Australian intellectual history by Greg Melleuish (see, for example, Melleuish
1995, 2014). It is also frequently cited inThe Oxford Companion to Australian
History, although it only receives three references in the more recent second
volume ofThe Cambridge History of Australia.
There is, nonetheless, a sharp contrast between the book’s lingering pres-
ence in what are clearly academic publications and the earlier prominence
of Hancock’s terms and tropes: for example, in the important collections
of essays on Australia produced, both in 1963, by Peter Coleman and
A. L. McLeod, and even more so in‘mass market’works such as Brian Penton’s
Advance Australia Where?(Penton 1943), which was much influenced by
Australia, as well as in Donald Horne’sThe Lucky Country, which Penton had
influenced in turn. The contrast is even sharper when the residual traces of
Australiaare compared to the‘Tocqueville industry’that is still going from
strength to strength.
In part,Australia’s fate could be the result of its point of view merging into
the intellectual background to the point of becoming a component of the
‘common knowledge’that is simply taken for granted. Even thirty-five years
ago, Ronald Conway, in describing Hancock as‘the father of modern Australia
watchers’, suggested that those who followed him had‘won easy royalties by
merelyfilching his insights’(Conway 1980, p. 3); equally, according to a
more recent assessment by Stuart Macintyre,Australia‘has entered so perva-
sively into the subliminal memory of historians that they unconsciously
repeat its phrases and take its conclusions as their starting-point’(Macintyre
2001 p. 38).
But while there may well be some truth to those statements, they seem
difficult to reconcile with the tendency of intellectuals—and even more so of
academics—to cite authorities, sometimes to excess. Additionally, if the cause
ofAustralia’s diminishing prominence is that it has merged into common
knowledge, some explanation would be needed of whyDemocracy in America
has not.
Rather, two factors seem more important in explaining the contrast. To
begin with, while the American foundation myths have enduring power in
shaping national debates, the more diffuse character of the Australian experi-
ence is such that‘among the Australian people only faint memories now
remain of the origins of their polity’(Hirst 2008, p. 142). It also seems
reasonable to suppose those memories have become increasingly faint as the
polity’s origins recede in time and as Australia has become more and more a
society of migrants, who have little connection to, or knowledge of, the
structural roots of the society in which they live. Again, the lack of any
tradition comparable to‘Americanism’that would frame immigrants’under-
standing of their country of settlement makes historical memory all the more
tenuous.
Henry Ergas