history

BIOGRAPHY OF A NATION

Michael Roe

Phillip Knightley
Australia: A Biography of a Nation
Jonathan Cape, London, $43.85hb, 380pp
0 224 05006 0

PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY, BORN IN Sydney in 1929, has long resided in Britain and from that base has won high acclaim as a journalist. The present substantial book surveys Australian experience, with some reference to the colonial period but for the most part since Federation. It is written in deliberate awareness that the Sydney Olympics are likely to enliven interest in Australia. To meet this need, Knightley has read some history, Manning Clark and Russell Ward evidently the major contributors. In further preparing for the book he visited Australia and gathered various stories. Journalist lore provides more data, while as well he invokes his own autobiography and background. The writing is skilled and sharp.
      Knightley's presentation clusters around two foci. First there is an emphasis upon success and growth, essentially as defined by that leftist nationalism, which has been important in Australian life and still more so in Australian historiography. Knightley remarks that 'the twentieth century will be remembered for the failure of a great social experiment, Communism', and proceeds to suggest that meanwhile in Australia another and more enduring attempt was made at establishing the good life. It pursued 'the middle way' -- economics-driven, but with government giving a fair deal to children and the unprivileged, and bosses likewise treating their workers. Knightley upholds a Polish commentator on world affairs, Ryszard Kapuscinski as best revealing this Australian style. There is no reference to the same notion being central to the analysis of Australia written by W.K. Hancock seventy years ago, and echoed by many followers, if more recently criticised as over-Whiggish and blinkered. A complement to the triumph of 'the middle way' has been progress of Australia towards independent nationhood, political and ideological.
      The book's second focus is on elements of conflict within Australian experience. This operates at various levels. To the fore was class conflict, deepening during World War 1 and with the establishment of communism in the Soviet Union. Civil war came much closer to Australia than general opinion allows, so Knightley asserts. On the conservative side stood British Establishment influence and ideas, seeking both to maintain imperial capitalism and to squash Australian nationhood. American influence has tended in the same general direction. Rancour and corruption derived from further sources. Prime among these was racism and chauvinism, directed towards the external non-British world, and to Aborigines and other minority groups within the nation. It is primarily these elements of conflict that resulted in many episodes of drama and excitement within Australia's experience, and which Knightley believes traditionally to have been muffled.
      There can be no doubt that Australia, like most places, has seen episodes of both social justice and harmony on one hand, and conflict on the other. Yet the two themes cannot both be dominant. Knightley tends to turn away from this dilemma, and to want matters both ways -- harmony and conflict, progress and reaction. Perhaps an academic reviewer is more likely to be bothered by this tension than will be the more general reader.
      Knightley's most solid chapters on the first half of the century are those dealing with the two wars. He emphasises the courage and capacity which Australian troops displayed. Winston Churchill and the British high command receive a lambasting as to 1914-18, Douglas Macarthur joining the villains in the 1940s. Knightley writes interestingly of the latter's involvement with the 'Brisbane Line' issue. Whereas Monash is among his heroes, Blamey is not. He echoes Paul Keating's denunciation of Britain's failure to defend Australia against Japan, and the crucial heroism shown on the Kokoda Trail.
      Domestic history after 1945 is presented very much in the style of Clark, Ward, and various others. Menzies' Britophilia was all the worse, argues Knightley, because otherwise the 1950s were seeing the beginning of a true national spirit. In developing the point he makes a rare venture into cultural matters, invoking the recognition then given first to Dorothea Mackellar (yet telling that her famous poem was written in 1908 and surely knowing that it had great acclaim immediately and long thereafter), and second to Norman Lindsay as a major artist! Whitlam's government is presented in terms of near-total enthusiasm; a chapter on the dismissal has 'The Crown Triumphs' as its title but gives most space to Knightley's hypotheses about the likely involvement of the CIA. In the nature of the case, he insists, formal documentation of any such story is unlikely to exist.

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BIOGRAPHY OF A NATION

Michael Roe

Michael Roe is currently studying the relations between Tasmania and the Commonwealth immediately after Federation.