 My name's Anne Evans. I'm the Associate Dean of Research for the College of Arts and Social Sciences, and it's my pleasure to welcome you all today. I would like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay my respects to the elders of the Nunwall people past and present. I acknowledge their contribution to this place and to this institution. The Cassie Norgall Professorial Lecture Series is an opportunity for us as a community to welcome it and celebrate new professorial appointments to our college. Today we celebrate the promotion of Professor Frank Bungiorno from the School of History in the Research School of Social Sciences. Frank is an historian who has held positions at King's College London, University of New England and Griffith University. He was an ARC postdoctoral fellow at the ANU in the late 90s, Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, and the Mellon Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin. Frank has written on and received awards for books on topics that are very important to many of us. Sex and the 80s. He also has an extensive list of publications on politics and labour in Australia with a huge variety of co-authors. In addition to his excellence in research and teaching, Frank's has served his discipline and the University through his work on numerous committees, including the New South Wales Arts Advisory Council, the New South Wales Ministry of Arts Literature and History Committee, and as a member of many editorial boards. Please join me in welcoming Professor Frank Bungiorno. Thanks very much, Anne, and thank you to everyone for being here tonight. I'd like to pay a particular tribute. One of my undergraduate lecturers is here. Professor Verity Bergman. So welcome, Verity. It's nice to have such an inspiring teacher here for this rite of passage. So thank you. It's a mark, I think, of the limiting character of a purely national perspective that it's so really been noticed that two English-speaking democracies of the 1980s each had a former trade union official as its national leader. Bob Hawke was a former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the ACTU, and Ronald Reagan was a former president of the Screen Actors Guild. Each is credited with having restored to their countries a sense of national pride and optimism. In Reagan's case, his role was supposedly to lift the gloom that had descended over the country during the Carter presidency, with its economic decline and its foreign humiliations, to demonstrate that in America it was indeed mourning again. In Hawkes, it was to take full advantage of the improving national mood in 1983 associated with the end of the drought and the end of a recession, and of course the victory of an Australian syndicate in the America's cup yachting competition in Newport, Rhode Island. Each of these members was a charismatic and popular leader who'd achieved celebrity outside formal politics, Reagan in show business, Hawke as a national union leader and media superstar who was surely as much a showman as Ronald Reagan. They both appealed to voters above and outside the formal structures of party and government, creating an almost mystical bond with the people which helped sustain in each case a powerful sense of destiny. Yet destiny often needed helping along. Each was flexible, being willing to compromise in ways that could be dismissed as mere expediency by their more ideologically committed allies and opponents, but I think which helps to account in each case for their political longevity. Now the rise of transnational and global histories in the early 21st century I think sometimes obscures the reality that much and perhaps most of the history being written about the modern world is still national. By national history I don't mean nationalist history, although the categories of course can and do overlap. Historians with a popular following still perform something of the part of the storytellers of their tribe, a phrase I borrow gratefully from Ian McKelman, sometimes addressing their audience as we, at worst trading in familiar and comforting national stereotypes and at best challenging familiar ways of thinking and of seeing. I'm myself a national historian. Both of my recent books, History of Sexuality since 1788 and a history of Australia in the 1980s, take Australia as their subject. But a national history that treats Australia as its basic unit of study inevitably misses something of the contingency of such a category. Australia is the product not only of a local political settlement, but also of global and transnational forces such as imperial conquest and decolonisation, industrialisation, migration, the expansion of capital, the development of trade and exchanges of information, knowledge, ideas and culture. The best national histories treat the nation state as embedded in global networks shaped by these forces. But it remains a valid criticism that most national histories deal inadequately with such challenges. The mere telling of a story about the nation can imply singularity or an exceptionalism, even a self-containment. We can easily miss, I think, the common elements in the leadership styles of a Reagan and a Hawke. So my lecture is in part a reflection on these problems which I discuss in reference to what I'm calling the global 80s. The decade has received increasing historical attention, as with the passage of time it passes from current affairs to contemporary history. Historians now seem increasingly confident in placing the 1980s in the context of a broader sweep of time. Some treat the decade as the end of an era in world history, placing 1989 and the end of the Cold War alongside such momentous and revolutionary years as 1789 and 1917. Famously, beginning with a controversial article published in 1989 and culminating in a 1992 book, Francis Fukuyama declared the moment as the end of history, by which he meant that liberal democracy and capitalism had emerged as the only viable economic and political systems. There was a universal pattern discernable in history, he said, and this is where it was going. Sure, there might be discontinuities along the journey, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of the Nazis, he cites as examples of that, but the process was coherence and unidirectional. We have trouble imagining a world that is radically better than our own, he explained, or a future that is not essentially democratic and capitalist. Now, there's little point in providing yet another critique of this flawed book, A Quarter of a Century After Its Publication. It's more pertinent, I think, to my purpose to suggest that the optimism and confidence of the end of history thesis was probably only possible in the early 1990s, in those years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 911 or perhaps before the genocides of the mid-1990s. It's an artefact, a period piece, if you like, through which we can read the effects of rapid and far-reaching change that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years before. It's little wonder then that a recent American collection of essays on the decade calls the 1980s a critical and transitional decade. But that book is almost exclusively concerned with the United States. Part four, which promises to consider the world beyond America's borders, is meaningfully called We Are the World. But there's little side of eti-iety in the recycling of that well-known 1980s song title. So historical knowledge is not nationally neutral. A political economy of knowledge ensures that the histories of powerful Western countries as a rule do better in the global, academic and publishing marketplace than those of smaller nations, to say nothing of the well-known divisions between the global, North and South. It's been a feature of transnationalism in history that it's drawn renewed attention to the relevance of local or national stories to a larger scene. Localities such as towns or cities will sometimes figure in such histories as nodes in a network, but in practice the histories of many places become invisible or very nearly so. The contrast of this rather ambiguous place for national history with what might be thought of as the golden age of Australian history in the years between the 1960s and the 1980s seems to me very stark. From the beginning of the 1960s, the end of empire, the eclipse of Australian Britishness, and the emergence of the so-called new nationalism formed a critical background to the rise of Australian history. In many ways, the prominence of the subject in the public sphere reflected the generational experience of those who had come to adulthood in the 1950s and 60s and felt that they'd been in sufficient access to Australian culture in their formal education. More generally, Australian history was part of a declaration of independence from the British Empire. There were similar developments in Canada, New Zealand, India, the Caribbean, and even arguably within Britain itself with the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism. Yet paradoxically, the rise of Australian history from the 60s to the 80s coincided with the rise of a critical social history, stimulated by international influences and it gave voice and agency to women, indigenous people, the working class, to migrants and ethnic and sexual minorities. The preoccupations of the new social history presented Australian history, I think, with a strangely divided personality. It fostered a sense of national distinctiveness and even belonging, even as it drew attention to diversity, exclusion and discrimination and cast a critical eye over national stereotypes. This was a creative tension, although one that paved the way for historical transnationalism once the nationalist impulses that had given rise to the Australian history boom took a rather different turn in the 1990s. In the 80s, however, the boom was in full swing. Books about the Australian past appeared in vast numbers on an ever-growing variety of subjects, including the genres of Aboriginal family history, autobiography and memoir. Think of the success of Sally Morgan and Ruby Langford-Gnibi. And Peter Carey's Book of Prize-winning historical novel, Oscar and Lucinda, set largely in colonial New South Wales and culminating in the massacre of Aboriginal people. Convict history seemed to do particularly well around the time of the Bicentenary of 1988, with historians such as Robert Hughes and Babette Smith who's with us today, writing very different kinds of books on the convict era. Anzac began its modern meteoric rise partly through the success of Peter Weir's film Gallipoli and Bert Faces a Fortunate Life, later a television miniseries. Historians, a few of them at least, were seen frequently in the media. They were as ubiquitous then as specialists in terrorism, international relations and strategic studies are today. TV miniseries screened on a bewildering variety of historical topics. The first fleet re-enactment, let's move along, the first fleet re-enactment would soon be sailing into Sydney Harbour, Coca-Cola logo and all. The Australian National University's own Manning Clark, wandered the land as the Bicentennial celebrity par excellence. Clark looked and sounded like many people's idea of an Old Testament prophet. How was it that in a country seen as secular-minded, egalitarian, democratic, informal and even anti-intellectual, Clark, with his searching spirituality, his well-honed biblical language and his cryptic literary allusions, came to achieve such a strange status? Possibly the national stereotype itself is flawed, that many Australians of the 1970s and 80s actually had a remarkably old-fashioned hunger for a dignified national symbolism that could be taken seriously by old countries. Here was evidence that Australia had a conscience and a soul and his books in their stately dust jackets, they looked fit to sit beside the family Bible on the bookshelf, showed that Australia also had a history and that it was not just an obscure footnote to the British Empire. Now the most influential contributions to understandings of the 1980s are in the work of journalists rather than professional historians, notably Paul Kelly, still editor at Large for the Australian. In Australia journalists have been more willing than historians to write of the recent past. Journalists' professional work provides them with a public profile and with contact stories and files that with much or little effort can be translated into book-length publication. Certainly Kelly's The End of Certainty, the story of the 1980s, 1992, remains I think in many respects the most influential account of Australia in that decade. Kelly tells his story in terms of its movers and shakers. It's largely the view from Canberra's parliamentary press gallery, with all of the benefits and the limitations of such a perspective. His was a contemporary history in almost every sense one might imagine, appearing in 1992 when the 1980s were a recent memory and for many an unhappy memory because they seemed a time of corporate greed and policy failure that had led to a nasty recession. But Kelly sets the 1980s in a wider context, the rise and fall of what he calls the Australian settlement in the 90s between 1901 and 1991, and much of the intellectual power of the book really comes out of that manner of framing his 1980s narrative. For Kelly, the decade mattered because it had seen a Labor government open up the economy to the world, deregulating the financial sector, reducing tariff protection, decentralising the industrial relations system and selling off public assets. Yet for all its emphasis on Australia's integration into the world economy, Kelly's story is a national one, addressed to a national audience and designed to produce national effects. That is to persuade Australians of the wisdom of the changes the previous decade had wrought and to urge them to support a politics that would extend those changes and developments into the 1990s. Kelly assumes the role of a kind of tribal storyteller, addressing the imagined community of the nation about its past and its prospects. Now my own approach to Australia's 1980s treats the Hawke Labor government as also very much a response to the economic, political and cultural challenges of the 1980s. Bob Hawke's election policy speech in February 1983 gave few signs of the dramatic changes that would mark the Labor government's 13 years in office. And especially I think in the direction of what contemporaries called economic rationalism and what we more often now I think call neoliberalism. Responding to the recession of 1982-83, Labor's election policy was recognisably Keynesian as well as protectionist. Increased spending would revive a faltering economy and a recession which had seen the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs was no time for tariff cuts. Yet almost from the moment Labor came to power it shifted from this traditional approach with both Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating worrying that excessive spending would lead to the very kind of inflationary outbreak that had played such a large role in destroying both the Whitlam and the Fraser governments. Keynesian economists and advisors soon found themselves on the outer. The most spectacular changes occurred initially in the Australian financial sector where the government floated the dollar in December 1983, a decision recognised then and even more forcibly since as a critical moment in the making of modern Australia, followed by a move in 1984 to allow foreign banks to begin operating in the country. At the same time as it subjected the economy and its own decision making ever more closely to the judgment of the global financial markets, the new government self-consciously cultivated an image of fiscal rectitude seeking to place as much distance as it could between itself and the Whitlam government. It moved away from that government's emphasis on universality in welfare with the notable exception of course of a new system of health insurance called Medicare. Now many of these changes were disorientating because they were introduced by a Labor Party that had historically sought to control rather than unleash market forces. But Australia's shift towards deregulation was anything but exceptional. Such changes occurred across the world, most famously in the case of Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the United States under Ronald Reagan. Moreover, the advance of the market occurred irrespective of whether the centre-left or the centre-right held office. It seems to me that the case of France is particularly instructive because the shift seemed so unlikely when socialist president Francois Mitterrand came to power in May 1981. Policies of the early years included nationalisation, public sector expansion, a lower retirement age, a shorter working week, more paid holidays, increased minimum wages, pro-union labour laws and a wealth tax. By mid-1982 however, it was evident that such policies far from stimulating the economy were actually worsening many of France's problems. Not surprisingly, it was about this time that the four communists who were in the cabinet left it. Inflation remained high and the country suffered a foreign exchange crisis that culminated in a decision to devalue the Frank in March 1983. Now Australia, it might be noted, devalued in the very same month as one of the first decisions of the Hawke government taken over in the Lakeside Hotel the morning after the election. A socialist U-turn followed in France a policy of austerity during the period of cohabitation in the mid-1980s, that is a socialist president Mitterrand and a conservative Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Industries that had been nationalised in the early 1980s were privatised. Chirac also cut taxes and spending, abolished price controls and introduced labour market reforms. Now the parallels I think with the Australian story seem pretty obvious. Indeed, the realisation that in an age of globalisation it was impossible for any particular country to follow its own course without due regard for the economic world bequeathed by the end of the long boom, took a distinctive form in each country. Nonetheless, the transnational neoliberal revolution can be traced in economic histories of the era as diverse as those of Spain, Ghana, Chile and New Zealand to say nothing of course of China's market reforms under Deng Xiaoping. In the fields of culture, consumption and technology, where a transnational or a global story seems nearly unavoidable, it's nonetheless surprising how wedded historical interpretation remains to a national perspective. The major new technologies of home and work such as the video cassette recorder, the fax machine and the personal computer can only be understood in the context of global consumer capitalism. True, the fax machine was particularly revolutionary in Japan because of the ease with which Japanese characters or images of Japanese characters could be communicated. But it was hardly less so in Australia where the number of units entering the country expanded from something like 8,000 to 50,000 between 1984 and 1987. It was a major boon for a country so distant from the world's markets, at least the world's major markets. The VCR was also becoming ubiquitous, climbing from one in 20 Australian households early in the 1980s to more than half by 1987. Personal computers spread across households and workplaces as they became cheaper in the process helping to create the global phenomenon of Julian Assange, a teenager in the mid 1980s, but already a confirmed computer geek soon after acquiring his first Commodore 64 in Lismore. He would become the 21st century's ultimate celebrity global citizen, rivaled in that status only I think by another Australian who in 1985 swapped his Australian for American citizenship to expand his media empire, Rupert Murdoch. Other Australian cultural exports made their mark in this globalising world with the export of TV soap such as Neighbours, of the hit film Crocodile Dundee and of pop groups such as In Excess and Midnight Oil. The British critic Peter Accroy described Crocodile Dundee starring the comedian Paul Hogan as a heavily Americanised film, I quote, Dundee wearing his Australian version of the Stetson acts like some representative of the old cowboy and thus reminds the American cinema audience of its more manly, heroic and good human past. Like Hogan and Dundee, the rock group In Excess were a huge hit in the United States, perfectly in tune with the music TV generation. Their music concerns itself with many of the stock concerns of the genre and a surrogate critic commented in Britain's New Musical Express. Lyrically, there are obligatory references to red dresses, long black hair, wanton and needon, but the market values of FM and MTV have brought with them this new kind of rock. None of this was intended as a compliment, I can assure you. The more blatantly political midnight oils engagement with nuclear environmental issues inevitably gave them a transnational sensibility. They flourished in the United States, however, of Reagan and Bush Senior, thereby bringing to the attention of young U.S. audiences the oppression suffered by Indigenous people asbestos miners and other victims of injustice in distant Australia. A properly transnational history of the United States in the 1980s that ignored Mick Dundee would surely overlook one of that country's dream heroes, a figure fit to take his place beside Reagan and is evocative of the nostalgic fantasy of that era that historians have identified. And similarly, I think a properly transnational history of Britain would need to make room for neighbours which assumed a notable place in the dream life of Thatcher's Britain. Transnational perspectives will not supersede national histories of the 1980s of the kind I've written, nor indeed of any other era, but national histories I think will be the poorer for their failure to take account of research that is attuned to the transnational and the global. Now you can, if you wish, try to forget about the 80s, but as the rise of that quintessentially 80s American man Donald Trump would suggest, the 80s don't wish to forget about us. Given the decades ubiquity in both the nostalgia industry and in public discourse, we're unlikely to be able to forget about the 1980s entirely, but there's a politics of memory in which we're enjoined to do our best to forget some things while perhaps recalling others, sometimes through rose-tinted glasses that can make them virtually unrecognisable to someone like me who's bothered to research the era. As Dennis Glover has recently reminded us in his affectionate, angry, nostalgic, elegiac and moving book about his hometown of Dovton in Outer Suburban Melbourne, there's a 1980s reformed cheer squad led by those two Pauls, Kelly and Keating, that enjoins us to forget the reality so evident in the post-industrial landscapes of many communities that the decade had its losers, those with skills that were not valued in a post-1980s post-recession deregulated economy. One of my own students in an economic history class just last week, after I explained that there are Australian industrial suburbs and towns that had a rate of unemployment in the 1980s above 15%, asked how such communities had recovered. The sad answer, of course, isn't many still have not. Indeed, some face further ordeals as the Australian car manufacturing industry ends and steelmaking comes under increasing pressure. There was a telling moment in the series of interviews that Kerry O'Brien recently conducted with Paul Keating in which O'Brien asked the former treasurer about those whose jobs were forever wiped out by industry restructuring under labour. And do you know what they found, Keating replies, a better job a week later in a growing economy with big employment growth. You make it sound so simple, replies are skeptical and somewhat forlorn sounding O'Brien. And so he does, Keating, that great political salesman wants us to remember the 1980s, but he also wants us to do a fair bit of forgetting as well. And he's not alone there. We can be fairly certain that in this post-Marbo age of sweetness and light in relations between mining companies and Indigenous people, or at least some of them, the mining industry doesn't want us to remember too vividly the days when its anti-landrights television advertising showed a black hand building a brick wall across a map of Western Australia containing the warning, keep out. This land is under Aboriginal claim and it would be no more polite to recall mining executive Hugh Morgan's denigration of Aboriginal culture as barbaric and indeed cannibalistic. And then there's the Melbourne historian Geoffrey Blaney who tells media interviewers these days of his role in campaigning against the pace of Asian migration to Australia in the 1980s. I was simply saying that social cohesion is important. And this may well be how Blaney now recalls his role in a highly emotional debate, but it's a sanitised summary. Beginning with the statistically inaccurate claim that Asians represented, quote, the favoured majority in Australia's immigration policy, Blaney later went on to condemn the hawk government for its asianisation and surrender Australia policies. He cited South Africa under apartheid as an example of a failed multicultural society. His image of recent immigration history crystallised as one of discrimination against British and European applicants, of Asians being preferred for government jobs, of a secret room in Canberra where officials manipulated Australia's immigration intake, of ordinary Australian people turned into refugees, his phrase, his word, outcasts and strangers in their own land. That last idea surely takes us deep into the territory of the present and to the melancholy image of a betrayed and abandoned white working class that is now at the heart of conservative politics whether in Trump's America, Brexit England or indeed among the Hansonite majority here. And as we've just seen in the scandal over a Labor Party advertisement in Queensland, it's also a standing temptation to other parts of the political spectrum. Now there are good reasons to ensure that we have a balanced account of these matters. The historians of the post-war eclipse of Britishness in Australia now often treat the 1960s as the critical turning point in the country's civic identity. In some accounts, that period, the 60s, appears almost as one of existential crisis as Australians took their place among the abandoned Britons left high and dry by the United Kingdom's turn to Europe. Yet in the new nationalist rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s, one searches in vain for a sense that Australia would cease to be a white nation. The language of Britishness went into decline and an explicit language of whiteness went with it. But the widespread assumption until the mid-1970s and the appearance of large numbers of Asian migrants in the wake of the Vietnam War, the assumption appears to have been that Australia could engage with Asia and abandon its offensive white Australia policy without fundamental change to its essential character, to its whiteness, to its westernness, to its Europeanness. This helps I think explain the kinds of anxieties that emerged in the 1980s by which time it was clear that more fundamental changes were occurring. In my reading, the 1980s becomes a turning point in the history of Australian national identity. The moment when, as Garson Haage has so vividly put it, the appearance of third-world looking people in Australian streets began to raise more fundamental questions about national self-hood than those suggested by the liquidation of the British Empire in the 1960s. But there are also other, I think, more immediate political issues at stake in how we remember. The dilemmas, conflicts and habits of thought that we find in the 1980s still cast their shadow over our own times. We are still being enjoined to worry over threats to national cohesion posed by the latest wave of migrants, with religion intersecting with, and arguably now I think overwhelming, race as the key signifier of difference. We turn to my final section. What I want to suggest in the final part of this lecture is that among the most fundamental responsibilities of the national historian is to seek to influence public consciousness with stories that are both true and engaging and yet sometimes uncomfortable and unsettling. For those who look to the past for a vindication of their own sense of self-hood or past behaviour, the work of historians committed to honest and painstaking historical inquiry can be threatening to a carefully composed story. To conservative nationalists, such work can look like a dubious form of self-indulgence on the part of overeducated and taxpayer-funded idiots, and even worse, a threat to Team Australia. We hear this sentiment expressed every April in complaints about academic historians who challenged this or that aspect of the Anzac legend. We have one of the principal targets of such complaints over here, Professor Beaumont. Yet notwithstanding the complications added by claims concerning Anzac's sacredness, the familiar complaints about disloyal academic assaults on Anzacary are really just a special example of a familiar attitude, the idea that histories of the national past should be patriotic, tidy and usable. Some of these issues arose in one of the more thoughtful reviews in my book, The 80s, that in The Weekend Australian by David Free. Bon giorno, he wrote, and I quote, retrieves the forgotten voices of the not-so-great and approach that is known in the trade as history from below. Whether these voices are always worth reviving is debatable. Such stuff is the white noise of Australian politics, the dust that had to settle before we could start seeing things in perspective. What do we gain by kicking it up again? Should it fundamentally change our minds about the past? Free worries that I might be suggesting, and I quote again from him, that revisiting the past from below is not merely a useful supplement to hindsight, but a revolutionary new way of seeing that trumps the naive journalistic practice of looking at history backwards. Apparently this is, and I quote, a piece of academic theory being pushed too far. To what degree exactly are our retrospective judgments obliged to capture what people felt back then in the heat of the moment? The answer to that one is to a very great degree, unless you want to write very bad history. The great British historian E.P. Thompson, of course, is able to help us here. Our only criterion of judgment, he says, in the famous preface to the Making of the English Working Class in 1963, the language of course, I'm afraid, is sexist, should not be whether or not a man's actions are justified in light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves. In some of the lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution, we may discover insights into social evils which we have yet to cure. So for Thompson, we should try to understand people's actions in light of their own experience and circumstances, rather than assimilating it to the history of what happened next. Paradoxically, in doing so, we were invited to relativise the present, to see our own perspectives and judgments as contingent, indeed as phenomena that might in due course become subject to the condescending, or if we're lucky, to the empathetic judgment of a future historian. Nonetheless, the perspective provided by the passing of time also clearly has its role to play, even when, as I do, we write of a past that's in the living memory of many of us. At one point in his review, Free compares my own treatment of the 1980s to Paul Kelly's in the end of certainty. Bon giorno favours the sympathetic close-up. Kelly takes the chillier, longer view. And surely the long view in history and politics is what matters. Individual pain matters, but the bigger picture, the retrospective wide shot, matters more. Again, I disagree. In good history, and certainly in good democratic history, they both matter a very great deal. Quite late in my research on the 80s, I became absorbed in some records in the National Archives of Australia on the Bicentenary. They were collected by the official historian of the Bicentenary, who wrote to country newspapers early in 1988, asking people to let him know what they'd done on the 26th of January. The letters reveal that alongside the official, formal and organised events, people did things their own way with an emphasis on the sociable playful celebration of a nation that they said made them feel grateful and proud. There were evasions, plenty of evasions of the darker aspects of Australian history, such as the dispossession of Aboriginal people, as well as engagements with it. We find both amongst those letters. I love this material, not least because it confirmed for me that there was a history from below still to be written about 1988, and enduring folk life only mildly influenced, I think, by the corporate branding of the Australian Bicentennial Authority and the controversies that had engaged Australian elites during that period. There's something oddly poignant about many of these personal stories, perhaps because so many writers wove their intimate experience and feelings for home, family, friends and country around their accounts of the national celebrations. My favourite concerns Tracy Matthews, a country town journalist and mother from Lee and Gaffa, who after describing a busy day of juggling her multiple roles, such a common story for professional women in the 1980s, she concluded, many people have said our Bicentennial marks the end of one era and the beginning of a new one for our nation. In retrospect, I see the same can be said for my family. On January 27th, the day after Australia Day, Dailey, her son, took his first steps and moved from babyhood to toddlerhood. Now, this shouldn't be dismissed as white noise or the unfortunate distraction or an unfortunate distraction from the big picture, the wide pattern, the chilly longer view. It's an Australian woman making meaning of her own professional, personal and family life in the context of a wider and more abstract connection, in this case, of course, to the nation itself. I feel an intense privilege and responsibility when someone affords me such a precious glimpse of her life and such a rare insight into her sense of belonging. Thank you. Tell us about what kind of artistic or interpretive decisions you made about how to start and finish a book that of course has obviously begun and begins with 1980 or 81. 83. I see. Can you tell us something about your thoughts about how you started the relationship or about the decade? The book is actually 1983 to 91, so I invented my own 80s. It's a period of the Hawke government. It also has a recession at both ends. I became ever more conscious as I was writing of what I owed actually to a number of other historians, not writing about the 80s, but things entirely different. The beginning of the book, it begins on the 16th of February, 1983. Bob Hawke's speech, his policy speech in the Opera House in Sydney, but a much greater drama, of course, was unfolding down south, the Ash Wednesday bushfires, and my account of that's deeply influenced by volume four of Manning Clark's History of Australia, which of course begins the same way with the, I always forget them, but the one in 1851, which William Strutter, of course, painted that great painting of. So I was very influenced by Graham Davison's account of the 1880s. I think in the structure of my book I think goes something to that and also to Michael Cannon's The Land Boomers. I was very concerned to tell a coherent story and it seemed to me to pick up in 1980 and kind of to end in 1989. In other words, a very literal kind of interpretation of the 80s wouldn't have worked the story. What I admire about both Cannon's book on the Land Boomers of Melbourne in the 1880s and of course Graham Davison's Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne is there's a very coherent story there. Both of them, of course, actually end in the depression of the 1890s and it forms a critical part, I think, of their sense of the shape of that period. So I'm very conscious, I think, of being influenced by my olders and betters, but writing about totally different things, yeah. Thank you, Frank, that was a beautiful, really bold question. My question is about autobiography and history and I think you can probably, that fabulous quote on it for yourself, that you wrote back on your book. It was the end of the book when you were a little unbiographical and so, of course, one has to think that your choice of the 1880s that they're going to write back. To some extent, quite unbiographical, but I wonder if you would just say something about, I mean, it has been said that you can find any historian's project in times of bibliography in that project sometimes. So I wonder if you would perhaps reflect a little bit on the autobiography and history's choices. Yeah, so the book isn't directly autobiographical except in a few flashes where I do draw on a recollection and, as you say, in a, I think, a probably three page passage at the beginning of the acknowledgments that has all sorts of dreadful admissions in it. But look, I think there is something quite distinct about dealing with a period that's within your living memory and perhaps particularly a period when you're growing up. You know, when I was essentially a teenager in this period and I was often conscious of chasing up things half remembered, checking my memory against other records of the period and often being quite surprised, I must say. So I probably had a pretty condescending attitude to the bicentenary in 1988 being a smart alec. And to go back, actually, and to look at some of the complexities of Australian responses, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to that event is often a little bit confronting, actually, because you're conscious of just how dependent you are on, I think, on your own circumstances, on the newspapers, perhaps that you read at that time. And I think we all did that in a quite limited way then. You took one newspaper, I suppose, each day and that kind of was your source of news. And so I was often testing memories. And I think, yeah, also, perhaps at an emotional level, there is a different kind of relationship to a period you've lived through because it's bound up in, one's own personal memories of a period, one's memories of family and friends. And when you are writing about an incident, you're often aware, oh, yes, I remember where I was when this was unfolding. I was on a school camp when the Ash Wednesday bushfires were unfolding, for instance. That caused quite a bit of concern back in Melbourne amongst the parents. So, yeah, I think there is a different kind of relationship to that kind of, the material I'm dealing with here. Yeah. Yes, Fred. I was wondering if you would talk a bit more about history from below, if I could just explain that. It's an embarrassing moment. It's not embarrassing myself at all, too. Whereas, I was to run a review about a website that the British Imperial Museum started to put up with three-quarters of a million names of men who fought in the British expeditionary corps and the British armies. And it said, every soldier, every note said, everyone who served in World War I deserves to be remembered. I thought, no, they don't. And it's simply that when you're writing a traditional history of political aliens, you know, your cohorts sort of defines itself. But if you, as I think we all do, think that we must do more than that, I'm more pleased for us to you to hear the voice from below. I mean, it can't be everybody that's happy about what I was trying to say about everyone who serves people. So we're still selecting, aren't we? Oh, yes, we're still selecting. Perhaps our initial impulses are democratic to move beyond those elites that you talk about. But we still use concepts, don't we? We use concepts like class. We use concepts of gender and ethnicity. Age figures quite prominently, I think, as one of the organising categories in the 80s. I talk about youth culture. I talk about what it was like to be a young unemployed person in the 1980s. We never get away from all those social science concepts that remain critical, I think, for writing history. Otherwise, as you say, we kind of just end up with a mess, absolutely. But that said, I think that, you know, I like the idea of a democratic history that one sets out to move beyond the writing about elites. But I don't want to sound unduly critical of Paul Kelly, because I think, you know, he's accounted his periods incredibly impressive. But it's not a democratic history. It's a history of, really, the Canberra-based elite. And it's about essentially political elites. And it's essentially about national political elites with a sprinkling of others from business and so on. But, you know, it isn't a history from below. It doesn't pretend to be a history from below. But that means it's not the story of the 1980s as he calls it. It's a story of the 1980s. I said I can work in my voice. I'm going back to the sort of question on the issue of, like, national history versus rural and global history. And if you just focus on Australia and Britain and the United States, you can very much get the sense of this global neoliberalism, similar issues, similar things going on. But I'm also looking at what's happening in Australia. When you contrast children in Australia, I'm really struck by the difference between what's happening in the nation, part of which is in this room at the moment, in the sense that, like, Chile has a very strong student movement, from any perspective, which is effectively rolling back the sorts of policies which were implemented by Pinochet and Chile. And for Australia, medications and that are, say, 17 hours ago in Chile, there were thousands of students marching in protest for free education. There's now roughly 240,000 students in Chile who are studying at Point 3. And there's four students went directly into the Chilean Congress at the last election and more will go in at the next election. Whereas in A and U, basically students seem to be essentially asleep. Oh, I don't know. Only when I'm lecturing them, yeah. I think my answer is by 10 to the student. There'll be a protest tomorrow in A and U possibly by a hundred. There is no free education in universities and no prospect of it in Australia. There's no student leaders, there's no prospect, probably, of the student president of this campus, becoming the member of the Chilean parliament in the next election. So the difference is really incredibly huge and it's really a question like why are your students essentially asleep, unengaged, ineffective, basically going backwards at this time. But, you know, there's a real set of questions there as to why is there such a big difference and a real question for all of the students in this room. Why aren't you going for a protest? Why are you basically effective? I want them to be here. I mean, you make a point, when one talks about, you know, common points between different countries, you're not saying the countries are identical. You're pointing to the ways in which there are shared histories as well as major differences. So, yeah, I mean, I certainly didn't intend to suggest that, you know, the various countries that I know named different points in the narrative somehow are all the same. In social and economic policy, in the 1980s, I mean, think of the ways in which German patterns of class cooperation, for instance, shape the way in which the neoliberal revolution, you know, runs through there. French statism is clearly strong and that conditions the way in which free market ideas are received and applied in France. So, yeah, I mean, you'll always find differences, but you don't really see the differences in the narrative. So, yeah, I think it's one of the, you know, the most challenging things is that balance between the two because we want a sense of immediacy. We want to create, empathy is the wrong word, although it's certainly one of the things we want to create, but you want to provide a sense of what the world might have looked like to particular actors and players in your story. It's an important thing that historians, at least a kind of history I'm doing will try to achieve, but you also need to move beyond that because we also need a sense of perspective. We need to be able to place an episode, an event, an individual period in a broader sweep of time and I guess my narratives tend to work in that sort of way, you know, so to tell a story, to narrate an event, but then to reflect on that event and also that broader, that broader sweep. So I think it's a really important balance to achieve. We can never completely put aside a sense of what hindsight provides us because it's, you know, really what doing history is, but it seems we're constantly, for me anyway, constantly moving backwards and forwards between those different relationships, the material, and I think we have to do both actually to write effective history.