56472 (671310), страница 8
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I do not attribute the fall of the Lang government to a split in the Labor Party. Nor do I treat the Hawke government with reverence. The question of reverence for the Hawke government is a matter of opinion.
In my view, after rereading the last section of the book, this reverence still seems clear to me. The point about Lang is quite explicit. On page 177, Macintyre writes:
Similar splits brought down State Labor governments in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.
It could hardly be clearer than that: the Lang government was the only state Labor government in NSW in the period he is discussing. Bob Gollan and Stuart Macintyre both criticise my piece for highlighting the question of Macintyre's presence on the Government curriculum committee. (I initially confused the Curriculum Committee with its subordinate body, the Curriculum Corporation, and I have corrected this after Stuart Macintyre brought this confusion to my attention)
I am not opposed, in principle, to Macintyre or anybody else accepting an appointment on Kemp's committee. If I was offered a place on Kemp's committee, which is unlikely, I would probably accept the appointment on condition that I could fight vigorously on that committee for the views that I hold, which is, of course, the reason that I'd be unlikely to be appointed, although stranger things have happened.
I underline the fact that Stuart Macintyre holds these various positions because it seems relevant in the context of the views that he appears to now hold, and that having these views he may well be a further force for conservatism in these areas of his extended influence, which is sad.
Bob Gollan responds on the question of sectarianism and the significance of the Irish Catholics, which is to me one of the most important issues in dispute between me and Macintyre. He says:
But I am reminded that my old colleague Jim Griffin, who first rang the church bells about this book, has a fixation on the Catholic Church and community.
He also says:
I do find it difficult to enter a discussion in which Manning Clark, Russel Ward, Brian Fitzpatrick, Ian Turner and Eris O'Brien are put in the same basket. For example, one of the most intemperate critics of Brian Fitzpatrick was Manning Clark.
My juxtaposition of the above historians, as in retrospect clearly representing a populist, democratic school of Australian historiography, is quite deliberate. Whatever the differences that existed between them, they all eventually came to a relative commonality of interests and preoccupations on many questions.
Among the key questions that confronted them all eventually were the development of class and the emergence of a labour movement, the discordant and oppositional role of the Irish Catholics in relation to the British establishment in Australia, the enormous question of race and genocide involved in the dispossession of the original Aboriginal nation inhabiting the continent, and the question of racism, the White Australia Policy, and migration in general.
Most of these historians began their inquiry by confronting the bitter sectarian division that existed in Australian society from the time of white settlement between the Irish Catholics and the British ruling class (from whose ranks most of these historians themselves originated).
Manning Clark, given his establishment Anglican background, being a direct descendent of Samuel Marsden, is obviously fascinated by these questions.
Russel Ward, in his autobiography (he had a similar Protestant establishment background to Clark) points out that these cultural conflicts dominated his early social and personal evolution. (Ward's autobiography includes a moving vignette describing a visit to Australia by R. H. Tawney, the notable English Christian socialist who wrote the ground-breaking Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the interesting and useful cross-fertilisation that took place between himself, Manning Clark, Eris O'Brien, R. H. Tawney and other historians during that visit. That vignette seems to me to symbolise the drawing together of the left democratic school in Australian historiography in that generation)
Rodney Hall's biography of John Manifold describes Manifold's inquiry into the Irish origins of the ballads and a painful and confronting element stemming from his Victorian Western District establishment background.
The story is similar with Rupert Lockwood, also of Victorian Western District establishment background. Lockwood's encounter with the oppositional role of Irish Catholics was clearly a significant part of his development, along with his involvement with the Communist Party. It's not accidental that both these Communists, who came from the Anglo ruling class of the Western District, and were converted to Communism in the upheavals of the 1930s, were fascinated by the interface between Irish Catholic Australians, the labour movement and socialism.
The Western District of Victoria had a much higher concentration of Irish Catholic settlers than most other parts of Victoria. In the early years of the labour movement, culminating in the conscription upheavals, these Irish Catholics were in an extremely radical frame of mind. They elected the Labor candidate, the Scottish socialist and poet John McDougall, as the first federal member for Wannon, later Malcolm Fraser's stronghold, in the first election after Federation.
Largely because of Irish Catholics, and sharpened by the conscription struggle, the Western District remained a Labor stronghold until the disastrous Labor Split of 1955, when many Labor supporters of Irish Catholics descent shifted over electorally to the DLP, and eventually to the Nationals.
During the White Guard paramilitary mobilisation during the Depression, the White Guard in the Western District was preparing to occupy all the Catholic churches and schools as well as trade union headquarters to prevent revolution. This is all described at length in a useful article in Labor History 10 years ago, and it's also studied from another direction, in Paul Adams' recent study of the Communist novelist, Frank Hardy, who was of working-class Catholic background and came from Bacchus Marsh, in the Western District.
Nothing in life and society is ever lost, and the seat of Mildura, in north-western Victoria has recently come back into play, being lost by the Nationals to one of the three independents who just put the Bracks Labor government into power in Victoria.
Macintyre's historiography, which neglects the complex and varied impact of the Irish Catholics on Australian history and the labour movement, is very poverty-striken and narrow.
The significance of the Irish Catholics in Australian life is also described in Bernard Smith's important autobiography, in which he describes how he wavered between the Catholic Church and the Communist Party before eventually joining the CP.
The striking thing about the British establishment's initial school of Australian historiography, represented by Ernest Scott, Arnold Wood, Arthur Jose and all the other Whig writers of school and university history textbooks, before the cultural revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, was the doggedly ruthless way they eliminated the Irish Catholics, the labour movement, and matters such as the battles over conscription and Langism, from their narratives.
In retrospect, the painful, moving and interesting way in which people like Russel Ward, Manning Clark, Rupert Lockwood and Bernard Smith came to terms with these past cultural developments and introduced into the story these major players was a big leap in Australian historiography.
Macintyre's historical revisionism, in which he reverts to the 19th century Whig elimination of major historical actors and currents in his historical story, must be contested in the interests of a comprehensive and balanced historical narrative.
Macintyre's modernised adherence to the Whig school of Australian historiography is demonstrated negatively by his elimination from his narrative of all the issues and individuals and events that I have enumerated above, and positively by his obvious animosity to the earlier school of populist democratic, leftist, Catholic Australian historians.
It is also demonstrated by his deliberate repetition of the bigotted, religiously based bias against Caroline Chisholm.
In my view, Macintyre's narrative represents the Whig school of Australian-British establishment history, modernised, with a dash of Stalinism, and one major progressive innovation, a lengthy and quite proper attention to Aboriginal history.
In my view, Macintyre's glib elimination of the Irish Catholic other in the 19th century, and his cursory treatment of the huge mass migration since the 1940s that has totally changed the ethnic make-up of Australia, are both unscientific. He treats these issues as if they were insignificant side-shows.
This is an almost terminal defect in any Concise History of Australia. Such a history can be any length you like (within reason), but I would favour a concise history about 100 pages longer, with the additions including a more lengthy and more balanced account of the development of the labour movement and class conflict, and major attention to the oppositional role of the Irish Catholics.
I would also include a celebratory and more detailed account of the development of mass migration from all areas of the globe, which commenced in the teeth of the British Australia racism of the 19th century and continues now, when all the other tribes beneath the wind are now a comfortable majority of Australian society, and multiculturalism, for all its defects at the official level, is now the thoroughly healthy prevailing ethos in Australian society.
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