is implicit proposition that the postwar settlement was unsustainable. The few times when Macintyre's own, rather dry, prose becomes anything like elegaic, are when he is implicitly celebrating the end of the postwar settlement with the advent of globalisation, accords and deregulation of the financial system during the period of the Hawke and Keating governments.
"Cultural studies" meets and mates with conservative academic history, to produce a kind of mule: grey armband history
Like many other literate Australians I have gradually become enraged at the disdainful, dismissive, half-smart, supercilious tone of much of what is called, these days "cultural studies".
Keith Windschuttle's useful book, The Killing of History , (Which Macintyre wisely ignores both in the Concise History and the bibliography), expresses in its title one of the main aspects of this cultural phenomenon.
The abstruse nature of a lot of "cultural studies", combined with the contemptuous tone often adopted towards popular culture and many other human activities, is a contributing factor to a decline in the number of students studying disciplines such as history, in which "Cultural studies" is now so influential. p> I don't want to go overboard in this criticism of "cultural studies" and "gender studies ", as a number of books and articles written in this idiom are both civilised and useful, for example, Raelene Francis's < book, The Politics of Work in Victoria, 1880-1940 (Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1993), Peter Spearritt and David Walker's Australian Popular Culture , Bruce Scates's A New Australia , about the 1890s, and many others. Nevertheless, it seems to me that many books and articles in this area are abstract and trivial and contemptuous of popular social practices, and that unfortunately this mode is coming to dominate these two fields.
From the political right (John Howard, Michael Duffy and others) there is another kind of attack on Australian history, which deliberately makes an amalgam between cultural studies and important critical historians such as Henry Reynolds, Robert Hughes and others, and condemns all critical history wholesale: the very useful with the totally useless, accusing them all of producing "black armband history ".
This attack by reactionaries such as Howard is assisted by the absurdist quality of much cultural studies in the field of history. In the interests of intellectual clarity and re-establishing Australian popular history in its proper critical role, I think it important to make a new distinction between the important "Black armband" historians, such as Henry Reynolds, Robert Hughes, Manning Clark and Russel Ward, who make an enormous positive contribution to Australian culture, and another, more negative genre, to which I now officially give the title "grey armband historians".
The bloodline of grey armband history is conservative British-Australian official history as the stallion, with the most dismissive sort of cultural studies as the mare. Macintyre is the obvious candidate for major eminent person and head of the field in this significant new genre.
How grey armband history works
Stuart Macintyre's Concise History is a very instructive example of this new discipline, and how it is organised and constructed. Its intellectual antecedents include books like Ronald Conway's The Great Australian Stupor and Jonathan King's Waltzing Materialism , which were best-sellers a few years ago.
These books 'unifying feature was a wholesale assault on the cultural and social practices of Australians, both working class and middle class, with an implicit standpoint derived from high culture, eternal verities and a uniformly unpleasant carping tone in their attacks on the allegedly fatally materialistic stream of Australian life.
Much of the cultural studies idiom in Australian history has taken over the standpoint and style of those two books in spades. The tone throughout Macintyre's Short History is, most of the time, distainful, grand and supercilious, particularly when discussing ordinary people's social practices and social life.
The exceptions to this emphasis are when Macintyre is discussing, rather reverently, the unifying nature of Anzac during the First World War, and the "modernising" activities of the Hawke and Keating governments.
This posture is adopted particularly sharply in relation to fields such as agriculture, the Snowy Scheme, current mass migration, manufacturing industry, the postwar social and economic settlement, "Elegaic" attachment to working class solidarity i...
