John Hirst - Looking for Australia

Are the finest guides to Australian history always those written by historians? Asked to name the best history books on Australia, I find my mind wanders to works that are not history proper. Is this because our historians have been poor, or because Australia doesnt yield its secrets when the usual methods are applied?

At the 2006 summit called by the Howard government to discuss the teaching of Australian history in schools, I signed up to the proposition that children should, among other things, know significant public events and developments. But is knowing them the way one comes to know Australia? In the United States or England, the public events of the past still definitely shape the nations sense of itself. Americans are, as their Declaration of Independence avers, committed to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The English are proud of creating the mother of parliaments and the protections of the common law. And in France, for a long time, a persons attitude to the Revolution determined which of the towns chess clubs they would join. Our history hasnt worked like this.

Two days after the history summit, I went to see my football team play at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. I rode by escalator up to a seat in the newest stand. In large handwriting on the walls surrounding me were the first rules of the Australian game, drawn up by the Melbourne Club in 1859. It was, of course, not the original document; I am not sure even whether the handwriting was a blown-up version of the original, but I felt that frisson of awe and attachment which sustains museums and which Americans feel when they look at the original Declaration of Independence under glass.

It might not be history, but there is a sporting lore in this country: names, dates, records, rules, triumphs and near misses. Remember Wayne Harmes sliding across the wet ground to keep the ball in play in the 1979 Grand Final, giving Carlton the opportunity to kick the goal that defeated Collingwood? And is it true that the boundary umpire who did not call the ball out of bounds was Harmess cousin? We have no equivalent lore of our public life. Everyone knows that Don Bradman kept up the nations spirits during the Great Depression, but how many know the name of Joe Lyons, who left the Labor Party during the Depression and became prime minister on the other side? If children are to be taught public events and developments, they will be learning what their elders do not know and seemingly dont need to know.

So let us begin privately, in a small dining room in an English county town. The guests have just left and the host and hostess are quarrelling. The hostess is about to utter the Australian declaration of independence. The talk of these two was created by the novelist Henry Handel Richardson in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930). Richard Mahony had made money as a doctor in gold-rush Ballarat; his wife Mary had only very reluctantly gone Home with him to Buddlecombe. Her first supper party there was a disaster, for she had put on a slap-up Australian spread and her guests had no more than toyed with it. She should have served just biscuits and sherry.

Her husband upbraids her for this terrible faux pas, to which she responds with a denunciation of the restrictions of English social life:

To remember I mustnt shake hands here or even bow there. That in some quarters I must only say Good afternoon and not How do you do? and then the other way around as well. That nice Mrs Perkes is not the thing and ought to be cold-shouldered; and when I have company I am not to give them anything to eat. Oh, Richard, it all seems to me such fudge! How grown-up people can spend their lives being so silly, I dont know. Out there, you had to forget what a persons outside was like I mean his table-manners and whether he could say his aitches as long as he was capable or rich. But here its always: Who is he? How far back can he trace his pedigree?