Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Frank Bongiorno, La Trobe University Press, $39.99.
The first full political history of Australia is a landmark book, a persuasive and all-inclusive work, from renowned historian Frank Bongiorno. It’s a social and cultural history, from pre-settlement Indigenous systems to the present day.
Bongiorno tells a rich story: a politics of ideals, visions and dreams as well as of roads, bridges and electric wires. Of dreamers and schemers. “I have tried to explain what Australians have expected of their political system, how effective it has been in meeting those expectations, and the kinds of activities in which they have engaged to make it live up to their hopes and aspirations. It is a history of ideas and institutions, and of leaders and followers. I tell the stories of many of the insiders who have moved easily in a world of power, but not, I hope, at the expense of the experiences of outsiders who have tried to make politics work for them from the margins.”
“This book is based on the conviction that while all of us – including historians – can choose to behave as if political affairs matter little to how our society functions, politics in the end has the habit of seeking us out of becoming entangled in lives that we imagine as purely private and disconnected from its demands.”
The book begins in deep time, among Indigenous people who lived on this continent for millennia, and ends in the age of COVID-19, the latest of the many external shocks to affect Australia’s political system.
The 472-page tome tells the story of shortcomings and disappointments, it also tries to capture the promise and possibility that Australians have seen in political life over the course of their history.
Depicting a wonderful parade of dreamers and schemers, Bongiorno surveys moments of political renewal and sheds fresh light on our democratic life. It’s a captivating account. From local pubs and meeting halls to the parliament and cabinet; from pamphleteers and stump orators to party agents and operatives. Moreover, it looks at the political insiders in the halls of power, as well as the agitators and outsiders who sought to shape the nation from the margins.
