The Victorian Labor Party came into being in the midst of great strikes of the early 1890s, and in the shadow of a crippling economic depression that was to send trade unionism into retreat throughout Australia.
Frank Bongiorno gives a lively account of the infant Labor Party's attempts to find common ground between competing demands and a picture of the Party emerges from these pages as 'a process rather than a thing, as contested ground rather than conquered territory'.
The Victorian Labor Party at last has a history that does justice to its complex and distinctive tradition, and suggests new ways of thinking about the history of Labor in politics throughout Australia.
