Australian History

In the fever of bicentennial celebrations of Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia, thousands of words have been written and dozens of new books have appeared. The South Australian events and publications alone celebrating the encounter between Flinders and Baudin have almost reached plague proportions. However, Miriam Estensen’s Life of Matthew Flinders is the first full-blown biography of Flinders since Geoffrey Ingleton’s Matthew Flinders: Navigator and Chartmaker (1986), a deluxe volume not intended for the mass market. A paperback edition of Ernest Scott’s 1914 biography recently appeared, but new sources have become available since then and it is certainly time for a fresh assessment of Flinders’ achievements and character based on all the available evidence we now have.

We readers ask a lot of our writers. We know what we like, but sometimes we prefer something new. We want to be taken along on the ride, but won’t tolerate being taken for a ride. We may want to learn something, but we don’t care to be lectured. We like a bit of fun, but can’t bear to be mocked. Yet we can also be quite generous. We don’t mind giving up control of our lives for the few hours it may take us to read a book, letting the writer take the tiller for a while. We are willing to believe in the events and characters the writer creates, to think and feel what the writer tells us to. And we go along with the greatest fiction of all: that the writer is omniscient and omnipresent. Not only do we collaborate in this great delusion, we encourage it.

Reviewers often like to start with a simple statement of what a book is all about. In the present case, this is difficult, because there are two books within these covers. The first three chapters fit its subtitle, ‘The Story of the Australian National Dictionary’, while the next seven fit the title Lexical Images, being essays on aspects of Australian history and culture as reflected in the pages of the Australian National Dictionary (1988). If a single theme has to be extracted, it is that historical lexicography is a fascinating process, generating a valuable product.

In the late 1950s, Honours students at Melbourne University could take Geoffrey Serle’s Australian History course only after completing John La Nauze’s full-year subject on Hanoverian and Victorian Britain (aka England). Those who questioned this restriction were informed that, since Australia was a small, derivative society, understanding its history required some knowledge of the culture, ideas and institutions exported here from Britain. While we may have discounted this rationalisation, with all the withering cynicism of late adolescence, at the time it hardly seemed worth making a fuss about.

In 1941 the allied Western Desert Forces captured 130,000 Italian soldiers in Libya, the majority of whom were evacuated to Australia, India, South Africa and Ceylon. In 1943 Australia held 4668 Italian POWs. To increase agricultural production and relieve the shortage of manpower, the Australian government shipped a further 14,000 Italian soldiers from India during the course of the war, to be employed on farms throughout Australia. Britain was already employing over 40,000 Italian prisoners, housed in central camps and working under supervision. With greater distances and fewer resources, the Australian government decentralised their operation, placing Italian prisoners on private farms, unguarded, under the authority of local Control Centres.

When the appointment of Archbishop Hollingworth as governor-general was announced last year, some critics argued that the separation of church and state was placed at risk. This objection was not heard when Pastor Doug Nicholls was appointed governor of South Australia in 1976, nor when Davis McCaughey, a Uniting Church minister, became governor of Victoria in 1986. Was the governor-generalship of Australia seen as being in a league of its own, or did the title ‘Archbishop’ ring alarm bells? And when the new governor-general became embroiled in the controversy over the church’s response to cases of child abuse, this secularist undercurrent bubbled to the surface again. I was struck by the strain of virulent anti-clericalism that ran through much of the talk-back commentary. Somehow the Anglican Church seemed easily identified in the popular imagination as part of the Establishment – remote, authoritarian and out of date.

I first encountered the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia long before I heard its name. Readers who  were at primary school in the late 1960s or early 1970s will know what I’m talking about — those illustrated booklets (a treasure trove for school projects) on Australian history, put out by the Bank of New South Wales, with pompous, triumphalist titles such as ‘Endeavour and Achievement’.

When did Australia grow up? Australian historians have accepted, almost as an obligation of their trade, that they must declare the moment when the child reached mature adulthood. Was it, as Justice Murphy proclaimed in splendid isolation on the High Court bench, at the moment of the adoption of the Commonwealth Constitution in 1901? He was, admittedly, an amateur historian. Was it with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, when the Dominions were given the right to have their own defence and foreign policies? Or in 1942, when Prime Minister Curtin looked to the United States ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional links and kinship with the United Kingdom’? Or with the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951? Or is the safest thing to stick with the election of the Whitlam government in 1972?

Tom Gilling’s first novel, The Sooterkin, was an engaging and self-conscious oddity. Set in early nineteenth-century Tasmania, it had at its centre the striking conceit of the Sooterkin itself, a child born to a former convict and who is, to all intents and purposes, a seal. The Sooterkin was a critical success, inviting comparison to Peter Carey for its Dickensian energy and its playful engagement with the slippery rudiments of the Australian imagination.