A living tradition

At the recent Historical Materialism Australasia Conference (Sydney, July 2015), the keynote address was delivered by veteran scholars Terry Irving and Raewyn Connell. The subject was their seminal book Class Structure in Australian History (CSAH), the first edition of which was published by Longman Cheshire in 1980, followed by a second edition in 1992. Whilst in print the book sold at least 12,000 copies, a significant figure at the time for an Australian book, still a figure to set a publisher’s lips drooling, and in terms of international academic/scholarly publishing, where print runs of 200 copies struggle to sell, a runaway success. As they say in the classics, CSAH ‘walked off the shelves’.