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Ann McGrath

Everywhen: Australia and the language of deep history edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy

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October 2023, no. 458

It can take an enormous intellectual effort for non-Indigenous people (such as this reviewer) to grasp Indigenous concepts of time. This is partially due to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has described as the incommensurability of Indigenous and Western epistemological approaches. In settler-colonial terms, land is a resource to be appropriated, surveyed, and exploited. Temporality is generally used to situate the colonisation event, the before and after, from a perspective where time is linear and forward-looking. By contrast, in Indigenous cosmological approaches, land, culture, and time are co-dependent and in perpetual conversation. Country and time are indivisible.

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In the New England summer of 1825, the residents of Cornwall, Connecticut, built a funeral pyre in the middle of their village green. From a nearby window, nineteen-year-old Harriett Gold watched as the flames leapt into the sky, her heart consumed with ‘anguish’. Among those burning Harriett’s effigy was her brother, Stephen, who, like nearly all of the town ...

How to Write History That People Want to Read by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath & Voice and Vision by Stephen J. Pyne

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February 2010, no. 318

‘Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in’, declared Jane Austen, and so too do a number of Australian publishers. It is a commonplace that historians do not know how to write, except to each other in ways that put other readers to sleep. The first advice to the author of any newly minted doctoral dissertation preparing a book proposal is to eliminate all reference to the thesis. The starting point in any of the non-fiction writing programs offered at universities is to purge their manuscript of academic diction. ‘Sadly’, Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath begin their advice book on the subject, ‘historical writing has quite a bad reputation’.

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If any scholar has written anything worthwhile on Australia’s early colonial history, it is unlikely to be mentioned in this book. In Michael Connor’s depiction, things have become so bad that all the historians, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and health experts, and everyone else who has written or spoken publicly about our history over the last thirty years, should be sacked immediately. So too should staff in the departments of education, in the Australian Research Council, and all their national and international academic peer reviewers. Recent PhD graduates should be asked to give back their degrees, as they have not been properly trained. Many historical research assistants should never be given jobs again. The appellations ‘associate professor’ or ‘professor’ should be removed from office doors. Historians of the Australian academy do not deserve them. The first targets should be the most prolific and popular historians. And finally, tenure and terra nullius should be banned.

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The sepia-toned photograph on the front cover of historian Richard Broome’s new book presents the reader with two young indigenous Australian boys, taken around 1900 at Ramahyuck, an ‘Aboriginal mission’. Bright-eyed, alert and pleased with themselves in white shirts, woollen vests, jackets and trousers, they appear to be wearing possum or kangaroo skin cloaks. A closer look, however, reveals that the furs draped thickly around their shoulders are not iconic cloaks, but their successful catch of tasty rabbits.

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Proof & Truth: The humanist as expert edited by Iain McCalman and Ann McGrath

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June-July 2004, no. 262

In his opening essay in this book, Hal Wootten, former judge and law dean, asserts that lawyers and historians are ‘natural allies’. It is certainly true that the common law system builds on reports of the resolution of cases decided long ago and far away. In that sense, legal history lies at the heart of the technique of Australia’s legal system.

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