Shaping a historiography: a conservative reaction

The moment of optimism about reconciliation between white and black Australia that might be drawn from shaping a new history after Mabo was soon subdued by a revival of conflict and division, a situation exacerbated by the election of John Howard’s Conservative government in 1996. Shifting or unstable histories led Howard to say in 1996 that Australian history was being ‘rewritten’ and taught ‘as a basis for obsessive and consuming national guilt and shame’. His government insisted on a celebratory historical perspective that told:

…the story of [all] our people...broadly constituting a scale of heroic and unique achievement against the odds…The ‘black armband’ view of our history reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. [1]

Not all Australians accepted that the nation owed a debt of land or even an apology to the nation’s indigenous peoples; and historians played a crucial role in defining a symbolic language of resistance to Labor’s proposals and Keating’s reshaping of the national story. In 1993, Geoffrey Blainey lamented the predominating influence of a ‘black armband’ interpretation of Australian historiography that had ‘assailed’ its previously optimistic tone. Australian historians had once patriotically given ‘three cheers’ to a story of progress. Manning Clark ‘had done much to spread the gloomy view’; Multiculturalism, embraced by the Labor Party, preached that ‘...much of Australian history was a disgrace’, as a result of mistreatment of Aborigines, Chinese and Pacific Islanders. Blainey revealed himself as a pessimistic conservative, observing Australia’s once impressive economic achievements and vibrant democracy threatened by a poor work ethic and a low sense of ‘individual responsibility’ in a ‘rights-mad’ society.[2]

Since the 1960s, Blainey had written impressive surveys and analysis of successful Australian enterprise conquering ‘the tyranny of distance’ and charting the relentless expansion of the mining industry.[3] Despite The Triumph of the Nomads, which praised aboriginal Australians for exhibiting a kind of European skill in mastering the land, Blainey’s work was essentially a tale of white liberal progress, particularly celebrating the achievements won outside the cities, in rural towns and on the land.[4] In 1982, The Blainey View, a nationally broadcast television series and accompanying coffee-table book popularised his interpretation.[5] Two years later, Blainey’s cheering turned to dark prophecy. In a speech, in the regional Victorian town of Warrnambool, Blainey warned that Australian culture was threatened by a rising tide of Asian immigration. Blainey’s revival of the old fears of white Australia stirred great controversy and his work faced an intense reaction from revisionist scholarship that at times belligerently challenged his methodology, values and conclusions.[6] Despite controversy, Blainey has continued to publish regularly and is one of the few Australian historians to enjoy an international reputation through influential contributions to the historiography of the causes of war and his sweeping narratives of world history.[7] Blainey’s Black Kettle and Full Moon is a typically richly detailed and thought provoking celebration of daily life in nineteenth century Australia, was a popular best-seller by Australian history standards and he continues to make decisive interventions in the national narrative.[8] Blainey’s black armband is a phrase, like the Australian legend, that has produced its own literature and entered national political discourse, embraced by Prime Minister John Howard in his conservative reading of Australia’s history and his resistance to offering indigenous Australians a formal apology.[9]

Keith Windschuttle made the most decisive impact by an historian on the national narrative since Clark and Henry Reynolds. His The Fabrication of Australian History challenged claims about the extent of frontier violence against aborigines made by Reynolds and other historians. Windschuttle accused a ‘politicised’ academic historiography of misleading the public with an account of ‘wilful genocide resembling the kind the Nazis perpetuated against the Jews.’[10] Analysing the conflicts between white and black Australians in Tasmania between 1803 and 1847, The Fabrication of Australian History found that few aborigines had been killed in direct violence with whites and also disputed Reynold’s claim of 20,000 aborigines killed in frontier violence across Australia.[11] Windschuttle argued that he simply seeks to identify the true facts of Australia’s frontier history, freed from undue political bias.[12] Many historians have rejected Windschuttle’s arguments. Reynolds responded with a searching critique of Windschuttle’s methodology and aims arguing that in ignoring key evidence. Windschuttle presents aborigines with no concept of patriotism or of possessing land; they were criminals engaging in murder and theft, thus provoking a backlash from white settlers. This historical interpretation clears the way, Reynolds suggests, for a highly politicised and sustained assault on the aims of ‘contemporary indigenous politics, land rights, self-determination, reparation, even the need for a prime ministerial apology.’[13]

On 25 January 2006, on the eve of Australia Day, Howard addressed the National Press Gallery. Halfway through his speech, Howard announced that the ‘history wars’, in which he had been prominent from time to time since 1996, were over. The ‘divisive, phoney debate about national identity’, he reported, ‘has been finally laid to rest’. Fewer Australians, Howard contended, were now ‘ashamed of Australia’s past’ than had been the case a decade earlier. Having moved beyond an obsession with diversity, Australians, he asserted ‘are now better able to appreciate the enduring values of the national character that we proudly celebrate and preserve’. Essential features of that character are loyalty, patriotism, egalitarianism, hard work, law abidance, tolerance and a respect for the country’s British heritage.

Howard’s defeat in the 2007 general election and his replacement by the government of Kevin Rudd may mark the end of the dominance of conservative revisionism but the Australian national narrative remains intensely contested.[14] Race and indigenous studies have emerged as the key area of conflict in Australian national identity and historiography. Yet as Anne Curthoys observes,

...in their increased attention to Aboriginal history, however, it seemed that historians paid a high price, losing their earlier ability to provide apparently unifying national narratives. Popular understandings of the place of Aboriginal history in Australian history remain unsettled and deeply divided.[15]

The division is provoked by competing visions of the needs of the present, needs that impel the stories historians choose to tell. Australian historiography has always responded to present political needs and conceptions of the nation. Feminist, indigenous or labour histories seek to find in the past inspiration for the political needs of women, the indigenous or the working-class in contemporary struggles and to understand their historical experience; often a tale of marginalisation or injustice is uncovered. Blainey and Windschuttle maintain a story of predominately white European and liberal progress in Australia and judged by media attention and book sales it is narrative that continues to command considerable appeal in the public imagination. Writing history is an act of moral creativity.[16] If the apparently competing versions of the national narrative contain mythological elements, it is because they have been invested by their authors with symbolic meanings and aspirations to elaborate a moral story that help to develop a shared vision of the nation.

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[1] His position can be found in Howard, John, ‘The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values which Guide the Federal Government’, Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, 18 November 1996.

[2] Blainey, Geoffrey, ‘Drawing up a Balance Sheet of Our History’, Quadrant, July-August 1993 p. 10.

[3] Blainey, Geoffrey, The Rush That Never Ended: a history of Australian mining, (Melbourne University Press), 1964 and The Tyranny of Distance: how distance shaped Australia’s history, (Melbourne University Press), 1966.

[4] Blainey, Geoffrey, The Triumph of the Nomads: a history of aboriginal Australia, (Sun Books), 1975.

[5] Blainey, Geoffrey, The Blainey View, (Macmillan), 1982.

[6] Ibid, Macintyre, Stuart and Clark, Anna, The History Wars, pp. 72-92; Gare, Deborah et al., The Fuss That Never Ended: the life and work of Geoffrey Blainey, (Melbourne University Press), 2003.

[7] See, Blainey, Geoffrey, The Causes of War, (Macmillan), 1973; The Great Seesaw, a new view of the Western World, 1750-2000, (Macmillan), 1988; A Short History of the World, (Viking), 2000.

[8] Blainey, Geoffrey, Black Kettle and Full Moon: daily life in a vanished Australia, (Viking Books), 2003.

[9] Davison, Graeme, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, (Allen and Unwin), 2000, pp. 16-17; ibid, Dixson, Miriam, The Imaginary Australian, p. 13; ibid, Gare, Deborah et al., The Fuss That Never Ended, pp. 104-105; ibid, Macintyre, Stuart and Clark, Anna, The History Wars, pp. 128-132.

[10] Windschuttle, Keith, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-1847, (Macleay Press), 2002, p. 2.

[11] Windschuttle, Keith, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian History, Part II: The fabrication of the Aboriginal death toll’, Quadrant, November 2000.

[12] Ibid, Windschuttle, Keith, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-1847, p. 402.

[13] Reynolds, Henry, ‘Terra Nullius Reborn’, in Manne, Robert, (ed.), Whitewash, On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, (Black Inc.), 2003, pp. 115, 135; see also Ibid, Macintyre, Stuart and Clark, Anna, The History Wars, pp. 161-170.

[14] Lyons, Martyn and Russell, Penny, (eds.), Australia’s History: themes & debates, (University of New South Wales), 2005 provides an important analysis of the issues of concern to Australian historians today.

[15] Curthoys, Anne, ‘Aboriginal History’, in ibid, Davison, Graeme, (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Australian History, p. 5. Haebich, Anna, ‘The battlefields of Aboriginal history’, in ibid, Lyons, Martyn and Russell, Penny, (eds.), Australia’s History: themes & debates, pp. 1-21 is a useful summary of the debates.

[16] Macintyre, Stuart, (ed.), The Historian’s Conscience: Australian historians on the ethics of history, (Melbourne University Press), 2004, an important collection of papers on the notion of moral creativity and the problems it generates.

Shaping a historiography: beginning a ‘history war’

The only way to discover who people actually are is through their expressions, through their symbolic systems…ethnography takes an historian to the systematic and public expression of who people are – their rituals, their myths, their symbolic environments.[1]

In The Death of William Gooch Greg Dening addressed a paradox that in order to discovering who people actually are, we must explore their symbolic systems, we must find who they are through their myths. In the 1990s, Australian history has been preoccupied with defining the nation’s past and its identity in controversies surrounding the work and opinions of prominent historians and struggles over the disputed facts of indigenous history particularly over the extent of frontier violence and dispossession. Macintyre and Clark’s The History Wars is an account of these politicised histories. Plotting the debate, Macintyre and Clark’s narrative shades into the terrain of myth, as they follow where history has been summoned to serve the symbolic needs of Australian national discourse.

Macintyre and Clark note that Prime Minister Paul Keating and his speechwriter, the historian Don Watson, relied inspirationally on Manning Clark.[2] An outspoken public figure in his later years, Clark’s History of Australia was vilified by his own publisher, Peter Ryan, following Clark’s death in 1991, as factually-inaccurate propaganda. Clark, Ryan concluded, was a victim of his own myth. It was an ‘epic’ myth of a tragic Australia, struggling for independence from its British origins that Clark offered his readers: an epic that Watson and Keating embraced.[3] Clark helped Watson and Keating conceive a symbolic environment, a moral space that Labor politics could occupy and to expand the moral space of Australian public life through an emotionally charged invocation of significant stories or myths from the past. Watson was presented with an unprecedented opportunity to employ the historian’s craft in national politics and invest Keating’s speeches with the resonance of myth, invoking the Australian legend to commemorate the sacrifices of two world wars and the symbolically-charged fate of the Unknown Soldier.[4]

History could also be summoned to destroy what Clark might have described as the ‘comforting’ myths with which white Europeans had obscured their treatment of the indigenous. ‘We committed the murders’, Keating bluntly reminded white Australians in his Redfern Park speech, as he stood before a stunned and largely indigenous audience.[5] ‘We practiced discrimination and exclusion.’ The High Court of Australia’s 1992 Mabo judgement[6] that recognised native title and the historic connection of Australia’s indigenous people to the land would form the basis of ‘righting an historic wrong.’[7] Historians had also played a vital role in rethinking the nation’s relationship with its indigenous peoples and laying the intellectual framework for the Mabo Judgement and the Keating Government’s response. Rowley and Stanner’s work began the task of revision in both historiography and in wider public discourse.[8] Henry Reynold’s path-breaking The Other Side of the Frontier established that Aboriginal tribes resisted the European invasion of their lands, and estimated that up to 20,000 aborigines had died in frontier violence while his The Law of the Land documented the legal and political denial of indigenous land rights.[9] Reynold’s work was cited in the High Court judgement in support of the claims made by Eddie Mabo on behalf of the Murray Island people. Attwood expressed concern about the role historians should play in redefining national identity in the wake of Mabo; historians had to retain a critical distance from a tendency to ‘essentialise’ Aboriginal claims about the past, propagating a ‘delusion’ that the past can be repossessed as ‘it really was’. A ‘new history’ could

…examine the moments when the ideals and values of both settler Australians and Aborigines have been upheld such that all peoples have benefited, and so genuine human progress can be said to be achieved.[10]

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[1] Dening, Greg, The Death of William Gooch, (Melbourne University Press), 1995, p. 157.

[2] Macintyre, Stuart and Clark, Anna, The History Wars, (Melbourne University Press), 2004, p. 242; see also pp. 123-125.

[3] Ryan, Peter, Lines of Fire: Manning Clark & Other Writings, (Clarion Editions), 1997, pp. 177-234, Craven, Peter, ‘The Ryan Affair’ in Bridge, Carl, (ed.), Manning Clark, Essays on his Place in History, (Melbourne University Press), 1994, pp. 165-187.

[4] Ryan, Mark, (ed.), Advancing Australia, The Speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister, (Big Picture Publications), 1995, pp. 279, 285, 287.

[5] On 10 December 1992, Keating gave a speech, written by Don Watson, on Aboriginal reconciliation addressing issues faced by indigenous Australians such as their land and children being taken away. This speech became known as ‘The Redfern Address’ and was given in Redfern Park to a crowd of predominantly indigenous people, and although it was not given a lot of media attention at the time it is now regarded by many to be one the greatest Australian speeches. Keating was the first Australian Prime minister publicly to acknowledge to Indigenous Australians that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face: ‘We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice’.

[6] The judgments of the High Court in the Mabo case inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law. In recognising the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their islands in the eastern Torres Strait, the Court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous people in Australia prior to Cook’s Instructions and the establishment of the British Colony of New South Wales in 1788. This decision altered the foundation of land law in Australia. The new doctrine of native title replaced a 17^th century doctrine of terra nullius (no-one’s land) on which British claims to possession of Australia were based. The Mabo decision thus solved the problem posed by the Gove Land Rights Case in 1971, which followed the ‘legal fiction’ of terra nullius. In recognising that indigenous people in Australia had a prior title to land taken by the Crown since Cook’s declaration of possession in 1770, the Court held that this title exists today in any portion of land where it has not legally been extinguished. On 20^th May 1982, Eddie Koiki Mabo, Sam Passi, David Passi, Celuia Mapo Salee and James Rice began their legal claim for ownership of their lands on the island of Mer in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea. The High Court required the Supreme Court of Queensland to determine the facts on which the case was based but while the case was with the Queensland Court, the State Parliament passed the Torres Strait Islands Coastal Islands Act which stated ‘Any rights that Torres Strait Islanders had to land after the claim of sovereignty in 1879 is hereby extinguished without compensation’.

The challenge to this legislation was taken to the High Court and the decision in this case, known as Mabo No. 1, was that the Act was in conflict with the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 and was thus invalid. It was not until 3 June 1992 that Mabo No. 2 was decided. By then, 10 years after the case opened, both Celuia Mapo Salee and Eddie Mabo had died. Six of the judges agreed that the Meriam people did have traditional ownership of their land, with Justice Dawson dissenting from the majority judgment. The judges held that British possession had not eliminated their title and that ‘the Meriam people are entitled as against the whole world to possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the lands of the Murray Islands’. Following the High Court decision in Mabo No. 2, the Commonwealth Parliament passed the Native Title Act in 1993, enabling indigenous people throughout Australia to claim traditional rights to unalienated land.

[7] Ibid, Ryan, Mark, (ed.), Advancing Australia, The Speeches of Paul Keating, Prime Minister, pp. 227, 232; Watson, Don, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, A Portrait of Paul Keating PM, (Random House Australia), 2002, pp. 288-291.

[8] Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, (Australian National University Press), 1970; Stanner, W.E.H., After the Dreaming: black and white Australians--an anthropologist's view, (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 1969.

[9] Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, (Penguin Books), 1981; The Law of the Land, (Penguin Books), 1987.

[10] Attwood, Bain, ‘The past as future: Aborigines, Australia and the (dis)course of History’, in Attwood, Bain, (ed.), In the Age of Mabo, (Allen and Unwin), 1996, pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.