For two years the chant was rehearsed, circulated, aestheticised: “globalise the intifada!”. A resistance moment. A noble liberation struggle, cleansed of consequence. Now that it has arrived not as metaphor but as blood, the same people who normalised the rhetoric – progressive activists, influencers, podcasters, the Greens, the Labor left – present themselves as mourners. Today it is condolences, unity, and prayers.
But you do not get to globalise the intifada and then feign surprise when it turns up.
This did not erupt spontaneously. It was built – patiently, rhetorically – until violence no longer felt aberrant but earned. Shock, at this point, is not innocence; it is evasion.
The Prime Minister calls for unity and convenes the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Necessary, yes – but no longer enough. The problem he faces is credibility. For two years the response to antisemitism has been managerial rather than moral: statements instead of lines, calibration instead of resolve.
The record is plain. Within hours of the October 7 Hamas massacre, and before Israel inflicted its biblical rage upon Gaza, Jews were openly abused outside the Sydney Opera House. Synagogues and childcare centres were firebombed and homes and vehicles vandalised. Hate preachers operated freely. Week after week, marches moved through our cities celebrating “resistance”, praising terrorism, calling for Israel’s elimination, and chanting explicitly for the globalisation of the intifada: violence against Jews, everywhere – for what else could that word mean? Jewish students and academics were harassed on campus. Jewish artists were doxed and frozen out of cultural life. Antisemitism was rhetorically dissolved by equating it with Islamophobia, converting a specific hatred into a moral blur.
Step by step, it was normalised.
The year ends with an Islamist terrorist attack at Bondi Beach – an ordinary, intimate place, place many of us walk, eat, linger. We were in Sydney last weekend, and had we stayed another night, we would very likely have been there ourselves, walking the promenade and then taking refreshment, as is our custom, at the North Bondi RSL, just across the road from the park where the atrocity occurred. Authorities had warned such an incident was probable. They were not speculating; they were reading the climate.
Antisemitism in Australia has risen to levels unseen in living memory – even in small country towns like the one we live near and in Byron Bay, meccas of alternative lifestyles and long-styled as havens of inclusion and wellness. Alongside this rise sits another failure: the government’s inability to confront antisemitism with clarity and force, preferring symbolic gestures and offshore moral posturing while hatred hardened at home.
Now, suddenly, our leaders discover grief. Social media is more revealing. Facebook fills with empathetic words and memes from politicians, public figures and keyboard activists who spent the past two years condemning Israel in ways that blurred – and often erased – the distinction between Israeli policy and Jewish existence, creating at best, indifference to Jewish fear and, at worst, a permissive climate of hostility toward Jews as such. Today it is all tolerance, inclusivity and unity – and an air of regret and reverence that reeks of guilt.
But not all. Social media has fractured along familiar lines. At one extreme are conspiracy theories — false flags, invented victims, claims the attackers were Israeli soldiers. At the other is denial: what antisemitism? Between them sits a more revealing response. There is genuine shock and horror, even remorse – but also a careful foregrounding of the Syrian-Australian man who intervened, coupled with a quiet erasure of the victims’ Jewishness; a reflexive turn to whataboutism; and a refusal, even now, to relinquish the slogans and moral habits of the past two years. If antisemitism is acknowledged at all, it is ultimately laid at the feet of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Why this reticence, this resistance to reassessment after the Bondi attack? Perhaps it lies less in ideology than in psychology. For some, there is a simple inability to relinquish prior convictions- positions publicly held, repeatedly performed, and now too entangled with identity to abandon without cost. For others, perhaps a deeper reluctance to acknowledge having been misinformed or misdirected, an admission that would require not just intellectual correction but moral self-reckoning. Empathy, too, has become selective: extending it fully to Jewish victims would require suspending, even briefly, a framework that collapses Jewish identity into the actions of the Israeli state. And finally, many are no longer reasoning freely at all, but are caught inside the machinery – the rhythms of platforms, slogans, group loyalties and algorithmic reinforcement – where reconsideration feels like betrayal and pause feels like capitulation.
So the question must be asked plainly: can many on the left side of politics, no matter how well-intentioned (and ill-formed) honestly say that nothing they have posted over the past two years contributed, even indirectly, to prejudice against Jewish people? Nothing that helped turn anxiety and empathy into hostility, criticism into contempt?
Australian Jews warned that today’s chant would become tomorrow’s attack. They were told they were exaggerating, weaponising history, crying wolf. Yet despite inquiries, legislation, and repeated arson and vandalism, the ecosystem of hate was allowed to deepen. Two years of weekly protests chanting “From the river to the sea”, “Globalise the intifada” and “Death to the IDF” – calling for the eradication of a nation state and its people – were treated as politics, not incitement.
In July 2024 the government appointed Jillian Segal, a lawyer and businesswoman, as Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (followed soon afterwards by the appointment of Aftab Malik as Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia). Her report, released a year later, was unambiguous: antisemitism had become “ingrained and normalised” across universities, schools, media and cultural institutions. She called for curriculum reform, university accountability, migration screening, and a serious national effort to explain what antisemitism is and why it corrodes societies.
Five months on, the government is still considering it. It has been under heavy pressure from many quarters to hasten slowly, including from within its own ranks: there were calls from the Labor left, including motions from branches and petitions, for Segal to be sacked and her report shredded.
Mere days after Bondi, the pushback has already begun. Pro-Palestinian platforms – and even some Labor branches and members – have denounced Jillian Segal, her report, and Prime Minister Albanese’s intention to implement its recommendations as an assault on democratic institutions and civil liberties. So, argue that that the Australian government is using the atrocity as a pretext to accelerate its repression of the Palestine movement, and, even, to protect and defend Australia’s complicity in what is viewed as the Gaza genocide. What this framing conspicuously avoids is any reckoning with the antisemitism the report documents- or with the immediate, practical questions now facing authorities. Among these are the potential for copycat attacks, and what duty of care is owed to the Syrian-Australian man who intervened to stop the attack? Hamas and sections of Middle Eastern media have already branded him a traitor. In this moral economy, even heroism is conditional – and quickly becomes a liability.
The partisan responses have been opportunistically predictable. The Murdoch media accused the government of weakness. The Liberal Party, led by Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, accused Labor of neglect. Pauline Hanson followed, reliably. None of it alters the central fact identified by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore: the taboo on antisemitism has collapsed. Perhaps because Jewish identity is lazily collapsed into Israel. Perhaps because the world’s oldest hatred never disappears; it waits for permission. That permission was granted – gradually, rhetorically, respectably. And antisemitism does not arrive announcing itself. It seeps. It jokes. It chants. It flatters those who believe they are on the right side of history, until history arrives and asks what they tolerated in its name.
This did not come out of nowhere. It arrived exactly as advertised, and this is what it looks like.
And shock, now, is not a moral position.
Postscript … just saying …
The following is a précis of an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on 20 December 2025 by satirist and presenter Josh Szeps entitled “What kind of Australia do we want to be? Let’s stop dodging the hard questions”. It encapsulates succinctly the questions we must ask ourselves. It is no satire:
In the aftermath of Bondi, everyone has an explanation and a slogan. Blame is flung in all directions – Israel, its critics, Muslims, the prime minister, “the world’s oldest hatred” – and consensus collapses into a hollow refrain: say no to hate. Comforting, yes; clarifying, no. Meanwhile, Jewish Australians now fear public gathering, and Muslim and Palestinian Australians brace for backlash of their own. This is the brittle edge of multiculturalism when the shared glue has weakened.
That glue once went by a plain name: liberal universalism – free speech, equality before the law, scepticism toward dogma, the right to criticise ideas without condemning people. Over the past decade it has been displaced by a politics of identity, grievance management, and performative outrage, leaving us unwilling to ask hard but necessary questions: how to integrate insular communities, how to criticise religious fanaticism without collapsing into bigotry, how to balance pluralism with a shared civic culture. Into that vacuum rush provocateurs, algorithms, and foreign actors only too happy to inflame old hatreds. The weekly Gaza marches exposed this failure. Slogans like “globalise the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” may sound abstract or benign to some, but to many Jews they carry a very concrete historical threat – especially after October 7. That most marchers may not have grasped the implications is precisely the problem. Chanting borrowed slogans in mass, without curiosity or restraint, is not moral seriousness. Nor is pretending that theocratic, homophobic, antisemitic religious doctrines are merely “cultural differences” compatible with the values that made Australia attractive in the first place.
Multiculturalism survives only if it demands something of everyone: discomfort and openness from the majority; reciprocity, restraint and abandonment of imported feuds from minorities. If liberals won’t defend universal values — plainly, without euphemism or ritual throat-clearing — others, far less liberal, will step in and do it for them.
Here are three particularly resonant paragraphs:
“Week after week, chunks of our cities were overtaken by protesters carrying signs that had nothing to do with Israeli policies, such as “globalise the intifada” and “by any means necessary”. The ubiquitous “from the river to the sea”, benign-sounding to bystanders, proposes that an Arab state ought to sit on top of all the land of Israel – that Jewish people should live at the pleasure of rulers whose theocratic education would make Australia’s most radical imam look like a Jew-loving hippy. Is such a sentiment just innocent political speech? Or, in the wake of the jihadism on October 7, 2023, could it be understood as a threat to conquer the world’s only Jewish safe space?
… if you found yourself marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge chanting slogans you didn’t write, about a complex issue you’re not really across, surrounded by crowds chanting the same thing, which others found intimidating … you may, in fact, not have been elevating the discourse. “Intifada” technically means “uprising”, but in the context of Palestinian resistance it implies exploding buses, drive-by shootings and suicide bombers in cafes. (See: “Second Intifada” in Wikipedia, kids). Presumably, most of the protesters didn’t know this. After last weekend, they do. The Intifada has been globalised …
It’s up to all of us to refresh multiculturalism by tethering it to universal values and admitting that it demands sacrifices all around. It demands that people in the majority make themselves uncomfortable, around unfamiliar languages, faiths, customs and food. And it demands that people in the minority give up dogmatism, grudges and cultural feuds”.
A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis; And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations—all were his! He counted them at break of day – And when the sun set, where were they?
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Christopher Allen, The Australian’s art critic, writes of how Greece’s antiquity presses in on the present. It is a lightweight piece, surveying as it does three millennia of history, from the days of the Greeks, Alexander, the Great and the Romans to those of the Ottomans and their successor states – but it is elucidating nonetheless.
It is a brief reminder of the veracity of the phrase “history is always with us”, and of how the past continues to shape the present through its influence on culture, human nature, and ongoing events – a constant guide, providing both cautionary tales and inspiration for the future, as we carry our history with us in our identities, cultures, societies and recurring patterns of behaviour. As author and activist James Baldwin is attributed to have said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history”.
Greece has always lived a double life. To the casual visitor, it is a sun-splashed idyll of sea and sky, but its history tells a darker story – a long, hard ledger of heroes and horrors, and the stubborn will to survive wedged between warring empires. The last two and a half millennia have been less a tranquil Mediterranean tableau than a parade of conquerors, liberators, and the occasional poet-adventurer.
Over time, Greece has drawn to its shores soldiers and adventurers, poets and dreamers – and naive youths like myself. I hitch-hiked down from what was then Yugoslav in the summer of 1970, a young man with a second-hand rucksack and followed the looping Adriatic highway from Thessaloniki and Athens. I knew enough history to feel the charge of passing near Thermopylae, where Spartans once made their famous last stand against the might of Xerxes. But I wasn’t to learn until over half a century later that an army of ANZACs battled overwhelming odds just a valley away.
The past, in Greece, as in the Middle East, always stands just offstage, awaiting its cue and refusing to stay politely within its own century. It is not merely one of the world’s most benevolent postcards; it is a crossroads of empires, a battleground of ambitions, a cavalcade of famous names and places, where East and West have met, mingled, clashed, and sometimes embraced in the long swirl of history, where the mythic and the modern travel together.
One particular reference also reminds me of how history sends out roots, twigs and branches throughout the settled and hence recorded world.
Tempe, on Sydney’s Cooks River, wears its classical inheritance more openly than most Sydney suburbs. When Alexander Brodie Spark built Tempe House in the 1830s, he christened the estate after the Vale of Tempe in northern Greece – a narrow, ten-kilometre gorge carved by the Pineiós River as it threads between Olympus and Ossa. The poets imagined Poseidon’s trident had cleft the mountains to make it; Apollo and the Muses strolled beneath its laurels; sacred branches were cut there for Delphi. Spark, standing between his own modest “Mount Olympus” and the river, saw a faint echo of the Greek idyll and gave the place its name.
But the Vale of Tempe was never entirely pastoral. Armies have squeezed through that narrow defile for millennia. The Persians marched through it on their way south – Tempe lies just north of the iconic pass of Thermopylae, part of the same chain of passes that determined so much of Greek military history. And in the twentieth century it would again become a stage for outsiders in uniform.
In April 1941 Australian and New Zealand troops, together with British units, were thrown into Greece as Lustre Force – outnumbered, outgunned, and facing a German army with air superiority and modern communications. One of the hardest-fought delaying actions took place – inevitably, given the geography – at Tempe Gorge on 18 April (the featured image of this post, from the collection of the Australian War Museum). The Australian brigade was commanded by Brigadier A.S. Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF. His “Anzac Force” (apparently the last operational use of that designation) held the gorge long enough to impede the German advance and allow wider Allied withdrawals. The serene valley Spark had sentimentalised became, for a few violent hours, an Anzac bottleneck: those same narrow walls that once sheltered shrines now channelling rifle fire and Stuka attacks. Many of those men would soon find themselves on Crete, resisting the first large-scale parachute assault in military history.
And then – because Australia never resists a touch of Mediterranean whimsy—the Hellenic (and Hellenistic) echoes continue in our own neighbourhood on the Midnorth Coast. Halfway along the road from Bellingen to Coffs Harbour lies the township of Toormina, home to our closest shopping centre and to the Toormi pub. Its name began its life on the slopes of Mount Tauro in Sicily, in the ancient town of Taormina, the site of a famous amphitheater. In the 1980s local Italian residents of who were clients of developer Patrick Hargraves (the late father of a good friend of ours) suggested the name “Taormina” for the new subdivision. He liked the idea but clipped the opening “a” to make it more easily pronounceable- and Toormina entered the Gregory’s and thelocal vernacular.
So in our small corner of New South Wales, Greek myth, Persian marches, Anzac rearguards, and Sicilian nostalgia all whisper from the signposts. Tempe and Toormina: unlikely twins, proof that even the quietest suburb can carry the long shadows of the ancient world.
Uncovering a forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
From ancient battles to World War II, a visit to Athens’ War Museum exposes the dramatic military history that shaped modern Greece. Christopher Allen’s deeply personal connection unravelled in the process.
Christopher Allen, The Australian, 21 November 2025
James Stuart, View of the Erechtheion, Athens, October 1787. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer. Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.
A little over 200 years ago, the Greeks began their war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered most of the Byzantine world in the 15th century; the renaissance in Western Europe thus coincided with the beginning of a new dark age for the Greeks under Turkish oppression. Some islands held out for longer: Rhodes, home of the Knights of St John, was taken in 1522, forcing them to withdraw to Malta; Cyprus, ruled by the French Lusignan dynasty from the time of the Crusades and then by Venice, was brutally conquered in 1571, and Crete, held by Venice since 1205, finally fell after a generation-long siege in 1669.
The Ottoman Empire reached the apogee of its power in the early 18th century, but then began a slow decline, one of whose incidental effects was to make the Greek world more accessible to Western travellers: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett spent time in Athens from 1751 and published their Antiquities of Athens in several volumes in 1762. By the early 19th century, Greece had become part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour; by 1816, the Parthenon Frieze was in the British Museum and profoundly transformed modern understanding of Ancient Greek art.
Meanwhile the Greek War of Independence began with revolts in the Peloponnese in 1821 and a Declaration of Independence in 1822, eliciting a savage response from the Turks and sympathy from intellectuals and the educated public in Western European countries. The slaughter of the population of the island of Chios in 1822 led Eugène Delacroix to paint his famous Massacre at Chios, exhibited in the Salon of 1824 and purchased in the same year for the national collection; it is today in the Louvre. In 1823, the most famous poet of his day, Lord Byron, who had already demonstrated his sympathy for Armenian culture and independence from the Ottomans, went to Greece to help in the fight, both personally and financially.
This 1813 portrait by Phillips depicts Lord Byron in traditional Albanian attire. Alamy
Byron’s death in 1824 at Missolonghi only attracted more attention and sympathy to the cause of Greek freedom, and the great powers – Britain, France and Russia – warned the Turks about further repression, even though they were also committed, for different reasons, to maintaining the integrity of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In 1827, at the Battle of Navarino, an international fleet led by the British and commanded by Sir Edward Codrington destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian navies. After further interventions on land by Russian and French forces, the Ottoman Empire was compelled, by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, to accept the independence of mainland Greece, although initially only as far north as the so-called Arta-Volos Line. The north, including Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, remained in Ottoman hands and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was born in the former Byzantine city of Salonika in 1881.
Instability in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s gave the new Greek nation the opportunity to annex the central region of Thessaly in 1881 (while Britain incidentally acquired Cyprus in 1878). Further important gains were made during the two Balkan Wars (1912-13): much of Epirus in the northwest as well as Salonika and most of southern Macedonia, most of the Aegean Islands and Crete; the British had already ceded the Ionian Islands in 1863 and the Italians would relinquish the Dodecanese after World War II in 1947. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of World War I, Greece had briefly seized eastern Thrace and territories in Anatolia, soon to be retaken by the Turks with immense loss of life in the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.
Model of Byzantine warship from the War Museum
This is of course a very much simplified version of the extraordinarily complicated story of Balkan politics from the mid-19th century, which forms such an important part of the lead-up to World War I. All of these events were accompanied not only by terrible military casualties on all sides, but by massive disruption to the population of lands where people of different ethnicities and faiths had lived side-by-side for centuries as part of a multiethnic empire, including war crimes and atrocities against civilians and non-combatants. And Greeks who had previously enjoyed political and economic prominence throughout the Ottoman world, including the Phanariots of Constantinople, were first stripped of their privileges, then persecuted and finally expelled in the tragic population exchange of 1923.
All of these events and many more are covered in the exhibits at the Athens War Museum, which I had never visited until a few weeks ago, but which gives a vivid idea of the almost continuous warfare that has been carried on over the past couple of centuries in a land most tourists imagine as a paradise of sea, sun and waterside taverns. The events of the war of liberation, especially as we pass through so many bicentenaries in the current decade, are naturally well represented: there is, for example, a new and interactive display devoted to the sea battle of Navarino and events surrounding this decisive moment in the war.
There are portraits of the many famous leaders of the independence movement in their picturesque costumes, as well as dramatic reimaginings of heroic battles, and of course weapons and equipment of the time. The resonance of the Greek struggle in Western Europe is recalled in a copy of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, as well as a version of Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Lord Byron in exotic Albanian costume (1813), of which the original hangs in the British embassy at Athens; another replica by the artist himself, but only of the head and shoulders, is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios
But there is much more about the history of Greece in Antiquity, and the chronological arrangement of the displays makes this an effective way to follow the sequence of events, especially the main episodes of the Persian Wars – with the great battles of Marathon in 490BC and Salamis in 480 – as well as the subsequent conflict between Athens and her quasi-subject states on one side and Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies on the other, known as the Peloponnesian War.
This disastrous war (431-404 BC) was followed in the second half of the fourth century by the rise of Philip of Macedon to hegemony, for the first time, over almost all of mainland Greece. After his assassination in 336, his young son, who became Alexander the Great, embarked on a spectacular campaign that led to the conquest of the whole of the vast Persian empire, from Egypt to what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s conquests led to the extension of Greek language and civilisation deep into Asia, creating the international culture of the Hellenistic period, characterised among other things by a rich and complex exchange of ideas and forms between East and West.
He left an indelible impression on all the lands he conquered and is, for example, the first historical figure in the Persian national epic, the Shahname. By the time of Ferdowsi, who composed this masterpiece a millennium ago, the Persians had forgotten about the Achaemenid dynasty that first created the Persian empire in the sixth century BC; even the great site of Persepolis was and still is called Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid, one of the mythical rulers from the great epic.
Each of Alexander’s battles – he is one of the handful of great generals never to have been defeated – is illustrated in clear diagrams, but they are also recalled in later images, in this case particularly in a series of 17th-century engravings whose story is probably unknown to almost all visitors to the museum. These are reproductions of gigantic paintings made as cartoons for tapestries commissioned by the young Louis XIV in the 1660s from Charles Le Brun, who was to become his court painter and who was later responsible for the decorations at Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors. The series illustrates the valour but also the magnanimity of Alexander, as is clear from the moralising inscriptions attached in the engraved versions. For a long time, the huge canvases were not displayed at the Louvre, but for the last few decades have had their own room upstairs in the Sully wing.
Following the chronological sequence from antiquity we eventually get back to the war of independence and its sequels already mentioned above; but the story continues, after what the Greeks call the Asia Minor Catastrophe of the early 1920s, with a new calamity two decades later. For Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 expecting, like Putin in Ukraine, to achieve an easy victory and utterly underestimating the strength and resolve of the Greek army. By the following spring, it was clear that he was getting nowhere, and Hitler decided to come to his rescue by invading Greece in April 1941.
A. Bormans, engraving after Charles Le Brun Alexander and King Porus
An Allied army, mostly consisting of Australian and New Zealand troops as well as some British units, was hastily put together and sent from Egypt to Greece as Lustre Force. It was heavily outnumbered by the Germans, who were also massively better equipped and had the benefit of air cover and wireless radio communication. Nonetheless, the Allied army put up a determined resistance in a series of battles including one notable action on April 18, 1941 at Tempe Gorge commanded by my grandfather, then Brigadier AS Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF and taken our first troops to World War II. The brigade he commanded at Tempe was known as “Anzac Force”, apparently the last use of the term, after the designation Anzac Corps for the whole Australian and NZ component of Lustre Force.
After the evacuation of mainland Greece, my grandfather was sent to fight the Vichy French in Syria, but many of our troops were taken to Crete, where in May 1941 they were faced with the first and only large-scale parachute assault in military history, in which the Germans suffered appalling casualties but ultimately prevailed. Next year will be the 85th anniversary of these dramatic events in Greece and Crete, and among other things will be commemorated by an exhibition of Australian and NZ artists whom I accompanied on a two-week tour of these battlefields in the second half of October.
It was a moving experience to visit what are today the peaceful sites of such desperate battles almost three generations ago, aware at the same time of the long history of warfare in the same lands: the Persians marched through Tempe, which is just north of Thermopylae; Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus (now Farasala), which you pass on the train from Athens to Salonika (now Thessaloniki), and; Cassius and Brutus died at Philippi in Macedonia, defeated by the Caesarian forces of Octavian and Mark Antony.
Christopher Allen is the national art critic for Culture and has been writing in The Australian since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.
It is three years since Australian songstress Judith Durham took the Morningtown Ride.Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom followed soon afterwards.
Judith might not have been my teenage crush – that was Dusty – but The Seekerswere a significant part of my adolescent soundtrack. Aussies were an exotic species back then in Britain, and to me, more associated with now-disgraced Rolf Harris with Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and Sun Arise, but there was also Frank Ifield and Patsy Ann Noble. More Aussies followed them to Britain – the Easybeats and Bee Gees entering the pop charts soon afterwards, while soon to be famous actors, artists, authors and activists had already steamed back to Old England’s Shores and were busy making names for themselves.
The Seekers were “discovered” by Tom Springfield and were marketed as the new Springfields, the natural heirs to that wholesome folksey trio (he had written their greatest hits or adapted them from folk standards). When the Seekers folded in 1969, group member Keith Potger gave us the New Seekers, a bunch of pretty blonde Brits who most people now believe wanted to buy the world a coke! For trivia fans, that song was (spoiler alert!) the happy hippie finale of that fabulous series Madmen.
The Seekers released their smash hit, the allegorical song of farewell The Carnival Is Over in 1965. Tom based it on a traditional Russian song about a brutal Cossack rebel [read all about him below]. A natural linguist, he’d learned Russian whilst undergoing compulsory national service in the fifties. Apparently, those few conscripts who graduated from the Ministry of Defence’s Russian Language School as interpreters and translators were regarded as the crême de la crême of conscripts. Often, trainees would put on concerts of Russian songs and plays for their own amusement.
Tom Springfield borrowed the melody of The Carnival is Over from Stenka Razin a traditional folk tune set to music in the 19th Century by Dimitry Sadovnikov. It told the tale of a drunken seventeenth century Cossack rebel who threw his Persian bride of one night over the side of his boat into the Volga River when his men accused him of going soft. Tom changed the story entirely though he retained a nautical riff and cast the star-crossed lovers as the theatre characters Pierrot and Columbinerather than casting them overboard.
Stepan Razin on the Volga (by Boris Kustodiev, (1918) State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Tom’s song was an ironic mid twentieth century reimagining in which a tragic, violent and mythic saga of patriotism, loyalty, and patriarchal authority illustrative of national an revolutionary folklore was reinvented into wistful pop as a saccharine song of romance, emotion, loss, and a meditation on the impermanence – how the joys of love are fleeting. No such maudlin melancholy on the part of the preening old riverboat pirate. Over the side she goes!
The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:
From beyond the wooded island To the riverbank he came, On his breast he held a maiden, And his comrades called her name. Then he flung her to the waters, Crying, ‘Thus I make my vow, I will have no foreign woman As a wife to me now.’
Say goodbye, my own true lover As we sing a lovers’ song How it breaks my heart to leave you Now the carnival is gone High above the dawn is waiting And my tears are falling rain For the carnival is over We may never meet again
Pierrot and Columbine
The shift from revolutionary folklore to wistful pop is emblematic of the 20th-century repurposing of folk traditions – filtering political anthems through modern, personal, and emotional frameworks. The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:
If you watch the hoary old Hammer horror film Rasputin, about the sinister Svengali who enchanted the last Czarina of Russia – portrayed herein by that eminent old frightener Christopher Lee – you will recognise the tune as a recurring leitmotif.
There is a clunky film reenactment of the story, sung by the famous Red Army Choir immediately below the Seekers‘ song.
Say goodbye, my own true lover
As we sing a lovers’ song
How it breaks my heart to leave you
Now the carnival is gone
High above the dawn is waiting
And my tears are falling rain
For the carnival is over
We may never meet again
Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine
Now the harbour light is calling
This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine
Now the harbour light is calling
This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Stenka Razin
From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.
On the first is Stenka Razin
With his princess by his side
Drunken holds in marriage revels
With his beauteous young bride.
From behind there comes a murmur
“He has left his sword to woo;
One short night and Stenka Razin
Has become a woman, too.”
Stenka Razin hears the murmur
Of his discontented band
And his lovely Persian princess
He has circled with his hand.
His dark brows are drawn together
As the waves of anger rise;
And the blood comes rushing swiftly
To his piercing jet black eyes.
“I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand.”
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You have never such a present
From the Cossacks of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.
Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Now a silence like the grave
Sinks to all who stand and see
And the battle-hardened Cossacks
Sink to weep on bended knee.
“Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chantey
To the place where beauty lies.”
From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.
… Robeson’s extraordinary career intersects with some of modernity’s worst traumas: slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, Fascism. Stalinism. These are wounds covered over and forgotten, but never fully healed. Not surprisingly, the paths Robeson walked remain full of ghosts, whose whispers we can hear if we stop to listen. They talk to the past, but they also speak to the future.
Jeff Sparrow, No Way But This. In Search of Paul Robeson (2017)
I read Jeff Sparrow’s excellent biography of the celebrated American singer and political activist Paul Robeson several years ago. I was reminded of it very recently with the publication of a book about Robeson’s visit to Australia in November 1960, a twenty-concert tour in nine cities. I have republished a review below, together with an article by Sparrow about his book, and a review of the book by commentator and literary critic Peter Craven. the featured picture is of Robeson singing for the workers constructing the Sydney Opera House.
I have always loved Paul Robeson’s songs and admired his courage and resilience in the face of prejudice and adversity. Duriung his colourful and controversial career (see the articles below), he travelled the world, including Australia and New Zealand and also, Britain. He visited England many times – it was there that my mother met him. She was working in a maternity hospital in Birmingham when he visited and sang for the doctors, nurses, helpers and patients. My mother was pregnant at the time – and, such was his charisma, that is why my name is Paul.
Paul Robeson was a 20th-century icon. He was the most famous African American of his time, and in his time, was called the most famous American in the world. His is a story of political ardour, heritage, and trauma.
The son of a former slave, he found worldwide fame as a singer and an actor, travelling from Hollywood in the USA to the West End of London, to Europe and also Communist Russia. In the sixties, he visited Australia and is long remembered for the occasion he sang the song Old Man River for the workers building the famous Sydney Opera House.
He became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism as an educated and articulate black man in a white man’s racist world.
Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was a star athlete in his youth. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism.
A respected performer, he was also a champion of social justice and equality. But he would go on to lose everything for the sake of his principles.
In the United States he became active in the civil rights movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era when American politics were dominated by a wave of hatred, suspicion and racism that was very much like we see today,
Paul Robeson, the son of a slave, was a gifted linguist. He studied and spoke six languages, and sang songs from all over the world in their original language.
But his most famous song was from an American musical show from 1927 – Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein – called Old Man River. The song contrasted the struggles and hardships of African Americans during and after the years of slavery, with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. It is sung the point of view of a black stevedore on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show.
It is a paradox that a song written by Jewish Americans from the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, the targets of prejudice and pogrom, should voice the cries of America’s down-trodden people.
When the song was first heard, America was a divided country and people of colour were segregated, abused and murdered. The plot of the musical was indeed about race, although it pulled its punches with the romantic message that love is colour-blind
It reflected America’s split personality – the land of the free, but the home of the heartless. Robeson sung the words as they were written, but later in his career, as he became more and more famous, he changed them to suit his own opinions, feelings, sentiments, and politics. So, when he sang to the workers in Sydney, Australia, his song was not one of slavery but one of resistance.
The Big Voice of the Left … Paul Robeson Resounds to this Day
Mahir Ali The Australian November 9, 2010
FIFTY years ago today, more than a decade before it was officially inaugurated, the Sydney Opera House hosted its first performance by an internationally renowned entertainer when Paul Robeson, in the midst of what turned out to be his final concert tour, sang to the construction workers during their lunch break.
Alfred Rankin, who was at the construction site on November 9, 1960, recalls this “giant of a man” enthralling the workers with his a cappella renditions of two of his signature songs, Ol’ Man River and Joe Hill.
“After he finished singing, the men climbed down from the scaffolding, gathered around him and presented him with a hard hat bearing his name,” Paul Robeson Jr writes in his biography of his father, The Undiscovered Robeson. “One of the men took off a work glove and asked Paul to sign it. The idea caught on and the men lined up. Paul stayed until he had signed a glove for each one of them.”
Workers had the best seats when Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House, 9 November 1960
The visit, Rankin tells The Australian, was organised by the Building Workers Industrial Union of Australia and the Australian Peace Council’s Bill Morrow, a former Labor senator from Tasmania.
In a chapter on Robeson’s visit in the book Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, which will be launched in Sydney tomorrow, Ann Curthoys quotes the performer as saying on the day after his visit to the Opera House site: “I could see, you know, we had some differences here and there. But we hummed some songs together, and they all came up afterwards and just wanted to shake my hand and they had me sign gloves. These were tough guys and it was a very moving experience.”
In 1998, on the centenary of Robeson’s birth, former NSW minister John Aquilina told state parliament his father had been working as a carpenter at the Opera House site on November 9, 1960: “Dad told us that all the workers – carpenters, concreters and labourers – sang along and that the huge, burly men on the working site were reduced to tears by his presence and his inspiration.”
Curthoys, the Manning Clark professor of history at the Australian National University, who plans to write a book about the Robeson visit, also cites a contemporary report in The Daily Telegraph as saying that the American performer “talked to more than 250 workmen in their lunch hour, telling them they were working on a project they would be proud of one day”. [Curthoy’s book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand, was published at last in 2025]
According to biographer Martin Duberman, Robeson wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the offer of a tour of Australia and New Zealand from music entrepreneur D. D. O’Connor, but the idea of earning $US100,000 for a series of 20 concerts, plus extra fees for television appearances and the like, proved irresistible.
Robeson had once been one of the highest paid entertainers in the world, but from 1950 onwards he effectively had been deprived of the opportunity of earning a living. A combination of pressure from the US government and right-wing extremists meant American concert halls were closed to him, and the US State Department’s refusal to renew his passport meant he was unable to accept invitations for engagements in Europe and elsewhere. Robeson never stopped singing but was able to do so only at African-American churches and other relatively small venues. His annual income dwindled from more than $US100,000 to about $US6000.
At the time, Robeson was arguably one of the world’s best known African Americans. As a scholar at Rutgers University, he had endured all manner of taunts and physical intimidation to excel academically and as a formidable presence on the football field: alone among his Rutgers contemporaries, he was selected twice for the All-American side.
Alongside his athletic prowess, which was also displayed on the baseball field and the basketball court, he was beginning to find his voice as a bass baritone. When a degree in law from Columbia University failed to help him make much headway in the legal profession, he decided to opt for the world of entertainment, and made his mark on the stage and screen as a singer and actor.
An extended sojourn in London offered relief from the racism in his homeland and established his reputation as an entertainer, not least through leading roles in the musical Show Boat and in Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona.
(He reprised the role in a record Broadway run for a Shakespearean role in 1943 and again at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959)
Robeson returned to the US as a star in 1939 and endeared himself to his compatriots with a cantata titled Ballad for Americans.
In the interim, he had been thoroughly politicised, not least through encounters in London with leaders of colonial liberation movements such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru.
He had sung for republicans in Spain and visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
Robeson’s refusal to reconsider his political affiliations once World War II gave way to the Cold War made him persona non grata in his homeland: his infatuation with the Soviet Union did not perceptibly pale in the face of horrific revelations about Stalinist excesses, partly because he looked on Jim Crow as his pre-eminent foe. It is therefore hardly surprising that exposure in Australia to Aboriginal woes stirred his passion.
On the day after his appearance at the Opera House site, at the initiative of Aboriginal activist and Robeson fan Faith Bandler he watched a documentary about Aborigines in the Warburton Ranges during which his sorrow turned to anger, and he vowed to return to Australia in the near future to fight for their rights. He made similar promises to the Māori in New Zealand.
But the years of persecution had taken their toll physically and psychologically: Robeson’s health broke down in 1961 and, on returning to the US in 1963, he lived the remainder of his life as a virtual recluse. He died in 1976, long after many of his once radical aspirations for African Americans had been co-opted into the civil rights mainstream. His political views remained unchanged.
It’s no wonder that, as writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams recalls, Robeson’s tour was like “a second coming” to “aspiring young lefties” in Australia.
Duberman cites Aboriginal activist Lloyd L. Davies’s poignant recollection of Robeson’s arrival in Perth on the last leg of his tour, when he made a beeline for “a group of local Aborigines shyly hanging back”.
“When he reached them, he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms.”
Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.”
She would have been less surprised had she been aware of the Robeson statement that serves as his epitaph: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Left for Good – Peter Craven on Paul Robeson
The Weekend Australian. March 11 2017
What on earth impelled Jeff Sparrow, the Melbourne-based former editor of Overland and left-wing intellectual, to write a book about Paul Robeson, the great African American singer and actor?
Well, he tells us: as a young man he was transporting the libraries of a lot of old communists to a bookshop and was intrigued by how many of the books were by or about Robeson.
All of which provokes apprehension, because politics is a funny place to start with
Robeson, even if it is where you end or nearly end. Robeson was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, my father used to play that velvet bottomlessly deep voice singing not only Ol’ Man River — though that was Robeson’s signature tune and his early recording of it is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time — but all manner of traditional songs. Not just the great negro spirituals (as they were known to a bygone age; Sparrow calls them slave songs) such as Go Down, Moses, but Shenandoah, No, John, No and Passing By, as well as the racketing lazy I Still Suits Me.
My mother, who was known as Sylvie and loathed her full name, which was Sylvia, said the only time she could stand it was when Robeson sang it (“Sylvia’s hair is like the night … such a face as drifts through dreams, such is Sylvia to the sight”). He had the diction of a god and the English language in his mouth sounded like a princely birthright no one could deny.
It was that which made theatre critic Kenneth Tynan say the noise Robeson made when he opened his mouth was too close to perfect for an actor. It did not stop him from doing Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings or The Emperor Jones, nor an Othello in London in 1930 with Peggy Ashcroft as his Desdemona and with Sybil Thorndike as Emilia.
Robeson later did Othello in the 1940s in America with Jose Ferrer as Iago and with Uta Hagen (who created Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as his Desdemona. He toured the country; he toured the south, which was almost inconceivable. When he was told someone had said the play had nothing to do with racial prejudice, Robeson said, “Let him play it in Memphis.”
Southern white audiences were docile until Robeson’s Othello kissed Hagen’s Desdemona: then they rioted. Robeson also made a point, at his concerts and stage shows, of insisting the audience not be segregated. James Earl Jones. who would play Robeson on the New York stage, says in his short book about Othello, “I believe Paul Robeson’s Othello is the landmark performance of the 20th century.”
Robeson would play the Moor again in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon. By that time, though, he had fallen foul of 1950s America. He had been called before the McCarthyist House Un-American Activities Committee. You can hear a dramatisation of his testimony with Earl Jones as Robeson, which includes an immemorial reverberation of his famous words when senator Francis E. Walter asked him why he didn’t just quit the US and live in Russia.
“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”
It’s funny how it was the real communists such as Bertolt Brecht and Robeson who handled the committee best. Still, in an extraordinary act of illiberalism, they took away his US passport and it took two years for the Supreme Court to declare in 1958 in a 5-4 decision that the secretary of state was not empowered to withdraw the passport of any American citizen on the basis of political belief.
When Paul Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House
It was this that allowed Robeson to do his Othello in Peter Hall’s great centenary Stratford celebration along with Charles Laughton’s Lear and Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus. It also allowed him to come to Australia. Very early on Sparrow tells the story of watching the clip of Robeson singing Ol’ Man River to construction workers in Sydney with the Opera House still a dream in the process of meeting impediments. The version Robeson sings is his own bolshie rewrite (“I must keep fightin’/ Until I’m dyin’ ”).
Well, fight he did and bolshie he was. I remember when I was a child my father telling me Robeson was a brilliant man, that he had won a sporting scholarship for American football (to Rutgers, in fact), that he’d gone on to receive a law degree (from Columbia, no less) and that he was so smart he had taught himself Russian.
But the sad bit was, according to my father, that he’d become a communist. Understandably so, my father thought, because of how the Americans treated the blacks. My father’s own radical impulses as a schoolboy had been encouraged, as Robeson’s were on a grander scale, by World War II where Uncle Joe Stalin was our ally in the war against Hitler’s fascism.
But this was the Cold War now, and a lot of people thought, with good reason, that it was behind the Iron Curtain that today’s fascists were to be found. Even if others such as the great German novelist Thomas Mann and Robeson thought they were encroaching on Capitol Hill.
Sparrow’s book No Way But This is circumscribed at every point by his primary interest in Robeson as a political figure of the Left rather than as a performer and artist.
It’s an understandable trap to fall into because Robeson was an eloquent, intelligent man of the Left and his status was also for a while there — as Sparrow rightly says — as the most famous black American on Earth. So his radicalism is both pointed and poignant.
His father, who became a Methodist minister, was born a slave and was later cruelly brought down in the world. But, unlike the old Wobblies whose bookcases he transported, Sparrow is not inward with what made Robeson famous in the first place and it shows.
No Way But This is a great title (“no way but this / killing myself, to die upon a kiss” is what Othello says when he’s dying over the body of Desdemona, whom he has killed) but Sparrow’s search for Robeson is not a great book.
As the subtitle suggests, it is a quest book but Sparrow is a bit like the Maeterlinck character cited in Joyce’s Ulysses who ends up meeting himself (whether in his Socrates or his Judas aspect) on his own doorstep. Sparrow goes to somewhere in the US associated with Robeson and meets a black-deaths-in-custody activist full of radical fervour. She introduces him to an old African-American who was in Attica jail for years. There is much reflection on the thousands of black people who were slaves on the plantations and the disproportionate number of them now in US prisons.
Yes, the figures are disquieting. No, they are not aspects of the same phenomenon even though ultimately there will be historical connections of a kind.
And so it goes. But this is a quest book that turns into a kind of travelogue in which Sparrow goes around the world meeting people who might illuminate Robeson for him but don’t do much for the reader except confirm the suspicion that the author’s range of acquaintance ought to be broader or that he should listen to people for a bit more rather than seek confirmation of his own predilections.
There are also mistakes. Sparrow seems to know nothing about the people with whom Robeson did Othello. There’s no mention of Thorndike, and when Ashcroft comes up as someone he had an affair with, Sparrow refers to the greatest actress of the Olivier generation as “a beautiful glamorous star”. Never mind that she was an actress of such stature, Judi Dench said when she played Cleopatra she could only follow Ashcroft’s phrasing by way of homage.
Sparrow also says “American actor Edmund Kean started using paler make-up for the role, a shift that corresponded with the legitimisation of plantation slavery”. Kean, who was the greatest actor of the later romantic period, was English, not American. His Othello would, I think, be more or less contemporary with William Wilberforce lobbying to have slavery made illegal. Sparrow seems to be confusing Kean with Edwin Booth, the mid-century Othello who happens to have been the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. But it’s still hard to see where the plantations fit in.
A few pages later — and it’s not important though it’s indicative — we hear of the rumour that Robeson was “romancing Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma”. Well, whatever she was called in the early 1930s, it wasn’t Countess Mountbatten of Burma because her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia during World War II, didn’t get the title until after the Japanese surrendered to him — guess where?
Such slips are worth belabouring only because they make you doubt Sparrow’s reliability generally. It’s worth adding, however, that his chapter about the prison house that the Soviet Union turned itself into is his most impressive. And the story of the last few years of Robeson’s life, afflicted with depression, subject to a lot of shock treatment, with recurrent suicide attempts, is deeply sad.
He felt towards the end that he had failed his people. He just didn’t know what to do. It was the melancholy talking as melancholy will.
It’s better to remember the Robeson who snapped back at someone who asked if he would join the civil rights movement: “I’ve been a part of the civil rights movement all my life.”
It’s to Sparrow’s credit that he’s fallen in love with the ghost of Robeson even if it’s only the spectral outline of that power and that glory he gives us.
Peter Craven is a cultural and literary critic
The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and NZ
Australians of a certain age know all about Paul Robeson’s magnificent voice. They know, too, that on a warm November day more than 60 years ago, the bass-baritone sang to 250 construction workers on the Sydney Opera House building site as the workers sat on scaffolding and stacks of timber and ate their lunch. Fewer know of Robeson’s Pro-Communist and pro-Soviet views and of how those beliefs damaged his career at home and abroad. And that’s not so surprising – as historian Ann Curthoys points out, the Cold War suppression of Robeson’s career and memory has been very effective.
Recovering the story of a man who was once the most famous African-American in the world and his equally impressive wife, Eslanda, is the task Curthoys, who grew up in an Australian communist family in the 1950s and 60s, sets herself in a new book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand.
It follows the couple’s tour – a mix of his concerts and their public talks and media interviews – to Australia and New Zealand over October, November and December 1960. Curthoys goes further, using the seven-week tour by this celebrated singer to explore the social and political changes just beginning in post-War Australia. Her interest is “the slow transition from the Cold War era of the late 1940s and 50s, to the 60s era of the New Left, new social movements and the demand for Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys is 79 now, but when Robeson toured she was 15 and living in Newcastle, a city the singer did not visit. Her mother, Barbara Curthoys, a well-known activist and feminist, was a fan of the singer but the trip passed the teenager by.
It was only decades later, as she researched her 2002 book on the 1965 Aboriginal Freedom Ride through regional NSW, that Curthoys connected with the story. As a university student she had taken part in the ride and moved from communism to the New Left. When she approached the subject as a historian, she realised that for some riders, their attendance at Robeson’s concerts five years earlier had been a defining moment in their “understanding of racial discrimination and Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys has had a long career in research and teaching at the Australian National University and the University of Technology, Sydney. She’s part of a remarkable family, and not just parents Barbara and Geoffrey, who was a lecturer in chemistry at Newcastle University. Her sister Jean is a leading feminist philosopher and her husband, John Docker, has written several books on cultural history, popular culture and the history of ideas.
Curthoys began researching The Last Tour in 2007, but put it aside for another project on Indigenous Australians before resuming work on it during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Post-Robeson, she has worked with two scholars on a forthcoming book on the history of domestic violence in Australia.
The tour, she says, was really several tours rolled into one with the Robesons covering many bases – from music to Cold War politics to feminism to Aboriginal rights. It was a conservative era: Robert Menzies’ Liberals ruled federally and five of the six Australian states had conservative governments. Robeson’s presence went unremarked by governments but for fans of his music – and his ideals – the tour was a significant event that was well covered by the press, even those opposed to his views on the Soviet Union.
For some fans, it was a music tour – 20 concerts in nine cities in Australia and New Zealand, at which Robeson sang his show-stoppers, including Deep River, Go Down, Moses; We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, and the song with which he is always identified, Ol’ Man River. The 62-year-old with the extraordinary voice also delivered “recitations” – a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello, an anti-segregationist poem Freedom Train, and William Blake’s anthem, Jerusalem.
What a thrill for Australian audiences, some of whom had followed the handsome, 1.9m singer and actor since the 1920s. Even in an age of limited communications, Robeson was well-known here through films; records and radio. Curthoys notes that one indicator of his fame was the way promising Aboriginal singers in the 1930s were dubbed “Australia’s Paul Robeson”.
He was famous – and controversial. Unlike many other supporters of communist ideas, Robeson refused to break from the Soviets after the invasion of Hungary in 1958 and continued to defend Moscow. The “anti-communist repression and hysteria” that gripped the US in the McCarthy era had a profound effect on his life and career, Curthoys writes. He was cited in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “supporting the Communist Party and its front organisations”.
A 1949 US tour was destroyed “after mass cancelling of bookings by venue managers either vehemently opposed to his politics or afraid in such a hostile climate of being classed as communist sympathisers themselves”. Then in 1950, he lost his passport. Over the years, he would “become for communists an emblem of defiance in the face of adversity, and one of the communist world’s most prominent speakers for peace,” Curthoys writes.
Unable to travel until his passport was restored in 1958, Robeson was steadfast in his support for communist ideals. That commitment was evident in Australia when the “peace tour” – built around a series of public meetings – was as important to the singer as the popular concerts where he reached a different audience. Curthoys details a related strand – the “workers’ tour”, which involved seven informal concert performances to groups of railway workers, waterside workers and those at work on the Opera House on that November day.
She says the events revealed much about the “the nature of class in Australia and New Zealand” at a time when “strong and confident trade unions” were interested in “broad cultural concerns”. Over several weeks Robeson attracted people who loved his music alongside those who loved his politics. Far from being shunned for his pro-Soviet views, Curthoys suggests, there was support from two different audiences – music people and “left-wing people who were either pro-Soviet or not”.
Even so, the Cold War anxieties over the Soviets meant a positive reception was not necessarily assured when Paul and Eslanda flew into Sydney at midday on October 12, 1960. They were greeted by several hundred fans carrying peace banners but they faced pointed questions about the Soviet Union at the 20-minute press conference at the airport.
Robeson refused to condemn the suppression of the Hungarian uprising and media reports suggested a torrid exchange. Curthoys reviewed a tape of the press conference and says while the questioning was “a little aggressive”, the event was not as bad as reported in the media. Indeed it was “fairly friendly” albeit for a “bad patch” when Robeson refused to budge on Hungary.
That tape and others, along with newspapers and Trades Hall documentation, yielded rich material but so too did the ASIO files on the couple. At the Palace Hotel in Perth on December 2 an ASIO operative appeared to be among those at a reception organised by the communist-influenced Peace Council. Among guests were the writer (and well-known communist) Katharine Susannah Prichard and “two women by the name of Durack, who were writers and/or artists”.
Curthoys sees Robeson as a “very courageous, very intelligent, intellectual person, very thoughtful about music, about folk music, about people”, but says his commitment to the Soviet Union was a costly mistake. He had embraced Moscow when he and Eslanda visited in 1934 at the invitation of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. Later, Robeson, a fluent Russian speaker, would say it was in the Soviet Union that he felt for the first time he was treated “not through the prism of race but simply as a human being”. Curthoys writes: “The excitement and validation he received during this visit would create a loyalty that later events would not dislodge and the public expression of which would damage him politically, commercially and professionally.”
The couple made several trips to the Soviet Union and accepted its political system completely. Curthoys notes: “They made no public comments about Stalin’s forced collectivisation policies that were in place during the 1930s and led to famine and the loss of millions of lives.” In Sydney Robeson was careful, but on November 5 he celebrated the forthcoming anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Waterside Workers Federation in Sussex Street. Two days later, during his first public concert in the city, he paid tribute to the Soviet Union as “a new society”.
The Soviet Union had been a great influence but so too was the Spanish Civil War, which Curthoys says helped define his view of the political responsibilities of the artist.
“Increasingly famous as a public speaker, on 24 June, 1937, he made a huge impression at a mass rally at the Albert Hall in London sponsored by prominent figures such as WH Auden, EM Forster, Sean O’Casey, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf, held to raise financial aid for Basque child refugees from the war. In what became his most well-known and influential speech, he stressed how important it was for artists and scientists and others to take a political stand: ‘Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights.’”
After World War II, Robeson was deeply involved in radical and anti-racism politics in the US but in 1947, as the Cold War worsened, he had had enough. He announced he intended to abandon the theatre and concert stage for two years to speak out against race hatred and prejudice. In fact he stopped stage acting for 12 years but continued to perform as a singer, often in support of political causes.
It was another 13 years before Australian audiences heard that glorious voice “live”. Australians, it seemed were primed for Paul. The tour may have been ignored by governments but during her research, Curthoys was “overwhelmed” by people “ready to assist, donating old programs, photographs, pamphlets, records, cassette tapes, invitations and other documents”.
Today, much of the Robeson image is defined by his Opera House performance on November 9 – high culture delivered, without condescension, to a building crew by a champion of the workers. Robeson, in a heavy coat, despite the warm weather, sang “from a rough concrete stage”. A PR expert could not have dreamt up a a better way to “democratise” an opera house than having the “first concert” delivered in its half- built shell. Curthoys shows how the event, no matter how memorialised now, was a small part of a tour that proved a financial and political success for the Robesons, who left Australia on December 4.
A few months later, depressed and exhausted, Robeson tried to commit suicide in Moscow. Over the next three years he was treated but could no longer perform or engage in public speaking. Curthoys notes that though his affairs with other women had strained their marriage, he and Eslanda had a common political vision and were together until her death in 1965. Robeson died on January 23, 1976 at the age of 77.
Helen Trinca’s latest book is Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of
Elizabeth Harrower (Black Inc.)
Economist and commentator Henry Ergas wrote in The Australian recently: “With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore. Understanding its divergence from overseas traditions is vital to recovering and redefining the distinctive voice it needs to deal with the latest threat to its existence.” I have repolished it below.
Personally, I find the crisis in contemporary conservatism, particularly as it pertains to Australia politics, fascinating. Here it is in danger descending into a culture of grievance and of populism (- defined as the quest for simple solutions to complex problems).
These fast-moving times are shaky ground for the creed. People are losing faith in institutions; the church no longer has moral influence; the social norms that once tied the community together are changing at lightning speed. Even many within what can be classified as the centre-right acknowledge what might be described as the conservative movement is apparently on the back foot, scrambling to define itself by what it opposes rather than what it believes, plagued by self-doubt and confusion as to what to believe what to stand up for.
As younger voters in the Anglo-sphere veer away from conservative parties, old warhorses and young fogeys, an incongruous, anachronistic cabal of reactionaries if ever there was one, desperately seek relevance and comfort as they endeavour to beat back what they see as the rising tide of progressivism and the proliferation of what they condemned as “woke” – a portmanteau word for whatever that dislike and disdain in politics and society’s at large.
“Conservatism” is an intriguing concept. It can broadly be translated as “traditional” values, and can embrace a varied spectrum of “isms”, including authoritarianism, hierarchy, nationalism, nativism and ethnocentrism, and also, en passant, religiosity, homophobia, and indeed, anything deemed antithetical to the old, tried and true ways. In a general sense, it has gained traction across much of the world as people yearn for order and stability and belonging and identity that western-style liberalism with its ecumenical emphasis on identity, equity and diversity cannot satisfy. Many highlight what they see as to the erosion of national institutions, of Western culture and even morality itself. Some advocate a national conservatism that hold nations to be distinctive and to seek to protect this distinctiveness.
It is in essence an atavistic worldview, one which harks back to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time and a yearning for “la recherche du temps perdu”. In its modern manifestations, it is in many ways a belligerent, intolerant creed, quite distinct from the late 18th century English parliamentarian Edmund Burke’s benchmark conservatism, namely the preservation of principles of the past which emerge from “the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation and improvement of property”, and in which institutions and customs were rendered sacred by longevity and continual use. The comfort of continuity, in fact.
And it is different to what perennial Australian prime minister Robert Menzies was alluding when he formed the Australian Liberal Party in 1945: “a healthy and proud sense of continuity, is one of the greatest steadying influences and a superb element of sanity in a mad world… “ in his Forgotten People speech of 1942, he invoked homes material, homes human and homes spiritual – the homes humans can live in and where families can be enriched spiritually – rather than the merits of some cold ideology. It was a uniquely reassuring doctrine for homely, ordinary folk opposed to change or frightened by it.
In his essay, “Why I Became A Conservative“, the late British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that the romantic core of the creed was the search for the “lost experience of home”, the dream of a childhood that cannot ever be fully recaptured, but can be “regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression”. At the heart of conservatism, in other words, is love: love for things that exist or existed and must be saved.
In his introduction to A Political Philosophy, Scruton wrote: “the conservation of our shared resources — social, material, economic and spiritual — and resistance to social entropy in all its forms”. His conservatism was, above all, conservationist: constant care for institutions, customs, and family. His debt to Edmund Burke: society is a contract between the living, the dead and the unborn; a “civil association among neighbours” is superior to state intervention; “the most important thing a human being can do is to settle down, make a home and pass it on to one’s children”.
There is something quite benign about these concepts of conservatism. In stark contrast, conservatism that is gaining traction in many countries, particularly in eastern Europe, but also on the MAGA movement in the United States and on the far-right in Western Europe and also, Australia is a cold, atavistic and embittered beast. Populist in its nature, it appeals primarily to those who favour the reassuring hand of a paternal authority figure who is able to promise those aforementioned simple solutions to the modern world’s bewildering array of complex problems. Freethinkers, individuals, and all of heterodox opinions and practices, political, social, biological or spiritual – beware!
Disclaimer: the only thing this post has to do with Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist comedy drama Le Fantôme de la liberté is its title, although like the film, it challenges pre-conceived notions about the stability of social mores and reality.
With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore.
Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott, The Australian 10 May 2025
In the aftermath of last weekend’s devastating election loss it is easy to write off conservatism in Australia. This wouldn’t be for the first time. As historian Keith Hancock observed in Australia (1930), conservative, in this country, has always been a term of abuse, implying that its target is an out-and-out reactionary.
There is nonetheless a profound paradox. Although conservative may be a term of abuse, Australian politics has long had a marked conservative vein, even as its chief protagonists have studiously avoided the descriptor. A hardy perennial, with a distinctive voice that contrasts with overseas conservatism, the conservative instinct in Australia has run deep, dominating federal politics for decades – and recovering, time and again, from setbacks that had been claimed to foreshadow its demise.
US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance. Picture: AP
In part, that identity crisis reflects the factor that has made for conservatism’s enduring success: its infinite adaptability. Indeed, the term defies easy definition, just as the groups to which it has been applied defy ready categorisation, making the conservative identity inherently labile.
As Paul de Serville, a historian of Australian and British conservatism, has observed, every party that has emerged to represent conservatism’s interests and beliefs across the past 350 years “is a study in contradiction between opposing traditions and schools of thought”.
Even its founding parent, the movement that eventually became the Conservative Party in Britain, has “died or lain dormant” numerous times, split at least twice, and never settled on any singular set of policies, ideas and beliefs. Its capacity to incorporate diverse elements has in fact been one of its defining qualities. After all, “what other party has elected a Jewish novelist (Disraeli) to lead a group of wordless squires? Or a grocer’s daughter (Thatcher) to rule a sulky band of Tory Wets?”
But beneath the shifting terrain of cultural and political battlegrounds, there are in British conservatism some identifiable commitments. Originally, the commitment was above all to tradition. Born in the turmoil of the English civil war, the Tories (a term derived from the Middle English slang for outlaw) stood for loyalty to the Church of England and the crown. Unapologetic royalists, their clergy defended the church against the Puritans while stressing the values of family, home and nationhood. Over time, however, the primary emphasis of British conservatism changed into a commitment to the virtue of prudence.
Often associated with a sense of human limitations and the impossibility of achieving utopia, British conservatism became the embodiment of a Western intellectual tradition that extends back at least as far as St Augustine.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson led a populist style Conservative Party. AFP
Conservatism in the US had a starkly different origin and trajectory. Far from being a reaction to the threat of change, it was a by-product of the American Revolution’s fight against the crown. Initially, what it sought to conserve was the ideal of a “mixed constitution” whose myriad checks and balances could prevent the development of an overmighty state. That coexisted with the agrarian conservatism of the south that feared, above all, the centralism that might abolish slavery and privilege northern manufacturers over southern primary exporters. Together, those foundations fuelled the development of a staunchly conservative, often highly formalistic legalism whose power – unrivalled in any other Western country – grew with the ascendancy of the Supreme Court.
But as early as the 1820s that version of conservatism faced a powerful challenge from Andrew Jackson’s radical populism. Jacksonian populism had more than its fair share of incoherence but its grassroots pugnacity spawned one of US politics’ most enduring and certainly most distinctive notions: the spectre of a “deep state” that was liberty’s greatest enemy.
Permeated by a Manichean friend-enemy dynamic that distinguishes what American historian Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” in US politics, the Jacksonians portrayed the federal government as far worse than overbearing: having been hijacked by the enemies of the common man, it was an actively malevolent force hiding behind the facade of law and order. Only by dismantling it could freedom be preserved.
Former US President Andrew Jackson
The Jacksonians left a deep imprint on the American right and most notably on its rhetoric, but they never entirely conquered the field. The somewhat rigid constitutional conservatism that had preceded Jacksonianism survived and, inspired by intellectual leaders such as Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia, flourished.
At the same time, many other varieties of conservatism appeared and at times reappeared after having gone into abeyance.
For instance, Vice-President JD Vance’scommitment to an intensely moralistic vision of politics – that privileges honest labour over endless consumption, security at home over adventures overseas, family and local community over wider notions of society – renews a Catholic tradition that had waned as the ethnic communities that were its original bearers assimilated into the American mainstream.
Vice-President JD Vance
In that sense American conservatism was always as mutable, open-ended and diverse as the US itself. But for all of that diversity, the nature of the presidential contest periodically forced its differing elements to coalesce around a leader who somehow embodied the spirit of the times.
As with all populisms, Trump’s message jumbles together contradictory, even irreconcilable, components. But it isn’t intended as a coherent intellectual project – it is not a politics of ideas that Trump pursues but of emotive response and instantaneous impact.
Even less is it a politics of cautious pragmatism, as was the conservatism of Republicans George HW Bush or John McCain, who also channelled one of American patriotism’s many styles. And least of all is it, like Vance’s, a politics of high moral purpose. Rather, it is a politics of personal power, deployed, often arbitrarily, to purposes that can change unpredictably from day to day.
That it is not to deny that there runs through Trump’s project American conservatism’s golden thread: the goal of restoring what his supporters view as the freedoms that were the original promise of the American founding and, later, the American Revolution.
But much as was the case with the Jacksonians, that goal is to be achieved by demolishing existing institutions, which are cast as having betrayed the original promise, rather than through their cautious reform. Trumpism’s intensely antinomian character is starkly antagonistic to the American tradition of constitutional conservatism, which is why a number of unquestionably conservative scholars are challenging the administration’s actions in the courts. At the same time, its messianic quality, imbued with visions of future glory, breeds a fanaticism entirely alien to the British conservative tradition.
Trumpism breeds a fanaticism alien to the British and Australian conservative tradition. AFP
It is entirely alien to the Australian conservative tradition too. Here the greatest difference lies in the fact the Australian political ethos has not seen the state as the enemy, much less as a malignant force. It has been regarded instead as a tool to be effectively used to benefit the people and help them flourish.
That difference from the US has profound historical roots. America’s initial European settlement occurred in the 1600s, a period distinguished in Britain by what became known as the “Old Corruption”. Government offices were chiefly sinecures, officially apportioned rackets for personal gain, propping up an oligarchy whose favours were openly for sale.
In contrast, European settlement in Australia and New Zealand began as sweeping reforms to Britain’s system of government were taking hold. For the first time it was becoming possible to treat the government as a utility, dispensing valued benefits, rather than as a lurking predator. Colonial governors’ administrations, while not without their own rackety aspects, were shaped by changes reducing royal patronage and improving government accountability. As Australian historian John Hirst argued, that laid the seeds of an enduring respect for impersonal authority, exercised, at least in theory, in the pursuit of prosperity and good order.
There were, for sure, periodic outbreaks of radical opposition. But the Australian approach was almost always to absorb the conflict by institutionalising its protagonists. Embedding the agitators within the system they were fighting against, that solution traded moderation for tangible gains.
For example, violent class war and mass strikes in the 1890s Depression culminated in the birth of the ALP as an official parliamentary party, changing laws and winning government. Later, the Arbitration Court became run largely by what had been the warring parties – the infamous “industrial relations club”, as columnist Gerard Henderson called it. In exchange for prestigious sinecures, the former enemies descended into what Hancock derided as a “pettifogging” legalism that suffocated the radicals.
Equally, landless gold-diggers demanded the squatters’ leases be ripped up, and stormed Victoria’s parliament in the 1850s. The Land Selection Acts in the subsequent decades established a regional population of often struggling farmers whose 20th-century political incarnation took the form of country parties.
Those parties not only secured “protection all round” in the 1920s, along with significant direct subsidies; they also ensured the establishment of marketing boards to which party worthies were invariably appointed. And much the same could be said of the Tariff Board, which shaped manufacturing protection for decades.
The corollary of that solution was a particular type of conservatism. Yes, in the early years of settlement there had been “real” conservatives of the Tory variety. But when self-government began, they were rudely jostled aside. Australian conservatism would not draw its strength from them.
It was instead the middle class that provided the dominating motifs of enduring Australian conservative strength. It isn’t difficult to understand why. The “workingman’s paradise” was a place where ordinary settlers and working men could get ahead, not rags-to-riches style, as the American dream pitched it, but enough to acquire comfort, leisure and independence.
Australian wages had been essentially the highest in the world since first settlement and the political victory of liberalism, which occurred during the 1850s gold rushes, ensured free markets and social mobility. To become an independent small business owner, to own your own home, to provide for your family, your children – this was the dream, and in Australia they by and large found it.
The conservatism that resulted from that success story incorporated the liberal beliefs and practices that proved so decisively triumphant in the colonial context. Historian Zachary Gorman observes that liberalism’s 19th-century victory in Australia was so comprehensive it became “less of a clear agenda and more of a pervasive political culture”. No longer conservatism’s upstart challenger as in Britain, liberalism here almost instantaneously became the established mainstream – it became what needed to be protected, as well as what conservatives sought to conserve.
Australian conservatism, then, sprang not out of reverence for the past or social hierarchy but from attachment to the enjoyments and freedoms of ordinary life that the most liberal polity in the world encouraged to flourish. It kept faith with ordinary experience and the socially durable values of an open society.
It soon came to shape the whole of the centre-right, underpinning both the twin liberal traditions of early 20th-century Australian life – the neo-Gladstonian free trade liberalism typified by NSW’s Henry Parkes, George Reid and Joseph Carruthers and the Deakenite liberalism protectionist Victoria championed.
More pragmatic and willing to innovate than, say, Britain’s Home Counties conservatism, Australian conservatism was dispositional rather than traditionalist – as a byproduct of urban, aspirational, middle-class Australia, generally inspired by the hope of improvement, it had no difficulty accommodating an uninterest in the past. The attachment to steady improvement was the important thing.
Robert Menzies’ pitch in his justly famous “Forgotten People” broadcast in 1942 captures this spirit perhaps better than any other significant Australian political testament. In it Menzies speaks directly to the attachment to the home and the family as the cornerstone of the “real life of the nation … in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who … see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race”.
Accompanying that emphasis on home and family is a classically conservative sense of continuity.
“It’s only when we realise that we are a part of a great procession,” Menzies declared in laying the foundation stone of the National Library of Australia two months after he retired in March 1966, “that we’re not just here today and gone tomorrow, that we draw strength from the past and we may transmit some strength to the future.”
Across several decades of political leadership Menzies’ speeches pulsed with phrases that exemplified this disposition. His governments have been “sensible and honest”. He speaks “in realistic terms”, sustained “by an unshakeable belief in the good sense and honesty of our people”.
Former PM Robert Menzies is pictured in 1941. Picture: Herald Sun
Yet this stress on continuity in Menzies’ rhetoric complemented rather than contradicted a commitment to what he referred to as “solid progress”. This country was a settler society built by successive waves of migrants; since its earliest days, its life had been saturated with optimism: Australia, said Menzies, was “our young and vigorous land”, still embarking on its glad, confident morning.
It was the constant undercurrent of hope and aspiration that gave Menzies’ conservatism its distinctive flavour, making it more explicitly geared to the confident expectation of future possibility than its European or American counterparts.
And it was precisely because it was so oriented to progress that the term conservative was generally avoided by the movement he forged, even as a conservative disposition bubbled along beneath its immediate surface, and was mirrored in electoral preferences of voters – not simply by voting right of centre but by giving governments a second term even if their first had been somewhat disappointing, and by regularly knocking back proposed constitutional changes.
However, those two elements – continuity and change – were uneasy bedfellows: continuity could, and eventually did, act as an obstacle to indispensable change.
The institutionalisation of conflict through entities such as the arbitration tribunals and the Tariff Board had, for decades, moderated conflict – but only at the price of inefficiencies that became ever more unsustainable as the world economy globalised in the 1970s and 80s. At that point, Australian conservatism entered into a prolonged crisis, torn between the deeply embedded value of caution and the equally strong value of adaptation.
It was easy to repeat Edmund Burke’s axiom that “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation”; but effecting sweeping change without destroying the party’s unity was of an entirely different order of difficulty.
Nothing more clearly highlighted the dilemma than Liberal leader John Hewson’s Fightback – a call to arms that was as close as the movement ever came to a truly Thatcherite policy revolution. Its failure had many causes but one was the complete absence of the sense of continuity and stability that has always been dear to the Australian middle class.
It lacked, too, the high Gladstonian moral clarity that Margaret Thatcher articulated in her heroic campaign to reverse Britain’s slide to socialised mediocrity. In fact, Thatcher’s argument for the moral basis of capitalism had far more in common with Menzies’ creed of “lifters not leaners” than with Hewson’s “economic rationalism”.
Former British PM Margaret Thatcher2001. Picture: AP
What was needed was a new synthesis. As Menzies had, John Howard, the first Liberal leader to actively identify himself as a conservative, provided it.
Nigel Lawson, who served as the Thatcher government’s most consequential chancellor of the exchequer, once commented that whereas “Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the (Conservative) party, Alec Home tolerated it, and Ted Heath loathed it, Margaret (Thatcher) genuinely liked it. She felt a communion with it.” Exactly the same could be said about Howard: his scrupulous respect for his party’s traditional ethos helped him succeed for as long as he did.
That is not to deny that Howard at times pursued dramatic change – a GST, industrial relations reform, gun ownership – but the approach was rarely radical in style, much less revolutionary in tone. It is telling that the one reform that failed was Work Choices, which went furthest in dismantling existing institutions. And it is telling, too, that subsequent Coalition governments tinkered with the arrangements Labor put in its place rather than seeking their wholesale removal.
Now the synthesis Howard forged between conservation and change is yet again under extreme stress. So, too, are its electoral foundations, as the bases of politics undergo a profound transformation.
Because of Australian conservatism’s pragmatic nature, marshalling broad alliances against those forces and movements that endanger the foundations of the polity has always been its signature approach. Finding some common ground among its constituents, each of those alliances combined the shared opposition to an adversary with a positive program based on overlapping, if not entirely shared, values. The way Liberals, free-traders and protectionists alike rallied alongside Conservatives when threatened by a new common enemy, the ALP in the early 20th century, is a classic example.
John Howard pictured in 1996 after claiming victory for the Coalition. Picture: Michael Jones
However, the dominant force in contemporary politics is fragmentation: the centrifugal pressures that make coalitions hard to assemble but easy to destroy have become ever stronger as social media and identity politics shatter politics’ traditional alignments.
The centre-right is far from being immune from those tendencies, as the emergence of the teals shows. And they are compounded by the pressures of Trumpian populism, which is as hostile to the compromises coalition-building entails as it is to inherited institutions. The only coalitions Trumpism can forge are those that aggregate resentments: against the arrogance of the “progressives”, the abuses of power that occurred during the pandemic, the perception that common values are denigrated and despised.
To use a phrase American constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt coined for the left, Trumpism’s dominant mode of action is “common-enemy politics”, with the adversary being the principal factor unifying its disparate parts. There are no shared values, nor any shared aspirations; the glue comes from shared hatreds.
But intransigent oppositionalism is no basis for a viable politics. Regardless of what Trump’s Australian acolytes believe, its transposition to this country would make for a future of repeated failure.
Rather, for a broader alliance to be possible again, a new synthesis is needed. Australia’s two greatest prime ministers, Menzies and Howard, suggest the way. Both exemplified a social conservatism that drew from the distinctively Australian emphasis on the conservative temperament over and above distinctive philosophical creed. Both forged a synthesis that combined an attachment to liberal principles with a commitment to large-scale changes needed to underwrite prolonged prosperity and progress.
Now, after the rout of last weekend’s election, that synthesis desperately needs to be redefined.
In the end, politics is about argument and arguments are about ideas. When politics seems so entirely bereft of them, Australian conservatives have no choice but to think again.
Henry Ergas is a columnist with The Australian. Alex McDermott is an independent historian.
British archaeologist, academic and historian David Breeze has argued that “the study of history best proceeds through controversy”, suggesting that scholarly debate and differing interpretations of historical events are vital for a deeper understanding of the past, that that confronting alternative perspectives, reinterpreting evidence, and engaging in critical analysis can lead to more nuanced and accurate historical narrative.
This is particularly relevant with regard to the study of the historical and contemporary relationship between Australia and its indigenous minority.
I’ve written often about the indigenous history of our country. The following passage from my piece on Australia’s The Frontier Warsencapsulates my perspective:
”There is a darkness at the heart of democracy in the new world “settler colonial” countries like Australia and New Zealand, America and Canada that we struggle to come to terms with. For almost all of our history, we’ve confronted the gulf between the ideal of political equality and the reality of indigenous dispossession and exclusion. To a greater or lesser extent, with greater or lesser success, we’ve laboured to close the gap. It’s a slow train coming, and in Australia in these divisive days, it doesn’t take much to reignite our “history wars” as we negotiate competing narratives and debate the “black armband” and “white blindfold” versions of our national story”.
The historical truth, elusive and subjective, lies in the wide no man’s land between them – a view subscribed to by economist and commentator Henry Ergas in an informative tribute to the role of the recently deceased historian Keneth Wind
shuttle in The Australian. Ergas maps the topography of the history wars, marking out the battle lines between the so-called “revisionist” historians who are said to see no good in our history as it related to indigenous Australians and those, often on the conservative side of Australian politics, who ostensibly see no evil.
He begins by citing the nineteenth century German historian Leopold von Ranke who held that the historian’s highest calling was to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”. To achieve that task, Ranke had observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception. Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Reading Ergas’s tribute, I was reminded of what George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the infamously funny Flashman diaries, wrote in his wartime memoir Quartered Safe Out Here:
“You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been.”
Below are pieces published in In That Howling Infinite in regard to Australian history as it these relate to Indigenous Australians:
Keith Windschuttle and the continuing battle for history
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 18 April 2025
Historian Keith Windschuttle in Perth, 2004.Ross Swanborough
With the death last week of Keith Windschuttle Australia lost a scholar driven by the duty Leopold von Ranke famously defined as the historian’s highest calling: to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”.
To achieve that task, Ranke observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception.
Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Never was that task harder than in this country’s “history wars”. Triggered, in the self-congratulatory words of the ANU’s Tom Griffiths, by a “concerted scholarly quest to dismantle the Great Australian Silence” – a silence that had “hardened into denialism … denial of bloody warfare on Australian soil” – the revisionist historians’ portrayal of Australia’s history as a never-ending tale of murderous dispossession, cultural decimation and environmental destruction inevitably took its toll on accuracy and objectivity.
There was, in the revisionists’ onslaught, little room for the Rankean virtues, first and foremost that of meticulous attention to the documentary records. It was therefore unsurprising that The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’s relentless focus on those records thrust Windschuttle into the firing line.
Historians Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds.
Nor was it surprising that he paid a high price for his audacity. As Tim Rowse, one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars of Aboriginal history, noted, “at least one speaker” at a 2001 National Museum of Australia conference on Windschuttle’s work “was patronising towards Windschuttle to a degree that exceeded anything I’ve experienced in academic life”; instead of addressing his arguments, the focus was on comparing Windschuttle to David Irving, thereby placing him “outside the conversations of humanists”.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest Windschuttle’s colossal efforts were ignored. As Rowse, who could hardly be accused of being a reactionary, admitted, Windschuttle’s review of the NSW archival evidence on the Stolen Generations was “compelling”, raising real questions about an episode that has become emblematic of “the heavy-handed and insensitive management of Indigenous Australians”.
Moreover, even the attempts to debunk the Fabrication’s contentions yielded tangible benefits. Windschuttle’s Quadrant articles were “widely derided as politically mischievous”, writes Mark Finnane, a legal historian whose work on the interactions between Indigenous Australians and the law has reshaped the field; but their longer-term impact “has been to accelerate research in local and regional studies”, providing a sounder factual base for broader analyses.
At least partly as a result, there are some outstanding works, including by historians broadly on the left, that are far removed both from the revisionists’ overwhelming Manicheanism and from the flights of fancy of the post-modernists Windschuttle had so effectively denounced in The Killing of History (1994).
For example, Rowse’s White Flour, White Power (1998) – with its conclusion that “‘assimilation’ was in some respects a constructive policy era, not only a destructive onslaught on Indigenous ways of life” – remains an exceptionally fine book, and several of his more recent essays, such as the one on the “protection” policy’s role in reversing the decline in the Indigenous population, directly challenge the revisionists’ core assumptions.
Equally, Finnane’s Indigenous Crime and Settler Law (2012), co-authored with Heather Douglas, provides a balanced account of the repeated efforts the colonial authorities made – albeit with only mixed success – to deal sensitively and humanely with the gap between tribal custom and English law.
Noting that putting “the colonial encounter in polarised terms” as a clash between black and white “is an abstraction from a complex and constantly shifting reality”, Finnane and Douglas highlight the need to recognise that “settlers were divided – convicts, free immigrants, military, governors”, as were “Indigenous peoples – jealous of their own country, accustomed in many places to constant warring, seeking advantage of alliances with settlers to advance or protect their own interests”.
And Andrew Fitzmaurice’s Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (2014) is a deeply researched corrective to simple-minded claims (including, unfortunately, by the High Court) about the relevance of “terra nullius” to Britain’s assertion of sovereignty.
But despite those efforts, the sloppiness continues, as even a cursory glance at the ever-expanding literature on the Native Mounted Police shows.
For example, the military historian Peter Stanley – who has been influential in the Australian War Memorial’s portrayal of the “frontier wars” – has recently claimed that “the Native Police were Australia’s own Einsatzgruppen”, the Nazi murderers who machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of Jews that they had herded on to the edge of pits, stripped naked and beaten to within an inch of their lives. That Stanley’s claim is abhorrent for minimising the horrors of the Holocaust should not need to be said; that it is grotesque for its obvious historical inaccuracy ought to be apparent to even the least informed reader.
Striking too are the contentions of Queensland historian Raymond Evans. The mounted police, Evans claimed in 2010, were responsible for 24,000 deaths. But since then, Evans, in work with Robert Orsted-Jensen, has nearly doubled that estimate to 41,040, allegedly on the basis of a methodology that is “conservative” and “cautious”.
Peter Stanley
Keith Windschuttle
In an attempt to justify relying on highly selective samples and superficial extrapolations, Orsted-Jensen has claimed that there was a “a very systematic, deliberate and comprehensive destruction of virtually all sensitive flies stored in Queensland’s Police Department” – an accusation that has become one of the revisionist historians most widely repeated tropes.
However, a devastating review of Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s work by Finnane and Jonathan Richards not only points to the wealth of documentary material on which Evans and Orsted-Jensen could have drawn; it also concludes that any gaps in the records are more likely “an accumulated outcome of administrative culling, bureaucratic indifference, and misadventure” than of systematic destruction.
In fact, “rather than a history of cover-up, the entire administration of the Native Police from as early as 1861 on illustrates the concern of governing elites with the risk of unwarranted killing”.
As for Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates of casualties, Finnane and Richards show that they are “highly subjective … and correspondingly unreliable”, while “the picture (Evans and Orsted-Jensen) paint of massive governmental indifference to or complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of Aboriginal deaths does not stand up to scrutiny”.
But if questionable assertions remain common in the professional literature, they absolutely pervade the public commentary. Predictably, the ABC publicised Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates; no less predictably, it has done nothing to correct the record. And if the academic historians are willing to rebut inaccuracies in scholarly publications, they are far more reluctant to do so when that involves intervening in the public debate.
That was apparent in the wake of Keryn Walshe and Peter Sutton’s Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? (2021), which vividly exposed the flaws of fact and analysis in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. The reviews in scholarly journals, such as that by Peter Veth in Australian Archaeology (2021), did not mince their words about Pascoe’s egregious errors; but more often than not, the media commentary by academic historians was cautiously circumspect.
There were, for sure, attacks on Walshe and Sutton that merely reproduced the left’s deeply engrained orthodoxy. To take but one example, Heidi Norman from UTS accused Walshe and Sutton of “wanting to strip the debate of contemporary meaning” by deploying a neo-colonial framework in which “Western definitions and labels are supreme”.
However, the academics’ dominant tone was mealy-mouthed, conceding that Pascoe had made mistakes but arguing that those mistakes counted less than Dark Emu’s merits in advancing reconciliation.
Peter Sutton
James Boyce
Thus, reviewing Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? in The Guardian, Sydney University’s Mark McKenna carefully put the word ‘fact’ in scare quotes, as if there was some doubt as to its meaning; while “at face value, this is a dispute about ‘facts’”, he wrote, the dry-as-dust issues of evidence and verisimilitude are far less important than “Pascoe’s ability to capture and move audiences desperate to hear his stories of Aboriginal ‘achievement’”.
In exactly the same way, the Tasmanian historian James Boyce recognised shortcomings in Pascoe’s work but nonetheless hailed it as a “significant cultural achievement”, whose “lifegiving” story “speaks to people for whom Aboriginal Australia remains a foreign country but want this to change”.
And Henry Reynolds, writing in Meanjin, essentially pooh-poohed the criticisms, arguing that Pascoe’s faux pas was primarily one of terminology: had Pascoe “declared that the First Nations peoples were not ‘just’ hunters and gatherers but graziers rather than farmers”, the problems with his account would have been largely overcome.
The undertone, in those comments, was clear: that it would be unfair to disabuse Pascoe’s adoring white fans, whose intentions were as pure as their thoughts were confused. Keeping faith with those intentions might involve distorting the truth; but the lie, like those Plato advocates in The Republic, would be a noble one, which ruling elites tell “in order to benefit the polis” by convincing citizens that “it is not pious to quarrel”.
Bruce Pascoe
Ironically, in their effort not to discomfort the masses, the revisionists had enveloped themselves in a Great Australian Silence of their own.
Yet the harm those deliberate distortions of the historical record cause is not just to truthfulness; it is to our ability to live with the past, rather than to live in the past. For so long as we cannot accurately and dispassionately view this country’s history, we will lack the foundations needed to better shape its future.
And it is not much comfort to know that when intellectual constructs stray too far from careful readings of the world, as they so tragically have in everything to do with Indigenous history and policy, reality has a nasty habit of biting back.
In the end, Nietzsche was right: the basic question societies, no less than individuals, must face, is “How much truth can we endure? Error is not blindness; it is cowardice.” Exposing cowardice takes courage. Now, with Keith Windschuttle gone, that duty must fall to others.
The featured image of this post is a profile in crystal of Kemal Atatürk that sits on my bookshelf as a reminder of my late friend and academic colleague Mehmet Naim Turfan. Naim, like millions of his compatriots, harboured a deep affection and respect for the legacy of Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye and its first president. It was gifted to me by His wife soon after his passing by his wife Barbara. His doctoral thesis was published posthumously in 2000 as Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Miliary and Ottoman Collapse. He is cited several times in the book that is the subject of this article. I thought of Naim often while reading the book and writing what follows.
Enver Pasha, soldier, politician and member of the troika that ruled the Ottoman Empire before and during WW1
Ottoman Endgame
Many believe that prior to the outbreak of World War 1 in August 1914, Europe had been at peace. In matter of fact, brutal and bloody little wars had raged in Eastern Europe three years prior, whilst Italy fought the Ottoman Empire for Tripoli and Cyrenaica, both now modern Libya and yet also presently two warring parts of a fractured whole and now being triggered by the aftermath of equally nasty little wars in the same lands in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The Ottoman Empire’s entry into alliance with the Central Powers in 1915 against the Entente of Britain, France and Russia was the direct outcome of what we know refer to generically as The Balkan Wars – which aided and abetted by Russia, saw the emergence of Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, they were the beginning of what we might now refer to as The Wars of the Ottoman Succession. They are not over.
The empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers against the Entente of Britain France and Russia was a devious, drawn-out business as it sought to take advantage of its potential allies in recovering why it lost in the preceding Balkan Wars that had deprived it of its European provinces,
Few have told the story of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Türkiye as well as English historian Sean McMeekin in his geographically sprawling and historically enthralling book The Ottoman Endgame. He juxtaposes military operations in the empire with those on Europe’s eastern and western fronts, demonstrating how, in the shifting fortunes of war in Europe, each impacted the other from the first offensives in France and on the eastern front to the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue sets the scene well in a brief but compelling review (published in full below with some excellent pictures, along with a article by the author himself):
”For the historian of the first world war, the Ottoman theatre is a blur of movement compared to the attrition of the western front. Its leading commanders might race off to contest Baku and entirely miss the significance of events in the Balkans, while the diffuse nature of operations tended to encourage initiative, not groupthink. The war of the Ottoman succession, as Sean McMeekin calls it, was furthermore of real consequence, breaking up an empire that had stifled community hatreds, and whose absence the millions who have fled sectarian conflict in our age may rue …
For the Ottomans, the “great war” of western historiography was part of a much longer period of conflict and revolution, and arguably not even its climax. The process started with the collapse of the Ottomans’ Balkan empire – encouraged by Russia, moderated by Britain – and it brought to power the militaristic regime of the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP. When Turkey entered the European war on 10 November 1914, Ottoman innocence was long gone, the army fully mobilised, the people benumbed by loss and refugees and the empire hanging in the balance. And yet, for the CUP and its triumvirate of leading pashas, the Young Turk troika of Enver, Talat and Djemal, the moment was as fraught with opportunity as it was with danger. On the opportunity side of the ledger was the prospect of riding Germany’s coat tails to victory, overturning the Balkan reverses and winning back provinces in the east from the old enemy, Russia. Enver, the CUP’s diminutive generalissimo, even spoke of appealing to Muslim sentiment and marching all the way to India.
For the Russians, the game was about winning Constantinople (or Tsargrad, as they presumptuously called it) and with it unimpeded access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus; it was with “complete serenity”, Tsar Nicholas II informed his subjects, that Russia took on “this ancient oppressor of the Christian faith and of all Slavic nations”
The European war on the eastern and western fronts was characterized by attrition and stalemate, but that waged by the Ottomans and the Russians, and soon, the British and French, was in contrast, highly mobile and constantly shifting, with the exception perhaps of the allied assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula which very soon resembled the trench warfare and brutal but futile offensives that characterized the Western Front. It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the war fought in the Middle East in terms of its territorial extent. From Baghdad to Baku, Gallipoli to Gaza, the Black Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Caspian Sea. It was waged across European and Asian Ottoman lands including present day Greece, Bulgaria and Romania in the west, in the Caucasus in the east, in present day Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and Iran, and in the south in present day Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Palestine.
Though the Sultan departed, and with him, the Islamic Caliphate, and most of the empire’s non-Turkish lands – were lost, under the leadership of former Ottoman commander and war hero Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Anatolian heartland resisted and ultimately repelled invading foreign armies, and the Turkish state he created endures today as an influential participant in world affairs.
Casting new light on old narratives
McMeekin, writes de Bellaigue, is an old-fashioned researcher who draws his conclusions on the basis of the documentary record. In the case of a conflict between Ottoman Turkey and Germany on one side, and Russia, Britain and France on the other, and involving Arabs, Armenians and Greeks, this necessitates linguistic talent and historical nous of a high order. McMeekin is at home in the archives of all major parties to the conflict and his accounts of some of the more contested episodes carry a ring of finality. Access to previously closed Russian and Turkish archives has provided new and potentially controversial insights into accepted narratives regarding the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging long accepted narratives, he addresses three of the most enduring shibboleths of the First World War.
He jumps right in even before he begins his wide-ranging story, leaves hanging in the air like a predator drone until he returns to it in chronologically due course. The Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 – the bête noir of most progressive narratives of the modern Middle East, and to many ill-informed partisans, the causus bello of the intractable Arab Israeli conflict – was not the brainchild of perfidious Albion and duplicitous France, but rather a plan for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire concocted by the foreign minister of Imperial Russia. France’s Monsieur François-George Picot and Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes played second and third violin to the “third man” Sergei Sazonov. Both Russia and France had for decades sought to establish their political, strategic and economic interests at the expense of the so-called “sick man of Europe”, an ostensibly terminal invalid who throughout the nineteenth century, had experienced many deathbed recoveries. Czar Nicholas II, in common with his Russian Orthodox predecessors, dreamt of bringing Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the heart of the orthodox patriarchate, or Tsargrad into the empire. It was no coincidence that the infamous Sykes Picot pact was outed by Russia’s Bolshevik regime after the collapse of the Czarist regime to discombobulate the revolution’s foremost European enemies.
The second icon of “received history” in McMeekin’s sights, is one Australia’s foundation stories – the ill-starred Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 and particularly, the the ANZAC’s Gallipoli legend. It was, from McMeekin’s perspective, a misconceived, poorly planned endeavour to capture the Ottoman capital, to relieve pressure on Russian forces engaged in bitter fighting in Eastern Anatolia, and potentially, to knock the Ottomans out of the war. Contrary to popular conceptions, the British were not exactly enthused by the idea. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s preference was for an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the empire – the port of Alexandretta in Ottoman Syria (now Turkish Antakya), with its strategic and logistic proximity to the Hijaz railway and the hinterland of the Levant. One indisputable fact about Gallipoli is that it assured the ascent Mustafa Kemal, a key commander who had already distinguished himself in the Balkan Wars, who would go on to conduct a fighting retreat of Ottoman Armies through what is now present-day Palestine and Syria, lead Turkish forces to victory in the war of liberation that followed, and, as Kemal Atatürk, would become the founder of modern Türkiye.
The third widely held narrative concerns the Armenian Genocide. Unlike the rulers of modern Türkiye, McMeekin does not deny its occurrence. Nor does he downplay or even ignore it, as does Israel for the idiosyncratic reason that it potentially minimises the horrors of the Shoah. Rather, he places it in the context of events in the empire’s Anatolian heartland. Two predominantly Armenian provinces in Eastern Anatolia were home to active nationalist independence movements, and these gave tacit and actual support to the Russian forces encroaching on the empire from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea (in present day Azerbaijan and Georgia). Armenian militias fought alongside Russian forces on the Caucasian front whilst partisans operated behind ottoman lines, and cities, town and villages were actually “liberated”, fostering fears in the Istanbul government of an treasonous” fifth column”. McMeekin acknowledges the death toll of what we now recognise the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity which was spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and implemented primarily through the mass deportation and murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Whilst most probably died of inhumane treatment, exposure, privation and starvation, unknown numbers were murdered.
Kemal Pasha and Ottoman offices at Gallipoli
Parallels
Reading The Ottoman Endgame, I was reminded often of his compatriot Anthony Beevor’s harrowing tale of the Russian Revolution (reviewed in In That Howling Infinite’s Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. That Revolution and the end of the Ottoman Empire converged. McMeekin notes that with regard to the war in Anatolia and the Caucasus, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Czarist Russia and the Central Powers, was poisoned chalice for both Russia and Turkey and as significant as any of the treaties that followed the end of the war.
I found it fascinating that many individuals who were to play a significant part in the Russian Civil war also feature in Ottoman Endgame. Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the imperial Black Sea fleet and General Anton Deniken, commander of Russian forces on the Caucasian front, became leaders of the Tsarist cause and were to command the counter-revolutionary White forces against the Red Army with the Siberian People’s Army and the Volunteer Army in Ukraine.
None were more prominent or as controversial in western narratives, however, as Winston Churchill. As noted above, McMeekin lays to rest the notion that the Dardanelles campaign and Gallipoli were Churchill’s sole doing and his folly – though he did blame himself later on and has been pilloried for it ever since. Ironically, once disgraced, and having volunteered to serve on the Western Front, at the end of the war, he was brought back into Lloyd George’s cabinet as Secretary of State for War. There, he advised against military intervention against Kemal’s nationalist forces and indeed mused about the option of dumping the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot dispensation imposed on the moribund empire’s Arab provinces after the armistice and of restoring the prewar territorial status quo, a kind of circumscribed Ottoman Redux. And yet, as civil war broke out and spread in the nascent Soviet Union, he was alone of his cabinet colleagues in advocating for a full-on allied intervention. Critics claimed that he dreamt, – though some believed that he fantasized – about of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers, and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats. It is not without reason that admirers and critics alike would agree that Winston had more positions than the Karma Sutra.
The Russian Revolutions – there were two, in February and October 1917 – and the Civil War that followed it, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire followed by foreign intervention, the war of liberation, and the creation and endurance of Türkiye can be said to have defined the contours of modern Middle Eastern geopolitics, setting the stage for many if not most of the conflicts that have inflicted the region since, including three Gulf wars, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, the Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, and the Arab-Israel conflict, arguably the most intractable conflict of modern times. Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war.
In the wake of the fall of the Russian Empire, the Twentieth Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”. Nor was it kind to the heirs and successors of the Ottoman Empire. Though the tyranny and oppression and the death and destruction wrought by rulers and outsiders upon the lands and peoples of the Middle East has been significantly less than that endured by the people of Eastern Europe and Russia, the region would fit Snyder’s sombre soubriquet.
TE Lawrence, General Allenby, Kemal Ataturk, and Ben Gurion
Clone of Russia returns to a Middle East it never really left
Sykes and Picot have taken the blame but actually it was a Russian who drew the map of the Middle East, writes Sean McMeekin
The World Today, 7 December 2018
To judge from press coverage, the emergence of Islamic State has brought about a cartographic revolution in the Middle East. With the borders of Syria and Iraq in flux, journalists have resurrected the legend of Sykes-Picot, wherein Britain and France are said to have divided up the Ottoman empire between them in an agreement signed 100 years ago, in May 1916. Russia’s intervention in Syria, by upstaging the United States and her allies, seems in this view to be completing the rout of western influence in the Middle East, putting the final nail in the coffin of ‘Sykes-Picot’.
Rarely has history been more thoroughly abused. In reality, none of the contentious post-Ottoman borders of the Middle East was settled by Sykes and Picot in 1916: not the Iraq-Kuwait frontier notoriously crossed by Saddam’s armies in 1990, not those separating the Palestinian mandate from (Trans) Jordan and Syria, not the highly contested and still-in-flux Israeli/Palestinian partition of 1948, nor, in the most relevant example from today, those separating Syria from Iraq.
To take an obvious example from recent headlines, Mosul, the Iraqi city whose capture in June 2014 led Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Islamic State to proclaim himself Caliph Ibrahim, was actually assigned to French Syria in the 1916 agreement.
Journalists are even more spectacularly wrong in describing the Ottoman partition agreement as exclusively (or even primarily) a British-French affair, omitting the driving role played by Tsarist Russia and her Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.
The final terms of what should more accurately be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement were actually hashed out in the Russian capital of Petrograd in the spring of 1916, against the backdrop of crushing Russian victories over the Turks at Erzurum, Erzincan, Batum, and Trabzon (the British were reeling, having been humiliated at Gallipoli and in Iraq, where an expeditionary force would shortly surrender).
The conquest of northeastern Turkey in 1916 left Russia, unlike her grasping allies, in possession of most of the Ottoman territory she was claiming – barring only Constantinople (called ‘Tsargrad’ by the Russians), which still needed to be taken.
At the dawn of 1917, Tsarist Russia was poised to inherit the crown jewels of the Ottoman empire, including Constantinople, the Straits, Armenia, and Kurdistan, all promised to her in the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement. Along the Black Sea coast, Russian engineers were building a rail line from Batum to Trabzon, with the latter city a supply base for the Caucasian Army, poised for a spring assault on Sivas and Ankara. With Russia enjoying virtually uncontested naval control of the Black Sea, preparations were underway for an amphibious strike at the Bosphorus, spearheaded by a specially created ‘Tsargradskii Regiment’.
After watching her allies try, and fail, to seize the Ottoman capital during the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign of 1915 (when Sazonov had first put forward Russia’s sovereign claim on Constantinople and the Straits), Russia was now poised to seize the prize for herself – weather permitting, in June or July 1917.
Of course, it did not turn out that way. After the February Revolution of 1917, mutinies spread through the Russian army and navy, including the Black Sea fleet, just as it was poised to strike.
In a remarkable and little-known coincidence, on the very day the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, Pavel Milyukov, first aroused the anger of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks by refusing to renounce Russia’s territorial claims on the Ottoman empire – April 4, 1917 – a Russian naval squadron approached the Bosphorus in ‘grand style’, including destroyers, battle cruisers, and three converted ocean liner-carriers which launched seaplanes to inspect Constantinople’s defences from the air. The amphibious plans were not abandoned until fleet commander Admiral AV Kolchak threw his sword overboard on June 21 during a mutiny. Even after ‘revolutionary sailors’ had taken control of the Black Sea fleet, a Russian amphibious strike force landed on the Turkish coastline as late as August 23, 1917, in one last sting by the old Tsargrad beast.
After the Bolsheviks took power, Russia collapsed into civil war, which left her prostrate, at Germany’s mercy. By signing a ‘separate peace’ with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia forfeited her treaty claims to Armenia, Kurdistan, Constantinople, and the Straits, throwing the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 into chaos, even as new claimants were appearing on the scene, such as Italy and Greece – not to mention local actors: Jewish, Arab, and Armenian troops were attached as national ‘Legions’ to General Allenby’s mostly British army as it rolled up Palestine and Syria. These forces, along with French, Italian, and Greek expeditionary forces sent after the war, and the Turkish nationalists who regrouped under Mustafa Kemal in Ankara to oppose them, would determine the final post-Ottoman borders in a series of small wars between 1918 and 1922, with scarcely a nod to the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement.
While Russia’s forfeiture of her claims in 1918 was welcome, in a selfish sense, to the other players vying for Ottoman territory, it was not necessarily a positive one for the region. In the absence of Russian occupying troops to police the settlement, the
Allies, in 1919, offered Russia’s territorial share, now defined (in deference to Woodrow Wilson) as mandates, to the United States – only for the Senate to vote down the Versailles Treaty, rendering the arrangement moot. Lacking Russian or American troops as ‘muscle’, the Allies leaned on weaker proxies such as the Italians and, more explosively, local Greeks and Armenians, which aroused the anger of the Muslim masses and spurred the Turkish resistance led by Kemal (the future Atatürk). Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, too, could only lament the vacuum left behind by the departing Russians, which left them to face Turkish wrath alone.
Soviet Russia re-emerged as a player in the Middle East fairly quickly, not least as Mustafa Kemal’s key diplomatic partner during his wars against the West and its proxies from 1920-22. In a reminder of the enduring prerogatives of Russian foreign policy, the Cold War kicked into high gear when Stalin made a play for Kars, Ardahan, and the Ottoman Straits in 1946: these moves, along with the British withdrawal from Greece, Turkey, and Palestine, inspired the Truman doctrine.
In an eerily similar replay of the history of 1917-18, the collapse of Soviet power in 1991 led Moscow to turn inward, withdrawing from the Middle East and inaugurating a period of US and western hegemony in the region, which turned out no less well than the Middle Eastern free-for-all of 1918-22. A prostrate and impoverished Russia put up no objection during the First Gulf War of 1991, and did little more than sputter during the Iraq War of 2003. Russia’s recovery of strength and morale in the Putin years led, almost inevitably, to her return in force to the Middle East – from which, in reality, she never truly left.
The Russian return to the region, along with Turkey’s increasingly overt hostility over her Syrian intervention, resurrects historical patterns far, far older than Sykes-Picot. For centuries, the Ottoman empire was the primary arena of imperial ambition for the Tsars, even as Russians were the most feared enemies of the Turks. In many ways, the Crimean War of 1853-56, which saw western powers (Britain, France, and an opportunistic Piedmont-Sardinia) unleash an Ottoman holy war against the Tsar to frustrate Russian ambitions in the Middle East, is a far more relevant analogy to the present crisis in Syria than the pseudo-historical myths of 1916. It is time we put the Sykes-Picot legend in the dustbin where it belongs.
Diplomatic carve-up: the third man
In David Lean’s 1962 film, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a cynical British official explains how the carcass of the Ottoman Empire was to be divided at the end of the First World War under the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
‘Mr Sykes is an English civil servant. Monsieur Picot is a French civil servant. Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot met and they agreed that after the war, France and England would share the Turkish Empire, including Arabia. They signed an agreement, not a treaty, sir. An agreement to that effect.’
This summary of wartime diplomacy has proved long-lived. It encapsulates the less than honest dealings of the British government with the Arabs – who wanted independence after being liberated from Turkish domination, rather than rule by the European colonial powers – but it leaves out the key figure in the deliberations, Sergei Sazonov, Russian foreign minister, 1910-1916.
Sazonov was one of the most significant diplomats both before and during the Great War. It was thanks to his adroit manipulation that Britain and its allies came to accept that Russia would gain the Ottoman capital Constantinople, in the event of an Allied victory, an outcome that Britain had tried for decades to prevent.
At the talks in the Russian capital Petrograd in 1916, the British and French emissaries were far lesser agents of empire than their host.
Sir Mark Sykes was a gifted linguist, travel writer and Conservative politician, but no top-flight diplomat. As for François Georges-Picot, he was an experienced diplomat and lawyer and noted advocate for a greater Syria under French rule.
But with France having no troops in the eastern theatre of war, he had to accept Russia’s demand to swallow up large parts of what is now eastern Turkey, but which Paris had set out to claim.
Sykes died of influenza in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, where Sazanov represented the White Russians. He died in Nice in 1927
Legal Legacy, WordPress August 6, 2016 by rhapsodyinbooks
Czar Nicolas I of Russia is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Sick Man of Europe” to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 20th century, there could be little doubt that the disparaging sobriquet applied in spades. The Ottoman Empire was soundly defeated in two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 by the comparatively pipsqueak countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia. One result of the wars was that the Empire lost all of its European territories to the west of the River Maritsa, which now forms the western boundary of modern Turkey. Then, when World War I broke out, the Ottomans made the disastrous decision to side with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente, ending up on the losing side of that cataclysm.
A popular theory is that the carving up of the Ottoman lands after the war, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, is the source of many of the problems of the current Middle East. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin concedes that it is not wrong to look to the aftermath of the war for the roots of many of today’s Middle Eastern problems, but the “real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” For example, the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement was sponsored primarily by Russia, whose foreign secretary, Alexander Samsonov, was the principal architect of the agreement. McMeekin’s retelling of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and its recrudescence as modern Turkey is a fascinating and complicated narrative.
Among the interesting facts McMeekin points out is that according to an 1893 census only 72% of the Ottoman citizens were Muslim, and that in the middle of the 19th century the majority of the population of Constantinople may have been Christian. The Balkan Wars started a trend, exacerbated by World War I, toward ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of Christians leaving the Empire and similar numbers of Muslims moving from territory lost by the Empire to areas it still controlled.
We in the West tend to think of World War I as a static slugfest conducted in the trenches of northern France. But the war in the East, particularly as it applied to the Ottoman Empire, was a much more mobile affair. In fact, the Ottomans ended up fighting the war on six different fronts, as the Entente Powers invaded them from many different angles.
Winston Churchill in 1914
At the outbreak of WWI, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany out of fear of Russia, which had coveted control over the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas for centuries. In 1914 the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia and met with initial success. However, Russia feared its early success was quite precarious, and so it inveigled its ally, Britain, to launch a diversionary assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. The “diversion” became one of the most deadly killing grounds of the war, as the British poured hundreds of thousands of men into the battle in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. The author credits Russian prodding more than Winston Churchill’s stubbornness for the extent of the British commitment. The Ottomans, led by Mustapha Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey”), prevailed in this hecatomb, showing that there was still plenty of fight left in the “Sick Man.”
Turkish General Mustafa Kemal, Gallipoli, 1915
The Ottomans also soundly defeated the British in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in late 1915, but they were less successful against the Russians, who invaded across the Caucasus and held much of eastern Anatolia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 caused them to withdraw voluntarily. The British ultimately prevailed against the Ottomans in 1918 by invading from Egypt through Palestine, with a little help from the Arabs of Arabia.
The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war in Europe in 1919, did not end the war for the Ottomans. The victorious Allies were ready to carve up much of the Empire for themselves. The Ottoman armies were to disband; England was to keep Egypt and to get Palestine and Mesopotamia; France was to get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of modern Turkey; and Greece was to get a large swath of western Turkey. All might have gone according to that plan, but Mustapha Kemal (Attaturk) was still in charge of a small but effective fighting force in central Anatolia. Attaturk husbanded his forces and fought only when he had an advantage. In a war that lasted until 1923, he was able to expel the Greeks from Anatolia and to establish the boundaries of modern Turkey.
McMeekin deftly handles this complexity with a lucid pen. His descriptions of the various military campaigns are riveting. This is not to say that he shortchanges the political machinations taking place. He gives more than adequate coverage to the “Young Turks,” a triumvirate that ruled the Empire from 1909 until they eventually brought it to its ruin in 1919. He also covers the Armenian massacres as objectively as possible, given the enormity of the events described.
Evaluation: This is a very satisfying book and an excellent addition to the enormous corpus of World War I literature. The book includes good maps and photos.
Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2015
How’s your ebb tide? Do you sign on the dotted lion? Is your tea nature Orpheus Rocker? Who is Charlie Charm Puck in ‘Waltzing Matilda’
Back in London in the early seventies, when Earl’s Court in Kensington was such a mecca for itinerant Australians that it was known in London and in Australia as Kangaroo Valley, I was acquainted with many expatriate and transient Aussies. Indeed, I married one I’d met at the School of Oriental and African Studies where we were both studying.
Breaking free of the cultural confines of their conservative country, many young Aussies overcame historian Geoffrey Blainey called “the tyranny of distance” by flying across it or joining the famous Hippie Trail from Southeast Asia to what many still referred to as “The Old Country”. Some became household names, including actor Barry Humphries, writer Clive James, art critic Robert Hughes, journalists John Pilger, lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, fashion designer Jenny Kee and sociologist Germaine Greer, and bands like The Easy Beats and The Bee Gees, who were actually Poms returning home, and the Seekers. By far the most controversial were the editors of Oz Magazine, Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and Martin Sharpe, the defendants in the infamous Oz Trial of 1970, at the time, the longest obscenity trial in British legal history, and the first time that an obscenity charge was combined with the charge of conspiring to corrupt public morals. See The Australians who set 60s Britain swinging
Most, however, were just ordinary folk, and they were so ubiquitous in London that they were often the butt of jokes (mostly good natured) and comedies, as personified in the cringeworthy uber-Coker Barry McKenzie which featured in Nicholas Garland’s comic strip in the satirical magazine Private Eye and Bruce Beresford’s dubious directorial debut, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.
I was fascinated and highly amused by the Aussie’s accents and their many hilarious colloquialisms, including “I’m as dry as a dingo’s conger” and “flat out as a lizard drinking”. To assist my communication with these antipodean strangers, I purchased a little lexicon assembled by Professor Afferbeck Lauder of the University of Sinny. I was assured that this was exactly how Strine was spoke by dinkum Strayans.
When I emigrated DownUnder a few years later, I found that very few natives spoke proper Strine – though there was The Paul Hogan Show – that the Australian accent was perpetually evolving due to the country’s exposure to outside cultural influences – especially American and British – and its increasing multiculturalism.
Rereading Let Stalk Strine recently, I found was a little like opening a time capsule or deciphering a text of Chaucerian English, though vagrant traces of the old vernacular linger still in such “Australianisms” as nukelar, envimint, gomint, and, of course, Straya. But even the use of words such as these is not widespread, and usually confined to interviews with National Party politicians and Pauline Hanson.
The book is still available, and although air fridge Strines and new Strines no longer speak the lingo, it is picture of the strine wire flife half a century ago.
Here are some of my personal favourites. They’re still pretty grouse after all these years.
There’s “baked necks” and “egg nishner”, “garbled mince” and “nairm semmitch”, the public speaking opener “laze and gem…”, and the nursery rhyme Chair Congeal. There’s idioms like “fitwer smeeide” and “fiwers youide”, translated as “if I were you, I would” and “if I were you, I’d…” as in “fitwer smeeide leave him. He saw-way sonn the grog” and “fiwers youide leave him anode goan livener unit”. And there’s the prefix didjerie as in “didgerie dabout it in the piper” and “ didgerie lee meenit or were you kidding”, and, of course, “he plays the didgerie do real good”.
My personal favourite, relevant, apt even, to this day is “Aorta”.
To quote the author, it is “the personification of the benevolently paternal welfare state to which all Strines – being fiercely independent and individualistic- appeal for help and comfort in moments of frustration and anguish. The following are typical examples of such appeals. They reveal the innate reasonableness and sense of justice which all Strines possess to such a marked degree: “Aorta build another arber bridge. An aorta stop half these cars from cummer ninner the city – so a fella can get twerk on time”. “Aorta have more buses. An aorta mikey smaller so they don’t take up half the road. An aorta put more seats in ‘em so you do a tester stand all the time. An aorta put more room in ‘em. You can tardily move in ‘em air so cradled. Aorta do summing about it.”
For more on Australia in In That Howling Infinite, see Down Under
When I first arrived in Australia in April 1978, I was keen to know more about the country I had unexpectedly migrated to – as a matter of fact, apart from what I’d learned from my then-wife, who was a Sydneysider, I knew very little. Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country was highly recommended. And yet, the Australia Horne described therein did not seem like the country I was about to call home. It was a critique of “the way we were” – the somnolent fifties and sixties that preceded its publication – a society and a culture that ceased to be relevant in the decades that followed. As author and columnist Nick Bryant writes in a reevaluation republished below: “Just as the title has been misappropriated – it was meant sardonically. its subtitle has been mislaid: Australia in the Sixties. Though many insights proved prescient and perennial, Horne was describing a different land”.
Indeed, the book had appeared as the Australia Horne described and condemned had already begun to change. An imperceptible social revolution had already been pushing against the rigid morality of the war-time generation. The comforting but constraining ties of the traditional family, religious observance and community obligation which were regarded as unreasonably oppressive by his generation and many in the one before it, were breaking down, to be replaced in the seventies by a more open, more travelled and and inquisitive society and a paternal and benevolent social welfare state which provided free healthcare and for a generation of Australians, free tertiary education – from which I, once naturalised, benefitted. Much if this change was not all that recognisable at the time – transformations of this kind are mostly visible only with the benefit of hindsight.
The Lucky Country nevertheless continues to dominate the intellectual landscape; but 60 years after its publication, and as Bryant notes, it’s one that Australia mistakenly takes too seriously.
“Many who use the terms “lucky country” or “tyranny of distance” have probably not even read the books or understand their original context or meaning. If they read the books today, they might see that almost every form of our personal, community, national and global interests still involve “distance” as much as ever, and that notions of “the lucky country” remain ironic. ” The result, he laments, is a re-run of issues revisited but not resolved, opportunities not seized, and challenges not confronted … it is no surprise that the distance between word and deed on so many fronts, and so often, has created its own climate change, one of a collective vacuum or vacuousness. An environment where it is too easy to become disinterested, or be distracted by, or attracted to, those offering an “answer”, even if it is often more volume, ideology, self-interest, simplicity, hype and nonsense than validity, ideas, public interest, substance, hope and common sense. A 24/7 connected world where we drown in words and information but thirst for bona fide truth, knowledge and understanding, and more disconnectedness and disengagement”.
We republish below two retrospectives we’ll worth reading, one written from a conservative perspective, the other, by Bryant, from a relatively progressive viewpoint (there are some great pictures too). Both agree however that it is a book that can be read in a slightly or very different way by each generation, always having something new to say. As columnist Henry Ergas notes therein: “For all of its shortcuts and grievous errors, its insights still dazzle, no matter how often they are read or reread. So does its freshness, its sense of humour and perhaps most of all, its eager hopefulness and sense of aspiration”.
“Join the Lucky Ones” ran the front-page headline of The Australian on Tuesday, December 1, 1964. Starting the next day, readers could enjoy “the first big instalment of Donald Horne’s controversial new book The Lucky Country”, which was being published that week.
Horne had a long association with Frank Packer and Australian Consolidated Press, but in a publishing coup Rupert Murdoch’s new national newspaper had secured exclusive rights for “the most candid, controversial book of the year”.
The Australian had begun life less than six months previously as a daring experiment, the first nationally circulated newspaper in a country beginning to fizz with a sense of expanding possibilities yet faced with new, sometimes daunting prospects in a dramatically changing world.
Horne’s much-anticipated “witty and irreverent study of Australians and their way of life” couldn’t have found a stage better suited to its bold approach or for the questions it was firing, at point-blank range, into the national conversation.
Australians were reintroduced to themselves in the weeks that followed as a people who “hate discussion and ‘theory’ but can step quickly out of the way if events are about to smack them in the face”.
The Australian newspaper on December 2, 1964 featured an extract of ‘The Lucky Country’
They found out that “to understand Australian concepts of enjoyment one must understand that in Australia there is a battle between puritanism and a kind of paganism and that the latter is beginning to win”. Competitive sport, they were now given to understand, had all the qualities of “a ruthless, quasi-military operation”, making it “one of the disciplinary sides of Australian life”.
As for mateship, it reflected “a socially homosexual side to Australian male life” that involved “prolonged displays of toughness” in pubs, where men “stand around bars asserting their masculinity with such intensity that you half expect them to unzip their flies”.
Perhaps most arresting was the argument that went with the title’s assertion. Australian life, combining scepticism and “delight in improvisation”, had resulted in dependence on a type of gambler’s luck.
As circumstances shifted, Australians’ “saving characteristic, ‘the gambler’s coolness’ ”, had helped them to “change course quickly, even at the last moment”.
But the aim of those swerves had always been to “seek a quick easy way out”. Now that strategy needed to be reconsidered.
Abrupt changes
The Lucky Country packed many punches – and they landed at the perfect moment.
The tremendous post-war growth of an educated and engaged public had been evident since the mid-1950s as new magazines proliferated and the market for Australian books expanded more prodigiously than at any other time in the century.
Coupled with that were global shifts even more dramatic and described in The Australian’s first editorial, which spelled out both the paper’s vision and the challenges the nation faced.
Since the end of World War II all the major European empires had ceded or lost control of the lands and people to Australia’s immediate north. As British, Dutch and French imperial power in Southeast Asia collapsed, new nations – including Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam – were born and ancient ones, such as Burma and Thailand, reshaped. Behind them lay “the brooding power and intelligence of the new China, a land with whose people’s desires and plans our own future is deeply entwined”.
The first Australian visit by a US President. United States President Lyndon B Johnson greets the crowd in Swanston Street, Melbourne. Ken Wheeler
These abrupt changes coincided with Britain trying to join the European Common Market, making it clear that wherever the United Kingdom saw its future, it was not primarily with the Commonwealth.
Losing the blanket of certainty that Australia’s close relationship with Britain had long provided was a blow. But, The Australian insisted, it could prove “a salutary shock”, as it helped us realise “that now, as never before in our history, we stand alone”.
Collection of snapshots
The Lucky Country’s impact was immediate and all-pervasive. Despite some scathing reviews (one confidently predicted the book would have been forgotten by the next football season), it flew off the shelves. Its initial print run of 18,000 sold out in nine days and the pace showed no sign of flagging.
In 1965 it sold another 40,000 copies before repeating the feat in 1966, a staying power beyond its publisher’s wildest dreams.
One of the books that truly defined the decade, it entrenched itself in the national consciousness in a way similar to Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance, published two years later, another title that instantly entered the national lexicon.
Blainey’s deeply researched work, which reflected his training as a historian, was tightly argued. In contrast, even Horne admitted that his book was “a collection of snapshots of Australia”. An assemblage of ideas and insights that had been amassing for a decade, Horne thought it was part of the book’s success, handing readers a host of opinionated pages of observation and commentary.
Donald Horne at home
More than the loose structure, though, the book’s style was crucial to its impact. That style came from Horne’s long spell as a journalist, editor and advertising man.
Horne had a keen understanding of what readers wanted to know and talk about. He had spent years honing his approach, addressing Australia’s burgeoning magazine and newspaper readers, and recognised their hunger for a new type of journalism that The Australian sought to embody: urbane, expository, intelligent, sparky, informed.
And if it worked for magazines and papers, why not for a serious – if chronically irreverent – book about who we were and how we now lived?
The Lucky Country introduced this sharp change in tone to Australia in the 1960s, marking it as ineradicably as David Williamson’s plays would do. The content matched the tone, too, aggressively insisting that the way we lived had changed so abruptly that the nation could no longer be served by the standard-issue ideas.
The national mythology, populated by bush legend figures (shearers, bushrangers, drovers) and grizzled Anzacs, had no relevance to daily reality.
Australians were urbanites and suburbanites, and increasingly so: from 1947 to 1966 the percentage of Australian living in cities leapt from 68 per cent to 83 per cent.
Misappropriated and misunderstood
Horne’s coup was to bridge this gap between myth and reality. Certainly to his mind The Lucky Country’s success came from the fact it captured Australia as Australians experienced it, not through the fake lenses of a glorified past.
It was, Horne claimed, the first book to reflect “the suburban nature of the lives of most Australians without jeering at them”. What really cut through, however, was the book’s underlying thesis.
Despite its gadfly-like style, the book worked off a set of powerful assumptions that constituted a strong, even startling, argument.
Horne would complain ever after that its title had been misappropriated and misunderstood. But it is hard to deny that the title itself made the argument palpably clear.
Earlier exercises in self-reflection generally portrayed Australia’s journey to nationhood as a process of maturation. Nurtured under the shelter of Britain’s wing, foresight, hard work and inspired guidance had allowed the infant nation to grow into a strapping adult, capable of standing on its own feet.
Horne knocked that narrative for six. Australia’s prosperity and stability were not, he argued, the result of increasing national maturity, much less diligence and determination. They were due to sheer good fortune. To make things worse, it was a good fortune the country didn’t deserve – or know how to use.
The problem wasn’t the bulk of ordinary Australians, who weren’t a bad lot. It was “the people on top”. Our leaders and elites were second-rate provincial mediocrities who had got stuck in a groove some 50 or 60 years earlier and never budged out of it, even as one generation passed to another and still another.
Premature senility
Thanks to them, the nation was in a time warp, living out a fantasy that bore no relation to its realities – or its challenges.
The proper national metaphor, in Horne’s eyes, was not a maturational shift from boisterous youth to fully fledged adulthood; it was a leap from childhood to premature senility. Without “a radical overthrow and destruction of the prevailing attitudes of most of the nation’s masters” the decades to come would likely witness “a general demoralisation; the nation may become run down, old-fashioned, puzzled, and resentful”.
The radical overthrow and destruction of Australia’s outmoded approach, and the subsequent renewal, could, Horne speculated, possibly come through the rising generation. He was drawn to generational explanations of change, citing Walter Bagehot’s comment that “generally one generation succeeds another almost silently.
But sometimes there is an abrupt change. In that case the affairs of the country are apt to alter much, for good or for evil; sometimes it is ruined, sometimes it becomes more successful, but it hardly ever stays as it was.”
The Lucky Country, featuring the painting of the same title by Albert Tucker
Generational change had salvaged the national project before. The great Australian initiative, when Britain and other outside models of development had been energetically rejected, had emerged in the decades at the turn of the 20th century. This was when a nationalism of mateship represented “the general egalitarian position” that, flecked with Irish anti-English hostility, had formed an explicit contrast to an England of wealth and privilege. To those who had experienced that earlier time, “this present pause would be unbelievable”.
Robert Menzies epitomised everything that had gone wrong. He had absorbed too much of the pro-British obsequiousness of the post-World War I world, notably “the ceremonial clinging to Britain” that was “part of the delusional structure of the people who were running Australia”.
Unable to escape that delusional structure’s grip, subsequent generations had fallen into Menzies’ stride rather than broken it. And while Menzies’ leading rival, Arthur Calwell, could not be accused of being unduly pro-British, he was no better able “to recognise and dramatise the new strategic environment of Australia”.
Fresh start
As a result, “the nation that saw itself in terms of unique hope for a better way of life is becoming reactionary – or its masters are – addicted to the old, conformist” ways of doing things. The inability to cope with change meant the “momentum towards concepts of independent nationhood has slowed down, or stopped”.
There were, however, inklings of a fresh start. Although “still full of mystery”, the generation born during and immediately after the war “seems fresher”. Who knew, “it may be the generation that changes Australia”.
Expressing the egalitarian pragmatism that Horne identified as the quintessential philosophy of the national consciousness, the baby boomers would be socially progressive, tertiary-educated, technocratic pagans and managerially gifted hedonists. As they gained control, the better qualities of the Australian people, sprawling and sunburnt on the nation’s beaches, would finally be able to express themselves unencumbered by the tired leftovers of a bygone era.
Exactly how this revolution would occur was left unclear.
Bathers at Bronte Beach, Sydney, 1964, John William’s Line Zero: Photo-reportage 1958-2003
Horne’s career had to this point been on the political right. He was still editor of Quadrant whenThe Lucky Country came out, a vigorous anti-communist who had run as a Conservative in an English election while living there in the 1950s.
In some ways, he might still have been a conservative – for example, in his identification of the ideals of egalitarianism and fraternity as the essence of a national culture that needed to be preserved.
What is certain, however, is that by the time of The Lucky Country, Horne was no conservator. His conservativism was what he now described as being of the “radical”, even “anarchist”, variety. Enormous social and political renovation was the order of the day and the book’s task, Horne said, was “to produce ideas that may prompt action at some later time” – but that would need a change agent only the future would disclose.
Whitlam the messiah
Given that sense of anticipation, it is unsurprising that Horne drank the Gough Whitlam Kool-Aid deeply and early. When Whitlam replaced Calwell as ALP leader, Horne declared that he “seemed to understand that not only the Labor Party but Australia as a whole needed a psychological reorientation, a new tone and style to make it adaptable in the modern world”.
In April 1973, less than six months after the federal election that brought “the ludicrous Menzies era” to a close, Horne predicted that Whitlam could easily become Australia’s greatest prime minister. Until then, it had begun to seem “as if our sense of nationality was going to remain rather grisly: a fairly second-rate European-type society cutting itself off from its environment and from the mainstreams of the age, trying to keep up its spirits by boasting about its material success, its mines and its quarries”.
Now he predicted a new national anthem within 12 months and a republic within 10 years. The eternal “tomorrow” of utopian political vision had suddenly become, as it were, Monday morning – and Whitlam was its messiah.
Inevitably, having soared to such heights, the deflation when the curtains fell on the new dawn was all the more traumatic. It exploded into visceral anger in the book Horne wrote immediately after the 1975 dismissal.
Whitlam, Horne said in Death of the Lucky Country, had been doubly “assassinated” – once by the governor-general, then again “by his defeat in an illegitimately called election, done in by strong and powerful enemies”.
Gough and singer Little Pattie. Sunday Telegraph
Donald Horne, centre, with union leader John Halfpenny, left, and authors Patrick White (right) and Frank Hardy in the background, leading the singing of Advance Australia Fair at Sydney Town Hall in 1976. They were “maintaining the rage” over the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitlam one year earlier.. Kevin Berry
The elites had had their revenge. Public violence, Horne suggested, would be an entirely understandable response. Horne’s own response was unending, incandescent, outrage.
Mingled with bitterness, that outrage pervades everything Horne wrote after Whitlam’s ignominious end: largely second-rate works that have faded from memory. He had, it turned out, only one book in him – but it was, nonetheless, a book of immense importance, not least because of its tough-minded approach to Asia and its adamant rejection of non-alignment as a bastardised form of neutralism.
To say that is not to ignore the paradox that underpins the book. Horne’s discussion in The Lucky Country of Australia’s British inheritance was rich and nuanced. But as the years passed Britishness became a birth flaw to be denounced with ever greater ferocity.
Yet for all of Horne’s strident nationalism, The Lucky Country is redolent, if not derivative, of the Britain of the mid to late ’50s.
During his stint in Britain, Horne had fully absorbed the new concept of “the establishment”, coined by London columnist Henry Fairlie in 1955 to describe not simply the individuals who held and exerted political power but the whole network of institutions, practices and attitudes through which those in or near power maintained their ascendancy.
By 1960, denouncing the dead hand and crippling impact of a musty, hidebound elite had become the stock in trade of an emerging class of British commentators.
Horne brilliantly transposed that leitmotiv to Australia, just as he transposed those commentators’ biting tone and the advertising-influenced writing style of the new American journalism.
A front-page story pointing readers to an extract ‘The Lucky Country’ published in the Australian; the next day, on December 2, 1964.
But jingles are no substitute for deep analysis – and The Lucky Country’s marvellous hits come amid some disastrous misses.
No miss weighs more greatly, or has had more deleterious consequences, than Horne’s easy, airy dismissal of the extraordinary economic advance Australia had experienced since the ’40s. To describe that achievement as due to blind luck is simply absurd.
It was, in fact, achieved in the face of a world economy profoundly and increasingly adverse to primary exporters, who had to deal with plunging commodity prices, as well as the relatively slow growth, and chronic balance of payments problems, of Britain, which was still Australia’s crucial export market.
That Australia managed to not merely cope with that environment but grow rapidly was no gift of nature: it reflected the remarkable adjustment capability of its primary exporters, who, as well as turning to Asia’s emerging markets, reduced their costs more rapidly than prices were falling.
And it was the adaptiveness of its primary exporters, along with the entrepreneurship of towering giants such as Lang Hancock and Arvi Parbo, that set the foundations for the mining booms Horne derided as just due to luck.
Party’s over: Bronte Beach, Boxing Day 2024. Picture: NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone
The belief that Australia’s prosperity was the result of good fortune rather than entrepreneurship and aspiration became one of the left’s key illusions. It framed Whitlam’s disastrous economic policies, which assumed the Australian economy was “indestructible”; it has recurred in recent years as successive Labor governments have dismissed mining, low-cost energy and agriculture as mere residues of earlier ages. The blind luck thesis had a natural appeal to the new elites who, in the decades after Whitlam’s fall, committed themselves to the fundamental remaking of Australia.
So did the overestimate of the merits of technocratic bureaucracy and the underestimate of the merits of Australian traditions that permeates Horne’s work. In that respect, Horne was right: the baby boomer generation changed Australia. And it was armed with the Whitlam-Horne vision that its leading scions became the new establishment.
By the late ’80s this new order had almost entirely replaced Horne’s reviled old second-rate elites, taking the commanding heights of cultural institutions and regulatory bodies, as well as dominating acceptable political discourse.
Undoubtedly a classic
Under first the boomers, and then their children’s generation, the longstanding policies, practices, norms and pronouns that had framed Australian life were upended, reversed, junked, repudiated.
In 1964, Horne declared that ordinary Australian people were not the problem: the elites were. Sixty years later that seems truer than at any other time in Australian history, but the elites in question are those whom Horne heralded and championed.
The great irony, though, is that the ordinary suburban Australians Horne brought to the forefront of national conversation have proven the immovable bulwark against which those new elites have collided, as they repeatedly rejected the new establishment’s wishes and projects.
Horne himself may not have appreciated this irony. But he can claim the credit for foretelling the two great protagonists in the national drama that continues to play itself out in the public square.
In the end, it is the hallmark of a classic that it is a book that can be read in a slightly or very different way by each generation, always having something new to say. Set against that test, The Lucky Country is undoubtedly a classic.
For all of its shortcuts and grievous errors, its insights still dazzle, no matter how often they are read or reread. So does its freshness, its sense of humour and perhaps most of all, its eager hopefulness and sense of aspiration.
On this joint birthday of The Lucky Country and of the newspaper that, 60 years ago, launched its career, renewing that spirit remains a task worthy of giants.
Henry Ergas is a columnist with The Australian. Alex McDermott is an independent historian.
Australia’s fortune was never dumb luck
Nick Bryant, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 2024
Sixty summers ago, thousands of Australians were devouring a book published in the lead-up to Christmas which became an instant Aussie classic. Unveiled in December 1964, Donald Horne’s masterwork, The Lucky Country, soon became postwar Australia’s most intellectually influential book. When I first came to live here almost 20 years ago, I consumed it in one gulp, flying, fittingly enough, from Sydney to Perth. Nothing I had ever read so brilliantly encapsulated the vast and confounding continent down below.
Not only did his polemic meet the moment – its first print run sold out in less than a fortnight – in many ways it stood the test of time. Just consider the opening riff, which finds Horne, whisky in hand, on the terrace of a hotel in Hong Kong, considering the regional implications of China: “Australia’s problem is that it now exists in a new and dangerous power situation and its people and policies are not properly re-oriented towards the fact.” He could be describing this very instant.
If Horne had received royalties for every time his most quotable line was re-quoted – “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck” – his bank balance would have rivalled his analytical clout. But other Horneian bon mots were also worthy of repetition. “Many of the nation’s affairs are conducted by racketeers of the mediocre,” he wrote, in another skewering putdown. No wonder the book remains such a literary landmark.
Yet while the prose was scintillating and the thinking of the highest order, Horne had not produced a biblical text: sacred words by which we should continue to live our national intellectual life, a work that was doctrinal and everlasting.
Just as the title has been misappropriated – The Lucky Country was meant sardonically, of course – its subtitle has been mislaid: Australia in the Sixties. Though many insights proved prescient and perennial, Horne was describing a different land. Just consider that superlative line about second-rate politicians, by which Horne meant the then-prime minister Robert Menzies and the then-Labor leader Arthur Calwell. Though it continued to resonate strongly in the ’60s, as Menzies was followed by a succession of unremarkable prime ministers – Harold Holt, John McEwen, John Gorton and William McMahon – this blanket condemnation did not apply to the ’70s, ‘80s or ’90s. Whatever you think of their politics, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard were not second-rate leaders.
Like his long-forgotten subtitle, the words Horne penned after his famous political sledge also need rescuing from obscurity. Not only were politicians second-rate, he said, but the country “lives on other people’s ideas”. In other words, it was second-hand. As he explained in the mid-1970s, “I had in my mind the idea of Australia as a derived society … In the lucky style, we have never ‘earned’ our democracy. We simply went along with some British habits”.
At first glance, Canberra seemed to prove this aphorism. The chambers of the old Parliament House looked like a loving recreation of the Palace of Westminster. But study more closely the history of Australian democracy, and a different story emerges. Rather than being slavishly imitative, Australia has a long history of democratic innovation. It pioneered the secret ballot, female enfranchisement, preferential voting and another essential safeguard against modern-day polarisation: compulsory voting. The history of Australia’s democracy is as much singular as derivative. It speaks of Australian exceptionalism and subverts Horne’s overarching thesis that the country was lazily derivative.
Even more problematic than Horne’s original thesis is the bastardised version of his thesis, which sees Australia as being unusually lucky because it was essentially a mine and paddock with glorious views. “I didn’t mean that it had a lot of material resources,” Horne was at pains to point out in the mid-70s. Yet, it’s precisely this interpretation that continues to exert such a vice-like grip on national thinking. What makes this false rendition so crippling and self-belittling is that it underestimates the extent to which Australia has made its own luck.
For much of the past half-century, however, that is precisely what has happened. The reform era of the Hawke, Keating and Howard years created an Australian model, blending government regulation, free enterprise and social welfare provisions such as Medicare, which underpinned decades of uninterpreted economic growth. Australia survived both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the dot com recession at the turn of the century before the resources boom kicked in. Other countries have tried to decipher the success of the “wonder Down Under” economy, which is based as much on smart policy settings, such as the Four Pillar banking structure, as coal and iron ore.
In a complete upending of Horne’s thesis, Britain has regularly pilfered Australian ideas – from Tony Blair mimicking Hawke and Keating’s “Third Way” to the Conservatives replicating Howard’s “Pacific Solution”. The Albanese government’s social media ban for children below the age of 16 is being closely monitored by other countries. Whether it’s bans on cigarette advertising or forcing tech giants to pay news organisations for access to their journalism, Australia is looked upon globally as a laboratory of reform. The historian Geoffrey Blainey was onto something when he described Australia as “one of the most experimental, and one of the most exceptionalist, countries in the history of the modern world”.
For sure, Australia can too easily succumb to the influence of others. The Trumpification of Australian conservative politics offers a timely case in point. But this is not a country, as Horne put it 60 years ago, that simply “lives off other people’s ideas”. Far from it. Indeed, as well as the 60th anniversary of Horne’s opus, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking work that made solar a viable source of renewable energy. It was pioneered at the University of NSW by one of Australia’s unsung heroes, Professor Martin Green.
The Lucky Country is not the only book from that era that has shaped Australia’s modern-day sense of itself. Published two years later, Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance reinforced the sense of geographic remoteness and geopolitical irrelevance. These two precepts have become increasingly obsolete, as the locus of the world has shifted from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, but also proven surprisingly obdurate.
Cultural-cringe thinking, that “disease of the Australian mind” identified by A. A. Phillips in his 1950 Meanjin essay, also feels redundant. Far more significant a force is Australia’s cultural clout, as demonstrated this year by the First Nations artist Archie Moore, who became the first Australian to win the coveted Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale.
Another overly influential work, Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness, which was published in 1960, also feels outdated at a time when local architects are winning such global acclaim with their emphatically Australian aesthetic. The 2024 World Building of the Year, for example, is a public school in Sydney’s inner city designed by the local firm FJC Studio.
Too much of Australia’s postwar intellectual architecture relies on design work from a bygone age. The problem, moreover, is compounded by mutual reinforcement. Lucky Country thinking, Tyranny of Distance thinking and Cultural Cringe thinking have created a superstructure of national self-deprecation.
The good news is that applying a wrecking ball to this kind of antique thinking creates a knock-on effect. Pillars start collapsing on each other. Edifices crumble. Consider this passage penned 20 years ago by Clive James: “When my generation of expatriates went sailing to adventure, most of us believed that what we were leaving behind was a political backwater. In fact, it was one of the most highly developed liberal democracies on Earth, a fitting framework for the cultural expansion that has since made it the envy of nations many times its size.”
As James shows here, when you demolish one shibboleth – the idea that the polity is second rate – others come tumbling down.
Australia’s self-belittling streak has its uses. It requires a leap of imagination to see a Trump-like demagogue ever emerging here, given the enduring power of the tall-poppy syndrome and the scything down of puffed-up poseurs who take themselves too seriously.
The problem is that tall-poppy thinking is too often applied to the country as a whole. That, I would suggest, is a product of how Horne’s The Lucky Country still dominates the intellectual landscape. It is a brilliant book, but 60 years after its publication, it’s one that Australia mistakenly takes too seriously.
Donald Horne, centre, with union leader John Halfpenny, left, and authors Patrick White (right) and Frank Hardy in the background, leading the singing of Advance Australia Fair at Sydney Town Hall in 1976. They were “maintaining the rage” over the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitlam one year earlier.Kevin Berry
Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
You won’t have to worry anymore When you hear the cry for home Van Morrison
Alec Derwent Hope (21 July 1907 – 13 July 2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant, and also, a critic, teacher and academic: He ended his career as Professor of English at the Australian National University, Canberra. He was referred to in an American journal as “the 20th century’s greatest 18th-century poet”.
Man Friday, published in 1958, is actually set in those faraway days of Georgian England. It begins where English novelist and journalist Daniel Defoe leaves off his 1719 tale of the iconic castaway Robinson Crusoe. Readers will recall that Crusoe was shipwrecked and subsequently spent 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. To refresh memories, there is a 200 word synopsis at the end of this post.
Hope takes up the story of Crusoe’s companion and servant Friday after he is brought by his “master” and sole companion to live in England. The completely alien culture that Friday, now a stranger in a strange land, encounters on this new “desert island” requires a huge and disturbing recalibration of his temporal, cultural and spiritual compass. He gradually arrives at an acceptance of the way of life that has been imposed upon him by circumstance.
His transformation and quiet resignation into an upper-class servant and his subsequent marriage and children take him farther and farther away from his memories and encase him within an artificial persona – until the day he accompanies Crusoe to an English sea port and hears the ocean’s beckoning roar for the first time in many years. The song of the ocean, the rush of memory, and Friday’s response to the call of the sea crystalizing in the poem’s ending.
It is a remarkably imaginative work juxtaposing Friday’s former life on an idyllic “island in the sun” (to quote the late Harry Belafonte’s lovely rhapsody’) to the stitched-up, hung-up, and in his perception, confined world of polite Georgian society. It is also captivating insofar it employs the sea as an extended metaphor (a device that I myself have used in poems and songs – see the Sound Cloud audio clips at the end of this post).
The sea runs like a leitmotif throughout the poem even when it is not mentioned explicitly. It has multiple associations: journeys by sea, separation and exile, isolation and loneliness, and the idea of home as an anchor, a goal, a safe haven, and as a longing. AD Hope further infuses it with the cultural differences and divisions, of social and spiritual barriers, of acclimatisation and assimilation of a kind. And in the end, an atavistic crying for home.
Saved, at long last through Him whose power to save Kept from the walking, as the watery grave, Crusoe returned to England and his kind, Proof that an unimaginative mind And sober industry and common sense May supplement the work of Providence. He, no less providential and no less Inscrutably resolved to save and bless, Eager to share his fortune with the weak And faithful servants whom he taught to speak, By all his years of exile undeterred, Took into exile Friday and the bird.
The bird no doubt was well enough content. She had her corn – what matter where she went? Except when once a week he walked to church, She had her master’s shoulder as a perch. She shared the notice of the crowds he drew Who praised her language and her plumage too, And like a rational female could be gay On admiration and three meals a day.
But Friday the Dark Caribbean Man, Picture of his situation if you can: The gentle savage, taught to speak and pray On England’s Desert Island cast away, No God like Crusoe is issuing from his cave Comes with his thunder-stick to slay and save; Instead from caves of stone, as thick as trees, More dreadful than ten thousand savages, In their strange clothes and monstrous mats of hair, The pale-eyed English swarm to joke and stare With endless questions round him crowd and press, Curious to see and touch his loneliness. Unlike his master Crusoe long before, Crawling half drowned upon the desolate shore, Mere ingenuity useless in his need, No wreck supplies him biscuits, nails and seed, No fort to builds, no call to bake, to brew, Make pots and pipkins, cobble coat and shoe, Gather his rice and milk his goats and rise Daily to some absorbing enterprise.
And yet no less than Crusoe so he must find Some shelter for the solitary mind; Some daily occupation to contrive To warm his wits and keep the heart alive; Protect among the cultured, if he can, The “noble savage” and the “natural man”. As Crusoe made his clothes, so he no less Must labour to invent his nakedness And, lest their alien customs without trace Absorb him, tell the legends of his race Each night aloud in the soft native tongue That filled his world when, bare and brown and young, His brown, bare mother held him to her breast, Then say his English prayers and sink to rest. And each day waking in his English sheets, Hearing the wagons in the cobble streets, The morning bells, the clatter and cries of trade, He must recall, within their palisade, The sleeping cabins in the tropic dawn, The wrapt leaf-breathing silence, and the yawn Of naked children as they wait and drowse, The women chattering around their fires, the prows Of wet canoes nosing the still lagoon; At each meal, handling alien fork and spoon, Remember the spice mess of yam and fish And the brown fingers meeting in the dish: Remember too those island feasts, the sweet Blood frenzy and the taste of human meat.
He piled memories against his need; In vain! for still he found the past recede Try as he would, recall, relieve rehearse, The cloudy images would still disperse., Till as in dreams, the island world hecknew Confounded the fantastic with the true While England, less unreal day by day, The cannibal Island ate his past away. But for the brooding eye, the swarthy skin, Witness to the Natural Man within, Year following year, by inches, as they ran Transformed the savage to an English man Brushed, barbered, hatted, trousered and baptised, He looked, if not completely civilised, What came increasingly to be the case: An upper servant, conscious of his place, Friendly but not familiar in address And prompt to please, without obsequiousness Adept to dress , to shave, to carve, to pour And skilled to open or refuse the door, To keep on terms with housekeeper and cook, But quell maids and footman with a look. And now his master, thoughtful for his need, Bought him a wife and gave him leave to breed. A fine mulatto, once a ladies maid, She thought herself superior to Trade And, reared on a Plantation, much too good for a low native Indian from the wood; Yet they contrived at last to rub along For he was strong and kind, and she was young And soon a father, then a family man Friday took root in England and began To be well thought of in the little town, And quoted in discussions at The Crown Whether the Funds would fall, the French would treat Or the new ministry could hold its seat For though he seldom spoke, the rumour ran The master had no secrets from his man And Crusoe’s ventures prospered so, in short, It was concluded he had friends at Court.
Yet, as the years of exile came and went, Though first he was he grew resigned and then content, Had you observed him close, you might surprise A stranger looking through the servant’s eyes. Some colouring of speech , some glint of pride, Not born of hope, for hope had long since had died, Not even desire, scarce memory at last Preserved that stubborn vestige of the past.
It happened once that man and master made A trip together on affairs of trade; A ship reported founding in the Down Brought them to visit several seaport towns. At one of these great Yarmouth or Kings Lynn, Their business done, they baited at an inn, And in the night were haunted by the roar Of a wild wind and tide against the shore. Crusoe soon slept again but Friday lay Awake and listening till the dawn of day. For the first time in all his exiled years The thunder of the ocean filled his ears; And that tremendous voice so long unheard Released and filled and drew him till he stirred And left the house and passed the town, to reach At last the dunes and rocks and open beach: Pale bare and gleaming in the break of day A sweep of new-washed sand around the bay, and spindrift arriving up the bluffs like smoke As the long combers reared their crests and broke. There, in the sand beside him, Friday saw A single naked footprint on the shore His heart stood still, for as he stared, he knew The foot made it never had worn shoe And, at glance, that no such walker could Have been a man of European blood. From such a footprint once he could describe If not the owner’s name, at least his tribe, And tell his purpose as men read a face And still his skill sufficed to know the race; For this for this was such a print as long ago He too had made and taught his eyes to know. There could be no mistake. A while he stood Staring at that great German Ocean’s flood; And suddenly he saw those shores again Where Orinoco flows into the main, And, stunned with an incredible surmise, Heard it his native tongue once more the cries Of spirits silent now for many a day; And all his years of exile fell away.
The sun was nearly to the height before Crusoe arrived hallowing at the shore, Followed the footprints to the beach and found The clothes and shoes and thought his servant drowned Much grieved he sought saw him up and down the bay But never guessed, when later in the day They found the body drifting in the foam, That Friday had been rescued and gone home.
Robinson Crusoe is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe (1660- 1731. an English novelist, journalist, merchant, pamphleteer and spy. First published on 25 April 1719, it is claimed to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations.
Written with a combination of epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character (born Robinson Kreutznaer) after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called “Más a Tierra” (now part of Chile) which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.
The first edition credited the work’s protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and that the book was a non-fiction travelogue.Despite its simple narrative style, Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world and is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre. Some allege it is a contender for the first English novel.
It tells the story of one Robinson Crusoe, a young and impulsive wanderer who, having his defied his parents, ran away to sea.
He was rescued by a Portuguese ship and started a new adventure. He landed in Brazil, and, after some time, he became the owner of a sugar plantation. Hoping to increase his wealth by buying slaves, he aligned himself with other planters and undertook a trip to Africa in order to bring back a shipload of slaves. After surviving a storm, Crusoe and the others were shipwrecked. He was thrown upon shore only to discover that he was the sole survivor of the wreck.
Crusoe made immediate plans for food, and then shelter, to protect himself from wild animals. He brought as many things as possible from the wrecked ship, things that would be useful later to him. In addition, he began to develop talents that he had never used in order to provide himself with necessities. Cut off from the company of men, he began to communicate with God, thus beginning the first part of his religious conversion. To keep his sanity and to entertain himself, he began a journal. In the journal, he recorded every task that he performed each day since he had been marooned.
As time passed, Crusoe became a skilled craftsman, able to construct many useful things, and thus furnished himself with diverse comforts. He also learned about farming, as a result of some seeds which he brought with him. An illness prompted some prophetic dreams, and Crusoe began to reappraise his duty to God. Crusoe explored his island and discovered another part of the island much richer and more fertile, and he built a summer home there.
One of the first tasks he undertook was to build himself a canoe in case an escape became possible, but the canoe was too heavy to get to the water. He then constructed a small boat and journeyed around the island. Crusoe reflected on his earlier, wicked life, disobeying his parents, and wondered if it might be related to his isolation on this island.
After spending about fifteen years on the island, Crusoe found a man’s naked footprint, and he was sorely beset by apprehensions, which kept him awake many nights. He considered many possibilities to account for the footprint and he began to take extra precautions against a possible intruder. Sometime later, Crusoe was horrified to find human bones scattered about the shore, evidently the remains of a savage feast. He was plagued again with new fears. He explored the nature of cannibalism and debated his right to interfere with the customs of another race.
Crusoe was cautious for several years, but encountered nothing more to alarm him. He found a cave, which he used as a storage room, and in December of the same year, he spied cannibals sitting around a campfire. He did not see them again for quite some time.
Later, Crusoe saw a ship in distress, but everyone was already drowned on the ship and Crusoe remained companionless. However, he was able to take many provisions from this newly wrecked ship. Sometime later, cannibals landed on the island and a victim escaped. Crusoe saved his life, named him Friday, and taught him English. Friday soon became Crusoe’s humble and devoted slave.
Crusoe and Friday made plans to leave the island and, accordingly, they built another boat. Crusoe also undertook Friday’s religious education, converting the savage into a Protestant. Their voyage was postponed due to the return of the savages. This time it was necessary to attack the cannibals in order to save two prisoners since one was a white man. The white man was a Spaniard and the other was Friday’s father. Later the four of them planned a voyage to the mainland to rescue sixteen compatriots of the Spaniard. First, however, they built up their food supply to assure enough food for the extra people. Crusoe and Friday agreed to wait on the island while the Spaniard and Friday’s father brought back the other men.
A week later, they spied a ship but they quickly learned that there had been a mutiny on board. By devious means, Crusoe and Friday rescued the captain and two other men, and after much scheming, regained control of the ship. The grateful captain gave Crusoe many gifts and took him and Friday back to England. Some of the rebel crewmen were left marooned on the island.
Crusoe returned to England and found that in his absence he had become a wealthy man. After going to Lisbon to handle some of his affairs, Crusoe began an overland journey back to England. Crusoe and his company encountered many hardships in crossing the mountains, but they finally arrived safely in England. Crusoe sold his plantation in Brazil for a good price, married, and had three children. Finally, however, he was persuaded to go on yet another voyage, and he visited his old island, where there were promises of new adventures to be found in a later account.
In That Howling Infinite 