Books
Mark McKenna
The Shortest History of Australia
It has taken publisher Black Inc some time to consider the ’roo in the room. Its highly successful Shortest History series has treated the Soviet Union, music and even the Crown before the country on which its offices lie. One might understand the reluctance. Australians are divided on identity and some readers will struggle to find their country in any history, particularly those weaned on older national syllabuses that squandered months on the Rum Rebellion but ignored Indigenous Australia. Mark McKenna’s The Shortest History of Australia considers any clichés deeming Australian history “boring” as simply “spectacular failures of imagination”.
McKenna reveals our history for what it is – marred by brutal dispossession of the original inhabitants, a nation that has clung to a racist colonial ideology and is riven with anxieties about non-white immigration and the region in which we live.
Even within a series defined by economy, The Shortest History of Australia has impressive breadth. Somehow in its pages not only is a history told but yesteryear’s jingoistic myths are dispelled. Part of the elegance is structural: chapters are thematically rather than chronologically ordered, giving McKenna freedom to leap. Beginning with “The Founding Lie”, which dispels terra nullius, it moves to our filial relationship with Britain, then to the Anzac myth and World War II, and finally the end of the White Australia policy to the present day.
Commendably, First Nations are given as much coverage as the form allows. The writing is deft and confident, with McKenna weaving in biographies and discussions on Indigenous artists such as Dorothy Napangardi. It even refers to Robert Hughes’s seminal The Fatal Shore as “exaggerated”, although Hughes’s prose remains unmatched.
The final chapter, “The Big Picture”, should be reprinted as a standalone essay on Australian identity. Through Federation it confronts founding tenets of egalitarianism and rebellion, bold for the time but compromised by those they excluded. It also considers both the cultural cringe of earlier intellectuals like Donald Horne, who believed Australia too immature to ever self-actualise, and the perspective of Tony Abbott’s lot, as displayed in his recent Australia: A History, which weaponises history in a reactionary culture war.
Perhaps the greatest achievement here is that the Australia that eventually emerges will be recognisable to most. One with a dark history with much left for truth and reconciliation, yet a stable multicultural democracy with a steady rule of law, that is becoming the envy of those we once modelled ourselves on.
Black Inc, 304pp, $39.99 (hardback)
Black Inc is a Schwartz company
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 29, 2025 as "The Shortest History of Australia".
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