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True Stories
Inga Clendinnen believes that democratic people need true stories about their past. In these engaging essays, based on her 1999 Boyer Lectures, she argues for the rejection of any single, simple account of the Australian past and looks towards a deeper understanding of what whites have done to Indigenous Australians.
118 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Inga Clendinnen
20 books39 followersInga Clendinnen, AO, FAHA was an Australian author, historian, anthropologist, and academic.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 26, 2018
The six sections of this book were originally talks by Inga Clendinnen for the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Boyer Lecture series in 1999.
Clendinnen, a historian and essayist who wrote on Spanish colonization in Mexico and on the Holocaust, here takes on the complexities of what it is to be Australian in such a multicultural society, the essential elements of Australian culture and, in very little space and in simple language, encapsulates the challenges of race relations through carefully chosen representative stories of white/black contact from the eighteenth century to the time of her writing.
One great stroke of good fortune for us (she says and I’ve thought this for years) is that we inherited the British system of law and government, with its insistence on the rule of law and the rights of citizens to take part in governing themselves, controlling power shifts peacefully, without violence. And the English common law system ‘gives our legal system a flexibility, a responsiveness to changing circumstance’. It’s far from perfect but it can accommodate social as well as political change.
Then she remarks on our way of memorializing the war dead on Anzac Day(25April), ‘unique in its sadness and absolute denial of military vainglory’, centred as it is on the irreparable nature of loss, and completely secular.
Our resourceful heroes and dry humour come next, both, she thinks, linked to an aversion to pomposity and our obstinately horizontal view of society that grew out of the first convict societies. So many ideas in here I could run a semester course on it!
Only near the end of her second lecture does she seriously introduce one of her main concerns - that the generally egalitarian white Australia lives along with an Aboriginal Australia that still experiences systemic injustice. Of course things have changed in the 20 years since she wrote these lectures, and new government programs have been introduced to try to overcome the terrible differences in health, education and welfare, and I won’t even try to discuss those but to keep to what Clendinnen covers in these lectures.
Some historians apples the American ‘Frontier’ concept to Australia, but things didn’t work quite like that here. Rather than thinking of steadily moving lines, we should think of a social territory - a contact zone, within which ‘“ peoples geographically and culturally separate come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”’. The history of these conflicts was unspoken in the white world until relatively recently and Clendinnen argues that what she calls the ‘hidden stories’ need to be told.
In each of the following lectures she tells stories of contact, land seizure, cultural change/loss and social devastation, much of wrought now by alcohol rather than land seizure.
To expand our egalitarian culture, to work to overcome injustice, she says, we need ‘good, true history, true stories of the making of this present land, none of them simple, some of them painful, all of them part of our own individual histories’.
To move forward, we need to take the past into account, not to live in it, but to take the knowledge of with us as honestly as possible, to better inform decision making.
Although she was writing 20 years ago, all the general points she makes are still well and truly alive, still needing attention. And these issues apply in many countries. Remaking history is a characteristic of totalitarian governments. Historical distortion or outright lies underlie persecution of minorities, unwanted ethnic or religious groups and then deny retrospectively that atrocities took place - think Armenia and Holocaust denial as Just two examples.
This is a very important little book.
Clendinnen, a historian and essayist who wrote on Spanish colonization in Mexico and on the Holocaust, here takes on the complexities of what it is to be Australian in such a multicultural society, the essential elements of Australian culture and, in very little space and in simple language, encapsulates the challenges of race relations through carefully chosen representative stories of white/black contact from the eighteenth century to the time of her writing.
One great stroke of good fortune for us (she says and I’ve thought this for years) is that we inherited the British system of law and government, with its insistence on the rule of law and the rights of citizens to take part in governing themselves, controlling power shifts peacefully, without violence. And the English common law system ‘gives our legal system a flexibility, a responsiveness to changing circumstance’. It’s far from perfect but it can accommodate social as well as political change.
Then she remarks on our way of memorializing the war dead on Anzac Day(25April), ‘unique in its sadness and absolute denial of military vainglory’, centred as it is on the irreparable nature of loss, and completely secular.
Our resourceful heroes and dry humour come next, both, she thinks, linked to an aversion to pomposity and our obstinately horizontal view of society that grew out of the first convict societies. So many ideas in here I could run a semester course on it!
Only near the end of her second lecture does she seriously introduce one of her main concerns - that the generally egalitarian white Australia lives along with an Aboriginal Australia that still experiences systemic injustice. Of course things have changed in the 20 years since she wrote these lectures, and new government programs have been introduced to try to overcome the terrible differences in health, education and welfare, and I won’t even try to discuss those but to keep to what Clendinnen covers in these lectures.
Some historians apples the American ‘Frontier’ concept to Australia, but things didn’t work quite like that here. Rather than thinking of steadily moving lines, we should think of a social territory - a contact zone, within which ‘“ peoples geographically and culturally separate come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”’. The history of these conflicts was unspoken in the white world until relatively recently and Clendinnen argues that what she calls the ‘hidden stories’ need to be told.
In each of the following lectures she tells stories of contact, land seizure, cultural change/loss and social devastation, much of wrought now by alcohol rather than land seizure.
To expand our egalitarian culture, to work to overcome injustice, she says, we need ‘good, true history, true stories of the making of this present land, none of them simple, some of them painful, all of them part of our own individual histories’.
To move forward, we need to take the past into account, not to live in it, but to take the knowledge of with us as honestly as possible, to better inform decision making.
Although she was writing 20 years ago, all the general points she makes are still well and truly alive, still needing attention. And these issues apply in many countries. Remaking history is a characteristic of totalitarian governments. Historical distortion or outright lies underlie persecution of minorities, unwanted ethnic or religious groups and then deny retrospectively that atrocities took place - think Armenia and Holocaust denial as Just two examples.
This is a very important little book.
December 15, 2014
Very good episodic study of aboriginal - White settler contact since 1788.Thoughtful and easy to read but important as she explains the need for true history so we can advance into the future based on truth not mistaken stories.
October 10, 2021
Essential to understanding Australia.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews