Meanwhile the American nuclear bases – or, if you believe they ought to be there, ‘joint facilities’ – set the country irretrievably within the global network of terror. In certain desperate contemporary dreams, ‘Australia’ is once again an Arcady, the safe place at the other end of everything. That’s how it is echoed in the dark north European limbo of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, as in the East German conversations Wolf writes about it in Cassandra.

Ambrose Bierce’s old frivolity can be profitably re-worked. The problem with national commemoration is that it returns the place to island status, precisely when, more than ever Australia should know itself a continent: internally divided, with no single ‘national identity’; facing outward, ‘part of the main’. But now, in a vast public fantasy, it is offered to the inhabitants as a highly special unity, congratulating itself on a mythic journey through two centuries to a grand point of arrival in the present. In May the Queen will open the new Parliament House in Canberra: designed by an Italian working from New York, it’s one of our more interesting public buildings since the Sydney Opera House (designed, as far as they’d let him, by a Dane). The new building is crowned by the biggest flagpole south of the equator, as phallic as you like.

That typifies the elephantiasis which has gripped the whole event – some forty thousand events, in fact, costing squillions, from the Tall Ships and the First Fleet Re-enactment and the Perth-Sydney balloon race to the smallest gumnut-throwing contest in the local Rotary park. My car’s new registration sticker bears that logo, and the words ‘Australia 1788-1988’; I’ll swear the car, an elderly German, has been particularly grumpy in her gearshift ever since it went on.

I resent it myself. As a white Australian who rather likes living here, I am the beneficiary of an invasion. If honour is due to Captain Phillip, a brave leader with amazing management skills, more is due to the convicts, who fetched, carried and built on the fatal shore, often in conditions of enslavement – although, in his chapter ‘The Invasion’ in Australians to 1788, Geoffrey Blainey thinks that’s putting it too strongly. In any case, the convicts did the work, and if anything like a nation was founded then, it was at outrageous human cost to both black and white. In a superb chapter, ‘Towards Australia’, Alan Frost argues that the Aboriginal people were dispossessed, the convicts exiled and exploited, so that Britain might have a far-south strategic base which could also serve as an off-shore gaol, conveniently remote. Whatever fine words were spoken at the initial Hag-raising and gunfire, they masked the workings of power which overreached all humane intentions.

At that rate, the 200^th anniversary might properly be marked by a lowering of flags, Last Posts, and salutations toward long-obliterated graces. Most black citizens and increasingly numerous white ones know it, with many – but not all – historians among them. The ABA has had a rocky ride since its establishment, by a hopeful Fraser government in 1981, with public fights, expensive resignations, and manifest unease about its own raison d’etre expressed in the censorship of its shiny literature: employees have been forbidden, for example, to use the word ‘invasion’ with reference to 1788. With ‘discovery’ ruled out, ‘foundation’ because the officially acceptable term. A few years ago the projected slogan was ‘Living Together’, an uneasy attempt to embrace Australians of more than a hundred different origins and languages into chummy, family-of-man communality. Then the Authority made an ominous rightward shift, and the words appear on hoardings which rear up, desperately cheerful, every few kilometres on our cluttered roads: CELEBRATION OF A NATION, in a burst of balloons and streamers. But most of them have been spray-canned: the one I see regularly denounces 200 YEARS OF WHITE LIES.

That line represents a major theme m the contra-centennial opposition. Most Aboriginal leaders are insisting on peaceful and dignified protest; some, peacefully or not, want to tip the re-enacted First Fleet back into the sea. A march (‘for hope, freedom and justice’) is under way; the writer Kevin Gilbert and others are working on their draft for the long-projected treaty which black Australians, unlike the Maoris and the Inuit, have never had. When the Hawke Government backed down on a national land rights policy nearly two years ago, Northern Territory Aboriginal people announced their boycott of the bicentenary. They are, however, organising a year-long celebration of their own culture, with emphasis on what they believe white Australians should learn from them about caring for the land.

Some Aboriginal people refused ABA grants for cultural projects: they saw it as blood money, and the whole event as the expression of institutionalised racism. Others have accepted their share of the $A8 million specified for Aboriginal participation. The first Aboriginal television station, Imparja, based in Alice Springs, is beginning its broadcasts with the help of bicentennial money. A successful black artist, Jimmy Pike, was commissioned to do the ABA’s official poster. It shows the white man’s ship arriving – from the viewpoint of the shore. Although serious interrogation is confined to fringe journals like Australian Society and Australian Left Review, satirical, contra-centennial songs break from the rock stations; derision, protest and indifference (‘What Bicentenary?’) spread round on middle-class T-shirts., As I write, the federal Aboriginal Affairs minister, Gerry Hand, announces his individual boycott of the official programme, and his intention to participate in Aboriginal demonstrations of protest. Then he has to decide whether he’ll go to official black events, like the opening of Imparja. The opposition calls for his resignation, and Hawke declares that he ‘respects’ the minister’s position. The national teachers’ federation, with 175,000 members, declares its own boycott, and its commitment to anti-racist teaching. The respectable Sydney Morning Herald publishes a guide to black protest events as well. Containment, incorporation, growls the disaffected Left. Others, insanely hopeful, prepare to march and dance with the Aboriginal people.

A few years ago, with all this impending at a comfortable distance, we made Jokes about mass emigration on 31 December 1987. The jokes wore thin. To make better ones, and unscramble the cacophony, we need some cultural analysis: a task which, as the Historical Library demonstrates too often, most of the Left, historians included, has been shirking like the plague for years. It’s not enough to talk about the mammoth circus turned on to distract us from a worsening shortage of bread. When the politicians instituted the circus, they underestimated the force of the very symbolism they sought to promote, and permitted the outward fling of a boomerang that was much bigger than they knew.

One of the best outcomes is that history is now far more openly a field of political contestation, an arena. Pasts which were suppressed and denied have been laid open, much less by historians than by those for whom history is immanent in the present. When the Government reneged on land rights – to avoid clashes with state governments and mining interests – it probably seemed that there were no votes in it anyway. Then we were all overtaken: it became apparent that black Australians were dying in prison cells in quite appalling numbers. Hawke held off on a Royal Commission for as long as he could, but now it’s under way, and the Aboriginal issue can’t be kept out of the headlines.

Australians to 1788, using research by the economic historian Noel Butlin, proposes that the indigenous population at the time of the invasion was at least seven hundred and fifty thousand, about two and a half times more than the earlier standard estimate. By the 1930s, Aboriginal people, who were counted separately in the census and were not accounted citizens, numbered less than seventy thousand. A single figure changes our map of that past which, as our schoolbooks delivered it to us, was all pioneering and progress. For our concepts of the scale of human destruction through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the implications are devastating.

From their academic vantage-points a whole decade back, they saw the brontosaurus lumbering towards them: ‘in 1977 a few historians in Canberra began to think about 1988 as a year offering a special opportunity to their craft. That year, we guessed, would inspire a larger and more general commemoration than Australians had organised at the end of any previous half century. The coming occasion was sure to be more national than those others, for advances in central government, transport and community had accelerated the transformation of states that had once been separate colonies into provinces of a single polity, whose people travelled about as never before, talked to each other on STD, watched all over the continent the same prime ministerial news conference and the same cricket match.’ The graceful preface by Alan Gilbert and Ken Inglis appears in each volume. It is pervaded by a belief in Australia as one community, however divided, and the temperate acceptance that the bicentennial beast would be friendly, or at least tractable. Among the important, long-lacked amenities it could provide was the proper stock of reference volumes for enquiring citizens, historians and their students: thus ‘one half of our enterprise was quickly decided on.’ For the rest, it was determined that one more general narrative history, periodised and allocated, could only ‘elaborate present understandings ... without providing any fresh vision’: so ‘instead of inviting historians to pass the baton along a familiar track, we proposed a series of survey camps; instead of stringing events on a thread of narrative, we imagined cutting slices.’

The slice approach should never have been controversial. It doesn’t by itself guarantee progressive – let alone radical history. In the result, each one-year study assembles its epoch around it; we get windows as well as microscopes. But some historians did object, and the publishers evidently thought the market required gestures toward authority and continuity: in consequence, we have the depressingly conformist Historical Dictionary and the bland chronology in Events and Places. The former does very little, with respect to personages, that the long-running Australian Dictionary of Biography doesn’t do very much better. Anthropology and science are barely represented; film, television, broadcasting and the press are there with major omissions; while the journals Meanjin and Quadrant have entries, the important oppositional work of Overland, Voice, Nation and Nation Review is nowhere in this register. The entry under Literature recites the same tired old canon, and fails the reader by talking as though nothing had happened to notions of writing, reading and authorship in the past thirty years. Very good entries on Law (Ross Cranston), Culture (Richard White) and on K. R. Murdoch (David Bowman) are exceptions to the general level. Even granting their own terms – those of closed and authoritative, rather than open and provisional history – the Dictionary and chronology could be much more imaginative; on a reprinting, they should be revised.

Much more invention lights up both the Atlas and Statistics. The former is disappointing only in that it offers no archaeology of mapping itself, although Australians to 1788 to some extent makes up for it. The relations of literacy, religion and education are mapped; so is urban gentrification -no quotes around the word now; the movements of convicts and bushrangers; Aboriginal landscapes and Aboriginal resistance, as well as the more obvious geographies of climate, land use and weather.

In the helpful Guide to Sources – where, inter alia, Australia’s underfunded and undervalued libraries get some of the attention they deserve – Stuart Macintyre surveys history writing itself. With the crumbling of both liberal-scholarly and radical nationalist traditions, which at least made frameworks for ‘engagement with the larger issues’, he finds we have suffered loss; academic history has too much succumbed to narrow professionalism. A little too gently (he could be misunderstood), he asks how, if at all, can national history be made worth doing now? And how can it give popular memory better resources than those offered by commercial ‘preservation’ and heritage lists? They are hard and necessary questions. The history volumes do not easily yield the answers.

Determindedly social-democratic, the books each have long sections on ‘the seasons of life’, the way Australians in any one period conducted the affairs of childhood, adulthood and family life, old age and death. Impressive fictions emerge. Some commentators have elected Fred Coneybeer, the horse-collar-maker of North Adelaide, a young family man and trade-unionist, the hero of Australians: 1888. Fred survives because his voluminous, ill-spelt diary is extant in the South Australian Archives. He was a meticulous chap, fond of saying ‘you bet’ and ‘no mistake’; he saved up to take his wife and baby to the centennial celebrations in Melbourne. His health and evident normality contrast, for instance, with the penurious strivings of another diarist, Ann Currie, a farmer’s wife in the Victorian back-country; the marginal life of an upper-class widow, Julia Suttor, doing the rounds of her married children’s establishments; the hand-to-mouth existence of a perennially unemployed father, Thomas Dobeson, on Sydney’s outskirts, and his defensive stock of ridicule for politicians and emigration agents, with all their ‘fairytales’ about the ‘land of promise’.

As hero of this volume, I prefer the legendary stat1stic1an Timothy Coghlan. He thought Australia at the centenary marvellously progressive and fortunate; in his numerous yearbooks and compendia, its people ‘were marching firmly and confidently into their ordered and perfectible future’. Coghlan, who got a knighthood in the end, was every bit as well-adjusted as Fred Coneybeer. But he was no mere number-cruncher. Like his successors who made the Historical Statistics volume, he understood that figures must be chosen, and are unavoidably interpreted; they are the ground of storytelling.

A lot of the 1888 volume is very practical history on material culture, shaped by the ruling concepts of pioneerdom. The chapters on energy and distance can be mapped over those on social and political life, community, law and politics to show how power -the kind requiring coal and steam, bullocks and horses – served other kinds. These accounts also show what the invasion did to ecology, and the huge material difficulties of reproducing Western ways of life in a vast antipodean country with too much rain in some places and not half enough in others. The packhorse trade lasted just long enough to keep Fred Coneybeer’s family comfortable.

In the last chapter of 1888, the common man enters cultural history. The English-Australian cable link, only six months in place, went dead in late June; some feared action by the Queen’s enemies. ‘Great excitement,’ wrote Fred. ‘Tuesday – worked all day – the paper seems strange now without any cabels –’ ... ‘Wednesday – the Cabel is still broken and we are in suspence about it.’ Then on 13 July: ‘the cabel is repaired and we got a batch of telegrams this afternoon – great run on the papers – about seven or eight additions out this afternoon.’

There could have been more in this volume on the newspapers which Fred and all his like consumed so avidly. In that far-off, foreign country where the press was the only mass medium, newspapers, like all media now, were never merely mirrors, but always agents, working on their worlds. Francis Adams and Henry Lawson are present in these pages as individual voices: but they were empowered by the Bulletin, which gave them and thousands of others their moments of public speech. Country-town newspapers were often literate and politically independent, some of the religious press liberal and urbane.

It is because ‘ordinary’ people wrote and read that we can now build histories like these. Their articulateness, and their curiosity as citizens, might valuably be seen in continuity with the more privileged cultural work of those who make books, theatre and newspapers. At that rate, the ordinary loses its categorical boundaries: ‘there are no masses ...’ The historians Coneybeers and Curries are only as ordinary as we want to make them: it is not in the once-real, now-inaccessible persons of history, but in these constructions, that they embody a sort of benign complacency. Too many Freds to console us, and we find that conservatism which is possible to history-from-below: this is where social-democratic history threatens to become populism, confirming the dominant order of things.

Australians: 1938 is well populated with Fred’s sociological grandchildren. The Oral History Project has assembled them to be their own witnesses, on the regimented childhoods of the 1930s, on growing-up, working, saving and marrying, living country and suburban routines, doing ballroom dancing, listening to the wireless. ‘The richness of everyday life’? There were also its poverty, banality and pathetically narrow horizons, for girls especially. It is good anthropological history, where the industry of feminist scholars makes its impact. Ladurie meets de Beauvoir’s daughters, and they produce these past worlds of traditionally-bred Australian wives and mothers with their lifelong anxieties, their toiling heroism.

But the domestic labour of women hardly figures in the section on Work, which mainly explores under-organised labour on the canefields, in clothing factories, engineering workshops and coalmines. One journalist briefly remembers his cadetship. Work and Leisure are the names of separate sections, and culture is subsumed in Leisure: thus the historians replicate the notion, still institutionally dominant, that ‘culture’ is decor, having nothing to do with real lives except to uplift or relieve them. ‘Ordinariness’ calls the tune again: it is as though the culture of this recent past must be insistently popular if its history is to claim general attention in the present. The concepts of story and character merge with the determining beliefs about the readers of today.

Thus, in a very good chapter on radio – appropriately titled ‘Wireless’ – Lesley Johnson presents the five-year-old Australian Broadcasting Commission as entirely pedagogical and snobbish, while the commercial stations did the real job of entertaining with their serials, dance bands, light classics and jazz. Johnson writes from a worked-out position, clearly anti-elitist and feminist: she analyses commercial radio in terms of its ideological placement of the audience as family members, and of women as family-bound. But with all that can be said on the ABC’s stubbornly Reithian self-concepts, they’re not the whole story, for the Thirties or since. For country listeners especially, the national stations opened worlds which were otherwise closed: and it was in 1938 that its independent news service began to break the strict limits set by the newspaper-owners (they were led by the elder Murdoch).

Leonie Sandercock and others contribute an excellent chapter on sport, viewed as work and popular theatre, and also as a part of political life – segmented, as sport always was, by the divisions of class and race. John Rickard’s survey of entertainment takes in dancing, music, magazines and newspapers; he also notes the formation of a Fellowship of Australian Writers, and its moves for grants and subsidies. He does not consider what the novelists, travel writers and essayists of the period were doing with their worlds. There seems to be no available strategy for him, or for other contributors to the Historical Dictionary and the Guide to Sources, to think about writing as an artefact penetrated by history – let alone to count it as work, with its own political economy.

Yet the Australian Thirties were clamorous with debate: the campaigns against book censorship: passionate discussion of the Spanish war and Fascism; arguments on the functions of broadcasting and the need for a national theatre: pamphleteering on the status and employment of women; and, around the sesquicentennial, the Aboriginal people. A picture, reproduced from a painting of the time, shows a jostling crowd in Sydney’s Kings Cross: in a couple of paragraphs opposite, Rickard acknowledges urban bohemias and student life, stressing their marginality.

But they weren’t so marginal. Australian urban tribes have continuous histories, going back to the earliest years of our cities. As a theory of the forms of bonding within them, ‘mateship’ won’t do: Edward Said has a better word when he expounds ‘affiliation’, meaning the links which replace those of kinship. Within those milieux, academic and professional divisions break down; articulation and argument develop, and work outward beyond the enclaves. In Ann McGrath’s chapter on the publication of Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, and in David Walker’s ‘Mind and Body’, there are flashes from intellectual life. But Richard White’s chapter, paradoxically called ‘Overseas’, is the only contribution to communicate the variety of that life within the country. He writes about the inflow and exchange of ideas, about the contrast and clashes among newspapers, and about their actual discursive work - for example, in the construction of the foreign as exotic, metropolitan and dangerous.

The same writer’s entry in the Historical Dictionary is the only place in the series to propose that for white Australians, as for black ones, culture is everything they do to make sense of their lives in the world. At that rate the high culture/popular culture divide – such a worry for some of these historians – is only one more cultural fact to be observed; there is no need to endorse it. In the same section, Hank Nelson probes the Australian Raj in Papua and New Guinea (‘Masters in the Tropics’); Amirah Inglis sketches the lives of Australian nurses on the Republican front in Spain; Janis Wilton writes of the Austrian refugees who came after the Anschluss. Here, perhaps, begins that liberation of Australian history, a hope to meet Stuart Macintyre’s anxiety; it should now be, as the economic historian Donald Denoon has been arguing, the history of Australians, wherever they have come from and wherever they have gone.

This is an extract from a long review of the Historical Library which appeared in the London Review of Books (Feb. 18^th)