Labour Biography

Lucy Taksa: J.S.T. MCGOWEN: A Biographical Sketch
James Sinclair Taylor McGowen was born at sea to James McGowen, a boilermaker and Eliza (nee Ditchfield) on 16 August 1855 during their journey to Australia. His parents travelled from Lancashire in England because James had been promised employment with the Victorian Government. The family arrived in Melbourne when James Sinclair Taylor was three weeks old and they moved to NSW in 1867. Full article

Rowan Cahill: The making of a Communist Journalist: Rupert Lockwood, 1908-1940
The journalist/publicist Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997) was one of Australia’s best known Cold War communists, his name synonymous with the Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia, 1954-1955, as author of the notorious Document J. However the communist journalist did not spring fully formed into history. He joined the Australian Communist Party in 1939. This article traces Lockwood’s development as a journalist and his evolution as a communist between the wars. It is a story that ranges from small-town Western Victoria, and the West Wimmera Mail, to Melbourne and Sir Keith Murdoch’s Herald. In between, much of the world is traversed--significantly, South East Asia and Civil War Spain. Lockwood was part of a generation of Australian journalists, arguably the best of that generation (people like Brian Fitzpatrick, Douglas Wilkie, John Fisher, Clive Turnbull, Wilfred Burchett, later Alan Moorehead, and James Aldridge). This account of his pre-communist career is as much a glimpse of the world of these journalists as it is an individual’s biography. Full article

Harry Knowles: Writing Labour Lives
For many years, labour biography in Australian mirrored the rather narrow path of labour historiography. Early work was as much autobiographical as biographical. It wasn’t until the mid-1930s that labour biography came into its own and grew steadily until the 1970s when there was a proliferation of biographical work. This momentum was sustained during the last two decades of the twentieth century with biographies of Labor politicians dominating a field which, in itself, has helped to perpetuate a circumscribed historical tradition. Full article

Peter Love: Frank Anstey - Living History
During his thirty-two years in the Victorian and Commonwealth parliaments Frank Anstey (1865-1940) came to personify Labor’s left populist tradition. In the course of an active and occasionally tempestuous career he developed a popular political economy that identified and deplored the role of elites in depriving ordinary people of their rights to political democracy and economic justice. Full Article

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