Myth, legend and the other stuff of history

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.