Product of a Community in Transition: The First Brisbane Trades and Labour Council, 1885-1888

In August-September 1885, Brisbane\u27s leading trade unionists founded a Trades and Labour Council (TLC). At that moment, the city of Brisbane was undergoing a rapid transformation from an underdeveloped provincial centre of some 30,000 inhabitants to a booming colonial capital of more than 90,000. The Council\u27s founders were men who embodied the values and habits of mind of the first half of the decade ofthe 1880s. They therefore created a peak labour body which could accommodate the features of a rapidly disappearing industrial relations system, a system based on exclusivist craft unions, on the benevolence of the city\u27s employers, on the assumption of the unity of purpose of capital and labour, on an unchanging social and industrial environment. However, a mid-decade tidal wave of immigration not only transformed the colony\u27s economic and industrial base, it brought into Brisbane, and into the city\u27s labour movement, a group of activists whose disposition was decidedly radical. Consequently, the TLC, even as it was created, was incapable of meeting the industrial, political and ideological needs of an invigorated labour movement. By 1888, the Brisbane TLC was committed to its own dissolution, a step which it took in June 1889, to make way for the Australian Labour Federation (ALF)