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Page 1: Open and closed histories

This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge]On: 22 December 2014, At: 17:25Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Australian Historical StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rahs20

Open and closed historiesDonald DenoonPublished online: 29 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: Donald Denoon (1990) Open and closed histories, Australian Historical Studies, 24:95, 175-188, DOI:10.1080/10314619008595840

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10314619008595840

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Page 2: Open and closed histories

Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 24, No. 95, October 1990

OPEN AND CLOSED HISTORIES

The first issues of Historical Studies present an arresting range and quality ofscholarship. The research journal separated professionals from antiquarians, butthe editors courted a wider audience than practising historians.1 Professionalsreviewed amateurs such as Evatt and Bavin without patronising; the outsiderFitzpatrick was seriously reviewed by one of the insiders who created the journal;Australians, New Zealanders and even Americans commented freely on eachother's work; reviews canvassing affairs in Fiji and Papua New Guinea as well asAustralia and New Zealand give the journal an 'Australasian' focus withoutneglecting the European roots of the settler societies; there is liberal analysis ofrace relations, and even a plaintive plea for women's history. Historical Studiesstrongly reflects the left-liberal humanism and social concern of the MelbourneSchool.2 It carried the flag of civilised scholarship into war, its pages already opento topics and perspectives which foreshadow its later agenda.

In volume 2 the New Zealander Beaglehole devoted a lengthy review article totwo analyses of imperial history—Knaplund's synthesis (which he found frail)and de Kiewiet's excellent South African History (thoroughly informed by Aus-tralian economic and social history).3 That range has narrowed over the years: asimperial history has fallen from grace, articles like Beaglehole's have become asrare as the works he reviewed.4 The emergence of the Journal of Pacific History(1966) and the New Zealand Journal of History (1967), and the evolution of south-east Asian studies, acknowledge political boundaries around national, state andparochial topics. The proliferation of journals for new specialisms—the Aus-tralian Journal of Politics and History (1955), Labour History (1962), AboriginalHistory (1977) and others—further threatens the catholic nature of HistoricalStudies, as two editors acknowledge.5 Australian topics increasingly predominatein the articles offered for publication, although breadth persists in the reviewsection and in occasional discursive essays.

Macintyre6, Pascoe7 and Bourke8 lament the 'professionalisation' of Aus-tralian history-writing among practitioners at large: they regret the specialisationand increasing emphasis on technique. The journal reflects the changing practicesof the academics who write for it. As late as 1952 Crawford addressed Australia'sregional linkages in Ourselves and the Pacific;9 and in Sydney, John Manning

1 S. Macintyre, 'Historical Studies: a retrospective'. Historical Studies vol. 21, no. 82, April 1984, p. 1.2 R.M. Crawford, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, Making History, Melbourne 1985.3 J.C. Beaglehole, 'The Writing of Imperial History', Historical Studies vol. 2, no. 7, May 1943, pp.129-43.4 W.K. Hancock, Australia, London 1930; Brian Fitzpatrick, British Imperialism and Australia,1783-1833, London 1939; and The British Empire in Australia, 1834-1939, Melbourne 1941.5 Macintyre, 'A retrospective'; and John Rickard, 'The Future of Australian Historical Studies',seminar paper, Australian National University, 10 May 1990.6 Macintyre, 'The Making of a School', Crawford Clark and Blainey, op. cit.7 Rob Pascoe, The Manufacture of Australian History, Melbourne 1979.8 Paul Bourke, 'Making Professional History', Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 91, October 1988.9 R.M. Crawford, Ourselves and the Pacific, Melbourne 1952.

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176 Donald Denoon

Ward's regional focus in British Policy in the South Pacific persisted through hisstudies of the British Empire published in the 1960s,10 but his latest publication—tragically his last—was a preface to a history of NSW railways.11

Geographical concentration does not matter unless it reinforces another kindof narrowing—a retreat from what Max Crawford called 'a view and sense ofhuman destiny'12 and Hancock described as intellectual 'span'. Lacking moreprecise terms, let us distinguish between 'open' and 'closed' analysis. 'Closed'scholarship seeks to answer one question definitively, drawing evidence andargument towards a single conclusion. 'Open' scholarship may address a singleevent but pursues consequences as well as causes and traverses a host of issues.This loose distinction may be illustrated by Andre Gunder Frank's 'closed'Underdevelopment or Revolution™ which scours the history of South America toreach the unequivocal conclusion that capitalism is the single cause of SouthAmerica's ills. Wallerstein's 'open' account of the world-wide consequences ofEuropean agricultural capitalism14 is often cited alongside Frank, and has muchthe same ideological posture; but Frank's work stands or falls on the credibility ofa single proposition, while Wallerstein stimulates even those readers who disputeall his perceptions and connections.

These approaches are not, of course, mutually exclusive: even a single pieceof writing may veer between openness and closure. Open is not necessarily betterthan closed history. Both are necessary, although open writing is usually morefun. Each approach can be abused: open exploration can become formless andanarchic; closed scholarship can become more authoritarian than authoritative.An authoritarian gem is presented by Gerard Henderson15 who concludes aselective and vituperative account of Gallipoli with the judgment:

To win a war against unjust aggression is not futile; to sacrifice your life in a battle againstmilitant nationalism is not to die in vain—whatever the historians, journalists, playwrightsand folksingers of a later generation might say.

Militant nationalism and unjust aggression will crop up again.Here I should declare dissatisfaction with national histories in general as well

as Australian national history in particular. However, that framework is here tostay, so we must make the best of it. Many situations incite scholars to resistclosure and re-order the subject matter. Queensland historians are different, notonly because of regional enthusiasm, but because their topics promote comparison

10 J.M. Ward, British Policy in the South Pacific (1786-1893), Sydney 1948; Earl Grey and theAustralian Colonies, 1846—1957: A Study of Self-Government and Self-interest, Melbourne 1958; andEmpire in the Antipodes. The British in Australia: 1840-1860, London 1966.11J.M. Ward, preface to John Gunn, Along Parallel Lines: A History of the Railways of New SouthWales, 1850-1986, Melbourne 1988.12Quoted in Macintyre, 'A retrospective', p. 3.13A.G. Frank, Latin America: underdevelopment or revolution, New York 1970.14Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of theEuropean World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York 1974.15Gerard Henderson, 'Anzacs' death a sacrifice, but never futile', Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April1990.

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with other tropical dependencies.16 The whole of Australian history looks differentfrom Reynolds's far northern eyrie.17 Teaching the subject outside Australiaintensifies the difficulty and clarifies the problem. I take advantage of myfortuitous and fortunate encounters with three historians who taught in Australia'sonly colony. Charles Rowley, Bill Gammage and Ken Inglis have not merelyadded to Australian history, but have sought to change its shape and its focus.

Rowley's first published article (in the first volume of Historical Studies)dealt with separatism in the Clarence district of NSW.18 A sensitive and cogentaccount of the environmental and economic origins of separatist sentiment, it isnonetheless conventional and limited in time, space and purpose. Rowley wasdeflected by the Pacific war from school teaching to army education. He becameprincipal of the Australian School of Pacific Administration in Sydney in 1950,training colonial administrators; then he directed the Academy of Social Sciences'luminous project on Aboriginal Australia. Six years as foundation professor ofPolitical Science at the University of Papua New Guinea—his closest encounterwith conventional academia—allowed him further opportunity to reflect onAustralians abroad and the Melanesians under their tutelage.

Rowley developed unique perceptions of Australia. First he examined theAustralian military occupation of German New Guinea,19 then widened his focusto write the most revealing general survey of social and political change incolonial Papua New Guinea.20 His later examination of Aboriginal Australia21

has given backbone to public debate since the 1970s. Conceptually, he chopped uphis subject matter and presented it in fresh categories. His work divided Australia,not into black and white, but into regions characterised by divergent tendencies inrace relations. He extended that vision by sketching three tiers, distinguishingtemperate from tropical Australia—and both from the dependencies across TorresStrait. Without losing faith in the benign qualities of his compatriots, heanatomised us in unflattering roles both at home and as a regional power. He isseldom cited in historiography because he side-stepped university appointmentsand sidled into policy discussions and 'political science'. In doing so, he saunteredinnocently across an unguarded disciplinary frontier, and his political science was(by later standards) woefully empirical, historical, and theoretically spare. What-ever its defects, however, his writing conveys that 'view and sense of humandestiny' which Crawford cherished.

Ken Inglis's career also took him to Papua New Guinea as a foundationprofessor, and it was from Port Moresby that he wrote the first volume of The

16 e.g. Kay Saunders (ed.), Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-1920, London 1984.17 H. Reynolds, Frontier: Aboriginals, Settlers and Land, Sydney 1987; The Other Side of the Frontier,Melbourne 1983; and The Law of the Land, Melbourne 1987.18 Charles D. Rowley, 'Clarence River Separatism' in Historical Studies, vol. 1, no. 4, October 1941,pp. 225-44.19CD. Rowley, The Australians in German New Guinea 1914-1921, Melbourne 1958.20CD. Rowley, The New Guinea Villager: a retrospect from 1964, Melbourne 1965.21CD. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society; Outcasts in White Australia; and The RemoteAborigines, Canberra 1970, 1971; and A Matter of Justice, Canberra 1981.

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Australian Colonists.22 Pascoe places him among 'sociologists' in the spectrumof ideological positions,23 and finds little fault in his work. In this he reflects acommon professional response: Rickard regrets that This is the ABC, which visitsthe battle-fields, is not more vehement in its conclusions.24 Inglis is seldom citedin public controversies concerning the ABC, Aborigines in the court system,public celebrations, or Australia's military tradition: the silence is curious, givenhow early and professionally (but calmly) he addressed these issues.25 Where hemost resembles Rowley is in his conception of re-ordering innumerable localstudies into a single, chronologically layered synthesis of the Australian experience.Australians: a Historical Library is an open scholarly enterprise in every sense,requiring contributors and editors to modify their approaches, and often to adoptsociological procedures. The outcome is innovative in every respect, although itsslices through time restrict treatment of international relations.26

Bill Gammage's career invites comparison. He begins with an admirablylarge question—what did Anzacs experience in the Great War?27—a moreambitious topic than Rowley's curiosity about the garrison in New Guinea. Hisresearch also detoured through Papua New Guinea, where his topics include theRabaul Strike and the Taylor/Black patrol.28 Returning to teach at Adelaide, hesuspended those researches to co-edit 1938. His recent foray into 'local history'illuminates a wider canvas than the formal subject of Narrandera,29 notablyAboriginal land use, the pattern of white settlement, the politics and culture of'the bush', the purpose and effects of land legislation, and land degradation. Hiscontributions to Australian and to Papua New Guinean history are always acutebut (unlike Rowley and Inglis) he leaves boundaries inviolate and accepts thelimitations of national compartments, stopping short of comparing, incorporating,or re-ordering the two theatres.

John Lack describes Narrandera Shire correctly as 'a big book, in heart as wellas in size, which demonstrates that local history can tackle big themes withcourage, style and professionalism'.30 In the same issue of Historical Studies,however, Gammage himself reviews three local histories, and concludes alarmingly:'Australian history needs more local studies. It is time to test past orthodoxies,and to probe beyond established generalisations.'31 (When, by the way, is it nottime to test past orthodoxy?) If this diktat means anything, it is the clarion call ofclosed scholarship. Why must we read all existing local histories, and set aside amonth a year for those currently in preparation? I fear this argosy, unless there is a

22 K.S. Inglis, The Australian Colonists: an exploration of social history 1788-1879, Melbourne 1974.23 Pascoe, The Manufacture of Australian History, ch. 5.24 John Rickard, review in Historical Studies, vol. 21, 84, 1985, pp. 436-7.25 e.g. K.S. Inglis, The Stuart Case, Melbourne University Press 1961; C.E.W. Bean, AustralianHistorian, St Lucia 1970; This is the ABC, Melbourne 1983; Australian Colonists.26 Australians: a historical library, ed. F. Crowley, A. Gilbert, K. Inglis and P. Spearritt.27 Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Canberra 1974.28 Bill Gammage, 'The Rabaul Strike, 1929', Journal of Pacific History, vol. 10, no. 3, 1975, pp. 3-29.29 Bill Gammage, Narrandera Shire, Narrandera, 1986.30 John Lack's review in Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 91, October 1988, pp. 222-4.31 Bill Gammage's review, ibid., pp. 224-5.

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greater golden fleece than enhanced understanding of Gippsland. Gammage'sincitement can hardly be justified without some (unstated) guarantee that localhistories will tackle the big themes which redeem them from parochialism. Letemerging historians do as Gammage does, not as he says!

Without the monumental organisation mobilised to create Australians: aHistorical Library, balkanisation tends to outrun synthesis. Dissertation practices,course organisation and career structures nudge scholars away from large questionstowards smaller units and manageable theses. Both Rowley and Inglis enjoyedlong periods without teaching commitments: the sharp dichotomy in Gammage'swritings may be reinforced by the practice of teaching Australian and Pacific (andevery other) history as self-contained units, more likely linked to courses in otherdisciplines (through area studies sequences) than to neighbouring history units.Monographs and dissertations written in that milieu seldom generate perplexingquestions. So where do the large questions come from, to give structure to historycourses and grist to the research mill?

One of the problems of closed scholarship is to see ourselves as others see us.A great virtue of the most recent, and most explicit, example of open scholar-ship—Avner Offer's The First World War: an Agrarian Interpretation*2—is such avision. Written in Canberra but conceived in England, this wide-ranging, loose-limbed and pyrotechnic essay implicitly challenges several areas of Australianscholarship. He seldom contests particular interpretations, but his juxtapositionof topics makes familiar features seem suddenly problematic. Several propositionsdeserve further attention, and the book as a whole sketches underexposed dimen-sions of Australian experience.

The form of Offer's argument is deceptively circular, beginning with hungryGermans in 1918, then crossing the North Sea to agrarian Britain, vaulting theAtlantic and circumnavigating the Pacific before revisiting Germany in 1919.Starting with an account of German food consumption during the war, he assessesthe extent of hunger and its impact on military and civilian morale. He thenreconsiders Britain's agricultural decline, and explores the great grain stapleeconomies which met her food deficit. That leads him to Canada and Australia,the preconditions of their prosperity, and the reasons for their hostility to Asianimmigration and Japanese pretension. The nervous insecurity which that stanceexcited in the dominions led their statesmen to seek the support of some friendlypower—either the United States (whose President Teddy Roosevelt fanned theflames of white racism in the Pacific) or an ambivalent British governmentcommitted to the Japanese Alliance and balancing many awkward imperialinterests. Back in Edwardian Britain, planners counted on American and dominionfood supplies to avert social conflicts which would otherwise accompany warfare.Strategists incorporated these supplies into military contingency plans. After aswift account of British preparations for a naval blockade (touted as more efficientand humane than the army's preferred option of continental war) Offer returns to

32 Avner Offer, The First World War: an Agrarian Interpretation, Oxford 1990.

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the War itself, the effects of economic blockade, the German gamble of unrestrictedsubmarine warfare in 1917, and the peace negotiations where Billy Hughesdisplayed his shrill bellicosity. Among many provocative suggestions, we may bemortified to find Australians sharing responsibility for the destructive way theFirst World War was conducted and (more directly) for laying the groundwork forthe Second.

This is not a book to command agreement, but to blast our minds out offamiliar orbits by an explosive charge of nutritional, agrarian, psychological,ethical, strategic and diplomatic perceptions. Offer criticises the 'colonial pessi-mists' among Australian historians (p. 132) who, while describing the seamy sideof the 'workingman's paradise' in the dominions, over-draw their case by ignoringthe miserable metropolitan lives forgone. The challenges to Australian scholar-ship, however, are wider than this single judgment in one footnote.

An Agrarian Interpretation has little to say about women: the most sustainedsection deals with German female mortality and morbidity as a measure ofcivilian health. Describing the agrarian frontier societies, however (p. 146ff.),Offer supports the view that early female suffrage reflects a distinctive pattern ofgender relationships. And in Ethel Cooper (p. 28ff.) he uncovers an admirablyindependent Australian who studied music in Germany and (accompanied by herpet crocodile until hunger separated them) endured the whole war, perceptivelyrecording the effects of economic blockade.

As an economic historian, Offer is obliged to account for the high value (andsophisticated production and distribution) of most temperate crops as against thelow value (and sluggish performance) of most tropical crops. The commonestaccount begins with W.A. Lewis's observation that temperate crops fetched fourtimes the value they might have enjoyed had they been grown by tropicalpeasants. Lewis calculates that the 'opportunity cost' to tempt peasants out ofsubsistence production is much lower than that required to lure temperate farmersinto the world market. Many empirical objections could be raised, including thefact that farmers accepted lower incomes than townspeople, and that theirentanglement in a capitalist economy prevented them from emulating peasantsand reverting to subsistence production. Offer seeks a broader explanation thanLewis's, for the simple reason that sugar and wheat (exported from both high andlow latitudes) earned the same price whatever their provenance. To explaindominion prosperity, he emphasises political interventions in the market, pointingout that factors of production were purposefully manipulated, protecting the lowcost of land in the 'land-grabbing societies' (North America, Argentina, Australiaand New Zealand) and fiercely separating Asian and temperate labour marketsthrough immigration policies (pp. 164-6).

His insistence on the primacy of social relationships ('social arrangementswere the key to economic success', p. 138) recalls a nineteenth-century tradition of'political economy'. It is also expressed in his analysis of British agriculture, thedecline of which is sheeted home (in chapters 7 and 8) to the peculiarly abrasiveclass relations which marked Victorian and Edwardian society and hamperedBritish production. Purely environmental or material circumstances cannot ex-

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plain a decline which was more precipitous than in any other European economy,and which proved to be temporary—Britain is once again a significant exporter offood. Landowners who played no role in management or research or production,tenant farmers lacking incentives to increase their efficiency, and a stolid, mutinousrural working class paralysed British agriculture in the face of new threats andopportunities. Australian agricultural expansion depended upon British circum-stances as well as Australian resources and competence. Setting these questions ina political and international context does not yield definitive explanations, but itchallenges the restrictive practices of most other economic historians.

In explaining the kind of society which emerged in the staple economies,Offer's methods are eclectic: at one moment proposing economic determinism('some staples promoted mateship, others promoted matrimony', p. 136) thenflirting with cultural determinism (in his treatment of Argentina, p. 139 andelsewhere) and even voluntarism (in accounting for anti-Asian sentiment). He isconsistent, however, in his optimistic treatment of dominion economy and society.One provocative aside defends the wisdom of reliance upon foreign investment:

to argue otherwise is to contemplate a colony without a staple export, with little immi-gration, and with much reduced investment from abroad. Such societies existed in someoutlying regions and provide a glimpse of settlement sans staples. The French agriculturaleconomy of Quebec and the pastoral Boers in Transvaal both suggest the flavour of suchsocieties... (p. 158).

The wider questions of racial and class antagonisms arising from land disputesand the environmental impact of land-mining*do not detain him, nor does headdress other objections to dependency.

The most arresting contribution towards understanding the dominion societiesis Offer's (almost pathological) avoidance of dichotomies. He depicts an inter-national, triangular relationship between 'Coast, Interior and Metropolis' (chapter10) which neatly sidesteps the temptation of 'home and abroad' on the one handand 'Sydney and the Bush' on the other. The staple producing interior and thecoastal entrepots were both shaped by their relations with metropolitan Britain—but shaped unequally and in some ways pitted against each other. If Britishcapital, migrants, markets and services shaped the colonial economies, coloniststhemselves had to manage the social consequences. And if 'the interior staplehelped to determine the structure of settler society' (p. 135) by promoting differentforms and degrees of solidarity among rural workers and producers, it was theentrepots which dominated policy formation, culture, and often ideology. Only inthe matrix of this triangular relationship are we to grasp the political problems ofintegrating coast and interior into harmonious societies.

Every dominion restricted Asian immigration, in the belief that the settlers'well-being required the exclusion of workers who might undercut wages andconditions. Because the dominions were democratic, an exclusive racism becamepart of the dominant ideology, seeking to create solidarity and avert alienation byexcluding 'aliens'. In general the more radical the party, the more vehement itsracism (chapter 14). Counterfactual calculation throws doubt on the economic

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benefits which were attributed to this social policy, but 'exclusion [of Asianimmigration] was at once the foundation of national identity in the Dominionsand the largest threat to it. That in itself is not a paradox, but one of the constantsof national existence.' (p. 209) What is a genuine paradox is that British strategistsbenefited from racist forces which were often rhetorically anti-imperialist andthreatened to pull the empire apart. The Anglo-Japanese alliance dismayeddominion opinion. Conversely, dominion exclusiveness strained the imperialloyalty of India, most directly in 1914 when Canadians barred the entry of Sikhs inthe first display of Canadian naval power.

It was this division which Teddy Roosevelt sought to widen by sending the'Great White Fleet'—and the young Canadian Mackenzie King—around thePacific to stiffen dominion opposition to Japanese pretensions. The Kaiser alsoobserved the problem but—like most issues outside Europe—misread it. It isastonishing that the ultimate beneficiary of this fissiparous tendency was Britainherself. British politicians and strategists courted dominion leaders during im-perial conferences in 1907, 1911 and 1913, but dominion prime ministers neededlittle persuading. In 1919 Prime Minister Hughes reckoned that Australians hadbeen to war 'to maintain those ideals which we have nailed to the very topmost ofour flagpole—White Australia' (cited at p. 376). Yet Australia fought as an ally ofJapan. More thought—and fresh evidence—might be given to explaining preciselyhow

the policy of exclusion, while it perhaps restricted economic development on the Pacificrim, nevertheless helped to maintain its bonds with the Empire, and made its resourcesmore readily available to Britain in wartime, (p. 214)

Offer's account merely touches on Australian conditions before the war,relying more on quantitative than qualitative evidence. A swift survey has nottime for the detail of The Broken Years, for example, much less Narrandera Shire,which are not cited. How are these realms of scholarship related? When Gammagerelates the little world of Narrandera to the wider issues of Australian life (p. 187ff.),he mentions a failed attempt to introduce Chinese workers into the region. Moresignificant was the minimal influence of formal religion among the pioneers,which led to the shedding of Catholicism by several Irish families, and theassimilation of multiple Christian traditions into a nominal Anglicanism. Formalculture was fostered less by the sober gentlemen of the Literary and DebatingSociety than by the public schools: and 'under the banner of progress, schoolschained Australian rural thought to urban values' (p. 193). Public schools alsoobserved a crowded timetable of imperial celebrations in Sydney.33 The localresponse to these festivals was tepid, except in 1900 when British reverses in SouthAfrica provoked dismay and a few volunteers. Nevertheless die outbreak of the GreatWar revealed that the imperial yeast had been working effectively. Passionatepatriots displaced sober citizens in organising expressions of imperial solidarity,recruiting drives and fund-raising. Local responses to the conscription referenda

33 Gammage, Broken Years, Prologue.

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suggest a populace at first evenly divided, then on reflection opposed to con-scription—but these were the only occasions when military or imperial issueswere presented in a form which people could decently resist. The dominantideology of race and empire was usually too difficult to confront. Gammage'sevidence therefore endorses and extends Offer's judgment: the urban entrepotsdominated the export-producing interior, in culture and ideology as well aspolitics and economy, to the Empire's advantage (p. 135ff.).

It is universally conceded that Australian identity was developed in thegeneration 1890 to 1915. What was that identity exactly? Offer mainly paraphrasesestablished accounts of the Australian content, but the imperial context providesprovocative clues. Not only were the dominions tightly integrated into Britishmarkets for capital, labour, migrants and agrarian production; British decision-makers were acutely aware of these relationships "and sensitive to the prospect ofGerman competition. While the world outside Europe lay 'below the mentalhorizon' of German military planners, their British counterparts kept a closewatch on the Atlantic and Pacific realms (chapter 18). Maurice Hankey, the keyfigure of the Committee of Imperial Defence, was the child of Australian parentsand retained investments here. He mistrusted France but he had ambitious plansto co-opt dominion leaders into imperial affairs. Admiral Fisher devoted time andimaginative effort to understanding the United States and Canada; Lord Eshercame to prominence through his committee which proposed measures to modernisethe British army after the Boer War. Australian authorities reciprocated thisawareness. Andrew Fisher, G.F. Pearceand Billy Hughes, all British-born, felt 'athome' when they visited Britain, even before they were 'duchessed'.

Offer picks up Davison's suggestion34 that the celebration of mateship inpre-war Australia was largely the work of urban writers, but he treats this as theliterary elaboration of a real rural solidarity. He goes on to endorse the orthodoxview that the Anzac experience transformed frail solidarity into a compellingnational legend. He remarks the high proportion—a quarter to a third—ofdominion volunteers who were British-born. This measure leads him to askwhether the unfettered life of the dominions transformed ambivalent—evenmutinous—British subjects into enthusiastic loyalists. A more complex analysis isrequired if we are to account for the depth of imperial patriotism. It is here thatInglis's and Gammage's more nuanced and detailed accounts35 complementOffer's perspective.

In 1885 the Mahdi posed no credible threat to British hegemony in Africa, letalone the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Within a week of hearing of GeneralGordon's predicament in Khartoum, however, the Catholic acting premier of NewSouth Wales had organised and offered troops to the Empire. Many more menvolunteered than could be sent. Opposition was slow to form, and failed to reverse

34 G. Davison, 'Sydney and the Bush: an urban context for the Australian Legend', Historical Studies,vol. 18, no. 71, 1978.35 K.S. Inglis, The Rehearsal: Australians at war in the Sudan 1885, Sydney 1985; and Gammage, TheBroken Years.

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Dalley's decision. In many ways the Sudan adventure prefigures Australianinvolvement in South Africa, the two world wars and Vietnam. Yet commitmentcut across party and sectarian lines, the occasion was almost farcical, there was noJapanese bogey and no plausible threat to Australia's security.56

People in Narrandera, like others in the Riverina, were connected to the restof the world through Offer's 'Coast', but only tenuously, since their lines ofcommunication could run through either Melbourne or Sydney (NarranderaShire, chapter 14). If Sydney controlled 'culture' through the public schools,economic links varied with the progress of railway lines and river transport. Thefederal referendum of 1898 attracted only a 23 per cent poll, though 72 per centexpressed an opinion in 1899 (in both cases favouring federation). The imperialcrisis of the Boer War had more local resonance than the federal issue (p. 195).Narrandera people were consumers more than producers of opinion: not until the1920s did they try to change the structure of the state and federal systems whichgoverned their lives.

After such limited interest in the outside world, the galvanising effect ofGallipoli is arresting. Empire Day remained an official public holiday, increas-ingly celebrated; but within a year of the Gallipoli landing there were vigorousrequests for Anzac Day to be another annual public holiday. Anzac Day andArmistice Day supplemented and eventually displaced Empire Day as occasionsfor patriotic enthusiasm. By Anzac Day 1917 the mayor was sure that the events inTurkey had written 'the first pages of Australia as a nation'. A branch of theReturned Servicemen's League was formed by 1918, and ex-servicemen organisedprivate functions and public rituals. The content of public celebrations wastransformed: 'What the soldiers had achieved and suffered coloured almost everypublic occasion. Honour boards hung in council chambers, schools, churches,clubrooms, court houses, large stores and the railway station.' (p. 204) Politicalrhetoric was enriched, as orators invariably claimed to represent the glorious deadas well as the exiguous living. Parochial sentiment was swiftly incorporated intoand fused with an Australian sensitivity which complemented and intensifiedimperial patriotism. When Australians talked of the birth of a nation in 1915, theymay have meant a dominion—one of several inter-related British nations. Perhapsit was an accident that Gallipoli occurred precisely when the signified dominionwas ready for a signifier—and the symbols provided by C.E.W. Bean werenational.37

Whatever the causes, the response of dominion volunteers—like the massivevoluntary enlistments of working-class British men—created armies of a scale andquality which none anticipated. The German High Command expected merelycolonial militias of dubious quality. British military planners were astonishedthat workers rallied to the war effort. Most had expected working-class acquiescenceat best, and at worst hostility and even sabotage (something like Ireland, the only

36 Inglis, The Rehearsal, ch. 1 and p. 162.37 D.A. Kent, 'The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C.E.W. Bean as editor and image-maker',Historical Studies, 21, pp. 376-90.

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part of the British Isles where a garrison was required). The enthusiasm ofdominion volunteers compounded the situation, and they could be deployedwherever British strategists chose. (Offer observes that Australian and New Zealandauthorities at first had no greater involvement in strategy than the LancashireCounty Council.)

Offer outlines the argument between the navalists—who intended minimaldisruption to civilian life, and wanted to win the war by the capital-intensivedevice of a naval blockade—and the army, who wanted a labour-intensive con-tinental land campaign, if necessary conscripting a truculent working class.(Whether that was the more effective strategy is an issue worth debating at greaterlength than he allows.) At any rate, the choice had not been made even when war

• was declared. What settled the issue was the mass of volunteers who made trenchwarfare possible. Australian enthusiasm for imperial wars remains something of amystery. Few Australians could find Khartoum on a map in 1885. Breaker Morantand his colleagues were paradoxical enemies of the Boers in 1899. Chauvinisthostility to Germany developed only after the Great War was declared. How manyAustralians understood why we had to invade Turkey in 1915? Only the Gurkhasshare such a long tradition of shooting Britain's enemies first and asking questionslater.

The role of dominion and American soldiers, the losses they suffered and thevital importance of food supplies from the same sources gave dominion leaders(and President Wilson) immense influence in the peace negotiations. The CanadianBorden declined to wield that influence ('a noble and sensible position to take', p.371). Hughes; however, grasped his moment 'and made a virtue of unenlightenedself-interest' (p. 372). During and after the war he devoted himself to capturingmarkets for Australian exports. Vengeful and single-minded, he approached thepeace settlement with the same ruthless concentration. He not only led theresistance to Japan's request for symbolic racial equality but also helped tip thebalance for continuing the blockade into 1919, and (supporting the French anddividing the British delegation) for punitive reparations no matter what the long-term consequences for international stability. Offer argues that the continuationof the blockade after the armistice was necessary to enforce Allied terms onGermany; but hunger lost the Allies the moral advantage which they enjoyedwhen the armistice was signed, and encouraged German revanchisle opinion(chapter 26).

Two questions arise directly. How did the Australian prime minister enjoysuch authority? Offer suggests:

without Australia's infantry and without Australia's wool, meat and wheat it is unlikelythat even Hughes could have single-handedly thwarted Germany, Japan and the UnitedStates. Britain relied on the Dominions for help in holding on to its post-war empire,(p. 376)

So far so good. But why was this new influence used so destructively? Offeracknowledges 'the force of his singular personality' (p. 376) and suggests that, in

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the unique trials of making war and peace, personalities had unusual power (p.371): in other words, a Great Man theory of diplomatic history.

It is tempting to follow Offer's lead. A Great Man, after all, stands outsidehistory and responsibility—his own or ours. Judging by the focus of books aboutthe Great War, we do follow Offer's lead. Hughes inhabits a twilight zone betweenthe well-lit trenches of the Western Front and the Palace of Versailles, wherediplomatic historians lurk and few Australians venture. Perhaps he is too embarrass-ing or too definitively described38 to warrant more attention.

As matters stand, in academic literature almost as much as in the media, acharming innocence prevails: Australians inhabit a peaceful continent and join inother people's wars only on request. This self-image is profoundly comforting.Whenever Indonesians, Papua New Guineans, Fijians or New Zealanders objectto the projection of Australian power beyond our shores, we chuckle over theirmisinformation or paranoia. Until we remember Billy Hughes. He did representAustralian exporters very well: 'from 1916 onwards he was constantly engaged indifficult and sometimes acrimonious negotiations with Britain over the allocationof shipping, the price of Australia's commodities, and the terms of payment'(p. 372). Did he also reflect Australian interests in the peace? He told the ImperialWar Cabinet: 'We were going to say to thousands of millions of people that no oneelse should come into Australia—which we had no moral right to do' (Ibid.). Onthe issue of White Australia at least, he was faithful to his constituency, andhostility to the symbolic equality of Japan was (as Offer reminds us) an essentialpopulist position.

On the issue of reparations Hughes overcame the objections of Lloyd George,the contempt of Keynes and the British Treasury, the condemnation of RobertBorden and the counsel of Woodrow Wilson. Briefed by W.A.S. Hewins and otherBritish mercantilists and allied to France he overrode every obstacle to punitivereparations. Hughes's biographer—and specialists in Australian foreign relations—suggest that he was not out of line with public opinion.39 On the face of it, wemust accept C.E.W. Bean's judgment arid concede Hughes's claim to representAustralia:

The controversy over mandates was only the first of several in which Mr Hughes, whateverone may think of his manners, secured for Australia terms the vital importance of which forhis nation has since been proved.40

Thus Bean, after a generation of reflection. As for motives:

38 L.F. Fitzhardinge, That Fiery Particle: a political biography of William Morris Hughes, 1862-1914,Sydney 1964 and The Little Digger, 1914-1952. William Morris Hughes: a political biography, Sydney1979; W.J. Hudson, Australian Diplomacy, Sydney 1970. T.B. Millar, Australia in Peace and War:External Relations 1788-1977, Canberra 1978; P. Spartalis, The Diplomatic Battles of Billy Hughes,Sydney 1983.39Ibid.40 C.E.W. Bean, ANZAC to Amiens, Canberra 1946, p. 525.

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Mr Hughes's attitude [to reparations] was probably not unconnected with his desire toreturn to Australia with the promise of a large war indemnity; Australia was estimated tohave spent £364 million on the war, and she had little return from war industry.41

If Bean is correct, the £5.5 millions actually received may be the worst return oninvestment in anyone's history.

But if Hughes represented Australia accurately, it changes the way weconsider Australia's role in the Pacific Islands. Offer's emphasis on the productionof food for Britain helps to bring into focus Rowley's tripartite division within theAustralian sphere. Tropical Australia had no significance for Britain until CSRbegan sugar production in Queensland. By 1914 the average British consumeringested 36 kg. of sugar each year (p. 39), requiring more suppliers than thetraditional producers in the West Indies. The Australian tropics offered nothingelse of interest to British consumers until beef extract became feasible, and thePacific islands offered nothing except Lever Brothers' production of copra in theSolomons and CSR plantations in Fiji which also catered to the decaying Britishtooth. Australian authorities almost exactly mirror British consumers in theirperception of exploitable resources. Offer's broad canvas provides a context fordetailed local evidence (such as Rowley presents in New Guinea Villager) ofAustralia's spectacular lack of interest in the economies of Melanesia.

Returning to the peace settlement, the acquisition of a share in Nauru'sphosphates is already well known. So too is Australia's role in capturing GermanNew Guinea and holding it under a League of Nations mandate.42 Neitherepisode sits comfortably with our vision of a pacific Australia. If we take theargument further, however, the view is even bleaker. On the stump in Britain,Hughes would demand the 'extirpation, root, branch and seed of German controland influence in British commerce and industry' (pp. 372-3). Given his head inNew Guinea, Hughes accomplished precisely that. More rigorously than theSouth Africans in South West Africa, the Belgians in Ruanda-Urundi or the NewZealanders in Samoa, Australians expropriated and deported German citizens.The allocation of property to ex-servicemen and the decline of a vigorousplantation economy all suggest vindictiveness.43 Yet Hughes never visited theislands. The extirpation of a German community and the elimination of everytrace of German occupation—apart from authority over Melanesians—were thework of Australian ex-servicemen. Hughes, having no political party of his own,crafted his policies to win ex-servicemen to the Nationalist cause: his vindictivenessmay have been calculated as much as temperamental. Introducing the uncomfort-able topic of Asian exclusion, Offer proposes that it was not 'merely the "darkside" of colonial societies. Rather, racism arose directly out of their virtues ofdemocracy, civic equality and solidarity. It expressed these virtues and oftenconfirmed and reinforced them.' (p. 198) The same formula might be applied to

41Ibid., p . 526.42Rowley, Australians in German New Guinea; Spartalis, op. cit. ch. 9.43Spartalis, op. cit.

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Australian participation at Versailles: that Hughes was not our 'dark side'. Rather,he arose directly out of colonial democracy, frontier radicalism, militarism andmateship.

In 1940, Historical Studies sought to provide a forum for all practisinghistorians, and the broader intelligentsia as well. In the 1940s that purpose wascredible. Since then, knowledge is increasingly fragmented by discipline and bynationality, separating us from each other. Isolation was experienced with parti-cular acuteness in the boundaries of Australian scholarship, inspiring new formsof synthesis (like those of Rowley, Gammage and Reynolds) and of cooperation(An Historical Library). The technology and organisation of public informationand debate have also been transformed by the emergence of new mass media. Ourprofessionalism alienates most of us from television and even the mass-circulationprint media, which propound the myths that provoke us to tirades in narrow-castmagazines and small-circulation journals. In the aftermath of an informationrevolution, most of us feel marginalised, even disfranchised: it is not feasible towrite a book (let alone a film script) whenever we have a critical point to develop.So we still need an open research journal—as well as closed specialist journals.The defining quality of a research journal is captured in the barbed advice ofSouth Africa's delegate at the 1911 Imperial Conference to a brash New Zealander,who justified the exclusion of Asian immigrants with the argument that each raceshould stick to the peculiar geographical environment to which it was naturallyadapted. If delegates pursued that line of argument, said a discomposed Malan, we'may be brought into historical investigations which would be rather disconcertingperhaps' (cited by Offer, p. 187).

Historical Studies is our forum for disconcerting investigations which cannotcommand a popular audience in the mass media: to examine the context andshape of Australian history as well as its content; to keep issues open; to exposeself-righteous moralising; and to remind ourselves of Australia's internationalroles. One of many such enquiries—placed firmly on the agenda by Offer'sAgrarian Interpretation—is to question the self-indulgent image of ourselves asinternational victims.

DONALD DENOONDow

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