Ann Curthoys and John Docker - Is History Fiction?
Ann Curthoys and John Docker
Is History Fiction?
Pp. viii + 296. Paperback. ISBN 0 86840 734 8 $39.95.
Ann Curthoys and John Docker have written a fluent and cleverly constructed book about history. It is intriguing to find that the authors begin with Herodotus and Thucydides, whom they place in apposition. They like Herodotus, whom they see as an outsider figure, spraying out narratives and characterisations from a range of cultures and leaving his readers to decide which were ‘true’. He also acknowledged the role of women in shaping the past. Thucydides was more masculine, more focused, more interested in state structures and more determined to explain events. Together the two ancients illustrate the ‘doubleness’ of history, as narrative and as analysis. The authors then proceed to weave a whole range of historians, from Ranke to Hexter, into this classical contrast. On the way they take account of debates over history as a science and as a source of meaning, while comfortably discussing the impact of developments such as feminism, postmodernism, Holocaust denialism and various ‘history wars’ fought in the United States, Japan and Australia. Given the potential for impenetrable tedium displayed in so many books about history, the sheer readability of this book is welcome. Let’s hope it will not be pigeon-holed as a merely Australian history book, since the authors consciously adopt a trans-national approach. Naturally, drawing upon their own interests, there are Australian insights, such as the reflection that European Australians were the true nomads, not the stay-at-home Aborigines whom they so dismissively tagged. One way of taking the authors’ work forward might be to define the boundary, if there is one, between the present and the past. An opening epigraph quotes Dorothy Bird Rose, who says that Aborigines believe that white people ‘don’t know what to remember and what to forget’, so that they ‘don’t know how to link the past with the present’. So far as Aboriginal Australia was concerned, white people were all too efficient at forgetting for far too long. But what is the present? Is it the fleeting moment, or some moving block of current time that can be entirely distinguished from the past? Curthoys and Docker provide plenty of food for thought. One minor complaint: spacing after full stops is cramped, and this printing glitch spoils the reader’s pleasure.