Australian History as It was Taught

History was not continuously taught at the private secondary school I attended in New South Wales, being reserved as an option for the final two matriculation years of high school. The History of Modern Europe by S.H. Roberts of Sydney University was the set text. I remember sitting in the classroom while the history lesson proceeded. Teaching consisted of the reading of Roberts aloud while students underlined passages for memorisation. Even so, parts of the lessons I overheard stirred my imagination. I still recall a phrase: “At this time Garibaldi smashed his way onto the centre of the stage.” Hardly memorable to an experienced ear but back then it made me think that history could be interesting.

At university the boiled-down outlines provided by lecturers were useful but for me rarely aroused much curiosity. But some books I read, giving story and context, did. I could not resist reading the lives of some memorable figures, such as Philip of Macedon, and also works such as Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History, with its promise of the unusual. I probably thought of history as story. (English literature was my main interest.)

Duncan MacCallum was a short, rotund, mild-mannered man who peered short-sightedly at the audience. He arrived with a folder of loose notes. Pages were soon strewn across the demonstration bench of the science lecture-room we used. He picked his way through the notes with some confidence, reading a page from here, one from over there. But occasionally there was a hiccup: “Now where is it?” I imagined him sighing inaudibly, as the class hoped with a mixture of embarrassment and sympathy that he would light upon what he was looking for to everyone’s relief. Usually he did, but not always. He could miraculously produce an item, sometimes a mere scrap of paper, like an errant footnote. But other times there were loose ends.

What impressed me was his dedication to minutiae that he believed important to completing the picture he felt bound to give. I sensed the enormous time and thoroughness behind his accumulated pile of papers, and also that each part of the puzzle, or of the questions he raised, mattered a great deal to him. No short cuts. Also, he implicitly conveyed the truth that “origins”, such as those of the first settlement, were complex matters and that finality may not be possible or desirable. And so he covered in detail conditions in Ireland, British politics, prisons, the penal code, the hulks, and many other things. He was far from being a model lecturer, but surviving bouts of impatience I learnt these valuable things from him, some of them not fully realised till later in life.

Another aspect of MacCallum’s course that I appreciated was the nature of the set essays. I recall doing my first on John Bigge’s 1820s report on agriculture in New South Wales. I found one of the few surviving copies in the stacks of the Fisher Library. While it was not an ancient record I marvelled that it was the first historical record or document that I had ever held in my hands. In Australian terms it was old, evoking a sense of times long past.

In other courses, such as English, we gained the impression that original sources were more venerably old or ancient than Australian ones, inaccessibly existing as rare books and manuscripts in libraries abroad. For instance, we studied the difficulties of the transmission of Elizabethan literature, Shakespeare offering one of the main examples. One lecturer, Harold Oliver, a noted scholar in the area, frequented the great Shakespeare libraries of the world. Yet while he and Guy Howarth had helped to pioneer the study of Australian literature through journal articles, students had no idea that down the road at the Mitchell Library was the greatest repository of Australian manuscripts and rare books in the world. It contained papers of such founding writers as Marcus Clarke and Miles Franklin, for instance. The course never touched upon such treasures at home but conveyed the idea that real scholarship happened elsewhere, in another country, where fortunate postgraduate scholarship-holders went to study.

I did not realise till much later that it was my essay work in the history course that turned me into a literary historian, valuing Australian archives. I followed the conventional path of going overseas, to London, for postgraduate research, working on English historical materials, newspapers and periodicals. But when I came home to teach it was Australian sources that I turned to, and Australian literature was where my love lay, though by no means exclusively.

I doubt if MacCallum influenced many students in the way that he did me, but I value his teaching. I think it was his quality of commitment and his concern with things close to home that impressed me. Outstanding teachers like him do not run to a pattern; they are individualists.

Laurie Hergenhan, Emeritus Professor of the University of Queensland, edited Australian Literary Studies from 1963 to 2001. He was one of the pioneers of the teaching of Australian literary history at universities.