Negotiating ‘a Realm of Public Power and Responsibility’: Labour’s Social Imaginary of Governance at Federation

Abstract

Labour’s social imaginary in the Federation period 1901–02 was constituted by a symbolic order summoned to represent participation and performance under the terms of the liberal state. Labour’s social imaginary functioned through structures and forms of display that were inherited from existing patterns and imaginings of governance, and which the movement adapted in its own forms and interests. It was expressed in parades and banquets, in the display of union banners; evident in public meetings and deputations, in the formal domains of conference and congress. Labour’s social imaginary was observed in the surveillance of the mainstream daily press and expressed in an increasingly sophisticated labour press. This process was at once an accommodation with the terms of the liberal state and political culture, and a challenge posed to it. The labour movement’s participation in liberal governance in the post-Federation period was a complex process of accommodation and assertion.