Australian History

I am writing this review in a cafe in the main street of Gympie, a town founded on gold discoveries in 1867. It is 200 kilometres north of Brisbane and seventy kilometres from the coast. Frontier types abound in a town population of 11,000 and in farming communities around. Rough, craggy, sunburnt faces, wizened facial muscles, arms creased by years of hard work and a determined walk. In their everyday habits they exhibit loyalty to friends, a capacity to improvise and a contempt for blacks. And these are the women.

As our feminist historians have pointed out, there are few women in Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, first published in 1958. Indeed in the index there are only a handful of entries: ‘on goldfields’, ‘prostitution’ or and ‘shortage of, in bush’, the last being the longest entry.

The Bulletin, The Bulletin,

The journalistic Javelin,

The paper all the humor’s in

The paper every rumor’s in

The paper to inspire a grin

The Bulletin. The Bulletin.

(The Bulletin, 28 May 1887)

Though I’d been looking forward to this book I had doubts about reviewing it. By definition it must touch on personal loyalties and friendships, and then, too, I had preconceptions about Bulletin history.

Within three hours motoring of Sydney is a wild and lovely valley of forgotten history, where pioneer settlers sleep in forlornly neglected small cemeteries, or whose headstones mark their resting place on the original land grants. The Macdonald River meanders shallowly through farmlands and past a few scattered cottages; above tower the enclosing mountains bush-clad and rock-strewn; overall there seems to emanate a strangely disturbing restlessness as if the disembodied spirits of the first pioneers still exert an unseen influence in the once life-pulsating Valley.

Timothy Hall has written a brief readable account of the lamentable Malayan campaign. but over the past forty years the story has been told more accurately and more dramatically by a succession of authors, many of whom were participants in that tragic debacle.

This obviously swiftly researched book is flawed by a number of omissions and exaggerations.

In a major piece of historical revisionism, Dr John Hirst has scrutinised the so-called evils of convict society in New South Wales between 1788 and 1840. Together with a mythology that has stemmed from it. He sees the image of Botany Bay as a place of depravity, where ‘vice is virtue, virtue vice’, as having been created by the opponents of transportation, the late eighteenth-century prison reformers such as John Howard and Jeremy Bentham; he traces their influence through Evangelicals, like Wilberforce, to the liberal Russell and the radical Molesworth who, in the 1830s, saw Australian settlers wallowing with their assignees in a sensual sty. Since the penal colonies would never cleanse themselves, it behoved indignant parliamentarians at Westminster so to do.

The bias in settlement and exploitation of nineteenth-century Australia was essentially English. These Antipodes were classed as a wide white land, for the Anglo-Saxon. A Scot or a Welshman could have a place. They were Celts, and classed as ‘British’, close to the centre of England’s Empire, the greatest ever seen.

What major figure in Australian history, apart from Ned Kelly, has had more biographies than Archbishop Daniel Mannix? Librarians can give a decisive answer to this far from rhetorical question. Certainly, Mannix looms large in serious Australian historiography. There are personal studies by Captain Bryan (1919), E.J. Brady (1934), Frank Murphy (1948 and 1972), Niall Brennan (1964), and Walter Ebsworth (1977), and B.A. Santamaria’s short, weighty lecture of 1977. As well, the Mannix shelf is crammed with books like Michael McKernan’s Australian Churches at War, Gerard Henderson’s Mr. Santamaria and the Bishops, Patrick O’Farrell’s The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, and B.A. Santamaria’s Against the Tide – in all of which Mannix is a dominating force. There is no lack of information about the archbishop.

‘This internment of ours is but a sideshow of the war’, says a former Dunera internee in this book. Yet this footnote to Britain’s war on the home front has acquired considerable importance for Australia.