History

Russel Ward’s new book is a revision of History, which he published in 1965, mainly for an American audience. In fact, it was read more in Australia and now he has extended the work, put in more detail, and, presumably in response to recent developments, included some cursory glances at the doings of Aborigines, explorers, and the female half of the Australian people.

The decisive influence on Australian politics and culture has been the fact that our society has always included a large minority who, even if they considered themselves British, were definitely Irish and not English. The fact that this minority has been Catholic and, as a result, has felt itself discriminated against, has shaped the church into an Irish rather than a European mode, so that, as Campion points out, not only was to be Irish to be Catholic, but to be Catholic was to be Irish.

A joke told annually and publicly for fourteen years closes this collection of Ian Turner’s work. From 1965 to 1978, Turner delivered the Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture and so created the site of an imagined overlap between the more formal rituals of the intellectual culture and the rowdy world of spectatordom, the VFL, the most visible and familiar self-presentation of the popular. He fabricated this site for speaking ‘our’ culture by romping around it in careful pastiche.

The major problem with this approach to history, as Fitzgerald treads it, is that he takes the preoccupations and perspectives of the twentieth century Sunshine State and implants them in a colonial Queensland context. This achieved, Fitzgerald can point to the continuities of Queensland history. I am reminded of my dog, who buries his bones and considers himself smart when he succeeds in digging them up.

Kathryn Cole’s book sets out by means of thirteen contributions to evaluate ‘two assertions about trade unions (which) are pervasive’. These are that they are very or too powerful, and that they are usually the aggressors in industrial disputes. Its conclusion is that unions are more sinned against than sinning, or, to paraphrase the words of Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited describing Lady Marchmain, ‘they are saintly without being saints’.

This book covers an important historical era in Aboriginal–European/Australian relationships. It describes in admirable detail the negotiations between the Pitjantjatjara people of north-west South Australia and their advisors on one side, and the South Australian government and bureaucratic departments on the other during the long hard battle to obtain title deeds to their land.

This is Emery Barcs’ autobiographical account of his early years in Australia. The bulk of the book deals with the time from his arrival in August 1939 until his discharge from the Australian Army in (according to my reckoning) October 1944. The book is divided into three sections - corresponding to the three distinct episodes Barcs experienced during this period. The first, entitled ‘No­body Owes You a Living’, deals with Emery Barcs’ attempt to make a living in Australia in the phoney-war period.       

The two local histories in this group are about utterly different places and are quite unalike in technique and form, yet they do share a common motivation. Both emanate from the researches and pens of local inhabitants, determined that the outside world should appreciate the qualities and problems of ‘our town’. However beyond this, they are linked only by ironies. One is the story of an environment and community being destroyed by an excess of wealth; the other is of a working-class suburb’s character and difficulties that spring from quite the reverse. The first is Nancy Cato’s very angry The Noosa Story: a Study in Unplanned Development; the second, In Those Days: Collingwood Remembered, is the fruits of the Collingwood History Committee.

Wrecks and the relics of wrecks have always fascinated. Their search and finding brings the excitement of the chase, their identification involves detective sleuthing, their background entails historical research; the very sight of them evokes the adventure of their days of sailing, and the drama of their night of death. Australian writing is rich in books about them, with earlier emphasis more on the adventure and the drama, less on the historical research and the archaeological interpretations. But with the coming of modern underwater techniques and sophisticated instruments, the haphazard sampling of maritime ruins has changed into the modern science of marine archaeology. The enlightened Maritime Archaeology Act (W.A.) and Historic Shipwrecks Act (Commonwealth) have made these relics a part of our national heritage, the Marine Archaeology course at the Western Australian Institute of Technology has formalized the new science, and the Western Australian Museum has built up a compendious catalogue of all the wrecks ever recorded on the Western Australian coast, together with all facts known about them.

In the closing years of the Napoleonic War, Edward Primrose Tregurtha saw active service in the navy for three years, and at the end of the war was honourably discharged – at the age of twelve years, after which he went back to school! He resumed his adventurous career as an officer in the East India Company, and saw further action in the Opium War in China, and in the troubles at Rangoon. Then followed five years of sea-faring and whaling until he finally settled at Launceston in 1836. His journal, which is reproduced in this book, covers first these early adventures and then a further sixteen years in Van Diemen’s Land and on the mainland.