Mark Latham: Don’t burn our complicated history down — learn from it

THOSE who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it — or simply trash it, writes Mark Latham.

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GOUGH Whitlam didn’t have many heroes in life. most likely he didn’t need to, given his amazing ability and self-belief in the creation of his own legend.

But during my five years working for him in the 1980s, there was one figure often praised around the office: Governor Lachlan Macquarie.

Gough identified with him as a builder, a creator of civilisation, a humanising force who believed in the equal treatment of people. Until the recent debate about Australia Day and its rewriting of Australian history, this was a common Labor thing to do.

The great political tension in the early colonial settlement was between the landed aristocracy, who wanted to use the convicts as a form of slave labour, and progressives such as Macquarie, who believed in emancipation and equality of citizenship.

Born this week: Lachlan Macquarie

Mark Latham.

Labor’s historian of choice, Manning Clark, subsequently described this as part of the Australian struggle between “punishers” and “enlargers” — a dichotomy Paul Keating picked up during his prime ministership.

As governor between 1810 and 1821, Macquarie was Australia’s first urbanist, founding townships such as Windsor, Richmond, Campbelltown and Liverpool (where I grew up).

He mapped out a town square and commons for each, with plans for the construction of the pillars of civilisation on their perimeter: a school, a hospital and a courthouse.

As mayor of Liverpool in 1993, I ordered the construction of a statue of Macquarie at the highest point in our CBD, overlooking his eponymous street. Whitlam was delighted.

It sealed our belief in the grandeur of the Macquarie legacy, the remarkable nation-building feat of turning a penal colony into a civilisation.

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Gough Whitlam in 1972.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie.

As Manning Clark wrote, he was “the father of Australia, the man with the benevolent heart, who counteracted distress and misery, who erected buildings of the highest utility and ornament, who befriended popular freedom, who sowed the seeds for the reformation of the convicts and the civilisation of the Aborigine.”

An early Whitlamite indeed.

Yet today, Macquarie is the subject of vicious revisionism.

He’s gone from being a Labor hero to widespread demonisation as an anti-indigenous thug. In truth, Macquarie reached out to Aboriginal tribes with offers of land grants and farm produce. Each year at Parramatta he held an Aboriginal friendship dinner and, in the same township, he built a special facility for the education of indigenous youth.

The Melbourne Invasion Day rally. Picture: David Caird

Yet on leftist websites, Macquarie is now derided as a “racist”, a “barbarian” and even a “terrorist”. He’s been fitted up for the 1816 Appin Massacre when, after farms had been attacked and settlers killed, Macquarie sent his soldiers on a law enforcement expedition.

Its leadership ignored his orders for the taking of prisoners and “sparing all women and children”. Instead, 14 Aborigines were slaughtered.

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Mistakes were made on the colonial frontier but by any fair reading of history, Macquarie should be remembered as a decent man and a visionary leader. In the history wars surrounding the date of Australia Day, the veteran commentator Paul Kelly has depicted the struggle as between “unpersuasive conservatives” and “a progressive crusade”. This is untrue. There is nothing progressive in the trashing of Macquarie’s reputation. There is nothing progressive in rewriting Australian colonial history with the single malignant purpose of recasting each of its leaders as genocidal maniacs. At the far-left ABC and sister shows including The Project, events are being fabricated, massacres are being invented and successful leaders are being maligned.

Genuine progressives must always seek out the truth and learn from it.

We must defend the virtues of our civilisation, using reason and rationality to build a society based on merit and the nation-building egalitarianism of men like Macquarie and Whitlam. We must never surrender to propagandists, the extreme, fanatical haters of Australia, like the organiser of Friday’s “Invasion Day Rally” in Melbourne, who, in offering a summary of their cause on the steps of Parliament, screeched aloud: “F ... Australia, I hope it f ... ing burns to the ground.”