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Good Reading : September 2007
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36 goodreading ı SEPTEMBER 2007 word of mouth history books REVIEWED BY GRANT HANSEN Everything about books www.goodreadingmagazine.com ONLINE The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution Bain Attwood & Andrew Markus This year marked the 40th anniversary of the 1967 refer- endum.The referendum’s result is widely considered a landmark in Australian race relations, but why? As Attwood and Markus point out, the ques- tions put were relatively nar row. Effectively they were to per mit Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to be counted in the census, and to per mit the Commonwealth to enact ‘special laws’ for indigenous Australians. No mention of citizenship; or the vote; or an end to discriminatory practices. Attwood and Markus convincingly argue that the true importance of the ref- erendum lay in the social movement that engendered it rather than the constitutional amendments it resulted in. Along the way, they delve into some dark corners of Aus- tralian constitutional history. The book provides a clear account of how a consensus gradually developed for the Commonwealth to take con- trol of Aboriginal policy, from as early as 1910. In January 1938, the 150th anniversary of British ettlement, the Australian Aboriginal League called for a Day of Mourning’ and published n eloquent demand for Com- monwealth action on Aboriginal affairs. A referendum that would have achieved a similar outcome to that of 1967 (but which primarily dealt with post-war reconstruction) was defeated in 1944. By the mid sixties an enor mous amount of bipartisan goodwill existed to effect posi- tive change in Aboriginal living conditions and civil rights. While the 1967 referendum was an expression of this change rather than a cause of it, it did demonstrate the massive public support for such change. Which leads to the embarrassing question: what happened next? Attwood and Markus are not totally pessimistic: much was achieved. But the sense of a lost opportunity is inescapable. This scholarly and well-researched book deserves to be widely read. ★★★★ Aboriginal Studies Press $34.95 Outback: The Discovery of Australia’s Interior Derek Parker In Outback Derek Parker has given us an oldfashioned kind of literary production: a straight- forward celebration of courage and deter mination. Not that these are qualities that should not be celebrated, but the question with history always remains: are we seeing it as it happened, or as we would like to think it happened? It begins with the very parochial claim that the explorers of Australia were ‘virtually unequalled in their fortitude’. Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of say, the Spanish in South America or the history of Antarctic exploration will recognise this claim for what it is: a typical piece of good oldfashioned Aussie self promotion. What the stories in this book remind us of on the whole, however, is how rational, commercially moti- vated, and rapid the European exploration of the interior of Australia in fact was. Parker’s principal sources are the jour nals of the likes of Oxley, Sturt, Mitchell and Stuart. Parker tells his stories well and has an eye for interesting detail. Apart from their inherent interest as accounts of discovery, these expeditions are of special interest for their descriptions of an Australian landscape unmodified by commercial stock farming and for their accounts of first contact with various groups of Aborigines. The book has one major technical failing: a scarcity of intelligible maps. But it’s worth a look if you are after a convenient summary of the major 19th-century exped- itions of exploration and weren’t put off the whole subject in primary school. ★★★ Woodslane $34.95 The Australians: Insiders and Outsiders on the National Character Since 1770 John Hirst John Hirst has made a career of attacking holy cows: usually (although not always) the livestock in his sights belongs to the left. Which makes this an inter- esting choice of theme: Hirst believes in a national character, and both left and right have long been interested in claiming it for their own. Australians are either inherently conservative, natural capitalists or inher- ently egalitarian, natural social democrats; depending. As Hirst points out in the introduction to The Australians, there is something ‘unfashionable’ about the concept of a ‘national character’. What he doesn’t explore are the very many good reasons why this is the case. Anyone old enough to remember the way national stereotypes were the stock in trade of family party bores can only be grateful that the world has moved on. And yet, we all love to hear the nice things other people say about ‘us’ and are fascinated by the less than nice things. What this book does do is deliver a wide range of observations on inhabitants of Australia – flattering, bemused and occasionally hostile – by both natives and non-natives ver the last two hundred years or so. As such, it is a tremendous read. All the usual suspects are here: Trollope on pert domestic staff; Twain on the Melbourne Cup; Bean on Gallipolli; DH Lawrence on the Coal Age. And then an eclectic selection of less well known but often acute observers. My favourite is Gavan Dawes, whose thoughtful and scholarly Prisoners of the Japanese is one of the best books around on the Australian experience of World War II. As he points out, in the extreme laboratory of the Japanese POW system, the Australians, Americans and English remained distinct. The question all this begs, however, is time. If national character exists – and it seemed to on the Burma Railway – does it change? Are we the same people we were in 1943? Hirst, in his introduction that compares the exemplary conduct of survivors of the Bali bombings with Australian soldiers at Gallipolli, seems to think so. But the observations contained in this collection tend heavily to the 19th and early 20th century: the very era when the myth of the Australian character was formed and well before the seismic social changes of the last half century. As such it is entertaining rather than persuasive. ★★★ Black Inc $29.95
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