“Real Solemn History” and its Discontents: Australian Political History and the Challenge of Social History

Abstract

The relationship between Australian political and social history has received little historiographical attention. Political history has been lauded or, more often, dismissed as traditional historical practice, while from the 1960s social history took its place as a catch‐all phrase for various “new” histories concerned with everyday life. This article examines the place of political and social history in the nascent Australian academic historical profession of the 1950s to the early 1970s, and then explores the impact of the new social history on academic political history. It will suggest that while there was only limited exchange before the late 1980s, in the last twenty years social history has contributed modestly to a reconstituted understanding of political history as part of lived experience.“[…] I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?”“Yes, I am fond of history.”“I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention […]”.1