The Great War - published in October 2014 GR Magazine

The Great War

In his Age of Extremes Eric Hobsbawm wrote: "The destruction of the past or rather of the social mechanisms that linked one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century."

Now the Age of Extremes is an uncannily prescient book; written at a time (1994) when American neo-conservatives were crowing about the "end of history". Hobsbawm, old Marxist that he was, correctly saw that with the collapse of the Eastern bloc a world brought into existence as a result of the Great War was coming to an end. The new world would be fundamentally different: not Eurocentric; globalised economically; and characterised by "the disintegration of the old patterns of human and  social relationships...".

Now that we are in the second decade of the 21st century some things are becoming clearer. And Hobsbawm's characterisation of the period from 1914 to 1991 as the "short twentieth century" - a unified era brought into existence as a direct result of the forces unleashed by the Great War now seems blindingly obvious. No Great War: no October Revolution in Russia; no Stalin; no Nazi Germany; no World War Two; no Holocaust; no Cold War.

The centenary of the war has produced a flood of new books. Many of these focus on the causes of the

 war and reengage with the debate as to whether the war was inevitable or a colossal snafu and the 

related debate as to whether Germany was really to blame. The consensus that developed following the publication in 1961 of Fritz Fischer's Germany's War Aims in the First World War - that Germany 

precipitated the war in order to pre-empt Russia's growing economic and military power has come 

under attack in recent years and does suffer from the fact that no coherent war aims can be found to 

have existed prior to September 1914.

In 1914  - The Year the World Ended  Paul Ham argues that "the Great War, in short was an avoidable

exercise in collective stupidity...launched by profoundly flawed ...men..."  Ham is a reliable guide in 

most cases but this judgement seems a little glib. In The War that Ended Peace  Margaret Macmillan 

offers a more nuanced analysis based on a detailed survey of the economic and political developments

in each of the main protagonists in the generation leading up to the war. She emphasises how the 

motivations and historical experiences of each of the major players interacted to narrow options and 

make war more likely. Max Hasting's Catastrophe provides a  relatively concise overview of what he 

describes as "the most complex series of happenings in history" before moving on to a detailed account

of operations in the balance of 1914. His view is that Germany and Austria bore primary responsibility 

and that the war had to be fought to prevent the Kaiserreich dominating continental Europe.

The debate about the causes of World War One is essentially impossible to resolve because each step in the descent into the abyss was a necessary but not sufficient cause. Current events in Europe do however 

make one hope that the lead up to the war receives the attention it deserves.

Once the war began its history is necessarily military history and this can be something of an acquired 

taste. Partly that is because the subject matter - killing and destruction on an industrialised scale - is

inherently repulsive. But on the other hand without military history it would be impossible to 

understand how the carnage went on for four years. Nor would the societal dislocation that it caused be

explicable.

Les Carlyon’s Gallipoli  is a well written conventional narrative history which places the campaign in 

its strategic context and provides considerable information about Turkish as well as Allied motivation 

and objectives. Patsie Adam-Smith’s Anzacs is a history of the first AIF with insights into matters such 

as the comparative rates of venereal disease in the allied armies. The Australians led the way in this 

area as well as on the battlefield. Somme Mud by EFP Lynch is the memoirs of an Australian infantry 

man, written in 1921 but only recently rediscovered and published for the first time. This appears to be 

the genuine article – the forward is by the respected military historian Bill Gammage – and is that rare 

thing: a detailed first hand account by an intelligent and thoughtful observer who somehow forced 

himself to confront and record the appalling reality he experienced.

The starting point for reading on the first AIF and in many ways the originator of the Anzac ‘legend’ is 

CEW Bean’s Official History of the Australia in the war of 1914-1918. At twelve volumes and in 

amazing detail – often actions are recounted at the platoon level with individuals being named -  this is 

not for the faint hearted. Bean was not jingoistic and was careful to discount exaggerated claims as to 

Australian martial prowess but he is also assiduous in finding admiring commentary from both allied and enemy observers. The overall effect is somewhat adulatory. Bean also wrote an abridged version of his history 

Anzac to Amiens which is rather more approachable.

A somewhat less uplifting impression is conveyed by The Broken Years a selection of Australian soldier’s letters home, edited by Bill Gammage, many of which depict the brutalising effect of incessant slaughter on the correspondents. Particularly by 1918 the Australians hated the enemy and exalted in their destruction. It was this hatred which seems to have driven the Australians to perform so well in the critical battles of 1918.

Many of those battles were directed by an Australian – John Monash. Roland Perry’s Monash: the Outsider who Won a War makes a pretty big claim for its subject in its title. In March and April 1918 Australian troops under the command of Monash, stopped the last great German offensive of that war from taking Amiens and splitting the British and French armies. It was the last throw of the dice for the Germans and it nearly came off.  On 8 August of that year 100,000 Australian troops, again commanded by Monash, and supported by Canadians, smashed the German defences south of the Somme  and advanced 8 kilometers in two days. At least 6 German divisions were effectively destroyed. Ludendorff, the German supreme commander called it his worst experience of the war and thereafter became convinced the war was unwinnable.

Monash is a fascinating figure on several levels. As a Jew of German birth he encountered real but 

subtle prejudice, particularly as he was promoted into the highest ranks of the army. His outstanding 

ability as an organiser, his considerable personal charm and his ability to attract mentors, including 

George V meant that none of this detained him for long. But whether he won the war as Perry suggests 

is definitely open to debate. Like a lot of successful military commanders Monash understood the value of public relations and one must be careful not to swallow his PR whole.

John Laffin’s The Battle of Hamel focuses on the first major set piece conducted by Monash which 

prefigured his later successes and set the pattern for the defeat of the German’s on the Western front.

British writers tend to be less effusive about Monash. Indeed since the 1980s there has been the development of a revisionist school which seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of the likes of Douglas Haig. Walter Reid's Architect of Victory Douglas Haig makes the case for the rationality of Haig's leadership and the centrality of his contribution to devising the improved operational methods which eventually permitted the Allies to break the stalemate in 1918.

Readers of Patrick Lindsay’s Fromelles will struggle with this view. Frommelles was the first battle in which Australians were involved on the Western Front and was the a textbook example of the horrors of trench warfare. Over 5,000 of the 7,000 attackers were casualties including over 2000 dead.

Les Carlyon's The Great War is a sound over view of 1916 to 1918; written from an Australian perspective it places it in the broader context of the war's strategic and tactical evolution.

Because evolve it did. Contrary to the classic image of repeated suicidal frontal attacks as shown in films such as Paths to Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front, the commanders of both sides had grasped by the end of 1914 that there was no point in committing infantry to wave attacks against entrenched opponents. Over the next three years the respective protagonists sought to develop techniques that would permit infantry to capture and hold opposing trench systems. Many of the techniques that produced the Allied breakthrough of August and September 1918 - the creeping barrage, smoke, counter battery fire, and tanks were already in use by 1916. The problem was that it took nearly two years of trial and error and the consequent appalling casualties to perfect the combination.

In Beaten Down by Blood  Michelle Bomford gives us a tightly focused account of the First AIF’s last great battle in September 1918 at Mont St Quentin Peronne. Bomford draws on eye witness accounts and battalion war diaries and citations as well as the microscopic history of CW Bean to give a detailed account of the battle.

There is a brief but perceptive treatment of the military ‘strikes’ (usually called mutinies) that followed the battle in late September and a balanced treatment of whether the battle was militarily justified or as CW Bean alleged a product of Monash’s thirst for military prestige. Bomford comes down on the side of Monash and concludes the battle contributed to hastening the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line and materially shortened the war.

 

The Great War also generated a lot of literature albeit of varying quality. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is a good illustration of this. The work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves has stood the test of time but a lot of their compatriots produced jingoistic doggerel. The war poets may not however be a reliable guide to how the bulk of the population viewed the war. Atypical perhaps, but Robert Graves' memoir Farewell to All That is a wonderful insight into the world of a public school educated British officer. For a much less ambitious but still valuable account of a "typical" Australian see An Anzac's Story by Ron Kyle.

In the late 1920s novels drawing on war experience began to be published. Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel gives a nihilistic German perspective.  Klaus Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is a far more perceptive book and of course a classic of the genre. Flesh in Armour by Leonard Mann has some interest for its candid descriptions of Australians in frontline combat but suffers from being neither true history nor well written fiction. Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune is a similar attempt from a British perspective and Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison from the Canadian. The problem can be seen in the cliché that war is 99 per cent boredom and one percent terror. A novel that attempts to reproduce this experience cannot be truthful without risking narrative momentum and acquiring an episodic, directionless character.

One writer who has successfully negotiated this difficult terrain is Pat Barker. Her magnificent Regeneration trilogy by combing the stories of Owen, Graves and Sassoon with a hyper realistic depiction of the front is a triumph.

The Great War continues to affect us in personal ways. The development of Anzac Day as a response to a collective yearning for meaningful national ritual; as opposed to a spree for returned soldiers, is only the most obvious example. Then there are the direct effects. Had my great grandfather not been killed in April 1917 my great grandmother would never have emigrated from Scotland to Australia; someone else would be writing this article. Many Australian families are still marked by the effects of the 250,000 casualties (some 69,000 deaths) through the impact on our grand parents and parents.

The resurgence of interest in family history evident in both television and on the internet is testimony to this and also suggests that Hobsbawm may not have got everything right. The trick will be - and this is the true role of history - to ensure that the past we rediscover is not merely a fantasy designed to serve our contemporary narcissism.

Protecting Software in the Digital Age (published in Law Society Journal September 2014)

Protecting Software in the Digital Age

Grant Hansen,

Partner, Holman Webb 

In the seminal case on damages for software infringement, Autodesk v Cheung (1990) 171 IPR 69 Justice Wilcox observed that:

one matter which is, in my opinion, relevant, is the difficulty computer program owners face in trying to protect their copyrights. Computer software is easy to duplicate, distribute and conceal. Particularly in a case where a person is supplying computer programs as an adjunct to other equipment, and is therefore not advertising the supply, infringements may be difficult to detect. And, when they are detected, proof of the facts may be a substantial task

Autodesk v Cheung involved a physical sale of counterfeit software, installed on PCs by a system builder. The case predates the distribution of software using internet connections. In the “digital economy” software can be downloaded and activated by an end-user without dealing with physical product. Much of this activity - such as sales on platforms such as eBay and downloads from sites which advertise their purpose -  remains visible. Other transactions using peer to peer technologies are more difficult to detect.  Software copyright owners invest considerable effort in seeking to promote authorised use of their software.

To see what is at stake one has only to consider the fate of the recorded music industry. From 1999 to 2013 music sales in the US dropped from US $14.6 billion to US $7 billion (reference RIAA website). While the development of subscription models such as Spotify now means that end users are at least prepared to pay something for their music, that outcome has been a pyrrhic victory for owners of music copyrights who now receive as royalties a proportion of a much smaller pie than before. Instead of paying twenty or thirty dollars for a CD the consumer can pay ten dollars a month for virtually every CD ever made. That is good for consumers but the long term effects on creative output remain to be seen. Certainly, anecdotal evidence suggests that musicians now make their money by touring rather than by selling recordings.

“Channel” and “End-user” Infringement

Software infringement manifests in two principal ways: “channel” and “end user” infringement. Channel infringement involves the sale of unlicensed software and or the means of activating and using software (typically, on the internet, by sale of product keys that permit activation of downloaded software). Channel infringement can be dealt with using test purchases to gather evidence of infringement. Liability is therefore usually not in issue. Running such enforcement programs cost effectively and identifying the quantum of infringing sales remain a major challenge but generally speaking software developers have been fairly successful in closing down illicit channels of distribution.

A more difficult challenge is posed by commercial end user infringement.

In 1988 major software copyright owners formed the Business Software Alliance. Members include most major software developers and include Adobe, Apple, Autodesk,  Baseplan, Bentley, Dassault Systèmes, Microsoft, PCT, and Siemens. The BSA is an industry initiative that operates throughout Asia, Europe and North and South America. Software owners in each jurisdiction have formed country committees which administer a compliance programme in that jurisdiction. Members pay subscription fees and agree that the proceeds of enforcement are paid to the BSA to fund further enforcement and education.

The big markets for enforcement work are not surprisingly in the developing economies of Asia where non-compliance rates frequently exceed 50 per cent.

Australia may lead the world in downloading unlicenced versions of Game of Thrones but our surveyed non-compliance with software is average for a developed economy, about 21 per cent valued at US$743 million in a 2013 (reference BSA Global Software Survey 2014).

The remit of the BSA is to promote authorised use of software by end-users. It is a feature of software enforcement that where one product is being infringed normally several others are as well.

Motivated Informants

Obtaining evidence of end user infringement is of course the major challenge. Infringers rarely spontaneously confess. Unlike channel infringement there is no public nexus - no point of sale  - where evidence can be obtained. The BSA in Australia therefore usually acts on information received. Informants come forward for a variety of reasons - to claim a reward; to get even with an employer they feel has treated them poorly; and because they do not agree with using unlicensed software for profit.

The use of motivated informants is an unusual feature of an essentially commercial jurisdiction and of course great care is required in assessing the reliability of the information provided. Generally speaking however, by assessing the consistency and specificity of the information and comparing that with publicly available information it is possible to form an accurate view of the informant’s reliability.

The BSA always gives the Respondent an opportunity to produce evidence of that it was in fact licenced (contrary to the information received). If evidence of licencing is not forthcoming the BSA then seeks to reach an appropriate negotiated settlement

If that is not possible the affected BSA members have a choice between commencing proceedings (based on the evidence provided by the informant) or making an application for preliminary discovery.

Preliminary Discovery

Preliminary discovery is a highly technical jurisdiction under rule 7.23 of the Federal Court Rules. It  requires evidence, at the time of the application, that: the Prospective Applicant:

i)       may have the right to obtain relief in the Court from a Prospective Respondent;

ii)     after making reasonable enquiries, does not have sufficient information to decide whether to start proceedings ;

iii)   reasonably believes that:

(a)     the Prospective Respondent has or is likely to have, or has had or is likely to have had, in its control, documents directly relevant to the question whether the Prospective Applicants has a right to obtain the relief; and

(b)   .inspection of all of the documents sought by the Prospective Applicants ;

would assist in making the decision to commence substantive proceedings.

This requires evidence from an appropriate decision maker within the Prospective Applicant. Given that Prospective Applicants are typically large multi-national corporations with complex internal delegations of authority, careful consideration is necessary. In Telstra Corporation v. Minister for Communications (no. 3) [2007] FCA 1567 the Prospective Applicant failed because the evidence going to the Prospective Applicant’s reasonable belief was from a person with insufficient authority to make the decision to commence proceedings.

Nor is preliminary discovery available when the Prospective Applicant has formed the view that it does have a right to obtain relief. See Gibson v. ANZ Banking Group Ltd (VSC Gobbo J. No 10670/91).

Clearly there is a tension here between having a reasonable belief that information may be held by a Prospective Respondent which will assist in making the decision to commence proceedings (which entitles the Prospective Applicant to preliminary discovery)  and actually having a belief that  a cause of action exists (in which case preliminary discovery is not available). The more reasonable the belief that the Prospective Respondent may have information that assists in the decision to commence proceedings, the more likely it is that the Prospective Applicant will be found to actually believe that it has a cause of action.

Commencing Proceedings

For this reason, if sufficient evidence is held to permit the particularisation of at least one instance of infringement as required by rule 34.35 of the Federal Court Rules, the better course is to commence substantive proceedings and to then obtain an order for discovery pursuant  Division 7.3 of the Federal Court Rules. Such orders are however not made as of right; it is necessary to persuade the Court that the Respondent has documents within its control that are directly relevant to a real issue in dispute.

Nevertheless, Courts do routinely make discovery orders in copyright infringement matters because the quantum of infringement is usually a real issue in dispute and can most reliably be addressed using the Respondent’s business records.

Whenever software is installed on a computer, a record of that installation, including the time and date of the installation is created and stored on the computer’s permanent storage medium. Those records can be accessed and reproduced in a written form. If the records show an installation and the respondent does not have a corresponding licence then liability for that instance of unlicenced reproduction can be established.

Traditionally in copyright matters, the respondent’s first line of defence was to put the applicant to proof of their title to the copyright in question. This does not happen in software cases because of the presumptions as to ownership under s129A of the Copyright Act . Providing the owner asserts its ownership on the software using the copyright symbol © ownership is deemed to be established unless disproved by the Respondent.

Software created in a country which is a signatory to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works 1886 or the Universal Copyright Convention Geneva 1952 receives the full protection of Australian law by virtue of the operation of the Copyright (International Protection) Regulation 1969 made pursuant to s 184 of the Copyright Act.

Evidence

More often than one might expect however, the quality of information provided

by an informant is astonishingly good and includes internal documents and screenshots of network files disclosing the existence of “crack files” or internal emails containing admissions of the use of illegal software.

Older readers will remember when ephemeral communications were by telephone or even, incredibly, face to face. In those times the litigators’ task was much harder. In the digital age, the email is truly the litigator’s friend.

The question arises however, can use be made of internal documents obtained by an employee or consultant, perhaps covertly, which incriminate the employer?

Section 138 (1) of the Evidence Act (Cth) 1995 provides that evidence obtained

“improperly or in contravention of an Australian law” is not to be admitted unless the desirability of doing so outweighs the undesirability of admitting such evidence Section 138(3) sets out matters the court can take into account such as the probative value of the evidence and the gravity of the contravention and the difficulty of obtaining the evidence without “impropriety”.

The first question is whether there is in fact any impropriety in the way evidence has been obtained from the Respondent. Sections 126A to 126E of the Evidence Act 1995 (NSW) create “protected confidences” but internal office communications are not within these categories. Sections 117 to 131 of the Commonwealth Evidence Act deal with privileged communications but again these do not include internal office communications. Such documents are however business records and admissible pursuant to s69 of the Evidence Act.

Even if a contractual provision purports to prohibit the disclosure of an incriminating document, it would remain potentially admissible by virtue of s138 (1) of the Evidence Act and at common law.

In National Roads & Motorists Assn v Whitlam [2007] NSWCA 81, Campbell JA (with whom Beazley JA and Handley AJA agreed) observed in relation to “confidential information” which is not subject to a statutory privilege,  the usual approach of the court is that it is more important that such evidence (if relevant)  be used in the administration of justice rather than that the confidence be protected.

The common law position is clear enough. The authorities established that the public interest in the disclosure (to the appropriate authority or perhaps the press) of “iniquity” will always outweigh the public interest in the preservation of private and confidential information.  In Allied Mills Industries v Trade Practices Commission  34 ALR 105 at 127 Sheppard J quoted with approval Wood VC in Gartside v Outram (1856) 26 LJ (Ch) 113, (at 114): “The true doctrine is, that there is no confidence as to the disclosure of iniquity. You cannot make me the confidant of a crime or a fraud, and be entitled to close up my lips upon any secret which you have the audacity to disclose to me relating to any fraudulent intention on your part: such a confidence cannot exist.”

Allied Mills concerned breaches of the Trade Practices Act. There is no doubt that that logic would also apply to breaches of the Copyright Act, many of which breaches are also potentially punishable by fines and imprisonment. (see ss132AC and following of the Copyright Act) Commercial infringement (reproduction), sale of and possessing infringing copies for a commercial purpose are all criminal offences.

As a practical matter however this issue rarely needs to be tested. Once the applicant knows a specific document exists its production can be required by a notice to produce pursuant to rule 20.35 of the Federal Court Rules, subject only to the recognized categories of privilege. If the document is not found by the respondent or is “lost” then the extant copy in the informant’s possession will, subject to s138 of the Evidence Act be admitted into evidence.

Indeed, the temptation to destroy evidence is significantly reduced by the Court’s power to strike out a defence in situations where evidence has been destroyed. In such cases it will be open to the Applicant to make an application for an order under rule 16.21(f) of the Federal Court Rules) to strike out the defence. See Moody Kiddell & Partners Pty Ltd v Arkell [2013] FCA 1066 and Palavi v Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd [2012] NSWCA 182).

Damages

Generally speaking, the major legal issue in most software cases is assessment of damages. Typically that is done by applying what is known as the “licence fee test”. That is based upon an inference that the Court may draw that a respondent, when presented with a choice between paying the licence fee and not using the software would have paid the necessary licence fee; see  Autodesk Australia Pty Limited v Cheung (1990) 171 IPR 69 and Microsoft Corporation & Ors v Ezy Loan Pty Limited & Anor (2004) 69 IPR 54.  Damages are payable irrespective of whether there has been any belated legalisation.

In Autodesk Inc & Ors v Ginos Engineers Pty Ltd & Anor [2009] FMCA 14 at [109], His Honour, FM Lloyd Jones held (in respect of the licence fee test) that in that case “the proper measure of damages is the retail price that would have been paid by the respondents had they obtained the licences they were required to. If the respondents had purchased valid licences, they would have purchased them at the retail, not the wholesale, price.”

Compensatory damages are however just the beginning. Section 115(4) of the Act provides that the Court is empowered to make an award of additional damages under section 115(4) of the Act where the Court is satisfied that it is proper having regard to the following:-

(a)               the flagrancy of the infringement;

(b)               the need to deter similar infringements of copyright;

(c)               the conduct of the defendant after the act subsequent to infringement or after an allegation of copyright infringement;

(d)              whether the infringement involves the conversion or work or other subject matter from hardcopy or analog form into digital or other electronic machine readable form;

(e)               any benefit to have accrued to the defendant by reason of the infringement; and

(f)                all other relevant matters.

The deliberate infringement of copyright for gain constitutes deliberate and flagrant conduct (see Microsoft Corporation v PC Club Australia Pty Ltd [2005] FCA 1522 at 223 per Conti J).

The availability of additional damages is a powerful incentive for respondents to settle software infringement claims at an early stage. Awards of multiples of the compensatory damages are routine. Post detection conduct is one of the factors a Court can have regard to in awarding additional damages.

Authorisation

The other great incentive for respondents to settle is the concept of authorisation under s36 (1) of the Copyright Act. Notwithstanding the High Court’s decision in Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd (2012) 95 IPR 29, company directors still have the requisite control to be exposed to personal liability where their company has engaged in infringing conduct. That can be the case even when the director had no actual knowledge of the infringement.

In University of New South Wales v Moorhouse (1975) 133 CLR1 the High Court found that authorisation included “countenance or acquiesce”. In Microsoft Corporation & Ors v PC Club Australia & Ors [2005] FCA 1522 at paragraph 277 Conti J applied the Moorehouse to directors of a private company observing:-

"As directors in office of PC Club at all material times, neither Ms Lee nor Mr Fang can escape liability ...for the same quantification of s115(2) damages for infringement of copyright. By virtue of their respective appointments...and their full time...employment...each of them must be taken to have authorised the infringing conduct of PC Club."

In APRA v Jain (1990) IPR 663, a decision of the full Federal Court, Mr Jain was the CEO of the proprietor of Old Windsor Tavern but he left the day to day running of the tavern to an employee. The Court found (at 671):  "Mr Jain knew that music would be performed at the tavern, but did not concern himself  with the actual pieces of music which would be performed."

Mr Jain was found to have authorised infringements even though "he did not concern himself with the actual pieces of music which would be performed."

Review of Tinderbox by MJ Akbar

Tinderbox – The Past and Future of Pakistan

by M J Akbar

Anyone who has watched Attenborough's Gandhi, knows the metaphor of India being a beautiful women with lustrous eyes: one eye Hindu, one eye Muslim. How a country where two faiths had lived intertwined for over a millennium could degenerate into the violence of partition is one of the real mysteries of India.

In Tinderbox Akbar analyses the ‘DNA’ of Pakistan, going back to the defeat of the Mughal Empire by the British and the impact of defeat and conquest on Muslim elites in the North of the Subcontinent.

Akbar shows how one aspect of that reaction is embodied in the Muslim league’s leader Jinnah. Jinnah was a pretty careless Muslim. He enjoyed a drink; could not quote the Koran, and invited Mountbatten to lunch during Ramadan. His model was Attaturk. He believed in a secular republic whose majority were Muslims and saw the Muslim faith and Urdu language as indispensable but vulnerable markers of community, which required their own state apparatus to survive.

Jinnah is often called the father of Pakistan. Akbar then focuses on Maulana Maududi, whom he calls the Godfather of Pakistan. Maududi, who died in 1979 was a Wahabi influenced religious scholar with a vitriolic hatred of the West and all its works. Maududi’s theological worldview could get traction in certain sections of the Muslim population both because of a historical (albeit contentious) memory of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the British Raj and the ongoing injustice and fitful economic progress of Pakistan.

Add bad politics and self-seeking politicians and, according to Akbar, you have the potential for a ‘toxic jelly state’ – one that neither collapses nor stabilizes and where there is a real chance that nuclear weapons could end up being controlled by people who believe suicide is a pathway to paradise.

That last proposition seems somewhat alarmist. What Akbar does not do is analyse in any detail the political numbers or the current allegiances of key military and judicial figures. When given a chance, the Pakistani people have consistently rejected Islamist political parties. The army has moved to crush the Taliban in the Swat Valley. A doomsday scenario is a long way off. What would have been useful, and what Akbar – an Indian Muslim and evidently no great fan of Pakistan – does not provide, is an analysis of how a more positive future, one where the tendency embodied in Jinnah prevails, might come about.

Review of Jacks and Jokers

Jacks and Jokers

By Matthew Condon

In an interview in the Courier Mail in March last year Matthew Condon said this about what at that time was a projected two volume work on police corruption in Queensland:

"I felt ...that I was in a unique position, as a storyteller, to try to get to the heart of this drama before even more people passed away and their memories were lost ..."

Unfortunately, this worthy ambition remains unfulfilled in Jacks and Jokers - now the second in a trilogy. The problem is easy to understand. Condon is dealing with about thirty years of policing history and literally hundreds of characters. Keeping track of who is who is a real challenge - all those Irish surnames - and is not assisted by Condon's episodic true crime writing style.

What Jacks and Jokers does provide is a picaresque journey through the dregs of Queensland society in the late 70s and early 80s on both sides of the thin blue line. But the "big picture" as the participants themselves refer to it, tends to get lost in a mass of sordid detail.

To illustrate the problem, a key thread in the story is the efforts of the corrupt police who are in "the Joke" to get rid of ex commissioner Whitrod's adherent and  chief of the Licensing Branch, Alec Jeppesen. The elements of this fascinating tale and its consequences are scattered over at least a dozen or so short references (beginning at page 98 and not concluding until page 365). But this is not a peripheral part of the story. It was the evidence on indemnity of Dwyer and his successor Parker which really exposed how the Joke worked - the Licensing Branch enforced the laws on prostitution and illegal gambling and generated about $250,000 a year in bribes - and their evidence also sent Tom Lewis to gaol. The history of the battle for control of the Licensing Branch was crying out for its own sustained analysis and not the fragmented treatment it receives.

And this is where Condon's dependence on former Commissioner Tom Lewis as a source is problematic. Lewis served seven years for corruption but maintains his innocence. He kept detailed diaries but was ultimately convicted on the evidence of other corrupt police. Lewis clearly has an agenda: to maintain deniability and Condon does not take him on (though he stops well short of exculpating him as well).

Perhaps the great unsolved question of the Moonlight State era is the precise relationship between former Assistant Commissioner Tony Murphy - never charged but generally agreed to have been the real criminal mastermind - and Commissioner Tom Lewis. As Tony Koch wrote in The Australian at the time of Tony Murphy's death in 2010: "Obviously the only one who could fill in the gaps and put history right is Lewis, but that is an unlikely event."

Japanese Prose Literature from 1000 CE and counting.

Japanese Prose Literature from 1000 CE and counting.

The editor of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan (Hearn was an earlier populariser of Japanoiserie in the west) has observed that the classic Western attitude to Japan goes through three stages: unreasoning infatuation; heedless dislike; and finally acceptance. As he puts it “more like marriage than a love affair”.
I first went to Japan in 1983 and freely admit to having experienced the three stages so described. These days, the bubble economy of the 1980s is a distant memory and Japan is only our third biggest trading partner.  Japanese investment in Australia has been in retreat for at least 20 years and Toyota is just the last of a long line of failed ventures.
So why bother? The answer of course lies in a culture that is a brilliant meld of tradition and innovation (though maybe not quite as unique as the Japanese like to think) and its cultural productions which, properly considered, really are uniquely rewarding.
So let’s begin at the beginning. And I do mean the beginning at least as far as the novel goes.
Some picaresque (and fairly pornographic) efforts from the Romans to one side (eg the Satyricon) the first novel ever was Genji Monogatari written in the early 11th century Heian Japan. This is a world with nothing in common with the more familiar Tokugawa period scenario of samurai, geisha and ninja. Not surprisingly, its author was a woman - Shikibu Murasaki. Genji is a massive house brick of a book and is usually consumed, at least in translation, in sensible abridgments. In common with its many descendants, part of its success is in capturing the atmosphere of a moment in time (or at least what the reader is persuaded must be that atmosphere) and few works succeed so completely in communicating a world which to most readers (including and perhaps especially to modern Japanese) is truly alien. The effete aristos who comprise Lady Murasaki’s subject matter do not engender a lot of sympathy but they are fascinating. Part of the problem in knowing how to react to this work is embedded in the potential Japanese has as a language to obscure agency. Unlike an inflected language the subject has no marker; unlike a syntactic language word order is not a reliable guide to grammatical meaning. Particles that follow nouns are capable of resolving the confusion but only if the composer so wishes. In the pitch dark veranda houses of 10th century Japan on a moonless night a certain amount of ambiguity was evidently considered desirable.
For a more immediately simpatico rendering of this era see the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Shonagon writes about the minutiae of Court life with sardonic wit. It is a world where the first thing you do on returning from a romantic tryst at day break is pen a “morning after poem” and despatch it forthwith. A typical excursion involves listening to cuckoos and inspecting a noble house where the quaint singing of the peasantry is the occasion for amusement.
In the history of literature it is vanishingly rare to have even one female perspective into such a distant time and place. In the whole history of classical Latin and Greek we have nothing like it except a few poems by Sappho. To have two female perspectives within a comparable time frame is pretty close to a miracle. And in fact there is a whole corpus of female poetry and diaries beyond the scope of this article. See the Anthology of Japanese Literature edited by Donald Keene.
But the gentle world which permitted this literary output – and remember, no output without an audience – was about to end. Yup, the blokes were in the saddle again.
Interestingly they found no reason to disrupt the outward form of things. An emperor would continue but real power would be exercised by soldiers.  Three ”tent government” regimes– the Kamakura, Ashikaga and Tokugawa Shogunates - ruled or attempted to rule Japan from the 12th century CE until the Meiji restoration in the 1860s. The emperor in Kyoto reigned, the Shogun ruled.  The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi in 1643 is one of the few literary productions we have written by a professional killer. Given his profession – training sword fighters to survive in a violent age – it is hardly surprising that the numerous aphorisms, all eminently quotable, are also all practically useless. No point in giving the competition a leg up when the stakes are so high. As he puts it: “amatueristic martial arts are the source of serious wounds”.
The Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War by way of contrast was written by Yagyu Menenori an official in the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1632 – effectively head of the secret service – and is at pains to bend Zen Buddhist techniques (such as the contradiction in terms) in the service of the State. For example:  “[if] myriad people are saved by the killing of one man. Would not this be a true example of ‘the sword that kills is the sword that gives life?’”
A more authentic version of this Buddhist view is in Kamo no Chomei’s “Account of my Hut” hut “  written in the early 13th century and which introduces themes which recur regularly in Japanese literature, particularly of disengagement from the contemporary world whose worth is illusory and the flowing river, always there but never the same.
Under the Tokugawa Shogunate Japan was a closed country from the early 17th century until the 1860s. Contacts with the West and China were closely controlled and confined to the port of Nagasaki. Christianity was ruthlessly suppressed and an attempt made to enforce strict caste distinctions between samurai, merchants and farmers. It is not surprising therefore that the cultural productions of the era owe nothing to Western models. Perhaps the most famous writer of the period is Matsu Bassho whose haiku in Japanese literature have the status of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He also wrote prose, particularly about his extensive travels in Japan. His The Narrow Road to Oku is a very early example of the high flown travel genre; strangely reminiscent of Samuel Johnson’s Walking Tour of Western Scotland and the Isles.
Notwithstanding the essentially reactionary nature of Tokugawa rule these centuries were also a period of massive and sustained economic development. By the time the American fleet obtained trading rights in the 1860s Japan was already ripe for radical change. The Last Shogun by Ryotaro Shiba is a well-researched novel set in this era. In Australia it would probably be classed as “faction” and marketed as non-fiction but the Japanese thankfully still know the difference between history and historical fiction.
The Meiji Restoration and entailed a thorough going commitment to adapt and utilise Western technology to preserve and strengthen the Japanese State. And it succeeded. Along with Thailand, Japan is the only Asian country to escape Western invasion and domination in the late 19th century. Inevitably however the influence of the West could not be confined to the means of production and the weapons of war. That this process would culminate in a military dominated regime whose armed forces routinely committed atrocities that would make Genghis Khan blush and ended in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was by no means a forgone conclusion. At the time it seemed that the breakdown of the Tokugawa caste system and introduction of Western idea and persons was a historic opportunity.
Those of us who visited Japan before “kokusaika” –internationalisation – was government policy are a little miffed to find that in fact the road we are on has been trampled to the stubble by many before.  By the late 19th century Westerners were everywhere in Japan: proselytizing (with very limited success); doing business; training technicians and teaching English (even then the real international language). Compulsory primary school education quickly produced a massive reading public. Per head of population the Japanese consume more novels than any other nation. There are still 18,000 odd book stores in the country compared to 6,000 in the United States. And from the beginning of this cultural efflorescence the Japanese were fascinated by the intersection of the West and their own powerful traditions.
Natsume Soseki is the Meiji era novelist who captures this extraordinary time. In Kokoro he writes about young people encountering a world full of new possibilities and problems. In I am a Cat, his first person narrator, a cat of course, engages in fairly savage satire at the expense of his middle class owners and their pretentious circle of friends.
Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country tells the relationship between an onsen (hot spring resort) geisha and an effete and independently wealthy ballet critic (who has never seen an actual ballet). This story, which has the potential to offend on just about every imaginable level, manages to transcend the Pretty Woman cliché, and becomes a serious meditation on the possibilities of love in the context of human selfishness. It all ends badly of course but also provides a vivid picture of the life of an onsen resort; one of Japans truly great contributions to civilized hedonism.
Junichiro Tanizaki is perhaps the greatest Japanese novelist to come to maturity before the Second World War. His Makioka Sisters bears comparison with anything Tolstoy wrote and is a brilliant evocation of the world destroyed by the war. Tanizaki’s The Key is an acute insight into one kind of dysfunctional marriage while his Naomi is a clear eyed study of what happens when sexual attraction overwhelms common sense.
All of these pre-war writers succeed in conveying a world which is exotic, sensual and yet recogniseably modern. Western readers accustomed to the obliqueness of their 19th century tradition on matters sexual are usually pleasantly surprised by Japanese directness in this area (which is not to say that these writers are engaged in erotica; they are just not products of a Judaeo-Christian ethical system).The characters are constrained (or left free to indulge their passions) by forces and expectations particular to pre-war Japan but they respond in ways that make sense given their context. Of particular note is the theme of male female difference and the feminine tradition which went underground at the end of the Heian era can be seen struggling to assert itself.
What these writers do not do is give any insight into the mindset which produced the Rape of Nanking. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have been slow to come to grips with the enormities committed in their name. There is no Japanese Gunter Grass.
That the “old Japan” is a world that is ceasing to exist remains a preoccupation of Japanese literature, sometimes solipsistically so. For mine, the most unfortunate expression of this obsession is the work of Yukio Mishima. Thirst for Love – the mercifully short (but very readable) early novel about an affair between an agricultural labourer and an upper class land owner is an example of his quasi-feudal world view tinged by sado-masochism. The very ambitious tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, (which he completed before committing seppuku after a failed right wing coup in 1970) is unfortunately very heavy going. By way of example, in Runaway Horses the series’ protagonist seeks to save a young man (whom he believes to be a reincarnation of a deceased childhood friend) from involvement with right wing fanatics in the early 1930s. He fails and the debate one might have expected about the merits of the militarist’s agenda simply never eventuates. Mishima is a post war writer who glamourizes what most observers now see as an aberration – the ultra-nationalist exceptionalism of the 1930s militarists.
Mishima eventually expressed his disappointment at the new Japan by committing seppuku and, it has to be said, at least had the courage of his fascistic convictions.  I suspect the reason for his high profile in translation has a lot to do with Confessions of a Mask, a semi-autobiographical early work which deals with the protagonist’s crypto-homosexuality and seemed to promise a radical critique of Japanese culture. Mishima was a radical but not in the way most of us had hoped. There is however an excellent movie about his life Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters which is definitely worth seeing.
Mishima’s suicide seems something of an over reaction. Post war Japanese fiction, has lost none of it vigour, nor its unique voice. Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes – about an amateur entomologist abducted by coastal villagers to assist in their fight against encroaching sand - is an early example of the tendency to the surreal and is reprised in spades in the work of Haruki Murakami.
Murukami’s novels are enormously popular and with good reason. He treads the border between speculative fiction and literature. His disengaged, hedonistic but ultimately decent protagonists guilessly act as vectors for their more driven and damaged counter parties. Norwegian Wood gives meaning to the cliché achingly beautiful and is one of the great doomed love stories this reviewer has read. Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World on the other hand is just really strange and seems to be a kind of metaphor for the use of computing memory. I could be wrong. South of the Border West of the Sun is another doomed love story and Dance, Dance, Dance will make you think twice about your next spontaneous visit to a country hotel.
Some might say that Murakami is a little slick. He found a winning formula and keeps pumping it out. The more heavy weight literary contender post war is Kenzabaro Oe. He has indeed won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His work can be difficult to find in English but the recently published  The Changeling is an attempt to understand the suicide of his real life brother in law Juzo Itami (the director inter alia of Tampopo and Marusa no Onna) and is set in immediate post war Shikoku.  As such it deals with many of the recurrent themes of his work  - his father’s quixotic death at the end of World war Two;  his life as a literary author of international standing; his brain damaged son, Hikari; his hatred of the militarists who led Japan into World War Two. It is both irritatingly narcissistic and episodically profound.
Much less well known in the West but extremely famous in Japan is Yasushi Inoue. Inoue was a prolific writer especially of historical novels which were meticulously researched. His The Samurai Banner of Furin Kazan is an accurate recreation of the “sengoku jidai’ warring states period in the 16th century. Fans of the Japan Total War real time strategy game will be impressed.
Banana Yoshimoto is a “younger” writer (relatively speaking) who writes about the generation disaffected with the values that made the economic miracle of the 60s and the bubble economy of the 80s possible. K.P. and Daidokoro are tales of disaffected twenty something trying to break out of the expectations of their elders.
The next big thing in Japanese literature has been a while coming but make no mistake it will arrive. I say this notwithstanding a somewhat depressing popular culture inhabited by supercilious panel show hosts food programmes (sound familiar?) and simpering “tarento” (of both genders). Having reached the third stage of acceptance of Japan you know that still waters run deep.
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Sense and Nonsense in Australian History

By John Hirst

You cannot spit in the CBD without hitting a right wing economist. Right wing historians are a rarer breed; a matter which John Winston Howard occasionally adverts to in his rare moments of leisure. Even rarer still is the intellectually respectable right wing historian – Keith Windschuttle does not count – and this makes John Hirst a figure of considerable interest.

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History  is a collection of Hirsts essays from the mid seventies. They are published in Robert Manne’s Black Inc. Agenda series. The collection has the merits and vices of the essay form: clear arguments produced at convenient length but often tendentious and inadequately substantiated. The latter vice is made worse by Hirst’s decision not to reproduce the references from the original essays. Generally speaking, the longer his pieces are the more thoughtful and interesting they become.

Hirst is at his best in his area of specialisation: convict and colonial  Australia. His insight into the limitations on the power of convict masters and the humanising consequences for the society engendered by the convict system are not now as startling as when they first came out, largely because the perspective has been popularised with some gory embellishment in Hugh’s The Fatal Shore.

He is at his weakest when trying too hard to be controversial. To this end he has an annoying tendancy to erect straw men so as to knock them down. In his essay Australia’s Absurd  History he attacks  multiculturalism by positing a form of it that is unrecognisable (unbridled cultural relativism). And yet Hirst clearly welcomes immigration; his concern is that the so called ‘Anglo’ contribution be properly acknowledged.

In How Sorry Can We Be he asserts that it is ‘morally impossible’ for the beneficiaries of the dispossession of the aborigines (ie all of us) to regret or apologise for the conquest. This is mere word play and rather unhelpful. More to the point the variety of settlement experiences in Australia (which largely explains the widely varying demographic fate of different indigenous populations even in closely settled areas) does not support Hirst’s premiss: that  dispossession was always and everywhere accompanied by the same atrocities. We cannot regret that we live here; we can apologise for arsenic in waterholes and the systematic practice of ‘dispersal’.  And yet Hirst is not a fan of Windschuttle’s sanitised version of our history. His views on the nexus between contemporary aboriginal culture (outside areas where traditional society survived somewhat intact) welfare and the intractable problems in health and other outcomes experienced are worth serious consideration. They prefigure the views expressed by Aboriginal leaders such as Noel Pearson in more recent times.

The first duty of a historian is to be sceptical of conventional wisdom in all its forms. That includes the holy cows of chardonnay sipping basket weavers. John Hirst has spent the last thirty years discharging that duty. Sense and Nonsense in Australian History is essential reading for anyone interested in the ongoing history wars and, properly considered, everyone else too.

   A History of Denmark

Knud J.V. Jespersen

As the Danes are quick to point out Denmark is a small country now, but it used to be a very big one. A thousand years ago the king of England was a Dane and until as recently as the mid 17^th century a large chunk of Southern Sweden as well as all of Norway and the Schleswig peninsular were ruled from Copenhagen. But from about that time on the Danes proved very adept at losing wars: first to Sweden – goodbye Skaane; then to Britain – goodbye Norway; then to Prussia – goodbye Schleswig Holstein.

This should have been a story of national disaster but the curious thing is that Denmark did not go the way of Poland, Ireland or the Balkans.  In A History of Denmark, Jespersen gives a concise thematic survey of the transformation of a multi-ethnic empire into an ethnically homogenous nation state. This is not a book for those who enjoy a telling anecdote. Jespersen focuses on the major institutions of the Danish state: government, Church, law and land ownership. His high level analysis makes fairly dry reading but it is well designed to reveal the structural continuities between the absolutist renaissance state and the constitutional monarchy which evolved from it. Both derived legitimacy from the consent of the governed and operated in opposition to the interests of the landed nobility.

Jespersen makes the point well that the land reform of 1780s which abolished villeinage and created the class of independent small farmers who set the tone of the country for over two centuries was an extraordinary achievement, given that not a drop of blood was shed in the process. This class of small holders were not peasants; they quickly adapted to commercial farming and created the agricultural basis of Danish prosperity. Similarly the adoption of a constitution in 1849 which conferred the vote on all adult males (women got the vote in 1915) was achieved without violence.

So while the Danes were not very good at winning wars they were remarkably good at nation building. The great vice of the Anglophone world-view is its lack of interest in how things are done elsewhere. This leads to a misplaced belief in the inevitability of certain historical processes. A History of Denmark is a useful insight into another path to modernity as well as an explanation of why there are no Danish republicans. 

The Peloponnesian War

By Thucydides

The Peloponnesian War is the name given to the conflict between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies fought between 431 and 404 BCE. As wars go in the impressive record of human mayhem it was nothing much; dwarfed by the Persian wars that preceded it and the conquests of Alexander and then the Roman Republic to follow. And yet the record made of it by an upper class Athenian who participated in the war as a fairly unsuccessful general – Thucydides - has become the template for all subsequent historical enquiry.

This is a book whose influence and ambition are truly staggering. Thucydides himself said his work “was done to last forever” and rarely has reach and grasp coincided as satisfactorily. The reasons for the success of the book tell us a lot about the cultural enterprise to which we are all heirs.

For a start you have the theme of democracy versus oligarchy. Thucydides was a luke warm democrat but so honest an observer that two and a half thousand years later we can still feel for the Athenian democracy as it struggles to balance self-interest and morality.

Then there are the debates. These are very Greek, in the classical sense. Probably reconstructions in detail but they repeatedly confront the reader with the real moral questions that confront politicians and soldiers and certainly confronted Thucydides’ peers. You hear the Plateans pleading for their lives with their laconic Spartan judges; you hear the debate in the Athenian assembly about whether to execute the male populace of the rebel city of Mytilene. And in the Melian debate you have a profound examination of the ethics of the exercise of power and its inherent capacity to corrupt.

On top of that there is some great narrative history. The account of the defeat of the Athenian Sicilian expedition is one of the greatest stories of hubris and nemesis ever told.

So do yourself a favour. The Penguin Classics translation by Rex Warner cost $3.50 back in 1977 and I’m sure is still a bargain.

History and Biography: Mad bad and dangerous to know.

Historical biography – the narrative recounting of the life of a person considered to be of historical significance or interest - has been around for a long time. The Romans seem to have been the originators of the genre and pretty well mapped out the boundaries. Suetonius’ Twelve Ceasars (from Julius Caesar to Domitian) gives us biography as expose - sex and violence in doses high enough to satisfy the somewhat jaded early second century palate. Plutarch’s Lives (covering famous rulers and generals of the Hellenistic and late Republican eras) on the other hand uses biography as a tool of  moral improvement.  Then there is eulogy – such as   Tacitus’ Agricola (his admiring account of the  1^st century Roman general who happened to be his father in law) and propaganda masquerading as biography as in the Augustan History (about the 2nd and 3^rd century emperors). To this day the genre exhibits the same split personality: trashy but entertaining versus serious and worthy; hagiography versus hatchet job.

The problem with historical biography is that great men and women demonstrably almost never make history without an awful lot of help. The explanatory power of the genre is questionable. Alexander may have been bisexual with a fraught relationship with his father and a mother from hell but this explains very little about the conquest of Persia.  Napoleon was vertically challenged and a Corsican but I doubt this is why he invaded Russia.

Biography may not be the most valid analytical tool for the historian but it is one of the more interesting. As Robert Lane Fox remarks in his tremendous Alexander the Great (which claims not to be biography but quacks and waddles like biography) ‘I am bored by institutions and do not believe in structures.’  The fascination of a life lived elsewhere is irresistible.  And the past offers some radically different elsewheres. A well written biography provides an accessible and rewarding entry into a another world.

Approaches however differ, as Suetonius and Plutarch illustrate. If you are not familiar with these authors do yourself a favour; they are available in inexpensive translation (copyright has long lapsed) and provide the source material for much of the contemporary perception of the ancient world. Be warned however that this is strong meat: the products of a pagan culture with a morality superficially familiar but  fundamentally different from our own. My favourite Suetonius life is his Caligula which is a blue print for every psychopathic tyrant since. While sensational (and totally uninterested in historical causation) Suetonius is considered fairly reliable.

                                                 

Modern biographers of the ancients struggle with the scarcity and bias of their sources. Seutonius for example wrote during the rein of Hadrian at least two generations after the last of the lives he documents. By this date it was almost a public service to dump on the Julio-Claudians. The best surviving source on Alexander -  Arrian  -  was written over 400 years after his subject’s death (albeit with access to contemporary accounts that do not survive).

As a result the task of the biographer of ancient lives much resembles a forensic detective, always mindful of the hidden agenda of their informant. Robert Lane Fox in his Alexander the Great manages to overcome these difficulties and produce an utterly plausible picture of an extraordinary individual. Christian Meier’s Caesar on the other hand, while packed with information, remains as dry as his epigraphic evidence.

After the end of Roman world biographical pickings are mainly confined to modern reconstructions of the careers of  better known monarchs such as W.L.Warren’s King John (which attempts to rehabilitate the much maligned Plantagenet). Certainly until the late medieval period, exotica such as the Alexiad of Anna Comnena (a biography of a 12^th century Byzantine emperor by his daughter) apart, there is a shortage of medieval writers with a real interest in exploring character in biographical form. By the Tudor period however the sources have expanded to provide a choice of subjects as  rich as the ancients.

And here the pickings are rich indeed. Henry VIII is the subject of innumerable accounts ranging from the scholarly to the fictional. Alison Weir’s Henry VIII King and Court places Henry’s life in a context that  makes him more explicable if not likable. Her account of Henry’s relationship with Anne Boleyn is both dramatic and chilling as she tracks the King’s progress from passionate suitor to loving husband to executioner.

After the Tudors the Stuarts.  For mine they provide more interesting biographical material than the Tudors (who in matters other than matrimonial were just too ruthlessly efficient to charm) precisely because they were brilliantly flawed. Antonia Fraser has made a career of writing royal biographies and her King Charles II is a balanced and well researched account of a complex and underrated monarch. She is particularly interested in character and her focus is on the individual subject rather than the historical events in which they figure.  Restoration England is sometimes presented as rakes in big wigs but it was also a time of religious turmoil and major scientific and artistic achievement . While paying due regard to Charles’ active social life Fraser also conveys his tolerance and rationality and the disadvantage of having such an outlook in an intolerant age.

At about this time, the field of biography begins to open up. Hitherto only royals, politicians, saints and generals led lives well documented enough to permit a biographical treatment. From about the 16^th century however artists, writers and scientists begin to become the subject of biography.

Perhaps the first such work is the Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari which appeared in about 1550. Vasari’s work remains an indispensable source for the artists of the Italian Renaissance and Counter Reformation. That mere artisans could be considered worthy of biography reflects a major cultural shift and, for the reader, a welcome change in subject matter.

The great artist is almost as problematic as the great man in history, and the connections between life and art are not, thankfully, easily defined. But biographies of artists, of all types, present a particularly fertile field for the biographer with a personal vision. Peter Robb’s M for example is on one level a well researched reconstruction and critique of Caravaggio’s brilliant art and sleazy life. On another level there is obviously a certain identification between the author and subject, which the author draws on to vivify his remote subject matter. The result is arguably misleading: Caravaggio’s sexuality for example, while clearly important to his art, probably cannot be elucidated from a 20^th century gay perspective. But so what; sometimes the life under consideration is just as interesting for the speculation it engenders about our own time as it is for what it explains about the past.

The most famous if not greatest biography of all is Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. I confess to having been satisfied with the abridged version edited by Christopher Hibbert. But this work is undoubtably the best example of the curious symbiosis that can arise between biographer and subject. Boswell’s vision of Johnson as a kind of eccentric secular saint but devastatingly witty withal is compelling. And such is its force that Boswell himself has become a major subject of biography; assisted by the discovery in the early 20^th century of his extensive personal journals which detail with unflinching honesty his clinical depression, his addiction to prostitutes and alcohol, and his acute observations of his well connected social circle.  Peter Martin’s  A Life of James Boswell is a sympathetic account of  the life of a man who, like the young Augustine, wanted to be good, but not just yet.

Lord Byron on the other hand never wanted to be good at least as that term was understood by his contemporaries. Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron Life and Legend offers a fresh assessment of Byron’s bizarre life and considerable talent for both poetry and self promotion. This is a scholarly work but its subject matter would catch the interest of Suetonius. As Byron himself put it, ‘I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan War.’

While Byron was at Harrow, acquiring the vices that would sustain him until his untimely death from excessive application of leaches in the embattled Greek port of Missolonghi twenty years later, the future of Europe was being decided. Byron was an extreme case but this period abounds with striking personalities. Horatio Nelson for example could easily be mistaken for a manic depressive. Christopher Hibbert’s Nelson A Personal history tends to think not but does not offer any alternative explanation apart from extreme patriotism compounded by ambition and genuinely insane personal courage. Nelson is a rare figure: a military man who is yet personally vulnerable; his highly unorthodox relationship with Emma Hamilton, with whom he lived together with her husband when not with the fleet is the focus of Hibbert’s book.

James Cook on the other hand had no time for mistresses. There is no shortage of accounts of Cook’s life but none of them have dug up anything salacious. The fascination of Cook lies in his unremitting dedication to tasks that by today’s standards were unbelievably difficult. Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook is a solid conventional telling of the great sailor’s career.

By the mid 19^th century, the number of potential subjects for the historical biographer explodes.  We are also approaching the edges of living memory (our grandparents’ grandparents). The relationship between the author and a near contemporary subject (particularly one who is still alive and has access to the law of defamation) changes. The scope for imposing a personal vision without engaging directly in current debates and serving current agendas is diminished. At that point biography ceases to be primarily historical  - a way of engaging a past reality - and becomes a way of exploring our contemporary culture. And that is a subject that will be around for ever.

Australian History Post World War Two

IIn 1945 Australia was a foreign country. The population was about seven million Life expectancy for men was about 65; somewhat more for women. Less than five percent of the population had tertiary education. Wool and wheat were our major exports. There was little mining for export. Industrial disputation was endemic 873,000 days a year in 1951 compared with 500,000 in 1994 and even less now. The population was predominantly English, Scots or Irish by descent. The leader of the opposition, Menzies, considered himself British. Married middle class women overwhelmingly did not work. Aborigines were not citizens, did not have the vote and lived largely on remote reserves from which they needed permission to leave.  (These and other statistics can be gleaned from The Transformation of Australia’s Population 1970 –2030 edited by Siew-Ean Khoo and Peter McDonald and Australian Political Facts edited by I. McAllister, M.Makerras and C.B.Boldiston)

The ‘Australian settlement’, established in the first decade of Federation by an unholy alliance of conservative Victorian manufacturers (who got high tariffs) and Labor Unionists (who got Conciliation and Arbitration and White Australia) had proven remarkably robust. Although Labor was seldom in power prior to 1941 the two longest serving ‘conservative’ prime ministers in the inter war period – Hughes and Lyons - were both former Labor parliamentarians; Hughes, a Labor prime minister; Lyons a Labor treasurer. They ratted on  the ALP on points of principle: conscription and external debt repayment respectively; but had no interest in attacking the Australian settlement. The only genuine conservative in the interwar period with the numbers in parliament to effect real change, Stanley Bruce, lost government in a land slide in 1929 after trying to dismantle the Commonwealth’s arbitration and conciliation system (sound like anyone we know?).

In 1943 the Curtin Labor government was returned to power in yet another  landslide, winning absolute control of both houses of Federal Parliament. They proceeded to put in place key reforms such as the pay as you earn income tax system, an effective central bank and child endowment. Curtin is a sympathetic figure: sensitive, intelligent and compassionate. See David Day’s John Curtin A Life for an account of Curtin’s inner struggles with grog and responsibility.

Curtain died in 1945 and Ben Chifley succeeded as Prime minister. Following another election win in 1946 the Chifley government set about some serious nation building. Mass assisted migration was introduced. The Snowy Mountains hydroelectric project was commenced. Manufacturing was encouraged and the first Australian made car was produced in 1948. See Graham Davidson's The Car  for a history of automobile manufacture in Australia. Australia participated actively in the establishment of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods Agreement on exchange rates. In many ways the Chifley government set the structural shape of Australia until the eighties and did so without dismantling any part of the Australian settlement.

The recently published Chifley A Life  by David Day is a good source on the achievements of the Chifley government as is Fred Alexander’s From Curtin to Menzies.

Change would happen but it owed little if anything to the conservative side of politics.  The politics of the late forties and early fifties laid the foundation for Menzies hegemony. By 1949 Menzies and the liberal party were providing effective opposition working on middle class fears of socialism. The defeat in the High Court of the bank nationalisation legislation did not help but what really did for Chifley in 1949 was a protracted coal miners strike (broken using the army) and the reintroduction of petrol rationing. Chifley remained leader of the ALP until his death in 1951 after another election loss. His home in Bathurst had remained a semi-detached workers cottage and he died in the Hotel Karrajong with its communal bathrooms and lack of room service. His reputation as a man of the people was cultivated but it was also genuine.

Menzies is not well understood today. His Britishness appears bizarre to most native born; his objections to the use of racist propaganda (against the Japanese) at the height of World War Two would probably surprise contemporary hard nosed conservative apparatchiks and his consistent advocacy of a mixed economy (with significant state intervention to alleviate poverty and unemployment) would not get him preselected to Kooyong today. 

There is surprisingly little written about Menzies which is readily accessible, even in major libraries. There is no essay on Menzies in Paul Hasluck's The Chance of  Politics (a collection edited by his son) which is a pity because Hasluck was a keen and candid observor of his fellow politicians and, unusually for the conservative side of polotics, bothered to record his impressions. His portrait of Barwick for example is a corker. Ian Hancock’s essay ‘The Rise of the Liberal Party’ in The Australian Century is a useful introduction. Judith Brett's Forgotten People attempts to psychoanalyse Menzies.Gerard Henderson’s Menzies’ Child is a fairly concise history of the Liberal party and contains considerable information about Menzies and his successors up to Howard. Henderson is a liberal insider who thinks Liberals do not value their history sufficiently. The result is that others tell their story for them. 

Menzies having gained power was determined not to lose it any time soon. The Korean War marked the high point of the Cold war with Australian troops fighting against the Chinese PLA in North Korea. See Robert O’Neill’s Australia in the Korean War for a scholarly and comprehensive treatment.

In the early fifties Stalin still ruled Russia and China had just fallen to Communism. It was an atmosphere conducive to a conservative scare campaign and Menzies proceeded to drum one up. The Communist Party Dissolution Act provides perhaps the first example in modern times of wedge politics. Ultimately Labor let it pass and the trigger for the double dissolution election in 1951 was, curiously, legislation to appoint a board to govern the Commonwealth Bank. The Liberals won comfortably. 

Apart from abolishing rationing (which ironically enough had been necessitated by Chifley’s desire to assist great Britain overcome its food and foreign currency shortages) and some fairly technical changes to the jurisdiction of the federal arbitration court, this was the extent of Menzies’ attack on the Chifley socialists’ arrangements. As Ian Hancock points out in his essay 'The Rise of the Liberal Party' in The Australian Century the second half of the forties saw the non Labor political tendency subscribe to a national consensus that required the national government to play a central role in preventing another depression and protecting the disadvantaged.

Thereafter Menzies manipulated the arguably deranged Doc Evatt into portraying himself as a fellow traveller with Stalin’s Russia and won a third term in the 1954 election comfortably. The DLP split from the ALP in 1955 and  Menzies won elections in 1957, 1960 (by one seat, during a recession) and 1963 on DLP preferences.  Holt won in a landslide in 1966 and Gorton scrapped back in 1969. But for DLP preferences the ‘Menzies era’ would have ended in 1960.

Gavin Souter’s Acts of Parliament, as always, is a reliable guide to the political history of the Chifley and Menzies eras and deals even handedly with both Labor and Liberal. As a result it is a fairly dry read. Bob McMullin’s Light on the Hill provides a detailed account of the Labor split set in a larger narrative history of the ALP.  Jim Murray’s essay ‘The Split’ in The Australian Century, edited by Robert Manne is a lucid and concise account of the Byzantine politics of the Labor party at this time. 

And so to bed.  Fifteen years of Menzies and economic prosperity created the apparently contented, somewhat boring society described in Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country       (first published in 1965). Horne’s book found an extensive market: not people who wanted to find out about Australia but Australians who wanted to be told how they were special. Craig Macgregor’s Australia in Profile served a similar purpose for a slightly more left wing audience.

Forty years on these books make strange reading. Their observations are of anecdotal value (because they are devoid of any systematic empirical backing) but what does come through is a tremendous complacency and a lack of anxiety. Full employment and a diet of barbequed meat, beer and sport will do that to you.

Beneath the surface however there were tensions: class, politics, religion, gender and sex were all about to get a good run. And the pretext was another war.

At a distance of forty years it is easy to forget how radically society changed in the course of the sixties. The Australian involvement in supressing the Communist insurgency in Malaya had been a matter of course. In 1966 it was all the way with LBJ; Askin growling ‘run over the bastards’ and the athletic Harold Holt was returned in an avalanche. But things were happening. In 1967 Australians approved a referendum that reflected a widespread desire to see the status and living conditions of Aborigines improved. Ann Cuthoys The 67 Referendum tells this story. Feminism was increasingly assertive. Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch was published in 1969 and was enormously influential: it sold 90,000 copies in two weeks in Australia.  In the 1969 Federal election Gorton was lucky to hold on to Government and the end of an era was in sight. 

Gorton, at least according to John Hancock in He Did It his Way , was doing his best to usher in that new era. Gorton is a curious case: a man who had such confidence in his own way of doing things that he could rouse the American ambassador out of bed at 2 am, accompanied (Gorton that is) by an attractive young female journalist, to discuss matters of state. Perhaps his greatest contribution was to quietly terminate the White Australia policy. This was the first brick in the wall to go of the Australian settlement. 

Gorton looked good on television and had a way with words: not something his successor Billy McMahon was ever accused of. I am not aware of a McMahon biography but stand to be corrected. 

But what is undeniable is that by the late sixties the complex of attitudes, policies and reflexes which had seen Australia commit virtually its entire army (including conscripts) to a fundamentally misconceived war in a far away land was on the nose. Paul Ham’s Vietnam the Australian Story is an excellent military history which does due justice to the social and political dimensions of the war. Ham, who has also written an excellent history of the Australians on the Kokoda track, is very much on the side of the diggers and is palpably angy about the mistreatment meted out to individual soldiers on their return from active service by peace activists. And yet it happened – inconceivable today- soldiers in uniform were spat at and called baby killers. The war became unpopular. About six hundred Australians died. Over fifty thousand Americans. And at the same time youth culture with its own music, means of intoxication, literature and value system (which didn’t last) was born.

Reading  Frank Moorhouse’s Days of Wine and Rage, published in 1980 but about the bohemian/anarchist/rat-faced world of Sydney’s ‘liberterian’ intelligentsia in the late sixties and seventies engenders a peculiar, squeamish feeling. On the one hand it is irrefutable evidence for the proposition that by the era described a lot of people had moved beyond Queen and Country and dib dib dib dob dob dob…on the other hand many of the people described are a bit unlikeable if not slightly grubby. The sort of people you would hesitate to leave alone with your girlfriend while you went to the bar for your shout. 

Meanwhile, serious work was being done but where it always had been. Whitlam’s election in 1972 was the material evidence that something had changed. Medibank, free tertiary education and a cultural renaissance followed; as did a 25 percent tariff cut and a series of astonishing ministerial scandals. But the change was still not to the core of the Australian settlement. Tariffs were still high; centralised wage fixing prevailed. The White Australia policy had already been folded up and put away by Gorton. 

What is hard to grasp now is how little interest people and politicians had in economics back in 1972. After twenty years of prosperity Whitlam thought  the problems of economics had been solved. A lot has been written about the Whitlam Government; a fair bit of it by persons involved in it. Graham Freudenberg’s A Certain Grandeur while obviously partisan is still regarded as an invaluable source. For a conservative but balanced perspective Robert Manne’s article , ‘The Whitlam Revolution’ in The Australian Century is worth reading. Alan Reid’s The Whitlam Venture is a journalistic, near contemporary account.

The pity is that the constitutional coup of 1975 has obscured the real merits of the Whitlam government. The great lie is that Whitlam, by himself, stuffed the economy; as if the Yom Kippur war (in 1974) and a doubling of the oil price were irrelevant. In fact the 1973/4 budget was in surplus at the time the effects of the oil shock and a wages boom combined to produce a blow out in inflation and unemployment in the second half of 1974. Perhaps Jim Cairns was not an inspired choice for treasurer and the 1974/5 budget did damage business confidence and fuelled inflation further because it was highly expansionary. But Hayden’s budget for 1975 became the first Fraser budget and no one complained. 

If you must revisit the dismissal both Whitlam’s The Truth of the Matter and Kerr’s Matters for Judgement are self serving. There is no doubt Kerr breached convention and behaved, on a personal level, like a scoundrel. And there is also no doubt Whitlam’s government had a limited shelf life: the electorate, unused to even five per cent unemployment and any inflation at all was waiting with the proverbial base ball bat in the parking lot. Paul Kelly's 11 November is a more balanced account.

Any amount of  hand wringing resulted from the untimely demise of the Whitlam Government. Most of it is now forgotten. Horne’s Death of the Lucky Country is an example of the genre. 

It is difficult now to remember how profoundly disliked Fraser was by about half the electorate. This is because Fraser has not changed while the world around him has and as a result he now comes across as quite an old softie. According to Paul Kelly,  Fraser – not Howard – was  in fact the genuine inheritor of Menzies. In keeping with that tradition he ran the odd scare campaign; got stuck into the unions when he could (but without changing the institutional arrangements that permitted centralised wage fixing) and basically maintained most of the existing settings. He did abolish Medibank – socialised medicine – but probably regretted it. He took a highly principled approach to issues such as apartheid, Vietnamese refugees and aboriginal land rights. 

So neo conservatives see the Fraser years as a lost opportunity. But Fraser was simply doing what the Liberals have always done best: minding the shop. Radical change was on the way but it would be introduced by the Labor Hawke Keating government. Paul Kelly’s End of Certainty is an excellent overview of the eighties and their dramatic changes. Kelly is first and foremost a journalist and can’t quite restrain himself from pushing the economic rationalist barrow but his book is an important one for understanding the full implications of what was happening. Because finally the days of the Australian settlement were numbered.

The settlement didn’t go quietly and tonnes of paper has been devoted to arguing the merits and fate of what one could loosely call the economic rationalist agenda. The best critique of the pure version of this agenda I have read is Brien Toohey,s Tumbling Dice, a book that deserved a wider audience than it got. Toohey does a good job of showing how equilibrium market theory is empirically bogus. He also documents how the high watermark of Treasuries influence was probably in 1989. The recession of the early nineties brought Government intervention back into the good books. Not that the rhetoric reflects that. 

A genre of works bemoaning our fate in a globalised economy are now principally of interest to show how difficult it really is to get crystal ball gazing right. Humphrey Macqueen’s Gone Tomorrow Australia in the 80s is full of good arguments and  well researched and almost entirely wide of the mark in its predictions. Craig McGregor’s Class in Australia, written in 1997 when the seismic shifts in tertiary education participation should already have been apparent reads like a report from another universe. John Pilger's A Secret Country, published in 1989 is not as grim as you might expect but is predictably self righteous and right on.

The fall of Keating in 1996 evoked another round of literary anguish. Like Gough, he had been a generous patron of the Arts. Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Jerusalem is a typical example. Mr Ellis enjoys a good lunch (as does the writer) and has dined with the best. Not all the people he mentions in conversation however reciprocate in their books. One struggles to find any reference to Bob in say, Freudenberg or John Edward’s Keating the Inside Story or even the equally self referential Don Watson in Confessions of a Bleeding Heart (which appropriately, in the hard back edition, has a photo of the author hugging himself on the back fly leaf).

Which brings us to the nineties and John Winston Howard. Now we really are within the historical equivalent of ‘dead ground’. You can’t see, let alone shoot, someone on dead ground. Howard won three elections and for the most part continued the economic agenda of the Hawke Keating government. But he lost his fourth election and his seat in parliament (remember Stanley Bruce in 1929) following an attempt to destroy the final surviving plank of the Australian settlement: the award system. Howard is reputed to be interested in history. Maybe he agrees with Mark Twain: history doesn’t repeat itself; but sometimes it rhymes.