Our Authors

Mick Armstrong

Mick Armstrong has been a socialist political activist and organiser in Australia since the early 1970s. He writes regularly for the Marxist Left Review and Red Flag newspaper and is author of a range of books and pamphlets, including From Little Things Big Things Grow: Strategies for Building Revolutionary Socialist Organisations (2007). Mick is a founding member of Socialist Alternative.

Tom Bramble

Tom Bramble has written extensively on the politics of the workers' movement in Australia and internationally. His books include Introducing Marxism: A Theory of Social Change (2015) and Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide (2008). He is a founding member of Socialist Alternative, a life member of the Australian university staff union and has been active in a wide range of social and political movements in Britain and Australia since the 1970s.

Kaye Broadbent

Kaye Broadbent has engaged with the Japanese language for over 30 years both personally and professionally. As a University lecturer she has taught and written about labour studies with a special interest in Japan and the conditions of Japan's workers. She has co-authored a chapter with Tom O'Lincoln on Japanese resistance to Japan's militarism in Donny Gluckstein (ed), Fighting on All Fronts, (Bookmarks: 2015). Kaye is a member of Socialist Alternative, an Australian revolutionary socialist organisation. Kaye is the editor and English translator of Against the Storm: How Japanese Printworkers Resisted the Military Regime, 1935-1945 (Japanese original by Sugiura Masao), published by Interventions in 2019.

Craig Cormick

Craig Cormick OAM is an award-winning author and science communicator. He has been Chair of the ACT Writers Centre and has been a writer in residence in Antarctica and Malaysia.
He has published over thirty books of fiction and non-fiction. Craig enjoys playing with history about as much as it enjoys playing with him.

Phillip Deery

Phillip Deery is a Cold War historian. His books include Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (2014), The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (2017) and Sparrows and Spies: ASIO and the Cold War in Australia, 1949-1975 (2022). He is an Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria University.

Alex Ettling

Alex Ettling is a social historian based in Melbourne, Australia. His historical practise incorporates writing, graphics and audio, frequently working in collaboration. Alex has been conducting an oral history program since 2018, in association with Melbourne's Living Museum of the West. He is a co-editor, with Iain McIntyre, of Knocking The Top Off: A People's History of Alcohol in Australia.

Lindsay Fitzclarence

Lindsay Fitzclarence was born in 1949 in Morwell, a town central to electricity production in the Latrobe Valley of Victoria. Like most people in Morwell at the time, his family was working-class. He qualified as a teacher and became a lecturer at Geelong Teachers' College, then taught in Faculties of Education at Deakin University, the University of South Australia and Monash University. His research focuses on power, politics and curriculum change. Fitzclarence is Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University; and he travels Australia exploring issues associated with land, water and species protection.

Charlie Fox

Charlie Fox taught Australian History at the University of Melbourne and The University of Western Australia before retiring at the end of 2011. He has published widely on histories of work, unemployment, intellectual disability, and radical political and cultural movements. At present he does occasional walking tours of radical Perth and Fremantle. He is co-editor of and contributor to Radical Perth Militant Fremantle (Interventions 2019).

Tom Freeman

Tom Freeman was a lifelong revolutionary, and a member of the International Socialist Tendency for nearly 30 years. His PhD thesis was edited by Sandra Bloodworth and published posthumously by Interventions in 2017 under the title Lenin's Interventionist Marxism.

David Gould

David Gould has worked as a teacher and counsellor in schools and universities in Australia, France, and Japan. He was later employed in the business world, as manager of a two-year business leadership program. David is a co-founder of Bare Elements Entertainment company. He also founded and is Secretary of Carlton Pride, the official LBGTI+ supporter group of the (AFL) Carlton Football Club. He lives in Melbourne with his Japanese partner of 30 years.

Ben Hillier

Ben Hillier is an editor of Red Flag and a member of Socialist Alternative in Australia. He is the author of Losing Santhia: Life and loss in the struggle for Tamil Eelam (Interventions 2019).

Lenore Layman

Lenore Layman is a Western Australian historian. Among her publications are Organise! A visual record of the Western Australian labour movement, Powering Perth: The East Perth Power Station and the electrification of Perth and 110 in the Waterbag: A history of life, work and leisure in Leonora, Gwalia and the Northern Goldfields. She was also the historian member of the team that produced the Australian Asbestos Network website on the health disaster of asbestos use in Australia. She is co-author of Radical Perth Militant Fremantle (Interventions 2019).

Sylvia Martin

Sylvia Martin is the author of three biographies of women neglected in Australian literary and cultural history. Ida Leeson: A Life was awarded the 2008 Magarey Medal for Biography. Her memoir Sky Swimming: Reflections on Auto/biography, People and Place was published in 2020. She is the author of Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin published by Interventions in 2021.

Sugiura Masao

Sugiura Masao was born in 1914 and started work as a type picker in a Tokyo printworks at the age of 12. By the age of 21, he was a leader of the Tokyo printworkers strike committee, which went on to form the first trade union in the Japanese printing trades. Sugiura was arrested in 1942 for his union activism and spent the rest of the war in prison. He later became General Secretary of the All Japan Print and Publishing Workers Union. He has published extensively on union building and activism. He is the author of the original Japanese version of Against the Storm: How Japanese Printworkers Resisted the Military Regime, 1935-1945 translated by Kaye Broadbent and published in English by Interventions in 2019.

Iain McIntyre

Iain McIntyre is a Narrm/Melbourne based historian and community radio broadcaster who has written and edited a variety of books about political activism, music, literature and (un)popular culture. Recent publications include the Locus award winning Dangerous Visions and News Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1980 (PM Press, 2021) and Environmental Blockades: Obstructive Direct Action and the History of the Environmental Movement (Routledge, 2021). He is a regular contributor to the activist resource website commonslibrary.org

Wayne Murdoch

Wayne Murdoch lives near Bendigo in Central Victoria and often drinks in the wine bar at the Union Bank where J.L. Irvine once worked. He has always been fascinated by 19th and early 20th century social history. He is the author of Kamp Melbourne in the 1920s and 30s: Trade, Queans and Inverts (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).

Allen Myers

Allen Myers joined the socialist movement in the United States in 1965. Migrating to Australia in 1974, he joined the tendency known at different times as Socialist Workers League, Socialist Workers Party, Democratic Socialist Party and Revolutionary Socialist Party. Along with the rest of the RSP, in 2013 he joined Socialist Alternative. His main role in the socialist movement has been as a writer and editor. He is currently an assistant editor of Marxist Left Review and a subeditor and contributor to Red Flag. Allen is the editor of Against the Stream (Vol 2 of the History of the DSP) (Interventions 2017) and Keeping the Red Flag Flying (Vol 3 of the History of the DSP) (Interventions 2020).

Tom O'Lincoln

Tom O'Lincoln has been active in left politics since 1967, in Germany, the US and Australia. He is the author of many books including Into the Mainstream: the Decline of Australian Communism; Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era; Australia's Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth and 'The Expropriators are Expropriated' and Other Writings on Marxism (Interventions 2015) . His political memoirs, The Highway is for Gamblers, was published by Interventions in 2017.

Sam Oldham

Sam Oldham is an interdisciplinary researcher based in Melbourne. His work on trade unions has won the Gollan Prize for Australian Labour History and the Monash University Historical Studies Masters Prize. He has been a member of several unions and a branch chair for the New Zealand secondary teachers' union. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne. His first book Without Bosses: Radical Australian Trade Unionism in the 1970s will be published by Interventions in 2020.

Bobbie Oliver

Bobbie Oliver is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include the labour movement and anti-war protest. She has published three books with Interventions. She is the author of A Natural Battleground: The fight to establish a rail heritage centre at Western Australia's Midland Railway Workshops (2019) and is co-editor of and contributor to Radical Perth Militant Fremantle (2019). Her latest book published by Interventions is Hell No! We Won't Go! Resistance to conscription in postwar Australia (2021).

John Percy

For half a century until his death in 2015, John Percy was a central figure in the effort to build a revolutionary socialist party in Australia. Radicalised in the 1960s, he was a founder and leader of the revolutionary youth group Resistance, then of the Socialist Workers League, which became the Socialist Workers Party and Democratic Socialist Party. John filled many roles over the years: branch organiser, editor, writer, political candidate, national president, national secretary, public speaker. Expelled from the DSP as part of a minority in 2008, John was instrumental in establishing and leading the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which in 2013 joined Socialist Alternative. John is the author of Against the Stream (Vol 2 of the History of the DSP) (Interventions 2017) and Keeping the Red Flag Flying (Vol 3 of the History of the DSP) (Interventions 2020).

Liz Ross

Liz Ross has been active in Women's and Gay Liberation and socialist politics since the early 1970s. She is a founder member and now life member of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA). As a union delegate in the 1980s and 1990s she was involved in and has written extensively about workers struggles. Author of 'Dedication doesn't pay the rent! The 1986 Victorian Nurses Strike' in Sandra Bloodworth and Tom O'Lincoln (eds), Rebel Women in Australian Working Class History; Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win! Builders Labourers Fight Deregistration, 1981-94 and 'Building Unions and Government Reform: the Challenge for Unions' in the Journal of Australian Political Economy. Since the early 2000s she has contributed to the debate about climate change as author of How Capitalism is Destroying the Planet, as well as conference presentations and articles. Liz is the author of Revolution is for us: the left and gay liberation in Australia, reprinted by Interventions in 2019. Her forthcoming book Stuff the Accord! Pay up! Workers' resistance to the ALP-ACTU Accord will be published by Interventions in 2020.

Karen Throssell

Karen Throssell is an award-winning writer and poet, with five poetry collections and a book of creative non-fiction The Pursuit Of Happiness (1988). She has also published in journals and anthologies including Overland, Westerly, Meanjin, Quadrant, Hecate and Artstreams. Karen was shortlisted for the 2017 Book of the Year Award - Poetry (Society of Australian Women Writers) and an earlier version of The Crime of not knowing your Crime was shortlisted in 2017 for the Dorothy Hewett award for works of creative non-fiction. Her work reflects her commitment to radical politics, literature and feminism.

Alexis Vassiley

Alexis Vassiley is a postgraduate researcher at Curtin University. His dissertation examines the rise and fall of trade unionism in Western Australia's Pilbara mining region. He has published in Labour History on trade union solidarity with Aboriginal rights at Noonkanbah, as well as on establishing militant trade unionism in the Pilbara. He is co-editor of and contributor to Radical Perth Militant Fremantle (Interventions 2019), and editor of the Interventions Red Swan Series in radical Western Australian labour history and politics.