Tony Abbott was a boxer during his Oxford years. A metaphor from the art of pugilism might be apt for his single-volume general history of Australia: Abbott is leading with his chin.
As it happens, the former prime minister has done a good job with Australia: A History. There are places where he has done a very good job.
It might sometimes be a bit woke for more conservative readers. The author’s note begins: “This is the book that should never have been needed.” Academic orthodoxy, Abbott explains, has “left many Australians ambivalent about our past, even though it’s far more good than bad”. He then goes on to tell of his reading of Ladybird history books in the 1960s.
At this point, one braces for the worst. Abbott certainly presents a benign view of the British empire. William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement get a good run; slavery does not. For Australia, British colonisation was a stroke of good fortune, although not initially for all, and Abbott does not obscure the injustice done to First Nations peoples. “It was not uncommon for a raiding party to kill the first Aboriginal person they spotted,” he observes of the 1830s pastoral frontier. Still, he thinks it was better to be colonised by the British than just about anyone else.
Abbott might present his book as an antidote to the gloom merchants of the academic left, but he still turns to their works in coming up with his own. When he cites an authority on the nature and extent of frontier violence, it is not the rightwing history warrior Keith Windschuttle but one of the latter’s principal targets, Lyndall Ryan. In contrast, Abbott’s account of the convict era is heavily indebted to the conservative historian John Hirst, who played down the coercive and violent features of transportation – the chains and lashes – in favour of freedom and opportunity. But Abbott’s telling might unfortunately leave the unwary reader the impression that convict life had some of the qualities of a holiday camp.
He then goes on to provide a mainly celebratory account of Australia’s relentless progress towards an egalitarian democracy where there has been widespread opportunity, class distinction hardly exists and “only the very unlucky have missed out on a decent life”. He does a competent job of describing the institutions and policies – such as tariff protection, compulsory arbitration and the living wage – devised to give a “fair go” to those prepared to “have a go”.
Economic and social policy of this kind had to go because it got in the way of individual effort and private enterprise. Not least for their efforts in consigning such interventionism to the dustbin of history, Bob Hawke and John Howard are the standout Australian prime ministers since Robert Menzies, in Abbott’s view, with Howard having “a strong claim to be regarded as our best-ever PM”. He is less enamoured of Gough Whitlam, whose dismissal and subsequent election defeat he clearly believes a satisfactory democratic outcome; and Paul Keating, a formidable political warrior and economic reformer flawed by his taste for anti-British nationalism, culture wars and “black armband” history.
In such ways, Australia: A History becomes more opinionated, but also less derivative, as it reaches the period of Abbott’s adult life. That makes for more lively reading and, at times, has generated some genuinely stimulating judgments, in nicely crafted prose. An example is the distinction drawn between the conservatism of Pauline Hanson, which “mistrusts change and instinctively resists it”, and Howard’s “that respects what is and wants the future to reflect the best aspects of the past”.
That’s a pretty convincing way of putting it, and Abbott is obviously on Howard’s side. But once he reaches the governments of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and his own, his performance of even-handedness and non-partisanship quickly falls away. The country’s 28th prime minister provides a brief, selective and spirited defence of his own government, followed by some hard judgments about Malcolm Turnbull’s (accompanied by a bit of old-fashioned score-settling) and Scott Morrison’s. He reminds us of Peta Credlin’s “Mr Harbourside Mansion” epithet for Turnbull, and accuses him of failing “to stress any big differences with Labor”. Morrison fares better in Abbott’s hands, largely because of Aukus, but Abbott believes his handling of Covid via a national cabinet made him “look more like the chairman of a committee than a national leader”.
This part of the book is a story of a nation going downhill, with its over-the-top Covid restrictions, excessive immigration and tolerance of unintegrated migrants. Abbott’s conviction that Australia remains “materially rich but spiritually poor” expresses a modern conservatism that is preoccupied with civilisational decay and out of love with what Australia – and much of the west – has become.
Abbott can at least celebrate the defeat of what he regards as a separatist proposal for the Indigenous voice and when, in this more hopeful mode, he imagines that “better times are usually only a few good decisions and the emergence of a couple of key leaders away”. While that doesn’t strike me as a sophisticated understanding of historical change, it does help account for why Abbott is hanging in there as one of the “mad uncles” which journalist and historian Chris Wallace has identified as integral to the Liberal party’s present factional turmoil.
Still, it is a virtue of Australia: A History that it takes political life seriously, even with its almost complete omission of state government. Australians, we learn over almost 400 pages, have the best democracy, the best soldiers, the best social system, the best mining industry, the best refugee policy, and much else worthy of the world’s attention and emulation. Abbott treats this country’s history as driven by the distinctive, and overwhelmingly admirable, qualities of its ordinary people and their political leaders: “a land built by heroes, both known and unknown”.
Yet it is also a tale of decline, leavened by what Henry Lawson called “the hope of something better than the present or the past”. Abbott’s version of that “something better”, however, will not be to everyone’s taste: if only we take pride in our British foundations, abandon climate and identity politics, and worry less over past injustices and fossil fuels, “our best days as a nation might still be ahead”.
Frank Bongiorno is professor of history at the Australian National University.
Australia: A History by Tony Abbott is published by HarperCollins Australia simultaneously with a three-part documentary on Sky News Australia, presented by Abbott, to be screened 13-15 October at 7.30pm.
