A Concise History of

Australia
Third Edition

STUART MACINTYRE

'... ,'...' CAMBRIDGE

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UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780FI5I6082.

Stuart Macintyre

2.009

First published 1999

Second edition 2.004
Reprinted 2.005, 2006, 2008
Third edition 2009
Cover design by David Thomas Design
Typeset by Aptara
Printed in China by Printplus

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data
Macintyre, Stuart, 1947A concise history of Australia I Stuart Macintyre

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3'd ed.
9780FI5I6082 (hbk.)
9780521735933 (pbk.).
Includes index.
Bibliography
Aboriginal Australians - History.
Republicanism - Australia.
Australia - History.
Australia - Politics and government.
Australia - Environmental conditions
994

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1.'1' /I
O/IIBN 978-0-';-'21-51608-2. hardback

ISBN 978-0-521-73593-3 paperback

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10
What next ?

'Historical events, like mountain ranges, can best be surveyed as

a whole by an observer who is placed at a good distance from
them.' So wrote an early professor of history (the chair I occupy
is named after him) in the closing pages of his concise history of
Australia. Ernest Scott wrote those words more than ninety years
ago and the idea of the historian as an observer of events has since
fallen into disrepute. The historian is now inside the history, inex
tricably caught up in a continuous making and remaking of the
past. History once served as an authoritative guide to decision
making. The great nineteenth-century literary historians produced
compelling accounts of the forces that had shaped their civilisa
tion; through these lessons in statecraft and morality, they provided
contemporaries with the capacity and the confidence to anticipate
their destiny. That idea of the historian as guide or prophet has also
lapsed. Futurology is the province of the economist, the environ
mental or information scientist; whatever the future holds, it will
be utterly different from what has gone before.
Scott applied his caveat to the final fifteen years of his narrative.
For him, the first years of the Commonwealth period constituted a
'closer range' of ephemeral change, but then his history of Australia
spanned only five centuries. Completed in the year that his com
patriots returned on imperial service to scramble up the slopes of
Gallipoli, it began 'with a blank space on the map' at the dawn of
European discovery and ended 'with a new name on the map, that

What next?
of Anzac'. Australian history now stretches over many millennia. In
this dramatically extended past the last two hundred or so years of
European habitation might well be regarded as too close to discern
its essential features. The colonisation that began in I 7 8 8 could be
seen, at greater distance, as no more than a temporary interruption
in the longer history of Australia.
Two thousand years ago Britain was itself colonised. After voy
ages of discovery, reconnaissance and trade, a Roman army took
possession. Initially the invasion met with little resistance, but as
the newcomers extended their presence they put down revolts by
the local tribes and sent back the trophies of those they conquered.
They built towns, settled ex-soldiers on the land, imposed their
law, language and customs, built walls to keep out alien incursions,
exploited the natural resources to create export industries, provided
troops for imperial service.
As new powers arose in the region, the emperor Constantine came
to shore up the island's defences, but eventually the imperial capac
ity declined and the province was left to defend itself. The indigenous
people had blended many of the ways of colonisers with their own
traditions, and waves of new arrivals also assimilated aspects of the
Roman legacy. The Roman colony itself lasted for more than four
hundred years. Its traces are still apparent in historic sites and place
names, but are j ust one slice of the island's multi-layered past. Rome
bequeathed a framework of government and law, but that too has
repeatedly been remade. Will the British colonisation of Australia
be sustained so long? Will it too be overlaid by the languages and
practices of other peoples ?
The relationship between the settlers and the indigenous peo
ples remains uncertain. From the beginning it caused unease. The
proclamation of sovereignty, the seizure of land and the violent con
frontations this caused always troubled some colonists. All attempts
to ease their conscience, whether by protection, reservation, conver
sion or assimilation of the Aboriginals, failed. The relationship is
more important than ever because its terms have changed. It used to
be said that whenever the English thought they had found an answer
to the Irish question, the Irish would alter the question. Eventually
it became apparent that the problem had to be turned around: for
the Irish, it was the English question.

A Concise History of Australia

In Australia the altered relationship between coloniser and
colonised became apparent in Aboriginal demands for self
determination. The Commonwealth's land rights legislation in 1 9 7 6
appeared to answer that call, but i n fact the transfer o f land to
Aboriginal ownership during the later 1 9 70S and 1 9 80s was ham
pered by State governments and largely confined to the desert and
savannah regions of the centre and the north. Land rights in theory
and rhetoric broke with the old assumptions by transferring title
as a matter of indigenous entitlement. Land rights in practice were
similar to the setting aside of reserves during the nineteenth cen
tury - a benevolent act by a sovereign colonist. In much the same
way the pursuit of reconciliation, made possible by the generosity
of Aboriginal participants, depended in the end on the willingness
of non-Aboriginal Australians to acknowledge past wrongs that
could never be undone. One commentator described the efforts of
those involved in the reconciliation process as providing 'therapy
for whites'.
The Mabo judgement of 1 9 9 2 shattered this humanitarian frame
work. By their decision the j udges of the High Court shifted the basis
of Aboriginal policy from the operation of statutory law, where
parliament authorised the restitution of Aboriginal land, to the very
foundations of the Australian legal system. The court did not over
turn the sovereignty of the government that had been established
in 1 7 8 8 but recognised the existence in common law of Aboriginal
property rights that preceded the European settlement and con
tinued past it. The subsequent Wik j udgement confirmed that these
rights could coexist with other property rights. The Commonwealth
has since legislated to confine the effect of the j udicial decisions but
their implications have yet to be fully worked out and their import
is irrevocable. The colonisers are confronted with the fact that they
share the land with the colonised.
The disappointing outcomes of Aboriginal self-determination
have only compounded this unfinished business. Aboriginal
claimants established land rights over large portions of northern
Australia, but the land had little commercial value to those who
yielded it up and did not create wealth for its new owners. Abo
riginals living in remote regions found it hard to establish eco
nomic independence, and the consequences of dependence on state

What next?
welfare proved debilitating. Nor were the outcomes for those living
in the south markedly better: they too were less likely to complete
school and obtain a qualification, more likely to suffer hardship,
poor health and early death. There is no longer agreement among
Indigenous leaders of the way forward, no longer the same moral
certainty. A lasting reconciliation remains elusive.
Australia, in name and substance, is a product of the European
supremacy that began five hundred years ago and ended in the
second half of the last century. In Asia and Africa the process of
decolonisation saw the expulsion or withdrawal of the imperial
powers and the creation of new states. The Europeans departed.
In the colonies of settlement where independent nation-states had
already emerged there was no departure but it became necessary
to rework the relationship between the settlers and the indigenous
people. New Zealand and Canada provide some guidance as to how
this can be done peacefully. Zimbabwe suggests the consequences
of refusal, and in South Africa the outcome is still unclear. While
the different paths to a postcolonial settlement are influenced by the
weight of the indigenous populations, it is clear that the claims of
First Nation peoples carry a much greater authority than before.
That influence is unlikely to diminish.
Visiting Australia for the first time in I 9 8 7 , the English writer
Angela Carter was struck by the signs of a society 'inexhaustibly
curious about itself'. Her hosts were constantly pondering the
national identity, repeatedly asking and telling themselves what
it meant to be Australian. She thought this an effect of the end
of empire. The writers with whom she travelled from one literary
festival to another were all 'addressing themselves to questions of
which the sub-text is post-colonialism', but these discussions took
place 'in the context of a society in which the points of reference
were no longer British' and the participants were 'still in the act of
defining themselves'. Carter's observation of the national preoccu
pation was keen, her explanation of it perhaps rather too British.
The Empire had not simply ended: it was in danger of being forgot
ten. The points of reference had ceased to be British long before she
came here; the difficulty was in finding new ones.
Colonies of settlement find it easier to throw off their tute
lage than to reconstitute themselves as fully autonomous entities.

A Concise History of Australia

Australian nationalism emerged in the nineteenth century by assert
ing its difference from the place of origin. This nationalism empha
sised the freedom and opportunity of the new world against the
constriction and debility of the old. It was the product of people
set loose in a new place where they could discard their fetters. It
constructed the Commonwealth as a young nation starting afresh
in a land of unlimited promise.
This Australia remained tied to its origins, however, by the silken
bonds of trade and investment, the continuing reliance on a pow
erful protector and, above all, the emphasis on consanguinity. No
matter how the settlers sought to attach themselves to the new
homeland, they could not share it with those who were here first
and they would not share it with others of the region. The insistence
on exclusive possession operated on almost every aspect of foreign
and domestic policy during the first half of the twentieth century,
only to perpetuate the condition of insecurity, the feeling of being
out of place, alone and exposed. Its legacy is apparent in the recent
characterisation by an Indonesian journalist of Australians as the
'white tribe of Asia', its continuing potency apparent in the refugee
crisis and alarm over border protection as well as the ambiguities
that still attend Australia's participation in regional forums .
Such is the power of the past that the appellation White Aus
tralia retains its force long after it has ceased to be accurate. The
attempt to maintain the purity of a transplanted people has given
way to the ethnic diversity of contemporary Australia. Twenty-five
per cent of Australians were born overseas, a higher proportion than
Canada, the United States or any of the settler societies. Nearly
20 per cent speak a language other than English in their home,
and the fastest-growing community languages are Cantonese,
Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, Filipino and Vietnamese. Ethnic diver
sity is greater, more harmonious and better appreciated than in the
countries of the region. Australians, moreover, are at ease in the
world. They travel widely and often, take up residence abroad and
mix freely, comfortable in their identity.
True, this rearrangement has left the dominance of the ethnic
majority intact - the descendants of those who claimed exclusive
possession continue to define the comfortable limits of pluralism.
The gradual, piecemeal manner in which they have done so has in

What next?
turn allowed for their own reconstitution, so that they now partake
of the very characteristics that were once alien and threatening.
The transfer of Ayers Rock back to Aboriginal ownership and the
restoration of its name, Uluru, has augmented its significance to all
Australians. The incorporation of Asian peoples and cultures into
the fabric of Australian life is least threatening to those who most
directly experience it. The problem with this slow, often grudging,
transition is that it provides no clear break that would settle the
ghosts of White Australia. Perhaps the Australian republic, which
must eventually come, will allow a final settlement.
As a young woman recently arrived in Australia, Catherine Spence
worried that new colonies were too easily disrupted by sudden
change: hence her observation that the gold rush had unfixed every
thing. As the 'Grand Old Woman of Australia', she looked back in
I 9 I O on a lifetime of service with the observation that 'Nothing is
insignificant in the history of a young community, and - above all
nothing seems impossible. '
The history related here i s one o f rapid initial change. Colonists
applied a familiar repertoire of practices to novel circumstances.
The false starts were quickly started anew. The first settlements in
New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland all shifted
to alternative sites, but Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne and Brisbane,
along with the more carefully planned beginnings at Perth and Ade
laide, soon established a durable presence. They remain the centres
of their States to this day. After early difficulties, the settlers found
how to work the land. They learned how to treat it as a green-field
site on which they could employ the most advanced technologies
and secure the greatest efficiency in the production of commodi
ties for world markets. They applied their prosperity to schemes of
improvement and adapted their institutions with similar ingenuity.
This nineteenth-century Australia thrust aside obstacles, confident
in its capacity to control destiny.
A hundred years later that confidence dissipated. Australia had
been caught and surpassed by later entrants, Australians were fol
lowers rather than leaders, careless of their earlier achievements. In
the closing decades of the twentieth century they cast aside much
of that legacy and embarked on an arduous renewal. It is thus
remarkable that the seventeen years of continuous growth achieved

A Concise History of Australia

after 1 9 9 1 relied so heavily on the original arrangement, commod
ity exports that attracted investment, stimulated service industries
and supported high living standards among an urban population.
Australia thus remains a magnet for the new settlers who continue
to arrive, bringing with them an unprecedented diversity and an
energy that sustains innovation. What might be learnt from such a
history? For those who were here first, the modern history of Aus
tralia is deeply traumatic and the healing has only begun. For those
who came, it is a story of fresh beginnings. A place of exile became a
land of choice and a sanctuary for successive waves of new arrivals
who have continually reworked it. It has dazzled them with its light,
intimidated them with its space, baffled them with its indifference. It
makes no declaration of its virtues. No Statue of Liberty welcomes
the newcomer, no proclamation of guiding principles is offered.
They are to be found in the way that Australians live and the
advantages that they usually take for granted. The maj ority enjoy
a modest comfort; as one newcomer in the 1 9 60s discovered, this
is a place where 'you did not need to be wealthy to be warm'. It
is a country of low population density, just two inhabitants for
every square kilometre, and for all the abuse of a fragile environ
ment, it allows for more. The high rate of immigration and a recent
upturn in the birthrate create a demographic structure that is bet
ter placed than other countries to avoid the imbalance of an aged
and dependent cohort overhanging the working population. The
life expectancy is high. It remains a country of opportunity.
A largely undemonstrative people, Australians rally in misfor
tune; fire and flood brings out the best in them. There is a wide
measure of freedom; differences are resolved by established proce
dures under the rule of law, and a healthy suspicion of extremes
protects Australians from despotism. These and other achievements
had to be won in the past, as they need to be defended today. The
history of Australia works backwards and forwards to rework our
understanding of how we came to be what we are. Its presence is
inescapable. To enter into it provides a capacity to determine what
still might be.