Denis Moriarty | History is not an exam, but we don't need to repeat its mistakes

The Magic Pudding is a wonderful book, and every child should read it. "Eat away, chew away, munch and bolt and guzzle, / Never leave the table till you're full up to the muzzle", the Puddin' sings.

It is the great Australian novel. And then, towards the end, you happen across this: "So I'll tell you what I'll do / You unmitigated Jew, / As a trifling satisfaction, / Why, I'll beat you black and blue ..."

Newer editions drop the middle two lines. Anyone who wants to see the book read at all, as I do, must applaud this. That's begging the question, however: Why do I want people to read a book by a fearful old racist? Why should I prefer censorship to cancellation?

Almost every children's author born before at least the beginning of the current century is going to contain some material that makes me shift uneasily in my chair. L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, seriously proposed genocide of Native Americans. In Tintin in the Congo, Hergé's Tintin addresses a class of Congolese children with "My dear friends, today I'm going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!". Painful. Mary Poppins, Doctor Doolittle, Pippi Longstocking - they all need rethinking for modern audiences.

It's not enough to say that those were different times, and that everybody thought that way. Not everybody did. The authors could have written better, more penetrating, wiser books. That would have been nice.

It's not just children's books, of course. The fathers of the Australian constitution included a fearfully racist paragraph - "Aboriginal natives shall not be counted" - whose impact outweighs that of every children's book ever written (with the possible exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Abraham Lincoln credited with having started the American Civil War). And that's just the constitution: let's not start on the Bible.

Australia was built on racism, from the bottom up. Europeans stole the land from the First Nations and defended it against anyone who wasn't Anglo-Celtic. Well into the 1950s, Immigration Department staff used to check under the fingernails of prospective immigrants for what was known as "a touch of the tarbrush".

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Alfred Deakin, as PM, said "The yellow, the brown, and the copper-coloured are to be forbidden to land anywhere", and he has a university named after him. John Curtin, our leader in WWII, had reservations about accepting black American troops in Australia to fight the Japanese. Another university.

There are Australian names with fewer stains, but none of them would have claimed to be unassailable. Nobody can be as virtuous as the critics of the future will require.

Australia was built by saints and criminals and capitalists and murderers and philosophers and poets and fascists and heroes and socialists, and by people who were different combinations of all of those things at different times. History is not a pass/fail examination. It's a family, where you feel closer to some people than others, where you're thankful or resentful for what they've done without being in any way blind to their faults or inclined to imitate their mistakes.

No, let's go a step further. Let's look inwards. I'll use myself as an example.

There are things I'm proud of in my life (my kids, my company, my time on a Sisters of Mercy board) that I can sort of take some of the credit for. And there are things that I'm sincerely ashamed of. There are certainly many, many things that I could have been cancelled for, and they include things I would at other times have joined in condemning.

I'm not going to share any of these blots, because I don't really believe I'm at all unusual. We're all compounds of the best and the worst, and so are the nations that we make up. What counts is our willingness to learn from our histories, and our shame, and our grief, and our remorse, and to reach for something better to come out of it. The Indigenous Voice to Parliament would be a start.

No, you can't make excuses for past abuses on the grounds that times were different then. But feeding my ego by comparing myself favourably with Roald Dahl takes time I could spend better making things different now.