Historylessness: Australia as a settler colonial collective

Abstract

Most cabbies would confirm that ‘Australia has little history’. This is remarkable; how can one explain this often repeated trope? While having ‘little’ history should be understood in the sense that Australia has a short chronology (as dialogically opposed to ‘Old Europe’, for example), this refrain could also be understood as a way of expressing a perception that Australia is, relatively speaking, an especially ‘historyless’ society. This article understands a recurring reference to a lack of a ‘dense’ past as one discursive feature related to a number of specific constraints typical of settler colonial ideological formations.

Perceiving a lack of history, a lack of conflict, and a classless circumstance are related. As well as historyless (and despite contradicting evidence) Australia has a long tradition of being routinely represented as an exceptionally egalitarian and classless society (again, as dialogically opposed to ‘Old England’). A classless political order would be characterised by a lack of conflict that would in turn produce no history. This article interprets this claim as another discursive feature typical of settler colonial rhetorical traditions. Mythologies about egalitarian societies inhabiting ‘quiet’ continents, and the reality of underdeveloped historiographies are related to the long lasting resilience of a settler colonial consciousness. The first section of this article outlines an approach to the historical consciousness of settler colonial political traditions; the second section focuses on Australian historiographies.

Notes

1. John L Comaroff, ‘Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa’, American Ethnologist 16, 1989, p 667.

2. Daniel Joseph Walther, Creating Germans Abroad: Cultural Policies and National Identity in Namibia, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002, p 183. Although it does not distance itself from the colonial dimension and language of German South West Africa, Walther's book remains a source of information pertaining to a specific example of a settler colonial project.

3. See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp 59–64.

4. Quoted in Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, p 93. Of course, parallel to this rejection of history, Zionism consistently expressed a determination to repossess history. It is important to note how dialectically opposed impulses coexisted and coalesced in the formation of different political traditions.

5. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Islam, Europe and Indian Nationalism: Towards a Postcolonial Transnationalism’, in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2005, p 235.

6. Edmund S Morgan, The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America, New York: Norton, 2005, p 23.

7. See, for example, Eric R Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin, 1967, pp 39–40.

9. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York: Perennial Classics, 2000, and Cheryl B Welch, de Tocqueville, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The impact this narrative had on settler political traditions should not be underestimated, as it directly shaped Turnerian notions of ‘frontier’ democracy, for example, and, by way of analogy and identification, other settler entities as well.

10. Ayse Deniz Temiz, ‘Dialogues with A Forgetful Nation: Genealogy of Immigration Discourses in the US’, borderlands e-journal 5(3), 2006. The URL for this article is: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no3_2006/temiz_behdad.htm

11. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965 [1690], # 48, 49.

12. Anthony Moran, ‘As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, 2002, p 1016.

13. Quoted in T H Irving, ‘1850–70’, in Francis K Crowley (ed.), A New History of Australia, Melbourne: W Heinemann, 1974, p 133. For various reasons not entirely unrelated to a perceived need to enact an anthropological revolution, other regimes would also symbolically mark their breaking away from historical orders. Both Fascist Italy and Gaddafi's Libya, for example, would enact a separate chronology.

14. Isn't it interesting that a most reasonable implication of this logic, that settlers degrading and/or defacing the land with poor environmental management should be dispossessed, has not yet been argued?

15. Ann Curthoys's work on Australian victimologies quotes anthropologist Andrew Lattas, who ‘examined how Australian nationalist discourses emphasize a struggle in which the pioneer, the explorer and the artist all suffer as they seek to possess the land’, and where ‘White settler suffering [ … ] becomes a means for conferring right of ownership to the land.’ Ann Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies 61, 1999, p 3.

16. For examples of how these interpretative necessities informed scholarly research, see, respectively: Gianfranco Cresciani, The Italians in Australia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, which concludes a long trajectory of inscription of ethnic migrant histories within national historiographical orders; Lorna Lippmann, Generations of Resistance: The Aboriginal Struggle for Justice, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1981; and Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1981.

17. This definition of settler endeavours (a characterisation focusing on a particular set of political traditions) differs from other approaches to the study of settler colonial forms, where emphasis is placed on the political ascendancy of ‘fragment’-establishing newcomers. See, for example, Louis Hartz (ed.), The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.

18. Donald Denoon, ‘Understanding Settler Societies’, Historical Studies 18(73), 1979, pp 526–527.

19. In The Fatal Shore—which outsells all other history books on Australia—Robert Hughes subverted this trope by concluding that, on the contrary, ‘the question of class was all pervasive and pathological’. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, New York: Knopf, 1987, p 323.

20. On a number of specific constraints characterising history writing in Australia, see Ann Curthoys, ‘Does Australian History Have a Future?’ Australian Historical Studies 118, 2002, pp 140–152. For an early detection of an Australian inclination to forget, see Bernard Smith's groundbreaking The Spectre of Truganini, Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980, especially pp 17–25.

21. In his analysis of the anti-transportation movement, a key moment in the transition to an Australian settler colonial order, John Hirst detected a particular sensitivity to history: while he noted how its promoters were ‘very conscious they were making history’ he also recorded how, immediately after the movement's victory, ‘John West, one of its Tasmanian leaders, wrote its history’. John Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales, Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, pp 212, 216.

22. John Hirst, ‘Australia's Absurd History’, in John Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005, pp 14, 16.

23. Irving, ‘1850–70’, pp. 163–164.

24. On the ‘Kisch affair’ see, for example, Heidi Zogbaum, Kisch in Australia: The Untold Story, Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2004. A perceptive reconstruction of the Cronulla riots is presented in Suvendrini Pereira, ‘Race Terror, Sydney, December 2005’, borderlands e-journal, 5(1), 2006. The URL for this essay is: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no1_2006/perera_raceterror.htm

25. I am not suggesting that sectional, class, or ethnic strife should be promoted; a peculiar and long lasting pattern of perception assuming that these conflicts are intrinsically un-Australian, however, should be the subject of further exploration.

26. See A A Phillips, The Cultural Cringe, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006. Here one could also mention historian Keith Hancock's recurring ridicule of Australian mediocrity and of an Australian incapacity of producing ‘history’—a possible case in point in the phenomenology of narrative envy.

27. See Brian Fitzpatrick, A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement, Melbourne: Rawson's Bookshop, 1944; Manning Clark, ‘Rewriting Australian History’, in Manning Clark, Occasional Writings and Speeches, Melbourne: Fontana Books, 1980, pp 4, 10; Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788–1975, Melbourne: Penguin, 1976; and Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia, Melbourne: Penguin, 1975. For an outline of the evolution of Aboriginal history as a field of historical enquiry, see Lorenzo Veracini, ‘A Prehistory of Australia's History Wars: The Evolution of Aboriginal History during the 1970s and 1980s’, Australian Journal of History and Politics 52, 2006, pp 439–454.

28. Quoted in Anthony Moran, ‘As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, 2002, pp 1019, 1020. For a definition of settler colonialism as essentially a project of replacement, see Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassell, 1999.

29. One example of how settler narratives often replicate a settler colonial need to enforce replacement is provided by an interpretation of Waltzing Matilda as a settler story, where the process of indigenization of the settler is completed and a settler logic of replacement is carried to its full logical extent (i.e. there is no Aboriginal presence whatsoever—except for an Aboriginal terminology that has been comprehensively, and significantly, appropriated and made truly own). In Waltzing Matilda the settler is the ‘native’: ‘nomadically’ inhabiting what is constructed as a pristine idyll before experiencing in succession the passages that would constitute a history of the Aboriginal experience: invasion, the clash of competing claims, a decision to fight against overwhelming odds rather than surrender to a claim that is perceived as ultimately illegitimate, extermination, and eventual haunting of country, are all elements of its narrative structure. And since a settler consciousness has entirely replaced an Indigenous presence, Waltzing Matilda is especially the story of an Indigenous dispossession. Crucially, its political imaginary is also a typically settler one, with a marked emphasis on an anti-aristocratic political message. Rejecting the possibility of establishing an aristocratic regime and its claims, however, is a rejection of history in this context, as any aristocratic regime by definition legitimises rule by reference to precedent and to historical realities. For a recent analysis of Waltzing Matilda's story and its relation to interpreting Australian history, see Inga Clendinnen, ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past’, Quarterly Essay 23, 2006, especially pp 3–8. See also Matthew Richardson, Once a Jolly Swagman: The Ballad of Waltzing Matilda, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006.

30. See, for example, Douglas Pike, Australia: The Quiet Continent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Indeed, for a long time ‘Australia’ was the standard title for a history book, as if a description of place could exhaust the history of an inherently historyless locale.

31. For examples of this pattern of perception, see Paul Carter, Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, and Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Elsewhere, settler political traditions could not possibly lay claim to a ‘quiet land’ and a celebration of frontier violence became a feature of national mythologies (in the US, for example). In these instances, however, the ‘quietness’ trope re-emerges after the ‘closing’ of troubled frontiers, when the establishment of a settled/settler order can be finally pursued.

32. Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002, p 3.

33. Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia, London: Oxford University Press, 1916; C E W Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1921–1942. See also Donald Denoon, ‘The Isolation of Australian History’, Historical Studies 87, 1986, pp 252–260.

34. Ann Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies 61, 1999, p 12.

35. On Anzac memorials, see Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, 1998. On war and memory in Australia, see Liz Reed, Bigger than Gallipoli: War, History, and Memory in Australia, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2004.

36. James Belich, ‘Colonization and History in New Zealand’, in Robin W Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, vol. V, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p 185.

37. See also Marilyn Lake, ‘Monuments, Manhood and Colonial Dependence: The Cult of Anzac as Compensation’, in Marilyn Lake (ed.), Memory, Monuments and Museums: The Past in the Present, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006.

38. G A Wood, ‘Convicts’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society VIII(IV), 1922, p 187.

39. John Hirst's 1983 book on New South Wales convict society, a contribution to the ‘normalising school’ on convict society, argues a similar conclusion by way of a different process: it was not a democratic tradition that should be upheld but had to struggle against British repression; on the contrary, it was a democratic tradition that should be upheld and one that could flourish under British rule (i.e. concentrationarian Australia was never a brutalised society). See John Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983.

40. W K Hancock, Australia, London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1930, p 80.

41. South African historian George McCall Theal's reconciliation of British and Boer experiences had performed a similar narrative shift in a South African context. His massive production epitomises a settler historiography, with a shift towards race and towards appraising a conflict between civilisation and barbarism. Leonard Thompson, for example, concludes that ‘Theal was a settler historian par excellence’. Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, p 56.

42. R M Crawford, Australia, London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1952.

43. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958.

44. Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788–1972, Melbourne: Heinemann, 1973. Indeed, even Manning Clark's recurring reference to a tragic register could be seen as one type of displacement, where an Australian history can only exist on the provision that it be recognised as the unfolding of a tragedy.

45. However, in Looking for Blackfellas’ Point, Mark McKenna provides a related and complementary argument. As well as forgetting and erasure, settler narratives can construe an active denial of responsibility, one result of a settler community's need to ‘create history in their own image’. One consequence of this narrative requirement is that even acknowledgment of Indigenous destruction becomes a discursive device by which the Indigenous presence is placed in an irretrievable and unrecoverable past—a way to confirm that Indigenous people do not have a place in settler histories. See Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002, p 94.

46. See Veracini, ‘A Prehistory of Australia's History Wars’, p 454.

47. See, for example, John Moloney, Australia: Our Heritage, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2006.

48. See John Howard's remarks in his 2006 Australia Day speech on the need to present a structured narrative and abandon a ‘fragmented stew of themes and issues’. Howard quoted in Inga Clendinnen, ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past’, Quarterly Issue 23, 2006, p 2. Clendinnen was about to participate in a ‘History Summit’ on the reformation of the teaching of Australian history organized by federal Education Minister Julie Bishop.

49. The outstanding success of TV series like ‘The Colony’, where contemporary Australians are asked to fully immerse themselves in nineteenth-century circumstances, is a case in point. See Belinda Gibbon, The Colony: The Book from the Popular SBS Living History Series, Sydney: Random House Australia, 2006.

50. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-century Life, London: Abacus, 2003.

51. Clendinnen insightfully summarises this approach as the ‘triumph of British explorers and settlers in overcoming the recalcitrant land [ … ] smoke rising from slab huts, the sound of axes ringing through the blue air, and so on’. See Clendinnen, ‘The History Question’, p 3.

52. See, for example, Robert Manne, ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right’, Quarterly Essay 1, 2001; Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003; and Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.

53. Keith Windschuttle, ‘The Break-up of Australia’, Quadrant, November 2000. This article is also available at: http://www.sydneyline.com/Massacres%20Part%20Two.htm

54. See Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002, p 3.

55. John Farrell, ‘Australia’, quoted in Ian Turner (ed.), The Australian Dream: A Collection of Anticipations about Australia from Captain Cook to the Present Day, Melbourne: Sun Books, 1968, pp 236–237.

56. For an anxious—and ultimately unconvincing—attempt to deny its very existence, see Michael Connor, The Invention of Terra Nullius: Historical and Legal Fictions on the Foundation of Australia, Sydney: Macleay Press, 2005.