Macintyre isn't too keen on explorers

In Quadrant last year, there appeared an important and very detailed article on current educational problems by the disenchanted leftist, and now rather conservative educational historian, Alan Barcan. This article was an overview of the crisis in curriculum that has emerged in Australian education, particularly the teaching of history.

Some parts of Barcan's critique are useful and correct. One of his points with which I agree is that omitting from the history curriculum many of the basic historical facts that used to be taught is a big practical mistake. For instance, the exploration of Australia was part of the British imperial conquest of these colonies, but it was also an intrinsically important part of the historical record.

In his careful, ritual obeisance to cultural studies, Macintyre, however, follows the current fashion. Many of the explorers are eliminated from his narrative. No Hume and Hovell, no Edward John Eyre, etc, etc.

A populist or leftist Australian history could easily mention Eyre's discoveries and then make a point about British imperialism by mentioning in passing the barbarous aspects of his later career as governor of Jamaica, where he judicially murdered part of the population of a rebellious village.

None of this kind of thing for Macintyre, either the naming of most of the explorers, or the opportunity for the exposure of British imperialism.

Another feature of Macintyre's book is its careful middle-of-the-road character in its mating official history with cultural studies. All the populist historians I have mentioned at length here are left out, but so are the most extreme, but rather significant and influential postmodernists writing in Australian history.

Debates about Australian history don't make it into Macintyre's narrative either. Postmodernists such as Greg Dening, who wrote Mr Bligh's Bad Language, and Paul Carter, who wrote The Road to Botany Bay, irritate me with their extreme cultural studies style and analysis, but nevertheless there is no question that they are extremely influential in current Australian historiography. To leave them and their books out of the narrative and the bibliography, as Macintyre does, is almost as intellectually unbalanced as leaving out Russel Ward, Brian Fitzpatrick or Black Jack McEwan.

Macintyre is clearly trying to stake out an extremely conservative, centre ground, for his grey armband history, consolidating the major recognised conservative academic historians in a narrative and alliance with the more conservative practitioners of cultural studies, to produce a new academic orthodoxy.

The problem with this Macintyre academic orthodoxy is that it is almost unrecognisable as useful Australian history.

No Proletarian Science. Macintyre ditches dialectics. Rather conservative politics, little religion, and almost no sex

A close friend of mine who was brought up in a middle-class, conservative Protestant family environment often jokes, that in that social environment the basic rule of etiquette was that politics, religion and sex were not discussed in polite society, and this social code was quite frequently expressed explicitly in just those words.

In my view, Macintyre has managed to observe a fair part of this convention in his Concise History. Some politics are mentioned, but they are pretty, high politics with very little radical dissent recognised. There is almost no religion in the narrative, and I couldn't find much sex.

Macintyre's book suffers from a lack of robust dialectical juxtaposition of people and events. What I mean by this statement can be illuminated by comparing Macintyre to a range of other historians as diverse as Robin Gollan, Susanna Short, Robert Murray, Shirley Fitzgerald and Michael Cannon. With different standpoints, Marxist, left liberal, and conservative, all these historians produce powerfully interesting social history by proceeding in what Marxists generally describe as a dialectical way. They treat conflicting social groups and historical actors as important in their own right, try to describe how those people saw the world, and describe, in a warm-hearted way, the conflicts between these individuals and social groups.

Shirley Fitzgerald and Michael Cannon, describing social developments, urban history and economic developments from a generally left liberal point of view, often including a fair bit of muck-raking, still ascribe, even to people that they criticise, a certain integrity and autonomy, and even when they are discussing such chaotic events as the pell mell development of Sydney, or the 1890s crash in Victoria, capture something of the human enthusiasms of all the players involved, without too much moralism.

Susanna Short, in her incomparable biography of her father, Laurie Short, gives a careful and interesting account of both her old man's outlook at each stage in his contradictory development, and something of the outlook of all the different conflicting groups, the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, the Catholic Groupers, the ordinary Laborites and Langites, etc. These people really come to life in Susanna's book.

In my view, Bob Gollan's book on the Communist Party, Revolutionaries and reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement (Melbourne University Press, 1975) is infinitely superior to Macintyre's longer Communist Party history. A Communist himself, Gollan, as a vantage point for understanding the history of the Communist Party, counterposes to the CPA's own view of itself the standpoint of the Trotskyists and the Catholics who were in conflict with it, which illuminates his narrative immensely.

Bob Murray, who is a right-winger in his basic political outlook, has written three very important books of Australian history, The Split, about the ALP split in the 1950s, The Ironworkers about the history of that union, and his delightful book The Confident Years, Australia in the 1920s.

Murray carefully distances his own views from his account of the events he describes and goes to considerable pains to describe the interaction between the interests and point of view of all the players, large and small, in the historical dramas he is recounting. It's worth just giving the chapter headings of The Confident Years: Fit for Heroes, The Political World of Billy Hughes, Post-war Labor, The Big Fella, Packer, Murdoch, Fairfax and Co, Bruce-Page Australia, The Golden Years, After the Bulletin, Workers and Bosses, Countdown to Catastrophe.