It is a mark of the limiting character of a purely national perspective that it has been so rarely noticed that two English-speaking democracies of the 1980s each had a former trade union official as its national leader. Bob Hawke, Australian Labor Party (ALP) prime minister, was a former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU); … Continue reading Inaugural Professorial Lecture—Is Australian history still possible? Australia and the global eighties