Geoffrey Bolton

Traditional academic festschrifts often lack coherence and consistency, especially when the honorand’s former students and colleagues, as more or less duty-bound contributors, share little in common beyond that association ...

Geoffrey Bolton has written a fine biography of one of Australia’s eminent sons, one not well recognised or widely remembered. Paul Meernaa Caedwalla Hasluck was born in Western Australia in 1905 and rose to become an accomplished journalist, a historian, public servant and diplomat, a minister of Parliament in the Menzies era, contender and possibly logical successor for prime minister, and governor-general. Each facet of Has-luck’s governmental career displayed a selfless commitment to duty, to the notion of governmental responsibility, as well as considerable achievements in the advancement of both the people of Papua and New Guinea, and policies in the Northern Territory relating to Aboriginal welfare.

Scattered across Lake Ballard, a vast salt lake north of Kalgoorlie, are fifty-one androgynous abstracted cast-iron alloy figures created by British artist Antony Gormley in 2002, all based on scans of the inhabitants of a tiny goldfields settlement. Gormley described his figures as ‘strangers in a strange land’. It is not too wild a stretch of the imagination to see them as explorers or prospectors driven by powerful dreams to wander endlessly across a shimmering landscape. One of these figures provides an evocative cover image for Land of Vision and Mirage.

The trouble about identifying great mistakes in Australian history is that most of them seemed like good ideas at the time. When, for instance, a recent IPA Review identified as one of Australia’s major errors the rejection in 1905 of George Reid’s free-trade federal government in favour of Alfred Deakin’s tariff protectionists, it indulged in anachronistic hindsight. However suited globalisation may be to the geopolitics and technology of the present day, things were different a hundred years ago. Every nation except Great Britain and Turkey used the tariff to protect local capitalists and employees. A whole anthology of ‘great mistakes’ risks deteriorating into a facile exercise in ancestor-bashing.

More revisionism, I sighed, viewing the title of this book. First it’s the extent of frontier warfare between Indigenous Australians and settlers, now it’s the 1930s Depression. Doubtless in the next year or two we shall have a history demonstrating that the trauma of Gallipoli has been much exaggerated, since most of those who took part survived and some lived to ripe old ages. I was too hasty. David Potts has produced a subtler and more nuanced study than might be expected from the book’s title and advance publicity. Some of his findings are open to debate, but he underpins his arguments with evidence based on many years of oral history research with his undergraduates in the splendidly creative school of history at La Trobe University. It is this use of oral history that makes for controversy.

As one who has lived in Western Australia for the greater part of her life and currently works in the arts,  my interest was piqued by the claim of the editors of his collection that Western Australia may bid farewell to the defensive term ‘Cinderella State’, once adopted in relation to its arts and culture. Traditionally perceived in the cultural imagination as ‘behind’ its east coast counterparts, Western Australia has struggled with the entrenched perceptions of many in eastern cultural centres: an edenic state with its beach culture, sun and outdoor lifestyle, somehow not quite in step with the rest of the country, and possessing a slight but discernible cultural ineptitude. As one contributor to this collection states, Western Australia has been viewed as ‘an isolated enclave sitting on the edge of a void’; insularity and parochialism have regularly been invoked when describing the most remote city in the world.

‘Queensland is different’, overseas commentators would mutter sagely when the media ran yet another story on Joh Bjelke-Peterson, premier of that state from 1968 to 1987. Authoritarian without generosity, self-servingly ignorant of the decent checks and balances usual in the Westminster style of government, prejudiced and inarticulate, Joh was impossible. And yet Queenslanders went on voting for him. His provincialism evidently appealed to their provincialism. Eventually, like the big frog in the small puddle of Aesop’s fable, Joh puffed himself up into believing that, at the age of seventy-six, he could become Australia’s national leader. Like Aesop’s frog, his bubble burst and, before the year was over, he was out of office. During his later years as premier, he was the subject of three biographical studies, written by Derek Townsend, Hugh Lunn and Alan Metcalfe. Joh’s own memoirs followed in 1990. With the lapse of another decade, it was time for a reassessment, and Rae Wear has provided it.

When John Hirst accepted the challenge of writing a history of Federation of scholarly quality but fit for a broad popular readership, he may have felt himself on a hiding to nothing. Previous historians have succeeded in convincing Australians that the story of the making of the Australian Commonwealth is at best dull.

Jane Austen’s aunt was once at risk of transportation to Botany Bay for shoplifting. It is piquant that Austen named two of her major male characters Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Captain Wentworth in Sense and Sensibility, because a leading inhabitant of New South Wales in those years was D’Arey Wentworth, disreputable but acknowledged kinsman of Lord Fitzwilliam. D’Arey Wentworth’s career smacks more of Georgette Heyer than Jane Austen, since he was a highwayman four times acquitted. Rather than push his luck further, he went, a free man, as assistant surgeon with the Second Fleet in 1790. As a young teenager Jane Austen may have read about him in the Times.

‘The historical aspects of The Rocks should not be oversold’, declared a recent Sydney Cove Authority strategic plan, ‘it should be used as a background’. In this sanitised heritage precinct, tourists might thrill to the hint of a raffish past, but should be shielded from more intimate and disturbing glimpses. This is always easy in the absence of systematic research.