Why bother about Macintyre's historical revisionism?

In an irritated aside in the new foreword to the paperback edition of Macintyre's book on the Communist Party, The Reds, Macintyre dismisses, in a contemptuous way, a detailed critique I made of that book, ascribing it to "1960s factionalism", without making any attempt to address the major questions of historical fact and emphasis I raised.

I obviously run the risk of similar curt dismissal from the great man on this occasion, and I also run the risk of being accused by some of having an obsession about Macintyre.

Why should Bob Gould bother? Well, I must admit that for me these questions are rather personal. I object to my assorted tribes, ethnic, cultural and political, being abolished from the historical record. When I was a kid, I acquired an initial knowledge of the clandestine Australian historical stream, Irish Catholic, socialist and working class, from my father, and also from the Catholic historical counterculture taught by the Christian Brothers.

As a young man those streams came together for me, and I was greatly stimulated by the way they flowered into the mature historical work of Brian Fitzpatrick, Russel Ward, Eris O'Brien, Manning Clark, Robin Gollan, Ian Turner, and popular historians such as Rupert Lockwood, Cyril Pearl, Michael Cannon, Robert Travers and William Joy.

I was also stimulated by novels with a historical basis, such as Kylie Tenant's Ride on Stranger and Foveaux and Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory and The Dead are Many. I was considerably enthused when this rich historical literature began to be used to some extent in some university history departments and in some high schools.

Texts such as Russel Ward's Concise History, Terry Irving's and Bob Connell's Class Structure in Australian History, Manning Clark's Short History, and even Robert Hughes' relatively recent The Fatal Shore, began to be used widely in history education.

These texts are interesting and particularly accessible to students, and they go a considerable distance towards introducing those social groups previously excluded, the labour movement, the working class and the Irish Catholics, to the historical narrative.

Stuart Macintyre, Miriam Dixson, and the Australian "national imaginary"

Macintyre applauds Miriam Dixson's new book The Imaginary Australian, in which she tries to stake out a territory for a false historical construct she calls the "Anglo-Celtic core culture", as against the discordant historical discourse produced by Celtic malcontents such as myself. It's absolutely clear from Macintyre's recent historical efforts, of which the Concise History, intended as a text book, is clearly the culmination, that Macintyre is devoted to Dixon's "Anglo Celtic core culture" project. He even mentions, reverently, in his last chapter Dixson's book, along with Paul Sheehan's chauvinistic Amongst the Barbarians, as important books to be read about the Australian future.

Dixson carries on somewhat about an Australian "national imaginary", which she does not spell out very clearly. In an argument I have written directed at Miriam Dixson, I take up her idea of the "national imaginary" which isn't intrinsically a bad idea. I just point out that my "national imaginary" (based on the historian's I've listed above and my own experience of life) is totally different to hers.

Well, we get from Macintyre's Concise History something of the possible flavour of the Macintyre, Dixson "national imaginary". The emphasis here must be placed on the "imaginary". Macintyre produces a conservative, Anglophile history of Australia by abolishing from the narrative, or dramatically diminishing in significance, whole categories, classes, tribes, and major historical currents and events.

These classes of people and events are mostly my people and events, my tribes, my class, my big social upheavals, and once again I record my strong objection to their exclusion from the Australian historical record.

John Howard, and the right-wing ideologues in some of the media are currently engaged in a wide-ranging exercise in rewriting Australian history. Howard and like-minded conservatives are making extravagant use of British-Australia Anzac symbolism to refurbish a reactionary, patriotic militarism, and to write out of the record past conflicts over wars and militarism, such as the referendum defeat of conscription during the First World War, and the ultimate rejection of the Vietnam intervention by the Australian people.

In my view, the general thrust of Macintyre's Concise History (with the exception of the completely appropriate detailed attention to Aboriginal history) fits in very well with this reactionary John Howard historical project.

The arena of history and history teaching is inevitably fiercely ideological. One is entitled to have whatever view one likes of events, social classes, religious groups, and other things. What one is not, in my view, entitled to do, is abolish them entirely from the narrative, whatever one may think of them.

An ostensible historical narrative such as Macintyre's Concise History, which abolishes from the story such diverse and interesting people as John Norton, Paddy Crick, George Reid, the Tory free trader, Bruce Smith who opposed White Australia, Peter Bowling, Jock Garden, Eddie Ward, Lance Sharkey, Black Jack McEwan, Laurie Short, Clarrie O'Shea, Edna Ryan, John Anderson, Murial Heagney, Jack Mundey, E. G. Theodore, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Johnny O'Keefe and a host of others, is in my view, rather farcical.

A history that reduces the many facets of Caroline Chisholm and her activity to the spiteful cliche that she was primarily a moral policewoman, is sectarian and bigotted. A history that avoids the work of all the important traditional and popular historians mentioned in this article, possibly because they introduce too much conflict and excitement to the narrative, is both much too right-wing, and a definite obstacle to keeping the students in history classes awake.

For the time being, until someone writes a new and improved entry-level textbook, people setting texts would be well advised to continue using Russel Ward, Connell and Irving, and other such books, rather than this extraordinary new book.

Questioning Macintyre