Australian History

Clare Wright’s Beyond the Ladies Lounge, a history of Australia’s female publicans, has been engulfed in a haze of marketing. Rarely has a thesis-turned-book attracted so much publicity. This book has been brilliantly promoted and has excited media attention.

Female publicans: it’s a great subject. Wright turns the spotlight on Australian pub culture and discovers women not just serving behind the bars but running the hotels. Apparently, this has always been the case. Her research reveals that as many as thirty per cent of Melbourne’s city and suburban hotels were licensed to women by 1889, and more than half a few decades later. Her work, therefore, upends both the view of the pub as a male stronghold and the contention that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women had almost no self-employment opportunities. It also complicates the notion of separate spheres deployed by many gender historians as an analytical tool, where women are confined to the private sphere while men venture into the public domain.

Anyone who heard Inga Clendinnen’s 1999 Boyer Lectures or who has listened to her in any other way will hear her voice clearly in this book: contemplative, reflective, warm, gently paced. Dancing with Strangers seems to have been written as if it were meant to be read aloud. It reaches out to its listeners ...

When Christine Anu sings My Island Home, that great Neil Murray song, there’s always an irony. She’s not singing about the big island that tugs at the heartstrings of most Australians when they hear the song, but a far smaller, more remote home in Torres Strait where things are done differently. The big island-continent may be benign in its fortified insularity, a haven against contaminants from across the seas, but it’s those smaller islands that have, in the song, the qualities of freedom, harmony and belonging that matter.

Early Sydney has beguiled many writers, and the latest to succumb is Kristin Williamson. She has combined an interest in the Rocks area with a self-confessed ‘obsession with our feisty female forebears’, and has produced an historical novel involving several real people.

Some reviewers like to stamp their own character on a review in its opening sentences. I prefer, however, to share with you some of Alan Frost’s words:

When I was a boy, living in a village set against a beach in Far North Queensland, I was struck by two kinds of trees. Ringing the beach at intervals were great ‘beach-nut’ trees (Calophyllum inophyllum). As early photographs of the beach do not show them, these trees must have been planted by European settlers. In my time, when they were perhaps seventy or eighty years old, they were up to fifty feet high, and they spread fifty feet in diameter … And scattered about the littoral were tall hoop and kauri pines … One behind our house may have been more than one hundred feet tall. It was said that this kauri pine was a beacon for ships at sea.

Towards the end of his informative introduction, Robert Manne, the editor of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, outlines the collective intention of the book’s nineteen contributors. He refers to Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), a revisionist text dealing with early colonial history and violence in nineteenth-century Tasmania, as ‘so ignorant, so polemical and so pitiless a book’ ... 

From this post-September 11 vantage point, the great debate about which Australian political party could claim to have done more to develop the country’s relations with Asia already seems bathed in a gentle glow of nostalgia. Back in the late 1990s, when issues of Australia’s identity with Asia had greater salience than they now do, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade decided to commission, as its contribution to the celebration of the centenary of Federation, a history of Australia’s engagement with Asia. The initiative was designed, in part at least, to show that no one side of Australian politics could claim the Asia project as its own.

Thanks to Alison Broinowski and Scribe, we now have an Australian booklet that seeks to make sense of the recent war in Iraq and of Australia’s participation in the war. Whatever shortcomings the book has – and shortcomings are inevitable when the slow art of book publishing seeks to keep up with contemporary events – its presence in the public arena is important, and both author and publisher have been brave in producing it so quickly.

While ‘history wars’ rage, some of the subjects of the wars have quietly slipped a significant book into the market. Has the book received significant attention? Don’t be silly. For a start, it is not couched in the winners-versus-losers terminology of the history wars. It is a difficult book to pin down, certainly not susceptible to quick newspaper coverage or, heaven forfend, television grabs. This reader could imagine at least some of the contributors to Blacklines mounting a convincing case that the current debate is a diversion from far more fundamental questions of representation of Australia’s indigenous peoples in history, anthropology and various media.

Australian football has lost its magic, a unique quality existing in the 1950s, and even as late as the 1970s. It derived from the fixed positions that players adopted and from their physical diversity. In their competing forms, they became metaphysical constructs – good versus evil, beauty versus ugliness, benign innocence versus malevolent experience – constructs limited only by the human imagination ...