Japanese Prose Literature from 1000 CE and counting.

Japanese Prose Literature from 1000 CE and counting.

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

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.