John
Hirst
Sense and Nonsense
in Australian History
Black Inc., $34.95
pb, 325 pp, 097507699X
JOHN
HIRST is a throwback.
I don’t mean in
his political views,
but in his sense of
his duty as an historian.
He belongs to a tradition
which, in this country,
goes back to the 1870s
and 1880s, when the
Australian colonies
began to feel the influence
of German ideas about
the right relationship
between the humanities
and the state. But it
is a tradition increasingly
hard to maintain. Under
this rubric, both his-torians
and public servants
are meant to be a source
of critical and constructive
argument about present
events and the destiny
of the nation. Henry
Parkes was an historian
of sorts, and he was
happy to spend government
money on the underpinnings
of historical scholarship
in Australia. The Historical
Records of New South
Wales was one obvious
result, and that effort,
in itself, involved
close cooperation between
bureaucrats and scholars.
Alfred Deakin was likewise
a man of considerable
scholarship (and more
sophisticated than Parkes),
whose reading shaped
his ideas about national
destiny, and who nourished
a similar outlook at
the bureau-cratic level.
In a later generation,
that great Australian
historian Keith Hancock
clearly thought of his
work as a form of public
service. He always wrote
as if he knew that his
words, including trenchant
criticism, would help
to shape national policy
— that they would
be useful to men and
women in power. In the
1940s and 1950s he helped
to found the Australian
National University
as an intellectual powerhouse
tied to government.
‘Nugget’ Coombs
might stand as an equivalent
public servant —
far-seeing and hard-hitting,
and valued by both sides
of politics. Especially
during those two great
periods of nation-building,
the late nineteenth
century and the decades
following World War
II, historians and public
servants had a considerable
respect for each other’s
work, partly because
they acknowledged similar
responsibilities. But
now, at a time when
the word ‘nation’
is on everybody’s
lips — national
identity, national maturity,
national medal tally
— intelligent thought
about the nation is
much more lightly valued.
Historians are abused
for writing critically
about the Australian
past. For their part,
public servants don’t
even pretend to large-minded
independent thought.
The picture is not entirely
bleak. Many curators
in government-funded
museums offer (when
they are left alone)
power-ful critical analysis
of the long-term evolution
of the nation, all the
more important because
they speak directly
to the popu-lation at
large. So-called ‘third-stream
funding’ is also
very promising. The
Linkage programme of
the Australian Research
Council funds scholars
to work in close cooperation
with various commercial,
public and community
bodies. It is a brilliant
scheme (largely unnoticed
by critics of government
funding for the humanities),
and it helps in giving
a long-term dimension
to many projects of
public importance in
the city and the bush.
From an economic rationalist
point of view, this
means a fair return
to tax-payers. From
a civilised point of
view, it means harnessing
scholarship to public
policy.
And yet, the number
of first-class historians
who write as if they
are communicating with
government, and with
a fair hope of making
an impact at a national
level, is too small.
Hirst takes the idea
of the nation very seriously,
and sees his scholarship
as a basic contribution
to its future. However,
even this book —
a collection of his
most important essays
and learned articles
since 1975 — shows
how hard it is under
present circumstances
for Australian historians
to make a useful impact
at that level, while
still being true to
their trade. Even the
most likely academic
voice is partly distorted
as it struggles to make
itself heard.
For one thing, it is
now hard to be taken
seriously in the wider
world without being
aggressively one-eyed.
This may be why, at
the outset of this book,
Hirst describes himself
as a ‘controversialist-cum-historian’.
His title, Sense
and Nonsense in Australian
History, carries
the same message, but
it is an accurate label
only for the weaker
parts of the book, where
he goes out of his way
to look like a fighter.
In fact, if the ‘history
wars’ have done
anything useful, it
is to expose the problems
involved in being an
effective controversialist
and a good historian
at the same time. The
difficulty is sharply
increased when the basic
terms of the controversy
are set, not by historians
themselves but by others
— and, of course,
it’s the press,
especially the Australian,
that now pretends to
set the historical agenda
for the nation. Some
time ago, Luke Slattery,
writing in that newspaper,
even claimed that in
future it would be journalists,
not scholars, who posed
all the big ideas. Of
course journalists do,
and have done, mightily
important work: think
of Deakin, who wrote
for The Age;
think of John West,
David Syme and so on.
But none of these demanded
the kind of monopoly
some in the press now
aspire to. In a single
stroke, the authority
of intellectual life
is undermined and individual
scholars are signed
up for other people’s
wars.
Hirst can be a powerful
controversialist, just
as he can be a brilliant
historian. But his two
roles sometimes get
in each other’s
way. He says in his
preface: ‘For over
twenty years I have
been quarrelling in
print with standard
left-liberal views of
Australian history.’
Here, as a controver-sialist,
he overstates the case
for a ‘standard
view’. His ‘left-liberal’
orthodoxy is typified,
he says, by Russel Ward,
Robin Gollan and Ian
Turner. Hirst himself
is a gradu-ate of Adelaide
and Melbourne, and,
at least from my perspective
(sitting halfway between
Sydney and Brisbane),
he sees the ‘standard
view’ with narrowly
southern eyes. Had he
been a product of Sydney
University, his category
of ‘left-liberal’
would have needed stretching
somehow to include John
Ward and, as our old
authorities in print,
A.C.V. Melbourne and
Stephen Roberts. They
were ‘liberal’,
but not ‘left’.
In other words, there
is a sense in which
Hirst’s quarrel
has a provincial focus
rather than a national
one. It has been cast
in national terms mainly
because Quadrant and
the Australian want
it that way.
Reading on, we almost
immediately get a more
complicated picture.
Hirst is indeed opposed
also to ‘liberal’
understandings in the
old-fashioned sense.
His argument about the
causes of Australian
Federation, summarised
in the introduction
(and detailed in his
book, The Sentimental
Nation: The Making of
the Australian Commonwealth,
2000), sets aside the
old liberal view, which
stressed commercial
motivations, so as to
push the case for nationalist
sentiment. A chapter
on multiculturalism,
written in 1990, carries
this logic forward —
surely to the extreme
limit. The enemies here
are the ‘exponents
of multiculturalism’,
who, he says, ‘are
now developing an absurdist
history of Australia’.
The book has no footnotes,
and only one scholar
(not an historian) is
named. Many readers,
recalling the previous
chapter, might conclude
that the ‘absurdists’
(my term) are the intellectual
progeny of Ward, Gollan
and Turner — all
proponents of the ‘standard
view’. Controversy
nourishes such silliness.
There are problems of
a different kind with
Hirst’s chapter
on what used to be called
‘women’s history’.
The whole approach is
sceptical. He concedes
to the ‘feminist
historians’ much
‘valuable work
which no historian can
ignore’. But what
is surely the most valuable
work of all, that mass
of energy justly called
the ‘new enlightenment’,
he himself ignores —
almost, it seems, deliberately.
This is strange because
some of its concerns
and insights overlap
with his own. Actually,
there are some good
portraits of what might
be called ‘the
sentimental nation’
that draw on a gendered
understanding of late-nineteenth-century
life and thought, by
Marilyn Lake, for instance.
I wish there was more
room to say nice things
about the book —
to list all the evidence
of Hirst’s originality
of thought, his courage
and clear moral sense.
His piece on the ‘pioneer
legend’, about
the sense of patriotic
tradition that was fundamental
throughout Australia
from the late nineteenth
century, is one of the
most important articles
Historical Studies
has ever published.
Thirty years on, it
has a continuing usefulness,
and the slant it offers
on the broad trajectory
of the Australian story
remains important. His
argument for ‘the
sentimental nation’,
as another aspect of
late colonial patriotism,
is not wholly convincing,
because the main evidence
is a bunch of poems,
but his fundamental
question — what
if emotion was the fundamental
cause of Federation?
— is bold and important.
It is especially inn-ovative
in focusing on men’s
emotions (though he
doesn’t state the
case like that himself).
In much of Hirst’s
writing, there is a
driving search for simplicity,
for a way around intellectual
abstractions and for
the merely human, and
the result can be very
rich.
For the moment, the
flaws in his approach
are more intriguing.
In parts of this book
(and in his Strange
Birth of Colonial Democracy,
1988), Hirst identifies
Australia’s ‘democracy
of manners’. By
this he means an egalitarianism
manifest predominantly
in the way people deal
with each other in daily
life. Created mainly,
he says, in the 1880s
and 1890s, it still
exists, as a form of
civility fundamental
to Australian culture,
and therefore fundamental
to the national constitution
(meaning ‘constitution’
in the widest sense).
But the argument is
too loose-ended. What
is the relationship
between Australian national
sentiment and Australian
civility? What about
other forms of solidarity?
With such shaky underpinning,
sometimes the scholarship
comes unstuck. For instance,
Hirst says that in the
late nineteenth century
the Catholic bishops
set up their own schools
because they didn’t
understand how good
Australia was. Deluded
by their Irish experience,
they thought that government
schools were designed
‘to undermine their
faith’. Here, he
badly underrates Catholic
understanding and the
real threat posed to
spiritual life by secular
habits and ideas. In
fact, he sounds like
the more facile kind
of multiculturalist
— the kind who
thinks that spiritual
loyalties are, or ought
to be, no more than
one thread in the rich
tapestry of the modern
nation. It is possible
to take the nation too
seriously.
Excessive seriousness
has real risks. The
only chapter written
especially for this
publication is called
‘How Sorry Can
We Be?’, and it
deals with indigenous
issues. Hirst, it hardly
needs saying, dismisses
Keith Windschuttle’s
logic about the number
of Aboriginal deaths
on the frontier. On
the other hand, Hirst
condemns the High Court
judgment in Mabo
(1992). There may be
good reasons for doing
that, but Hirst’s
are not good. He describes
the judgment as one
based on ‘liberal
fantasy’, meaning
the notion that the
British acquisition
of Australia could have
been achieved without
damage to the indigenous
people. The judges,
in other words, should
have understood that
the civilisation of
which they were a part
was only possible because
of numerous Aboriginal
deaths, and, armed with
that understanding,
should have withheld
their condemnation of
‘past injustices’.
Genuine critical thought,
with discrete moral
and intellectual priorities,
has apparently been
outlawed among public
servants. Historians
who try it are also
supposed to be wasting
public money. But surely,
in this respect, the
courts of law are safe?
Their ancient, arcane
methods still have an
unfailing momentum and
purpose. They still
stand for some-thing
beyond immediate prejudice.
Nevertheless, Hirst
sug-gests that justice
ought to be defined,
not according to strictly
legal criteria, but
according to its impact
on the nation. Aboriginal
deaths were necessary,
he says. Therefore the
killing was not unjust.
There couldn’t
be a better proof that
taking the nation too
seriously can hit at
the heart of what the
nation is really for.
It almost seems pretentious
to suggest that the
historical profession
ought to be as self-sufficient
in its intellectual
agenda, and therefore
as useful, as a court
of law. But if that
does seem pretentious,
it only shows how badly
off track we are.
