Australian History

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.

In this short book Peter Charlton suggests that the final campaigns fought by Australian forces in the south-west Pacific were unnecessary, foisted upon our troops by an ambitious high command, notably General Sir Thomas Blarney. He argues that since Curtin had surrendered any Australian control over the use of its troops to MacArthur, it was left to Australia’s own generals to protect the country’s interests in circumstances where its political leaders had conspicuously failed. In so doing, these generals squandered Australian lives in a series of operations of dubious military value, using troops that were under-equipped and maintained, and ultimately seeking to win over public opinion by recommending a large number of decorations for valour in the field. The troops themselves were under no illusions about the value of their activities, and politicians had long ago abrogated their responsibility for setting out the political aims and limits of Australia’s military involvement. All in all, this was truly a “generals’ war”.

Lloyd Robson has produced a finely researched and lucid book which will become a standard reference on the early political history of the island of Tasmania. Volume One deals with the intrigues, conflicts and self-indulgences that were endemic in the emerging society and boldly illustrates the path to ‘self rather than ‘responsible’ government, together with the feelings of animosity that were generated towards particular colonial governorships.

Mapping the boundaries of relationships between church and state is a vital part of religious history. Walter Phillips makes a major contribution to our understanding of the changes which followed the ending of state aid in the nineteenth century. The pressures of voluntaryism made the retention of vision of a Christian country very hard, for protestant individualism and denominational competition made the shaping of a common ethos impossible. Nevertheless, Phillips makes it clear that the protestant churches, through their leadership, put up stiff resistance to the trends of the times.

In Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Colin Johnson presents the invasion of Australia by white men, referred to as ‘nums’ or ‘ghosts’, through the eyes of the Aborigines, ‘humans’. With the central character Wooreddy and his wife Trugernanna, (Truganinni) we witness the annihilation of a race of people, the breakdown of their culture.

The authors’ respective backgrounds gave them excellent qualifications to write this history of the FIA and the result is a book which should have much wider interest than its bland title suggests.

In 1956 my husband and I lived in Perth for some months, and that is when our continuing friendship with Mary Durack; her late husband Horrie Miller, pioneer aviator, and their family, and her artist sister, Elizabeth, began. My friendship with Mary deepened over years, often at Writers’ Weeks in Adelaide, occasionally in Sydney or Perth. The various Duracks I’ve been lucky enough to know are great Australians and from them I’ve learned more about a vast country and goodness and bravery, than from almost any other people or sources. Mary is more generous than I have room to describe here, and to her a long list of Australian writers, white and black, owe debts of gratitude for help of many kinds – some acknowledged, some taken, perhaps, more for granted than it should be.

There is a long tradition in Australian music publishing that only the worst will do. In the era of long-winded and Latinised Victorian histories and reminiscences of old colonists, the music sector easily bested the rest for pontification and inaccuracy. In the thirties, when even journalistic standards were at an all-time local low, the few music histories and biographies that managed to find their way into print, often via the vanity presses, were tediously pedantic. The forties actually improved on matters, due to war-time isolation and a new awareness of music as propaganda; but the fifties produced the most conservative of demi-books, their authors still mentally located somewhere on their knees before a middle European iconostasis that concealed, artistically, a good deal of ritualised nonsense in the name of cultural superiority.