History Commons^™

Radical Sydney - Places, Portraits And Unruly Episodes, Terry Irving, Rowan Cahill

Terry Irving

Sydney is represented to its citizens and to the rest of the world as a postcard, an impressive, beautiful city, a desirable tourist destination.

But there has always been another Sydney not viewed so fondly by the city’s rulers, a radical Sydney they are intent on ‘disappearing’ beneath concrete and glass. In the arc of working-class suburbs to the south and west, menace and disaffection developed. From the early nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century these suburbs were large and explosive places of marginalised ideas, bohemian neighbourhoods, dissident politics and contentious action.

Through a series of snapshots of …

A Childe Bibliography: A Hand-List Of The Works Of Vere Gordon Childe, Terry Irving, Peter Gathercole

Terry Irving

A hand-list devoted to the published writings of Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957). It includes political writings, letters to newspapers, and reviews, as well as his books, articles and contributions to books. It covers his Australian years as well his academic career in Britain. Because its aim is to create an historical record of both Childe's work and the continual contemporary interest in his ideas, the list is arranged year by year to highlight his productivity and the periods when attention to his work was greatest. There are four sections: (i) books and monographs; (ii) articles and chapters; (iii) reviews; and …

Esmonde Higgins In The Soviet Union, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

Esmonde Higgins visited the Soviet Union in 1920 and became a Communist, and in 1928 and began a process of disengagement from Communism. This chapter explores his reactions to the Soviet Union during those visits, in particular how he projected onto the Soviet system his own imagined world of socialist feelings. Back in Australia it was the bureaucratic and ruthless style of the party's leadership that cured him of his sentimentality about Communism and the Soviet system.

The Southern Tree Of Liberty - The Democratic Movement In New South Wales Before 1856, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

Responsible government began in New South Wales after two decades of radical democratic agitation. Radical intellectuals from England, Ireland, Scotland and Europe mobilized the working men and women of the colony to resist the aristocratic form of government proposed by pastoralists and city capitalists. There was violence on the streets and goldfields, and some notable electoral victories. As 'a great fear' gripped the local elites the British government forced them to accept a more liberal form of representative government in the belief that this would placate the democrats and keep the colony safe for British imperial needs.

Labour Intellectuals In Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations, Terry Irving, Sean Scalmer

Terry Irving

The article begins with a discussion of labour intellectuals as knowledge producers in labour institutions, and of the labour public in which this distinctive kind of intellectual emerges. Next we construct a typology of the three modes of labour intellectual that were proclaimed and remade from the 1890s (the 'movement', the 'representational', and the 'revolutionary'), and identify the broad historical processes (certification, polarization, and contraction) of the labour public.

Places, Protests And Memorabilia - The Labour Heritage Register Of New South Wales, Terry Irving, Lucy Taksa

Terry Irving

A guide to collections and sites of labour heritage in New South Wales. It contains three data bases: (i) labour memorabilia; (ii) sites of working class leisure, housing and work; (iii) labour precincts in Sydney, its suburbs and the main towns of NSW. The precincts database was constructed through a systematic search of documentary sources between 1890 and 1980 so that it can reveal the changing contours of the precinct over time.

The Growth Of Federal Authority, 1929-40, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

This chapter covers the period of economic crisis in which Labor returns to government at the national level, splits and loses office, and rebuilds its strength in a long process of asserting the authority of the Federal Parliamentary Party against the state branches and the factions they often spawned. It begins with Scullin's victory and ends with the new leader, Curtin, poised to make Labor the party of government in another moment of national crisis.

The Public Sphere And Party Change: Explaining The Modernization Of The Australian Labor Party In The 1960s, Terry Irving, Sean Scalmer

Terry Irving

This article argues that the modernization of the Australian Labor Party was not inevitable or necessary. The party did not modernize because it was overly dominated by trade unions, because society had changed, or because class was no longer central. Instead the transformation of the party was the result of a series of political struggles, in which the modernizers grasped new resources in the changing public sphere - the dynamic new media of post-war Australia.

Labour Historians As Labour Intellectuals: Generations And Crises, Terry Irving, Sean Scalmer

Terry Irving

Over the last nine decades Australian labour historians have been engaged in a massive, ongoing, fractious, collective intellectual project. This chapter argues that labour historians should understand their role historically, as labour intellectuals, and sketches three generational moments in the history of labour history intellectuals. We conclude that labour history is a popular, collective, democratic, regional, and political form of history-writing.

Esmonde Higgins - Politics As Intellectual Practice, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

This chapter traces Esmonde Higgins' struggle to define his intellectual practice from 1919 to 1954, using his private correspondence and his published writings. It divides his reflections into three parts: alienation, practice, and contradictory aspects of practice.It describes his route from Communist bureaucratic practice to having conversations 'about human interests' with workers as equals in adult education classes and informal domestic gatherings.

Childe And Australia - Archaeology, Politics And Ideas, Terry Irving, Peter Gathercole, Gregory Melleuish

Terry Irving

This book focuses particularly on Gordon Childe's Australian background and connections, while also linking his European and Australian experiences and various aspects of his work in prehistory, archaeology, history and politics. Included too are Childe's own letters and reminiscences of those who knew him, some published for the first time.

Youth In Australia - Policy, Administration And Politics, Terry Irving, David Maunders, Geoff Sherington

Terry Irving

This book describes and analyses the development of youth policy in Australia since the end of World War II. Three eras are distinguished in terms of how society constructed youth as a problem: as juvenile delinquency (to 1960); as a generation gap (to the mid-1970s); and most recently as a wasted resource (1975-1990). In each period chapters cover: the social and demographic context and images of young people; policy development; bureaucratic structures; and the politics of youth and youth policy.

Les Origines Du Socialisme Parlementaire En Australie, 1850-1920, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

An English-language version of this article appears in 'LABOUR HISTORY - A JOURNAL OF LABOUR AND SOCIAL HISTORY', 67 (November 1994), 97-109. It describes the mid-19th century origins of the working class, the impact of the early introduction of parliamentary politics, the rise of industrial unionism and the formation of the Labor parties.

Challenges To Labour History, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

The decline of the labour movement in the 1980s and 1990s robbed labour history of its elan as 'history with a social purpose', and the rise of postmodernism devalued the attempt by labour historians to grasp social reality as a whole. Today there is a commonly expressed feeling that labour history is experiencing a crisis. The first three essays in this volume are historiographical; then four essays engage with the challenges posed by post-modernism and cultural theory; and finally four essays present examples of the ways in which theoretical reappraisals can shape the writing of labour history.

Class Structure In Australian History - Poverty And Progress, Terry Irving, Raewyn Connell

Terry Irving

First published in 1980, this book is an updated and reorganized account of the history of the class structure in Australia. A new chapter discusses the period 1975-1991, and there is a new theoretical chapter introducing the reader to modern debates about class. Separate sections for documents and photographs support the narrative. Extensive notes provide a guide to research literature.

New Light On 'How Labour Governs': Rediscovered Political Writings By Vere Gordon Childe, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

This article uses four rediscovered political essays by Gordon Childe to revise certain accounts of his political thought in the period when he was writing 'How Labour Governs' (1923). It shows that he was not a syndicalist; that he would not be hostile 'to a real Labor government'; that he had not renounced working-class politics; but that he was concerned about the negative effects of Labor's obsession with capturing the state on working class solidarity.