Humphrey McQueen

Early Life and Academic Career

McQueen was born in Brisbane to a working-class family that were active in the Australian Labor Party. He was educated at Marist College Ashgrove, and later edited the Queensland Young Labor newsletter. He completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours at the University of Queensland in 1965. McQueen was an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia, campaigning against conscription as chairman of the Melbourne-based Revolutionary Socialist Group in 1968. His organisational engagement shaped his interest in Maoist and Gramscian theory, influencing his subsequent historical work. From 1966-1969 he was employed as a teacher at Glen Waverley High, Victoria. In 1970, He moved to Canberra, where he taught Australian history at the Australian National University from 1970-1974 It was there that he met and befriended the historian, Manning Clark.

Convicts and Rebels

McQueen’s early academic writing was intent on dispelling the approaches to labour history generated by the Australian Old Left, especially Russel Ward's The Australian Legend. His critique was first developed in Convicts and Rebels, in which McQueen contested the Australian Whig history associated with the Old Left. As he argued:

"Ward uses class to mean nothing more than that group of people who came to the colony as convicts and ignores all social and national divisions within this category. It is misleading to clothe the convicts in the aura of class struggle since for its first fifty years Australia did not have a class structure, but only a deformed stratification which had itself been vomited up by the maelstrom which was delineating class in Britain. If a class formula must be given to the majority of the convicts it must be lumpen-proletariat or petit- bourgeoisie” McQueen, 1968

In the article, McQueen doubted the authenticity of a democratic and egalitarian tradition emanating from Australia’s convict history. He challenged the egalitarian aspect of the tradition, highlighting the prominence of racism in convict society.

A New Britannia

In 1970, McQueen wrote A New Britannia, an historical analysis of the emergence and development of the Australian labour movement. It influentially argued that the history of the Australian labour movement, from colonisation to Australian federation (1788-1901), should be understood as an extension of Imperialism within the British Empire. The argument challenged existing account of the labour movement emerging from the Australian Old Left, which had mythologised the nation-building and democratic nature of the movement. In seeking to challenge accounts of Australian history presented in the Old Left, McQueen established the grounds to contest the Whig tradition in Australian scholarship. He identified that British imperialism cannot be separated from the experience of capitalism in Australia, and that Australian identity should be reconsidered in light of the role that racism and Patriarchy had played in development of the Australian labour movement. Together with an application of British New Left theorists, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, the approach redefined the nature of Australian historical enquiry, which would prove to be influential in the discipline of history.

Receptions of the book were mixed. Terry Irving in reviewing A New Britannia, highlighted the work’s theoretical legacy, but also the need to produce a more developed theoretical engagement. He stated that A New Britannia “Will provoke angry discussion, but I hope it will also provoke the new left to develop the methodology necessary to write a new history”. This observation would influence the development of another hallmark of the Australian New Left, Class Structure in Australian History.