Paul Strangio - Neither Power Nor Glory: 100 Years of Political Labor in Victoria, 1856-1956

Acknowledgements

While the Victorian Labor Party has previously lacked a major narrative history, I have not built from scratch. I wish to acknowledge the scholarship of others from whom I have learnt much. Two works that have been an invaluable resource in writing this history are Frank Bongiornos The Peoples Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 18751914 and Kate Whites John Cain & Victorian Labor, 19171957 . When it came to understanding the split of the 1950s, my greatest debt was to Robert Murrays epic account, The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties . There are also a number of excellent unpublished theses relevant to the topic and of them I particularly wish to note Carlotta Kellaways The Melbourne Trades Hall Council: Its Origins and Political Significance, 18551889, Celestina Sagazios The Victorian Labor Party, 18851894, DW Rawsons The Organisation of the Australian Labor Party, 19161941 and Stanley Petzalls The Political and Industrial Role of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, 19271949.

I am enormously indebted to my colleagues and friends who generously agreed to read the manuscript of this book. Frank Bongiorno and Brian Costar read it in its entirety, while James Walter read the early sections. They all offered astute suggestions for improvements and saved me from numerous errors and infelicities. Needless to say, the remaining flaws are my responsibility alone. Brian not only read the manuscript, but has been an inexhaustible fountain of advice and encouragement. He is one of the finest academic mentors in this country. Stuart Macintyre has been another source of wise counsel and steadfast support.

While researching the book I have been the beneficiary of the dedicated efforts of many library staff. I will be eternally grateful to Richard Overell and his colleagues at the Rare Books Collection in the Matheson Library at Monash University for the patient and efficient way in which they dealt with my many requests for help. The Rare Books reading room became a sanctuary while I pored through past issues of Labor newspapers. I am also very appreciative of the assistance I received from the staff of the State Library of Victoria. I spent countless hours in the librarys Heritage Reading Room as I gradually worked my way through the records of the Victorian Labor Party. Thanks also to the helpful staff at the Australian National University Archives, the National Library of Australia and the Parliamentary Library of the Parliament of Victoria. The latter were especially generous in facilitating my access to many of the photographs that appear in the book.

I began working on this book while a lecturer in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University and subsequently transferred to the Politics department within the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash. I wish to thank my academic colleagues for providing a congenial environment within which to teach and research. The chaotic state of my office became a much-commented indicator of my absorption in this project. I am especially grateful to my fellow Australianists in the Politics department, Nick Economou, Jim Walter and the late Dennis Woodward, for their conversation and humour.

I have been fortunate to enjoy the support of a long list of staff at Melbourne University Publishing: Sybil Nolan encouraged me to take up the project, Foong Ling Kong was patient and calm despite my dilatory progress on the manuscript, while Colette Vella enthusiastically embraced the project when she became executive publisher in 2011. I am also very grateful to Kristin Odijk for her meticulous copy editing of the manuscript in preparation for publication and to Diane Leyman for cheerfully and expertly overseeing the production process.

As is the way with these things, my greatest debts are closest to home. My parents, Vincent and Mary, have been unswerving supporters for as long as I can remember. My beautiful children Jack and Gemma have learnt to put up with my idiosyncratic distractions and bring me joy everyday. My chief thanks is to my life partner and kindred spirit, Aileen Muldoon, who not only knows the quirks of the Victorian Labor Party better than me but has been the bedrock of this and most other things I have accomplished. The book is dedicated to her.

Preface

Towards the end of his long and illustrious career, the doyen of historians of Victoria, the late Geoffrey Serle, endeavoured to prick the interest of younger colleagues in writing a history of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). His encouragement of that undertaking came against the backdrop of a productive decade beginning in the early 1980s during which historical accounts were published of most of the other state Labor parties. Keenly aware of Victorias political and cultural differences, Serle was confident that there was a distinctive story to be told about the Victorian ALP. Notwithstanding Frank Bongiornos innovative 1996 thematic study of the formative period of Victorian Labor and Kate Whites earlier part-history of the party and part-biography of its first majority premier, John Cain snr, Serles suggestion has remained unheeded until now. It had stayed that way even while in the ensuing decades the other hitherto neglected state labour movement (Western Australia) gained a history and the ALPs national condition continued to generate a sprawling body of literature. This book finally answers Serles call.

While Victorian Labor awaited a historian, a remarkable but largely unremarked transformation was occurring in its fortunes. If anything defined the Labor story in Victoria up until the 1980s, it was the partys chronically poor electoral performance compared to its interstate counterparts. The facts are stark: the Victorian ALP was the last of the Labor parties to achieve office, the last to form majority government (not until 1952), and its share of government during the twentieth century was less than half of that of the New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmanian and Western Australian branches. The ALP in Victoria had also long been an impediment to federal Labors governing ambitions by winning on average only about one-third of the states seats in the House of Representatives. Yet since the 1980s this situation has changed dramatically. Labor has been in office in Spring Street for more than two-thirds of the past three decades and in federal contests during the same period Victoria has been routinely the best performing mainland state for the ALP. In belatedly making the transition to being a party of government, Victorian Labor had sloughed off its past.

There is little doubt that the dismal electoral record of the pre-modern Victorian Labor Party deterred historians from taking it up as a subject. That weakness did at least pique the passing curiosity of political scientists. At one stage a debate erupted about the peculiarities in the voting behaviour of Victorianswas there perhaps a mutation in the publics political DNA that rendered them innately anti-Labor? With its whiff of the Berthold Brecht aphorismwouldnt it be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another onethis always seemed an improbable proposition and even harder to sustain given recent electoral trends. In writing this history of Victorian Labor from its colonial origins through to the split over anti-communism in the mid-1950sthe latter calamity both culminating and consolidating its record of failurea primary objective has been to understand the partys fallow years. If not the voters, what accounted for the Victorian exceptionalism of the last century? In doing so I have delved into the dynamics of the (colonial) state parliamentary scene in Victoria, which itself is an area that has been greatly under-researched. One of the things to emerge from the book is that Labors travails were to some extent part and parcel of the dysfunctional condition of that scene in the first half of the twentieth century. The history is not exclusively confined in its focus, however, to the state sphere: it follows the story of the Victorian ALP as it bumped up against national events, especially during the conscription crisis of World War I and the split of the 1950s.