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Past shrouded in polemics

Stuart Macintyre

5 July 2004 - During the row that followed last year's publication of my book The History Wars and Robert Manne's Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, many people suggested that I must be pleased that history was so much in the news. The media controversy certainly helped sales, but I am not sure that it assisted informed discussion of the issues.

The tone of the argument was set by the initial coverage. Narrow and adversarial, it centred on the motives and reputations of the authors; name-calling became a substitute for reasoned argument. Talkback radio sessions attracted callers who were in no doubt about at all where they stood: I cannot recall a single instance when we were asked about what we had written. Opinion articles were accompanied by cartoons and graphics depicting a desperate and unseemly struggle for supremacy in the history wars.

Outside the ranks of the combatants a different spirit was evident. My co-author Anna Clark and I found ourselves in discussion with Bert Newton on Good Morning Australia, and discovered that our host had a keen interest in the subject. Chance acquaintances who seldom read history books told us how instructive they found our account.

For several weeks, The Australian featured letters to the editor under the heading of "Most Talked About: History Wars". The changing subtitles offered their own commentary: "No winners, so far, in the history wars", "Descent into unworthy polemic", "No dissent in sterile universities". Presented in this way, it is little wonder that one correspondent suggested "if all historians were laid end to end they wouldn't reach a conclusion".

A number of interested parties recoiled from the crude polarisation of the history wars. One of them was Dawn Casey, the then director of the National Museum of Australia, and with good reason since she was the principal victim of the Howard Government's recriminations. When her first term expired at the end of 2002, she was given just a further 12 months. During that year, three members of the museum's governing council who had supported her were replaced. Museum sources told The Age that the minister, Rod Kemp, and the chairman, Tony Staley, were furious that I was invited to launch the book the museum published on frontier conflict. Thereafter Casey was closely supervised: Kemp accompanied her to Senate estimates committee to field all awkward questions. By the end of 2003 she was free to speak her mind. She said that her critics were "cultural commandos" engaged in overt political interference with a public institution.

The history wars that are conducted in the media have the qualities of a tar baby. They are an unattractive artefact, a sorry substitute for historical understanding; but anyone who seeks to respond is caught up in them. Even when you deplore the way that polemic deforms reasoned argument, you are seen as a polemicist.

The title of our book possibly invited such a response. We took the title from a formative argument at Washington's Smithsonian Museum in 1994 over the Enola Gay exhibition. That episode displayed some distinctive features. It built up into a campaign of denunciation waged by conservative politicians, commentators and media figures. It employed some of the tactics that had been developed over the past decade: it identified intellectuals, the "new class" and "the elites" as enemies of pride in the nation's past; and it waged a campaign of censorship under the guise of combating "political correctness".

We used the term history wars, then, to describe the way that similar tactics had been taken up in this country and used to rescue Australian history from the black armband historians. This campaign was prosecuted in the public arena but it involved a struggle to win control of cultural institutions such as the ABC and the National Museum, and efforts to discredit the historical profession and other academics with specialist expertise in interpreting the past.

The object of war is to vanquish the enemy. The duty of the scholar is to seek under standing. The importation of military methods into historical scholarship is ruinous to the enterprise. Adversarial intolerance is inimical to the principle of academic freedom.

The public discussion of history, on the other hand, serves other purposes: remembrance, entertainment, instruction and argument are among them. Such purposes are poorly served when one dogmatic assertion shouts down another, and character assassination replaces reasoned argument. The history wars are an ugly side of the Australian present and they debase public life.

Stuart Macintyre is co-author, with Anna Clark, of The History Wars (Melbourne University Press). This is an extract from the afterword to the new updated edition.

Source: The Australian

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