A Model of Reading Practice in the Australian Labour Movement During the First Half of the 20th Century

This paper aims to contribute to the growing field of scholarship that examines reading within the labour movement. However, unlike earlier contributions, which have focused on what is read rather than how it is read; on the nineteenth rather than twentieth century; or on specific individuals rather than common actions, the analysis presented here examines the dominant, distinctive form of reading that developed within the Australian labour movement during the first half of the twentieth century. I This reading practice is contrasted with an ideal type of bourgeois reading, as a means of illuminating what is particular and historically significant in the practices of working-class readers.