Ian Turner’s Industrial Labour and Politics: The Labour Movement in Eastern Australia 1900–1921 is a major re-interpretation of the development of the Australian Labour movement. It is a useful model of the proper examination of labour movements in general and it is one of the few studies in labour history where the specific institutions evolved by the labour movement are not viewed as isolated factors in themselves but as a momentary expression of the movement itself. Finally Turner makes some important statements about the bases of social investigation. Factually, his study is certainly the finest study in its field. He investigates the period from the creation of the Commonwealth to Australia’s emergence from the First World War and also presents two detailed studies of the Australian working class in 1900 and 1921.
There were immense changes in Australian society over those 21 years. They marked the transition from the hegemony of the older craft unions to that of the unions of unskilled workers and the establishment of a new pattern of industrial unionism. The industrial and social changes were basically those found in Germany during the 1870’s, Britain in the 1880’s, and France from about 1890 to 1910. The basic shift from primary to secondary industry meant that the influence and the ideas of the pastoral workers and the miners gave way to those of the railwaymen, engineers, seamen, and unskilled production workers. As in Europe, the transition was marked not only by a period of heightened industrial unrest directed against management but a ‘civil war’ in the Labour movement. Here, however, the similarity between Europe and Australia ends. For what particularly complicates our understanding of this period is the fact that an alp built round an artisan ideology was in power for much of this period and the government was deeply involved in the industrial unrest not only as a government but when the alp was in power as part of the Labour movement. Again, the