In April 1998, Australia suddenly erupted into industrial war. Security guards with dogs and balaclavas swarmed docks across the country, threw out all 1,400 unionised workers at Patrick Stevedores, and then replaced them with a non-union workforce. Blockades sprang up at major ports, thousands of workers walked off the job to support the sacked wharfies,…

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…

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….

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…