In 1993, Atkinson, still very much in Clark’s shadow (the sixth and final volume of A History of Australia appeared in 1987), pushed the boat out on his own magnum opus. By that time, sole-authored, multi-volume histories of Australia were already becoming a rarity. The interests of academic historians had become more specialised and would soon be more global. Within the historical profession, epic national histories were seen as antiquated in focus and form. In the years that followed, the only other Australian writer to set out on a similar course to that of Atkinson was another Clark admirer, Thomas Keneally, whose three-volume history, Australians, has just been completed. In quite different ways, both writers are concerned with the central question that Clark posed: Who are the Australians? While Keneally answers the question through a compelling, narrative-driven chronological history that brings us up to the present day, Atkinson is discursive, elliptical, highly sceptical of narratives of national maturation, and finishes his third volume with Australia at the time of World War I. As he writes in his introduction, the war ‘made a much deeper mark on the Australian people than did anything else, including Federation’, while the years before 1914 were ‘another world’.

Alan Atkinson (photograph by Brian McInerney, courtesy University of Sydney)

Over more than two decades, the ‘deeper logic’ of The Europeans in Australia slowly emerged. At the heart of the project lay the challenge of understanding the formation of a ‘moral community’. Atkinson compares the High Court’s Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) judgments with Federation in 1901. Both were a means of ‘squaring the circle’. Both drew on the idea of nation ‘as something sovereign – something self justifying’. Atkinson argues that they threw up a range of questions: ‘how big can [nations] be and still make sense? Is a nation possible without a single unrivalled government to define it? Can a nation have a conscience? Can a nation have a soul, or at least a spiritual essence?’ If Atkinson’s view of Mabo and Wik is slightly idealised (in Mabo, for example, the Court explicitly declined to entertain the notion of indigenous sovereignty precisely because to do so would be to threaten the sovereignty of the Crown, and ipso facto, the sovereignty of the Court itself), his ability to see the broader relationship between the nation making of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is breathtaking.

He takes the question of ‘moral community’ far beyond matters of the state to include relations between ‘Men and Women, Black and White, God and Humanity’, marriage and family life, and ‘the ecology of the ordinary household’. Atkinson has an almost omnipotent eye. Different colonies, towns, and cities are held in view simultaneously. He attempts the impossible: to hold the entire continent in his gaze at once. In lesser hands, the constant shifting of place, subject, and focus, would result in cacophony. But Atkinson manages to find a way to make the centre hold. Ideas and mentalités are his organising principles, while figures such as Rose Scott and Alfred Deakin reappear throughout the book, anchoring the narrative. Two closely related questions tie this third volume together: how did Australians come to comprehend, possess, and belong to the continent? And in the words of Henry Parkes, how did the ‘feeling of nationality’ take hold?

‘First the people reimagined one by one each corner of the continent,’ declares Atkinson, ‘then came the single comprehensive view. When a certain critical number of Europeans in Australia could grasp in their minds the map of Australia, then, and only then, Federation could go ahead by popular consent.’

Throughout the book, he reveals the myriad ways in which a national imagination was formed: by fixing on ‘the Centre as the pivot of a new national domain’, by joining the north of the continent to the south, through the ever-extending reach of government, through meteorology, speech, fences, maps, geography, communications (particularly the overland telegraph, the telephone, and a burgeoning literacy), and ultimately, through war, which transformed ‘the Europeans in Australia into the Australians in Europe’. Like no other historian before him, Atkinson explains the ‘anchoring [of] European civilization in Australian space’. He draws attention to the importance of ‘scientific management and efficiency’ in dealing with ‘complex problems’. Men and women at work were increasingly seen as analogous to machines – in sport, intellectual endeavour, work, business, the home, and on the battlefield. At the same time, he reveals how we came to love Australia, its flora and fauna, its light, its open spaces, and its unique sensory palette. To read The Europeans in Australia is to understand how the bonds of community came to extend to the bonds of nation. It is also to understand how local independence and diversity was so often lost in the effort to assert ‘purity and uniformity’ in a nation which strove for ‘a maximum sameness of appearance, language and habit, and rational and manly citizenship’.

One of the truly distinctive qualities of Atkinson’s scholarship is his acute sensitivity to the sensory dimensions of the past, to everyday speech, and to the noises of the bush. He is just as interested in ‘soundscape’ (‘voices had pungency, like bodily smells’) as he is in landscape. He manages to get behind the conventional labels of the period such as ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ and reveal the creativity of Australian society at the time. Using a vast array of primary sources, he takes us into the private and domestic worlds of Australians. He sits at the family table and tries to retrieve the ‘ephemeral’ minutiae of daily existence. This constant striving to reach the lives of ordinary people enables him to circumvent the conventional ways of seeing Australia in the early twentieth century. ‘The main issue of the day,’ he claims, ‘was not, in fact, the famous conflict between empire and nation, between Britain and Australia … [it was] the balance struck in every household, in every mind, between the needs of small places, of wives, parents and children, of old habits and old duties, and on the other hand, the needs of places big beyond imagination, of nations and empires.’

Atkinson’s devotion to uncovering the ‘voices’ of the past has become one of the signature qualities of his work. Years ago, working on the patterns of convict protest, he would ‘spend all day with depositions’ and remembers being ‘struck at the end of each day with the way the texture of the voices, as transcribed by the clerks’, stayed with him. The past was already ‘abuzz’ with voices. I recently asked Atkinson whether his role as a historian could in any way be compared to that of a composer. Could his determination to record the voices as faithfully as he hears them be akin to composing, so that we, his readers, might hear the past ‘sing’, a word which Atkinson himself uses? Typically, he replied that while he wished this were true, he doubted that it was, except in ‘very simple ways. But what does give me a strange kick,’ he said, ‘is the sight or sound of multiple voices in conversation or in song, where each neatly, as it were respectfully, seems to respond to all the others, in turn. I find that just magic. Three magpies together can do it.’

Throughout The Europeans in Australia, Atkinson’s voice moves from place to place and person to person, in and out of lives, rooms and houses, hearts and minds, families, cultures, and societies. He is one of the few historians who seem to have the ability to be both as one with his past characters and yet separate from them. There is this astonishing synthesis of sources, the attempt to recreate the inner life of past actors and the full external context of the past in which their lives were lived, the acute ethnographic eye for detail, the voice that never mocks and the undeniable compassion in tone, but above all else a voice that expresses solidarity with all those who lived in the past, first and foremost to ensure that they are not forgotten.

This kaleidoscope of past voices is probably one of Australia’s finest examples of polyphonic history. Manning Clark aspired to write such a history too, yet his polyphony was so often a reflection of his own inner voices that only a handful of his stories – Burke and Wills and Gallipoli among them – have endured from the millions of words he compiled. Atkinson’s polyphonic history brings us much closer to the untidy, lived experience of the past. If Atkinson is ever asked to design a new Australian flag, I suspect it might well be his three magpies in song, a subtle interweaving of voices and personalities, a commonwealth of multiple voices in conversation.

In Europe and the United States, comparable sole-authored histories would be considered a major cultural event and the subject of extensive intellectual debate across the wider literary culture. Yet in Australia, Atkinson’s The Europeans in Australia is barely known outside the historical profession. Unlike Manning Clark, whom Atkinson described as always having ‘a sense of his own incipient celebrity’, Atkinson is reserved and does not seek a public role. Clark craved visibility as much as Atkinson treasures his privacy. And while Clark never once mentioned the work of another historian in his six volumes, Atkinson is embedded in a community of scholars. He spends several pages in his introduction outlining the influence of so many of his colleagues’ publications on his work. It is undoubtedly true that Clark’s narrative style was far more accessible than Atkinson’s, which is not so much narrative as a highly original form of historical mapping. Perhaps these differences in style, temperament, and ambition explain why Clark’s achievement in completing A History of Australia between 1962 and 1987 became so widely recognised at the time. But there are other reasons. Outside of a small minority, Australia’s public culture does not have the same respect for intellectual endeavour as can be found in many other countries. In the wake of the ‘history wars’ and the rise of the Anzac myth, we have also become less willing to embrace history that is not seen to be praising our courage and sacrifice on the battlefield or revealing our true character in a benign and celebratory manner. When trying to answer the perennial question ‘who are the Australians?’, it seems that we do not want to have to work too hard.

Some of the most affecting moments in The Europeans in Australia arise when Atkinson turns members of his own family into historical subjects. Informed by more intimate knowledge, his luminous portraits, such as the one of his paternal grandfather, the public servant Arthur Atkinson, are unforgettable.

An inhabitant of offices and the business world … [Arthur was] a man of precise emphasis, in voice and manner, and assertive eccentricity, and a man torn, as his world was torn, between the pleasures of living at the edge of a momentous future … and the need to escape backwards, to the bush, the mountains and the sea, between the noise of the telephone and the noises of old Australia.

There are also wonderfully humorous moments. Honeymooning with his bride, Ruby Seed, at Jenolan Caves, Arthur confronted such a hazardous track down to the caves that ‘having hired two places in a tourist automobile, [he] stood all the way on the running board poised to snatch his wife from the steep drop on the far side’.

Atkinson’s final chapter on war is one of the most powerful in the book, not only because he shows us the private ambitions and motivations for fighting, the unbearable grief experienced by those who lost their loved ones, and the ‘local talk’ on the home front, but because he finishes with the story of his maternal grandfather, who joined the AIF in 1916. Suffering from shell shock after fighting at the Somme, he ended up in a London hospital. There, a telegram reached him from Dubbo where his wife, Ina, had just given birth: ‘Ina daughter both well.’ ‘The daughter,’ writes Atkinson, ‘was my mother, from whom, in powerful ways, comes this book. Such is death. Such is life.’

‘Mighty’, a word now rarely used in everyday speech, is one that Alan Atkinson employs often. It is also a word that aptly describes his accomplishment in completing a work of such originality and vision as The Europeans in Australia, one that is epic in conception and execution and one that stands virtually alone in the ever-expanding field of Australian historiography. 

Michael Rowe reviewed Volume One in our April 1997 issue; John Hirst reviewed Volume Two in September 2004.