Labour History in Australia

Abstract

The study and writing of labour history in Australia began outside the uni versities, as it did in most overseas countries. At the beginning of the twentieth century Australia was a newly-founded Commonwealth with a dominion status rather less developed than that of Canada.1 Australian universities were bastions of the British Imperial outlook and there was no serious study of the country's past and not the slightest interest in the growth of its labour movement.2 As a result la bour history writing in Australia was from the start associated with nationalist emotion and the practical concerns of trade unions and activists in the labour cause. Australian labour history accords very well with the British historian Eric Hobsbawm's account of that field of study as tradition a highly political sub ject.3 Labour history had emerged as a more or less sophisticated study in Britain around the turn of the century, under the tutelage of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and J.L. and Barbara Hammond. The Webbs were Fabian socialists convinced that the economic and social conditions of life could, by deliberate and planned human intervention, be changed for the better. Like the Hammonds, who worked from simple humanitarian-liberal assumptions in their famous studies of the plight of the town and village labourers in early industrial England, the Webbs suc ceeded in first focussing attention on the labouring classes in a way which had not previously been contemplated by British historians.4 In comparison with the writings of the Webbs and Hammonds the early studies of the labour movement in Australia were more democratic in perspective, because of their stress on the working class's own initiatives, and more optimistic in celebrating what many were coming to see as the ' 'laboratories of democracy ' ' of Austalia and New Zealand.