The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft

Abstract

This book is a quirky, serious and personal exploration of the art and craft of history in Australia since the Second World War. I have chosen to illuminate my discipline in the way my French table companions found most congenial: by nominating some of my favourite historians and trying to describe how they work. I am keen to show that writing history is a highly creative act and that its artistic aspirations are perfectly consistent with the quest to represent the past truthfully. Good history is a high-wire, gravity-defying act of balance and grace that flls me with awe. Rather than investigating this process abstractly, I am going to observe how particular historians construct a body of work out of a lifelong dialogue between past evidence and present experience. Historians tend to be dedicated, passionate citizens who seek to make a difference by telling true stories. They scour their own societies for vestiges of past worlds, for cracks and fissures in the pavement of the present, and for the shimmers and hauntings of history in everyday action. They begin their enquiries in a deeply felt present. But as time travellers they have to forsake their own world for a period – and then, somehow, find their way back.