Alan Atkinson - The Europeans in Australia: A History
Alan Atkinson
The Europeans in Australia: A History
Volume Two: Democracy
South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2004
Hardback Pp. xxiii + 400. $59.95 019553642 8
Half a century ago, C.M.H. Clark crafted a majestic invocation of the Australian past noteworthy both for imaginative empathy and florid prose. Those few who attempted to emulate his approach were likely to be mocked for producing ‘pidgin Manning’. In the second volume of his planned trilogy, Alan Atkinson harnesses the Manning Clark spirit to give a fresh creative insight into modern Australia’s dreamtime. As a historical interpretation, it has one solid advantage. Atkinson’s study is based on the imaginings of the people he wrote about. Clark, who gazed into the face of a wooden portrait of Arthur Phillip and perceived Enlightenment reason in conflict with dark passions, relied too much on his own. For Clark, men and women were fleshly actors in mighty ideological struggles, between Catholicism and Protestantism, privilege and democracy. For Atkinson, democracy is a social rather than a political concept. Yet human autonomy is never wholly clarified. The book is organised into three sections, entitled ‘Still They Kept Coming’, ‘Their Method of Utterance’ and ‘The Masses Unpacked’ (the last, presumably, a double entendre). Each is prefaced by a contemporary description of insects – flying ants, cicadas and bees – with the obvious implication that early Australians resembled all three, a metaphor that subordinates individuality to instinct. The reviewer too must soar to catch the author’s winged heels: this is pointillist history. Just as the tiny details of Seurat only make a picture when we stand back, so Atkinson’s meaning flows subliminally and is not easily pinned down. As he enigmatically puts it, ‘vivid things are to be glimpsed merely on their passing our window.’ (p. 286)
In covering 1820 to the 1870s, Atkinson talks of generations, but readers may sometimes have to calibrate their own time lines as chapters flows chronologically from one to the next. Within sub-sections, there are apparently seamless links between logically unrelated topics. My favourite (pp. 279-86) does not blink as it moves from the treatment of lunacy to the establishment of Queensland. ‘In some sense Queensland was itself a kind of hallucination, a mixture of waking and dreaming.’ Well, in 1859 it was very large and contained few settlers. And what are we to make of the claim (p. 204) that ‘the settler population was beginning to work with the idea of an existence deeply dyed – gilded and stained – by the new world …. So much salted blue, so much dried brown.’ The continent itself becomes a huge carcass, which Europeans had to learn to ‘skin and carve’ (p. 210). Miners burrowed into its ribcage, mapmakers traced its sinews. But ‘the jagged lines’ on Thomas Mitchell’s chart of botanist Richard Cunningham’s fatal expedition on the Bogan are ‘a jagged cry of pain’. (p. 214) Actually, they are the zigzag tracks of a lost explorer – and, anyway, whose pain: Cunningham’s, Mitchell’s, Australia’s? Atkinson’s focus upon democracy might suggest that he aims to trace the past to the present, but sometimes the emphasis is reversed. ‘Ancestors are strange reflections of the present – an early shadow of yourself,’ he remarks as he introduces us to his great-grandparents. Without realising it, we too have entered the dreamtime.
In his final sentence, Atkinson tells us that European Australians were not ants at all, but resembled the small crimson crabs which four pages earlier had swarmed from their burrows in a Western Australian river estuary to greet the incoming tide. It seems a touch unfair to unleash a new image after 339 pages, and what does it mean? Had the Europeans left burrows in Britain to embrace the ocean of Australia? Or did they scramble from colonial sandholes to plunge into the warm surf of modernity? Every History department encounters the odd [sic] student suffering from a touch of the James Joyces: I recall one who called the 1914 War an ‘otiose oubliette’. Usually, firm and sympathetic essay therapy can curb the affliction. But how shall we handle the student who not only characterises colonial Australians as estuarine river crabs, but can footnote the statement too? I congratulate an old friend on a magnificent achievement, but I do hope that it proves to be unique.