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The History Wars by Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark & Whitewash edited by Robert Manne

by
October 2003, no. 255

Towards the end of his informative introduction, Robert Manne, the editor of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, outlines the collective intention of the book’s nineteen contributors. He refers to Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), a revisionist text dealing with early colonial history and violence in nineteenth-century Tasmania, as ‘so ignorant, so polemical and so pitiless a book’ ... 

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There were seven of them, as in a folk tale. The family was too poor to put shoes on their feet. They lived in a village called New. Hard though life was, they knew it would be worse without Kindly Leader, who was carrying the land into prosperity and joy. At present, however, the seven sons had little to eat.

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Judith Wright and Meanjin

Dear Editor,

As generally happens, your note of the recent death of ‘Clem’ Christesen (ABR, August 2003) appears to give him full credit for the early days of Meanjin. Judith Wright is, unfortunately, unable to correct that view of history herself. From what I have been told of those gestational wartime years, her role was no less significant than Christesen’s. Furthermore, she certainly did a great deal (probably most) of the practical work that is essential to sustain such a journal, especially one that was determined to open windows to worlds different from the one represented by the Bulletin. As their contemporary, the Queensland poet Val Vallis, once put it to me, poetry ‘had to have a whiff of eucalyptus about it for the Bulletin’. Certainly, Douglas Stewart, the redoubtable editor of The Red Page, did not relish the new competition, and Vallis recalls being told, with more than a touch of schadenfreude, when work appeared in the fledgling Meanjin: ‘We knocked that back at the “Bully”.’

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Australian football has lost its magic, a unique quality existing in the 1950s, and even as late as the 1970s. It derived from the fixed positions that players adopted and from their physical diversity. In their competing forms, they became metaphysical constructs – good versus evil, beauty versus ugliness, benign innocence versus malevolent experience – constructs limited only by the human imagination ...

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You have to sympathise with Nikki Gemmell. When she described her sense of liberation on deciding to publish The Bride Stripped Bare anonymously, she seemed to have in mind only a desire not to offend people close to her. She would also have liberated herself from the literary celebrity machine. But, once the game was up, she got even more of it than she would otherwise have done. It doesn’t seem to have bothered her too much. The profile in The Age and the appearance on Andrew Denton’s television show didn’t suggest that she was determined to salvage what she could from her original plan to stay invisible. Some of my more cynical friends have suggested that that was what she had in mind all along. But the book is written with a candour that confirms her avowals.

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There is a difference between celebrity and recognition. Celebrities are recognised in the street, but usually because of who they are, or who they are supposed to be. To achieve recognition, however, is to be recognised in a different way. It is to be known for what you have done, and quite often the person who knows what you have done has no idea what you look like. When I say I’ve had enough of celebrity status, I don’t mean that I am sick of the very idea.

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Miss Maude Silver, Miss Jane Marple, where are you, with your splendid and authoritative bosoms, your discreet inquiries, natural reticence, and cunning powers of deduction? Oh, a long way from these sisters in crime.

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Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations

      jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow

my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened

     as I am not by a lost country.

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Santamaria absolved

Dear Editor,

As one who was both active in the Labor Party at the time of The Split and also a Catholic, I agree with almost everything in Heather Nash’s review of The Pope’s Battalions (ABR, August 2003). But there are serious omissions.

The most important one is the reviewer’s neglect of a matter of history that is evident early in the book and that goes to the heart of the cause of The Split. This is the now proven fact that B.A. Santamaria aimed to control the ALP, secretly and from the outside, and to promote legislation through a Labor government in keeping with his own religious/political fantasies. Bemused, if not blinded, by his own enthusiasm and self-righteousness, Santamaria was confident that he would be able to do so. The Pope’s Battalions makes this clear, and provides firm evidence. This is not the first book to do so, but its early chapters also show how these less-than-realistic aims were the outcome of ideological theories of society that Santamaria absorbed from several different sources during his youth. They crystallised in his heart and mind, despite the impracticality of such dreams in the twentieth century, especially in Australia.

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To an outside observer of the Australian literary and cultural scene, the Ern Malley hoax is one of those spin-offs in the Australian experience that keep on conjuring up Mark Twain’s famous dictum of the nature of the country’s history: ‘It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies ... 

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