LIES, DAMNED LIES AND ... POSTMODERNIST HISTORIOGRAPHY.(Australia)(Brief Article)

"However, another move is required of the discipline [history], one that runs contrary to many of its traditional procedures. This needs to be made with reference to the way history interprets or reads memory. Conventionally, historians have tended to reject such a `subjective' source, noting, as conservative critics of the stolen generations narrative have done, the ways in which its retrospectivity can make it unreliable, and opting for the `objectivity' of contemporary or historical sources. This approach makes much sense, and should not be abandoned unless we want to regard history as merely another kind of fiction. However, if we merely adopt this conventional tack, we foreclose or abort the opportunity of deepening our understanding of the past and relationships between past and present.

"More recent historical approaches to memory proceed in two different directions. The first begins by accepting that the value of autobiographical testimony may often lie not in its adherence to facts, but at the points where desire, imagination and symbolism, for example, are evident. Quite obviously this requires a methodology that does not naively regard texts such as the narratives of the stolen generations as simple sources that provide a ...