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The Australian Literature Resource

The History Wars Revisited: A Retrospective Symposium at the Free University of Berlin, Tuesday 6 October 2009

The History Wars of the 1990s in Australia have been variously interpreted in the broader social context as a symptom of a return to conservative values and as part of a complex of other issues in the area of policing, immigration and asylum politics. At the more immediate level of intellectual debate, they have been seen as a trench war between rigidly polarized positions and as a rehashing of debates that had already been resolved within the discipline of historiography. Speakers include:

• Bain Attwood, Professor of History at Monash University, author of The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution (re. ed. 2007), Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005), Rights for Aborigines (2003).
• James Boyce, freelance historian from Hobart, author of Van Diemen's Land (2008), winner of Tasmania Book Prize 2009.
• Stephen Muecke, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales, author (with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe) of Reading the Country (1984), No Road (bitumen all the way, (1997), Ancient & Modern: time, culture and indigenous philosophy ( 2004), and and Joe in the Andamans and other fictocritical stories (2008).
• Kim Scott, Western Australian author of True Country (1993), Benang - From the Heart (1999), The Dredgersaurus (2001), and with Hazel Brown, Kayang & Me (2005).