Barry Smith

The combatants in the so-called ‘History Wars’ have been denouncing each other for about a decade. The main issue is the handling of black–white relations in histories of Australia. There are tangential disputes about the policies of the National Museum and the worth of the historian Manning Clark and his writings, but these are not germane to this article. On the left, television historians ... (read more)

The visit of H.G. Wells to Australia in 1938–39 provides a spectacle of provocation under difficulties. The provocations were mostly Wells’s; the difficulties he shared with his hosts. The outcome was disappointment all round. In mid-1938, Wells accepted an invitation from the Congress Organising Committee of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) t ... (read more)