n the style of Russel Ward, and almost anything else that interferes with this Macintyre-Dixson version of modernising bourgeois British-Australia, with its naturally hegemonic "Anglo-Celtic core culture".
It is hardly necessary to point out how well this historical style and construction fits in, generally, with the perceived interests and strategic orientations of major fractions of the ruling class in rapidly "Globalising" modern Australia. p> Macintyre's mating of conservative British-Australia academic history with cultural studies produces an offspring in which the bad genes of both parents predominate.
Macintyre and racism
The "left" face of Macintyre's construction is a constant stress on past racist and sexist practices, particularly of the working class. In this way he makes ritual obeisance to the mood prevailing in the currently fashionable and powerful cultural studies and gender studies academic territories.
In discussing past racism and sexism, however, Macintyre rarely notes the activities of many minorities that have fought, often ultimately successfully, against racism and sexism. An exception to this neglect is when he ascribes the only important past activity against anti-Aboriginal racism to the Communist Party, which is really a quite unbalanced approach.
Australian history is peppered with all sorts of radical and religious groups and individuals who fought against racism. For the 19th century this is documented thoroughly in Henry Reynolds 'most recent book, This Whispering in Our Hearts . p> Macintyre's undialectical airbrushing out of almost all of the minorities that fought against racism tends to make the eventual overthrow of the White Australia Policy, and the legal removal of the bars to many Aboriginal rights, mysterious and inexplicable in his narrative, but it is entirely consistent with his dismissiveness towards most Australian popular movements.
Macintyre and the struggle for women's rights
Stuart Macintyre's treatment of sexism and the struggle for women's emancipation is worthy of note. He adopts the currently fashionable standpoint of some conservative feminists by giving extended recognition and praise to the 19th century temperance movement.
He notes the fact that Australian women got the vote in all states and the Commonwealth well before the rest of the world, but he hardly notices the fact that this was a direct product of the broad struggle in the Australian colonies for basic democratic rights, spearheaded in this instance by Australian feminists but largely accepted and even supported by civilised forces among Australian men.
This demonstrable and important political fact about women's rights in Australia does not prevent Macintyre from asserting a generally gloomy, rather inaccurate, but currently fashionable, proposition that Australia was more or less universally sexist in the past. p> Needless to say, he pays no recognition to Portia Robinson's The Women of Botany Bay , an important work on convict women, and Grace Karskens 'useful book, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (Melbourne University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-522-84722-6), both of which illustrate the way many convict women managed to improve their situation and assert their independence, and were by no means the totally hopeless, hapless victims that many historical narratives present them as.
Later, Macintyre blandly ascribes the achievement of equal pay for equal work for women to a ruling by the Arbitration Commission, ignoring the long popular movement, led mainly by women in the trade unions, that produced that Arbitration Court determination.
The lifelong agitation and effective organisation of trade unionists such as Muriel Heagney and Edna Ryan for equal pay and equal rights for women is abolished from Macintyre's narrative. This long struggle of women in Australia for equality and full social and economic rights, therefore tends to disappear against a backdrop of more or less universal sexism.
When reviewing the past, it is obvious that a lot of people were racist and sexist a lot of the time. What was significant and exceptional about the Australian experience, however, was the earliness of major achievements, such as the uniquely early achievement of votes for women, and the establishment of child endowment in the Lang period in New South Wales.
Despite the culturally prevailing sexism, material achievements such as this shifted the social norms dramatically and laid the basis for further improvements in women's rights and expectations, which ought to produce a more favourable assessment of past gains for women in Australia. Not so for our Stuart. p> In the Concise History , official history out of cultur...
