Labour History and Cultural Studies

Author(s): Ann Curthoys

Source: Labour History , Nov., 1994, No. 67 (Nov., 1994), pp. 12-22
Published by: Liverpool University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27509272

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 LABOUR HISTORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Ann Curthoys

In the early 1960s a group of historians led by ANU academics Eric Fry and Bob Gollan
formed the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Its first Bulletin came out in
April 1962, and was transformed into the journal Labour History in roughly its current format
with the fourth issue in May 1963. Contributors to the Bulletin saw themselves as writing a
new and contentious kind of history, especially with its subject matter. Those early issues
of Labour History included articles - academic, anecdotal, reminiscence - on issues such as
strikes and riots, unions, employer-union relations, labour and radical organisations, leading
labour movement figures, and radical and labour politics, parties, and ideas.
Labour history in Australia remains alive and well. The journal that carries that title is
flourishing, receiving far more articles than it can print, and with a waiting list of up to two
years before publication. Essays dealing with aspects of labour history appear regularly in
other journals as well, such as Australian Historical Studies and the Australian Journal of
Politics and History. As a review article in AHS by Rae Frances and Bruce Scates in 1993
indicated, publishers continue to produce in abundance books on various aspects of labour
history.^he most recent Labour History conference, in June 1993, is testimony in itself,
having attracted over 100 papers from historians and activists around the country. Labour
historians are well represented in the academy: a large number of academic teachers of
history, in Australian history probably the majority, have close associations with it. Labour
history is also important for teaching and research in industrial relations and political science,
and a significant number of labour historians work in those fields.
Now, a third of a century later, where is the enterprise of labour history? How far have
historians been able to achieve the aims of its founders, and have or should they have new
aims?

Labour History in Australia

In a symposium called 'What is Labour History', published in 1967, Eric Fry saw it as
essentially the history of a social class, the working class, which emerged at a certain point
in history. It is, he said, analytical, dynamic, and not confined to national categories. Terry
Irving noted the emphasis within the field to that point on institutional history, the small
amount of work done on the history of ideas, and the virtual absence of the study of the
culture of the working class. He suggested that most Australian labour historians had little
understanding of class, and called for a more complex class analysis in the distinctive
Australian context.3
During the 1970s, this more complex understanding slowly began to emerge, not so
much through a direct study of the culture of class, as Irving had advocated, as through the
impact on labour history of the new social movements - especially the women's movement.
Women's history had a sudden and dramatic impact with the publication, all in the same
year, 1975, of Labour History's special issue, Women at Work, and the well-known feminist
histories by Anne Summers, Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, and Miriam Dixson.4 The
following year, in an unusually theoretical and reflective article for Labour History, Susan
Eade brought to labour history readers a greater knowledge of the social history movement
in British history. She pointed to the notion of social history as a total history of society, and

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Curthoys - Labour History And Cultural Studies 113

to the growing importance of oral history. In the same issue, Jim Hammerton drew attention
to the liveliness of women's history in Britain. In Australia, the combined impact of feminism
and the new social history led to increased interest in the history of women as workers,
political activists, trade unionists, and members of working-class communities.5 Ten years
later, by the fiftieth issue of the journal, it seemed as if women's history had all but taken
over.6
These changes occurred under John Merritf s editorship from the mid 1970s to the mid
1980s. During these years the interests of labour history widened to include women's, media,
urban, and health history. Studies of unions, Labor, strikes, and industrial crisis points
continued, however, to dominate, though as a proportion of the total articles in the journal
they fell from, on Stephen Garton's reckoning, a high 79 per cent in the 1960s to 65 per cent
in the 1970s. The emphasis on Australian labour's relation to foreign policy debates, and
especially questions of war and fascism, continued. The work of Andrew Markus and Verity
Burgmann, and a special issue in 1978 edited by Markus and myself titled Who Are Our
Enemies? Racism and the Working Class in Australia, did much to align labour history with
the history of racism and immigration policy. Yet the gulf between labour history and
Aboriginal history remained wide, the two articles in Who Are Our Enemies? not being
followed up with further articles until two in 1988, and two more, one by an Aboriginal
author, Jackie Huggins, in 19917

The strange death of labour history

At the Australian Historical Association conference in 1990, Verity Burgmann announced
the death of labour history. It had become, she said, unfashionable to publishers, academics,
and selection committees, overtaken by its newer rivals, women's, Aboriginal, and social
history. Verity defended labour history from its critics, arguing that it had become
unfashionable not because of its own failure to meet the challenges provided by women's
and Aboriginal history, but because of a change in the political climate, a turning away
from the socialist and Marxist ideas it had often embraced. Labour history, she argued,
died from external not internal causes.8 Raelene Frances and Bruce Scates replied in
Australian Historical Studies that labour history is not dead; it has not even become
unfashionable. There is, they felt, no need to diagnose the causes of a death that has not
occurred. Labour history remains healthy both as a distinct field, and as overlapping with
social and cultural history, and especially women's history.9
Wondering myself just how labour history is developing now, I looked at the last ten
issues of the journal, from number 57 (November 1989) to number 66 (May 1994). I was
interested in subject matter, but more particularly in the approach. To what extent had the
emergence of Cultural Studies as a new and distinct field of study influenced the articles?
I noted that these ten recent issues continue to show a major preoccupation with the
traditional work of labour history, on unionism, arbitration, and strikes; on the policing,
regulatory, and welfare roles of the state; and on political conflicts over peace, war and
conscription. What stands out also is the vast attention to women's labour history: with
articles on women's wages, equal pay campaigns, arbitration, motherhood endowment,
women's occupations such as barmaids and nurses, domestic service, confectionery workers.
The amount of detail here is truly impressive. Certainly, Frances and Scates are right to
reply to Burgmann that women's history and labour history are overlapping rather than
distinct fields of study.
Yet I am not entirely satisfied by the reply Frances and Scates made to Burgmann's
paper. In particular, I am concerned by their conflation of social and cultural history. The

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14 Labour History Number 67 November 1994

two are not the same thing. Here I want to explore the difference between them and what it
means for future scholarship within labour history. My reading of the last ten issues of
labour history indicates a recent growth in the number of articles addressing questions of
cultural history: on entertainers in Vietnam, representations of workers in monuments,
masculine ideology, homosexuality in the Cold War, and imaginary Newcastles. In the
excellent collection Women, Work, and the Labour Movement (1991), edited by Rae Frances
and Bruce Scates, we can recognise the essays on cultural history easily: there is one on
sexualised consumerism and the working woman's wardrobe, another on 'selling soap:
domestic work and consumerism'. In short, there are signs of a new cultural history within
Labour History, both the journal and the field in general, but they are still very tentative. I
want to argue for a more wholehearted look at the challenges and implications of Cultural
Studies for the practice of labour history. An historiographical conversation with cultural
theory would, I believe, be of great value to labour history.

Towards a new cultural history

In 1989 Lynn Hunt published a collection of essays in the US, announcing to a broad English
speaking audience the emergence of a new form of cultural history, from a variety of sources:
British Marxist history, French social history, Russian literary theory, American cultural
anthropology.10 This form of history influences many historians today, without their
necessarily knowing quite where it has come from or to what extent it is different or distinct
from what they had already been doing. I'd like to explore the elements that make up
cultural history today.

Marxism
Cultural history inherits from Marxism an interest in the emergence and culture of class.
The fortunes of Marxist history have waxed and waned since Marx's death, reaching a
peak between the 1930s and the 1970s, declining rapidly during the 1980s and even faster
during the 1990s. During the 1960s and 1970s Marxist approaches seemed satisfying and
explanatory, especially for the way they provided a link between social and economic
position and political action. Marxist history seemed to be particularly useful for explaining
conflict, and the ways in which class groupings could change over time as capitalism itself
changed and developed.
The Marxist approach to class was forced, however, to confront some serious difficulties.
Its critics argued, influentially, that class differences were not the only forms of social
division, since race, ethnicity, and gender play a very important part in determining
economic opportunities, social position, and access to power. If gender and ethnic differences
and conflicts constantly cut across class relationships, how can we continue to see classes
as social groupings, as collective political actors? Many, including notably Barry Hindess
in The Politics of Class, concluded they cannot, and that classes are simply groupings defined
by a common economic position. Some times this common economic position will find
political expression; at other times it will not. Class is a valuable but not privileged concept
in historical explanation."
Compared with the 1970s and early 1980s, there is relatively little academic historical
writing today within a Marxist tradition. It has suffered not only from a critique of class as
a primary category, but also from many other telling critiques. These have centred on the
opposition to the idea of a single unfolding historical principle, such as the contradiction
between the forces and relations of production, and the idea that we can see economic
changes as the motor of history. Critics see Marxism as Eurocentric, as attempting to see

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Curthoys > Labour History And Cultural Studies 15

the whole of world history through a European lens. They criticise it for historicism, its
belief that we can discern historical laws, and see specific histories as part of a larger
meaningful whole, an enforced totality. Finally, there is opposition to Marxist theories of
history as teleological, resting on the idea that history has a purpose, is a story only half
told, whose ending is already knowable but not yet achieved. As postmodern emphases on
discontinuity, fragmentation, and dispersal appeal to more and more historians and their
readers and students, these aspects of Marxism become less attractive.12
Paradoxically, though, while the new cultural history accepts these critiques of Marxist
history, it also derives in part from it. There is one major strand of influence from Marxism
that tends to escape most of these criticisms. Edward Thompson, especially in his 1963
work The Making of the English Working Class, rescued the British Marxist historical tradition
from its dry determinism, its historicism, its teleology, and its concern only with broad
structures and with a very limited form of economic history. In stressing class as a
relationship that emerges at a particular time in a specific context, he gave the Marxist
tradition new life. Thompson returned historical agency to the working class, or more
precisely the ex-peasants and artisans who constituted the emerging working class in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, seeing them as actors who through their
own collective consciousness and cultural practice were present at the making of their own
history. It was, above all, class as a culturally specific phenomenon that interested him. It is
this aspect of Marxism that flourishes best today, and which gives labour history some of
its continuing vitality.

Social history
Cultural history also arises from the Annales School, originally the home of social history.
The Annales School is the phrase used to refer to a cluster of historians, over three generations,
around the French historical journal Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilisations, founded in
1929. Their area of study was mainly Europe, especially France, and their period medieval
and early modern, that is, mainly dealing with the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. In
Australia it is usually historians working in or studying European history who discuss the
work of the Annales school; its concerns and methods have been slow to percolate through
to the study of Australian history. And yet, though Australian labour historians may not be
fully aware of it, the approach of the Annales school has indirectly influenced their work
quite considerably. Originally led by Marc Bloch and Henri Febvre, the school wanted to
break away from narrative political history, allowing more space to economic and social
history. The next generation, led by Fernand Braudel, sought a quantitative and totalising
emphasis in the study of economic and demographic trends over long periods; they desired
a non-specialist 'total' history.13
The third generation of Annales historians, of the 1970s and 1980s, in reaction to the
quantitative history of the 1950s and 1960s, gradually moved from social to cultural history.
They looked to new objects and new methods, exploring the history of phenomena that
were not thought of historically before, such as climate, madness, death, fear, guilt, dreams,
and memory. As Peter Burke puts it, there was a journey 'from the cellar to the attic', from
the so-called economic base to the cultural superstructure. They had been influenced by,
among other things, Philippe Aries' study of childhood, or rather of the development of
the notion of childhood, which argued that before the seventeenth century there was little
idea of childhood as a separate stage in life.14 Aries showed how we cannot use our current
everyday concepts to understand the past, rather we look at the ways those concepts first
arose. Increasingly the study of the ideas of everyday life over a long period of time caught

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 Labour History Number 67 November 1994

on. The group focussed on qualitative as well as quantitative study of cultural practices,
leading to studies of symbolism, representation, language, gestures. Another influence was
the increasing interest in collective memory, images of the past created by a society through
flags, national songs, buildings, textbooks, and so on. It is perhaps this aspect of the Annales
tradition which has been most influential in Australian history, as exemplified in the work
of historians such as Chris Healy, Alistair Thomson, and Paula Hamilton.15

Poststructuralism
A third influence, most problematically for labour history, on the development of cultural
history has been poststructuralism. A precursor here was the structuralist anthropologist
Levi Strauss, who pointed out that the Western habit of explaining ourselves by history is
not the way of thinking of many non-western cultures. History is not only a story of past
cultural practices, it is itself a cultural practice. He pointed out that the Marxian adage that
human beings make their own history expresses the dynamism of a particular culture rather
than representing a portrayal of the past existence of humanity as a whole. We cannot
assume that our understanding of the past is somehow superior to that of a non-Western
people; we need to realise that a historical mode of thinking is just one possible way to
understand the world, and not a superior or privileged way. Historical facts are not given;
it is the historian who constitutes them by abstraction. We don't, Levi Strauss says, have to
do away with history. We need only recognise that history is a method with no distinct
object corresponding to it, a way of understanding the world, rather than the world itself.16
Levi Strauss was echoing the nineteenth century philosopher Nietzsche in emphasising
that there is no vision of reality uncontaminated by interpretation. More recently,
poststructuralists have also returned to Nietzsche, attracted to his argument that we cannot
discover any universal or substantive truth in history. How one sees the past is a matter of
perspective. Any perspective is a particular structure of knowledge, but also, and necessarily,
a structure of ignorance. Every account of the past tells us something, and hides something,
conceals as it reveals.
The most powerful poststructuralist influence of all on historians remains the work of
Michel Foucault. Foucault reflects the shift from social to cultural history since the early
1970s in France, and in the 1980s in English speaking historiography. Foucault repeated
and revived Nietzsche's critique of the search for origins. History, says Foucault, teaches
us how to laugh at the 'solemnities of the origin'. The desire for knowledge of origins comes
from the belief that things are most precious and essential at the moment of birth. Foucault
also warns against the desire for continuity. The present is not a culmination of the past but
merely a current episode in a series. The only possible approach to history, for Foucault, is
to refuse the certainty of absolutes, to distinguish, separate, disperse.17
Foucault warns against the traditional idea of the purpose of history, of seeking
continuities of place, language, and culture. Far from providing a basis for a unified national
identity, history's major task is 'the systematic dissociation of identity1. That is, identity must
be plural. 'The purpose of history is not to discover the roots of our identity but to... seek to
make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us.' Foucault argues against any idea of
a continuing human nature. 'Nothing in man - not even his body - is sufficiently stable to
serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.' We cannot rediscover
ourselves in history, because we are not there.18
Foucault also wanted to change the subject of history, the matters that historians think
worthy of investigation. He urged the giving of a history to those things that we tend to
think are without history, are somehow natural and eternal - 'sentiments, love, conscience,

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 117
Curthoys labour Hittory And Cultural Studies

instincts'. 'Effective history', he says 'shortens its vision to those things nearest to it - the
body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion and energies. It reverses the surreptitious
practice of historians, their pretension to examine things furthest from themselves.... Effective
history studies what is closest, but in an abrupt dispossession, so as to seize it at a distance...'
History can challenge our ideas of the 'dull constancy of instinctual life'.19
Foucault did not always live up to his own advice to historians. Far from a picture of
plurality, discontinuity, and dispersal, he often, most startlingly in the ever-so-influential
Discipline and Punish, creates the impression of offering a massively totalising account. In a
rather dark functionalism, he continues ideas of system and dominating discourses that
somehow co-opt or pre-empt everything they touch, including all forms of resistance. In
other work, however, such as The History of Sexuality, the pluralistic decentred Foucault of
the earlier manifestoes reappears and acquires shape and substance.

Bakhtin
Perhaps, though, the single most important influence on the emergence of cultural history
has been the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). Bakhtin participated as a young scholar
in the intellectual ferment of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, debating prominent theories of
the time, Russian Formalism, Freud, Marxism, and the philosophy of language, publishing
a path breaking study, The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Arrested in 1929 during a purge
of Leningrad intellectuals, he remained in exile in various provincial towns for the rest of
his working life. When young Soviet scholars began to take renewed interest in his work in
the early 1960s, the Dostoevsky book was republished in 1963, and followed two years
later by Rabelais and His World. Translations of his work began to appear in France in the
late 1960s, followed by English translations in the 1970s. By the 1980s, scholars internationally
welcomed Bakhtin's writings for their theories of language, genre, and carnival, and their
suggestive notions of the monologic, the dialogic, polyphony, heteroglossia, and
carnivalesque.20
In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin evokes the cultural practices of Rabelais' time - the
Late Middle Ages and the early modern period - especially carnival, and sees clowns,
tricksters and fool figures as permanent representatives of carnival in non-carnival times.
Carnival opposed all official culture, a temporary liberation from the prevailing regime of
truth and established order, a suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and
prohibitions. The plenty and abundance of the carnival feast offered its participants a sense
of freedom from the iron cages of circumstance and want; the future, for a moment, became
open-ended. Carnival uses humour to mock hierarchies of age, gender, class, and celebrates
the body as grotesque, its earthiness and sexuality puncturing the solemn and pompous.21
The significance of this interest for historians has been a focus on carnival as a clue to
social conflict and diversity, to the desires and aspirations of ordinary people. Such people
may rarely have written documents we can now use as traces of consciousness, but in the
evocation from a range of sources of their ribald and mocking behaviour at carnival time,
we get a sense of their perceptions and understanding of social hierarchy. Through a study
of such periods of outburst, we can understand more general cultural ideals and behaviour.
Natalie Davis shows this most clearly in her influential essay, 'Women on Top', in which
she describes widespread images of women as having power over men, images created in
the spirit or time of carnival, that both remind us of the usual power relations, with men on
top and powerful, and indicate the possibility, understood throughout history, of the fragility
of this power, the possibility of challenging it, though, perhaps, not for long.22

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181 Labour History Number 67 November 1994

Cultural Studies and History

These historical streams - Thompsonian Marxism, Annales social history, Foucault, and
Bakhtin - intertwine closely with thinking in linguistics, philosophy, literary criticism, and
anthropology, the interconnections producing an emerging new field of Cultural Studies.
Cultural Studies is now defined by an interest in representation, self-reflexivity, popular
culture, communication, and post-modernity.23 It also connects with feminist theory and
gender studies, and with 'postcolonial' understandings of the related processes of
colonialism, dispossession, racism, and Orientalism. Edward Said, in his major work
Orientalism in 1978, investigated the history of European constructions of knowledge about
other cultures, defining Orientalism as a continuous mixture of fascination with and
contempt for Oriental culture, always knowing it better than it knows itself. This critique
of European, indeed Western, ways of understanding culture promoted and supported a
profound rethinking of the position of both anthropology and history, and the constitution
of speaking positions, writing, and audience.24
History, then, as a discipline and a cultural practice, was present at the making of Cultural
Studies, was always already in Cultural Studies. Yet it has been severely shaken by the
dazzling performances of its offspring, emerging from its adolescent growth spurt into
academic adult independence. Despite the major contribution of historians to its
development - through Thompson, Foucault, the Annales School, Bakhtin, Natalie Davis -
there has nevertheless been something of a divergence between the relatively new field of
Cultural Studies and the older discipline of history, to the point where many historians see
Cultural Studies as concerned only with the present, the ephemeral, the fleeting expressions
of popular culture. Many in Cultural Studies see historians as empiricist, immune to theory
of any kind, and heavy-handed, literal-minded, and 'external' in their treatment of texts.
Where practitioners of Cultural Studies elegantly and protractedly wring the last drop of
meaning from a small number of texts, historians draw far too little from their massive and
carefully amassed documents. History and Cultural Studies have drifted too far apart, to
the detriment of both. It is time to resume the intellectual conversation they once enjoyed.
As a specialised field within history, reaching outwards towards industrial relations,
and with a strong and continuing tradition of political engagement, labour history tends to
distrust developments in Cultural Studies just as its more conservative counterparts do.
(In these debates 'cultural studies' and 'postmodernism' merge and become one.) In contrast
to the conservative suspicion of Cultural Studies as somehow politically radical, or more
precisely 'politically correct', labour historians frequently evince a traditional left wing and
radical suspicion of it as merely textualist, and necessarily insensitive to working-class
experience and struggle. As Terry Irving argues in the introductory chapter to the recent
collection Challenges to Labour History (1994), the postmodernist preoccupation with language
and culture 'can be carried too far*, denying that culture expresses an 'underlying social or
economic reality.' Postmodern textualism, Irving continues, loses sight of 'working-class
knowledge of the world as a set of constraints and hardships'; while the postmodern
replacement of a 'structural account of power* with an emphasis on micro-power is a
backward step. The result: 'For labour history the promise of postmodernism is political
irrelevance'.25
Irving expresses some real disagreements with poststructuralism here, especially around
the question of an 'underlying' structure or reality. Where structuralist approaches, Marxist
and otherwise, tend to make a great deal of the distinction between underlying or hidden
structures, and the surface reality we see and experience, and thereby posit deeper 'real'
meanings to events, experiences, politics, and practices, poststructuralists oppose this

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Curthoys Labour History And Cultural Studies 19

distinction for the singular meanings it strives for and produces. For historians, in my
view, the poststructuralist critique of structuralism is welcome and indeed liberating: instead
of having to find and fix the 'real' meaning of any event, period, or practice, a search which
becomes ever more frantic, elusive, authoritarian, and reductive, one can instead explore a
diversity of meanings and perspectives, and their complexity and inter-relationships.26 For
historians structuralism as an analytical strategy is a confining straitjacket, a closing of
possibilities, an illusory end to the analytical rainbow.
Yet if there are clear differences here over the notion of 'structure', many of these critiques
rest on either a misreading of the potential of Cultural Studies, or a taking of one of its parts
for the whole. It is important to clear some of these misreadings away, for labour historians
need the insights of Cultural Studies. They already accept, for example, the value of the
insights of Edward Thompson for understanding the differences between working class
cultures and the official and middle class cultures that have sought to contain and reform
them. But there is a great deal more to consider and learn from, such as Foucault7s ability to
lift the analysis to a higher meta-level, undermining and examining the previously-trodden
historical ground, raising for discussion how given concepts and discourses were created.
Labour historians would do well also to heed Bakhtin, especially his insights into the sudden
exposure at festive moments of uneasy power relations. Perhaps we will come to see the
1988 Bicentennial in this light: established as a celebration of 200 years of British settlement,
it became for many instead a new recognition of the rights and claims of the indigenous
peoples of the continent. Its official meanings were, in part at least, turned upside down.
The festive moments of the labour movement - its Labour Day and May Day parades, its
annual picnics, its anniversaries and celebrations - all provide special opportunities for
insight into the community and diversity of people who labour. And in Australian labour
history we especially need the insights of theorists like Edward Said for recognising and
interpreting colonial understandings of Aboriginal people.27
Perhaps the 'postcolonial' aspect of Cultural Studies carries the most important
implication of all for Australian labour historians. The work being done on race, ethnicity,
postcoloniality, and identity can help us develop a more perceptive and self-reflexive
approach to Aboriginal labour history. As Ann McGrath, Bruce Scates, and Raelene Frances
point out, Aboriginal history is not a field in which labour historians have made a significant
contribution, though some individuals work and study in both fields.28 Work on the history
of Aboriginal labour, such as Henry Reynolds' With the White People (1990) and Deborah
Bird Rose's Hidden Histories (1991), tends to be seen as Aboriginal rather than labour history.
While some people speak loosely of the 'new histories', meaning women's and Aboriginal
history, there is in fact no comparison between the two for their impact on labour history.
While women's history has transformed labour history since 1975, Aboriginal history has
scarcely begun to make its mark.
The question of Aboriginal history is major not peripheral. Public understanding of
Aboriginal issues has been moving very fast, and labour historians are in danger of finding
themselves rather behind public opinion. The Mabo Decision and subsequent Native Title
legislation, and accompanying debates during 1992-3, building on long-standing Aboriginal
demands for land rights and sovereignty, greatly accelerated public non-Aboriginal
recognition that we are all invaders and occupiers still. The Prime Minister's speech at
Redfern in December 1992 to mark the beginning of the International Year for the World's
Indigenous Peoples, went further than any previous Prime Minister had gone, in stressing
in very direct terms the responsibility of white Australia for the murder and dispossession
of Aboriginal people. The Liberal Party continues to flounder on this issue, being too slow

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20 Labour History Number 67 November 1994

to recognise that the centre has shifted very far to the left on Aboriginal questions. In this
changing context, labour historians cannot set aside the question of Aboriginal history any
longer; the forthcoming special issue on Aboriginal labour history is extremely welcome,
and none too soon.
A serious approach to this history involves considerable work and thought. Aboriginal
groups have increasingly insisted on a history that stresses their difference, their direct
experience of invasion and racism, their survival, and Aboriginal people are increasingly
writing works of biography, autobiography, and history that tell their side of the story.29
The work of non-Aboriginal professional historians working in the field has been changing
since the late 1960s, when their interest in Aboriginal history lay largely in a reforming
spirit intent on examining racism and colonialism, both racist ideas and institutionalised
practice. The work of the 1980s went further, attempting to show the perceptions,
understandings, and active and adaptive responses by Aboriginal people to a set of
destructive events.30 We all know, however, that we have still a long way to go, and given
the appropriations of the past it is little wonder that many Aboriginal people resent being
written about by non-Aboriginal historians at all. In the end, non-Aboriginal historians
have to make their own decisions, and I agree wholeheartedly with Frances, Scates, and
McGrath when they warn that we must be wary of a history that, in the name of a fear of
speaking for an Other, returns to a practice of silence and exclusion. Labour historians
need to rethink our entire Australian post-contact history as occurring in the context of
colonisation and dispossession, and understand the ways in which, as Frances et al put it,
"Aboriginal' and 'European' history are inseparably enmeshed'.31

Conclusion
In the 1960s labour historians pondered whether labour history was best thought of as a
field of study, or whether it entailed specific methodological and theoretical approaches.
On the whole, they concluded that it was a field of study, within which all sorts of methods,
theories, and political sympathies could operate. It was not, though, simply a sub-discipline
of the larger discipline of history. The more adventurous of its advocates, such as Eric Fry,
said that by looking at the submerged part of the iceberg, one could gain fresh insights in to
the character of the iceberg as a whole. Through concepts such as those of class, class-based
communities, and class relationships of power, a focus on labour came to entail a whole
new approach to history generally.
Women's history involved similar decisions. Certainly, women's lives and experiences
formed a new field of study, within which all sorts of theory and method jostled for
supremacy. Yet it too could not remain a sub-discipline, a compartment of history, for a
focus on women shifted the focus generally. The concepts of gender and gender
relationships, on which women's history was founded and which it promoted, came to be
applied to history as a whole. In the end, women's history turned its attention back on the
men, looking at ideals of masculinity in workplaces, trade unions, politics, and culture.
The margins, yet again, changed the mainstream.
We can think of the challenges of Cultural Studies for labour history in similar terms.
Cultural Studies is a field of study, with particular interests in images and representations
and modes of narration; in music, songs, jokes, clothes, buildings, food, bodies, objects,
spaces, and sounds; and in festive practices, celebrations and commemorations. Yet it also
has larger methodological implications, advocating a self-reflexivity about history itself as
a cultural practice, putting forward a way of extending our access to the past through a
wider, broader, more attentive and more informed reading of its traces. For labour historians

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Curthoys Labour History And Cultural Studies 121

there is the promise in the study of popular culture of finding another way of construing
E
the less powerful people of the past as actors, as agents, another way of finding an active
voice for those who did not leave direct records. Labour history has innumerable moments
N
susceptible to cultural analysis - strikes, marches, meetings, congresses, anniversaries,
D
political campaigns, work and management practices, responses to new technologies, N
political ideas, organisational conflict. A cultural analysis will in all these cases ask: what O
meanings did people give these events? How did they place themselves in them? Far from T
being mere postmodern textualism, Cultural Studies can enliven and enlarge labour history, E
and provide it with new and larger audiences.
S
ENDNOTES
1. This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the Labour History conference of Jun
2. Rae Frances and Bruce Scates, 'Is Labour History Dead?', Australian Historical Studies,
470-81.
3. E.C. Fry and T.H. Irving in 'Symposium: What is Labour History?', Labour History, no. 12, May 1967, pp.
69-81.
4. Ann Curthoys, Susan Eade, and Peter Spearritt (eds), Women at Work, ASSLH, Canberra, 1975;
Edna Ryan and Anne Cordon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work 1788-1974, Nelson, Melbourne,
1975; Anne Summers Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia, Penguin,
Ringwood, 1975.
5. Susan Eade, 'Social History in Britain in 1976 - A Survey', and AJ. Hammerton, 'New Trends in the
History of Working Class Women in Britain', Labour History, 31, November 1976, pp. 38-52; 53-60.
6. Stephen Garton, 'What Have We done?' in Terry Irving (ed), Challenges to Labour History, UNSW Press,
Sydney, 1994, p. 54, says the proportion of articles on women jumped from 2 per cent in 1960s to 14 per
cent in the 1980s.
7. For a recent discussion, see Rae Frances, Ann McGrath, and Bruce Scates, 'Broken Silences? Labour
History and Aboriginal workers', in Irving, Challenges to Labour History, pp. 189-211.
8. Verity Burgmann, The Strange Death of Labour History', in Australian Labor Party, New South Wales
Branch (eds), Bede Nairn and Labor History, Leichhardt 1991, pp. 69-82.
9. Frances and Scates, op. cit, pp. 470-81.
10. Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History, University of California Press, 1989.
11. Barry Hindess, The Politics of Class, 1990.
12. For a summary of these critiques see Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West,
Routledge, 1990, chapters 1,2, and 3.
13. For a valuable short history see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-1989,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990.
14. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, New York, 1965.
15. See Ahstair Thompson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994;
Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, OUP,
Melbourne, 1994; Chris Healy, The Training of Memory: Moments of Historical Imagination in Australia,
PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1993.
16. Claude Levi Strauss, 'History and Dialectic', in The Savage Mind, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London,
1966, first publ. 1962, last two chapters. See discussion in Robert Young, White Mythologies, pp. 41-9.
17. Michel Foucault, 'Nietszche, Genealogy, History', in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977, pp. 139-164.
18. Ibid, p. 153.
19. Ibid, p. 155.
20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984; Mikhail
Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984; Katerina Clark and Michael
Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984.
21. For a detailed discussion of Bakhtin, see John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
22. Natalie Davis, 'Women on Top', in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, 1975.
23. For recent discussions of Cultural Studies, see John Frow and Meaghan Morris (eds), Australian Cultural
Studies: A Reader, Allen and Unwin, 1993.
24. Edward Said, Orientalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978. See also James Clifford, The
Predicament of Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1988.
25. Irving, op. cit, pp. 5-6.
26. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, ch. 10, 'Structure Sign
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'.
27. See Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind,
Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1991.
28. Frances, McGrath, and Scates, 'Broken silences', in Irving.
29. Some examples include: Phillip Pepper and Tess D'Aurago, You Are What You Make Yourself to Be, Hyland
House, 1980; Crawford, Evelyn, Over My Tracks: A Remarkable Life, Penguin, 1993, 'As told to Chris

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 22 Labour History - Number 67 November 1994

Walsh'); Rosemary Van den Berg, No Options, No Choice! The Moore River Experience. My Father, Thomas
Corbett, an Aboriginal half-caste, Magabala Books, 1994; Robert Bropho Fringe-dweller, Sydney, Alternative
Publishing Cooperative Ltd, 1980; Monica Clare, Karobran: The Story of an Aboriginal Girl, Sydney,
Alternative Publishing Cooperative Ltd; Bill Cohen, To My Delight: The autobiography of Bill Cohen, a
grandson of the Gumbangarri, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, 1987; Kevin Gilbert, Living Black; Joe
McGuinness My Fight for Aboriginal Rights, University of Queensland Press, 1991; Sally Morgan, My Place,
Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle, 1988; Sally Morgan, Wanamurraganya: The story of Jack McPhee,
Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1989; Charles Perkins, A Bastard Like Me, Sydney, Ure Smith,
1975; Roberta Sykes and Shirley Smith, Mum Shirlt Heinemann Education, 1981.
30. For a discussion of developments in Aboriginal history, see Ann Curthoys and Stephen Muecke,
'Australia, for Example', in David Carter and Wayne Hudson (eds), The Republicanism Debate, NSW
University Press, Sydney 1993, pp. 177-200.
31. Frances, McGrath and Scates, op. cit., p. 194.

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