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'In recent years debates about the ethics of portraying Indigenous subjects and subject matter have almost been superseded by circular debates about 'true' Australian history and who has the right to tell it. This has been disappointing in a context of the morally and formally imaginative speculations of historians such as Tom Griffiths, Fiona Paisley, Stephen Kinnane and Greg Dening, and also in a context of Indigenous studies Professor Marcia Langton's evidently too-hopeful calls for the activation of a shared cultural space. But as this local debate has become more heated, more public, the oddest spectacle of all in recent years was the recent lambasting of historical novelists.
Novelist Kate Grenville was a particular target of attack. Notable historians such as Mark McKenna, John Hirst and Inga Clendinnen vociferously condemned dramatic accounts of the past as anachronistic, unethical and, most curious of all in relation to the fictioneer's job description, untrue. I revisit the 'history wars' stoush to argue that these historians overlooked the suasion of broader, local political battles to determine and culturally enshrine particular narratives of Australian pasts; I argue that they also eschewed the linguistic turn of postmodernism and the contributions made therein by prominent historical scholars in their own field such as Hayden White and Dominic LaCapra. The paper finally shows how Grenville, Kim Scott and other novelists have engaged with colonial archival materials, deploying particular narrative techniques that enable them to generate compelling postcolonial dramatisations of colonial pasts. (Author's abstract)
Novelist Kate Grenville was a particular target of attack. Notable historians such as Mark McKenna, John Hirst and Inga Clendinnen vociferously condemned dramatic accounts of the past as anachronistic, unethical and, most curious of all in relation to the fictioneer's job description, untrue. I revisit the 'history wars' stoush to argue that these historians overlooked the suasion of broader, local political battles to determine and culturally enshrine particular narratives of Australian pasts; I argue that they also eschewed the linguistic turn of postmodernism and the contributions made therein by prominent historical scholars in their own field such as Hayden White and Dominic LaCapra. The paper finally shows how Grenville, Kim Scott and other novelists have engaged with colonial archival materials, deploying particular narrative techniques that enable them to generate compelling postcolonial dramatisations of colonial pasts. (Author's abstract)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 6 Mar 2012
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http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-63067-20120124-0000-www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/1829/2633.html
Archival Salvage : History’s Reef and the Wreck of the Historical Novel
JASAL

Subjects:
- Nothing Personal 2010 single work review
- Eucalyptus : A Novel 1998 single work novel
- 'Opportunistic Transpositions and Elisions' : Roger McDonald's The Ballad of Desmond Kale; or, the Fiction Question : Who Owns Stories? 2008 single work criticism
- Accommodating the Past 2008 single work review
- True History of the Kelly Gang 2000 single work novel
- Oscar and Lucinda 1988 single work novel
- Havoc in History House 2006 single work criticism
- The History Question : Who Owns the Past? 2006 single work essay
- The Writer's Reader : A Guide to Writing Fiction and Poetry 2002 anthology criticism
- Gould's Book of Fish : A Novel in Twelve Fish 2001 single work novel
- The New Diversity : Australian Fiction : 1970-88 1989 selected work criticism
- After the Celebration : Australian Fiction 1989-2007 2009 selected work criticism
- Searching for the Secret River 2006 single work criticism
- The Secret River 2005 single work novel
- The Lieutenant 2008 single work novel
- Shadow Lines 2003 single work biography
- The Ballad of Desmond Kale 2005 single work novel
- Looking for Blackfellas' Point : An Australian History of Place 2002 single work non-fiction
- Benang : From the Heart 1999 single work novel
- A Noongar Voice, An Anomalous History 2008 single work criticism
- That Deadman Dance 2010 single work novel
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