The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft
TOM GRIFFITHS
BLACK INC., $34.99
A hundred years ago Germans described England as "the land without music", wrongly. But perhaps Australia could be termed the land without history. We have our commemorations, increasingly dominated by Anzac Day, and there is the ever-growing interest in family history. But - for ill as much as an unburdened good - historical consciousness does not inform our lives.
Tom Griffiths' stimulating book, among many things, is a plea for the abiding relevance of history. As he eloquently puts it, "The present is but a breath, and the future doesn't exist except as a projection of the past". It therefore requires to be known.
He tells of Stephen Murray-Smith joining an official expedition to Antarctica, and discovering, to his horror, that technology allied with bureaucracy resulted in an almost compete disruption of any sense of continuity. Details of the extent of ice in the bays, journeys of previous field parties, even details of the age of a building that would assist a plumber: all were lacking. At one stage even the officer-in-charge's daily logs of activities were, for a time, officially discontinued. 
Griffiths reminds us that - along with the belief that they would die out - until the mid-20th century it was commonly believed that the Aborigines had occupied Australia for only a few thousand years.
But often whites have been no better informed about their own history. When Griffiths went to Queensland's Dawson Valley, he met the locals particularly interested in its pioneering families, and found almost no one knew of Judith Wright's account of her family's involvement in the district given in The Generations of Men.
As for The Cry for the Dead - effectively a re-write, foregrounding frontier conflict - that was completely unknown. Yet Wright drew a comparison between the Aborigines' loss of their lands, and the way traders and banks have dispossessed many farmers. "What's stolen once," she wrote, "is stolen again."
Such perspectives - and the way Wright radically changed hers, adopting full scholarly apparatus in doing so - are what the historian can uniquely offer. Moreover, unlike the social sciences, history pays more attention to the individual, and to particular circumstances.
Tom Griffiths demonstrates this in The Art of Time Travel by examining 14 writers of history themselves. It is a deliberately personal selection: apart from a couple of his teachers, the choice centres on those historians who have spoken to him as an environmental and public historian through their writings. So Manning Clark has only a bit part. Feminist history as such is put to one side - but five of these pieces do address the work of women.
Griffiths' method is to take a historian as representative of a particular approach, and give us just enough biographical detail to situate their concerns, discuss the issues they have raised, and then comment on the controversy or further work that may have followed. This sounds academic, but Griffiths is much broader in his sympathies than his being a professor of history at the ANU might suggest.
His opening piece is on Eleanor Dark - whose novel The Timeless Land he deems remarkable for its careful research as much as for its literary qualities. Similarly, of A Million Wild Acres, a book by the farmer Eric Rolls, he simply says, "I think it is the best environmental history yet written of Australia".
Seeing history as a collective enterprise, Griffiths' book is marked by a generosity of spirit. So he writes about Geoffrey Blainey with a sympathetic level-headedness, noting that, as the historian of mining, he is more interested in economy then ecology.
Quirky, idiosyncratic, and a graceful and persuasive writer, Blainey has always respected that ordinary people have valuable historical information to offer. He was, notes Griffiths, a "public historian" before his time. Blainey has also seen himself to some extent as the spokesman for the common (Anglo-Celtic) man - even if this meant (on multiculturalism) becoming out of joint with the times. But that is not the end of the story, or any story.
For Griffiths, as it should be for everyone, history has no finality. Apart from new material turning up, each period experiences shifts in preoccupations, which should prompt new questions of the past. New questions require new answers - and a search for new facts - ultimately creating a new history.
Well travelled and as keen a walker as Keith Hancock (and R.H. Tawney), Griffiths notes that for the Aborigines a historical sense has always been grounded in place, not in time. So in discussing the work of Graeme Davison, Griffiths notes how it arose from a curiosity about the Victorian capital - not only "Marvellous Melbourne", but also the "terra nullius of the human spirit": suburbia. Davison sought to bring out "the hidden dimensions of the familiar", extending to the freeway, the Holden and the Mixmaster.
Similarly, the more detailed work of Grace Karskens on early Sydney also receives attention: she examined the colony's early years with such intense scrutiny that she not only became familiar with the inhabitants of each household, but dreamed about them. In daylight hours, the keen interest both historians took in the intricacies of their chosen localities became suspect: each drew the attention of the police, or were threatened with it.
Aborigines and the environment are at the heart of this book, and rightly. Once it was realised the Aborigines had survived conquest - and had a future - their past began to be looked at differently.
New scientific techniques verified what people had increasingly been suspecting - that Aboriginal occupation of the continent has been much longer than was assumed. We are told how John Mulvaney, while on a dig in Queensland in 1962, received a telegram with the results of radio-carbon dating of artefacts specially sent to Cambridge: his first thought was that an extra nought had been added to the figure, by mistake. Aboriginal occupation is now reckoned at 60,000 years.
Australians have begun to realise, Griffiths believes, that they are the inheritors of a human saga of great significance: people here survived Ice-Age cold droughts in the central deserts, managing to sustain civilisation in the face of massive climate change.
As the country moves out of the shadow of the British Empire - and into the too-brilliant sunlight of global warming - we need new ways of seeing ourselves. As Grace Karskens shows, elements of Aboriginal continuity - even in urban Sydney - have always been there. Australian history was never as entirely non-Indigenous as we thought.
In addition, we now need "to see our fossil-fuel society in proper perspective", Griffiths writes, "to see ourselves not just as a civilisation but as a species". As this excellent book demonstrates, historians - usually thought of as being fixated on the past - may have got there first.
The Art of Time Travel is sure-footed, subtle, and open-minded - qualities one might expect from an author so insistent on the importance of perspective. Indeed the perspectives it offers will help develop the concerns that are moving to centre stage in 21st-century Australia, and enhance a sense of attachment to this land. It is a major work.
Jim Davidson is the author of A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W.K. Hancock (UNSW Press), which won the Age non-fiction book of the year in 2011. He is writing a double biography of literary magazine editors Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith.