Marilyn Lake

All nations are sustained by myth-making, but some myths are more problematic than others. Australia has long taken heart from the myth of Anzac, the story that in their ‘baptism of fire’ at Gallipoli, in 1915, Australian men gave birth to the nation. Notably militarist in orientation, extolling the feats of men at war, extensive government investment has helped render our national creation myth sacrosanct. Thus, when Alan Tudge, a former Coalition minister for Education and Youth, contemplated suggested changes in the national history curriculum in 2021, he declared that the school curriculum must never present Anzac as a ‘contested idea’. Anzac Day was ‘the most sacred day in the Australian calendar’.

In the process of British colonisation, Aboriginal people lost their country, kin, culture, and languages. They also lost their freedom. Governed after 1901 by different state and territory laws, Aboriginal peoples were subject to the direction of Chief Protectors and Protection Boards, and were told where they could live, travel, and seek employment, and whom they might marry. They were also subject to the forced removal of their children by state authorities. Exemption certificates promised family safety, dignity, a choice of work, a passport to travel, and freedom. Too often, in practice, exemption also meant enhanced surveillance, family breakup, and new forms of racial discrimination and social segregation.

In July 1894, a year after New Zealand women had gained the national right to vote (the first in the world to do so), their spokesperson Kate Sheppard prepared to address a suffrage rally in London, alongside Sir John Hall, the parliamentary sponsor of the New Zealand suffrage campaign. They took the stage in the vast Queen’s Hall at Westminster to report on their historic fourteen-year struggle. In an age when oratorical skill defined public authority, Sheppard was, unfortunately, not a forceful speaker. She was evidently ill at ease on the platform and her voice ‘scarcely audible’, as historian James Keating reports in Distant Sisters, his meticulous account of Australasian women’s international activism in support of women’s suffrage between 1880 and 1914.

Marilyn Lake is without doubt one of the most influential historians in and of Australia in the last thirty years. ‘SIGN. US. UP’ writes Clare Corbould, one of the contributors to this festschrift, when describing the reaction of her postgraduate self and friends to seeing Lake sweep through the crowd at a history conference in the late 1990s ...

In 1902, Australian feminist and social reformer Vida Goldstein met Theodore Roosevelt in the White House during her North American lecture tour. Marilyn Lake retells the story of their encounter in her important new book. Seizing Goldstein’s hand in a vice-like grip, the president exclaimed: ‘delighted to meet you’. Australasian social and economic reforms attracted Roosevelt and other Americans ...

In pondering the construction of public memory in Ireland, the eminent American historian Richard White insisted on the demythologising work of history as a discipline: ‘History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain. History forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed.’ In Best We Forget: The war for white Australia, 1914–18 ...

If you read only one book about Australia’s experience of World War I, as the deluge of commemorative publications marking the outbreak of the war becomes a veritable tsunami, make it Broken Nation, an account that joins the history of the war to the home front, and that details the barbarism of the battlefields as well as the desolation, despair, and bitter divisions that devastated the communities left behind.

This is an important book that should be read by as wide a range of historians as possible. Some will find it totally agreeable, others will find it very disagreeable, while others will agree with some parts of the book but not all. It is a book not just about the ‘militarisation of Australian history’, but, perhaps more importantly, about how Australians see themselves in the world.

On the front of the only postcard my grandfather kept is a picture of the United States Navy’s ‘great white fleet’ off Australian shores. A Pennsylvanian uncle sent it to the nine-year-old boy in 1908, ‘from one white man to another’. After reading Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynolds’s important new book on the transnational assertion of white racial identity in the early twentieth century, I now know that our American relative was merely echoing Rear-Admiral Sperry, who, at a luncheon in Sydney the same year, greeted his Australian hosts as a ‘white man to white men, and I may add, very white men’.