Alan Atkinson

The Australian monarchy: Imperfect but important

The question of the monarchy in Australia is to be considered within a strict context of time and space. Distance — the fact that this is an absentee institution — is a prime consideration. Distance has served to emphasise the traditional distinction between the private and public capacities of the sovereign. The queens ‘public body’, and in particular the notion of the Crown, has an authority in Australia beyond what it can have in Britain. The passage of time has embedded this authority within Australian constitutional method so thoroughly that it is taken for granted. And yet it provides much of what is distinctive and valuable within the relationship of people and government. The Australian republican movement is to be partly understood as an attack on this relationship.

Federation, Democracy and the Struggle against a Single Australia

Abstract One of the essential characteristics of modern nationhood is singularity. There is one Australia, with one story, one foundation, one destiny and one face to the world at large. However, singularity limits good history. It makes a particularly strong impact on our understanding of those episodes which seem to be crucial turning points in the history of the nation, including in Australias case the period of federation and World War One. Good accounts of that period, and thus of the whole Australian experience, depend on avoiding the seductions of singularity, and the impact on scholarship of ‘the lethal chimera of the modern nation-state’.

The I in the past

In October 2017 the Atlantic published an interview with the Chinese filmmaker Ai Weiwei about his new documentary, Human Flow, which is a penetrating survey of the world’s refugee crisis. In this film, Ai takes on the extraordinarily difficult task of conveying both the vastness of the phenomenon, with mobile crowds of 65 million, and the inward individual reality of the refugee experience. The mighty plural and the fragile singular, the many and the one – a multiverse on an enormous scale. Bringing those two dimensions into balance within a single film, as Ai Weiwei does, was partly a matter of technique, but as I understand it from the interview, the challenge went deeper than that. The interviewer remarks to Ai that, ‘In many instances, you were filming people who were enduring – or had recently endured – the worst moments of their lives. Did you have ethical concerns about the way you portrayed your subjects?’ Ai Weiwei answers almost as if ‘ethical’ means ‘spiritual’. ‘Humanity is subjective’, he says. ‘It can be seen in poetry, as I’ve included in the film. It can be seen in a landscape.’ He adds, narrowing back a little, ‘I wanted to establish a relationship between a tragic human crisis and a historical, larger context’. It is a brief interview but it has a lot to say to the historian. For instance, there is the question of creative distance: ‘I like to be very objective’, says Ai Weiwei. ‘In [a] documentary, you need to leave space between the creator and viewer of the film.’ For that reason, although there was copious editing afterwards, in this film the original shots were often made with the camera being left still, unheld and running of its own accord. Ai himself got caught up in one shot, and, he says, that too was included. The end effect was a certain amount of unpredictability, an injection of accident and even fun into the presentation, undercutting, as he puts it, the film’s ‘too-serious’ dimension and reinforcing the personal. ‘Humanity is subjective’, and yet ‘I like to be very objective’. There is a problem there, but it is a fertile one. Ai Weiwei visited more than 40 refugee camps in 23 countries, an enormous geographical and cultural diversity quite apart from the number of human beings involved. But however extreme, this echoes fairly precisely the main challenge in being a historian. Humanity being subjective, historians have often tried more or less to portray the ‘I’ in the past, but it is necessarily a struggle. Other people’s subjectivity is hard to grasp – it is almost counter-intuitive to think you can do so – and that difficulty is compounded by scholarly training. Quasi-scientific objectivity remains an awkward ideal. Some have disowned the struggle on the