Australian History

That Australia’s first national school of painters were ‘city bushmen’ is well documented. Tom Roberts began his career as a photographer in Collingwood, Frederick McCubbin in the family’s West Melbourne bakery and Arthur Streeton as an apprentice lithographer. Stories about their plein air painting excursions to Box Hill, Mentone, and Eaglemont are often told. The useful art historical label ‘The Heidelberg School’ first seems to have been used by a local journalist reviewing Streeton’s and Walter Withers’ work done chiefly in this attractive suburb where, with others of like inclination, they have established a summer congregation for out-of-door painting (The Australasian Critic,  l July 1891). Leigh Astbury, however, defines his use of the term Heidelberg School ‘in its current broader sense, that is, artists of a more ‘progressive tendency working in Melbourne and Sydney in the 1880s and 1890s’.

In Grade 5 social studies we ‘did’ Australia. After Captain Cook and the first fleet and settlement, and a couple of lessons spent drawing Aboriginal mia-mias and weaponry came the explorers. Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, Hume and Hovell, Major Mitchell, Burke and Wills Captain Sturt, and Edward John Eyre … Their names and achievements were committed to memory as surely as the three times table. But as our sticky hands traced maps from our atlases onto lunch wrap paper and into our exercise books – there to be outlined in accident-prone Indian ink, and the dotted lines of exploration marked – the explorers somehow failed to grasp our imaginations. We experienced little sympathy with their effort or their suffering, and only a mechanical recognition of the importance of their discoveries.

The Great Mint Swindle was one of the most outrageous frauds in the history of Australian crime. On 22 June 1982, the closely guarded Perth Mint handed over, without a murmur, $650,000 worth of gold bars, which were never to be seen again. Not a shot was fired, not a person threatened. It was all done with three fake building society cheques, which the Mint accepted without question. The mastermind behind the ingenious swindle never showed his face.

Keith Willey died on 6 September 1984. He had just submitted the manuscript of what was to be his last book. A study of Australian humour in adversity titled You Might As Well Laugh Mate, it summed up the man, not least in his last days. Sardonic, self-effacing, unashamedly Australian.

At the August 1984 conference of Australian historians, the Public Lecture Theatre at Melbourne University was packed to hear a panel of distinguished colleagues discuss Geoffrey Blainey’s creation of the public debate on Asian immigration. Blainey did not attend. His mentor Manning Clark did, though he refused to denounce his most famous pupil. Surrender Australia? is largely the product of that meeting. Historians take themselves rather seriously and already there have been complaints that a concerted attack on one of the discipline’s favourite sons is unprecedented. Letters to The Age were denouncing the book as ‘an attack on a great Australian’ well before it was published or the correspondents could see the contents. Public controversy is certainly rare among local historians, being largely confined to such esoteric matters as whether Australia was settled to get rid of convicts or to acquire flax, an argument in which Blainey took a major role. In a small society, academics do not usually denounce each other in the fashion long acceptable in central Europe or America. Equally, they do not often engage in public controversy on matters which draw in the vulgar multitude. While professional historians are not very radical, they mostly subscribe to liberal views, among which tolerance for minorities and for the ideas of others are the most acceptable. Blainey presented his colleagues with a dilemma. They could draw up their skirts and pass by on the other side, or they could publicly disagree with him.

Somebody recently told me that Geoffrey Blainey wrote much of the text of this history of Victoria while travelling in aircraft. If true, Blainey has an enviable knack of finding seats with elbow room, but otherwise there’s no reason to complain. Sir Charles Oman, the great military historian of the Napoleonic wars, was said to have drafted one book during a summer spent waiting for connecting trains at French railway stations. Those fortunate enough to possess a lot of intellectual capital should make the most of it. In the central four chapters of social history, perhaps the most satisfactory part of this book, Blainey cites his evidence as ‘the accumulation of years of casual reading of old newspapers, looking at historic sites and talking with old people’. Disarmingly, he adds: ‘Most of the explanations of why change came are probably my own’.

I sometimes wonder whether David Combe’s detractors have ever read the legend of his sins – the transcript (even as officially bowdlerised) – of his conversation with Ivanov on 4 March 1983. It is upon the fact of this event (but certainly not upon the record of its substance) that Combe is widely charged, not with treachery, but with greed, intolerable ambition, and amazing indiscretion.

On his first day at St Patrick’s, East Melbourne, Vincent Buckley was ‘flogged and flogged’ by a Jesuit priest in ‘an incompetent fury’. It is an experience that many of his readers will easily recognise, though their remembered lambastings were more likely to have been incurred at the hands of the Brothers and, unlike Buckley’s, would have been a continuing feature of school life. 

Adam Smith’s economics foresaw that capital would seek new ways to save us kitchen time, to brighten the dinner table and to stop us for a roadside snack, but each time an investment saved a minute here, lifted a moment there, filled a gap in the market, it separated eaters further from the source of food. The ‘middle­man’ slandered agrarian values, insulated us from the seasons, took away the diversity of distance, compromised quality for price, and then distracted us from the deterioration with the baits of cheapness, convenience and gourmet entertaining.

That statement on page 229 more or less summarises Michael Symons’s book and indicates several of its basic muddles. Yet in many ways it is an invaluable pioneering history and, if it often exasperates, it at least leads the reader to some stimulating and constructive fury, in a very enjoyable way.

Geoffrey Blainey must be Australia’s bestselling historian by a very long way. His audience is far wider than Manning Clark’s for instance: and far less critical. Clark is periodically savaged by packs so frenzied they often seem unable to recognise the nature of the quarry. The difference of course is a matter of both style and substance. Clark, as an early critic once said, is ‘full of great oaths and bearded like the pard’, and he has not changed his fundamental spots. Blainey’s picture is inserted in the barren landscape on the front cover of this book, all warm and friendly; not a Jeremiah, but a kindly tribal elder who will unravel your historical landscape sotto voce, and with perfect equanimity. You can step into your past with Geoffrey Blainey and know you’ll be safe. He’s just about the friendliest historian imaginable.