History

The editor of The Scots Abroad took one big hoary fact, stuffed it in a cannon and fired it. Indeed he fired it to several parts of the world. Then he wrote letters to the provincial experts, asking them to survey the effects his missile had on landing. The results of course were fairly predictable and roughly the same in each case – it was the same fact after all. A lot of gravel and some larger stones thrown up, several casualties among the native population, little damage to public buildings, though in more than one case banks were reported collapsed and men in grey suits were seen running away. At the bottom of the crater lay the fact, quite unexploded, still as hoary and unyielding as when it was fired. This was a Scottish fact, or, rather, the fact was a Scot, or a Scottish ‘national type’, so we shouldn’t wonder that it was quite intact.

From his first venture into print in 1923 Jack Lindsay has produced well over 150 books covering subjects as wide ranging as alchemy, ballistics, anthropology, philosophy, literary and art history, biography, and politics, as well as his own creative writings. His ‘astounding creative energy’ has deserved a large and generous book and he is well served by this collection of twenty-two essays and he is magnificently served by Bernard Smith’s editing, which, by placing the essays in illuminating sequences and juxtapositions, maps out the complexity and quality of Lindsay’s life and work. Smith’s Preface argues for the need in a volume such as this to redress the neglect in this country of Lindsay’s voluminous and wide-ranging work. The attempt deserves success.

When Scholars wandered across our television screens recently, palettes in hand, many were offended by the anachronisms: busts taking artists off to Sydney, or feminist polemics leading out to a car-clogged St Kilda Road. One Summer Again was an impression of Australia’s impressionists, and had the honesty to make that plain; and the more one reads about Roberts, Streeton, and Conder, the more it becomes clear that, in addition to communicating the raw energy and exuberance, the miniseries got the essentials absolutely right. Tom Roberts was as Chris Hallam, himself a onetime Englishman and art student, depicted him: confident, given to making pronouncements, a touch humourless perhaps, but a man with a high sense of purpose who easily moved among all kinds of people at all social levels.

One of the truly astonishing accounts to emerge in Munster’s account concerns another US president, John F. Kennedy, whose press secretary, Pierre Salinger, forged a cable in Murdoch’s name to kill a Murdoch report of an off-the-record talk he had with the president. The cable, sent through State Department channels, was signed ‘Murdoch’.

Yanks Down Under purports to examine the “American impact on Australia” during the second world war. After some 400 pages of text I was no wiser as to the nature of this impact. I could not decide whether the authors thought that the wartime American presence here had a permanent effect or whether it was significant but strictly temporary. In their final sentence the authors claim that the American presence led to the “development, years before the creation of any formal diplomatic and military agreements, of a lasting alliance”, but it is difficult to discover any basis for this assertion in the evidence that the authors provide. The bulk of the book is devoted to a mountain of almost entirely trivial detail which is not without interest, nostalgic or otherwise, but which falls far short of sustaining the argument that the authors apparently seek to advance.

A classic, a cynic might say, is a work which is much admired but seldom read. But the reappearance of H. M. Green’s A History of Australian Literature, long admired but also long out of print, is likely to change that definition. To read this work again is to realise just how good it is, how apposite to many of our current concerns. Its title suggests why this is so, A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied. This is a history which is systematic as well as serious, aware not only of the problematic nature of the terms "history”, “Australian” and “literature” but also of the interplay between texts and contexts and of the multiple nature of these contexts – geographical (in a sense Foucault would understand, concerned with space as a psychic as well as a physical fact), historical, ideological. But it is also written by someone who knows how to read literature, who is concerned to restore the integrity of language and is able to combine an appreciation of the precise and univocal with a sense of the fulness and complexity of the symbol. Green’s account of a writer is always judicious and perceptive and usually generous. More importantly he is always prepared to honour the terms which a writer sets for him or herself or has posed by the environment – his essay on Brennan, for example, is-still perhaps the most balanced written about that problematic writer.

Poussard’s Outbreak of Peace (Billabong Press, $3.95 pb, 44 pp) is a personal record of the women’s action at Pine Gap in November 1983. It is difficult to say precisely how Poussard achieves the fine balance of political and personal commentary that she does, but her introduction provides a clue. ‘Australians are an urban, shore-hugging people,’ she writes, ‘but in the middle of our urban, shore-hugging consciousness there is a space, a desert. For a people with few myths, the openness and vastness of the Centre holds a hint of liberation.’

The first idea I remember having about the past as history was that people were more brutish then and more unjust because they were more ignorant. History was progress. This was the enlightened age.

Keith Willey died on 6 September 1984. He had just submitted the manuscript of what was to be his last book. A study of Australian humour in adversity titled You Might As Well Laugh Mate, it summed up the man, not least in his last days. Sardonic, self-effacing, unashamedly Australian.