Dixson

I was a bit startled a few months back when your name and your then forthcoming book, The Imaginary Australian, were invoked by Paul Sheehan and several other right-wing journalists to validate their hostility to migration, multiculturalism and so-called "black armband history". This populist Janissary tabloid pack is riding high at the moment in the print media.

A number of them should know better, considering the cultural background suggested by their Irish names. They are my current pet hate. I was troubled and my curiosity was aroused by their enthusiasm for your work and the obvious fact that it had been made available to them before publication. Could this be the same Miriam with whom I rubbed shoulders in the small Sydney Trotskyist group presided over by Chairman Nick.

After some delays the book was released last week. Reading it led me to again read The Real Matilda and, to my mind, your most important book, your first, Greater than Lenin, the ground-breaking text about the Sydney Trades Hall Reds of the 1920s, to locate this new work The Imaginary Australian in the context of your past intellectual activity.

I have fond and still vivid memories of that small but significant Sydney socialist group in the early 1960s, and your and my presence in it. I remember clearly an earlier conference of the dissident Communist magazine Outlook, where I first met you, and you had recently completed the traumas of leaving the Communist Party and departure from a marriage to a Jewish left winger, Bernie, and your romantic entry into a new relationship with another comrade, Allan, taking two of the three kids along.

I remember those kids well: intelligent, confident and bright as tacks, and responding to family changes very resiliently. When you moved to Sydney and set up house with Allan, as you will remember, our small Trotskyist embryo party of 30 people or so, met at your house at Ashfield for quite a while. We were, as I remember it, a pretty colourful, talented and diverse group, and we went on to do all sorts of different things. We met there because yours was the biggest loungeroom. A traumatic split in the group began to develop right there, in that loungeroom.

Some of the features of those meetings will remain etched on my mind forever. Nick ponderously and stubbornly chairing the meetings, and occasionally boring us almost beyond endurance, with myself and others arguing intensely with him about emerging political disagreements. I remember you impartially criticising us all in the framework of your personal struggle to carve out a space for yourself as a youngish mother, moving against all odds back into academic life, completing a degree, a project and a thesis.

Some of my colleagues in the faction on my side of the group, used to afterwards caricature the meetings a bit, and your role in them, where you would demolish Nick for his almost magnificent sexism, and tick off the younger ones like myself for what you called our irresponsibility. (You seemed, in those days, to particularly disapprove of me.)

Almost by clockwork, you would get a migraine around 9pm, after criticising the lot of us, and go to bed in another room as the meeting carried on in the loungeroom.

In retrospect, considering the circumstances, you were pretty smart in proceeding in this way, although possibly a bit irritating to the rest of us. I remember it vividly now, in the context of the very real and important personal project in which you were then engaged, that of defining a territory for a female academic with a young family, and a right to political activity, balancing all those things together, and in that respect, you were a magnificent pioneer of your kind, who were to become a much larger cohort later in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Incidentally, have you read Hall Greenland's useful biography of Nick Origlass, Red Hot, and Susanna Short's excellent biography of her father, Laurie Short, A Political Life, in which Nick figures so largely.

I imagine, in retrospect, that you share my view that, despite his many and obvious human flaws, Nick taught us all much more than anyone else could at the time and that we were all rather privileged and lucky to have come under his influence for significant periods in our lives.

The reason I introduce this little memoir of our common life and times is partly to establish a bit of context, but also partly to raise a very important methodological point about your latest book. In this book you embrace totally the currently fashionable "new class" theory, without either detailed description or careful explanation.

The context, however, and the favourable reference to Katharine Betts, suggests that you accept her version. I have just recently completed a thorough and, I believe unanswerable demolition of this "new class" theory, The real story about the "new class", to which I refer you.

I find your espousal of this theory astounding. (The same point applies to Betts, herself a female academic, but I don't know Betts, and I do know you, and I saw you close up, righteously clawing your way into academe, and the best of Irish luck to you!)

The following point is the central defect of the "intelligentsia-new class" theory, as applied to Australia by Betts, P.P. McGuiness, Michael Thompson, Bill Hayden and now, Miriam Dixson. (I find Hayden and the "new class" a bit rich. I wonder, does that born-again monarchist locate Her Majesty, the Queen, or himself, in the "new class".)

The number of people with a recognisable university degree is now more than 17 per cent of the adult population and approaching 20 per cent. To describe this group as a homogenous "new class" is ludicrous.

It is, in fact, a nasty, conservative, political construct devised to attack these people's perceived "progressive" views supporting migration and multiculturalism and their lack of "traditional family values". The usual aim of conservatives who wave around "new class" rhetoric is to divert attention and animosity from the tiny minority who are the real ruling class in capitalist society, to the relatively less powerful social layer who work in education, health, the arts, communications, etc.

You wax eloquent about the "new class" theory in your last chapter, Conclusion: Understanding the Apostles. So does Bill Hayden, in his review of Katharine Betts' book, The Great Divide, in a recent Weekend Australian. Both your last chapter and Hayden's curious review sharpen the basic points about this theory.

Responding, it seems to me, to the analysis that I have been distributing widely, Hayden now qualifies the notion of the "new class" to only those who work in such areas as the media, and disagree with him. You also play around with the notion considerably in your last chapter, and both these versions highlight the obvious humbug associated with the theory.

Is this theory real political sociology or reactionary ideology? Who are the "new class"? Do they include all those with university degrees? For instance, are the several hundred thousand women teachers with degrees, members of the "new class"? Are the 54.8 per cent of women with degrees, of the 357,800 in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) category Society and Culture members of the "new class"?

In practice, all the "new class" theorists like yourself, Hayden, Sheehan, McGuiness, Betts and Thompson create a real moveable feast, in which you switch, as convenient, backwards and forwards from descriptive sociology to reactionary ideology in a totally eclectic way whenever it suits your argument.

In passing you make liberal use of the tendentious postmodernist category called "intellectual capital". In practice, in the writings of the right-wing populist school on these matters, people with degrees become members of the "new class" if they hold, and campaign for, a range of ideological views in support of high migration, celebratory multiculturalism etc, of which you disapprove.

They often snap back into being normal human beings, "ordinary Australians", if they agree with you on something. As serious political sociology, the "new class" theory, whether in your conservative populist form, or the Bourdieuan postmodernist form, is in practice, serious political humbug, usually used for totally reactionary purposes.

From the point of view of the status of women — the issue around which The Real Matilda is constructed — the "new class" theory is absolutely poisonous. When you were one of the wonderful first swallows of the approaching Feminist Spring, in the early 1960s, you were part of a tiny and brave minority of 15 per cent women, of the still comparatively small number of Australians with university degrees (then only about 3 per cent of the adult population).

Now that the number of Australians with degrees is nudging 20 per cent, women are about half, although they are still concentrated in education and health, etc, at the lower end of the income scale. To create an artificial construct of people with degrees as forming a "new class", which Betts does, is to include the massive new cohort of women with degrees, including Betts and yourself, in this "new class".

This is obviously absurd, and politically very dangerous to the interests of women, particularly when it is associated, by people like Michael Thompson, Michael Duffy and McGuiness, with a ferocious attack on the free university education of the Whitlam period, with the implied support for up-front university fees that goes with this attack. Have you really thought through the global political implications of so easily adopting this essentially conservative, but currently widely touted "new class" theory?

I assert that it is much more accurate and also, as it happens, more politically useful, to look upon the explosion of educational access for working class and lower middle class people, particularly women, during the last 30 years, as a righteous revolution, rather than the emergence of some artificially defined "new class".

Does Australia have what can be properly described as an "Anglo-Celtic core culture"?

The assertion of the vital nature of what you call the "Anglo-Celtic core culture", and its "holding" quality for Australian life, is your central preoccupation in the new book. I also am preoccupied with the question of national identity, and have written a number of essays on this question. I agree with you that Australia has a national culture, and a distinct national identity.

Like you, I reject the fancy postmodernist rhetoric ditching all notions of national identity and I launched a polemic asserting the existance of a distinct Australian national identity, particularly in opposition to the postmodernist Ghassan Hage.

I disagree sharply, however, with your intellectually quite forced celebration of what you call "Anglo-Celtic Australia" as the basis of a "core culture", and your consignment of the Irish component of the Australian culture to a kind of tolerated side culture of a "clannish, pre-modern" Papist sort, to be absorbed by this British Australian "core culture". I also reject the proposition that all the other elements in the Australian mosaic can be usefully conflated into this notion of an Anglo-Celtic "core culture" effectively dominated by the "British" aspect.

My reading of Australian history, particularly of the 19th century, in which I have soaked myself for the last couple of years, is radically different to yours. I can see why, with your tendency to celebrate the "civilising influence" of bourgeois British Australia, you are a bit crooked on the historians Manning Clark and Russell Ward.

The striking thing about both their narratives is this celebration of the dramatically oppositional Irish Catholic other, the "hard" other, to British Imperial Australia. Any objective reading of the 19th century demonstrates wave after wave of conflict of this sort.

In relation to the development of Australian nationalism in opposition to British Imperialism, I would rely on and refer you to the relatively recent, excellent and compact overview of this question, the book British imperialism and Australian nationalism, by Luke Trainor, Cambridge University Press, 1994. I would also rely heavily on Michael Roe's important and ground-breaking work, published in 1965 by Melbourne University Press, Quest for authority in eastern Australia 1835-1851. Roe's book, which arose out of his thesis, supervised by Manning Clark, included the first major inquiry into the contrasting roles of the two major religious groups in Australian society, the Catholic group mainly on the leftist and democratic side, and the Protestant group mainly reinforcing the deep-rooted conservative aims of the squatting interests.

Conflicts of the oppressed with the rulers of British Australia

These conflicts started with the Aboriginal military resistance, led by Pemulwuy of the Eora people, around Sydney from 1790-1802. They continued with the Castle Hill Irish rebellion. They were embodied in the many outbreaks of bushranging. They continued further with the Aboriginal war of resistance in Tasmania.

The Australian colonies then experienced the struggle against transportation, for self-government, and against proposals for a "Bunyip Aristocracy". Then came Eureka, followed by the struggle for "free selection" of land in most of the colonies, the Kelly outbreak in Victoria, and the Aboriginal war of resistance of the Kalkadoon in Queensland, then the great strikes of the 1890s.

We also had the "blackbirding" slave trade of the Kanaka of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) to these shores, followed 30 years later by their ruthless expulsion from Australia, etc. All through the 19th century, from convict times on, my Irish ancestors and the secular working class of non-Irish background and indigenous Australians were in constant conflict with British Imperial Australia. Why am I telling you this? You know it already from your early work in labour history.

In my reading of these matters, the distinct Australian national identity, which we both agree exists in some form, was hammered out at every stage in opposition to imperial British Australia. How can that constitute an "Anglo-Celtic core culture".

For all the right-wing populists, like Paul Sheehan, Katharine Betts, Michael Thompson, etc, that kind of formulation is code for all the old reactionary rubbish that was used against the emerging labour movement and my Irish ancestors and also against indigenous Australians, non-British Australians, Chinese Australians and other Australians of colour. There is, indeed, a real Australian national identity, but it is a product of all those struggles and many later, against the brutal power and the pretensions of the British ruling class in colonial Australia.

I and many thousands of others are deeply hostile to your condescending British Australian notion of an "Anglo-Celtic core culture"! These days a comfortable majority of Australians have a distinct idea of a national Australian identity to which they lay claim and contribute, but we of the current majority would not describe that identity in terms of your "Anglo-Celtic core culture". That formulation is unpleasant nostalgia for an Australia that is now, happily, in rapid decline.

What constitutes this "Anglo Celtic core culture"?

One of the difficult aspects of your new book is that you don't really spell out what are for you the key aspects of the "Anglo-Celtic core culture". You make a series of throwaway references to various features of Australian life and leave us to draw the inferences for ourselves. This is just a little unfair, really.

On page six you make what is, in fact, one of your key formulations:

At least over a period of consolidation, the core culture needs to keep on imparting its steadying sameness and cohesion to institutional patterns and broad values. It needs to continue providing enough of that sameness to give Australians as a whole not the desire — for that we clearly have — but the ability to live with enriching diversity over the long term.

Further down on page six, you say: "social cohesion is badly fudged in current identity debate", and on page seven you raise the awful spectre: "In today's world, the dangers of social unravelling — in Russia, in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Indonesia — are there for all to see." On page 44, you approvingly resurrect Henry James in this memorable paragraph:

In 1907 the American novelist Henry James aired related concerns about his own country. Between 1881 and 1910, 15 million migrants entered America, and according to the 1910 census, over 22 per cent of the population said they could not speak English. During decades overseas, James had developed his own kind of "obsession" about the impact of what he called "the great 'ethnic' question" on "the 'American' identity". So in 1907 he went back to find out what changes the ethnic "ghost had made in his supposedly safe old house". He discovered the "lapse" of some spontaneous "element of communication" that enabled the "play of mutual recognition" which then operated in European countries. "Founded on old familiarities", this spontaneity had involved a kind of "impalpable exchange". In the United States such exchange was now not only "absent" but unthinkable. The result was a "sterility" of communication, indeed a "staring silence". With a great artist's insight, James perceived that for the United States, "nothing is more characteristic ... than the development of ... machinery ... [through which] the idea of intimacy of relation may be ... freely cherished". He partly suspected and partly hoped that in the end the old identity would assert itself. After "the business of slow co-minglings and makings-over" had finally worked itself through, old-identity "qualities ingrained in generations", might "rise again to the surface".

Again on page 157, you promiscuously invoke the Francophile views of the postmodernist, Julia Kristeva, to reinforce your position:

On immigration and on the nation, Kristeva's criticism of the French Left, with which she identifies, repays careful attention. In France, she writes, "ridicule kills, nationalism is in bad taste and patriotism [is] downright trashy". Kristeva declares herself "grieved to have heard on many occasions, left-wing intellectuals, for the sake of a misunderstood cosmopolitanism, sell off French national values". The Left, she contends "demagogically flatters the immigrants and runs down the national reality into which they hope to become integrated". The resultant underestimation of the "national imaginary" could bring the most dire results.

In this context, it doesn't matter at all whether Kristeva is a Bulgarian or a Brazilian, in the same way that it didn't matter whether the Anglophile, the late Frank Knopfelmacher was a Czech or a Chechen. Their reactionary views are examples of the phenomenon of some migrants becoming more super-assimilationist and ultra-"patriotic" (in the interests of the host imperialist power) than anybody else. The great example of this in the 20th century is the brutal great Russian chauvinist, the vicious Comrade Stalin, who actually came from Georgia, a Russian colony not unlike Ireland as a colony of England.

Many of these extracts from your book are examples where you infer right-wing populist views on contentious current questions from the mouths of prestigeous authorities without quite sticking your neck out to the extent of saying that you totally agree with them. It seems quite clear to me that you do largely agree with them on the matters referred to in the extracts that you choose to quote.

Your lament at the breakup of "social cohesion" in "Russia, Yugoslavia and Indonesia" is extraordinarily revealing. In each of those cases the break-up was in large part caused by the spectacular revolt of the subject nationalities in those three empires against the Russians who oppressed the other nationalities in the Soviet Union, the Serbs who oppressed the other nationalities in Yugoslavia, and the Javanese elite and military who oppressed and oppress the other nationalities in Indonesia.

The "social cohesion" in these states was the social cohesion produced by a brutal imperial oppressor nationality suppressing the national rights of other nationalities. Your use of this analogy is unintentionally very illuminating about your attitude to the national question in Australia. You obviously regard the domination of Australian society by the Anglo elite of the last century as necessary to "social cohesion". That "social cohesion" is just as unpalatable to most Australians now as the former "social cohesion" was to the other nationalities in the three states mentioned above.

Paragraphs like the ones I have quoted recur throughout your book, and they are usually associated with the proposition that you are not really opposed to ethnic diversity, but that you desire that this ethnic diversity should go through the sieve of the "Anglo-Celtic core culture", which seems to me to be a mealymouthed and fancy way of reasserting the old, unpleasant and discredited policy of total assimilation of all minorities into the "British Australian" way of life.

In addition to this, the whole build-up of these paragraphs is obviously designed to create a fear that the extent of ethnic and cultural diversity in some way threatens the "holding quality" of the "Anglo-Celtic core culture".

Well, it is quite clear that the ethnic diversity is one of the factors that has thrown Tory British imperial Australia into full retreat. Personally, I celebrate this dramatically increasing ethnic diversity and the irreversible retreat of Tory British imperial Australia to which this increasingly complex and vibrant Australian multiculture is a major contributor.

Anzac Day and wars in Australian history

You join, in a very deliberate way, the current attempt to revive militarism by the orgy of sentimentality about Anzac Day, the Vietnam veterans etc, that has become one of the key motifs in recent times of the tabloid press. You are not quite as crude as your fan, the best-selling journalist, Paul Sheehan, who proclaims that Anzac united Australia, but you get quite close to this notion, as you often do in the book, through the voices of others.

On page 150 you say:

Within the allegedly secular Australian national identity, Anzac embodies a reflection of Kantorowicz's universal "sacrificial moment". The historian Ken Inglis tells us that after 1918 Anzac Day became our "national day", and its "ceremonies, monuments and rhetoric" constituted something like a "civic religion". Others, such as Alistair Thomson, have underlined the idea that the Australian nation was born in blood above the cliffs of Anzac Cove. Anzac thereby furnishes an Australian example of Anderson's idea of an integral link between religion and the national imaginary. Anzac provides just such a bridge between the nation and identity concerns like death, suffering, and immortality — concerns managed by pre-modern dynastic imagined communities and bequeathed to the imaginary of the modern nation.

There is no doubt at all that the construction of Anzac Day is a central part of the celebration of imperial bourgeois British Australian identity. The fact that it incorporates and commemorates the very real pain, anguish, tragedy and heroism of a number of generations of Australians, mainly men but some women, who fought and died in a series of wars, is what gives Anzac Day its real potency as a national symbol, which is unfortunately used by the ruling class in capitalist Australia for the most reactionary purposes.

I have a rather different attitude to Anzac Day and the wars in which Australia has been involved. No one in my family has ever been a pacifist. My adult relatives and ancestors have fought in several of those wars as volunteers and, indeed, I campaigned in a civilian way in relation to the Vietnam War, against it. I would commence a narrative about Australians and wars with the first Australian war, the one between indigenous Australians and British imperialism, which went on in quite a sharp way on the frontier, from the time of Pemulway, the great Aboriginal guerilla leader, for the next 150 years, and in which thousands of unfortunate people were killed. (Obviously there were many more Aboriginals killed than whites.) In that war I mainly celebrate the indigenous Australian resistance, although I feel sadness for the whites killed as well.

I celebrate also military acts of resistance by the underclass of colonial Australia against British Imperialism, such as the Castle Hill rebellion of the Irish in 1804, the Eureka Stockade and the Kelly outbreak. I celebrate the vigorous Australian opposition to the sending of an Australian contingent to the war of British imperialism in the Sudan. I also celebrate the widespread Australian opposition to Australian participation in the war of British imperialism against the Boers in South Africa. My own Irish grandfather was arrested and did three months in Grafton Jail over a small local incident of opposition to the Boer War. None of those wars were at all popular with the Australian labour movement at the time, particularly with Irish Australians.

Nevertheless, when the First World War broke out, my father, that Irish grandfather's son, joined up, mainly as he put it later, to see the world. He survived Gallipoli, but was blown up in 1918 by a shell and survived less his left arm, with one leg shorter than the other, and with five pieces of shrapnel still in his body. He went on to live to 80, and became a school teacher and an activist in the labour movement.

My father was quite emotional about his First World War experiences. The main things he celebrated about this war were the mutinies of the Australian soldiers on the Western Front, in which he participated, the famous fraternisation with the Germans at Christmas in the early years of the war, and the vote of the frontline soldiers against conscription in the two referendums.

He was particularly proud of the fact that the British were not game to shoot any of the Australian mutineers, although many were shot in the British and French armies. He identified deeply and profoundly with the decisive event of the First World War at home in Australia, the defeat by the combination of the secular working class, the Irish Catholics and the farmers, of Billy Hughes' conscription proposals in the referendums.

The sum of his First World War experiences left him with a great aversion to imperialist wars. He had a complex attitude to Anzac Day. He wore the returned soldiers badge all his life, because he said he had a right to it. He had been maimed and his mates had died for that right. Nevertheless, he rarely went to the Anzac Day march because, as he put it, he was repelled by the sight of the base officers who sent his mates out to get killed, up at the front.

He was expelled from the Labor Party during the Second World War, along with his leader J.T. Lang and the Victorian parliamentarian Maurice Blackburn, for opposing conscription for overseas service. These proposals by the Curtin government were also opposed more cautiously from within the Labor cabinet by Eddie Ward and Arthur Calwell. My dad lived long enough to lend vigorous support to our campaigns against the Australian participation in the imperialist war in Vietnam in the 1960s and the 1970s.

In the lead-up to the Second World War a contingent of Australians, including nurses, went to fight on the side of the Republicans in Spain, against Fascism, in the International Brigades, and a number were killed in this utterly righteous cause. One young Sydney Catholic, Nugent Bull, went off on a lone misguided sortie to fight on the Franco side. Paradoxically, after fighting on the fascist side, he went to England at the end of the Spanish Civil War and joined the British Air Force to fight Hitler. He was killed in action in 1941. Such were the contradictions of the times.

The Second World War

Despite all the above, eligible male relatives of mine volunteered to fight in the Second World War. From the point of view of most Australians, including the labour movement and the working class, the Second World War against German Fascism and Japanese aggression, involving a military threat to Australia, was the "good" war, as Studs Terkel, the American writer, calls it. It was particularly good locally, in one sense, that the number of Australians killed and injured was much less than in the First World War.

Even the Australian Trotskyists, Nick Origlass, Laurie Short and others, who led significant industrial struggles for basic workers' rights during the war, supported military defence against the possibility of Japanese invasion, while at the same time demanding the democratisation of the Army and the organisation of workers militias. (The only letter Trotsky ever wrote to the Australian Trotskyists revolved around that point. Trotsky said the fact that the Australian working class would resist any invasion by Japanese Fascism militarily, was justifiable and should be supported. This letter of Trotsky's is the famous letter that was baked when hidden in an oven during a raid on Nick Origlass's house by police in 1940. It mostly survived, rather crisp and brown.)

A major feature of Australia's involvement in the Second World War was its complexity and the ambiguities that emerged during this conflict. The battle between the Curtin government and Churchill over the conflict of interest between the defence of Australia and Britain's military interests, has been widely discussed in all the literature.

The conflict over the reckless sacrifice of Australian soldiers in the Malay Peninsula by the British, was particularly sharp. There is a whole school of British military "history" that attempts to ascribe the collapse of Singapore to the alleged insurrectionary indiscipline of the Australian troops, who did not take at all kindly to being sacrificed to the Japanese Army.

There are several very tendentious recent British books on this subject. The most extreme example of this unpleasant "blame-the-Aussies" genre of British "military history" is Singapore, The Pregnable Fortress by Peter Elphick (Hodder and Stoughton, 1995). For me, the great hero of the Second World War is Mick Gibbins, the inventive and lively Aussie sergeant who, after his British commanding officers surrendered, managed to lead his platoon of young volunteers from Gippsland out of up-country Malaya, through the jungle, partly with the aid of Chinese communist guerillas. They crossed over to Sumatra in a small boat and then walked across Sumatra.

They finally got on to another ship, one of the last away, back to Fremantle. These resourceful Aussies, the "Malayan harriers" only just escaped court martial. The military brass were embarrassed by their initiative. Only generals were supposed to escape.

My mother's brother volunteered when Darwin was bombed, ending up in the Air Force in Britain as part of the Australian air crew who were sacrificed by the mad Bomber Harris, many of whom were killed in Harris's crazy and barbarous daylight bombing raids on Germany. My uncle was lucky, and survived.

By far the most popular piece of literature that came out of the Second World War, among men who actually fought in that war, was the wonderful novel about the Aussies at Tobruk, The Twenty Thousand Thieves, by the communist novelist, Eric Lambert, who himself fought at Tobruk. This was a constant best seller for several years in the late 1940s. The main feature of this novel was that, while in a general way it supported the righteousness of the war, it also celebrated the rebelliousness, indiscipline and plebian self identity of the soldiers, as the title of the book suggests.

Frank Thompson and Australians

I got the idea for writing this letter to you from the quite famous open letter written by the redoubtable E.P. Thompson, whom I am sure we both revere as the real founder of modern labour history, to Leszek Kolokowski, disagreeing with him about his renunciation of Marxism. Well, there are only "six degrees of separation" in intellectual life, as in other aspects of life.

You will be aware of the sadness associated with the recent death of the novelist Iris Murdoch, after a period of Alzheimers Disease, and the moving coverage of her husband, John Bailey's battle with this human problem. Well, when young before the Second World War, and an enthusiastic communist, Iris Murdoch recruited E.P. Thompson's elder brother, Frank, to the Communist Party. After this, they split up as lovers, although he still tried to woo her back from afar at the war.

Frank Thompson became involved in British Special Operations Executive military and intelligence operations in the Balkans, in which he ultimately lost his life heroically in a botched guerilla march from Yugoslavia into Bulgaria. He had opposed this military adventure as madness but, nevertheless, loyally carried it out in a disciplined way, after pressure both from British military headquarters in London and Russian and Bulgarian communist leaders in Moscow. He was shot by the Nazis, along with other guerillas, after capture.

The story of this military screw-up became caught up in the Cold War and Frank Thompson's ghost was variously denounced by Eastern European Stalinists as a British agent and by MI5 military historians as a dangerous agent of the Comintern. In 1981, E.P. Thompson gave a wonderful lecture unravelling this strange historical story in a tribute to his heroic brother's memory, and wrote a little book, one of his last, about these events, celebrating his brother's life.

A part of this book consists of Frank Thompson's moving and interesting love letters to Iris Murdoch. This whole small anecdote of people's lives is a wonderful vignette of modernity. What pops out from this story is a view expressed by Frank Thompson about Australians. On page 65 of Beyond the Frontier we read the following letter from Cairo in August 1942, from Thompson to Iris Murdoch.

Sanders of the River

This Frank Thompson story, although intrinsically very interesting, may seem like going a long way round in a discussion of Australia and wars. But the point is, if an intelligent and courageous young middle class English communist could have such a view of Australians in 1942, it was obviously based on the immediate conflicts of interests between Britain and Australia and an already developed hostility towards Australians of the English middle classes, going back to the First World War and much further. How much fiercer must have been the hostility of the British ruling class to Australians and Australia? So much for the British-Australia patriotism celebrated and memorialised through Anzac Day.

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was my war in the sense that, as a mature young adult, my life was dominated for seven or eight years by the utterly righteous and justified campaign against this rotten war. (Earlier on, I had escaped national service (nasho) in the 1950s because of enormous bunions.) The overwhelming majority of those who campaigned against the Vietnam War had no personal animosity towards the national service conscripts and peacetime regular soldiers who were sent by our vicious political masters to wage war against the people of Vietnam.

Certainly, the militant and effective group of which I was the initiator and secretary, the Vietnam Action Committee, had, as its central slogan, "Bring Australian troops home now" and we placed a lot of our agitational emphasis on this being in the interests of the Australian soldiers as well as the Vietnamese.

There were some Vietnam antiwar protesters who vilified the soldiers, but they were a tiny minority of the opponents of the war. With the complex and diverse nature of my family background in relation to wars, I was personally very conscious of the fact that young men are drawn into wars by a multitude of circumstances and, in the case of those sent to Vietnam, often against their will.

In the case of others who went off to the Vietnam War willingly, their views were sometimes changed by their experiences of the war. When the war ended, the Australian troops had come home, and many Vietnamese who had fought on the losing side ended up in Australia, I felt no personal animosity towards any of them. One of the paradoxes of the Vietnam experience is that I now have friends amongst Vietnam veterans, particularly among those veterans who have been campaigning for their natural right to compensation for their exposure to agent orange.

I also have a number of friends among Vietnamese migrants to Australia. I was greatly heartened in the vigorous marches against Pauline Hanson's racism a couple of years ago, by the wonderful diversity of those marches, which included the largely Anglo or Celtic young members of slightly exotic socialist groups, and also large contingents of Vietnamese migrants marshalled in a rather military way by old officers from the South Vietnamese Army.

I am utterly repelled by the modern right-wing populists, like your fan Paul Sheehan, who make a meal of alleged Vietnamese ghettoes in Cabramatta. After all, the 300,000 Aussies from Indochina wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the Vietnam War.

The bourgeois historical revisionism in relation to the 1960s and the 1970s and the struggle against the Vietnam War does not intimidate me one bit. We were right in our opposition to the war and many of those who fought in it, or even initiated it, such as former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, now realise this.

I am in favour of reconciliation between all the participants in that conflict, but that is a different question, and those of us who opposed the war from day one have nothing at all to apologise for.

There is a further question in relation to the upheavals of the 1960s and the 1970s, which were crystallised in the campaign against the vicious war in Vietnam. They brought to a head a number of developing contradictions in Western society and they unleashed social forces that are quite socially and culturally irreversible.

The reactionary populist attack on this whole period is rubbish. You say, on page 96:

Yet when we examine aspects of our history that are both unique and formative — for Europeans, a location far from Europe and long seen as intractably alien; a core culture ethnically split from the start, partly over issues born of colonialism going back to the 12th century; the brutal extended displacement of the indigenous people; and a stigmatised convict beginning — the fact is that Australia's imagined community actually "held" us with surprising firmness until the 1970s.

You are here inferring the general right-wing populist rhetoric about how the disintegration of so-called "civilisation" started in the 1960s and 1970s. This kind of rhetoric is self-interested, conservative nonsense designed to try to roll back the very considerable leaps in human consciousness and understanding, and the resulting changes in social practices, that took place in the 1960s and the 1970s.

On the more immediate question of the significance of Anzac Day and war nostalgia as a "holding force", I summarise my viewpoint in the following way. My ancestors and relatives, including way back one possible Aboriginal ancestor, have fought or otherwise been involved in a number of the wars that have taken place in Australia or affected Australia.

I celebrate the lives and heroism of all those who have fought in all those wars on whatever side. I am quite incapable, however, of abdicating my realistic political understanding of those military events. I am very proud, for instance, of the defeat of conscription in the referendums in 1916 and 1917, and the opposition of many Australians to the First World War, and I am proud of the effective and ultimately successful campaign against the Vietnam War.

I celebrate and mourn the pain and death of those who fought and were killed in those wars, even if, as in the case of the Australian soldiers in Vietnam, they were on the wrong side. I believe the war memorials should be respected properly. I am greatly taken with acts of reconciliation such as Terry Burstall's books, particularly the one in which he goes back to Vietnam and meets up with the Vietnamese soldiers who fought on the other side to him at Long Tan.

I note the great respect with which the people of Vietnam, including the Vietnamese Army, treat the graves and memorials to the soldiers that fought against them during the war. That war was my war, in a sense, and I am greatly interested in reconciliation between all those who were affected by and involved in that war, both Australians and Vietnamese, on both sides.

One thing I have no intention at all of ever doing (even if I live to be 100), is join the utterly reactionary general celebration of the Anzac events by imperial British Australia, in the current tabloid way that is so obviously just a crude political device to create a counter-revolution in Australian historiography.

I fully understand, support and celebrate the aspect of Anzac Day in which men and women who fought in all those wars go along to commemorate their own younger lives and the lives of those who have already passed on and their common experiences in those events, and to see old friends. I often watch the march on television as a cultural event and a passing commentary on the lives of other Australians.

In no way do I oppose or begrudge the ordinary Australians who fought in those wars those movingly human celebrations. Nevertheless, I do not regard the First World War and Australia's participation in it or the utterly unrighteous war of imperialist intervention in Vietnam, and our participation in that war, as being a culturally useful primary focus for Australian national identity.

Celebrating these wars is a rather obvious device for reasserting a reactionary "British Australia" cultural hegemony, which I have been fighting all my life. What I primarily celebrate about those two wars is the great wisdom displayed by the Australian people in defeating conscription in the First World War, and eventually opposing the Vietnam War and withdrawing Australian troops from Vietnam.

Celebrating Anzac and the memories of Charlie Mance (born December 3, 1900)

In relation to Anzac Day and wars, I would draw your attention to the fact that most of the last few surviving contemporaries of my father who actually fought in the First World War, when interviewed on television, say very firmly that war is hell, and that war, in particular, was very bad indeed. I have a number of times in recent years been greatly impressed by the stubborn way that a couple of these old diggers have got that basic point over on television in the few seconds of air time that you get in a televisoin grab. They are great men indeed, those still surviving First World War diggers.

It is worth reprinting in this context part of an interview with one of them, Charlie Mance, by Gina Leros and Deborah McIntosh in Sunday Life, in the Sun Herald (August 15, 1999):

In 1917, Charlie abandoned his job as a blacksmith's striker in a metal foundry in Brunswick, Victoria, and joined the war by lying about his age — he was only 16 — and scraped in at a mere 160 centimetres. But he was bolstered by a combination of ambition — "I wanted to do something for my country because the Anzacs were losing" — and teenage invincibility. "We were all young and silly as rabbits, I suppose, but I was thrilled to pieces to do it. I was tough and strong and wanted to serve to the best of my ability."

Charlie enlisted at a time when reinforcements were urgently needed on the Western Front. "When I joined up, things were pretty tough for the Anzacs. They'd already evacuated Gallipoli and volunteers were getting scarce. The pick of the Australian nation had already gone. So, they created what they called a Sportsman's Thousand — the 22nd battalion — where they reduced the required weight and height from 172 centimetres and I put up my age to make it through. I knew I was doing the wrong thing because I was underage; I even lied to my mum to get her to sign the papers."

The new recruits spent a few months training in Victoria: "We were poorly equipped. The guns got so scarce that we had to train with a log of wood to represent a rifle."

They disembarked in England in December 1917 and arrived in France in April 1918, where Private Mance, No. 763A, fought with the 22nd in Amiens, Ville-sur-Ancre, Villers-Bretonneux and Mont St Quentin. A determined youth, Charlie recovered from a gas attack that left him blinded and voiceless for six weeks, then resumed his frontline attack on Herleville on 18 August 1918.

Charlie recalls one gruesome battle: "In France, they had a life-size crucifix, they had machine guns behind it and blew us out. They got 14 of us, I got wounded and there were three dead. The stretcher-bearers yelled out, 'Can you walk?' and being a young kid, I said, 'yes', because there was still lots of hard work to do, see?

"A 60-pounder would fire and frighten the hell out of you; there'd be flying shrapnel and artillery everywhere. Lots of our fellows got killed so I'm lucky to still be here."

By the end of 1918, only 130 of the 1000 men were left. Charlie was wounded in the chest by a shell. "And the conditions were shocking," he adds. We were lousy as a bandicoot as I say, and we wouldn't have a bath for four months. We'd be living in trenches of mud and slush and we were half-starved."

His last battle was the capture of Montbrehain near Beaurevoir on the Hindenburg Line on October 5, 1918.

Charlie was discharged in 1920. In that year, he also married Bessie Luckwell in Warminster, England. "Bessie was 18 and I was 18 and five months," says Charlie, eyes glistening. "I literally met her walking down the street! We were only young blokes, kicking around in mobs, as you do. And the English girls wanted adventure, wanted to fall in love or go to Australia with an Australian soldier — which she did."

Charlie tried to prevent his own son, Lionel, from being conscripted in WWII "because I didn't want him to be gun fodder". Military service isn't the only answer, he says, for teaching young people discipline, obedience or patriotism.

One of the 60 pounders mentioned by Charlie Mance was the shell that maimed my father in 1918. It is interesting that my father, all his life, used almost exactly the same form of words as Charlie Mance does here about joining up: "We were all young and silly as rabbits." The powerful testimony of those like my father and Charlie Mance who, if his luck continues as it has so far, will live to see the new century, should be very forcefully taken into account.

In view of the war experiences of First World War diggers, it is not at all appropriate that mindless militaristic celebration of Winston Churchill's costly Anzac Cove military disaster, in which so many young Australians, New Zealanders, Britons and Turks died needlessly, should be taken as the defining centre of Australian national identity.

Lenin and national identity

I am rather amazed that you can write a whole book about the national question in Australia without some reference to Lenin's very well-known work on the subject, which I regard as the basic introduction to the question in the modern world. As you well know, Lenin had a fairly well-developed notion of nationality and what the fundamental characteristics of a real nation are, which he associated with factors such as language, religion and ethnicity but with which he also associated such questions as nationalities being tied in with the economic framework in which they exist. His view was quite complex.

He regarded such nationalities as the Irish, the Poles, and also the Russians and the Ukrainians and the English, as very real entities. In relation to nationalism, however, he made a sharp distinction about the nationalism of oppressed colonial peoples, in which he included the Irish and the Poles, and which he regarded as a progressive force, in the limited sense that they tended to break up the imperialist hegemony in the world.

On the other hand he regarded such things as Imperial British, Russian and German nationalism as thoroughly reactionary, although he quite clearly recognised the existence of Russia, Germany and England as real nationalities with real national identities. After the Russian Revolution he celebrated a number of aspects of Russian culture and identity.

He was after all, a Russian himself, and longed for the wide spaces of Russia while in exile. Nevertheless, in the latter part of his life, he fought bitterly against Stalin over the developing tendency of the new Soviet state to reproduce reactionary Russian nationalism in relation to the previously subject peoples. He described the reassertion of Russian nationalism in this way as "the old reactionary Russian rubbish".

In approaching the question of national identity in Australia, I regard Lenin's views on the question as very useful indeed. I believe Australia started as a colonial settler state of British imperialism. The British ruling class of colonial Australia, which was imposed on the indigenous Aboriginal Australians, on the already colonised Irish, Scots and Welsh, and also on the proletarian and plebian underclass brought from Britain itself, was thoroughly reactionary.

The struggle of the diverse underclass of Australia against this British imperial Australia triumphalism imposed on them, is at the core of the whole history of Australia in the 19th century and the early 20th century. Along with many Australians now, my origins are in this underclass of Australia.

I have no inclination at all to celebrate the "core holding quality" of British imperial Australia. Most Australians like me have been fighting that reactionary ideology for 210 years!

On page 12, you wax eloquent:

Cut from English diffidence and spliced with Irish ambivalence, Australian patriotism has never been as explicitly self-affirming as that of, say, the USA or France. But there is a real sense in which, warts and all, Australian patriotism is a work of popular art, a piece of high creativity by the common imagination.

On page 95, you say:

In a word, that historical contrast contributes to an ultimate Australian mystery: why are we so lukewarm in articulating patriotisms? Recognition that through all this the Irish play a role, perhaps a key role, will not stop us appreciating Irish Australia's central part in fashioning our rich national tapestry. Rather, aired as fundamental to an integrating identity debate, such recognition will encourage fuller awareness of what is now so astonishingly muted: the truly remarkable strengths Australia possesses.

Your clear inference is that the past patriotism of British ruling class Australia is a wonderful thing to be celebrated, and that it is a pity that the hostility of Irish Australians like myself has muted that celebration, and has even interfered with the proper reverence required for the national flag.

In addition to this the Irish were not keen on an "open pluralistic society" presumably, in this context, the one imposed on them by the English with superior, more industrialised and modern military organisation and weaponry. From where I sit, your British patriotism is the "last refuge of scoundrels". From the point of view of working class Anglo-Australians, Irish Australians, indigenous and non-British Australians, including Australians of colour, there is, indeed, a popular plebian multicultural Australian national identity to be celebrated, but that is quite different and in total opposition to the rabidly racist "patriotism" of upper-class "British" Australia.

When I was a kid at a Christian Brothers school in the 1950s we used to sing Advance Australia Fair in "clannish Celtic" defiance of British Australia, which of course, sang God Save the Queen. Now, when I see on television John Howard and Pauline Hanson, whose immediate ideological predecessors sang God Save the Queen with such fervour, wrapping themselves in Advance Australia Fair, I am forcibly struck by the way symbols can be transformed, and this fact tends to make me even a little bit uneasy about Advance Australia Fair as a national symbol.

The real new Australia of the year 2000. Race, religion (or lack of it) and ethnicity. Why I celebrate, and don't lament, like you do, the decline of Protestant religion and freemasonry

I was a bit amazed at your pain and nostalgia at the decline of freemasonry and the drop in religious adherence as part of the decline of what is now described by many as "civil society". Well, from where I sit the collapse of freemasonry is a totally healthy development. Freemasonry started out as a revolutionary force in the early modern world. It degenerated rapidly throughout the 19th century and became, in the latter part of the period when it had significance in the English speaking world, a brutal cultural device for preserving Anglo-British ruling classes and their interests against outsiders such as the Irish Catholics.

The sooner the now archaic institution of freemasonry disappears forever, the better, from my point of view. The Catholic Church may now allow Catholics to become Freemasons in a fit of misguided ecumenism, but that doesn't impress me one little bit.

I vividly remember in the 1950s when my anti-communist left-wing Catholic father left forever the Industrial Group in the Teachers Federation. The breaking point for him was when the Industrial Group admitted Mrs Preston Stanley Vaughan, who was a member of the Liberal Party and a lady Mason. That was altogether too much for my old man, and he broke decisively with the Santamaria group over that question and never went back to them.

The same applies to "the decline of religion". This is a complex question. In Australia it is not really a decline of religion in general, but a decline in formal Protestant religious adherence. I have, from where I sit, a bit like Charles Price, from his different angle, an inordinate interest in things like ethnicity, religion and non-religion, as revealed in the very detailed and useful material that progressively emerges after each census from that wonderful secular Australian institution, the Bureau of Census and Statistics.

I am still, at the age of 63, a fairly stubborn agnostic in terms of personal religious belief, although I have acquired in later life more respect for the variety and complexity of the religious beliefs of others, and I no longer have any sort of atheist triumphalism in these matters. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, I regard the decline of Protestant religious allegiance in the census as a very healthy thing.

The actual situation is that the number of Catholics is now nudging 30 per cent, the highest ever, the number of non-believers is nudging 25 per cent, the highest ever, the number of non-Protestant religions is nudging 10 per cent, the highest ever, and the number of notional Protestants has nosedived to about 35 per cent from the 70 per cent of 50 years ago. What has actually happened is that the 10 per cent of the 25 per cent of non-believers who are ex-Catholics like me, have been replaced in the Catholic column by newer migrants from a wide spectrum of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

In my shorthand version of Australian society, I have two sides. On the one side are the majority of the 35 per cent who still identify themselves as Protestants, the majority of whom, incidentally, usually vote Liberal. On the other side of my scales are the Catholics, the non-believers, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Orthodox, who, incidentally, mostly vote Labor. On my progressive side of that division are also located the more progressive elements of Anglo-Australian background, many of whom no longer identify with the Protestant religion because of its profound identification in Australian history with reaction and the ruling class.

Protestant religion

Protestant religion in Australia has been mainly identified historically and culturally with the most reactionary aspects of Australian experience, from convict times until very recently. The convicts were totally alienated by such people as Marsden, the flogging clergyman-magistrate, and the imposition of official Protestantism on them as a form of "correction".

Marsden's major conflict with Governor Macquarie stemmed from Macquarie appointing an emancipast, ie, an ex convict, as a magistrate. The evangelical "Christian" Marsden point-blank refused to serve as a magistrate on the same bench as an ex-convict. So much for Christian redemption!

Subsequently the native born "currency" working class continued their convict parents' estrangement from the Anglican religion of their rulers. Later on, Protestantism was associated with such things as the imposition of "British Australia" on the Irish and the destruction of "pagan" Aboriginal cultural practices.

In a very important article in Labour History (No. 7, 1964) the late Rupert Lockwood, in his well-known thorough and inventive way, published a summary of a major 20,000-word research project, titled, British imperial influences in the foundation of the White Australia Policy. In this article he has a most illuminating collection of material drawing on British government documents from the Colonial Office relating to the first 70 years of white settlement.

He satisfactorily establishes that the whole ideology of British colonisation included an evangelical Protestant, racist arrogance about stamping out paganism in Australasia and the Pacific, and preserving Australia and New Zealand for "British race" white settlement. He particularly draws on the Colonial Office private papers of the major figure, Sir James Stephen, the permanent head who ran the Colonial Office in the decisive empire-shaping years for Australia of 1813 to 1847.

Stephen was an extremely influential, sophisticated, Bible-thumping member of the powerful Clapham Sect of Evangelicals, which had such enormous influence on the development of the British Empire and Australia. Sir James Stephen was also a leading figure in the foundation of the Church Missionary Society, which was the religious arm of British imperialism in the South Pacific.

Stephen's personal papers reveal that he was obsessed with the interests of Protestant evangelical religion, which he identified messianically with the "divine global mission of the British race". Stephen is quoted in Charles Price's important book, The Great White Walls are Built (Australian National University Press 1974), thus:

In 1841 he stated that Australia would be a land "where the English race shall be spread from sea to sea unmixed with any lower caste. As we now regret the folly of our ancestors in colonising North America from Africa, so should our posterity have to censure us if we should colonise Australia from India"; likewise in 1843 he opposed the proposal to use public funds to assist Indian coolies to NSW on the grounds that they would "debase by their intermixture the noble European race ... introduce caste with all its evils ... bring with them the idolatry and debasing habits of their country . . . [and] cut off the resource for many of our own distressed people". Stephen used his powerful position in the Colonial Office, and his enormous bureaucratic skills, to vigorously and in large part successfully, oppose Chinese and southern European migration to the Australian colonies, to preserve these colonies for the "divine British mission".

The first Anglican Primate of Australia, Bishop Broughton

The first Anglican Primate of Australia, Bishop Broughton, was in Anglican Church affairs, a high churchman. He was, however, a rabid anti-Papist, and he agitated throughout his religious career against Irish Catholics coming to the Colony of NSW. He was the initiator of the first committee of the Sydney establishment campaigning against Chinese and Asian immigration to the colony, and he was the chairman and dominant personality in this racist committee for nearly 15 years.

He also played a role in the attempted extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. I quote here from the book by American anthropologist, Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (Vintage, 1992) page 252:

Government-sponsored groups called roving parties, and consisting of convicts led by police, hunted down and killed Tasmanians. With the declaration of matrial law in November 1828, soldiers were authorised to kill on sight any Tasmanian in the settled areas. Next, a bounty was declared on the natives: five British pounds for each adult, two pounds for each child, caught alive. "Black catching", as it was called because of the Tasmanians' dark skins, became big business pursued by private as well as official roving parties. At the same time a commission headed by William Broughton, the Anglican archdeacon of Australia, was set up to recommend an overall policy towards the natives. After considering proposals to capture them for sale as slaves, poison or trap them, or hunt them with dogs, the commission settled on continued bounties and the use of mounted police.

Later in the 19th century, by and large, the various Protestant sects and the predominantly Protestant upper-class vigorously opposed the development of the labour movement. In the early 20th century, up to the end of the 1930s, under the rubric of opposition to "rum, Romanism, socialism and gambling" there continued to be a constant Protestant upper class and middle class mobilisation against the labour movement.

The most exotic representative of this reactionary Protestant mobilisation was the crazy, Bible-bashing Liberal politician and NSW cabinet minister, T.J.Ley, in the 1920s, later a convicted murderer. The generally anti-popular role of Protestant religion in Australian history makes an enthusiastic celebration of past Protestant religion as part of our "national imaginary" a very problematic thing indeed.

Alongside the demographic changes in formal religious allegiance, there have also been significant changes in the ideological, cultural and political character of different Australian religious groups. It should be noted that Australia is a kind of intermediate example in religious matters.

The decline of organised religion has not gone as far in Australia as it has in Britain or most of Europe. On the other hand, it has gone substantially farther in Australia than it has in the United States. If you look at the US, a rather moralising, anti-modern Protestant "religious" revival, with such aspects as banning the teaching of teaching evolution in schools, has become a very feature of American life in recent years.

This has gone on at precisely the same time as the US prison population has increased to proportionately three or four times the size of prison populations anywhere else in OECD countries. This "religious" revival in the US is an extremely barbarous cultural phenomenon and is one of the reasons why I am opposed to any retrospective celebration of the role of Protestant religion in past Australian history.

Past middle class and upper class Protestant religion in Australia had a great resemblance to the grossly mutated current American form of Protestant "religious" revival. Viewed through the prism of the history of Protestant religion in Australia, or the prism of the current American "religious" revival, that particular past religious culture is hardly a thing to be celebrated by civilised modern human beings.

Moore Theological College

Happily, numerically reduced Australian Protestant religion does not generally take the bizarre forms often characteristic of North America. We have had far fewer vicious witchhunts here, looking for non-existent "Satanic ritual child murderers". The "Toronto blessing" (speaking in tongues and writhing on the ground) and other charismatic religion, while it has acquired a certain popularity in Australia, hasn't spread in anything like the way that it has mushroomed in the midwest and the south of the United States.

The two largest mainstream Protestant sects, the broad church and high church current, dominant in the Anglican Church in Australasia, and the Uniting Church drawn from the old Presbyterians and Methodists, have both shifted somewhat to the left culturally and politically, and quite a few of their adherents these days are on the left of politics, and many of them even vote Labor rather than being entrenched Tories like their ancestors.

For this reason, the fact that I heard recently that you have become active in the Anglican Church in Armidale does not seem to me to be necessarily a decisive element in your evolution to the right. With your ethnic and cultural background, it's quite natural that if you develop religious concerns, which is not unusual in human beings later in life, you should explore the religious framework dominant in your own cultural background.

In the politics of the Anglican communion, there have been changes of a significant sort culturally, even in the evangelical wing, which I gather is the dominant force in the Armidale diocese — one of the few Evangelical Anglican dioceses outside Sydney. For the last 12 years, due to a pure accident of geography, my bookshop has been opposite Moore Theological College, the intellectual powerhouse of the rather dynamic evangelical faction dominant in the Sydney Anglican Church, which continues to conduct its rigorous and determined agitation in stubborn opposition to the broad church and high church mood predominant in Anglicanism elsewhere in Australia.

In the past, if asked to locate myself anywhere in the intellectual universe, I'd usually have located myself as far opposite as you can get from Moore College evangelicalism. After all, their Cromwellian ancestors drove my Irish Catholic ancestors to "Hell or Connaught", and those kinds of battles persisted in Australia in the 19th century, when Protestant evangelicals were at the cutting edge of British-Australian political reaction of the sort that you now tend to retrospectively celebrate.

Moore College and the Sydney evangelical faction were actually founded by a wave of unemployed Calvinist-oriented Irish Anglican ministers, displaced suddenly due to the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland in the 19th century, who carried with them to Australia a strong brew of anti-Papism, given bitter material force by their loss of status and employment due to the act of the British Parliament disestablishing the Church of Ireland (to placate the Catholic majority who were sick of paying tithes to the church of the English oppressor).

The other influences present at the foundation of Moore College were Welsh pietism and enthusiasm, and the English evangelical revivalism that culminated early in the 20th century in the Keswick movement.

In Australia in the 19th century Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans and other Protestants were ferocious wowsers. They fought vigorously against alcohol, gambling, the theatre, public dancing, divorce, mixed bathing, many public sports and against anything at all being open on Sundays, with, unfortunately, a good deal of success.

On these matters there was a massive cultural divide between the Protestant middle class and upper class, on the one hand, and the secular working class and the Irish Catholics on the other. This conflict is described comprehensively in Keith Dunstan's book, Wowsers and Bill Lawton's book A Better Time to Be. They were also rabid "British-Australia" racists. This kind of thing culminated culturally in Sydney, at the time of the First World War, when many of the staff and students of Moore College volunteered early in the war, in a euphoria of British Australia patriotism with a religious edge.

Unfortunately, many of these zealous young men were subsequently killed in the awful universal carnage of that horrible war. (The book Sydney Anglicans by Stephen Judd and Ken Cable has a useful account of the origins of Moore College.)

Manning Clark, Anglicanism and Moore College

An interesting part of Australian intellectual history is the preoccupation of our greatest Australian historian, Manning Clark, with such matters as the Enlightenment, the Anglican Church, and the Catholic Church in Australian life, and the tension and conflict between these three important influences.

Part of the explanation for this important historical preoccupation of Clark's lies in his own personal and family background and connections. Clark was a direct lineal descendant of the flogging parson/magistrate, the evangelical Samuel Marsden and of several other significant establishment figures.

His mother, a member of the Hope family, was the sister of the well known Father Hope, the longtime rector of the oppositional High Church stronghold in the strongly evangelical Sydney diocese, Christ Church St Lawrence, near Central Railway. Paradoxically, Clark's mother herself was a determined and well-formed Calvinist Anglican, entrenched in the low church Sydney tradition.

Her husband, Clark's father, was an Anglican clergyman who studied at Moore College in the early years of the century, but moved away from evangelical beliefs to a more latitudinarian Anglican viewpoint, and ended up as an Anglican minister in the Melbourne diocese. Clark's father also was involved in an unfortunate personal scandal, fathering an illegitimate child while the Anglican minister at Kempsey.

This interesting and complex personal family history obviously was a great stimulus to Clark's considerable interest in the religious and philosophical matters encapsulated in the great dramatic interplay between Catholics, Protestants and the Enlightenment in Australian history.

Moore College today

Given the complex history that I've just outlined and the reactionary Tory influences in the past of the evangelical current in Australian life, I've been fascinated by the obvious cultural changes in the Moore College community that I have observed in the 12 years they have been my neighbours. I've got to know them quite well through a process of intellectual dialogue with many of the students and staff, often sitting behind my till in the shop, or in the Green Iguana Cafe just up the road, which many of us who spend a lot of time in the area, share for breakfast.

The "new" Moore College still draws many of its students training for the Anglican ministry from the traditional lower middle class Bible belt around Epping and Ryde, or in the outer suburbs like Sutherland and Baulkham Hills (they don't seem to get many from the real upper classes). The other striking feature of the student body these days is that a quarter or a fifth of the students seem to be Asians: Chinese or Koreans. This phenomenon is partly a product of the fact that one of their ideological leaders, Phillip Jensen, was the Anglican Chaplain of the University of NSW, and his outreach work with his rather intense Bible-based Calvinist Anglicanism seems to have struck a chord with Asian students.

A curious feature about the Asian faces that seem to worry you and Charles Price as you walk through the streets of downtown Sydney is that some of them probably belong to evangelical Anglicans. Maybe you should glance under their arms and look for the New Testament before you allow yourself the "prickle of uneasiness" at their Asian faces. Associated with this is a certain amount of exogamy, some Moore College students are married to people of other ethnic groups. I find the total disappearance of anti-Asian racism in the Moore College community very striking and rather moving, conscious as I am of the fiercely British racist outlook of their immediate religious ancestors.

As part of their teaching system, Moore College places considerable emphasis on the students and staff being a small, discrete community. Most of the staff live in staff quarters in the college and by the second or third year, most of both the single and married students live in quarters in the college or college houses nearby. The effect of this is to create a compact intellectual and social community. Some other theological colleges question or reject this model, but my external impression is that it works very well for Moore College and contributes to the development of their internal esprit de corps and distinctive outlook.

Anglicans I know tell me that the Sydney evangelicals are the only group of Anglicans who are actually growing, and that they are engaged in an energetic program of colonisation of other dioceses. I find this success a bit puzzling ideologically, given their spare, rigorous, Calvinist theology. My impression from the students and the staff of the college is that these days quite a few of them quietly vote Labor.

They also are located in a reasonably compatible way in Newtown, cheek by jowel with one of the largest gay communities in the southern hemisphere, and in a typical Sydney way all of these discrete Newtown communities seem to get on fine at a day-to-day level, despite all the overt differences between them. Three cheers for Sydney!

Moore College Bible literalism

I have several times acquired copies of the Moore College syllabus in the bottom of boxes of books sold to me by departing students. I find it fascinating. The ideological bent of Moore College is still a very recognisable Calvinist, election and personal conversion based Bible Christianity. The syllabus is rather narrowly focused around the Bible, Biblical interpretation and ancient Greek and Hebrew.

There is only a limited emphasis on philosophy, general history or natural theology. Within its narrow framework, however, the college syllabus is impressively thorough and the student workload is obviously considerable. College students are required to state on oath that they have read a certain number of pages of Calvin's Institutes over the holidays, a commitment that impresses me mightily.

The two major ideological leaders of the faction, Peter Jensen, the principal of Moore College, and his brother, Phillip Jensen, both underwent conversion experiences at Billy Graham rallies in their young manhood, and their theology places a great emphasis on conversion experiences.

Moore College is said to have the largest, most diverse and comprehensive theological and biblical library in the southern hemisphere. The staff I have met are serious-minded, careful, well-educated men, extremely committed to the ideological framework of their beliefs, and the students as a whole impress me as taking these beliefs very seriously.

They have occasional theological disputes. In recent times, one of the staff, Bill Lawton, changed his views on some religious matters, in a non-evangelical direction and he ultimately left the college. They are particularly hostile to evangelical renegades or heretics like Barbara Thiering, for obvious reasons.

Their opposition to Barbara Thiering is clearly heightened by her obviously enormous erudition in matters Biblical, stemming from her early religious grounding as an evangelical, which she now uses in a complex and imaginative historical construction, locating the New and Old Testaments in the context of all the other Near Eastern religious influences within which they evolved.

This kind of scholarship, to which Thiering brings her immense knowledge of the Bible, tends to operate against the evangelical notion of the Bible as totally inspired, and the unique and sole revelation of an all powerful god, from Genesis to Revelation. Thiering's exercise of locating the Bible, reasonably reverently, in its comparative context, tends to undermine the fixated Evangelical preoccupation with the Good Book as the sole source of God's revelation.

Evangelicals often try to justify their animosity to Thiering by ridiculing her scholarship. (They assert that no other Bible scholars, by which they mainly mean other evangelicals, agree with her.) Their anger against her clearly has its deepest origins in the threat that her analytic approach presents to their whole world view.

What I find absolutely striking about Moore College and its community, which is a very distinctive sub-section of the general Newtown community of which I, too, am a part, is not so much the obvious continuity they have with past evangelical Christianity in Australia, but the subtle changes that have equally obviously taken place.

For instance, as a matter of policy, the college decided to stay in Newtown rather than move to a possibly more congenial suburban area somewhere in the Bible belt. By staying in Newtown, they obviously aim to have their students engaging with the complexities of the modern world, and this seems to me to work very well for them.

They are still believing Bible Christians, but the rabid racism has vanished and their large Asian component are full citizens of their small community. Despite the fact that they would disapprove of quite a few of the things in my shop, they have never expressed the view that anything in my shop should be censored, and a number of them are quite good customers.

They seem to have quietly changed their attitudes to things like extremes of Sunday observance, dancing, the theatre and alcohol, although they are still strongly opposed to gambling and considering the rather anti-social modern orgy of gambling in Australia, they may have a certain point there. They took vigorous and successful action to prevent a legal brothel being located opposite the college, and despite the fact that I believe that the current legalisation of prostitution is sensible I supported the college fully in its opposition to this completely inappropriate location of a brothel immediately opposite religious premises.

I get on with my Moore College neighbours extremely well and I like a lot of the individuals I know personally, despite our religious and cultural differences. The interesting point about Moore College and the Sydney Evangelicals is that they are still a significant and potent ideological and religious force.

Their modernised evangelical religious set-up is a distinctive Sydney phenomenon. To some extent they have quietly come to terms with modernity, and this has equipped them quite well to operate in the current world. They seem to me to be one of the religious groups likely to survive and grow. Personally, I reject their sophisticated Calvinist theology, which, in fact, brings into sharp focus my own fundamental philosophical problem with theism, and reason for religious disbelief, which focuses on the problem of evil.

Calvinist predestination. No salvation through good works. Damnation for the overwhelming majority of the human race who don't explicitly accept Jesus Christ as their saviour

While Moore College has changed dramatically in many matters, the underlying Calvinist theology and Biblical literalism is still a substantial part of the ideological ethos of the institution. Pleasant people although many of them are, they have three or four underlying religious preoccupations that are in the sharpest conflict with rational modernity.

They believe profoundly in Augustinian predestination, which involves the notion that God knows from the moment of creation whether each individual soul he creates will be saved or damned, and that it is possible for a saved soul to know, by an experience of Christ, whether they are saved or not. (I've never actually struck a Calvinist who thought that they were one of the damned. All those I've ever met seem to me to be convinced of their own salvation, by way of a conversion experience at some time in their lives.)

From this point of view, they make a big point of condemning any Arminian theology, which involves humans achieving salvation by good works, and that kind of theology is subject to their worst anathemas. They are extreme Bible literalists, and they seem to me to take the Bible, as translated in the 16th century, by Martin Luther and William Tyndale and the other great reformers, as the document to which, in practice, they ascribe God's direct inspiration, and therefore the source of all real religious knowledge.

For me, Richard Marius's very important and magisterial life of Martin Luther establishes quite effectively the eclectic way in which Luther selectively developed Bible literalism to bolster his already existing views on many questions, and Moore College theology seems to me to proceed in much the same way as Martin Luther did in relation to the Bible. In discussion with some of the staff and students recently, I was startled when it dawned on me that many of them, possibly the majority, reject notions of Darwinian physical evolution in favour of reationism.

Christians who accept Darwinian physical evolution, while ascribing it to god's direct intervention, are regarded by many Moore College evangelicals as being on the extreme radical outer wing of their Christian community.

The recent Anglican Church ideological explosion, spearheaded from Moore College, over the quite moderate religious views of the new Anglican Primate of Australia, Peter Carnley, throws their basic Calvinist evangelical theology into bold relief.

Two aspects of Carnley's views figure most sharply in their expressions of outrage. First of all, his very careful and limited qualification of the notion of a physical ressurection by Christ. Secondly, his statement that conscientiously believing adherents of other religions could possibly be saved. The angry Sydney evangelical response to this proposition is based on the fundamental Calvinist notion that no one can be saved except people who recognise Christ as their saviour, as the Moore College people do.

This is obviously pretty tough on the three or four billion people in the world who have never heard of the Christian revelation, but the muscular Calvinist theology isn't deterred by this problem, and asserts tough cheddar for those not selected for salvation by God, as salvation is a free gift from the deity, as we all deserve damnation anyway because Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, etc. Their theology is pretty brutally constructed, and is obviously only psychologically acceptable to those who are convinced of their own salvation.

This theology inevitably tends to confine "salvation" to a suitably small and select proportion of the human population, consigning the vast majority of us to the flames down below. It's fairly understandable that evangelical Calvinist theology had great appeal to the Dutch and English entrepreneurial capitalists when they were embarked in the 17th and 18th centuries on the great adventure of carving up the world into empires.

This kind of Calvinism was also very strong among the Boer farmers in South Africa at the height of Apartheid, as they conveniently associated their privileged position in relation to the conquered blacks, with God's municifent favour to his chosen people and to the saved, which was, of course, them.

The fierce cultural arrogance of this deeply held underlying evangelical view has given rise to angry and amusing journalism, like Mike Carlton's Sydney Morning Herald article in which he compares the evangelicals to the repellant evangelical Canon Slope in Barchester Towers and says that he would not like to be in the same heaven with Sydney evangelicals.

An imaginative satirist describes St Peter taking a group of tourists around heaven. He shows them the locations for all the different groups like the Buddhists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims etc. When he gets to a little corner, St Peter shows them a cordoned off area, where he says: "we keep the Sydney evangelicals here, and try to maintain the illusion in their minds that they are the only ones here, for the sake of their mental stability".

Their fundamental Calvinist theology and network of beliefs collides sharply with the modern world in a number of ways. Nevertheless, their agressive prosetelysing, and their appearance of religious certainty gives the Moore College Evangelicals a certain appeal to people out of the Protestant tradition who are cut adrift by the dramatic and fairly constant decline of the official Protestant religious ethos.

For this reason, the modern Sydney Evangelicals are a significant part of the complex skein of Sydney cultural life, quite capable of looking after themselves within the stimulating, complex and contradictory mosaic of Sydney cultural and religious life.

As the graduates of the "new" Moore College come more and more to staff the Anglican Church in the Sydney Diocese, and in the other dioceses where they are engaged in their energetic colonisation, it will be fascinating to see what changes take place in the Anglican communion.

It seems very clear to me that, while the current staff and students of Moore College have deep and enduring roots in the Calvinist Protestant Evangelical tradition from which they come, that, nevertheless, they are different in a number of important ways to the totally politically and socially reactionary old Tory conservatism that used to be associated with the evangelical current in the Anglican church. The exact form that the changes within Anglicanism will take are not yet entirely clear, but it is quite clear that Moore College will be a force in these changes.

In modern Australia the interface between religion and politics has changed significantly. For instance, the Moore College evangelicals are, these days, carefully removed a bit from the public political sphere, although obviously many of their North Shore upper crust allies in the broad evangelical faction dominant in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney are still a major influential force in Liberal Party politics.

Nowadays there is quite a significant Catholic presence in the Liberal Party, which was absolutely unthinkable even 30 years ago. One curiosity of this is that the Opus Dei ultra-clerical Catholic secret society is well represented in the leadership of the right wing faction, which is currently challenging the left liberals for control of the Liberal Party in NSW. Another significant presence in this Liberal right wing faction is members of the Mormon Church, the fastest growing religion on earth, whose origins in the "special angelic revelation" of Joseph Smith in the 19th century, are such an instructive caricature of the far more historically remote and obscure origins of Christianity and Islam.

Despite these shifts in the model of developing progressive Australian national identity that will emerge for the 21st century, the main components will come, I believe, from my right-hand column, the column with the Jews, Catholics, Anglo non-believers, Orthodox and Muslims etc, in my scales, though an increasing number will also come, as well, from continuing Protestant religious believers who have shed the past reactionary triumphalism of British Australia.

All ABS statistics and emerging demographics suggests that my progressive side of the scales are now comfortably in front and will continue to draw ahead, which bodes badly for your sad notion of the "core holding quality" of Anglo-British Australia.

It seems to me wrong historically to attempt to rehabilitate the reactionary past of Australian Protestant religion, as part of your "core holding quality" of "Anglo-Celtic Australia". In the 19th century, despite the reactionary Medieval ideology of the Catholic Church, the oppressed class position of the Irish Catholics propelled them into the progressive, democratic, reform-minded, rebellious side of Australian society.

On the other hand, the class position of Protestantism, as the religion particularly of the oppressing upper class and their middle class clients, located Protestant religion firmly on the side of reaction. The more civilszed position of many modern Australian Protestants, produced by changed social circumstances, is a very good thing, but it can't be used to rewrite the historical record.

David Marr's book, The High Cost of Heaven

The eloquent and elegant opponent of censorship, David Marr, has just had published a book dissecting the influence of the Christian sects on Australian life, particularly in relation to censorship. Marr is a beautiful and powerful writer, and this book is both brilliant polemic, and emotional testimony, informed by the experience of a gay man who grew up in an Anglican religious environment, and for a considerable period in his life tried to balance his Anglican religious beliefs and his emerging homosexual sexuality.

His angry book is a realistic corrective to being too soft on some of the negative features of the influence of all the Christian religions, both the Protestants and the Catholics, on Australian life. His acid but reasonably fair and amusing pen sketches of such people as Brian Harradine and Phillip Jensen raise a number of serious questions about the pressures exerted by organised Christianity, to impose, for instance, censorship standards that they favour, on the rest of us who have different values.

David Marr is absolutely right to warn against the wide extension of official government censorship. That is a much bigger danger than the difficulties involved in a more relaxed attitude to censorship. The recent extraordinary banning of a French film including non-violent explicit heterosexual sex scenes underlines the danger of broadly expanded official censorship.

In general I am strongly opposed to censorship. Some alleged artistic productions, such as the Virgin in the Condom, the Piss Christ, and the recent elephant dung Virgin, ought not to be displayed, because of the obvious attack involved on the deeply held religious symbols of many people, but it's better to achieve the withdrawal of such offensive artifacts by public pressure than by outright censorship.

The problem with official censorship, once it gathers momentum, is that the would-be censors, who are often driven by an underlying fundamentalist religious impulse, really have the intention of outlawing all public artistic representation of explicit sexuality. Happily, most of the population doesn't agree with them. Why should the minority views of some Christians on such matters be imposed on the rest of us?

A similar problem arises in relation to the rights of homosexuals. All Christian sects regard homosexual activity as what the Catholics would call a "mortal sin", despite the fact that, to a certain percentage of the population, their homosexual desire is as primal as the sexual drive of heterosexual people.

This is one of the features of the natural universe that sharpens my personal rejection of Christianity. Most religious believers have created a cosmology in their minds that contains an all-powerful God, who is good in all respects, and has created and sustains the universe at every moment in time. On the face of it, according to this set of beliefs, he has created a certain proportion of the population whose sex drives (the most primal of drives) will, if practiced, condemn them to damnation.

The Calvinist or Jansenist resolution of this problem, that if homosexuals are part of the elect, they will resist these primal sexual urges, seems totally ridiculous to me on the basis of all my observations of the world. This is another aspect of the "problem of evil", which is my ultimate philosophical reason for rejecting Christianity.

Marr writes in the most moving way about homosexuality and religion, and his very real pain and anguish highlights the great problems involved in reconciling, in society at large, the interests of all, including homosexuals and Christians, when many fundamentalist Christians regard homosexual activity as such a grievous sin that it ought to be stamped out, by almost any means available.

Hints, inferences and inuendos

I must say I found your new book a bit on the difficult side. In it you have well and truly made the leap from history into almost pure cultural theory despite your ostensible disagreement with other cultural theorists and post modernists.

I have a problem with an apparent historical discourse that remains almost entirely on a very abstract theoretical plane, except when you use the odd well-chosen illustration to buttress your theoretical position.

With a considerable degree of effort, I believe I get the general drift of your argument. I am infuriated by constant asides in which you infer an often thoroughly reactionary stance on current contested political questions, but do it in such a way as to leave yourself the out that you may have been misunderstood. As an example of what I mean, on page 42, you write:

Mourning and moving on

We end this first chapter where we began. Charles Price, a pioneering opponent of White Australia, observed in 1990 that people object to novelty if they fear "the whole character of the nation [is] changing too fast". For "ordinary people", it's a question of how many Asian-looking people there will be as you walk down the street. Living in rural Australia for over 30 years, on visits to the city I can detect in myself prickles of shock, even traces of fear alongside real pleasure at the diversity brought by newer ethnic groups. So I understand what Price was getting at. The problem is that an intermediate process has been discouraged, not by those newer groups themselves of course, but by the Australian intellectual culture and by officialdom. Part of the Australian "obsession" with identity turns on the relation between the "core culture" and the ethnic groups represented in post-1970s mass immigration. For some of that obsessiveness is a displaced grief that is forbidden to mourn and has nowhere to go.

And again, on page 33:

But should we sit back and conclude it is an inevitable and sufficiently strong process? Anglo-Celtic Australians are to a degree handing on an existing social imaginary to non-Anglo-Celts. That "mixture" itself forms the bridge by which, with all their drawbacks, old-identity values and attitudes may both cement and maintain the emerging whole. While ethnic characteristics must always flourish as desired, the absorption of sufficient old-identity values — especially political values — into this "mixed" section will do much to ensure Australia's prospects for workable coherence in the long term. And therefore the more diversity will feel safe to flourish. Yet in today's world we can hardly sit back complacently. If Price's "fastest-growing", "mixed" section of Anglo-Celts and non-Anglo-Celts are adopting aspects of the pre-existing Australian imaginary, his statistics make it clear that this take-up is broad enough. But to what extent does it strike deeply enough to ensure sufficiently powerful continuity of civic and other values?

And again, on page 46:

Yet in Australia, as throughout the West, the nation's reputation — never high in many circles — deteriorated during the late 1970s and 1980s. In the intellectual culture, attachment to the nation is widely seen "as a ... folkloric harbinger of an abiding series of dark possibilities — from racial vilification ... to ethnic cleansing". Indeed so dense is "the thicket of negatives now associated with the phenomenon of nationalism", according to the Monash University sociologist Robert Birrell, that anti-nationalism has become "a marker of intelligentsia standing".

There are many other similar passages throughout the book, organised in much the same way, with a very dense theoretical construction, and an implicit political conclusion, but expressed through the voices of others, particularly in this case, Charles Price, who is a very good demographer but gets blamed for many strange things nowadays.

I particularly dislike the totally demagogic mantra with which I am already familiar, from Katharine Betts, Paul Sheehan, Robert Birrell and others, in which the "cosmomulticultural" views of the alleged "new class" are counterposed to the allegedely chauvinistic views of "ordinary Australians". This construction has become, in the migration, ethnicity and multiculturalism debate, a bit like the clouds of ink released by squids when threatened.

It seems to me, Miriam, old colleague, that you are quite aware of all the current controversies on levels of migration, the racial composition of migration, multiculturalism and other questions, and it seems obvious that your views have moved fairly sharply in a right-wing, Anglophile, "British" direction. If that is indeed the case, why not come out and say so more explicitly? Participate in the debate. Let's have an argument on these matters.

Keeping it all on this lofty ultra-theoretical plane seems to me to be an attempt to join the debate while not joining the debate, and intellectually dishonest. As an example of what I mean, the business about seeing too many oriental faces in the streets of Sydney. You don't know the half of it. You should walk from Central Railway down Broadway to the old Grace Brothers. If Asian faces make you a little uneasy, you'll be scared stiff after you get to Grace Brothers.

Sydney is like that these days, and it's a more interesting and exciting and prosperous place because of it. Most of us who live here are almost oblivious to the faces of the people we see (We see them every day.) Sydneysiders are mostly invigorated and even excited by the cultural diversity obvious in the streets. Most of us realistically associate that cultural diversity with Sydney's relative prosperity compared to some other parts of Australia.

The Irish in Australia

In my re-reading of The Real Matilda I was, on this occasion, rather electrified by your treatment of the Irish question and of women convicts. I remember being troubled by this analysis when I first read it back in the 1970s but pushing it aside in mild embarrassment, giving you the benefit of the doubt, thinking that maybe you might have known more than I did on the subject due to some special individual research.

But now that I see that analysis in the context of the further development of your construction of Australia, and now that there is a vast amount of new material and real research available on these questions, I'm driven to challenge your analysis rather sharply. You say, on page 155 in the old Penguin edition, at the start of the chapter on the Irish:

In the 19th century between one-third and one-quarter of Australia's population was Irish, the percentage of single female immigrants sometimes running far higher. The Irish clustered most markedly on the lowest rungs of the status hierarchy. Russel Ward has argued that the Irish influence on early Australian working-class attitudes was disproportionately strong and consequently "Irish working-class attitudes formed another important ingredient in the distinctive Australian ethos which was developing". Although I agree with his appraisal of the strength of Irish influence, I suggest we substitute "lower-class" for "working-class" and more important, adopt a view of the Irish as not-quite-Western, and as primitive in the sense of pre-modern. This was a view commonly held by the English at the time: "The men of the establishment in Sydney thought the Irish Catholics so benighted . . . that, in their eyes, there was nothing but the shade of a Catholic's skin to distinguish him from an aborigine." In this was the Irish male, like the black, became a "victim" of English colonial arrogance and he passed on to his woman the humiliation and blighted self-image which imperialism enforced on the colonized Irish male. The humble, quasi-Western status of Irish women, Irish rigid sex-role stereotyping and Irish fear of sexuality have done a good deal to shape the curiously low standing and impoverished self-identity of Australian women.

Irish males were the victims of long centuries of English colonial cruelty, despoliation, contempt and arrogance. By coming to Australia, the Irish did not shake off their past heritage, neither its treasures, its dreams nor its nightmares. The Irish were classed as "victims", and as masters are prone to do, the English defined their victims as wretchedly unworthy beings. Even if, and as, a victim, passionately rejects his master's definition, a deep and treacherous corner of the heart accepts it and turns it inward in self-hate and self-denigration. Survival demands he turns it back, outwards, as much as he can. Usually, a victim achieves only limited success in this; changing early versions of the self is hard going. But nothing stops him trying. Part of their self-hate, thus, Irish males turned outwards on to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant master; part, alas, on to Irish women.

You develop this position further on in The Real Matilda and you return to it at length in The Imaginary Australian. I believe that this construction is a totally flawed Anglophone British imperialist view of Australian social development, and also of Irish social development. The Manning Clark, Russell Ward, Allan Patience, Michael Roe, Don Baker, James G. Murtagh, Rupert Lockwood and Eris O'Brien treatment of this question is a far more accurate and truthful representation of the general Irish influence on Australian life, culture and politics.

The Whiggish, Protestant cant about the Irish being "pre-modern" is a particularly offensive and distorted view of this question. I base myself here on the above writers in relation to Australia, and on particularly E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, T.A. Jackson's Ireland Her Own and John Prebble's important work on Scottish history and particularly on the Scottish clearances. I would also refer you to Theodore W. Allan's recent book on the construction of British Race ideology on the back of the colonisation of Ireland. As Thompson points out in The Making of the English Working Class, a big slice of the whole of the British Isles, including England, was pre-modern in the 19th century.

The persistence of the clan collectivism in Ireland and, indeed, in Scotland and Wales, was a powerful force of political and social resistance that carried over almost immediately into the construction of a working class in Britain and the development of a labour movement. Witness the enormous Irish presence in Chartism, for instance. What Trotsky, in particular, described as combined and uneven development came into play very sharply here. The unfulfilled national aspirations of the Irish and, indeed, the Scots and the Welsh, impacted directly into the making of the English working class as described by Thompson, and more so into the construction of the labour movement. This was even more the case in Australia.

The Irish may well have been illiterate, as you say, but so were many of the English and the Scots. But in rapidly developing Australia they all learned to read pretty fast. The "clannish Gaelic" oral history that you appear to fear actually did exist and it poured into the new literary culture of the Irish as they learned to read. It was a very handy, lively and useful thing, the "clannish pre-modern" oral culture, and it permeated the whole of Australian life, somewhat threateningly, perhaps, to your newly emerging straightlaced, Whiggish inclination, but a wonderful basis for rebellion, struggles for democracy, battles against the arrogant ruling class of "British Australia", etc.

The wonderful role of this "pre-modern" Irish oral culture in Australia was beautifully described in John Manifold's important book, Who Wrote the Ballads and also in the lifelong work on Australian folklore by John Meredith, particularly his important work on Frank the Poet.

As Allan Patience said, in his response a few years ago to your fellow Anglophile, Frank Knopfelmacher:

The early history of Australian Catholicism robs Dr Knopfelmacher's quaint doctrine of Anglomorphism of any substance. Many Irish and other Celtic convicts and their families experienced the quasi-racist cruelty of the English officials and soldiers in the early part of this country's history. It was partly a response to this that the Australian colonies in the latter half of the 19th century rapidly formulated some of the most radically democratic political institutions for their times. The democratic strains that grew so healthily then later informed and helped shape similar developments in democratic government in England. In short, it is ridiculous to assert that some mythical anglomorphism radiates out from England to shine civilisation upon us all. The English have been relatively slow, though promiscuous, learners, borrowing from other cultural traditions, not the least being the Celtic traditions upon which they imposed themselves over 400 years ago. Knopfelmacher's position is dismissive of the integrity and richness of non-Anglomorphic Celtic traditions and is seemingly ignorant of the democratic history of Australia's political development.

I can't better Patience's statement of the position. That's my position too, and in different ways it is the outlook of liberal leftist historians like Manning Clark, Russel Ward, Keith Amos and Michael Roe, Marxists like Don Baker, and Catholic historians like James Murtagh, Tom Keneally, Eris O'Brien and Colm Kiernan. Patrick O'Farrell, on whom you particularly rely for your jaundiced interpretation of Irish Australian history, is a very industrious and useful chronicler, but a rather conservative interpreter of the ethnic and cultural politics of Irish Australia.

Women convicts, Irish women convicts, and Irish women

Your interpretation of women's history, and particularly convict and Irish women's history, seems to me to be, on mature reflection, just plain wrong. It suffers badly from the Damned Whores and God's Police syndrome made famous by Anne Summers in her groundbreaking book on Australian women. In the last 20 years feminist historians and many other historians have been researching both Irish women in Australia and convict women in Australia.

Portia Robinson, in particular, has done an enormous amount of work on convict women. Her work shows that many convict women made "good" in Australia in quite a spectacular way and improved their status significantly, including many Irish convict women. While convict women certainly were oppressed, even doubly oppressed, nevertheless, the sheer shortage of women gave them a distinct social advantage and even some power in the situation, which enabled many of them to advance and improve their lives.

Incidentaly, about half the convict women were Irish Catholics, a fairly recent discovery. The improvement of the status of women in Australia did not only, or even mainly, come from the women of the leisured upper classes, as you imply. It came in quite a dramatic way, from below, from the sheer life affirmation of the women of the "lower orders", particularly the Irish, with their rebellious outlook and "clan collectivism".

All the recent literature shows this. (An interesting small question in Australian intellectual history might be: did your views in The Real Matilda about convict women spark off Portia Robinson's interest in the question, which led her to produce the massive evidence that refutes your thesis, and to produce the major and effective critical article she wrote later about The Real Matilda.)

The Irish women in particular

There is now a considerable literature on this question, and you ought to change your position in the light of this work. I refer you particularly to the books, Barefoot and Pregnant, by Trevor McClaughlin, also Irish Women in Colonial Australia, edited by T. McClaughlin, Allen and Unwin 1998, the chapters on women in The Irish Emigrant Experience in Australia, edited by J. O'Brien and P. Travers, 1991, the extremely important work by Shirley Fitzgerald on Irish women in Sydney in Rising Damp, Grace Karskens' recent books on Millers Point, which include a major section on the Irish women there, an the rich literature about the history of various nuns and communities of nuns in Australia.

The picture that emerges from this literature is quite different to your gloomy picture of total oppression and total sexual oppression of Irish women. The sexual repression in Ireland was a relatively recent phenomenon of the 17th and 18th centuries, imposed on Ireland by a curious combination of British Imperialism and the repressive Jansenist influence within Irish Catholicism that started in the 17th century, due to the training of Irish priests in French seminaries, where Jansenism was dominant.

This was a rather insecure overlay on the wonderful robust Rabelaisian Brehon Irish Celtic culture which was sexually anything but repressed and in which women had a very high status. Brehon culture kept breaking out among the "clannish Irish", particularly led by the women, in opposition to all of the forces trying to stamp it out. This is one of the explanations for the practical persistence of the "Irish clan culture" to which you refer frequently, without too much real understanding, and explains the quite powerful social influence that Irish women continued to exercise despite their ostensible subjection.

No one who has any serious familiarity with Ireland, the Irish or Irish Australians, including Irish Australian women, really believes that those women were any more repressed than other women, and in fact they often appeared in a number of significant ways to be more independent and liberated.

When the Irish national struggle erupted in its most decisive form in the early years of this century in Ireland, women were in the forefront. Sixty women actually fought in the GPO in the Easter Rising. Constance Markievicz was a Republican General in the Rising.

So potent and vigorous a political force were women in the Irish national revolution of 1916 to 1922 that the Cumman Na mBann, the nationalist women's movement founded by Constance Markievicz was an absolutely decisive political force. For instance, the fact that the women's organisation rejected the Treaty by 419 to 63 votes at its convention on 5th February 1922 was the decisive event that precipitated Ireland towards the civil war over the Treaty.

It is worth quoting (from Conor Kostick's book Revolution in Ireland) the following:

The Cumman Na mBann believed that by opposing the Treaty they had ... "regained for the women of Ireland the rights that belonged to them under the old Gaelic civilisation [the Brehon laws], where sex was no bar to citizenship, and where women were free to devote to the service of their country every talent and capacity with which they were endowed; which rights were stolen from them under English rule, but were guaranteed to them in the Republican Proclamation of Easter week".

Even the sexual repressiveness in the Catholic education system in Australia was an exaggerated version of the sexual rep

Interrogating Miriam Dixson A letter to an old colleague

(With apologies to E.P. Thompson and Leszek Kolokowski)