The Books of My Life: A New History of Australia

 

I have complained about the lack of narrative coherence, the choppiness, the fragmentation, and the ornamentation of so many contemporary college and university introductory textbooks these days in previous reviews. Given this it was a pleasure to read an older textbook for a change, a textbook not surprisingly published before the torrent of postmodernist and hence problematic textbooks since the 1990s and a textbook that provides a superb overview of one national history, the history of Australia, Frank Crowley's edited collection A New History of Australia (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974).

A New History of Australia is divided into twelve chronological chapters all written by experts in the field ranging from the British settlement of Australia in the eighteenth century to the prime ministership of Gough Whitlam in 1972. Each chapter contains not only the highlights of Australian political and economic history of the specific eras. It also integrates social, demographic, and cultural histories into the chronological narrative making it an example of how well social, demographic, and cultural histories can be integrated into the more traditional political and economic history format. In this regard it is an outstanding example of how the old history and the new history can be melded to provide readers with a broad understanding of Australian history from above and from below.

Some, of course, will, not surprisingly, find things to criticise in A New History of Australia. Some reading it today will find the writing in some of the chapters somewhat antiquated. Some will decry something that is often present in other national histories of Australia, including the two volume The Cambridge History of Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), namely, chapters on pre-European Australia. Some, particularly those raised on postmodernist textbook robbery, will find the text too dense and encyclopedic, something I instead find worthy of praise. Some will undoubtedly find the book somewhat out of date and, admittedly, it has not been revised since 1974. Despite such criticism, however, A New HIstory of Australia, though published almost fifty years ago, remains a classic in the writing of Australian history. Very, very highly recommended.