An Improbable Success
ROSS FITZGERALD

Tony Abbott Australia: A History,
HarperCollins Australia, 2025 pp 395, $ 39.99

“He who controls the past, controls the future” wrote George Orwell in his classic work, 1984. This is something Tony Abbott doubtless had in mind as he set himself to writing this history of Australia: How an Ancient Land Became a Great Democracy. While many former PMs have written memoirs, Abbott is the first to have shunned that form of self-justification in favour of writing, instead, what amounts to a strong defence of the country itself. His working title, as he told me, was “Australia – a Proud History” which the publishers thought a little too “out-there”. Still, that’s the message that permeates every page of this lively and fair-minded account of Australia so far: that Australians have plenty to take pride in.

Abbott argues that modern Australia has an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation, and an immigrant character. Hence his history traces these threads from pre-settlement through to present times. Naturally, he deals with all the big episodes in our past, Aboriginal occupation, convict years, the pastoral expansion, the gold rushes, federation, the Great War, depression, and further war, then the post war period right up to this year’s federal election.

As Abbott tells it, Australia’s first century of European settlement:
“was an improbable but spectacular success, with a convict colony transforming itself into a democratic pioneer enjoying the world’s highest standard of living. The 1890s depression (which hit Australia harder than almost anywhere else), the federation drought, and especially the sacrifices of the Great War cast a dispiriting pall; that only the comparative abundance and success of the post war period slowly dispelled. Under prime ministers Hawke and Howard, Australia enjoyed a quarter century of good government: Hawke appreciated that workers couldn’t get ahead unless their bosses made a profit so his government (uniquely for a Labor one) fostered business. Howard was an economic liberal and a social conservative who largely succeeded in creating a society that was “relaxed and comfortable” with itself.

Like most contemporary historians, Abbott dwells on the impact of British settlement on Australia’s indigenous peoples. But unlike many, his history is not a tale of unmitigated woe. Yes, there were massacres: starting with the Appin massacre, in Governor Macquarie’s time, when troops fired on an Aboriginal camp. In his subsequent report, the governor claimed that locals had started the fight; but even if correct, that hardly justified a one-sided slaughter. There was the infamous Myall Creek massacre, a completely unprovoked attack that killed up to 30 indigenous men, women and children; that the subsequent hanging of seven of the perpetrators hardly atoned for.

On the other hand, the British government’s instructions to Governor Phillip were to “live in amity with the native peoples” and all of the early governors stressed that Aboriginal people had the rights of British subjects. Abbott lionises for modern readers the remarkable figure of John Plunkett, the Catholic attorney-general who persisted in prosecuting the Myall Creek murderers in the teeth of fierce settler resistance; and who later prosecuted Thomas Coutts, who’d poisoned some 20 Aboriginal people near Grafton, only to escape justice because of the then-rule that Aboriginal people could not testify in court – a rule he tried to change. Even on the frontier of settlement, argues Abbott, there was as much cooperation as conflict. The same humanitarian instincts that ended transportation, because it was a form of “white slavery”, eventually brought the rule of law and missionary paternalism to the outback; although, to our shame, the last known massacre was at Coniston in the NT, as late as 1928.

Even if British settlement brought exotic diseases, vast disruption, and occasional violence to the original inhabitants, it also brought previously unknown concepts such as the equal dignity of every human being, the rule of law, and technological progress. Not for nothing do the Torres Strait Islanders still refer to the advent of Christianity as “the coming of the light”. It hasn’t all been good; but it’s hard to dispute Abbott’s conclusion that our British foundations are an inestimable blessing to modern Australia.

Abbott reminds us of how quickly free institutions developed, even in a convict colony. By the 1850s, nearly all adult males could vote, over a half a century in advance of Britain. In South Australia, by the 1890s, both women and Aboriginal people could vote and, at least in theory, run for elected office. These were the days of “Australia Felix” and “Australia Unlimited” when Henry Parkes could equate Australia’s potential as a global powerhouse with that of the United States a century earlier. Abbott points out that it was the imperial government in London that tried hard to talk our post-federation leaders out of the White Australia policy. Even so, the discrimination Chinese gold-diggers faced here was not as severe as in California. One of the leading businessmen of “marvellous Melbourne”, the second city of the Empire by the 1880s, was Lowe Kong Meng. Senator Thomas Bakhap served in the early national parliaments and our most celebrated Great War sniper was Trooper Billy Sing.

By the time of our 1988 bicentenary, says Abbott, all Australians enjoyed full legal and substantial social equality. We were as free, fair, and prosperous as any country on earth; while our immigration programme was even then giving a multi-ethnic flavour to our core Anglo-Celtic culture and our fundamentally Judaeo-Christian ethos. As Bob Hawke told the cheering crowds on Sydney Harbour that day, here, there is “no hierarchy of descent” and must be “no privilege of origin”.

In covering subsequent events, including, briefly, his own government, Abbott discloses some anxieties for the future: how can we combine national unity with ethnic diversity via a strong civic patriotism; especially at a time when recent migrants can routinely return “home” and live on-line in their old culture; and particularly if the official story of modern Australia now veers into “truth telling” about massacres for which there’s only an oral tradition?

The big national questions for today’s and tomorrow’s Australians will be much better answered if they have a good idea of their past – a better one than most of them currently seem to have given the replacement of narrative with episodic history; and the general decline in the percentage of students that take history at all. We’ll do the future better if we learn from the past; and this fine book is at least the glass half full history of our country that more Australians should come to understand.

Ross Fitzgerald AM is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University . His most recent publication isChalk and Cheese: A Fabrication, co-authored with Ian McFadyen.

Quadrant , November 2025, pp 81-82.