al duller than Russel Ward's. His illustrations, other than Aboriginal illustrations, are usually of conservative historical figures, and there are fewer of them.
Russel Ward makes extensive use of line drawings and historical cartoons of a radical character. Little of that for Macintyre. And so it goes.
Macintyre's selection of sources
In his important book The First Ten Years of American Communism , James P. Cannon, the pioneer US Communist and Trotskyist leader, prints an exchange of letters between himself and the historian Theodore Draper, who was at that time writing his definitive histories of the origins and early development of the American Communist Party.
Part of one of the letters reads as follows:
Ira Kipnis's book, The American Socialist Movement: 1897-1912 , published in 1952, gives some interesting information about the evolution of the Socialist Party up to 1912. I assume you are familiar with it ... From what I have read I am inclined to be a bit suspicious of Kipnis's objectivity. There are some tell-tale expressions in the Stalinist lingo which should put one on guard. His book is overstuffed with references. They may all be accurate, but as you know, a history can be slanted by selectivity of sources as well as by outright falsification. In skimming through the book for the first time I was torn between my own unconcealed partisanship for the left wing and my concern for the whole truth in historical writing.
It is well to keep in mind Cannon's view on this matter when examining Macintyre's Concise History . At the end of the book, Macintyre has a bibliography for each chapter. What is striking is the books that he leaves out of this list.
For instance, he abolishes the work and books of Rupert Lockwood, Michael Cannon, Allan Grocott, Keith Amos, Colm Kiernan, Tom Keneally, Patrick O'Farrell, Margaret Kiddle, Malcolm Campbell, Geoffrey Serle, Ross Fitzgerald, Cyril Pearl, Bob Murray, Michael Cathcart, Robert Cooksey, Ray Markey, Jack Hutson, Lloyd Ross, Sandy Yarwood, Frank Farrell, Eric Rolls, Portia Robinson, Denis Murphy, and many, many others. p> He just about abolishes the discipline of labour history, both from his narrative and from his list of sources. Popular historians such as Ion Idriess, Frank Clune, William Joy, Wendy Lowenstein, etc, are expunged. Public historians and local historians get very little attention. Two local histories are mentioned, Bill Gammage on Narrandera and Janet McCalman on Richmond. Yet Shirley Fitzgerald, our foremost urban historian, and her (and her associates ') magnificent oeuvre on Sydney and suburbs, don't get a guernsey.
As with Macintyre's Oxford Companion to Australian History , it appears that the further you are from Melbourne or Adelaide, the harder it is to get recognised. After all his previous discussion of it, Macintyre completely abolishes the debate on class from his new narrative.
The debate on class in Australian labor history is discussed at length by Macintyre himself in the collection, Pastiche 1 (Allen and Unwin 1994), and in his Oxford Companion . It is described thoroughly in Australian Labor History by Greg Patmore. It is discussed in the introduction to the second edition of Ian Turner's Industrial Labor and Politics , in which Turner replies comprehensively and persuasively to McQueen and Macintyre. p> The documents of that argument include the wrongheaded, but enormously influential book by McQueen, A New Britannia . This debate led to the production of the important book by Terry Irving and Bob Connell, Class Structure in Australian History , which was a synthesis of the predominant view that emerged from the debate, that a working class of a particular kind had emerged in Australia in the 19th century, and that the emergence of a Labor Party and a labour movement was a progressive development for the working class.
Connell and Irving's book and Russel Ward's Concise History were widely studied in universities and high schools from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The seminal Australian Legend , by Russel Ward, and The Legend of the Nineties , by Vance Palmer, were also widely influential at high school and university levels.
Macintyre's treatment of this important intellectual exchange and the influential literature from different strands in this debate is to abolish it all from his new narrative. Connell and Irving are abolished. Greg Patmore is abolished. Humphrey McQueen is abolished: all his three important books, A New Britannia , the indispensable book about Australian art, The Black Swan of Trespass , and his useful illustrated Social Sketches of Australia 1888-1975 ,...
