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Articles 1 - 22 of 22
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Mullen's Choices, Rowan Cahill
Mullen's Choices, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Obituary/biographical note concerning Geoff Mullen (1947-2014), and his anti-conscription activities (1967-1972) in Australia during the Vietnam War.
Book Review: David Grant, 'Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seamen's Union, 1879-2003' (2012), Rowan Cahill
Book Review: David Grant, 'Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seamen's Union, 1879-2003' (2012), Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Review of David Grant, 'Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seamen's Union, 1879-2003' (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2012). The reviewer co-authored a history of the Australian Seamen's Union (1872-1972) in 1981, and this review is sympathetic towards Grant's history, and makes a case for the ongoing production of worker/union histories.
A Case Of Open Access, Rowan Cahill
A Case Of Open Access, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
I support ‘open access’, the enabling of unrestricted and free internet access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. Too much academic/scholarly writing is locked up behind the paywalls of multinational publishing empires, generating enormous profits from the unpaid, often publicly financed, labours of vassal scholars/academics. So too with scholarly books, confined as they are by small print runs and exorbitant ‘library copy/sale’ prices. To my mind there is much in contemporary scholarly publishing practice that reminds me of the medieval library at the heart of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980), hidden as it is in a labyrinth, accessible …
Book Review: Nichole Georgeou. Neoliberalism Development And Aid Volunteering, Rowan Cahill
Book Review: Nichole Georgeou. Neoliberalism Development And Aid Volunteering, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
As Nichole Georgeou explains at the start of her book, the gestation of this study was her immersion and experiences in the field of aid volunteering in Japan and North Vietnam (pp.xv-xviii). This was during the early 1990s, when she was in her early twenties; they were experiences that left her asking huge moral, ethical, political questions about volunteering.
Shaping Histories, Terence H. Irving, Rowan Cahill
Shaping Histories, Terence H. Irving, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
During the last few years, a number of researchers have interviewed the authors regarding their politics and practice in relation to 'history'. In reflecting upon their individual 'historiographies', they have put the following together. The authors met at Sydney University in the 1960s; Irving was a post-graduate student and a tutor; Cahill was an undergraduate student. They were two of the five founders of the Sydney Free University (1967-1972).
Review: 'Disobedience: The University As A Site Of Political Potential, Rowan Cahill
Review: 'Disobedience: The University As A Site Of Political Potential, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
The radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, and related student insurgency, is still largely uncharted territory when it comes to Australian history. There is a small body of scholarly research comprinsing theses, book chapter, journal articles, and an equally small number of relevant books. To my knowledge only one book, by Mick Armstrong (2001), attempts to survey and grapple with the entire period, its politics and complexities; in 114 pages, this is a brief but useful contribution.
The Looming War On Trade Unions, Rowan Cahill
The Looming War On Trade Unions, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
In October 2013, the right-wing journal Quadrant published the book Australia’s Secret War, an account by Hal Colebatch of homefront industrial disruptions by Australian trade unions during the Second World War. Described as a secret history rescued from ‘folk memory’ – and one previously suppressed by leftists – it detailed ‘treacherous’ industrial actions by unionists that denied/delayed vital war materials to the frontlines between 1939 and 1945, resulting in the deaths of service personnel. These actions, the argument went, pointed to a deliberate and coordinated attempt at sabotaging the war effort courtesy of the communist leaderships of the unions involved. …
The Enemy Within, Rowan Cahill
The Enemy Within, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
As the Anzac commemoration industry, awash with millions of dollars of government and corporate investment, gears up to celebrate the centenary of the Gallipoli landing in 2015 (embracing in the process all Australian military adventures overseas going back to involvement in the New Zealand Maori Wars of 1863–64), and the Sudan intervention of 1885), it is salutary to reflect on a seldom discussed Australian military tradition closer to home – in fact, at home. Simply, military might in Australia has, since early colonial days, been deployed on the home front. Forget the ‘feel good’ domestic use of military forces in …
On Darkened Days And Sleepless Nights, Rowan Cahill
On Darkened Days And Sleepless Nights, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
The author's thoughts on the role of radical historians, and the roles of protest and dissent in history. He argues that it is the "act of resistance that is crucial, not necessarily its success or otherwise". The example of the resistance to Nazism by Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) is invoked.
Breaking The Iron Collars, Rowan Cahill
Breaking The Iron Collars, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Review of Kevin Baker, "Mutiny, Terrorism, Riots and Murder: A History of Sedition in Australia and New Zealand", Rosenberg Publishing: Dural, 2006.
A Khaki Future?, Rowan Cahill
A Khaki Future?, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Australia is a martial and warlike nation, established on beachheads on the east coast of the continent in 1789 by the military might of Britain. Long-running conflict with the indigenous people ensued, a struggle that went on into the 1920s and is yet to be incorporated into mainstream tellings of the history of the Australian nation. With invasion secured and indigenous dispossession well in hand, military interventions followed in the lands and affairs of others: in New Zealand during the 1860s against the Maori people, where volunteers were enticed with the promise of sharing confiscated land; the Sudan (1885–86); the …
Maritial Matters, Rowan Cahill
Maritial Matters, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Between 2006-2009, Rowan Cahill published a number of commentaries relating to the Anzac tradition, and to the Australian martial tradition generally, on the Leftwrites experiment in progressive group blogging. A selection of these commentaries follows; they represent views of the Australian martial experience at radical odds with mainstream Australian histories. The issues raised are still relevant, especially as the Australian government is currently spending its way through millions of dollars as it prepares to commemorate/celebrate the centenary of the Gallipoli landing (2015). Leftwrites is archived in the Pandora web archive of the National Library of Australia.
Would 'The Making Of The English Working Class' Get Made Today?, Rowan Cahill
Would 'The Making Of The English Working Class' Get Made Today?, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
It is fifty years since leftist publisher Victor Gollancz published The Making of the English Working Class by English historian Edward Palmer Thompson (1924–1993). During 2013, this event has been, and is being, commemorated globally in political and scholarly conferences and journals. My dilapidated copy is the Penguin revised edition (1968), purchased in 1970. Still in print, and with more than a million copies sold worldwide, Thompson’s hugely influential doorstop book is regarded as a pivotal exploration of social history, as much an historical classic as it is a literary classic. The book runs to some 900 pages and over …
The Eight Hour Day And The Holy Spirit, Rowan Cahill
The Eight Hour Day And The Holy Spirit, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
In Australia during the 1850s skilled workers in Sydney and Melbourne generally worked a 58 hour week; 10 hours per day Monday to Friday with 8 hours on Saturday. For other workers it was longer; shop assistants, for example, worked between 12-14 hours per day. Child labour was not uncommon; in 1876 in New South Wales, for example, the NSW Coal Mines Act was passed to limit the working week for boys aged 13-18 years to 50.5 hours per week and ban the employment of girls or boys in mines under the age of 13. The idea that working people …
Len Fox 1905-2004, Rowan Cahill
Len Fox 1905-2004, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
The Eureka flag draped over the coffin of Len Fox was there because Len had spent much of his life, some 60 years and three books, authenticating a flag in the Ballarat Art Gallery as the flag that flew over the stockade of the Eureka rebels in 1854, the symbol, in the words of historian Bob Walshe who spoke at his funeral service, "that most dramatically captures the spirit of Australian struggle for an independent democratic republic".
Introduction - A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movement And The Labour Movement, 1965-1975, Rowan Cahill
Introduction - A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movement And The Labour Movement, 1965-1975, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
The Conference, 'Social Protest Movements and the Labour Movement, 1965-1975', was held in Sydney on September 22-23, 2001. It took place eleven days after Muslim militants crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Centre in New York and into the Pentagon, and nine days after the Australian government, in consultation with the United States government, invoked relevant provisions of the ANZUS treaty equating an attack on the US as an attack on Australia's peace and safety. Australia was heading for military involvement in a war against the hapless, impoverished nation of Mghanistan - a war that US President George W. …
On The Technique Of Working-Class Journalism, Rowan Cahill
On The Technique Of Working-Class Journalism, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
No abstract provided.
The Making Of A Communist Journalist: Rupert Lockwook, 1908-1940, Rowan Cahill
The Making Of A Communist Journalist: Rupert Lockwook, 1908-1940, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
The journalist/publicist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997) was one of Australia’s best known Cold War communists, his name synonymous with the Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia, 1954-1955, as author of the notorious Document J. However the communist journalist did not spring fully formed into history. He joined the Australian Communist Party in 1939. This article traces Lockwood’s development as a journalist and his evolution as a communist between the wars. It is a story that ranges from small-town Western Victoria, and the West Wimmera Mail, to Melbourne and Sir Keith Murdoch’s Herald. In between, much of the world is traversed--significantly, South …
A Conscription Story, 1965-69, Rowan Cahill
A Conscription Story, 1965-69, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Conscription (National Service) was re-introduced to Australia in November 1964, and ended in 1972. Conscripts were randomly selected by a lottery system for 20-year-old males. While it was not publicly known at the time, I in 12 eligible males were actually selected, though this ratio varied according to the number eligible each year and the actual number required by the army; so, for example, in October 1972 the chances of being selected were I in 20.1 Whilst historians tend to refer to conscripts as “men”, it should be remembered that in Australia during the 1960s neither the right to vote …
Obituary: Kondelea (Della) Elliott (1917-2011), Rowan Cahill
Obituary: Kondelea (Della) Elliott (1917-2011), Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
In 1902 Lenin published the political tract which became a basic text for left-wing activists titled 'What is to be Done?'. Della Elliott tended not to ask that question; rather she saw what had to be done, and got in and did it. In the process, her doing was careful, meticulous, and professional; all the metaphorical'i's were dotted, and the 't's crossed. Moving away from metaphors to actualities, spelling had to be correct, and meanings clear.
Home Front Ww2: Myths And Realities, Rowan Cahill
Home Front Ww2: Myths And Realities, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
Beginning with recent attempts by conservative interests to depict some Australian trade unions as having acted in 'traitorous' ways during World War 2 by engaging in activities that variously sabotaged the home front war effort, this lecture examines the claims, and the myth of the social solidarity of Australian society 1939-45.
The Radical History Of Sydney University: Student Activism In The 60s, Rowan Cahill
The Radical History Of Sydney University: Student Activism In The 60s, Rowan Cahill
Rowan Cahill
A personal account of radical activism at Sydney University during the 1960s by two activist/participants, Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving. The talk was part of the campaign by Sydney University students to mobilise for the National Rally for Education Rights held on 26 March 2014.