People's History of Australia

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 na...

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 dealing with sexism, homophobia, racism, and other oppressions &#82...

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...

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 publ...

Throughout Australian history, Chinese workers in Australia have been demonised for their alleged enthusiasm for undercutting white workers and happily embracing terrible working conditions from the 19th century until the present day. Fortunately, these racist myths are precisely that - myths. From the arrival of the first Chinese migrants in the 1840s, Chinese workers in Australia have an extraor...

Throughout Australia's history, racism has proven to be a remarkably effective weapon in dividing different groups from each other, despite them sharing the same common enemies and the same interests. Vicious anti-Aboriginal racism was deeply rooted in Australian culture from an early stage, and during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, there is minimal history of joint struggle between whit...

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, deliberately confining women to only the lowest-paying jobs, refusing to employ women as steelworkers, and making u...

In mid-2016, the University of Sydney abruptly announced that it would be closing down its Sydney College of the Arts campus. Within the space of a few months, the internationally-renowned arts school, which had produced scores of famous graduates and offered an almost unique education in visual and fine arts, would be gone, and its students shunted off to another university. Fortunately, students...

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 eve...

When the British Empire invaded and colonised Australia in 1788, the new ruling class had a problem - there was no pre-existing working class in Australia waiting around to work for them. Their solution was to bring tens of thousands of convict prisoners here against their will as a labour force. Despite often horrendous working conditions and a brutal regime of punishment, convicts fought back, f...

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In 1996, newly elected politician Pauline Hanson swept to national prominence after making an extraordinarily racist and inflammatory maiden speech in federal parliament. Capitalising on her notoriety, Hanson announced plans to form a new political party, One Nation, with local branches and a mass membership, and polls indicated she would win widespread support. Anti-racists, however, had other id...

In the 1940s, with an influx of thousands of new members, the Communist Party of Australia established the Marx Schools - one of the most remarkable experiments in Australian educational history. The schools ran from 10am until 10pm every day of the week, and offered extensive courses in socialist theory, the practicalities of union organising, how to chair meetings and give public speeches, in an...

In early 1973, over a thousand predominantly Aboriginal workers rose up on strike against their employers in the cotton fields of rural NSW, where they were paid pitiful wages, pushed to work for over ten hours a day, denied rest breaks, and even doused with toxic pesticides as planes sprayed it over fields while workers were still in them. The strike took place at the height of the cotton season...

In the 1970s and 1980s, Turkish migrants in Melbourne established a thriving working class culture - founding social centres, organising strikes, waging political campaigns, and running theatre groups, language classes, sporting teams and other cultural activities. Today we chat with human rights lawyer and researcher Eda Seyhan, who's conducted extensive research into this extraordinary movement....

The Pilbara is one of the remotest and most economically significant regions not just in Australia, but in the world, with almost indescribably huge quantities of iron ore. In this episode, we chat with Alexis Vassiley about the epic story of Pilbara unionism, from the rise of mining unionism in the 1960s, to the peak of union power in the 1970s when the Pilbara was one of the most militant union...

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 believed workers should form unions not just to win better wages and conditions, but to overthrow bosses and take over their workplaces themselves, and within a few years they'd recruited thousands of mem...

In June 1973, the Ford Motor Company's factory in Broadmeadows, Melbourne, exploded with protest. Thousands of migrant workers, who were subject to brutal working conditions and racist company management, staged a 12-week strike, and when their own union officials attempted to force them back to work, they rioted and smashed up the factory - in the process winning huge wage increases and basic res...

On 24 June 1978, thousands of people poured onto the streets for Sydney's first ever Mardi Gras - a joyful celebration of gender and sexual diversity, and a defiant statement against state-sanctioned homophobia which viciously criminalised and discriminated against LGBTQI people. In today's episode we chat with Peter Murphy, who was there on the night as police brutally attacked the parade, and as...

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. Within days, over 1,000,000 workers across Australia had gone on strike, O'Shea was released from prison, and the repressive 'Penal Powers' laws he was jailed under, which made strikes illegal, had been rendered dead. Strike rates exploded...

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, our democracy, and our way of life. In this episode we chat with historian Robert Bollard and...

In 1971, a Trotskyist revolutionary was elected as the mayor of Leichhardt Municipal Council in Sydney - one of the most unusual developments in Australian political history. This Trotskyist revolutionary was Nick Origlass, who over the course of his life fought the fascist New Guard in the streets of Kings Cross, led thousands of Balmain ironworkers on strike against their own union's policy of s...

In this episode, we cover the spectacular wave of protests against the 1971 sporting tour of Australia by the white supremacist Springbok rugby union team. Tens of thousands took to the streets and directly disrupted Springbok matches, while thousands of unionists made the tour almost impossible by refusing to staff flights that carried the Springbok, work in hotels that allowed them to stay, or s...

In 1929, the world plunged into the most catastrophic economic crisis in modern history – the Great Depression. With unemployment in Australia standing at over 33% of the workforce by the early 1930s, we look at how unemployed workers across Sydney organised on a massive scale and fought, in the face of vicious police and government repression, for the right of all people to have access to housing...

Welcome to People's History of Australia! We're a new podcast focusing on the history of ordinary people in Australia coming together to collectively fight for a better life. In this episode, we cover the brilliant story of 300 migrant women who went on strike against brutal sweatshop conditions in their textile factory in Brunswick, Melbourne, in 1981. None of the women had ever been on strike be...