History

Cultural scholarship is usually contentious, let alone the kinds of scholarship that infer knowledge about the deep past from limited and fragile sources, but points of scholarly consensus around the autochthonous culture of Australia before and during the transitional phase of European ‘contact’ and then European colonisation have emerged and joined over the last 60 years or so to form extraordinary history, a history that Indigenous narrative traditions were always inviting the non-Indigenous imagination to engage with.

Cook appears, in Namatjira’s paintings, a reminder, remainder, corpse, trace, or ghost: a symbol of the repeated and the repeatable, the rule of law, and the law of the father. He signifies the continuity of settler sovereignty in the body of the current Queen, and the continuity of invasion in the form of a constant companion.

Roger Lee’s The Battle of Fromelles and Meleah Hampton’s Attack on the Somme are part of a relatively recent shift in the focus of Australian military history: they revisit big battles on the Western Front, which few works have done since Charles Bean’s Official History (1921-42). It’s as though, inflated with myths of Gallipoli, our Great War literature has had little use for strategic reality. Perhaps it takes a century to get clear of the revulsion aroused by the killing in that war – which Bean blocked out by writing the original romance of it as heroic achievement.

It seems we are living through a near perfect storm of Anzac historical consumption, with a number of factors working in concert. First, Australian historical narratives have been deeply challenged by the emergence and power of Indigenous historical perspectives, especially since the 1970s and 1980s. Australia’s ‘origin story’, once characterised by discovery, nascent democracy and workers’ rights, has been powerfully reimagined by Indigenous writers and rights activists as a narrative of invasion and dispossession.’

‘Dancing with Strangers would have an honoured place in Australian historiography by virtue of the skill, intelligence and literary brilliance of its author alone. It is the product of a lifetime spent interrogating first-encounter texts to reveal and make understandable their hidden truths. But what is most remarkable about the book is the invitation it extends to readers to learn and wonder in the company of such a brilliant historian. ‘

The recent victory of nationalist parties in Hungary and Poland, with their anti-immigrant rhetoric, has emboldened the likeminded in their western neighbours; they eagerly await coming elections while entreating Australia’s hardline refugee policy. They have already set the agenda with Brexit and in the United States, where rightwing populism prevails. Liberal and leftist pundits are plundering European history for analogies to understand these developments, invoking the German template in particular. Is Trump a fascist, indeed a Nazi? Or, if not, at least some (or many) of his supporters? Reading The Vanquished suggests that excessive attention is paid to Hitler and the 1930s, the politics of which were over-determined by the Great Depression. To understand the fragility of parliamentary regimes and the authoritarian appeal, we need to return to the origin of the interwar conflicts in the years covered by this book.’

On 11 October 1848 the Australasian Botanic and Horticultural Society held its inaugural exhibition, in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. The…

Balanced and measured though he is, McPhee is aware that the French Revolution is too vital and controversial an event to be subordinated entirely to a historian’s caution. And it is his less cautious, more assertive comments and explanations which make this book not only a great source for learning about the Revolution, but also, perhaps more interestingly, an intervention in the debates surrounding the Revolution’s causes, conduct and consequences.

On Anzac Day, Australian culture anticipates what it confirms: the sending of long-range military expeditions to encourage and support wars in which British or American forces are engaged. Just as there is no serious parliamentary debate over decisions to go to war in the political culture, no interest in ‘war powers’ reform, which might minimise that power in the executive as there has been in Britain, there is little if any questioning of these issues in Australian literary culture either. As Chris Roberts elegantly concludes, Bean’s romance of Anzac excuses our Gallipoli failure by turning ‘failure into heroic achievement’ – or, we could say, by functioning to institutionalise ignorance of our imperial history in a romance that hides behind the false and misleading glory that the nation was born at Gallipoli.

‘We all have an idea that the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns did not turn out well. Dealing with that failure has after all helped to shape the Australian identity. It has given us the Anzac tradition, which rests on a story of heroism in defeat. In his new book on Churchill and the Dardanelles campaign, Tom Curran gives us a penetrating new account of the inception and failure of those campaigns, and so takes us into areas Australian historians have tended to overlook.’