WRITING & BROADCASTING AUSTRALIA: A HISTORY – TONY ABBOTT

Former Australian prime minister, The Hon Tony Abbott, is a man of many parts. Not content to contain his views to speaking, Tony Abbott has now contributed a sales record breaking volume on Australia history – Australia A History – how an ancient land became a great democracy. This led to Abbott also fronting a three-part documentary series on Sky News Australia. The message? As Abbott puts it, Australia has far more to be proud of than ashamed of. It is the history of people from all over the world remaking themselves in a land underpinned by the security and liberties of a British inheritance. As Abbott sees it, Australia has an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character. To discuss all this and more, Tony Abbott addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 15 December 2025

WRITING & BROADCASTING AUSTRALIA: A HISTORY

TONY ABBOTT

It’s an honour to be here at The Sydney Institute. It’s sad to be here at such a fraught time in the life of our city and our country but, still, I do welcome the chance to talk about our country at its best, which I have tried to encapsulate in my own way, in the history that has been just published.

As I’m sure most of you have worked out, I think that our history has far more to be proud of than to be ashamed of. I don’t think we’re perfect, no country is. But, on balance, it’s a great story. It’s a story that should be better known. And I thought that using, if you like, the amplification that is available to a former Prime Minister, I should tell the story to the best of my ability, as objectively and as fairly as I could. I’m delighted that my former parliamentary colleagues on the other side of the fence, Kim Beazley and Bill Shorten have been prepared to offer supportive words for the book.

I was particularly delighted when Nova Peris, the former Labor senator from the Northern Territory and the first Aboriginal Australian to win an Olympic Games gold medal.

What has happened in this country in the last 24 hours at Bondi Beach is simply un-Australian. From 1788, we have been a place where people have been able to come from all over the world and build a better life for themselves and their children. In fact, the story of convict Australia, I believe is, essentially, a redemption story. The cover illustration on the cover of Australia: A History is based on a painting by George Edwards Peacock. Now, George Edwards Peacock was a solicitor in London. He was sentenced to death for forgery that was commuted to transportation for life. Because he was educated, he was sent to help run the administration of the punishment centre at Port Macquarie. Within a few months, his family had joined him in Port Macquarie. Understandably enough, the family preferred to be in Sydney and George Edwards Peacock, the convict, was transferred to Sydney, where he became the 19th century version of a meteorologist. He was at the South Head weather station for the best part of two decades. The weather records we have for Sydney from the late 1830s to the early 1850s are essentially the work of George Edwards Peacock.

Edwards Peacock was someone who could hardly have done worse as a solicitor in England, someone who could well have paid with his life for his crime. He came instead to Australia, and he was given a second chance. In Australia, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. And that is the story of so many of those who came to Australia, including the majority of the 160,000 or so who came here as convicts. Yet, the “Fatal Shore” has come to dominate our thinking about those times. But as best we can tell, less than 10 per cent of the convicts ended up going to punishment centres like Port Arthur, Norfolk Island, Port Macquarie and Moreton Bay.

So, it’s a great story that should be better known.

The great thing about just about everyone who has come to Australia is that they have come to this country to be different and better. They have come to this country to very much be part of this wonderful project, project Australia. And we shouldn’t think for a moment that this has been some kind of oppressive Anglophile settlement. Sure, we have a British foundation and, yes, the wonderful institutions which have been with us from 1788 till today are fundamentally British in their origin. But this is a country with an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character.

I want to talk for a moment about the immigrant character. There were Jews on the First Fleet. There were black people on the First Fleet. As we know, by the end of the 1850s there were something like 50,000 Chinese gold seekers. And given that the settler population of Australia at that time was scarcely a million, that means that roughly five per cent of our settler population at that point in time was Chinese.

While many of them went back as the gold started to dissipate, many of them stayed. Lowe Kong Meng was one of the most prominent business people of Melbourne in the 1870s and 1880s, one of the founding directors of the Commercial Bank of Australasia. Senator Thomas Bakhap was in the post Federation parliaments. Trooper Billy Sing was our most successful marksman of the Great War. Trooper Yin Gan was one of the first to storm ashore at Gallipoli. And talking of the Jewish contribution to our country, as we all would know, General Sir John Monash was of German Jewish extraction. As a citizen soldier he brought an engineer’s mind to the trauma and the tragedy of the Great War battlefields and perfected the integration of infantry, armour and artillery and air, which was responsible, finally, for breaking the stalemate on the Western Front, which had cost so many millions of Allied lives.

Sir Isaac Isaacs of Jewish heritage was our first non-British governor-general and a former chief justice. Sir Zelman Cowen, also a governor-general. Indeed, no group of people have been as successful as Jewish Australians at both maintaining their own solidarity, maintaining their own sense of community and, at the same time, making a marvellous contribution to wider Australia. It’s interesting when you think of the post-war migration, which has been so much a part of modern Australia’s success. The expectation on the New Australians, as they were called, from the 1940s through till about the 1970s, was that they would integrate from day one, and they would assimilate, if not entirely themselves, certainly their children would assimilate into the wider Australian community.

One of the issues that we have to deal with today is the issue of “multiculturalism”. Now, plainly, we are a multi-ethnic society. We have been a multi-ethnic society since the very beginning of modern Australia. But in the end, can we continue to flourish as a multiculture? Isn’t it the core Anglo-Celtic culture which has made us attractive to millions of people from all around the world, the most welcoming culture in the world? Isn’t it the core Judeo-Christian ethos, I would say, the most universal ethos in the world, that has made us so attractive to millions of people from all around the world and makes us attractive still? These are issues that the horrific events at Bondi last night cause us to ponder.

We have seen Jew hatred rampant on our streets, from the grotesque protest in the Opera House forecourt on 9 October 2023, extending through these routine hate marches in our big cities and coming to a horrible climax with that march across the Sydney Harbour bridge a couple of months ago. And then, of course, the extreme manifestation of Jew hatred in the horrific violence that we saw at Bondi yesterday evening. All of this un-Australian. What we need to do, going forward, is to have a stronger emphasis on Australian values, more determination to ensure that people that come to our country do, in fact, join Team Australia and are prepared to forsake anything that might militate against their joining Team Australia.

I want our country to be every bit as good in the future as it has been in the past. Indeed, that’s why we study history. We study history to learn its lessons, and to apply those lessons to the present and the future. We do have so much to be proud of. The story of modern Australia, from 1788 until today, is overwhelmingly people coming here to join our team. May God preserve that forever.

And may no one find succour in this country who is so consumed with hatred for people on the basis of race or religion that we see the kind of horror that we all witnessed to our dismay yesterday.

So, look, wonderful to be here. I am always pleased to be here at The Sydney Institute. Over the years, Gerard and I have sparred a bit, but to use one of John Howard’s famous phrases, the things we have in common are always more important than anything that might divide us.

Q & A

Q: I was wondering whether you might share some reflections on the process of writing the book. What surprised you, perhaps, about the process? What did you enjoy? And how long did it take?

Tony Abbott: Well, it was quite a lengthy process. Because I have a lot of things to do as well as write. I guess you’re often interrupting what might be your major ongoing project with a whole lot of other projects which are pressing at the time, although perhaps not as significant in the longer run.

The origin of the book was a conversation that I had with John Roskam in the depths of the interminable, intermittent Melbourne lockdowns. I was there to do a few podcasts with Roskam at the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). After one of the podcasts, we were lamenting the state of our country and trying to work out what we can do to improve the shining hour.

Eventually I said, maybe what we need is a new history that at least gives a glass-half-full as opposed to a glass-half-empty perspective on the country.

And John said, “I think you’re just the person to write it and, if you do, I’m certainly going to help.” So, thanks to the IPA, I had a couple of terrific researchers – including Andrew Kemp, David’s son, who collaborated with me on Battlelines, which some of you might remember came out in 2009.

What would happen, typically, is before the task of writing each chapter started, I would sit down with Andrew and a couple of others. I would talk about what I thought the chapter ought to cover. They would go off and do us a draft. I would then say, well, this draft is good in this respect and that respect, but honestly, I would have more on this and less on that, and why did we forget talking about whatever else it might be.

It was a kind of an iterative process. And then when they had done their work, I then spent a lot of time translating it all into Abbott-speak. That’s why it did take a lot longer than I expected it to take. Unlike my previous books, which have essentially been works of advocacy, this had to be a book that stood up not just to critical scrutiny of the arguments, but to critical scrutiny of exactly what was said in terms of what was in and what was out, whether I’d done justice to all of the various key elements in our history.

I have to say, once I had a draft that I was happy with, HarperCollins had a whole series of questions and issues that they wanted further developed and explored. So that’s why it was all quite lengthy.

But I am incredibly thrilled at the final product. I’m already thinking of some of the things that might be further developed and there’s one or two tiny imperfections. I’m thinking of what might come in an updated edition at some point in time. There’s already been quite a few reprints but at some point, I suspect, there’ll be an updated edition. But no, I’m really proud of what’s been produced. But like everything that’s worth doing – in the end, it’s a team effort.

Q: I would have thought that during the period that you’re covering, the real tension you don’t dwell on is the tension between a large Protestant majority and a 20-25 per cent Catholic minority. You mention it, but you seem to pass over that a bit. I mean, what would you say about that?

Tony Abbott: There’s no doubt that there was, for much of our history, a kind of frisson, if you like, between the Irish-Catholic segment of our population and the British Protestant segment of our population. But one of the things about being dumped halfway around the world is that old distinctions suddenly don’t make that much difference, because you’ve all just got to muck in to make a go of things. And we did have the Castle Hill uprising, when some of the Irish convicts got very excited about developments back in Ireland and had visions of throwing off the yoke of the Crown here in New South Wales and commandeering a ship and going back to Ireland to join the fight.

So, it wasn’t unknown to us. That rebellion was quickly put down with, in fact, the assistance of the one Catholic priest who did his best to persuade the Irish convicts that in fact, what they were doing was not God’s work after all. The early governors were very keen to ensure that all faiths got a fair go. The early governors subsidised education, which was invariably either Anglican education or Catholic education. Early governors subsidised the building of churches. For instance, St Patrick’s at Church Hill in Sydney was built in part with support from the colonial government.

I’m indebted to Geoffrey Partington for his wonderful exploration of, I suppose, the different roots of Australian identity. He quotes Cardinal Patrick Moran. Cardinal Moran, you might remember, was an unsuccessful candidate for the Federal conventions. Cardinal Moran said, “Nowhere on Earth have the Irish enjoyed such freedom and opportunity as under the Crown in Australia.” And I think that has been largely true.

Now we know that at the time of the conscription plebiscites, the Easter Uprising in Dublin, there was, I suppose, a further outbreak of tension. There was a tendency on the part of “Empire loyalists” to regard Irish Catholics as a bit suspect. Hugh Mahon was in all sorts of trouble as a Catholic member of the Federal Parliament because he was regarded at that time as being insufficiently loyal to the Crown in 1916-17. I can remember as a kid at the Holy Family Convent in Lindfield being told not to walk past the public school down the road because someone might throw stones at you. But it never happened, which I can put down to the fact that perhaps even then, any sectarian tensions were rapidly dissipating.

As we know, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) was a vehicle by which many of the Catholics of Australia migrated politically from one side of the fence to the other. I can remember saying in the parliament on the day of the late great B. A. Santamaria’s funeral that the DLP was alive and well and living inside the Howard Government. I’m not sure that John thanked me for that phrase but, nevertheless, I certainly think it was true. I do think that it’s easy to exaggerate those tensions and I think that, in practice, they were less real here than back in the British Isles.

Q: It’s hard enough to get anybody discuss the merits of immigration these days, but multiculturalism is even more difficult to discuss. Why is that?

Tony Abbott: Well, because the easiest thing to say in order to shut down debate is to accuse people of being a racist. The worst thing you can say about anyone, short of being some kind of a sexual exploiter of young people, is to say, “Oh you’re a racist.” And none of us want to be accused of it, certainly none of us want to be that.

Modern Australia, in common with modern Britain and modern America, are as colour-blind and the least racist societies that have ever existed. The fact that you only have to walk past a bar in Sydney, to look at the crowd there, to know that we just take people as we find them.

We don’t put them in boxes because they might be of a different ethnicity or a different race or different colour.

Still, there is this sensitivity, I suppose, because none of us want to look like we are, in a sense, pre-judging people on the basis of their ethnicity or their race. It is sometimes difficult to talk about the need for integration or assimilation without someone arcing up. Particularly someone who’s got a vested interest in promoting ongoing ethnic identity and saying, “Well, hang on a minute, do you not value our culture?”

The truth is, everyone’s culture is their culture. All cultures have, I suppose, strengths and perhaps weaknesses as well. I just think that, by any objective standard, that broadly Anglo-Celtic culture is absolutely magnificent. If you don’t want to join it, there are plenty of other places in the world to live. So, we should be able to discuss multiculturalism.

I certainly think we should be able to discuss levels of immigration without the debate being wantonly derailed and hijacked by accusations of racism. And for what it’s worth, immigration averaged just over 100,000 a year in the Howard era. The Howard era was our most recent golden age as a nation. It was a time of economic dynamism. It was a time of strategic strength. It was a time of social harmony, if I might dare use that phrase.

John Howard succeeded wonderfully well in helping Australians to be relaxed and comfortable about themselves. You might remember that phrase that he was much mocked for at the time. But by the middle of the first decade of this century, I think we really were relaxed and comfortable about ourselves. And, frankly, I think that if we scaled back immigration to about the levels of the Howard average, we would be doing ourselves a huge favour.

Q: Tony, on the issue of immigration, I’m not concerned about numbers. But Australia has always been part of the world whether it was colonialism, world wars, whatever. Globally now, anti-Semitism is on the rise. The war in Gaza has made it impossible for Jewish communities in Australia. But nothing in the world has happened in Australia like Sunday at Bondi. Is there a way that, as a country, we can stop hate speech in legitimate institutions, such as religious institutions where, literally, young people are being indoctrinated with hatred of Jews. How do we stop that? Because it’s global, but as a country, it’s dangerous.

Tony Abbott: Well, you’re absolutely right, because if Jew hatred is, I suppose, tolerated, even licensed, up to a point, sooner or later, hateful thoughts become hateful actions such as what we saw.

I can’t believe that the New South Wales Police didn’t crack down on that protest outside the Opera House on 9 October 2023. I can’t believe that that march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge wasn’t banned. I can’t believe that these hate preachers who are up there every week in the prayer rooms and mosques of Sydney and Melbourne haven’t been either prosecuted or deported.

There’s been a chronic weakness of government. There’s been a hand-wringing impotence on the part of leaders who should have been so much stronger. That would send a very clear message, not just to people who might be on social media, fanning the flames of religious discord, but even people in schools presenting a, perhaps, over-the-top version of Islam.

I know what they do in some other countries. In places like the United Arab Emirates, for instance, to be an Imam, you’ve got to be licensed. The Muslim Brotherhood-type Imams don’t get licensed.

That’s not to say that there’s not an underground movement. Even so, the Emiratis and the Egyptians and successful Muslim countries are very good at monitoring and, where necessary and possible, cracking down on all of that.

The last thing I want to see is any authoritarianism in this country but just as we wouldn’t tolerate, for a second, someone calling himself or herself a Catholic and urging, for arguments sake, a bombing campaign in Northern Ireland, we wouldn’t tolerate that for a second. Why have we tolerated these people standing up and effectively calling for the annihilation of all the Jews in Israel? Why have we tolerated that? We’ve had an appalling double standard. Again, it comes down to weak leadership.

Q: There’s been a massive drop off in interest in the study of history, in schools, universities, for various reasons. Thoughts on how to turn that around?

Tony Abbott: Well, it’s a good thought, a good question, and let me offer this thought. Partly, I suspect it’s because there are fewer teachers who are interested in history. In the end, the kids tend to take their lead from their elders and hopefully betters.

The other problem is that so much of our recent historiography has been, to use Geoffrey Blainey’s term, “Black Armband”. And, given the instinctive sense that most Australians have that this is a good country, the natural corollary they draw from that is we must have an okay history, at least, if it’s produced good people like us.

I think there’s been a resistance to delving into the Black Armband historiography that predominates because people think, hang on, this doesn’t correspond to my instincts about what would actually have been the case.

So, if people are given a more fair-minded history and, dare I say it, a more upbeat history, they’ll suddenly get more interested in it. Who wants to sing a dirge? We all want to sing uplifting stuff. And if there is at least a measure of uplift in the history that we’re taught, we’ll see more enthusiasm for it.