History

I took the sub-title of Tom Shapcott’s book to be mildly ironic. His ‘brief history’ is not brief, nor is it a history in the conventional sense. It is a hefty compilation of lists– lists of writers assisted by the Literature Board, lists of projects, lists of payments and awards to authors, lists of publications –together with long extracts from official reports, board minutes and documents of various kinds, all impressively tabulated and cross-referenced, with codes and file numbers in abundance. And at first sight it looks pretty dull. Surely a prose narrative would have brought the story more vividly to life? Surely Tom Shapcott, the Board’s respected director since 1983, could have presented this laborious aggregation of data in more digestible form, enlivening his history with the occasional sharp anecdote, dwelling here on a notorious personality, here on a clash of wills, here perhaps on the tiny scandal or neglected cause celebre?

These books are about the American Empire and its influence, with the first taking Australia as its focal point. Kolko’s monumental study of Vietnam and its War, and the American role therein and elsewhere, doesn’t even mention Australia. Fair enough, for we were only one of the cosmetic effects employed by Washington to try to cover the hideous face of the War she was conducting.

Women’s fashions change every year. History fashions change every decade. When I was at school and at University history books told me to be grateful for being British. Out on the streets I was told ‘Buy British and be proud of it!’. Times change, brother – as Colin Cartwright, Barry Humphries’ creation, pointed out. Now, in the season of the sere and yellow leaf, I am asked to read a history quite different from what I read when young.

Less than a week after the publication of this book, the federal government gave notice that it intended to give legislative recognition to its major thrust – that is, the government said it would acknowledge that Australia’s aborigines once owned Australia.

‘The settlement of returned soldiers on cultivable land,’ wrote Ernest Scott in Volume XI of the Official History of Australia in the War 1914–1918 (1936), ‘is one of the most ancient policies of governments after wars.’ Soldier settlement in Australia after World War I is a major instance of a practice dating back as far as Assyria in the thirteenth-century BC. In early twentieth-century Australia, the need to raise an army entirely from volunteers, and the insatiable demands of modern war, made soldier settlement as much an inducement of recruitment as a means of calming things down afterwards, its traditional function.

The official myth of the relationship between the elected political leaders and the bureaucrats charged with the administration of their decisions has been that it is for the politicians to set the ends, choose the values, and for the bureaucrats to advise on the means for the implementation of those values. The bureaucratic advice is to be objective and impartial as bureaucrats are there to serve governments committed to very different political values. But the myth has not always fitted the reality; facts and values are not so easily distinguished. James Walter in The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government documents the emergence of a new political role in Western parliamentary democracies from this inevitable gap between the administrative and executive arms of government; and he explores the implication of this both for traditional ways of understanding political decision-making, and the range of role options open to political activists.

The Australian Year looks like the dreaded coffee table book, yet another gloss on the national ‘identity’, backed by Esso, and fit for export only. Certainly, the cover picture of parroty water gives that impression, as do many familiar ones inside, though the main photographer, Peter Solness, does turn in some good homely details as well. Generally, the photographs stand like an avenue of plane trees, their density and hues changing with the seasons of Les Murray’s fully ripened, free-ranging text – which meets the high expectations we might be forgiven for holding when a major Australian poet, a well-versed country boy and populist by persuasion, an erudite and vernacular singer of the old and new, writes a book on a phenomenon as democratically inclusive and resonant as the seasons.

The editor of The Scots Abroad took one big hoary fact, stuffed it in a cannon and fired it. Indeed he fired it to several parts of the world. Then he wrote letters to the provincial experts, asking them to survey the effects his missile had on landing. The results of course were fairly predictable and roughly the same in each case – it was the same fact after all. A lot of gravel and some larger stones thrown up, several casualties among the native population, little damage to public buildings, though in more than one case banks were reported collapsed and men in grey suits were seen running away. At the bottom of the crater lay the fact, quite unexploded, still as hoary and unyielding as when it was fired. This was a Scottish fact, or, rather, the fact was a Scot, or a Scottish ‘national type’, so we shouldn’t wonder that it was quite intact.