'Notwithstanding the defeat of the Voice referendum in October 2023, a demand for ‘truth-telling’ remains. Australian Historical Studies is pleased to host an ongoing discussion about what historical scholarship can contribute to truth-telling. In August 2023 (volume 54, no. 3), Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards used the instance of Samuel Griffith to consider how to contextualise individual responsibility for the colonial state’s killing of Aboriginal people. In this issue we are pleased to publish a very different comment: Matthew Fitzpatrick’s reflections on lessons from the historiography of Germany. Fitzpatrick’s starting point is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars differ in their investments in and approaches to critical narratives of colonisation. There is an ‘Indigenous space’, he cautions, that ‘should not be unthinkingly co-opted by non-Indigenous scholars’. The likely impetus of such co-option is a desire for truth-telling to be healing, redemptive, and decolonising. Advising non-Indigenous scholars to be suspicious of ‘all attempts at assimilation, reconciliation or relativisation’ of the pasts that they produce, Fitzpatrick enjoins historians to facilitate ‘the perpetual problematisation of irreducibly traumatic pasts’. The lesson from recent German historiography is that ‘multi-vocality’ – encouraging histories from many standpoints – militates against hopes of an ‘end point where the work of truth-telling is finished and differing historical experiences can be reconciled and transcended’. In Australian historiography, that multiplicity is more likely, he suggests, if we privilege the ‘local’ and question the possibility of a ‘national’ colonisation story. Fitzpatrick sees promise in ‘increasingly vocal and heterogeneous Indigenous voices’. (The heterogeneity of the ‘Indigenous space’ was amply demonstrated, after his paper was written, in the 2023 debate about constitutional recognition.) As well, he champions ‘voices from Australia’s own migrant community’ – to which Australian Historical Studies (vol. 53, no. 4, November 2022) has recently given a platform in the Themed Issue ‘Their Own Perceptions: Non-Anglo Migrants and Aboriginal Australia’.' (Fiona Paisley : Editorial introduction)
'In 1981, Australia was urged by Richard Haese in Rebels and Precursors to take note of the authentic national vision in the art of the Angry Penguins – Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker – and to see their accomplishments as in large part due to their patrons: John and Sunday Reed. The Reeds continue to be widely credited with having provided the necessary financial support, the intellectual and critical discernment, and the nurturing and guidance to bring the group, as united revolutionaries, into being. The quality, character and iconography of their art has been examined elsewhere, but this is not so for the contribution of the Reeds whose reputed influence has largely gone unchallenged. The following is an interrogation of the mythology that has developed around the founders of Heide. How did these mythological accretions accumulate to the degree that the Heide story has become folkloric?' (Publication abstract)
'In The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890–1914, Mark Hearn uses a biographical method to investigate the influence of ‘powerful movements’ and new ideas on seven select Australian writers, activists, and politicians, who are distinguished by their differences of race, class, and gender. The test subjects, in order, are the working-class writer Henry Lawson; the feminist activists Rose Summerfield and Vida Goldstein; the poet and academic Christopher Brennan; the journalist-turned-politician and, ultimately, prime minister Alfred Deakin; the First Nations writer and inventor David Unaipon; and the working-class activist John Dwyer. The book is organised into an introduction, the seven biographical chapters, and a brief conclusion.' (Introduction)
'A few years ago, I had occasion to re-read The Lucky Country. It stood up well, and although dated (naturally) the book holds its place alongside Trollope and Hancock as a contemporary response that has become a classic account of Australia. But as Ryan Cropp makes plain, this bestselling book – which apparently has never gone out of print – is only one of a couple of dozen. For a man who, when asked how he would like to be described on his tombstone, said ‘writer and talker … and luncher’, Horne was astonishingly productive. When well into his sixties, he wrote seven books in five years. And at the very end – co-written with his wife Myfanwy – he even managed one on dying.' (Introduction)
'What a delight it was to read Jane Carey’s newly published history of women scientists in Australia. There is great satisfaction in seeing renewed attention directed towards this topic and the important, and delightful, women at its centre.' (Introduction)
