royed the penal clauses of the Arbitration Act, is not mentioned. The urban affairs activities of the Whitlam Government are mentioned, but without naming Tom Uren.
The Whitlam Government is effectively dismissed as futile and too radical, and leftists who supported it are attacked for acquiescing in its alleged statism. But when you get to the Hawke and Keating governments, they are treated with fulsome and fawning respect.
Hawke, the Hawke Government, Keating and the Keating Government between them, are mentioned 26 times in about 20 pages, and this is in a narrative in which Jim Cairns isn't mentioned once, either in relation to the Vietnam Moratorium, or the Whitlam Government.
The Whitlam ministers Rex Connor, Clyde Cameron and Stuart West aren't mentioned once. That's the kind of elitist official history Macintyre has produced. p> Macintyre eliminates the states in the modern period
A curious feature of Macintyre's book is that, attempting to be a concise history of Australia, it goes a long way towards eliminating state history from the modern narrative.
For instance, Neville Wran is not mentioned. Hawke 13 times. No Neville Wran, no Graham Richardson. Keating 13 times, no Laurie Brereton, no Wayne Goss, no Nick Greiner, no Peter Beattie, no Bob Carr, no John Cain, no Carmen Lawrence, no John Ducker, no Barry Unsworth, no Steve Bracks. p> Important books about state politics, such as Robert Travers ' wonderful deconstruction of Henry Parkes, Cyril Pearl's important Wild Men of Sydney , and David Dale's book on the Wran period, are totally ignored.
A very strange book
What I find really eccentric, is for Macintyre to have virtually abolished the states in a literary-historical way, when they have not been abolished in the material world. Macintyre's book has almost no discussion of the ebb and flow of political, social and cultural circumstances in the separate states in the 20th century.
To leave the state dimension out of a history of modern Australia is an absurdity because many of the important historical developments in Australia still proceed largely in a state framework. Macintyre can't bear to mention Country Party leader Black Jack McEwan. There are many areas in which, in my view, Macintyre's historical revisionism is inaccurate in establishing any useful context for Australian history, and is likely to mislead readers, particularly young readers and overseas readers, about the real thrust of Australian developments. p> The writing out of the narrative of most conflict, most rebellion, and discordant and radical forces such as the Irish Catholics, produces a picture of Australia that I find very difficult to recognise. If Macintyre still regards himself as any kind of Marxist or popular historian, a history of Australia in the 20th century in which Black Jack McEwan is not mentioned by name, and the post-World-War-Two implicit social arrangement is dismissed, but the Hawke-Keating globalisation of the economy is implicitly endorsed as inevitable, is quite bizarre.
Politically, what Macintyre has produced is a thoroughly conservative history, but that's only one aspect. The other aspect, from a history teaching point of view, is that this kind of deracinated official history is rather boring.
If textbooks like this are allowed to predominate in contrast with a lively and interesting and, incidentally, quite radical, book such as Russel Ward's Concise History , in my view the audience for Australian history will probably decline, and the number of students studying it will probably drop.
Macintyre is exceedingly dry. There is very little social history. There is not much sporting history. There is no overview of modern Australian art. The speedy sweep through modern Australian society in the last couple of chapters is rather moralising in tone and written as from a great height or distance.
Macintyre seems to me to be a bit of a wowser and puritan, which are big disadvantages to anyone trying to write intelligently about Australian history. He doesn't really seem to like us much. b>
Why bother about Macintyre's historical revisionism?
In an irritated aside in the new foreword to the paperback edition of Macintyre's book on the Communist Party, The Reds , Macintyre dismisses, in a contemptuous way, a detailed critique I made of that book, ascribing it to "1960s factionalism", without making any attempt to address the major questions of historical fact and emphasis I raised.
I obviously run the risk of similar curt dismissal from the great man on this occasion, and I also run the risk of being accused by some of having an obsession about Macintyre.
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