Australian History

According to the back cover: ‘This book explores the way common conversation matters … that during the last two hundred years we have been beguiled by reading and writing. Only during the last part of the twentieth century have we begun to remember the importance of speech as a source of truth in human affairs.’ It could also be noted that the seven essays collected here began as lectures, seminars or articles on such themes as the role of the monarchy in modern Australia (Prince Charles is judged a better speechmaker than his mum, therefore we have hope), the republican movement, the significance of Manning Clark and Henry Reynolds as influential Australian historians, the early nineteenth-century views of Edward Smith Hall and James Macarthur on the rights of Aboriginal people, and Raffaello Carboni’s account of the Eureka Stockade.

In the aftermath of the ideological jousts between Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle about the level of violence on the colonial frontier, a new book has appeared that tackles the issue from a fresh perspective. The author, John Connor, is a military historian. In this meticulously researched and highly readable book, he uses the methods of military history to examine the weapons, tactics and conduct of warfare on the Australian frontier during the first fifty years of British colonisation. Connor emerges from the fray with exciting new findings.

Reviewers often like to start with a simple statement of what a book is all about. In the present case, this is difficult, because there are two books within these covers. The first three chapters fit its subtitle, ‘The Story of the Australian National Dictionary’, while the next seven fit the title Lexical Images, being essays on aspects of Australian history and culture as reflected in the pages of the Australian National Dictionary (1988). If a single theme has to be extracted, it is that historical lexicography is a fascinating process, generating a valuable product.

In the fever of bicentennial celebrations of Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia, thousands of words have been written and dozens of new books have appeared. The South Australian events and publications alone celebrating the encounter between Flinders and Baudin have almost reached plague proportions. However, Miriam Estensen’s Life of Matthew Flinders is the first full-blown biography of Flinders since Geoffrey Ingleton’s Matthew Flinders: Navigator and Chartmaker (1986), a deluxe volume not intended for the mass market. A paperback edition of Ernest Scott’s 1914 biography recently appeared, but new sources have become available since then and it is certainly time for a fresh assessment of Flinders’ achievements and character based on all the available evidence we now have.

We readers ask a lot of our writers. We know what we like, but sometimes we prefer something new. We want to be taken along on the ride, but won’t tolerate being taken for a ride. We may want to learn something, but we don’t care to be lectured. We like a bit of fun, but can’t bear to be mocked. Yet we can also be quite generous. We don’t mind giving up control of our lives for the few hours it may take us to read a book, letting the writer take the tiller for a while. We are willing to believe in the events and characters the writer creates, to think and feel what the writer tells us to. And we go along with the greatest fiction of all: that the writer is omniscient and omnipresent. Not only do we collaborate in this great delusion, we encourage it.

In the late 1950s, Honours students at Melbourne University could take Geoffrey Serle’s Australian History course only after completing John La Nauze’s full-year subject on Hanoverian and Victorian Britain (aka England). Those who questioned this restriction were informed that, since Australia was a small, derivative society, understanding its history required some knowledge of the culture, ideas and institutions exported here from Britain. While we may have discounted this rationalisation, with all the withering cynicism of late adolescence, at the time it hardly seemed worth making a fuss about.

In 1941 the allied Western Desert Forces captured 130,000 Italian soldiers in Libya, the majority of whom were evacuated to Australia, India, South Africa and Ceylon. In 1943 Australia held 4668 Italian POWs. To increase agricultural production and relieve the shortage of manpower, the Australian government shipped a further 14,000 Italian soldiers from India during the course of the war, to be employed on farms throughout Australia. Britain was already employing over 40,000 Italian prisoners, housed in central camps and working under supervision. With greater distances and fewer resources, the Australian government decentralised their operation, placing Italian prisoners on private farms, unguarded, under the authority of local Control Centres.

When the appointment of Archbishop Hollingworth as governor-general was announced last year, some critics argued that the separation of church and state was placed at risk. This objection was not heard when Pastor Doug Nicholls was appointed governor of South Australia in 1976, nor when Davis McCaughey, a Uniting Church minister, became governor of Victoria in 1986. Was the governor-generalship of Australia seen as being in a league of its own, or did the title ‘Archbishop’ ring alarm bells? And when the new governor-general became embroiled in the controversy over the church’s response to cases of child abuse, this secularist undercurrent bubbled to the surface again. I was struck by the strain of virulent anti-clericalism that ran through much of the talk-back commentary. Somehow the Anglican Church seemed easily identified in the popular imagination as part of the Establishment – remote, authoritarian and out of date.

I first encountered the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia long before I heard its name. Readers who  were at primary school in the late 1960s or early 1970s will know what I’m talking about — those illustrated booklets (a treasure trove for school projects) on Australian history, put out by the Bank of New South Wales, with pompous, triumphalist titles such as ‘Endeavour and Achievement’.