Who Owns the Past by Inga Clendinnen


finished 5/23 .......... essay history Australia .......... rating 9

This lengthy essay, 60+ pages, appeared in the October issue of Quarterly Essay, an Australian publication. The author, Inga Clendinnen, one of Australia's premier historians, takes a look at various aspects of historical studies and asks about the kind of history we need today. She says historians are not in the business of nation-building and more to the point, are actually in the business of taking the myths apart. In this essay she takes Kate Grenville and her popular work, The Secret River, apart for her use of imagination rather than evidence. She also discusses other aspects of Australian history like Anzac and the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children.

I've read Aztecs and Dancing With Strangers by Clendinnen. In Atzecs she was very, very dense and thorough, it was a rather difficult book to read. But in both Dancing With Strangers and this essay she is much, much easier to read. She acknowledges this in Dancing as a result of an illness which she writes about in her memoir, Tiger's Eye.

Posted: Wed - May 23, 2007 at 05:51 AM        

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