MARK McKENNA The Shortest History of Australia. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress

Mark McKenna’s short history is both broad and nuanced, demanding a new understanding of our country’s past.

It’s a shame Pauline Hansen and her supporters are unlikely to read this book. If they did, they would realise that Australian history is a mass of contradictions.

Citing Noel Pearson’s description of Australia having three strands to its history – First, Second and Third Nations, representing Indigenous, British Colonial and Multicultural – McKenna argues that we have concentrated on the Second, a linear history of settler progress that ignores the ‘founding lie’ that the land was not taken by force.

The first chapter closes with a demand for an ‘entirely new understanding’ of our country’s past and the captivating chapter titles that follow – ‘From Ubirr’, ‘The Island Dilemma’, ‘Taking the Land’, ‘War and Memory’, ‘Fire and Water’, ‘Fault Lines’, ‘Homelands’, ‘Facing North’ and ‘The Big Picture’ – signal a broad perspective.

Ubirr in Kakadu National Park takes us far from Botany Bay to ancient rock paintings and archeological discoveries of artefacts used for seed grinding at nearby Madjedbe, proving that human settlement began 65,000 years ago. ‘From this vantage point,’ McKenna writes,

conventional views of Australian history – so often locked in tragic tales of stoic British settlers fanning out from the southeast corner of the continent – are turned on their head.

We need to be reminded that we are a continent rather than a country, and that we existed in European imagination for nearly 2000 years as a mythical Great South Land before seventeenth-century Dutch navigators reached the northern coastlines of what became Terra Australis. Even then (as McKenna notes) ‘the continent was never claimed in one moment’, but after Arthur Phillip ‘different sections were possessed in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion’: a second colony in Hobart (1804), then Port Essington on the northern tip of Arnhem Land (1823), and the western third of the continent in 1829. Overlooked until later were Melbourne and Adelaide.

That settlement meant dispossession of the Aboriginal inhabitants and their removal, often termed ‘dispersal’, in the one-sided frontier wars, has been suppressed in traditional settler histories. Australians have long searched for an identity and in the early twentieth century, loyalties were divided between the newly federated country and Britain. Imperial loyalty drove our rush to support Britain at the declaration of the First World War, and Gallipoli has become increasingly sanctified in recent years as the birthplace of the nation. However, as McKenna suggests, ‘fighting war and remembering war require different mentalities’, and he produces wonderful evidence to support his case.

Richard Casey, subsequently a high-level diplomat, Liberal MP and Governor General (as Lord Casey), served at Gallipoli and initially wrote ‘we had no idea why we were here’, before hardening his attitude and dehumanising the enemy:

The number of dead Turks is something wonderful – the slopes in front of our trenches are literally covered with Turks.

The loss of life at Gallipoli was enormous as the figures quoted show: the Ottoman Empire 86 692, Britain 21 255, France 10 000, Australia 8709, New Zealand 2779 and India 1358. It wasn’t just about us, it was an imperial campaign, an Allied folly. Many Australian soldiers enlisted in a gung-ho spirit looking forward to the greatest adventure of their lives. Private William George Murray might have been one of these men, and wrote home of enjoying killing Turks. After the war he had a far less distinguished career than Casey. Joining the Northern Territory Police, he led what became known as the Coniston massacre northwest of Alice Springs in 1928, which killed between 70 and 150 Aboriginal people.

Drought, fire and floods are a constant warning of the perils of our climate and thus the ‘Fire and Water’ chapter discusses geography and ecology; how we have adapted to our environment and how we have used and often abused it. In McKenna’s words:

The early explorers’ dreams of a vast inland sea had proved to be nothing more than fantasy, but governments and settlers were undeterred. In an increasingly mechanised rural economy there was land clearing and drilling for artesian water in Queensland, the overuse of bore water in southwest Western Australia, worsening salinity, especially in the remote Mallee region of Victoria and South Australia, western New South Wales and Western Australia, the leaching of soil nutrients due to excessive use of phosphates, the pollution of rivers and waterways across the continent, and the granting of land to farmers and returned soldiers that was not viable for farming.

‘Australia was conquered in the name of two empires: Christ and the King’ and the major fault line was not geological, but sectarian. In contrast to the Protestant majority, the Catholic Irish comprised a quarter of the convicts transported until 1868, and around 30 per cent of Australia’s population at the time of the First World War. Their empire was held to be Christ and the Pope, and when Catholic schools were established in each colony in the late nineteenth century, it became possible to live

from birth to death within a distinct and separate Catholic culture, involving not only education and church, but also business, sporting and social networks.

Religious sectarianism reached its peak at the time of the conscription referendums of 1916 and 1917, when Prime Minister Billy Hughes and Irish-born Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix were on opposite sides of the debate, but it continued as a divisive element in Australian society and politics until the 1960s.

‘Modern Australia has always been a migrant society,’ McKenna writes in the ‘Homelands’ chapter, and the 90 per cent Anglo majority who in the 1940s might have thought of themselves as ‘true Australians’ are now a dwindling minority. As 7.5 million people have migrated to Australia from more than 180 countries since 1945, the One Nation party will seemingly be pushing its monoculture barrow up a steep hill.

In a concluding note, McKenna comments that ‘there was no point in writing another chronological history’ and so decided to say ‘more about some things rather than a little about many things’. The ‘things’ are about ‘connections between histories of place and the larger narratives of nationhood’ and he adds:

I’m always struck by the richness and variety of Australian history, especially its Indigenous histories, which I’ve included in every chapter of this book. This seemed all the more important after the failure of the 2023 referendum, which rejected the proposal to recognise First Nations Australians in the constitution by establishing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

The Shortest History of Australia is the twenty-first in an impressive list of shortest histories published by Black Inc. Some critics will label McKenna’s book ‘black armband history’. It’s definitely not of the white-picket-fence variety, but honest history at its best.

Mark McKenna The Shortest History of Australia Black Inc. 2025 HB 294pp $39.99

Bernard Whimpress is a historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book as a photographer is North Adelaide Golf Course: A document 2026.

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Tags: Australian environment, Australian history, colonial history, Coniston massacre, First Nations history, frontier wars, Gallipoli, immigration, muliculturalism, sectarianism, Ubirr