Mark Hearn

Biographic Data

ID419839
NAMEMark Hearn
GIVEN NAMESMark
FAMILY NAMEHearn
SIGNATUREHEARN M
AFFILIATIONSMacquarie University
ORCID0000-0001-8248-9556
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS55
TOTAL CITATIONS19
AUTHOR COUNT55
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1969
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX3

  • Narrating modern crisis and acceleration: Re-reading Carl Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna

    Mark HearnARTICLERethinking History2026

    In the late nineteenth century, the economic, social and cultural accelerations of western modernity triggered intensifying reactions, including racism, nationalism and communitarian politics, that sought refuge in tradition from the threat of change. Conversely, cultural movements emerged that embraced the dynamics of innovation. Carl Schorske’s Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, immersed in the complexity of these contesting responses …

  • Most Remarkable Consequences’: Governing the Commonwealth Franchise, 1902–03

    Open AccessMark HearnARTICLEAustralian Historical Studies2026

    A gendered and racialised electoral franchise was established following Federation, from the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 to the federal elections held on 16 December 1903, the first conducted by an electorate of all white adult male and female voters. The argument traces the social imaginary of disenfranchising the indigenous, enfranchising women while limiting the terms of inclusion, performing participation in the election ca…

  • Reading the Future: Late Modern Histories of the Fin De Siècle

    Open AccessMark HearnARTICLEHistória da Historiografia…2025

    Late modern histories of the fin de siècle have projected present dilemmas and their premonitions of the future into historical analysis. Recent historiographical focus on the global nature of the fin de siècle has also reframed interpretations, both complicating and enriching the history of the period and its relationship with present future. This article explores how historians have in recent decades returned to the fin de siècle and the aspira…

  • Negotiating ‘a Realm of Public Power and Responsibility’: Labour’s Social Imaginary of Governance at Federation

    Mark HearnARTICLEAustralian Historical Studies2024

  • Interpreting Eric Hobsbawm's History of the Fin de Siècle ‘Twilight Zone’

    Open AccessMark HearnARTICLEThe Historical Journal2023References: 7

    Eric Hobsbawm's account of the fin de siècle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its post-First World War aftermath, raises the questions of how historians place themselves autobiographically in their histories, and how personal history informs their interpretations. A focus on the fin de siècle reveals Hobsbawm exploring a cultural social democracy as an alternative to the market capitalism that provided the turbulent dynam…

  • A single Australia? Alan Atkinson’s narrative construction of late modernity

    Mark HearnARTICLEHistory Australia2022

    Across three key texts, the historian Alan Atkinson has projected an unease with twenty-first-century Australia into the past development of the Australian nation. Atkinson traces a ‘singularity’ from the ‘age of Australian Federation ... fixed on the Centre as the pivot of a new national domain’. By the early twenty-first century, for him, the nation had become an all-consuming focus of identity, degraded by globalisation. Atkinson’s ‘single Aus…

  • The fin de siècle and the multiple temporalities of historical periodization

    Mark HearnARTICLERethinking History2022Cited by: 1References: 6

    Developing an effective theory of periodization requires an engagement with the multilayered figurative constructions of historical time made by historians and historical actors. The fin de siècle c1890-1914, a period variously interpreted as reflecting an historical endpoint or an anxious transition to twentieth century modernity, provides a compelling focus for this engagement. John Zammito has argued that ‘[Reinhart] Koselleck’s formal theory …

  • Managing “Self‐Preservation”: Charles Pearson's National Life and Character and the Early Australian Commonwealth

    Open AccessMark Hearn, Ian TregenzaARTICLEAustralian Journal of Politics &…2019

    In National Life and Character (1893), Charles Pearson argued that the breakdown in “character” threatening social cohesion in Britain was a phenomenon that was replicated on a global scale in the late nineteenth century. The economic and technological progress that characterised the industrial revolution in Britain had stimulated urbanisation, and unleashed, Pearson claimed, a “bestial element in man”, degrading the quality of civic and economic…

  • Originally French but Afterwards Cosmopolitan”: Australians Interpret the Fin de Siècle

    Mark HearnARTICLEJournal of Australian Studies2019

    From the early 1890s, application of the term fin de siècle functioned as an ambiguous metaphor that could symbolise hope invested in progress and technological innovation, or a fear of national decline. The term was most consistently employed to regulate the behaviour of women, in the reinforcement of prevailing gender roles and in resistance to the emergence of the New Woman, identified as an unwelcome embodiment of the fin de siècle and feared…

  • Contesting ‘the Ballarat cry’: Interpreting the unstable narrative of trade and race in the 1903 federal election

    Mark HearnARTICLEHistory Australia2018

    Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s 1903 election ‘Ballarat cry’ of ‘fiscal peace and preferential trade for a white Australia’ provided a peroration that he deployed in speeches throughout the campaign to rally popular support for his nation-building programme. A narrative of trade and race was designed to avoid an unstable or hostile future by reconstituting security within the British Empire and white identity, buttressed by immigration restriction…

  • Industrial Defence Against the Whole World”: Deakinite New Protection as Narrative of Global Modernity

    Mark HearnARTICLEJournal of Australian Studies2018

    As it evolved towards the New Protection program from 1906, Deakinite protectionism manifested as a historicised narrative of modernity: an attempt to impose a rationale of nation-building over the heterogeneous and unstable impact of new economic relations and technologies, and the tense dynamics of competition between nations. History was invoked by actors fashioning the nation-building task in post Federation Australia as they claimed to make …

  • Compelled by the circumstance of our time and situation’: Alfred Deakin’s 1907 defence statement as narrative of fin de siècle acceleration

    Mark HearnARTICLEHistory Australia2016

    Historians have focused on anxiety over the rise of Asia and concern over imperial rivalries as motivating factors in stimulating the development of Australian defence policy in the post-Federation period. Yet these factors cannot entirely explain the imperatives that shaped Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s statement on defence policy in December 1907, and the key proposals Deakin outlined in his speech – to create an Australian naval squadron and …

  • Anzac Labour: Workplace Cultures in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War

    Mark HearnARTICLEAustralian Historical Studies2016

    Anzac Labour: Workplace Cultures in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War." Australian Historical Studies, 47(1), pp. 182–183

  • John Dwyer's London Stories

    Open AccessMark Hearn, Mark Hearn Mark HearnARTICLELabour History2015

    This manuscript provides an analysis of working-class radical John Dwyer’s life and work in London, and the acquisition of beliefs and habits of behaviour in the East End of the imperial capital that shaped Dwyer’s subsequent Australian experience. The documents that Dwyer preserved of his London life after arriving in Sydney in 1888 reflected a strong impulse to maintain a good character dedicated to fulfilling his duties, and thereby accumulati…

  • Bound with the Empire: Narratives of Race, Nation, and Empire in the Australian Labor Party’s Defence Policy, 1901–21

    Mark HearnARTICLEWar & Society2013References: 6

    From federation in 1901 and into the post-First World War period, the Australian Labor Party attempted to manage the competing tensions of nationalism, empire loyalty, and a White Australia, that may be described as Labor’s empire nationalism. This article traces its influence on the Party’s defence policy, identifying the development of Labor’s empire nationalism in the period before the First World War; the relationship between Labor’s empire n…

  • A Three-Cornered Life, the Historian WK Hancock

    Mark HearnARTICLEJournal of Australian Studies2012

  • The Benefits of Industrial Organisation'? The Second Fisher Government and Fin de Siècle Modernity in Australia

    Open AccessMark Hearn, Mark Hearn Mark HearnARTICLELabour History2012References: 1

    Although Labor achieved an extraordinary political ascendancy at the 1910 federal election, Andrew Fisher's post-election speeches and interviews revealed that he remained troubled by two dilemmas: whether Labor could effectively control the transmission of its message in the public sphere and the degree to which Labor could impose its legislative agenda. Fisher stressed the need for Labor to establish a network of labour dailies. Labor also comm…

  • Reinterpreting the Second Fisher Government

    Open AccessMark Hearn, Mark Hearn Mark Hearn et al.ARTICLELabour History2012References: 2

    At the April 1910 general election, the federal Labor Party, under the leadership of Andrew Fisher, became the first party of its type to form a majority government anywhere in the world. Yet the second Fisher Labor government of 1910-13 has been largely neglected by labour historians and political scientists alike. The task of this introduction and broader thematic edition is twofold. First, it explains, and places in global and comparative cont…

  • Representative Lives? Biography and Labour History

    Open AccessMark Hearn, Mark Hearn Mark Hearn et al.ARTICLELabour History2011References: 3

    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 Whi…

  • Containing “Contamination”: Cardinal Moran and Fin de Siècle Australian National Identity, 1888-1911

    Open AccessMark HearnARTICLEJournal of Religious History2010

    Cardinal Patrick Moran, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney 1884–1911, believed that Australian Catholicism would flourish with the emergence of the new nation through Federation in 1901, provided that Australians turned away from foreign influences, including anarchism and nihilism. Moran also sought to use Australia to “Christianise” the enormous population of China, and believed that Chinese immigration could make a useful contribution to nation…

  • Developing a critical discourse: Michel Foucault and the cult of solidarity

    Mark HearnARTICLECritical Discourse Studies2008References: 13

    Australian trade unions face the organizational and ethical challenge of advanced liberalism and its privileging of an enterprise culture, an ideological hegemony which unions, with their traditions of solidarity and collectivism, struggle to resist. While it has been argued that critical discourse studies offer a research methodology to develop politically engaged resistance strategies, CDS has not subjected the values and language of union mobi…

  • Productivity and patriotism: The management narrative of New South Wales Rail Chief Commissioner James Fraser, 1917–1929

    Mark HearnARTICLEBusiness History2008Cited by: 4References: 11

    The management narrative of James Fraser, the Chief Commissioner of the NSW Railways and Tramway Department, 1917–1929, provided the defining values of the Department's organizational discourse and reflected the aims of transformational leadership, inspiring managers and staff to share the values he advocated. Fraser sought to impose a regime of disciplined productivity upon rail and tram workers based on scientific management techniques, and lin…

  • Brave New Workplace: How Individual Contracts are Changing Our Jobs

    Open AccessMark Hearn, David PeetzARTICLELabour History2008

    The push for individual contracts for employees overturns a century of collective efforts to create basic rights and a 'fair go' in Australian workplaces. David Peetz delves underneath the layers of corporate and government doublespeak that surround this most heated issue to uncover what is really happening in relations between employers and employees. He explains who benefits from individual contracts and who doesn't, and how this will change th…

  • Cultivating an Australian Sentiment: John Christian Watson's Narrative of White Nationalism

    Mark HearnARTICLENational Identities2007Cited by: 1References: 3

    Contemporary observers and historians have interpreted Australia's first Labor Prime Minister, John Christian Watson, as an ideal leader for Labor's early participation in nation-building following the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Little attention has been paid to the values Watson brought to Labor's participation in nation-building. Race, defence and the ‘cultivation of an Australian sentiment’ formed the recurring them…

  • Making Liberal Citizens: Justice Higgins and His Witnesses

    Open AccessMark HearnARTICLELabour History2007

    In the Commonwealth Arbitration Court's treatment of women workers the contradictions and tensions of liberal citizenship in post-federation Australia are sharply manifest. A meaningful sense of citizenship required economic rights and economic independence as a basis for participation in the public sphere, a civic participation offered to men but denied to women. The commonwealth and state industrial tribunals played a key role in defining the g…