There are few words more slippery than ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’. Another new book, by the American historian Helena Rosenblatt (The Lost History of Liberalism: From ancient Rome to the twenty-first century), shows how they can mean diametrically different things to different audiences. In France, liberalism favours limited government, and in the United States, just the opposite. In Australia, which Rosenblatt barely mentions, capitalisation alone, ‘big L’ or ‘little l’, can make all the difference. In the November issue of this magazine, the editor spoke of Australian art galleries and theatres as ‘a refuge for … liberal values’, but not, apparently, the liberal values Kemp writes about.

Left: Henry Parkes (1815-1896), foremost leader of Australian Liberalism and five times Premier of NSW. Right: Earl Grey (1802-1894), a British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies

Kemp acknowledges the problem – ‘We find people who are more or less liberal in most political organisation and social institutions’ – and he explains his use of big and little ‘L’, though his explanation raises more questions than it answers. Thus, the Liberal Party is easily conflated with the ‘the liberal project’, as it began in Australia in 1788. Ultimately, I think the result reads better as a work of political philosophy, seen through the prism of historical narrative, than as history in any strict sense. Insofar as it is history, it is a story told many times already, though that is not to say it cannot be told again, with deeper learning and in new circumstances.

Melbourne University Publishing describes the projected five volumes as a ‘landmark’ study. Whether as political philosophy or as history, no such project could be more timely. The world press is full of argument about ‘the crisis of the liberal order’. What could be more useful now than a detailed stocktake of the impact of Australian liberalism (whatever it is) from its first arrival, as a way of understanding where we go from here? Given that the crisis of the liberal order is also a crisis of democracy this first volume ought to be particularly urgent, because it sets in context the first instalment of Australian democracy (manhood suffrage), in the 1850s.

This is also an admirably bold project, and its boldness appears from the start, in the subtitle of this first volume: ‘How Australians won their freedom, 1788–1860’. For Kemp, the freedom had three main components. The earliest (1852) was the ending of convict transportation to the eastern colonies, brought about largely by protest movements under liberal leadership. However, Western Australia received convicts from 1850 to 1868. The second freedom was substantial self-government within the British empire, won by most of the colonies in the 1850s but, once again, by Western Australia only in 1890. The third was manhood suffrage, although that also came later to both Queensland and Western Australia. Even in the other colonies and even among men there were restrictions in practice (my point, not Kemp’s). The liberal leadership, doubting the vote-worthiness of illiterate men and of men on the move, imposed stringent residence requirements and a literate voting process (the ballot).

Obviously then, ‘Australians’ does not mean everyone. It does not mean women. When Frank Crowley’s New History of Australia appeared in 1974, it included as a significant innovation a short, stand-alone index entry for ‘women’, positioned, as Marilyn Lake famously remarked, between ‘wombats’ and ‘wool’. Crowley did not list ‘men’, because there was no need. Nearly half a century after Crowley, Kemp has done the same. Women generally have little airtime in this book. A count of the personal names in the index and among the ‘biographical notes’ at the end of the volume suggests that individual women account for about four per cent of the individuals mentioned.

Women at the first state election comparing notes, Brisbane 1907 (photograph via State Library of Queensland/Wikimedia Commons)

So far, for Kemp, Mary Wollstonecraft is the only woman, dead or alive, supposed to have written anything useful about gender and liberalism during the period in question in Australia. And yet taxpayer-funded scholarship for two or three generations, some of it dispensed over Dr Kemp’s signature, while he was education minister, tells a wholly different story. Given that the same issue is central to the current ‘crisis of the liberal order’ and given the larger purposes of this publication, it might surely have been given more room.

Wherever there was manhood suffrage, Aboriginal men could register and vote, and a few did. All the same, Indigenous people cannot be included in the ‘Australians’ of the subtitle, either. On the subject of race relations, Kemp declares that the British settlement of Australia involved ‘a huge human cost’, but it was fundamental all the same to the ‘liberal project’. The cost did not come from invasion itself but from the fact that ‘[m]any of the settlers … did not share the moral codes of the leaders of their governments’.

Altogether, then, the ‘Australians’ of this volume are a limited group, and we might say that the trickle-down effect of the freedom they won in the 1850s was limited, too, and this in spite of the fact that, by Kemp’s account, egalitarianism and ‘the dignity of, and respect for, all people’ has been central to liberal thinking. The reader might admire the easy, expansive style of Kemp’s writing, but just where we need moral subtlety most of all, it seems to go missing.

David Kemp (photograph via Melbourne University Press)In other words, the argument, though bold, is by no means unflinching. It also glances aside from the difficult question of liberalism and violence – the violence intrinsic to liberalism as a means of government. Not only invasion but also the transportation of convicts depended on force, including violence, as all penal systems must do. As an aside, note that Liberal governments in Australia retained capital punishment long after others had given it up. The question of liberalism and violence is another of those exquisitely difficult issues driving the present ‘world crisis’, a crisis of mobile populations, fluid frontiers, and urgent adjustment of national and international law. A truly landmark study would prefigure at least a little of that somehow.

Dr Kemp makes issues such as these into speed bumps on the forward progress of liberalism, when they are surely fundamental to the road map. In the end, though this is a highly ambitious project, it is hard to see how the liberalism here described can be very helpful for ‘the liberal project’, present and future, even on a national scale, let alone for Australia’s position in the larger, but at the same time increasingly small, world. Learned in its own way, it seems to be too narrowly imagined and, ultimately, not bold enough for the present crisis.