Eight years ago, distinguished writer, editor and publisher, Julianne Schultz AM provided a Foreword to The Honest History Book, edited by David Stephens and Alison Broinowski, and dedicated to the proposition that Australia is more than Anzac - and always has been. Eight years on, the Honest History website is still in operation, while royalties from the sale of The Honest History Book, along with copyright fees from reprints of its chapters for schools, help fund the Defending Country website.
Since writing this Foreword, Julianne Schultz has published The Idea of Australia (2022). She is one of Defending Country's distinguished Supporters. Her Foreword to The Honest History Book is republished here with her permission.
Wars change people and they change countries – profoundly and intimately. Wars can be slow to build but quick to erupt, turning once peaceful neighbourhoods into fear-ridden battle zones. The impact is immediate, but produces legacies that endure to shape personal relations, political systems, social orders and economic structures. Framing the experience, interrogating the events, the characters and the sometimes invisible forces at play are all crucial to identifying and making sense of the legacies. It is essential if we are to find a thread that connects the past with the present and helps inform the future.
For eons war has been understood through the prism of battle: winners and losers, brilliant and flawed leaders, blood-soaked battlegrounds, body counts, armaments, strategy, devastation and triumph. The madness that can descend to destroy the lives of those who survive is brushed aside, the political and economic transformations that follow are too often assumed to be a given rather than a response shaped by what came before.
Interrogating the past – honestly, critically, avoiding the traps of ahistoricism and sentimentality – is essential. In a country like Australia, with the eyes of each new set of arrivals set firmly on the future horizon, it is particularly challenging finding the language and stories that shift perspectives and allow the past to be animated. The political response is generally to repeat the time-honoured national myths, to celebrate the heroics, to ignore the complicating details and counter-narratives and move on. In Enduring Legacies, the edition of Griffith Review published in April 2015, Peter Cochrane and I invited a diverse group of historians, some of whom have also written for this collection, to address the process of complicating what was thought to be simple and settled.
The Honest History Book takes the next step. It sets out the complications arising from the many threads of our national history that we need to know about and try to understand – the environment, immigration and multiculturalism, the economy, inequality, the role of women, settler-Indigenous relations, and our lingering ties to the monarchy and to large countries in the northern hemisphere. The book also deals trenchantly with some myths – some of them to do with war and Anzac, some not – that we should not have let ourselves become comfortable with. The chapters of the book present compelling evidence that our history is complex, even messy, a work in progress.
Evidence is, of course, the currency of history. One of the great public history initiatives taken in Australia in recent years has been the decision to digitise and make available the records of those who served in wars – the records of their engagement, where they were sent, the battles they fought in, the injuries and illnesses they contracted, death notices, attempts to repatriate personal effects and secure pensions. The heartbreaking stories of bravery and victory, loss and tragedy are captured in the copperplate handwriting on yellowing official forms, now available on a screen near you.
This has been a remarkable project, and has given countless Australians some insight into the lives of their forebears, or those who once lived in their neighbourhoods, attended their schools, worked in their offices. At best it has explained a backstory that would otherwise not have been told (in a land where the prevailing ethos is not to talk too much about yourself), provided an important building block in national empathy. At worst it has fostered sentimentality, weeping in a field in western France over the presumed grave of great-great Uncle Ralph, who died at twenty without a trace.
But, in a country where the only wars on our own soil have been with the Indigenous peoples, this digital investment skews our understanding of history and who we are. We need a similar project to animate the records of the Frontier Wars, the battles, the leaders, families, collaboration, betrayal, court cases and punishment.
This is a matter of public record, records that languish in archives and libraries awaiting liberation. This is the evidence we need to set free and use.
There is evidence about immigration and multiculturalism, too. Apart from Indigenous Australians, we are a country of people who have arrived from elsewhere, many escaping from impending wars or fleeing in their aftermath, bringing with them memory and trauma and a desire to forget and move on. These people’s stories are captured in the official records of arrival and settlement, but they too languish in archives and libraries, kept alive only by the thread of family storytelling.
Imagine, though, a project that animated the records of the Frontier Wars and the management of Indigenous people, a project that also made easily accessible the records of those who have been arriving by boat and plane for two centuries. All of these stories are matters of public record and go further than the experiences of soldiers in remote battles in making sense of who we are and where we have come from and how this shaped the creation of our norms and values. The skills developed in making war records available should in the name of honest and full history be applied to these other two defining matters of public record.
If countries and people are shaped and changed by war we need to be willing to fully examine that transformation – not just through the records of the men and women who fought on foreign soil, but those who fought here, and those who sought refuge here. History is complicated, nuanced, provisional. Making sense of it requires more work, more stories, more thinking and, for it to be honest, it demands a bigger frame.
Picture credits: Tyne Cot cemetery in Belgium (Wikipedia/Gary Blakeley) and Port Fairy Aboriginal Massacre Monument in Victoria (Wikipedia/Mattinbgn). Tyne Cot contains the graves of nearly 12 000 Empire soldiers from the Great War 1914-18, including 1369 Australians. The Port Fairy monument commemorates up to 6500 First Nations deaths (no-one knows exactly how many) in the Eumeralla Wars 1830s-60s.
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