THE LABOUR movement lost two of its leading historians last month-Robin (Bob) Gollan and Eric Fry. Gollan and Fry were both members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), radical nationalists who saw the struggle for socialism as a fight for a "fair go".

Both served in World War Two.

I met them some years ago, while presenting a conference paper on the clandestine activities of the RSL.

They told me that, after the war, they had been sent into the RSL by the CPA to try to swing its membership behind working-class campaigns for better pay and conditions.

With obvious amusement, they remembered the RSL as no place for communists and that they had left before being "pushed".

Both men played a pioneering role in the study of workers and labour organisations in Australia, seeing the importance of "history from below".

Eric Fry wrote an influential thesis entitled "The condition of the urban wage earning class in Australia in the 1880s" and, after joining the academic staff at the ANU, edited Tom Barker and the IWW (1965), Rebels and Radicals (1983) and Common Cause: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Labour History (1986).

While completing a PhD in London, Bob Gollan was influenced by the work of the Communist Party Historians Group and met with some of its most influential scholars, such as E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill.

He wrote three very influential books about the labour movement-Radical and working class politics: a study of Eastern Australia 1850-1910, The Coalminers of New South Wales: a history of the union 1860-1960 and Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement.

The two men established the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History in 1961 and, with it, a journal, now known as Labour History.The journal encouraged the study of social history, class society and the study of trade unions.

The Society was formed with an explicit intention of involving labour activists, as well as Marxist and non-Marxist left-wing historians, in the study of working-class history so that lessons from the past could assist in the struggles of the day.

Like today, the period in which the organisation was formed was one of intense debate over which "version" of history would predominate.

Cold War conservatives hated the fact that many well-read works of Australian history had been written by radicals and challenged conventional versions of the past.

We now know that ASIO took a keen interest in the branch's activities. It sent a "mole" along to meetings in Sydney and Canberra and these spies compiled detailed reports about whether attendees were CPA or ALP members and made lists of who subscribed to the journal.

In 2005, as a former serving airman, Gollan received a commemorative medallion from the Federal Government to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War Two.

Although uncritical of the war itself, the medal made him really angry. Gollan railed against Howard's Australia and a government whose actions he felt sure his dead comrades would not endorse or respect.

"We have become a country governed by lies and fear," he wrote in the Canberra Times. "[Howard] boasts he stands for mateship and egalitarianism at the same time he attempts, by his industrial relations 'reforms', to destroy the institutions on which those qualities have been nurtured."

His last wish was to "hang in there long enough to vote that bastard out of office".

Although he didn't quite make it, as Alan Ramsay remarked upon Gollan's death, others will gladly step up to do it for him.

Sarah Gregson