History

As an ‘imagined community’, Australia ‘imagined imagining needs more that community’, most strenuous imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are recolonized over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War II, but our cultural colonization by the United States was probably effective at least sixty-five years ago, by the time Australian cinema outlets had been secured for Hollywood, and closed off for local producers, through the nefarious block-booking system. With film and television, there never was much political will to defend ourselves; nor was there any, a year ago, to prevent the powerful American magnate Rupert Murdoch from taking over two-thirds of the press in what used to be his own country. There are moments and areas where it still seems reasonable to promote cultural nationalism, l not positive xenophobia.

I took the sub-title of Tom Shapcott’s book to be mildly ironic. His ‘brief history’ is not brief, nor is it a history in the conventional sense. It is a hefty compilation of lists– lists of writers assisted by the Literature Board, lists of projects, lists of payments and awards to authors, lists of publications –together with long extracts from official reports, board minutes and documents of various kinds, all impressively tabulated and cross-referenced, with codes and file numbers in abundance. And at first sight it looks pretty dull. Surely a prose narrative would have brought the story more vividly to life? Surely Tom Shapcott, the Board’s respected director since 1983, could have presented this laborious aggregation of data in more digestible form, enlivening his history with the occasional sharp anecdote, dwelling here on a notorious personality, here on a clash of wills, here perhaps on the tiny scandal or neglected cause celebre?

These books are about the American Empire and its influence, with the first taking Australia as its focal point. Kolko’s monumental study of Vietnam and its War, and the American role therein and elsewhere, doesn’t even mention Australia. Fair enough, for we were only one of the cosmetic effects employed by Washington to try to cover the hideous face of the War she was conducting.

Women’s fashions change every year. History fashions change every decade. When I was at school and at University history books told me to be grateful for being British. Out on the streets I was told ‘Buy British and be proud of it!’. Times change, brother – as Colin Cartwright, Barry Humphries’ creation, pointed out. Now, in the season of the sere and yellow leaf, I am asked to read a history quite different from what I read when young.

Less than a week after the publication of this book, the federal government gave notice that it intended to give legislative recognition to its major thrust – that is, the government said it would acknowledge that Australia’s aborigines once owned Australia.

‘The settlement of returned soldiers on cultivable land,’ wrote Ernest Scott in Volume XI of the Official History of Australia in the War 1914–1918 (1936), ‘is one of the most ancient policies of governments after wars.’ Soldier settlement in Australia after World War I is a major instance of a practice dating back as far as Assyria in the thirteenth-century BC. In early twentieth-century Australia, the need to raise an army entirely from volunteers, and the insatiable demands of modern war, made soldier settlement as much an inducement of recruitment as a means of calming things down afterwards, its traditional function.

The last decade or so has seen a spate of books and films about the days of British colonialism. While much of this outpouring has been critical of aspects of those days, it is hard to avoid the sneaking suspicion that underneath it all lurks a fair amount of nostalgia. And here lies the danger in much of this material: it is one thing for colonial survivors to feel nostalgic (as it is hard for people to discredit important actions in their own lives); it is another for them to lure readers into sharing that feeling.

The official myth of the relationship between the elected political leaders and the bureaucrats charged with the administration of their decisions has been that it is for the politicians to set the ends, choose the values, and for the bureaucrats to advise on the means for the implementation of those values. The bureaucratic advice is to be objective and impartial as bureaucrats are there to serve governments committed to very different political values. But the myth has not always fitted the reality; facts and values are not so easily distinguished. James Walter in The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government documents the emergence of a new political role in Western parliamentary democracies from this inevitable gap between the administrative and executive arms of government; and he explores the implication of this both for traditional ways of understanding political decision-making, and the range of role options open to political activists.

The Australian Year looks like the dreaded coffee table book, yet another gloss on the national ‘identity’, backed by Esso, and fit for export only. Certainly, the cover picture of parroty water gives that impression, as do many familiar ones inside, though the main photographer, Peter Solness, does turn in some good homely details as well. Generally, the photographs stand like an avenue of plane trees, their density and hues changing with the seasons of Les Murray’s fully ripened, free-ranging text – which meets the high expectations we might be forgiven for holding when a major Australian poet, a well-versed country boy and populist by persuasion, an erudite and vernacular singer of the old and new, writes a book on a phenomenon as democratically inclusive and resonant as the seasons.