Postscript: Australian and British Labour Compared

Abstract

At the outset I should make it eminently clear that I am expert in neither Australian nor British labour history. As a Canadian labour historian, I have read broadly in both fields but can claim no particular research expertise in either. I can claim, however, a broad interest in the development of comparative and transnational approaches to the study of the working class. Undoubtedly, this interest was the basis for Greg Patmore and Neville Kirk's request that I produce a brief afterword or postscript for this collection of essays. In April 1987 a group of Canadian labour historians met with Welsh colleagues in the beautiful setting of Gregynog Hall new Newtown in mid-Wales. Under the joint leadership of Deian Hopkin, then editor of Llafur, and myself, Canadian and Welsh colleagues learned much from each other in comparing working-class development in the two geographic areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Approximately 20 months later, a similar group of Canadians traveled to Sydney, Australia to participate in a joint conference with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.2 Both of these conferences, while undoubtedly productive and stimulating, left their organisers frustrated with the limitations of simply placing two national perspectives side-by-side with no explicit effort to tease out the comparative insights. Hence, Patmore and Kealey devised the technique utilised in a second Australian Canadian conference in Sydney, and repeated in this British-Australian volume. Experts from each national context wrote theme papers on their country but then they were asked to work together to develop a truly comparative essay. The results of the first effort appeared in 1996, and this collection represents the fruits of the most recent collaboration between the Australian and British Societies for the Study of Labour History.3 One significant difference between the two efforts is that fewer of the final matchups are contained in the current volume. As Kirk suggests in his introduction, it is to be hoped that the conference presenters on historiography, race, gender and the passages of radicalism and culture will submit their final essays for publication.4 For these would provide a broader context in which to situate the essays published here; in this regard, the historiographie essay would be particularly beneficial. The absence of these essays leave the existing collection rather too narrowly focused on work and the labour movement at the expense of an array of other aspects of workers' lives. The editors are evidently well aware of this fact as the Berger / Patmore essay itself highlights 'the importance of transnational transfer processes for the development of nationally constituted labour movements'.5 We have spoken already about comparative and transnational labour history. It is important that we clearly distinguish these approaches because, while related, they are not identical. As recently refined by Michael Hanagan, 'Transnational labour history studies state border crossings that result from labor market demand, state labor policies, the actions of workers, or the practices of working-class institutions'.6 Hence, not all comparative labour studies qualify because not all of them involve