History

Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.

Fawaz Gerges is a leading expert on mainstream Islamist movements, jihadist groups, and social movements in the Middle East. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe. Two decades ago, his in-depth field research resulted in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went global (2005). It showed that the 9/11 terror attacks united social forces in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda. The dominant response of jihadi groups was an explicit rejection of Al Qaeda and total opposition to the internationalisation of jihad. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation gave Al Qaeda a ‘new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide’.

Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First Fleet to 1817. His second, Gudyarra (2021), focused on the battles between the Wiradyuri and the settlers around today’s Bathurst region from 1822 to 1824. Gapps’s new book, Uprising, takes us over the full middle swathe of colonial New South Wales, including campaigns from dozens of clans, between 1838 and 1844. Each volume moves us forward in time and over greater expanses of Country. Collectively, the Gapps trilogy is a clear and detailed refutation of Australia’s continued reluctance to name the violent episodes that occurred between black and white peoples before 1901 as what they so plainly were: war.

For many Victorians their impressions of the squatting age have been formed by visits to Como or to Werribee Park. These mansions, of course, reflect the ultimate achievement of the squatters’ aspirations but tell us little of the struggles involved in realising those aspirations. These tangible proofs of squatter opulence, coupled with historical accounts of the squatter-selector battles, have inevitably cast the squatters in the role of the ‘bad guy.’ But to Heather Ronald her squatters, the Chirnsides, are the ‘good guys.’ ‘I dispute the oft-repeated statement,’ she says, ‘that squatters set themselves up as a class above everyone else … Many of the earliest successful squatters came from good families and were educated people; their attitudes were moulded by the way of life in rural Scotland, with its Squire and tenant system … Thomas and Andrew, in their estate management, were only following the example set by good landlords at home.’ But this was precisely why many Australians opposed them.

There has been, for some time, a debate among researchers of Australian history. Should the moral and psychological dimensions of settler experience be examined, or do we know enough already?

The Yirrkala Bark Petitions were intensely significant in Australian politics, contributing not only to major changes in race relations in Australia but to the way Australians understood their country’s history and its future. Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk is a lucid, accessible, and engaging account of those 1963 Yolngu1 Petitions from the Yirrkala region of Arnhem Land: her book will deservedly be read widely and throw new light on the complex events which shaped this turbulent time. Yet as powerful and moving as this book is, it will leave some readers with lingering questions. This review will outline some of its many strengths, and will also suggest some of those questions.

To borrow from Jones and Bassett: ‘Not another Kelly book!’ Well, yes; in fact two more can be added to last year’s bumper crop. One of them comes from Kelly Country itself, written by two local residents. And the two books provide a perfect example of the extremes in the Kelly publishing game.

Venice is a vast project for an historian. Dennis Romano has written what he calls a ‘remarkable history’, generous in its pursuit over 600 pages, with eighty-five pages of impeccable documentation. It is a revisionary history, not only because Romano goes beyond the end of the Republic in 1797, when Napoleon conquered Venice and planted a Tree of Liberty in St Mark’s Square. The three chapters on Modern and Contemporary Venice bring Romano’s history to the present day.

Many students of Australian history are aware of a particularly ugly cartoon published in the Bulletin in December 1946. ‘The Pied Harper’ depicted a hook-nosed Arthur Calwell playing a Jew’s harp welcoming a shipload of ‘imports’ (Jews) into Australia. This was the stereotypical image: bearded, unattractive, and similarly hook-nosed. The analogy with the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was clear. In contrast – and to assuage such public anxieties about mass migration – were the published photographs in January 1948 of Calwell, the immigration minister, celebrating Nordic-looking ‘beautiful Balts’, as he termed them, on their arrival to Australia.