Nation, History, Museum: The Politics of the Past at the National Museum of Australia
The National Museum of Australia opened its doors to the public on 11 March 2001. Located in Canberra, the federal capital, the Museum was the centre-piece of celebrations marking the centenary of Australia’s federation. As such, the Museum’s director, Dawn Casey, described the AU $155 million, state-of-the-art institution as ‘a gift to the nation’. But for some, this was not the sort of present that Australia wanted. In officially opening the Museum, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, seemed somewhat under-whelmed, struggling to find anything positive to say about the new edifice. In his speech, the Prime Minister parsimoniously claimed that ‘Whatever may be said and whatever has already been said about the Museum … [it] will change in a very profound way the enjoyment of life for people who live in the national capital’ (Howard, 2001).
A Prehistory of Australia's History Wars: The Evolution of Aboriginal history during the 1970s and 1980s
While an extensive debate has recently addressed more contemporary contributions to historical scholarship, the historiographical background to Australia's History Wars has rarely been appraised. This article proposes an interpretative narrative of the evolution of Aboriginal history during the 1970s and 1980s. While before the late 1960s a systematic historiography of Aboriginal-white relations did not exist, these decades have witnessed the emergence and consolidation of Aboriginal history as an established academic discipline. The 1970s saw the “detection” of Aboriginal persistence and resistance and the historiographical tradition established during this decade insisted on the contested nature of the invasion process. Conversely, during the 1980s, an interpretative tradition stressing Indigenous agency, transformation and adaptation shifted the focus of historiographical attention.
The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 . By Geoffrey Wawro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1966. Pp. 313. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-56059-4.
This expanded and reworked Yale dissertation ventures into a topic done spellbindingly two decades ago by one of the grand masters of German military affairs, Gordon Craig, whose Battle of Koeniggraetz (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1964), was published in a series commissioned by Hanson W. Baldwin. NewYork Times military affairs editor. Wawro does not approach the literary brilliance of Craig, but his work goes beyond it in several important respects. First, although Craig dealt with a good deal of the preliminary background and also the aftermath, his book focused squarely on the major battle which decided the war, whereas the book at hand deals with the entire war, which included several other battles, notably Langensalza, between Prussia and the Hanoverians in north-central Germany and Custoza between Austria and Italy in northern Italy. Secondly, whereas Craig knew the German sources as well as anyone, Wawro here uses not only German, but Austrian, French, British, and Italian ones. Of the last two, the former are important for the diplomatic background, the latter for the southern campaign area as well as for the problematic PrussianItalian relations. Thirdly,Wawro has dug deeper than Craig into primary source archives. Especially for the central emphasis of the book, the Austrians and Italians, he has mined the archives in Vienna, Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice. For example, he uses a number of war diaries which officers from captain to field marshal kept and later deposited in military archives. Interestingly, both authors use Hans Delbriick andTheodor Fontane. Delbriick wrote half a dozen essays on the war and after his death in 1929 two of his colleagues published a fifth volume of his classic Art of War in the Framework of Political History which dealt substantially with 1866, partly on the basis of Delbriick's Berlin University lecture notes. Fontane covered the war as a newspaper correspondent and published more than a thousand pages from his eyewitness experiences, Der deutsche Krieg von 1866, 2 vols, (Berlin, 1871-72).