EssayTHE TERM ‘HISTORY wars’ is best known in Australia for summing up the fierce debate over the nature and extent of frontier conflict, with profound implications for the legitimacy of the British settlement and thus for national legitimacy today. That...

Essay‘A WRITER,' DECLARED the novelist Thomas Mann, ‘is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.' University-based historians working in Australian history are fast learning the truth of Mann's little dictum. In schools and universities...

EssayIT HAS BEEN said of George Macaulay Trevelyan that he was gifted with a 'vivid pictorial sense'. True enough, but consider for instance an extract from the opening to his biography of Earl Grey, Grey of Fallodon (1937):Fallodon has...