Humphrey Dennis McQueen (born 26 June 1942) is an Australian public intellectual, historian, activist, and former Associate Professor in Social and International Relations at the University of Tokyo. Over the course of his career he has written histories, biographies and cultural criticism.[ Men of Flowers, with Peter Lyssiotis and Wayne Stock, Masterthief, 2010,] McQueen was the pivotal figure in the development of the Australian New Left.[Williams-Brooks, Llewellyn (2016). "Radical Theories of Capitalism in Australia", Honours Thesis, University of Sydney, viewed 20 April 2017,[1]] His most iconic work, A New Britannia,[McQueen, H 1970/2004, A New Britannia, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, p.31] gained notoriety for challenging the dominant approach to Australian history developed by the Old Left.[Bongiorno, F 2008, "Two Radical Legends: Russel Ward, Humphrey McQueen and the New Left Challenge in Australian Historiography", Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 201–222.] Although McQueen began his career as an academic at the Australian National University under Manning Clark, his career from the 1990s has been as an independent scholar.
Early life
McQueen was born in Brisbane to a working-class family that was active in the Australian Labor Party.[Gould, Bob (2004) 'The Life and Work of Humphrey McQueen: Never Trust Tories Bearing Gifts', Ozleft, viewed 20 April 2017] His father was Dinny "Horse" McQueen (1899–1971), a tanner and assistant bookmaker who knew John Wren. Dinny was a long-time member of the Leather and Allied Trades Union who, along with his working wife and McQueen's mother, was recruited to the ALP in the 1950s by a Grouper (although his politics was communistic).[Humphrey McQueen, "The Making of an Australian Working Man Dinny McQueen 1899-1971", The Queensland Journal of Labour History, Issue: 34, March 2022, pp. 34-44.] McQueen was educated at Marist College Ashgrove and was a contemporary of future PNG prime minister
/ref> He joined the ALP at the age of fifteen, and was instrumental in establishing the Queensland Young Labor organisation and was editor of its newsletter.[ In 1961, McQueen served as the ALP campaign organiser for the seat of Ryan.]
Early career
Before academia
McQueen'
/ref> He left the Commonwealth Public Service soon afterwards to undertake a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Queensland where he graduated with Honours degree in 1965.
McQueen was an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia,
Academia
McQueen's political activism in the 1960s led him to join academia in 1970. His first Marxist critique was a paper in 1967, Which Party for Socialists?, arguing against the ALP. His first academic article came in 1968 when the political economist Bruce McFarlane invited McQueen to write an article in Labour History.[McQueen, Humphrey 1984, Gallipoli to Petrov, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney] The article, Convicts and Rebels, contested the Australian Whig history associated with the Old Left.[McQueen, H 1968, "Convicts and Rebels", Labour History, Vol. 15, pp. 3–30.][Martin, A W 1962/2007, The Whig View of Australian History: And Other Essays, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne.][Connell, R W 1974, "Images of Australia", in D E Edgar (ed.) Social Change in Australia: Readings in Sociology, Cheshire Books, Sydney.][Williams-Brooks, Llewellyn (2016). "Radical Theories of Capitalism in Australia", Honours Thesis, University of Sydney, viewed 20 April 2017, [2]] In the article, McQueen doubted the authenticity of a democracy and egalitarian tradition emanating from Australia's convict history. He challenged the egalitarian aspect of the tradition, highlighting the prominence of racism in convict society.
In 1970, he moved to Canberra, where he taught Australian history as a senior tutor at the Australian National University from 1970 to 1974.
McQueen's early academic writing was intent on dispelling the approaches to labour history generated by the Australian Old Left,[Fitzpatrick, B 1944, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Macmillan, Melbourne.][Turner, I 1965, Industrial Labour and Politics: The Labour Movement in Eastern Australia: 1900–1921, Australian National University, Canberra.] especially Russel Ward's The Australian Legend.[Ward, R 1958, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Oxford] McQueen was head-hunted by the political scientist, Henry Mayer, to write a book after he read McQueen's articles "Convicts and Rebels" and "A Race Apart".[Marks, R.L., 2011, Rejection, Redemption, Ambivalence: the New Left and Australian Nationalism (Doctoral Dissertation), La Trobe University] McQueen wrote A New Britannia, an historical analysis of the emergence and development of the Australian labour movement. It influentially[Lenin, V I 1899/1964, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Progress Publishers, Moscow.] within the British Empire. The argument challenged existing account of the labour movement emerging from the Australian Old Left, which had mythologised the nation-building and democratic nature of the movement. In seeking to challenge accounts of Australian history presented in the Old Left, McQueen established the grounds to contest the Whig tradition in Australian scholarship.[Anderson, P 1964, "The Origins of the Present Crisis", New Left Review, Vol. 23, viewed 16 September 2016, .] and Tom Nairn,[Nairn, T 1964, "The Nature of the Labour Party", New Left Review, Vol. 27, No. 38, viewed 29 September 2016, .] the approach redefined the nature of Australian historical enquiry, which would prove to be influential in the discipline of history.
Receptions of the book were mixed. Terry Irving in reviewing A New Britannia, highlighted the work's theoretical legacy, but also the need to produce a more developed theoretical engagement. He stated that A New Britannia "Will provoke angry discussion, but I hope it will also provoke the new left to develop the methodology necessary to write a new history".[Irving, T 1970, "Head-Standing", Bulletin, 12 Dec, pp. 55–57] This observation would influence the development of another hallmark of the Australian New Left, Class Structure in Australian History.[Irving, T & Connell, R 1979, Class Structure in Australian History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne.][Williams-Brooks, Llewellyn (2016). "Radical Theories of Capitalism in Australia", Honours Thesis, University of Sydney, viewed 20 April 2017] The Papua New Guinea Post-Courier said, 'Mr Humphrey McQueen is a very angry young man, and there is plenty of justification for this in Australia.'
/ref> The Canberra Times said, 'In order to encompass such a wide range McQueen has obviously left gaps in his argument, but this matters little... He is concerned to show that the projection of radicalism and nationalism into socialism and anti-imperialism is mythical. This he does, as others have done, but will such attacks ever kill the myth?'
/ref> Rowan Cahill in Tribune said, 'The trouble is when you dash around frantically from one battlefield to another, like as not you'll end up shooting the wrong people. I believe this is what he has done... McQueen notes that revolutionaries in power have sometimes distorted history in order to stay there; I add the note that in attempting to search out a strategy for coming to power we have to be careful that something similar is not also done.'
/ref> The journalist W.A. Wood in Tribune attacked the book calling McQueen 'Mr Justice McQueen'
/ref>
In 1971, McQueen wrote a review against Christopher Hitchens calling his work on Marx 'acceptable as a fourth year honours
essay but it would not be remarkable even as that' and 'it would be useful for a student with no more than an hour to prepare for a tutorial on the subject.'
/ref> McQueen said of his teaching style, 'History is a study of the development of
society — the society as a whole ... the bourgeoisie have isolated and categorized scholarship in such a way as to eliminate the study of the interaction of all social factors, environment, politics and economics... my course is designed to restore histor-y to a study of society as a whole.'
/ref>
McQueen called for a boycott of the 1972 election because the ALP under Gough Whitlam would be 'even more imperialist
in its policy towards South East Asia.'
/ref> Mungo McCallum said McQueen was 'a middle-class academic putting forward views, on the ideal society but without suggesting realistic proposals to attain it.'
/ref>
Independent career
By 1978, McQueen had left ANU and had shifted away from his earlier work as he became increasingly influenced by Maoism.[Bongiorno, "Two Radicals"] This led McQueen to depart from A New Britannia and the Gramscian New Left, a process he described in the 2004 edition. McQueen believed in a fusion between the philosophical and economic Marx, which was a midway between the two competing interpretations of Marxism that had preoccupied radicals since the 1920s.[Long, Malcolm 1973, Marx and Beyond, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney.] McQueen's fourth book was Social Sketches of Australia (1978), a social history of Australia since the late nineteenth century. Continuing on from early work, Social Sketches was a correction to the secondary source focus of A New Britannia, focusing instead on primary sources and the perspectives of minorities.[Piccini, Jon 2011, “Reading Humphrey McQueen's A New Britannia in De-colonial Times,” Overland 224, pp. 12-20.]
McQueen's work since the 1970s has been varied, ranging from historiographical works to art history and the importance of British slavery to the development of capitalism. McQueen's work on George Fife Angas and Peter Goers' commentary of it were criticised by a relative of Angas's for incorrectly stating that he had been a slave owner when there is no evidence of this. McQueen (like Clinton Fernandes) misinterpreted the nature of Angas's agency in collecting compensation awarded to other people.[David R.M. Irving & Marcio Andrade-Campos, "George Fife Angas, Questions of Slave Compensation in ‘Honduras’ (Belize), and the Colonisation of South Australia: New Perspectives from Primary Sources", Australian Historical Studies, 03 Jan 2025.]
Personal life
McQueen was married to Judy McQueen.
Bibliography
McQueen contributed a chapter entitled "Born free: wage-slaves and chattel-slaves" to Foundational Fictions in South Australian History (2018).[ PDF]
External links
