Little History of the Australian Labor Party

Nick Dyrenfurth is Executive Director of the social democratic think tank the John Curtin Research Centre. He is the author or editor of 12 books, including Getting the Blues: The future of Australian Labor, Mateship: A very Australian history, Heroes and Villains: The rise and fall of the early Australian Labor Party, The Write Stuff: Voices of unity on Labor’s future (co-edited with Misha Zelinsky), All That’s Left: What Labor should stand for (co-edited with Tim Soutphommasane) and Confusion: The making of the Australian two-party system (co-edited with Paul Strangio). Nick is a leading media commentator and Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, where he received his PhD and lectured for several years. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney and secretary of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Nick has also worked as a Labor Party adviser and speechwriter and secretary of the ALP’s National Policy Forum.Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University and Distinguished Fellow of the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University. He has written widely on Australian politics and especially the Australian Labor Party. His books include The Sex Lives of Australians: A history and The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia, which both won ACT Book of the Year. His Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia also won ACT Book of the Year and the Australian Political Studies Association’s Henry Mayer Book Prize. Frank recently collaborated in an updated edition of the late Mungo MacCallum’s The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers: From Barton to Albanese and he is a regular contributor to media on Australian history and politics. He is President of the Australian Historical Association and the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Humanities.