This book is intended to give anyone interested, as every Australian should be, in an account of our past that’s positive, whilst not being oblivious to our mistakes and imperfections as a nation.
If to be Australian is still akin to having won the lottery, the history that’s produced us is surely something to savour. Tony Abbott’s book is inspired by love of country, yet he comes to grip with our flaws, making it a fresh, powerful, highly readable single-volume history of Australia that deserves a wide audience. Scholarly researched, scrupulously fair-minded and very engagingly written, this is a big narrative history at its best. It explains why Australia is such a wonderful, unique place, and why history is all the better when written by those who themselves helped make it.
It isn’t quite ‘the white armband’ version of history I was expecting in the first half, nor a “Liberal Party Highlights Package” in the second half, It makes for enjoyable reading. Tony Abbott has written with reverence and richness, bringing our nation’s past, although painful and proud, to life with striking clarity. This book helps us rediscover our past with honesty and respect, so we can better understand our present and shape a stronger, more inclusive future.
The former Prime Minister lauds his country’s progressive, egalitarian democracy where ‘only the very unlucky’ miss-out – yet judges it materially rich but spiritually poor. It might be sometimes a bit woke, the author’s notes begins: “This is the book that should never have been needed”. Academic orthodoxy, he explains has “left many Australians ambivalent about our past, even though it’s far more good than bad”. British colonisation was a stroke of good fortune, although not initially for all, and Abbott does not obscure the injustices carried out against First Nations People. He observes that it was better to be colonised by the British than just about anyone else. Abbott might present his book as an antidote to the gloom merchants of the academic left, but he still turns to their works in coming up with his own.
The author’s account of the convict era is heavily indebted to the conservative historian, John Hirst, who played down the coercive and violent features of convict transportation– the chains and lashes-in favour of freedom and opportunity. But Abbott’s telling might leave the unwary reader under the impression that convict life had some of the qualities of a holiday camp. Then we amble into contemporary life with his views of the best prime ministerships we’ve had , he becomes opinionated, but also less derivative, as it reaches Abbott’s adult life. It certainly makes for lively reading and at times, generated some genuinely stimulating judgements, in nicely crafted prose. Once he moves away from his adoration for John Howard and reaches the governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and his own, his performance of evenhandedness and non-partisanship quickly falls away.
The country’s 28th Prime Minister provides a brief, selective and spirited defence of his own government, followed by some harsh judgements about Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison’s governments, accompanied by a good load of old-fashioned score-settling. This part of the book is a story of a nation going downhill with its over-the-top Covid restrictions, excessive immigration and a tolerance of unintegrated migrants. Abbott can at least celebrate the defeat of what he regards as a separatist proposal for the Indigenous Voice and when, in this more hopeful mode, he imagines that “better times are usually only a few good decisions and the emergence of a couple of key leaders away”.
It doesn’t strike me as a sophisticated understanding of historical change, it does explain why Abbott is hanging in there, as one of the country’s ‘mad uncles’. Abbott’s version of that “something better”, will not be to everyone’s taste.
Publisher : Harper Collins Australia, ISBN 9781460768297, RRP $49.99.
