GREAT BRITISH HISTORY.(Review)

THEY WERE GOING to get Hampton High School in suburban Melbourne, because they still teach British History, a teacher acquaintance told me in the mid-1980s. Sure enough, a few years later the school, which I had attended in the 1940s, was closed, ostensibly for the much less contentious reason of falling student numbers.

Whatever the real reasons for that closure, we now live in a society where not only the British Isles history once taken for granted as essential knowledge for every Australian child, but most history, has been banished from most educational curricula, at least partly for reasons of political correctness. Often the memory of what was taught has also been banished, with the mantra of "the history I used to be taught at school was ... " followed by something along the lines of inaccurate, misleading, discredited and especially racist.

The feeling of clandestinely reading banned material adds to the pleasure of The Isles, by Norman Davies, the latest, mildly and pleasantly revisionist, history of the British Isles, from the cavemen to Tony Blair. It is a good book, but the reaction of reviewers has been intriguing. Many have greeted the book as a welcome corrective to the "triumphalism" said to have dominated past renderings of British history and to have warped the views of John Howard and Bob Menzies, among others.

The publishers seem to have grasped this view as a commercial bonus, seeing a huge pent-up thirst for Watergate-style uncovering of the true evil past. The paperback edition quotes, among the blurbs, from an extraordinary review in the Australian by David Day in which that Canberra academic historian says:

 
   Davies is particularly concerned to counter the schools of nationalist 
   historiography that have made the history of [the] isles synonymous with 
   the mythical English history that tells a triumphant story spanning nearly 
   nine hundred years ... The nationalist school stirred the hearts of 
   children from Manchester to Melbourne and nourished the souls of men, such 
   as Robert Menzies ... it is a history that marginalises the story of the 
   other people who occupied those islands--including the Irish, Scots, Welsh 
   and Norsemen--and elevates the English to a central place. Davies has 
   marched from the margins to knock over those blustering mythologisers ... 

Day's original review also named John Howard as having his pro-British pants thoroughly kicked by this book. Even extracts quoted in the blurbs from reviews in the conservative Financial Times and Economist in London laud the seeming debunk of patriotism. One even wonders from such reactions if The Isles, except that it is so hefty, might soon even be approved for a place in Australian school curricula, along with Aboriginal and Other Genocide and Depression Studies.

My difficulty with the view of Day and others like him is that it is plain wrong. There has been no great problem with misleading British (or pre-postmodern Australian) history. "Triumphalism" is easy to say and to accuse others of, but much harder to pin down among millions of words of historical writing over hundreds of years, of varying purposes and degrees of seriousness: "You mythologise, whereas I have insights."