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Unions ACT is the peak body for trade unions in the Australian Capital Territory. It was formed on 16 April 1931 as the Trades and Labour Council of the Federal Capital Territory, changing its name to the Trades and Labour Council of the ACT in 1938, and then Unions ACT in 2002.
It comprises 23 affiliate trade unions and represents over 33,000 members.

Walter Niel Gunson, known Niel Gunson, was a pioneering historian of the Pacific who completed his PHD at the Australian National University in Professor Jim Davidson’s Department of Pacific History, 1955-1958. He was born and raised in Gippsland, Victoria. He was a Fellow in the Department of Pacific and Asian History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, 1962-1993, and held a visiting fellowship after retiring in 1993.

Gunson is recognised for his ethnographic research in the history of Protestant missions to the Pacific Islands and Polynesia in the 19th century. His later research focused on genealogy and kinship studies in the Pacific. His other interests included European, Australian Indigenous and local history. He owned a large library and archive collection which he shared with others.

Gunson mentored at least 20 PHD scholars. The Journal of Pacific History created the Gunson Prize in 2012 for scholars researching Pacific history. He was a foundational member of The Journal of Pacific History, and in 1975 helped establish the journal Aboriginal History. He worked for the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau. He established the first Tongan history workshop at the ANU in 1987 which resulted in the formation of the Tongan History Association (currently the Tonga Research Association) in 1989.

Margaret Anne Jolly AM FASSA, an Emeritus Professor in the College of Asia and The Pacific at the Australian National University (ANU), was born in Sydney on 12 April 1949. She is an historical anthropologist recognised as a world expert on gender in Oceania and has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, exploratory voyages and travel writing, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art.
Jolly worked as a Tutor and Senior Tutor in Anthropology at Macquarie University, while completing her doctoral studies. After completing her PhD, she was appointed Lecturer at Macquarie University (1980-1986). In 1983 she took up an appointment as Visiting Fellow on a Project on Gender Relations in the South West Pacific, Anthropology, in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University (ANU). Jolly was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1987. She was seconded to the Anthropology, Comparative Austronesian Project, Research School of Pacific Studies, at the ANU as a Visiting Fellow (1989-1991) and then returned to Macquarie University for a year, before taking up another secondment at the ANU where she was appointed a Visiting Fellow and Convenor, Gender Relations Project, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (1992-1995). She was subsequently appointed to a permanent position as a Senior Fellow and Head, Gender Relations Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU (1995-2009). In 1999 Jolly was promoted to Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies/Pacific Studies, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU. She was awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship for her project Engendering persons, transforming things: Christianities, Commodities and Individualism in Oceania (2010-2015) in 2009.
In addition to her roles at the Australian National University and Macquarie University, Jolly has held a number of prestigious academic roles including Head of the Gender Relations Centre (1992-2009); Burns Distinguished Visiting Chair, History, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1998); Visiting Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz (2002); Visiting Professor, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France (2009).
Jolly is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and in 2020 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia for "significant service to education, particularly to gender and Pacific studies".

Francis Barrymore (Barry) Smith completed a BA and a MA at the University of Melbourne and in 1959 was awarded a British Council scholarship to complete a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge University. On his return to Australia in 1962 he took up a lectureship in history at the University of Melbourne. He joined the Department of History, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University as Senior Fellow in August 1966 and was promoted to Professorial Fellow in 1975. He became Professor of History in 1992. After retiring in 1997, he continued as an Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow until 2013. Smith wrote extensively on Australian and British social and medical history. He supervised and mentored many students and was a key figure in the network of historians.

The Builders’ Exchange of New South Wales (NSW) was an early twentieth‑century association and meeting place for building contractors and allied trades in NSW, functioning both as an industry club and as a practical hub for work, information, and advocacy.
The Builders’ Exchange emerged in Sydney in the early 1900s as a formal association of builders and contractors, at a time when the construction industry was becoming more organised and specialised.
Its core purposes included coordinating tendering and contract information, providing rooms for meetings and professional networking, and representing members’ interests on issues such as employment and building conditions. During periods of economic difficulty, the Exchange introduced systems such as registration for unemployed members, designed to match them with available work and to assist both employers and workers.
The Builders’ Exchange operated alongside broader master builders’ organisations that had existed in NSW from the late nineteenth century, such as the Builders & Contractors Association of NSW founded in 1873, which later evolved into regional Master Builders Associations.
Over time, many of the functions of the Builders’ Exchange were absorbed or paralleled by the growing Master Builders Association of NSW and its regional branches.

Timothy Macnaught was amongst the first graduates of Macquarie University and completed his doctorate, on which this monograph is based, at ANU in 1975. After teaching history at the University of Hawaii for five years, he returned to Australia to serve in senior positions in church secondary schools in Victoria. In 1997 he joined the Office of National Assessments (ONA) in Canberra as senior analyst for the Oceania Branch to prepare classified reports for the Prime Minister and senior ministers. He retired from ONA in 2015. His book The Fijian colonial experience: a study of the neotraditional order under British colonial rule prior to World War II was published by ANU Press in 1982.

William 'Bill' Standish was a both a frequent observer on politics and a leading political scientist of Papua New Guinea for over 45 years, His focus was Chimbu Province, where he had married and built his own house (in Mindima, near Kundiawa), and where his death in 2019 was marked by traditional mourning gathering known as a ‘haus krai.’

He worked as a lecturer in Comparative Government at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1971-1974, and continued his research based in PNG to 1977. He was awarded his PhD - supervised by John Ballard - at the Australian National University in 1991, on “Simbu Paths to Power: Political Change and Cultural Conformity in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.” In subsequent years he alternated between positions in PNG and Australia, working for LaTrobe, the Parliamentary Library, and ANU, where he remained in various capacities until 2014. Along the way, he worked with AusAID and as an Elections Analyst, both in Papua New Guinea, as well as alongside documentary filmmaker Thom Cookes in 2002-3. He also served as a parliamentary researcher, providing parliamentary reports on Melanesian politics, governance in PNG and the rising role of violence in its elections.

Wilfred Shawcross was one of the first archaeology lecturers in the Department of Prehistory and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU), joining the department in 1973. He held various teaching and research positions at the ANU between 1973 and 1993.
Wilfred conducted extensive research in Australia and New Zealand, including significant archaeological excavations at Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes region of New South Wales, Australia between 1974 and 1980, focusing on Pleistocene human remains.

Leonard (Len) graduated from Carey Grammar School in Melbourne in 1930 and after relocating to Adelaide in 1932 he gained a position with the flour milling group Bunge (Aust.), beginning a 48 year career in the wheat industry.
Between 1934-38 he worked intermittently in Port Lincoln in wheat exports before joining the newly established Australian Wheat Board (AWB) in November 1939. In 1942 he was transferred to Melbourne as Assistant Manager of the Victorian Office and later as State Superintendent. Leonard was exempt from war service as the supply and marketing of wheat was a protected occupation.
While with the AWB Leonard held the positions of Secretary of the Head Office in Melbourne (1945), Assistant General Manager (1949) and General Manager (1963). He made 65 overseas trips to 57 countries.
In 1968 Leonard was awarded the Order of the British Empire for Service to the Wheat Industry.
When Leonard retired in 1977 he was the last of the AWB's original staff.
In November 1941 Leonard married Verona (Rona) Chesterfield in Adelaide and they had one daughter Helen. Leonard and Rona travelled extensively after his retirement until Rona's death in 1998. Leonard died on 21 April 2013.

John Scarborough was a notable architect who started his career with Scarborough, Robertson and Love in Melbourne. The registered partnership John F.D. Scarborough and Partners was incorporated in 1965. Following the death of John Scarborough in 1971 the firm was purchased by the remaining directors and now operates as Scarborough Architects, a trading name registered in 2000.

John F. D. Scarborough and Partners designed a range of commercial and private buildings including several church buildings for the Presbyterian church in the 1940s. They moved into design of academic libraries with the first commissioned university library at the University of Melbourne, the Baillieu library. This was followed by designs for Monash University and the Australian National University’s R.G. Menzies building.

Michael was Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Born in Ireland, he has a BA from Dublin University and in 1964 was awarded his PhD at the Australian National University for his work on social structures in Vanuatu. His primary research interests were in the anthropology of religion, gender, and ethnography of Vanuatu, India and Ireland.

Robert ‘Bob’ Mitton is primarily known for his book The Lost World of Irian Jaya, published posthumously after his early death in 1977.

After completing a geography degree at Monash in 1970, Mitton was hired by mining companies Kennecott Indonesia and subsequently Newmont, to prospect for copper in the western half of the island of New Guinea, a region then known as Irian Jaya (now divided between six Indonesian provinces, and also commonly called West Papua). This work gave him the opportunity for private research, taking him over the entire length of the Irian Jaya central mountain range. In 1974 he joined an anthropology expedition (of Prof. M. T. Walker of Southern Illinois University) in the Asmat coastal area, and later organised another expedition of his own, and traveling the entire length of the Baliem river. In 1975 he was appointed a cultural consultant by the National Cultural Council of Papua New Guinea and subsequently did work for the National Museum in Port Moresby.

Bob Mitton spent six years in Irian Jaya. A serious observer, he developed extensive knowledge of the region’s botany, geology, geography, history and anthropology. He was motivated by concern that the region “nearest to paradise” was being destroyed by contact with the outside world and conceived a book that might alert the world to Irian Jaya’s needless destruction. He made notes and took thousands of photographs for this projected volume, but before these plans came to fruition he was struck (in October 1976) with leukemia and died on the 21st of January of 1977 at the age of 30 at Melbourne. The book project was taken up by his friends, leading to the publication of The Lost World of Irian Jaya with Oxford University Press in 1983.

Over the years 1971-1976 Mitton assembled a significant collection of artefacts, especially Asmat shields, as well as significant quantities from Dani groups of the central highlands. After his death, some of these materials were placed in the MacLeay Museum (now part of the Chak Chak Wing Museum) in Sydney.

Born in Arkansas, USA, David Hyndman studied at the University of Colorado, and completed his MA at the University of Idaho. In 1972, he moved to Australia to pursue his PhD at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Queensland. His doctoral thesis on the Wopkaimin people of the Ok Tedi area of Papua New Guinea was completed in 1979.
He studied subsistence, ethnotaxonomy, ethnobotany, mining and Indigenous peoples, and biodiversity conservation. He completed several periods of fieldwork in the region from 1973 through the 1980s. He spent a good deal of research on the effects of the Ok Tedi mine on the surrounding area, both socially and environmentally.
From 1989-1992, Hyndman worked with the T'boli people of Mindanao in the southern Phillippines. Hyndman was a lecturer and later a reader at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Queensland, from which he retired in 2001, moving to the Canberra region.

Nigel D. Oram was an ethnologist and academic. In 1946, after military service in World War II, he read history at Oxford University. This was followed by a career in the British Colonial Service in East Africa and Uganda, where, in his own words, he had experience of law-and-order problems. In 1961, Oram helped set up the New Guinea Research Unit, Port Moresby, which was an offshoot of the Australian National University. His role was to undertake social research. To facilitate his information gathering, Oram learnt the Motu and Hula languages, and undertook his field work along the coast in a 35-foot long lakatoi canoe. In 1969, he was appointed a fellow at the University of Papua New Guinea, where he remained from 1969 to 1975. Oram returned to Australia where he taught prehistory for nine years at La Trobe University and where, upon his retirement in 1984, he became an honorary senior research fellow. He subsequently continued his research, frequently with the assistance of his daughter Rosemary Joan Oram (later Dobbyn).

Donald Stanley Gardner was born in London and studied biology and anthropology as an undergraduate in England before arriving in Canberra in 1975 to take up a PhD scholarship in Anthropology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts — the very first graduate student to do so. He carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Mianmin people in PNG’s West Sepik Province.
He was awarded his PhD in 1981 and subsequently commenced as a Lecturer in Anthropology, a position he held until 2004 when he moved to Heidelberg before moving again to Lucerne in 2008.
During his time at the ANU, Donald made eight field trips to the Mianmin, spending some 40 months there in total. His research covered social organisation, ritual, historical transformation, demography, nutritional status, and the potential impact of a large-scale mining project. He took a multi-disciplinary approach and collaborated with Robert Attenborough, a biological anthropologist, on an ARC project that looked at epidemiology and demography in its ecological and sociological context.
He died in Canberra in September 2025.

Naroo Pastoral Company was a pastoral company with properties in New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania. It was part of the Amatil portfolio and was jointly co-owned by British Tabacco Co (Australia) Limited and British-American Tabacco Company, London. It owned the following properties:
Belford Park, Upper Hunter NSW: beef cattle stud and sheep
Buddah, Warren area NSW: beef cattle, citrus fruit, sheep
Buttabone, Warren area NSW: beef cattle, sheep
Glenrock, Upper Hunter NSW: beef cattle, sheep, horse breeding
Jemalong, Forbes area NSW: beef cattle, sheep, dryland and irrigated crops
Meteor Downs, Springsure Queensland: beef cattle, sorghum
Mungadal, Hay area NSW: merino sheep, beef cattle
North East Pastoral Co, Gladstone area Tasmania: beef cattle and sheep
Narellan, Boorowa area NSW: beef cattle, sheep
Oxley, Warren area NSW: beef cattle
Ringorah, Warren area NSW: beef cattle
Steam Plains, Conargo area NSW: beef cattle and sheep
The Mount, Forbes area NSW: beef cattle
Wargam/Warwillah, Carrathool area, NSW: beef cattle