"Rats and Revolutionaries": The Labour Movement in Autralia and New Zealand 1880-1940.

"Rats and Revolutionaries": The Labour Movement in Autralia and New Zealand 1880-1940. By James Bennett (Dunedin: Otago History Series, University of Otago Press, 2004. 214 pp. NZ$39.95).

The old Imperial history treated each colony as part of an Empire centred on London. From the perspective of the white colonies of settlement, the development of a Commonwealth of self-governing nations in the first half of the twentieth century saw this Imperial vision fragment into several national histories. In the first instance those who pioneered the new national histories had been trained in Imperial history and understood the links and connections, both between centre and periphery and around the periphery itself. Ironically parts of this older sense of unity are only being rediscovered within those once lily-white colonies of settlement, in part because comparative history has become fashionable.

There is a particular irony about this situation in the case of Australia and New Zealand. Until the formation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, New South Wales and Victoria, two of the oldest settlements, were more closely linked to New Zealand in many respects than they were to the other states that eventually joined the Australian Commonwealth. A quick glance at the index to a newspaper such as the Melbourne Age for most decades in the nineteenth century indicates that references to events in New Zealand far outnumbered those to events in Western Australia, Queensland, or even South Australia. The reverse was also true. Although Bennett largely ignores the infrastructure of inter-colonial communication, for most of the period he studies regular steamship services linked the South Island to Melbourne and the North Island to Sydney (just as regular services also linked New Zealand to Vancouver, San Francisco and various Pacific Islands). Some historians have assumed that formation of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901 marks the end of the Tasman world, and Bennett's brief book asks whether this conventional periodisation makes sense in terms of labour history. However, it should be noted that many journals and organisations remained Australasian, the word used to refer to Australia and New Zealand, at least until 1915, and that some still exist. Indeed Sydney is even today home to more New Zealanders than any city in New Zealand other than Auckland. (1)

Bennett's book opens with a brief analysis of 'Reciprocal Amnesia' and then quickly focuses on trans-Tasman union organisations in the 1880s and the Maritime Strike of 1890, a strike that began in Sydney and spread rapidly to New Zealand's main ports. Although different political alignments emerged in the different colonies as a result of the industrial upheavals of these years, in New South Wales and Queensland Labour Parties successfully established themselves. In New Zealand, Victoria and South Australia organised labour, such as it was after the Maritime Strike, allied with Liberal Parties. In New Zealand, ironically, the Liberal-Labour alliance enacted a sweeping range of reforms that made the country widely known as "the social laboratory of the world". Bennett, perhaps because he did his PhD in Australia, is at pains to downplay the fact that New Zealand's Lib-Lab coalition was far more radical than the Labor Parties of New South Wales and Queensland. This may explain why he believes that the issues historians once considered divided the two countries, such as the new Commonwealth of Australia's on-going commitment to a 'White Australia' immigration policy, were more apparent than real. I am far from convinced. William Pember Reeves, the self-confessed socialist who was the architect of New Zealand's labour reforms, still provides the fullest exploration of the Australasian context in his classic study, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (London, 1902), and he treated the exclusion of paupers and 'aliens', especially Asians, as an experiment of comparable importance to minimum wages or compulsory arbitration. (2) It was an experiment that labour historians tended to ignore until Francis Castle's wrote his incisive analysis of "the wage workers welfare state", although several historians had argued that racism played a fundamental role in class formation. (3)

After discussing the events of the 1890s, Bennett turns to the racial 'imaginary' and social policy. A reader familiar with the literature will learn little new, but Bennett's loose comparative approach prompts further reflection about these developments. The different roles played by the two indigenous peoples, the Maori in New Zealand and the so-called Aboriginals in Australia, receive some attention in chapter 2, but we probably now need more detailed studies of racism and 'whiteness' in particular occupations and a wider comparative focus, ideally one that includes Canada and the United States. (4) Later, in looking at the 1920s and especially the Communist Party, he returns to the question of race, not least because the Communist Party's internationalist position isolated it from most Australian unionists. Even in New Zealand, where racial issues played out quite differently, the issue had high potential to prove disruptive.

Bennett's focus then narrows to focus on "traditions of militant agitation ..." (p. 27). He provides a brief overview of the rise of revolutionary industrial unionism in both countries, the impact of the War and arguments over conscription, and then analyses the role of the Communist Party in the 1920s and '30s. Here he builds on the work of Kerry Taylor and Stuart Macintyre, focusing on relationships between the two parties and the role of New Zealanders, particularly Jean Devanny and Heidi Weitzel, within the Australian movement. (4) By and large, across the concluding chapters, which treat several topics in the inter-war period, he explores various comparative issues, often by means of reviewing a particular book, such as Ian Reid's comparative analysis of Fiction and the Great Depression (1979), or focusing on a particular person such as John A. Lee. I found some analyses stimulating; others begged more questions still; and in one or two cases I felt that he had failed to understand the issues. Bennett's loose comparative perspective allows him to explore certain trans-Tasman themes within labour history and to tentatively analyse the different historio-graphical approaches within the two countries. On the whole it is better on the themes that it is on the approaches. Except in those areas where historians have long recognised the trans-Tasman nature of events, such as the Maritime and Waihi Strikes, it is not clear that this book will require historians of either country to revisit their conclusions, but it does strengthen the view that people and ideas kept moving back and forth across the Tasman at least until the outbreak of World War II.

Erick Olssen

University of Otago

ENDNOTES

1. For 'the Tasman world' see the essays in Keith Sinclair, ed., Tasman Relations: New Zealand and Australia, 1788-1988 (Auckland, 1988), and James Belich, Making Peoples: the New Zealanders from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century (Auckland, 1996).

2. E.g. Peter J. Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Lawrence, 1987).

3. Francis G. Castles, The Working Class and Welfare: Reflections of the Political Development of the Welfare State in Australia and New Zealand, 1890-1940 (Wellington, NZ, 1985).

4. At a conference on racism and the labour market, orgainsed by the International Institute for Social History, scholars from the United States, having heard about the Australasian experience, described the policy of racial exclusion as 'scientific racism'. See Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen (Eds.), Racism and the Labour Market: Historical Studies (Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt and New York, 1995).

5. Taylor, "Workers Vanguard or People's Voice? The Communist Party of New Zealand from Origins to 1946", PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1994 and Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (Sydney, 1999).