Who is an Australian? Is it David Campese? Kylie Minogue? The woman reading out the Irish weather forecast on RTE? That former prime minister who actually (gasp) touched Queen Elizabeth? Veteran reporter Phillip Knightley says he set out to answer this question in his celebration of 200 years of nationhood, Australia: Biography of a Nation. He hasn't come up with a very clear answer, but along the way he has written a gripping and comprehensive story of Australia's development since 1788.
It is not an Olympic special; the bicentenary of Federation, in 1901, inspires it. But it is the book to get if you really want to have some understanding of the island continent. Bill Bryson might be funnier, but such accounts as his best-seller, polished though they are, serve as tourist guides, underline stereotypes and ultimately convey more of the writer's amusing view of life generally than a particular place.
This book, by an Australian-born journalist who has the advantages of both intimacy with, and intellectual distance from, his homeland, gives the reader the flavour of events which shaped the country. These are the momentous events in Australian modern history: they are the stories older relatives would talk about when my generation was growing up. Knightley tells them in compact form, but comprehensively, as one would expect from such an excellent reporter, also the author of classics such as The First Casualty, on the fate of the truth in war reporting.
Attitudes to a young nation's history will have resonance for Irish readers - both in the problems of conveying it, and in types of "revisionism". Knightley reminds us that, for kids in Australian classrooms until very recently, the history of their own country was, in the words of comedian John Clarke, "boring as dirt". There was the First Fleet and the Rum Rebellion and John Macarthur's sheep-breeding: this curriculum, of course, was a carefully-sanitised Empire history, designed to make Aussies still think of England as "home" and not get too excited about their own vast country. I remember coming across Geoffrey Trease's This is Your Century as a kid, and, revelling in the execution of the Romanovs, the gas in the trenches, the Charleston, the US civil rights movement and so on, thinking, "Why hasn't anything ever happened in Australia?" Knightley writes of this feeling, and then trounces it convincingly with the colourful history of his country.
There is the terrible toll of Australian lives exacted by the two World Wars - and the fierce battle over conscription, so strongly resisted by the great Irishman, Archbishop Daniel Mannix (during which the assistant Minister of Justice, one J. Fihelly, told a rally in Queensland that every Australian conscripted into the army released a British soldier to harass the people of Ireland). Then there were the Victorian police strike of 1923; the campaign led by Sydney's "Big Feller", Jack Lang, to fight for the average citizen against the federal government in the 1920s; the secret armies, and how close the infant nation was to civil war; the attack on Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines; the Petrov affair, and the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, which led to the long afternoon of Robert Menzies' conservative prime ministership; the sacking of Gough Whitlam after three rollercoaster years in 1975; and, of course, the gradual realisation of the dreadful wrongs done to the aboriginal people, and the zigzagging towards a way of life which recognises the rights of all Australians.
Knightley spices his tale with key moments in which the "characteristic" Australian behaviour, of good humour in adversity and an amiable lack of respect for authority, were forged. Here is a company of Australian soldiers in the first World War, being inspected by an upper-crust English staff officer with a monocle. By the time he has strutted up one line, then turned, all the men have popped into their eye sockets a shiny penny, in imitation.
My favourite of the colourful splashes in Knightley's patchwork quilt concerns the notorious Bodyline cricket tour of 1932-33, when the English team under Douglas Jardine decided the only way it could retrieve the Ashes from the unbeatable Aussies was to play the man, not the game. (My father, born in 1903 and a cricket star himself, was still talking about this tour in a dry sort of anguish 50 years later. It certainly did nothing for Anglo-Australian friendship in his generation.) The English bowlers proceeded to play their newly-perfected ball "along the line of the body".
Unfortunately it was more often along the line of the head, resulting in numerous Australian cricketers being felled with concussion and fractured skulls. Ultimately, as Knightley tells it: "The fifth and final Test was held in Sydney between 23 and 28 February 1933. Relations between the two teams had been further strained when Jardine complained to [Australian official] Victor Richardson that an Australian player had called him a bastard. This might be an innocuous term in Australia but Jardine assured him it was not in Britain. Richardson summoned the Australian team and while Jardine waited, asked: "All right, which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?"
But the British view of history was hard to shake off, especially in the Menzies years, the era of that man whose happiest moment was when Queen Elizabeth appointed him Warden of the Cinque Ports (other holders include: Her Majesty the Queen Mother). Naturally all the truth of cynical exploitation of Australian (and other commonwealth) forces in the first and second World Wars was never on display, or the facts about nuclear testing at Maralinga and other sites in the 1950s. It came as a surprise to many Australians to learn the extent of Albion's perfidy towards Australia after the fall of Singapore, so forcefully put by Prime Minister Paul Keating (he of the hand on the royal back) in a heated parliamentary exchange in the 1990s. Certainly, the older generation had told us that it was the Yanks who saved us. But we knew little of the other side of the coin, such as the infamous "Brisbane Line", excluding most of Australia which the British military experts wrote off as indefensible, if push came to shove.
A question which is likely to interest Irish readers - why on earth did the Australians not vote for a republic in last November's referendum - is dealt with briefly, probably because the result only came out as the author was finishing the book. To an outsider, having read of Britain's virtual abandonment of the faithful, if insolent, possession on at least three major occasions, the adherence to the English monarchy does seem strange. The fundamental conservatism of Australians is one explanation, as more tellingly is that the republican model proposed (in which the president would be chosen by politicians) was not a winner in a country where politicians have scant respect, and behaviour in even the federal parliament often resembles the playground at a mostly-male St Trinian's.
Knightley does write movingly about the tragedy of the Stolen Generation, the aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents in their thousands because the authorities thought they would thus be improving their lot. It is heart-breaking stuff. And this is only part of what aborigines have had to suffer - the wrong end of a settler's musket was a more definitive answer to the problem of what to do with the blackfeller. Knightley traces the legal attempts to restore title to tribal lands to indigenous Australians, but also recognises that for many white Australians it is hard to accept that their five or six generations of attachment to a place can be over-ruled. Simple political correctness is not the answer here.
Paul Keating's Labor government took a step in the right direction. John Howard's Liberals took a step back. Just as Ireland in 2000 is struggling with a fair and equitable treatment of its newest inhabitants, Australia on the other side of the world has to do the same for its oldest.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist