History Wars
Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 52, Number 3, 2006, pp. 439-454.
A Prehistory of Australia’s History Wars: The
Evolution of Aboriginal History during the 1970s and
1980s
LORENZO VERACINI
Australian National University
While an extensive debate has recently addressed more contemporary contributions to historical scholarship, the historiographical background to Australia’s History Wars has rarely been appraised. This article proposes an interpretative narrative of the evolution of Aboriginal history during the 1970s and 1980s. While before the late 1960s a systematic historiography of
Aboriginal-white relations did not exist, these decades have witnessed the emergence and consolidation of Aboriginal history as an established academic discipline. The 1970s saw the
“detection” of Aboriginal persistence and resistance and the historiographical tradition established during this decade insisted on the contested nature of the invasion process.
Conversely, during the 1980s, an interpretative tradition stressing Indigenous agency, transformation and adaptation shifted the focus of historiographical attention.
During the 1970s and 1980s what had previously been considered the domain of anthropologists, ethnologists and archaeologists became an interest of historians as well.1 While initially historians concentrated on challenging the image of Australia as the “quiet continent” and unqualified descriptions of Aboriginal destruction, a second moment of historiographical reinterpretation shifted the focus of historiographical attention towards Aboriginal-white relations after the end of the hostilities on the
Australian frontier.2 Throughout a recent outbreak of Australia’s “History Wars”, Keith
Windschuttle assumed that practitioners of Aboriginal history form a coherent group in their thinking. However, these “wars” were preceded by a long, complicated and strongly contested process of historiographical transition.3 This article
A Prehistory of Australia’s History Wars: The
Evolution of Aboriginal History during the 1970s and
1980s
LORENZO VERACINI
Australian National University
While an extensive debate has recently addressed more contemporary contributions to historical scholarship, the historiographical background to Australia’s History Wars has rarely been appraised. This article proposes an interpretative narrative of the evolution of Aboriginal history during the 1970s and 1980s. While before the late 1960s a systematic historiography of
Aboriginal-white relations did not exist, these decades have witnessed the emergence and consolidation of Aboriginal history as an established academic discipline. The 1970s saw the
“detection” of Aboriginal persistence and resistance and the historiographical tradition established during this decade insisted on the contested nature of the invasion process.
Conversely, during the 1980s, an interpretative tradition stressing Indigenous agency, transformation and adaptation shifted the focus of historiographical attention.
During the 1970s and 1980s what had previously been considered the domain of anthropologists, ethnologists and archaeologists became an interest of historians as well.1 While initially historians concentrated on challenging the image of Australia as the “quiet continent” and unqualified descriptions of Aboriginal destruction, a second moment of historiographical reinterpretation shifted the focus of historiographical attention towards Aboriginal-white relations after the end of the hostilities on the
Australian frontier.2 Throughout a recent outbreak of Australia’s “History Wars”, Keith
Windschuttle assumed that practitioners of Aboriginal history form a coherent group in their thinking. However, these “wars” were preceded by a long, complicated and strongly contested process of historiographical transition.3 This article