Ian Turner, Bob Gollan and others. His initial standpoint, expressed mainly in the long article from Th e N e w L e ft i n A ustr a l ia , was to make a sweeping distinction between a "petty bourgeois group of unions" and a "socialist proletarian group of unions", and this critique was given some verisimilitude by his already quite extraordinary reading and erudition.
Shortly afterwards, he published A N e w Br i t a nn ia , in which he questioned the notion that a proletariat, in a broadly Marxist sense, had emerged at all in 19th century Australia. Methodologically, he advanced this view by mechanically associating the development of a proletariat with the necessity of such a proletariat having a proletarian consciousness. He was, of course, wrong about that. Nevertheless, despite this organic methodological error, which he quite frankly acknowledged later, in the Afterword to the 1986 revised edition of A N e w Br i t a nn ia , the book had an extraordinary impact ideologically.
This was because of the robust and iconoclastic social history used by McQueen to demystify the evolution of class relations in Australia, in which he demonstrated a discursive, knowledgeable and witty eye. Typical of this new eye was his chapter about pianos, and the social function of pianos in Australian colonial society became a recurring motif in McQueen's social history. This importance of the piano in Australian social history has been taken up since by many others, but it was McQueen who first, in recent times, discovered and popularised the piano as a major artifact in Australian social history. <В
A N e w Br i t a nn ia a s b e sts e ll e r
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A N e w Br i t a nn ia was the first Australian-written book that caught the wave of the cultural sea change in the 1960s and the 1970s, and for a serious book of history, it was a very major publishing success, and has since sold about 40,000 copies. The only two other books of Australian leftist history or sociology that ever approached it numerically, were Miriam Dixson's book, Th e R ea l M a t i ld a: W o m a n a nd I d e nt < i> i ty i n A ustr a l ia, 1788-1975 (Pelican, Melbourne, 1976), and Keith Windschuttle's book, Unemployment, a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia, (Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1980). But they came later. p> McQueen was subsequently joined in his critique of the traditional Australian Marxist historians by the young Stuart Macintyre. But Macintyre, as it developed, was evolving in a somewhat different direction, into an almost stereotypically moderate social democratic disagreement with the Old Left historians. The debate about Australian labour history that developed around A N e w Br < i> i t a nn ia ; was robust on all sides. From where I sit, it had an altogether healthy outcome. A kind of dialectical reconciliation eventually evolved. McQueen quietly, but quite clearly, relinquished the methodological standpoint of A N e w Br i t a nn ia , and began to incorporate in his subsequent historical work the methodologically obvious: that, in objective terms, a proletariat did emerge in Australia in the 19th century, although it had a limited reformist consciousness. p> For their part, the Old Left historians, with whom he had been arguing, accepted the limitations of their earlier work, in relation to sexism and racism in particular, to which McQueen had drawn attention so vigorously. The late Russell Ward, in particular, went on to write rounded socialist and populist histories of Australia, which remedied the defects to which McQueen had pointed, and took up something of McQueen's robust social history. p> Having established his forte and major piece of intellectual territory as Australian social history, McQueen went on to produce several more wonderful, funny and interesting books of Australian social history, published by Penguin, wh...
