Australian History

Barbara Cummings’s history combines archival research, interviews with her peers, and autobiography to declare the common experiences of an Aboriginal sub-culture, the ex-inmates of the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin. She deems it ‘a first step in our healing process’. It is also an outstanding contribution to feminist and Aboriginal history.

Mr Jackson’s book narrates his experience and that of a friend as prisoners of the Japanese in Thailand during World War II. It is neither a good nor memorable book, but it does raise, however unintentionally, significant issues. In a nation still bereft of a civil religion, that amalgam of myths and tales of heroes which defines a country’s sense of self and values, the experiences described by Mr Jackson should be honoured.

Louisa Lawson’s journal, The Dawn, probably wasn’t as politically influential as we would like to think, despite reliable evidence of a substantial subscription list and a fairly far-flung readership. Its championing of major issues of the day such as Female Suffrage and Marriage and Divorce law reform was relentless, unswervingly logical, and resounding, but the momentum which would bring victory in those and other campaigns for womens’ rights did not come centrally from The Dawn. And, when Louisa was saluted as Mother of the Suffrage, it was at least as much for her personal efforts – her speeches, public appearances, debates, and formidable public example – as for her ringing editorials and ideological feature articles. Indeed, Louisa’s very first image for the journal (‘phonograph to wind out audibly the whispers, pleadings and demands of the sisterhood’) with its haunting suggestion of Aeolian Harp mixed in with the latest amplification technology, was peculiarly apt in that The Dawn was less a shaper and leader of feminine political opinion than a fearless and unequivocal announcer of it. And, in the early stages at least, it was a more or less solitary voice – which greatly enhanced its importance.

Professor Mulvaney’s thematic history of encounters between outsiders and Aboriginal Australians is developed through a discussion of events located in specific places. He has selected places which are in the Register of the National Estate (many of which he initially nominated) or are being considered for inclusion. The places, then, are by definition part of Australia’s cultural heritage, and an important focus of the book is to illuminate some of the types of events which have shaped Australian society.

Are you (as I am) conscious of suffering from what they call the postmodern condition? You know, the spiritual and moral void within commodity culture, the isolation of individualism, the lack of meaning and all that. Since reading this book, I have begun to think that we should all spend time in Sparkes Creek. Havelock Ellis, who became the great British psychologist of sex, went there over a hundred years ago, as a boy of nineteen:

What Revolution? The title’s a teaser! Echoes of Lefty/Godot? You’ll understand if I’m infected by Noel McLachlan’s prose. On page after page, sentences and semi-sentences addressing the reader informally/colloquially (even verblessly!), rich in apostrophes, italics, parentheses, sloping lines between pairs/triads, even quartets/quintets, of words, ending often with exclamation marks and (nine times on one page I’ve counted!) question marks.

Back in 1964 before I left the University of Tasmania, Amanda Howard (now Lohrey) introduced me to a serious, nondescript first-year student who, she told me, would go far. Twenty years later Peter Conrad is a Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and author of a number of well-regarded books on literature, opera, and television, with a reputation established on both sides of the Atlantic.

Staining the Wattle is the fourth volume of a series edited by Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee collectively entitled A People’s History of Australia since 1788. People’s history, as understood by Burgmann and Lee, is not popular history, that is to say history written to be of interest to the general reader. This book actually makes very dull reading. Nor is it exactly, at least to judge by this volume, social history, that is to say history dealing with the lives of ordinary people. This book is about politics. People’s history, as understood by Burgmann and Lee, seems, rather, to be ideologically useful history; history as a weapon of social change, as a means for the unmasking of the forces of oppression which have shapes, and for the glorification of the forces of progress which have struggled to reshape, Australian history.