Conversations | Professor Geoffrey Blainey | The Importance of Understanding History

[Music] [Music] [Music] well jeffrey blaney thank you very much for being with us this is a great honor for me i've been reading your material by choice but also by compulsion i think since i was about 20 which is now quite a long time ago is that true yes uh your uh the national trust calls you a living treasure which i think is remarkable i don't know what that feels like i don't even really know quite what it means but you um you've written what some 40-yard books the classic tyranny of distance more recent books a short history of the world which is a masterpiece and i'd recommend to people who want to get a feel for how the world's worked a short history of the 20th century how wars begin a short history of christianity and your most recent book the story of your first 40 years before i forget that's a remarkable record why do you feel that history is important well i suppose it's the reservoir of human experience and the great part of human experiences outside our lifetime and a grandparent's lifetime and history is about all all we've got the amount of experience that we can learn in our lifetime is is relatively limited so that history is there like a huge library waiting to be tapped if we want to tap it i've noted uh in my time in public life many of the people i respected greatly including political leaders were avid readers of history and they seem to feel i think it was churchill who said that uh all you need to know about statescraft can be learnt by studying history he said that did he yes he did bringing the wisdom of the past to the table yes because you have to interpret history there are always rival interpretations of what happened in the past and you have to choose which interpretation suits your view of human nature or how people behave well back at the time when i was at university reading books like tyranny of distance one of the things i had to write is was the topic was set for us uh is there such a thing as truly empirical history and and you raised that very subject it seems that an awful lot of history that's taught now is revisionist history it's designed to try and establish if you like a world view rather than to allow people to be properly informed about what's happened i'm quite concerned about that you know i think that uh many people who came into history in the 1960s and 1970s came in not because it was a way of investigating a way of learning about the past and maybe glimpsing the future they came because they had a message which they could use the history platform to so there's much less discussion about important historical matters today than i think there was let's say in 1950 when i began to write history it's a sad thing to say uh debate is all important but a lot of the debate now doesn't take place it seems to me that it's a very patronizing and and and unfair thing to do to our children it's effectively to make them victims of our own culture wars so we adults you know are involved let's face it in the west today in an enormous brawl over who we really are and our children as a result are at the whim of whoever has a sort of the greatest clout in the classroom today so to speak in terms of who sets the curriculum and what have you they're not necessarily being taught accurate history which means that they don't have that opportunity to bring the wisdom of the ages to the table well they don't even have the opportunity to evaluate their own country and their own civilization it seems to me that uh the present-day australia for all as faults as one of the great success stories of modern history and that's why such huge numbers of people want to come here we're one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world you know we had democracy in the times of athens and the ancient greek cities but that wasn't real democracy the modern kind of democracy where one of the exponents of it and that's one of the great achievements because we don't realize most of the countries in the world are not democracies may never become that so that's something we should rejoice in and we should also rejoice that this has been an extremely innovative country so many inventions of importance to the world have come from australia and uh people don't realize that this country in 1788 could feed in most seasons of people who lived here but it couldn't be anybody else well in some years i would think australia probably feeds not only the 25 million people here but maybe 80 or 100 million people in other parts of the world if you allow let's say 2 000 calories a day you know we we look at the faults of this country but we don't and we don't tell children that this country also has great virtues which they've inherited and they have to maintain yeah well you're touching a a strong nerve there because i'm a farmer and they tell me one australian farmer feeds 600 people and indeed you're right we feed three or four times our own population when we can get free of drought and we clothe many more because we're a major producer of the fibres that's right and and what about minerals and it's all done but that technology that we employ is quite extraordinary and then there are minerals but let's let's go back to this issue of objectivity now you had a really interesting early life we're all the product of our early life you were son of the mance your father was a methodist minister you moved around must have been at one level challenging how do you make friends when you move every four years or the other level very very interesting because you saw in australia that's gone and how did that shape you well um it's the only childhood we had there were five children in our family it's the only childhood we knew so that we didn't think we were in any way disadvantaged that after four years we had to move on to another town it meant that when you started a new school you were well behind because the school had different standards and emphasized different things but uh i i learned so much about australia i mean at the age of three we went to south gippsland that lean gathered a daring town and that's where i grew up my ambition was to be a farmer lucky my ambition wasn't fulfilled because i couldn't cope as a farmer nowadays a farmer's got to be a jack of all trades but i'm not mechanically skilled but i wanted to be a farmer desperately and then we moved to geelong in the small provincial city of manufacturing city and that was a very different world and then we moved to ballarat we saw so much of the australia that was and the different kinds of values and attitudes uh you know like a lot of weaknesses that old time australia but it had great strengths and and i myself honor it let's i'll come back to that in a moment and trace through where you went from there but one of the things that that strikes me is that one of the books you wrote which i found really fascinating not so much because it's so much deep and meaningful about the great thoughts and philosophies and how that shaped us but just to show how we once lived to forgotten australia and i think that book was called uh black kettles and full moon black candle not quite the right title but that's what it's called black catalan full moon right and i found that just incredibly interesting and of all the interesting things i learned you know the history of matches and how difficult it was to launch a pipe or boil a billy before somebody came along with matches and i think the 1850s or whatever but then he was the one that really stunned me australia was a major importer of ice not the drug the frozen water yes we imported ice in the northern hemisphere that's right [Music] in boston which was in one of the world's great ports there were ponds that produced ice in large quantities and the ice was cut and then carried down to the port and put into sailing ships wooden sailing ships with no cargo other than ice and those sailing ships would set out for melbourne melbourne was the great ice importer passed through the equator where the ship was often become it might take four or five months to reach melbourne then the ice was taken by then a lot of it had melted was taken ashore and put into the fast common co coaches sent up to ballarat and bendigo and inland places sent to the hotels in melbourne and people paid a lot of money for the ice uh in fact they preferred it to the geelong germany invented mechanical eyes geelong was the first place in the world to invent mechanical eyes but then people in australia said that his long ice wasn't cold enough and they still referred the boston eyes i thought ice was eyes but there you go so that's in part you came you know of course you wrote much earlier about the tyranny of distance many of those inventions refrigeration we could export me airplanes that's right distance but but before we go there um to go back to something earlier again this whole question of objectivity one of um i think the truly remarkable things that you've been prepared to do which we all need to learn from was that you said once that perhaps we'd overdone the three cheers version of our history you know where we clapped everything that we'd achieved we talked about our colonial days without regard for the downside it was all about how clever we'd been then we had the sort of reaction uh that wanted to describe us as horrendous uh sort of sons and daughters of oppressive colonialists from the other side of the world that became i think you termed the expression the black armband view of history and you said that we need to meet somewhere sensibly in the middle perhaps we needed a correction but that the correction it turns out to be more prejudiced and more dangerous uh than than the original that we were trying to break free of yes i said that uh in the lecture at sydney university i think in 1992 i was brought up in the three cheers view of australian history that uh it was one of the great success stories of the world but there's very little you could you you could criticize but that was born that theory was born in many ways of the country being at war you have to maintain the morale of the country you have to say this is a great country we're defending and you know we we had the first world war 1914-18 then the 20 years it was strongly influenced by that war then we had the second world war you just have to maintain morale and people are proud of a country if they give up if they have to risk their life defending it and then came the period perhaps from the 1970s on which when people said the failings in australia much more conspicuous much more important than the successes and they said look at the way we've treated aborigines well of course there was much at fault in in in treating aborigines uh but at the same time there was a tendency to glorify aboriginal society to say that they lived in peace with one another well of course the evidence is overwhelmingly against that they're human beings and they fought and you know people like to say well they had a wonderful sense of the kinship well that's true but you know a man could have uh 10 or 20 wives in aboriginal society that's not quite kinship by modern definition so there's great virtues in aboriginal society we moved to the situation where we said our society is infinitely inferior to an aboriginal society i don't accept that likewise people said look what we've done to the environment well true we've often failed in being custodians of the environment but that's true of every every country in the world over history has not been a faithful custodian of the environment the environment has to be changed in order to support a larger and larger population so i thought we moved to a gloomy view of australian history from perhaps a view that was too optimistic and that gloomy view is now extremely powerful and it dominates the primary schools which are the great educator no matter what people say universities are not the great educators in australia the primary schools are the primary schools the homes of the black armband very history it's a very interesting insight that's my view uh and well it's something for us to really think about um those formative views just as we also know of course that the the the very early years before you even start at a preschool are incredibly important and yet often we behave as though they're not i think but let's drill into that a bit more did you go to preschool i didn't know and i didn't go into equipment and i lived out in the middle of nowhere yes i didn't suppose it would have gone on very well in preschool but to drill into this one of the great problems we have is jonathan hype puts it we now teach our children that life is a battle between good people and bad people well we know that's nonsense we're all a mixture this lack of ability to hold things in suspension we see it with a debate over australia day in a way i mean i can understand that aboriginal people have deep grievances i can understand that but to move the date my personal views that would be madness why not use the date to have a much more honest discussion about what happened don't lose the date you may lose the discussion it would be my view but to come back to something i just want to say it's taken us a very long while to accept australia today even even mainstream australian society has been slow to accept it in victoria we didn't even call it australia today we call it a a day when i was a child and many parts of australia didn't celebrate australia day now every part of australia in some way or other celebrates australia day and that's a great achievement it seems to me when some success has been achieved that you decide to throw it out i mean i think the big mistake is that the aborigines don't use australia day to celebrate their own achievements they say captain cook we've got no time for captain cook uh they say well our ancestors discovered australia well in a sense that's true why don't they build one and we'll we build a monument to the early aboriginal explorers and discovers their attitude i think has become very negative and if they want to criticize australia today why not do something positive themselves well i i i agree and if there are issues that they want to explore we'll use the day to explore it but let's do it in a sensible way and then what strikes me here you see is that uh in the area that i used to represent uh there's an area called uh mile creek where a terrible massacre happened in the earth this is your old electorate yeah and i so i became very interested in the story uh and you know it's been well researched now and it was a horrendous thing you know a bunch of i think it's 10 or 11 stockmen uh when most of the men were away drove the women and children and the few remaining men that were in the camp at mile creek over a cliff and it was terrible now and it's beyond dispute a lot of that story it is now but but here's my point we never tell the story without recognizing the nobility of the white people who were aggrieved and insisted that those men be taken to trial including the manager of the station was one of henry danger he was a famous landowner up there his manager became aware of what had happened and courageously it was very courageously because he's probably his own life was in danger he insisted that those men be brought to trial now they were acquitted first time around and people uh from the jury were heard to say things like i'd never hear see a white man hang for killing a black man but there was a man called plunkett who was i can't remember his title but effectively the chief justice of new south wales at the time he was a devout catholic as it happened burning with indignation that this terrible miscarriage of justice managed to force a second trial and people were hung so there's two sides of the story you know there were people who were noble enough to insist on justice and that's never told or too rarely told to see history's never straightforward is that not a simple question of one grouping of people are perfect and another group of people are all bad that's to deny the truth of human nature [Music] it's inevitable that aboriginal leaders will be hostile to parts of australian history and it will go on for a long time and there are a wide variety of things they're entitled to publicized but at the same time in the period where the aborigines were believed to be maltreated the average australian was giving from their own pockets considerable sums of money there were no welfare states to set up missions all around australia now the missions are out of favor but the missions provided a welfare system for aborigines which didn't exist in australia for mainstream australians there was no welfare state in australia in 1860 or 1880 in a bad time you were in strictly speaking in a depression you were better off being an aboriginal than being a white australian what did you do if you were a white australian and you're unemployed there were no social services so that it was much more complex than we like to think but at the same time i respect the aboriginal spokespeople their leaders are entitled to draw attention to these grievances but they should also draw attention to other things well uh i represented a lot of aboriginals i had more aboriginals put you know in percentage terms in almost any other electorate in australia and there was a very wide range of views you know it was often very interesting to talk to aboriginal people particularly older ones i remember an old lady at walgett telling me how deeply she regretted the loss of their mission yes because she said she and her friends had been given a surprisingly good education they'd been taught a lot about nutrition and hygiene and what have you and she was deeply appreciative of it and she regretted that her grandchildren particularly had not had the same opportunities she'd had no you don't hear that perspective and i think the point you and i are just making is that it's always much more complicated and we often ascribe ill intent to people who have really been very well intentioned indeed interesting now you can turn into your computer and you can find out all kinds of things and you can look up postcodes and find out what the people in that postcode were like and how they differ from other places and the last time i looked it up about three years ago the most christian towns in australia were aboriginal towns yes and uh the most uh unchristian towns were places like north victoria certain suburbs and city now that's a sign that that part of european civilization and christianity that came amongst the aborigines wasn't despised in the way we imagined it was now many aborigines cling to that part of our civilization and stand up for it more yes than we do we seem to despise it well it's fallen from favor and dramatic fashion uh christianity is most one of the most astonishing things in my lifetime i couldn't predict that it would happen but it's it's happened you've written about it extensively now some might say well you're the son of a man have you been objective i must say from my point of view i can't understand why it's so air brushed out i mean i just gave an example really of mile creek now there was a very noble person of profound christian faith who said there's a terrible injustice here you know the idea that a man is lesser because of the color of his skin is anathema and he forced through justice that was the influence of christianity you could say the same about the slave trade every time i mention that on one of these conversations there'll be comments saying uh oh the bible condones slavery in reality the christian churches have always supposed that they just often haven't had the power to influence the governments of the day to be fair to the spanish and the portuguese church they were adamant that the the explorers who went to south america should not engage in slavery but they didn't have the influence to carry it uh and then of course about the time australia was settled there was this massive debate that was very important i think i'd be interested in your reactions to this about the ending of slavery and it was led by christians slavery was abolished what was the key principle that the color of your skin doesn't determine whether you're a full member of the human family or not so we were settled at a time when at least large and influential slabs of the society rejected the idea that you should keep people as goods and chattels you had to respect all all souls of being as menzies put it of equal value in the eyes of heaven and it's washed out of the system yeah well my own uh background i was brought up as a methodist and we went to we never went to evening church which was in the 1930s and 1940s often the big day but we always went to morning church and we had to we're the children of the clergymen and we went to sunday school all those kinds of activities and uh you know i look back in that time and i value the the the the people and what they did uh you know their the their sense of uh that there was standards that might be too high but they tried to achieve those standards and i respect my parents for the life they lived and their amount of help they had to give people wherever they lived in in the 1970s and 1980s i largely stopped going to church i don't know why but i did and then in about 1990 i started to go again and i started when people were often attacking christianity i i thought well the attacks are too extreme and i found myself defending christianity but if everyone would just say this i was appointed to the council of the australian war memorial uh soon after mr howard and your party came to power in 1996 and i i thought when the unknown soldier was taken from his grave in france and brought back and brought to canberra and placed there in that special tomb i thought that's a very strange thing to do i mean the first aif the soldiers of the first world war from australia were christians we know from the census that probably 98 of them were christian and perhaps one percent were jewish and uh here's they're taking a soldier from sanctified ground in france buried with a religious ceremony and they're putting him in the war memorial in canberra without a religious ceremony and without any religious inscription and after a while in the council of the war memorial and a first-class institution i was really so pleased to be on the board and to meet the other members i said i can't understand what you've done you've taken somebody from hello ground and you put him into secular ground you wouldn't dream of doing that to an aboriginal the aborigines would quite rightly protest yeah and in that way they've taught us a lesson and i said i think he should be given an inscription the same inscription that was on his grave in france i mean there was a very strong debate and all the heads of the armed services who in those days used to attend meetings of the warden world said we're in favor of that and so it was put on his term in canberra no i think it isn't known unto god it would cover jewish soldiers islamic soldiers if there are any i suppose there are a few in the australian army christian soldiers and i became i became a defender of christianity because i could see no other people who are willing to stand up and defend it and that that's a sign of how i've gone in a circle and believed that you know the christian component of our civilization was very important and uh we we should recognize it and if people want to discard it that's that's their right in a free world but the idea that you should constantly attack it and say that it gave nothing to our society to our nation seems to me to be tampering with history that's just my view well i think you have said somewhere that plainly for for all of its faults it's given us far more good than it has visited man yes that's my view i happen to share that view and to lead out of that one of the things that i focus a bit on in these conversations is given that we've destroyed our story we've really discredited it children go through our education system where let's face it our christian origins along with our broad cultural history is disparaged or not taught it's to be rejected we're to find a better way but what is that better way what story what unifying narrative are we giving to our children and our grandchildren well i i don't suppose there is a unifying narrative which is given to them know that in some schools they are given a a narrative children like to be like to have heroes they like to be they like to barrack for their own society and i think in schools that are disparaging of uh australia as as an unworthy country is is unfair on the children themselves especially boys they're barrackers and uh they like to don't like to see their country disparaged just as they don't like to see their football team or the cricket team dispersed it may be wrong but that's and likewise it's true of a great majority of girls we we have to give them something to be proud of and we should not teach them that they're superior to the generations that have given them so much but that's an interesting point in itself at some point i made this observation a little while ago so apologies for those who have heard me uh do it and at some stage in a relatively recent past the value of humility and a right view of yourself has given way as a premier virtue to the idea of pride and and to me you know pride can be very easily something that just puffs up and leads to a fall this this need for a balanced perspective you know i'm a great admirer of donald bradman for his his um modesty and victory and graciousness donald don bradman oh yeah you know modesty and in victory graciousness and defeat um we seem to have lost that australian commitment you're you as a historian it always seems to have been one of the marks of australians that you shouldn't be on yourself [Music] that a due sense of proportion yeah and a humility is important yes and i i think um sport has been one of the great teachers in australia we're one of the first nations in the world to become obsessed with spectator sport and it's it's very important to us and i think uh spectator sport in the 19th century uh well it was often highly competitive and rough and tumble there was a belief that it was it was just as important to accept defeat graciously as it was to win well we've moved a bit away we've moved a bit away from that sentiment but in in public life you notice it especially and you would notice it in politics that uh uh by the 1980s the great word was rights yes everybody had rights yeah uh responsibilities were pushed to one side you can't have rights unless there's a reservoir of responsibilities that supports the rights and that was really the characteristic of the 1980s including that attempt by the hawke government to give us the bill of rights the bill of rights is lovely in theory but if it doesn't also emphasize that you have responsibilities it's not where the paper is printed and i'm glad i strongly opposed the bill of rights even though people say well nearly every country in the world has a bill of rights but many of the worst countries in the world have a bill of rights i agree with you very strongly so did bob carr from the other side of politics to me and he was very effective in pinning the failures that can derive out of a competitive environment that arises but i think there's a really important point that you wrote we don't talk about freedoms anymore we talk about rights and then if we're honest those rights become competitive so i have to compete for my rights versus you that's not what we did in australia so we know as we speak we've got a debate going on over a religious religious freedom bill we've never needed it in the past it wasn't needed in australia because even in the sectarian days of protestant versus catholic feeling which is something of a black mark i think on our history but even then we didn't need legislative protection we evolved out of it by talking and debating and coming to our senses i would argue now we have to resort to law so we don't talk freedom we talk competing rights well the these are all interesting topics uh they're not so easy to debate in public as they were 20 or 40 years ago universities to me are a disappointment there's much less debate in universities than there used to be one of the interesting things about universities there's a national code for responsible conduct and research to my surprise we have major universities that treat that code with contempt how can you have national institutions which don't support their own moral code yeah and uh it's very difficult to debate about that in universities i shouldn't hold forth too much or i'll be expelled well the good thing is that you're free to speak as am i yes i am resigned in 1988 from university so i'm a pre-citizen um one of the things that uh you said in your book it struck a chord with me because uh some of the people i respected most in parliament when i went in were people from the other end of the political spectrum who had a very left-wing view of the world but had a deep commitment to humanity and i might have argued with their solutions but not with their humanity and their noble objectives you uh i think were great friends with many people that you differed with enormously but were able to have intelligent conversations with when you were an academic well when you were a student at wesley and then you ended up at melbourne university and yeah yes um a lot of the uh me i'm i'm i'm conservative not in relation to change but conservative in relation to values by disposition i suppose but but a lot of people on the other side of politics i admire we had earlier this week the memorial service was john kane who was the leader of the labour party in victoria the premier like his father before him and when he i had newspaper columns at one time and i've i suppose i often detect john kane when he was premiere of victoria but uh i can remember i've known him for a long time but played football against him when i was very young and while i've opposed him i thought there's there really is a solid decent citizen and when i heard the testimonies to him at the memorial service the kind of life he lived the way he he would often travel at the back of the plane while his staff traveled or his public servants said the front of the plane there was a really good citizen who loved his state and loved his country and i thought people who knew him irrespective of they thought his politics should be proud that he was a fellow australian who believed in giving something back to his country something that he'd gained from earlier generations of labour people i i understand exactly what you're saying and in fact one of the earlier conversations in this series was with peter baldwin who was from very much the opposite end of the political spectrum to me when we're in canberra but he's a very fine man with a deep concern for his fellow citizens and what he has to say about where we are now is really interesting so that's a little plug for one of the conversations with somebody who's very different in his worldview but he cares about people um let's explore something that you we were touching on a moment ago you were saying you know young people particularly young men like to barrack for their sports team you can extend that out they're proud to be australian you know in previous generations they've fought to protect freedom uh you know we we love to see australia do well at the olympics this is a really important point because of course many of those who now educate our children and so forth come from a world view who that suggests that nationalism is a bad idea you see it in many debates but of course the ultimate example of it is brexit brexit in many ways was a rejection of the european idea george way would do away with national boundaries it's time to do away with the nation state to me that flies in the face of everything we know about human nature we're tribal by nature now there's a bad form of tribalism but there's a noble form loyalty to kiss and kin to our community to our nation how do we resolve that tension because i think if it's clarified for them most young australians will say yeah i do believe in australia mm-hmm it may be that in 300 years time there will be world government it may have been achieved by force or may have been achieved by common consent but i don't think we'll like it particularly um the advantage of of having the nation is that you can have i think democracy can work within a group with shared values to a high degree a democracy can't operate in the world you couldn't have world elections for a world parliament that would leave people satisfied you know the nation is the best institution we have at the moment that they may come when it's whittled down but uh how could you possibly say i support everything that the united nations does you couldn't possibly because after all the majority of countries in the united nations and not democracies don't believe in democracy they have very little tolerance for other values we have to make the most of the world we have and nationalism if it's extreme it's dangerous but nationalism is if it's a if it's in modern form is essential you can't have a you you can't have a working society in this uh see i would argue that the fatal flaw at the heart of communism people love to argue if they if if they're latter-day communists they still exist and we've got neon mark marxists it seems around the place that i was only the implementation of communism that was the problem the theory's fine i think the theory is seriously flawed because i don't think human beings want to give their first loyalties to the party or the state they want to give it to their loved ones to their children to their spouses whatever it's interesting isn't it the revival of respect to the communism amongst the young apparently is quite apparent in in the united states and they're quite apparent in england i suppose it's here if i had more contact with with young people in a wider sense but but communism started out as a kind of an ideal and people sort of side deal that we share everything and we're all equal but uh the communism in praxis didn't work out that way and communism is is is now rightly uh seen as a virtue in some ways but a terrible threat in other ways but here's a new generation knowing no history and saying that communism looks really good let's see where it went wrong and try again that uh it raises again the importance of a proper understanding of history and out of that shared values i don't see how without shared values you can have a coherent polity and we're all worried about fracturing in canberra but i think that reflects what we've become as a people i think the fracturing we're seeing in our politics is because of a lack of shared values and and the fracturing in the australian community it worries me we're fracturing we don't have a common story a common set of values and we need to distill those out because i'm sure they're there yeah i really believe they're there but the trouble is that everything now from let's let's be frank too much of our educational system too much of our media and so forth encourages us to focus on the things that divide us and the things that we don't have in common rather than things that we do have in common [Music] yeah well i tend to agree with what you say but to come back to your most famous work can you just run us through how you think our distance shaped us and then from that lead into the easy way we fell into democracy most countries went through years of bloodshed and turmoil to establish the rule of law the idea of the vote we seem to do it very easily yeah so the tyranny of distance first jeffrey how did it shape us as a people well just on the the question of democracy uh australia began largely as a convict settlement the convicts were sent out here and to serve their centers and of course they're allowed to stay here as free people in fact if they serve their seven years or 14 years in australia they can actually return to england but of course nearly all of them had no money to return to england so here was a society which was a long way removed from democracy but before long and convicts were still arriving here but there was a free press and the newspapers could attack the government there was the beginning of democracy with the little legislative council some of whose members were appointed by the government but others were elected then [Music] by the early 1850s the colonies as they were called were unable to create their own constitution new south wales south australia and victoria there there were free elections uh it every every male had the vote including in victoria new south wales aboriginals if they were part of society and they wish to have the vote here were some of the great inventions of democracy the secret ballot was known overseas as the australian ballot because really that's right or in some places as a victorian ballot introduced about 1856 but that's a tremendous change where people can vote secretly rather than having their boss or the employer look over their shoulder and see how their vote made it and make sure that they were punished or deprived of promotion if they voted the wrong way i mean that's a that's a an australian invention australian was the first nation in the world to allow women both to vote for parliament as a stand for parliament new zealand was ahead of us but new zealand didn't allow women to stand for parliament so that in some ways here's one of the great laboratories of modern democracy and uh that that's something to be proud of but that's that's not not not taught in school i would imagine and not known by large by half the population will half the population as roots in australia that are very recent and understandably they don't know much history so that uh democracy was won quietly and quickly in australia but those numbers of people would say we should have wondered by revolution we've got it cheaply well maybe we did get achievement but i think you're better if you can gain something with that bloodshed yes that's my view that's my unpopular view well uh and we were talking about the influence of christianity uh women first secured the vote in south australia as i understand it and it was driven actually by a group of christian women and women's temporal alliances with women's christian temperance union there you go my daughter's written the thesis on them right yeah they were the great campaigners the campaigners for the democracy they believed that the women could get the vote uh one of the things they could do was control the liquor trafficking hotel opening hours we forget that uh drunkenness was a was was a much more difficult problem then than it is now in some ways because if a husband spent let's say 12 of the weekly wages at the pub what he there then deprived his family of things that they needed whether more food or clothes attica clothes to where to go to school so that the temperance movement was really a social as a social justice movement in the era before there was a welfare state to try to compensate people for their ill fortunes so i i think the story of democracy in australia with all its failings it's a great story and now democracy isn't doing so well in australia apparently the federal system is is not working as it was intended to work in the australian constitution was there to say certain tasks belong to the states and certain tasks belong to the federation now we've got many government activities that are carried out not only by the commonwealth but by the states and by the the local chiro or city uh it's at the moment the model system and that doesn't help it doesn't help and we know from the loewy institute's work that many young australians now doubt democracy i don't blame those young australians partly because i think they've not been encouraged to explore the options but also because of the things that you mentioned it's not working as well as it should and politics looks fractured i'd say that's because our society is fractured but it still looks fractured and as though it can't take us forward to me it comes back to the need though the very thing we're talking about a better understanding of our history a friend of mine was talking the other day about a discussion he had with a young 18 year old australian girl and she was astonished and angry to learn that in the view of um my friend we were once a british society she was angry about the idea that had anything to do with britain and wanted to deny it and simply say no we're a multicultural society the need to understand where you are if you were to move forward surely requires that you understand where you've come from [Music] well as australia in the in the 19th century was predominantly a british society with english language english laws english institutions there were substantial minorities at one time on the gold fields in the 1850s a big chinese population overwhelmingly men very few women there were large german populations in south australia and the women were in victoria and parts of queensland and the back of albury but the the germans accepted that this was an english society with this institution that's why they came here because they were persecuted in prussia their own homeland so that we had in some senses a multicultural population but they were very much in a minority and they accepted the values of the host society and welcomed those values let's uh then just round it out with a thought at the moment we're consumed with the issue of climate change now i don't want to say for a moment it's unimportant that's not my topic here my worry is that we have learned we've forgotten how to have a sensible reasoned respectful discourse and that we'll end up implementing ad hoc and unwise policies because we've lost the ability to discuss now we've always been robust in our discussions in australia but what has allowed us to descend to the point where reason is so easily sacrificed in your view the climate change or global warming is really one of the most fascinating intellectual topics of my lifetime and maybe of the last 200 or 300 years it's really quite a difficult topic but we try to make it simple and uh it it it it puzzles me in in in many ways that we as australians don't realize how volatile our climate has been traditionally means in in europe in their history they don't have the same history as we have i mean here was this land populated by aborigines 20 000 years ago they'd been here for the previous 40 000 years and suddenly their whole world changed the seas began to rise to a degree that nobody would dream of predicting in the mood of current room the sea levels rose by over 100 meters generally around the world australia was cut off from new guinea australia was cut off from tasmania at one time you could walk from hobart to port moresby and suddenly this whole world changed and australia became a completely different place the climate changed completely that's a vital part of the history and we it wasn't man-made global warming there must have been some other cause of it but that's part of our history we forget that climate is incredibly volatile we now know that in the 12th century a.d in australia before in the europeans where in the 12th century a.d a very dry climate in most of australia especially the temperate zone and 1174 began a drought that lasted for 39 years the damage it must have done to the country the population population must have shrank shrunk very considerably the birth rate down the death rate up it's not part of our history we know that from drills put down in the east antarctic in what they call the law dome this should be part of our thinking and if it were part of our thinking we'd say well it may be that a human industrial civilization is harming the climate but there presumably other factors because look what's happened in the past you know it should be a much more open question for debate than simply saying we know what the causes is full stop uh people say we should trust science we should learn from science but of course science was at fault science in 1950 told us that there was no danger of the climate changing in australia you by you should honor science but you don't give it complete trust so i remain uneasy that no debate takes place about things that should be debated of course it's a major matter and we should be taking it seriously but it's been incredibly simplified especially in this last bushfire season these are my heretical thoughts well thank you very much indeed the wisdom of the ages well not really i've enjoyed the conversation hugely and i hope our listeners will as well and watchers but i have to ask you this before i forget it's the first 40 years of your life there's been a few more years since are we going to hear the rest of the story well i've written i've written parts of the next uh i i may do it i'm i'm doing doing a bit at the moment of course i have to re-enter controversies i've been in a lot of controversial situations i don't like controversy or controversy i don't but i don't shy away from it i'd prefer that it didn't take place but if it's there i unwisely take part in it because that's why you have a mind that's why we have a democracy that's why we have media so people can say what they think thank you very much indeed thank you thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital 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Channel: John Anderson

Views: 35,851

Rating: 4.8727274 out of 5

Keywords: Economics, Capitalism, History, Australian History, Socialism

Id: FV-QQoV7qKs

Length: 55min 0sec (3300 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020