History

‘It’s as though a well-dressed man has taken off his hat to pat his hair and found a bald spot he then delights in scratching. Never overplayed, and modestly developed, the interplay between the stories of the past and the historian’s self-scrutiny in recounting them is a device that is both charming and revelatory.’ Rosemary Sorensen on Graeme Davison, ‘chattering genealogists’ and family history.

The use of individual cases throughout Across the Seas throws the issues into relief. As Neumann comments, the strategy of rendering refugees anonymous has done much to distance these issues from everyday Australians. It has allowed governments to control the agenda.

Beaumont refers to the expectation that if Britain declared war ‘Australia and the other dominions would follow’. She says, wrongly, that ‘the Cook government accepted the British decision without question’ and uses the term ‘consensus’ to describe the political foundations on which the troops went to war. This misconception is characteristic of the imperial romance that still influences the writing of Australia’s Great War history.

The recent skirmishes over the meaning of Anzac Day and the implementation of the national history curriculum suggest that Forgotten War is unlikely to dampen the flames of historiographical contest. But Reynolds claims that Nicholas Clements’ Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania will do just that. In contrast to Reynolds’ overview of the frontier wars, Clements has chosen just one — Tasmania’s ‘Black War’ — and has reached deep into the archives to produce a painstakingly researched social history of this episodic conflict.

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka not only succeeds in bringing women’s presence on the Australian goldfields vividly into focus, but it also considers the instrumental role they played in transforming power relations within the fluid and often turbulent social and political formations of the goldfields community, which reached boiling point in the Eureka uprising.

How is it possible in the network society of the twenty-first century that the Australian public should have been so ill informed for so long about what its troops have been doing in Afghanistan, and why has this situation been allowed to persist?