History

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The starting point in any of the non-fiction writing programs offered at universities is to purge their manuscript of academic diction. ‘Sadly’, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath begin their advice book on the subject, ‘historical writing has quite a bad reputation’.

Not surprisingly, publishers often claim that their latest offering takes the reader down a path never before trodden, to reveal new insights and understandings of well-worn topics and events. The Path of Infinite Sorrow is no exception, with the promise of a ‘whole new perspective’ on the Japanese side of the story of the Kokoda campaign in Papua during the early stages of World War II. In recent years, the status of Kokoda has challenged that of Gallipoli in the national consciousness, with a number of lengthy tomes, guidebooks, journal articles and newspaper articles, not to mention a feature movie, devoted to the campaign. But why another book, and does it offer anything new?

This is a celebration of Aboriginal survival on the Georges River, a river which snakes through the south-western suburbs of Sydney and disgorges into Botany Bay.

It is always a pleasure to sit down with a fat book by New Zealand historian James Belich. He writes with verve and takes a big-picture view of the past, giving you plenty to think about and, better still, much to argue with. Until lately he has been mainly known for his fine-grained histories of New Zealand and its Maori Wars. Now he ascends to the stratosphere for an Olympian survey of white folks pouring in astonishing numbers into the newly accessible regions of Australasia, Africa, Siberia and the Americas during the nineteenth century. From this exalted perspective they look like nothing so much as a great swarm of bees diverging into several different streams in search of new hives. There had been nothing like this concentrated great voluntary migration in the history of mankind.

It is ironic that I am writing this review on the tenth anniversary of the comprehensive defeat of the Republican referendum in 1999. This book by Craig Wilcox sets out to tell us that the British army (the Red Coats of the title) was much more popular in the colony than we had hitherto thought. Indeed, on the evidence, it was more popular in Australia than it ever was in Britain, which, even in the nineteenth century, had no love for standing armies.

In what now seems to be the vanished country of the early years of my career, begun in the State Library of Victoria in the 1970s, I vividly remember John Arnold enthusing about his interest in the polymath Jack Lindsay (1900–90), son of Norman (another polymath) and one of the founders of the short-lived but gorgeously named Fanfrolico Press, whose legacy of fine books excited the keen interest of collectors. I was impressed that my precocious younger colleague had devoured Jack Lindsay’s three volumes of autobiography and had entered into an admiring correspondence with a man who in his Australian youth had found himself possessed by the written word.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, historians combined to produce large reference volumes of national history. Some were stimulated by anniversaries, notably the dictionary, atlas, gazetteer and chronology, guide to sources and compilation of statistics that were published by Fairfax, Syme and Weldon for the Bicentenary. Some were initiated by publishers, such as the Companion to Australian History (1998) that Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and I edited for Oxford University Press.

With the sun’s morning rays glinting off their bayonets, the Australian soldiers rushed headlong towards the Italian fortress of Bardia in Libya. They sang as they advanced. Although there were isolated pockets of resistance, within hours the Australians had broken through the perimeter and Italian troops were beginning to surrender in their thousands. The capture of the supposedly ‘impenetrable’ fortress of Bardia in early January 1941 by the 6th Australian Infantry Division, fighting its first battle, was a major success that led to the capture of more than 40,000 Italian soldiers. The resounding victory by these sons of the original Anzacs was held to prove the inherent combat prowess of Australians. Major General Iven Mackay, the 6th Division’s commander, afterwards commented there was the notion ‘that the Australian is a born soldier and that, once given the weapons, he is alright’. Or so the myth goes.

The opening sentence of Norman Davies’ blockbuster Europe: A History (1996) notes that ‘History can be written at any magnification’. Yet the superlative asserted in the title of John Hirst’s latest book does bring one up, well, short. Its claim is plainly contestable – how about ‘Plato to NATO’ (the irreverent shorthand for once-fashionable US undergraduate ‘Western Civ.’ survey courses)? Moreover, Hirst makes no pretence of giving us Europe from go to whoa. Commencing with the ‘Ancient Greeks’ (omitting Minoans and Myceneans), he concludes around 1800 with the French Revolution and Napoleon, because the lecture course at La Trobe University from which his book derives went no further. These lectures were first offered ‘to students in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little about the civilisation of which they are a part’. This is a remarkable statement from a distinguished historian of Australia, even granted the growing recognition that what usually passes for ‘Australian history’ cannot in and of itself meet all the cultural, educational and intellectual needs of Australian students.

War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.