Australian History

Antoine Capet’s pithy observation that commemoration is the continuation of history by other means neatly defines the focus of Peter Stanley’s latest book and the problem that he sets out to grapple with. The recently successful advocacy of a ‘Battle for Australia’ annual commemoration flies in the face of the historical record and the evidence that supports it, but the advocates of the popular notion that the Japanese stood poised to invade Australia in 1942 have never allowed the facts to get in the way of a firmly rooted belief.

The Australian migrant experience is often regarded through the prism of the postwar experience and the waves of immigration and exodus, chiefly from Europe. Today, except among historians, the settlement of Australia is often the butt of colonial and convict humour, or the stuff of pop-cultural iconography and self-identification. This comes at the expense of a true appreciation and understanding of Australia’s rich cultural and demographic origins. In the light of recent cultural debates regarding ethnicity and multiculturalism, it is clear that our understanding of our society, and the varied backgrounds of its constituents, is wanting.

In the days of the Great Anzac Revival, it is unusual to find an Australian VC who has not been the subject of a biography. Here we have one of the most famous of them all – Arthur Blackburn (1892–1960). I was surprised to find that this is the first biography of him.

Operating submarines has been a very expensive part of Australian naval history. The first two boats (submarines are referred to as ‘boats’ rather than ‘ships’) were lost in wartime operations: AE1 with all hands off Gape Gazelle (New Guinea) in 1914, and AE2 in the Sea of Marmara (Turkey) in 1915. After World War I, Australia was given six ‘J’ Class submarines by Britain, but lacked the personnel and funds to maintain them. They were soon scrapped. Two submarines acquired in the late 1920s – Oxley and Otway – were decommissioned during the Great Depression. Thirty-five years later, the RAN took delivery of the first Oberon Class submarines built in Scotland. All six boats served with distinction during the Cold War, several engaging in highly classified ‘special operations’. By the mid 1980sthe RAN’s ageing submarine fleet needed replacing. Australia was about to learn that submarines were even more costly to build. Although submarines had been refitted and extensively modernised in Australia, none had been built from plans.

Freedom on the Fatal Shore brings together John Hirst’s celebrated works on the early history of New South Wales: Convict Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1983, and Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, published in 1988. Both books have been out of print for some time; the chance of picking up a second-hand copy is almost nil. Black Inc. has done historians, students and general readers a great service with this combined volume. Convict Society and Strange Birth have an intellectual symmetry that justifies their union.

Henry Bolte and Bob Askin were the ‘big men’ of state politics in the 1960s, when I was a young political scientist. Bolte I never met, and Askin I met only once, but I knew the latter’s deputy premier, Charlie Cutler, quite well. I grew up in northern New South Wales and throughout my life, it seemed, we had only ever had Labor governments. The premiers cycled by with an air of inevitable succession: McKell, McGirr, Cahill, Heffron, Renshaw. Yet all five had been there in 1941 when the rejuvenated Labor Party, free both of Jack Lang and the far-left opposition to him, trounced the Mair–Bruxner government at the polls. For anyone who had been through that quarter of a century, Labor’s narrow defeat in 1965 was a shock. How could it have happened?

These two books on the building of the Thai–Burma railway in World War II are very different in format and tone. Australian film-maker Patti Wright’s Men of the Line is an exquisitely designed collection of stories and images by Australian prisoners of war who were forced to build the railway for their Japanese captors. Wright describes her book as ‘a tribute to the ex-POWs who experienced the best and worst that human nature can offer and returned to tell the tale’. Canadian journalist Robin Rowland’s A River Kwai Story: The Sonkrai Tribunal is a solidly researched investigation that concentrates on F Force, the group of Australian and British prisoners that suffered the worst death rate on the railway, and the postwar war crimes trial that found seven Japanese soldiers guilty of the ‘inhumane treatment’ of these men. Rowland concludes that the Japanese did commit war crimes; she also exposes failures by Australian and British officers that increased the POWs’ suffering.

This is an honest, modest report of what students and teachers across the country think about the teaching of Australian history in schools. Anna Clark has allowed her subjects to speak for themselves; being a scrupulous historian, she has not edited their offerings. So we hear words like these: ‘Now they’re having like record numbers [at Anzac Day], and like huge ceremonies all over Australia and they’re like young people that respect it’; and ‘Reading a textbook, when you have to like read three pages of a textbook, and then the teacher’s like, “Do the questions”...’ An enduring value of this book will be its record of teenagers’ spoken English in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It makes for rather tiresome reading, but it is salutary to be constantly reminded of where students are at, like.

Raymond Evans completed his History of Queensland on a Brisbane verandah in late 2005. The Howard government was still in power, and Premier Peter Beattie was grappling with regional health care. By the time of publication, John Howard was gone, and Beattie had resigned – though not before contracting Ross Fitzgerald to write the official state history for Queensland’s sesquicentenary in 2009.