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Geoffrey Bolton
The
Middle Way:
The Oxford History of Australia, volume 5, 1942-1988
OUP 334pp
Australian
Book Review, August 1990, pp.
9-10
In 1942 an Aborigine
shouted through the streets of Geraldton “The Japs will do me”. Nine
years earlier his family had been stripped of its possessions and
incarcerated on a reserve. That fragment typifies the best in Bolton’s
contemporary history – an ear tuned to the moment when the retelling
of a story will carry the greatest effect, in this case during his
summary of the Pacific War.
Fewer history
professors today are game to follow their prejudices by leaving out
Aborigines or women. Instead, they glimpse the marginals and minorities
before resuming the real business of history, namely, men talking to
each other. Although Bolton includes many sections on what many of his
peers deem the fashionable oppressed, he reminds us that their lives
have not ceased just because he has reverted to high politics. Sharp
sentences interrupt that domineering debate as when he has Dame Enid
Lyons explain her appointment to the first Menzies cabinet: “They
needed someone to pour the tea.”
As general editor of
the Oxford series, Bolton had expressed his openness to the scholarly
results of the past decades of social protest by allocating the first
volume to Aboriginal Australia and by asking two women to free select on
the boy’s own nineteenth century.
The two volumes already
published in the series, Beverley Kingston on 1860-1900, and Stuart
Macintyre on 1901-1942, offered new structures for their surveys, both
building out from their own more detailed scholarship. Kingston
approached her span through five themes: materialism, belief, society,
culture and power. Macintrye wove topics along a loose time-line. Their
series editor has not learned from their examples.
Instead, Bolton expands
the list of topics to be treated without establishing any new order or
identifying a dynamic much beyond that associated with the fortunes of
the Commonwealth Parliament. His manner is summed up in the title “The
Middle Way’ and highlighted by presenting the years 1951 to 1965 under
the banner of R G Menzies. Incidents and themes are linked by little
more than chronological proximity.
Bolton almost takes up
the theme of shifting cohorts by mentioning the dominance during the
1950s of aged businessmen, politicians and scientists, as well as noting
that the anti-Vietnam war movement challenged the rule of old,
Anglo-Saxon men. Bolton had not done the research necessary to turn such
incidents into a coherent explanation for the immobility of aspects of
Australian life before the later 1960s. Were any benefits from
compulsory retirement negated by promotion according to seniority in the
public service? A revealing history of Australia awaits an adroit
head-counter who can map the comings and goings of judges, shire clerks,
and senior teachers. Prosopography also could be used to explore how the
philosophies and reforms of the last twenty-five years have affected the
writing of Australian history.
Fewer and fewer
historians (Bolton quotes Ezra Pound) leave blanks when they do not know
something. If Bolton’s practice is any guide, the lacunae are plugged
nowadays with paraphrases of the quinquennial census. The old standby of
cataloguing parliamentary politics is there too. Certain of his blanks
need to be filled in, none more so than the transformation of the world
economy. By skimming overseas events, Bolton is left with clichéd
judgements about the origins of ANZUS, Korea’s civil war, Indonesian
ambitions and the Suez crisis, though the usual pitfalls of the Coral
Sea battle and the 1965 coups in Indonesia have been avoided.
Errors of detail are
not confined to the overseas sections. Few of the mistakes I noticed
undermined the point that Bolton was making. Historians need to draw
distinctions between “true facts” and accurate truths”, with
faults in the former counting as venal and only the latter as mortal
offences. Bolton’s mistake about which year the emperor Showa died is
an “untrue fact”, while his suggestion that the Masonic lodges did
not have a parallel women’s organisation is an “untruth” because
he uses that morsel of misinformation to sustain a wider claim.
Typically though, he has brought the residue of sectarianism to our
attention, even if his index-maker did not notice.
Bolton’s plain style
keeps the most mundane of his narratives readable, always with the
prospect that one damned thing after another will be enlivened by a
quick turn of phrase, as in his remark that wartime factories provided
women with “less onerous” jobs than domestic service, or by a
personal reminiscence such as this 1967 parody picked up in a Perth beer
garden:
Put another Buddhist
in
In the Buddhist burning bin …
As a West Australian
whose finest book is about North Queensland, Bolton’s mind is not
trapped beneath the Brisbane line. And yet, by the end, there are too
many other voices and not enough of the author’s.
General histories are
difficult enough to bring off because no one can be expert in every
area; those dealing with the very recent past suffer the added
disadvantage of every reader’s knowing better about some aspect from
their own lives. Manning Clark drew the line at 1935 and the final
bicentennial volume confirmed Georg Lukacs’s observation that the
bankruptcy of bourgeois intellectuals is revealed whenever they attempt
to deal with the present as history. Bolton’s “The Middle Way” is
Whiggish in style and sympathies without the confident vision of that
descendency.
Social and intellectual
critics of the traditional methods of writing about the past have been
more successful at asserting the right of out-groups to be heard than
they have been at constructing replacements for the ordering principles
once provided by political chronicle and the ideal of empire. Feminist
writers offer “power” in all its manifestations as a superior matrix
to psephology without being better able to account for why breakouts
occur. Australianists stress the local at some cost to the explanation
of how we interact with the global. Bolton’s middle way demonstrates
that more than goodwill will be needed to surpass the rich fare which
protestors have laid before our tribe of scribblers.
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