Threadgold, S., Gerrard, J. (Eds.) (2022) Class in Australia, Monash University Publishing.

Abstract

There is a sense of what has come before in chapters such as Greg Noble’s ‘Contradictory Locations of Class’ that looks back on class analysis from the 1970s and asks what class models are ‘for’ (36). And this is a pertinent question, and one that several authors attempt to tackle. Class analysis is also contextualised within Australia’s colonial history with a chapter by Barry Morris that explains how the original penal colony became a capitalist society and the way in which ‘colonial class dynamics’ (40), operated in the settler-colonial society that was based on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people by the settlers. This context is important in gaining an understanding of how class in Australia shares some commonalities with the British system that it is based on, but also how the specific circumstances of colonialism in Australia further shaped the class system. This type of survey also includes the different ways that class positions have been described and defined, and Mark Western evaluates some of these methods in his chapter ‘Some Comments on Class Analysis’.