the book, and it's clear from the considerable power that he now holds as Dean of Arts, Ernest Scott Professor, member of the Vice-Chancellor's Committee of Melbourne University, and historical adviser to one of Federal Minister David Kemp's committees, that Stuart Macintyre is now an enormously influential intellectual figure in the organisation and teaching of Australian history.
It would be naive to think that, in the full plenitude of this power and influence, he did not write this book in the expectation and hope of it becoming a kind of new orthodoxy.
The careful way in which it is organised, drawing together conservative historiography and "cultural studies" in a kind of grey Anglo middle ground, indicates the kind of historical orthodoxy which Macintyre wishes to lay out for us and obviously desires to predominate.
In the conversation at afternoon tea at the Labor History Conference, Macintyre made a fourth point to me, a point he has made on several other occasions.
He claimed that, in his history teaching, he finds that undergraduates don't seem initially to know very much about past Australian history, and that because of this you end up with a better teaching result if you do not overburden them with relatively unimportant details, such as names, explorers and superseded conflicts.
Macintyre seems to indicate that, as we live in a globalising world, we should dispense with many of the past complications, and look boldly towards the homogenised future. He seems to think this is what the young expect of us. He summarises this outlook in the last, rather self-serving paragraph of the acknowledgements in the Concise History :
The book is aimed also at a younger generation of Australians who are poorly served by a school curriculum in which history has become a residual. I have dedicated it to my two daughters, born in England, raised in Australia, who have too often had their father play the pedagogue and all along have been instructing him in their interests and concerns.
In my view, Macintyre uses the historical interests of his daughters as a surrogate for his own deliberate and considered historical conservatism. In the course of running my up, middle and down-market bookshop, in Newtown in inner-urban Sydney, I come into constant contact with many of everybody's sons and daughters, at least the sons and daughters who come into bookshops.
I find the variety of their historical interests and concerns far wider than those Macintyre encounters, according to his description in the Concise History . Many of these people are the children of migrants from many countries, or migrants themselves.
I recently had for sale in my shop, as a cheap publisher's remainder, a rather good book on the history of Greeks in Australia. It sold extremely well and generated considerable interest among younger Greek Australians. p> Barry York's book on the Maltese in Australia sold very well also, often to people of Maltese background. Eric Rolls's book on the Chinese in Australia sells extremely well to young Chinese. None of those books, or any other books about the history of non-British migrants in Australia, got any significant recognition in Macintyre's history or made it into his bibliography.
Macintyre's self-fulfilling prophecy about young people and Australian history
In my experience as a bookseller, our robust Australian multiculture, and continuing mass migration, about both of which Macintyre's Concise History is so elegantly sceptical, are generating considerable interest in the history of past diversity and conflict in Australia.
Unfortunately, these are just the elements that Macintyre tends to filter out of his historical narrative, as they are, he seems to suggest, of little interest to the young.
In my view, the opposite holds. If we don't have a proper historical grounding in our past conflicts and turmoils, how can we possibly understand the future? There is nothing quite like conflict and argument to gain the attention of people reading history.
Macintyre leans heavily on the unconvincing proposition that the young are not too interested in history. Well, it is true that the numbers studying history at a secondary and tertiary level have dropped. That is far more a product of unwise past decisions and present practices in relation to curriculum in schools and universities, and the way history is taught, than to any intrinsic lack of interest in Australian history.
Macintyre's approach to the teaching of history to the young is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless we teach students about all the complexities of the Australian saga, in an interesting, quirky and sympathetic way, of course they will be bored by Australian history and won&...
