BY PAT BREWER
CANBERRA — An added sense of immediacy will be added to the next National Labour History Conference — because it will be immersed in a labour struggle of its own.
According to conference organiser Phil Griffiths, the conference happens in the midst of a four year struggle to save the Noel Butlin Archives, the most significant repository of trade union records in the country.
The archives, which at 13 shelf kilometres are even larger than the national library's manuscript collection, are threatened with closure by the administration of the Australian National University.
The ANU's initial announcement four years ago that it would close the archives was met with a fierce campaign by historians and unionists, who eventually organised a three-year rescue package. That ran out this year and, while the archives have been given a further $100,000 one-off funding package, the archives' supporters must now campaign to fund and manage the archives properly.
Organisers plan to hold tours of, and a reception in, the archives during the April 19-21 conference, to raise its profile amongst historians and unionists.
This year's biennial conference, the seventh, will focus on the core themes in labour movement history of work, organisation and struggle and feature more than 130 individual contributions from both labour movement activists and academics.
The conference is timed to coincide with the centenary of the federal parliamentary Labor Party and this party's role within the labour movement will be one major theme, along with streams dealing with the union movement, the Communist Party, Canberra labour history and the Cold War.
Of especial interest will be the theme of the final day, April 21: Pacific labour history. Guest speakers include Joses Tuhanuku, the founder of the Solomon Islands General Workers Union and John Paska, the general secretary of the PNG Trades Union Congress.
Special emphasis has also been given to the theme of racism with a major session chaired by Henry Reynolds featuring Marilyn Lake, Bain Attwood and Sue Taffe, who will examine the campaigns for Aboriginal rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Another strand in this theme will be a Marxist reassessment of racism in Australia challenging the dominant insistence that working-class people were the main force for racism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Conference organisers expect a large turnout and say that, due to sponsorship from unions and labour clubs, they have managed to lower registration costs to encourage public attendance.
Registration starts on April 19 at 9am in ANU's Copeland Building foyer; the conference sessions start at 10am.
For more information, call (02) 6125 2347, email <labhist@coombs.anu.edu> or visit the conference web site at <http://histrsss.anu.edu.au/lhconf.html>.