Inga Clendinnen: Selected Writings

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INTRODUCTION

History Matters: Selected Writings of Inga Clendinnen

James Boyce

WHEN INGA CLENDINNEN DIED IN SEPTEMBER 2016, Australia lost an internationally renowned historian of rare imaginative capacity, fierce intelligence and wide interests. Her ability to decipher distant documents, rituals and actions was complemented with a capacity to communicate the insights she wrought from empirical evidence in powerful and poetic prose. Clendinnen’s subject was nothing less than human consciousness – she endeavoured to understand what people’s actions and experiences meant for them. Awareness of the complexity and impenetrability of human behaviour only motivated her to dig deeper, honing her research and literary skills, until she wrote the memorable texts that transformed our understanding of the past.¹

Given her achievements and long academic career – at the University of Melbourne, from 1956, and La Trobe University, from 1969 – it is surprising that Clendinnen’s first paper appeared only in 1979. Appropriately, ‘Understanding the Heathen at Home’ was a reflection on the work of E.P. Thompson, who proved to be a mentor not just for the way he wrote history but because of whom he wrote it for. In The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson had provided ethically imbued empirical history to a general readership without compromising scholarly standards. In the decades to come, Inga Clendinnen would do the same.

Clendinnen always emphasised the privileges of her time and generation, contrasting the opportunities she had enjoyed with her mother’s constrained world in provincial Geelong. Nevertheless, the ‘gendered gerontocracy’² of post-war academia partly explains her relatively late start to publishing. Inga Jewell had married the philosopher John Clendinnen in 1955, while completing a history honours degree at the University of Melbourne, and would become mother to two boys, Stephen and Richmond. Family responsibilities combined with part-time teaching presumably further limited the opportunity she had for research.

But it is also likely that Clendinnen was not yet ready to publish the writing she had practised since childhood. By temperament and principle, she celebrated her mentors but would copy none of them. It took time to develop her historical and literary voice, with the key to finding this being two decades of reading, teaching and collegial engagement.

Clendinnen read widely for pleasure all her life. A vast body of absorbed knowledge, crossing disciplines, genres, cultures and eras, would enrich and inform her prose. Pepys, Levi, Frame, Chekhov, Flaubert, Trollope, Tolstoy, Calvino, Proust, Hesse, Borowski, Mailer, Nabokov, Babel and Leys – these are but some of the writers she reflected upon. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was returned to repeatedly. For its narrator, Marlow, ‘the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze’.³ Once Clendinnen began to write, her probing recalled that of the Polish genius, albeit in a different mode: both writers could be fairly described as brilliant literary anthropologists.

Another writer Clendinnen frequently returned to was her ‘friend’ the sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne, who ‘talks about anything because he is afraid of nothing … his invitation into every subject [is] to think about it, to search out its meanings – to share his surprise, or joy, or horror that there are such things in this green world’.⁴ The life-giving exuberance of the ever-curious Frenchman and his confidence in the capacity of the written word to convey mystery and wonder would become features of Clendinnen’s own literary style.

The long wait for her first scholarly publication ensured that Clendinnen’s writing was also shaped by decades of teaching. Clendinnen recalled being ‘paralysed’ when she first wrote, imagining her audience ‘as a handful of scowling academics’. Her perspective on her readers subsequently changed: ‘I realised I already knew them. They were my students, or kin to them’ but ‘now on the other side of the page instead of the table’.⁵ Clendinnen’s dialectical style – openly sharing possible paths to insight and truth – was formed in and by the lecture hall:

I simply did the same things I used to do with my students: laying out the issues, telling them why I thought they were worth thinking about, introducing and evaluating the sources, then leading what were now my fellow investigators through different analytic procedures, testing the usefulness and the limitations of each one as we went; and at the end summing up how far we had come, how far we still had to go, and what sources and analytic techniques might get us there …

The die was cast, I would not write for the eight other experts in the field … I would write in the hope of seducing an intelligent, non-specialist audience into giving me a large slice of their uncommitted time, into thinking about the issues I most cared about.⁶

Writing for everyday people did not mean simplification: ‘Time and again I’ve been tempted to slide over something difficult, to make something look simple when it was not; I resisted the temptation; and time and again readers have demonstrated that I was right to do so’. This confidence in the reader makes Clendinnen’s work empowering to read.

The long period of formation also gave Clendinnen two other communities that would influence her work. The first was within the academy where, as a foundation member of the history department at La Trobe University in the 1970s, she joined a circle of Melbourne-based historians pioneering new approaches in ethnographic history. Dubbed the ‘Melbourne Group’ by the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz (whose writings were often cited by Clendinnen), it included Greg Dening, Rhys Isaac, June Philipp, Tony Barta and Donna Merwick. Insights from anthropology were employed by the group to unravel meanings from encounters, rituals, performances, actions and episodes that were not apparent in a conventional reading of the documentary record. In an introduction to one of her favourite Australian history books, Don Watson’s Caledonia Australis, Clendinnen summarised the objective of this approach: ‘Perpetuators might forget, but victims do not … ghostly shapes still haunt the page, preserved in objects or archives or languages or landscapes, or in tenacious structures of habitual thought and feeling. There they are, layer upon layer, some set in stone, others close to indecipherable’. The historian’s goal is with ‘skill and … tenderness to restore these time-bleached texts to legibility’.⁷

Clendinnen’s main field of research during this period was in Mesoamerican studies. She would recall that ‘working on early Mexico was the happiest time of my academic life. The literary sources were sumptuously equivocal: sixteenth-century Spaniards watching Indians, or glimpsing them from the corner of an eye; Indians acting, reacting, memorialising their experience in ways quite unfamiliar to the outsider’. Mexico was also Clendinnen’s introduction to the significance of ‘non-literary sources: to figurines and pots, to ceremonial dress and dramas, to customary practices sacred and mundane, to local landscapes drenched with transcendent meanings’. This was ‘baptism by full immersion as a cultural anthropologist, and about as disorientating as full-immersion baptism must be’. The reward was that Clendinnen gradually began to feel she was in ‘(intermittent, always fragile) communication with these people remote from me in time, place and thought’.⁸

With such profound preparation, it is not surprising that Clendinnen’s first article in an international journal, ‘Landscape and World View: The Survival of Yucatec Maya Culture under Spanish Conquest’,⁹ was a mature work that instantly established her reputation in the field. In her words, it explores ‘how variously religion works on the ground: how apparently commonplace objects and places and apparently innocuous actions can be exalted to the sacred by covertly shared imaginings’.¹⁰ Confronting the assumption that indigenous society was ‘a delicate glass vessel shattering under the impact of the Spanish cudgel’,¹¹ Clendinnen explored how the Maya were able ‘to recreate their traditional social worlds’ within the new settlements.¹² Through probing artefact and action, a previously obscured continuity was identified, including in daily domestic life: ‘House and houseyard, church and patio, echoed the four-sided shape of the world, and the new village, like the old, protected itself from the forest by guardian crosses at its four entrances … the continuity of the old order was constantly pledged by the rhythms and shapes of daily experience’.¹³

Clendinnen’s first book, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan 1517–1570, was published in 1987 by Cambridge University Press and won the American Historical Association’s prize for best book of the year in Latin American history. The book explores Spanish settlement in the Yucatán and the Maya response, its centrepiece the inquisition of 1562, when Franciscan missionaries savagely sought to root out religious and cultural practices they considered idolatrous. Again, the actions of both sides are explored, meanings uncovered and ambiguities and mysteries frankly faced, because to avoid areas of uncertainty would be ‘to leave unexplored what matters most’.¹⁴

A second book, Aztecs: An Interpretation, followed in 1991. Here the same resolve to transcend cultural boundaries is evident, including by the exploration of the seemingly unfathomable violence involved in human sacrifice. Clendinnen signals in Aztecs that her determination to seek understanding will brook no limits, because, as she concluded in ‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico’, ‘once that sense of unassuageable otherness has been established, the outlook is bleak indeed’.¹⁵

The success of these two books and a series of influential articles meant that after a decade of publication Clendinnen’s writings were becoming standard references for students, researchers and a wider readership interested in the field. But although a distinguished scholar of international repute, Clendinnen was still little known in Australia. What changed this was the writing which accompanied her long battle with serious illness.

In 1994, four years after being diagnosed with a rare condition, auto-immune hepatitis, Clendinnen received a liver transplant. Throughout this difficult, disorientating and painful period, Clendinnen wrote only ‘to preserve myself’,¹⁶ but the body of prose constructed out of physical frailty, mortality-infused memory, drugged hallucinations and the privations and enigmas of hospital life would coalesce (with the mentorship of her new publisher, Michael Heyward) into a remarkable memoir.

There is a paradoxical sense of release in Tiger’s Eye. As Clendinnen notes in the book’s epilogue, ‘Illness casts you out, but it also cuts you free’.¹⁷ On receiving the Australian Society of Authors Medal in 2006, she reflected that ‘it was only after I had emerged from academe that I began to think I might be a writer as well as a historian’. Clendinnen had always ‘fretted’ over ‘words, sequences, images’, but she had done so ‘secretly, even guiltily, because … in those days an academic who gave too much attention to style, as it was contemptuously called, declared herself to be fatally light-minded’.¹⁸

It was fortuitous for Australians that Clendinnen’s creative release was channelled into an exploration of the nation’s history. Her post-transplant reading included the diaries of George Augustus Robinson, ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’ in the Port Phillip District during the 1840s. This was a time when settlement of the vast grasslands of the eastern seaboard proceeded at a pace that historian Richard Broome believes was ‘as fast as any expansion in the history of European colonisation’.¹⁹ The consequence was that 85 per cent of the Aboriginal population of what is now Victoria was dead by 1850, a death rate which Clendinnen observed was higher than any colonial encounter she knew of except that in the Caribbean. The seasoned scholar of the Mesoamerican colonial encounter became absorbed by Robinson’s extensive record of his journey through the war zone of the western districts (a country she knew well from childhood), by the paradoxical character of the chief protector and the tragic context in which he fulfilled his duties. Her musings were set out in ‘Reading Mr Robinson’, published in the Australian Book Review in 1995 and reproduced in Tiger’s Eye.

Although Clendinnen’s transplant was a success, visiting Central America was thereafter prohibited because ‘Mexican pathogens are famously vicious’.²⁰ This meant her foray into Australian history became a full immersion, signified by the presentation of her ABC Boyer Lectures, ‘True Stories’, in 1999, later published in a book of the same name.

The lectures open in classic Clendinnen style with the forensic examination of an ‘incident on a beach’. What was going on for both parties when men from the Baudin expedition encountered a single Aboriginal woman on the southwest coast of Western Australia in 1801? From this fraught meeting between French explorers and a terrified individual, the lectures delve into the cultural gulf and growing conflict central to the momentous early encounters between colonising Europeans and the Indigenous people of the continent.

Clendinnen’s Boyer Lectures provided an urgently needed space for national reflection at the turn of the millennium. Relatively few Australians have engaged seriously with history, and the prejudices derived from early exposure to boring teaching and bad writing remain widespread. Three decades of rich scholarship documenting not only the conflict on the colonial frontier but also the complexity of local resistance, adaptation, accommodation, encounter and survival remained surprisingly little known, even among people concerned with addressing the injustices of the past. Clendinnen’s respect for the intelligence of her audience meant that her nationally broadcast lectures became a symposium on this research and its implications. The wisdom wrought from personal suffering was not incidental to the favourable reception the talks received. Nor was Clendinnen’s maturity and moral integrity. Modern English lacks words to describe embodied wisdom, in which the aura of the person delivering the message is recognised as integral to its impact; but few people who heard the Boyer Lectures, or Clendinnen speaking at forums and festivals across the country in the decade that followed, would forget the power of her presence.

If ‘True Stories’ gave Clendinnen a new audience in Australia, Reading the Holocaust (named by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1999) gave her a new audience worldwide. Clendinnen had been challenged by Robert Manne’s book The Culture of Forgetting, which reflects on the implications of the controversy that erupted in 1995 when a young Australian writer, Helen Demidenko, won a series of literary awards for a novel connecting events of the Holocaust with the suffering of a Ukrainian family at the hands of ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ during the 1930s. The writer’s defence of her inaccurate, anti-Semitic version of history – that it was based on what she had heard from her father – collapsed when her Ukrainian name and identity were exposed as inventions. Manne’s troubling charge that the response to the episode revealed a ‘culture of forgetting’ the Holocaust was taken personally by Clendinnen, who set out to overcome the demoralising ‘bafflement’ widely associated with the twentieth century’s most heinous crime.²¹

The epigraph of Reading the Holocaust evokes the Greek myth of the Gorgon Medusa. This half-human monster turned to stone all who gazed upon her, until Perseus, armed with gifts of the gods, held the monster’s image steady in his shield and killed her (although ‘even in death the head retained its power to petrify’).²² Clendinnen sets out to ‘dispel the Gorgon effect – the sickening of the imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will which afflicts so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust’.²³

Reading the Holocaust was a powerful rejoinder to the view that the Holocaust was so exceptional an event that it is incapable of being understood in human terms. Clendinnen showed that despite the unique scale of the Holocaust’s institutionalised, ideologically driven, technologically enabled horror, the work of inquiry can and must go on. Clendinnen never suggested that there could be complete comprehension (‘this is not a matter of arriving at some Aha! now I comprehend everything! theory or moment’),²⁴ but through meticulous unpacking of eyewitness accounts of action and ritual, she affirmed the worth of scholarly endeavour. The motivation was not research for research’s sake, but a belief that preventing future genocides requires fathoming what such an event meant for past participants, to the extent that we possibly can.

After Reading the Holocaust, Clendinnen returned to home shores. Her chosen topic was the most tragically transformative and poignant encounter in Australian history: that at Port Jackson between the Aboriginal people (the ‘Australians’) and the British in the first years of European settlement. Using the books, reports and journals of the officers as her sources, Clendinnen deployed skills honed on the Spanish–indigenous American encounters to reimagine Aboriginal actions and responses. A celebrated example of Clendinnen’s unrivalled ethnographic skill was the new interpretation she gave to one of the best-known incidents of this period, the spearing of Governor Arthur Phillip at Manly Cove. The paradoxical fact that this violence led to a degree of rapprochement is explained by the possibility that it was intended to be a ritual punishment of the governor, in which he would endure ‘a single spear-throw in penance for his and his people’s many offences’.²⁵ The fact that no Briton was killed by skilled spear-throwers in September 1790 was less likely to be a fortunate accident than a deliberate decision.

Dancing with Strangers is a book grounded in an affirmation of the humanity of the Aboriginal people, the British settlers and the reader. This means that even confronting disparities are taken seriously and uncertainties never glossed over. The sole concern of the book is to understand what happened when the British colonised Aboriginal land. We are introduced to the people of 1788 by a guide who knows that it is only through an honest honouring of difference, sometimes unbridgeable, that genuine understanding can emerge.

Dancing with Strangers was published amid a public debate about the level of violence perpetrated against Indigenous people in the early years of British settlement. This was less an argument among historians than one between conservative cultural commentators and those with knowledge of the documentary sources. Clendinnen’s focus on the period of first contact at Port Jackson, a moment in Australian history when any future seemed possible, and her delving into the fraught space that separated even sympathetic British observers from the ‘Australians’ they met, meant that the book’s honesty provided a bedrock to the resurgent cause of reconciliation. Clendinnen bequeathed to a conquered continent a creation story that helped the nation imagine a more hopeful future.

One settler not open to change was the prime minister of the day, John Howard, whose determination that Australians should be taught a more celebratory version of the nation’s past, stripped of its so-called ‘black armband’, provided the context for what was to be Clendinnen’s last book.

Clendinnen had proclaimed the indispensability of history throughout her career. Even in ‘Understanding the Heathen at Home’ she highlights the danger of imagining that the people of other cultures and times were just like us, except in ‘fancy dress’. But it was Clendinnen’s 2006 Quarterly Essay, The History Question: Who Owns the Past?, that developed her views into a comprehensive, widely cited and sometimes misunderstood critique.²⁶ While it powerfully answers the claim that the fiction writer’s ‘empathy’ and ‘intuition’ give them an access to the past denied the historian, this is not the essay’s main subject. Rather, Clendinnen set out to affirm the creative scope, moral importance and methodological integrity of history. She was frustrated by all those who diminished the discipline, be they novelist or politician. Representatives of both groups wrongly assumed that history should confine itself to the facts of the matter, with the creativity, emotions, imagination, interpretation and ethical concern of the historian detached from his or her scholarship. But this is a method of history that almost no historian since Lord Acton in the nineteenth century has sought to practise (and so overwhelmed was he by the infinite number of facts that he wrote almost nothing). Clendinnen maintains that good history writing is as confronting and creative as any literature because it is grounded in what happened: ‘With a work of fiction we marvel at the fictioneer’s imagination. With real thought and actions presented for our scrutiny we are brought to wonder at ourselves’.²⁷

Some of the best evidence for the truth of the thesis put forward in The History Question is to be found in the author’s other work. Anyone who believes that history is not as imaginatively profound as fiction, or as ethically engaged as philosophy, politics or religion, needs to read Inga Clendinnen. Her writings are an enduring testament to the truth that while we might ‘live within the narrow moving band of time we call the present … the secret engine of our present is our past, with its plastic memories, its malleable moralities, its wreathing dreams of desirable futures’.²⁸

While Clendinnen continued to write, recurrent ill-health from 2008 prevented the fulfilment of her expressed plan to write a follow-up to Dancing with Strangers.²⁹ Delightfully crafted essays continued to appear, worthy of her mentor Montaigne, a body of work that ensures her place among Australia’s finest essayists.

Two anthologies of Clendinnen’s work were published in the last decade of her life, both with informative introductions by the author. Together they provide companion volumes to this one. Agamemnon’s Kiss, published in 2006, collected general essays written since her illness, while The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society, published in 2010, chiefly comprised Mesoamerican scholarly articles. Some of the writings in those anthologies are reproduced here.

The works collected in this anthology seek to demonstrate how and why Inga Clendinnen wrote history. For while Clendinnen was an exceptionally gifted essayist, her ability to write serious history for a general readership was unrivalled in this country. It is for this reason (as well as out of deference to the two anthologies for which Clendinnen selected the essays herself) that I have also included a number of extracts from her books. My hope is that these excerpts will encourage readers to experience them in full.

Two years before she died, Inga Clendinnen received the Dan David Prize, awarded to individuals of ‘proven, exceptional, distinct excellence’ in one of several fields, ‘who have made and continue to make an outstanding contribution to humanity’.³⁰ Much of the one million dollars in prize money was donated to Médecins Sans Frontières in gratitude to the medical professionals who saved her life twenty-five years before. This prize was the apex of the many awards Clendinnen received, including her appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006. However, the honour that meant the most to her was that her writing continued to be read. History and readers of history mattered to Clendinnen, because seeing a better future requires keeping an eye on the past. While we should not ‘shuffle backwards into the twenty-first century’, responding to the challenges of the new millennium requires ‘a crabwise approach, eyes swivelling sideways, backwards, forwards, with equal intensity, because while the past is past, it is not dead. Its hand is on our shoulder’.³¹

ENCOUNTERS

IN AUSTRALIA

1

INCIDENT ON A BEACH

I BEGIN WITH THE STORY OF AN INCIDENT ON A BEACH. THE place is the southwest coast of what we now call Western Australia. The year is 1801. A French scientific expedition is coasting those shores, with the official blessing of their First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte. Their main job is to collect samples of flora and fauna which might be useful back home in France, but they are committed scientists, and they are curious about the human population too: indeed, one of the naturalists aboard has a special interest in the infant discipline of Anthropology. But while they have seen the smoke of many fires they have not sighted a single native until they surprise a solitary man, fishing in waist-deep water. The encounter is not encouraging: as the Frenchmen advance, waving glass necklaces at him, he shouts, who knows what, shakes his fish spear at them and disappears into the scrub.

Then they come upon a man and woman digging for shellfish. The man runs, but the woman, ‘seized with fright’, we are told, flings herself down and flattens her face and body into the sand, arms and legs bent ‘like a frog on the edge of a pond’. The Frenchmen surround her. One lays presents beside her – a mirror, a little knife – while another quickly checks to see whether she still has her front teeth. (Dampier had reported that the people he encountered had lost theirs.) He finds that she does.

Then, hoping she might stop crying, the men withdraw twenty feet or so. But she remains pressed into the sand, save that she once lifts her head and looks at them. So they come back and pick her up and hold her suspended so they can examine her. Then, ‘as she still would not stand, they laid her on her back on the sand’.

The leader of the expedition continues the account:

I saw then that she was pregnant – that is probably what prevented her from fleeing … This woman had a small round face with pronounced features … She was of small stature, but well-made … I judged from her breasts that she had had many children, although she appeared not to be more than twenty or twenty-two years old. Her only clothing was an old skin … a piece of the same skin forming a kind of pocket, which contained several small onions, similar to the roots of orchids … At last, as this woman showed no sign of life, we left her. We were hardly more than thirty paces from her when we saw her stealing away on hands and knees into the bushes, leaving behind our presents and her stick.

This is the story as Nicolas Baudin recorded it in his report to his superiors.¹ The story was told honestly: Baudin was confident that he and his men had conducted themselves correctly, and that they had done no harm. Clearly they intended none. In one sense the woman was lucky: these strangers didn’t rape her, they didn’t abduct her, they didn’t kill her. Three centuries earlier, Spaniards might well have done any or all of those things. The Frenchmen had treated her gently. Of course they would not have treated a Frenchwoman met on a beach like that, but these heirs to the French Revolution certainly recognised her as a fellow human, black and near naked though she was – they gave her both time to stop crying, and her little gifts, and they molested her only in so far as their scientific purposes required. They were only doing their job – and they did her no harm.

Or so they thought. Now, consider the matter from her perspective. She had been surrounded; she had been paralysed with terror. One of the strangers had forced his fingers into her mouth. At that point she had been lying face down, so he must have turned her head to the side before he could thrust them in. Then they had lifted her and stared at her and tugged at her garment as she hung in their hands like a frozen frog. Then they laid her down and stared some more. And then they went away. So what had happened to her?

What is terrifying is that we do not know, even as we watch her press herself into the sand, as we watch her crawling away. We see her body, but we do not see her mind. What did she think was happening as she felt the hands of these very material apparitions? What did she think was happening to the child in her belly, the child she was desperately trying to protect from their sight and touch? And later, when she crept back to her people, how was she received? Was she received at all? Was she shunned? Was she killed? They would have been watching what happened. They would have seen her hanging in those strange bleached hands. What did they think had happened to the child in her belly? Did they decide to kill it, too? And the man who fled in terror, abandoning his pregnant woman to the strangers. Where would he find his manhood now?

We don’t know the answers to any of these questions. All we do know is that no harm was intended, and that harm was almost certainly done. We also know the Frenchmen’s story, a story told honestly from their perspective, despite all the things it leaves out, of what happened on the beach. We don’t know the woman’s story at all. We can only infer what it might have been by exercising our imaginations.

It is also worth thinking about the gifts the Europeans brought to bestow upon these as yet unknown locals: glass beads, knives, mirrors. This is the standard inventory of the smiling face of imperialism. Columbus took beads, knives and mirrors with him to America. Why knives? Because knives are seriously useful in any economy? Why beads? Because savages are vain? Because all men are vain? Why mirrors? A usefully portable fragment of white man’s magic? A joke on the savage? The woman had just been subjected to the novel experience of the sustained European scientific gaze. Is she now being invited to scrutinise herself? She leaves the European things anyway – along with her digging stick, which is her essential equipment for life. What I most notice about this aborted transaction is that the Europeans bring no mirrors for themselves.

There is little point in apportioning blame close to two hundred years after the event. What interest me are two things. First is the intellectual and imaginative exercise we have just been through in doing this little bit of history: retrieving just what happened, thinking about its possible consequences, deciding from their words and actions just what the Frenchmen were up to and the kind of men they were, and doing our best to imagine the thoughts and feelings of the silent players in the scene. Second, there is the separate matter of clarifying and examining our own responses to what happened.

What I feel, to my surprise, is anger. In part this is because she is a woman, young, pregnant and alone, she is being manhandled, and as a woman I resent that. But I have to admit to a deeper response which is an anachronistic absurdity. What I want to say is: ‘Take your hands off her, you Frenchmen’. I see them as foreign intruders molesting my countrywoman, someone from my territory – a territory my forebears will not even enter for several decades, forebears who could well perform actions much worse than these earnest Frenchmen. Nonetheless, that is what I feel. And I do not feel in the least implicated in what was done to her: I am on her side. What, I wonder, do you feel?

As to why this small long-ago event should matter to any of us – well, I will make a large claim for it: I believe its examination is conducive to civic virtue, and therefore to the coherence of a democratic liberal state. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum identifies three qualities as necessary for responsible citizenship in a complex world: an ability to critically examine oneself and one’s traditions; an ability to see beyond immediate group loyalties and to extend to strangers the moral concern we ‘naturally’ extend to friends and kin; the development of what she calls the ‘narrative imagination’ – the ability to see unobvious connections between sequences of human actions, and to recognise their likely consequences, intended and unintended.²

Nussbaum believes that these three things sustain the political health of a democratic nation, and so do I. I also believe that these things can be achieved, indeed are possibly best achieved, by the close analysis of past situations like the one we have just been looking at. Reflection on such situations liberates our imaginations to taste experiences other than our own – what it was like to be that woman on the beach, what it was like to be one of those rather embarrassed French scientists. That imagining expands our moral comprehension. We are also led to reflect on unobvious connections and the range of possible outcomes – what Nussbaum would call the narrative imagination at work.

Such analyses also help us to know ourselves more exactly, and more critically. For example: what is this territory I discover I feel so powerfully about? Why did I feel invaded, too? Some years back, one of those books appeared which precipitate ideas lurking in the corners of the mind into clear view. Benedict Anderson asked what holds nations together. Think about it. What set of experiences signifies ‘Australia’ to you? What do you directly know of it? You know your family, your friends, the people at the school, your workmates if you still have a job, the lady in the corner shop if there is still a corner shop, the people at the fruit stall, a cloud of relations, your football team, some people on radio and television. You will have travelled over bits of it, some bits often if your social or economic work takes you there. But it is still a very patchy mental map. There will be suburbs even in your home city as unvisited as Marco Polo’s China.

So where is ‘Australia’? As Anderson makes clear in his Imagined Communities – it’s in your mind.³ Nations are imaginary communities, and none the less real for that. And nations, especially democratic nations, especially democratic ethnically and religiously diverse nations like our own, cannot hold together unless they share a common vision as to how the world works, what constitutes the good life, what behaviour is worthy of respect, what behaviour is shameful. Present input clearly matters – the journalists of the ABC and SBS influence my image of Australia and the world every day – but our understanding of our nation is also profoundly shaped by our view of its past, of its history – however vague that view might be.

That the study of history can encourage civic virtue is not a fashionable view in 1999. This has been the bloodiest century in human history, which makes it a bad time for the notion that goodwill and mutual respect can come out of reflection on the past. Most people would say that Yugoslavia has been destroyed by its history: by unassuaged passions and unforgiven wrongs. Michael Ignatieff has written a fine book arguing that it is not the past dictating to the present which has devastated Yugoslavia, but present politicians ruthlessly manipulating the past: that it is bad history, not true history, which has reduced the place to ruins. He may be right.⁴ I think he is right. But what is clear is that it is too late for good history to help Yugoslavia now. Once civil order breaks down, vengeance becomes a dangerously attractive existential choice, giving purpose to every action, significance to every thought. It cripples the moral imagination, freeing people to act towards their neighbours, now become their ‘enemies’, in any way they like – ‘look what you’ve made me do!’ To consolidate good history made out of true stories we need time, and peace, and we need the will. We also need to keep in mind that truth is a direction and an aspiration, not a condition.

Other people would say I am too ambitious in wanting true stories to make up the history of a nation rather than one simple and therefore necessarily false one: a story about how fine and great we are, how fine and great we have always been. They would say that people need simple stories which will make them proud of their country; that too many stories, especially if they are as lumpy as true stories tend to be, will only confuse them.

We have a prime example of the dangers of a simple story powerfully and repeatedly told close to hand in the United States of America, where American history is on the syllabus at most years in primary and secondary school, where the American flag is worshipped daily, and where ‘America’ officially can do no wrong. Teach grown men and women a nursery version of their history and you will make babies of them when it comes to grasping the actual workings of their own society, and of their nation in the wider world. The hypocrisy of much American foreign policy is only possible because so many of its people believe that the USA simply could not engage in dishonourable actions. They believe in their nursery version. So, even more alarmingly, do many people within the United States government.

One example only: in the course of snatching their onetime friend, later archenemy, President Noriega from Panama, in an operation they code-named ‘Just Cause’, the invading US troops and air force killed somewhere between three thousand and seven thousand people, nearly all of them civilians going about their ordinary business – not drug dealing, not engaging in subversive political activity, just shopping, working, going to school. And all to lay hands on a single villain. Those thousands of dead Panamanians simply do not exist in American consciousness, much less burden their conscience. They have been comprehensively ‘disappeared’. The internal problems of the United States polity – angry black men and women in the cities, armed white men in the hills – have a lot to do with that insistent but spurious national story.

By contrast, there are, increasingly, at the end of this terrible century, examples of divided nations who are making the choice for good history. Let me offer you two. First, South Africa. Under the old regime, racial division and gross inequality were sustained by state violence, and caused incalculable social misery. That regime was ended by negotiation, so there could not be a criminal tribunal, a Truth and Justice Commission. Instead, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up.

The Commission’s aim was to open the circumstances of secret killings to the light. What all the people attending the Commission, victims and perpetrators alike, were doing was a painful kind of public history: establishing precisely what had happened, in scrupulous detail, then recording it. Even the triumphant African National Congress, to the continuing rage of some of its members, found its wrongdoings exposed, and soberly set down.

The man who headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, wanted the new state to begin not with no history, not with false history, but with a true history forged out of its divided but shared past. And it worked. Vengeance, reparation, even justice, turned out to be less important than knowledge. From now on, no one in South Africa can deny the past or falsify it. South Africans, black and white, have their true stories. Some will still cry for justice, but the worst of the agony has been assuaged and rendered unavailable for disreputable use by that extraordinary collective enterprise in good history.⁵

My second and still problematic example is Ireland, where over the last few years we have watched not so much the forging of a new history, but a halting, difficult movement away from bad history. We have watched a people extricating themselves from the tyranny of legends, from corrupted histories which have been used to promote murderous division. The burning in their beds of three young brothers, the bomb at Omagh, made manifest what can happen when grossly simplified and distorted myths are declared to be the one and only true history. The growing accord depends on many things, not least Ireland’s new prosperity, but I think they can do what they are beginning to do politically only because some good history had already been done, for example and in particular on the history of the Irish famine.

It had been a central tenet of Irish republican mythology that the Great Famine of 1847 occurred because wicked men organised the export of corn to foreign Protestant landlords in England while Catholic Irish men, women and children were left to starve. As Colm Tóibín puts it, the Famine ‘had to be blamed on the Great Other, the enemy across the water, and the victims of the Famine had to be this entire Irish nation rather than a vulnerable section of the population’.⁶

Over those few years a million people out of eight million people starved to death or died from disease. Two million more emigrated, with thousands of them dying en route to the United States or Canada or Australia. The famine was certainly made worse by bungling, by adventurism, by cold-heartedness. It was made the occasion for a cynical land-clearing exercise, with evictions and forced expropriations. And the Irish were despised by the British ruling caste: The Times of March 1847 declared them to be ‘a people born and bred from time immemorial in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder, and consequent destitution’ – not an encouraging evaluation on the eve of the third year of the failure of the potato crop.

Nonetheless, recent research – research too detailed and thorough to be denied – has established that Ireland remained a net food importer during the hungry forties, that many members of the Catholic Irish middle class profited from the anguish of their compatriots, and that some of the most mean-minded of the Poor Law administrators were not Protestant landlords, but Irish Catholics.⁷

End of legend. During the presidency of Mary Robinson, the Famine was brought back into Irish history as the tragic shared legacy it is, with the parts analysed, responsibilities allocated, and the victims memorialised and mourned. Good history at last, with each side having to acknowledge the truth of stories different from their own preferred versions. So what kind of history do we need here, in this fortunate slice of the world called Australia? We have already had a tussle over that question. Geoffrey Blainey began it. Blainey has always had a knack for titles: The Tyranny of Distance, The Triumph of the Nomads, The Rush that Never Ended. He is also moved by the stories of small men who dream large dreams, like the immigrant lad who began by boiling up sugar and water in his parents’ bathroom and peddling toffees from a tray at weekends, and turned into Mr Macpherson Robertson the lollies baron, bringing joy and tooth decay to generations of Australians.⁸ Blainey sees the romance in mercantile and industrial endeavour, and he makes us see it too. He tells us true stories which other historians neglect to tell.

I was therefore taken aback when Blainey deployed that deft wit to abduct the phrase ‘Black Armband History’ from the Aboriginal protest movement of the seventies, because the phrase was altogether too dismissive of those other stories which were part of the stories of his favourite Aussie battlers, and certainly part of the one big story of how we have come to be as we are. I was shocked by John Howard’s adoption of the Black Armband History tag. The Prime Minister’s leap to appropriate it seemed to me an act of partisan opportunism. What Howard wanted, transparently, was white-out history, a simple tale of the triumph of the Anglo-Celts over deserts and empty places, ignoring the mosaic of different peoples we have