Jim Hagan and Apprentice Historians (Essay‪)‬

Reflecting on what we learnt from Jim Hagan about 'being a historian' is a difficult task. To start with, it involves reflecting on dramatic changes in university life since Jim established the union history project at Wollongong University in the early 1980s. Secondly, Jim was a larger-than-life supervisor, and it is easy for us to be caught up in the mystique that we have constructed around our teacher-student relationship we had with him. Then there are the more profound intellectual effects of our association with Jim: how we and others of our cohort transmit elements of Jim's legacy through our own research practice and in our own work as thesis supervisors. This mystique was evident in discussions at and following Jim's wake. It is instructive that a bunch of middle-aged academics--who, in many cases, had not seen each other for many years--would have so much to say to each other about their former supervisor rather than the more usual confidences regarding their latest project or local work gossip. So much has changed over these 30 years: the sites of academic production, namely the history discipline and the university sector itself, as well as the political economy of which unions are a part. Changes in the former help explain why most of the labour historians who Jim supervised are not to be found in history departments. Most are certainly employed by universities, though most often in former industrial relations departments which have now all but transformed into component parts of business schools. Of course this is not particular to our cohort; more institutionally-focused labour historians of many varieties and places have found jobs in business schools. Humanities faculties have suffered from an array of externally imposed difficulties since the 1990s. Yet, for their part, history departments appear to have been more welcoming towards labour historians who are primarily concerned with social history, social movements, or identity politics, than the sorts of materialist, institutional history that Jim's trade union history project encouraged.