Wednesday 5 December 2012

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University by RICHARD HIL

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University
RICHARD HIL
NewSouth Publishing, 2012, 239 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Universities were better in the olden days, says Dr. Richard Hil in Whackademia.  As an Essex University student in the 1970s, Hil joined the Socialist Workers Party (which expanded his political horizons) and the Campaign for Real Ale (which expanded his waistline) whilst his lecturers stimulated his intellectual growth.  With 25 years behind him as an academic in Australian universities, however, he has seen the excitement of higher education stifled by corporatisation and its business model which treats education as a commodity to be sold, a degree as a “passport to a business career”.

The market assault on higher education in Australia was begun by the federal Labor government in the 1980s under the guise of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ and as an attack on ‘elitism’ and a sheltered workshop of pampered scholars who were not paying their way in Australia’s capitalist economy.

Under Labor’s ‘reformers’, the university workplace was redefined by the values of “economic rationalism, commercialisation, managerialism, corporate governance and other outgrowths of neo-liberalism”, says Hil.  Bureaucracy and corporate jargon dominate - all the crud of Key Performance Indicators, performance reviews, ‘quality assurance’, marketing and promotions, and micro-management of academics presided over by all-powerful corporate managers.

In a context of declining government funding, universities search for revenue streams, the most lucrative being full-fee-paying overseas students, whilst entry requirements for domestic students are eased and ‘soft-marking’ and ‘soft assessment’, especially for the semi-literate, compromise quality in the quest to reduce drop-out rates and keep the university’s market share of students, and their dollars, up.

The transformation of universities from places of intellectual passion into dull commercial enterprises designed to serve industry has seen the economic imperatives of the capitalist economy determine which courses survive.  As universities become managed by the corporation for the corporation, the curriculum increasingly suits vocational, market-oriented ends.

As the Business Council of Australia higher education spokesperson and accountant at one of Australia’s largest accountancy firms, demanding a lock-step customer-supplier business ethos, succinctly put it, “I am your major customer – I take 750 of your product each year”.  The liberal arts, especially, are on the endangered list unless they can be tethered to the ‘creative industries’ of visual design, media, publishing and advertising.

For Australia’s 120,000 academics, they have become cogs in a grinding knowledge machine.  Research has become a distant dream as class sizes expand, bureaucratic monitoring and reporting dogs every day and an administrative burden flourishes.  Academics are “overworked, burnt out, not coping, running out of energy, stressed out, not sleeping, and plain knackered”.  The 67,000 casual teachers have the bonus of poor job security.  Meanwhile, like other corporate CEOs, Vice-Chancellors prosper, soaring into the million dollar salary atmosphere.

Hil argues for a return to a university of community, collegiality, fun, soul, interest and delight.  To a republic of ideas and debate where critical thinking and clear communication matter most.  To education for active citizenship in a vibrant democracy.  To a campus that is “critic and conscience” of capitalist society’s unjust status quo.

Academics, like cats, are difficult to herd but, starved of sustenance by government budgets, sedated by forms and tranquilised by bureaucracy, there has been regrettable success in disciplining them.  As Hil’s entertaining book shows, however, there is a way out beyond just complaint – activism, small and large, for education as intellectual discovery, for education for social change.

Sunday 2 December 2012

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution by PETER FITZSIMONS; and EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle by GREGORY BLAKE

EUREKA: The Unfinished Revolution
PETER FITZSIMONS
William Heinemann, 2012, 696 pages, $49.95 (hb)

EUREKA STOCKADE: A Ferocious and Bloody Battle
GREGORY BLAKE
Big Sky Publishing, 2012, 249 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Labor’s Foreign Minister and history buff, Bob Carr, has dismissed it as a ‘local tax revolt’ and the Liberal Party has stoutly ignored it but the political importance of the gold miners’ Eureka Stockade in 1854, the closest thing Australia has had to an armed insurrection, deserves more than the short shrift it gets from Australia’s politicians who are the beneficiaries of the democratic reforms won through armed struggle by working people, as two new books on Eureka by Gregory Blake and Peter Fitzsimons show.

The discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 sucked half the male population of the British colony away from their city and farm jobs and, facing massive wage rises for those left, the squattocracy (the rural ruling class) and the urban capitalists got their colonial government to impose a tax, through a license fee, on the miners to, as Fitzsimons notes, force the diggers back to work for their proper masters.  The tax also pumped a handy £50,000 per month into the government itself, prompting one journalist to note that ‘the Government is the greatest Gold Digger after all’.

Exploited by a tax (paid in advance, gold or no gold), oppressed by police (“uniformed thugs with guns”, says Fitzsimons), chained like beasts to trees and logs if caught without a licence during digger-hunts, denied justice in corrupt courts, their grievances not listened to by government, the tinder was set.  The spark was the connivance of a bent coroner and magistrate in absolving a pub owner and mate from the murder of a miner, and the prosecution of three miners for arson when the pub was torched by angry miners.

When a 12,000-strong miners’ meeting protested by burning their licenses, government officials ordered a license-hunt by mounted police, this time with drawn swords, who arrested seven miners, and by newly-arrived British soldiers with fixed bayonets who fired on the miners.  Incandescent with fury that the government had abandoned all restraint, most miners switched from faith in deferential petitions and ‘moral persuasion’, taking to ‘physical force’ and erecting a defensive stockade on a small hillock called Eureka.

Politicised through English Chartists (working class political radicals), the armed miners united around a manifesto of demands for democratic reforms to Victoria’s parliament of the rich which was elected by just 4,000 propertied men of a total population of a quarter of a million.

Governors La Trobe and Hotham, writes Blake, feared this “conspiratorial democratic political agenda”.  The authoritarian Ballarat Goldfields Commissioner saw demands for the abolition of the license fee as ‘a mere cloak to cover a democratic revolution’, writing of the need to teach a ‘fearful lesson’ about the price of rebellion to any other Victorian democrats.  Hotham had been overheard, as he departed England, to say ‘a little blood-letting would not do the unruly gold-miners any harm’.

When least expecting it (naively thinking the authorities would respect the Sabbath), and consequently with only 120 miners in the stockade, the attack came on Sunday, 3 October, overwhelming the stockade in just twenty minutes.  Around 60 miners were killed, most, notes a rightly indignant Fitzgerald, after resistance had ceased - “the worst of the murderers, for that is what they have become, are the police”.

To justify what Fitzsimons calls its “killing frenzy”, the government tried 13 prisoners for High Treason but could not find a jury of common men willing to convict any of them, so strong was popular sympathy for the miners.  With Governor Hotham’s moral authority listing badly in a sea of popular outrage, Hotham was forced to give the miners reform rather than face revolution, conceding all their demands (abolition of the license fee, granting the miners’ a vote and wider male suffrage not long after).  To ease Hotham’s pain, his own Commission of Inquiry into Eureka also noted that the economic returns from increasingly difficult mining were less than the usual wages the miners could earn and that this would drive them back to their old jobs better than armed troopers.

Democracy, on bourgeois terms, also turned out to be not so bad as feared.  Peter Lalor, leader of the rebels, was elected (minus one arm lost in the battle) to parliament in 1856 where he spent three conservative decades as a Minister of the Crown and strike-breaking mine-owner opposing further democratisation.

Blake, alas, makes little of the politics of Eureka.  His turgid history dismisses the historical relevance and class conflict interpretation of Eureka as driven by the “rigid political ideology” of Marxism but lead-footed doctrine better describes Blake’s own history of Eureka.  It is a myth, Blake says, that poorly armed, “innocent gold miners” were confronted by a “tyrannical government” which “brutally slaughtered” them in a “fearsome massacre” and his aim is to redeem the government, police and soldiers in an “affirmation of Australian nationhood” through Eureka.

Ultimate government responsibility for crushing the revolt was, pleads Blake, a “necessity” when faced with insurrection.  Government officials were poor, helpless cogs in a war dynamic when faced with a political challenge to their rightful authority, whilst the police have been victims of unwarranted “prejudice and vilification”.  The blood-lust behaviour of the soldiers (such as repeated use of the bayonet on the wounded) was “perfectly consistent” with what an army has to do against an “insurgency”.  Blake’s swooning over gun calibres and associated militaria betrays his intention of normalising Australia’s war brutalities.

As for the miners, says Blake, they have been romanticised as underdog heroes.  They brought on their  own heads the state’s military response by aggressively arming for war with guns aplenty and a sturdy fortress.  Fitzsimons shows, however, that the stockade was “a long way from impregnable” and that the rebels’ guns, pikes and theatrical sword props faced a “devastating” firepower disadvantage from the  276 well-armed attackers, including cavalry, with 200 in reserve and 850 more, plus artillery, on the way.

Fitzsimons is not ideologically hamstrung by Blake’s revisionist militarist nationalism although he does share the limitations of the nationalist analytical framework, promoting Eureka, along with the Anzacs at Gallipoli, as part of the ‘birth of a nation’ through bloodletting.

Eureka, in Fitzsimons’ telling, is much more than Blake’s narrow “history of a battle” – it is the history of class struggle.  The conservative columnist, Gerard Henderson, as noted by Fitzsimons, has lauded Eureka as a rising by small businessmen ‘against iniquitous taxes and over-regulation that was stifling their creation of wealth’ but this, whilst technically correct (the miners were independent, petit-bourgeois producers in economic competition with their claim-jumping rivals), misses the point.  The miners united, by manifesto and arms, for economic justice and democratic political rights, as have slave, peasant, national liberation and proletarian rebels, a political process of universal relevance to all oppressed and exploited classes, not just Henderson’s self-employed, small-time capitalists.

Fitzsimons wants his book to be “read like a novel” and this is how it is best read – for the artistic flavour of the drama of a stirring political rebellion by flawed but passionate common people against the power of the privileged.  As Mark Twain put it, Eureka is the ‘finest thing in Australasian history.  It was a revolution … a strike for liberty … a stand against injustice and oppression ... a victory won by a lost battle’.

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC by JOHN HAMILTON

THE PRICE OF VALOUR: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Gallipoli Hero, Hugo Throssell, VC
JOHN HAMILTON
Pan Macmillan, 2012, 393 pages , $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon
 
Stunning his home-town audience of patriotic Australians in 1919 with his statement that ‘the war has made me a Socialist’, Captain Hugo Throssell, one of nine Australian soldiers to win a Victoria Cross for supreme bravery at Gallipoli in 1915, made headlines, and enemies, on the anniversary of the signing of the Allies’ World War 1 peace treaty with Germany, says John Hamilton in his biography of Throssell.

The civic authorities of the town of Northam in Western Australia listened with increasing disbelief as Northam’s own war hero went on to denounce war for enriching armaments makers, war profiteers and rival national capitalist classes in their competition for territory, markets, resources and profits.

Throssell, the privileged son of a conservative State Premier,  had married Katherine Susannah Prichard, the journalist and feminist who went on to fame as a novelist and founder of the Communist Party of Australia.

Throssell, the dashing cavalry officer, who, in the first flush of battle, wrote how it was ‘most glorious’ to see a bayonet charge and what a ‘wonderful thing’ it was to see men running through an artillery bombardment, had become war-weary and disillusioned after seeing his mates killed and after suffering severe mental injury himself.

With what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, Throssell’s days were filled with nervousness and headaches (he had taken a head wound) and his nights were tortured into sleeplessness by what he had seen at Gallipoli and by the death of his brother who had signed up with Hugo in the belief that war was a thrilling adventure.

Prichard’s communism, and her profound love for a handsome, vital, selfless man, helped Throssell make sense of his ghastly war experiences.  Reading Engels may not have been easy – ‘Hell, girl, what the blazes does this mean?’, he would holler – but ‘usually our political discussions ended in love-making’, wrote Prichard.  Throssell, without becoming a party member, accepted Prichard’s political views as his own.

Australia’s political police put Throssell’s radicalisation down to ‘his wife’s influence’, or ‘his mind perhaps having been affected’ by the cerebro-spinal meningitis he contracted during the war.  Throssell’s biographer hedges his bets, saying it is possible that the brain injury Throssell received from a botched, war-time sinus operation made him “more vulnerable and easily influenced”.   Socialism, apparently, can only be understood as a psychological disorder, the product of a weakened mind.

Throssell, however, knew his own mind – on the back of his will he wrote ‘I have never recovered from my 1914-18 experiences’, shortly before committing suicide by his army pistol in 1933.  He also added an appeal that ‘my wife and child get the usual war pension’.  Owing £10,000 with just £10 in the bank, Throssell’s financial disasters during the economic Depression had been exacerbated, writes Hamilton, by his “enemies at work within the government” who helped ensure his economic projects were costly failures, and by conservatives in the Northam Returned Soldiers and Sailors League who got the government to remove Throssell from his job as soldiers’ representative on the government’s Discharged Soldiers’ Settlement Board.

The Repatriation Department added insult to tragedy by disputing the Coroner’s finding that Throssell’s war wounds were the cause of his suicide.  Prichard angrily defended her husband who ‘believed he would be ensuring a pension to me and my son by his last act.  I consider that his “grateful country” made it impossible for my husband to live.  He thought he had to die to provide for his wife and child’.

It was not until 1999 that a “modest memorial the size of a backyard barbecue” was erected to Throssell in Northam by his ‘grateful country’ whilst during the Depression, Throssell had been forced to try to pawn his Victoria Cross but was offered only 10 shillings for it – the ‘price of valour’ for a war hero who had, as his son, Ric, said later when donating Throssell’s medal to People for Nuclear Disarmament, ‘declared his commitment to peace’.

Throssell has not been well served by official history, nor by his biographer, Hamilton, whose conventional war narrative focuses on Throssell the warrior not the socialist and which includes a disapproval of Throssell’s decision to choose a patriotic occasion of military celebration to denounce war – “not the time nor place”, says Hamilton – but what better time or place could there be.  It took political courage and Throssell had just as much of that as he had bravery on the battlefield.