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The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft
Writing good history is a high-wire act of balance and grace. Historians 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.
In The Art of Time Travel, eminent historian and award-winning author Tom Griffiths explores the craft of discipline and imagination that is history. Through portraits of fifteen historians at work, including Inga Clendinnen, Judith Wright, Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, he observes how a body of work is constructed out of a life-long dialogue between past evidence and present experience.
Riveting, beautiful and elegantly written, this landmark book conjures fresh insights into the history of Australia and revitalises our sense of the historian’s craft – what Tom Griffiths calls “the art of time travel”.
In The Art of Time Travel, eminent historian and award-winning author Tom Griffiths explores the craft of discipline and imagination that is history. Through portraits of fifteen historians at work, including Inga Clendinnen, Judith Wright, Geoffrey Blainey and Henry Reynolds, he observes how a body of work is constructed out of a life-long dialogue between past evidence and present experience.
Riveting, beautiful and elegantly written, this landmark book conjures fresh insights into the history of Australia and revitalises our sense of the historian’s craft – what Tom Griffiths calls “the art of time travel”.
336 pages, Paperback
First published June 27, 2016
About the author
Tom Griffiths
20 books4 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Tom Griffiths is a writer and historian whose work has won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism, including the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History and the Douglas Stewart and Nettie Palmer Prizes for Non-Fiction. His books include The Art of Time Travel, Hunters and Collectors, Forests of Ash and Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University.
Tom Griffiths is a writer and historian whose work has won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism, including the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History and the Douglas Stewart and Nettie Palmer Prizes for Non-Fiction. His books include The Art of Time Travel, Hunters and Collectors, Forests of Ash and Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University.
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September 3, 2026
“Writing history is a highly creative act and its artistic aspirations are perfectly consistent with the quest to represent the past truthfully.” The Art of Time Travel is, according to its author, Tom Griffiths, “a quirky, serious and personal exploration of the art and craft of history in Australia since the Second World War... by nominating some of [his] favourite historians and trying to describe how they work.” Griffiths chooses subjects who “are not necessarily trained or professional historians... but they are all people who research the past with a reflective scholarly purpose.”
The historians that Griffiths examines and one of their major works are listed below.
Eleanor Dark – The Timeless Land (1941)
Keith (W. K.) Hancock – Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man’s Impact on his Environment (1972)
John Mulvaney – The Prehistory of Australia (1969)
Geoffrey Blainey – The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (1966)
Judith Wright – The Cry for the Dead (1981)
Greg Dening – “Writing: praxis and performance” in Writing Histories, ed. Curthoys & McGrath, 2000
Henry Reynolds – Frontier (1987)
Eric Rolls – A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest (1981)
Stephen Murray-Smith – Sitting on Penguins: People and Politics in Australian Antarctica (1988)
Donna Merwick – Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (1999)
Graeme Davison – The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978)
Inga Clendinnen – Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (2003)
Grace Karskens – The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009)
Mike Smith – The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (2013)
Griffiths quotes the esteemed Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis, at length on the importance of history to human understanding and meaning:
Griffiths begins with the novelist Eleanor Dark, a writer who invested “deeply in an empirical quest for historical understanding.” Other writers with similar quests are examined, including Kate Grenville and Inga Clendinnen. Both sought, at least in Grenville’s words, to “put a novelist’s flesh on the bones of the documents,” or, more provocatively stated by Clendinnen, “to bump historians off their track”. They may be able to get closer to “what it was actually like”—but where, then, is the line between fiction and non-fiction? Griffiths posits:
The History Wars were a fierce political debate on how to interpret Australia’s colonisation, particularly in relation to its effects on First Nations peoples. There were, broadly speaking, two schools of thought: one that emphasised the achievements and development associated with British settlement, and another that focused on the dispossession and violence experienced by First Nations peoples. Blainey associated the latter with the “black-armband view of Australian history”. Past events were not necessarily in dispute, but their interpretation was.
One of the key revisionists of this period was Henry Reynolds, who is also the subject of another chapter in this book. Reynolds was “particularly infuriating to conservatives… because he defeated them on their own ground”. He sought to illuminate the entire national story vis-à-vis Aboriginal experience, by invoking the “great tradition of historiography about the Anzac legend.” Reynolds extolled patriotic ardour, based on his belief in the power of history for Australian political progress. Reynolds demonstrated that history, in effect, is not a static enterprise.
Another influence of the History Wars, but also history in general, is how it is produced. Griffiths provides insights on the archive, stating:
This is not to say that scientific empiricism, distinct from historical positivism, does not have a place in the historical craft. For instance, Griffiths has a chapter on the great archaeologist Mulvaney, who was able to pioneer carbon dating to illuminate “the dark continent of prehistory” in Australia. One only needs to look at the great classicist of our age, Mary Beard, to understand the profound impact archaeology has on corroborating or challenging the texts of antiquity, and how the former can augment the empirical craft of history.
Griffiths includes chapters on postmodernist historians like Donna Merwick. From the 1970s, “all ‘facts’… were intellectual constructions; an independent empirical reality would thus be inaccessible. Fact and fiction blurred playfully, dangerously. This discipline of history, with its moral and civic responsibility to insist on that distinction, was challenged to the core.” Historical knowledge as constructed narratives using empirical methods on past events, according to some versions of the postmodernist critique, may have been only constructions of the past itself.
In relation to this debate, Griffiths refers to the great Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who observed that the postmodernist turn made it harder for “historians to defend their dedication to scientific procedures of evaluating evidence as anything other than pedantry, especially once the grand ‘faith in the possibility of a definitive, positivistic scientific truth’ had passed.” Reading these chapters, Griffiths seems exhilarated by these theoretical debates, which clearly inspired his thinking on the craft. Quoting Goodman, there were “a set of debates in which we are all implicated.”
Griffiths, however, rarely criticises the pitfalls of postmodernist relativism as he does those of the positivist and celebratory view of Australian history. The former was forcefully challenged by Richard Evans on three grounds. First, denying the possibility of truth through hyper-relativism can have dangerous consequences, such as legitimising Holocaust denial. Second, it is self-contradictory: if no historical claim can be true, then postmodernist conclusions cannot claim to be true either. Third, abandoning the possibility of objective truth risks undermining the empirical procedures historians use to interpret the past.
Griffiths does not readily make his thoughts clear on where he stands in this historiographical debate. From the evidence presented, he appears to be against positivism, yet he lauds the scientific rigour of archaeology. It is difficult to discern precisely where Griffiths lands. However, reading between the lines, especially in the prologue where he says, like E. H. Carr, that history is a dialogue between the present and the past, he recognises the pitfalls of seeking objective truth in history, but also does not lose sight of the need to faithfully attempt to represent the truth.
Griffiths notes a similar contradiction among postmodernist historians: while focusing “almost religiously on language and texts and, in this sense, reinforced the conservative core of historical practice even as it destabilised the search for truth.” Moreover, Griffiths never explicitly states that he agrees with the postmodernist view; rather, he appears intellectually stimulated by the theoretical debates. Lastly, Griffiths is intent on history underpinning humanity’s meaning. This leads me to think that Griffiths may also be influenced by R. G. Collingwood.
Collingwood notes that the historian understands historical action by rethinking the thought behind it. Depending on the context of the historian and the way they have engaged the archive, the history produced is interpretive while remaining constrained by evidence, and, from a different theoretical lens, may produce a different interpretation of the past that is contested and offers different meanings. Like Carr, history is therefore neither a passive recovery of an objective past nor an unconstrained construction of it.
Griffiths’ empiricist construction of the past is exceptional—it is sometimes indistinguishable from the lyrical musings of the great novelists, sometimes piercing in analytical insight, but overall, he loves the craft that he has mastered. Griffiths quotes Mulvaney regarding the dialogue with the past: “is not a once-for-all achievement, but rather is a continuing effort, whose end—if ever there is an end—still lies far beyond sight.” He concludes that history is “an invitation to debate”. However, there is no substitute for Griffiths’s own concluding remarks:
The historians that Griffiths examines and one of their major works are listed below.
Eleanor Dark – The Timeless Land (1941)
Keith (W. K.) Hancock – Discovering Monaro: A Study of Man’s Impact on his Environment (1972)
John Mulvaney – The Prehistory of Australia (1969)
Geoffrey Blainey – The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (1966)
Judith Wright – The Cry for the Dead (1981)
Greg Dening – “Writing: praxis and performance” in Writing Histories, ed. Curthoys & McGrath, 2000
Henry Reynolds – Frontier (1987)
Eric Rolls – A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest (1981)
Stephen Murray-Smith – Sitting on Penguins: People and Politics in Australian Antarctica (1988)
Donna Merwick – Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (1999)
Graeme Davison – The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978)
Inga Clendinnen – Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (2003)
Grace Karskens – The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009)
Mike Smith – The Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts (2013)
Griffiths quotes the esteemed Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis, at length on the importance of history to human understanding and meaning:
Gaddis uses the gravitational phenomenon known as a ‘singularity’ to understand the flow of time. Singularities exist within black holes and transform everything that passes through them; a singularity was the initial state of the universe before the Big Bang. Gaddis suggests that the present is a singularity through which the future must pass in order to become the past. On the future side of the singularity, continuities and contingencies are fluid and indeterminate; however, as they pass through it, they fuse and cannot be separated. The present locks these swirling possibilities and shifting relationships into place, and they can’t be unzipped. This compelling image captures the gravitational power of the past and the exhilaration and terror of living. It reminds us that the present, to which we pay so much lip service, snaps into solidity in a moment. The past is our only anchorage and our chief source of meaning.Most chapters focus on the First Nations–settler historical nexus and how Australian historiography has been both oppressive (the Great Australian Silence) and emancipating (revisionist histories produced during the History Wars). Many also examine the relationship between environmental history and the land in southeastern Australia. Though illuminating, the book would have been stronger if Griffiths had diversified the socio-geographic subjects of Australian identity. However, this critique is more than offset by Griffiths’s perceptive analysis of the authors he does include.
Griffiths begins with the novelist Eleanor Dark, a writer who invested “deeply in an empirical quest for historical understanding.” Other writers with similar quests are examined, including Kate Grenville and Inga Clendinnen. Both sought, at least in Grenville’s words, to “put a novelist’s flesh on the bones of the documents,” or, more provocatively stated by Clendinnen, “to bump historians off their track”. They may be able to get closer to “what it was actually like”—but where, then, is the line between fiction and non-fiction? Griffiths posits:
The good historian, like the top tennis player, plays the edges and hits down the line. History’s commitment to evidence that can be revisited, to a journey of discovery that can be retraced and challenged... Historians always have at least two stories to tell: what we think happened, and how we know what we think happened. So the ‘non’ in our ‘non-fiction’ signifies an edge that can sharpen our prose… [while] acknowledg[ing] that there are things we don’t and can’t know. Silence, uncertainty and inconclusiveness become central to the narrative.The novelists’ impact on Australian identity is debatable, but that of the academics is indubitable. Griffiths explicates this with a chapter on Geoffrey Blainey. Griffiths initially praises Blainey as “one of the pioneers of a la longue durée in the Australian setting. He embraced this interest in long-term, little noticed economic and social cycles, and delineated geographical patterns and changes in material life that reached beyond a generation.” However, for the remainder of the chapter, Griffiths critiques Blainey’s central role in the History Wars that raged during the 1990s and 2000s.
The History Wars were a fierce political debate on how to interpret Australia’s colonisation, particularly in relation to its effects on First Nations peoples. There were, broadly speaking, two schools of thought: one that emphasised the achievements and development associated with British settlement, and another that focused on the dispossession and violence experienced by First Nations peoples. Blainey associated the latter with the “black-armband view of Australian history”. Past events were not necessarily in dispute, but their interpretation was.
One of the key revisionists of this period was Henry Reynolds, who is also the subject of another chapter in this book. Reynolds was “particularly infuriating to conservatives… because he defeated them on their own ground”. He sought to illuminate the entire national story vis-à-vis Aboriginal experience, by invoking the “great tradition of historiography about the Anzac legend.” Reynolds extolled patriotic ardour, based on his belief in the power of history for Australian political progress. Reynolds demonstrated that history, in effect, is not a static enterprise.
Another influence of the History Wars, but also history in general, is how it is produced. Griffiths provides insights on the archive, stating:
Libraries and museums link people and things to the world of storytelling and scholarship… Historical records are constantly lost and destroyed without purpose or import... And therefore the gaps and silences in the public record can be equally revealing. A fascinating graph might be sketched of the cycles of preservation and destruction and their relationship to the fashions and politics of scholarship.Yet how the archive is analysed emerges in chapters covering John Mulvaney. Griffiths notes that there had long been a “hope of the humanities to become scientific, and to be objective and predictive about human cultural and social change,” [but that this hope] faltered from the beginning of the twentieth century, although the quest goes on in some social sciences today. Throughout the book, however, Griffiths emphasises that “subjectivity, reflexivity, context and contingency” are “scholarly virtues” and that pure objectivity may not be possible in history.
This is not to say that scientific empiricism, distinct from historical positivism, does not have a place in the historical craft. For instance, Griffiths has a chapter on the great archaeologist Mulvaney, who was able to pioneer carbon dating to illuminate “the dark continent of prehistory” in Australia. One only needs to look at the great classicist of our age, Mary Beard, to understand the profound impact archaeology has on corroborating or challenging the texts of antiquity, and how the former can augment the empirical craft of history.
Griffiths includes chapters on postmodernist historians like Donna Merwick. From the 1970s, “all ‘facts’… were intellectual constructions; an independent empirical reality would thus be inaccessible. Fact and fiction blurred playfully, dangerously. This discipline of history, with its moral and civic responsibility to insist on that distinction, was challenged to the core.” Historical knowledge as constructed narratives using empirical methods on past events, according to some versions of the postmodernist critique, may have been only constructions of the past itself.
In relation to this debate, Griffiths refers to the great Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who observed that the postmodernist turn made it harder for “historians to defend their dedication to scientific procedures of evaluating evidence as anything other than pedantry, especially once the grand ‘faith in the possibility of a definitive, positivistic scientific truth’ had passed.” Reading these chapters, Griffiths seems exhilarated by these theoretical debates, which clearly inspired his thinking on the craft. Quoting Goodman, there were “a set of debates in which we are all implicated.”
Griffiths, however, rarely criticises the pitfalls of postmodernist relativism as he does those of the positivist and celebratory view of Australian history. The former was forcefully challenged by Richard Evans on three grounds. First, denying the possibility of truth through hyper-relativism can have dangerous consequences, such as legitimising Holocaust denial. Second, it is self-contradictory: if no historical claim can be true, then postmodernist conclusions cannot claim to be true either. Third, abandoning the possibility of objective truth risks undermining the empirical procedures historians use to interpret the past.
Griffiths does not readily make his thoughts clear on where he stands in this historiographical debate. From the evidence presented, he appears to be against positivism, yet he lauds the scientific rigour of archaeology. It is difficult to discern precisely where Griffiths lands. However, reading between the lines, especially in the prologue where he says, like E. H. Carr, that history is a dialogue between the present and the past, he recognises the pitfalls of seeking objective truth in history, but also does not lose sight of the need to faithfully attempt to represent the truth.
Griffiths notes a similar contradiction among postmodernist historians: while focusing “almost religiously on language and texts and, in this sense, reinforced the conservative core of historical practice even as it destabilised the search for truth.” Moreover, Griffiths never explicitly states that he agrees with the postmodernist view; rather, he appears intellectually stimulated by the theoretical debates. Lastly, Griffiths is intent on history underpinning humanity’s meaning. This leads me to think that Griffiths may also be influenced by R. G. Collingwood.
Collingwood notes that the historian understands historical action by rethinking the thought behind it. Depending on the context of the historian and the way they have engaged the archive, the history produced is interpretive while remaining constrained by evidence, and, from a different theoretical lens, may produce a different interpretation of the past that is contested and offers different meanings. Like Carr, history is therefore neither a passive recovery of an objective past nor an unconstrained construction of it.
Griffiths’ empiricist construction of the past is exceptional—it is sometimes indistinguishable from the lyrical musings of the great novelists, sometimes piercing in analytical insight, but overall, he loves the craft that he has mastered. Griffiths quotes Mulvaney regarding the dialogue with the past: “is not a once-for-all achievement, but rather is a continuing effort, whose end—if ever there is an end—still lies far beyond sight.” He concludes that history is “an invitation to debate”. However, there is no substitute for Griffiths’s own concluding remarks:
History is essential to meaning and identity and it is a powerful disciplinary tool in the search for truth. But its greatest virtue is uncompromising complexity…. No matter how practised we are, it always humbles us. No matter how often we visit the past, it always surprises us. The art of time travel is to maintain critical poise in this dizzy space. There is a further hazard: we never return to exactly the same present from which we left, for time cycles on remorselessly even when we seek to defy it. And in the course of our quest we find that we, too, have changed.
May 15, 2017
The Art of Time Travel describes how different Australian historians have approached history, how and why they’ve written down what they know, sharing it with those of us who care to know. The book explains the different inspirations that led the various historians down the path they chose, and it also gives the reader an understanding of the difficulties of stepping-out of the “politically correct” square, and that historical truth can only be told from a personal perspective.
The book is interesting, easily accessible, and very important, assisting those interested in history to get a better well rounded understanding of how history is shared with us, and it also tells us to take-care, and not believe everything we read, taking notice of what is missing from the historical narrative.
The Art of Time Travel has proved to be a source of inspiration for my amateur historian aspirations which I demonstrate the best way I can within Artuccino’s Allan Cunningham Project.
The minute I saw Tom Griffith‘s book description on Amazon.com.au I knew his book was a one I must read. If you combine my interest in the craft of writing to my enthusiasm for collecting fragments of early Australian colonial history, a book about Historians, especially Australian Historians, would be one that I would gobble up.
Skills required to make an intuitive Historian are the ability to retain massive amount of facts, analyse and consider them, and then communicate by writing eloquent prose. They need to be passionate and tenacious about their subject, and be tough enough to debate their interpretation of historical moments, similar to scientists. Not an easy path to choose. The truth about an historical matter is always subject to the bias of, not only the historian, but the influences of current day politics and cultural appropriateness.
We depend on historians to ensure our true history is recorded accurately. They have the responsibility of showing us what happened to previous generations and why. If we know what happened and why, we may be able to find solutions for our future to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes again. Much of our knowledge is built on the mistakes of the past, and on solutions that worked and those that did not.
My first experience of reading the truth about Australian History, in particular, about the aboriginal experience, was John Pilger’s ground breaking book The Secret Country. It opened my eyes to something I needed to know.
Tom Griffith’s book reinforces my understanding that studying history helps us interpret the world around us and the “why” of things. Comprehending the passions and biases of the people who write history can help us read between the lines and form an opinion about what to believe and what not to believe, which in turns anchors my understanding that when I write about history I must take on the responsibility of being accurate and respectful.
The book is interesting, easily accessible, and very important, assisting those interested in history to get a better well rounded understanding of how history is shared with us, and it also tells us to take-care, and not believe everything we read, taking notice of what is missing from the historical narrative.
The Art of Time Travel has proved to be a source of inspiration for my amateur historian aspirations which I demonstrate the best way I can within Artuccino’s Allan Cunningham Project.
The minute I saw Tom Griffith‘s book description on Amazon.com.au I knew his book was a one I must read. If you combine my interest in the craft of writing to my enthusiasm for collecting fragments of early Australian colonial history, a book about Historians, especially Australian Historians, would be one that I would gobble up.
Skills required to make an intuitive Historian are the ability to retain massive amount of facts, analyse and consider them, and then communicate by writing eloquent prose. They need to be passionate and tenacious about their subject, and be tough enough to debate their interpretation of historical moments, similar to scientists. Not an easy path to choose. The truth about an historical matter is always subject to the bias of, not only the historian, but the influences of current day politics and cultural appropriateness.
We depend on historians to ensure our true history is recorded accurately. They have the responsibility of showing us what happened to previous generations and why. If we know what happened and why, we may be able to find solutions for our future to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes again. Much of our knowledge is built on the mistakes of the past, and on solutions that worked and those that did not.
My first experience of reading the truth about Australian History, in particular, about the aboriginal experience, was John Pilger’s ground breaking book The Secret Country. It opened my eyes to something I needed to know.
Tom Griffith’s book reinforces my understanding that studying history helps us interpret the world around us and the “why” of things. Comprehending the passions and biases of the people who write history can help us read between the lines and form an opinion about what to believe and what not to believe, which in turns anchors my understanding that when I write about history I must take on the responsibility of being accurate and respectful.
January 23, 2017
This is such an interesting and enjoyable book, each chapter devoted to a writer of Australian history. Most of the writers, but not all, are or were professional historians. Griffiths is himself Professor of History at the Australian National University. He was a student at the University of Melbourne at the time I was there back in the 1970s and I was amused to find that I had shared at least one experience there with him.
He had started off studying History and English Literature, as had I. After one year of English, which seemed to be run along the lines that books were either good or bad because F R Leavis had said so over in Cambridge, I dropped it in favour of extra History subjects and it seems I was not alone in that.
"The past was testing ground for thought. Studying English Literature at the same time, I had felt that I was trying to second-guess some undeclared orthodoxy that defined right and wrong answers and good and bad texts. Consequently there was an exodus of literary-minded students from English to History at Melbourne University in the mid-1970s." (page 205)
One of the best anecdotes in the book concerns a final year History student called Graeme Davison who
"... was walking the back-streets of Melbourne's inner suburb of Richmond in search of its nineteenth-century history when he was apprehended by a policeman. He was photographing houses and carrying an old canvas bag containing two cameras and the hammer and screwdriver he needed to carry out running repairs on his uncle Jack's 1948 Triumph Roadster. As he was gazing at the lanes and cottages, he became aware that he was being followed by a car driven by 'two burly young men'. Suddenly one of the men jumped out, bundled him into the back seat of the car and began to go through the incriminating canvas bag. Graeme was suspected of housebreaking.
'What do you think you're doing?' asked the plain-clothes detective.
'Historical research.'
'And how long have you been on this caper?' " (page 220)
Fortunately he survived this brush with the law to become an historian of note.
The main drawback of this book is that it has made me want to read one or more books by most of the historians portrayed!
Probably of interest mainly to Australians who love the craft and discipline of history.
He had started off studying History and English Literature, as had I. After one year of English, which seemed to be run along the lines that books were either good or bad because F R Leavis had said so over in Cambridge, I dropped it in favour of extra History subjects and it seems I was not alone in that.
"The past was testing ground for thought. Studying English Literature at the same time, I had felt that I was trying to second-guess some undeclared orthodoxy that defined right and wrong answers and good and bad texts. Consequently there was an exodus of literary-minded students from English to History at Melbourne University in the mid-1970s." (page 205)
One of the best anecdotes in the book concerns a final year History student called Graeme Davison who
"... was walking the back-streets of Melbourne's inner suburb of Richmond in search of its nineteenth-century history when he was apprehended by a policeman. He was photographing houses and carrying an old canvas bag containing two cameras and the hammer and screwdriver he needed to carry out running repairs on his uncle Jack's 1948 Triumph Roadster. As he was gazing at the lanes and cottages, he became aware that he was being followed by a car driven by 'two burly young men'. Suddenly one of the men jumped out, bundled him into the back seat of the car and began to go through the incriminating canvas bag. Graeme was suspected of housebreaking.
'What do you think you're doing?' asked the plain-clothes detective.
'Historical research.'
'And how long have you been on this caper?' " (page 220)
Fortunately he survived this brush with the law to become an historian of note.
The main drawback of this book is that it has made me want to read one or more books by most of the historians portrayed!
Probably of interest mainly to Australians who love the craft and discipline of history.
May 15, 2017
I don’t really know what I was expecting – I only chased up this book because it was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – but The Art of Time Travel, Historians and the Craft is such a wonderful surprise! To describe it as a collection of portraits of fourteen Australian historians is underwhelming to say the least, yet it turns out to be a captivating book which charmed me from start to finish.
The very first historian chosen is Eleanor Dark. Yes, the author of the much-loved novel that many Australians read at school, The Timeless Land. The choice of a novelist to lead the fray is emblematic of Tom Griffith’s approach: though Griffiths is himself a professor of history, he’s not hidebound by a formal academic definition of what historians might be, or where they might find their material, or what they do with it. So the chapter about Eleanor Dark is a wonderful portrait of a novelist whose research and ways of interpreting it told Australians an important story about who we are as a nation. This chapter kept making me want to retrieve my Eleanor Dark novels from the shelves and read them all over again, with fresh insights.
Curiously, Griffiths held me captive again with his next entry, Keith Hancock. I’d heard of him, but I’d never read his stuff the way I’ve read Eric Rolls, Geoffrey Blainey, Henry Reynolds and Inga Clendinnen – all of whom get their own chapter too. So it was from Griffiths that I learned that ‘If there were a Nobel Prize for History,’ observed Stuart Macintyre in 2010, ‘Hancock would surely have won it.’ It was Hancock’s pioneering work of environmental history, Discovering Monaro (1972) that provoked this accolade, and by Griffith’s account of it, it’s one I want to read.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/15/t...
The very first historian chosen is Eleanor Dark. Yes, the author of the much-loved novel that many Australians read at school, The Timeless Land. The choice of a novelist to lead the fray is emblematic of Tom Griffith’s approach: though Griffiths is himself a professor of history, he’s not hidebound by a formal academic definition of what historians might be, or where they might find their material, or what they do with it. So the chapter about Eleanor Dark is a wonderful portrait of a novelist whose research and ways of interpreting it told Australians an important story about who we are as a nation. This chapter kept making me want to retrieve my Eleanor Dark novels from the shelves and read them all over again, with fresh insights.
Curiously, Griffiths held me captive again with his next entry, Keith Hancock. I’d heard of him, but I’d never read his stuff the way I’ve read Eric Rolls, Geoffrey Blainey, Henry Reynolds and Inga Clendinnen – all of whom get their own chapter too. So it was from Griffiths that I learned that ‘If there were a Nobel Prize for History,’ observed Stuart Macintyre in 2010, ‘Hancock would surely have won it.’ It was Hancock’s pioneering work of environmental history, Discovering Monaro (1972) that provoked this accolade, and by Griffith’s account of it, it’s one I want to read.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/15/t...
September 30, 2020
Please note this is a 3.5.
An entirely inspiring and fascinating endeavour into Australian history and historians, this book, while now perhaps a little dated, offers some incredible insight into the world of Australian historiography. There’s a lot to be found in here- however, some sections are far richer than others, with chapters such as the Dark one making for standouts, but many of the later historians being rather forgettable.
The work has some absolutely five star essays in it, but it could have done from some bolstering to the rest of the cast of characters. While this book has enormous value, it occasionally suffers from more of a lack of passion than it perhaps should. An interesting exercise- although perhaps not quite so gripping as it possibly could have been.
An entirely inspiring and fascinating endeavour into Australian history and historians, this book, while now perhaps a little dated, offers some incredible insight into the world of Australian historiography. There’s a lot to be found in here- however, some sections are far richer than others, with chapters such as the Dark one making for standouts, but many of the later historians being rather forgettable.
The work has some absolutely five star essays in it, but it could have done from some bolstering to the rest of the cast of characters. While this book has enormous value, it occasionally suffers from more of a lack of passion than it perhaps should. An interesting exercise- although perhaps not quite so gripping as it possibly could have been.
September 6, 2017
A must read for any person with a passing interest in historiography. I couldn't put it down.
May 6, 2017
This is a fantastic look back at various current Australian historians, and how they use so many varied elements and approaches to form their work. If your studies were always based on 'primary sources', of written documents which were very dry, this analysis will certainly reinvigorate your interest in history. I heard about it on Radio National. Every chapter focuses on a different historian and their work. As I was reading Tom Griffith's book I kept exclaiming to myself, I'll have to read or re-read that particular book! So far I've read Grace Carsken's 'The Colony', and Judith Wright's 'A Cry for the Dead', and I've really enjoyed them. Be aware, they are all full-on history writing, not really popular history.
May 15, 2017
An extremely satisfying read. The writing of Australian history is reviewed under the unifying perspective of the author Tom Griifiths. His perspective is humanistic, not contrary and is unifying. He uses 14 chapters to reflect on 14 writers of Australian history. Not all are traditionally classified as historians but his choices are consistent with his view that history writing consists of being true to historical sources whilst writing insightfully. His reviews of books written by his chosen 14 are likely to prompt a deeper reading of Australian history.
December 25, 2016
Superb writing, personal and accessible, and a marvellous work of historiography. I've come from this book hungry to read more work from the historians featured chapter by chapter. Bravo Tom Griffiths.
August 7, 2021
This was an amazing read. To get a broad sweep of Australian History and reviews of Australian historiography at the same time was a great treat. With Tom Griffiths as the guide there is a wonderful, expert and expansive, conversation about what Historians have been interested in and what debates have happened as a result of their work.
November 14, 2020
Trigger warnings: death, mentions of the treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout Australia's post-1788 history.
3.5 stars.
I don't know exactly what I thought this book would be, but it wasn't this. I think I thought maybe it would be an examination of what historians do and how they do it??? And instead, I got what's essentially a series of mini-biographies about fourteen historians, authors, and archaeologists who've been significant or influential in Australian history.
Some chapters were utterly fascinating and I was hooked to the page - I think Grace Karskens' chapter was probably my favourite, but that could be because I majored in historical archaeology in undergrad and so I'm very familiar with her work. Other chapters were incredibly dry and a hard slog to get through. Some chapters seemed to barely focus on the historian in question, which was somewhat unsettling - Inga Clendinnen's chapter seemed to focus more on Kate Grenville than anything.
But, like, a guy I went through postgrad with gets name dropped a bunch of times, so that provided an unexpected moment of excitement...
3.5 stars.
I don't know exactly what I thought this book would be, but it wasn't this. I think I thought maybe it would be an examination of what historians do and how they do it??? And instead, I got what's essentially a series of mini-biographies about fourteen historians, authors, and archaeologists who've been significant or influential in Australian history.
Some chapters were utterly fascinating and I was hooked to the page - I think Grace Karskens' chapter was probably my favourite, but that could be because I majored in historical archaeology in undergrad and so I'm very familiar with her work. Other chapters were incredibly dry and a hard slog to get through. Some chapters seemed to barely focus on the historian in question, which was somewhat unsettling - Inga Clendinnen's chapter seemed to focus more on Kate Grenville than anything.
But, like, a guy I went through postgrad with gets name dropped a bunch of times, so that provided an unexpected moment of excitement...
January 8, 2017
This is a very academic exercise.
A lot of insider analysis of various historians.
The chapter on Judith Wright is illuminating. A poet environmentalist (before it was even a movement), plus a writer and historian.
This summary of her career and inspirations is thorough and engaging.
I have followed Judith Wright's influences and have borrowed A Million Wild Acres by Eric Rolls to further my meagre knowledge in this area.
The book was in high demand on the loan circuit, so will revisit at a later date.
A lot of insider analysis of various historians.
The chapter on Judith Wright is illuminating. A poet environmentalist (before it was even a movement), plus a writer and historian.
This summary of her career and inspirations is thorough and engaging.
I have followed Judith Wright's influences and have borrowed A Million Wild Acres by Eric Rolls to further my meagre knowledge in this area.
The book was in high demand on the loan circuit, so will revisit at a later date.
February 11, 2017
This is a deceptively simple book, drawing you in to thinking it will be a series of bios, but instead is a profound meditation on historiography, Australia's developing understanding of our history, and ultimately Australia itself. Instead of attempting to comprehensively cover his subjects, Griffith chooses as apect of each to focus on: Judith Wright to explore environmental history; Inga Clendinnen to explore the relationsip between history and historical fiction, and Mike Smith to explore the implications of Australia's 'deep time' - a population that massively predates all but Africa. The journey takes us through frontiers and surburbs, past farming communities, Antartic-huddled public servants, sunday afternoon drives, 50000 year old caves, and rainforests. Again, and again, however, the narrative returns us to the issues of the 'frontier', of the impact and reverberation of invasion, and how slowly our historiography has recovered from Terra Nullius, the refusal to acknowledge Indigenous peoples as significant, or actors, and hence to understand much of what happened here. Which is not to say this book deals in dichotomies. Griffiths does not steer away from the debacle of the 'history wars' and reiterates the certainty now of high death tolls from frontier wars, but he is also critical of narratives which simplify to "settlers arrived and local Indigneous people resisted and died', pointing to the impact of settlement on Indigenous groups well beyond the frontier, and the myriad of responses to this, as well as disease, climate and Indigenous cultural developments. There is a yearning, in the latter part of the book, for a history acknowledges and understands the tapestry of Australian life, before and after 1788.
It may not be a book primarily of bios, but many of the portraits are compelling. Greg Dening's shows a passionate, generous teacher, Keith Hancock's a complex, grumpy man finding peace through history of a loved retreat. Blainey, well, despite Griffith's generally rcar3ful and respectful tone, Blainey manages to come out as a reckless provacateur, a man frustrated by the death of a view of the world that affirmed his values, and willing to allow sloppy and harmful historical ideas to proliferate: even to give them a shove along. Kate Grenville, who is thanked for reviewing the sections she is mentioned in, also cops a bit of a gentle, polite bruising, as Griffiths explores her claim to have been part if the 'history wars' with a novel deliberately designed to be fiction, rather than 'non'. Griffiths understands the history wars as, in part, a fight for history itself: that facts need trump nationalism. He credits both the power of Grenville's fiction to deal with societies griefs and its limitation.
The book is, in short, a wonderful exploration of history and how it shapes, and is shaped by, who we are as a society and who we are as individuals. Great read.
It may not be a book primarily of bios, but many of the portraits are compelling. Greg Dening's shows a passionate, generous teacher, Keith Hancock's a complex, grumpy man finding peace through history of a loved retreat. Blainey, well, despite Griffith's generally rcar3ful and respectful tone, Blainey manages to come out as a reckless provacateur, a man frustrated by the death of a view of the world that affirmed his values, and willing to allow sloppy and harmful historical ideas to proliferate: even to give them a shove along. Kate Grenville, who is thanked for reviewing the sections she is mentioned in, also cops a bit of a gentle, polite bruising, as Griffiths explores her claim to have been part if the 'history wars' with a novel deliberately designed to be fiction, rather than 'non'. Griffiths understands the history wars as, in part, a fight for history itself: that facts need trump nationalism. He credits both the power of Grenville's fiction to deal with societies griefs and its limitation.
The book is, in short, a wonderful exploration of history and how it shapes, and is shaped by, who we are as a society and who we are as individuals. Great read.
January 21, 2018
Historian Tom Griffiths examines the work of 15 Historians whose work is in Australian history. Their fields are distinct and their approaches are different and he writes about them with a generosity that shows their work as exciting with their words helping us to time travel to the periods they recreate. I now want to read each one of these 15 writers and I want to read more of Tom Griffiths too. And as they all wrote multiple books that means years and years of reading ahead of me. (Maybe not Eleanor Dark. I suffered under The Timeless Land in secondary school).
I want to see what Grace Karskens saw when she excavated sites at the Rocks in Sydney and found household goods the showed cosy domestic lives of convict families and to see what Mike Smith saw in a huge cave site in central Australia that took us back millions of years. And I want to read more of the gentle and humane Greg Dening and the revelations about settler land use from Eric Rolls whom so many people seem to have discovered. I am looking forward to discovering him myself. So a lot of history reading ahead.
Near the beginning of 2017 I read a non fiction book that has resonated with me since, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel. Now at the beginning of 2018 I have read another non fiction book that is going to be one of my favourite books of the year.
I want to see what Grace Karskens saw when she excavated sites at the Rocks in Sydney and found household goods the showed cosy domestic lives of convict families and to see what Mike Smith saw in a huge cave site in central Australia that took us back millions of years. And I want to read more of the gentle and humane Greg Dening and the revelations about settler land use from Eric Rolls whom so many people seem to have discovered. I am looking forward to discovering him myself. So a lot of history reading ahead.
Near the beginning of 2017 I read a non fiction book that has resonated with me since, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel. Now at the beginning of 2018 I have read another non fiction book that is going to be one of my favourite books of the year.
September 8, 2016
Tom Griffiths, ‘The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft’, Black Inc, 2016.
Tim Flannery calls this extraordinary book ‘luminous’. As someone intensely interested in all facets of Australian history, but not academically trained, I would add ‘illuminating’. Griffith presents his personal selection of significant historians, over fourteen chapters beginning, unexpectedly with a discussion of Eleanor Dark’s novel, ‘The Timeless Land’ and ending with Mike Smith’s groundbreaking archaeology that showed Australia as a continent ‘replete with time’. Colonial Sydney, urban communities, the Monaro High Plains, Antarctica, the reality of frontier conflict, history as art, history and fiction – all are explored and discussed in pitch perfect prose that, somehow, echoes the writing styles of each historian.
If I were to allow myself a minor grievance it would be that Griffiths has showcased so enticingly, so many important books written about Australian history over many decades, that I will never find enough time to read all of them.
Tim Flannery calls this extraordinary book ‘luminous’. As someone intensely interested in all facets of Australian history, but not academically trained, I would add ‘illuminating’. Griffith presents his personal selection of significant historians, over fourteen chapters beginning, unexpectedly with a discussion of Eleanor Dark’s novel, ‘The Timeless Land’ and ending with Mike Smith’s groundbreaking archaeology that showed Australia as a continent ‘replete with time’. Colonial Sydney, urban communities, the Monaro High Plains, Antarctica, the reality of frontier conflict, history as art, history and fiction – all are explored and discussed in pitch perfect prose that, somehow, echoes the writing styles of each historian.
If I were to allow myself a minor grievance it would be that Griffiths has showcased so enticingly, so many important books written about Australian history over many decades, that I will never find enough time to read all of them.
January 16, 2017
This was an encouraging preparation for my (anticipated) return to studying history in 2017. Griffiths surveys the history of how Australians write and tell the history of this land, not just in the work of professional historians but also in fiction, poetry and archaeology. Woven through the scholarly narrative are Griffiths’ recollections of his own training in the Melbourne and ANU history schools. His commitment to the twentieth-century French study of the longue durée, histories spanning centuries, leads him to argue for a long view of Australian history from the Pleistocene era to “the unfolding present” of human-inflicted climate change.
November 22, 2016
What a beautiful book! Each chapter provides insight into the particular journeys of an individual Australian historian. As a reader I found this book provoked a hunger to read the great works that were mentioned. I thoroughly recommend this book as a reflection on the passionate journey of those historians and the fascinating aspects of Australian history.
November 2, 2016
I was moved by this book, which has revealed to me the unbelievable cultural heritage that as an Australian I inherit of 30,000+ years of human inhabitation of this continent. A book all Australians should read.
September 15, 2017
I found this book rather uneven but the good sections probably deserved 4 stars. It has made me want to read Eleanor Dark whom I have always ignored.
April 17, 2017
The writers in this book ... are keen, in some cases legendary walkers and when they step outside they are equipped with boots, cameras, maps and pocket notebooks. P12
I was interested that so many were keen walkers particularly liked Eleanor Dark & Graeme Davison examples.
I was interested that so many were keen walkers particularly liked Eleanor Dark & Graeme Davison examples.
Read
November 26, 2017E-book borrowed from library. Got as far as Geoffrey Blainey when the library whisked it away. I might return to it later, but it's not light holiday reading.
September 1, 2018
An ode to some outstanding Australian historians (and a small number of novelists for whom history was important to their approach), an exploration and explanation of their methods, the controversies of Australian history, its links with archaeology etc. Every historian and those who want to understand how historians do their work and the changing theoretical frameworks and political context in the field ought to read this. Tom Griffiths is a gifted writer and scholar. I have to read it all over again.
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