Our Defrauded Young

Of the tranquil reign of Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius, Gibbon tells us that it had “the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind”. This emperor, whose rule produced no history, was diligent, tolerant, commonsensical, and had a sense of humour. One authority adds the further compliment that “he had no intellectual tendencies”. Perhaps his tutelary hand has stretched benignly over Australia for the last couple of centuries? For it is widely said and widely believed that “Australia has no history”. Or, at any rate, no history really worth mentioning.

No history! Poor little us! But is it true?

To be sure, you will search our past in vain for much in the way of the highly reportable: no little princes drowned in casks of wine; no kings’ heads cut off; no catastrophes like the Black Death. Nor have we ever assassinated a president, nor had a civil war, nor risen to a flight of oratory to compete with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The total body-count of our own citizens murdered in the course of politics hardly compares with the fifteen million or so chalked up by Stalin, or the similar numbers liquidated by Mao. Concentration camps with gas ovens passed us by entirely. Unlike Indonesia, we have never had a revolution, nor flung the butchered bodies of a dozen generals into the famous Crocodile Hole. We have avoided (perhaps narrowly) being overrun by a cruel invader. To come sharply down the scale, even our much-touted Rum Rebellion and Eureka Stockade passed with less inconvenience than, say, today’s irregularities in Fiji.

But has nothing whatever happened between the landing at Sydney Cove in 1788 and the “Sorry Day” circus last month? An absurd thought. The “materials”—Gibbon’s oft-used expression—for Australian history lie in profusion all around us. The apparent poverty of our “civic story”, without which a nation can scarcely be said to exist, is the fault of so many of our history teachers: pedestrian, constipated, blown like so many bottles from the identical “progressive” mould to which nowadays they must conform, or go jobless.

The dispiriting sense that we have no worthwhile national story begins in our schools, as many of us have long suspected. A new book by Anna Clark now lifts the charge above mere suspicion, and prosecutes a powerful case that our history teachers are selling Australia short. (Let me add, and let me emphasise, that we still have history teachers of the utmost talent and devotion; and we still have schools where the vital role of history is acknowledged and accommodated. They are, alas, outnumbered by the other kind.)

Anna Clark, not yet thirty, is clearly a young historian to watch. She happens (note, just happens) to be Manning Clark’s granddaughter. With deft dignity, she owns her familial affection for Manning, but makes it clear that she is professionally her own person. It seems to me a pity that, some five years ago, her name appeared as co-author with Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s “progressive” history godfather. Their joint effort was called The History Wars, one of the most vacuous volumes I read in ten years. But that was then.

Her new book, written solo, discusses the present state of history teaching across Australian schools, and an ugly tale it is. She has, admirably, gone to the source for her own facts, and visited thirty-four schools over all states, interviewing nearly 200 students and about sixty teachers and educationists. Across such a wide field as this country’s schools, one might have hoped for an even more numerous sample—probably Clark would have liked that too. But the startling unanimity and firmness of the responses she received show that she is on target: Australian History stinks in the nostrils of the senior form students who are obliged to endure it.

It bores the pants off them. They find it dreary and repetitive. It stirs no imagination or pride. It fails to deepen their understanding of either the Australia they live in now, or of the Australia that went before.

Clark’s researches establish that Aboriginal history in particular is a “turn-off”: all that endless and unrelieved harping on what monstrous “racists” Australians were—and remain. Did we do nothing right?

In my last year at school—I think it was 1939—my class was taught about David Unaipon (1872–1967), the Aboriginal near-genius who was an inventor, an experimental physicist, a philosopher, a musician and an author of books. Over the last couple of days I have asked a dozen people at random what the name “David Unaipon” means to them. I drew eleven blanks; number twelve said tentatively: “Isn’t he that full-blooded Aboriginal who’s on our fifty-dollar banknote?” He is indeed, and an excellent short account of his outstanding life appears in volume 12 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Surely Unaipon offers a shining example for Aboriginal emulation, even though he doesn’t wear that now-obligatory black armband? Might that be the very reason why we hear of him so seldom?

According to Clark, Australian Federation is another arid desert for the young, denounced as a non-event, something meaningless which they are obliged to “get up” through endless boring rote-learning. Federation—the Book of Genesis of their nation? A Constitution recognised around the world as one of the fairest, most rational and serviceable polities ever crafted by mankind? Boring, eh? And irrelevant?

But our children can be perverse, and even subversive; it appears that, all off their own bats, the little monsters readily take an interest in the history of Anzac, and Australia’s general military prowess. How appalling that they should want to know about Australia’s shabby involvement in “imperial” wars, and battles far away! Anzac and the rest are not subjects taught with enthusiasm in our schools at present.

One of my favourite historians was Douglas Pike, who had turned forty before he entered academic life. (He once told me that, as a bush worker, he had equalled the Australian record time for skinning a sheep.) I keep precious memories of the ten years we worked together, he as founding general editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and I as its original publisher. The gritty wisdom of the world of real work complemented the depth of his distinguished scholarship.

This thoughtful and sceptical man wrote a short general history which he titled Australia: The Quiet Continent. Though published some forty years ago, and inescapably overtaken by time, it still offers shrewd and balanced wisdom which we need today: Australian history may not rate high for tempestuous colour or Sturm und Drang. But there is a unique, absorbing story there of a new people building their own nation in their own way. Boring? Trivial? Irrelevant? Maybe that depends on how it is taught.

Our History today seems to meander aimlessly around Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”, lost in

Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams.

Few readers seeking historical truth (or even reliable facts) would now consult Manning Clark’s six-volume History, widely accepted as the most spectacular busted flush in Australian scholarship. Yet, at both academic and school level, Clark’s ghost still spreads a psychic force of gloom and defeat. His groans—unleavened bread, kingdom of nothingness, unfed sheep looking up—repeated often enough, depress the spirits and narrow the scope of hope and effort.

Manning never outgrew the naive Marxist determinism of his youth. He and his fellow Marxists knew the direction that “history” would take, and were determined to be on board. His condescension to R.G. Menzies made Clark absurd: “Poor old Bob! Couldn’t see which way the river of life was flowing!” One can only say that, for a man navigating against the tide, Menzies made a reasonable fist of seventeen years of power.

Life has let the history teachers down. Things did not turn out the way they expected. Their distaste for an Australia which falls so far short of their hopes can hardly be true, and certainly is not worth teaching. In short, they are sulking.

The fresh, healthy gusts of overdue change are slow coming from the heights. The Liberals’ Julie Bishop had a try; Labor’s Julia Gillard is probably well enough aware of the truth, but will be handicapped by the power wielded in the Labor Party by the appalling teachers’ (“educational”) trade unions.

From Anna Clark’s work, we may draw hope for salvation from below. More than sixty years ago, Manning himself wrote about the “unerring eye of the adolescent for anything that is not genuine”. Those eyes are now wide open, and their teachers should beware. Remember Kipling:

What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, by Anna Clark, is published by the University of New South Wales Press, $29.95.