It is indicative of Ward’s blindness to feminist historiography that he does not bother – in the current issue of the journal Historical Studies devoted to revisiting The Australian Legend – to refute the attacks made on his work by Anne Summers and Miriam Dixson. This is all the more notable given that Ward, in this article published twenty years after his book was first released, is so keen to put the knife into Humphrey McQueen and his (male) ‘urban history’ attackers. Ward still persists in claiming, twenty years later, that his book shows ‘that from ancient Rome until today men have been impelled to romanticise and identify with ‘outback’ or ‘frontier virtues’… It never occurs to Ward to wonder what women identify with.

Yet Ward has a case. Many of his critics have missed his point, which as he said in the original edition was to trace the development of a ‘national mystique’ that grew up ‘among the bush workers in the Australian pastoral industry’. Ward has never claimed that his legend applied to the majority of Australians, so that much of the criticism made by urban historians, in particular by Ronald Lawson in his Brisbane in the 1890s (UQP, 1973) is certainly wide of the mark.

In the same issue of Historical Studies, J.B. Hirst has come up with a much more telling critique of Ward, in an article titled ‘the Pioneer Legend’ Hirst writes:

That the legend which Ward describes exists is unquestionable; he is misleading, however, when he implies that this was the only national legend… Those who feel that Australia has been made according to the legend would be better advised to establish the other legends, stereotypes and symbols Australians have made or adopted. The pioneer legend is one such…

Hirst makes clever use of the writing of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to show that they can just as easily be seen to celebrate the ‘pioneer legend’ (those who first worked and settled the land - and were in some sense owners) as against Ward’s ‘Australian Legend’ (in many cases the pioneers’ employees).

However, the debate is really more complex than that. Ward’s 1958 book, which has now sold over 40,000 copies, is in itself an historical artifact, and Oxford University Press’s lavish reissue of it confirms that status. While Ward may not have made ridiculous claims for the legend, other writers, both ‘popular’ and ‘scholarly’, have taken such a fancy or such a dislike to the concept that it has captured their imagination. In short, the Australian legend. along with the argument about the reasons for Australia’s foundation, has become the centre of a major historiographical debate in a country where such debates are virtually unknown.

Ward’s book, and the praise and attacks that it generated, have all been preoccupied with the search for our national identity. In the last twenty years this theme has dominated Australian history and - I submit - almost stifled it. When David Walker dares to question the literary nationalism of Vance Palmer in his Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cu/rural Identity (ANUP, 1976) he is attacked by Judah Waten (in the Age) for demeaning one of the greats of the Australian legend.

There are new and more fundamental debates emerging in Australian history. Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police has in the four years since it was published sold almost as many copies as Ward’s book in twenty years and such sales certainly cannot be explained by textbook settings alone. Social mobility and the class structure are also emerging as key concerns among what one might loosely term the ‘stratificationist’ and ‘Marxist’ strands of Australian history, politics and sociology. Ward’s book has little relevance to these debates.

In 1958, Russel Ward claimed, and still claims today, that:

if we seek the source of the national self-image we must look, almost exclusively, to the bush. Poets, painters and drinkers in public houses recognise Ned Kelly, or Ben Hall, or the ‘Man from Snowy River’, or even the old digger’ plying his poker machine in a city RSL Club as symbols or embodiments of Australian characteristics.

I can see it now. Kate Jennings, Brett Whiteley and the jackeroos of Chinchilla (they have jilleroos there too) all gathering at the local RSL to recite the ‘Man from Snowy River’.

There is still no shortage of yarns in the bush, but they are pretty light on pervasive legends. Ward’s book achieved the influence it did because it pre-dated general popular and scholarly recognition that ours was an increasingly urban society. In 1958 the Australian legend still had some residual evidence going for it – waggies (and even gypsies) could occasionally be seen on the road to Gundagai – but no more. This legend is dying. The swaggies have been replaced by sexist young men in panel vans replete with surf boards and sometimes accompanied by female friends (the bumper sticker ‘Don’t laugh, your daughter may be in here’ says it all). We would do well to take Hirst’s advice and set to work on other legends and stereotypes. If the legend lives on, it will be on the office tables of the bourgeoisie, as they thumb through Oxford University Press’s handsome illustrated reissue of Ward’s book at a not unreasonable $19.95.