Penny Russell

'If we take it for granted that John Macarthur was a bad man,’ writes Alan Atkinson, ‘then all the surviving evidence takes on a colouring to match. If we think that, then every word he wrote is suspect. On the other hand, leave the question of character open and the evidence takes on a new richness altogether – a deeper and more complex humanity. That is what I aim to do in this book.’

A child of nine is taken to Sydney for the first time to visit her mother, a patient at the Coast Hospital lazaret. Upon arrival, she learns that she, like her mother, has leprosy. Her fate is fixed from that day; she will live the remainder of her life in the lazaret. She takes the new name of ‘Alice’ to hide her former self, and the world closes in upon her. There will be no more school, no playing with her younger brothers and sisters, no friends of her own age, no prospect of romance, no hope of freedom.

Lessons from History is a big, ambitious book. Its twenty-two essays – amounting to some 400 pages of research, reflection, and references – seek to pin down, in accessible form, the combined expertise of thirty-three practitioners of history and related fields. Together they address a mélange of pressing issues facing Australia today, testament to the diversity of contemporary Australian history and its interdisciplinary reach. Political, social, economic, business, environmental, and oral historians are all represented, alongside authors whose institutional base is in strategic studies, economics, politics, or administration, but whose work is informed by a keen interest in the past and its lessons.

When the offer came to review this book, I accepted enthusiastically, and unthinkingly added, ‘That sounds fun!’. Upon reflection, I deleted that last sentence: what would it say about me, I wondered, that I should expect the account of a hangman and his work to be entertaining? I thought better of the sentence, but the anticipation remained.

There are many ways one might write a history of Australian history, but from any angle it’s a heroic project. In Making Australian History, Anna Clark is open about the difficulties, the possibilities, and her choices. How do you make sense of Australian history, she asks, amid a ‘swirl of changing sensibilities, methods, culture, politics and place’? How do you trace the story of a discipline across time, when each generation has defined the contours and boundaries of that discipline differently? How do you write a genuinely inclusive history of Australian History – one that gives due place to the full range of historical forms, not just those approved in academic circles?

The name of Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper shines bright in the history of Aboriginal activism in Australia between the two world wars. It is linked with the formation of the Australian Aborigines’ League, of which he was the founding secretary; the Day of Mourning on the anniversary of white settlement in 1938; and a petition intended for George V, signed by almost 2,000 Aboriginal people and demanding Aboriginal representation in parliament. This last was perhaps Cooper’s most cherished project. He spent years gathering signatures and waiting for the most opportune moment to present it; his disappointment at the indifferent response of the Australian government darkened his final years.

Gwen Good’s migration to Perth in 1963 turned out well. She loved Australia, the climate that turned life into one long summer holiday, and the house that she and her family soon acquired. She was an active member of her church, and a contented wife and mother who revelled in her children. By the 1980s she was ready to give away the bundle of reel-to-reel tapes on which, decades before, the family had conveyed its early impressions of Perth in audio letters to be sent home to England. The letters had come back to her when, in turn, her parents migrated to join the Goods in Perth. They held a past that had blended so seamlessly into the present that it no longer seemed particularly interesting.

Penny Russell could not have chanced upon a better phrase than Jane Austen’s ‘It was rather a wish of distinction … It was the desire of appearing superior to other people’ when she was seeking a title for this book. The colonial gentility of Melbourne, or ‘Society’ if you want to use their understanding of who they were, could only define themselves in terms of who they were not – or who they would never wish to be.