Academy Fellow

Terry Irving is a radical historian, author, and educator. He was one of the founders of the Free University in Sydney in the late 1960s, an activist in the movement to democratise universities in the 1970s, a prominent New Left contributor to the writing of Australian history in the 1980s, and the editor of Labour History – A Journal of Labour and Social History in the 1990s.

Terry’s scholarship combines historical research with social science concepts, particularly those of class, generation, and space. His book with Raewyn Connell, Class Structure in Australian History (1980, 1992) is a study of how class as a structure of social relations reproduces in new forms over time. He used class analysis to investigate an aspect of the age order in Youth in Australia: Policy, Administration and Politics (with D. Maunders and G. Sherington,1995). Discovering the insights of radical geography, he studied class and space in Places, Protests and Memorabilia – The Labour Heritage Register of New South Wales (with Lucy Taksa, 2002) and Radical Sydney – Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes (with Rowan Cahill, 2010).

In recent years, when idealist, ‘post-modern’ thinking has dominated social analysis, Terry has defended materialist approaches to the study of ideas and lives. He published a selection of his articles and essays as examples of materialist analysis in The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (2021, with Rowan Cahill). His The Southern Tree of Liberty: The Democratic Movement in New South Wales before 1856 (2006) focussed on the history of radical democratic activism and violent contention that is omitted from the accepted liberal, ‘culturalist’ accounts of democracy in this country.

His recent biography, The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe (2020) connects the personal, political, and social dimensions of Childe’s situation with his materialist philosophy of history. In writing biography, Terry is not looking for the irreducible and sovereign core of individuality in a person’s life but rather for the person as a product of history. His current project is a biography of Edward John Hawksley, a forgotten writer and political activist who was the most important radical democratic intellectual in Australia’s early political history. Although Hawksley left no personal papers, his words in public provide the biographer with a pathway to his self. His speeches and writings during turbulent times may be understood as his attempts at constituting both a real and an imagined life as an actor in history.

American Council of Learned Societies Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Rochester (1972-3); Honorary Fellowships at the University of Warwick (1972 and 1978); Exchange Professorship at the University of Texas at Austin (1992); International Board of (British) Society for the Study of Labour History (since 1993); Vice-president, International Commission (of the International Committee of Historical Sciences) for the Study of Social Movements and Structures (1996-2004); Vice-President, History Council of New South Wales (1996-2000); Annual History Citation awarded by the History Council of New South Wales in 2003 for ‘his contribution to the study of labour and political history in Australia’; Organiser: ‘Working Lives: Labour History and Autobiography’, Round Table RT18 at 20th International Congress of Historical Sciences (Sydney, 4 July 2005); Life Member, Australian Association for the Study of Labour History (2008); Emeritus Editor, Labour History (since 2020).

1.Irving, Terry, 2020, The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, pp. xxiv + 419

2.Irving, Terry & Rowan Cahill, 2010, Radical Sydney – Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes, with Rowan Cahill, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp xvi + 368

3.Irving, Terry, 2006, The Southern Tree of Liberty – The Democratic Movement in New South Wales before 1856, The Federation Press, Sydney, pp xiii + 290

4.Irving, Terry, D. Maunders & G. Sherington, 1995, Youth in Australia: Policy, Administration and Politics, Macmillan Education Australia, Melbourne, pp. xvii+398 

5.Irving, Terry & Raewyn Connell, 1992, Class Structure in Australian History - Poverty and Progress, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne (second edition, revised and significantly enlarged) pp.x+525