You are invited to attend the launch of historian Humphrey McQueen’s
seventeenth book:
*We Built This Country: Builders’ Labourers and Their Unions*
(Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, 2011)
At* The New International Bookshop*
Trades Hall, 54 Victoria St Carlton, Vic
*Wednesday 30th November 2011
6.30 to 7.30pm*
Humphrey McQueen is a freelance historian and cultural commentator who has written extensively on Australian society, culture and the labour movement.
Amongst his many influential titles are *A New Brittania: an Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism*, *The Black Swan of
Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944* and *Temper Democratic: How Exceptional is Australia?*
*We Built This Country* charts the history of Australian builders’ labourers and their unions, from their early beginnings as ‘Weird Mobs’ of Irish and
Italians, through to the radical days of the Builders’ Labourers Federation green bans and worker control in the sixties, to the struggles of the
present day. A companion volume to his 2009 history of labourers’ occupational health and safety struggles *Framework of Flesh*,* We Built
This City* pictures builders’ labourers as ‘improvising nomads’ who have shaped Australia socially and culturally as well as with concrete. Through
this historical survey McQueen has opened a window into the making of the Australian working class.
Please join us when Humphrey launches *We Built This Country* in The New International Bookshop at 6.30 pm on Wednesday November 30.
Drinks and snacks will be available by donation and entry will be by $2/5 donation to the Shop.
On behalf of the NIBS Co-operative, thanks.
In solidarity,
Sharne Vate
**Please forward across your networks**