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David Meredith, The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart McIntyre, The English Historical Review, Volume 132, Issue 558, October 2017, Pages 1399–1402, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cex270
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This is an ambitious history of 47 chapters, 1,280 pages, written by 67 authors. It is impressive in its size but also its scope, originality and scholarship. The division of each volume into two parts, one containing lively and well-written chronological narrative chapters, the second a greater number of in-depth thematic contributions, provides the reader with a coherent framework and a set of issues that define current Australian historiography. An absence of cross-referencing between the chapters leaves the reader to discover their own contrasts and similarities. A bibliography would also have been useful.
Australia has the world’s oldest continuous culture, but is also a new country, reaching the formal status of a nation only a little over a century ago. This contrast is evident in the chapters of Volume 1 and in its subtitle, ‘Indigenous and Colonial Australia’. ‘Colonial’ takes up far greater space than ‘Indigenous’. Neither volume provides insights into Aboriginal society—its structures, culture, beliefs, economies, institutions or languages—before or after 1788. Even the number of Indigenous people in the nineteenth century is not reported. Although many chapters in Volume 1 at least mention the Aborigines, the claim to Indigenous history really rests on Chapter One, ‘The past 50,000 years: an archaeological view’, by Peter Veth and Sue O’Connor, and Chapter Fourteen, ‘Indigenous and settler relations’ written by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds. Mar and Edmonds offer a (mostly) sympathetic description of dispossession, frontier violence and demographic collapse, but their chapter remains essentially an account of what Europeans did to the original Australians, not ‘Indigenous’ history. The Indigenous voice is missing. Dispossession is seen as relentless and, although resistance is acknowledged, it is not generally the main focus. The settlers were strongly opposed to what they saw as interference from Britain over the issue and resented attempts from any quarter to curb their attacks. Hostility and indifference were mingled with regret—not of the actions themselves, as the settlers believed in their absolute right to possess the land—but at the passing of the Aboriginal race such a short time after the arrival of the Europeans. The myth of a ‘dying race’ was constructed to reassure colonial society (if not its critics) that, whatever excesses had occurred, the outcome was unavoidable. It says much, therefore, that in the early twentieth century one of the justifications for Australia taking over Papua was to show the world that they could, in fact, be entrusted with power over a native population. In putting forward this claim, Marilyn Lake, in Chapter Twenty-Two, ‘Colonial Australia in the Asia-Pacific Region’, casts Australia as seeking redemption for its past genocidal wrongdoings. Dispossession was, of course, a complex process, and one that went further than forced removal from ancestral lands: political rights and access to welfare were also specifically denied to Aboriginal people, who were not even enumerated in the human population in the Federal censuses.
