Australiana

A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

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.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Ottoman Redux – an alternative history and The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye 

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. Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.

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, the famous English poet, wearing traditional Albanian attire. It captures his fascination with the Balkans and his travels, marking a moment of cultural exchange in his life. Picture: Alamy

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

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

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.

Continue reading →

“High above the dawn is waiting” … the unlikely origin of a pop song

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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 Seekers were 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 Columbine rather 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.

Read more about music in In That Howling Infinite in Soul Food – Music and Musicians

Stenka Razin – A Cossack who scared the tsar

Old Seekers and New


The Carnival is Over 

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.

The continuing battle for Australia’s history

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

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 Wars encapsulates 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. Picture: Ross Swanborough

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.

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.

The Killing Of History by Keith WindschuttleThe Fabrication of Aboriginal History by Keith Windschuttle

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

Peter Stanley

Keith Windschuttle

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

Peter Sutton

James Boyce

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

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.

Let Stalk Strine – a lexicon of Australian as it was once spoken (maybe)

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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

The way we were … reevaluating The Lucky Country sixty years on

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

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.

In a piece I wrote five years ago, How the “Lucky Country” lost its mojo. I quoted author and onetime publisher Steve Harris:

“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”.

© Paul Hemphill 2025. All rights reserved

Sixty years on from Donald Horne’s instant classic, has The Lucky Country run out of luck?

Has a nation of gamblers with a disdain for ‘theory’ ridden its luck for too long?
Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott, The Australian, 28 December 2024
Has a nation of gamblers with a disdain for ‘theory’ ridden its luck for too long?

“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”.

Join the Lucky Ones: Page 11 from The Australian newspaper on December 2, 1964 featuring an extract of Donald Horne's 'The Lucky Country'

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”.

All the way with LBJ: The first Australian visit by a US President. United States President Lyndon B Johnson greets the crowd in Swanston Street, Melbourne. Picture: Ken Wheeler

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: the author constantly fretted that his seminal book’s title had been misunderstood and misused.

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.”

Modern classic: Cover of The Lucky Country, featuring the painting of the same title by Albert Tucker. Picture: Supplied

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, from John William's new book Line Zero: Photo-reportage 1958-2003. Picture: Supplied

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”.

In Gough we trust: Horne remained incandescent with rage long after the end of the Whitlam experiment. PIcture: Sunday Telegraph

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 from Donald Horne's 'The Lucky Country' to be published in the Australian; the next day, on December 2, 1964.

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

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.

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.

Welcome to Country, a symbol of mutual respect

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

We aknowledge the Gumbaynggirr People, the traditional custodians of the Land we are standing upon, and the Land from the Tablelands to the sea; and who have been here for over sixty-five thousand years. We also pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging of the Gumbaynggirr nation and to other Aboriginal and First Nation people present.

Today, at public gatherings and meetings, at carnivals and ceremonials, at conferences and conventions, many of us recognize and acknowledge our first peoples as the traditional owners of this land and acknowledge elders past, present and future.

Last year, among Murdoch’s myrmidons and his stablemates on Foxtel’s Sky after Dark, Chris Kenny was the only advocate for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

In the an opinion piece republished below, he writes: “In my view they have become a welcome and useful addition to our national culture. However, there is no reason they should be treated as some sacred rite, beyond criticism or even a laugh … In recent weeks there has been more anger and outrage rather than laughter over welcomes to country, and much of it is entirely unreasonable. It is clear some Australians resent them; we often hear people completely misconstrue the sentiment by declaring they do not want to be “welcomed to their own country”.

On the first anniversary of the unsuccessful Voice referendum, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that leading No campaign spokesperson Nyunggai Warren Mundine had said that debate on the Voice provoked a more profound national discussion about whether Indigenous people should have what he termed “special rights”. He says progressives and conservatives he spoke to during the campaign wanted practical improvements on issues such as education but were sick of gestures such as welcome to country ceremonies. “People like the concept but it goes overboard when it is every meeting at work and every plane when you land. It’s like a new religion, like the new saying of grace before meals. The Yes people haven’t realised they are actually turning people against them by overkill.”

Much of the antagonism towards Welcome to Country has indeed been fuelled by the divisive hangover of the referendum. In its aftermath, there was talk among some right-wing commentators, including former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott, and organizations like Advance Australia, that the time had come to see off the irritatingly woke and ubiquitous welcomes and acknowledgements. The “silent majority” of Australians, they claimed, had made their view known with the resounding rejection of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The attacks have expanded and amplified on talkback radio and by some of Kenny’s colleagues on Sky News (particularly the opinionated and misanthropic swamp creatures of Sky After Dark) which had run a news-stream dedicated to promoting the No case.

But the reality is that these expectations have not been realized and that regardless of the unfortunate outcome of the referendum of October 14th, 2023, the Welcome to Country is alive and well among Australians of goodwill throughout our wide land.

I concur with what Kenny writes, including his admonition that the ritual ought not be overdone and inappropriate, such as in events wherein a local Indigenous representative offers an official welcome to country, and then every speaker feels the need to share their own version of recognition in well-intentioned but redundant virtue-signalling.

There are also instances where welcomes and acknowledgements can be too political and aggressive. Declaring that “sovereignty was never ceded”, or demanding that we defer to a particular culture can be interpreted as is an unwelcome and uncomfortable imposition and is not the reason people may have turned up to a particular event.

Back in July 2022, when The Voice was a hopeful prospect, the ABC’s Q&A programme was hosted by the indigenous Garma Festival in the Northern Territory. Its MC, Stan Grant, journalist, writer, academic and a Wiradjuri man, defined sovereignty in the context of the indigenous Voice to Parliament and the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a spiritual concept. White folk associate it with powers and thrones, with control over states and nations and their citizens, with ownership, particularly of territory, of land, of real estate. Country, as Kenny concludes in his opinion piece, does not mean a sovereign nation, but rather, the traditional lands of indigenous people – just as these routinely talk about going back to their traditional family regions as being “on country”.

To some Welcome to Country  might be a “woke” imposition, but to many others, it is a mark of respect and an acknowledgment of our history. To borrow from Mark Twain, reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

I’m quite relaxed  and comfortable about that …

For more in In That Howling Infinite on on Indigenous Australians and The Voice Referendum, see:

Welcomes to country are a mark of mutual respect

Chris Kenny, The Australia, September 20, 2024.
Brendan Kerin gave a brilliantly welcoming and informative speech prior to the GWS Giants and Brisbane Lions game at Sydney Olympic Park. Picture: Fox Sports

Brendan Kerin gives a Welcome to Country at Sydney Olympic Park.  Fox Sports

Welcomes to country and recognitions of traditional owners have rapidly become ubiquitous, if not universally embraced. They continue to spark unnecessary controversy and acrimony.

In my view they have become a welcome and useful addition to our national culture. However, there is no reason they should be treated as some sacred rite, beyond criticism or even a laugh.

Early on, I was sceptical and remember two decades ago, when working for then foreign minister Alexander Downer, we were at a function at the Adelaide Convention Centre, built over the city’s main railway station, and Downer was on stage waiting to speak when then Democrats senator Natasha Stott-Despoja began her remarks by recognising the “traditional owners”. It was quite a novel and woke gesture at the time, and I texted Downer asking why we needed to recognise the South Australian railways?

Boom Tish! The private quip was just to see the amusement on Downer’s face, and I wasn’t dis­appointed.

In recent weeks there has been more anger and outrage rather than laughter over welcomes to country, and much of it is entirely unreasonable. It is clear some Australians resent them; we often hear people completely misconstrue the sentiment by declaring they do not want to be “welcomed to their own country”.

Kenny acknowledges that there were rational and reasonable reasons to oppose the referendum, but “it was clear then and is perhaps even more obvious now that a sizeable minority voted no because they did not want to hear from their Indigenous compatriots again”.

A welcome to country speech is made ahead of the International Test Match between the Wallabies and Georgia at Allianz Stadium in Sydney in July. Picture: Getty

 Welcome to country speech of the International Test Match between the Wallabies and Georgia at Allianz Stadium in Sydney in July. Getty

Much of this antagonism has been fueled by the divisive hangover from the unsuccessful voice referendum. During that debate, Marcia Langton said that if the no vote prevailed it might be difficult for Indigenous elders to accept invitations to provide welcomes to country.

This understandably emotional reflection has been twisted into a promise to abandon the ceremonies if the referendum failed and thrown back at Professor Langton and Indigenous Australians ever since, with demands for the promise to be honoured. As a voice advocate, I was at pains to point out there were rational and reasonable reasons to oppose the referendum, but it was clear then and is perhaps even more obvious now that a sizeable minority voted no because they did not want to hear from their Indigenous compatriots again.

“Controversial Welcome to Country at AFL semi-final sparks bitter backlash,” screamed the Daily Mail this week after Brendan Kerin performed the ceremony at the GWS Giants versus Brisbane Lions match at Homebush. The story quoted social media posts saying: “What a disgrace, referring to BC as Before Cook and then lecturing everyone” and “Woke Joke. Australia has fallen.”

Others pointed out, in a chippy display, that there would be no AFL if Captain Cook had not voyaged to Australia. Our nation’s history is not a zero-sum equation.

The attacks were expanded and amplified on talkback radio and by some of my colleagues on Sky News. In my view, Kerin’s speech was brilliantly welcoming and informative, and genuinely aimed at explaining why these ceremonies are not about welcoming people to Australia.

Kerin said the ceremony had existed for 250,000 years BC, which he explained as “Before Cook” drawing laughs from the crowd. Sure, the figure he used was ridiculous (homo sapiens are only known to have existed for 200,000 years) but let us call that poetic license – his point was that welcome to country ceremonies existed in ancient Indigenous cultures as a way for members of one tribe or language group to gain permission to traverse or visit the country of another group.

“Within Australia we have many Aboriginal lands, and we refer to our lands as ‘country’,” Kerin said. “So it’s always a welcome to the lands you’ve gathered on – a welcome to country is not a ceremony we’ve invented to cater for white people.”

That was a terrific and generous explainer. Country does not mean a sovereign nation but the lands of that people – just as Indigenous people routinely talk about going back to their traditional family regions as being “on country”.

Dancers perform during the welcome to country before the friendly between AC Milan and AS Roma in Perth in May. Picture: Getty

Dancers perform during the welcome to country before the friendly between AC Milan and AS Roma in Perth in May. Getty

Major sporting events are occasions when these ceremonies are most appropriate; the crowd was about to enjoy a terrific game of a sport Indigenous Australians love, claim some role in creating, and excel at. And Kerin was there to welcome people, not to their nation, but to that particular region, letting them know about the ­cultural history of that place, and inviting them to have a wonderful night. It astounds me that anyone could find this anything but up­lifting, adding to the richness of the experience.

Sometimes welcomes to country are overdone and inappropriate. I have been to events where they open proceedings with a local Indigenous representative doing an official welcome to country, but then every speaker feels the need to share their own version of recognition, as if they have to tick it off for fear of being seen to boycott the gesture.

Even online meetings can ­labour under the same endless ­virtue-signalling. This sort of stuff is over the top and unnecessary, and in the end, it must be counterproductive because it generates eye-rolling or open resistance.

There are also instances where welcomes to country can be too political and aggressive. Telling us that sovereignty was never ceded, or demanding that we defer to a particular culture, is not welcoming. Especially at sporting, artistic or entertainment events, any sort of political lecturing is an unwelcome imposition – it is not the reason people have turned up.

Ancient tribal practices about visiting other tribal lands were very different and varied across the continent, so it is true that the modern welcome to country model has only been around for about 40 years. This does not delegitimise it; rather it correctly identifies it as a modern cultural evolution to help bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians together.

In these pages last month, Melbourne barristers Lana Collaris and Georgina Schoff aired a spirited legal debate about whether a welcome to country is appropriate for law council meetings. My view is that it is hardly necessary in such a context.

More to the point, if people try to invest some legal weight to the custom – with references to “nationhood” and “sovereignty” – they will kill it off. I too object to the “first nations” terminology which has been imported from the US and is heavily politicised.

Welcomes to country work best and will survive best if we keep ­politics and legality right out of it. At heart, it is simply about people sharing their histories and offering a hand of friendship.

Just like toasts at birthday parties or speeches at weddings, these things are sometimes over-cooked or strike the wrong chord. Other times they just seem completely inappropriate and out of place – last year I heard a recorded welcome to country on a bus from Melbourne’s Spencer Street station to Tullamarine.

But conducted properly at the right events, this practice enriches all of us and furthers reconciliation. As I travel around Australia I find it fascinating to know which Aboriginal group covers which territory, and it is terrific that children learn this at school.

That does not mean that we need to change the names of our cities or places, and it does not mean that schools should send kids on a guilt trip. However, it does mean we can have a richer sense of our history, one that stretches at least 40,000 years BC.

When I have travelled in Ireland, for instance, I have wanted to know which county I am in and learn a little about its unique history, likewise the states of the US. And in America I have wanted to know a little about the indigenous groups, the Sioux or Lakota, Cherokee, Cheyenne and Navajo, their similarities, differences, battles, and their impact on contemporary events.

Why would we not want to know about all this in our own cities and states, in our own country? Sure, there are Indigenous activists who run extreme agendas, just as there are racist extremists who have abhorrent attitudes towards Indigenous people, but surely the overwhelming majority of us want to know each other, help each other, and respect each other.

It is that simple. Welcomes to country are a mark of mutual ­respect, and a touchstone for deeper understanding. I am hopeful and confident they will be part of our national culture for centuries to come

The many lives of an unsung Anzac hero

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Once upon a war

Back in the last century, before ANZAC Day became the secular Christmas that it has become, before marketing people and populist politicians saw its commercial and political potential, before the fatal shore became a crowded place of annual pilgrimage, my Turkish friend, the late Naim Mehmet Turfan, gave me a grainy picture of a Turkish soldier at Gelibolu carrying a large howitzer shell on his back. Then there was this great film by Australian director Peter Weir, starring young Mel Gibson and Mark Lee. There were these images of small boats approaching a dark and alien shore, of Light Horsemen sadly farewelling their Walers as they embarked as infantry, and of the doomed Colonel Barton humming along to a gramophone recording of Bizet’s beautiful duet from The Pearl Fishers, ‘Au fond du temple saint’ before joining his men in the forlorn hope of The Nek …

At the heart of the Anzac Day remembrance is the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ role the Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16, Winston Churchill’s grandiose and ill-conceived plan to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war by seizing the strategic strait between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, thereby threatening Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. It was a military failure. From the initial seaborne assault to the evacuation, it lasted eight months and cost 114,000 lives with 230,000 wounded.

In 1915, Australians greeted the landings at Gallipoli with unbridled enthusiasm as a nation-making event. But it wasn’t long before they were counting the dreadful cost. More than 8000 Australians died during the Gallipoli campaign. As a loyal member of the British Empire, Australia eventually sent 330,000 men overseas to fight for the King. Volunteers all, not all of them white men – despite the authorities’ policy of recruiting only Australians of Anglo-Celtic stock, their ranks included many indigenous, Chinese and others. By the time the war ended in 1918, 60,000 of them were dead. As the late historian Ken Inglis once pointed out: “If we count as family a person’s parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, then every second Australian family was bereaved by the war.

Gallipoli is cited as the crucible of Australian nationhood, but the Anzacs’ part in the doomed campaign was but a sideshow of the wider campaign. Although it is celebrated in Australian song and story, it was the Ottomans’ most significant victory in the war that was to destroy the seven-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire secure the reputation of its most successful general Mustafa Kemal, who as Ataturk, became the founder of modern Turkey.

Some thirty-four thousand British soldiers died on the peninsula, including 3,400 Irishmen who are remembered In The Foggy Dew, one of the most lyrical and poignant of the Irish rebel songs: Right proudly high over Dublin town, they hung out the flag of war. ‘Twas better to die ‘neath that Irish sky than at Suvla or at Sud el Bar…Twas England bade our Wild Geese go that small nations might be free, But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves or the fringe of the grey North Sea.

Ten thousand Frenchmen perished too, many of these being “colonial” troops from West and North Africa. Australia lost near on ten thousand and New Zealand three. Some 1,400 Indian soldiers perished for the King Emperor. Fifty seven thousand allied soldiers died, and seventy five thousand were wounded. The Ottoman army lost fifty seven thousand men, and one hundred and seven thousand were wounded (although these figures are probably much higher). An overlooked fact is that some two thirds of the “Turkish” solders in Kemal’s division were actually Arabs from present day Syrian and Palestine. Gallipoli was indeed a multicultural microcosm of a world at war.

Whilst the flower of antipodean youth is said to have perished on Gallipoli’s fatal shore, this was just the overture. Anzac troops were dispatched to the Western Front, and between 1919 and 1918, 45,000 Aussies died there and 124,000 were wounded.

Once upon a war, the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915-16 was a sideshow to the bigger theatres of the Eastern and Western Fronts. To some, it was a reminder that they could not stomach Winston Churchill for this was said to be his greatest stuff up in a career replete with such (although they would admit that he more than exonerated himself his and Britain’s Finest Hour). For many Australians and New Zealanders, it was a national baptism of fire, of youthful sacrifice on the altar of Empire. And notwithstanding the military defeat and retreat, the folly and foolhardiness, in the harrowing adversity and heroism, lay the bones of a young country’s enduring creation myth.
Former soldier James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow

From The Watchers of the Water – a song about Gallipoli, © Paul Hemphill 2015. All rights reserved

Official war historian Charles Bean went ashore at Anzac Cove on 25 April, more than 5 hours after the first troops. Here is his first dispatch (it was not published in Australia until 13th May):

It was eighteen minutes past four on the morning of Sunday, 25th April, when the first boat grounded. So far not a shot had been fired by the enemy. Colonel McLagan’s orders to his brigade were that shots, if possible, were not to be fired till daybreak, but the business was to be carried through with the bayonet. The men leapt into the water, and the first of them had just reached the beach when fire was opened on them from the trenches on the foothills which rise immediately from the beach. The landing place consists of a small bay about half-a-mile from point to point with two much larger bays north and south. The country rather resembles the Hawkesbury River country in New South Wales, the hills rising immediately from the sea to 600 feet [183m]. To the north these ridges cluster to a summit nearly 1,000 feet [305m] high. Further northward the ranges become even higher. The summit just mentioned sends out a series of long ridges running south-westward, with steep gullies between them, very much like the hills and gullies about the north of Sydney, covered with low scrub very similar to a dwarfed gum tree scrub. The chief difference is that there are no big trees, but many precipices and sheer slopes of gravel. One ridge comes down to the sea at the small bay above mentioned and ends in two knolls about 100 feet [30m] high, one at each point of the bay.

It was from these that fire was first opened on the troops as they landed. Bullets struck fireworks out of the stones along the beach. The men did not wait to be hit, but wherever they landed they simply rushed straight up the steep slopes. Other small boats which had cast off from the warships and steam launches which towed them, were digging for the beach with oars. These occupied the attention of the Turks in the trenches, and almost before the Turks had time to collect their senses, the first boatloads were well up towards the trenches. Few Turks awaited the bayonet. It is said that one huge Queenslander swung his rifle by the muzzle, and, after braining one Turk, caught another and flung him over his shoulder. I do not know if this story is true, but when we landed some hours later, there was said to have been a dead Turk on the beach with his head smashed in. It is impossible to say which battalion landed first, because several landed together. The Turks in the trenches facing the landing had run, but those on the other flank and on the ridges and gullies still kept up a fire upon the boats coming in shore, and that portion of the covering force which landed last came under a heavy fire before it reached the beach. The Turks had a machine gun in the valley on our left, and this seems to have been turned on to the boats containing part of the Twelfth Battalion. Three of these boats are still lying on the beach some way before they could be rescued. Two stretcher-bearers of the Second Battalion who went along the beach during the day to effect a rescue were both shot by the Turks. Finally, a party waited for dark, and crept along the beach, rescuing nine men who had been in the boats two days, afraid to move for fear of attracting fire. The work of the stretcher-bearers all through a week of hard fighting has been beyond all praise.

And this was just the beginning …

More on the Anzacs in In That Howling Infinite: Tel al Sabi – Tarkeeth’s ANZAC Story 

On 27th July 2024, the Australian published extracts from a recently published biography of Henry Koba Freame, adventurer, soldier, orchardist and interpreter. It provides such a stirring account of the landing of Australian soldiers at what is now Anzac Cove on 25th April 2015 and the subsequent Gallipoli campaign that it was worth republishing below. But first, a brief summary of Freame’s eventful life.

The road to Gallipoli

Wykeham Henry Koba Freame is believed to have been born on 28 February 1885 at Osaka, Japan, though on his enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force he gave his birthplace as Kitscoty, Canada. He was the son of Henry Freame, sometime teacher of English at the Kai-sei Gakko in Japan, and a Japanese woman, Shizu, née Kitagawa. As he was fluent in Japanese and spoke English with an accent it is likely that he was brought up in Japan. In 1906 he was a merchant seaman and on 19 July of that year married Edith May Soppitt at St John’s Anglican Church, Middlesbrough, England.

Freame probably came to Australia in 1911 and on enlisting in the A.I.F. on 28 August 1914 described himself as a horse-breaker of Glen Innes, New South Wales. Posted to the 1st Battalion as a private, he embarked for Egypt on the troopship Afric on 18 October and was promoted lance corporal on 7 January 1915. On 25 April he landed at Anzac and after three days of heavy fighting was promoted sergeant. He was awarded one of the A.I.F.’s first Distinguished Conduct Medals for ‘displaying the utmost gallantry in taking water to the firing-line although twice hit by snipers’. He was mentioned in dispatches for his work at Monash Valley in June when Charles Bean described him as ‘probably the most trusted scout at Anzac’.

Having served in the Hottentot rising of 1904-06 in German East Africa and in the Mexican wars, Freame was an accomplished scout before joining the A.I.F. He had an uncanny sense of direction and would wriggle like an eel deep into no man’s land, and at night even into enemy trenches, to pick up information. His dark complexion and peculiar intonation of speech had led his companions to believe that he was Mexican—an impression which he reinforced at Anzac where, in cowboy fashion, he carried two revolvers in holsters on his belt, another in a holster under his armpit and a bowie knife in his boot pocket. On 15 August he was wounded during operations at Lone Pine and was evacuated to Australia. He was discharged as medically unfit on 20 November 1916.

Freame settled on the Kentucky estate in New England, New South Wales, when the estate was subdivided for a soldier settlement scheme, and was appointed government storekeeper. He eventually acquired a Kentucky block and was a successful orchardist. His wife died in 1939 and on 16 August 1940 he married Harriett Elizabeth Brainwood, nurse and divorced petitioner, at St John’s Anglican Church, Milson’s Point, Sydney. With the outbreak of World War II he offered his services to the Australian Military Forces and in December 1939 was planted among the Japanese community in Sydney as an agent by military intelligence. In September 1940 he was appointed as an interpreter on the staff of the first Australian legation to Tokyo.

Early in April 1941, however, Freame returned to Australia because of ill health and was admitted to North Sydney Hospital suffering from a severe throat condition which greatly impaired his speech. He died on 27 May and was buried in Northern Suburbs cemetery with Anglican rites. His death certificate records the cause of death as cancer though Freame himself and later his wife alleged that he had been the victim of a garrotting in Japan. He considered that the attack was the consequence of the injudicious wording of the announcement in the Australian press of his posting to Tokyo. He had been described as employed by the Defence Department at a time when he was telling his Japanese acquaintances another story. Extant evidence provides no definite clarification of the circumstances of his death, though the claim of garrotting was investigated, and rejected, at the time.

James W. Courtney, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8,1981

How did we forget this Anzac hero?

Ryan Butta, The Australian, 26 July 2024

 

Harry Freame in 1915 before departing for Gallipoli

Harry Freame in 1915 before departing for Gallipoli

In the years after World War I, Harry Freame had a legitimate claim to be considered the most famous Anzac soldier to have landed at Gallipoli. Born in Japan and raised as a Samurai, he was the recipient of the first Distinguished Conduct Medal to be awarded to an Australian soldier for his efforts in those first bloody days of Gallipoli, and his name was legend among the Australian troops who had fought that tragic battle. As the landing turned into trench warfare, the troops knew Harry risked his neck each night to venture out into no-man’s land and map the Turkish defences.

Harry was on personal terms with the key Anzac commanders, and in the postwar years generals would visit him and reminisce about the war. Australia’s official war historian for World War I, Charles Bean, who first met Harry in June 1915, was fascinated by Harry his whole life. The Australian public came to know Harry through the newspapers of the day that splashed his wartime exploits of courage and daring across their pages.

What became of him?

The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli by Ryan Butta

Harry Freame’s boots hit the sands of Anzac Cove at around 7.40am on April 25, 1915. He was part of D Company, 1st Battalion. By the time they landed, Anzac Beach, as it came to be known, was already strewn with the broken and bloodied bodies of the men and pack animals that had come before them on that infamous morning.

It wasn’t Harry’s first sight of the region – he had sailed this way before – and it wasn’t his first taste of war.

There is a picture of Harry taken before the landing, most likely in Egypt. In it he is in full uniform, flat-brimmed hat, a bandana tied around his neck, wire clippers and binoculars attached to his belt. He holds his Lee–Enfield full wood .303 rifle by the barrel, the butt resting on the ground. He is looking slightly downwards at the camera. There is none of the naive merriment so often seen in the pictures of young Australian soldiers who had mistaken war for a great boys’ own adventure. But nor is there any fear in those eyes. Harry knew what he was in for, and he was ready for it.

As he waded through the waist-high water towards the sand, Harry carried in his pack three days’ rations and an extra 150 rounds of ammunition. He would have heeded the warning of Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the British officer in overall command of the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces, who had advised the troops prior to landing to drink as much water as they could, as once ashore supply of food and water could not be guaranteed for at least three days.

The landing itself had been rehearsed as much as possible on the nearby Greek islands, under conditions nothing like what Harry and the rest of the Anzacs would soon face, but as the 1st Battalion’s official war diary records, “we knew very little of the actual plans for the attack – in fact, the whole thing seemed to be rather in the air, and so it proved”.

All that the officers of the 1st Battalion knew was that the 3rd Brigade was to land first and rush the enemy positions. When Harry and D Company landed on Anzac Beach, they had no idea what success, if any, the 3rd Brigade had had. Judging by the dead and dying who littered the beach, staining the Aegean waters red, and the enemy bullets and shells that whistled around their heads and whipped the waves to foam, it could be easily believed that none of the 3rd Brigade had survived that hellfire of a dawn.

Harry at age the age of 24

Harry at age the age of 24

■ ■ ■

Harry’s battalion formed up just north of Anzac Beach, in the shadow of Ari Burnu, sheltered from the murderous fire being poured down upon the landing from the peaks of Gaba Tepe, and waited for orders. When the orders came, they “were very vague”, alluding to nothing more than the need for the battalion to reinforce the firing line. But to reinforce a firing line, you needed to first find the firing line, and when the men looked up towards the imposing ridges and valleys that confronted them, there was no firing line.

The ridges above the beaches were crawling with pockets of men, some engaged in isolated fights, hand-to-hand combat wherein they lived or died by the thrust of their bayonets or the quickness of their wits.

Recalling that bloody morning, poet John Masefield wrote:

“All over the broken hills there were isolated fights to the death, men falling into gullies and being bayoneted, sudden duels, point blank, where men crawling through the scrub met each other and life went to the quicker finger, heroic deaths, where some half section which had lost touch were caught by ten times their strength and charged and died.

“No man of our side knew that cracked and fissured jungle. Men broke through it on to machine guns, or showed up on a crest and were blown to pieces, or leaped down from it into some sap or trench, to catch the bombs flung at them and hurl them at the thrower.

“Going as they did, up cliffs, through scrub, over ground … they passed many hidden Turks, who were thus left to shoot them in the back or to fire down at the boats, from perhaps only fifty yards away.”

■ ■ ■

The firing line, a concept easily imagined in the safety of an officer’s headquarters, was non-existent on the actual field of battle. On that first morning there was just a mad rush for high ground, up the forbidding slopes and into the ridges and valleys that held not only Turkish and German and Syrian troops and gunners but also the hope of cover and survival.

A primeval need to push further and further inland gripped the soldiers, in the hope that there, beyond the next valley, the next ridge, lay safety.

By 10am, with clothes still heavy with sea water after the landing and many of their rifles jammed with sand, now useful only for bayonet thrusts and charges, Harry and what elements of D Company were able to be formed up left the beach and set off for the ridges. Coming upon officers from the 3rd Battalion, D Company was redirected to the hill known as Baby 700, where reinforcements were urgently needed.

Through dense, waist-high scrub of gorse-like bushes and along the dried-up water courses littered with boulders, the men forged ahead uphill, legs heavy but the words of the commanding officers to advance, advance, advance running through their heads. Many of the men of D Company who fought their way up towards Baby 700 that clear bright morning would etch their names into the history of the Anzacs and the 1st Battalion: Major FJ Kindon, second-in-command of 1st Battalion; Major Blair Swannell, commanding officer of D Company; Captain Harold Jacobs, second-in-command of D Company; Lieutenant Geoffrey Street; and Captain Alfred Shout, the man who would leave Gallipoli the most decorated soldier of all, though sadly not with his life. And beside Shout, as was so often the case in the blood-soaked months that followed, in lock step, there was Lance Corporal Harry Freame.

Strategically important, Baby 700 had been the focus of intense fighting all morning, with remnants of the Australian 9th, 11th and 12th battalions all joining the battle as the Turkish troops advanced and retreated in a series of intense skirmishes conducted under the continuous hail of shrapnel fire from unseen Turkish positions. The approaches to Baby 700 were complicated by folds of ridges and valleys, and in these the Australian men became detached from their companies and lost until they could connect up with other Australian soldiers, sometimes from their own company, sometimes not.

Freame at his final Anzac Day march, in 1940.

Freame at his final Anzac Day march, in 1940.

By 11am, Harry and D Company had reached The Nek, a thin strip of ridge that connected to Baby 700. The area was being held by Captain Lalor and men of the 12th Battalion. Lalor was the grandson of Peter Lalor, the man who had led the revolt at Eureka. With him on that morning on the approaches to Baby 700, Lalor carried a magnificent sword, said to be the one used by his grandfather at that famous stockade. Swords had been prohibited to be carried during the landing, but Lalor had disregarded the order.

Across The Nek on the slopes of Baby 700, Turkish troops were gathering. Joining up with Lalor’s group, the newly arrived men of D Company formed up and charged the Turkish troops, driving them back into a gully before advancing up Baby 700.

After reaching the summit, D Company started to dig into that hardscrabble ground. The Turkish troops they had driven before them had retreated, but only to a previously unseen trench, and from here they poured heavy fire on the entrenching D Company. It was here that D Company’s commander, Major Blair Swannell, was killed on that first morning, shot dead just as he had earlier predicted he would be to his mates aboard the Minnewaska in the predawn fog before the landing.

Against the fierce Turkish assault, the Australians had only their rifles (when they worked), bayonets and pistols. The naval guns offered no support, as those manning them were afraid of firing on their own troops in the complicated mess of invaders and invaded that swarmed the hills of the peninsula.

A few artillery guns had been brought ashore at midday but were then ordered to be sent back out to the boats. Other commanders had refused to allow their guns to be landed, such was the chaos on the beaches, and it wasn’t until dusk that the first artillery guns came into action in support of the Australian troops.

The Australian firing line on Baby 700 could not hold, and over the course of the morning the Australian troops moved over the summit only to be thrown back by vicious counterattacks no fewer than five times.

In the midst of the fighting, there was Harry Freame, moving from position to position, scouting the ground and enemy positions, running messages between commanding officers.

At one point Harry and a small group of men drove a contingent of Turkish troops from a trench. But having gained the trench they found they were then held in place by persistent enemy fire. The men hadn’t heeded the words of Lieutenant General Birdwood, and who could blame them, and they were out of water, exhausted and near death. Without water they felt that they would soon perish or be forced to surrender.

Harry called for volunteers to brave the bullets and shrapnel and go for water. None raised a hand or spoke a word, so over the side of the trench he went, collecting water bottles from those who would never thirst again, fallen soldiers whose twisted repose could never be mistaken for the sleeping, a last look, a last thought of home or their best girl held fast in a glassy eye like a butterfly trapped in amber.

When Harry returned, he brought not only precious water but food and pickaxes for the grateful men.

All day the fighting raged on Baby 700, with ground taken then lost, the attackers and counterattackers continually changing roles, the air perfumed with the smell of the wild thyme that had been lashed by the bullets and shrapnel bursts. And as the day stretched on, still the men had no idea where the firing line was, only supposing that it was somewhere ahead of them, always somewhere over the next ridge, and that they must get to it. And if they could not advance, then at all costs they tried to hold on to whatever patch of land they had come to stop on.

At around 4.30pm, as D Company, reinforced now with New Zealand troops, fought to hold the right side of the Baby 700 slope, a massive Turkish counterattack was launched that peeled the Australians off the slope. Alfred Shout, who had been with Lalor when he was killed, had earlier left Harry and fourteen men at The Nek with orders to hold it no matter what. The small group came under intense fire and before long only nine men were left, and by the time Shout returned, retreating from Baby 700, only Harry and one other man held the position. The rest lay dead or dying about them. Shout ordered them both to follow him in retreat towards the beach.

After regrouping on the beach, Shout and Harry then set about rounding up men from various battalions, a combination of the stragglers and shirkers, the lost and the shell-shocked. Harry collected around two hundred men and led them back up the slopes to reinforce the New Zealand troops who were holding Walker’s Ridge, a key position leading back to Baby 700, which was by now firmly in Turkish hands.

■ ■ ■

Recording the efforts of Lance Corporal Harry Freame on that chaotic first day at Anzac Cove, official war correspondent Charles Bean wrote:

 “With such fighters as Lieutenant A.J. Shout, Lieutenant G.A. Street and Lieutenant Jacobs, all of his own battalion, he and others held vital positions in that constantly moving and changing fight but none was so ubiquitous as he, now holding a key ­position on The Nek leading to Baby 700, now ­finding for his commander the scattered parts of his battalion.”

As night fell on the evening of April 25, the fighting abated only somewhat; rifle fire and shrapnel bursts echoed through the night. At around midnight, Lieutenant General Birdwood sent an urgent message to his commander-in-chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, urging an immediate evacuation of the peninsula. Hamilton, from the comfort of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, was having none of it, advising Birdwood that he had “got through the difficult business and you have only to dig, dig, dig until you are safe”.

Freame with his stepsister in 1898.

Freame with his stepsister in 1898.

The following morning, April 26, the hills of the peninsula rang with the sounds of shovels, digging, digging, digging. Those not digging or engaged in holding a position were out scouring the ravines and hillsides for the wounded and missing, and it was while thus engaged that Harry came across a detachment of men under the command of Captain Harold Jacobs sheltering in a trench at Quinn’s Post. The men had had no water to drink and were in a desperate state. Harry offered to go for water and without a second thought braved the enemy fire that came in from unseen snipers and dashed back down the valley from where he had just come. He soon returned with the promised water, allowing the position to be held.

Realising that Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Dobbin, the company commander, would need information on Captain Jacobs’ position and situation, Harry was again up and over the side of the trench, making his way back down the valley to where Lieutenant-Colonel Dobbin was located. As Harry approached Dobbin’s trench, he was heard to yell out, ‘All right!’ Arriving, he delivered his message to Dobbin. Mission accomplished, it was only then that Harry revealed that on the descent he’d been struck twice by snipers’ bullets, once through the fingers of the left hand and once through the left arm.

For the duration of the fighting at Gallipoli, Quinn’s Post remained the Anzacs’ most advanced position and the key to their defensive positions. It would never have been held if not for the bravery of Harry Freame.

Charles Bean later noted that very few men received decorations for the deeds performed at the Anzac Cove landings. But when the recommendations came out, the name Harry Freame was first among them. His citation read: “Has displayed the utmost gallantry in taking water to the firing line, though twice hit by sniper fire.” Harry’s commanding officer further reported: “Since I have assumed command of the Brigade, Serjeant Freame has almost daily performed some action worthy of recognition in the shape of carrying out night reconnaissance, conveying messages through dangerous zones etc etc. He is a fine fearless soldier who I strongly recommend for recognition.”

■ ■ ■

The recommendation was heeded and Harry, for his work over those first days of Gallipoli, was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Writing both publicly and privately years after the war, Bean offered the view that Harry should have been awarded the Victoria Cross and that the only reason he wasn’t awarded the VC was because, “Australian commanders hesitated to set up for that hallowed decoration any standard short of the impossible. I think that it is safe to say but for that Harry would have been awarded the highest decoration”.

When I set out to write this book, I wanted to discover why we had forgotten Harry Freame. Why, when our schoolchildren learn of the history of the Anzacs, do they learn more about a donkey than a man who was known at the time as the Marvel of Gallipoli? And I wanted to know why the Australian government covered up their role in the death of Harry Freame, why the man Charles Bean described as probably the most trusted scout at Gallipoli was never believed when he said, “They got me”.

This is an extract from The Bravest Scout At Gallipoli by Ryan Butta (Affirm Press) out now.

Better read than dead – are our books the footprints of our past?

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

… she is accumulating stories, adding them to the library of self, becoming larger. She might become as large as all literature. She will, at any rate, have a voyager’s easy wherewithal among this society of the unread and unworldly

Thus did an author describe an anonymous young woman he encountered on a Melbourne tram.

It got me thinking, and I asked my self a question: If our books are the footprints of our past, when you discard those books, are you discarding that past?

Earlier this year, I’d jettisoned half of a book collection I’d accumulated over sixty years – books that have followed me as moved from Birmingham to reading to London, migrated to Australia, and moved from house to house in Sydney and finally settled in the midst of a forest in northern New South Wales.

Out went books of all formats and genres. Mementos of former passions and fashions. Relics of past courses and careers. Old school textbooks, university texts, fiction, nonfiction, dictionaries, coffee table books. I’d worked for years in publishing so the complimentary copies alone were colossal. .

I’d already culled box-fulls of books a decade ago when we’d last moved house and home, and this time, I was determined to downsize further.

My primary criteria was that if I hadn’t looked inside the covers of a book for twenty, thirty, fifty years, then I wasn’t likely to do so in the next five, ten, twenty years I have left on this planet.

Nevertheless, I kept back five full shelves.

Books of poetry, some of them a century old. All-time favourite novels, including the iconic Russians, Hardy, Herbert and Heinlein. Non-fiction histories I regard with particular nostalgia or think might be of use again one day. Books about music and musicians, particularly the Beatles and the Bobster. Recent purchases. And, books I consider “rare” – a subjective descriptor that I can only explain as old books which I picked up in secondhand bookshops when I lived in London in the sixties and seventies. Some, I reckon, are actually rare!

Sooner or later, these too may go.

When I review my remaining shelves, all bending under the weight of their contents, I contemplate the next cut.

Do I feel I am discarding my past?

I was unsure.

Since the great clean out, I’ve been reminded often, out of the blue –  by a film, perhaps, a podcast or an article I’ve read online – of a particular ex-book or two or three. I’ve mourned their departure and wished that I’d kept them. It’s like a bibliographical version of a phantom limb.

Last night I asked a friend and fellow-bibliophile the question I posed at the head of this piece.

He replied with a question. “Where did your books end up?”

“At the Coffs Harbour Rotary Club’s annual charity bookfest”, I replied.

“Then you did the right thing”, he said.

“Your books will enjoy a new life. They will continue their work, giving pleasure and knowledge to new readers”.

I made that last bit up – poetic license, familiar to all book lovers.

 

© Paul Hemphill 2024. All rights reserved

Below are a selection of recent articles from the Sydney Morning Herald on the joys of books and of reading. The first is the story I referred to above. It illustrates beautifully how books lead you into imaginary worlds, or, as the author puts it, “the limitless wonderland of all I’ve read”. The second tells the story of the “street libraries” that have proliferated in recent years. Here on the Coffs Coast, there are shelves in in the two main shopping malls where folk can donate, swap or borrow books of all genres or simply browse whilst shopping, whilst there are several tiny libraries in our local towns of Bellingen and Urunga. The last considers the changing faces, forms and functions of public libraries. “These aren’t libraries your parents or older siblings may have visited”, the writer  observes. A visit to Coffs Harbour’s new, beaut library would confirm that.

The featured image and that below are of the Coffs Harbour Rotary Club’s annual Bookfest, a hugely popular event on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales that raises thousands of dollars for Rotary’s charitable works. I’ve taken home some surprising “finds” in recent years.

Read also in In That Howling Infinite, Better Read Than Dead – the joy of public libraries

Coffs Harbour Rotary Club BookFest

Australia’s last reader was on my tram, travelling to another world

Anson Cameron, Sydney Morning Herald, June 28, 2024

The last reader in Australia turns out to be a young woman. No surprise. John Logie Baird rendered men illiterate at a stroke when he invented the TV in 1926.

She sits on the 109 heading for Box Hill reading a paperback, her mind pincered and freed by noise-cancelling headphones. Look at her face – she is not here, she is there, in that world she and the author have agreed on. I can’t see the book’s cover – hence it is all books to me. It’s an Indian novel, an anthology of verse, a cavernous collection of short stories – it’s the limitless wonderland of all I’ve read.

She’s deeply engaged, attendant to the thousand tasks that go to running a fictional state. She is raising castles, razing San Francisco, riding a dragon or a night train, watching lords and ladies gavotte clockwise to chamber music, lying in a military hospital in Milan wounded and in love. But her face is frustratingly passive.

I’m waiting for her eyes to widen as Oliver Twist asks for more. I’m waiting for her to shake her head and hold the book out and stare at its cover and silently mouth the words, “Doris Lessing … girl, what the absolute f—?”

A block further on up Collins Street she nearly laughs, but catches herself, because … these 109 riders, these TikTokettes who surround her – they are not to know or understand that Quixote has taken his sword to puppets while believing them men.

If she is an assiduous reader, the young woman on 109, (and I believe she is: look at her bend to the page) she is accumulating stories, adding them to the library of self, becoming larger. She might become as large as all literature. She will, at any rate, have a voyager’s easy wherewithal among this society of the unread and unworldly, these cerebral homebodies, her fellow tram riders, these addicts stoned by the blizzard of micro-vids blowing from their phones.

Reading requires sharp neurological footwork. It is not a passive activity. Scans of the brain show areas of it are lit like aurora when you are reading. Imagining 1930s Maycombe, Alabama during the Depression, its streets and stores, its loungers and livery, is a mental workout that the cleavage vignettes on OnlyFans and the skateboard pratfalls of TikTok don’t require and can’t supply.

Rates of literacy were low before the printing press. Reading was confined to clerks, diplomats and priests – a tool-of-trade, and a skill as rare and dubious as clairvoyance. Guttenberg enabled the novel – a new handheld entertainment, a portable story for which you didn’t need a whole theatre – you could now hold escapades and hemispheres in your hand.

People now see reading as a quaint, historical diversion, a pastime for those who lacked more splendid options, a drag, something akin to needlepoint or whittling, a distraction for castaways and folk who got snowed-in for long winters without power, a hobby for paranoid misanthropes, abandoned widows and anti-social geeks – for Victorians, Edwardians and colonials. The citizens of the TikTok epoch think of libraries as a type of asylum.

Watching her read her paperback, this young woman on the 109, I know she is a juggler of empires, a traveller in limitless cities, is becoming wise in love, and steeped in tragedy’s lore, and, as well, is an addict of hilarity, and goes to sleep listening to orchestras play at unsuspecting ducal balls held on the eve of revolutions.

I also know she is the final ambassador sent by Australia to the country of Fiction to represent us there, to meet its ancient and vibrant people and assure its VIPs we love reading and will always be their allies. But this is mere diplomacy. It is not true. She will be the last visitor from here. That place’s splendours are undiminished, but superseded – and Australians do not go there any more.

Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.

My street library was just a family project. What happened next, well, you wouldn’t read about it

Amy Adeney, Sydney Morning Herald, June 28, 2024

I’ll be honest – my motives for installing a street library outside my house were not particularly community-minded. At the time I was really into “projects”. We’d just finished transforming our swimming pool into a trout pond (yes, really), and I was looking for something new to keep my kids busy during the summer holidays. As a picture book reviewer, my bookshelves were overflowing, so a street library felt like a two-birds-one-stone solution.

I’d heard about street libraries and noticed the occasional book box on side streets – but I didn’t know much about the movement, or how they worked. I purchased a large ready-made raw timber unit from the Street Library Australia website and got to work on the fun bit – bringing it to life. We chose a deep purple paint colour called Dumbledore and adorned the doorframe with mirrors and jewels.

Dumbledore the street library.
Dumbledore the street library

The website advises that it’s a good idea to give your street library a name, and Dumbledore felt perfect – a font of wisdom and knowledge, like the books that it would hold. When the paint and glue were dry, Dumbledore was glorious to behold, and once it was installed on a post behind our front fence with a bunch of books inside, I dropped a note in every letterbox on the street informing residents of the new street library. At that point I was ready to sign off – mission accomplished.

What came next was entirely unexpected. Notes and cards began to appear in our letterbox, thanking me for “adding a touch of beauty to our neighbourhood,” for initiating such a “fabulous venture,” and promising to add and swap books. The cards were mainly from strangers. We had lived in the house for six years but had never spoken to many of our neighbours.

Suddenly, we found ourselves striking up conversations with people as they browsed the library, chatting about books and offering recommendations. On days when the box was full, small piles of books would be left on our doorstep, to be squished into the shelves when there was space available.

Amy Adeney is a Melbourne-based children’s author and teacher. Her book, The Little Street Library, is published by Affirm Press.

The little library that has a 20 per cent chance of winning best in world

At Sydney’s Marrickville Library, you can get pizza delivered to your lounge chair or secret nook. Even better, you can eat it there or in the sunken garden while using the wifi.

In China, the 31,800 square metre New Ningbo Library is open 24 hours a day and will serve around 8000 visitors a day.

These two libraries are among five finalists announced last Friday for the International Public Library of the Year Award 2021 to be announced in August.

The Marrickville Library is in the running to win an international award for library of the year.
Marrickville Library. These aren’t libraries your parents or older siblings may have visited.
Another finalist, the new Deichman Bjørvika in Oslo Norway, includes a secret and hidden library for the future. The six-storey building has a gaming zone, secret rooms for children and views of the fjord. As well as borrowing from the collection of 450,000 books, locals can learn to sew or play the piano.

Its “Future Library” project has commissioned authors including Margaret Atwood to write novels that won’t be published – or even available to be read – until 100 years from now.

Oslo’s new library is called the library with a view.
Oslo’s new library is called the library with a view. Eric Thaulung

Another finalist, the library and cultural centre Forum Groningen in the Netherlands, is based on the Roman forum. And the Het Predikheren, the new library in Belgium, incorporates a Baroque monastery. It was described by judges as “poetic” with a sense of “mystique”.

Nearly all have cinemas, play and meeting areas and public spaces.

Even 20 years ago, many libraries were “supermarkets of books” with rows of dimly lit books, said Cameron Morley, the manager of public library services with the State Library of NSW.

Today’s libraries had a greater variety of nuanced spaces for different types of visitors with different needs and differing amounts of tolerance for noise. They had also made it easier to find items in the collection, he said.

Many libraries were now being designed with increased outdoor space where patrons could use the wifi but still be safely spaced, he said.

Marrickville Library, designed by architects BVN, has already won nine national architecture awards, three National Trust heritage awards and a NSW landscaping award.

Announcing the shortlist, the judges admired Marrickville’s beautiful adaptive re-use of the old Marrickville hospital. The floating canopy roof originates from the pitched roof of the existing building.

Since the announcement that the Australian library was a finalist for the international award, staff have been awed by the quality and size of the international competitors.

So what does Marrickville have that they don’t?

Heart, said Inner West council mayor Darcy Byrne. “It’s not just a library, it is the town square. It is the heart of Marrickville. It is such a lively place. There are so many young people coming in. It is not quiet or old or dead. It is lively and youthful.”

Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne says the heart of the community found inside the Marrickville Library distinguishes it from its international competitors.
Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne . Kate Gerachty

Last October, the 3600 square metre library had 53,000 visitors, including a record number of young people studying at university or the HSC. It’s become so popular that the council’s senior manager of libraries Caroline McLeod has had to place three orders for additional chairs.

SInce it opened in late 2019, visitors numbers have more than doubled. Many come for the day. “It’s a joyous thing to see how many people are in the library,” said Ms McLeod.

Ms McLeod said it might not have a hidden library like Norway’s. But it did “have secret spots or secluded spots where you can be alone”.

Ningbo’s new library is one of five finalists for the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) library of the year.
Ningbo’s new library is one of five finalists for the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) library of the year. Hammer Lassen Architects
Het Predikheren Library in Belgium was built to incorporate an old Baroque monastery.
Het Predikheren Library in Belgium,built to incorporate an old Baroque monastery. Stadmechelen
The Forum Groningen in the Netherland is competing against Marrickville’s library for best library in the world 2021.
The Forum Groningen, Netherlands is competing against Marrickville’s library for best library in the world 2021. Deon Prins

Arguments of Monumental Importance – statuary declarations

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

The past is another country – they thought things differently there; and if the past shapes the present, the present also shapes the past.  Arguments of Monumental Proportions – Fallen Idols

The defacing and destruction of monuments to dead and dubious white men is back in vogue – not that the practice has ever actually gone out of style. As The Australian’s Art columnist Christopher Allen writes in an article republished below, statues have been set up as monuments to great and not so great men and removed by their enemies for a very long time. Even without considering the many precedents in antiquity, countless statues were destroyed during the French Revolution, others during the mob violence of the short-lived “Commune” government in Paris in early 1871 – including the figure of Napoleon on the Colonne Vendôme – and many more under the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Then there is the tearing down the statues of tyrants in the fall of dictatorships, from the former Soviet empire to Iraq. In those instances, the state or a despot had set up multiple effigies all over the country as symbols of power and instruments of oppression, and they were overthrown in the collective movement of popular revolution.

To paraphrase Allen, portrait monuments proliferated in more recent times, particularly in the 19th century, as a consequence of increasing prosperity, patriotism or nationalism and local municipal pride. Monarchs, politicians, leaders of national unification or liberation movements, explorers and founders of new colonies, notable scientists and writers, philanthropists and other prominent citizens were commemorated in public statuary. Arguably, too many were raised; sometimes their subjects have lost the prominence they once had; or some of their deeds may now today be considered reprehensible. An argument could be made to relocate a statue to a museum instead, but such decisions ought not be taken lightly, especially if the justification for removal and relocation are ideological or made in response to online protests and vandalism.

in Arguments of Monumental Proportions – Fallen Idols, I wrote a while back:

“As an Aussie and a Brit of Irish parents, and as a history tragic, I find the long running monuments furore engrossing. Statues of famous and infamous generals, politicians and paragons of this and that grace plazas, esplanades and boulevards the world over, and their names are often given to such thoroughfares. They represent in visual and tangible form the historical memory of a nation, and as such, can generate mixed emotions reflecting the potentially conflicted legacies and loyalties of the citizenry”.  

“It is”, I wrote, “about the control of history – and who controls it. We all use history, incorporating perceptions of our national story into lessons that guide or confirm our present actions and outlooks. Our history is written not only in scholarly narratives, but also, in commemorations, in statues, flags and symbols, in the stories that children are taught about their country and their community from their earliest school years, and in the historical figure skating they are taught to remember and honour. History, it is said, is written mostly by the victors – but not always. So, the inevitable tensions between different versions of the past fosters tension and conflict, and grievance and offense in the present. Particularly in onetime colonialist and settler countries, and the lands these once ruled and exploited … All sorts of emotions, hopes and fears lie behind our various creation myths. No matter the source of our different “dream-times” we are all correct in one way or another. People wheel out the wise old “blind men and the elephant” story to illustrate how blinkered we are; but in reality, if those blind men were given more time, they would have expanded their explorations and discovered a bigger picture”.

Which brings to recent events in Hobart, in our most southern state and one of Australia’s earliest colonies and the location of many of many bloody atrocities in Australia’s Frontier Wars, and to Allen’s article which tells the tale of a nineteenth century public figure whom very few Australians have heard of and of his illicit trafficking in the remains of a decease indigenous man. 

Read also In That Howling Infinite another story of the British Empire’s sticky fingers: Bringing it all back home – the missing mosaic and other ‘stolen’ stuff  

Felling Crowther’s statue is not the way to right a historical wrong

Not all civic statues are appropriate for all time, but public comment space must be protected, not vandalized

Christopher Allen, The Australian, 29th June 2024

The William Crowther statue in Franklin Square Hobart was vandalised in May 2024. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones.

William Crowther’s statue, Franklin Square Hobart, May 2024. Nikki Davis-Jones.

No doubt many people, regardless of their political orientation, were disturbed by the recent news that a civic statue had been vandalized and destroyed under the cover of night by an anonymous gang of attackers in Hobart. The event was all the more shocking because the city council had already determined to remove the statue from its public location following controversy about the actions of the individual it celebrated.

This kind of attack, to be quite clear, has nothing in common with tearing down the statues of tyrants in the fall of dictatorships, from the former Soviet empire to Iraq. In those instances, the state or a despot had set up multiple effigies all over the country as symbols of power and instruments of oppression, and they were overthrown in the collective movement of popular revolution. In this case an individual monument to a respected citizen, erected by the community, was destroyed by a small group of zealots.

Statues have been set up as monuments to great men and removed by their enemies for a long time. Even without considering the many precedents in antiquity, countless statues were destroyed during the French Revolution, others during the mob violence of the short-lived “Commune” government in Paris in early 1871 – including the figure of Napoleon on the Colonne Vendôme – and many more under the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Statues have not always been effigies of individuals; some of the most beautiful Greek sculptures were simply of the ideal body; others represented divinities, as also in Christian, Buddhist or Hindu traditions. Portrait sculpture began in the Hellenistic kingdoms and flourished in the Roman period. After the fall of the Empire, and with the decline of all the arts, no sculptural likeness was made for a thousand years. The Renaissance rediscovered portraiture with enthusiasm, both in painting and sculpture, and over the next few centuries portraits of monarchs and other leaders became common in big cities.

Portrait monuments proliferated in more recent times, particularly in the 19th century, as a consequence of increasing prosperity, patriotism or nationalism and local municipal pride. Not only monarchs but prominent politicians, leaders of national unification or liberation movements, explorers and founders of new colonies, notable scientists and writers, philanthropists and other prominent citizens were commemorated in public statuary. Often these adorned and helped to shape the new public parks laid out for the enjoyment of populations in great modern cities.

Arguably too many of these monuments were put up, and sometimes the individuals in question have lost the prominence they once had; or some of their deeds may now be considered reprehensible. In certain cases an argument could be made to relocate a statue to a museum instead, but such decisions should not be taken lightly, especially if the grounds for removal and relocation are ideological, or made in response to the digital mob behaviour of social media.

The felled William Crowther statue in Franklin Square Hobart. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

The case of William Crowther (1817-85) is an interesting one. He was a member of a prominent Hobart family of doctors and natural historians, including his own father and then his son and grandson who enjoyed distinguished careers in medicine, science, war and politics over the following century. He was an expert surgeon, a keen natural scientist and an entrepreneur with important shipping and whaling interests, as well as a member of the colonial parliament and briefly premier of Tasmania. Less than four years after his death, a statue was set up by public subscription to honour an eminent fellow citizen.

Crowther is controversial because of his alleged, and it seems fairly certain, involvement in a grisly, if scientifically motivated, affair in 1869. Darwin’s great book On the Origin of Species had only appeared a decade earlier, in 1859, and scientists were eager to understand more about the comparative morphology of different human families. Tasmania held a particular interest because the Indigenous Tasmanian population differed considerably from the mainland people.

By those years, however, over a generation after the end of the Black War (1824-31), very few individuals of unmixed Tasmanian descent survived, and just one male: William Lanne (c. 1836-69) – sometimes given as Lanney or Lanné – who worked as a whaler, was well-known in Hobart, and had even been introduced by the governor to Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh in 1868. When he died of cholera in 1869, he was buried at Saint David’s Church in Hobart, where Prince Alfred had just laid the foundation stone for the present Saint David’s Cathedral (consecrated in 1874).

Lanne’s funeral was a solemn occasion, attended by a large number of Hobart citizens. The Hobart Mercury reported (March 8, 1869): “Having been duly sealed, the coffin was covered with a black opossum skin rug, fit emblem of the now extinct race to which the deceased belonged; and on this singular pall were laid a couple of native spears and waddies, round which were twined the ample folds of a Union Jack, specially provided by the shipmates of the deceased. It was then mounted upon the shoulders of four white native lads, part of the crew of the Runneymede, who volunteered to carry their Aboriginal countryman to his grave.”

Behind the scenes, however, there was a struggle to secure a “perfect” Tasmanian skeleton for scientific research; the Royal Society of Tasmania, founded in 1843 and the first Royal Society outside Britain, wrote to the government, and according to the same article in the Mercury, “The Government at once admitted their right to it, in preference to any other institution, and the Council expressed their willingness at any time to furnish casts, photographs, and all other particulars to any scientific society requiring them. Government, however, declined to sanction any interference with the body, giving positive orders that it should be decently buried.”

The William Crowther statue as it was. Picture: Chris Kidd

The William Crowther statue as it was. Chris Kidd

On the night before the burial, nonetheless, someone stole Lanne’s skull from the morgue, as the article goes on to relate: “The dead-house at the Hospital was entered on Friday night, the head was skinned and the skull carried away, and with a view to conceal this proceeding, the head of a patient who had died in the hospital on the same day, or the day previously, was similarly tampered with and the skull placed inside the scalp of the unfortunate native, the face being drawn over so as to have the appearance of completeness.”

Crowther was suspected of having carried out this mutilation because he had wanted the skeleton to go to the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The Royal Society, concerned that the rest of the body might similarly be stolen, then removed the hands and feet, partly to render the remaining skeleton less attractive to thieves. They also alerted the governor to the need to guard the grave against possible robbery, and while this was agreed on, it seems that the Hobart municipality failed to arrange watchmen; the grave was opened on the night after the funeral and the skeleton removed, leaving behind the skull that had been inserted into Lanne’s head.

It is not entirely clear who was responsible for these events, although it seems to be generally assumed that Crowther sent Lanne’s skull to the Royal College of Surgeons, who awarded him a gold medal and a fellowship. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (1969) states: “In 1860 he was appointed one of the four honorary medical officers at the Hobart General Hospital, but was suspended in March 1869 over charges of mutilating the body of William Lanney, the last male Tasmanian Aboriginal. An inquiry showed that two mutilations had taken place, the first at the Colonial Hospital, the other at the cemetery the night of the burial. Drs Crowther and G. Stokell, resident medical officer at the hospital, were suspected of the first, the Royal Society of Tasmania of the second.”

Whatever the truth, the story is gruesome, a window into another time and a world of which we can be highly critical but from which there is also much to learn. Perhaps it would have been preferable to move the statue to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where it will no doubt now be transferred and where it can be accompanied by displays that explain what we know about the events surrounding Lanne’s death and burial.

Simply cutting the statue down, however, closes off the opportunity for reflection; erasing the traces of the past may offer short-term satisfaction, but in the long run it encourages forgetting rather than remembrance and reflection. Is it not better to understand this episode and ponder its implications than to bury it under self-indulgent slogans like “decolonize”, which was scrawled on the statue’s base?

The most fundamental principle in this and similar cases, however, is the protection of public space in a democratic society. In a figurative sense, it is imperative to protect the public space of free discourse and open debate. Today that space is more than ever under attack from ideologues of different political orientations who seek to suppress or silence those who disagree with their views.

We saw recently the attempt by a city council in the west of Sydney to ban a book on same-sex parenting; but we could equally have seen another group trying to ban a book critical of the same arrangements.

Freedom of speech means accepting that those who disagree with you have a right to argue their case.

The preservation of freedom of discourse and debate is harder than ever in the digital age; this may seem paradoxical, since social media ostensibly allows everyone to express their opinions more promiscuously than ever before. But in practice that expression is quickly drawn into various competing maelstroms in which people vie to agree with each other ever more vociferously.

The same kind of mechanics endanger the physical public spaces of the modern city, the streets and squares and parks which are shared by all its citizens and residents. This public space must be one of order and peaceful process, where people can live and work and socialise in security and as much as possible in an environment of harmony.

The public space is one of lawful communal process. If, in this case, a monument is put up by the community, any decision about moving it must also be taken by the community (albeit in a different time and context)..

It is as unacceptable for a self-appointed gang to destroy a public monument as it is for selfish residents to cut down trees that block their view or greedy developers to demolish a heritage building for commercial gain or looters to smash a shopfront during a natural disaster. We must be unequivocal in our condemnation of the violation of common space in a democratic society.

Killing for Country … dark deeds in a sunny land

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

… they were standin’ on the shore one day
Saw the white sails in the sun
Wasn’t long before they felt the sting
White man, white law, white gun
Solid Rock, Goanna 1982

As indigenous author and academic Victoria Grieves-Williams writes below in her essay regarding journalist David Marr’s recently published family history: “We live in a time of reckoning over the colonisation of the land mass that we now know as Australia. While British officials carefully avoided acknowledging that people existed on this continent prior to their arrival by adopting the infamous doctrine of terra nullius, many Australians are now re-examining the historical basis of their presence here. They know that they enjoy the material wealth and lifestyle of the lands they have come to call home and until recently there was no need to doubt, or be self-conscious, about Australia being “home”. Yet there clearly were people here, and it was only the idea of an empty country that made it possible for agents of Empire, such as the Uhr brothers, ancestors of the journalist David Marr, to go about attempting to empty it”.

I’ve written often about the indigenous history of our country. The following passage from my piece on Australia’s The Frontier Wars. This passage therefrom encapsulates 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”.

Below are pieces published in In That Howling Infinite in regard to Australian history and politics as these relate to Indigenous Australians:

Healing country key in David Marr’s awful family history of murder and mayhem

Victoria Grieves Williams, The Weekend Australian. 16th March 2024

Journalist and biographer David Marr with Indigenous leader Noel Pearson in 1997.
                      David Marr with Indigenous leader Noel Pearson in 1997

We live in a time of reckoning over the colonisation of the land mass that we now know as Australia. While British officials carefully avoided acknowledging that people existed on this continent prior to their arrival by adopting the infamous doctrine of terra nullius, many Australians are now re-examining the historical basis of their presence here. They know that they enjoy the material wealth and lifestyle of the lands they have come to call home and until recently there was no need to doubt, or be self-conscious, about Australia being “home”.

Yet there clearly were people here, and it was only the idea of an empty country that made it possible for agents of Empire, such as the Uhr brothers, ancestors of the journalist David Marr, to go about attempting to empty it.

Thus, settler colonials are having to come to terms with the fact that their ancestors were often murderous, criminal and racist, to what we may now understand as absurd and totally unnecessary lengths. And if they were not actually involved in these dirty deeds they were condoning them and even cheering them on. There were voices of dissent, but few are in the historical record. It is a ghastly story.

It is hardly surprising that Marr is now at the forefront, telling a family story about one of his great great grandparents and siblings that truly angers him. He has said that researching and writing this history is “partly an act of atonement and partly an act of rage”.

Marr is palpably angry. The book is written with an urgent passion, brave in what it reveals and unforgiving in the light it casts on bloody deeds.

I can only echo all that reviewers and commentators have said about this book. As Richard King said in his review (The Australian, October 13, 2023, republished below)this is “a magnificent achievement and a necessary intervention, on a subject that still divides Australia: the violent dispossession of its native peoples”.

It is what we have come to expect from a master journalist and storyteller who has a brilliant track record in publishing. The research is thorough and in this Marr was assisted by his partner Sebastian Tesoriero who connected with the joys of Trove, the online historical newspaper database. The search for the deeds of the Uhr brothers and the bloody swathe they and the Black Troopers cut through northern NSW and up through Queensland and into The Gulf country during the 19th century is satisfyingly forensic.

The aim of my essay is to place the book Killing for Country: A Family Story in the context of a process of truth telling. There is no doubt about the truth and veracity of this argument, that the frontier was a place of bloody mayhem and murder. Many Aboriginal people have always known this; the more naive of us have known at least since the early 1980s, with the publication of Geoffrey Blomfield’s groundbreaking Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing and Henry Reynold’s important work, The Other Side of the Frontier.

What is left is to find a way to deal with this history in the best way possible, so as not to exacerbate social tensions and negatively impact race relations. My contention is that this is indeed a family story, to be resolved at that level.

On finishing reading the book I was left with the question: “What now?” What do we do with this awful history of murder and mayhem, the rage and need for atonement?

The first thing is to understand these events as history in a deeper sense, that is within a larger historical frame. Perhaps then we can understand what it is telling us of the true nature of human beings. This is the approach evident in Aboriginal cultural understandings of time and the ways in which conflicts are resolved.

Killing for Country, by David Marr

 

Victoria Grieves Williams is an Indigenous academic based in New York.
                                          Victoria Grieves Williams 

Historians are now recognising that the colonial wars unleashed from the 16th century onwards are the first of the Great Wars. The death toll was immense: the Spanish conquest of the Americas from the 16th-18th centuries has an estimated death toll of 28 million. The British Empire, which held 24 per cent of the Earth’s total land area by 1920, wrought an estimated death toll of 100 million people. It was by far the largest empire in history and a source of great pride for those who tied their fortunes to it.

One could say that it was the fashion. Colonial wars were fought by European powers over the Indigenous people of the global south, not only in Australia but in Africa, Asia, South America and Mexico, India and China. The aim was to dispossess, enslave, destroy and claim all of what these people had of value, for the Empire. They were enormously successful.

No small part of this success is due to the specific kind of white masculinity that enabled the bloody conquest, that seemed to relish the lawless frontier and the opportunity to prove oneself.

This specific masculine ideal of violence as normative was nurtured and fostered as a part of the imperial ambitions of Britain, and thus built into colonial culture and politics. The workings of what the anthropologist Rita Laura Segato refers to as the masculine mandate whereby the libido is conscripted into providing constant proof that one truly is a man was the order of the day. Subservience to the masculine mandate is for both men and women the only way to exercise any power “power is expressed … exhibited and consolidated, as virile potency in a brutal form”.

Thus arises the pedagogy of cruelty through which Segato names all of what is manifest on human bodies to reduce them to things – violence, terror and cruelty.

In interviews, Marr has been emphatic that the people of the killing times are the same as those of today. It is my view that they are separated by huge social, cultural and political gaps and contexts that shape them. This has been a long debate in sociology, is it nature or nurture that produces certain kinds of people? In the case of settler colonial masculinist ideology, the society back in Britain was often shocked by the excessive violence of the frontier. They sought ways to curb them. Perhaps some realised they were a necessary evil and continued to fund and support them.

An Invasion Day ceremony held in Kings Domain park in Melbourne. Invasion Day ceremony held in Kings Domain park in Melbourne

However, Marr has a point about the unchanged nature of people over time when you consider the murdered and missing Aboriginal women and children in Australia. For example, the crimes of the serial murderer Richard Dorrough against Aboriginal and Pacifica women. He, who perversely wanted his crimes to be known, can be seen as subservient to the masculinist mandate. There are many other perpetrators. The phenomenon of murdered and missing Aboriginal women and children is evidence of the continuation of the gendered conquest and pedagogy of cruelty in contemporary Australian society.

To enlarge on the macro view, the huge death toll in all of the worldwide wars since the 16th century has not seemed to make a dent on the continuing overpopulation of the Earth. We need to consider that huge hordes of Europeans moved out to the global south because they could not continue to live in home countries that were already overpopulated. The 18th century saw famines and food riots in Britain and France.

The colonial wars and subsequent mass migrations were a result of the very pressing need to find other lands on which to grow food and be able to live, as well as the search for the bounty that these lands could offer in timber, animal and mineral resources. While the idea of Manifest Destiny propelled settlers in North America, settlers in Australia were not untouched by this and also had the idea of an empty continent – therefore those who were there beforehand were not legitimate, had no rights, were not truly human.

And still yet – what now?

It’s important to understand that the way people see history, utilise it or deal with it varies according to cultural approaches. Aboriginal cultural understanding has it that our ancestors beyond the last two generations (that are usually in living memory) go back into eternal time where they are part of the paradigms for the proper human behaviour on Earth, also known as the Law. These paradigms are accessed through stories that are often attached to constellations and landforms. Eternal time is ever-present, it is here “running along beside us” enabling a connection through eruptions of eternal time into the present.

Eternal time then is connected to normal time in which we live, this is the “everywhen” that is often used to describe Aboriginal understandings of time. It is more than that, it is known as tjukurpa by Central Australian Anangu, and by other names elsewhere. Altogether it is the sacred, that is more easily accessed when in the state between dreaming and wakefulness. Hence the misnomer, the Dreaming.

David Marr.
David Marr.

If the Law is transgressed then people have to be held to account for their actions and the aim of a full and frank hearing is for people to be able to continue to live together in a good way. All involved are given an opportunity to speak their truth and an appropriate punishment is decided on and meted out. Once resolved, settled, these matters are never spoken of again. It is considered that the business is finished.

So, what now? The Yoorrook Commission in Victoria defines truth telling as the act of telling true history by listening to the experiences of First Peoples.

Marr has written this book as a contribution to the truth-telling process and this is, as he says, a family story. It holds the key to the important connections and relationships that can grow out of meeting with the “other” side. There are many descendants of the survivors of the killing times in north Queensland who have their own stories to tell. In some places the notorious Darcy Uhr is still in living memory.

What remains is for the Uhr family descendants to reach out and begin to make connections across the divide of a brutal history, for which no-one alive today is responsible or culpable, but for which we can feel deep regret and seek to heal the bonds that bind us as human beings. Our lives will all be so much better for it.

Victoria Grieves Williams is an historian and Warraimaay woman whose mother worked as a cook and housemaid at sheep stations at Brewarrina. She is based in New York

Killing for Country book review: examining the Native Police’s violent dispossession of Indigenous Australians

Richard King, The Australian. October 13th 2023

Young guns: journalist David Marr listens to lawyer Noel Pearson speak during 1997 National Law Week Forum meeting. Marr has this week released his latest book on his own family’s links to Indigenous massacres.

Running to almost half a thousand pages, prodigiously researched and immaculately written, David Marr’s Killing for Country: A Family Story is surely one of the books of the year. Modestly described as a “family story”, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could hope to find on the shelves. Clearly, the book holds enormous significance – enormous personal significance – for its author. But Marr brings the same forensic approach to this narrative of the frontier wars as he did to his celebrated biography of Patrick White, to his monographs of Tony Abbott and George Pell, and to his indispensable account of the Tampa/Children Overboard affair and Pacific Solution, Dark Victory.

It is a magnificent achievement, and a necessary intervention, on a subject that still divides Australia: the violent dispossession of its native peoples.

It was the discovery that his great-great-grandfather had served with the Native Police that set Marr off on this bold endeavour. The son of Edmund Blucher Uhr, scion of a poorly connected family with pretensions to Irish nobility, Reginald Uhr and his brother D’arcy were both officers in this notorious outfit, which cleared land of its Aboriginal owners at the behest of the squattocracy, avenging attacks on farmers’ livestock and “dispersing” troublesome gatherings. “Dispersing” was a euphemism, of course, but so too was “police”: as even contemporaries understood, the NP was a quasi-military unit, not a tool of law enforcement. It’s estimated that over 60 years it murdered more than 10,000 people (Marr says a “cautious interpretation” of these figures has seen estimates rise from 10,000 to 20,000 and now to more than 40,000).

The NP began its campaign of killing in the Darling Downs in 1848, but its brutality reached its feverish peak as it moved north in the 1860s, in the wake of Queensland’s break from New South Wales. Its campaigns were characterised by a basic asymmetry, as the belligerents in the frontier wars operated according to different principles: the Indigenous peoples saw themselves as redressing grievances through evening up the score, while white retaliation was inordinate. A pattern quickly established itself. Colonial expansion led to Indigenous resistance, which led in turn to further dispersals. Notwithstanding that these acts of violence were often met with disapproval by the colonial authorities, the indulgence shown towards them was baked in, in a way that gives the lie to the idea that the NP was dispensing justice. The reality is that it was clearing the land of black bodies.

Killing for Country by David Marr is about the author’s great-great-grandfather, who served with the Native Police, which cleared land of its Aboriginal owners, often by murdering them.

This picture is complicated by the fact that the NP comprised units of eight to ten such bodies under the command of a single white one. But in Marr’s telling, this organisational structure was something of a genius-stroke, in that it drew on the multinational nature of the Indigenous population and on the profound connection to place – to country – that characterises Indigenous society in general. As he puts it:

“What made them strange and dangerous to each other was being away from their own country, the country that made them who they were. Here was a deadly conundrum. While officially denying their attachment to land, colonial authorities would rely on that profound attachment – and the divisions it provoked – to raise a black force that would strip them of their country.”

Such an arrangement also allowed the NP to characterise the murdering as what a US Republican might call “black on black” violence. The recruitment of Aboriginal men gave white officers a handy alibi when questioned by their superiors.

Why would the killers need an alibi? The question may sound ridiculous, but conservative history warriors who criticise histories such as these, will often suggest that their authors are guilty of projecting modern values backwards (this is the so-called “black armband” charge). But what emerges from these grisly pages, and from the accounts of the contemporary outrage directed against the clearances, is a picture of a system of “justice” founded on a gargantuan hypocrisy – hypocrisy being the compliment that vice implicitly pays to virtue. In other words, many of the men in this “story” knew full well that they were involved in an immoral undertaking, and commentary that attempts to downplay this reality is, itself, unhistorical. This is not to say that the picture is simple: history is a tragedy, not a morality play. It is simply to agree with the author that if it is possible to feel pride in one’s country, it should be possible to feel ashamed of it too.

Author and journalist David Marr adopts an even, controlled tone for his devastating new book. (Picture: Lorrie Graham)

Marr does not make a show of such feelings. In his television appearances, he will often adopt the sort of demeanour that (I imagine) sends conservatives round the bend: the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger eyes; the casual, cruising exasperation at the politics he doesn’t share, and is, therefore, self-evidently preposterous. But here the tone is even and controlled. One notes the slightly ironic adjectives and the occasionally sardonic descriptions. (“He recruited blacks as guides. He also shot blacks who stood in his way. Somerville was a genial and unscrupulous gentleman of the warrior class.”) But in general he lets the material speak for itself. Goodness knows, there’s plenty of it. As Marr notes – again, a little sardonically – one good thing about the colonists is that they wrote plenty of fine letters home.

The attitudes evinced in those letters, or the language in which those attitudes are couched, will no doubt distress most contemporary readers, and it would be vacuously polemical to assert that nothing’s changed. It has. Nevertheless, it is the achievement of this book to invite us to reflect on the many connections between contemporary Australia and its bloody past. That past is not a foreign country. It just speaks in thicker accents than we are used to.

Richard King is an author and critic. His most recent book is Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (Monash University Press)

Killing for Country: A Family Story
By David Marr
Black Inc, Nonfiction
$39.99; 468pp