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Although the conclusion to Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855--57) finds the protagonists Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit comfortably situated in London, the novel's long and meandering narrative entertains alternate possibilities. This essay considers the relation of emigration to British middle-class identity, both in the historical context of the 1850s and in the fictional world of Dickens's novel. Australian free emigration, which saw a significant rise in the 1850s, serves as a limit case against which to test the significance of remaining at home in England. Little Dorrit is a novel that "settles" on a domestic life of bourgeois stability, but it arrives at this conclusion only after contemplating less-predictable futures abroad. Dickens himself considered emigrating to Australia while writing Little Dorrit, and the novel's quiet conclusion reflects the author's own conflicted resolution to forego life beyond British shores. Dickens's novel ultimately suggests that Victorian middle-class stability depended at least in part on the rejection of economic possibilities abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a comparatively 'flat' social structure and lack of obvious class-based cleavages, Australian society is stratified by objective, multidimensional measures of social class. Using data from a July 2015 survey of a random sample of Australian citizens, latent class analysis identifies six class types in Australian society, based on the distributions of cultural, social, and economic capital among respondents. The resulting classes are categorised as 'precariat', 'ageing workers', 'new workers', 'mobile middle', 'emerging affluent', and 'established affluent'. The precariat is characterised by high numbers of retired pensioners, the ageing worker class the highest mean age, and the new worker class by its low rate of unemployment. The established middle class accounts for one quarter of the adult population, while the emergent affluent class has the youngest mean age, and the established affluent is the most advantaged. We also show Australians are acutely aware of their class identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ten years (1963-1973) of visits to Australia of Italian Communist Party (PCI) officials. In particular, the visits' origins, meaning and ramifications are analysed and framed against the background of post-war migrant worker identity discourses and radical politics. They appear to have shaped markedly the direction of the experience of Italian communists in Australia, especially in Sydney, and their interaction with both the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the PCI. Ultimately, they helped spread the message of Italian communism among migrants and encourage the replication on Australian soil of the successful experience of the Europe-based PCI federations with thousands of worker members. For the CPA, which had been looking for new ways to break through to the hearts and minds of the migrant proletariat, the visits heralded a stronger partnership with its Italian members, a closer link with Eurocommunism, and a potential new stream of recruits that would have reversed the hemorrhaging of membership. The visits were instrumental, as argued in this paper, for the establishment and promotion of an Italian cultural and language space for which far-left Italian migrants in Australia had long yearned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As museums continue to broaden their offers and attract increasingly diverse audiences, it becomes ever more important to understand how motivations for visitation can vary between different cultural groups. This article explores some of the reasons people visit cultural festivals at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, combining data from 5 different festivals with a total sample of 414. The audience of these festivals contains a mix of 74% cultural community members and 26% non-community members, and their reasons for visiting the festivals differ in distinct ways. Among these distinctions, it was found that social identity played a role in why people chose to visit, especially for community members and at the festivals of communities that were relatively new to Melbourne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS ESSAY investigates the formal and informal educational pursuits of the labour movements and working-class communities of Australia and Canada. It suggests that worker education in the two countries was conducted by similar institutions, notably by branches of England's Workers Educational Association (WEA) but within very different cultural contexts. By juxtaposing these two national cases we demonstrate that labour's reliance on such community-wide institutions was mediated by the relationship between the labour movements and informal networks of working class interaction, on the one hand, and the body politic, on the other. Australia's prominent labour movement and strong tradition of public working class interaction enabled community-wide educational activities to be challenged. In Canada, by contrast, the collaborative nature of adult education and the "tools courses" taught by unions represented a different consensus about the nature of class identity and the place of unions in national politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]