verland , of May 1989, there is a full-page review by Stuart Macintyre of Russel Ward's important autobiography A Radical Life . The tone of this review is respectful and includes the following: "Finally, there is the story of how Russel Ward came to write The Australian Legend , that seminal codification of the national past ... The Australian Legend distilled these experiences and explored their historical genesis, establishing Russel Ward as a leading member of what is called the Old Left. His leftism was real and passionate, and the scars left by victimisation are apparent as he rehearses his experiences at the hands of the cold warriors of the University of NSW. The book concludes with his appointment to the University of New England; the radical life continues. "p> It is useful to consider the context of this courteous and intelligent review. Macintyre's views had obviously not evolved so far to the right on historical matters as they have now. Macintyre then was more junior on the academic historical ladder, and Russel Ward was regarded quite rightly as a major Australian left democratic historian, at the height of his literary and historical powers.
In other articles around that time Macintyre repeated this kind of positive appraisal of The Australian Legend , which he had so harshly criticised in the 1970s. In the intervening decade between 1989 and 1999, the intellectual climate in Australian historiography has shifted to the right, Macintyre himself being one of the significant influences in that shift. All the radical democratic leftist historians whom Macintyre so condescendingly dismisses as the Old Left, except Robin Gollan, are now deceased, and obviously can't argue back without the use of a oiuja board, and Macintyre no longer proclaims himself as the representative of the New Left, as he once did.
Sniffing this colder, more reactionary atmosphere in Australian history, which he helped create, Macintyre now returns to pretty much what he said in the 1970s, expressed in a more radically conservative way. In his Concise History , on page 219, Macintyre writes:
As before, when confronted with the failure of millennial expectations, the left retreated into a nostalgic idealisation of national traditions. Its writers, artists and historians turned from the stultifying conformity of the suburban wilderness to the memories of an older Australia that was less affluent and more generous, less gullible and more vigilant of its liberties, less timorous and more independent. In works such as The Australian Tradition (1958), The Australian Legend (1958) and The Legend of the Nineties (1954), the radical nationalists reworked the past (They passed quickly over the militarism and xenophobia in the national experience) to assist them in their present struggles. Try as they might to revive these traditions, the elegaic note was clear. The radical nationalists codified the legend of laconic, egalitarian, stoical mateship just as modernising forces of change were erasing the circumstances that had given rise to that legend. While the radical romance faded, the conservative courtship of national sentiment prospered.
The pompous tone of the above speaks for itself. The authors of these influential books, Russel Ward, Vance Palmer and AA Phillips, are neither named, nor are their books mentioned, in Macintyre's bibliography or index.
They are treated by the overweening Macintyre as disembodied examples of a cultural trend, rather than, as they then were, living breathing historians, with a point of view of some importance. In retrospect, the working class solidarity that they "elegaicly" celebrated wasn't nearly as extinct as Macintyre claims.
The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were in fact a period of constant improvement in working class wages and conditions, achieved, in the framework of the so called postwar settlement, by the well tried, and long practiced means of working class and trade union agitation. This involved sporadic use of industrial action combined with judicious exploitation of the arbitration mechanisms by unions.
These improvements of working class living standards, which were quite spectacular, were also advanced by the conflict and competition between left and right in the labour movement for support, which resulted in both general factions, in their own particular ways, pushing for and achieving steady incremental improvements for the working class.
The high point of this process was a result of the elimination of the penal clauses after the O'Shea upheaval in 1969, which led directly to the dramatic explosion of improvements in wages and conditions between 1972 and 1982 (which infuriated the Australian bourgeoisie).
Macintyre largely ignores this development, or even suggests it was not a good thing, in h...
