History

It is genuinely hard for countries like Australia, which have never regarded a powerful and alternative intelligentsia as particularly crucial, to appreciate either the role such an entity famously played in Russia or what a homegrown one might offer.

Do not be put off by this book’s bland title. In a country that has placed the Anzac Legend at the centre of its national identity, Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War is a profoundly subversive book. Cherished ideas of the Australian army as an egalitarian institution and of Australians as natural soldiers whose setbacks can always be blamed on the failings of others (generally the British or the Americans) are put to the test and found wanting. Those looking to have their strident assertions of Australian nationalism validated will be disappointed, but there are already plenty of other Australian military books that can satisfy them. Garth Pratten provides a portrait of Australians at war that is less heroic and more ambiguous, but ultimately more realistic because more human.

One of the keenest childhood memories of David Meredith, narrator of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964), is of the hall of his parents’ suburban home in Melbourne. It was full of prostheses, the artificial limbs of servicemen returned, maimed, from the Great War. The men are friends and former patients of Meredith’s parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father served in the First AIF. The scant historical regard that has been paid to these damaged men, and to their families, is rectified by Marina Larsson’s brilliant study of Shattered Anzacs. Her subject is the cohort of revenants who returned to Australia after the war – their bodies ruined, shell-shocked, infected with venereal disease and tuberculosis – and the families, institutions and government bureaucracies into whose hands they fell.

In a delightful memoir of a boyhood spent in Mussolini’s Italy, Umberto Eco recalled that the heady days of the Liberation in his small town near Milan were encapsulated in the taste of Wrigley’s Spearmint, given by an African-American GI (New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995). After the years of ‘palefaces in blackshirts’, these Americans appeared like exotic time travellers from the future. At the same time, the boy discovered that, unlike the long-winded Duce, large slabs of whose bombast schoolchildren were expected to commit to heart, the leader of the local partisans addressed the cheering crowd in the piazza with a few well-chosen and rhetoric-free words. Equally astonishing was the discovery that newspapers could carry opinions other than those mandated by the state.

Brenda Niall has the knack of lucid multi-focus, a great thing in a biographer. That organisational deftness, an ability to keep the tangled loops of people’s lives spooling freely through her fingers while she projects a rich and dramatic context for them, was evident in her group study of The Boyds (2002), and it is the structural virtue in this new work, The Riddle of Father Hackett.

The design of this book is something of a mystery, not least because it presents as a critique of design, seeking to recuperate something that has been lost through ‘the graphic orthodoxies of cartography and architectural drawing’. This lost cultural component, the ‘dark writing’ of Carter’s title, is variously evoked as mythological, participatory, creative and recreative, as a body, a form of movement, a certain kind of substance.

This is not so much a history of Sydney as a tour with a sensitive and alert guide who knows her history. The site is modern Sydney. Although Sydney was only just beginning to develop suburbs when the book ends – in the 1820s – Karskens tours the whole of the Cumberland Plain, the area that metropolitan Sydney now covers.   For the modern suburbs, as everywhere else, Karskens describes the land and how it was used when occupied by the Aborigines and the first Europeans. She points to what remains from earlier times in the routes of roads, remnant vegetation, the built environment and place names.

Devotees of the television program Spooks may find Australian history less than exciting, but the Petrov Affair is surely the exception that confounds the cliché. Its ingredients included the Cold War, espionage, agents, a defection (hugely important propaganda for the Menzies government on the eve of the 1954 federal election) and a charming woman, the defector’s wife, who was unceremoniously hustled on to a waiting aeroplane by beefy officials from the Russian Embassy. The poignancy of Evdokia Petrova’s white shoe lying abandoned on the tarmac as the plane took off was only eclipsed by the drama of the refuelling stop in Darwin, where she was prevailed upon by Australian security to remain in this country with her husband, Vladimir. He was quite clear about his defection; Evdokia, in that pivotal moment and long afterwards, was tormented by uncertainty.

I once visited John Batman’s property in north-east Tasmania, happily in the company of a Tasmanian. The guidebook listed it as a heritage site on a public road, but the graded track along the side of a ridge had to be entered by a gate marked ‘Kingston – Private Property’. We drove several kilometres before reaching another gate. We breached this, too. On our left was a nineteenth-century stone cottage incorporated into a weatherboard homestead. On our right was a large shed and stables. A generator puttered away, and music came from the house. We shouted our presence. Only the horse in the stables responded. Clearly, we were not going to find a stall selling Batman memorabilia.

The Blue Plateau, set in the Blue Mountains, is part memoir, part essay and part anecdotal local history. Mark Tredinnick wrote it during the seven years he spent living in the valley below Katoomba with his wife and growing family. Strangely, we learn little of the author or his family as this informative, sympathetic and poetic book emerges from its landscape in meditative bursts. It is a kind of mosaic of prose poems. If there is an order in this book, it is, as Tredinnick suggests in his prologue, one that is more implicit than explicit.