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Book Review
| Stuart Macintyre (ed.), The Historian's Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004. pp. xiv + 166. $29.95 paper.
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| In one of his characteristically engaging essays, Thomas Lacquer identifies a tension at the very heart of history. On the one hand our discipline claims the status of a science, rational, objective, committed to the pursuit of a historical truth. On the other, History is embroiled in what Lacquer calls the 'immediacy of memory' and memory, (as Joy Damousi astutely reminds us) is emotional, selective and subjective. The Historian's Conscience is a book positioned between these two great claims on History as a discipline. Amongst its contributors are some of the most highly regarded practitioners of History in Australia. Several bring a lifetime's experience to their writing: all reflect with great care and even greater insight into the often conflicting claims of their scholarship. |
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In many cases, this reckoning with the historian's conscience is a deeply personal undertaking. In one of the most delightful articles in this highly readable collection, Greg Dening remembers his first youthful encounters with the people and places of the past. We join him on an imaginary journey across continents and millennia, a confident unravelling of the mysteries of ages, a leap into 'deep time'. And we witness the historian, accomplished, articulate and successful as he was, acknowledge the limitations of his learning.
We felt the past belonged to us because we had the skills to discover it. Fifty years on, I now know that to be wrong. The past belongs to those on whom it impinges, and they will represent it in many ways. They dance it. They sing it. They paint it. They play it (p. 45).
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Recognising that one was wrong is also the theme of Marilyn Lake's article. Few have done more to advance the cause of feminist historiography in Australia and fewer still are prepared to acknowledge the shortcomings of their earlier scholarship. Many labour historians (myself included) have long admired Lake's strident condemnation of the conservative forces that dominated Tasmanian politics during the Great War. Tempted as she was 'to write history as a record of heroes and villains', Lake now asserts the higher obligations of a historian.
[G]ood history and good politics are not the same project, and indeed may often be at odds, the complexity of historical analysis undermining or inhibiting, the simplifying binary logic of effective politics. History should generate complex understandings; politics thrives on dichotomies and demands one choose between sides (p. 96).
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There is a similar almost confessional refrain in Bev Kingston's frank exploration of the institutional constraints on the modern historian, John Hirst's disarming reflection on the subjectivity of scholarship and Iain McCalman's innovative reckoning with the writing of history. 'Flirting with fiction' is an apt title for the latter's article; to reach a broader audience, McCalman is one of the few historians prepared to suspend authorial judgement, blur the borders between fact and fiction and 'allow [his] readers to make their own critical evaluations of [the past]'. A similar willingness to exercise the historical imagination informs Penny Russell's thought provoking piece on the practice of biography and the enlarging quality of life narratives. |
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Despite Lake's comments above, politics is never very far from conscience. The collection is in part a response to the history wars that raged around Windschuttle's recent re-evaluation of frontier violence and the politics of the past (how it is imagined, remembered and forgotten) is the focus of several articles. Rhys Isaac and Graeme Davison invite us to imagine 'more inclusive histories', the former through ethnography, which widens the field of testimony, the latter through what he calls 'civic pluralism' and a less prescriptive presentation of the past in museums. Davison ably defends the National Museum from conservative forces that would censor and sanitise history. And he rejects any model (from any place on the political spectrum) that would treat the Museum's visitors 'as children, unable to think for themselves'. His article might well be contrasted with Joy Damousi's strident critique of Anzac commemoration. The historian, she argues, has an 'ethical responsibility' to intervene in memory, to remind the visitor to Gallipoli of the conservative political purpose the 'commemorative moment serves'. The way collective memories shape and sometimes subvert the purpose of history also informs Glenda Sluga's account of national and ethnic tensions, Fiona Paisley's traumatic revisiting of indigenous testimony and David Christian's ambitious consideration of History and global identity. And, aptly, a response to Windschuttle opens the first chapter of the book. History, Alan Atkinson reminds us, should be 'a work of compassion in the original sense of the word'. It can lead us to 'something larger than sympathy or pity', a 'shared feeling' that confirms the humanity in us all. It is the absence of that higher moral sense which makes Windschuttle's work such poor history, the wanton prejudices of the past marring the project of analysis and critique. |
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The Historian's Conscience is a timely, challenging and sometimes quite courageous book. But my own conscience would not be clear if I did not alert readers to its shortcomings. Stuart Macintyre has been an energetic and conscientious editor but the number of individuals who declined his offer to contribute to the volume ultimately undermines the span if not the integrity of this book. It is not just that I missed the voice of freelance historians, those who write outside the academy and whose history is so often in the public eye. I am also concerned that ethics here seems a sensibility of the very elite of the academy. Only one of the contributors is below the rank of Associate Professor, half are near (or in) retirement, most have a long association with the prestigious (and privileged) Melbourne School. Reading this book, I longed for voices from the margins: the early career researchers who grappled with the ethics of scholarship at a feisty session of the Australian Historical Association, the history practitioners who fight largely forgotten 'history wars' in the community, even (dare I say it) the doubting voices of our students themselves. These may not be 'the eminent contributors' loudly announced on the back cover of this book, their history may not be as polished, as mature or as marketable, but it is an 'intellectually provocative', 'personally revealing' 'must read history' just the same. Having said that, I welcome the publication of The Historian's Conscience. It has opened up an important and long overdue conversation in our discipline and it reminds us that the ethics of history reach well beyond the drab, clinical and unconscionable accounting of the Windschuttle School. |
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| University of New South Wales |
BRUCE SCATES | |
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