The Use and Abuse of Australian History

334 Pages·2000·1.62 MB·English

by  Graeme Davison

Graeme Davison has been Professor of History
at Monash University since 1982. He has taught
at the University of Melbourne, at Harvard,
where he was Professor of Australian Studies,
Edinburgh and the Australian National University.
His publications include The Rise and Fall of
Marvellous Melbourne, which was jointly awarded
the Ernest Scott Prize, The Unforgiving Minute
and, as an editor, Australians 1888, A Heritage
Handbook and the Oxford Companion to
Australian History. He is a former president of
the Australian Historical Association, Chair of
the Victorian Heritage Council, and adviser
to several museums, libraries and archives.
The Use and
Abuse of
Australian
History
Graeme Davison
ALLEN & UNWIN
Copyright © Graeme Davison 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
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permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in 2000
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Davison, Graeme, 1940– .
The use and abuse of Australian history.
Includes index.
ISBN 1 86448 720 8.
1. Australia—History—Philosophy. I. Title.
994
Set in 11/14 pt Sabon by DOCUPRO, Sydney
Digital processing by The Electric Book Company, www.elecbook.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Preface
PREFACE
F
twenty years I have been fortunate to
OR ALMOST
combine my teaching and writing as an academic
historian with a range of historical activities out-
side the university in such fields as historic con-
servation, family history, museums, cultural tourism,
urban planning and national celebrations. I began this
work partly as a hobby, partly through a sense of
professional obligation. It was fun to work with enthu-
siasts who loved history for its own sake and satisfying
to see history influence public policy. Only gradually
did I begin to recognise that it was through these
everyday forms of history-making, as much as the work
of my academic colleagues, that our discipline was
being challenged and transformed.
The following chapters are the fruit of my reflec-
tions on the uses of Australian history in these largely
non-academic settings. The subjects covered are diverse,
even seemingly serendipitous, but they are chosen
because they illuminate some abiding concerns.
Throughout the book I have sought, not simply to
describe what goes on in the history business, but what
makes it tick. How is the past being used? What kinds
of arguments and images are being deployed? What
interests and audiences are being addressed? Who gains
and who loses from the uses of the past? And amidst
vi THE USE AND ABUSE OF AUSTRALIAN HISTORY
so many users and abusers of history, what is the role
of the professional historian?
I had been writing on these themes for some time
before I recognised that they were indeed components
of a single project. Tom Griffiths and Bain Attwood
first encouraged me to think of bringing my ideas
together as a book and John Iremonger offered me the
opportunity to do so. I am also grateful to them for
their perceptive comments on earlier drafts. Although
some of these chapters have had an earlier incarnation
as articles, chapters and conference papers, almost all
have been revised and reshaped for this publication,
some very extensively, and I have also taken the oppor-
tunity to bring the references up to date. Chapters 1,
8, 9, 12, 13, and 14 appear here for the first time. I
am grateful to the editors and boards of Australian
Historical Studies, Quadrant and the New Zealand
Journal of History and to the Council of the Royal
Australian Historical Society for permission to draw on
material that appeared originally in their publications.
I also thank the History Department, University of
Melbourne for permission to reproduce Chapter 5,
which appeared in a shorter version in Donna Merwick
(ed.), Dangerous Liaisons: Essays in Honour of Greg
Dening (Melbourne 1994). Chapters 6 and 7 were
published in an earlier version in A Heritage Hand-
book; I thank my co-editor Chris McConville. My
former research assistant the late Sheryl Yelland helped
to locate useful material, especially for Chapter 2.
I owe much to the example and friendship of col-
leagues who have been my fellow travellers in public
history. I learned much from Geoffrey Blainey with whom,
along with the late Lloyd Robson, I once travelled the
Victorian countryside as a member of the Norman Harper
Safari to high school history students. With Greg Dening,
PREFACE vii
my former colleague at the University of Melbourne, I
shared the excitement of introducing final year honours
students to the skills of ethnography and caught some of
Greg’s own passionate interest in how the past was made
present in ritual and ceremony. Ken Inglis taught me that
monuments are as important as documents in reading the
past. My introduction to the heritage business came in
the late 1970s with an invitation to join the Victorian
Historic Buildings Council: I would like to record my
appreciation to Ian Lonie, Boyce Pizzey, Ray Tonkin and
David Yencken and to the staff of what is now Heritage
Victoria for the windows they have opened for me. In the
late 1980s Monash University inaugurated a Master’s
Program in Public History designed to prepare historians
for work in heritage, museums, local history and other
non-academic forms of history. To my Monash colleagues
in public history—Ann McGrath, Chris McConville, Tom
Griffiths, Margaret Anderson, Jan Penney, David Dun-
stan, Brigid Hains, Tony Dingle and Meredith
Fletcher—to our students, and to Rosemary Johnston,
who has been the generous friend and enthusiastic sup-
porter of us all, I owe special thanks. It is to them that I
dedicate this book.
Contents
CONTENTS
Preface v
1 Introduction: Australian history on the eve of
the millennium 1
2 The last hero? History and hero-worship 20
3 Monumental history: Do statues (still) speak? 37
4 The Great Voyage: National celebrations in
three new lands 56
5 Ancestors: The broken lineage of family
history 80
6 Heritage: From patrimony to pastiche 110
7 Antiques, shrines and documents: What
makes a building historic? 131
8 Sacred sites: The battle for historic churches 146
9 Living history: Touring the Australian past 162
10 ‘A neglected history’: Has school history lost
the plot? 178
11 Community: The uses of local history 197
12 Turbulent times: The historical vision of
modern management 221
13 ‘A vote, a rifle and a farm’: Unnatural rights
and invented histories 238
14 Conclusion: Is history useful? 258
Notes 276
Index 302
chapter one
Introduction: Australian
history on the eve of
the millennium
INTRODUCTION
I
exciting and unsettling to be a historian in
T IS BOTH
the late 1990s. We live amidst the ruins of so much
that we once thought enduring, yet with such yearn-
ings for a sense of our bearings, that the study of the
past can seem either sheer self-indulgence or the most
urgent intellectual challenge of our times.
History is often in the headlines. Never before,
perhaps, have historians occupied as prominent a place
in Australian public life. Some, like Manning Clark,
Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, have assumed
the role of prophets, peering deep into the national soul
and sometimes warning of wrath to come. And like
prophets through the ages, they have attracted the slings
and arrows of the naysayers and sceptics. Their prom-
inence in public life is not simply a reflection of their
own talent as writers and controversialists, but of the
renewed salience of history in Australian public affairs.
Mabo and Wik, the High Court cases that assert a
continuing right of Aborigines to a native title in land,
also signalled a new readiness among jurists and
politicians to consider the claims of history. But to
a generation raised on the school textbooks of the
1940s and 50s Mabo and Wik represented a new and
2 THE USE AND ABUSE OF AUSTRALIAN HISTORY
troubling kind of history. No longer, it seemed, was the
past the handmaiden of patriotism, but a source of
division, no longer the foundation of national destiny,
but a bone of national contention.
The crisis of Australian history is one facet of the
general crisis of meaning that now afflicts democratic
societies. Liberal democracy largely defined itself in oppo-
sition to the absolutism of king, church and Kremlin;
when those opponents were defeated, democracy did not
lose its appeal but it lost its historical dynamic. Much of
the energy of modern democratic leaders is occupied by
the mechanics of government, trimming the sails of the
ship of state in accordance with the navigational data
provided by pollsters, ratings agencies, money markets,
lobbyists, talkshow hosts and backbench rumblings. But
leading the nation also calls for something more—an
ability to project a set of unifying national values and
beliefs, what President George Bush called ‘the vision
thing’. Postmodernists may believe that history has come
to an end but, in the high moments of national life,
statesmen continue to find history indispensable. For the
‘big picture’ is always a moving picture, and the goals of
current policy must seem to be aligned with historic goals.
The politics of history
Few Australian politicians are profound students of
history but at important moments they must look as
though they are. Possibly no modern Australian prime
minister has uttered the word ‘history’ as frequently as
Paul Keating. At Kokoda, where he kissed the ground
on which the Diggers died, at Redfern, where he sought
a historic act of reconciliation with Aborigines, at
Winton where he reflected on ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and