A Concise History of Australia Third Edition STUART MACINTYRE '. ..., '. ..' CAMBRIDGE . ::: UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780FI5I6082. © Stuart Macintyre 2.009 First published 1999 Second edition 2.004 Reprinted 2.005, 2006, 2008 Third edition 2009 Cover design by David Thomas Design Typeset by Aptara Printed in China by Printplus A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data Macintyre, Stuart, 1947- A concise history of Australia I Stuart Macintyre 3'd ed. 9780FI5I6082 (hbk.) 9780521735933 (pbk.). Includes index. Bibliography Aboriginal Australians - History. Republicanism - Australia. Australia - History. Australia - Politics and government. Australia - Environmental conditions IL) 994 "1 t 1.'1'/I (3) 978-0-';-'21-51608-2. hardback 30:. C])f 11 /3 O/ IIBN ISBN 978-0-521-73593-3 paperback Reproduction and communication for educational purposes The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of ",bib,4/; one chapter or 10% of the pages of this work, whichever is the greater, .i:I' 0".... ' to be reproduced and/or communicated by any educational institution 1! 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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel tio timetahle� and other fa�tual}nf�rm� n given in :?is w rk are correct at . , . ? 10 What next? 'Historical events, like mountain ranges, can best be surveyed as a whole by an observer who is placed at a good distance from them.' So wrote an early professor of history (the chair I occupy is named after him) in the closing pages of his concise history of Australia. Ernest Scott wrote those words more than ninety years ago and the idea of the historian as an observer of events has since fallen into disrepute. The historian is now inside the history, inex­ tricably caught up in a continuous making and remaking of the past. History once served as an authoritative guide to decision­ making. The great nineteenth-century literary historians produced compelling accounts of the forces that had shaped their civilisa­ tion; through these lessons in statecraft and morality, they provided contemporaries with the capacity and the confidence to anticipate their destiny. That idea of the historian as guide or prophet has also lapsed. Futurology is the province of the economist, the environ­ mental or information scientist; whatever the future holds, it will be utterly different from what has gone before. Scott applied his caveat to the final fifteen years of his narrative. For him, the first years of the Commonwealth period constituted a 'closer range' of ephemeral change, but then his history of Australia spanned only five centuries. Completed in the year that his com­ patriots returned on imperial service to scramble up the slopes of Gallipoli, it began 'with a blank space on the map' at the dawn of European discovery and ended 'with a new name on the map, that What next? of Anzac'. Australian history now stretches over many millennia. In this dramatically extended past the last two hundred or so years of European habitation might well be regarded as too close to discern its essential features. The colonisation that began in I788 could be seen, at greater distance, as no more than a temporary interruption in the longer history of Australia. Two thousand years ago Britain was itself colonised. After voy­ ages of discovery, reconnaissance and trade, a Roman army took possession. Initially the invasion met with little resistance, but as the newcomers extended their presence they put down revolts by the local tribes and sent back the trophies of those they conquered. They built towns, settled ex-soldiers on the land, imposed their law, language and customs, built walls to keep out alien incursions, exploited the natural resources to create export industries, provided troops for imperial service. As new powers arose in the region, the emperor Constantine came to shore up the island's defences, but eventually the imperial capac­ ity declined and the province was left to defend itself. The indigenous people had blended many of the ways of colonisers with their own traditions, and waves of new arrivals also assimilated aspects of the Roman legacy. The Roman colony itself lasted for more than four hundred years. Its traces are still apparent in historic sites and place­ names, but are just one slice of the island's multi-layered past. Rome bequeathed a framework of government and law, but that too has repeatedly been remade. Will the British colonisation of Australia be sustained so long? Will it too be overlaid by the languages and practices of other peoples? The relationship between the settlers and the indigenous peo­ ples remains uncertain. From the beginning it caused unease. The proclamation of sovereignty, the seizure of land and the violent con­ frontations this caused always troubled some colonists. All attempts to ease their conscience, whether by protection, reservation, conver­ sion or assimilation of the Aboriginals, failed. The relationship is more important than ever because its terms have changed. It used to be said that whenever the English thought they had found an answer to the Irish question, the Irish would alter the question. Eventually it became apparent that the problem had to be turned around: for the Irish, it was the English question. A Concise History of Australia In Australia the altered relationship between coloniser and colonised became apparent in Aboriginal demands for self­ determination. The Commonwealth's land rights legislation in 1976 appeared to answer that call, but in fact the transfer of land to Aboriginal ownership during the later 1970S and 1980s was ham­ pered by State governments and largely confined to the desert and savannah regions of the centre and the north. Land rights in theory and rhetoric broke with the old assumptions by transferring title as a matter of indigenous entitlement. Land rights in practice were similar to the setting aside of reserves during the nineteenth cen­ tury - a benevolent act by a sovereign colonist. In much the same way the pursuit of reconciliation, made possible by the generosity of Aboriginal participants, depended in the end on the willingness of non-Aboriginal Australians to acknowledge past wrongs that could never be undone. One commentator described the efforts of those involved in the reconciliation process as providing 'therapy for whites'. The Mabo judgement of 1992 shattered this humanitarian frame­ work. By their decision the judges of the High Court shifted the basis of Aboriginal policy from the operation of statutory law, where parliament authorised the restitution of Aboriginal land, to the very foundations of the Australian legal system. The court did not over­ turn the sovereignty of the government that had been established in 1788 but recognised the existence in common law of Aboriginal property rights that preceded the European settlement and con­ tinued past it. The subsequent Wik judgement confirmed thatthese rights could coexist with other property rights. The Commonwealth has since legislated to confine the effect of the judicial decisions but their implications have yet to be fully worked out and their import is irrevocable. The colonisers are confronted with the fact that they share the land with the colonised. The disappointing outcomes of Aboriginal self-determination have only compounded this unfinished business. Aboriginal claimants established land rights over large portions of northern Australia, but the land had little commercial value to those who yielded it up and did not create wealth for its new owners. Abo­ riginals living in remote regions found it hard to establish eco­ nomic independence, and the consequences of dependence on state What next? welfare proved debilitating. Nor were the outcomes for those living in the south markedly better: they too were less likely to complete school and obtain a qualification, more likely to suffer hardship, poor health and early death. There is no longer agreement among Indigenous leaders of the way forward, no longer the same moral certainty. A lasting reconciliation remains elusive. Australia, in name and substance, is a product of the European supremacy that began five hundred years ago and ended in the second half of the last century. In Asia and Africa the process of decolonisation saw the expulsion or withdrawal of the imperial powers and the creation of new states. The Europeans departed. In the colonies of settlement where independent nation-states had already emerged there was no departure but it became necessary to rework the relationship between the settlers and the indigenous people.