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The Victorian Labor party came into being in the midst of the great strikes of the early 1890s, and in the shadow of a crippling economic depression that was to send trade unionism into retreat throughout Australia.

In The People s Party, Frank Bongiorno gives a lively account of the infant Labor Party s attempts to find common ground between the competing demands of inner-city workers and farmers, Catholics and Protestants, trade unionists and disaffected liberals, teetotallers and boozers, socialists and feminists. The Victorian Labor Party emerges from these pages as a process rather than a thing, as contested ground rather than conquered territory .

For so long treated as a poor cousin of its New South Wales counterpart, the Victorian Labor Party at last has a history that does justice to its complex and distinctive tradition, and suggests new ways of thinking about the history of Labor in politics throughout Australia.