History

Very few people – apart from royalty – have had countries named after them. But the coinage ‘Rhodesia’ was being used a few years after the white military force Pioneer Column moved into Zimbabwe in 1890. For Cecil Rhodes was truly a colossus, punningly named after one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. A famous Punch cartoon has him bestriding the map of Africa, one foot on Cape Town and the other on Cairo, linked by a telegraph line hanging from his outstretched arms.

In writing Borneo: The last campaign, Michael Veitch has taken on a worthy subject. It was ‘the largest, most complex, most meticulously planned amphibious military operation ever undertaken by the forces of Australia’. Yet, despite its scale and the military prowess displayed, the campaign has received little sustained attention in print since the publication of Gavin Long’s official history, The Final Campaigns, in 1963 and is overshadowed in the public imagination by the great epics of Australian military history, like Gallipoli and Kokoda.

This book starts with something of a bum steer. The cover declares that Survival in Singapore is about the ‘triumph and tragedy of Australia’s greatest commando operation’. It turns out that the commando operation is not its main subject at all, as Tom Trumble acknowledges in his note to readers, but the hook for a tale of sacrifice and suffering in Japanese-occupied Singapore during World War II. This faint misdirection did not trouble me – the subject of wartime Singapore interests me more than a tale of derring-do – but it did surprise. Is this part of marketing a popular war history – always go with the more dramatic angle?

The growth in understanding of the tens of thousands of years of this continent’s pre-colonial and post-colonial Aboriginal history has been one of the great intellectual achievements of postwar Australia. But if these two collections of essays are any guide, there are reasons to be gravely concerned about the future of this field of knowledge.

The latest in Don Watson’s intermittent series of books and essays about the United States – which now spans twenty-five years – finds him in a melancholy mood, though not quite ready to write off America.

The genocide of the First Peoples of Tasmania, concentrated within a brief, sixty-year span from 1815-75, was an incalculable tragedy that destroyed a remarkably adaptable and ecologically sustainable group of nations who occupied the island for at least 40,000 years. The rapid destruction of Aboriginal Tasmania in a colonial environment that was rapacious and profoundly racist meant that there was next-to-nothing left that might allow us to understand how they saw themselves, or the nature of their social structures and customs, and the belief systems of their world. This is especially tragic for the descendants who have sought to affirm their Aboriginal identity in the face of the ignorance and self-satisfied indifference of the immigrant society.

Mark McKenna’s The Shortest History of Australia is the latest offering in Black Inc.’s Shortest History series (now nearing twenty titles). Combining erudition and expertise with good writing and respect for readers, the books aim to be more than a primer or a simple precis of common knowledge. Rather, the challenge of length imposed by the publisher and heralded in the title is generative for the history told. In both the text and in ensuing publicity, authors explain and justify how they tackled the task.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is famous in France for his booming eloquence, his rich vocabulary, and his deep knowledge of history and politics. The firebrand orator was born in 1951 in Tangier, Morocco, to parents of Spanish and Sicilian descent, then moved to France with his mother in 1962. After a degree in philosophy and languages he was a schoolteacher before becoming a political organiser and elected politician, notably from inner-city Marseille.

Can a ‘shortest history’ of Turkey, including the expansive history of the Ottoman Empire, work? As well as covering imperial grandeur, it must address complex and sensitive issues such as the Kurdish conflict, the Armenian genocide, Islamism, slavery, and autocracy. Benjamin C. Fortna, a Middle Eastern historian, successfully combines sympathy and interest in Turkey with a candid examination, including of darker aspects of its past.

A wise scholar once advised me against using absolutes in historical writing. The first reason is functional. When you resort to words such as ‘everyone’, ‘everything’, and ‘nobody’, you invite trouble; most of the time you can find an exception. The second reason is more important. The use of such words can betray an approach that packages the messy past too neatly, where there is little room for nuance and even less for uncertainty. Confidence doesn’t necessarily produce the best results.