Sitting on the Rail
I’ve finally finished. (Hmm. How else does one finish?)
Sitting on the Rail: The Westralian Worker’s response to wartime issues
The Westralian Worker occupies a privileged place in Western Australia’s labour history, as the working class movement’s official organ. This study seeks to understand how the paper dealt with its conflicting roles as reflector and projector of labour movement opinion—the observer-agent dichotomy. It does so by analysing the Worker’s response to some of the major issues facing labour during World War I. The peace movement, anti-German attitudes, the persecution of the IWW, and the conscription debates are considered. It will be argued that the Worker attempted to accommodate a wide range of views, but as organised labour’s divisions grew deeper, this position became untenable; ultimately the Westralian Worker was captured by the anti-conscriptionists.
Read the whole thing: PDF.
UPDATE: It’s now in the library.
Now you’ve finished with the railway workers and W.W.I, Rob, consider following up on Don Mountjoy and W.W.II railway workers’ activities. There may still be a few around from the old C.P. cells who could give you a fascinating story. If so, it would be a shame to not do something now, before the last of them die off.
Congrats, Rob!
Btw, I seem to be having trouble with the pdf. It crashed Mozilla when I tried to view it in-browser, so I downloaded it to the desktop and it’s bothering the standalone Acrobat Reader as well (”There was an error opening this document. This viewer cannot decrypt this document.”) It could be me, but it might have been corrupted during the upload.
the pdf worked for me. i only read the bit about the wobblies, which was surprisingly interesting.
Dan, you may need a newer version of Acrobat, that’s the only thing I can think of.
Thanks, Roop. It’s one of those topics, I guess, that you’re either interested in or not; the Wobblies, though, tend to rouse people’s curiosity.
Well done and good luck! Treat yourself to a beer. It’s funny how unusual the superscript-referencing system looks to me though – us scientists have to do the old (Names in Brackets et. al, 2003) style referencing, and one assumes everyone else out there does things the same way!
Congratulations Robert! Looks like an interesting thesis, and huge, too. I’m saving it for later reading.
So what are you going to do now?
Thanks, Joseph.
Well, I’ve still got (at least) two more years of an LLB to get on with, so I’m not planning too far ahead. I won’t rule out further history study in the future, though. In fact, I’d say it’s more than likely that I’ll do some kind of post-grad research.
I’m up to page 53 now. I was reading it before bed last night, and I couldn’t bring myself to put it down!! No joke, I’m finding it really interesting.
But then, I do have a personal interest, I suppose…
I do have a couple of criticisms, but I’ll note them later. I think from memory they were mostly to do with wording, in which case the problem could well have been my tired brain and not your writing. We’ll see!