The documents of that argument include the wrongheaded, but enormously influential book by McQueen, A New Britannia. This debate led to the production of the important book by Terry Irving and Bob Connell, Class Structure in Australian History, which was a synthesis of the predominant view that emerged from the debate, that a working class of a particular kind had emerged in Australia in the 19th century, and that the emergence of a Labor Party and a labour movement was a progressive development for the working class.
Connell and Irving's book and Russel Ward's Concise History were widely studied in universities and high schools from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The seminal Australian Legend, by Russel Ward, and The Legend of the Nineties, by Vance Palmer, were also widely influential at high school and university levels.
Macintyre's treatment of this important intellectual exchange and the influential literature from different strands in this debate is to abolish it all from his new narrative. Connell and Irving are abolished. Greg Patmore is abolished. Humphrey McQueen is abolished: all his three important books, A New Britannia, the indispensable book about Australian art, The Black Swan of Trespass, and his useful illustrated Social Sketches of Australia 1888-1975, are ignored. Ian Turner is abolished: Industrial Labor and Politics, Sydney's Burning and even his books about sport.
Macintyre is left, in his own narrative, as the only towering figure surviving from the debate on class, dismissing contemptuously, as "neglecting racism" The Legend of the Nineties and The Australian Legend, without even deigning to name the authors, or list them or the books in the bibliography. What a superior man this Macintyre is!
In the section on the Great Depression, J. T. Lang's own books, and Bede Nairn's important Lang biography, are not mentioned. None of the biographies of Mannix are mentioned. Patrick O'Farrell's important works on the Irish in Australia are not mentioned, and neither are Tom Keneally or Keith Amos or any other writers about Irish Australia.
In relation to the Vietnam War, Gregory Pemberton's important book, Vietnam Remembered (Weldon Publishers 1990), and neither are Sioban McHugh's Minefields and Miniskirts, on women during the Vietnam War or Greg Langley's A Decade of Dissent or Ken Maddocks' books of oral history on the Vietnam conflict.
Important books like Paul Barry's biography, The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer aren't mentioned, nor is Mates by Fia Cumming, or The Fixer by Marianne Wilkinson about Richardson, or Graham Richardson's own book.
Clyde Cameron's books of autobiography are ignored, as is Bill Guy's recent biography of Cameron, A Life on the Left. In relation to the Communist Party, only Macintyre himself survives as the recognised author and expert. Alistair Davidson, Robin Gollan, Barbara Curthoys, Frank Farrell, Miriam Dixson, Tom O'Lincoln and even Beverley Symons, the author of the extremely useful bibliography associated with Macintyre's own book, are all ignored in relation to their published work on the Communist Party.
Oppositional encounters with the Communist Party, of which good examples would be Hall Greenland's biography of Nick Origlass, Red Hot, Susanna Short's biography of Laurie Short, Stephen Holt's biography of Lloyd Ross, and B.A. Santamaria's useful autobiography, are totally ignored.
Given the Marxist background that Macintyre asserts on occasion, it is rather strange that he omits from any consideration, two major original and significant critical books about Australian life from a Marxist point of view: Vere Gordon Childe's important How Labor Governs from the 1920s, and Egon Kisch's Australian Landfall from the 1930s.
Macintyre's book is organised in a way that is quite consistent with his narrow British-Australia approach. For a start, the predominance of so called theory is accentuated by the abolition of footnotes.
The reader is told that at the end of the book there is a listing of where quotes used in the narrative come from, but they are not presented as notes to the source, and only one person out of 100 will, in practice, laboriously work out where the ideas came from.
The net effect of this device is to dramatically increase the role of the narrator of the book, and de-emphasise the way in which he has been influenced by the research and ideas of other people. Another effect is to make it unclear what part of the material is quotes, and what part is Macintyre's own view, leaving Macintyre with the perfect out, if challenged on some point, that he was merely quoting the views of others.
This way of proceeding is a very elitist writing device, presenting an enormous obstacle to the reader's understanding of the genesis of the ideas in the book, but it is a device that is quite common in postmodernist circles under the rubric of theory.
Another infuriating feature of Macintyre's dry writing style is the deliberate way he avoids naming historical figures, or historians who he obviously regards as minor, and the effect of this device is to make some important, named historical personalities, towering presences over a landscape otherwise inhabited by the nameless.
Sometimes this device becomes almost bizarre. Examples of this are:
On page 48, where he names Samuel Marsden about five times, on both sides of this sentence.
As early as 1803 King allowed an Irish convict to exercise his clerical functions, though that privilege was withdrawn in the following year when the Priest was suspected of using the Mass to plan the Castle Hill Uprising. In 1820 two new priests came voluntarily from Ireland with official permission to fulfill their compatriots' religious obligations.
Three Catholic priests, none of them named, but Samuel Marsden named four times in the same paragraph.
Again, when discussing The Bulletin at some length, Macintyre manages to do it without mentioning the important founding editor, J. F. Archibald.
When discussing the Second World War, he quotes a John Manifold poem and describes Manifold as "another descendent of a pastoral dynasty" without mentioning either his name or the fact that he was a Communist when he wrote the poem.
Later in the same paragraph, when discussing Eric Lambert's Twenty Thousand Thieves he doesn't mention either the name of the book or the name of the author.
This loopy device recurs again and again in this strange book, a triumph of a supposedly theoretical approach over any attempt at utility. It makes the narrative a very lordly document indeed.
In addition to this problem, throughout his book Macintyre mentions far fewer secondary historical figures and secondary sources than does Russel Ward, particularly secondary figures who contribute radicalism or conflict to the historical mosaic.
Macintyre's mention of Manifold's war poem, without naming or identifying the author clearly, is serendipitous in several ways.russel Ward uses another Manifold war poem, from the same anthology, in his Concise History (naming Manifold).
My favourite Manifold poem, from the same anthology, begins with the line, "Crazy as hell, And typical of us, Just like that, 'Comrade', On a bus", but I don't think that poem would be of much use for Macintyre's purposes.
The other very important literary contribution for which John Manifold is known is his useful pioneering work, Who Wrote the Ballads (Australasian Book Society, 1961). This was the first major work on rebel balladeers, mostly Irish, such as Frank McNamara (Frank the Poet), and their important contribution to the Australian radical ethos and culture.
Other people who have done work in this area, and written books, are Hugh Anderson, John Meredith and Rex Whalan.russel Ward made very extensive, almost instrumental use of this kind of ballad material in The Australian Legend, in sketching out the deep sources of the Australian anti-authoritarian and egalitarian ethos, which is possibly why Macintyre regards Ward's book as overly elegaic and misleading.
It was, again, curiously serendipitious that Hugh Anderson's book about Tocsin was relaunched in the afternoon at the Sydney Labor History Conference where Macintyre spoke, and that Anderson was present for the occasion. I find it very striking that the Celtic ballads, which figure so deeply in the cultural mosaic of Australian rebellion, get no recognition at all in Macintyre's narrative or bibliography.
Macintyre doesn't only abolish the Catholics, he just about abolishes religious history from the 19th century story. As Jim Griffin pointed out, Macintyre very nearly abolishes the Irish Catholics.
On examination, the means by which he does this are in themselves rather startling. Not only does he abolish the Irish Catholics, but to do this he has to just about abolish religion as a whole from the story of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
There is no significant mention of sectarian religious conflict. There is no mention of important institutions such as the freemasons and the Loyal Orange Lodge, despite the fact that nearly all Tory Australian prime ministers and governors were freemasons.
To avoid the conflicts that had a religious form, in the interests of a bland narrative, Macintyre makes the whole religious sphere just about disappear, which to me, as a Marxian materialist, seems to be a completely unscientific and novel way to write about Australia in the 19th century.
Incidentally, Macintyre finds no place in his story for the interesting conflict in the 1930s between the Labor Prime Minister James Scullin (in which Scullin ultimately succeeded) and the British authorities in London, over the appointment of the Jew, Sir Isaac Isaacs, as the first Australian-born Governor General, in which the endemic, vicious anti-Semitism of the British ruling class was such a major issue.
Stuart Macintyre, Henry Mayer and the Sydney University Department of Government
In relation to the sectarian Protestant mobilisation against the labour movement in the early 20th century, which Macintyre systematically ignores, the most useful piece of evidence is the several-times-reprinted monograph on NSW politics from 1901 to 1917, first produced by the Sydney University Government Department in 1962, and last reprinted in an expanded form in 1996.
This very important source book chronicles NSW politics for each of the 17 years and each yearly entry has a major section titled Sectarianism, so important a feature of NSW politics was that subject in that decisive period, when the Labor Party first became established as a party of government.
This development took place despite a constant Protestant mobilisation against the Labor Party, focussing on Catholics, socialists, liquor, gambling and sport. Macintyre's failure to use the evidence presented in this monograph seemed to me amazing and then it struck me rather forcibly that he nowhere refers to any of the historical work of the empirical political historical school that developed around Henry Mayer, Dick Spann, Joan Rydon, Ken Turner, Michael Hogan and others in the Sydney University Government Department from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Macintyre doesn't recognise any of the publications or books of this major school anywhere in the Concise History. It seems a pretty tall order to ignore the seven editions of the Henry Mayer Readers on government, which influenced tens of thousands of students, but Macintyre succeeds in doing this.
Given his, selectively asserted, past attachment to Marxism in the historical sciences, Macintyre's book has a very curious approach to the history of capitalist development and the conflict between the classes.
His approach is heavily influenced by the current "globalising" fashion, particularly popular in cultural studies, but also advanced by capitalist ideologues who positively applaud the decline of manufacturing industry in countries like Australia.
The effect of this is that Macintyre concentrates on political history, of the generalised national sort, and cultural criticism of popular social practices. The actual history of Australian capitalist economic development is de-emphasised, and the spectacularly piratical origins of Australian capitalism, particularly British imperial finance capital, is considerably understated.
The sharply contradictory and brutal, but very effective development of manufacturing capitalism in Australia tends to be written of by Macintyre with the enthusiastic hindsight stemming from its current decline, which he seems to favour. (Macintyre manages to write a Concise History of Australia without mentioning Crick, Willis, W. L. Baillieu, W. S. Robinson, Essington Lewis or Bully Hayes, for instance)
In writing about the 19th century, sources such as Brian Fitzpatrick, Eris O'Brien, Michael Cannon and Cyril Pearl, all of whom have a critical or muckraking approach to the development of Australian society, particularly the economic origins of the ruling class, are ignored completely.
How is it possible to write about the origins of Australia without reference to the work of Eris O'Brien? How is it possible to write about capital formation and the slump of the 1890s without reference to historians such as Michael Cannon, Brian Fitzpatrick and Andrew Wells. But Macintyre does so and, as a result, his narrative is a dry as dust, bland, official history, neglecting conflict and particularly de-emphasising the piratical origins of the Australian bourgeoisie.
When you get into the early 20th century, this curious style of history writing is even more pronounced. When discussing the First World War, the whole emphasis is on "heroic sacrifice". He manages to avoid explicit reference to the General Strike of 1917, to the release of the IWW leaders framed in 1917, or to the assassination of Percy Brookfield, the leftist Labor politician who procured their release by his use of his balance of power in the NSW parliament.
The sectarian Protestant mobilisation against the Labor Party led by the Tory murderer T. J. Ley in the 1920s is not mentioned. No mention is made of the adoption of the socialisation objective by the Labor Party in 1921. The Seamen's strike, and Bruce's attempt to deport the Seamen's leaders Tom Walsh and Jacob Johnson doesn't make it, and neither does the Victorian Police strike.
Popular historians and popular historical works about the period, such as Turner's Sydney's Burning, Brown and Haldane's Days of Violence about the police strike, and Lang's I Remember, are ignored. Important radical figures such as the Labor Federal politician Frank Anstey and the then Communist secretary of the Sydney Labor Council, Jock Garden, don't rate a mention.
When you get into the 1930s, the narrative gets even wierder. The only mention of Jack Lang is in relation to incident during the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, when a member of the fascist-minded New Guard galloped up on a horse and cut the ribbon before Lang could do so. All that Macintyre says about the popular mobilisation behind Lang at the time of the Premier's Plan, is the following:
The incident was theatrical, but it came as the demagogic Premier, Jack Lang was defying the national agreement to reduce public expenditure and street violence was building an atmosphere of public hysteria. Only when the Governor dismissed Lang in May 1932 did the unrest subside.
That's the only mention of Lang. No mention of the Lang Plan. No mention of the mass meetings and the popular mobilisations around Lang on a national scale. This airbrushing of Langism slides over into falsification in the untrue statement in Macintyre's book that the Lang government fell because of a Labor split.
This is dry as dust official history, with one variation. Dopey nostalgia for Stalinism is introduced into the narrative as a kind of alternative to describing the popular mass movement of the time led by J. T. Lang. There is a lengthy account of the activities of the Unemployed Workers Movement and the Communist Party, presented as if they were the major actors, and almost the only actors, in the upheaval against the effects of the Depression.
What 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.