Bain Attwood

In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance,” and Public History

In the last few decades the nature of history making, especially that regarding the contemporary era, has been transformed, changing not only the pasts that are being related but the way in which many people relate to those pasts. The shift in the nature of historical knowledge and historical sensibility owes much to both popular and academic forms of history; indeed, it is largely the outcome of a convergence of the interests and approaches of elite history and culture with those of popular history and culture. Generally speaking, history making has been democratized, but more particularly there has been an unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testimony. People who have experienced an event and bear witness to it have come to be regarded as the most authentic bearers of truth about the past, indeed as the embodiment of history, and their accounts are increasingly received by many as a substitute for the history of the professional historian who seeks to record and explain a past event. This phenomenon owes much to the fact that we live in a global world in which an ideal of human rights has triumphed, a politics of recognition calling for acknowledgment of the collective experience and identity of minority groups has flourished, new institutions and technologies providing a sense of immediacy have expanded, and a culture of intimacy has become dominant in public institutions, not least in the media. Together, these changes have placed the personal at the center of public culture and put emotion on display; the

Unsettling pasts: reconciliation and history in settler Australia

During the last three or four decades, settler societies have been forced to confront the nature of their colonial histories, as new political movements and new histories have provoked controversy over injustices committed in the past. Much contemporary discussion has come to resemble the ongoing debates about forgetting, responsibility, guilt, atonement and compensation in countries such as Germany. This has proven enormously unsettling. Modern states are forged largely through historical narratives, which provide nations with a sense of being a moral community. As Gyanendra Pandey has observed, this is what ‘gives nationalisms their greater or lesser appeal and staying power’. Consequently, a nation’s loss of certainty regarding its moral worth can threaten both national identity and identification with the nation. It can be argued that this is especially so in settler societies. Most states have problematic origins and have to undergo a transition from de facto coercive power to de jure authority, but this is perhaps more evidently the case for settler states since their origins are considered to be more recent. In societies such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia, the foundational historical narratives that settler communities previously took for granted have been discredited by new national histories. This confrontation with the colonial past has been especially shocking in the Australian case, largely because its settler peoples, especially Anglo-Australians, ‘are not used to thinking of [their] history as contentious, morally compromised or volatile, as dangerous, as, say, Japanese or South African history’. Coming to terms with this past has been difficult in Australia, then, not just because of the nature of its past but because of the nature of its history-making during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which assumed a form of forgetting or disremembering. Here, I will consider the nature of the history-making in Australia in the closing decades of the twentieth century, and analyse its implications for righting historical wrongs and achieving reconciliation. It can be argued that in Australia, as in many other countries during this period, at least two fundamentally different kinds of history-making have been at work. The first is history of a more or less conventional academic kind, which has often been complicit with the liberal democratic state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its goal of developing a ‘modern’ unitary nation. The second, closely related to a series of memorialising practices, might be given the name ‘subaltern pasts’ or ‘Aboriginal Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 243–259, 2005

Aborigines and academic historians: Some recent encounters∗

For their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940. By Anna Haebich. University of Western Australian Press, Nedlands 1988. Pp. xviii & 413. 517.50 paper. ’Born in the Cattle’: Aborigines in Cattle Country. By Ann McGrath. Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1987. Pp. xi + 200. 517.95 paper. Blood From a Stone: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League. Edited by Andrew Markus. Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1988. Pp. vi + 124.

The Public Life of History

9.95 paper. Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606–1985. By D.J. Mulvaney. Queensland University Press, St. Lucia 1989. Pp. xvii + 263.

Law, History and Power: The British Treatment of Aboriginal Rights in Land in New South Wales

44.95 cloth. A Hundred Years War: the Wiradjuri People and the State. By Peter Read. Australian National University Press, Canberra 1988. Pp. xvii + 145.

Aboriginal history, minority histories and historical wounds: the postcolonial condition, historical knowledge and the public life of history in Australia

18.95 cloth. Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land. By Henry Reynolds. Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1987. Pp. ix + 234.

Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title

14.95 paper. The Law of the Land. By Henry Reynolds. Penguin, Ringwood 1987. Pp. xii + 225.

(The) 1967 (referendum) and all that: Narrative and myth, aborigines and Australia∗

12.95 paper. Aboriginal Austra...

The making of the Aborigines

In September 2005, Bain Attwood and Dipesh Chakrabarty convened a group of historians at the Australian National University to discuss the productive effects of the contemporary politics of recognition on historical practice. The essays in this collection are a selection of the work that began at that meeting and that matured in a collective discussion eighteen months later at Columbia University.1 Central to the project was Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation of the concept of a “historical wound,” a notion that grows out of Charles Taylor’s discussion of the politics of recognition in multicultural societies.2 Within the perspective of this politics, wrote Taylor, “misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred.”3 The notion of the “historical wound” extends this idea to the sphere of public representation and debate by reflecting on the fact that the “wounds of misrecognition” invoke the past as the site of the original slight and as the site that calls for redress in the present. “Historical wounds” are thus a feature of a politics of recognition that is quite recent — a rhetoric that received considerable impetus from the processes of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as from the civil rights struggles of the same period. Moreover, this politics of recognition has intensified noticeably

Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History

In recent decades historians have devoted considerable attention to the historical treatment of indigenous title in Anglophone settler colonies. These scholarly accounts have tended to emphasise the role metropolitan legal and intellectual discourses played in the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In this article I present a critical analysis of an influential example of such work in respect to the British denial of Aboriginal rights in land in the colony of New South Wales before providing an alternative account of the manner in which Aboriginal title was treated, which focuses on the nature of the relations on the ground between sojourners, settlers and Aboriginal people, the ways in which these encounters were represented by the British and the local practices regarding the transfer of land.