The Idea of Australia: A Search For the Soul of a Nation. Julianne Schultz. Allen & Unwin.
Not so well known as it once was, the “whither Australia?” book. For decades, from the 1880s onwards, it was a staple of Australian publishing, culminating in the one example most people know, or know of: Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Aside from a few stragglers in the ’80s and ’90s, the final flurry was in the ’70s, with book titles like Whither God’s Own You Beaut Land or somesuch, and a cover photo of an R.M. Williams boot crushing a beer can in front of a white scrim (no Photoshop then; getting it right would have taken most of a slab).
The most celebrated practitioner from the conservative side was a crotchety bloke named Ronald Conway, author of Land of the Long Weekend, a real intellectual celebrity in his day, whose posthumous unmasking as a serial paedophile rather took the gloss off the approach. By that time, decades of multicultural immigration had fractured both reality and image of a unified land, and the start of the knowledge class/mainstream split was creating two disjunctive value systems. Since the values of that proto-knowledge class included “not co-opting other peoples’ experiences or assimilating them to a generalised whole”, the “whither Australia” book fell into abeyance replaced by sectional accounts, which refused notions of a country as a whole that could be synthesised.
There is thus a grand paradox at the heart of Griffith Review editor Julianne Schultz’s attempt to revive the genre, The Idea of Australia: A Search For the Soul of a Nation, since Schultz is uncomplicatedly an advocate of any attempt to assimilate section experience to the whole. For example, the conservative attempt to wrap up First Nations peoples’ experience as ultimately, despite suffering and oppression, part of the Australian rise to justice — “We are one, but we are many… ” etc, etc — is part of a long history of silencing and forgetting. How then can the boomer daughter of a Lutheran pastor pull off such a book?
The answer is that unless you agree with her very specific formulation of how the parts fit together — and this reviewer does not — you can’t, and the book decomposes into several volumes that contradict one another and that do not even remotely try to find the nation’s soul. The master idea is pretty much that Australia is at its best when it is turned outwards to the world, and inward only to First Nations peoples, and defines its present through the process of self-criticism of the past.
Alas, from 1788 on, we have mostly been consumed by fear — of the outside world, of the people we oppressed to colonise the place — and with that comes an inwardness and wilful blindness, resulting in a stunting self-satisfaction. That argument I would suggest is not only not proven, but actively undermined by much of the history that Schultz adduces to her case.
Thus the book collapses into several: one is a survey of Australia over the past 30 years; another is an inquiry into the history of Australian institutions, back to 1788; another is a personal memoir of growing up with a view of Anglo-Australia through a Germanic, and rather isolated, child/youth’s-eye view; and another still is an account of the survival near culture-death, and resistance and renewal of Australia’s First Nations peoples against invasion and colonisation. This last passage is held to implicitly determine the meaning of Australia for non-Indigenous people; a popular approach in the era of the utter dominance of the settler-colonialist thesis. It does so even when the white response is silence or ignorance.
With a work this ambitious, the more seasoned (old, defeated) reviewer reminds oneself to avoid turning someone else’s decade of work into an occasion for cheap shots. You read, get irritated by an asinine judgment or a pompous phrase, get up, walk around the book, and sit down again. I had to do a few turns of the room to walk out much of the arrogance, saviourism, elitism and misconstruction of this version of our continent-nation.
The spine of it is the deep history, but let’s start with Schultz’s account of the past 30 years. There is a serviceable enough institutional history here, of politics since the early ’90s, and one has to remind oneself that much of it will be new to anyone under 50. But it is wrapped up in the conventional knowledge class two-step: a Keatingolatry, made possible by ignoring much of what St Paul actually did, and centring on what he aspired to; and a Howard demonology, in which his decade-long success is taken, in the last analysis, to be a sleight of hand, dependent on piping to the surface the subterranean fear-swamp on which we live.
Keating, we are told, turned the economy “outward to face the world, and a social compact had ensured that the excesses of neoliberal economics were curtailed by targeted income support, increased educational opportunities superannuation for all and more equal opportunities … he sketched a vision that: ‘our children … will employ [their inheritance] not as an enclave marooned on an abundant island, but as a nation with a destiny flowing from the most generous benefaction of history'”.
“By contrast,” Schultz argues, “John Howard’s [1996] stump speech accentuated the negative.”
That is the knowledge-class party line, and it emphasises a deep flaw of the book: the absolute incuriosity about the thinking and values of millions of “everyday” Australians, as compared to the values people such as Schultz think they should have. Many, many Australians in 1996 saw it the other way round: it was Howard whose “comfortable and relaxed” approach encouraged Australians to be more positive about who they had collectively turned out to be.
It was Keating who had, in less than half a dozen years as prime minister, eviscerated the industrial core of the capital cities most of us live in; rendered a working class that had once led the world in progressive struggle surplus to requirements; imposed a slashing budget of them when improbably reelected in 1993; saw inequality yawn wide (“superannuation for all”? Where?); and simultaneously began a campaign of enforced cultural nationalism, founded on middlebrow expression mistaken for high culture — concert pianism, Kokodalotry — to which many were indifferent.
These are the judgments of a former AFR journalist who believes herself to be centre-left, but is centre-right economically and a postmodern liberal on cultural matters — pretty much the standard neoliberal framework of our time. That in turn leads her to give a distorted account of the mainline of our history.
We were an Anglo-Celtic society whose pulse, post genocide and ethnic cleansing, was the struggle to make, for the greatest number of people, a place that enshrined the “positive freedom” that society should guarantee a life worth living. This was first at the root of the doctrine of protection, and then of the labour movement as it became independent and set a national, then global, agenda — most strikingly through the 1907 Harvester judgment. Here’s Schultz:
The dirty little truth about the Australian attachment to fairness is that it has always been partial. It was not long after Federation that a social contract was struck with white Australian men to ensure a minimum standard of living for most. It was a bit like mateship. You choose your mates. You look out for them, rather than committing to an all encompassing principle of liberte, egalite, fraternite.
Yes, what could mateship have to do with fraternite? Quite aside from that solecism, the judgment on the judgment is nasty, ignorant and stupid. Harvester was based on Pope Leo XII’s “rerum novarum” of 1893, and the notion that the state had a duty to guarantee living conditions for men and their families. Yes, it was familialist, because the culture was. But far from prizing isolated mateship, it turned men back towards their family obligation. In its extension, not of fairness — it actually entrenched hierarchy — but of the principle of a meaningful and secure life, to a particular group, was the embryo of a universalism.
Schultz later praises Louisa Lawson and Vida Goldstein as bringing a new feminine spirit to politics around Federation, not realising, it seems, that both were socialists first and feminists second, and saw material politics, as everyone did, as necessarily prior to the politics of gender relations — that Schultz anachronistically applies, in any case.
This disdain for such a collective achievement is the root error of Schultz’s judgment: the idea that notions of protection, security and bordering within our history are purely a product of fear — fear of the outside, and of the return of the repressed knowledge of what we have done within our borders. In fact, they are themselves the active expression of a positive set of values, held to guarantee a good life, and that shared belief has been what it is to be Australian for most of our history.
But that is an easy thing for Schultz to elide because the actual Australian people make almost no appearance in this book. In a search for the soul of the country, there is almost nothing about (a partial list): the suburbs and how we made and live in them; the inner cities and how they changed; what it was to feel oneself simultaneously British and Australian, in the decades to the ’60s; football and sport and its meaning for us (save for a section on Adam Goodes and racism); a consideration of both the popular and middlebrow culture (Indigenous expression aside) that, judging by its popularity, expressed something of us — no The Slap, The Castle, Fat Pizza, Ion Idriess, Cold Chisel, Love Serenade, The Big Pineapple, the Deni Ute Muster (whatever that is); and nothing of the highbrow response to our national condition: no Gerald Murnane, no Glenn Murcutt, no Peter Booth, no Inga King.
There is little about the momentous transformation of Australian culture by the post-1948 arrival of Meditteranean people of all nationalities, pretty much save for a sneering, incorrect reference to Arthur Calwell’s alleged preference for blond, blue-eyed Balts. It’s the exact opposite: the Balts were landed first to get an Anglo-Celtic monoculture accustomed to the idea of “new Australians”. There was never any doubt the bulk of immigrants would be olive-skinned. You may call that trick a little sleazy, but “preference”? Nah.
There is, instead, a namechecking of the “brilliant” people who left and the “brilliant” young people coming up, for whom this largely absent, actual Australia functions as a backdrop. There’s nothing on the TV we watched and how it expressed and shaped us; there are about 20 pages on Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Grace Tame (Schultz is even more obsessed with the latter than I am). Good people both, but an utterly distorted apportionment of a book exploring a nation’s soul.
Where there is something more visceral, it comes from the third book, Schultz’s life, in various rural parishes, and then in mediaworld Sydney, although even among the effective pen portraits and stories there is self-parody — as when a struggle by harbourfront apartment owners to regain access to a beach privatised by richer residents is compared to the first encounter here of 1788. Yes, Julianne, that must have been exactly what 1788 was like.
That last is an uncommon note, because the book’s treatment of First Nations history is so extensive as to verge on the unctuous. With lived Anglo-Celtic and migrant Australia largely a vacuum, a First Nations history fills it, in a manner that suggests not merely attention towards something silenced and neglected, but the idea that the history of settler Australia is so utterly corrupted, its culture and life so born of negative and defensive response, that the only story that can be told is the First Nations’ one. This is more or less admitted to in the first chapter:
Why do odd fears and threats lie dormant for decades only to bubble to the surface, like groundwater from the vast Artesian Basin? … In searching for answers, I had to dig further into the history I thought I knew: to reconsider the legacies of invasion, settlement and Federation …
She does more than that. First Nations history is so overwhelmingly drafted in to substitute for the absent Anglo-Celtic and European-migrant history, that it is effectively assimilated as our essence.
In one passage, typical of the strategy, Schultz twins Bob Hawke and the 1983 America’s Cup win, with the history of the Yirrkala bark petitions of the time. The former is barely touched on, and the most important moment of it — a prime minister saying “any boss who sacks someone for not turning up today is a bum!” — omitted. The bark petitions become our lost soul of the era. Well, it’s of moment, but most Australians will know nothing at all of it, and it will never have been a presence in their lives in any way. Millions, however, remember the day of the America’s Cup win and Hawke’s remark and the sense of fun and collectivity it generated. There was some co-option about what a great Aussie bloke Alan Bond was, etc, but most of it was simply the pleasure of the cheek of it, knocking off our American cousins at a race they’d rigged to win forever.
I would suggest that in few other cultures of the world would the prime minister have semi-declared a wild-cat holiday, and the fact that it was even possible would tell you a lot about who we were then, and whether we still are that now. But Schultz has no interest in it. In place of its slight blokiness and mild hypocrisy — it turned out, for some people, “Bob said so” did not count as a defence against sacking — she substitutes the event she wishes had significance for the mass of Australians.
Much of the book is like that. It is particularly strange because many First Nations activists and writers do not want to be considered “Australian” in any simple, single and uncomplicated notion. Full citizens of this polity at this time, yes. But of some essence derived therefrom? Nuh-uh. Schultz is surely guilty of that particular mode of colonisation, drawing on First Nations history for rich and compacted meanings that the atomised settler present makes inaccessible to Anglo-Celtics. It is a very odd, and increasingly common, process. Indeed it appears to have become one of the principal drivers of the now near-universal practice of “acknowledgement”, which involves granting everything to First Nations peoples about the land we occupy, except some of the land itself.
The book is, in that sense, a manifesto for the elite “command” section of the knowledge class, and the roll-call of people Allen & Unwin persuaded to endorse it, and shows that a full-court press is underway to push something lacking a sufficiently strong driving idea into the world. Some of the people endorsing it are dimwits, some are part of the Griffith Review crowd, and a few are historians from the labour and radical left who really should have read it more carefully and been circumspect about boosting something that pretty much trashes the argument of their own work, academic and activist.
The dilemma for any account of the soul of a nation founded on genocide, one that genuinely cleared a space, is that they, we, lived and made lives with little present reference to what had come before. To argue that such persists as a social and political unconscious is reasonable enough. But you’ve got to work through the actual conscious to see what it was that the unconscious might be whispering to.
Ah, look, the book has fine writing on Schultz’s German-Australian history, and has deeply felt and documented accounts of the First Nations/settler encounter over two centuries. In a way, it’s a good enough book with the wrong title and a misleading first chapter. But if you are going to try for the soul-of-the-nation thing, you have to face the grisly task of writing about people who did not much mind that genocide had occurred, and kept on not minding for the seven decades of a whole life and beyond.
If you can’t face that, fair enough, but don’t claim someone’s else’s history for the one you can’t tell. There is a touch of the academic graverobber about it. We were mostly Sunnyboys and AC/DC, the quarter-acre block and flat whites, demarcation disputes and Wogs Out of Work, cattle and cane and “Cattle and Cane” — and if those particularities appear to you to be silly or of no interest (certainly insufficient to make it into this book) then your sense of us was less “whither?” than withered, the old tree dead pushing through the dirt once again.
It is true that globalisation has turned out to be a mechanism for increasing the wealth of the wealthy. Many predicted this but during the 80s and 90s and 00s I didn’t think it was inevitable. Much was going to depend on international institutions. Things looked promising for a while: the Chinese middle-class arrived, because the PRC knew how to use the opportunity; there was talk that nations further down the pipeline, particularly in Africa, would follow a similar trajectory, as China itself began looking for cheaper labour. But not all governments had the shrewdness, discipline, determination and ruthlessness of the PRC.
I’m happy to wear that I was naive, but I can’t see the retreat towards economic nationalism, albeit necessary, as anything other than a retreat – even a defeat. It appears that each entity has now to aim for “social democracy in one country” in its own way.
As for the ordinary Australian nationalism GR says Schultz ignores, we should never discard pride in Australia’s imperfect steps towards social democracy (e.g. Harvester). But in those moments when we fully allow ourselves to acknowledge the appropriation of the continent and the accompanying genocide, there is not much room left in the imagination for the positive. Yet acknowledge we must. I suspect the German people are somewhat more advanced than we are towards this goal. Dispossession and Harvester, the Holocaust and Beethoven.
On a lesser matter, I’m not so sure that anyone should revisit let alone re-embrace the America’s Cup win. I enjoyed it, indeed I watched all the way through the stately snail-like progress towards the finish in race seven, heart in mouth. But it didn’t take long for the “rich man’s sport” perspective to assert itself, and I suspect this was true for most of us. We turned back to the cricket and swimming, and forgot it altogether once Bond imploded. As for Hawke’s remark about the bosses – yes it was a uniquely Australian moment, but it’s one-off superficiality, even hypocrisy, was yet another reminder that a mature national ethos was still very much in the making. As it still is.
There are much more positives to be celebrated. As noted the vast number of non-Anglo migrants since the 1950s onwards found a place of freedom and salvation, an escape from genocide in many circumstances. I would argue that this cohort and many of their decendants don’t have the cultural baggage that Schultzs implies, and may infact be offended by their story’s erasure.
So what is Australia? I’m not sure, but I suspect over the last 2 years it has become more strongly state based (at least for WA’ers).
There seems to be more than a whiff of reverse-engineered pious condescension in this discussion. I don’t have much knowledge, even less class, and I don’t work. Nonetheless I have some sympathy with the “knowledge worker class” who many seem to both belong to and despise. This class, as I understand it, is posited as a reconfigured, emerging descendant of the bourgeoisie. We should remember that most social progress and all revolutions have relied on the middle-classes.
Australia needs to be an outward looking social democracy, allied with and reinforcing other social democracies, unencumbered by any notions of national essence, but also clear sighted about how it has come to be. The working class won’t take us there.
Nation states do not have souls. Social democracy must be developed without such a fiction. The social democracies of C19th Europe were nationalist and racist, and fascism duly emerged from them. Schultz’s work is misconceived, but Rundle’s criticism is itself in danger of contradiction: apparently she should have included the experience of many more people, the millions who heard Howard as more positive than Keating, for example. They too should be included, it seems, in the quest to define our “soul”. But nations do not have souls and it is dangerous to invent them.
Social democracy is part of our tradition and achievement. Rundle says, “We were an Anglo-Celtic society whose pulse, post genocide and ethnic cleansing, was the struggle to make, for the greatest number of people, a place that enshrined the “positive freedom” that society should guarantee a life worth living.”
Trouble is, this struggle wasn’t “post genocide and ethnic cleansing”, it was contemporary with, even part and parcel of it. The eight hour day was won by Melbourne masons in 1856. The “greatest number of people” did not include the original inhabitants, till… well, till when?
Australia’s “empty” inland has served as a blank canvas for riffing on European spirituality or indulging in European existential despair. Explorers simply did not see anyone or anything there. The absoluteness of this failure is unique to our relations with the first peoples, precisely because we needed their land. No other group in Australia was or is in anything like this case. We are still learning how to see aboriginality, and we should complete the project.
That said, you don’t get to complete projects by banging on about them. Attentive, observant silence is often the best approach.
Like others here, I thank GR for reading this book for me. Also like others, I am sure that I too would have put it back on the shelf.
“We should remember that most social progress and all revolutions have relied on the middle-classes.”
I have to respectfully disagree. I think that the middle class have certainly provided much of the leadership and the inspiration for social and material progress but it is the working class and this class at its best which has moved history. Old dreadful shock-jock of the 70s and 80s, John Pierce, said business built Australia. I don’t agree with that either. Working people, usually unskilled, semi skilled and skilled workers built this country and did so at the behest of businesses and governments. They did this risking their lives in some cases and for pay which varied from comfortable and adequate to poor and starvation level. Always enriching the sharemarket and the balance of payments. The middle class layers can simply shut up shop and go somewhere else. The workers are stuck with the bill. Without the Parisian, urban working class storming the Bastille, there would be no one to lay the foundations to give expression to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and France would have been stuck with a monarchy for many years with its accompanying incompetence, extravagance and injustices. Look what happens when a country has no organised working class and relies on its middle class for inspiration – you have the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire and the Chinese Empire as examples.
Social progress and revolutions cannot happen without, at the very least, passive consent from the working class, and usually with very active involvement, and sometimes start at their initiative. However, they are led by the middle-classes. Both are essential.
I am pushing back against a tendency in this discussion for commentators to drip with contempt for the “knowledge workers”. My point is we won’t get very far without them.
Well “knowledge workers’ be damned. Who are they anyway? IT geeks? The ones who say if they can’t fix it it’s free yet when they can’t they redefine what they mean by can’t fix – fix as to their definition of what’s fixable? Who else? Librarians? Archivists? Historians? Engineers and architects? Rocket scientists? The men behind the men behind our “Top Guns”? The people working on our subs? Or are they the ones who work in marketing/advertising, sales, accounts? Managerial/executive class? The ones who sold off real estate.com and carsales.com and seek from Fairfax, despite all their growth potential and excellent profiles while giving Fairfax its Domain.com which sucks by comparison. Why the CEO, CFO, COO and other executives weren’t put up against the wall after that has escaped me but I am sick to death of this knowledge class w###. It seems to me that they constitute people working in academia and IT.
And what’s this passive consent from the working class. The middle class like its knowledge worker segment are all head and no body. They wouldn’t make it up Argyle Lane let alone march down the Champs De Elysees. The working class provide the mass and the force as well as the cream – Chifley, Curtin and other Labor luminaries.
Knowledge workers are like all workers They are as valuable only as they are able to be useful and what is useful varies from context to context, time to time and from place to place. They risk becoming a dime a dozen and don’t earn anywhere near what they did during the early to mid 1990s. We won’t get far with no involvement from the working class and I would prefer a discussion as to what constitutes the working class these days because that is really an interesting proposition.
You also say, “Australia needs to be an outward looking social democracy, allied with and reinforcing other social democracies, unencumbered by any notions of national essence, but also clear sighted about how it has come to be. The working class won’t take us there.”
What a thing to encumber the working class with. Outward looking. To where should we look out? Who should we look out to or for even? Reinforcing other social democracies. Even though we only have 1 parliament and can’t dictate to other countries with legislatures how to govern or vote or pass laws. Unencumbered by notions of national essence. What does this mean exactly? I don’t think it means anything exactly. I thought the fair go was a good enough national essence. I thought some old-fashioned European liberal values of free speech, free press, free association and quality education and a skilled workforce fairly if not well renumerated would be good enough for me to have as national essences but, hey!, you know better. Clear sighted as to what it has come to be. That is a bridge too far!! Read history books. The working class won;t take us there. Nor should they. They are too busy surviving, doing your dirty work.
It is more accurate to say that the working class in Australia and probably the world over has changed. When I left school manufacturing accounted for 25% of employment. Now it accounts for 6.8% (I think. I hope I am not channelling Albo re: unemployment rates there). The working class of 3rd World countries has been expanded at the expense of the working class in western countries. I certainly think the working class of these developed countries won’t take us anywhere except inferior products, poverty, environmental degradation and slavery. They have no leaders among them and those that are are put in gaol or killed. The working class made this country prosperous. It is only that we have found other ways to earn our prosperity as well. And many of the old middle class are today’s working class. I am referring to teachers and nurses who are professional within an industrial framework and very repressed. How about advocating for them for a change instead of trying to guilt-trip everyone?
Metal,
(1) True, a working class that is struggling to survive cannot be outward looking. But a fully achieved social democracy would lift them beyond that level. As a matter of fact, for most of my life, the organised Australian working class has been remarkably outward looking. But these days, with a diminished union movement, no real appetite for social democracy among the middle class, and essentialist views of national identity becoming more prevalent, things are not trending well
(2) “Reinforcing” does not mean dictating to other countries.
(3) National essence? Essentialist views of national identity? Look no further than the “soul” of Schultz’s title. Putin trades on the idea of a Russian “soul”, Hitler thought that Germans had, as an irreducible essence, a national quality which no other people could match. I applaud your list of “European liberal values”, and the idea off a fair go – but you are not describing an essence, you are describing values, which people can rise to or fall from from time to time – social democratic values. We are on the same side about this.
(3) “The working class made this country prosperous.” You’ll get no counter-argument from me about what and who creates wealth.
(4) “How about advocating for them (teachers and nurses).” As a teacher and an active unionist all my working life, I think I’d rather just stay quiettly retired.
Yes, but no one can define a national essence. You mention the Russian soul but a soul in the context of a nation can’t be accurately defined. It can only be asserted and promulgated, usually via hatred and through military means otherwise it is asserted and defined clumsily. You mentioned the German people as having an imagination for the positive despite their history of genocide. Yes genocide is a very hard thing to come back from and they seem to have done it but why look for the negatives in Australia constantly given the needless heartache Germany put the world through in the 2nd World War? If this dark and negative context of Australian history is highlighted constantly and defined as our national essence there will be little to nothing positive at all for people studying the humanities to aspire to or look forward to or study positively and the national essence or soul, both of which you haven’t defined and no one here has, will be seen as forever negative. I think my assertion of desirable European liberal values will suffice to me for our national essence. We can aspire to the positive, to be positive and dynamic and to materially, intellectually and culturally enrich our lives and this applies as much to First Nations Peoples. Otherwise as well these people will forever have a limited, stultified outlook which sees them as forever second class citizens destined to misery. A positive approach is good for First Nations as well and negative constant carping views will do no good – White or Black. European or First Nations.
Most of these working people like the masons of Melbourne were in desperate need of shorter working hours and decent pay to survive and live better family lives. How are they to be blamed for Aboriginal injustices and massacres when they were flat out trying to survive in an industrial society themselves? This is unfair and simply apportions blame to those least deserving of contempt. This is just Humphrey McQueen and Stuart Macintyre revisited who bang on about how bad the Australian working class were for the mortal Marxist sins of racism and bourgoisification. How about some contemporary analysis of other countries experience with First Nations Peoples?
No conquests are pleasant anywhere, anytime.
In 1856 labour was in short supply because of the goldfish and the masons were the best paid of trades. They had substantial bargaining power. They were indistinguishable, materially, from the middle-class.
Apportioning blame? That’s not what I am doing or advocating. There was genocidal dispossession and there was also world-leading progress towards social-democratic goals. They happened simultaneously. Each has contributed to the Australia we are. If we want to see Australia, we need to see both.
Yes of course similar countries have similar histories. So?
But genuinely, Metal, thanks for taking the trouble to make your three replies to my post.
goldfish!!! gold rush
Yes we need to see both but approaches like Schultze’s book are all one-sided. Our past social democratic achievements are meaningless because of the decisions of Empire, governments and businesses?! I don’t buy it and anyone who does this are kidding themselves. I do not wish to lessen the poor inhumane treatment of our First Nations Peoples but many social categories have been mistreated on a poor or almost similar scale. Children who were adopted out. Children who were brought here to work on farms because of the poverty stricken nature of their parents back home. Unmarried mothers who had their children taken away and were either not supported by government agencies or were lied to by doctors, nurses, hospitals, social workers, bureaucrats, priests, politicians. And the many thousands of soldiers who were sent to their deaths by incompetent leaders including generals and other Officers in the wars we have fought. Similar service men who survive and lived horrible lives plagued by their injuries and experiences. And near to my heart, nurses and teachers. Boy are they oppressed and after all the study they have done!!
I just don’t subscribe to an overwhelmingly negative view. That is a mug’s game and is a lie with every day we live here.
typically exhilarating and enlarging…sadly one’s ungenerous instinct is to rue the fallow ground this rarified level of review is, alas, always doomed to fall upon in this joint. 99% of its ideal (information class) audience being as dogmatic, derivative and dull as dogsh*t. wonderful stuff
Thank’s Guy. Even though found self wincing throughout.
“. . . . but don’t claim someone’s else’s history for the one you can’t tell.”
There-in truth, anguish, fear . . . we all have yet to overcome. Must overcome. But have no confidence. For we have left it, far too long?
I’ve looked through this book a few times in the bookshop, but always landed at that yeh/naa point and instead bought something else. Thanks for the review, I’ve had similar thoughts from my flicking. I’m having similar thoughts about Anna Clark’s Making Australian History – a little too much of the putting it down, walking around the couch moments feeling irritated for my liking.