A barbecue, a protest … or a good book? We asked some of our leading historians to choose an essential Australia Day read. Here are the works they consider crucial to understanding our culture and history.
Why Warriors Lie Down and Die: Djambatj Mala – Richard Trudgen
https://www.whywarriors.com.au/
When asked to nominate a book I consider essential to understanding Australian history, a few come to mind. Clarrie Cameron’s Elephants in the Bush and Other Yamatji Yarns, Busted Out Laughing: Dot Collard’s Story, and Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man show the gentle strength and beauty of Aboriginal thought and language in the face of recent brutality. David Burramurra’s Oceanal Man: An Aboriginal View of Himself – an article rather than a book – shows the depth of history of the continent.
The list of people continuing the storytelling tradition is long. You can’t go wrong reading the stories of Bill Neidjie or Charlie McAdam.
I would nominate Why Warriors Lie Down and Die: Djambatj Mala by Richard Trudgen as essential to understanding how we got to where we are. The book clearly explains why resurgence is still possible. It is an outstanding representation of Aboriginal voices, and an example of the compelling storytelling that is still emerging from the ancient oral traditions of this place.
Lawrence Bamblett, Senior Lecturer, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian National University
The Australian Legend – Russel Ward
Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958) has had some bad press over the years. Based on a PhD thesis about bush ballads, the book was a brief study of a figure Ward called “the typical Australian”. While Ward believed convicts, Irish, bush-rangers and gold miners had contributed something to the national image, he thought the pastoral worker, especially the shearer, was the quintessential national type. A white bushman as “the typical Australian” and mateship as his creed. Oh, dear!
Goodreads
Needless to say, such arguments formed a handy target for critics as the 1960s and 1970s unfolded. Surely Australia was one of the most urbanised countries in the world, so what about city people? What about women? And what of Indigenous Australians? Were they simply to be written out of the national story by Ward, as they had been so often by previous historians? And wasn’t his bushman also hostile to Asians?
Ward explained that he was exploring a national image, a stereotype, but one that had influenced how people actually behaved and how they thought of themselves. For that reason, the book remains essential reading for anyone wishing to understand this country. The image Ward examined remains alive within Australia, and perhaps especially beyond it as a resilient global image.
Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, Australian National University; Distinguished Fellow, Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University
Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions – Clare Wright
For a book that challenges and deepens your understanding of Australia I would turn to Clare Wright’s new, compelling history of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, Ṉäku Dhäruk. This is pacy, epic storytelling about beautiful bilingual documents formally presented by the Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1963. The dramatic narrative unfolds month by month throughout one year; the book is cinematic in its evocation of land, weather, seasons, politics and people.
Text Publishing
How did the Australian government receive this respectful and deeply spiritual petition from a people who have always remained on their land and never ceded it to the invaders? I think readers know the answer, but as we reflect on our nation’s history, let’s consider paths not taken as well as opportunities that still beckon. Australia is a continental constellation of sovereign peoples whose histories deepen and enrich any understanding of the modern nation. This book takes you on a roller-coaster ride into another world, an Australia most of us hardly know.
Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History, Australian National University
Truth: the third pillar, alongside Voice and Treaty, of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. We historians have been truth telling about colonisation for decades, and there’s no shortage of books that illuminate why 26 January is better known as Invasion Day.
For this year’s dose of truth, I’d recommend a new release: Clare Wright’s Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions, the third book in her Democracy Trilogy. In this rollicking read, Wright tells how the people of Yirrkala asserted their sovereignty against mining interests and birthed the modern land-rights movement. It’s a tale of resistance and survival in the face of dispossession, but also an extraordinary glimpse into the sophistication of Yolŋu culture and governance. We settlers should be so lucky to live alongside such wisdom.
Yet the true history of this continent is not only contained in history books. Truth telling is sometimes more potent in the creative arts, and I have found First Nations poetry especially affecting. Two personal favourites are Natalie Harkin’s Archival-Poetics and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Living on Stolen Land. Both remind us that the past isn’t past and – as Kwaymullina puts it – “there is no space of innocence”. Having reckoned with that fact, what will we each do next?
Yves Rees, Senior Lecturer in History, La Trobe University
Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal contact in north Australia – Regina Ganter
This beautiful book (with contributions also from Julia Martinez and Gary Lee) turns the map upside-down, to examine the continent’s entanglement with Asia starting centuries before the arrival of the British. Looking north, it begins with Macassan trepang (sea cucumber) fishermen travelling south from Sulawesi each year to trade with First Nations Australians along the coast, from
Western Australia to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
UWAP
Exploring the rich cosmopolitan exchange between Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Malay and Afghan people across the country’s north, Mixed Relations is based on more than 100 interviews combined with extensive historical research. It explores topics such as pearling in the north of Western Australia, government “protection” of Aboriginal people from Asians, and the Asian culture of Darwin.
These are stories that should be central to our national history. And especially precious to me is that Mixed Relations overflows with gorgeous images, bringing this past to life.
Jane Lydon, Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History, The University of Western Australia
Words to Sing the World Alive: Celebrating First Nations Languages, edited by Jasmin McGaughey and The Poet’s Voice
When Captain Arthur Phillip raised the flag of Great Britain at Warrane (Sydney Cove) on 26 January 1788, the invading nation dispossessed the original owners of more than their property. We often hear that the vast majority of the 250 indigenous languages spoken prior to 1788 were “lost”.
UQP
As those First Nations’ elders, writers and artists now engaged in the arduous, vital process of language revitalisation are at pains to point out, language wasn’t clumsily lost, like a set of car keys down the back of the couch. Language, like land, was stolen.
Words to Sing the World Alive, is more than simply “a celebration of First Nations Languages”, as this beautiful, moving, important book humbly claims in its subtitle. It is a timely and necessary intervention into Australia’s exceptionally and stubbornly monolingual national culture.
It shows us that if history is the lock, language is the key.
Clare Wright, Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement, La Trobe University
Winners and Losers – Stuart Macintyre
In Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History (1985), Stuart Macintyre offers a thematic single-volume history of Australia since the British government established a penal settlement at Port Jackson. His theme is inequality – what inequalities people noticed and cared about, and what they did to overcome them.
Routledge
Macintyre devotes chapters to the struggles of convicts, small settlers, wage-earners, the unemployed, those not supported by wage labour, the school-aged, women and Aboriginal people.
There has been no single agenda of social justice. Rather, in each of the chapters Macintyre discusses a particular set of reformers, each advancing a particular conception of a more equal Australia. Each movement shaped the state and established common expectations of what governments, if they are serious about a “fair go”, must do.
The result is a compact, readable, evolutionary account of what Australians have come to expect a state to do for those it governs.
Tim Rowse, Emeritus Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia – Billy Griffiths
I first read Billy Griffiths’ Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia when it came out in 2018, and loved how it charts the recognition of Australia’s ancient history. It’s a story of how settler colonial Australia slowly realised that the continent’s human history didn’t begin with colonisation, but stretched over millennia, reaching into an expanse of time that seems almost unimaginable. “The New World had become Old”, he explains.
Black Inc.
When I returned to study last year, I read Deep Time Dreaming again and it was even better second time around. Griffiths’ book isn’t simply about ancientness, but about the nature of Deep Time itself, patiently explained by First Nations Knowledge Holders, he acknowledges, shared by communities, measured by science and humanities, and held in archives on Country. “Beneath a thin veneer, the evidence of ancient Australia is everywhere, a pulsing presence”, Griffiths writes. This is a book I’ll keep returning to and hope others do, too, on this significant weekend.
Anna Clark, Professor of Public History, University of Technology Sydney
Australia – W.K. Hancock
Although it was published in 1930, W.K. Hancock’s Australia remains essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamics that established Australian politics, economics and culture.
State Library of South Australia. Public domain.
Hancock dissects the key developments of early 20th century Australia, what he terms elsewhere the “settled polices”: White Australia, industry protection, and Australia’s unique system of industrial arbitration, all of them the product of Deakinite liberalism, established with the support of the Labor Party.
These policies were inspired by a radical spirit and were meant to create a better Australia. They ultimately failed because they had unintended consequences, and because the “idealism” of Australians did not take account of the realities of the wider world. Protectionism led to industries becoming increasingly unviable without government support. The industrial system threatened productivity because it linked wage increases to rises in the cost of living, rather than increasing output.
As for White Australia, Hancock commented that Australians put up barriers because they could not trust themselves to be just to people different to themselves; they believed that homogeneity was a precondition for a just society.
Hancock’s Australia is still relevant today because it explains how a particular form of “cultural patterning” shaped Australia for a large part of the 20th century. Moreover, it is a wonderfully written book, full of wit, and a model for how to write good history.
Greg Melleuish, Professor of History and Politics, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong
Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes – Meaghan Morris
History has always been the glamour discipline of the Australian humanities. In this country, we have history wars, not criticism wars or philosophy wars. Our public intellectuals tend to be historians; works of history are the ones most likely to find readers beyond academia; the scholarly debates that erupt into public awareness are generally historical.
EM Press
History’s stature is evident in the ease with which one could fill a bookshelf with landmark volumes of Australian history – books that have changed how large and diverse readerships think about Australia’s past, and so understand its present and imagine its future.
But by both professional training and personal inclination, I’m a particular fan of books that approach history more indirectly: books that look to artworks of one kind or another as what Theodor Adorno once called “the unconscious historiography of their epoch”. And here pickings are slimmer.
One stand-out text that delivers on the promise of this approach is Meaghan Morris’s Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes, an extended reading of two poems by Forbes. When it was first published in 1992, it provided a singularly acute historical analysis of the Keating revolution and its implications for Australia’s place in the world. Three decades on, it offers an unparalleled insight into the libidinal machinations of neoliberalism – an era which, globally, appears now to have ended. Five stars.
Thomas H. Ford, Senior Lecturer in English, La Trobe University
People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won – George Williams and David Hume
NewSouth
Australia has changed dramatically since 1901, but the constitution still reflects the 19th century language and ideas of its authors. In People Power, George Williams and David Hume have managed to turn referendum history into a page turner. Republished following the defeat of the Voice to Parliament in last year’s referendum, it is a fascinating account of why our current system makes it so easy for popular ideas to be defeated.
The Voice in 2023, a republic in 1999, 4-year terms in 1988, these are all ideas most Australians supported, but a lack of bipartisanship followed by similar negative campaigns, unchecked disinformation, and the age old appeal to ignorance – if you don’t know vote no – saw each of them fail.
This book reminds us that hope is not lost. Free of legal jargon, it offers practical measures that can return referendums to public ownership and make it more likely that good ideas will prevail over bad politics. Australia Day is an ideal time to consider what we want out democracy to look like.
Benjamin T. Jones, Senior Lecturer in History, CQUniversity Australia
This post was originally published on here
