Making working-class heroes: Labor cartoonists and the Australian worker, 1903-16

The establishment of union-based papers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia created a base for professional cartoonists whose sympathies (and mostly origins) were strongly working class, though their mode of employment placed them as intellectuals. The paper looks at cartoons published in Tocsin, Labor Call, and the Australian Worker, notably those of Claude Marquet. Marquet and his fellows created a populist representation of organised labour which shaped class imaginings of the ideal Australian worker as male, muscular, and white. The homoerotic aspect of these representations is read here as generating the desire which moves the images towards the mythic.