Sir William Keith Hancock was, if not Australia’s greatest historian, then certainly its most conspicuous. Born in Melbourne in 1898, Hancock won a Rhodes scholarship in 1920, read history at Balliol college, and returned to Australia in 1926, proclaimed as ‘The youngest professor in the British Commonwealth’. He wrote extensively on subjects of Empire, and was biographer of South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Later in his career, he was instrumental in the founding of the Australian National University.
Hancock’s greatest achievement is perhaps his Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, a monumental work in two parts, commissioned by Arnold Toynbee and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. For this, he was popularly regarded as the ‘great historian of the Commonwealth’ – an identity born not insubstantially out of his capacity to view the world simultaneously from the ‘Colonial’ and (after his studies at Oxford) ‘Imperial’ perspectives.
Hancock’s most striking observations however, are contained within ‘Australia’, an earlier, and relatively more concise volume, produced by publisher Ernest Benn in 1930. The book appears as part of a global series penned by eminent historians during the inter-war years. It aimed at “a balanced survey, with such historical illustrations as are necessary, of the tendencies and forces, political, economic, intellectual, which are moulding the lives of contemporary states”.
Hancock organizes his survey in five volumes, but there are three distinct themes which I see emerging from his text. The first is that of Australian continental Discovery – this deals with the early movements of White settlers, their interactions with the Aboriginal people, and most significantly, the geographical strengths and limitations which guided population spread in the early 19th Century. The second theme is of Politics – the growth of Trade Unions, their relationship to a rising Labor party, the opposing ‘parties of resistance’, and the Nationalist and Country party movements. The third is Culture. By culture I do not mean the art, music and literature of Australia (although this does get brief mention in the book’s closing pages), but rather, the culture of a people. This has to do with the coalescence of all the practical matters, historical circumstances, and civilizational antecedents that shape what Hancock’s identifies as the uniquely Australian disposition. In this effort – the Toquevillian attempt to frame the character of a ‘new’ people, Hancock singularly excels.
It might surprise the 21st Century reader to see an Australian historian of a full century passed refer to White settlement as the ‘Invasion of Australia’. That is the term Hancock uses, however it is not clear that he connotes the same destructive impression of the founding of modern Australia that many today would imply. Hancock, I think, uses the term to describe the geographical sprawl of the first white settlers, in rolling their cattle and caravans over Australia’s vast inward spaces. The ‘Invasion’ is of the land itself, not of the lives of the Aboriginal people, who Hancock nonetheless clearly sympathizes with.
In tracing this ‘invasion’, Hancock offers insight into the initial lack of development of Northern Australia. It is the direction of flow of Australia’s great Rivers, he argues, which incentivized the first explorers to push settlement South and West from Sydney. The need to find a meeting point (and eventually an ocean outlet) for the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee, in the manner of America’s Mississippi, drove exploration in the direction of those great water systems.
Hancock’s most meticulous research in this aspect of the book appears to be in his evaluations of seasonal rainfall over the different regions of the Australian continent. Here he makes dramatic use of an ongoing comparison to the ‘frontier push’ of the United States. He illustrates how – absent a revolution in farming technology – Australia’s interior presents a bare fraction of the potential prosperity of the American frontier. There are no riches to be found at the fringes of the Australian push into western plains. For this reason the Australian population compresses in on itself relatively quickly. It is urbanized, and then regionalized. The push is into the urban sprawl of Sydney and Melbourne, and upwards to Brisbane. As far as new agricultural frontiers go, after sheep farming’s establishment there is some prosperity to be found in the sugar cane farming regions of North Queensland. But as Hancock points out, there is scarce money to be made without the assisting arm of government protectionism.
Here he reaches an extraordinary inflection point in his comparative historical-economic analysis of America and Australia. Hancock claims (and his claim is born out by history), that the American instinct for chance, fortune, and entrepreneurism, as compared to the Australian instinct for collectivization, risk-mitigation, and defacto socialism, is in large part generated by geographical circumstance. Burnt into early Australia’s sensibility, he feels, is an awareness of the inhospitable interior of the country. The Australian man, faced with the option to advance alone on the frontier, or retreat to the collective safety of the city, in reality has little chance of success at enterprise on a barren continent. The American man, on the contrary, has decidedly better odds. It is in his favour to chance his arm, and in that favour so this enterprising will cascades forth in abundance to his heirs. Nationally, inter-generationally, this enshrines Freedom as America’s cry, and Fairness as Australia’s.
Much of the book’s content flows in to, or out from, these central observations. There is a coda, however, as far as Politics is concerned, and that is in the area of foreign policy.
Hancock was writing in 1932, barely a decade after a belligerent Prime Minister Hughes went to Versailles invoking the vainly-shed blood of the ANZAC Generation, and argued for Australia’s interests as Australia. Capturing the sentiment of the time, Hancock fleshes out the necessary progression in the character of a colonial, versus a national foreign policy for Australia. His most prescient observation is that the Pacific – in which Australia’s future clearly lies – can in the 20th Century, not remain a theatre isolated from European (read: global) geopolitics. This is striking. Consider that the current war in Ukraine daily rebalances the scales of conflict potential over Taiwan. Here Hancock sounds a warning. He argues that shared national similarities are not shared national interests. The United States, he says, will not automatically rise after Britain as an all-time guarantor of Australian security in the Pacific, just because Los Angeles’ climate is similar to Sydney’s, or even because the nations speak the same language, watch the same movies, and farm the same crops. Real interests are real interests, and Australia must be as self-sufficient in defense as she possibly can be.
At the turn of the 19th into the 20th Century, Australian self-determination in defence meant the colonization of Papua New Guinea, amidst the threat of rising German imperialism. As Hancock recounts, the premeditated fortification (through political allegiance, Imperial co-operation, or unilateral military operations) of the archipelago that ring-fences Australia, was taken seriously by Colonial and early Federation governments.
Perhaps Hancock wasn’t trying to chill the spirits of his readers in 1930, but the brief closing paragraph to his extraordinary book is hard to read without a sense of foreboding today:
“One hundred years ago Australia was still a gaol. Some of her greatest cities are less than a century old. The poets have seen truly that Australia’s life is in the future. It may extend through European centuries; it may be short. Australia lies opposite an awakening Asia. She shares a civilization whose destiny is beyond prediction.”
Benjamin Crocker
July, 2022
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Benjamin Crocker is a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation Postgraduate Scholar at St John’s College, Annapolis. He is a constitutional fellow at the American Conservative, and writes for The Spectator Australia. Ben has previously taught at The University of Sydney, conducted the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and recorded new music for radio, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC Classic FM).
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