Mark McKenna

Tokenism or belated recognition? Welcome to Country and the emergence of Indigenous protocol in Australia, 1991–2014

This article addresses the largely neglected history of the widespread acceptance of Indigenous protocol across Australia since 1991. Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country ceremonies are now established as permanent features in Australias cultural landscape. For the first time, the article seeks to explain the origins, development and historical significance of Indigenous protocol. In particular, it explores the Indigenous perspective. It explains how the protocols emerged largely due to the initiatives of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (1991) and Reconciliation Australia (2000) and argues that they constitute the infiltration of a radically different understanding of both history and place in Australia.

Australian history and the Australian ‘national inheritance’

Over the last decade, there has been an increasing push from political parties, both conservative and Labor, and sections of the political class—opinion makers, journalists, and private think tanks—to equate knowledge of history with the concept of a ‘national inheritance’. Implicit in this argument is the idea that history is something to which we owe fealty, that it is a body of knowledge, a national canon of events and stories, which we should embrace as a demonstration of patriotism; Anzac Day being the prime example. From a range of perspectives, this essay attempts to document, understand and critically evaluate this shift in Australias public culture.

Settler colonialism and (re)conciliation: frontier violence, affective performances, and imaginative refoundings

It is the exorcising of these “negative emotions” that is satire’s greatest function. Allowing such explosions in print, online, on stage, or on television (or at mass rallies via placard) short-circuits emotions that might otherwise be turned to more violent acts (261). Satire “does make things happen”, and while the “Boss Tweeds” or Nick Cleggs of the world may have cause to fear it, it will probably not be able to stop the Hitlers or the Trumps. Nor should it be expected to. At the conclusion of her Preface, Milner Davis can almost be felt to cringe as she apologises that—in addition to this one—“yet another book on humour” may be forthcoming (xviii). Given the standard of Satire and Politics and the demonstrable contribution it has made to an under-researched field, there is definitely no need to apologise. The next one is keenly awaited, but in the meantime, there is plenty in Satire and Politics to go on with.

‘National Awakening’, Autobiography, and the Invention of Manning Clark

ABSTRACT In the late twentieth century, Australian historian Manning Clark (1915–1991) was the nation’s leading historian and public intellectual. Clark published a six-volume history of Australia (1962–1987) and was one of a vanguard of intellectuals striving to articulate a new Australian nationalism in the wake of the British Empire’s decline. His best-known volumes of autobiography were published in quick succession. Puzzles of Childhood (1989), which tells the story of his parents’ lives and the ‘nightmares and terrors’ of his childhood, and Quest for Grace (1990), which begins from his days as a student at Melbourne and Oxford universities in the 1930s and ends just as the first volume of A History of Australia is published in 1962. In addition to these two volumes, Clark’s autobiographical writings extended to reflections on historical writing, essays, speeches and interviews. This paper argues that all of Clark’s writing (including his histories) can be seen as inherently autobiographical. As Clark remarked, ‘everything one writes is a fragment in a gigantic confession of life’. Clark’s autobiographical writings point not only to the notorious unreliability of autobiography but also to much larger questions, such as the relationship between autobiographical truth and his invention as a national figure, and the author’s right to own their life story. Finally, perhaps more than any other Australian intellectual of his generation, Clark’s autobiographies narrate his life story as an allegory of national awakening.

A History of Australia

In their introduction to A History of Australia Mark Peel and Christina Twomey stress that one of their aims is to challenge the conventional view of Australian history as shallow, uneventful and dull. ‘What is it that makes Australian history fascinating?’ they ask. Several answers follow. The way indigenous Australians shaped their environment and their interactions with colonial settler societies, the mobility of Australian society and its willingness to indulge in experimentation, its self-consciousness, its ‘sense of possibility’ and undeniable ‘tremors of anxiety’, and finally, the undoubted preeminence of racial hierarchies in determining the boundaries of community and national belonging. After dividing their labour (Peel writing the nineteenth century, Twomey, from federation to the present) they then face the problem confronted by every historian who has dared to go down a similar path. Where and how to begin? Paraphrasing the opening sentence of Volume One of Manning Clark’s A History of Australia (1962), they remind us how simple the answer once was: ‘history commenced when civilisation arrived in Australia during the last part of the eighteenth century’. In his opening chapter, ‘First People’, Peel provides an impressive demonstration of how Clark’s dictum can be turned on its head, writing a deft mini-essay on the subtleties and significance of Aboriginal ‘civilisation’ over a period of more than 40,000 years. Yet his success also raises as many questions as it answers. Beginning a history of Australia by collapsing forty to sixty thousand years of indigenous history into thirteen or so pages, then proceeding to devote the next 250 pages to the previous two centuries has itself become ‘conventional’. But is there a viable alternative? Apart from the understandable problems of evidence, there is a larger problem: how do we write about historical change within an oral culture that saw past and present as one? Our standard mode of chronological history seems to be ill equipped for such a daunting task. Despite Peel’s admirable intention to ‘see the land through their eyes with whatever materials and methods we have’ (3), the imbalance in the weighting of A History of Australia actually points to the immensity of what we cannot know. Australians peer into the deep well of the Aboriginal past and struggle to comprehend the lives and cultures of the thousands of human generations that have gone before them. Narrating Australia’s history through a clever mixture of chronological and key thematic headings, Peel and Twomey have produced one of the most readable and compelling national histories in recent years, one that appears to be perfectly pitched for the tertiary student market at home and overseas. One distinctive feature of the book is the many helpful graphs and tables that appear throughout, clearly outlining the changing patterns in population growth, immigration and unemployment, and providing useful lists of key parliamentary legislation. Although their respective styles are significantly different (Peel: commanding, occasionally lyrical, more likely to rely on primary sources and keenly attuned to North American comparisons; Twomey: less discursive, more narrativedriven, homing in on emblematic detail and drawing more on secondary sources), A History of Australia nonetheless possesses a natural coherence. Peel and Twomey display less preoccupation with the shifting trends in historiography than Stuart Macintyre’s A Concise History of Australia (2009). They also place less emphasis on frontier violence than David Day’s Claiming a Continent (1996). Yet they are successful in revealing Australia’s different state and regional histories,

A History for our Time? The Idea of the People in Australian Democracy

An attempt is made to re-appraise the language of popular sovereignty in Australian political history and to signpost some important directions that new research might take. The increasing relevance of popular sovereignty in contemporary politics in both the United Kingdom and Australia is explored. The traditional interpretations of the role of popular sovereignty in Australian political history are outlined: their origins are explained, their credibility is assessed and the recent historiography of popular constitutionalism in nineteenth-century Australia is addressed. In conclusion, some directions for future research are suggested.

‘I Wonder Whether I Belong’: Manning Clark and the Politics of Australian History 1970–2000

This article focuses on the role Manning Clark played in popularising a critical reading of Australian history, especially between the early 1970s and his death in 1991. It also discusses Clarks influence on Paul Keating, Labor Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996. Finally, it explains the antipathy of Australian conservatives towards Clark; largely in light of Clarks views concerning ‘civilisation’, British ‘heritage’ and the dispossession of Aboriginal Australia.