History

In this debate over the present understanding of sovereignty, history can broaden our perspective, revealing that the present and the possible are not coterminous; the past alive with ideas we may never have considered, or dismissed summarily as implausible.

if the metaphor of the kangaroo is some attempt to speak of what cannot be spoken of, so that it can be objectified and forgotten, the rat speaks of the impossibility of this, the constant return of the repressed, despite the best efforts of settlers to do away with it and live as though the land has always been theirs.

In The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist, Kate Fullagar invites us to rethink the British empire of the eighteenth century, understanding it not as the inexorable outcome of economic and technological superiority but as a more tenuous – even tentative – project, contested at its centre as well as its edges.

Truganini was the last First Nations Tasmanian with no European ancestry to die. It is a terrible reason to be famous, and Pybus argues that ‘Australians should know about how she lived, not simply that she died.’ How Truganini lived tells us a great deal about the transactions, trades and outright thefts through which British settlers took possession of the territory they called Australia.

‘The plague archive that interests me most combines the factual and the fictional, the historical and the contemporary. Reading the stories of Australia’s early twentieth-century plague outbreak gives us insight into the emotional experience of an epidemic. Further, reading the plague archive in the contemporary moment shows that the emotional consequences of an epidemic do not stop with the abeyance of the disease. The impact of the epidemic continues, and is reworked and understood in new ways as the archive is reread.’

Whilst both Kent’s and Keating’s books will satisfy their very different readerships, there remains a largely unmet need for feminist histories that bridge academic and popular audiences. In this moment of renewed feminist activism, when hard-won feminist gains are under threat from the economic fallout of Covid and the ideological warfare of conservative governments, it’s more vital than ever to cultivate widespread understanding of the complex histories of this movement.

Since the publication of my novel The Making of Martin Sparrow in 2018 I have often been asked the question ‘What made you turn to fiction?’ This has turned out, usually, to be a question with a sub-text: ‘What made you, a long-time historian, cross over to the other side?’ But whatever form the question takes, my answer is always the same: ‘That’s easy,’ I say, ‘you get to make things up.’ It’s a rejoinder that is nowhere near as liberating as it may sound. Just what is meant by ‘make things up’? And is the writer now free, discharged of all responsibility to history, having gone over to the other side?

What Khatun so deftly accomplishes is the almost impossible task of working from inside imperial intelligence (in all senses of the word), but thinking from traditions outside them, bringing entire repositories of knowledge from epistemes not accorded legitimacy by hegemonic codifications of colonial world-making.

Overall, The British in India reads not so much as a successful call for more rigorous public engagement with the nuances of empire’s history as it does a retreat back into the arrogant position of a scholar who has never felt it particularly necessary to justify his interest in the everyday lives and literature of white people (racist or not), to the exclusion of all else. His admonishment for postcolonial scholars to spend ‚Äúmore time in the archives‚Äù raises the question of which archives he sees as valuable, given the scarcity of Indian voices in his social history.’

Why then is Brett’s new biography important? It is important, because, written with conspicuous skill and economy, it is the leading continuation and affirmation of Deakin’s liberal-progressive life and work in our own troubled times of short parliaments and major geopolitical changes – the rise of China at a time of uncertainty about US leadership in the world today. It is important because, in those ways, it offers the most rational defence of Deakin’s nation against the changes he already saw the need to guard it against. But while the biography presents the face of liberal reason and a sharp, though still sympathetic psychological and political portrait, it generates a certain silence. Its greatest importance may indeed be that it takes us to the limits of its liberal comfort zone. For at that limit, it becomes possible to see how the biography’s minimal history represents the ongoing liberal denial of the geopolitical reality that was a mainspring of federation.