Myth, legend and the other stuff of history

The “history wars” might be over, but history is in the news again because the Prime Minister has put it there.

The putsch began in mid-2004 with the announcement of a $31 billion education package from the federal government. Certain conditions had to be met before schools would get their bonus funding, among them that “every school must have a functioning flagpole, fly the Australian flag and display a ‘values framework’ in a prominent place in the school.” The Prime Minister, John Howard, and the then Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, assured us that “this is a major investment in Australia’s future … It will leave us better equipped to face the global future and help us build on our long traditions of innovation and technical excellence.”

That seems a lot of hope to invest in a piece of fabric and a poster, but if the connection was obscure, the intention was plain. Then came the Prime Minister’s 2006 Australia Day speech. Only a couple of paragraphs related to the nation’s history, but they were heartfelt, so we would be wise to pay attention.

Mr Howard is concerned about the state of the teaching of history, especially Australian history, in schools today. There is too little of it, too few students are studying it, it is the wrong kind of history anyway: “Too often it is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of themes and issues. And too often history, along with other subjects in the humanities, has succumbed to a postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of achievement is questioned or repudiated.”

Mr Howard wants a “structured narrative”, and he wants that narrative to be an “objective record of achievement” which will make us proud of our country, our forebears and ourselves.

History fuses easily with patriotism; Mr Howard wants them fused: “We want [newcomers] to learn about our heritage. And we expect each unique individual who joins our national journey to enrich it with their loyalty and their patriotism.” It is to achieve those ends that he wants “a root and branch renewal of the teaching of Australian history in our schools”.

I had become accustomed to listening to my Prime Minister with a degree of nervous dread, so I was surprised to find myself in sympathy with much of his speech, even with his longing for a clear, celebratory story of how Australia got to be the fine country it undoubtedly is.

I think he wants his story because he thinks we’re going to need it. For most of our immigration history we have managed to avoid significant ethnic or religious clotting, with most incomers dispersing throughout the country within a generation.

Now there is the risk of the geographical concentration and the social isolation of people of a different and charismatic faith who share a long and continuing history of injustice at European hands, and this at a time of decreasing job security and shrinking opportunities.

Furthermore, with intolerant religions and amoral global capitalism snatching more and more territory in the world, secular liberal democracies begin to look less like the highway to the future and more like an endangered species.

But despite my sympathy, I think it will be difficult for Mr Howard to arrive at his “objective record of achievement”, and then to present it as “Australian history”, for a number of reasons.

The first is that in human affairs there is never a single narrative. There is always one counter-story, and usually several, and in a democracy you will probably get to hear them. Remember the origin of the history wars.

A lot of Australians wanted to go on telling themselves the stories their fathers had told them about the triumph of British explorers and settlers in overcoming this recalcitrant land: about smoke rising from slab huts, the sound of axes ringing through the blue air, and so on.

They were good stories; they sometimes approximated what happened; they also made people feel good. Then along came this fellow named Henry Reynolds who said, “Hold it. There’s another story going on here. These other things happened too, and I can prove it.” As he proceeded to do. Consternation. But now, except for the die-hards, there is (sometimes grudging) acceptance that yes, there is another story interwoven with our own, a story about what happened to the people who were here before the British came, and attention must be paid to that story, too.

If you (or Mr Howard) are still yearning for a single, simple story without historians spoiling your fun, consider the ditty which ought to be our national anthem instead of the dingo-wail we have now: Waltzing Matilda.

The plot is straightforward. A swagman is settling down by a billabong after a hard day’s swagging. A jumbuck comes down to drink at the billabong, the swagman grabs him, stuffs him into his tuckerbag. So there he is, sitting in the shade of a coolibah tree, his billy is boiling, soon he will be having a free mutton dinner. Peace. Happiness. Then his homemade Eden is disrupted: up comes the squatter mounted on his thoroughbred, up come the troopers one two three, the squatter challenges him - “Whose is that jumbuck …?” - and the swagman declares his contempt for such footling concerns by jumping out of the frying pan and into the billabong, which he now haunts in a posthumous claim to rightful possession.

That is the story from the swagman’s point of view. What values does it celebrate? Death before submission, especially submission to corrupt authority. Property is theft. Troopers are the running dogs of pastoral capitalism. (You can see why Howard favours Advance Australia Fair.)

Switch to the squatter, and the values change. He knows the time, the sweat and the money it took to get his merinos to this good place, and now here is this useless layabout stealing one. (Some of the blackfellas around the place used to do that too. He soon cured them.)

As for the troopers: they might have thought the swagman was a useless layabout; they might have envied his freedom; they might have been looking forward to their own stolen mutton dinner. They might have felt any of those things, or none of them, or something quite different. They don’t speak, they don’t act. We only know their official role. We have no clue as to what was in their hearts.

By contrast, I think the jumbuck would have had a view about hairless lamb-murdering hypocrites who pretend to have your interests at heart - “Please, have this grass, have this water, watch out for that dingo!” - and then turn on you. I doubt the jumbuck saw much difference between the humans, whether swaggie, squatter or trooper, or their equine companions either.

If you are a good historian (the fine thing about history is that you don’t have to be a professional to do it well), you will already have noticed that this is a place of shade and good water: that there would have been other camp-fires here.

You might also have noticed those rippling syllables of “billabong”, “coolibah”. What might the coolibah tree be thinking? That this strange breed of biped with their sharp-hoofed companions are squabbling over meat where once there had been soft-footed people who moved lightly over the land; who fought, but not over meat.

This four-verse, 16-line song turns out to be more complicated than it looked. And the layers of stories don’t end there: if we kept burrowing under that coolibah tree we would come to Gondwanaland and tectonic plates, which thankfully lie beyond historians’ jurisdiction.

If you were a practising historian, you would also want to know where the song came from: who had made it out of what experience for what purpose.

Waltzing Matilda was invented by a man called Paterson, selfnamed “Banjo”, in 1895. Banjo Paterson was no swagman. He was no bushman either, having left his family’s farm for Sydney Grammar School when he was ten. He was a city-based lawyer and a sometime poet who published in the ardently nationalistic Bulletin, and he did a great deal to create the myth of the tough men created by the tough Australian bush. He wrote Matilda four years after the bitter shearers’ strike. Squatters were not popular then, or not among the readers of the Bulletin. Paterson constructed his swagman saga out of the hard politics of the early 1890s.

Nowadays we take Waltzing Matilda easily, enjoying its extravagances along with our mild contempt for outsiders who don’t know what “jumbuck” and “billabong” and “waltzing Matilda” mean. We like the tune. We like the sentiment, too, however fast it is eroding.

That might be why we like it - because it is a relic from a remote past. Or is it important to us not because it is a fragment of history, but because it is not: an invented moment masquerading as an icon of a fictional all-white past?

Nowadays the bush myth is alive and serving present purposes well, although now the squatter has the central role, as when The Men from Snowy River clatter up Collins Street in their R.M. Williams outfits in defence of their inalienable right to graze their cattle on public land, or the Prime Minster dons his Akubra, Pastoralist Style, to signify his solid worth. Meanwhile the billabong swagman has become an innocuous icon of feckless freedom. But the resonances of the idea remain specific to us.

Here I have tried to show how the root-system of an invented but vital myth can bind a person to the nation and to the national culture, while remaining sufficiently flexible to allow any number of individual emphases and uses, including cynical ones. A successful myth only grows more potent with exploitation.

Down at the beachfront there is a shop selling mainly to tourists and backpackers. Yesterday a toy was on special display: a koala wearing a leather waistcoat and a slouch hat, waving a bunch of green plastic gum leaves. If you poked a button hidden under his waistcoat, his stomach would croak a verse of Waltzing Matilda. The shopkeeper misread my interest and said, “Awful, isn’t it? Made in China!” It was both awful and made in China. But I still wanted it.

Waltzing Matilda has become a durable myth, commanding general recognition and affection yet remaining sufficiently capacious to contain a jumble of personal associations. Its expansiveness is the problem.

Mr Howard’s ambition is to extend the scope of the values he sees as common to old Australia to embrace newcomers. He specifies these common values as “respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, a commitment to the rule of law, the equality of men and women and a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces tolerance, fair play and compassion for those in need”.

Waltzing Matilda meets some of these criteria, but on others it spectacularly fails. Why does he want these values shared? Because “a sense of shared values is our social cement. Without it we risk becoming a society governed by coercion rather than consent.”

I think he is right about that, too. But perhaps what Mr Howard needs is not history, which resists simplification, but legends: “traditional stories popularly regarded as historical”, like the stories and values which cluster so thickly around Anzac Day.