Australian History

What the hell is Bob Ellis? Discuss. Ellis might put it like this himself. Chances are he’s asked the question of a street window once or twice in wonderment and mock self-mockery. He’s earned it. From the back-cover blurbs down the years, one has got, by way of label, ‘l’enfant terrible of Australian culture’ (The Inessential Ellis, 1992), ‘a kind of dusty national icon’ (Goodbye Babylon, 2002) and now, in a disappointing regression to understatement, ‘a political backroomer’. We can assume, I think, that these are self-descriptions. Another, from the text of Goodbye Babylon, puts it this way:

In his spirited foreword, well-known football writer Martin Flanagan notes that ‘More Than a Game is in the best traditions of Australian football writing. It is unauthorised, a necessary virtue given the blurring of the Australian media with the corporate interests behind football.’ Flanagan also knows that writing about football in Australia has become a dignified and scholarly pursuit. Still, football as representing the verities of life is a powerful and relatively new symbol. As the editors and contributors amply demonstrate, Australian Rules history has been measured out in tribal rivalries and violence. These two themes, along with many contemporary evaluations, are explored in detail.

There must be few Australian history books that have run to a fourth edition, and it’s hard to think of any that have provoked as much discussion – and rancour – as Humphrey McQueen’s ‘New Left’ classic A New Britannia. It’s the Sergeant Pepper of Australian historiography: racy, emblematic of its time and place, and full of special effects – the impolite may call some of them recording tricks. Does it still have the capacity to shock the first-time reader, as it did me when I encountered it as an under­graduate in the 1980s? Perhaps, having been bred on so many of the legends to which McQueen laid waste, I was just very shockable. Like a lot of readers, I had never imagined Henry Lawson as a fascist.

The word ‘honour’ is rarely heard in contemporary Australian English. It belongs to a time when the public behaviour of individuals and governments was judged by standards found in a moral code with its roots in medieval chivalry. To be ‘honourable’ was to be known for doing right. When honour was lost, disgrace followed. With the disappearance of ‘honour’ from our public language, perhaps we have also lost the possibility of disgrace.

‘Select arresting quotes. Let your characters speak if the evidence is there,’ A.J.P. Taylor told his Oxford history students. In his own best-selling The First World War: An Illustrated History, struggling to convey something of the enormity of the disaster of the third battle of Ypres, Taylor wrote: ‘On 8 November Haig’s Chief-of-Staff visited the fighting zone for the first time. As his car struggled through the mud, he burst into tears and cried: “Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?” His companion replied: “It’s worse further up.”’

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.

Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1879, but his family moved to England ten years later. Bean returned to Australia in 1904 and became a junior reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald. On assignment in western New South Wales to produce a series of articles on the wool industry, Bean decided that the most important part of the industry was the men on whose labour it depended. He collected these articles in On the Wool Track, published in 1910. Bean’s monument is his official history of Australia in World War I, which can be – and has been – interpreted as an exegesis of his famous sentence: ‘it was on 25th April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’. But the earlier On the Wool Track is an Australian classic, also: an elegant memorial of a vanished pastoral age.

The official account of James Cook’s first voyage in the Endeavour (1768-71) was published in 1773. The account, being an edited version of Cook’s journal, occupies the second and third volumes of John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere. The first volume includes voyages by Byron, Wallis and Carteret – all seminal voyages in the history of the British Empire. We need to remember that Cook represents the culmination of the scientific discovery in the southern hemisphere, beginning with William Dampier in the late seventeenth century.