In the main, this four hundred page political biography of d’Alpuget’s silver- haired husband is well written and even handed. A hagiography it isn’t, which means that, as well as his achievements, a number of the PM’s mistakes are highlighted. These include the blatant ministerial mistreatment, after the 1990 election victory, which he largely engineered, of the NSW Right numbers man, Senator Graham Richardson, who as a result then became a strong supporter of Paul Keating’s long-held aim of supplanting Hawke in the Lodge.

Actually, d’Alpuget reminds us that, for all his personal and political weaknesses and venalities, Richardson was a fine, and passionately committed, Minister for the Environment, who after helicoptering “over some of the Tasmanian forests that both the Liberal and Labor parties in Tasmania were keen to log”, had been convinced by the conservationist (and later Greens senator) Bob Brown of the urgent need to protect them. By the time they arrived back in Hobart, the Senator was a convert, intending to become a warrior for Brown’s cause. In his memoir, ‘Whatever It Takes’, Richardson wrote: “That was a bad day for the logging industry in Australia but a very good one for me, the environmental movement and the Labor Party. It didn’t take too long to work out that we had a perfect convergence: what was right was also popular.”

Indeed it was Richardson who realised that, by the time of the 1990 federal election, electoral politics had to be done differently and in a particular way, namely that the votes to win were the green preferences. According to d’Alpuget, this election would “collect people’s dreams and unconscious wishes, as elections always do, but quietly, in marginal electorates. Slowly and silently, the tens of thousands of people in ‘the holding paddock’ of the marginals were about to push the (Hawke) government back into office by voting Labor second.”

d’Alpuget is spot on in her analysis of Richardson who “always promoted himself as a tough operator, which the Left took at face value, and loathed.” But, she argues, there was “a softer, genuinely empathetic side to him”, best seen when he was Minister for Health and became, in the words of the head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Mike Codd, “passionate about Aboriginal health. Genuinely passionate. He could have achieved an awful lot in that portfolio, but he had to resign.” His resignation was due to scandal and, as d’Alpuget aptly concludes, “the shadow of scandal seemed to be Richardson’s kismet, pursuing him into his seventh decade.”

Although she cannot hide her sympathies, it seems to me that d’Alpuget is extremely insightful comparing Hawke and Keating – the self-described ‘Placido Domingo of Australian politics’. It is hard to disagree with her contention that much of the latter’s problem as a politician was his introversion. Thus while with intimates Keating was “warm, affectionate and funny, with strangers he was shy and even nervous.” d’Alpuget tellingly recounts how a journalist, walking with him through a crowd, heard Keating mutter, ‘Don’t make eye contact! Don’t look at them. Just keep going.’
By contrast, Hawke was “forever eager to meet people, to stop, shake hands, tell a joke, ruffle the hair of a child. He loved ‘the mob’ and exuded the disarming conviction that every stranger would like him.” In contrast, Hawke believed that, for many years, Keating “not only did not love the Australian people, as he, Hawke did, but actually rather despised them.”

It is a sign of the power of her analysis that d’Alpuget convinces this reviewer that Hawke’s huge strength as PM was that he deeply loved the Australian people, and believed in their goodness. At the time, this was reciprocated in spades. Thus even during the economic crisis of 1986 he was still so popular “that at one Sydney shopping centre a crowd gathered in such a surge that a Hawke staffer feared there had been an accident.” Inquiring what had happened, the staffer was simply told: ‘We’re here to see the Prime Minister!’

When asked to explain Hawke’s great election victory in 1987, the s unrivalled Labor Party chronicler and speechwriter , Graham Freudenberg, remarked that “there’s never been a prime minister who enjoyed the job, had sheer joy in it, as much as Bob. He exuded the spirit of fun and sheer zest for it.” Freudenberg explained it thus: “I don’t mean having power and the appurtenances, which of course he enjoyed, he loved. But just the sheer joy of being prime minister for THIS PEOPLE. The Australians.”

In this rivetting book on Hawke, there are the occasional inaccuracies. For example, in chapter 7 Douglas Sturkey, a long-time member of the diplomatic staff of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who in 1990 succeeded Sir David Smith as Official Secretary to the Governor-General of Australia is wrongly referred to as Doug Sterkey.

More than balanced against this is that d’Alpuget’s biography is a genuinely fine read. Fittingly perhaps, some of the best writing in ‘HAWKE: THE PRIME MINISTER’ concerns the fundamentally ludicrous Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen for PM campaign. d’Alpuget deftly explores the way in which Joh and his ‘white shoe brigade’ played right into the PMs hands and against the fortunes of John Winston Howard who, in a later incarnation, was to rival Bob Hawke’s populist appeal.

Blanche d’Alpuget, ‘HAWKE: THE PRIME MINISTER’, Melbourne University Press, 2010, 401pp, $54.99.
By Ross Fitzgerald, Sydney Morning Herald, August 7-8, 2010, Spectrum pp 32-33.

But as William McInnes explains, history comes in all shapes and sizes, so that by 2007 “the page had turned upon the government of which Ms Bishop had been a member, presenting a new minister with the opportunity to speak about history and identity and Australia”.

Many Australians are familiar with the history of academic contention, ranging from Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, to Robert Manne and Henry Reynolds, to Keith Windschuttle. Notice, though, that all these professional historians are men. But then there are other, much less academic histories. The year that Bishop made her remarks about Australia’s history, McInnes was in a TV drama, earning a dollar playing the part of our 14th prime minister, John Curtin, a Labor man through and through, who, many would argue, gave his life in service to this country.

The educated Bishop would appreciate the fact that our history was being told in the form of entertainment, broadcast across the nation, and beyond. She is, after all, the Liberal Party member for the seat of Curtin. As McInnes rightly says, “Curtin’s story belongs to us all.” Yet, as he mentions throughout the book, what we take to be history is many things – and varied.

This easy-to-read narrative of our country since World War II is complemented by scores of revealing and often highly personal black-and-white photographs. This is not surprising given the fact that The Making of Modern Australia was released to coincide with an ABC TV series of the same name. It was produced in association with the makers of the ABC documentary Ten Pound Poms and McInnes stars as the narrator.

This well-crafted book has, for me, many reverberations. Thus we are reminded that, from 1953 to the early 1970s, free morning milk was provided to primary school students to strengthen our diet. As McInnes puts it, “The milk was carried in by specially selected milk monitors, a prized position among students. Small glass milk bottles, and later small cartons, and a free drinking straw, were handed out by the monitors in time for what was termed in Queensland ‘little lunch’, or morning recess.”

In 1964, when I was 20, Donald Horne coined the ironic term “the lucky country”. He believed Australia’s wealth came “not so much from the cleverness of its citizens but from its bountiful natural resources”. Yet most Australians adopted the phrase as a term of praise.

As my father was a Democratic Labor Party voter and an avid supporter of B.A. (Bob) Santamaria, the sections dealing with the great split in the ALP in the mid-1950s and beyond are particularly fascinating. The fact is that many Australian families were rent asunder by the Labor Party/Roman Catholic split. Thus some family members continued to support the ALP while others, staunchly anti-communist, voted for the DLP and, by their preferences, helped keep the Liberal prime minister Robert Gordon Menzies in power well beyond his use-by date.

The Making of Modern Australia ends with a eulogy about Australia Day. Unfortunately, McInnes does not directly discuss the fact that January 26 is regarded by almost all Aborigines and Islanders as Invasion Day and that, for many citizens, black and white, the most appropriate date to celebrate the creation of Australia is January 1, because that was when, in 1901, our separate colonies became a single nation.

Yet for McInnes the fascinating stories of indigenous and multicultural Australians weave their way through this delightful book, as do the tales of Anglo-Celtic and European and Islamic and Vietnamese Australians. So, too, do the stories of Catholic and Protestant and Buddhist and Hindu and atheist Australians, as well as heterosexual, homosexual and transsexual Aussies. The truth is that while we may share many characteristics, we are all shaped by our own stories. As he so rightly puts it, “we come in all shapes and sizes and colours. All types. New and old, good and bad.”

Living in our island continent, in the Antipodes, in the Great South Land, it’s good (and indeed necessary) for us to listen to each other and to ask and learn about each other’s stories. When that happens, we can come to deeply share each other’s experiences and, in the process, to participate in the making of modern Australia.

Review of William McInnes, THE MAKING OF MODERN AUSTRALIA Hachette, 342pp, $35
Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum, July 31-August 1, 2010

The book’s author, Mark Aarons, came under the “adverse notice” of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in early 1965 when he was only 13, while his father’s ASIO files began when he was 14, in the early 1930s. Indeed, one of the great strengths of The Family File is the extensive use made of the detailed reports of the many ASIO agents who successfully infiltrated the communist movement in this country, and especially the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and its many and varied offshoots.

Remarkably, ASIO’s surveillance files on Laurie Aarons – a “professional revolutionary” born in August 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution and three years before the founding of the CPA, amounts to a massive 85 volumes, while that of his third son, Mark, boasts nine volumes of text and photos – up to the time when such ASIO files could be officially “released”.

There are at least two important revelations in The Family File: the first concerns the radical Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett and the second the Soviet Union’s Australian spymaster, Walter (Wally) Clayton.

The fact is that throughout his life, Burchett, who developed a close friendship with Ho Chi Minh and leading revolutionaries throughout the world, repeatedly claimed not to be a communist. Yet Mark Aarons’s communist grandfather, Samuel Aarons, who met Burchett when he boarded a ship in Noumea on the way to Europe to “try his luck”, puts paid to this. Samuel Aarons clearly stated that “Burchett had previously applied for membership of the CPA in Melbourne, but claimed he never received a response”. Burchett later wrote with considerable warmth about his time on board a ship with Samuel and his wife Esme. The author simply puts the situation thus: “It is possible that Sam finally recruited Burchett to the party on the voyage.”

The other crucial revelation in The Family File concerns an interview that Laurie Aarons taped with Wally Clayton shortly before the latter died in October 1997. This makes it crystal clear that Clayton not only admitted to be the senior CPA member who co-ordinated the KGB’s operations in Australia, but that he was also entirely unrepentant about being the key spymaster, identified by ASIO and MI5 officers as “KLOD”.

The Family File contains an excellent black-and-white photo of a bespectacled, gaunt and harried-looking Wally Clayton at the time of his appearance in March 1955 at the highly explosive Royal Commission on Espionage. As the book makes clear, in 1943 Clayton was recruited as the Soviet’s Australian spymaster.

Throughout his crucial undercover career, Clayton handed over highly classified Western secrets to his KGB handler in Australia for direct transmission to Moscow.

One crucial weakness in Mark Aarons’s important study is that the book contains no endnotes or footnotes. This means that it is utterly impossible to trace and check the many sources he has relied upon for the hundreds of quotations that grace The Family File. Annoyingly, the contents page contains no chapter titles, and no chapter breakdowns. Whether this is deliberate or a typesetting mistake is unclear.

As the narrative proceeds, it is illuminating to be told the names of key Australian politicians who were, at least for a time, “dual members” of the Australian Labor Party and the CPA, and also for it to be demonstrated just how many ASIO spies had penetrated the communist movement in this country.

Even more so than in the Labor Party, deeply acrimonious “splits” were common among Australian communists. Indeed, towards the end of their formal existence, there were up to eight communist groups or parties co-existing at the same time. It is worth remembering that, even today, there is still a Communist Party of Australia that was largely formed from the largely Russian-oriented Socialist Party of Australia. In 2010 the CPA produces its own newsletter and, perversely, seems flushed with funds.

In The Family File, Aarons deals with honesty and aplomb about the many and varied weaknesses of the CPA and, perhaps even more so, in the other communist parties in the country. Yet he also chronicles how dedicated “communist revolutionaries” played a useful and important role in the anti-apartheid and anti-war movements, as well as helping to promote indigenous self-determination, green bans, feminism and the independence of East Timor.

As he points out, militant communists were at the forefront of promoting workers’ rights in Australia, as well as successfully lobbying for improved wages and conditions. Thus until the 1980s many ALP supporters regularly voted for communists in trade-union elections. This was because card-carrying communists were “often effective unionists, immune from bribery, prepared to fight the bosses and use effective tactics to win concessions for union members”.

The Family File, Mark Aarons, Black Inc, #34.95
Review by Ross Fitzgerald in The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 July 2010

This concisely written, effectively illustrated “history from below” focuses on all those rebels and political malcontents banished by British authorities to the ends of the earth in the Antipodes.

Death or Liberty: Rebel Exiles Transported to Australia 1788-1868 usefully adopts the historiographical approach of the leading 20th-century scholars E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude to understand and elucidate the forces producing rebellion in the mother country. As Moore explains, studies by these and other progressive historians have demonstrated “how the uprooting of Britain’s agrarian communities by the forces of capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation and the expansion of the empire led not only to class division, social breakdown and crime, but also to revolution, riot and organised resistance”.

Moore clearly argues in the early chapters of this fine book that Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rude have successfully recast many so-called “political criminals” as democrats and progressive reformers who were transported to Australia as a penalty for the “advance of self-determination, universal suffrage, free speech and assembly, workers’ rights and social justice”. Indeed, it is hard to resist the conclusion that transportation removed political threats from “home” in England and elsewhere in Britain and at the same time intimidated other potential rebels who might have contemplated active dissent and revolution.

Death or Liberty cogently examines the continued use over nearly a century – from 1788 to 1868 – of this “system” by successive British governments. It had the specific aim of suppressing radical political movements by means of exiling rebels to what Robert Hughes so tellingly called “this fatal shore”.

This thoroughly researched, thematic, social and political narrative has chapters dealing with different groups of political prisoners. They range from the Scottish and Tolpuddle and Young Ireland Martyrs to the Canadian Patriots, the Chartists, the United Irishmen and the Fenians. Perversely, with the conspicuous exception of the Irish rebels, while many of these other radical political exiles are now honoured in their countries of origin, there is still relatively little “to commemorate their time on our soil or contribution to our history”.

As Moore points out, this book has been written so that 21st-century readers, and especially the young, might learn the stories of “the rebels, radicals and protestors” who can be seen as sacrificing their own liberty to help achieve the egalitarian democracy we enjoy in Australia today.

Transportation to the British colony of New South Wales, Moore powerfully argues, was invented to “soak up the wave of criminality caused by the tectonic shifts in traditional British social relations”. But very soon after the arrival in Australia of the so-called First Fleet, transportation was embraced as “the best way to excise from the body politic both radical malcontents who wanted to import foreign systems of government like republicanism, and dissenters from the lower orders who threatened the King’s peace and property”. Indeed, by the 1790s transportation was also seized upon as the solution to Irish lawlessness and the “habit of rebellion”.

While in the past few decades interest in Australia about Irish rebel traditions has grown, it does seem passing strange that – at least until the advent of this brilliantly conceived, chronologically based narrative history – there has been little official and even historical acknowledgement of the debt our democracy owes to our varied and diverse political convicts, ranging from the Chartists and the machine-breakers and the North American patriots, through to both the Scottish and Tolpuddle Martyrs. It is pleasing to report that Moore has gone a long way to remedying this unfortunate situation.

As it happens, he was awarded the NSW History Fellowship by the NSW Government and Arts NSW to help research and write Death or Liberty. In the opinion of this reviewer, it was money well spent.

Review of Death or Liberty by Tony Moore. Review by Ross Fitzgerald in The Sydney Morning Herald, July 10, 2010

As the introduction to this superbly illustrated book explains, it discovers “the street corners where they spoke, their union offices and lecture halls, the pubs and cafes in which they socialised”, and so much more.

A pivotal chapter concerns Australia’s famous short-story writer and poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922) and his mother, Louisa Lawson, one of this nation’s most important feminist authors and longstanding editor of that edgy journal for Australian women, The Dawn.

It is crucial to understand that alcoholism, depression and debt plagued Henry Lawson’s life and, as a direct result, this led in 1903 to the breakdown of his seven-year marriage to Bertha, a nurse, and stepdaughter of Sydney’s radical bookshop owner William McNamara, who is featured in a lively and illuminating chapter by one of seven contributors to this book, Bruce Scates.

Louisa Lawson died in Sydney’s Gladesville Mental Hospital in August 1920, two years before her deeply troubled son. Many of our most talented writers and intellectuals were plagued by mental instability, including that world-renowned archeologist, historian and labour activist Vere Gordon Childe who, after being hounded out of Australia by conservative forces, returned to Sydney in 1957.

Soon after, he committed suicide, on October 19 that year, by jumping off the edge of a cliff in the Blue Mountains. As the fine chapter on Childe concludes, his friend, the leader of the federal Labor Party, H.V. (Bert) Evatt, “spoke at a service for him at the church in North Sydney where Childe’s father had been the rector”. The authors rightly insist that it is worth remembering that, during World War I, many professors in Australia “worked for military intelligence as censors”. But they could not effectively move against Childe until he publicly associated himself with “the radicals” by delivering an anti-war paper at a peace conference in Sydney.

Many chapters in this excellent book are subtly interconnected. Thus contributions range from documenting the struggles for defending free speech at a number of stumps throughout Sydney in 1915, to the role at that time of the local branch of the incendiary Industrial Workers of the World, to the foundation by a number of activists impressed by the 1917 Russian Revolution of the Australian Communist Party in Sydney in October 1920, and to the role in the 1950s of fiery poet, playwright and activist Dorothy Hewett and the so-called Redfern Reds.

This chapter features a photograph of the fiery Hewett’s house in Marriott Street, Redfern, in which she squatted and organised clandestine communist activities in the community and in the local sewing mills, and another of the community Billiards Parlour at 103 Regent Street in 1940, which became the Communist Party’s Henry Lawson Hall.

It is worth remembering that the statue on a grassy Domain knoll overlooking Woolloomooloo Bay in tribute to Henry Lawson was unveiled in 1931 by NSW governor Philip Game, who sacked Labor’s maverick premier Jack Lang who in latter years was to be such an influence on flamboyant prime minister Paul Keating.

In a powerful symmetry, one of the book’s final chapters deals with Survival Day, January 26, 1984, and Koori Redfern. The telling text is underlined by a black-and-white photograph of the former Empress Hotel in Regent Street, Redfern, a site that featured significantly in the world of Sydney’s Black Power militants in the 1970s and that was renamed the Regent Hotel.

Radical Sydney does not shy away from the offensive attitudes of many early Australian radicals and of their journals of opinion, including The Worker and especially The Bulletin, which in 1888 proclaimed: “No nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour is an Australian.” Such poisonous and persistent racism led to the labour movement in particular insisting, in the year of Federation, 1901, that the nation should be, and should remain, a white Australia.

Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill’s Radical Sydney is so much more interesting, revealing and crisply written than Jeff and Jill Sparrow’s Radical Melbourne (2001) and Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier’s Radical Brisbane (2004). Indeed, it is a most enjoyable and illuminating history.

Terry Irving & Rowan Cahill, Radical Sydney:Portraits and Unruly Episodes, UNSW Press, 384pp, $39.95.

The Weekend Australian, June 5-6, 2010

This is the fundamental thesis of What were They Thinking? It is an argument that Walter and his research assistant Tod Moore (who wrote two key chapters) advance with skill and clarity. Indeed, to carry the notion further, Walter quotes from Don Watson’s classic portrait of Paul Keating, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: “Politics and history are alike in that the craft of both is storytelling.”

As Walter points out, one of Kevin Rudd’s responses to the global financial crisis was to write an essay, while Tony Abbott’s successful challenge for the Liberal Party leadership was preceded by a well written and cogently argued book, Battlelines, which he immediately updated for a second edition.

Unsurprisingly, Walter’s narrative of political thought in Australia gives prominence to Rudd’s exegesis, The Global Financial Crisis, published in The Monthly in February last year.

Drawing on the diverse intellectual and ethical example of John Maynard Keynes, Rudd expounded the notion that “from time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place”. Such changes were indeed under way last year, the Prime Minister argued, with “fault lines yielding to fractures which in time may yield to even deeper tectonic shifts”.

Rudd’s other great intellectual and moral influence, he claims, is heroic German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his trenchant February 2009 critique of the “alleged excesses of neo-liberalism”, also published in The Monthly, Rudd presented social democracy as “rejection of both state socialism and free market fundamentalism”.

As Walter explains, Rudd’s elaboration of the “social democratic” task, as opposed to ideological neo-liberalism, borrowed much from the so-called third way that had been pushed by Tony Blair, which in turn was “said to have been adapted from [Bob] Hawke and [Paul] Keating”.

Walter helpfully examines the background to the “socialist objective” of the Australian labour movement and the ALP, and usefully illuminates the historic 19th and early 20th century battles between the proponents of free trade and protectionism.

In his conclusion Walter reveals that he began this exploration of the politics of ideas with the present Prime Minister, “not because he was specially gifted, or his message was unusually deft”, but because Rudd “illustrated something that is a recurrent feature of effective leadership”: that “crafting a narrative for the times” is essential for any effective political leader.

He also quotes John Howard in support of this idea, from February 2009: “Those who triumph politically are those who have not only superior arguments but also the capacity to present those arguments in a compelling fashion.”

Yet as Rudd’s essays make manifest, the influences of distinctly Australian ideas seem few and far between. Indeed, as Walter writes, when Robert Manne sought responses to Rudd’s GFC essay for publication in The Monthly in May last year, he “deemed Australian reaction so disappointing that only the great and good of other metropolitan cultures were commissioned to reply”. The Monthly published pieces by Eric Hobsbawm, David Hale, Dean Baker, Charles R. Morris and John Gray, which seemed a prime example of Australian intellectuals still looking to “the great elsewhere”, to use Sylvia Lawson’s memorable line.

However, that cannot be said of Goodbye to All That?, edited by Manne and David McKnight, a collection of essays in which most of the contributors (all of whom are from Australia) tackle what they regard as the economic and fiscal failure of neo-liberalism.
Most also canvass the urgency (or not) of policy change, especially when it comes to climate change and the economy, which they maintain are interconnected.

In a section headed The Economics of Greed and Risk, the editors open with a reprinted version of Rudd’s GFC essay, which is treated with something akin to undue deference. This is probably because the editors — Manne in particular — applaud what they take to be the end of the era of extreme free-market capitalism and excessive private greed, which they enthusiastically argue “was founded on the belief in the superiority of the market over government intervention”.

Yet as even Manne and McKnight concede, many previous books that have suggested that “civilisation had reached a moment of crisis” have proved to be exaggerated or radically wrongheaded. The wolf has not appeared, despite cries to the contrary.

But with “the looming danger of catastrophic climate change”, Manne, McKnight and their carefully selected contributors argue the situation now is fundamentally different: “With the arrival of this threat, the wolf is finally at the door.”

So what is there to differentiate Goodbye to All That? from other precautionary tomes? Even though the editors stress “the very real harm” that neo-liberalism and human-induced climate change has inflicted, my guess is very little. Human experience suggests that even if wolves sometimes do appear at our door, usually they can be handled.

Moreover, if the economic and fiscal fault lies with the conservatives, as the Manne group implies, what are we to make of the British Labour Party and its recently departed leader Gordon Brown, beside whom Rudd has regularly stood with pride? During the period Brown wielded power as chancellor and then prime minister he advocated “regulation with a light touch”. For all this time, with the Conservatives out of office, London was a centre of the world’s financial system, yet the economy was approaching crisis. About this crucial fact the contributors to Goodbye to All That? are strangely silent.

Fortunately, not every contributor to this collection toes what seems to be the editors’ party line. Thus, while John Quiggin suggests that in his GFC essay Rudd had “struck the right rhetorical notes”, he rightly points out that in practical terms the Rudd government has shown “little evidence” of a renewal of social-democratic thinking. Quiggin also points out, again quite rightly, that Australia has “suffered only modest and indirect effects from the global financial crisis”. In part, he maintains, “this favourable outcome reflects good management; but good luck has been at least as important”. Trusting to luck that Australia will be “similarly favoured in the future”, would be unwise.

The most thoughtful contribution is Anne Manne’s essay on The Question of Care. While all her co-contributors agree we face “the looming catastrophe of global warming”, Manne maintains that “this is not simply caused by the burning of fossil fuels” but it “derives from a fatal flaw in our system of accounting”. As she points out, we “track social progress” by the “narrow measurements of economic growth and gross domestic product”. Although she does not mention it, the sacred cow of GDP is worshipped not only in Western countries but in the rapidly growing economies of China and India as well.
But we do not measure the cost of that growth, in terms of climate change but also in terms of quality of life, which ought include care and concern for the young and old and the impoverished and disposed in our societies. Climate change, Manne maintains, has “dramatically confronted us with the folly of our obsession with growth at the expense of every other aspect of human existence”.

Mainstream assessment bodies, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, she argues, are recognising this crucial point. As OECD secretary-general Donald Johnston wrote in 2005, “What does gross domestic product really tell us about economic and social progress?” It is hard to argue with his conclusion: as an indicator, not much. It is certainly hard to disagree with Robert Kennedy, who once remarked that the GDP “does not capture the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play — it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”.

One consequence of ever-rising GDP that Manne does not mention is ever-increasing population growth, which is ravaging human societies across the planet. This is a problem even for Australia, with our population estimated to reach 35 million by 2049. In his contribution to this book, Ian Lowe writes that “delusion that economic growth could continue seamlessly forever” was dispelled by the GFC, then usefully adds: “We will have [to stabilise] our population and our per capita consumption so that the sum total of human demands can be met sustainably by natural systems.” That whole question of global population control is worth a book of its own.

By Ross Fitzgerald, Australian Literary Review, 2 June 2010.

What Were They Thinking? The Politics of Ideas in Australia, By James Walter, UNSW Press, 400pp, $39.95

Goodbye to All That? On the Failure of Neo-Liberalism and the Urgency of Change. Edited by Robert Manne and David McKnight, Black Inc, 278pp, $32.95

Superbly illustrated, it also contains intriguing and highly moving material originally excluded by the original editor, the official war correspondent Charles Bean, but carefully and lovingly preserved in the collections of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

A fascinating feature of this edition is a thoughtful introduction by Ashley Ekins, head of the military history section of the Australian War Memorial, who explores and explains the items left out by Bean.

One example is a fine satirical drawing by Lance Corporal H. Watson depicting the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm 11, caught precariously on the bayonet of a casual pipe-smoking Anzac soldier. Why this was omitted is unclear. Another offering rejected for publication in 1916 were two sketches by an unidentified cartoonist – most likely Private David Barker of 5th Field Ambulance – presenting possible alternatives for Christmas in Gallipoli. The top sketch is an optimistic “What we hope for”, while the bottom sketch, “What we’ll probably get”, captures the awful reality of life in the trenches.

The material in THE ANZAC BOOK, as Carlyon points out, was “conceived, written and sketched and painted in holes in the ground while the fighting was still going on”. This is what makes this book unique. Indeed, many contributors painted “with iodine brushes” and “scribbled on scraps of paper with red and blue pencils” while Gallipoli was experiencing the worst blizzards and snowstorms in 40 years. In the main, though, most contributions accepted for publication reflected relatively high morale and national pride, though often tinted and tinged with laconic irony.

In a slightly different way, ‘An Eyewitness Account of Gallipoli’ provides a compelling, yet understated, account of what it was like fighting in Egypt and at Anzac Cove in 1915.

This collection of black and white drawings and notes by Signaller Ellis Silas of the 16th Battalion is so powerful precisely because everything he sketched and recorded he had seen and experienced first hand. Indeed, there is some truth in the assertion made by the book’s extremely helpful editor, John Laffin, that Ellis Silas was the
Anzac artist. Writing about his powerful series of illustrations of what it was like fighting in April 1915, Silas wrote, “It is not with any desire for morbid sensationalism that I introduce the dead in every drawing. They were part of our daily life; they were part of the character of the Peninsula – at least of Anzac.”

In stark contrast to these two often matter-of-fact and sometimes good-humoured treatments of Australian and New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli, the essential thesis of the contemporary WHAT’S WRONG WITH ANZAC? is that, in the past two decades, we have witnessed a relentless, and unfortunate, militarisation of our history. This has especially occurred since April 25, 1990 – the 75th anniversary of the Anzac’s landing – when Bob Hawke became the first Australian prime minister to preside over the Dawn Service at Anzac Cove.

Five Australian historians – Joy Damousi, Carina Donaldson, Marilyn Lake, Mark McKenna and Henry Reynolds – have written this book because they are deeply concerned about the flagrant promotion of Anzac Day as the Australian national day and about many disturbing aspects of what they term “the Anzac resurgence.” All five authors write because they “want to do justice to Australia’s long anti-war tradition” and because they want to “reclaim our national civil and political traditions of democratic equality and social justice in whose name we now ask our soldiers to fight”.

While much of the writing is dull, and rather worthy, the stand-out chapter is by Mark McKenna, whose biography of Manning Clark is to be published this year. In his attempt to explain how Anzac Day has in effect become Australia’s national day, McKenna argues that, rather than focussing on an Imperial organised carnage against the Turks, we “see the Anzacs as we need to see them: an army of innocent, brave young men who were willing to sacrifice their lives so that we might ‘live in freedom’”. He also points out that in 2010, “our image of the Anzacs is a far cry from the hundreds of Gallipoli veterans who ‘played two-up in the main streets of Sydney’, ‘danced, sang war-time songs, staged mock marches and directed traffic’ on Anzac Day, 1938. Australians have mostly forgotten all those soldiers who “suffered mental breakdown, died prematurely, or committed suicide”, those “overcome by the fear of death, who could not bring themselves to fight and deserted”, or those who came back home to find themselves unwanted and unemployed. These men saw little, if anything, to celebrate in Anzac Day.

Yet in 2009, mourning those who died in the Victorian bushfires, another Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, compared the fire-fighters who stood at ‘the gates of hell’, to the Anzacs in their ‘slouch hats.’ As McKenna poignantly puts it, it is as if “any story of courage and loss must now be placed in ‘the Anzac tradition’ before national mourning can truly occur.” At the same time, he argues that January 26, Australia Day, can no longer resonate as a truly national day because for our indigenous peoples it is a day of mourning, Invasion Day.

Although McKenna does not mention it, one of the most perceptive commentaries about the changes to Anzac Day was provided by no other than Manning Clark. As Lake highlights in a useful essay, Clark persuasively argued that our founding ideals of ‘equality of opportunity without servility, mediocrity, or greyness of spirit’ had recently been “cast to the winds”.

The turn to Anzac Day as our ‘day of glory’, Clark wrote in volume 5 of his ‘History of Australia’ had made our nation a “prisoner of her past, rather than an architect of a new future.” The reshaped story of Anzac heroism, he rightly predicted, would be told in Australia “for generations to come.”

Published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April, 2010:

THE ANZAC BOOK, UNSW Press, 240pp, $49.95

AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF GALLIPOLI By Signaller Ellis Silas, edited by John Laffin, Rosenberg Books, 90pp, $24.95

Professor Ross Fitzgerald has written 32 books, most recently the co-authored UNDER THE INFLUENCE: A HISTORY OF ALCOHOL IN AUSTRALIA and his memoir MY NAME IS ROSS: AN ALCOHOLIC’S JOURNEY.

2008 saw the publication of Chloe Hooper’s remarkable non-fiction novel THE TALL MAN. This award-winning work deals with the death on 19 November 2004 of a 36 year old Palm Island man, Cameron Mulrunji Doomadgee, who swore at a policeman, Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley – then 33 years old, weighing 115 kilograms and 200 centimetres (6 feet and 7 inches) tall. Forty-five minutes later, Doomadgee was found dead in a watch house cell.

Now in 2010 we see the appearance of Joanne Watson’s passionate and magisterial history of Palm Island, whose opening and final chapters also deal in detail with the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee, as well as the riot and widespread civil unrest that followed this tragic event. As a result of the burning down of the police station, courthouse and police barracks, a state of emergency was declared and local police were evacuated from Palm Island. Authorities only “regained control” after reinforcements, including members of the Special Emergency Response Team, were flown in from Townsville by Chinook helicopter and from Cairns by plane.

Ms Watson recounts how, after a 2006 inquest found Senior Sergeant Hurley was responsible for the horrific internal injuries that caused Doomadgee’s death, in June 2007 Hurley was acquitted of manslaughter by a supreme court jury in Townsville. What is not disputed is that Mulrunji Doomadgee had sustained massive injuries – including scalp and jaw injuries, a black eye, four fractured ribs and a completely ruptured liver and portal vein, with the liver ‘cleaved in two.’ At the time of writing this review, a reopened coronial inquest into Doomadgee’s death in custody was taking place at Palm Island and also in Townsville.

Published by the innovative Aboriginal Studies Press, PALM ISLAND is the first substantial history of the island from pre-European invasion to the present. Exploring some of the most explosive and intriguing events in Queensland’s history, Watson’s compelling narrative is the outcome of over twenty years of oral history and archival research, including a comprehensive examination of church, court and administrative records, and diverse media reports.

Established in 1918 as a penitentiary for “troublesome” Torres Strait Islanders and especially Aboriginals from north and northwest Queensland, Palm Island became, Watson persuasively argues, “the receiving centre for survivors of bitter clashes between colonisers and Indigenous people on the Queensland frontier.”

In the 20th century this reached a crescendo in the Palm Island strike of 1957, which was widely covered by the Australian media who, with the conspicuous exception of Communist Party newspaper the Tribune, came out strongly in favour of white officials, government administrations and the Queensland police who fought a running battle on the Island with ‘indigenous agitators.’ Thus this strike, which in a population of 1400 was only opposed by seven Murri residents, was characterised as a ‘native revolt’ and ‘ the ‘Palm Island Riot’.

Ever since the brutal ex policeman Roy Henry Bartlam took control as Superintendant in 1953, resentment was growing about his relentless persecution of so-called ‘trouble makers’ as well as inadequate or non existence payment to indigenous workers and to the unsavoury rations, which often included fly blown meat.

In June 1957 a protest, initially led by women, marched up Mango Avenue – a street which for decades had been barred to indigenous islanders. Yet despite the forbidding presence of heavily armed police freighted in from Cairns and Townsville and a patrol boat whose machine gun was pointing towards the beach, Murri residents took control of the distribution of goods, including food and drink. Although only temporary, for a while this reversed the social roles on the island.

Government retribution was harsh. Many of the island’s indigenous leaders, including Bill Congoo and Willie Thaiday and their families, were deported from Palm to other ‘native reserves’ and ‘ places of exile’, including the Cherbourg mission and Woorabinda. Not surprisingly, the Tribune’s call for a searching public inquiry into these events was utterly ignored. For decades there had been massive official misstatements and untruths made by government and the media about conditions on the island. Thus while future Labor premier E.M. (‘Ned’) Hanlon described it as a ‘demi-paradise’, in 1932 Palm Island’s resident doctor, Thomas L. Bancroft, defined it as ‘the Black-fellow’s Graveyard’. He revealed conditions of ‘filthiness and squalor’ and a ‘great mortality’ among the residents.
As Watson makes clear, it is Dr Bancroft who should be believed.

Differentiating herself from what she takes to be Chloe Hooper’s moralistically black and white position, Watson powerfully contends that there is a very close nexus between alcoholism, addiction and social breakdown, and alcohol related violence, sexual assault, crime and suicide resulting from chronic stress and poverty. Thus at the same time that indigenous islanders experienced an 80% unemployment rate, a federal inquiry in 1977 reported that over 90% of men and 80% of women on Palm Island severely abused alcohol. If anything, the current situation is even worse. As Noel Pearson and international authorities make clear, there is an unambiguous causal connection between being on welfare, being at the bottom of the social order, and a very high incidence of endemic alcoholic intoxication and other forms of addiction.

Yet this compelling history explores the rich tapestry of humour and hope, as well as helplessness and hate, and especially the combined existence of powerlessness and resilience that characterises the indigenous peoples of Palm Island. Watson’s thoroughly researched narrative demonstrates that the island community has had an extraordinary past; a history at the same time “rich, staggeringly brave, stoic and humorous, tragic and inspiring.” As historian, Dr Rosalind Kidd, rightly points out, Watson’s compelling narrative of and about Palm Island and its peoples is “an important caution to those who mistake official statements for historical truths.”

Indeed it is primarily talented and hard working historians like Joanne Watson who can best write Queensland and Australian history.

Published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 17-18 April, 2010

Professor Ross Fitzgerald has written 32 books, most recently the co-authored Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia and his highly praised memoir My name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey.

With each chapter written by different authors it is inevitable that there will be some quibbling about which symbols should have been included in the book, and which were not. While the kangaroo clearly rates a chapter, I am puzzled as to why the equally deserving emu, koala, platypus, or kookaburra (or even the Kelpie dog) have not gained a guernsey. Similarly, while I share the editor’s love of the pavlova, it seems surprising that neither the lamington nor the peach melba (nor even delicious Aeroplane Jelly) do not deserve a mention of their own.

Could it simply be that the editors first chose the authors, who then produced a chapter on what they regarded as their favorite national symbol? In any case, such a book is bound to be a curate’s egg. Thus some contributions are clearly head and shoulders above the rest.

Peter Spearitt’s chapter on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Richard White and Sylvia Lawson chapter on the Opera House are brilliantly crafted pieces, which by the way demonstrate than many of our key national symbols hail from Sydney, rather than from Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth. The limpid prose style of each highly engaging contribution is enhanced by full page colour representations of Grace Cossington Smith’s sensuous modernist painting ‘The Bridge in Curve, 1930’ and by Ken Done’s oil and acrylic ‘Bridge and Opera House by Night, 2003.’ As these works demonstrate, both structures are such well-known symbols that even abstract depictions are easily recognizable. This point is made clear by a photograph of Dame Edna Everage’s huge “Sydney Opera House Hat’ which Barry Humphries’ stellar creation wore to the Ascot races in 1976.

To my mind, Robert (not to be confused with Richard) White’s chapter on Vegemite and Libby Robin’s chapter on wattle are the absolute standouts in this intriguing book.
While wattle has long been a symbolic flower of Australia (featured prominently in our national sporting colors of green and gold) for decades there was a debate, especially originating in New South Wales, about whether or not the waratah also deserved pride of place. In fact, it was not until 1992 that September 1 was officially declared as ‘National Wattle Day’.

It is useful to be reminded that it was the vastly underestimated colonial poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, who first championed the wattle as our national symbol. Thus his great ballad, ‘The sick stockrider’ , has the dying bushman asking his mates: ‘Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave!’

When Gordon committed suicide by shooting himself at Brighton beach in 1870, his devoted friend Elizabeth Lauder planted a wattle on his grave. For the next 30 years, supported by that leading advocate of federation, the Australian Natives Association (ANA), she not only tended his grave but annually sent its seeds to Victorian schools for planting in Gordon’s memory. As Robin points out, in 1912 Victoria’s Wattle Day League “marked Wattle Day…with a visit to Gordon’s grave at the Brighton Cemetery.” And it was through this association with Gordon’s death that the wattle acquired its commemorative role. But wattle, then and now, has had far wider, if not deeper, conations. Thus, the book features a fine 1925 coloured illustration to Marilyn Lake and Penny Russell’s quaint and quirky chapter on “Miss Australia”, entitled ‘My Sweet Australian WATTLE GIRL’. As the caption points out: “It was sometimes a struggle to reconcile a modern beach-going Miss Australia with the more traditional image of a wattle girl”, although this does not answer the moot question as to why “Miss Australia” either was, or deserves to be, one of our key national symbols.

In 2006 the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott, noted that recent research had shown that the only ‘brand name’ more popular than the ABC was Vegemite. How a waste-product from the brewing industry – namely yeast extract from beer – came to be viewed with such affection, nation-wide and occasionally beyond, is the task that Robert White sets himself in his exemplary chapter about one of our all time favourite foodstuffs. The fact that Vegemite was even named on the prime minister’s website as one of Australia’s national icons was, White maintains, ‘as much a matter of clever marketing as the unlikely appeal of its distinctive flavour.’ Indeed an attempt to market Vegemite – the ‘health food of our nation’ – in Japan, on the theory that it ‘resembled soy sauce’, failed utterly ‘when the sample consumers found it inedible.’

Yet here in Australia the fact is that, by 2008, advertisers with ‘their characteristic marketing opportunism … could claim to have sold its billionth jar and consider opening a Vegemite museum in Melbourne’. Although the latter plan ‘has apparently now been dropped’, it is hard to disagree with White’s conclusion that Vegemite has proved highly ‘versatile in adapting to advertising fashions, political factions, and cultural shifts for over 80 years, a trend which shows no signs of abating’.Indeed, unlike the Holden car, which I would argue no longer claims an unambiguous Australianness, Vegemite has not only acquired, but for decades has maintained, ‘the priceless cachet of being itself an Australian symbol’.

As a final aside, I wonder why Lucy Kaldor’s revealing chapter on the gum tree does not mention that, at least until recently, they were widely known as ‘widowmakers’. This is because, especially in the bush, falling eucalypts killed a great many farmers, most of whom were male!

Ross Fitzgerald has written 32 books, most recently his memoir ‘My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey’, which was published last month by New South Books.

Review of Melissa Harper & Richard White (eds), ‘Symbols of Australia’, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2010, pp 235, $29.95. Spectator Australia, March 19, 2010

In 1836 when the naturalist Charles Darwin arrived in New South Wales, Sydney harbour was already a remarkably busy place and Sydney town, with a population of almost 20,000, a hub of activity.

Darwin’s ship the Beagle was but one of 570 vessels that arrived that year in Port Jackson. Only 16 of these were convict ships, with the rest comprising immigrant vessels, whalers, traders and local coasters carrying produce. As Ian Hoskins points out in this masterly, multi-layered history, the Sydney newspapers ‘ran whole pages dedicated to shipping news; arrivals and departures to and from Newcastle, Norfolk Island, Launceston, Hobart, Liverpool and London. There were reports of wrecks, boats for sale, cargo unloaded.’

Although relatively few Sydneysiders then lived on the foreshores, most depended in some significant way upon the port. Sixteen thousand of these men and women were free, and there was increasing agitation to stop entirely the transportation of convicts. The granting of free land had been abolished in 1831 and land sales were helping raise monies to assist free immigration to a colony where commercial and residential development was even appearing on Sydney’s north shore.  In 1836 Darwin was able to see steamers and paddle wheelers that burnt local coal on their way to and from the Hunter River. Moreover, by this time whaling (which earned more than wool) comprised as much as 29 per cent of the colony’s total export income.

It is fascinating to read what influential others thought of Sydney and its harbour. In 1873, in his book Australia and New Zealand, the English novelist and travel writer Anthony Trollope powerfully evoked the loveliness of the place: ‘I despair of being able to convey to any reader my own idea of the beauty of Sydney harbour. I have seen nothing equal to it in the way of land-locked sea scenery.’

As Hoskins explains, where Trollope despaired, the local writer Francis Myers persevered. In 1886 he described the waterway at night and at dawn in some of the best prose ever written about the harbour: ‘The water is still then, and all the hills are vested in a luminous grey, actually melting, fancy might say, in the crucible of dawn, phantom shapes they seem wrapped in the shrouds of mist.’

Two years later, in his memoir Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions, the mariner and novelist Joseph Conrad, who had sailed down from Bangkok in a ship full of teak, recalled several visits to Sydney’s quay.  He described it thus: ‘From the heart of the fair city, down the vista of important streets, could be seen the wool-clippers lying at Circular Quay.” No longer part of a prison-house, the dock he wrote, was by then an “integral part of one of the finest, most beautiful, vast, and safe bays the sun ever shone upon’.

In this sweeping, limpidly written and superbly illustrated history of Sydney harbour, Hoskins explores the fascinating story of one of the world’s most recognized waterways from the time of the local Gameragal, Gadigal and Wangal clans to current, passionate 21st century concerns about the immediate and long-term future of the harbour.

Some unusual facts stand out. In particular, I had not realized how few convicts, troops and civil officials arriving in Australia could swim. This meant that when they fell overboard from boats and other vessels in the harbour, it was often goodnight nurse!

Similarly, although it is well known that the first few fleets brought cattle, sheep, goats and pigs to the infant penal colony of New South Wales, it remains unclear how many cats and domesticated dogs arrived in our formative years. Certainly, most early governors of the penal settlement were appalled by the economy and culture that developed around grog, and especially spirits, which in the absence of sterling soon became a common currency. For example when, during the governorship of John Hunter, a much desired load of brandy from the Cape of Good Hope arrived, it was almost immediately exchanged for over six times its original value.

It us useful to be reminded that in 1901, the year of Australia’s federation into a single nation, Sydney was in the grip of bubonic plague which had arrived in the docks just 12 months before our first governor-general, Lord Hopetoun, had stepped ashore. Spread by rats in the waterfront, from ships probably originating in Hong Kong, the contagion that flourished in the warm, wet Sydney autumn soon followed the transport routes that radiated out from the port.  Almost certainly ferries took the plague across the water to North Sydney and Manly, while coastal steamers transported the disease as far north as Brisbane.

In Sydney Harbour, Ian Hoskins has produced a fine history, an excellent read, and a testament to all the human beings who still inhabit it and fight for its preservation. It is a tribute to Hoskins’ narrative grasp that he manages to balance contemporary ecological and environmental concerns with an emphasis on the crucial role of a number of key Aboriginal mediators. In the colony’s very early days, Bennelong, a Wangal man, was the most important conduit between the European newcomers and the harbour clans who, as a result of endemic disease, were already ‘growing scarce.’

Indeed Governor Arthur Phillip, with whom he established a close relationship, built Bennelong a house at Sydney Cove, at a place the British colonists had originally called Cattle Point but soon renamed Bennelongs Point.  Returning to New South Wales after having been feted in Great Britain, Bennelong found that the only way he could cope with the strain of straddling two cultures was to increasingly use alcohol as an emotional and psychological anesthetic.

Ross Fitzgerald has written 32 books, including his memoir My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey, which will be launched by the Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson on 2 February. The Spectator Australia 9 January 2010.