Doubleness of history

In recent years, there has been significant public anxiety over Australia’s past, and historians have found themselves in the middle of a contest over increasingly urgent issues of historical narrative and approach. It has been a heated debate, encapsulated by a series of graphic and divisive metaphors proclaiming history’s ‘murder’, ‘fabrication’ and even the ‘killing of history’. While these so-called ‘history wars’ have come to dominate discussion of Australia’s past, the limitations of such debate are telling: history has been forced into opposing camps (left–right, black–white etc.); and examining contrasting readings of the past without falling into its prescribed lines of division now seems more difficult than ever.