Alan Atkinson

This book has one of the most beautiful covers you could hope to see: a Margaret Preston woodcut of Sydney Harbour, in rich blue, scarlet and ivory. Nor does the inside disgrace the exterior. It is a long time since anyone attempted a history of New South Wales, more than a century according to the blurb, presumably a reference to T.A. Coghlan’s annual publication, The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, the last edition of which appeared in 1901. Beverley Kingston is highly qualified to do the job, and the twentieth-century detail is especially good.

John Hirst is a throwback. I don’t mean in his political views, but in his sense of his duty as an historian. He belongs to a tradition which, in this country, goes back to the 1870s and 1880s, when the Australian colonies began to feel the influence of German ideas about the right relationship between the humanities and the state. Today it is a tradition increasingly hard to maintain. Under this rubric, both historians and public servants are meant to offer critical and constructive argument about present events and the destiny of the nation. Henry Parkes was an historian of sorts, and he was happy to spend government money on the underpinnings of historical scholarship in Australia. The Historical Records of New South Wales was one obvious result, and that effort, in itself, involved close cooperation between bureaucrats and scholars. Alfred Deakin was likewise a man of considerable scholarship (and more sophisticated than Parkes), whose reading shaped his ideas about national destiny, and who nourished a similar outlook at the bureaucratic level.

Tasmania was named Tasmania, instead of Van Diemen’s Land, because of a need to push the island’s history back as far as possible beyond 1803. The Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman was usefully iconic partly because he had nothing to do with convicts. But yearning for a distant past, a past cut off from the present, was common among nineteenth-century Europeans. As John Stuart Mill remarked, ‘comparing one’s own age with former ages’ was suddenly an everyday habit. The fact that several generations divided Tasman’s visit from British settlement was almost an advantage.

Pity the professional historian. It is hard to know where to turn these days to avoid being abused, even from the most unlikely sources. According to Andrew Riemer, writing lately in the Sydney Morning Herald, the main reason professional historians castigated Robert Hughes in 1988, when he published The Fatal Shore, was because he had ‘occupied their territory’. Is there any other professional group in Australia so childish, irresponsible, parasitical and useless as the professional historian? Judging from remarks like this, appearing weekly in the press over the last few years, apparently not. And why is it, at a time when the number of living professional historians probably outnumbers the total of their deceased predecessors since time began, we supposedly manage to work as a tiny clique? Someday an historian, maybe even a professional one, will explain this unlikely phenomenon. Allegations such as these are linked somehow with the overwhelming anti-intellectualism of early twenty-first-century Australia, but exactly why historians, among all the others, are hit so hard and so often is a puzzle.

Manning Clark rescued Australian history from blandness and predictability by making Australia a cockpit in which the great faiths of Europe continued their battle, with results that were distinctive. He concentrated on the great characters who were bearers of one of the faiths: Protestantism, Catholicism, or the Enlightenment.

Anyone who heard Inga Clendinnen’s 1999 Boyer Lectures or who has listened to her in any other way will hear her voice clearly in this book: contemplative, reflective, warm, gently paced. Dancing with Strangers seems to have been written as if it were meant to be read aloud. It reaches out to its listeners ...

According to the back cover: ‘This book explores the way common conversation matters … that during the last two hundred years we have been beguiled by reading and writing. Only during the last part of the twentieth century have we begun to remember the importance of speech as a source of truth in human affairs.’ It could also be noted that the seven essays collected here began as lectures, seminars or articles on such themes as the role of the monarchy in modern Australia (Prince Charles is judged a better speechmaker than his mum, therefore we have hope), the republican movement, the significance of Manning Clark and Henry Reynolds as influential Australian historians, the early nineteenth-century views of Edward Smith Hall and James Macarthur on the rights of Aboriginal people, and Raffaello Carboni’s account of the Eureka Stockade.

This book tells how the Irish government gradually rearranged its methods of convict transportation, from a variety of destinations in North America to a single destination on the far side of the world. The story takes place predominately between 1783 and 1791, from the independence of the United States (which effectively closed American ports to British and Irish transports) to the sailing of the Queen, the first ship to take convicts direct from Ireland to New South Wales. It is a subject that has never been properly examined, mainly because we tend to assume that the Irish point of view – as far as administration goes – was nothing more than a footnote to the British.