Shopgirls as Consumers: Selling Popular Music in 1920s Australia

The mid-1920s were boom years for the Australian gramophone trade. The most prominent multinational record companies had established local branches, and a handful of new factories produced millions of records for sale on the local market. Department stores joined an established network of music traders in retailing these cultural products. This article explores the labour of women involved in the retail sale of gramophone records in Melbourne. Selling recorded sound animated a charged rhetoric of musical meliorism, class and taste, according to which the value of the product was determined by the supposed musical quality thereof. Australian saleswomen or “shopgirls” were required to perform evidence of their modernity in the commercial encounter. I propose that conceiving of record saleswomen as simultaneously sellers and consumers provides valuable insight into the entangled nature of capitalism and culture in the realm of Australian music. This exploration of the process of commercialisation of recorded music illuminates the connection between labour and culture, leisure and society in colonial modernity.

Migrant Labour and Their “Capitalist Compatriots”: Towards a History of Ethnic Capitalism

The relationship between migration and Australian capitalism has long been a topic of robust scholarly debate in sociology and economics. Researchers in those fields have highlighted how migration has left an indelible imprint on Australian capitalism. By contrast, Australian migration histories have given scant attention to the role ethnic groups played in Australian capitalism. This lack of attention is particularly curious in historical studies of Greek Australia given the significance of small business in facilitating migration and settlement. From Federation onwards, Greek ethnic capitalism - or, more precisely, the relations between Greek migrant labourers and their petite bourgeoisie employers - became a topic of media coverage. In fact, the relations between Greek workers and employers were so important that newspapers routinely reported on the subject. This article examines this media coverage, its racialist and criminalising connotations, and historical relevance. It concludes with some observations on how histories of capitalism can productively engage with the histories of ethnicisation.

Labour in the Technocratic Frame: Macroeconomic Policy and Wages in 1950s Australia

Though the labour market has always been central to macroeconomics, policy has usually had no instrument for intervening directly in the wage-setting process. But in the mid-twentieth century, economists commonly believed that there should be such an instrument. In 1950s Australia, it seemed that the arbitration system could potentially be used as such. This article uses Trevor Swan’s contemporary model of Australian policy in the 1950s to understand the tensions facing policy and explain why wage control seemed to be a solution. The arbitration judges began to consider macroeconomics in their decisions, and the unions adapted by presenting macroeconomic arguments of their own. In full employment conditions, labour had considerable economic power outside the tribunal, and the limitations of arbitration as an instrument of policy raised the shadow of unemployment as an alternative disciplining device.

Surviving School and “Survival Schools”: Resistance, Compulsion and Negotiation in Aboriginal Engagements with Schooling

In Australia, Aboriginal peoples have sought to exploit and challenge settler colonial schooling to meet their own goals and needs, engaging in strategic, diverse and creative ways closely tied to labour markets and the labour movement. Here, we bring together two case studies to illustrate the interplay of negotiation, resistance and compulsion that we argue has characterised Aboriginal engagements with school as a structure within settler colonial capitalism. Our first case study explains how Aboriginal families in Victoria and New South Wales deliberately exploited gaps in school record collecting to maintain mobility during the mid-twentieth century and engaged with labour markets that enabled visits to country. Our second case study explores the Strelley mob’s establishment of independent, Aboriginal-controlled bilingual schools in the 1970s to maintain control of their labour and their futures. Techniques of survival developed in and around schooling have been neglected by historians, yet they demonstrate how schooling has been a strategic political project, both for Aboriginal peoples and the Australian settler colonial state.

Thinking Capitalism from the Bedroom: The Politics of Location and the Uses of (Feminist, Queer, Crip) Theory

The New Histories of Capitalism (NHC) boast a foundational narrative that decries the supposed elision of the “economic” during the long reign cultural and social history. Yet, at the same time, the NHC are themselves based on a recognition that ideas of “economy” are not natural, and hence must be historicised using the same intellectual tools that powered the cultural turn in the first place. In practice, however, the demographics and structuring assumptions of the “new” histories of capitalism are remarkably similar to the “old” labour and economic history. Both its historical actors and its practitioners remain, by and large, white cisgender men engaged with normative visions of “capitalism” and “economy” that privilege finance, waged labour, business and trade. As the NHC take shape within Australia, this article highlights the imperative to learn from - but crucially, not appropriate - the expertise of communities who have long theorised and critiqued “capitalism” due to their subordinate position within its cultural and economic hierarchies. Using examples from feminist, queer and crip theory, I argue that the knowledges of those marginal to or excluded from waged labour, capital accumulation and material consumption constitute a rich repository of intellectual tools with potential to engender more robust historicisation of “capitalism” and the worlds it helps create.

Nature, Labour and Agriculture: Towards Common Ground in New Histories of Capitalism

Goods developed and exchanged in the production of capital value are commodified nature that is acted upon by humans. Yet new histories of capitalism have for the most part ignored nature as impacted by this economic, social, and environmental system, and the agency of nature in commodification processes. This article responds to the call from a leading historian of capitalism to consider “the countryside” as a neglected geography of human-nature relations that is integral to generating capital value. It asks whether co-exploitation of “the soil and the worker,” as Marx stated of industrialising agriculture in Britain, also occurred in Australia. To answer this, I have drawn together histories of environment, economy, and labour that are concerned with soils and labour for agriculture, which has resulted in a twofold conclusion. First, it is a feature of capitalist production in Australia that the tenacity of “yeoman” or family farming as the model for Australian market-based agriculture did not exploit labour. Farming has, however, transformed Australian soils in many places from their natural state. This transformation is viewed as necessary from a resource perspective but damaging from an ecological view. Second, Australian historians of labour and environment do not participate in international debates about whether or how to consider the historical intersection of nature and labour, or, indeed, nature, labour, and capitalism. The reasons for this are historical and methodological. The environment-labour divide among historians is relevant as global environmental and social crises motivate the search for new sources and relational methods to historicise these connected crises.