Cultural History in Australia

CULTURAL HISTORY IN AUSTRALIA

Hsu-Ming Teo is a post-doctoral research fellow at Macquarie University, where she lectures in history. She has published on travel writing, imperialism and popular literature, and is currently working on the culture of romantic love in Australia. In 1999 she won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her novel, Love and Vertigo, which was published in 2000. Richard White teaches in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of the landmark study Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (1981) and co-editor with Penny Russell of Memories and Dreams: Reflections on twentieth-century Australia: Pastiche 2 (1997) and co-editor with Ros Pesman and David Walker of The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing (1996).

CULTURAL HISTORY IN AUSTRALIA

EDITED BY

Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White

UNSW PRESS

A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © UNSW Press 2003 First published 2003 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in UNSW Press, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Cultural history in Australia. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 589 2. 1. Australia – Historiography. 2. Australia – Civilization – Historiography. I. White, Richard, 1951– . II. Teo, Hsu-Ming, 1970– . 994.0072

Cover Di Quick Mindfields: pool. Acrylic, mixed media, found objects on paper, 50 cm x 100 cm Printer Griffin Press

CONTENTS

1

Contributors

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White

1

PA RT O N E • I N G E N E R A L …

2

Cultural history and the nation Ann Curthoys

22

3

‘He filled us full of laughter’: contact and community in Australian experience Alan Atkinson

38

4

On the defensive: poststructuralism and Australian cultural history Stephen Garton

52

5

The nature of culture and the culture of nature Tom Griffiths

67

6

Memory studies and cultural history Paula Hamilton

81

7

On being a white man, Australia, circa 1900 Marilyn Lake

98

8

Cultural transmissions Richard Waterhouse

113

9

Performances: indigenisation and postcolonial culture Jan Kociumbas

10 Multiculturalism and the problem of multicultural histories: an overview of ethnic historiography Hsu-Ming Teo

127 142

PA RT T WO • I N PA R T I C U L A R …

11 Cultures of distinction Penny Russell

158

12 ‘In spite of it all, the garden still stands’: gardens, landscape and cultural history Katie Holmes

172

13 Creating the white colonial woman: Mary Gaunt’s imperial adventuring and Australian cultural history Angela Woollacott

186

14 ‘The Empire was a bar of soap’: life stories and race identity among British emigrants travelling to Australia, 1945–1971 Alistair Thomson

201

15 Making the ordinary extraordinary in the 1950s: explorations of interiority and Australian cultural history Joy Damousi

214

16 Culture is talk. Living is story. Greg Dening

226

Notes

236

Index

265

CONTRIBUTORS

Alan Atkinson teaches Australian history at the University of New England. The first volume of his study, The Europeans in Australia: A History, was published in 1997, and the second volume is due for publication in 2003. His work on the importance of orality in Australian experience, The Commonwealth of Speech, appeared in March 2002. Ann Curthoys is Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. She has published widely on aspects of Australian history, including indigenous history; racial thought and race relations; women’s history; television and journalism. She has also written about historical writing, feminist theory and national identity. Her book, Freedom Ride: An Australian Journey, was published in September 2002. Her current projects include a study of the historical experts and the Australian Federal Court, and a book with John Docker, Is history fiction? Joy Damousi is an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent publications include The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999) and Living With the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post War Australia (2001). She is currently writing Freud in the Antipodes, a history of psychoanalysis in Australia. Greg Dening is the writer of some dozen books, which he would like to think of as ‘double-visioned’ histories of Oceania. In his retirement, he is Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University. He ‘adjuncts’ by offering a series of workshops for postgraduates from all disciplines and all universities in Australia. The series is called ‘Challenges to Perform’ and is concerned with the creative imagination in the presentation of scholarly knowledge.

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Stephen Garton holds a Personal Chair in History at the University of Sydney and is the author of Medicine and Madness (1988), Out of Luck (1990), The Cost of War (1996) and numerous articles on crime, eugenics, madness and social welfare. He is currently writing a book on Histories of Sexuality: From Ancient Greece to Sexual Revolution. Tom Griffiths is a Senior Fellow in the History Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra. His books include Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996) and Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (2001). Paula Hamilton is Associate Professor of History and University Reader at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has worked on a number of public history projects for libraries, museums and government authorities, and co-edits the journals Public History Review and Locality. She has published widely in the field of memory studies/cultural history and is currently completing a new book on memory and popular culture in Australia. Katie Holmes began exploring the field of cultural history in her work on Australian women’s diaries (Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s, 1995). After a brief foray into the meanings of singleness at the turn of the twentieth century, she turned her attention to Australian women’s gardens and, with Sue Martin, is currently working on a cultural history of public and private gardens in Australia, 1788–1965. She teaches History and Women’s Studies at La Trobe University. Jan Kociumbas has taught in and is now Honorary Associate of the Department of History at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Possessions, 1770–1860 and Australian Childhood: A History, which is volume two in the Oxford History of Australia, and an editor of Maps, Dreams, History: Race and Representation in Australia. Marilyn Lake holds a Chair in History at Latrobe University. Between 2001 and 2002 she held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University in the United States. Her work on the history of gender, race, citizenship and the nation has been published in several international anthologies, including Joan Scott, ed., Feminism and History (1996), Clare Midgley ed., Gender and Imperialism (1998) and Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (2000). Her most recent book is Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (2002).

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Penny Russell is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sydney, where her teaching and research interests span nineteenth-century Australian and British history, with a particular interest in gender and the culture of imperialism. She is at work on a biographical study of Jane Franklin, traveller and wife of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin; one aspect of that research was recently published by the National Library of Australia as This Errant Lady. Hsu-Ming Teo is a post-doctoral research fellow at Macquarie University, where she lectures on history. She completed a PhD on British women travellers and is currently finishing a book on colonialism, race and the mass-market romance novel. She has started an Australia Research Council project on the culture of romantic love in Australia. Alistair Thomson is working on a book with Jim Hammerton, Ten Pound Poms – The Invisible Migrants: A Life History of Post-war Migration from Britain to Australia. Al’s other publications include Anzac Memories (1994) and, with Rob Perks, The Oral History Reader (1998). He is Director of the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Sussex. Richard Waterhouse is Professor of History and Head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Studies at the University of Sydney. He is the author of four books on aspects of United States and Australian social and cultural history: A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670–1770; From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914; The Principal Club: A History of the Australian Jockey Club (with Martin Painter); and Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788. Richard White teaches History at the University of Sydney, where he initiated and continues to teach a course on Australian cultural history. He is the author of Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (1981) and co-editor of Pastiche (1994); Memories and Dreams (1997) and the Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing (1996). He has published numerous articles on aspects of Australian cultural history, war, national identity and travel. He is currently working on travelling identities, on the Australian holiday and on the limits of nationalism. Angela Woollacott is a Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Her publications include On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (1994) and

To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (2001). She is currently working on a book about how scholarship on gender has transformed historical understanding of the modern British Empire, to be called Gender and the Politics of Empire.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank Penny Russell and Paula Hamilton for their valuable comments on the project and earlier drafts of the introduction; their colleagues and students at Macquarie and Sydney Universities, who are always a stimulus to research; Heather Jamieson for her patient and perceptive editing; and Robin Derricourt, Phillipa McGuinness and Mary Halbmeyer for their faith in the project. Last but not least, we would like to thank all the authors who contributed to this book; the enthusiasm, time and thought put into various chapters are much appreciated.

1 INTRODUCTION HSU-MING TEO AND RICHARD WHITE

Cultural history is fashionable today, probably the most fashionable of history’s many approaches. It has taken over that role, first from political history and then from social history, as the all-embracing form of explanation of the past; standing for what might otherwise be known as ‘general history’ or even just ‘history’. When historians set out to write the history of everything, these days they are most likely to imagine themselves writing cultural history. When did this trend develop? Perhaps we can see the emergence of cultural history as the dominant mode of historical understanding in a rather curious publishing incident. In 1975 Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made America, a history of the impact of Hollywood on American life, was published with the sub-title: ‘A Social History of American Movies’. The following year, it was republished with the subtitle: ‘A Cultural History of American Movies’.1 Sklar had not changed his mind about what he was doing; he had always regarded his work as a cultural history and he insisted on the corrected title with the second publication. What is interesting is that in 1975, such work was still widely regarded as ‘social history’, so it was published and marketed as such. By 1976, however, the publishing industry recognised that ‘cultural history’ was becoming the new catchy and marketable phrase which encapsulated Sklar’s work. Is there a difference, then, between ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ history? Does the distinction rest on subject matter or methodological treatment? And how are they related to each other and to other modes of history? These are questions which this introduction explores in order to provide a general background to the following chapters on Australian cultural history in this volume. The practice of cultural history in Australia is undoubtedly influenced by international trends, such as the

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French Annales school of social and cultural history, the Birmingham school of cultural studies, or the North American focus on poststructuralist influenced theories of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and the postcolonial condition. Yet the kinds of cultural history we produce in Australia – the methodologies we utilise, the topics we study and the issues that preoccupy us – are inevitably most influenced by our fellow historians and postgraduate students – usually working within the Australian university system. Cultural History in Australia provides a taste of the diversity of subject matter and theoretical approaches currently employed by historians working in or around the area of Australian history today. There have been other valuable works on Australian popular culture, and an ongoing journal, Australian Cultural History.2 What we have tried to do in this volume, however, is to provide a snapshot of the discipline at the start of the 21st century. We looked for historiographical pieces which provided an overview of the practice of Australian cultural history from various theoretical or methodological perspectives; reflective pieces which discussed the uses and limits of theory and provided concrete examples; or case studies which drew upon the historian’s area of specialty but which also demonstrated critically and systematically the ideas and/or agendas which influenced this particular approach to writing cultural history. We were not interested in sketching out a uniform approach to cultural history; rather, we wished to convey the rich diversity of subject matter, methodologies and perspectives – even when these conflict. Cultural history has been flourishing in Australia for over two decades now, and we felt that it was time to take stock of the discipline, to consider – especially in this chapter – its fashionability as a historical event or phenomenon. To understand this rise to its new status requires us to engage in some cultural history ourselves. To ask why one way of thinking about things becomes prominent at a particular time is itself pre-eminently a question for the cultural historian. Now, the question could be approached in a number of ways. We could see it as essentially a political phenomenon, driven by academic and intellectual power structures, the increasing professionalisation of academe and the rise of identity politics. The interest in histories of, for example, women, blacks, indigenous peoples, and gays and lesbians, came as much from the demands of different groups of students for recognition and inclusion as from the political agendas of particular historians. Secondly, we could see this trend as a social one, reflecting the demands of social groups which grew up with a new relationship to the consumer economy. These were groups defining themselves as niches distinct from the ‘mainstream’. In

INTRODUCTION

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constructing a group identity, they looked towards the ‘discovery’ or construction of group history in order to legitimate their existence as a social entity. Or we could find a cultural explanation within a postmodern splintering of ‘identity’ which is suspicious of grand explanatory narratives; instead understanding ‘identity’ as plural, fluid, self-referential and even playful. As the university has expanded to include a more diverse student body, interest in questions of identity and representation have intensified. What all this suggests is that there are at least two ways of defining cultural history: as a subject for history, or an approach to history. That is, as a branch of history that takes ‘culture’ as its subject, or one that takes a ‘culturalist’ approach to history. But even a ‘culturalist’ approach depends on an underlying assumption of the nature or content of ‘culture’; yet this, as all cultural historians, sociologists and anthropologists recognise, is one of the most difficult words to define. Raymond Williams, in his marvellous ‘cultural history’ of ‘keywords’ in the English language, saw culture as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language … because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought’.3 Williams traced different understandings of ‘culture’ beginning with the fifteenth-century usage of the word to denote the tending of livestock or agriculture. From these origins we have inherited vague notions of the culture of the people – whether folk culture, peasant culture or ‘popular culture’ – as something both organic and cultivated. A second meaning associates ‘culture’ with the intellectual and artistic achievements such as music, literature, painting, sculpture and so on. Until the twentieth century this meaning was associated with ‘high’ culture, but thereafter it was also used to signify popular, mass-market culture. A third definition of culture springing from the Enlightenment aligned human civilisations along a cultural scale, with European culture at the apex of civilisation. This view was challenged by a fourth notion which sees ‘cultures’ in the plural as the distinct ways of life, shared values and meanings of various social groups. This is often referred to as the anthropological definition of culture. And finally, in the late twentieth century an understanding of culture has developed which sees culture as the production and exchange of meanings, how we make sense of the world, particularly through language. While Williams provided a number of different understandings of culture, Greg Dening has counted 366 extant definitions – a surfeit of significations indeed! What, then, is cultural history and where did it come from?

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T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L S C E N E In western Europe the term ‘cultural history’ originally drew upon Williams’s second definition, referring to the study of the artistic or intellectual products of ‘high’ culture. It was, however, intimately connected to the Eurocentric view of civilisation, for it was often part of the teleological history of ‘Western civilisation’ which began in the ancient world (focusing on Greco-Roman ‘civilisation’ as opposed to other groups’ ‘barbarism’), progressed through a splendid Renaissance – when many of the first cultural histories were written – and marched unstoppably on to triumphant ‘modernity’. Histories of language, literature, art, religious doctrines and biographies of artists and writers began to be written in the fifteenth century and were followed by histories of music, medicine, mathematics and the sciences.4 By the end of the eighteenth century, there was a general awareness that all these various aspects of social life were interconnected; part of the ‘culture’ of society. The great nineteenth-century historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt, saw his subject in terms of the values, rituals and beliefs of a society. The things he studied – not only painting and literature, but festivals, funerals, weddings, manners, morality, popular religion – are identical to the areas of life many cultural historians would consider today. Thus the cultural history that takes culture as its subject is nothing really new. For Burckhardt, however, modernity had its roots in the political character of the states he considered. Although his subject was culture, the explanatory framework he gave it was that of political history. (What is new about contemporary cultural history, by contrast, is that, following the ‘cultural turn’, culture has become not only a subject for historians but an approach to history; it is now treated as a framework for explaining all aspects of the past.) Increasingly, political history came to dominate the commonsensical understanding of ‘history’ and by the end of the nineteenth century the main focus of academic historical writing was fixed on the nation-state and its activities. The development of particular forms of cultural life were linked to the development of the nation-state and its peculiar identity. In many cases, such as Macaulay’s or Acton’s histories of England, cultural history was relegated to a self-contained chapter on ‘culture’ or customs. Others such as Frederick Jackson Turner and the American ‘progressive’ historians turned to cultural life to explain the distinctive character of their society and nation,5 but with the rise of Rankean history, the discipline began to be conceptualised as a ‘social science’ in which the political and economic principles governing society could be discerned. In the first half of the twentieth century, cultural

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history was virtually abandoned to amateurs or left to other academic disciplines (‘literary studies’ in England and sociology in Germany) while professional historians turned their attention to the ‘hard facts’ of political, constitutional, military and diplomatic history. This resulted in narrative histories of ‘great men’ and ‘great events’. With the growth of Marxist and economic history from the interwar years onwards, narrative history was supplemented by analytical histories drawing from abstract economic principles. In many ways the marginalisation of cultural history was not a surprising development given the tumultuous events that marked the first half of the twentieth century: imperial conflicts around the world, the two world wars, global revolutionary activity in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the crumbling of European empires and the mushrooming of new nation-states largely based on ethnic nationalism. Economic crises and industrial disputes in the 1920s were followed by the worldwide Depression which exacerbated the proliferation of both left- and right-wing extremist politics in the 1930s. This was an era when identity could truly be said to be pegged to class status and political ideologies. Little wonder, then, that in the political, economic, ideological and military unrest of the time, historians should have focused precisely on these particular aspects of the past rather than on ‘culture’. And given the vastly different cultures of those regions in which revolutionary activity and anti-imperial protest broke out, perhaps cultural activity did seem self-evidently to belong to the ‘superstructure’ (in Marxist terms) or to be an effect of ‘the market’ (in liberal economic terms) at that time. Although the conception of history as a social science continued to dominate the post-World War II era, the second half of the twentieth century saw a gradual democratisation of the discipline. It was no coincidence that this occurred when social movements sprang up calling for the democratisation of western societies, and for constitutional rights to be translated into tangible legal and occupational rights. From the late 1950s onwards there was a gradual shift of attention from political and social elites to various social groups which had been disadvantaged in one way or another. Histories of the working classes, women, blacks, indigenous peoples and immigrants proliferated during the 1960s and 1970s: two decades which witnessed global civil rights movements, student protests, union activity, the feminist movement and – in North America and Australia – indigenous rights movements. The emphasis of the new ‘social history’ fell heavily on the social categories set out by the founders of sociology and social theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. Historical investigation turned to ‘society’ and

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the elements that apparently constituted it: social groups, social movements, social ideologies, and the ‘culture’ of societies. Religious, demographic, legal, criminal and financial records were mined for evidence. Historical writing shifted from narratives of causation to analyses of social and economic structures. By the end of the 1970s, the three inescapable categories of historical analysis were posited as class, gender and race, while individuals and social groups were by turns represented as ‘victims’ or ‘agents’ of their own history. Individual motivation and action were located within a ‘social context’ shaped by economic and political forces. It has been argued that the rise to prominence of social history was brought about by the work of the Annales historians on the one hand, and by historians grappling with the problems of Marxist theory on the other.6 The journal Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations was founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. The subtitle (retained until January 1994) indicated a move away from political history and a turn towards interdisciplinary methodologies, particularly those of geography, anthropology, economics and demography. An anthropological notion of an all-embracing ‘culture’ subsumed entities which had largely been treated separately until that point: the state, the market, religion, and the arts. It was not until the postwar period that the Annales historians moved from the margins of French and European history to become one of the leading institutions of the profession. In an astute summary which applies as much to the social preoccupations of the 1960s and 1970s as to historical research produced then, Willem Frijhof comments that Otherness, resistance, or obstruction with regard to the established rules were the privileged themes of social history: strikes, rebellion, revolution, magic, witchcraft, prophecy, anarchy, deviance, folly, unruly behaviour, popular culture, the world turned upside down, prenuptial sexuality, cross-dressing, crime, heresy, mysticism, and even religion itself.7

The attitude towards the past on the part of the new postwar generation of protesting students, blacks, women, indigenous peoples, peace and nuclear disarmament campaigners, as well as historians, was ‘one of estrangement’. The anthropological gaze – for so long trained on the culture of colonised Others – was now directed at the past, which was, in the words of one historian, ‘a foreign country’.8 Most Annales historians turned their attention to the social, economic and cultural life of Fernand Braudel’s conjoncture – the ‘medium term’ comprising a few decades to a century, apparently aligned with the rhythms of social life and demographic changes. In focusing on

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common culture, however, individual agency largely disappeared and underlying social, economic and environmental structures came to occupy centre stage. This was what later generations of Annales scholars protested against: it was no use knowing what the cultural life of past societies consisted of unless one could also understand how it was experienced. Later generations thus added the exploration of belief structures, patterns of everyday thought and social mores – mentalités – to the ambitious Annales program to write the ‘total history’ of society. Their approach to the history of consciousness was intended to open up the existential, experiential aspects of ordinary life to historical understanding, and they began to rely heavily on sources such as art, folklore and customs to construct a picture of past mentalities. In this approach they paralleled similar historiographical developments in Germany (Alltagsgeschichte: the history of everyday life) and Italy (microstoria: the ‘microhistory’ of the ordinary people) during the 1970s. These historiographical developments arose in opposition to social science approaches which had neglected the experience of ordinary people as much as traditional political history which focused on the wealthy and powerful. Many microstoria historians, like their British counterparts, had begun as Marxist historians and later moved into methodologies which challenged the ‘macrohistorical’ concerns of conventional Marxist history: industrialisation, class struggle, modernisation and imperialism. In Britain the turn towards social history was spurred by a growing discomfort and dissatisfaction with existing political and economic Marxist explanations of historical events and present-day circumstances. Marxist accounts of history had deflected away the focus on individual agency to emphasise economic structures and class struggle instead. ‘Culture’ was largely relegated to the ‘superstructure’ and regarded especially by the Frankfurt School9 as fulfilling a political function. Crudely put, ‘high’ culture was seen as having the potential to jolt people out of their complacency to challenge the oppressive structure of society, whereas popular or ‘mass-market’ culture produced and propagated by capitalist industry was regarded as the evil anodyne of the masses, distracting their attention through mindless entertainment and lulling them into dull acceptance of the status quo. Marxist understandings of culture thus lay in the political and economic realms, rather than regarding culture itself as a source of historical explanation. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the turn towards ‘culture’ was meant to explain why socialist revolutions had not yet occurred in advanced industrial societies; why the social, political and economic institutions of capitalism enjoyed a remarkable resilience and support even from subordinated groups. The aim was also to rediscover the cultural roots of resistance and

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dissent among disadvantaged classes and to celebrate the ‘folk culture’ of ordinary people. There was an apparent confluence of these developments together with the international impulse to democratise history; to move the focus of historical studies from the ‘centre’ of power to the ‘margins’ – particularly the cultures and experiences of the disadvantaged and exploited, and those who did not conform to established norms. There is little doubt that E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) made the greatest impact on anglophone social and cultural history. Prior to Thompson’s work, the history of the working classes was usually associated with political or labour histories of guilds, labour movements and institutions, the effects of industrialisation on work patterns, working conditions and prominent labour and political leaders. Thompson pioneered the process of writing ‘history from below’ to look at how ordinary workers drew from their particular cultural roots in order to make sense of their experience of class and work, and to create a collective political identity which would serve to advance their interests. Class was no longer a ‘structure’ or a ‘category’, but something that was created in the course of human relationships, mediated through shared culture. Feminist historians followed suit in the late 1960s, producing political biographies of feminist leaders, female labour leaders and women’s working conditions. Then, from the mid-1970s onwards, the trajectory of the feminist movement led historians to espouse the private sphere as a domain equally worthy and urgently in need of historiographical attention. The feminist battle-cry that ‘the personal is political’ also underpinned studies showing that historical inequalities in the public sphere were inextricably linked to gender relations in the private sphere. Cultural beliefs about ‘femininity’ and ‘the role of women’ became of crucial historical importance, intersecting with class structures, even as women’s culture began to be examined for its instances of solidarity and resistance to ‘patriarchy’. As the 1970s wore on, however, the commonsensical nature of social categories – even ‘society’ itself – began to break down under the onslaught of the new politics of identity and differentiation. Bonnell and Hunt point out that Because they assumed that social context and social attributes gave much of modern Western life its decipherable meaning, historical sociologists and social historians spent much more time studying the effects of social position and social interrelationships than they did querying the meaning or operation of social categories themselves.10

The boundaries or limits of ‘society’ were rarely examined, for ‘society’ was presumed to be coterminous with the perimeter of the nation-state.

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Thus histories were written of ‘Australian society’, ‘American society’, ‘French society’, and so on. Yet grass-roots politics of the late 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that ‘society’ was fragmented into a plurality of different interest groups based on a dizzying variety of criteria: wealth, work, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, leisure activities and consumption. Increasingly, the emphasis on universal categories such as class and gender began to give way to an exploration of how social entities such as class, or ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ came about historically; how meaning was created, propagated, received and transformed. ‘Social’ history mutated quietly into ‘cultural’ history, but this was not a resurgence of the earlier history of ‘high’ cultural artefacts. By the 1970s ‘culture’ in the anglophone academy was being used in the anthropological sense to mean social practices, beliefs and productions. At this point, two hitherto separate lines of research began to converge, especially in British social sciences and humanities. The increasing interest in ‘popular culture’ came from both history and literary studies, giving rise to the embryonic Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. The legendary origin of (British) cultural studies putatively begins in Britain in the late 1950s with the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, workingclass Oxbridge scholars who had been trained in modernist Leavisite literary criticism and who, like E. P. Thompson in the early 1960s, turned their analytical skills to dissecting traditional working-class culture and contrasting this with popular, mass-market culture. Hoggart became the founding director of the CCCS in 1964 and was later succeeded by Stuart Hall in the 1970s. Under Hall’s guidance during that decade, traditional British anti-theorising gave way to experiments with continental neo-Marxist theories by Althusser, Gramsci, Adorno and Benjamin. Innovative and subtle analyses were produced of various cultural practices in constant negotiation, struggle, and resistance against more dominant commercial forms tarnished by capitalist values. The influence of the Frankfurt School and its disdain for popular or mass culture was evident in many of these works. The early CCCS works of the 1970s have since come under criticism from a number of directions. Firstly, studies of male working-class subcultures were emphasised at the expense of women, who were marginalised if not actually excluded.11 Practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ also continued the modernist tradition of an elitist and rather condescending view of popular culture and those who consumed it, lamenting the demise of traditional folk culture and condemning the manipulation of the passive masses by the new massmedia institutions and publications.12 Finally, cultural studies only began belatedly to deal with the problem of the legacy of colonialism and race in metropolitan culture.

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The cultural turn – whether in the form of ‘cultural studies’ or ‘social/cultural history’ – focused on events in Europe without taking into account the highly significant fact that it was precisely from the 1950s onwards that the European imperial powers were decolonising, and when immigrants from the former colonies were making their way into the imperial metropole. Viewed from this perspective, the search for a white working-class culture and identity which was unmistakably ‘British’ or ‘French’ could also be seen as a cultural-nationalist response to non-white immigration. Indeed, Paul Gilroy has criticised the cultural turn in Britain for identifying and maintaining ‘Britishness’ as ‘Anglo-Saxonism’.13 The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 brought this critique to the centre of literary studies, cultural studies and history, spawning a new but related industry of ‘postcolonial studies’ which focused precisely on the ongoing cultural, economic and political problems of decolonisation, postcolonialism, neo-imperialism and race relations. With many of the practitioners moving between colonised and coloniser cultures in their own lives, postcolonial cross-cultural perspectives enriched the understanding of culture that underpinned scholarship – it was more fluid, more hybridised, more complicated. When American scholars took up cultural studies with energetic enthusiasm in the 1980s, it was not long before ‘international’ (largely American) centres of cultural studies sprang up like mushrooms. American cultural studies seemed likely to become as ubiquitous as American culture. The study of culture invaded new disciplines and specialties, leading one critic to write rather disapprovingly that ‘there seems almost no limit to its applicability in almost any context’, while another remarked rather sardonically that ‘a kind of academic culture mania has set in’, bringing in its wake departments of film studies, performance studies, media and communication studies, while literary studies has had to make room for – of course – cultural studies.14 It was around this time that the cultural turn also manifested itself in the form of the ‘new cultural history’. From the mid-1980s onwards historical works began to appear which self-consciously labelled themselves ‘cultural history’. Examples of these include Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), Roger Chartier’s Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (1988), and Lynn Hunt’s edited collection, The New Cultural History (1989). What exactly was ‘new’ about this cultural history? For one thing, it signalled a ‘culturalist’ approach to history whereby ‘culture’ became the bedrock of historical explanation. But perhaps its newness was also linked to national historiographical practices, for it signalled the influence of anthropology and the Annales

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school on the way American historians approached history – especially medieval and early modern European history. It has been argued that a better term for the new cultural history would be ‘anthropological history’. Anthropology had its heyday in the American academy during the late 1960s and 1970s,15 and many of the American historians subscribing to the new cultural history claimed inspiration or influence in methodology particularly from Clifford Geertz’s work, particularly the notion of ‘thick description’ set out in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Like Claude Lévi-Strauss before him, Geertz applied the formalist literary practice of semiotics – the study of signs – to the study of cultures. Rituals and social practices as well as material artefacts form a complex system of symbols signifying all kinds of meanings which tell us about the ‘culture’ of a particular society or social group. Notions of the foreignness and ‘otherness’ of different cultures were no longer merely spatial or geographical, but also chronological, applying not only to different groups existing beside ‘us’ but also to our ancestors in the past. The aim of the anthropological historian is to reveal this ‘otherness’, to make it intelligible through the interpretation of culture as a text. In this understanding, ‘culture’, as Raymond Williams’s formulation was constantly reiterated in countless volumes, is ‘a whole way of life’. Yet there are problems with this formulation. For one thing, it presupposes that society works as an integrated system when, instead, many cultural historians have been interested in the way competing cultures relate to each other. Another problem for the historian is the practical question of what such a broad definition leaves out. We can see how easy it would be in adopting such a definition of history that cultural historians imagine themselves to be writing the history of everything: for cultural history to become general history or, simply, History itself. Furthermore, it is surely troubling that the turn to anthropology came just as structural anthropologists themselves were taking a step back from their methodological tools and reassessing their discipline.16 Geertz’s work has been criticised for reading order and meaning into symbolic forms at the expense of uncovering and making sense of conflict and struggle; of lacking a specific social and historical context so that the rituals and activities of one particular group in society come to symbolise a homegeneous, unified ‘culture’ of that society.17 In any case, ‘anthropological history’ does not take into account the profound impact of poststructuralist theory on the discipline of anthropology itself. The idea that symbols are stable and can be transmitted without dilution or mutation, to be received and analysed for unchanging structures, has come under fire from poststructuralists. The production, transmission and reception of meaning – the very processes underlying

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social history’s assumption that traditions and intentions could be passed on simply or discerned clearly by the historian – have been problematised by the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Perhaps it was the linguistic turn which was most influential in effecting the transition from ‘social’ to ‘cultural’ history, for poststructuralist theories of language served to undermine the belief that social categories were somehow natural and universal. Social groups such as ‘class’ or ‘women’ began to be understood entities which are historically constituted through language or ‘discourse’. From the 1980s historians began to employ the Foucauldian term ‘discourse’ to describe the texts (verbal, visual and material) and institutional practices through which we understand and make sense of our daily lives. In a move collapsing Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemony’ and ‘the subaltern’ with Foucault’s exposition of ‘discourse’, historians began to talk about ‘hegemonic discourses’ and to look for ‘counter-discourses’ which subaltern groups utilised to articulate resistance and change. Historians have, of course, always valued and worked closely with the subtle nuances of text and context. They always knew a document revealed as much about its author and their context as about its ostensible subject. They have always been aware of how the practice of rhetoric shapes utterances; how thought is influenced by consciously or unconsciously held beliefs and assumptions which are historically specific. But following Derrida’s practice of deconstruction, cultural historians began to pay attention not only to what a text says or how it functions, but also to the conflicts and absences in a text: what it doesn’t say, the absent figures (such as women, minority groups, social ‘deviants’) it marginalises but silently implicates, and the irreconcilable tensions between different representations which result in competing discourses within the text. Bound up with discourse analysis was a new way of understanding power. Power was no longer seen as hierarchical, something possessed by the privileged few at the top of the social scale, and wielded over the masses under them by material dominance and brute force. Instead, power came to be viewed as something which is dispersed throughout society, enacted in each and every social relationship. While it can still coerce physically, it operates most potently through culture, through the ways in which discourses shape the way people relate to the world. This view of discourse is, of course, rather similar to the old Marxist notion of ideology, except it rejects the Marxist judgement of ‘true’ and ‘false’ consciousness. In discourse theory there is no actual, existing ‘reality’ waiting to be discovered when one is free of ideology: ‘reality’ is precisely constructed from discourses and their particular beliefs

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about truth. This tendency towards total relativism concerned many. If the old Marxist certainties no longer sufficed, discourse analysis was still interested in the question: who benefits from the circulation of particular ways of seeing the world? Stuart Hall even reasserted his commitment – albeit a troubled one – to Marxist politics18 and voiced his concern that the ‘cultural turn’ had led to a depoliticisation of the humanities once ‘culture’ became a profitable route to academic professionalism.19 Perhaps it is here that we should admit our own qualms about studying cultural history just for ‘novelty’ or entertainment value, or even simply as a form of identity politics in which, as Paula Hamilton’s chapter makes clear, the use of history to construct group identity can be of short-term political value but is arguably culturally debilitating in the end. Our preference is for a cultural materialist approach which sees cultural history as inseparable from, and of necessity questioning, political and economic interests. To sum up the international scene, then, as we see it from Australia at the beginning of the 21st century. Firstly, there has been a shift from concepts and structures back to human subjects as agents. Secondly, the confident description and interpretation of cultural structures has given way to a more problem-ridden analysis of the production, signification, reception, and transformation of meaning. Thirdly, a democratisation of history has taken place with attention widening to include the daily life of ordinary people. Finally, in an archetypally postmodern development, cultural history at the end of the twentieth century saw a growing fascination not only with the disadvantaged masses, but also with marginalised minorities and ‘niche’ identities. Indeed, identity politics increasingly drives cultural history projects today. Identity has become the focus of cultural production and consumption, especially as it operates in the market. Perhaps we are seeing a more general shift – in the western world, at least – from identities being determined by class, gender, race or ethnicity, to a more postmodern willingness to ‘construct’ or choose identities based on niche-market consumption and differentiation.

C U LT U R A L H I S TO RY I N A U S T R A L I A Has cultural history in Australia followed the same pattern? We have presented a history that, for convenience, uses the notion of national traditions, noting differences across French, British and American historical traditions, specifically delineating different approaches to cultural history and identifying transnational influences. Is it possible – or even desirable – to identify an Australian tradition of cultural history? One of the purposes of this book is to survey cultural history as it is

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currently practised in Australia in order to allow readers to make up their own minds on that question. A single volume cannot hope to cover comprehensively all the trends in Australian cultural history, but we do suggest its diversity. What we have tried to do is to provide a sample of essays which are, in many respects, not merely finished narratives but ongoing conversations – even arguments – with the past and future of history: if, in Greg Dening’s words, ‘Culture is Talk. Living is Story’, cultural history is both. Many of these chapters present well-considered engagements with theoretical issues: Ann Curthoys on the value of the nation as the framework for historiography; Stephen Garton on the effects of poststructuralism on the discipline of history; Marilyn Lake on the political significance of cultural ideas of whiteness and masculinity during Federation; Penny Russell on class, gender and social distinctions. Others chart fairly recent developments in their fields: Alan Atkinson on literacy and communications technology; Tom Griffiths on environmental history; and Joy Damousi on the formation of psychological identities. The impossibility of writing cultural histories of self-contained national, racial or ethnic groups uncontaminated by issues such as imperialism or global diasporas is indicated in Richard Waterhouse’s overview of his research into cultural transmissions; Jan Kociumbas’s troubled consideration of Aboriginality and Australian national culture; and Hsu-Ming Teo’s discussion of the uneasy relationship between multiculturalism and ethnic history. Ideas of identity-construction through cultural transmissions and/or appropriations find echoes in Katie Holmes’s exploration of gardening as cultural history; Alastair Thomson’s consideration of the life stories told by British immigrants travelling to Australia; and Angela Woollacott’s case study on the travel writer and novelist, Mary Gaunt, in which issues of gender, imperialism, whiteness and race relations intertwine in complex ways. The one thing that characterises much of this body of work is that we seek to open up various issues and research fields to further investigation and ongoing debate about cultural history. At this point we don’t intend to pursue an extensive history of cultural history in Australia. The following contributions contain a variety of perspectives on the history of history in Australia – historians are incorrigible historicisers. Those multiple perspectives are an important feature of the contemporary practice of history: there can be no single authoritative account. All we offer now are a number of observations about the production of cultural history in the Australian context. It is influenced by a number of structural parameters: such things as how far historians in Australia (writers, teachers, students) are part of an international academic culture; how much they talk to each other within or

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across national boundaries; how far the conferences they attend cohere around national or international organisations and national or international subjects (in turn affected by funding, perks and the desire to travel as well as the professional need to plug into the networks and intellectual ‘fixes’ that conferences provide); how often, in the relatively small and new field of Australian cultural history, the conventional wall between academic and student is breached; how far their writing is defined by the audience (national or international, real or imaginary) they write for – or by publishers’ impressions of that audience; the ways scholarly reputations are made, following the different waves of fashion in postgraduate study – Oxbridge, Australian universities, American universities – and the different configurations of public profile, peer gossip, cultural cringe and cultural strut. To track a coherent genealogy for cultural history as a subject through such a minefield is simply too dangerous. It is clear, however, that much of the creative fluidity of the way cultural history gets done in Australia derives from the tensions between the national and the international in historians’ working lives. On the one hand we find ourselves relating to a national system of universities and research funding, to publishers with national markets, to media that popularise history for national audiences. On the other hand we have a (perhaps peculiarly Australian?) relationship to supranational intellectual endeavour, which can be seen as an obsession with ‘world class’ reputations and international league tables, but can reflect a genuine interest and involvement in what happens in the rest of the world. We are subject to all the limitations and possibilities of an orphan colony on the periphery of a postcolonial globalised world. Within this framework it is nevertheless possible to make a number of generalisations about the ways in which cultural history has been practised in Australia. Firstly, there is a sense in which the new history – democratic, cultural – found an easy victory in Australia (too easy, some might say) because of the nature of Australia’s national history. As Ann Curthoys stresses,20 national history – in the sense of identifying a distinctive and autonomous (postcolonial) national experience – is a relatively new phenomenon in Australia, not really appearing until the 1950s as a professionalised academic discipline.21 Its emergence coincided with the growing international interest in the new social history. While that produced a strong tradition of labour history in Australia, it also found a ready convergence with a new national history. The amalgamation, often called the ‘radical nationalist’ school, celebrated the culture and role of (mostly male) workers in Australia’s development. Perhaps the most significant product of that convergence was Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend of 1958. This study of the origins of a

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distinctive Australian ‘character’ certainly fits many notions of cultural history, finding the ‘legend’ emerging in the unique culture that developed among working people in the back districts of Australia. Drawing on academic and popular interest in folk songs, Ward argued that it was possible to reconstruct from such sources the popular culture of outback workers in ways similar to E. P. Thompson’s approach to the English working class, or Eugene Genovese’s to American slave culture.22 Not only was Ward’s subject culture (the democratic, popular culture that emerged in the bush and was then further articulated and disseminated nationally by the Bulletin magazine and the trade unions of the late nineteenth century); his explanatory dynamic was a cultural one, his story driven by the ways in which ordinary people constructed the world around them, from the odds and ends of cultural baggage they brought with them and the particular frontier experiences they encountered in Australia. Ian Turner was another influential figure whose interest in radical politics (his early work was on the Wobblies and other radical working-class organisations) led him to an interest in popular culture, with work on graffiti, children’s rhymes and his muchloved Australian rules football. So we can see how an interest in the new social history, combined with the novelty of national history in Australia, led to an early interest in the culture of ordinary Australians. The second point to note is how much that interest in popular culture was bound up in a national project of delineating a distinctive Australian culture. Where Ward differed from other historians producing history ‘from the bottom up’ was in his insistence that the process resulted in a distinctive, unifying national culture.23 He drew quite selfconsciously on Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ to argue that Australia’s frontier produced an essentialised and fixed Australian ethos. Even earlier, C. E. W. Bean had linked ‘democratic’ history to an obsession with distinctiveness: he regarded his Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (1921–42) as a history ‘from the bottom up’, but he too had insisted that this history revealed a distinctively Australian military tradition within the experience of the ordinary soldier. At the same time Australian history was being professionalised, the standard histories of the various arts in Australia were also being published, and they too emphasised what was distinctive: H. M. Green on literature (1961), Bernard Smith on painting (1962), Roger Covell on music (1967), J. M. Freeland on architecture (1968). Australia’s distinctiveness was being found less in its political structures than in its culture, both high and low. This trend which understood culture essentially in national terms culminated in Geoffrey Serle’s influential bird’s eye view of high culture in Australia, From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973). Yet it was never that simple. For all the power of the radical nation-

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alist tradition in cultural history, there was a lot of cultural history being written outside it. Some was self-consciously conservative, as in the work of John Manning Ward, harking back to the earlier imperial history which had portrayed the spread of British institutions and ‘civilisation’ to Australia. More was simply written outside a nationalist framework, as with George Nadel’s Australia’s Colonial Culture (1957) and Michael Roe’s The Quest for Authority (1965). Manning Clark’s monumental History of Australia (1962–1987) began as a story of ‘civilisation’ coming to Australia through the trinity of Catholicism, Protestantism and the Enlightenment, though he was to succumb to the charms of nationalism which turned him into a national icon by the 1970s. By that time the New Left was also challenging the celebratory radical nationalist view of Australian culture, most powerfully in Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia (1970). Within the rapidly expanding fields of Aboriginal history and women’s history through and beyond the 1970s, stimulated by effective political activism, there were devastating critiques of attempts to identify a celebratory, unitary (white, male) national culture. Even when this work remained within frameworks of political or social history, it undermined confident assertions about a unifying Australian culture; but increasingly historians of both indigenous Australia and gender took the cultural turn in their work. Urban history too – particularly the ‘culturalist’ Melbourne tradition represented by Graeme Davison – challenged the primacy of the Bush legend. Histories of popular culture – Australian Popular Culture (1979), Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends: Essays in Australian Cultural History (1982), John Rickard’s impressive survey, Australia: A Cultural History (1988) and Richard Waterhouse’s Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788 (1995) – tended to be written against the grain of national readings of culture and were especially sensitive to processes of cultural transmission. Richard White’s Inventing Australia (1981) insisted on the constructedness of national identity. And finally, the journal Australian Cultural History emerged as a self-conscious counter to the radical nationalist tradition and all those ‘possessed by Marxist or nationalist certainties’.24 It is remarkable how much of this work predated the ‘cultural turn’. Understandably, then, much of it has been produced without any felt need to articulate it in poststructuralist terms. Don Watson has claimed for Australia the distinction of being the first postmodern nation,25 but it was without knowing it. Just as Australia produced socialism without doctrine in the late nineteenth century,26 it produced cultural history written without overt theorising in the late twentieth. Arguably, the very ease of that victory for cultural history in Australia, mediated as it

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was through the taken-for-grantedness of national history, has meant that it has escaped interrogation and justification. It has not had to prove itself. So are we all cultural historians now whether we know it or not? It comes as no surprise that the grandest historical narrative being written at the beginning of the twenty-first century should be conceived as cultural history, ‘a history of the common imagination in Australia’, ‘an attempt to describe the day-to-day intellectual notions associated with life as an Australian among Australians’, and to regard language as ‘the machinery at the bottom of everything’.27 What is more surprising is that beyond the cultural turn, the habit of seeing culture as being explicable only in national terms continues.28 Despite the effectiveness of poststructuralism in deconstructing the nation – see Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Thonghai Winichakul – even quite consciously poststructuralist work in Australia remains committed to some form of national project. History perhaps can’t escape its role as constitutive – and quite crucially constitutive – of the nation, in that it of necessity provides a particular audience, usually constructed within national markets, with a sense of a shared past. And historians in Australia has been important in the national culture, providing everything from content for the film industry to evidence for legal judgements on Aboriginal land rights to consciousness-raising in the women’s movement – as well as providing the stuff of endless displays of national commemoration in this peculiarly commemorative age. But as Eric Hobsbawm has reminded us, identity history is not enough; historians should not simply massage national (and other) identities, but take some sort of responsibility for how their work is used.29 Those Australian historians who seek an escape from the straitjacket of national history, do so in individually isolated ways. We turn away from talking to each other or to other Australians, preferring to address our own specialised audiences overseas.30 Australian historians have benefited from the postcolonial turn which has turned attention at the centre (to the extent that a centre still survives) to the periphery. There is more scope these days for work by Australian historians on Australia to find a place in international journals and collections. Indeed, where cultural studies and cultural history is concerned, Australian authors find their way into a surprising number of ‘international’ (still mostly American and British) collections.31 We can agree with the centre that the periphery is relevant, even surprisingly fashionable, and claim we are it. And yet the periphery is fashionable only so long as it has a relationship with the centre: it is less as equals and more in our specificity as Australians that the centre most often wants us to talk to them. In the process of that talk, have we stopped talking to each other? It is a dilemma common to other cultural forms – compare the continuing debate

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in the film industry between contributing to an international film culture or making films for Australians. While never quite that stark a choice between the national and the international – many historians flit successfully between the two – it remains framed politically, economically and institutionally as a choice between those two audiences. It is our hope that this book might have something to say to both.

PA R T O N E IN GENERAL …

2 CULTURAL HISTORY A N D T H E N AT I O N A N N C U RT H OY S

In the public debates within Australia over history in recent years – from the debates over Native Title in 1993, through the Bringing Them Home report of 1997, to the celebrations of Federation in 2001 – many public commentators attempted to summarise the positive and negative aspects of Australian history in an attempt to assess its overall balance. While some historians, journalists, and politicians adopted a critical judgment of the past, many others, including Geoffrey Blainey and Prime Minister John Howard, sought a positive ‘balanced’ account. This chapter suggests that there are other, much more valuable, ways of thinking about the past, and that the prevalent focus on the nation as a discrete entity, whether positive or negative, leads to a very limited sense of history. In the context of globalisation – economically, culturally, and even politically – the nation matters less, or at least in a very different way , than it once did. The world becomes smaller and there is a greater sense of the interconnectedness of local histories, societies, economies and cultures. Historians worldwide are pondering the implications of these globalising processes for their own practice. History has generally been organised, researched and taught in national categories, and Australian history is no exception. Australian history has for several decades been written largely by and for Australians, and has a large local audience. The downside of its success at home is its invisibility abroad. While there is some interest in aspects of Australian history in other parts of the world, its international audience is small.1 The more it matters to us, it seems, the less it matters to anyone else. We are not alone in our national straitjacket. A. G. Hopkins, in ‘From National History to Imperial History’ in 1999, outlined the development of national histories in the former colonies of the British

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Empire, noting how separate these histories have become, not only from British history, but also from each other. ‘East and West Africanists,’ he notes, ‘scarcely communicate: India and Burma are studied by separate groups of scholars’. A little later he observes the ‘growing provincialism that is the inevitable counterpart of the search for a national identity. Historians of India know little of Africa and vice versa; historians of Australia and New Zealand rarely make cross-references; historians of Canada have ceased, typically, to look beyond North America’. Hopkins goes on to note that these national historical traditions are all experiencing questioning from within, especially in their treatment of indigenous histories. In Canada, Australia and New Zealand alike, there is an anguished reappraisal of national histories in the light of indigenous claims and issues. ‘However,’ he says, ‘even the best of recent studies deal with these events entirely within a national framework, thereby conveying the impression that they are unique’.2 This is largely true: this essay explores why this is so in relation to Australian historiography particularly, and what might be done about it. Are there ways to be less ‘national’ and more ‘transnational’ in our approach, and is it possible to participate more than we do in worldwide historiographical conversations? In thinking about where we have been and where we might go, I consider the influence of specifically cultural approaches on the kinds of Australian history we have now, explore a little further the current restiveness about the limitations of national history, and examine the role cultural theory might have in developing transnational histories. Towards the end of the essay, I ponder the importance of a cultural approach to transnational historical questions by investigating the specific case of the history of genocide.

B U I L D I N G A N AT I O N A L H I S TO R Y It is important to remember just how recent a phenomenon a national Australian history is.3 Though there were some key school history texts such as Ernest Scott’s immensely popular A Short History of Australia, published in 1916 and reprinted for decades afterwards, and a slowly growing number of specialist studies and collections of documents, only a modest amount of Australian national history was written before World War II.4 While a major reason for this slow development was the small size and number of universities until the 1950s, an associated cultural reason was a middle class anxiety in the interwar period and through to the 1940s and 1950s that Australia lacked a worthy intellectual national culture, and was merely a second-rate derivation of Britain. D. H. Lawrence had said influentially on his visit to Australia in 1922, and many intellectuals agreed with him, ‘that’s what the life in a

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new country does to you: makes you so material, so outward, that your real inner life and your inner self dies out and you clatter around like so many mechanical animals’.5 Australia, many thought, was mediocre, philistine, contemptible, forever doomed by location and distance and by its fraught penal and colonial origins. Its history, many intellectuals thought, could not be a matter of interest or pride; and Australia could only be understood as a derivative of Britain and the Empire. Historian W. K. Hancock articulated this psychological attachment to Britain and sense of Australian cultural inferiority in his popular and much-discussed book, Australia (1930). He described Australians as transplanted Britons, who had so far sent down only shallow roots in Australia itself, but were now developing some attachment to Australia too. In a flurry of gendered and sexualised metaphors, he went on: ‘A country is a jealous mistress and patriotism is commonly an exclusive passion; but it is not impossible for Australians, nourished by a glorious literature and haunted by old memories, to be in love with two soils’.6 In other words, for Australians nation and Empire were not alternatives; one was a part of the other, and Australian history was part of British history. Hancock was articulating the common assumptions of the time; high school history texts in the interwar period and indeed for some time afterwards emphasised the importance of the fact that most Australians were the descendants of British immigrants, and were European in culture and inheritance. Scott’s Short History, for example, stressed the British imperial link, ending with fulsome praise of the British Commonwealth. Meanwhile, in Britain, in the context of an emphasis from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s on the ‘world-wide community of the British race’, expressed in schemes for imperial federation, and cultural attachments to the idea of Greater Britain, historians wrote histories of Empire that were often guided by a teleology of constitutional progress. British countries moved from colonies to nations and ever closer to British ideals and achievements of good governance.7 The few Australian historians sharing their countrymen’s deep faith and belief in the Empire – Hancock himself, Stephen Roberts, Ernest Scott – wrote within a similar framework, though they added to it support for the White Australia Policy. In this, the historians expressed majority public opinion for the first half of the twentieth century: a strong identification with racial exclusion as a means of guaranteeing their cultural and social identity as white Australians within the British Empire. Hancock’s Australia argued that Australia had a great deal to fear from Asia: ‘Facing her northern doors were vast reservoirs of yellow humanity, whose outpourings, if unchecked, would ruin what she held most precious – the economic and racial foundations of her homogenous egali-

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tarian society’.8 Ernest Scott had similarly felt no embarrassment in supporting racial immigration policies, as necessary to Australian economic wellbeing. These interwar histories, written in both Britain and Australia, also avoided the history of colonisation itself, that is, of Aboriginal dispossession. In the nineteenth century, these processes had been part of public discussion and represented in popular histories, sometimes revealing an anxiety about the morality of the processes involved in taking other peoples’ land by force, and often reflecting on the ‘inevitability’ of colonisation and the destruction it brought. But, as the forcible seizure of lands became increasingly remote in time and space (it was still occurring in the north of the continent), these anxieties had faded by the early twentieth century. By the interwar years, when whiteness as a marker of Australian identity was possibly at its peak, the story of dispossession largely disappeared from public consciousness, memorialising and published histories. Very gradually, Australian historiography fashioned for itself after World War II a national non-imperial identity. It was the era of national independence, in political terms for the former colonies of Asia and Africa, and in cultural terms for the former Dominions. The response, as Hopkins has noted, was the development, separately in each postcolonial nation, of a professional, academic, national history. For nations that had once been part of a European empire, the development of national histories was part of the postwar growth in the United States and Britain of area studies – of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. In Australia, though, as in Canada and New Zealand, the push for a national history and area studies came from local rather than metropolitan centres of power. Neither the United States nor Great Britain had much continuing need to understand Australian politics, society and history. Within Australia, this new national historiography was part of a distinctively local intellectual project. While many Australian intellectuals in the postwar period continued to see Australian society and culture as derivative and second-rate, and felt restive and isolated as a result, or left for metropolitan centres, some began to argue that social and cultural life in Australia had its own interest and importance. Australians, they now said, must discard the notion that they lived in a society lacking in talent and ingenuity. Part of this intellectual project was to see Australian history as fascinating, distinctive and national rather than imperial. As a result, the growing number of historians of Australia in the postwar period wanted to liberate Australian history from its former position as a small insignificant consequence of the larger story of British imperial history, bound by a narrative of the development from colonies to nation.

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If earlier histories of Australia had been written as part of a broader British imperial historical enterprise, the newer histories were clearly written at and for home, where home meant Australia itself. Manning Clark remarked in a celebrated intervention in 1954: ‘Let us drop the idea that our past has irrevocably condemned us to the role of cultural barbarians’.9 He opposed the idea that Australians are indifferent to things of the mind, and the concomitant idea that there were no engrossing differences, no great issues and no epic dramas of conflicting principles and historical personalities. Clark found particularly offensive Lawrence’s sweeping claim that Australians possessed no inner life. Australian history for him was one expression of a major human struggle between opposing life philosophies and religions, notably the Enlightenment, Protestantism and Catholicism. Though he was one of the founders of the new national history, his interest in Australia was not a nationalistic emphasis on exclusive virtues or characteristics, but rather an opportunity to observe the playing out of major European and Enlightenment conflicts, dilemmas and dramas, in salient, distinctive and interesting ways. The inner life erupted into public actions and contests between men – and he meant men – in a history so profound that it required a novelistic kind of historical writing to do it justice. It should, he demanded, be ‘great as literature’, have something to say about ‘human nature’, and return to ‘the great themes they (historians) abandoned when they joined in the vain search for a science of society’.10 Local stories displayed universal themes and patterns. Now that we take a lively and extensive national historiography for granted, it is hard to remember how uncongenial many found this shift in perspective from ‘British offshoot’ history to national Australian history. For decades, many historians continued to stress Australia’s epiphenomenal character as a product of British policies, people and institutions. In a review of the state of Australian history in his Presidential Address to Section E of Australian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1959, J. A. La Nauze described Australia as, ‘at least until recently, a notably derivative and dependent society in its culture and institutions. Until the present generation, nearly everything came from Britain’. As a result, he insisted on the importance of knowing British in order to understand Australian history.11 John M. Ward, Challis Professor of History at the University of Sydney when I was a student in the 1960s, was a specialist in British colonial policy and Australian colonial history, and belonged to a school of history that sought to illuminate the Australian aspects of imperial history.12 History students at Sydney could not study Australian history until their third year, and it had such low status that few did so even then. Bright history students went generally to Oxford or Cambridge, and studied British

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or European history or, less often, to the United States to study US history. (It was the same in literature: Australian literature was considered to be of low status and was little taught until the 1970s.) Nevertheless, a national historiography which took Australian history as its centre did gradually emerge. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, Australian history written largely by and for Australians developed rapidly, covering a wide variety of types and styles of history, differentiated by political attachments, theoretical approaches and variations in historical method.13 While none of these histories forgot the rest of the world entirely, Australian national history in these decades witnessed a decline in interest in Australia’s place in the British Empire and later Commonwealth, and a low level of interest overall in international and regional contexts and referents. For many young historians in these decades, too much focus on the British aspects of Australian history was to deny the autonomy, distinctness, excitement and value of Australian history itself. Just as British historians frequently ignored the British settler societies as serious objects of study or as relevant to British history, and even imperial historians looked less at the former Dominions than at other parts of the Empire, so Australian historians very often rejected Britain as particularly relevant to them. The other distinctive feature of this national historiography, compared to the prewar histories, was its changing attitude to questions of race, immigration and colonisation. Historians fairly rapidly, after World War II, stopped defending the White Australia Policy, and wrote histories that explored the reasons for the emergence of racially based immigration policies.14 A rethinking of the violent colonial foundations of the nation, however, took much longer. Despite the development of some specialist studies in the 1940s, such as journalist Clive Turnbull’s Black War: the Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, the general Australian histories of the 1950s and 1960s, whatever the political complexion, had even less indigenous material than their predecessors.15 What little recognition they did give was generally framed within the nineteenth-century idea of the inevitability of Aboriginal extinction.16 In taking such little interest in indigenous histories, these historians were not simply reflecting the ideas of their times; in other cultural spheres, such as literature, film, art and design, and also in anthropology and the press, interest in Aboriginal culture and conditions was growing, though often in a somewhat patronising way. Rather, the historians’ focus on the nation, and indeed their nationalism as custodians of national identity, made it difficult for most of them to think beyond the framework developed by a white nationalistic settler consciousness.17 There were some alternative voices, amongst popular historians and from scholars in adjacent disciplines like archaeology and

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anthropology, whose work interacted with the growing political movement for equal and civil rights for indigenous peoples.18 For the most part, though, it was only when public concern with racism in its local and international manifestations increased rapidly from the late 1960s that professional historians finally moved to the forefront in the investigation of histories of indigenous colonisation, dispossession and institutionalisation.19 In tackling the question of the foundations of colonisation of the country, they became at once national, and critical, historians. From the 1980s, historians inspired directly by cultural theory shared this growing national focus. Cultural histories in Australia have had a deep concern with the nation, as their titles indicate: Inventing Australia (1981), Creating a Nation (1994), Creating Australia (1997), Anxious Nation (2000), and so on. Their contribution has been to de-naturalise the nation, a process made famous by Benedict Anderson with his instantly telling phrase ‘imagined communities’ and Homi Bhabha with his emphasis on ‘narrating the nation’.20 Cultural theorists have been concerned with the question of national identity – how it is created, its cultural meaning, its constructedness, its forms of representation. Under the influence of postcolonial theory, they have been interested in imperial and national discourse, the frameworks of thinking and understanding and culture which enabled white Australians to develop their particular mix of nationalism, emphasis on whiteness, and imperial loyalty. They have frequently been critics of the nation, through the frameworks of feminism, multiculturalism and indigenous rights. Paradoxically, this critical stance has helped to fix the gaze and framework of Australian historiography even more firmly on the nation than before. Film historians, literary historians and historians of popular culture have all puzzled over the construction of national tropes in their chosen cultural form, and thus the nation has become at once a focus for analysis and an object of critique.21 That which is to be critiqued has to first be identified, described and analysed.

ESCAPING THE PRISON HOUSE OF N AT I O N A L H I S TO R Y Yet in this search for distinctiveness, and disengagement from the older imperial history, there have been losses as well as gains. While Australian history has become more independent, complex, diverse, autonomous and self-critical, it has also become more isolated and inward looking. Cultural history is no exception. The reason is not to do with the failings of the historians, as such, but with the enterprise itself. The nation as a framework for historical understanding has severe limits, as

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Hopkins and many other historians around the world have noted. There is an implicit assumption in national histories that their primary task is the discovery of what makes a nation, a people, distinctive, rather than a focus on what is shared with and often causally interconnected with histories and societies elsewhere. Even where this assumption is relatively weak or up for examination and critique, national histories generally posit the motivations and reasons for the events and processes they trace as being generated largely within the nation, and offer detailed narratives and analyses that make little mention of similar events elsewhere. We are now witnessing a growing recognition, at least in parts of the Australian historical community, and especially amongst feminist, indigenous, cultural and environmental historians, that national history, while still necessary, is not enough. As indicated at the beginning of this essay, there is a search for new ways to join a world historical and intellectual community of theorisation, debate and understanding. The problem, of course, is how to reach beyond the nation without losing either the empirical density or the local appeal and significance that national histories have in recent decades enjoyed. Some (including me) have called for the development of more comparative histories, especially those that illuminate developments common to settler societies. Twenty years ago, a landmark work by Donald Denoon explored the possibilities of comparative settler histories, and since then Andrew Markus, David Goodman and others have shown the possibilities of Australian–American comparative historical studies. A special issue of Australian Feminist Studies edited by Fiona Paisley has recently advanced the cause of comparative and transnational histories considerably.22 Yet comparative histories, while illuminating and interesting and insightful, do not really change the direction of national history; the nation remains the organising principle. ‘Transnational history’ captures better than ‘comparative history’ does the idea of historians looking at historical processes, at networks of influence and power which transcend the nation. The point of the exercise becomes not comparison, but the study of influence and interconnection. These can take many forms – diasporic histories, post-secular histories focusing on histories of religion and belief, histories of transnational organisations and political movements, histories of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and cultural contact and exchange.23 One variant of transnational histories relevant to this discussion are histories of a larger region which includes Australia, as in Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein Smith’s History of Australia, New Zealand and the Western Pacific.24 Another is to recover an interest in imperial history, especially British imperial history, the solution advocated by some, especially A.

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G. Hopkins, quoted earlier. This time, says Hopkins, historians could restore ‘the international and essentially imperial dimension to national history without installing its former accompanist, deference, too’.25 Again, surely Hopkins is right. A renewed interest in imperial history, including but not confined to British history, would help place Australian history within the systems of power and influence that help make it explicable to Australians and of interest elsewhere. Where Hopkins’s argument breaks down, however, is in his unremitting hostility to cultural theory and postmodernism. Indeed, he sees postmodernism and postcolonialism as one of the major influences on the development of non-communicating national histories, since their rejection of ‘totalisation’ and, he might have added, delight in fragmentation, led them to avoid making the generalisations and connections that might weld these histories together. Hopkins deplores the recent emphasis amongst historians on questions of representation and meaning, that is, cultural questions, at the expense of attention to ‘the hard political and economic questions that were once central to imperial history’.26 ‘The postmodernist attack on European racism and other forms of cultural domination’, he goes on to suggest, has produced a ‘totalising project of its own’, in which Western views of the world are assembled into a composite known as Orientalism and the complexities and differences within Western understandings are elided and forgotten.27 For Hopkins, postmodernism is a narrowing project, limiting historical work to a small number of cultural themes, and treating those themes in a way that is ‘frequently flawed, unoriginal or needlessly complex’.28 Thus his urging for an imperial history that traces influences, connections and networks of power becomes also an advocacy for increased attention to economic and political histories and a disdain for cultural history. Yet the development of the ‘new imperial’ history has itself witnessed the importance of work by cultural historians such as Catherine Hall, Antoinette Burton, Mrinalini Sinha and many others. In the reconsideration of imperial connections, questions of identity, meaning and representation – the areas where cultural history has excelled – are of crucial importance.29 The perceptions of coloniser and colonised of each other, the development of hybrid identities, the multiple cultural exchanges and interactions are all major elements in any history of colonisation and imperialism. While we might readily concede that postcolonial studies has at times indeed become narrow, repetitious and totalising, quoting Said and Bhabha and others ad nauseum, the aim of a transnational history must be to rework the huge current interest in the cultural in new ways. Yet even the ‘new imperial history’ is not, of course, the whole

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answer. For modern Australians, the desire to look outward, to connect, cannot be confined to the British world and its former manifestations as Empire and Commonwealth. It must, of necessity, go much further, to continental Europe, to Asia, the Pacific, the United States, to the other former dominions, and indeed to the world as a whole. A wide variety of migration and diasporic histories mean that Australian histories must include the histories of all those who have migrated there, from China, India, Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Italy, Greece and so forth. And there are other geopolitical considerations that take our reference points well beyond the British world. Consider, for example, what can be learnt by bringing Australian historiography into a conversation with that of Japan, at first, perhaps, an unlikely connection. Masayo Tada argues very effectively against those scholars who see looking outward as primarily a matter of considering the British world, and suggests a much broader frame of reference. Tada points out that both Australia and Japan have an ambivalent and marginal relation to ‘the West’, and both have imperial and colonising pasts that are now the subject of major public debate. The ‘history wars’ in Australia and Japan of the late 1990s and continuing today have some remarkable similarities, and both indicate a deep ambivalence about their status as perpetrators and victims, powerful and powerless, coloniser and colonised.30 In short, the world, not the former British and other empires, is our context. The rapidly growing field of world history has great possibilities for Australian historians, both in deepening our understanding of Australian history and in understanding how that history might be of benefit to historians generally. By providing much longer timelines and covering much larger geographical entities than national historians are used to, world history shakes up our categories and our historical explanations. Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel is a case in point, with its chapter on Australia that he uses to support his case that the development of agriculture, and of the social and cultural patterns that went with it, depended on the presence of domesticable plants and animals, rather than cultural differences per se. It would be interesting to survey the treatment of the Australian continent and its peoples within the rapidly growing genre of world history.31 Rather than conduct such a survey here, I focus in the last part of this essay on one of world history’s fastest-growing sub-genres, and that is the especially apposite field of the history of genocide. It is a subgenre of world history in the sense that genocide studies tend to take the world, and the whole of humanity, as their object. Genocides which occur in one part of the world at one point in time are somehow connected to, or at least illuminating of, genocidal processes and actions elsewhere. So I want to ask: what is Australia’s place in this scholarly

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world; how might Australian historical scholarship contribute to it, and how might Australian scholarship be transformed in the process? And what might be the value of a specifically cultural approach to and within these conversations and debates?

BRINGING AUSTRALIA IN: GENOCIDE IN A U S T R A L I A N A N D WO R L D H I S TO RY There is now a lively world of international scholarship which considers the question of genocide holistically, and investigates case studies – the Armenian genocide of 1915–16, the Holocaust of 1939–45, the events in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s.32 Australian participation in it is slowly growing, with contributions by scholars such as Tony Barta, Colin Tatz and Dirk Moses. In public debate, the genocide question has been considered since the Human Rights Commission’s Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which investigated the history and effects of Aboriginal child removal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had argued that Australian child removal practices fell within the definition of genocide used in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. This aspect of the report horrified many Australians of quite varying political views. Many people, including historians, rejected the notion that child removal could be reasonably described as ‘genocide’. Subsequent arguments have focused on the assimilation and absorption policies of the twentieth century, attempting to determine whether such policies had genocidal intent, that is, the destruction of Aboriginal peoples as identifiable human groups. The debate also broadened into a reconsideration of the question of violence on the frontiers of settlement, and indeed the effects of colonisation and settlement itself on the indigenous populations of Australia. These are by no means new debates, but they took on a new edge with the application of the word ‘genocide’, with all its associations and connections with the Holocaust of World War II, to Australian history. The first step towards illuminating the complex ‘genocide’ debate for Australian history is to consider genocide as an historical and not purely a legal concept.33 While it is a lively issue within international law, stemming from the UN Convention and subject to new developments quite recently in consideration of events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, which necessarily influences historical debate, historians must work with an historical rather than a legal definition. The great twentieth-century Polish-Jewish jurist Raphaël Lemkin (1901–1959) is generally regarded as having defined the term in his 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. His definition became the basis of the 1948 UN

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Convention, though that convention significantly modified his original formulations. Lemkin proposed his new concept of ‘genocide’ – deriving the term from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (killing, as in tyrannicide, homicide, fratricide) – defining it as a twofold process. As he explains in Chapter IX, ‘Genocide’, of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.34

Genocide meant that one national pattern was to be destroyed, to be replaced by the imposition of another.35 Genocide signified a ‘coordinated plan’ of different actions ‘aiming at’ the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the ‘aim’ of annihilating the groups themselves.36 Genocide was not to be confined to the notion of mass killing, though that was profoundly important, but was to be seen, rather, as a composite of actions (economic, social, religious, moral, political, military) by which the destruction of a nation or group’s foundation of life was to be secured. Since the destruction of any human group results in the loss of its future contributions to the world, in Lemkin’s view the future of humanity as a world community is affected. For my purposes here, a key issue is the connection between genocide and colonialism. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Lemkin saw a clear relationship of between the two, especially in wartime western Poland, where German colonisation was conducted on a large scale as part of the project of extermination of the Polish Jewish population.37 One people was to be exterminated, and another put in its place; the two processes went together. The connection between colonisation and genocide has been developed further by a number of scholars, especially in two texts which both appeared in 1997, the same year as the Bringing Them Home report brought the genocide word so controversially into public Australian debate. One of these texts was A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, by the Native American historian Ward Churchill. For Churchill, the greatest series of genocides ever perpetrated in history – in terms of magnitude and duration – occurred in the Americas, led by Columbus himself. By first dispossessing them of their abundant cultivated fields and then instituting policies of slavery and systematic extermination, Columbus reduced the formerly prosperous Taino people from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million in 1496. By the time of Columbus’ departure in 1500, only 100 000 Taino had survived; by

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1514, there were 22 000; by 1542, only 200 were recorded. The pattern of destruction inaugurated by Columbus continued as the pattern of genocide for the Americas, so that, Churchill suggests, it is probable that more than one hundred million pre-Columbian peoples died in the course of Europe’s ongoing conquest of the continent. A hemispheric population estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by something over 90 per cent. Entire civilisations were eradicated.38 Subsequent English colonisation of the American continent was just as destructive, reducing many American Indian tribal groups to tiny remnants of their former selves. He goes on to argue that settler-colonies around the world established during European expansion post-1492 in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina are not only potentially but inherently genocidal. A settler-colony to be a settler-colony requires ‘wholesale displacement, reduction in numbers, and forced assimilation of native peoples’.39 ˆˆˆ The second text which emerged in 1997 was a remarkable book, Exterminate all the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, by Sven Lindqvist.40 This book traces the genealogy of the idea, so harshly expressed by Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that extermination of entire peoples was inevitable and necessary. In it, Australian history, at first seemingly irrelevant, gradually acquires major importance. Lindqvist traces the growth of the extermination idea, later renamed genocide, as the inevitable byproduct of progress, reminding us of what every Australian historian knows, that so great was the death rate of indigenous peoples in all the British colonies of settlement that the House of Commons established a Select Committee to enquire into the matter; its eventual report in 1837 recognised the rights of indigenous peoples to land and recommended that steps be taken to stop the slaughter. Despite the attempts of British colonial authorities, and of non-government aborigines protection societies both in Britain and in the colonies, the slaughter continued.41 Europeans were especially mindful of the destruction in Tasmania, where frontier violence, disease and starvation had reduced a population of about 3-4000 to a few individuals by the early 1860s, the last person of full descent dying in 1876.42 Lindqvist draws attention to the attractions of the new racial science which depicted these huge population losses as inevitable processes whereby the higher races displaced the lower, bringing civilisation and progress to the world; in these circles, as Lindqvist puts it, ‘the

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Tasmanian (case) became the paradigm, to which one part of the world after another yielded’.43 When the Anthropological Society debated the extinction of the so-called lower races on 19 January 1864, the opening speaker reminded his listeners of the fate of the Tasmanians, and predicted the next to depart the world stage would be the Maori.44 (Later in the book, Lindquist argues that the successful colonisation methods of the British empire were the exemplar for Hitler when planning colonisation and genocide of the Jews, Poles, Russians and others in the territories east of Germany.)45 Indeed, as Henry Reynolds points out in Genocide: An indelible stain?, the idea that Tasmania provides the paradigmatic case of extermination, or genocide, is now well established in the international literature. Especially important for modern equations of Tasmania with genocide was Clive Turnbull’s Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, written in the context of World War II and first published in 1948. This was a period when the world was reeling from the events now known as the Holocaust, when many were looking to history for antecedents and explanations. Turnbull wrote: Not, perhaps, before, has a race of men been utterly destroyed within seventy-five years. This is the story of a race which was so destroyed, that of the aborigines of Tasmania – destroyed not only by a different manner of life but by the ill-will of the usurpers of the race’s land … With no defences but cunning and the most primitive weapons, the natives were no match for the sophisticated individualists of knife and gun. By 1876 the last of them was dead. So perished a whole people.

Indeed, so fixed had this idea of the complete extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people become that it was only with the rise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal movement in the second half of the 1970s, along with the publication of Lyndall Ryan’s book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, in 1983, that most people learned there were descendants, after all. Genocide had taken place, but its ultimate purpose, extinction, had not. So, in some ways, with this history of public knowledge that the colonisation of the Australian colonies produced population losses on a massive scale, it is a little curious to find, in the late 1990s, such strong public reaction to the idea that the concept of genocide could be applied to the Australian colonial past. The historians of the nineteenth century recognised the extermination of their own times, and some of them expressed anguish and concern; it was only later that indifference and denial set in. There are two aspects to the recent debates – ques-

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tions of historical interpretation, and questions of definition. There have been angry debates over the nature and extent of child removal, and over the extent of killing on the frontier.46 There has also been discussion as to whether ‘genocide’ is an appropriate or a misleading term for characterising some or all of these events, a debate confused by the fact that in popular discussions ‘genocide’ is equated with mass killings of an entire people, appropriate only or mainly to the Holocaust, whereas in scholarly debate, as indicated above, the term has a much wider meaning, taking in various attempts to annihilate a people, including the taking of children. In a very real sense, national honour is seen to be at stake, just as it is for the Turkish historians who argue that what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1916 was a human tragedy but not an example of genocide. For others, national honour is better served by confronting the question of genocide directly.47 As the debate over the meanings of genocide, their relation to colonialism, and Australia’s place in a world history of genocide proceeds, as it surely will, the contribution of cultural historians will be essential. At the heart of the genocide debate is the question of identity, a quintessentially cultural question. The UN Convention definition refers to the attempt to destroy a ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such’, while Lemkin speaks of the attempt to destroy one ‘national pattern’ and replace it with another. In other words, what is at stake is not only the killing of people, but also the attempt to eliminate some people’s sense of being a people, a distinct human group. That is why the question of the removal of children is so important in these debates, for it is clearly not about killing, but about the attempt to eradicate any sense of ‘peoplehood’, of national or ethnic or group identity.

CONCLUSION It is clear that specialists in Australian history – with their detailed and unparalleled knowledge of the processes of invasion, settlement, destruction and also accommodation, sharing and interaction that occurred in all their complexity on the Australian continent – have something very important to contribute to the development of worldwide knowledge of how it is that at times one population wishes to eradicate, or accepts the large scale destruction of, another. In our pursuit of these local minute details, we can illuminate some of the largest scale processes known to humanity. More generally, by linking this local scholarship to international scholarly debate, we might encourage the two-way conversation essential to the development of more truly transnational cultural histories.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the following people for commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter: Desley Deacon, John Docker, Richard White, Jill Matthews, Georgine Clarsens, Angela Woollacott, Alison Kibler, Fiona Paisley and Rosanne Kennedy. I also thank the audience at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Kings’ College, University of London, to whom I delivered an earlier version in January 2002.

3 ‘HE FILLED US FULL OF L A U G H T E R ’ : C O N TA C T A N D COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE A L A N AT K I N S O N

The Sydney Morning Herald is the oldest newspaper in Australia and one of the oldest in the world. Since 1831 it has been central to life in Sydney and within New South Wales. As a result it has always been an important paper for advertisements. During its first 25 years its classifying system was extremely simple. There was a heading for ‘Ship Advertisements’ and another for ‘Sales by Auction’. Anything which did not fit under one or of those two headings was presented with no heading at all. However, in August 1856 a third classification was invented: ‘Persons Advertised For’. Newspapers in Melbourne had offered this service for some time. It was especially useful during the gold rushes in Victoria, when there were so many new arrivals – tens of thousands in a few short years – and so much chaotic movement that people frequently lost touch with each other. Within two years the ‘Persons Advertised For’ column in the Herald was suddenly taken up by readers in a way which must have surprised the editors. On 19 June 1858 the following two advertisements appeared: Macadam. Should this meet your eye, call and see your blessed South Head Road, between Lyn-terrace and Bourke-street;

And: Miss Jane H– and Minney C–, remember Manly Beach To-Day, Sat., 19th, 10 a.m. G.M.A.

From this time the Herald worked as a public noticeboard for furtive, star-crossed lovers and, for all we know (some messages being wholly cryptic), many other kinds of public and yet secret communication.

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Reading the papers one by one from that time, it is possible to follow messages backwards and forwards, although wires were often crossed and the wrong people answered. Some used code-words as a means of labelling their exchanges but this did not always help in keeping conversation on track. On 10 September 1858, for instance, a message appeared with the heading ‘Wicked One’. It read simply ‘how very unkind of you yesterday’. Next day there were three answers: Wicked One. – What am I to imply? Write to me the same as before, as I must not. Wicked One! Consider my age and feelings. Jemima.

And: Wicked One! Meet me at half-past 4 To-day.

There was nothing more until 29 September, when we read: ‘Dear Wicked One. – Was it for me? Let me know. I shall do as I said on the 17th; do not doubt this time. Wicked you know you are.’ This last message coincided with a short exchange in the same column between another couple about the Mayor of Sydney’s Fancy-Dress Ball, which was to be on 31 September. A woman, identified as ‘Mary S.’, was told to ‘Look out for Toby at the Mayor’s Ball, dressed as a Cricketer.’ Next day, Mary’s answer was published: ‘Toby. – I will be at the Mayor’s Ball, in green, as a soldier’s daughter. Mary S.’ After the ball the Herald gave a list of everyone who had been there, including their costumes, from which we can guess that Mary S. was Mrs Severn, who was with her husband. Toby, however, should have been more explicit, because the ball boasted 17 cricketers. The argument set out below depends on showing how easily people can pick up new ways of getting in touch with each other. In saying something about the history of communications in Australia my main concern is the importance of common and popular ingenuity. We have our own experience in this respect with the internet. But the business of making contact through increasingly mysterious technology is one with a long history. Mary S. and Toby were part of the process. Here we find the basis for that network of relationships which is the fabric of all forms of association beyond the intimate and face-to-face, including nationality. And here I diverge from the understanding of nation forming to be found in the work of Benedict Anderson. Arguments such as Anderson’s, which focus on print literacy (considered especially as a market phenomenon), encourage ideas about mass association as something shaped by imagination, and in particular the imagination of the reader as a regular consumer of books and periodicals. Through

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literacy, says Anderson, we come to believe in a national community of which we are part but most of whose members we do not know. This may be true as far as it goes. But arguments which focus on other aspects of long-distance communication can lead to other, complementary conclusions. Under this rubric issues of imagination give way to issues of contact, of keeping in touch. Even from the point of view of literacy, a stress on reading gives way to a stress on writing, and especially to forms of writing designed to link individuals. The messages which passed between readers by way of ‘Persons Advertised For’ certainly appeared in the public press, and must have been read by many eyes. But they were not meant to be understood by anyone apart from the sender and the recipient, by Toby, for instance, and Mary S. An understanding of nineteenth-century communications technology – or rather, of the way in which communications technology was taken up and used – explains why and how men, women and children in this country came to think of themselves as members of some nation or other (the colonial nations before 1901 and the federal nation thereafter), of an empire and of an anglophone world. But I am really concerned with any kind of association beyond the face-to-face. As we know very well today, new forms of public order, including government, can be tightly intermeshed with new methods of communication. Increasingly efficient and pervasive methods of getting in touch must thus figure largely among the causes of Australian federation, together with a wish to make those methods even more efficient and pervasive. Federation was first attempted in the period around 1850. The colonial minister in Britain, Earl Grey, a visionary in many respects, went so far as to appoint a governor-general of the Australian colonies, with the idea that a federal legislative system might be put into place beneath him. Several influential colonists also argued at the time for some form of intercolonial government. For some, indeed, it looked like an ideal means of putting pressure on Britain to stop the transportation of convicts to any part of the continent – just as the more successful effort in 1901 was partly designed to ensure the better exclusion of the Chinese. But some were just as concerned with enlarging margins of association as with reinforcing boundaries. Even at that early stage, federation was seen as a means of pushing forward railway building, steamships and the telegraph. Hugh McColl, for instance, proprietor and editor of the Melbourne Banner, wrote in 1853 of the need for ‘some general assembly or congress, to regulate the various and important matters which affect the common interests and requirements’ of the various colonies. He hoped especially for a unified railway network. But he also wanted a single system of laws, appropriate to a single national community. Implicit in his writing was a belief in rapidly

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improving communications, manifest especially in newspapers like his own. He clearly understood that what he called the ‘jarring legislation’ which existed from colony to colony must become increasingly problematic as Australians, scattered throughout the continent, dealt more often with each other and travelled more efficiently.1 Under federal authority public order would march in step with technological change. As it turned out, federation only happened when the communications infrastructure was properly in place, rather than the other way around. During the second half of the nineteenth century that infrastructure created what John Hirst has called ‘the sentimental nation’, and by that he means a community widely scattered and yet bound by sentiment, by feelings of common identity, each Australian being in some sense in touch with the whole. Presumably a ‘sentimental nation’ is a beast slightly different from, though overlapping considerably with, an ‘imagined nation’. In other words, a feeling of community which is the cumulative effect of the interlinking of its members can be distinguished from a feeling of community which depends on each member embracing ideas about the whole. There is thus a significant difference between Australian and American federation (easily overdrawn, no doubt). The American colonies were forced into combination by the sudden need to throw off British rule, by the idea of a common enemy. The Australian colonies combined more gradually – they grew together – as their people took advantage, one by one, of new communications technology. From the 1850s both telegraph and railway lines moved steadily outwards from each of the Australian capital cities. The speed with which colonists took up telegraph communication is remarkable. Telegraphy was first attempted in Melbourne in June 1853. In March 1854 a permanent line was in operation and 4000 messages were sent within the first 12 months. ‘[D]espite the cost [of each message],’ says Ann Moyal, ‘the telegraph system immediately fed into the mixed strands of Victoria’s burgeoning commerce, linking trade and transport, dispersing news from Melbourne to the Murray, connecting investors with markets, gold diggers with buyers, and adding its own dynamism to a vigorously progressing colony’. A line to Adelaide was opened in 1857, to Sydney in 1858, to Launceston (by submarine cable) in 1859 and to Brisbane in 1861. Perth was joined to the network in 1877. Moyal suggests that ‘Australians took to telegrams like ducks to water. There was something about the laconic staccato style of the communication which suited their unloquacious temperaments’.2 The telegraph carried public news as well as linking individuals. Brief summaries of news, including market reports, could now be relayed with unfamiliar speed around the continent. Much still depend-

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ed on the newspapers, which were the only means of placing telegraphic messages before the world at large. The first combined Australian cricket team, for instance, was fielded to play England in 1877 and the news of its victory in Melbourne on 17 March was broadcast by telegraph. In Lismore, in northern New South Wales, the editor of the Northern Star received a telegram with the details on 19 March and, his paper being only a weekly, he published it on the 24th, a week after the event.3 This may seem slow. But it was probably enough to draw the inhabitants of the different colonies together as something like a single crowd of spectators, all, as it were, on the edge of their seats for the last wicket fall. But more significantly, the telegraph created a fabric of messages among individuals. Opportunities for contact were taken up, as I say, very quickly, although men and women from colony to colony showed a varying appreciation of the way in which this technology could link them to a continental network beyond. For instance, a count of telegrams sent shows that Melbourne was more closely linked to other parts of Australia than Adelaide was.4 It would probably be a straightforward task to measure the gradual integration of the colonial communities into a single community – ‘girt by sea’ – by counting up the telegrams which passed from colony to colony, year by year. This task still awaits us. Railways had a similar effect. In 1883 Sydney and Melbourne were linked by rail and by 1888 trains ran from Brisbane through to Adelaide. Railways made a difference not only for travel but also for postage, which was still far more important than the telegraph as a means of long-distance communication – and not only, of course, for letters but also for newspapers. And note, once again, that newspapers (like the telegraph) linked individuals as well as conveying public news. They were a medium which (unlike television but like the internet) flourished by the active participation of consumers, through advertisements and through letters to the editor. The numbers of newspapers vastly increased during the nineteenth century and the most successful papers were those which rode on the back of the latest technology – technology to be used in collecting news and ideas in the first place, in printing it up and in getting it out.5 Events such as these are usually treated as footnotes to the Australian story. They seem trivial and prosaic. The work of Ann Moyal and K. T. Livingston has much of value to say about the telegraph and the telephone, but how many more general Australian history texts mention such matters at all? Our tendency to ignore postage, historically the most important of all methods of long-distance communication and one similarly dependent on technological improvement, is

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almost absolute. And yet people have always been excited by such technology, as it unfolds in their own time, especially insofar as it is userfriendly, foolproof and designed for use en masse. It becomes part of the cutting edge of popular culture. Excitement is a result not only of obvious novelty. It is also due to the magic involved, the expanded processes of imagination and sentiment which come from dealing directly with people and places out of sight but no longer out of mind. And it is due to an increasing sense of individual agency. It may be possible to argue, for instance, that the use of telephones not only facilitates contact but also encourages it, because the phone’s efficiency is somehow counterintuitive and the mystery draws one in. And yet, it is mystery so easily managed. Marcel Proust wrote in the 1920s about the way in which the sound of a human voice via the telephone added a new degree of vibrancy to the relationship of speaker and listener. For him the effect of such technological ingenuity was indeed similar to magic.6 Democratic culture, as it emerged in the 1840s, was inspired by innovation such as this. Stephen Kern has written about the altered sense of space and time which was a result of technological change during the period 1880 to 1914. He writes too about the effect on democracy, but by ‘democracy’ he means habits of social equality.7 I am here more concerned with the popular sense of association which dated from the mid-nineteenth century and which was the result of the widespread use of great communicative agencies. Democracy is too loosely understood as mere egalitarianism. Rather, it is a method of government shaped partly by that common sense of control which goes with being able to make an impact on other people, including people in power, whatever the distance. As such, democracy in Australia dates from the mid-nineteenth century and Mary S. and Toby were among its pioneers. So were the little girls who, at about the same time, were the agents in what might be called a revolution in literacy – and thus of letter writing – throughout the Australian colonies. The evidence, though vague in detail, proves a sudden enthusiasm, deeply felt, for access to new media, and especially among women and girls. There seems to have been considerable popular excitement with literacy, as a new means of ordering one’s life. The capacity to cope with and to make the most of writing, especially the capacity of women, changed dramatically. This is a phenomenon too frequently ignored, as an aspect of both democratic and gender history. It needs to be understood as part of the cultural basis of modern nationality and of other nineteenth and twentieth-century forms of association. Cultural history must be not only a matter of identity and imagination, but also of action, ideas being implicit in action, and vice versa.

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The change was at least partly a result of the new efficiency of postal services, beginning in Britain, where by far the most important innovation was Rowland Hill’s penny post. In these years the regular and reliable delivery of the mails was understood to be one of the main criteria of good government, and enormous effort was spent on it. Postage thus became a much more common part of daily life. In Britain the number of letters posted grew from 76 million in 1839, just before the penny post was introduced, to 347 million in 1850. Change was more gradual in the colonies, but in New South Wales between 1835 and 1845 the number of letters and newspapers passing through the Sydney post office more than quadrupled, as did the distance covered by the mails, while the population of the colony only doubled.8 There was a new concern, among Europeans throughout the world, with mass communication as the basis of economic progress and of moral improvement, and large numbers, even among the semi-literate, joined in the effort. In December 1857 a mother wrote from New York to her son on the Victorian goldfields. She was struck with the fact that communication over such a distance could be so intimate and reliable. At any moment in New York, she said, ‘when we meet our friends and they inquire after your welfare … we can refer back a short space of time and say that you was wel [sic]’.9 It was presumably a process as mysterious to her as the internet is to most of us. The new postal facilities were clearly in step with demand. Indeed the relationship between supply and demand seems to have been one of mutual reinforcement. Children were rapidly drawn into this suddenly enlarged regime of communication. Perhaps it could equally be said that the enlargement was itself partly the work of children. In New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Western Australia and South Australia there were serious attempts to reform the elementary schools in this period, so as to make education more widely available. There were significant changes to the school systems in Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia in 1848, in New South Wales in 1849 and in South Australia in 1852. But circumstantial evidence suggests very clearly that government action was everywhere at least partly provoked by transformations already underway among the people. We can measure with fair approximation the extent to which these reforms matched the inclinations of the population at large. During the second half of the nineteenth century the colonial censuses provided figures showing degrees of literacy (‘can read and write’, ‘can read’, ‘cannot read’) with the population subdivided by age (usually at fiveyearly intervals). So it is possible to show how, for all four colonies, each age cohort improved on its predecessor. (I leave out the experience in Victoria, separated from New South Wales in 1851, because the gold

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rushes make its population history too complicated.) Such subdivisions of age begin for New South Wales and South Australia at censuses taken in 1861. For Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia they begin only in 1881, but even at that distance from the pivotal period of change consistent patterns emerge. In Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales and Western Australia there seems to have been a sudden increase in literacy among girls born in the late 1830s and at school during the 1840s. A comparison of that five-year cohort with its predecessor, by way of the census figures, suggests that in Van Diemen’s Land there was an improvement of eight percentage points among girls able to read and write. In both New South Wales and Western Australia the difference is seven points. In South Australia improvement came a little later, with a jump of ten percentage points between girls born in the late 1830s and those born in early 1840s. In each case the trend continued thereafter. In New South Wales, for instance, 81 per cent of women born in the late 1840s had learnt to read and write by 1861, compared to 70 per cent of those born in the early 1830s. Male literacy also improved (from a higher base) but everywhere the process among males was slower. As a result in New South Wales by 1861 young women were already more literate than men of the same age (a difference of six percentage points among those aged 15 to 19), and this difference is to be found throughout all the Australian colonies in due course.10 For reasons I cannot explain, no such female superiority is to be found, apparently, in comparable figures for England and Wales.11 I can suggest, then, that in Australia those patterns of long-distance association, including patterns of national feeling, which were to be formed during the second half of the nineteenth century were more clearly shaped by women’s needs and women’s sensibility than had ever been the case before. Here is additional context for those arguments on gender identity which have been proposed by Marilyn Lake and others for the period of federation. In earlier generations, among the mass of the population boys and men had always been pushed into writing and reading more thoroughly than women and girls. Traditionally too, it was often thought good enough for a girl to be able to read without being able to write. Now – in the 1840s and 1850s – girls clearly wanted to write as well. The reforms in schooling which dated from the late 1840s must have helped this process, but they came too late to be one of its causes. It would be more plausible, as I say, to argue that the reforms were a result of increasing demand. They are therefore a neat example of the way in which governments might respond to popular opinion in a pre-democratic age. It is clear too that children and their parents made use of the

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schools in complicated ways. Undoubtedly where new schools were established more children were enrolled and to that extent reform efforts and increased literacy were closely coordinated. And yet, even while girls’ literacy was beginning to equal, and even to outstrip the literacy of boys, surviving figures for enrolment and attendance suggest that girls were still in a marked minority at school. In New South Wales in 1852, for instance, only 46 per cent of pupils were girls. In South Australia the number was consistently as low as 36 per cent until 1851, and thereafter 45 per cent.12 It seems that Australian girls, when they went to school, were (typically, I mean) learning more effectively than boys. Presumably, for reasons of girlish culture which must to some extent remain obscure, they felt a greater need. Perhaps they knew that, as girls and as women, place-bound in their everyday life, there must be a distinctive charm in leaping distances by post. Girls, thanks at least partly to their parents, often had their own ways of learning to read and write. The evidence here says a little more about motivation. In South Australia the Sunday schools had a higher proportion of girls than did the government day schools.13 In Van Diemen’s Land, while boys outnumbered girls in the government schools, the opposite was true of the ‘private venture’ schools established outside the government system. Because of the type of teachers employed in the island’s government schools they had what Derek Phillips calls a ‘reputation for roughness’ whereas the private venture schools were more refined. ‘[L]abouring parents,’ Phillips suggests, ‘wanted something better than a labouring man to be the teacher of their daughters’.14 But they obviously cared less about their sons. In Western Australia it was the Catholic Church which stepped into the breach, with new schools founded in Perth and Fremantle in 1846–47. In 1847, says David Mossman, ‘thirty boys were enrolled in the Catholic Boys’ school in Perth, while double that number of girls, the majority of them Protestants, attended the convent school’. The Sisters of Mercy, who ran the convent, represented a new model of polished womanhood and one which had an obvious appeal to the poor. The nuns set their face against ‘roughness’. As one of them remarked in August 1849, ‘We would not admit a naughty child and this is, I believe, one of the chief recommendations of the school’. Music and singing were a particularly important part of the Catholic style of education. Sister Mary Francis sang solo at mass on Christmas Day 1848. ‘The people were all astonished and delighted,’ another nun remarked, ‘[and] crowds of Protestants came to hear her. I have every hope it will be the means of making many converts amongst the poorer classes’.15 It appears that the main attraction of writing at this time, for the daughters of poor parents, was that it made them respectable. Nor is

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this simply a question of performance and appearance. Respectability, among all ranks of life, might also be an active condition, a means of making contact, of expanding the limits of association. Certainly, among women, writing, like singing in church and playing musical instruments, were the means of constructing a ladylike image. But these skills, and even more the reading of novels and the writing of letters, were respectable in other ways. They implied a distinctive means of enlarging and controlling one’s world. At the same time numerous ladies’ schools were set up which aimed among other things to polish the daughters of the lower middle classes, teaching them how to write to each other in a ladylike handwriting and in ladylike language. A new culture of letter writing among a range of status groups went hand in hand with a far more efficient – a more user-friendly – postal system. These mid-century girls, together with their brothers, were being taught to take advantage of an enlarged information and communications network. The lessons they learnt had extraordinary implications for the way in which, as members of society, they might be interlinked – implications not only within each colony and not only within Australia as a whole, but throughout the world. In middle age little girls who had learnt to write in the 1850s were to be among the first women to enjoy the right to vote in Australia. By that time they and their children had experienced not only the coming of the telegraph but also of the telephone. In the year of federation there were nearly 25 000 telephone services throughout Australia and the telephone was beginning to supplement the telegraph as a common method of communication. In 1902 the first interstate trunkline was built, from South Australia to Victoria, and Sydney was linked with Melbourne in 1907.16 In the era of federation, the Australian colonies were truly, if not literally, stitched together with telephone lines. The telephone came to my great-grandparents’ house, near Narromine, in western New South Wales, within a few years of federation. The family’s response proves nothing in itself, but it helps to convey some of that sense of novelty, that sense of control – even that sense of magic – which led people of all kinds towards such technology, and through such technology to build outwards their web of association. The younger children were told to write poems to mark the event. This included my grandmother, then a young teenager, who is supposed to have composed the following verse sitting on top of a stepladder. Our telephone was opened, With great surprise and pleasure, To all who knew about it, And saw that it was clever.

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Oh dear, what a scramble, When they heard the first bell ring, But I had gone to ramble, The cutters lunch to bring. But when I did come home, I heard enough about it, To make me roar with laughter And then become excited. That night we had a long chat, To Williams, the postmaster. He’s such a very funny chap, He filled us full of laughter.17 There were nine children, including five little girls. How did they all join in the ‘long chat’ with ‘Williams, the postmaster’? How did Williams manage, apparently simultaneously, to fill them full of laughter? The picture we get of adults and children gathered around the new machine, sharing as much as they could in the messages backwards and forwards, each of them imagining Williams’ face and form at the other end, is the kind of picture which might be repeated any number of times in the long history of technological innovation in Australia. Contact of this kind also offered a new sense of the meaning of intimacy. Private circumstances at one end of the line must be suddenly imagined by someone else – someone remote and yet equally private – at the other. Kern writes of the telephone and of other late-nineteenthcentury inventions as phenomena which ‘pierced the shell of privacy’. As a result, he says, they provoked angry reactions from those who valued the quiet security of home life. He quotes the English writer Arnold Bennett, for instance, on the ‘fearful universality’ of the telephone in the United States.18 But Kern makes no distinction between male and female responses to this great change. Perhaps it was men, on the whole, who most valued silence at home. Telephones involved not only an invasion but a validation of privacy and they might well have been enchanting to women and girls, who were supposed to be wholly private beings. Any new communications technology, meant for the masses, is bound to do something useful for those who, because of age, gender or disability, cannot easily move about themselves. But they must be especially attractive to those who are forced to make a virtue of their seclusion. As with postage, the telephone created a distinctive type of nation-

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al community. It was enormously important for methods of government. It played its part, for instance, in the consolidation of national feeling in the new German Empire, Bismarck being the first statesman in the world to use it in linking provincial capitals to the seat of government.19 In the United States a journalist noticed in 1911 that ‘the new idea has already arrived in the more efficient departments of the Federal service’. The same happened about the same time among federal civil servants and politicians in Australia, although the evidence in our case suggests that until the 1920s phones were used more as a kind of oral telegraph (say, for organising meetings) than as a means of lengthy discussion.20 For many years this seems to have been typical of the population at large. So far, phone calls were too expensive for chatting. They promoted efficiency rather than affection. Even so, where people were widely scattered they gave a new sense of togetherness. In the 1920s organisations were emerging in the bush, such as the Country Party and the Country Women’s Association, which would have been hard to initiate and sustain without phones. In fact the party lines used in the bush allowed for meetings held on the phone. In New South Wales the CWA had 128 branches by the end of its first five years. Emerging as it seems to have done from the new communications technology, it is not surprising that the CWA’s founders listed as one of their main ambitions for rural Australia, ‘Telephones at cost within reach of all householders’.21 In fact, this great object was a long time coming. As late as 1983 only 85 per cent of households in Australia had phones (for others, of course, a phone may still have been ‘within reach’) and the figure for the country was still as low as 79 per cent.22 But by then telephones were beginning to make a new impact on Australia. Once again, it is possible that women led the way. Ann Moyal’s study of the way in which women were using their telephones during the 1970s and 1980s suggests that something dramatic had happened in that time. She makes no explicit comparison with men, but perhaps the stereotyped understanding of male and female telephone use is based largely on truth. What Moyal calls a ‘dynamic feminine culture of the telephone’ came into existence. In other words, thanks largely perhaps to the increasing cheapness of calls, the proportion of non-utilitarian messages had reached a kind of critical mass. This was a phenomenon, a set of attitudes and relationships, she says, ‘in which kin-keeping, nurturing, community support, volunteer activity, and giving and receiving care played a signal part’. Use of the telephone typified by short calls was overlaid by more broadly social and affective uses, typical of long calls – sometimes, no doubt, very long calls, rambling conversations lacking any instrumental purpose but effective nonetheless in the interweaving of association.23

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A good deal has been written about the way in which imagination works in the reading and writing of material meant for a general audience. We have much less information about the imaginative aspects of reading and writing between individuals and about speaking and listening. This limits our understanding of the impact of the telephone, radio and internet. I have already mentioned Proust’s impressions of the telephone. In 1913 an American periodical, the Women’s Home Companion, likewise commented on the way in which talking on the phone seemed to change the way people dealt with each other. There seemed to be a new kind of intimacy, a closeness, a pulling down of barriers not in spite of but because of distance. The Woman’s Home Companion saw this as scandalous. ‘A young girl,’ it remarked, ‘who would not think of standing on a street corner to converse with a boy will call him at his home by telephone and exchange idle nothings with him’. This looked, to the Woman’s Home Companion, like a ‘lack of manners’. And according to Kern, ‘Telephone conversation allowed men to take liberties with [female] operators that they would never think of taking in person.’24 Similar things could be said today about the way in which telephone marketing works. Telephones upset ideas about personal space. They upset ideas about space altogether. Much the same happens with writing and print – remember Toby and Mary S. – and now it is email which can seem peculiarly frank, rude and intrusive. But the other side of rudeness is imaginative challenge, the surprise involved in breaking through barriers of distance. The result is always an artificial kind of relationship, and one always in a way miraculous. With each new type of communications technology we get new methods and types of association. Intimacy and moral community are refashioned. We feel a new kind of closeness. An account of media education in the Australian in April 2001 states that ‘computer technology used to be taught as a science subject’. Today, on the other hand, it has ‘a strong creative character and … [it draws] a broader range of students’. It is now a ‘soft science’ rather than a hard one.25 It affects the world in more subtle, more social and more pervasive ways. This transformation may well herald a change similar to that which schoolchildren, especially girls, effected throughout Australia in the 1840s and 1850s and similar also to that which Moyal finds among women telephone-users in the 1970s and 1980s. In every case it is possible to suggest that ideas about association are the offspring, not just of thought but of action, not just of imagination but of making contact. New methods of making contact must always be attractive to those who are disadvantaged by old methods. In the process culture and society, whether local, national or international, are refashioned.

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FURTHER READING For further reading on nationalism and Australian nationhood, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983; Anne Coote, ‘Imagining a Colonial Nation: The Development of Popular Concepts of Sovereignty and Nation in New South Wales with Particular Reference to the Period between 1856 and 1860’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 1, 1999, pp. 1–37; J. B. Hirst, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2000; and Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context’, Historical Studies, vol. 22, 1986, pp. 116–31. Key texts in the history of communications include Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983; K. T. Livingston, The Wired Nation Continent: The Communication Revolution and Federating Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996; Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications, Nelson, Melbourne, 1984; Alan Atkinson, ‘Classified Cupid’, Push from the Bush, no. 22, April 1986, pp. 30–38.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Marian Quartly, Bill Green, Richard White and Hsu-Ming Teo for their comments on the drafting of this paper.

4 ON THE DEFENSIVE: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND AUSTRALIAN C U LT U R A L H I S T O R Y S T E P H E N G A RTO N

History is often on the defensive. The attacks stretch back many years and have come equally from within as without. In the 1880s, philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche questioned both the authenticity of the past and the narrative of progress that sustained the discipline. If we jump forward to the 1950s, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss stated his preference for structure over event, instigating an avalanche of rebuttals from historians. A decade later historian Geoffrey Elton warned of the evil effects of sociology on our capacity to interpret the past. Despite these warnings the discipline survived, even prospered. But the jeremiad is again in vogue. Over the last few years there has been a spate of warnings about the impending decline of history, both in Australia and elsewhere, expressed in dramatic and colourful language – of killing, attack, defence, murder and the threat of a ‘black armband’ distortion of the past. At the centre of what has become known as the ‘history wars’ is a disciplinary struggle, shaped by deeper currents of cultural contest over the role of knowledge, persistent social conflicts over the production and uses of truth, economic change, transformation in the function of universities and generational shifts. But in the heat of battle the complexities often get lost. Many of those seeking to defend what they see as the traditional disciplinary virtues of objectivity, truth and a knowable past, have constructed a ‘bogey-man’ – poststructuralism – as the cancer eating away at these core values. I’m not convinced by these warnings of imminent destruction. Of course the self-styled ‘defenders’ of history might take this as evidence that I am too stricken by the disease to be able to see the real dangers it poses. But looking around me I still see a lot of excellent history being written, striking and original contributions in many journals, illuminating and path-breaking books, a vibrant postgraduate culture, some

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excellent work by Honours students and reasonably healthy undergraduate enrolments. Moreover the theorists that are said to be the root of the discipline’s problem are almost unrecognisable in the potted summaries provided by some critics. Instead of illuminating accounts of difficult theoretical positions we get strangely distorted caricatures, all the easier to demolish, but hardly conforming to the spirit of impartiality and objectivity these critics invoke as the antidote to the poisons of poststructuralist moral relativism and empirical scepticism. In contrast I believe that, on the whole, the effect of poststructuralism has been positive. It has played an important role in the shift away from social history, with its narrow focus on oppression, agency and experience, to cultural history and its concern with more complex problems such as culture, language, identity, subjectivity, gender, postcolonialism, power and discourse. Seeing this shift in a favourable light is undoubtedly a matter of taste, and not in itself an adequate defence of poststructuralism. Moreover some poststructuralist ‘theory-laden’ history is demonstrably poor. The issue, for me, is not ‘poststructuralism’ versus ‘real history’ but the more old fashioned distinction between good and bad history (more of this later). But criticism of poststructuralist history, most notably by Australian commentator, Keith Windschuttle, and distinguished English historian Richard Evans, has commanded an appreciative audience. They are part of a much wider literature of complaint about the threat to Western culture posed by poststructuralism and postmodernism.1 Both these movements, in questioning some of the traditional foundations of Western knowledge, have naturally raised the ire of defenders of traditional values and systems of analysis. In much of the debate about these movements, however, poststructuralism and postmodernism tend to be seen as one and the same thing. But there are differences. Postmodernism is primarily a movement within the arts which has challenged modernist assumptions that truth lies at a deeper level, beyond realistic forms of representation. Poststructuralism, however, has been a movement largely within the humanities and social sciences questioning theories that find the explanation for the nature of social life and human culture in deeper social, economic, psychological and cultural structures. In contrast poststructuralism eschews the search for causes grounded in hidden structures, instead focusing on how language and culture themselves shape social and cultural life. If we accept that poststructuralism has been a significant and controversial influence on strands of Australian cultural history, it is worthwhile exploring the nature of this impact and why this has upset some critics. Here I want to suggest that cultural history cannot be reduced to poststructuralism. It is only one strand within this broader field.

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Similarly I will argue that, despite the influence of poststructuralism on some cultural historians, the accounts of poststructuralism and its effect on the discipline by prominent critics, like Evans and Windschuttle, are flawed. More importantly I hope to point to the utility of poststructuralism for cultural history, by citing some historical work which has opened up new understanding of Australia’s past. History doesn’t require defending; it needs openness, tolerance and robust debate.

A U S T R A L I A N C U LT U R A L H I S TO RY Cultural history is flourishing. Over the last decade it has become a major enterprise, both in Australia and overseas. It is one that has sustained journals, such as Australian Cultural History, interdisciplinary groups such as the Sydney-based Australian Culture Workshop, numerous conferences, publications and theses. Moreover some of the established areas of historical scholarship in Australia, such as labour history, have felt impelled to accept that culture is a legitimate focus of historical inquiry.2 Other respected journals, notably Australian Historical Studies and Journal of Australian Studies, have devoted issues to new directions in historical scholarship, most of which involve the cultural analysis of diverse subjects such as citizenship, national identity and subjectivity.3 And even a casual glance at the contents of the major Australian journals reveals a plethora of articles focusing on problems of representation, narrative, myth, textual strategies, cultural practices, power, knowledge, sexuality, masculinity, femininity, space and much more, signifying the impact of poststructuralism on the new cultural history. Moreover many of these studies have moved beyond a narrow definition of culture as literature, film, popular media, theatre and recreation to embrace such themes as bushwalking, tourism, eating, crime, ageing, childhood, work and war. The subjects of many of these articles tend to be social groups such as women, indigenous Australians and workers – a move away from the traditional focus on influential men. The roots of cultural history are many. Given this diversity one should hesitate before offering a definitive definition. But at a very general level there seems to be a consensus that cultural history is concerned with the signs, symbols, rituals and practices that historically shape ideas, beliefs, habits and action. It is concerned with uncovering the meanings embedded in forms of cultural interaction defined in the anthropological sense of a ‘whole way of life’. Most cultural histories work from the premise that human societies are saturated in symbols, narratives, rituals and ‘webs of significance’, to use Clifford Geertz’s evocative phrase. The past is lived, remembered, memorialised and experienced within these relatively autonomous cultural frameworks.

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And these frameworks are the product of action, invention, imagination and social practice, and the political, social and cultural conflicts emerging out of contests over power and meaning.4 Poststructuralism then is hardly the only significant influence on cultural history. There are many strands of cultural history that have grown out of Marxism, Russian formalism, the Birmingham School, popular memory, American folkloric studies, ethnography, women’s history, gay studies, postcolonialism and a variety of other movements and approaches. Cultural history also has a close relationship with the discipline of cultural studies; a similarly theoretically diverse field but one more usually concerned with contemporary culture. Of interest here, however, is Meaghan Morris’s argument that the distinctive character of Australian cultural studies is the product of its origin in historical rather than literary debates, unlike America and Britain.5 Some proponents of cultural history in Australia, notably John Rickard and Richard Waterhouse, are distinctly antipathetic to poststructuralism, drawing their inspiration more from E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.6 Moreover we shouldn’t confuse support for particular social movements, as Richard Evans does, as evidence for the debilitating effects of poststructuralism. There are feminists, such as American Joan Scott, who champion Foucault, but equally others, notably Australian feminist historian Beverley Kingston, strongly opposed to poststructuralism.7 The fact that cultural history has drawn inspiration from a very diverse range of sources does raise the question of exactly what is poststructuralism and what has been its influence in this field. Certainly the focus on signs, symbols, rituals, gender, ethnicity, power or narrative of themselves do not constitute poststructuralism. There are plenty of approaches, such as Marxism, which attempt to theorise these problems in ways very different to poststructuralism. Marxists, some ethnographers, and some feminist, gay, postcolonial and cultural theorists seek for the roots of culture in deeper structures of class, gender, sexuality, imperialism and economic relations. In other words they retain a faith in the structuralist project of seeing culture as a reflection of underlying structures. Poststructuralists, however, focus on language and culture as autonomous realms of social practice, exploring the ways that these practices are produced and contained by language itself. For poststructuralism there is nothing prior to language. The social world is only apprehended through the lens of language and therefore it is essential to understand how language produces culture. Here we have a complex theoretical and political debate within social theory over whether language produces culture or whether culture is merely an effect or a reflection of deeper social, psychological or economic structures. These debates have been at the heart of the evolution of cultural history.8

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One of the strengths of cultural history is that it has introduced new debates and perspectives into traditional areas of historical scholarship. While cultural history has obviously been a major strand of feminist, indigenous, labour and welfare history, there have been interesting cultural analyses that have enlivened intellectual, economic, political, military, religious and education historiography.9 Some of these have deployed poststructuralist concepts to great effect, others have utilised theories and methods that owe little to poststructuralism. Moreover there have been major works of cultural analysis in staples of Australian history, such as Federation, the history of the gold rushes, and postwar reconstruction.10 These studies have transformed our understanding of Australian politics and culture in profound ways. These important books and articles in Australian cultural history have found an enthusiastic audience. Publishers have thought them fit to publish, journals have found referees keen to recommend publication and many have elicited sympathetic and appreciative assessments. These works have in turn influenced other scholars and contributed significantly to healthy debates in Australian history. Australian cultural history, like cultural history more generally, is a diverse field, drawing on a range of concepts and theories. If we are to comprehend the past we need tools and concepts to allow us to grasp the cultural contexts in which the remnants of the past have been produced. Historians, like many other evidence gatherers, have to work with partial and imperfect materials, and struggle to confer significance on these traces. This requires an effort to reconstruct the historical contexts which frame the evidence. And such reconstructions require theories about how cultures work. Theory is not an optional extra but is ever present in historical interpretation (although more or less explicit depending on the historian). Disputes between historians may revolve around particular pieces of evidence but such arguments are embedded in deeper differences over theories of the nature of culture and power. Many cultural historians are fervent opponents of poststructuralism but others have found poststructuralist theories of power, knowledge, gender, discourse, discipline, governmentality and embodiment, to name but a few, useful in understanding the significance of remnants of the past. But poststructuralism has done more than add to the armoury of historical methods and techniques for understanding past events. It has also raised new questions about the ways historians actually work with these remains of the past. In giving meaning to the past, historians don’t just interpret the evidence: they compose stories about these meanings, or in the words of Hayden White, they ‘emplot’ the past.11 This is itself a cultural process. The past is often found as stories and transformed into new types of stories, which have their own narrative

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structures. In other words the relationship between the past and present is not merely one of recovery, but of mediating the various ways in which both the past and the present are saturated in stories. Historians make stories out of stories and poststructuralism has heightened awareness of these processes, making historians more self-conscious about what they actually do in the act of composing their own stories. The process of mediation has been one of the most significant insights of poststructuralism. This is not so much a denial of a usable past as a caution about the difficulties of using it. Of course this self-consciousness is what so annoys historians such as Richard Evans and Keith Windschuttle. Many historians, in Australia and overseas, have found poststructuralist concepts useful. Others have found the questions raised about how historians engage with the past critical for understanding the relationship between the past and the present. But for Windschuttle, in particular, the support of colleagues carries no weight. Instead he asserts that the bulk of the profession attracted to these ideas are dupes, naïve and unable to see that the theories they support erode the very basis of the discipline. Although I don’t share these fears it is important not to dismiss them out of hand. This just threatens to lead us into a situation of assertion and counter assertion. Instead we need to explore this disquiet more closely.

AT TA C K I N G P O S T S T R U C T U R A L I S M Has poststructuralism enlivened the discipline of history? As I have tried to indicate, much ink has been spilt on this question. And within the field of cultural history there are intense debates between poststructuralist and non-poststructuralist approaches. These nuances and subtleties are largely lost on some of the self-proclaimed defenders of the discipline. One of the more disappointing dimensions of the debate is the resort of critics like Evans and Windschuttle to ‘schoolboy’ logic games, caricature and quoting out of context to advance their claims. Their argument that poststructuralists assert there is no truth, but want us to believe this statement is true, might look clever but is genuinely facile in relation to the more sophisticated arguments about ‘truth’ developed by scholars such as Foucault. Thus the critics create a ‘straw poststructuralist’ easily demolished, but one that hardly corresponds to any insightful reading of poststructuralist theory. For historians who pride themselves on their rigour, there are a surprising number errors in their analysis. The rhetoric of the critics borders on the florid. One of the foremost Australian critics, Keith Windschuttle, has accused contemporary

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literary and social theory of ‘murdering’ the discipline. For Windschuttle poststructuralism is the denial of any objective truth about the past. It is a belief that the past is viewed solely through the present and thus that history is largely fiction. Windschuttle lambasts historians who have fallen ‘for last season’s theoretical models’, blind to the fact that they spell the end of history as we know it.12 In a remarkably similar formulation, eminent Oxford historian Richard Evans, noted for his studies of modern Germany and his pivotal role in rebutting Holocaust deniers, such as David Irving, has argued that poststructuralists see ‘the past’ as a product of present day power struggles. For Evans, poststructuralism is the revolt of the disenfranchised radicals of the 1960s, an attempt to claim power for historians as a compensation for their loss of relevance in the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush era. Although Evans affirms that the relationship between past and present is intimate, drawing as he does on the by now classic arguments of E. H. Carr, like Carr, Evans sees the contemporary bias of the historian as a shroud that can be torn away to find a true past. Both Evans and Windschuttle believe in an objective past, found in the sources, which can exist beyond the discipline of history, free of the taint of present theory and politics. For them poststructuralism imperils this fundamental basis for the discipline.13 There are worrying dimensions to these characterisations of poststructuralism. Windschuttle and Evans refuse to accept that there are actually many varieties of poststructuralism. Instead they collapse them into a single, uniform school of thought – in Windschuttle’s colourful turn of phrase ‘the gurus all share a similar set of views’.14 But this is demonstrably false. There are vast differences in the methods and concerns of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, de Certeau, Lyotard, Jameson, Said and LaCapra (to take just a few of those seen to be part of the canon). Moreover there were serious disputes between them, notably between Foucault and Derrida.15 Equally worrying is the way Windschuttle collapses traditions such as ethnographic history into poststructuralism, ignoring the different lineages of these theories and methods. Moreover he glosses over statements which contradict or complicate his characterisation. For example Windschuttle castigates Greg Dening for seeing history as fiction, ignoring the fact that Dening talks of history as a conversation between past and present, one where both parties interact, a statement which implies an acceptance of an actual past, although one that can only be retrieved with difficulty.16 Similarly Windschuttle argues that Foucault’s histories of forms of classification such as penology, criminology and psychiatry position crime and insanity as ‘arbitrary products of language’, completely missing the fact that language for Foucault is not arbitrary but systematic, ordered

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and determined by social practices and forms of power and authority.17 Other problems abound. Evans argues that poststructuralism is really a 1980s revolt by intellectuals against irrelevance. This seems to fly in the face of the fact that many of the most influential theorists of poststructuralism came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s (not the 1980s). They represented a complex response to the failures (theoretical and political) of Marxism, not a revolt against Thatcher and Reagan. Moreover, far from poststructuralism being part of the emergence of new sub-disciplines, such as social, labour and women’s history, as Evans suggests, poststructuralism represented a challenge to these approaches – one strongly resisted by many historians in these fields.18 There are a lot of potential points of dispute here. But rather than go into the minutiae of these issues it might be useful to narrow the focus. Both Evans and Windschuttle identify Michel Foucault as the poststructuralist who has exerted the most influence on the discipline of history. But Evans and Windschuttle’s account of Foucault seems almost unrecognisable to anyone with even a passing familiarity with his work. Their lack of understanding of Foucault’s ideas and the contexts that produced them is troubling. Importantly, although many scholars of Foucault see significant shifts in Foucault’s oeuvre, Evans and Windschuttle pick bits and pieces from across the spectrum of his work to develop their singular characterisation. A few examples will suffice. Evans argues that Foucault is concerned with the ‘ideological products’ of the dominant discourse.19 But this ignores a key dimension of Foucault’s analysis, which sees discourses such as criminology, sexology and psychiatry as products of actual social practices. For Foucault knowledges are constructed by practices, which in turn shape knowledges. It is the double helix of discourse and social practice that shapes the past.20 Foucault is far from Evans’ strangled vision of him as merely an historian of ideology. In other words, contrary to the assertion of Windschuttle and Evans, there is for Foucault a knowable past, one of practices and knowledges, which undergo historical change. Similarly Windschuttle asserts that Foucault is a theorist of social repression, one who fails to see the virtues of genuine social reform. But this ignores Foucault’s extensive criticism of theories of repression. In contrast he insists that power is productive, not repressive. Power produces subjects – the criminal, the welfare recipient, the madman, the homosexual, the specific intellectual and many more – born of precise historical practices and knowledges. These subjects might be caught in relations of domination and subordination, but the subjects don’t exist outside of the discourses and practices that produce them – they are created historically. For Foucault these are not fictions imposed on the past

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but actual historical developments, keys to the organisation and distribution of power in contemporary culture. Moreover Windschuttle’s effort to refute Foucault by resort to ‘historical evidence’ is fraught with problems. For example he takes issue with Foucault’s analysis of the ‘great confinement’ in the eighteenth century, arguing instead that the most significant period of institutionalisation was the late nineteenth century.21 But here Windschuttle has confused quantity with quality. What is significant for Foucault is not the numbers confined in the eighteenth century, but the creation of enclosed institutions as a new type of social strategy. Moreover the eighteenth-century practice was to confine people in large undifferentiated asylums that contained the mad, the criminal, the poor, the aged and the diseased under one roof. What marks out the late nineteenth century was not the growth in the numbers confined (although these did increase exponentially) but the differentiation of problem populations into very specific categories and institutions (the feebleminded, the defective delinquent, the moral imbecile, the psychopath, the neurasthenic, the sociopath and many more). The key to understanding Foucault’s contribution to the history of institutionalisation is his theorisation of this process – the emergence of disciplinary and ‘dividing practices’. Thus Windschuttle’s refutation only works because he ignores key dimensions of Foucault’s argument. Similarly Evans demonstrates a palpable lack of understanding of poststructuralism, pointing to scholars such as John Boswell as evidence of this scourge, when in fact Boswell was deeply opposed to Foucauldian approaches, and was the subject of harsh criticism by poststructuralist historians of sexuality.22 More examples of how Evans and Windschuttle have fundamentally misconceived the nature of poststructuralism and the work of Foucault in particular might strain the patience of readers. It is important, however, to distinguish between Evans and Windschuttle. Evans develops the more subtle analysis. He does make the mistake of seeing continuity between social history and postmodernism, when most theorists would argue for a profound rupture between the two; social history being in some senses a conventional enterprise to uncover the facts of social existence, although one focusing on the experiences of the ‘underdog’ rather than the elite. But in other ways Evans concedes that the past is fragile, involving a complex relationship between past and present. For Windschuttle the battle lines are clearer. There is empirical history and there is theory-laden history. The former is healthy and correct; the latter is fashionable and fundamentally threatening to the discipline. But this dichotomy of history as empirical or theoretical is flawed. Windschuttle’s own efforts to refute poststructuralist history by

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resort to the facts do not withstand sustained scrutiny. He is very selective in his use of evidence and often distorts the arguments of theorists like Foucault to sustain his point. More importantly, his distinction between empirical and theory-laden is one that most historians would reject, at least those writing after R. G. Collingwood’s influential work in the 1940s on the relationship between the historian and the past as one of interpretation and imaginative reconstruction.23 Even Evans admits that the present influences the past, that historians select the evidence and impose order on a chaotic past. Windschuttle ignores these problems. For him facts are self-evident, theory free and waiting to be discovered. Historical dispute then becomes the clash between historians with the facts and those who distort the facts through their own political and ideological biases. Good history is the identification and eradication of bias. Of course this is important but it is not that simple. History is more than the collection of facts; it is an effort to make those facts meaningful. This means understanding the contexts in which the facts are produced. The granting of meaning involves historians in a conversation between past and present. This is where poststructuralism has made a valuable contribution to the discipline. It has opened up conversations, allowed historians to ask different types of questions and given us new contexts in which to understand those things (facts) which are the stuff of interpretation. This is obvious when we observe historians in action.

M A K I N G H I S TO RY Despite my disagreements with Windschuttle and Evans, we share a belief in the need to ground historical inquiry in the evidence. This call to examine the evidence and subject it to scrutiny can be controversial. Windschuttle has generated considerable debate about the existence and extent of massacres on the Australian frontier, arguing that historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan have exaggerated the numbers of Aborigines killed in these conflicts. He claims that the available sources do not support the conclusion that these conflicts constituted massacres. A number of historians, however, have pointed to flaws in Windschuttle’s use of the sources.24 Windschuttle’s demand that historians examine the evidence carefully is not without merit, and if it leads to serious reassessments of the numbers killed, even if the number is lower than current estimates, this will be a useful contribution to debate. But we cannot survive by evidence alone. The flaw in Windschuttle’s argument is his belief that history can only be based on the evidence that survives. Here he echoes the arguments of Geoffrey Elton who claimed that where there were no traces of the past there was

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no history.25 But evidence is always partial and only takes on a meaning if placed in an appropriate context. In other words historians always construct larger worlds from the fragments that survive. They also use concepts, such as massacre, to make sense of the evidence. We can argue about the content and definition of concepts but we must acknowledge that what survives as evidence is only part of the picture. While Windschuttle rightly alerts us to the possibility that some reports of killings were exaggerated, there were even more powerful factors militating against the reporting of frontier killings of indigenous people (after all, there were precedents for the hanging of whites who killed blacks). It is likely that reported cases were the tip of an iceberg. Although we can never know the precise size of that iceberg it is a reasonable assumption that more killings took place than are actually recorded. Thus to declare that the historical reality of frontier conflict is only that provided by the few sources that remain is to fundamentally mistake the nature of historical evidence and the contexts in which it was produced. Nonetheless evidence is essential to advance historical debate. Here I can agree with Windschuttle and Evans. Where we depart is over the need to interpret the evidence. All history involves some conceptualisation, some conferring of meaning and significance and this can only come through some theory (be it poststructuralism, Marxism, functionalism or some other analysis of how societies work). Even ‘common sense’, the preferred, supposedly untainted by theory, frame of reference for historians like Windschuttle and Evans, has an ideological underpinning, one which, for theorists like Gramsci, makes it political and theoretical.26 History cannot be divided into two clearly demarcated camps, empirical and theory-laden. The two are intertwined in complex ways, although there are some histories that parade ‘common sense’ as their interpretation and others that proclaim theory at every turn. But we can’t take either of these positions as a priori signifiers of historical worth. There are numerous articles and books published each year which add valuable evidence, but fail to converse with the wider discipline. They add facts but in no appreciable way advance our understanding of the past, open up new horizons or significantly revise previous ways of seeing the past. They may be useful but don’t engage or appreciably transform our understanding of the past. There are other studies, however, which add immeasurably to our understanding of the past because of the novelty, depth and sophistication of the empirical research. To cite just one example, Janet McCalman’s Sex and Suffering (1998) is a path-breaking study of women’s’ health, one partly grounded in a Thompsonian search for social experience. It offers profound insights into gender, health, medicine and social policy.27 At the same

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time there are numerous poststructuralist accounts that are little more than rhetorical flourishes placed over some rather thin evidence.28 The issue is not empirical versus poststructuralist, as Windschuttle would have it, but illuminating interpretations of the past versus pedestrian accounts. This distinction is worth pursuing in greater detail. Here I want to take a few examples of recent works, which, to me, have enhanced our knowledge of the past. Most are cultural histories drawing some of their inspiration from poststructuralism. This is an effort to demonstrate, contra Windschuttle and Evans, that history can be enriched by such approaches. Of course the choice of texts is a very personal one, and not everyone will agree with my assessments, least of all critics such as Windschuttle. But there is a weight of opinion on my side. Many of the works chosen have been well received by a broad range of Australian historians. And I am working from the assumption that historians, on the whole, have not been duped. They have assessed the worth of specific poststructuralist concepts and integrated them where appropriate into their interpretations of the past. Here poststructuralism is not an overlay, masking a poverty of research, but a way of opening out and exploring detailed empirical research, offering new ways of viewing the past. There are many cultural histories that have made a significant contribution to the discipline. Some of these wear their theory very lightly, but nonetheless utilise important poststructuralist ideas and concepts. For example, Tom Griffiths’s marvellous study of the antiquarian imagination in colonial Australia draws on a diverse range of theoretical traditions – ethnographic ideas of people as ‘history makers’, Foucauldian concepts of discourse and classification, and ideas about culture, representation and perception drawn from contemporary debates in cultural history.29 Catharine Coleborne’s work on women in colonial lunatic asylums challenges our understanding of colonial madness and confinement as forms of social control, through a detailed examination of the ways in which the spaces and practices of the asylum were gendered.30 Similarly Ros Pesman illuminates our understanding of travel, tourism and the construction of female identities through a subtle reading of the travel narratives, letters, diaries and autobiographies of Australian women travellers. Here she examines ideas of exile, narrative and the writing of the self to understand the complex ways that women negotiated and subverted the gendered cultural restrictions of Australian society.31 Similarly David Walker’s award-winning study of Australian perceptions of Asia draws on a rich array of sources – diaries, private papers, travel brochures and magazines, as well as government reports, inquiries and diplomatic correspondence. This fine study explores the

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ways in which Asia was configured in the Australian imagination, through a detailed study of spatial, cultural, geographic and racial anxieties that shaped Australian views of its place in the region. Drawing on concepts of Orientalism, and discourses as ordered bodies of knowledge, Walker provides a strikingly original account Australian cultural understandings of Asia.32 The convict era has also been a fertile field for historians. In the last 20 years this area has been significantly enriched by the work of many historians, most notably John Hirst, David Neal, Kay Daniels, Stephen Nicholas, Michael Sturma, Paula Byrnes and, more recently, Deborah Oxley’s path-breaking analysis of women transported to New South Wales from 1815 to 1840.33 Some of these historians, notably Sturma and Byrne, have drawn some inspiration from cultural history. But the most striking instance of this approach is the work of Joy Damousi. She examines the ways in which convict women were constructed as ‘depraved and disorderly’ and how these representations arose out of specific forms of resistance to masculine colonial authority. This is achieved through close readings of some key texts, examinations that reveal the complex ways in which discourses on gender shaped the experience of convict women. Here Damousi explores how women contested the social spaces of shipboard life, the factory and the homestead, and used their sexuality to subvert authority and claim some agency in an oppressive colonial regime. Damousi deploys poststructuralist concepts of discourse, power, space, gender and sexuality to uncover the sexual dynamics of colonial society.34 The result is an illuminating and invaluable contribution to our understanding of convict women and the colonial gender order. Aboriginal history has been another area of extraordinary growth in recent years. The contribution of scholars such as Henry Reynolds, James Miller, Marcia Langton, Jackie Huggins, Lyndall Ryan, Richard Broome and Andrew Markus, again to name but a few, has been enormous. Reynolds, despite the recent efforts of Windschuttle to diminish his contribution, has enriched our understanding of colonial race relations through an exploration of life on both sides of the frontier and the nature of frontier conflict. Perhaps most importantly he has dug deep into the evidence to show that early colonial authorities accepted that Aborigines had occupied the continent and had some claim to ownership of the land.35 But little of this work could be called poststructuralist; indeed there has been a striking absence of poststructuralism in Aboriginal history, although there are a few important exceptions.36 One notable contribution to the analysis of white/indigenous relations in Australia which does draw very effectively on Foucauldian concepts of discourse, power and governmentality (meaning in this context

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the ordered regulation of conduct) is the work of Tim Rowse.37 This immensely subtle analysis of assimilation policy in central Australia is a detailed study of colonial rationing and how it gave rise to pervasive colonial discourses that shaped assimilation policy. This was not a simple evolution of ideas moving inexorably and logically towards assimilation. Rather it was a complex and contradictory set of knowledges and practices that shaped colonial relationships in profound ways. Rowse delivers a fresh and insightful study of assimilation policy, one that escapes the simplistic ‘whiggish’ assumptions of policy makers, anthropologists and historians alike. This study comes out of detailed empirical research but, equally important, is shaped by the new ways Rowse reads the evidence, deploying poststructuralist concepts to raise original and rewarding questions.

CONCLUSION Australian cultural history is a rich and diverse field, offering new ways of seeing our past. Poststructuralist ideas and concepts are not essential to this field of inquiry but they have been very influential. As my very small selection of examples has tried to show, some of the best work in the field has utilised poststructuralist concepts – sometimes extensively and other times in limited but important ways. Foucault’s concepts of power, discourse, subjectivity and governmentality have been used fruitfully by a number of cultural historians. Others have drawn on poststructuralist literary analysis deploying concepts such as representation, narrative and imagination to great effect. Such concepts and approaches have failed to please critics such as Windschuttle and Evans. They take this poststructuralist influence as symptomatic of a crisis in the discipline. As my case studies have attempted to argue, this is not a crisis but a thriving and invigorating culture of scholarship and debate. What marks out the works I have chosen, however, is detailed and rigorous empirical research enlivened by new ways of interpreting the evidence. This requires concepts and ideas that come from theory. Windschuttle’s distinction between empirical history and theory-laden history does not withstand serious scrutiny. Good poststructuralist history requires exhaustive and rigorous research. But history is always more than the discovery of facts: it is the placement of facts in contexts, the conferral of meaning and the weaving of fact and context into a coherent and defensible narrative of the past. It also involves an awareness of the constructed nature of historical narrative, an insight that can open up deeper problems about how we write history. The past is not something that just sits outside of the present but is constructed within culture, and requires a system of exposition to make it comprehensi-

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ble. Windschuttle’s choice is really one between competing theories and methods, not one between fact and theory. In this context Windschuttle and Evans are calling for a narrowing of our historical vision. They want to cling to the idea of a certain and knowable past and the historian as an objective commentator. This is a call for a return to supposedly commonsense understandings of evidence, which largely replicate the ideas of the makers of these documents. In other words the arguments of Windschuttle and Evans are ones for a return to the history of ‘dead white males’. This is a call for a return to political, economic and policy history, free of the insights of poststructuralism or the concerns of social movements. These historians ignore arguments that documentary evidence contains silences and unless we can read evidence against the grain and past these silences we will not uncover the history of social groups excluded from the evidence or of those who are the objects rather than the subjects of documents.38 In other words we need to see that evidence itself is an historical process, one shaped by politics and power. It is not something outside these structures. The arguments of historians like Windschuttle and Evans, instead of fostering history as a discipline that can liberate us from the tyranny of the present, threaten to make us the captives of the past. What constitutes good history is the opening up of novel ways of seeing the past and the forging of new connections between past and present. Cultural history and poststructuralism have the potential, as the work of many historians demonstrates, of achieving this end. They are ways of escaping the poverty of empiricism.

FURTHER READING Opponents of poststructuralism in history include Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Macleay, Paddington, 1994; Richard Evans, In Defence of History, Granta, London, 1997; and Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, Norton, New York, 1994. For other interesting accounts of the contribution of poststructuralism to history and social theory see Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History, Routledge, London, 1991; R. J. C. Young, Torn Halves: Political Conflict in Literary and Cultural Theory, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996; Robert Hollinger, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 1994; and Alan Megill, ‘The Reception of Foucault by Historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 48, 1987.

5 T H E N AT U R E O F C U LT U R E AND THE C U LT U R E O F N AT U R E TO M G R I F F I T H S

The relationship between culture and nature is a famous philosophical conundrum and a promising playground for cultural historians, especially in a settler society. It is also, at times, an urgent and practical question of environmental management.

C U LT U R E A N D N AT U R E Nature has often been seen to lie outside culture, as an absolute and a given, as a hard, physical, earthy, empirical reality against which culture defines itself. This view of nature has enabled historians to use it as a steady and colourful backdrop to human action. Nature is stage and setting for the human drama, and it is also something that humans do things to. Nature is changed – made historic – by human action. Historians have differed, depending on politics, era and context, as to whether such human-induced changes constitute ‘improvements’ (a powerful legislative measure of land use in Australian history) or ‘disturbance’ (a recent ecological term for human presence). Accordingly, their histories might be either progressive or apocalyptic. What is consistent in these views is the externality of nature to culture.1 Three intellectual revolutions have challenged this vision of the separability of nature and culture. One is that humans are elemental and animal: we are evolutionary beings made mostly of water and related viscerally and chemically to the whole natural history of the universe. Family history – across deep time – becomes natural history. The Darwinian revolution, which is still unfolding, revealed that culture is embedded in nature. Such an insight has seen the return of certain kinds of biological determinism. We all become children of the last Ice Age or servants of the selfish gene.2

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Another intellectual revolution is that we have discovered that nature is more changeable and dynamic than we have acknowledged, and more deeply influenced by human history than we knew. If history is evolutionary, then nature is also historical. The old idea of ‘the balance of nature’, of ecological equilibrium, has been discarded. ‘Disturbance’ is now found to be endemic in natural systems; it is not rare and external but essential and structural. So, for example, it is climate and not just weather that is changeable. And a landscape without humans no longer appears the norm.3 The third stream of new thinking about culture and nature combines revolutions from both sides of the science/humanities divide, and it is the one that has most affected (albeit belatedly) cultural historians. In the twentieth century, Einstein’s theory of relativity famously destabilised Newton’s clockwork universe. A mechanistic cosmology of isolated and discrete atoms was replaced by elastic and viscous time–space, by the vision of a constant flow of transforming energy.4 Physicists investigating the behaviour of the electron in the 1920s found its reality elusive and reflective. Mathematician and humanist, Jacob Bronowski, described the new scientific view like this: ‘The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects, out there, for it cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us, and the knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us. There is no way of exchanging information that does not demand an act of judgment.’5 Mechanism and materialism – the intellectual foundation of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution – have had their day. Theories of uncertainty destabilised three centuries of scientific thought. In such a universe, nature can no longer be characterised as inanimate matter governed by external forces reducibile to mathematical laws. It can no longer be seen as ‘a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly’, as philosopher A. N. Whitehead described the Newtonian legacy.6 Instead, nature seems holistic rather than reductive, creative rather than predictable. There are no atomic facts, and there is mystery. Being is inescapably relational, and knowledge is always partial, always contingent, always historical.7 And just as the observer cannot be separated from the observed, so is consciousness integral to the universe, not outside it. In this sense, the new vision of the universe revives an animistic view of nature that existed in Europe before the scientific revolution, and which still remains in many parts of the world.8 Later in the twentieth century, particularly from the 1960s, the humanities in the West were also swept by uncertainty and relativism,

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and consequently by a greater respect for indigenous cultures. The theory of the social construction of reality and a belief in the primacy of representation both privileged culture as agent and determinant, and made reality – history and nature – seem beyond objective apprehension. If even physics was perceptual, then what hope history? For those unacquainted with the scientific revolutions, postmodernism in cultural theory seemed radical and surprising, but instead we may see it as a part of the same paradigm change that brought uncertainty and indeterminacy to the heart of the natural sciences in earlier decades. The idea that language shapes reality and cannot capture it, which arose particularly in linguistic and literary theory in the 1960s, echoed earlier scientific discoveries of the indeterminacy of matter, and of the inseparability of truth and meaning, observer and observed. Paradoxically, history became professional and self-consciously ‘scientific’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at just the moment when science shuddered at its core and became uncertain – and reluctantly and irredeemably cultural. By a similar paradox, one of the influences of postmodernism and deconstructionism in the humanities in the late twentieth century – and an incidental and unnecessary one – was a turning away from the earth and nature at a time of public environmental crisis.9 But that is now changing, and environmental history and ecocriticism are expressions of a renewed, reflective engagement with the physical world. The natural sciences are increasingly looking to the social sciences and the humanities for those relational analytical skills essential to the investigation of seamless phenomena such as time–space, nature–culture, and an organism-and-its-environment, and for the insights of holism, eclecticism, synthesis, connectivity, poetry, narrative, storytelling. The result of these three intellectual revolutions – that humans are animal, that nature is historical, and that the universe is mysterious – is that the relationship between culture and nature is now high on the Western scholarly agenda. Scientists have again ventured into the traditional domain of humanists, offering exhilarating histories of the earth, long-term evolutionary sagas, and narratives of humans as a species.10 In turn, problems that have often been seen as purely scientific or material or environmental are now more readily understood as fundamentally social and humanist. Social scientists are increasingly ‘locating ecological problems in the behaviour of human beings’.11 As anthropologist Deborah Rose puts it, ‘Major ecological change, much of it in crisis, is situated across the nature/culture divide.’12

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N E W W O R L D N A R R AT I V E S In Australia – a late, southern settler society with a long indigenous history and a unique ecology – the nature/culture divide has often been given a date. On the continent’s eastern coast in the late eighteenth century, one of the great ecological – as well as cultural – encounters of all time took place, and 1788 joined 1492 as ‘one of the major discontinuities in the course of life on this planet’.13 When the British arrived in New South Wales, their industrial revolution at home was beginning to gather pace, fuelled by the fruits of imperialism elsewhere. Therefore, Australia, unlike most other parts of the New World, experienced colonisation and industrialisation almost coincidentally, a compressed, double revolution. Australia’s late European colonisation made it the country to which George Perkins Marsh looked most hopefully for careful documentation of industrial society’s environmental impact on virgin territory.14 It was even more of a New World than America, which had once shared a land-bridge with Eurasia. Australia was truly ‘the antipodes’; it lay beyond what became known as Wallace’s Line, an abrupt boundary of faunal types at Lombok, east of Bali and Borneo, and had never been home to hoofed, placental mammals. Aboriginal peoples, like nature, were confined to schematic or romantic prefaces to Australian history. But Australian nature was much more cultural than settlers first realised, and the indigenous peoples had a more ancient and dynamic relationship with the land than the recent colonisers ever imagined. Late twentieth-century scholarship in archaeology, anthropology and history muddied the boundaries between nature and culture in Australia. ‘No segment of the history of Homo sapiens’, wrote archaeologist John Mulvaney of Australian prehistory, ‘had been so escalated since Darwin took time off the Mosaic standard.’15 This dating revolution not only linked Australia to a world Pleistocene past, it also began to sketch out an intriguing human history and enabled scholars to offer a distinctive regional interpretation of hunter-gatherer society. When anthropologist Rhys Jones coined the term ‘firestick farming’ to describe Aboriginal land management, he deliberately and provocatively resuscitated that word ‘farming’ and applied it to a people allegedly ‘without agriculture’.16 Different environmental pressures on the Australian continent led to a very different – and, to Europeans, an unrecognisable – type of farming. Aboriginal culture, it emerges, was innovative as well as ancient; no longer could it be simply characterised as ‘the stone age’ of humanity, nor was it the quintessential hunter-gatherer society. Here were found the world’s oldest cremation, perhaps the earliest human art, by far the earliest watercraft in the world, the first evidence of

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edge-ground axes, an early domesticated species in the dingo, millstones that predated agricultural revolutions elsewhere, and the most ancient evidence of modern humans. Some now argue that the arrival of those first humans in Australia sixty or more thousand years ago ranks with the arrival of the British two hundred years ago as a momentous, cataclysmic moment in world ecological history.17 In the words of George Seddon, ‘the most important fact in the environmental history of Australia is that it had a radical new technology imposed upon it, suddenly, twice’.18 Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management, sometimes a horrifying concentration of environmental damage and cultural loss, and sometimes a heartening parable of hope and learning. Ecologists working in Australia today often feel like they are ambulance drivers arriving at the scene of an accident.19 Such a roller-coaster of environmental history makes us think differently and more sharply than the rest of the world on many environmental matters. On such a continent we can never blithely assume the dominance of culture over nature, nor can we believe in the infinite resilience of the land. We are committed by history and circumstance to an intellectually innovative environmental enquiry.

T H E R O OT S O F E N V I R O N M E N TA L H I S TO R Y The writing of Australian history has always been suffused with a sense of the land and its difference – the observed peculiarities of antipodean nature – but it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that ‘environmental history’ as a conscious sub-discipline emerged. Its sources are many: the imperial encounter with rapid environmental change in the New World, an emphasis by colonial and early national historians on the challenges and politics of land settlement, a long-term investment in the study of Australian land use by historical geographers, the geographic inspiration of the French Annales historians (especially Fernand Braudel), the postwar discovery of Australian antiquity, the rise of green politics since the 1960s, and the recent disciplinary definition of ‘environmental history’ in the scholarship of the American West.20 ‘Environmental history’ is a term that is often used quite differently by scientists and humanities scholars. In one sense, geologists have been doing environmental history since Hutton and Lyell, biologists have been doing it since Darwin and physicists since Einstein. The discovery of an ancient age for the earth – and for humans – demanded a history. It became a habit of the nineteenth century to compile chronologies, make narratives, construct genealogies, and so the

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environmental sciences strengthened as observational, experiential and storytelling disciplines.21 Until the early 1970s, ‘environmental history’ was a term often used by geologists, palaeobotanists and archaeologists in their analyses of environmental change in the quaternary period. In this context it was a phrase only incidentally applicable to human experience. But for some scholars, the economic life of early humans was indeed most fruitfully considered in relation to the wider economy of nature.22 And for about a century, it was historical and cultural geographers who carried the burden of analysing Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, as one landmark book put it in 1956.23 In a perceptive and wide-ranging analysis of the origins of environmental history, Richard Grove, the author of Green Imperialism (1995), characterised the new environmental history in its initial stages as ‘a fairly parochial takeover bid by North American scholars of what was already a firmly established subject’. Grove enjoyed making fun of the innocence of American environmental historians such as Roderick Nash who, in 1972, behaved ‘as if discovering something quite new’ and lamented a lack of reading material in the area.24 Historians have indeed been slow to integrate an active nature into their narratives and to acknowledge their interdisciplinary heritage in this field, but it is also true that many geographers were retreating from environmental history about the time that historians were venturing into it.25 In any case, there are some distinctive dimensions to the latest generation of environmental history. For a start, it is more self-consciously history. It gets its sense of innovation from its explicit intervention in a discipline that is tenaciously human-centred. Environmental issues have generally been assigned to the other side of the great divide between the sciences and the humanities, and historians – by inclination and training – tend to feel more at home with books and paintings than they do with pollen and pipettes. The former are therefore more likely to enter their historical analyses as evidence than the latter. When history has aspired to be a science (a periodic goal), it has been in method rather than subject matter, whereas geography has had to accommodate a constant identity crisis in both matter and method. History has remained unambiguously a humanities subject, concerned overwhelmingly with human morals and motivations, a professional discipline formed in the nineteenth century at the time of rising nationalism and increasing bureaucracy, and therefore especially concerned with identity and documents.26 As Alfred Crosby has noted, historians were trained to value written eye-witness accounts above all else, and yet environmental history was often unobserved and unrecorded.27 But that is not a new challenge for historians, whose discipline –

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literally – is to read against the grain of their sources, listen for silences, and speak for the forgotten and oppressed as well as the articulate and powerful. Now they are determined to give the non-human world some agency in the historical narrative.28 So one of the ways in which the latest environmental historians explained the emergence of this ‘new’ field was by describing an expanding circle of empathy and ethics, one that now went ‘beyond the human dimension to embrace all life’.29 ‘This would indeed be history “from the bottom up”’, enthused liberal progressivist Roderick Nash in 1972, fitting it into the framework of New Left history, ‘except that here the exploited element would be the biota and the land itself’.30 And the biota was no mere passive servant – no more than those other neglected agents being written into history: the working classes, blacks, women. The revisionist histories giving voice to the experiences of these groups recognised the strength and subversity of their underworlds. So too, then, did environmental historians seek to describe a natural world that had rhythms and histories of its own, wanting to recognise nature as an actor in its own right, as more than a static physical base, more than a cultural construct.31 They made a bid for nature to join the hallowed trio of race, class and gender as recognised determinants of human consciousness and social behaviour.32 Environmental history, constantly wrestling with biological determinism, also represented a return of materialist styles of history following the decline of Marxist history and economic history.33 And it was powerfully shaped, and given urgency, by green and black politics which both emerged strongly in the late 1960s. Thus the historians’ traditional concerns of identity, agency, economy, politics and (in the American case especially) nationalism helped them make environmental history new, and yet recognisably their own. As Donald Worster put it, environmental history was ‘born of a moral purpose, with strong political commitments behind it’; it is a scholarly response to the sense of global ecological crisis.34 American environmental historians reciting the history of their particular field of practice sometimes go back to George Perkins Marsh, the author of Man and Nature (1865), or early wilderness advocates Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, but more often they begin with the Wisconsin wildlife biologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold who, in his classic text A Sand County Almanac (1949), called for ‘an ecological interpretation of history’. The next landmark in this lineage is generally Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a book celebrated as being ‘both scientifically informed and evangelical’, linking ecology and politics in an explosive way.35 A combination of romanticism and critical politics, and a strong dose of apocalypticism, has given the new field its character.36 The dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 and the land-

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ing on the moon in 1969 – and the sight of the Earth floating alone, finite and lovely in awesome space – dramatically enforced a planetary consciousness.37 Environmentalism and environmental history are, of course, different phenomena and they are often in tension with one another. When historians write of giving nature a voice, they seem to align themselves with environmentalism. And, indeed, one way that historians first ventured into this field was by writing about wilderness consciousness and conservation politics. Yet environmentalism often separates and opposes the categories of nature and culture which environmental historians are so eager to enmesh. And environmentalism gains a critical political edge by presenting itself as new, as ‘green’, whereas historians continually find earlier conservationists and more ancient origins of environmentalism.38 The new environmental history’s explicit engagement with the scientific insights and metaphors of ecology is one of its most distinguishing features, and it commits the field to sharing an intriguing intellectual and political journey. Ecology took form as a discipline from the 1920s, and became powerful in popular culture from the 1960s. Libby Robin has analysed the rise of ecological consciousness in Australia in this period through a study of the Little Desert dispute in Victoria in 1969.39 She shows how ecology gained confidence and definition as a science partly through a close engagement with postwar conservation politics, but that it became a looser and more volatile concept in the hands of the green movement of the early 1970s. A dramatic political and generational change overtook conservation in Australia at that time, and the uses of ecology were caught up in it. And ecology has wrought its own revolutions. When it burst upon the public imagination of the Western world in the mid-twentieth century, it appeared to be a study of equilibrium, harmony and order. At the end of the century, however, it had become more concerned with disturbance, disharmony and chaos.40 Suddenly scientists were looking everywhere for disturbance in nature, especially signs of disturbance that was not caused by humans but by the restlessness of climate and the violence of the elements.41 When preaching ‘the balance of nature’, ecology had seemed a natural ally of conservation. But ‘disturbance’ seemed to justify intervention. As Worster put it, ‘what does the phrase “environmental damage” mean in a world of so much natural chaos’?42 Ironically the change had come about at least partly because humanities scholars had insisted that ‘disturbance’ and historical change could not be eliminated or wished away, they had to be studied. Stephen Pyne has wryly observed that ‘An environment without people is even more abstract and meaningless than the ideal frictionless surface beloved of physicists.’43

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So environmental historians follow the fashions of ecology with special interest – from climaxes and superorganisms to energy flows and ecosystems to patch dynamics and landscape mosaics. They also speculate about the politics of an ecology of community and cooperation as against an ecology of individuality and competition.44 It can be disturbing to find science as malleable as culture, but it can also be strangely satisfying too, especially to humanities scholars weary of coping with the charges of relativism. Richard White wrote in 1990: ‘Historians thought ecology was the rock upon which they could build environmental history; it turned out to be a swamp.’45 And in 1998, Stephen Pyne reflected mischievously that ‘Ecological science is far too unstable to serve as a foundation for history. Rather it furnishes convenient scaffoldings to be erected, torn down and reassembled on the hard pilings of philosophy and art. The rest will be swept away in the next storm of discovery and paradigm shifts.’46 Environmental history in its new guise is also distinctive in its strong identification with the humanities, especially in its commitment to narrative. The pioneering Australian historical geographer (and environmental historian!) J. M. Powell, an astute commentator on tradition and innovation in the new field, has discerned ‘a greater emphasis on story-telling’.47 The commitment to narrative brings environmental historians back to their fundamental disciplinary concern with values and morals, and requires that they reflect upon what this new materialism and old determinism does to the human story. Having negotiated the new science of chaos, they return to their own side of the great divide and must deal with the linguistic turn in literary scholarship. Does the enrolment of an active nature in the narrative allow oneself to tell different kinds of stories? How do we ‘animate nature without anthropomorphising it’?48 If narration is central, then just how plural are its possibilities, and how do we judge multiple truths? In a stimulating essay, William Cronon has wrestled with the implications of postmodern critical theory for environmental history – an important task in a field where historians often make a theatre of their realism, are invigorated by the bracing otherness of nature, relish their muscular engagement with the physical archive, enjoy putting on boots to go to work, and often find themselves involved in practical, political outcomes from their research and writing. He concludes that we must tell not just stories about nature, but ‘stories about stories about nature … because narratives remain our chief moral compass’, and because the stories we tell change the way we act in the world.49 Scholars in the humanities, especially when they are working in an interdisciplinary setting, also need to advocate the distinctive skills of the storyteller, to defend the logic of poetry, and to champion narrative not just as a

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means, but a method, and a rigorous and demanding one.50 The conventional scientific method separates causes from one another; it isolates each one and tests them individually in turn. Narrative, by contrast, carries multiple causes along together; it enacts connectivity. We need both methods. Environmental history, then, builds on (and does not displace) the contributions of disciplines that have long invested in the same subject, such as archaeology, geography, forestry, ecology and economic history.51 But it is also, in certain ways, a distinctive endeavour, recognisably a product of the late twentieth century. Its academic vitality springs directly from a contemporary sense of crisis about the human ecological predicament. It often moves audaciously across time and space and species and thereby challenges some of the conventions of history, by questioning the anthropocentric, nationalistic and documentary biases of the craft. Environmental history frequently makes more sense on a regional or global scale than it does on a national one. It uniquely bridges planetary and deeply local perspectives, staking a claim for histories that are bound intimately to place and also embrace the natural world, histories that are deeply attentive to human and biological parochialism. Environmental history offers a genuine and challenging meeting of sciences and the humanities. It is a place where social history and deep time have to find their correspondences. Yet environmental history remains, at heart, one of the humanities, concerned with cultural, moral, economic and political questions, and founded in narrative.

A TA L E O F T W O L A N D S C A P E S : M A K I N G H I S TO RY O F D R O U G H T A N D F I R E If the coming together of ecology and history best defines the new ‘environmental history’, then the most illuminating confluences are those where each discipline helps the other to identify what constitutes a unique ‘event’, both ecologically and historically. The two examples presented here are drawn from contrasting landscapes – the open plains and the forested mountains – and involve different forces of nature – drought and fire. Both became the focus of Royal Commissions and have therefore left heavy legacies in the archive as well as in the field. One was the long drought that settled on the western lands of New South Wales in the late nineteenth century, and the other was the Black Friday bushfires that engulfed the mountain ash forests of Victoria. Each of these epic elemental dramas consolidated the settlers’ picture of unruly Australian nature. In the face of such unpredictable extremes, human agency seemed dwarfed by natural

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forces. These were ‘natural disasters’, human tragedies. Yet what is intriguing is that, in trying to come to terms with each of these ‘natural’ events, Australians began to perceive their own complicity in bringing them about. The great drought of the 1890s and the great fire of the 1930s each came near the end of – and eventually ended – particularly intensive periods of human utilisation of grass and trees. The interplay of society and ecology was complex, constant and ultimately cataclysmic. The 1901 Royal Commission took place only about 40 years after occupation of the far western plains of NSW. In the 1860s and 1870s vast areas of Australia’s ‘outside country’ were rapidly and successfully colonised by sheep and cattle, a period of pastoral expansion that coincided with a sequence of above-average rainfall seasons. By the end of the 1870s, the NSW pastoral frontier had effectively closed and western leases were consolidated in the hands of the wealthier pastoral capitalists. Squatters and investors were convinced that it was lack of water alone, rather than the nature of grasses and soils, that limited the carrying capacity of the land. They were encouraged by the discovery of the artesian basin, the development of water conservation techniques and even by expectations that the act of settlement itself might change the climate for the better.52 But from the 1880s, the environmental limits of pastoralism in western NSW quickly materialised. The suppression of fire brought about by Aboriginal dispossession and European occupation led to the encroachment of scrub upon the pastures, and the remaining native grasses and herbage came under increasing pressure from gross overstocking. Fewer grasses meant even fewer fires and even more scrub. Rabbits invaded the Western Division and covered the red and black earth like a grey blanket, and there was, as witnesses to the Commission put it, ‘a race between the rabbits and the sheep’ for the last feed. A long drought then settled on the land from the mid 1890s. In these circumstances, overstocking was not always just speculative optimism; it was a desperate defensive measure, a form of panic, a final gamble, ‘a symptom as well as a cause of environmental catastrophe’.53 Such marginal land and such a capricious climate could not deliver the high and constant return that the landholders’ debts required. Wool prices continued falling and the property boom died. In the 1890s sheep numbers in the Western Division were reduced by two thirds, from 15 million to five. Economic historian Alan Barnard reminds us that in only a handful of years since has the region carried as many as half the stock run there in 1894.54 Many people testifying to the 1901 Royal Commission felt that they had observed, in just a couple of decades, environmental change so mas-

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sive and fundamental that it was irreversible, and they struggled to calculate if it was their fault or nature’s.55 Many spoke of ‘a change of seasons’, the ultimate betrayal. Some came to realise that ‘droughts’ were not always entirely due to lack of rainfall. Rather, they were exacerbated and made manifest by overstocking and the environmental change resulting from pastoralism itself. Droughts could be a symptom of the earth as much as of water, and of politics as much as nature. Drought could be drummed into visibility by hooves. It could be eaten into urgency by stock. It could be magnified by human panic. Hence learning about drought meant not only seeing beyond it as a ‘natural disaster’ – recognising it as endemic and periodic in the Australian natural system – it also meant accepting that droughts could, to some extent, be induced by human action. Settlers began to articulate their growing perception that, in grazing ‘the outside country’, a precious, non-renewable resource had been unwittingly raided. As journalist Charles Bean put it when travelling the wool track after the long drought: So when the white man, raw, inexperienced, ignorant, struggled out onto those apparently rich plains and proceeded to manhandle the scrub and the grass, in less than twenty years he succeeded, too often, in destroying much of the wealth that had been gradually stored there from the beginning of the world. It was wealth which had painfully fought and survived the disease of Australia itself. Drought did not kill it.56

Here was an immense sense of history dawning on settler Australians, an understanding not only of deep ecological time, but of their own historical role in violating it. The ‘apparently rich plains’ had been a fragile, evanescent creation that pastoralism had made into a mirage. The Black Friday bushfires of 1939 were also a long-term natural rhythm exaggerated by a period of intense human utilisation. Black Friday was Friday the 13th of January, 1939. In that week, 1.4 million hectares of Victoria burned, whole settlements were incinerated, and 71 people died. Sixty-nine timber mills were engulfed, ‘steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire’, and the whole state seemed to be alight.57 It was a moment in the environmental history of Australia when people had to confront – and reform – their whole relationship with the bush. ‘These fires were lit by the hand of man,’ declared Judge Leonard Stretton, who conducted the Royal Commission into the causes of the fires within a few weeks of the disaster.58 It was society and not nature that was under trial before the Commission. But postwar ecological research, especially by David Ashton, revealed that mountain ash forests perversely needed periodic holocaust

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fires to reproduce; they need Black Fridays.59 History and ecology also combine to reveal just how unusual that particular fire was.60 The first half of the twentieth century produced a dramatic concertina effect of change in the forests of mountain ash. The 1939 fire occurred after decades of intensive sawmilling in the Victorian mountain ash forests, and was the culmination of serious fires in 1898, 1905, 1908, 1914, 1919, 1926 and 1932. This rapid succession of fires meant that Black Friday burnt a human forest legacy, and it was more ferocious as a consequence.61 And the sources of ignition were manifold. There was continual discomfort at the Royal Commission and it wasn’t just the extreme heat during the hearings. As Stephen Pyne put it: ‘It was as if Australians could not bring themselves to admit the reality of what had occurred or to confess the full complexity of the tragedy or their collective complicity in it.’62 Stretton certainly found that ‘the truth was hard to find’. Discovering the causes of such fires was like analysing the first seconds of a stockmarket crash. Everyone was implicated, but who acted first? And did it matter? The panic was real and it was ready to precipitate. Fires were lit and fires were not put out because many people in the bush, frustrated by the rules of the Forests Commission which restricted burning, felt that it was better to burn late than never. Stretton called it mass suicide. Black Friday was an uncharacteristically extensive wildfire because it was indeed lit by ‘the hand of man’. It changed the structure of the forests of ash for hundreds of years. It burnt more than three times the combined area of forest affected by any other fires in Victoria during the past century, and an area more than ten times larger than the annual average. The sheer extent of Black Friday may have masked the previous prevalence of low intensity, ground-surface fires, and the earlier extent of multi-aged stands of mountain ash. Furthermore, the great fire’s scale and timing led to almost two decades of unusually intense and sustained salvage logging which further simplified the forest structure. Therefore, Black Friday may be a misleading template for the clearfelling regime which currently governs management of the mountain ash.63 So Black Friday, like the long drought of the 1890s, emerges as an intriguing artefact of nature and history, a cultural exaggeration of a natural rhythm. Even as we discover its ecological depth, we are reminded of its historical specificity. In order to understand each of these events, we have to negotiate our way through a long historical shadow and an enduring ecological legacy, and neither landscape can be understood today without knowledge of the specific years that wrought such change. Settlers came to realise that they had tipped nature into an

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escalating instability and began to argue that the land needed people as much as people needed the land. They felt that they could not, because of rabbits and regrowth, just give the overgrazed plains ‘a spell’, and nor could they forever keep fire from the tall forests. So the events not only revealed the interaction of ecology and history, they also wedded nature and culture in new, active ways. And at the subsequent Royal Commissions, an age-old philosophical conundrum again became the subject of practical and political interrogation.

N OT E O N S O U R C E S A key historical work in exploring recent changes in the relationship between nature and culture is William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995, especially Cronon’s Introduction, pp. 23–56, and a stimulating Australian reflection is Deborah Rose, ‘Connecting with ecological futures’, in Malcolm Gillies, ed., Position Papers: The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, The Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Canberra, 2001, pp. 35–44. David Lowenthal has recently reviewed the field in ‘Environmental History: From Genesis to Apocalypse’, History Today, vol. 51, no. 4, April 2001, pp. 36–42. New World narratives in Australian environmental history are explored in a comparative context in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, eds., Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997. The challenge that postmodernism and deconstructionism presents to environmental history (and vice versa) is addressed by Stephen Pyne, ‘Smokechasing: The Search for a Usable Past’, Environmental History, vol. 6, no. 4, October 2001, pp. 530–40, and William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History, vol. 78, 1992, pp. 1347–76. The 1890s drought and the 1939 fire are analysed more fully in Tom Griffiths, ‘A Hundred Years of Environmental Crisis’, Rangeland Journal, vol. 23, 2001, pp. 5–14, ‘The Outside Country’ in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths, eds., Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002, pp. 222–44, and Forests of Ash: An Environmental History, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2001. Sections of this essay also appeared in my ‘How many trees make a forest? Cultural debates about vegetation change in Australia’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 50, no. 4, 2002.

6 MEMORY STUDIES AND C U LT U R A L H I S T O R Y PA U L A H A M I LTO N

While over 80 bushfires ringed Sydney in December and January 2002, Dai Rimmer from Springwood in the Blue Mountains wrote an open letter to the firebug or arsonist responsible for the fires. It appeared on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Do you know what you have done to me?’ she demanded rhetorically, and then proceeded to itemise her loss: the bedlamp, originally my father’s, is a swirl of tortured colour; my great grandfather’s plaque presented to him by King George after world war 1 is somewhere in that mess, melted into an unrecognisable blob … Your fire ripped through a lifetime of history, mine and my family’s and left it as black and burnt as the bush … I’ve lost my roots, I belong nowhere, all I have is memories … 1

What caught my attention was her concept of ‘history’ – family belongings, photographs, furniture, videos etc. which held her past – and what she chose to tell the reader about in her letter: not just the objects passed down in a linear sense through the generations but those which revealed where her family’s past intersected with a public one or the ‘ceaseless interrelationship between public and private that registers large and small events alike’ as Harry Harootunian puts it.2 The plaque from King George, for example, located her ancestors in time as part of a wider connected story. This is laid beside the ordinariness of her father’s lamp, also kept as part of a more personal history. Clearly this sudden moment of brutal rupture in her life made Dai Rimmer not only very angry but suddenly aware of her sense of ‘historicity’, a term, according to Ricoeur, which describes ‘the fundamental and radical fact that we make history, that we are immersed in history, that we are historical beings’. This awareness involves a

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sense of shared experience, of being shaped by and participating in events larger than oneself.3 Also evident is the significance of the objects, not simply as mnemonic devices but as caretakers of memory. With a deep expression of loss, Rimmer says, ‘Now all I have is memories’, indicating that this is what’s left: the life of the mind – and therefore no bulwark against the vagaries of ageing and tricks of memory. We are now so used to externalising our memories against the threat of forgetting (where we came from, who we are) that we panic when the individual is the only repository left. But I was also left with a deep disquiet after reading this letter: how do I connect my practice as a cultural historian, involving expert knowledge and skills, with Rimmer’s understanding of history as a form of social knowledge – as natural as breathing, David Thelen says.4 What underpins this question are the possibilities and limits of cultural history and the place of my work as a cultural historian. Firstly, does this area of study have a purpose beyond the historical analysis of a range of cultural artefacts, beyond a recognition that history can only be represented in a range of cultural forms? Secondly, can it incorporate the ‘history of the present’ that is central to the interdisciplinary study of memory? Some have argued that cultural history, by definition, involves not simply a shift in the object of study, being the distant past, but in the practice of history and the nature of historical knowledge itself. Richard Johnson raises these issues in his recent discussion of history and cultural studies: ‘what is at stake here,’ he says, ‘is not exactly being a historian or not (though this can seem the issue) but rather the different ways of working historically, and the relationship between these and conventional expectations of history as a practice, homely, or more institutionally installed’.5 Reflecting on Raphael Samuel’s contribution to the profession after his death, Luisa Passerini referred to his groundbreaking book, Theatres of Memory, which was subtitled ‘the past and present in contemporary culture’: I think the book expresses it very well, the whole process, from an approach which takes into consideration that every experience is a culture really, that every experience brings culture, and therefore also to the possibility of not looking for authentic culture, not looking for the subjects of the revolutions, but of finding the signs of historical movement everywhere. It could be in the elites or in the masses, in imagination as well as in a strike. But always with an eye in the end to what connects the legendary, the imaginary, whatever, to agency and subjectivity and experience in fact. So in a way this book seems to be the sign

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of this huge change which is under process and which is not … enough reflected upon. First of all it is a change which involves not only historians, of course. The book shows very well that history and memory do not belong only to the historians, but it would be interesting to reflect on what it means for history as a profession, that so many on the left, of those in left history, have gone through this culturality. 6

Passerini raises some of the central issues in relation to the shift from the social to the cultural in history: the movement away from empirical work to representation studies; the centrality of experience and subjectivity in method and exposition; the issues of a transformative cultural politics and the role of intellectuals; and, finally, the question of the historian’s authority in relation to the ‘historicity’ of the general population. I propose to investigate some of these concerns through my recent thinking about memory and historical consciousness in contemporary Australia. I argue that historical understanding in many countries is now shaped by an overall shift to a memorial framework as the principal mode of interpreting the past and, while there are local inflections here, it is a widespread phenomenon which is not confined within national borders. This memorial culture is characterised by the dominance of memory and commemoration as the prism through which we negotiate the past. A central feature is the increasing involvement of large numbers of people, now doing the work of mourning and public remembering themselves, rather than leaving it to others. There are varying modes of participation, from the thousands who place wreaths or makeshift markers at the sites of violent or traumatic deaths (Oklahoma Bombing, Ground Zero), to those who actively work at commemoration. The contradictions of memory in multicultural societies and the more participatory nature of commemoration in the late twentieth century are evident across a range of sites in contemporary Australia, both public and private. In 1998, for instance, the New South Wales parliament passed a motion to erect a plaque commemorating attempted Armenian genocide by the Turks from 1915–1921.7 Turks from around the world choked the parliament’s email system with over 70 000 messages of protest, crashing it (as well as the federal parliament’s internet system when they were diverted there). The government nevertheless unveiled the memorial plaque in March 1999, in time to condemn all genocides carried out during the twentieth century. The date chosen for commemoration was 24 April. The following day, 25 April, ironically enough presents a very different version of Turkey: it is a ‘sacred’ national day in Australia that commemorates the loss of several thousand Australian lives on the shores of Gallipoli in

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Turkey in 1915. Though a loss for the Allies, in Australia this day is ‘celebrated’ as a baptism of fire, marking the emergence of a nation; in this context the Turks have been correspondingly elevated to the status of a truly worthy enemy. The Friendship Gate at Anzac Cove in Turkey testifies to the strength of a relationship forged in the years after the war. In an Australian memory, Turkey can be both a noble enemy and a nation carrying out attempted genocide at the same time, illustrating some of the tensions evident in the attempts to reconcile group memories in a single account of the national past. The sense of disjuncture that characterises the experience of migration and the remaking of family and community through memories that reach across space and time is also apparent in an example from the domestic sphere. Recently a reward was offered in a local Sydney newspaper for the return of family videos and film stolen in the course of a household burglary. Mr Henry Lee, an Australian born in Malaysia and now living in Sydney, was distraught that thieves had stolen the recording of his three-year-old daughter’s birthday party, her first steps, and unprocessed photographic film of his wife’s grandmother in Malaysia, which were for them irreplaceable. Mr Lee not only offered a reward for anyone finding the videos, but was also willing to pay the thieves for their return. ‘We just want our memories back,’ he said, ‘whatever the cost.’8 This is at first sight a sad story about late-twentieth-century loss, a consequence of our increasingly externalised modes of remembering. We pay the thieves who steal our memories to get them back. Our memories are for sale, for barter and exchange. But like Dai Rimmer’s bushfire letter and the commemorative plaque, it also highlights other aspects of historical culture, or ways of living historically, in Australia today. These stories reveal a historical consciousness which expresses itself through artefacts of memory. With the globalising of identity politics, contesting the memory of events which took place 85 years ago and 14 000 kilometres away is possible in the Australia of today; and so is recreating family identities that can transcend a foreign place of origin. Both are examples of an expanding memorial culture, a historical sensibility where temporal continuities are strengthened and sustained through communication with others. The widespread availability and access to new technologies of memory contributes to the dissemination of this historical sensibility, although little is known as yet about how the use of these most recent electronic forms is shaping memorial expression.9 The meaning of the twentieth century is in the grip of memory, Eric Hobsbawm declared at the end of it. While many scholars might agree, we as yet know little about how people individually or collectively understand the past in their everyday lives, how the memories of

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their experiences shape choices for the future. Nor has the relationship between the act of remembering and a sense of historical consciousness been the subject of much investigation With my colleagues at the University of Technology, Sydney, I am currently conducting a national survey, based on an American study by David Thelen and Roy Rosenzwieg, investigating how Australians think about, evaluate and use the past.10 When completed, this study may be able to help us connect the work of professional historians with the historical understanding of people in general, linking history as a professional study with history as a form of social knowledge and activity. The context for this research is a much publicised retreat from formal learning of history in classrooms and lecture theatres, the so-called ‘crisis in history’ shared by other countries. Yet at the same time there is an increasing obsession with the past, both personally and in a range of public forums, especially within political debate and in an increasing number of arenas in popular culture. Newspapers, for example, have become intensely concerned with marking anniversaries of historical events and some scholars have written about the struggle between journalists and historians to tell stories about the past in their columns.11 This growing preoccupation with the past packaged for public consumption has been matched by a proliferation of sites (such as memorials, national parks, museums, television, film) and practices (for example, re-enactments, genealogy, local history, autobiography, oral histories) which are all now viewed as constituting our cultural memory and its social expression. But it is the public debates which have caused most intense division in Australian society about the nature and meaning of the past. Since 1992–93, claims by indigenous people to native title within the context of national reconciliation, and revelations of a ‘dark history’ of violence, separation and massacres, have been deeply unsettling to those who want to cling to a celebrated concept of nation and have had a profound impact on both indigenous and non-indigenous historical consciousness. ‘This really is a major change,’ says one commentator, ‘from an Australia that defined itself as a nation primarily in terms of its relationship to an outside power, to an Australia that defines itself primarily in terms of a set of internal relations and an internal dynamic. We are not used to thinking of our history as contentious, morally compromised or volatile, as dangerous as, say, Japanese or South African history, American Civil War history, or recent Russian history.’12 These complex political and cultural changes have been the stimulus for our study, and in the first part of this essay I want explore the shifting ground between memory and history that is a consequence of

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these shifts. The second part takes up the question of that relationship through the particular case of the ‘stolen children’ in Australia, where the issues relating to a unified national past have been most clearly illuminated.

B E T W E E N M E M O RY A N D H I S TO RY Many have argued that the impact of new technologies of remembering, consequent changes to the forms of historical representation and an increasing shift to sites in popular culture (film, television etc.) have contributed to the changing relationship between the past and present in our societies. The effects of playing with time, its use as a marker in our lives, the collapse of the distance between an event occurring and its representation, and the endless recycling of the past all help to provide what some have defined as ‘prosthetic memory’: a mediated access to a past that individuals have not themselves experienced creating ‘memories’ that transcend space and time.13 According to Vivian Sobchack these new technologies have effected the creation of ‘a new and pervasive self-consciousness about individual and social existence as an “historical subject”’.14 There are also those who argue that gradually we have lost faith in time itself. It is certainly evident that in Australia today there are many different understandings of temporality, and these co-exist in considerable tension. While there is as yet no history of historical consciousness in Australia, it is still possible to discern some trends over time. Across generations many will have different levels of knowledge and understanding about the past. Those over 60, for example, have had very little of their historical knowledge informed by school learning, since before 1945 only 17 per cent of Australians completed high school. For those born after World War II, in an era of mass secondary schooling and increased tertiary education, a larger number will have been exposed to formal history classes at school, especially since in some states it is a compulsory area of study. The rapid expansion of historical sites since the 1960s, alongside a proliferation of historical organisations, has also no doubt had considerable impact on intergenerational knowledge and attitudes. The number of people growing older and surviving longer and the growth of cultural diversity in Australia’s population have created a very different context for the transmission of historical knowledge in Australian society. Certainly these changes have meant that more people become historical ‘monuments’ (or living treasures) in their own lifetime, as the society increasingly values those who remain to tell the stories of their past experiences. The tumultuous social change of the last four decades has seen up

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to four different generations shaped by quite divergent understandings about ‘race’ and ‘empire’. Some still living remember a time when their sense of belonging rested with England, which they called ‘home’. Others, now middle-aged, grew up identifying with the ‘pink bits on the world map’ which signified the British Commonwealth, rather than with a strong sense of Australia as a sovereign territory and nation. What we may be currently experiencing in the traditional Anglophone population, then, is the final death of a consciousness justifying the national and colonial projects of European powers. But such change also encourages a desire for temporal anchoring, for continuities not necessarily satisfied by the existing modes of writing Australian history. There’s a game they play in the ‘eccentric’ news column of the Sydney Morning Herald about how far strands of ‘living memory’ survive through the generations. Thus, we can still find the grandchildren of transported convicts: Rev. Colin Dyster, 92, grandson of Thomas Dyster, transported in 1827 at 14, who opened a skin and hide store in Adelaide when he completed his sentence; Mrs Doris Schrader, 89, and Mrs Lorna Havill, 86, granddaughters of John Woolbank, transported at 15 in 1836 for stealing 24 necklaces and four pairs of shoes (although the ladies don’t know about the news item because they are ashamed of the family skeleton). These popular lineages suggest that the past can still be linked through the generations even though the meaning of that lineage has altered: for some, it is now acceptable (even desirable) to acknowledge convicts as ancestors, though others of venerable years still hold to a different historical sensibility.15 Not all of those involved in history making desire continuity with the past. Many are attracted by the element of exoticism in historical activities. Sometimes these contradictory attitudes are evident in the same practice, such as historical re-enactments where the appeal of immersion, getting close to the experience of the past, is juggled with the pleasure of difference and estrangement.16

THE AUTHORITY OF THE WITNESS On 23 June 2001 the national newspapers mourned the death of Gallipoli veteran Roy Longmore, which left 102-year-old Alec Campbell as ‘the Last Anzac’. ‘Australia has now only one living link to the battlefield that forged a national identity,’ a journalist said. (Longmore did not see active service. He was 16 when he arrived in Gallipoli. He carried water from the beach to the trenches and was evacuated when he became ill several weeks later). Kate, Campbell’s 80-year-old second wife, said she had been ‘dreading this day’ because she knew that her

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husband would ‘slip away a little’ from her, that he would become ‘a living national treasure, the property of the nation’. Like many others before him whose lives came into the media spotlight, Campbell objected to being made a ‘hero’ simply because of his longevity and was wary of glorifying war. ‘We just did what we were told,’ he said.17 This valorising of the ‘last’ witness to Australia’s most powerful myth of nationhood is an indication of the extent to which a memorial culture has come to dominate the national consciousness. These old men attest to the ‘truth’ of a collective experience which over the last few years has come to mean much more than war service in an overseas battle. The myth of brave white masculinity forged at Anzac is almost impossible to challenge, despite attempts by activist feminist groups since the 1970s to do so. Indeed, the Anzac legend has been ‘rediscovered’ by a different younger generation who make pilgrimages to the sites of battle in Turkey and seek almost a religious reliving of the event. Unease about that moment when the ‘living memory’ will be lost seems to imply fears about the loss of continuity with the experience, or mistrust of the ways in which it will be retold in the future through different forms such as film or novels. Pierre Nora writes of the time in societies ‘when memory passes from the generations that are its bearers to the historians who reconstitute a past they have not experienced’. He argues that these positions can co-exist in one generation or overlap, as they do in contemporary Australia, since there are many historical accounts and analyses of Australian participation at Gallipoli. Yet Nora identifies another process which accompanies this transition from firsthand account to abstract historical narrative: the inevitable loss of a detailed specificity of events as memory passes from one generation to another.18 The rising obsession with individual remembering as ‘authentic’ or the individual as eyewitness to what becomes a ‘collective memory’ owes much to the shifts in modernity, including increasing affluence and education, as well as the democratisation of many Western societies after the 1950s. The importance of the individual’s life, the altered sense of entitlement – what one critic has called ‘egocentric’ histories – have been linked with equally profound shifts in what it means to think historically in these societies, a shift evidenced by the growth of a massive industry in published life histories, memoirs etc.19 In these circumstances, historical consciousness entails seeing oneself as an individual subject of history. As a consequence, the decreasing gap between present and past encourages us all to be ‘historical subjects’ in the same or immediately succeeding generations. It also signifies important changes to our understanding of a public and private self that witnessing, confession or disclosure entails. ‘Testimony has become

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the crucial mode of our relation to events of the times,’ remarks one commentator.20 Some historians claim that an individual witness to events does not constitute a ‘history’ in the sense of an abstracted account and there are a great many perceptual limits to a single point of view. Nonetheless, argues Saul Friedlander, ‘the altogether disruptive voices of the historians and victims must be heard, despite their unsettling dissonance’.21

H I S TO R I A N S A N D M E M O RY Changes to our understanding of the nature of history as a discipline reflect how closely memory and history have become intertwined over the last few years. Some scholars claim that the formal discipline of history posits a separation of past and present not evident in the forms of remembering which have captured the public imagination in so many countries. For Michel de Certeau all writing of history ‘institutes a reality by establishing a division between past and present such that the past functions as the other to the time of writing and is made intelligible by this writing’. ‘This division,’ he says, ‘organises its production and is concealed as much as possible.’22 He does not suggest, however, that there is a simple division between memory and history, nor that history functions as the ‘bad boy’ in the relationship, or as memory’s other. It is rather that the changing relations between memory and history are central to an understanding of shifts in historical consciousness. When I was training as an historian in the 1970s, only specialists studied what was called ‘contemporary history’, and tertiary history courses at universities all stopped about 50 years before the current generation. The recent emergence of an interdisciplinary field of memory studies constitutes one of the contemporary points of convergence between memory and history. Most of the writing in this field tends to be Eurocentric, often claiming the Holocaust of World War II as the origin and rationale for the ‘memory boom’.23 Much of this focus on the Holocaust has been useful for my analysis of the Australian case below, while Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa and Chile provide evidence of a broader phenomenon involving major state-sanctioned public debates about remembering the past. Perhaps the memory struggles of indigenous peoples in postcolonial countries, where they battle the dominant framework of non-indigenous memory and history, have something to offer those who have explored the field only from the viewpoint of those affected by the 1939–45 war.24 They focus more specifically, for example on the relationship of memory to place and the strongly localised nature of some group memories which may or may not act as countermemory to national mythologies.

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Several recent surveys of the field of memory studies have questioned the ubiquitous use of ‘memory’ and have been critical of the indiscriminate reference to associated terms, particularly ‘collective memory’, questioning its validity as either a descriptive or analytical tool. However, when utilised in the Australian case, ‘collective memory’ helps us to understand the ‘continual presence of the past’ in public debates, as Susan Crane puts it, as well as the ‘politics of time’ that has become evident in the contest over the meaning of past events.25 ‘Collective memory’ can be variously defined, though the term usually refers to the making of a group memory so that it becomes an expression of identity, and accepted by that group as the ‘truth’ of experience. Collective memory can be set in stone as an unquestioned myth or it can be continually renegotiated across time in accordance with external circumstance and generational shifts. James Young distinguishes between a memory of an experience which is shared by all who participated and the meaning they negotiate afterwards (a war reunion, for example); and memory of an event which has affected only some members, but comes to represent the traumatic experience of the whole. Thus the particular experience of indigenous children in Australia who were taken from their parents by the Australian state governments between the 1920s and the 1960s comes to stand in for the traumatic experience of everyone of that generation who is indigenous. 26

THE AUSTRALIAN CASE In 1995–96 the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Children from their Families, undertaken by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), heard oral submissions from 535 indigenous people about the effects of separation and institutionalisation by the state. The life stories told in the report, titled Bringing Them Home, trace the impact of government policy on individuals, families and communities. Most express profound loss and dislocation – ‘one by one by one’, as Judith Miller said of Jewish experiences during the Holocaust, or ‘like a tragic dirge’, according to Anna Haebich, a historian who has written about the history of indigenous child removal in Australia.27 Released in 1997, the report provided a focus of considerable emotive power for the politics of memory in contemporary Australia and brought issues of responsibility for past wrongs to centre stage. One of its major recommendations was for an apology from the state for its past actions towards Aboriginal people – a recommendation which the federal conservative government refused to endorse. Indeed government ministers contested the growing power of indigenous collective

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memory, represented by the influential concept of a ‘stolen generation’, claiming that only 10 per cent of children were separated at any given period. In all likelihood the inquiry was influenced by previous models for public expiation of wrongs such as those of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, Holland and Chile. These models shaped the type of evidence heard and its subsequent harnessing to the cause of reconciliation. One might argue, however, that the HREOC report had more in common with Holocaust remembrances by ‘victims’, since there were no memories gathered at the time from those involved in carrying out past government policies. But the factors already identified, such as the dominance of a memorial culture and the authority accorded eyewitnesses in Australian society, provided a context for the nature of the response and the subsequent debates in Australia. In his report, Ronald Wilson, president of the HREOC inquiry, made a statement that expressed his understanding of the relationship between the present and the past: For individuals, their removal as children and the abuse they experienced at the hands of the authorities or their delegates have permanently scarred their lives. The harm continues in later generations, affecting their children and grandchildren. In no sense has the inquiry been ‘raking over the past for its own sake’. The truth is that the past is very much with us today in the continuing devastation of the lives of indigenous Australians.28

As the public clamour from a broad section of the population for an apology from government increased, Prime Minister John Howard emphasised the distance between the present and the past. In one of his speeches to parliament on this issue he declared that Australians know that mistakes were made in the past; know that injustices occurred and that wrongs were committed. But for the overwhelming majority of the current generations, there was no personal involvement of them or of their parents.29

There is a clear political struggle here between two very different understandings of the relationship between the past and the present. For indigenous people and those non-indigenous participants in the HREOC report who heard the many stories of lives destroyed by separation and its effects across the years, past and present are blurred. For the Prime Minister and his government, the past is at a distance and quite separate from any continuing responsibility in the present – although since on other occasions Howard has taken the opportunity to

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capitalise on the mobilising power of memorials, particularly in relation to the commemoration of Anzac and of prisoners of war in Japan during World War II, there is an obvious element of political expediency in his rhetoric: these war commemorations are designed to strengthen connections between past experience and present conservative understandings of masculinist nationhood. In this time of intensive national memory work much of the public discourse was expressed in the rhetoric of ‘forgetting’. Why weren’t we told? is the title of Henry Reynolds’ book on the issues, repeating a question asked frequently of him at public speaking engagements by non-indigenous people. One of the problems with a confessional model of public testimonies is that it obscures the transformation of a national consciousness which has already taken place to allow their articulation. The idea of ‘forgetting’ encourages an empiricist explanation – as if memories were waiting under a rock to be found rather than constituted at a time of different questions. Historians and commentators alike draw on this rhetoric of a ‘forgotten’ history, which at its extreme blames historians and journalists for keeping knowledge from the public. Equally damaging is the assumption that Aboriginal people collectively have always ‘known’ about these events, while the non-indigenous population was kept in the dark. In practice of course the interplay between memory and the public knowledge of our history is much more complex. We should be worried, says Klein, ‘about the tendency to employ memory as the mode of discourse natural to the people without history’, and, I add, a particularly narrow concept of memory as an organic ‘oral tradition’.30 For some years both before and after the HREOC report, indigenous narratives about life under colonialism circulated through various public arenas as an insistent counterpoint to the powerful myths of white nationhood. Through published autobiographies, novels, songs, films and other cultural forms, individual stories gradually gained greater currency with non-indigenous and indigenous audiences alike. With few exceptions the majority did not adopt historiography as an avenue, yet these accounts of personal experience that spoke on behalf of a group helped to redefine what constitutes historical knowledge and its transmission. Gordon Bennett, for example, uses the visual to make interventions into Western modes of historical understanding: ‘I see much of my recent work as history painting, not as documentary history painting, but rather as painting that investigates the way history is constructed after the event,’ he said.31 Often the lines between personal and collective stories are obscured through these forms of memory work, just as there is no clear division between public and private,

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family and community. Because many of the chosen modes of communicating the Aboriginal past rely on less formal ways of educating a nonindigenous public about indigenous ‘histories’, they not only question traditional epistemologies of history as a writing practice, they also encourage an historical sensibility which collapses the past and the present because it is largely grounded in collective memory. In latter years the almost compulsive telling of stories, particularly involving removal from indigenous families, can be explained by the previous ‘absence’ of memory, not simply of the events themselves, but of the pain associated with them. Apart from some localised instances, much of the knowledge had been lost within Aboriginal families who were often themselves split from traditional communities and moved around as a result of government policies. Michael Roth argues that ‘when communal memory is fractured and no longer able to provide the continuity essential to community life, storytelling, narrative memory, which transfigures and transforms the past, is a condition of retaining it’.32 Roth, like others who have examined the stories of painful experiences, sees that they are usually of a fragmented nature. Thus it is ‘narrative integration’ that produces the memory of the event, and it is when they are told as stories that guilt and blame are attributed.33 Many have explored how memory operates in this way to recreate traditions, but once the bonds of community are broken only names remain, rescued from oblivion perhaps in the storytelling process. More importantly, what is also lost through community disruption is the communicating of the memory to a subsequent generation, a story of transmission that provides continuity through ‘vicarious witnessing’. From the 1970s, a number of non-indigenous historians researching the field began to be influenced by questions of memory, particularly if they drew on the new oral history methods which changed the relationship between past and present in historical research. Many found it impossible, or undesirable, to separate their historical practice from their role as public advocates and activists. Peter Read was one of the founding members of Link-up, an organisation set up in the 1980s to bring together indigenous parents and children who had been separated by the practice of child removal. In a recent reflection on that work he says: Those of us who have worked in Aboriginal history for some years are astounded by the transformation in the self-perception of the separated children, and of the communities from which they were removed. In 1980, the only writer who had described the experiences of a removed Aboriginal child was Margaret Tucker. Today there are at least a dozen books on the subject. Hundreds of former wards and adoptees have been interviewed for a dozen television and radio documentaries

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... no removed Aborigine now writes of his or her separation without linking personal experience to general Aboriginal removals, and that phenomenon to the wider policy of assimilation.34

Many academics working in the field of Aboriginal history have been vitally involved in identifying and nourishing the ‘stolen generation’ memories. They have added the weight of their activism within Aboriginal communities and their historical research to the general understanding of the ‘stolen generations’ as a countermemory which subverts the traditional assumption of an unproblematic national history. Bain Attwood has recently traced the process by which the ‘stolen generations narrative’ has come to assume centre stage in the national consciousness and its emergence as a ‘collective memory’ for indigenous people. In doing so, he argues that the story of children being taken away moves from highly specific localised knowledge amongst the Wiradjuri and the Yorta Yorta groups about a particular level of government practice to a national narrative which has ‘slipped its moorings’ in historical research and become a ‘metanarrative’ or myth. Attwood’s work reveals in some depth how the creation of memory about the ‘stolen generations’ has been mutually constituted by both indigenous and non-indigenous people, and argues that its mobilisation by indigenous people has become an important element in their collective identity.35 His argument is particularly useful in this context for its explication of the complex strengths and weaknesses of interpreting an Aboriginal past within a memorial framework, and the role of historian advocates in that process. Attwood himself has been outspoken in the public arguments between commentators about the significance of the HREOC inquiry testimonies and is wary that the critical understandings he has derived from historical analysis can be utilised by conservatives to undermine Aboriginal community claims, particularly in relation to compensation. But there are many voices from across the political spectrum speaking against the dominance of memory in public forums for quite different purposes. Ironically they share some of the same anxieties. Other historians have been more concerned about the previous ‘absence’ of knowledge in relation to government policies and their destructive effects on indigenous people. Anna Haebich’s new work documents extensive evidence in the public domain of child removals during the twentieth century, and even brings to light public opposition that was both vocal and influenced government policies. Underpinning her historical inquiry is the worrying question, ‘how could we not have known?’, a question which has resonances for those who lived through the Holocaust. She terms it ‘A Twilight of Knowing’.36 However, as

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Irwin-Zarecka argued, ‘something that does not fit within the established structures of thinking and feeling is likely to be excluded from remembrance’.37 This is also the case with the writing of history or what is constituted as ‘history’. There is an epistemological gap between what we ‘know’ at the time and what we understand later.

AGAINST MEMORY There have been few voices to date which speak against the dominance of memory in public debates about the past, particularly its effects on the historical imagination in contemporary society. But there are troubling aspects of its use which need closer analysis. Some of these issues have been addressed in more general terms with other countries in mind by scholars such as Klein and Winter, who are concerned about the unquestioned assumptions not only in the academic discourse relating to memory studies but also about the way public discussion of memories is framed.38 They apply equally to the Australian case. The first issue addresses the tendency of indigenous peoples to adopt a ‘strategic victimhood’ as a result of their experience in the past, and the memories now made public; or to be ascribed the identity of ‘victims’ by non-indigenous people so that increasingly over time the moral identification of being a victim and the ‘heritage of suffering’ becomes a feature of this group’s identity. Within this discourse, Aboriginal people are left only the category of ‘survivors’ if they want to transcend the past. The solidarity provided by remembered victimhood is especially attractive, suggests Ian Buruma, to those whose communal identity is already under threat.39 Thus Michael Jackson, an indigenous writer, speaks of ‘a kinship born of identification with others’, an ‘empowering sense of being part of a collective tragedy, a shared trauma’.40 Some years ago, Charles Maier warned against this trend in the USA, which he called a ‘surfeit of memory’. Under these circumstances, ‘confessional memory is seen as the only valid reparation, and as a claim upon official memory, the victim’s anguish comes to be seen as a valuable possession. Other peoples also want the status of victimhood.’41 This problem leads to a second issue emerging from the collection and representation of many individual stories about the indigenous past, particularly their collection within the framework of the HREOC inquiry: the question of ‘authenticity’ in remembering. This is a common problem with oral or life histories as an historical practice, but where feelings can only be expressed, rather than discussed or debated, then they cannot be readily challenged.

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The third issue is the widespread use of psychoanalytic terms to explain the cause and effect of bringing to light stories involving personal hardship and pain. Thus it is a small conceptual step from individuals to national and indigenous groups who suffer ‘trauma’ that needs to be ‘healed’ through the psychiatric terms of a ‘talking cure’. ‘There is a persistent assumption in current discourses of reconciliation that encountering the “truth” and apologising will function palliatively,’ say Gooder and Jacobs, ‘and that from these two interlinked processes will emerge a healed nation’.42 Not only has the ‘cure’ proved problematic in almost every country where testimony has been collected for this purpose but, as others have noted some time ago, even the speaking out is a double-edged sword. Langer argued in relation to the Holocaust that ‘there are different types of representation embedded within the same narrative: one which seeks transcendence and one which enmeshes the witness in the events of the past’. Telling the story can bring relief, he says, but the unfolding plot often brings nothing but pain and anguish.43 ˆˆˆ In this essay I have traced the increasing influence of memory on public opinion, as a factor in public debates, and on some areas of the historical discipline itself. I have argued that the alternative pasts articulated publicly within this culture can function as countermemory and effectively challenge the traditional narrative of nation, but they also have major effects that impede rather than enhance historical understanding. Central to the constant shadow play, sometimes collaborative, sometimes confrontational, between memory and history have been equally important shifts in historical consciousness characterised by a strengthening of temporal continuities and the continual presence of the past in contemporary discourse. At the beginning of this essay I asked how might my work in cultural history engage with a more general understanding of history as a form of social knowledge. My question was meant to underline the unease amongst the professional community of historians – in effect a crisis of authority – emerging in this memorial culture which is confounded by the democratisation of historical practice and the new cultural forms for communicating history. The consequence of such profound shifts is a changed attitude to the meaning of the past and its role in Australian cultural life: the past matters to people now more than ever before.

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N OT E O N S O U R C E S The following works provide further reflections on history and memory: Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, University Press of New England, Dartmouth College, 1999; Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1995; Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991; and Preempting the Holocaust, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998; Realms of Memory. The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols. under the direction of Pierre Nora, 1992, (trans. from French) Columbia University Press, 1996; Anne Ollila, ed., Historical Perspectives on Memory, SHS Helsinki, 1999; Susannah Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology, Berg, Oxford, 2000; Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past. Popular Uses of History in American Life, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998; Michael S. Roth, The Ironists’s Cage. Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995; Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas, eds., Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2001; Nancy Woods, Vectors of Memory. Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe, Berg, Oxford, 1999; James Young, The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1993.

7 ON BEING A WHITE MAN, AUSTRALIA, CIRCA 1900 M A R I LY N L A K E

‘When I say “Man”, I mean … the white man.’ LOTHROP STODDARD, THE RISING TIDE OF COLOUR1

INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN LESSONS The Australian nation-state was inaugurated in 1901 in a radical act of racial expulsion. The white men who comprised the first federal government passed the Pacific Islands Labourers Act, which required that Pacific Islanders or ‘Kanakas’, who had been brought to labour in the Queensland sugar cane plantations in the late nineteenth century, be deported.2 When Prime Minister Edmund Barton introduced the Bill, he explained the necessity of the measure in terms of the difference that separated the ‘Pacific Islander’ from the ‘white man’: The difference in intellectual level and the difference in knowledge of the ways of the world between the white man and the Pacific Islander, is one which cannot be bridged by acts or regulations about agreements. The level of the one is above that of the other, the difference being one in human mental stature – of character as well of mind – which cannot be put aside by passing 50 laws or 1000 regulations … He cannot be made to understand the condition of his engagement. He may be brought to a state of partial understanding, but it is impossible to say that he can have a degree of contracting capacity equal to that of the man who is dealing with him.3

Contractual relations were impossible between the Islander and the ‘white man’ – a ‘Higher Power’ having made them unequal – and all attempts at co-existence or assimilation would surely end in degradation for both parties. The white man could not deal with the black labourer ‘man to man’. This was the lesson Australian political leaders – Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin and H. B. Higgins – learnt from the historical experience of the United States of America.

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In American Ideals and Other Essays published just four years earlier, future US president Theodore Roosevelt had offered this observation on white colonial democracies: Nineteenth century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the new worlds’ surface, temperate America and Australia. Had these regions been under aristocratic governments, Chinese immigration would have been encouraged precisely as the slave trade is encouraged of necessity by any slave-holding oligarchy, and the result would in a few generations have been even more fatal to the white race; but the democracy, with the clear instinct of race selfishness, saw the race foe, and kept out the dangerous alien. The presence of the negro in our Southern States is a legacy from the time when we were ruled by a trans-oceanic aristocracy. The whole civilisation of the future owes a debt of gratitude greater than can be expressed in words to that democratic policy which has kept the temperate zones of the new and the newest worlds a heritage for the white people.4

Australian national leaders shared these sentiments. In the democratic societies of the temperate zones white men considered they had a chance to pioneer a new civilisation in which all forms of labour were granted dignity and due reward.5 The able and urbane attorney-general in the first federal government, Alfred Deakin, conscious of being ‘charged with the future of this country’ invoked the ‘teachings from the experience’ of the United States in his speech on the Immigration Restriction Bill: We should be false to the lessons taught us in the great republic of the west; we should be false to the never-to-be-forgotten teachings from the experience of the United States, of difficulties only partially conquered by the blood of their best and bravest; we should be absolutely blind to and unpardonably neglectful of our obligations, if we fail to lay those lessons to heart.6

Establishing a new civilisation for the white man was also the dream of Henry Bournes Higgins, a liberal member of the first federal parliament, a lawyer, a representative of the working-class electorate of North Melbourne and attorney-general in the first Labor party government in 1904. He too referred to the American example: ‘We have only to look at the great difficulty which is being experienced in America in connexion with the greatest racial trouble ever known in the history of the world, in order to take warning and guard ourselves against similar complications’.7 Thus he hailed the legislation to

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deport the Pacific Islanders as ‘the most vitally important measure on the programme which the government has put before us’.8 Its significance lay in the fact that it raised the question of whether ‘northern Australia should be peopled by white men or not. I feel convinced that people who are used to a high standard of life – to good wages and good conditions – will not consent to labour alongside men who receive a miserable pittance and who are dealt with very much in the same way as slaves’.9 In 1907, as newly appointed president of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, Higgins would have the opportunity to determine a minimum wage for Australian workers, whom he took care to define as ‘civilised beings … living in a civilised community’.10 As Gail Bederman has argued for this period in the United States, the discourse on ‘civilisation’ was regularly conscripted to legitimate competing claims to power and status.11 The ‘white man’ combined white supremacy, male dominance and evolutionary advancement in the one powerful figure. ‘To speak of the white man was thus to link white males to the power and evolutionary advancement of civilization and to link black males to unmanliness and savagery’.12 In offering his ‘strongest support’ to the legislation to deport the Islanders, Higgins had confided that he ‘watched its course with the deepest anxiety’. One way or the other, it would have ‘a deep and lasting effect’.13 The Pacific Islands Labourers Act was complemented by the Immigration Restriction Act. ‘The two things go hand in hand’, advised Attorney-General Deakin. They were ‘the necessary complement of a single policy – the policy of securing a “White Australia”’.14 Drawing on the precedent of earlier colonial legislation, the Immigration Restriction Act was designed to prevent coloured aliens – ‘those inclined to invade our shores’ in Deakin’s words – from entering Australia as future immigrants. There were, as members of parliament reminded each other, some 90 000 coloured aliens – variously designated as Afghans, Asiatics, Assyrians, Chinese, Cingalese, Hindoos, Japanese, Kanakas, Malays, Manilamen – already in Australia. White Australia was a fantasy that spoke to anxieties called up by the presence of aliens inside and outside the nation. For Deakin, the issue was the cause of ‘so much anxiety’ because it spoke to ‘the profoundest instinct of individual or nation – the instinct of selfpreservation for it is nothing less than the national manhood, the national character and the national future that are at stake’.15 Why did these issues cause Australia’s national leaders such profound anxiety? In what sense were their manhood and self-preservation at stake? To answer these questions we need to investigate the

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subjectivity of the ‘white man’ whose sense of self was felt to be so powerfully threatened. We need to attend to ‘the practices of subjective self-constitution’ (in Stuart Hall’s words) but also to locate the study within a global analytical frame. There have been many histories of the White Australia policy, but none that have taken the constitution of the racialised, gendered identity of the ‘white man’ as the focus of their analysis.16 Insofar as he has been invisible as an identity, the ‘white man’ has not been conceptualised as an historical subject whose emergence is in need of documentation or explanation. Too often, as Bederman points out, historians assume what they need to investigate.17 Earlier studies of White Australia have argued about whether it was the achievement of capital or labour, but the ‘white man’, in whose interests the policy was promulgated, was not an identity defined in terms of class.18 Traditional accounts of ‘race relations’, little interested in the constitution of subjectivities, have tended to represent racism as an ahistorical force with a life of its own, sometimes quiescent, sometimes resurgent. In mirror fashion, emergent studies of ‘whiteness’ too often treat it as a fixed essence or property or source of privilege with seemingly transhistorical application and meaning.19 It was James Baldwin who wrote, ‘No one was white before he/she came to the United States’, pointing to the historical production of the figure of the ‘white man’ in the relations of imperial rule.20 As Catherine Hall, historian of imperialism, has noted, identities might thus be understood as made, not given, and as strategic and positional, rather than essential.21 Which is not to deny that they may also be deeply felt. In Australia, the militancy of the ‘white man’ was crucially linked to his positioning as a ‘colonial’ – an ambiguous inbetween figure – on the one hand the beneficiary of British imperialism and Aboriginal dispossession, on the other, dependent on, and subordinate to, the imperial power. In her history of colonialism in the British Caribbean, Hall has pointed out that the colonial project depended on ‘the construction of a culture and the constitution of new identities, new men and women who in a variety of ways would live with and through colonialism, as well as engaging in conflict with it’. New selves were constructed, she writes, for those ‘who were ruling as well as those who were ruled’.22 I wish to suggest that one of those selves was the ‘white man’, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, as Australians embarked on their postcolonial future, the established dichotomy of ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’ no longer seemed to hold. The anxiety of the white man in Australia, I suggest, was the anxiety of the colonial apprehending the emergence of a postcolonial world.

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POSTCOLONIAL APPREHENSIONS When Prime Minister Barton rose in parliament in August 1901 to speak to the second reading of the Immigration Restriction Bill, he held in his hand a book that gave voice to and shaped the white man’s insecurities. Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast, published in London in 1893, foretold of a future, ‘not far distant’, when white men would find themselves ‘humiliated’ and ‘thrust aside’. An Englishman, Pearson had been educated at Oriel College, Oxford and worked as Professor of History at King’s College, London before migrating to the colony of Victoria in the 1870s, where he enjoyed a career as a university lecturer, educational reformer and a minister for education, championing, among other causes, women’s education. In the 1870s, Pearson had formed a debating society at the University of Melbourne, where idealistic young men met to discuss the public questions of the day. Among their number were a young Alfred Deakin and Henry Bournes Higgins. Barton read long passages from Pearson’s book to the parliament self-consciously charged with the national future, including this (clearly disturbing) vision of a postcolonial world in which the erstwhile ‘servile’ classes had become masters: The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe circled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of the Europeans; when Chinamen and the natives of Hindustan, the states of Central and South America, by that time predominantly Indian … are represented by fleets in the European seas, invited to international conferences and welcomed as allies in quarrels of the civilised world. The citizens of these countries will then be taken up into the social relations of the white races, will throng the English turf or the salons of Paris, and will be admitted to inter-marriage. It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated … We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will be that the changes have been inevitable.23

In this passage, Pearson depicts the postcolonial world in piquant terms as a drama of white masculine humiliation – occurring in all the most manly of sites – on the high seas, in the halls of industry, at international conferences, in the salons of Paris, even on the English turf. He considered the changes inevitable, but were they? Was it not the duty of

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leaders of white men to defend their interests and to prevent these unsettling developments? Should not Pearson’s forecast be received as a rallying-cry? Pearson’s book caused a stir in England and the United States among men of public affairs. As Thomas G. Dyer, historian of Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘idea of race’, has observed: ‘The Australian author’s book was the rage in the intellectual circles in which Roosevelt moved during 1894 and 1895’.24 Pearson’s biographer, John Tregenza, has also noted: ‘Coming when it did at the full tide of imperialist sentiment, it produced the shock he had expected, and he became a celebrity’.25 In London, Prime Minister Gladstone was reportedly ‘full of Pearson’s book’, telling dinner guests at Downing Street that everyone should read it. In May 1894, Pearson received a letter from the United States reporting that ‘men in Washington’ were greatly interested; few books had caused so many men to revise their ‘mental estimate of facts’.26 The correspondent was Theodore Roosevelt, who also wrote a long review of National Life and Character in the Sewanee Review, in which he chided Pearson for being ‘unduly pessimistic’, but praised him for forcing the reader ‘to ponder problems of which he was previously wholly ignorant, or which he but half understood’.27 His own view, from the perspective of American experience with the Indian and the Negro, was that white control would never be jeopardised, because insurrections would be mercilessly crushed. But perhaps the time had come for the white man to assert his authority in the world at large? In her study of Roosevelt in Manliness and Civilisation, Gail Bederman identifies 1894 as the year in which he first began to advocate imperialism as the white man’s racial challenge. She finds his interest in foreign policy first mentioned in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge in October that year, but misses the significance of Pearson’s book, which he read in May, and reviewed in August. Arguably Pearson’s alarmist projections helped inspire Roosevelt’s new imperial project. In his review of National Life and Character, Roosevelt dismissed as a ‘weakling’ the ‘man who cannot struggle with his fellow-men’, though commended Pearson himself for being ‘a man of strength and courage’, for he faced the future with manly fortitude. The American statesman was altogether more sanguine about the state of the world than the gloomy Antipodean: ‘At no period of the world’s history has life been so full of interest and of possibilities of excitement and enjoyment as for us who live in the latter half of the nineteenth century’.28 He was impressed, though, with Pearson’s facts about the declining white birth rate and the implications for the world

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of ‘the teeming population of China’: ‘Unquestionably, no community that is actually diminishing in numbers is in a healthy condition: and as the world is now, with huge waste places still to fill up, and with much of the competition between the races reducing itself to the warfare of the cradle, no race has any chance to win a great place unless it consists of good breeders as well as good fighters’.29 As Dyer has observed, ‘these thoughts, which also provided the basis for some of his general racial theories, came at least in part from his reading Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character’.30 Henceforth, as Bederman writes, ‘race suicide’ became one of Roosevelt’s favourite themes. The American was perplexed, however, at Pearson’s suggestion that ‘once the tropic races are independent, the white peoples will be humiliated and will lose heart’: ‘this does not seem inevitable, and indeed seems very improbable’. With the insouciance, perhaps, of the already independent man, Roosevelt continued: ‘No American or Australian cares in the least that the tan-coloured peoples of Brazil and Ecuador now live under governments of their own instead of being ruled by viceroys from Portugal and Spain: and it is difficult to see why they should be materially affected by a similar change happening in regard to the people along the Ganges or the upper Nile’.31 Taking his own condition of manly independence for granted, Roosevelt was unable to see that the independence of Africans or Asians might challenge the white colonial’s very status as a man. Still under the protection of Britain, cast in the role of a dependent, how could the colonial demand respect at international conferences, in Paris salons or on the English turf? He could, at least, retrieve his manhood in the confines of ‘his own home’. As Roosevelt advised, ‘in his own home’, the white man ‘can always protect himself, and as soon as he is seriously menaced, always will protect himself by protective tariffs and stringent immigration laws’.32 In Australia, this combination of measures introduced in the first decade of the Commonwealth’s existence, would be named New Protection – its novelty inhering in the insistence that tariff protection be accompanied by state protection of the adult male wage. Australian national leaders would seek to secure the status of the Australian white man in the postcolonial world, not through heroic imperial conquest – they did not yet possess their own navy, as they were reminded when the impressive Japanese Training Squadron visited Sydney in 1903 – but through state action to guarantee his status in ‘his own home’. The institutionalisation of the living wage, intended to empower white Australian manhood, was thus a key racial strategy.

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I M P E R I A L D I C TAT I O N Henry Bournes Higgins, whose task it was to define the living wage in 1907, was an Irish immigrant to the colony of Victoria, opponent of the Boer War, protégé of Pearson and vigorous defender of the status of the white man in Australia against what he held to be imperial domination and bullying by the British. As Australians were at pains to point out, colonials confronted different psychic challenges from those faced by the British in the metropolis. In National Life and Character, Pearson had observed that the ‘Englishmen at home’ found it hard to understand the ‘fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes’, but it was simply ‘the instinct of self-preservation quickened by experience’ – for the threat to the boundaries of White Australia was experienced as a threat to the masculine colonial self .33 In the debate on immigration restriction in 1901, Deakin also observed that European statesmen might ‘well view with surprise the anxiety exhibited here in this respect’.34 But as another member of parliament explained in the course of the same debate, the British could never grasp the importance of ‘race’ to the colonial, because ‘it is not a question of manhood [for them] … in the same way as it is for us’.35 It is the importance of ‘race’ to the Australians’ sense of manhood that becomes clear in the parliamentary debates. In seeking to introduce the racial boundaries that they saw as essential to the preservation of their manhood, Australian political leaders ironically provoked their further emasculation by the British Colonial Office – being robbed of their manhood at the very moment they entered into their nationhood. The Colonial Office made it clear to Australian political leaders that they should not incorporate explicitly racist exclusions into federal immigration legislation as proposed, but rather should follow the Natal precedent and adopt the ruse of a dictation test. There were loud complaints in the Australian parliament that the government was ‘submitting to the dictation of the Colonialoffice’.36 In 1897, the colonial premiers had been warned by Joseph Chamberlain in the Colonial Office that they should seek to avoid giving offence to other imperial subjects such as Indians and Chinese, but also to the Japanese, with whom the British had forged the Anglo–Japanese Treaty in 1894. The Australians should ‘bear in mind the traditions of the empire, which makes no distinction in favour of or against race or colour’, announced Chamberlain, seemingly forgetting for the moment that while some imperial subjects enjoyed the right of self-government, ‘subject races’ were expressly denied it. To ‘exclude by reason of their race or colour all her Majesty’s Indian subjects, or even

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all Asiatics, would be an act so offensive to those peoples’, continued Chamberlain, ‘that it would be most painful, I am certain, to her Majesty, to have to sanction it’. Moreover, Australians should remember that in India there were hundreds of thousands of men who were every bit as civilised as they were, ‘who are, if that is anything, better born in the sense that they have older traditions and older families’.37 Was Chamberlain reminding the colonials of their convict forebears? Could a nation founded in convict transportation ever be regarded as civilised? In his recent (and unnecessarily provocative) book Ornamentalism, David Cannadine has sought to remind us of the complexity of colonial hierarchies, which were attuned to rank and class snobberies, as well as racial and ethnic distinctions. To class-conscious British eyes, he wrote, nineteenth-century settler colonies, such as Australia, were full of ‘the dross and detritus of the British metropolis: convicts and their progeny … poor rejects from the slums and back streets of Birmingham and Glasgow; failed professionals in the law and the church and the military ...’ Viewed as ‘hicks and bumpkins and criminals’, colonials were, according to Cannadine, ‘the white trash of their time’.38 Or as Ann Laura Stoler, in her work on the Netherlands East Indies, has observed, white colonials were ‘parvenus’, only ‘fictive Europeans, somehow distinct from the real thing’.39 (Australians visiting Batavia had their own reasons to doubt that Europeans there were ‘the real thing’, repeating the British rumour that there was not one family of wholly Dutch descent, that ‘the whole race is now riddled with the black element’.) 40 It was widely agreed, however, that the Japanese were a highly civilised and cultivated people, as the British reminded Australians in the debates over immigration restrictions. The Japanese belong to an empire whose standard of civilisation is so much higher than that of Kanakas, Negroes, Pacific Islanders, Indians, or other Eastern peoples, that to refer to them in the same terms cannot but be regarded in the light of a reproach, which is hardly warranted by the fact of the shade of the national complexion.41

They were also a powerful military force. Japan had proven its naval strength in its defeat of China in 1895. In this rapidly changing world, Attorney-General Deakin defended his government’s decision to adopt the British suggestion of a dictation test. To liken the Japanese to other coloured aliens was, he emphasised, understandably offensive to such a civilised, albeit ‘high spirited’ people: ‘To lump all these peoples together as Asiatics and undesirables would naturally be offensive to a high spirited people like the Japanese, and surely, without any request from the British govern-

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ment or without representations from the Japanese people, mere considerations of courtesy, such as should exist between one civilised people and another, should lead us to make this distinction’.42 In international relations, ‘civilisation’ could cancel out the effects of ‘colour’ or ‘complexion’, allowing the Japanese to be recast, in effect, as honorary white men. Higgins, who advocated a new definition of civilisation based on respect for labour and the standard of living, would have none of it. He also admired the Japanese, he said, but it was their ‘good qualities’ that made them ‘dangerous’ to the white man: It is not their bad qualities, but their good qualities which make them dangerous to us. We frankly and openly say: ‘You are thrifty, industrious, and you are willing to work from morning to night for the mere satisfaction of your physical wants, and for that reason we will not have you’. We frankly say that we want men with a higher standard of life, who will not be content with a low standard, or with low wages, but who are determined to get the best things the world can give them. 43

In thus seeking to redefine the meaning of civilisation, Higgins also sought to discredit Japanese claims to recognition as the equals of white men. His reiteration of his preference for ‘frank’ and ‘open’ speaking also signalled his own identification as a ‘white man’ and his contempt for British unmanliness in their resort to subterfuge and duplicity – as instanced by their suggestion of the dictation test. To the colonial mind, the British were hypocrites, because while they claimed to disapprove of distinctions between peoples on racial grounds, they denied the rights of citizenship and self-government to their coloured subjects, notably in India. Alfred Deakin returned from a visit to India (whence he had journeyed to research irrigation schemes) deeply disturbed at the arrogance of the British administration and their ‘almost contemptuous indifference’ to the needs of the local population. Here was another lesson about the brutalising effects, on whites, of being served by a coloured servant class.44 The British, moreover, seemed to have no objection to the divisions based on class that marked their own country. ‘I am quite sure,’ said Higgins, ‘that if any gentlemen, who form the Government of England, saw any chance of English slum children rubbing shoulders with their own children, they would soon take steps to stop it’.45 Australian objections to the British proposal that they cloak their racist objectives in a dictation test expressed a combination of outrage at imperial dictation, indignation that they could not state their racist intentions outright, ironic comment on British unmanliness

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and hurt that the Colonial Office seemed to pay more heed to the sensibilities of the Japanese and ‘Hindoo Rajahs’ than to democratic white men. ‘Unless we are able to speak out straightforwardly,’ asserted one member of parliament, ‘we shall never be able to get any satisfaction or any constitutional freedom’.46 ‘It is very humiliating,’ said the member for Corio, ‘when we find that it is necessary to temporise with other nations in order to secure some temporary trade advantage …’47 Higgins considered that Australian men were being robbed of their manhood: ‘Are we to be treated as schoolboys or men? Are we to look after the interests of Australia, or to subordinate those interests to the interests of the old country?’48 Despite Australian protests, the Colonial Office prevailed and the requirement that prospective immigrants submit to a dictation test in a ‘European language’ became law. In 1902, Britain entered into a new Anglo–Japanese Treaty; in 1903 the Japanese Training Squadron visited Australia and in 1905, the guidelines for the dictation test were changed to require that it be administered in ‘any prescribed language’. In 1908 the nationalist Bulletin magazine changed its masthead from ‘Australia for the Australians’ to ‘Australia for the White Man’.

A F F I R M I N G T H E W H I T E S TA N D A R D In 1906, Higgins was appointed president of the newly established Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration and in the following year he was called upon to make an historic determination – presiding over the Harvester judgment, which laid down the principle of a minimum wage for adult male workers. The decision arose from an application by H. V. McKay, manufacturer of agricultural machinery, including the Sunshine Harvester, for exemption from excise duties under the Excise Tariff Act of 1906 on the ground that the employer paid his employees ‘a fair and reasonable wage’. This was the New Protection and it fell to Higgins to interpret the meaning of a ‘fair and reasonable’ wage. The workers in question were white unskilled male labourers working in manufacturing industry. Higgins decided that the ‘first and dominant factor’ to take into account must be the cost of living of ‘a civilised being’ ‘living in a civilised community’.49 In 1901, he had explained to parliament: ‘We do not want men beside us who are not as exacting in their demands on civilisation as ourselves’.50 What were Australian demands? One ‘Westralian worker’ was moved to observe to a ‘Jap standing outside a laundry’: ‘you don’t get enough in a week to keep a white man in beer and tobacco for the same period’.51 In his judgment, Higgins endorsed the view that the normal needs of the

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white man might include intoxicating liquor and tobacco, as well as books and newspapers, tram and train fares, insurance benefits and union fees. After surveying a range of evidence, some of it submitted by workers’ wives, Higgins determined that the minimum living wage for an unskilled labourer should be set at seven shillings a day or £2/2/- a week for a six-day week. He also made it clear, in this and subsequent judgments, that life as a civilised man entailed marriage and children, hence the worker would need to be paid sufficient to maintain his dependents – his ability to support a wife and children defined his own independence and status as a man. Higgins based his calculation of the worker’s needs on the cost of living for a household of ‘about five people’. The Harvester judgment represented a radical rebuff to employers and the champions of business who argued that wages should be determined by productivity or profit levels – or, in other words, industry’s capacity to pay. Defining human need as the central wage fixing criterion, they predicted, would bring the country to economic ruin. The significance of Higgins’ intervention – ‘no judicial decision roused greater interest in the first decade of federation … None had such long-term significance’, according to F. K. Crowley – has been widely recognised in Australian historiography.52 In his recent Concise History of Australia, Stuart Macintyre has summarised its import in these terms: the principles of Higgins’ Harvester judgment became a fundamental feature of national life. Wages were to be determined not by bargaining, but by an independent arbitrator. They were to be based, not on profits or productivity, but human need. They were premised on the male breadwinner, with men’s wages sufficient to support a family and women restricted to certain occupations and paid only enough to support a single person. Women contested the dual standard for the next sixty years. 53

His assessment speaks to the impact of feminist history which, since the early 1970s, has tended to hold the Harvester judgment responsible for institutionalising the economic subordination of women.54 The determination of a minimum wage did not just reward manhood, however; it empowered white manhood. Aboriginal men were not awarded equal pay by the Arbitration Court until the 1960s; and colonial and state legislation as well as industrial awards barred Asian, Afghan, Indian and Islander men from entering a range of designated occupations.55 In defining the Australian worker as ‘a civilised being’ ‘living in a civilised community’, the Harvester judgment signalled that Australia was to be a ‘white man’s country’.

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P R OT E C T I N G T H E H O M E L A N D New scholarship on race relations has drawn attention to the absence of ‘whiteness’ as an analytical category in scholarly research and writing. This practice has had the effect, as Aboriginal scholar Aileen MoretonRobinson has argued with regard to writing on Australian women, of making ‘race’ ‘the prison reserved for the “Other”’.56 Yet it is not the case, as is often asserted, that ‘whiteness’ has operated as an invisible, unmarked, category in Australian history – the fantasy of White Australia made whiteness omnipresent and highly visible. What has been obscured in historical analysis is the historical specificity of the ‘white man’ as an identity and the ways in which he was produced in processes of identification and projection, which ‘harnessed affect to political life through the production of national fantasy’ – White Australia as the secure homeland, at once homogeneous nation and impregnable fortress.57 For the white man in turn-of-the-century Australia, anxiety was the ‘affect’ central to his tie with the homeland and to a representation of a self which seemed in danger of annihilation. In his book Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939, David Walker has recorded wittily and at length the prevalence of invasion narratives in Australia from the 1880s through to the 1920s, but his ironic approach to his subjects’ anxieties and lurid fantasies gets seriously in the way of historical analysis and explanation. There is little interrogation of the anxious white man as an identity which was itself historically produced through the invasion narratives, which might be reconceptualised as narratives of masculine violation. We need to historicise the emergence of the figure of the Australian ‘white man’ within the complex relations of colonialism. In the processes of colonisation in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Australia, the identity of the ‘white man’ was in the first instance constructed through his conquest of Aborigines, whose own apprehensions were crucial to this process. From the viewpoint of Aborigines, differences of status, class and ethnicity between the colonists – between Irishmen, English, Germans, Italians, Jews – were obscured as they confronted these populations as invaders of their country. Henry Reynolds has noted that early acts of Aboriginal retaliation against individuals changed into generalised warfare as they began to conceptualise the diverse settlers as one people – white men or whitefellas – accountable for each other’s actions. ‘They have a tradition among them that white men have usurped their territory, have driven them into the forests, have usurped their game … ’ reported Protector George Augustus Robinson, in the 1830s.58 In the process of dispossession, colonists became ‘white men’ who would assert their distinctive capacity for government, over themselves and variously designated Others: natives, coloured aliens, some Europeans and women

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of all kinds. In his pioneering study Fear and Hatred Purifying Australia and California 1850–1901, Andrew Markus charted the increasing use of ‘generic’ terms for classifying non-European nationalities towards the end of the nineteenth century. His analyses of newspaper articles suggested the creation of a ‘two-category structure’. 59What he doesn’t register is that the new dichotomy was the corollary of the emergence of the identity category of the ‘white man’ . White men were masters but, as colonials, they were also subject to imperial dictation and British condescension. The humiliations of colonial masculinity – as Mrinalinhi Sinha has defined them in Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century – were not confined to racialised Others. In Australia, the condescension towards, and subordination of, colonials was keenly resented; resentment which animated their investment in, and promotion of, their status as ‘white men’, but it was an identity that was already looking anachronistic, even as Australian political leaders made it their own. Like many fantasies, White Australia fed on an apprehension of lost power and it promised to restore the white man to his rightful place – not only through the protection of wages and the empowerment of breadwinners at home, but in the world at large, at international conferences, on the high seas, on the English turf, in the salons of Paris. Hence, the urgent departure of Australian Prime Minister W. M. Hughes at the end of World War I for the salons at Versailles, determined to ensure that the Wilsonian ‘moment’ would not become a postcolonial age. 60 The Japanese had given notice of a proposal for a statement on racial equality that they wanted written into Covenant of the League of Nations. It read: The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all alien nationals of states who are members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect, making no discrimination in law or in fact on account of their race or nationality.61

The pugnacious Welsh-born Australian prime minister insisted that the Japanese proposal was directed at the destruction of White Australia and was vociferous in his determination that it would be defeated. Hughes’ objections were loud and continuous. A delegate noted in his diary how he harangued fellow Welshman, Lloyd George: ‘morning, noon and night [he] bellows at poor Lloyd George that if racial equality is recognised … he and his people will leave the conference bag and baggage’.62 In his own notes, Hughes confided he would ‘sooner walk

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into the Seine or the Folies Bergeres with his clothes off’ than agree to the Japanese proposal – surely a graphic indication of a white man in distress.63 In the end, the solidarity of the Pacific immigrant nations – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States – with a reluctant United Kingdom in tow – defeated frantic diplomatic attempts to arrive at a compromise. The ineffectual US President, Woodrow Wilson, succumbed to domestic and international pressure to uphold the inter-linked principles of white supremacy and national sovereignty (by declaring the vote not passed, because it was not unanimous), but was happy for the Australian prime minister to receive the blame. Unwilling to act as scapegoat, Hughes called a conference with the Japanese press, where he spoke of statesmen who spoke in ‘forked tongues’: ‘The Japanese people are not fools, but on the other hand are very keen and wise people and they will know how to interpret correctly the motives of these so-called friends of Japan who have circulated these insidious rumours’.64 In his account of the Pacific nations’ mobilisation to defeat the statement on racial equality, Sean Brawley in The White Peril emphasises their joint interest in immigration restriction, but their stand also served to highlight how invested were the leaders of white postcolonial nations in perpetuating the colonial order of things. As Charles Pearson and his protégés Alfred Deakin and H. B. Higgins well understood, what was at stake was nothing less than their sense of self and their pride of place in the world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to Hsu-Ming Teo, Stuart Macintyre and the participants in seminars in the History Department, Harvard University and the Institute for Historical Research, University of London for detailed comment and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter.

8 CULTURAL TRANSMISSIONS R I C H A R D WAT E R H O U S E

I In the mid-nineteenth century there was a pre-occupation amongst European and American historians with identifying the unique qualities that underpinned the institutions and values of particular countries. And so, Macaulay, Michelet and Bancroft wrote histories of England, France and the United States respectively which emphasised moral, intellectual and political progress, albeit in a context which was claimed as distinctive. In other words each of these historians claimed for their own country a history that was superior because it produced more progressive values and institutions compared to those of other countries. None of these histories considered the possibility that transcultural relations with other nations might influence the cultures of particular countries. Towards the end of the century in the United States the influential Johns Hopkins University historian, Herbert Baxter Adams, abandoned the notion of American uniqueness in favour of the ‘germ school’ of history. Linking particular New England towns with the tribal councils of the Germanic tribes, he argued that the Teutonic people had developed the representative institutions later shared by England and the United States. In this context, American institutions and indeed American history were simply continuations of European institutions and history.1 Frederick Jackson Turner, a Midwesterner who studied at Hopkins in the early 1890s, years in which the ‘germ theory’ was taught as an unchallengeable orthodoxy, disagreed with it completely and proposed the ‘frontier thesis’ as an ostensibly powerful, heretical alternative. American values, American institutions, American characters were the

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unique products of the American frontier: they were created as an expanding number of Europeans interacted with a unique and ‘primitive’ natural environment. The role of government in providing a generous land grants system, roads, canals and railroads prompted a sense of common purpose, which became American nationalism. Physical conditions promoted particular character traits – practicality, individualism, and optimism. And primitive social circumstances prompted a sense of egalitarianism and democratic institutions. In a very real sense Turner was crystallising an American mythology rather than articulating an historical interpretation. The frontier thesis was not new but Turner gave it intellectual force and academic respectability. His interpretation had an enormous, indeed a dominant, impact on American historiography, that reached into the 1930s and beyond. But in the 1930s some powerful critics emerged. They pointed to Turner’s inexact usage of terms and his failure to define them; his failure to explain how the frontier actually changed people’s character; his pre-occupation with the frontier and his neglect of the roles of urbanisation, class, industrialisation and mass immigration in shaping American values and institutions. More recently, historians have pointed out that Turner interpreted Native Americans only as a retarding force, ignoring the critical role that transcultural relations between the indigenous peoples and the invading Europeans played in shaping western and indeed American culture. When Russel Ward published his The Australian Legend in 1958, he drew heavily upon the Turner thesis for inspiration. ‘It is clear then,’ he argued, seemingly oblivious to the criticisms of the Turner thesis, ‘that frontier conditions exerted a unifying, nationalist, influence in Australia as in America.’2 In Australia too the frontier nurtured a type of character that became a national mystique. In the bush, native-born (European) Australians developed a set of attitudes that involved and reflected egalitarianism and mateship, a disdain for authority, local as opposed to imperial patriotism, a commitment to pragmatism and a corresponding contempt for intellectual pursuits, and finally a virulent racism.3 However, in Australia, the typical frontier dweller was not a small scale, entrepreneurial farmer but rather a wage earner, inclined towards collectivism rather than capitalism. The values and attitudes of these rural itinerants were passed on from one generation to another, and in the 1890s underwent a process of cultural transmission into the colonial capitals, with the newly emerged union movement and ‘the bushman’s bible’, The Bulletin, acting as conduits.4 In consequence, a regional and rural character type was transformed into a national legend. Many of the criticisms made against Ward’s study have paralleled

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those originally launched against Turner. For example, historians have questioned Ward’s argument that the itinerant bushworker was valorised and mythologised as the ‘typical’ Australian. In this context John Hirst has argued that the ‘pioneer’ was more powerful and enduring than the ‘bush’ legend. In classifying all European settlers on the frontier as pioneers possessed of a common purpose, and in celebrating their individual rather than collective enterprise, the ‘pioneer’ legend provided a conservative and classless, rather than a radical and class conscious, view of the nation’s rural past. At the same time, critics have accused Ward of downplaying urban and immigrant influences and of almost altogether ignoring the contribution of women and Aborigines to the creation of Australian culture and identity.5 Both Turner and Ward were concerned to argue that the ideas and values relating to American and Australian national characters and identities were locally produced, the result of particular social, economic and environmental circumstances in each country. Ironically, the ‘germ school’ heavily influenced their interpretations. They simply shifted the original sources of American and Australian character from the countryside of central Europe to the forests of Wisconsin and the plains of western New South Wales. If Turner and Ward understood the emergence of national character and the values associated with it as reflecting an organic process, other historians and cultural theorists, particularly those associated with the Frankfurt School, interpreted the role of culture in hegemonic or imposed terms. Strongly influenced both by Marx and Gramsci, the Frankfurt School emerged in the interwar period at a time when many intellectuals feared that propaganda and ‘mass culture’ were playing critical roles in the establishment of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy and Russia. Both the members of the School and their post-World War II adherents have argued that ‘the culture industry’ was and is producing mass culture for the purpose of subverting true democracy and imposing capitalist hegemony. Mass culture, they argue, leaves no space for people either to create or choose culture: rather, they are passive recipients.6 The arguments in a number of important and influential studies of the history of Australian culture reflect these understandings and assumptions.7 However, some Australian historians who might tentatively be labelled ‘nationalist’ have tended to argue both for an organic and hegemonic role for culture. So, in mapping the emergence of an Australian literature, art, music, theatre and architecture in Australia, Geoffrey Serle adopted a ‘genealogical’ approach, one that argued for the creation of a distinctive Australian culture as a result of the gradual accumulation of locally produced artefacts within an antipodean context. But the influx of American culture after World War II involved a

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process of cultural as well as economic hegemony and threatened a newly emerged sense of cultural independence and self-reliance.8 But not all historians have argued that imported culture is by definition hegemonic culture, a threat to the creation and integrity of a distinctive local identity and set of cultural values. In a famous study, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (1955), and in a subsequent volume, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia (1964), which he co-authored, Louis Hartz set out his fragment thesis, one designed to apply to a range of settler societies.9 Those English colonists who founded the north American colonies in the seventeenth century carried with them a Lockean or liberal fragment which embodied a belief in popular sovereignty based on the right of revolution, and a notion that property (or land) ownership was the basis of society. In contrast, the working-class Britishers who settled Australia some two hundred odd years later carried with them a radical fragment, whose central ethos combined a hatred of the upper classes and a love of leisure. Yet, although the fragments were radically different, the processes were the same. First, what were fragments in Britain became the whole in America and Australia. Second, not only did the fragments become dominant in their new homes but they were also immune to subsequent influence or modification. In the words of Hartz, in each case, the fragment was ‘protected against a whole series of later enemies as a result of its original movement’.10 Since the 1970s historians and cultural theorists have both broadened their definition and changed their understanding of the role of culture. Serle’s 1973 study of the creative spirit in Australia still identified culture with the ‘high’ arts but more recent general histories have understood that culture embodies popular values and institutions as well as those associated with ‘the Arts’, and that it embraces work as well as leisure.11 Following Raymond Williams, they have also accepted that culture is a process involving interchange across time, class and national borders, between different ethnic and racial groups, and between men and women. Influenced by the Birmingham School of cultural theory, which emerged in the UK in the 1960s, they have come to reject the notion that people were the passive recipients of culture. It may be true that, unlike pre-industrial times, nineteenth and twentieth-century Europeans, Americans and Australians no longer made their own culture. But within the framework of massproduced culture there was an enormous range from which to choose. At the same time, historians have explored how cultural artefacts and values were and are transfigured to meet particular needs. Within this

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context the products of the ‘culture industry’ were reworked by consumers to become elements of a culture of defiance and resistance. In the following pages I propose to explore the processes by which external cultural values and institutions were transferred to Australia during the period of European occupation. I also propose more briefly to examine the transcultural exchanges that took place across class, gender and race in the same period. In the end my aim is to argue that Australian culture is neither the product of organic growth nor of imposed hegemony. Nor are our values and institutions the unwavering product of a 200-year-old fragment. Rather, contemporary Australian society and culture are the results of a continuing series of cultural imports constantly reworked to meet local circumstances, and of a dynamic set of internal transcultural exchanges.

II In 1788 England was a country in transition. In the north of England the appearance of factories led to the emergence of a nascent proletariat, while in rural areas the triumph of an agrarian capitalism was marked by the consolidation of farms through an accelerated process of enclosure. The social consequences of these developments were to be considerable. In rural areas an ordered, hierarchical society based on notions of deference was still evident; but in the cities, especially London, such ideas had lost their authority. Instead, the transient poor, beggars, porters and carters, many of them the victims of rural land consolidation, treated the upper classes with insolence and contempt. Attitudes to labour and work were also changing. In pre-industrial Europe there was no clear demarcation between home and work because outwork was the norm and the family constituted the standard work unit. Moreover, work was both seasonal and task driven. In the late eighteenth century, however, some factory owners set out to regulate work by the clock rather than by the task. Textile operatives, in particular, were now expected to labour for the full week and the time allocated to breaks in the day, week or year were limited. In many industries customary work practices were retained, but the development of the factory system saw the creation of a bifurcation between home and work. Although there is also some evidence that English culture was beginning to take on aspects of a culture of consumption, most could not afford luxury as well as essential commodities. In fact, late eighteenth-century recreations remained traditional in nature. In the main this leisure activity was divided into five overlapping types: fairs and wakes (celebrations held to mark the anniversary of the dedication of the local church and which included banquets, blood sports

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and races of all sorts); sporting activities, which included football, cricket, horse-racing, bare-knuckle prize fighting and athletic contests; bloodsports, especially bullbaiting and cockfighting; activities centred around alehouses; and finally, entertainments associated with theatres. Yet underpinning this wide variety of recreations were common values and patterns of behaviour. Violence and disorder characterised many occasions associated with public recreation. At the same time gambling was closely linked to most of them. And finally, the aristocracy and gentry on one hand, and the plebeians on the other, both enjoyed popular recreations as part of a shared public culture. For the former, they represented opportunities to display patronage and paternalism, for the latter they were occasions to escape the discipline of masters and mistresses, to demonstrate their preference for unrestrained and traditional, rather then rational and ‘modern’ forms of recreation.12 And so, at the time of the settlement of New South Wales, England was a country in the process of profound social transition. At the same time, the values associated with deference and patriarchy which were used to promote and maintain the hierarchical order were losing force. And they would prove to be of little value in establishing an ordered and hierarchical society in the antipodes. Moreover, what exacerbated the situation was the fact that the convict colonies had a duality of purpose. On the one hand they were intended as closed and static societies, as prisons. But on the other, both the imperial officials and the colonists themselves expected them to function as ‘plantations’, that is, stapleproducing colonies. In that context they were likely to be marked by materialism, entrepreneurialism and exploitation, rather than characterised by a closely structured social system. Neither Governor Phillip nor his immediate successors encouraged the transfer of English cultural practices and institutions to Australia. Nevertheless, pre-industrial institutions and the values associated with them were relatively quickly established. Cockfights were held in Sydney from the earliest years of settlement. Prize fights date from slightly later, with the first recorded contest taking place in 1814. Although the first official horse-race meeting in Sydney was not organised until 1810, match races (contests between just two horses) were commonplace events on the colonial roads up to a decade earlier. The first recorded cricket match in the colonies dates from 1803, but the sport didn’t flourish as a popular game until the 1820s. By 1800 public houses were as much a feature of Sydney and its surroundings as they were of the English landscape. Established in Sydney in 1796, the colony’s first theatre enjoyed a turbulent and interrupted career that came to an end early in the first decade of the nineteenth century. With

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the opening of the Royal Theatre in Sydney in 1833 and the building of theatres in the other colonial capitals in the 1840s, theatrical entertainment emerged as a central institution of colonial culture. Pre-industrial culture in Australia served three purposes. Firstly, the officers and later the wealthy free settlers were active in promoting certain sports in particular both as a means of amusing but also as a means of defining themselves as a colonial ruling class. In organising such sports as horse-racing and prize fighting, they provided entertainment for and displayed paternalism towards the plebeians. In gambling on the results of sporting contests they demonstrated a gentry style associated with risk taking. Secondly, authorities also sanctioned certain pastimes and leisure activities in the hope of weaning the convicts and their children from gambling and drinking. So cricket was promoted as ‘healthy’ and ‘innocent’ and the theatre as a form recreation that would serve educational ends. In fact, however, for the convicts and other members of the colonial lower orders such pastimes and leisure activities became part of a culture of resistance. Many of them had come from urban areas in England where notions of deference were irrelevant. And so while the officers and gentlemen organised cockfights, prize fights and especially horse-racing as a means of inculcating patriarchy, more often than not the plebeians turned them into occasions of disorder. To give but one example, when Macquarie sanctioned the colony’s first horse-race meeting in Hyde Park in 1810 he officially prohibited gambling and drinking at the venue. In response many of the convicts became so intoxicated they were unfit to work for several days. Theatres may have been intended as sites of rational recreation by the authorities but the realities were quite different. Although Shakespearean plays were presented frequently, so were dramas and comedies considered of dubious moral and intellectual worth. At the same time, riots and disorder were commonplace, while the appearance of prostitutes in the boxes discouraged ‘decent’ people from attending. In the 1840s in Sydney and a decade later in the other colonies, theatre began to take on some of the characteristics of rational recreation, featuring the works of Shakespeare and other reputable dramatists as well as a significant number of operatic works. Thirdly, the introduction of pre-industrial English values, institutions and rituals to Australia helped the new arrivals to adapt to a new and strange climate; they provided them with a sense of familiarity and belonging. In introducing familiar ways into what they considered an aberrant environment, the colonists were rendering it habitable and civilised. Rather than adjusting to the places they found, they sought instead to remake them in English ways.13

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In the period after 1850 Australia shed its pre-industrial characteristics. Between 1850 and 1914 most capital cities underwent dramatic increases in population. Moreover these cities began to take on distinctly modern characteristics. In the walking cities of the pre-industrial world there was less residential segregation between social classes than now became the case. Once differentiation was by street and neighbourhood; by the 1870s it was by suburb. The working classes occupied the inner and the middle class the outer city zones. These colonial cities also took advantage of the new technologies created by the Industrial Revolution, reflected, for example, in new modes of transport – trains and trams. Changed modes of production represented by factories also involved changed work practices based on time discipline. These recognisably modern cities also required cultural values and institutions that reflected the new ways of living and, indeed, understanding. Four major characteristics defined Australian culture in the period between 1850 and 1914. Firstly, popular culture became increasingly commercialised, no longer one made by the people themselves but rather a mass-produced culture that was widely disseminated, heard, read and seen. So, for example, what now marked Australian sport – including cricket, football in both its Rugby and Victorian Rules forms, and horse-racing – was the existence of organised and regular competitions or meetings (in the case of horse races) run by modern bureaucracies; standardised rather than local rules; modern technology in the form of, for example, batting gloves, bats with springs and starting barriers; the emergence of a specialised sporting press; the creation of detailed sporting statistics; and the emergence of paid or professional athletes whose income came from admission fees charged to now enclosed stadiums and race courses. Theatre managers too used modern advertising techniques, posting flashy bills, planting stories about particular companies in the press, and promoting performers as ‘stars’ rather than actors. These processes, involving the commercialisation and modernisation of sport, were also evident both in England and the United States. Given that most sports played in Australia had English provenances, it is likely that the inspiration for the changes implemented in Australia were inspired by the ‘Mother Country’.14 However, this was not the case with theatre, as I shall demonstrate in a moment. Secondly, for the first time American cultural influence made its presence felt in Australia, especially in the area of theatrical entertainments. In part this resulted from the fact that American show business used more advanced technology and advertising than its English counterpart. For example, the English circus retained its traditional form: advertising was at a minimum, travel was by road using horse and van, and the programs were mostly equestrian. American circuses travelled

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by rail, employed advance agents to provide a plethora of advertising, and featured three-ring programs with a kaleidoscope of acts. At first Australian circuses were derived from the British model but by the late nineteenth century they utilised technology, advertising techniques and programs plagiarised from American example.15 Growing American influence also reflected the fact that the optimistic values embedded in American popular culture were more suited to the sense of purpose and progress that characterised Australian society than the values of fatalism and resignation that remained evident in aspects of English cultural institutions. American vaudeville featured songs and sketches that promoted life in the city as exciting and glamorous, as providing social and sexual freedom. In contrast English music hall songs and skits lamented the lot of the working classes, portrayed as the victims of industrialism. And so it was vaudeville and its values that emerged as the dominant popular stage entertainment in Australia in the 1890s while Sydney and Melbourne’s music halls declined into little more than fringe institutions.16 Thirdly, Australia’s shared public culture disappeared. In its place emerged a series of institutions representing varied and sometimes conflicting cultural values, and designed to cater to more specialised audiences. As part of this process, the construction of the notion of high culture and its deliberate separation from other forms of culture took place. In Europe and America this separation involved both the articulation of the idea of high culture as aesthetically and morally superior to other forms of culture and its institutionalisation through the creation of state or philanthropically funded opera companies and orchestras, and the construction of lavish museums and galleries to house the great works of art. In Australia colonial governments and prospective philanthropists were both unwilling and unable to fund the establishment of such institutions and companies on a scale anything like those in Europe or North America. So what emerged was an aesthetic of high culture without the institutions. Shakespeare, Beethoven and Wagner were valorised as Kultur’s holy trinity, but locals had to rely on intermittent visits from touring companies to see their works performed. The example of high culture is in fact a fascinating case study in cultural transmission, for its late nineteenth and early twentieth-century construction was a European and American as well as a specifically English phenomenon. The promulgation of the concept in Australia may have come primarily via England but some reinforcement also came directly from France, Germany and the United States. In this context, the brothers Lionel and Norman Lindsay were more influenced by the German Friedrich Nietzsche in forming a belief that culture belonged exclusively to a natural aristocracy than they were by the English intellectual Matthew Arnold.17

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Finally, Australian colonial culture also took on some hybrid characteristics. For the most part Australians read British and American novels and poetry, attended plays and musicals that had first enjoyed success in the West End or on Broadway, and hung paintings of English landscapes on their walls. But there were, of course, some intellectuals, writers and artists seeking to produce paintings, stories, poetry and plays with local settings, flavours and characters. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries melodrama became an important vehicle for the creation of an imagined Australia. Yet while these plays featured colonial themes, characters and locations, ‘foreign’ influences penetrated even these indigenous texts. So, Walter Cooper’s Hazard (1872) featured as its hero a classic Bush character, in the form of Harry Worthe – ‘Stout, rough voice, tawny hair and beard … cabbage tree hat, bluff manner’. Incongruously, another main character was an AfricanAmerican minstrel stage stereotype figure, ‘Jubilee Jake’, whose presence in the Australian Bush is never explained. Examples of such hybridity reverberate not only through Australian drama but also literature and film down to the present.18 These four trends continued to be reflected in twentieth-century Australian culture. English cultural influence remained powerful. For many Australian intellectuals English high culture set standards, which the periphery could aspire to but probably never emulate. Further, large-scale English immigration to Australia, especially after World War II, served to reinforce the standing of earlier cultural borrowings, especially those that related to sport. But English ways also influenced newer forms of Australian popular culture. For example, in the 1960s Australian rock ’n’ roll began to take on a quality of its own. Characterised by a stripped down and raw form of blues, and lyrics that were often sardonic and sometimes highly irreverent, the bands that created and performed this distinctive Australian rock – first to local and subsequently to overseas audiences – were largely made up of youths who had immigrated to Australia from the UK in the 1950s. Bands like the Easybeats and AC/DC were formed in Australia but made in England.19 Australian culture continued to be shaped too by American influences, particularly via the new forms of cultural transmission: cinema, radio and television. Already, by the early 1920s more than 85 per cent of the films shown in Australia were of American origin. Radio became the critical conduit for American popular music first in its ‘jazz’, and later in its rock ’n’ roll form. In the 1930s it also became a vehicle for the transmission of American middlebrow culture through such programs as ‘Great Plays in Half-an-Hour’ and ‘Cream of the Classics’. In the 1950s and indeed into the late 1960s

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Australian commercial television was dominated by shows dealing with American families, American war heroes, American private detectives and American frontiersmen. Cinema, radio and television in some ways reversed the trend towards the development of a variety of cultural institutions catering to different tastes and specialised audiences. After World War I most Australians listened to radio and went to the cinema and after 1956 a majority also became television viewers. Still, the wide variety of choice meant that consumers had a huge range of popular, middlebrow and high culture programs and films from which to choose.20 Moreover with the establishment of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) in 1954, its subsequent creation of national ballet and opera companies and its promotion of repertory theatre, high culture in institutionalized form finally became established in Australia. Whereas the Arts Council of Great Britain was ostensibly the model for the AETT, its proposed funding was intended to follow American precedent and depend much more on philanthropy than on government. And finally hybridity continued as Australian cultural producers continued to look both to England and increasingly the US for example and inspiration. In 1958 the AETT produced ‘the first Australian musical’, Lola Montez, whose plot was based on a series of fictitious events surrounding the famous performer’s visit to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. Reflecting a strong Broadway influence, in fact it unintentionally came close to parodying the genre. Similarly, as a home-grown television production industry developed in Australia in the 1960s, the domestic comedies, police dramas and soap operas that resulted were cast in the mould of easily recognised English and American counterparts.21 And yet in the years immediately after World War II a series of new ingredients were also added to the cultural mix. With the promotion of large-scale immigration not only from the UK but also from northern, eastern and southern Europe the Australian, authorities also hoped that New Australians would acculturate to the so-called Australian Way of Life as soon as possible. Instead, the immigrants founded and settled in their own communities and formed their own self-help, cultural, educational and sporting associations. Succeeding waves of immigrants from Europe, the Middle East and more recently Asia resulted in the creation of an even more culturally diverse society. Finally, between 1973 and 1980, the authorities acknowledged reality and abandoned assimilation in favour of multiculturalism.22 Postwar immigration acted both to create a more culturally diverse Australian society and to dilute English and American cultural influence. But there was also continuity, for in hanging on to their cultural baggage, in choosing those values

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and institutions they found relevant to their own experiences and requirements, the New Australians were continuing a cultural tradition that had existed since 1788.

III One of the most significant economic, social and cultural developments of the nineteenth century was the emergence of classes, which included the working classes (comprising unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled workers and their families) as well as the middle class. Drinking and gambling were integral to the culture of the working classes. Moreover they favoured recreational pursuits because they were pleasurable; they did not consider that they also needed to be moral and rational. Finally, they accepted the notion of professionalism in sport, believing both that it ensured higher standards and provided a means of extra income and the prospect of social mobility for working-class athletes, cricketers and footballers. In contrast, the middle class was committed to amateurism in sport, arguing that its main purpose was character building. The middle class believed too that cultural pursuits required an educational and moral purpose, which was one reason why it patronised ‘high’ cultural activities. Finally, reform was linked to middle class consciousness: its focus was on Sabbatarianism, temperance and the evils of gambling.23 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there is evidence that sections of the working classes began to adopt values and practices associated with domesticity and respectability. And in this process women may have played a key role, a neat example of the intersection of class and gender. Because many of them had worked as servants and shop assistants before marriage, women from the working classes partly acculturated to the values held by their employers. The influence of these women was potentially powerful in limiting the time and money their men folk spent on gambling and drinking, in encouraging them to take up domestic hobbies and spend time at home, and in encouraging them to join such institutions of rational recreation as mechanics’ institutes.24 After World War I, but more especially after World War II, the increasing affluence of the working classes allowed them to adopt an even more recognisably middle-class lifestyle as they moved from the inner city to the suburbs, not only becoming property owners but acculturating even further to notions of domesticity. But this process of cross-class cultural transmission increasingly became a two way process. As the programs and advertisements to be found on radio, cinema and later television popularised and glamourised gambling and drinking, and as the increased commercialisation of entertainment and sport rendered notions of rational recreation and amateurism irrelevant, the

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middle class adopted cultural values and practices that were identical to those of the working classes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries some bitter cultural conflicts had marked inter-class relations as the proponents of middle-class reform sought to remake the working classes in their own image. By the end of the twentieth century, through a continued process of cultural resolution, these conflicts had more or less disappeared.25 On the nineteenth-century Australian frontier violence and murder marked race relations. Aborigines responded to the European invasion with guerrilla warfare and the Europeans responded in turn with actions that often amounted to extermination. Yet at the same time the Europeans also came to depend heavily on the Aborigines for labour. In some times and places Aborigines were paid in wages and in others they received rations. In any event, in the early days of the New South Wales frontier they often supplied game to the squatters, as well as working as shepherds and rouseabouts. As the frontier expanded, after mid-century Aborigines were found as sugar cane cutters, miners, and stockmen.26 In the process, they acculturated in part to European practices. As early as the 1840s they were acknowledged as accomplished riders, thus justifying their value as stockmen. Many of those who worked on properties and stations wore European clothes and some were regarded as ‘bush dandies’. But they also held to their own ways, returning to their own people to hunt, maintaining their own rituals expressed, for example, through corroborees, adhering to their own burial practices.27 Moreover, the processes of transmission also passed in the other direction. Europeans in the bush came to accept Aboriginal folklore, believing, for example, that snakes never die until sunset no matter how badly wounded, that crows talk to each other, and that a full moon produces colder weather in winter. In a more practical way they learnt essential bush skills from the Aborigines – how to track, live on bush food and find water.28 In the twentieth century this two-way cultural transmission process has continued. On the one hand, as more Aborigines moved to cities the process of Aboriginal acculturation to European ways was accentuated. On the other, by the 1970s indigenous rights had overtaken civil rights as the main aim of Aboriginal organisations. Now they demanded guarantees for the preservation of Aboriginal customs, language and culture; guarantees which, they claimed, could only be assured through land rights. For European Australians the problem of relating Aboriginal to Australian culture and identity has become increasingly significant and vexatious. Until the 1950s most European attempts at imitating Aboriginal culture – as for example, the representation of a corroboree in the musical Collit’s Inn (1933) – added up to caricature. In 1953, Beth Dean, seeking ‘an authentic background’ on

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which to base the choreography for a new production of John Antill’s ballet Corroboree, visited Arnhem Land to study Aboriginal dances, initiation ceremonies, songs and folklore. On one occasion Aboriginal women performed a secret dance for her on condition that her husband left. Presented in abridged form at a gala concert for the Queen in 1954, before enjoying a successful regional and capital city tour of Australia, Corroboree was acclaimed as presenting ‘the real Australian continent – the first outback’. It was also described as an ‘Australian masterpiece’. But what it represented too, as perhaps the Aboriginal women sought to indicate to Dean, was outright expropriation.29 However, the 1990 musical, Bran Nue Dae, billed as the first Aboriginal musical and composed by Jimmy Chi and the Broome band Kuckles, pointed to a new, indeed radical direction. It tells the story of an Aboriginal boy’s flight back to his hometown of Broome in search of love and identity. The musical celebrates Aboriginal culture, its capacity to survive and adapt, despite European practices and intentions. At the end even the European characters discover they are Aborigines.30 And so Bran Nue Dae locates the ultimate source of Australian identity and character not in the values generated by a mythical European bushman, but in the reality of more than 60 000 years of Aboriginal culture. From the perspective of the early 21st century an acknowledgment that Australian culture is ultimately Aboriginal seems both obvious and appropriate. The creation of antipodean civilisation clearly did not commence in 1788. However, the notion that there is a distinct Australian identity or Way of Life seems increasingly anachronistic. Rather, the process of cultural transmission will contribute continuously towards the creation of a complexity of Australian cultures, of an ever increasing variety of Australian ways of living.

9 PERFORMANCES: I N D I G E N I S AT I O N A N D P O S T C O L O N I A L C U LT U R E JAN KOCIUMBAS

Processes of globalisation and decolonisation have brought new directions in Australia’s attempts to create a distinctive national identity. Aboriginal culture, though never entirely absent from Australian nationalist iconography, is now highlighted by monarchists and republicans alike as offering something more complex, ancient, sophisticated and unique than the old bush mythologies which formerly signalled Australian nationhood. It is as if only Aboriginality can provide a meaningful, significant and unifying resonance in the otherwise diverse cacophony of local multiculturalism and global cosmopolitanism. This was graphically illustrated at the opening pageant of the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Here, an innocent if coyly sexualised little white girl was depicted as imbibing words of wisdom from an ancient Aboriginal elder, depicted as in touch with timeless, redemptive secrets lost but still relevant to the urban, materialistic world. Where the little white girl seemed part of beachside consumerism, the elder, along with the mysterious Mimi dancers whom he appeared to summon up, apparently still dwelt far out in the stony, bony deserts of the nation’s heartland, painting their ageless, Dreaming stories, somewhere ‘back of beyond’. Nostalgic romanticisation of faraway, ‘other’ people, places and cultures for nationalistic purposes is no novelty in the West. Europeans no sooner began to explore and colonise the wider world beyond their foggy shores than they coveted the supposed innocence, simplicity and spiritual power of pure primitivism. This was imagined to lurk in newly discovered, exotic landscapes and to underlie ‘ancient’ cultures. It also throbbed in the veins of selected ‘wild’ characters who were chiefly, though by no means always, male. A mirror of Western desires and fears, this fetishisation of the ‘noble savage’ could and did exist side by side with racist denigration of colonised people by which Europeans

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routinely justified enslavement, exploitation and dispossession. In this noble/ignoble dichotomy, much depended on whether the object of the gaze was ‘the last of the tribe’, or dwelt far away on a distant frontier, supposedly untouched by the more regrettable aspects of ‘civilisation’. Above all, the mystic seer could not be a political threat. Given that the noble savage was intrinsic to colonialism, how can one explain its ongoing appeal to politicians and policy makers in the postcolonial nation, where the injustices of the past have supposedly been redressed? This phenomenon is the more puzzling since it is not unique to Australia. Thus the choice of Cathy Freeman to light the Sydney Olympic flame was foreshadowed at Atlanta in 1996 when Muhammed Ali was selected to enact this ritual. Can it be that by such performances, white settler nations present themselves as offering a gesture of public atonement for the wrongs of the colonial era, and indicate that such injustices are now left far behind? Such a project might be of special utility in white settler nations like Australia and America, where postcolonialism is a particularly nebulous myth. The white settlers have not departed and many of the political, economic and legal structures of colonialism continue to exist. Thus to transform the formerly despised savage or slave into an emblem of postcolonial nationhood might usefully obscure such realities, the more so if selected aspects of the colonised person’s culture were also appropriated for these purposes. The effect would be to assert that there is no cause for political disruption, since civil rights were achieved in the late 1960s, land rights in the 1990s, and that cultural diversity is the order of the day.

COLONIALIST INVISIBILITY Such an interpretation is supported by the fact that despite token gestures of recognition and conciliation, traditional colonialist imagery has not been abandoned. Thus, at the Sydney 2000 pageant, the ‘sacred’ Aboriginal prelude was soon eclipsed by a historical fantasy which, reenacting pioneer myths of settlement, was dominated by the ubiquitous white bushman, a figure left over from the rural mythologies forged over a century before. Coinciding with Federation, these legends had celebrated masculinist enterprise and chauvinistic adventure, qualities which, though supposedly unique to white Australians, were closely allied with the iconography of the imperial frontier of that time. Certainly, Australian nation makers, lacking a Bastille, a war of independence, a civil war, or an ‘honourable’ war against indigenous resistance, focused more heavily than other culture makers on the land itself as shrewish and bizarre. Finding no fruitful inland garden or familiar

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forest which it was the ‘manifest destiny’ of the white man to possess, they were more inclined to dwell on the pioneers’ failure to civilise and subdue this wilderness, and white women were rendered more peripheral to this heroic fight. Only the occasional male itinerant shearer, drover, horsebreaker, swagman or bushranger ever seemed peacefully at home in the land, and even he (though sometimes, like Clancy, a visionary) was sardonic, silent, hardened, cruel, even mad. Nevertheless, as in other settler legends, toiling axemen, bogged horses, lost children and exhausted women were reified as sacrificial emblems of imperial expansion. Reference to biblical or classical texts helped embalm this mythology, where indigenous people were not so much absent as present as foils. Primitive, treacherous and cunning, they were seen as part of the uncivilised New World. This was in spite of the fact that both in the ideology of pioneering and its practice, their skills were extensively exploited and sometimes copied and usurped. In Australia between the wars, this colonialist mythology was heightened as much as challenged by modernism’s celebration of technology’s triumphs over nature. Though drought, depression, soil erosion and mechanisation were among the factors then changing the face of rural industry forever, many artists, filmmakers and writers continued to allege that the nation’s spirit somehow resided in frontier experience. Ever greater imperial emphasis on white male athleticism, racial purity and sexual health also fed the cultural dominance of existing pioneer tropes, rendered particularly relevant by Australians’ ongoing economic and military dependence on Britain and their own sub-imperialism in the continent’s arid heartlands and the Pacific. While image and policy makers focused on the young, white, athletic body, hardened and refined by struggles to tame an otherwise barren land, attempts to make Aboriginal extinction a reality produced statutes to assimilate fairer-skinned children and hide others away on remote reserves. Even the continent’s ‘dead, red centre’, site of an extensive pastoral industry reliant on Aboriginal labour, was largely imagined as bereft of Aboriginal people, its surreal, empty landscapes usefully providing a marked contrast to the teeming mass of healthy white bodies depicted as sporting on the beach. The sesquicentenary of 1938 underlined these imperial visions. Official pageants in Sydney celebrated British navigational achievements, though now with emphasis on armed vessels and recreational yachts filling the Harbour. There was also a re-enactment of white men landing from tall ships, a theme then being extensively reworked in school texts, on postage stamps and in official histories. In the official movie of these events, March to Nationhood, photographed by Frank Hurley, pioneer churchmen, traders and especially sheep-breeders

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loomed large, convicts were obliterated from the frame and ‘Stone Age’ black men (forced into the act on pain of losing their rations) apparently cowered in fright and fled from the beach. Floats in the street parade through what was referred to as the ‘white city’ included a display of Maori arts and crafts but the only other reference to Aboriginal culture was a grotesque shot demonising a corroboree dancer, used as a contrast with what modern Australia had achieved. The Aboriginal protesters’ renaming the sesqui-centenary celebrations as ‘A Day of Mourning’ was largely ignored. Meanwhile, advertisements for ‘Boomerang Tyres’, ‘Abo Fertilizer’ and Pelaco’s ‘Mine Tinkit They Fit’ shirts further articulated ideas of inherent inferiority, as – at a more covert level – did the cartoons of Stan Cross and Eric Jolliffe. Aboriginal physiognomy was further degraded by its caricature on ashtrays, cups, clocks and other household items, and on municipal coats of arms, where Aboriginal figures usually featured as graciously giving way to more enterprising and civilised newcomers.1 This emphasis on the British ‘discovery’ of Sydney as the birth of Australian nationhood continued through the Cook bicentenary in 1970 and the bicentenary of the British landing in 1988. Jonathan King’s romancing of long-obsolete ships and billowing sails helped maintain the focus on British maritime technology with the Harbour Bridge as another icon of supremacy. By now, massive Aboriginal political protest ensured that there could be no repeat of the 1938 beachside landing and flag raising, but media coverage of the first nationwide gathering of some 60 000 Aboriginal and other protesters in Sydney was largely ignored. This conservative edge to the Sydney bicentenary rituals was the more notable given that Aboriginal activism was being given increased press coverage. As well, Aboriginal issues were being appropriated by a wide range of white radical supporters, as is discussed below. The cases for equal pay in the cattle industry (1965) and amendments to the constitution (1967), followed by the Tent Embassy (1972), the Northern Territories Land Rights Act (1976) and the mining lobby’s response, further ensured that there could be no ignorance of Aboriginal issues. Among mainstream Australian intellectuals and culture makers, however, the myth that, prior to the British arrival, the continent had been largely uninhabited and that it had then been peacefully settled along liberal lines, died hard.

D I S P L AY This long commitment to enforced invisibility did not necessarily exclude various forms of colonialist display, as the use of Aboriginal corroboree in the sesqui-centenary indicated. This process harked back to

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the centuries-old practice whereby indigenous people were brought back to Europe, alive or dead, and perused as cultural artefacts. This custom was popularised with the Victorian fetish for the rational presentation of ‘useful information’ and the rise of mass commercial entertainment. Thus, 17 Aboriginal men, women and children, taken from North Queensland as ‘human curiosities’, were exhibited for popular consumption in P. T. Barnum’s Travelling Circus in 1883–98.2 Arguably, the recognition of Aboriginal sporting prowess was often part of this process, being a format for colonialist racial comparisons. This was notable in the Aboriginal cricket team which undertook a gruelling and, for some members, fatal tour of England in 1868. Aboriginal men continued to feature as sporting exhibits, especially as boxers, rodeo riders and football players.3 This display of indigenous people mirrored the activities of Western science which had long collected, dissected, appraised and, more recently, photographed indigenous people and indigenous things for its own advancement and profit. Nowhere was this more apparent than in colonial Australia where Aboriginal men, women and children, along with their material and sacred objects, had been acquired, scrutinised and in some cases traded to the point where a wide array of European experts claimed to know Aboriginal minds, bodies and society better than Aboriginal people themselves. In both its popular and scientific forms, this scrutiny of Aboriginal people manufactured and popularised racial stereotypes, inviting comparison between the savage and the civilised, and in the case of the exhibitions, fairs, taverns, zoos and circuses, suggested that indigenous people were freaks, ‘missing links’ hovering on the brink of extinction or regression to the animal world.4

A P P R O P R I AT I O N Despite this long commitment to enforced invisibility coupled with organised display, the changeover to appropriating selected aspects of Aboriginality for nationalistic purposes had simultaneously been developing. Though less obviously colonialist than policies of denigration, appropriation is by no means unproblematical. Attempts to imitate and incorporate other people and their culture can be just as exploitative and reprehensible as less subtle acts of vilification, caricature or contempt. Like the theft of artefacts and exhibition of indigenous people, appropriation raises issues of power, ownership and compensation. Besides, admiration for another society is not necessarily free of racial stereotypes. This was graphically demonstrated at the Sydney Olympic’s opening pageant, where the Ancient Elder could be seen as reanimating nineteenth-century ideas of the continent’s indigenous people as a

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‘dying race’, sadly but inevitably giving way to the young, innocent and more talented newcomers. The Olympic’s postcolonial yet still imperialist masque also reiterated the belief that ‘real’ Aboriginal people were and are located only in the ‘outback’, where they eschew material culture in the pursuit of rarer and higher things. It was as if urban Aboriginal people and their culture did not exist, nor any challenge to white intellectuals’ self-claimed right to define Aboriginality and its worth. Most early acts of appropriation were aimed at utilising selected aspects of Aboriginal parlance to help inform bush mythology. From the 1890s, lovers of Australiana and outdoor life began to incorporate Aboriginal phraseology and place names into local parlance and landscapes,5 though Maori names for houses and places were also popular at this time. By the 1930s, a range of intellectuals and artists were turning to indigenisation as a possible means of replacing what they saw as the naïve nationalism of existing rural mythology with something more cerebral and mature, on a par with European literature and arts and more capable of resisting what they saw as the pernicious influence of mass industrial culture and Americanisation.6 In this they were influenced by modernism’s interest in ‘primitive’ masks, totems, art and artefacts as a window on both the lost memories of the alienated individual and the collective unconscious of the West. Intellectuals who liked to be seen as ‘transgressive’ began to flirt with the latest psychological and anthropological theories, further developing romantic stereotypes of the ‘savage’ as a repository of vital energies, eroticism, rhythm, magic and fantastic dreamlike trances now lost to weary, overcivilised Europeans.7 In postwar Australia, the expectation that indigenisation might help form a more erudite, modern national identity was rendered more urgent by the growing recognition that Australia could no longer depend on the ‘mother country’ for military and economic protection. This in turn triggered a wider appraisal of past certainties, as historian Manning Clark indicated in 1943. According to Clark, white settler Australians, far from winning a rightful homeland and unique identity out of their long and testing war with the bush, actually did not know who they were. This was because they had arrived only recently on this continent and, even worse, had ‘frenziedly raped her for her wealth’. Though still dismissive of Aboriginal society, Clark’s perception of land mismanagement as a cause of collective guilt and psychic malaise foreshadowed the reconceptualisation of the bush as ‘the Land’, a still weird but now ancient, fragile and endangered place which nurtured pilgrims, prophets, seers and saints, somehow in touch with the nation’s psychic needs. A. P. Elkin was more specific. An ambitious anthropologist who,

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thwarted in his efforts to be accepted as an authority on New Guinea, was intent in publicising the need for an ‘Australian anthropology’, Elkin inferred that the Aboriginal ‘dream-time’ (a concept which he claimed to have recently uncovered) was somehow related to filling the white man’s spiritual abyss.8 Both articles were published in the new literary journal, Meanjin. Launched in 1940 and aiming to foster an ‘intelligently managed national consciousness’, Meanjin sported an Aboriginal name and featured Aboriginal x-ray art, a departure which suggested that the national quest for a ‘spiritual core’ was somehow linked to indigenous things.9 This appropriation of Aboriginal symbols to represent the postcolonial nation not only masked ongoing colonialism but sanctified it. In Western discourse, the search for personal and national origins had long meant finding a magical home, a place of rest and spiritual harmony and ‘going primitive’ was often associated with such quests.10 Thus, while some intellectuals continued to hunt for heroes, legends and sacred places in the somewhat antiquated ‘legend of the nineties’, others flocked to anthropological and psychological interpretations of Aboriginal spirituality, assumed to have the power to heal alienated newcomers otherwise stranded in an ancient, ravaged land. Already Roland Robinson’s ‘Jindyworobak’ movement, Eleanor Dark’s inclusion of Aboriginal characters in her historical fiction, Mary Gilmore’s search for Aboriginal motifs to express national identity and Margaret Preston’s references to Aboriginal bark painting in her art, were among the manifestations of growing interest in scientific constructions of Aboriginality as the key to forging a more profound, learned and spiritual heritage. Some writers were clearly influenced by the professionalisation of anthropology, Robinson in particular acknowledging his debt to Elkin, Strehlow and Berndt.11

TO U R I S M A N D P E R F O R M A N C E Large-scale appropriation of Aboriginality to condone, spiritualise and obscure ongoing colonialism was fostered by the opening up of central Australia to tourism. In contrast to some white settler nations, Australia’s indigenous people had never been in strong demand even as tourist icons and as yet had little opportunity to turn this market to their own, counter-hegemonic purposes. Certainly, boomerang-throwing exhibitions and the making of artefacts for sale attracted some public interest into the interwar period, but more varied and less marginalised public performance roles were denied. This was in strong contrast to New Zealand where, in 1897, Maori soldiers had been dispatched to London to perform the haka as part of the Diamond Jubilee

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and where, in 1901, the itinerary for a royal tour included a three-day carnival of Maori performance at that growing mecca for tourism, Rotorua. Similarly, in America certain romanticised aspects of ‘Native’ culture were introduced to amuse and instruct tourists at Niagara, informing them of selected ‘savage’ and in some cases sexual aspects of the nation’s now dead past. In Hawaii, the hula had by the turn of the century acquired the steel guitars and alluring female dancers so central to the developing tourist industry’s re-presentation of the sexual attractions of Hawaii and the tropical Pacific.12 In contrast, until relatively recent times, the tourist potential of Aboriginal performance had been dismissed. Paintings of corroborees, often with white spectators, had been produced by early colonial artists as diverse as Wallis, Glover, Skipper, Gill and Liardet, but most degraded these events as evidence of monstrous and irrational primitivism.13 Even Macquarie’s novel adaptation of the corroboree at his Parramatta meetings from 1816, prompted by his search for Aboriginal ‘kings’ to come in to treat and talk, soon became nothing more than an occasion for white spectators to congratulate themselves on rising above such savagery. In 1867-68 a corroboree was arranged to amuse visiting Prince Albert but thereafter even such colonialist uses of the performance were abandoned. The word itself came to be employed casually to describe any dance or celebration by white people and by the early twentieth century was further demoted to mean a mindless, loud noise created by a group.14 When revived by John Antill for his modernist ballet, Corroboree (1950), the performance was by non-Aboriginal people and presented as a kind of psychic insight into stone-age behaviour. Beth Dean’s ‘Kukaitcha’ (1968), specially choreographed for Mexico’s Cultural Olympics, conceded a paternalistic admiration of ‘our’ Aboriginal dancers, but was performed by Ballet Folklorico against a backdrop designed by Russell Drysdale.15 Even in the 1970s and 1980s, Aboriginal people’s own performance initiatives, such as the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre and later the Bangarra Dance Company, attracted minimal white attention, as did urban Aboriginal theatre. Even so, growing attention to the tourist potential of Australia’s central and northern frontiers meant that selected ‘stone-age nomads’ were simultaneously attracting media attention. Sagas of dead or disappearing inland explorers had long provided the raw material for outback romanticism; now railways and aircraft made it increasingly possible for journalists, artists, geologists and anthropologists to visit these mythic places themselves.16 From 1929, the Australian National Travel Association’s magazine, predictably named Walkabout, included material on remote Aboriginal people while, in tourist material

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generally, photographs of ‘traditional’ Aboriginal people were juxtaposed with those of flora and fauna as distinctively and originally Australian.17 By the 1950s, modernist images of brown men and red sand began to adorn postage stamps, ashtrays and wall-plates; prints of Albert Namatjira’s watercolours graced office and lounge-room walls. Stories about remote Aboriginal people also featured in children’s fiction and school texts.18 This combination of denigration and appropriation in the new national iconography sometimes had a sexual dimension. Voyeuristic coffee-table tomes made their appearance, some in limited editions and boxed cases, detailing even the most secret of desert people’s places and objects, and unveiling the most private of their initiation customs, including tooth extraction and even sub-incision.19 As a national icon, the typical Aboriginal was a male desert-dwelling man, scantily-clad, bearded, leaning on a spear, mystical yet at the same time corporal and savage, and as often as not, linked to forms of male sexual expression forbidden in the West.20 Inadvertently the new Federal policy of nationwide Aboriginal assimilation stimulated metropolitan and overseas demand for images and objects which signalled ‘otherness’. Aired from 1939 and announced in 1951, assimilation reflected the postwar government’s determination to exploit and defend the mineral wealth of their northern frontiers. Even the most distant Aboriginal people, especially those categorised as ‘full blood’, were no longer to be permitted to roam naked around generous outback reserves. Instead, all Aboriginal people were to be woken from the ‘Dreamtime’ and systematically incorporated into white Australia. In full flight by the 1960s, this policy drew attention to ‘primitive people’ still dwelling somewhere, out there, and embodying both scientific evidence or holy lore useful to the West. Glossy books of legends, like Charles P. Mountford’s The Dreamtime (1965), with weird, surrealist illustrations by Ainslie Roberts and directed at adult readers, found ready sales. Whereas such collections had been produced since the late nineteenth century, they had previously been considered suitable only for young children, themselves then thought to be in a ‘primitive’ stage of growth which matched the assumed childlike state of the savage.

PROFESSIONAL ABORIGINALISM By the 1970s, anthropology’s monopoly of this burgeoning market was being challenged by a bevy of new academic studies. This produced a colossal increase in orientalist inspection and display which

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would nevertheless be accepted as necessary to postcolonialism. The Commonwealth government’s Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (1964) was a major player in this production of exotic Aboriginality as national resource. Launched in the wake of the new assimilation policy, this powerful body was premised on the assumption that incorporation, though essential, would all too quickly quench what was left of traditional mythology and ritual. This would not only be a loss to science and tourism but might derange the innocent savage or produce troublesome political fallout. The Institute’s Interim Council, active from 1961, produced no less than 63 research projects within its first three years. Studies were concentrated on, though not confined to, the supposedly uncontaminated northern desert people and attracted a huge range of local and overseas intellectuals, studying everything from art, music and language to intelligence, skinfold thickness, the psychological effects of sub-incision, using existing hospital and medical records and post-mortem findings, and possible skeletal comparisons with the Japanese Ainu. 21 No Aboriginal people were members of this organisation. Growing in tandem with Aboriginal people’s struggle for citizenship and land rights, this escalating construction of ‘expert’ knowledge about ‘traditional’ Aborigines was highly self-serving, helping to silence and speak for Aboriginal viewpoints as well as perpetuate stereotypes. This was the more so as many members of the burgeoning Aboriginalist industry found it expedient to align with land rights rather than the new policy of national assimilation. While partly driven by a need to atone for the past racial injustices which historians and anthropologists were now bringing to the fore, support for land rights secured a continuing ‘primitive’ research base, a posture of moral righteousness to mask ongoing voyeurism, considerable media publicity and a high profile as expert witnesses in landrights and other government enquiries. Led by anthropologists Stanner and Berndt, all these ‘helpers’ soon altered Aboriginal emphasis in land-rights petitions on hunting and fishing rights or retention of mission land. By the 1970s, land rights meant legally proving that certain anthropologically defined individuals boasted an unbroken spiritual affiliation with equally defined ‘sacred sites’. This was a notion which meshed wonderfully with the redefinition of Aboriginal and other indigenous people as custodians of a pristine environment, and with rugged areas like Uluru and Kakadu as emblems of wilderness and nationhood to which travellers from the coastal cities must venture for spiritual refreshment and ecological enlightenment.

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DESERT ART The movement towards incorporating a spiritualised Aboriginality to sanctify the postcolonial nation was fostered by the growing international and tourist demand for Aboriginal desert art. By 1968, the bringing in of what was seen as the last of the world’s desert nomads to be formally assimilated, together with the dispossession of Aboriginal people from the Northern Territory cattle stations, meant that, within two years, bark paintings (previously confined largely to museums and craft shops and in 1985 able to be purchased in a Northern Territory gallery for $200), cost as much as $4000. Yet such developments were dwarfed by the sensational prices paid for work by desert painters using acrylics. This tradition emerged in the early 1970s at Papunya. Established in 1969 to provide a collection camp for Pintupi and other Aboriginal people forcibly brought in from the Western Desert, Papunya only became an artistic centre after schoolteacher Geoff Bardon, pondering how to integrate large numbers of disparate groups and re-educate their children, encouraged a group of elders to paint a large mural at the school. The result was a version of their honey-ant story which, to Western eyes, seemed colourful, decorative and contemporary, resembling abstract art. Individual works on hardboard and then canvas soon followed, with similar developments ensuing at Yuendumu, Utopia and Turkey Creek. The coded ambiguity of this work appealed to intellectuals, while the notion that it spoke of timeless wisdom and potent, unseen forces attracted the hoi polloi. Northern rock art too rapidly drew attention, especially when it was located in rugged areas which trapped the tourist gaze. The beauty and creativity of all these works was indeed remarkable, while the movement also usefully allowed Aboriginal people to draw global attention to their enduring knowledge of and relationship with their country. Nevertheless, most of these remote artists avoided the awkward issue of pre-invasion and present-day experience, in contrast to urban people like Gordon Bennett or Trevor Nickolls who were accused of ‘angry sloganeering’.22 In other ways too the Western response remained colonialist. Within a decade, northern output had become individualised and commodified as signature art and was drawing sensational prices. It had also become a major export industry, estimated at $200 million by 1997. Yirrawala was dubbed the Picasso of Arnhem Land and Clifford Possum the Leonardo of the Western Desert. Following Yirrawala’s death in 1976, the collection of his work in the Australian National Gallery, worth more than a million dollars, was extensively reproduced on postcards, tea towels and the like, with little of the proceeds reaching his family. In 1988, Bardon was made a member of the Order of Australia for his services to Aboriginal art.23

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INDIGENISING CHURCHES The notion that a colonising culture might become postcolonial merely by appropriating the culture of the people that it colonises is perhaps most blatantly revealed in the indigenisation of the Australian churches. By the 1970s, the churches were in dire need of a new, pro-Aboriginal image to offset the fact that, as the first people to work with Aboriginal people ‘in the field’, missionaries had long been agents of assimilation, utterly convinced that conversion was premised upon renunciation of ‘pagan’ practices and beliefs. Much of the new academic historiography, somewhat one-sidedly, was highlighting this, dwelling on church people’s enthusiastic participation in practices of child removal and the destruction of sacred objects. Indigenisation was an obvious solution, the more so since many surviving missions were in the firing line of postwar mining initiatives which targeted indigenous people’s land. Shrinking white congregations made it imperative for the churches to cling to their indigenous ones, especially as, under the new assimilation policy, significant government funding became available to missions. The churches’ response was thus particularly parasitical, while emphasising the unctuous, confessional tone which has come to characterise much white intellectual debate on postcolonial nationhood. Thus church people like Veronica Brady joined secularists like Bernard Smith and activists like H. C. Coombs and Judith Wright in speaking of what was increasingly seen as the ‘taint’ of the nation’s ‘original sin’. By 1988 church leaders were prominent in the movement for ‘reconciliation’, a concept steeped in the idea of seeking forgiveness for a guilty past. By 1991, reconciliation had replaced the more radical push for a treaty which had commenced after the failure of the Coe land rights case in 1979.24 The churches’ search for atonement also meshed with their interest in finding ‘a distinctively Australian pattern of religiosity’ and an ‘Australian Christ’. Appropriating Aboriginal cosmologies offered a convenient resolution to both of these quests and ranged from the Catholic discovery of a ‘sacramental’ quality in Aboriginal spirituality, to the sponsoring of a ‘Didgeridoo Theology’ by the Protestant Nungalinya College at Darwin and the endorsement of Aboriginal insights in ‘healing workshops’ in the southern cities.25 By the 1980s many theologians were also allowing indigenisation of some Christian rituals. This was a move long sought by Aboriginal Christians, both church leaders and lay people, who had always retained key aspects of their own religion, absorbing gospel stories into their ancestral rituals and beliefs. Eventually endorsed by many churches was a fusion of Christian and Aboriginal imagery in church iconography, so that, on Catholic vestments, a lithe rainbow serpent might now be permitted to

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adorn the shamrock green. This endorsement of the art of desert people, where landscapes were themselves suitably biblical, was visible at the World Council of Churches meeting in Canberra in 1990. Key northern artists who had painted subjects like a ‘Jesus Dreaming’ were invited to the Canberra meeting, especially to one function held at the High Court, where Aboriginal art from northern Australia was a palpable presence.26 Especially in Australia, where open discussion of racist violence and injustice had for so long been denied, themes of shame, guilt and atonement offered opportunities for Aboriginal people to broaden attention to Aboriginal demands. Thus radical Aboriginal church leaders were not slow to suggest that the land-rights issue was crucial less to various Aboriginal groups than to the holiness of the whole nation.27 Nevertheless, the churches’ appropriation of Aboriginal religion more easily found common ground with the anthropological emphasis on Aboriginal people’s relationship to land as primarily spiritual rather than economic. As well, it matched the legal apologists’ notion that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with Australia’s inheritance of British law or policing system. The law had always been right, just and moral, only greedy colonial pastoralists and modern multinational miners had polluted it and as such, it remained a solution to Aboriginal people’s problems, not a cause.

WHITE ABORIGINES Attempts to invent a new, godly and moral postcolonial culture have involved whitewashing the church and law, but also the reconstruction of private identities. As early as the interwar period, nationalist collectors and intellectuals like R. H. Croll and Alfred Kenyon were appropriating Aboriginal names for their literary pseudonyms.28 By the 1950s, books by Harney, Mountford, Marshall and others began to speak in the first person as if the authors actually were Aboriginal, and while still overall disparaging Aboriginal belief systems as archaic superstition, some began to invest the heroic bushman with specifically Aboriginal traits. Some parents have long borrowed Aboriginal terminologies to name their children, especially girls. This tradition could be said to date from 1790, when Mary and Richard Johnson named their daughter ‘Milba’. A more strident nationalist borrowing commenced in the early twentieth century, for example, ‘Kylie’ Tennant, born at Manly in 1912. ‘Jeddas’ began to appear on birth certificates following the release of Chauvel’s notable but problematic movie in 1955. Where by the 1970s growing recognition of Australia’s convict heritage was prompting genealogists to search for

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convict forebears, by the 1990s some hoped to find evidence of Aboriginal ancestry, or were even prepared to invent it, as Marcia Langton has noted.29 This process seems to have especially affected genuinely conscience-stricken people aware that their families had been directly involved with the colonial processes of exploitation and dispossession. Elizabeth Durack’s ‘Aboriginal’ art, produced and exhibited under the name of Eddie Birrup, may be seen in this light. Another who imagined herself as almost Aboriginal was Sydney interwar activist, Joan Kingsley Strack, whose grandmother had lived alongside the Wallaga Lake people whom the family had displaced from their land. Appalled by the Aboriginal Protection Board’s cruelty and indifference to Aboriginal girls, she romanticised her grandmother as nursing and caring for these people as their own ‘little Missus’ and believed that, as a child, she herself had been given the name ‘Mingi’, meaning ‘little woman’, by one of the elders. She also named her daughter after ‘Queen Narrelle’, the wife of a Yuin leader.30 Some recent attempts to fabricate an Aboriginal identity seem motivated less by guilt than a desire to experience and usurp the exotic, creative spirituality now associated with the concept. ‘B. Wongar’, who turned out to be a Serbo-Croatian immigrant, would seem to be a case in point, and perhaps also Leon Carmen’s ‘Wanda Koolmatrie’ and Lawrence Beck’s ‘Gundabuka’. These inventions could be seen as less concerned with re-establishing an Australian identity to replace the defunct bush mythology in the new, multicultural nation than with the ongoing colonialist desire to empower oneself by competing or merging with Aboriginal cultural productions. If so, then they are arguably part of the same colonialist tradition as physical anthropologist Ramsay Smith’s publishing of David Uniapon’s ancestral stories under his own name in 1925, or Berndt’s borrowing and westernisation of Aboriginal stories in The Speaking Land (1988). If it is now impossible to imagine Australian postcolonial nationhood without an indigenous component, for Aboriginal people this change has come at a price. Non-indigenous people insist on their right to define, borrow and usurp Aboriginality and imprint it with trappings of primitivism, while not necessarily addressing ongoing poverty, ill-health, racist denigration and other problems which still underlie the slick presentation of the successful, multicultural nation. At the same time, even the most talented Aboriginal writers, artists and performers can be dismissed as unauthentic, inventing a naïve, essentialist sense of self. Processes of intellectual colonisation thus remain; only the methodologies of the performance have changed.

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FURTHER READING On indigenisation, Bain Attwood’s introduction to his In the Age of Mabo (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996) offers important insights, as does the article by John Morton in that collection. This book also contains Richard Broome’s analysis of the revisionist academic histories. Tim Rowse’s After Mabo (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1993) discusses the issue of ‘moral anxiety’ as well as the construction of Aborigines as conservationists.

10 MULTICULTURALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF MULTICULTURAL HISTORIES: AN OVERVIEW OF ETHNIC HISTORIOGRAPHY HSU-MING TEO

The age of multiculturalism in late twentieth-century Australia has also been the age in which studies of ‘Australian culture’ proliferated.1 Multiculturalism, which began as an official policy ending attempts to assimilate or integrate non-British migrants into dominant Australian culture, was first adopted by the Whitlam Labor government in 1973 and amplified by the Fraser coalition government thereafter. As an official government policy, it involved the public acceptance of immigrant and minority groups as distinct communities, which are distinguishable from the majority population with regard to language, culture and social behaviour, and which have their own associations and social infrastructure.2

As in the 1890s, when the move towards federation saw the construction of ‘Australian’ cultural identity defined through the exclusion of the non-white Other, it is noteworthy that in the 1970s considerations of racial and cultural inclusion/exclusion appeared at a time when ‘Australian’ culture was once again being consciously defined under the rubric of the ‘new nationalism’. Did an awareness of the political, social and economic ramifications of culture and cultural difference facilitate a move towards an official policy of multiculturalism? Or did multiculturalism focus the spotlight on and add impetus to the need to understand what was ‘Australian’ culture? Multiculturalism appeared to exist in a complex, ambivalent relationship with ‘Australian’ culture and the attempts to analyse it. The same unease with the exact significance of multiculturalism was evident in the ‘grand national’ histories published during this time, in which non-British peoples were mostly absent – an exclusion also reflected in government-funded historical films produced in the late

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1970s and 1980s.3 Barry York speculated that because Australian history was initially taught from within the framework of British history, there was little incentive to come to terms with ‘the non-British aspects of our heritage’.4 Only when university academics and schoolteachers from a non-British background emerged in greater numbers from the 1980s did more systematic teaching and research into the history of these minority groups begin. The result was that non-indigenous Australian history was largely the history of white, British-descended peoples, while ethnicity in mainstream history made fleeting appearances principally under the rubric of ‘race relations’. Topics deemed pertinent included the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes, racial tensions in labour history, the White Australia policy, post-World War II immigration, and a cursory reflection on multiculturalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century – though comment on and analysis of the last was usually left to cultural studies since historians were slow to work extensively on such recent events. In the 1990s, cultural historians certainly attempted to expand the boundaries of Australianness to include non-British cultures. An edition of Australian Cultural History, for example, was devoted to ‘Australian Perceptions of Asia’ (no. 9, 1990), while attempts to integrate the ‘ethnic’ component of Australian history into more mainstream histories have occurred in the volume on food (no. 15, 1996) and ‘Intellect and Emotion’ (no. 16, 1997–98). The latter two volumes of Australian Cultural History explored the transformation in various cultural practices brought about by intercultural exchanges. Bev Kingston, for instance, examined the transmission of Indian culture to Australia in the form of food, language, and religion or philosophy.5 John Rickard’s Australia: A Cultural History also attempted to integrate the lives and cultures of non-British Australians, as well as deconstructing the ‘myths of official propaganda that Australia was a racially homogeneous society, basically of British stock’.6 Nevertheless, the presence and histories of Australians of nonBritish background continued to hover at the margins of mainstream Australian history, and there was often something rather awkward about their inclusion, as if historians didn’t quite know how or where to fit them in. This awkwardness in historiography appeared to parallel an awkwardness and ambivalence at the heart of multiculturalism, which came under attack not only from right-wing conservatives who wished to turn the clock back to a more nostalgic, mythically homogeneous British Australia, but more significantly, from critics on the Left who argued that multiculturalism ‘does not accept, confront and challenge the discourse of race, but rather represses it’.7 Because multiculturalism and mainstream Australian history functioned around the notion of a

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core ‘Anglo-Celtic’ national culture, so-called ethnic cultures were inevitably marginalised. Quite often, ethnic cultures were treated as petrified spectacles rather than dynamic processes whose content, meanings and values changed over time. It was only at the end of the twentieth century that notions of transcultural hybridity began to appear: the understanding that cross-cultural encounters among different groups not only transformed those groups but also produced new ‘hybrid’ cultural forms within the dominant culture. I have used the term ‘dominant’ or ‘mainstream’ rather than ‘core’ culture because the discussion of a ‘core culture’ often seems to me to project present conservative cultural values anachronistically back to the past – a process which does not take sufficient account of other types of differences which gave rise to fierce tensions and dissensions in the past, such as the sectarianism which pitted predominantly Irish Catholics against predominantly British Protestant settlers right up till the 1950s. Perhaps it was only with nostalgically infused hindsight that we could, at the end of the twentieth century, look back and discern some sort of ‘Anglo-Celtic core culture’. That there exists at an official and unofficial level a dominant or mainstream culture seems undeniable. Still, I prefer the designation ‘dominant’ or ‘mainstream’ because these terms suggest that this culture is not static but open to resistance and change. They suggest, moreover, that other cultural tributaries can at times be part of the ‘mainstream’ while running along different channels on other occasions. It is the divergence from the mainstream along ethnic lines which is of interest here. This chapter sketches a brief overview of ethnic history as it developed in Australia, looking at the main problems that have been encountered in researching and writing ethnic history. It then moves on to discuss the future directions ethnic history might take through engaging with the methodologies and concerns of the ‘new cultural history’. Barry York, one of the most influential social historians of ethnicity, has identified three objectives of a ‘multicultural approach to Australian history’: 1

to gather information and tell the stories of particular groups who may be defined ethnically (i.e., who share a sense of identity based on race and/or language and religion)

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to relate the historical experience of minority groups to the wider story of the Australian nation and

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to better understand Australia’s position in the world through the study of the diverse societies from whence immigrants came.8

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Most extant ethnic histories covered the first objective and briefly attended to the second and third. I hope to show, however, that cultural history also offers other ways of approaching multiculturalism and ethnicisation; approaches that may lead to more profound engagement with Aboriginal and mainstream Australian historiography. Ethnic history was part of a larger international historiographical trend towards exploring and recovering the experiences and histories of the economically, politically and socially disadvantaged and marginalised; a trend that began with attention towards the working classes and spread to women, indigenous and colonised peoples, and minorities of all sorts. In Australia, multiculturalism produced a climate conducive to the emergence of histories which focused on the experiences of ethnic minorities. The first work to study in depth the heterogeneity of Australians had been Jens Lyng’s problematic, Social Darwinian Non-Britishers in Australia (1935), which purported to analyse various ‘races’ and ‘sub-races’ to determine ‘scientifically’ which groups would contribute most effectively to the development of Australia.9 This, however, was racialist (and racist) history, not ethnic history. Rather than focusing on ‘race’, multiculturalism established distinct ‘ethnic’ cultures, inducing pride in people’s ‘ethnic heritage’ and in Australia’s cultural diversity. The language of race – based, as it had been, on a hierarchy of biological difference – was discredited after World War II. ‘Ethnicity’ was believed to be a more acceptable term, connoting cultural difference rather than biological essentialism. However, the problem still remained that common understandings of ethnicity often retained a ‘racial’ or ‘biological’ basis. As we shall see later, ‘ethnicity’ is as much a cultural construct as ‘race’.10 The earliest volumes of ethnic history focused on the Irish in Australia. Although historical works on the Greeks and Chinese began to appear in the late 1960s and 1970s, ethnic history emerged largely in the 1980s, especially in the lead-up to the bicentenary of European settlement in 1988.11 Perhaps in an attempt to expand the idea of the nation beyond British colonial settlement and to construct a new Australian ‘multicultural’ identity, a new body of ethnic history was consolidated, led by Michael Cigler’s pioneering Australian Ethnic Heritage Series, which was commissioned and published by the Australasian Educational Press in Melbourne. A total of 16 books were published between 1983 and 1988, providing basic histories of the following groups: the Afghans, Americans, Baltic peoples, Cornish, Czechs, Dutch, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Lebanese, Maltese, Poles, Scandinavians, Scottish and the Spanish peoples. The problem of identifying the criteria of ‘ethnicity’ is evident in this rather eclectic list. Why were ‘Americans’ – a heterogeneous nation of immigrants – ‘ethnic’?

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Why was a linguistically, culturally and nationally diverse region such as Scandinavia covered in one volume while the Cornish – part of Britain and, presumably, of the core ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture – were given a separate volume of their own? It seemed in some ways that ‘ethnicity’ had been defined by internalising stereotypical representations in mainstream culture. Issues covered in one of these volumes typically concerned a brief history of the country of origin; conditions that led to migration; the first immigrants to Australia from a particular ethnic group; problems of racial categorisation; the process of migration and settlement; occupations; religion and other traditional rituals and cultural practices; attempts to assimilate; and experiences of racial discrimination. Most concluded with an assessment of the contribution made by the particular ethnic group in question to mainstream Australian society. After the cessation of the Australian Ethnic Heritage Series, many of its authors went on to contribute to James Jupp’s 1988 project, The Australian People: The Nation, Its People and Their Origins – an impressive encyclopedic work which was updated and reprinted in 2001. Jupp’s was the first work which brought together the historical, political and cultural backgrounds of many different national, regional and ethnic groups currently living in Australia. The 1990s saw the publication of more richly detailed works, particularly on Greek, Italian and Chinese-Australian histories. Perhaps because of the comparatively early start in gathering archival material and locating useful sources for Greek-Australian history, Hugh Gilchrist was able to produce a series of comprehensive volumes on the complex relationship between Greece and Australia, beginning with Greek myths of the southern land mass, attempts at exploration, settlement, Australian travellers in Greece, and the evolution of particular GreekAustralian cultural forms.12 Chinese-Australian history was an expanding field with work on Chinese-Australians in the defence forces, in the Rocks area of Sydney, and cultural life in various parts of Australia.13 The trajectory of Chinese-Australian history moved through the stages of ethnic history articulated by York: from stories of settlement to more complex considerations of Australia’s historical relations with other nations. In doing so, it provided a vital counterpart to historical works focusing on Australian perceptions of and relations with Asia.14 The research and production of ethnic history was not without its particular problems. Documentary sources were difficult to find, being fragmentary and scattered. In this regard, York’s compilation of the ethnic historical sources available in the National Library of Australia was most valuable.15 Oral histories were also resorted to, but these were generally slanted towards particular types of interviewees. For example,

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in researching Italian-Australian history, Gaetano Rando observed that while written accounts – diaries, memoirs and autobiographies – presented a predominantly middle-class experience, the oral histories compiled by interviews with Australians of Italian background tended to highlight a working-class perspective.16 More problematic was the quality of the work produced. York commented that although the Australian Ethnic Heritage Series focused attention on ethnic history, individual volumes varied in quality and demonstrated three major weaknesses in ethnic history. Firstly, there was often an inclination to exaggerate a group’s importance; secondly, a tendency to ‘isolate the activities of the particular group from the wider social historical matrix’; and thirdly, a failure to examine and link the experience of settlement and migration to conditions in the country of origin.17 Early ethnic histories were often celebratory, monumental narratives, recognisable as the genre of ‘contributory’ history made familiar by women’s history when it first appeared in the 1970s. The sacrifices and contributions made by non-British/Irish Australians to nation building were undoubtedly important and needed to be made common knowledge. Yet the problem was that by accepting the nationbuilding paradigm of grand national history, these additions might rate a fleeting acknowledgment – ‘women and ethnic groups were there and did their bit too’ – but they hardly de-centred or transformed the focus of Australian history on ‘white’ people of British/Irish descent. The position in which ethnic history found itself was mirrored in the politics of multiculturalism. Ghassan Hage observed that one of the principal values of Australian multiculturalism was said to be cultural enrichment – ethnic cultures added ‘colour’ and variety to mainstream ‘AngloCeltic’ culture, producing a vibrant sense of cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, he argued, ‘the discourse of enrichment encapsulates a White nation fantasy’ which continues to position white Australians ‘in the centre of the Australian cultural map.’18 To justify multiculturalism with the argument of cultural enrichment was not only to leave intact the structures of power largely inhabited by ‘Anglo-Celtic’ people, functioning according to traditional British political and economic culture,19 but also to limit the effects of non-British/Irish cultural transformation to an apparently benign realm of ‘cultural contribution’. The vast bulk of ethnic history in Australia was social history produced through traditional methodologies: statistical and demographic histories of immigration and settlement, histories of labour, political and institutional organisations, and a small, separate section for women. Popular culture was often equated with a static traditional folk culture, and the study of this was produced along anthropological lines: the transmission and careful maintenance of cultural traditions,

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architecture, food and clothing, and how these added colour and new festivals to late twentieth-century multicultural Australia. Rarely did these works intersect with the postmodern preoccupation of international cultural history with issues of identity construction, discourses of power, and the politics of resistance and cultural transformation. These involved examination of such things as the construction of masculinities and femininities; youth and age; the political negotiation of multiple identities; the legacy of colonialism, postcolonialism and indigeneity; cross-cultural transmissions or appropriations, and hybridity. Cultural studies had focused attention on the mass media, consumption, modernity and the cultural effects of globalisation, while feminism brought ideas of sexuality and embodiment to the forefront of historical consciousness. International cultural history was in a state of innovative ferment, but little of this found its way into ethnic history during the 1980s and 1990s. There were, of course, examples of ethnic history which took new culturalist approaches to ethnic historiography. One of the more novel approaches to diversity is found in Shirley Fitzgerald and Garry Wotherspoon’s edited volume, Minorities: Cultural Diversity in Sydney (1995).20 The cultural complexity of Sydney’s history was explored not merely in terms of ethnicity (represented by case studies on Greek, Jewish and Irish-Australian communities) but also in terms of sexuality (particularly homosexual subcultures), physical disability, language, alternative religions and counter-cultural spiritualities. Investigations of ethnic festivals, carnivals, and ceremonies such as the annual Candlelight AIDS Memorial March were juxtaposed to bring new understanding of the ways a community worked to maintain its sense of difference as well as its connection to the mainstream. They revealed much about the way in which a city’s space could be claimed and transformed by particular cultures, providing new perspectives on how various minority cultures evolved and influenced mainstream culture around them. Unsurprisingly, much attention was devoted to the issue of identity and the role of community organisations and institutions in anchoring and renewing minority identity. Ethnicity is, of course, the form of identity this chapter is concerned with, but rather than histories of ethnicity, I want to suggest that it may be more fruitful to start looking at histories of ethnicisation – a process bound up with migration and settlement, geographical location, identity attribution by the dominant culture, and voluntary identification with others as a statement of solidarity and difference. Too often the fact of primordial ethnicity is simply assumed in ethnic histories. Jan Ryan argued that although ‘ethnic’ studies arose in reaction to the exclusion or marginalisation of ‘ethnics’ in ‘broad-stroke Australian

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histories’, the result was to create an ethnic group – the ‘Chinese’ – out of many different peoples, and it was only in recent works that the diversity of a supposedly single ethnic group’s composition began to be explored. James Jupp made the same argument for Australians of British descent: ‘Any discussion of the ethnic origins of Australia must take into account not only that there was much ethnic and regional variety in Britain and Ireland, but also that ethnicity is a shifting phenomenon, shaped by a rapidly changing society.’ As Joseph Pugliese explained, ‘there is, in one sense, no such thing as an “ethnic” as such – in the sense of an essentialised empiricity, that is, as something fixed, absolute, and scientifically quantifiable; rather, I would argue that one only ever becomes ethnic’.21 Ethnicisation is created not only through shared language and culture, but also through experiences of discrimination. It is reinforced through official and unofficial political and cultural institutions – the official policy of multiculturalism, for instance, and its reification of ethnic groups. For example, the ethnic community which appeared ‘Italian’ to outsiders was comprised of different groups governed by different economic interests, gender inequality, and ethnocentrism operating between different regions of origin in Italy. However, the ethnic ‘Italian’ community was produced through the process of ‘discriminatory ethnic and gender relations experienced by migrants in Australia’, which led them to resist the ‘racism of assimilation’ by guarding and actively enforcing their own language, customs, social mores and rituals, many of which were not simple expressions of ‘static ethnicity’ but ones which were adapted to local Australian conditions.22 Far from being a discrete entity, ethnicity is always relational, enacted within particular contexts. For not only were these ‘ethnic’ cultural artefacts and practices modified or transformed by the local environment, they were also invested with new political and social meanings which changed over time. The celebration of Italian religious festivals in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s could be read as a defiant expression of ethnicity and political resistance to the prevailing policy of assimilation. Later, however, the changing political climate, the introduction of multiculturalism and the growth of an urban class of ‘cosmo-multiculturalists’23 not only transformed the meanings of these festivities but also fragmented their significance for different sections within and without the ‘Italian’ community in Australia. Ethnic history provided a largely synchronic view of cultural rituals and traditions, but I would argue that a cultural history of ethnicisation would provide a diachronic and dynamic understanding of those same rituals, traditions and identity production. Ethnicisation, moreover, was linked to issues of colonialism and postcolonialism. Categories of race and ethnicity had been utilised by

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European scientists, missionaries and colonial administrators as technologies of management, and these ethnic identities were then assumed and developed more profoundly by groups of people thus designated as strategies of resistance, or ways of intervening and creating spaces for themselves within institutions of power.24 A profound engagement with the legacy of colonialism has yet to occur within ethnic history. As far as I am aware, Barry York’s Empire and Race (1990) is the only work to deal meaningfully with questions of colonialism by contextualising Maltese immigration to Australia within the broader framework of the politics of British imperialism.25 Yet as Ann Curthoys has argued, the ‘continuing presence of colonialism has implications for all immigrants’, for all ‘non-indigenous people, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants alike, are beneficiaries of colonial history’ because we are all ‘living on someone else’s land’.26 One of the gaping holes in ethnic Australian history has been the lack of serious engagement with Aboriginal history: the failure to think through issues of dispossession and racial relations between ethnic and indigenous groups, or to examine the connection between the racialisation of Aborigines and non-British peoples. The celebratory nature of certain ethnic histories, the understandable anxiety not to vilify a particular ethnic group which had already suffered and often continues to suffer racism and marginalisation from mainstream Australian society posed a dilemma for assessing ethnic-Aboriginal relations. For instance, in The Germans in Australia (1985), Ian Harmstorf and Michael Cigler touched on German relations with Aborigines, mentioning the decimation of Aborigines through disease and dispossession of their land, and referring to German Lutheran missionary efforts to eradicate the ‘horrors of heathenism’. However, they ultimately concluded that ‘it would be wrong … to condemn them for what today may seem to be a lack of understanding of the Aborigines’. They pleaded for us to remember that the first German settlers were acting ‘according to their faith and the ideas of their time. Whether they acted in the best interest of the Aborigines is perhaps not for other white settlers to judge’.27 Many other ethnic histories either ignored ethnic–Aboriginal relations or made a similar plea. Yet inattention to Aboriginal history and indigenous issues, and a focus on what Curthoys called ‘historical victim narratives’ – stories of ‘persecution or economic difficulty in the country of origin, experiences of racism and rejection after arrival’28 – allowed the elision of any meaningful discussion of racial discrimination on the part of non-British migrants towards indigenous people or, indeed, towards each other.29 Similarly, however, Aboriginal studies often ignored the presence of non-British settlers, framing Australian history and race relations with-

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in a dichotomous black/white racialised perspective, equating ‘whiteness’ with Australians of British/Irish descent. In her ground-breaking research on how white women in Australian universities who taught anti-racism nevertheless denied their white race privilege, Aileen Moreton-Robinson drew from Ruth Frankenberg’s work on the sociohistorical construction of whiteness in the United States. Yet little attempt was made to accommodate Frankenberg’s complex, nuanced picture of the porousness and instability of white identity.30 MoretonRobinson seemed to assume that feminist academics were white and of British descent. Too often in mainstream Australian, Aboriginal and ethnic history, the understanding of whiteness was static. Yet a quick glance at the administration of the Immigration Restriction Act demonstrates the instability of the category. For example, it was not until the post-World War II period that the Maltese were considered ‘white British subjects’ by the Australian government, but even then the precariousness of this identity was demonstrated in 1947 when Maltese and Cypriots were categorised as ‘coloured’ by confused Australian officials in London.31 Critical works on ‘whiteness’ can certainly open up interesting possibilities for ethnic history.32 The concept of whiteness can be used to analyse how ‘white’ people have been racialised or ethnicised, and how white cultural practices have been propagated and maintained in Australia. This is not merely about unearthing racism in cultural practices and pointing the accusing finger. Rather it is about asking how a particular group of Australians have been represented to themselves and others as ‘white’; what this whiteness meant at different times; what it was defined or constructed against; who counted as ‘white’ and under what circumstances; what unconscious privileges and perceived responsibilities went along with it; what cultural practices gave expression to and reinforced whiteness; and, above all, how being white became normal and ‘Australian’, and how this was challenged. The porousness of whiteness and the flexibility of white cultural practices means that another fruitful area of investigation might be to examine the ‘whitening’ or anglicisation of non-British cultural practices. The very resilience of whiteness lies in its ability to absorb new influences and be transformed, holding out the possibility of assimilation into white privilege. For example, Italian opera was accepted as ‘high’ white culture long before Italians were acceptable as white ethnic migrants. Jill Roe’s work on Dayspring demonstrated how the various spiritual beliefs and philosophies of non-white cultures were adopted and transformed into white Australian counter-cultural practices.33 Ethnic history should be concerned with whiteness because, as Stuart Hall argued, the symbolic power of white ethnicity in countries with a British colonial history

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‘arises from the fact that’ in common understanding, whiteness ‘is not an ethnicity. Precisely, it is the norm by which everything else becomes an ethnicity’.34 The normativity of whiteness in Australian cultural practices is clearly demonstrated in studies of sexuality and sexual cultures, which generally focused on white middle-class subjects. Indeed, the emergence of poststructuralist ‘queer theory’ was prompted by ‘the widespread perception that gay/lesbian-based “identity politics” often excluded homosexual men and women from working-class and ethnic minority backgrounds as well as transgendered people.’35 Rarely did ethnic histories deal with sexual activity, let alone examine sexual identities. (One exception was Christine Stevens’s Tin Mosques and Ghan Towns, which described the effects of sexual frustration and deprivation on Afghan cameleers’ behaviour, especially towards Aboriginal women.36) Yet sexuality and sexual cultures should surely form an important area of investigation in studies of ethnicisation, for, quite often, belonging to one group meant exclusion from the other. Homosexual men of nonBritish/Irish background were largely unrepresented in ethnic or queer discourses. Those who studied sexuality often disregarded ethnicity, while there was a silence among ethnic groups about those who transgressed heterosexual boundaries. This was evident in a 1999 case study of ‘Asian’ men on the gay scene which concluded that assimilationist forces were still at work: Fitting into the scene culture involves processes of assimilation, and loss of connection even with supportive ethnic networks. While all men who look for a place to belong on the scene generally feel pressure to assimilate to a predominantly white middle-class gay culture, Southeast Asian men generally had more cultural distance to cover.37

The cult of the white male body led to experiences of discrimination, exclusion and isolation, demonstrating how problems of racialisation or ethnicisation kept recurring in all sorts of cultures and subcultures. It was not only mainstream Australian society that had to deal with the difficulties of multiculturalism and discrimination. Quite often, the focus of ethnic history has been inward looking, centring on the ethnic group without serious engagement with mainstream historical issues apart from those mentioned earlier. Perhaps it is time for ethnic history to examine not only the processes of ethnicisation, but also the processes of inter-cultural or cross-cultural relations. This is not merely the engagement of the ethnic group with mainstream society, but with other cultural groups as well, be they ethnic communities or homosexual cultures. To look at cross-cultural transmissions and transformations sheds much light not only on ethnic history but

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also on the development of dominant or mainstream Australian culture. The ‘Americanisation’ of Australian culture is an interesting case in point. Janiszewski and Alexakis’s recent work brought to light a curious instance whereby American culture of the early to mid-twentieth century was imported to urban and rural Australia by Greek-Australians who had previously worked in the United States. An example of this was the establishment of American-style Greek milkbars and cafés: [B]y the mid-1910s, Greeks had firmly introduced the American drugstore soda bar to Australia and, in the 1930s, the American-style milk bar … Milk bar and café names such as the Californian, Monterey, Niagara, and Golden Gate reflected their origins. American-style confectioneries also appeared in Greek-owned shops together with another American influence, ice-cream.38

The transmission of fantasies of American popular culture was, in this instance, mediated by Greek-Australians. The fact that the culture they chose to import and transmit to Australia was ‘modern American’ rather than ‘traditional Greek’ says much about the fascination and safety of American culture for Greek-Australians in the age of White Australia. The quest to legitimate multiculturalism in the 1990s, especially in the face of a backlash against it and the demand for a return to a cohesive ‘Anglo-Celtic core culture’, has led some historians to argue that Australia has always been a multicultural country. An estimated 5 per cent of the First Fleet were of non-British origins, drawn from British colonies around the world including India, Ceylon, Mauritius and Africa,39 while Germans, Greeks, French, Spanish, Swiss, Italians and Chinese had settled in Australia since the gold rushes of the midnineteenth century. John Docker argued that the notion that Australia had a largely homogeneous ‘Anglo-conformist’ culture prior to World War II was a myth. Recent research suggested that such Anglo-conformity was probably pervasive only in the 1920s and ’30s, after the internment of the so-called ‘enemy aliens’ during World War One. Such interning helped to crush not only the distinctive culture of German-Australians … but the multiculturality that had robustly existed since the gold rushes.40

These views have been contested by historians such as Miriam Dixson, who pointed out that to describe Australia as ‘multicultural’ from 1788 was misleading since non-British groups formed such small numbers, while the degree of difference existing prior to World War II in no way compared to the rapid demographic transformation through processes of non-British migration in the postwar period.41 True enough, even though the dominant majority of British-descended people were by no

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means homogeneous but were culturally distinguished from each other by gender, class, dialect, national, regional and religious differences; differences which led the British themselves to talk of various ‘races’ within Britain in the nineteenth century, and which are only beginning to be explored.42 In the end, the question is whether we want to enforce a dominant, relatively homogeneous view of Australian history and identity, or whether we will allow the voices of the marginalised to be heard and included in stories of the geographical entity called ‘Australia’. As long as the history of Australia continues to be regarded as the history of the nation-state, cultural history will be co-opted to play a role in the construction of (a singular) national identity. But if we regard the history of Australia as the complex and varied histories of the many different groups who have come and settled in someone else’s land under the umbrella of colonialism, then the issues we engage with, the stories we tell, will bear the imprint of racial as well as inter-cultural and cross-cultural relations; stories which not only acknowledge dispossession and discrimination, but also tell of cultural ferment and dynamic hybridity. If ethnic history were to break out of the ideological mould of multiculturalism – with its reification of ‘ethnicity’ – to engage more profoundly with the concerns and methodologies of cultural history, the resulting multi(ple)-cultural histories would be tremendously significant not only to Australians but to all societies which grapple with the delights and dilemmas of living with difference.

N OT E O N S O U R C E S For general works on ethnic history, see: Jock Collins, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australia’s Post-War Immigration, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1988; James Jupp, ed., The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins (1988), Australian National University and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Melbourne, 2001; Barry York, Ethno-Historical Studies in a Multicultural Australia, Studies in Australian Ethnic History no. 13, Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1996; Barry York, Our Multicultural Heritage 1788–1945: An Annotated Guide to the Collections of the National Library of Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1995. For further reading on multiculturalism, race and ‘whiteness’, see: John Docker and Gerhard Fischer, eds., Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2000; Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998; Andrew Markus, Australian Race

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Relations, 1788–1993, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994; Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993; Ruth Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1997; Richard Dyer, White, Routledge, London and New York, 1997; Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, Sage, London, 1999; John Stratton, Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Alison Holland, Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Marilyn Lake, Ewan Morris, Stuart Ward and Richard White for commenting on this essay at various stages.

PA R T T W O : I N PA R T I C U L A R …

11 CULTURES OF DISTINCTION PENNY RUSSELL

Once upon a time, our founding mothers and fathers came to Australia in convict ships, and built a new society through their labour in penal servitude. But they would not accept the imprint of slavery or shame. Instead they proved to be resilient and adaptable, better suited to the demands of this new environment than their would-be masters. As years went by, the convicts became free, and, once free, wealthy. Their children, the currency lads and lasses, were true Australians, born to work, play and prosper in the wide brown land. In time, independent labour brought its own reward, transportation ceased, and the colonies were granted self-government. Free immigrants flooded to Australian shores in growing numbers, drawn by the prospect of boundless riches in exchange for toil. Squatting, goldseeking, farming, manufacturing, teaching or preaching: the choices seemed as unlimited as the opportunities they offered for wealth and social mobility. The new immigrants brought with them their social aspirations, and refused to recognise the accidents of birth or education as a basis for political representation, success, leisure or social leadership. Manhood suffrage, the eight-hour day, a proliferation of mechanics institutes and a high level of home ownership marked the Australian colonies as spaces in which class privilege held no sway, where Jack was as good as his master and might soon be master himself. Of course not everyone was happy. An early elite had unpacked their pianos onto the beach only to watch them sink knee-deep in sand, and had built grand houses from borrowed money on a whisper of hope for the future. But their aspirations were tossed like dust in the winds of change that blew across the colonies – and perforce they, too, had to join the struggle for a living, to take their chances in the ebb and flow of prosperity, to rub shoulders with successful newcomers. Against the

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pressing logic of a classless society, their pretensions dwindled into harmless absurdities, pathetic mementoes of a greatness that might have been. The mannered solemnities of Europe, its inflexible traditions and entrenched class structure, were anachronisms in the working man’s paradise. By the end of the nineteenth century Australia was poised to emerge as a distinctive, classless nation, freed from the restrictions of British privilege, able to invite all to join in universal suffrage, universal prosperity and, ultimately, the Australian way of life. In a robust assertion of national distinctiveness, Australia was claimed for the Worker. ˆˆˆ Or so the story runs. No historian, and few Australians, would accept that story as an unqualified historical truth.1 Australians – especially Aboriginal Australians, immigrant Australians and their descendants, women, the welfare class – live with the consequences of structural inequality. Historians have repeatedly criticised the myths of egalitarianism and social mobility, pointing instead to entrenched social divisions and the unequal distribution of resources that have characterised the history of white Australia since its inception. Even Russel Ward, who in 1958 traced the influence of egalitarian values to the beginnings of white settlement, was careful to write of them in terms of an ethos, an idea – the ‘Australian legend’ – rather than as historical reality.2 In the decades since, historians have returned again and again to Ward’s constructs, seeking to explain their origins, their power and above all their limitations.3 But for all their efforts, ‘egalitarianism’ remains unshakeably part of the popular imagining of Australia’s national tradition. Every historian of nineteenth-century Australia seems doomed once more to engage with that legend, seek to understand its continuing force, and endeavour, yet again, to lay it to rest. To expose the inequalities, injustices and exclusions that underpin the egalitarian myth is a relatively straightforward endeavour – but the battle is never really won. In this article I seek to angle the historical gaze differently, and consider the pervasiveness and continuing force in Australia, not of egalitarian aspirations, but of an obsession with social distinctions. I review the limited space allowed in Australian historiography for the study of status and distinction, and ask whether a way forward might be offered by the insights and approaches of the ‘new cultural history’. I argue that we need not merely to show the social divisions that belie the celebratory culture of egalitarianism, but also to address directly the imaginings of privilege, power and distinction that simultaneously imbue our cultural world. An obsession with status is not an obsolete excrescence we accidentally imported from the ‘old

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world’, one we might hope eventually to throw off by the simple strategy of ignoring it.4 It is part of our colonial heritage, imprinted in our culture. If we are to address our inequalities, we must first own them. The significance of social distinction in Australian society has engaged my attention persistently since the 1980s, when for my doctoral thesis I identified a group of women in mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne who, with heartfelt faith in their own status as ‘gentry’, actively policed social distinctions through dress, manner, conversation and networks.5 The mere existence of these women in Australian society raised difficult questions, not all of them addressed by the brisk debates on the nature of class in Australian society that dominated historiography in the 1980s. Labour historians, interested in the emergence of working-class identity and activism, understandably paid little attention to the complications of status within the ruling class. The most influential formulation in the 1980s was that offered by Connell and Irving, who argued in Class Structure in Australian History that the nineteenth century had seen the emergent ‘hegemony of the mercantile bourgeoisie’ that replaced or incorporated an earlier pastoral ruling class.6 It was against such power that the trade unions and the labour movement gradually recognised common interests and a working class ‘for itself’ became more apparent.7 In such formulations, the status distinctions drawn between competing groups within the bourgeoisie, like the aspirations towards respectability of the self-employed, were peripheral complications at best.8 This broadly Marxist model of class formation framed my thesis, but provided few guides as to how to deal conceptually with my particular sources: the diaries and correspondence of elite women, prescriptive literature on etiquette and social conduct, the minutes of philanthropic societies. Such sources pointed to a world in which social distinctions served not to unite but crucially to divide the mercantile bourgeoisie into exclusivist, competitive components. My feminist training demanded that I take women’s experience and social activity seriously, and recognise their agency, albeit within social structures.9 In a dialogue about sex and class, therefore, I endeavoured to stitch together social aspiration, social exclusiveness, taste and feminine virtue across a materialist base. The gentry, I suggested, constituted a self-defined group, a particular ‘fragment’ of the bourgeoisie to whom distinctions of status were meaningful – largely because of the active role women played in their perpetuation. In a society that offered limited scope for socially significant female activity, women’s sense of identity and their actual social authority depended in large part on their recognised status. In turn, a lady’s status depended on the extent to which she displayed the modesty and virtue thought indispensable to genteel femininity. I

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argued that if we took seriously the work of women, we must at least recognise that distinctions of status mattered, in ways that crucially affected the formation of class consciousness. While the policing of social distinctions appeared to be women’s work, that social work was not a marginal feminine activity, a product of false consciousness, but a necessary element in the complex equations of a male-dominated and essentially elitist society. I was not alone in my interests. In an important article published in 1986, ‘The Lady and the Australian Girl’, Beverley Kingston argued that the social fluidity of the colonies was confined to male society. The English ideal of the ‘gentleman’ was by the nineteenth century so watered down that it ‘adapted easily to colonial conditions’, and could be readily attached to occupation or to honorifics. The qualities of a lady were more rigidly drawn and more elusive, dependent on the role models of ‘real’ (English) ladies.10 Ladies could only demonstrate status through a proper – and unchanging – understanding of social behaviour and etiquette. But the fluidity of male society was in large part dependent on that female activity: it was ‘by relegating some of the essential responsibility for differentiating status and maintaining social distances to women that male-dominated Australian society was able to project itself as egalitarian’.11 Kingston’s model positioned women as hapless pawns in that equation: their subordination in society left them with no choice but to accept and police the constraining ideology of the ‘lady’. In turn, their subordinated role had significant social and cultural consequences. Since responsibility for guarding the social and cultural standards of the ‘Old World’ rested with middle-class mothers, their own powerlessness perhaps contributed to the feelings of inadequacy and provincialism with which generations of Australians continued to regard European culture. Perhaps, then, the social inequality of the sexes might help explain Australia’s lasting cultural cringe. To consider either class or national identity without taking seriously the experience of women, Kingston concluded, was ‘rather like trying to play a violin with one hand’.12 But one significant strand in Australian historiography seemed content with the music thus produced. During the 1980s, cultural history in this country was dominated by a conservative masculine establishment, immune to the challenges of feminist history. In 1979 the Australian Academy of the Humanities initiated a series of annual seminars, the papers from which constituted a new journal, Australian Cultural History. Where Russel Ward had sought a radical nationalist cultural tradition in the ballads of convicts, bushrangers and rural workers, the AAH aimed to ‘encourage the study of the activity of mind in Australia as expressed in philosophical, scientific, scholarly, religious,

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artistic and governmental pursuits’.13 The seminars sought to understand the insecurities, ‘self-congratulatory’ posturings and assertive, provincial anti-intellectualism of Australians.14 A representative edited collection produced out of the series covered such topics as religion, suburbia, rural life, education and status: fields central to female existence and female culture. But amidst the variety of papers, sustained individual attention was directed only at two women: the Queen, and one patron of the arts. Neither the politics of gender nor the cultural work of women, it appeared, need inform an understanding of Australian culture. At one of these seminars, John Hirst presented an influential discussion of ‘Egalitarianism’.15 True to his context, Hirst demonstrated that it was technically possible to emphasise the ongoing obsessions of Australians with honour, status and ‘gentlemanliness’ without even by accident mentioning a woman. His discussion centred on a masculine mythology of egalitarianism, which he found it sufficient to address in exclusively masculine terms. Arguing that previous discussions had blurred the possible meanings of egalitarianism, Hirst carefully teased out three particular forms: ‘equality of opportunity, of political rights, and of manners’. The two first were enshrined in colonial parliaments, with their refusal ‘to recreate here a closed system of privilege’. But manners had a more chequered history. A ‘society of deference, ranks and titles’ long flourished in the colonies, precisely because these ‘signs of success’ were necessary to mark the upward mobility of migrants in the new society. The most readily available social distinction ‘was that of becoming a gentleman’. In Australia, the fluidity already becoming apparent in that category in nineteenth-century England was increased to the point that traditional criteria disappeared: ‘“gentleman” became the status of anyone holding a certain position in the occupational hierarchy or possessing independent means’.16 To this point, Hirst was at one with Kingston – but where Kingston saw a fluidity for men that was denied to women, Hirst saw both fluidity and competitive anxieties operating simultaneously within the masculine world of the gentleman. Where ‘new men could not be excluded, the contentions for place and precedence were fearsome’. Even liberal democrats who battled against old world privilege thus remained obsessed with titles and honours, which alone seemed ‘solid and certain’ amidst social chaos.17 But a colonial society which, while allowing opportunity, still dressed success ‘in traditional garb’ was particularly vulnerable to criticism from the new radicalism and socialism that reached the colony after the 1880s. J. F. Archibald’s Bulletin brought to bear in Australia an irreverent critique of pretence, ‘humbug’, and slavish imitations of English political and social relationships. Drawing on both British

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disdain for colonial pretension and the rhetoric of the new labour movement, which seemed about to sweep away distinction and privilege in the old world itself, Archibald showed ‘how pathetically provincial New South Wales was … [;] running after the “gewgaws of titles” while the rest of the world was discarding them’. Meanwhile in Australian literature, as in its parliaments, the working man came to be invested with a new dignity, representing qualities of hard-working respectability against the charade of social distinction. In such developments Hirst saw the emergence of a ‘different world’, characterised by an egalitarianism of manners: the one egalitarianism, he concluded, generally acknowledged to exist in modern Australia. And this, he added, should not be undervalued, since if social meetings between people can occur without inducing ‘the heartache and corroding anger that can be the other side of deference, then egalitarians of all sorts should rejoice’.18 Hirst, then, eschewed the confused generalisations of many earlier discussions of egalitarianism. By paying careful attention to the imperial cultural context, he could delineate the continuing influence of British culture in attitudes too easily seen as products of a distinctive and new Australianness. In combing out the ambiguities inherent in public culture, he took the analysis of egalitarianism via such sources perhaps as far as it can go. But the omissions and silences in Hirst’s discussion are equally obvious. Most striking is the confidence with which he sketches both an obsession with status and a will to egalitarianism as being characteristic of ‘Australian’ society, without once gesturing towards the implications of this portrait of a white male community for female, Aboriginal, or non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant Australians. A cultural history that accepted the masculine framework of the dominant culture on its own terms ultimately offered few solutions to the interpretive problems I faced in my thesis. Focusing on the political domain and a male-dominated print culture, Hirst erased women’s central preoccupation with status. Steeped as I was in women’s diaries from the period, my own perception was that social hierarchies were established not primarily through public debate but through the minutiae of local societies, through the countless tiny decisions daily taken on dress, style, greetings, entertainments, calls, invitations, gestures, snubs. Distinctions were established and maintained in a world of sociability located at the intersection of public and domestic life, a world of parties, balls, dinners and family gatherings in which the demeanour of both sexes was equally at stake, and in which any suggestion of an ‘egalitarianism’ of manners was a continual source of personal and deeply felt offence. The woman-centred perspective of my thesis thus drew me away from public discourse and towards a rich and complex world of

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innumerable social exchanges at the micro level – and thus, tentatively, towards an alternative style of cultural history, which was beginning to be richly modelled by ethnographic historians influenced by Clifford Geertz.19 In this world of mannered, ritualised but often confused exchange, women appeared not merely complicit, but thoroughly instrumental, in constructions of ladylike femininity. Indeed, their agency seemed so clear that I found it difficult to accept Kingston’s suggestion that their concern with status was a direct product of their subordination. Women’s diaries revealed deep anxieties over status and authority, persistent jostlings for precedence and social value, elaborate social rituals and rivalries around the simple morning call, and constant efforts to set in place the material trappings of an elegant domestic life. In analysing these, although I remained thoroughly engaged with vexed issues of structure and agency, class and feminism, I became increasingly concerned with issues of identity and self-representation. I was struck in particular by the intensely performative nature of female gentility. Ladies’ conscious display of superiority licensed a judgmental and censorious culture, in which criticism was directed inward as well as outward.20 The self-consciousness of the performance thus in itself created an element of self-doubt, which set women incessantly on guard against the betrayal of a less refined inner self. The instability of genteel femininity, and indeed of the whole edifice of gentility in colonial society, placed a considerable psychological burden on women. Women’s work in policing social distinctions was not necessarily to their own ultimate benefit, but it was central to their identity, and made a lasting impact on society. Out of this perception of psychic anxiety, I developed a structural model of precarious equilibrium, showing how the social interests of women of conservative class politics fostered their continued conservatism in terms of gender. My thesis implied that an elitism so integrally bound up with the lived and felt experience of femininity could not be so readily eliminated as Hirst had suggested by cultural celebrations of the superior manliness and independence of the male worker. So my concerns remained firmly focused on the social implications of female behaviour, especially for class relations, and attempted in broad terms to address issues of historical change. Though in my desire to explain change in terms of the minutiae of daily life, performance, manners, ritual and anxiety I was drawn towards the cultural analysis of meaning in everyday life, ultimately my thesis worked within rather than against most of the unspoken boundaries that delimited Hirst’s analysis. My challenge was confined to pointing out his disregard for the complicity and power of women within a group he had identified only as ‘gentlemen’. I did not address the more fundamental silences of his discussion

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– silences which, indeed, I perpetuated. My guiding principle was selfdefinition, and since race remained muted in the self-definition of urban middle-class white people, I was able by and large to ignore it. Even the inequalities of sex I addressed only within the limited framework of the gentry. Though working-class women were a significant presence in my thesis, I was there primarily interested in the relationships across class that developed between women.

ˆˆˆ During the 1990s, the questions and frameworks of a ‘new cultural history’ assumed growing significance in the writing of Australian history. The main trends in the new forms of enquiry and methodology have been well summarised by Geoff Eley in relation to British historiography. Eley suggests three major characteristics of cultural history: it unsettles the categories of analysis on which historical enquiry is founded; extends and complicates the questions asked; and diversifies the methods employed, particularly through an interest in popular culture and ‘microhistorical’ analysis.21 These developments reflect the profound impact of Foucault and poststructuralism on all scholarly disciplines, as well as the explicit political and theoretical challenges posed to knowledge by feminism and postcolonialism. But they also grow from the work of social historians, whose detailed research in itself raised new questions about meaning and identity in the societies studied. The unresolved questions left at the conclusion of my postgraduate research were characteristic of those that more generally impelled social enquiry towards cultural analysis. For the history of status and distinction in Australian society, the implications are at once unsettling and inspiring. The comfortable elitism involved in investigating the claims or practices of an elite, selfdefined group can no longer escape critical scrutiny in a scholarly field where categories of identity and experience have been subject to questioning from all sides. But it seems possible that more complex questioning might turn the issues of status and distinction outwards into broader conceptualisations of race, colonialism, nation, gender and subjectivity, causing them to splinter and recoalesce into a rather different history. The categories of identity on which so much history writing has been based – of women, the working class, ethnic or sexual minorities – have themselves come under challenge. Joan Scott in particular has offered an influential critique of the conventions of historical practice that first identify the group or category and then explore ‘experience’ as

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a foundation for historical analysis.22 She argues that this process merely replicates imagined identifications, rather than asking how and why such identifications were produced in the first place. In a recent article she employs the metaphor of a ‘fantasy echo’ to draw attention to the ‘imagined repetitions or repetitions of imagined resemblances’ that underlie categories of identity, and argues that historians must endeavour to deconstruct, rather than reify, the ‘fantasies’ that secure such categories and enable subjects to ‘transcend history and difference’.23 Scott’s arguments have implications for the writing of history across the axes of gender, race, class and colonialism. She reminds us continually to treat the categorisations of both the past and the present with suspicion, to assume neither their continuities nor their retrospective applications. While her work has been criticised for potentially undercutting political action and argument necessarily based on communities of identity, it would be difficult to refute her central point, that all such communities are to an extent discursively produced, within historically contingent circumstances. And not only communities, but also subjectivities: Scott points out that the subject positioning of individuals is developed within particular constellations of discourses and meaning, along specific and complex axes of power. An interest in the historical production of subjectivities encourages a shift from the requirements of a social history founded upon group formation and experience towards a cultural history that investigates the resonances of particular terms – femininity, masculinity, gentility, civility and civilisation, for example – across society as a whole. Historians of class in Australia need no reminding that the categories they work with are fluid. Those who have focused on the gentry, in particular, have always recognised that this was an inherently unstable group in the making – if not, indeed, on the make. ‘Ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ in Australia had no pre-given, accomplished identity, but sought to build social relationships and structures in ways that promised them an elite status, one founded in almost equal measure on optimistic fantasy and nostalgic (mis)remembering – and more on these than on circumstances of birth or even of material wealth. But while recognising the nostalgia, optimism and fragility inherent in these aspirations, historians have tended to take other aspects of identity as much for granted as did their subjects. Only recently has feminist history problematised the apparent stability of gender identity; and only recently has the persistence of indigenous historians and activists in critiquing the premises of white history compelled a new awareness of its unthinking imperialism. Though the iconic ‘lady’ might take her femininity, her whiteness and her presence on Aboriginal land for granted, Australian historians can no longer do so.

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It has been harder still, perhaps, to unsettle the category of Australianness itself. Australian social and cultural histories are still dogged by the persistent dichotomy of nation versus empire, of Australian specificity versus British cultural dominance. But in recent years, a progressivist focus on the emergence of a separate national identity in Australia has given way to a more complex acknowledgement that Australian settlers were not builders of a nascent (and innocent) nation, intent only on realising their own freedoms, but empire builders, active agents in the expansion of British imperialism. A history informed by those critical interventions characterised as ‘postcolonial’24 must acknowledge that there never was a significant disjuncture between Australia’s imperial and its national past, and that the preoccupations of white society are never entirely separable from the context of racial violence and dispossession that underpinned colonial settlement. A study of social distinction, then, must recognise that the language used to evoke status distinctions was steeped in the imperialist, and implicitly racialist, discourse of ‘civilisation’. Ann Stoler has drawn attention to the close, fluid relationship that exists between the logic and language of class and race, suggesting that the ‘racial lexicon of empire … may have provided for a European language of class as often as the other way round’. 25In nineteenth-century colonies, middle-class ‘strategies of identity-making and self-affirmation were unstable and in flux’26 – an instability apparent not only in ‘cultural hybridities and sympathies that repeatedly transgressed distinctions’27 on racial terms, but also in the difficulties of marking status distinction between bourgeois and working-class colonists, and amongst the bourgeoisie themselves. In Australia, insecurity was manifest in constant, anxious reference to the standards of the metropolis. Manners mattered in this society, both as reassurance that the colonies would not slide into barbarity or mediocrity, and as a way of marking, and limiting, the social ascent of individuals. A running thread in the language of Australian elitism is the use of terms like ‘brute’, ‘savage’, or ‘scarcely humanised’28 to designate white people – convict women, children, tradesmen’s wives – who fell outside the standards of polite behaviour. Such terms graphically demonstrate just how close was the relationship between ‘civility’ and its etymological cousin, ‘civilisation’, and demonstrate the truth of Stoler’s assertion that racial discourse was ‘formative in the making of a middle-class identity’.29 A history of manners that turned its gaze outward from the concerns of the elite to the implications of such nice social distinctions for society as a whole might ask how they resonated in the wider colonial context, with all its tensions, multiple loyalties, hybrid identities and racialist underpinnings.30 In so doing, such a history would need to visit

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once again the vexed and vexing questions of Australian national identity and the ‘ethos’ of egalitarianism. It would need to look beyond the strident tones of particular national imaginings that have dominated Australian public culture and seem to preclude serious attention to the distinctions of status. Aspirations towards social distinction were demonstrably present throughout Australia’s nineteenth-century (and arguably its more recent) history, but have been repeatedly marginalised. Those who hankered most for distinction have been almost invariably represented as reaching towards the ‘old world’: acting, in Kingston’s words, as a ‘link with a past they had never seen, and as a brake on the future they were rushing towards’.31 A history that took distinction seriously would need to adopt a different lens – not, like the old guard of imperialist historians, to invoke the standards of the ‘old world’ to assess the progress and failings of the new; but rather to consider how ‘old world standards’ in themselves became subject to specific negotiation and contestation within Australian society.32 In the Australian imagination, the laws of privilege and pedigree, of gentility, good taste, cultivation and civility were all certainly associated with England. But ‘England’ itself, as community or as standard measure, was neither pre-given nor immutable. Rather, it came to be fashioned in particular ways in the colonial imagination, so that ‘English’ standards were subject to all sorts of resonances, articulations, and reinventions, which informed their particular purchase in Australian society. Australian colonists, ‘inventing Australia’, continually reinvented England.33 For colonists, then, the concept of gentility was decidedly not an externally defined standard, but an item of ‘cultural capital’, in Bourdieu’s terms, the possession and definition of which was in constant contest, exchange, negotiation, resistance and strategic deployment.34 Manners were not simply symbols, but significant items of social exchange to be preserved and if necessary redefined in a changing world. Manners, then, were of immediate, ever-present social significance in the colonial world – and remained significant in ways worthy of the historian’s attention, free from the vast condescension of posterity. The history of civility, politeness, of manners themselves, is indeed another area with a developing richness of historiography, which directs attention away from populist social history of customs and ritual, towards a more complex appraisal of the cultural significance of ‘polite’ or civilised behaviour.35 Such a widened concept of a history of manners, especially within a colonial society, cannot be sustained fully by focused studies of insular social groups, but demands instead a sketch of the formation of subjectivities around axes of class, gender and race, across an imperial canvas.

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Fortunately, cultural history also offers strategies for rendering such a project manageable. Rather than attempting to emulate the sweeping narratives of more traditional historiography, the archetypal methodology of cultural history lies in detailed, ‘micro’ analysis of a word, gesture, or encounter.36 To me perhaps the most important aspect of cultural history is that it allows attention to the individual voices that too often slip through the gaps in broad narrative accounts. History is made up of a multitude of whispery but insistent voices from the past, each filled with its own imaginings and fond hopes, cynicism or despair, its own way of understanding an endlessly complex world, of explaining the inexplicable, of articulating an imperfect, subjective grasp on an historically determined existence. This conglomerate of contested, contingent meaning making that we call experience must be caught in a finer mesh, in the analysis of the webs of life as lived by individuals in relation to each other, as well as in the broader web of discourses that shaped and sought to define those lives. In analysis of the particular, and in the complexity of its relationship to the general, lies the recurring fascination of history. I will close this article with one example, rich in suggestive possibility. In April 1839, near the shores of the Murray River, an English lady watched as an Aboriginal man whom she knew only as ‘Joe’ demonstrated his hunting skills. For the benefit of his white audience, he climbed several tall eucalyptus trees, showing how he would search in the hollows of the tree for a lurking opossum, pull it from its hiding place and descend with his prize. Already well aware that no animals were hiding there, he displayed little enthusiasm for the hunt. The coming of whites to the Murray River region had devalued ‘Joe’s’ hunting skills and threatened his livelihood. He now lived near a newly established police station and begged for the ‘refuse victuals’ of passing travellers, being required in exchange to perform skills that may once have been a source of both masculine pride and material good, but now seemed emptied of both.37 Jane, Lady Franklin wrote a detailed account of the scene to her husband, the governor of Tasmania. Her interest in ‘Joe’s’ performance was in part ‘scientific’, in part the habitual curiosity of a seasoned traveller. But she was not the only recorder of the scene. Beside her stood a keen young naturalist, Dr Hobson, whose observing gaze fell not only on the young Aboriginal man but also on Lady Franklin herself, enthusiastically watching. One detail of the scene before him, which Lady Franklin had not recorded, struck him as irresistibly humorous. In his diary he wrote that the ‘man was clothed in a shirt and jacket only!!!’. He was in fact – ‘in Lady Franklin’s presence’ – naked from the waist down. 38

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In this tiny incident in the wilderness, modes of civilised behaviour were both tested and starkly revealed. ‘Joe’, donning the shirt and jacket that to him perhaps represented the white man’s power, but leaving off the trousers that were less obvious symbols of status, betrayed his imperfect access to white ‘civilisation’. Lady Franklin, loftily failing to notice the bare bottom that ascended and descended the trees before her, displayed her own perfected civility. It was through such enactments of social blindness, such undisturbed comportment, that a lady demonstrated moral virtue, impeccable social conduct and – implicitly – rank. But the implied snigger of the white man who observed the scene mocked both the ‘savage’ and the lady. To Dr Hobson, the ridiculous appearance of the Aboriginal man, clad in the incomplete trappings of white culture, marked him as unworthy of the civilisation apparently offered him in compensation for his lost land, livelihood and identity. But Jane Franklin’s stable identity as a lady, with all its requirements of manner, dress and propriety, made her an equally absurd figure amidst the boundless liberties of the wilderness. Only white men, it seemed, could move freely and without loss of dignity between the urbane centres of civilisation and the social wilderness of the frontier. But I would suggest that Dr Hobson’s snigger, far from expressing delight at his own comparative dignity, betrayed discomfort – the discomfort intrinsic to colonisers who in their own identities had to ‘reconcile the civility and values of home with the raw novelty of sites of settlements’.39 Hobson, his anxieties perhaps rendered still more acute by the fact that he was colonial-born, could not have been free of the nervous apprehension that elements of both absurdities inhabited the identity of the white colonising male. On the one hand lay a fear of being ridiculous, or simply wrong, for bringing into this new world of boundless possibility those social rules of manners, conduct and comportment that were appropriate only to an ‘old world’ riddled with hierarchical distinctions. On the other hand lurked the fear that the colonist who made his way through the physical and social wilderness of this unfamiliar world, far from the centres of that ‘civilisation’ that underpinned and justified conquest, forced to invent new rules of social conduct to fit unprecedented situations, might himself prove nothing but a barbarian. To rework English standards of conduct into new rules for a new society might be a sign of a dawning national confidence. But perhaps in taking some aspects of English manners while ignoring others the colonist rendered himself ridiculous in the eyes of the metropolis, exposing vital gaps in his imperfect clothing of civilisation. To project these fears onto the emblematic figures of the ‘lady’ and the ‘savage’ could not altogether disguise anxieties that lay close to the heart of colonial society.

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To the ladies of Melbourne in the 1860s, such direct encounters as this were rare, even unimaginable. Their ladylike sensibilities were more likely to be challenged by a recalcitrant housemaid than by a half-naked Aboriginal man. But the mentality of the ladies of the 1860s, and the security of their position of genteel femininity, were founded no less than Lady Franklin’s on a history of colonial encounters that was swiftly being erased from social visibility. To think through the continuing purchase of race and imperialism on a history of social distinction, beyond the point where it became invisible to individual consciousness, is more of a challenge, but nonetheless vital to understanding the complexity of Australia’s past. Australia’s colonial history is full of such moments, of chance encounters in which ‘manners’, in their widest sense of social knowledge, codes and judgments, both produced and shaped human relationships. Confusion, imperfect communication, and outright incomprehension can be traced to entrenched assumptions about what constituted civilised or polite behaviour. Such assumptions equally imbued understandings of ‘equality’, ensuring that no discussion of egalitarianism could exist free from a profound faith in the reality and significance of social difference. A new cultural history of manners in Australia would need to turn its back on the endless quest for a ‘distinctive’ national culture, and instead concentrate on those moments of confusion and of certainty that point so powerfully to persistent cultures of distinction.

12 ‘IN SPITE OF IT ALL, T H E G A R D E N S T I L L S TA N D S ’ : GARDENS, LANDSCAPE AND CULTURAL HISTORY K AT I E H O L M E S

Historians’ interest in the meanings of land, landscape and place has burgeoned in recent years, a reflection in part of the influence of postcolonial and poststructural ideas on the discipline of history. Rather than holding an inherent or intrinsic meaning, we now see attitudes to the surrounding environment as something created through a variety of representations, be they written, visual, musical, etc. Ideas about landscape, for example, will reflect a system of meaning; understandings and representations of it will change over time and a task for the cultural historian is to explore shifts in such understandings and perspectives. Interest in ideas about land and landscape is also indicative of the continuing search to understand the ways in which predominantly AngloAustralians have understood what it might mean to be ‘Australian’. The trinity ‘land, landscape, place’, to which we might add ‘space’, has been understood as crucial to our cultural identity. The individual ways in which the negotiation of these things occurred, however, has not been well explored. It is the nature of historical training to locate the particular as part of a broader narrative, and what is often lost in the process is the individual’s life and voice, complete with her meanings, emotions and desires. Gardening is an activity which evokes ideas about landscape, space and place. It has been described as a ‘ritual of habitation’,1 an activity through which an individual interacts with the landscape, planting out meanings and claiming space. As such, it involves not only the actions and associations of individual gardeners, but reflects the fashions, fantasies and beliefs of their culture. For the cultural historian, studying gardens provides an opportunity to explore this intersection between individual and cultural understandings of place and landscape, to read the garden as an expression of individual and cultural aspirations. The

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process, however, is not without problems, for the ‘reading’ of gardens and landscape, which I for one undertake, is through written texts. Neither of the two gardens – or gardeners – which I discuss in this chapter are extant, and for only one of them do any visual images remain. This is not an unusual problem for historians – we are probably more comfortable reading written texts than ‘real’ landscapes anyway – but it means I am relying on the combination of my gardeners’ skills as writers and my own imagination to envisage the particular transformations of place in which they were engaged. But we might argue that the visual effect of the garden is only one of its features, and that for the women discussed here, there were other, equally important, meanings to be realised. My intention here is to explore some of these meanings and the ways they were produced through literary texts. As a cultural historian, my interest is in the language and ideas used in writing about the garden, and what this can tell us about how the different gardeners I consider understood their world. How did they make sense of their activities in shaping their environment, and what were the ‘intellectual landscapes’2 influencing their transformations of the land around them? The two gardeners I discuss in this chapter could hardly be more different. While both were white and born in Australia, class, age, historical location and place all separate them. Mildred Hood was a young Tasmanian woman gardening and writing a diary during the years 1908–1910. While she aspired to be a doctor, she had neither the education nor the financial resources to achieve her aim. Through her garden, however, she hoped to earn enough money to put herself through medical school. A garden and £500 a year would realise her dreams. Anne Tully was the creator of the second garden I discuss. Terachy was an ‘outback’ garden, made known to us through Anne’s narrative of its creation, published in Australian Home Beautiful in 1954. The productive garden of Mildred and the more ornamental garden of Anne indicate differences in socio-economic status which are crucial to understanding the meanings the gardens carried for them. Yet despite their differences, we can see similar themes emerging in the two women’s understanding of landscape and the place of the garden within it. And, through the silences in their texts, we are alerted to what was not acknowledged, namely the function of gardens as a mark of ownership and settlement, a means of disguising a history of conflict, not only with the indigenous owners, but with the land itself. The ‘lie of the land’ thus carries double meaning: gardens actually changed the landscape, the ‘lie’, and in doing so changed its meanings. In planting gardens, Europeans planted particular understandings of civilisation: gardens reflected an ordered, controlled environment, one where the history of the land and the violence of its acquisition had been erased.

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Mildred Hood was a 19-year-old Tasmanian woman living with her family on land a short distance from Hobart. While diary writing was a reasonably common activity for young middle-class women, it is unusual to find diaries of young working-class women still in existence.3 In 1909 Mildred confided to her diary her abiding passion to be a doctor, that she ‘might rescue the perishing and care for the dying’ (11 September 1909), and perhaps diary writing is indicative of her desire to escape her circumstances. Her prospects were few: she had very limited education, much of it self-acquired, and was from a poor family. But she had heard that ‘Lady doctors are becoming more common. the Newspaper says they are outstripping the men in England’ (31 December 1908). Her mother dismissed her dreams, so Mildred set about finding ways of earning money. A Doctor to be which I love the most I am afraid is beyond my reach, but I often think there may be hope. Mother promises me an acre of land when we shift to our new home. I have £2 13/- pocket money to lay on this land. Potatoes are my purpose crop, which at the lowest aught [sic] to bring in 20 pounds to the acre a year, if I am not mistaken. Potatoes are 11 pound a ton this year … But I fear the scheme [to be a doctor] will cost 500 pound. (31 December 1908)

Mildred was not defeated by the size of the task ahead of her. She sowed bed after bed of onions, only to have them trampled into the ground by a roaming cow. She worked hard at clearing her land, providing details of the physical labour involved: My big garden is about quarter of an acre. The timber consist of 7 stumps. the undergrowth consist of sags & fearns. I have done all the clearing myself except the stumps and Roy [brother] did those for me. I have been a little over a month doing the diging. The rubish when raked up formed immense heaps one of which I burnt today. I am geting ready a bed, 3 panel long about one breath, which I am going to plant out with strawburys as soon as possible. (5 May 1909)

Two weeks later she reported that it was all levelled, only to have her mother announce that she wanted to move to a different farm. A month later she recorded her disappointment: With much regret I throu up my big garden. Mother says as we may sell out at any time she does not want me to slave on my garden for no purpose. Mother has aloud me many advantages. but she does not understand my feelings. She thinks plenty to eat and plenty to wear aught to satisfie me, but it is more than my ambition mind can stand. If I think the same in the future as I think now, I will NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! settle on a farm after mother dies, if I cannot be a physicin I will join the Salvation army. (18 June 1909)

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Yet still Mildred was not daunted. Her hopes lay in her garden: if she could grow enough vegetables, and sell enough eggs, she would realise her ambition: ‘I never expect to get enough money to go to college but entend to work my way as many a chemist has done and many a sailor. The study of medicene is sweet - The study of the BODY IS STILL THE DESIRE OF MY HEART.’ (22 May 1909) The garden would be her path to liberation, a release from the endless domestic duties and care of her siblings with which she was encumbered. A very strong theme of a woman struggling for independence runs through Mildred’s diary. It is infused with a critique of the injustice of her situation, and by extension, woman’s lot in life. In a mood of considerable despondency, she wrote: I have almost lost interest in my garden. The work seems so hard FOR NOTHING. I would not care if I worked day and night if I could make something. but most of the crops have failed. trenching and all that work is not very easy after ones days work. Roy gets paid for his work. but I have to work after hours to get money for myself. and little at that. I do not say that mother is unjust. But she seems to think that we girls do not want money. I often [wish] mother had no girls. then perhaps she would be able to sympathise with one a little more … I do not want idle love but I want her to have the same interest in us girls as she does in the boys. we do our duty as girls. Just as much as Roy does his.

At this stage in Mildred’s diary, the garden was a place of frustration, a site of drudgery and disappointment, where her fantasies crumbled in the face of the injustices of her sex and the failure of her labour to be productive. It is also a place where Mildred learnt more about the realities of sex and power, especially in relation to her brother. Her heroic vision of herself as a doctor – to ‘rescue the perishing and care for the dying’ – can be read in part as a defiant desire to show her mother her worth, in which case her choice of a predominantly male profession is telling. We might also read Mildred’s choice of medicine as an expression of – probably unconscious – sexual curiosity about the body and the senses: ‘the study of the body is sweet,’ she writes, hinting more at the pleasure of the senses than the joys of dissecting a corpse, while the capitals she uses in her confession, ‘the study of the BODY IS STILL THE DESIRE OF MY HEART’ carry an emphasis we should heed. In choosing medicine as her emancipatory path, she chose a profession which would give her access to the body and the knowledge of it, one on which unclear sexual desires could easily crystallise. In many ways Mildred’s investments in her garden reflect an embracing of the yeoman ideal. Hard, industrious work on the land would be rewarded. But she also fought against the role of the yeoman

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farmer, and the gendered implications it carried. Mildred’s hope that she would achieve her independence through small-scale, home-based industry is telling. Women’s magazines of this period repeatedly encouraged women to pursue such small-scale schemes: jam making, dressmaking, raising chooks. All these were supposedly, if women managed them correctly and worked hard, meant to provide avenues for women’s independence. Horticulture too was seen as a very appropriate path for women to pursue and the acceptance of women into Victoria’s Burnley Horticultural College in 1899 offered them training in this endeavour. The federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 added another dimension to this call: the creation of gardens was seen to have a stabilising effect on the citizens of the new nation and women were encouraged to bring beauty and domesticity to the man-made ‘deserts of crowded cities and suburbs’.4 Mildred was one of probably thousands of women who hoped, through such pursuits as gardening, to escape their dependence on their family and embrace a different kind of future. Through the interim space of the garden, part public, part private, Mildred would move from the domestic hearth to the world beyond. But her ‘liberation’ was conceived in very gendered terms: her life as a doctor would be one of servitude and care of the poor. ‘I would not want any of the pleasures of the world. I would not want fine clothes. or a happy home husbands and children to be bothered with nor I would not ask my patients to pay me, because I know if I did God’s work he would not see the right forsaken nor his seed begging bread.’ (11 September 1909) Mildred’s rejection of domesticity included the husband and children that inevitably went with it, but carried the very values of domesticity into the public sphere. Another narrative Mildred’s diary tells is that of settlement and the transformation of the land. It had to be cleared, trees felled, ferns dug out and burnt, all sticks and stones removed. The land had to be rendered productive, its meaning changed. The link between gardening and civilisation is very strong in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and Mildred’s cultivation of her land might also be seen as a fulfilment of both religious and national imperatives. The narrative which is not told here, but on which the Hood family’s occupation of the land was based is, of course, the removal of all Aborigines from the land, albeit many decades earlier. The silence in the diary around the history of this conflict is significant. Gardens, whether productive or aesthetic, were another means of appropriation of the land and Mildred’s garden can be read as part of the story of possession and its corollary, dispossession. Mildred’s vision of her garden was not just European, but reflected particular class and cultural understandings. In fact ‘vision’ is perhaps the wrong word to use, evoking as it can a sense of a vista, a garden in

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a landscape. In planning and planting her garden, Mildred did not seek to create the picturesque landscape sought by the colonial upper classes. She sought an ordered, productive and efficient space. Beauty, if you like, created through her own hands, and measured: ‘a quarter of an acre’, a ‘bed, 3 panel long about one breath’. This garden was functional, tactile rather than aesthetic. Mildred did not, at least not through her diary, seek to place it in the context of the surrounding landscape, perhaps because she did not conceive of it in those terms. To borrow a phrase, it was ‘land’ rather than ‘landscape’,5 visually at least. It is as if she looked from inside her clearing, and with lowered eyes. The point from which Mildred viewed her world reflected her gender and her class. The boundaries of her garden were brought into being through her work and writing, her labour and language.6 Her creation of her garden as a place, a place distinct from the surrounding scrub and ferns and stumps, thus enabled her to think of herself as standing outside it: it brought into being her fantasy of studying medicine. Once her site of servitude was clear, so could the path out of it take shape. That Mildred also shared the ‘point of view’ of her culture, namely colonial understandings of both land and landscape, is evident from the measurements she provided: fencing and measuring, surveying the land, were some of the primal acts of possession by Europeans. In contrast, aesthetics and an image of an ideal landscape were central to Anne Tully’s garden, and she defied considerable odds in order that her vision of fertility and beauty be realised. ‘My Outback Garden’ tells a story of the creation of the garden at Terachy, the station belonging to the Tully family and situated near Ray in southwest Queensland. As a published, retrospective account, Anne’s narrative lacks the more immediate chronicling of disappointment and despair that we find in Mildred’s diary, and alerts us to the ways in which the nature of the text itself, the mode of representation, influences the meanings we might find there. The readers of Australian Home Beautiful would have shared a particular class vision and understanding of landscape with Anne, and indeed the artist’s impression of Anne’s garden which accompanies her story provides us with an example of that point of view. We gain a ‘bird’s eye’ view, a circular possessive vision carrying completely different ideas of possession and power than found in Mildred’s diary. Terachy is located in one of those parts of Australia where stations are large enough to be marked on maps, and where towns and people are scarce. Anne’s narrative of her garden is framed in terms of the trials and tribulations involved in establishing a garden on land where shortages of water, extreme weather conditions and an absence of ‘skilled’ labour were just some of the hurdles needing to be overcome

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before the resulting ‘oasis’ could be realised. Unlike Mildred, whose struggles with nature were experienced at an intimate, individual level, Anne’s are represented as being with the forces of the elements and the spirit world. Her narrative fits well the genre of the pioneer legend, and it is no coincidence that Anne established her family’s lineage in the first paragraph of the article: her father-in-law was Patsy Tully and motherin-law Sarah Durack, well-known families of the squattocracy and owners of the adjacent station, Ray; families credited, Anne believed, ‘with some of the greatest cattle-droving feats in Australian history’.7 Anne’s own father was John Leahy, Speaker of the Queensland Parliament. Having thus begun her narrative, Anne registered the arrival of different times: the prospect of a garden was unimaginable to the pioneers ‘as they struggled for survival’ but, Anne confessed, ‘there is no progress without change and in my blood was a craving for a garden’. A garden registers settlement and a degree of prosperity and Anne’s narrative reflects a confidence in keeping with its postwar 1950s context. The site she and her husband had chosen for a home was selected for its proximity to the Ray property, rather than its suitability. ‘It was a desolate spot, covered by a dead mulga forest that had once been swept by fire. Here and there were gilgies, that, when later on had been filled in with soil, made badly-drained spots for a garden.’ We immediately know that Anne will do battle with the elements, and indeed the metaphors of war are never far from her narrative. Lack of water was the first enemy, but a sub-artesian bore sunk 11 years after the house was built, enabled a garden. A mill, ‘the biggest one made’, stood as ‘a lovely sentinel to keep watch and ward over the garden, whose life depended on it’ (p. 43). Next came the lawn, ‘the first that ever graced a home in these parts’, but the two teenage boys Anne had as workers, ‘one white, one an aboriginal’, made a proper mess of her desire to level the result, ‘and when finished it looked almost like the waves of the ocean – a really frightening sight’ (p. 45). The final product, however, achieved after much work, proved worth it, with Anne declaring it ‘verdant green, beautifully level’, thus fitting the pastoral vision from whence the idea had first come.8 There were other visions Anne sought to realise, one being a recreation of the garden of her Australian childhood: ‘I wanted to grow all the things that grew in my father’s garden, such as roses, azaleas, pelargoniums, hydrangeas; fuchsias, etc. All were tried and found wanting’ (p. 47). Anne’s nostalgic garden was not suited to the climate but, despite this, Anne confessed that every year roses were planted, with extensive efforts made to sustain them – including the building of a special dam which proved leaky, and underground drains – but a ‘droughty summer, and they too, join the legion of the lost’ (p. 51). Greater

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success was achieved with plants suited to tropical climates, including some natives, and Anne provided a list. As Anne tells the story of her garden, we learn also of the influences shaping her vision. Unable to recreate the garden of her childhood, the effect or impression she does leave is of similar origins. It is essentially a European vision, a cultural form adapted to a different environment. There was an entrance walk, rows of cedars, flower beds, hedges, a grove of citrus, ‘winding paths and beds of lilies and shrubs’, a vegetable garden, and of course the lawn. Modelled on the gardens of the English gentry, in postwar Australia it was, if you like, a garden of Empire, an assertion of the values of a past glory. Anne’s story is of an evolving garden, where some things succeed and some don’t, visions change, and it is never quite clear who does the work. Much of the narrative is written as if the garden itself, or the plants within it, made the decisions about where and how they will grow. For example, the site of the vegetable garden became filled with flowering trees: ‘jacarandas, firewheel tree, laburnum, poinciana, silky oaks and some orange trees – soon appeared here and there to complete a forest’, which Anne acknowledges was ‘part of my dreams’. In the process, the ‘vegetables had to seek a new garden of their own’. Good rains enabled the planting of olive trees and cotton palms, after which ‘18 Kurrajongs shot off at right angles’ (p. 51). The impression that the garden grew of its own accord is in part stylistic and in part an assertion of the naturalness of this self-creating garden. But while Anne leaves us in no doubt as to whose vision was being realised, just who did the work is much more obscure. Presumably the labourers who had made such a mess of the lawn were not re-employed, but it is highly likely that other Aboriginal labour was used, placing Anne in the position of a white colonial mistress in charge of white and Aboriginal male labour. Writing of the Tully and Durack families in a book called Heartbreak Corner, Anne’s daughter, Fleur Lehane, makes no secret of the fact that Aborigines worked both inside and outside the Terachy homestead, but is far less forthcoming about the abuse of their labour.9 The absence of labour in Anne’s garden (in contrast to Mildred’s emphatic representation of her back-breaking work), also asserts the legitimacy of the Tully’s possession of the place, as if the land itself embraces Anne as its true owner. Her narrative reinforces her appropriation of the land, and the legitimacy of it. Indeed her reference to the ‘deaf and dumb black Joe’ (p. 52), who helped recreate the lawn after drought, endorses such a reading: her dismissive description renders him both stupid and irrelevant; without language he was without culture and therefore carried no attachment to the land he now worked.10 Such rendering absolves Anne from any recognition of prior

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claims to the land, or any problem with her desire to totally change its nature, to impose a different meaning. This desire is evident, as I have already mentioned, in the metaphors of battle and war which run throughout the article, often quite explicitly: ‘One never loses hope in this country, and the uneven battle goes on year after year’ (p. 51). The battle is primarily waged against nature itself: the swarms of grasshoppers which came with the good seasons resulted in a continual war for a few months every year’ (p. 51); and when a severe frost decimated the garden, burning all the hedges to the ground and wiping every skerrick of green from all the plants, Anne commented, ‘but this country breeds us tough, and the fight went on’ (p. 51). In telling her story this way, Anne frames it within the familiar narrative of ‘man’s struggle against the elements’, only in this case it was a woman attempting to render the land fertile and, in her eyes, beautiful, to leave a particular imprint upon it. Anne reflected on the struggle she engaged in: Often on hot summer nights I have sat here under the stars, watching the horizon ringed with terrible bushfires, my eyes sweeping the boundless plains that stretch for miles in all directions, and feeling the hostility of its frowning grey landscape as if it resented the presence of those who had come to tame it. (p. 51)

Jay Arthur has written of the way in which colonists have represented and imagined the unpeopled landscape of Australia as an unland, expressed also in terms of -less. ‘The country without colonial intervention is endless and featureless and the country before the advent of the colonists timeless and ageless.’11 Anne Tully’s description of the land surrounding Terachy fits precisely this imagining. The plains are boundless and hostile, uncivilised and, significantly, resistant to being tamed. Just as the plants in Anne’s garden are invested with actions, so the land has human-like qualities. It fights back against the violence to which it is subjected, and in doing so is aided, in language at least, by the spirit world of the original inhabitants: The summer that followed the Big Frost must have been specially organised by the debil-debils of its witch world, for no rain fell till the following February. You have to live through a droughty summer to probe the depths of strain and stress, a trial indeed for man and beast much less a garden: hot blistering sandstorms, sometimes lasting all day and night, everything in the house and garden covered with a thick pall of dust and the poor flowers all bashed and broken. (p. 52)

It is the unnaturalness of this landscape and climate which is so striking in this description. It is excessive and violent, leaving destruction and

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loss in its wake.12 It is a landscape completely at odds with the Arcadian ideal of Anne’s dreams, one where a natural harmony is meant to exist ‘between people and their setting’.13 Instead, we have a country which is in the control of evil spirits who play havoc with the settlers’ dreams. The land as Anne describes it in these passages is what Jay Arthur calls ‘default country’. It is seen against the image of what is supposed to be normal: green, well-irrigated pastures. ‘[I]t turns what is normal in Australia into abnormal’,14 and in doing so justifies attempts to change it, to imbue it with different meaning and bring it into the naturalness of another vision. As if to reinforce this point, Anne claims the help of a different spirit world. While the ‘witch sprites’ had brought destruction, the arrival of good rains and kinder seasons was the doing of ‘propitious’ gods who enabled the lawns to be replanted and to ‘stretch emerald green and cool, a fitting harvest for unremitting toil’ (p. 52). So the gods smile on Anne’s creation, adding legitimacy to the realisation of her vision. Even God ‘never gives you more than you can bear’ and ensured Anne had water enough for survival. Indeed, Anne claims the survival of her garden as some sort of testimony to a relationship she established with the natural world, that the oasis she had created in the midst of barrenness, was meant to be: when I go sometimes at night to the roof-top to keep tryst with the stars that have looked down kindly through the years on my struggles, I fancy they twinkle a little more merrily when they hear me say, ‘Well, in spite of it all, the garden still stands.’ (p. 52)

The garden was her monument to a different world. It mediated the harshness of the surrounding landscape, providing a retreat from the unnaturalness of that barren land. Writing in 1996, Anne’s daughter noted that the Terachy garden ‘came into being because of a woman’s brave persistence, and ended up the showplace of the district. Planes flying over on the way to Darwin called it the oasis in the desert’.15 In this imagining, the garden was a true paradise – Anne’s own Garden of Eden – blessed by the gods, recognised for its testimony to the values of civilisation, the harnessing of nature through hard work and toil. The contrast with Mildred’s garden is telling. As befitted Mildred’s class, it was to be productive. In this sense it was also ‘civilised’, a public display of industriousness, of family productivity and respectability. But for Mildred, the success of her garden would determine her ability to escape it and move into a much more public world of medicine and service. For Anne, however, public success and recognition were reflected in the garden itself. It was a retreat from the more masculine world of commerce and agriculture, although can also be seen as a commodity,

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adding and reflecting value, and contributing to the standing of the family within the district. Mildred’s garden was of a different kind. It was a commodity, used for profit rather than pleasure, and reflected an understanding of land Mildred shared with her class and culture. To it she added her own individual, gendered meanings. The garden offered a path out of her domestic servitude into the public world. It was a site of liberation. In the transformed enclosure of the garden, her life would be made fruitful. The narratives which both Mildred and Anne told about their gardens reveal particular gender, class and colonial understandings of land, landscape and gardens. And just as the colonists believed God was on their side in bringing civilisation to this ‘barren’ land, so both women reflect the Christian imperative to render the land fruitful. In the process they created their own quite different versions of paradise. I have argued elsewhere that the garden was a crucial means by which women were able to establish a sense of place.16 What both gardens alert us to is the often troubled nature of that relationship. For Mildred, the garden provided a means of escaping the particular place where she resided. In the first half of the diary in particular, there is little attachment evident in the way in which she wrote about her garden. It was a place of labour and defeat. She battled against the land, her mother and her circumstances. The land did not produce, her hard work did not bear fruit. Mildred was unable to settle, to take root and she struggled against her lot in life as a woman. In March 1910 the family moved to Risdon and Mildred again set about creating a garden. Her commercial activities diversified and she built chook houses, set rabbit traps and sold their skins, planted potatoes, grain and rape. It appears her mother’s belief that the land was more fertile may have been correct. In her last entry, Mildred records her sense of satisfaction: I am now on the high road to prosperity. I have more than an acre of ground all fenced. Severil [sic] houses built on it. Everything paid for, and to crown it all I have got a dozen hens. half of them laying nearly every day. and eggs have been 2/- a dozen this winter and I am going to rare a lot of chickens this season. All being well I have a little house all to my self to sit in. I have bought this with my own money.

And so the diary ended, three years after it had begun. She may have had a room of her own, but she remained a long way from £500 a year. Perhaps Mildred’s dream had given way to realism and she was prepared to settle for less. In the earlier sections of the diary, however, we can see the disjuncture between Mildred’s dream and reality played out through her relationship with the barren land: in defeat, hostility and

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hopelessness. The ground would not yield and escape was her only hope. The family’s move to more productive land generated a different interaction. It gave back, a relationship developed. This was all measured in terms of productivity, and in the evidence of establishment. For Mildred, the other crucial ingredient was a sense of being settled, of staying in one place long enough to see a garden grow. Gone were fantasies of medicine, the ideal of self-sacrifice and saintly virtue; gone too, it seems, were the family tensions. Mildred had managed to achieve some sort of independence through her garden, the very place which had served as the site of so much of her internal and domestic conflict. And so we see the intersections between individual and cultural aspirations, and the inscription of these in terms of class and gender. Anne also battled against the land, but given her class status, her success was measured not in terms of productivity, but in the emerald green lawns denoting wealth and leisure, and her strong sense of having defied the odds to realise her vision. The sense of establishment and settlement was also crucial to Anne, but while for Mildred this allowed the time necessary for her gardening skills to be realised, for Anne it was evidence of having left behind the lifestyle, if not the values, of the ‘pioneers’, of having ‘moved on’ and established other ideals. What she could not envisage was their temporary nature. The vision of Empire her garden evoked was of a different time and place. For both Anne and Mildred, the garden was a site of desire and transformation. Mildred’s garden was fertilised with the fantasy of a different life. It was a place of escape and entry, her path to an alternative future. Anne also sought to transform the meaning of the land she worked but into a vision of fertility and harmony, of refined nature, of difference from the land around her. But the artificiality of this ideal was repeatedly exposed, first by the land itself, and then by the hand of neglect and more mercenary values. The Terachy property was sold in 1979 and was later resold and divided between family members; the garden was left to die. Subsequently one of Anne’s daughter’s acquired the house and the land around it, and attempted to tackle ‘the garden and the mess of dead and dying trees. Today it stands like a giant skeleton, a sad reminder of a more gracious age’.17 Exposed, the values of that ‘more gracious age’ can appear as transitory, and the garden revealed as bearing the cultural weight it does indeed carry. We can see now that the ‘graciousness’ of that world is a nostalgic evocation of a time when the fertility of the garden and the use of the surrounding land was based on the exploitation of indigenous labour and an unsustainable vision of landscape. The Empire was dead. Anne’s attempts to establish her sense of place imposed foreign meanings and methods on unsuitable land.

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A reading of gardens such as that I have been employing here, sees them as ‘sites of meaning’ which can tell us a great deal about the individual aspirations of their creators and their cultural frames of reference. The differences in the gardens of Mildred and Anne were not simply manifest in the physical garden, but in their modes of representation as well as in the women’s attitudes toward them. The ‘idea’ of the garden is what is at issue, and the ways in which that idea found expression. Cultural history allows us to see the landscape and its transformation as an historical source. The mistake is to believe that the meanings, metaphors and values invested in Mildred’s and Anne’s gardens no longer fertilise our gardens or our ideas about landscape. As George Seddon has written, possessing the land through the activity of gardening is ‘one of the tools of imperial power; it remains one of its symbols and the slowest to loosen its hold’.18 The cultural visions which Anne and Mildred sought to realise were appropriate to the differences in their class and circumstances, and neither could save their gardens from the hand of time, change or neglect. But so powerful have their visions proved that any shift in the values which sustain them can seem as unattainable as Mildred’s dream of studying medicine and £500 per year.

B I B L I O G R A P H I C N OT E S The intellectual framework for this essay draws on many different areas of academic inquiry. In understanding the concept of landscape I have been influenced by the work of numerous writers. Some useful collections include: Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988; Stuart Wrede and William Howard Adams, eds., Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the 20th Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1991; W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994. In Australia the work of George Seddon (Landprints) has been very important, as has Paul Carter’s The Road Botany Bay. John Dixon Hunt has done much ground-breaking work on the understanding of gardens, including his collection Garden History: Issues Approaches Methods, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, 1992. Other writers I have found useful include Simon Pugh, Garden-Nature-Language, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988; and Robert Riley, whose essay ‘Gender, Landscape, Culture: Sorting out some questions’, Landscape Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, Fall 1994, was one of the first to consider issues of gender and the garden. Two other somewhat eclectic collections on gardens are Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr., eds., The Meaning of Gardens:

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Idea, Place, and Action, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1990, and Charles Moore, William Mitchell and William Turnbull, Jr., eds., The Poetics of Gardens, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993. Rebecca Preston has also written an extremely useful essay on the idea of Empire and British gardens: ‘“The Scenery of the Torrid Zone”: The Imaginary Travels and the Culture of Exotics within 19th Century British Gardens’, Department of Geography: Royal Holloway, University of London, 1997.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to Céline Grasser, Rhys Isaac and Penny Russell for their extremely helpful and insightful comments.

13 C R E AT I N G T H E W H I T E COLONIAL WOMAN: MARY GAUNT’S IMPERIAL ADVENTURING AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL HISTORY A N G E L A WO O L L AC OT T

In the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, the period often cited by scholars as accelerated modernity, the new technologies of travel coincided with high imperialism. Not only imperial armies and administrators but colonial subjects took advantage of the possibilities of politically legitimated mobility to and within colonised territories. Moreover, this was a period of gender instability, with feminist movements pushing the boundaries of women’s social, educational, professional and political opportunities. For white women in the British colonies or dominion of Australia, the empire proved a global stage upon which they could act out novel, modern desires and ambitions. As they travelled to parts of the world exoticised by oriental and imperial discourses, and under British control, privileged Australian women contributed to shaping the ideology of white superiority and the particular role the white-settler colonies or dominions could play in the evolving imperial polity. From the 1870s, Australian performers like Nellie Stewart worked imperial entertainment circuits to appear in India and other colonies. For some Australian women, various sites of the empire became arenas for professional development. In 1904 Dr Helen Mayo, who received her basic medical education in Adelaide, went to London for further training at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children and the Tropical School of Medicine. By way of extended practice, after leaving London Mayo spent two months doing obstetrical work including home visiting at Coombe Hospital in Dublin, and then a year performing general medicine at St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi before returning to Australia.1 The British colonies in Africa were also sites for Australian women’s imperial adventuring. From 1922 to 1925 Annie Duncan travelled in Swaziland and other parts of southern Africa, living with her

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brother, seeing the country and participating in Christian missionary enterprise.2 Such examples can be multiplied. Seeing their access to other colonies as an extension of belonging to one of the empire’s white-settler colonies or dominions, Australian women claimed active roles in multiple imperial sites and staked out the broader imperial significance of the white colonial woman. This essay considers the ways in which one prominent Australian represented the meanings of the white colonial woman within imperial culture, setting up the white Australian woman as an ideal imperial type, using herself as an example but constructing a broader category and arguing for its imperial importance. A travel writer and novelist who became a recognised commentator in both England and Australia, Mary Gaunt exploited both the empire and the possibilities that this period of modernity offered women to create her unusual life and career. The racial and gender politics that saturate Gaunt’s writing present a refracted imperial view of Australian culture and the Australian polity; at the same time, Gaunt extrapolates Australian cultural politics to other imperial sites. Analysing Gaunt’s narratives presents a challenge to cultural history in Australia to broaden the frame of analysis beyond the colonial or national to the imperial and transnational. Gaunt’s confident sense of herself as an Australian on the imperial stage, her simultaneous interwoven nationalism and imperialism, and her popularity in both Australia and Britain all militate against the possibility of seeing Australian culture as self-contained. Moreover, her feminist and racist pro-imperial ideologies force us to consider how culture has worked transnationally (and transcolonially) even as it has propagated notions of national difference. ˆˆˆ Mary Gaunt was born in Victoria in 1861, grew up in privileged circumstances in its western goldfields and rural districts, and was educated at Grenville College, Ballarat. In 1881 she matriculated to the University of Melbourne (one of the first women to do so) but did not complete the arts course she began, turning instead to writing. She had some early success with her writing and took a trip to England at the beginning of the 1890s to advance her publishing career. In 1894 she married Dr Hubert Lindsay Miller, who had a medical practice in Warrnambool, Victoria. While she helped him with his office and ran the house, he supported her in her writing, and in the following few years she published a collection of short stories and two novels. In 1900 Miller died, and the next year Gaunt left newly federated Australia at the age of 40 to live in London and pursue a literary career.3 Her writing

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career, eventually quite successful, was based on her travels, usually undertaken explicitly in order for her to write about them. Gaunt’s travels took her to a range of countries, including Russia and China, but it is West Africa and Jamaica, historically linked parts of the empire, that predominate in both her travel writing and her fiction. Gaunt undertook two substantial journeys to the west coast of Africa, in 1908 and 1910. The title of her 1912 travel account, Alone in West Africa, suggests the significance she invested in having sometimes been the only ‘white’ woman in the colonised areas she traversed. She first went to Jamaica at the end of World War I, initially as a health cure, but she stayed for 18 months and returned again around 1930 on commission to research and write a book clearly intended to help develop Jamaica’s tourist trade. Her two trips each to West Africa and to Jamaica became grist for a slew of books. In fact she had co-authored (with John Ridgwell Essex) three novels set in West Africa between 1904 and 1909, but she then published, apart from her highly successful 1912 travel account, at least three more novels with similar settings between 1910 and 1926. Her writing about Jamaica includes two travel accounts, Where the Twain Meet (1922) and Reflections in Jamaica (1932), and at least one novel published in 1933. She was very conscious, from her first trip to Jamaica, that these two imperial sites which absorbed much of her energy and attention spanning three decades, were historically linked. Fatalistically, she commented: ‘When first I took passage to Jamaica it seemed as if purest chance were sending me there. But I begin to believe there is no such thing as chance, for when I remembered that Jamaica was an old slave colony I realised that this last coincidence was but the culmination of a curious series that have guided my steps through long years’.4 As she was well aware, having studied and written about the centuries-old fortresses of the slave trade that dot the west coast of Africa, enslaved Africans in Jamaica had come from the regions of her earlier travels. I focus on Gaunt in this essay for several reasons. Gaunt not only travelled to and spent many months in each of these two parts of the empire, but she researched them and became quite knowledgeable; indeed Where the Twain Meet is a history of Jamaica from slave-holding times to the twentieth century. She was regarded in the metropole as an authority on both places, for example being invited in 1912 to lecture to the British West African Association.5 If her fiction seems aimed at a popular audience, her travel writing was serious, but both sold well. Alone in West Africa went into four editions, while her 1910 novel set between Britain and West Africa, The Uncounted Cost, controversial because of its gender politics, had large sales and gained much

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attention. Her books were widely and favourably reviewed.6 Crucial to my choice of Gaunt for this essay is the fact that throughout her lifetime her writing was inflected by her sense of herself as a white colonial woman, specifically an Australian woman. One Australian journalist commented in 1912 in a nationalistic character sketch: ‘Mary Gaunt left Victoria for London more than ten years ago, but she is still a thorough Australian, energetic, enterprising, with a keen, quick sense of humour’.7 Gaunt drew upon her early life in Australia in all her non-fiction writing, and invoked her status as a white colonial to comment even-handedly on the British colonies she toured and on metropolitan Britain, often being quite critical of the metropole. Throughout her writings, Gaunt constructs an image of the white colonial woman – both herself and other women – as practical, intelligent, secular, brave, enterprising, hardy and likeable, frequently in specific contradistinction to Englishwomen, or at least, what Gaunt represents as the typical or fashionable Englishwoman. (She once mentioned to an interviewer that two of the other ‘white’ women she came upon in her West African travels were Australians.8) Gaunt used the English press as a platform to expound her nationalistic Australian views. In April 1912 she published in The Daily Chronicle a polemic against the flawed ‘sheltered life’ of English girls, which resulted, in her view, in their being ‘curiously dependent and self-conscious’. In specific contrast the young Australian woman was ‘a creature of resource’ whose ‘wholesome’ education had turned her into an ideal companion for the enterprising man. The inadequate upbringing of English girls had, according to Gaunt, serious imperial implications. The empire depended upon a ‘spirit of adventure’ that was imperilled if ‘half of the nation is not sure of itself’. Invoking her own observations, Gaunt indicted most of the Englishwomen she had met in West Africa as overly fearful: ‘They were afraid, heaven only knows what they were not afraid of, from black men and chills to driver ants and crawly things’. And their fears meant that they were ‘an intolerable burden to their husbands’.9 Australian women, Gaunt had explained earlier, were far more capable because the Australian climate and social mores both promoted independence, and the relative lack of domestic help meant even middle-class Australian women learnt practical skills.10 This message – that Australian and other white colonial women are more suited to and better workers in the imperial enterprise than Englishwomen – recurs throughout Gaunt’s travel and fiction writing. The fact that Gaunt’s fiction is animated by her imperial politics makes her work eminently suited to the methods of cultural analysis. Using the tools of cultural history, such as the insights of feminist and postcolonial studies and theories of whiteness as race discussed earlier in this

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volume, we can unravel Gaunt’s many stories that elaborate this message in order to understand its political meanings. Those political meanings will allow us to see at work assumptions of the early twentieth century about the interconnectedness of empire, the interconstitution of race and gender, and the central place of sexuality therein. Gaunt’s concern to establish in her writing the racial and sexual order that would best facilitate imperial expansion mirrored narratives of the White Australian nation. Gaunt knew from her travels the unsettled frontiers and turbulence of British territories in Africa, just as all white Australians knew that ‘their’ continent included ethnic Others and northern and western frontiers where Anglo, Aboriginal, Asian and islander cultures mixed. As Catriona Elder has argued, the narratives that underpinned the national project of a White Australia depended on attempts to fix the inherently unstable categories of race, gender and sexuality.11 Cognisant of Australia’s challenges to establish itself as a White nation, Gaunt sought to naturalise British rule in other parts of the empire through stories that depended on her sense of proper racial and gender arrangements. Gaunt’s ideologies confront us with the fact that she saw no contradiction between her explicit racism and her passionate feminism, a shadowy legacy for contemporary feminism to which other scholars have drawn attention in relation to other contexts.12 Gaunt presented her views of the empire at length in her travel writing as well as in her fiction. She believed that the British Empire was a global force for good and that trade was its engine and would benefit indigenous peoples. Yet she also contended that Christian missionary evangelising was wrong-headed and that the donations that supported it would be far better spent on uplifting the poor in Britain whose suffering, she contended, was unequalled in Australia or West Africa. She was overtly racist and believed that clear hierarchical lines needed to be drawn between white and black: ‘the white man has always ruled the black; so, I think, he must always rule … I hope that the white man will always rule Africa with a strong hand’.13 Gaunt attributed her own views on race at least partly to her Australianness, commenting at one point that as ‘an Australian’ she had ‘strong feelings on the question of colour’.14 Although she did not explicitly refer to the White Australia policy, the casual tone of this reference suggests that she expected her metropolitan readers to understand that racial hierarchies were a serious matter for Australians. In her earlier Australian fiction, Aborigines had appeared as unidimensional, dangerous ‘blackfellows’, who continually threatened the lives of the heroic white settlers, and who deserved simply to be killed.15 Gaunt’s writings on West Africa are full of traders and colonial administrators, and her respect for their work is clear. A central message

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that she continually reiterates is that for West Africa to flourish, to become the wealth-generating imperial possession for which it has the potential, these white men must be joined in their work of colonisation by white women. ‘Women are the crying need; quiet, brave, sensible women who are not daunted because the black cook spoils the soup, or the black laundryman ruins the tablecloth, who will take an intelligent view of life, and will make what is so much needed – a home for their husbands’.16 Gaunt’s strong abhorrence of miscegenation was one reason she urged white women to go to West Africa, but there were other reasons. A staunch feminist, she believed that women should be actively engaged in the work of the world, and she saw companionate marriage as offering women in the colonies a way to engage with their husbands’ responsibilities and support both the husbands and the broader imperial enterprise. But Gaunt’s feminism went beyond companionate marriage (in which category she clearly saw her own brief, happy marriage). She believed in, and advocated in her writing, the economic opportunities that the colonies offered to single women. ‘I have always been keenly interested in openings for women’, she wrote, ‘and inclined to be wrathful when other women talk as if matrimony were the only career for a woman. Of course matrimony is good for a woman, exactly as it is for a man, but I have always felt strongly that it is for the nation’s good that every woman should go down into the arena and work for her living as a man does’.17 Gaunt represents the potential of the colonies for economic and social independence for a single woman in two portraits, one factual account of a young woman she met on her postwar travels in Jamaica, and a fictional portrait set in West Africa that bears a marked resemblance to the former. Charlotte Maxwell Hall, whom Gaunt met in Jamaica, captured her fantasy: Hall, she exclaimed, was ‘entering upon a career I should have loved at her age’. Indeed, she wrote that meeting Hall was one of the most interesting things that happened in her whole 18-month Jamaican tour. She described Hall as ‘young, extremely good looking, if she will allow me to say so, charming, and, above all, she is strenuous and vivid with energy – indomitable’.18 Hall was employed as the government meteorologist, and also managed a 600-acre cattle farm she had inherited from her father; she had been born in Jamaica to English parents. She lived on the farm, with her servants but otherwise alone, on a very high hill with what Gaunt claimed was one of the best views in Jamaica, tending personally to her cattle and planting exotic trees on her property. She ran a small side business selling milk, and treated the minor ailments of the local (black) people if she could. To feminist, pro-capitalist and pro-imperial Gaunt, Hall represented hope for the future: ‘I saw a side of life which gave me not

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only great hopes of Jamaica, but for all the tropical possessions of Britain. Here was a place run – by a woman, a young woman – and run frankly for gain and for the good of all the people surrounding it’.19 Gaunt’s feminist fantasy was so inspired by Hall that she drew upon her to create the protagonist of her 1926 novel set in West Africa, The Forbidden Town, suggesting that, for Gaunt, Jamaica and West Africa could be interchangeable settings. Fabia Vrooman, like Hall, is 24 years old, beautiful, energetic, practical and strong-willed. Unlike Hall, she was born in England, but her heritage is crucially not just English: her father was a Dutchman naturalised as English, and more importantly in Gaunt’s characterisation, on her mother’s side she is descended from (American) New England stock. The repeated invocations of that New England heritage explain, in Gaunt’s logic, why Vrooman is so confident, strong and brave, unlike most Englishwomen. Gaunt’s category of the capable white colonial woman, then, includes more than just Australians. Vrooman, who has worked as a stenographer for a rubber company since she was 17, suddenly inherits an old Dutch rubber estate on the ‘Mahogany Coast’ of Africa from a distant relative. She knows from her job in the rubber company that rubber is in ever-increasing demand, that rubber prices are escalating, and that the Mahogany Coast is a good place to grow it. She goes to the city to consult with the merchant company that dominates that part of West Africa, Briscoe and Belfont, from whom she learns that the estate is in great disrepair. Finding herself patronised by the firm’s senior director (but less so by the younger managing director), she rejects their low bid for the estate and resolves to throw in her job and go to Africa to manage it herself. The plot is among the more melodramatic of Gaunt’s tales, with an extended action sequence that reveals the existence of an illegal slave trade between the British colony and a Portuguese colony. Because the book is set in 1925, the news of the slave trade (that borders on indentured labour) may have been a surprise to metropolitan readers. Most relevant to my point here is that, despite great difficulties when she arrives at her estate, Vrooman succeeds in turning the property around, through her own hard work as a hands-on manager and her shrewdness. The detailed portrait of Vrooman as a practical and humane estate manager and head of her own household is explicitly feminist, yet the feminism is undercut to the extent that Vrooman ends up in a romantic union with the younger managing director of Briscoe and Belfont, who comes to West Africa and sees her in action. But it is not completely undercut, because their marital plans include her continuing to run the estate.20 The romantic unions between heterosexual white colonisers that characterise Gaunt’s fiction of West Africa are directly related to her

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strident condemnation of miscegenation, a stance that, significantly, shifts somewhat by the time of her 1933 Jamaican novel. She asserts starkly in Alone in West Africa: ‘Tall, stalwart, handsome as is many a negro, no white woman may take a black man for her husband and be respected by her own people; no white man may take a black girl, though her dark eyes be soft and tender, though her skin be as satin and her figure like that of the Venus of Milo, and hope to introduce her among his friends as his wife’.21 That this was Gaunt’s own view in 1912, not just that of others, is clear from her West African fiction. The impossibility of interracial sexuality, as she saw it, is most evident in her very first West African novel, The Arm of the Leopard, co-written with John Ridgwell Essex in 1904. Gaunt, of course, had not been to West Africa when they wrote this book, and her co-authorship with Essex was in good part because she depended upon him for knowledge of the region. The story is set in 1894–95 on the West African coast around Accra and in territories exploited by the British Royal Niger Company. Margaret Rivers, a beautiful and idealistic young woman from rural Oxfordshire, has taken passage to West Africa to marry her fiance, the African Dr James Craven whom she met and became engaged to while he was studying medicine at Cambridge. On the boat out the other passengers are shocked to learn of her intention to marry a black man, and seek to dissuade her, none more energetically than the tough manly prospecting Scotsman David Lindsay (who seems to be a reference to David Livingstone except for his lack of religiosity). Before the boat arrives in Accra she admits that she doesn’t really love Craven and had only intended to marry him out of kindness; she pledges herself to Lindsay instead. The plot depends upon Craven’s reaction to his rejection by Rivers – which he of course instantly recognises as racially driven – and becomes in fact a character study of, in the words of the title of the first chapter, ‘The “Educated Nigger”’. Bearing out the racist views of the white people on the boat, Craven (whose name Gaunt seems to have chosen deliberately) behaves very badly. As one of several English-educated African men in Gaunt’s West African fiction, but the one developed at most length, Craven exemplifies what these characters have in common, the fact that despite their education, their knowledge of Western civilisation and their upper-crust English accents, they are still ‘barbaric’.22 Rather than taking his rejection in a gentlemanly fashion, Craven reacts by racing off into the bush and making a devilish pact with a ‘Ju-ju witch doctor’ to murder Lindsay. The worst part of the pact is that he agrees that if the witch doctor can get rid of Lindsay, and Craven marries Rivers, he will give up their first-born son as a blood sacrifice. For most of the novel Craven seems ruthless about this pact being

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carried out. At the novel’s end, however, he is redeemed. Partly through Rivers’ entreaties, and partly because it transpires that Lindsay’s murder was to be accomplished by a wholesale attack on an English trading post, he relents and tries to avert the attack. He fails to do so, but achieves his redemption by protecting Rivers from attack at the risk of his own life. In fact it is unclear at the conclusion if he survives his bullet wounds, but this seems apparently unimportant compared to his racial salvation. The book ends with Lindsay proclaiming: ‘Dr. Craven … I’ve wronged you. You’re a white man, after all’. Thus the ‘educated nigger’ reveals that the tenets of Western civilisation have not been fully lost on him, and although he cannot marry the white woman, he can, honorifically, overcome his racial inferiority.23 Gaunt’s strictures against miscegenation are repeated in her 1910 and 1913 West African novels, although not at such length. By her 1933 Jamaican novel, however, her views have shifted remarkably, perhaps because it was evident to her that interracial sexuality in Jamaica had such a long history by the time of her visits that decrying it was pointless. Perhaps she recognised too the historical complexity of racial politics in Jamaica, under British control since the mid-seventeenth century, in a way that she did not see in West Africa, colonised only at the end of the nineteenth century. Her novel Harmony: A Tale of the Old Slave Days in Jamaica is set in the late-eighteenth century against a backdrop of the abolition movement in Britain and the prospect of the possible ending of the slave trade and even slavery itself. The point of the plot is to show how racially and emotionally complicated relations between enslaved and free in Jamaica had been. Roger Thole is master of the sugar plantation Harmony in the Montego Bay district. He does not love his wife, who is represented as selfish, lazy, stupid and endlessly complaining (the dependent Englishwoman of Gaunt’s trope). They have a four-year-old son Roger who is physically fair like her, but Thole also has another four-year-old son, the product of a brief sexual relationship he had with his beautiful young quadroon slave Hesba (who herself was sired by her former master and supposedly has some of the best blood of England in her veins). The slave son is dark and handsome, supposedly the spitting image of Thole himself, and is the apple of his father’s eye, contrary to law and racial ideology. When the plantation is hit by smallpox, his wife is ill and his legitimate son dies, Thole pulls a switch known only to a couple of the slaves: he announces that it was his slave son who died and is buried, and meanwhile he whisks his boy by Hesba to the port, claiming that to save his ‘son’ from the smallpox he must send him to England to be raised by his sister. When Roger Junior returns from England 17 years later, a tall, handsome, darkhaired, university-educated young gentleman, his secret (unbeknown

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even to himself) is safe at first. But on the morning of his wedding to the widely desired daughter of the neighbouring plantation, Roger Junior’s slave status is revealed and the wedding cancelled. Roger Junior is sequestered in chains and tortured; with the help of his birth mother and father he escapes and lives for months in ‘the cockpits’, the remote and wild mountain hideout of all escaped slaves. There he learns of a planned slave uprising, and he risks his freedom to return to his father’s plantation to warn them. He goes to another plantation too to issue the warning and finally brings the local regiment of soldiers to the Montego Bay plantations, where the uprising is consequently quelled and bloodshed averted. At the end of the novel, Roger Thole Senior buys his son’s freedom (technically he had been owned by another family member), and Roger Junior, now redeemed and a hero, is about to embark for England, with ample funds supplied by his father, perhaps to study law. His fiancee Petronella has maintained her love for him throughout, and it is unclear at the end whether or not their union will eventuate. Gaunt may well have left this key part of the plot indeterminate because even then she was not prepared to sanction an ‘interracial’ union (and it is no doubt significant to the possible union that Roger Junior is an octaroon who passes for white), but the indicators are that the two probably will find a way to marry. Thus, in contrast to the impossibility of interracial sexuality expounded in her earlier writing, Gaunt is here entertaining the plausibility of what would have been considered in late eighteenth-century Jamaica an interracial marriage. In the context of the novel, Roger Junior and Petronella are well suited and love each other. If Roger’s secret had not been revealed, the plot suggests, they would have been very and appropriately happy. Moreover, it is clearly significant that Thole Senior’s English-born wife is cast as unattractive both physically and morally, while the enslaved Hesba is not only beautiful but a good and kind woman, and it seems therefore natural that her son should be the one beloved by his father. Gaunt’s racial politics have shifted away from the ideologies she expressed with Essex in The Arm of the Leopard, even if Roger Junior, the hero of Harmony who is bound for England and success at the end of the novel, is racially mixed, unlike Dr Craven. Indeed, her earlier position had included an indictment of the racially mixed as unlikely to be educable, whereas Roger becomes well educated. Despite the prominence of interracial sexuality in these two novels, Gaunt’s book that was truly controversial at the time of its publication was neither The Arm of the Leopard nor Harmony. And it was not racial politics that sparked the controversy surrounding her 1910 novel, The Uncounted Cost, but gender politics, specifically her feminist refusal of the sexual double standard. The Uncounted Cost was banned by the

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Times Book Club and circulating libraries, the unintended effect of which was to markedly increase its sales.24 A message that recurs in Gaunt’s fiction is that the colonies offer redemption for both white men and white women – as well as for a few of the colonised. This message is at its starkest in The Uncounted Cost where the two protagonists, Anne Lovat and Joseph Cunningham, each find redemption from what the novel posits as comparable sins of commission. Joseph Cunningham is, at the start of the novel, a captain on a Royal Navy ship. He engages in a flirtatious but unconsummated relationship with a married woman, and on a weekend’s leave stays overnight at her house (in separate bedrooms). He ought to have left a contact address with his ship, even for such a short leave, but omits to do so because it would impugn the reputation of the married woman. His ship leaves harbour on an unscheduled tour during the weekend and because he is not notified to rejoin it, he is found to be AWOL. He is court-martialled and dismissed from the navy, partly because he continues to refuse to implicate the married woman by admitting where he had been and by asking for his behaviour to be unofficially condoned as what all men do. With his naval career, which had been widely regarded as leading to the position of admiral, wrecked, Cunningham joins the Colonial Service and is posted to West Africa. Anne Lovat, meanwhile, is a struggling novelist who lives in a flat in central London. For two years, she had been romantically and – what was considered so daring on Gaunt’s part – sexually involved with a junior officer in the navy, to whom she regarded herself as engaged, awaiting only the right financial circumstances to marry. Suddenly her fiance throws her over, and she is not only heartbroken but has to confront ‘the uncounted cost’ of her sexual life, the fact that she is now considered by some unmarriageable – although she herself does not dwell on that so much as her broken heart. Lovat and Cunningham, who have met once in England, meet again on holiday on the French Riviera, he falls in love with her and asks her to marry him – only to implicitly withdraw his offer when she tells him very delicately of her previous sexual union. A year or so later Lovat agrees to accompany her cousin on a visit to West Africa to the cousin’s husband, a medical officer in the colonial service. Lovat hopes the trip will provide material for her writing (which positions Gaunt’s character as something of an alter ego). Out in West Africa she runs again into her former fiance, realises that she no longer loves him, and realises instead her attraction to the more mature, intellectual and responsible Cunningham, who happens to be stationed at the same outpost as her cousin’s husband and has risen to the level of District Commissioner. Under the life-threatening circumstances of an uprising of the indigenous people, Lovat

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increasingly admires Cunningham, and Cunningham, aware of his continuing love for Lovat, realises the unimportance of her prior sex life. They pledge their love and commitment to each other, just as the army arrives to save them from their siege and possible death. The violent circumstances of colonialism, then, provided each their redemption from sexual sins committed in the metropole and allowed them to find happiness together. What was so shocking to some of Gaunt’s contemporaries, of course, was her feminist proposition that a woman who had been sexually active deserved to find redemption and happiness, and her equation between Cunningham’s unconsummated dalliance with a married woman and Lovat’s radical stance that it was sensible to have a sexual relationship with the man she planned to marry and with whom, she had hoped, she would spend her life. Significantly, Lovat never regrets her sexual activity, despite the heartbreak, loneliness and rejection she suffers in consequence.25 While the starker, less hypocritical (in some ways) exigencies of colonialism and colonial social life, according to Gaunt, offer redemption for colonisers, they also provide a litmus test for moral qualities and character in explicitly gendered terms. Thus intellectually and morally stronger colonising men and women can identify each other, and each other’s desirable characteristics, and make partnerships that will be happy and imperially productive. Similarly, Gaunt found the violence attendant upon colonialism frequently convenient in her plot resolutions, so that in at least two of her novels pairings end up being rearranged at the expense of the weaker or less likeable characters. Her 1906 novel Fools Rush In: A West African Story, co-written with Essex, is her most extended condemnation of missionaries, the ‘fools’ of the title. Two male English missionaries, in a region of Northern Nigeria, decide to bring out from England their wife and fiancee respectively. The two missionary men are painted as not only mistaken in their enterprise, but effeminate. The missionary women, both smarter and more pragmatic than their men, and in that sense more masculine, quickly become disillusioned with both Christian evangelising (to Muslims) and the men. By the end of the novel, the missionary husband is dead as a result of his own folly during an indigenous conflict, and the missionary fiance spurned. In their place, the now-not-so-missionary women have developed romantic unions with the local colonial service administrator and his military adjunct.26 These men, in their turn, have shifted from their early stance that ‘West Africa is no place for a white woman’ (a view that Gaunt attacks continually) and come to appreciate the women as not only attractive companions in an isolated outpost but sensible potential partners in their work.

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Colonialism, according to Gaunt, offers white women all kinds of possibilities: economic opportunities, a context for companionate marriage, and redemption from past mistakes, even sexual mistakes considered irredeemible by dominant metropolitan culture. But the empire requires the right kind of woman, strong, hard-headed, worldly (not other-worldly), intelligent and practical women, like those nurtured in the more pragmatic environment of the white-settler colonies or dominions such as Australia. Gaunt took pride in exemplifying this ideal white colonial woman, through her travels ‘alone’ (that is, sometimes with only her indigenous servant and carriers), often in great discomfort and through dense jungle. In one representative cameo she describes with satisfaction the results of her own practical abilities. She was staying briefly at the British Consulate in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and could not help noticing the poor light emitted by the consulate’s ‘excellent lamps’. Realising that neither the consul nor his servants knew how the lamps worked, she fixed them herself and the consulate became properly illuminated.27 Such small incidents, as well as larger issues like the prevention of miscegenation, both represent, for Gaunt, what the right kind of women have to offer the empire. ˆˆˆ Mary Gaunt’s writings compel us to consider several aspects of early twentieth-century Australian culture. Perhaps the most obvious is the need to look beyond the national frame, and indeed to question the possibility of such a frame at all. ‘Australian’ cultural history must certainly incorporate the subnational and the transnational, at the same time that it recognises the constructedness and contingent nature of all national boundaries. Gaunt’s lifelong insistence on her own Australianness and repeated invocation of that Australianness – and reminiscences of Australia – in all of her travel writings, despite the fact that she never returned to Australia to live, show how Australianness could be constructed in multiple parts of the globe. Similarly, Gaunt’s strident pro-imperialism illustrates the fact that many Australians in the early twentieth century saw no great contradiction between Australian nationalism and the expansion of the British Empire. The ways in which most Australians reconciled their nationalism with support for the empire were central to Australian culture. Gaunt’s racism, moreover, presents an imperial context for Australian race relations. Her comfortable assertion that as an Australian she had ‘strong feelings on the question of colour’ is an implicit reference to the White Australia policy and to the subjugation of Aborigines in Australia, and her lack of embarrassment about her racism is conso-

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nant with dominant Australian attitudes. Gaunt applies such racist attitudes to other parts of the empire and shows their direct connection to pro-imperialism. Gaunt’s knowledge of the meanings of the White Australia policy, adopted particularly to curb Chinese immigration, was rooted in the fact that her father had been an official ‘protector’ of the Chinese in the Victorian goldfields of the mid-nineteenth century. As a child, she had witnessed the violence against the Chinese that necessitated their ‘protection’.28 Yet in most of Gaunt’s writing, she assumes the superiority of ‘white’ people and the necessity of imperial rule. And, of course, her merging of feminism and pro-imperialism makes clear the complicity of such feminism with racist hierarchies in Australia as elsewhere, a complicity that needs to be recognised and that would create obstacles for feminist internationalism. Gaunt’s very valorising of the white colonial woman as fitter for the empire than many Englishwomen was directly related to her racism. The practical, hard-headed (although also at times humane) colonial women she admired and created as characters enacted her assumptions of white superiority and justifications for British rule. By allowing us insight into these aspects of early twentieth century Australian and transnational imperial culture, Gaunt’s writings illustrate the utility of cultural analysis. A body of writing by an Australian woman elsewhere in the empire shows the interconnectedness of imperial culture, a culture in which Australians participated and to which they contributed. It also shows the desire to create through narrative the racial and gender order that would shore up, at once, both nation and empire.

FURTHER READING Anthologies that provide other examples of the cultural application of postcolonial and feminist theory to a variety of imperial sites include Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1998; Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997; Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader, Routledge, New York, 2000; and Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1998. On the reasons to question national frames, see Antoinette Burton, ‘Who needs the nation? Interrogating “British” History’, in Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire, pp. 137–53. On whiteness as racial identity, see David R.

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Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History, Verso, London, 1994; Ruth Frankenberg, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History, Verso, London, 1992, and Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Carroll Pursell and Jonathan Sadowsky for reading a draft of this essay and making helpful suggestions.

14 ‘THE EMPIRE WAS A BAR OF SOAP’: LIFE STORIES AND RACE IDENTITY AMONG BRITISH EMIGRANTS TRAVELLING TO AUSTRALIA, 1945–1971 A L I S TA I R T H O M S O N

I’ve always been excited and intrigued by the contribution which life stories can make to historical understanding. The recorded memories of Australian war veterans; the diaries of adult learners; the autobiographical writing of postwar British immigrants: in each case life histories have revealed the hidden histories of groups of people – and of particular historical experiences – which are often missing in traditional documentary sources. Perhaps most importantly, life stories illuminate the subjective meanings of experience: what it felt like to be under fire; the mature student’s struggle with new learning; why an immigrant family might shed its Australian dream and return to live in Britain. Of course, life stories have been a controversial source for historical enquiry. Most obviously, in the 1970s oral history was the focus of savage criticisms from positivist historians who argued that memory was an unreliable source because of the distortions of age and bias, and that the interview was tainted by the contribution of the historian who might shape the answers he wanted to hear. Oral historians responded by developing rules for checking the reliability of the memories they collected, but also by arguing that the so-called unreliability of personal testimony might be a resource as much as a problem. The silences and contradictions in remembering might offer clues about the complex and conflictual nature of past experience; the myths and fabulations of memory could reveal the significance and meaning of those past experiences in the present-day life and identity of the narrator, and the entangled relationship between an individual account and cultural memory. In recent years there has been an explosion of theoretical and methodological literature about the interpretation and use of life stories, not just amongst oral historians, but also in the related fields of life-story sociology and narrative psychology, and in auto/

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biographical approaches in literary studies, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistic and communication studies, as well as other work which explores the relationships between identity, memory and personal narrative. My own approach to working with life stories is a type of pragmatic ‘double take’. On the one hand I believe that personal testimony is an invaluable source which can help us to make better histories, informed by a nuanced understanding of intimate lives in social contexts and of the relationships between social forces and individual agency. On the other hand, in working with life stories we need to be alert to the ways in which they are shaped by the contexts and relationships of storytelling, by the narrative possibilities of language and by the creative processes of memory. In other words, when we use life stories to recreate and interpret past experience we need to know something about the creation of our source and the ways in which the story mediates that experience. And yet at the same time we need to be careful to see the story as more than just a source for finding out about the past. The life story is also part of the history. For example, migrants tell stories at every stage of the journey: they tell their families why they are going and what they expect to become; they write shipboard journals which record their new experiences and first impressions; they send letters home which describe (and conceal) life in a new land; they compose poems of pain and regret; they write memoirs which construct a personal history of immigrant achievement. The stories show how the personal history of migration was understood and articulated at every stage and, crucially, they remind us that words – of enthusiasm and hope, pain and regret – shape action. At every stage of the migrant’s lifelong journey the stories she tells influence the decisions she makes, about leaving home, about settling in a new country, or about returning to the old country. This case study uses personal accounts by British postwar migrants to Australia, focusing on accounts written during and immediately after the voyage to Australia. It considers the ways in which migrants defined themselves through their meetings with the ‘natives’ as they stopped off at the various ports of empire. What notions of race and empire did British migrants bring as cultural baggage to Australia, and how were their identities reshaped by the voyage itself? The case study shows how national identities are constructed within particular social contexts and through a dynamic tension between a sense of self and a sense of the other. The chapter also explores the nature of ‘ship’ stories and their use in cultural history.

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S H I P S TO R I E S More than a million British people emigrated to Australia in the quarter century after World War II. Most of them took advantage of the assisted passage migration scheme by which adults travelled for ten pounds and children went free. Several years ago I began to collect personal accounts of this migration, and was immediately struck by the significance of the ‘archival history’ of these accounts. The archival and publication histories of personal narratives – the processes of production, preservation, archiving, cataloguing and publication which explain how and why certain accounts end up in the public domain and are thus available to researchers – is often revealing about the personal meaning of experience and the cultural significance of the stories told. It is not surprising that most of the available British postwar migrant diaries are contemporary accounts of the sea voyage to Australia. The voyage was a special time and a significant rite of passage with a definite beginning and end. Many passengers wanted to record a momentous event which was often their first overseas trip, either for themselves or as a record to send friends and relatives. On board ship the migrants had the time for reflection and writing which was not so readily available in everyday working and domestic lives in Britain or Australia – many were writing a journal for the first time – and the shipboard journals usually end at the start of the new life in Australia. In time, the writers or other members of their families recognised that their migration experience had a wider cultural significance as a significant chapter in Australia’s postwar history, and decided that the shipboard journals were valuable historical records which should be deposited in a state archive. We often think of journals and diaries as private, ‘uncensored’ documents, but in fact they are very often written with a real or imaginary audience in mind. For example, the Ulster nurse Margery Black, travelling to Australia in 1949, recorded her thoughts and impressions in a duplicate book and at each port of call she posted copies back to family and friends; her scathing criticisms of the ‘disgusting English habits’ of some of her fellow passengers are clearly addressed to an Ulster audience. Matt Dickinson, a Co-op grocer from Northumberland travelling to Melbourne with his wife and three children in 1955, produced his journal as a guide for his brothers, who were also considering emigration, and thus his account includes careful descriptive passages about what they should expect – and what they should bring – as they travel to Australia. In each of these examples the imagined audience influences the writing of the journal.1 Some journals are more intimate and introspective. In 1946 Albert Walker left his young bride in Chesterfield and set off by train to

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Plymouth and thence to Australia where he hoped to carve out a new life for them both. Desperately sad and lonely after leaving Marjory, and anxious about his uncertain Australian future, the emotions of leaving are heightened by a journey made so lovely by the glorious Spring weather, we were having at the time. England is so lovely in Spring. Everything is happy and the country smiles at every turn. This made it much more difficult to leave, and I thought of all those lovely places I had seen … and wondered whether I should see the like again and whether one day I should return and see them again.2

Whether written primarily for oneself or for a wider audience, these emigration journals provide a way of articulating and making sense of the experiences of travel and disjuncture. For example, in a memoir written in 1995, Graham Little recalls the diary he kept as a 15-year-old emigrating with his family in 1954: The prospect of the voyage brought out my third diary, a red exercise book with tables on the back. I filled in my name in sloping handwriting, and under Subject I put ‘Memoirs of a Trip to Australia on S.S. Strathnaver’. Later I wrote underneath this ‘Diary’ in case I’d been too ambitious. Now I started to write down my feelings, even before we left England …

The process of emigration changes the way young Graham keeps a diary, and the diary records, articulates and shapes the ways he thinks and feels about his migration. ‘The day before leaving, it’s all up and down, waking in excitement then having qualms, then again thinking but I wouldn’t miss it for the world: That is how it has gone on all day. Just at this minute I am wishing we were embarking today – I think!’ These minute-by-minute bulletins and the assumption that the imaginary reader will enjoy the humour of it are new in my diary-keeping. Being for the high jump, even if it’s just emigrating, frees you up perhaps.3

Young Graham Little’s daily bulletins evoke the turbulent emotions of emigration, and they remind us of the significant role of the journal as a resource for personal comprehension and explanation. And yet journal writing is also a cultural process, and each narrator uses the language and meanings of his or her culture to make sense of experiences and events. On the voyage to Australia the ten pound Poms drew upon British cultural memories of empire and oceans to articulate their own intimate experiences.

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B R I T I S H C U LT U R A L M E M O RY A N D M A R I T I M E I M A G I N AT I O N As Graham Little recalls, ‘Ships were big news in these days’. The quarter century after World War II was the last great age of ocean-going migration to the New World, which ended as jet aeroplanes gradually became a more practical and economic alternative during the 1960s. As a British migrant in Perth during the late 1950s, Elizabeth Jolley recalls that ‘[t]he arrival of a great ship was an occasion’ and laments that ‘[v]ery few ships come now except the container ships and who would throw streamers and sing to a container?’4 For some migrants, the sea voyage conjured up a powerful collective memory of Britain as a maritime nation. At Plymouth Hoe, Albert Walker ‘did enjoy the feeling of standing there and imagining the feelings of those who first sighted the Spanish fleet’. Upon boarding the Empire Brent in Glasgow in 1949, ex-Navy man Sydney Hart reflects upon his own migration adventure: ‘Maybe the ghosts of Francis Drake, Captain Cook and Anson were beckoning me on. … I could smell the assorted tangs of Singapore and the fragrant East, together with the thousand other odours that in combination spell adventure and romance’.5 Teenager Graham Little charted his own voyage through an imagined world of sea-going adventure: I liked to keep remembering that we were in a ship and sailing across famous seas or, on another scale, only a speck in the ocean, hardly bigger than the birds who dropped down from the sky when the scraps were thrown out in the ship’s wake. I liked to picture us as a pencil line stretching further and further across the charts to the underside of the world. I liked the sound of old timbers creaking in the library and on the stairs and listened to it as I went off to sleep at night. You could imagine an old wooden sailing ship as a sort of skeleton within this great big iron and turbine machine.6

Historical and literary imagination generated expectations through which the migrants might comprehend and compare their own voyage: as a great adventure; as an improvement upon nineteenth-century migrant ships; or as a travesty of the ‘luxury cruise’ some expected. The twelve thousand mile voyage to Australia – typically four weeks though the Mediterranean and Suez and across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle – impressed upon the migrants the great distance between Britain and Australia and the huge gap they were opening up in their lives. To keep track of their whereabouts and yet locate themselves in relation to ‘home’, some charted the distance they travelled each day and recorded their inexorable movement away from British time. For the Northumberland grocer Matt Dickinson, Greenwich Mean Time

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served as a metaphor for Britishness and as a way of marking his place in the world. ‘Twenty one days out’ he visits the ship’s bridge: I was very interested to notice that the sprinkler fire fighting equipment were British made, despite the fact that this ship was originally an American built, small aircraft carrier and was refitted for passengers in Italy. The Radar, Compass and charts were also British Products. The Chronometer which was Swiss, was showing ships time and GMT. 10.45am ships time and 5.15am GMT. It makes you realise how much Greenwich is depended upon, by not only the British but all nationalities.7 And yet despite these attempts to mark time and space, the sea voyage is also an extraordinary liminal period, as the migrants move between the two countries and their two lives, between memory and imagination. In 1959, Ivy Skrowronski left Bournemouth for South Australia with her Polish refugee husband and two children. In 1986 she writes about their time at sea: One never reads what happens to migrants during the journey to their new country. Temporarily homeless, plunged into a no-man’s-land between countries, it is a very strange feeling indeed. One door has closed behind them, another remains unopened, but the prospect of three weeks on a ocean liner for £10 per head, with children travelling free, is enough to tuck their worries away for a while.8

The aeroplane flights which slowly began to replace the sea voyage to Australia in the 1960s provided a dramatically different travel experience. The day after arriving in Perth by plane in 1965, Roger Kilworth explains in a tape sent back to England that ‘I’m still recovering from the flight’. He describes a nightmare flight with no sleep in cramped seating, terrible noise, frequent refueling stops and delays, and peculiar meals – and wishes that he had come by boat like other immigrant friends. The plane trip was physically grueling, but perhaps most important it did not offer an interregnum of time and space. A month at sea might allow for carefree relaxation or provide opportunities to make plans for arrival and learn more about their destination; each migrant ship carried an information officer who organised talks and film shows about Australia, though few migrants recall learning much of great value. Above all, the month at sea offered the opportunity for significant reflection about migration and its dramatic reshaping of the life course. In an autobiographical essay, Elizabeth Jolley, who emigrated to Perth with her husband and children in

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1959, evokes the potential of the ocean voyage for memory and imagination, for desolation and for hope: But for all the voyage remains a physical and emotional experience which cannot be erased. At some point in the journey the migrant is hit by the irrevocable nature of his decision. Even if he starts back as soon as he reaches his destination he will never be the same again. Suddenly there was, during my own long journey, the realisation that the world is enormous. During a day when the ship was waiting in the Great Bitter Lake, the calm expanse of colourless water, with its lack of concern for human life, caused a sense of desolation more acute and painful than anything experienced during the first term of boarding school. Memory followed memory; the stillness of willow trees along soft green river banks and deep grass in water meadows where sweetbreathed cows, straying close to the field paths, waited to be herded for milking. Then there were the field flowers, the cow parsley, purple thistles, nettles and the dock leaves so close to the nettles, a remedy for stings. And there were grass-covered graves with groundsel growing at the edges in a walled cemetery. All these images came from a time far removed from the time preceding the voyage. We had long left the Midlands and had encountered the cold hostility of Edinburgh and the apparently more affable but essentially exclusive world of Glasgow. We should have been experienced migrants. The strangest of all was the vision of my father walking alongside the ship waving farewell as he used to walk and wave alongside the train every time I left for boarding school. And ridiculous as it was, I wanted to rush back to him, to hear his voice once more. But which of us can walk on water, I mean, long distance.9

Recently, I’ve been collecting retrospective accounts of the voyage to Australia – like Elizabeth Jolley’s autobiographical essays – and comparing these memoirs and interviews with the contemporary accounts of ship journals. At first sight these retrospective accounts do often lack the very precise details which are recorded in journals, and they are less able to provide ‘minute by minute’ bulletins which record how thoughts and feelings change during the course of the voyage. The retrospective accounts tend to frame the memory of the voyage in particular, significant terms: for example as a luxury cruise almost beyond the imagination of postwar working-class Britons, or as a torrid voyage in cramped conditions on a hastily refitted wartime troopship; as an event marred by sea-sickness or enlivened by romance. Some retrospective accounts focus on an iconic memory (for example, the numbness and desperation of departure; or the first plate-load of food piled up in front of an English child used to rationing; or the moment when the migrant was hit ‘by the irrevocable nature of his decision’) and use that single

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memory to frame the emigration story in specific terms, as the start of a personal disaster, as an introduction to land of plenty, or as a momentous turning point. Of course in an interview we can often push beyond these well-worked stories and draw out more detailed and contradictory memories. But those well-rehearsed iconic memories are themselves revealing about the enduring significance of the voyage in memory and identity, and how meaning has been crystalised in particular, resonant terms. One other notable difference between retrospective accounts of the emigrant voyage and journals of the time concerns the ways in which they report attitudes about, and relationships with, the foreigners that they met along the way. Some of the more reflective and politically aware memoirists recall their own earlier attitudes and feelings with a degree of self-criticism, but more often the retrospective accounts either consciously or unconsciously self-censor racial stereotypes which have become less socially or politically acceptable. By contrast, the emigrants’ contemporary journals are remarkably frank in this regard, and offer a window onto postwar British working-class racial and imperial attitudes. A British imperial identity – though sometimes challenged within the ship along the fracture lines of social class and ethnicity – was reinforced by the migrants’ confrontation with ‘the natives’ as they traversed the ports and harbours of Empire.

T H E E M P I R E WA S A B A R O F S OA P In part, the British migrants experience their journey and stop-overs as excited tourists, and are delighted to see places that they had imagined but never dreamed of visiting. Indeed, the train trip across Britain towards the port of embarkation offers for some migrants their first views of the country beyond their own region. The Dickinsons travel from Northumberland to London with wide-eyed enthusiasm for new places, and when they overnight in London, ‘Trafalgar Square, with the pigeons, is a sight that everyone who passes through London tries to see. Glenise and David were thrilled, but David was bent on killing one … ’ Throughout the voyage Matt Dickinson writes with excitement and interest about changing climatic conditions, sealife and birdlife, and about the places that they visit along the way. In 1965 the Jenkins family from Walton-upon-Thames visits Pompeii in Naples, goes shopping in Port Said and relishes a day excursion in Ceylon, and Thomas Jenkins, formerly a journalist with the Scottish Sunday Express, writes that ‘we have enjoyed our trips ashore – really enjoyed them, memorably and in depth’. The migrants are also eager shoppers, whether it is trading by rope with vendors bobbing in small crafts around their ship

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in Port Said, or visiting the bazaars and duty-free shops that proliferate around the ports. In Colombo in 1951 the extended Saxton family from Essex go ashore for the first time and their self-appointed local guide leads the unwitting tourists to a jewellery shop: The sales staff ambushed us. And Pop cried out in exasperation, that we were emigrating to make money, not to spend it! Outside the store, Pop offered our guide ten bob to piss off.10

The glimpse of ‘the Orient’ is a potent experience for many of the migrants. As the Jenkins sail out of Naples, with the ship playing popular British tunes, ‘A cool voice beside us said, “Edge of the known world. What now, eh?” … We felt much more emotional then we had done when we left Southampton. … The words so exactly mirrored our thoughts … ’ The North African coastline, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Aden and Bombay or perhaps Ceylon – the route of the migrants’ ships evokes a rich and complex set of British and imperial imaginaries about the Orient. As their ship passes Mecca, Matt Dickinson notes that from here the followers of Mohammed ‘swept across NORTH AFRICA, spreading Islam by fire and sword’. When the ‘beautiful spectacle’ of the North African coastline recedes, ‘As the bloke on the Pictures would say “We leave Algeria, Land of Mystery and Romance” or should it be intrigue.’11 One of the ways in which the migrants comprehend the Middle and Far East is as lands which are exotic and mysterious and yet steeped in history and redolent of ancient civilisations. As Thomas Jenkins passes through the Suez Canal in 1965 he writes in his diary that, ‘Beyond the banks, I see a mysterious woman shrouded in black moving among the palm trees. None of them, so far, has a water jar on her head, but otherwise the biblical picture is perfect.’ Also at Suez, but in 1949, Sydney Hart records ‘the usual sights greeted our eyes as daylight came: the ever-lasting caravans, the clumsy-looking but highly efficient Arab dhows that had flitted to and fro the centuries when we Britons were still learning how to handle clumsy coracles!’12 Yet the ancient civilisation and biblical history of the middle east is almost invariably contrasted with its present-day and post-imperial squalor. Empire is a thread which runs through the migrant stories, and it is usually an empire which brought order, cleanliness and efficiency to lands which are now reverting to their previous squalid and corrupt state. The emigrant stories not only traverse the ports of empire; they also chart the quarter century of an empire in decline. Anchored in Malta’s Valetta harbour in 1949, Sydney Hart admires the imposing sight ‘of our own Mediterranean Fleet at exercise’ and praises ‘the island that had thrilled the civilized world by its unbelievable stand against the

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overwhelming, evil forces of Nazism and Fascism’. On the Suez Canal in 1955, Matt Dickinson spots the monument to the 1914–18 Empire War Dead in the Ismalian Campaign. To see that Monument standing there, with a background of sand and salt marsh, brought right back that memory of school days, learning, ‘THE SAND OF THE DESERT IS SODDEN RED. RED WITH THE DEAD OF A SQUARE THAT BROKE THE GATLINGS JAMMED AND THE COLONEL DEAD THE REGIMENT BLIND WITH DUST AND SMOKE’ And they are still doing it. Two Grenadier Guardsmen were on the boat at Port Said, seeing someone, and today as we passed up the canal we saw two English soldiers on a jeep, patrol part of the canal embankment.13

Migrants often compare the ports which are still under British control with those which are newly independent. As their ship passes through the Suez Canal Matt Dickinson remarks in his journal, ‘When you have seen the Egyptian Army or Police you realise what a good soldier the TOMMY is. We had Egyptian Police and Army Officers on board at Port Said. The Police, wearing Luger automatics, but pathetically musical comedy in appearance.’ Fourteen days out they arrive in Aden (which is still a British protectorate): ‘The first thing that impresses you on landing, is the absolute smartness of the Aden Police in their Khaki shorts and shirt and a black belt with a brass buckle and the black fez and black puttees and sandals. They look really efficient.’ In Aden one year previously, Graham Little makes the same comparison: In the markets I saw British soldiers from a navy vessel in the harbour – we made our little tour of the Empire keeping one eye out for the gunboat that would be sent to rescue us. … Prompted by my father, but how he knew isn’t clear, I gave the Aden police higher marks than the ones in Egypt.14

The post-imperial Middle East is not only inefficient; the politics of the natives who have taken over are threatening and yet they are also dismissed as rather ridiculous. The British emigrants, steeped in imperial ideology, are unable to comprehend the causes and nature of Arab nationalism. Remembering his migrant voyage of 1949 from the vantage point of 1957, Sydney Hart recalls of Port Said – ‘the gateway to the East’ – that it is ‘a pretty troubled area now. Then, as now, the times were somewhat turbulent, though no hint was apparent of the surprising moves that were to be made later, when Egyptian

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nationalism ran wild.’ Thomas Jenkins had spent a year of National Service in Egypt where he ‘had grown to dislike the Egyptian people very much. Since then there had been Suez’. As they pass the Egyptian coast in 1965 he writes to a friend that ‘if you were foolish enough to land, you’d find a bunch of Nasser’s hooligans throwing lead at you out of Czech machine guns. Our next stop will be Colombo, where we plan an excursion to see Buddhist temples, elephants bathing, and mutilated beggars.’15 The East: exotic, inefficient, rebellious, threatening, and, perhaps most of all, dirty. When the Dickinsons go shopping in Aden (recorded and recalled as a scorching, fetid hell hole by most migrants), ‘the squalor of some of the shacks is an eye opener to western eyes and so is the smell’, though when their young son David is lost they find him a couple of hundred yards away talking to an Aden policeman, and Matt notes that ‘[t]he youngsters got on grand with the coloured people’. For many of the British migrants, the ship is a safe haven, a capsule which quarantines and protects them from this squalid, threatening world. The Jenkins visit Port Said: Immediately we were under assault from men and boys … like vultures round a kill … The place felt and smelled dirt-poor and diseased. The people – we never saw a woman – kept up their pleading, menacing barrage … We beat our way back though the remaining ranks of pleading brown hands (it was rather like a nightmare flag day). When ‘Oriana’s’ fat British walls closed around us, we felt visibly relieved.16

Graham Little, writing from his perspective as a University of Melbourne academic in 1995, offers one of the most thoughtful analyses of the migrant response to the East. Citing an entry from his diary when they entered Port Said in 1954, he writes in his autobiographical letter to his daughter that ‘our politics weren’t very good’. He recalls that their father, who had grown up in and then left the slums of Belfast, had always associated squalor with personal and social failure, and that this disdain readily transferred from the slums of Britain to the squalor of the East, with an additional overlay of imperial ideology. On the map of the world our politics were British and British Empire. There were special reasons for that in Northern Ireland, of course. But we assumed it’d been proven the British way was the best, better than the Americans, the Continentals and of course all the Asian and African countries, the coloured races. We’d heard the British always exercised their power even-handedly and other people envied us. …

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We went on a tour of Port Said, ‘very smelly and dirty’ the diary says, as you’d expect. ‘Took photos of the Egyptians and bought a FEZ! … ’ Bombay was the heart of my idea of Empire … what we were looking for were human sights, and what we wanted – and didn’t want – were sights to amaze and shock, things that would be frightening, disgusting, authentically exotic. And we got them. We saw a crowd in the slums beating a man the guide said was a pickpocket, we saw men washing clothes that looked like rags in primitive open-air laundries, themselves like performing monkeys, and I convinced myself I’d seen a man with two heads. Everything of course was accompanied by strange smells. I’m glad I’ll never know what the people of Port Said and Aden and Bombay and Colombo thought of us as they watched us staring at them. … We weren’t quite tourists – hardly anyone was then – but we weren’t imperialists showing the flag, either. I tried to believe we deserved being better off that all the suffering people we saw, like we deserved to be well looked after at dinner in the restaurant on the ship. But I couldn’t convince myself. I was embarrassed to point my camera at the people in the streets and most of my photos were of ourselves, usually on the boat. I don’t know if we were racist because the things that frightened us in all these places was the same thing that frightened us at home, the poverty and the dirt. … The Empire was a bar of soap, Lifebuoy or the then wonderfully carbolic Pears. Being British was being clean. Appropriately enough when we sailed from Bombay to Colombo, our last port of call before Australia, I wrote in my diary ‘very clean and very like England’.17

Indeed, when the migrants reached Australia – after they had got over the initial shock of the stark corrugated iron sheds of the Fremantle docks and took their first trip into Perth – their overwhelming feeling is one of relief. As our anonymous journal writer of 1949 concluded, ‘It is a clean, homely and interesting place … Everywhere is spotlessly clean, especially food shops and shops where food is eaten.’18 If the empire was a bar of soap, then at first sight Australia was clean and British. Simon Gikandi writes that ‘the other was a constitutive element in the invention of Britishness, and we can see how the British postwar emigrants’ fleeting contacts with the Oriental ‘other’ reinforced and reshaped their sense of themselves as British, and as the representatives of a country and Empire which stood for order, progress and good hygiene’.19 These feelings – and a sense of relief that Australia might be just like Britain but with sunshine – would soon unravel, but that is another story …

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A N OT E O N S O U R C E S Examples of my own work with life stories include Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994; Pam Coare and Alistair Thomson, eds., Through the Joy of Learning: Diary of a Thousand Adult Learners, NIACE, Leicester, 1996. For a review of the debates about memory and oral history, see Alistair Thomson, ‘Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History’, Journal of American History, vol. 85, no. 2, 1998, pp. 581–95. For a listing of some of the diverse recent literature about memory and life story, see Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader, Routledge, London, 1998, p. 5. For my favourite writings on the subject, see Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1994; and Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1997. On life stories and migration see the review essay, Alistair Thomson, ‘Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies’, Oral History vol 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 24–37. On the ‘archival histories’ of personal narratives by British postwar migrants, see Alistair Thomson, ‘Recording British Migration: Place, Meaning and Identity in Audio Letters from Australia, 1963–1965’, in Wilfred Prest and Graham Tulloch, eds., Scatterlings of Empire, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2001, pp. 106–116. Jim Hammerton and myself are currently writing a book about the postwar British emigrants, with the working title, ‘Ten Pound Poms – The Invisible Migrants: A Life History of Postwar British Emigration to Australia’. Though this article focuses on a number of published and unpublished accounts by British migrants which are available in Australian public archives, our book will draw upon two large archives of oral and written accounts by British migrants which are held at La Trobe University in Melbourne and the University of Sussex in Brighton. The classic text on Western perceptions of ‘the Orient’ is Edward Said’s Orientalism, Routledge, London, 1978. See also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, London, 1993.

15 MAKING THE ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY IN THE 1950s: E X P L O R AT I O N S O F I N T E R I O R I T Y AND AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL HISTORY J OY DA M O U S I

In his analysis of Australian culture and society, The Lucky Country, published in 1964, Donald Horne reflected on the Australian ‘type’. He observed that ‘Australia is not a country of great political dialogue or intense searching after problems (or recognition of problems that exist). Australians prefer to play or watch sport, and this gives life one of its principal meanings’.1 For Horne, Australians were not ‘taken in by words and they are suspicious of public emotion’.2 He characterised them as a ‘largely non-contemplative people who often like the thought of action and the future’.3 Horne was echoing the sentiments of many of his generation who believed that during the 1950s and 1960s Australia was a vast suburban expanse which bred indifference, mediocrity and hedonism, rather than reflection and self-analysis. The expatriate community that perceived Australia in these terms had grown during this time as Jeffrey Smart, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Peter Finch, amongst others, escaped what they perceived was the stultifying conservatism of Australian cultural life. Yet this was not a uniform response. There were those who could see more to the Australian suburbs, such as the celebrated artist John Brack. It is indeed a paradox that while writers, artists and performers left Australia because they identified a conformity and indifference in the suburbs which stifled creativity, others such as Brack drew their very inspiration from it. In Brack’s work, the suburbs were a repository of anxieties, repressions and fears, of various neuroses and sinister possibilities. This approach was in contrast to that of the other great satirist of the suburbs, Barry Humphries, whose alter-ego, Dame Edna Everidge, explored suburban life to identify the cultural sterility which he and his cohort were desperate to escape.

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Until very recently, historians have themselves replicated the very assumptions about the indifference of white Australians to contemplative reflection within the stifling culture of suburban life. The national stereotype is invariably represented by an Australian male who values independence and individualism, negates emotion and self-expression and has no care other than for immediate, material concerns. By claiming a place for inner life, this article is part of a larger project which attempts to challenge assumptions that Australian intellectuals and Australian culture in general has not embraced questions of interiority. In order to explore these themes, I examine the ways in which Australians exposed their inner thoughts and anxieties through the ABC radio program, ‘Psychology Mailbag’, which was conducted by the psychology professor Oscar Oeser during the 1950s. An examination of this case study offers an opportunity to reflect on the place of interiority in the formation of identity, the role of the ‘psychological’ in this process and the ways in which the medium of radio enhanced such an interaction. This approach draws on recent literature which considers emotional and psychological states as theoretical concepts which are central to historical analysis. Although ideas about identity, inferiority, anger, the conscious and the unconscious, grief and mourning, have been drawn from disciplines which subscribe to universal truths about the self such as psychology and psychoanalysis, cultural historians have, paradoxically, used these categories to highlight the contingent, fluid and historical nature of emotional life. These practitioners aim to historicise inner life and consider how such states are constructed and expressed within the specifics of time and place. The influence of the ‘psychological’ during the 1950s cannot therefore be understood outside of discourses shaped by the Cold War, where ‘normalcy’ was perceived in a prescriptive way. This reflects Catherine Lutz’s formulation that such rhetoric promoted not only a ‘vigilant self’, but also a self which was ‘suspicious of itself’. In the public response to Oeser’s broadcasts, this ‘self-suspicion’ most commonly centred on the fragile identities determined by gender, class and ethnicity.4 With an emphasis during the postwar period on homogeneity and assimilation, identity was often framed through rigorous selfsurveillance.

RADIO IN THE 1950s Despite the advent of television in Australia in 1956, radio continued to be an extraordinarily popular medium. Richard Waterhouse suggests that by the 1940s radio was ‘an integral element of Australian life and culture’.5 By 1942 there were 1 323 000 licence holders. Although

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ratings dropped after 1956, and serials, quizzes and plays moved to television, personalised programs such as ‘Psychology Mailbag’, commentated by a disembodied, authorial voice, lent itself to radio listening. ABC radio offered a range of programs and created communities of eager listeners across the country. ‘Few Australians,’ writes K. S. Inglis, ‘were beyond the range of the ABC’.6 Radio provided a space between public and private spheres where discussion of the privatised self often found expression within the public arena through the mode of confession. It was not the only medium through which confessional issues were conveyed and understood, but it was certainly the most popular. In the context of postwar reconstruction, radio was perceived to be a consciousness-raising medium that had the potential to educate its listeners, make good citizens and build a better world. One contributor to the ABC magazine, Talk, wrote in June 1946 that: We can use radio to develop a great national consciousness. We can use radio to raise the standard of living; to raise our culture from a level which is all too obviously low ... We can use radio to make the nation become more spiritually, politically, and hygienically aware.7

Oeser’s discussion needs to be understood within this belief that the ABC promoted the training of citizens through educational talks on the radio. His programs blended a mixture of social psychology with home-spun commonsense and fitted what Richard Boyer believed was the ABC’s capacity to educate and enlighten the community. The radio, Boyer believed, was an ‘even more revolutionary device than the internal combustion engine’. ‘Psychology Mailbag’ thus served as an educative program, operating ‘in the service of public enlightenment’. If by the 1950s radio had become central in defining a cultural space and shaping national identities through listening, then psychology became increasingly popular as the discourse through which contemporary understandings of the ‘self’ were created. As Nikolas Rose argues, psychological experts ‘have enmeshed themselves inextricably with our experience of ourselves’.8 They have ‘shaped the vocabularies of those who manage human conduct’ and we ‘have come to speak in psychological dialects’. Conversation is permeated with psychological terms – ‘stress, anxiety, motivation, personality, self-esteem’. Modern selves have ‘become psychological selves’.9 It is also to normality that psychologists looked in their analysis. The ways in which they provided the language, classification and identity of the ‘normal, child, adolescent, parent and so on became the hallmark of psychology’. It became evident that rather than pursuing cases of pathology, in fact, ‘definitions of

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normality were sought’.10 As Oeser noted, the psychologist is concerned to understand ‘normal behaviour and what unleashes “abnormal” behaviour’.11 Once this is understood, it is only a short step to turn abnormal into normal behaviour. It is easy to see how such ideas gained currency in the climate of the Cold War. This was a time when politics was characterised by interrogation, paranoia and prosecution. The fear of communist invasion or subversion allowed moral absolutes to dictate the political agenda. Cultural ideals were shaped by assimilation policies where white Anglo-Saxon culture was the norm that all ‘others’ were expected to emulate. Despite the material prosperity and consumer comforts which many Australians enjoyed during this period, the 1950s was also a time of heightened anxiety and paranoia about political and cultural conformity.

‘PSYCHOLOGY MAILB AG’ In the first session of his weekly radio broadcast on the ABC Professor Oscar Oeser outlined the origin and purpose of his program which went to air weekly. It was because there had been so many requests for information about psychology that the Talks Director felt it might be worthwhile to have a session devoted to answering questions … ‘Psychology Mailbag’ is an experiment … You will have to ask sensible, genuine questions. And I shall try to find people who will give a sensible, genuine answer, within the limits of what is known … And when we don’t know the answer, we shall have no hesitation in saying so.

The program went to air initially at 9.45 pm on Saturdays and then moved to a 5.15 pm time slot on Sundays, with a maximum air time of 12 minutes. It is difficult to judge the success or otherwise of the show, although it did attract an enthusiastic response from some of its listeners. One Lance Loughrey wrote to Oeser praising the show and telling him that it had become a central part of his intellectual life. ‘I would just like to tell you how much I enjoyed your psychology talks on the ABC’, he wrote. It may interest you to know that a group of us who get together at the house of a well known writer on a Sunday night are often provided with material for discussion from your talks … Hoping you are allowed to keep up the good work.

Oeser reached a broad audience as it was not only intellectuals who responded to his broadcasts. E. B. Waddy, who had written in to the show with a query about aggression, wrote

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I have just listened to your session on air (9.45 pm on 3AR, 12/8/50). The letter you discussed was written by the undersigned and I extend my sincere thanks for your helpful and thought provoking discussion ... Since discharge from a psychiatric hospital in 1943, things have not gone too well for me. A copy of the script would be very much appreciated as I am sure a study of your analysis will prove very helpful – to quote you: ‘Problems must be analysed and recognised’. Again, thanking you for your helpful talk.

Oeser was a social psychologist who was appointed as the first professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne in 1946. After the war, he had been involved in the de-nazification program in Germany. In his publications, Oeser promoted various aspects of social psychology. He argued in 1955 that classroom teaching was faulty because there was little insight into the social structure and dynamics of the classroom situation. This involved ‘far more attention to the nature and effects of group processes in the development of a balanced, mature personality’. The link between the local and wider society was encapsulated in Oeser’s view that social psychology could provide the knowledge of the way in which the individual responded and related to the multitude of elements in their social world.

OESER’S LISTENERS Oeser’s listeners raised a number of issues which covered a range of topics. All shared an anxiety about the need to detect ‘abnormal’ behaviour and how to ‘correct’ such behaviour. A concern about one’s identity as a mother, wife, housewife, father or husband, was grounded in an implicit concern for a self ‘suspicious of itself’, which was in need of diagnosis. In his responses, Oeser promoted notions of ‘normality’ and ‘well-adjusted behaviour’, which he defined as ‘giving and receiving affection’. The confessional mode encouraged by Oeser – where he read out their letters and responded to them on air – brought listeners’ anxieties to the surface, and suggested the ways in which some listeners in the suburbs were reflective of psychological issues. The family and the home were the sites of several suspicions, and it was in discussion of the domestic sphere that Cold War politics of fear, paranoia and threats to homogeneity often found their most powerful expression. The psychologist J. V. Ashburner observed in his discussion of the figure which most effectively encapsulated Cold War anxieties – the homosexual – that the ‘potentialities of the home’ needed to be considered seriously when analysing the creation of pathologies. In the same vein, one ‘housewife’ wrote with considerable anxiety regarding her attitude towards housework:

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Could you tell me why I feel so incapable of struggling through my housework every morning then in the afternoon find it quite simple ... when the morning comes I have the awful sensation of an ant trying to scale Mount Everest and duck and shy till the afternoon. Do you suppose it is some sub-conscious frustration or just a bad habit? Is there any hope for this sort of thing when one has reached middle-age and if so what is the best way of coping with it?

Oeser reassured this writer that this ‘mental fatigue’ was ‘normal’. He recommended ‘planning’, because a ‘general plan’ is needed to tackle the first job that comes to hand. An unknown aspect of this condition, Oeser counselled, might be the ‘sub-conscious’ explanation being suggested by the writer as the key to the ‘problem’. The restlessness might also be explained by the writer’s desire to have the work completed in the morning, so that she could paint in the afternoon. Child-rearing advice was prominent among the themes covered by Oeser and this points to the increasing influence of psychology in understandings of children’s education at the time. A fear of dogs, Oeser observed, suggested an ‘irrational fear’ that emanated from another source. He claimed that experiences within childhood held the key to understanding such emotions. His prognosis of one such case was that ‘the boy had been unable to communicate his terrifying experiences … The original reason for the fear had been lost and the person for the rest of his life was plagued with an irrational fear’. One listener disagreed with Oeser’s assessment in that he/she did not believe ‘that if a child has been severely frightened and has now generalised the fear to all sorts of animals it would take so long to unlearn this fear’. Oeser responded that children have an imagination and a fantasy life ‘which means they do take a long time’. Moreover, he added, ‘how very easily an emotional experience in connection with one object is generalised by human beings to refer not only to that object in different situations, but to a whole series of other objects and situations, that are in some respects similar’. Oeser discussed agoraphobia in this context: ‘the boy had been unable to communicate his terrifying experience [because] he had … technically repressed these feelings’. This went back to a ‘fear of punishment for being in a forbidden place’. The original reason ‘for the fear had been lost and the person for the rest of his life was plagued with an irrational fear’. Oeser suggested that the parents should attempt to associate dogs with pleasant situations, but he himself heightened this ‘suspicion’ by suggesting that a deeper reason might also be connected to his fear – that is, ‘some overwhelming nightmare he may have had, or with some other threatening experience’. Children’s fear, it was claimed, emanated from a number of sources, notably from their mothers. Oeser drew on a range of familial models

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that reflected the conventional beliefs about the nuclear family, and women’s domestic role within it. In one such case, Oeser believed the implications were of a sexual nature. One mother wrote nervously that her daughter feared the view of a man’s head at the window and had become obsessed by it. Oeser replied that ‘it sounds to me as though she will need skilled psychological help … she may very well lose this fear when she gets married and has a family of her own to look after’. It was to ‘childhood fantasy’ that Oeser again turned, to explain the obsession which became a ‘terrible childish fantasy with which at that time she was preoccupied’. Oeser would isolate the most seemingly mundane and ‘ordinary’ activity and in his analysis, would fuel this type of anxiety. This suspicion was further heightened through his discussion of home life, which he believed was the source of either ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ identity. The absence of the father, and its impact on families was another central question relating to the need for normality within the family. Oeser used this opportunity to elevate the purpose and importance of a ‘normal’ family: ‘The family is the most closely knit social group we know … The relations between people and their effects on each other are more intense and more powerful than in any other situation’. In terms of ‘adjustment of a person to the general conditions of his life, the most potent influence has lain within the family’. Two letters identified family dynamics as a concern. One despairing father wrote anxiously from Balaclava: I read somewhere the other day that when the parents in a household do not get on too well together the children are likely to be difficult to manage … I was away at the war for a long time and since I have been back the wife and I have not been hitting it off too well, and we never seem able to agree. My two girls seem to be growing daily more cheeky and disobedient with me and the boy slowly quarrelsome and rebellious. They seem to take sides with my wife against me. What should I do?

Another woman wrote about the difficulty of raising children as a single mother. ‘Would you discuss the difficulties and advantages of bringing up children without a father? My husband died when our first daughter was eighteen months old, and before the second daughter was born, so that they have only had my influence and training.’ She felt that there was difficulty in assuming ‘the undivided authority of responsibility, although it no doubt simplifies discipline and the principles of behaviour. There must be many pitfalls more than one recognises.’ Oeser described the Oedipal complex as a way of understanding this issue, as it was ‘a stage of development in which the child begins to love

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the parent of the opposite sex and to hate the parent of the same sex as himself’. In this scenario, the child will direct both love and hate towards the mother. Echoing the view of most psychological theorists of the day, Oeser noted how ‘what happens in the early years of a child’s development within the family is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of his personality as an older child and as an adult, and is also fundamental to our understanding of the nature of society’. To have ‘harmonious relations at home is the most important single factor in human happiness’. Oeser spent much of his commentary on familial relations and on the behaviour of returned servicemen after they had been absent: The father will … have to face the fact that a good deal of his authority has been transformed, and he cannot simply step back into the home and expect everything to be as it was when he left; and more important, he must realise that he will still be expecting the children to behave as they did when they were four or five years younger.

The success of the transition depended, however, on the behaviour of the mother, ‘on how the mother kept the memory of the father alive while he was away, and secondly, on the degree to which she likes power for its own sake’. It is the disempowerment of the father that he highlights as the issue, for it is the mother who ‘will not give up her control or even share it, and the father becomes merely the odd-jobs man about the house’. His advice was to send the children to a co-educational school and for the mother to develop outside interests, to keep her ‘developing as a full and mature person’, and to ‘prevent the children from suffering from over protection’. The ‘broken family’ was of great detriment to children and it was preferable to send children ‘to boarding schools, rather than be at home in a broken family’. But he argued that ‘on the whole the psychological arguments against boarding schools are stronger than the arguments in their favour’. In large part, boarding school insists on a high degree of uniformity, but a democratic society ‘flourished when there is a great diversity of interests, attitudes and opinions’. Oeser identified the family as the ‘most closely knit social group we know’, because the ‘relations between people and their effects on each other are more intense and more powerful than in any other situation … the most potent influence is lain within the family’. An imbalance within the family would have dire consequences: the way the mother deals with children is ‘of paramount importance’, and ‘so great for character development as to overshadow almost everything else that happens in the family circle for the first few years’. Those without fathers, or father substitutes ‘tend to resent the fact that children talk about their fathers’.

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Oeser believed the early years of development in the family ‘is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of his personality as an older child and as an adult, and is also fundamental to our understanding of the nature of society’. He placed enormous stress on the home environment: if a child is well adjusted at home, the child will be well adjusted in other parts of his life. Boys mirror their fathers, whilst girls mirror their mothers. Where there is no father present, the mother should be kept preoccupied in other activities so she will not smother her child. The question of adoption also emerged, with Oeser arguing that the most important issue was sustaining a ‘sense of security and assurance of love and affection’, which were ‘absolutely indispensable factors in a child’s life’. Parents need to confront the issue, otherwise there will be deep ‘suspicion and resentment’. Issues of race and ethnicity informed many of these discussions. Oeser’s advice to a mother who believed that half-castes ‘inherit the worst attributes of both races’ was that it was a ‘nonsense’, because it was obvious that psychological characteristics were not ‘inherited in the same way as physical features’. In this context, the program certainly served its educative purpose, especially in relation to racism. Oeser used this case of ‘race prejudice’ to discuss the ways in which ‘psychological characteristics’ are not inherited like physical features, but are learned. Stereotyping is identified as part of this problem and is a ‘substitute for intimacy’ – and a ‘substitute for getting to know people slowly by trial and error’. Oeser offered a lecture in inverting and using stereotypes, isolating issues such as economic gain (in the context of imperialism, where ‘Africans, Indians, Chinese’ must be saved ‘from themselves by the white man, who must treat them rather like troublesome and sometimes dangerous children’), and projection, where we attribute ‘evil intentions to people or to things other than ourselves’. These racialised anxieties and stereotypes permeate the letters which are written for discussion. In one letter a concerned mother discussed how in her son’s school there were quite a lot of foreign children, some of them can’t even speak English, and my husband says he will not have his child mixing with a lot of foreigners. We could send the boy to the school in town where most of the children are Australian, but this is further away, and I am afraid that the strain of travelling might be too much for him. Do you think mixing with foreigners could do him much harm? Oeser arranged for one psychologist who had experience ‘in the study of prejudice’ to speak on the program. Reflecting the assimilationist views of the day, he argued that it was important that ‘children become

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assimilated to the Australian pattern, so that they are accepted as Australians’. To do this, they ‘need to attend schools in which there are lots of ordinary Australian children and vice-versa’. In this country, he noted, ‘there is a dangerous and growing tendency to attribute economic hardships to immigrants or to Communists or to both’. The extreme example of this was ‘to be found in Nazi Germany, where everything that was unpalatable to the regime was attributed to Jews and the Communists’. The child who is bullied at school needs ‘the therapy of a convenient little social group and perhaps in addition to that some play therapy in a psychological clinic’. Drawing on the prevailing beliefs of ‘primitivism’ and the stereotypes of the day about the ‘backwardness’ of the ‘superstitions’ of the Aborigines, one listener asked whether there was any truth ‘in the belief that bone-pointing can cause death?’ Oeser drew on cultural arguments by explaining that this was part of her belief system as the listener ‘has … been taught to believe in the efficacy of bone-pointing. If she gave up that belief, she might just as well give up her whole tribal culture’. Oeser was eclectic in his advice and analysis, and while he did not use psychoanalytic approaches, he drew on several concepts which derived from Freudian analysis, such as the Oedipus Complex and dream interpretation. Oeser answered the question, ‘Is psychoanalysis of any value to people who can’t afford the time or money for such treatment?’, by replying that the ‘nature of psychoanalytic treatment is such that it cannot be accelerated by using drugs and it is not a common practice to try to do so’. He identified one clinic that ‘provided services freely to the needy’. Day-to-day, mundane, seemingly trivial events were a source of anxiety and concern for Oeser’s listeners. The roots of emotional responses were especially the cause of great interest. These included job satisfaction, which ‘arises out of poor personality adjustments’, because some people ‘consciously or unconsciously resent it every time they are given an order’. This was a pathological problem, because something happened in childhood which ‘distorted their ability to understand the need for social control and their ability to accept it simply and unemotionally as part of the general pattern of living’. Oeser claimed it was determined by ‘an adequately balanced personality development and adequate adjustment of a person’s capacities, attributes and emotions on the job’. Compulsion was another issue which was raised by one listener who ‘cannot start on his work until his desk is clear of everything except a blotting pad, six pencils and a box of matches. These objects all have to be arranged in an exact way’. Oeser used the opportunity to discuss disorder and order, and compulsiveness in the child. The ‘inferiority complex’ became the focus of another discussion, where Oeser

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described a ‘persistent feeling of inferiority and inadequacy’ in terms of issues ‘very deeply buried in the personality’. The question of sensitivity to noise arose, and Oeser believed that the person ‘who is excessively sensitive to noises is nearly always a frustrated and unhappy person’. Oeser also believed that if a child was doing homework with the wireless on, ‘it means that they are insufficiently balanced or not stable enough to cope with their internal unconscious emotional problems’. Oeser promoted the view that people should talk and listen to each other. He claimed that one ‘of the troubles in our society is the excessive number of barriers to free discussion or ... free communication between people. We are all so full of irrational prejudices that we find it hard to talk to one another about the sort of events that occur in everyday life’. The auditory experience mediated by the radio enhanced this process, but it also suggests the ways in which a sense of ‘the suspicious’ self – that where psychology was used to ‘correct’ behaviour – permeated concerns about ethnicity, race, gender and class. In doing so, it points to the ways in which issues relating to motivation, reflection and the processes of inner life were raised by suburban Australians who were attempting to make sense of the ordinary and everyday through the popular science of psychology. Underpinning these meanings was a surveillance and suspicion of the self, in pursuit of an illusionary ‘normality’. These discussions were lost on the critics of suburban philistinism. The idea that Australian suburbs could only be viewed as a cultural desert, and that the 1950s were characterised exclusively by bland material hedonism, is tested by the responses Oeser received from his listeners. In offering an opportunity to his radio audience to analyse their social and psychological anxieties, Oeser’s program allowed its listeners to explore new forms of self-scrutiny. These confessions point to a nervous voice struggling to emerge from the suburbs – one which cultural commentators of the day, and many since, have not been willing to listen to in their unqualified dismissal of suburban life.

B I B L I O G R A P H I C A L N OT E For details of the views of expatriate Australians and of discussions relating to the Australian suburbs, see Ian Britain, Once an Australian: Journeys with Barry Humphries, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes, Oxford, Melbourne, 1997; John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, Sydney, 1988; Tim Rowse, ‘Heaven and a Hills Hoist: Australian Critics on Suburbia’, in Richard White and Penny Russell, eds., Memories and Dreams: Reflections on 20th Century

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Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, pp. 213–26; and Richard White, ‘Boyd, the Suburb and the Austalian Way of Life’, Transition, no. 38, 1992, pp. 96–107. A recent discussion on the cultural history of emotions can be found in Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States, New York University Press, New York, 1998. The information on the history of radio is drawn from Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788, Longman, Sydney, 1995; and K. S. Inglis, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932–1983, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983. Cold War politics, assimilation and cultural life are discussed in Richard White, ‘The Australian Way of Life’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 73, October 1979, pp. 528–45; Stephen Alomes, Mark Dober and Donna Hellier, ‘The Social Context of Postwar Conservatism’, in Ann Curthoys and John Merritt, eds., Australia’s First Cold War, Vol.1: Society, Communism and Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, pp. 1–28; and John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia, UNSW Press/Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000. Information on Oeser can be found in Nicholas Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in Australia in the 1950s, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995. The details of Oeser’s classroom study is taken from O. A. Oeser, ed., Teacher, Pupil and Task: Elements of Social Psychology Applied to Eduction: A Practical Manual for Teachers, Tavistock, London, 1955. All references to the ‘Psychology Mailbag’ program and correspondence with Oeser are located in the O. E. Oeser Papers, V65/13, Box 24, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne.

16 C U LT U R E I S TA L K . L I V I N G I S S T O R Y. GREG DENING

1 9 6 7 ‘ E T H N O G G I N G ’ I N H AWA I ’ I It is 1967. The Vietnam War grinds hopelessly on. I have just finished my anthropology degree at Harvard. I am flying home via Hawai’i where the anthropology and history departments at the University of Hawai’i have offered me a short-term appointment. The airports are filled with young men and women in military uniform. Hawai’i is a giant military camp, a giant military hospital. I come to the University of Hawai’i with large ambitions to teach a new sort of history. ‘Ethnohistory’, I call it, until the politics in the name disturbs me – there is no reason why the history of first peoples in Oceania or the Americas or Africa should be ‘ethno’ and the history of empires and conquerors just ‘history’. ‘Culture contact’ won’t do either. Cultures don’t come in contact. ‘Contact’ is too wimpish a notion for the story of the violent encounter between the islanders and intruding strangers that I have to tell. Thirty-three years on, I still won’t have a name for it. Maybe ‘anthrohistory’ would do. ‘Anthrohistory’ suggests that both sides of my story – of natives and of strangers – are equally subject to my anthropological and historical gaze. But give something a name, and someone will create an association, a journal, and department, and will begin to put boundaries about it. I’m not into boundaries around knowledge. ‘Double-visioned history’? I would settle for that if only to challenge the presumptions of so much single-visioned history that is around. It would have to be ‘multi-visioned history’, though, wouldn’t it? Our gaze on the past is gendered, coloured, aged, classed, modern and postmodern – multi-visioned. ‘Cross-cultural history’? Yes, if it is accepted that all history across time and space is cross-cultural.

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Just ‘cultural history’? Why not? So long as we don’t waste time debating what ‘culture’ is. At my last count there were 366 discursive definitions of ‘culture’. Let me make it 367 and leave it. Culture is talk. Living is story. Be patient with me. The history department at the University of Hawai’i did not know what to do with me. The ‘Pacific’ history they taught was about empires, navies and wars. Not much ‘ethno’ at all. The anthropology department set me to teach first year Ethnology – Ethnology 101. My class was made up of Samoans, Tongans, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese Macaons, Hawaiians and a few sun-dazed and water-logged Anglo-Americans. The textbooks set – not by me – were formulaic descriptions of island societies. There was not much incentive in them to enter into cultural differences. None at all to translate the differences into some representation of otherness. So I started a practice in Hawai’i that I followed for the rest of my teaching academic life. I taught ‘culture’ by asking my students to describe it. I taught the past by asking them to tell something of the present in story. ‘Ethnogging’, my later students used to call it, with affectionate disrespect. I was persuaded to that practice by a cathartic pedagogic experience. It involved a Hawaiian-born student. I had asked my students to describe something different in their lives. The ‘different’ did not need to be great – something across gender, religious belief, language, ritual, ethnic custom. Some did marriage ceremonies. Some did luau, Hawaiian feasts. Some did their ‘pot’ parties. A couple of Buddhists did the Sunday mass I used to celebrate at the Honolulu cathedral. The Hawaiian-born student wasn’t much into study of any sort. He ‘didn’t know what to do’. I asked him what he did on Sundays. He said that he used to play touch football on the beach at Kaneohe. ‘Do that,’ I said. The Sunday morning beach game was played between Hawaiianborn young men and the US marines based at Kaneohe. There was not much love lost between them. The Hawaiians were resentful that their island had become an army camp. The marines were resentful at the ingratitude for the sacrifices they were making and at being made to feel strangers in their America. The ‘touch’ in the touch-football was a pretty relative concept. The games were violent, full of subliminal hatred. I remember very well my student’s discovery that a touch football match was so much larger than itself. It was a parable about something else – about identity, about political domination, about macho gendering. He then confronted with some relish how he would make a narrative that matched the excitement of his discovery. He had to perform his experiences, make theatre of it.

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History – the transformation of a past, no matter how recent a past, into words or paint or dance or play – is always a performance. An everyday performance as we present our selective narratives about what has happened at the kitchen table – to the courts, to the taxman, at the graveside. A quite staged performance when we present it to our examiners, to the collegiality of our disciplines, whenever we play our role as ‘historians’. History is a performance. History is a performance of past performances. History is a performance of cultural talk. History as a performance is cultural talk. Let me de-mystify these gnomic statements. ˆˆˆ History is a performance. Victor Turner, long ago, with the verbal tricksterism he delighted to play, alerted us to the Indo-Aryan word form ‘per’ in performance – and experience. ‘Per’ means gamble. There always a risk in performance. That is because a performance is a public display shaped in time and space. In time: there is always a deadline, a stage call, in a performance. Practice and rehearsal are cut short. No perfection is possible. There is always room for change and improvement. I perform now. I, in these circumstances, with the skills I have, to this audience. In space: performance is public. It is in a delineated space, sometimes a physical space – a stage, a lectern – always a social space as attention is drawn by gesture, or voice tone, or eye contact, or dress, to what is being performed. A performance is always to somebody. The audience is live and present or it is imagined to be present. There is always an exchange of some sort in a performance. I perform in a lecture. So I calibrate the silences – sullen disagreeing silences, polite seminar-faced silences, sleeping silences, bored fidgety breaches of silence. Maybe in the loneliness of writing and research the imagined audience is only myself. But if I am wise, it is an honest self that is my audience as I ask myself, ‘Am I intrigued enough to read the first sentence that I write? And all the others?’ Performance is a gamble. It is also a self-conscious gamble. Performance is always reflective. I know myself in a performance. I know my tricks. I know my ignorance. No matter how kind the audience is to my performance with its applause, I am the true judge of its standards. There is always an element of claptrap in performance, attracting applause, turning the audience’s attention away from the part being performed to the performing of the part. ˆˆˆ

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History is a performance of past performances. Culture is talk in all the ways talk is symbolised – in word, gesture, scaped environments, things encapsulated with meaning. That talk is stream of consciousness, but it is sentenced, paragraphed and chaptered, too. That is life, full of shaped public moments. Sometimes we call these moments ritual, sometimes theatre. These shaped performances have beginnings and ends. They are dramatic. They are directed so that an audience sees the plot. An audience goes away having heard words in conversation or seen symbols in very concrete forms or experienced a choreography of bodies, and reduces what the audience has seen to a few sentences that tell what all this has meant. History in representing these past performances is read and heard if it mimics life’s performances in their particularity, if it tells its stories well. We all know something about storytelling, don’t we? We know what bores us. We know what confuses us. We know when jargonistic language cuts us off from understanding. We know that the enemy of an effective story is formalism. Rigidity and patter will always destroy the creativity of the moment. Perhaps the most important thing that we know is that we are least persuaded by overpowering knowledge preoccupied with itself. Roland Barthes called this preoccupation a peppering of our writing with ‘reality effects – extraneous uncontexted facts that become ends in themselves’. The last thing we want to know are all the reality effects in another storyteller’s head. What we really want to know is how the other storyteller is joining the story we are already telling in our own head. The thea in theatre, and the the in theory both come from the Greek word for ‘seeing’. Both theatre and theory are places of seeing. We go to theatre to ‘see’ the meaning of conversations on perhaps the most trivial of matters. We don’t go to the theatre to be told what we are seeing. We never learn the truth by being told it. We need to experience it in some way. Believe me, the worst chapters in any thesis are inevitably the ‘theory chapters’. They hang over the whole like some template that never templates. Maybe the theory chapter should come at the end as a reflection on what has been seen. Maybe it should not be there at all. ˆˆˆ History is a performance of cultural talk. Cultural talk really is quite sophisticated. Thank you, Wittgenstein, for alerting us to that fact. We don’t survive culturally unless we hear the many meanings of cultural talk in its different occasions of use, in the relationship between talkers, in the tropes of which the talk is a part. We know that there is nothing

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boxed in cultural talk that doesn’t jump out of that box into some other box – nothing that is in an economic box that is not also in a psychological box, that is not in a gender box, that is not also in … whatever. Play the observer to cultural talk and you will translate past talk so much better. ˆˆˆ History as a performance is cultural talk. All of living is in the moment after, a matter of interpretation of what has happened a blink of an eye ago. History – that transformation of the past into words, etc. – is never the past itself. It is always the past in another form, a metaphor of the past. But our histories, those moment-after interpretations, are our present. We live our roles in them, our gender, our institutions, our power and our powerlessness. Our histories are the metonyms of our present. Living is story.

1 9 7 4 F LY I N G TO T H E L A N D I am flying over an immense ocean. I am sitting nervously behind two gesticulating French pilots. They point to every button on their instrument panel as if it is a subject of some great philosophical or mechanical crisis. It is December 1974. We have just taken off from Tahiti’s Faa airport in a wet season storm. We are over this vast ocean on a northeast tack. That small part of it beneath our northeast flight over the 1500 kilometres separating Tahiti from the Marquesas was the northern tip of the Tuamotu Archipelago, known in older sailing days as the Low or Dangerous Archipelago. Its 78 atolls and innumerable hidden reefs fan a 2000-kilometre arc across the eastern approaches to the Central Pacific. Although it was my first time among them, my mind’s eye had scanned them many, many times. I had mapped them in all sorts of ways – for the variety of their flora and fauna, for the variety of their cultural forms, for their populations and the relics of their populations, for the canoe voyaging among them. My first images of the Pacific had come to me through the endless texts that innumerable intruders into this vast ocean had made of their experiences. I have never recovered from the historian’s first excited discovery that most of history comes from unpublished sources – from letters, diaries, logs – imprinted as much with tears, sweat, blood and the dirt of time as by ink and pencil. I have always counted it the great privilege of an historian’s life to finger these pages, sometimes for the first time after they were made. I have always felt as well that because so much of living is lost in the writing of it down, the historian’s

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obligation is to saturate her- or himself in all there is. So history writing is as much a pilgrimage to all the places where these unique and disparate remnants of the past are to be found as it is a culling from books on library shelves. In the way of things, the history of strangers coming into the Pacific is to be found where they came from – London, Boston, Paris, Rome, Nantucket – rather than the places they came to. But here in a Twin Otter 20 000 feet above the sea, I am making a pilgrimage the other way round. I am flying to the Land. In December 1974, I would not have called the islands I was flying to The Land, Te Fenua. Nor would I have called the people who lived there The Natives, Te Enata. I would have called them by the name Spanish outsiders had given them 400 years earlier – the Marquesas, the Marquesans. But crossing their beach would be my learning experience. I would get the confidence and the courage to call them what they called themselves. I am apprehensive. The Land and its Natives had changed my life. But I had been to the Land and met its Natives only in libraries and archives. I know that I am stranger to them. I know the cost of every stranger’s intrusion. The sadness of their story had affected me ever since I began to learn it. Inevitably I come with a sense of trespass. Their terrible story and my knowledge of it had been the capital of my life. The rewards of 20 years study of them to this time had been great. I bring to them in my luggage the pride of my academic life to this time, my first book about them, The Marquesan Journal of Edward Robarts (1974). I know all my short-cuts in that book. I know all its tricks of camouflage for my ignorance. Early in my studies of Te Fenua, I had read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961). It had shaken me to my core. In a world of victims, he wrote, there are no innocents. No one can write twosided history who in some way benefits from the power of the victors. No one can mediate between the disempowered living and the voiceless dead. All of us writing in a history so terrible as that of the Pacific – or of the Americas or of Africa for that matter – have had to resolve that dilemma for ourselves. No doubt we all do it differently. For me, giving the dead a voice has been reason enough for my history. I am with Karl Marx, too. The function of my history is not so much to understand the world as to change it. If my history by story and reflection disturbs the moral lethargy of the living to change in their present the consequences of their past, then it fulfils a need. I have not silenced any voice by adding mine. ‘Being there’ is the ethnographer’s claim to authority. It is a dangerous claim, of course. There are delusions in ‘being there’. The discipline of anthropology knows them well. ‘Being there’ can too often be

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a claim on experience that cannot be checked or even shared. A claim of ‘being there’ is blind arrogance without the humility that an encounter with otherness must bring. I found that ‘being there’ in Fenuaenata undermined any sense of authority I had. Those with authority were those who understood every nuance of a language that I had barely mastered. Those with authority were those who could look to the landscape and tell its history, to an environment and read every sign. I discovered how deep the silence was in me, even as I gave the Land a title – The Silent Land. Those inner silences humbled me. I began to know what I did not know. My true authority, I discovered, would always be my humility. ‘Being there’ for an historian is the feeling for the past that can only be matched by the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years I sit at the tables in the archives. It is the assurance that my extravagance with time here is rewarded with a sensitivity that comes in no other way. It is an overlaying of images one on the other. It is a realisation that knowledge of the past is cumulative and kaleidoscopic, extravagantly wasteful of my energy. The name of the game of our true storytelling is persuasion, not domination. Our performance is to let others perform. The extravagance of our engagement in the archives will always give our language richness, our images colour and sharpness, our arguments conviction, our examples pertinence, our selection an informed boldness. ‘Being there’ where the past leaves itself most particularly is our signature gesture in history making. Without it we are just literary critics.

2001 ‘ADJUNCTING’ I am at a privileged time in life. I write day in, year out. I am more writer than professor, though writing, I believe, is always a profession of self, living and other. When you have been writing academically for nearly 50 years, as I have, you begin to wonder if you have anything more to say. Anyway, the one thing an historian can be sure of is that somebody is coming who will say what I have been really saying when I appeared to be saying something else. Culture is a very elliptic sort of talk. It does not need to be repetitive, though. I am still a sort of a professor. An ‘adjunct professor’. I am not sure what ‘adjuncting’ is or is meant to be, but as I experience it, it is like academic grandparenting. I adjunct by presenting workshops to doctoral students in the final years of their research. ‘Challenges to Perform’, the workshops are called. They focus on the creative imagination in the presentation of scholarly knowledge. My students are from all disciplines: medicine, architecture, anthropology, literature, history,

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linguistics, music, dancing, painting. And they are from all universities. The staff I invite to perform for these students are from all disciplines too: astrophysicists, ethnomusicologists, novelists, filmmakers, environmentalists, among all the others. They cannot speak to their specialism so much as their experience. These workshops are as I think a university should be. They present the resources of the whole university to those most capable of using those resources. We soon discover that we learn by exchange. We all, staff and students, are inspired by one another. Imagination scares many of those who feel that their duty is to be in touch with the real world. Imagination is equated with fantasy by many. But imagination is not necessarily fantasy. Imagination is hearing the silences because I have heard so much else. Imagination is taking the cliché out of something that has been said so many times before. Imagination is finding a metaphor that someone will see, a word that someone will read. Imagination is discovering a structure for a hundred thousand words that will make it seem just like a hundred words. Imagination is not breaking the rules of scholarship but taking the function of those rules and making them fly. Inevitably, I tell my students what I have said in this piece. I urge them to perform their true stories and to discover the performative element in the past. ‘Be mysterious,’ I tell them. Present the most complicated truths by story. ‘Be experiential.. Observe from within. ‘Be compassionate.’ Write with the whole body, not just the mind. ‘Be entertaining.’ Hold the readers’ attention within the creative structures of the writing. ‘Be reforming.’ Change the world. Is there one thing more that I would like to say? Yes, there is. In fact there are two. They are the two sides of the one coin. The one thing is that territoriality is our enemy. The other is that altruism is our ally. Territoriality in disciplines, in departments, in universities, in cities, in states, in nations is our enemy. Exclusiveness kills the creative imagination. We cross territorial boundaries, we cross beaches, when we give a little of ourselves. We hear when we silence ourselves.

BEACHES OF THE MIND Where minds meet is a beach of sorts, a place in-between, a limen, a threshold, where to share that space one has to give a little, where everything is new by being somehow shared, where everything is in translation, where we see ourselves reflected in somebody else’s otherness. ˆˆˆ

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Beaches. My life with all its memories is filled with them. My books are all written beside a beach or overlooking one or within the sound of one’s waves. As I write now, the combers on the beach below my window roll into a continuous rush of sound. It is the white noise that separates my mind from my body and lets me think to write. There is hardly a week that I don’t walk a beach. These days I can’t walk their soft white sand. There is too much pain and reminders of mortality in that. A dune to cross to reach a beach drains energy and resolve. No! The beach I walk is the hard wet sand at the sea’s edge. It is an edge that moves with the tide and each wave in the tide, of course. So, unless it is barefoot, the walk meanders just beyond the reach of the largest wave in a set – always the seventh, don’t the fishermen say? This glistening strand between high and low tide is my freedom trail. I lose myself as I walk. I write in my mind. The waves are my worry beads. It is an in-between space in an in-between space. The last reach of the sea soaks into the sand. On one side colonies of gulls and terns dry themselves on the white sand. On the other, the sea side, gannets dive into the troughs between breakers. Occasionally dolphins are to be seen surfing in the green transparencies of the waves. In the soak of the sea life stirs almost immediately as the crab holes bubble. Worms and pipi wander just below the surface, sucking life from the brine seeping into their world. Sandpipers ballet after the retreating waves. This wet stretch between land and sea is the true beach, the true inbetween space. Among the peoples of Oceania about whom I write – the maohi of Tahiti, the enata of the Marquesas, the kamaiana of Hawai’i – it is a sacred, a tapu space, an unresolved space where things can happen, where things can be made to happen. It is a space of transformation. It is a space of crossings. ‘Life is a Beach’, the tee-shirts in every seaside resort proclaim. Yes, life is a beach, though the truth of that is not as hedonistic as the teeshirts are meant to imply. Life is the marginal space between two unknowables – its befores and its afters. All of living is a crossing. Living is all the crossings within one crossing. It is the process in these crossings that intrigues me. The process, not so much the change. Not essences and polarities that never were, but creative unfolding. How does one catch creative unfolding – movement – in words? Music might catch the flow of things, and so might painting. But there is stasis in a word that describes the world as things. ‘To arrest the meaning of words, that is what the Terror wants’, Jean-François Lyotard once wrote.1 And Herbert Marcuse put his slant on the idea: ‘All reification is a process of forgetting. Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps

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dance’.2 I want to write cultural history that avoids both the Terror and the forgetting. There is no beach without sea, no sea without sky, no sky without the earth’s curve. In the view from the beach, the forefront is all detail and movement, all history, one is tempted to say. But the ordered restlessness of the waves diffracts the gaze, dissolves attention into reflection. From a beach, things loom in the glim of the horizon and in the shimmer of the mind’s eye. From a beach, it is possible to see beyond one’s horizons. Beaches breed expansiveness. My beaches do anyway.

B I B L I O G R A P H I C A L N OT E S I have made these ideas public over a number of years: Performances, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996; Readings/Writings, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998; ‘The Theatricality of History-Making and the Paradoxes of Acting’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 8, 1993, pp. 73–95; ‘The Theatricality of Observing and Being Observed’ in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 451–84. My debt to the ideas of others is great: Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, Performing Arts Journal Publications, New York, 1982; Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989, pp. 141–48.

NOTES

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Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies, Random House, New York, 1975; Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Vintage Books, New York, 1976. 2 For example, Peter Spearritt and David Walker, eds., Australian Popular Culture, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1979; Ian Craven, Martin Gray and Geraldine Stoneham, Australian Popular Culture, Cambridge University Press, published in association with Australian Studies and the British Australian Studies Association, Melbourne, 1994; Graeme Turner, Making it National: Nationalism and Australian Popular Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. 3 Raymond Williams, Keywords, Fontana, London, 1983, p. 87. 4 Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1997, pp. 3–16. 5 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Wesleyan University Press, published by the University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 1997, p. 42. 6 Lynn Hunt, ‘Introduction: History, Culture, and Text’, in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989, p. 1. 7 Willem Frijhof, ‘Foucault Reformed by Certeau: Historical Strategies of Discipline and Everyday Tactics of Appropriation’, in John Neubauer, ed., Cultural History After Foucault, Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1999, p. 85. 8 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985. 9 The ‘Frankfurt School’ is the name given to a group of philosophers who were associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. The most renowned intellectuals from this group include Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. All subscribed to Karl Marx’s theory of historical materialism but sought to adjust this theory to their perceptions of modern realities. Collectively, this body of work became known as ‘Critical Theory’. With the exception of Benjamin, the Frankfurt School had an overwhelmingly pessimistic view of modernity and popular culture. 10 Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999, p. 7.

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11 See the CCCS Women’s Studies Group publication, Women Take Issue, Hutchison, London, 1978; and also Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A thief in the night: stories of feminism in the 1970s at CCCS’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Routledge, London and New York, 1996. 12 John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 51–63. 13 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Verso, London and New York, 1993, pp. 3–4. 14 Peter Goodall, High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, p. xii; William H. Sewell Jr, ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, in Bonnell and Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn, p. 37. 15 Sewell, ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, p. 36. 16 Frijhof, ‘Foucault Reformed by Certeau’, p. 86. 17 Hunt, ‘History, Culture, and Text’, pp. 12-13. 18 Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’, in A. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World System, Macmillan, London, 1991, p. 68. 19 Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, ‘On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies’, in Morley and Chen, Stuart Hall, p. 373. 20 See chapter 2. 21 This is not to say there was not considerable interest in aspects of Australian history earlier. See, for example, Brian Fletcher, Australian History in New South Wales 1888 to 1938, NSW University Press, Kensington, 1993. The Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society dates from 1901, but the more academic Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand (now Australian Historical Studies) first appeared in 1940. 22 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made New, Pantheon Books, New York, 1974. 23 Although it is worth noting some of the French Annales school – Braudel particularly – could also end up in a celebration of national identity. 24 S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith, eds., Australian Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 3. 25 Don Watson, ‘A Toast to the Postmodern Republic’, Island 55, Winter 1993. 26 Albert Métin, Socialisme sans doctrines, [1910], Alternative Publishing Cooperative, Sydney, 1977. 27 Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History. vol. 1 The Beginning, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1997 pp. ix, xi. 28 See Richard White, ‘Inventing Australia Revisited’ in Wayne Hudson and Geoffrey Bolton, eds., Creating Australia: Changing Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, p. 16. 29 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Identity History is Not Enough’, On History, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1997. 30 We are grateful for discussions with Penny Russell on this point. 31 See Stratton and Ang, ‘On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies’.

CHAPTER 2 1

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Australian history is taught by Australian Studies centres in Europe, North America and Asia, often with Australian government support, past and/or present; sometimes some Australian history is conveyed in travel literature, e.g. Bill Bryson, Down Under, Random House, Sydney, 2000; there will sometimes be Australian chapters in international historical collections on specific issues, such as histories of gender and race; and there are occasional ‘breakthrough’ texts, such as Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Pan Books, London, 1988. A. G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, Past and Present, no. 164, 1999, pp. 198–243.

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For a discussion of pre-World War II Australian historiography, see C. Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997; S. Macintyre, ‘The Writing of Australian History’, in D. H. Borchardt, ed., Australians: A Guide to Sources, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, pp. 1–29; Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas, eds., The Discovery of Australian History 1890–1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1995; G. Walsh, Australia: History & Historians, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, 1997; S. Macintyre, History, the University and the Nation, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1992. S. Macintyre, A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1994; R. M. Crawford, M. Clark and G. Blainey, with an introduction by S. Macintyre, Making History, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1985. Quoted in M. Clark, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, in his Occasional Lectures and Speeches, Fontana, Melbourne, 1980, p. 5. W. K. Hancock, Australia, Benn, London, p. 51. Cf. A. Curthoys and J. Docker, ‘The Two Histories: Metaphor in English Historiographical Writing’, Rethinking History, vol. 1, no. 3, 1997, pp. 259–73. Stuart Ward, ‘Transcending the Nation: a global imperial history?’, in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., 2003. Hancock, Australia, p. 50. Clark, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, p. 4. Clark, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, p. 5. J. A. La Nauze, ‘The Study of Australian History, 1929–1959’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, vol. 9, no. 33, November 1959, p. 10. J. M. Ward, Earl Grey And The Australian Colonies, 1846–1857: A Study Of Self-Government And Self-Interest, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1958; J. M. Ward, James Macarthur, Colonial Conservative, 1798–1867, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1981. For a series of surveys on developments in Australian historiography, see G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre, eds., The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998. For discussion and commentary on the feminist literature, see A. Curthoys, For and Against Feminism: A Personal Journey into Feminist Theory and History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988. M. Clark, A Short History of Australia, Heinemann, London, 1963, pp. 133–34; Ray Evans, Kathryn Cronin, and Kay Saunders, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination, Australia and New Zealand Book Co, Sydney, 1975; Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California, 1850–1901, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1983. See E. Foxcroft, Australian Native Policy. Its History, Especially in Victoria, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1941; P. Hasluck, Black Australians: A Survey of Native Policy in Western Australia, 1829–1897, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1942; C. Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1948. Hancock had said in 1930 the advance of British civilisation made inevitable ‘the natural progress of the aboriginal race towards extinction’ (Hancock, Australia, p. 21). Douglas Pike’s Australia: the Quiet Continent (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1966) said of the indigenous person confronting the onrush of white settlement: ‘Whether he chose dependence or clash, the end was death, lingering or sudden’ (p. 36). Russel Ward wrote in his book, Australia (Ure Smith, Sydney, 1979), that one ‘difficulty that Australian pioneers – unlike those of North America, South Africa, and New Zealand – did not have to contend with was a warlike native race’,

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and went on to describe the lives of indigenous peoples as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, redeemed perhaps by the lack of territorial conflict and ambition (p. 21). Manning Clark in his Short History evoked quite sympathetically the point of view of the settlers: ‘They were angered by the indolence of the aborigine, by his inability and absence of desire to exert himself to raise himself out of his material squalor’ (p. 40). In later years he was to publicly bemoan his own blindness in this area, and the later volumes of his A History of Australia paid greater attention to indigenous histories than had the earlier ones. As late as 1974, a survey collection edited by Frank Crowley, widely used in teaching in university courses in Australian history, had no discussion of indigenous histories. Frank Crowley, ed., A New History of Australia, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1974. For a more detailed discussion, see my essay, ‘We’ve only just started writing national history and you want us to stop already?’ in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn. Landmarks in this development included Charles Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1970); the journal Aboriginal History (founded in 1977); Richard Broome’s Aboriginal Australians (George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982), a survey history much used in university history teaching, reprinted every year; and Henry Reynolds’ widely read series of books beginning with The Other Side of the Frontier (Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1981). From the mid-1980s run-up to the Bicentennial commemoration of 1988 onwards, indigenous people’s accounts of the colonial past were increasingly heard as indigenous women and men stressed in public debate their prior occupation, direct experience of invasion and racism, and struggles for survival. S. Morgan, My Place, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1988. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, London, 1983; Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1990. Bob Hodge and Sanjay Seth, The Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Post Colonial Mind, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991; Susan Dermody and Liz Jacka, The Screening of Australia, Currency Press, Sydney, 1987–88; Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986. Australian Feminist Studies, special issue entitled ‘New Comparison/ International Worlds’, vol. 16, no. 36, 2001. Sean Scalmer in his recent book, Dissent Events, especially develops this idea of tracing networks, influences and power relations from one locality to another, and demonstrates just how much Australian political activists in the 1960s, for example, learnt from and transformed the ideas and political style of the American civil rights movement. Sean Scalmer, Dissent Events, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002. Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein-Smith with Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, Blackwell, Malden, Mass., 2000; Donald Denoon with Marivic Wyndham, ‘Australia and the Western Pacific’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, p. 216. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 199. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 200. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 241. See Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1994; Antoinette Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, Routledge, London, 1999; Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of

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Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Routledge, London, 2000; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995. Masayo Tada, ‘Grappling with Another Other: Australian Studies in Japan’, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2002. I discuss this a little further in ‘Does Australian history have a future?’, in Kate Darian Smith, ed., Challenging Australian Histories, special issue of Australian Historical Studies, 2002. Apart from many monographs, there is the specialist journal, the Journal of Genocide Research. See also Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Introduction – Genocide: Definitions, Questions, Settler Colonies’, Aboriginal History, vol. 25, 2001, pp. 1–15. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, Washington, D.C., 1944, p. 79. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, pp. xi, 79–80. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 79. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 79. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1997, pp. 1, 85–87, 97, 129, 403. See also David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 422. Since this essay was written, Dirk Moses has written on this issue at length in ‘Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the “racial century”: genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, pp. 7–36. It had appeared in Swedish in 1991, but appeared in English translation only in 1997. I am using Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, Granta Books, London, 1998. Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, pp. 123–24. See Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Second Edition, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p. 14 for the population estimate of 3–4000 and passim for the history of the destruction of Aboriginal societies in Tasmania. Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, p. 130. Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, p. 131. Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, p. 156 ff. Robert Manne, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2001. Keith Windschuttle, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian history’, parts I, II and III, Quadrant, October–December 2000. See Aboriginal History, no. 25, 2001.

CHAPTER 3 1 2 3 4 5

Banner, Melbourne, 7 October, 8 November 1853. Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications, Nelson, Melbourne, 1984, pp. 16–30. Northern Star, 24 March 1877. Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 28. See, for instance, R. B. Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1903–1920, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976.

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Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Chatto & Windus, London, 1981, vol. 2, pp. 134–36. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1983, pp. 208, 315–16. Alan Atkinson, ‘Postage in the South-East’, Push from the Bush, no. 5, December, 1979, pp. 26–27; M. J. Daunton, Royal Mail: The Post Office since 1840, Athlone Press, London, 1985, p. 80. Mother to son, names both unknown, 31 December 1857, La Trobe Ms 10943, Public Library of Victoria. Census of New South Wales, 1861, Sydney, 1862; South Australian Census, 1861, South Australian Parliamentary Papers, 1862, vol. 1, no. 5; Tasmanian Census, 1881, Tasmanian Parliamentary Papers, 1883, vol. 45, no. 72; Census of the Colony of Western Australia, 1881, Perth, 1882; Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1911, vol. 1, p. 170; Alan Atkinson, ‘Male and Female Literacy, 1851–61’, The Push: A Journal of Early Australian Social History, no. 28, 1990, pp. 12–14. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963, p. 171. Fifth Report of the Commissioners of National Education in New South Wales, for the Year, 1852, and Denominational School Board Annual Report for 1852, N.S.W. Legislative Council Votes and Proceedings, 1853, vol. 1, pp. 497, 616; Statistical Register, 1856, tables no. 11 and 12, South Australian Parliamentary Papers, 1857–58, vol. 1. Statistical Register, 1856, tables no. 11 and 12, South Australian Parliamentary Papers, 1857–58, vol. 1. Derek Phillips, ‘The State and the Provision of Education in Tasmania, 1839 to 1913’, PhD thesis, University of Tasmania 1988, pp. 464–66. D. F. Bourke, The History of the Catholic Church in Western Australia, Perth, 1979, pp. 24–25; David Mossman, State Education in Western Australia 1829–1960, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1972, p. 9; Sister Ursula to Rev. Mother Cecilia, 19 December–1 January 1849, and same to same, 5 August 1849, in Geraldine Byrne, ed., Valiant Women: Letters from the Foundation Sisters of Mercy in Western Australia, 1845–1849, Polding Press, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 119, 139. Moyal, Clear Across Australia, p. 85. Ina Perry, ‘Compton Telephone’, n.d. (in my possession). Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, pp. 187–88. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, p. 214. Herbert Casson, in Independent, 26 October 1911, quoted in Ithiel de Sola Pool, Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment, Ablex, Norwood, N.J., 1983, p. 72; Ann Moyal and Roslyn Russell, ‘Politicians and the Telephone: Assessing the Australian Evidence’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 34, 1988–89, pp. 333–44. Quoted in E. K. Teather, ‘Seventy years of the Country Women’s Association’, Australian Geographer, vol. 23, 1992, p. 169. Jennifer M. McKay, ‘Time of Day and Telephone Interviews in Rural-Urban Australia’, Australian Geographer, vol. 17, 1986, p. 65. Ann Moyal, ‘The Qualitative and Ethnographic Approach’, in Ann Moyal and Alison McGuigan, eds., Research on Domestic Telephone Use, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 56–60. Woman’s Home Companion, March 1913, quoted in Pool, Forecasting the Telephone, p. 133; Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, p. 215. Australian Higher Education Supplement, 9 May 2001, p. 48.

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See for example Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987. For an interesting rebuttal of Bloom and similar critics by an historian, see Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture and History, Beacon Press, Boston, 1996. See special issue devoted to ‘culture’, Labour History, no. 79, November 2000. See Citizens and Subjects Symposium, Australian Historical Studies, no. 100, 1993, pp. 357–402 and ‘Fresh Cuts’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 67, 2001. There will always be variations on these themes, and even dissenters, but the definition I have offered is drawn from a range of general works such as Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994 and Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999. Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1998, pp. 1–28. John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, London, 1988 and Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788, Longmans, Melbourne, 1995. See Joan Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Feminism and History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 152–80, and Beverley Kingston, ‘Home Truths from the 1970s: Twenty Years On’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 27, no. 106, 1996, pp. 30–36. For some general overviews of these debates see Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History, Routledge, London, 1991; Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ., 1998; and John Neubauer, ed., Cultural History after Foucault, Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1999. For some recent examples see Lucy Taksa, ‘All a Matter of Timing: Managerial Innovation and Workplace Culture in the NSW Railways and Tramways prior to 1921’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 110, 1998, pp. 1–26; James Walter, ‘Designing Families and Solid Citizens: The Dialectic of Modernity and the Matrimonial Causes Bill, 1959’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 116, 2001, pp. 40–56; and Annabel Cooper, ‘Textual Territories: Gendered Cultural Politics and Australian Representations of the War of 1914–1918’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 100, 1993, pp. 403–21. See Helen Irving, To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia’s Constitution, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997; David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994; and Nicholas Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social Change and Social Analysis in Australia in the 1950s, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973. Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Macleay, Paddington, 1994, pp. 2, 4–5. Richard Evans, In Defence of History, Granta, London, 1997, pp. 191–203. Windschuttle, The Killing of History, p. 12. For a brief summary of this conflict see Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing, Faber & Faber, London, 1991, pp. 119–22. But there were many other disputes. Baudrillard famously dismissed Foucault as a theorist and de Certeau was highly critical of some of Foucault’s key propositions. Feminists and postcolonial theorists have pointed to the lack of explicit attention to gen-

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der and race in key theorists such as Derrida and Foucault. And the list of disputes could go on. Windschuttle, The Killing of History, p. 74. See Greg Dening, Performances, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996. Windschuttle, The Killing of History, p. 25. Evans, In Defence of History, pp. 196–211. Evans, In Defence of History, pp. 195–96. See for example many of the essays in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, translated and edited by Colin Gordon, Harvester, Brighton, 1980. Windschuttle, The Killing of History, pp. 145–54. David Halperin, ‘Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality’, Representations, no. 63, 1998, pp. 93–120. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1946. Two useful critiques are Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe, ‘Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History’, Overland, no. 163, 2001, pp. 51–69 and Richard Hall, ‘Windschuttle’s Myths’, in Peter Craven, ed., The Best Australian Essays 2001, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 117–30. Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1967, p. 20. See the essays on the ‘national popular’ and intellectuals in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings, selected and edited by Quinton Hoare, translated by John Mathews, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1978. Janet McCalman, Sex and Suffering: Women’s Health and a Woman’s Hospital, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998. Of course such a judgment is a matter of taste. For my taste Joseph Pugliese’s is just one example of poststructuralist theory triumphing over the evidence. This study of shell-shocked soldiers has some grand theoretical pronouncements but is based on a few selected texts and fails to see the larger medical, social and cultural contexts in which war neurosis was produced. Joseph Pugliese, ‘The Gendered Figuring of the Dysfunctional Serviceman in the Discourses of Military Psychiatry’, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, eds., Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 162–77. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996. Catharine Coleborne, ‘She Does her Hair Fantastically: The Production of Femininity in Patient Case-Books of the Lunatic Asylum in 1860s Victoria’, in Jane Long, Jan Gothard and Helen Brash, eds., Forging Identities: Bodies, Gender and Feminist History, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1997, pp. 47–68. Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996. David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1999. Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996. Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997. Some of his major works include The Other Side of the Frontier: An Interpretation of the Aboriginal Responses to the Invasion and Settlement of Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1982, The Law of the Land, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1987 and Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1995. See for example Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995 and Bain Attwood and

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John Arnold, eds., Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, Special Issue of Journal of Australian Studies, no. 35, 1992. 37 Tim Rowse, White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1998. 38 See Judith Allen, ‘Evidence and Silence: feminism and the limits of history’, in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross, eds., Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986, pp. 173–89.

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For a stimulating reflection on ideas of nature, see George Seddon, ‘The Nature of Nature’, in his Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 7–14. See also Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, in his Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, Verso Editions and NLB, London, 1980, pp. 67–85. The books I refer to here are Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody Over the Last 13,000 Years, Jonathan Cape, London, 1997, and Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976. An excellent collection that reflects on the implications of this change (and others) is William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995, especially Cronon’s Introduction, pp. 23–56. Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth: Towards 21st-Century Science, Viking, London, 1991; and Deborah Rose, ‘Connecting with Ecological Futures’, in Malcolm Gillies, ed., Position Papers: The National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Canberra, 2001, pp. 35–44. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Futura, London, 1981, p. 229. See also his Science and Human Values, Harper & Row, New York, 1965, and The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1978. Quoted in Peter Marshall, Nature’s Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking, Simon & Schuster, London, 1992, pp. 178–79. Rose, ‘Connecting with Ecological Futures’, pp. 35–38. Marshall, Nature’s Web, p. 373. Jonathan Bate, ‘Drawing Culture from a Silent Spring’, The Australian Financial Review, 31 August 2001, p. 6; Norbert H. Platz, ‘Greening the New Literatures in English: A Plea for Ecocriticism’, Anglisteng 1999, Mainz (Proceedings of the conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English), vol. 21, pp. 313–26. For example, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel; and Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and Peoples, Reed, Sydney, 1994, and The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples, Text, Melbourne, 2001. Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx, ‘The New Environmentalisms’, in Conway, Kenniston and Marx, eds., Earth, Fire, Air and Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1999, pp. 1–29. Rose, ‘Connecting with Ecological Futures’, p. 35. Alfred W. Crosby, ‘Reassessing 1492’, in his Germs, Seeds and Animals: Studies in Ecological History, M. E. Sharp, New York, 1994, p. 185. George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, edited by David Lowenthal, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, p. 49. D. J. Mulvaney, ‘Archaeological retrospect 9’, Antiquity, vol. 60, 1986, pp. 96–107. Rhys Jones, ‘Fire-stick farming’, Australian Natural History, vol. 16, 1969, pp. 224–28.

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17 Flannery, The Future Eaters, pp. 144–45. 18 George Seddon, ‘The Man-Modified Environment’, in John McLaren, ed., A Nation Apart, Longman Chesire, Melbourne, 1983, p. 10. 19 Steve Morton (CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology – now CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems), address to a workshop on ‘Environmental History in the National Museum of Australia’, jointly sponsored by the Museum and the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 14 April, 1999. 20 I have here drawn on my entry on ‘Environmental History’ in G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre, eds., The Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998. 21 Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 24–25; Stephen J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Penguin Books, London, 1991, pp. 51, 280–81; Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, Cambridge, Melbourne, 1996, chapter 1. 22 For example, J. G. D. Clark, Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis, Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, 1952. 23 W. L. Thomas, Jr., ed., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1956. I am drawing here on an unpublished paper by Richard Grove, ‘North American Innovation or Imperial Legacy? Contesting and Re-assessing the Roots and Agendas of Environmental History, 1860–1996’, presented at a Colloquium on the Environment held at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 14–15 February, 1996, kindly made available by the author. 24 Grove, ‘North American Innovation or Imperial Legacy?’, and Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. 25 Michael Williams, ‘The Relations of Environmental History and Historical Geography’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 20, no. 1, 1994, pp. 3–21. 26 Greg Dening, ‘A Poetic for Histories: Transformations that Present the Past’, in Aletta Biersack, ed., Clio in Oceania, Washington, Smithsonian Institution, 1990, pp. 347–80; Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, pp. 210–11. 27 Alfred W. Crosby, ‘The Past and Present of Environmental History’, American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 4, October 1995, pp. 1177–89, at p. 1181. 28 For a commentary on the concern with the agency of nature, see David Demeritt, ‘The Nature of Metaphors in Cultural Geography and Environmental History’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 18, no. 2, June 1994, pp. 163–85. 29 Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1989. 30 Roderick Nash, ‘American Environmental History: A New Teaching Frontier’, Pacific Historical Review, vol. 41, 1972, pp. 362–71. See also Donald Worster, ‘Doing Environmental History’, in Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 289–307. 31 Stephen J. Pyne, preface to new edition of Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1998. 32 Donald Worster, Alfred W. Crosby, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon and Stephen J. Pyne, ‘A Round Table: Environmental History’, in The Journal of American History, vol. 76, no. 4, March 1990, pp. 1087–1147. 33 William Cronon, ‘The Uses of Environmental History’, Environmental History Review, vol. 17, no. 3, Fall 1993, pp. 1–22, at p. 13, and Donald Worster, ‘The Two Cultures Revisited: Environmental History and the Environmental Sciences’, Environment and History, vol. 2, no. 1, February 1996, pp. 3–14. See Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1991, and Worster’s, ‘Transformations of the Earth: Toward

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an Agroecological Perspective in History’, in Worster et al., ‘A Round Table’, pp. 1087–1106. Worster, ‘Doing Environmental History’, p. 290. See, for example, Crosby, ‘The Past and Present of Environmental History’, and Worster, The Wealth of Nature, p. 45. John MacKenzie, ‘Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment’, in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, eds., Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Keele University Press, Edinburgh, 1997, pp. 215–28. Donald Worster, ‘The Vulnerable Earth: Toward a Planetary History’, in Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth, pp. 3–20. Libby Robin, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998, and Richard Grove, Green Imperialism. On environmental history and environmentalism, see J. M. Powell, ‘Strangers and Lovers: Disputing the Legacy of Environmental History’, in Livio Dobrez, ed., Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times, Bibliotech, Canberra, 1994, pp. 87–103. Robin, Defending the Little Desert, especially chapters 4 and 8. Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, p. 158. Worster, The Wealth of Nature, p. 164. Worster, The Wealth of Nature, p. 169. Stephen J. Pyne, ‘Smokechasing: The Search for a Usable Past’, Environmental History, vol. 6, no. 4, October 2001, pp. 530–40. Worster, ‘History as Natural History’ and ‘The Ecology of Order and Chaos’, in The Wealth of Nature, pp. 30–44 and 156–70. Richard White, ‘Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning’, in Worster et al., ‘A Round Table’, p. 1115. Stephen J. Pyne, preface to new edition of Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1998. J. M. Powell, ‘Historical Geography and Environmental History: An Australian Interface’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 22, no. 3, 1996, pp. 253–73, at p. 255. See also J. M. Powell, ‘Strangers and Lovers’ (see note 38), ‘Marginal Notes? Recent Works in Australian Environmental History’, Australian Geographer, vol. 27, no. 2, 1996, pp. 271–78, and Disputing Dominion: Environmental Sensibilities, Historical Consciousness and Academic Discourse in Australia, Working Paper No. 36, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Melbourne, 1995. Pyne, Preface, Burning Bush, 1998. William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History, vol. 78, 1992, pp. 1347-76, at p. 1375. See Tom Griffiths, ‘The Writing of A Million Wild Acres’, in John Dargavel, Di Hart and Brenda Libbis, eds., The Perfumed Pineries, Australian Forest History Society, Canberra, 2001, pp. 184–94. I have not discussed here, for example, the significant work of W. G. Hoskins and J. B. Jackson, or the influence of Fernand Braudel, because I am focusing on the distinctive character of environmental history since 1970, but see Tom Griffiths and Tim Bonyhady, ‘Landscape and Language’, in Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001, and Griffiths, ‘Deep Time and Australian History’, History Today, vol. 51, no. 11, November 2001, pp. 20–25. Jenny Lee, ‘A Black Past, a Black Prospect: Squatting in Western NSW, 1879–1902’, MA thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1980, p. 54. Michael Quinn, ‘Possessing the West: the Public Management of the Western Division of NSW, 1880s to 1930s’, PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1995, p. 69.

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54 Alan Barnard, ‘Aspects of the economic history of the arid land pastoral industry’, in R. O. Slatyer and R. A. Perry, eds., Arid Lands of Australia: Proceedings of a Symposium Held in the Academy of Science, Canberra, May 1969, ANU Press, Canberra, 1969, p. 219. 55 Tom Griffiths, ‘A Hundred Years of Environmental Crisis’, Rangeland Journal, vol. 23, 2001, pp. 5–14. 56 C. E. W. Bean, On the Wool Track, Angus & Robertson, Melbourne, 1963 [1910], pp. 47–48. 57 L. E. B. Stretton, Report of the Royal Commission into the Causes of and Measures Taken to Prevent the Bushfires of January 1939, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1939, p. 1. 58 Stretton, Report of the Royal Commission, p. 5. 59 David Ashton, ‘Fire in Tall Open-Forests (Wet Sclerophyll Forests)’, in A. M. Gill, R. H. Groves and I. R. Noble, eds., Fire and the Australian Biota, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, 1981, pp. 339–66, and ‘The Big Ash Forest, Wallaby Creek, Victoria – Changes During One Lifetime’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 48, 2000, pp. 1–26. 60 Tom Griffiths, Forests of Ash: An Environmental History, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2001. 61 David Lindenmayer, ‘Using Environmental History and Ecological Evidence to Appraise Management Regimes in Forests’, in Stephen Dovers, ed., Environmental History and Policy: Still Settling Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 74–96. 62 Stephen J. Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992, p. 312. 63 For aspects of the debate, see P. A. Attiwill, ‘Ecological Disturbance and the Conservative Management of Eucalypt Forests in Australia’, Forest Ecology and Management, vol. 63, 1994, pp. 301–46, and David Lindenmayer, ‘Using Environmental History and Ecological Evidence to Appraise Management Regimes in Forests’.

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Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 2002, p. 1. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet. Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life, Columbia University Press, New York, p. 19. 3 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, University of Chicago Press, 1984 (tr. McLaughlin & Pellauer), p. 274. 4 David Thelen, comments on a paper at ‘The Future of the Past’ conference in London, Ontario, 2002. 5 Richard Johnson, ‘Historical Returns. Transdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies and History’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, p. 263. 6 Luisa Passerini, Patrick Fridenson and Lutz Neithammer, ‘International Reverberations: Remembering Raphael’, History Workshop Journal, no. 45, Spring 1998, pp. 256–7. 7 In this instance, 1.5 million Christians were killed by Muslim Turks. Turkish peoples claim the conflict was a civil war, not a genocide. The weight of Western historical scholarship supports the latter view. 8 Inner Western Suburbs Courier, Monday 9 March 1998, p. 25. 9 Though the ‘relationship between the modern media and the contemporary politics of memory’ is a central theme of Nancy Woods’ book Vectors of Memory. Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe. Berg, Oxford, 1999. See also Chris Locke, ‘Digital Memory and the Problem of Forgetting’, in Susannah Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology, Berg, Oxford, 2000, and Radstone’s introduction to the same volume. 10 This project is being carried out at University of Technology, Sydney by Jane

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Connors from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Paul Ashton, Heather Goodall and myself, with assistance from Australian Research Council grants. Louella McCarthy is the project’s senior researcher. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen published their findings as a book: The Presence of the Past. Popular Uses of History in American Life, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998. Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body. The Kennedy Assassination, the Media and the Shaping of Collective Memory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992. David Carter, ‘Working on the Past, Working on the Future’, in Richard Nile and Michael Peterson, eds., Becoming Australia. The Woodford Forum, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1998, p. 10. See Celia Lurie, Prosthetic Culture. Photography, Memory and Identity, Routledge, London, 1998. Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History. Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, AFI Film Reader, Routledge, London, 1996, p. 3. ‘Column 8’ in Sydney Morning Herald, 13 and 20 May 1999, p. 1. The First Fleeters are an Australian historical society, membership of which is confined to those who can document their descent from those aboard this first convict fleet to Australia. Among members, descent from a convict is considered preferable to descent from the ‘brutal’ guards who brought them out. See Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, esp. chapter 6. Chris Healy recently argued that ‘we are in the middle of a mundane heritage crisis’ as national cultural institutions try to come to grips with historical shifts. See his ‘“Race Portraits” and Vernacular Possibilities: Heritage and Culture’, chapter 13 in Tony Bennett and David Carter, eds., Culture in Australia. Policies, Publics and Programs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. There is no space here to address the possibilities of cultural tourism, an increasing factor in the experience of the past. Weekend Australian, 23–4 June 2001, p. 1. For a thoughtful discussion of the impact of indigenous issues on war commemoration, see Ann Curthoys, ‘National Narratives, War Commemoration and Racial Exclusion in a Settler Society: The Australian case’, in T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, Routledge Studies in Memory & Narrative, London, 2000, pp. 128–44. Pierre Nora, ‘Generations’ in vol. 1, Conflicts & Division, of Realms of Memory. The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols. under the direction of Pierre Nora, 1992, (trans. from French), Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 530. Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, vol. 69, Winter 2000, pp. 127–50, uses this term. Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’, in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1995, p. 16. See also Shoshana Feldman & Dori Laub, eds., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Routledge, New York, 1992. Saul Friedlander, ‘History, Memory and the Historian: Facing the Shoah’, in Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas, eds., Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2001. Friedlander says, ‘The historian cannot and should not be the guardian of memory. The historian’s gaze is analytic, critical, attuned to complexity, wary about generalizations’, pp. 278–79. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988, p. 10. Jay Winter, ‘The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Raritan, vol. 21, no. 1, 2001, p. 52. Some recent work in anthropology has begun to explore this field. See

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Jeannette Marie Mageo, ed., Cultural Memory. Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2001. Susan Crane, ‘Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory’, and Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, in American Historical Review, Forum on History and Memory, December 1997, vol. 102, no. 5, 1997, pp. 1372–85 and pp. 1386–1403 respectively. James Young, The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1993, p. xii. Anna Haebich, Broken Circles. Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2000. Bringing Them Home: Report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission National Inquiry into the Separation of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders from their Families, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 1997, p. 3. The Australian, 27 August 1999. Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, p. 144. Ian McClean and Gordon Bennett, The Art of Gordon Bennett, Craftsman House, G & B Arts International, Sydney, 1996. Michael S. Roth, The Ironists’s Cage. Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 9. This is a point made by Efrain Sicher in ‘The Future of the Past. Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary American Post-Holocaust Narratives’, History & Memory, vol. 12, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2000, pp. 56–91; and Susan J. Brison, ‘Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of Self’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present, University Press of New England, Dartmouth College, 1999, pp. 39–54. Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound: The Return of the Stolen Generations, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999, p. 49. Bain Attwood, ‘“Learning About the Truth”: The Stolen Generations Narrative’, in Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan, eds., Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001, pp. 183–212. For more general points about historians’ role in memory scholarship, see Georg G. Iggers, ‘The Role of Professional Historical Scholarship in the Creation and Distortion of Memory’, in Anne Ollila, ed., Historical Perspectives on Memory, SHS Helsinki, 1999, pp. 49–67; and particularly Saul Friedlander, ‘History, Memory and the Historian: Facing the Shoah’. Anna Haebich, Broken Circles, chapter 9, ‘A Twilight of Knowing’, pp. 563–70. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance. The Dynamics of Collective Memory, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1994, pp. 52–53. Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, and Jay Winter, ‘The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, passim. Ian Buruma, ‘The Joys and Perils of Victimhood’, New York Review of Books, 8 April 1990. Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations. Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2000, p. xvii, argues that Buruma does not deal with the ‘perpetrators’ and ‘leaves the guilt component unexplored’. Michael Jackson, At Home in the World, Sydney, 1995, cited in Anna Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 568–69. Charles S. Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial’, History & Memory, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall/Winter 1993, p. 149. Maier argued that the dominance of memory in public discourse signified a retreat from transformative politics (p. 150).

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42 Haydie Gooder and Jane M. Jacobs, ‘“On the Borders of the Unsayable”: The Apology in Postcolonising Australia’, Interventions, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 238–39. 43 Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991; and Preempting the Holocaust, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998. For a discussion of these issues see Dominic LaCapra, ‘Holocaust Testimonies. Attending to the Victim’s Voice’, Writing History, Writing Trauma, chapter 3, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2001.

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Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, Scribner’s, New York, 1923, p. 157. Although (white) women were granted full political rights the following year (in legislation which simultaneously excluded the majority of Aboriginal people from such rights), no Australian woman won election to the federal parliament until 1943, in part because they insisted on standing as independent ‘woman’ candidates. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 3 October 1901, p. 5571. Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays, Putnams, London, 1897, p. 289. Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred Purifying Australia and California 1850–1901, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, pp. 243–47; see also John Kane ‘Racialism and Democracy: The Legacy of White Australia’, in Geoff Stokes, ed., The Politics of Identity in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 12 September 1901, p. 4806. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6 September 1901, p. 4659. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3 October 1901, pp. 6815–19. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3 October 1901, pp. 6815–19. Commonwealth Arbitration Reports, vol. 11, 1907–1908, pp. 3, 4. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cutural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1995. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, p. 50. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3 October 1901, pp. 6815–19. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12 September 1901, p. 4806. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12 September 1901, p. 4804. See, for example, A. J. Yarwood, and M. J. Knowling, Race Relations in Australia A History, Methuen, Melbourne, 1982; Andrew Markus, Race Relations in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, p. 6. See, for example, Verity Burgmann, ‘Capital and Labour: Responses to Immigration in the Nineteenth Century’ in Penny Russell and Richard White, eds., Pastiche: Reflections on Nineteenth Century Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. For a vigorous critique of ‘whiteness studies’, see Barbara J. Fields, ‘Whiteness, Racism, and Identity’, International Labor and Working Class History, no. 60, Fall 2001. Quoted in Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1997, p. 285. Catherine Hall, ‘William Knibb and the Constitution of the New Black Subject’, in Martin Dauntin and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1999, p. 303.

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22 Hall, ‘William Knibb and the Constitution of the New Black Subject, p. 303 See also Catherine Hall’s new book, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867, Polity, Cambridge, 2002. 23 Quoted by Barton in Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 7 August 1901, p. 3503. 24 Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London, 1980, p. 11. 25 John Tregenza, Professor of Democracy: The Life of Charles Henry Pearson, 1830–1894, Oxford Don and Australian Radical, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968, p. 231. 26 Tregenza, Professor of Democracy, p. 231. 27 Theodore Roosevelt, ‘National Life and Character’ in Sewanee Review, August 1894, reprinted in American Ideals and Other Essays, Putnams, London, 1897, p. 271. 28 Roosevelt, ‘National Life and Character’, p. 273. 29 Roosevelt, ‘National Life and Character’, pp. 293–94. 30 Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 144. 31 Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 290–91. 32 Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt, pp. 289–90. 33 Quoted by Barton, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 7 August 1901, p. 3503. 34 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12 September 1901, p. 4806. 35 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 September 1901, p. 5074. 36 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 24 September 1901. 37 Quoted in Western Australian Parliamentary Debates, vol. 11, 1897, p. 423. 38 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, pp. 124–25. 39 Quoted in Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 48. 40 David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1999, p. 186. 41 Cited in John Bailey, The White Divers of Broome: The True Story of a Fatal Experiment, Macmillan, Sydney, 2001, p. 53. 42 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 25 September 1901, p. 5136. 43 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 September 1901, p. 5078. 44 Walker, Anxious Nation, p. 31. 45 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 September 1901, p. 5078. 46 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 September 1901, p. 5074. 47 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 September 1901, p. 5074. 48 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 6 September 1901, pp. 4655–56. 49 Commonwealth Arbitration Reports, vol. 11, 1907–1908, Ex Parte H. V. McKay, pp. 3–4. 50 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 20 September 1901. 51 Westralian Worker, 26 October 1900. 52 F. K. Crowley, ‘1901–14’ in Frank Crowley, A New History of Australia, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1994, p. 284. 53 Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. 151. 54 See, for example, Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work 1788–1974, Penguin, Melbourne, 1989 (reprint); Patricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath, Marilyn Lake and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation, Penguin, Melbourne, 2000 (reprint). 55 Markus, Australian Race Relations, pp. 120–21. 56 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up To The White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000, p. xix.

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57 See Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1991, p. 5; and Renata Salecl, ‘The Fantasy Structure of Nationalist Discourse’, Praxis International, no. 13, 1993, pp. 216–17. 58 Henry Reynolds, ‘Aboriginal–European Contact History: Problems and Issues’, in Russell and White, eds., Pastiche, pp. 56–57. 59 Markus, Fear and Hatred, p. 259. 60 Erez Manela, ‘The Wilsonian Moment and the Origins of the Postcolonial World’, paper delivered to the Harvard History Department, 31 January 2002. 61 Sean Brawley, The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America 1919–78, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995, p. 13. 62 Brawley, The White Peril, p. 15. 63 Brawley, The White Peril, p. 15. 64 Brawley, The White Peril, p. 28.

CHAPTER 8 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9

10 11 12

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Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, p. 65. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1984 (reprint edition), p. 241. Ward, Australian Legend, pp. 56–68, 83–106, 129–33; Russel Ward, ‘The Australian Legend Re-Visited’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, October 1978, p. 174. Ward, Australian Legend, pp. 221–30. Critiques of Ward’s thesis are conveniently collected in Historical Studies, vol. 18, October 1978; and John Carroll, ed., Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Heinemann Educational, London, 1973; Theodor. W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry reconsidered’, in J. M. Bernstein, ed., The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Routledge, London, 1991, pp. 85–92. Amongst a myriad of examples, see R. W. Connell and T. H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narrative and Argument, Longman, Melbourne, 1986; Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee, eds., A People’s History of Australia Since 1788, four volumes, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1988; Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981. Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts The Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788–1972, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1973, esp. p. 227. Louis H. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1955; The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada and Australia, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1964. Hartz, Founding of New Societies. For example, see John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, London, 1988. The standard works on eighteenth-century English culture are R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1704–1800, Hutchinson, London, 1981; John K. Walton and James Walvin, eds., Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1983. Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788, Longman, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 12–31; Richard Waterhouse, ‘High Culture and Low Culture: The Changing Role of Shakespeare, 1833–2000’, in John Golder and Richard Madelaine, eds., O

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Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage, Currency Press, Sydney, 2001, pp. 17–23. For the modernisation model applied to sport, see Marvin L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820–1870, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1986, chapter 1. New York Clipper, 22 February 1908; Australasian Stage Annual, 1901, p. 571. Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage, 1788–1914, UNSW Press, Sydney,1990, pp. 128–31. For the construction of high culture in England and America, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, Faber & Faber, London 1992; and Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988. Walter H. Cooper, Hazard: or, Pearce Dyceton’s Crime, F. Cunningham and Co., Sydney, 1872. Long Way To the Top: Stories of Australian and New Zealand Rock and Roll, ABC Video, Sydney, 2001, episodes two and three. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp. 157–239 Australian National Library, Australian Elizabethan Trust Papers, Box 113, playscripts, ‘Lola Montez’. James Jupp, Immigration, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1991, pp. 69–107. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp. 53–126. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, p. 83. Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, pp. 157–239. P. Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, Henry Colburn, London:, 1827, pp. 26–27, 167; Thomas Archer to William Archer 9 June 1840, Archer Papers, Oxley Library, Brisbane; Henry Haygarth, Recollections of Bush Life in Australia, John Murray, London, 1864, pp. 62–63; Carl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, John Murray, London, 1889, pp. 366–67. Australian Town and Country Journal, 13 September 1890, 26 September 1891, 3 December 1898. Australian Town and Country Journal, 21 January 1899. Unidentified press clipping dated ‘March 1953’ in Mitchell Library, Sydney; Grafton Daily Examiner, 16 March 1954; Daily Mirror, 11 February 1954. Jimmy Chi and Kuckles, Bran Nue Dae: A Musical Journey, Currency Press/Magabala Books, Sydney and Broome, 1991.

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C. Bruce and A. Callaway, ‘Dancing in the Dark: Black Corroboree or White Spectacle’, Australian Journal of Art, vol. 9, 1991, pp. 79–81; G. Dutton, White on Black, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1974, pp. 73, 156; R. White, Inventing Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981, p. 122. C. Fusco, ‘The Other History of Intercultural Performance’, Drama Review, vol. 38, no. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 143–67; M. Aird, Portraits of our Elders, Queensland Museum, South Brisbane, 1993; R. Poignant (curator), ‘Captive Lives: Looking for Tambo and his Companions’, Australian National Library Travelling Exhibition, Canberra, 1997. R. Broome and A. Jackamos, Sideshow Alley, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998; C. Tatz, Aborigines in Sport, ASSH, Adelaide, 1987. M. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990, pp. 3–41; T. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 18–27, 34–83; R. Glover, ‘Scientific Racism and the Australian Aborigine’, in J. Kociumbas, ed., Maps, Dreams, History, Department of History, University of Sydney, 1998, pp. 67–130.

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Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, pp. 170–73. K. Tsokhas, ‘Romanticism, Aboriginality and National Identity: The Poetry and Prose of Mary Gilmore’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 29, no. 111, 1998, pp. 232–36. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, pp. 108–18, 162–64, 183–85. Clark and Elkin, cited in J. Docker, Australian Cultural Elites, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1974, pp. 90–91; P. Wolfe, ‘On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 33, no. 2, 1991, pp. 197–224. C. Christesen cited in Docker, Australian Cultural Elites, pp. 85–87. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, pp. 186–87; A. Lattas, ‘Primitivism, Nationalism and Individualism in Australian Popular Culture’, in B. Attwood and J. Arnold, eds., Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, La Trobe University Press, Bundoora, Vic., 1992, pp. 45–58. J. J. Healy, Literature and the Aborigine in Australia, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989, pp. 154–80. La Perouse: The Place, the People and the Sea, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra 1988, pp. 12, 13, 55, 67; C. Balme, ‘Hula and Haka: Performance, Metonymy and Identity Formation in Colonial Hawaii and New Zealand’, Humanities Research, no. 3, 1998, pp. 43–53; A. Maxwell, ‘Rewriting the Nation’, Meanjin, vol. 53, no. 2, 1994, pp. 314-26; K. Dubinsky, ‘Local Colour: The Spectacle of Race at Niagara Falls’, in A. Burton, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, pp. 67–79. Dutton, White on Black, plates xiii, 16, 42, 55, 58. G. Wilkes, ed., A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1978, p. 93. B. Dean, ‘Aboriginal Dance in the Mexican Cultural Olympics’, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 11, October 1969, pp. 11–12. J. Marcus, ‘The Journey Out to the Centre: The Cultural Appropriation of Ayers Rock’, in A. Rutherford, ed., Aboriginal Culture Today, Dangaroo Press, Sydney, 1988, pp. 254–74; Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, pp. 176–92. Illustrated in W. Robertson, Coo-ee Talks (1928), and B. Minns, The Real Australian (1924), reprinted in F. Paisley, ‘Federalising the Aborigines? Constitutional Reform in the Late 1920s’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 29, no. 111, 1998, p. 251. L. O’Connor, ‘The More Things Change: The Representation of Aborigines in New South Wales State Primary Schools (1940–1965)’, in Kociumbas, Maps, Dreams, pp. 239–313. See for example, F. D. McCarthy, Australia’s Aborigines: Their Life and Culture, Colorgravure, Melbourne, 1957. J. Beckett, ‘The Past in the Present …’ in J. Beckett, ed., Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1988, pp. 206–07; Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 183. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 1, 1965, pp. 1–3; no.2, 1965, pp. 2–6, 27. Sydney Morning Herald, 28 November 1987, p. 3. B. Genocchio, Australian’s Review of Books, March 2001, p. 3. J. Wright, We Call for a Treaty, Fontana, Sydney, 1985, pp. 74–77, 104; Australian Council of Churches, Justice for Aboriginal Australians, Sydney, 2000, pp. 20–21; F. Brennan, Sharing the Country, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1991, pp. 83–109. G. Trompf, ‘Foreword’, in A. Pattel-Gray, ed., Aboriginal Spirituality, Harper Collins, Blackburn, Vic., 1996, p. ix; Australian Council of Churches, Justice for Aboriginal Australians, pp. 55–58. The Serpent and the Cross, video, directed by Chris Hilton, 1991.

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27 C. Harris, ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Spirituality’, in Pattel-Gray, ed., Aboriginal Spirituality, pp. 66–67; Koori Mail, 3 July 1991, p. 6; 19 May 1993, p. 14. 28 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 174. 29 M. Langton, ‘Well, I heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television …’, Australian Film Commission, North Sydney, 1993, pp. 29–30. 30 V. Rose, ‘My One Bright Spot: A Personal Insight into Relationships Between White Women and Aboriginal Women, 1920–1942’, PhD Thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney, 1998, pp. 1, 10, 64–67, 74.

CHAPTER 10 1

The cultural turn in Australia synchronised with the international cultural turn discussed in the introduction and was influenced by the same factors. Although there had been a number of significant histories of literature, music, art and national myths during the mid-twentieth century, the 1970s saw the burgeoning of works focusing specifically on ‘Australian culture’. See the list of additional readings at the end of Chapter 1. 2 Stephen Castles, ‘Multiculturalism in Australia’, in James Jupp, ed., The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins (1988), Australian National University and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Melbourne, 2001. 3 Jan Ryan, ‘Chinese Australian History’, in Wayne Hudson and Geoffrey Bolton, eds., Creating Australia: Changing Australian History, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1997, p. 71. See, for example, Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788, Longman, South Melbourne, 1995; Geoffrey Bolton, The Oxford History of Australia 1942–1988, vol. 5, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990; Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation, Penguin, Melbourne, 1994. See also the conservative historical films produced during the ‘new nationalist’ era such as Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, etc. These are discussed in Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia, vol. 2, Currency Press, Sydney, 1988. 4 Barry York, Ethno-Historical Studies in a Multicultural Australia, Studies in Australian Ethnic History no. 13, Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1996, pp. 25–26. 5 Bev Kingston, ‘The Taste of India’, Australian Cultural History, no. 9, 1990, pp. 36–48. 6 John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, 2nd ed., Longman, London and New York, 1996, p. 35. 7 John Stratton, Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998, p. 206. 8 York, Ethno-Historical Studies, p. 8. 9 J. S. Lyng, Non-Britishers in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1935. 10 For a discussion of the problematic usage of ‘race’, see Robert Miles and Rodolfo D. Torres, ‘Does “Race” Matter? Transatlantic Perspectives on Racism after “Race Relations”’, in Rodolfo D. Torres, Louis F. Mirón, and Jonathan Xavier Inda, eds., Race, Identity and Citizenship, Blackwell, Oxford and Malden, Mass., 1999; also Robert Miles, Racism After ‘Race Relations’, Routledge, London, 1993. 11 See, for example, J. F. Hogan, The Irish in Australia, Ward and Downey, London, 1888; P. S. Cleary, Australia’s Debt to the Irish Nation Builders, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1933; Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, New South Wales University Press, Kensington, NSW, 1987; C. A. Price, Southern Europeans in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1963; C. A.

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Price, ed., Greeks in Australia, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975; D. Conomos, History of the Greek Community in Queensland to 1939, no publisher given, Brisbane, 1975; Gillian Bottomley, After the Odyssey: A Study of Greek Australians, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1979; C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1975; C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921, Raphael Arts, Richmond, 1977. Hugh Gilchrist, Australians and Greeks, Volume I: The Early Years, Halstead Press, Sydney, 1992; Australians and Greeks, Volume II: The Middle Years, Halstead Press, Sydney, 1997. M. Loh, Dinky-Di: The Contributions of Chinese Immigrants and Australians of Chinese Descent to Australia’s Defence Forces and War Efforts 1899–1988, AGPS, Canberra, 1989; Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney’s Chinese, State Library of New South Wales Press, 1997; Eric Rolls, Sojourners: The Epic Story of China’s Centuries-Old Relationship with Australia, and Citizens, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1992 and 1996; Jan Ryan, Ancestors: Chinese in Colonial Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1995; Diana Giese, Beyond Chinatown, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1995. Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992; Lachlan Strahan, Australia’s China: Changing Perceptions from the 1930s to the 1990s, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and Melbourne, 1996; David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1999. Barry York, Our Multicultural Heritage 1788–1945: An Annotated Guide to the Collections of the National Library of Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1995. Gaetano Rando, ‘Narrating the Migration Experience’, in Stephen Castles, Caroline Alcorso, Gaetano Rando, Ellie Vasta, eds., Australia’s Italians: Culture and Community in a Changing Society, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992, p. 187. York, Ethno-Historical Studies, p. 17. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998, pp. 117–18. One of the problems in discussing the confusing descriptors, ‘whiteness’, ‘Britishness’ and ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture, is the distinction between political and economic institutions which were set up along the lines of British imperial institutions of politics and trade, and a more amorphous cultural realm vitalised by diverse ‘white’ – British, Irish, European, American – sources. For the relationship between Britishness and whiteness, see Douglas Cole, ‘“The Crimson Thread of Kinship”: Ethnic Ideas in Australia, 1870–1914’, Historical Studies, vol. 14, no. 56, 1971, pp. 511–25. Shirley Fitzgerald and Garry Wotherspoon, eds., Minorities: Cultural Diversity in Sydney, State Library of NSW Press in association with The Sydney History Group, Sydney, 1995. Ryan, ‘Chinese Australian History’, p. 75; Jupp, ‘The making of the AngloAustralian’, in The Australian People, p. 75; Joseph Pugliese, ‘Language and Minorities’, in Fitzgerald and Wotherspoon, Minorities, p. 195. Ellie Vasta et al., ‘The Italo-Australian Community on the Pacific Rim’, in Castles et al., Australia’s Italians, pp. 217–18. Hage, White Nation, p. 201. Terence Ranger, ‘Introduction’ to Terence Ranger, Yunas Samad, Ossie Stuart, eds., Culture, Identity and Politics: Ethnic Minorities in Britain,

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Avebury, Aldershot, 1996, p. 3. See also Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Routledge, London, 1995. Barry York, Empire and Race: The Maltese in Australia 1881–1949, The Modern History Series, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1990. Ann Curthoys, ‘An Uneasy Conversation: The Multicultural and the Indigenous’, in John Docker and Gerhard Fischer, eds., Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2000, p. 32. Ian Harmstorf and Michael Cigler, The Germans in Australia, Australian Ethnic Heritage Series, AE Press, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 80, 81. Curthoys, ‘An Uneasy Conversation’, p. 34. Although not dealing with a non-British migrant group, see Don Watson, Caledonia Australis: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier of Australia, Sydney, Collins, 1984, which looked at how dispossessed Scottish Highlanders participated in the dispossession of Aborigines in Gippsland. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Duggaibah, or “Place of Whiteness”: Australian Feminists and Race’, in Docker and Fischer, eds., Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, pp. 240–55, and ‘Troubling Business: Difference and Whiteness Within Feminism’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 15, no. 33, 2000. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993. York, Empire and Race, p. 198. See, for example, Ruth Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1997; Richard Dyer, White, Routledge, London and New York, 1997; and Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, Sage, London, 1999. Jill Roe, ‘Dayspring: Australia and New Zealand as a setting for the “New Age”. From the 1890s to Nimbin’, Australian Cultural History, no. 16, 1997–98, pp. 170–87. Stuart Hall, ‘Politics of Identity’, in Ranger et al., Culture, Identity and Politics, pp. 132–33. Peter Jackson and Gerard Sullivan, ‘Introduction: Ethnic Minorities and the Lesbian and Gay Community’, in Peter A. Jackson and Gerard Sullivan, eds., Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives, Harrington Park Press, Binghampton, N.Y., 1999; co-published as the Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 36, nos. 3–4, 1999, p. 21. Christine Stevens, Tin Mosques and Ghan Towns: A History of Afghan Cameldrivers in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 224. Damien Ridge, Amos Hee and Victor Minichiello, ‘“Asian” Men on the Scene: Challenges to “Gay Communities”’, in Jackson and Sullivan, Multicultural Queer. Effy Alexakis and Leonard Janiszewski, In Their Own Image: Greek Australians, Hale & Iremonger, Alexandria, 1998, p. 106. James Donohoe, The Forgotten Australians: The Non Anglo or Celtic Convicts and Exiles, J. H. Donohoe, Sydney, 1991, p. 33. John Docker, ‘Post-Nationalism’, Arena Magazine, February–March, 1994, p. 41. Miriam Dixson, The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts and Identity – 1788 to the Present, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2000. See the discussion of British peoples in Jupp, The Australian People. Also, L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–1850, Manchester University Press, 1997; and Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, Palgrave, Houndmills, 2001.

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The images do, however, surface in many accounts which otherwise offer a more complex portrait of colonial society. C. M. H. Clark makes great play with the absurdity but also the melancholy undertones of such pretensions in his A History of Australia. See in particular Vol. III, The Beginning of an Australian Civilization, 1824–1851, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1973. Paul de Serville evokes the standards of pedigree and breeding and the doomed efforts of an expatriate gentry class to maintain their exclusive standards in a colonial world. See Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne before the Gold Rushes, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1980, and Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria 1850–1880, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991. Both, however, stress the impossibility of exclusiveness in a society committed to egalitarian values. Alan Atkinson takes conservatism more seriously in Camden, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1958. Twenty years after the publication of The Australian Legend, in a special issue of Historical Studies, Graeme Davison pointed to the origins of the ‘bush legend’ in a disaffected urban imagination, while John Hirst suggested that an individualist ‘pioneer legend’, celebrating the endurance and enterprise of families who had settled on the land, flourished in Australia alongside the valorisation of the radical collectivity of the itinerant bush worker. In later work, Richard White pointed to the ways the celebration of a bush ethos was fed by the pleasures that Bohemian writers and artists of the cities took in the suburban bushland; Marilyn Lake critiqued the celebration of masculine freedom from family, domestic responsibilities and women implicit in the image of the ‘Lone Hand’; and Richard Waterhouse noted that nostalgia for a time of lost innocence and egalitarianism was evident in the cultural production of rural as well as urban areas. See G. Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, October 1978, pp. 191–209; J. Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, October 1978, pp. 316–37; R. White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981; M. Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 86, April 1986, pp. 116–31; R. Waterhouse, ‘Australian Legends: Representations of the Bush, 1813–1913’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 31, no. 115, October 2000, pp. 201–21. A rich tradition of social and labour historiography has persistently offered more concrete refutations of the myth of egalitarianism, chronicling the endemic poverty and inequalities, particularly of city life. See for example S. Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney 1870–90, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987; A. O’Brien, Poverty’s Prison: The Poor in New South Wales 1880–1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1988; J. Lee and C. Fahey, ‘A Boom for Whom?: Some developments in the Australian Labour Market, 1870–1891’, Labour History, no. 50, May 1986. Against a strong historiographical tradition depicting the 1890s as a period of transition to modern industrial capitalism, accompanied by a nostalgia for the freer, more independent, more egalitarian and socially mobile past, such works tend to posit a structural poverty and inequality endemic in white Australian society from the beginning. Histories of Australian society chronicle with remarkable persistence the final defeat of genteel pretensions. The obsolete aspirations of a gentry class have been identified as having their last hurrah before the onset, variously, of the 1840s depression, the 1850s gold rushes, the 1880s boom, the 1890s depression, and World War I. Such accounts paradoxically confirm the lasting nature of such pretensions. See my critique of this construction in A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 2–3.

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P. Russell, ‘A Wish of Distinction: Genteel Femininity in Melbourne Society’, PhD, University of Melbourne 1990; published as A Wish of Distinction. My PhD was completed at the University of Melbourne between 1985 and 1989. The particular constellation of ideas and influences I delineate below reflect (incompletely) my own interests and partialities at the time, rather than the full array of intellectual choices then available in the History Department there, let alone in Australian or feminist historiography. R. W. Connell and T. H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980. For a review of the historiography on the working class current in the mid 1980s, see S. Macintyre, ‘The Making of the Australian Working Class’, Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, October 1978, pp. 233–53. There were, of course, a number of studies of Australian society more attentive to status distinctions and self definition – see, for example, H. McQueen, A New Britannia, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1970; J. Rickard, Class and Politics, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, and ‘The Middle Class: What is to be Done’, Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 76, 1981, pp. 446–53; G. C. Bolton, ‘The Idea of a Colonial Gentry’, Historical Studies, vol. 13, no. 51, 1968, pp. 307–28; M. Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835–1851, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965. Other historians were, however, addressing that problematic question of ‘respectability’ from many different angles. See in particular Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability’, and the response by C. McConville, ‘Rough Women, Respectable Men and Social Reform: A Response to Lake’s “Masculinism”’, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 88, April 1987, pp. 432–40. Janet McCalman, ‘Class and Respectability in a Working-Class Suburb: Richmond, Victoria, before the Great War’, Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 78, April 1982, pp. 90–103, provides a detailed investigation of respectability as bound up with personal and social identity and aspiration – a more useful way forward in considering the relevance of status across a broader community than accounts of the imposition of middle-class standards of respectability upon an otherwise ‘rough’ and rowdy working class. Work by Joan Scott, Judith Butler and Denise Riley, unsettling the feminist reliance on women’s ‘experience’ and questioning the foundational category of ‘women’ itself, appeared too late to make major impact on my thesis. See J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1990; D. Riley ‘“Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1988; J. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 5, December 1986; ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, Summer 1991. See also K. Canning, ‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience’, Signs 19(2) 1994, pp. 383–404. B. Kingston, ‘The Lady and the Australian Girl: Some Thoughts on Nationalism and Class’, in N. Grieve and A. Burns, eds., Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 28–29. Kingston, ‘The Lady and the Australian Girl’, p. 40. Kingston, ‘The Lady and the Australian Girl’, p. 41. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith, eds., Australian Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p. 3. (This is an edited collection from the journal, published in book form.) Goldberg and Smith, Australian Cultural History, p. 4. First published in 1986, this paper was reprinted as ‘The Pioneer Legend’ in Goldberg and Smith, Australian Cultural History, pp. 58–77. Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, pp. 58–62.

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17 Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, p. 63–64. 18 Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, esp. pp. 70, 72, 75. 19 See, for example, Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1982; Susan Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860, Norton, New York and London, 1984. 20 Richard L. Bushman would develop a similar argument about the performative nature of gentility and the self-censorious culture it produced in his The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992. 21 G. Eley, ‘Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later’, in T. McDonald, ed., The Historical Turn in the Human Sciences, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1996, pp. 193–243; G. Eley, ‘Between Social History and Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and the Practice of the Historian at the end of the Twentieth Century’, in J. Leerssen and A. Rigney, eds., Historians and Social Values, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2000. See also R. W. Fox and T. J. Lears, eds., The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1993; L. Hunt, The New Cultural History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989, and L. Hunt and V. Bonnell, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999. 22 Joan W. Scott, ‘Evidence of Experience’; see also her ‘Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2001, pp. 284–304. 23 Scott, ‘Fantasy Echo’, pp. 287–88. Scott draws here upon Michel Foucault’s advice to historicise, ‘denaturalise’ and thus destabilise the categories on which present power structures rest. 24 See, for example, F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997; C. Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000. 25 A. L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1995, p. 123. 26 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 113. 27 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 112. 28 These and similar phrases surface continually in nineteenth century sources. In an encounter with convict women, the Tasmanian governor’s wife Lady Franklin deplored the fact that they ate meat in their hands, ‘exactly like brutes’. Jane Franklin, Diary of an Overland Tour to Sydney 1839, 29 June 1839. Sir John Franklin Diaries and Letters, National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection, MS 114. The Melbourne coroner Curtis Candler wrote to Lord Newry, visiting the colonies in the train of HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, that the NSW governor had ‘“made up his private parties … not only with ministers but their wives; several of them not in humanised society at all, and others scarcely admitted”!’ S. C. Candler, Addenda to Diary, 9 February 1868. La Trobe Library Manuscript Collection, State Library of Victoria, MS 9502. 29 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, pp. 123–24. 30 See Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1994. 31 Kingston, ‘The Lady’, p. 41. 32 In their efforts to conceptualise the perpetual, unresolvable social accommodations that constitute Australian identity, historians are beginning to employ the language of ‘hybridity’. I draw on this concept to a degree here, but am aware

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that even the notion of ‘hybridity’ can still assume definable ‘English’ and ‘Australian’ elements. On hybridity, see Catherine Hall, ‘Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial, Thinking the Empire’, in Hall, Cultures of Empire, p. 3; Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. For use of this concept in Australian historical interpretations, see for example A. Callaway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth-Century Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2000; A. Card, ‘History in Motion: Dance and Australian Culture, 1920 to 1970’, PhD, University of Sydney, 1999. See White, Inventing Australia. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 72–79. Anna Bryson illuminatingly outlines the application of Bourdieu’s arguments here to a history of politeness in From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 17. See, for example, Bryson, Courtesy to Civility, Bushman, Refinement of America, L. E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. Recent historiography on politeness reflects the growing impact of Norbert Elias’s account of the gradual ‘civilizing’ of manners and comportment from early modern times. N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (2 vols), English translation, Blackwell, Oxford, 1978 and 1982. A growing historiography in the area was acknowledged in a conference co-sponsored by The Huntington and The Royal Historical Society and held at The Huntington on 14–15 September 2001. Papers from this conference are published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. xii, December 2002. A classic example is Robert Darnton’s analysis of a ‘cat massacre’ in Paris in the 1730s. R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other episodes in French Cultural History, Vintage Books, New York, 1985 (first pub. 1984), esp. Introduction and ch. 2. Letter, Jane Franklin to Sir John Franklin, 20 Apr. 1839. In Sir John Franklin, Diaries and Letters, National Library of Australia MS 114. The various accounts of this scene, and a more detailed discussion of Lady Franklin’s colonial travels, may be found in This Errant Lady: Jane Franklin’s Overland Journey to Port Phillip and Sydney, 1839, ed. P. Russell, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2002. I use this incident to frame a more extended narrative discussion of politeness in colonial society in my article, ‘The Brash Colonial: Class and Comportment in Nineteenth-century Australia’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. xii, December 2002. Edmund Charles Hobson, Diary of a journey, with Lady Franklin’s party, overland from Melbourne to the Hume River, 20 Apr. 1839. La Trobe Library Manuscript Collection, State Library of Victoria, Box 25/1, M 383/09. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, p. 3.

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Charles Moore, William Mitchell and William Turnbull, Jr., The Poetics of Gardens, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, pp. vi–vii. David Goodman, Gold Seeking, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, p. xxxix. For discussion of women’s diaries and the motivations for writing them, see Katie Holmes, Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995. Mildred Hood’s diary is held in the Archives of Tasmania, NS 568/3. Australian Women’s Sphere, December 1900, p. 35. For a further discussion of women in horticulture, see Katie Holmes, ‘Fertile Ground: Women in Horticulture’, Australian Garden History Journal, vol. 10, no. 6, May/June 1999.

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The expression belongs to Céline Grasser, whom I thank for sharing her thoughts on this with me. For a discussion of settler’s establishments of boundaries, see Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, Faber & Faber, London, 1987, pp. 154–55. Ann Tully, ‘My Outback Garden’, Australian Home Beautiful, October 1954, p. 43. (Subsequent page references to the same source.) See George Seddon, Landprints: Reflections on Place and landscape, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 179. Fleur Lehane, Heartbreak Corner: A Story of the Tully, Durack and Other Pioneer Families in South-West Queensland, Fleur Lehane, Beaudesert, 1996. As a contrast to this depiction of Aboriginal gardeners, see Katie Holmes, ‘Gardens’ in Imaginary Homelands, special edition of Journal of Australian Studies, no. 61, 1999, pp. 156–57. Jay Arthur, ‘The Eighth Day of Creation’, in Imaginary Homelands, special edition of Journal of Australian Studies, no. 61, 1999, p. 66. Arthur, ‘The Eighth Day of Creation’, p. 67. Seddon, Landprints, p. 180. Arthur, ‘The Eighth Day of Creation’, p. 73. Lehane, Heartbreak Corner, p. 130. See Katie Holmes, ‘“I have built up a little garden”: The vernacular garden, national identity and a sense of place’, in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, vol. 21, no. 2, April–June, 2001, pp. 115–21. Holmes, ‘I have built up a little garden’, p. 204. Seddon, Landprints, p. 182.

CHAPTER 13 1

Details of Mayo’s time in both Dublin and Delhi are to be found in the Helen Mayo Papers, PRG 127/2, Letters to her parents 1904–1906, Mortlock Library of South Australia. 2 Annie Duncan documented her travels in her unpublished memoirs, now in her papers PRG 532/6, Mortlock Library of South Australia. 3 On Gaunt’s life, see E. Archer, ‘Gaunt, Mary Eliza Bakewell’, Australian Dictionary of Biography 1891–1939 (vol. 8); ‘Gaunt, Mary’, Who’s Who 1920, A. & C. Black, London, p. 968; Ian F. McLaren, Mary Gaunt, A Cosmopolitan Australian: An Annotated Bibliography, University of Melbourne Library, Parkville, Vic., 1986; Virginia Blain et al., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, p. 414; Sue Martin, ‘“Sad Sometimes, Lonely Often … Dull Never”: Mary Gaunt, Traveller and Novelist’, in Debra Adelaide, ed., A Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic., 1988, pp. 183–97. 4 Mary Gaunt, Where the Twain Meet, John Murray, London, 1922, p. 1. 5 The British Australasian, 15 February 1912, p. 18. 6 On the various editions of Gaunt’s books and the large number of reviews they received, see McLaren, Mary Gaunt, A Cosmopolitan Australian. 7 Alice Grant Rosman, ‘An Australian in West Africa: Mary Gaunt Talks to “Everylady’s”’, Everylady’s Journal, 6 June 1912, p. 330. 8 Rosman, ‘An Australian in West Africa’, p. 330. 9 Mary Gaunt, ‘The Sheltered-Life Girl: An Australian View of Her “Soft” UpBringing’, The Daily Chronicle, 15 April 1912, p. 4. 10 Mary Gaunt, ‘Woman in Australia,’ The Empire Review, no. 1, March 1901, pp. 211–16. 11 Catriona Elder, ‘Staging “White” Australia: Representations of Race and Sexuality in the North,’ in Jane Long, Jan Gothard and Helen Brash, eds., Forging Identities: Bodies, Gender and Feminist History, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, WA, 1997, pp. 29–46.

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12 On these issues for British feminism, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1994; and for Australian feminism see Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2000. 13 Mary Gaunt, Alone in West Africa, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1912, p. 16. 14 Gaunt, Alone in West Africa, p. 68. 15 See particularly Mary Gaunt, Kirkham’s Find, originally published 1897, reprinted Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic., 1988, pp. 72–89. 16 Gaunt, Alone in West Africa, p. 391. 17 Mary Gaunt, Where the Twain Meet, John Murray, London, 1922, p. 288. 18 Gaunt, Where the Twain Meet, p. 288. 19 Gaunt, Where the Twain Meet, p. 290. 20 Mary Gaunt, The Forbidden Town, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1926. 21 Gaunt, Alone in West Africa, p. 16. 22 Mary Gaunt and John Ridgwell Essex, The Arm of the Leopard: A West African Story, Grant Richards, London, 1904, p. 31. 23 Gaunt and Essex, The Arm of the Leopard, p. 306. 24 McLaren, Mary Gaunt, A Cosmopolitan Australian, p. xvii. 25 Mary Gaunt, The Uncounted Cost, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1910. 26 Her other novel in which colonialism provides exigencies that allow mistaken marriages to be shed and sounder alliances made is Every Man’s Desire (1913). 27 Gaunt, Alone in West Africa, p. 65. 28 Mary Gaunt, A Woman In China, J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, 1914, pp. 4–5.

CHAPTER 14 1

Matt Dickinson, ‘Our Diary of Our Migration from England to Australia, 1955–56’, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, MS 13116; Margery G. Black, ‘Diary, 11 January 1949–14 February 1949’, Mitchell Library, MSS 4303. 2 Albert Walker, ‘Diaries for 1946, 1955–1956, 1957–1958’, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, MA 11509, Box 1776/4-5, 1 April 1946. 3 Graham Little, Letter to My Daughter, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 206–07. 4 Elizabeth Jolley, ‘Who Would Throw Streamers and Sing to a Container?’, in Caroline Lurie, ed., Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1993, p. 61. (Originally ‘Voyagers Together to a New World’, The Age, 16 January 1988.) 5 Sydney Hart, Pommie Migrant: The Adventures of a British Emigrant ‘DownUnder’, Odhams Press, London, 1957, pp. 12–13. 6 Little, Letter to My Daughter, p. 211. 7 Dickinson, ‘Our Diary’, no date. 8 Ivy Skowronski, I Can’t Think of a Title: An Autobiography, I. Skowronski, Adelaide, 1986, p. 2. 9 Jolley, ‘Who Would Throw Streamers’, p. 61. 10 Dickinson, ‘Our Diary’, p. 19; Thomas Jenkins, We Came to Australia, Constable, London, 1969, p. 105; James Saxton, Something Will Come to Me, Stockwell, Ilfracombe, 1981, p. 150. 11 Jenkins, We Came to Australia, pp. 95–96, Dickinson, ‘Our Diary’, pp. 21 and 8. 12 Jenkins, We Came to Australia, 12 December 1965, p. 99; Hart, Pommie Migrant, 1957, p. 22.

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13 14 15 16 17 18

Hart, Pommie Migrant, pp. 19–20; Dickinson, ‘Our Diary’, p. 15. Dickinson, ‘Our Diary’, pp. 15 and 23; Little, Letter to My Daughter, p. 219. Hart, Pommie Migrant, p. 20; Jenkins, We Came to Australia, pp. 96, 100. Dickinson, ‘Our Diary’, pp. 23–25; Jenkins, We Came to Australia, pp. 96–98. Little, Letter to My Daughter, pp. 219–21. Anon, 13 October 1949, in his ‘Journal, 21 September 1949 – 14 October 1949’, MS 11881, Box 2401/5, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria. 19 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness; Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996, p. xviii.

CHAPTER 15 1

Donald Horne, The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties, Penguin, Melbourne, 1964, p. 15. 2 Horne, The Lucky Country, p. 37. 3 Horne, The Lucky Country, pp. 37–38. 4 Catherine Lutz, ‘Epistemology of the Bunker: The Brainwashed and Other New Subjects of Permanent War’, in J. Pfister and N. Schnog, eds., Inventing the Psychological: Towards a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 245. 5 Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788, Longman, Sydney, 1995, p. 183. 6 K. S. Inglis, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932–1983, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 155. 7 Ward Leopold, ‘Is Radio to be a Force for Good - or Goods?’, Talk, June 1946, p. 59. 8 Nikolas Rose, ‘Assembling the Modern Self’, in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 224. 9 Rose, ‘Assembling the Modern Self’, pp. 224–25. 10 Rose, ‘Assembling the Modern Self’, p. 231. See also R. T. Martin, ‘The Notion of Normality’, Australian Journal of Psychology, vol. 4, no. 1, June 1952, pp. 28–39. 11 This and following quotations from the ‘Psychology Mailbag’ program and Oeser’s correspondence taken from the O. E. Oeser Papers, V65/13, Box 24, University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne.

CHAPTER 16 1 2

Lyotard is quoted in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988, p. 165. Herbert Marcuse is quoted in Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1980, p. 154.

INDEX

Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre 134 Aboriginal history 17–18, 22, 25, 27, 32–5, 61, 64, 70, 77, 85, 90–6, 101, 109–10, 115, 125–6, 127–40, 145, 150–2, 198, 238–9, 250; see also Aboriginality, land rights, race and ethnicity Aboriginal Protection Board 140 Aboriginality 14, 32, 109, 125–6, 127, 130–3, 159, 169, 173, 190, 223; see also Aboriginal history, race and ethnicity AC/DC 122 acculturation see assimilation Acton, Lord 4 Adams, Herbert Baxter 113 Adorno, Theodor 9, 236 adventure 189, 205 advertising 42, 120–1, 124, 130; see also cultural consumption agency 6–7, 13, 39, 43–7, 49–50, 53, 63–4, 67, 69, 73, 76–8, 81–3, 160, 164, 167, 186–7, 191; see also identity agriculture 31, 33, 70–1, 175 air travel 134, 205–6 alcohol 118–19, 124 Alexakis, Effy 153 Ali, Muhammed 128 Alltagsgeschichte 7 Althusser, Louis 9 Americanisation 120–3, 132, 153 Anderson, Benedict 18, 28, 39–40 Annales 2, 6, 10–11, 71, 237 anthropology 3, 6, 9–11, 27–8, 35, 52, 54, 65, 69, 70, 132–6, 139–40, 147, 202, 226, 231 Antill, John 126, 134 anxiety 140, 164, 167, 170, 214–24

Anzac 83–4, 87–8, 92; see also war appropriation 126, 128, 130, 131–3, 135–6, 138 arbitration 100, 108 archaeology 27–8, 70, 72, 76 Archibald, J F 162–3 architecture 16, 115 Armenians 36, 83 Arnold, Matthew 121 art 3–4, 16, 27, 70, 92, 115, 121–2, 129, 132–40, 214, 234 artesian water 77, 178 Arthur, Jay 180–1 Ashburner, J V 218 Ashton, David 78 Asia and Australia 24, 63–4, 100, 105–6, 109–10, 143, 146, 152; see also White Australia Policy assimilation 32, 65, 94, 98, 125, 129, 135–8, 142, 146, 149, 151–2, 206, 215, 217, 222, 225 Atkinson, Alan 14, 18, 258 Attwood, Bain 94, 141 Australian Broadcasting Commission 215–16 Australian Cultural History 2, 17, 54, 143, 161 Australian Culture Workshop 54 Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust 123 Australian Feminist Studies 29 Australian Historical Studies 54 Australian Home Beautiful 173, 177 Australian identity see national identity Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies 136 Australian Labor Party 99 Australian Studies 237 authenticity 88, 95, 125, 140

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autobiography 88, 92, 147, 201, 206; see also life stories Baldwin, James 101 ballet 123, 126, 134 Bancroft, George 113 Bangara Dance Company 134 Banner 40 Bardon, Geoff 137 Barnard, Alan 77 Barnum, P T 131 Barta, Tony 32 Barthes, Roland 229 Barton, Edmund 98, 102 Baudrillard, Jean 58, 242 beach 129, 231, 233–5 Bean, C E W 16, 78 beauty 177, 180 Beck, Lawrence 140 Bederman, Gail 100, 101, 103, 104 Beethoven, Ludwig van 121 Benjamin, Walter 9, 236 Bennett, Arnold 48 Bennett, Gordon 92, 137 Berndt, Ronald 133, 136, 140 Bhabha, Homi 18, 28, 30 Bicentenary 130, 145, 239 biological determinism 67, 73 Birmingham school 2, 9, 55, 116 Birrup, Eddie 140 Black, Margery 203 ‘black armband’ 52; see also ‘History Wars’ Blainey, Geoffrey 22 Bloch, Marc 6 bohemianism 258 Bonnell, Victoria E 8 boomerang 133 Boswell, John 60 Bourdieu, Pierre 168, 261 boxing 118–19, 131 Boyer, Richard 216 Brack, John 214 Brady, Veronica 138 Bran Nue Dae (musical) 126 Braudel, Fernand 6, 71, 237, 246 Brawley, Sean 112 Bringing them Home 22, 32, 33, 90–4; see also child removal British comparisons 117–18, 154, 168 British Empire see imperialism Britishness 24, 87, 189, 203, 206, 212 Bronowski, Jacob 68 Broome, Richard 64, 141, 239 Bryson, Anna 261 Bulletin 16, 108, 114, 162 Burckhardt, Jacob 4 burial practices 70, 125 Burton, Antoinette 30 Buruma, Ian 95, 249

bush legend 16, 78, 114–15, 122, 125–6, 127–9, 132, 139–40, 161, 258 bushfires see fire Bushman, Richard L 260 Butler, Judith 259 Byrnes, Paula 64 Campbell, Alec 87 Candler, Curtis 260 Cannadine, David 106 Carmen, Leon 140 Carr, E H 58 Carson, Rachel 73 censorship 195–6, 203, 208, 215 census 44–5 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies see Birmingham school Chamberlain, Joseph 105–6 chaos 74, 75 Chartier, Roger 10 Chauvel, Charles 139 child removal 32, 36, 86, 90–4, 129, 138 children 16, 43–8, 109, 129, 135, 139–40, 167, 207, 219–22, 224; see also child removal Chinese in Australia 99, 105, 145–6, 148–9, 199; see also White Australia Policy Churchill, Ward 33–4 Cigler, Michael 145, 150 cinema see film circus 120–1, 131 citizenship 28, 40–1, 43, 54, 105, 107, 128, 136, 176, 216, 250 civilisation 17, 100, 107–9, 119, 128–31, 166–7, 169–70, 173, 176, 180–1, 194, 238, 261 Clark, C M H (Manning) 17, 26, 132, 238–9, 258 class 5–6, 8–9, 14, 46–7, 55, 73, 100–1, 106–7, 110, 114–21, 123–5, 145, 147, 152, 158–71, 173–4, 176–7, 181–4, 207, 215, 224, 258–60; see also distinction cleanliness 212, 216 climate 68, 74, 119, 177, 180, 189, 212; see also drought, environmental history cockfighting 118–19 Cold War 215, 217–18 Coleborne, Catharine 63 collectivism 114, 258 Collingwood, R G 61 Collit’s Inn (musical) 125 colonialism 9–10, 25–7, 30–5, 64, 70, 92, 101, 104, 110–11, 122, 127, 130–40, 145, 149–51, 162–3, 165–71, 180–3, 187, 190–2, 196–7, 210; see also imperialism, postcolonialism

INDEX

Columbus, Christopher 33–4 commemoration 18, 22, 83–8, 92–3, 96 common sense 62, 66, 216 communications technology 14, 38–50, 84, 86, 216 communism 217, 223 community see social interaction comparative history 29 see also transnational history complaint, culture of 53 confession 95, 216, 218, 224 conjoncture 6 Connell, R W 160 Conrad, Joseph 34 conservation politics 74, 141; see also environmentalism conservatism 164, 214, 258 consumerism see cultural consumption contemporary history 89; see also present and past ‘contributory history’ 147 convicts 40, 64, 87, 106, 118–19, 130, 139–40, 158, 161, 167, 248, 260 Cook, James 130 Coombs, H C 138 Cooper, Walter 122 Corroboree (ballet) 126, 134 corroborees 125, 130, 134 Country Party 49 Country Women’s Association 49 Covell, Roger 16 Crane, Susan 90 cricket 42, 118–20, 131 crime 58, 60 Croll, R H 139 Cronon, William 75 Crosby, Alfred 72 Cross, Stan 130 Cross-cultural history 226; see also transnational history, cultural transmission Crowley, F K 109, 239 ‘cultural capital’ 168 cultural consumption 2, 13, 39, 42, 116–17, 120, 123, 127, 131, 137, 147–8, 208–9, 211, 217; see also market relations ‘cultural cringe’ 15, 26, 161 cultural studies 9–10, 18, 55, 82, 143, 148, 202 cultural transmission 113–26, 152–3, 163, 168, 179, 239; see also transnational history, cross-cultural history ‘cultural turn’ 4, 10, 17–18, 144, 255 culture, definitions of 3, 11, 54, 67, 116, 227 Curthoys, Ann 14, 15, 150 Daily Chronicle 189 Damousi, Joy 14, 64

• 267

Daniels, Kay 64 Dark, Eleanor 133 Darnton, Robert 10, 261 Darwin, Charles 67, 71; see also evolution, Social Darwinism Davison, Graeme 17, 258 ‘Day of Mourning’ 130 de Certeau, Michel 58, 89, 242 de Serville, Paul 258 Deakin, Alfred 98–100, 102, 105–7, 112 Dean, Beth 125–6, 134 deconstruction 12, 69, 80 defence 104, 132, 146 deference 117–19, 162–3 democracy 43, 99, 115, 221; see also egalitarianism demography 6, 34, 44–5, 104, 120, 147, 180, 230 Dening, Greg 3, 14, 58 Denoon, Donald 29 Derrida, Jacques 12, 58, 243 Diamond, Jared 31 diaries 160, 163–4, 173–4, 176–7, 182, 201, 203–4, 230 Dickinson, Matt 203, 205, 208, 210–11 dictation test 105, 107; see also White Australia Policy dingo 71 discourse 12–13, 53, 59, 63–4, 65, 100, 169, 215–16 discrimination 146, 149, 150, 152, 222; see also Aboriginality disorder 118–19, 223 display 164, 181; see also performance dispossession 25, 77, 101, 110, 128, 137, 140, 150, 173, 176, 239, 257; see also Aboriginal history, land rights distance 50, 205–7 distinction, social 14, 159–71, 258–61; see also class distinctiveness 16, 115, 138, 163, 167, 171, 187 diversity see multiculturalism Dixson, Miriam 153 Docker, John 153 domesticity see private sphere ‘Dreamtime’ 127, 133, 135, 139 dress 39, 125, 160, 163, 169–70, 176 drinking see alcohol drought 76–8, 129, 178–80 Drysdale, Russell 134 Duncan, Annie 186–7 Durack family 140, 178–9 Durack, Elizabeth 140 Durack, Sarah 178 Durkheim, Émile 5 Dyer, Thomas G 103, 104

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Easybeats 122 ecology 67, 71, 73–4, 76, 78 economic history 5, 30, 44, 66, 72, 73, 76, 77 economics 6, 55, 139 education 44–6, 50, 85–6, 88, 102, 123, 143, 162, 173–6, 189, 193–5, 216, 218–19, 221–4, 227, 233 egalitarianism 16, 24–5, 43, 88, 99, 107–8, 114–15, 159–3, 168, 171, 258 Einstein, Albert 68, 71 Elder, Catriona 190 Eley, Geoff 165 Elias, Norbert 261 Elizabeth I, Queen 126 Elkin, A P 132–3 Elton, Geoffrey 52, 61 email 50, 83; see also internet embodiment 148, 175; see also sex and sexuality emotion 95–6, 143, 172, 174, 204, 207, 214–15, 219, 223, 225; see also sentiment empirical history 53–66, 67–8, 83, 92, 210; see also evidence environment see nature environmental history 14, 29, 67–80, 115, 172 environmentalism 71–5, 141 essentialism 148–9 Essex, John Ridgwell 188, 193, 195, 197 ethnographic history 58, 63, 164, 226 ethnography 55; see also anthropology etiquette see manners Evans, Richard 53–5, 57–63, 65–6 everyday life 7, 84, 164, 223, 224 evidence 56, 61–6, 72–3, 76, 136, 160, 173, 201–3, 213, 230–2, 243; see also empirical history, testimony evolution 67, 69, 100 experience 53, 62, 165–6, 169, 201–2, 259 explorers 134, 205 facts see evidence family history 81, 87, 139–40 family see private sphere fancy dress 39 Fanon, Frantz 231 Febvre, Lucien 6 Federation 40–1, 47, 56, 98, 128, 142, 176 feminism and feminist history 8–9, 17–18, 28–9, 55, 88, 109, 160–1, 164–6, 186, 189–92, 195, 242, 250, 259, 263; see also gender, women’s history

femininity 43, 45–50, 54, 148, 160, 164, 166, 169–71 fiction, history as 56, 58–60 film 19, 27, 92, 122–4, 129, 139, 142–3, 209, 255 Finch, Peter 214 fire 70, 76, 78–80 ‘firestick farming’ 70 Fitzgerald, Shirley 148 folk culture 8–9, 16, 55, 125–6, 147 food 143, 148, 206–7 football 120, 131, 227 Foucault, Michel 12, 55, 57–60, 63–4, 165, 242–3, 260 fragment thesis 116 Frankenberg, Ruth 151 Frankfurt school 7, 9, 115, 236 Franklin, Jane 169, 260 Fraser, Malcolm 142 Freeland, J M 16 Freeman, Cathy 128 Freud, Sigmund 223 Friedlander, Saul 89 Frijhof, Willem 6 frontier thesis 114, 129 gambling 118–19, 124, 228 gardening 14, 172–84 Garton, Stephen 14 Gaunt, Mary 14, 187–99 gay and lesbian identities 55, 152, 218 Geertz, Clifford 11, 54, 164 gender 6, 8–9, 14, 26, 38, 43–6, 50, 53, 55, 62–4, 73, 101, 105, 109, 116–17, 124, 127, 129, 149, 160–2, 166–8, 175–7, 182–3, 186–90, 195, 199, 215, 219–20, 224, 230, 237, 242–3; see also feminism and feminist history, femininity, women’s history genealogy see family history generations 43–7, 86–9, 93, 173 genocide 23, 31–6, 83–4, 125, 129, 240, 247 Genovese, Eugene 16 geography 6, 71, 72, 76 geology 71–2, 134 Germans in Australia 150 Gikandi, Simon 212 Gilchrist, Hugh 146 Gilmore, Mary 133 Gilroy, Paul 10 Gladstone, W E 103 globalisation 22, 84, 127, 148 gold rushes 38, 41, 44–5, 56, 123, 143, 153, 187, 199 Gooder, Haydie 96 Goodman, David 29 government and governmentality 40–1, 43–4, 64–5, 100, 123, 149; see also power

INDEX

graffiti 16 Gramsci, Antonio 9, 12, 62, 115 Great Men 5 Greeks in Australia 145–6, 153 green politics 71, 74; see also environmentalism Green, H M 16 Greer, Germaine 214 Grey, Henry George, 3rd Earl 40 Griffiths, Tom 14, 63 Grove, Richard 72 guilt 138–40 Habermas, Jürgen 236 Haebich, Anna 90, 94 Hage, Ghassan 147 Hall, Catherine 30, 101 Hall, Charlotte Maxwell 191 Hall, Stuart 9, 13, 101, 151 Hamilton, Paula 13 Hancock, W K (Keith) 24, 238 Harmstorf, Ian 150 Harney, Bill 139 Harootunian, Harry 81 Hart, Sydney 205, 209–10 Hartz, Louis 116 Harvester judgment 108–9 Healy, Chris 248 hegemony 12, 115–16 heritage 248 Higgins, H B 98–9, 102, 105, 107–9, 112 ‘high culture’ 7, 9, 16, 115–16, 121–4, 151; see also art, literature, music Hiroshima 73 Hirst, John 41, 64, 115, 162, 164, 258 historical geography 71–2, 75 ‘history from below’ 8, 16, 73 ‘History Wars’ 31, 52–66, 85, 90–2 Hobsbawm, Eric 18, 84 Hoggart, Richard 9 Holmes, Katie 14 ‘Holocaust’ 32, 35–6, 58, 89–91, 94, 96 Hood, Mildred 173–8, 181–4 Hopkins, A G 22–3, 25, 29, 30 Horkheimer, Max 236 Horne, Donald 214 horse racing 118–19 horticultre 176 Hoskins, W G 246 hotels see alcohol housework 218–19 Howard, John 22, 91 Huggins, Jackie 64 Hughes, W M 111–12 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission see Bringing them Home Humphries, Barry 214

• 269

Hunt, Lynn 8, 10 Hurley, Frank 129 Hutton, James 71 hybridity 30, 122–3, 144, 48, 167, 261 Hobson, Dr 169 identity politics 2, 8, 13, 18, 84, 89–90, 147, 152, 166 identity 3, 14, 23–7, 30, 36, 41–3, 45, 53, 63, 72–3, 81–4, 87, 90, 93–6, 101, 110–11, 123, 126, 127–40, 142–8, 151, 160, 164–7, 170, 172, 189, 201–2, 208, 215–18, 221, 227, 259; see also national identity imagination 39, 43, 50, 55, 61, 63–5, 82, 173, 206, 219, 232–3 Immigration Restriction Act see White Australia Policy immigration see migration imperial history 17, 22–3, 26, 29, 87, 143, 168 imperialism 10, 14, 17, 24, 27–8, 30–1, 55, 70–1, 101, 103, 107–8, 114, 118, 128–9, 150, 163, 166–8, 179, 183–4, 186–9, 202, 209–12, 231, 256; see also colonialism, postcolonialism independence 104, 175–6, 182–3, 189, 191, 210, 215 indigenous history 23, 27–9, 34, 69, 85, 89, 95, 114, 131–4, 145, 166; see also Aboriginal history individualism 75, 114, 215, 222, 258 industrialisation 70, 114, 117, 120–1 Inglis, K S 216 intellectuals 24–5, 83, 130, 137 interiority 214–24 internet 39, 50 interpretation 56, 61, 62 intimacy 48–50, 214–24 Irish in Australia 144–5 Irving, David 58 Irving, Terry 160 Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona 95 Italians in Australia 146–7, 149, 151 Jackson, J B 246 Jackson, Michael 95 Jacobs, Jane M 96 Jameson, Fredric 58 Janiszewski, Leonard 153 Japanese comparisons 31, 136 Jenkins, Thomas 208–9, 211 Jindyworobak movement 133 ‘Joe’ 169 Johnson, Richard and Mary 139 Johnson, Richard 82 Jolley, Elizabeth 205–7 Jolliffe, Eric 130 Jones, Rhys 70

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Journal of Australian Studies 54 Jupp, James 146, 148 Kenyon, Alfred 139 Kern, Stephen 43, 48, 50 Kilworth, Roger 206 King, Jonathan 130 Kingston, Beverley 55, 143, 161, 164, 168 Klein, Kerwin Lee 92, 95 Kociumbas, Jan 14 La Nauze, J A 26 labour history 8, 15, 54, 59, 143, 147, 160 labour 98–100, 107–9, 117, 129, 163, 174, 177–9, 182–3, 198, 218–19, 223, 258 LaCapra, Dominick 58 Lake, Marilyn 14, 45, 258 land rights 18, 25, 34, 64, 85, 110, 116, 124–5, 128, 130, 136, 138–9, 173, 179 land use 67, 70–1, 77–9, 114, 118, 128–9, 132, 137, 139, 172–84 landscape 68, 79, 172, 177, 180, 184, 232; see also place, sense of Langer, Lawrence 96 Langton, Marcia 64, 140 language 54–5, 58, 69, 132, 134, 136, 139, 142–4, 148–9, 167, 173, 177, 179–80, 204, 216, 229, 232 Lawrence, D H 23, 26 League of Nations 111 Leahy, John 178 Lee, Henry 84 Lehane, Fleur 179 leisure 116–18, 124, 129, 183, 203, 206, 214 Lemkin, Raphaël 32–3, 36 Leopold, Aldo 73 letter writing 42–7, 160, 202, 217–18, 220, 230 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 11, 52 life histories 88–96, 147, 201, 213 Lindqvist, Sven 34 Lindsay, Lionel 121 Lindsay, Norman 121 ‘linguistic turn’ 12, 69, 75; see also ‘cultural turn’, semiotics Link-up 93 literacy 14, 39–40, 43–7, 177, 203, 230, 232 literature 3–4, 16, 27, 92, 115, 122, 129, 132–3, 135, 140, 163, 187, 190, 205 literature, history as 26 Little Desert 74 Little, Graham 204–5, 210–11 Livingston, K T 42 Lloyd George, David 111

Lodge, Henry Cabot 103 Lola Montez (musical) 123 Longmore, Roy 87 Loughrey, Lance 217 love see romance Lutz, Catherine 215 Lyell, Charles 71 Lyng, Jens 145 Lyotard, Jean-François 58, 234 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 4, 113 Macintyre, Stuart 109 Macquarie, Governor Lachlan 119, 134 madness 58, 60, 63 Maier, Charles 95 Maltese in Australia 150–1 manners 4, 50, 160–4, 167–8, 170–1, 261 Maoris 130, 132–4 Marcuse, Herbert 234, 236 market relations 5, 13, 39, 41, 50; see also cultural consumption, economics Markus, Andrew 27, 64, 111 Marsh, George Perkins 70, 73 Marshall, Alan 139 Marx, Karl and Marxism 5–7, 9, 12–13, 17, 55, 59, 62, 73, 115, 160, 231, 236 masculinity 14, 45, 48, 50, 54, 64, 88, 92, 100–5, 108, 111, 128, 135, 148, 161–4, 166, 169, 181, 197, 221, 258 mass culture 7, 9, 115–16, 120, 131–2 materialism 68, 73; see also Marx, Karl mateship 114; see also bush legend Mayo, Helen 186 McCalman, Janet 62, 259 McColl, Hugh 40 McKay, H V 108 McQueen, Humphrey 17 meaning 54–5, 61–2, 65, 69, 87–8, 90, 144, 149, 164–5, 169, 173, 177, 180–4, 187, 190, 201, 203–4, 208, 214, 229, 232–4 Meanjin 133 mechanics’ institutes 124 media 130, 134, 136, 148; see also communications technology, film, newspapers, radio, television Mein Smith, Philippa 29 melodrama 122 memorial culture 81–97, 210 memory 55, 81–97, 201–2, 206–7, 213, 221, 234, 249 mentalité 7 Michelet, Jules 113 microstoria and microhistory 7, 164–5, 169, 172 middlebrow 122

INDEX

migration 14, 24, 27, 31, 98–100, 104–12, 114–15, 122–3, 142–54, 158–9, 201–13, 222–3 milkbars, 153 Miller, James 64 Miller, Judith 90 mining 135, 138–9 miscegenation 191, 193–5, 198, 222 missionaries 138, 150, 187, 190, 197 modernism 129, 132, 134–5 modernity 120, 148, 186–7, 236 moon landing 74 morality 4, 38–9, 44, 73, 75, 95, 119, 121, 124, 136, 139, 141, 170, 196–7 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 110, 151 Morris, Meaghan 55 Morton, John 141 Moses, Dirk 32, 240 Mossman, David 46 Moyal, Ann 41–2, 49–50 Mountford, C P 135, 139 mourning 83, 130, 215; see also burial practices Muir, John 73 multiculturalism 14, 28, 83, 86, 123, 127–8, 140, 142–54; see also migration, race and ethnicity Mulvaney, John 70 museums 121, 137 music hall 121 music 3–4, 16, 46, 115, 122–3, 125–6, 136, 234; see also opera Nadel, George 17 Namatjira, Albert 135 narrative and story 56–7, 63, 65, 69–73, 75–6, 93–6, 110, 159, 169, 175–80, 182, 187, 190, 199, 201–2, 208, 227–32 Nash, Roderick 72–3 national history 4, 8–10, 14–18, 22–36, 71, 76, 92, 94, 142, 147, 187, 198, 237 national identity 14–16, 22–8, 39–45, 48–9, 54, 72–3, 83–9, 92, 96, 98–100, 102, 114–15, 127–8, 131–5, 138–40, 142–3, 158, 161, 167–8, 172, 176, 187, 189–91, 198, 202, 210, 214, 216, 237, 255 National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Children from their Families see Bringing them Home National Library of Australia 146 native title see land rights natural history 67, 69 nature 67–74, 79, 129, 172–84; see also environmental history Neal, David 64 ‘new cultural history’ 1–2, 4, 10–12, 17–18, 144, 148, 159, 165

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New Left 73; see also sixties ‘new nationalism’ 142 New Protection 104, 108 New Zealand comparisons 133–4 newspapers 38–42, 44, 85, 120, 174, 176, 189 Newton, Isaac 68 Nicholas, Stephen 64 Nickolls, Trevor 137 Nietzsche, Friedrich 52, 121 ‘noble savage’ 127–8, 132 Nora, Pierre 88 Northern Star 42 nostalgia 178–9, 183, 205, 258 Oeser, Oscar 215–25 Olympic Games 127–8, 131–2, 134 opera 119, 121, 123, 151 oral history 88, 92–3, 95, 146, 201, 213 Orientalism 10, 30, 64, 135–6, 186, 209, 211–12 otherness 11, 127, 135, 142, 190, 202, 208, 212, 222, 227, 232 Oxley, Deborah 64 Pacific Islanders 98, 106, 226–7, 230, 234 Paisley, Fiona 29 Passerini, Luisa 82–3 pastoralism 77–8, 125, 129, 137, 139, 160, 178 patriarchy 8, 118 Pearson, Charles 102–5, 112 performance and perfomativity 47, 130–1, 133–6, 140, 164, 169, 181, 186, 227–30, 232–3, 260 Pesman, Ros 63 Phillip, Governor Arthur 118 Phillips, Derek 46 physics 68, 69 picturesque 177 Pike, Douglas 238 pioneer legend 115, 128–9, 178, 180, 183, 190, 238–9, 258 place, sense of 76, 89, 172, 177, 182; see also space poetry 47, 75, 202; see also literature political activism 5, 73, 93–4, 130, 136, 138–9, 239 political history 1–4, 6–7, 12, 16–17, 30, 43, 49, 56, 66, 147; see also power popular culture 7–9, 16–17, 43, 74, 84–6, 96, 116, 120–2, 147, 153, 165, 188, 236; see also folk culture, mass culture population see demography Possum, Clifford 137 post war reconstruction 56, 216 postal services 42–47, 135; see also letter writing

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queer theory 152

religion 4, 17, 46, 88, 124, 133, 138–9, 143–4, 146, 148–9, 162, 176, 181–2, 187, 190, 193, 197, 209 representation 54, 65, 69, 83, 177, 184 resistance 7–8, 117–19, 144, 148–50, 168, 196; see also power respectability 46–7, 50, 118–19, 124, 163, 167, 181, 259 Reynolds, Henry 61, 64, 92, 110, 239 Rickard, John 17, 55, 143 Ricoeur, Paul 81 Riley, Denise 259 Rimmer, Dai 81–2 rituals 11, 54, 70, 125, 135–6, 146, 149, 164, 168, 229 Roberts, Ainslie 135 Roberts, Stephen 24 Robin, Libby 74 Robinson, George Augustus 110 Robinson, Roland 133 rodeo 131 Roe, Jill 151 Roe, Michael 17 romance 38, 50, 192–3, 207 romanticism 73, 127, 132–4, 140, 205 Roosevelt, Theodore 99, 103 Rose, Deborah 69 Rose, Nikolas 216 Rosenzweig, Roy 85 Roth, Michael 93 Rowley, Charles 239 Rowse, Tim 65, 141 Royal Commissions 76–80 royal tours 126, 134 Russell, Penny 14 Ryan, Jan 148 Ryan, Lyndall 35, 61, 64

rabbits 77 race and ethnicity 6, 9–10, 14, 24–5, 27, 30, 34–5, 64, 73, 87, 98–112, 116–17, 125, 127–40, 142–54, 166–71, 187–90, 193–5, 198–9, 202, 208, 211, 215, 222–4, 237–9, 143; see also Aboriginal history ‘race suicide’ 104 radical nationalists 15–17 radio 50, 122–4, 215–25 railways 40–2, 114, 120–1, 134 Rando, Gaetano 147 Ranke, Leopold von 4 rational recreation 118–19, 124 Read, Peter 93 reading 47, 50; see also literacy Reagan, Ronald 59 reconciliation 89–91, 96, 138 re-enactments 87, 129 relativism 12–13, 53, 68, 75

Sabbatarianism 124 Said, Edward 10, 30, 58 Samuel, Raphael 82 Saxton family 209 Scalmer, Sean 239 school texts 23–4, 129, 135 schooling see education science 50, 68, 72, 75–6, 131, 136, 145, 150, 169 science, history as 26, 69, 72 Scott, Ernest 23–5 Scott, Joan 55, 165–6, 259 sectarianism see religion Seddon, George 71, 184 self see subjectivity semiotics 11 sentiment 41, 43, 49, 95; see also emotion Serle, Geoffrey 16, 115–16 sesquicentenary, 1938 129–30 Sewanee Review 103

postcolonialism 10, 15, 18, 25, 28, 30, 53, 55, 89, 101–2, 127–8, 133, 136–40, 148–9, 165–7, 189, 242; see also colonialism, imperialism, race postmodernism 30, 53, 60, 69, 75, 80, 148 poststructuralism 11, 14, 17–18, 30, 52–66, 152, 165, 172, 243 Powell, J M 75 power 12, 30, 40, 43–5, 49, 53, 55–6, 58–60, 64–6, 73, 83, 90–1, 94–6, 100–1, 111, 114, 131, 147–51, 159–61, 164–6, 170, 175, 177, 187, 221, 230–1, 239, 260 prehistory 70; see also archaeology present and past 39, 50, 57–8, 61, 65–6, 82, 86, 88–93, 96, 166, 201–2, 227, 230–1 press see media, newspapers Preston, Margaret 133 primitivism 127–9, 132–5, 139–40, 223 prisoners of war 92 private sphere 8, 48, 50, 81, 83–4, 92, 117, 124, 163, 176, 191, 202–3, 216, 218–22 professionalisation of history 2, 15, 16, 23, 25, 69, 72, 83, 85 progress in history 52, 65, 67, 113, 121, 178, 212 prostitution 119 Proust, Marcel 43, 50 psychoanalysis 96, 215, 223 psychology 14, 132–3, 201, 214–24 Pugliese, Joseph 149, 243 Pyne, Stephen 74–5, 79

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sex and sexuality 54–5, 60, 64, 121, 127, 134–5, 148, 152, 169, 175, 190–7, 220–1 Shakespeare, William 119, 121 ships 202, 205–6, 211 silence 66, 73, 93, 136, 139, 163–5, 173, 176, 179, 201–2, 228, 232–3 Sinha, Mrinalini 30, 111 ‘sixties’ 58–9, 73, 239 Sklar, Robert 1 Skrowronski, Ivy 206 slavery 188, 192, 194–5 Smart, Jeffrey 214 Smith, Bernard 16, 138 Smith, Ramsay 140 Sobchack, Vivian 86 Social Darwinism 145 social history 1–2, 5–7, 9, 15–17, 53, 59–60, 76, 83, 144–5, 147, 165–8, 258 social interaction 38–50, 163, 169, 171, 216, 224, 233 socialism 17, 162 sociology 52, 201 space 54, 64, 148, 172, 206, 228 spirituality 140, 148, 180–2, 216; see also religion sport 16, 42, 117–18, 120, 122–4, 131; see also individual sports, Olympic Games Stanner, W E H 136 Stevens, Christine 152 Stewart, Nellie 186 ‘stolen generation’ see Bringing them Home, child removal Stoler, Ann Laura 106, 167 ‘stone age’ 70 story see narrative Strack, Joan Kingsley 140 Strehlow, Carl 133 Stretton, Leonard 78–9 structuralism 6–7, 11, 53, 55 Sturma, Michael 64 subaltern studies 12 subjectivity 45, 53–4, 59, 63, 65, 83, 88, 101, 110, 139, 163–70, 182, 189, 201–2, 215–16 suburbia 124, 162, 214–15, 224 suffrage 47; see also democracy sugar 125, 194 Sydney Harbour Bridge 130 Sydney Morning Herald 38, 81, 87 Tada, Masayo 31 Taino 33–4 Talk 216 tariff 104, 108 Tatz, Colin 32 technology 39–40, 43, 47–9, 71, 83, 86, 120–1, 129–30, 216; see also communications technology telegraph 40–2, 47

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telephone 43, 47–50 television 122–4, 216 Tennant, Kylie 139 tent embassy 130 Teo, Hsu-Ming 14 testimony 88–9, 92–5, 202 text 173, 177, 230 Thatcher, Margaret 59 theatre 115, 118–20, 123, 134, 186, 228–9 Thelen, David 82, 85 theory 52–65, 229 ‘thick description’ 11 Thompson, E P 8–9, 16, 55, 62 Thomson, Alistair 14 Thoreau, Henry David 73 timber mills 78–9 tourism 63, 133–7, 188, 208, 212, 248; see also travel trade unions 16, 114, 160; see also labour trade 102, 104, 190 transnational history 29, 31–6, 113, 152, 187, 198–9; see also cultural transmission travel 14–15, 63, 134, 136, 146, 186–99, 201–12, 237 Tregenza, John 103 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions 89, 91 Tucker, Margaret 93 Tully, Anne 173, 177–84 Turnbull, Clive 27 Turner, Frederick Jackson 4, 16, 113–15 Turner, Ian 16 Turner, Victor 228 Uniapon, David 140 United Nations 32–3, 36 United States comparisons 16, 33–4, 41, 98–9, 101, 113–17, 128, 134, 151 urban history 17 vaudeville 121 ‘victimhood’ 95, 150 violence 27, 33–4, 61–2, 118, 125, 139, 173, 180, 199, 226–7 ‘whig interpretation of history’ 65; see also progress in history ‘whiteness’ 14, 25, 27–8, 98–112, 143, 147, 151, 154, 170, 187–90, 194, 250, 256; see also race and ethnicity Waddy, E B 217 wages and conditions 100, 104–5, 107–9, 111, 117, 125, 130; see also labour Wagner, Richard 121 Walkabout 134

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Walker, Albert 203, 205 Walker, David 63, 110 war 16, 81, 111, 178, 180, 201, 210, 220–1, 226–7, 243, 248; see also Anzac, ‘Holocaust’, prisoners of war Ward, J M 17, 26 Ward, Russel 15, 114–15, 159, 161, 238–9 water 77–8, 125, 177–8, 181; see also drought Waterhouse, Richard 14, 17, 55, 215, 258 Watson, Don 17 Weber, Max 5 White Australia Policy 24–5, 27, 40, 98–105, 110–12, 143, 151, 153, 198–9 White, Hayden 56 White, Richard (American historian) 75 White, Richard (the other one) 17, 258 Whitehead, A N 68 Whitlam, Gough 142 wilderness 74, 136 Williams, Raymond 3–4, 9, 11, 55, 116

Wilson, Roland 91 Wilson, Woodrow 112 Windschuttle, Keith 53–4, 57–66 Winichakul, Thonghai 18 Winter, Jay 95 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 229 women’s history 17, 43, 45–6, 48, 55, 59, 62, 73, 102, 109, 115, 129, 145, 147, 151, 161–2, 260; see also feminism and feminist history, gender Women’s Home Companion 50 Wongar, B 140 Woollacott, Angela 14 work 116–17, 120, 218–19; see also labour, wages and conditions World Council of Churches 139 world history 31 Worster, Donald 73–4 Wotherspoon, Garry 148 Wright, Judith 138 writing see letter writing, literacy Yirrawala 137 York, Barry 143–4, 146–7, 150 Young, James 90