Stuart Macintyre - The Historians Conscience: Australian historians on the ethics of history

THE
HISTRINAS
CONSCIENCE

THE
HISTRIANS
CONSCIENCE

Australian historians on the
ethics of history

Edited by

STUART MACINTYRE

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

an imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd

PO Box 1167, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

mup-info@unimelb. edu. au

www.mup.com.au

First published 2004

Copyright in this collection Stuart Macintyre 2004

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2004

Copyright in the individual pieces remains with their respective

authors.

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Typeset in Malaysia by Syarikat Seng Teik Sdn. Bhd.

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group Designed by Phil Campbell

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Macintyre, Stuart, 1947.

The historians conscience: Australian historians on the ethics of history.

Bibliography.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 522 85139 8.

1.HistoriansAustralia. 2. HistoryMoral and ethical aspects.

3.HistoriographyAustralia. I. Macintyre, Stuart, 1947907.2094

To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled; effaced, and what is worse, defaced!

Carlyle, Past and Present, Book 4, Chapter 1.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was conceived in a conversation with Louise Adler, the director of Melbourne University Publishing, and Sybil Nolan, the commissioning editor. We thought it would be helpful to move beyond the narrow and polemical terms of the History Wars by inviting a range of historians to explain how they deal with the ethical issues that arise from their work. Having convinced me to assemble such a collection, they then applied their considerable persuasive skills to the contributors. I write in the Introduction that 'we invited a number of historians and this resort to the plural form is scant acknowledgement of the role they played in soliciting, pursuing and preparing the essays. I am grateful to Carla Taines for her speedy and skilful editing of them.

The invitations went out in early Autumn as hard-pressed academics returned to the lecture theatres, and pushed their own writing to fugitive moments between classes, meetings and other commitments. I am particularly indebted to those who found time to take on this additional task, some at very short notice. Several freelance historians were already beholden to deadlines and I thank them for expressing regret that they were not able to contribute. Those represented in this collection agreed that the royalties from this volume would go to Australian Historical Studies.

Other colleagues and friends offered their own thoughts on the issues this collection canvasses, and I thank Fay Anderson, Jamie Belich, Frank Bongiorno, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Pat Grimshaw for those conversations. Graeme Powell of the National Library, who for so long has served historical scholarship, answered a number of queries by immediate return of email. He is an exemplar of the values our book affirms.

CONTRIBUTORS

Alan Atkinson writes mainly in the area of colonial Australian history. The first volume of his projected three-volume work, The Europeans in Australia, was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press and the second in 2004. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of New England, Armidale.

David Christian taught Russian and World History at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1975 to 2000, when he moved to San Diego State University in California. He has published several books, including a co-authored history of food and drink in Russia, a study of the vodka trade in Russian history, a textbook history of modern Russia, a synoptic history of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia up to the thirteenth century, and, most recently, a world history that begins with the origins of the Universe and ends in the distant future.

Joy Damousi is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. Her recent areas of publication include memory and the history of emotions, themes which she explored in her last two publications, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge, 1999) and Living With the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgiaand Grief in Post-war Australia (Cambridge, 2001), and in the collection of essays edited with Robert Reynolds entitled, History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (MUP, 2003). She is currently writing Freud in the Antipodes, a history of psychoanalysis in Australia.

Graeme Davison teaches history at Monash University, where he is a Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor. His books include The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Car Wars: How Cars Won our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities and, as co-editor, The Oxford Companion to Australian History. His prize-winning The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne is to be republished by Melbourne University Publishing in a revised edition in 2004. He has been active for more than twenty years as a writer and advisor on heritage, museums and archives. His current research includes a history of suburban Australia and, as co-editor, a history of Sydneys Power House Museum.

Greg Dening was educated in philosophy, theology, history and anthropology in Jesuit seminaries and at the Universities of Melbourne and Harvard. He has written some dozen books on the cross-cultural history of the Pacific. They include Islands and Beaches (1981); Mr Blighs Bad Language (1992); The Death of William Gooch (1996); Performances (1996); and Readings/ Writings (1998). Since his retirement from the Max Crawford Chair of History at the University of Melbourne in 1991, he has been an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. He adjuncts by conducting postgraduate workshops on the creative imagination in the presentation of scholarly knowledge.

John Hirst was born and educated in Adelaide. Since 1968 he has taught history at LaTrobe University. He has written a number of books, among them: Adelaide and the Country, Convict Society and its Enemies, The Strange Birth of ColonialDemocracy and The Sentimental Nation. He is chair of the Commonwealth government's Civics Education Group and deputy chair of the National Museum Council.

Rhys Isaac is an emeritus professor at LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia; and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the History Department of the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. He was born in South Africa in 1937, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1959, and migrated to Australia in 1963. His academic historical specialism is the American Revolution in Virginia. In 1983 his book, The Transformation of Virginia, 17401790 (Chapel Hill, 1982) won the Pulitzer Prize in History. The work employed an anthropological methodology that is associated with the so-called Melbourne Group that includes Greg Dening and Inga Clendinnen. Just published with OUP New York is a book entitled