The ‘little empire of Wybalenna’:1 Becoming colonial in Australia1

Abstract

The colonial past is hot property in Australian public life at present. Debates throughout the 1990s about 'black armband' history versus 'white blindfold' history, about histories of land use and ownership, and about what constitutes 'mainstream' Australian historical scholarship seem to have coalesced in the arguments surrounding Keith Windschuttle's publications. In this most recent set of history wars, some Australian historians seem to feel under siege.' Others, as Nicolas Rothwell suggests, see this as a breath oflife for the discipline, reasserting the centrality of history even as it calls into question the authority and reliability ofhistorians. These debates draw such heat because they are ultimately about the relationship between the colonial past and what might be called the 'postcolonial' present. It is at once a debate about history as a discipline and a debate about how historical understandings affect our present: as Graeme Davison suggests, history has become 'a bone of national contention'P Ifarguments about 'the past' are those we can