Mark Hearn

One big union : a history of the Australian Workers Union, 1886-1994

Introduction: the progress of a moderate man W. G. Spence 1. The knights of the blade, 1886-9 2. Looking for justice, 1890-1 3. The hustle for jobs, 1892-4 4. Grinding in the iron heel, 1895-1901 5. The giant refreshed, 1902-14 6. One big union, 1914-20 7. Ourselves alone, 1920-9 8. A union that battles, 1930-9 9. A wonderful machine, 1940-9 10. Anxious to see the light, 1950-9 11. The meaning of mateship, 1956-9 12. Making the truth hurt, 1960-9 13. Too good for the lot of you, 1970-9 14. Out of the past, 1980-94 Conclusion.

Securing the man: Narratives of gender and nation in the verdicts of henry bournes higgins

Historians have long debated the significance of the decisions of Justice Henry Bournes Higgins as President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court (1907–21), and his marginalisation of women in the paid workforce. Higgins’ motivations have been less thoroughly explored. Gender demarcation clarified the role of the working class in nation‐building. Women were relegated, as much as possible, to the domestic sphere, to fulfil their motherhood role on behalf of the nation and clear the way for the establishment of the disciplined workplace functions of the male breadwinner. The verdicts and transcripts of Higgins’ decisions reflect the complex exchange between the liberal architect and the governed as he regulated state‐sponsored freedom to bargain and organise—albeit in the name of law and order. On behalf of the development of the young Commonwealth Higgins regulated working‐class manhood by suppressing industrial militancy, upholding managerial prerogative—the right of management to rule their workplaces—and marginalising the participation of women in the workforce.

Reworking Citizenship: Renewing Workplace Rights and Social Citizenship in Australia

ABSTRACT As a focus of creative self-expression through work, the workplace is a key site of identity formation as well as economic reward. A new narrative of social citizenship must be sourced in workplace experience and must be capable of adaptation to discrete needs. This article considers the potential for constructing this narrative and reflects on the significant obstacles. Reconstituting meaningful social citizenship in an ‘enterprise culture’—a radically restructured and individualised economic and social system—requires adaptation to the fractious diversity of this culture. It requires a creative reassertion that workers have legitimate rights to equitable conditions of work and opportunities to participate in civic life—to influence the conditions that affect them both in the workplace and the wider community. Unions can continue to play an active and creative role in advancing these rights.

Cultivating an Australian Sentiment: John Christian Watson's Narrative of White Nationalism

Contemporary observers and historians have interpreted Australias first Labor Prime Minister, John Christian Watson, as an ideal leader for Labors early participation in nation-building following the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Little attention has been paid to the values Watson brought to Labors participation in nation-building. Race, defence and the ‘cultivation of an Australian sentiment’ formed the recurring themes of Watsons national narrative. Compelled by a need to fix an identity from the peripheral territories of empire as a British subject and the leader of white Australians in a nation, as he claimed, that ‘we have made our own’, Watsons narrative provides insights into the anxieties of racialised white identity in the federation period—an identity tested by conflicting class and national loyalties.

Productivity and patriotism: The management narrative of New South Wales Rail Chief Commissioner James Fraser, 1917-1929

The management narrative of James Fraser, the Chief Commissioner of the NSW Railways and Tramway Department, 1917–1929, provided the defining values of the Departments organizational discourse and reflected the aims of transformational leadership, inspiring managers and staff to share the values he advocated. Fraser sought to impose a regime of disciplined productivity upon rail and tram workers based on scientific management techniques, and linked appeals to increased productivity with patriotism to manage the stresses imposed on the Department during World War I. Frasers narrative reflected the values of liberal governmentality in shaping the conduct and culture of the workforce. It is argued that the narrative turn may establish a more fruitful analytical relationship between business history and organization studies by uncovering the discursive codes and values embedded in organizational culture and practice.

Examined suspiciously: Alfred Deakin, Eleanor Cameron and Australian liberal discourse in the 1911 Referendum

This article explores the experience of two individuals, Alfred Deakin, leader of the Opposition, and Eleanor Cameron, the organising secretary of the Australian Women’s National League, who represented and led the self-governing constituency of Australian liberalism during the campaign against Labor’s April 1911 referendum proposals to increase Commonwealth control over corporations, trade and industrial relations. Foucault’s concept of liberal governmentality is employed to interrogate the tensions imposed on the liberal individual and the contradictions of liberalism.

A Wild Awakening: The 1893 Banking Crisis and the Theatrical Narratives of the Castlereagh Street Radicals

The Active Service Brigade (ASB) agitated on behalf of the Sydney unemployed during 1893-1894, in the wake of the 1893 banking crisis which heralded the onset of the colonial depression of the 1890s. The ASB declared its emergence in the working class districts of East Sydney in street theatrical marches and meetings. The Brigade and the anti-bank journal Hard Cash employed a melodramatic rhetoric of class conflict. Banker and free trade politician William McMillan was a symbolic villain of these theatrical narratives for his role in facilitating bank reconstruction and resistance to labour mobilisation, forcing his political withdrawal from East Sydney, and the labour precinct of Castlereagh Street.

Developing a critical discourse: Michel Foucault and the cult of solidarity

Australian trade unions face the organizational and ethical challenge of advanced liberalism and its privileging of an enterprise culture, an ideological hegemony which unions, with their traditions of solidarity and collectivism, struggle to resist. While it has been argued that critical discourse studies offer a research methodology to develop politically engaged resistance strategies, CDS has not subjected the values and language of union mobilisation and class resistance to sufficient scrutiny. Employing discourse analysis to promote equality and workplace justice requires a willingness to engage in a critical examination of what terms like class solidarity now mean in the context of enterprise culture. Foucaults stress on the power relationships embedded in discourse clarifies the history of solidarity and intensifies our critical analysis of the new discursive formations of enterprise culture which have stripped traditional union solidarity of its institutional basis and authority. Foucaults ethics, based in the notion of the care of the self, suggests that union claims to govern and represent the interests of their members can only be reinvigorated by applying the Socratic ideal of self-examination and self-transformation.

Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation

In 1916 Ernest Scott, the recently appointed Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, chose to conclude A Short History of Australia with a discussion of Australia’s novelists and poets. In the final paragraph of the discussion, and the book itself, he observed: Perhaps not many of the writings of these men are well known outside Australia; but what of that? She has her own life, and it is good; they wrote for her about the things that are hers; and they have helped her people to understand their country, their destiny, and themselves.1 Scott might have provided a similar commentary of the ambitions of Australia’s historians, across the twentieth century, to create and contest a mythic narrative of national experience. Berger et al. observe that European national histories ‘showed a remarkable zeal in demonstrating the uniqueness of their particular nation-state’; a similar zeal in Australian national histories was intensified by a strong sense of insularity as a federation of colonies finding its path to nationhood in a region distant from comparable Western nations.2 Australians defensively withdrew from the Asia-Pacific region in the name of economic growth and white cultural destiny. Looking inward, the national narrative attempted to discover the sources of Australian character from within a culture that could proudly acknowledge its British origins, while scrutinising itself for the evidence of a unique transcendence.

Writing a life: John Dwyer's narrative identity

John Dwyer, a working class Sydney radical active in the period 1890–1914, felt compelled to express his being in narrative—his political aspirations and spiritual speculations, his fraught circumstances as a worker, husband and father. Dwyers narrative is not a streamlined autobiographical statement: his surviving papers follow the upheavals and strains of his life. By exploring Dwyers life and personal papers, this article argues that narrative identity provides a significant methodological tool for analysing the lives of historical actors, enriching traditional, materialist interpretations while avoiding the disconnection from historical experience that some critics have associated with postmodernism. The article places a stress on the dilemmas of alienation and subjectivity and explores their relationship with narrative theory.