Australian History

Once regarded as a provincial backwater, Perth has been transformed by the latest mineral resources boom into the nation’s fastest-growing city. The world’s most isolated capital, it is also one of the most outward-looking: a land of ‘porous boundaries’ and endless possibilities, where time and distance are illusory, and the collective gaze of its citizens has, from the first, been resolutely fixed upon the future; and yet it remains a site of ‘great contradictions’. ‘Spacious yet claustrophobic’, open but secretive, it is a place where Georgian buildings sit alongside glass towers; where nostalgia for a ‘vanished frontier’ infects the prevailing mood of optimism; and where, in winter, even the iconic Swan River flows in two directions at once, the rainwater from the Darling Scarp washing seawards above the salty incoming tide beneath. Faced with these competing views, author David Whish-Wilson goes in search of the essential Perth and finds a people and a place shaped by ancient and modern forces.

Brian Fitzpatrick – a notable historian, intellectual, and civil libertarian – was a prominent Melbourne figure in the middle of the twentieth century. He died in 1965 and survives partly as the central figure in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s poignant memoir My Father’s Daughter (2010), an affectionate and yet painfully honest book. It describes Fitzpatrick’s difficult marriage, his awkwardness in relationships, the frustrations of his career, and, above all, his drinking. Around the time his daughter was born, Fitzpatrick published two books that made a significant mark on Australian historiography: British Imperialism and Australia, 1783–1833 (1939) and its sequel The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History 1834–1939 (1941). Sheila Fitzpatrick credits these works with an important role in prompting Manning Clark to repudiate an economic view of Australian history in favour of his grand narrative of competing philosophies.

Between European settlement in 1829 and the 1900 federal referendum, the legislation regulating matrimony in the infant Swan River colony changed eight times. Now, in this intelligent dissection of marriage and divorce laws in colonial Western Australia, historian Penelope Hetherington examines the political, religious, and social forces that effected change, redefined gender relations, and led to a gradual recognition of the rights of women.

As the smoke cleared over the ruins of the Eureka Stockade on 5 December 1854, a male diarist observed that a woman was among those ‘mercilessly butchered’ by troopers and police. According to her descendants, Catherine Smith was another casualty, shot by soldiers and dead three weeks later. In the 1880s a female correspondent to the Ballarat Star also claimed to have been among the wounded. This woman was not one of the twenty-seven-odd civilians killed; nor was she among the unknown number who later died from their injuries. Yet still soldiers shot at her as she fled, and she was lucky to escape alive.

If the London Australian expatriate community has an aristocracy of sorts – as it clearly does – then Geoffrey Robertson QC and the novelist Kathy Lette, his wife since 1990, would be among its leading nobility. Robertson and Lette mix with royalty, both real and literary (‘our daughters had been flower girls at Salman’s wedding – I can’t remember which one’). I would love to have been present when Robertson advised Diana, during her affair with James Hewitt, that the Treason Act of 1361 laid down the death penalty for any party to adultery with the wife of the heir to the throne. Did she blush or blanch?

If you read only one book about Australia’s experience of World War I, as the deluge of commemorative publications marking the outbreak of the war becomes a veritable tsunami, make it Broken Nation, an account that joins the history of the war to the home front, and that details the barbarism of the battlefields as well as the desolation, despair, and bitter divisions that devastated the communities left behind.

Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.

In The Baby Farmers, legal scholar Annie Cossins revisits a bizarre episode in Australian criminal history. Her text focuses on a pair of baby killers who operated in Sydney during the nineteenth century. In October 1892, Sarah and John Makin were arrested after a baby’s corpse was found buried on their farm. An investigation revealed the bodies of twelve more babies, all buried in properties that had been inhabited by the Makins. The couple’s crimes stemmed largely from their poverty. Purchasing babies provided them with an (albeit limited) income. These babies had often been born out of wedlock, and their mothers relinquished them to avoid the stigma surrounding ‘illegitimate’ children.

Tim Bowden, ABC journalist and historian, hosted a television program called BackChat between 1987 and 1994. Viewers could write in with their comments on Aunty’s offerings. One correspondent criticised the Rob Sitch-inspired spoof of the commercial current affairs programs, Frontline ...

Telling Stories is a great brick of a book full of diverting bits and pieces about Australian culture over the past seventy-seven years. It is hugely entertaining – a sort of QIin book form, with seventy-nine authors offering their brief observations on aspects of Australian cultural life. No one will read it cover to cover: it’s the sort of book you can leave about the house for anyone to pick up and amuse herself with for fifteen minutes or so. They can jump from titbits about rock music, or children’s novels, films or poetry, or serious pieces on the slow movement towards understanding Australia’s Aboriginal heritage. The editors suggest it is ‘a twenty-first century cabinet of curiosities’. By and large, it creates an optimistic, even celebratory, account of the experience of Australian life in the twentieth century.