Indeed some of the work in Botany Bay: The Real Story was published in Frost’s seminal 1980 book Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question and in his 1994 book Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginnings .

For the past 35 years, Frost, emeritus professor of history at La Trobe University, has toiled in archives here and overseas (especially the Public Record Office, now the National Archives, in London) to flesh out a mighty narrative about the origins of the decision to settle New South Wales in late January 1788.

In particular, he directs his considerable intelligence to ascertaining how politicians and administrators in Britain came to choose Botany Bay not just as a means of ridding “the old country” of its excess criminals, but also to gain a key strategic advantage over rival nations, including the Dutch and French, and to assume control of valuable natural resources such as Norfolk Island’s pines and flax, which were so sorely needed by the British navy.

As we were taught at school, the American War of Independence (1775-1783) severely disrupted the transportation of British convicts, which resulted in prisoners being held in increasingly overcrowded metropolitan and country jails and crammed into the hulks (unrigged ships) that littered the Thames and which, at best, were seen as a short-term solution to “the convict problem”. It is not so much that Frost’s “real story” of the origins of Botany Bay denies or discounts all of the above. But what he does do in this splendidly researched but sometimes rather dense book is to tell a story that is much more complex and multi-layered and often at variance with the statements of previous Australian historians.

Early chapters deal efficiently with crime and punishment in 18th-century England. They also usefully explain how, for those felonies not deemed serious enough to warrant the death sentence, imprisonment in “houses of correction” and especially transportation to British colonies in the New World were the favoured forms of punishment. To use that colourful phrase, these miscreants were banished from their country “for their country’s good”.

But, in analysing British court records, Frost attempts to explode the myth that most of those transported to America and NSW were, in the main, guilty of trivial offences. He argues that in fact most transportees had committed serious crimes of violence and robbery that had, at the mercy of the crown, been downgraded from the death penalty.

Contrary to received wisdom, Frost also claims that those hundreds of convicts held on hulks in the Thames, and also at Portsmouth and Plymouth, were not especially overcrowded and that, before the transportation of prisoners to Botany Bay, allocated rations kept most prisoners in reasonable health, and that their death rate on board was not particularly high. Moreover, he maintains that a number of these prisoners were pardoned by the crown or enlisted in the British army and navy to serve overseas.

It is certainly true that from 1783 the number of British subjects convicted of felonies rose substantially, placing pressure on municipal and country prisons. This, Frost concedes, led to increasing calls for the resumption of “transportation beyond the seas”, to faraway places, including West Africa. Moreover by 1784 James Matra, who had sailed on the Endeavour with Captain James Cook, proposed that, for reasons of trade and strategy as well as ridding Britain of its surplus convicts, a colony be established at Botany Bay on the eastern coast of NSW.

In 1785 the famous naturalist Joseph Banks reinforced the eastern coast of NSW as a suitable site for transportation. But, as Frost carefully argues, it was the very capable prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, who in late 1786 argued that the new colony centred at Botany Bay was to be more than a dumping ground for convicts. Indeed it was intended to play “a crucial role in the expansion of British trade”.

A colony in NSW would certainly offer a solution to the convict problem. But, more significantly, according to Frost it would assist British traders gain much-needed resources; “increase Britain’s ability to combat France, Holland and Spain in the Indian and Pacific oceans”; and provide a naval base as well as and naval materials.

How convincing is this revisionist history? That’s moot. Certainly, penalties in late 18th-century England were extremely punitive. The existing game laws, for example, were very severe, which meant that those found guilty of poaching often had their death sentences commuted to transportation to Botany Bay. Plus, I remain suspicious of the claim that those imprisoned on hulks fared as well or better than those who were held in metropolitan or country “houses of correction”, or who enlisted to serve their country overseas. Thus it was not uncommon for inmates in the hulks to regard transportation to the colonies as an option much preferred to remaining on the Thames.

But while this may be the case, Frost satisfies this reviewer that Blainey was right to stress the significance of naval stores, and materials such as hemp and flax and timbers, in the British administration’s decision to plumb for NSW and the adjacent Norfolk Island, as opposed to other places of transportation.

Moreover, it now seems clear that reasons of trade and strategy, including outmanoeuvring the French, were pivotally important in the Botany Bay decision.

Although not an easy read, Botany Bay: The Real Story is a fascinating and compelling attempt to explain the multiple reasons for the so-called First Fleet arriving on January 26, 1788, to establish a convict colony in the continent we have long called Australia.

Botany Bay: The Real Story, By Alan Frost, Black Inc, 276pp, $32.95

Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University and the author of 33 books.

The Weekend Australian February 19-20, 2011

But at another, deeper, level it is a compelling tale of what happened to scores of young women after the dramatically unexpected fall of Singapore to the Japanese. It is also a powerful counter-factual history of what might have been had things been different.

Among hundreds of evacuees scrambling to the docks to escape Singapore were 65 members of the Australian Army Nursing Service, led by matrons Olive Paschke and Irene Drummond. All boarded the coastal freighter Vyner Brooke. Named after the third and last White Rajah of Borneo (Sarawak), the ship, captained by Richard “Tubby” Borton, made it only as far as the waters off Banka Island near Sumatra when it was attacked by Japanese bombers.

The small ship sank within a half hour. Those who survived the sinking of the Vyner Brooke included 22 Australian nurses who, after drifting at sea, some of them for days, found their way to Muntok, the largest settlement on Banka Island, which now boasts the world’s largest tin smelter. Having been escorted to Radji Beach, a few kilometres to the west of Muntok, the nurses were ordered into the sea by a senior Japanese officer, Captain Orita Masaru, and executed in a hail of machinegun bullets.

The gruesome events of that morning left a sole Australian survivor. She was the remarkable Vivian Bullwinkel who, covered in blood, remained up to her waist in the sea until the Japanese had left. Significantly, like Bullwinkel and many other Australians at the time, most of Masaru’s troops could not swim. Although later interned, Bullwinkel, born at Kapunda in South Australia and trained at the Broken Hill Hospital, survived the starvation and disease that killed many of her friends. She was eventually able to bring to light the truth about the atrocities committed against Australian nurses on Radji Beach and elsewhere in the Pacific.

Author of a brilliant work of social history, The Bloodbath, about the 1945 VFL grand final, Ian W. Shaw has turned his talents to this powerful tale about a much more important bloodbath. Some of the most riveting and revealing material in On Radji Beach comes from surviving first-hand accounts. Thus nurse Betty Jeffrey described the doomed city of Singapore as she boarded the Vyner Brooke: “There were fires burning everywhere behind and about us and on the wharf hundreds of people trying to get away, long queues of civilian men and women, and a long grey line — us. Masts of sunken ships were sticking up out of the water, but there were no ships in sight other than forlorn-looking barges.”

Looking back at the blazing city, Veronica Clancy wrote: “In the distance, Singapore appeared to be just ablaze, the flames almost reaching the sky. The planes of the enemy caught in the searchlights looked like silver moths around an enormous light. The smoke from the burning oil dumps seemed to hang in dark clouds overshadowing everything.”

Most poignant of all is Bullwinkel’s account of the slaughter of her comrades. At the end of the line of Australian nurses, Alma Beard said to her: “Bully, there are two things I’ve always hated in my life, the Japanese and the sea, and today I’ve ended up with both.”

Unable to reply, Bullwinkel thought: “How can something as dirty and evil as this be happening in a place that is so beautiful?” As a believer, one thought gave her comfort; that she would be reunited with her dead father and some time in the future with her mother, and brother John. As the line of 22 young Australian women began to move forward, she heard the indomitable Irene Drummond call out to them: “Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.”

Shaw powerfully describes the situation seconds before the nurses were murdered: “There was a moment of almost supernatural silence as they set off. Several of the girls looked across and made eye contact with friends, but most just looked straight ahead, seeing something that no one else would or could ever see. And then the killing began.”

Is it any wonder that the sole survivor of the massacre on that beautiful beach couldn’t explain why she was spared, other than to be able to recount this terrible tale, or that Shaw often visits Bullwinkel’s corner in the Australian War Memorial because he finds it inspirational? At least in part, it hints “at lives cut short, of sacrifice and self-sacrifice”. It also highlights, as the author of this unforgettable book concludes, “just what the families of those who did not return actually lost in Banka Strait, on Radji Beach, and in the camps of Muntok and Sumatra”.

On Radij Beach, By Ian W. Shaw, Macmillan, 346pp, $34.99
Ross Fitzgerald is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University.
The Weekend Australian October 9-10, 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

Doc Evatt, notoriously, was a disastrous leader – the great Labor split of the 1950s occurred on his watch – but what is less known is that his political career was in difficulties even before he became leader. These difficulties arose from his failure to reconcile the competing demands of global diplomacy and domestic politics.

A cache of previously unexamined documents in the National Library of Australia sheds new light on this facet of Evatt’s career. Evatt’s entry into politics made headlines. On the eve of the wartime federal election of 1940, he stood down as a High Court judge in order to run as an ALP candidate.

Different Labor factions vied for his services and, buoyed by a wave of enthusiasm, he won the seat of Barton with a swing of 14 per cent. When the Curtin Labor government came to office in 1941 Evatt became a senior minister from the word go.

But the downside to Evatt’s importance as aminister meant he did not have much time to tend to his Sydney electorate.

Suburban disaffection soon surfaced as a result. Dissent was led by Joe Quinane, a local ALP member and unpaid secretary of the Barton Federal Electorate Council, the main ALP organising body in the seat.

Quinane was a bit of a fixer – it was due to his machinations that the way was cleared for Evatt to enter the House of Representatives. Quinane came to rue his intervention on behalf of Evatt. It was, he discovered, no fun having him as his local member. As external affairs minister Evatt was often away in foreign parts. When in Australia, matters of state and ministerial duties kept him confined to his office in Canberra. Indeed, in wartime the seat of Barton had a virtual absentee member. Evatt had little time to deal with local correspondence and often failed to attend ALP meetings organised by Quinane.

Quinane’s displeasure increased in 1942 when Evatt defied the Barton Federal Electorate Council after it instructed him to oppose the Curtin government’s proposal to send conscripts to the south-west Pacific theatre. On the eve of the council’s vote, Evatt paid Quinane a rare visit and offered to secure an officer’s commission for his son.

Quinane, who knew that this offer was an inducement to get him to drop his opposition to conscription, was not impressed. This was a completely inappropriate intervention by a senior cabinet member in wartime.

As the war dragged on, Quinane became evermore convinced that Evatt was out of touch with grassroots Labor opinion. In 1944 Labor Party members in Barton, motivated by old-style anti-banker sentiment, called on Evatt to oppose the Bretton Woods international financial agreement. Once again Evatt ignored the views of the Barton council. His focus was fixed on the creation of a new post-war world order and its grand accompanying institutions such as the UN and the World Bank, and he was not going to be distracted by lesser concerns.

Eventually Quinane warned Evatt that he was likely to face a preselection challenge because of his non-attendance at council meetings and his flouting of its recommendations on key issues.

In 1946, an election year, Quinane drew up a list of strategic government appointments, which, he considered, were designed to buy off possible preselection challengers in Barton. The list included Roden Cutler (the future governor of NSW).

Cutler, Quinane honestly believed, was given a diplomatic post in New Zealand by Evatt in order to spirit him away from a possible preselection race.

Dissent ratcheted up. Quinane feared that Labor would lose Barton in the 1949 election if Evatt, weighed down by his glory as a world statesman, stood again.

Quinane took the plunge and announced that he was standing against Evatt in the preselection ballot in Barton. On the eve of the vote, Quinane circulated a list of complaints against Evatt. He cited Evatt’s failure to visit local party branches and criticised his handling as attorney-general of the Chifley government’s attempt to nationalise the private banks. He reeled off examples of unresolved conflict and tension in such trouble spots as Palestine, China, Indonesia and Berlin in a bid to deflate Evatt’s reputation as a UN peacemaker.

Typically, Evatt almost missed the Barton preselection ballot. After serving as UN president, he returned by sea (Evatt was notoriously fearful of flying) and only just arrived home in Sydney in time for the vote. In the event, Evatt won the ballot easily, by 196 votes to 33. There was no way that such a senior Labor figure would be rolled. But the mere fact that Evatt had to deal with a contested preselection at all despite being a senior minister was embarrassing for the ALP.

The Liberals, hoping to capitalise on the internal disaffection with Evatt in Barton, nominated a celebrity candidate – war heroine Nancy Wake – to contest the seat in the 1949 election. The Chifley government lost the election and Wake slashed Evatt’s majority but nonetheless he was re-elected.

Evatt became federal ALP leader in 1951 and was never again threatened by a contested preselection in Barton.

The Quinane family, however, was not done with the Doc. Joe Quinane’s son Fred followed his father into the Labor Party. He joined the Commonwealth public service and moved to Canberra, where he became secretary of the local ALP branch. He also enrolled in The Movement, the anti-communist organisation run by B. A. (Bob) Santamaria, who was later to be a mentor of current federal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

In 1954 Evatt condemned Santamaria, whose help he had previously enlisted, thereby precipitating the great Labor split of the ColdWar era.

Fred Quinane remained in the ALP despite the denunciation of Santamaria, but this did not mean that he liked Evatt.

In 1955 Fred was involved in an attempt to depose Evatt and replace him with the deputy ALP leader, Arthur Calwell. Evatt, because he was based in Parliament House and estranged from the ALP in his own electorate, had got into the habit of renewing his annual party membership with the Canberra ALP branch. In 1955 he forgot to renew his membership. An attempt to remove him from the party leadership was launched once Quinane, as local party secretary, cheerfully confirmed that Evatt had let his membership of the ALP lapse.

Evatt’s opponents insisted that he could no longer hold any position in the ALP up to and including the parliamentary leadership because his membership had lapsed. His supporters demanded that this technicality be overlooked. The dispute went all the way up to the ALP national executive where Evatt was confirmed as leader only after ALP numbersman, Pat Kennelly, twisted a few arms.

This aborted coup helped to persuade Labor’s powerbrokers that Evatt could no longer be left exposed to the irritating incidents of insurgency that had become a hallmark of the Quinane axis linking Barton and Canberra.

In 1958 party insiders shifted Evatt to the ultra-safe Labor seat of Hunter. He was able to spend his declining days as Labor leader secure in the knowledge that at last he was spared the grassroots disaffection associated with Joe Quinane and his like-minded son Fred.

A clear message emerges from the various Quinane documents, now housed at the National Library. They show that Evatt’s political career was imperilled long before he precipitated the great split of the mid-1950s.

From as early as 1942 Evatt had to cope with an ever-rising tide of disaffection in his own seat of Barton. His base, untended there, eroded dangerously. Evatt discovered to his cost that prestige gained at international conferences is of little consequence – and indeed may be counter-productive – if a political leader becomes disengaged from issues and concerns on the home front.

This is an abiding political truth, as pertinent for Kevin Rudd as it once was for Doc Evatt.

The Canberra Times, April 14, 2010. Ross Fitzgerald’s and Stephen Holt’s new biography, Alan (‘‘The Red Fox’’) Reid will soon be published by New South Books.

Certainly it is nothing like John Ritchie’s measured The Wentworths: Father and Son, published 10 years ago by Melbourne University Press.

Moreover Tink, who until 2006 was shadow attorney-general and shadow leader of the house in the NSW parliament, is given to overstatement. Thus in chapter 26, Wentworth Demands Self-government, he maintains that his subject “resembled the rough and roguish founders of the English and Irish aristocracies — William the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell”. This, to put it mildly, is hyperbole on overdrive.

As it happens Wentworth’s father, D’Arcy Wentworth, who was born in 1762, hailed from Portadown in Ireland where his father was an innkeeper. Tink is at pains to point out that before D’Arcy Wentworth arrived in NSW, he had been acquitted of four highway robberies in England. It was on the transport ship Neptune, on what was then “the longest voyage in the world”, that D’Arcy impregnated a 17-year-old convict, Catherine Crowley, who had been sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing “some sheets and clothes … from the house of her employer”.

The red-headed Australian-born William Crowley, later known as William Charles Wentworth, was their offspring. Here is Tink’s depiction of how William’s parents met relatively early in the Neptune’s voyage: “As no picture or description of Catherine exists, just what the attraction was remains a mystery. But knowing D’Arcy, she was no doubt pretty or voluptuous or both.

“For her part, Catherine wanted to escape her violent convict companions, who were ‘abandoned creatures’, covered in filth and vermin. So D’Arcy (whom Tink later describes as “tall, dark and handsome”) plucked her from this putrescent pile into his quarters.” Enough said.

In NSW, D’Arcy soon established himself as a trader and surgeon who, according to Tink, treated governor Lachlan Macquarie for venereal disease.

This biography makes much of the fact that Charles Wentworth (1790-1872) — a noted explorer, orator, newspaper editor, squatter and politician with a squinting eye — boasted a number of firsts, including the first book published by an Australian-born author.

Typical of his grandiloquence, Wentworth titled his book, published in May 1819, A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen’s Land: With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages which these Colonies offer for Emigration, and their Superiority in many Respects over those Possessed by the United States of America.

He was also the joint editor and proprietor of the colony’s first independent newspaper. The Australian, and the primary founder of the University of Sydney, which of course was Australia’s first. Tink notes that Wentworth was often drunk and disorderly — he was “placed under restraint” at least three times — and that, especially after his father’s death in 1827, he “slipped badly” and engaged in numerous “drunken escapades”.

Indeed, the Sydney Gazette speculated that Wentworth was “either a little cracked in the upper story” or “downright mad”.

At the same time, though, Wentworth was an extremely able proponent of taxation by representation, of trial by jury and of a form of self-government for NSW.

Despite its weaknesses of style, Tink’s biography is particularly illuminating in dealing with Wentworth’s bitter conflicts in NSW with governor Ralph Darling and the irascible Scottish Presbyterian clergyman, parliamentarian and educationist John Dunmore Lang. He also deals well with Catherine’s death at 27, of Wentworth’s de facto wife Sarah Cox, whom he married in 1830, and of his caring relationship with his 10 children.

Tink usefully compares Wentworth’s contempt for Aborigines, whom he characterised as “ourang-outangs” and savages, with his liberal attitudes to Europeans of different beliefs. Thus when Wentworth introduced his bill to establish Sydney University, he said: “Clergy … ought to be excluded altogether from (its) management. Its gates must be open to all whether they were disciples of Moses, of Jesus, of Brahmin, of Mohammed, of Vishnu or of Buddha.” In fact, Wentworth was suspicious of formal Christianity.

The section of the book dealing with his thwarted attempt to purchase the south island of New Zealand is also telling.

One of the most accurate descriptions of the complicated, yet commanding, personality of Wentworth in his middle years comes from The People’s Advocate of August 25, 1849. Its leader writer wrote: “With (a) heavy, loose, drab coat and … mass of grizzled hair there is something of the commanding ruin in Wentworth.” It continued: “In his public speaking there is an inexcusable slovenliness and disrespectful bearing which would never be tolerated … if he did not possess superior intellect … There are times which witness him rise to the stature of a giant over his compeers. Few have equal power … to demolish an opponent’s arguments; and none can command more forcible and original language … The tones of his voice are discordant and grating, sometimes running into a loud, harsh, impatient and decided drawl … His action is inelegant and random. His personal appearance is tall and athletic (but) slightly stooped … His countenance is florid and marked by courage and determination.”

Wentworth died at 81 in England in March 1872. The following year the body of the man who had helped achieve trial by jury and freedom of the press in Australia was returned to Sydney. His state funeral on May 6, 1873, was declared a public holiday. At the beginning of the service the polished cedar coffin, covered in wreaths made from native plants at Wentworth’s home at Vaucluse, was “borne down the aisle (of St Andrew’s Cathedral) to Beethoven’s Funeral March, after which the bishop conducted a Church of England service”.

Tink summarises the situation thus: “While the pillars of church and state were paying homage to a man who detested organised religion, 70,000 spectators lined the route to Vaucluse in big crowds from the cathedral to the Woolloomooloo omnibus stand and smaller clusters along the rest of the way. The only exception was in front of the coffin, where a group of ‘native Australians’ — about 400 Australian-born Europeans — marched. To their annoyance they were soon joined by half a dozen ‘barefoot and bedraggled’ (Aborigines).”

As The Sydney Morning Herald put it at the time, their presence “publicly disputed” the Europeans’ claim to be “native Australians”.

William Charles Wentworth: Australia’s Greatest Native Son, By Andrew Tink, Allen & Unwin, 329pp, $50

Ross Fitzgerald’s new book, Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia, is published by ABC Books in September.

The attack on Macintyre’s work as a historian for having being an “ex-communist” is gratuitous and foolish. What about all those ex-comms who turned to the Right?

The current denigration of Macintyre is redolent of the unprincipled attacks on Geoffrey Blainey after his Warrnambool speech in 1984.

Although Blainey and I differ markedly about politics, I was distressed by the attack on his work by a posse of Australian academics, as a direct result of his views about Asian immigration.

Macintyre has always praised Blainey’s work as a historian, and he continues to do so. Also, not only did he not take part in the attempted demolition on Blainey’s professional reputation in Surrender Australia, but when it was published, he was critical of the book.

It is not surprising that Macintyre is somewhat aggrieved by the promotion of an article written by the editor of Quadrant, Keith Windshuttle. This is because Windshuttle has a long history of undermining Macintyre in the so-called History Wars, which in my opinion began in 1984-1985, with the scurrilous attacks on Blainey’s reputation.

It is not the case, as claimed, that in May 1984 Blainey stopped teaching when he became dean of Melbourne University’s history department. Rather, Blainey had become dean of Melbourne University’s history department more than two years before his historic 1984 Warrnambool speech.

And while dean from 1982-04, Blainey continued to teach a fourth-year honours class.
The suggestion that Blainey’s colleagues, including Macintyre, incited student protest against him is also wrong. A number of them, including Macintyre, deplored it.

It suggests heroic prescience to claim that Macintyre might have furthered his professional and professorial ambitions by leading an attack on Geoffrey Blainey in 1984. At that time, Macintyre was only a senior lecturer, and there were a number of colleagues in the Melbourne University history department who were senior to him, in particular the extremely capable Lloyd Robson and Noel McLachlan.

How, for example, was Macintyre to know that Robson, who had far stronger claims to a chair than him, would take early retirement? And how was Macintyre to know that there would be no stronger external applicant?
In truth, the Machiavellian claims about Macintyre are ludicrous.

The fact is that Blainey and Macintyre are continuing to produce historical work and writings of the first rank. Long may this happy state of affairs continue.

Ross Fitzgerald is Emeritus Professor History and Politics at Griffith University and a regular columnist for The Australian.

As a direct consequence of the rift – and despite Labor’s previous strong performances – the conservatives soon took power and there they remained for 32 years.

The stoush also precipitated the rise and rise of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and all it meant for the Sunshine State and Labor’s electoral future.

It’s with a chilling sense of deja vu that parts of the ALP, 51 years later and 1000km south in NSW, are seeking to target Morris Iemma as revenge for his efforts to modernise the state’s antiquated electricity industry.

Like Gair, Iemma has served three years in the top job, has the support of his cabinet and faces an Opposition which is only slowly turning itself around. Also like Gair, he’s challenging the ALP’s industrial wing by asking, “Who’s running the show?”

Iemma started this fight in the open, staring down the party’s annual conference and its 800 delegates. But he faces the ugly reality that the ensuing battles are now being waged behind his back, by senior members of the party executive who don’t like being ignored.

Vulnerable MPs have already had their preselections threatened, wild leadership speculation makes the daily news, and ambitious MPs are being promised promotions. With such predictable tactics set to continue, prepare to see regular leaks of “internal party polling”, naming scores of MPs who’ll be “wiped out” at the next poll if they don’t join the putsch.

Iemma’s fight is about the future of power in both senses of the word: whether to restructure the electricity industry, and whether Labor MPs should be dictated to by extra-parliamentary forces. The NSW union movement, led by John Robertson, has ideologically opposed any suggestion that the structure of the energy industry be changed.

That’s despite most of the workforce he represents lining up, hands out, for the generous incentives on offer.

Union delegates make up over half of the votes at the ALP’s annual conference.

In the face of an overwhelming majority at the May conference, the recently elected general secretary of the NSW ALP, Karl Bitar, chose to vote against the Premier and with the unions to deliver an ultimatum to the elected Government.

Iemma has pushed on regardless. After such a public showdown, and with their egos now stung, who could doubt that Robertson and Bitar had to be seen to be hitting back.

Ironically, they were the very people who anointed Iemma to replace Bob Carr in the first place.

But like the electricity debate, Iemma’s detractors don’t seem to know what outcome they’re trying to achieve.

Surely they should be worried about where they will end up when the shooting stops?

After all, it is ALP practice in NSW that outgoing heads of the party executive and the union movement wind up with seats in state parliament after their terms end.

Treasurer Michael Costa and former premier Barrie Unsworth both walked into parliament at the end of their reign at Labour Council.

Both have this year played key roles in advocating strongly for Iemma’s electricity package.

Costa and Unsworth entered parliament and shook off their union bias by embracing issues that were in the overall community interest, not just the industrial community.

Many might say that Costa sometimes goes too far, but who can doubt his commitment to reform?

His successor Robertson plans to be the next union boss to enter the NSW parliament. Talk of his premiership ambition runs white-hot within the NSW caucus.

MPs wary of his planned career trajectory, at the expense of their own, say he’s already eyed off several possible seats where he could be inserted.

But with the Work Choices campaign now a distant memory, and a widespread wish that the electricity debate should be over, the credibility gap he needs to jump to get to parliament is wider than his predecessors’.

Robertson’s hostility to any form of electricity restructure has not seen him produce any alternative or compromise.

Further, he actually forced Iemma so far on to the back foot that the embattled premier had no choice but to fight back without new concessions, lest he looked like he’d folded.

Robertson knows his image needs reinventing.

That’s why it’s worth carefully examining his 11th-hour intervention in the threatened Sydney rail strike during this week’s World Youth Day celebrations. Robertson was nowhere to be seen over two days as the strike threat was whipped up, instead allowing an antiquated rail union secretary to barrel his way through fiery and inflammatory justifications.

As the issue hit fever pitch, Robertson calmly entered stage left, shoehorned his battered and confused union colleagues out of camera shot, and simply announced that a solution would be found. For two days he hadn’t called for calm, or urged further talks. Maybe he spent the time waiting for the critical moment to intervene, while fine-tuning his “peace in our time” news grabs.

This could be one of the first signs that, after the bloody fight between the union movement and himself against the NSW premier and most of the parliamentary Labor Party over electricity, Robertson is beginning to more carefully stage manage his persona.

In doing so, he seems to be engineering a two-pronged approach. Move Iemma to the sideline, and move himself to the frontline.