21 May 2013 5:45 PM – 7:30 PM Organised by the Royal History Society of Victoria Location: RHSV Headquarters, Medical Drill Hall, 239 A’Beckett St – Melbourne. Speaker: Paul Strangio Time: 5.45 pm (Following the RHSV AGM) Cost: RHSV Members free, Non-Members $10. Compared to its fellow state ALP branches, the Victorian Labor Party has been […]
We re-post here a thoughtful discussion by Associate Professor Terry Irving. Click here to view this post on the Radical Sydney blog. **** **** Terry Irving was co-author of Class Structure in Australian History (1980, 1992) and became a prominent labour historian. He edited the journal Labour History, 1990-1998, and was President of the Australian Society for the Study of […]
The Melbourne Branch of the Labour History Society is proud to announce the winner of the inaugural Sam Merrifield Prize. Congratulations to Dustin Halse whose article “‘Citizens Who Serve’: The Political Rights of Victorian Public Servants, 1856-1916” tells an important, largely overlooked, story about white-collar workers. In the process he makes a valuable and an […]
The BLF History Committee has put together a booklet which celebrates the life and contribution of Norm Gallagher. A controversial figure in the labour movement, interest in Gallagher’s contributions to the working lives of builders’ labourers has increased in recent years. This booklet, The Builders Labourers Federation “Never Powerless”: Lessons for the 21st Century, has […]
The Melbourne Branch has received nine entries for the inaugural Sam Merrifield Prize. The prize celebrates the best piece of writing on labour and radical history by early career historians. Our panel of judges (Phillip Deery, Peter Love, Geoffrey Robinson and Judy Smart) will announce the winner on Labour Day, 11 March 2013.
Verity Burgmann on Joe Owens On 20th September the cranes of Sydney stopped for one minute during the memorial service at the NSW Trades Hall to commemorate the life of Joe Owens, who died at the age of 77. Joe succeeded Jack Mundey as Secretary of the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation, a position he occupied […]
At Newman College on 16 October 2012, Val Noone gave the following talk on his field trip in July this year to the sites of the Murray Valley labour cooperatives which Irish revolutionary Michael Davitt visited in 1895. For the third time in a decade I have learned much about the 1890s in Australian history, […]
Read Hilda Kean on the destruction of the Ruskin archive. Published in History Workshop Online. Whose Archive? Whose History? Destruction of Archives at Ruskin College, Oxford | History Workshop.
On 24 July 2012, Michael Nash died suddenly. Few members of the Melbourne Branch would have known Mike, but many would be aware of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, of which he was the Director. With his passing, we lose an encyclopedic knowledge of the vast archival collections held at the […]
Rowan Cahill: I became aware of the rudiments of this story during the 1970s and 80s in my various associations with the former Seamen’s Union of Australia (now part of the Maritime Union of Australia), and the now defunct Communist Party of Australia. It was in these environments I first heard about, and met former members of, a strange […]
