A question of dates!

 

 

There are occasions when doing research that you come across something that you’ve always accepted and then find out you’ve been wrong all the time and, more to the point, so has everyone else.  While working on a chapter on 1848 and Chartism, I checked the reference for:

‘We desire no fraternisation between the Irish people and the Chartists--not on account of the bugbear of physical force, but simply because some of their five points are to us an abomination…’

I wanted to get the correct page reference in the Dublin Weekly Nation for this statement written by John Mitchel, the paper’s editor, and published on 14 August 1847.  I’d always accepted this as the correct date based largely on Dorothy Thompson’s reference to it.  In fact it was published a year earlier on 15 August 1846 in the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ section on page 8. In fact, the quotation is cited on three occasions in the Northern Star editorials as its banner: ‘‘The Nation’ and ‘The Charter’’, Northern Star, 19 September 1846, p. 4, ‘‘The Nation’ and ‘The Charter’’, Northern Star, 10 October 1846, p. 4, and ‘‘The Nation’ and ‘The Charter’’, Northern Star, 17 October 1846, p. 4.  So how have so many historians—and there are exceptions such as –got this wrong?

It’s the classic case of an initial source giving a date that is then perpetuated in subsequent work.  As far as I can see the first reference to Mitchel’s comment was in  Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History 1845-1849: A Sequel to ‘Young Ireland’, (Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co.), 1883, p. 450 and was, for instance cited as the reference by Christine Kinealy in her Repeal and Revolution: 1848 in Ireland, (Manchester University Press), 2009, p. 125. 

 

Mitchel’s statement was written, according to Charles Gavan Duffy, because he was angered by ‘The Chartists who listened to the egotistical declamation of Mr Feargus O’Connor did not understand the party [Young Ireland]’.  The full statement is as follows:

 

We have received a printed address from the Chartists of England to the Irish people, with a request that we should insert it in THE NATION. ‘We desire no fraternisation between the Irish people and the Chartists--not on account of the bugbear of physical force, but simply because some of their five points are to us an abomination, and the whole spirit and tone of their proceedings, though well enough for England, are so essentially English that their adoption in Ireland would neither be probable not at all desirable.  Between us and them there is a gulf fixed; we desire not to bridge it over, but to make it wider and deeper.

 

As far as I can ascertain, this is a case of ‘false news’.  Having checked the Northern Star for the months before August 1846, I have not come across any ‘printed address from the Chartists of England’ and can only assume that Mitchel concocted the whole thing.  He is not saying anything that was not widely known: Mitchel was opposed to Chartism in Ireland and beyond as he did not see it as offering any relief to Ireland’s problems.  He could have just as easily written this in 1847 as 1846.  It was not until early 1848 that his view changed and he urged the Irish not to reject Chartism…cynical opportunism I suspect as much as a Damascene conversion.

 

My Books and other publications

Those publications with an asterisk (*) were co-written with C.W. Daniels. This list does not include editorials for Teaching History, book reviews or unpublished papers. Neither does it include the two series of books for which I have been joint-editor: Cambridge Topics in History and Cambridge Perspectives in History. Including these books would increase the length of this appendix by 52 books.

1974-1979

Computer-based data and social and economic history (for the Local History Classroom Project), (1974).

Social and Economic History and the Computer (for LHCP), (1975).

‘Local and National History -- an interrelated response’, in Suffolk History Forum, 1977.

‘Our Future Local Historians’, in The Local Historian, Vol. 13, 1978. *

‘Sixth Form History’, in Teaching History, May 1976. *

‘Sixth Form History’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 3 June 1977. *

‘The new history -- an essential reappraisal’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 2 December 1977. *

‘Interrelated Issues’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 1 December 1978. *

‘The Myth Exposed’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 30 November 1979 * also reprinted in John Fines (ed.) see below.

1980-1984

Nineteenth Century Britain, (Macmillan), 1980. *

‘The Local History Classroom Project’, in Developments in History Teaching, (University of Exeter), 1980. *

‘A Chronic Hysteresis’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 5 December 1980. *

Twentieth Century Europe, (Macmillan), 1981. *

‘Is there still room for History in the secondary curriculum?’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 5 December 1981. *

‘Content considered’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 9 April 1982. *

Twentieth Century Britain, (Macmillan), 1982. *

‘A Level History’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 8 April 1983. *

‘History in danger revisited’, in The Times Educational Supplement,  9 December 1983. *

‘History and study skills’, in John Fines (ed.), Teaching History, (Holmes McDougall), 1983. 

‘History and study skills’, reprinted in School and College, Vol. 4, (4), 1983.

Four scripts for Sussex Tapes, 1983:

People, Land and Trade 1830-1914.

Pre-eminence and Competition 1830-1914.

The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution.

Lloyd George to Beveridge 1906-1950.

Four computer programs for Sussex Tapes, 1984:

The Industrial Revolution.

Population, Medicine and Agriculture.

Transport: road, canal and railway.

Social Impact of Change.

‘It’s time History Teachers were offensive’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 28 November 1984. *

The Chartists, (Macmillan), 1984. *

1985-1989

‘Using documents with sixth formers’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 29 November 1985. *

Learning History: A Guide to Advanced Study, (Macmillan), 1986. *

GCSE History, (The Historical Association), 1986, revised edition, 1987, as editor and contributor.

‘Training or Survival?’ with M. Booth and G. Shawyer in The Times Educational Supplement, 10 April 1987.

Change and Continuity in British Society 1800-1850, (Cambridge Topics in History, Cambridge University Press), 1987.

‘There are always alternatives: Britain during the Depression’ for BBC Radio, 14 September 1987.

‘Cultural imperialism’, in The Times Educational Supplement, 4 December, 1987.

‘The Training of History Teachers Project’, in Teaching History, 50, January 1988.

‘History’ in Your Choice of A-Levels, (CRAC,) 1988.

‘The Development of Children’s Historical Thinking’ with G. Shawyer and M. Booth, Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 18, (2), 1988.

‘The New Demonology’, Teaching History, Vol. 53, October 1988.

The Future of the Past: History in the Curriculum 5-16: A Personal Overview, (The Historical Association), 1988.

‘History Study Skills: Working with Sources’, History Sixth, Vol. 3, October 1988. *

‘A Critique of GCSE History: the results of The Historical Association Survey’, Teaching History, Vol. 55, March 1989.

1990-1999

‘History Textbook Round-up’, Teachers’ Weekly, September 1990.

‘Partnership and the Training of Student History Teachers’, with M. Booth and G. Shawyer, in M. Booth, J. Furlong and M. Wilkin (eds.), Partnership in Initial Teacher Training, (Cassell), 1990.

Economy and Society in Modern Britain 1700-1850 (Routledge), 1991.

Church and State in Modern Britain 1700-1850 (Routledge), 1991.

‘History’ in Your Choice of A-Levels, (CRAC), 1991.

‘Lies, damn lies and statistics’, Teaching History, 63, April 1991.

‘BTEC and History’, in John Fines (ed.), History 16-19, (The Historical Association), 1991.

‘What about the author?’, Hindsight: GCSE Modern History Review, Vol. 2, (1), September 1991.

‘Appeasement: A matter of opinion?’, Hindsight: GCSE Modern History Review, Vol. 2, (2), January 1992.

Economic Revolutions 1750-1850 (Cambridge Topics in History, Cambridge University Press), 1992.

‘Suez: a question of causation’, Hindsight: GCSE Modern History Review, Vol. 4, (1), September 1993.

‘History’ in Your Choice of A-Levels, (CRAC,) 1993.

History and post-16 vocational courses’, in H. Bourdillon (ed.), Teaching History, (Routledge), 1993.

‘Learning effectively at Advanced Level’, pamphlet for PGCE ITT course, (Open University), 1994.

Preparing for Inspection, (The Historical Association), 1994.

Managing the Learning of History, (David Fulton), 1995.

Chartism: People, Events and Ideas (Perspectives in History, Cambridge University Press), 1998.

BBC History File: consultant on five Key Stage 3 programmes on Britain 1750-1900, 1999.

2000-2009

Revolution, Radicalism and Reform: England 1780-1846, (Perspectives in History, Cambridge University Press), 2001.

‘The state in the 1840s’, Modern History Review, September 2003.

‘Chartism and the state’, Modern History Review, November 2003.

‘Chadwick and Simon: the problem of public health reform’, Modern History Review, April 2005.

2010

Three Rebellions: Canada 1837-1838, South Wales 1839, Eureka 1854, (Clio Publishing), 2010.

2011

Three Rebellions: Canada 1837-1838, South Wales 1839, Eureka 1854, (Clio Publishing), 2011 Kindle edition.

Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1840-1882, (Clio Publishing), 2011.

Economy, Population and Transport (Nineteenth Century British Society), 2011 Kindle edition.

Work, Health and Poverty, (Nineteenth Century British Society), 2011 Kindle edition.

Education, Crime and Leisure, (Nineteenth Century British Society), 2011 Kindle edition.

Class, (Nineteenth Century British Society), 2011 Kindle edition.

2012

Religion and Government, (Nineteenth Century British Society), 2012 Kindle edition.

Society under Pressure: Britain 1830-1914, (Nineteenth Century British Society), 2012 Kindle edition.

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1918, (Authoring History), 2012.

Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1840-1882, (Clio Publishing), 2012 Kindle edition.

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain 1830-1918, 2012,  Kindle edition.

Rebellion in Canada, 1837-1885 Volume 1: Autocracy, Rebellion and Liberty, (Authoring History), 2012.

Rebellion in Canada, 1837-1885, Volume 2: The Irish, the Fenians and the Metis, (Authoring History), 2012.

2013

Resistance and Rebellion in the British Empire, 1600-1980, Clio Publishing, 2013.

Settler Australia, 1780-1880, Volume 1: Settlement, Protest and Control, (Authoring History), 2013.

Settler Australia, 1780-1880, Volume 2: Eureka and Democracy, (Authoring History), 2013.

Rebellion in Canada, 1837-1885, 2013, Kindle edition.

'A Peaceable Kingdom': Essays on Nineteenth Century Canada, (Authoring History), 2013.

Resistance and Rebellion in the British Empire, 1600-1980, 2013, Kindle edition.

Settler Australia, 1780-1880, 2013, Kindle Edition.

Coping with Change: British Society, 1780-1914, (Authoring History), 2013.

2014

Before Chartism: Exclusion and Resistance, (Authoring History), 2014.

Suger: The Life of Louis VI 'the Fat', (Authoring History), 2014, Kindle edition.

Chartism: Rise and Demise, (Authoring History), 2014.

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2014.

Before Chartism: Exclusion and Resistance, (Authoring History), 2014, Kindle edition.

2015

Chartism: Rise and Demise, (Authoring History), 2015, Kindle edition.

'Development of the Professions', in Ross, Alastair, Innovating Professional Services: Transforming Value and Efficiency, (Ashgate), 2015, pp. 271-274.

Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The Midlands and the South, (Authoring History), 2015.

Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The North, Scotland Wales and Ireland, (Authoring History), 2015.

2016

Chartism, Regions and Economies, (Authoring History), 2016.

Breaking the Habit: A Life of History, (Authoring History), 2016.

Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The Midlands and the South, (Authoring History), 2016, Kindle edition.

Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The North, Scotland Wales and Ireland, (Authoring History), 2015, Kindle edition.

Chartism, Regions and Economies, (Authoring History), 2016, Kindle edition.

Suger: The Life of Louis VI 'the Fat', revised edition, (Authoring History), 2016.

Robert Guiscard: Portrait of a Warlord, (Authoring History), 2016.

Chartism: A Global History and other essays, (Authoring History), 2016.

Chartism: A Global History and other essays, (Authoring History), 2016, Kindle edition.

Roger of Sicily: Portrait of a Ruler, (Authoring History), 2016.

Three Rebellions: Canada, South Wales and Australia, (Authoring History), 2016.

2017

Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882, (Authoring History), 2017.

Disrupting the British World, 1600-1980, (Authoring History), 2017.

Britain 1780-1850: A Simple Guide, (Authoring History), 2017.

People and Places: Britain 1780-1950, (Authoring History), 2017.

2018

Britain 1780-1945: Society under Pressure, (Authoring History), 2018.

Britain 1780-1945: Reforming Society, (Authoring History), 2018.

Three Rebellions: Canada, South Wales and Australia, (Authoring History), 2018, Kindle edition.

Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882, (Authoring History), 2018. Kindle edition.

Disrupting the British World, 1600-1980, (Authoring History), 2018, Kindle edition.

Britain 1780-1945: Society under Pressure, (Authoring History), 2018, Kindle edition.

Britain 1780-1945: Reforming Society, (Authoring History), 2018, Kindle edition.

Robert Guiscard: Portrait of a Warlord, (Authoring History), 2016, 2018, Kindle edition.

Roger of Sicily: Portrait of a Ruler, (Authoring History), 2016,  2018, Kindle edition.

People and Places: Britain 1780-1950, (Authoring History), 2017, 2018, Kindle edition.

Breaking the Habit: A Life of History, (Authoring History), 2016, 2018, Kindle edition.

2019

Radicalism and Chartism 1790-1860, Authoring History), 2019.

Radicalism and Chartism 1790-1860, Authoring History), 2019, Kindle edition.

2020

The Woman Question: Sex, Work and Politics 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2020.

Canada's 'Wars of Religion', (Authoring History), 2020.

The Woman Question: Sex, Work and Politics 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2020, Kindle edition.

2021

Canada's 'Wars of Religion', (Authoring History), 2021, Kindle edition.

The Woman Question: Sex, Work and Politics 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2021, hardback.

Economy, Population and Transport 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2021, paperback and hardback.

2022

Classes and Cultures 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2022, Kindle, hardback and paperback.

Work, Health and Poverty 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2022, Kindle, hardback and paperback.

Education and Crime 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2022, Kindle, hardback and paperback.

Religion and Government 1780-1945, (Authoring History), 2022, Kindle, hardback and paperback.

Breaking the Habit: a review by John A. Hargreaves

Breaking the Habit: A Life of History, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2016, 175 pp., £7.13, paper, ISBN 9781530295234

 

In this retrospective but far from introspective, autobiographical memoir Richard Brown muses ‘on the nature of History in an increasingly challenging environment’. The author, familiar to readers of online reviews on the Historical Association website as a prolific reviewer of a wide range of historical resources and as a compulsive blogger on his popular blog, The History Zone, which has a diverse following encompassing students in secondary, tertiary and higher education, confesses himself to being addicted to history for almost as long as he can remember. I first encountered Richard as a fellow reviewer for the Historical Association’s flagship journal for secondary school teachers, Teaching History, and utilised many of his textbooks in the classroom in my own teaching, finding them always well-grounded in classroom experience, thoroughly researched and lucidly stimulating in the historical interpretations they offered. But this is more than a handbook for history teachers as the equestrian photograph of the infant author on the cover anticipates and essentially it reveals the extent to which a developing understanding of history interweaves with our life experiences from the cradle to the grave. It is more personal than anything else he has written and particularly moving in its account of how as a registered carer he supported his late wife Margaret, to whose memory the book is dedicated, in his post-retirement years until her death in 2015.

 

 

Its starting point is the affirmation that many would share that ‘being a teacher remains one of the most fulfilling of the professions’ and that ‘there is nothing more enjoyable than observing students learning to become critical in their approach to life’. What follows, he continues, is ‘an otiose attempt to make sense of my own life by intermingling autobiography with materials on History, teaching and learning initially written often at speed as part of on-going debates on education and history but now revised in the more cloistered solitude of my study’. It identifies the hybrid influences combining the rural experience of the Fens and the traditions of his mother’s family with the urban experience of his father and his family, mediated initially largely through memories and stories but with an increasing recognition of the importance of historical evidence in creating ‘a narrative to explain the evidence’ and a developing focus on how students learn history throughout his teaching career influenced strongly like so many of us by the Schools History Project.

Breaking the Habit: A Life of History

Just Published

Historians, it has been said, are rather like a good bottle of wine…they mature with age. Being seen as a rather crusty claret may not be a bad thing and I’ve now reached the point in my life when I feel it right to air—as with the claret—my own reflections on the nature of History in an increasingly challenging environment. I do not claim that my own life has been anything other than ordinary but when you get to a certain age I suppose you start to look back on things. What follows is an otiose attempt to make sense of my own life by intermingling autobiography with materials on History, teaching and learning initially written often at speed as part of on-going debates on education and history but now revised in the more cloistered solitude of my study.

Breaking the Habit: A Life of History

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, (1 March 2016)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1530295238
• ISBN-13: 978-1530295234

Reaching a thousand

I’ve been blogging regularly since July 2007 on my two blogs Looking at History and the History Zone, putting the posts I write on both.  Both sites are designed to promote history as a subject as well as providing me with a vehicle for putting forward my own ideas on the subject as well as on current political issues.  History Zone began life as a blog on Windows Live before migrating to WordPress at the beginning of October 2010; Looking at History has used the Google blog platform from the outset.  The only reason for having two blogs with broadly the same material is the result of a comment from a friend who said it would allow me to maximise audiences.  He was right…Looking at History has had over 830,000 hits in the intervening years while History Zone  has had a mere 71,000…such is the influence of Google as a search engine. In many respects the blogs acted as first drafts of material that later found its way into some of my published books and though marketing was not one of the reasons why I began blogging, it is now an integral part of my marketing strategies. 

Both blogs are now within spitting distance of a thousand posts, an average of 125 posts a year or just over two a week.  This reinforces the point made by many professional bloggers that the key to building and retaining an audience is to post regularly and, in the case of political comments, make them current…little point in commenting on the question of tuition fees two weeks after politicians proposed to reduce them from £9,000 to £6,000 should they win the General Election.  That, and their subject matter, has resulted in building a large audience in the UK, United States, Canada and Australia but also in Germany, France, Ukraine, Russia, Spain and India.  At this moment, the blog is being looked at in the UK, Australia, United States, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Algeria, Kenya, the Netherlands and the Philippines using computers, phones, tablets and iPads.  The blogs have become truly global in their audience, have been referred to on other blogs and have even found their way into several academic books.

Many people begin blogging with good intentions only to fail after a few posts or the posts become so irregular that the blog ends up lacking an real coherence.  I was lucky in that I had a pretty good idea about what my intentions for the blogs and, though they have evolved over the years, those intentions remain largely unchanged.  So I plan to continue doing what I’m doing and what I enjoy and hope that my audience agrees. 

Shaping a historiography: separate national stories

Australia and New Zealand ignore each other when telling their national stories. A research project at the University of Canterbury is seeking to address this problem by exploring the Australia-New Zealand relationship on multiple levels, political, intellectual, cultural, social and economic from the 1880s to 2000. Entitled ‘Anzac Neighbours: 100 years of multiple ties between New Zealand and Australia’, this project by three University of Canterbury colleagues, two historians and a political scientist has received a grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund to hunt for an answer as to why the two Southern Hemisphere countries share various pasts but neglect their common history and to disclose the continuing ties and flows between them. There remains a remarkable similarity in their flags. They share the same stubborn commitment to the Union Jack and the same reference to their common place under the Southern Cross.

Together, Australia and New Zealand once wore the name ‘Australasia’, and the ‘Anzac Neighbours’ team seek to confirm the continued existence of this region even though the collective label has fallen into disuse. In part, this project was the result of the Blackwell History of the World volume, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, where Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein Smith found that they were, indeed, writing about a coherent region, even though it no longer had a name[1]. Their history argues that the naming of places is a political act. Australasia emerged as a political and cultural entity with European settlement and regional relations survive despite its submergence; if anything, Australasia has resurfaced as an idea as globalisation has gathered force.

In a keynote address at the Australian Historical Association Conference in 2002, Donald Denoon argued that the Australasian dimension of their joint pasts is a ‘repressed memory’ that historians have airbrushed out of both Australian and New Zealand historiographies[2]. The term ‘Australasia’ was first used in the eighteenth century, even before Captain James Cook by de Brosses in 1756 and entered the English language as referring to the lands south of Asia. By the late nineteenth century, its purview had shrunk to the sphere of British influence in the South Pacific, and Australia and New Zealand were commonly referred to as ‘the seven colonies of Australasia’. Historians since have erased this name and the connections associated with it from both Australian and New Zealand history, as if they wanted to forget that New Zealand and the Australian colonies were part of ‘Australasia’ before 1901. Yet this community of interests was ‘real’, as James Belich has recognised, even if it was a bit vague or fuzzy around the edges[3]. By ‘fuzzy’ he means that contemporaries were unclear over whether the place and community called Australasia included ‘all the colonies in the southern seas’, the British ones as well as New Zealand and the Australian continent[4].

The problem is that neither country’s historians have given due credit to the influence of the other. For a hundred years, historians on both sides of the Tasman Sea have produced national histories that ignored their shared pasts and neglected the historical parallels. From W. K. Hancock in 1930 through to the ten-volume ‘slice’ history written for Australia’s bicentenary in 1988, the Australian national story has excluded any mention of a common history with New Zealand[5]. This can be explained by a general historiographical shift from imperial to national history in the second half of the twentieth century[6].

The one exception is the debates in 1901 about whether New Zealand should join the Australian Commonwealth and even the history of these has been treated separately on each side. It is only in the latest Australian literature that John Hirst, for instance, relates Keith Sinclair’s cultural interpretation from the 1980s that ‘most New Zealanders did not want to become Australians’ to the Australian national story, to support the case that sentiment dominated over business in the creation of Australia[7]. In the process, The Sentimental Nation opened up debate about cultural connections. Pacific history tackled a more regionalist agenda in the early work of C. Hartley Grattan, but this reflected an interested American’s perspective that saw the Pacific as a region including the large rim countries and treated Australia and New Zealand as its south western quadrant[8].

The kind of Pacific history that evolved out of the Australian National University tradition under New Zealander J. W. Davidson after the Second World War concentrated on the oceanic islands and their contact histories. It left persistent boundaries between Pacific, Australian and New Zealand history, despite the direct explanatory relevance of New Zealand to an understanding of relations between indigenous peoples and new immigrant settlers and of Australia to the experience of Papua New Guinea. There have been some attempts to make Australasian comparisons, such as Kerry Howe’s 1977 Race Relations in Australia and New Zealand: a Comparative Survey, Simon Ville’s Rural Entrepreneurs about the stock and station agent industry and other thematic studies that share an interest in colonialism[9].

Shaun Goldfinch is the author of a political science monograph that compares the refashioning of the two countries’ economic policies[10]. His thesis complements that in the Blackwell history, that identities in the region are created and transformed locally, though often shaped by ideas generated elsewhere: Goldfinch highlights institutional density as an influence. Environmentalists, too, have no difficulty in seeing Australasia as a region; for instance, Tim Flannery in his ‘future eaters’ thesis, and Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel[11]. It is historians who prefer the boundaries of the sovereign nation–state, producing separate Australian and New Zealand books or separate chapters for books that supposedly discuss the two settler societies together. As A. G. Hopkins reflected at the end of the twentieth century, ‘the tradition of arranging history so that it fits within national borders surely needs to be revised’, with the passing of the age of empires[12].

This may seem odd to the rest of the world that is accustomed to considering Australia and New Zealand together, but polite, mutual ignorance is the norm in local historical and opinion-making circles. The well-regarded End of Certainty: the Story of the 1980s, by Australian journalist Paul Kelly, talks of ‘the Australian Settlement’ that endured for eight decades after Federation[13]. Its five planks – White Australia, arbitration, protection, ‘state paternalism’ and ‘imperial benevolence’ – are represented as unique and distinctively Australian. From the ‘foundation idea’ of White Australia to its ‘bedrock ideology’ of protection, arbitration is assumed to be an Australian institution based upon an Australian idea, the ‘fair go’ principle[14]. John Rickard also claims arbitration as a distinctive Australian institution, expressive of the national psyche[15]. In 2002, the concluding volume from the Australian National University’s ‘Reshaping Australian Institutions’ Project reiterated that Australia was unusual for its system of tariff protection that underpinned the ‘Australian Settlement’[16]. Yet the New Zealand historian Erik Olssen and others have demonstrated that these ‘experiments’ are as fundamental to New Zealand as to Australian history[17]. The social scientist Francis Castles describes industrial conciliation and arbitration as ‘this most peculiar of Australian institutions’, yet he argued in notable earlier work that the core concepts of the ‘wage earners’ welfare state’ and the politics of ‘domestic defence’ also applied to New Zealand[18].

At the July 2002 conference in Brisbane of the Australian Historical Association, the umbrella organisation for historians in Australia, an occasional whiff of disdain floated in the air as Kiwi papers were welcomed and Australian scholars expressed polite wonder at the richness and diversity of New Zealand historical scholarship. It was as though New Zealand continued to be marginal to the core business of Australian history. Again in September, a major international conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ACSANZ) met in Canberra on the subject of possible converging futures, without a mention of New Zealand in either the conference’s title or its agenda[19].

The continuing ignorance of New Zealand fictional literature in Australia compared to that from India or Canada is a phenomenon that regularly draws bemused comments from reviewers. New Zealanders are just as guilty. They have absorbed the myth that New Zealand’s ‘Better Britons’ are superior to the Australian Britons. New Zealanders lacked the taint of convictism, they were moulded by a vigorous, cooler climate, and they enjoyed relations with a superior type of ‘native’[20]. New Zealand scholars have underwritten this tale of separate histories. The country’s nationalist historian Keith Sinclair chose to focus primarily on the nineteenth century when writing for his edited collection Tasman Relations. He stridently demonstrated New Zealand’s ‘destiny apart’, especially in respect to the country’s allegedly better race relations[21]. Closer to our time, the New Zealand Journal of History chose to shape its millennium edition of 2000 around New Zealand in the Pacific as the theme for the twenty-first century. Remarkably, Australia was omitted entirely[22].

---

[1] D. Denoon and P. Mein Smith, with M. Wyndham A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, Blackwell, 2000.

[2] D. Denoon ‘Alternative Australias’, Keynote session, AHA conference, Brisbane, 3^rd July 2002; see also his Eldershaw Lecture, ‘Re-membering Australasia’, Hobart, Tasmania, 12^th May 2002.

[3] J. Belich Paradise Reforged: a History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000, Allen Lane, 2001, pages 46–7.

[4] New Zealand Federation Commission Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives, Report, Appendix 4, 1901, pages 558 and 682.

[5] W. K. Hancock Australia, Ernest Benn, 1930; A. D. Gilbert et al. (eds.) Australians: a Historical Library, 10 volumes, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, 1987.

[6] See, for example, S. Macintyre ‘Australia and the Empire’, pages 163–81 and J. Belich ‘Colonization and history in New Zealand’, pages 182–93, in Oxford History of the British Empire, volume 5: Historiography, ed. R.W. Winks, Oxford University Press, 1999.

[7] J. Hirst The Sentimental Nation: the Making of the Australian Commonwealth, Oxford University Press, 2000; K. Sinclair ‘Why New Zealanders are not Australians: New Zealand and the Australian Federal Movement, 1881–1901’, in Tasman Relations: New Zealand and Australia, 1788–1988, ed. K. Sinclair, Auckland University Press, 1987, pages 90–103.

[8] C. H. Grattan The Southwest Pacific Since 1900: a Modern History; Australia, New Zealand, the Islands, Antarctica, University of Michigan Press, 1963.

[9] Monographs include: K. R. Howe Race Relations in Australia and New Zealand: a Comparative Survey 1770s–1970s, Methuen, 1977; H. R. Jackson Churches and People in Australia and New Zealand 1860–1930, Allen & Unwin, 1987; W. D. Borrie The European Peopling of Australasia: a Demographic History, 1788–1988, Australian National University, 1994; and, S. P. Ville The Rural Entrepreneurs: a History of the Stock and Station Agent Industry in Australia and New Zealand, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Edited collections of importance are: F. Castles, R. Gerritsen and J. Vowles (eds.) The Great Experiment: Labour Parties and Public Policy Transformation in Australia and New Zealand, Allen & Unwin, 1996; K. Neumann, N. Thomas and H. Ericksen (eds.) Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, University of New South Wales Press, 1999; and, B. Attwood and F. Magowan (eds.) Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, Wellington and Sydney, Bridget Williams, 2001.

[10] S. Goldfinch Remaking New Zealand and Australian Economic Policy: Ideas, Institutions and Policy Communities, Victoria University Press, 2000.

[11] T. F. Flannery The Future Eaters: an Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People, Chatswood, Reed, 1994; J. M. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: a Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, Jonathan Cape, 1997.

[12] A. G. Hopkins ‘Viewpoint: back to the future: from national history to imperial history’, Past and Present, volume 164, (1999), page 243.

[13] P. Kelly The End of Certainty: the Story of the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, 1994, page 1.

[14] P. Kelly The End of Certainty: the Story of the 1980s, Allen & Unwin, 1994; see also B. Birrell Federation: the Secret Story, Duffy and Snellgrove, 2001.

[15] J. Rickard Australia: a Cultural History, 2^nd edition, Longman, 1996, chapter 6.

[16] G. Brennan and F. G. Castles (eds.) Australia Reshaped: 200 Years of Institutional Transformation, Cambridge University Press, 2002, page 11.

[17] E. Olssen Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s, Auckland University Press, 1995; J. Holt Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand: the First Forty Years, Auckland University Press, 1986.

[18] F. G. Castles The Working Class and Welfare, Allen & Unwin, 1985; and his Australian Public Policy and Economic Vulnerability, Allen & Unwin, 1988.

[19] Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand Converging Futures: Canada and Australia in a New Millennium? National Convention Centre, Canberra, 12^th-15^th September 2002.

[20] P. Mein Smith ‘New Zealand Federation Commissioners in Australia: one past, two historiographies’, Australian Historical Studies, volume 34, (2003), pages 305-325; see also J. Belich Paradise Reforged: a History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000, Allen Lane, 2001.

[21] K. Sinclair (ed.) Tasman Relations: New Zealand and Australia, 1788–1988, Auckland University Press, 1987; and his ‘Why are race relations in New Zealand better than in South Africa, South Australia or South Dakota?’, New Zealand Journal of History, volume 5, (1971), pages 121–7

[22] New Zealand Journal of History, volume 34, (2000): see editorial introduction.

Are we a nation of amnesiacs?

How much do we know or want to know about our pasts?  For the past half century, there has been a widespread discourse about western societies ignoring their collective pasts and their citizens not knowing their national history.  This view is often legitimised in surveys showing that people fail to identify famous events and politicians and is also linked with concerns about the perils facing the nation and questions of citizenship. What is seen as woeful ignorance is used to justify educational reforms in which the state imposes its view of the past through a national curriculum that has less to do with the past than with current political concerns. 

Who is this?

However, there are other ways to look at peoples’ perception of the past particularly discourse on historical ignorance can, itself, be considered a site of memory. The site is an intangible monument carefully constructed, erected for political purposes, widely visited, and dedicated to a particular relationship between peoples and their national pasts. In the ignorance of history discourse, ignorance generally means one thing: the incapacity to answer correctly factual questions about history. In Canada, for instance, The Dominion Institute was created in 1997 to improve Canadians’ knowledge of their national history. In 1997, the Institute published its first annual history survey, which tested general knowledge. The discovery that only 54 per cent of Canadians polled could name Sir John A. Macdonald as Canada’s first Prime Minister and only 36 per cent knew that Confederation took place in 1867. Since then, the Institute’s polls have filtered into the national discourse, quoted in more than 2,000 media stories and routinely incorporated into political speeches.  By the late 1990s it had become conventional wisdom that Canadians did not know their history, in large part because their schools did not teach it or did not teach it properly.  Similar conclusions were reached at the turn of the millennium in Australia—leading in part to the ‘History Wars’ and in the United Kingdom, though here the debate went back to the 1960s.  Ignorance, it seems, was a combination of poor teaching, an un-prescribed curriculum and the triumph of skills over knowledge and by erecting what is in essence a false dichotomy provided justification for intervention by the state not simply in what was taught but its pedagogical character.

What battle is this?

Discourse on ignorance of history is easily digestible because it is built on common sense evidence showing a lack of historical facts that ‘everyone should know’. Implicitly in those facts, there is a normative framework oriented toward a specific and increasingly politicised definition of a nation’s history which, to different degrees in different countries changes when governments change.  Ignorance of history discourse has become bureaucratised and self-fulfilling.   Since 1997, The Dominion Institute repeated its 1997 survey in 2001 and 2009 and found that Canadians have a persistent difficulty with identifying Sir John A. Macdonald. In Quebec, La Coalition pour l’histoire commissioned a similar survey in 2012 to support changes in the history curriculum. In that poll, it was found that 94 per cent of those surveyed were unable to identify Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, the first Prime Minister of Quebec.  In 2002, historian Desmond Morton declared, ‘Canadian ignorance of our history is commonplace, and not just among professors. Politicians and business leaders repeat the mantra’ .

What is most problematic about the evidence is that it documents only ignorance and excludes investigation of what people actually know about the past. Many researchers have contested the validity of the discourse on historical ignorance arguing for surveys that include no factual questions, but open ones, such as: ‘How important is the past of Britain to you?’  Results of these more nuanced surveys add much greater complexity and diversity to the notion of historical amnesia.  The problem is that little attention has been given by the media or politicians to surveys like this largely perhaps because they call into  question their vested interest in government spending and educational reforms.  What history is, how it is defined, how it is taught and how it is received by its different audiences must be set against the widespread popularity of history as a leisure activity—whether as family history or in the audiences for the History Channel.  Historical amnesia, it appears, is a matter of elite rather than populist perceptions.   

Shaping a historiography: Crawford and Hancock

The most sophisticated expressions of the liberal interpretation of Australian history in the inter-war years were provided by R.M. ‘Max’ Crawford (1906-1991) and Keith Hancock (1898-1988). A former student of Wood’s in Sydney and Oxford’s Balliol College, Crawford took over the chair of history from Ernest Scott at the University of Melbourne in 1937 and set about establishing what would become known as the Melbourne School of History. Crawford reformed both the department’s programmes and the secondary school curriculum to include the study of Australian history. He also significantly expanded the staff and research skills of the department and the Melbourne School came to represent ‘history as a truly liberal education’.[1] At the University of Sydney, Stephen Roberts undertook a similar renovation of university and school history programmes and the study of Australian history benefited, but perhaps not to the extent that occurred in Melbourne. Roberts, with an interest in European history, did not make the national story a high priority.[2] The establishment of the scholarly journal Historical Studies in 1940 also stimulated the professional development of the discipline.[3]

Crawford developed a ‘synoptic view’ of history, which broke with both conventional empiricism and the determinism of Marxism to advance a sophisticated liberal humanism. He argued that historians must engage with the complexity of human activity and conflict and that history was a process of critical analysis and an expression of moral judgements. The historian should be a philosopher.[4] Crawford’s willingness to explore new territory included his own region. Ourselves and the Pacific introduced the history of the Pacific region to an Australian audience. Published in 1941, just as Australia faced an unprecedented threat posed by Japan’s rapid military conquests across the Pacific, Crawford and his collaborators invited Australians to consider their geographic place in the world, rather than to dwell in the imagined homeland of Britain:

To-day, Australians and New Zealanders have no doubt that their destiny is to be influenced by the fact that they border the same ocean as China, Japan, the United States and Russia.[5]

However, as Ourselves and the Pacific acknowledged, immigration restriction of Asians and Pacific Islanders had helped the British dominions delay their destiny. Excluding Chinese immigrants reflected ‘…their desire to shut out the Pacific and to preserve their own European character.’[6] Australians may have wished to preserve their European character, but Crawford was willing to accept and promote a legend of that character transformed by its national experience. His liberalism celebrated the character of the Australian, an unromantic, individualistic type who persevered through the challenges of settling the land and war, challenges that created a nation:

The heroism of the Anzacs was not different in kind from the courage and endurance of the early pioneers. Australia became a nation [at Gallipoli] because for the first time she was plunged into the responsibilities of nationhood.[7]

Methodological sophistication did not deter Crawford from cultivating a mythological account of Australian experience. In Australia, published in 1952, he was the first historian to employ the term, ‘the Australian Legend’, to describe a ‘national myth’ drawn from life on the land and of a need to distinguish Australian experience and achievements from that of the ‘old world’ of Europe.[8] Crawford described Australians facing the trials of the outback with a willingness to ‘have a go’, often disrespectful of pretentiousness and drawn to a cynical and often grim brand of humour.[9] This portrait of the Australian type neatly fused with Crawford’s liberalism. Australians cherished their individual independence and hoped to build a nation where liberal freedom might flourish:

…the essence of Australian democracy has been a belief in the rights of the individual, without thought of status. The very demand for state action has in some part sprung from this belief – to secure equality of opportunity, a fair and reasonable livelihood, and political rights. The call for state intervention in Australian democracy has often been, in short, an expression of its individualism.[10]

Crawford understood that he was distorting the truth to produce a mythic explanation of the past in order to reinforce the values that Australians shared. As he observed

The Australian Legend is not necessarily a picture of the Australians; but it is a picture of ideals that have been dominant in Australia, and ideals may at least take part in moulding character.[11]

Crawford hoped that his transmission of the national myth would play its own role in shaping the national character, and like Scott, he reinforced the lesson of the Australian legend by concluding his discussion with a final testimony to the plain heroism of the Australian character as it faced the test of war. He cited a long quotation from the Charles Bean’s history of the Australian Imperial Force in France in 1918 on the individualistic nature of the Australian soldier.

It was understandable that Crawford would defer to the official historian of Australia in the First World War. In Charles Bean, the myth of Anzac had its most vigorous champion, a cause that Bean pursued in a multi-volume history and several other works from The Anzac Book in 1916, through to the multi-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918 published between 1921-1942 and in his advocacy of the establishment of the Australian War Memorial in the nation’s capital, which when it opened in 1941 included a museum that celebrated Australian military heroism.[12] The extract that Crawford selected included all the defining elements of that peculiar mix of Australian individualism, egalitarianism and mateship that Bean felt was intensely expressed in war writing that the ‘incorrigibly civilian’[13] Australian soldier had maintained his volunteer status by almost perversely exercising his democratic right to reject conscription in the 1916 and 1917 referendum ballots. The digger was never really reconciled to military discipline, yet he was bound to his fellow soldiers: ‘a man must “stand by his mates” at all costs.’ He rejected the English ‘social class’ distinctions evident in the British Army; the Australian soldier ‘…knew only one social horizon, that of race’[14] and even Australian officers could be included in that category. The Australians were, Bean concluded, ‘masters of their own lives.’[15]

Like Crawford, Keith Hancock was Oxford trained, although Hancock’s liberalism had a harder and more self-critical edge, driven by the tensions of a young man caught between the metropolitan culture of Britain and provincial Australia and his compulsion to test the idealised character of Australian national life against the reality of experience.[16] In Australia, published in 1930, ‘intellectual detachment’ struggled with an ‘emotional attachment’ to the Australian people to produce an innovative interpretation and structure, focusing on themes rather than chronology.[17] Hancock employed an inventive use of language that provocatively clarified and redefined the national narrative: colonial Australians were ‘transplanted British’ who became ‘independent Australian Britons’

...it is not impossible for Australians, nourished by a glorious literature and haunted by old memories, to be in love with two soils.’[18]

Hancock offered some shrewd insights into the myths of mateship and egalitarianism: while Australians ‘intolerance of oppression and sympathy with the under-dog’ were attractive character traits, they could conspire to create a monochrome culture of mediocrity.

The passion for equal justice can so easily sour into a grudge against those who enjoy extraordinary gifts…the ideal of “mateship” …springs not only from [the Australian’s] eagerness to exalt the humble and meek, but also from his zeal to put down the mighty from their seat.[19]

Hancock was the first Australian historian to offer an incisive critique of the nation building project that successive Commonwealth governments had pursued since Federation. Most Australians and their historians had broadly welcomed policies to protect Australian industry and culture and to offer its workers some measure of security at work and in retirement through immigration restriction of non-Europeans, tariff protection, compulsory arbitration and social welfare initiatives including the old age pension. Hancock tartly concluded that Australians had ‘an excessive dependence on the state.’[20] He maintained that Australians sought both ‘fiscal’ and racial protection. In this culture of protectionism, ‘[t]he policy of White Australia is the indispensable condition of every other Australian policy.’[21] White Australia was the central defence of national identity and this, in Hancock’s view, justified the restriction of non-Europeans.

What [Australians] fear is not physical conquest by another race, but rather the internal decomposition and degradation of their own civilisation. They have gloried in their inheritance of free institutions, in their right to govern themselves and freely make their own destiny.[22]

Hancock believed that tariff protection had not only to be analysed on economic grounds, but also for its ‘emotional and ideological flavour.’[23] His analysis had been influenced by his contemporary, Edward Shann, whose Economic History of Australia was also published in 1930.[24] Like Shann, Hancock criticised the fiscal impact of protection, to which Hancock added a cogent analysis of its cultural consequences. Protection in Australia was a ‘faith and a dogma’ that had triumphed ‘because it appealed irresistibly to the most ardent sentiments of Australian democracy’.[25] Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s New Protection programme in the period 1905-1908 had drawn the incipient Australian Labor Party into support for his administration by requiring manufacturers to provide ‘fair and reasonable’ wages in exchange for tariff assistance. Despite the mounting cost of tariff protection in the 1920s, Australians clung to it as a defence of their standard of living and a bulwark against ‘frugal and unscrupulous foreigners’, particularly the populous Asian neighbours to the north.[26] This faith in protectionism also inclined Australians towards the paternalistic and utilitarian ‘state socialism’ of which the Labor Party had emerged as the leading advocate by the 1920s.[27]

Describing how drought and the search for arable land had compelled colonial exploration of the continent, Hancock revealed a perceptive awareness of the importance of environmental factors in Australian history and their implications for nation building.[28] He punctured the nationalist and economic expansionist delusions represented by the ‘strange gospel’ of Australian Unlimited, fashionable in the post-World War I years, by noting the ‘Saharan latitudes’ of Australia’s arid interior citing figures of sparse rainfall to dispel ‘…the vanity of imagining that Australia’ of comparable geographic size to the United States, could ‘…ever compare with that country in wealth and power.’[29] The ‘invasion of Australia’, as Hancock bluntly characterised the waves of exploration and pastoral expansion, also had a ‘devastating’ impact on the indigenous population. Hancock was not blind to liberal hypocrisy over the ‘natural progress of the aboriginal race towards extinction’

Australian democracy is genuinely benevolent, but is preoccupied with its own affairs. From time to time it remembers the primitive people whom it has dispossessed, and sheds over their predestined passing an economical tear.[30]

Hancock presented Australian government ‘as the instrument of self-realisation’ through which the people sought ‘…to put the collective power of the state at the service of individual rights.’[31] Despite widespread support for state intervention, Hancock believed Australia’s national mission remained fundamentally liberal, if inward-looking. Tim Rowse has identified Hancock’s radical ‘New Liberalism’, an advocacy of a free market approach to trade and industrial relations, as an essential but largely unacknowledged theme of Hancock’s text:

What distinguishes Australia is the subtlety with which its politico-economic meaning is buried within an apparently non-partisan survey of Australian civilization and nationhood.[32]

Hancock sought to defend the interests of British and Australian capital at a time of global economic crisis. Yet it seems apparent, as he implicitly acknowledges, that Hancock’s hope that Australians would one day realise the ‘spiritual achievement’ of a distinctive nationality compelled Hancock to embrace ‘radical liberalism’, as a means of urging Australians from their habits of economic dependency while he remained undisturbed by Australia’s continuing attachment to Britain.[33] Perhaps because he continued to invest a hope in the future potential of a mature liberal Australian society, Gregory Melleuish suggests that Hancock failed to push his analysis to its logical conclusion: that protection might also equal selfishness. Hancock resorted to ironic observation.[34] As it stood, Hancock’s astringent survey of Australia’s isolationist and ‘homogeneous egalitarian society’ did not sit comfortably with a country plunging into the devastating global depression of the early 1930s that only encouraged nations, including Australia, to erect further tariff protection.[35] Australia exerted considerable influence over subsequent generations of Australian historians, inspiring a repetition of his characterisations and provoking a rejection of them.[36]

Hancock’s dislike of Australian provincialism led him back to Britain in 1933 where he exerted an influence on British perceptions of Australia. Like Scott’s and Crawford’s short histories, Hancock’s Australia was published by a British publishing house. Hancock’s influence over the interpretation of the British Empire and the emerging post-Second World War British Commonwealth and Australia’s place in the Commonwealth narrative was established in his Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs.[37] Hancock revealed himself as an idealistic advocate of a ‘liberal commonwealth’, tempered by instinctive realism. Amid fractious ‘procession’ of the various nations united only by the lingering but increasingly frayed ties of empire, he found his ‘fellow countrymen’ emitting unqualified, unreflective ‘cries of joy’ as they marched along.[38]

---

[1] Macintyre, Stuart, ‘The Making of A School’, in ibid, Crawford, R.M., Clark, Manning and Blainey, Geoffrey, (eds.), Making History, pp. 3, 9-12.

[2] Fletcher, Brian, ‘Australian History’, in Caine, Barbara, et al (eds.), History at Sydney, Centenary Reflections 1891-1991, (Highland Press), 1992, p. 162.

[3] Macintyre, Stuart, ‘The Making of A School’, in ibid, Crawford, R.M., Clark, Manning and Blainey, Geoffrey, (eds.), Making History, p. 7.

[4] Crawford, R.M., The Study of History, a Synoptic View, (Melbourne University Press), 1939; Dare, Robert, ‘Max Crawford and the Study of History’, in ibid, Macintyre, Stuart and Thomas, Julian, (eds.), The Discovery of Australia, 1890-1939, pp. 188-190.

[5] Crawford, R.M., (ed.), Ourselves and the Pacific, (Melbourne University Press), 1941, p. vi.

[6] Ibid, Crawford, R.M., (ed.), Ourselves and the Pacific, p. 221.

[7] Crawford, R.M., Australia, (Hutchinson’s University Library), 1952, p. 166.

[8] Ibid, Crawford, R.M., Australia, pp. 145, 148.

[9] Ibid, Crawford, R.M., Australia, p. 153.

[10] Ibid, Crawford, R.M., Australia, p. 154.

[11] Ibid, Crawford, R.M., Australia, pp. 154-155.

[12] The Anzac Book, (Cassell & Co.), 1916; Bean, C.E.W., Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, 12 Vols. (Angus and Robertson), 1921-1942; for Bean’s mythic intentions see Ball, Martin, ‘Re-reading Bean’s Last Paragraph’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 24, (2003), pp. 248-270.

[13] Bean, C.E.W., Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Vol. 6, (Angus and Robertson), 1934, p. 5.

[14] Ibid, Bean, C.E.W., Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Vol. 6, p. 6.

[15] Ibid, Crawford, R.M., Australia, p. 155.

[16] Melleuish, Gregory, Cultural Liberalism in Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 1995, pp. 118-120.

[17] Hancock, W. K., Australia, (Ernest Benn Ltd.), 1930, p. vii.  See also, Davidson, Jim, The Three-cornered Life: The Historian W. K. Hancock, (Melbourne University Press), 2010.

[18] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 68.

[19] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 74.

[20] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 69.

[21] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 77.

[22] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 80.

[23] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 82

[24] Shann, Edward, An Economic History of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 1930.

[25] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, pp. 83, 89.

[26] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, pp. 89, 102.

[27] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, pp. 127-188, 140.

[28] A theme not seriously re-examined in Australian historiography until the 1970s: Tom Griffiths ‘Environmental History’ in ibid, Davison, Graeme, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 221.

[29] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, pp. 17, 19.

[30] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 33.

[31] Ibid, Melleuish, Gregory, Cultural Liberalism in Australia, p. 122.

[32] Rowse, Tim, Australian Liberalism and National Character, (Kibble Books), 1978, p. 89.

[33] Ibid, Rowse, Tim, Australian Liberalism and National Character, pp. 80-81.

[34] Ibid, Melleuish, Gregory, Cultural Liberalism in Australia, pp. 123-126.

[35] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 67.

[36] Macintyre, Stuart, ‘‘Full of Hits and Misses’: A Reappraisal of Hancock’s Australia’, in Low, D.A., (ed.), Keith Hancock, The Legacies of an Historian, (Melbourne University Press), 2001, pp. 36-38.

[37] Hancock, W.K., Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 2 Vols. (Oxford University Press), 1937-1942; Low, D.A., ‘Imperium et Libertas and Hancock’s Problems of Nationality’, in ibid, Low, D.A., (ed.), Keith Hancock, The Legacies of an Historian.

[38] Thomas, Julian, ‘Keith Hancock: Professing the Profession’, in ibid, Macintyre, Stuart and Thomas, Julian, (eds.), The Discovery of Australia, 1890-1939, p. 149.

What is a historian?

I’m not sure whether it’s envy or snobbery or simply a desire to maintain their historical hegemony that leads ‘academic’ historians to lay waste to the work produced by ‘popular’ historians.  Sir Max Hastings appears to have borne the brunt of this in recent months with the publication of his highly readable and eminently successful—in terms of books sold—history of the outbreak of the First World War.  Yet it has been dismissed as ‘broad-brushed and judgemental’ in a review in the Times Literary Supplement and of failing to take account of the research that has, in the last half century, deepened our perceptions of the war.  Christopher Clark, author of Sleepwalkers published two years ago, went further saying that Hastings ‘is not a historian.  He is a man who writes about the past.’  In an excellent review in The Spectator on ‘First World War, the battle of the historians’, Simon Heffer examines the ways in which historians have written about the war have changed and why.  When discussing popular history he writes:

‘In taking our history more seriously, and demanding from historians evidence that prevents the presentation of fact from being recast as simple assertion, we have moved on from the Arthur Bryant school that still sets the model for populist history.’

While there is much about Bryant that I find distasteful—his pro-appeasement views and admiration for Nazi Germany in the 1930s highlighted by Andrew Roberts in his Eminent Churchillians who described him as ‘ a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug’—and the overtly patriotic stance of his writings, I was perhaps fortunate to have been brought up reading his King Charles the Second, first published in 1931 and his three-volume biography of Samuel Pepys, perhaps his best works, rather than his somewhat vacuous general histories.  J. H. Plumb was equally critical of Bryant arguing that his failure to achieve professional recognition was his lack of intellect.  Although professionals historians were frequently negative about his best-sellers, Bryant's histories were explicitly praised by prime ministers Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson, who awarded him a knighthood and made him a Companion of Honour in the 1960s, and Callaghan and Thatcher.  Despite this he was remarkably successful selling over two million copies of his forty plus books, many of which are still in print, and he was a columnist for the Illustrated London News for almost half a century.  But was he a historian and what does that actually mean?

Although being a historian has become more sophisticated, its primary characteristics have not really changed since Herodotus and Thucydides—it is a recounting by the historian of what happened in the past grounded in contemporary sources and  it should be communicated to an audience orally or in writing.  More problematic is the view that historians produce a ‘true account’ of the past.  In reality, this is never possible and interpretation is a third characteristic of being a historian—of course, there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ interpretations, a case not of whether you agree with a particular historian’s views or not but of the degree to which those views are based on a close analysis of the available sources.  While assertion and polemic have long been a feature of historical writing—historians from Bede to Macaulay have all been guilty of it—but that does not necessarily make them ‘bad’ historians.  Their literary populism is the key to their success and explains why we still read Bede and Macaulay and don’t read other historians.  

Forty years on…

As Christopher Daniels reminded me in his recent article on historical sources, it’s forty years since we wrote out first article on history education.  Not only does that means that we’re both growing disgracefully older but that, in the interim, little has changed in the ways that examination boards approach the evaluation of sources.  Particularly, and this is the core of Chris’ paper, visual sources are still largely ignored when assessing students.  In fact, perusing some old examination papers and comparing them with today’s equivalent, the types of sources used has barely changed at all.  What visual material there is is generally in black-and-white rather than colour, the norm in say Geography papers. 

http://www.johncatt.com/downloads/pdf/magazines/ccr/ccr51_1/

Refighting the First World War by today’s politicians

It is hardly surprising in the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War that historians, politicians and countries are reappraising its origins, course and consequences.  We have already seen the publication of a tranche of books on the subjects including the excellent study by Max Hastings of its beginnings and David Reynolds’ superb study of its ‘long shadow’ during the twentieth century and there is undoubtedly more to come.  Now there’s nothing wrong with re-examining past events and coming to different interpretations of those events—the essence of what being a historian is about—but I also become a little jaundiced when politicians enter the fray largely because their comments are normally ill-informed and designed to attract the media and because those comments often have little to do with the events themselves and rather more to do with contemporary political agendas.

Michael Gove’s comments in the Daily Mail last Thursday is the case in point.  He argues that people’s understanding of the war had been overlaid by ‘misrepresentations’ which at worst reflected ‘an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage’.  ‘The war was, of course, an unspeakable tragedy, which robbed this nation of our bravest and best,’ wrote Mr Gove. ‘But even as we recall that loss and commemorate the bravery of those who fought, it's important that we don't succumb to some of the myths which have grown up about the conflict.’ ‘The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh, What a Lovely War!, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles - a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite.’  Then comes the critical point: ‘Even to this day there are left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.’  Yes, it’s a further assault on Mr Gove’s bête noire…left-wing academics even though the origins of the idea of ‘lions led by donkeys’ came from Conservative politician Alan Clark’s revisionist history.  What Michael has done is to erect an Aunt Sally that few historians now believe in and proceed to knock it down.  The importance of Clark’s The Donkeys is that it initiated a debate into how the war was conducted—which was his intention—rather than simply an attack on the incompetence of the ‘top brass’.  Today we have a more nuanced view of how the generals ran operations during the War—and perennial trench warfare was beyond most of their experiences—and historians recognise that there were some poor and some very good military leaders and that no general, good or bad, could sensibly regard their troops merely as cannon-fodder to be thrown pointlessly against the enemy trenches. 

That there has been a response from the Labour Party should come as no surprise.  Shadow education secretary and TV historian Tristram Hunt also criticised Mr Gove's ‘crass' comments. ‘The reality is clear: the government is using what should be a moment for national reflection and respectful debate to rewrite the historical record and sow political division.’   While Sir Tony Robinson commented that ‘I think Mr Gove has just made a very silly mistake; it's not that Blackadder teaches children the First World War. When imaginative teachers bring it in, it's simply another teaching tool; they probably take them over to Flanders to have a look at the sights out there, have them marching around the playground, read the poems of Wilfred Owen to them. And one of the things that they'll do is show them Blackadder.  And I think to make this mistake, to categorise teachers who would introduce something like Blackadder as left-wing and introducing left-wing propaganda is very, very unhelpful. And I think it's particularly unhelpful and irresponsible for a minister in charge of education.’   Tony’s mistake was that Michael Gove did not mention teachers in his article though others, including Jeremy Paxman, have criticised schools for relying on episodes of Blackadder Goes Forth to teach about the conflict.  The critical word here is ‘relying’ and in my long experience in teaching I have never come across any teacher who would ‘rely’ on fictionalised drama to teach about the War.  Drama provides one interpretation of the War, Wilfred Owen another and Rupert Brooke yet another.  I am reminded of Nikita Khrushchev’s comment that ‘Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.’  Undoubtedly Michael Gove would agree.