The Knowledge Solution: Australian History: What place does history have in a post-truth world?

Index

INTRODUCTION

Anna Clark

About ten years ago, when I was researching the state of Australian History teaching, I interviewed Jennifer Lawless, Inspector for History at the New South Wales Board of Studies. It was a time of apparent crisis: research had revealed more Australian students knew the presidents of the United States than Australia’s own leaders, and many didn’t even know what historical event was actually marked by Australia Day.¹

Yet for Lawless, History was a challenging and slippery beast of passionate debates and even stronger beliefs. Developing History syllabuses was ‘a nightmare’, she explained. ‘I get probably ten times more ministerials, letters and emails challenging whatever we have in the History curriculum than any other subject.’² Her comments pointed to a puzzle that persists still: despite the stigma of being ‘boring’, Australian History prompts extraordinary levels of public debate.

Prime Minister John Howard’s attempts at curriculum reform following the Cronulla riots in 2005 generated extensive disagreement among teachers, historians, politicians and public commentators, all of whom had strong opinions about what History was, how it should be taught, and why. Similarly heated contests took place over the representation of Indigenous histories at the National Museum of Australia, whether the Australian War Memorial should include reference to the frontier wars, and the question of an Apology to the Stolen Generations.³

These so-called ‘history wars’ have dominated public discourse over Australian history commentary for the better part of three decades, representing a polarised, political and very public series of disputes over the nation’s past. They demonstrate that Australian history is anything but dull.

They also show us that history isn’t simply something that happened in the past. It’s something we do. We make history. We craft and mould it. We decipher and communicate it. ‘Human beings are history-makers,’ the late ethnographic historian Greg Dening once described, with characteristic expansiveness; past and present become ‘bound together in an interpretive act we call history,’ he mused.⁴ In other words, doing History helps us make sense of ourselves, as well as the past itself.

Every generation asks its own historical questions and seeks out histories that speak to its own interests and concerns. In 1932, US historian Carl Becker gave his Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, and declared that history ‘cannot be precisely the same for all at any given time, or the same for one generation as another.’⁵ Doing History involves a conversation with the past, which changes according to who’s conversing, where and when. A history of the ‘White Australia Policy’ written in 1923 is not the same as histories two generations later, as this book confirms.

What’s the collective noun for a group of historians? An ‘archive’? That certainly seems apt for this collection of histories from the Melbourne University Publishing stable.

It’s a modest span of ideas and time—one hundred and fifty years of history-makers from one Australian university press, in a nation where histories could be measured in millennia rather than print runs. And yet it also reveals a lot about this discipline we call ‘History’ (with a capital H).

For a start, it shows how History in Australia has been interwoven with the nation. As the German historiographer Stefan Berger has noted, the persuasive nationalism that emerged across Europe during the nineteenth century was intimately entwined with the professionalisation of the History discipline. Nations needed history to make sense, a coherent narrative to offer citizens; History, meanwhile, came to form a cosy dependence on that national narrative for enabling and verifying its disciplinary authority and expertise.⁶

Australia was no exception, and the discipline of History emerged contiguously with national formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Education departments commissioned History texts, universities appointed History professors, and increasingly professionalised historical practice articulated its own sources and methods.⁷

In that mould, the first book published by Melbourne University Press was Myra Willard’s (largely uncritical) history of the White Australia Policy. Its inclusion here is not to register support, but shows how such ideas were not only once mainstream, but also award-winning.⁸ Those intimate ties of History to the nation continue still, even with the additions of comparative and transnational scholarship.⁹ Most of the histories in this collection are about Australia in some way, although their relationship with the idea of Australian national ‘progress’ becomes increasingly fraught over the twentieth century.

That’s because the flip side of this anchoring of the History discipline with Australia’s national narrative is how it judges other forms of knowledge as inconsequential. Alexis Wright insists in her essay that scholarly and official history-making was a way of ‘maintaining a national ideology that would continually remind Aboriginal people: we control you’.

Such generational and methodological shifts across the twentieth century are perhaps most obvious in a collection of this type, where feminist histories of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Indigenous histories, as well as Robert Reynolds’ history of homosexuality and Janet McCalman’s history of class, sit alongside Geoffrey Blainey’s popular and ultimately optimistic account of Australia’s mining history, The Rush that Never Ended (1964). Public and oral histories nestle among archival research, but also point to important shifts in the ways Australian history has been produced. These methods have pushed the boundaries of historical research and practice over time, as John Rickard and Peter Spearritt contend. Intimate histories of the body, of families, drunkenness and abortion produce very different readings of the past to Michael Cannon’s economic history of the nineteenth century land boom, published in 1966. Ray Parkin’s detailed micro-history of HM Bark Endeavour contrasts Rebe Taylor’s equally epic, but sweeping history of Aboriginal Tasmania.

But, as Rafaello Carboni’s account of the Eureka Stockade demonstrates, Australian historiography isn’t a linear story of progressive inclusiveness. His narrative, written seventy years before Willard’s study, not only exuberantly relives a major turning point in Australia’s democratic history, but also includes a plea for common humanity and fair government representation fifty years before the White Australia Policy.

The collection reveals as well an important feature of the Australian History profession in the second half of the twentieth century. As ANU historian John La Nauze wrote in Australian Historical Studies in 1959, there had been a sort of ‘industrial revolution’ of Australian historical writing since 1929, with enormous increases ‘in the numbers of articles, monographs, books, works of reference, bibliographies, books of documents, books in figures, books in thesis-language, books in English’.¹⁰ Consequently, this collection is dominated by texts published after the Second World War, when universities expanded rapidly, along with scholarly research.

That proliferation and increasing diversity of perspectives also meant historical contest was perhaps inevitable. James Curran and Stuart Ward note in their book, Remaking Australia, how persistent pressures to produce a collective national story came to a head during Australia’s bicentenary in 1988. In marking that anniversary, celebrations of the nation’s imperial beginnings were challenged by histories (both scholarly and community-based) that acknowledged the violence of that legacy in settler colonial society. The nation subsequently looked to new origin myths, like the Anzac story, which was perhaps more noble (and certainly less complicit) to narrate Australia’s birth as a nation.¹¹

The nation’s entanglement with History had created a disciplinary practice that was distinctive: based on official public archives, taught at public institutions, and set in official histories and texts. Meanwhile, new histories pushed the boundaries of that practice (by using oral and environmental histories, for example) and questioned the arc of the national narrative (by including the violent acquisition of the continent). Australia’s ‘national story’ became hotly disputed, as the articulation of the history wars demonstrated.

Alexandra Dellios’s 2017 book on migration history shows how national questions about Australian identity and direction are often historical ones. And it demonstrates how historians like Dellios contribute to national public debates on identity with their writing. The History Wars, written by Stuart Macintyre in 2003 (and to which I contributed a chapter on History education), felt like a sudden wake-up call in that respect: when historians deviate from a national story of progress, what sort of ‘history’ are they actually doing? When Mark Davis writes that ‘What people are now looking for isn’t simply a unifying public narrative, but a unifying public narrative that can tie together all the various threads of what people are today’, it brings those challenges of ‘writing the nation’ into sharp relief.

The history wars raised important questions about historical practice and the role of historians, and I sometimes wonder if this is a peculiarly Australian phenomenon. Despite the global reverberations of the history wars, international colleagues are often amazed that history regularly makes the front pages in Australia, and that Australian historians are embroiled in national public debate. They think it’s marvellous, because it shows how historians are central to national identity and public discourse. But the publicity has a cost: while Australian historians are trained to read complexity and write with doubt, they find themselves on shakier, more dangerous ground once embroiled in polarising and politicised debate.

Inadvertently, the history wars also confirmed that scholarly History, despite an increasingly inclusive practice, was itself implicated in the colonial project. With its origins in non-Indigenous national formation, and bounded by the apparatus of state archives, educational institutions and professional associations, this is a Western empirical practice tinged with colonial control. The concepts of ‘objectivity’, ‘truth’ and ‘evidence’ are not neutral terms anywhere, as Peter Novick reminds us, let alone in settler-colonial histories.¹²

The question of how Australian History incorporates not only Indigenous perspectives, but also Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies is an important one raised by this collection. Indigenous history-makers have not only challenged Australian History to include Indigenous perspectives, but also have rightly called out the complicity of the History discipline for occluding them in the first place. In her important intervention, Alexis Wright states simply and powerfully that ‘Aboriginal people have not been in charge of the stories other people tell about us’.

Surely there’s an ethical obligation for History to become more expansive, to include archives of country, of songlines, of embodied histories, sung, spoken and lived? These are touched on in David Unaipon’s Native Legends, where he describes Aboriginal peoples’ knowledge of the ‘habits and the anatomy and the haunts of every animal in the bush’. They know ‘all the birds, their habits, and even their love, or mating, notes’, he wrote, and they know ‘the approach of the different seasons of the year from various signs, as well as from the positions of the stars in the heavens’. Arguably, MUP’s 2006 republication of his essays, first issued in 1930, holds up not only the distinctiveness and depth of Aboriginal histories, but also how their acceptance by the academy has been belated.

As Marcia Langton writes in her prologue to the First Australians book, Aboriginal archives are everywhere, and their inclusion expands our understanding of the past and practice of history:

Some rock-art galleries depict white men on horses, wearing hats and sometimes carrying guns, and their sailing ships, intimating the watchfulness of Indigenous people and their need not just to observe but also to record the remarkable changes they were witnessing in their world. As the settlers became more familiar, some Indigenous people took up crayons and paintbrushes to document the tumultuous life around them.

Langton’s and Unaipon’s pieces, written eighty years apart, point to forms of history-making that are difficult to reconcile with the History discipline. As such, Michele Grossman describes, there has been ‘a discursive space in which non-Indigenous intellectuals have historically had relatively free rein in making their own critical interventions across a range of Indigenous Australian matters, without the obligation of engaging with the scholarship, arguments or analyses of Indigenous Australian intellectuals themselves’. Can the discipline be decolonised? The American History Review has recently attempted to do just that.¹³ Although Grossman insists that in doing so, Indigenous histories must not be confined to the more-than-human world. (Leaving ‘real History’ to non-Indigenous academicians.)

While there are obviously challenges in bringing deep time to life, in stretching Australian History beyond contact, the Uluru Statement from the Heart shows that history and truth-telling aren’t the monopoly of Western empiricism.¹⁴

These interventions have prompted non-Indigenous historians to push the boundaries of the discipline in order to make History more inclusive and accountable. Any conversation about the capacity of History to take on such challenges is naturally foreshortened in the pages of an edited compilation like this one, but still provocative and important. Look at how Mark McKenna reaches into the landscape to try to write a moment of contact history as a group of shipwrecked sailors traipse up an Aboriginal coastline to the distant British outpost of Port Jackson, how Bain Attwood attempts to populate and recover a Kulin history of colonial Melbourne, and how Rebe Taylor moves into archaeological spaces in an attempt to reimagine Tasmanian deep time.

How we do History, how we wrestle with it over time, is an enduring theme of this collection. While this is a book of exemplars, it also includes plenty of reflection and self-doubt—like Peter Sutton’s musings on his work in Cape York in the 1970s and a talk by Manning Clark at the Australian National University in 1967, where he admitted that when he first ‘tried to communicate this thing (there was always too much to say) I found I had not the slightest idea of how to do it—to tell the story’. That uncertainty is also beautifully articulated by Alexis Wright in her reflective essay on history writing:

I knew the style and intent of the national narrative would always be one of the greatest challenges I would have as a writer. We are all collectively the inheritors and generators of the country’s psyche, and I wanted to know how I would be affected by this. The way that this country shapes its people would constantly be on my mind while trying to tell stories of who we are, how we see the world, what our traditional ground means to us, and our desires and ambitions. The cloud is always present.

Collating this anthology also involved wrestling with history to a degree, as well as a healthy degree of angst. It was impossible to include everyone in this MUP archive—my opening nod to Greg Dening, for example, was a small attempt to squeeze him in somehow. There are many others whose work and history are deeply admired, yet it simply wasn’t feasible to publish the entire back catalogue, notwithstanding my protestations. Despite that, the book attempts to convey a sense of history-making in Australia, both in its diversity and its change over time, as well as some of its legacies (compelling and otherwise). It speaks to fields of Australian historiography in their own right—histories of sexuality, gender, race and class, as well as bodies of work such as convict, transnational, military, Indigenous and migration histories.

Taken together, these excerpts are more than the sum of their parts. They represent attempts to write Australian history, not simply at a point in time, but by many people over time. It’s a history of History—albeit an introductory one. I trust that The Knowledge Solution: Australian history might be a prompt to further reading on the history (and possible future) of Australian History. It’s far from the final word.

Notes

1Tony Taylor, ‘Disputed Territory: Some political contexts for the development of Australian historical consciousness’ in Canadian Historical Consciousness in an International Context: Theoretical frameworks , The Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC; The Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, 2001, at www.cshc.ubc.ca/viewabstract.php?id=17 ; Employment Ministerial Council on Education Training and Youth Affairs, ‘Civics and Citizenship Years 6 to 10 Report 2004’, Curriculum Corporation, Melbourne, 2006, p. 35, at www.mceetya.edu.au/verve/_resources/Civics_and_Citzenship_Years_6_10_Report.pdf .

2Anna Clark, History’s Children: History wars in the classroom , UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008, p. 4.

3John Carroll, Richard Longes, Philip Jones and Patricia Vickers-Rich, Review of the National Museum of Australia, Its Exhibitions and Public Programs: A report to the Council of the National Museum of Australia, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Canberra, 2003, at www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/562805/ReviewReport20030715.pdf ; Christina Twomey, ‘Trauma and Reinvigoration of Anzac: An argument’, History Australia , vol. 10, no. 3, 2013, pp. 85–108; A. Bonnell and M. Crotty, ‘Australia’s History Under Howard, 1996–2007’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 617, no. 1, 2008, pp. 149–165 at doi.org/10.1177/0002716207310818; Anna Clark, ‘Coalition of the Uncertain: Classroom responses to debates about history teaching’, History Australia, vol. 4, no. 1, 2007, pp. 12.1–12.12; Bain Attwood, ‘In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generation’s narrative, distance, and public history’, Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 1, 2008, pp. 75–95.

4Greg Dening, Performances , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 35, 44.

5Carl Becker, ‘Everyman His Own Historian’, in C. Becker (ed.), Everyman His Own Historian , Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1966, p. 242.

6Stefan Berger, ‘Introduction’, in S. Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: A global perspective , Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, pp. 1–29; and ‘Narrating the Nation: Historiography and other genres’, in S. Berger, L. Eriksonas and A. Mycock (eds), Narrating the Nation: Representations in history, media and the arts , Berghahn Books, New York, 2008.

7See, for example, Brian H. Fletcher, ‘Australian History: The imperial context 1880s–1939’, Australian Journal of Politics & History , vol. 40, no. 1, 7 April 2008, pp. 1–15 at doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8497.1994 . tb00086.x; and Australian History in New South Wales, 1888–1938 , New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1993; and The 1888 Centenary Celebrations and New Developments in the Writing of Australian History , University of Sydney, Sydney, 1988.

8Myra Willard won several essay prizes for her research, which was also published in the leading history journal in Australia at that time, The Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society , in 1922.

9Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected Worlds: History in transnational perspective , ANU E-Press, Canberra, 2005; Anna Clark, Yves Rees and Alecia Simmonds (eds), Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History , Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2017.

10 John La Nauze, ‘The Study of Australian History, 1929–1959’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand , vol. 9, no. 33, November 1959, p. 3 at doi.org/10.1080/10314615908595147 . See also, Stuart Macintyre, The Poor Relation: History of social sciences in Australia , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2010; Hannah Forsyth, A History of the Modern Australian University , New South Publishing, Sydney, 2014.

11 Mark McKenna and Stuart Ward, ‘It Was Really Moving, Mate: The Gallipoli pilgrimage and sentimental nationalism in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies , vol. 38, no. 129, 2008, pp. 141–51.

12 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘objectivity question’ and the American Historical Profession , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988. See also, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity , Zone Books, New York, 2007.

13 Alex Lichtenstein, ‘Decolonizing the AHR’, American Historical Review , vol. 123, no. 1, 2018, pp. xiv–xvii.

14 Referendum Council, Uluru Statement from the Heart, at www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.pdf , 25 July 2019: ‘We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’.

1

EPIPHANY WEEK AT EUREKA

Raffaello Carboni, an active participant at the Eureka Stockade, relates the story behind the myth, evoking the build up, drama and horror of the event

From The Eureka Stockade, published 2004, first published in 1855

III

Jupiter Tonans

One fine morning (Epiphany week). I was hard at work (excuse old chum, if I said hard: though my hand had been scores of times compelled in London to drop the quill through sheer fatigue, yet I never before handled a pick and shovel), I hear a rattling noise among the brush. My faithful dog, Bonaparte, would not keep under my control. ‘What’s up?’ ‘Your licence, mate,’ was the peremptory question from a six-foot fellow in blue shirt, thick boots, the face of a ruffian armed with a carabine and fixed bayonet. The old ‘all right’ being exchanged, I lost sight of that specimen of colonial brutedom and his similars, called, as I then learned, ‘traps’ and ‘troopers’.¹ I left off work, and was unable to do a stroke more that day.

‘I came, then, 16,000 miles [26,000 kilometres] in vain to get away from the law of the sword!’ was my sad reflection. My sorrow was not mitigated by my mates and neighbours informing me that Australia was a penal settlement. Inveterate murderers, audacious burglars, bloodthirsty bushrangers, were the ruling triumvirate, the scour of old Europe, called Vandemonians, in this bullock-drivers’ land. Of course I felt tamed, and felt less angry, at the following search for licence. At the latter end of the month, one hundred and seventy seven pounds troy, in two superb masses of gold, were discovered at the depth of sixty feet [18 metres], on the hill opposite where I was working. The talk was soon Vulcanish through the land. Canadian Gully was as rich in lumps as other goldfields are in dust. Diggers, whom the gold fever had rendered stark blind, so as to desert Ballaarat for Mount Alexander and Bendigo, now returned as ravens to the old spot; and towards the end of February ’53, Canadian Gully was in its full glory.

IV

Incipit lamentatio

The search for licences, or ‘the traps are out to-day’—their name at the time—happened once a month. The strong population now on this goldfield had perhaps rendered it necessary twice a month. Only in October, I recollect they had come out three times. Yet, ‘the traps are out’ was annoying, but not exasperating. Not exasperating, because John Bull, ab initio et ante secula, was born for law, order, and safe money-making on land and sea. They were annoying, because, said John, not that he likes his money more than his belly, but he hates the bayonet: I mean, of course, he does not want to be bullied with the bayonet. To this honest grumbling of John, the drunkard, that is the lazy, which make the incapables, joined their cant, and the Vandemonians pulled up with wonted audacity. In a word, the thirty shillings a month for the gold licence became a nuisance.

A public meeting was announced on Bakery-hill. It was in November 1853. Four hundred diggers were present. I recollect I heard a ‘Doctor Carr’ poking about among the heaps of empty bottles all round the Camp, and asked who paid for the good stuff that was in them, and whither was it gone. Of course, Doctor Carr did not mention that one of those bottles, corked and sealed with the ‘Crown’, was forced open with Mr Hetherington’s corkscrew; and that said Dr Carr had then to confess that the bottle aforesaid contained a nobbler some £250 worth for himself. Great works already at Toorak. Tout cela soit dit en passant. Mr Hetherington, then a storekeeper on the Ballaarat Flat, and now of the Cladendon Hotel, Ballaarat Township, is a living witness. For the fun of the thing, I spoke a few words which merited me a compliment from the practitioner, who also honoured me with a private precious piece of information—‘Nous allons bientot avoir la Republique Australienne! Signore.’ ‘Quelle farce! repondis je.’ The specimen of man before me impressed me with such a decided opinion of his ability for destroying sugar sticks, that at once I gave him credit as the founder of a republic for babies to suck their thumbs.

In short, here dates the Victorian system of ‘memorialising’. The diggers of Ballaarat sympathised with those of Bendigo in their common grievances, and prayed the governor that the gold licence be reduced to thirty shillings a month. There was further a great waste of yabber-yabber about the diggers not being represented in the Legislative Council, and a deal of fustian was spun against the squatters. I understood very little of those matters at the time: the shoe had not pinched my toe yet.

Every one returned to his work; some perhaps not very peacefully, on account of a nobbler or two over the usual allowance.

IX

Abyssus, abyssum invocate

‘Joe, Joe!’ No one in the world can properly understand and describe this shouting of ‘Joe’, unless he were on this El Dorado of Ballaarat at the time.

It was a horrible day, plagued by the hot winds. A blast of the hurricane winding through gravel pits whirled towards the Eureka this shouting of ‘Joe’. It was the howl of a wolf for the shepherds, who bolted at once towards the bush: it was the yell of bull-dogs for the fossickers who floundered among the deep holes, and thus dodged the hounds: it was a scarecrow for the miners, who now scrambled down to the deep, and left a licensed mate or two at the windlass. By this time, a regiment of troopers, in full gallop, had besieged the whole Eureka, and the traps under their protection ventured among the holes. An attempt to give an idea of such disgusting and contemptible campaigns for the search of licences is really odious to an honest man. Some of the traps were civil enough; aye, they felt the shame of their duty; but there were among them devils at heart, who enjoyed the fun, because their cupidity could not bear the sight of the zig-zag uninterrupted muster of piles of rich-looking washing stuff, and the envy which blinded their eyes prevented them from taking into account the overwhelming number of shicers close by, round about, all along. Hence they looked upon the