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Richmond

(3121, 3 km E, Yarra City)

The Melbourne inner suburb of Richmond grew around a picturesque hill that early caught the eye of affluent settlers seeking a vista to the Dandenong Ranges and elevation above the effluvia of the poor. By the 1860s industry seeking easy waste-removal had also discovered its river flats, and its fate as an industrial suburb was sealed. As the Hill became studded with mansions, villas and wide terraces, the lower ground was a maze of narrow streets with tiny cottages and single-storied terraces. Churches also found sites on the Hill - St Stephen's Anglican was the first - but the pride of place was later taken by William Wardell's magnificent St Ignatius' Catholic Church, built for the Jesuits (1867-).

Richmond was one of the first suburbs to establish municipal government. Self-governing by 1855, it became a city in 1882, and its population stood at 40 000 by Federation. It was a self-sufficient community, where most people lived and worked within its boundaries, and the ruling elite were to be seen at church as well as at work and on the council. The 1880s land boom saw terraces and villas erected on better ground by building societies and speculators, and some of the gold-rush cottages demolished. Subdivisions of larger blocks served by lanes and rights-of-way produced instant slums, which were to be a refuge of the very poor until the reclamation programs of the 1950s and 1960s.

Richmond's descent into a fully working-class community began in the 1890s depression. The genteel sought refuge in the garden suburbs, and many of the grand homes became boarding houses. The rise of working-class politics, led by the Political Labor Council, moved the business elite off the council and out of Richmond's parliamentary seats until it became one of the nation's safest Australian Labor Party (ALP) seats and most notorious hotbeds of factional politics.

With politics went religion. While Catholics remained a large minority in the suburb, they came to symbolise Richmond's character and culture. The traditions of Irish rebelliousness and machine politics were cultivated by both Labor supporters and detractors. ALP preselections were fiercely contested as ambitious but thwarted working-class men yearned for office either on the city council or in parliament, and allegations of impropriety dogged the Richmond ALP and local government for over 70 years. As a poor community made poorer by the great depression of the 1930s, petty gangsterism, SP bookmaking, sly grog selling and small-scale political corruption flourished in the absence of jobs and profits.

Industry expanded into larger scale manufacturing. The outworking boot, shoe and clothing trades were converted into deskilled factory workforces. Matches, processed foods, heavy engineering - all grew in the first two decades of the 20th century, and the city council was caught between encouraging industry and protecting living conditions.

The aura of sleaziness in public life exacerbated tensions between sectarian antagonists, and between the respectable and the less respectable. In residential streets, strong community feelings were created by shared problems and enforced intimacy. In hard times, few went hungry as neighbours and extended family helped out; but social ambition, quelled by the insecurities of the 1930s, reawakened after World War II. Richmond industry boomed during the war in the Pacific and its workers had never known such wages. Thwarted social aspiration combined with fears of communist influence in the Labor movement to make Richmond one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the 1955 Labor split.

Richmond was transformed by postwar immigration: first from southern Europe (Greek) and later from South-East Asia (Vietnamese, and East Timorese refugees from Indonesia). Housing Commission of Victoria slum-reclamation cleared entire blocks of workers' homes in north Richmond, replacing them with walk-up flats and tower blocks, but the first public-housing estate, built on the site of John Wren's old pony race track, shines as an example of the best city planning accomplished by the commission. The final transformation was gentrification. As industry left for cheaper, larger sites outside the inner city, and as middle-class Melbourne discovered the charms of inner-city living and Victorian architecture, Richmond was socially reinvented. House renovation has given way to warehouse conversion as some of the industrial landmarks have become luxury apartments, and Richmond's Yarra River precinct is returning to residential use.

Janet Mccalman

References

McCalman, Janet, Struggletown: public and private life in Richmond, 1900-1965, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1984. Details

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richmond - place - emelbourne - the encyclopedia of melbourne online

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School of Historical Studies, Department of History, The University of Melbourne

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Richmond - Place - eMelbourne - The Encyclopedia of Melbourne Online, eMelbourne is a biographical, bibliographical and archival database about Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, with links to related articles and images.

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Richmond, 3 km east of central Melbourne, has been a residential, industrial and residential, and latterly a more residential, suburb. Until 1994 Richmond was also a municipality. Its western boundary, Punt Road, adjoined Melbourne city and its eastern boundary was the Yarra River, across from leafy Hawthorn. The river curved around to form Richmond’s southern boundary, opposite South Yarra and Toorak. The northern boundary, Victoria Parade, adjoins Collingwood. Richmond was named after Richmond Hill, London. Like its London counterpart it has Kew close by.

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From the vault: Melbourne slums of the 1930s

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The Great Depression and the impact on Melbourne in the 1930s

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The Great Depression and the impact on Melbourne in the 1930s

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The Great Depression - How Were Families Affected? ACOKFH018

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This Australian-made, curriculum fit program examines the impact of the Great Depression on Australian society during the late 1920s and 1930s. This period saw levels of poverty and despair on a scale never before experienced in contemporary Australia.

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The hardships of parenting in the Great Depression

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The hardships of parenting in the Great Depression

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Clip description

Four women recall the hardship of raising children during a period of mass unemployment. The government provided a 'baby bundle' consisting of poor quality clothing.

Teacher's notes

provided by

This clip shows Eileen Pittman and Tibby Whalan talking about raising children during the Great Depression (1929-39) in Australia. Eileen Pittman describes the 'baby bundle' handed out at the government-run baby clinics and how arrowroot biscuits and condensed milk provided a staple diet for children. Tibby Whalan talks about the endless toil involved in running a household with no electricity, running water or money to buy new clothes and shoes at a time when domestic duties and child-rearing were seen as the sole responsibility of women. This is interspersed with black-and-white archival footage and photographs of women and children in the years of the Great Depression, showing them in run-down fibro or corrugated-iron huts, performing domestic tasks and visiting the baby clinic.

Educational value points

The Wall Street crash in October 1929 led to an international economic collapse; the period from the collapse to 1939 is now known as the Great Depression. Economic depressions, such as the Great Depression, are sustained periods of low economic activity characterised by continuing falls in output, high unemployment and a resulting crisis for communities all over the world, with many people suffering starvation and difficult circumstances.

Australia's dependence on the export of primary products such as grain and wool and reliance on overseas loans meant it was among the countries worst affected by the Great Depression. Unemployment reached a peak in 1932, when 29 per cent of Australians were officially out of work. The working class was the hardest hit and many were left homeless and destitute.

As illustrated by the clip, many families endured extreme hardship and poverty during the Great Depression. Families unable to pay rent were evicted and forced to live in substandard accommodation, often with no running water, electricity or gas. Sometimes, several families would share a house, with each family crammed into one room. Others lived in public spaces such as Sydney's Domain, in makeshift shelters constructed of corrugated iron and hessian sacks.

Even though domestic duties have long been undertaken by women in most societies, the Great Depression added a new layer of burden to these duties. During the Great Depression, domestic work was repetitive and relentless toil. Houses sometimes had only one tap, usually in the backyard; alternatively, women had to get water from nearby creeks. Bathing children and washing was often done in a communal outside tub. Those without electricity or gas had to collect and chop wood for heating and cooking.

The clip suggests that women had to improvise during the Great Depression, with family survival often depending on traditional women's skills of mending and sewing and making do. Unemployment and low wages meant there was no money for new clothes and families relied on hand-me-downs that were constantly patched or unpicked and re-made. Children's clothes, including nappies, were sometimes made of flour sacks or even hessian.

As described in the clip, child-raising and housework were seen as woman's sole responsibility at the time. Although women were often working for low wages while their husbands left the family home in search of work (often referred to as being 'on the wallaby'), housework was still considered women's work. Mothers frequently emerged as the head of the family, managing what money there was and keeping the household together. Some resorted to begging or hawking to feed their family.

In the clip, Eileen Pittman refers to 'baby clinics' in the clip. The first state-funded Baby Health Centre opened in Alexandria, a Sydney suburb, in 1914 and was followed by other clinics in New South Wales and the other states. Run by nursing sisters, the clinics aimed to keep children healthy by educating mothers about infant welfare, particularly the importance of breastfeeding, personal hygiene and clean environments. The baby's progress was monitored through weighing and check-ups. During the Great Depression, the clinics provided some free milk, food and nappies.

People frequently went hungry during the Great Depression. They often ate bread and dripping and 'cocky's joy' (bread and golden syrup). State government relief schemes kept many unemployed men and their families alive, and single men who could prove they were destitute were paid a sustenance wage (the 'susso') to work on government-financed public work schemes. Others had to rely on charitable groups that ran soup kitchens or provided some limited monetary assistance and basic food rations.

The clip refers to the use of condensed milk and arrowroot biscuits in children's diets. Infants were often fed arrowroot biscuits mashed with condensed milk, a substitute for fresh milk. Diseases associated with under-nourishment, such as rickets, were common.

Bread and Dripping is an example of the type of documentary produced by Australian women filmmakers between 1970 and the early 1980s. Like Bread and Dripping, many of the feminist documentaries made in that period focused on women's personal experiences, favouring autobiographical discourse, oral histories and the absence of an 'authoritative' or controlling voice-over.
This clip starts approximately 6 minutes into the documentary. Pictures of women and children living in poor conditions. Eileen Pittman is interviewed in a lounge room. There are shots of the sisters in the clinic with children.
Eileen Pittman Raising children in the Depression. Using the baby clothes, the government handout. The little nighties they gave you, if you put them in the water, it was too hot, they'd go stiff and stand up on their own. And the nappies, were so rough, that you got - this was the government baby bundle they gave you. But you could go to the clinic. The clinic sisters would help you out with clothes and food. But the main milk was condensed milk. That was the main milk that we used then, and arrowroot biscuits.
Tibby Whalan is interviewed at a kitchen table. There are pictures of women washing and working around poor housing with children around them.
Tibby Whalan When I was first married, it wasn't so much, just two of us, and then there was three of us, and then there was four of us. And I used to cook in a camp oven, I used to boil the washing up in a kerosene tin after I'd carried the water from the creek. And I had galvanised iron tubs to wash with. I bathed the kids in them, I bathed myself in them. It was pretty hard work. Many a time I had to go and chop the wood to start the fire to cook a meal, and I always seemed to be cooking and washing and ironing and mending, and I did that at night time by candlelight or lantern light or kerosene lamp light. Didn't have any washing machines or electricity or anything else in those days. It was a very primitive life when you come to think of it, and it was a never-ending round of work. There was patching and mending. I can remember sewing patches together to make pants for my little girl, and darning and knitting, of course. I did a lot of knitting. And all the home crafts that you sometimes see today, they're taught in tech. Well, you learnt those and you had to do them from sheer necessity. The only time I ever got any break from the children was when I went to my mother's and stayed with my mother. But I didn't get any emotional support whatsoever or any responsibility for the children. That was my job, I was the woman. The man did the outside work, the woman did the inside.

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child poverty; documentaries; economic depressions; housework; housing; poverty; sex role; social services; baby clinics; infant welfare; the great depression;

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Four women recall raising families during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The film also looks at the activism of women and the beginnings of the early feminist movement in Australia. (Video excerpt 2.05 minutesalso has educational notes. This clip chosen to be PG)

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Unlike World War I, the Second World War was waged much closer to home.
This time, they were facing an enemy in their own Pacific neighbourhood, aiming to invade the mainland. Civilians had to prepare for the invasion, and they faced years of hardships and shortages.

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Unlike World War I, the Second World War was waged much closer to home. This time, they were facing an enemy in their own Pacific neighbourhood, aiming to invade the mainland. Civilians had to prepare for the invasion, and they faced years of hardships and shortages.

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Australia's Involvement in WWII - Behind the News

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Academic article - women and family in post-war Australia

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Academic article - women and family in post-war Australia

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In Australia, the war did not only affect those men and women who went to fight and serve abroad. Many things also had to change for those who remained at home.

Many men left their jobs to join the armed forces leading to a shortage of labour. New industries had to be created to supply the troops with weapons, uniforms and ammunition . The government had to control the buying and selling of scarce goods, to ensure that everyone received a fair share.

Australians began to experience shortages of almost everything they needed in daily life. At the time of World War II, most of them drank tea, not coffee. When the Japanese captured many of the countries that grew the tea supplied to Australia, this caused severe shortages. Enemy action in the Pacific also disrupted the normal supply of goods by ship to Australia. Australian troops abroad had to be supplied with food produced in Australia, and when thousands of American troops arrived in Australia to fight the war in the Pacific, they also had to be fed.

To ensure that everyone received a basic amount of essential supplies such as meat, butter, sugar and tea, the government brought in a system of rationing. Everyone had to apply for ration books, which contained a number of coupons. Each coupon gave the holder permission to buy a certain amount of something, usually over a weekly period. Despite the hardship, rationing was well received by the public because it applied to everyone equally. Nevertheless, when the government announced in May 1942 that they would impose rationing on clothing, there was a rush to buy as much as possible before rationing began.

RUSH TO BUY CLOTHES - Stampede buying following recent ministerial announcements...has so depleted stocks held by Melbourne traders that blankets and other articles are now virtually unobtainable.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 7 June 1941

People were encouraged to be as self-sufficient as possible: to keep hens for eggs, and to grow their own vegetables at home. Even some public parks were dug up for vegetable gardens. Shortages and rationing also led to hoarding: people who had access to some rare commodity, such as petrol, would store up as much as they could, for their own use in the future. This only made shortages worse. It also led to a black market: items that were in demand were sold privately, at very high prices, outside the rationing system.

But rationing was not enough. The government also needed large amounts of money to pay for weapons, aeroplanes, ships, tanks, ammunition, and soldiers' wages. One source of this money was the savings of individual citizens, who were encouraged to lend money to the Government by purchasing bonds called 'Victory Loans'. In order for people to have more money to spend on bonds, the government tried to discourage them from spending it on themselves, for things like cigarettes, beer, movies and gambling.

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In Australia, the war did not only affect those men and women who went to fight and serve abroad. Many things also had to change for those who remained at home.

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Article - Highlights an experience similar to Connies in the 1960s

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Article - Highlights an experience similar to Connies in the 1960s

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Anne Summers has spoken about her own experience with a backyard abortion. AAP Image/Luis Enrique Ascui

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard spoke out against sexism and misogyny in the parliament last month, her words had resonance far beyond the political context of the moment.

It was a reminder that women suffer injustices, and too often silently. In Australia, those injustices are often seen as first world problems that are political and economic, and less commonly, life threatening.

This is not always true, and it certainly was not true in the 1960s. While this revolutionary decade saw the advancement of some women's rights, it remained a dangerous time for women. Simple acts like engaging in sex could cost a woman her life. But, out of shame, these deaths were kept out of view. No Australian drama captures this better than the ABC's Dangerous Remedy, which airs on the public broadcaster on Sunday night.

It is a telemovie about power, corruption and abortion, and the grave toll it has taken on women. It has caught my attention for several reasons. It brutally shows the trajectory that Australian women have travelled in the quest for equality. It is a story that touches on the heart of my research about what meaningful print investigative journalism can achieve in society, and it is poignant, local story-telling.

Set in Melbourne, the opening scene is of a young, single woman waiting haplessly for a car to arrive to take her to an unknown destination. She is trusting that they, whoever they are, will fix her most intimate problem, an unwanted pregnancy. She waits nervously on the roadside in a socio-political climate that renders her a social pariah if her secret were disclosed; and if not, as a law-breaker in her efforts to rid herself of a physical, economic and social burden.

What happens next is something worse than either of these dilemmas. She is bundled into a car, blindfolded and taken to a dirty, makeshift infirmary. Perhaps more confronting for the audience is that this might be dramatised, but it is not fiction.

Someone who knows its reality is Dr Anne Summers, an author and journalist, and former Keating government advisor heading the Office of the Status of Women. After watching a preview copy she wrote to her Facebook followers of her own experience with backyard abortion:

I am so glad the story of this awful era is finally being told. I had the same experience as the girl in the opening scene, being butchered by a backyard operator in Melbourne in the 1960s, being blindfolded before being driven to the suburban house where the abortion was performed. The only difference was that I did not die, because I was lucky enough to get professional medical help in time.

It is incredible to think that it is only 40 years since the Victoria police controlled abortion in that state (the same happened in NSW) and desperate women, especially those who did not have the money for the qualified doctors operating out of private hospitals, risked their lives to end unwanted pregnancies.

Unfortunately, Summers' story is not unique. Researchers suggest as many as one in four Australian women have experienced abortion. And, because of the efforts of "Dangerous Remedies" protagonist Dr Bertram Wainer, women's experiences in Victoria are now legal and no longer involve the horror of makeshift clinics.

Today, women's experiences of pregnancy termination are safer, but are they less traumatic? I don't know. I do know from reading the scores of responses to Summers' on Facebook that there is still a social stigma attached.

I also know that when I was a nurse, I emotionally supported friends, and more than once walked with them past protestors outside a termination clinic. It was threatening and intimidating. Abortion is a difficult decision without the pressure of strangers, some whose intentions are malevolent. In 2001, Steven Rogers lost his life working as a security guard protecting women entering such clinics.

In the 1960s, Wainer was a courageous man who raised allegations of a police protection racket involving a group of Victorian abortionists. For a fee, police would not pursue doctors and backyard abortionists who performed illegal abortions.

The media also played an important role during this time. My research about investigative journalism introduced me to the work of journalist Evan Whitton. He is barely mentioned in the telemovie, but he is also a courageous fellow, who demonstrated what investigative journalism could do well: holding those with power to account.

Whitton seized on Wainer's allegation, publishing details of six sworn affidavits alleging police extortion in Melbourne's Truth newspaper, in a story called "The Ugly Cloud". The revelations led to a government board of inquiry chaired by Melbourne silk Bill Kaye. Jack Ford, Jack Matthews and Martin Jacobson of the homicide squad were jailed. Wainer's dedicated campaign led to law reform, and Whitton earned his second of five Walkley awards exposing the injustices.

Researching this story, Whitton told me: "The task was made easier by the failure of other organs of the media to turn up during Dr Wainer's campaign to show that bad laws made bad cops", he said. "Police roundsmen tend to be prisoners of the source. I suspect editors made the error of believing them when they said Dr Wainer was mad and bad and there was nothing in the police corruption story".

How wrong they were.

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Dangerous remedies: ending the horror of backyard abortions

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When Prime Minister Julia Gillard spoke out against sexism and misogyny in the parliament last month, her words had resonance far beyond the political context of the moment. It was a reminder that women...

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Until the influx of European immigrants from 1947, nearly all Australian Catholics were Irish by birth or heritage. ( overview: video lecture)

The Convicts

The convicts who formed the majority of early Catholics were mostly Irish. Some 40,000 Irish were transported. Most were at least nominally Catholic.

Only a few of the First Fleet convicts, such as Hannah Mullins, were Irish. Transportation from Ireland began with the which left Cork in 1791, landing the convicts in Sydney in very poor condition.

Chevalier Robert Sutton de Clonard (b. Wexford, 1751), La Perouse's second-in-command at Botany Bay in 1788, had served in the French navy at the Chesapeake, an engagement which led to American victory in the War of Independence.

The Men of '98 and the Castle Hill Rebellion

Some 400 participants and alleged participants in the Irish Rebellions of 1798 and 1803 were transported to Sydney from 1800. Their story is told in Anne-Maree Whitaker's 'Swords to ploughshares? The 1798 rebels in New South Wales', Labour History 75 (1998), 9-21.

Among them were the first priests in Australia, James Harold, James Dixon and Peter O'Neil. Governor King found Fr Dixon cooperative and in 1803 proclaimed toleration for Catholics and allowed Fr Dixon to say mass.

Fr Dixon pleads with the Castle Hill rebels, "Lay down your arms my deluded countrymen." [Detail of contemporary watercolour, nla.pic-an5577479]

In 1804 Irish convicts at Castle Hill rebelled. Government troops marched quickly to meet them. Fr Dixon and officers remonstrated with the rebels without success, and the rebels were defeated in the " Battle of Vinegar Hill ".

Thereafter the Irish generally chose respectability and assimilation into the increasingly prosperous society of New South Wales. A leader was James Meehan, who did much of the colony's surveying work in Macquarie's time and helped many of his countrymen to settle in the Campbelltown area and to the southwest, laying the foundation for Irish chain migration to the Goulburn and Murrumbidgee regions.

During the priestless years of the Macquarie era, Catholic prayer life continued in the Sydney homes of two other "Men of '98", William Davis and James Dempsey.

John Plunkett

John Plunkett (b. Co. Roscommon, 1802) was Attorney-General of New South Wales in the 1830s and 40s. He secured the conviction and hanging of the perpetrators of the Myall Creek Massacre and his Church Building Act 1836 gained equal government treatment for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians.

Irish immigration

Many immigrants came from Ireland around the time of the Great Famine of the 1840s and later, including 4000 female famine orphans.

While many settled in the inner cities, some spread in country areas, a few of which became Irish-dominated. Boorowa was described in 1862 as " the headquarters and paradise of the Ryans and might be supposed to be a veritable slice of the County Tipperary." Val Noone's Hidden Ireland in Australia describes the Irish communities of Victoria, some Gaelic-speaking.

Fr McEncroe, the Irish and the Benedictines

Fr Philip Conolly (b. Co. Monaghan, 1786) and Fr John Therry (b. Cork, 1790) arrived in 1820 as the first officially-approved chaplains. But by the 1830s government policy favoured an English-led church and the first two Archbishops of Sydney were English Benedictines.

Tensions arose between English leaders and Irish clergy and people. The story of the leader of the Irish "faction" is told in Edmund Campion's ' Archdeacon John McEncroe: An architect of the Australian Church', Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 39 (2018), 4-12.
The English Benedictine ascendancy ended with the death of Archbishop Vaughan in 1883. His successor, Cardinal Moran, and other Irish bishops, transformed the Australian Church into an Irish-led organisation until 1940.

Irish success in the new land

While political advancement for Catholics in Ireland had made little progress in seven centuries, in the colonies Irishmen soon gained prominent positions. John O'Shanessy (b. Thurles, 1818) became the second premier of Victoria in 1857. Patrick Jennings (b. Newry, 1831) became the first Catholic premier of New South Wales in 1886. Peter Lalor (b. Raheen, Co. Laois, 1827) was the most prominent leader of the Eureka Stockade and later a conservative politician.

Patrick McMahon Glynn (b. Co. Galway, 1855) was one of the "Fathers of Federation" and responsible for including a reference to God in the preamble to the Australian Constitution. Hugh Mahon (b. Co. Offaly, 1857) was the only member ever to be expelled from federal Parliament (for "seditious and disloyal utterances", 1920)

Ned Kelly

Ned Kelly was born to Irish immigrant parents in 1854. His Jerilderie letter uses Irish grievances to "justify" his killings, calling the police "a parcel of big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords." Although no churchgoer, when wounded at the Glenrowan siege he accepted the last rites from Fr Matthew Gibney (b. Co. Cavan, 1835, later Bishop of Perth).

Cardinal Moran and the Irish ascendancy

Patrick Francis Moran, nephew of the leading figure in the Irish "ecclesiastical empire", Cardinal Cullen, was appointed Archbishop of Sydney in 1884 and named the first cardinal in Australia the next year. Between then and his death in 1911, he ordained nearly 500 priests and officiated at the openings of countless churches and schools. In the 1890s he gave some support to the emerging Labour cause.

He wrote several works on Irish Catholic history and the massive History of the Catholic Church in Australasia (1003 pages). His biography Prince of the Church, by Philip Ayres covers both Irish and Australian periods.

In Moran's time, large numbers of Irish priests, brothers of the Christian and Patrician orders, and nuns of orders such as the Mercies and Brigidines, arrived to staff the newly expanding parishes, schools and hospitals.

The Irish bishops and religious superiors

The first bishops of Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and most non-metropolitan dioceses were Irish, setting the tone for later developments. Around World War I, every archbishop and almost all bishops in Australia were Irish.

The first two Archbishops of Melbourne, James Goold (b. Cork, 1812) and Thomas Carr (b. Co. Galway, 1839) coped successfully with the extraordinary growth of Melbourne and built the massive St Patrick's Cathedral. Patrick Morgan's Melbourne Before Mannix portrays the vibrant Irish Catholic community of Carr's time.

In Sydney the leadership of Moran's successor, Michael Kelly (b. Waterford, 1850) was generally considered uninspired. His Coadjutor ( appointed with right of succession, which did not come to pass) Michael Sheehan had been a leader of the revival of the Gaelic language. His best-selling Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine impressed schoolboys from B.A. Santamaria to Thomas Keneally.

James Duhig (b. Co. Limerick, 1873), Archbishop of Brisbane for 48 years from 1917, favoured cooperation with the established order and was knighted. Unusually for a bishop, he wrote an autobiography.

Many of the first orders of nuns to come to Australia had a background working with the Irish poor. Irish were prominent amongst women religious superiors, such as Sr M. John Baptist de Lacy, founder of St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, Ursula Frayne, founder of schools in Perth and Melbourne, Mother Xavier Maguire of Geelong, Mother Gonzaga Barry of Ballarat, Mother Vincent Whitty, who established many schools in Queensland, Mother M. Berchmans Daly, founder of St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, Mother Gertrude Healy, a later hospital adminisrator, and Mary Synan, founder of the Brigidines in Australia.

Male superiors included the Jesuit Fr Joseph Dalton (b. Waterford, 1817), founder of Xavier College and Riverview.

Mannix and the Irish cause

Daniel Mannix (b. Co. Cork, 1864) arrived in Melbourne as coadjutor Archbishop in 1913, after being President of Maynooth Seminary. He was Archbishop from 1917 till his death aged 99 in 1963. By then he was Australia's best-known churchman and best-known Irishman, principally for his leadership of the anti-conscription campaigns of 1916 and 1917, his involvement with Irish independence, and his patronage of B.A. Santamaria's "Movement" which precipitated the Labor split of the 1950s.

In 1920 Mannix, by then known for his support of Irish independence, attempted to visit Ireland. The British navy sent a destroyer to arrest him on the high seas and land him in England. "Since the Jutland battle, the British Navy has not scored a success comparable to the capture of the Archbishop of Melbourne," Mannix said.

The many books on Mannix include Brenda Niall's award-winning and J. Franklin, G.O. Nolan and M. Gilchrist's The Real Archbishop Mannix: From the Sources. ( video)

Mannix's friend, the Irish nationalist priest Fr Hackett, is the subject of Brenda Niall's The Riddle of Father Hackett.

Rural Catholics: "John O'Brien" and Around the Boree Log

Poor rural Irish Catholic communities created a distinctive culture, celebrated in the poems of "John O'Brien" (Fr Patrick Hartigan, b. Yass, 1878 to Irish parents). Well-known are ' The Little Irish Mother', ' At Casey's After Mass', and ' Said Hanrahan'. A silent film was made in 1925 ( Part 1, 41MB) (Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive). A first-hand non-fictional account of a similar community is Bernard O'Reilly's Cullenbenbong (flimed as Sons of Matthew, 1949)

The story of a small-town Irish Catholic community is told in the centenary history of the Mudgee parish.

Sectarianism and anti-Irish discrimination

Sectarian tensions were heightened in 1868 when a mentally ill Irishman and former seminarian, Henry O'Farrell, shot and wounded the visiting Prince Alfred, and again in World War I because of suspicions of disloyalty by Catholics, especially Mannix.

"No Irish need apply" signs were occasionally found in job ads in the mid-nineteenth century and less overt discrimination occurred up to about 1960. Freemasons, though not explicitly anti-Catholic, favoured one another in employment so de facto disfavoured Catholics. But Orangeism, which is explicitly anti-Catholic, was never strong in Australia. Although Australia had the ethnic composition of Ulster, restraint on both sides avoided the troubles of that region.

Almost none of the Australian squattocracy were of Irish Catholic background. (Rare exceptions were former convicts John Grant in central western NSW and Ned Ryan, "King of Galong Castle." Patrick Durack (b. Co. Clare, 1834) was a pioneer in western Queensland and the Kimberley, as described in his granddaughter Mary Durack's Kings in Grass Castles.)

Up to 1960, few Irish names were to be found at the higher levels of banking, insurance, the armed forces, conservative political parties and academia.

Sectarian scandals

In 1900 Cardinal Moran's right-hand man, Fr Denis O'Haran (b. Enniskillen, 1854), was named as co-respondent in a divorce case. After litigation accompanied by sectarian conflict, a jury found in his favour but doubts remained.

A sectarian cause célèbre began with the flight of Sister Liguori (b. Bridget Partridge, Co. Kildare, 1890) from the Presentation Convent, Wagga, in 1920. She lodged with a Protestant minister and subsequent court cases inflamed sectarian bitterness. The story is told in Maureen McKeown's The Extraordinary Case of Sister Liguori. ( video lecture)

Indigenous Australians

One of the few areas of Catholic endeavour that were not dominated by the Irish was missionary work to aboriginal Australians, which was mostly led by Spanish, German, Italian and French orders.

An exception is the work of the Sisters of St John of God in the Kimberley, recorded in the Heritage Centre Broome. Sister Mary Gertrude (b Co. Clare, 1884) established the Derby Leprosarium. The last Irish nun, Sr Bernadette O'Connor, died in 2007.

Poor communities of mixed Irish-Aboriginal descent (" shamrock aborigines") were found in some settled rural areas, as described in Warren Mundine's autobiography.

Eileen O'Connor and the Brown Nurses

Eileen O'Connor, who died aged 28 in 1921 after suffering severe spinal problems almost all her life, is likely the be the first saint from an Irish-Australian background. Her parents were Irish-born. She co-founded Our Lady's Nurses for the Poor (Brown Nurses) to care for the Sydney sick poor in their own homes. The cause for her canonisation is under way. T.P. Boland's Eileen O'Connor tells her story, while Jocelyn Hedley's And Here Begin the Work of Heaven explains her spirituality. Hedley's Hidden in the Shadow of Love recounts the life of the Nurses after Eileen's death.

St Patrick's Day

The great day for the Irish each year has always been St Patrick's Day (17 March). It has been celebrated enthusiastically, sometimes over-enthusiastically, since at least 1795. Particularly remembered is the 1920 St Patrick's Day parade in Melbourne, a massive pro-Irish political demonstration led by Archbishop Mannix and 14 (or possibly 20) VC winners on white (or possibly grey) chargers. ( video)

Irish organisations

The Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society provided social security in the era before the welfare state.

Many general-purpose Catholic societies, such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Knights of the Southern Cross (founded by Patrick Minahan, b. Killaloe, 1866), the Catholic Federation, the Catholic Club, the Children of Mary and the Genesian Theatre were heavily Irish, while Irish bodies like the Irish National Association and the Gaelic Club were heavily Catholic in membership.

The Australian Labor Party's Irish heritage

Irish Catholic workers, many in lower-paid jobs, gravitated to the early Labor Party and in some places came to dominate it.

James Scullin, the first Catholic prime minister (1929-32) was the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, as was John Curtin. Joe Lyons and Ben Chifley both had Irish-born mothers and paternal grandparents. Scullin, Lyons and Chifley maintained connections with the Church, Curtin did not. ( video of Scullin and Lyons)

The Labor-Catholic nexus was strong in New South Wales, where in the 1950s moderate premiers of Irish-Australian background, James McGirr and J.J. Cahill had close relations with Catholic Church leaders.

J.J. Cahill came from the Marrickville Labor branch. It was said that an old lady arrived late at a branch meeting and accidentally genuflected; when everyone laughed she said "It's all the same faces." ( source)

In Queensland, the Labor government of T.J. Ryan (1915-19) was followed by long periods of Labor dominance.

In a later generation, Susan Ryan paid tribute to her Irish and Catholic heritage.

Arthur Calwell

Calwell meets Lithuanian immigrant Konstancija Brundzaite, 1947 (Australian National Maritime Museum)

Arthur Calwell was the most flamboyantly Irish and Catholic of Australia's major political figures. During World War I he attracted police suspicion over membership of the Young Ireland Society, and learned Gaelic. As Minister for Immigration in the Chifley government, he instituted a massive immigration program of Eastern Europeans (many Catholic) from 1947 which transformed Australia from "a dull inbred country of predominantly British stock" to its modern multicultural complexion. He was less successful as leader of the federal opposition, 1960-67. He was awarded a papal knighthood.

End of Irish influence

Few priests, religious or other Irish immigrants came to Australia after 1940. The autobiography of Fr Kevin Condon (b. 1932), Here I Am Lord: Memories and Musings of a Wandering Dominican is a rare memoir of an ordinary priest satisfied with his parish work.

Patrick O'Farrell, historian of Irish Australia

Patrick O'Farrell (1933-2013) was the most celebrated historian of both Irish Australia and Catholic Australia. His books include The Catholic Church in Australia: A Short History; Documents in Australian Catholic History 1788-1968; The Catholic Church and Community: an Australian history and The Irish in Australia. A website on his work gives details.

Currently active historians include Jeff Kildea who specialises in Irish and Irish-Australian history and Siobhán McHugh whose radio and oral history work has included the Australian Irish and mixed marriages. Dianne Hall and Elizabeth Malcolm's A New History of the Irish in Australia (2018) gives a recent overview. ( review)

Thomas Keneally, well-known for his historical fiction on Australian, international and Catholic themes, has also written the non-fiction The Great Shame on the Irish famine.

In fiction

Ruth Park's novels The Harp in the South and Poor Man's Orange movingly bring to life an inner-city poor Irish Catholic community of the 1940s. Similar rural communities appear in her husband D'Arcy Niland's novels The Shiralee and Call Me When the Cross Turns Over.

Christopher Koch's novel Out of Ireland (1999) deals with Irish convict transportation to Van Diemen's Land.

Colleen McCullough's popular 1977 novel The Thorn Birds, about the Cleary family on Drogheda station, sold some 33 million copies. The miniseries, filmed in California with a few kangaroos, became the United States' second highest-rated miniseries of all time.

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Irish Catholic Australians - Australian Catholic Historical Society

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Until the influx of European immigrants from 1947, nearly all Australian Catholics [...]

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Melbourne class system through the past century

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Melbourne class system through the past century

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Class

The hierarchical division of society along economic lines, class permeates the geography, institutions, codes of conduct and language of the modern city. Class was as fundamental to the experience of Melburnians as it was to the lives of city-dwellers elsewhere, although it was expressed and made visible in distinct ways. There are stories about class in Melbourne that are different from the stories of London, or New York, or even of Sydney or Adelaide.

The characteristic class structure of colonial Melbourne was a product of three epochs: the land rush of the 1830s and 1840s, the gold rush of the 1850s and the land boom of the 1880s. The first created a mercantile society dominated by the demands of the pastoral interior for the export and import of goods and organised hierarchically around a division between an elite of gentlemen squatters and their merchant allies, an intermediate class of shopkeepers and small tradesmen, and a relatively undifferentiated mass of artisans and labourers. Paul de Serville, the historian and defender of the Port Phillip Gentlemen (1980), portrays them as a would-be aristocracy valiantly defending 'decent manners and educated tastes in a difficult period'. Social relations in the infant town were still shaped very largely by the assumptions of English rural and provincial society, a model that, as contemporaries knew, was being challenged by industrialisation and urbanisation. 'In large cities the working class possess an importance which could never even be dreamed of in the country', the Port Phillip Gazette warned in 1844. 'In large cities the working class may war with and overpower their superiors.' Yet, already, while Melbourne was little more than a town, it has been argued, its working men were displaying some of the features of a self-conscious class.

With the gold rush, Melbourne instantly became a city and the conservatives' fears of violence and mob rule seemed about to be realised. They reacted with a program of reforms, including the foundation of a university, public library and museum, designed to civilise the masses and reinforce the moral and political tutelage of the pre-gold elite. In fact the masses were less barbarous, and the threat of political revolution less dire, than they feared. Melbourne's working classes, recruited mainly from the influx of unassisted immigrants lured to the city by gold, were the most skilled, educated and ambitious in the colonies. Many were drawn from the nonconformist chapels, lodges, friendly societies and trade unions of the respectable English working class. The communities they formed in the city's inner ring of riverside suburbs were founded on small-scale industries in which masters and men united around a common political program of tariff protection and radical democracy. The city's strong manufacturing base and rapid physical growth promoted the growth of a strong middling class of self-employed builders, manufacturers and artisans devoted to ideals of self-help and upward mobility. During the 1860s and 1870s, the gold rush immigrants led the political struggles to unlock the lands occupied by the squatters and to curb the power of the property-based Legislative Council. As they grew older and more prosperous their liberalism lost some of its radical edge, though not its meliorist tone. By the 1880s, the men who had led the campaigns to unlock the lands of the squatters were often running building societies and mortgage banks offering the urban working class a chance to get homes of their own. It was the gold rush, more than any other event, that shaped Melbourne's long tradition of political liberalism, manifest in the strength of its voluntary associations, its veneration for homes and gardens, its independent schools, its religious moderation, its strong cross-class enthusiasm for spectator sport, of which Australian Rules football is the outstanding example, and (later) its national leadership of the non-Labor political parties.

By 1860, the class structure of the city was already being etched on its landscape. Some of the richest residents - those with access to carriages of their own- were heading towards the well-drained slopes overlooking the Bay at Brighton and St Kilda, to the upper Yarra River at Heidelberg or on the high southern and eastern banks at South Yarra, Toorak, Hawthorn or Kew, where they formed exclusive suburban enclaves. Yet until the 1880s rich and poor usually dwelt in the same localities, divided, where they were divided at all, according to a subtler, more localised pattern of segregation: rich on the hillsides, poor on the flats; rich on the wide avenues and carriage streets, shopkeepers along the main streets, poor in the back streets and alleys. As late as 1889 an English observer, accustomed to the uniformity of London's 'long unlovely streets', was struck by Melbourne's comparative 'diversity': 'A poor house stands side by side with a good house, a cottage, one might almost say a hovel, in close proximity to a palace'.

Class relations in late 19th-century Melbourne were grounded in the often wide differences in economic power between large capitalists, such as merchants, bankers and manufacturers, and the higher professionals (together making up about 5% of the male workforce); shopkeepers, self-employed tradesmen and other clean-handed employees such as clerks (about 30%); a large intermediate subclass of artisans and skilled tradesmen (40%) and the substratum of labourers, domestic servants and other unskilled workers (about 25%). Their incomes ranged from the most prosperous merchants (£3000-5000 p.a.) and professional men (£1000-3000), through the middling class of shopkeepers (£300-400) down to artisans (£150-200), unskilled labourers (£80-100) and servants (live-in maids on £25-50).

How these class differences were manifested, however, depended on the changing scale and character of the urban stage in which they were played out. In the 1860s, when the Melbourne elite consisted of possibly no more than a few hundred families, social relations could be conducted more intimately than they could two decades later when the elite may have been four or five times as large. 'Did not see a soul in town', Annie Riddell, daughter of one leading family, noted in her diary in 1872, reflecting the assumptions of a face-to-face society in which class was defined in terms of 'the people we know'. As the metropolis expanded, and with it the numbers of aspiring newly rich families, rituals of inclusion and exclusion became increasingly codified, public and impersonal. The publication of manuals like Australian Etiquette (1886), ladies' advice columns in weekly newspapers like the Australasian, the 'society novels' of Ada Cambridge and Jessie Couvreur ('Tasma'), and 'society' newspapers like Table Talk indicated that class relations were entering a new stage when social position was defined, not just by rank or birth, or even by who knew whom, but by the precisely calibrated standards of a plutocratic society.

'Money is the gauge of social consequence in Melbourne', Ada Cambridge observed in 1903. She was writing in the aftermath of a land boom that had made hundreds of new fortunes, and almost as suddenly unmade them. In this bigger, more affluent and more mobile society people's class position was more often judged, not by their personal attributes, but by the pecuniary style in which they lived. 'As a man is judged publicly by the character of his attire, so, privately, are people by the appearance of their homes', a building society publicist observed in 1890. New suburbs were designed to appeal to a specific class of purchasers, and contracts of sale sometimes included covenants and caveats designed to exclude anyone whose income, or architectural taste, might lower the tone of the neighbourhood. On the new suburban railways middle-class and working-class passengers rode separately in First and Second Class compartments, or on special workingman's trains. In theatres, at the races, in clubs and pubs and even in churches (where the rich paid for pews while the poor sat apart), the classes occupied separate spaces.

Historians have traditionally traced the development of 'class relations' in late 19th-century Melbourne to its growing industrial unrest, and to the emergence of organised trade unions and employers' associations dedicated to their members' defence, a process that culminated in the foundation of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and its non-Labor counterparts in the 1890s. This may take too narrow a view of the forces transforming urban society. The decline of political factions and the emergence of political parties in the early 1890s was also a response to the growing stratification and segregation of social relations outside the workplace as well as within, and to the reorganisation of the entire metropolis around more impersonal and segregated patterns of life.

By 1900 the suburban commuter, making his way from his suburb to the city, could recognise his passage 'through several zones of suburbs, each of a different class. Next to his own suburb is one of detached villas, each with its own garden; then comes a region of wooden cottages, all neat and comfortable; and finally, stucco terraces, rather dingy and crowded, and many of them with cards at their window, proclaiming that "board and residence" may be obtained within.' Contemporary beliefs about social status and hygiene reinforced this association of the working classes with the dense, inner suburbs, especially to the north and west of the city, and of the middle classes with the leafy, sparsely settled outer eastern and southern suburbs. For almost a century the Yarra was the city's main social divide, with predominantly working-class suburbs and Labor electorates on one side, and middle-class suburbs and non-Labor electorates on the other. By the 1930s depression it was apparent in the gulf between the massive unemployment rates in the city's west and inner ring, and the relatively comfortable outer-eastern suburbs. The Yarra remained an important symbolic frontier until the 1970s and 1980s, when it was obliterated by the movement of industry to the suburbs and the gentrification of the inner city.

When Melburnians referred to class they often did so obliquely, using language in which moral, religious, hygienic and racial ideas were intertwined with economic ones. While the middle class made subtle distinctions between the genteel and the nouveau riche, respectable working people - those governed by ideals of cleanliness, sobriety, punctuality and thrift - looked down on their 'rough' neighbours. 'Four-fifths of our servants are Irish - liars and dirty', observed the newly arrived English gentleman Richard Twopeny in Town life in Australia (1883), frankly declaring an ethnic prejudice that permeated class relations in Melbourne from the 1840s until the 1940s. While Irish women were dispersed throughout the metropolis as servants in middle-class households, Irish men concentrated in North and West Melbourne near the waterfront and railway yards, where the demand for unskilled physical labour was greatest. Melbourne did not develop a conspicuous Irishtown like those in some American cities, and intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics was common, but sectarian prejudice remained strong. Irish Catholics (though not Irish Protestants) were tacitly excluded from most of the largest business houses and many of the smaller ones. Fred Cato, proprietor of a chain of cash groceries, observed of one of his employees, a 'gentleman from the Emerald Isle': 'Do not think he is a RC, for we have made up our minds to only have protestants work for us. Somehow I can never properly trust a RC.' Excluded from the most prestigious forms of employment, Catholics nevertheless had their own paths to prosperity as publicans, horse-dealers, policemen, politicians and, increasingly, as public servants and lawyers. Sectarianism, often shorn of its doctrinal roots, but operating through freemasonry and other webs of influence, remained a powerful undercurrent in Melbourne society well into the 20th century, reaching its peak during the conscription crisis of World War I and festering into the 1920s.

Young Melburnians first encountered the reality of class at school. In no other Australian city does the question 'What school did you go to?' carry such a heavy freight of meaning. Independent schools, especially the most prestigious Protestant schools, such as Scotch College, Melbourne Grammar, Wesley College and Geelong Grammar, have produced more than twice as many of the local elite as have their Sydney counterparts. As Janet McCalman persuasively argues in her study of the Melbourne middle class Journeyings (1993), 'the private school did more than educate - it made you middle class, it gave you lifelong, indestructible membership of the caste, not for anything learned at the school, but just by the fact of "being there"'. The link between class and private schooling, weakened by the expansion of state secondary education in the 1960s and free universities in the 1970s, re-emerged with new strength through the increasing privatisation of education from the 1980s.

After World War II, Melbourne's middle-class ethos, most strongly articulated by its favourite son Prime Minister Robert Menzies, was being widely diffused throughout an increasingly educated, white-collar, suburban society. The political scientist Alan Davies, who interviewed the residents of one new suburb in 1960, found that while most labelled themselves 'working class' or 'middle class' according to their manual or non-manual occupation and party loyalty, 'style of life' factors - housing, education and religion - also strongly influenced people's class identification. An even more powerful solvent of old class labels was the rapid influx of new immigrant groups from Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe. As the immigrants took up the low-rent housing and low-paid factory jobs of the inner suburbs, the descendants of the old Irish Catholic working class began to move upward, to new white-collar jobs, and outward, often towards the northern weatherboard suburbs which by the 1960s had become the electoral strongholds of their political voice, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). By the end of the century, with the collapse of the DLP, most of these middle-class Catholic families had joined their old sectarian enemies in voting for the Liberal Party.

The ALP, under its new leader Gough Whitlam, had now begun to articulate a new reform program geared to the changed class alignments and class-consciousness of the cities. Whitlam departed from Labor tradition in focusing on the interests of the working man and his family in his suburban home, rather than just the workplace, and sought to redress class inequalities by improving urban services in areas like Melbourne's 'deprived west'. New migrant families, such as Italians and Greeks, were often outstripping 'old Australians' in their ability to acquire homes of their own. Within a generation they had often exchanged terraces in the inner city for brand-new villas in the outer suburbs, especially to the north-east and west. Taking their place in those inner-city terraces were a new wave of migrants, the university-educated middle class or 'trendies' who began a process of gentrification that has now almost turned the old class map of the city inside out, bringing the rich back to the centre and leaving the poor increasingly marooned on the edge. By 2003 house prices in the inner ring rivalled those in the old bourgeois enclaves of Toorak, Brighton and Camberwell and exceeded all the rest.

Immigrants of non-British origin had now broken the hold of the old Protestant middle class on the city's economy. Sidney Myer, a Jew from the Russian Pale, had led the way in the 1920s by establishing Australia's largest retail chain, marrying into the Anglo-establishment and founding a philanthropic trust that pioneered a new American style of civic philanthropy and began to disarm a latent anti-Semitism among the city's elite. By 2003 Jewish immigrant families, including the Pratts, Smorgons, Liebermans, Gandels and Besens, were high in Business Review Weekly's list of Melbourne's richest, and even higher in the list of public philanthropists. Immigrants' names - Parbo, Grollo, Switkowski, Nasser - were also conspicuous among the city's corporate elite.

At the start of the 21st century class has not gone away, but for many Melburnians it has seemingly disappeared. Since the 1970s Melbourne's economy has undergone a revolution as profound as those that produced the well-defined class structure of the late colonial city. The decline of manufacturing and the rise of the service and knowledge economies, with their patterns of 'flexible' short-term, part-time employment, have blurred traditional class alignments, hollowing out the middle ranks of skilled manual employment and increasing the real gap between Melbourne's haves and have-nots. Yet while people are more alert than ever to economic differences, and more dependent on inter-generational transfers of wealth, there is a reluctance to attribute them to 'class'. 'Class' was a word that belonged to the old Melbourne of clashing unions and employers, Liberal and Labor parties, in which social conditions could be 'made and unmade' by collective action. In the new city, where it is everyone for themselves, there is little place for a language of collective responsibility or identity. Instead of the old cleavage between class-based parties, politics is redefined around a cultural divide between the well-to-do, but Left-leaning, 'cosmopolitans' of the inner city and the poorer, but more conservative, 'battlers' of the outer suburbs. On the city's lowest rung, the poor suburbs on its frayed edges, however, the realities of class continue to rankle. 'It's money that counts', a Broadmeadows woman says. 'Things you haven't got and other people have.'

Graeme Davison

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class - entry - emelbourne - the encyclopedia of melbourne online

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School of Historical Studies, Department of History, The University of Melbourne

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Class - Entry - eMelbourne - The Encyclopedia of Melbourne Online, eMelbourne is a biographical, bibliographical and archival database about Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, with links to related articles and images.

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Introduction

According to Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, the history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.

Certainly, many would agree that this was the fundamental division of society in Marx and Engels' day, at the early stages of the industrial revolution, when the masses toiled for long hours in the factories and mines, while the rich capitalists rode in polished carriages, waited on hand and foot by a staff of butlers, maids and cooks.

But is this the case today, particularly in a country like Australia, where the majority of the population would describe themselves as "middle class", where we can all go to the same beach together, and barrack for the same national cricket team against the Poms, and where the son of a Dulwich Hill garage owner can become prime minister for the Liberal Party? Is this society still fundamentally divided by class and driven by class struggle?

Appearances can sometimes be deceiving. This is where a Marxist analysis can be useful, to search beneath the veneer of our liberal-democratic society, and look at what actually makes it tick, at who creates the wealth in this society, who owns it and in whose interest political power is exercised.

What is social class?

Many sociologists - those who can see no further than the capitalist system - will tend to define class as a matter of income, as a way of categorising society by simply looking at what people earn, or a matter of status or how they are looked upon by society. A Marxist analysis however, looks to a more fundamental explanation of class, rooted in a person's relation to the productive process, specifically to the means of production - the sum total of a society's productive capacity that goes to producing things that are sold on the market - commodities.

In order to define a person's class, Marxists ask what level of control that person wields over the means of production. Another way of saying this, is asking whether you own part of the means of production or not, and if you are an owner, then how much?

Do you own a TV station, a string of factories or a chain of newspapers, for instance - or perhaps you own a significant stake in all three? Perhaps you own a major transport company, are managing director of an international mining corporation, or the CEO of Coles-Myer? If so, you are part of the capitalist class, the class which owns and controls the vast amount of productive capital in this society. In 1998, the capitalist class comprised around 5% of families in Australia. They owned 76% of share and similar investments, 46% of bank deposits, 46% of rental properties and 29% of private business equity.

Marxists don't base conceptions of class on income. Income can be deceptive for the most wealthy, where income tax minimisation schemes, such as payment in share options, can cut the taxable income of the wealthy significantly - to the point where they are only really paying 13% on their actual income, according to a front-page article in the Sydney Morning Herald on December 20.

So where do you and I fit in? Most likely, you are part of the majority of the Australian population - someone who gets up in the morning and goes to work, whether at a factory, a mine, a government department or a KFC. You do the work you are assigned, a small cog in a larger wheel. At the end of the week, you receive a wage or a salary. You are part of the working class, some two-thirds of the Australian population, whose only productive asset is their ability to work (whether as a nurse, a carpenter, teacher or labourer) - their labour power - which they must sell to an individual capitalist, or the state, in order to receive a wage and make ends meet.

Of course society is not quite that simple. There are also intermediate layers, people who own small farms, or a small business, who primarily rely on their own labour power, or that of their family, and maybe a couple of employees. As a social layer, this petty bourgeoisie is continually being driven into bankruptcy by large capital, only to appear in some other sector of the economy in some other form.

So while the deregulation of hours for shopping giants Coles and Woolworths has driven many small shops to the wall, the rise of the technology industry has spawned a whole range of new, individual contractors. Some individual professionals are also petty-bourgeois - some doctors or lawyers who own their own small practice, for instance.

Why is class so important?

Liberal sociologists tell us that class is just one of the ways that we can divide society, alongside ethnicity, gender, religion or social outlook. Class is just one among many ways to categorise people - no more important than any other. They will also tend to define class descriptively, arguing that the term "working class" really only applies to those who work blue-collar jobs, or those who are trade union members, or excluding anyone who has been to university. By weighting the dice in this way, they can easily come to the conclusion that the working class in a country like Australia is getting smaller, almost ceasing to exist, and that we are all middle class now.

And it's true that the nature of the working class in a country like Australia has changed over the last 50 years or so. According to ABS statistics, in 2003 over 65% of the workforce were employed in white-collar jobs of one sort or another - from teachers to nurses to bank tellers and public servants. Blue-collar occupations, which comprised over half of the workforce in 1947, are now only one-third of it. The decline in the manufacturing industry in Australia has had a massive impact. In 1966, over 26% of working-people worked in manufacturing. By 2002 it had fallen to just 12%.1

But the vast majority of people who work white-collar jobs are also members of the working class. In many cases, their control over their own work is even less than that of blue-collar workers, and often their wages are lower also.

Of course there are exceptions. Some small sections of salaried people receive such large incomes, often including significant perks, as well as shares and other property, that they should be considered a part of the capitalist class, or at least its intimate ally. The likes of judges, for instance, or permanent heads of government departments, or CEOs of major companies fall into this category. Then there are also salaried people, the nature of whose jobs places them outside the working class. Socialists see police and prison officers in this category for instance. Their role in society - as agents of state repression - puts them outside the working class.

But that still leaves around two-thirds of the population, who, when defined by their relation to the means of production, are members of the working class. Objectively these people own no stake in production other than their ability to labour - whether with their hands or their brain. They are forced to sell this ability to capitalists (or the state), and in return receive a wage. The capitalists provide them with the tools of their trade, the materials they work on or sell and take the profit for themselves.Marxists call this exploitation. Workers receive only a portion - in most cases a very small portion - of the wealth they create, in the form of wages. The majority of that wealth - also called surplus value - is expropriated by the capitalist class.

What do Marxists mean by ruling class?

Power relationships don't begin and end at the office or factory gate. While every adult citizen of Australia formally has equal rights under the law - the right to vote, the right to protest, the right to petition government, and the right to run for office, it's a fact that some people's rights carry more weight than others. As Anatole France put it: "The law ... in its majestic equalitarianism, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg on the streets and to steal bread." The fact is that those who own wealth - capital - in this society carry more social weight, more power, than the rest of us.

When you or I disagree with what the government is doing, we might swear at the TV. If we're a little more adventurous, we might write a letter to the newspaper, which may or may not get published. Better still, we might join a demonstration, even join a political party like the Socialist Alliance, and by joining with others, make our voice a little stronger.

But when Rupert Murdoch disagrees with what a government is doing, governments take fright. The weight of daily newspapers in every state capital city buys a lot of power. So when Murdoch, or shock-jock Allen Jones, or the CEOs of Qantas or Coles-Myer speak, politicians listen.In fact, the capitalist class doesn't often have to tell politicians or governments what they want. Because the politicians generally know their place. Almost all of them rely on the patronage of one section of capital or another for their position and they're unlikely to want to risk losing capital's political and financial support. And then there is always the state - that faceless body of police, soldiers, judges, screws and bureaucrats - which implements the law in a way that invariably seems to protect the interests of those with the most to protect.

Class and class struggle

The existence of class struggle is an inevitable result of the division of society into classes. By their very nature, the existence of classes leads to class struggle. The division of society into classes appeared in human history at a point when the production of a stable social surplus - in other words, the ability to produce more wealth than would normally be consumed by the society in simply staying alive - became commonplace. This started around 15,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. The surplus was not enough to guarantee everyone a better existence, and so there emerged a struggle over who was to get it.

The division of society into classes means that one class is exploiting the labour of another and therefore expropriating the social surplus created by the productive class for themselves. This was more open and obvious in precapitalist class formations, such as slavery - where the slave was owned entirely by the slaveowner - or in feudalism - where the serf was compelled to work for free on the lord's lands in return for the right to cultivate a small plot. In capitalism the exploitation is more hidden. Surplus value - the value a worker creates in excess of their wage - is extracted at the point of production, seamlessly.

In this way the employment contract can seem an equal one - workers bring their labour power, employers bring their capital, and both go away appropriately paid. This is how high school economics explains it. As we've seen, however, the worker produces far more value in a working day then they are paid for - this is surplus value, which is expropriated by the capitalist, by virtue of their ownership of the means of production - the factory, the raw materials - and the finished product that is sold.

But the division between what portion of social production goes to one class or the other is not fixed. And so, throughout history, we have seen a continual struggle between classes, over which one will have the larger share of the wealth. Much of the standard of living that workers in Australia enjoy, as well as our civil rights, were won through this struggle - class struggle.

Class struggle is endemic to class society. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at lar ge, or in the common ruin of the contending classes".2

The state

Where you have class struggle, unless there is to be continual civil war, you need an institution that arbitrates disputes between classes, sets the laws and enforces them. This role is played by the state. And the state is there to defend the interest of the most powerful class in any society, the class with the greatest wealth, who can exert the greatest power - the ruling class. Under capitalism, as Marx and Engels point out in the Manifesto: "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

Far from being neutral or above class conflict, the role of the state under capitalism is to ensure the smooth reproduction of capitalism from one generation to the next, protecting the property of the propertied classes, maintaining a military to defend and extend the interests of the ruling class overseas, a judiciary to enforce the laws that protect property, a police force to keep us into line if we start to question too much, and prison-officers - screws - to keep us in jail if we step out of line just a bit too far.

But the state only works at the level of repression in the last instance. Capitalism and capitalist relations seem to reproduce themselves as though naturally in this society, as though they were common sense and there were no alternative. And it's a vital role of the state to make sure that things happen that way. And so the school system, the courts, the bureaucracy and the parliament, all enforce and bolster this idea, discouraging any idea of stepping outside of the free and democratic system that we have.

Ideology

The idea that capitalism is eternal, that inequality is natural, and that competition is necessary, are central ideas that govern mass behaviour under capitalism. Capitalist ideology - by which we mean the system of ideas that presents capitalism, parliamentary democracy, social inequality, and respect for power as natural and common sense - is crucial to the smooth running of capitalism in an everyday sense. We get up, go to work, respect the boss, respect police, popes and politicians, because that's what we've been taught to do. Institutions as basic as the family, the church, school, and other social institutions, set up and reinforce these ideas in our heads from cradle to grave. It's only a minority of working people, during normal times, who will fundamentally challenge these ideas, grasp the really exploitative nature of the system and struggle to change it.

Limits to democracy

Part of liberal capitalist ideology is the idea that we live in a democratic society, and while democracy under capitalism is rather limited, it is real. We are permitted to vote once every three or four years. We are permitted to protest in between times. We are even permitted to establish our own parties, and to run on whatever policies we might choose, and of course, the candidate with the most support gets elected, and the party with the most candidates elected forms government.

However wealth intrudes even here, to have its voice heard louder than you or I. For while Lachlan Murdoch and I each have only one vote on election day, Lachlan Murdoch, or the CEO of BHP-Billiton, can have a greater impact on the result of an election than you or I, both by giving money - serious money - to the political party whose policies they support most, or by using their newspapers, TV stations or radio stations, to present their preferred candidates as the best, most sympathetic, or most in the "national interest" and thereby secure them greater exposure and more votes.

This is the way the capitalist class - the ruling class - make sure that whichever government gets elected, it serves their general interests.

And what about the workplace, or the school or university, where most of us spend the better part of our waking lives, or else stuck in traffic going to and from? How much democracy is there? Try asking your boss for a vote on how much the workers should get paid against how much profit the company makes - and see how far you get.

Of course, limited as they are, democratic and civil rights are not illusory, and must be defended at all costs. In certain circumstances, socialists can use this democratic space to advantage, at least in getting a greater hearing for our politics, but in some cases in winning elections, and being able to offer a pole of attraction, and make an argument to masses of people from the parliamentary platform.

Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks in Russia, understood this. Even in the limited franchise of the Russian parliament - the Duma - after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks stand candidates, and that those that were elected use their parliamentary seats as a platform from which to educate the mass of people on what the government was really doing and so build support for socialism. The Scottish Socialist Party is another example of how socialists can effectively use parliament to build support for socialism.

In Australia, the Greens dominate the electoral space to the left of Labor at the present time and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future, until and unless they attain some share of power and come under pressure to either implement their radical policies or bend to the will of capital. Either way, the openings will then be larger for socialists.

Nevertheless, it is still important to pose a serious socialist alternative in elections. The small vote that socialists attract at the present time indicates a solid and conscious base of support for socialism in many cases, and in some cases, socialists can be elected to particular positions, as in the case of Steve Jolly, who was elected councillor for Yarra City in Melbourne in 2004 local elections, and went on to win a very respectable 6% of the vote in the recent state elections.

Nevertheless, with so much wealth behind the parties that support capitalism and against a socialist electoral alternative, any notion of electing a majority of socialists to a state or federal parliament and wielding power is an unlikely one, to say the least. And even if a majority of socialists were elected to parliament, the permanent and unelected portions of the state - the police, judiciary bureaucracy and army - defend capitalist property and would attempt to frustrate a socialist parliamentary project by any means necessary. As Karl Marx said in The Civil War in France, written about the Paris Commune of 1871:

"But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

"The centralised state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature - organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor - originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism."3

The state is set up and staffed by the capitalist class at its highest echelons. It will not sit idly by and simply accept its own democratic displacement. The history of coups against left-wing governments is an example of this capitalist self-defence when democracy makes the wrong decision.

How can the working class change society?

So if the capitalist system, with its state that defends capitalist relations, tilts the playing field against the working class; if we can't use the capitalist state to fundamentally change society, and if the power of the most concentrated, most wealthy and strongest ruling class in history is arrayed against us, how can we hope to change the world? Is socialism just a utopian idea after all? Were Marx and Engels just starry-eyed dreamers? Should we just accept a little amelioration of the system around the edges?

Well, if we believed that, I doubt we would be here on a Saturday afternoon in early January. But if we can't change the system through the system, how can the working class change society?

The answer comes from the very place that the working class occupies in production. We own nothing but our ability to labour, which we are forced to sell to capital in order to receive a wage. The other side of this equation though, is that all industry requires workers in order to keep running. If we stop work, the economy stops work. Individually we are weak, but together we are powerful.

This is the basis to the revolutionary potential of the working class. It is the first ascendant class in history that represents the vast majority in society, who cannot liberate itself, without overturning the whole system at the same time.

As Marx and Engels put it, again in the Communist Manifesto:

"All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

"All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air".4

Unfortunately though, matters are however, not quite that simple. While the working class retains the potential for revolutionary action, the unity needed to carry that through, particularly the unity behind a revolutionary leadership, remainselusive.

This has impelled some socialists to give up on the working class as a whole in countries like Australia - imperialist countries whose wealth helps them dominate the globe. They argue that the working class, while a class in itself, inasmuch as it exists as an objective social category, will not become a class for itself, a revolutionary class able to cause society to be "sprung into the air". They argue that the divisions that rend the working class in an imperialist country, particularly differences of race and national origin, are simply too great to overcome.

What prevents working class unity?

Certainly it would be foolish for socialists to ignore the material and ideological phenomena that have tended to divide the working class in a country like Australia. They are not problems that can be leapt over in our attempt to forge revolutionary unity. They must be contended with and ultimately overcome.

Primary among the divisions in the working class in an imperialist country like Australia is the existence of a more privileged strata of the working class - what Engels and Lenin called the aristocracy of labour - a section of the working class, which because of its strategic position in the workforce, is systematically bribed by the capitalist class, using a part of the wealth it accumulates as a result of monopoly production.

From around the end of the 19th century, the economies of countries like Australia came to be dominated by monopoly capital. The emergence of new industries such as the oil industry or the highly industrialised mining industry, which required massive amounts of capital to get under way, changed the nature of the economy. Their sheer size excluded all but the largest capital from playing a part. This huge capital merged with financial capital, making massive industrial /financial concerns, which dominated the economy. Today the Macquarie Bank is an example of one such concern.

By their dominance of whole sectors of the economy, these firms could severely restrict competition, and so command monopoly profits - far higher than the average return on capital. In many cases, this capital was also exported to less developed countries, where natural resources and cheap labour were ruthlessly exploited. Think of Australian capital's continuing domination of PNG or Fiji, for instance.

A portion of monopoly super-profits was used by the monopolists to systematically bribe a section of the working class into support for the system. A far higher standard of living was guaranteed, but only for a minority. This minority - usually the most organised in the most strategic industries - then became the social base for class-collaboration in imperialist countries, a section of the working class that identified its interests closely with those of the ruling class, which while it sought to maximise its wages and conditions (often at the expense of other, less-organised workers), identified with the so-called "national interest", which means the interest capital as a whole, and has been won to restricting its horizons to remain within a capitalist framework.

Traditionally, the aristocracy of labour in Australia has been composed of well-organised, white, Anglo men. Women, migrants and of course indigenous Australians, generally fall outside of its ranks, and are confined to less-organised, poorer paid, often part-time or casual jobs.

Statistically this division of the working class is not difficult to identify. From the 1940s, when migrants from southern Europe were forced in large numbers into the dirtiest, lowest-paid jobs that many Anglo-Australians would not take up, to the 1970s and beyond, where Vietnamese migrants were funnelled into the sweatshops of clothing manufacturers, or the dead-end process jobs on the factory floor. In New Zealand, the contrast is black-and-white. The majority of the low-paid industrial workforce is Maori or Pacific Islander, while most of the supervisory staff, and of course the bosses, are white.

Today, some workers on 457 visas are brought to Australia to perform jobs for low wages, often in appalling conditions. As they are not migrants, only guest workers, they have no legal rights and so can be superexploited, and threatened with deportation if they complain or seek union organisation. Some unions, notably the MUA in WA and the AMWU in Victoria are attempting to smash these wage-cutting stunts by employers, by offering individual workers their protection and finding them work covered by awards or enterprise agreements. Other unions, however, have been sucked into the capitalist framework of seeing such vulnerable workers as competition and simply wanting to stop their entry or send them back to poverty.

Indigenous workers could legally be paid less than non-indigenous workers until the late 1960s. After the passing of legislation requiring equal pay, many Aboriginal stock-workers on cattle stations in the north of Australia lost their jobs. Today, unemployment among indigenous Australians remains over 20%, rising to over 40% if work-for-the-dole schemes are not included.5 Indigenous people are also massively over-represented in all state and territory prisons.

Both the government and the Labor opposition have also systematically used Australian chauvinism to try to weld at least a portion of the white Australian working class to its white Australian bosses, at the expense of unity with migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. The not-so-subtle shift of both parties away from multiculturalism - which was itself a way to try to forge national unity, based on common identification with Australian capitalism - to "integration" (not very different from the white-Australia policy of "assimilation"), is a further attempt to cut across class identification by emphasising national difference and encouraging white workers to see those migrants who do not "integrate'' as the enemy, as a threat to social harmony.Ideological justifications follow the material differences. Racism, Australian national chauvinism, sexism and homophobia often manage to divide the working class against itself during ordinary times.

What prevents working class unity?

Certainly it would be foolish for socialists to ignore the material and ideological phenomena that have tended to divide the working class in a country like Australia. They are not problems that can be leapt over in our attempt to forge revolutionary unity. They must be contended with and ultimately overcome.

Primary among the divisions in the working class in an imperialist country like Australia is the existence of a more privileged strata of the working class - what Engels and Lenin called the aristocracy of labour - a section of the working class, which because of its strategic position in the workforce, is systematically bribed by the capitalist class, using a part of the wealth it accumulates as a result of monopoly production.

From around the end of the 19th century, the economies of countries like Australia came to be dominated by monopoly capital. The emergence of new industries such as the oil industry or the highly industrialised mining industry, which required massive amounts of capital to get under way, changed the nature of the economy. Their sheer size excluded all but the largest capital from playing a part. This huge capital merged with financial capital, making massive industrial /financial concerns, which dominated the economy. Today the Macquarie Bank is an example of one such concern.

By their dominance of whole sectors of the economy, these firms could severely restrict competition, and so command monopoly profits - far higher than the average return on capital. In many cases, this capital was also exported to less developed countries, where natural resources and cheap labour were ruthlessly exploited. Think of Australian capital's continuing domination of PNG or Fiji, for instance.

A portion of monopoly super-profits was used by the monopolists to systematically bribe a section of the working class into support for the system. A far higher standard of living was guaranteed, but only for a minority. This minority - usually the most organised in the most strategic industries - then became the social base for class-collaboration in imperialist countries, a section of the working class that identified its interests closely with those of the ruling class, which while it sought to maximise its wages and conditions (often at the expense of other, less-organised workers), identified with the so-called "national interest", which means the interest capital as a whole, and has been won to restricting its horizons to remain within a capitalist framework.

Traditionally, the aristocracy of labour in Australia has been composed of well-organised, white, Anglo men. Women, migrants and of course indigenous Australians, generally fall outside of its ranks, and are confined to less-organised, poorer paid, often part-time or casual jobs.

Statistically this division of the working class is not difficult to identify. From the 1940s, when migrants from southern Europe were forced in large numbers into the dirtiest, lowest-paid jobs that many Anglo-Australians would not take up, to the 1970s and beyond, where Vietnamese migrants were funnelled into the sweatshops of clothing manufacturers, or the dead-end process jobs on the factory floor. In New Zealand, the contrast is black-and-white. The majority of the low-paid industrial workforce is Maori or Pacific Islander, while most of the supervisory staff, and of course the bosses, are white.

Today, some workers on 457 visas are brought to Australia to perform jobs for low wages, often in appalling conditions. As they are not migrants, only guest workers, they have no legal rights and so can be superexploited, and threatened with deportation if they complain or seek union organisation. Some unions, notably the MUA in WA and the AMWU in Victoria are attempting to smash these wage-cutting stunts by employers, by offering individual workers their protection and finding them work covered by awards or enterprise agreements. Other unions, however, have been sucked into the capitalist framework of seeing such vulnerable workers as competition and simply wanting to stop their entry or send them back to poverty.

Indigenous workers could legally be paid less than non-indigenous workers until the late 1960s. After the passing of legislation requiring equal pay, many Aboriginal stock-workers on cattle stations in the north of Australia lost their jobs. Today, unemployment among indigenous Australians remains over 20%, rising to over 40% if work-for-the-dole schemes are not included.5 Indigenous people are also massively over-represented in all state and territory prisons.

Both the government and the Labor opposition have also systematically used Australian chauvinism to try to weld at least a portion of the white Australian working class to its white Australian bosses, at the expense of unity with migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. The not-so-subtle shift of both parties away from multiculturalism - which was itself a way to try to forge national unity, based on common identification with Australian capitalism - to "integration" (not very different from the white-Australia policy of "assimilation"), is a further attempt to cut across class identification by emphasising national difference and encouraging white workers to see those migrants who do not "integrate'' as the enemy, as a threat to social harmony.

Ideological justifications follow the material differences. Racism, Australian national chauvinism, sexism and homophobia often manage to divide the working class against itself during ordinary times.

How do socialists struggle for working class unity?

Faced with these divisions in the working class, socialists attempt to emphasise the commonality of workers as against what sets them apart. Socialists emphasise the class unity of workers against their national or racial differences.

And these are lessons that workers do learn through struggle. Significant battles in the car industry, or in the steel industry in the 1970s, in the Redfern Mail exchange in the 80s, and in Brisbane at Steal Line Doors in the '90s,6 are just a few examples of successful struggles led by migrant workers, where solidarity was successfully built, cutting across national or racial lines. Historically there has also been significant trade union support for Aboriginal land rights struggles - the Gurindgi in the Northern Territory among the most famous.

Socialists prioritise these struggles, which draw working people together and cut across national, racial or gender divisions to unite working people in struggle. By turning the most conscious against the least conscious, nationalism, racism, sexism and homophobia in the working class can be broken down, and unity formed.

That is not to say that socialists do not confront discrimination in the working class movement. We also champion the rights of the most oppressed - democratic rights to equality - throughout the working-class movement. The only way that unity can be forged is by breaking down the petty divisions in the working class, and winning all workers to their fundamental unity as workers against the boss. Any attempt to ignore backward attitudes, or attempts to suppress, or outlaw them, simply lets them fester and grow stronger, all the while undermining working-class unity.

The working class is the only force in this society with the potential to change the world. The role of socialists and the role of struggle is to win that class to an understanding of its role - to win it from merely being a class-in-itself, a class that exists, to being a class-for-itself, a class whose social power can bring down the old order and begin the task of building socialism.

[Abridged]

Sources:

1 Kuhn ed., Class and Struggle in Australia (Pearson Longman: Frenchs Forest, 2005), p. 58.

2 Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto and Its Relevance for Today (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 1998), pp. 45-46.

3 Marx, The Class Struggles in France (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 2003), p. 254.

4 Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto and Its Relevance for Today, pp. 54-55.

5 Khun ed., Class and Struggle in Australia, p. 147.

6 Ibid., p. 168.

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Social classes and class struggle in Australia

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Introduction According to Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, the history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.

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These days, when Australians of Irish Catholic descent have occupied the highest positions in the land, it may seem hollow to talk of them as marginalised.

But right up to the 1970s the Catholic-Protestant divide was deeply entrenched - with painful and often lasting social consequences for those who dared to marry across it.

Siobhan McHugh, a journalism academic and oral historian, captured some of those experiences in interviews we're showcasing on this month's episode of Trust Me, I'm An Expert - a podcast where academic experts surprise, delight and inform us with their research.

Here's a teaser:

Among the stories McHugh collected was the tale of Susan Timmins. Her parents, Julia and Errol, married despite their different religious backgrounds. After Julia died in childbirth, neither side of the family helped Errol and he subsequently put Susan and her brother into an orphanage.

In this episode, McHugh explains what drove her to unearth these stories and how they fit into broader debates about race, class and sectarianism in Australian society.

"It's actually a myth that there was once this sort of polite and white Australia before the multicultural kind of Australia that we have now. Actually, this period is misrepresented by the term Anglo-Celtic, which suggests there was a cosy community of British and Irish at the time," she said.

"That is actually absolutely the opposite of what the truth was. The truth was that there was this over 70% Protestant majority and about 23% Catholic minority - and the minority of Irish Catholics were deliberately kept as an underclass."

Trust Me, I'm An Expert is out at the start of every month. Find us and subscribe in iTunes, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can read more about what the podcast is all about here, and find our previous episodes here.
Music in Episode 3 of Trust Me, I'm An Expert:
Kindergarten by Unkle Ho, from Elefant Traks

Lee Rosevere: Thoughtful, from Free Music Archive

Music in Siobhan McHugh's segments by Thomas Fitzgerald, with vocals by Kavisha Mazella.
Additional audio sources:
Radio Documentary Series, Marrying Out: 2 x 50 minutes
Additional material:
History Australia journal article by Siobhan McHugh on mixed marriages

National Library of Australia: Sectarianism and Mixed Marriage Oral History Collection by Siobhan McHugh (indexed)
https://siobhanmchugh.org/marrying-out/

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Until 1970s the Catholic-Protestant divide was deeply entrenched in Australia. On this episode of Trust Me, I'm An Expert, journalism academic Siobhan McHugh shares stories of those who married across it.

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Australian social trends of the 20th centry

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Australian social trends of the 20th centry

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Population Characteristics: 20th century: beginning and end

During the 20th century Australia became an older, more culturally diverse, and much more urbanised society, holding wider religious affiliations, placing greater value on home ownership, with more females than males, and with a workforce more concentrated in service-industry based, 'white collar' occupations.

In 1900, Australia was a sparsely-populated but more characteristically rural nation with a large proportion of workers engaged in primary industries. The population was younger, largely Christian, with comparatively limited education, and with more males than females. At that time, Australians were as likely to be renting their home as to be owning it. In 2000, Australia is an older, more culturally diverse, more densely populated and much more urbanised society holding wider religious affiliations, placing greater value on home ownership, with more females than males, and with a workforce more concentrated in service-industry based, 'white collar' occupations.

Definitions and data sources
Data presented in this article have been sourced mainly from Censuses of Population and Housing conducted in 1901, 1911 and 1996. Wherever possible, 1901 data has been used to describe Australian society at the beginning of the 20th century. Where relevant data was not collected in 1901, the next available source of data was used.

To span as much of the century as possible, data closest to the years 1900 and 2000 has been sought wherever a comparison has been made.

Not all definitions and classifications are strictly comparable, and therefore the magnitude of change cannot be measured precisely in many cases. However, adjustments to categories have been made to achieve sufficient comparability between the two points in time to enable broad analysis of change.

Older with more females
In 1901, 113 years after the arrival of settlers from Europe, over half (55%) of the population were children or youths (aged younger than 25 years). In 1999 this age group constituted little more than a third (35%) of the Australian population. In contrast, at the start of the 20th century, those aged 35 years or older formed 29% of all Australians. At the end of the century, half of all Australians were at least 35 years of age.

Australia was a male dominated society at the dawn of the 20th century. Males comprised 52% of the general population in 1901 and would likely have represented a large majority of voters, given that prior to 1902, women were entitled to vote in South Australia and Western Australia only. By the middle of 1999, females had formed a slight majority of the general population (50.2%) and a marginally wider majority of those eligible to vote (50.7%).

The main factors that have influenced the change in the age profile of the population are lower fertility and longer life expectancy (see Australian Social Trends 1999 , Our ageing population ). Greater female life expectancy in concert with a proportionately larger older population has contributed to the excess of women over men in the population.
AGE AND SEX OF THE AUSTRALIAN POPULATION IN 1901 AND 1999

Age distribution (%)

Total

(a) Preliminary estimated resident population.

Source: 1911 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, Statistician's report Volumes I & II; Population by Age and Sex, Australian States and Territories, June 1999 (cat. no. 3201.0).

More densely populated and more urbanised
While concentration of the Australian population in the southern and eastern coastal belt of the continent changed little during the 20th century, Australians are generally living in closer physical proximity to each other, and in more populous urban centres.

In 1906, there was on average almost two square kilometres of land per inhabitant. By 1996, this had reduced to less than half a square kilometre per person. While a large increase in population density has occurred in Australia during the 20th century, it remains one of the most sparsely populated nations on this measure. However, population density does not give the complete picture. Large areas of the continent (particularly inland) are virtually uninhabited, while some coastal regions are very heavily populated.

At the start of the century, almost half the population lived on rural properties or in small towns (less than 3,000 people). Although one in three Australians lived in a city of at least 100,000 people in 1906, the most populous cities, Sydney and Melbourne, had populations only of little more than half a million people (538,800 and 526,400 respectively).

In stark contrast, most Australians (53%) lived in a city of close to, or more than, a million people in 1996. These city dwellers outnumbered almost threefold those living in small towns and rural properties, whose proportion of the total population had fallen to 18% in 1996.
URBANISATION IN 1906 AND 1996
(a) Includes people living in rural areas between population centres.
(b) Comprising at least 3,000 people.

Source: Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, Statistics for period 1901-1907, No.1 1908; unpublished data, 1996 Census of Population and Housing; 1999 Year Book Australia (cat. no. 1301.0).

Wider cultural diversity
Australia entered the 20th century as an overwhelmingly Christian nation whose inhabitants had been born almost exclusively in Australia, the United Kingdom or Ireland. Australia ended the century with about 16% of its people born in countries other than these. While still predominantly Christian, the proportion of Australians affiliating with the Christian faith in 1996 (78%) was considerably less than it was in 1901 (98%).

Much of this change to the cultural composition of Australian society was generated by large-scale post-war migration (see Australian Social Trends 1997, Birthplace of overseas-born Australians, pp. 12-15) and a growing tendency for Australians to not affiliate with any religion.

Indigenous Australians continue to be a relatively small but very important part of Australia's rich cultural tapestry. In 1901 there were an estimated 93,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. By 1996, their number had grown to 386,000.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN 1901 AND 1996

Birthplace(b)

Total

Religious affiliation(c)

Total

Better educated
In 1911, when the minimum school leaving age was 14 years (12 in Queensland), fewer than one in three (31%) 14 to 15 year olds still attended school. With only 2,465 university students Australia-wide in 1911, rates of participation in education were very low for older teenagers (3% of those aged 18 or 19 years) and negligible for those aged 20 years or older (less than 1%).

Extension of the compulsory school age to 15 years (16 in Tasmania) and the need to undertake post-school education to acquire marketable skills to compete in the job market has resulted in teenagers staying in education for longer, and older Australians being more likely to be studying. In 1996, over half of all 18-19 year olds (53%) were attending an educational institution, along with 12% of all Australians aged 20 years or older.
RATES OF PARTICIPATION IN EDUCATION IN 1911 AND 1996
Source: 1911 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, Statistician's report Volume I; unpublished data, 1996 Census of Population and Housing.

With less confined gender roles
Working-age males in each major age group in 1999 were less likely to be in the labour force (engaged in paid employment, or unemployed and looking for work) than were males in corresponding age groups in 1911. Lesser likelihood of being part of the labour force has been far more pronounced among teenage males and men aged 60 years or older than it has been for 25-44 year old men.

Set against this shift towards reduced male labour force participation has been sharply increased female participation. Apart from women aged 65 years or older, whose low participation rate in 1911 (8%) was even lower in November 1999 (3%), the likelihood of females having, or looking for, paid employment was considerably greater in 1999 than it was in 1911. The largest percentage point increases occurred for women of child bearing and child rearing ages (20-54 years).

Some of the observed declines in labour force participation rates since 1911 may be attributable to greater participation in education (mainly among younger people), and the establishment and development of income support measures such as social security and superannuation. Increased participation by females younger than the age-pension minimum is likely to have been influenced by changing attitudes towards the roles and rights of women over the past forty years.

A consequence of the dramatically higher labour force participation of women aged 25-54 years has been the pervasive abandonment of the traditional cultural norm that viewed a man's role primarily as 'breadwinner' and a woman's as 'homemaker'. Changes over recent decades in post-school educational attainment (see Australian Social Trends 1997, Education and employment, pp. 84-87) also indicate a trend towards the proliferation of a wider array of options in gender roles among men and women.

In tandem with a longer period of education prior to joining the workforce, earlier retirement (see Australian Social Trends 2000 , Retirement and retirement intentions ) and longer life expectancy may also be compressing the number of years of life in the workforce by many of today's men. On average, late 20th century Australian men could expect a shorter paid working life (in number of years, but more so as a proportion of their total lifetime). They could also expect a longer period of retirement before their death than their grandparents did. For many men, the length of this period will represent a third age in their life's span.
LABOUR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATES IN 1911 AND 1999
More concentrated in service industry-based occupations
Despite some major differences in the way in which industries were described and classified in 1901 and 1996 (see box describing industry categories), comparisons of numbers of people employed in similar industry groupings reveal a great deal of change in the structure of Australia's economy.

Most evident has been the large shift in employment away from the primary production industries such as agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining towards employment in service industries engaged in activities such as retail trade, finance, insurance, property management, health, education, administration and defence. Greater efficiencies in production processes through technological and organisational advances have underpinned much of this change.

Despite the large decline in the contribution of primary industries to total employment, their contribution to export income remains disproportionately high. Merchandise exports originating from the agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining industries represented a little over one-quarter of Australia's exports of goods and services during 1998-99.7
EMPLOYMENT BY INDUSTRY, 1901 AND 1996

Source: Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1911, Statistician's report, Volume I; 1996 Census of Population and Housing: Selected family & labour force characteristics, Australia (cat. no. 2017.0).

Greater value placed on home ownership
Near the end of the century, Australia was largely a nation of home owners and home buyers. In 1997-98, 71% of households had bought or were buying their homes. This contrasted with earlier in the century when, in 1911, Australians were almost as likely to be renting their homes (48%) as they were to be owning or buying them (52%).

Throughout the 20th century, Australian government policies have encouraged home ownership. The Commonwealth Government assisted soldiers returning from the First World War to purchase homes, by providing them with loans under the War Service Homes Act 1919 (Commonwealth). In the 1920s, housing policy emphasised improved opportunities for home ownership among low to moderate income households by providing financial assistance for home ownership via the Housing Act 1927-28 (Commonwealth).

After World War II, home ownership was viewed as essential in re-establishing the stability shattered by depression and war. The perception that home ownership created stability continued to be cherished by public opinion during the 1950s and 1960s. Under pressure from the States, the Commonwealth Government encouraged the sale of public rental dwellings in 1954. Also, young people were encouraged to save to buy or build their home through tax free grants provided under the Homes Savings Grant Act 1964-65 (Commonwealth).8 Various government schemes (State and Commonwealth) to assist first home buyers to purchase a home during more recent decades have continued to support the ideal of home ownership.
HOME OWNERSHIP, 1911 AND 1997-98

(a) Private dwellings occupied by owners or prospective owners as a percentage of private dwellings occupied by owners, prospective owners or tenants (1911).
(b) Households who owned their homes with or without a mortgage as a percentage of households who owned their homes with or without a mortgage or rented their homes (1997-98).

Source: Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1911, Statistician's report, Volume I; Housing Occupancy and Costs, Australia, 1997-98 (cat. no. 4130.0)

Reflecting on change
By comparing selected aspects of Australian society at the beginning and end of the 1900s, some of the enormous changes that have occurred in the structure of our society throughout the century can be seen. The culture in which a child born in 1901 was raised was clearly very different to that which will be experienced by one born at the end of the century.

Of course there have been many factors driving these changes. Numerous advances in science, medicine and technology have been important, as have been changes in social attitudes to a wide range of issues. Many of these changes have been supported by government policies, as seen through legislative changes. However, changes are also influenced by events and social and economic trends occurring overseas as well as by the actions of individuals within our society.

Most of the following articles in this edition of Australian Social Trends examine change over the more recent past. While the magnitude of change tends to be considerably less over a decade than over a century, taken together they indicate the broad direction in which our society is headed.

2 Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics 1914-1917, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia taken for the night between the 2nd and 3rd April, 1911; Volume 1, Statistician's Report, Including Appendices, Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Melbourne.

3 Australian Surveying and Land Information Group 1992, The Ausmap Atlas of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.

4 Smith, L. R. 1980, The Aboriginal Population of Australia , Australian National University Press, Canberra.

5 Australian Bureau of Statistics 1998, Census of Population and Housing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, Australia, 1996 , cat. no. 2034.0, ABS, Canberra.

6 Rosenman, L. and Warburton, J. 1995, 'The changing context of retirement in Australia', Social Security Journal , Dec. 1995, pp. 54-66.

7 Australian Bureau of Statistics 2000, Year Book Australia 2000 , cat. no. 1301.0, ABS, Canberra.

8 Australian Bureau of Statistics 1992, Housing Australia: A Statistical Overview , cat. no. 1320.0, ABS, Canberra.

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Population Characteristics: 20th century: beginning and end During the 20th century Australia became an older, more culturally diverse, and much more urbanised society, holding wider religious affiliations, placing greater value on home ownership, with more females than males, and with a workforce more concentrated in service-industry based, 'white collar' occupations.

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The ‘holy war’ to get rid of Melbourne’s slums

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These slums were photographed 90 years ago by someone who wanted them demolished. See how they look today.

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Womens' changing rights and freedoms post-WW2

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Womens' changing rights and freedoms post-WW2

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Rebel women in Australia's working class history

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Rebel women in Australia's working class history

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Brazen hussies and God's police
Fighting back in the depression years

JANEY STONE

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as 'Brazen Hussies and God's Police: Feminist Historiography and the Great Depression', Hecate, vol. VIII (1) 1982.

What took place during [the depression] was a massive but mute mobilisation of Australia's housewives to fight for the survival of the institution which gave them their special role in society ... In this way women helped ensure that even during a period of economic turmoil some basic form of social cohesion was maintained and that any threat of widespread revolt against the political and economic order which had caused the Depression

-- Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police

The women however remain hidden in the background often in isolation ... The sense of guilt and failure of unemployed women and of wives of the unemployed was no less strong, but it was internalised, was hidden from families, was brushed aside as unimportant in the face of the greater task of survival.

This is the conventional analysis of the depression. Both criticise historians for paying less attention to women's suffering than that of men; both portray women as 'God's police', shoring up the collapsing social fabric. Margaret Power likewise argues that they 'served a valuable function in defusing discontent and maintaining social order'.

Was that really the case? This chapter takes a look at the 1930s and draws very different conclusions.

Soon after the depression's onset there was a 10% across the board wage cut, and many industries saw increased hours and eroded conditions. But of course the most pressing problem facing the working class was unemployment.

Frankly I have given up hope of achieving anything worthwhile immediately ... the Labour Movement and the ACTU executive officers are so terribly reactionary in their views on women workers.

Firstly it must be said that the response was not actually entirely unmitigated sexism. While opposing married women, the CTU did give some help to young unemployed women and showed some concern by organising 'Pound days' and collecting clothing. The union participated in a meeting of unemployed women at Trades Hall and gave financial help to individual members. Other unions helped in similar ways. In the late thirties, at the instigation of Heagney, the unions founded the Council of Action for Equal Pay, which was active for several years.

The assistance available to unemployed women was admittedly totally inadequate, but even had the limited attempts been extended, and the full weight of the union movement been thrown behind Heagney's efforts, for example, this would not have helped much in building a movement to liberate women. Heagney's approach was itself fundamentally flawed.

They unwittingly collaborated in the perpetuation of these injustices by devoting their energies to trying to alleviate the symptoms of that distress, rather than fighting for social changes which might remove them.

Summers wrongly exempts Heagney and her centres from this critique. She admits that the education courses they offered left something to be desired. Housewifery, drawing, singing and elocution sound more like training for Jane Austen heroines than job training during the Depression. Had the UGRM survived, Summers argues, it might have been able to grapple with the dilemma. But the dilemma lay in the welfare approach itself.

As with refuges and rape crisis centres of more recent times, the 1930s welfare approach saw women as essentially victims needing help. Rather than mobilising a large political fighting force, they concentrated on helping the needy or retraining the few. They offered the unemployed bandaids for their wounds when what was needed was weapons and organisation for a fightback.

Some might argue that there was no basis for such a fightback ¾ that since they lacked union organisation and were weighed down by their household cares it would be utopian to expect women of the time to have done more than whimper quietly and submit. Summers gives us a picture of Heagney taking a principled feminist stand in splendid isolation. 'But there was little she could do for she had virtually no support.' Power similarly refers to the small group of Sydney feminists as 'voices in the wilderness'.

I take a contrary position. If we restrict ourselves to looking for clear articulation of feminist principles, we will find very few. But if we look for the participation of women in the struggles of the day then we will find they did not remain hiddenin the background.

We always got a good reception and had good meetings. It was relatively easy then to organise the unemployed because they queued up to get their dole and met each other regularly and were able to talk about current affairs and make plans for whatever meetings were on.

Although sustenance and relief was for men only, since government support was distributed at local government level, local pressure could be brought to bear. In Boolaroo, NSW, in September 1930, a women's demonstration marched on the local police station demanding relief for unemployed women. In Port Adelaide, there was a women's unemployed committee, with 150 attending meetings. After one meeting over a hundred pursued a scab. In another incident, a female picket was described as 'jumping on the back' of a scab and 'bearing him to the ground, scratching and screaming.' When a teacher at a Port Adelaide school kept in some children to write 500 words each for using the word 'scab' during a wharf strike, several hundred women marched on the school in protest and had to be stopped by police.

This militancy continued throughout the depression. At a demonstration by the Newcastle Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM) in 1932, the jobless were 'so incensed' that they forced the doors of the local bureau and demanded an interview. 'A big part was played by the women who, during the abuse from officials, were advised to leave by the police "in case of trouble" but refused stating, "If there is to be trouble, we will take our share of it!"' The demonstrators won their demands, including immediate relief for six women and a man with a sick wife and an eight-day old child. In Glebe (Sydney) in the same year, when police tried to assault male unemployed leaders at a meeting, 'the women took a prominent part in the defence, one was knocked over and tramped over by policemen, but this did not deter her from still carrying on her protest against police brutality.'

When this became known to the women they immediately took the lead and marched over three miles to the [North Illawarra] council chambers, which they packed to the limit. The mayor was asked to receive a deputation of women and a speaker which he refused. It was then the trouble started. The whole audience crowded behind the chairs of the aldermen demanding the women be heard.

It appears that in the Melbourne dole strike the women were not as active as in NSW although, 'in many instances they have been leading and marching in the demonstrations. They took part in an illegal demonstration from North Melbourne Town Hall.' One article claimed that they 'were clamouring for a share in the work. One hundred of them marched to a charity organisation and demanded relief.' However, they did not participate fully in the local committees. In almost every suburb a few women were active, but they did little more than collect relief: 'only in one or two places did they address meetings or go on the picket line'. The reason for this seems to have been that in some suburbs such as Port Melbourne the strike leaders actually refused to allow them onto the committees. However, the author remarked that where the strikers were most solid, such as Richmond, the greatest numbers of women were drawn into strike activity.

The politicians hated to see the women ... oh they hated them ... biggest cowards on earth, all the blah, blah, blah in the world but they couldn't stand up to the women. When you're hungry and you can't feed your children you get pretty angry.

Women were also active in the eviction struggles. In Melbourne's inner suburbs the UWM was very well organised and, according to its well known leader Jim Munro, stopped many evictions. The police caught them in Fitzroy once and 'belted the insides out of us; men, women and children'. On another occasion when some furniture had been seized to pay overdue rent, UWM members went around to make sure no regular second hand dealer would bid for it at the auction. This was successful, but

Another popular tactic was deputations to members of parliament.

While men appear to have been the main organising force behind anti-eviction actions, the women didn't always wait for them to act. When a Footscray family was to be evicted in 1935, the husband went as an individual to the local authorities only to be told to be out before Christmas. But the women of the district 'had made up their minds that no eviction was going to take place, and they elected a deputation to wait on the Town Clerk and place the case in its stark reality before him'. This tactic was successful, and just in time because the wife gave birth that day.

So we called this fantastic meeting in the Lower Town Hall. And that was my debut as a speaker, in front of all these hundreds of unemployed women.

Then they started to drag me ... through the streets of Sydney. And I got indignant ... So I started to punch one of the blokes and hit him with the handcuffs. He said, 'That's assaulting the police. That's another charge.'

It was an act of solidarity with these wrongly arrested anti-eviction fighters. Some of the women were so weak they had to be taken to hospital and forcibly fed at four days. I lasted the longest ... I finished my eight days' hunger strike.

We were always fighting and demonstrating in those days. It made me a militant ... you had to get into the struggle to survive ... we were all in it together ... although we had nothing ... you didn't have time to think of your own troubles.

The men were having street meetings too. It was illegal you see ... there was no free speech. My husband told me not to come up to town this night as there was going to be trouble. Well, I dressed my son up when he went off, and off I went. I was walking up the street when this big policeman ordered me off. Someone yelled that Paddy was in gaol ... well, I was furious, I turned on the policeman and stamped my feet at him and told him, how dare you speak to me like that amongst other things. Everyone was clapping and singing out ... anyway, he backed off and never arrested me.

We decided we'd have a march up to parliament house and present a deputation ... This huge big police inspector with all his policemen standing across the roadway called upon us to stop and read us the riot act ... and then asked us to desist and go home. None of us would do it. Some women lay down on tram lines. One woman started fighting a policeman with an umbrella and there was great melee, oh a terrific fight. All these hundreds of women ¾ the traffic was held up right back to the railway station.

It makes you laugh to hear that men ought to go back to work for the sake of their womenfolk. This is our strike as much as it is the men's.

In her novel Sugar Heaven Jean Devanny describes the wives' role in the Queensland sugar cane cutters strike of 1935.

Lots of the men didn't like their women taking up public action ... We used to go to Lodge [Union branch] meetings and address them. Some of the men were embarrassed and so were we but we soon got used to each other.

I remember I heard about a meeting being held that night and decided to go. We had built a shack and it only had one door. My husband sat in the doorway so I couldn't go, but I was only about 6 stone so I slipped out the window and away down the road I went ... he was alright after that ... got used to it and always minded the children so I could be in all the meetings and demonstrations.

It wasn't that the Women's Auxiliary just supported men ... it was our own survival we were fighting for ... I tell you it built character, those struggles ... Somehow when you're in your own little family everything just goes along and you nestle in. When everything is an upheaval ... it's different ... everyone is together.

In the past, women folk have been isolated from an industrial point of view and to some extent have indirectly assisted the ruling class on account of their lack of knowledge and understanding of the class struggle. Lately however considerable progress has been made by their support of the Federation in the national strike.

Never let the facts spoil a good prejudice!

Other unions set up women's auxiliaries during the thirties. But they do not seem to have had the spontaneous and fiery militant quality of those in the mining communities, and were more orientated to conventional activities. Members of the ARU auxiliary baked their own bread against price rises (and won a reduction of one penny) and they also had a clothes fund for babies of mothers on the dole. They did participate in a big rally in the Sydney domain protesting about the dismissal of married women. In some country centres, the women's auxiliary was the main focus for the union.

There seems to have been almost a continuous battle between textile employers and workers throughout the depression. It started in August 1932, when Victorian employers cut wages by 15%. This was in addition to the 10% across-the-board cut for all workers two years previously.

A party of more than twenty girls ... went in search of other girls who had offered for work that morning. They shouted insulting names at the loyal workers. Then they went in a body to a hotel, where another worker boarded, and sought to gain entrance to her room. Sergeant Roser seized the leader of the girls and conducted her to the police station in a car.

With the spread to Goulburn and Sydney there was much active picketing and fundraising. Again the union officials 'on many occasions ... completely ignored the strike committee and ... prevented it exercising direction and control of the strike'. And again the strike ended with only a partial victory, despite a militant mood that could have taken it to complete success. The full operation of the new award was prevented in most mills, but there were some losses. A number of smaller stop-works and disputes occurred in the wake of the major strike. For instance workers at the Commonwealth Weaving Mills in Sydney were able to prevent victimisations, but at a number of other mills they could not be averted.

It is deplorable that a big and important union like this one, which has always given assistance to this court in all industrial matters should be defied by a handful of women who are nothing but rebels.

The executive responded that it was doing everything in its power to persuade them to return to work.

Lack of trade union and other organised support meant that women fared badly, for the more strongly organised sections of the community were pacified at the expense of those less able to defend their rights.

Certainly their unions were often weak, but there was nonetheless a substantial level of rank and file action. In many cases women strikers received adequate and even quite good support from their union officials. If they or their unions lacked the power and political awareness to create a really adequate overall response to the economic and social crisis of the thirties so, after all, did most men.

Following the dismissal of two female tobacco workers in May 1935, approximately 50 strikers held out for over a year. A levy on others in the industry provided strike pay, and the matter came up in parliament after police used violence to break up a picket. The union clearly gave a fair degree of support, including sending delegates interstate to publicise their case, and forming a 'flying squad' to visit tobacconists. But since the factory resumed production with scabs within three weeks of the strike's commencement, the only hope of victory lay in spreading the strike. Although they seemed to have considered this action, it never actually occurred.

Radical and working class women weren't the only ones to organise. In opposition to, and frequently in conflict with them, was the Australian Women's Guild of Empire, launched in 1929 under the capable and experienced leadership of Adela Pankhurst Walsh.

The Communist Women, led by Mrs Jean Devanny came in a body and interrupted continuously ... We all felt proud to belong to the Guild when we listened to Mrs Walsh quietly answering the avalanche of questions that was hurled at her while honestly trying to help these people.

Most of the Guild's efforts went into the workplace. At the invitation of employers, Adela and others would speak to lunch hour meetings in shops, factories and on the docks. A speaker at the Alexandria Spinning Mills in 1937 focussed on the urgent need for Australia to remain loyal to the empire. At the end of the meeting, she sold her audience wool to make winter bed covers for those unable to afford them.

'What do you want here?' hooted an interjector ... 'You never wash a cup!' 'You couldn't do a day's washing!' screamed others. Hastily Mrs Metcalfe held up her flag of battle ¾ a large double bed quilt made from knitted squares ... [She] explained that this quilt was made by cooperation and loving friendship. Only by cooperation could success be achieved. First of all in the home, and then in industry, by cooperation between capital, management and labour.

'If you want work, come and work like us.' ... 'Twister! How much are you paid for this?'
This may not have been the entirely spontaneous action it was claimed to be, but as a participant said, 'There is not one communist in this factory, but there is not one of us would stand a twister like her.'

Seven women were ejected. One fought a constable with her fists, and others attacked the police with their handbags. They shouted at the top of their voices while they were being ejected.

So much for the picture of 'mute' women in the depression! In reality, they played many roles, including that of working class fighters. They were to do so again in the World War that followed.

Whenever there was a strike Adela would appear, speak to the workers and hand out leaflets. Not surprisingly she was popular with employers, who got into the habit of sending for her at the first whiff of industrial action. By 1936, she was addressing 30 audiences a month as well as speaking every Sunday in the Domain.

The Guild was not the only right wing women's organisation of the period. For example in September 1931, an anti-communist meeting in the Sydney Town Hall included the women's section of the Sane Democracy League, the Feminist League, the National Association of Women, the Women' Christian Temperance Union and the Progressive Housewives' Association. They all wished to take the offensive to defend Country, Religion and Morality; marriage itself would be smashed if left-wing 'fiends' had their way. The meeting passed a motion demanding the 'expulsion of communism from this country, vigorously, unconditionally and uncompromisingly'. The disruption of the meeting by radical women, presumably members of the CPA, led to 'wild scenes':

Adela started to speak: 'I only wish to get more work for the unemployed ...' But the indignant workers howled her down and made her get out. We looked over the wall and saw Adela and her friend running down the lane.

These factory incursions often provoked hostility. At one meeting at IXL in 1936, the Guild speaker managed to overcome the resentment.

Daughter of the famous British suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, Adela came out to Australia in 1915. Originally a militant socialist and feminist, and for a short time a member of the young Communist Party, by the end of the twenties she had swung sharply to the right. Not only was she now for industrial peace but she had also left behind any support for women's rights, claiming that these women were sapping the initiative of men who had 'spilled their blood over the whole surface of the earth, and strewn their bones thick beneath every sea in the interests of future generations.'

The Guild hoped to 'end the industrial and class strife and to restore industry on a basis of cooperation and good will'. Although the first point of its charter was 'to combat communism and all forms of class government', one is not really surprised to find Lady Rhondda and Lady Gordon as its patronesses. Mrs David Maugham, daughter of Australia's first (conservative) prime minister and married to a prominent lawyer, was president for several years, and names prominent in Sydney's social and business world were also conspicuous among the membership. Turnover in the executive resulted not from ideological differences but from the resignations of ladies leaving for overseas trips. The NSW Chamber of Manufacturers gave it consistent financial support, and other employers' organisations contributed in various ways.

In its early years the Guild was very active among working class housewives in the industrial suburbs of Sydney and nearby centres such as Wollongong. At 'industrial tea parties' (where free food and entertainment were draw cards) the wives of unemployed men obtained fabric at cheap rates, to be made into clothes and then sold by the Guild. There were also weekly meetings, children's circles ('little outposts of empire') and charity work.

The Guild was anathema to the Communist Party, who constantly reviled Adela Walsh. The CPA's Militant Women's Group called her 'Mrs Liar Walsh' or 'Mrs Traitor Walsh' in their publications, and the Sydney and Cessnock groups followed her around to her various meetings to expose her politics. The Guild answered the insults in kind, attacking 'Madam Kollontai and her shrieking sisterhood.'

One tea party in Miller's Point (Sydney) in 1934 proved 'a most unpleasant afternoon'. The secretary reported:

A number of other industries also saw women take industrial action. In 1935 there was a strike at Melbourne basket shoe factories over the demand to be covered by the bootmakers' award. Most of the strikers were European migrants. Pantry maids at Carlyons Restaurant in Melbourne's Spencer Street campaigned successfully against overtime and victimisation with most joining the union, while in Sydney there was also a successful campaign to organise hotel and restaurant workers. Railway waitresses met in October 1937 to discuss several grievances, and formed a section of the Australian Railways Union. In 1933, Western Australian domestic servants gained the right to be addressed as Miss or Mrs.

Given that there was industrial action in most occupations where women were found, it is clear that it is quite mistaken to say:

A third wave of strikes occurred in early 1938, again in Victoria. There was a range of issues including dismissals and night shift rates, but the strikes focussed on piece rates in the new award. About 2,500 workers were involved altogether, many of them women and juniors, and, as each mill settled, another would go out. Although some workplaces elected strike committees, after the first few days control passed to the Trades Hall. The workers seem to have won substantial wage increases.

In fact, the textile industry was seldom free of disputes during the thirties, and smaller strikes were regularly reported in the daily press. Part of the explanation for the militancy in this industry might be the fact that unemployment peaked earlier in the sector than in manufacturing industry generally. Having gone into recession in 1927, the textile industry was recovering strongly by 1931-32, due to devaluation and tariffs. Employers could perhaps therefore afford minor concessions not available in other sectors. The Militant Minority Movement were active in the first and second strike wave, and their agitation seems to have had some effect.

The clothing industry also had a large female workforce. Organising in this industry was much more difficult than in textiles, because workshops were smaller with sweatshop conditions common. In addition, piecework and outwork must have undermined efforts to organise into unions. The union officials' role in suppressing incipient militancy was also an obstacle. Although the Militant Minority Movement distributed leaflets to clothing workers during the 1932 strike they never got any foothold in the industry.

All the same, there were a number of instances of industrial action. A one-week strike in a Melbourne factory in 1930 gained a new weekly wage based on the previous piece rates. Workers in at least one other factory were also able to prevent a wage cut.

A larger dispute occurred in July 1932, when clothing workers were again faced with a wage cutting award in addition to the 10% across the board cut. The union's strength was concentrated in men's ready-made clothing, and about 700 of these workers, mostly women, engaged in a short-lived strike. They reluctantly returned to work under pressure from the union officials, who convinced a mass meeting to accept the employers' offer of a restoration of wages. This led to defeat because the employers never carried out their promise.

A new system involving speedup led in March 1935 to 170 'girls' from three men's clothing factories striking. After 10 days out, they went back to the comment from the union secretary, one Mr A Wallis, that 'the new system ... would benefit both employers and employees'. A short strike at Universal Clothing in July 1937 did win a retrospective wage rise.

Female rubber workers engaged in a number of strikes. An act banning mass picketing allowed police to disband daily pickets at Hardie Rubber Works in June 1930. Several years later, 180 'girls' at the same factory struck over piece work rates. When the strikers went to collect their previous week's wages, the police surrounded them in an attempt, as a union official put it, to create a 'fear psychology'. When another group of 500 strikers rejected a union executive recommendation to return to work, the case went to arbitration, the judge commenting:

Immediately 700 employees at Yarra Falls Spinning Mills, 500 of them female, went on strike. Following an offer to reduce the cut to 7.5% the union officials convinced the strikers to return to work pending further negotiations. Not long afterwards, at a mass meeting which consisted 'largely of young women and girls and boys dressed in knickerbockers', 1000 textile workers voted to strike again, electing a committee which sent speakers out to other mills to spread the strike. On the same day, the dispute spread to Launceston, where 1000 workers from three mills struck and picketers pitched tents in the street when rain set in.

With 3,500 out in Melbourne there were too many to meet in Trades Hall, so 'the strikers went to the Temperance Hall, the girls marching along Russell Street singing.' The strike was solid and the mood determined, but unfortunately inexperience and lack of organisation in Melbourne allowed the union officials to independently talk members in Ballarat and Geelong into accepting the offer. None of the rank and file decisions about leaflets and picketing were carried out. The strike ended in Melbourne after 10 days, and 6 days later in Tasmania. Although forced to settle, they had achieved a partial victory in reducing the cut to 7.5%.

A little over a year later, a second important mass strike occurred in the same industry, this time in New South Wales. The issue was a new award which meant wage cuts, speed up and night work for women. The strike started in Orange where there were 'disorderly scenes'.

They called us brazen hussies ... it was unheard of ... the coalfields women didn't take long to cotton on ... basically they were fighters ... they had to be

Best known and most inspiring, however, is the Miners' Women's Auxiliary. Miners wives have a tradition of action from the 19 th century: they stopped trains carrying scabs, marched and picketed, argued with scabs and 'tin-kettled' (banging on pots and pans in a war of nerves). Such was their reputation that they were rebuked for 'forgetting their sex', and in one strike the manager allowed the men strikers to address the scabs but refused the women.

During the depression, this tradition developed into formal organisation. The 1934 Wonthaggi strike saw the first women's auxiliary and in the following years auxiliaries sprang up in many mining centres. However, the national leadership didn't recognise them until 1939. This suggests some reluctance by the officials to endorse an organisation which might 'interfere with the domestic work of the union'. There was hesitation at the rank and file level as well:

The courage of these female activists is highlighted by events in 1930 when a number were arrested by police acting under orders from the NSW Lang Labor government. Pat Hurd, the daughter of Communist writer Jean Devanny, was only 17 at the time.

The mayor threatened to have the room cleared if they were not quiet, but the women told him he could have them locked up, at least they would be fed, and they would take their children along too, and they could feed them also; that even if their menfolk were on strike they didn't intend to starve. A further demonstration was arranged by the men and the women to the Food Relief Depot at Wollongong, which resulted in a complete victory for the strikers, for besides receiving food relief for the time they were on strike, the men were also reinstated.

During the 1935 relief workers' strike there were several similar accounts. At Como (NSW) the wives not only organised social functions, and collected money and food, but also wrote articles and marched in demonstrations. On one occasion police stopped a march of unemployed men in Corrimal.

There is no doubt that women in some ways were worse off than men. The plight of unemployed single women who had no family to fall back on was desperate. It was in response to their predicament that Muriel Heagney organised a 'Girls' Week' in Melbourne in 1930, which raised £5000. With this money, an Unemployed Girls' Relief Movement (UGRM) was set up, whose main activity was the establishment of centres where the 'girls' could drop in for company, use sewing machines or attend education courses. In addition, they offered relief work in cooperation with the government: in return for a small allowance the women sewed clothes to be distributed to the needy, or made jam. Large numbers of women passed through the doors of the centres, and Heagney felt that their effort 'in building up a women's cooperative movement ... [was] without parallel in Australia'.

A group of Sydney Labor women carried out a politically similar type of work; NSW Premier Jack Lang gave them the use of a building which they ran as a hostel for homeless women without any further government assistance. Jessie Street, another well-known feminist of the time, and her United Associations of Women were also concerned to help the female unemployed. A meeting of women's organisations in 1931 decided on a strategy of teaching women to farm.

There were numerous other examples of voluntary relief work, generally consistent with what Summers calls the God's Police role. At the time, the Communist newspaper Working Woman attacked these efforts, claiming that in one of the sewing centres, material was cut into strips and then sewed together again just to keep members occupied.

But criticism at this level is quite inadequate. Even if the participants had been very usefully employed, and even if the government had not interfered with their operation, there are serious problems with such a strategy. As one writer points out, these centres were effectively a form of work for the dole. It might have been better than starvation, but they represented very cheap labour, severely undercutting women's already miserable wage rates.

Summers herself accurately criticises the welfare approach of middle class voluntary work:

To fully understand the union officials' hostility, we have to see it in the context of a failure of the traditional methods of trade unionism: their customary approach could not cope with the problems posed by the depression. It was not just misogyny, because the official trade unions failed male workers too.

The early depression years were a time of working class defeat. The economy began to slide toward depression and unemployment in 1927. From 1928, there was a series of major industrial confrontations initially involving the waterside workers, whose prolonged unofficial strike was broken. This was followed by major defeats of the timber workers and the miners on the northern NSW coalfields. By the start of the depression proper in 1929, many trade unionists were disillusioned with the failures of their existing leaders, and were prepared to consider alternative and more radical ideas. This provided the Communist Party with opportunities leading to the formation of the Minority Movement (MM) with its militant approach and attempt to raise consciousness on a range of issues. It also provides the context for the rank and file actions which occurred sometimes independently of and sometimes in opposition to the union officials.

But first let us look at Heagney's approach in a little more detail.

It is generally accepted that unemployment during the depression was not as severe for women as for men. This was largely because they were restricted to certain sections of industry which were not necessarily the worst hit. Twenty five percent of breadwinners were women in 1933 and, throughout the thirties, the female workforce continued to grow as did their labour force participation rate. However, the 1933 census showed 15% female unemployment (for men it was 26%) and as there must have been a great ideal of hidden unemployment and underemployment, it is clear that conditions for women workers were harsh.

Practically no relief work was available to them and government sustenance was also denied. Kent-Hughes, Victoria's Minister for Sustenance declared in 1932 that while domestic work was available at any wage, under any conditions, anywhere in the State, jobless women would be denied public assistance.

The depression is generally regarded as a time of unparalleled male chauvinism among male workers, because of the way male trade unionists attacked married women and blamed them for unemployment. It is certainly true that many trade unions were hostile to married women workers, and Queensland shop assistants actually had a parade of sandwich-board men as part of a campaign for legislation to exclude them from industry. The Clothing Trades Union (CTU) seems to have had a policy, whether official or de facto is not clear, along the same lines. And many other unions were similarly antagonistic. Muriel Heagney's disillusionment later on in 1942 seems to anticipate a modern radical feminist perspective:

The economic background and the trade unions

Unemployed women organise

Many modern accounts of the unemployed movement focus on the helpless wife, baby in arms, sitting on her pathetic possessions in the street after being evicted; or at best they show women as fundraisers. Actually they played a very active role in the unemployed movement.
they were worried about some 'ladies' who had also turned up at the auction. 'Our wives and everybody got alongside them and growled, "You bid for this you bitch, and I'll tear your bloody hair out". "You open your mouth and I'll kick your guts in!"' The furniture was safely returned to the dispossessed family.
Brazen hussies and strike support

Striking back

Right wing women organise

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Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History

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Brazen hussies and God's police Fighting back in the depression years JANEY STONE An earlier version of this chapter appeared as 'Brazen Hussies and God's Police: Feminist Historiography and the Great Depression', Hecate, vol. VIII (1) 1982.

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Women's participation in paid work has increased considerably over the past 50 years. Women made up almost half the paid workforce in Australia in 2020, compared to around 30% in 1966.

In addition to participating in paid work at much greater levels than in the past, women are also working longer. This has changed across the generations - particularly at the ages when women usually have children. These changes have occurred in conjunction with changes in employment opportunities, greater access to paid parental leave, access to more flexible working arrangements and changes in the structure of the economy. In comparison, male employment across time, and across the generations, has seen much smaller changes.

This article compares female employment, by age, at various points since 1966, then provides a 'cohort' analysis which compares female employment and full-time employment, by age, across the generations.

Chart 1 shows the employment-to-population ratio of women in 1966, 1980, 2000 and 2020. The employment-to-population ratio, which is the number of employed women as a proportion of all women, is used as it controls for increases in the population over time and thus is more comparable over longer periods of time than employment levels.

Through the years, there has tended to be quite high employment for women in their early 20s, with a distinct decrease in employment for women between around 25 and 40. This decrease was earlier, and more pronounced in 1966, but has steadily decreased. In 2020, there was only a slight dip in female employment at around 30 years of age.

The age at which women's employment was lowest has increased from 30 in 1966 (32.2%), to 31 in 1980 (46.4%) and 35 in 2000 (60.6%). Interestingly, the age at which women's employment was lowest in 2020 was 30 - the same as in 1966. However, this is associated with an employment-to-population ratio than is more than twice as high as in 1966, and only a slight decline from earlier ages.

In 2020, women were also more likely to continue to work as they got older compared with earlier years. For example, the employment-to-population ratio for 65 year old women in 2020 (35.6%) was more than 3 times higher than similar aged women in previous years (less than 7% in 1980, and around 10% in 1966 and 2000). Note that the age structure of employment in 2020 was broadly similar to 2019.

Another way to look at changes in female employment over time is to look at the experiences of women across the different generations. This provides a different perspective to looking at female employment at various points in time.

Chart 2 compares the employment-to-population ratio of women, by age, across the generations (based on their year of birth). For this article, the following common generations and years of birth have been used:

'Greatest generation' - born between 1901 and 1924

'Silent generation' - born between 1925 and 1945

'Baby boomers' - born between 1946 and 1964

'Generation X' - born between 1965 and 1979

'Millenials' (Gen-Y) - born between 1980 and 1994

'Generation Z' - born between 1995 and 2009

Women in later generations had higher levels of employment than women of similar ages from earlier generations. For example, 45 year old women from the 'Greatest generation' had an employment-to-population ratio of 41.4% compared to 58.6% for women from the 'Silent generation'.

A prominent feature in each generation is the dip in overall employment for women aged around 30 years, which coincides with the time women are most often raising children. Unlike the previous point in time comparisons however, which showed a progressive increasing of the age at which employment was lowest, the age at which employment is lowest for women is more similar across the generations - between 29 and 32 for each generation.

Women in the more recent generations tend to work for longer in their lifetime, with employment highest in the late 40s for both 'Baby boomers' and 'Generation X'.

Chart 3 shows the full-time employment-to-population ratio for women, by age, across the generations.

It shows that full-time employment for young women entering the workforce has changed across the generations. This is in contrast to overall employment which was similar for young women across the generations, highlighting the increasing prevalence of part-time work.

It also shows that, while employment for Baby boomer and Generation X women was highest in their 40s, full-time employment did not return to the highs of their early 20s.

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Women's participation in paid work has increased considerably over the past 50 years. Women made up almost half the paid workforce in Australia in 2020, compared to around 30% in 1966. In addition to participating in paid work at much greater levels than in the past, women are also working longer.