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The Victorian labour movement's monument to the eight-hour day was proposed in 1889, upraised near the Victorian Parliament in 1903 and moved to a spot outside the Trades Hall in 1923. This article...

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...

Australian historians have long placed the examination of historical evidence, scholarship and changing representations of the past at the centre of their teaching. This chapter reviews the history of Australian practice, foregrounds the innovative approaches of the New Left generation and contemplates recent challenges to prevailing methods, especially those driven by the changing university sector and the changing orientations of students. This chapter critically examines major responses to these challenges, particularly the increasing emphasis on ‘doing history’ in the classroom. It argues that ‘doing history’ activities must continue to connect scholarship, representation and evidence, and should not be limited to the exclusive analysis of primary evidence.

Celebrated as the father of Indian independence, Mohandas K. Gandhi was also a transnational activist. This chapter explores the transnational dimensions of Gandhi’s career and influence. It argues that Gandhian nonviolence—what he called ‘satyagraha’—was a transnational production: it was developed as a political performance that might allow those on the colonial periphery to influence metropolitan targets; it drew upon British, European, American, and Indian influences; it reflected intercultural relationships that spanned the continents. Second, it contends that the global career of Gandhian satyagraha was enabled by the mass communications of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and by a repeated labour of translation, shared among a community of nonviolent advocates in India and the West. The history of Gandhian protest therefore demonstrates the longevity of global activism. It also highlights the centrality of transnational networks to the forging of successful global careers and campaigns.

The identity and association of the ‘transnational activist’ so far have not been the subject of detailed historical scholarship. And although historians lately have begun to explore social movements in a global historical perspective, their descriptions of figures of global activism appear ideologically too narrow to describe all forms of transnationalism connected to social movements. This volume therefore proposes the term ‘transnational activist’ and approaches the history of this actor by examining five central controversies: those of periodisation (is this activist a figure mainly of the twentieth century?); context (what are the historical contexts that nurtured the emergence of transnational social movements?); action (what does the activist do?); form (what ‘types’ of transnational activists are there, and do they differ when considering different periods of globalisation?); and dynamics (examining how reinvented actions may themselves become new objects of diffusion, thereby conceptualising the process as more “continuous” and recursive). When discussing these controversies, this collection deliberately focusses on the Anglo World, seeking to place the ‘transnational activist’ in the context of imperial relationships and movements, and to bring these into dialogue with the more familiar ‘global’ activism of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Thereby, in spite of not being exhaustive, it considers a long time period, and a variety of colonial and post-colonial contexts, as well as of activists from many different movements.

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.

Social movements emerged quickly in Australia and exerted a rapid and important influence on the development of politics and society. Not only were Australian men among the first to enjoy the privilege of the suffrage, they were also among the first to extend this privilege to women, to form powerful unions, to forge parties of labour capable of wielding national power, and to host movements of environmental protection. Indigenous people also used methods of petitioning and demonstration from the nineteenth century, though with notably lesser success. The precocious mobilisation of Australian social movements reflected the nation's history as a penal colony and a settler colony. The state was a powerful agent and the object of political claims. It acted to repress the most radical political agents, but also to incorporate and legitimate the demands of major political campaigns. This process was evident from the nineteenth century until the twenty first. It was jeopardised by the rise of neoliberalism, and the growing unwillingness or incapacity of the state to conform to past practices. In understanding the trajectory of Australian social movements, one therefore grapples with more general questions concerning the relationships between movement, state, empire, and economy.

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.

During 1871 and 1872 the Victorian Premier, Charles Gavan Duffy, led his minsters on a banqueting tour of the colony during which he made a series of speeches in defence of his Government. Little noticed since but controversial at the time, Duffy's tour called into question the centrality of parliament and the meaning of colonial democracy. Earlier interpretations, derived from the study of colonial New South Wales, paint Australian politics in this period as ideologically somnolent and unprincipled. Yet Duffy's tour and the associated hullabaloo reveal the intellectual vitality and vigour of democracy's brash antipodean form. Its significance has been overlooked by historians. However Duffy's oratory tour was undertaken almost a decade before Gladstone's 1879 apparently pioneering Midlothian campaign, and the electioneering practices he initiated in the early 1870s shaped elections in the years that followed.

The memoirs and diaries composed by politicians represent an increasingly important form of history. This article provides a comprehensive survey of such writings in Australia. It suggests that they have become more popular, diffuse, confessional, immediate, ambitious, interventionist and cynical over recent decades. The significance of these developments is considered and some tentative explanations advanced. © 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2010 School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

Political diaries can claim literary, political and intellectual significance, yet they have rarely been subject to serious or extended enquiry. In this article we offer the first comprehensive survey of the Australian political diary. We also analyse these writings in some depth, suggesting that, taken as a whole, the diaries reveal three Weberian “ideal types” of the politician: the “patrician”, the “professional”, and the “radical”. These ideal types are used to shed a new light on the functioning and limitations of parliamentary democracy in Australia.

While the Great War raged, Australians were twice asked to vote on the question of military conscription for overseas service. The recourse to popular referendum on such an issue at such a time was without precedent anywhere in the world. The campaigns precipitated mass mobilisation, bitter argument, a split in the Labor Party, and the fall of a government. The defeat of the proposals was hailed by some as a victory of democracy over militarism, mourned by others as an expression of political disloyalty or a symptom of failed self-government.But while the memory of the conscription campaigns once loomed large, it has increasingly been overshadowed by a preoccupation with the sacrifice and heroism of Australian soldiers – a preoccupation that has been reinforced during the centennial commemorations.This volume redresses the balance. Across nine chapters, distinguished scholars consider the origins, unfolding, and consequences of the conscription campaigns, comparing local events with experiences in Britain, the United States, and other countries. A corrective to the ‘militarisation’ of Australian history, it is also a major new exploration of a unique and defining episode in Australia’s past.

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.

The rise of Hansonism provoked a campaign of demonstrations, rallies, marches and walkouts. This movement was frequently received within the media as violent, disruptive, and illiberal. However, I argue that anti-Hanson contention represented a noteworthy form of active citizenship. It contested the presence of the One Nation Party, undermined the ideological claim that Hanson represented ‘ordinary’ Australians, and garnered substantial publicity. The anti-Hanson campaign was concerned not only with the staging of dissent in public space, but with how that dissent was framed within the public sphere. Reflecting these public dynamics, the anti-Hanson movement moved over time from a reliance on contestational gatherings, that directly opposed the One Nation Party in physical space to autonomous gatherings, that attempted to create separate spaces of anti-racist politics. Ultimately, therefore, the campaign can be understood as a flexible, democratic and self-reflexive form of political mobilisation.

The emerging forms of global economy and culture have stimulated a recent, feverish interest in the possibilities of social movements in a globalized environment. Transnational social movements have beckoned as new political actors; global civil society has loomed as a new forum for democratic decision making; and new(ish) technologies, such as the internet, have promised fresh forms of international mobilization and organization.1 This has coalesced with the postmodern insistence on contemporary transformation, difference, and play, so that the near future has seemingly promised newly minted, international, performative, fractured, mass-mediated, and technologically wired social movements, operating in a historically novel fashion on the terrain of global civil society. However, this enticing prospect has recently been questioned on a number of grounds. The political capacities of social movements to contest globalization have been found wanting;2 the tendency of global civil society to amplify the values and powers of the advanced industrial societies has been highlighted;3 and the cyberdemocratic appeal of the internet doubted.4 More than that, the historical novelty of contemporary social movement practice has also come under strong attack. Historians have identified such playful and expressive activities as demonstrations, boycotts, and public assemblies in the eighteenth century.5 They have emphasized the international circulation of ideas like popular sovereignty in the period before the American Revolution6 and the transnational scope of such venerable movements as the campaign for working-class emancipation.7

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 argues that the Australian Labor Party was transformed in the 1950s, shedding its rhetorical commitment to socialism as well as many of its democratic ties to the organised working class. It also attempts to explain this transformation. The argument that this transformation was the product of rising working-class incomes and declining class consciousness is considered, before being rejected on both empirical and theoretical grounds. An alternative political explanation, which focuses on the interactions between the Party, its working-class constituency, and its leadership, is then offered. The article thereby aims not only to reconceptualise a specific moment in the history of Labor, but to reorient our theoretical approach to the Party, and our understanding of political change in the early postwar decades.

The first of the gold rushes was the most dramatic. In the decade following the original discoveries, 600,000 immigrants settled in the Australian colonies, taking the non-Aboriginal population to 1,152,000 by 1861; estimates of the Aboriginal population in that year range up to 180,000. While Victoria grew fastest, from 77,000 to 539,000, all the mainland colonies doubled in size. The challenge Victoria faced as its richest alluvial fields were worked out was to stem the outflow of prospectors and consolidate local industries that had sprung up to serve their needs. The other colonies competed for labour and capital to fulfil their own aspirations. They made rapid strides. Stimulated by a high rate of fertility and further migration, which brought nearly 750,000 additional settlers, the country’s population reached 3,174,000 by 1891. Half lived in towns and cities, among which Melbourne (473,000), Sydney (400,000) and Adelaide (117,000) accounted for more than one third of their colonial populations. The consolidation of settlement in the south-east corner of the continent was accompanied by a push into the north: separated from New South Wales in 1859, Queensland’s population grew over the three decades from 30,000 to 394,000. Economic progress outstripped the increase in population and gross domestic product increased more than threefold; the annual rate of economic growth averaged 4.8 per cent.

The non-violent protests of civil rights activists and anti-nuclear campaigners during the 1960s helped to redefine Western politics. But where did they come from? Sean Scalmer uncovers their history in an earlier generation's intense struggles to understand and emulate the activities of Mahatma Gandhi. He shows how Gandhi's non-violent protests were the subject of widespread discussion and debate in the USA and UK for several decades. Though at first misrepresented by Western newspapers, they were patiently described and clarified by a devoted group of cosmopolitan advocates. Small groups of Westerners experimented with Gandhian techniques in virtual anonymity and then, on the cusp of the 1960s, brought these methods to a wider audience. The swelling protests of later years increasingly abandoned the spirit of non-violence, and the central significance of Gandhi and his supporters has therefore been forgotten. This book recovers this tradition, charts its transformation, and ponders its abiding significance.

‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come’, so intoned Gandhi's most influential translator, Richard Gregg. It was April 1962, and he referenced the power of non-violence. Gregg's memory extended to the false prophecies of the 1930s and the timid experiments of mid-century. But by now he could also survey nearly a decade of unprecedented activism. From the mid-1950s, movements for civil rights and against nuclear arms perfected satyagraha as a form of mass politics for the West. The landmarks loom large, still half a century later. In Britain, the campaign to ‘ban the bomb’ encompassed invasions of rocket sites from 1958 and ‘sit-down’ demonstrations in central London from 1961. At Easter time, a year before Gregg's commentary, 150,000 people joined the fifty-two-mile march from the Aldermaston reactor to the national capital; later that September, 1,300 were arrested in a knowingly illegal demonstration underneath Horatio Nelson's stony gaze, in Trafalgar Square. Alex Comfort's tuneful incitement, ‘Sit, Brothers, Sit’, captured the developing sensibility with perceptive whimsy: Then sit, brothers, sit, And let every brother sit, The bombs and bases to picket: While you've still got an arse you can say they shall not pass. Sit down and the cops can't kick it. In the United States, the movement for African-American civil rights mobilised earlier and ranged even further. A boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama began in December 1955, when 50,000 residents united under the leadership of a young pastor, a certain Dr Martin Luther King Jr. From February 1960, a ‘sit-in’ movement spread from Greensboro, North Carolina.