RADICAL AND WORKING CLASS POLITICS A Study of Eastern Australia, 1850-1910 by GOLLAN, Robin

Students of British political history are likely to find much of interest in the parallels between the development of radicalism and the labour movement in their own country and in Australia. Mr Gollan’s book, describing the process of evolution of politics in Victoria and New South Wales, affords a useful opportunity for establishing mutual influences, comparisons and occasionally contrasts in these processes. In general, the emergence of labour as a political force in Australia took place in advance of similar events in Britain. The colonies obtained manhood suffrage a generation before it was achieved in the home country, and the absence of a hereditary aristocracy removed an important restraining influence upon the advance of democracy. Nor was the working class fragmented by a heterogeneous immigration as it was in the United States: the overwhelming majority of Australia’s population in the nineteenth century was from either Britain or Ireland. Consequently, it was only infrequently that social legislation had to wait upon the precedent of Westminster: more often, the initiative was taken in Australia or New Zealand, so that the leaders of the British labour movement increasingly looked to the Antipodes for their inspiration. The first labour parties and the first Labour governments were attained, not in Britain, but on the other side of the globe. Yet there were significant differences between the evolution of British and Australasian labour politics. The power of the ‘caucus’ has little parallel in Britain, whatever the power of the party conference may be; and the association of the Australian and New Zealand labour movements with nationalism in those countries and with the campaigns for fiscal protection has no parallel at home. American influences came across the Pacific with even greater force than across the Atlantic: the Knights of Labor, the I.W.W., Henry George, Edward Bellamy and the De Leonites all figure more prominently in the story than we are accustomed to know them. Finally, the strength of the Irish element in the Australian population has given a twist to Australian politics which is distinctively different from what we are used to in most parts of Britain.