The Victorian Labor party came into being in the midst of the great strikes of the early 1890s, and in the shadow of a crippling economic depression that was to send trade unionism into retreat throughout Australia.
In The People s Party, Frank Bongiorno gives a lively account of the infant Labor Party s attempts to find common ground between the competing demands of inner-city workers and farmers, Catholics and Protestants, trade unionists and disaffected liberals, teetotallers and boozers, socialists and feminists. The Victorian Labor Party emerges from these pages as a process rather than a thing, as contested ground rather than conquered territory .
For so long treated as a poor cousin of its New South Wales counterpart, the Victorian Labor Party at last has a history that does justice to its complex and distinctive tradition, and suggests new ways of thinking about the history of Labor in politics throughout Australia.
- ISBN13 9780522847383
- Publish Date 30 September 1992
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 29 May 2007
- Publish Country AU
- Imprint Melbourne University Press
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 280
- Language English