History

One of the first things that Australians learn at school or on arrival as migrants is that this country has a rich history of war. Australia’s military tradition has been an integral part of the making of modern Australia. World War II opened doors to a wave of European migration and cultural enrichment, and each conflict since then has been followed by a similar surge of social development. Australia has grown up on war – or, at least, we have grown through it.

What two things do the following people have in common: Samuel Pepys, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Émile Zola, Franz Kafka, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gabriel García Márquez? Answer: they all did office work, and they all wrote about it. Regardless of Kafka’s conviction that ‘writing and the office cannot be reconciled’, the evidence is that the office breeds writing like nowhere else. From the Restoration period to the present, all the great themes of modernity seem to coalesce around it.

Jean-Luc Godard’s film about young French revolutionaries, La Chinoise (1967), was described by Manny Farber as having ‘a suspicious sideways movement […] sliding sideways, crab fashion, [that] bars progress to its inhabitants, keeps turning the actors whirligig fashion without revealing anything about them’. Named after graffiti from the Paris uprising of May 1968, McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street takes on the Situationist International (SI) with what look, at first, to be similarly crab-like gestures.

Deltroit (pronounced del-troy) is an exceptionally fine pastoral property and homestead in the Riverina – ‘pastoral’ in the Australian sense, with drovers, not shepherds, and the furies of fire, flood, and drought never far from mind, notwithstanding a privileged life in magnificent surroundings:

Until recently, there was a prevailing attitude that to succeed as a professional author one had to go into exile. The small Australian market could not support a writing career; it was necessary to travel abroad and court a larger readership. Because Australia was a British colony, the obvious destination was London, heart of empire.

The years 1909 to 1914 were unusually busy in Antarctica. Back in 1900 the continent had barely been walked on, but in the succeeding decade or so, expeditions of scientific and geographical enquiry, often burdened with heavy loads of imperialist endeavour, penetrated to the heart of the last unexplored continent. The attainment of the South Geographical Pole became the emblematic centrepiece of triumph and tragedy in the so-called ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration. In January 1909 Ernest Shackleton and three others were forced to turn back just a few days’ travel from the South Pole. Two years later, in December 1911, the southern geographical extremity of the planet was first reached when Norwegian Roald Amundsen and four companions stood at the pole. Just over a month later, a defeated and exhausted British party led by Robert Falcon Scott marched away from the South Pole to their deaths and, until recent historical deconstruction, a revered place in Britain’s Imperial folklore.

Any recent ‘big picture’ church history will suffer by comparison with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity (2009). That book discovers all manner of new evidence about this protean religion and opens up questions about its life in every age and across every continent. Even its subtitle, The First Three Thousand Years, wants us to appreciate that Christianity has to be understood through its origins in the Hebrew and Greek cultures of the millennium before Bethlehem. Geoffrey Blainey’s history begins more conventionally with the birth of Jesus.

Communities, extended family connections, and role models have been keys to Aboriginal participation in Australian sport. Other factors – racist exclusion among them – have limited the appearance of Indigenous athletes in professional running and boxing. The high proportion of Aboriginal footballers now playing in the Australian Football League and both rugby codes inevitably begs the question of absences in other major sports.

In Australia’s past, sex has been theorised, pathologised, even criminalised, but comparatively little has been written about the topic. One of the more exciting developments in Australian historiography over the past fifteen years has been the inclusion of gay and lesbian narratives. These perspectives have broadened understandings of Australia’s past and have shown how reading original historical sources against the grain can provide evidence about the intimate lives of Australians.