Tony Abbott\u2019s history of Australia comes as a surprise. It has a spellbinding verve which will beguile friend and foe alike. We don\u2019t expect such narrative command from a former prime minister of Australia.<\/p>\n
In office, Abbott was a believer in the \u2018lean and lift\u2019 principle of civic life, with a marked preference for the lifting side, which led to policies like work for the dole and budgets which were generally perceived as rough on the poor. His great ideological influence was the radical conservatism of Bob Santamaria and the formation of the Democratic Labor Party, the anti-communist \u2018Groupers\u2019 who caused the Split (in 1956) which stopped Labor from achieving government again until Gough Whitlam won the 1972 election.<\/p>\n
But Abbott was always a vivid figure on the Australian political landscape \u2013 Jesuit-educated and a Rhodes scholar, with an Oxford blue in boxing and the gift of the gab. At the Lindt Caf\u00e9 siege in Sydney in 2014 he was asked: \u2018Is this the fault of the Imams?\u2019 He replied: \u2018Is the IRA the fault of the Pope?\u2019 He said he would \u2018shirtfront\u2019 Putin. He also mused recently that perhaps we should send the Australian army to Ukraine.<\/p>\n
No one ever doubted his power. He studied for the Catholic priesthood and one of his teachers said he was like a whale in a wading pool. He embodies one kind of Australianness. He does not rank highly among prime ministers since the heyday of John Howard on the Liberal (i.e. Conservative) side, and before him the last great Labor leader, Paul Keating.<\/p>\n
The bookcaptures the sweeping drama of the country\u2019s political history, and it feels weird to be in the hands of a man who clearly wants to paint his masterpiece. Well, it is not the equal of Robert Hughes\u2019s The Fatal Shore, the epic history of convictism, but it is still difficult to put down.<\/p>\n
Abbott believes in the progressive transformation of Australia. In the First Fleet days, under Governor Arthur Phillip (chronicled by his lieutenant Watkin Tench), we get a clear sense of how these improvising military men were inheritors of the Enlightenment. Abbott has no love for the Exclusives, the Rum Corps led by John Macarthur, but he is impressed by Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who seated the emancipists, the ex-convicts, at the governor\u2019s table. Arthur Phillip had indicated that there would be no slavery and Macquarie was a supporter of William Wilberforce.<\/p>\n
Abbott has the inflamed, relishing eloquence of a chronicler who does everything in his power to recreate the past. Despite being a monarchist and a radical right-winger, he knows events lead to democratic advances. He is intoxicated by the \u2018beautiful lies\u2019 of Australian history that enchanted Mark Twain. His own political blooding came from the Split and he is open to the compromises that Australian political progress was heir to. The rebellion at the Eureka Stockade brought charges against a racially divided group of miners, but the jury refused to convict.<\/p>\n
Abbott celebrates how old and grand Australian democracy actually is. He emphasises how a government such as Joe Lyons\u2019s, originally Labor, was bound to break the bonds of that association. He is also too keen to claim that Robert Menzies (\u2018the great grey god of Australian sleep\u2019, as Robert Hughes called him) was impressive in forging a path for \u2018middle\u2019 people; but this can\u2019t possibly have the status of John Curtin, the Labor wartime prime minister who signalled a pivot to America in his celebrated 1941 \u2018All In\u2019 speech. The great \u2018Light on the Hill\u2019 speech comes from Curtin\u2019s much-loved Labor successor Ben Chifley.<\/p>\n
Gough Whitlam lives in legend because of his dismissal by the governor general, but he embodied a more culturally confident Australia. His nemesis, Malcolm Fraser, was a squatter who was also a powerful anti-apartheid liberal. He would not let John Howard, his treasurer, free the market. Abbott\u2019s favourite Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, did just that. Abbott sees Hawke as a true lover of Australia. He acknowledges Hawke\u2019s successor, Paul Keating, but views him as a vituperative good hater. The Labor government of this period was an example of proto-monetarist third wayism and may have influenced Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n
Abbott has the flash and glory of anecdote as parable. Here\u2019s one he doesn\u2019t have: no one who has ever been greeted in the Senior Common Room of King\u2019s College, Cambridge with the words \u2018Orstralian, eh? Two wongs don\u2019t make a white!\u2019 can ever be mistaken as to the most famous words ever spoken by an Australian. They were quoted by Tony Tanner, the literary critic, with booming ferocity and echo Arthur Calwell, who transformed Australian immigration after the second world war.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s Abbott\u2019s thumbnail sketch:<\/p>\n
Calwell sat and passed the state public service examinations and began working as a clerk at the age of 16\u2026 Much of his vast knowledge was self-taught\u2026 He studied Mandarin Chinese\u2026 Calwell was old Labor: working-class, socialist, fiercely anti-conscription and racially conscious\u2026 He survived an assassination attempt and generously forgave the young assailant\u2026 His only son, Art, had died from leukemia at the age of 11 and Calwell wore only black ties for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n
Australia has been in a state of mourning and confusion since the Bondi massacre on 14 December, which saw 15 people, many of them Jewish celebrating Hanukkah, murdered. The mourning reached its zenith when the former attorney general Mark Dreyfus read in parliament the ancient Hebrew lament for the dead, the Kaddish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tony Abbott\u2019s history of Australia comes as a surprise. It has a spellbinding verve which will beguile friend…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,37664,36974,54742,247844,247845,62451,44,17171,247846,247847],"class_list":["post-490525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-history","tag-australian-politics","tag-gough-whitlam","tag-john-macarthur","tag-lachlan-macquarie","tag-malcolm-fraser","tag-news","tag-paul-keating","tag-the-lindt-cafu00e9-siege","tag-the-split"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}