Despite the increasing awareness of voluntary action in both countries in recent times, there has been little interest in exploring the historical relationship of voluntary action and labour. It is argued in this paper that the overall silence of the relationship between voluntary action and the labour movement has its origins in the emergence of a 'myth' of Labour hostility towards voluntary action. This 'myth' explains to some degree the invisibility of voluntary action in labour historiography, and misrepresents the labour movement's relationship with voluntary action in the UK and Australia. Rather than being implacably hostile to voluntary action, there has always been a strand within labour thinking in the two countries that has seen voluntary action as an essential complement to the state, and as integral to the building of the modern welfare state.

William Beveridge's report 'Voluntary action: a report on methods of social advance' was published in October 1948. When his earlier and more well-known report 'Social insurance and allied services' appeared in December 1942, the winter cold failed to put off long queues of purchasers. A second report on tackling unemployment had a similarly warm reception. Beveridge became a household name across the world as the 'father of the welfare state'. Yet in sharp contrast 'Voluntary action', his third report, provoked very little interest and rapidly disappeared from view. Beveridge himself continued to attract considerable attention for his contribution to the creation of the British social security system and the impact across the world of his ideas on a social service state. Yet even his biographer, Jose Harris, who contributes a chapter to this book, barely mentioned 'Voluntary action' in the first edition of her book. However, the profound shift in attitudes in Britain and elsewhere during the last two decades about the respective roles of governments and the voluntary sector and their relationship was reflected in Harris's second edition, which now included a full critical account of 'Voluntary action.' For the promotion of voluntary action has become a very popular concept across and beyond politics, and voluntary organisations are now significant players in public policy across the political spectrum and in many different countries. As a result, many people are now looking at Beveridge's 'Voluntary action' in a new light while exploring possible answers to many twenty-first-century dilemmas. In order to reflect upon the significance of Voluntary action and explore its contemporary relevance, a group of historians from Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand gathered together in November 2008 at a symposium to mark the sixtieth anniversary of its publication. Convened by the United Kingdom Voluntary Action History Society and hosted by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London, the symposium sought to explain and evaluate the legacy of Beveridge's 'Voluntary action' in Britain and the 'wider British world'.

William Beveridge's report 'Voluntary action: a report on methods of social advance' was published in October 1948. ... In assessing the impact of Beveridge's 'Voluntary action' over the last sixty years, this book also provides a reminder that the terms 'voluntary action' and 'voluntary sector' are both fluid and contestable. In this book we use Beveridge's own definition of voluntary action as outlined in his 1948 report, as encompassing mutual aid, self-help and philanthropy. ... As the individual chapters demonstrate, the ideas that William Beveridge developed in his 'Voluntary action' in the late 1940s have regained currency in recent times. What he had to say then has proved to be still relevant to us today, in an era which has seen increased co-operation and formal partnerships or 'compacts', but also widely expressed concerns about the basis of relations between third-sector organisations and the state.

This article examines the role played by 'imperial girls': daughters of vice-regal representatives, consuls and ambassadors despatched by British governments to represent its interests in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras. Little is known about children's responses to their imperial childhoods and they are rarely considered in transnational and imperial history. It is argued that imperial girls had a more influential and practical education than their brothers who were often absent from the family circle at boarding school. Although they did not have formal educational opportunities, girls remaining with their families learned much more about the imperial mission, about how to act within the imperial space, and the expectations placed on imperial women through the organisational impulse of philanthropy, social reform and the transnational commodity of the imperial feminist mission. This article assesses the possible impact imperial childhoods had on later imperial women using one case study: that of Lady Helen Munro Ferguson [later Viscountess Novar]. She spent a large portion of her own childhood in imperial circles and was later an imperial woman in her own right as the Governor-General's wife in Australia between 1914 and 1920, and the founder of the Australian Red Cross.

During the first half of 1948, while the report on voluntary action was in press, William Beveridge and his wife Janet toured New Zealand and Australia. Beveridge was invited to New Zealand by its oldest university, the University of Otago in Dunedin, to deliver the first De Carle lectures. This invitation was quite the antidote to a freezing and generally depressing British winter, one of the coldest on record, through which Beveridge and his team of inquiry assessors and research assistants (including his wife, Janet) worked to complete his third report, 'Voluntary action'. With the manuscript and the supplementary volume, 'The evidence for voluntary action' completed, the thought of leaving behind food rationing, queues, strikes and a mood of quiet despair for an all-expenses-paid round-the-world trip for himself and his wife was too good to pass up. A keen traveller, Beveridge had not before been to New Zealand, and to include a visit to Australia, which he had last visited at the age of three in 1882, and where he had many cousins, was an opportunity not to be missed.' Beveridge was also interested in these two 'British nations', and he was keen to assess their development since the war and to 'see people, to ask them questions, to get to know them'.