Australian History

The federal government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory is, above all, an exercise of power. It illustrates for all to see that the government can interfere with the smallest details of domestic life in a blatantly discriminatory way, regardless of Australia’s international obligations and professed belief in racial equality. It declares to the world that adult Aborigines can be treated like children. Both the present and previous government would argue, in a time-honoured way, that it is for the communities’ own good.

Having cut my narrative teeth on Dad and Dave and Martin’s Corner (and my critical molars on the Listener-In), I had high expectations of this book. Night after childhood night, I would wait agog for Wrigley’s Chewing Gum and a burst of rowdy music to usher in the outback doings of Dad and his hayseed family. Martin’s Corner, on the other hand, was brought to our living room by Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which, we were assured, would ‘provide the essential bulk or roughage your system needs to keep it functioning healthily and regularly’. I didn’t know what this meant, but, such was the persuasive power of commercial radio, I believed it. Just as I believed from Sunday-night listening to the Lux Radio Theatre that ‘nine out of ten Hollywood stars used Lux for their daily active lather facials’, though I did wonder about the arid pores of that misguided ‘tenth’ star. The ABC was there for the news, but it was 3LK for entertainment, including such taxing intellectual games as Quiz Kids and Bob Dyer’s Pick-a-Box.

A couple of anniversaries explain the occasion of this collection: one hundred and fifty years of responsible government in New South Wales, and the bicentenary of Lachlan Macquarie’s arrival as the governor who, Brian Fletcher argues, has had the most ‘persistent hold over public consciousness’ in reflecting the ambiguities of a convict colony. The volume is framed by Rod Cavalier’s foreword, which encourages a sequential reading of these thirty-seven essays, each part-biographical study of a governor and part-analysis of the evolving office. Such a course, Cavalier suggests, will show the position to be no sinecure but a ‘constant’ in the flux of politics. Even so, as civics tests regularly show, it is a position in need of rehabilitation if it is to rise above being a misunderstood curiosity.

Poor communication has long been activism’s Achilles heel. Engaging the wider populace and influencing opinion rely as much on the effective, reliable delivery of a message as on well-organised ideas and events. We may be loath to admit it, but intelligent public relations can aid any pursuit – advocatory, activist, or otherwise.

It is from this perspective that the expansive new publication How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, hoaxes, graffiti & mischief-making takes its cue. Compiled and written by Melbourne writer, zine-maker, and community radio presenter Iain McIntyre, this vividly illustrated volume documents not only an unofficial history of Australian protest, activism, and all-round cheek, but the connections between political trouble-making and its ability to influence popular opinion. It succeeds, for the most part.

Academic historians only took to urban history in any systematic way during the 1970s, but Melbourne, regardless of what historians might have had to say about it, has always had a strong sense of its own identity and culture. In the heyday of 1880s ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, journalist Richard Twopeny saw the city as representing ‘the fullest development of Australian civilisation, whether in commerce or education, in wealth or intellect, in manners and customs – in short, in every department of life’. English historian J.A. Froude, staying in style as a guest at Government House, saw Melbourne people as having ‘boundless wealth, and as bound-less ambition and self-confidence’; they were ‘proud of themselves and of what they have done’.

A number of questions sprang to mind when I heard that Thomas Keneally was writing a three-volume history of Australia from its origins to the present. The first was to wonder how he would fit it into his crowded schedule. Clearly, though, this is not a problem. Keneally has just published another novel. More intriguing was the question as to what Keneally could add to the subject. After all, Australia is not lacking in colonial histories, many written by historians who are skilled writers. As Keneally is primarily a novelist, albeit one with a serious interest in our history and with several non-fiction studies under his belt, would the work reflect the conventions of historical fiction?

One of the keenest childhood memories of David Meredith, narrator of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964), is of the hall of his parents’ suburban home in Melbourne. It was full of prostheses, the artificial limbs of servicemen returned, maimed, from the Great War. The men are friends and former patients of Meredith’s parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father served in the First AIF. The scant historical regard that has been paid to these damaged men, and to their families, is rectified by Marina Larsson’s brilliant study of Shattered Anzacs. Her subject is the cohort of revenants who returned to Australia after the war – their bodies ruined, shell-shocked, infected with venereal disease and tuberculosis – and the families, institutions and government bureaucracies into whose hands they fell.

This is not so much a history of Sydney as a tour with a sensitive and alert guide who knows her history. The site is modern Sydney. Although Sydney was only just beginning to develop suburbs when the book ends – in the 1820s – Karskens tours the whole of the Cumberland Plain, the area that metropolitan Sydney now covers.   For the modern suburbs, as everywhere else, Karskens describes the land and how it was used when occupied by the Aborigines and the first Europeans. She points to what remains from earlier times in the routes of roads, remnant vegetation, the built environment and place names.

Gough Whitlam’s 1972 policy speech, delivered before a crowd of thousands at the Blacktown Civic Centre in a scene that bore a closer resemblance to a pop concert than to a political campaign, is seen as the ultimate articulation of the Whitlam Labor government’s radical program for change. If its chief political architect was Whitlam, its amanuensis was Graham Freudenberg. With Whitlam’s election as leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1967, Freudenberg eagerly joined his staff as press secretary, a position he had previously and less happily held with Arthur Calwell, who was leader from 1960 to 1967.

Andrew Fisher fares well in the new Museum of Australian Democracy, at Old Parliament House, Canberra. The entrance to the galleries is framed, on one side, by E. Phillips Fox’s dark 1913 portrait of an imposing and resolute Fisher, in contrast to the garish, spreading corpulence of George Lambert’s 1924 Sir George Reid on the other. Inside, in the procession of prime ministers, Fisher is represented more comprehensively and intimately than his peers. There is his miner’s crib – for this leader of Australia’s first majority Labor government definitely came from the working class – and his fountain pen, presented by his granddaughter to Kevin Rudd (who, the caption reads, is a ‘passionate admirer’ of his Queensland predecessor). Elsewhere in the Museum, in commemorating the suffrage movement, the key exhibit is a replica of the hat worn by Fisher’s wife, Margaret, when she marched beside Vida Goldstein in a London protest for women’s franchise in 1911.