The Books of My Life: A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

 

When my father and mother moved me and my family to Texas in the mid-1960s I remember being more interested in the adventure of moving than in where we were moving and why. The myth of Texas had no meaning for me at the time. I think, in fact, I had only barely heard of Texas as I hadn't really watched many, if any, of the Hollywood westerns that celebrated the myth of Texas. I was much more interested in the Beatles, Doctor Who, who was mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and the American version of rounders, especially one of America's baseball players, Sandy Koufax, who, like the Doctor was truly mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and who, unlike the Doctor, was actually real, though I am not sure I made that distinction at the time.

One thing I do recall from my teenage years is that the Beatles, Doctor Who, and Sandy Koufax were much more interesting to me than school, which, even though I was interested in history and politics, didn't do for me what the Beatles, Doctor Who, Sandy Koufax, and adventuring along Five Mile Creek in the Oak Cliff part of Dallas did. School simply did not engage me intellectually. The extracurricular, on the other hand, did. 

My memories today of my secondary school years are mostly extracurricular. I recall the seemingly endless rituals of football pep rallies at Browne. I recall the attempt of a small minority of us to stage an anti-Vietnam War walkout one afternoon after a pep rally, an effort that failed because the administrators and teachers got wind of it and chained us into the school with two teachers at every door. And I recall, if vaguely, that each of us at Browne had to take a mandatory Texas civics class in, if memory serves, seventh grade.

Like history in general, as I have come to realise, the civics class on Texas history and culture that was mandatory for me and my T W Browne school mates was, as I look back on it from the distance of today, mythic. It told a mythic tale of freedom seeking Texas, of Texas heroes, the Texans who fought for independence, and of non-Texas villains, the bad guys who tried to keep Texas unfree and Texans locked in the chains put there by a dictatorial tyrant named Santa Anna, who, in retrospect seems to be, in the Texas mythology of the 1960s, a Hitler before Hitler and a Stalin before Stalin. Historical presentism. While all of this mythhistory was clearly present at the time I was forced to take my Texas civics class, the only thing that I recall that I consciously remembered from that class at the time was the Texas's state song, "Texas Our Texas". Music, it seems, was central to my life at the time.

The lyrics of "Texas Our Texas", I later came to realise thanks to my increasing understanding of the empirical economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities of our world, was grounded in mythhistory and the closely related boosterist history. History as Advertising. It was, as I came to understand, the history that the powers that be, who were less part of a conspiracy to brainwash us than accepting, consciously and unconsciously, of a set of cultural ideological myths and self-images, believed we needed to be socialised into in order to be good Texans (and presumably good Americans). It was a history that, even if I didn't realise it at the time, affected me in such a way that I felt suitably awed when I visited the Alamo in San Antonio and San Jacinto near Houston with my family, the place, in the myths of Texas, where freedom loving and heroic Texans fought against incredible odds to make Texas free and the place where the freedom loving Texans finally defeated the villainous freedom hating Mexicans winning their freedom once and for all. I had, without even realising it, been socialised into a Texas version of the battle between good and evil, between good Duddly Do-Right (the Canadian mountie symbol become American heroic icon) and evil Snidely Whiplash, running through my head affecting how unconsciously or subconsciously I read "reality". At that age I was just too literal to recognise the parody and satire in that tale of good and evil that was Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash.

This manichean version of history I was socialised into turned out to be relatively short lived in my increasingly intellectual and scientific life. Soon, thanks to rock and roll and the Vietnam War, I was among the "bohemians" and "deviants" few who had come to realise the truth, namely that mythic and boosterist history, whether it was the mythic and boosterist history of Texas or the mythic and boosterist of Big D where every house was like a palace, was just that, mythic and boosterist. When I went to college I learned that the great social scientist Emile Durkheim argued that all cultures or societies needed such myths, and needed the "deviants" who contested it, to create a common community with a common identity. I learned that this, this need for a common community, was why communities needed and had the mythic, boosterist, and heroes versus villains stories and symbols that were grounded in a binary of sacred and profane.

The social sciences, and particularly, cultural anthropology, helped me to recognise the reality of how many of the tales and stories of American (and other) culture were socially constructed, universalised, transcendentalised, or fetishised. They were, as I came to recognise, the manichean myths that societies and cultures lived by and through, including in, if more complexly and contradictorily, in the core nation societies with its large populations and multilayered economic, political, cultural, and regional systems. It also helped me recognise that the histories that societies and cultures told about themselves were also mythic and, if less so, critical, drawing, as they did, on contradictions in the societies and cultures in which they were constructed.

I went to college during an era in which consensus history and myth history was under assault. It was an era in which social history, particularly social history influenced by quantitative approaches in the social sciences and particularly sociology, and cultural history, influenced by cultural anthropology and particularly by Clifford Geertz, were becoming prominent in the history profession and bureaucracy. Donald Denoon's, Philippa Mein-Smith's, and Maravic Wydham's A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), is one of the many products of this renewed interest in ethnographically sensitive cultural history in the post-imperial, post-modern, and post-industrial historical profession.

Denoon, Mein-Smith, and Wyndham place identity at the heart of their history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. Filtering identity, an identity that is both somewhat static and dynamic, through its interactions with other social and cultural constructions including imperialism, colonisation, modernisation, nationalism (New Zealand marking itself off from Australia in binary cultural fashion, for example), industrialisation (particularly in Australia), cultural myths (the myth exeptionalism and the myths of the bush, the beach, the yeoman battler, and British gentility, for example), deindustrialisation, decolonisation, the indigeneous rights movements, and great power politics (a great power politics in which the US replaced Britain as dominant power--economic, political, and cultural--in the region after World War II), Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history provide interested readers with an excellent cultural, economic, and political history of the region and particularly Australia and New Zealand. 

Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, while a superb history of the region, is not a book for the novice or for an introductory course in the history of Australia, New Zealand, or the Pacific. It is, however, an excellent introductory text for the advanced undergraduate, history and social science graduate students, and the intelligent reader who already knows something about the history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. I, for instance, knew the broad outlines of Australian and Kiwi history and found those very helpful in expanding my knowledge of Australian and New Zealand history but was somewhat adrift in the parts of the book dealing with Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian history. Despite this I found reading the book highly rewarding and worth the effort. I highly recommend it.

A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific will, of course, not please those who prefer their history to be the history of "great men", particularly great political men, and great events, particularly great political events such as scholars like J.L. Granatstein who, while not opposed to some of the new social and cultural history, has bemoaned the killing of history, by which he means political history which he thinks should be at the heart of the historical enterprise, in his jeremiad on the subject. The historical profession, however, is a marketplace and the historical markets that are prominent at the moment are cultural and social. Nor will it please those who prefer their  history mythic, legendary, and manichean, who prefer, in other words, their history European and celebratory and filled with European saints and sinners. For these latter, the only good history is politically and ideologically correct, as they define it, history. It will, on the other hand, please those, like me, who recognise that the tales we tell about ourselves are generally socially and culturally constructed and have a tenuous relationship to empirical reality. That empirically grounded history and social science, as the culture wars that rack the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, are persona non grata in a world that generally prefers its history comic bookish and Hollywoodish means that the histories of those who can see through the myths, the delusions, and the tales of white hats and black hats, are likely never be accepted in a world where reality is almost always "reality". So much for scientific enlightenment.