Talk:Doug Bardolph

A couple of things:

As I understand it, Bardolph and Dale were not the only Lang Labor MPs: Tom Howard in Adelaide was too.

The article papers over Bardolph's re-expulsion after Lang Labor merged into the regular ALP, and the current wording is a really confusing way of putting it that his later career was as an independent. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 14:49, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks DW. I'm working my way through it. Any help gratefully received. Doug butler (talk) 15:15, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * As I understand it, the ALP rescinded all expulsions, but I don't know that Doug Bardolph ever did get back inside the tent. I suspect nothing short of resignation of the leaders and his installation as Secretary would have induced him to rejoin. And thanks for the tip on Tom Howard. How did I miss that? Doug butler (talk) 16:07, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * This is a very, very poorly documented period of South Australian history, even though it's an incredibly fascinating one and there'd easily be enough material for a riveting book (which I might well write one day!). It took a LOT of research to find out who went where for the South Australian member lists, and if we didn't have Trove it'd have been a completely hopeless exercise. My notes from the time say Bardolph rejoined with everyone else and was expelled again in 1935, but I don't know where that came from. I'm having a lot of trouble doing serious editing at the moment (I did my back in and can't sit up for long periods of time), but I'll try to do another round of combing through the sources in the next couple of days and see if I can find where I got that from. (Also, since you seem to be interested on this and pretty thorough yourself, if you ever wanted to write an article on the split itself, I'd be mad keen to join in.) The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 01:49, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the compliment, but my self-imposed project is to get rid of redlinks in the S.A. MLC's, then the MHA's, correcting Trove tronsl;foratiens on the way. Learning by doing. I don't think Doug Bardolph was sacked from the A.L.P., just what I've called "disendorsed"; the Party term being somewhat obscure "automatically placed himself outside the A.L.P." - reminds me of a vulgar and quite apt analogy involving a tent. Does Prof. Jaensch's Government of South Australia cover this period? One day I'll find a copy in an op-shop for my library. Doug butler (talk) 23:30, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * You're going to create articles for all SA MPs? Oh how I love wikipedia. Kudos to you :) Timeshift (talk) 23:49, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Getting much less interesting closer to the present day. Would that Trove's Advertiser OCR work extended another 50 years. Doug butler (talk) 00:16, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

The party still uses "automatically placed himself outside the ALP", and it still means "your arse is out on the kerb and you're sitting as an independent": see George Petersen and Terry Martin for two more recent examples. Amanda Fazio is a slightly different case, but the reportage of Bardolph was much closer to Petersen and Martin than Fazio. If he was just disendorsed for the next election, that would be one thing, but again as I recall it Bardolph was actually booted out, and those two things are not the same.

As I said on Timeshift's talk page (better to have the conversation here), my memory is that some of the broader texts on SA politics got a bit lazy and decided to pretend the split never happened rather than working out where the heck every single member of the Labor caucus went, over that three year period - essentially deciding that "they were all Labor anyway" even though at one point there were four Labor parties in the House. I think Trove is a much more reliable marker of party affiliation than a lot of book sources, especially the further back we go: once we hit the 1910s it gets even less clear and a lot of them may well go for a quick fix, whereas we have access to more sources at the touch of a button than the authors of some book in the 70s ever did. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 01:45, 28 November 2014 (UTC)