History

As Tim Bowden would well remember, the ties of Hobart to the Antarctic have been visible long before the transfer of the Antarctic Division from Melbourne to Kingston, south of Hobart, in 1982, and the establishment of the Institute of Antarctic and Oceanic Studies at the University of Tasmania six years later. From the 1950s, the chartered Scandinavian vessels that carried members of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions, Nella, Kista, Magga and other Dans, set out from Hobart early each summer. To look south down the Derwent was to know that one was truly at the end of the inhabited world. Yet if no permanent settlement has ever been created in Antarctica, thousands of Australians have worked and wintered there. The Silence Calling is Tim Bowden’s exemplary record of their achievements in this, the golden jubilee year of the ANARE.

‘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.

Gallienus is hardly the best known Roman Emperor. The records of his reign from 235 to 268 are so fragmentary that even the date of his assassination can only be approximated as taking place during a six-month period.

Artful Histories represents that extraordinary achievement – a learned critical study, based on a thesis, which is exhilarating to read. While it covers the expected ground, with careful accounts of Australian autobiographies of various types, it also addresses a core problem of current literary debate – the relative status of different literary genres, and the interrelation between writing and life. There is no mention here of The Hand That Signed The Paper or The First Stone (they are beyond the range of the discussion) but McCooey’s elucidation of the relationship between autobiography, history, fiction, and life bears directly on the issues which have kept Australian readers arguing over the past year. At the end of his chapter on autobiography and fiction, McCooey summarises the difference in a seemingly simple statement: ‘Fictional characters die fictionally, people die in actual fact.’ The implications of this are far from simple, and McCooey argues for the maintenance of the boundary between genres on the grounds of moral responsibility.

The central contention of this provocative, well-written, and extensively researched study is that Australia underwent a process of decolonisation during the 1940s, and that only by understanding this can we make sense of the subsequent relationships between Australia, Britain and the United States.

The first virtue of this study is to remind us of the dramatic, potentially cataclysmic, quality of the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes to California in the late 1840s and to south-east Australia soon afterwards. That was prime among the several characteristics the two experiences had in common. At few other points is there so close affinity in the histories of Australia and the USA. The subject is altogether appropriate for one, like David Goodman, who has engaged in research in both countries, and who teaches their comparative history. The result is a most satisfying monograph. While the heavier incidence is on the Australian side, this is one of the few examples in the Australian repertoire of effective comparative work. One of few others in that list – Andrew Markus’s Fear and Hatred – also probes the goldfield, experience, describing how the British master-race treated the Chinese in either case. Goodman’ s aim is much more ambitious – to reveal basic socio-political responses to the cataclysm of gold.

I early disqualified myself from reviewing Greg Dening’s The Death of William Gooch: A history’s anthropology. For one thing, we are old friends. That means that if I told you that I think it a marvellous book (and I do), you might not believe me. There was another reason: being a friend, I had read much of the text in the writing, and knew the book in its earlier form as a Melbourne History Department publication, so it could not be as fresh to me as it would be to a first-time reader. Given that, self-exclusion seemed the best policy. But now I want to sneak back in, if briefly, and by a side door, because I discover that this MUP edition is illustrated, or, more correctly, illuminated, by visual texts, which so interact with the written text as to make the book new. Furthermore, the visual material was not only provided and selected by Dening, as is conventional, but author-located on the page. an innovation I would very much like to see become the convention. It is a fascinating extension of the text producer’s role, and elongates an already formidable writer’s reach.

Some time ago, I was curious about steam cars and found an advertisement, dating from the 1920s, for the sole Victorian distributor of the Stanley Steamer. The address was Flinders Lane, the street in Melbourne which exudes more personality than most of the others combined. I discovered that the building in question had been turned into a printshop. But its origins as a motor garage were obvious. Such unprepossessing buildings as service stations survive more by good luck and stubbornness than by design. So I was strangely impressed. All the more so because Flinders Lane now boasts a boutique hotel with a swimming pool that overhangs the street. You can paddle out and look down on the traffic swimming below you like the lost city of Atlantis.