The historiography of Australian economic history

Introduction Australian history is, of course, largely economic history. D. B. Copland Over the past century a body of history has been written that includes some of the most vivid specimens of any kind of Australian history, and that, perhaps of all Australian history, strikes closest to the country's concerns. This is Australian economic history, a history that is 'Australian' not only in reference but also character; a history that shares little pedigree with British economic history, and remains apart from the practice of American economic history. This chapter tells the story of writing this history by means of a schema of 'four generations'. Chroniclers of progress The Australian Commonwealth came into existence in 1901 without an economic history. This was not for any lack of interest in economic matters, but more on account of the intimate dependency of a barely fledged Australian intellectual life on British academic capital. Professor Walter Scott of the University of Sydney illustrates the point. He was an earnest advocate of political economy at the University, a founder of the Australian Economic Association, and author of the first paper in the Australian Economist. And yet in that paper Scott asserted that Australia had no economic history (Scott 1888). Born in Devon and dying in Oxford, Scott saw economic history as the transformation of feudalism into capitalism, and Australia could have no part in that story. Scott underlined the truth that if Australia's economic past was to acquire any significance it would be on account of it being Australian, rather than serving some other concern, and that such a signifi cance would require the existence of a 'national consciousness'. Such a consciousness did exist at the time of Federation. And this consciousness was actually given some space by the incongruent subject matter of British economic history. For if Australian economic history had nothing to offer England, equally English economic historiography of the day had little to offer Australia.