AustLit

'Notwithstanding the defeat of the Voice referendum in October 2023, a demand for ‘truth-telling’ remains. Australian Historical Studies is pleased to host an ongoing discussion about what historical scholarship can contribute to truth-telling. In August 2023 (volume 54, no. 3), Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards used the instance of Samuel Griffith to consider how to contextualise individual responsibility for the colonial state’s killing of Aboriginal people. In this issue we are pleased to publish a very different comment: Matthew Fitzpatrick’s reflections on lessons from the historiography of Germany. Fitzpatrick’s starting point is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars differ in their investments in and approaches to critical narratives of colonisation. There is an ‘Indigenous space’, he cautions, that ‘should not be unthinkingly co-opted by non-Indigenous scholars’. The likely impetus of such co-option is a desire for truth-telling to be healing, redemptive, and decolonising. Advising non-Indigenous scholars to be suspicious of ‘all attempts at assimilation, reconciliation or relativisation’ of the pasts that they produce, Fitzpatrick enjoins historians to facilitate ‘the perpetual problematisation of irreducibly traumatic pasts’. The lesson from recent German historiography is that ‘multi-vocality’ – encouraging histories from many standpoints – militates against hopes of an ‘end point where the work of truth-telling is finished and differing historical experiences can be reconciled and transcended’. In Australian historiography, that multiplicity is more likely, he suggests, if we privilege the ‘local’ and question the possibility of a ‘national’ colonisation story. Fitzpatrick sees promise in ‘increasingly vocal and heterogeneous Indigenous voices’. (The heterogeneity of the ‘Indigenous space’ was amply demonstrated, after his paper was written, in the 2023 debate about constitutional recognition.) As well, he champions ‘voices from Australia’s own migrant community’ – to which Australian Historical Studies (vol. 53, no. 4, November 2022) has recently given a platform in the Themed Issue ‘Their Own Perceptions: Non-Anglo Migrants and Aboriginal Australia’.' (Fiona Paisley : Editorial introduction)