As the Vietnam War came to an end, the Maoist student movement declined rapidly, as did the Trotskyist and Anarchist youth movements in other states. The lack of very clear and recognisable party connections between the Maoist youth movement and the broader society contributed to the decline of the Maoist student movement.
During this decline the Maoist movement became even more sectarian and there were a number of incidents of physical assaults by some Maoists against political rivals on the general grounds that they were "counter-revolutionary". Happily, after a while these assaults ceased.
A number of former Maoist student leaders moved on to become organisers of the Builder's Labourers Federation, under the Maoist union leader Norm Gallagher -- particularly Jim Bacon and Brian Boyd. In 1977, after the overthrow of the Gang of Four in China, the Maoist student movement split, with leading personalities such as Langer and Russell supporting the Gang of Four, and they formed a group called the Red Eureka Movement, which didn't last long.
The most charismatic figure in the Maoist movement, Albert Langer, gained a certain notoriety in the 1990s through a belligerent campaign for the right to vote informal in elections, and came out in support of the first Gulf War, as did some of his old associates, such as Darce Cassidy. Darce, generally a pleasant and affable bloke, became first a producer at the ABC, and the secretary of the ABC Staff Association (the union), then moved over to become head of industrial relations of the ABC (the employer).
When the second Gulf War erupted, Langer and Kerry Russell, energetic activists still, became converts to the "progressive nature" of US imperialism, their former primary foe, viz a viz the allegedly barbarous "Islamic Threat". They assembled a number of their old Maoist associates, such as Bill Kerr and Barry York around a website devoted to preaching the virtues and progressive features of the second Gulf War. A recent article in the Good Weekend (the Sydney Morning Herald and Age Saturday magazine) was revealing about the political evolution of the old Maoist activists. Albert Langer, Kerry Russell, Bill Kerr and Barry York supported the second Gulf War, while Mike Hyde and Fergus Robinson, in addition to Humphrey McQueen, Brian Boyd and Jim Bacon, all opposed the war. So the second Gulf War divided the old WSA Maoist student cadres down the middle.
For about the last 35 years, McQueen has been a self-employed writer, historian and Marxist intellectual, almost entirely outside both the advantages, fashions and restraints of the academic environment. In this he somewhat resembles Isaac Deutscher in a previous generation and another country, who produced his major work outside universities. In Australian intellectual life, McQueen occupies a niche a bit like that currently occupied in the UK by the impressive Marxist intellectual Terry Eagleton. In the sense that, like Eagleton, McQueen has remained grandly and effectively independent of the lunatic and transitory intellectual fashion of postmodernism and, again, like Eagleton, he has not tried at all (unlike many retreating Marxist intellectuals) to make concessions to the idiom, style or method of these bourgeois academic fashions. He and Eagleton have done something completely different. They have both developed and deepened classical Marxism in particular ways. In Humphrey's case, as part of his own intellectual evolution, he has explored and developed the Marxist method of Antonio Gramsci, without putting Gramsci to the crude opportunist uses that many Eurocommunist intellectuals do as part of their generalised shift to the political right.
In his first major intellectual transmogrification, his early Maoist phase, McQueen established his intellectual presence as a major labour and social historian with a sharp critique, from a rather ultraleft standpoint, of the previous generation of labour historians, Russell Ward, Ian Turner, Bob Gollan and others. His initial standpoint, expressed mainly in the long article from The New Left in Australia, was to make a sweeping distinction between a "petty bourgeois group of unions" and a "socialist proletarian group of unions", and this critique was given some verisimilitude by his already quite extraordinary reading and erudition.
Shortly afterwards, he published A New Britannia, in which he questioned the notion that a proletariat, in a broadly Marxist sense, had emerged at all in 19th century Australia. Methodologically, he advanced this view by mechanically associating the development of a proletariat with the necessity of such a proletariat having a proletarian consciousness. He was, of course, wrong about that. Nevertheless, despite this organic methodological error, which he quite frankly acknowledged later, in the Afterword to the 1986 revised edition of A New Britannia, the book had an extraordinary impact ideologically.
This was because of the robust and iconoclastic social history used by McQueen to demystify the evolution of class relations in Australia, in which he demonstrated a discursive, knowledgeable and witty eye. Typical of this new eye was his chapter about pianos, and the social function of pianos in Australian colonial society became a recurring motif in McQueen's social history. This importance of the piano in Australian social history has been taken up since by many others, but it was McQueen who first, in recent times, discovered and popularised the piano as a major artifact in Australian social history.
A New Britannia was the first Australian-written book that caught the wave of the cultural sea change in the 1960s and the 1970s, and for a serious book of history, it was a very major publishing success, and has since sold about 40,000 copies. The only two other books of Australian leftist history or sociology that ever approached it numerically, were Miriam Dixson's book, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788-1975 (Pelican, Melbourne, 1976), and Keith Windschuttle's book, Unemployment, a Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australia, (Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1980) . But they came later.
McQueen was subsequently joined in his critique of the traditional Australian Marxist historians by the young Stuart Macintyre. But Macintyre, as it developed, was evolving in a somewhat different direction, into an almost stereotypically moderate social democratic disagreement with the Old Left historians. The debate about Australian labour history that developed around A New Britannia; was robust on all sides. From where I sit, it had an altogether healthy outcome. A kind of dialectical reconciliation eventually evolved. McQueen quietly, but quite clearly, relinquished the methodological standpoint of A New Britannia, and began to incorporate in his subsequent historical work the methodologically obvious: that, in objective terms, a proletariat did emerge in Australia in the 19th century, although it had a limited reformist consciousness.
For their part, the Old Left historians, with whom he had been arguing, accepted the limitations of their earlier work, in relation to sexism and racism in particular, to which McQueen had drawn attention so vigorously. The late Russell Ward, in particular, went on to write rounded socialist and populist histories of Australia, which remedied the defects to which McQueen had pointed, and took up something of McQueen's robust social history.
Having established his forte and major piece of intellectual territory as Australian social history, McQueen went on to produce several more wonderful, funny and interesting books of Australian social history, published by Penguin, which took advantage of the new technology of book production, with lots of illustrations, photos and pen drawings (partly designed for a high-school market) and these books became set texts in school history courses in many states, and sold extremely well. Again, the piano motif recurs in these books. For all this period, Humphrey did a bit of teaching, but the modest returns from his rather successful books enabled him to have a reasonable existence as an independent author and intellectual.
After this, McQueen's interest in the visual arts developed rapidly, and his next major sphere of intellectual activity turned him into one of Australia's important art historians -- in my view, up there even with Bernard Smith. McQueen's most significant work of art history is a breathtaking and comprehensive overview, with an implicit Marxist eye, of the evolution of Australian art, The Black Swan of Trespass. He had difficulty finding a publisher for this book, and it was eventually published by Apcol, a small socialist co-operative publisher. Apcol, however, didn't have much of a distribution network, and its resources didn't run to colour printing of the rich works of Australian art that pepper this important book. Black Swan of Trespass is an extremely important piece of Australian intellectual history, and it never got either the distribution or the presentation it deserves. It is an excellent candidate for some publisher with half a brain giving a decent advance to McQueen to produce a new, more elegant, edition with improved production and colour plates.
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