Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Radical History: Thinking, Writing And Engagement, Terry Irving, Rowan Cahill

Terry Irving

Shaping Histories, Terence H. Irving, Rowan Cahill

Terry Irving

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).

Labour Intellectuals In Australia: Modes, Traditions, Generations, Transformations, Terence H. 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, drawing on our previously published work. Next we construct a typology of three ‘‘modes’’ of the 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. In a case study comparing the 1890s and 1920s we demonstrate how successive generations of labour intellectuals combined elements of these ideal types in different …

‘The Triumph Of Green Hearts Over Sere’: Reflections On Student Radicalism At Sydney University In The 1910s And The 1960s’, Terence H. Irving

Terry Irving

At the end of the paper I sketch an argument for considering these two periods together, but I want to begin on a personal note. For some time I’ve been writing about left intellectuals in the early twentieth century, one of whom is Gordon Childe, and in the course of researching his undergraduate years at Sydney University between 1911 and 1913 I made a couple of interesting discoveries about student radicalism. I discovered the existence of a University Socialist Society in 1910 and 1911, a fact that nullified Alan Barcan’s claim in his book, Radical Students, that political clubs did …

How Labour Governs: Lessons For Today, Terence H. Irving

Terry Irving

The 2007 conflict between the NSW Labor Ministry and the party’s extra-parliamentary organisation is not new. Vere Gordon Childe described the first such clashes, and the reasons they are endemic, in How Labour Governs, his 1923 book about workers’ representation. According to Childe, there is something at the core of being ‘labour’, something in the fundamental process of organising to represent a wage-earners’ interest, that produces a fatal flaw in the labour movement, so that it ends up not knowing how to use its power in government, and failing as an organ of workers’ representation.

‘Labour History And Its Political Role – A New Landscape’, Terence H. Irving

Terry Irving

As I was thinking about what to say today I read an article on Manning Clark and found something that made me pause. It was a description of our venerable journal, Labour History, but characterizing it in terms that none of us would use, at least not in public. Instead of describing our field, our sources or our methods, our long list of illustrious contributors, it said that Labour History was the journal of Australia’s left-wing historians. Well, this was in Wikipedia – but nonetheless it struck me that, yes, this is a truth I am prepared to accept. I’m …