Foreword - Traffic 10
Just over a decade or so ago, almost everywhere you looked, history as a discipline appeared to be in a bad way. In Australia, Keith Windschuttle, at that time a relatively obscure media lecturer, published his readable but intemperate volume, The Killing of History (1994), in which he lamented the death of history at the hands of cultural studies. His book was cheered on by conservative commentators, who loved his newly discovered rhetorical technique of exaggerated language (‘killing’), combined with exaggerated argument (blithely categorising as a collective gang of ‘postmodern’ killers Karl Popper, Michel Foucault, Perry Anderson, Simon Schama and Terry Eagleton), and inflated menace (‘murdered by literary critics’).
Across the Pacific, a history crisis of a different sort unfolded as Lynne Cheney, abetted by a cohort of radical-right politicians and commentators―including Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan―poured scorn on the 1994 national standards in schools history, a voluntary code which was, according to Cheney et al., nothing less than a subversive leftist plot to indoctrinate the minds of gullible US school students, a conspiracy labelled by the conservative Wall Street Journal the ‘End of History’. Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross Dunn, the three perfectly amiable and centrist professional historians most closely associated with the standards, were then pilloried in the right wing media as socialist fifth columnists. Cheney’s influence was so great in that first conservative decade of Bush family politics that in January 1995 the standards, voluntary as they were, faced a Senate resolution, to be duly condemned.
North of the 49th Parallel, and not to be outdone by events in Australia and the US, the Windschuttleist technique was adopted by Canadian military historian Jack Granatstein, whose similarly-titled book Who Killed Canadian History? (1998) caused a rumpus in his homeland. There the recently established Dominion Institute had been conducting surveys which clearly showed that a majority of Canadian school students could not name their nation’s first English-speaking Prime Minister, nor indeed Canada’s first French-speaking PM.
Back in Australia the plot had already thickened, so to speak, as Geoffrey Blainey’s ‘Black Armband’ designation of historians with whom he disagreed quickly became the marker for the beginning of a long and exhausting history war―more theatre than war, really―which lasted from the mid-‘90s until the final days of the Howard administration in October 2007. This drama featured a strongly interventionist push by the Howard government, firmly backed from the early 2000s onwards by The Australian newspaper under the crusading editorship of Chris Mitchell. Windschuttle himself made a reprise cameo appearance in late 2002 with the publication of his controversial book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, a hefty volume which then produced a brief Windschuttle media frenzy (mainly fostered by The Australian), featuring the Sydney controversialist himself, a claque of noisily dedicated supporters, and a cast of puzzled, bemused and angry victims of Windschuttleism at work.
What did it all mean? And how does my brief account of recent conflicts caused by political interference in historical scholarship tie in with this volume of essays by scholars who are at the start of their careers as professional historians? The answer to these two questions lies in the importance of seeing history not just as an academic exercise but as an activity that combines rigorous scholarship with commitment to public debate. To rehash Marx, it is not enough to simply be a thinker; it is also vital to take the debate out there into the community at large, to use research as an opportunity for informing public and professional debate in a considered and effective fashion.
As many historians in Australia, the US and Canada did, it is vital to remind the disingenuously simplistic politicians and commentators, of both right and left, with their bags of rhetorical tricks that there is more to history than just celebrating dead famous people or, as one ALP minister in the Rudd government commented (when discussing the benefits of the proposed national curriculum), having all students work from the same textbook. Not that the indissoluble relationship that exists between history and personal politics makes much sense to ideologically-motivated commentators with their primitive views of ‘objective’ (i.e. acceptable) facts. Indeed, one such, Janet Albrechtsen, has gleefully pointed out that a thoroughly apolitical Keith Windschuttle had revealed historian Marilyn Lake for what she was? an historian with an attitude. Moreover, Albrechtsen demanded, with a massive failure of intelligence and of self-insight, that the Marilyn Lakes of this world be ‘named and shamed’―for having professional opinions of their own which they are prepared to put out there in the community at large.
Meanwhile, in my own field of education, I see a current failure to engage with the community at large as a serious and disappointing phenomenon. Far too many academic educators have become more and more enamoured with the arcane, the abstruse and the ineffectual; more concerned with criticism than with action, all the while extolling the virtue of action to their students; more interested in the repressive nature of schooling, all the while ignoring the suppressive nature of their own dull, grey monomania.
That is why this collection is a refreshing change, since it represents a renewal of a now healthy profession once under siege. It also demonstrates the best aspects of historical scholarship as seen through the lenses of a variety of techniques and approaches, ambitiously examining a wide world of topics ranging from a feminist study of geisha politics to an analysis of filmic nostalgia for the good old days of the dull, grey monomaniacal German Democratic Republic. History in several of its varieties is represented here: no primitive neo-conservative crudities that abhor nuance and ambiguity; no over-reliance on postmodernist puns that suggest a lack of awareness of Christopher Norris’s demolition of Derrida; no half-understood poststructuralist mutterings that show ignorance of Andrew Scull’s recent demolition of Foucault’s scholarship: just good, incisive scholarship―and interesting stories.
Tony Taylor
Associate Professor, Monash University