I’ve recently got stuck into Otto English’s “Fake Heroes” (the not-quite-sequel to “Fake History”) and a recent chapter on Captain Robert Scott entitled ‘How to be Heroic, even in Failure’ got me thinking about Australian history.
Anyone who has listened to my podcast will know that, if there’s one thing that really gets my blood boiling, it’s a dead idiot who went down in history as a hero. The fact that these aforementioned dead idiots often took dozens, sometimes hundreds, of others with them is usually neatly glossed over 😡 English puts it like this:
“People who achieve great things on Britain’s behalf and on on to have long and fruitful lives may eventually, if they’re lucky, wind up with a blue plaque on the wall of a childhood home, or perhaps a cul-de-sac named in their honour. But those who die miserable, stupid deaths, having fucked up spectacularly in a totally futile endeavor, are pretty much guaranteed at least one gigantic memorial, poems, plaudits and enduring fame.”
Otto English in “Fake Heroes”
Swap ‘Britain’ with ‘Australia’ and this paragraph remains as true as ever; it’s even more likely if the person died prematurely.
Let’s take one of my least favourite Australian ‘heroes’ as an example: Robert O’Hara Burke.
Despite being perhaps the most incompetent leader of an exploration expedition Australia had ever seen, nearly everyone in this country will have heard the phrase “Burke & Wills” even if they could tell you nothing more. He’s a legend, despite the fact that all he really managed to do was make life hard for himself and his expedition party, then die of starvation/dehydration in the Australian desert. His defenders like to point out that he succeeded in his objective to cross the continent, but what was the point of his achievement? It certainly did nothing for Burke – he literally returned as a bag of bones! It did teach White Australia about the interior of the continent, but Burke didn’t have to die for us to learn that.
What’s more, there were other explorers who crossed the continent, such as Alfred Howitt and John Stuart who, unlike Burke, returned alive from their expeditions. Howitt was, in fact, the man who led the rescue party that found John King, the sole survivor of Burke’s “Gulf Party” – the four men who had made a rush for the Gulf of Carpentaria, then perished on the way back. It’s also worth pointing out that Burke was almost certainly not the first person to cross the continent, Australia, remember, has been continuously inhabited for more than 65,000 years, and the Indigenous people had, among many other things, complex trading routes which cross-crossed the entire continent. There were also First Nations explorers, including Bungaree, who circumnavigated the continent, and Woollarawarre Bennelong, who was the first Indigenous Australian to visit Europe and return.
But who’s heard of Howitt or Stuart? Those residents of South Australia probably know of Stuart (there is a university there named after him), but his star is eternally eclipsed by Burke’s outside his home state. As for Bungaree and Bennelong, Australia has a shocking record when it comes to so much as recognising the existence of First Nations people, so I’m not surprised they were left out of the common history books. Work is ongoing to rectify Australia’s white washing of its history, but it’s a process that’s moving slowly.
Burke, on the otherhand, who died a “miserable, stupid [death], having fucked up spectacularly in a totally futile endeavor,” is a household name. There’s a statue of him and William Wills (his second-in-command, who was one of the men who died because of Burke’s idiocy) in Melbourne – although it’s currently in storage while they build a new train station, but it’ll be back in a few years – and countless streets and suburbs have been named after him. Whole towns in Victoria and New South Wales bear his name, as does an electorate in Queensland, and there’s more memorial plinths, columns and fountains dotted across Australia (including in places with no connection to any of the explorers) than I have space to list. There’s t-shirts with his face on them, four-wheel drive companies that splash his likeness across their marketing material, and even cafes named after him dotted all across Australia. Given the man died of starvation and dehydration, I can’t help but feel this last one is rather insulting!
But, think about it. Of all the statues in your town, all the ‘heroes’ you might have a vague idea about, how many of them became heroes because they a) did something supremely stupid, b) died young, or c) both?
Another good example of an Australian ‘hero’ on the idiot parade is Peter Lalor, who is right up there with Robert O’Hara Burke on my list of “Most Awful Australian Historical Figures”. Lalor was the leader of the doomed Battle of the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, 1854; he lost his left arm as the result of a gunshot wound and, while the men he had lead in a suicidal pitched battle against the British Army were being killed or rounded up, he scurried off the Geelong and went into hiding with his fiancée. I can’t honestly call him a coward, but his behaviour in this instance was utterly contemptable. Following an announcement of an amnesty, he came out of hiding and was later elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly, where he showed his true colours as a rabid conservative. While doing his utmost to restrict suffrage, decrease taxes on wealthy landowners (which he himself had become), and ban Chinese and other non-Europeans from entering the state, he continued to play on his former glory days to appeal to people’s sympathies and pretend to be a working class hero. He remained in Parliament for thirty-two years!
He didn’t die young (a shame, really, given what he went on to do), but he did do something fundamentally stupid. He never experienced a second of consequences for his role in the deaths of somewhere between 30 – 60 stockaders and civilians (the stockade the gold miners made their stand in had been built around civilian tents, and many of these people were not supporters of the rag-tag causes that Lalor and the diggers were so fired up about; when they challenged the army, these people got caught in the crossfire) and was able to convince people that he was nothing but an ordinary man who had been forced to take extraordinary action. It was a lie, but it was one that sounded good, so Lalor’s idiocy became a heroic stand. There’s a statue of him in Ballarat, a residential wing of Federation University is named after him, as are several streets. Like Burke, he gave his name to an electorate, and there are also several buildings and community institutions which pay him homage. Quite an achievement for a man whose claim to fame cost multiple lives and showed him to be a dilettante in every sense of the word!
Unfortunately, the reason there are so many idiots in history is because many of them were powerful people, who were believed to have done something heroic, gallant or daring. A glorious death (particularly in the nineteenth century) was seen as something to be admired and so many of our heroes (although not all, as demonstrated by Peter Lalor) would not be heroes had they not died young. Usually while doing something that was reckless at best, and completely unnecessary at worst. Instead of idolising such people, we should be making an effort to learn about those who made provisions, took their time, recognized their limits, asked for assistance, and succeeded without costing lives. Believe me, there’s plenty of them.
[Language note: I am aware of the ableist origins of the word ‘idiot’, and its generally insulting nature. However, there’s a difference between snarling “You’re an idiot!” at someone for making a mistake or because you don’t like them, and describing the mind-boggling stupidity of a historical figure who, through hubris, racism, greed or arrogance (or a combination of the above), actively chose to take a path which resulted in their death and, more often than not, the deaths of others.]