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The Oxford Companion to Australian History
A critical comment
By Bob Gould
The Oxford Companion to Australian History, edited by
Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre
This impressive-looking 710-page book was published in 1998,
with a
lot of hype, as the definitive companion to Australian history. The
three named editors are high-powered academic figures in the Melbourne
historical establishment, all professors at major universities, one of
whom, Hirst, represents the right, so to speak, Macintyre the left and
Davison is kind of in the centre.
Well, in my view, this book may be useful in the way the Encyclopaedia
Britannica
often is, as a largely unused prestigious presence on your bookshelves,
but a useful companion to Australian history it is not, and I'll try to
explain why.
A useful companion should be a comprehensive coverage of the
field,
in an accessable, user-friendly mode. At the very minimum, such a
volume should have a comprehensive index or at least a comprehensive
name index.
The other Oxford companions to various Australian disciplines
that I
have seen have general indexes or name indexes, or both. This book has
neither. As a substitute, it has something called a subject index at
the end, a very summary and confusing index, with only a handful of
headings.
The nearest thing you get to a name index is a list of
historians in
the subject index, and a list of contributors to the volume itself at
the front of the book. Many, many significant historians or historical
figures who are mentioned in the book make it neither into the list of
contributors nor the name index.
If a historical figure or a historian that the three
prestigious
editors consider minor (maybe this classification is in relation to
themselves) don't make it into the book itself with their own entry,
there is no direct way of locating any reference to them, even if it
exists in the book.
To make matters worse in this respect, there are two
categories of citizenship in relation to books mentioned in the Companion.
Contributors, and the major historians mentioned in the historians
entry in the subject index are in large bold type if they are mentioned
in an entry in the book. Lesser mortals, particularly lesser
historians, are mentioned in plain type.
If you wish to find out whether Judith Keen is mentioned, you
have
to have the brainwave of thinking: "Ah, Spanish Civil War." Well, yes,
she is there in that entry, but you could easily miss her in the small
type. And again, the notable Sydney historian, Shirley Fitzgerald,
Australia's most important urban historian. She is not a contributor.
She is not in the list of historians, but: "Ah, maybe urban history",
and there she is, if you read the small type.
The same for Ross Fitzgerald, the important Queensland
historian.
There are many extremely significant historians who don't make it into
the list of historians or contributors, and are therefore only present,
if at all, in an entry about their specialty, if you can have a flash
as to what that specialty would be called, but always in the small type.
There are a couple of hundred historians mentioned in the book
in
subject entries, who are in no way accessable by any index. What a
pompous, academic, elitist, self-serving way to organise something
called a Companion to Australian History. Easily solved by the
presence of a general name index, of course, but that would take the
focus off the big guys.
A small sample of hundreds of Oxford small-print historians,
or
historians not mentioned in the volume at all, would be: Shirley
Fitzgerald, Judith Keen, Ross Fitzgerald, Bob Connell, Ray Markey, Jan
Kociumbas, Jock Collins, Colm Kiernan, Jim Andrighetti, Barry York, Bob
Murray, J.N. Rawling, Lynette Silver, Eddie Penzig, Malcolm Campbell,
Sandy Yarwood, Susanna Short, Tom O'Lincolin, Susanna De Vries, Anne
Henderson, Gerard Henderson, Roger Milliss, Mary Dickenson, Alleyn
Best, Allan Barcan, Rosemany Broomham, Richard Raxworthy, Sue Rosen,
Lenore Coltheart, R.D. Walshe, John Bach, Portia Robinson, Robert
Travers, Siobhan McHugh, Henry Mayer, Joan Rydon, R.N. Spann, Helen
Nelson, Michael Hogan, Jack Hutson, Peter Edwards, Rupert Lockwood,
Greg Pemberton, Edward Duyker, Bruce Muirden, Edmund Campion, Bill
Hornadge, Lorna McDonald, Jim Miller, Bobbie Hardie, Noel Loos, David
Marr, John Meredith, Ray Evans, John Harris, Paul Carter, Neil Gunson,
Anna Haebich, James E. Calder, Bruce Elder, Pamela Lukin Watson,
Geoffrey Blomfield, Neville Green, John Pilger, P.D. Gardner, Hudson
Fysh, Nancy Cato, Bill Rosser, L.E. Skinner, Gordon Reid, Hector
Holthouse, Keith Willey, Mary Durack, Peter Taylor, Judy MacKinolty,
Graham Jenkin, Ian Clark, David Lowe, Luise Hercus, Douglas Lockwood,
Alistair Davidson, David Headon, Judith Wright, William Joy, Bradley
Bowden, Clem Lloyd, Ken Buckley, Stewart Svenssen, Tim Flannery, James
G. Murtagh, Jim Hagan, Ken Turner, T. Suttor, Margo Beasley, Frank
Farrell, Dick Hall, Audrey Johnson, Izzy Wyner, Braden Ellem, E.W.
Campbell, Jerzy Zubricki, Kay Daniels, Don Watson, Fr. Patrick Ford,
Delia Birchley, A.G. Evans, D.W.A. Baker, Oliver McDonagh, Tony Laffin,
Winifred Mitchell, Hall Greenland, Nial Brennan, Jim Griffin, Paul
Ormonde, Tom Truman, Alan Grocott, Malcolm Prentiss, Tony Cahill, E.J.
Docker, Kylie Tennant, Tom Keneally, John O'Brien, Patrick Travers,
Jakelin Troy, Bob Reece, Marianne Wilkinson, Michael Blakeney, Edgar
Ross, Graeme Osborne, Warren Fahey, Sylvia Lawson, Robert Cooksey,
Dennis Murphey, Dennis Cryle, Gerhardt Fischer, Colleen Burke, Zoe
O'Leary, Pamela Rajkowski, John Manifold, Max Brown, Hugh Anderson,
Terry Burstall, Bill Beatty, Keith Dunstan, Bob Birrell, Charles
Rowley, Keith Windschuttle, C.Y. Choi, C.F. Yong, Jan Roberts, Peter
Corris, Julia Blackburn, R.L. Kirk, Peter White, James F. O'Connell,
Sean Brawley, Katharine Betts, Lloyd Ross, Andrew Moore, and even
Andrew Wells, Macintyre's initial collaborator on the history of the
Australian Communist Party, and so on.
The discrete entry on Herbert Vere Evatt in the book does not
even mention his major and important books of history, Rum Rebellion,
William Holman and the Australian Labour Movement, and The
King and His Dominion Governors.
The list of historians given in the rather rudimentary subject
index
at the back just has the surname of the historian without given names
or initials, which, in the case of common names, makes it very hard to
work out who is intended, and is an aristocratic form that is a
formidable obstacle to utility.
One feature of the book seems to be that the further away from
Melbourne a historian or subject gets, the less recognition they get in
the book. Another feature is that non-university academic historians,
popular historians and public historians get very little mention or
recognition in this book.
By way of comparison, the Oxford Companion to British
History
in the same series, published a year earlier, and very similar in
format and layout, is about 300 pages longer. It has one editor, John
Cannon, and no research assistants are mentioned. It has a simple
arrangement for all contributions. They all, including Cannon's, have
standard initials. Less elitist, no large bold type for favoured
historians or historical subjects. This book also has a subject index
at the end, with, however, no subject entry for historians. Cannon's
book is more down-to-earth all round, and less academically snobbish.
In my view, both books would benefit from a general index as well.
It gets worse. Most of the actual work on the book was
obviously
done by the two "research assistants", Helen Doyle and Kim Torney,
although it is also clear from the book that the prodigiously energetic
Stuart Macintyre also did a lot of the work. This presents a bit of a
problem in terms of big guys' academic protocol in relation to
attribution.
This problem is overcome in what seems to me an exceedingly
snobbish
way. The historian contributors who only make the occasional
contribution are generally attributed with their full name. Two of the
three editors, the two with the smaller number of contributions, Hirst
and Davison, are mainly attributed with their full name, but
occasionally with initials. The energetic Macintyre presents a problem.
If you used his name all the time, he would dominate the book, which
might put the other two editors' noses out of joint, so he is
attributed by name about a third of the time, and he gets initials for
the rest.
This ostensible humility still leaves his imprint all over the
book,
but with a certain discrete bashfulness. The poor old research
assistants, who produce workmanlike, intelligent and knowledgeable
entry after entry, only rate initials. If ever a book was produced to
look like a useful tool without being nearly as useful as it looks, but
to also embody academic snobbery, it is this bizarre title.
An accommodation between the left and the right of the
Melbourne historical establishment
The Companion has a curious editorial slant. It is
obviously
an accommodation between the leftist liberal views of Macintyre, and
the rightist views of Hirst, and what emerges is a kind of two-strand
establishment, corporate liberalism as the dominant view. Macintyre is
the expert on the labour movement, culture and ideology, and this area
is dominated by his personal preoccupations and biases. He has a
certain reverence for radical things in the past, but this is shot
through with a hostility to all populism. He's rather down on Jack
Lang, and so on.
He manages to write an entry on the history of the Labor Party
without mentioning Lang, Eddie Ward, Jack Beasley, or Laurie Short. In
fact, Eddie Ward isn't mentioned anywhere in the book.
Macintyre manages to mention the ALP-DLP split, without
reference to Bob Murray's seminal work on the subject, The Split.
He showcases at length such things as the "new left", and his version
of class, and elevates, rather out of proportion to their real
significance, academic arguments about matters in which he was involved.
Carl Bridge is the author of the entry on Manning Clark, and
he
savages Clark with all the conventional critical points, several of
which in my view, are mostly wrong. But this all fits in with
downgrading the significance of past historians who gave great weight
to matters such as class, the labour movement and the clash of the
Irish and the British in Australian history.
The person who does the entry on the Catholic Church,
Catherine
Massam, dismisses in a rather ahistorical way the Tridentine Irish
Catholic populism of the 19th century, and so on. One Mark Lyons, who
contributes the essay on sectarianism (religious, presumably), quotes
his own postgraduate thesis, the core of which seems to be the rather
eccentric and unpleasant but widely held, essentially Anglophile, view
that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was mainly responsible for
the religious sectarianism of the 19th century.
A kind of political correctness, from the viewpoint of a bland
corporate liberalism on major questions, dominates the book from start
to finish.
A feature of this book that has infuriated the radical
conservative clique around the magazine Quadrant
is its lengthy and thorough attention to all aspects of Aboriginal
history. In my view, this lengthy and thorough attention to Aboriginal
history is the best feature of the book. The comical huffing and
puffing of the current Quadrant bunch about this matter
underlines how far removed they are from a civilised approach to the
real world.
On the right, in Hirst's territory, so to speak, ruthless
corporate
liberalism also prevails in the basic ideology of the book. If you can
find Black Jack McEwan, for instance, which is difficult (a mental test
for any reader who has a copy of the book: try to imagine what entry he
is under in the small print) you find that the tariff/wage-increase
trade-off over which he presided for a number of years was a very bad
thing.
Again, there is even an entry for the Northern Myth,
by
Graeme Davison. He asserts quite forcefully that any idea of populating
the northern part of Australia is total rubbish. There is a quite
pronounced bias in the book against matters such as irrigation, and the
entries relating to agriculture and also to the environment, are shot
through with a mild animosity towards the agricultural sector of
Australian society. Even the entry on multiculturalism tells us that
multiculturalism is now a bad thing.
A striking example of the historical narrowmindedness and
Melbourne-centric nature of this book is its virtual abolition from
Australian history of Henry Mayer and his colleagues in the Sydney
University Department of Government. From the 1950s to the 1990s this
department's empirical school of Australian political history and study
was a major force in political history, through its monographs, the
journal edited by Mayer, Politics, and the seven editions of
the Reader edited by Mayer, which influenced tens of thousands
of Australian undergraduates.
There is no potted history of Australian art, only an entry
about
art history. I couldn't find any reference anywhere in the book to
Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Ken Done, Noel Counihan or Brett Whiteley.
Very strange.
In sum, this appears to be a book in which assorted versions
of
what, in these postmodern times is looseley designated theory, has
triumphed almost completely over what Karl Marx used to say: "history
is whole cloth".
That's a great pity, really. The many entries under the
initials of
the two research assistants are very good indeed, and in fact they
display an often quirky and much broader historical approach than that
of the three editors. It's a great pity they did not have even greater
control over the book. Who knows, they may even have modifield or
removed the corporate liberal ideological bias. And I bet if they had
been in control they would have insisted on an index and name index to
make it the useful research tool that it might have been.
August 1, 1999
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