History
In 1856 stonemasons in Melbourne won the eight hour day, one of the first occasions in the world where organised workers had achieved this without loss of pay. The same year Melbourne Trades Hall Committee was formed and received a grant of land to build a Trades Hall. The world's first workers parliament, Melbourne Trades Hall, was built on the site in 1859. It was built in the style of the parliament buildings which were just down the road, and over the years has been further developed. With increasing activity during the 1880s in the Australian labour movement the committee became a Council to reflect its expanding role. The full title, Victorian Trades Hall Council was formally adopted in 1968.
In recent times, as well as being the centre for union activity, the Trades Hall Council has opened the Trades Hall building to many cultural events, plays, and concerts including the Melbourne Comedy Festival - concentrating on political and 'on the edge' performances. It was classified by the National Trust and is included in the Register of Historic Buildings (Victoria).
Some notable members of the Trades Hall Council from the 1880s include William Trenwith and Chummy Fleming, both from the Victorian Operative Bootmakers Union.
Read more about this topic: Victorian Trades Hall Council
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“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)