are ignored. Ian Turner is abolished: Industrial Labor and Politics , Sydney's Burning and even his books about sport. p> Macintyre is left, in his own narrative, as the only towering figure surviving from the debate on class, dismissing contemptuously, as "Neglecting racism" The Legend of the Nineties and The Australian Legend , without even deigning to name the authors, or list them or the books in the bibliography. What a superior man this Macintyre is! p> In the section on the Great Depression, J. T. Lang's own books, and Bede Nairn's important Lang biography, are not mentioned. None of the biographies of Mannix are mentioned. Patrick O'Farrell's important works on the Irish in Australia are not mentioned, and neither are Tom Keneally or Keith Amos or any other writers about Irish Australia. p> In relation to the Vietnam War, Gregory Pemberton's important book, Vietnam Remembered (Weldon Publishers 1990), and neither are Sioban McHugh's Minefields and Miniskirts , on women during the Vietnam War or Greg Langley's A Decade of Dissent or Ken Maddocks 'books of oral history on the Vietnam conflict.
Important books like Paul Barry's biography, The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer aren't mentioned, nor is Mates by Fia Cumming, or The Fixer by Marianne Wilkinson about Richardson, or Graham Richardson's own book. p> Clyde Cameron's books of autobiography are ignored, as is Bill Guy's recent biography of Cameron, A Life on the Left . In relation to the Communist Party, only Macintyre himself survives as the recognised author and expert. Alistair Davidson, Robin Gollan, Barbara Curthoys, Frank Farrell, Miriam Dixson, Tom O'Lincoln and even Beverley Symons, the author of the extremely useful bibliography associated with Macintyre's own book, are all ignored in relation to their published work on the Communist Party.
Oppositional encounters with the Communist Party, of which good examples would be Hall Greenland's biography of Nick Origlass, Red Hot , Susanna Short's biography of Laurie Short, Stephen Holt's biography of Lloyd Ross, and B.A. Santamaria's useful autobiography, are totally ignored. p> Given the Marxist background that Macintyre asserts on occasion, it is rather strange that he omits from any consideration, two major original and significant critical books about Australian life from a Marxist point of view: Vere Gordon Childe's important How Labor Governs from the 1920s, and Egon Kisch's Australian Landfall from the 1930s.
Macintyre's historical method
Macintyre's book is organised in a way that is quite consistent with his narrow British-Australia approach. For a start, the predominance of so called theory is accentuated by the abolition of footnotes.
The reader is told that at the end of the book there is a listing of where quotes used in the narrative come from, but they are not presented as notes to the source, and only one person out of 100 will, in practice, laboriously work out where the ideas came from.
The net effect of this device is to dramatically increase the role of the narrator of the book, and de-emphasise the way in which he has been influenced by the research and ideas of other people. Another effect is to make it unclear what part of the material is quotes, and what part is Macintyre's own view, leaving Macintyre with the perfect out, if challenged on some point, that he was merely quoting the views of others.
This way of proceeding is a very elitist writing device, presenting an enormous obstacle to the reader's understanding of the genesis of the ideas in the book, but it is a device that is quite common in postmodernist circles under the rubric of theory.
Another infuriating feature of Macintyre's dry writing style is the deliberate way he avoids naming historical figures, or historians who he obviously regards as minor, and the effect of this device is to make some important, named historical personalities, towering presences over a landscape otherwise inhabited by the nameless.
Sometimes this device becomes almost bizarre. Examples of this are:
п‚· On page 48, where he names Samuel Marsden about five times, on both sides of this sentence.
As early as 1803 King allowed an Irish convict to exercise his clerical functions, though that privilege was withdrawn in the following year when the Priest was suspected of using the Mass to plan the Castle Hill Uprising. In 1820 two new priests came voluntarily from Ireland with official permission to fulfill their compatriots 'religious obligations.
Three Catholic priests, none of them named, but Samuel Marsden named four times in the same paragraph....
