Monash University > Library > Exhibitions > Fifty Books from Fifty Years >

32. Labor Call

Chosen by:
Dr Paul Strangio,
School of Political & Social Inquiry

The Labor call. (Melbourne : Printing and Publishing Co-operative Society Ltd., 1906-1953)

Continues: Tocsin (Melbourne, Vic.)

Continued by: Labor (Melbourne, Vic.)

The Rare Books Collection houses four decades (1913-53) of Labor Call, the official organ of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party. While available in microfilm in some other libraries and institutions, leafing through the original folio format newspapers in the Rare Books reading room generates a special sense of historical verisimilitude for the researcher. Superseding Tocsin in 1906 and before it the Commonweal and Workers’ Advocate, like these predecessors Labor Call was a weekly. The party perennially dreamed of launching a daily newspaper to counter the misrepresentations of the ‘capitalist’ mainstream press, but as those plans were never realised it is Labor Call that remains an indispensable source for anyone interested in the history of the Victorian labour movement during last century. While Tocsin (1897-1906) had been renowned for its doctrinal eclecticism, one historian has remarked that by the time the newspaper metamorphosed into Labor Call it had ‘been transformed into a dull party organ, a mere mouthpiece of the party central executive’. Yet, for the greater part of its existence, Labor Call was much more than a sanitised propaganda sheet. The party’s successes and failures (there was more of the latter) can be charted through its pages; so, too, can its ideological passions, both fleeting and enduring, and its divisions were sometimes aired with raw candour. The newspaper also contains writings of many of the party’s luminaries, not least a youthful John Curtin and the great wordsmith and radical-populist Frank Anstey. The branch reports that regularly appeared in Labor Call are also a boon for the historian, revealing as they do the rhythms of a party which, despite its limited political success, still sustained a grass-roots movement of scale that would make the contemporary Victorian ALP envious. One of the great pities for the researcher is that Labor Call disappeared in late 1953 at a time when the party was on the cusp of its greatest disaster, the split of 1954-55. Its replacement was a short-lived monthly that was even more unimaginatively titled Labor.

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