Australian History

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.

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.

The Shearers by Patsy Adam-Smith is worth a place in the best of libraries if only for its superb collection of photographs and reproductions – 291 of them! She is to be commended for including reproductions of an 1891 ‘Loyalty’ certificate, an 1890 Queensland Shearers’ Union ticket and three ‘shearing ticket’ versions of the Amalgamated Workers’ Union. I wish I could claim possession of an original of these. I do, however, have a complete collection of every membership certificate issued in what is now called The Australian Workers’ Union right from its very beginning in 1886, when it was called the Australasian Shearers’ Union.

Russel Ward’s new book is a revision of History, which he published in 1965, mainly for an American audience. In fact, it was read more in Australia and now he has extended the work, put in more detail, and, presumably in response to recent developments, included some cursory glances at the doings of Aborigines, explorers, and the female half of the Australian people.

Poor John Monash has waited a long time. Before he died in 1931, he clearly hoped for a friendly posthumous biography. He destroyed his collection of erotica and some extramarital love letters. This was characteristically called ‘Emergency Action’. Less characteristically, he instructed his son-in-law and executor, Gershon Bennett, not to ‘preserve indefinitely’ the enormous collection of letters, diaries, cuttings, etc.