Project MUSE®: Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 116 (2019) through current issueLatest Articles: Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social HistoryTWOProject MUSE®Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History1839-30390023-6942Latest articles in Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editorial
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975983
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During my time as Editor of Labour History we have had many special issues devoted to specific themes, starting with the very first, which was on the Cold War. It now seems a fitting culmination of that decade-long work to focus attention on the very essence of our discipline, the archives and methodologies that drive our project.It is personally very gratifying to have attracted for this latest special issue the range of contributions, both geographically and temporally, that reflect a diversity of peoples in visual, oral and textual sources. Our coverage – from coerced convict and indentured to free labour, across migrant workers and their communities, on mobile maritime and gendered workforces, addressing themes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallEditorial2025-12-05text/htmlen-USEditorial2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®34802026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05The Archive, Digitisation and Labour’s History: An Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975984
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Dust, Carolyn Steedman’s fabulous title for her 2001 book on archives, was her chosen metaphor for what modern historians grapple with. These she named as a set of beliefs about the material world inherited from the nineteenth century, and the particular kind of documentary evidence collected in official archival repositories. Instituted simultaneously with the public’s right of access, this systematic record-keeping, its storage and retrieval, became “a foundational and paradigmatic activity of historians,” a way of writing political and social history.1Labour history as a field comes within this modern history, focussed as it has been on the working-class experience under capitalism, the conditions of labouring
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallThe Archive, Digitisation and Labour’s History: An Introduction2025-12-05text/htmlen-USThe Archive, Digitisation and Labour’s History: An Introduction2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®348582026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Labour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistibility in Memory Work: Emma Goldman, Jean Désirée, and Rose Pesotta
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975985
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In December 1919, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was deported from the USA amid the intensifying repression of the post-World War I Red Scare in a moment saturated by surveillance, censorship, and political expulsion. Yet this act of state exclusion did not mark the end of Goldman’s political life; rather, it initiated a fragmented, transnational, and ongoing process of memory work. What followed was not the consolidation of a stable legacy, but the emergence of a dynamic archival assemblage, a dispersed constellation of letters, pamphlets, surveillance files, memoirs, photographs, and marginalia. These heterogeneous materials resist containment in any single institutional setting; instead, they continually reconfigure
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallLabour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistibility in Memory Work: Emma Goldman, Jean Désirée, and Rose Pesotta2025-12-05text/htmlen-USLabour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistibility in Memory Work: Emma Goldman, Jean Désirée, and Rose Pesotta2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®1110522026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Recovering the History of Chinese Amahs Travelling to Britain, 1840s–1930s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975986
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In an 1858 report on “Orientals in London,” Joseph Salter of the London City Mission (a Protestant evangelical and philanthropic foundation) detailed his encounter with a Chinese nursemaid or “amah.” The amah, who he referred to as “Singang” and later “Sing Sung,” had been employed to care for a missionary’s wife and children on the journey from the Chinese Treaty Port of Ningpo (Ningbo) to London.1 On arrival in London, the amah found herself without a job and with nowhere to go.2 Salter’s role in the London City Mission was to proselytise to and assist Asian workers he encountered on the streets and docks of London. So it was that he found Sing Sung and took her into his home.3 She stayed with Salter until early
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallRecovering the History of Chinese Amahs Travelling to Britain, 1840s–1930s2025-12-05text/htmlen-USRecovering the History of Chinese Amahs Travelling to Britain, 1840s–1930s2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®1681832026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Trouble on the Roads: Using Digital Techniques to Explore Convict Protest in Van Diemen’s Land
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975987
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Until 1840, convicts labouring under sentence accounted for the majority of the Australian workforce.1 While convict transportation was managed by the state, property rights in convict labour were routinely “assigned” to private masters under an arrangement that dated back to the earliest days of the colony. While masters paid no rent or wages, they were required to feed, clothe and house their convict charges.2 Although they were not legally entitled to physically punish their convict servants, they could prosecute them. The magistrates who heard such cases were empowered to sentence convicts to be flogged, confined in a solitary cell or sent to a punishment station such as a road gang. There, male convicts could
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallTrouble on the Roads: Using Digital Techniques to Explore Convict Protest in Van Diemen’s Land2025-12-05text/htmlen-USTrouble on the Roads: Using Digital Techniques to Explore Convict Protest in Van Diemen’s Land2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®1224372026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05“As a Stewardess Sees It”: Locating Experience and Emotion in the Work of Australian Ship Stewardesses
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975988
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Almost a century ago an anonymous Melbourne journalist pointed to the absence of women in stories of seafaring labour. While seafaring men’s “courage, resource and fortitude” was known, little or nothing was ever said of those women who faced the same dangers, shared the same hardships, “and do a man-size job besides.”1 The journalist’s observation is an alert to the little-known fact there were Australian women working at sea in the 1930s, earlier than previously known, and that it was taken for granted as normal and unexceptional, albeit overlooked and deserving of attention. “Doing a man-sized job” did not, however, mean doing the work that a man did. Until the 1970s, the only work Australian women could do on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmall“As a Stewardess Sees It”: Locating Experience and Emotion in the Work of Australian Ship Stewardesses2025-12-05text/htmlen-US“As a Stewardess Sees It”: Locating Experience and Emotion in the Work of Australian Ship Stewardesses2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®1249872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Panopticon to Plexus: Analysing Colonial Labour and Migration in 1820s NSW
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975989
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The British may not have created the longest-lived empire in history, but it was certainly one of the most data-intensive.In early nineteenth-century Australia, the expansion of the British Empire involved applying an unfree workforce to the conquering of First Nations land on behalf of elite capitalists. This effort generated richly detailed records that enabled some of the earliest data-driven management and surveillance techniques.2 As Richard Ward has shown, this immense bureaucratic effort to capture and control information on convict workers reinforced state authority and social order while enhancing a vast project of labour exploitation.3 However, labour historians were slow to engage with that documentary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallPanopticon to Plexus: Analysing Colonial Labour and Migration in 1820s NSW2025-12-05text/htmlen-USPanopticon to Plexus: Analysing Colonial Labour and Migration in 1820s NSW2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®1020222026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Becoming Visible: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in Digitised Photographic Archives from Queensland and New South Wales
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975990
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Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, domestic service was a primary form of labour for Aboriginal women and young girls in Queensland and New South Wales. The presence of Aboriginal women and girls in domestic service was facilitated by child removal legislation, policies and practices that permitted the forceful removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in this period.1 Domestic service in white homes was viewed by colonial (and later Commonwealth and state governments) as a means of removing Aboriginal children from what they perceived as the corrupting influences of Aboriginal mothers and the broader Aboriginal community. It was also presented in racialised terms as the most appropriate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallBecoming Visible: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in Digitised Photographic Archives from Queensland and New South Wales2025-12-05text/htmlen-USBecoming Visible: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in Digitised Photographic Archives from Queensland and New South Wales2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®1196192026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Digitizing the Experiences of Migrant Labour in Qatar
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975991
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Eid Mohamed arrived ready and eager to tell his story,1 to be heard and to be listened to – so eager, in fact, that Zahra and Suzi had barely started the preliminary questions before he began to speak. So, what’s my goal here? How did I come here?Yes, exactly! We will tell you about it in a minute when we start recording. Is it on already?Do you want me to stop it?No, it’s fine.So, my goal is to say how I got here when I start telling my story, right?If you can, please start by telling us your name, Eid Mohammed?2By the summer of 2024, when he was sitting down to tell his story, Eid had been living in Qatar for over five decades, leaving his home country of Pakistan with his father and brother when he was only
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallDigitizing the Experiences of Migrant Labour in Qatar2025-12-05text/htmlen-USDigitizing the Experiences of Migrant Labour in Qatar2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®742242026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Re-Writing History from the Margins: Philippine Labour Migration to and Labour Organising in 1970s Denmark
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975992
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The history of Philippine migration to Denmark has received little attention – scholarly, political, or journalistic. Rather, it has been treated as an isolated, perpetually contemporary phenomenon, rarely with any context other than through vague references to sociological and anthropological concepts of “Global North/Global South,” and “care drain/care chain.”When Filipinas started entering Denmark in unprecedented numbers from the mid-2000s, it was thus received in the public domain as a surprising and sudden occurence. However, migration from the Philippines to Denmark was neither new nor sudden. They were in fact the latest entrants in a long history of labour migration from the Philippines to Denmark that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallRe-Writing History from the Margins: Philippine Labour Migration to and Labour Organising in 1970s Denmark2025-12-05text/htmlen-USRe-Writing History from the Margins: Philippine Labour Migration to and Labour Organising in 1970s Denmark2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®379782026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Photography as Labour and Industry: Reading Photographic Archives of Indentured Labour
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975993
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A few hundred photographs – held in libraries and museums across Australia – depict Melanesian men and women who were brought to Australia during the Pacific labour trade between 1864 and 1905, to work in sugar cane plantations. Lying dormant for over a century, these pictures have recently gained public attention, appearing in a host of exhibitions and circulating in social media and image sharing platforms.1 Curators have used them for their emotional appeal as poignant testimonies of the suffering and resilience of Pacific workers. Historians have deployed them mainly as illustrations of already reached conclusions.2 Both approaches to the photographic archive overlook the role played by images in processes of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallPhotography as Labour and Industry: Reading Photographic Archives of Indentured Labour2025-12-05text/htmlen-USPhotography as Labour and Industry: Reading Photographic Archives of Indentured Labour2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®434672026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Hidden Voices: Exploring South Sea Islander Narratives in the James Cook University Library’s Special Collections
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975994
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This Research Note summarises the findings of research funded by the Australian Historical Association Northern Australia Fellowship. My fellowship aimed to determine the capacity for the James Cook University (JCU) Library Special Collections materials to tell the stories of South Sea Islanders in north Queensland from 1869 to 1901. The implications of this for researchers, archivists and Australian South Sea Islander communities formed a significant component of my analysis. The Special Collections hold an important record of cultural, social, environmental and economic developments connected to the history of north Queensland and, directly and indirectly, the history of Australian South Sea Islanders. Five
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallHidden Voices: Exploring South Sea Islander Narratives in the James Cook University Library’s Special Collections2025-12-05text/htmlen-USHidden Voices: Exploring South Sea Islander Narratives in the James Cook University Library’s Special Collections2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®427192026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05How Well Is Labour History Served by Trove?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975995
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The research and writing of Australian history have been transformed by the development of digital resources, at the same time as continuing cuts to government funding of cultural institutions have placed pressure on many of these projects. Trove, the National Library of Australia’s digital database, now includes more than 14 billion items, including a massive archive of Australian newspapers. The democratising effects of this world-leading open access database should not be underestimated. When the future of Trove appeared in jeopardy a few years ago as a result of the end of funding, the many heartfelt expressions of the support for the project were notable.For all the virtues of Trove’s Australian Newspapers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallHow Well Is Labour History Served by Trove?2025-12-05text/htmlen-USHow Well Is Labour History Served by Trove?2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®187612026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Ray Peckham (1929–2025): Communist, Trade Unionist and Wiradjuri Leader
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975996
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Raymond Edward Peckham, known to many as Uncle Ray, passed away on 6 June 2025 at Dubbo Base Hospital. Uncle Ray made an outstanding contribution to the struggle for Aboriginal rights. He travelled extensively during the 1950s and 1960s, visiting Aboriginal reserves and missions across NSW to organise against oppression. He was a leading member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) and campaigned tirelessly to build support in the working-class movement behind the demands of his people.Ray was born on 24 June 1929, in Bunyip Victoria, the 11th of 13 children. His parents were both Wiradjuri: father, Tom Peckham, was from Parkes, and his mother, Linda Lillian Australia
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallRay Peckham (1929–2025): Communist, Trade Unionist and Wiradjuri Leader2025-12-05text/htmlen-USRay Peckham (1929–2025): Communist, Trade Unionist and Wiradjuri Leader2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®220872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Notice Board
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975997
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2025 Labour History Conference: The Spirit of 1975: Transformations in Australian Labour History. In 2025, the Melbourne branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (ASSLH) will host the society’s 19th Biennial Conference. The venue is the beautifully renovated Trades Hall Council building. The conference will be held from 26 to 28 November 2025 and commemorates the 50th anniversary of the International Women’s Year, the dismissal of the Whitlam government, and the end of the American War in Vietnam. The Spirit of 1975: Transformations in Australian Labour History features historians and activists concerned with this theme, and with wider issues and developments epitomised by that year. A wide
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallNotice Board2025-12-05text/htmlen-USNotice Board2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®38172026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Research Notice Board
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975998
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Sylvie Brassard, “Les Femmes du Musée de l’Homme: Understanding Women’s (In)visibility in the History of Anthropology (1928–1970)” (PhD diss., School of Humanities, University of Western Australia, 2024), https://doi.org/10.26182/083f-4f70.French anthropology’s history mostly features men. It was believed that women were absent or never accomplished anything. However, historical sources show numerous women contributing to research at the Musée d’Ethnologie du Trocadéro (MET) and the Musée de l’Homme (MH) from 1928 to 1970. How did they become invisible? Creating historiographic memorability and significance can be compared to a “leaking pipeline” from which women disappeared. The MET and MH are a case study where
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallResearch Notice Board2025-12-05text/htmlen-USResearch Notice Board2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®21762026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Australian Society for the Study of Labour History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975999
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President:Rae FrancesEmeritus ProfessorCollege of Arts and Social SciencesAustralian National University, Canberra, ACTEmail: Rae.Frances@anu.edu.auVice President: Bobbie OliverAssociate Professor, School of HumanitiesThe University of Western AustraliaEmail: Bobbie.Oliver@uwa.edu.auSecretary: Julie KimberFaculty of Life and Social SciencesSwinburne University of Technology Hawthorn, Vic 3122Tel: (03) 9214 8103Email: jkimber@swin.edu.auTreasurer: Phillip DeeryEmeritus ProfessorCollege of Arts and EducationVictoria University, VICEmail: phillip.deery@vu.edu.auExecutive Members: Frank BongiornoProfessor of HistoryCollege of Arts and Social SciencesAustralian National University, Canberra, ACTEmail:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallAustralian Society for the Study of Labour History2025-12-05text/htmlen-USAustralian Society for the Study of Labour History2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®49342026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals by Maurice Casey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976119
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This book takes the momentous world events of the early to mid-twentieth century and peels back the layers populated by big-name actors such as Stalin, Hitler and Trotsky to uncover the trials, tribulations and aspirations of lesser-known revolutionaries who were accommodated by their Russian hosts at the Hotel Lux in the centre of Moscow. There were Australians who stayed at the Lux, but they do not feature here.Maurice Casey lectures in History at Queen’s College Belfast. His literary style is that of the detective-historian; the reader is taken through numerous archives in Moscow and the USA; as well as private papers, such as troves of letters discovered by the author in an attic in the Cotswolds, England, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallHotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals by Maurice Casey (review)2025-12-05text/htmlen-USHotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals by Maurice Casey (review)2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®72282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation by Jonathan Connolly (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976120
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In Worthy of Freedom, Jonathan Connolly explores the “normalisation” of Indian indentured migration in the British Empire. Starting in the immediate aftermath of abolition, Connolly examines how the initial hostility towards indentureship (a system of bonded, contract labour) gradually gave way to its growing acceptance. In doing so, he also makes a convincing case for the importance of indentureship to understanding the fraught conceptual development of free labour in the post-emancipatory era.Arranged chronologically, Worthy of Freedom offers a pithy analysis of the changing imperial attitudes towards indentureship between the 1830s and 1870s. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the scandals that enveloped the initial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallWorthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation by Jonathan Connolly (review)2025-12-05text/htmlen-USWorthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation by Jonathan Connolly (review)2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®74532026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05James Scullin by Michael Easson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976121
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In the lexicography of the modern Labor Party, “James Scullin” is a synonym for “tragedy.” The “ghost” of his government’s collapse in response to the Great Depression haunted Labor leaders when the global financial crisis arrived in 2008. Ted Theodore, treasurer in the short-lived Scullin government, is similarly perceived by Labor’s Chris Bowen as the “most tragic treasurer.” In the days before this year’s federal election, when Labor’s fortunes seemed rather less promising, Scullin’s one-term government loomed large in public discussion.Michael Easson reinterprets James Henry Scullin. Easson has been a businessperson, unionist and labour official in New South Wales, and more latterly one of the recurring scribes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallJames Scullin by Michael Easson (review)2025-12-05text/htmlen-USJames Scullin by Michael Easson (review)2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®73072026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917–19 by Mary Fraser (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976122
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Dr Mary Fraser is a social scientist who works on the modern history of police and an academic at the University of Glasgow. Since 2018 she has been an associate at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, and in 2023 she was awarded a fellowship of the Royal Historical Society. Fraser is also a founding member of the Police History Society.The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917–1919 is a meticulously researched and prodigiously referenced book containing graphs, tables, and images that assist in understanding the immensity and problematic nature of the task of feeding Britain during World War I. Fraser commences with a succinct statement of the book’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallThe British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917–19 by Mary Fraser (review)2025-12-05text/htmlen-USThe British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, 1917–19 by Mary Fraser (review)2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®71872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack by Willa Hammitt Brown (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976123
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Willa Hammitt Brown’s study explores the intersection between reality and memory of work in the Great Lakes of the USA. These forests, located in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, have an outsized role in American mythology, due to the figure of Paul Bunyan, a mythological happy logger conquering the wilderness. She asks what work mythological labourers do to obscure the reality of our hard, dangerous labour history. The answer, as this fascinating monograph clearly demonstrates, is to romanticise a complicated and exploitative past, covering up the contested nature of that labour.Brown demonstrates the intertwined environmental, labour, and racial exploitation of the late nineteenth century rapacious attacks on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallGentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack by Willa Hammitt Brown (review)2025-12-05text/htmlen-USGentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack by Willa Hammitt Brown (review)2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®66772026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Rex Patterson: A Voice for the North by Lyndon Megarrity (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976124
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This book explores the life of Rex Patterson, a Labor federal politician from Northern Queensland. It is part of a series of Australian biographical monographs that was initiated “because of the decline in the study of Australian history at our schools and universities” (7). The series challenges ignorance and misrepresentation concerning Australian historical figures. The books are not “academic” but “scholarly,” with an emphasis on “on a clear narrative” (7). Following from this, the book is well written but does not discuss the broader historiographical issues relating to biography.Patterson was born in Bundaberg, Queensland, in 1927 and raised on a family farm. A teacher before entering the RAAF at the end of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallRex Patterson: A Voice for the North by Lyndon Megarrity (review)2025-12-05text/htmlen-USRex Patterson: A Voice for the North by Lyndon Megarrity (review)2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®70292026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05Contract, Labour Law and the Realities of Working Life by Eugene Schofield-Georgeson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976125
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In the thriving field of Australian labour law, there has not been a systematic account of judicial ideology (the systems of beliefs that orient judicial decision-making). It is a glaring omission as court decisions in labour law expressly implicate the interests of workers and employers as well as broader societal interests. As Schofield-Georgeson’s book seeks to address this gap, it constitutes a significant contribution to Australian labour law scholarship. This book raises three critical questions:Is there a systematic class bias to the High Court’s labour law jurisprudence?If so, how is such bias manifested?If so, how can such bias be corrected?The book seeks to “demonstrate that Australia’s highest court has
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976125">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/788/image/coversmallContract, Labour Law and the Realities of Working Life by Eugene Schofield-Georgeson (review)2025-12-05text/htmlen-USContract, Labour Law and the Realities of Working Life by Eugene Schofield-Georgeson (review)2025-12-052025TWOProject MUSE®88322026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-12-05