Labour movement youth organisation and policy in eastern Australia, c.1918 - c.1939

Abstract

Labour youth organisations in the period 1918 to 1939 have only recently emerged in memoirs, been mentioned as a by-product of women's studies, or partially re-discovered through the development of labour history. Communist initiatives, as the most enduring and self-consciously counter-hegemonic, form a central strand in this thesis, yet they are just one part of a far broader tradition. From 1903 to 1928 Socialist Sunday Schools preached a secular gospel of humanity and love. Opposition to the Great War by Quakers and pacifists led to the formation of a Children's Peace Army. A Brisbane Labor Girls Club, founded in 1919, spread the doctrine of 'One Big Union' and in 1925 University Labour Clubs began building socialist enclaves in the midst of bourgeois privilege. Early Labor Party youth organisations in Victoria and New South Wales served as a step-ladder to individual political careers or, alternatively, were motivated by belief that the ALP's bureaucratic structure might somehow be influenced in a socialist direction from within. Trade unions and Trades Hall Councils also responded, formulating policy to deal with the erosion of traditional apprenticeship or, as the Depression lifted, to ease the plight of a 'lost generation', seemingly destined to a future of low pay and 'blind alley' jobs. A more diffused ideology of youth grew out of events the labour movement felt unable to ignore : the survival of jingoism and militarism in the school curriculum after 'the war to end all wars'; continuation of juvenile military training in the 1920s; the possible effect of child migration and the rapid growth of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, YMCA and other 'capitalist' youth movements. Trade unions hoped to recruit young people and the ALP expected their vote at twenty-one, yet the labour movement feared the economic competition of youth in the workplace and suspected that its intervention in party politics might have turbulent results. Communist strategy, based on an imported Leninist model, bore only partial relationship to how Australian working class youth actually resisted bourgeois socialisation. These ambiguities account for the vacillating, intermittent characteristics of so many labour youth initiatives and their failure to seriously challenge establishment- sponsored organisations. Show more