Class, Community, and Culture: The Case of the Brass Band in Newcastle

Abstract

Labour historians, in Australia as in Britain, have traditionally regarded the development of the organised labour movement as their main concern, and the Marxists among them, in particular, have devoted the greater part of their energies to studying different features and phases of the class struggle. In recent years, admittedly, they have widened their horizons by adding other areas of social tension and instability, such as race and gender to their remit. This suggests, however, that they are still obsessed by phenomena which have divided, rather than united, capitalist-democratic societies in the past. The result is that conflict continues to feature more prominently than consensus in their writings and on their conference agendas. Can such a one-sided picture be sufficient for a proper understanding of 'people's history'? After all, men and women do not live in an aura of unremitting strife, nor does the wage-dependent class, whatever its precise composition, exist in isolation from the broader, pluralist society of which it is a part. It is surely right for labour historians to seek to understand integration as well as exclusion, and the cement which has held society together ought to be of as much interest to them as the tremors which have occasionally rocked its foundations. If we want to widen the scope of our subject to take account of these matters, there are several interesting and important concepts which we might usefully pursue. 'Culture' and 'community' are two of them, and this paper, by focussing on one apparently trivial example, will try to indicate briefly some of their implications and possibilities. The 'trivial example' is the brass band and its place in the life of the Newcastle region of New South Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been deliberately chosen because it raises another key theme in Australian labour history. The brass band was one facet of the lively and diverse popular culture which successive waves of British, mainly working-class, immigrants brought with them in their baggage to Australia between the 1870s and the 1920s; but, not surprisingly, it gradually acquired some new characteristics when transplanted to its new home.1 By exploring its subtle transformation, we are forced to consider the degree of 'Britishness' in Australian society and culture as it developed. Australia may have become 'different' from the United Kingdom; but how different? Given that neither 'Britain' nor 'Australia' were homogeneous entities, in which areas or aspects of Australian life did similarities to the 'old country7 remain strongest, and in which did the sharpest and earliest divergences occur? British stereotypes may provide useful models for Australian labour history; but are they always relevant and appropriate? Or can they blind us to some of the distinctive features of working-class life and experience which developed in Australia between the ending of convict transportation and the Second World War? This paper seeks to raise these wider issues by tackling one specific problem: in the early twentieth century, it was often claimed that the Newcastle area was 'the brass-band capital' of Australia (if not, indeed, of the southern hemisphere). What was the basis of these claims? Were they justified? If so, what implications might they have for our understanding both of the Newcastle region's place in Australian labour history and also of some of the important differences between working-class life and experience in Australia