True Believers

At 11a.m. on Tuesday 8 May 1901, one day before the first federal Parliament of Australia convened, 24 members of the House of Representatives and Senate met in a stuffy basement room in Victoria's Parliament House. Their purpose? 'That we form ourselves into a Federal Labor Party.' From these small beginnings opens the big story of the nation's oldest political institution, the federal Caucus of the Australian Labor Party. Barely three years after that meeting, Labor was at the helm of the new