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What is the place of ‘peace history’ in the study of Australian history? This article considers the marginalisation of ‘peace history’ and ponders recent challenges to such marginality. It further explores the possibility that studies of the Australian peace movement might not simply contribute to a fuller understanding of Australia’s past, but might also contribute to a more ambitious and historically grounded understanding of the ‘social movement’ as a transnational political actor.

‘Social movement studies’ sits on the borderlands between political science and sociology. It is a sub-discipline of comparatively recent origin. Though the concept of the ‘social movement’ entered...

The 1951 referendum campaign to ban communism produced a massive shift of public opinion, from Yes to No. This article attempts to explain why. It examines the political appeals and rhetoric of the Liberal and Labor Party leaders, their coverage across the entire metropolitan press, and their use of radio. Breaking with earlier interpretations, it argues that Evatt's campaign encompassed wider issues than civil liberties, suggests that Menzies' campaign was damaged by unruly meetings and shows that neither side appealed exclusively to ‘reason’ or to ‘passion’. Ultimately, the success of the No campaign rested on its capacity to mobilise most Labor voters and to attract some Liberals. This was an extraordinary achievement, but it was secured using routine forms of electioneering.

Australia was a precocious mass democracy. In the middle of the 19th century the franchise was extended to nearly all white male adults, the secret ballot was introduced, and other important reforms implemented. Surprisingly, these developments have attracted little recent attention. Dominant interpretations are based on selective surveys of particular colonies; they either elevate the gold diggings or else cynically claim that democratisation was mostly accidental and inglorious. This paper encompasses a survey of the three major colonies. It argues that widespread collective action was a spur to political change, and that electoral reforms were introduced to contain future contention.

Mohandas K. Gandhi is conventionally described as an anti-colonial rebel, a prophet of nonviolence and a political saint. But though seldom described as a “humanitarian,” Gandhi himself sometimes deployed the term to describe his aspirations and activities; likewise, he criticized colonists for their failure to honour “humanitarian” principles. In examining Gandhi’s politics from the relatively unfamiliar vantage of humanitarianism, his political inspirations and his relationship to empire emerge in new ways. Equally, the form and the meaning of Gandhi’s actions also raise important questions regarding the limits and assumptions of the humanitarian project. This paper considers the changing connections between Gandhi, humanitarians and empire over more than half a century. It aims, more ambitiously, to consider how these relationships contributed to a significant moment in the global history of nonviolence.

This article provides a long-range analysis of the relationships between class, capitalism, and the sport of cricket. It argues that cricket embodies four broad class processes: class formation, hegemony, class struggle, and commodification. These processes have been present throughout the history of cricket, thereby helping to remake the game and its culture. Over time, cricket transformed from a means of ruling-class formation (a gentlemen's game) and of ideological control (inculcation in elite values) to a means of subaltern mobilization and cultural pride (an expression of class struggle). However, over recent decades, the process of commodification has grown in intensity. The repackaging of cricket as a form of spectacular entertainment has increasingly stripped it of cultural power. This has undercut the operation of the other three processes and has driven radical devotees of the game into an uneasy nostalgia. In consequence, the history of cricket is not simply illuminated by class analysis, it also discloses broader dilemmas concerning the relationships between class, capitalism, and radical politics today.

This article attempts to place the philosophy of Marxism inside the web of Communist political practice within the Communist Party of Australia between 1942 and 1956. It argues that Marxism was presented as an objective knowledge, and the prestige of Marxism was used by Party leaders to build internal discipline and unity, and quell dissent. Party intellectuals selectively called upon Marxist authorities in order to entrench their own power, and to justify political strategies. Detailed attention is given to three specific uses of Marxism: the way Marxism was used to justify Party policy, to explain the Party's growth between 1941 and 1945, and to justify ‘loyal’ dissidence within the Party. The result of these ideological uses of Marxism was that Communists failed to understand their political environment and the extent of their political influence. The events of 1956 threatened the health and internal equilibrium of the Communist Party, and the implications of these events on the subsequent use...

This article deals with European Nuclear Disarmament's (END) difficult positioning in the Cold War of the 1980s. Its vision was for a humanistic socialism from below that would be capable of breaking up the Cold War and unite a divided Europe that in turn could act as a possible "third way" between the liberal capitalism of the USA and the orthodox Communism of the Soviet Union. However, it proved difficult to build these alliances across the Cold War divide without talking, at the same time, to representatives of the "official" peace movements of the Communist states. END found itself between the Scylla of having no dialogue at all with Eastern Europe or the Charybdis of having a dialogue also with the Communist regimes which was seen sceptically by the dissidents. The article traces the difficulties of END of building humanistic socialist alliances for peace from below with special reference to END's Working Group on Germany.

This issue of Labour History is dedicated to the study of labour women's leadership. The topic is relatively unfamiliar to the pages of the journal, and even to academic scholarship.

Review(s) of: A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movements and the Labour Movement, 1965-1975 by Beverley Symons and Rowan Cahill, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Sydney Branch, 2005. pp. x + 94. $20.00 paper. Review(s) of: Uncharted Waters: Social Responsibility in Australian Trade Unions by Greg Mallory, Boolarong Press, Brisbane, 2005. pp. xx + 242. $35.00 paper.

This article studies the rise of the modern labour technocrat within the Amalgamated Metal Workers' Union, which developed in this period a large research, educational and publicity apparatus, a vibrant shop steward movement, and independence from the political parties of the labour movement. Intellectual work within the union at first aimed to encourage rank and-file intervention in industry. A series of defeats and changing political relationships altered the focus of intellectual work to an alliance with Labor in government. Thus the union's intellectuals took on a different role, that of technocratic expert. The rise of the modern labour technocrat- a new and dominant actor in the labour movement of the 1980s - was not inevitable. There was a contest over the place and role of the labour expert in the 'modern union' during the 1970s and 80s.

This article is a contribution to the ongoing dialogue concerning the relative virtues of culturalist Marxism and discourse analysis in the study of labour and social history. The dialogue has increasingly preoccupied more theoretically-minded historians over the 1980s and '90s, as the conceptual basis of much of labour history has been subjected to quite fundamental critique. Ann Curthoys has recently offered such a critique in Labour History, arguing that the search for structural explanations of events should be abandoned as 'authoritarian' and 'reductive', and that it should be replaced by an exploration of the 'diversity of meanings and perspectives' that history contains.1 This article responds to such a view. The argument proceeds in three broad sections. Firstly, it traces the theoretical underpinnings of Thompsonian labour history, and in particular the political and intellectual genesis of the central concept of 'working class experience'. Secondly, it explores the critiques of working class experience launched over the 1970s and '80s from the perspectives of structuralism and post-structuralism, and assesses the power and the implications of such critiques. Thirdly, it offers the beginnings of an attempt to adjust to the force of this attack from a materialist perspective, and to suggest a reformulated, and more aggressive form of labour history. It is a theoretical article, concerned with the discussion of approaches to the writing of history, rather than with the demonstration of such approaches, yet it remains intimately concerned with the future treatment of labour in actual historical scholarship.