Is the uncivil war over?(Ryan)(Australian history)(Column)

 
And Robbie, please give me your hand-- 
Is this the end or beginning? 
How shall I understand? 

--John Betjeman "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel"

AS THE INTREPID History Summiteers made their gingerly descent from the Canberra mountain in August, I felt a little like poor Oscar: just exactly where are we now? History's Eminent Persons did not return to the plain below stooped beneath heavy tablets graven upon stone; Moses himself, fresh off Sinai, might well have sniffed at the insubstantiality of a mere press release which still bore skid marks from its passage to and fro across the drafting table.

A wit of my acquaintance once remarked that, from its venom, recent historical disputation in Australia could aptly be called the "hissstory" wars. Might the Summit be the place where the hissing had to stop?

The occasion seemed at least to draw a line in the sand against further encroachments by political correctness, by loony "theorists" and by the Left. But a line in the sand which leaves too much of the terrain across the other side of it remains largely a gesture. The long march back through the institutions will be the labour of years.

Journalist Paul Kelly (himself a Summiteer) struck a hopeful note in a later television interview: once they were dragged out into the sunlight of general public scrutiny, Kelly thought, the gimcrack intellectual nullity of many present History courses in Australian schools would ensure their own spontaneous collapse. The Summit may produce something better to replace them.

Since the "History Wars" will themselves become a subject of Australian historiography, let us hope that, having wasted so much time fighting them, the historians will not unduly waste even more time analysing them. The "Wars" were a lamentable distraction from History's noble proper work, and no credit to Australia's intellectual standing. Back in September 1993, at the very start of the almighty stink about Manning Clark's History, the English Independent newspaper ran a full-page article by Bryan Appleyard, in which he noted the "thinness" of Australian culture: it was inconceivable, he said, that criticism of a single book, "however popular, could cause such a stir in Britain". Since then, the History Wars have done little to improve Australia's reputation for scholarly maturity or depth.