Who’s who on this site

The information below was correct in 2008.

Mick Armstrong is a long time socialist who initially became politically active in the student movement of the late 1960s & the anti-Vietnam movement. He is currently a members of Socialist Alternative. His other publications include a Marxist account of the Origins of the ALP.

Sandra Bloodworthhas been active in campaigns ranging from the 1970s Civil Liberties struggle against the Bjelke-Petersen Government in Queensland to anti-nuclear movements, the Jabiluka Action Group, campaigns for refugees and strike support. She is co-editor of the book Rebel Women and a member of Socialist Alternative.

Tom Barnes has been a student activist and a member of the International Socialist Organisation since 1997. In Sydney he was active in the campaign against higher education fees, voluntary student unionism, and the campaign to the stop the Jabiluka uranium mine. He is currently active in the Refugee Action Collective in Melbourne.

Tom Bramble teaches Industrial Relations at the University of Queensland. His research and publications are in such areas as union and managerial strategies, labour flexibility and new production systems, and the political economy of industry policy. He is the editor of Never a White Flag, the memoirs of New Zealand labour militant Jock Barnes, and a member of Socialist Alternative.

Luke Deer a long term student activist and National Committee member of the International Socialist Organisation.

Jamie Doughney is currently the senior researcher at Victoria University's Workplace Studies Centre. He entered academia in 1990 after a 20 year involvement as a trade unionist and radical activist. This included a period on the staff and as editor of Direct Action.

Tony Duras submitted "Peace is Trade Union Business" as an Honours thesis at Monash University in 1996. Our web version has since been republished in Workers Online. Since 1997 he's been researching and writing a Masters thesis on the relationship between trade unions and new social movements in Australia, particularly the women's and environmental movements, between 1965 and 1985. As well as his research he has been an active unionist.

Carole Ferrier is the editor of Hecate: A Women's Interdisciplinary Journal and an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Queensland. She teaches in a range of courses in the areas of gender, class, race and ethnicity in relation to literature, especially Australian literature, and has also published widely in these areas. She has been an activist for democratic rights for thirty years, and her politics have remained consistently international socialist.

Diane Fieldes began her political career in the campaign against the Vietnam war. She continuted it as a student activist, and has since been a union delegate in the public service and more recently in the education union at the University of New South Wales, where she is completing a PhD on equal pay campaigns. She is a member of Socialist Alternative.

Mark Gillespie has been an active member of the International Socialist Organization for over 20 years. As a electrician he was active for many years in the union movement before becoming a student activist. The One Nation Party honoured him for his anti-racist activism by putting his photograph on the web in their 'thug file'. He successfully completed his honours dissertation on the 1998 Waterfront Dispute in 1999, and is currently working on a PhD at Griffith University, about Australian imperialism in East Timor.

David Glanz is a leading member of the International Socialist Organisation and a national convenor of the Socialist Alliance. He played a leading role in the S11 protests against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000, is active in the peace movement, a delegate with the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance, and a member of the editorial board of the Socialist Alliance magazine, Seeing Red. He is the Socialist Alliance candidate for the federal seat of Wills.

Michal Glikson is an artist who has had exhibitions in Brisbane and Canberra. She is studying at the Canberra School of Art and Australian National University.

Sarah Gregson is currently writing up her research on the role of the RSL in the race and labour struggles of the interwar period in Australia. She teaches Industrial Relations and dreams of escape. She is a long-time member of the International Socialist Organisation.

Phil Griffiths is currently researching the history of the White Australia policy at the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also written "Australian Perceptions of Japan: The History of a Racist Phobia" (Socialist Review, Melbourne, No 3, 1990), and did his history honours thesis on The Decline of Free Trade in Australian Politics, 1901-1909 (Macquarie University, 1998). He is a member of the International Socialist Organisation, and former editor of the ISO newspaper, Socialist Worker.

Martin Hirst has been active in socialist politics since 1975 and claims to have been the only Trotskyist to evervwork in the federal press gallery as a journalist. Martin is now teaching journalism at the University of Queensland and has just written a book about journalism ethics.

Rick Kuhn teaches politics at the Australian National University. His publications and interests are in the areas of economic policy and thought in Australia, contemporary German political economy, and the Marxist economist Henryk Grossman.

Ashley Lavelle is a post-graduate student in the School of Politics and Public Policy at Griffith University, and a member of the International Socialist Organisation. His research focus is on Federal Labor Oppositions.

Melanie Lazarow Melanie cut her political teeth in the anti-apartheid movement that grew on campuses in South Africa in the early to mid 70s. Soon after arriving in Australia in 1977 she chose to be involved with the International Socialist movement and to date is a member of the International Socialist Organisation. Over the last 10 years Melanie has been an activist in the National Tertiary Education Union, and in 2001 was the Vice President of the Melbourne University Branch.

Karl Marx was a 19th Century troublemaker.

Judy McVey was a founder of Women's Campaign for Abortion and Trade Unionists for Abortion during the 1979 abortion campaign in Queensland. She was also active in the Civil Liberties campaign in Brisbane in 1977-80. She has been active as a union delegate in the CPSU since the early 1980s, and is now a Section Councillor in the Department of Family and Community. She has been a member of the International Socialist Organisation since 1978.

Georgina Murray trained and taught as a sociologist in New Zealand at Auckland University but has taught politics since moving to Australia in 1990. She currently works in the Humanities Department, Griffith University, Nathan, Brisbane Qld.

Tom O’Lincoln is a founder of the international socialist current in Australia. He is the author of Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism and Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era; and co-editor of Class and Class Conflict in Australia and Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History. (You can read about these on the Booknotes page.)

Douglas Pacheco left El Salvador with his family to move to Costa Rica and then on to Australia. His Ph.D. is on the repercussions of financial liberalisation on the Costa Rican economy. He teaches at Monash University.

Jean Parker first got involved in politics in the struggle against up-front fees at Sydney University in 1997. She has been active in the student movement, the refugee campaign, and anti-war activity since then. Jean completed honours in sociology at UNSW in 2003, lives in Sydney, and is a member of Solidarity.

Eric Petersen Eric Petersen is a lawyer in Sydney, author of The Poverty of Dialectical Materialism, and a member of Socialist Alternative.

Tony Roberts moved to Melbourne after finishing a History degree at the Australian National University in 1976. He worked on the International Socialists' paper, The Battler, and later in the AUSTUDY office, where he was active in the Reform Group of the ACOA (a forerunner of the Community and Public Sector Union). He now works as an editor and proof-reader for a union-related graphic design studio. In 1979, Tony helped establish Royal Park Reds, Australia's first regular cricket club for socialists.

Liz Ross joined Women's Liberation in Canberra in the early seventies, and became active in Gay Liberation around the same time. She has been a campaigner around issues such as abortion rights, a union delegate in the Department of Social Security (Centrelink) for ten years, a member of left wing organisations since the seventies, and active in solidarity with union struggles. Liz is currently completing a book on the 1986 struggle against the deregistration of the Builders Laborers Federation. Member: Socialist Alternative.

Stephen Sherlock has worked on politics, social change and the labour movement in India and Indonesia for many years.

Jerome Small lives and works in Melbourne. He has an ongoing interest in class and race in Australian history, and has continued to collect material on many of the themes discussed in this thesis. An occasional student at La Trobe University, he intends to one day help rewrite the story of how "White Australia" came about. He is a member of Socialist Alternative.

Robert Schutze is a journalist and PhD student at the University of Queensland.

Janey Stone became a socialist in 1962, participating in student and anti-war campaigns. She joined the Women's Liberation Movement in 1969. Since then she has been a union delegate, political activist and writer in many fields, including sexual politics and the Middle East as well as in her occupation, cancer research. She has been a longtime member of organisations in the international socialist current.

Terry Symonds has been involved in many campaigns for workers rights and is an active member of the Australian Services Union in Brisbane. He is also a convenor of Australia-Indonesia Union Support, a committee of rank and file unionists committed to building solidarity between workers in Australia, Indonesia and East Timor. Terry is a member of the International Socialist Organisation.

Ji Giles Ungpakorn is a founding member of the Thai Marxist organisation "Workers Democracy". He is an Assistant Professor of Politics in the Department of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.

Louise Walker joined Socialist Action in 1987, and was a member of the International Socialist Organisation between 1990 and 1992. She submitted her Honours thesis "Beers, Bed and Board: Industrial Behaviour Around the Hotel and Liquor Industry Wages Boards, 1900-1914" in 1995. She is a course adviser in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, where she remains an active unionist.

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