Abolishing the Catholics

I hope I'm not beginning to sound a bit obsessional about Macintyre. I have written several other critical articles about his historical work, but I'm afraid I can't really escape presenting this critique.

I was first alerted to Macintyre's new book, The Concise History of Australia, by Jim Griffin's review in The Australian.

Griffin pointed out that Macintyre's new history just about abolished the Irish Catholics from the narrative. As Australian Catholic history is one of my interests, my curiosity was immediately aroused. I hurried over and bought the book at Gleebooks, and became immediately fascinated by it in the same way that I am fascinated by Paul Sheehan's chauvinist Amongst the Barbarians, and Miriam Dixson's The Imaginary Australian.

At approximately the same time I heard on the grapevine that Stuart and his conservative mate, John Hirst had recently been appointed by David Kemp, Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs in the Howard Government, as historical advisers to a body known as the Civics Education Group, which then employed Kemp's other educational body, the institution with the amazing economic rationalist name, The Curriculum Corporation, to prepare curriculum materials for history teaching in Australian schools.

In the context of the high politics described above it seems reasonable to look very closely at Stuart Macintyre's new Concise History, because it is obviously written for a high school and introductory university market, and Macintyre and his publishers may well desire to see it emerge as the major university entry-level Australian history textbook for the next period.

Let us, therefore, carefully investigate Stuart Macintyre's version of textbook Australian history, and how it is organised and presented. The first thing is how strikingly similar it is in format, and some aspects of presentation, to Russel Ward's book of the same name.

It is the same physical size, although a bit shorter, and it even has a similar presentation, with both covers being a work of Australian art. Even the periodisation in the book is, in large part, roughly similar.

The two tables of contents are:

RUSSEL WARD 1. Black and white discoverers c.60,000 BC-AD 1770 2. Empire, convicts and currency c.1771-1820 3. New settlements and new pastures c.1821-50 4. Diggers, democracy and urbanisation c.1851-85 5. Radicals and nationalists c.1886-1913 6. War and depression c. 1914-38 7. War and affluence c. 1939-66 8. Going it alone c. 1967-92

STUART MACINTYRE 1. Beginnings 2. Newcomers c.1600-1792 3. Coercion, 1793-1821 4. Emancipation, 1822-1850 5. In thrall to progress, 1851-1888 6. National reconstruction, 1889-1913 7. Sacrifice, 1914-1945 8. Golden age, 1946-1974 9. Reinventing Australia, 1975-1999 10. What next?

As is clearly indicated by the names of the chapters, the historical approach of the authors is quite different. Ward's approach is left democratic, Marxian and populist. Macintyre's book is a major move in the direction of restoring the official British-Australia history that used to dominate the teaching of Australian history before the 1960s.

Macintyre's is a thoroughgoing counter-revolution compared with Russel Ward's book. Ward celebrates the struggle for democracy and the campaign for free selection. Macintyre adopts a more critical and sceptical view of the significance of these developments in a style reminiscent of the attitude pioneered by his conservative mate Hirst.

 Ward notes and describes the important oppositional role of the Irish Catholics and records the sectarian conflicts of the 19th century. Macintyre's only mention of sectarian religious conflict is in relation to the schools debate.

 Ward celebrates the emergence of the labour movement as an assertion of working class independence. Macintyre treats the emergence of the labour movement in a more sceptical way.

 Ward celebrates and discusses the defeat of conscription during the First World War and the radicalisation in the labour movement that this produced. Macintyre plays down the conscription struggle, omits the 1917 general strike and ignores the radicalisation of the labour movement in the 1920s.

 Ward celebrates the popular labour movement mobilisation of Langism against the Depression and its consequences. In his only mention of Lang, Macintyre succeeds in sounding like the Governor of India deploring "unrest". Macintyre even ascribes the fall of the Lang government to a split in the Labor Party, which is untrue, and thereby airbrushes out of history Lang's removal by Governor Game, the precedent for the later removal of Whitlam by Kerr.

 Ward celebrates the popular upheaval against the Vietnam War, and mentions the initially instrumental role of Arthur Calwell, the Labor opposition leader, in this mobilisation. Macintyre treats the agitation against the Vietnam War in a much more low-key and sceptical way, ignoring Calwell.

 Ward adopts a sharply critical stance towards the Hawke and Keating governments. Macintyre has a more reverent tone towards these governments and treats their deregulation of the economy and turn to economic rationalism as a more or less inevitable response to the global circumstances.

 Ward adopts a generally favourable attitude towards mass migration. Towards the end of his book Macintyre implicitly opposes further mass migration in a rather curious section in which he first spends a lot of time criticising the thrust of government-sponsored multiculturalism, immediately followed by:

After two hundred years of overseas recruitment to build the population of Australia, a new voice called for immigration control, that of environmentalists. Throughout the European occupation of the country there had been efforts to conserve its resources and protect fauna and flora, water and forest, from wanton destruction, but the developmental impulse usually prevailed. The end of the long boom coincided with an enhanced appreciation of the costs of development. The great triumphs of the post-war period turned out to be illusory. The Snowy Mountains Authority had turned back the rivers from the south-east coast to water the Riverina plains, and poisoned the soil with salt; the Ord River on the north-west coast had been dammed, but infestations of insects killed most of the crops; the government's scientific organisation waged biological warfare against the rabbit, but the survivors returned to compete for pasture.

This paragraph is followed by a lengthy celebration of the importance of the conservation movement in modern Australia, and read in context, it is fairly clear that Macintyre now shares some environmentalists' views in favour of reducing immigration, although in his usual magisterial fashion he infers this position from the views of others, leaving himself a possible let-out if challenged on the point.

There are many other differences between the two books. Macintyre's is a good deal duller than Russel Ward's. His illustrations, other than Aboriginal illustrations, are usually of conservative historical figures, and there are fewer of them.

Russel Ward makes extensive use of line drawings and historical cartoons of a radical character. Little of that for Macintyre. And so it goes.