Thursday 23 January 2014

First contact to federation - Australian history reviewed




Australian History reviewed -  first contact to federation

History is only as interesting as the questions we put to it. Until relatively recently the questions being asked of our own history were, by and large, spectacularly boring. You could be forgiven for thinking nothing of any interest happened between Captain Cook and Gallipolli. The convict past was vaguely disreputable and the silence on the Aborigines was deafening.  And if you believe that nothing ever happened you naturally conclude that things will never change either. Nothing, of course could be further from the truth.

Considered in the context of world history, Australia provides a particular instance of the expansion of European settlement; as such its fascination lies in a comparison with the shape of other settlement societies. Considered from the indigenous point of view it is a history of dispossession and adjustment. Plenty of blood and guts there.

Considered from the standpoint of contemporary culture it is the story of how  identity is created and the legitimizing uses that can be made of particular versions of history. In this regard the contest for the commanding heights is as fierce and as interesting in Australia as any where else.

Australian history, as opposed to pre-history or archaeology, begins with European exploration. And this may be where the great inferiority complex begins. For the early Dutch and English explorers were not impressed by what they found. William Dampier’s account of his visit to Western Australia was the first published account of Australia in English and was extremely influential. In a Pirate of Exquisite Mind,  D and M Preston, point out that the published version differed significantly from the original journal and that the more unflattering descriptions of the indigenous population may have been inserted for sensational effect by an editor. In any event the bad press did the trick and there was no attempt to settle Australia until after Cook’s account of the east coast was published nearly a century later. There are a lot of books about Cook and many of them are not terribly good. Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook a Biography is  reliable, conservative and sticks closely to Cook’s journals. Nicholas Thomas’s Discoveries the Voyages of Captain Cook is a fascinating attempt to reimagine the experience of Cook’s first contacts across vast cultural chasms. A classic in this field, although from the perspective of an art historian rather than an anthropologist, is Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific. These are books that help the reader imagine what could and could not be seen by the earliest European visitors.

Of course we might have been French, it wasn’t for lack of visits. Colin Dyer’s The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians provides a convenient survey of Gallic interest in Australia while Klaus Toft’s The Navigators provides a more detailed examination of Baudin’s exploration of the Australian coast in competition with Flinders. Flinders of course is of considerable interest in his own right as an exemplar of that late 18th century enlightenment person who is both a careerist and wildly emotional. No psych tests to pass in those days before sensitive appointments. In Mathew Flinders Miriam Estensen gives us a sensitive treatment of a man who loved his wife truly but left her for 10 years because it was the only way to get promotion.

Timing is everything, particular in the history of European settlement. The relatively late settlement of Australia meant we were not settled by refugees from religious persecution but by the outscourings of Georgian Britain’s prison system. For an academic consideration of the implications, and a valuable comparative perspective -  see Louis Hartz’s  The Founding of New Societies. At the risk of simplification his thesis is that America was settled by puritans and got one country under God; Australia was settled by convicts and got institutionalised egalitarianism and rum for currency. Mind you this was written long before the plasma TV was standard issue in the suburbs.

Robert Hughes’ impressive account of the convict era, The Fatal Shore will probably stand the test of time. Hughes writes better than most and has some very sound insights into the Australian character; that curious combination of resentment of authority but respect for force being one of the most acute, if not most flattering. Hughes is also right to stress the fact that Sydney was established to be a prison but a prison which was a very bold experiment in rehabilitation. Certain aspects of the penal policies of the late 18th century and early 19th century (especially of Macquarie) would be considered unbearably progressive these days. Hughes does well to emphasise the boldness of the vision and its amazing success as well as the horrors of places like Norfolk Island with its murder lotteries and psychopathic discipline.

One of the best contemporary sources for the First Fleet is Watkin Tench’s diary, recently republished as 1788 with an introduction by Tim Flannery. Tench is a good example of the spirit of the late 18th century: rational, optimistic and curious. He wrote with a view to publication (as did many other First Fleeters) but his diary is an invaluable record of first contact with the Aboriginals and the precarious establishment of a viable European settlement. His perspective is largely free from the racial prejudice that economic self interest and social Darwinism would inflict on later observers.

Carolly Erickson’s The Girl from Botany Bay focuses on the career of Mary Broad,  transported for robbery in company, her time in Port Jackson as the partner of Governor Phillip’s chief fisherman, and her subsequent escape in an open boat to Timor where she and her accomplices were arrested and returned to England. In England her cause was taken up by Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell – a man with more than a passing interest in the demi-monde  - and she was ultimately pardoned.  Her story is of particular interest because of the glimpse it provides of life at the bottom of the Georgian social pile: no place for the faint hearted, let it be said.

In a similar vein is  The Floating Brothel  by Sian Rees which focuses on the surprisingly well documented female convicts who were transported as part of the Second Fleet. Rees traces them from their criminal records in England through to their subsequent lives in Australia. Notwithstanding the somewhat tacky title this is a well researched and well written account of a group of people whose lives would normally not have been recorded. It also provides an insight into Georgian social engineering: women were necessary to divert the men from the occasion for vice. At one point it was proposed that Polynesian women be recruited for this purpose, a proposal not pursued for practical rather than ethical reasons. Not all that diversion would meet the standards of respectable society but officers such as Phillip were extremely pragmatic on such matters. This is a world far removed from the strictures of the Victorian period.

These accounts of convict life – notwithstanding lashings of rum, sodomy and the cat-o-nine tails - bring out the enormous improvement in life outcomes which were possible for the transported. Not that all of the settlers agreed that this should be the result. The clash between the Emancipists and the Rum Corps is perhaps the first great contest for the Australian identity. These days the emancipists would never get a look in but in the early settlement they found a champion in William Bligh  whose vision of  a society of diligent small holders would have produced a very different country than what actually transpired. H.V. Evatt’s classic Rum Rebellion is a masterly piece of partisanship which will leave you wondering how someone as evil as John Macarthur ever made it onto the two dollar note. The truth alas is more complex and for a more nuanced study of Macarthur and his times see Man of Honour by Michael Duffy. Duffy emphasises Macarthur’s marginal respectability in an age where being a gentleman meant being prepared to fight a duel if you were insulted at a boozy dinner party. At the same time as fighting duels however Macarthur was a resourceful and talented businessman. Like many of the transported convicts he saw Australia as an opportunity; albeit an opportunity to be built on free convict labour. In many ways he is a prototype of the socially conservative advocate of economic freedom which is such a feature of the subsequent Australian social landscape.

Lachlan Macquarie, on the other hand, was an earnest Highland Scot, one of those sons of Caledonia who provided the backbone of the British imperial administration throughout the 19th century. He is a kind of prototype too: the good leader who is ultimately betrayed.  John Ritchie’s   Lachlan Macquarie  tracks Macquarie’s moderately successful career prior to his being posted to New South Wales and makes clear that the posting was hardly the crowning achievement of  a brilliant career. Macquarie was nothing if not diligent however and he avoided the outright failures of his predecessors (having a regiment loyal to him helped minimise the risk of another coup) and superintended the transition of New South Wales from gaol to free colony, leaving Sydney some magnificent Georgian architecture in the process. Aspects of his administration were however criticised in a report commissioned by the British Colonial Secretary concerned that transportation was losing its deterrent effect, and he returned to Scotland to eke out a fairly miserable retirement.

The Bigge  Report which was critical of Macquarie squarely backed the vision of men like Macarthur. Land grants to Emancipists were abolished and discipline tightened. The future of the colony lay in commercial grazing conducted by capitalist farmers employing convict shepherds. From the 1820s rapid expansion occurred west of the Dividing Range, most of it beyond the official boundaries of the colony. Over the next half century a distinctive culture and economy took shape in the vast rural hinterland, characterised by a marked imbalance of the sexes and an itinerant rural workforce on the one hand and commercially oriented land owning pastoralist families on the other. The influence of ‘the Bush’ in the formation of the Australian identity would be difficult to overestimate. Manning Clarke’s magisterial  A History of Australia is still the place to start for this history if only because he is a great stylist. Clark of course has a number of axes to grind and if you want an alternative view of the world read  Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance. Blainey is a different type of historian to Clark, and although Clark is the alleged Marxist,  Blainey is the more interested in economics as a causal factor. If you are interested in the percentage of a woolgrower’s expenses taken up by cartage in the 1840s (and you should be if you want to understand the expansion of wool production) then Blainey is your man. For a thoughtful analysis of the cultural implications of the development of the rural economy there is Richard Waterhouse’s   The Vision Splendid. Waterhouse examines the development of a mythology of Bush versus City and the curious fact – curious in such a highly urbanised country - that many Australians still believe that to find a true Australian you have to visit a sheep station.

As the pastoral frontier advanced the indigenous population came into contact and conflict with the squatters and their shepherds. Neither Clark nor Blainey have a lot to say about frontier inter racial conflict.  W. E.H. Stanner first identified ‘the Great Australian Silence’ in the 1968 Boyer Lectures. They are still worth reading, if you can find them. Stanner was perhaps the first academic to put into the public discourse the idea that there was a huge gap in the mainstream history of Australia. C. D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society was  a groundbreaking overview  of the history of frontier interaction and was followed by Henry Reynold’s The Other Side of the Frontier. This influential work makes skilful use of surviving contemporary accounts to paint a convincing picture of extensive and at times effective black resistance. In Claiming a Continent  David Day attempts a one volume overview  of Australian history which gives considerable space to the issue of frontier conflict and analyses Australian history in terms of how an invader legitimises its conquest. First published in 1996 it already reads like the product of another (kinder) era. As a take on a number of still contemporary debates it retains considerable interest but it simply lacks the space to do justice to the complexities of regional variation..

For this reason some of the most satisfying history of the Australian frontier is found in regional studies. Bobby Hardy’s Lament for the Barkindji is well researched history of Aboriginal peoples along the Southern reaches of the Darling. Its tone is at times paternalistic but it includes considerable information not otherwise accessible. Koori A Will to Win by James Miller is a history of contact in the Hunter Valley. Miller makes no bones about whose side he is on. Invasion and Resistance by Noel Loos is a scholarly account of one of the most intense areas of conflict; North Queensland. It includes appendices that list in detail what is known about deaths from Aboriginal resistance in the area of study. A similar concern for accuracy of numbers is found in Henry Reynold’s Fate of a Free People which is a history of the Tasmanian frontier and the bargain struck by the Aboriginal survivors of the intense conflict of the late 1820s.  Frontier Justice by Tony Roberts provides a similar service for the Gulf country of the Northern Territory. Keith Windschuttle  has advanced an alternative thesis for the destruction of  traditional Tasmanian society but it has to be said that his views are considered tendentious by most scholars in the field. Anyone who has spent any time looking at the primary sources that deal with black white relations on the Australian frontier is struck by the unremitting violence reported and the universal practice of ‘dispersal’. Roberts is particularly useful for his insight into how police on the frontier became masters of euphemism. The introduction to the most recent edition of Fate of a Free People provides a useful (and balanced) summary of the debate on this subject for those interested in pursuing it further.



















































































































































































































































 AUSTRALIAN HISTORY REVIEW

History is only as interesting as the questions we put to it. Until relatively recently the questions being asked of our own history were, by and large, spectacularly boring. You could be forgiven for thinking nothing of any interest happened between Captain Cook and Gallipolli. The convict past was vaguely disreputable and the silence on the Aborigines was deafening.  And if you believe that nothing ever happened you naturally conclude that things will never change either. Nothing, of course could be further from the truth.

Considered in the context of world history, Australia provides a particular instance of the expansion of European settlement; as such its fascination lies in a comparison with the shape of other settlement societies. Considered from the indigenous point of view it is a history of dispossession and adjustment. Plenty of blood and guts there.
Considered from the standpoint of contemporary culture it is the story of how  identity is created and the legitimising uses that can be made of particular versions of history. In this regard the contest for the commanding heights is as fierce and as interesting in Australia as any where else.

Australian history, as opposed to pre-history or archaeology, begins with European exploration. And this may be where the great inferiority complex begins. For the early Dutch and English explorers were not impressed by what they found. William Dampier’s account of his visit to Western Australia was the first published account of Australia in English and was extremely influential. In a Pirate of Exquisite Mind,  D and M Preston, point out that the published version differed significantly from the original journal and that the more unflattering descriptions of the indigenous population may have been inserted for sensational effect by an editor. In any event the bad press did the trick and there was no attempt to settle Australia until after Cook’s account of the east coast was published nearly a century later. There are a lot of books about Cook and many of them are not terribly good. Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook a Biography is  reliable, conservative and sticks closely to Cook’s journals. Nicholas Thomas’s Discoveries the Voyages of Captain Cook is a fascinating attempt to reimagine the experience of Cook’s first contacts across vast cultural chasms. A classic in this field, although from the perspective of an art historian rather than an anthropologist, is Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific. These are books that help the reader imagine what could and could not be seen by the earliest European visitors.

Of course we might have been French, it wasn’t for lack of visits. Colin Dyer’s The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians provides a convenient survey of Gallic interest in Australia while Klaus Toft’s The Navigators provides a more detailed examination of Baudin’s exploration of the Australian coast in competition with Flinders. Flinders of course is of considerable interest in his own right as an exemplar of that late 18th century enlightenment person who is both a careerist and wildly emotional. No psych tests to pass in those days before sensitive appointments. In Mathew Flinders Miriam Estensen gives us a sensitive treatment of a man who loved his wife truly but left her for 10 years because it was the only way to get promotion.

Timing is everything, particular in the history of European settlement. The relatively late settlement of Australia meant we were not settled by refugees from religious persecution but by the outscourings of Georgian Britain’s prison system. For an academic consideration of the implications, and a valuable comparative perspective -  see Louis Hartz’s  The Founding of New Societies. At the risk of simplification his thesis is that America was settled by puritans and got one country under God; Australia was settled by convicts and got institutionalised egalitarianism and rum for currency. Mind you this was written long before the plasma TV was standard issue in the suburbs.

Robert Hughes’ impressive account of the convict era, The Fatal Shore will probably stand the test of time. Hughes writes better than most and has some very sound insights into the Australian character; that curious combination of resentment of authority but respect for force being one of the most acute, if not most flattering. Hughes is also right to stress the fact that Sydney was established to be a prison but a prison which was a very bold experiment in rehabilitation. Certain aspects of the penal policies of the late 18th century and early 19th century (especially of Macquarie) would be considered unbearably progressive these days. Hughes does well to emphasise the boldness of the vision and its amazing success as well as the horrors of places like Norfolk Island with its murder lotteries and psychopathic discipline.

One of the best contemporary sources for the First Fleet is Watkin Tench’s diary, recently republished as 1788 with an introduction by Tim Flannery. Tench is a good example of the spirit of the late 18th century: rational, optimistic and curious. He wrote with a view to publication (as did many other First Fleeters) but his diary is an invaluable record of first contact with the Aboriginals and the precarious establishment of a viable European settlement. His perspective is largely free from the racial prejudice that economic self interest and social Darwinism would inflict on later observers.

Carolly Erickson’s The Girl from Botany Bay focuses on the career of Mary Broad,  transported for robbery in company, her time in Port Jackson as the partner of Governor Phillip’s chief fisherman, and her subsequent escape in an open boat to Timor where she and her accomplices were arrested and returned to England. In England her cause was taken up by Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell – a man with more than a passing interest in the demi-monde  - and she was ultimately pardoned.  Her story is of particular interest because of the glimpse it provides of life at the bottom of the Georgian social pile: no place for the faint hearted, let it be said.

In a similar vein is  The Floating Brothel  by Sian Rees which focuses on the surprisingly well documented female convicts who were transported s part of the Second Fleet. Rees traces them from their criminal records in England through to their subsequent lives in Australia. Notwithstanding the somewhat tacky title this is a well researched and well written account of a group of people whose lives would normally not have been recorded. It also provides an insight into Georgian social engineering: women were necessary to divert the men from the occasion for vice. At one point it was proposed that Polynesian women be recruited for this purpose, a proposal not pursued for practical rather than ethical reasons. Not all that diversion would meet the standards of respectable society but officers such as Phillip were extremely pragmatic on such matters. This is a world far removed from the strictures of the Victorian period.

These accounts of convict life – notwithstanding lashings of rum, sodomy and the cat-o-nine tails - bring out the enormous improvement in life outcomes which were possible for the transported. Not that all of the settlers agreed that this should be the result. The clash between the Emancipists and the Rum Corps is perhaps the first great contest for the Australian identity. These days the emancipists would never get a look in but in the early settlement they found a champion in William Bligh  whose vision of  a society of diligent small holders would have produced a very different country than what actually transpired. H.V. Evatt’s classic Rum Rebellion is a masterly piece of partisanship which will leave you wondering how someone as evil as John Macarthur ever made it onto the two dollar note. The truth alas is more complex and for a more nuanced study of Macarthur and his times see Man of Honour by Michael Duffy. Duffy emphasises Macarthur’s marginal respectability in an age where being a gentleman meant being prepared to fight a duel if you were insulted at a boozy dinner party. At the same time as fighting duels however Macarthur was a resourceful and talented businessman. Like many of the transported convicts he saw Australia as an opportunity; albeit an opportunity to be built on free convict labour. In many ways he is a prototype of the socially conservative advocate of economic freedom which is such a feature of the subsequent Australian social landscape.

Lachlan Macquarie, on the other hand, was an earnest Highland Scot, one of those sons of Caledonia who provided the backbone of the British imperial administration throughout the 19th century. He is a kind of prototype too: the good leader who is ultimately betrayed.  John Ritchie’s   Lachlan Macquarie  tracks Macquarie’s moderately successful career prior to his being posted to New South Wales and makes clear that the posting was hardly the crowning achievement of  a brilliant career. Macquarie was nothing if not diligent however and he avoided the outright failures of his predecessors (having a regiment loyal to him helped minimise the risk of another coup) and superintended the transition of New South Wales from gaol to free colony, leaving Sydney some magnificent Georgian architecture in the process. Aspects of his administration were however criticised in a report commissioned by the British Colonial Secretary concerned that transportation was losing its deterrent effect, and he returned to Scotland to eke out a fairly miserable retirement.

The Bigge  Report which was critical of Macquarie squarely backed the vision of men like Macarthur. Land grants to Emancipists were abolished and discipline tightened. The future of the colony lay in commercial grazing conducted by capitalist farmers employing convict shepards. From the 1820s rapid expansion occurred west of the Dividing Range, most of it beyond the official boundaries of the colony. Over the next half century a distinctive culture and economy took shape in the vast rural hinterland, characterised by a marked imbalance of the sexes and an itinerant rural workforce on the one hand and commercially oriented land owning pastoralist families on the other. The influence of ‘the Bush’ in the formation of the Australian identity would be difficult to overestimate. Manning Clarke’s magisterial  A History of Australia is still the place to start for this history if only because he is a great stylist. Clark of course has a number of axes to grind and if you want an alternative view of the world read  Geoffrey Blaney’s The Tyranny of Distance. Blaney is a different type of historian to Clark, and although Clark is the alleged Marxist,  Blaney is the more interested in economics as a causal factor. If you are interested in the percentage of a woolgrower’s expenses taken up by cartage in the 1840s (and you should be if you want to understand the expansion of wool production) then Blaney is your man. For a thoughtful analysis of the cultural implications of the development of the rural economy there is Richard Waterhouse’s   The Vision Splendid. Waterhouse examines the development of a mythology of Bush versus City and the curious fact – curious in such a highly urbanised country - that many Australians still believe that to find a true Australian you have to visit a sheep station.

As the pastoral frontier advanced the indigenous population came into contact and conflict with the squatters and their shepherds. Neither Clark nor Blaney have a lot to say about frontier inter racial conflict.  W. E.H. Stanner first identified ‘the Great Australian Silence’ in the 1968 Boyer Lectures. They are still worth reading, if you can find them. Stanner was perhaps the first academic to put into the public discourse the idea that there was a huge gap in the mainstream history of Australia. C. D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society was  a groundbreaking overview  of the history of frontier interaction and was followed by Henry Reynold’s The Other Side of the Frontier. This influential work makes skilful use of surviving contemporary accounts to paint a convincing picture of extensive and at times effective black resistance. In Claiming a Continent  David Day attempts a one volume overview  of Australian history which gives considerable space to the issue of frontier conflict and analyses Australian history in terms of how an invader legitimises its conquest. First published in 1996 it already reads like the product of another (kinder) era. As a take on a number of still contemporary debates it retains considerable interest but it simply lacks the space to do justice to the complexities of regional variation..

For this reason some of the most satisfying history of the Australian frontier is found in regional studies. Bobby Hardy’s Lament for the Barkindji is well researched history of Aboriginal peoples along the Southern reaches of the Darling. Its tone is at times paternalistic but it includes considerable information not otherwise accessible. Koori A Will to Win by James Miller is a history of contact in the Hunter Valley. Miller makes no bones about whose side he is on. Invasion and Resistance by Noel Loos is a scholarly account of one of the most intense areas of conflict; North Queensland. It includes appendices that list in detail what is known about deaths from Aboriginal resistance in the area of study. A similar concern for accuracy of numbers is found in Henry Reynold’s Fate of a Free People which is a history of the Tasmanian frontier and the bargain struck by the Aboriginal survivors of the intense conflict of the late 1820s.  Frontier Justice by Tony Roberts provides a similar service for the Gulf country of the Northern Territory. Keith Windschuttle  has advanced an alternative thesis for the destruction of  traditional Tasmanian society but it has to be said that his views are considered tendentious by most scholars in the field. Anyone who has spent any time looking at the primary sources that deal with black white relations on the Australian frontier is struck by the unremitting violence reported and the universal practice of ‘dispersal’. Roberts is particularly useful for his insight into how police on the frontier became masters of euphemism. The introduction to the most recent edition of Fate of a Free People provides a useful (and balanced) summary of the debate on this subject for those interested in pursuing it further.





































































































































































































































































 AUSTRALIAN HISTORY REVIEW

History is only as interesting as the questions we put to it. Until relatively recently the questions being asked of our own history were, by and large, spectacularly boring. You could be forgiven for thinking nothing of any interest happened between Captain Cook and Gallipolli. The convict past was vaguely disreputable and the silence on the Aborigines was deafening.  And if you believe that nothing ever happened you naturally conclude that things will never change either. Nothing, of course could be further from the truth.

Considered in the context of world history, Australia provides a particular instance of the expansion of European settlement; as such its fascination lies in a comparison with the shape of other settlement societies. Considered from the indigenous point of view it is a history of dispossession and adjustment. Plenty of blood and guts there.
Considered from the standpoint of contemporary culture it is the story of how  identity is created and the legitimising uses that can be made of particular versions of history. In this regard the contest for the commanding heights is as fierce and as interesting in Australia as any where else.

Australian history, as opposed to pre-history or archaeology, begins with European exploration. And this may be where the great inferiority complex begins. For the early Dutch and English explorers were not impressed by what they found. William Dampier’s account of his visit to Western Australia was the first published account of Australia in English and was extremely influential. In a Pirate of Exquisite Mind,  D and M Preston, point out that the published version differed significantly from the original journal and that the more unflattering descriptions of the indigenous population may have been inserted for sensational effect by an editor. In any event the bad press did the trick and there was no attempt to settle Australia until after Cook’s account of the east coast was published nearly a century later. There are a lot of books about Cook and many of them are not terribly good. Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook a Biography is  reliable, conservative and sticks closely to Cook’s journals. Nicholas Thomas’s Discoveries the Voyages of Captain Cook is a fascinating attempt to reimagine the experience of Cook’s first contacts across vast cultural chasms. A classic in this field, although from the perspective of an art historian rather than an anthropologist, is Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific. These are books that help the reader imagine what could and could not be seen by the earliest European visitors.

Of course we might have been French, it wasn’t for lack of visits. Colin Dyer’s The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians provides a convenient survey of Gallic interest in Australia while Klaus Toft’s The Navigators provides a more detailed examination of Baudin’s exploration of the Australian coast in competition with Flinders. Flinders of course is of considerable interest in his own right as an exemplar of that late 18th century enlightenment person who is both a careerist and wildly emotional. No psych tests to pass in those days before sensitive appointments. In Mathew Flinders Miriam Estensen gives us a sensitive treatment of a man who loved his wife truly but left her for 10 years because it was the only way to get promotion.

Timing is everything, particular in the history of European settlement. The relatively late settlement of Australia meant we were not settled by refugees from religious persecution but by the outscourings of Georgian Britain’s prison system. For an academic consideration of the implications, and a valuable comparative perspective -  see Louis Hartz’s  The Founding of New Societies. At the risk of simplification his thesis is that America was settled by puritans and got one country under God; Australia was settled by convicts and got institutionalised egalitarianism and rum for currency. Mind you this was written long before the plasma TV was standard issue in the suburbs.

Robert Hughes’ impressive account of the convict era, The Fatal Shore will probably stand the test of time. Hughes writes better than most and has some very sound insights into the Australian character; that curious combination of resentment of authority but respect for force being one of the most acute, if not most flattering. Hughes is also right to stress the fact that Sydney was established to be a prison but a prison which was a very bold experiment in rehabilitation. Certain aspects of the penal policies of the late 18th century and early 19th century (especially of Macquarie) would be considered unbearably progressive these days. Hughes does well to emphasise the boldness of the vision and its amazing success as well as the horrors of places like Norfolk Island with its murder lotteries and psychopathic discipline.

One of the best contemporary sources for the First Fleet is Watkin Tench’s diary, recently republished as 1788 with an introduction by Tim Flannery. Tench is a good example of the spirit of the late 18th century: rational, optimistic and curious. He wrote with a view to publication (as did many other First Fleeters) but his diary is an invaluable record of first contact with the Aboriginals and the precarious establishment of a viable European settlement. His perspective is largely free from the racial prejudice that economic self interest and social Darwinism would inflict on later observers.

Carolly Erickson’s The Girl from Botany Bay focuses on the career of Mary Broad,  transported for robbery in company, her time in Port Jackson as the partner of Governor Phillip’s chief fisherman, and her subsequent escape in an open boat to Timor where she and her accomplices were arrested and returned to England. In England her cause was taken up by Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell – a man with more than a passing interest in the demi-monde  - and she was ultimately pardoned.  Her story is of particular interest because of the glimpse it provides of life at the bottom of the Georgian social pile: no place for the faint hearted, let it be said.

In a similar vein is  The Floating Brothel  by Sian Rees which focuses on the surprisingly well documented female convicts who were transported s part of the Second Fleet. Rees traces them from their criminal records in England through to their subsequent lives in Australia. Notwithstanding the somewhat tacky title this is a well researched and well written account of a group of people whose lives would normally not have been recorded. It also provides an insight into Georgian social engineering: women were necessary to divert the men from the occasion for vice. At one point it was proposed that Polynesian women be recruited for this purpose, a proposal not pursued for practical rather than ethical reasons. Not all that diversion would meet the standards of respectable society but officers such as Phillip were extremely pragmatic on such matters. This is a world far removed from the strictures of the Victorian period.

These accounts of convict life – notwithstanding lashings of rum, sodomy and the cat-o-nine tails - bring out the enormous improvement in life outcomes which were possible for the transported. Not that all of the settlers agreed that this should be the result. The clash between the Emancipists and the Rum Corps is perhaps the first great contest for the Australian identity. These days the emancipists would never get a look in but in the early settlement they found a champion in William Bligh  whose vision of  a society of diligent small holders would have produced a very different country than what actually transpired. H.V. Evatt’s classic Rum Rebellion is a masterly piece of partisanship which will leave you wondering how someone as evil as John Macarthur ever made it onto the two dollar note. The truth alas is more complex and for a more nuanced study of Macarthur and his times see Man of Honour by Michael Duffy. Duffy emphasises Macarthur’s marginal respectability in an age where being a gentleman meant being prepared to fight a duel if you were insulted at a boozy dinner party. At the same time as fighting duels however Macarthur was a resourceful and talented businessman. Like many of the transported convicts he saw Australia as an opportunity; albeit an opportunity to be built on free convict labour. In many ways he is a prototype of the socially conservative advocate of economic freedom which is such a feature of the subsequent Australian social landscape.

Lachlan Macquarie, on the other hand, was an earnest Highland Scot, one of those sons of Caledonia who provided the backbone of the British imperial administration throughout the 19th century. He is a kind of prototype too: the good leader who is ultimately betrayed.  John Ritchie’s   Lachlan Macquarie  tracks Macquarie’s moderately successful career prior to his being posted to New South Wales and makes clear that the posting was hardly the crowning achievement of  a brilliant career. Macquarie was nothing if not diligent however and he avoided the outright failures of his predecessors (having a regiment loyal to him helped minimise the risk of another coup) and superintended the transition of New South Wales from gaol to free colony, leaving Sydney some magnificent Georgian architecture in the process. Aspects of his administration were however criticised in a report commissioned by the British Colonial Secretary concerned that transportation was losing its deterrent effect, and he returned to Scotland to eke out a fairly miserable retirement.

The Bigge  Report which was critical of Macquarie squarely backed the vision of men like Macarthur. Land grants to Emancipists were abolished and discipline tightened. The future of the colony lay in commercial grazing conducted by capitalist farmers employing convict shepards. From the 1820s rapid expansion occurred west of the Dividing Range, most of it beyond the official boundaries of the colony. Over the next half century a distinctive culture and economy took shape in the vast rural hinterland, characterised by a marked imbalance of the sexes and an itinerant rural workforce on the one hand and commercially oriented land owning pastoralist families on the other. The influence of ‘the Bush’ in the formation of the Australian identity would be difficult to overestimate. Manning Clarke’s magisterial  A History of Australia is still the place to start for this history if only because he is a great stylist. Clark of course has a number of axes to grind and if you want an alternative view of the world read  Geoffrey Blaney’s The Tyranny of Distance. Blaney is a different type of historian to Clark, and although Clark is the alleged Marxist,  Blaney is the more interested in economics as a causal factor. If you are interested in the percentage of a woolgrower’s expenses taken up by cartage in the 1840s (and you should be if you want to understand the expansion of wool production) then Blaney is your man. For a thoughtful analysis of the cultural implications of the development of the rural economy there is Richard Waterhouse’s   The Vision Splendid. Waterhouse examines the development of a mythology of Bush versus City and the curious fact – curious in such a highly urbanised country - that many Australians still believe that to find a true Australian you have to visit a sheep station.

As the pastoral frontier advanced the indigenous population came into contact and conflict with the squatters and their shepherds. Neither Clark nor Blaney have a lot to say about frontier inter racial conflict.  W. E.H. Stanner first identified ‘the Great Australian Silence’ in the 1968 Boyer Lectures. They are still worth reading, if you can find them. Stanner was perhaps the first academic to put into the public discourse the idea that there was a huge gap in the mainstream history of Australia. C. D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society was  a groundbreaking overview  of the history of frontier interaction and was followed by Henry Reynold’s The Other Side of the Frontier. This influential work makes skilful use of surviving contemporary accounts to paint a convincing picture of extensive and at times effective black resistance. In Claiming a Continent  David Day attempts a one volume overview  of Australian history which gives considerable space to the issue of frontier conflict and analyses Australian history in terms of how an invader legitimises its conquest. First published in 1996 it already reads like the product of another (kinder) era. As a take on a number of still contemporary debates it retains considerable interest but it simply lacks the space to do justice to the complexities of regional variation..

For this reason some of the most satisfying history of the Australian frontier is found in regional studies. Bobby Hardy’s Lament for the Barkindji is well researched history of Aboriginal peoples along the Southern reaches of the Darling. Its tone is at times paternalistic but it includes considerable information not otherwise accessible. Koori A Will to Win by James Miller is a history of contact in the Hunter Valley. Miller makes no bones about whose side he is on. Invasion and Resistance by Noel Loos is a scholarly account of one of the most intense areas of conflict; North Queensland. It includes appendices that list in detail what is known about deaths from Aboriginal resistance in the area of study. A similar concern for accuracy of numbers is found in Henry Reynold’s Fate of a Free People which is a history of the Tasmanian frontier and the bargain struck by the Aboriginal survivors of the intense conflict of the late 1820s.  Frontier Justice by Tony Roberts provides a similar service for the Gulf country of the Northern Territory. Keith Windschuttle  has advanced an alternative thesis for the destruction of  traditional Tasmanian society but it has to be said that his views are considered tendentious by most scholars in the field. Anyone who has spent any time looking at the primary sources that deal with black white relations on the Australian frontier is struck by the unremitting violence reported and the universal practice of ‘dispersal’. Roberts is particularly useful for his insight into how police on the frontier became masters of euphemism. The introduction to the most recent edition of Fate of a Free People provides a useful (and balanced) summary of the debate on this subject for those interested in pursuing it further.





































































































































































































































































 AUSTRALIAN HISTORY REVIEW

History is only as interesting as the questions we put to it. Until relatively recently the questions being asked of our own history were, by and large, spectacularly boring. You could be forgiven for thinking nothing of any interest happened between Captain Cook and Gallipolli. The convict past was vaguely disreputable and the silence on the Aborigines was deafening.  And if you believe that nothing ever happened you naturally conclude that things will never change either. Nothing, of course could be further from the truth.

Considered in the context of world history, Australia provides a particular instance of the expansion of European settlement; as such its fascination lies in a comparison with the shape of other settlement societies. Considered from the indigenous point of view it is a history of dispossession and adjustment. Plenty of blood and guts there.
Considered from the standpoint of contemporary culture it is the story of how  identity is created and the legitimising uses that can be made of particular versions of history. In this regard the contest for the commanding heights is as fierce and as interesting in Australia as any where else.

Australian history, as opposed to pre-history or archaeology, begins with European exploration. And this may be where the great inferiority complex begins. For the early Dutch and English explorers were not impressed by what they found. William Dampier’s account of his visit to Western Australia was the first published account of Australia in English and was extremely influential. In a Pirate of Exquisite Mind,  D and M Preston, point out that the published version differed significantly from the original journal and that the more unflattering descriptions of the indigenous population may have been inserted for sensational effect by an editor. In any event the bad press did the trick and there was no attempt to settle Australia until after Cook’s account of the east coast was published nearly a century later. There are a lot of books about Cook and many of them are not terribly good. Richard Hough’s Captain James Cook a Biography is  reliable, conservative and sticks closely to Cook’s journals. Nicholas Thomas’s Discoveries the Voyages of Captain Cook is a fascinating attempt to reimagine the experience of Cook’s first contacts across vast cultural chasms. A classic in this field, although from the perspective of an art historian rather than an anthropologist, is Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific. These are books that help the reader imagine what could and could not be seen by the earliest European visitors.

Of course we might have been French, it wasn’t for lack of visits. Colin Dyer’s The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians provides a convenient survey of Gallic interest in Australia while Klaus Toft’s The Navigators provides a more detailed examination of Baudin’s exploration of the Australian coast in competition with Flinders. Flinders of course is of considerable interest in his own right as an exemplar of that late 18th century enlightenment person who is both a careerist and wildly emotional. No psych tests to pass in those days before sensitive appointments. In Mathew Flinders Miriam Estensen gives us a sensitive treatment of a man who loved his wife truly but left her for 10 years because it was the only way to get promotion.

Timing is everything, particular in the history of European settlement. The relatively late settlement of Australia meant we were not settled by refugees from religious persecution but by the outscourings of Georgian Britain’s prison system. For an academic consideration of the implications, and a valuable comparative perspective -  see Louis Hartz’s  The Founding of New Societies. At the risk of simplification his thesis is that America was settled by puritans and got one country under God; Australia was settled by convicts and got institutionalised egalitarianism and rum for currency. Mind you this was written long before the plasma TV was standard issue in the suburbs.

Robert Hughes’ impressive account of the convict era, The Fatal Shore will probably stand the test of time. Hughes writes better than most and has some very sound insights into the Australian character; that curious combination of resentment of authority but respect for force being one of the most acute, if not most flattering. Hughes is also right to stress the fact that Sydney was established to be a prison but a prison which was a very bold experiment in rehabilitation. Certain aspects of the penal policies of the late 18th century and early 19th century (especially of Macquarie) would be considered unbearably progressive these days. Hughes does well to emphasise the boldness of the vision and its amazing success as well as the horrors of places like Norfolk Island with its murder lotteries and psychopathic discipline.

One of the best contemporary sources for the First Fleet is Watkin Tench’s diary, recently republished as 1788 with an introduction by Tim Flannery. Tench is a good example of the spirit of the late 18th century: rational, optimistic and curious. He wrote with a view to publication (as did many other First Fleeters) but his diary is an invaluable record of first contact with the Aboriginals and the precarious establishment of a viable European settlement. His perspective is largely free from the racial prejudice that economic self interest and social Darwinism would inflict on later observers.

Carolly Erickson’s The Girl from Botany Bay focuses on the career of Mary Broad,  transported for robbery in company, her time in Port Jackson as the partner of Governor Phillip’s chief fisherman, and her subsequent escape in an open boat to Timor where she and her accomplices were arrested and returned to England. In England her cause was taken up by Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell – a man with more than a passing interest in the demi-monde  - and she was ultimately pardoned.  Her story is of particular interest because of the glimpse it provides of life at the bottom of the Georgian social pile: no place for the faint hearted, let it be said.

In a similar vein is  The Floating Brothel  by Sian Rees which focuses on the surprisingly well documented female convicts who were transported s part of the Second Fleet. Rees traces them from their criminal records in England through to their subsequent lives in Australia. Notwithstanding the somewhat tacky title this is a well researched and well written account of a group of people whose lives would normally not have been recorded. It also provides an insight into Georgian social engineering: women were necessary to divert the men from the occasion for vice. At one point it was proposed that Polynesian women be recruited for this purpose, a proposal not pursued for practical rather than ethical reasons. Not all that diversion would meet the standards of respectable society but officers such as Phillip were extremely pragmatic on such matters. This is a world far removed from the strictures of the Victorian period.

These accounts of convict life – notwithstanding lashings of rum, sodomy and the cat-o-nine tails - bring out the enormous improvement in life outcomes which were possible for the transported. Not that all of the settlers agreed that this should be the result. The clash between the Emancipists and the Rum Corps is perhaps the first great contest for the Australian identity. These days the emancipists would never get a look in but in the early settlement they found a champion in William Bligh  whose vision of  a society of diligent small holders would have produced a very different country than what actually transpired. H.V. Evatt’s classic Rum Rebellion is a masterly piece of partisanship which will leave you wondering how someone as evil as John Macarthur ever made it onto the two dollar note. The truth alas is more complex and for a more nuanced study of Macarthur and his times see Man of Honour by Michael Duffy. Duffy emphasises Macarthur’s marginal respectability in an age where being a gentleman meant being prepared to fight a duel if you were insulted at a boozy dinner party. At the same time as fighting duels however Macarthur was a resourceful and talented businessman. Like many of the transported convicts he saw Australia as an opportunity; albeit an opportunity to be built on free convict labour. In many ways he is a prototype of the socially conservative advocate of economic freedom which is such a feature of the subsequent Australian social landscape.

Lachlan Macquarie, on the other hand, was an earnest Highland Scot, one of those sons of Caledonia who provided the backbone of the British imperial administration throughout the 19th century. He is a kind of prototype too: the good leader who is ultimately betrayed.  John Ritchie’s   Lachlan Macquarie  tracks Macquarie’s moderately successful career prior to his being posted to New South Wales and makes clear that the posting was hardly the crowning achievement of  a brilliant career. Macquarie was nothing if not diligent however and he avoided the outright failures of his predecessors (having a regiment loyal to him helped minimise the risk of another coup) and superintended the transition of New South Wales from gaol to free colony, leaving Sydney some magnificent Georgian architecture in the process. Aspects of his administration were however criticised in a report commissioned by the British Colonial Secretary concerned that transportation was losing its deterrent effect, and he returned to Scotland to eke out a fairly miserable retirement.

The Bigge  Report which was critical of Macquarie squarely backed the vision of men like Macarthur. Land grants to Emancipists were abolished and discipline tightened. The future of the colony lay in commercial grazing conducted by capitalist farmers employing convict shepards. From the 1820s rapid expansion occurred west of the Dividing Range, most of it beyond the official boundaries of the colony. Over the next half century a distinctive culture and economy took shape in the vast rural hinterland, characterised by a marked imbalance of the sexes and an itinerant rural workforce on the one hand and commercially oriented land owning pastoralist families on the other. The influence of ‘the Bush’ in the formation of the Australian identity would be difficult to overestimate. Manning Clarke’s magisterial  A History of Australia is still the place to start for this history if only because he is a great stylist. Clark of course has a number of axes to grind and if you want an alternative view of the world read  Geoffrey Blaney’s The Tyranny of Distance. Blaney is a different type of historian to Clark, and although Clark is the alleged Marxist,  Blaney is the more interested in economics as a causal factor. If you are interested in the percentage of a woolgrower’s expenses taken up by cartage in the 1840s (and you should be if you want to understand the expansion of wool production) then Blaney is your man. For a thoughtful analysis of the cultural implications of the development of the rural economy there is Richard Waterhouse’s   The Vision Splendid. Waterhouse examines the development of a mythology of Bush versus City and the curious fact – curious in such a highly urbanised country - that many Australians still believe that to find a true Australian you have to visit a sheep station.

As the pastoral frontier advanced the indigenous population came into contact and conflict with the squatters and their shepherds. Neither Clark nor Blaney have a lot to say about frontier inter racial conflict.  W. E.H. Stanner first identified ‘the Great Australian Silence’ in the 1968 Boyer Lectures. They are still worth reading, if you can find them. Stanner was perhaps the first academic to put into the public discourse the idea that there was a huge gap in the mainstream history of Australia. C. D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society was  a groundbreaking overview  of the history of frontier interaction and was followed by Henry Reynold’s The Other Side of the Frontier. This influential work makes skilful use of surviving contemporary accounts to paint a convincing picture of extensive and at times effective black resistance. In Claiming a Continent  David Day attempts a one volume overview  of Australian history which gives considerable space to the issue of frontier conflict and analyses Australian history in terms of how an invader legitimises its conquest. First published in 1996 it already reads like the product of another (kinder) era. As a take on a number of still contemporary debates it retains considerable interest but it simply lacks the space to do justice to the complexities of regional variation..

For this reason some of the most satisfying history of the Australian frontier is found in regional studies. Bobby Hardy’s Lament for the Barkindji is well researched history of Aboriginal peoples along the Southern reaches of the Darling. Its tone is at times paternalistic but it includes considerable information not otherwise accessible. Koori A Will to Win by James Miller is a history of contact in the Hunter Valley. Miller makes no bones about whose side he is on. Invasion and Resistance by Noel Loos is a scholarly account of one of the most intense areas of conflict; North Queensland. It includes appendices that list in detail what is known about deaths from Aboriginal resistance in the area of study. A similar concern for accuracy of numbers is found in Henry Reynold’s Fate of a Free People which is a history of the Tasmanian frontier and the bargain struck by the Aboriginal survivors of the intense conflict of the late 1820s.  Frontier Justice by Tony Roberts provides a similar service for the Gulf country of the Northern Territory. Keith Windschuttle  has advanced an alternative thesis for the destruction of  traditional Tasmanian society but it has to be said that his views are considered tendentious by most scholars in the field. Anyone who has spent any time looking at the primary sources that deal with black white relations on the Australian frontier is struck by the unremitting violence reported and the universal practice of ‘dispersal’. Roberts is particularly useful for his insight into how police on the frontier became masters of euphemism. The introduction to the most recent edition of Fate of a Free People provides a useful (and balanced) summary of the debate on this subject for those interested in pursuing it further.

































































































































































































































































































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