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The Cambridge History of Australia, Volumes 1 and 2

Article in Australian Historical Studies · September 2014

DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2014.946550

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The Cambridge History of Australia,

Volumes 1 and 2
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Lyndall Ryan
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Published online: 19 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Lyndall Ryan (2014) The Cambridge History of Australia, Volumes 1 and 2,
Australian Historical Studies, 45:3, 452-454, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2014.946550

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 REVIEWS
Books
The Cambridge History of Australia, Volumes 1
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle (Australia)] at 00:47 20 October 2014
and 2.
Edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre.
Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Vol. 1, pp. 636; Vol. 2, pp. 644. A$325.00 cloth.
The appearance of the first Cambridge History of
Australia is a major event in Australian histori-
ography. In 1933 Cambridge University Press
considered Australian history as a small part of
the imperial project and included it with New
Zealand in Volume VII of the Cambridge History of
the British Empire, and Ernest Scott, the volume’s
editor, struggled to find a sufficient number of
Australian historians to contribute key chapters.
Since then the study of Australian history has
come of age and The Cambridge History of Austra-
lia presents an important overview of where the
discipline stands today. The editors, who enjoy
major international reputations as Australian
historians, found no difficulty in enlisting the
‘expertise of 67 historians, across generations
and fields of knowledge, to present a fresh
account of the nation’s past’ (xxvii). Volume 1,
Indigenous and Colonial Australia, addresses Aus-
tralia’s history to federation in 1901, and Vol-
ume 2, The Commonwealth of Australia, considers
the nation’s history since then. Of the sixty-
seven contributors, thirty-two are female and
thirty-five are male, reflecting a marked change
from the solely male contributors to Volume VII
in 1933. A further change is reflected in the
collaborative approach to writing Australia’s
history in that twelve of the twenty-three
chapters in Volume 1 and ten of the twenty-
four chapters in Volume 2 are co-authored. Nor
could all the contributors be considered as
historians. At least two of them are archaeolo-
gists, another is an economist and five others are
better known as political scientists.
How then have the editors managed this
distinguished and diverse group of scholars in
the production of a coherent story of the
nation’s past? To ensure a consistent structure
and approach, the editors have divided each
volume into two parts: the first comprises nar-
rative chapters of each major historical period,
from forty thousand years ago to 2010; and the
second part consists of chapters which illumin-
ate key themes in Australian history, such as
religion, education, society and welfare, class,
the economy, the environment, Indigenous
people, population and health, government,
law and regulation, science and technology,
the media and art and literature. The contribu-
tors begin their chapters with a comprehensive
review of historiographical debates relevant to
their designated period or theme and then refer
solely to published primary and secondary
sources to articulate their argument. Thus the
overall impact is not always a fresh interpreta-
tion of the past but rather an important over-
view of where key debates in Australian history
stand today. On these grounds alone The Cam-
bridge History of Australia will be eagerly read by
students of Australian history in search of clear
narratives and an understanding of how Aus-
tralian history has been constructed.
How then does each volume fulfil its task? I
was enchanted with the connectedness between
the narrative and thematic chapters in Volume 1
and less enamoured with their disconnectedness
in Volume 2. This is not surprising. Volume 1
repositions colonial Australia from a minor
colonial outpost of empire where the Indigenous
inhabitants were the most primitive people on
earth to an important site of nineteenth-century
globalisation and the first Australians a critical
component of modern humanity. The narrative
chapters drive the story and the thematic chap-
ters offer further analysis of key issues. Put
together they provide fresh and exciting ana-
lyses of the Indigenous and colonial periods
which firmly connect them with the present.
In chapter one, Peter Veth and Sue O’Con-
nor show how archaeologists have recon-
structed the Indigenous past from less than ten
thousand years to more than forty thousand
452

years, which in turn coincided with demands by
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for
self-determination and a growing non-Indigen-
ous appreciation of Indigenous cultures. In
chapter three, Emma Christopher and Hamish
Maxwell-Stewart locate the penal colony at
Sydney in 1788 within the history of convict
transportation since 1615, completely overturn-
ing the long-held view that the convicts Britain
transported to Australia were outcasts of empire.
Rather they were an integral part of the imperial
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle (Australia)] at 00:47 20 October 2014
project. In the thematic chapter on law and
regulation, Mark Finnane shows how colonial
law and policing emerged from the long history
of convict transportation and how it shifted and
changed in the Australian colonies to meet new
and diverse challenges such as frontier violence,
goldmining and urbanisation.
In similar vein David Goodman in his
review of the gold rushes of the 1850s positions
them within the mid-nineteenth-century move-
ment of men and ideas associated with global
capitalism. The young miners who came to the
Victorian goldfields, he argues, were the first
generation of educated young white men from
Britain, Europe and North America, who con-
sidered the goldfields of the Anglo-Pacific Rim
such as California, Australia and New Zealand as
international sites of radical discourse in which
new concepts of parliamentary democracy based
on white race supremacy were hotly debated.
Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell further
explore the concepts in their chapter on the
campaigns for colonial self-government. Helen
Irving also considers the federation campaign
within global debates about representative
democracy that would resonate with the repub-
lican convention in the 1990s. Combined with
Melissa Bellanta’s stimulating chapter on the
cultural debates of the 1890s, the reader could
be forgiven for concluding that the major
debates about shaping who we are as Austra-
lians were embedded in the nineteenth century.
The optimism of Volume 1 is largely absent
in Volume 2. Its purpose is to show how the
fledgling nation of 3.8 million people in 1901
became a middle world power of 22.8 million
people in 2010. The narrative chapters largely
explore the operation of the Commonwealth
parliament and how the key prime ministerial
players operated in times of economic and
political crisis such as the Depression and two
world wars, the entry into the world economy
in the 1980s and their response to the global
Reviews: Books 453
financial crisis of 2008. The thematic chapters,
however, tackle more complex issues such as
religion and politics, society and welfare, gender
and sexuality, Indigenous Australians, science
and medicine, culture and media, the economy,
education, the environment, travel and tourism,
as well as Asia-Pacific relations. They offer a
completely different picture of the twentieth
century. The tension between the political nar-
rative and thematic chapters is never resolved.
John Hirst sets the narrative pattern with a
masterful survey of the first decade of the
Commonwealth parliament which laid the
foundations for the nation’s raison d’être for the
next sixty years. Stephen Garton and Peter
Stanley then show how World War I destroyed
the optimism of the first decade with a devast-
ating account of the statistical and emotional
impact of the war on Australians at home and
on the battlefields of the Middle East and
France. The Great War appears to have dam-
pened Australians’ radical spirit. Not even Frank
Bongiorno, who rarely produces a dull word in
whatever he writes, quite succeeds in bringing
the 1930s Depression to life, although Kate
Darian-Smith’s fast-paced chapter on the big
issues of postwar reconstruction spawned by
World War II produces some gems.
After that the political scientists take over
and the broader approach of the earlier narrat-
ive chapters dissipates. Judith Brett’s stylish
account of the Menzies era does not quite
come to grips with Cold War ideology and how
it was unable to sniff the winds of political and
social change of the 1960s. Paul Strangio’s sober
assessment of the 1960s and 1970s, James
Walter’s focus on how the Australian govern-
ment grappled with globalisation in the 1980s
and 1990s and Murray Goot’s attempts to
understand the political complexities of the last
decade result in rather dry dissections of the
political process rather than serious analyses of
key moments in the nation’s postwar history
such as the 1951 Referendum to ban the
Communist Party, the Dismissal of the Whitlam
Government in 1975, the republican convention
of 1997 and the Dark Victory election of 2001.
Above all they avoid comparisons with the past
such as the federation debates on representative
democracy that enlivened Volume 1.
The thematic chapters open out the broader
and far more interesting issues. Graeme Davi-
son’s fine chapter on the sectarian divide
between Catholics and Protestants breathes
 454 Australian Historical Studies, 45, 2014
new life into the debate about the critically
important connections between religion and
politics. The chapter on gender and sexuality
by Katie Holmes and Sarah Pinto also adds
immeasurably to our understanding of the
ongoing tension between sexual desire and
religious faith. Anna Haebich and Steve Kin-
nane painfully illustrate the myriad ways Indi-
genous peoples across Australia sought to claim
their independence from control by govern-
ment, pastoral companies and missions in the
Downloaded by [University of Newcastle (Australia)] at 00:47 20 October 2014
first seventy years of federation and their varied
experiences with government bodies since then.
Simon Ville’s lively chapter on the economy
draws out important differences between large
and small economies across the century, and the
other thematic chapters are very informative
although without having anything particularly
new to say. However, when read as a whole,
they convey a deep sense of disappointment at
opportunities lost.
In the final chapter Mark McKenna provides
an overview of the history profession and its
development since World War II, and it could be
read as an explanation for historians’ disap-
pointment with the present. It could also indic-
ate that as the nation matures they have become
less optimistic and more realistic about the
possibilities of the past which contains so much
unfinished business. Indeed the overall impres-
sion of Australia that is offered by The Cambridge
History of Australia is of a nation still in search of
itself and desperately uncertain of its future.
LYNDALL RYAN
University of Newcastle
© 2014, Lyndall Ryan
Australian History Now.
Edited by Anna Clark and Paul Ashton. Sydney:
New South Publishing, 2013. Pp. 317. A$34.99
paper.
Anna Clark and Paul Ashton have done the
profession a great service by compiling and editing
a rich volume detailing the transformation in
Australian historiography over the past three
decades. Australian History Now sets out to consider
key developments in historical research and writ-
ing as well as the nature and meaning of historical
practice in the early twenty-first century. Its
diverse collection of brief, reflective essays by
some of Australia’s finest historians has more
View publication stats
than accomplished this goal and will become
an indispensable part of libraries for years to
come.
This is a very full but accessible compilation.
Clark and Ashton have produced a useful intro-
ductory essay, which is followed by writing on
Aboriginal history (Peter Read), labour history
(Stuart Macintyre), a feminist voice (Ann
Curthoys), oral history (Alistair Thomson), mil-
itary history (Peter Stanley), history in the
academy (Alan Atkinson), history in schools
(Paul Kiem), history in museums (Mathew
Trinca), the history wars (Anna Clark), public
history (Paul Ashton), history and heritage
(Graeme Davison), community history (Martha
Sear), history and television (Clare Wright),
history and creative writing (Tony Birch), envir-
onmental history (Tom Griffiths), transnational
history (Marilyn Lake) and new cultural history
and the colonial past (Leigh Boucher).
The diversity and breadth of the collection
makes it difficult for the reviewer to select
contributions to comment on. Peter Read’s per-
ceptive analysis of Aboriginal historiography
charts key shifts within the scholarship, from
the studies of frontier violence in the 1970s
informed by the recording of indigenous oral
histories; to stories of survival in the face of
overwhelming odds in the 1980s; to the decade
of hope in the 1990s that witnessed ‘a rejuve-
nated Aboriginal Australia in poetry, autobio-
graphy, fiction and history’ (32). In contrast,
the first decade of the new millennium saw
the mood quickly change, reflecting both the
Howard government’s rejection of reconciliation
and a new preoccupation with uncovering the
stories of the Stolen Generations.
Ann Curthoys has written a wonderfully
engaging autobiographical essay on her evolu-
tion as a historian. Curthoys’ early scholarly
interest in race relations in colonial New South
Wales was augmented by an encounter with
Women’s Liberation in 1970 ‘that changed
everything’ and ‘stimulated a rethink of my
politics, my life and my approach to history’
(58). An early essay from this time, ‘Women’s
Liberation and Historiography’, set out
Curthoys’ initial thoughts on how a focus on
women’s history would transform the writing of
Australian history generally. As the new field of
feminist history came into its own in the 1970s,
Curthoys participated fully as a teacher,
researcher, commentator, theorist and histori-
ographer; and in the 1980s and 1990s,