Abstract

Girt
Shaun Crowe

When Tony Abbott decided to revive British honours in late March, he did so because it would add a “grace note” to Australian life. He thought it would be “nice touch”, an enriching ornament to our past. Knights and Dames would again lumber over the national landscape, representing all that was good about our British heritage.

Word choice is important here. “Grace note” implies a certain memory of Britain – of cucumber sandwiches, PG Wodehouse and summers in the country. Abbott’s imaginative England is one of poise and restraint, and the Crown (“Western civilisation’s oldest continuing institution”, as he likes to point out) an embodiment of its best instincts.

Tony Abbott is a politician and therefore has a complicated relationship with History. The past isn't simply the past, something to be dispassionately understood. To quote Manning Clarke, History serves more as “a vast manure heap to fertilise the soil of some future harmony”. For Abbott, History is a useful tool for contemporary politics – in his case, a way to preserve a reverence for institutions he considers vital, despite being threatened by the tides of social change.

These myths are worth interrogating. Just how much “grace” has Britain added to Australian life? According to Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, a book recently published by the historian David Hunt, the answer is not much.

Girt traces Australian history from the First Fleet to the 1820s and Macquarie’s governorship of New South Wales. Hunt is a television writer cum historian, and writes his tale with an eye for the gory and absurd. Because of this, Girt is an ideal book for jaded high school students, too many of whom are weighed down by a fear that Australian history consists solely of sheep stations, Hills Hoists and cochlear implants.

(Trust me on this one - I was there not long ago).

Hunt tells a rollicking tale of early Australia, of venal explorers and wretched convicts, military coups and rum-drenched soldiers. It’s a funny book that manages to tell the story of our past, while also gently prodding the present (the First Fleet was the “world’s first example of a public-private partnership”, allowing “government to avoid responsibility, the private sector to maximise profit, and consumers to wake up in a dark alley with no trousers”).

Underneath Hunt’s humour and irony is something quite close to a serious point. Girt suggests that Australia’s early leaders were not all the graceful products of a gentleman’s drawing room – that the mark left by Britain’s establishment on Australia is not as clean as some would like to believe. Myths are popped with glee, convenient nostalgia confronted head-on.

Joseph Banks, eulogised by history as a mild and curious botanist, was actually a vainglorious “publicity slut”. The Second Fleet (outsourced to Camden slavers paid without referenced to how many convicts arrived in Sydney, removing their incentive to keep their mostly female prisoners alive) was like “Dante’s Inferno on water”. The Rum Corps, lead by John Macarthur in the early 1800s, oversaw a semi-feudal state, brought to its knees by drunkenness and public corruption.

As Hunt points out, the same John Macarthur envisaged Sydney as a colonial aristocracy, underpinned by convict labour and expansive land grants. It was to replicate Britain, taking its gentry and replanting it at the other end of the earth. He lamented the rise of “democratic feeling” in the colony and was in many ways the prototypical ‘Bunyip aristocrat’.

For as long as the question remained, one of the biggest barriers to genuine Australian democracy was this desire to be British. Votes in the New South Wales Parliament were weighted according to property, the Legislative Chamber required land ownership, and nomadic workers often got no say at all. Far from underpinning Australian democracy, Britain’s social and economic structures were actually the biggest impediment to an egalitarian politics.

As Russell Ward argued, insofar as Australia possessed a democratic impulse (a travelling clergyman described as it as like “the French Revolution without the guillotine”) it came from indigenous sources – from convincts and the “currency generation”, the independence of nomadic bushman and their trade unions. It was from people who, as Francis Adams wrote in his novel The Melbournians, looked at their kids and decided to “bring them up to proud of their country, and hate to prefer it to any other, but to give all their lives to making it better and happier than any other”.
  
Hunt’s book is a splash of icy water in the face of the Australians who, when trying to understand the good in their own backyard, have to look backwards and elsewhere. In Battlelines, Tony Abbott argued that the “instinct to defer to authority and tradition … is deeply ingrained in human beings, even if it’s grossly under-appreciated by intellectuals”.

That may be so. But Australian history is full of traditions (not to mention the oldest, indigenous one) – most of them, especially those that called themselves Australian with a straight back and no shame in their eyes, did more than the British to forge an egalitarian identity and nation. They didn’t need a knighthood to know that.

Shaun Crowe is a doctoral candidate and research manager at the Centre for the Study of Australian Politics.

David Hunt, Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, Black Inc Books, 2013.