A Reading of Brian Fitzpatrick

Abstract

In the small but growing literature on Australian historiography there already exists a cast of stereotyped characters. Brian Fitzpatrick's role is easily recognised: he is presented as the first to apply to Australia's past an economic interpretation, or, as Ian Turner puts it, the first to apply Marxian concepts of a class-struggle to the whole history of Australia.1 Not only did he pioneer valuable research into the economic development of the country, then, but he helped mould what C. Hartley Grattan later called a 'fashion of thinking' among Australian historians. Like most clich?s, this contains a basic truth but it leaves little room for comprehending what is complex, distinctive and unresolved in Fitzpatrick's work. These elements can only be restored through a closer reading of his texts than is normally offered in such historio graphical discussions. It may be time, furthermore, to restore these writings as important statements in Australian intellectual history rather than to treat them solely as sources for revisionism. In this essay, therefore, I shall not be concerned with the validity of Fitzpatrick's formulations but with the nature and range of his concerns. British Imperialism and Australia, 1783-1833 (1939) and its sequel The British Empire in Australia, 1834-1939 (1941) do constitute an attempt to unify the Australian experience within the framework of an economic interpretation. The opening sentence of the first edition of the second book makes Fitzpatrick's stance clear?'Political philo sophies and political trends can usually be explained by reference to economic developments which they reflect'?and the argument which follows further holds that Australian political and social history will be unintelligible unless it is placed in a larger context, that of the social and economic condition of Britain. Fitzpatrick's intentions here were not those of the comparative historian; he was concerned to emphasise that the economy of Australia was inextricably related to and fundamentally controlled by the forces and impulses of the British economy, in particular by the flow of British capital and labour. A basic proposition of the first book is that the British design entertained a dual vision of Australia?'every governor was required to maintain a prison and to plant a peasantry' 2?and a major theme in Fitzpatrick's account is the vitiation of this plan for a smallholders' Australia. The explicit subject of his books is the economic process that frustrated this vision which he presents almost as a conspiracy of the interests of British capital and the collusion of Australian governments to achieve the ascendancy and dominance of wool. By the