Cirrus@Austlit

'Despite the inherent chance and coincidence of Australian history, there’s a certain sense of inevitability when we trace our national narrative in hindsight. The sequence of chapters in our textbooks and syllabuses seems logical and coherent. Colonisation follows European imperialism and exploration. Suffrage follows the discovery of gold. Federation is realised after a growing national consciousness.' 

'History journals are disciplinary time capsules. Like textbooks and syllabuses, their usefulness extends beyond the currency of their content. Taken together, their volumes reveal radical breaks, methodological challenges and changing historical focus across generations of historians. They also expose the inheritance of disciplinary values over time, showing how certain methods and practice endure as others are augmented. This review of History Australia’s first 20 years explores research and disciplinary trends advanced by the journal, as well as its contribution to understanding the role and function of Australian history.' (Publication abstract)

'When the eminent Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner first published his essay on “The Dreaming” in 1956, there was increasing scholarly and popular interest in the complexity and duration of Australia’s Indigenous cultures.' (Introduction)

'A bold and expansive history that traces the changing and contested project of Australia's national story. You will think about this country differently after reading this book.

'Australian history has been revised and reinterpreted by successive generations of historians, writers, governments and public commentators, yet there has been no account of the ways it has changed, who makes history, and how. Making Australian History responds to this critical gap in Australian historical research.

'A few years ago Anna Clark saw a series of paintings on a sandstone cliff face in the Northern Territory. There were characteristic crosshatched images of fat barramundi and turtles, as well as sprayed handprints and several human figures with spears. Next to them was a long gun, painted with white ochre, an unmistakable image of the colonisers. Was this an Indigenous rendering of contact? A work of history?

'Each piece of history has a message and context that depends on who wrote it and when. Australian history has swirled and contorted over the years- the history wars have embroiled historians, politicians and public commentators alike, while debates over historical fiction have been as divisive. History isn't just about understanding what happened and why. It also reflects the persuasions, politics and prejudices of its authors. Each iteration of Australia's national story reveals not only the past in question, but also the guiding concerns and perceptions of each generation of history makers.

'Making Australian History is bold and inclusive- it catalogues and contextualises changing readings of the past, it examines the increasingly problematic role of historians as national storytellers, and it incorporates the stories of people.' (Publication summary)

'‘Some stories are hard to tell’, says the blurb of Jo Jones’ recent book on fiction and the history wars. For a debate that swirls around the limits of history and fiction to get at ‘the truth’, this statement is perhaps truest of all. While the history wars have been characterised by politicised contests over the past, arguing over terminology such as ‘invasion’ and ‘settlement’, ‘commemoration’ and ‘celebration’, it was the contest over ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ that caught historians and fiction writers off-guard. When the novelist Kate Grenville suggested that her book, The Secret River, was able to straddle the polarisation of the history wars because fiction can come to history from the perspective of empathy and imagination, several historians bristled. Rather than being bound by contests over evidence and interpretation, a ‘novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, and say there is another way to understand this’, Grenville insisted. In response, historians such as Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen refused to accept that disciplinary history might be less equipped to understand or interpret the past.' (Introduction)

'What does it mean to really know an ecosystem? To name all the plants and animals in a place and understand their interactions? To feel an embodied connection to Country? To see and hear in ways that confirm and extend that knowledge?' (Introduction)

'As a historian I'm not used to this sort of archive. 

'It's a freezing spring morning in Clifton Springs, near Geelong, and I'm elbow deep in shellfish in a suburban backyard. We're measuring mussels: sixty-five millimetres long, twenty-nine millimetres wide, fifteen millimetres deep; fifty-six millimetres long, twenty millimetres wide, nine millimetres deep. On and on it goes, hundreds of times. Then we move to oysters: fifteen millimetres; fourteen millimetres, three millimetres...' (Publication abstract)

'It’s 50 years since the anthropologist WEH Stanner gave the 1968 Boyer Lectures — a watershed moment for Australian history. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn’t “be explained by absent mindedness”:

 It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.' (Introduction)

'This book brings together sixteen well-known writers from diverse backgrounds: Debra Adelaide, Paul Ashton, Anna Clark, Robert Crawford, John Dale, Ross Gibson, Bridget Griffen-Foley, Lucinda Holdforth, Julia Horne, Paul Kiem, John Maynard, Betty O’Neill, Penny Russell, Janis Wilton, Garry Wotherspoon and Clare Wright. It looks at how history – a discipline which generally strives for critical distance – and the past – a concept which is open-ended and useful in the present – are used in a range of genres from historical and ‘true crime’ novels to family history and memoir.' (Publisher's blurb)