Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

In A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Stuart Macintyre fuses a dash of the ancient story of the Aborigines with the later, well-documented eighteenth-century “invasion” by British prisoners and their keepers. His largely political-social synthesis informs but seems lacking in import beyond his key observation, which hinges on raw cultural conflict: “The Australian experience points up the key vulnerability of an isolated civilization to external aggression” (13).

Macintyre debunks the schoolboy history of Australia – that the former penal colony’s origin is one “of a sleeping land brought to life by purposeful endeavor” by colonists who “broke the silence of a primeval wilderness” in a “late chapter in British, European and world history” (1-2).

He sets aside the notion of colonial nationalism following the “path of the West in a journey that led from ancient Greece and Rome to Christian Europe, the Renaissance and Enlightenment with liberty, democracy and prosperity as its end-point” (5). What remains is a postmodernist mishmash of big facts and prominent players tied together merely by time and space.

His timeline begins “at least 40,000 and possibly 60,000 or more years before the present” (4). However, over his own protestations, he, too, turns to the invasion of 1788 as a real starting point. Macintyre’s chronological narrative has chapters summarizing basics, such as “Newcomers,” “Coercion,” “Sacrifice” and “Golden Age.” The space: the island-continent of Australia and its regional sphere, framed generally by Malaysia and Singapore to the northwest and New Zealand to the southeast.

Great Britain, of course, plays the leading role. The Axis powers, the United States and other nations come and go during the World Wars, taking Australian fighters with them.

The “nation” beyond the confines of the commonwealth itself, is comprised of Britons and their descendents, especially as Australia comes into its own during World War II, with white Australians discovering an identity in being “not” British, and the Aborigines and their descendents, from whom Macintyre finds a main source of modern national, multicultural identity. Geographically isolated Australia’s nationalistic “insistence on a common culture” at the turn of the twentieth century has been replaced by a celebration of many cultures with the renaissance of Aboriginal traditions near the turn of the twenty-first (278).

However, having removed any pretense of a “grand view” and having dismissed newer attempts at historical interpretation as “caught inextricably in the tangle of language and imagery used to describe them” – the convicts, for example, as victims, or as criminals, or as a work force (43) -- Macintyre rather negatively finds in Australia’s history “no declaration of its virtues” and in its present a cultural exhaustion and “signs of a premature senility.” (279).

Macintyre dismisses the role of the historian as guide to the future and seems suspicious of the historian’s contribution in any deeply interpretive way to understanding the past. Australia’s problem, he concludes, is: “No Statue of Liberty welcomes the newcomer, no proclamation of guiding principles is offered” (279-280). He leaves it at that.

END