history
BACKBONE OF NATIONAL NARRATIVE
John Docker
Robert Manne (ed)
The Australian Century: Political Struggle in the Building of a Nation
Text Publishing $24.95pb, 333pp, 1 875847 21 9
WHAT AN EXCELLENT collection of essays on Australian political history this is, admirably assembled and with a lucid introduction by Robert Manne, an associate professor at La Trobe University and a stellar presence in the Australian public sphere of commentary and debate. It is an ideal book for its intended audience of high school students and early-years undergraduates. The students will learn a great deal from it, indeed it will be a life-forming experience. They'll learn this: 'Political history is the backbone of every national narrative.' They'll learn that only men can write political history and that political history is only about men. I was myself deeply influenced here. I had lazily thought that there were quite a few political historians and political scientists who were women, were prominent in the field, and were bringing to the scene newperspectives, entertaining narratives, differently organised collections. Before this book I had been happy to know some of them. But it appears there are so few political historians of any gender in Australia that one contributor, John Hirst, found himself having to contribute two chapters to the volume.
The students will learn from these essays how to write model political history. It is impersonal (never use the 'I' voice, never situate yourself in time and space and current controversies, never draw attention to yourself as a narrator, as a character in the story being told), authoritative, certain, unshadowed by negative capability, by the pathos of doubt. The students will learn that the political historian is master of the field he lordly surveys, indeed he knows 'the very heart of the matter'. The political historian is judicious, secure in possession of the facts, truth, reality and actuality of the past, yet also given to sudden, often violent, judgments on the moral character of people he has never met and who existed long ago. The one-time Queensland premier E.G. Theodore, the students will learn, 'was a prosperous, intelligent and well-read man'; Chifley revealed 'genial warmth, sense, wit, intelligence and apparent sincerity', though he 'could also be vindictive and spiteful'; Billy Hughes was 'clever, eloquent and unscrupulous'; Dr Evatt had a 'devious mind'. The students will consequently learn that the political historian is in full possession of real sincerity, warmth, wit, sanity, sense, probity, intelligence, scruples, and wide reading: how otherwise could he so confidently, freely, unerringly judge?
The students will learn that the political historian writes in a strong, muscular, manly way. They can infer this invaluable lesson from Allan W. Martin's chapter 'The Politics of the Depression', which refers admiringly to a secessionist movement in Western Australia in the 1930s as 'virile'. The students will learn something very interesting from 'The Split', by Robert Murray, who tells them that members of the mid-century Communist Party were 'fanatical in their belief' and their 'strategy' was 'laid down from Moscow'. The Catholic Church, however, even in The Movement, was apparently not fanatical, and only 'sensitive Protestants had looked on Catholic Action as an organ for aggressive Vatican intervention in Australian affairs'. The students will learn from this wise comment not to be overly sensitive about the Vatican apparently interfering in Australian society in the year of 1999 by banning a Sydney order of nuns from administering to Christ's constituency, the outcast and ignored.