Geoffrey Blainey was a vocal and strenuous participant in those so-called ‘history wars’, but, although I agreed at the seminar with Watson’s recognition of the essential ‘puerility’ of the argument and with Noel Pearson’s later plea that we needed ‘to appreciate the complexity of the past and not reduce history to a shallow field of point scoring’, it seems to me that a proper contemporary appreciation of Blainey’s new book, The Story of Australia’s People: The rise and rise of a new Australia, should not be diverted by either the glib and ultimately meaningless ‘black armband’ or the silly and equally vapid ‘three cheers’ nomenclature. Blainey, in this work at any rate, generally shrugs off the sloganising past. He does this especially through storytelling.

In a celebrated interview with actress Charlotte Rampling, filmmaker Jack Bond asks, ‘What is the essence of French film?’ Rampling laughs at this imponderable question, but answers after a characteristic, considering pause: ‘They [French directors] tell stories in a different way. They don’t try to make stories that have to entertain. They just tell them – stories of people’s lives ...’

In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens, a master storyteller, introduces the illiterate Betty Higden to whom ‘Sloppy’ regularly reads excerpts from the newspaper with great panache and drama. Betty explains that she is not ‘much of a hand at reading ... [but] I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’

Geoffrey Blainey is not half bad either. And he ‘does’ many voices – the voices of the goldfields, the outback, the explorers; the voices of farmers, squatters, ‘tall poppies’, poets, idealists, inventors; of prime ministers, heroes, rogues; the ‘voice’ of drought, Lawson’s ‘red marauder’; the voices of soldiers and leaders in Australia’s many wars; the voices of migrants and their detractors; of priests, politicians, paragons, and paupers. In The Story of Australia’s People, Blainey ‘just tells’ the story. He understands narrative, how it must be disciplined as it unfolds, temptingly revealing this or that side-track and fleetingly appearing faces; how sometimes unsuspected or uninvited voices arise from narrative’s potentially unruly array of possibilities; how, if you are sufficiently aware and skilful, references to hard-won, unpretentious or briefly relevant sources can be woven in to sentences that still maintain their integrity and relevance as story-carriers; how speculation can embroider and intrigue without distorting the essential, known story:

If the [Eureka Stockade] miners had marched on Melbourne, what could Hotham have done? Where would he have found reinforcements for his small force? ... if [Peter] Lalor had been more experienced, and all his miners had remained in the stockade on that first weekend in December 1854 [instead of leaving to spend the night with friends or family], his forces probably would not have been routed. The result of the rebellion would have been undecided and postponed. Perhaps the two leaders would have found a compromise, or perhaps they would have fought another battle in Ballarat or elsewhere ...

Historians, some of them anyway, might find the conditional nature of this passage – ‘if ... probably ... perhaps ... perhaps’ – unacceptable, but this is how story, the ‘stories of people’s lives’, can become lively and enthralling narrative, because lives and events have these penumbral, shadowy, but finally unrealised possibilities. Blainey is fascinated by them and speculates about them: what might have been can be instructive, atmospheric, a moving part of the story, as long as it does not hijack the story itself. His intriguing glance at French colonial ambitions is an example of how much can be suggested or implied by imaginative speculation and reconstruction:

France was now eager to find a new and remote colony ... In 1853 it began to occupy New Caledonia ... thereby [shunning] one of its last opportunities to snatch a small remote portion of this dry continent. Indeed, if the Aborigines even in one region had been more united and less debilitated by diseases, and if they had begun to understand the politics and rivalries of the barely comprehensible world that was half-swallowing them, they could have informally invited the French, thereby conferring on them some legitimacy.

France’s decision to ignore Australia was understandable. Even Colonial Australians took little interest in most parts of their own land ... The effects of this decision, or default, were far-reaching. The huge continent became the sole possession of Britain. Few decisions have had more influence on Australia’s modern history.

Professor Geoffrey Blainey (National Library of Australia/Victorian Collections)Blainey’s method in general is straightforward, chronologically tracing a sometimes dramatic, sometimes complex, but always carefully mapped path through ‘momentous changes, many being unexpected, into the twenty-first century’. As the title suggests, his journey from the ‘stampede for gold in May 1851’ (Chapter 1) to a vision of ‘a continent of hope and opportunity’ (Chapter 25) is a more optimistic progression than is to be found in, say, David Day’s Claiming a Continent: A new history of Australia (1996) which places ‘race at the centre of the Australian story and [links] it to a broader narrative of possession, dispossession and proprietorship’, or in some other versions of the same story. This difference in tone and texture is partly the result of Blainey’s prevailing strain of reasonable optimism – unsurprising given his strenuous role in the black armband arguments – and partly the commitment to narrative. ‘Story’, allied to a fluid, confident prose style, gathers its own momentum and sweeps along, now with some pace, now attending to detail, but never taking time off for essayistic polemic or drum beating of one kind or another. In Homage to Catalonia (1938), one of the great narratives of twentieth-century literature in English, Orwell recognises, in his characteristically no-nonsense fashion, the nature of the narrative beast. Having initially ‘ignored the political side of the war’, he found it was beginning to ‘force itself’ on his attention, and – recognising the potential clash of narrative with polemic – he advises, ‘If you are not interested in the horrors of party politics, please skip.’

In the end, Geoffrey Blainey’s stirring peroration – ‘Rarely if ever in the long history of the same land were two peoples so different in cultures, languages, religions, kinships, weapons, and economic and social life. And yet it is, for both peoples, a continent of hope and opportunity’ – is difficult to endorse in its entirety, and his encouraging narrative can only partially establish its reality. Aborigines, for example, remain critically disadvantaged. Their health and the health of their children is parlous, and their history suffers routine attacks of denial. And although, in the bigger picture, ‘there’s keen delight in what we have’, being told by Pauline Hanson on television that ‘Australia does not welcome refugees’, and seeing former liberal prime ministers and present coalition members scrambling to parade their Trumpism seems more like the dreary ‘rattle of pebbles on the shore’ than the ‘rise and rise’ of a new wave.