Table Of ContentTHE
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Blunders, stuff-ups and misjudgements are a part of any E
country’s history. Dwelling on what might have been
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isn’t always helpful, but recognising our mistakes and
learning from them is important. In this highly original R M i stak es
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and provocative book leading Australian historians
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attempt to do just that.
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Eschewing the smugness and arrogance that hindsight
can bring, and celebrating the many smart choices that I OO FF AA UU SS TT RR AA LL II AA NN HH II SS TT OO RR YY
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have been made, these writers look at key moments
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where one bad decision led to many more, where false
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assumptions remained in place for too long, and where K
we were blinkered to the reality around us.
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What if the English colonists hadn’t thought the
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country had very few indigenous inhabitants with no
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attachment to the land? What if they hadn’t assumed
the land was as fertile as England and made for grazing? A
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What if introducing species like foxes and cane toads
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had seemed like a bad idea? What if we had thought
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about the likely consequences of sending thousands of
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young men off to fight in overseas wars? Or had realised
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that the British strategy for saving Singapore wouldn’t
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hold up? What if dividing the nation into states at
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Federation was abandoned for another system? Or if A
Gough Whitlam had acted differently? Or if giving our N
cities over to cars had seemed like a foolish thing to
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do?
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These and many other stories, scenarios and situations T
are explored with verve, compassion and insight. The O
Great Mistakes of Australian History is a lively and R
provocative account of where we might have got it Y
wrong, written so that next time we can get it right.
edited
UNSW PRESS
by
CROTTY
and
ROBERTS
UNSW edited by MARTIN CROTTY and DAVID ANDREW ROBERTS
PRESS
Great Mistakes02 11/9/06 12:03 PM Page i
THE
G R E AT
s
M i s t a k e
OF AUSTRALIAN HISTORY
MARTIN CROTTY teaches history at the University of
Queensland where he is also deputy director at the
Australian Studies Centre. He is the author of Making
the Australian Male:Middle-Class Masculinity in Australia
1870–1920 and is currently writing a history of the
RSL.
DAVID ANDREW ROBERTS teaches Australian history at
the University of New England.He has written about
Australia’s early colonial period and is the co-author of
Ancient Ochres:The Aboriginal Rock Paintings of Mount
Borradaile.
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Great Mistakes02 11/9/06 12:03 PM Page iii
THE
G R E AT
M i s t a k e s
O F A U S T R A L I A N H I S T O R Y
Edited by MARTIN CROTTY
and DAVID ANDREW ROBERTS
UNSW
PRESS
Great Mistakes02 12/9/06 9:33 AM Page iv
A UNSW Press book
Published by
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
www.unswpress.com.au
© Martin Crotty and David Andrew Roberts 2006
First published 2006
This book is copyright.Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose
of private study,research,criticism or review,as permitted under the
Copyright Act,no part may be reproduced by any process without
written permission.While copyright of the work as a whole is vested
in the editors,copyright of individual chapters is retained by the
chapter authors.Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Crotty,Martin,1969– .
The great mistakes of Australian history.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 86840 995 2.
1.Australia - History. I.Roberts,David Andrew,1969– .
II.Title.
994
Text design Ruth Pidd
Cover design Di Quick
Cover photo Rosanne Olson/Getty images
Printer Griffin Press
Great Mistakes02 11/9/06 12:03 PM Page v
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Introduction:Contemplating the Role of Mistakes in Australia’s Past 1
Martin Crotty and David Andrew Roberts
Indigenous Peoples
1. ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country 14
to the New Comers’:The Denial of Aboriginal Rights
David Andrew Roberts
2. Shelley’s Mistake:The Parramatta Native 32
Institution and the Stolen Generations
Peter Read
The Australian Environment
3. The Burke and Wills Phenomenon: 48
Trial and Error in the Conquest of Australia
Alan Atkinson
4. Agrarian Ideals and Pastoral Realities:The 64
Use and Misuse of Land in Rural Australia
Richard Waterhouse
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5. A Curse Upon the Land:Foxes and Cane Toads 79
Manda Page and Greg Baxter
6. ‘An Architectural Monstrosity’?:The Cahill Expressway 93
and Town Planning
Paul Ashton
War
7. Naive Militarism:Australia’s World War I Generation 108
Martin Crotty
8. A Great and Impotent Friend:The Singapore Strategy 123
David Day
9. The Enemy Within:Wartime Internment of Enemy Aliens 139
Ilma O’Brien
Politics and Trade
10. ‘Another Singapore’? Australia Turns Away from Asia 156
Marion Diamond
11.States of Mind:Federation and the Problematic Constitution 170
Clive Moore
12.Guarding the Flood Gates:The Removal of Non-Europeans, 186
1945–49
Klaus Neumann
13.(Mis)adventures in Brinkmanship:Whitlam and the 203
Governor-General
Wayne Reynolds
Notes 219
Index 238
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Notes on Contributors
PAUL ASHTON is Associate Professor of Public History at the University
of Technology, Sydney. He is co-editor of the journal Public History
Review and co-director of the Australian Centre for Public History.His
publications include The Accidental City:Planning Sydney Since 1788.
ALANATKINSON has taught Australian history at the University of New
England since 1981, and is currently an Australian Research Council
professorial fellow.He is the author of several books,including Camden
(1988),The Commonwealth of Speech(2002) and The Europeans in Australia
(Vol.1,1997,Vol.2,2004,and Vol.3 forthcoming).
GREG BAXTER and MANDA PAGE both teach ecology and conservation
management at the University of Queensland. Greg was awarded his
PhD for research into the ecology and management of egrets in coastal
NSW,while Manda’s PhD was undertaken in the arid zone on vegeta-
tion dynamics and restoration.They are both involved in a research
program called Conservation Research In Semi Arid InlandS (CRISIS)
as well as pursuing separate research interests. In Greg’s case these
include research into the ecology and management of koalas, dingoes,
wallabies,ducks and fire.Manda’s current interests include research into
the reintroduction of bilbies, the ability of seed rain to monitor arid
systems and the impact of fire on soil seed banks.
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The Great Mistakes of Australian History
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MARTIN CROTTY teaches history at the University of Queensland
where he is also deputy director of the Australian Studies Centre. His
major publications include Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class
Masculinity in Australia 1870–1920.He is currently working on a history
of the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL).
DAVID DAY is a graduate of Cambridge University and has been a vis-
iting professor at University College Dublin and the University of
Tokyo, and a visiting fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. He is
based at La Trobe University in Melbourne. His books include John
Curtin (1999) and The Politics of War (2003).His latest book is Conquest:
A New History of the Modern World (2005).
MARION DIAMOND is an associate professor in the School of History
at the University of Queensland. She has written biographies of the
entrepreneur Benjamin Boyd,the journalist Charles St Julian and the
feminist and immigration agent Maria Rye. She is currently com-
pleting a biography of the opium trader, and friend of John
Macarthur,Walter Stevenson Davidson.Much of her work deals with
the linkages between colonial Australia and the wider imperial world,
and she has a particular interest in Australian links with Asia.
CLIVE MOORE was born in north Queensland,educated in Mackay and
at James Cook University in Townsville,and has taught at the University
of Papua New Guinea and the University of Queensland where he is
now an associate professor. His major and rather eclectic publications
have been on Australia’s Pacific Island immigrants, the Pacific labour
reserve, Australian Federation, masculinity, gay Queensland, New
Guinea and most recently the Solomon Islands. His major research
project is now on Malaita Province in the Solomon Islands.
KLAUS NEUMANN has written books,articles and radio plays about the
histories and cultures of the Pacific Islands,Australia,New Zealand and
Germany.His latest book is the award-winning Refuge Australia (2004).
He is currently pursuing projects about Australian responses to
refugees and asylum seekers; colour and Australian immigration; and
public memories in ‘perpetrator societies’.Klaus works in the History
department of the University of Melbourne.
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Notes on contributors
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ILMA MARTINUZZI O’BRIEN is a researcher at Victoria University and is
director of the Italian Australian Records Project. She has published
widely and curated major exhibitions on Italian immigration. Her
current research, supported by the Australian Research Council, is on
internment during World War II. She is an honorary associate in the
School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University.
PETERREAD is Senior Research Fellow,National Centre for Indigenous
Studies,Australian National University.He is also company secretary of
Stolen Generations Link Up (NSW), which helps Aboriginal people
separated from their families as children to return to their families.His
books include Returning to Nothing:The Meaning of Lost Places (1996),
Belonging:Australians,Place and Aboriginal Ownership (2000),and Haunted
Earth (2003).
WAYNE REYNOLDS is an associate professor at the University of
Newcastle where he runs programs in the history of Australian foreign
policy and defence.He has published on Whitlam’s foreign policy and is
currently working on an official history of the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty,which the Whitlam Government ratified.
DAVID ANDREW ROBERTS was born in Newcastle, NSW, and now
teaches Australian history at the University of New England. He has
written on various aspects of Australia’s early colonial period,and is the
editor of the Journal of Australian Colonial History. He is the co-author,
with Adrian Parker, of Ancient Ochres:The Aboriginal Rock Paintings of
Mount Borradaile (2003).
RICHARDWATERHOUSE is Bicentennial Professor of Australian History
and Head,School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry,University of
Sydney. His latest book is The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural
History of Rural Australia (2005). He is currently engaged in a study of
the history of European land settlement policies and practices in
Australia.
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