Lyndall Ryan

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Lyndall Ryan | Conference Report: Race, Nation, History: A Conference in Honour of Henry Reynolds, Canberra, 29–30 August 2008 | Labour History, 95 | The History Cooperative

CONFERENCE REPORT

Race, Nation, History: A Conference in Honour of Henry Reynolds, Canberra, 29–30 August 2008

On a cool, clear late August morning, about 150 people gathered in the Downstairs Lecture Theatre at the National Library of Australia, to attend the conference in honour of Henry Reynolds' seventieth birthday. Organised by Tom Griffiths from the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University and Bain Attwood, from Monash University and sponsored by the History Program in RSSS at the ANU, the School of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania and the National Library of Australia, which was celebrating its fortieth birthday in its current location.	1
The conference had two purposes: to critically assess Reynolds' work in a national and political context; and to address new questions and problems that he had helped to pioneer in the field of Aboriginal history. Over the two days, a very interested audience heard about 14 papers, spread over seven sessions. The last paper was presented by Reynolds himself.	2
In his opening address, Tom Griffiths said that Reynolds, the author of 11 single authored books had influenced two generations of historians. He could be likened to the British social historian E.P. Thompson, who re-imagined the way historians could write history. Reynolds had inhabited his work sympathetically and then pushed the boundaries of the discipline.	3
Most papers addressed the themes raised by Reynolds' work. On the first day, Ann Curthoys and Elizabeth Elbourne used Reynolds' This Whispering in Our Hearts (1998) to offer new insights on the British Humanitarians and the Colonial project; Rani Kerin used Reynolds' With the White People (1990) to offer a fascinating account of attitudes to the emergence of 'half-caste' children in northern South Australia in the 1930s; Daniel Richter from the University of Pennsylvania used Reynolds' work on terra nullius to enthrall the audience with a well illustrated and detailed account of 'The Strange Colonial North American Career of Terra Nullius' and James Boyce used Fate of a Free People (1995) and An Indelible Stain? (2001) to argue that the Tasmanian Aborigines were ethnically cleansed from western Tasmania between 1832 and 1834.	4
On the second day, Lisa Ford from Law at Macquarie University extended Reynolds' argument in The Law of the Land (1987, 1992, 2003) about Aboriginal sovereignty; Russell McGregor from James Cook University focussed on Assimilation and Aboriginality, Warwick Anderson from Sydney University used Nowhere People (2005) to offer a brilliant exposition titled 'Ambiguities of Race on the Reproductive Frontier', while Tim Rowse presented a highly contested assessment of the same text; Marilyn Lake used Drawing the Global Colour Line (2008) to make a plea for more subjectivity in writing about race and ideology; and Miranda Johnson used The Law of the Land and Aboriginal Sovereignty (1996) to present a brilliant case for the significance of the Gove Land Rights Case for Aboriginal history. This was followed by a paper delivered for Larissa Behrendt on historians and lawyers.	5
Three papers however, stood out. Dipash Chakrabarty, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Chicago, in 'Henry Reynolds and the Politics of History', argued that Reynolds was in one sense a postcolonial historian in that he lived in proximity to the survivors of the colonial story. This was apparent in his first book, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981, 1982, 2006), the product of the wider historical reassessment of colonisation that was taking place in the 1960s and 1970s. E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm promoted the idea of history from below and how the industrial revolution gave rise to the politically aware worker and the revolutionary proletariat.	. . .

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