Death of Bruce Mitchell

It has been a very long time since we posted. It's not that we have lost interest, just that posting has been hard in the middle of busy lives. I hope that we will do better in future.

Belshaw's world: In memory of Bruce Mitchell records the death of University of New England historian Bruce Mitchell. Bruce began as a Labor historian, then became heavily involved in local and regional history. Here he made a significant contribution not just in terms of his own work but, more importantly, through the contribution of his students.  

Follow The Sun - Aussie travel posters from 1930 - 1950

Continuing our series on resources that can be used to flesh out the history of Australian and New Zealand Thought, Australia's National Library had a fantastic exhibition of Australian travel posters from 1930 to 1950.

Visual material of this type can be a great help in understanding the way people thought of themselves, how they wanted to be thought of by others.

Our thanks to the Other Andrew for drawing the exhibition to our attention via his post To Australia Via Suez Canal!

The Lord's Prayer and the Australian Parliament - hints about the changing ways Australians think

In a post on my personal blog, In defence of the Lord's Prayer in the Australian Parliament, I mounted a case for the continued use of the Lord's Prayer at the start of sessions in the Federal Parliament. The comments that followed left me in a minority of one!

I found the discussion interesting in part because of the hints it provided about changes in the way Australians think. I want to explore those hints in this post. My discussion does not pretend to be rigorous, simply putting ideas forward for further discussion.

To set the scene, the Lord's Prayer has, to my knowledge, been used in the Australian Parliament since Federation. This passed without comment until quite recently when persistent moves began to have it dropped. Listening to the debates on the matter, the proponents are quite passionate about it. So what has changed?

In teasing this through, I am not arguing positions. Rather, I am pointing to various linked themes and asking questions. I am providing links to some of my own posts where I see these as relevant.

Is/was Australian a Christian Country?

I got drawn into this one in Was Australia a Christian country - and what comes now. However, there is a broader question.

In the past, the question as to whether or not Australia was a Christian country was primarily of interest to the Churches promoting spiritual and moral revival. There was, I think, a usually implicit assumption that Australia was in fact a Christian country even if observance by many was quite nominal.

The need to argue, to prove if you like, that Australia is not and indeed never has been a Christian country is (I think) quite new. This got me thinking. When did it first emerge, who argued it, why was it seen as important?

Separation of Church and State

The argument here is that the retention of the prayer is a breach of the principle of separation of church and state. Now for reasons I outlined in Freedom of religion in Australia - a historical note, church and state have always been separate in Australia, with freedom of religion actually enshrined in the constitution. This did not prevent us then or now using the Lord's Prayer as a matter of custom, having military chaplains, using a variety of religious symbols in public activities and so on.

In all this, there has always been a view in Australia that churches should butt out of politics. This was, I think, most pronounced on the non-Labor side. I haven't checked my sources, but I can think of a number of pronouncements by Liberal politicians. The position on the Labor side was more complicated because of the traditional linkages as well as changing relationships between that Party and elements within the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic vote was very important to the Party.

Again, something has changed with the concept of separation of church and state somehow gaining extra power. Again, I wondered in my mind when this first happened, who argued it?

Changing attitudes to religion

The discussion provided a number of hints about Australia's changing attitudes to religion.

Australians have always been a fairly irreligious lot. Some years ago I had a friend who was doing religious studies as part of her university course. The bible was one of the set texts. When she got into a lift carrying the bible, she suddenly had half the lift to herself! More recently at a parents' function at my daughters' Anglican school, a number of parents complained about the emphasis the school placed on religion. I actually found this quite odd. After all, they had chosen to send their daughters to a church school.

In recent years, church attendances along with the proportion of the population claiming especially Christian affiliation have been in decline. Yet in all this, I have the strong impression, one that could be checked through media mapping, that we talk far more about religion in Australia than we used to.

The influence of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism is obviously one influence. For example, one comment linked the need to keep church and state separate because of the push for Sharia law in certain countries. A second commentator commented on what the writer saw as an imbalance in reporting on Muslim issues.

Inn my post, I commented on what I saw as an anti-religion tone in some of the commentary. This was really intended to draw a response, and indeed it did. However, it was also meant as a serious point.

There has always been a sceptic theme in Australian thinking. However, the rise of a consciously atheist stream, the argument that the Lord's Prayer should not be used because it might offend atheists, marks a significant change, one that future historians will probably explore.

This change is not unique to Australia. In this context, it is always a difficulty to disentangle Australian features from broader elements, including the conscious use or even misuse of international trends for local purposes. I explored one element of this in Australia's Culture Wars - uniquely Australian?

In the discussion, I was left wondering to what extent the loss of moral authority of Australia's Christian Churches through things such as sexual scandals had opened the way for alternative views. In Australia of the past, the Churches were seen as largely dominant in the general moral sphere. Again, I suspect that this change is potentially measurable.

Liberal Democracy and a Pluralist Australia

There was one reference in the discussion on the separation of church and state suggesting that the continuation of the use of the Lord's Prayer was incompatible with Australia's position as a liberal democracy.

I am not sure when the phrase "liberal democracy" first emerged. Again, and I stand to be corrected, I think that its current usage is quite recent. It has now become a symbol, a set of attributes, used to describe certain western countries.

More broadly, there were a number of comments suggesting that maintenance of the Lord's Prayer was incompatible with Australia's position as a multi-ethnic community. I am not quite sure why this should be so. However, that is beside the point for the purposes of this post.

The real issue is the evolution and application of the concept that Australia's institutions, policies and programs attuned to the majority needed to be adjusted to accommodate the presence of minorities.

This is not an attack on those policies, although I do have reservations about certain aspects. Rather, I am talking just about the history.

Australian Legend - a personal note

Rafe's post looking at some writing on the Australian Legend raised some interesting issues. I thought that I should write a short companion piece, adding context especially for readers not familiar with Australian historiography.

Published in 1958, Russel Ward's Australian Legend remains one of Australia's best known history books and was republished back in 2003. The SMH article in the cited link provides an interesting context to the book, while the Australian Government's Cultural Portal provides a short if incomplete and partial introduction to the bush legend.

I have a direct interest in Russel's work at several levels.

He was one of my teachers at the University of New England and in fact forms one element of the New England intellectual tradition that I started to explore in a yet to be completed series. I was also fascinated then and now by the Australian character, although my interpretation was a little different from Russel's.

I do not have time in this short post to write a detailed historical analysis. Instead, I just wanted to point to a few threads that interest me.

All groups, nations included, have their own legends, constructs that they use to interpret the past.

In recent years I have worked mainly as a management consultant. Part of my work has focused on understanding the nature of organisational change and renewal. Central to this has been the nature of organisational cultures, the way in which this impedes or facilitates change.

I make this point because I sometimes feel that in this post-modern world in which the study of history has fragmented and lost a degree of relevance as a consequence, historians have become very uncomfortable in dealing with legends. They want to critique the legend itself, rather than looking at what is.

Take, as an example, the Turner frontier thesis, a thesis that formed a building block in Russel's thinking. In simple terms, Turner argued that the American culture and character had been formed in a positive way by the moving frontier. Russel adopted this concept to some degree and applied it to Australia.

Today, at least in Australia, this type of thinking makes us very uncomfortable because we see the moving frontier through a prism set by indigenous-non-indigenous relations. How can we attribute positive attributes to something so maligned? Yet the frontier thesis has an existence at several levels independent of any questions of Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations.

To say that something - the moving frontier - has negative elements, should not deny its broader features, including its role in influencing and supporting intellectual ideas.

Then, too, Russel was writing from and influenced by a particular tradition, one that still retains some mythic powers.

In an earlier work that I have not been able to check so am writing from memory, Professor Moses suggested that there had been three main schools in Australian historiography, old left, new left and imperial.

Russel belonged firmly to the old left stream. Influenced by Irish Catholicism as well as ideas coming out of England, this school saw the creation of a new Australian identity as a central issue. This is the world of Eureka, of trade unions and the 189os strikes, of sometimes rampant Australian nationalism.

Russel's emphasis on mateship, on egalitarianism, comes in part from this world. This is also the world of Bernard Smith, whose pioneering work on the history of Australian art argued that the history of Australian art lay in part in the creation of a distinctive Australian identity.

The position was always far more complicated than Russel allowed. The books that Rafe referred to in his post draw some of this out, including the influence of city based intellectuals and writers. Many of these in fact came from the country, but they formed a distinctive radical group. Much more was involved than just the itinerant bush worker.

Russel also ignored what Moses called the imperial stream in Australian historiography, although Russel himself with his Adelaide connections, with his moustache and formal manners, really came from part of the Australian establishment.

The imperial stream saw Australia and the evolution of the Australian character in the broader context of the history of Great Britain and the Empire. This is the world of Mary Grant Bruce in children's writing, of Charles Chauvel in film.

The imperial stream was just as Australian as the old left tradition. Whereas the old left tradition saw Australian identity evolving in some ways in opposition to the mother country, the imperial tradition saw the Australian identity as part of but better than that holding in England. A selection of the best from home plus Australia's own unique elements.

This view was in fact mirrored in the UK in both official and popular writing where the tall, lean, laconic competent colonial became a popular figure.

There is a strange analogy here to the Australian Aborigines.

All groups measure themselves to some degree by the way they are perceived by those around them.

The constant negative presentation of indigenous problems, as was pointed out in an Oceania article back in the 1960s, affects Aboriginal perceptions of themselves. Australians as a whole were far more lucky, because their presentation in the broader Imperial environment was largely positive from the very beginning. This fed back into Australian perceptions of themselves.

In all, Rafe's post opens up some very major topics!

Checking out the Australian Legend

For a lot of the 20th century the image of the Australian bushman exerted a deal of fascination in some intellectual circles and it certainly resonated with me, growing up on a farm and thinking of myself as a bushman and a pioneer. This is a review of three books that look critically at the Australian legend from different angles.

John Docker's book on the 1890s is a revelation. Those who think that the bushmen, pioneers, radical nationalists and male chauvinists of “the legend” dominated the scene will be amazed at the picture that emerges. Feminism, anarchism, socialism, republicanism, and anti-religious free thought in various forms were running strongly, with other more esoteric currents of orientalism and mysticism. One of these was the myth of Lemuria created by Madame Blavatsky of the theosophists. This was a theory of a Golden Age on a lost Southern continent where the spiritually elevated Lemurians created the wisdom that pervaded the ancient cultures of India and the Levant. According to Docker’s account these ideas spawned a batch of Australian novels and joined with the works of Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker to inform much early Australian science fiction writing.

John Carroll and others also demolish quite a few myths about the national identity and especially the legend of the Bushman. A paper on the nomadic tribes of urban Britain identifies the pathological roots of some bushman characteristics such as restlessness and irresponsibility which were modified or idealised for the purpose of the legend. A chapter argues that some superficially attractive features of the semi-nomadic bachelor existence ascribed to the bushmen were projections by alienated urban intellectuals who occupied a “sleazy urban frontier” of boarding houses, pubs and radical meeting places. Maps indicate the concentrations of boarding houses in central Sydney of 1890 and the close proximity of the premises of various socialist, republican, land-reform, freethought and literary organisations.

Boris Frankel was trying to reshape the political culture. That was a few years ago and I am not sure where his project got to after this book, published in 1992. Frankel was brought up on a radical nationalist version of the Australian legend and his concern was to find a more up-to-date vehicle for the radical reforms that he desires. He ssw himself as a custodian of the Enlightenment project of emancipation and this book sets out to defend humanist values from a number of deadly enemies - cultural relativists, cynical postmodernists, economic rationalists and the Old Right.