Labour Historians as Labour Intellectuals: Generations and Crises

Over the last nine decades or so, Australian labour historians have been involved in a massive, ongoing, fractious, collective intellectual project. Together, they have written the history of Australian labour institutions; the history of class relations; the history of work; the history of community; the history of labour's political thought; the history of working-class culture; and the history of how class intersects with gender, race and sexuality. At various moments, the project has been criticised, defended, ironically eulogised, remade and recovered. It has been attacked as politically-motivated; theoretically underdeveloped; communistic; nationalistic; masculinist; naive; overly critical; overly celebratory; old-fashioned and intellectually marginal.