People's History of Australia: Recent Episodes
People's History of Australia
People’s History of Australia is a podcast and blog looking at Australian history from the perspective of ordinary people fighting together for a better life.
The idea that Australia was invaded in 1788 is strangely controversial. A Google search for the phrase ‘Was Australia invaded’ provides an AI-generated answer claiming that ‘Australia has not experienced a full-scale foreign military invasion of its mainland’. The Wikipedia history of Australia makes no mention of invasion or indeed any warfare between between Aboriginal nations and the colonisers at all, and large numbers of articles ask ‘Was Australia invaded in 1788?’ as if the issue is somehow not obvious.
At the time the British Empire invaded Australia in 1788 however, no one was in any doubt as to what was happening. The first convicts came ashore escorted by a significant body of armed troops, the first structure built in the colony was a military one, and colonial authorities constantly referred to the fact that they were at war. For their part, Aboriginal people quickly realised that they were dealing with a military invasion of their land, and fought back heroically.
In this episode, we chat with historian Stephen Gapps, author of the pioneering book The Sydney Wars, about First Nations’ resistance to the invasion of Sydney. Contrary to claims that relations between the colonists and Aboriginal people were mostly peaceful after a short period of confusion and misunderstanding,The Sydney Wars shows how both sides were aware that they were involved in a war for survival. And contrary to accounts that depict the conflict as a one-sided series of massacres and Aboriginal defeats, Stephen’s research reveals that First Nations warriors used sophisticated military tactics and waged a protracted war of resistance across three decades that often had the invaders on the back foot.
You can buy The Sydney Wars here. Sign up to our Patreon now to have the chance to get a free copy of Stephen’s book and support our podcast!
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design design.
In contemporary Australian mass culture, it’s hard if not impossible to find any representation of life as it’s lived by the majority of the population. Few movies, plays, TV shows or documentaries reflect what it’s like spending most of your waking life working to make a boss rich, struggling to keep up with bills, or...
From the 1880s until the 1980s, telephone operators were at the centre of the communications industry in Australia. Before the invention of the internet or mobile phones, virtually all telecommunication across the country and internationally took place through landline telephones. And operators, who connected calls to their intended destination, were completely essential to that process.
Employed first by the federal government and then by the government-owned corporation Telecom, operators worked in gruelling conditions – a predominantly female workforce, they were subject to low pay, a physically and mentally overwhelming pace of work, and consistent threats to their occupational health. For much of their history, they also had a union which refused to take up their interests and which saw itself as almost an arm of management. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, this abruptly changed, and telephone operators became some of the most militant workers in Australia, staging inspiring strikes and work bans to fight for better conditions on the job.
In this episode, we talk with librarian, union activist and historian Jeff Rickertt about the extraordinary history of the telephonists. We explore how essential their work was to the everyday functioning of Australia’s economy, how the telephonists have been virtually erased from history, how it was that their union became completely co-opted and tamed by management, and how, beneath the surface of a seemingly quiescent workforce, resentment and resistance were always present, and were only waiting to explode into industrial militancy and activism.
You can read Jeff’s PhD thesis on the telephonists here. Sign up to our Patreon now to have the chance to get a free copy of Jeff’s history of the telephonists, Resistance on the line, which is currently retailing for $250.
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design design .
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a powerful and radical new movement arose in Australia challenging the widespread oppression that women faced across the country – the women’s liberation movement.
Women in Australia in this era had plenty to fight about. It was illegal to get an abortion, and divorce was extremely difficult to obtain. Married women were barred from holding jobs in the public service, and were officially and unofficially excluded from a huge range of industries and occupations. Paid parental leave didn’t exist, and there was no support for single parents. Women weren’t even allowed in pubs – if women wanted to drink, they had to go and sit in a segregated “ladies’ lounge” out the back.
Some things however were perfectly legal. It was completely legal for a husband to rape or sexually assault his wife, since marriage was taken to automatically imply consent at all times forever. It was also entirely legal for employers to pay women less than men for doing the same job – ads for jobs would display the male rate of pay for the position, and then the female rate of pay for the position, which was 75% of the male rate. Added to this was a pervasive everyday culture of public sexism and misogyny that touched all areas of life.
Fortunately, tens of thousands of women across the country stood up and fought back, fighting for both reforms and for a new kind of society. In this episode, we chat with Janey Stone, who was involved in the women’s liberation movement both in the US and Australia, about this incredible era.
You can check out Interventions, the Australian radical publishing house which is led by Janey, here, as well as the Interventions book in which Janey mentions, Rebel Women, here. You can read some of Janey’s other recent writings here, while you can watch a short interview with Janey’s mother Rose about her life and activism here.
Check out our upcoming full-day festival on 15 March 2025, Radical Sydney!, here.
We now also have a new Patreon account and you can subscribe to support us here!
Opening music courtesy of Glitter Rats, closing music courtesy of the Victorian Trade Union Choir. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
Throughout Australian history, non-white migrant workers have consistently been stereotyped as docile, submissive, and willing to work for extremely low wages. Nowhere has this been more true than for Chinese workers in Australia, who from the 19th century until the present day have been demonised for their alleged enthusiasm for undercutting white workers and happily embracing terrible working conditions.
Fortunately, these racist myths are precisely that – myths. From the arrival of the first Chinese migrants in the early 19th century, Chinese workers in Australia have an extraordinary history of rebelling, resisting, going on strike, and collectively fighting against their employers for better wages and better working conditions. Chinese workers conducted what was possibly the first strike in the history of Queensland, were active participants in the mass goldfield rebellions of the 1850s, formed unions and went on strike again and again, and consistently declared their solidarity with the struggles of working people across Australia and across the world.
To talk about this amazing history that has been virtually hidden and ignored, we’re joined in this episode by Liam Ward, a filmmaker and academic at RMIT University in Melbourne, who has researched and publicised some of the stories of Chinese workers in Australia and their struggles.
You can read some of Liam’s work about anti-Chinese racism and the struggles of Chinese workers in Australia here and here.
Check out our upcoming full-day festival on 15 March 2025, Radical Sydney!, here.
We now also have a new Patreon account and you can subscribe to support us here!
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
When Australia was invaded in 1788, the new colony’s nascent ruling class deployed violence and repression on two fronts. On one side of the frontier, the colonial administration used troops and pastoralists to wage genocidal war against Aboriginal nations, and on the internal side of the frontier, very often the same troops and the same pastoral employers were then used to repress and crush uprisings by convicts and workers. Whilst the degree of violence and brutality was certainly different, the two groups’ enemies appeared to be the same – the employers and the colony’s ruling class as a whole.
Unfortunately, racism has proven to be a remarkably effective weapon throughout Australian history, and despite often sharing the same enemies, there is minimal history of joint struggle between white workers and Aboriginal people during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, and workers and their unions were in fact often extremely hostile towards non-white workers.
In the 1930s, however, things suddenly began to change. For the first time ever, mass meetings of predominantly white union members began passing motions declaring their solidarity with Aboriginal resistance. White unemployed workers fought alongside unemployed Aboriginal workers. And a huge campaign took shape across the country, with the participation of thousands of white workers, against frontier massacres and violence. At the same time, radical left-wing theory began arguing that Aboriginal people and every other working-class person in Australia had a shared interest in opposing racism and waging united struggles together.
To talk about this incredible history and how such a remarkable change took place, we’re joined in this episode by Paddy Gibson, an activist, academic and historian, who discusses socialist anti-racist theory in the 19th century, its flaws and how it was modified and challenged by the Communist Part of Australia during 20th century, and the amazing campaigns led by the Communist Party against anti-Aboriginal racism during the 1920s and 1930s.
You can read Paddy’s PhD thesis here, and you can listen to other talks given by Paddy here.
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
Since it was founded in the 1920s, BHP’s Port Kembla steelworks has completely dominated the town of Wollongong, employing over 25,000 workers at its peak and physically towering over the city.
For much of its existence, the steelworks also systematically discriminated against women. Company management deliberately confined women to only the lowest-paying jobs, refused to employ women as steelworkers, and made up arbitrary rules to keep women out – all while constantly advertising for new jobs.
In the 1970s, women in Wollongong decided to fight back. They protested, chained themselves to the gates of the steelworks, and sneaked in and stayed for overnight shifts with the support of male steelworkers. Then, in 1980, activists stepped up the pressure and began a largescale Jobs for Women campaign that involved thousands of workers, led to a protest encampment being set up outside the steelworks, and witnessed mass rallies for women’s rights in the centre of Wollongong. Shortly afterwards, BHP buckled and hired over 300 women steelworkers, and committed to ending discriminatory hiring practices. JfW activists then launched the first anti-discrimination class action case in Australian history, which led to them being awarded $1.4 million in damages.
To talk about this amazing struggle, we’re joined by socialist activist Diana Covell, a founding member of the Jobs for Women campaign and a former steelworker at Port Kembla. Diana talks about her history as an activist across a range of now-famous campaigns, about the Jobs for Women campaign, and about the humour, joy and camaraderie of fighting alongside her fellow campaigners.
Diana has written about the Jobs for Women campaign in the 2019 anthology The far left in Australia since 1945, which you can purchase here. You can also read a journal article written by Diana about the JfW campaign and a similar struggle in Canada here. Diana will also soon be releasing a book about the JfW struggle, so stay tuned for that!
Opening music courtesy of Glitter Rats. Closing music, ‘The Giant Feels Their Sting’, courtesy of Sue Edmonds, who wrote the song to celebrate the court victory against BHP while working as Artist in Residence at the South Coast Labour Council. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
In mid-2016, the University of Sydney abruptly announced that it would be closing Sydney College of the Arts, its internationally-renowned arts school. Within the space of a few months, the school, which had produced scores of famous graduates and offered an almost unique education in visual and fine arts, would be closing its doors, its staff would be terminated, and all of its students would be shunted off to another university to finish out their degrees.
Fortunately, students at SCA had completely different ideas about the future of their school. Students responded with explosive fury, howling down university officials and virtually chasing them out of meetings, storming the university senate, holding vibrant mass meetings, and staging a student strike that virtually closed SCA. Then, in a final dramatic culmination, students invaded the SCA administration building, barricaded themselves inside, and vowed that they would not leave until SCA was saved.
In this episode, we chat with Kelton Muir, a historian and Let SCA Stay activist who’s written an honours thesis about the SCA campaign.
You can read Kelton’s thesis here, and you can watch several amazing long-form videos captured during the SCA campaign here and here.
We’re also hosting a party to launch this podcast episode, featuring a panel of SCA activists! It’s on Wednesday 8 May at 6.30pm at Sydney Trades Hall. All welcome! You can find more details and invite others on the Facebook event.
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
In November 1975, the elected Labor Party government of Australia was sacked without notice by Sir John Kerr, the governor-general. Having single-handedly gotten rid of the elected government, Sir John then personally appointed a new government of his own choosing led by Malcolm Fraser and the Liberal Party.
The dismissal – or the Kerr Coup as many referred to it – was one of the most dramatic events in Australian history, and ushered in a period of intense social conflict. For the next eight years, Malcolm Fraser’s prime ministership was marked by general strikes, high levels of industrial disputes and working-class militancy, riots in the streets, powerful environmental campaigns, and vibrant social movements against the oppression of women, LGBTQ people, Aboriginal people and migrants.
The Fraser era is full of incredible stories, and ripe with lessons for struggles today, and these have been catalogued in the brilliant and recently republished book Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era, by Tom O’Lincoln. Very sadly, Tom has recently passed away, but we’re lucky enough in this episode to be joined by Diane Fieldes, a socialist activist and historian, to discuss the Fraser years and the movements that arose during this period.
We highly recommend purchasing a copy of Years of Rage, which you can do here.
We’re also running a small fundraiser for our podcast! You can find out more and donate here.
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
When the British Empire invaded Australia in 1788, the colony’s new ruling class had a problem – there was no pre-existing working class in Australia waiting around to work for them. Governments and employers could establish all of the farms, workshops, factories and other workplaces that they liked, but without people who had no alternative but to work for them, they were never going to get very far.
Aboriginal people had little inclination to spend all day working to enrich white masters when they could simply work for themselves and their communities, and while a vast and dispossessed English working class existed, the wages needed to entice workers to the opposite end of the world would have been prohibitively high. The authorities’ solution was to to bring over 160,000 convict prisoners to Australia against their will in order to form the colony’s initial labour force, and they subjected them to brutal working conditions and punishments to secure their obedience.
Convicts, however, rebelled on a massive scale against their conditions. In spite of incredible risks, they rioted, went on strike, ran away and became bushrangers, carried out sabotage, and engaged in hundreds of thousands of low-level acts of individual and collective resistance. In the process, they made convictism so expensive that it could no longer be continued, and they laid the basis for unions and for the workers’ movement in Australia.
In this episode, we interview Michael Quinlan, an academic at the University of New South Wales and co-author with Hamish Maxwell-Stewart of Unfree workers: insubordination and resistance in convict Australia, about the resistance of convict workers to the regime they worked under. Michael and Hamish’s work represents the culmination of decades of research, and is one of the only books to cover such a momentously important topic.
You can buy Unfree workers online here, and you can also purchase Michael’s (more affordable) Origins of worker mobilisation here.
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
In 1977, the premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, abolished the right to hold street protests. “Don’t bother applying for a march permit,” he declared. “You won’t get one. That’s government policy now.” In response to this decision, activists swung into action, launching a massive campaign to win back the right to protest. Rally after rally...
In 1996, newly elected politician Pauline Hanson swept to national prominence after making an extraordinarily racist and inflammatory maiden speech in federal parliament attacking Aboriginal people and Asian-Australians.
In the wake of this performance, Hanson’s entire speech was printed word for word in most newspapers across the country, while for several months she received more media coverage than John Howard, the prime minister – who for his part virtually endorsed Hanson’s views by saying that he understood why people agreed with her. Capitalising on her sudden celebrity status, Hanson announced plans to form a new political party with local branches and a mass membership, and polls indicated widespread support.
Anti-racists, however, had other ideas. Huge anti-Hanson rallies were organised in towns and cities across the country, and every attempt to run a public meeting featuring Hanson or to build a local party branch was met with large and militant protests that disrupted and often shut her meetings down. Support for One Nation dwindled and by 1999 the party had collapsed, never to return to its previous strength and prominence.
In this episode we chat with Vashti Fox, a socialist and anti-fascist campaigner, about the extraordinary movement to defeat Pauline Hanson and prevent the formation of a mass, racist party in Australia.
You can read some of Vashti’s work here, and you can view footage of protests against Pauline Hanson below (some of which is fairly biased and unfortunately also features an interview with Hanson).
Opening music courtesy of Glitter Rats, and closing music courtesy of Pauline Pantsdown. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
In the 1940s, the Communist Party of Australia was approaching the peak of its power as the largest and most influential left-wing organisation in Australian history.
The Communist Party of Australia demanded far more of its members than an average political organisation. To be a communist, you were expected not just to become an activist and an organiser, but to read and study deeply, and to understand often complex theoretical texts. And so with thousands of new members flocking to it, the Communist Party established one of the most ambitious systems of adult education ever seen in Australia – the Marx Schools.
Based in several capital cities, the Marx Schools ran from 10am to 10pm every day of the week, and offered CPA members and sympathisers extensive, in-depth courses in socialist and Marxist theory, in the practicalities of union organising, in how to chair meetings and give public speeches, in anti-fascism and women’s rights, and in art, economics, philosophy and literature. With a pedagogy far more advanced and participatory than most universities, and in an era when most Australians had no formal education beyond age 13 or 14, the Marx Schools taught thousands of workers how to both understand the world and how to change it.
To discuss this remarkable experiment in Australian adult education, we’re joined in this episode by Bob Boughton, a former academic and social worker who’s done extensive research on the Marx Schools.
You can read Bob’s PhD about adult education in the Communist Party of Australia here, and Bob has also recently helped edit and publish Comrades!, a book which tells the life stories of over 100 Australian communists, which you can find here.
Opening and closing music courtesy of Glitter Rats. People’s History of Australia logo design courtesy of Nissenbaum Design.
Wee Waa, in northern New South Wales, is at the centre of the cotton industry in Australia. Tens of thousands of hectares of cotton crops surround the town, which describes itself as “the cotton capital of Australia”. During the twentieth century, each year Wee Waa would see an influx of more than a thousand predominantly...
In the late 1960s, thousands of Turkish migrants began moving to Australia as part of a wave of post-World War II immigration that permanently changed the face of Australian cities. For the Australian government and employers, migrants from Turkey and other non-English-speaking countries represented one thing: cheap factory labour that would meekly accept low wages...
In the late 1960s, thousands of Turkish migrants began moving to Australia as part of a wave of post-World War II immigration that permanently changed the face of Australian cities. For the Australian government and employers, migrants from Turkey and other non-English-speaking countries represented one thing: cheap factory labour that would meekly accept low wages...
The Pilbara region of Western Australia is one of the remotest places on the planet. It’s also one of the most economically significant regions not just in Australia, but the world, with almost indescribably vast quantities of high-grade iron ore which power steelworks across the globe and generate tens of billions of dollars in profits...
In the early 1900s, radicals and militant unionists across Australia founded the Industrial Workers of the World, arguably the most legendary left-wing organisation in Australian history. The IWW – or the ‘Wobblies’, as they were colloquially known – believed workers should form unions not just to win better wages and conditions, but to overthrow bosses...
In the decades following the end of the Second World War, Australia witnessed the biggest wave of migration in its history. Millions of people from Asia, Europe and the Middle East immigrated to Australia and changed the demographic makeup of the country forever. Postwar migrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds were overwhelmingly consigned to the worst, most...
In 1978, Sydney’s first ever Mardi Gras took place. The Australia in which the parade happened, however, was profoundly different to today. LGBTQI people faced intense discrimination and persecution, with consenting sex between adult men considered a crime and coming out an act that jeopardised employment, housing and personal relationships. Entrapment and violence at the...
In May 1969, Clarrie O’Shea, the secretary of the Victorian branch of the tram workers’ union, was jailed for refusing to pay fines his union had been hit with under Australia’s repressive ‘Penal Powers’ laws. Within a matter of days, over a million workers across the country had gone out on strike. Electricity and gas...
Few periods of Australian history are as heavily mythologised as World War I. From school textbooks to Anzac Day ceremonies, we’re told that Australia was born as a nation on the shores of Gallipoli and that the country united as one behind our gallant diggers, who gave their lives to defend our freedom and democracy....
In 1971, Nick Origlass, a Trotskyist revolutionary, was elected as the mayor of Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney – one of the most unusual developments in Australian political history. Nick Origlass came of age during the Great depression of the 1930s, and was an indefatigable enemy of all forms of authority, and a lifelong believer...
In 1971, Australia exploded with protest against a sporting tour by the white supremacist South African rugby union team – the Springbok. The Springbok were the ultimate international symbol of South African racism. Under a system known as apartheid, white South Africans, who made up 20% of the country’s population, owned 80% of all its...
In 1929, the world plunged into the most catastrophic economic crisis in modern history – the Great Depression. The effect of the Depression on ordinary people across Australia was devastating. By the early 1930s, the official unemployment rate stood at over 33%, and poverty, homelessness and starvation were ubiquitous. Newspapers reported soaring suicide rates, thousands...
In December 1981, 300 women working at the Kortex textile factory in Brunswick, Melbourne, rose up against their employer and went on strike. None of the women at Kortex had ever been on strike before, and few spoke English fluently. And yet over the next eight days, the Kortex workers defied violence and intimidation from...