From making do to making home : gender and housewifery on the Victorian goldfields
- Authors: Dernelley, Katrina
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Labour History Vol. , no. 117 (Nov 2019), p. 1-21
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Feminist historians have been strong advocates for the recognition of women's domestic lives, yet housework remains an underexplored area of labour history. Scholars of material culture have explored individual aspects of domestic life on the goldfields, particularly needlework; however, the broader focus has remained on women's activities outside the home. Although typically interpreted through narratives of masculine adventure, hardship and goldseeking, the goldfields were also domesticated landscapes. Both men and women consciously made attempts to create home, even when the concept of home was transitory. Commonly, the task of transforming an industrial landscape into a domestic one fell to women, who had been assigned the "natural" responsibility of household labour for centuries. The expectation was that women would attend to the daily labour-intensive work of creating and maintaining home.
Understanding regional trades and labour councils : Sources for Australian labour history
- Authors: Steel, Kathryn
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Labour History Vol. , no. 115 (2018), p. 129-143
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: An exploration of sources available to document the history of a specific type of Australian labour organisation, the regional trades and labour council, has been informed by a quest for the early history of the Gippsland Trades and Labour Council. This paper builds on previous surveys to investigate the variety, extent and relevance of sources available to document the formation of such organisations and the context within which they determine and carry out their strategies and campaigns. The paper also considers advances in technology and the challenges and opportunities they offer for accessing, appraising and making available labour history sources, both physical and born digital.
Triumphant, troubled, then terminal: an examination of the Cain and Kirner decade 30 years on
- Authors: Harkness, Alistair
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Labour History (Australia) Vol. 105, no. (2013), p. 27-46
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: More than 30 years have elapsed since the election of the Cain Labor government in Victoria in April 1982 and, given that only limited academic literature exists on this period of governance in Australia's second most populous state, it is worth examining in detail the Cain and Kirner Labor governments. This article sets this period in the context of the longer political history of Victoria, provides analysis of Labor's rise from electoral inconsequence to government, and charts the course of Labor's decade in office until it ended unceremoniously in October 1992. The article argues that, in contrast to the Hawke and Keating federal governments, Labor in Victoria largely eschewed neoliberalism and pursued a more traditional social democratic agenda. This program proved fruitful until "the recession we had to have" severely impacted on the local economy in 1990-91 and led to the landslide defeat of 1992.
Representing militancy: photographs of the Broken Hill industrial disputes, 1908-20
- Authors: Adams, Paul , Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Labour History Vol. 101, no. (2011), p. 1-34
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The Big Strike of 1919-20 was Broken Hill’s greatest industrial battle but the photographic record of this militant era on the Barrier mines is dominated by pictures of the Great 1909 Lockout. Rather than cover the details of these well-known disputes, this article considers the value and power of photographs of the disputes – their presence, absence, production and presentation in major newspapers and in postcards – an area which has secured far less attention from Australian labour historians. Our concern is not only to read this visual material as evidence of industrial disputes but also to consider how the widespread circulation of such images affected contemporary perceptions of The Hill. We argue that images of a militant locality with a determined labour movement, popular after the 1909 dispute, may well have attracted militant organisers to the town who were important players in the major 1919-20 Big Strike. These images have dominated perceptions of Broken Hill as a bastion of unionism ever since
Herbert Vere Evatt, The Tolpuddle Martyrs : Injustice Within the Law
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Book review
- Full Text: false
- Description: Book Review- Herbert Vere Evatt, The Tolpuddle Martyrs: Injustice within the Law, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 2009 (first published 1937). pp. xxi + 104. $25.00 paper Herb 'Doc' Evatt, is perhaps best known for his role in forging the United Nations, defending the Communist Party in the High Court, and for his failure to win office during his term as Labor leader (1951-60). The extent of Evatt's legal and historical scholarship is often overlooked. This new edition of his 1937 book, The Tolpuddle Martyrs, is a timely reminder of the brilliant and energetic intellect behind Evatt's more public activities. In 1834, in the midst of concerns over the rising tide of trade union and reform activity, six labourers from Dorset were charged under the 1797 Illegal Oaths Act and sentenced to seven years transportation to the Australian colonies.
A tale of two towns: industrial pickets, police practices and judicial review
- Authors: Baker, David
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Labour History (Australia) Vol. 95, no. (2008), p. 151-167
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Both the 1992 APPM Burnie dispute and the late December 1999 Lyttelton industrial dispute involved small bands of local police adopting peace-keeping and non-interventionist control of picket-lines. Considerable criticism from management, and subsequently the judiciary, was directed against the non-confrontational police response. Judicial criticisms of police handling of both disputes failed to consider the adverse consequences of a return to a traditionally aggressive policing approach. This article argues that the local relationship between union officials and local police was a significant factor in limiting violence and that a resort to belligerent policing of picketing should be resisted. The similarities of police and union approaches in both cases were stark, as were the criticisms of alleged police inactivity
David Oldroyd, Estates, Enterprise and Inventment at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution : Estate Management and Accounting in the North-East of England c.1700-1780
- Authors: Eklund, Erik
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text
- Full Text: false
- Description: Book Review