Making Australian History
Making Australian History is essentially about the history of history in Australia – how it has shaped our national identity and how history has been shaped. An ambitious project, which Anna Clark admits that she struggled with. She found a way to structure the book during walks in the Dyarubbin-Hawkesbury region of New South Wales, where she came across the markings of colonial surveyors near Aboriginal rock art, including one that depicted the outline of a woman in a crinoline dress. This confronting sense that timeless layers of history-making existed, provided her with a novel way to structure the book.
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Making Australian History
Anna Clark | 2022
As a reader it is difficult to separate oneself from the knowledge that Anna Clark is the granddaughter of esteemed historian Manning Clark, best known for his six-volume history of Australia, first published in the early 1960s. Indeed, in a recent interview with The Guardian she noted that his work was a ‘tension’ she wrestled with while writing Making Australian History, admitting she grew up with a different historical consciousness from most people: ‘historians and historical chatter were often found around the family dinner table’. Manning Clark died when Anna Clark was twelve, not long after he was denounced as a communist agent. She says the controversy ‘was not simply a disagreement about the past. It was about power, politics, national identity and futures.’
Like her grandfather’s work, this is an ambitious, ‘big idea’ of a book. I came to it expecting traditional historiographical analysis, with works such as Rob Pascoe’s The Manufacture of Australian History (1979) in mind. But Clark challenges the very idea of historiography by questioning ‘who is a historian?’ She points to the diversity of history-making, observing that commentators and politicians argue about history, journalists write popular histories, novelists write historical fiction, filmmakers use historical subjects. All stake ‘a claim on the national narrative’.
So how does Clark bring such a diversity of history-making into her book? Making Australian History has sixteen chapters: Making history, Beginnings, Contact, Convicts, Nation, Memory, Colour, Protest, Distance, Silence, Family, Gender, Emotion, Imagination, Country and Time. Each is introduced by a text. These extracts are not necessarily drawn from traditional sources for history. As well as documents, such as early histories of Australia, they capture voices recorded in speeches, poetry and convict songs, and provide traces of the past through material culture such as Aboriginal art, fish traps and photographs. These varied sources reflect different eras and diverse forms of history-making. They are intriguing starting points for each chapter and part of an attempt to write an inclusive history of history-making that Clark calls ‘an effort in synthesis, structure and compromise’, which she hopes will be ’a discussion starter’. One noticeable ‘compromise’ is an almost exclusive focus on history-making in Australia’s eastern states.
The first chapter, ‘Beginnings’, starts with a passage from an anonymous 1787 text History of New Holland. Clark loosely discusses this book by weaving a path through other early histories. All exhibit a sense of the prior ‘blankness’ of the country (she doesn’t use the term terra nullius) and she observes that Australia was historiographically emptied by these history-makers. Despite this, she finds occasional glimpses of ‘an older world order’ in books like an 1834 history in which an Aboriginal person is described as saying ‘white-fellow come, kangaroo all gone!’. The tantalising question Clark then poses is whether this disregard of occupation was ‘in spite of Aboriginal people’s prior presence, ownership and knowledge of Australia, or because of it’.
Chapters proceed in this exploratory manner until history as a discipline emerges in the chapter entitled ‘Nation’. The growth of state education and the foundation of universities was accompanied by a burgeoning national consciousness. Historical records were first compiled and published. With the appointment of Australia’s first Professor of History at the University of Sydney in 1891, the discipline arrived as a scientific pursuit of facts to be researched, learnt and taught. A competition was launched for an Australian history school textbook. The winning entry’s discussion of frontier violence was quickly deleted, but it still took twelve years of disagreement and compromise before publication. Such debates are a foretaste of later bitter disputes over what history should be taught to Australian students.
In the chapter on Memory, a photograph of the Australian War Memorial’s Hall of Memory is Clark’s text. It leads her to the emergence of the Anzac in Australia’s national memory, which she argues is part of the search for ‘an origin story’. The ‘digger’, she maintains, was ‘a potential salve’ to internal schisms during and immediately after World War I. Clark observes (here drawing on the work of Carolyn Holbrook) that in his official history, C.E.W. Bean populated national memory with ordinary citizens — ‘laconic, practical and egalitarian’ — and the digger became a romantic heir to the swaggie and the gold miner. But in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, memory had shape-shifted and growing awareness of the nation’s violent colonial beginnings led to Anzac being used to ‘smooth over growing awareness and unease’ during the bicentenary of Australian settlement. Come the centenary of World War I, the Australian government spent more on official commemorations than all of the other nations involved. While Clark recognises the strength of this political investment in reinvigorating and bolstering the Anzac story, she touches it comparatively lightly. Instead, she emphasises the genuine connectedness that many people feel to the Anzac story, particularly once historical research began to personalise the digger experience. It is historians rather than ordinary Australians who have been ambivalent in making meaning of the Anzac story. An unanticipated spin off has been work to ‘map the variegated contours of Anzac memory’, thus providing a focus for the growth of memory studies. The Anzac story may be sentimental, it may have been generated in calculated ways, but nevertheless, writes Clark, neatly returning to her text, this is ‘the feeling that washes over you when you stand in the Hall of Memory’.
So much more is covered in this intriguing book that argues for multiple sources, interdisciplinary understandings and inclusive history-making. While this is not new to a generation of historians who grew up in the shadow of social history and post modernism, Clark’s exploration of history-making is novel.
You will either love or be confused by Clark’s distinctive prose style, which switches from conversational to erudite, as she loops around her sources in unexpected and sometimes puzzling ways. There are several rationales for the conversational tone. Clark is Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS, Sydney, that for many years has promoted history to broad public audiences. Clark is committed to an inclusive view of history-making. She has relied heavily on oral histories in her previous books to capture the views of Australians about history. Hence it is not surprising that the book is published by a trade publisher, Penguin Vintage, whose audience is far broader than that of an academic publisher. Nevertheless, despite steering clear of ponderous academic language, rejecting traditional endnotes and eschewing an index in order to promote new historical understandings, the book ends with a sixty-page bibliography.
Making Australian History is published by Penguin Vintage Books.
Reviewer: Jenny Gregory, PHA (WA)