The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History is celebrating sixty years of its journal, Labour History, this month with the publication of a 200-plus page issue which takes the opportunity of this significant anniversary ‘to pause, reflect, take stock, look back and see forward’, as editor Diane Kirkby puts it in an opening editorial.

She continues: ‘With a combination of reflections, new research articles, remembrances and a look ahead to future achievements, we have produced a slightly unusual issue. Our goal has been to capture the moment and interweave continuing themes of labour history’s project in the conversation between past, present and future that underlies all that we do.’

The issue includes contributions by established labour historians and ‘work done by the newest group of scholars, the authors who had not previously published with us, or probably other academic journals’, demonstrating research currently being done by postgraduates and ‘illustrating the continuing engagement with questions threaded through Labour History’s past’.

The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History shares common roots with the Society for the Study of Labour  History¹. The historian Asa Briggs, who served as the UK Society’s first chair, and delivered our inaugural address in May 1960, also spent six months of that year as a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, where he worked with the labour historian Bob Gollan. As a result, Gollan was able to promote the idea of an Australian labour history society, which duly held its first meeting in Brisbane in May 1961.

1. Eric Fry, ‘The Labour History Society (ASSLH): A Memoir of its First Twenty Years’, Labour History 77 (November 1999), pp. 83-96.

• Find out more about the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History.
• See Labour History on the Liverpool University Press website.