Diane Kirkby
Biographic Data
| ID | 520222 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diane Kirkby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diane |
| FAMILY NAME | Kirkby |
| SIGNATURE | KIRKBY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | La Trobe University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3288-4819 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 54 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Kerreen Margaret Reiger (1946–2026): Feminist Scholar of Mothers’ Labours
As a Stewardess Sees It: Locating Experience and Emotion in the Work of Australian Ship Stewardesses
This first study undertaken of Australian ship stewardesses draws attention to specific aspects of working in the male-dominated maritime industry. It takes a feminist methodology that looks to women-authored sources to find evidence of experience not visible in traditional union and business archives. The article makes a case for “Letters to the Editor” as a source for accessing emotions in labour history. These letters allow women’s voices to b…
The Archive, Digitisation and Labour’s History: An Introduction
Nina Trige Andersen, Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations 1950-2015
Lines of Exchange: Australian and New Zealand Women on Carnegie and Fulbright Programme Awards c. 1930s–1980s
Narratives of international educational exchange programmes such as the US–sponsored Fulbright and the Commonwealth–centred Carnegie grants reveal the formative role these exchanges played in extending the geographical, scholarly, and professional boundaries of women’s worlds. Notably, these award schemes influenced, shaped and expanded the career aspirations and professional experiences of a group of women from Australia and New Zealand. In this…
‘Australian sailors wanted’: Labour supply and Australian shipping, c. 1870–c. 1914
In the pre‐1914 era Australia did not develop an ocean‐going merchant navy. The problem is well recognised in previous studies that assumed that it was high Australian wages that made the operational cost of deep‐sea vessels uncompetitive on a global scale. This article reconstructs historical shifts in the Australian market for a seagoing workforce and demonstrates there was low recruitment of Australian labour. Drawing on new sources and inspir…
An Editorial View
‘No One Here … Understands the Problem of Aboriginal Art’: The Fulbright Program, Aboriginal Studies and Aboriginal Art, 1950–65
From 1950, the Fulbright Program of academic exchange brought a stream of visiting American scholars to Australia and Australians to the USA. The first wave of these scholars to study Aboriginal society and culture, principally through the discipline of anthropology, played a significant role in developing the field of Aboriginal studies, and in bringing Aboriginal art, music and dance into greater public prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s. …
An Undesirable Type of Fulbright Grantee’: Women, Gender and Transgression in the Cold War Asia–Pacific Region
This article takes the world’s most far-reaching scheme for fostering global leadership, the Fulbright Program, to illuminate the manifestation of gender difference in the elite world of educational exchange. Previously unexplored archives offer a rare insight into the way men in power judged, defined and reported on women they deemed to be ‘an inappropriate type’ of grantee. At a time when speaking out publicly or privately against the United St…
"If You Thought about Those Things, Your Life Would Be a Misery!" Mental Health and the Safety of Seafarers
Seafaring has long been recognised as a hazardous occupation, with the ever-present risk of disease, drowning or serious, often fatal, injuries from fires, accidents, shipwrecks or simply falling overboard. Health and safety concerns about physical dangers came to include illness from toxic substances but only recently has attention turned to the psychological hazards of shipboard living and working under conditions of isolation. A recent survey …
Academic ambassadors, Pacific allies: Australia, America and the Fulbright Program
This book recounts the history of the Fulbright Program in Australia, locating academic exchange in the context of US cultural diplomacy and revealing a complex relationship between governments, publicly funded research and the integrity of academic independence. The study is the first in-depth analysis of the Fulbright exchange program in a single country. Drawing on previously unexplored archives and a new oral history, the authors investigate …
These Labourers in the Field of Public Work: Librarians, Discrimination and the Meaning of Equal Pay
Librarianship has long been recognised as a numerically female-dominated occupation. Despite demonstrating a standard pattern of a sex-segregated labour force, it has suffered neglect in historical studies of women’s work. This article positions Australia’s librarians in the history of white-collar public service workers, and librarianship as illustrative of important themes of twentieth-century women’s labour history. For smart, educated, ambiti…
Labour: The New Zealand Labour Party 1916–2016 / One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia
Labour: The New Zealand Labour Party 1916–2016 / One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia." Australian Historical Studies, 49(3), pp. 420–421
Law, history, colonialism: The reach of empire
Drawing on the latest contemporary research from an internationally acclaimed group of scholars, Law, history, colonialism brings together the disciplines of law, history and post-colonial studies in a singular exploration of imperialism. In fresh, innovative essays from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection offers exciting new perspectives on the length and breadth of empire. As issues of native title, truth and reconciliation com…
Connecting work identity and politics in the internationalism of ‘seafarers … who share the seas’
‘We seafarers ... who share the seas’ is the expression of a collective identity and mutual responsibility. This article examines that collective identity among members of the Seamen’s Union of Australia and asks, what did internationalism mean in practice to seafarers themselves? Employing an oral history method, coupled with a reading of the union’s own printed media, it explores the seafarers’ understanding of internationalism that they claime…
Second to None in the International Fight’: Australian Seafarers Internationalism and Maritime Unions Against Apartheid
The participation of trade unions in the anti-apartheid movement is a subject which arguably merits more attention. This article brings into focus a group of unionists whose activism against apartheid was in the forefront of key initiatives. Drawing on new research the argument recounts the role of Australian seafarers on the international stage, particularly its association with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and shows how knowledg…
Indian Seamen and Australian Unions Fighting for Labour Rights: "The Real Facts of the Lascars' Case" of 1939
In 1939, the outbreak of war prompted strikes by Indian seafarers across the empire. This article traces events in Australia as Indian seafarers asserted their labour rights and in doing so contested their exploitative working conditions as “lascars” or the seagoing equivalent of shore-based indentured “coolie” labour. While the Australian government responded in ways that reinforced the “coolie” status of Indian seafarers, the Australian labour …
Social Movements, Internationalism and the Cold War: Perspectives on Labour History
This article deals with European Nuclear Disarmament's (END) difficult positioning in the Cold War of the 1980s. Its vision was for a humanistic socialism from below that would be capable of breaking up the Cold War and unite a divided Europe that in turn could act as a possible "third way" between the liberal capitalism of the USA and the orthodox Communism of the Soviet Union. However, it proved difficult to build these alliances across the Col…
Pursuing Trade Union Internationalism: Australia's Waterside Workers and the International Transport Workers Federation, c. 1950-70
© 2016 Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. When the Australian Waterside Workers Federation (WWF) decided in 1971 to join the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) it overturned decades of antipathy to the ITF. We ask why union officials held this view and why the union now changed its mind at this particular moment. We argue that while union power was strong in the immediate post-war decades, the WWF was able to pursue…
A Design for Learning? A Case Study of the Hidden Costs of Curriculum and Organisational Change
Like the sector itself, the study of higher education has expanded exponentially in recent decades. There are now many scholarly accounts of the impact of neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies on teaching and learning practices in universities internationally, and of the managerialist forms of governance accompanying them (e.g.
Never a Machine for Propaganda’? The Australian-American Fulbright Program and Australia's Cold War
Some overlap in personnel between the Australian-American Fulbright board and those advising Menzies on anti-communist legislation and the 1951 referendum, including former Chief Justice J. G. Latham, raises questions about the politicisation of the Fulbright program over this period. A careful reconstruction of the Australian scheme's founding years reveals, however, that the program resisted becoming a simple instrument of Cold War foreign poli…
Those Knights of the Pen and Pencil: Women Journalists and Cultural Leadership of the Women's Movement in Australia and the United States
Journalism has been crucial to progressive political movements, and the work of journalists has provided the cultural leadership necessary for recruiting members and advancing the cause. This cultural leadership is explored through the journalism of three women who in Australia and the United States, wrote for a labour and socialist readership and also edited a periodical. Combining paid work and activism, journalism gave them an occupation that …
Past Law, Present Histories
This collection brings methods and questions from humanities, law and social sciences disciplines to examine different instances of lawmaking. Contributors explore the problematic of past law in present historical analysis across indigenous Australia and New Zealand, from post-Franco Spain to current international law and maritime regulation, from settler colonial humanitarian
Books
In This Issue
Beer, Glorious Beer”: Gender Politics and Australian Popular Culture
Law, history, colonialism: The reach of empire
Drawing on the latest contemporary research from an internationally acclaimed group of scholars, Law, history, colonialism brings together the disciplines of law, history and post-colonial studies in a singular exploration of imperialism. In fresh, innovative essays from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection offers exciting new perspectives on the length and breadth of empire. As issues of native title, truth and reconciliation com…
Never a Machine for Propaganda’? The Australian-American Fulbright Program and Australia's Cold War
Some overlap in personnel between the Australian-American Fulbright board and those advising Menzies on anti-communist legislation and the 1951 referendum, including former Chief Justice J. G. Latham, raises questions about the politicisation of the Fulbright program over this period. A careful reconstruction of the Australian scheme's founding years reveals, however, that the program resisted becoming a simple instrument of Cold War foreign poli…
Those Knights of the Pen and Pencil: Women Journalists and Cultural Leadership of the Women's Movement in Australia and the United States
Journalism has been crucial to progressive political movements, and the work of journalists has provided the cultural leadership necessary for recruiting members and advancing the cause. This cultural leadership is explored through the journalism of three women who in Australia and the United States, wrote for a labour and socialist readership and also edited a periodical. Combining paid work and activism, journalism gave them an occupation that …
The wage-earning woman and the state”: The national women's trade union league and protective labor legislation, 1903–1923
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDiane KirkbyAn earlier and very different version of this paper was presented to the 9th Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, 1980, and subsequently appeared in the published papers of the conference. I wish to thank Herb Gutman and Joan Hoff Wilson for comments made at that conference, and Laura Bennett, Peter Shergold and Christopher Tomlins for comments m…
"If You Thought about Those Things, Your Life Would Be a Misery!" Mental Health and the Safety of Seafarers
Seafaring has long been recognised as a hazardous occupation, with the ever-present risk of disease, drowning or serious, often fatal, injuries from fires, accidents, shipwrecks or simply falling overboard. Health and safety concerns about physical dangers came to include illness from toxic substances but only recently has attention turned to the psychological hazards of shipboard living and working under conditions of isolation. A recent survey …
Indian Seamen and Australian Unions Fighting for Labour Rights: "The Real Facts of the Lascars' Case" of 1939
In 1939, the outbreak of war prompted strikes by Indian seafarers across the empire. This article traces events in Australia as Indian seafarers asserted their labour rights and in doing so contested their exploitative working conditions as “lascars” or the seagoing equivalent of shore-based indentured “coolie” labour. While the Australian government responded in ways that reinforced the “coolie” status of Indian seafarers, the Australian labour …
From Wharfie Haunt to Foodie Haven”: M odernity and L aw in the T ransformation of the A ustralian W orking-class P ub
In the first half of the twentieth century, indeed until the 1960s, dining out was unusual for ordinary Australians, saved for special occasions when they ate in the dining room of the local hotel. This formal and conventional style of dining provided utterly predictable food in surroundings that emphasized the specialness of the occasion and the status of the diners, rather than the imaginative quality of the food. Pubs also provided cheap food …
Pubs and Progressives: Re-inventing the Public House in England 1896–1960
Liquor trading has always been heavily regulated by the state. At the beginning of the twentieth century, public consumption of alcohol came under renewed pressure as a long-standing temperance campaign began to take legislative effect. This was not limited nationally but was widespread, at least in the English-speaking world. The reform movement that targeted the British drinking culture has been identified by historian David Gutzke as Progressi…
Honorary Chinese'?1 Women Citizens, Whiteness and Labour Legislation in the Early Australian Commonwealth
With a focus on the early Australian commonwealth where progressive labour laws, the enfranchisement of white women and the exclusion of indigenous people from citizenship coincided with immigration restrictions based on racial identity, this paper explores what Adolph Reed has described as ‘the shifting role of racial hierarchy as a technology of civic status that in constraining or affirming legal and unofficial citizenship rights and prerogati…
This Isn’t a Novel. It is a Life!’: Dymphna Cusack and *Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid
This article examines the collaborative writing relationship between author Dymphna Cusask and the autobiographical subject Catherine Elliott-Mackay. It also considers the contribution of Caddie to Australian womenâ s writing and the history of womenâ s work
Far from a Low Gutter Girl. The Forgotten World of State Wards: South Australia 1887-1940
Why So Few? Women Academics in Australian Universities
This book had its genesis in the new wave of consciousness about women's position in society and the women's movement of the 1970s. Its aim is to contribute to the interest in and knowledge about Australian women through a study of a group who share the common situation of women in societies based on a sexual division of roles but who work in the particular locus of a university where they are a minority in both number and status
The wage-earning woman and the state”: The national women's trade union league and protective labor legislation, 1903–1923
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDiane KirkbyAn earlier and very different version of this paper was presented to the 9th Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, 1980, and subsequently appeared in the published papers of the conference. I wish to thank Herb Gutman and Joan Hoff Wilson for comments made at that conference, and Laura Bennett, Peter Shergold and Christopher Tomlins for comments m…
Writing the History of Women Working: Photographic Evidence and the 'Disreputable Occupation of Barmaid
'Work,' Veronica Beechey has claimed, 'has an uncertain status within feminist discourse.'1 Feminist discussions of work have moved from the domestic labour debate of the 1970s, which sought to reconcile Marxism and feminism (capitalism and patriarchy), to a growing number of empirical studies of women's work, all of which have strengthened and deepened our under standing of the relationship between gender, work and the economy. Yet contemporary …
Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice. The Life of an Australian-American Labor Reformer
Journal Article Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice. The Life of an Australian-American Labor Reformer. By Diane Kirkby. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xxvi + 254 pp. $44.50, ISBN 0-521-39102-4.) Get access Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice. The Life of an Australian-American Labor Reformer. By Kirkby Diane. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xxvi + 254 pp. $44.50, ISBN 0-521-39102-4.) Eileen Boris Eileen Boris H…
The Power of Pen and Voice: The Life of an Australian - American Labor Reformer
The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s
A cultural history of Australia during the 1890s with emphasis on the remarkable creativity of the period in stories, novels, paintings, design, journalism, intellectual and political movements
Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice, the Life of an Australian-American Labor Reformer
Books
Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of K.S. Inglis. Edited by John Lack. History Department, University of Melbourne, 1998. Pp. v + 269. $20.00 (plus postage) paper. Anzacs, the Media, and the Great War. By John F. Williams. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1999. Pp. x + 302. $35.00 paper. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. By Ken Inglis assisted by Jan Brazier. The Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press,…
Barmaids: A History of Women's Work in Pubs
Barmaids: A History of Women's Work in Pubs
Conference Reports
Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangaroo: A Married Woman Tests Her Property Rights in Colonial New South Wales
In 1891, in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Mrs. Olivia Mayne brought an action for breach of contract against two brothers, theatrical entrepreneurs, James and Charles MacMahon. Mrs. Mayne claimed the MacMahon brothers owed her money for the hire of her property, a boxing kangaroo called “Fighting Jack.” The MacMahons contested her claim, hoping to avoid their obligation by disputing the legally binding nature of the agreement they had mad…
Beer, Glorious Beer”: Gender Politics and Australian Popular Culture
‘Winnies and pats … brighten our pubs’: Transforming the gendered spatial economy in the Australian pub, 1920–1970
The bar of the local pub was where men pursued their leisure. Those same pubs that women, 'the Rubies and Lillies and Winnies and Pats', owned, ran and worked in, and thereby brightened with their presence, did not become women's space simply because women worked there. Pubs were national icons, and, seemingly, they were patronised by men because men who drank there could access the national values of mateship and egalitarianism
This Isn’t a Novel. It is a Life!’: Dymphna Cusack and *Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid
This article examines the collaborative writing relationship between author Dymphna Cusask and the autobiographical subject Catherine Elliott-Mackay. It also considers the contribution of Caddie to Australian womenâ s writing and the history of womenâ s work
Dining on Turtles
As gentlemen of the Royal Society in London sat down to their turtle dinner in 1793 they were participating in an historical event: an act simultaneously of fine dining and colonialism. Feasting and d
Ocker Sheilahs’ and ‘Bloody Barmaids’: Caddie, biography and gender history in 1970s Australian historical film
This essay argues for the value of historical analysis for film criticism, and the value of film analysis for historical understanding, through exploration of the popular Australian film ‘Caddie’, released commercially in 1976. It takes issue with the dismissal by film scholars of Caddie as a class narrative of downward mobility transcribed by the politics of International Women's Year. It demonstrates that the film adhered to the original book's…
Pubs and Progressives: Re-inventing the Public House in England 1896–1960
Liquor trading has always been heavily regulated by the state. At the beginning of the twentieth century, public consumption of alcohol came under renewed pressure as a long-standing temperance campaign began to take legislative effect. This was not limited nationally but was widespread, at least in the English-speaking world. The reform movement that targeted the British drinking culture has been identified by historian David Gutzke as Progressi…
Honorary Chinese'?1 Women Citizens, Whiteness and Labour Legislation in the Early Australian Commonwealth
With a focus on the early Australian commonwealth where progressive labour laws, the enfranchisement of white women and the exclusion of indigenous people from citizenship coincided with immigration restrictions based on racial identity, this paper explores what Adolph Reed has described as ‘the shifting role of racial hierarchy as a technology of civic status that in constraining or affirming legal and unofficial citizenship rights and prerogati…
From Wharfie Haunt to Foodie Haven”: M odernity and L aw in the T ransformation of the A ustralian W orking-class P ub
In the first half of the twentieth century, indeed until the 1960s, dining out was unusual for ordinary Australians, saved for special occasions when they ate in the dining room of the local hotel. This formal and conventional style of dining provided utterly predictable food in surroundings that emphasized the specialness of the occasion and the status of the diners, rather than the imaginative quality of the food. Pubs also provided cheap food …
Books
In This Issue
In this issue
In This Issue
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (29 works) · History (27 works) · Law (27 works) · History (19 works) · Australian History and Society (18 works) · Politics (15 works) · Publishing (13 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Project commissioning (12 works)