Shaping a historiography: gendering the Australian legend

Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia rejected Ward’s ‘mateship’ myth and the labour movement’s contribution to nation building. Succumbing to the ‘siren entreaties of bourgeois culture’ Labor betrayed the working-class in parliament; the unions timidly resorted to state-sponsored compulsory arbitration instead of pursuing revolutionary action. Embracing White Australia, the labour movement ensured that racism became ‘the most important single component in Australian nationalism’, in a culture that reverently clung to its imperial ties.[1] A New Britannia was a shrill expression of the New Left challenge to established Australian historiography, clearing the ground for a reconsideration of Australian historiography and an interrogation of national myths. Connell and Irving’s Class Structure in Australian History (1980) and Rowse’s Australian Liberalism and National Character (1978) provided two of the most coherent New Left critiques of Australian nationalism; the tone of ‘Old Left’ romanticism was replaced with a critique of class structure, the ‘hegemony’ of the industrial ruling class and prevailing liberal ideology.[2]

Dixson’s The Real Matilda provided a sharper analysis of Australian ‘mateship’ culture that had treated women with ‘contempt’ and ‘brutality’ and had excluded them from the workplace and public life and hence from the national story. Dixson’s critique of Ward’s myth of the typical Australian exposed its ‘womanlessness’ and a ‘peculiarly limited style of masculinity’ of Australian national identity.[3] Like her New Left contemporaries, Dixson’s work had an explicitly political ambition: to challenge the prevailing organisation of Australia’s power structures and institutions, to create ‘a less fiercely competitive society’. Significantly, this project required not only reformed institutions but a new language: The Real Matilda included ‘a kind of glossary’ to clarify a new understanding of ‘women and identity’, including ‘androgyny’, ‘machismo’ ‘patriarchal society’ and ‘role model’.[4] Written in 1976, The Real Matilda appeared as the Whitlam Labor government was cast from office, ushering in seven years of conservative rule. Although the denial of equal pay to women, a wage policy established in the first years of the Commonwealth, was overturned in the mid-1970s, signalling a gradual reversal in the policies and cultural practices that had denied the citizenship of women, the achievement of a less fiercely competitive society remained unfulfilled.

Despite the assaults from McQueen and Dixson, several important studies of Australian national identity returned to Ward’s work and the noble bush worker, indicating the legend’s enduring hold on the popular imagination and the narrative strategies of historians considering Australian national identity. In Inventing Australia, Richard White argued that Ward had stressed the nationalist element of the bush worker myth while marginalising its significance as a tool for ‘romanticising imperial expansion’, and as ‘a symbol of escape from urban, industrial civilisation’.[5] Anticipating the thesis advanced in Benedict Anderson’s influential Imagined Communities, White asserted that ‘[t]here is no real Australia waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention.’ The historian must look to the inventors of the various forms of national identity cultivated since white settlement, and ask ‘what their function is, whose creation they are, and whose interest they serve.’[6] The writers and artists of the 1890s had propagated the bush legend as an escape from Australia’s rapidly urbanising culture; Palmer and Ward tried to revive this cause fifty years later. By that time, the experience of the Second World War and disastrous Nazi fantasies of a master race had ‘helped discredit the whole idea of a national type.’ The ‘quiet’ post-war replacement of White Australia with the notion of a multicultural Australia, built on successive waves of post-war immigration, had created a more mature, nuanced and restrained sense of national identity.[7]

White wrote at a time of relative optimism about the possibilities of a multicultural Australia, when the potential disturbances of globalising capital were not fully apparent. However, by the late 1990s these pressures were increasingly evident and unemployment, family pressures, crime and drugs caused growing civic fragmentation that threatened global society.[8] In The Imaginary Australian, Miriam Dixson argued that the rejection of Ward’s Australian legend had gone too far especially in fomenting an ‘unwarranted’ self-loathing of ‘Anglo-Celtic Australia’. She took up the international debate on nationalism and argued that a more realistic and assured sense of national identity had to be drawn from Australian history, to find a way between the past quest for homogeneous ethnic integrity and the emptiness of internationalism.[9] Where The New Matilda stressed the marginalisation of women in the national story, The Imaginary Australian interrogated the ‘complex and ambiguous’ and indeed ‘collusive’ role of women, symbolised in the feminised idealisation of the nation.[10] The Australian Legend and Its Discontents explored the legend’s diverse meanings especially in Linzi Murrie’s contribution that made explicit the masculine codes implicit and unexamined in much of the previous historiography of Australian ‘mateship’ and intensified the focus on the ‘peculiarly limited style of masculinity’ observed by Dixson in The Real Matilda. The Bushman masculinity is distinguished by the centrality of the homo-social as a masculine value. The heroic individualism, so important in representations of other frontier masculinities, is absent here. In its place is the egalitarianism of ‘mateship’ that functions as a strategy of legitimation within the male homo-social group. The ‘typical Australian’ must not deviate too much from his mates.’[11] Like all good legends it proved adaptable: the bush ‘mateship’, of the 1890s could be recast for the needs of binding the digger to the requirements of war. Murrie concluded:

The Australian legend has been a powerful fiction for constructing and legitimating dominant meanings of “masculine” and “Australian” in Australian culture, forged through the mythology of mateship.[12]

In 1997, Marilyn Lake declared that ‘feminists today are among the most creative interpreters of citizenship.’[13] Since the early 1970s, the New Left’s call for a more penetrating and analytical history inspired a range of important revisions in the fields of cultural history, class, convict history and race relations. Yet none were vitally significant as the sustained revision of gender relations not only to clarify the treatment of women and recognise their contribution to Australian national life, but to demonstrate the fundamentally gendered nature of Australian history and national identity. Few studies have as powerfully analysed the burden of the ‘ideal of femininity’ placed on Australian women as Matthews’ Good and Mad Women

…a history of the lives of individual women who have been confronted by the maze of gender imperatives’, and who struggled to live up to ‘the demand that they be “good women”.[14]

Lake has been at the forefront of the reconsideration of national identity, stressing the relationship between the categories of gender, race and class and the need to explore the expression of these inter-related categories in the development of nationalist consciousness.[15] Privileging masculine conceptions of the nation required categorisation of those excluded. Lake claims the Harvester judgement of 1907 that established the concept of fair and reasonable wage for male breadwinners and marginalised women in the workforce also ‘empowered white manhood’, by entrenching legal discriminations against indigenous and non-white workers.[16] Being forced from the workforce into motherhood roles did not, however, drive women from participation in the nation. As one of the authors of Creating a Nation, the first general history of Australia to assert ‘the agency and creativity of women’, Lake and her collaborators, as Dixson observes, ‘accorded women a central role...[as mothers] women were not alienated from, but central to nation building.’[17] Creating a Nation followed the intervention of women in the private and public spheres of Australian life and revealed how the concerns and needs of women and children helped shape public policy.

Realising the interconnections between class, race and gender, it is no coincidence that feminist historians such as Lake and Anne Curthoys have been at the forefront of looking out from the imagined boundaries of the nation. Lake has argued that the development of Australian national identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be seen as part of a ‘trans-national discourse of nation and race.’ She seeks to locate the development of the idea of the ‘white man’ both as a ‘territorial’ phenomena in Australia, and also in its global context, part of a wider discourse of white identity, particularly with racial ideas circulating in the United States, an exchange stimulated by anxiety about ‘…the white man, a figure produced in the relations of colonial rule,’ and the dilemmas of a multi-racial state.[18]

Engaging with the recent trans-national debates on the nation and its identities, Curthoys has acknowledged the insularity of Australian history and has argued that to understand the nation we must explore the forms of identity constructed around it such as the notion of diaspora, an enduring sense of identity and cultural links, transported through migration from one nation to another. Exploring the diaspora of the various immigrant groups to Australia charts the relationship between the nation and the wider world and may return the Australian historian to an interest in ‘British identities and connections.’[19] Looking inward remains instructive: Alan Atkinson has reconsidered the history of European settlement in Australia to argue that Australia exhibited a remarkably original political culture from the beginning. Despite its multi-volume scale, Atkinson’s study employs a creative and forensic analysis of ‘talk’ and ‘writing’ to offer a positive interpretation of Australian identity that does not perpetuate the traditional marginalisation of women and the indigenous and that is sensitive to the trans-national context of the development of Australian political language.[20]

The focus of Lake’s and Atkinson’s recent works suggests that interrogating the nature of national identity requires finely-honed studies as well as the sweep of the big picture. Dale Blair’s Dinkum Diggers investigates the national myth at a discrete level of the experiences of the men who served in the First Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force in World War One. Dinkum Diggers does not present a heroic portrait in the style of Bean, but a picture of predominantly working-class men trying to cope with their extraordinary circumstances and suffering as best they could, and sometimes rather baffled by the exaggerated reports of their battlefield conduct. Blair could not find evidence of Ward’s idea that the diggers conformed to an idealised, ‘mateship’ notion of how they should behave.[21]

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[1] McQueen, Humphrey, A New Britannia, (Penguin Books), 1970, pp. 42, 51, 220 and 233-236.

[2] Rowse, Tim, Australian Liberalism and National Character, (Kibble Books), 1978 and Connell, R.W. and Irving, T.H., Class Structure in Australian History, (Longman Cheshire), 1980.

[3] Dixson, Miriam, The Real Matilda: woman and identity in Australia, 1788 to the present, (Penguin Books), 1976, pp. 12, 24.

[4] Ibid, Dixson, Miriam, The Real Matilda, pp. 230, 233.

[5] White, Richard, Inventing Australia, (George Allen and Unwin), 1981, p. 103.

[6] Ibid, White, Richard, Inventing Australia: images and identity, 1688-1980, p. viii; Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, (Verso), 1983.

[7] Ibid, White, Richard, Inventing Australia, pp. 157, 169-170.

[8] Ibid, White, Richard, Inventing Australia, p. 171.

[9] Dixson, Miriam, The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and identity, 1788 to the present, (University of New South Wales Press), 1999, pp. 2-3, 128-161.

[10] Ibid, Dixson, Miriam, The Imaginary Australian, pp. 56-62.

[11] Murrie, Linzi, ‘The Australian Legend and Australian Men’, in Nile, Richard, (ed.), The Australian Legend and Its Discontents, (University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia), 2000, p. 90.

[12] Ibid, Murrie, Linzi, ‘The Australian Legend and Australian Men’, pp. 91-92.

[13] Lake, Marilyn, ‘Feminists creating citizens’, in Hudson, Wayne, and Bolton, Geoffrey, (eds.), Creating Australia, (Allen and Unwin), 1997, p. 97.

[14] Matthews, Jill Julius, Good and Mad Women, The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia, (George Allen & Unwin), 1984, p. 8.

[15] Lake, Marilyn, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation: Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts’, Gender & History, Vol. 4, (1992), pp. 305-322.

[16] Lake, Marilyn, ‘On being a white man, Australia, circa 1900’, in Teo, Hsu-Ming and White, Richard, (eds.), Cultural History in Australia, (University of New South Wales Press), 2003, p. 109.

[17] Ibid, Dixson, Miriam, The Imaginary Australian, p. 59; Grimshaw, Patricia, Lake, Marilyn, McGrath, Ann and Quartly, Marian, Creating a Nation, (Penguin Books), 1996.

[18] Lake, Marilyn, ‘White Man’s Country, the Trans-National History of a National Project’, Australian Historical Studies, number 122, (October 2003), pp. 354, 360; see also, Lake Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, (eds.), Drawing the global colour line: white men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality, (Cambridge University Press), 2008.

[19] Curthoys, Anne, ‘We’ve Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already?’ in Burton, Antoinette, (ed.), After the Imperial Turn, Thinking With and Through the Nation, (Duke University Press), 2003, pp. 85-86.

[20] Atkinson, Alan, The Europeans in Australia, 2 Vols. (Oxford University Press), 1997, 2004 and The Commonwealth of Speech, An Argument about Australia’s Past, Present and Future, (Australian Scholarly Publishing), 2002.

[21] Blair, Dale, Dinkum Diggers: an Australian battalion at war, (Melbourne University Press), 2001, pp. 192-193.

Devolution, fragmentation and the end of the United Kingdom!

‘We’re all in this together’, the mantra expounded by George Osborne relentlessly over the past five years…though aimed at justifying the reduction of the deficit and the government’s austerity measures, it can also be seen as the Westminster view of the United Kingdom.  The reality, however, is far more complex than this simplistic view.  The development of the United Kingdom took centuries—the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the tenth century, the conquest of Wales in the thirteenth century, the Act of Union of 1707 and finally Act of Union  that finally brought Ireland under the centralised control of Westminster.  Yet it has taken less than two decades—since 1998 in reality—to unravel this constitutional settlement.  By giving devolution to Wales and Scotland and then to Northern Ireland (the rump of the 1801 legislation), the government created a constitutional momentum that led to the narrowly lost Scottish referendum in September and the precipitous statement by David Cameron about resolving the ‘English question’ in tandem with further devolution for Scotland.  This, combined with Britain’s increasingly fractious and tenuous membership of the EU, reinforces the concerns of many that we are going back to a ‘little England’ scenario, a fragmentation of the United Kingdom which though constitutionally still ‘together’ is increasingly splitting apart and that the usual approach of muddling through or tinkering with things won’t do.

Yet that, it appears is precisely what Westminster intends to do.  Scotland will get more devolved powers—too little I suspect for those calling for independence and too much for many in England who argue that they do not have the same freedoms.  There will be a movement of power from Westminster to the English ‘regions’, something already presaged in proposals to give the bigger cities their own mayors.  The West Lothian question will be ducked yet again as the Labour Party has a vested interest and future governmental necessity of keeping Scottish MPs voting rights.  The House of Lords will not be abolished.  The question of the EU will be fudged with the Prime Minister, if he wins the 2015 election (something many people think unlikely), like Chamberlain bringing back a ‘piece of paper’ from Brussels offering repatriation of powers but no solution to the unfettered immigration from the EU.  If he loses then Labour are not offering a referendum anyway.  This might have worked a decade ago…even five years ago…but it won’t now. Tinkering is no longer something that the public will countenance.  There is a constitutional momentum building across the United Kingdom that favours something more radical, more fundamental.

Do nothing and things will simply implode.  Scotland will gain its independence in a decade after a second successful referendum.  Northern Ireland and Wales will in effect be given Home Rule.  England will become even more fragmented as Westminster fails to curb regional aspirations in, for instance, the North and Cornwall, while its regional policies devolve more and more power to the new mayoral regions.  UKIP will gain in power and MPs and the government will be compelled to give the in-out referendum people want and it will lose.  What we will have is a fragmented, disunited kingdom; in effect a failing state of no global influence or significance especially when we lose our permanent place on the UN Security Council.  Preventing this, as I see this now inevitable process, requires rapid constitutional change and a written British Constitution.  It means the creation of a federal structure with a unicameral English Parliament in Birmingham, something that will inevitably lead to a diminution in the powers of the Westminster Parliament so we can get rid of the House of Lords, elected on the same terms as those in Scotland and Wales combining first-past-the-post and proportional representation.  We are better together than apart but cosmetic change to maintain the status quo no longer cuts it.

Shaping a historiography: Challenging mythologies

Melleuish observes that the radical nationalists Vance and Nettie Palmer influenced Hancock’s Australia, helping him to frame ‘a picture of the failure of suburban Australia to generate a vital, living culture.’[1] Where Hancock crafted a tough and realistic assessment of the national culture, Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties sought to revive the transformative power of myth. Palmer worked to reinvigorate a radical and nationalist interpretation of Australian experience, by focusing on the writers who had celebrated the struggles of convicts, gold miners and bush workers for economic justice and political rights.

The significance of this dream-time was that it turned the eyes of Australians inward and impelled them to discover themselves and their own country.[2]

Palmer acknowledged that ‘myth-making’ played a crucial role in any revival of a radical and nationalist consciousness.

It has been said that men cannot feel really at home in any environment until they have transformed the natural shapes around them by infusing them with myth.[3]

Since Scott, Australian historians had recognised the importance of the writers and artists of the late nineteenth century in helping to define the national character in its native environment. Crawford had observed that the writers of the 1890s ‘made room for the inspiration of Australian life’.[4] The Legend of the Nineties wanted to exploit the legend to inspire a new and distinctively Australian form of cultural vitality in the reactionary Cold War climate of the mid-1950s and at a time when consumerism seemed to diminish the strength of the radical heritage.

Brian Fitzpatrick had already provided radical nationalism with analytical depth in his studies of Australian economic and working life and critical examination of relations with empire. By focusing on the class relations and forms of structural injustice that Crawford and Hancock had tended to downplay, Fitzgerald argued that Australians were not quite masters of their own lives. It has been said that the ‘old left’ historians whose work came to prominence in the post-Second World War years ‘discovered that cultural tradition as young men in uniform.’[5] An idiosyncratic Marxist and journalist who was unable to secure an academic position because of his politics and his drinking problems, Fitzpatrick provided texts that clarified the radical tradition, pouring out a range of books across the war years that influenced subsequent generations of economic and labour historians and was the first historian to place the working-class at the centre of the national story. [6]

There was a touch of romanticism in Fitzpatrick’s analysis. In The Australian Commonwealth, he described how the working-class contributed its laconic traits to national life: an aversion to unnecessary conversation as most subjects are ‘hardly worth talking about’[7] and a reluctance to make heroes

The Australian people made heroes of none, and raised no idols, except perhaps an outlaw, Ned Kelly, and Carbine, a horse.[8]

Accounting for White Australia, Fitzpatrick also resorted to irony rather than confront the nature of working-class and labour movement enthusiasm for immigration restriction.[9] Robin Gollan was among those who acknowledged Fitzpatrick’s influence.[10] His Radical and Working Class Politics took up the theme of the labour movement’s intervention in national life and Labor’s emergence as ‘the party of Australian nationalism’, turning away from socialist internationalism to embrace White Australia through immigration restriction and a defence policy within the British Empire.[11] Manning Clark also recognised Fitzpatrick’s pioneering work.[12] Yet in 1954, he described Fitzpatrick as a ‘disappointed radical’ lamenting the collapse of Labor party from a pure force ‘working for the regeneration of mankind’ in the 1890s into a machine concerned only with the capture of political power. Clark scoffed, ‘this makes most of the histories of Labor read rather like the stories of fallen women.’ A history at once more coolly rigorous and understanding of human nature was required.[13]

In the same year that Palmer published The Legend of the Nineties, Manning Clark[14] challenged the assumptions on which it was based. In a lecture at the Australian National University, Clark declared that Australian history needed to be rewritten, a task specifically required to address ‘the problems and aspiration of this generation.’[15] Clark had been a student of Crawford’s at the University of Melbourne and had won a scholarship to Oxford. However, unlike Crawford and Hancock, he was demoralised by the experience of class-ridden pre-war Britain. A brief experience of the darkness of Nazi Germany in 1938 intensified his pessimism. In 1946, Crawford invited Clark to begin teaching Australian history at Melbourne, the first serious attempt to stimulate its study at a major Australian university and a spirit of high seriousness pervaded Clark’s efforts to rewrite the national story.[16]

Between 1946 and 1954, Clark clarified the research domain of Australian history and the parameters of his own project by editing several volumes of primary source documents.[17] This process of exploration and reconsideration resulted in a lecture that displayed the intellectual sophistication that Clark brought to his task. ‘Rewriting Australian History’ also set out many of the rhetorical and symbolic devices that Clark would employ in his A History of Australia, devices that turned from tools of creative revision to totems of his own myth over the course of the six volumes published between 1962 and 1987. Clark not only wished to explain the story of the Australian people. He was troubled about what Australian historiography was for: he declared the liberal ideal ‘bankrupt’ and accused the universities of producing its most persistent defenders.[18] Like Ivan Karamazov, Clark wanted ‘to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.’ A disappointed idealist, Clark seemed unsure of a new path, reaching back to the 1890s for a metaphor of contemporary disillusion that he found in a sermon by Cardinal Patrick Moran: ‘in many respects it is an age of ruins’.[19]

Despite seeking consolation in history, Clark declared that in order to address the problems of the new generation historians needed to abandon ‘the comforters of the past’.[20] They had to jettison Hancock’s ridicule of Australian mediocrity and belief in Europe as ‘the creative centre.’ Historians had to explore the tension between ‘the Catholic and Protestant view of the world’, as revealed in Australian history. They had to abandon Wood’s liberal romanticism of the convicts, the ‘great majority’ of whom were professional criminals: ‘let us rather examine the habits and values of the criminals’, anticipating not only his own work but the rich field of convict history that would develop in subsequent decades.[21] Clark exposed the weakness of the radical nationalist interpretation: historians had to move beyond an unthinking embrace of ‘the ideal of mateship’ and locate it as a phenomena of a specific set of historical circumstances of nineteenth century bush life and recognise that ‘the conditions to which belief in mateship was a response have almost entirely disappeared.’ Mateship had also helped produce the White Australia policy and an insular nationalism. To address the problems of a new generation Australian history had to be written by ‘someone who had something to say about human nature’ and who could strike on ‘some great theme to lighten our darkness.’ [22]

Clark’s analysis initiated a ‘counter-revolution in Australian historiography’ and he certainly cast himself in a prophetic role.[23] Unlike previously published single volume short histories, the scale of Clark’s work asserted that Australian history was worthy of epic enquiry. No-one had previously thought, as Clark did in the first volume, to consider Australian history by posing epigrams from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to examine the clash of Catholicism and Protestantism in a new land, in turn faced with the Enlightenment’s challenge to faith, and to follow these tensions at work in the dilemmas of individual and collective experience.[24] These themes set his history on a different level from what had come before and the work of his contemporaries. The national story Clark told seemed for a time to represent something more than the nation, elevating both its history and the Australian experience.

Discussing the historiography of Australian nationalism, Michael Roe observed that in 1954 Clark indicated his challenge to the ‘mateship’ stories of radical nationalism that found their most coherent and persuasive statement in Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend; yet by the end of his History Clark had seemed to agree with Ward, embracing nationalism and republicanism in the wake of the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government by the Governor-General.[25] Published in 1958, The Australian Legend traced the development of the nineteenth century bush worker from its convict origins. Ward conceded that he cultivated a myth, but one that he argued expressed the actual experience of Australians and a myth that held values that should endure. According to the myth the ‘typical Australian’ is a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry pretentiousness in others.

He is a great improvisor, ever willing to have a go at anything...He is a fiercely independent person who hates officiousness and authority, especially when these qualities are embodied in military officers and policemen. Yet he is very hospitable and above all, will stick to his mates through thick and thin, even if he thinks they may be in the wrong.[26]

This echoed Bean’s celebration of the digger and the social levelling that Hancock identified in ‘mateship’. Inglis has observed that ‘historians have put mateship at the centre of national experience.’[27] Ward reasserted the value of a myth for a changing Australian nation: ‘though some shearers are now said to drive to their work in wireless-equipped motor-cars, the influence of the “noble bushman” on Australian life and literature is still strong’.[28] Ward’s reassertion was largely accepted on its own terms. Despite the occasional note of scepticism, by the 1960s there had been no serious interrogation of the meaning of ‘mateship’ as a form of either masculine or national identity.

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[1] Ibid, Melleuish, Gregory, Cultural Liberalism in Australia, p. 117.

[2] Palmer, Vance, The Legend of the Nineties, (Cambridge University Press), 1954, p. 52.

[3] Ibid, Palmer, Vance, The Legend of the Nineties, p. 172.

[4] Ibid, Crawford, R.M., Australia, p. 148.

[5] Macintyre, Stuart, ‘Old Left’ in ibid, Davison, Graeme, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 482.

[6] See, Fitzpatrick, Brian, British Imperialism and Australia, 1783-1833, (Sydney University Press), 1939, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, (Rawson’s Bookshop), 1940, The British Empire in Australia, 1834-1939, (Melbourne University Press), 1941 and The Australian People, 1788-1945, (Melbourne University Press), 1946. For Fitzpatrick and the development of Australian Labour History see, Garton, Stephen, ‘What Have We Done? Labour History, Social History, Cultural History’, in Irving, Terry, (ed.), Challenges to Labour History, (University of New South Wales Press), 1994.

[7] Fitzpatrick, Brian, The Australian Commonwealth, (F.W. Cheshire), 1956, p. 28.

[8] Ibid, Fitzpatrick, Brian, The Australian Commonwealth, p. 209.

[9] Ibid, Fitzpatrick, Brian, The Australian Commonwealth, pp. 158-164.

[10] Gollan, Robin, Revolutionaries and Reformists, (George Allen and Unwin), 1975, pp. 190-191.

[11] Gollan, Robin, Radical and Working Class Politics, (Melbourne University Press), 1960, p. 196.

[12] Clark, Manning, The Quest for Grace, (Viking Books), 1990, pp. 176-177.

[13] Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, in Clark, Manning, Occasional Writings and Speeches, Fontana Books, 1980, pp. 14-15.

[14] Holt, Stephen, A Short History of Manning Clark, (Allen and Unwin), 1999 and Matthews, Brian, Manning Clark: A Life, (Allen and Unwin), 2008 provide contrasting biographical studies. See also, Russell, Rosalyn, (ed.), Ever, Manning: Selected Letters of Manning Clark, 1938-1991, (Allen and Unwin), 2008.

[15] Ibid, Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, p. 4.

[16] Crawford, R.M., Clark, Manning and Blainey, Geoffrey, (eds.), Making History, (McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books), 1985, pp. 57-58, 61.

[17] Clark, C.M.H., Select Documents in Australian History, Vol. 1: 1788-1850, (Angus and Robertson), 1950 and Select Documents in Australian History, Vol. 2: 1851-1900, (Angus and Robertson), 1955.

[18] Ibid, Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, pp. 18-19.

[19] Ibid, Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, p. 7.

[20] Ibid, Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, p. 4.

[21] Ibid, Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, p. 10; see Quartly, Marian, ‘Convict History’, in ibid, Davison, Graeme, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 154.

[22] Ibid, Clark, Manning, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, pp. 15-17, 19.

[23] Coleman, Peter, ‘Introduction: The New Australia’, in Coleman, Peter, (ed.), Australian Civilisation, Cheshire Melbourne, 1962, p. 6.

[24] Clark, C.M.H., A History of Australia, Vol. 1, From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie, (Melbourne University Press), 1962.

[25] Roe, Michael, ‘Nationalism’, in ibid, Davison, Graeme, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 463.

[26] Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend, (Oxford University Press), 1958, p. 2.

[27] Inglis, Ken, ‘Mateship’, in ibid, Davison, Graeme, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 420.

[28] Ibid, Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend, p. 13.

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.

Yes it’s the Oliver syndrome…more!

The UK has been told it must pay an extra £1.7bn (2.1bn euros) towards the European Union's budget because the economy has performed better than expected in recent years. The additional payment was requested after the European Commission's statistics agency, Eurostat, reviewed the economic performances of member states since 1995, and readjusted the contributions made by each state over the last four years - based on their pace of growth.   Patrizio Fiorilli, a European Commission spokesman, said the additional request for funds ‘reflects an increase in wealth…Just as in Britain you pay more to the Inland Revenue if your earnings go up’.  It is hardly surprising that a government source said the budget demand was ‘not acceptable’.

Whether the request for additional funds is within EU rules or not, it is a politically inept decision by the Commission.  With the growing intensity of the debate in Britain over whether it should remain in the EU, the resurgence of support for UKIP and the forthcoming Rochester by-election, the timing of this announcement could not be worse.  It gives the impression that the EU bureaucracy has no sense of what is politically expedient  and inexpedient but is only concerned with following the rules come what may.  It has its agenda and seems unwilling or unable to step outside its own tunnel vision to appreciate that this vision is not acceptable to many people…it’s a closer union at all costs.  Now some may see this as politically and ideologically inspired…a vision of a more prosperous and politically united European state rather than the fragmented and aggressive nationalism that existed prior to 1945…others take a different view..the EU as a top-down, bureaucratically-centred, undemocratic, technocracy trying to imposed a uniformity on the diverse and ‘un-uniform’ nations of Europe.

The problem with the rule-oriented, treaty-based conception of the EU is that rules and treaties are difficult to change quickly…this requires, as it should, the agreement of all the member states.  So what happens when some aspect of these rules and treaties is not working for member states?  Well often little in the short-term as making changes to rules and treaties is a long, frequently drawn-out process.  Once something has been enshrined in rules or treaties—whether good or bad—the EU constitutional structures make it very difficult to reverse them even if they are clearly not in the interests of member states.  The EU has become a leviathan, if not quite yet in the Hobbesian mode.  Its unidirectional approach to development seems premised on the notion of more not less interference in the affairs of nation states coupled with an unwillingness to recognise that alternative ways of developing Europe have any real validity at all.      

Shaping a historiography: Ernest Scott and the Short History

A number of the historians may well have recoiled at any suggestion that their histories included elements of politicised myth-making. Influenced by von Ranke’s empiricism and intolerant of theory, Ernest Scott saw himself elaborating the facts into service to clarify the story of the Australian people.[1] Yet the Short History, the first significant history of Australia published in the twentieth century, outlined the mythic origins and character of the Australian people. Scott wanted to explain how British racial origins and the accompanying heritage of liberal ideals had flourished in Australia. Gifted with ‘the most liberal endowment of self-government that had ever been secured in the history of colonisation by dependencies from a mother-country’, the ‘thoroughly British’ Australian population had been left ‘free to work out their own destiny’.[2] Thus Australia became ‘…a field for the exercise of their racial genius for adaptation and for conquering difficulties.’[3] Scott was himself a product of this genius for adaptation: an emigrant of illegitimate birth from London without an academic degree, Scott had trained as a journalist and published several works on the exploration and settlement of Australia before becoming the chair of history at the University of Melbourne in 1913.[4]

Ernest Scott (left) c1916

Scott described a myth of progress and the formation of a unique national identity. His idealised vision was most potently expressed in his observations on the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli on the 25 April 1915. Britain found itself at war with Germany in August 1914 and the Australians ‘flew to arms on the instant’ in support of the Empire. The Anzac landings had occurred a year before the publication of Scott’s Short History, and although he could only offer a few remarks about the campaign in the concluding chapter, he made the most of his opportunity to elevate the campaign into myth. Scott asserted that Anzac and its sacrifices had been pre-destined by fate and prophesied in the poetry of Henry Lawson. Scott observed that poetry was that ancient and ‘Spartan’ art form of the Muses that could not only confer artistic inspiration, but also bestowed the gifts of memory and prophecy. The ‘Spartan spring’ had flowed ‘constantly and copiously’ in Australia, and poured ‘hot from the heart’ of Henry Lawson: ‘There are passages in his virile ‘Star of Australasia’ that ring like the authentic message of prophesy, written as this poem was nearly a quarter of a century before the name of Anzac blazed into being :

… I tell you the Star of the South shall rise – in the lurid clouds of war.[5]

Australians were fulfilling an ancient destiny by sacrificing themselves in war, to ‘fight for a Right or Great Mistake’.[6]

In his Short History, Scott sought to solve the contemporary problems of Australians: who they were and how their history might help them cope with the unprecedented sufferings posed by the First World War. In identifying shared British origins, Scott offered a reassuring sense of familiarity, enhanced by an account of how Australians had proved themselves worthy of their inherited traditions and faced the challenges of developing a new country. Scott defined and expressed this mythic history on behalf of the Australian people and the Short History became a standard reference for students and the general public selling 40,000 copies within a decade and appearing in a number of editions between 1916 and the outbreak of the Second World War.[7]

In Scott’s tale of progress and sacrifice, the first Australians were swept from sight by the relentless tide of European progress; he briefly described how the ‘fading out of the native race’ was grim, hateful and inevitable.[8] However, the sectarian and racial tensions between the Protestant English majority and the Irish Catholic minority went largely without comment. The fundamentally gendered nature of Scott’s celebration of the Australian character with the masculine conquest of the land and cult of military sacrifice on behalf of the feminised nation and the imperial motherland was simply taken for granted. In these omissions, Scott’s Short History established a familiar pattern for Australian historiography that persisted well into the twentieth century, sustaining the myth of racial and male superiority that defined white, British-Australian culture. The Short History provided a vital text for establishing Australian history as a legitimate area of historical enquiry, capable of being fashioned into a compelling narrative and worthy of further research. Yet it was not until 1926 that before Scott established the first course offered by an Australian university called ‘Australasian History’ that sought to place the study of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific in its imperial context but not structured along the lines of the nation building lessons that he had described in the Short History.[9]

‘Mateship’ at Gallipoli: the epitome of two ‘myths’

At the University of Sydney, George Arnold Wood had already begun to expand the research horizons of Australian historiography. Like Scott, Wood was a British immigrant, although formally trained as an historian at Balliol College. At Oxford he was influenced by von Ranke’s methods and encouraged to explore primary sources. Appointed to the chair of history in 1891, Wood, like many of his contemporaries, saw the study of history as a story of progress to be explained in essentially literary terms. He was an ardent liberal who believed history must illuminate the present and act as a moral force, shaping the values of future leaders and ‘much of Wood’s interest in history centred round the struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism.’[10] Overworked and sometimes at odds with the University of Sydney authorities because of his radical liberalism, Wood presided over a syllabus that privileged British and European history at the undergraduate level; he only once taught an undergraduate course in Australian history, in 1925. Amongst postgraduates, he encouraged research into Australian history, a field which opened up with the availability of primary sources at the State Library of New South Wales, opened in Sydney in 1910, and through his involvement in the project to publish The Historical Records of Australia between 1914 and 1925 that documented the early colonial period.[11]

In 1922, Wood published The Discovery of Australia, a pioneering account of the exploration of the continent and in the same year produced an influential article in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, then the only dedicated historical journal in the country, on white Australia’s origins as a convict settlement.[12] Wood took issue with the established tendency to avoid discussion of the shameful convict stain, considered an embarrassment by most respectable Australians. He argued that convicts, ‘generally criminals of a low rank’, had played a vital role in nation building after being transported by the state to protect the interests of a corrupt English aristocracy. ‘Is it not clearly a fact that the atrocious criminals remained in England, while their victims, innocent and manly, founded the Australian democracy?’ The convicts were equipped with both the qualities and the gender required for nation building. Australian sacrifice at Gallipoli and on the Western Front demonstrated that convict ancestry had produced Australians who had ‘proved themselves to be among the greatest and noblest souls who have ever grown among the British race.’ Wood cast back in time to find vindication of the liberal democratic nationalism that he championed.[13]

---

[1] Macintyre, Stuart, ‘The Making of A School’, in Crawford, R.M., Clark, Manning and Blainey, Geoffrey, (eds.), Making History, (McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books), 1985, p. 11.

[2] Ibid, Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia, pp. 330-332.

[3] Ibid, Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia, p. 336.

[4] Macintyre, Stuart, ‘Ernest Scott: ‘My History is a Romance’’, in Macintyre, Stuart and Thomas, Julian, (eds.), The Discovery of Australia, 1890-1939, (Melbourne University Press), 1995, pp. 71-75.

[5] Lawson, Henry, ‘The Star of Australasia’, In Days When the World Was Wide, And Other Verses, (Angus and Robertson, 1903), p. 116.

[6] Ibid, Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia, pp. 336-340. See also, Cronin, Leonard, (ed.), A camp-fire yarn: Henry Lawson complete works 1885-1900, (Lansdowne), 1984, p. 459.

[7] Macintyre, Stuart, A History for a Nation, Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History, (Melbourne University Press), 1994, p. 73.

[8] Ibid, Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia, pp. 184-185.

[9] Ibid, Macintyre, Stuart, ‘Ernest Scott: ‘My History is a Romance’’, p. 85.

[10] Fletcher, Brian H., ‘History as a Moral Force: George Arnold Wood at Sydney University, 1891-1928’, in ibid, Macintyre, Stuart and Thomas, Julian, (eds.), The Discovery of Australia, 1890-1939, pp. 13-14.

[11] Fletcher, Brian H., ‘History as a Moral Force: George Arnold Wood at Sydney University, 1891-1928’, in ibid, Macintyre, Stuart and Thomas, Julian, (eds.), The Discovery of Australia, 1890-1939, pp. 18-19.

[12] Garden, Don, ‘Historical Societies’ in ibid, Davison, Graeme, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 321.

[13] Wood, G. A., ‘Convicts’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. viii, (1922), pp. 187, 190 197.

Shaping a historiography: a mythic beginning

In 1916, Ernest Scott, newly appointed professor of history at the University of Melbourne, concluded his highly influential A Short History of Australia with a discussion of Australia’s novelists and poets. In the final paragraph of the book, he observed

Perhaps not many of the writings of these men are well known outside Australia; but what of that? She has her own life, and it is good; they wrote for her about the things that are hers; and they have helped her people to understand their country, their destiny, and themselves.[1]

Scott might have provided a similar commentary of the ambitions of Australia’s historians, across the twentieth century, to create and contest a mythic narrative of national experience. European national histories

…showed a remarkable zeal in demonstrating the uniqueness of their particular nation-state; a similar zeal in Australian national histories was intensified by a strong sense of insularity as a federation of colonies finding its path to nationhood in a region distant from comparable western nations.[2]

Australians defensively withdrew from the Asia-Pacific region in the name of economic growth and white cultural destiny. Looking inward, the national narrative attempted to discover the sources of Australian character from within a culture that could proudly acknowledge its British origins, while searching for evidence of its unique character.

This introduction considers twentieth century Australian national histories that have embraced or challenged myths of national identity and nation building from the interpretations of an evolutionary Australian-British liberalism and progress typified by Ernest Scott in the period between the two world wars, to the mid-century assertions of a culturally distinctive Australian nationalism, and the intensely competitive revisionism over issues of national identity, race and gender in recent decades. Successive generations of Australian historians have grappled with the themes of ‘mateship’ and ‘egalitarianism’, White Australia, and masculine struggles of progress and sacrifice in war. During the first half of the twentieth century, many Australian historians cultivated the status of these mythic themes in shaping what Margaret Somers has described as a ‘meta-narrative’: a myth of national identity.[3] From the late 1960s, this project, serving the needs of homogenous nation building, was challenged by a more critical analysis of the evolving nation, as the economic and cultural protectionism that had characterised Australian society since federation in 1901 began to break down under the influence of post-war immigration and the liberalisation of the economy.

Myth is a highly charged concept to link with the study of history: as Rebecca Collins observes, ‘myth and history are typically construed as antithetical approaches to the past’. To suggest that fable and fact may be reconciled to explain the past is to apparently suggest that truth and falsity can explain the same historical event.[4] Yet, myth cannot be so easily dismissed from a consideration of history, particularly from histories of nations and national identity. All histories contain some element of myth especially some sort of ‘creation story’[5], a distortion of the truth produced to draw out a significant explanation of the past; a sense of significance shared by a cultural group embracing a mythic explanation of the past in order to reinforce shared values. Historians write to communicate with contemporary audiences and Collins concludes that all history writing is concerned with the political problems of the present.[6]

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[1] Scott, Ernest, A Short History of Australia, (Oxford University Press), 1916, p. 340.

[2] Berger, Stefan with Donovan, Mark and Passmore, Kevin, ‘Apologias for the nation-state in Western Europe since 1800’, in Berger, Stefan, Donovan, Mark and Passmore, Kevin, (eds.), Writing National Histories, Western Europe since 1800, (Routledge), 1999, p. 10.

[3] Somers, Margaret R., ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory’, in Hall, John R., (ed.), Reworking Class, (Cornell University Press), 1997, p. 85.

[4] The distinction between fact and fable was far less problematic for medieval historians. Take, for instance, the writings of Dudo of St Quentin and their importance in establishing the ‘Norman identity’ in the early eleventh century; see, Webber, Nick, The Evolution of Norman Identity 911-1154, (Boydell), 2005, pp. 1-53.

[5] The question of Australia’s creation story is contested. For the indigenous peoples, it lies in the ‘dreamtime’ though they have no single creation story. For those who came to Australia after 1788, the events at Gallipoli and the Anzac spirit have been regarded by some as the modern creation story. Ernest Scott linked the European settlement of Australia with the idea of Australia becoming a nation on the battlefields of Gallipoli: ‘This Short History of Australia begins with a blank space on the map and ends with the record of a new name on the map, that of Anzac.’

[6] Collins, Rebecca, ‘Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography: myth as mystification in historical discourse’, Rethinking History, Vol. 7, (2003), pp. 341-343, 356.

The need for an archive

Bonwick’s main interest lay in the preservation of records for posterity and he followed this interest assiduously even though he was not successful in having a public records office created in any of the Australian Colonies. Between 1872 and 1891 Bonwick called on Sir Henry Parkes, the NSW Premier to support and assist him in his endeavours.  Bonwick had a Public Service position in mind when he wrote to Parkes:

It was as the historian and not the copyist, that I sought to select from the old records of our Colony. I would copy the most important, make a digest of the others, and give a collective report of the whole as the archivist’.[1]

In May 1885, Bonwick wrote privately to Parkes:

By this mail is sent an application to the Colonial Secretary at Sydney, for permission to act as the archivist in your colony to a small extent. Knowing from Sir Saul [Samuel, NSW Agent General in London], who has little interest in literary matters, that the Govt may need a friend to literature to support my claim, I ask your service. Objections to a general transcription of early records I can understand, as family names and stories may appear, so I seek only to make for your Public Library a list of all the documents in the Record Office here, from 1786 and a short digest of their contents.[2]

Even though Bonwick was never appointed archivist of NSW, he was the first to raise the profile of archives in the Australian colonies and certainly contributed to the belief that the proper care of government archives was the cornerstone of democracy. Not everyone was impressed with Bonwick’s work. A reviewer of the second volume of Historical Records of New South Wales asked rather sarcastically

Why must we read a quantity of the dreariest public correspondence, all that is hardly the material for history...The whole thing has been conceived on an excessive scale which neutralizes the talent of the historian and exposes the community to ridicule...besides the disproportion of the work is melancholy. Four solid tomes bring us only a few years on our way to New South Wales. In four volumes Mommsen has written the history of the majesty of Rome.[3]

It was not all criticism and in the preface to Historical Records, Alexander Britton wrote:

But for the active search made in London by Mr J Bonwick FRGS, the early records on New South Wales would have been little better than a blank, the transcripts that have been made repair, so far as can be repaired, the loss of early Colonial records. [4]

Bonwick had written to Parkes in 1891:

I hope soon to report to you upon the systems adopted in various countries, in relation to the preservation and utilization of materials constituting a records office’.[5]

Bonwick was not the first person who had suggested the establishment of a record office for government archives. George Burnett Barton[6], brother of Edmund Barton, first Prime Minister of Australia,  noted:

The records of the Colony for the past hundred years are stored in a large room at the Colonial Secretary’s office; but no attempt has been made to ascertain their contents, or even to arrange them so that their contents could be ascertained, by anyone in search of information they are supposed to contain...the result is that the records, in their present condition, are not available for historical or any other purposes.[7]

Archives were invariably stored in a haphazard arrangement with no special premises. When the Garden Palace in Sydney was vacated after the International Exhibition of 1879-1880, it was thought to be a good idea to store some State archival material there. When the Palace burned to the ground, these irreplaceable archives, including relics of the Eora people, were also destroyed. In subsequent correspondence with Parkes, Barton puts forward a proposal for his employment as Keeper of Public Records, but this fell on deaf ears.

In 1891 a History Board was appointed to revise the text of the official history of NSW, to supervise the Colonial archives collection and to publish the documents on which it was based. This grew into Historical Records of New South Wales, edited first by Alexander Britton and then by Frank Murcott Bladen, who went on to become Principal Librarian at the Public Library of New South Wales in January 1907.[8] In that role he was vocal in his criticism of the lack of a public records office in NSW, stating:

It is a disgrace to Australia as an enlightened nation that there is no place where the original papers bearing on the discovery of the continent; the exploration and settlement of the states; the constitutional history and records of their courts of law and judicial and political institutions can be consulted by the student of history.[9]

As Principal Librarian Bladen occupied an influential post to push for the establishment of a records office, though despite his best efforts, nothing tangible occurred during this period. Bladen had undertaken a visit to Europe in 1902 looking at archives that influenced his thinking during this period. The concept of a records office was once more on the agenda with some powerful supporters. The Trustees of the PLNSW were pushing for a separate public records office for their own possibly more selfish reasons. This was the construction of a suitable building not only to house the library collections of the State but also the archival collections.

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[1] Bonwick to Parkes, 16 January 1884, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Parkes correspondence, A9, p. 51.

[2] Bonwick to Parkes, 8 May 1885, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Parkes Correspondence, Vol. 2, A872, p. 363.

[3] Sydney Morning Herald, 20 January 1894, p. 4.

[4] HRNSW, Vol. 1, (1), p. xi

[5] Bonwick to Parkes, 2 November 1891, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Parkes Correspondence

[6] Ward, John M., ‘Barton, George Burnett (1836-1901)’, ADB, Vol. 3, pp. 113-115.

[7] Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Parkes Correspondence, Vol. 6, A876, p. 39.

[8] Fletcher, B.H., ‘Bladen, Frank Murcott (1858-1912)’, ADB, Supplementary Volume, pp. 33-34

[9] Bladen, F.M., Manuscript notebook on archives, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, C710, p. 12. .