Eric Hobsbawm on invented traditions & Australian sheep shearers
Eric Hobsbawm although he ended up as a Companion of Honour saw himself very much as someone on the margins of society. Forced to flee from Nazi Germany, kept out of academic jobs in the 1950s due to his Communist Party membership, yet as Francis Newton, author of a paperback on the jazz scene, then not much approved by the CP.
This was reflected in his historical work. He saw things through a Marxist prism but often focused on matters at the margins the better to explain the centre.
In his collection Fractured Times he has a chapter on the myth of the American cowboy where he also surveys similar groups of men including Australian sheep shearers. An itinerant workforce they were also strong union men. Hobsbawm notes that they had sympathy for the 1917 Russian Revolution enough indeed to attend a solidarity meeting. However when police searched some attendees for subversive literature they found only multiple copies of a leaflet noting that if water rotted the boots of sheepshearers think what it might do so their stomachs.
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