This is an edited and updated version of this year’s History Council of New South Wales Annual History Lecture, delivered by Frank Bongiorno at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney in September.
I’m going to begin with a fictional history, a thought experiment. Perhaps I should call it a “what if?” or counterfactual history to give it the gloss of respectability.
It is 1928 and Australia’s greatest sculptor, Lindsay Norman, has a big idea. He wants to carve the heads of four of Australia’s greatest statesmen into a mountain that he spotted in an isolated corner of the Australian Alps on his latest honeymoon. Inspired by an American mountain with a similar appellation, Mount Rushless would be named in honour of Australians’ laidback ways, but it was just right for what Norman had in mind, not least because he worried that a lackadaisical people would disappear from the face of the earth unless it mended its ways.
Modern art was degenerate. Puerile ideas from the old world were poisoning the national bloodstream. The manly white vigour that had made the nation — expanding the reach of the British race over an entire continent and even into New Guinea — was being sapped of its virility. The nation was becoming weak and effeminate. Even its cherished racial purity was under threat in a world where covetous aliens demanded Australia open its vast open spaces to inferior races. So said Norman in his 1924 manifesto, Salvaging the Nation.
Lindsay Norman had been thinking about whose heads would need to appear on Mount Rushless. William Charles Wentworth was there, not only because he had helped found the University of Sydney and become the country’s greatest statesman but also because in 1813, with some companions, he had found a way through the Blue Mountains and thereby paved the way for the wool kings. Here was a nation-builder in every sense of that word.
Then there was Henry Parkes, the working-class radical who saw the light, moderated his opinions, and became a founding father of the Commonwealth of Australia, the name he wanted for the new nation. Norman — who was himself originally from Victoria — had Alfred Deakin in view, too. He was favoured because of his role in making the White Australia Policy, and for taking over Papua as the foundation of an Australian empire. Norman cared less about his supposed achievements in progressive social and economic legislation, for they had only made Australians soft.
The fourth head, however, worried Norman, giving him many a sleepless night. Norman was no Labor man: far from it. He thought Labor’s social legislation, and its pretence that ordinary folk rather than talented elites made history, had weakened the nation. But Norman knew that he had to find a Labor man, not least because he hoped to screw a few thousand pounds for his work out of the wealthier unions.
The obvious Labor star was Billy Hughes, and what a joy it would be to work in stone on that formidable nose. But Hughes was a hated figure among union people because he had split the Labor Party and, in any case, he was still in politics. Clearly, he would not do. Then fate intervened. That sturdy former coalminer Andrew Fisher, thrice Labor prime minister, died in London. Fisher was a Queenslander, too, which was as convenient as his recent passing, and he had done much to build the Royal Australian Navy. It had to be Fisher.
I have invented this story — obviously, an Australian adaptation of the story of the Mount Rushmore monument in the black hills of Dakota — to underline both its plausibility and unlikelihood. It’s plausible to the extent that so many of the ideas that had motivated Gutzon Borglum’s project in the United States were shared with Australians. Both countries were the products of settler colonialism. Both celebrated histories of territorial expansion they saw as synonymous with progress. Those heads on Mount Rushmore — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — were chosen for their role in expanding the continental reach of the United States.
But this grand symbol of Manifest Destiny was built on the lands of the Sioux nation, supposedly protected by a treaty. If there had been any similar monument in Australia, where there was no treaty at all with Indigenous peoples, the result would have been the same. The racist, masculinist and elitist ideas that motivated Borglum’s Mount Rushmore project were common enough in Australia in the same period. Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory (1995) shows that Borglum resisted feminist efforts to have Susan B. Anthony included; we can be sure that if there had been an artist such as our fictional Lindsay Norman at work on an Australian project, any proposal for the inclusion of an Australian suffrage leader such as Rose Scott would also have received short shrift.
In another respect, my thought experiment is quite implausible. If you are old enough, you might recall an advertisement that ran on television in 2001, around the time of the Centenary of Federation. It featured a young boy, doing his homework, who asks his father the name of the first US president. That gives Dad no problem: “George Washington” — head number one on Mount Rushmore. But then the boy asks the name of the first prime minister of Australia. Tough one. Dad now looks a bit embarrassed. “Go and ask your mother,” he suggests. “What kind of country would forget the name of its first prime minister?,” asks the voiceover as the boy heads off to see if Mum knows. We then meet a diverse range of Australians, none of whom knows the first prime minister’s identity.
There are extenuating circumstances for this formidable display of historical ignorance, we are assured: “Perhaps it’s because in 1901, our nation was created with a vote, not a war, in peace, not in anger, that we take our beginnings for granted.” Eventually, we meet a man and woman, each elderly, who can name Edmund Barton. The boy — now perhaps enlightened by his mother, although that’s not explained — returns to his father to give him the answer. Dad replies that he knew that; the son looks appropriately sceptical.
Just what civic purpose was served by simply being able to name-check Barton is not explained, but one has to start somewhere, I suppose. The slogan “Australia. It’s what we make it” — perhaps reflecting uncertainty about why knowing about the past might still matter — appears on the screen with a dynamic rendition of the Centenary’s official logo (a multicoloured stylised map of Australia) brought into existence by a kind of shooting star — although with one too many points to be the Federation Star.
At around that time the late historian John Hirst, who published a history of Federation intended to help overcome such startling ignorance. He spent several pages of The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (2000) dealing with how Federation had failed to capture the Australian imagination, why it had been “forgotten.” He had no simple answer. One reason, he suggested, was that when Australians were members of the British Empire, the history they knew celebrated the rise of British liberty. Once those ties were broken, the nation’s “civic consciousness” became “impoverished.”
Certainly, as late as the 1950s, it was the Ancient Constitution, Magna Carta, the civil wars, and the Glorious Revolution that provided the most solid foundations of an Australian political history. When Labor leader H.V. Evatt fought his battle against the Menzies government’s attempt to ban the Communist Party in 1951, his appeal was frequently to “British justice.” And in the following year, at considerable expense, the Australian government bought a version of the Magna Carta from Britain.
In 1988, though, when an Australian visit for Lincoln Cathedral’s Magna Carta — Lincoln has one of four copies of the original — was organised by Australian expatriate clergyman Rex Davis, it was a financial failure. That didn’t discourage the ACT branch of the Australia–Britain Society from choosing Magna Carta in the mid 1990s as the theme for a Centenary of Federation monument in the capital. Funding of over half a million dollars came from the British government, so we now have a Magna Carta monument and a Magna Carta Place in Canberra, but I’d suggest that most Australians no longer consider this political history their own. Revisionist historians in the wider Angloworld have also exposed the mythologisation of Magna Carta in political efforts to craft a celebratory and expansive history of British constitutionalism.
The political heroes of Australian democracy included the odd “local” such as Peter Lalor, the Eureka rebel, but they were more commonly the heroes of English political and constitutional history. Names such as John Hampden or John Pym — heroic figures in the struggle of the English parliament against Charles I — will mean nothing to most Australians today, but for earlier generations they were the progenitors of Australia’s own political freedoms.
Hirst concluded his Federation study with his own answer to the question of what kind of country doesn’t know the name of its first prime minister, “The answer is a country that is not quickly going to place Barton and Deakin alongside its real heroes: Ned Kelly, Phar Lap, and Don Bradman — a bushranger, a horse, and a cricketer.” Here, Hirst’s remarks recalled, consciously or not, those of an earlier historian, one of more radical leanings. Brian Fitzpatrick, writing in The Australian Commonwealth: A Picture of the Community, 1901–1955 (1956), noted that Australia had “no Jeffersons and Lincolns… The Australian people made heroes of none, and raised no idols, except perhaps an outlaw, Ned Kelly, and Carbine, a horse.” But for Fitzpatrick, that was a good thing: they had “still made of Australia a home good enough for men of modest report to live in, calling their souls their own.”
The implied contrast in much of this kind of discussion is with the United States, even allowing that it, too, had enjoyed a favourite Depression-era racehorse, in Seabiscuit. There is a longstanding impression that Americans have a stronger sense of national identity than Australians, and that they are much more engaged with their own history.
It is certainly easier to find American institutions, and monuments, devoted to promoting an approved version of the nation’s history. A notable example is the phenomenon of the presidential library. In his book Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (2006), Benjamin Hufbauer argues that these grand institutions — beginning with the first devoted to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 — reflect the growing power of the Office of President itself, the tendency towards an “imperial presidency.” They are about “how power is remembered and how these constructed memories of power shape contemporary and future presidential authority.”
Australia has followed to some extent in establishing a series of prime ministerial libraries and centres. These are devoted to Alfred Deakin, John Curtin, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, John Howard and Robert Menzies. And we are evidently not done: there was an announcement in late October of a Julia Gillard Prime Ministerial Library, to be located at the University of Adelaide. And the Malcolm Fraser Collection within the University of Melbourne Archives arguably approaches prime ministerial library status. All of these prime ministerial libraries are located within universities, which can create financial vulnerabilities, and Gideon Haigh writing some years ago wondered how willing they were likely to be to ask really tough questions about the subjects to which they were devoted.
By way of contrast, each former American president pursues large-scale philanthropic support for their own library and has a hand in its creation, with the National Archives and Records Administration playing the central part in administration. They are necessarily central to critical research on their respective subjects. Presidential libraries, more generally, are in a much stronger position to shape historical consciousness and collective memory than their Australian counterparts. Perhaps in this field, as in other aspects of our national life, we have been too enthusiastic in a desire to follow an American model. Prime ministers are not presidents — and the leadership churn of recent years would have been a great boon to the building industry if every prime minister were to have a library.
The British scholar Michael Billig coined a term that can help us understand some of the matters I am exploring, “banal nationalism,” the hardly noticed, taken-for-granted ways that communities express their national identity. And it involves processes of both remembering and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion — even as the boundaries shift with changing values.
For example, we have, as the Americans do with their presidents, sometimes placed the faces of Australian prime ministers on our stamps. We name federal electoral divisions after politicians, as well as Canberra suburbs, and the odd country town, university, road, building or bridge. The renaming of the Victorian federal electorate of Batman as Cooper, and of Murray as Nicholls — after the Yorta Yorta men and Aboriginal political activists William Cooper and Doug Nicholls — expresses an expanded sense of what practising politics has meant.
All the same, Australia has only begun the process of honouring the rich traditions of Indigenous political activity in public ways, although both Cooper and Nicholls have public monuments. One place First Nations politics does figure is in the aural and visual record: I am thinking here, for instance, of Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly’s celebration of the struggles of the Gurindji for better wages and their land in “From Little Things Big Things Grow,” a political story also powerfully evoked in Mervyn Bishop’s photograph of Gough Whitlam pouring sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hand — even if that was apparently staged for better effect after the actual ceremony.
Political memory happens informally, too, rooted in folklife, culture and conversation. My former doctoral student and colleague, Emily Gallagher, has uncovered children’s engagement with everyday politics in their imaginative play — their writing and drawing, for instance — while another of my students, Gary Humphries, who is also a former Liberal parliamentarian, recalls a rhyme that his mother taught him about the political leaders of the day, a product of the streets of 1930s Leichhardt:
Lang, Lang, brave and bold
Oughta be, oughta be dipped in gold
Stevens, Stevens, bah, bah, bah
Oughta be, oughta be dipped in tar.
Folklorists have long drawn attention to the rich tradition of protest song, playground rhyme and political graffiti. And today, we need to consider the online world, where memories of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership, now global, will likely be dominated forevermore by her famous “Misogyny Speech,” always at hand on You Tube.
The intersection of the official and popular can, in unpredictable ways, generate rich political memory. Names of prominent leaders sometimes attach to a whole period, as in phrases such as the Menzies era or the Whitlam era. That even happens at the state level, with Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen era. There, the political landmark of the Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct — a mouthful of unlikely material for political memory — now works in historical consciousness through casual references to the commissioner, Tony Fitzgerald. “Before Fitzgerald” and “After Fitzgerald” are common phrases, rich in an imagery that extends well beyond what we usually think of as politics. A contemporaneous Bicentennial event, Expo 88, is sometimes recalled alongside “Fitzgerald” as when Queensland “came of age.” “After Fitzgerald” was also “After Expo.”
Some institutions have as their very mission to shape understanding of political memory. That is true of the National Archives Australia. Its eventually unsuccessful legal battle with Jenny Hocking over release of the Palace Letters is a reminder of how reliant we are on access to original documents if we are to undertake honest, well-informed appraisal of our political history.
The Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House also seeks to shape understandings of both the political past and the possibilities of our system. As democracy around the world and even sometimes at home has been subjected to assault in recent years, it has assumed a more active role in civics education.
Local institutions can also play a role. Ballarat has its Prime Ministers Avenue, an assembly of busts in that city’s Botanical Gardens. That golden city has long had a keen sense of its own national importance, representing itself through the Eureka uprising — a much mythologised political event in its own right — as the cradle of Australian democracy. The original commissioning, and funding, of Prime Ministers Avenue came from Richard Crouch, a local politician who had been both a federal Liberal and Labor parliamentarian. The city council provided money for a time, but there is now a philanthropist, a local resident, once again paying the bills, and possibly looking nervously at national opinion polls as I speak. The site has also seen protest: an environmental activist group installed CoalMo in May 2022 — in “honour” of Scott Morrison — during the election campaign, but he survived only a few hours.
Ballarat might remind us that collective memory is also collective forgetting. Eureka has a place in the stories Australians tell themselves about the evolution of their democracy. Yet, as Clare Wright has shown in The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (2014), women’s role had long been underestimated in an overwhelmingly blokey national legend. Nor is there collective memory of the demonstrations of Chinese diggers in the 1850s on the Victorian goldfields against discriminatory taxation, which enjoyed some success. We recall in mainstream history the sufferings and oppressions of the goldfields Chinese but not their brave and resourceful political resistance. That sits alongside our failure to appreciate the deep history of deliberative forms of decision-making among Australia’s Indigenous people as an integral part of this country’s democratic history. Perhaps voters might have been more willing to accept the Voice proposal at last year’s referendum if they had a warmer appreciation of those long-standing practices and traditions.
Forgetting can be facilitated by literal destruction, whether by design, greed or indifference. The Earlwood home in which John Howard grew up is now the site of a KFC restaurant, and the Bankstown fibro in which the young Paul Keating lived was demolished to build units. More recently, the Deakin holiday home, Ballara, in Point Lonsdale, has been subject to a campaign led by Deakin descendant, Tom Harley, against a decision by the relevant Victorian planning authority to allow its sale for subdivision. By way of contrast, the Chifleys’ modest home in Bathurst has been a house museum since the 1970s, and the Curtins’ home in Cottesloe, Perth, is available for short-stay accommodation. That hardly turns it into a national shrine, but it is better than a Zinger Burger with chips.
Perhaps we are getting a little better in these matters. A recent and successful campaign for state heritage listing of the building that housed Elsie Women’s Refuge, the country’s first, honours and preserves a site of great historical significance for Australian women and the feminist movement. Michelle Arrow in The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (2019) has shown how efforts such as this one exemplified the personal becoming the political; domestic violence and other matters excluded from the public sphere were drawn into everyday politics through feminist action. Elsie, a Glebe property occupied in 1974 by a group of Sydney feminists that included Ann Summers, Jennifer Dakers and Bessie Guthrie, is as much a site of political life as any parliamentary chamber or cabinet room.
Prime ministerial homes, too, have fared better in more recent times. The Morrison government provided funds for the purchase and preservation of the home Bob Hawke lived in as a child in Bordertown, South Australia: like Curtin’s home, it has become tourist accommodation. Recently, through a marvellous initiative led by former NSW premier Barrie Unsworth, some Labor people banded together to raise the million dollars needed to buy the former Whitlam family home at 32 Albert Street, Cabramatta. The Morrison government subsequently provided $1.3 million to support this effort. It is a lovely mid-twentieth-century modernist home that doubled as a de facto electorate office for the young but fast-rising western Sydney MP. And it was where the family, their friends and Labor supporters celebrated the party’s famous victory in the 1972 election. Just as the Chifley house museum works as a reminder of the lifestyle of the respectable provincial working class, the Whitlams’ place — designed by a local architect Roy Appleton — registers something of the continuing modesty of middle-class taste in the mid 1950s. It is now part of the Whitlam Institute within the Western Sydney University.
The phenomenon of the political memoir is beyond the scope of what I can say tonight, but my colleague Joshua Black has explored how memoirs and the wider context of media coverage, book tours and literary festivals have promoted particular understandings and images of Australian politics. The more successful of them, such as Bob Hawke’s and John Howard’s, have been widely read and the most sensational, such as Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson’s Whatever it Takes and Labor leader Mark Latham’s The Latham Diaries, have contributed to a wider cynicism. “Whatever it takes” has become a description of a certain way of doing politics, one most of us dislike.
Certain television documentaries have reinforced this image of politics. Labor in Power, with Richardson prominent among the interviewees, screened in 1993 and was arguably the most accomplished of them. It paid attention to personal rivalry as a dynamic of Labor’s time in federal office from 1983, but the wider story was a serious effort to transform the nation and the Labor Party along with it. The more recent documentaries, The Howard Years, The Killing Season and Nemesis, were each accomplished examples of documentary-making, but they presented Australian political history in a rather more sinister light. Personal ambition overshadowed policy agendas. In Nemesis, the camerawork — with its use of empty, semi-darkened rooms for the interviews — hinted at danger, as if even now someone might emerge from the shadows to stab a political rival in the back, like one of those final scenes that they used to include in James Bond films: the surprise attack from a character such as Nick Nack, the main villain’s sidekick, just when you think the drama over.
It was not always thus: through the 1970s and 1980s there was a boom in fictionalised accounts of Australian history in the form of live theatre, feature films and television mini-series. Fuelled by both the cultural nationalism of the era and tax laws that generously rewarded investors in film and TV, there were dozens of them. Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis’s play The Legend of King O’Malley had its premiere in 1970. Notable films also dealt with aspects of Australian politics with less levity, such as Phillip Noyce’s Newsfront (1978), but political history really found its genre in the multi-part television series. Any Australian viewing these programs would have received something like an extended course in national history, although possibly not one that would pass muster in a high school classroom or university lecture hall.
By the time True Believers, a 1988 drama about Australian politics, appeared on our screens, I was a nineteen-year old history student at the University of Melbourne and I found even the advertisements for the program so risible that I refused to watch it. I have done so more recently and must confess to having been entertained and informed, amid quite a few laugh-out loud moments.
True Believers is a melodrama, with a decided leftward slant, to put it mildly. The eight-part series begins with John Curtin on his deathbed and Ben Chifley present to accept the mantle — reluctantly, it is emphasised, since reluctance to set yourself apart from your mates is the Labor way and Chifley is the quintessential Labor bloke. What follows is a lot of old suits and hats, and generous applications of Brylcreem, with the occasional homely wife, sassy journalist or devoted secretary thrown into this very manly world. Chifley, played by Ed Devereaux of Skippy fame, is salt-of-the-earth, the kind of bloke everyone would want as their uncle, while Bert Evatt is brilliant, thrusting and unstable, child-like rather than villainous. An appropriately ruthless Bob Menzies — extravagantly eyebrowed — is not without sensitivity or principle, though neither can outdo his opportunism. Bob Santamaria, Catholic activist, is a zealot with mad eyes who seems more like a dangerous cult leader than the amiable fellow of later times enquiring of viewers “How do you do?” on his Sunday morning TV program Point of View.
True Believers was just one of many such programs. The Dismissal screened in 1983, when memory of the sacking of the Whitlam Government was still raw and Labor had just made it back into office. Indeed, the first episode was screened on 6 March 1983: the Sunday after Bob Hawke’s election victory. Labor-aligned lobbyist David Combe was annoyed when his new friend Valery Ivanov, the Soviet diplomat — and, unknown to Combe, a KGB agent — arrived at his Canberra home for a chat just as he was settling down to watch. If there was any sense of lineage between Whitlam and Hawke being evoked in the screening of The Dismissal at this time, the rightward course of the new Hawke government, which in the coming months grappled with the sensational Combe–Ivanov espionage affair, would soon dispel that impression. The Dismissal works as a story of grand ambitions, thwarted ideals and flawed visionaries, a story told against a background of relentless conservative bastardry and a governor-general who seems almost single-handedly to be propping up the nation’s whisky industry.
What was happening here was the rise to cultural power of the creatives who had first come into their own in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Whitlam generation. Mother was Britain, and young Australia needed to throw off her overbearing influence. But there was an older, bigger, more powerful and rather ruthless relative waiting in the wings. When Uncle Sam was not suspected of killing our best racehorses, as in Phar Lap, he was pulling us into immoral and unwinnable wars, as in Vietnam or else menacing our national soul, as in Newsfront.
If the left seemed to be winning the culture wars as each of these films and programs rolled off the assembly line and on to our screens, the environment of recent years has been rather more sharply contested. Oddly, a rather old-fashioned bearer of collective history has taken much of the brunt: the statue or monument. Some statues, including here in Sydney, have been vandalised or graffitied — although, unlike in Britain, none has yet been dumped in the sea. With the authorities’ approval, they have occasionally been moved, or removed, or they have been reinterpreted through new inscriptions.
Yet despite the movement against statues seen to be entangled in the brutal history of colonisation, they are also still being erected. In Victoria, a Kennett-era initiative designated the threshold for a Victorian premier to have a statue commissioned in their honour as 3000 days. The result has been a nice mix: the Country Party’s Albert Dunstan, the Liberals’ Henry Bolte and Rupert “Dick” Hamer, and Labor’s John Cain Junior were “in.” Daniel Andrews has also qualified, while Kennett did not.
In the ordinary course of events, most of us probably barely notice such statues. The first I remember taking any notice of was that of Tommy Bent. That’s what my parents called him. If you were driving through the genteel suburb of Brighton in Melbourne, Tommy was hard to miss at the busy intersection of Bay Street and the Nepean Highway. Tommy was a man connected in my mind with weekends and beaches. And my father always had some dad joke to share about him, which persistently involved old Tommy coming down to visit the loo.
The statue of Tommy — actually Sir Thomas Bent, premier of Victoria from 1904 until 1909, the year of his death — has been perched on a granite pedestal of twelve feet since 1913. The statue itself, accompanied by a small drinking fountain, is a further nine and a half feet tall. A press report of the dedication called it “an excellent likeness.” The commission, supported by public donations, went to a woman sculptor, Margaret Baskerville: the Melbourne Argus believed this was the first time in Australia that a woman had received such a commission.
Bent is a fine example of nominative determinism. Bent by name, bent by nature, is the accurate and telling subtitle of Margaret Glass’s 1993 biography. He’d have kept a whole team of ICAC investigators permanently employed, for he seamlessly combined the role of minister for railways and land boomer, relentlessly exploiting his political clout to enrich himself. Bent was so bent that he was accused even of deeds that he was unlikely to have committed — notoriously, the theft of the splendid Victorian parliamentary mace, which went missing in 1891: there were claims that it was later used in a pseudo-parliamentary ritual in a nearby brothel.
A married man, Bent did assault one of his many reputed girlfriends; the case mysteriously disappeared, settled out of court. Graeme Davison tells us that monumental history’s role is to celebrate, honour and commemorate, not to analyse or explain. It does not remember bruised women or fleeced investors. Statues do often lie; they proclaim the deeply flawed as flawless heroes, the slaver as a philanthropist, the crook and thug as the model of a self-made man.
It is easy to satirise this heroic tradition of statuary. A group of Ormond College students at Melbourne University in the 1980s did just that with a politician named George Ievers. Ievers was a minor local worthy who belonged to a family that included other minor local worthies, also honoured with statues. Once a year, the students faithfully made a pilgrimage to the Ievers monument in Royal Parade, listen to a speech by some distinguished person, and then returned to college for the George Ievers Dinner. Sadly, unlike the Ievers statues themselves, that tradition did not endure. Satire, like protest, is more fragile and ephemeral than men in stone. So are traditions.
It is possibly because stone endures that we so worry over it. Recent campaigns have sought better representation of women and women’s political activism. Melbourne has a monument commemorating the Monster Petition of 1891 with its 30,000 signatures calling for women’s suffrage. Designed by Susan Hewitt and Penelope Lee and commissioned for the centenary of Victorian women gaining the vote at the state level (1908–2008), it takes the form of a scroll that evokes the original petition held in the Public Record Office of Victoria. While that sculpture avoided drawing attention to any particular woman — an elision that perhaps speaks to the masculinist character of traditional statuary — an organisation calling itself A Monument of One’s Own has now successfully campaigned to have a statue of Zelda D’Aprano, the equal pay campaigner, represented by a life-size bronze outside Victorian Trades Hall.
In Sydney, Catherine Freyne, historian, and Julie Bates, sex worker activist, have led an effort to secure the return of Joy, a statue of a sex worker, to the City of Sydney. The Loui Fraser sculpture was briefly in Darlinghurst in the mid 1990s before being moved to Macquarie University after some objections from locals. Now, Joy may be on her way home, as a replica — Macquarie wants to keep the original. Here is a battle over politics and history: are sex workers’ rights and history to be acknowledged publicly, or to be tucked away safely on a campus in North Ryde?
In Canberra, sculptor Lis Johnson’s Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney — who both entered parliament in 1943 — were recently unveiled. The timing was poignant: Parliament House had been exposed as an unsafe place for women. Lyons and Tangney stand as a response to the Peter Corlett statue of Curtin and Chifley, making their way from the Hotel Kurrajong to (Old) Parliament House. They amble along like any other yarning mates, everymen in a society that likes to think itself laid-back and egalitarian. Corlett also sculpted Menzies, who walks alone by Lake Burley Griffin, evoking his party’s individualism. Adjacent to what is called Robert Menzies Walk, this statue, commissioned in 2012, makes a more explicit connection with the development of Canberra itself. (The lake was a product of the Menzies era.)
Since the 1990s, the Liberals have done more to address their party’s own history. Menzies’ “The Forgotten People” broadcast — his eloquent 1942 celebration of the middle class — now features regularly in a Liberal Party discourse that those concerned sometimes inflate into a “philosophy.” The words are, of course, no more a philosophy than Ben Chifley’s “Light on the Hill,” or the phrase “True Believers” — taken up in Labor circles in the wake of the television series, most famously by Paul Keating, triumphantly, on election night in 1993.
For the Labor-leaning, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke have acquired a kind of modern folk hero status alongside older heroes such as Curtin and Chifley and probably now overshadowing them. Whereas for Whitlam, collective memory once seemed bound tightly to the Dismissal, it has been different in the last decade or so. His death in 2014 became an occasion for reflection on the expansive possibilities — and achievements — of the Whitlam government when compared with the straightened politics of our own times. A popular “memory” of the Whitlam government is one in which he is seen as responsible for getting one a university education. Whether literally true or not, it functions as a certain kind of political memory, an intersection of ordinary people’s lives with the wider world of politics.
For Hawke, whose government reintroduced fees for tertiary education, collective remembrance is more centred on personality: the reformed larrikin who was said to have had a “love affair with the Australian people.” John Howard is probably as close as the right has to a modern folk hero comparable with these figures — that famous tracksuit of his remains evocative of a kind of affectionate dagginess. Others, such as Scott Morrison, have tried to win hearts as well as votes but failed.
Still, it is worth pausing over the way certain policies of the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Howard governments have come to do symbolic work of a kind surely anticipated at their inception. Whitlam’s abolition of university fees overshadows aspects of his government’s legislative achievement that he and his colleagues regarded as far more important at the time. Fraser has been reimagined, especially but not only in the Vietnamese community, as a friend of the refugee, not Big Bad Mal of the Dismissal, or “Kerr’s cur.” Medicare, an early Hawke-era achievement, and gun laws, the product of Howard’s first term, now epitomise Australians’ differentiation of themselves from Americans. These reforms have grown in stature as other reforms have shrunk, disappeared or — in the case of several once much-vaunted economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s — have become connected with contractions of social opportunity and widening inequalities.
We are also more conscious than a generation or two ago of Australia’s fair electoral administration, compulsory voting and preferential voting as points of difference with other countries. Democracy sausage, synonymous with peaceful, Saturday voting in community spaces as the citizen’s basic duty, now embodies a distinctive historical experience, even a national identity.
A modern Lindsay Norman with a commission to adorn Mount Rushless would have plenty to work with, but he would find himself on Country now well understood to have a deep history of First Nations place-making, politics and sovereignty. Modern political memory can only be layered in such ways, alive to both the inscriptions and erasures that still pervade our collective sense of Australia’s political history and heritage. •
