Clark, Russel Ward, Brian Fitzpatrick, Ian Turner and Eris O'Brien are put in the same basket. For example, one of the most intemperate critics of Brian Fitzpatrick was Manning Clark. p> My juxtaposition of the above historians, as in retrospect clearly representing a populist, democratic school of Australian historiography, is quite deliberate. Whatever the differences that existed between them, they all eventually came to a relative commonality of interests and preoccupations on many questions.
Among the key questions that confronted them all eventually were the development of class and the emergence of a labour movement, the discordant and oppositional role of the Irish Catholics in relation to the British establishment in Australia, the enormous question of race and genocide involved in the dispossession of the original Aboriginal nation inhabiting the continent, and the question of racism, the White Australia Policy, and migration in general.
Most of these historians began their inquiry by confronting the bitter sectarian division that existed in Australian society from the time of white settlement between the Irish Catholics and the British ruling class (From whose ranks most of these historians themselves originated). p> Manning Clark, given his establishment Anglican background, being a direct descendent of Samuel Marsden, is obviously fascinated by these questions.
Russel Ward, in his autobiography (he had a similar Protestant establishment background to Clark) points out that these cultural conflicts dominated his early social and personal evolution. (Ward's autobiography includes a moving vignette describing a visit to Australia by R. H. Tawney, the notable English Christian socialist who wrote the ground-breaking Religion and the Rise of Capitalism , and the interesting and useful cross-fertilisation that took place between himself, Manning Clark, Eris O'Brien, R. H. Tawney and other historians during that visit. That vignette seems to me to symbolise the drawing together of the left democratic school in Australian historiography in that generation)
Rodney Hall's biography of John Manifold describes Manifold's inquiry into the Irish origins of the ballads and a painful and confronting element stemming from his Victorian Western District establishment background.
The story is similar with Rupert Lockwood, also of Victorian Western District establishment background. Lockwood's encounter with the oppositional role of Irish Catholics was clearly a significant part of his development, along with his involvement with the Communist Party. It's not accidental that both these Communists, who came from the Anglo ruling class of the Western District, and were converted to Communism in the upheavals of the 1930s, were fascinated by the interface between Irish Catholic Australians, the labour movement and socialism.
The Western District of Victoria had a much higher concentration of Irish Catholic settlers than most other parts of Victoria. In the early years of the labour movement, culminating in the conscription upheavals, these Irish Catholics were in an extremely radical frame of mind. They elected the Labor candidate, the Scottish socialist and poet John McDougall, as the first federal member for Wannon, later Malcolm Fraser's stronghold, in the first election after Federation.
Largely because of Irish Catholics, and sharpened by the conscription struggle, the Western District remained a Labor stronghold until the disastrous Labor Split of 1955, when many Labor supporters of Irish Catholics descent shifted over electorally to the DLP, and eventually to the Nationals. p> During the White Guard paramilitary mobilisation during the Depression, the White Guard in the Western District was preparing to occupy all the Catholic churches and schools as well as trade union headquarters to prevent revolution. This is all described at length in a useful article in Labor History 10 years ago, and it's also studied from another direction, in Paul Adams 'recent study of the Communist novelist, Frank Hardy, who was of working-class Catholic background and came from Bacchus Marsh, in the Western District. p> Nothing in life and society is ever lost, and the seat of Mildura, in north-western Victoria has recently come back into play, being lost by the Nationals to one of the three independents who just put the Bracks Labor government into power in Victoria.
Macintyre's historiography, which neglects the complex and varied impact of the Irish Catholics on Australian history and the labour movement, is very poverty-striken and narrow.
The significance of the Irish Catholics in Australian life is also described in Bernard Smith's important autobiography, in which he describes how he wavered between the Catholic Church and the Communist Party before eventually joining t...
