Julie Kimber is an Australian historian based at Swinburne University of Technology. She has edited several book collections on Australian political and labour history. Her research interests include the Cold War, biography, and political/radical/legal history.
Peter Love is an Australian historian. He is the author of Labour and the Money Power and has edited several collections on labour and political history.
Peter Love is President of the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and Senior Lecturer in Politics at Swinburne University of Technology. He has a long-standing interest in the Australian labour movement and has written about its institutions, ideological inclinations and some of its more colourful individuals. He has also been a union activist.
Lynn Beaton has been a researcher, writer and activist for over thirty years. She was a pioneer of women’s history with ground breaking work on the theories of women’s employment based on the Australian experience of women at work in the second world war. Subsequently employed by the ACTU Working Women’s Centre as a researcher and project manager Lynn published numerous papers on women’s employment and unions. She then spent five years in Thatcher’s Britain where she wrote about the industrial turmoil that accompanied the introduction of neo-liberal economics. Most significant of these works was the book Shifting Horizons about the women in the 1984-1985 British Miners’ Strike. Returning to Australia Lynn was employed as an analyst of women’s employment strategies by the Victorian Department of Labour, then as researcher/manager of Job Watch where her research work concentrated on the increases of casual and sub-contracted workers. Since then Lynn has worked as a tertiary teacher of Community Development and a freelance researcher and writer. She is currently working on a history of the Federated Furnishing Trades Society, which will be published by Melbourne University Press in 2007.
Margo Beasley is a consultant historian of many years’ standing who has worked for many agencies including local government, trade unions, business organisations and community groups. She is best known for Wharfies: A History of the Waterside Workers Federation of Australia (1996) but has also written several other books and produced major oral history projects. She completed her PhD in the Department of History and Politics at the University of Wollongong in 2004 and is currently employed by the City of Sydney’s History Program.
Drew Cottle is a senior lecturer in Politics at the University of Western Sydney. He has an abiding interest in capital history, and has published books on the Brisbane Line, and the experience of Sydney’s wealthy in the Great Depression. Dr Cottle’s research and writing embraces international political economy, Asian studies, political ecology and labour history.
Angela Keys is a PhD candidate with the Centre for Rural Social Research at Charles Sturt University. She has co-authored articles for theJournal of Australian Political Economy, Labour History, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, the Journal of Chinese Australia, Sporting Traditions, Z Magazine, and co-wrote a chapter on the political economy of Tonga in Ivan Molloy and Ron Reavell (eds), The Eye of the Cyclone: Governance and Stability in the Pacific, University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, Queensland, 2006. Her most recent publication is a co-authored chapter on eviction struggles in Sydney during the Great Depression in Scott Poynting and George Morgan (eds), Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia, ACYS Publishing, Hobart, 2007.
Helen Masterman-Smith is a researcher at the University of South Australia. Helen recently completed a doctoral thesis in feminist political economy at the University of Western Sydney. Her research focuses on gender, labour and community politics in Australia.
Charles Fahey is a senior lecturer in the School of Historical and European Studies, LaTrobe University. His main research interests are labour history, rural history and the history of the Victorian Goldfields. With John Lack, he is currently working on a history of the Sunshine Harvester Factory. His other projects include a project to collect demographic data on settlers on the Victoria goldfields with Alan Mayne. He is also working on the wheat and mining industries for a history of inland Australia. This project, ‘Beyond the black stump’ is a collaborative project bringing together historians from across Australia.
John Lack has a strong interest in the history of work in Australian manufacturing, particularly in Melbourne’s western suburbs, where he was raised and schooled, and in whose factories his family of origin worked. He has a particular interest in the mythology of beneficent employers such as H.V. McKay, the ‘inventor’ of the harvester, ‘father’ of Sunshine, and ‘begetter’ of the 1907 basic wage. He and Charles Fahey are writing a history of the Sunshine Harvester Works.
Patricia Grimshaw is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne where her teaching and research have focused on gender history and comparative colonialism. She is currently co-writing a history of working mothers in Australian history and recently co-edited with John Murphy and Belinda Probert the collection Double Shift: Working Mothers and Social Change, Circa, 2005.
Nell Musgrove is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, completing a thesis examining the history of child welfare in Victoria. Her research interests include gender history, the history of the family and women in Australian history. She works as a tutor and sessional lecturer in history at the Australian Catholic University.
Shurlee Swain is an associate professor in history at the Australian Catholic University. She is a co-editor of the journal Australian Historical Studies. In 2006, she co-edited (with Andrew Brown-May) The Encyclopedia of Melbourne.
Claire Higgins is a Master of Arts (Public History and Heritage) candidate at the University of Melbourne, writing her thesis on the experiences of post-war migrant women who found work in Melbourne’s textile and clothing industry. She is interested in examining how their working lives were affected by language difficulties, economic necessity, and engagement with trade unions. This research is also concerned with how these women viewed the industry itself. Ultimately, Claire’s thesis aims to incorporate their experiences into wider industry history. Claire’s research has the potential to contribute to Museum Victoria’s oral history and textile collections, and as such, she has been awarded one of the Museum’s 1854 Student Scholarships for 2006. Claire is also currently completing a six-week internship at the Australian War Memorial, researching a possible exhibition on ‘T.E. Lawrence and the Light Horse Brigade’.
Rob Hitchcock has worked as an Organiser for the Victorian Branch of the Technical Division of the AMWU, as an Industry Development Officer with the VTHC, as an Industrial Officer and Secretary of the North Australian Workers Union Branch of the ALHMWU and as an advisor to the Minister for Employment, Training and Workplace Relations in the Northern Territory Government. He is currently living and working in the UK.
Val Noone is a writer and historian. He holds a PhD from LaTrobe University and is a Senior Tutor at Melbourne University. His research expertise includes: Australia’s relations with Vietnam, the role of Catholicism, and the anti-war movement. His publications include Disturbing the War: Melbourne Catholics and Vietnam, Melbourne, Spectrum, 1993.
Ben Maddison is a lecturer in history at the University of Wollongong. His research specialises in Australian working class history and commodification history. The paper presented here is part of a larger project of rethinking the history of class relations in Australian from the point of view of commodification. He has recently organised an international workshop at the University of Wollongong titled ‘The Colonial Commons: law, land, labour and living’.
Bobbie Oliver is senior lecturer in Social Sciences at Curtin University. From 2000-2004, she was first-named Chief Investigator of the ARC-funded Midland Railway Workshops History Project, which collected interviews and documentary materials from past employees. Dr Oliver is co-editor (with Dr Patrick Bertola) of The Workshops: A History of the Midland Government Railway Workshops, UWA Press, 2006, in which she has written on apprenticeship training, and she is also the author of several published papers on aspects of the Workshops.
Mikael Ottosson is a senior lecturer and researcher at the School of IMER, Malmö University, Sweden. His main research field is social and labour history. He has a PhD in history and wrote his thesis (1999) on the change of culture and group identities among the glass workers in a local Swedish community, 1820 to 1880. His wide-ranging research topics include the Swedish volunteer militia 1860-1880; the consolidation of Sweden during the nineteenth century; the media picture of the labour movement and different aspects on working time. His current research focuses upon the ‘lazy-bones’ history and the conceptual history of human work.
Calle Rosengren is a PhD student in Working life science at Kristianstad University, Sweden. He holds a master’s degree in Working Life Science. His area of research is temporal aspects of work and organisation. His research focuses upon how time was treated as a resource in working life debates during the twentieth century. The main materials in his study are the protocols of the Swedish national working time committees, 1918, 1963 and 2001.
Kerry Taylor is a senior lecturer in History at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. He works mostly on the history of the radical political movement in New Zealand, especially the Communist Party of New Zealand, of which he is writing a history. He is co-editor of Culture and the Labour Movement: Essays on New Zealand Labour History (1991, with John Martin) and On the Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand (2002, with Pat Moloney). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Labour History.
Jeff Rich studied history at the University of Melbourne, and completed his PhD research on the history of Victorian building workers and unions in the nineteenth century in 1992. He has since followed a career in the public service. The 150th anniversary of the eight hour day in Victoria provided an opportunity for him to present his PhD research to a wider audience.
Barbara Webster lectures in Australian and world history in the School of Humanities, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton. Following her 1999 doctoral dissertation, Barbara’s chief interest continues to be working class and trade union history with a focus on the Central Queensland region and the locality of Rockhampton in particular. She is currently investigating the Rockhampton Railway Workshops’ and exploring through oral history the working lives of some of the 1,250 men employed there at the industrial site’s peak. For the past six years, Barbara has also joined other CQU historians in the Historical Coastlines (Community Perspectives) project of the Cooperative Research Centre for Coastal Zone, Estuary and Waterway Management. Her work includes a monograph, Marooned: Rockhampton’s great flood of 1918 (2003), and a 2004 co-authored international journal article on waterway engineering history. She is also a co- author of Community, environment and history: case studies of Keppel Bay, CQU Press, 2007. She is also assistant editor of The Great Circle for the Australian Association for Maritime History.
