The historian’s conscience is a companion to Stuart Macintyre’s previous book, The history wars (re-issued 2004). In his earlier work, Macintyre provides an anecdote which illustrates the context in which he is writing and the purpose of both books.
He tells of a school teacher in the 1990s who was appointed by the Victorian Government to prepare curriculum materials on Australian studies. In order to do so, the teacher recruited a post-graduate student from the History Department of the University of Melbourne. After reviewing the proposed materials, the teacher became disturbed by the gloominess of some of the episodes included. During the 1930s Depression, for example, the wealthy were able to buy more because of deflation. Frustrated at this, the teacher finally turned to the white board, which he divided into two halves. He labelled one side, ‘Blainey’, and the other side, ‘Manning Clark’. He explained that the first, referring to the work of Geoffrey Blainey, is ‘good’ history, and the second ‘bad’.
For Macintyre, this story illustrates two disturbing trends that have dominated Australia’s relationship to its own history. The first is how the study and uses of history have been divided into opposing camps. This violates the basic procedures of historical inquiry: the pursuit of objectivity, balanced by the doubt that this can ever be achieved. The second is how this division has resulted in misunderstanding the past. After all, it was Blainey who initially made this point about deflation during the Depression, not Clark.
The purpose of The history wars was to understand how these trends surfaced. In The historian’s conscience, Macintyre, together with 13 other Australian historians, reflect on their profession, in an effort to move beyond the previous narrow polemic of the ‘history wars’.
Macintyre opens this collection of essays by stating the two ‘divergent obligations’ of historians: history as a social science and history as heritage. History as a social science regards the historian as a dispassionate and objective observer. History as heritage sees the historian as an involved custodian of the past. ‘One reworks the past to serve the interests of the present, the other attaches the present to a binding past.’
Yet Macintyre admits this distinction is drawn too starkly. Joy Damousi, in her essay, ‘The emotions of history’, argues that the field of the historian lies somewhere between these two obligations; that it involves maintaining a tension between objective facts and subjective