Humphrey McQueen - A New Britannia/Social Sketches of Australia
Humphrey McQueen
A New Britannia
Paperback x + 326 pp. 0 7022 3439 7
Humphrey McQueen
Social Sketches of
Paperback xii + 418 pp. 0 7022 3440 0
Humphrey McQueen was not so much an angry as an arch young man when he published A New Britannia back in 1970. A New Left attempt to make sense of Australia in the Vietnam era, it brusquely dismissed the self-congratulation of the Australian Legend to argue that if the Labor party was inadequate and the working class nasty, greedy and racist, at least both were logical products of mainstream historical forces. Many established historians hoped McQueen would simply go away, but the condemnations of Russel Ward and Donald Horne cited on the cover of this latest edition merely remind us that he is still around.
Yet for a book that professed to surf the wave of
its bold generalisations upset the purists, to whom all simplification amounted to distortion. But the general reader accepted that bold brush strokes were needed on a giant canvas, and the text could be accepted as empirical iconoclasm. Through successive editions, a lengthening ‘Afterword’ has stripped bare the ideological bones. In an age when Marxists are grouped with morris dancers as relics of an absurd past, Humphrey McQueen proudly identifies himself with Lenin and Gramsci as he deconstructs his own text in unfashionable self-criticism. It is cheering to find someone who can still be perverse after 34 years.
His Social Sketches of Australia first appeared in 1978, so that the latest edition is appreciably larger than the first. Each chapter, McQueen explains, is built around seven running themes: work, urban life, rural life, health, Aborigines, whiteness and views of the world, with other issues on the fringes and an occasional year or controversy in more specific review. He insists that the book ‘is not history in any meaningful sense’. Presumably that pretentious m-word means ‘ideological’ or ‘analytical’, for there is no doubt that McQueen provides a good read.
Queensland University Press has produced two robust paperbacks.