Soft Histories: Making History on Australian Television

Abstract

This article examines the series of publicly funded and ABC-screened history documentaries produced by the Making History initiative since 2005, and the social, economic and cultural conditions of their creation. I argue that the final products of Making History represent an impoverished vision of history and an ideological bias reflective of the wider politics of government funding and commissioning. This article contends that a lack of accountability by Australian film and television industry players, the culture of funding, commissioning and production in Australia, and slowness on the part of the academy to vitalise the Humanities and broaden the agenda for history and historians, are key contributing factors to the limited way that the past is represented on Australian television screens. I argue that change and innovation in Australian television history are both possible and desirable, but that there needs to be greater collaboration between the history profession and the film industry.This article has been peer-reviewed