Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill (born 1945) is an Australian radical historian and journalist with background as a teacher, and farmhand, and has variously worked for the trade union movement as a rank and file activist, delegate and publicist. During the Vietnam War he was a conscientious objector, and was prominent in the anti-war, student protest, and New Left movements of the period, primarily as a publicist and communicator. Formative journalistic influences during the 1960s were gained on the Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit under the editorships of Hall Greenland and Keith Windschuttle.

In 1967 Cahill was a founder of the radical and innovative Sydney Free University (1967-1972); between 1969-1973, he was a member of the editorial board of Australian Left Review (ALR), a bi-monthly journal of theory and practice published by the Communist Party of Australia. During this period, ALR had a pioneering role in introducing the work of Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) to Australian intellectual and political audiences. From 1970 to 1972, Cahill was employed by the militant Seamen's Union of Australia (SUA) as a journalist and historian. There he was influenced by SUA leader Eliot V. Elliott and by Della Elliott, editor of the union's monthly journal, the Seamen's Journal. Beginning in 1967, Cahill was placed under surveillance by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

Cahill has been widely published in socialist, trade union, academic and mainstream publications; he has written numerous pamphlets and booklets, and is the author or co-author of six books, including a history of the Seamen's Union of Australia (1981). As a classroom teacher, he was a prolific contributor to education debate via contributions to non-academic publications, particularly Education, journal of the NSW Teachers Federation.

Between 2001 and its final issue in December 2006, Cahill was a regular contributor to, and Picket Line Correspondent for, the internationally acclaimed Sydney based labour movement online journal Workers Online. He works as a part-time teaching academic at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales. With long-time colleague Terry Irving (1938- ), he is a proponent of radical history.

Cahill is married to high school English and drama teacher, Pamela Cahill. Together they are parents to political economist Damien Cahill, sociologist Erin Cahill (sociologist) and poet Tim Cahill (poet).