The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft

345 Pages·2016·2.75 MB·English

by  Tom Griffiths

Praise for The Art of Time Travel
‘Griffiths’ luminous new work underlines the inarguable point that if we are
truly to understand our history, we must get to know those who wrote it. A must-
read for anyone interested in Australia’s past.’
– TIM FLANNERY
‘Erudite but honest. Generous yet discerning. Warm, perceptive and nothing if
not elegant. A soulful meditation on the people who have shaped our past into
the stories we call history, by an historian who himself is at the top of his game.
Tom Griffiths reveals that the beating heart of history rests in the humanity of
those who write it.’ – CLARE WRIGHT
‘Tom Griffiths’ study of fourteen historians greatly enriches our understanding
of Australia past and present. The book teems with fresh insights into our
history. The author, himself an eminent environmental historian, keeps his
subjects close to earth. Like much of his work, the book adds new meaning to
the word “country”.’
– KEN INGLIS
‘A series of subtle and penetrating intellectual portraits of Griffiths’ teachers,
forebears and peers. As we read, we are brought into communion not only with
the minds of these thinkers, but with the mind of Griffiths himself, an historian
at the height of his powers, with insights that range far beyond history to the
meaning and significance of modernity itself. This book is not only a meditation
on the past, but a rallying cry for the future, in which Australia’s history might
be a source of both unflinching self-examination and poetic wonder.’ – BRIGID
HAINS
‘For too many decades Australian history has been a cacophony of “too many
notes”. Tom Griffiths has the rare, reconciling capacity – and a collegial
historian’s generosity – to envisage it as a symphony, created by many voices,
the discordant as well as the harmonious, that tells an evolving, bracing story of
who we are.’ – MORAG FRASER
‘Tom Griffiths reveals the crucial importance of history to our humanity. A rare
feat of imagination and generosity, The Art of Time Travel will remain relevant
for decades to come.’ – MARK MCKENNA
‘By exploring the intellectual and emotional backstories of fourteen people who
have crafted Australian history, Tom Griffiths shows how and why it is done. In
the process, he has created a beautiful work of history.’ – JULIANNE SCHULTZ
‘Sharp insights, thoughtful judgment, a generous spirit – The Art of Time Travel
has the hallmarks of all Tom Griffiths’ scholarship. His panorama of Australian
historians shows why any similar survey conducted in the future will include his
own artful work among the honoured.’ – STEPHEN J. PYNE, Arizona State
University
‘An enthralling account of the intellectual rediscovery of Australia, vividly
brought to life by a gifted interpreter. Griffiths’ lyrical prose is mesmerizing.’ –
DAVID LOWENTHAL, University College London
‘Liberates the study of historians and historiography from the dry, soulless
confines of the academy to demonstrate the creative and imaginative craft at its
best. If there were one single volume to encapsulate this dramatic, complex,
entangled and exciting field, The Art of Time Travel is that book. Certain to
become an instant classic.’
– JANE CARRUTHERS, University of South Africa

For Michael, Julie, Mardie and Dominic
Contents
Prologue
ONE The Timeless Land: Eleanor Dark
TWO The Journey to Monaro: Keith Hancock
THREE Entering the Stone Circle: John Mulvaney
FOUR The Magpie: Geoffrey Blainey
FIVE The Cry for the Dead: Judith Wright
SIX The Creative Imagination: Greg Dening
SEVEN The Frontier Fallen: Henry Reynolds
EIGHT Golden Disobedience: Eric Rolls
NINE Voyaging South: Stephen Murray-Smith
TEN History as Art: Donna Merwick
ELEVEN Walking the City: Graeme Davison
TWELVE History and Fiction: Inga Clendinnen
THIRTEEN The Feel of the Past: Grace Karskens
FOURTEEN Dr Deep Time: Mike Smith
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index
Prologue
A
couple of years ago, when I was walking a pilgrimage route in rural France,
I was invited to share the evening meal with three fellow walkers, all of them
French. Conversation eventually got around to how we earned our livings. One
was an air-conditioning salesman, one was a nurse and the third a psychological
counsellor. When they discovered that I was a historian, there was a chorus of
approval, even, dare I say it, a frisson of serious regard – something unexpected
for scholars in Australia. And, as proud French citizens, they were ready with
their natural next question: ‘Who are your favourite French historians?’
The question beautifully fulfilled one of the stereotypes we have of French
culture – that the general public knows and reveres its nation’s intellectuals. It
was predicated on the confidence that they would know the names I managed to
present to them. Even the adjective ‘favourite’ acknowledged that there were
many possibilities of which they were aware, and that my answer would reveal
something about myself. The question also sweetly assumed that I, as a historian
living in Australia, was part of a global scholarly community, and would surely
be familiar with the historians of France. They awaited my answer – I am not
exaggerating – with strong interest.
I gave them two names. The first was Fernand Braudel. This was greeted
with satisfaction and approval. Yes, they replied, The Mediterranean was a
landmark work, a history with prodigious scale and depth, a book they all knew.1
My second offering was Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. ‘Oh yes! The author of
Montaillou!’ they rejoiced.2 I had hit the jackpot here, and there was much to
discuss about the intimate eye on medieval society that Ladurie had given us all.
My stocks went up even further when I was able to say that I had heard Ladurie
speak just a week earlier, at a conference in Munich. Now I was boasting. Before
the meal was over, they had pressed me for the titles of my histories and
regretted that they were not ‘yet’ translated into French. I knew they never
would be, but how exhilarating that they considered it likely.
Over the next week or two, as I strode across the Aveyron, I happily
pondered this heady conversation, which had unexpectedly united my scholarly
and recreational lives. Would I ever be asked this question in Australia, I
wondered. And how would I reply? What is the role of historians in our national
conversation and what exactly is it that they do?
This book is a quirky, serious and personal exploration of the art and craft of
history in Australia since the Second World War. I have chosen to illuminate my
discipline in the way my French table companions found most congenial: by
nominating some of my favourite historians and trying to describe how they
work. I am keen to show that writing history is a highly creative act and that its
artistic aspirations are perfectly consistent with the quest to represent the past
truthfully. Good history is a high-wire, gravity-defying act of balance and grace
that fills me with awe. Rather than investigating this process abstractly, I am
going to observe how particular historians construct a body of work out of a
lifelong dialogue between past evidence and present experience. Historians tend
to be dedicated, passionate citizens who seek to make a difference by telling true
stories. They scour their own societies for vestiges of past worlds, for cracks and
fissures in the pavement of the present, and for the shimmers and hauntings of
history in everyday action. They begin their enquiries in a deeply felt present.
But as time travellers they have to forsake their own world for a period – and
then, somehow, find their way back.
If, at the dinner table, I had named a third favourite French historian, it would
have been Marc Bloch. A French Jew who fought in both world wars, Bloch was
a senior member of the French Resistance in Lyon who was captured by the
Gestapo, imprisoned, tortured and murdered in 1944. Together with Lucien
Febvre, he founded in 1929 the Annales School of historians, which pioneered
‘the new social history’ with its integration of social science techniques and
interest in long-term changes in social structures and collective mentalities.
Bloch was a gifted student of rural society, and his French Rural History (1931)
and Feudal Society (1939) remain greatly admired. But perhaps his most famous
works were those written during the German occupation of France, when he was
mostly stranded from his sources except for the grim stimuli of oppression and
imprisonment. In 1940 he wrote Strange Defeat, an urgent but reflective analysis
of his country’s ‘terrible collapse’ under the German invasion. He also began
writing The Historian’s Craft – but it was unfinished on the evening he was
taken in a truck to be executed with twenty-seven other Resistance prisoners.
The manuscript survived, and it began with the question, ‘What is the use of
history?’ The book was his response: a heartfelt but calm self-examination at a
time when many felt betrayed by history. Bloch’s tenacious integration of civic
engagement and critical scholarship amidst such trauma was an inspiration to
many of the historians studied in this book.3
Historians are often challenged about the usefulness of their discipline – and
they frequently challenge themselves. The Australian historian Graeme Davison,
himself inspired by Marc Bloch’s practical sense of history as a craft, took up
the challenge of ‘the utilitarian age’ of the late 1990s to write his insightful book
The Use and Abuse of Australian History.4 Another Australian historian, Hugh
Stretton, besieged by rising economic rationalism in the 1980s, treasured history
as a discipline because it has ‘three qualities which have been scarce in modern
social science’: it is ‘holist, uncertain and eclectic’. ‘Who study societies of
every kind,’ he asked, ‘study them whole, know most about how they conserve
or change their ideas and institutions, write in plain language, and generally
know how uncertain and selective their knowledge is at best? Historians do.’5
History is a form of knowledge that tends to be subtle, humble, complex and
contextual and therefore less amenable to generalisation, prediction or
application. A decade ago, when I was writing a history of Antarctica and
researching human experience in remote places, I read the medical and
psychological studies of life in isolated communities and kept coming up against
the limits of faceless, nameless, clinical accounts of deeply personal and cultural
matters. In the name of objectivity, rationality and generalisation, real people
were gutted and meaning ebbed away. History, by contrast, spills over with
illuminating, verifiable examples that you can argue with. This person did that
here, then, because. History’s commitment to contingency and particularity has
often been seen to weaken its usefulness. But to understand the rigours of the
long polar night – and to survive it – people need vivid tales of winters past.
Historians welcome questions about usefulness because history is a
democratic practice that cherishes its connection with the people and the polity.
History can be constructed at the dinner table, over the back fence, in parliament
and in the streets, and not just in a tutorial room or at the scholar’s desk.
Historians generally don’t try to hide behind jargon or intimidate others with
professional bullying. They aim to give voice to common experience and seek to
communicate with the widest audience. Ironically, it is this very inclusiveness
that can expose their authority to challenge. History is so important, so
ubiquitous, so integrated with our public and personal lives – with the very