Provincialism

For the past twenty years, Bain Attwood has been trying to de-provincialise what he sees as an insular historiography of Aboriginal Australia by imploring colleagues to embrace the latest intellectual trends from France, America and New Zealand. In Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, he expands on his many press articles on the ‘history wars’ and combines them with methodological reflection on postmodernism and post-colonialism. What advice does he have for his colleagues in the face of doubts cast on their work by newspaper columnists and other ‘history warriors’?

His task is complicated by the fact that this book is also explicitly directed at a general audience, an aim that is frustrated by indulging in psychoanalytic vocabulary with little definitional assistance. Pitching his discussion of identity politics and Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) at the lay reader, Attwood delivers able summaries of the issues, although they do not go beyond the now extensive literature on the subjects. To this extent, two-thirds of Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History repeats commonplaces and rushes through doors opened by scholars before him. Some of these scholars are acknowledged; many are not.