Book Review

There is a battle raging in this country over what happened in Australia’s past. This is very much a political battle; the Australian present is to a great extent being guided, and its future decided, by a contest over the ‘true history’ of Australia.	1
This conflict is most evident in recent attacks on the scholarship of Henry Reynolds, and his documentation of Australian frontier history and the conflict between white settlement and Aboriginal society. Much of this intellectual combat has taken place in the media, and in the pages of the right-wing cultural journal Quadrant, a favourite read of Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard and many of Australia’s conservative politicians and business leaders. The concerted and high profile attacks on Reynolds are politically driven. If Reynolds can be discredited, his methodology shown to be flawed, his scholarship shonky, then the intellectual props for a range of issues to do with Aboriginal people, from Land Rights to Reconciliation, are weakened, and conservative and rightist agendas can better come into play.	2
Also in the line of fire has been historian Manning Clark (1915-91), whose life’s work helped many Australians understand that they have a history that can be examined as a national history, and not just as a deferential reflection of the greater histories of others. During the 1990s Clark became a media and right-wing target. Criticism, much of it vicious and not much more than Chinese-whisper gossip, attempted to undermine his credibility as a historian and the reputation of his monumental six volume A History of Australia. The crudest of these attacks took place in 1996 in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper, with an attempt to portray Clark as a Stalinist, a covert communist, perhaps even a Soviet spy.	3
The Cold War war style attacks on Clark and Reynold’s lead me to a consideration of recent scholarship on Australia’s cold war. For Australian conservatives the 1950s and the early 1960s form a golden era, symbolically enshrined in the leadership of Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies. It was a time of a comfortable, safe, essentially Christian, white-Australia, culturally anglocentric but drawing security from the protective might of the USA.	4
In 1998 the Courier-Mail attempted to prove the ‘un-Australianess’ of a canon of Australian leftist writers active during the 1950s and 1960s. It wasn’t just Manning Clark who was in their sights. The integrity of writers like Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Frank Hardy, Dorothy Hewett, Alan Marshall, Katharine Prichard, and Judah Waten all came under question. Veteran Cultural Freedom skirmisher Peter Coleman was sent to Moscow to trawl Soviet literary archives and come up with dirt about Moscow gold and Soviet influence. His research formed the basis of a series of articles published by the Courier-Mail on the supposed treachery of these writers during the Cold War; a matter of ‘guilt by implication’.	5
Ian Syson, editor of the left cultural journal Overland, refers to the campaign against Clark, and to Coleman’s Moscow trip, in his contribution to the collection of essays Arguing the Cold War. According to Syson the Cold War is very much with us. The enemy is no longer a foreign ideology but the intellectual and moral temper of post-1960s Australia. However the old Cold War weapons, tactics, and some of the foot soldiers, remain the same.	6
Arguing the Cold War is based on papers delivered at the 1998 Cold War conference organised by the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History. Editors Peter Love and Paul Strangio have complemented conference papers with additional material. The result is a collection of thirteen experiential based and analytic essays that will no doubt pump a lot of fresh specialist footnotes into the knowledge industry, while at the same time serving as an introduction to the storm, stress and complexities of the Australian Cold War experience.	7
The collection offers a wide ranging and engaging discussion of the Cold War in Australia. Peter Love’s opening essay is a model of narrative and analysis as he details the overall nature of Australia’s Cold War, compressing a great deal of data and reflection into some 5000 words. I thought Jenny Hocking’s scholarly essay on the 1951 Referendum especially important because it clearly establishes that the referendum proposal to ban the Communist Party brought Australia to the brink of becoming a police state, a point lost in many popular accounts of the period. According to Hocking, the principled and successful campaigning by ALP leader Dr H.V. Evatt against the proposal, at great personal political cost, was his ‘finest hour’. This is a point not often made, and one that needs to be made, as a sort of reminder of what true greatness is about in our own era of labor politics where principles tend to yield to political expedience. Elsewhere in the collection, Phillip Deery explores aspects of writing revisionist Cold War history, focusing on the top-secret Venona documents released in 1996 by the US National Security Agency. He thoughtfully examines pitfalls awaiting revisionists who look for the smoking gun in a bid to justify McCarthyism; he also stresses the need to follow the evidence where it may unpalatably lead.	8
Menzies’ Cold War: a Reinterpretation is a likely companion for Love and Strangio’s collection. Author Les Louis is a veteran historian whose patient archival work exposed Cold War plans by the Menzies government to intern leftists, and to use the armed forces against organised labour (Operation Alien, 1951-53). Here the author’s familiarity with deeply buried archival material is all too evident. Louis argues that Menzies created elements of a national security state during the early 1950s, using external and domestic communist ‘threats’‚ to ride roughshod over Australian democratic traditions. This was nothing short of a class war; it involved nobbling the power of the trade union movement, eliminating rival visions of the future, and introduced an era of capitalist growth and consumerism. Capitalism was rejuvenated in the process, shedding its associated images of depression, fascism, and war. It was a time of fear and loathing, during which communist and left-wing resistance managed to stave off the worst infringements of civil liberties.	9
Red Rag Publications, part of the small independent left outfit Vulgar Press, should be congratulated for publishing these two books. They do contribute to the understanding of a crucial period of Australian history, a period that tends to be neglected and served by piecemeal investigation. Their publication points the way forward for specialist intellectual interests in an era strangled by corporate publishers and bottom line attitudes.	10
Bowral ROWAN CAHILL

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