Cirrus@Austlit

'In this experimental reflection on the ‘history wars’ associated with Keith Windschuttle’s writings, the author recruits a storyteller, an ex-diplomat, whose yarning style subtly contests the ‘graphocentrism’ of Windschuttle’s faith in the truth of the written document. For the latter, facts are both enshrined in print, yet forever ‘out there’ in the world innocently waiting to be gathered. Against this, the essay argues that facts are indeed ‘fabricated’– in an appropriation of Windschuttle’s critique of black arm-band historians. Not only fabricated, but well-fabricated1 according to the best protocols and methods of historical research. If historical facts are thus constructed, they must also be institutionally supported so that they can continue to exist, and that too is an on-going negotiation in which diplomacy must also play a part. The negotiation is not between the veracity of facts and the distortions of ideology; peace will never be achieved along that pathway. The real war is between the most cherished values that support the manufacture of the facts that serve the parties involved. The skilled diplomat intervenes to listen to what it is they hold most dear, and then negotiates what they might relinquish to achieve a workable peace.' (Publication abstract)

'In this essay I explore the common ground of history and fiction, suggesting that they are a tag team, sometimes taking turns, sometimes working in tandem, to deepen our understanding and extend our imagination. But I also argue that there are times when the distinction between them is vital, and that it is incumbent on historians – on those who choose at certain moments to write history – to insist and reflect on the difference. I hope to create a context in which such explanations will not be misinterpreted as defending territory. In the course of the essay I refer to historians who write fiction and novelists who write history, and I draw especially on the work of the novelists Eleanor Dark and Kate Grenville, poet and historian Judith Wright, and the historians Inga Clendinnen, Grace Karskens and Ross Gibson.' (Publication summary)

'This paper examines ‘archival poetics’ in contemporary history and fiction writing, with a focus on Mark McKenna’s An eye for eternity: The life of Manning Clark, Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A new American life and Kim Scott’s Benang, from the heart. It investigates the ways in which the authors of these works move away from the forensic imaginary embodied in a certain kind of historiography’s approach to the archive, to create a more personal, powerful and situated kind of history writing. It argues that these works suggest that history is less about the sublime chaos of the past – which cannot be narrated without duplicity, damage or violence – than how we engage the past, which is, on reflection, an entirely different thing.' (Publication summary)

'In 2013, the NSW Premier’s Young People’s History Prize was won by Australian novelist Jackie French’s historical novel Pennies for Hitler. French’s young adult novel, Dingo: The dog who conquered a continent, was also one of the three works shortlisted for the prize. No history/literary wars broke out over these historical novels. This article considers why children’s historical fiction is considered ‘good’ (or ‘good enough’) history when so many adult historical novels are not. Beginning with a brief overview of the competing claims about the ‘fictiveness’ of history, this article then uses French’s Pennies for Hitler as well as her novel Hitler’s daughter (1999) as case studies to test what Australian children – French’s main readership – would actually learn about Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the Second World War from historical fiction. It concludes with a reflection about why the pleasures of childhood reading are denied adults, who are perhaps encouraged to treat history like work instead.' (Publication summary)

'This paper explores innovative ways of writing across the borders between fiction and non-fiction in crime histories and examines how crime sources can actively encourage writing that is imaginative, subjective and ambiguous. Drawing on recent historiographic critiques of the archive, the paper argues that the constructedness of archival crime sources and close responsive reading and interpretation of these sources can validate, even demand, of historians the use of nuanced fictive writing practices that eloquently express the complexity of the crimes, the killers, the victims, the societies that created them and the intricacies and truths of the sources that contained them. As well as iconic examples from the literature, the paper examines my own research and writing about two very different murder trials from Perth, Western Australia, one already published, the other a work in progress. The trials of Martha Rendell and Audrey Jacob bookend sixteen years of Perth history from 1909 to 1925 when expectations and representations of women’s gender roles in Perth changed dramatically, producing very different outcomes for the women. The archival sources for each case determine the contrastive structures and styles for developing the resulting works of scholarly crime prose fiction.' (Publication abstract)

'Biographies that openly include conjecture and speculation have attracted virulent criticism for moving from a supposedly factual, historical mode of writing to a more imaginative and, therefore, (necessarily) non-historical approach. Profiling the most contentious of biographical sub-genres – the ‘speculative biography’, which proclaims the central role of authorial interpretation in biographical writing – this investigation uses a case study approach to focus on a number of rarely discussed works that illustrate varied aspects of the productive role of speculation in biographical writing. It also aims, by exploring how fiction and history can be framed and discussed in relation to biographical research and writing, to diffuse the limiting irreconcilability that is often mobilised when discussing these two terms as oppositional and antithetical tendencies, and instead suggests the rich potential of utilising the two as complementary writing strategies to produce biographies as rich, appealing and thought-provoking historically-informed narratives of real lives and experience. By referring to reviews, it also provides some contextualisation of how these biographies have been received by critics and reviewers. The focus is on international works.' (Publication abstract)