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Full-Text Articles in History
Death, Decline Or Atrophy? The Necessity Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Death, Decline Or Atrophy? The Necessity Of Politics, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
While thinking about the contemporary state of politics, it is very difficult to shake off a recurring image from the brilliant television series A Very Peculiar Practice. In that show, a wonderful aging character was writing a book about the parlous state of higher education in Great Britain. 'Death of the University' muttered Jock into a portable tape recorder, between swigs of Scotch, as he wandered around campus despairing at the shattered values and distorted priorities of the new university. Jock spoke for all of us who care about education. I hope to be speaking to all of us who …
Illawarra Unity: Editorial July 2006, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial July 2006, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the new Industrial Relations legislation prepares the labour movement for wider and more militant struggles, it is good to be reminded of industrial action that resulted in trade union victory.
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2007, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2007, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Class and the very concept of class struggle seem almost quaint today. They speak, it is sometimes assumed, to different times. Yet in the battle around WorkChoices, in the struggle for public education and the public sphere generally, class is ever present. Paradoxically, participants on both sides of the culture and history wars have tended to slide past class, elevating instead gender, race and sexuality, on the one hand, or national pride and economic progress, on the other. Terry Irving brings class back to life in his new book The Southern Tree of Liberty: the democratic movement in New South …
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2005, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2005, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
Labour movement struggles have a significant cultural dimension. The role of music has been particularly important. IWW songster and activist Joe Hill personified the intimate connection between songs and struggle. When contemporary folk musician John McCutcheon performs, as he invariably does in Australia, ‘The Ballad of Joe Hill’, he prefaces the song with a wonderful tale about Paul Robeson singing for the workers on the steps of the Sydney Opera House (see John McCutcheon Live at Wolf Trap). Folk music is story-telling and it gives a voice to the oppressed, the marginalised and the working classes. In this issue of …
Siev X And The Banality Of Evil: An Interview With Tony Kevin, Anthony Ashbolt, Tony Kevin
Siev X And The Banality Of Evil: An Interview With Tony Kevin, Anthony Ashbolt, Tony Kevin
Anthony Ashbolt
Tony Kevin is the author of the award-winning A Certain Maritime Incident: The Sinking of the SIEV X, published in 2004. He retired from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 1998, after a thirty-year public service career involving posts in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Prime Minister’s Department. He was previously Australia’s ambassador to Poland (1991-94) and Cambodia (1994- 97). Tony Kevin has been an honorary Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies since 1998. Since 2001 he has given guest classes on United Nations …
Remembering The Warilla Strike: An Interview With Jim Bradley, Anthony Ashbolt, Jim Bradley
Remembering The Warilla Strike: An Interview With Jim Bradley, Anthony Ashbolt, Jim Bradley
Anthony Ashbolt
Jim Bradley, the local New South Wales Teachers Federation spokesman at the time of the Warilla teachers strike in 1976 is now an active campaigner on behalf of the disabled. His impressive work with the South Coast Disabled Surfers Association has received national recognition.
Long Tan: The Politics Of Forgetting, Anthony Ashbolt
Long Tan: The Politics Of Forgetting, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
The 40th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Long Tan have been both excessive and tendentious. The rehabilitation of Vietnam veterans now serves to reinforce amnesia about Vietnam itself. Such amnesia serves the interests of policy makers in Canberra. Far from the immoral imperialist venture that it was, the American war in Vietnam now functions as a salutary reminder of Australian heroism. The noble warrior is recreated before our eyes: spurned and trashed by the anti-war movement and the Government, labelled a baby-killer by people in the street or the pub, thrown in the gutter to fester and die of …
The Warilla High School Strike: A Veritable Class Struggle, Anthony Ashbolt
The Warilla High School Strike: A Veritable Class Struggle, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
On 10 February 1976 the Illawarra Mercury reported that 18,000 steelworkers would strike from midnight for 24 hours due to BHP’s refusal to ratify a steel award which lifted the all purpose bonus from $12 to $30. The following day, the major industrial news (front page) involved the ACTU warning of massive industrial unrest if the 6.4% was not granted. It was not until page 8 that there was an item about Warilla High School teachers going on strike the previous day. From then on, it was much bigger news. The Warilla High School strike persisted for 28 days and …
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2008-9, Anthony Ashbolt
Illawarra Unity: Editorial 2008-9, Anthony Ashbolt
Anthony Ashbolt
As the financial system internationally shudders and shakes and disappears, only to reappear as something else, we are entitled to ask if this finally is the death throes of capitalism. Or is it merely the end run of what Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called “extreme capitalism”? Rudd’s diagnosis, of course, is problematic, precisely because he fails to see the systemic fault-lines. Instead, he points to personal greed and unfettered finance as the causes, when both are merely symptoms of a more deadly neo-liberal disease. And the current Labor Government, rather than tackling this disease directly, pushes empty rhetoric …