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This paper explores the dynamic by which \"labourism\" potentially undermines \"mutualism\" by examining the experience of Westfund under Australian Labour Party governments. The principle of self-help and the act of organising to provide mutual benefits have strong traditions in the labour movement. Westfund was a health fund established in 1953 by the Western District Branch of the Miners' Federation in Lithgow New South Wales, largely to provide medical benefits to miners. Organised labour historically has also campaigned for state provision of welfare services. In Australia, the notion of \"Labourism\" refers to a particular approach adopted by organised labour whereby they represented their interests directly in the political sphere through the Australian Labor Party. When the labour movement achieved its aim of a more universal health care system under the Whitlam ALP government, Westfund chose to work within the system in order to survive. Mutualism and labourism co-existed. The subsequent introduction of Medicare by the Hawke ALP government brought changes which created a more threatening business environment for health funds. In this instance to mitigate the danger it posed to their business, Westfund chose to oppose more aggressively aspects of the universal health system. Westfund weakened its institutional ties to the labour movement, and became more autonomous from its roots as a mutual.

Labour biography is an exercise in shaping meaning from the unruly experience of a life immersed in activism. The biographer facilitates the evolution of a labour tradition with lessons of solidarity and social justice, resistance and betrayal. The complex dynamics of leadership and activism have compelled labour biographers from H.V. Evatt's study of William Holman, to the recently published first volume of Jenny Hocking's biography of Gough Whitlam. Outstanding biography is prompted not only by the qualities of the subject but also by a tension between leadership and the tests of war and economic depression, post-war reconstruction, and above all the progressive renewal of Australian society that characterises the historic mission of the labour movement. The article also explores how women's 'distinctive class subjectivity' might be drawn into recasting the terms of not only describing the role of women in the labour movement, but also recasting our wider understanding of Australian labour history.

Arthur Rae (1860-1943) was a New Zealand shearer and labourer who moved to Australia in 1889. The son of a long-serving official in the New Zealand railway's union, he became an organiser and later a prominent leader in the Australian Workers Union (AWU) during the 1890s and into the early years of the twentieth century. In 1891 he began his somewhat sporadic career in Labour politics as one of the first Labour members to be elected to the New South Wales Parliament in 1891. Rae's activism was informed by his deep commitment to late nineteenth socialist ideals and to ameliorating the condition of working people. His commitment to these socialist ideals and his refusal to compromise them were the determining factors in his labour movement career. It eventually cost him his career in, and membership of, his union and relegated him to the periphery of Labour Party politics. Rae's struggle was to find the ways to proselytise his socialist vision for Australian workers despite his marginalisation within mainstream labour institutions. That he was able to do this over a period of almost three decades is a testament to the powerful role individuals can play making labour history.

This study explores the long- and short-term backdrop to the Hawke-Keating government's decision in 1984-85 to include the US banking giant, Citibank, in the select group of 16 foreign banks granted an Australian banking licence. Such a development ran counter to decades of mutual distrust between the Australian labour movement, large foreign banks in general, and US multinational firms in particular. It was also by no means inevitable. Citibank's success is attributable neither to structural imperatives per se nor to superior strategic acumen. Rather, it derived from a shifting long-term interplay between structural factors, strategic and ideological intent and chance events. In particular, we highlight Citibank's emergence as a significant player in non-bank financial services activity in Australian during the 1960s and '70s, an emergence that reflected persistent lobbying, well-timed market intervention, and serendipity. Equally, we argue that Federal Labor's ultimate embrace of selected foreign banks, and of Citibank in particular, is best understood as a marriage of convenience. We also present evidence to show that the outbreak of amity between Labor and Citibank was by no means assured and that the immediate backdrop involved a complex process of positioning, probing, stand-off and trade-off between Labor neo-liberals, Reserve Bank and Treasury officials and Citibank executives.

The articles drawn together in the thematic section, 'Struggling for Recognition: the Individual in Labour History', reveal the diversity of experience and interpretation that opens before the historian seeking to understand and explain how often marginalised historical actors engaged in political or industrial activism, or simply coped with their circumstances. Struggles for security, justice and recognition formed a constant preoccupation and stimulus to action for the subjects under discussion. This article addresses the issue of how historians are to stand in relation to their chosen biographical subjects, and explores various forms of innovative methodology that may assist historians to construct a rigorous analysis. A focus on gender also clarifies that the construction of identity is a crucial element in the subject's response to class, nation and race, and biography can play an important role in exploring how these dynamics are developed and expressed. Finally, the article focuses on the relationship between Australian labour historiography and the study of the individual.

'Labouring Lives' was the autumn conference for the British Society for the Study of Labour History organised by the University of Manchester Communist Party Biographical Project and the Dictionary of Labour Biography. It was held in Manchester, 3 November 2001.

Review(s) of: Labour Legends and Russian Gold, by Kevin Morgan, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2006. Pp. iv + 315. 18.99 Paper.