UNSW Press

The Torch and the Sword began life as Craig Stockings’s PhD thesis, and shows its origins on every page. He presents a hypothesis and refers to it often as he proceeds systematically through a chronological and thematic exposition of his subject.

There are few times we use words related to what we throw away in any sort of positive manner; if, for example, this weren’t a nuanced, careful book, I might call it trash. Certainly, one might refer to, say, a crime novel or a Jerry Bruckheimer film as ‘trash’, but mean it with love and affection, and ‘wasted’ or ‘trashed’ are words used with affection and some pride by people when referring to drug-fuelled exploits. In general, though, we use such words – trash, junk, garbage, waste, rubbish – in a pejorative sense, and it is this sense of waste that Hawkins wants to challenge and complicate in this brief study.

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.

Fancy an editor in this post-whatnot era using the word ‘great’ to describe the poems he publishes. Lord save us! It is almost as though recent decades hadn’t been, and we still wore the mild woolly clothing of the postwar years. But here is the Canberra poet and longtime schoolteacher Geoff Page offering us a high road through poetry in English: a series of touchstones, as our serious uncle Matthew Arnold might have said.

Activist Wisdom is the latest addition to the field of studies about Australian social movements. The authors, Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, are academics who aim to take ‘knowledge from the streets back into the academy’. They try to do this by considering how ‘practical knowledge’ (that is, the knowledge that activists have gained ‘from experience’) has contributed to the survival of different movements.

There is a curious division evident in Australian politics at the moment. One side wants to talk about history, and the other wants to talk about language.

However respectful its intentions, literary biography invariably takes on the character of a siege, laid by oneself against another. Every biographical subject, unwittingly or not, builds fortifications to repulse such invaders, and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was no exception. He did, however, adopt a characteristically sly defence. His castle was regularly open to the public. Inside, he would be on hand to guide visitors through its rooms, an amusing if distant squire, knowledgeably arguing the architectural merits of his own, not insubstantial, additions, and giving the punters their money’s-worth with polished tales of eccentricity, debt and alcoholism for each of the family portraits. He was both garrulous curator and living artefact in a museum of his own design.

Craig Emerson is a good man to have around in federal politics. He has ideas, which is what politics should be largely about. And ideas, in the barnyard of Canberra politics, are almost as scarce as hen’s teeth. Emerson has a PhD in Economics from ANU. In earlier times, as an adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke, he had a reputation for being a bit of an environmentalist. Traditionally, the two disciplines don’t sit happily together. He managed to embrace them both.

Don Aitken was born in 1937, Hugh Stretton in 1924. They have both had distinguished academic careers, making important contributions to the development of Australian social science, and at various points have been prominent in public debate. Both of these books might be seen as reflections on the current state of Australia, about which the younger Aitken is clearly more optimistic than is Stretton.

In recent years, there has been significant public anxiety over Australia’s past, and historians have found themselves in the middle of a contest over increasingly urgent issues of historical narrative and approach. It has been a heated debate, encapsulated by a series of graphic and divisive metaphors proclaiming history’s ‘murder’, ‘fabrication’ and even the ‘killing of history’. While these so-called ‘history wars’ have come to dominate discussion of Australia’s past, the limitations of such debate are telling: history has been forced into opposing camps (left–right, black–white etc.); and examining contrasting readings of the past without falling into its prescribed lines of division now seems more difficult than ever.