January 16, 2025 • 50 mins
The 2024 History Council of New South Wales Annual History Lecture was given by Professor Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at Australian National University. First held in 1996, the Annual History Lecture was inaugurated by the HCNSW to underline the importance of history to current issues and concerns. The lectures are original works that constitute a significant contribution to historical knowledge.
The title of the 2024 lecture is
Making Their Political Mark:
How have Australians remembered politics?
2024’s Annual History Lecture was held at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney University on the 10th of September. It was recorded by Zoom, with post production by the HCNSW team using Canva Pro.
The photographs featured are by Tim Harris Photography. https://twhphotography.com.au/
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HCNSW Cultural Partners:
City of Sydney
Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts
Museums of History NSW
National Archives of Australia
Placemaking NSW
Reserve Bank of Australia
State Library of New South Wales
University of New England
University of Newcastle, School of HCISS
University of New South Wales, School of History & Philosophy
University of Technology Sydney, Australian Centre for Public History
The History Council of NSW is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Stephen Gapps (00:43):
Thank you.
It's now my great pleasure tointroduce Professor Frank
Bongiorno, who will delivertonight's annual history lecture
.
Frank is Professor of Historyat the ANU, who is Senior
Lecturer at King's CollegeLondon and the University of
England.
He's the author of Dreamers andSchemers the 80s, and A Little
(01:08):
History of the Australian LaborParty, amongst other things.
He was until recently presidentof the Australian Historical
Association and is president ofthe Council for the Humanities,
arts and Social Sciences.
And tonight Frank wonderfullyengages with the topic of
History Week, marking time withhis question making their
(01:31):
political mark how haveAustralians remembered politics?
Frank Bongiorno (01:48):
I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people
and pay my respects to Elders,people and country.
I'd like to thank Uncle Alan,John Graham and Stephen Gapps
for their gracious words tonightand, above all, the History
Council of New South Wales forthis invitation to deliver the
annual history lecture.
I'm a former member of theManagement Committee and have
(02:09):
been a long-term member of theHistory Council and so am all
the more aware of the honourinvolved.
And, of course, thanks to themuseum Charchak Wing Museum for
hosting us tonight.
I'm going to begin my efforttonight with a fictional history
, a thought experiment, Ibelieve the philosophers call it
(02:31):
.
Perhaps I could call it awhat-if or counterfactual
history, to give it the gloss ofrespectability.
Okay, it's 1928.
It's 1928 and Australia'sgreatest sculptor, Lindsay
Norman, has a big idea.
He wants to carve the heads offour of Australia's greatest
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statesmen into a mountain thathe spotted in an isolated corner
of the Australian Alps on hislatest honeymoon, Inspired by an
American mountain with asimilar appellation.
Mount Rushless was named inhonour of Australia's laid-back
ways, but it was just right forwhat Norman had in mind, not
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least because he worried that alackadaisical people would
disappear from the face of theearth unless it's mended its
ways.
Modern art was degenerate.
Puroile ideas from the oldworld were poisoning the
national bloodstream.
The manly white vigour that hadmade the nation expanding reach
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of the British race over theentire continent and even into
New Guinea, it was being sappedof its virility.
The nation was becoming weakand effeminate.
Even its cherished racialpurity was under threat in a
world where covetous aliensdemanded Australia open its vast
open spaces to inferior races.
(03:58):
So said Norman in his 1924manifesto, Salvaging the Nation.
So Lindsay Norman had beenthinking about whose heads would
need to appear on MountRushless William Charles
Wentworth had to be there, notonly because he'd become the
country's greatest statesman and, of course, helped to found the
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University of Sydney, butbecause, with some companions in
1813, he'd found a way throughthe Blue Mountains and thereby
paved the way for the Walkins.
He was a nation builder inevery sense of that word.
Then, of course, there wasHenry Parks, the working class
radical, who saw the light,moderated his opinions and
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became a founding father of theCommonwealth of Australia, the
name, in fact, that he hadwanted for the new nation.
He wanted to be called aCommonwealth.
Norman, who was himselforiginally from Victoria, also
had Alfred Deakin in view.
He was favoured because of hisrole in the making of the White
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Australia policy and for takingover Papua as the foundation of
an Australian empire.
Norman cared less, rather less,about his other supposed
achievements in progressivesocial and economic legislation,
for they'd only madeAustralians soft.
The fourth head, however,worried Norman, giving him many
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a sleepless night.
Now, norman was no Labor man,far from it.
He thought Labor's sociallegislation, rather like
Deakin's, and its pretense thatordinary folk rather than
talented elites made history,made for national weakness.
But Norman knew that he had tofind a Labor man, not least
because he hoped to screw a fewthousand pounds for his work out
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of the wealthier unions.
Now the obvious labour star wasBilly Hughes, and what a joy it
would be to work in stone onthat formidable nose.
But Hughes was a hated figureamong union people because he'd
split the Labour Party and inany case he was still in
politics.
It was unseemly to put his headon Mount Rushless so clearly he
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wouldn't do.
But then fate intervened.
Fate intervened that sturdyformer coal miner, andrew Fisher
, thrice Labor Prime Minister,died in London late 1928.
Fisher was a Queenslander too,which was as convenient as his
recent passing, and he'd donemuch to build the Royal
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Australian Navy.
It had to be Fisher.
Now I've invented this story,obviously an Australian
adaptation of the story of MountRushmore, that monument in the
Black Hills of Dakota.
Use a Paul McCartney phrase tounderline both the plausibility
and unlikelihood of the storythat I just told.
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It's plausible to the extentthat so many of the ideas that
had motivated Good Son Borglum'sproject in the United States
were also shared withAustralians.
Both countries were theproducts of settler colonialism.
Both celebrated their historiesof territorial expansion, which
they saw as synonymous withprogress.
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Those heads on Mount RushmoreGeorge Washington, thomas
Jefferson, abraham Lincoln andTheodore Roosevelt were chosen
for their role in expanding thecontinental reach of the United
States, but this grand symbol ofmanifest destiny was built on
the lands of the Sioux Nation,supposedly protected by a treaty
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.
Now, if there'd been anysimilar monument in Australia,
where there was no treaty at allwith Indigenous peoples, the
result would have been much thesame.
The racist, masculinist andelitist ideas that motivated
Borglum's Mount Rushmore projectin the United States were
common enough in Australia.
In the same period, borglumresisted feminist efforts to
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have Susan B Anthony included,and we can be sure that if
there'd been an artist such asour fictional Lindsay Norman at
work on the Australian project,any proposal for the inclusion
of an Australian suffrage leadersuch as Rose Scott would surely
have received similar treatment.
In another respect, though, mythought experiment is quite
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implausible.
Now, if you're old enough, ifyou're old enough, you might
recall an advertisement that ranon television in 2001, around
the time of the centenary ofFederation.
It featured a young boy doinghis homework and asking his
father the name of the first USpresident.
That gives dad no problem atall George Washington, head
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number one on Mount Rushmore.
But then the boy goes on to askthe name of the first prime
minister of Australia.
Tough one, dad now looks a bitembarrassed.
Go and ask your mother, hesuggests.
What kind of country wouldforget the name of its first
prime minister?
(09:05):
Asks the voiceover, while theboy heads off to see if mum
knows the answer.
We then meet a diverse range ofaustralians, none of whom know
the first prime minister'sidentity.
Now there are extenuatingcircumstances for this
formidable display of historicalignorance.
We are assured, and quoteperhaps it's because in 1901 our
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nation was created with a vote,not a war, in peace, not in
anger, that we take ourbeginnings for granted.
Eventually we meet a man andwoman, both elderly, who can
name Edmund Barton.
The boy, now perhapsenlightened by his mother,
although it's not explained,returns to his father to give
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him the answer.
Dad replies that of course hereally knew that, and the son
looks appropriately sceptical,as sons do.
Now, just what civic purpose wasbeing served by being able to
name-check Barton is not reallyexplained, but I guess one has
to start somewhere.
(10:09):
The slogan Australia, it's whatwe make it.
Australia it's what we make it,perhaps reflecting uncertainty
about why knowing about the pastmight actually matter in the
present, appears on the screenat the end, with a dynamic
rendition of this centenary'sofficial logo the multicoloured
outline of a stylised map ofAustralia, brought into
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existence by a kind of shootingstar, although I noticed I don't
know if there's an explanationfor this with one too many
points to be the Federation star.
I don't know if that wasdeliberate or historical
ignorance, or what.
I think I got it right.
It's eight, isn't it?
Yeah, so there you go.
I kept counting it because Ithought I was getting it wrong.
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But no, it is eight.
It is eight Now.
The late historian John Hurst,who published the history of
Federation at that time that wasintended to overcome such
startling ignorance, spentseveral pages with how
Federation had failed to capturethe Australian imagination, why
it had been, as he said,forgotten.
He had no simple answer.
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One reason, he suggested, wasthat when Australians were
members of the British Empire,the history they knew and
celebrated was the rise ofBritish liberty.
Once those ties were broken,said Hearst, the nation's civic
consciousness becameimpoverished.
Certainly as late as the 1950s,it was the ancient constitution
, magna Carta, the civil warsand the glorious revolution that
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provided the most solidfoundations of an Australian
political history.
When Labor leader Bert Evertfought his battle against the
Menzies government's attempt toban the Communist Party in 1951,
his appeal was frequently toBritish justice and in the
following year, the Australiangovernment.
Since 1952, the Australiangovernment bought a version of
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Magna Carta from Britain atconsiderable cost over 15,000
pounds In 1988, when anAustralian visit of Lincoln
Cathedral's Magna Carta Lincolnhas one of four copies of the
original was organised byAustralian expatriate clergyman
Rex Davis.
It was a financial failure.
That did not, however,discourage the ACT branch of the
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Australia-Britain Society fromlater choosing Magna Carta in
the mid-1990s as the theme for acentenary of federation
monuments in the capital,canberra.
Funding of over half a milliondollars came from the British
government.
So we now have a Magna Cartamonument and a Magna Carta place
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in Canberra, but I'd suggestthat most Australians no longer
consider this political historytheir political history.
In fact I don't think they didin the 1990s either.
Revisionist historians in thewider Anglo world, of course,
have also exposed themythologisation of Magna Carta
in political efforts to craft acelebratory and expansive
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history of Britishconstitutionalism and, of course
, of the British Empire itself.
And the 800th anniversary wasfairly recently Now.
The political heroes ofAustralian democracy did include
the odd local such as PeterLawler, the Eureka rebel, but
they were more commonly theheroes of English political and
constitutional history, namessuch as John Hampton or John Pym
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, heroic figures in the struggleof the English Parliament
against Charles.
I will mean nothing to mostAustralians today, I hope
probably in this room everyoneknows who they are, but to most
of us probably not much.
But for earlier generationsthey were the progenitors of
Australia's own politicalfreedom.
Hearst concluded his Federationstudy in 2000 with his own
answer to the question of whatkind of country does not know
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the name of its first primeminister.
The answer, he said, is acountry that is not quickly
going to place Barton and Deakinalongside its real heroes, ned
Kelly, farlap and Don Bradman, abushranger, a horse and a
cricketer.
I included that one on theright Actually it's in from my
last book, dreamers and Schemers, because it actually pictures
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Ned Kelly having taken overGraham Berry the Premier's
office.
It was anti-liberal,anti-graham Berry propaganda
because the Kelly outbreakcoincided with Victoria's great
constitutional crisis of thatera.
So here I think Hearst'sremarks record, consciously or
not, those of an earlierhistorian, one of much more
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radical leanings than JohnHearst, brian Fitzpatrick, who,
writing in 1956, had noted thatAustralians had no Jeffersons
and Lincolns.
The Australian people madeheroes of none and raised no
idols, except perhaps an outlaw,ned Kelly, and Carbine a horse.
Obviously in 1956 it was stillCarbine and not Farlap.
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But there you have it.
But for Fitzpatrick, that was agood thing.
They had, and I quote stillmade of Australia a home, good
enough for men of modest reportto live in, calling their souls
their own.
Now I think the implied contrastin much of this kind of
discussion of political memoryis the United States allowing
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that it too, of course, hadenjoyed a favourite
Depression-era racehorse,seabiscuit.
There's a long-standingimpression that the US has a
stronger sense of nationalidentity than Australians and
that Americans are much moreengaged with their own history.
It's certainly easier to findAmerican institutions and
monuments that are devoted topromoting and approved versions
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of the nation's history.
A notable example, of course,is the Presidential Library.
In his book PresidentialTemples how Memorials and
Libraries Shape Public Memory,benjamin Hufbauer argues that
these grand institutionsbeginning with the first devoted
to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in1940, reflect the growing power
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of the office of presidentitself, the tendency towards an
imperial presidency.
They are about how power andI'm quoting from him here how
power is remembered and howthese constructed memories of
power shape contemporary andfuture presidential authority.
I've put that one up therebecause it's the only one I've
visited.
It's the LBJ one in Austin,texas, and then you can head out
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of town and go to the LBJ Ranchas well, if you like, in the
Hill Country.
Australia has followed to someextent in establishing a series
of prime ministerial librariesand centres.
These are devoted to AlfredDeakin, john Curtin, gough
Whitlam, bob Hawke, john Howardand, the most recently
established, robert Menzies.
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There's also a Malcolm Frasercollection within the University
of Melbourne archives whichapproaches, I think, prime
Ministerial Library status.
In Australia, all PrimeMinisterial Libraries are
located within universitieswhich can, as we all know,
generate their own financialvulnerabilities, and Gideon Hay,
writing some years ago,wondered how willing they were
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likely to be to ask really hardquestions about the subjects to
which they were devoted.
By way of contrast, in theUnited States, each former
president pursues large-scalephilanthropic support for their
own library I noticed an articlejust today on the Barack Obama
one and they have a hand in itscreation, and the National
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Archives and RecordsAdministration plays a central
part in the administration ofthe whole system.
So they're necessarily centralto critical research on their
respective subjects.
Presidential libraries librariesmore generally are in a much
stronger position, I think, toshape historical consciousness
and collective memory than theirAustralian counterparts.
They're much smaller Australiancounterparts.
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Perhaps in this field, as inother aspects of our national
life, we've been tooenthusiastic in a desire to
follow an American model.
Prime Ministers are notpresidents, and the leadership
churn of recent years would havebeen a great boon to the
building industry and the CFMEU,of course, if every Prime
Minister were to have a library.
The British scholar, michaelBillig, coined a term that can
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help us, I think, understandsome of the things I'm exploring
tonight banal nationalism, thehardly noticed, taken for
granted ways that communitiesexpress their national identity.
And it involves processes ofboth remembering and forgetting
inclusion and exclusion.
Even the boundaries sorry, evenas the boundaries shift with
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changing values I guess that'sone of my themes tonight.
Those boundaries have shiftedover the years.
Who belongs, who doesn't, forexample, we have as the
Americans do with theirpresidents, sometimes place the
faces of Australian primeministers on our stamps.
We name federal electoraldivisions, canberra suburbs and
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the odd country town universityroad building bridge after our
politicians.
The renaming of the Victorianfederal electorate of Batman as
Cooper and of Murray as Nichollsafter the Yorta Yorta men and
Aboriginal political activistsWilliam Cooper and Doug Nicholls
, expresses an expanded sense ofwhat practising politics has
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meant in this country.
All the same, australia hasonly begun, I think, the process
of honouring the richtraditions of Indigenous
political activity in publicways.
One place they do figure is inthe oral and visual record, and
I'm thinking here, for instance,of Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly's
celebration of the struggles ofthe Gurindji for better wages
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and their land in.
From little things, big thingsgrow.
A political story also, ofcourse, powerfully evoked in
Mervyn Bishop's photograph ofGough Whitlam pouring sand into
Vincent Lingiari's hand.
In fact, a reversal of aceremony that John Batman was
said to have performed inMelbourne in the mid-1830s, even
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if that was apparently stagedthe coloured one that is for
better effect after the actualceremony, I think the one on the
left captured by an activist,was as it was actually happening
.
Political memory happensinformally too.
It's rooted in folk life, inculture and in conversation.
My former doctoral student andesteemed colleague, emily
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Gallagher, has uncoveredchildren's engagement with
everyday politics in theirimaginative play, their writing
and drawing, for instance.
There you have.
This is Mr Hawke's house.
Mr Hawke is in the hospitalfrom the Hawke papers over in
Adelaide University of SouthAustralia.
Another of my students, garyHumphries, a former Liberal
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parliamentarian, recalls a rhymethat his mother taught him
about the political leaders ofthe day, which was a product of
the streets of Leichhardt in the1930s Leng Leng, brave and bold
, orteby Orteby dipped in gold.
Stephen Stevens bah bah bah.
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Orteby Orteby dipped in tar.
Folklorists have drawn attentionto the rich tradition of
protest song, of playgroundrhyme and, of course, political
graffiti.
And today we need to considerthe online world, where memory
of Julia Gillard's primeministership, now global, will
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likely be dominated forevermoreby her famous misogyny speech, I
should say always at hand, ofcourse, on YouTube.
It lacks that ephemerality of aplayground rhyme that sits
there in people's memories andthen, of course, often doesn't.
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The intersection of theofficial and the popular can in
unpredictable ways generate, Ithink, rich political memory
names of prominent leaderssometimes attached to a whole
period, as in phrases such asthe Menzies era or the Whitlam
era.
That even happens at the statelevel, such as Queensland's
Bjorki-Peterson era.
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There the political landmark ofthe commission of inquiry into
possible illegal activities andassociated police misconduct a
mouthful of unlikely material,one would have thought for
political memory now works inhistorical consciousness through
casual references to thecommissioner, tony Fitzgerald.
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Before Fitzgerald and afterFitzgerald are common phrases in
Queensland still, and they'rerich in an imagery that extends
well beyond what we usuallythink of as politics.
A contemporaneous bicentennialevent Expo 88, is sometimes
recalled alongside Fitzgerald,as when Queensland came of age
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or Brisbane sometimes came ofage, it stopped being just a
country, town and so on.
After Fitzgerald was also afterExpo.
Some institutions have as theirvery mission the shaping of
political memory.
That's true of the NationalArchives of Australia.
It's eventually an unsuccessfullegal battle with Jenny Hocking
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over release of the palaceletters is a reminder, I think,
of how reliant we are on accessto original documents if we're
to undertake honest,well-informed appraisal of our
political history.
With better funding in recentyears, as well as improved
relations with researchers,hopefully the National Archives
has turned a corner.
The Museum of AustralianDemocracy at Old Parliament
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House also seeks to shapeunderstandings of both the
political past and thepossibilities of our democratic
political system, as democracyaround the world, and even
sometimes at home, has beensubjected to assault in recent
years.
It's assumed that is, themuseum has assumed a more active
role in civics education.
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There are also localinstitutions that play a role in
this sort of space.
Ballarat has its PrimeMinister's Avenue, an assembly
of busts in that city'sbotanical gardens.
If you might have seen it, thatgold rush city, that golden
city, has long had, I think, akeen sense of its own national
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importance as a place that,through the Eureka uprising, a
much mythologised politicalevent in its own right,
represents itself as the cradleof Australian democracy.
The original commissioning andfunding of Prime Minister's
Avenue came from Richard Crouch,a local politician who'd been
both a Liberal and a Laborparliamentarian at different
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times.
The City Council providedfunding for a time, but there's
now a philanthropist, the localresident, once again paying the
bills and possibly lookingnervously at national political
opinion polls.
As I speak, the site has alsobeen one of protest.
An environmental activist groupinstalled Colmo in May 2022
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during the election campaign,but I understand he survived
only a few hours before beingtaken away by officials.
Ballarat, I think, should remindus that collective memory is
also collective.
Forgetting Eureka has a placein the stories Australians tell
themselves about the evolutionof their democracy.
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Yet, as Claire Wright has shown, women's role has long been
underestimated or even ignoredin an overwhelmingly blokey
national legend and history.
Nor is their collective memoryof the demonstrations of Chinese
diggers in the 1850s on theVictorian goldfields against
discriminatory taxation, whichof course you know was sort of
the issue at the heart of Eurekaas well, and you know these
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campaigns enjoyed some success.
We recall in mainstream historythe sufferings and oppressions
of the goldfields Chinese, butnot their brave and resourceful
resistance.
That sits, I think, alongsideour failure to appreciate the
deep history of deliberativeforms of decision making among
Australia's Indigenous people.
We still, I think, fail oftento see those as an integral part
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of the story of democracy inthis country.
Forgetting can be facilitated byliteral destruction, whether by
design, greed or indifference.
The earlwood home in which johnhoward grew up is now the site
of a kfc, and the bankstownfibro in which the young paul
keating lived was demolished tobuild units.
More recently, the deaconholiday home, bellara at point
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lonsdale, has been the subjectof a campaign led by deacon
descendant and liberal partyidentity tom har against a
decision by the relevantVictorian planning authority to
allow its subdivision.
By way of contrast, theChifley's Modest Home in
Bathurst has been a house museumsince the 1970s and the
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Curtin's Home in Cottesloe,perth is available for short
stay accommodation.
That hardly turns it into anational shrine.
But Cottesloe, perth isavailable for short-stay
accommodation.
That hardly turns it into anational shrine.
But it is better, I suppose,than a Zinger burger and chips.
Perhaps we're getting a littlebetter in these matters.
There's a recent and successfulcampaign for the heritage
listing of the building thathoused Elsie Women's Refuge, the
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country's first, honours andpreserves a site of great
significance for Australianwomen and the feminist movement.
The work of Michelle Arrow heretonight has shown how efforts
such as this one, that is, thefounding of Elsie back in 1974,
exemplified the personalbecoming.
The political Matters, such asdomestic violence, excluded from
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the public sphere, were drawninto everyday politics through
feminist action.
Elsie, a Glebe propertyoccupied in 1974 by a group of
Sydney feminists including AnneSummers, jennifer Dacres and
Bessie Guthrie, is as much asite of political life as any
parliamentary chamber andcabinet room.
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Prime ministerial homes havefared better.
In more recent times, theMorrison government provided
funds for the purchase andpreservation of the home where
Bob Hawke lived as a child inBordertown, south Australia.
Like the Curtin's home thatshort stay accommodation you can
see what they're doing here.
It's good, self-sustainingstuff.
Recently, though, through amarvellous initiative led by
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former New South Wales PremierBarry Unsworth, some Labor
identities in the city bandedtogether to raise the million
dollars needed to buy the formerWhitlam family home at 32
Albert Street, cabramatta, whenit came up for sale.
The Morrison governmentsubsequently provided $1.3
million to support that effort,and it's a lovely 20th century
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modernist home that doubled as ade facto electorate office for
the young but fast risingwestern sydney mp, and it was
also where, of course, thefamily and friends and labour
supporters celebrated theparty's famous victory in the
1972 election.
It was there in the backyard,and, and just as the Chifley
House Museum works as a reminderof the lifestyle of the
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respectable provincial workingclass at that time, the
Wickham's Place, designed bylocal architect Roy Appleton,
registers something, I think, ofthe continuing modesty of
middle-class taste.
Former Prime Minister, ofcourse, staff and travel
entitlements at the publicexpense after they retire.
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One way it needs to be mentioned, I think that these facilities
are used is to attend to thatparticular leader's legacy.
They might draw on the researchand administrative capacities
of their office to producememoirs or interventions in
political debate.
Paul Keating, for instance, hasmade regular statements not
only on urban planning in Sydneybut on superannuation policy
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and Australian foreign policy,especially China China relations
matters, I think, on which hesees his own prime ministerial
legacy as at stake.
The phenomenon of the politicalmemoir is beyond the scope of
what I can say tonight, but mycolleague Josh Black, who we saw
up here earlier tonight, hasexplored how memoirs and the
wider context of media coverage,book tours, literary festivals
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have promoted particularunderstandings and images of
Australian politics.
The more successful of them,such as Bob Hawkes and John
Howards, have been widely read,and the most sensational, such
as Labor power broker GrahamRichardson's Whatever it Takes
and Labor leader Mark Latham'sthe Latham Diaries, have
contributed to a wider cynicism.
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Whatever it Takes the phrasehas become a description of a
certain way of doing politicsone, I think, that most of us
dislike politics.
One, I think that most of usdislike.
Certain television documentarieshave reinforced this image of
politics Labour in Powerscreened in 1993, and arguably
the most accomplished of them,still paid attention to personal
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rivalry as a dynamic.
But the wider story was aserious effort by Labour in the
80s to transform the nation andthe Labor Party along with that.
The more recent documentariesthe Howard Years, the Killing
Season and Nemesis were eachaccomplished examples of
documentary filmmaking.
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But they represented well, theypresented recent Australian
political history in a rathermore sinister light.
I think recent Australianpolitical history in a rather
more sinister light.
I think Personal ambitionovershadowed policy.
In Nemesis the camera work withits use of empty, semi-darkened
rooms for interviews hinted atdanger, as if even now someone
might emerge from the shadows tostab a political rival in the
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back.
It reminded me of one of thosefinal scenes they used to
include in James Bond films.
You know the ones where thesort of the sidekick knick-knack
, you know in one of them wouldsort of, you know, do a final
attack just when you thought allthe drama was over.
It was not always thus.
I mean through the 1970s and80s there was a boom in
(31:58):
fictionalised accounts ofAustralian history in the form
of live theatre feature filmsand television miniseries,
fueled by both the culturalnationalism of the era and the
tax laws of the era, whichgenerously rewarded investors.
There were dozens of them.
Notable films dealt withaspects of Australian politics,
such as Philip Noyce's Newsfrontin 1978.
(32:22):
But political history reallyfound its genre, I think, in the
multi-part television series.
Any Australian viewing theseprograms would have received
something like an extendedcourse in national history,
although possibly not one thatwould pass muster in a high
school classroom or universitylecture hall.
(32:42):
By the time True Believers, a1988 drama about Australian
politics, appeared on ourscreens, I was a 19-year-old
history student at theUniversity of Melbourne and I
found even the advertisements ofthe program so risible that I
refused to watch it.
Now I've done so more recently.
This is the joys of streaming,of course, which my daughter
(33:04):
actually put on our televisionrecently instead of just on our
computers.
So we're making big progress inour house.
So I watched it and I mustconfess I was entertained,
informed, occasionally moved,amid, I have to say, quite a few
laugh out loud moments.
The program is high melodramawith a decided leftward slant,
(33:26):
to put it mildly.
The eight part series beginswith John Curtin on his deathbed
, with Ben Chifley present toaccept the mantle, reluctantly,
it's emphasised, sincereluctance to set yourself apart
from your mates is a labour wayof doing things, and Chifley is
the quintessential labour blokethat's followed by a lot of old
(33:46):
suits and hats and generousapplications of brill cream,
with the occasional homely wife,sassy journalist and devoted
secretary thrown in to this verymanly world.
It's a very chaste world too.
No one seems to be having anaffair, you'll be pleased to
hear.
It's a very chaste world too.
No one seems to be having anaffair, you'll be pleased to
(34:06):
hear.
Chifley, played by Ed Devereaux, of Skippy fame.
Well, people of a certaingeneration anyway, is the salt
of the earth, the kind of blokeanyone would want as their uncle
.
While Bert Everett is brilliant, thrusting and unstable
Childlike, I think, rather thanvillainous, bob Menzies,
extravagantly eyebrowed, isappropriately ruthless and
(34:27):
although not without, you know,compassion and principle, these
cannot outdo his opportunism.
Bob Santa Maria, the Catholicactivist, is a zealot with mad
eyes who seems more to me in theshow, more like a dangerous
cult leader than the amiablefellow of later times inquiring
of viewers.
How do you do on a Sundaymorning?
(34:48):
On his show point of view, trueBelievers was just one of many
such programs.
The dismissal screened in 1983,when memory of the sacking of
the government was still raw andLabor just made it back into
office.
You know, really, I think,suggested a sense of lineage.
The very first episode was the6th of March.
(35:08):
The screening of it was the 6thof March 1983, the Sunday after
Bob Hawke's election victory.
Labor-aligned lobbyist DavidCoombe was annoyed when his new
friend Valery Ivanov, the Sovietdiplomat unknown to Coombe, a
KGB spy, arrived at his Canberraresidence for a chat just as
(35:29):
Coombe was settling down towatch the dismissal.
If there was, I think, anysense of a lineage between
Whitlam and Hawke being evokedin the screening of the
dismissal at this moment, therightward course of the new
Hawke government, which in thecoming months had to grapple
with the Coombe Ivanov affair,would soon dispel that
impression.
(35:51):
The dismissal works as a storyof grand ambitions, thwarted
ideals and flawed visionaries, astory told against the
background of Vivaldi's FourSeasons pleasant Canberra
scenery, relentless conservativebastardry and the bumbling of a
Governor-General who seemsalmost single-handedly to be
propping up the nation's whiskyindustry.
Land of Hope in 1986 told aneven more ambitious Labor story,
(36:15):
extending from the strikes ofthe 1890s and the founding of
the Labor Party through to theWhitlam election victory.
Eureka in 1983 was notable infinding a prominent place for
women in the story of thatuprising.
The Last Bastion, screened in84 as well efficiently covered
the defence of Australia fromthe Japanese under the admirable
(36:37):
Curtin Labor government.
Now, what was happening herewas the rise to cultural power
of the creatives who'd firstcome into their own in the late
1960s and early 1970s, theWhitlam generation.
I guess Bob Ellis is therescribbling away on several of
them and David Williamson wasbehind the last bastion.
Mother was Britain, and youngAustralia needed to throw off
(37:00):
her overbearing influence.
But there was an older, bigger,more powerful and rather
ruthless relative waiting in thewings when Uncle Sam was not
suspected of killing our bestracehorses, as in Farlap.
He was pulling us into immoraland unwinnable wars, as in the
miniseries Vietnam, or elsemenacing our national soul, as
(37:20):
in Newsfront, if the left seemto be winning the culture wars,
as each of these films andprograms rolled off the assembly
line and onto our screens, theenvironment of recent years has
been a rather more sharplycontested one.
Oddly, a rather old-fashionedbearer of collective history has
taken much of the brunt thestatue or monument.
Some statues, including here inSydney, have been vandalised or
(37:44):
graffitied, although, unlike inBritain, at least so far as I'm
aware, none has yet been dumpedin the sea With the authority's
approval, they've occasionallybeen moved or removed, or
they've been reinterpretedthrough new inscriptions.
Yet, despite the movementagainst statues seen to be
entangled in the brutal historyof colonisation, they're also
(38:05):
still being erected In Victoria.
A Kenned-era initiativedesignated the threshold for a
Victorian premier to have astatue as 3,000 days.
I don't know how they came upwith that, but the result has
been a nice mix.
We have the country party'sAlbert Dunstan, the Liberal's
Henry Balty, dick Hamer from theLiberal Party and Labor's John
(38:28):
Cain Jr.
Daniel Andrews is qualified.
So we watch this space.
I guess Geoff Kennett did not.
In Sydney, the 2013 Hyde Parkstatue of Lachlan Macquarie was
a rather bizarre late entranceinto the country's monumental
history, made even more peculiarby the choice of an extract
(38:50):
from an obituary in a Tasmaniannewspaper as the statue's
inscription paying tribute to aperfect gentleman, a Christian
and supreme legislator of thehuman heart.
Future Future sculptors, it'ssaid, would imagine a guardian
angel.
But historians have now,including Stephen Gapps, who,
we've heard from tonight, havenow had much to say about
(39:12):
Macquarie's previously neglectedrole in the frontier wars, now,
in the ordinary course ofevents and outside such
controversy, most of us probablybarely notice statues.
The first I remember taking anynotice of was that of Tommy
Bent.
Now, that's what my parentscalled him.
He was always Tommy Bent and ifyou were driving through the
genteel suburb of Brighton inMelbourne, tommy was hard to
(39:35):
miss at the busy intersection ofBay Street and the Pean Highway
.
Tommy was a man connected in mymind with weekends and beaches
and my father and this is veryappropriate from what we've
heard about toilets tonight,because my father always, always
had a dad joke to share aboutTommy Bent and it persistently
involved old Tommy having tocome down to visit the loo, and
(39:58):
I thought that was hilarious.
The statue of Tommy actually SirThomas Bent, Premier of
Victoria from 1904 until 1909,the year of his death has been
perched on a granite pedestal of12 feet since 1913.
The statue itself, accompaniedby a small drinking fountain, is
a further nine and a half feettall.
(40:20):
A press report of thededication called it an
excellent likeness, big,presumably.
The commission, supported bypublic donations, went to a
female sculptor, margaretBaskerville.
The Melbourne Argus believedthis was the first time in
Australia that a woman hadreceived such a commission.
Now, bent, of course, is a fineexample of nominative
(40:40):
determinism.
Bent by name, bent by nature,is the accurate and telling
subtitle of Margaret Glass'sbiography.
He'd have kept teams of ICACinvestigators permanently
employed, seamlessly combiningthe role of Minister for
Railways with Land Boomer,relentlessly exploiting his
(41:00):
political clout to enrichhimself.
Bent was so bent that he waseven accused of deeds that he
was unlikely to have committed.
Notoriously, the theft of thesplendid Victorian parliamentary
mace, which went missing in1891, has never been found.
There were claims it was laterused in a bizarre
(41:21):
pseudo-parliamentary ritual in alocal brothel.
Bent, a married man, didassault one of his many reputed
girlfriends.
The case mysteriouslydisappeared, settled out of
court.
Graham Davison reminds us thatmonumental history's role is to
celebrate, honour andcommemorate, not to analyse or
(41:44):
explain.
And that's true here.
Monuments generally don'tremember bruised women or
fleeced investors, certainly notthose in this heroic tradition.
And statues do often lie.
They proclaim the deeply flawedas flawless.
The slaver becomes thephilanthropist, the crook and
the thug as the model of theself-made man.
(42:04):
Now it's easy to satirise, ofcourse, the heroic tradition of
statuary.
A group of Ormond Collegestudents at Melbourne University
in the 1980s did just that witha politician named George Evers
.
Now, evers was a minor localworthy who belonged to a family
that included many other minorlocal worthies also honoured
(42:25):
with statues around Carlton.
Once a year, the studentsfaithfully made a pilgrimage to
his monument in Royal Parade,listened to a speech by a
distinguished person theyselected for the occasion and
then they would return tocollege for the George Evers
dinner.
Sadly, unlike the Evers statuesthemselves, the tradition did
not endure Satire and tradition,like protest, is more fragile
(42:49):
and ephemeral than men in stone.
That's possibly because stoneendures that we so worry over it
.
Recent campaigns have soughtbetter representation of women
in Sydney.
There's been an effort led byCatherine Franey, who's here
tonight, and Julie Bates, a sexworker activist, to secure the
return of Joy, a statue of a sexworker, to the city of Sydney.
(43:13):
The Louis Fraser sculpture wasbriefly in Darlinghurst in the
mid-90s before being moved toMacquarie University after some
objections from locals.
Now Joy may be on her way homeas a replica, because Macquarie
wants.
After some objections fromlocals.
Now Joy may be on her way homeas a replica because Macquarie
wants to keep the original.
But here, I think, is anotherbattle over politics and history
.
Are sex workers' rights andhistory to be acknowledged
(43:35):
publicly, openly, or are they tobe tucked away safely on a
campus in North Ryde?
As the result of anothercampaign by a monument of one's
own, the name of the group,zelda Di Prano, who campaigned
for equal pay and chainedherself to the Commonwealth
Building in Melbourne in 1969,is now represented by a
(43:56):
life-size bronze outside TradesHall in Carlton, melbourne.
In Canberra, sculptor LizJohnson's, Enid Lyons and
Dorothy Tangney both enteredParliament in 1943, were
recently unveiled and, of course, the timing was poignant the
Parliament had been exposed asan unsafe place for women.
Lyons and Tangney arguablystand as a response to the Peter
(44:19):
Corlett statue of Curtin andChifley making their way from
the Hotel Currajong toParliament House.
They amble along like any otheryarning mates, every man in a
society that likes to think ofitself as laid-back and
egalitarian.
Corlett also sculpted Menzies,who walks alone by Lake Burley
Griffin, evoking his party'sindividualism, perhaps Adjacent
(44:41):
to what is called RobertMenzies' Walk.
This statue, commissioned in2012, I think makes a more
explicit connection with thedevelopment of Canberra itself.
The lake, of course, was builtduring the Menzies' era.
Since the 1990s, the Liberalshave done more to attend to
their own party's history.
Menzies' the Forgotten Peoplebroadcast.
His eloquent 1942 celebrationof the middle class now features
(45:05):
regularly in Liberal Partydiscourse, which those concerns
sometimes inflate into aphilosophy.
The words are, of course, nomore a philosophy than Ben
Chifley's Light on the Hill, orindeed the phrase true believers
, taken up in Labor circles inthe wake of the television
series mentioned earlier, mostfamously, of course, by Paul
Keating on Election Night 1993.
(45:26):
For the labour-leaning Gough,whitlam and Bob Hawke have
acquired a kind of modern folkhero status alongside older
heroes such as Curtin andChifley, and they probably now
overshadow those older ones.
Whereas for Whitlam, collectivememory once seemed tightly
bound to the dismissal, it'sbeen different, I I think, in
the last decade or so.
His death in 2014 became anoccasion for reflection on the
(45:49):
expansive possibilities andachievements of the Whitlam
government when compared withthe more straightened politics
of our own times.
A popular memory of the Whitlamgovernment is one in which he's
seen as responsible for gettingone a university education, I
think, particularly for women,and whether that's literally
true or not, it functions as acertain kind of political memory
(46:11):
, an intersection of ordinarypeople's lives with the wider
world of politics.
For Hawke, whose governmentreintroduced fees for tertiary
education, collectiveremembrance is more centred on
personality.
The reformed larrikin who wassaid to have had a love affair
with the Australian people, johnHoward, is probably as close as
(46:31):
the right has to a modern folkhero comparable with these
figures, and that famoustracksuit of his remains
evocative of a kind ofaffectionate dagginess.
Others, such as Scott Morrison,have tried to win hearts as
well as votes, but have failed.
Still, it's worth pausing overthe way certain policies of the
Whitlam, fraser, hawke andHoward governments have come to
(46:53):
do symbolic work of a kindsurely unanticipated at the time
of their inception.
Whitlam's abolition ofuniversity fees now overshadows
in memory aspects of hisgovernment's legislative
achievement that he and hiscolleagues regarded as far more
important at the time.
Fraser has been reimagined,especially, but not only, in the
(47:14):
Vietnamese community, as thefriend of the refugee, not the
big bad male of the dismissal.
Kerr's Kerr Medicare an earlyhawkier achievement and gun laws
, the product of Howard's firstterm, now contribute to
Australians' differentiation ofthemselves from Americans.
These reforms have grown instature as other reforms have
(47:35):
shrunk, disappeared or, in thecase of several of the much
vaunted reforms of the 1980s and90s, those economic reforms
have become connected with thecontraction of social
opportunity, widening inequality.
We're also more conscious, Ithink, than a generation or two
ago, of Australia's fairelectoral administration.
(47:56):
Its compulsory voting andpreferential voting is points of
difference with other countries.
Democracy sausage, synonymouswith peaceful Saturday voting in
community spaces as a citizen'sbasic duty, now embodies a
distinctive historicalexperience and perhaps even a
national identity.
Australians today, I suggest,are no longer as reluctant as
(48:18):
they were even a generation agoabout making their political
mark.
Stephen Gapps (48:22):
Thank you, Thank you so much, frank.
I know that Frank had me goingabout Mount Rushless for a
moment.
They're so believable and Ijust wonder.
(48:45):
I know that there's a lot ofBlue Mountains historians here
tonight and I wonder if I have avague memory of several
proposals for faces to be carvedin the Blue Mountains.
Can anyone confirm that?
Okay, so a most important partof the evening is to thank the
support of our cultural partnersand the New South Wales
(49:06):
government through Create NewSouth Wales, as well as our
annual History Week festivalevery September.
How many other programs andservices would not be possible
without these.
The Chau Chak Wing Museum forthe use of the venue tonight,
(49:27):
and I'd like to thank our annualawards subcommittee, associate
Professor Jan Lanicek, AssociateProfessor Julie McIntyre, Dr
Naomi Parry-Duncan, and for alltheir hard work and commitment
in the awards process andjudging, and our events
subcommittee, most capable to bechaired by Jesse Adam Stein.
I'd also like to thank all ourannual history awards sponsors,
our 10 general councillors, 11cultural partners for the
(49:48):
tremendous ongoing support.
I'd like to thank members andmember organisations who are at
the heart of everything we do inthe council and, to finish up,
to thank our history councilteam, Catherine Shirley, Amanda
Wells, Lauren Chater and KatrinaDubé for all their hard work
through the year in producingthis event tonight.
(50:08):
If everyone would give everyonethere a thank you.
Thank you.
It's now my great pleasure tointroduce Professor Frank
Bongiorno, who will delivertonight's annual history lecture
.
Frank is Professor of Historyat the ANU, who is Senior
Lecturer at King's CollegeLondon and the University of
England.
He's the author of Dreamers andSchemers the 80s, and A Little
(01:08):
History of the Australian LaborParty, amongst other things.
He was until recently presidentof the Australian Historical
Association and is president ofthe Council for the Humanities,
arts and Social Sciences.
And tonight Frank wonderfullyengages with the topic of
History Week, marking time withhis question making their
(01:31):
political mark how haveAustralians remembered politics?
Frank Bongiorno (01:48):
I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people
and pay my respects to Elders,people and country.
I'd like to thank Uncle Alan,John Graham and Stephen Gapps
for their gracious words tonightand, above all, the History
Council of New South Wales forthis invitation to deliver the
annual history lecture.
I'm a former member of theManagement Committee and have
(02:09):
been a long-term member of theHistory Council and so am all
the more aware of the honourinvolved.
And, of course, thanks to themuseum Charchak Wing Museum for
hosting us tonight.
I'm going to begin my efforttonight with a fictional history
, a thought experiment, Ibelieve the philosophers call it
(02:31):
.
Perhaps I could call it awhat-if or counterfactual
history, to give it the gloss ofrespectability.
Okay, it's 1928.
It's 1928 and Australia'sgreatest sculptor, Lindsay
Norman, has a big idea.
He wants to carve the heads offour of Australia's greatest
(02:52):
statesmen into a mountain thathe spotted in an isolated corner
of the Australian Alps on hislatest honeymoon, Inspired by an
American mountain with asimilar appellation.
Mount Rushless was named inhonour of Australia's laid-back
ways, but it was just right forwhat Norman had in mind, not
(03:15):
least because he worried that alackadaisical people would
disappear from the face of theearth unless it's mended its
ways.
Modern art was degenerate.
Puroile ideas from the oldworld were poisoning the
national bloodstream.
The manly white vigour that hadmade the nation expanding reach
(03:36):
of the British race over theentire continent and even into
New Guinea, it was being sappedof its virility.
The nation was becoming weakand effeminate.
Even its cherished racialpurity was under threat in a
world where covetous aliensdemanded Australia open its vast
open spaces to inferior races.
(03:58):
So said Norman in his 1924manifesto, Salvaging the Nation.
So Lindsay Norman had beenthinking about whose heads would
need to appear on MountRushless William Charles
Wentworth had to be there, notonly because he'd become the
country's greatest statesman and, of course, helped to found the
(04:20):
University of Sydney, butbecause, with some companions in
1813, he'd found a way throughthe Blue Mountains and thereby
paved the way for the Walkins.
He was a nation builder inevery sense of that word.
Then, of course, there wasHenry Parks, the working class
radical, who saw the light,moderated his opinions and
(04:41):
became a founding father of theCommonwealth of Australia, the
name, in fact, that he hadwanted for the new nation.
He wanted to be called aCommonwealth.
Norman, who was himselforiginally from Victoria, also
had Alfred Deakin in view.
He was favoured because of hisrole in the making of the White
(05:01):
Australia policy and for takingover Papua as the foundation of
an Australian empire.
Norman cared less, rather less,about his other supposed
achievements in progressivesocial and economic legislation,
for they'd only madeAustralians soft.
The fourth head, however,worried Norman, giving him many
(05:25):
a sleepless night.
Now, norman was no Labor man,far from it.
He thought Labor's sociallegislation, rather like
Deakin's, and its pretense thatordinary folk rather than
talented elites made history,made for national weakness.
But Norman knew that he had tofind a Labor man, not least
because he hoped to screw a fewthousand pounds for his work out
(05:48):
of the wealthier unions.
Now the obvious labour star wasBilly Hughes, and what a joy it
would be to work in stone onthat formidable nose.
But Hughes was a hated figureamong union people because he'd
split the Labour Party and inany case he was still in
politics.
It was unseemly to put his headon Mount Rushless so clearly he
(06:10):
wouldn't do.
But then fate intervened.
Fate intervened that sturdyformer coal miner, andrew Fisher
, thrice Labor Prime Minister,died in London late 1928.
Fisher was a Queenslander too,which was as convenient as his
recent passing, and he'd donemuch to build the Royal
(06:33):
Australian Navy.
It had to be Fisher.
Now I've invented this story,obviously an Australian
adaptation of the story of MountRushmore, that monument in the
Black Hills of Dakota.
Use a Paul McCartney phrase tounderline both the plausibility
and unlikelihood of the storythat I just told.
(06:54):
It's plausible to the extentthat so many of the ideas that
had motivated Good Son Borglum'sproject in the United States
were also shared withAustralians.
Both countries were theproducts of settler colonialism.
Both celebrated their historiesof territorial expansion, which
they saw as synonymous withprogress.
(07:15):
Those heads on Mount RushmoreGeorge Washington, thomas
Jefferson, abraham Lincoln andTheodore Roosevelt were chosen
for their role in expanding thecontinental reach of the United
States, but this grand symbol ofmanifest destiny was built on
the lands of the Sioux Nation,supposedly protected by a treaty
(07:35):
.
Now, if there'd been anysimilar monument in Australia,
where there was no treaty at allwith Indigenous peoples, the
result would have been much thesame.
The racist, masculinist andelitist ideas that motivated
Borglum's Mount Rushmore projectin the United States were
common enough in Australia.
In the same period, borglumresisted feminist efforts to
(08:00):
have Susan B Anthony included,and we can be sure that if
there'd been an artist such asour fictional Lindsay Norman at
work on the Australian project,any proposal for the inclusion
of an Australian suffrage leadersuch as Rose Scott would surely
have received similar treatment.
In another respect, though, mythought experiment is quite
(08:22):
implausible.
Now, if you're old enough, ifyou're old enough, you might
recall an advertisement that ranon television in 2001, around
the time of the centenary ofFederation.
It featured a young boy doinghis homework and asking his
father the name of the first USpresident.
That gives dad no problem atall George Washington, head
(08:45):
number one on Mount Rushmore.
But then the boy goes on to askthe name of the first prime
minister of Australia.
Tough one, dad now looks a bitembarrassed.
Go and ask your mother, hesuggests.
What kind of country wouldforget the name of its first
prime minister?
(09:05):
Asks the voiceover, while theboy heads off to see if mum
knows the answer.
We then meet a diverse range ofaustralians, none of whom know
the first prime minister'sidentity.
Now there are extenuatingcircumstances for this
formidable display of historicalignorance.
We are assured, and quoteperhaps it's because in 1901 our
(09:28):
nation was created with a vote,not a war, in peace, not in
anger, that we take ourbeginnings for granted.
Eventually we meet a man andwoman, both elderly, who can
name Edmund Barton.
The boy, now perhapsenlightened by his mother,
although it's not explained,returns to his father to give
(09:49):
him the answer.
Dad replies that of course hereally knew that, and the son
looks appropriately sceptical,as sons do.
Now, just what civic purpose wasbeing served by being able to
name-check Barton is not reallyexplained, but I guess one has
to start somewhere.
(10:09):
The slogan Australia, it's whatwe make it.
Australia it's what we make it,perhaps reflecting uncertainty
about why knowing about the pastmight actually matter in the
present, appears on the screenat the end, with a dynamic
rendition of this centenary'sofficial logo the multicoloured
outline of a stylised map ofAustralia, brought into
(10:31):
existence by a kind of shootingstar, although I noticed I don't
know if there's an explanationfor this with one too many
points to be the Federation star.
I don't know if that wasdeliberate or historical
ignorance, or what.
I think I got it right.
It's eight, isn't it?
Yeah, so there you go.
I kept counting it because Ithought I was getting it wrong.
(10:51):
But no, it is eight.
It is eight Now.
The late historian John Hurst,who published the history of
Federation at that time that wasintended to overcome such
startling ignorance, spentseveral pages with how
Federation had failed to capturethe Australian imagination, why
it had been, as he said,forgotten.
He had no simple answer.
(11:11):
One reason, he suggested, wasthat when Australians were
members of the British Empire,the history they knew and
celebrated was the rise ofBritish liberty.
Once those ties were broken,said Hearst, the nation's civic
consciousness becameimpoverished.
Certainly as late as the 1950s,it was the ancient constitution
, magna Carta, the civil warsand the glorious revolution that
(11:35):
provided the most solidfoundations of an Australian
political history.
When Labor leader Bert Evertfought his battle against the
Menzies government's attempt toban the Communist Party in 1951,
his appeal was frequently toBritish justice and in the
following year, the Australiangovernment.
Since 1952, the Australiangovernment bought a version of
(11:57):
Magna Carta from Britain atconsiderable cost over 15,000
pounds In 1988, when anAustralian visit of Lincoln
Cathedral's Magna Carta Lincolnhas one of four copies of the
original was organised byAustralian expatriate clergyman
Rex Davis.
It was a financial failure.
That did not, however,discourage the ACT branch of the
(12:21):
Australia-Britain Society fromlater choosing Magna Carta in
the mid-1990s as the theme for acentenary of federation
monuments in the capital,canberra.
Funding of over half a milliondollars came from the British
government.
So we now have a Magna Cartamonument and a Magna Carta place
(12:41):
in Canberra, but I'd suggestthat most Australians no longer
consider this political historytheir political history.
In fact I don't think they didin the 1990s either.
Revisionist historians in thewider Anglo world, of course,
have also exposed themythologisation of Magna Carta
in political efforts to craft acelebratory and expansive
(13:03):
history of Britishconstitutionalism and, of course
, of the British Empire itself.
And the 800th anniversary wasfairly recently Now.
The political heroes ofAustralian democracy did include
the odd local such as PeterLawler, the Eureka rebel, but
they were more commonly theheroes of English political and
constitutional history, namessuch as John Hampton or John Pym
(13:31):
, heroic figures in the struggleof the English Parliament
against Charles.
I will mean nothing to mostAustralians today, I hope
probably in this room everyoneknows who they are, but to most
of us probably not much.
But for earlier generationsthey were the progenitors of
Australia's own politicalfreedom.
Hearst concluded his Federationstudy in 2000 with his own
answer to the question of whatkind of country does not know
(13:53):
the name of its first primeminister.
The answer, he said, is acountry that is not quickly
going to place Barton and Deakinalongside its real heroes, ned
Kelly, farlap and Don Bradman, abushranger, a horse and a
cricketer.
I included that one on theright Actually it's in from my
last book, dreamers and Schemers, because it actually pictures
(14:15):
Ned Kelly having taken overGraham Berry the Premier's
office.
It was anti-liberal,anti-graham Berry propaganda
because the Kelly outbreakcoincided with Victoria's great
constitutional crisis of thatera.
So here I think Hearst'sremarks record, consciously or
not, those of an earlierhistorian, one of much more
(14:36):
radical leanings than JohnHearst, brian Fitzpatrick, who,
writing in 1956, had noted thatAustralians had no Jeffersons
and Lincolns.
The Australian people madeheroes of none and raised no
idols, except perhaps an outlaw,ned Kelly, and Carbine a horse.
Obviously in 1956 it was stillCarbine and not Farlap.
(14:58):
But there you have it.
But for Fitzpatrick, that was agood thing.
They had, and I quote stillmade of Australia a home, good
enough for men of modest reportto live in, calling their souls
their own.
Now I think the implied contrastin much of this kind of
discussion of political memoryis the United States allowing
(15:18):
that it too, of course, hadenjoyed a favourite
Depression-era racehorse,seabiscuit.
There's a long-standingimpression that the US has a
stronger sense of nationalidentity than Australians and
that Americans are much moreengaged with their own history.
It's certainly easier to findAmerican institutions and
monuments that are devoted topromoting and approved versions
(15:39):
of the nation's history.
A notable example, of course,is the Presidential Library.
In his book PresidentialTemples how Memorials and
Libraries Shape Public Memory,benjamin Hufbauer argues that
these grand institutionsbeginning with the first devoted
to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in1940, reflect the growing power
(16:00):
of the office of presidentitself, the tendency towards an
imperial presidency.
They are about how power andI'm quoting from him here how
power is remembered and howthese constructed memories of
power shape contemporary andfuture presidential authority.
I've put that one up therebecause it's the only one I've
visited.
It's the LBJ one in Austin,texas, and then you can head out
(16:25):
of town and go to the LBJ Ranchas well, if you like, in the
Hill Country.
Australia has followed to someextent in establishing a series
of prime ministerial librariesand centres.
These are devoted to AlfredDeakin, john Curtin, gough
Whitlam, bob Hawke, john Howardand, the most recently
established, robert Menzies.
(16:45):
There's also a Malcolm Frasercollection within the University
of Melbourne archives whichapproaches, I think, prime
Ministerial Library status.
In Australia, all PrimeMinisterial Libraries are
located within universitieswhich can, as we all know,
generate their own financialvulnerabilities, and Gideon Hay,
writing some years ago,wondered how willing they were
(17:06):
likely to be to ask really hardquestions about the subjects to
which they were devoted.
By way of contrast, in theUnited States, each former
president pursues large-scalephilanthropic support for their
own library I noticed an articlejust today on the Barack Obama
one and they have a hand in itscreation, and the National
(17:27):
Archives and RecordsAdministration plays a central
part in the administration ofthe whole system.
So they're necessarily centralto critical research on their
respective subjects.
Presidential libraries librariesmore generally are in a much
stronger position, I think, toshape historical consciousness
and collective memory than theirAustralian counterparts.
They're much smaller Australiancounterparts.
(17:49):
Perhaps in this field, as inother aspects of our national
life, we've been tooenthusiastic in a desire to
follow an American model.
Prime Ministers are notpresidents, and the leadership
churn of recent years would havebeen a great boon to the
building industry and the CFMEU,of course, if every Prime
Minister were to have a library.
The British scholar, michaelBillig, coined a term that can
(18:13):
help us, I think, understandsome of the things I'm exploring
tonight banal nationalism, thehardly noticed, taken for
granted ways that communitiesexpress their national identity.
And it involves processes ofboth remembering and forgetting
inclusion and exclusion.
Even the boundaries sorry, evenas the boundaries shift with
(18:34):
changing values I guess that'sone of my themes tonight.
Those boundaries have shiftedover the years.
Who belongs, who doesn't, forexample, we have as the
Americans do with theirpresidents, sometimes place the
faces of Australian primeministers on our stamps.
We name federal electoraldivisions, canberra suburbs and
(18:58):
the odd country town universityroad building bridge after our
politicians.
The renaming of the Victorianfederal electorate of Batman as
Cooper and of Murray as Nichollsafter the Yorta Yorta men and
Aboriginal political activistsWilliam Cooper and Doug Nicholls
, expresses an expanded sense ofwhat practising politics has
(19:21):
meant in this country.
All the same, australia hasonly begun, I think, the process
of honouring the richtraditions of Indigenous
political activity in publicways.
One place they do figure is inthe oral and visual record, and
I'm thinking here, for instance,of Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly's
celebration of the struggles ofthe Gurindji for better wages
(19:45):
and their land in.
From little things, big thingsgrow.
A political story also, ofcourse, powerfully evoked in
Mervyn Bishop's photograph ofGough Whitlam pouring sand into
Vincent Lingiari's hand.
In fact, a reversal of aceremony that John Batman was
said to have performed inMelbourne in the mid-1830s, even
(20:07):
if that was apparently stagedthe coloured one that is for
better effect after the actualceremony, I think the one on the
left captured by an activist,was as it was actually happening
.
Political memory happensinformally too.
It's rooted in folk life, inculture and in conversation.
My former doctoral student andesteemed colleague, emily
(20:30):
Gallagher, has uncoveredchildren's engagement with
everyday politics in theirimaginative play, their writing
and drawing, for instance.
There you have.
This is Mr Hawke's house.
Mr Hawke is in the hospitalfrom the Hawke papers over in
Adelaide University of SouthAustralia.
Another of my students, garyHumphries, a former Liberal
(20:50):
parliamentarian, recalls a rhymethat his mother taught him
about the political leaders ofthe day, which was a product of
the streets of Leichhardt in the1930s Leng Leng, brave and bold
, orteby Orteby dipped in gold.
Stephen Stevens bah bah bah.
(21:11):
Orteby Orteby dipped in tar.
Folklorists have drawn attentionto the rich tradition of
protest song, of playgroundrhyme and, of course, political
graffiti.
And today we need to considerthe online world, where memory
of Julia Gillard's primeministership, now global, will
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likely be dominated forevermoreby her famous misogyny speech, I
should say always at hand, ofcourse, on YouTube.
It lacks that ephemerality of aplayground rhyme that sits
there in people's memories andthen, of course, often doesn't.
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The intersection of theofficial and the popular can in
unpredictable ways generate, Ithink, rich political memory
names of prominent leaderssometimes attached to a whole
period, as in phrases such asthe Menzies era or the Whitlam
era.
That even happens at the statelevel, such as Queensland's
Bjorki-Peterson era.
(22:13):
There the political landmark ofthe commission of inquiry into
possible illegal activities andassociated police misconduct a
mouthful of unlikely material,one would have thought for
political memory now works inhistorical consciousness through
casual references to thecommissioner, tony Fitzgerald.
(22:35):
Before Fitzgerald and afterFitzgerald are common phrases in
Queensland still, and they'rerich in an imagery that extends
well beyond what we usuallythink of as politics.
A contemporaneous bicentennialevent Expo 88, is sometimes
recalled alongside Fitzgerald,as when Queensland came of age
(22:58):
or Brisbane sometimes came ofage, it stopped being just a
country, town and so on.
After Fitzgerald was also afterExpo.
Some institutions have as theirvery mission the shaping of
political memory.
That's true of the NationalArchives of Australia.
It's eventually an unsuccessfullegal battle with Jenny Hocking
(23:18):
over release of the palaceletters is a reminder, I think,
of how reliant we are on accessto original documents if we're
to undertake honest,well-informed appraisal of our
political history.
With better funding in recentyears, as well as improved
relations with researchers,hopefully the National Archives
has turned a corner.
The Museum of AustralianDemocracy at Old Parliament
(23:41):
House also seeks to shapeunderstandings of both the
political past and thepossibilities of our democratic
political system, as democracyaround the world, and even
sometimes at home, has beensubjected to assault in recent
years.
It's assumed that is, themuseum has assumed a more active
role in civics education.
(24:01):
There are also localinstitutions that play a role in
this sort of space.
Ballarat has its PrimeMinister's Avenue, an assembly
of busts in that city'sbotanical gardens.
If you might have seen it, thatgold rush city, that golden
city, has long had, I think, akeen sense of its own national
(24:21):
importance as a place that,through the Eureka uprising, a
much mythologised politicalevent in its own right,
represents itself as the cradleof Australian democracy.
The original commissioning andfunding of Prime Minister's
Avenue came from Richard Crouch,a local politician who'd been
both a Liberal and a Laborparliamentarian at different
(24:42):
times.
The City Council providedfunding for a time, but there's
now a philanthropist, the localresident, once again paying the
bills and possibly lookingnervously at national political
opinion polls.
As I speak, the site has alsobeen one of protest.
An environmental activist groupinstalled Colmo in May 2022
(25:06):
during the election campaign,but I understand he survived
only a few hours before beingtaken away by officials.
Ballarat, I think, should remindus that collective memory is
also collective.
Forgetting Eureka has a placein the stories Australians tell
themselves about the evolutionof their democracy.
(25:27):
Yet, as Claire Wright has shown, women's role has long been
underestimated or even ignoredin an overwhelmingly blokey
national legend and history.
Nor is their collective memoryof the demonstrations of Chinese
diggers in the 1850s on theVictorian goldfields against
discriminatory taxation, whichof course you know was sort of
the issue at the heart of Eurekaas well, and you know these
(25:50):
campaigns enjoyed some success.
We recall in mainstream historythe sufferings and oppressions
of the goldfields Chinese, butnot their brave and resourceful
resistance.
That sits, I think, alongsideour failure to appreciate the
deep history of deliberativeforms of decision making among
Australia's Indigenous people.
We still, I think, fail oftento see those as an integral part
(26:15):
of the story of democracy inthis country.
Forgetting can be facilitated byliteral destruction, whether by
design, greed or indifference.
The earlwood home in which johnhoward grew up is now the site
of a kfc, and the bankstownfibro in which the young paul
keating lived was demolished tobuild units.
More recently, the deaconholiday home, bellara at point
(26:39):
lonsdale, has been the subjectof a campaign led by deacon
descendant and liberal partyidentity tom har against a
decision by the relevantVictorian planning authority to
allow its subdivision.
By way of contrast, theChifley's Modest Home in
Bathurst has been a house museumsince the 1970s and the
(26:59):
Curtin's Home in Cottesloe,perth is available for short
stay accommodation.
That hardly turns it into anational shrine.
But Cottesloe, perth isavailable for short-stay
accommodation.
That hardly turns it into anational shrine.
But it is better, I suppose,than a Zinger burger and chips.
Perhaps we're getting a littlebetter in these matters.
There's a recent and successfulcampaign for the heritage
listing of the building thathoused Elsie Women's Refuge, the
(27:21):
country's first, honours andpreserves a site of great
significance for Australianwomen and the feminist movement.
The work of Michelle Arrow heretonight has shown how efforts
such as this one, that is, thefounding of Elsie back in 1974,
exemplified the personalbecoming.
The political Matters, such asdomestic violence, excluded from
(27:42):
the public sphere, were drawninto everyday politics through
feminist action.
Elsie, a Glebe propertyoccupied in 1974 by a group of
Sydney feminists including AnneSummers, jennifer Dacres and
Bessie Guthrie, is as much asite of political life as any
parliamentary chamber andcabinet room.
(28:03):
Prime ministerial homes havefared better.
In more recent times, theMorrison government provided
funds for the purchase andpreservation of the home where
Bob Hawke lived as a child inBordertown, south Australia.
Like the Curtin's home thatshort stay accommodation you can
see what they're doing here.
It's good, self-sustainingstuff.
Recently, though, through amarvellous initiative led by
(28:23):
former New South Wales PremierBarry Unsworth, some Labor
identities in the city bandedtogether to raise the million
dollars needed to buy the formerWhitlam family home at 32
Albert Street, cabramatta, whenit came up for sale.
The Morrison governmentsubsequently provided $1.3
million to support that effort,and it's a lovely 20th century
(28:44):
modernist home that doubled as ade facto electorate office for
the young but fast risingwestern sydney mp, and it was
also where, of course, thefamily and friends and labour
supporters celebrated theparty's famous victory in the
1972 election.
It was there in the backyard,and, and just as the Chifley
House Museum works as a reminderof the lifestyle of the
(29:07):
respectable provincial workingclass at that time, the
Wickham's Place, designed bylocal architect Roy Appleton,
registers something, I think, ofthe continuing modesty of
middle-class taste.
Former Prime Minister, ofcourse, staff and travel
entitlements at the publicexpense after they retire.
(29:27):
One way it needs to be mentioned, I think that these facilities
are used is to attend to thatparticular leader's legacy.
They might draw on the researchand administrative capacities
of their office to producememoirs or interventions in
political debate.
Paul Keating, for instance, hasmade regular statements not
only on urban planning in Sydneybut on superannuation policy
(29:50):
and Australian foreign policy,especially China China relations
matters, I think, on which hesees his own prime ministerial
legacy as at stake.
The phenomenon of the politicalmemoir is beyond the scope of
what I can say tonight, but mycolleague Josh Black, who we saw
up here earlier tonight, hasexplored how memoirs and the
wider context of media coverage,book tours, literary festivals
(30:14):
have promoted particularunderstandings and images of
Australian politics.
The more successful of them,such as Bob Hawkes and John
Howards, have been widely read,and the most sensational, such
as Labor power broker GrahamRichardson's Whatever it Takes
and Labor leader Mark Latham'sthe Latham Diaries, have
contributed to a wider cynicism.
(30:34):
Whatever it Takes the phrasehas become a description of a
certain way of doing politicsone, I think, that most of us
dislike politics.
One, I think that most of usdislike.
Certain television documentarieshave reinforced this image of
politics Labour in Powerscreened in 1993, and arguably
the most accomplished of them,still paid attention to personal
(30:56):
rivalry as a dynamic.
But the wider story was aserious effort by Labour in the
80s to transform the nation andthe Labor Party along with that.
The more recent documentariesthe Howard Years, the Killing
Season and Nemesis were eachaccomplished examples of
documentary filmmaking.
(31:16):
But they represented well, theypresented recent Australian
political history in a rathermore sinister light.
I think recent Australianpolitical history in a rather
more sinister light.
I think Personal ambitionovershadowed policy.
In Nemesis the camera work withits use of empty, semi-darkened
rooms for interviews hinted atdanger, as if even now someone
might emerge from the shadows tostab a political rival in the
(31:38):
back.
It reminded me of one of thosefinal scenes they used to
include in James Bond films.
You know the ones where thesort of the sidekick knick-knack
, you know in one of them wouldsort of, you know, do a final
attack just when you thought allthe drama was over.
It was not always thus.
I mean through the 1970s and80s there was a boom in
(31:58):
fictionalised accounts ofAustralian history in the form
of live theatre feature filmsand television miniseries,
fueled by both the culturalnationalism of the era and the
tax laws of the era, whichgenerously rewarded investors.
There were dozens of them.
Notable films dealt withaspects of Australian politics,
such as Philip Noyce's Newsfrontin 1978.
(32:22):
But political history reallyfound its genre, I think, in the
multi-part television series.
Any Australian viewing theseprograms would have received
something like an extendedcourse in national history,
although possibly not one thatwould pass muster in a high
school classroom or universitylecture hall.
(32:42):
By the time True Believers, a1988 drama about Australian
politics, appeared on ourscreens, I was a 19-year-old
history student at theUniversity of Melbourne and I
found even the advertisements ofthe program so risible that I
refused to watch it.
Now I've done so more recently.
This is the joys of streaming,of course, which my daughter
(33:04):
actually put on our televisionrecently instead of just on our
computers.
So we're making big progress inour house.
So I watched it and I mustconfess I was entertained,
informed, occasionally moved,amid, I have to say, quite a few
laugh out loud moments.
The program is high melodramawith a decided leftward slant,
(33:26):
to put it mildly.
The eight part series beginswith John Curtin on his deathbed
, with Ben Chifley present toaccept the mantle, reluctantly,
it's emphasised, sincereluctance to set yourself apart
from your mates is a labour wayof doing things, and Chifley is
the quintessential labour blokethat's followed by a lot of old
(33:46):
suits and hats and generousapplications of brill cream,
with the occasional homely wife,sassy journalist and devoted
secretary thrown in to this verymanly world.
It's a very chaste world too.
No one seems to be having anaffair, you'll be pleased to
hear.
It's a very chaste world too.
No one seems to be having anaffair, you'll be pleased to
(34:06):
hear.
Chifley, played by Ed Devereaux, of Skippy fame.
Well, people of a certaingeneration anyway, is the salt
of the earth, the kind of blokeanyone would want as their uncle
.
While Bert Everett is brilliant, thrusting and unstable
Childlike, I think, rather thanvillainous, bob Menzies,
extravagantly eyebrowed, isappropriately ruthless and
(34:27):
although not without, you know,compassion and principle, these
cannot outdo his opportunism.
Bob Santa Maria, the Catholicactivist, is a zealot with mad
eyes who seems more to me in theshow, more like a dangerous
cult leader than the amiablefellow of later times inquiring
of viewers.
How do you do on a Sundaymorning?
(34:48):
On his show point of view, trueBelievers was just one of many
such programs.
The dismissal screened in 1983,when memory of the sacking of
the government was still raw andLabor just made it back into
office.
You know, really, I think,suggested a sense of lineage.
The very first episode was the6th of March.
(35:08):
The screening of it was the 6thof March 1983, the Sunday after
Bob Hawke's election victory.
Labor-aligned lobbyist DavidCoombe was annoyed when his new
friend Valery Ivanov, the Sovietdiplomat unknown to Coombe, a
KGB spy, arrived at his Canberraresidence for a chat just as
(35:29):
Coombe was settling down towatch the dismissal.
If there was, I think, anysense of a lineage between
Whitlam and Hawke being evokedin the screening of the
dismissal at this moment, therightward course of the new
Hawke government, which in thecoming months had to grapple
with the Coombe Ivanov affair,would soon dispel that
impression.
(35:51):
The dismissal works as a storyof grand ambitions, thwarted
ideals and flawed visionaries, astory told against the
background of Vivaldi's FourSeasons pleasant Canberra
scenery, relentless conservativebastardry and the bumbling of a
Governor-General who seemsalmost single-handedly to be
propping up the nation's whiskyindustry.
Land of Hope in 1986 told aneven more ambitious Labor story,
(36:15):
extending from the strikes ofthe 1890s and the founding of
the Labor Party through to theWhitlam election victory.
Eureka in 1983 was notable infinding a prominent place for
women in the story of thatuprising.
The Last Bastion, screened in84 as well efficiently covered
the defence of Australia fromthe Japanese under the admirable
(36:37):
Curtin Labor government.
Now, what was happening herewas the rise to cultural power
of the creatives who'd firstcome into their own in the late
1960s and early 1970s, theWhitlam generation.
I guess Bob Ellis is therescribbling away on several of
them and David Williamson wasbehind the last bastion.
Mother was Britain, and youngAustralia needed to throw off
(37:00):
her overbearing influence.
But there was an older, bigger,more powerful and rather
ruthless relative waiting in thewings when Uncle Sam was not
suspected of killing our bestracehorses, as in Farlap.
He was pulling us into immoraland unwinnable wars, as in the
miniseries Vietnam, or elsemenacing our national soul, as
(37:20):
in Newsfront, if the left seemto be winning the culture wars,
as each of these films andprograms rolled off the assembly
line and onto our screens, theenvironment of recent years has
been a rather more sharplycontested one.
Oddly, a rather old-fashionedbearer of collective history has
taken much of the brunt thestatue or monument.
Some statues, including here inSydney, have been vandalised or
(37:44):
graffitied, although, unlike inBritain, at least so far as I'm
aware, none has yet been dumpedin the sea With the authority's
approval, they've occasionallybeen moved or removed, or
they've been reinterpretedthrough new inscriptions.
Yet, despite the movementagainst statues seen to be
entangled in the brutal historyof colonisation, they're also
(38:05):
still being erected In Victoria.
A Kenned-era initiativedesignated the threshold for a
Victorian premier to have astatue as 3,000 days.
I don't know how they came upwith that, but the result has
been a nice mix.
We have the country party'sAlbert Dunstan, the Liberal's
Henry Balty, dick Hamer from theLiberal Party and Labor's John
(38:28):
Cain Jr.
Daniel Andrews is qualified.
So we watch this space.
I guess Geoff Kennett did not.
In Sydney, the 2013 Hyde Parkstatue of Lachlan Macquarie was
a rather bizarre late entranceinto the country's monumental
history, made even more peculiarby the choice of an extract
(38:50):
from an obituary in a Tasmaniannewspaper as the statue's
inscription paying tribute to aperfect gentleman, a Christian
and supreme legislator of thehuman heart.
Future Future sculptors, it'ssaid, would imagine a guardian
angel.
But historians have now,including Stephen Gapps, who,
we've heard from tonight, havenow had much to say about
(39:12):
Macquarie's previously neglectedrole in the frontier wars, now,
in the ordinary course ofevents and outside such
controversy, most of us probablybarely notice statues.
The first I remember taking anynotice of was that of Tommy
Bent.
Now, that's what my parentscalled him.
He was always Tommy Bent and ifyou were driving through the
genteel suburb of Brighton inMelbourne, tommy was hard to
(39:35):
miss at the busy intersection ofBay Street and the Pean Highway
.
Tommy was a man connected in mymind with weekends and beaches
and my father and this is veryappropriate from what we've
heard about toilets tonight,because my father always, always
had a dad joke to share aboutTommy Bent and it persistently
involved old Tommy having tocome down to visit the loo, and
(39:58):
I thought that was hilarious.
The statue of Tommy actually SirThomas Bent, Premier of
Victoria from 1904 until 1909,the year of his death has been
perched on a granite pedestal of12 feet since 1913.
The statue itself, accompaniedby a small drinking fountain, is
a further nine and a half feettall.
(40:20):
A press report of thededication called it an
excellent likeness, big,presumably.
The commission, supported bypublic donations, went to a
female sculptor, margaretBaskerville.
The Melbourne Argus believedthis was the first time in
Australia that a woman hadreceived such a commission.
Now, bent, of course, is a fineexample of nominative
(40:40):
determinism.
Bent by name, bent by nature,is the accurate and telling
subtitle of Margaret Glass'sbiography.
He'd have kept teams of ICACinvestigators permanently
employed, seamlessly combiningthe role of Minister for
Railways with Land Boomer,relentlessly exploiting his
(41:00):
political clout to enrichhimself.
Bent was so bent that he waseven accused of deeds that he
was unlikely to have committed.
Notoriously, the theft of thesplendid Victorian parliamentary
mace, which went missing in1891, has never been found.
There were claims it was laterused in a bizarre
(41:21):
pseudo-parliamentary ritual in alocal brothel.
Bent, a married man, didassault one of his many reputed
girlfriends.
The case mysteriouslydisappeared, settled out of
court.
Graham Davison reminds us thatmonumental history's role is to
celebrate, honour andcommemorate, not to analyse or
(41:44):
explain.
And that's true here.
Monuments generally don'tremember bruised women or
fleeced investors, certainly notthose in this heroic tradition.
And statues do often lie.
They proclaim the deeply flawedas flawless.
The slaver becomes thephilanthropist, the crook and
the thug as the model of theself-made man.
(42:04):
Now it's easy to satirise, ofcourse, the heroic tradition of
statuary.
A group of Ormond Collegestudents at Melbourne University
in the 1980s did just that witha politician named George Evers
.
Now, evers was a minor localworthy who belonged to a family
that included many other minorlocal worthies also honoured
(42:25):
with statues around Carlton.
Once a year, the studentsfaithfully made a pilgrimage to
his monument in Royal Parade,listened to a speech by a
distinguished person theyselected for the occasion and
then they would return tocollege for the George Evers
dinner.
Sadly, unlike the Evers statuesthemselves, the tradition did
not endure Satire and tradition,like protest, is more fragile
(42:49):
and ephemeral than men in stone.
That's possibly because stoneendures that we so worry over it
.
Recent campaigns have soughtbetter representation of women
in Sydney.
There's been an effort led byCatherine Franey, who's here
tonight, and Julie Bates, a sexworker activist, to secure the
return of Joy, a statue of a sexworker, to the city of Sydney.
(43:13):
The Louis Fraser sculpture wasbriefly in Darlinghurst in the
mid-90s before being moved toMacquarie University after some
objections from locals.
Now Joy may be on her way homeas a replica, because Macquarie
wants.
After some objections fromlocals.
Now Joy may be on her way homeas a replica because Macquarie
wants to keep the original.
But here, I think, is anotherbattle over politics and history
.
Are sex workers' rights andhistory to be acknowledged
(43:35):
publicly, openly, or are they tobe tucked away safely on a
campus in North Ryde?
As the result of anothercampaign by a monument of one's
own, the name of the group,zelda Di Prano, who campaigned
for equal pay and chainedherself to the Commonwealth
Building in Melbourne in 1969,is now represented by a
(43:56):
life-size bronze outside TradesHall in Carlton, melbourne.
In Canberra, sculptor LizJohnson's, Enid Lyons and
Dorothy Tangney both enteredParliament in 1943, were
recently unveiled and, of course, the timing was poignant the
Parliament had been exposed asan unsafe place for women.
Lyons and Tangney arguablystand as a response to the Peter
(44:19):
Corlett statue of Curtin andChifley making their way from
the Hotel Currajong toParliament House.
They amble along like any otheryarning mates, every man in a
society that likes to think ofitself as laid-back and
egalitarian.
Corlett also sculpted Menzies,who walks alone by Lake Burley
Griffin, evoking his party'sindividualism, perhaps Adjacent
(44:41):
to what is called RobertMenzies' Walk.
This statue, commissioned in2012, I think makes a more
explicit connection with thedevelopment of Canberra itself.
The lake, of course, was builtduring the Menzies' era.
Since the 1990s, the Liberalshave done more to attend to
their own party's history.
Menzies' the Forgotten Peoplebroadcast.
His eloquent 1942 celebrationof the middle class now features
(45:05):
regularly in Liberal Partydiscourse, which those concerns
sometimes inflate into aphilosophy.
The words are, of course, nomore a philosophy than Ben
Chifley's Light on the Hill, orindeed the phrase true believers
, taken up in Labor circles inthe wake of the television
series mentioned earlier, mostfamously, of course, by Paul
Keating on Election Night 1993.
(45:26):
For the labour-leaning Gough,whitlam and Bob Hawke have
acquired a kind of modern folkhero status alongside older
heroes such as Curtin andChifley, and they probably now
overshadow those older ones.
Whereas for Whitlam, collectivememory once seemed tightly
bound to the dismissal, it'sbeen different, I I think, in
the last decade or so.
His death in 2014 became anoccasion for reflection on the
(45:49):
expansive possibilities andachievements of the Whitlam
government when compared withthe more straightened politics
of our own times.
A popular memory of the Whitlamgovernment is one in which he's
seen as responsible for gettingone a university education, I
think, particularly for women,and whether that's literally
true or not, it functions as acertain kind of political memory
(46:11):
, an intersection of ordinarypeople's lives with the wider
world of politics.
For Hawke, whose governmentreintroduced fees for tertiary
education, collectiveremembrance is more centred on
personality.
The reformed larrikin who wassaid to have had a love affair
with the Australian people, johnHoward, is probably as close as
(46:31):
the right has to a modern folkhero comparable with these
figures, and that famoustracksuit of his remains
evocative of a kind ofaffectionate dagginess.
Others, such as Scott Morrison,have tried to win hearts as
well as votes, but have failed.
Still, it's worth pausing overthe way certain policies of the
Whitlam, fraser, hawke andHoward governments have come to
(46:53):
do symbolic work of a kindsurely unanticipated at the time
of their inception.
Whitlam's abolition ofuniversity fees now overshadows
in memory aspects of hisgovernment's legislative
achievement that he and hiscolleagues regarded as far more
important at the time.
Fraser has been reimagined,especially, but not only, in the
(47:14):
Vietnamese community, as thefriend of the refugee, not the
big bad male of the dismissal.
Kerr's Kerr Medicare an earlyhawkier achievement and gun laws
, the product of Howard's firstterm, now contribute to
Australians' differentiation ofthemselves from Americans.
These reforms have grown instature as other reforms have
(47:35):
shrunk, disappeared or, in thecase of several of the much
vaunted reforms of the 1980s and90s, those economic reforms
have become connected with thecontraction of social
opportunity, widening inequality.
We're also more conscious, Ithink, than a generation or two
ago, of Australia's fairelectoral administration.
(47:56):
Its compulsory voting andpreferential voting is points of
difference with other countries.
Democracy sausage, synonymouswith peaceful Saturday voting in
community spaces as a citizen'sbasic duty, now embodies a
distinctive historicalexperience and perhaps even a
national identity.
Australians today, I suggest,are no longer as reluctant as
(48:18):
they were even a generation agoabout making their political
mark.
Stephen Gapps (48:22):
Thank you, Thank you so much, frank.
I know that Frank had me goingabout Mount Rushless for a
moment.
They're so believable and Ijust wonder.
(48:45):
I know that there's a lot ofBlue Mountains historians here
tonight and I wonder if I have avague memory of several
proposals for faces to be carvedin the Blue Mountains.
Can anyone confirm that?
Okay, so a most important partof the evening is to thank the
support of our cultural partnersand the New South Wales
(49:06):
government through Create NewSouth Wales, as well as our
annual History Week festivalevery September.
How many other programs andservices would not be possible
without these.
The Chau Chak Wing Museum forthe use of the venue tonight,
(49:27):
and I'd like to thank our annualawards subcommittee, associate
Professor Jan Lanicek, AssociateProfessor Julie McIntyre, Dr
Naomi Parry-Duncan, and for alltheir hard work and commitment
in the awards process andjudging, and our events
subcommittee, most capable to bechaired by Jesse Adam Stein.
I'd also like to thank all ourannual history awards sponsors,
our 10 general councillors, 11cultural partners for the
(49:48):
tremendous ongoing support.
I'd like to thank members andmember organisations who are at
the heart of everything we do inthe council and, to finish up,
to thank our history councilteam, Catherine Shirley, Amanda
Wells, Lauren Chater and KatrinaDubé for all their hard work
through the year in producingthis event tonight.
(50:08):
If everyone would give everyonethere a thank you.
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