Political history

is a long-standing interest of Australian historians. The early colonial histories of W. C. Wentworth, James Macarthur, J. D. Lang, Herman Melville, and John West were concerned with the policy of British officials and its implementation by local administrators; their works were interventions into contemporary debates that sought to draw out the lessons of the past in order to shape the future. After the advent of self-government in the 1850s, later nineteenth-century historians such as G. W. Rusden and H. G. Turner took the actions of parliaments and ministries as the central dynamic of their narrative accounts.

The early academic historical profession reinforced this preoccupation. ‘History is past politics, politics are present history’, pronounced the English constitutional historian E. A. Freeman at the end of the century. He and his Australian counterparts traced the growth of freedom from monarchy to democracy, and trained their students in the lessons of statecraft by attending to the record of representative government. Politicians and politics were at the forefront of twentieth-century national record as related in the textbooks and short histories of Ernest Scott, Gordon Greenwood, and Frank Crowley: Alfred Deakin and the making of the early Commonwealth, W. M. Hughes and the conscription crisis of World War I, S. M. Bruce and national development, James Scullin and the Depression, John Curtin and national survival in World War II, Ben Chifley and postwar reconstruction, R. G. Menzies and the conservative supremacy of the 1950s. The same technique is apparent in (Manning Clark's History of Australia (1962–87)), where leading figures in public life contend for supremacy as they seek to impose their will on national life: thus the detailed portraits of Macarthur and Macquarie in volume 2, and the polarisation of Curtin and Menzies in volume 6.

Political history has frequently been treated biographically, and is present in constitutional, economic, and social history; but it was slower to develop as a subject in its own right, and historians still commonly depend on journalism and other contemporary commentary for an understanding of the political dimension. F. W. Eggleston's elucidation of early-twentieth-century Victorian politics in the 1931 biography of George Swinburne remains the best guide to that phenomenon; the Canberra reporter (Warren Denning's narrative, Caucus Crisis (1937)), remains the standard account of the failure of the Scullin government, just as (Paul Kelly's The Dismissal (1983) and November 1975 (1995)) offer the fullest record of the Whitlam government's demise. Nor is the neglect of politics confined to the political historians. In a survey of political history (in (Don Aitkin, ed., Surveys of Australian Political Science, 1985)), Peter Loveday observed that historians of land settlement, immigration, or education could not avoid dealing with political history but typically failed to undertake the ‘in-depth research in its own right’ necessary to provide an understanding of ‘the struggle for power within the field in question’. He contended that ‘the politics in history is, on the whole, left to the political scientists’.

Loveday was able to look back on a substantial corpus of work on the Australian political system built up by the pioneers of his discipline—(L. F. Crisp, Australian National Government (1965)); (Sol Encel, Cabinet Government in Australia (1962)); (S. R. Davis (ed.), The Government of the Australian States (1960)); (R. N. Spann, Government Administration in Australia (1979)); and state studies by R. S. Parker on NSW, C. A. Hughes on Qld, Dean Jaensch on SA, W. A. Townsley on Tasmania, Jean Holmes on Victoria, Ruth Atkins on the ACT, and A. J. Heatley on the NT—all with substantial historical coverage.

His censure of the historians was too sweeping, but later trends might seem to confirm it. The shift to social history turned historians' attention away from decision-making to lived experience; ‘history from below’ rejected the institutional. ‘Why does social history ignore politics?’, asked two of its prominent British exponents ((Geoff Eley and Keith Neild, Social History, 1980)). The further shift to cultural history brought a new understanding of politics, the politics of discourse in which every form of knowledge was a field of power relations and governmentality a technique for controlling marginality and difference; but cultural historians seldom attended to formal political processes—three case studies presented as examples in AHS (1993) dealt with kindergartens, civics, and the 1954 royal tour.

The earlier political history worked with more narrowly defined boundaries. It took the business of government as legislation, administration, and judicial review, and studied it through the official record. It sought to identify the forces that linked elected representatives to their bases of support, typically by positing their expression of competing interests, and to show the means whereby they secured election through the articulation of policies and programs, typically by public opinion studies based on the press. This methodology suited the requirements of the postgraduate thesis, since a given period of colonial, state, or federal politics or a particular political issue could be subjected to close study, but it largely assumed its terms of analysis.

Peter Loveday and A. W. Martin combined a more rigorous conceptual framework with a quantitative methodology in Parliaments, Factions and Parties (1966), which showed how the advent of responsible government in NSW preceded the party system. They demonstrated that a shifting pattern of factions characterised parliamentary life. Their identification of the factional nature of colonial politics was widely imitated in other colonial studies. With the assistance of other scholars, Loveday extended the examination to The Emergence of the Australian Party System in the states and early Commonwealth (1977). (John Rickard's Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth 1890–1910 (1976)) looked more closely at the transition to class-based parties. Federation itself has been widely studied, but more often in its constitutional and cultural dimensions (as in (J. A. La Nauze, The Making of the Australian Constitution, 1972) and (Helen Irving, To Constitute a Nation, 1997)) than to elucidate the political alignments.

There has been a revival of attention to the earlier forms of colonial politics. (David Neal suggested in The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony (1991)) that, in the absence of representative assemblies, politics was displaced into the courts; the first volume of (Alan Atkinson's The Europeans in Australia (1997)) argued that ‘the establishment of a community of convicts and ex-convicts raised, almost by accident, profound questions about common rights … [and] the responsibilities of power’.

The distinctive forms of colonial politics outside NSW were studied by (Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent (1957)), and (J. B. Hirst, Adelaide and the Country (1973)), for SA; and (Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age (1963) and The Rush To Be Rich (1971)), and (Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism (1991)), for Victoria. The political history of other colonies was pursued through biographies of leading politicians, such as Frank Crowley on John Forrest, R. B. Joyce on Samuel Griffith, and A. W. Martin on Henry Parkes, or in general histories such as Lloyd Robson on nineteenth-century Tasmania.

The history of state politics in the twentieth century has suffered an equal neglect. In the rash of sesquicentennial publications in the 1970s and 1980s, it was notable that only SA produced a volume concerned with the subject. In 1992 Ray Wright produced a first-class narrative history of the Victorian parliament, A People's Counsel.

There is an extensive literature on twentieth-century parliamentary affairs. (C. A. Hughes has produced three volumes of the essential handbook, Australian Government and Politics (1968, 1977, 1986)), which lists ministries and election results. (Geoffrey Sawer's Australian Federal Politics and Law in two volumes (1956, 1963)) summarised the party policies, legislation, parliamentary business, and constitutional issues of each of the first 18 Commonwealth parliaments up to 1949. While successor digests are still needed, the AJPH has published since 1955 political chronicles of federal and state politics. (Gavin Souter's Acts of Parliament (1988)) offered a large-scale narrative of federal politics, enlivened by sharp evocations of the leading personalities and incidents.

The principal histories of political parties are covered in entries on the Australian Labor Party, the Democratic Labor Party, the Democrats, the first Liberal Party and National Party (1917–31), the United Australia Party, the post-World War II Liberal Party, and the former Country Party. Labour history has produced an abundant literature on the left, and (Andrew Moore, The Right Road (1995)), brings together substantial research on the far right. Yet while rural politics is well served by the histories of Don Aitkin, B. D. Graham, and Ulrich Ellis, urban conservatism is a neglected field. The essays on (Australian Conservatism, edited by Cameron Hazlehurst in 1979), provided some insight into conservative ideology and organisation between the world wars. (Judith Brett's reading of Robert Menzies' Forgotten People (1992)) opened up the rhetorical and psychological dimensions of Australia's pre-eminent conservative leader. While there are substantial studies of political attitudes and voting behaviour, the history of elections and electioneering remains sadly neglected.