The texts of the Waterside Workers' Federation offer a valuable insight into
the beliefs and activities of one of Australia's more powerful and militant unions. This
investigation focuses on the period following the end of the 1930s and the years of
World War 2 when the WWF was going through a rebuilding phase under a strong
Communist leadership. Seen as an essential tool for the organizational rebuilding of a
battered and fragmented Federation, the leaders of the union saw the establishment of
a journal as a priority. The product of this vision was the widely distributed, monthly
Maritime Worker. This newspaper became the masthead of a politically re-awakening
union and through it historians have been able to access the ideological directions the
WWF took to achieve its industrial and political objectives.
This investigation places the texts of the Waterside Workers' Federation under
the scrutiny of a post-structuralist analysis that has the work of Michel Foucault as one
of its principal features. The object of this project is to develop a critique of the
organising processes that inform historical knowledge. These processes are recognised
as the constraints that discourse functions place on all meaning and understanding.
By focussing on the texts of the Waterside Workers' Federation and interrogating the
interpretative features that support the notions of text, ideology and discourse, this
investigation introduces the need for a re-examination of the constitutive and
organisational features that have constrained and limited historical knowledge in the
modem period.