[2] His most iconic work, A New Britannia,[3] gained notoriety for challenging the dominant approach to Australian history developed by the Old Left.
Dinny was a long-time member of the Leather and Allied Trades Union who, along with his working wife and McQueen's mother, was recruited to the ALP in the 1950s by a Grouper (although his politics was communistic).
[7] McQueen was educated at Marist College Ashgrove and was a contemporary of future PNG prime minister Julius Chan.
[8] He joined the ALP at the age of fifteen, and was instrumental in establishing the Queensland Young Labor organisation and was editor of its newsletter.
[1] The 'burly, goatee bearded...freethinker' was suspended from the university in 1962 when he reproduced the opinions of Peter Kenny, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation researcher, in 1962.
[13] McQueen was an active participant in the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia,[14] campaigning against conscription as chairman of the Melbourne-based Revolutionary Socialist Group in 1968.
[15] He had also been secretary the Vietnam Day Committee in Melbourne when it held a vigil outside the United States Consulate and picketed the Defence Standards Laboratories in 1967.
[23] Although many agreed with McQueen's argument that Duntroon did not allow the right to free thought, fundamental to the liberal conception of a university, the department approved the request.
[22] Together with an application of British New Left theorists, Perry Anderson[29] and Tom Nairn,[30] the approach redefined the nature of Australian historical enquiry, which would prove to be influential in the discipline of history.
[37] In 1971, McQueen wrote a review against Christopher Hitchens calling his work on Marx 'acceptable as a fourth year honours essay but it would not be remarkable even as that' and 'it would be useful for a student with no more than an hour to prepare for a tutorial on the subject.
'[40] Mungo McCallum said McQueen was 'a middle-class academic putting forward views, on the ideal society but without suggesting realistic proposals to attain it.'
McQueen believed in a fusion between the philosophical and economic Marx, which was a midway between the two competing interpretations of Marxism that had preoccupied radicals since the 1920s.
Great Depression and Aftermath Cold War New Left Contemporary Active Historical McQueen contributed a chapter entitled "Born free: wage-slaves and chattel-slaves" to Foundational Fictions in South Australian History (2018).