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Disgrace dressed up as history

John Kinsella

1 August 2004 - Rarely have I been so angry over the publication of a book as I am over Frank Welsh's Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia. In the past, if I have had to negatively review a book I've felt a pang of regret. This book is the exception. Welsh's so-called history is a disgrace.

It is not so because it is a history of Australia written by a non-Australian. In fact, there should be more of those. It is a disgrace primarily because of the way this book deals with Australia's indigenous people. Though he gives the impression at times of being anti-racist and deeply humanist, Welsh is a classic apologist for the invasion and occupation of the Australian landmass.

Welsh's understanding of anything indigenous is laughable and insulting. He mocks the fact that census figures have shown that the number of people claiming Aboriginal heritage has increased. Of course it has: it is now recognised that Aboriginality is not a matter of how much Aboriginal blood you have, but that you have Aboriginal identity. It might be surmised that another reason the census showed more people claiming Aboriginality was their increased confidence to live a life without the general societal and governmental persecution of the past.

Even with the removal of 'light-skinned' Aboriginal children (the 'Stolen Generation') from their parents, a process he eventually declares racist, Welsh waters down the crimes through a surface effort to be the impartial historian.

"The road to hell is invariably paved with good intentions, and the intentions of Sir Paul Hasluck, in charge of Aboriginal Affairs and the Territories from 1949 for twelve years, were demonstrably excellent." Here condemnation of white Australia should be in full force. It is not. Heritage is far more complex than Welsh understands or wants to understand.

One of the hundreds of Welsh's misrepresentations comes in his brief gloss on the negative effects on Paul Keating's Labour government of the notorious 'Hindmarsh Island affair'. In the 1990s, a proposed bridge construction was blocked because of Aboriginal concerns over traditional fertility rites, dubbed 'secret women's business'. A subsequent Royal Commission concluded that this secret business was a hoax contrived to prevent the bridge being built — but it has become gradually clear that the commission's findings were deeply flawed.

This incident has been seen as a marker in Australia's cultural wars (though Welsh seems to know nothing of Australian culture outside sport). Whatever the truth, the issues are more complex than Welsh's summary: "a Royal Commission... found that the Aboriginal ladies had 'fabricated' convenient secret religious beliefs; it was the stuff of which satire is made, and did nothing to advance Aboriginal causes... or Labour's appeal to cynical voters."

You need not deconstruct this language much to pick out the condescension in "Aboriginal ladies". And the book is full of such things. Welsh pretends to be sympathetic but is constantly mocking.

He is at least capable of recognising the vileness of the present administration (that of Prime Minister John Howard) in its treatment of refugees, particularly in the appalling Tampa incident of 2001, when a Norwegian freighter carrying Afghan refugees rescued from a sunken vessel was refused entry. Yet Welsh investigates nothing adequately, and there is always a tone of superiority.

One could further mention Welsh's witticisms and put-downs ("A short person with oversized vanity, Kerr had been known as the 'Liberace of the Law'..."), his dubious citing of observers such as Bill Bryson, and his bizarre choices in what to include. The problem with these choices is evident when he tells the story of a government or a period: the 1974 double dissolution of Gough Whitlam's government is at least worthy of more serious analysis, surely. Facts and primary sources are supposed to inform a history - in this work they flutter around like illustrations in a picture book. Even the footnoting is inadequate.

Some might believe Welsh's style flamboyant, but it cannot compare with that of Charles Manning Clark's classic six-volume History of Australia.

The book paints Australia as a cultural vacuum. A place where the Irish Ned Kelly is simply a hoodlum, and not worthy of mythologising. Why not think a little bit more about why such mythologies are created? A thug and murderer he might have been, but his "spirited" manifesto, 'The Jerilderie Letter', is a unique moment in Australian history and merits investigation. The issue of Kelly's Irishness is not to be dismissed in a few condescending lines. Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang may be fiction, but it has more truth than Welsh's vision.

Welsh appears to think himself fair-minded and generous. He purports to support multi-culturalism (he likes the food), but what of the histories of the Chinese, Greek and Italian Australians, and many other peoples outside the Anglo-Celtic world, as histories in themselves, and not just appendages to the British colonial inheritance?

It is like the age of Empire all over again - yet Welsh doesn't know he's doing it. And it is with Aboriginal history that the flaws remain greatest. Welsh has little respect for their private histories - he should try reading Dot Collard's uplifting story, Busted Out Laughing, or Aboriginal Australia, edited by Bourke, Bourke and Edwards; or maybe a closer reading of Bruce Elder's sobering Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatments of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. Though the last is listed in Welsh's bibliography, its lessons appear unlearned.

John Kinsella is an Australian poet.

Source: Scotland On Sunday

related links :

• Waves of change
  26 July 2004 - Telegraph (UK) - Phillip Knightley reviews Great Southern Land: a New History of Australia by Frank Welsh

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