Former prime minister (and journalist) Tony Abbott has published a political history of Australia. Across 18 well-written chapters, he narrates the nation’s trajectory, starting with the establishment of a penal colony in 1788 and ending with the failed Voice referendum of 2023. Abbott’s aim is to restore national pride by showing that our past was “far more good than bad”.

Review: Australia: A History – Tony Abbott (Harper Collins)

This “balance sheet” approach was first introduced to Australia by historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1993, sparking the “history wars”. Argument focused on the impact of colonisation on Indigenous Australians and especially the scale of frontier warfare. Abbott’s perspective also feeds into the continuing culture war about Britain’s imperial past and polarised views about how to remember the Empire. As historian Stuart Ward recently noted, such debate is as old as imperialism itself.

Abbott begins with a rebuke to professional historians:

This is the book that never should have been needed. Until quite recently it was taken for granted that Australia was a country that all its citizens could take pride in, even the Aboriginal people, for whom the 1967 referendum marked full, if belated, acceptance into the Australian community.

His lifelong passion for history, he explains, was sparked by the Ladybird books, specifically the “adventures from history” series he read as a child. These narrated “great things done […] by great men and women”. He too tells his story in part through “key individuals”.

For Abbott, Australia has been a project characterised by “a consistent high-mindedness, a largeness of spirit or liberality” from its political leaders.

But Abbott’s Australia is narrowly conceived, excluding the perspectives of non-British cultures, women, and especially First Nations people. Abbott wants us to be proud of the achievements of men like him.

Much of his account offers a very readable synthesis of mainstream historical research, and he acknowledges his research team, Andrew Kemp, Alex McDermott, Paddy O'Leary and Dom O’Leary, supported by the Institute of Public Affairs.

The first third of the book covers the 19th century, from “1788 and all that”, to the achievement of federation. But a series of omissions allows him to tell a story of linear progress from an “ancient” past to modernity, as signalled by the book’s tagline: “How an ancient land became a great democracy”.

Most glaring is his cartoonish depiction of First Nations culture, whose history he states is “now largely lost”, evident only through archaeological traces and colonial records. Citing anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, Abbott characterises Aboriginality as “timeless”, reducing traditional life to a “tough existence”. He quotes from Robert Hughes’ 1986 blockbuster The Fatal Shore, which described “a ceaseless grubbing and chasing for subsistence foods”. This was a derogatory description, even for its time.

Abbott ignores the last half-century of scholarship, which has explored the richness and dynamism of First Nations life across the continent. He dismisses the survival of Indigenous traditions and knowledge into the present. In this way, First Nations cultures are........

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