Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell, eds. - Australia's History: Themes and Debates

Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell, editors,

Australia's History: Themes and Debates

Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005

Pp. xx + 197 Paperback ISBN 0 86840 790 9 $39.95

This is a collection of ten essays written both by established historians and younger scholars. The editors have aimed to assemble assessments of the present state of historical research on various topics, and have tried to counterbalance the “usual preponderance of Sydney and Melbourne” (p. xx) by commissioning essays on and from other parts of Australia. Anna Haebich surveys the contested field of Aboriginal history, while Penny Russell delves below the heroic story of settler society. Regina Ganter’s “View from the North” refreshingly asserts that, far from being marginal, Australia’s north coast has long enjoyed links with the Indonesian islands such as Sulawesi (Celebes to the old-fashioned). She illustrates her argument with three helpful maps, and I am a touch disappointed that she did not go the whole hog and swivel at least one of them, to shock our conventional view that north must always be at the top. David Walker reprises the argument of his Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939 (1999). A lively sketch of Western Australia by Charlie Fox points to a paradox: the West has steadily become more like the rest of the country, but it has a potential “Indian Ocean buzz” whose mere existence undermines much of the rhetoric about Asia-Pacific destinies. Catriona Elder tackles the massive question of immigration in a fast-moving overview. Richard White examines national symbols, Melanie Oppenheimer and Brice Scates the impact of war, and Alison Holland uses citizenship as a way into understanding how Australia moved from colony to multiracial society. In outlining the themes of “Cities, Suburbs and Communities”, Seamus O’Hanlon faces the problem that readers in Thebarton will not be excited by examples from Bankstown. His unifying themes relate to general questions about home ownership and housing stock. “We have aimed to illuminate the contemporary concerns of Australian historians for an audience of interested non-specialists in the field, the majority of whom may have little previous knowledge of Australia’s rich history,” say the editors (p. xx). In reality, that is almost exactly what the book cannot achieve, partly from the novelty of the topics, but also because each essay is economically written, to a length of about five thousand words, presumably with the undergraduate attention span in mind, leaving little scope for the story-so-far. It might have been more useful to have re-cast the Introduction as a two-century twenty-minute overview history, incorporating the four pages allocated to a not-very-useful Timeline which unluckily dates the election of the second Menzies government to 1948. But the idea behind the collection is excellent and this volume should become the flagship for a series. The person-of-the-match award goes to Regina Ganter for daring to go whether others fear to tread and supplying those welcome maps.