History

Eugenia Williams’s appealing memoir of a Czech–Hungarian family spans many defining moments of twentieth-century European history. In the final days of World War II, the author and her family were part of the civilian population trapped between retreating and advancing armies. The memoir concludes more than two decades later. In 1969, one year after the Czechoslovakian democracy movement was crushed by the Russians, the family joined a refugee exodus to Austria, and eventually received immigrant permits to Australia. Williams appears to have been cushioned from trauma by her nurturing family and community. The bright surface of the narrative also reflects her buoyant temperament.

Ian Crawford’s title announces his book’s challenge: to provide a view of Kimberley history that builds on the foundations of Aboriginal oral tradition. The title is taken from Aboriginal storyteller Sam Woolagoodjah’s account of the first pastoral settlement of the Kimberley in the early 1860s.

Companions may be in short supply in the world of the flesh, but in the print media there are many on offer. Cambridge University Press has just released its seventh ‘Companion to Religion’, and another nine are waiting in line. If none of these appeals, there are a host of companions from other publishing houses offering their services. Companions, it seems, are now adjudged to be the suitable mode for bringing the latest in religious scholarship to a wider readership. ‘Handbooks’ are perhaps too simple; ‘Essays’ too boutique: both have attempted to package information in theology, religion and biblical studies.

Rabbi Emeritus John Levi, the author of this revised edition, is one of the notable Australians of his generation. The first Australian to be ordained a rabbi, he served Temple Beth Israel in Melbourne from 1960 to 1997. He was founder and past-president of the Council of Christians and Jews, a member of the governing body of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, President of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, an acclaimed scholar, holder of advanced degrees, including a Doctor of Divinity from Hebrew Union College, and is a Member of the Order of Australia. Levi also has a passion for history – for documenting in the most meticulous detail the first Jewish communities of Australia. It comes as no surprise that he has deep roots in this land. His great-great-grandfather helped to arrange the first Jewish services in Melbourne in 1839; his great-grandfather, Nathaniel Levi, was the first Jew to be elected to the Victorian parliament, in 1860.

The Italian historian Giambattista Vico once observed that historical knowledge is less like knowing the facts of things and more like knowing what it is to experience them. Good social history fits Vico’s description. Its power lies in the detail. The paradox of social history is that the apparently prosaic details of the everyday lives of a group of people can become vivid and tantalising, and provide an imaginative experience of those lives.

Colin McPhedran, the son of a Burmese mother and a Scottish oil company executive father, was living a comfortable middle-class colonial life in Central Burma with his mother, sister and two brothers when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. He was eleven years old. The invasion spread terror throughout the population, which feared the notorious savagery of the Japanese army. The European and mixed races felt particularly threatened, and Colin’s mother made the fatal decision to flee their comfortable villa and escape to India. The children’s mixed parentage concerned her; she resolved to undertake the journey with her three younger children. She was especially anxious about her fifteen-year-old daughter whose youthful European beauty would, she thought, make her a special target for sexual abuse. Colin’s father did not play any part in this disastrous decision, having escaped to Calcutta when Rangoon fell to the Japanese.

‘Ah, Dan Sickles. I visited his leg,’ announced a colonel recently, as he spotted American Scoundrel on the floor of my office. He was referring to Sickles’s right leg, which was shattered by an unexploded cannonball on 2 July 1863, at Gettysburg. Sickles, as major general of the Third Corps of the Union army, had just led his men to what would prove an endlessly controversial victory, given that he had defied the orders of his commanding officer, George Gordon Meade, as to the positioning of his troops. As Thomas Keneally reports:

After chloroform was administered to Dan, Dr Thomas Sim, the corps’ medical director, using a new method of rounded amputation, cut off the leg at a third of the way up the thigh. He had just read that the Army Medical Museum in Washington was advertising for samples, and so, instead of throwing the limb into a heap, he had it wrapped in a wet blanket and placed in a small coffin for shipment to Washington. Dan’s shattered leg lived on as a museum exhibit and remains on display at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.

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’.

When did Australia grow up? Australian historians have accepted, almost as an obligation of their trade, that they must declare the moment when the child reached mature adulthood. Was it, as Justice Murphy proclaimed in splendid isolation on the High Court bench, at the moment of the adoption of the Commonwealth Constitution in 1901? He was, admittedly, an amateur historian. Was it with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, when the Dominions were given the right to have their own defence and foreign policies? Or in 1942, when Prime Minister Curtin looked to the United States ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional links and kinship with the United Kingdom’? Or with the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951? Or is the safest thing to stick with the election of the Whitlam government in 1972?

Blessed are the compilers of dictionaries, writers of reference books and encyclopedia entries – how would we access knowledge without them? But if they work in the Australian university system, they are not blessed by the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, which awards no research points whatsoever for such activities. Lindy Abraham’s esoteric-sounding dictionary of alchemical imagery is a fine example of the kind of scholarly labour that doesn’t fit well with bean-counting bureaucrats’ notions of ‘productive’ research. With her assistance, we gain access to a world-view that had its roots in Hellenistic Egypt in 300 BC but, during the Renaissance, re-emerged as a powerful intellectual force: a precursor to modern science, as well as a systematic form of philosophy.