Australia: A History

(By Tony Abbott) (2025)

Many, many years ago, Mark Twain wrote: “Australian history is .. picturesque; It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies & all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. Full of surprises, & adventures, & incongruities *& contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true!”

Australia’s 28th Prime Minister has written a history of Australia, explaining that he did so to try, not to counter, but to balance-correct, the currently prevailing ‘black armband’ narrative of those determining that the ancient evil of colonisation can and should be redressed now, and that our negative past is prologue to our future Utopia; in short, those who want to turn Western Civilisation into an irrational confusion. The author seeks to honour a nation “in which none of its three elements of an indigenous heritage, a British foundation or its immigrant character…took official priority over the others.”

He has done so splendidly, not via some angry revanchist or reactionary polemic but in a refreshingly fair, clear-eyed, and (dare we say) sound way. More Kylie Tennant history than that of Manning Clark or Robert Hughes or Phillip Knightley or Stuart MacIntyre, although plenty of left-leaning sources are given a go in the book. The political warrior of Battlelines, 10 years on from his occupation of high office, has stowed his flame-thrower and made a genuine and successful stab at a popular, non-academic general history, easily accessible to any citizen, although this is essentially a political history, sequential from the nation’s culture.

Abbott is an optimist but no Mark Tapley. And although he deeply believes in Australia’s underlying greatness, and is fond of the great-men-in-history approach, here we find a big canvas of disparate peoples – not just the early political, social and wealth founders like Arthur Phillip, John Macarthur, Lachlan Macquarie, William Charles Wentworth, and Edward Wakefield, but Bennelong and Pemulwuy, pioneer women such as Caroline Chisolm and Mary MacKillop, and the early reformed convicts (dumped into a harsh and unforgiving land, but one without walls, or slavery in its purest form). Abbott covers the punitive raids of early settlers, such as the notorious Myall Creek massacre, but he is not interested in score settling.

He is excellent on the politics of things, such as the burgeoning self-governing trends of the colonies, the most thoughtful and peaceful establishment of any nation in history in 1900, the symbolic forging of nationhood in WWI, depression and WWII, the post-war period dominated by Robert Menzies, and the often turbulent economic, social and political times since, including the economic miracles, the Vietnam War, the dismissal, Timor, Bali, Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2000 Olympics, 911, the successful and unsuccessful referenda, Covid-19, and our current malaise.

Some of his writing crackles: “…it remains remarkable how much of the rule of law, with fair trials and the presumption of innocence, would be applied in a settlement comprised almost entirely of convicted criminals.”

“Modern Australia was never a grand design. It was the spontaneous product of all those individuals and families looking to make a home or to keep one – to strike it rich, to make fresh beginnings or to hold onto what they had…Among them were humanitarians, pragmatists and the ruthlessly self-interested.’

“The Myall Creek massacre was shocking and controversial, not simply because it occurred, but because the perpetrators were caught and brought to trial. This was almost unheard of in colonial society.”

“The National Reform and Protection League…This ‘astounding innovation’, barked one opponent, seemed designed to ‘degrade politics and political men’, but it actually gave birth to modern mass democratic politics in Australia.”

“The final draft [of the Commonwealth Constitution] forbade anyone having more than one vote, required no property qualification for voting or for standing for the Senate, ensured payment of members, and provided for a deadlock remedy, a wide franchise and a referendum process for constitutional amendments. What we take for granted today were great breakthroughs then.”  

“In preference to outright exclusion based on race, and following other colonial governments, the Commonwealth proposed a dictation test that would determine eligibility to come to Australia. Immigration officials could test immigrants in an unfamiliar European language…The dictation test was still in use in the late 1930s, when the Lyons government used a dictation test in Gaelic to refuse admission to the communist intellectual Egon Kisch.”

“Bruce governed with the inclinations of a businessman. He avoided the polarising politics of radicals and reactionaries, but he made the classic technocrat’s mistake of assuming that good sense and expertise could solve any problem by taking the politics out of policy.”

“[Canberra] was a ‘dry’ town, under federal ordnances in the ‘temperance’ era, so getting a drink required driving nine miles (14.4 km) to Queanbeyan on the NSW border on roads that were half made and muddy on bad days.”

“Florey, alongside fellow South Australian scientist Mark Oliphant, who made microwave radar possible and convinced Oppenheimer of the feasibility of building an atomic bomb in 1941, ‘changed history’ and ‘are the two most consequential Australians of the war.'”

“Today, Australians take for granted living in a multi-ethnic society, something that would have been unthinkable almost everywhere a century ago and that is still strange in many countries.”

“Incredibly, [Evatt] revealed that he had personally written to Molotov, the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, to confirm whether the documents were forgeries. Molotov’s representative confirmed that they were. ‘I attach great importance to this letter,’ Evatt said, ‘which shows clearly that the Soviet Government denies the authenticity of the Petrov documents.’ The government benches broke into laughter. According to one journalist present, Menzies turned to his colleagues and said ‘The Lord has delivered him into my hands.’ This was the end of Evatt, who staggered on ghostlike until February 1960…”

“Although much had changed, Menzies made it seem like nothing that really mattered had. That was his unique political skill.”

“The most contentious aspect of Aboriginal welfare had long been the practice of child removal…’neglect’ could be a highly subjective concept between two very different cultures.”

“…a common complaint among intellectuals…[they] found little to admire in a culture that was, to them, provincial and humdrum; even though the post-material social and moral liberation they championed rested on an explosion of material progress.”

“Calwell was old Labor: working-class, socialist, fiercely anti-conscription and racially conscious…He survived an assassination attempt in 1965 and generously forgave the young assailant, whose mother he met. His renowned empathy was the result of lived experience. His only son, Art, had died from leukemia at the age of 11 and Calwell wore only black ties for the rest of his life. Calwell’s problem was that he wasn’t winning.”

“As Lenin is reputed to have said, nothing happens for decades and then decades happen in weeks…The Whitlam era was a tumultuous experiment, elements of which remain embedded in Australian life.”

“To Fraser, the question was whether Whitlam would go voluntarily or involuntarily to the people. Fraser foresaw this endgame with a clarity that Whitlam lacked…In the end, the constitutional crisis of 1975 was resolved by democracy…Even if Whitlam’s most die-hard supporters continue to ‘maintain the rage,’ most Australians were comfortable settling the impasse this way.”

“Was it Fraser or was it the Liberal Party that changed? Most likely, critics on the left misread him when he was in government, while critics on the right misread him after government…He was a liberal interventionist at home and a liberal internationalist abroad.”

“Hawke and Keating complemented each other: Hawke’s mission was to build a new consensus, while Keating’s was to destroy the old one.”

“In the wake of Mabo, Keating used an address at Redfern Park, on 10 December 1992, to offer a caustic opinion of British colonisation: ‘We took the lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.’  It was an eloquent but one-sided denunciation of Australia, and came strangely from a national leader. Expunged from this story were the evangelical humanitarians and Whig liberals and the success of Indigenous Australians themselves in achieving legal and political equality over the previous half-century. Such examples, which hint at a more complex story, held no place in Keating’s imagination.”

“Six weeks after the 1996 federal election, on 28 April, a lone gunman armed with an Armalite semi-automatic rifle, opened fire on men, women and children at the historic site of Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing 35 and wounding 23. It was the worst mass shooting since federation…although gun regulation was a state issue, the scale of the Port Arthur tragedy prompted a national response. Howard understood the importance of leadership to drive policy change under such circumstances. It helped that he was more pragmatist than dogmatist on states’ rights.”

Abbott accepts that his “perspective on the events of our past certainly won’t be everyone’s”, and he is right when he says – at he did at his launch – that “the self-critical component of Western Civilisation has metastasized into self-loathing.” In the final analysis, Abbott’s conclusion is a worthy one: “Australia is a land built by heroes, both known and unknown. Each generation’s challenge is to be worthy of them and to build on their mighty legacy so that our best days as a nation might still be ahead.”