Australia between the wars, notably Michael Cathcart,
Defending the National Tuckshop (McPhee
Gribble, Fitzroy, 1988), and Andrew Moore, The
Secret Army and the Premier (New South Wales University Press, Kensington,
1989). Collectively, these historians established
the existence of a plethora of secret rightist paramilitary political formations
between the wars, anti-democratic and fascist in character, with connections to
serving military personnel, and with membership, organisational and financial
links to the highest echelons of the Australian ruling class, and with a
collective, often overlapping male membership of some 130,000 members at a time
when the male population of Australia stood at two million.
Verity
Burgmann and Jenny Lee (editors), A Most
Valuable Acquisition: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, McPhee
Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1988; Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (editors), Constructing a Culture: A People’s History
of Australia since 1788, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1988; Verity
Burgmann and Jenny Lee (editors), Making
a Life: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, McPhee Gribble/Penguin,
Melbourne, 1988; Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (editors), Staining the Wattle: A People’s History of Australia since 1788,
McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1988. Edited by
academic Verity Burgmann and archivist/literary editor Jenny Lee, this illustrated
four-volume People’s History was conceived
and published as a critical challenge to the multi-million dollar carnival of
celebratory histories and dress-up nationalist re-enactments which marked the
1988 Centenary celebration of the European invasion of Australia. Beginning in
1983 with themed volumes in mind, the editors assembled a large team of
specialist contributors, academic and non-academic. The brief was to produce
essays on society and culture, with attention to issues of class, race, gender,
and sexuality, and to be authoritative, concise, accessible. It was a long,
often painful, collaborative creative process.
The editors explained their series aimed at
recapturing and bringing into history the voices and experiences of those
neglected in conventional histories: “Aboriginal people, women, members of
ethnic or racial minorities and the working class in general”. The intent was
to present readers with ideas and new ways “of exploring the past,
comprehending the present, and making the future”. Contributor Andrew Milner,
in an essay on the history of Australian radical intellectuals inside and
outside the academy, argued that academic intellectuals who confine themselves
to addressing social justice issues amongst niche audiences of fellow academics
in the belief they were tending “the tree of liberty”, were delusional and in reality
did not change anything; radical intellectual activity had to be part of social
movements and the masses. He presciently anticipated the fate of academic intellectuals
and their emasculation by the contemporary neoliberal university.
Drew
Cottle, The Brisbane Line: A Reappraisal,
Upfront Publishing, Leicestershire, 2002. Cottle’s book,
based on his doctoral thesis (Macquarie University, 1991), found difficulties
securing publication via traditional scholarly outlets, hence the less orthodox
mode via Upfront. Consequently the book did not receive the promotion and distribution
provided by a regular publisher, and was generally cold shouldered by academia.
Cottle’s focus was the belief held by some journalists, politicians and
elements of the Australian intelligence community during the 1930s and 1940s,
that in the event of the invasion of Australia by Japan, collaborators would
emerge to help administer the nation in the interests of Japan, and that these
would come from the elites of Australian industry, business, conservative
politics, and the intelligentsia. Essentially Cottle chases a phantom, a ‘what
if’ scenario, and ultimately he comes up empty handed. But in hunting this phantom,
he engages in a robust examination of Australian capitalism, politics and
culture between the wars. Drawing on a huge body of secondary sources, and
immersing himself in the shadow worlds of Australian security and intelligence
files across numerous agencies, Cottle interviewed key players, trawled through
private papers and consular records, along with the records of business and
private organisations. His documentation and interrogation of sources is
exhaustive and forensic, and in ferreting sources Cottle acted at times as a
detective. The result is a political and economic tour de force, one that casts
light on some dark places in the Australian national soul, and rattles
skeletons in the closet of its ruling class.
R.N. Ebbels, The
Australian Labor Movement 1850-1907 – Extracts from contemporary documents,
Sydney, Noel Ebbels Memorial Committee in Association with Australasian Book
Society, Sydney, 1960. Noel
Ebbels became a legend to left-wing students and intellectuals after his death
in 1952, thrown from the back of a semi-trailer while hitch-hiking between
Sydney and Melbourne as the student organizer for the Communist party. Manning
Clark, in a memoir written for this book, remembers his great personal charm
and the way charity and compassion enriched his communist beliefs. The
documents published here -- supplemented by others contributed by a group of
well-known radical scholars -- were a product of his studies in history at
Melbourne University for which he received a first-class honours degree. Their
significance lies in the way they illustrated the current left-wing myth about
the Australian working class’s history – at least in the period they cover - a
myth that equated political maturity with socialist consciousness. So on that
score the book is an historical curiosity. But the documents are preceded by a
long introduction written by Lloyd Churchward that does something different. He
places the working class in its capitalist setting, making one of the first
structural analyses of class relations in this period. And a particular point
he makes is worth contemplating in the light of the way liberal historians
dismiss all scholarly work of this kind as ‘radical nationalist’. Churchward
points out that Labor’s nationalism was focused on state-building whereas the
earlier nationalism of the labour in the 1880s and 90s was ‘a democratically
based nationalism’, focusing on building a working class movement. In fact
Churchward was prefiguring a radical critique of the nationalist strain in
labour history.
Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots – A
Study of Intolerance, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland,
1988. This was the first book-length study to
confront the ‘popular and professional complacency’ about violence in
Australian history. The professionals Ray Evans had in mind were the historians
of the generation that wrote and taught in the second long boom, a period when
conservatives tried to bemuse us with ideas of people’s capitalism, class
harmony and upward mobility. These historians taught us to turn our eyes
away from violence; there was even a general text called The Quiet Continent.
Evans was from the succeeding generation of historians whose world-view was
framed by conflict. In their work, the role of violence in class and race
relations came into focus. But there was often something missing from their
studies, a description, or better still an analysis as well as a description,
of a ruling class at work. Ray Evans’s book on the extraordinary events of 1919
in Brisbane made up for that absence. He directs our attention not just to the
horror of the pogrom against Brisbane’s Russians and to the vindictive
harassment of industrial militants but more importantly to the mobilization
of intolerance and repression, the range of establishment forces involved, the
conspiratorial process needed to direct them, and the sinister connection between
wealthy men and state personnel, including elements from the Labor government.
In his introduction Evans explains how he was drawn to write ‘people’s
history’, and his book does capture the words and experiences of workers and
agitators, but it does much more. It shows a ruling class in action, using
right-wing vigilantes and pliant state authorities to defend its
interests.
Raymond
Evans, Kay Saunders, Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion,
Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland, Australia
and New Zealand Book Co., Sydney, 1975. Later republished by the
University of Queensland Press with the title inverted, this book comprised a
series of linked thematic essays examining the multi-faceted often violent and
bloody history of race relations and racism in colonial Queensland with respect
to Aboriginals, Melanesians, and Chinese. For the authors, racist legacies of this
colonial past were ongoing in the Queensland of their day. While subjecting
Queensland to forensic scrutiny, the authors understood that that racism was
part of a wider Australian past and present. Blending history and sociology,
this was the first Australian book to attempt the comprehensive
analysis/discussion of Anglo-Australian racism as it applied to targeted minorities.
It blazed a trail, and evolved out of the authors’ various involvements during
the 1960s and 1970s with issues of class, women, human rights, and in the
anti-war movement and the anti-apartheid campaign against the 1971 Springbok
Rugby Tour of Australia.
It was a passionate, committed book,
addressing a hidden/forgotten/ignored/denied traumatic past. The authors looked
forward to a future in which the legacies of this past were addressed, and society
was moving on to a humane social justice based future. Around them they saw
hopeful signs that Australia was moving forward in this direction. Their book
was conceived to help kick the ball along. Their research was deep, their
footnoting comprehensive. Critics picked up on the latter and wrongly accused the
authors of cobbling three doctoral theses together. However, at the time none of the authors had doctorates. But even if correct, that misunderstand
purpose and intent. The footnotes documented the existence of a hugely
traumatic past, generously pointed future researchers to sources, and
martialled evidence; in many ways the book was not only history, but also the past
on trial.
Young scholars when
they wrote, the authors received little institutional support. They were warned
off the project by academic colleagues, and variously faced hostility and apathy. Openly
committed scholarship was not the name of the game. Once the book was published,
some bookshops refused to sell it. Despite all this, the book went through
three editions (1975, 1988, 1993), each with a new Preface discussing related
issues and updating historiographical and research developments between
editions. As for the authors, two subsequently built academic careers, and one became a human rights lawyer.
Eric Fry
(editor), Rebels & Radicals,
Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983. Editor Eric Fry was a labour history
pioneer in Australia, and in this book he endeavoured to break away from the
genre he had helped create, which at the time had tended to become focused on
the Labor party and the trade union movement to the exclusion of broader and
more inclusive radical/social historical approaches. Moreover, in terms of
labour biography, a canon of characters had emerged, again, primarily
personalities associated with the Labor party and the trade union movement. But
as Fry argued in 1983, the past and the present involve contradictory and conflicting
social/historical forces; rebels and radicals are indispensable agents, helping
shape the future by opposing and restricting society’s rulers, paving the way
for social change, opening doors to/for reformers, and giving birth to what at
the time might appear as ‘unthinkable’. In the process of this contestation, radical
and rebels not only empower themselves, but also others. Fry cast his net
widely, and in twelve biographical essays his contributors wrote of a range of
Australian radicals, crossing class, race, and gender divides, lives that had previously
existed in historical records in fragmentary ways, their radicalism variously played
down and their contributions denied acknowledgement as credible critics of
society in Australian historical canons, mainstream and otherwise.
Hall
Greenland, Red Hot: The Life & Times
of Nick Origlass, Wellington Lane Press, Neutral Bay, 1998.
This book began as a post-graduate project in the early 1970s, before
Greenland’s possible future as an academic was stymied by vengeful authorities
for his radical critiques and campus activities in pursuit of the
democratisation of university structures and processes at Sydney
University. Ever the activist, Greenland
subsequently chalked up a lengthy record in local social and environmental
issues in Sydney, was a pioneer in the development of Green politics in NSW,
and became a journalist in alternative media, picking up a coveted Walkley Award
along the way. Trotskyist Nick Origlass (1908-1996) was one of Greenland’s
mentors in the 1960s/70s. This book is the study of a cantankerous
self-educated intellectual, trade unionist, local politician, who came to
understand that global issues could be fought locally, and that the local could
be global. It is a radical spatial study of a small area of Sydney (Balmain),
its politics, culture, and radical traditions, and of a minor yet important
Sydney intellectual/political tradition, Trotskyism, seldom discussed outside
of internecine literature. Empathetic, critical, scholarly, enjoyably readable,
Red Hot also demonstrates that
communities can organise, resist, challenge, and defeat powerful interests and
forces, and decisions, often corrupt, made at their expense.
Joe Harris, The
Bitter Fight – A Pictorial History of the Australian Labor Movement, University
of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1970. Joe Harris was a Queensland building worker and
rank and file union activist who wanted to do something about the ignorance of
labour history among his fellow workers. So he took his collection of
Queensland labour movement ephemera to a sympathetic publisher who urged him to
extend it to the rest of the country. It appeared during a period of rising
popular struggles, so when its ‘stridently partisan tone’ was attacked he
responded: ‘I am a militant socialist,
an industrial worker with first hand experience of strikes, stoppages, and
victimization. With such a background it is difficult to be “objective” about
the events that shaped the labor movement, or to see much merit in the
arguments of those on the opposite side of the industrial picture’. Hence the
book’s title. It’s a big book, with nearly five hundred illustrations, tied together
by Harris’s pithy commentary. The photographs, cartoons, leaflets and extracts
from the newspapers are beautifully reproduced. Jim Cairns, hero of left labour
and the anti-war movement, wrote the foreword – too idiosyncratic to be helpful
- but reading it won’t detract from the experience of being immersed in a
powerful story of successful and unsuccessful struggles, of forgotten events
such as the Administrator of the Northern Territory being deported from Darwin
by the workers’ movement, and of eccentric characters like the future Russian
commissar Artem who won the metal shovelling championship while working on the
Warwick railway line. Of course there are portraits of the officials and
politicians but the lasting impression that the book leaves is of a vibrant
labour movement culture, produced by artists, writers and educators - labour
intellectuals in short, like Joe Harris himself.
Audrey
Johnson, Bread and Roses – A personal
history of three militant women and their friends, 1902-1988, Left Book
Club, Sydney, 1990.
Before second wave feminism the left was as sexist and male dominated as
the rest of Australian society, and feminist historians in the 1970s were right
to point this out. They also contributed to exposing the androcentric bias of
class analysis. By 1978, the left was moving to embrace feminism. In that year
2000 women attended the first Women and Labour conference, the papers later
collected as Women, Class and History –
Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788-1978 (edited by Elizabeth
Windschuttle, Fontana, 1980). But socialist and communist women, seen through
the lens of gendered oppression in the academic feminist studies, often lost
their agency as working class militants. Audrey Johnson’s book lovingly
restored that agency. Her book is a collective biography of Mary Lamm (Wright),
Topsy Small, and Flo Davis (Cluff), and a dozen or so of their friends, based
on interviews and documents of the time. It follows their lives of continuous
political activism from the late 1920s to the late 1980s, in party and union
struggles, as rank and file activists and officials, as orators and writers. As
the title says, this is a personal history, letting us hear the voices of Mary,
Topsy and Flo, but also the author’s voice as she sets the scene and explains
the significance of campaigns with the same commitment to socialism as her
three militants. In their eighties they were still fighting for pensions,
women’s rights and a nuclear free pacific. Audrey herself was from a working
class family. After she won a scholarship to Sydney University, where she was a
member of the Labour Club and the Communist Party, she became a social worker
and administrator. We met her in the first New Left in the 1960s. As well as
this book, Audrey Johnson wrote a biography of left-wing Senator, Bill Morrow (Fly a Rebel
Flag, Penguin Books, 1986).
Rupert
Lockwood, Black Armada, Australasian
Book Society, South Sydney, 1975. Publication
of this book was rejected during the 1960s by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA)
in which Lockwood was prominent as journalist, editor, orator, pamphleteer, and
intellectual (1939-1969). It was eventually published following the
encouragement and support of Indonesia scholars Rex Mortimer and Benedict
Anderson. Reprinted twice, it was also translated and published in Indonesia
(1983). Drawing on insider knowledge, personal involvement, original research, interviews,
and correspondence, Lockwood detailed the lengthy boycott (1945-1949) by
Australian trade unions, particularly the maritime unions, of Dutch shipping in
Australian waters which contributed to the formation of the Indonesian
Republic. Thoroughly footnoted, Lockwood’s account was a transnational study and
explored aspects of White Australia before these became Australian academic
industries. It was also written as a demonstration, and assertion, of the
possibilities of trade unions engaging in social and political activities
beyond the purview of wages and conditions.
Lloyd Ross, William
Lane and the Australian Labor Movement, Lloyd Ross, 313 Cleveland Street,
Redfern, 1935. This is an unusual
book in the library of Australian radicalism. It is both a seminal study of
Labor’s betrayal of socialism and also an account of what was betrayed, a
movement cemented not by personal ambition and collective opportunism but by
idealism and feelings, especially love, intimacy and kinship. These were the
feelings that Lane inspired and which he drew on for his vision of communism.
Lloyd Ross was moved by those feelings too. He wrote the book as a socialist
activist on many fronts: cultural, educational, political as well as
industrial, for he was the secretary of the New South Wales branch of the
Australian Railways Union when it appeared. In fact he self-published it, using
his own funds and the offices of the union in Redfern (Sydney), because no
commercial publisher would touch it. And no wonder. He called its first chapter
on the 1890s, ‘Poets and Revolutionaries’, because he wanted his readers to
understand two things: that Lane’s power was that of a poet, in a time ‘when a
poet could be a leader’, and that ‘only when Labor recovers its own idealism
will it be able to do justice to Lane.’ Since then Labor has been deserted by
both poets and revolutionaries; labour history has lost its radical bite; and
the book itself has been forgotten. It was almost lost. In the thirties,
without the promotion of a commercial publisher, sales were slow. Unbound
pages, gathering dust at the back of a Communist bookshop, were seized on the
night the Menzies government banned the Communist Party in 1940. Then in the
late seventies radical author and publisher, Michael Wilding, discovered that
Lloyd Ross had retrieved and stored the unbound pages. Ross gladly released
them and radical publishers, Hale and Iremonger, bound them, with a loose cover
for which Ross wrote a few paragraphs confirming that fifty years later he
still stood by the book’s conclusions about Lane and the labor movement. As we
do.
Malcolm
Saunders and Ralph Summy, The Australian
Peace Movement: A Short History, Peace Research Centre Australian National
University, Canberra, 1986. This small book (78pp) is still
the only one on the topic in the field, and that field (Peace Studies) not
exactly an Australian growth industry currently or ever, and a pauper concern
in a national culture that bankrolls pro-military academic studies and war
commemoration with multi-millions of dollars, and publishers who generate a
tsunami of military themed publications. Saunders and Summy were pioneer
scholars in Peace Studies, and this book is simply what it says it is, the authors
comprehensively describing a tradition of peace activism reaching back to short
lived and limited protests against Australian colonial support for the British
in the Sudan in the late 1880s, but not becoming established and creating continuities
until the Boer War of 1899-1902. We have both used this book over the years in
our various works, and regard it as an important publication despite its
brevity and size, simply because it does exist in a world where mainstream
history tends to ignore the subject or treat it as an irrelevancy. When ‘peace’
and ‘anti-war’ sentiment has to be discussed, as in the 1960s/70s and the
Vietnam War, for example, ‘anti-war’ activism is treated as being specific to a
time, in many ways derivative and imported, and not part of a counter, at times
radical, Australian tradition with a long history.
R.D. (Bob) Walshe, 1854 The Eureka
Stockade 1954, Current Book Distributors, Sydney, 1954; and Australia’s
Fight for Independence and Parliamentary Democracy, Current Book
Distributors, Sydney, 1956. In these
booklets, in just over 90 pages, Bob Walshe laid down the foundations for the
radical study of democracy in Australia. Their common thread was the idea of
popular struggle. At that time the new profession of academic history writing
paid little attention to Australia, dissolving our history into that of
Britain. The development of government organisations in the nineteenth century
colonies was called ‘the coming of self-government’, as if it were a natural process.
There was little interest in seeing the process as a contest between the
colonies and Britain, and even less on seeing it as contested within Australia.
Bob Walshe, although a student of history at Sydney University, drew on a
different historical tradition, an anti-imperial tradition that had developed
within the labour movement. He read the books and articles of movement
intellectuals who wrote history in and for the movement, people such as Gordon
Childe, Brian Fitzpatrick, Bert Evatt, Sam Rosa, Bob Ross, Lloyd Ross and Jim
Rawling. In the first of these booklets Walshe quoted Evatt: ‘Australian
Democracy Was Born at Eureka’, and taken together his booklets provided the first
attempt by a radical historian to justify this statement. He insisted that
Australia gained from a world-wide struggle for freedom and that within
Australia the colonists struggled to make parliamentary government democratic
and to win complete self-government.
Walshe was himself a labour movement activist. Born into a working
class family, he left school at the age of 14, entered the workforce, then
joined the Army for World War II. Beginning as a Fabian socialist, he emerged
in 1945 a communist. Taking advantage of post-war education programs, he went
to university and trained, then worked, as a history teacher. All the while he
researched, wrote, published, organised, becoming a prominent intellectual in the CPA. Expelled for his role in
circulating the Twentieth Congress anti-Stalin/ist speech by Nikita Kruschev, which the CPA tried to suppress, Walshe became
a publisher and prolific author/editor of books on history and education. His
school textbook The Student’s Guide to World History, in print from
1963-1980 (three revised editions), introduced generations of Australian students
to the subject, encouraging a self-directed approach to the subject and its
processes. Ever the activist/organiser, Walshe also pioneered environmental activism. His original 1950s
research on Eureka continues to be cited. Education historian Alan Barcan
described Walshe as “a model activist”; never ego driven, and still an activist at the
time of writing, he could be described as ‘the most famous person you do not
know’.
