© Blackwell Publishing 2003

History Compass 1 (2003) AU 023, 1–3

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKHICOHistory Compass1478-0542© Blackwell Publishing 20032003000000 Original Article

Why Australian History MattersCarl Bridge

Why Australian History Matters

Carl

Bridge

King‘s College London

Abstract

I have been teaching Australian history to students in the University of Londonon and off over the last fifteen years. Most of the class are young Britons, andthere is a scattering of exchange students from other European universities, theAmericas and Asia. It is a perennially popular subject and I often wonder why?One answer, better than it seems at first sight, is the mountaineer’s: ‘because it isthere’. But there are certainly some things that attract students to Australianhistory more than others. There is a fascination with the exotic and the naturalwonders. Students are particularly interested in the Aboriginal past and culture.And they are curious to explore what European and other immigrants and theirdescendants have achieved when they have a chance to invent a society

de novo

.There is also an interest in how a country of predominantly European traditionshas negotiated its position permanently anchored as it is in Pacific Asia. As ourLondon students all study Australian history along with courses on the historiesof other countries and movements, there is also considerable opportunity forcomparative work, and this offers perspectives that do not naturally occur to

historians studying Australia from within.

Let’s look at some of these aspects a little more closely.First, Aboriginal culture and history. Non-Australian students discover

that this is a history of perhaps the oldest continuous society or civilisationon earth, stretching back at least 50,000 years and probably more.Aborigines have the oldest religion, the first demonstrable burial rites, andpractised very sophisticated ways of fire-stick farming and fish harvesting.Their deep knowledge of and respect for country and their oral traditionof ‘song lines’ which informed it are still only partially comprehended byWestern science and law. Then there are the tragic and sometimes bloodyfrontier encounters which came with the advent of the Europeans, thecomplex accommodations which followed, the ‘stolen generations’ andthe renaissance of the last thirty years.

Second, there is Australia as a ‘neo-Britain’ or ‘Austerica’, where a newstart was made to fashion a society and state without the blemishes of theold. True, there is the temptation to judge it as just another derivative,province of Europe. Of course it was in many respects, but this missesthe point. In Australia there was no established church and no hereditary

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aristocracy. The Australian colonies led the Mother Country in fullmanhood suffrage by sixty years, and in full women’s suffrage by thirtyyears. Other liberal innovations preceded those in Europe: the secret, or‘Australian’ ballot, payment of MPs, ‘secular, compulsory and free’ elementaryeducation, and the resolution of industrial disputes by arbitration courts.At the end of the nineteenth century Queensland had the world’s firstLabour government, a French intellectual commentator pronouncedAustralia a triumph of ‘

socialisme sans doctrines

’ and others talked of it withouthyperbole as a ‘working man’s paradise’. Australia was ‘born modern’.There was also an underside to all of this: working women did not havesuch a rosy view; a White Australia policy restricted non-European immi-gration to a trickle; and Aborigines eked out an existence on the marginsof the society and did not share the bounty. Nevertheless, on balance,Australia in 1900 was probably the most prosperous and egalitarian societyon earth. It was, and still thinks of itself as, the land of the ‘fair go’ andof the ‘suburban dream’.

Third is the related theme that Australia, from its European beginnings,was economically speaking a product of what we might now call an earlyphase of globalisation. The Australian colonies’ staple products—wheat,wool, meat and minerals—were extracted not for local consumption, butto supply the global market. Each of the Australian colonies’ capital citieswas a distribution node through which transport links passed. Immigrantscame in and products went out. To slightly paraphrase the Australianpoet, Henry Lawson, ‘the mighty bush with iron rails was tethered to theworld’. Dependence on global markets led to dramatic cycles of boomand bust. There was an acute depression in the 1840s, where wool was insuch low demand that many boiled down their flocks for tallow. Bloatedon gold, ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ became the first city of the Empire inthe 1880s, but crashed into depression in the 1890s when the buildingand credit bubble burst. Later, the 1930s depression hit Australia harderthan many other countries because of its dependence on global markets.This long experience has bred a certain hard-bitten realism that has madeadjustment to the contemporary pressures for universal free trade and‘level playing fields’ easier for Australians than for most.

Fourth, there is Australia as the product of the great migrations of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, from British convicts to victims ofthe Highland clearances and the Great Irish Famine, to goldseekers, torefugees and economic migrants from war-torn Europe and war-ravagedVietnam and Afghanistan. Since 1945 Australia has become one ofthe most multicultural societies anywhere, with people speaking over ahundred different first languages and from an almost equally diverse rangeof cultural traditions. Just how Australia’s older traditions will absorb, adjustor metamorphose in this environment is still an open question. The recentagonising over the projected transition from monarchy to republic is justone facet of this process.

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Why Australian History Matters 3

Fifth, there is Australia as a cross-roads between Europe and Asia inthe coming Pacific century, as a place for brokering and inter-change ofgoods, ideas and information. With the economic rise of Japan, China andSouth Korea, and of the (probably only temporarily arrested) lesser ‘tigereconomies’ of southeast Asia, and with its new population mix andhighly-skilled workforce, Australia is well-placed for this role. How this isplaying out is another area for exploration.

There are many other questions and issues. Australia is an exampleof a middle-ranking power trying to make its way in the world. Has itmerely been a spear-carrier for the British and Americans or has it care-fully and prudently pursued its own interests? Why does Australia punchso far above its weight in sporting endeavours? Why, well into livingmemory, were Australians (and Canadians and New Zealanders), moreBritish than the British? Will the British middle-class ever properly forgiveAustralians for their lack of deference, for being ‘the poor who got away’?And how, post the 1992 Mabo High Court judgement’s recognition ofnative land title, will non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal Australians work outa common destiny? Clearly, to borrow words from the eminent Australianhistorian, Manning Clark, Australia has a strong claim to significantparticipation in ‘the great conversation of humanity’.

Notes

Carl Bridge is Professor of Australian Studies and Head of the Menzies Centre for AustralianStudies at King’s College London.