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.

Federation to World War Two - Australian History reviewed

Australian History since 1900.

If it is true that we are doomed to repeat the history we do not understand then our own history should be particularly compelling. Australian history however has always suffered from an image problem. The most common complaint is that it is boring: nothing happened. This view reflects a very narrow idea of what constitutes an event. While Australia has been mercifully spared the horrors which make the history of Russia, Europe and China so terribly fascinating there is still plenty to work with: a unique set of political and economic arrangements resulting from  Federation and only now being finally replaced by something else; participation in two world wars and numerous other regional conflicts; a depression and a massive immigration program. While we have avoided disaster it was sometimes a close run thing. And the intellectual struggle to own this history and bend it to contemporary purposes continues unabated.

In particular, the history of the near past can be extremely tendentious. History is often conscripted to prove that a particular party line is correct.  In Paul Kelly’s  The End of Certainty –  the story of the 1980s history is made to show the inevitability of the economic rationalist world view. Kelly is certainly on to something: the particular set of constitutional, legal and economic arrangements which were put in place in the first decade after Federation and which Kelly  describes as the ‘Australian Settlement’ were definitely unraveling in the 1980s and Kelly provides a detailed account of the political dimension to this process. Kelly however has a very large axe to grind – the benefits of free market economics and globalisation -  and as the result is that a book which could have been a very important analysis of  a critical phase in Australian history often descends into partisanship. His proposition that the protectionist policies of the early twentieth century were an economic failure from their inception would come as a surprise to the Australians who enjoyed post war prosperity.

But the concept of an Australian Settlement hammered out in the wake of Federation is a productive one. As a creation story, Federation has its problems. No redcoats firing on patriotic citizens; no tumbrels creaking off to the guillotine; no scheming Otto von Bismark or red shirted Garibaldi. Just a bunch of lawyers in waistcoats, sporting beards that would not be out of place in an outlaw biker gang, negotiating free trade and protection. The interest in the story however lies in the unique set of arrangements which the new nation devised.

Gavan Souter in Lion and Kangaroo succeeds in breathing life into names which are often seen but little remembered such as the Victorian Deakin – cultured, widely read but indecisive – the Queenslander Griffiths  - upper class and an amateur translator of Dante -  and the New South Welshman, Barton – a classics scholar who enjoyed a long lunch. He surveys what he sees as the key formative influences of the new nation and they are a revealing selection: parliament, the high court, the relationship with Britain and two of the bloodiest battles of the great War in which Australians participated, Gallipoli and Pozieres. Souter understands that institutions and events are ultimately people and he has an eye for the telling detail.

In his  Acts of Parliament Souter provides a comprehensive narrative history of Federal politics until the 1980s. The politics of the first decade of federation is fascinating because it explains the content of the Australian settlement. Protectionists, led by Barton allied with the young Labor party to keep the Free Traders (Paul Kelly’s spiritual ancestors) out of power and to enshrine white Australia in the first substantive legislation passed by the Federal Parliament. Legislation providing for a national industrial arbitration system followed soon after.

The achievement of the first decade of Federation was to stabilise the class conflict which had seen Australia on the verge of civil war during the industrial disputes of the 1890s when Queensland pastoralists, under the banner of ‘Freedom of Contract’ (sound familiar?) made a determined attempt to destroy the rural union movement. The bitterness of this struggle which was a tactical defeat but strategic victory for the unions explains much about the following century of industrial relations and political history in Australia. Defeated by scab labour and special constables the unionists decided to get even  not angry. The result was the Australian Labor party. Ross McMullins  Light on the Hill  is a detailed account of the ALP from its origins to the Hawke government. Its treatment of the early history of the party is illuminating in that it highlights how central  to the Australian settlement were the concerns of organised labour, be it in restricting non white immigration or legislating for compulsory arbitration. Labor could be so influential, though rarely in power, because of the division of the conservatives between the New South Wales based free traders and the Victorian protectionists.

The new nation enjoyed a high standard of living, democratic government and its citizens were among the longest lived in the world. But something was missing. World War One however was to provide the missing element. Blood. Some 69,000 Australians died in WWI and the overall casualty rate was over 50% of men enlisted. One can understand the need to find something redemptive in this shambles.

The recent growth in attendance at Anzac day commemorations is an interesting phenomenon which undoubtedly reflects the time devoted to it in schools as well as widely felt need to participate in unifying ritual. For those who want to get beyond the mythology, 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 fascinating 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 observor 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. 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. Almost forgotten now, Monash was the Allies most successful general on the Western front. Roland Perry has written an excellent biography, Monash: the Outsider who Won a War which makes intelligible his tactical brilliance. 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.

 

After the war to end all wars there was a brief period of economic recovery but the twenties in Australia were not prosperous. Falling commodity prices and industrial unrest characterised the political environment. Just when the Scullin Labor government had finally achieved office after a landslide victory the New York stock exchange crashed and the chairman of the Commonwealth Bank Board, in line with the economic orthodoxy of the day demanded massive expenditure cuts. Australia did not pull out of the resulting downward spiral until World War Two.  Jack Lang by Bede Nairn is a biography of the ‘Bigfella’ and is of particular interest for its treatment of how the conventional economic wisdom of the day guaranteed an exacerbation of the economic crisis. Lang, a real estate agent from what was then western Sydney, knew little and cared less about economics and his attempt to run a populist line against they who paid the piper was short lived.

On any view the thirties were a dark time. Fascism in Europe, Stalinism in Russia, militarism in Japan and economic collapse everywhere. Racism went without saying. Something had to give and when it did we had the greatest conflagration in world history. For Australia, two fronts had particular significance: North Africa and New Guinea. North Africa is particularly remembered for the role of the 9^th division in the successful defence of  Tobruk, and in inflicting the first major defeat on German land forces of the war at Alamaine. Somewhat unfairly, the role of other Australian units in the earlier successful campaign against the Italians in North Africa and the Vichy French in Syria are less well remembered.

The first siege of Tobruk took place at the nadir of Allied fortunes in WWII, in mid 1941. Its successful defence prevented the Germans from securing a forward supply base and was instrumental in keeping them from conquering Egypt, the Suez Canal and accessing Middle Eastern oil.

Tobruk’s defenders were largely Australians of the 9^th division with British artillery and some Indian units. The commander of the 9^th division, Morshead initiated a policy of active defence with nightly patrols contesting no mans land. My grandfather, transferred into the 2/15 battalion during the siege had told me about these patrols, which were certainly the highlight of his war, and I was amazed to find that the original operational reports of them are available on line through the Australian War Museum web site by reference to the battalion involved. For those with access to first hand accounts, it is fascinating to find certain details – the Gurkha penchant for removing ears; the role of a Salvation Army padre in providing hot food -  confirmed in the voluminous primary and secondary sources available. Let Enemies Beware- the History of the 2/15 Battalion  by R Austin is based on operational diaries and memoirs of participants. Tobruk and El Alamaine by Barto Maughan is a detailed and scholarly military history of these campaigns while Alamaine – the Australian Story by  Mark Johnston and Peter Stanley focuses on the 9^th division’s role in the Alamaine campaign.

Detailed military history is not to every ones’ taste and it would be fair to say that what these works gain in credibility they lose in readability. In this regard the north African campaign is not as well served as some of the WWI campaigns or New Guinea.

And not all interest is healthy. Since most Australians have at least heard of Tobruk there is a fighting chance of getting something published about it. The Last Man Standing by Peter Dorman focuses on the war of one Herb Ashby. Unfortunately the book is not transparent about its own methods but appears to be an example of what is sometimes called ’faction’; an unholy blending of the genres of popular history and historical fiction. This hybrid genre is characterised by extensive speculation about what its protagonist must have been thinking at any given time and reconstructed conversations which no one could possibly remember. The forward suggests Mr Ashby was extensively interviewed but absent any scholarly apparatus it is impossible to know and what you are left with is moderately entertaining historical fiction.

Peter Fitzsimmons Tobruk is in a similar vein but is at least up front about the method adopted. Fitzsimmons is described on the fly leaf as Australia’s most ‘beloved popular historian’. This must have come as a surprise to him as in the introductions to both Tobruk and Kokoda he has the decency to make clear that he feels free to make up some of what he writes (while not changing any known facts). A ’novel like feel’ is how he puts it.

This reviewer would prefer the genres to not blend. The problem is that the moment you start making things up – what a person was thinking on seeing something – or the details of a conversation – you are guessing and potentially misleading people. Veteran soldiers may not be appalled by death; they may indeed be rather callous about it. Or they may be much more scared than they admit to. Absent first hand accounts (which of course have their own problems to do with self justification and hindsight) the question about what is in a past figure’s mind is best left to historical fiction.

The other iconic campaign of the war for Australians is Kokoda.  Again its fascination lies in the fact that it was a predominantly Australian operation. The Japanese in fact never had a chance of taking Port Moresby; had no intention of invading Australia; and were criminally neglected by a high command that had started to believe their own propaganda about ‘Japanese spirit’ (‘yamato damashii’). But the campaign, particularly in its early stages,  showed Australian troops performing both very well against the odds –in the case of the 39^th battalion and, in the case of the 53rd battalion, very poorly.

Paul Ham’s Kokoda  is highly readable, covers the campaign from both Japanese and Australian perspectives and avoids mythologising. Peter Brune’s Those Ragged Bloody Heroes  focuses on the divergent experiences  of the 39^th  and 53^rd malicia battalions. The contrast is revealing of the importance of leadership, training and equipment and is a timely reminder that not all Australians are born soldiers.

Brune’s  The Spell Broken is about the little known Milne Bay campaign in 1942 which was in fact the first significant defeat of the Japanese army in WWII. Also undeservedly forgotten are the post Kokoda campaigns to clear the Japanese from central New Guinea. John Coate’s  Bravery above Blunder is a detailed military history of the Huon Peninsular campaign in 1943 and describes one of the largest scale operations ever undertaken by Australian troops independently.

Peter Thompson’s The Battle for Singapore is a balanced account of the greatest disaster to ever befall British or Australian arms. Hellfire by Cameron Forbes is a thoughtful treatment of the Malaya campaign and the subsequent experiences of captivity of Australian POWs. Unusually, Forbes makes an attempt to understand the how the Japanese military code of bushido could be perverted so as to permit the Japanese army to commit war crimes with such sickening  albeit spasmodic frequency.

Flack by Michael Veitch deals with Australian participation in the air war. In contradistinction to the ‘factionalised’ accounts referred to above this is good popular history. Veitch lets his informants speak for themselves and resists the temptation to embroider. Voices of War – Stories from the Australians at War Film Archive, edited by Michael Caufield is a selection of oral histories drawn from both Australian men and women who participated in of conflicts

From WWI until the present. First person accounts are both fascinating and problematic. But they form a valuable reality check for more document based histories.

The end of World War II brings us well into the era of living memory and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a clear perspective as to what matters and what is ephemeral.  It is worth reflecting on the fact that the world that  Australians fought to defend in North Africa and New Guinea in the 1940s has almost entirely disappeared. White Australia went in the late sixties; high tariffs in the seventies and eighties; the last bastion to fall was probably the industrial relations system despatched by the most recent amendments to the Workplace Relations Act. All of this territory is highly contested as even a casual perusal of John Hirst’s Sense and Nonsense in Australian History  would suggest. Recent history blends into journalistic editorial and a definitive history of the post war period in Australia remains to be written. When it is it will certainly be worth a look.

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 18^th 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 18^th century and early 19^th 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 18^th 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 19^th 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 18^th 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 18^th century and early 19^th 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 18^th 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 19^th 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 18^th 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 18^th century and early 19^th 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 18^th 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 19^th 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 18^th 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 18^th century and early 19^th 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 18^th 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 19^th 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.