Frank Welsh - Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia
Frank Welsh
Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia
London, Allen lane, 2004,
pp. xxxviii + 720, ISBN 0-713-99450-9
Frank Welsh is a retired banker who has written an impressive number of general histories. The fact that he is an Englishman appears to be regarded as an issue in the authorship of this massive study of the Australian experience, although it is hard to see why this should be so. Predominantly this is a political history, with a solid component of external relations from the 1880s onwards, and indeed public affairs offer one of the few coherent frameworks for such a study. Each chapter is split into bite-sized sub-sections, a useful device for covering the ground during phases such as the later nineteenth century, when six separate colonies are motoring aimlessly forward, or the muddled inter-war period when the historian must squeeze in allusions to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Bodyline text-matches. One nuisance is the elusiveness of the referencing. Welsh’s endnotes list many sources and provide further acerbic comment. Some publishers use the running head to identify the relevant page numbers in the text. Others at least include the chapter title as a guide. This work grimly confines itself to chapter numbers for each section of endnotes, forcing the reader to leaf backwards to the start or flip hundreds of pages to the Contents list. Why?
At times, it is difficult to know which audience the book is aimed at. To explain, for instance, that Queensland has the population of Hampshire and Sussex in the area of western Europe presumably says more to British readers than to their antipodean cousins. On the other hand, it is Welsh’s opinions that form the most valuable element in the book, and these will make most impact on Australians themselves. Nor is he grimly predictable. True, he condemns Chifley’s plans to nationalise the banks, but on Vietnam and Aboriginal affairs, he is sardonically radical. He insists that the arrival of Europeans should be termed an ‘incursion’ not an ‘invasion’. He is sensible in dismissing the notion that ‘mateship’ is unique to Australian male culture, argues against the utility of compulsory voting and regards the country’s home-made honours system as ‘ridiculous’. He dislikes Westpac as the name of a bank, prefers Waltzing Matilda to Advance Australia Fair as a national anthem and regards the classic novel Such as Life as ‘barely readable’. On recent politicians, some of whom he has dealt with on business, he can be charmingly lethal. I am not sure that Malcolm Fraser was ‘a twentieth-century Gladstone’, but Arthur Calwell was certainly a ‘dinosaur’. Gough Whitlam had ‘all the qualities needed to succeed in politics, except that of judgement’, but his penchant for overseas jaunts made him only ‘a part-time tyrant’. Whitlam’s nemesis, the governor-general Sir John Kerr, ‘might have been a bastard but he was unmistakeably an Australian bastard’. Bob Hawke’s enemies regarded him as ‘a foul-mouthed drunken boor’, while his friends would quarrel only with the tone of the description. Andrew Peacock was ‘handsome, sporting and charming’, while John Howard was ‘none of the above’.
Few of Welsh’s evaluations are neutral, and some seem off-beam. In Commonwealth terms, the American invasion of Grenada was tactless, but was it ‘unprincipled’? More to the point, why mention it all? This is a very discursive book, even ruminating on the mystery of national football codes and outlining the rules of cricket. Unfortunately, the text is not always accurate. Lord Grey’s committee of 1849 was not a parliamentary enquiry but an experiment in policy-making under the auspices of the privy council. Grey himself left office in 1852, not 1854, which was the year the Americans prised open Japan, not 1858. Except through the traditional form of quarter sessions, I do not think local government had become a training ground for national politics in Britain by 1850, and I am sure Disraeli, in the Hughenden graveyard, did not plan the 1887 Jubilee celebrations. New South Wales conservatives did not intend to create a hereditary upper house in 1853: the celebrated ‘bunyip aristocracy’ proposal went no further than providing for a possible future titled electoral college. John Hackett collected his knighthood two decades after he appears as ‘Sir John’ in 1890, J.X. Merriman did not become premier of the Cape for sixteen years after he appears in 1892 (fascinating man, but why mention him at all?). De Valera was not prime minister of Ireland (where I live we say ‘Taoiseach’) when he visited Australia in 1948, nor did Menzies break Walpole’s record for holding the office. Britain joined the EEC in 1973, not 1971, and the Queen presided over not five but sixteen Commonwealth realms at the time of Australia’s republican referendum. Whitlam’s tactical resignation as Labor leader in 1968 was directed against dictation by the extra-parliamentary National Executive and not designed to liberate him from the caucus. (Indeed his narrow victory tended to increase backbench control.) There was no joint sitting of the two houses of parliament before the 1974 election, since the constitution provides for such an eventuality only after an inconclusive double dissolution. Compass points and simple arithmetic are occasionally wayward. John Hunter sailed eastward to seek help from the Dutch at the Cape in 1788, not westward, and Admiral Somerville withdrew the Indian Ocean fleet in 1942 to Mombasa, not to west Africa. Thirteen years intervened, not ten, between the murder of Gordon in 1885 and the reconquest of the Sudan in 1898; twenty-four years, not fourteen, between the LBJ visit in 1967 and Bush senior’s tour in 1991.
Welsh is also cavalier with names. Some figures in the Australian past are usually referred to by two forenames: William Charles Wentworth, John Hubert Plunkett, John Dunmore Lang and the pervasive New Zealander William Pember Reeves. Welsh democratically slices out their middle names in each case, while Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson seems lucky not to have become plain ‘Fergie’. In other cases Welsh is oddly formal. I doubt if anyone has called New Zealand’s first woman prime minister ‘Jennifer Shipley’ since she left school, while the appearance of the Western Australian mining magnate as ‘Langley Hancock’ comes as a surprise to those who know him through the ancient Scottish folk ditty, ‘Old Lang’s Iron’. There are errors in the names of Watkin Tench, James Bicheno, Allan McLean and the Earl of Dudley ─ minor glitches in minor figures. Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, and Ireland’s Charles Stewart Parnell are also casualties, the more regrettable as neither really needed to be dragged in at all.
But if we put aside these blemishes, we can perceive a deeper question behind Welsh’s endeavour. He is impressed by Australia’s success, economically, socially and democratically, as confirmed in UN lifestyle league tables. Brazil had natural wealth but has struggled to create a decent society. Japan modernised but drew upon an integrated pre-industrial economy and a firm institutional basis ‘whereas Australians, to a very considerable extent, developed their own solutions’. How could they have done this in so short a time as two hundred years? In short, when does Australian history start? Now, your reviewer left Canberra in 1977 to work in Ireland and Britain. If the story cold-started in 1788 (and the opening scenes were hardly promising) then it follows that one-eighth of Australia’s history has taken place since I left. Conscious though I am of the ageing process, I cannot accept so impacted a timescale, the more so as much of the achievement was already well in place while I was there. Clearly, then, we need a mental framework that places the Australian past in a much longer context, one that still values European Australians for their adaptability, just as it honours the claims of Aboriginal Australians based on their prior occupancy and spiritual affinity to the environment. Herein lies one overwhelming challenge to the writers of general histories: how does one handle ‘the story so far’, the cultural baggage and institutional inheritance that Australians imported from the far side of the world? Almost equally perplexing is the corollary to the equation: is there a happy ending? There is for our author, since we leave him rejoicing in 2003 at England’s victory in the rugby world cup. In a tailpiece, he hopes that Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke might sit down with assorted ex-governors-general and Aboriginal thinkers to draft a blueprint, or Green Paper, that will unscramble the complicated federal system, accommodate a safe republic and usher in a brave new world of democracy, just like the federation movement a century ago. Alas, I challenge the comparison and I doubt the methodology.
This is a lively and well-written book: I blenched at two uses of ‘aggravating’ to mean ‘provoking’ and winced at two examples of ‘inter’ being used for ‘intra’, a small enough haul of nitpicking in a quarter of a million words. And much can be forgiven the first general history ever, in my recollection, to cite that most delightful of all emigration pamphlets, Australia A Mistake: New Brunswick for the Emigrant, produced in 1855 before the Empire had come to be thought of as one big happy family.