We don’t go into the city together much because Steve finds walking difficult, but the milder weather was such a relief today that I really wanted to do something ‘in town’. So off we went….
First stop was the Royal Historical Society of Victoria to see their current exhibition ‘The Burying of Melbourne’
In the mid-1850s some areas of the Melbourne CBD were buried under a layer of clay at the direction of Melbourne City Council, a rather extraordinary event that until recently had been largely forgotten. It is only in recent years that archaeologists carrying out the excavations required prior to developments in the city have uncovered evidence of the clay layer.
A study commissioned by the Heritage Council of Victoria found that the burying was part of efforts by the City Council to control flooding, caused largely by the original laying out of Melbourne’s street grid without due consideration of the flow of water over the underlying topography.
The depositing of the clay layer, metres thick in some places, had a significant effect on the lives and circumstances of those affected but did result in the sealing off of a layer of archaeology stemming from the earliest days of European settlement.
This exhibition, The Burying of Melbourne, describes events leading up to the burial and looks at some of the archaeology discovered beneath the clay.
The problem was that people started building their houses before the roads were built, which meant that when the roads finally did come through, the houses were much lower than the road. As a result, the houses flooded in heavy rain. The council ordered that the properties had to be filled up to road level with clay. In some cases, particularly where the houses were not owned by the occupants, the house was in effect entombed by the clay, with new houses built on top of them. The layer of clay was located when a compulsory archaelogical inspection was made for a new development near the Wesleyan church in Lonsdale Street. Comparisons were made between the contour maps pre-filling and after-filling to identify the sites where the clay was likely to have been spread. Six terrace houses dating from the 1840s were found in Jones Lane.
This exhibition is not high-tech: indeed, it is mainly maps and photographs of the archaeological dig. There are a few of the objects on display that were located on the site, most particularly the level under the clay. But I find the idea of a whole layer sealed off by clay for 170 years quite fascinating.
Then back onto the train and down to the Swanston Street tram for a quick trip up to the NGV International in St Kilda Rd. I wasn’t interested in the $40 Westwood/ Kawakubo exhibition (when did these exhibitions become so expensive?) and just stuck to the freebies. Somehow or other we ended up in the British and European Collection 13-16 Century, which you can see in a 3D version here if it doesn’t induce too much nausea for you. Actually you can see it online better than you can in real life because at least they turned the lights on to film it: probably because of the age of the artwork, it is very dimly lit. Their signage of the objects themselves is appalling- white print of about 12 pt font on grey behind glass. I just couldn’t read it at all. However, given that I’m not likely to visit Europe again, it was a little bit like being in a grand European cathedral close up.
What I really intended to see was a display of the National Gallery of Victoria Travelling Scholarship. This is a tiny exhibition, tucked away on the first floor near the escalators. The NGV established its Travelling Scholarship in 1887, just 25 years after the Gallery opened. Awarded every three years, the three-year scholarship granted a stipend to study at art epicentres across Europe. Scholarship-holders were required to provide to the Gallery a replica of an Old Master painting, a nude study, and an original composition. A cheap way of increasing the size of the collection, I suppose. The exhibition is mainly just a projection on a wall, showing biographical details of several recipients (nicely balanced between male and female artists) with a few glass cases containing objects belonging to Constance Stokes (nee Parkin) trip that she received as part of her scholarship in 1929. Just a slight young girl, you get a sense of how exciting it must have been to travel over to London to study at the Royal Academy of Arts, with her passport, photographs and ball invitations.
It’s appropriate that I should be writing this review on January 26, Australia Day. Here’s a recommendation: if you’re going to read a survey history of Australia, then read this one.
There’s lots of survey or short histories written by eminent historians to choose from, many of which appear in several editions as they were updated to encompass later events: Keith Hancock’s Australia first written in 1930; Gordon Greenwood’sAustralia A Social and Political History (1955) Manning Clark’s A Short History of Australia (1963) ; John Rickard’s Australia: A Cultural History (1988); Creating a Nation (1994) by Pat Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly; David Day’s Claiming a Continent (1997) and Stuart Macintyre’s A Concise History of Australia (2000). There’s even Alex McDermott’s Australian History for Dummies (2011). One could quite justifiably ask “Does the world need another short history of Australia?” And I would answer: yes, and it should be this one.
In 1968 New Zealand historian Keith Sinclair wrote an article for Historical Studies called ‘On Writing Shist’ (that second ‘s’ is very important!) He pointed out that shist (i.e. short history) is not a summary of what is known in order to be memorized, but a summary interpretation of a topic, intended to make it understandable. It should be aimed at the educated non-specialist, and the author cannot assume more than the most vague background knowledge. Facts are illustrative and form a “very thin, hard skeleton”, and the overwhelming problem is what to leave out, rather than put in. The heart of the task is to shape the overall pattern of ideas, facts and prose, interwoven into a pattern of thought and story. It is meant to be read, rather than consulted, utilizing the novelists’ tools of suspense and pace, driven by the author’s sense of commitment to his subject.
McKenna addresses the issue of the need for “new ways of thinking about the nation’s history” right in his first chapter. He writes:
Most national histories are ‘rise and rise’ narratives. They narrate the nation’s formation and walk chronologically through familiar milestones. In Australia’s case, there’s a chapter on Indigenous Australia before 1788, before moving onto the main story: penal colony to gold rushes and responsible government, then to Federation, the First World War and the Anzac legend, the Depression, the Second World War, postwar reconstruction and the Cold War; before waves of non-British migration, the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the end of White Australia usher in the emergence of a more open, global economy and culturally diverse society. Or words to that effect. The history of the nation-state- from one formative event to the next. (p. 7)
So how is he proposing to avoid this straightjacket? His fundamental strategy is to see Australia as a continent rather than a nation, to turn both Edward Barton’s declaration “a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation” on its head. He foregrounds place, both the climate, ecologies and histories of different regions of Australia, and the Indigenous understanding of history which can never be divorced from place. And rather than that awkward, dangling introductory chapter of “The Aborigines”, he integrates Indigenous perspectives and actions throughout the whole book, from start to finish. Nor does he follow a well-ploughed chronological trench: indeed, Captain Cook and Botany Bay don’t appear in detail until Chapter 9, more than half-way through the book, in a chapter titled ‘Facing North’.
He starts right up front in Chapter 1 ‘The Founding Lie’, with a reflection on the Sydney Opera House, its design and construction, then considers its site – Bennelong Point. In Chapter 2 ‘From Ubirr’ he joins hundreds of visitors at Ubirr, in the Kakadu National Park looking north to the Arafura Sea at dawn- again, starting at a place- to emphasize the great migration from Asia into northern Australia, and the influence of trade with the north. Chapter 3 ‘The Island Dilemma’ looks at the sense of geography and the ‘island’ perspective that encouraged isolation as both a negative and positive force. He takes us to Christmas Island, both its now-deserted CI Club for administrators and Europeans, then its use as a detention centre for asylum seekers. Ch.4 ‘Taking the Land’ (and there, again is that ‘place’ emphasis) starts with John Howard at the Longreach Stockman’s Hall of Fame in 1997, promising that government legislation would ensure pastoralists’ rights after the Wik decision. He traverses land policy from Cook’s act of possession to the spread of ‘settlement’ and Aboriginal resistance, especially in Queensland. He notes that Australia has silenced not only the evidence of frontier warfare, but also the many efforts at reconciliation that were made between British settlers and First Nations Australians (p. 75).
Chapter 5 ‘War and Memory’ takes us to Australia’s “most storied beach”, 15,000 kms away. In a desperate craving to be connected to European history through blood sacrifice:
Over time, the birthplace of their nation was conveniently displaced 15,000 kilometres offshore to Anzac Cove. Australia thus became the only modern nation-state to create an origin myth not located on its own soil p.90
He points out that, two decades before the outbreak of the Great War, and for at least a decade after the war ended, in areas like Wave Hill and Victoria River of the Northern Territory and the Pilbara and Kimblerley regions of Western Australia, frontier violence was still occurring. War memorials to the First World War stand in villages, towns and cities throughout Australia, but the Australian War Memorial resists calls to recognize the loss of life in frontier wars.
Chapter 6 ‘Fire and Water’ takes us to Red Bluff, Kalbarri in Western Australia way back on 25 January 1697, and the desperate search for water by the men and officers from the Dutch East India Company who anchored three ships in Gantheaume Bay and rowed towards the coast. Drought, fire and flood are “a cycle as ancient as the country itself”, and while non-Indigenous Australians have long been familiar with bushfires and floods, the memory of one is swiftly erased by the arrival of the other, as if we’re fighting the same battles with the country (p. 111). Here are the plans for irrigation using the Murray-Darling, the Snowy River scheme and the fires at Mallacoota in December 2019. In Chapter 7 ‘Fault Lines’ we go to Waverley cemetery in Sydney, and the grave of Louisa and Henry Lawson, before embarking on a really good analysis of Catholic/Protestant sectarianism, touching on Ned Kelly, Billy Hughes and conscription. Chapter 8 ‘Fault Lines’ starts with Dorothy Napangardi, one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists, and the gradual recognition and appreciation of Indigenous ways of belonging to Country in the late twentieth century. For many non-Indigenous Australians, works of First Nation artists are a reminder that, as recently arrived migrants in a country, we do not have the same keys to Country. Modern Australia has always been a migrant society, and McKenna returns 19th century migration, especially from Ireland, and the Chinese migrants lured by the prospect of wealth on the goldfields. He goes through the conversion from a white, British enclave to a diverse multicultural nation, while noting that it was driven by self-interest and economic necessity. He reminds us of the memories of discrimination and prejudice through the story of William Yang, born in 1943 on a tobacco farm on the Atherton Tablelands. In Chapter 9 ‘Facing North’ (there’s that sense of place and geography again) we finally meet Captain Cook face to face. To illustrate the short-term economic mentality of resource extraction he turns not to gold, but to pearls, and the pearling industry not just for its importation of divers from Asia, but its mix of voluntary and forced Aboriginal labour (I didn’t know about this). He then moves on to New Guinea, and Australia’s WW2 in the Pacific.
I’d like to look at Chapter 10 ‘The Big Picture’ in more detail as an example of the diffuse way in which McKenna writes, his integration of stories of individual people into broader historical events, and the sweep of a theme across time. He starts with Charles Doudiet’s sketches of Eureka, which were only discovered in 1996 through a Canadian family which found them in their attic. These sketches verified for the first time the location of the Eureka Rebellion and the use of the Eureka flag, and they are the springboard for McKenna to discuss Australian democracy and its evolution from Eureka and the anti-transportation movement, through to self-government of the colonies in the mid 19th century. Then he moves to a second picture, Tom Roberts’ ‘Opening of the First Parliament of the Australian Commonwealth 9 May 1901′ and federation as a political compromise that combined elements of the US federal constitution and the Westminster system. The opening of Parliament House in Canberra in 1927 had many guests, but two uninvited guests were Jimmy Clements and John Noble, two Wiradjuri elders who walked 150 kilometres from Brungle Aboriginal station near Tumut in NSW to attend the opening. Here McKenna turns to Indigenous agitation for their rights in the 1920s and 1930s, set against Queen Elizabeth’s tour of 1954, the first reigning British monarch to set foot on Australian soil. He returns to Indigenous activism and the 1967 referendum, and the myths that surround it, before moving on to Whitlam and his deliberate cultivation of what Whitlam called “a vigorous national spirit” and ending the era of assimilation in favour of land rights and self-determination. This was encapsulated by the photograph of Whitlam pouring a handful of red earth into the hands of land rights leader Vincent Lingiari in 1975. However, the most seismic shift was the High Court Decision in the Mabo case, and he returns to Eddie Mabo’s sketch of his ancestral land on Mer which hangs not far from Tom Roberts’ ‘Big Picture’ in Parliament House. McKenna finishes the chapter with another painting of the people on Mer executed by Tom Roberts on his way to London in 1903. Twenty years after his arrival in London, Roberts presented the painting to the British Museum, and there it stayed undiscovered until found in 2009 by a curator from the National Museum of Australia.
He closes his book with an Epilogue titled ‘Modernity and Antiquity’ which starts with suburbia and the humble Sydney houses of both John Howard and Paul Keating. He notes that in the half-century since the dismissal of the Keating government, the old verities have vanished: Australia is now one of the world’s most diverse, multicultural and liberal democracies. The Indigenous cultures that White Australia tried to eradicate are now fundamental to the nation’s identity. From a protectionist economic policy, we are now an open, free-trade economy; the alliance with the US remains the linch-pin of its defence; the population has doubled since the mid 1970s and there is a distinctive rise of environmental consciousness, with the Tasmanian Greens the first Green party in the world. He notes that the closer we come to the present, the harder it is to discern which reforms will be of lasting significance. He returns to the “Big Lie” with which he started his book, and the question that continues to gnaw at Australia’s soul is how to tell the truth about the nation’s history and what Noel Pearson called “a rightful place” for First Nations Australians. Here are the apologies, the Uluru statement and the referendum campaign. He closes as he started with a place: this time Lake Mungo National Park (the most spiritual, life-changing place that I have visited in Australia) and the potential for Mungo to be “for all Australians, black and white. It can embrace us all in its spirituality, and draw us closer to the land.” (p. 266)
This is a beautifully written, really carefully crafted and highly original book. Although part of the ‘Shortest History’ series that ranges across the whole world, I feel that it is far more directed at an Australian audience than an international one, but both readers could take much from the book. Indeed, the word ‘shortest’ obscures the deep-time and Indigenous emphasis of the book. By eschewing completely the chronological approach, he prioritizes understanding of a theme illustrated through many kaleidoscopic prisms. In the author’s note at the end of the book, he says that he decided to “say more about some things rather than a little about many things”. He has certainly succeeded in this. His prose is beautiful, drawing your interest from vignettes based on people, with a pace that doesn’t get bogged down in details. It’s excellent. Read it.
My rating: 10/10
Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc. but that hasn’t influenced my rating!
Big Ideas (ABC) This talk, recorded at the University of Technology Sydney’s Vice Chancellor’s Democracy Forum on 14 May 2025 features Sarah Churchwell, who is one of the presenters of the Journey Through Time podcasts that I’m enjoying. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, and The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells. From the ABC website it says: Sarah Churchwell takes you on a gripping and confronting journey into America’s recent past to explain its extraordinary present, starting with dark story at the heart of that American classic Gone with the Wind. Knowledge lies at the heart of a healthy democracy, and its many custodians include libraries, universities, cultural institutions, and a free and independent media. So what happens when these institutions are intimidated, dismantled or destroyed, as is happening in America right now, under the government of President Donald Trump? I really enjoyed it.
The Birth Keepers- the Guardian. The Birth Keepers This year-long investigation by Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne looks at Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark, two influencers who made millions selling a radical version of free birth where women would birth ‘wild’ with no medical intervention whatsoever through their Free Birth Society. I was appalled by the length of time that some of these women laboured after their waters had broken, and the hands-off attitude of a baby ‘choosing’ to take a breath. Despite having no formal medical training, these two doulas created courses that have ensured that the Free Birth movement has moved world-wide, while netting them a fortune. There are six episodes.
Short History Of.. Having seen the film Nuremberg, I decided I’d listen to Short History’s take on The Nuremberg Trial. I was far more impressed with this podcast than I expected, fearing a couple of kids giggling, but it was very professional and the narrator has a lovely voice. At the Moscow Conference of 1943 it was decided that Germany would be held criminally responsible for the atrocities committed during the war, but this was uncharted territory. Churchill wanted the death penalty, without trial; Stalin wanted a judicial trial but with the outcome already decided, America wanted the Germans treated as any other judicial process. One of the problems was that the Germans’ actions were not crimes when they were committed. In the end the prosecutors settled on four charges (i) conspiracy to wage aggressive war, which encompassed the crimes before the war began (ii) crimes against peace (iii) war crimes (iv) crimes against humanity. It was decided that the trials needed to take place in Germany in front of the German people. They would try 24 people, comprising a cross-section of high ranking officials across all sectors, although in the end there were only 21 defendants. It was not difficult to find defence lawyers, because many lawyers craved the spotlight in an exotic social environment. They did not use witnesses, but documents. In the second week they showed film of the concentration camps, which had a seismic impact. Hermann Göring was the ringleader of the defendants: he and Speer were the most forceful, the rest were rather pathetic. 12 were sentenced to death, 7 others were imprisoned and there were 3 acquittals. Within 10 days all appeals were rejected. The hanging equipment arrived on 13 October, but on 15 October Göring suicided before his execution which was scheduled that night. The International Military Tribunal packed up at the conclusion of the first trial. There were twelve other Nuremberg trials, but the first one was the only truly international trial.
When my son said that this was his favourite book of 2025, I took notice. When I told him that I had borrowed it from the library, he hedged a bit, saying that he didn’t know if I’d like it. He’s wrong: I loved it. I could barely put it down over the three days that I read it: sand, beach and grandchildren notwithstanding.
I’m not a particularly science-y person, but this book is far more than ‘just’ science. Like a Mark Kurlansky book (think Salt, Cod etc.) it combines science, history and travel, but it also packs quite a bit of political analysis as well. I’m writing this on 5 January 2025 as the reality of Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and imposition of US oil interests is sinking in, and Conway’s comments about autarky (i.e. the policy of being self-sufficient that underlies Trump’s ‘America First’ policy) seem particular apposite right now. Ed Conway is the economics and data editor of Sky News and a columnist for The Times (London), which are right-wing connections that do not engender my trust. However these contexts are not particularly apparent in Conway’s book, except perhaps for the ultimately optimistic viewpoint with which he ends the book. Quite apart from his politics, his journalist background equips him with the eagle eye for a good anecdote and the ability to bring the narrative back onto more general-reader territory when it threatens to wade into technologically and scientific details.
In the introduction he identifies himself as a denizen of what he calls ‘the ethereal world’:
…a rather lovely place, a world of ideas. In the ethereal world we sell services and management and administration; we build apps and websites; we transfer money from one column to another; we trade mostly in thoughts and advice, in haircuts and food delivery (p.13)
He distinguishes this from ‘The Material World’, which undergirds our everyday lives by actually making things work, often through companies whose names are unknown to us, but which are more important than the brands that use their output:
…operating stuff in the Material World….you have to dig and extract stuff and turn it into physical products…a difficult, dangerous and dirty business (p.14)
He chooses six raw materials – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium- which are not only important substances in the world, but are the primary building blocks of our world and have fuelled the prosperity of empires in the past. They are the very hardest to replace. These six materials form the basis of products several steps up the chain: sand, for instance, is the basis of silica which underpins optical fibre and the concrete and cement that makes modern high-rise cities possible. In analysing these materials, he traces back their ‘discovery’ to ancient civilizations, often by accident or through observation, before being intentionally created with processes that often form the basis of present methods. Concrete, for example, was ‘discovered’ three times: there is evidence of cement use in Neolithic ruins in Turkey that date back more than 10,000 years; the Bedouins created concrete-like structures in 6500BCE, and the Roman used a form of concrete in many of their buildings before the recipe was lost for hundreds of years following the fall of the Roman Empire. The discovery of On Architecture by Roman architect Vitruvius, and its translation into French and English, triggered the 18th and 19th century quest for new concoctions to replicate or surpass the Roman recipe (p. 75). Perhaps because he is a British journalist, he highlights deposits in the British Isles rather more than we would think of today, and both German and British ingenuity are highlighted, as well as American. Thomas Edison makes several appearances, but the complete absence of any women at all highlights the male-dominated nature of science and invention.
The structure of the book has a sense of symmetry that I find appealing: six raw materials examined in six parts, each with three chapters, an introduction to the book and a conclusion. I can’t vouch for the reliability of his information, but each time I exclaimed “Hey, did you know…?” to my much more scientifically-oriented husband, he already did know and what he knew aligned with the information in the book.
Unlike many in the media companies and publications he works for, Conrad does not deny the reality of climate change and the environmental degradation that occurs as part of the mining and extraction of his six materials. However, as he points out, the production of an environmentally harmful material was often prompted by the desire to replace an earlier, even more harmful energy source which would have brought about an even more devastating environmental impact. e.g. coal replacing wood, kerosene replacing whale oil, or polyethylene replacing gutta-percha from the rapidly disappearing Malaysian guttapercha tree. It is this pattern that contributes to his optimism about our ability to mitigate climate change in the long term, if we can overcome the short-termism of the political cycle and make financial and lifestyle sacrifices for an unborn generation- actions for which there is equivocal evidence so far.
However, he is not completely Panglossian. Australia, and Rio Tinto in particular come in for trenchant criticism over the destruction of the Juukan Gorge for the extraction of iron ore. As he points out, part of the luxury of living in the ‘Ethereal World’ is that we can shunt the environmental impacts of our lifestyle into the ‘Material World’ which often happens to be a third world country. Wealthier countries, like Chile and Australia to a lesser extent are starting to question the environmental costs when the extraction occurs in their country instead of someone else’s.
Despite the shift towards autarky promoted by Trump in particular, and turbo-charged by the world’s realization of the precariousness of supply chains during COVID, the story of these six materials is also the story of globalization. Here in Australia we see the shipping out of raw materials (especially to China), but the circulation is much broader than this, with the finished product integrating multiple processing steps from right across the globe. Such processes make the world more inter-connected than America/Australia/China first politicians might desire.
The Material World is – well, material- but it has political implications. While the rest of the world panics about China’s dominance of the battery supply chain, China panics about its reliance on the rest of the world for its raw materials- hence China’s Belt and Road strategy. Particularly in relation to the production of advanced silicon chips, security is uppermost in the attempt to prevent industrial espionage and to make sure that China does not gain this ability. Ironically, China is unlikely to develop the hyper-pure silicon from which the silicon chip ‘wafers’ are made because the crucibles to melt it are available (so far) only from a single site at Spruce Pine, in North Carolina, operated by only two companies, Sibelco (Belgium) and the Quartz Corp (Norway). This raises the unsettling question of the effects of a landslide on the road that winds to Spruce Pine, or the malicious spraying of the mines with a particular chemical. But this single source is unusual: there is usually another source or another product to take the place of a threatened material. His six materials highlight the international reach of companies based in one country, and the diversification of such companies into new processes as part of the evolution of products and materials.
This evolution of products and materials lies at the heart of the optimism of the book. We have worked out how to turn complex products into commonplace and increasingly cheap items (for example solar panels and semiconductors). Although he has chosen six materials for his analysis, they are intertwined: batteries are just as reliant on copper as they are on the lithium inside them; steel inside concrete is a better building product than either alone. Even though we need to keep extracting materials to make the very ambitious transition to net zero, with solutions like hydrogen and wind turbines requiring huge amounts of energy, there is one major difference. In the past we used fossil fuels to burn, but now we are using them to build.
For years, people assumed that it would be impossible to make iron and steel at the scale we can today. Rediscovering the recipe for concrete seemed like a pipe dream. Scientists doubted that we would ever be able to tame extreme ultraviolet light, let alone use it to mass produce silicon chips. Will we look back in a decade or two and wonder why we ever fretted about producing enough hydrogen to back up the world’s energy grids, or why we struggled to generate copious power from the hot rocks deep beneath the earth?…If there is one lesson you should take from our trip through the Material World, it is that with enough time, effort and collaboration, these things usually happen….Humankind has, since its very first days, left a visible imprint on the earth. There is no point pretending otherwise. It is part of our story. It has allowed us to live longer, more comfortable lives than ever before. It has enabled us to fill the planet with more individuals than anyone could have imagines, with 8 billion brains and 8 billion sets of hopes and dreams. We are also capable of living far more sustainable, cleaner lives, diminishing our destruction and contamination and living in closer harmony with the planet. We will do so not by eschewing or dismissing the Material World, but by embracing it and understanding it. (p. 443)
The Global Story (BBC)The Death of Reading This episode was based on a recent essay by James Marriott ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’ which can be found on his Substack here. Both the essay and this discussion go back to the mid- 1700s when the spread of reading beyond the elites meant that power no longer had to be performed visually, but could be disseminated and reinforced by the written word. Marriott draws on Neil Postmans work ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, and argues that beyond the concern about the decline of reading in the 1990s, the spread of the smart phone from 2010 onward has led to a steep drop in educational standards. With the rise of TikTok and Instagram, we are returning to the primacy of visual display – a sort of counter-revolution in thinking and perception.
Journey Through Time Episode 48: The Paris Commune: Can the City of Light Govern Itself? After the uprising over the cannons on Montmatre, the radicals took over, but with no leader, they split almost immediately. Auguste Blanqui would have been the leader, but he was in prison (as indeed he was for whole decades of his life). Supplies were allowed in, but Paris was still lunder siege. Napoleon III’s column was pulled down, although it was later re-erected. Elections were held with 4 days to give the leaders legitimacy with the result that there was an anti-nationalist government but otherwise, the movement splintered. The new government started issuing executive orders (and don’t we know about THEM!) to separate church and state, provide rent relief and soldier pensions, provide free secular and compulsory co-education, cap salaries, and give workshops to co-ops. So far, all normal socialist fare, but also they imposed decimal time (10 day weeks, 10 hour days etc), banned night baking as a labour market reform for bakers, and banned croissants (can’t remember why). They treated legitimate and illegitimate children equally and had same and equal pay for teachers. The army was a citizen’s militia, and army discipline broke down almost immediately. 150,000 people per day fled Paris, where there was constant violence but no terror as such (in Revolutionary terms). From afar, Marx was interested but because he didn’t support the French International, he waited a while before writing about it. Women were influential in organizing, but they were not inspired by feminist or suffragist ideals. To get Auguste Blanqui released from prison, they took hostages which backfired on them. There were small mini-communes in the rural towns, but essentially Paris was on its own.
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the ‘Shortest History’ part of the title of this series of books published by Black Inc dealing with world history, many written by Australian authors. Declaring to be the shortest history seems rather definitive and pugnacious, and almost a challenge to later authors to become even shorter. The blurb for the series claims that the books can be read in an afternoon -something that I doubt, in this case – but certainly they are a work of concision and discipline on the part of the author, in being able to confidently assert a fact or event in a single paragraph instead of hedging with qualifications, nuances and debates. Of course, much is elided in such an approach, but there is also a bracing forthrightness about a sweeping history that needs to tie together so many small details into an overarching narrative.
Don Watson comes to the task as a historian in his own right, political speechwriter, and a commentator on current-day American society and political culture. As well as his American Journeys published in 2008 (my review here), he has been a regular contributor to the Black Inc./Schwartz stable on American politics with three Quarterly Essays: No.4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America (2001), No 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the time of Trump (2016) (my review here) and most recently in 2024 with No. 95High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, which I reviewed here. With The Shortest History…. he is writing as an outsider, and a long-term, well-informed watcher as well.
His outsider status is most apparent in the opening chapters of the book, where he makes clear that there were competing European powers – England, France, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden- that put ‘boots on the ground’ on what was to become American territory. Drawing the distinction between the 1776 establishment of the United States, and the history of ‘America’ starting in 1492, he goes even further back 20,000 years to the first peoples, and the early introduction of enslavement that followed early European ‘discovery’. In what, perhaps, might be characterized as ‘black armband history’, he continues to turn the spotlight around onto First Nations and Black experience as the narrative of United States history marches forward…always forward.
The book progresses chronologically, but the chapters are thematic. In his introduction Watson notes that:
While the history of the United States is to an uncommon degree a history of ideas, it is equally the story of men and women testing the truth of those ideas against experience: in politics, in churches, on frontiers, in cities, in industries, in battle, in homes, in schools, in Hollywood, in literature and in music. (p. xiv)
Watson places strong emphasis on ideas: on the intertwined Puritan ideas of harsh punishment and discipline set against competing ideals of individualistic self-reliance, which in turn existed alongside traditions of social justice, education, communitarianism and democracy. He notes the influence of Enlightenment philosophers and the scientific revolution in providing an intellectual framework for their grievances and the language to express it through the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Federalists papers. He puts his historian hat on to discuss Turner’s Frontier thesis on the ‘freedom’ of the frontier in the popular imagination and he notes the recurrent waves of religious ‘awakenings’ and the struggle between order and chaos-‘ the American id and the American superego’ (p 58). Challenging these were the ‘maniacal appetite for wealth’ whetted by the financial opportunities following the Civil War, and especially during the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s which pushed aside “the restraining influences of conscience and religion, or the egalitarian principles implied in the country’s democratic creed” (p.94) The Civil War, in his telling, had a long advent of compromises on the part of the North, which was well aware of the incompatibility of slavery with the ideals espoused in the republic’s founding documents.
Although we know the political landscape in the United (huh!) States today as being Republican and Democrat, the meaning of both words has changed over time. To be ‘republican’ was to champion the idea of the American republic, and it was not necessarily democratic. The nature of the parties changed over time, with the immigrant influx between 1890 and 1920 shaping the cultural and political evolution of urban America:
The Democratic Party evolved into the party of both the burgeoning multiethnic cities and the reactionary South, while the Republicans remained the voice of white Protestant provincial America. (p. 112)
Looking at the policies of Presidents over time, particularly in the Progressive era, it is not easy to distinguish to which party the president belonged. For example Woodrow Wilson was a southerner from the Democratic Party, and a progressive as well as a segregationalist. Kennedy did not like Martin Luther King, and he had little interest in domestic politics. Nixon was mad, but he was the most liberal republican of the century excluding Teddy Roosevelt (p. 187). Some Presidents receive more attention than others. Probably because of current-day parallels, President Andrew Jackson receives more attention than he might have in a book written 30 years ago. For a former speechwriter for Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, I was surprised that he was so critical of FDR. It seemed to me that the emphasis on presidential personality and actions received more emphasis in the latter part of the book, within the time of Watson’s own memory, I would guess. Interestingly for a historian, he ascribes ‘luck’ as an important factor that determined a President’s actions and reputation.
This is not just a political history because Watson interweaves popular culture, including music, Hollywood and literature, as well as broader social movements including Communism and anti-Communism, evangelical religion and protest movements. However, the political emphasis does mean that it is a predominantly male history, with political actors Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton receiving more attention than other women in his narrative. As the book moves on, the early emphasis on indigenous and Black history is muted and where it is mentioned it is mainly in political terms. Particularly in the post-WW2 years, he integrates conformity, consumerism and commercialization into the “American Dream”, which was very much restricted to white America:
Nothing spoke more eloquently of the American dream than the bustling heartland towns, their Main Streets lined with mom-and-pop stores, barber shops, diners, ice cream parlours, theatres and movie houses, with Fords and Chryslers and De Soto Coronados parked in rows; and, just beyond them, unlikely numbers of regularly attended churches, schools, sports stadiums and public swimming pools (p. 154)
Watson started his book in the introduction, with the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. At first, I thought that this reflected Watson’s own expertise and reputation as a commentator on American affairs, but when he returns to 6 January at the end of the book as part of his argument, it is as a historian.
The United States was born with one foot in the Christian church and the other in commerce. It might equally be said that it had a foot in the high ideals of religion and the Enlightenment and a foot in the frontier philosophy of whatever it takes. The loathing felt for the liberal elites, and for intellectuals in general, was an old one, and the failure of liberals and intellectuals to understand either the people who loathed them or the degree of their loathing was just as old. The ‘Washington swamp’ was not new [and] …the coonskin hats and the shaman’s horns in the Capitol building were as if lifted from a picture in my childhood Davy Crockett book…All these gestures to contemporary grievance connected to threads of belief and myth, and patterns of ideological dispute, that are as old as the country itself. Extraordinary, even ‘unprecedented’ as the insurrection of 6 January 2021 seemed, it occurred in the same grindhouse of uncrossable divides and undying fixations.” p. 261
I guess that only time will tell if Watson’s decision to start and finish the book with Trump was a narrative framing, or whether it is a historical analysis in its own right. Only in coming years will we know whether Trump II marks a whole new phase, or whether as Watson suggests in 2025, the Trump presidency reflects a continuity that flows across the United States’ history. By its very nature, a ‘short history’ with its abridgments and encapsulation, is probably best placed to provide an answer.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 580: The Irish Civil War: The Assassination of Sir Henry Wilson (Part 1) In this week’s episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by historian Ronan McGreevy, to discuss the pivotal assassination of Sir Henry Wilson, whose death launched the tumultuous Irish Civil War. Sir Henry Wilson was the MP for Northern Ireland, and an Irish Unionist. He had served in the British Army, and as a leading figure in the British Army he urged the British government to crack down on the IRA, a group which he saw as a military problem, rather than a political problem. On 22 June 1922 he was scheduled to open a memorial at Liverpool St station, which he did. On his return home, three men waited for him and shot him six times on his own doorstep. The gunmen escaped by taxi, but were surrounded by a mob. Two of the assassins were ex-soldiers themselves and part of the Irish diaspora. Meanwhile an election held in Ireland led to acceptance of the Treaty, but the anti-Treaty dissidents took over the Four Courts, where they were issued with an ultimatum by the (Irish) government to remove themselves. Among the dissidents, the issue was not so much partition, but the Oath that parliamentarians would have to pledge, not in words but in the level of independence that an Irish parliament would have. The IRA itself split, but the majority was anti-Treaty. Sectarian violence increased in Northern Ireland, and Wilson became the public face of the Unionist stance. So who ordered the assassination? Historian Ronan McGreevy, the guest on the podcast, has argued that it was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret oath organization from 1858), headed by Michael Collins. The two assassins were hanged after a 1-day trial and the anti-Treaty dissidents were removed from the Four Courts. The Civil War had started.
Journey Through TimeThe Paris Commune: The City that ate its Zoo (Episode 2) With the so-called Government of National Defence negotiating with the Prussians, Paris now saw itself as the defender of France. One of the first things to be done was to hold an election, to affirm the legitimacy of the leaders. And who should be elected as Mayor of Montmartre but Georges Clemenceau, who was to end up as Prime Minister of France. Perhaps his anti-German sentiments during and after WWI sprang from this early experience with the Prussians. However, despite the stance taken by the Parisians, in the rural villages people wanted peace at any price so a divide sprang up between Paris and its surrounds. As the Prussians increased the siege, people ate first their horses, then their pets, rats and the zoo animals excluding the hippopotamus (too hard to kill and cut up) and the monkeys (too much like us). As with Gaza today, there was disease and incessant shelling, and eventually in January 1871 the Government of National Defence capitulated. Ruinous reparations were imposed on France as part of the surrender, and the Prussians would continue to occupy until the reparations were paid. Meanwhile the German Empire settled in at Versailles, just to rub salt into the wounds, and their insistence on parading through the streets angered the Parisians even more. Elections were held, and the rural/Paris split continued. The 300,000 armed guardsmen in Paris refused to surrender so the National Government at Versailles decided to confiscate their weapons. The Guardsmen and the parisian crowds moved the cannons onto Montmatre (the Sacre Coeur church wasn’t there then- it was a very poor neighbourhood) and in March 1871 the women rushed to Montmatre to stop the seizure of the cannons by the National Guard troops.
The Rest is Politics US edition I listen to this podcast every week, but there’s no point documenting it because things change so quickly. But Episode 132 The Mistakes that led to Trump is more historical, looking at the economic decisions that led to the populism that brought us The Orange One. (Just to ensure that I will never be admitted to US). The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement emphasized stability in the post-WW2 international economy, but in August 1971 Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, which at that time was a lowly $31 per ounce! The globalization and off-shoring mantra was that a rising tide lifts all boats, and China was admitted to the World Trade Organization as an emerging market, something that Donald J Trump opposed even then.
The EconomistThe Weekly Intelligence: Operation Midas. Wow. This podcast really got me thinking. It involves the corruption scandal in Ukraine, which led to the dismissal of President Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, Andrei Yermak. The police force in Ukraine is so corrupt that an alternate corruption watchdog structure was established, comprising the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). These were the two bodies that Zelensky was trying to get rid of, until such huge public and Western government pressure forced him to leave them alone. NABU and SAPO uncovered a huge corruption crisis where officials skimmed off millions from the state nuclear energy commission with scant regard to the effects of decaying and damaged infrastructure on the population. Why? Zelensky claimed that it was to get rid of Russian influence, but was it just to protect himself. I’d thought of Zelensky as one of the ‘good guys’ but perhaps there are no ‘good guys’ here. I’m sure that this destabilization is just what Russia wants, but is there a real and continuing problem of corruption in Ukraine?
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 578 The Irish War of Independence – Bloody Sunday (Part 3) As with the previous two episodes, Dominic and Tom are joined by Irish historian Paul Rouse. I knew about the 1972 Bloody Sunday, but not about the Bloody Sunday that took place on 21 November 1920. It started with the IRA targetting about 19 men in Dublin, shooting 15 dead in 8 locations. It was personally ordered by Michael Collins himself. Not all the victims were intelligence officers, and not all were English. That afternoon there was a football match at Croke Park. The football authorities were warned to cancel it, but they decided to go ahead because the park was already half-full. At 3.30 trucks, and 15 minutes after the game began, trucks arrived. Shooting began from the outside (this is important because the British claimed that the shooting began from inside), and there was a stampede and crush. There was blowback in England with acts of violence, followed by reprisals against the IRA, who found it hard to get arms. Finally a ceasefire and truce was announced, and negotiations began.
The Human Subject (BBC) This is the final episode in the series. If the second-last episode about deep-brain stimulation seemed a bit ho-hum, this one certainly made me angry. The Trauma Victims and their Blood tells the story of Martha Milete, who was shot in 2006 when masked men invaded her house. Without ever giving consent, she found herself part of an experiment into Polyhaem, a form artificial blood which would certainly be a boon to emergency medicine, but which initially caused heart attacks in all of the first ten subjects, with two of them dying. These terrible results caused the product to be shelved but in 1996 a change in the FDA regulations meant that there was no need for individual consent from trauma patients- which is how Milete found herself part of the experiment. Instead, Polyhaem had to gain ‘community consent’, which they interpreted as giving a Powerpoint presentation at the hospital, and the initial provision of blue bracelets that had to be worn 24 hrs a day opting out (they soon ran out and it took a year to replenish them). Appalling.
Witness History (BBC) I love this program. Ten minutes- enough time for a walk home from the station- and really interesting. Orson Welles Broadcasts War of the World has interviews from various people who were involved on the radio program broadcast on the night before Halloween in 1938. I’d forgotten that H.G. Well’s short story ‘The War of the Worlds’ was set in England. When Howard Koch wrote the radio play, to be performed as part of a weekly program, it was a very boring show. So it was decided to set it in a real location in New Jersey, and to present it as a live broadcast which had interrupted the programming for the night. Up to six million people tuned in, unaware that they were listening to a radio play, and it prompted mass panic. There’s an interview with Orson Welles himself, as well as with the script writer and the producer John Houseman. Really good.
Rear Vision (ABC) America’s Radical Left Part I and Part 2 looks at the history of the left in America. Part I looks at the religiously-driven radicalism of early America and the failure to create a dedicated ‘labour’ party in United State. This failure was tied up with other competing ideas about colour and ethnic identity, and the Republican and Democratic parties were canny enough to co-opt some of the Left’s ideas- enough to undermine support for a minority party which might not gain power. Part 2 looks at the effect of the Soviet Union on Left politics, McCarthyism and the rapid re-emergence of Left ideas under the Black Power movement. The election of Zohran Mamdani to New York mayor and the persistence of Bernie Sanders shows that the Left isn’t dead yet.
Thanksgiving Day in America has just passed. We do not celebrate it, or anything like it, here in Australia, although as it happens I participated in a Thanksgiving lunch with American and Australian friends last Saturday. Historian Heather Cox Richardson posted a video about Thanksgiving which she was undecided about leaving up, so I’m posting about it now while it’s still there. You can find it here:
In this video, she returns to one of the primary documents, Mourt’s Relation to describe the First Thanksgiving, and it’s quite different to the story as I understood it. There’s no starving Pilgrims here: instead they were surrounded by food:
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain [Myles Standish] and others.
Mourt’s Relation was a document published in 1622 to reassure investors that the colony was a successful (and that they hadn’t ‘done’ their money) and to encourage others to come. There is another similar document called Of Plymouth Plantation written between 1630-1651 CE. Of Plymouth Plantation doesn’t have any starving Pilgrims either:
They began now [fall of 1621 CE) to gather in the small harvest they had, and to prepare their houses for the winter, being well recovered and in health and strength and plentifully provisioned; for while some had been thus employed in affairs away from home, others were occupied in fishing for cod, bass, and other fish, of which they caught a good quantity, every family having their portion. All summer there was no want. And now, as winter approached, wild fowl began to arrive [and] they got abundance of wild turkeys besides venison. (Book II.ch.2)
HCR (ie. Heather Cox Richardson) points out that there is a difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans although they are often conflated in the public imagination. The Pilgrims were separatists, who wanted to leave the Anglican Church, whereas the Puritans were prepared to stay in the church and transform it from within. The Pilgrims went to America from Leiden in the Netherlands, where they had escaped in the hope of establishing their own independent congregation. However, when their children were not doing as well as they hoped, they headed off for America as a form of ‘tough’ love to turn their grumpy adolescents into god-fearing responsible young people.
She also points out that the Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to arrive in New England. English cod fishers had been plying the New England coast to avoid competition in the North Sea, and they had established relations with the local tribes, as well as exposing them to contagious diseases that plunged the indigenous population into crisis.
What really interested me were the parallels and differences between the early contact in New England and in New South Wales. The fishers were followed by explorers, like George Weymouth, who was struck by the straight pines which he immediately saw as potential masts for the British navy – a very early hope with the NSW settlement as well. The Pilgrims were struck by the ‘park-like’ appearance of the land, which as in Australia, had been managed by firestick farming by the local tribes. ‘Park-like’ was a common description of the Australian explorers as well. The difference was that the Pilgrims saw this as proof that God had prepared this new land for them: Australian explorers just saw the commercial potential. And in both cases, the spread of disease decimated indigenous populations and de-stablized their politics.
HCR recorded this for an American audience, but this Australian listener found it fascinating.
Let’s just jump ahead, shall we? I have been listening to podcasts between September and November, but many of them have been current affairs podcasts, which just come and go.
This is the story of patient B-19, a 24-year old who, in 1970, walks into a hospital in Louisiana troubled by the fact that the drugs he’s been abusing for the past three years are no longer having the desired effect. He claims he is “bored by everything” and is no longer getting a “kick” out of sex. To Dr Robert Heath’s intrigue, B-19 has “never in his life experienced heterosexual relationships of any kind”. Somewhere along the way, during the consultations, the conclusion is drawn that B-19 would be happier if he wasn’t gay. And so they set about a process that involves having lots of wires sticking out of his brain. Julia and Adam hear from science journalist and author, Lone Frank, author of The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor.
Actually, I wasn’t particularly shocked by this episode. It was the 1970s after all, time of ‘Clockwork Orange’, and brain stimulation and operant conditioning was all the go. While most of us wouldn’t see being gay as something that had to be ‘cured’, I do wonder if truly deviant behaviour that would otherwise see a person incarcerated for life (an inveterate child abuser?) might not still turn to methods like this?
The Rest is History Episode 606: Enoch Powell Rivers of Blood With Nigel Farage on the loose, it seems appropriate to go back to revisit Enoch Powell and his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. As Dominic and Tom point out, Enoch Powell is better remembered than a lot of Prime Ministers are, and he influenced Thatcher and inspired the Brexiteers. He was born in Birmingham in 1912 and was a precocious child who seemed destined to be a classics scholar. He had no interest in women, but he was obsessed by Nietzsche. He was a Professor of Greek at Sydney University by the age of 25 (I didn’t know that!), but he really wanted to be the Viceroy of India (as one does). He fought in WW2 but not in a combat role. He was a Tory, but he was often critical of the party, and championed English nationalism in Parliament in his hypnotic droning voice. He decriminalized homosexuality, was anti-Vietnam, anti-US but economically very dry. Despite the influx of Windrush and British/Pakistani immigrants in the late 1940s, immigration was seen more as a regrettable necessity rather than a national issue. At first Powell did nothing about the reported ‘white flight’ from areas like his electorate of Wolverhampton, but by 1964 it was recognized that immigration had to be controlled to avoid the ‘colour question’, a question supercharged by television of unrest in Montgomery and Alabama in the US. Why did Powell change? He argued that he was representing the views of his electorate, and he held up an ideal of the English people and became more radical as a way of distinguishing himself from Heath. In 1967 there was an influx of Indians from Kenya after Kenyatta expelled them and an Act was passed to restrict immigration. The Labour government introduced a Racial Relations Bill in 1968 which prohibited racial discrimination in areas like housing. When the Tories decided to quibble over the details but accepted the principle of the bill, Powell was furious and this was the impetus for the ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’, which was publicized beforehand, so television crews were there to record it. He was sacked as Minister for Defence, but he had strong support on the streets. He never distanced himself from violence, but he was wrong- there were no rivers of blood. And until now Tories wouldn’t touch the issue again.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 577: The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2) After their largely ceremonial electoral victory in 1917, Sinn Fein established an alternative shadow government which had cabinet positions, courts and issues a Declaration of Independence. It wanted to attend the Paris Peace Conference, but it didn’t get a seat at the table. The IRA was recruiting heavily, but the majority were more involved with logistics and protection rather than firing guns. The conflict hotted up in the early 1920s when the IRA began attacking police barracks and courts. There was a mass resignation of police, and they were replaced by ex-army soldiers, the notorious ‘black and tans’ and auxiliaries. In 1921 the Flying Columns and IRA intelligence ramped up, with localized violence. But this violence was not necessarily a sectarian war, but it certainly had sectarian aspects.
In Our Time (BBC). Apparently Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from In Our Time after 26 years. He is 85, after all, and he was starting to sound a bit quavery. So, they’re dipping back into the archives and they replayed an episode on Hannah Arendt from 2017. She was born to a non-observant Jewish family in Hanover in 1906, a family that was so non-observant that she was surprised when she found herself singled out as being Jewish. She had an affair with Heidegger, but then he became a Nazi. She was a classicist, and she maintained this interest throughout her life. She escaped to America in 1941 as a refugee, where she developed English as her third language. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she warned of a new sort of atomized evil, like a fungus, and she saw Eichmann as thoughtless, rather than evil. Actually, I hadn’t realized that she was anything other than a political writer: she was just as focussed on the human condition as politics.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 