aotic events as the pell mell development of Sydney, or the 1890s crash in Victoria, capture something of the human enthusiasms of all the players involved, without too much moralism.
Susanna Short, in her incomparable biography of her father, Laurie Short, gives a careful and interesting account of both her old man's outlook at each stage in his contradictory development, and something of the outlook of all the different conflicting groups, the Stalinists, the Trotskyists, the Catholic Groupers, the ordinary Laborites and Langites, etc. These people really come to life in Susanna's book. p> In my view, Bob Gollan's book on the Communist Party, Revolutionaries and reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement (Melbourne University Press, 1975) is infinitely superior to Macintyre's longer Communist Party history. A Communist himself, Gollan, as a vantage point for understanding the history of the Communist Party, counterposes to the CPA's own view of itself the standpoint of the Trotskyists and the Catholics who were in conflict with it, which illuminates his narrative immensely.
Bob Murray, who is a right-winger in his bas ic political outlook, has written three very important books of Australian history, The Split , about the ALP split in the 1950s, The Ironworkers about the history of that union, and his delightful book The Confident Years , Australia in the 1920s. p> Murray carefully distances his own views from his account of the events he describes and goes to considerable pains to describe the interaction between the interests and point of view of all the players, large and small, in the historical dramas he is recounting. It's worth just giving the chapter headings of The Confident Years : Fit for Heroes , The Political World of Billy Hughes , Post-war Labor , The Big Fella , Packer, Murdoch, Fairfax and Co , Bruce-Page Australia , The Golden Years , After the Bulletin , Workers and Bosses , Countdown to Catastrophe .
Robert Murray as a dialectician
Political conservative though he may be, but Murray's way of proceeding seems, to this Marxist, to be impecably dialectical, and an extremely useful way to write Australian history.
Murray's narrative benefits from a certain enthusiasm for Australian economic development and a knack for writing entertaining social and economic history. He gives a very thorough account of economic and social developments: how many cars were registered, how many people went to the movies, the growth of manufacturing industry, that sort of thing, in a way that meshes in very well with the overall thrust of the book.
The Confident Years is a very counterpoint to Macintyre's cultural studies approach to writing Australian history, particularly when you compare Macintyre's handling of the 1920s with Murray's.
Another sphere that Macintyre ignores is popular history. Macintyre's historical scholarship might benefit from a bit of research into the 60 year-old, seven-day-a-week historical features in the reactionary Sydney tabloid, The Telegraph Mirror . These historical features have often been a good deal more radical than the implacably reactionary content of the rest of the newspaper and, particularly recently, they have been a rather good example of how to present history in a popular and discursive way for a broad audience.
The people and events covered in these useful historical features almost never make it into Macintyre's dry account. Monica Heary, who frequently writes these features, recently wrote a very useful article about the internal political conflicts in Australia during the First World War, which left Macintyre's account of these events for dead.
She used roughly the same number of words Macintyre devoted to this topic in his book. Monica Heary, the busy features journalist, writing to a deadline every day, nevertheless succeeded in working into her narrative the General Strike of 1917 and the release of the IWW frame-up victims thanks to Percy Brookfield's use of his balance of power in the Parliament. Obviously, this is partly because newspaper history writing involves looking for exciting and important events to move the narrative along.
Macintyre's history writing might benefit from studying this Telegraph-Mirror historiographical school and going back through the historical features morgue of the Telegraph Mirror .
In the 1970s we had the "debate on class". In the year 2000 we desperately need the "debate on Australian history".
In the introduction to his Concise History , Macintyre proudly proclaims that the Australian Research Council gave him a grant to write ...
