At a Guild forum on Aboriginal Welfare and Multiculturalism some weeks ago, a student member of Resistance asked the somewhat unfairly treated guest speaker, Wilson Tuckey, why John Howard complained of a ‘black arm band’ view of history, a term first coined by a ‘right wing radical historian.’ What interested me was not the question, but the description of Geoffrey Blainey as a ‘right wing radical.’ The description struck me as both unfair and ignorant, especially in light of Blainey’s 1975 work, Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia.

Blainey begins with the arrival of the first Aboriginals. Through accident and design from the stepping stones in South East Asia the first Australians embarked upon process exploration and discovery, creating over thousands of years ‘hundreds of fluid republics.’ These republics spread over vastly different terrain and environment, each deploying different hunting and gathering techniques, divided from their neighbours by geography, language, mythology or blood.

From their arrival Blainey charts the environmental impact of the first Australians, the introduction of their technology favoured some and endangered others; from the bush fly to marsupial tigers. Their greatest environmental impact, argues Blainey, came from the use of fire. Fire was a symbol of the aboriginals ability to shape their environment, to model and mould it to suit them. Fire altered the vegetation, it ‘turned forest into..open country, and scrub land into grasslands’ increasing the supply of food and the population of the first Australians. Blainey argues this shatters the myth of aborigines as prisoners of their land, prisoners of a static environment with static natural resources. While fire increased the population, other factors ensured that it did not become unsustainable. Blainey observes that the fluid republics were not free from warfare and epidemics, arguing that both were a curb on population, which, along with taboos, euthanasia and abortion, ensured their survival. Blainey is careful not to condemn or praise, rather he stresses the necessity, the rationale and the background of their actions.

In Part Three: Reign of the Wanderers, Blainey explores the varying hunting techniques, which differed from region to region, the different rituals, the trade routes, and the different bush medicine. He paints a picture of an extraordinary diverse groups of people, constantly changing and in flux, adapting to and adapting the environment. There is a rising sense of drama towards the end of Blainey’s work as the neolithic revolution creeps towards Australia and the fluid republics, only to stop at the Torres Strait Islands just as the countries of Europe embark upon their journeys of exploration. This age of exploration was to bring the world’s only industrial power to the Australian coast. Blainey writes,

‘..on the east coast the white sails of the English ships were a symbol of a gale which in the following hundred years would slowly cross the continent, blowing out the flames of countless camp-fires, covering with drift-sands the grinding stones and fishing nets, silencing the sounds of hundreds of languages, and stripping the ancient aboriginal name from nearly every valley and headland.’

Triumph of the Nomads is a powerful piece of history, meticulously researched, sympathetic yet objective. Blainey as a right wing radical ? Perhaps its worth remembering that towards the end of his life Manning Clark regretted never writing on the first Australians. And yet in 1975 while this darling of the left was fawning at Whitlam’s feet, celebrating the mythical young tree green, Blainey, the ‘right wing radical’, produce a work of history on Australian aborigines that should be compulsory reading for every Australian, not least Ms Hanson.