The result is that history plays little serious role in the policy debate, much
less in the wider battle of ideas—bringing to mind Hancock’s comment that
while Tocqueville believed there was in America an‘instinctive distaste for the
past’,‘in Australia, defiance of“the truculent, narcotic and despotic past”has
always been one of the most popular themes of forward-looking democracy’^12
(Hancock 1930, p. 270). It is unsurprising that, under those circumstances,
canonical works such as Hancock’sAustraliawould fade from prominence as
the decades passed.
But that is not to say the policy debate is entirely amnesiac. There has always
been a clash between a radical-nationalist view of Australian history—
characterized by‘an obsession with the creative role of the Labor movement
and a denial of the contributions [to Australia’s progress] of the middle classes,
the churches, the universities and non-radical reformist and liberal move-
ments (Coleman 1962, p. 6)—and one which sees the impact of Labor as
both more limited and, especially, more negative (Shaw 1962). WhileAustralia,
with its (misplaced) emphasis on Labor as the‘party of initiative’, somewhat
straddles that divide, it is undeniably critical of the policies Labor most enthu-
siastically endorsed, and nowhere more so than of the cult of‘fairness’.
That makesAustraliaprofoundly inconvenient from the standpoint of that
broad swathe of Australian public intellectuals for whom‘fairness’is a defin-
ing value. Little wonder then that Andrew Leigh, a Labor parliamentarian and
former professor at the Australian National University, in approvingly quoting
Hancock’s summary of the Australian ethos as involving‘the sentiment of
justice, the claim of right, the conception of equality’, singularly fails to quote
the concluding part of Hancock’s sentence, which points to‘the appeal to
government as the instrument of self-realisation’and so opens the way to
Hancock’s discussion of the damage the quest for fairness causes (Leigh 2013,
p. 30). And little wonder, too, that the left-wing economic historian, Kosmas
Tsokhas, who has describedAustraliaas‘the most insightful and substantial
study of Australian history and societypublished before the 1960s’(Tsokhas
2010, p. 262; emphasis added), defines its relevance to current debates in
terms of what he claims is its recognition of‘prior Aboriginal ownership’,
the‘destruction of native forests by pastoralists and farmers’,‘the important
role of public investment and state enterprise in economic development’,
and‘a trend towards a cultural feeling and psychological awareness of
national difference and separateness from Britain’(Tsokhas 2010, p. 262)—
as if Hancock, rather than being a stern critic of the radical view of Australia’s
development, had somehow endorsed it. The result is a use ofAustraliawhich
(^12) Hancock is citing a famous lecture by poet Bernard O’Dowd, which helped shape Australian
cultural nationalism. However, in the lecture, O’Dowd spoke of the past as‘narcotizing’, not
‘narcotic’(O’Dowd 1909).
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History