Chris McConville
Fresh from celebrating one glorious misadventure in Australia’s radical history, the labour movement now confronts a more awkward anniversary. The recent 150th year celebration of the Eureka Stockade brought with it a certain self-congratulatory afterglow. Less sanguine recollections will no doubt colour the fiftieth anniversary of the great ALP Split of 1955. This catastrophe had its origins in ... (read more)
Jack Lang was born to a poor watchmaker’s family in Sydney in 1876. He was twice premier of NSW and founder of two breakaway Labor parties. Lang lives on in the popular imagination as that hapless figure at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, upstaged when the sword-wielding Captain de Groot of the right-wing New Guard rode in and slashed Lang’s official opening ribbon. De Groot ... (read more)
The last institution of old Collingwood, the Collingwood Football Club, is poised to take flight from yuppified terraces in the former industrial suburb or new headquarters, on the site of what was once John Wren’s motordrome, Olympic Park. Now is a perfect moment in which to read this intriguing story of the one-time patron of Collingwood’s football, politics and gambling – Its masculine wo ... (read more)
Brisbane’s unruly rioters and Melbourne’s enemies within continue the Vulgar Press’s excellent series of city guides. By interpreting familiar places in Melbourne and Brisbane from within a tradition of left-wing activism, the guides emphasise a different environmental heritage. Where city planning seems bent on transforming daily life into those sanitised displays that can garner tourist do ... (read more)