History

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’.

For any who may suffer under the delusion that the production of good histories is easy, these three books offer some valuable lessons. The first, J.0. Randell’s Yaldwyn of the Golden Spurs, is the work of a Gentleman (i.e. amateur) historian, the other two are very much the labours of mere Players. William Henry Yaldwyn (1801–66) was a Sussex squire, (in Burke’s LandedGentry by the skin of his teeth), who turned Australian squatter to boost the family’s dwindling fortunes. He was certainly ‘in’ on some of the most significant historical action in midcentury Australia – pioneering Victorian squatter, a Port Phillip Gentleman and founder of the Melbourne Club, a visitor to the gold fields in 1852, and a few years later a pioneering squatter again, this time in Queensland. It was only Queensland that amply rewarded him, both financially and personally. He served two brief terms in the Legislative Council where, Mr Randell informs us, his ancestors’ Cromwellian sympathies encouraged him to propose a motion, finally passed by both houses in 1862, which established the elective nature of the upper house at the expense of the power of the Crown. As one of the few Queensland farmer politicians to have advanced the cause of Democracy, he is indeed a raraavis.

Inland explorers and their discoveries form a vital part of Australia’s historical consciousness and the tracks they made on maps of exploration and settlement are part of the learning process of every Australian schoolchild. All too often, though, the image of the explorer is two-dimensional and the men and their motives seem less interesting than the patterns of dotted lines in the huge expanse of the Australian continent in schoolbook maps.

One notable exception has been the Prussian explorer and naturalist, Ludwig Leichhardt, who came to Sydney in 1842 to study the land and to collect geological and botanical specimens, and who became the leader of expeditions in Northern Australia, to explore the inland rivers for new lands and routes across the vast territory to the north and west of the settled eastern coast.

This book is a useful acquisition for those anxious about Australia’s prospects in the 1980s and while it does not exude optimism it contains a generally hopeful outlook which, given the way things are going, could be a rare commodity in 1990. The topics covered are those thought the most complex and difficult which the policymakers are likely to confront this decade. The essays are of a variable quality and somewhat less than uniform in style but Professor Coral Bell gives this volume a focus and an overall perspective in her preface. Her excellent opening chapter and final remarks (arising from the debates at the ANU Seminar) make up for some of the deficiencies of her distinguished colleagues. As she observes, there is no great optimism to be found in these pages, but at least the prophets of doom have been held at bay. She writes that ‘anyone writing in 1979, and reasonably in touch with international opinion on matters like the possibility of a major depression, or an energy crisis, or Soviet­Chinese or Soviet-American confrontations in the early 1980’s must be bound to take a rather sober view of the prospect for mankind, including Australians’. She asserts that the issues confronting Australia in the 1980s are likely to be those that were evident in the 1970s and that there remain almost immutably the same preoccupations, namely the search for security and prosperity. She must be right.

Until recently I had found that the most useful book on the history of shipping in the Australian area was the two-volume work Pageant of the Pacific by Captain F. Rhodes, published in 1936. During the last few years we have had several books devoted to single companies, such as the E. & A. Line, the AUSN, Adelaide Steamship, and smaller companies, each of which showed the difficulty of condensing a lot of ships histories into one volume. To deal with all the coastal companies, some of which extended overseas, in one volume, requires ruthless editing and carries the danger of the story being stripped of its flesh, to leave us with the dry bare bones. Two years ago there appeared the very complete work by Dr John Bach, A Maritime History of Australia in nearly 500 pages. The work under review is briefer and easier to read, being about 330 pages with 115 photographs and line drawings. A strange omission in both these books is that their bibliographies give no mention to Rhodes’ great work.