Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by

Literary Critics and Social Theorists by Keith Windschuttle: Challenges to Labour
History by Terry Irving
Review by: Charlie Fox
Source: Labour History , May, 1997, No. 72 (May, 1997), pp. 216-220
Published by: Liverpool University Press

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 Labour History Number 72 May 1997

In two further wide-ranging chapters, Oxley placed her female convict subjects
in a comparative statistical context - with the vast majority of their peers,
contemporary Irish and English working women, who did not offend against the
law. This analysis illuminated transformations of women' s work in this critical
phase of industrialisation, as it also displayed more fully the convict women's
background. They emerged not only as competent indeed compared to their sisters,
but the very women whose skills were most in demand in the colony, if we can take
as evidence for this the workers named as desirable in advertisements for free women
migrants.
If I raise one question about Convict Maids, it is one directed not only at Oxley7 s
book, but at many others in the field of nineteenth-century Australian history. At
the very same time that Oxley addresses one 'creative tension' in colonial history,
she in fact presages another, one that she does not resolve. At the beginning of her
introduction Oxley alludes to 'areas of blindness relating to the nature of the invasion
and the ongoing process of dispossessing the original inhabitants' of Australia. By
contrast, the title of her final chapter runs: 'Britain's Loss, Australia's Gain?'
Undoubtedly it could only be a white Australia that Oxley is thinking of when she
considers 'gain', but this is not acknowledged. Convicts, male and female, came to
New South Wales under duress to face initially harsh and oppressive conditions.
Inasmuch as any of them survived to sustain decent lives, theirs is a colonial success
story. But where do we place the colonised in this narrative? Female convicts may
be absolved from the cruelty with which some of their male counterparts dealt with
Aborigines. But can we also rejoice unambiguously that these women represented
a fine foundation for a new society? Somehow in our reconsiderations of colonial
history, even when dealing as Oxley does with convicts, we need to acknowledge
the imperial nature of the process. Maintaining the complexity of the meaning of
'colonial', while attending to the specificities of the particular subject under review,
constitutes an ongoing challenge for historians in the field.
Meanwhile Deborah Oxle/s scholarly achievement in Convict Maids is admirable.
It will be of very considerable interest to labour historians and women's historians
of Britain and early Australia particularly, as well as to economic historians of both
countries. She has produced a fine book which should be widely read .

The University of Melbourne PATRICIA GRIMSHAW

Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered

by Literary Critics and Social Theorists. Macleay Press, Sydney, 1994. pp. 265.
$39.95 paper.

Terry Irving (ed.), Challenges to Labour History. University of New South Wales
Press, Sydney, 1994. pp. ix+217. $24.95 paper.

Historians have always been divided along political lines but have we ever been so
divided about the future of the discipline? Keith Windschuttle feels decidedly gloomy
about the future, identifying history7s problems as the disruption of its method by
alien epistemologies. On the other hand Terry Irving feels positively optimistic about

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Book Reviews 217
the future of labour history, looking to its ruling intellectual models for support.
Both these positions are, I think, untenable. Windschuttle is rightly pessimistic but
for the wrong reasons, and Irving is simply too confident. Richard Broome's short
piece, 'History's Fading Star', in the December 1995 issue of the Australian Historical
Association Bulletin, shows where history's problem really lies; it is in the
vocationalism running rampant through our educational institutions. Add to that
the likely effects of the Vanstone reforms on the humanities and the prospect of the
'Howardising' (an antipodean Thatcherising) of Australian history to 'proper
national' purposes, and it is hard to see a particularly rosy future.
As for labour history, Irving describes its major threats within the universities
and I will return to these shortly. Otherwise, labour history will go where history
goes and, presumably, it will continue to accompany organised labour into?and
with luck out of?the wilderness. Listing all these arguments may well be, as Irving
suggests, the metaphorical equivalent of wringing one's hands, but what should
labour historians do, apart, that is, from retrieving our marching boots from the
back of the cupboard.
Challenges to Labour History is a product of various conferences held in the early
1990s which explored problems and issues in the field. Hence it was conceived and
published when political labour was doing reasonably well. The book comprises
twelve essays, some arguing for particular perspectives on labour history or
proposing new subjects for analysis, others castigating various colleagues for various
sins. On the whole it is a fine collection, a great boon for those teaching labour
history. However I don't want to discuss the individual contributions. Instead I
want to make some remarks about Terry living's introduction. It is in many ways
quite exemplary: summarising, contextualising, arguing, criticising in such a way
as to permit several readings of it. As another reviewer has suggested, it can be read
as an attempt by Irving to knock a few of his colleagues into line. It can also be read
as an attack on postmodernism. I read it, however, as a defence of what Irving calls
the critical stream of labour history, one which he suggests is rooted in either Marxism
or Liberalism. In defending critical labour history, he attacks what he calls the
legitimating stream which, emanating largely from NSW, posits continuities between
Labor's present and past. In this he joins Bruce Scates and Rae Frances who, in a
recent review of labour history, were critical of the 'celebratory' histories written by
historians supposedly aligned to the New South Wales Right.
There is a faintly troubling ring to these kinds of attacks?as if the 'righf does
not have the right to do labour history; as if celebrating lineage is something 'real'
labour historians don't do: as if celebrating organised labour is not labour history
with a political purpose (something Irving approves of)! Why not? The left does not
own labour history and, to paraphrase Humphrey McQueen, labour history is not
on the side of the left. I begin to wonder whether, in the context of the onslaught on
both organised and unorganised labour to come, it might be time for a little bit
more celebration of organised labour's achievements. When the union movement
is being depicted as hopelessly reactionary, when conservatives portray late twentieth
century versions of nineteenth century employment contracts as progressive, when
history is plainly so important to current debates, perhaps we should spend more
time defending labour's citadels historically.
living's discussion of the 'other kind' of labour history is situated in an analysis
of labour history's purpose and three currently common attacks on the subject: its

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 218 Labour History Number 72 May 1997

apparent fragmentation, challenges to its ruling intellectual models, and its supposed
loss of political purpose. Irving discusses then dismisses these in turn, albeit
sometimes in a slippery way and sometimes inconsistently. He denies, for instance,
that the apparent fragmentation is a problem; yet presumably the fragmentation of
history is one of the reasons why labour history is (he tells us) sometimes regarded
as 'white bloke's history7, a point he obviously feels strongly about. He then shows
that labour history is under attack by postmodernists; indeed the blurb on the back
cover refers to the postmodernist denial of labour history's claims to grasp social
reality as a whole. But labour history has never claimed to represent social reality as
a whole and Irving acknowledges that its two dominant models, Marxism and
Liberalism, have been exposed as either incomplete or tainted by inappropriate
assumptions. Yet he returns to these to provide the defence against labour history's
enemies. Thus he labels postmodernism as a conservative ideology, as if recent
history had not shown us how problematic such labels are. Postmodernism is not
necessarily conservative; so for labour historians to declare it an enemy, as Irving
does, seems unwise. Certainly many postmodern assumptions are antagonistic to
working-class politics and indeed too many postmodernist icons and luminaries
have had questionable politics (Heidegger, de Man, even Foucault himself). But
does anybody outside academic postmodernism take the postmodernist denial of a
material world seriously? The ever-increasing denial of social explanations for
poverty, unemployment and other kinds of material disadvantage is surely much
more important. There is, however, enough progressive and useful poststructuralist
analysis in fields such as feminism, education and ethnicity to suggest at least a
possibility of dialogue with labour history. After all Foucault, in his earlier work,
did not deny that social class meant oppression and resistance, nor did he deny that
the factory was a site where, to use his jargon, disciplined bodies were produced,
although I've never seen a Foucaultian pursue this. And while postmodern politics
proposes a multiplicity of such sites and resistances its less blinkered opponents do
not deny collective identity.
So, given the phenomenal growth of postmodernism in Academia, it is evident
that labour historians need to approach it strategically. And given the growth of the
new social movements which at present distrust organised labour I think we are
going to have to accept that social class, the lynch pin of labour history's own history,
is just one of those collective identities that not only make progressive politics but
can also make regressive politics. Such an assertion does not fail to recognise the
sharpening of class tensions in the 1980s and 1990s. Denying the existence of social
class or the relevance of class analysis is classical class politics. However, as
conservative mutterings about equal opportunity and anti-discrimination acts get
louder, other kinds of social tensions and struggles will also sharpen. Labour and
labour history have not always been good at linking up with these struggles. They
need to be.
Keith Windschuttle's book Is wonderfully titled. Everybody likes a murder
mystery, although there isn7t much mystery about who Windschuttle thinks is
murdering history. His argument proceeds from assertions regarding the state of
history in Australia to descriptions of various epistemologies (structuralism,
semiotics, cultural studies, and more) and authors7 oeuvres (Dening, Hadyn White,
Paul Carter, Foucault, Fukuyama, Habermas, Kuhn, Popper, Giddens) which

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 Book Reviews 219
together, he claims, have provided the philosophical relativism which underpins
the attack on history. In concluding his argument, Windschuttle sets out his ideal,
the Western historiographical tradition, 'the great historians of the pasf (p.242),
whose work exemplifies both the search for and the possibility of finding the truth.
He writes:

I still count myself fortunate to have been forced to read Gibbon, Macaulay,
Carlyle, Maitland and Tocqueville for an undergraduate course on
historical method at the University of Sydney in 1966. The students who
attend compulsory seminars on Foucault, Heidegger and post
structuralism are grossly underprivileged by comparison, [p.249]

Windschuttle has always written aggressively. His 1980 book Unemployment is

still one of the best scholarly interventions in Australian politics and his biting,
mocking tone is certainly appropriate when he parodies the Madonna studies end
of Cultural Studies, or pricks the Paul Carter bubble, or exposes the appalling
ignorance of many postmodernists about what historians actually do. yet one
wonders why he is so uncompromisingly empiricist. Is he totally unaware of the
complexity of the marriage?or more appropriately the menage ? trois?between
sociology, social theory and history? One would not expect him to sympathise with
the Marxist critics of, say, postmodernism, such as Alex Callinicoss, Frank Lentricchia
or Bryan Palmer, or even Irving, his fellow Sydney-ite. There are, however, other
points along the way between relativism and empiricism where he could have
paused for reflection: Hunt, Appleby and Jacobs' 1994 book Telling the Truth About
History, for instance, or indeed even What is History? It is not entirely a foregone
conclusion that poststructuralism, to take one of his targets, is as resolutely
incompatible with history as he supposes. (See, for instance chapter one in David
Roberts' 1995 book, Nothing but History. Structuralism and the Question of History.)
Nor should he deny the value of some of the recent Australian histories which are
influenced by Foucault, for instance, David Goodman's elegant analysis of the
language of gold in Goldseeking or Lynette Finch's The Classing Gaze which, although
it has some big gaps (notably any real reference to either existing labour history or
nineteenth century political economy), surely alerts us to the possibility of alternative
constructions of social class in the late nineteenth century.
Windschuttle's basic premise is that he speaks for history. He doesn't, of course;
he speaks for his own kind of history. At the same time he presumes to speak for a
common sense, every-person kind of history against the obscurities practised by
academics. There is more than a hint of Geoffrey Blaineyism about him, recalling
Blarney's presumption to speak for 'ordinary7 Australians against multiculturalism.
That one of those popular guides to postmodernism was on the best seller list in
Australia earlier this year should put an end to that kind of argument. More than
one reviewer has pointed out that some of Windschuttle's arguments are too simple.
His chapter on Foucault is a case in point. Certainly Foucault was greatly influenced
by Nietzsche and Heidegger, but he was a product of French intellectual
preoccupations as well, as James Miller's stunning biography shows. In any case it
becomes increasingly difficult to identify a single Foucaultian position, given his
intellectual trajectory and the huge range of interpretations of his work. Raphael
Samuel once referred to him as an historian posing as a philosopher. Gerard Noirel

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 Labour History Number 72 May 1997

describes his histories as philosophical inquiries into the nature of truth. The quite
ferocious debates about Madness and Civilisation, in Still and Velod/s 1992 collection
Rewriting the History of Madness, illustrate the point further.
This oversimplicity is also apparent in the way Windschuttle structures his
arguments. There is little real engagement with the debates about the work of some
of his authors. Dening's arguments are demolished by Obeyeskere's and so, therefore,
is structuralism. Foucaulfs study of the asylum is demolished by Gauchet and Swain
and by Scull, his study of the prison by Garland, and thaf s the end of it. Only
Fukuyama gets a chance to reply to his critics. And always, it is the critics of the
enemies of history whose work is above suspicion, above contradiction. If history is
the historical activity E.H. Carr described, then in Windschuttle's book history is
absent. It is frozen in time at the moment of rebuttal.
The person who holds the fort always seems likely to regard the slightest
transgression as treachery and this is Windschuttle's greatest failing. We are all used
to telling postmodernists, for instance, about the wonderful variety of philosophical
and epistemological positions from which historians write. However Windschuttle,
in his anxiety to defend his Fortress History, defends only the position that ignorant
postmodernists attack, that history is always empiricist: and that is a position which,
in the 1990s, is frankly unsustainable.
As a writer and teacher of labour history I'm not really bothered by the
intellectual/academic enemies of history, even though academic postmodernists
can be as ruthlessly totalitarian as anyone else, despite their professed respect for
'difference'. The decline of history in schools, of Australian history in universities,
the attack on higher education, the falling fortunes of labour, all present a much
greater threat to both history and labour history. Yet, need we be terminally
pessimistic? History 'outside' seems to be booming. The Victorian PRO attracts
researchers in record numbers; genealogists maybe, but what of that? Public history
is in good health. The heritage industry is booming. Even non-academic labour
history still struggles along. And there is nothing like struggle to re-charge
enthusiasms.

University of Western Australia CHARLIE FOX

Mark Bray and Nigel Haworth (eds), Economic Restructuring and Industrial
Relations in Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Analysis. ACCIRT
Mongraph No. 8, University of Sydney, 1993. pp. ii +155. $20.00 paper.

Braham Dabscheck, The Struggle for Australian Industrial Relations. Oxford

University Press, Melbourne, 1995. pp. xiv +194. $26.95 paper.

J. J. Macken, The Employment Revolution, The Federation Press. Annandale, 1992.

pp. vi + 138. $25.00 paper.

John Mathews, Catching The Wave: Workplace Reform in Australia. Allen and
Unwin, St Leonards, 1994. pp. xiv + 359. $34.95 paper.

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