Humphrey Dennis McQueen was born on 26 June 1942 and is an Australian public intellectual.
23 Facts About Humphrey McQueen
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Humphrey McQueen has written books on history, the media, politics and the visual arts.
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Humphrey McQueen was born in Brisbane to a working-class family that was active in the Australian Labor Party.
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Humphrey McQueen's father was Dinny "Horse" McQueen, a tanner and assistant bookmaker who knew John Wren.
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Dinny was a long-time member of the Leather and Allied Trades Union who, along with his working wife and Humphrey McQueen's mother, was recruited to the ALP in the 1950s by a Grouper.
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Humphrey McQueen was educated at Marist College Ashgrove and was a contemporary of future PNG prime minister Julius Chan.
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Humphrey McQueen joined the ALP at the age of fifteen, and was instrumental in establishing the Queensland Young Labor organisation and was editor of its newsletter.
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In 1961, Humphrey McQueen served as the ALP campaign organiser for the seat of Ryan.
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Humphrey McQueen left the Commonwealth Public Service soon afterwards to undertake a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Queensland where he graduated with Honours degree in 1965.
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The panel appointed to judge the 'bearded' Humphrey McQueen found him guilty but declined to punish him.
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Humphrey McQueen was an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia, campaigning against conscription as chairman of the Melbourne-based Revolutionary Socialist Group in 1968.
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Humphrey McQueen had been secretary the Vietnam Day Committee in Melbourne when it held a vigil outside the United States Consulate and picketed the Defence Standards Laboratories in 1967.
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Humphrey McQueen challenged the egalitarian aspect of the tradition, highlighting the prominence of racism in convict society.
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Humphrey McQueen wrote A New Britannia, an historical analysis of the emergence and development of the Australian labour movement.
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In seeking to challenge accounts of Australian history presented in the Old Left, Humphrey McQueen established the grounds to contest the Whig tradition in Australian scholarship.
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Humphrey McQueen identified that British imperialism cannot be separated from the experience of capitalism in Australia, and that Australian identity should be reconsidered in light of the role that racism and Patriarchy had played in development of the Australian labour movement.
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Humphrey McQueen stated that A New Britannia "Will provoke angry discussion, but I hope it will provoke the new left to develop the methodology necessary to write a new history".
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The Papua New Guinea Post-Courier said, 'Mr Humphrey McQueen is a very angry young man, and there is plenty of justification for this in Australia.
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Humphrey McQueen is concerned to show that the projection of radicalism and nationalism into socialism and anti-imperialism is mythical.
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In 1971, Humphrey McQueen wrote a review against Christopher Hitchens calling his work on Marx 'acceptable as a fourth year honours essay but it would not be remarkable even as that' and 'it would be useful for a student with no more than an hour to prepare for a tutorial on the subject.
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Humphrey McQueen called for a boycott of the 1972 election because the ALP under Gough Whitlam would be 'even more imperialist in its policy towards South East Asia.
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Humphrey McQueen believed in a fusion between the philosophical and economic Marx, which was a midway between the two competing interpretations of Marxism that had preoccupied radicals since the 1920s.
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Humphrey McQueen contributed a chapter entitled "Born free: wage-slaves and chattel-slaves" to Foundational Fictions in South Australian History.