In a much quieter way, the controversialist is also evident in both Convict Society and Strange Birth. ‘For over twenty years,’ wrote Hirst recently, ‘I have been quarelling in print with standard left-liberal views on Australian history.’ In Convict Society, the target was those interested parties who characterised early New South Wales as a brutal gulag. Hirst’s book did not stop Robert Hughes, whose The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868, was published in 1988. In his introduction, Hughes tipped his hat to Hirst:

Colonial Australia … was a more ‘normal’ place than one might imagine from the folkloric picture of society governed by the lash and triangle, composed of groaning white slaves tyrannized by ruthless masters. The book that best conveys this and has rightly become a landmark in recent studies of the System is J.B. Hirst’s Convict Society and its Enemies.

That said, Hughes pressed on with his irresistible account of ‘the lower depths of the system’.

‘Normality’ was a key word for Hirst. Hughes had emphasised the brutality of it all, with the greater part of his book focused on the ‘places of secondary punishment’. Hirst, on the other hand, was much more subtle. You cannot gauge the temper of a society by studying its maximum security prisons – you have to study the society itself. While Hughes devoted the greater part of his book to the penal colonies at Norfolk Island, Port Arthur, Macquarie Harbour and Moreton Bay, Hirst set about the interrogation of social relationships in Sydney and the townships, farms and estates beyond.

Hirst’s influence registers regularly in public discussion of our past. David Malouf’s recent take on Australia’s past (Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance, Quarterly Essay 12, 2003) seems to have drawn something from Hirst. Both agree that the ruling spirit was not ‘Hobbes and Sade’, as Hughes claims, but a concern to manage the convict system as humanely as possible.

Hirst took his cue from the observation that New South Wales made a more or less untroubled transition to a free society. This happened because, in a sense, it had always been free. He is good at the startling sentence: ‘This was not a society which had to become free,’ he writes in the introduction, ‘its freedoms were well established from the earliest times’. What did he mean by this? Simply that bondage was not forever (it was not a slave society) and freedom beckoned, along with boundless opportunity, in a society that was by and large well fed and open to upward mobility. Freedom was expanding virtually from the first day of first settlement. Free children were born to convict parents. Convicts were emancipated and became ‘free labour’; their legal rights were established; and pretty soon a free economy dwarfed the business of provisioning for felons. The practise of freedom in this penal colony is the focus here. Hirst likes to see relationships close up, to show his readers in vivid detail how governors and masters were compelled to negotiate with convicts, or how convicts ‘working in their own time’ made money (and a new life for themselves), or how ticket-of-leave men ran their own cattle with the master’s herd.

Strange Birth of Colonial Society followed in 1988. Hirst wanted to know how it was that a society run by imperial officials and local landowners for more than sixty years could so quickly and seamlessly segue into political democracy. ‘The upsetting of the conservative constitution and the establishment of democracy was the most rapid political transformation in Australian history,’ he writes. The conservatives had been firmly entrenched but they were displaced and demolished, politically speaking, in the space of about three years (1856–58).

The standard left-liberal view of Australian history is not so easy to identify here. Perhaps the flattering idea that we are a ‘naturally democratic’ people was in Hirst’s spotlight, or was it the tendency among labour historians to render the founding democrats as romantic figures full of high-minded ideals? As Strange Birth soon reveals, Hirst is more inclined to agree with the mid-nineteenth-century conservatives that the democrats were a poorly educated, rough and grasping lot, anything but high-minded, and his history emphasises how, once in power, they brought politics into disrepute.

Unlike Convict Society and its Enemies, Strange Birth is a more decentred and difficult set of arguments to get a handle on, let alone summarise. Here, political culture is broadly conceived. Inquiry and argument go in all directions. This is not old-fashioned political history focused on elections, electorates and administrations. Hirst’s interests are far too sociological for that. He wants to explore social relationships, the conventions by which they are governed and the attitudes that either sustain or undermine them. It is in the social life and the political culture of New South Wales that we will find how such an easy transition in Macquarie Street could be possible, and we will find its fatal flaw as well.

Hirst explores the power of loyalism and the dangerous idea of democracy, relationships between landlords and tenants, the impact of gold and working of authority on the goldfields, the easy adaptation of the concept of the gentleman in Australia (a masterly thread), public attitudes to bushrangers and to the Chinese, and, finally, the abuse of parliamentary procedure and power once democracy was in place. This theme is the main one; the others funnel in.

In New South Wales, unlike Victoria and South Australia, the tenor of political conflict was shaped by the presence of an entrenched landed class that assumed a natural right to power. The outcome was a vicious, sharp-tongued battle for hearts and minds and ultimately for the spoils. The tone of parliamentary proceedings never recovered from the antics and the oratorical savagery of 1856–58, to say nothing of what went before. Hirst’s argument culminates, I think, with the chapter on ‘Disgust’, a remarkable exploration of bad behaviour and its consequences – the discrediting of politics entirely. He writes about how democracy turned out to be jobs for the boys on a grand scale:

Only in New South Wales did the democratic order replace a well-established ancient regime. The mother colony was seventy years old. Democracy here had much more the air of new men running pell-mell to seize the valuables which had long been kept from them. It represented not so much the founding of a new order as the vulgarizing of what had gone before.

Hirst’s disappointment is consistent with his many years as a distinguished historian and public intellectual whose concern for the nation – its cultural vitality, its security and coherence – is paramount. In Strange Birth, we learn that democracy happened in a way that left us without a political culture we could be proud of, with no great parliamentary leaders we can celebrate, no figures that register deep in our hearts and our culture in the way that, say, Washington does, or Jefferson, or Lincoln, in America today. What we have is ‘disgust’. Thus we are left with soldiers and sports stars to celebrate, with the occasional nod to Melba. Our political forebears are lost to us. That’s the message. But is it right?