Australian History

Nathan Spielvogel, a highly regarded Ballarat historian and schoolmaster, in 1928 presented the Annals of the Ballarat Hebrew Congregation to the executive committee. He told how he had discovered, in a corner of the schoolroom adjacent to the synagogue, an old iron box full of letters and papers, tied and labelled. They were dated from 1855 to 1877 and covered the first twenty-two years of Jewish communal life in Ballarat. Papers from 1878 to 1892 were destroyed great number) were prevented from remaining on the missions, where in most cases, they had spent their whole life. The Act set in motion a general breakdown in the family structures, which, for so long, had created a rich and culturally satisfying life for Aborigines on the missions. by fire at the secretary’s residence, but from then on records were preserved, unfortunately without the correspondence that made Spielvogel's annals so human and vivid. Newman Rosenthal, from these sources, has written a history of considerable importance. It increases the small literature on the history of Jewish communities in Australia and reveals that Ballarat owes a great debt of gratitude to civic minded Jews from Eastern Europe and the British Isles for their forthright support in founding institutions and building civic pride.

Ralph Wiltgen’s history of the founding of the Roman Catholic church in Oceania stands within a definite tradition: the recording by members of the various Christian denominations of the activities and personalities involved in their proselytisation of the heathen inhabitants of the Pacific islands. Works of the earlier century sought to eulogise the missionaries and encourage the faithful back home to continued support. Wiltgen’s approach shows the influence of far more sophisticated attitudes and scholarship. He has consulted dispersed and complex archival sources written in several languages, he has pieced together his intricate and detailed narrative in painstaking fashion, to describe the growth of Roman Catholic missionary activity in the Pacific from its commencement in Hawaii in 1825, to the existence of an arch-diocese, eight dioceses and eight vicariates apostolic in 1850. Pride in this achievement underlies his writing but does not lead into rationalisation or polemic.

Fifty years ago the sagas of maritime discovery were the monopoly of the historians; but today they have been taken over by the geographers, and especially by the practical geographers who themselves go down to the sea in ships. Australia is fortunate that its two major interpreters of the voyage of Torres – first Captain Francis Bayldon and now Captain Brett Hilder – are, or were, both blue-water navigators, with special experience of the waters that Torres crossed. Captain Hilder’s The Voyage of Torres is strictly the account of a voyage, and that voyage is analysed with consummate professional skill. The documents of Torres and Prado sufficiently supply the materials, but they are not materials which could be interpreted by an armchair theorist equipped with a school atlas. The guess-work distances sailed, the errors in the primitive observation of latitude, the absence of longitude, the crudeness of early cartography, the loss of some of the records – all of these produce conundrums which only an expert can solve. Earlier analysts, working over the same material, have come to different conclusions; but Captain Hilder’s comprehensive, scientific and authoritative analysis renders obsolete the conjectures of his predecessors, and settles for all time the details of the course sailed.

Whatever would we do without Geoffrey Blainey? If he did not exist it would certainly be desirable to invent him. Of all our historians perhaps only Manning Clark reaches such a wide audience: but while Clark's epic history is pitched at a prophetic level, Blainey’s various works are, literally, much more down-to-earth affairs. Yet they are full of ideas, new insights and questionings of old orthodoxies.

The best of a newspaper should be, or used to be, news. But in the electronic age, when sheer questions of the very survival of print media are raised often enough, mere news is not enough. The press has those functions of interpretation, comment and backgrounding which electronic news gathering rarely has time for or interest in, and one of the qualities which marks a quality paper is its activities in these areas. And the quality of those activities.

It is ironic and, perhaps, happy for him that the most vainglorious of Australian Labor Party leaders has so quickly become the subject of more books than any Australian Prime Minister. Your ‘1975’ library now contains many instant histories, polemics, laments, critical academic studies, eulogies, and edited highlights, but not yet a comprehensive biography of Gough Whitlam.

More serious works have been written on the life and times of W.M. Hughes than on any other Australian prime minister and, probably, any Australian at all. The little man got off to a flying start with his own books about himself and his amazing adventures, then Farmer Whyte among others came along and, to cap it off, there has emerged the very lengthy two-volume study of Hughes by L.F. Fitzhardinge, among the best and certainly the most elegant of our political biographies.

Inland explorers and their discoveries form a vital part of Australia’s historical consciousness and the tracks they made on maps of exploration and settlement are part of the learning process of every Australian schoolchild. All too often, though, the image of the explorer is two-dimensional and the men and their motives seem less interesting than the patterns of dotted lines in the huge expanse of the Australian continent in schoolbook maps.

One notable exception has been the Prussian explorer and naturalist, Ludwig Leichhardt, who came to Sydney in 1842 to study the land and to collect geological and botanical specimens, and who became the leader of expeditions in Northern Australia, to explore the inland rivers for new lands and routes across the vast territory to the north and west of the settled eastern coast.

Until recently I had found that the most useful book on the history of shipping in the Australian area was the two-volume work Pageant of the Pacific by Captain F. Rhodes, published in 1936. During the last few years we have had several books devoted to single companies, such as the E. & A. Line, the AUSN, Adelaide Steamship, and smaller companies, each of which showed the difficulty of condensing a lot of ships histories into one volume. To deal with all the coastal companies, some of which extended overseas, in one volume, requires ruthless editing and carries the danger of the story being stripped of its flesh, to leave us with the dry bare bones. Two years ago there appeared the very complete work by Dr John Bach, A Maritime History of Australia in nearly 500 pages. The work under review is briefer and easier to read, being about 330 pages with 115 photographs and line drawings. A strange omission in both these books is that their bibliographies give no mention to Rhodes’ great work.