The men who made the nation

Abbott’s personal history is, at heart, a history of the men who made the nation — and the women he forgot.

Image: HarperCollins.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott will be best remembered by many as the target of his predecessor, Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s electrifying ‘misogyny speech’ in which she castigated him for, among other things, campaigning against her in front of signs that read ‘Ditch the witch’ and ‘Bob Brown’s bitch’. Gillard later expressed her surprise that such behaviour had not ended his career. Sexism is as bad as racism she said.

In his latest post-political career move, our 28^th Prime Minister has become a historian. In Australia: A History, he describes Gillard’s speech as a mere ruse designed to distract, but he doesn’t address Gillard’s charges of sexism and misogyny nor enquire into the anger that propelled her eloquence. Neither misogyny nor sexism feature in the index.

Rather, Abbott explains that he has written a history of Australia to instil a sense of national pride in his fellow citizens. Some kinds of citizens are more visible than others, however, in his account of the transition from convict colony to modern democratic nation. Politicians, monarchs, military men and explorers figure largely. That this is a men’s history of Australia is clear not just from the endorsements and its skewed account of historical agency and change, but also from the index, in which ‘women’ as a category have a small special entry, as in older national histories, when they appeared between ‘wombats’ and ‘wool’.

“Abbott explains that he has written a history of Australia to instil a sense of national pride in his fellow citizens. Some kinds of citizens are more visible than others, however, in his account of the transition from convict colony to modern democratic nation”.

Tellingly, however, there is no index entry for subjects such as the feminist movement or the birth rate or maternal citizenship or the women’s liberation movement or sexual violence or women’s refuges or the Women’s Electoral Lobby or the March4Justice in 2021, for there is no discussion of these subjects in the actual text. Whereas hundreds of individual men are named in the index, there are just a handful of women thus identified as historical subjects. There is no index entry for ‘men’ of course because men are the book’s taken-for granted subjects.

Abbott tells us that individuals and their ideas matter, but key change-makers –  including Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal women – such as Rose Scott, Jean Daley, Muriel Heagney, Miles Franklin, Jessie Street, Bessie Rischbieth, Mary Bennett, Margaret Tucker, Dorothy Tangney, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Jackie Huggins, Elizabeth Reid, Beatrice Faust, Pat O’Shane, Anne Summers, Susan Ryan, and Lowitja O’Donoghue are completely absent from this account of the making of a nation.

“There is no index entry for ‘men’ — because men are the book’s taken-for-granted subjects.”

Abbott wrote his history, he suggests, so that Australians might feel some pride in their singular achievements. Sure there were mistakes and imperfections, but he emphasises notable democratic reforms – compulsory schooling, the secret ballot, political rights and industrial arbitration, for example, and later the neoliberal economic reforms brought in by the Hawke-Keating and Howard governments, though he doesn’t register the first compulsory minimum wage in the world in 1896 or equal pay for teachers in 1958 or the supporting mothers’ benefit in 1973 or marriage equality in 2017.

The 1912 Maternity Allowance, championed by labour women activists such as Jean Daley as the right of newly enfranchised women citizens is attributed to Prime Minister Andrew Fisher and the introduction of equal pay for women, advocated by generations of feminists from Clara Weekes to Muriel Heagney to Zelda D’Aprano is credited to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s initiative of 1972. Longtime Labor activist Heagney founded the Council of Action for Equal Pay in 1937 that campaigned for pay equality for decades.

Abbott’s heroes include William Wentworth, Alfred Deakin, Robert Menzies, Bob Hawke (‘our greatest Labor Prime Minister’), Kim Beazley, John Hewson and John Howard (who has ‘a strong claim to be regarded as our best-ever PM’). He discusses different versions of ‘liberalism’ that have shaped Australian politics – protectionism versus free trade and state intervention versus market privatisation – but seems puzzled by Deakin’s faith in the agency of the state as a means to secure social justice, noting that the radical reforms in the early 20^th century came at the cost of productivity.

British-born Abbott emphasises Australian loyalty to British values and authority especially in the domain of foreign policy, at the time of federation and later, but doesn’t note the tensions involved between Australian assertions of independence and British imperial power, for example, that Deakin’s clash with the Colonial Office in 1907 led him to a nervous breakdown and prompted his defiant and irregular invitation to the Americans to send their naval fleet our way. Progressive Australians were in fact generally more sympathetic to the country Deakin called ‘the great republic’ before the deadly imperial embrace of World War 1.

“…Abbott emphasises Australian loyalty to British values and authority especially in the domain of foreign policy, at the time of federation and later, but doesn’t note the tensions involved between Australian assertions of independence and British imperial power…”

Abbott writes his new history to address the influence of ‘black armband view of history’, invoking Geoffrey Blainey, who contributes the foreword to the book. The transformative impact of recent histories of empire, settler colonialism and frontier violence, that resulted in Indigenous dispossession, widespread massacres and the destruction of Aboriginal community and culture – ‘the logic of elimination’ – in the late Patrick Wolfe’s influential formulation – creates the context in which Abbott yet seeks to write ‘a proud history all of our own’. He devotes much time to addressing the effects of colonisation and recognises the ubiquity of conflict, but insists that colonists’ relations with Aborigines were also characterised by friendship, cooperation and adaptation. He wants to emphasise his sympathy with Aboriginal people, noting in a caption to the accompanying photographs that ‘part of my annual tradition as prime minister [was] to spend a week in an Aboriginal community’. Despite this he notes that he voted ‘No’ in the recent referendum on the Voice to Parliament, because in his view it would have entrenched ‘separatism’ and ‘inequality’ in the Constitution. In his view the equality of citizens demands the sameness of rights.

“In his view the equality of citizens demands the sameness of rights”.

All historians write from a particular standpoint and perspective on the world. Abbott notes that his is a ‘personal history’. It’s a version of history in which parliamentary politics – which was his career for twenty-five years between 1994 and 2019 – is centre stage, though readers are also reminded of Abbott’s non-parliamentary interests, when we are told, for example, about the gradual easing of historical restrictions on surf-swimming in Sydney.

Australia: A History is a national history in which half the nation remains for the most part invisible. Women’s lives, their ideas, work, skills, political mobilisations and achievements are clearly deemed irrelevant to the making of the nation. Sexism and misogyny can take many forms, discursive as well as political. The transformations in historical understanding effected by feminist scholarship during the last 50 years have passed the former Prime Minister by.

Some like-minded readers will no doubt applaud.

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