Blainey’s point was that “controversy, not war, will continue for a long time to come” since argument was part of “the nature of history and of most intellectual activities”. All the more so in Australia, “a nation where the main strands of history – Aboriginal and European – are utterly different”.
It’s much the same with usage of the term “the end of history”. Writing in The Australian on August 20, 2022, I made the point that the suggestion that someone was on the wrong side of history was just another way of shutting down debate. These days this word weapon is primarily embraced by the left – or liberals in US parlance.
History is in the news again following the revelation that, so far, 19 volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography are under revision. The initial general editor was Australian National University academic Douglas Pike. The inaugural publisher was Melbourne University Press, then managed by Peter Ryan.
The publication of the ADB was a terrific achievement for a nation of around 12 million of which only a small percentage of the population had a tertiary education. Moreover, it was essentially put together by those who devoted their time free of charge.
It came as some surprise, then, to hear ADB general editor Melanie Nolan say this on the ABC about the publication (which has been published by ANU Press since 2012): “Of the 14,000 ADB articles, probably a third will stand the test of time and won’t need much changing; a third of them are dreadful (and) a third of them need significant work.”
It’s a long time since a general editor of a historical dictionary fanged their own publication. Sure Nolan, who is a professor at the ANU’s National Centre for Biography, has been in the ADB position for only a few years. But she presides over a publication that gets about 1.2 million visits a year. Not a bad result for a publication the general editor of which reckons contains close to 5000 “dreadful” entries.
On August 19, Nolan was interviewed about the ADB by David Marr, the newly appointed presenter of ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live. The session was advertised as “Fixing up Australia’s written history”. The blurb declared: “History is subjective but in Australia we have a history of not just sanitising the past and its characters but censoring or at least covering up.” It was suggested “one significant project” to do with the de-sanitising was the proposed revision of the ADB.
Then Marr introduced Nolan by saying that “decolonising those 20 volumes, nine million words and almost 14,000 biographies can’t be done overnight”.
Nolan told Marr the project was overdue. She spoke about the need for “revisionism” and made the obvious point that “our values change”. She added: “It’s a long time since historians have been completely objective.” But she did not say when such a (utopian) time existed. Nolan acknowledged that the ADB was an unusual publication of its type in the 1960s in having the lives of representative Australians covered. By this she meant that not all entries were about the rich, powerful and famous. But Nolan criticised the ADB for having a celebratory past and added “people who were seen as disreputable were not included”.
The last claim is not the case. Bushranger and police killer Ned Kelly gets coverage (volume five), as does Sydney’s madam criminal Tilly Devine (volume eight) and murderer Jean Lee, the last woman hanged in Australia (volume 15). Nolan states that only 170 convicts are in the ADB. But it’s not zero. And she said women had been dreadfully underestimated.
The last matter has been addressed in recent years. And Nolan has foreshadowed already planned volumes on colonial women and convicts plus greater coverage of Indigenous Australians. Moreover, in 2005, when Diane Langmore was general editor, the ADB put out a supplementary volume covering people who were missed in the period 1788-1980. Also, through the years there have been a number of corrigenda issued.
In private correspondence about a late friend who has an ADB entry, Nolan advised me in writing that “the ADB does not unilaterally change an author’s text without their permission”. But it does so on occasions. After all, some errors have to be corrected.
It makes sense that, from time to time, historical dictionaries have to be brought up-to-date. The problem with what Nolan told Marr is that the ADB – which is largely funded by taxpayers’ money – now has an agenda to revise Australian history so it can present what Nolan has referred to as “truth”. Which would seem to mean truth as perceived by her and her contemporary colleagues.
Nolan told Marr that while the ADB “has patriotic origins … it’s in a university”. As such, “we are not just telling stories about people we value in the past but also analysing those because we are social scientists”. In view of the state of social science in most Western universities, this suggests that what Marr described as Nolan’s decolonisation project will involve yet more voices of alienated left-wing intellectuals condemning their own societies while on the taxpayer teat.
Then there is the question of what, in Nolan’s view, requires revision. Take historian Manning Clark, a key player in promoting the left-wing interpretation of Australian history. The current entry on Clark in the ADB online refers to his Meeting Soviet Man, published in 1960, as “a controversial book on the Soviet Union”.
It was more than that. Clark compared Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to Jesus Christ and made no substantial criticism of the communist totalitarian dictatorship that prevailed in 1960 under the heirs of Lenin and Stalin.
The Clark entry could do with substantial revision. But do not expect any. It doesn’t fit an Australian decolonisation project.
It’s nearly a decade since Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s leading historian, dismissed “talk of the history wars raging in Australia”. Writing in The Weekend Australian on February 21, 2015, he commented that the usage of the word war in this context was mistaken.