Monash University Publishing and Victorian Trades Hall Council are delighted to invite you to the launch of The Conscription Conflict and the Great War   Edited by Robin Archer, Joy Damousi, Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer  To be launched by The Hon Bill Shorten MP With MC Luke Hilakari                                                                                                                  When: Thursday 27 October 2016, 6.00 for… Read More

  The Brunswick Coburg Anti-Conscription Commemoration committee have launched a Pozible (crowd funding) campaign to get Tom Barker’s Anti-Conscription/Anti-War poster reprinted and onto the streets. They need to raise $1340 to print around 200 large scale reproductions of the poster. You can donate to the cause via the campaign site. The committee is also busy organising lots… Read More

By Hall Greenland   It is the season for centenary commemorations of the Great War. In the past months: the battles at Pozières, Mouquet Farm, Fromelles, and the Somme. The great and the good have been sorrowful and respectful of the fallen – as they should be. Lest we forget? No way. Just don’t mention… Read More

Val Noone and Mary Doyle invite you to a centenary commemoration of Archbishop Daniel Mannix’s first speech against conscription: Dr Mannix: “Clifton Hill, where I committed my original sin” 6.00 for 6.30 pm Friday 16 September 2016 Aikenhead Hall, St John’s Parish Corner Queens Parade and Wellington Street, Clifton Hill On a wet and stormy night, 16… Read More

Gwen Goedecke, life-long activist, and member of the Melbourne Branch of the Labour History Society has died. A service to celebrate Gwen’s life will be held this Saturday at 11.00am at the Unitarian Church in Grey Street, East Melbourne. In 2009, the state government inducted Gwen into the Victorian Honour Roll for Women for her outstanding… Read More

By Rowan Cahill   A discussion of Peter Linebaugh, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day (Oakland: PM Press, 2016). Writing in 1896, not long before his death, indefatigable socialist thought-maker and dreamer William Morris wrote that May Day is “above all days of the year fitting for the protest of the disinherited… Read More

By Peter Love On Sunday 3 April the Campaign for International Co-operation and Disarmament (CICD) arranged a special occasion where it paid tribute to the work of John Ellis as campaign activist and photographer in the cause of peace. CICD expressed that special regard by conferring Life Membership on him. When guests entered the Unitarian… Read More

A message from David Cragg, Victorian Trades Hall Council On 11-12 May 1916, the THC convened an All-Australia Trade Union Anti-Conscription Conference at the Melbourne Trades Hall.  (Please note that this was some 11 years before the ACTU was established.) The successful conference resolved unanimously to oppose the introduction of conscription for military service in Europe and… Read More

On Wednesday 27 April, Ross McMullin will kick off the 2016 Local Labor lecture series with a talk on Chris Watson and his 1904 Labor Government. Ross McMullin is a leading Australian historian, whose books include The Light on the Hill (the ALP centenary history), and the award winning Pompey Elliott and Farewell, Dear People: biographies of Australia’s lost generation. The… Read More

A number of events are being held to commemorate the centenary anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916.  A conference at the University of Melbourne, 7-8 April, will feature a number of local and international experts who will address a range of aspects of the Rising, including its Australasian contexts. Keynote Speakers at the event include Dr Roisín Higgins (Teesside University); Dr Fearghal McGarry… Read More

By Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill   Kicking away the props In recent years, in various places and on our blog “Radical Sydney/Radical History”, we have written about radical history. As radical historians we seek out, explore, and celebrate the diversities of alternatives and oppositions, arguing there is a basic tension between radical history and… Read More

Book Review: Frank Bongiorno, The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2015), xiii and 370 pp. ISBN 9781863957762. Hb.$45.00. By James Walter    Frank Bongiorno’s history of the 1980s is an ambitious exercise in marrying cultural and social history with politics and economics. It is wide-ranging in its attention to dominant mores,… Read More