Murray Johnson

Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803

engage in the historical experience of Aboriginal Australia. This empathic witnessing has helped create the conditions to underpin the push for reconciliation. Butler also examines how Australian historians have responded to Indigenous testimony. Here, she reviews memoirs written by Henry Reynolds and Inga Clendinnen which reflect on how they, as historians, developed their understanding of the frontier. For Butler, Reynolds and Clendinnen remain firmly entrenched in a liberal humanist tradition in which the moral authority of the historian is preeminent. While acknowledging the importance of their work, Butler is critical of the way Reynolds and Clendinnen continue to privilege the voice of the academic historian. In contrast to the liberal humanist tradition, Butler points to the work of other scholars, such and Deborah Bird Rose and Katrina Schlunke, for a more contingent view of the past. In the closing chapters of her book, Butler moves beyond Indigenous history to other examples of witnessing in contemporary Australian society. In what reads as a disparate set of examples, she discusses the role of witnessing in Asylum-seeker advocacy, Norma Khouri’s fictional memoir Forbidden Love and the surf-documentary Bra Boys. Whereas the chapters dealing with Indigenous history employed a wide range of sources and explored similar themes, the later chapters draw on a much narrower archive and at times appear disconnected. As a reader, I was left wondering whether Forbidden Love and the Bra Boys were exemplars of a wider cultural phenomenon or were perhaps idiosyncratic examples of how testimony functions in contemporary Australian culture. Butler’s analysis of these examples was interesting, but I remained unconvinced as to their broader significance. Witnessing Australian Stories: History, Testimony and Memory in Contemporary Culture is an interesting book. While at times I was uncertain about the relevance of the individual case studies, I was convinced by the book’s central argument that witnessing has become an important feature of modern political debate in Australia.