David Day (1) (1949–)

David Day is the historian who has so memorably written biographies of Australia's war-time prime ministers Ben Chifley and John Curtin, and more recently of Paul Keating. His latest book is the remarkable story of Maurice Blackburn, a name well-known as Australia's leading compensation and social justice firm of lawyers, but perhaps not so well-known as the founder of the firm.

These days when the political class is full of lawyers and economists, it is salutary to read that Maurice Blackburn was the first-ever barrister to be elected to parliament as a Labor MP. He arrived there at a time when the Labor movement was defined by its working-class and trade union constituency. But though his origins were in the gentry (and he looks the part in the cover image, eh?) Blackburn had no easy entry to his profession, and struggled financially throughout his life.

Born in Inglewood in 1880 to a father who was a bank manager and an ambitious mother from the squattocracy, Blackburn might have had a comfortable middle-class life, but his father died of typhoid when Maurice was just a boy, leaving his mother Thomasann a widow with four children under seven at a time when social welfare was minimal. She had something in the way of investments which enabled her to resume life in Melbourne, and to send Maurice to the Toorak Prep school and then to Melbourne Grammar, but from the age of 16, he was expected to support his mother and siblings and so he went to work as a law clerk in 1896.

His journey towards the law degree took some years. He had to do an arts degree first, which he almost completed but he failed maths and couldn't graduate. Day suggests that his unimpressive academic record had a number of causes, not the least of which was that he was working to pay not only his university fees, but also the cost of keeping his brother James in the Kew Asylum after his mental illness escalated beyond his mother's capacity to manage it. But from 1901 Maurice left the law firm and worked as a tutor, which enabled him to become more involved in university life and develop his ideals of civil liberty and democratic participation in decision-making. With a stint teaching at Wadhurst (Melbourne Grammar's Prep School) and then at the Gippsland College in Sale, Maurice might well have had a career in teaching, but he recognised that even when he was finally able to complete the arts degree, he was never going to be able to compete with the preference for Oxford or Cambridge headmasters. The death of his brother was the catalyst for him to return to Melbourne and enrol in law school. He graduated in 1909, and after a year as an articled clerk, he was finally admitted to practise in 1910, aged 30.

This biography is a straightforward chronological account of Blackburn's life, and Day is scrupulous about acknowledging where the gaps are. So Maurice's love life remains opaque until his political activities bring him into contact with Doris Hordern. What is fascinating about this bio is the historical context that Day provides: the social milieu in a Melbourne very different to today. These were the early years of Federation, and of the emerging Labor movement, and because Australians felt confident about progressive reforms that made life better for ordinary people, Melbourne had a lively cultural and politically aware milieu. The Victorian Socialist Party held multiple activities to engage and educate people: lectures and debates with excursions and family picnics to lure attendance. Maurice had made a name for himself through his advocacy in the Gas Consumers League, making gas prices an election issue in 1911 when the threat of nationalisation was enough to make them reduce prices.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/12/29/maurice-blackburn-champion-of-the-people-by-...… (més)

How does a state acquire proprietorship over a territory, especially if there are people living there already? David Day makes the case that this has been the central political issue in Australia’s history, and it is a question that underlies many contemporary and historical national struggles, from the wars in Palestine and Bosnia to Aboriginal demands in Canada today.
Day’s history reveals many facts of Australian history that I was unaware of, starting with the fact that Europeans searched for it for centuries before Cook confirmed its existence as a continent in the 1770s. It seems astonishing that with sailing expeditions from the 1400s, and occasional contact, that it should take so long, but explorers rarely ventured far into the vast and dangerous southern seas. Having made the discovery, they saw little profit in establishing a remote sea port. The main interest of Europeans was to keep their rivals from benefitting, disregarding the fact that the land was already occupied. Hence the decision to deport convicts to establish a colonial presence.
But one small colony cannot establish a right of proprietorship over a continent. Day lays out the principles of ownership by discovery, conquest, occupancy or moral right, and says that Britain and Australia have gone through all of these in their claims to be lawful owners of the continent. Often these have come into conflict. The 200-year campaign to extend European occupancy, which still exists mainly in a few concentrated areas around the periphery, conflicts with Aboriginal ownership. Australian policies have denied Aboriginal moral rights by saying that Aboriginal people had no recognized property and were a degenerate, declining population anyway. Settlers reinforced this by driving them off their lands, often violently and sometimes through deliberate massacre as late as the middle of the twentieth century.
By portraying European and especially British cultures as superior, Britain and Australia attempted to justify the moral claim to ownership. To strengthen this claim, Australia tightly restricted immigration, particularly from Asian and southern European countries until the end of the second world war. This was critical to prevent nearby Asians from establishing an occupancy claim to parts of the continent where they had long had trading contacts and small settlements. Australia’s restrictive immigration policy, however, conflicted with the need to populate and occupy vast territories, so much of its foreign policy was designed to encourage British, northern European and white American immigration.
This overt racism broke down in the face of the need to expand population by the mid-twentieth century, when the shifting interests of both Britain and the USA turned away from the remote, expensive and unproductive colony that no longer fit geopolitical priorities. Needing to attract more foreign investment to support industrial development in a new economy, racial discrimination became harder to justify, and Australian policies shifted. A new economic boom after WWII was financed by growing Asian countries and their desirable markets, so Australia now identifies as an Asian country. In keeping with this more liberal approach is a growing acceptance of multiculturalism. Ironically, a new identification with Aboriginal history and peoples is now used to support a continued claim to proprietorship in the face of new interest by China, Japan and Indonesia. Conceding actual rights to land through a treaty with Aboriginal peoples has proven difficult, however, and a new White Australia movement is pushing the Conservative Party to anti-immigration and anti-Aboriginal policies.
Day tells a history of Australia that is soundly researched and academically based, but interesting and readable. While the focus is on government policy and personalities, he fills it in with descriptions of the living conditions, women’s and workers’ movements, and with the story of Aboriginal resistance to colonialism. The book is well written and insightful, and leads to a more critical view of our own Canadian colonialism, where we have used similar themes in justifying the Franco-British presence and protecting it against territorial Americans.… (més)

This book is exactly like Antarctica itself: it's big, it's daunting, and requires commitment to finish from end to end. But it's also extremely well-written and never uninteresting. I agree with some of the other comments here that a map would have been helpful, but I found David Day to be a terrific writer and an extremely thorough researcher. My own family was part of the Sandefjord whaling industry operating out of Stewart Island in New Zealand, so I especially enjoyed the chapters involving the Norwegian efforts in Antarctic exploration (every time I read "Vestfold Hills" a smile came to my face).

5 stars.… (més)