Tony Abbott’s history of Australia wants us to be proud of men like him

Former prime minister (and journalist) Tony Abbott has published a political history of Australia. Across 18 well-written chapters, he narrates the nation’s trajectory, starting with the establishment of a penal colony in 1788 and ending with the failed Voice referendum of 2023. Abbott’s aim is to restore national pride by showing that our past was “far more good than bad”.

Review: Australia: A History – Tony Abbott (Harper Collins)

This “balance sheet” approach was first introduced to Australia by historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1993, sparking the “history wars”. Argument focused on the impact of colonisation on Indigenous Australians and especially the scale of frontier warfare. Abbott’s perspective also feeds into the continuing culture war about Britain’s imperial past and polarised views about how to remember the Empire. As historian Stuart Ward recently noted, such debate is as old as imperialism itself.

Abbott begins with a rebuke to professional historians:

This is the book that never should have been needed. Until quite recently it was taken for granted that Australia was a country that all its citizens could take pride in, even the Aboriginal people, for whom the 1967 referendum marked full, if belated, acceptance into the Australian community.

His lifelong passion for history, he explains, was sparked by the Ladybird books, specifically the “adventures from history” series he read as a child. These narrated “great things done […] by great men and women”. He too tells his story in part through “key individuals”.

For Abbott, Australia has been a project characterised by “a consistent high-mindedness, a largeness of spirit or liberality” from its political leaders.

But Abbott’s Australia is narrowly conceived, excluding the perspectives of non-British cultures, women, and especially First Nations people. Abbott wants us to be proud of the achievements of men like him.

The Ladybird history of Australia?

Much of his account offers a very readable synthesis of mainstream historical research, and he acknowledges his research team, Andrew Kemp, Alex McDermott, Paddy O'Leary and Dom O’Leary, supported by the Institute of Public Affairs.

The first third of the book covers the 19th century, from “1788 and all that”, to the achievement of federation. But a series of omissions allows him to tell a story of linear progress from an “ancient” past to modernity, as signalled by the book’s tagline: “How an ancient land became a great democracy”.

Most glaring is his cartoonish depiction of First Nations culture, whose history he states is “now largely lost”, evident only through archaeological traces and colonial records. Citing anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, Abbott characterises Aboriginality as “timeless”, reducing traditional life to a “tough existence”. He quotes from Robert Hughes’ 1986 blockbuster The Fatal Shore, which described “a ceaseless grubbing and chasing for subsistence foods”. This was a derogatory description, even for its time.

Abbott ignores the last half-century of scholarship, which has explored the richness and dynamism of First Nations life across the continent. He dismisses the survival of Indigenous traditions and knowledge into the present. In this way, First Nations cultures are relegated to a static primitivism, which has no place in a modern nation state.

He pays far more attention to British history, arguing that by the 1780s Britain had “become the world’s leading power and most enlightened country”. This is the first of many such claims to be “the best”. Again:

The Britain of the 1780s was […] at the forefront of the liberal enlightenment, of the development of private property rights, the growth of markets and the beginning of the anti-slavery crusade.

Yet praise for the anti-slavery movement is not matched by acknowledgement of Britain’s status as the world’s leading slave-trading nation during the years of its “enlightenment”. British slavery was only abolished in 1833 and thus was entangled with Australian colonisation for more than 50 years.

Such selectivity allows him to paint a rosy picture of the convict system. He adopts conservative historian John Hirst’s argument, focusing on the era of Governor Macquarie in Sydney, that convicts enjoyed relative freedom in colonial society. Hirst suggested that the independence granted to many convicts after emancipation was the foundation of democratic institutions and an egalitarian Australian ethos.

Abbott’s insistence that “convicts were not slaves”, and that “Sydney could hardly have been less like a slave colony” is sharply contradicted by contemporary evidence for the system’s brutality and heartbreak.

For example, as Bermuda-born Chief Justice of New South Wales Francis Forbes explained in 1825, Australian convicts were not proto-citizens. As a “West Indian” himself, he thought their assigned masters regarded them “precisely in the same way as a planter in the West Indies regards his slaves”.

Indeed, Macquarie and his first wife Jane, the daughter of a wealthy Antiguan slave-owner, bought “two young, smart slave Boys” as household servants while stationed in Bombay in 1795 and they came with his household to Sydney.

Thus Abbott argues for a “comparatively benign experience” for convicts sent to New South Wales. This is indeed the Ladybird view of history, omitting any darkness or complexity.

Abbott’s denial echoes former prime minister Scott Morrison’s June 2020 comments that “there was no slavery” in Australia’s history, which prompted heated responses from First Nations leaders.

The Australian Wars

Abbott and his research team have moved on from the “history wars” debate about frontier violence, acknowledging this now well-established history. However, Abbott’s account of colonialism remains a partial story.

Evidence for the rigorously researched Colonial Frontier Massacre Map, which records around 11,257 Aboriginal deaths between 1788 and 1930, is termed “guesstimates” by Abbott. Conflict, he writes, was a result of pastoral expansion and “the survival of the fittest”. But he challenges a view of “the expansion of settlement as only a series of ‘frontier wars’”.

Instead, Abbott suggests that conflict was tempered by the “indispensable” role of Aboriginal labour and local knowledge in the settling of Australia. Settlers’ children were cared for by “Aboriginal tribes”. Frontier warfare is construed as scattered episodes of “conflict” or “massacre”, rather than integral to the system of colonisation.

Later in his book, Abbott claims gun reform after the Port Arthur Massacre was relatively easy to accomplish because we lack an “entrenched gun culture”, due to “our relatively peaceful settlement”. Another new book shows otherwise.

The Australian Wars, following director and editor Rachel Perkins’ successful SBS documentary series, presents extensive research. The book’s editors, Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Henry Reynolds, demonstrate that Indigenous nations resisted occupation of their lands “territory by territory”, as the frontier moved across the continent.

As Perkins explains, these were Australian Wars because combatants fought for “a way of life and sovereignty of a whole continent”.

Abbott’s is a Sydney-centric origin story, which also excludes the centuries-old regional engagement across the continent’s north. This is dismissed in a sentence as “a bit of canoe traffic around northern Queensland and some trepang trading with Indonesian fishermen”.

Western Australian readers will be surprised to hear that their state was also an offshoot of the convict system. Misleadingly, Abbott suggests Sydney emancipist Solomon Levey initiated the Swan River colony by providing the necessary capital. In fact, the drivers of western colonisation included imperial rivalry, trade and a desire for new products. Levey was just one of numerous private investors who saw a profit to be made from the continent’s first free colony. Freedom from the convict taint was a key selling point.

Abbott is on surer ground as he moves into the 20th century. He devotes the book’s middle third to the new nation’s “bold experiment” of democratic institutions, participation in two world wars and the Great Depression. In focusing on federal leadership and summarising the key events of Australian politics, Abbott and his team are at their best. The final third of the book spans the post-war “liberal revival” of the 1940s and 1950s to the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

As a political history, perhaps it is not surprising there are few if any “great women” in Abbott’s account. Nor that the impact of his “great men’s” policies upon others generally remains unexamined. Thus the idealistic, rights-informed vision for Aboriginal assimilation devised by Paul Hasluck, Menzies’ Minister for Territories, is fairly set out. Yet the impact of child removal upon Aboriginal families is downplayed.

There is no mention of the Stolen Generations, nor the landmark 1997 Bringing Them Home report – just an index entry for “Aboriginal Australians, removal of children from”.

Abbott’s bias toward his own side of politics is also to be expected. The 1975 Dismissal of Gough Whitlam by governor general Sir John Kerr, for example, is portrayed as the sensible democratic solution to political deadlock. Alternative views of this event are omitted, for example Jenny Hocking’s analysis of more than 200 palace letters between Kerr and the queen, revealing his prior consultation with the monarchy before he sacked Whitlam.

Linking past and present

As we approach the present, Abbott abandons his measured tone, celebrating the glory days of the Hawke–Howard era. The final chapter, titled “Drifting Backwards”, offers a counterweight to the boosterish tone of the rest of the book. Here, Abbott switches from history to lament the “cultural confusion” of our present moment.

Howard, he suggests, might be our “best-ever PM”, despite initiatives which later became “problematic”. These included a ban on introducing civil nuclear power, establishing renewable energy targets, environmental legislation “that gave green busy-bodies legal standing” and a commitment to “acknowledging Indigenous people in the Constitution”. Abbott’s own achievements were to stop the boats, repeal carbon and mining taxes, and “the biggest federal infrastructure spend in history”.

Abbott’s choice to end with the Voice referendum is significant. In his words, this was “the rejection of the proposed entrenchment in our nation’s Constitution of a new body chosen by Indigenous people only and comprising Indigenous people only but with a significant say over the government of all of us”.

Abbott’s characterisation is wrong. The October 2023 referendum asked voters to approve an alteration to the Australian constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by creating a “Voice” able to make representations to parliament on matters relating to First Nations peoples. While its final form was undecided, this body would have offered advice only.

For Abbott, this would have given First Nations people “a status and a say beyond that of everyone else”. Its rejection was a triumph for an “essentially colourblind” society.

But we do not live in an equal, “colourblind” society. Many inequalities in the present are the outcome of the structural nature of colonial violence, the Stolen Generations and Indigenous pain. Abbott’s partial history precludes recognition of these links.

In 1998, historian Mark McKenna noted in his parliamentary report, Different Perspectives on Black Armband History, there was broad agreement regarding “content” from both sides. Disagreement focused on “emphasis”. He suggested that, “As a people, we are trying to come to terms with the fact that ‘Australian’ history is no longer written purely from the perspective of the majority.”

Similarly, multiculturalism expert Andrew Jakubowicz argues democratic societies work on the basis of how much trust there is between people. Commenting on the two recent reports to the government by its envoys to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia, he noted that different communities need to recognise and respect “the sort of pain that the others have”.

In this sense, Abbott’s history of Australia returns us to the polarised “black armband” 1990s and the refusal to recognise others’ experience.

Abbott never spells out exactly why we should feel national pride. I assume on one level he sees it as the basis for unity. Nor does he question whether “pride” is necessarily an outcome of being “the best” or having a “good” history.

But when I talk to my students about the idea that we should judge our history as either “good” or “bad”, they are quick to challenge this approach. They see historical processes such as imperialism as complex, with diverse outcomes and perspectives.

For some of us, confronting our unequal past is no cause for shame or pessimism. On the contrary, truth telling and recognition of diverse views seem necessary for a united future.

Jane Lydon receives funding from the Australian Research Council.