hat an objectionable way of using Stalinism as a left face for an essentially conservative official history of the Depression. Even when discussing the Communist Party and the Unemployed Workers Movement, which are mentioned many times, they remain disembodied, shadowy entities, suspended in mid-air, so to speak.

None of the significant leaders or colourful characters in the communist movement of the 1930s are actually named: no Stalinist leaders such as Lance Sharkey, Richard Dixon or J. B. Miles. No important Communist union leaders such as Ernie Thornton, Lloyd Ross, Orr and Nelson, Jim Henderson or Jim Healy. No communist writers such as Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Jean Devanney or, in a later period, Frank Hardy. Just the disembodied entity of a totally idealised Communist Party.

My detailed critique of Macintyre's book on the Communist Party, The Reds, made the point fairly sharply that this book was a narrowly institutional history of the Communist Party, and tended to treat the CP as a majestic entity standing alone, outside the context of its interaction with the labour movement as a whole.

This is, in my view, a dangerous defect in a history of the Communist Party. This curious methodology verges on the absurd when it is carried over from an institutional history of the CP into a Concise History of Australia and the CP of the 1930s is idealised during the Third Period and the later Popular Front periods, without reference to its intersection and conflict with the rest of the labour movement, particularly Langism.

Macintyre and Vietnam

The 1960s and the 1970s are discussed in a curious way. There is a heavy emphasis on something Macintyre calls the "New Left", but the enormous popular mobilisations against the Vietnam War, spearheaded by Vietnam Action Committees, Vietnam Day Committees and Vietnam Moratorium Committees, is presented in a very summary way.

The day after Macintyre spoke at the Labor History Conference, there was a moving and interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald by political commentator Allan Ramsey. This article commemorated events exactly 35 years before, when Ramsey had been a very junior member of the Canberra Press Gallery.

On the day when the Liberal Government announced the sending of troops to Vietnam, Labor leader Arthur Calwell went into the parliamentary chamber and made a powerful speech opposing the intervention, pledging a future Labor government would withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam, a commitment from which Calwell never flinched.

Ramsey's article points out, with some emotion, how far-sighted Calwell was on that eventful day 35 years ago. No sentimentality of that sort for our Stuart, however. His last reference to Calwell describes Calwell's removal from the Labor Party leadership by Gough Whitlam in the following terms: "The Labor leader was Gough Whitlam, elected to that position in 1967 after a long struggle with the old guard led by its gnarled centurion, Arthur Calwell."

You get no hint from Macintyre that one of the main issues in Whitlam's successful leadership challenge to the "gnarled centurion", Arthur Calwell, was the proposition that Calwell had been too radical in committing the ALP to immediate withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam, and that Whitlam's new policy in 1967 was a much more ambiguous statement about Vietnam policy, involving reducing the number of troops, and negotiating with the NLF, rather than immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.

Oh that we might have a few "gnarled centurions" like Arthur Augustus Calwell, in the labour movement today!

The industrial explosion in 1969 led by Tramways Union Secretary, Clarrie O'Shea, which destroyed the penal clauses of the Arbitration Act, is not mentioned. The urban affairs activities of the Whitlam Government are mentioned, but without naming Tom Uren.

The Whitlam Government is effectively dismissed as futile and too radical, and leftists who supported it are attacked for acquiescing in its alleged statism. But when you get to the Hawke and Keating governments, they are treated with fulsome and fawning respect.

Hawke, the Hawke Government, Keating and the Keating Government between them, are mentioned 26 times in about 20 pages, and this is in a narrative in which Jim Cairns isn't mentioned once, either in relation to the Vietnam Moratorium, or the Whitlam Government.

The Whitlam ministers Rex Connor, Clyde Cameron and Stuart West aren't mentioned once. That's the kind of elitist official history Macintyre has produced.

Macintyre eliminates the states in the modern period

A curious feature of Macintyre's book is that, attempting to be a concise history of Australia, it goes a long way towards eliminating state history from the modern narrative.

For instance, Neville Wran is not mentioned. Hawke 13 times. No Neville Wran, no Graham Richardson. Keating 13 times, no Laurie Brereton, no Wayne Goss, no Nick Greiner, no Peter Beattie, no Bob Carr, no John Cain, no Carmen Lawrence, no John Ducker, no Barry Unsworth, no Steve Bracks.

Important books about state politics, such as Robert Travers' wonderful deconstruction of Henry Parkes, Cyril Pearl's important Wild Men of Sydney, and David Dale's book on the Wran period, are totally ignored.

A very strange book

What I find really eccentric, is for Macintyre to have virtually abolished the states in a literary-historical way, when they have not been abolished in the material world. Macintyre's book has almost no discussion of the ebb and flow of political, social and cultural circumstances in the separate states in the 20th century.

To leave the state dimension out of a history of modern Australia is an absurdity because many of the important historical developments in Australia still proceed largely in a state framework. Macintyre can't bear to mention Country Party leader Black Jack McEwan. There are many areas in which, in my view, Macintyre's historical revisionism is inaccurate in establishing any useful context for Australian history, and is likely to mislead readers, particularly young readers and overseas readers, about the real thrust of Australian developments.

The writing out of the narrative of most conflict, most rebellion, and discordant and radical forces such as the Irish Catholics, produces a picture of Australia that I find very difficult to recognise. If Macintyre still regards himself as any kind of Marxist or popular historian, a history of Australia in the 20th century in which Black Jack McEwan is not mentioned by name, and the post-World-War-Two implicit social arrangement is dismissed, but the Hawke-Keating globalisation of the economy is implicitly endorsed as inevitable, is quite bizarre.

Politically, what Macintyre has produced is a thoroughly conservative history, but that's only one aspect. The other aspect, from a history teaching point of view, is that this kind of deracinated official history is rather boring.

If textbooks like this are allowed to predominate in contrast with a lively and interesting and, incidentally, quite radical, book such as Russel Ward's Concise History, in my view the audience for Australian history will probably decline, and the number of students studying it will probably drop.

Macintyre is exceedingly dry. There is very little social history. There is not much sporting history. There is no overview of modern Australian art. The speedy sweep through modern Australian society in the last couple of chapters is rather moralising in tone and written as from a great height or distance.

Macintyre seems to me to be a bit of a wowser and puritan, which are big disadvantages to anyone trying to write intelligently about Australian history. He doesn't really seem to like us much.

Why bother about Macintyre's historical revisionism?

In an irritated aside in the new foreword to the paperback edition of Macintyre's book on the Communist Party, The Reds, Macintyre dismisses, in a contemptuous way, a detailed critique I made of that book, ascribing it to "1960s factionalism", without making any attempt to address the major questions of historical fact and emphasis I raised.

I obviously run the risk of similar curt dismissal from the great man on this occasion, and I also run the risk of being accused by some of having an obsession about Macintyre.

Why should Bob Gould bother? Well, I must admit that for me these questions are rather personal. I object to my assorted tribes, ethnic, cultural and political, being abolished from the historical record. When I was a kid, I acquired an initial knowledge of the clandestine Australian historical stream, Irish Catholic, socialist and working class, from my father, and also from the Catholic historical counterculture taught by the Christian Brothers.

As a young man those streams came together for me, and I was greatly stimulated by the way they flowered into the mature historical work of Brian Fitzpatrick, Russel Ward, Eris O'Brien, Manning Clark, Robin Gollan, Ian Turner, and popular historians such as Rupert Lockwood, Cyril Pearl, Michael Cannon, Robert Travers and William Joy.

I was also stimulated by novels with a historical basis, such as Kylie Tenant's Ride on Stranger and Foveaux and Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory and The Dead are Many. I was considerably enthused when this rich historical literature began to be used to some extent in some university history departments and in some high schools.

Texts such as Russel Ward's Concise History, Terry Irving's and Bob Connell's Class Structure in Australian History, Manning Clark's Short History, and even Robert Hughes' relatively recent The Fatal Shore, began to be used widely in history education.

These texts are interesting and particularly accessible to students, and they go a considerable distance towards introducing those social groups previously excluded, the labour movement, the working class and the Irish Catholics, to the historical narrative.

Stuart Macintyre, Miriam Dixson, and the Australian "national imaginary"

Macintyre applauds Miriam Dixson's new book The Imaginary Australian, in which she tries to stake out a territory for a false historical construct she calls the "Anglo-Celtic core culture", as against the discordant historical discourse produced by Celtic malcontents such as myself. It's absolutely clear from Macintyre's recent historical efforts, of which the Concise History, intended as a text book, is clearly the culmination, that Macintyre is devoted to Dixon's "Anglo Celtic core culture" project. He even mentions, reverently, in his last chapter Dixson's book, along with Paul Sheehan's chauvinistic Amongst the Barbarians, as important books to be read about the Australian future.

Dixson carries on somewhat about an Australian "national imaginary", which she does not spell out very clearly. In an argument I have written directed at Miriam Dixson, I take up her idea of the "national imaginary" which isn't intrinsically a bad idea. I just point out that my "national imaginary" (based on the historian's I've listed above and my own experience of life) is totally different to hers.

Well, we get from Macintyre's Concise History something of the possible flavour of the Macintyre, Dixson "national imaginary". The emphasis here must be placed on the "imaginary". Macintyre produces a conservative, Anglophile history of Australia by abolishing from the narrative, or dramatically diminishing in significance, whole categories, classes, tribes, and major historical currents and events.

These classes of people and events are mostly my people and events, my tribes, my class, my big social upheavals, and once again I record my strong objection to their exclusion from the Australian historical record.

John Howard, and the right-wing ideologues in some of the media are currently engaged in a wide-ranging exercise in rewriting Australian history. Howard and like-minded conservatives are making extravagant use of British-Australia Anzac symbolism to refurbish a reactionary, patriotic militarism, and to write out of the record past conflicts over wars and militarism, such as the referendum defeat of conscription during the First World War, and the ultimate rejection of the Vietnam intervention by the Australian people.

In my view, the general thrust of Macintyre's Concise History (with the exception of the completely appropriate detailed attention to Aboriginal history) fits in very well with this reactionary John Howard historical project.

The arena of history and history teaching is inevitably fiercely ideological. One is entitled to have whatever view one likes of events, social classes, religious groups, and other things. What one is not, in my view, entitled to do, is abolish them entirely from the narrative, whatever one may think of them.

An ostensible historical narrative such as Macintyre's Concise History, which abolishes from the story such diverse and interesting people as John Norton, Paddy Crick, George Reid, the Tory free trader, Bruce Smith who opposed White Australia, Peter Bowling, Jock Garden, Eddie Ward, Lance Sharkey, Black Jack McEwan, Laurie Short, Clarrie O'Shea, Edna Ryan, John Anderson, Murial Heagney, Jack Mundey, E. G. Theodore, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Johnny O'Keefe and a host of others, is in my view, rather farcical.

A history that reduces the many facets of Caroline Chisholm and her activity to the spiteful cliche that she was primarily a moral policewoman, is sectarian and bigotted. A history that avoids the work of all the important traditional and popular historians mentioned in this article, possibly because they introduce too much conflict and excitement to the narrative, is both much too right-wing, and a definite obstacle to keeping the students in history classes awake.

For the time being, until someone writes a new and improved entry-level textbook, people setting texts would be well advised to continue using Russel Ward, Connell and Irving, and other such books, rather than this extraordinary new book.

Questioning Macintyre

A note to Stuart Macintyre based on a discussion with him during afternoon tea at the Labor History Conference

I am writing this after distributing my response to your book following your address at the Labor History Conference in Sydney in April 2000, participating in the discussion there, and having an exchange of views with you in the afternoon tea break.

Your first argument was that your concise history was not intended as a textbook. Your publishers must have other ideas, because the second page of the book has this statement:

This is a new series of illustrated 'concise histories' of selected individual countries, intended both as university and college textbooks and as general historical introductions for general readers, travellers and members of the business community."

Human beings have names. Australians like names

Your second argument related to the curious method of mentioning secondary historical players but not naming them. You re-emphasised the strange point made in your introduction that proper names would only confuse overseas readers, and that their use would unreasonably pad out the book. I think both of these arguments are ludicrous.

If you gave the proper name of every minor character in front of the description of them, it would probably increase the size of the book about half a page, which is hardly significant, even for the most frugal publisher.

The argument that the addition of the name of the person would confuse overseas readers is incomprehensible to me. Most, if not all, humans on the planet, have names, and human beings are quite used to names. Human beings like names. In bursts of creative cultural exhuberance, humans, particularly Australian humans, invent colourful nicknames for people, "Pig Iron Bob", "Cocky Calwell", "Black Jack McEwan", for example.

If anything, mentioning historical players without their name is likely to confuse both local and overseas readers, particularly if you assume that many overseas readers will be developing an interest in Australian history, and are very likely to read at least one more book about Australia than your book.

The absence of names in association with historical figures is likely to reduce the utility of your narrative, and incidentally contribute to making the story more difficult, dry and boring for the reader, whether local or overseas.

Which Australian history books are really out of print?

In relation to the fact that you eliminated from your references and bibliography a number of important Australian historians, particularly populist and labour historians, you argued, in the conversation at afternoon tea, that your bibliography consisted mainly of books that are in print and accessible.

Well, I have a fair amount of experience as a bookseller, both new and secondhand. I don't particularly like being the bearer of bad tidings, but going through your bibliography carefully, more than half of the books you mention are currently out of print, many of them obviously so.

If you had included the significant works from the major Australian historians that you ignore, the in-print, out-of-print ratio would, in my view, not be affected at all, as quite a few of the books you ignore are in print.

The following books are just a random selection from your bibliography, from the majority of the 300 books listed there, which are out of print: Gavin Souter, Lion and Kangaroo. Australia: 1901-1919, The Rise of a Nation (Sydney, William Collins, 1976); Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Ringwood, Vic, Penguin, 1975); Lesley Johnson, The Unseen Voice: A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio (London, Routledge, 1988); Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989); Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth: The Sixties and Australia (Melbourne, Hyland House, 1991); Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia (North Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1984); Greg Whitwell, Making the Market: The Rise of Consumer Society (Fitzroy, Vic, McPhee Gribble, 1989); Philip Ayres, Malcolm Fraser (Richmond, Vic, William Heinemann, 1987).

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