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Book Review
| John Manning Ward, The State and the People: Australian Federation and Nation-Making 1870–1901, edited by Deryck M. Schreuder and Brian H. Fletcher with Ruth Hutchinson, Federation Press, Sydney, 2001. pp. xxvi + 150. $30.00 paper.
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| This book, as the editors insist, is meant as a document. It is the last and unfinished work of John Ward, who was Challis Professor of History at the University of Sydney for an entire generation, 1949 to 1981 and was afterwards Sydney's Vice-Chancellor. Ward, his wife and a daughter, were all killed in a railway accident in the Blue Mountains in 1990, and it is interesting to speculate how he might have engaged in the debates provoked by the centenary of federation ten years later. It is clear from this text that he had worked out much of what he had to say by the early 1980s, and it is not surprising that it often reads now like the product of a by-gone age. And yet, in some ways it also seems lucidly up-to-date, hinting at an understanding of federation that is still to be properly realised. |
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The two editors explain that this book was meant as the second in a trilogy whose connecting thread was the place of liberal conservatism in Australian political life. The first of the series was a political biography of James Macarthur, published in 1981. The present text is more or less complete, although Ward apparently planned a background chapter on the 1870s. There are smaller, less obvious gaps elsewhere, and, as they say, there is no 'final chapter of summation', although that vacancy has been filled, more or less, by the text of a lecture given in 1982. |
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The editors are satisfied, from their knowledge of the way Ward worked, that the text available to them was close to final. They include a copy of the opening page of the first chapter (curiously, that includes material crossed out by Ward but to all appearances reinstated by themselves). It demonstrates that he had vaguely indicated his sources for footnoting, but these have not been included in the publication, which contains no footnotes. Apart from brief paragraphs at the head of each chapter, summarising the ensuing argument, nor are there any editorial annotations. The book might have been more useful with notes here and there showing where Ward seems to have been superseded and contradicted in some way, and where he still seems to occupy the field alone. A book in which the best of an earlier generation is pitted against the new-nationalist scholarship of the 1990s and of the centenary period would have been extremely interesting. Had he been drawn like this into current debate we might have understood more completely what we have lost by Ward's premature death. |
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We are told that the over-all theme of the three volumes was to be Australian liberal conservatism. However, in this text (and also in the Macarthur book) Ward is much better on the liberal side of this mixture than he is on the conservatives side. The reader searches in vain for any consistent argument as to what Australian conservatism is, or has been. There is a good deal on Edmund Burke, and yet Ward's Burke seems attenuated and one-dimensional. The text conveys no sense of the conservative as someone who values the continuities of past, present and future, as Burke did – in profoundly imaginative ways. Ward's conservative is either someone who understands the need for change but who wants it to happen slowly, or else someone who believes in free enterprise. Sometimes he can find both characteristics in a single personality, surely an amalgam more typical of the twentieth century than the nineteenth. |
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It is in his treatment of liberalism, pure and simple, that the book is most valuable. The reader becomes steadily more impressed with the federal movement as the work of men (women are absent) genuinely interested in the impact of ideas on daily life. During the last parts of the argument we begin to feel that federation was, among other things, an intellectual adventure. That is a notion of considerable originality, at least as it comes from Ward's hands. However, even the discussion of liberalism is short on detail. This was never meant as an exhaustive book. Ward was the kind of writer who, if he wrestled with his material, did so very much in private. There is a succinctness and aloofness about his writing, so that sometimes the text feels more like an essay (in the old sense) than a thorough history. Even as an essay, however, its presentation, at least towards the end, has a power that takes the reader – this reader, anyway – by surprise. The understated method is that of a man, who, typically for his generation, thought that academic rank should be enough to get him all the attention he needed. It is a deeply suggestive work all the same. |
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| University of New England |
ALAN ATKINSON | |
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