Thomas Keneally, in the third volume of his long-arc Australian history told from the perspectives of both the great and the humble – the series title, Australians, is meant to convey something of a demotic history-from-below ambition – now propels this story forward. In Flappers to Vietnam: A Time of Wars, Change and Social Revolution (the tagline could in reality describe any fifty years in the past five hundred of world history), he takes us from the interwar years and the rise of both communism and fascism, to World War II and its Cold War aftermath, before sketching out the generational rifts animating the 1960s that fissured around the time of the Vietnam War into open conflict. It is the story of this isolated Anglo-Celtic culture’s encounter with modernism, no less; of the direct antecedents of contemporary Australia. And it is a rich and enthralling subject.

The familiar tableaux of convicts and marines, explorers and Diggers has been replaced in this volume by a gallery of politicians such as Robert Menzies and John Curtin; artists such as Norman Lindsay and Sidney Nolan; Don Bradman and his nemesis, Douglas Jardine. The large role of World War II in shaping that society, or at least defending it – determining what it would not be – is honoured by the story of that towering yet turbulent military figure, General Thomas Blamey. Many of the individual biographies that Keneally favours as an organisational principle have been told elsewhere; the challenge is to integrate them into an arbitrary temporal span (1920–66) and to make sense of it historically.

That this is also to a large extent the historical backdrop to Keneally’s own autobiography is signalled by a few clunky personal interventions on the part of ‘the author’. It is cheering, and invigorating, to see the story of modern Australia given shape, coherence, and significance by a writer – a novelist and amateur historian – of Keneally’s stature. But it is not a sparkling writerly performance. The prose has a hurried – now and then a weary – quality. Given the tremendous amount of historical material that Keneally has assimilated and integrated into his tale, perhaps it is understandable that there is a lack of nuance in the telling. A routine, and even slightly bureaucratic, tone clings to the prose; a strange quality to find in the work of a Booker Prize novelist and screenwriter.

One of the most endearing features of the narrative is the focus it gives to the changing role of women, flagged by the Flappers of the title. It is strange, therefore, to see this theme adumbrated in such lacklustre writing:

Factory girls adopted the style of the flapper to the extent that they could. The manifestation was seen as decadent by feminists such as the remarkable Edith Cowan ... The ‘flapper’ vulgarised women and was undermining what had been achieved, Edith Cowan believed. Some could see the benefits of the new woman, however, whoever she was ... Since the flapper reached Australia by way of the flicks, there was no country town that was not affected by the phenomenon.

Later, on a related subject, Keneally asks: ‘Were women’s opportunities as cancelled by the onset of peace as is generally argued?’

Such passages reveal a writer struggling for the mot juste and for a relaxed yet incisive narrative style. ‘To the extent that they could’ is at once self-evident and stiff. Terms such as ‘manifestation’, ‘phenomenon’, and the curious ‘cancelled’ are taken from the lexicon of bureaucracy or management. ‘Some could see’ is unaccountably imprecise and ‘whoever she was’ inexcusably vague, while the use of single quotations over flapper in one instance and not others throws up an unfortunate hurdle. There is not enough attention, in this and many other passages, to the finer quality of the text. 

In the first volume of this series, published in 2009, Keneally foreshadowed the biographical method that he pursues in the new book. He aims to ‘tell the stories of a number of Australians’ representing each period, and selects them to ‘identify major aspects and dynamisms of the Australian story ... I also hope that through following these histories of particular, though sometimes obscure, individuals, and by examining infrequently reported aspects of the lives of the well-known, I have managed to cast a light on at least some of the mysteries of the Australian soul.’ One of his key sources has been the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

The approach serves him well, to varying degrees, in Flappers to Vietnam. In chapter five, titled ‘Japan Ascendant’, Keneally decants the story of maverick journalist and Asia watcher Peter Russo, who spent much of the decade to 1941 in Japan and wrote informed though sympathetic commentary about Japanese militarism. The story casts an oblique perspective on Asian-Australian relations of the period and makes an interesting counterpoint to the narrative of the Pacific War. But the risk of this kind of method is that it can result in pastiche. To flesh out the story of Australian involvement in the Spanish Civil War, for instance, Keneally introduces several cameos in a sentence or two; their presence adds more clutter than light. All we really learn about the evanescent Aileen Palmer, who appears on page 127 only to vanish after two sentences, is that she was on the front lines for two years in Teruel in Aragon, and was remembered thus by the British writer Winifred Bates: ‘She comes in looking very rosy and well; dressed in corduroy trousers, muddy boots, and an enormous old sheepskin coat; she reminds me of one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan.’ The description, with its catalogue of small details, has charm, but as we have no idea about Palmer’s age, former occupation, motivation, or fate, it fails to fix this character in the pageant of history and does nothing to illuminate the ‘mysteries of the Australian soul’.

Many of these vignettes are lacking in detail, density, and any sense of human roundness. The story has a more satisfying sense of solidity when Keneally is dealing with political figures such as Menzies and Santamaria, Curtin and Calwell, and even the ill-fated Harold Holt. There are also some strange lacunae. The period saw an expansion of Australian universities as part of a deliberate policy of the erudite yet feline Robert Menzies, but there is little sense of the postwar efflorescence of education in Flappers to Vietnam. The conflict between left- and right-wing writers, artists, and intellectuals percolates through this volume taking on a variety of forms. But there is no mention of the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax or of the role of journals such as Meanjin, Overland, and Quadrant as incubators of intellectual life and polemical antagonists. The nation produced three Nobel Laureates between 1920 and 1966 – Howard Florey, John Eccles, and Macfarlane Burnet – yet not one of them is worthy of mention. Patrick White, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1973 and had by 1966 published five of his most important novels, including Voss (1957), receives only the most banal and cursory mention.

In his pursuit of the Australian soul, Thomas Keneally has given less attention than the period deserves to the achievements of the Australian mind. Even popular history needs a touch of refinement.