Review of Beverley Kingston, 'A History of New South Wales' (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pb ISBN 0 521 54168-9, pp. x, 299.
In 2006, Beverley Kingston, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales, offered the early twenty-first century her very human and wise perspectives on the white peoples' experience of their daily life in New South Wales, from the arrival of the First Fleet to the present. Later in the year she would do the same in a very personal discussion - at unusual length - with Quentin Dempster on television in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's perspectives programme, 'State Line'. Her book, published earlier, 'A History of New South Wales', is the first history of the premier state to have been issued in over a century. It is also both political and social, cultural and insightful, as to many of the events which we tend to list in somewhat perfunctory fashion. The treatment is, perhaps, much of what might have been expected from a reflective historian who has also written well about the experiences of women in work in Australia, we well as the witty and perceptive Basket, 'Bag and Trolley: A Short History of Shopping in Australia' (1994).
The Vietnam Experience and the Australian Folk's New Legend
In 1979 I saw the film, 'The Deer Hunter'. As long as I can remember, I've had great personal difficulty with violence in any shape or form and this movie was extremely violent, based in large measure on the effect of the Vietnam War on a group of American friends. An early scene in the movie saw the ominous 'thud, thud, thud' of several helicopters coming through the jungle clearing, and the sound reverberated through my being. It was unnerving, frightening, terrifying and this was the mere suggestion of things to come. The initial impulse was to walk out of the theatre there and then, but I forced myself to stay believing that I had some sort of duty to know something of the horrors of war. This is what it's like for many 'baby boomers'. They have had no experience of war. At the conclusion of the movie I walked back outside into busy George Street, into the brilliant Sydney sunshine, trembling inwardly and shaking outwardly, incredulous that the city was carrying on regardless and quite oblivious to my fractured psyche. How on earth was it for the actual people who had experienced such terror? Barry Heard's book 'Well Done, Those Men', has a similar profound effect on those who read it.