Fighting Against War: Peace Activism in the Twentieth Century
About this ebook
Given the destabilisation of much of the globe, and the increasing militarisation of domestic politics by Western governments, it is unsurprising that a widespread movement for peace is momentarily lost. But history provides hope. By looking back we can see the ebb and flow of peace movements, and the lessons here are instructive. The present commemorative phase provides historians with a license to tell the stories that underscore the feeble fabric of nationalistic hubris – ones that seek to analyse and understand the human condition rather than simply commemorate it. Tales of national re-birth are but one facet of war, complicated by a much richer, dirtier, and more nuanced reality. This reality challenges the necessity of war, and allows us to empathise with war’s victims, elucidate oppositional tactics, and provide explanations for the difficulties in sustaining a pacifist approach in the midst of war.
The chapters here deal with aspects of peace and anti-war, of memory, of forgetting, and of legacy. The majority – unsurprisingly, given the present historical moment – concentrate on the experience of the First World War. The shadows of that war are long, and the historiography they build on extensive.
Contributors include Phillip Deery, Julie Kimber, Karen Agutter, Anne Beggs Sunter, Robert Bollard, Verity Burgmann, Liam Byrne, Lachlan Clohesy, Rhys Cooper, Carolyn Holbrook, Nick Irving, Chris McConville, Douglas Newton, Bobbie Oliver, Carolyn Rasmussen, Phil Roberts, and Kim Thoday.
About the author
Julie Kimber is an Australian historian based at Swinburne University of Technology. She has edited several book collections on Australian political and labour history. Her research interests include the Cold War, biography, and political/radical/legal history.
Phillip Deery is Professor of History at Victoria University, Melbourne. His latest book is Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
Karen Agutter is an historian with a focus on migration, specialising in issues of migrant identity and the impact of immigrants on host societies particularly at times of conflict and war. She has published on a number of aspects of the Italian deportations during WWI as well as other areas of migration history. Karen is currently researching foreign born soldiers who served in the First AIF and is also involved in an ARC funded research project seeking to identify the social impacts of post-WWII migration in particular through hostels and work camps.
Anne Beggs-Sunter is a lecturer in Australian History at the Federation University Ballarat campus. She has an abiding research interest in the influence of the Eureka Stockade on Australian culture, and has also specialised in the history of Ballarat.
Robert Bollard currently teaches at Deakin University. He was runner up for the Serle Award in 2008 for his PhD thesis on the Great Strike of 1917 and is the author of In the Shadow of Gallipoli: the hidden history of Australia in World War One (Sydney: NewSouth Press, 2013).
Verity Burgmann is Adjunct Professor in Politics at Monash University. She is the author of numerous books including (with Hans A. Baer) Climate Politics and the Climate Movement in Australia (Melbourne University Press: Melbourne, 2012); Power, Profit & Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation (Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 2003); (with Meredith Burgmann) Green Bans, Red union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation (University of NSW Press: Sydney, 1998); Revolutionary Industrial unionism. The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge University Press: Melbourne, 1995); Power and Protest. Movements for Change in Australian Society (Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 1993); In Our time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885–1905 (Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 1985).
Liam Byrne is a PhD Candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the political culture of the Victorian Labor Party between 1914 and 1921.
Lachlan Clohesy teaches history in the College of Arts at Victoria University, Melbourne. He completed his doctorate, entitled “Australian Cold Warrior: the Anti-Communism of W. C. Wentworth”, in 2010. His research interests include anti-communism, security and intelligence, nuclear power and weapons, Aboriginal affairs and Australian political history.
Rhys Cooper is a PhD student in History at the University of Melbourne, where he is working on a thesis provisionally titled Savior to Slayer: Constructions of Australian heroism during the Great War. Rhys completed his Honours at the University of Queensland where he worked on a project, in conjunction with Queensland Health and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which identified trends in First World War veteran life expectancies.
Carolyn Holbrook is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. She completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2013, which won the Serle Award for the best thesis in Australian History (2013/2014) and which was published as Anzac: The unauthorised Biography (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014). In 2013, she won the Gollan Prize in Australian Labour History, for “Marxism for Beginner Nations: Radical Nationalist Historians and the Great War”, Labour History, 103 (November 2012).
Nick Irving is completing a PhD at the University of Sydney on the transnational dimensions of Australian protest during the Vietnam War. He has taught extensively in Australian and American History at both Sydney and Macquarie Universities. His research interests include the Cold War, transnational protest and social movements, pacifism and war.
Chris McConville is Senior Research Fellow, Federation University. He previously taught at the University of the Sunshine Coast and Victoria University, Melbourne.
Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has held teaching positions at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand, and was an Associate Professor in European History at the University of Western Sydney 1991–2008. He is the author of British Labour, European Socialism and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (OUP, 1985), and British Policy and the Weimar Republic, 1918–1919 (OUP, 1997). His two most recent books are Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014) and The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London: Verso, 2014).
Bobbie Oliver is an Associate Professor in History at Curtin University, Perth. Her research interests focus on labour history and heritage and conscientious objectors to military service. Her most recent publication is: Bobbie Oliver and Sue Summers (eds), Lest we forget? Marginalised Aspects of Australia at War and Peace (Bentley: Black Swan Press, 2014).
Running parallel with, and occasionally overrun by her work as a Professional historian, Carolyn Rasmussen has maintained her engagement with the history of labour and peace movements, beginning with a masters thesis on the Coburg branch of the ALP and a PhD on opposition to war and fascism in the interwar period. A common thread through all this work has been the story of Doris Hordern and Maurice Blackburn. With the aid of an Australia Council grant and Roger Coates Research Grant she has recently made significant progress on a joint biography of this important political couple.
Phil Roberts is currently studying a PhD at the Mount Helen Campus of Federation University. He has completed the Confirmation of Candidature with the history proposal entitled “Avenue & Arch: Ballarat’s commemorative practices and attitudes to war and peace as reflected in the civic management of the Avenue of Honour and Arch of Victory.” Phil is a former secondary history and geography teacher and school principal. Since 1982 he has written 15 local history books about schools, sporting clubs and community organisations.
Kim Thoday, a chaplain in South Australia, recently completed an MA research thesis at Victoria University on Christian Socialism and peace activism in the early Cold War in Australia.
Victor Gordon is a visual artist born in South Africa. Gordon is primarily a painter and sculptor. He also creates installations assemblages, collages, drawings and photographs.
