A BOOM FOR WHOM? SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN THE AUSTRALIAN LABOUR

The rapid growth which characterised the Australian economy between 1861 and about 1891 has earned the period the title of the first 'Long Boom'. The momentum of colonial expansion was checked only by a few brief recessions, and over the period as a whole population and production increased threefold or more.1 Thrown into sharp relief by the bleak depression years which followed, this protracted spate of prosperity attained the status of a halcyon period. Measured against the misery of the 1890s, the complaints of Brennan and his ilk seemed mere quibbling. A generation of Australian economic historians has largely taken it as unproblematic that the laws of supply and demand, meliorated by the influence of governments on the colonial labour market, brought the working class a substantial share in the fruits of economic growth. As N. G. Butlin has described it, outside the comparatively slack years of 1878-9 and 1885-6, there was 'a high level of employment ... a seller's market for labour' throughout the colonies,2 with commensurately high wage levels. More specifically, R G. Macarthy has emphasised that the large role played by construction and extractive industries produced strong demand and 'extraordinarily high' wages for unskilled and semi-skilled labour.3 W. A. Sinclair has qualified this picture somewhat, noting that there was significant unemployment in South Australia throughout the 1880s, in NSW and Queensland in the mid-1880s and in the port cities during periods of heavy immigration; however, he is insistent that unemployment among immigrants represented only a 'transitional' state, and is generally inclined to share a sanguine view of the condition of the Australian working class during the boom.4 This optimistic picture is based largely on a priori deduction from conventional assumptions rather than on any detailed investigation of social conditions. For evidence, economic historians of this school have relied heavily on Butlin's estimates of per capita income and consumption, although these mere averages say nothing about distribution. Their evidence on earnings is derived almost entirely from contemporary data on wage rates, which give no indication of the regularity of actual returns to labour.5 In Butlin's case these data on wage rates are backed up by references to employers' and public works