Drawing the historian back into history: creativity, writing, and The Art of Time Travel (original) (raw)
Related papers
Australian historians and biography
Australian Journal of Biography and History, 2018
The publication of the first number of the Australian Journal of Biography and History provides an opportunity to reflect on recent Australian biographical practice. 1 By recent, we mean the last two decades, with our starting point Stuart Macintyre's 1998 survey of biography in the Oxford Companion to Australian History. He noted that the genre was wide-ranging: The writing of a life is an activity practised by historians in company with other academic, professional and amateur writers. It is a popular and deceptively simple genre that spans the filial memoir and the critical study, and ranges from the formal record to the imaginative recreation that spills into fiction. 2 Macintyre pointed to a fork in Australian biographical practice in the 1950s (common to western historiographies) when, on the one hand, professional historians turned to biography and, on the other, academic historians developed a newly found 'mistrust', finding defects in adequately comprehending a completed life and a tendency to rely on singularity and individual agency in preference to structural causation. 3 Biography is perhaps only just starting to shake off this history, although to some it remains academic historians' 'unloved stepchild, occasionally but grudgingly let in the door, more often shut outside with the riffraff'. 4 Macintyre, however, found evidence that Australian historians had 'largely dropped any suspicion of the genre of biography' by the end of the twentieth century, not least because they recognised its considerable potential for bringing historical research to 1 The authors thank the three reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their constructive suggestions. 2 Stuart Macintyre, 'Biography', in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, ed.
In Defence of 'the lesser cousin of history': An Interview with Rohan Wilson
2014
Few branches of postcolonial literature are as contested as the historical fiction of settler societies. This interview with the Australian historical novelist Rohan Wilson, author of The Roving Party (2011) and To Name Those Lost (2014), explores the intersections between truth, accuracy, and existential authenticity in his fictional accounts of nineteenth-century Tasmania. Wilson offers a nuanced yet robust defence of fiction’s role in narrating colonial history. He explains his intentions in writing two linked yet distinctive novels of the frontier—one that focuses on the “Black War” of the 1820s and 1830s, and another that explores how racial violence is refracted by capitalism in subsequent decades.
Benang, by Kim Scott (1999), and Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan (2001), are historical novels which uphold Linda Hutcheon’s description of the postmodern novel: “both fiction and historiography are simultaneously used and abused, installed and subverted, asserted and denied.” Yet both novels also reveal at their core a deeply ethical imperative. Ultimately responding to their moment of creation, both novels in very different ways argue the impossibility of a state‐sanctioned version of the Australian past. They are political works of literature which, in my reading, intervened culturally into one of the most central existential debates in Australian society. The History Wars were a series of disputes centred around epistemological, methodological, philosophical and political questions of evidence, honesty, truth and myth in relation to Australia’s past. They were fuelled by a series of measures in the 1980s and 1990s, not least the Native Title Act (1993) which overturned the legal falsehood of terra nullius, and aimed to acknowledge aspects of the country’s past which contributed to the oppression of Aboriginal people. The spirit of Reconciliation, enshrined in government policy in 1990, led to brief moments of official recognition such as the famous ‘Redfern Speech’ by Paul Keating in December 1992. Identifying the landmark Mabo court ruling as “an historic turning point,” Keating stated that “there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth.” Against this framework, a terminology of ‘myth’, ‘untruth’, ‘lies’, ‘invention’ and, most heatedly, ‘fabrication’, dominated Australian politics during the 1990s and early 2000s, and continues to be prominent today. The History Wars gave rise to an atmosphere of extreme existential crisis in the universities. Not only for historians, but for all people involved in creating and relating Australian historical narratives, this involved a questioning of methodology which spanned the role of paper sources versus oral sources, the idea of historical records either being manufactured for a particular aim, or indeed misinterpreted and manipulated for particular political reasons became central. The opening up of historical practice in the 1970s and 1980s had been necessitated by the conditions of colonisation, namely the absence of historical evidence of oppression, and the pretence that the only valid source is a written one. However this opening up and the subsequent experimentation with a variety of creative approaches to history were denigrated as untruthful. One of these creative approaches was through historical fiction that was critically and politically engaged with the very process of how history is ‘written’. While not setting out to philosophically examine and appraise the notion of ‘historical truth’, this thesis seeks to analyse the way in which the notions of historical truth and evidence were taken up by two Australian writers in novels published during Howard’s second term (1998‐2001), following a tumultuous decade of political and epistemological debate over history and historiography. It analyses these authors’ examinations of the process by we reach collective understandings (or not) about the past, and in the role played by literature in that process.