The Study of Occupational Health in Australia

Abstract

Labour historians have rarely made occupational health their prime focus of study.1 In the last twenty years Labour History (USA) has printed only four such articles.2 One piece ?on mine disasters ? has appeared in the Society Jor the Study oj Labour History Bulletin3 while History Workshop has had one autobiographical document?The Martyrdom of the Mine?which in part described workplace dangers.4 In Australia Labour History provided a lead in the mid-1960s with the publication of E. C. Fry's survey of the colonial parliamentary papers in which he cited sources relating to workers' health and specifically to work accidents.5 The lead was not followed. June Stoodley's article on the attitudes of Queensland miners to the introduction of safety regulations in the 1890s stands alone in the journal.6 The major Australian monographs in the field are similarly silent. In Radical and Working Class Politics (1960), Bob Gollan made fleeting reference to the regulatory industrial legislation of the 1890s but not to the threats to workers' health which invoked it.7 Injury and disease had no place in Coghlan's optimistic account.8 For the others ?for instance, Fitzpatrick and Turner?the issue did not arise, probably because it did not become a prime concern of most of the developing trade unions.9 The focus of these writers on the institutions of the organised section of the working class led them by and large to reflect trade union priorities in their choice of topics. Union concentration on other issues led to historians' oversight. The major exception to this ?among both unions and historians ? has been in the mining industry where considerable attention has been directed to both accidents and lung disease (the pneumoconioses ? silicosis, phthisis, asbestosis ? and their associated diseases ?pneumonia, tuberculosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma.10 It is, then, the historians of mining (or of mining communities)