Abstract:
This essay asks how the remaking of Australian history in the last quarter of the
twentieth century has affected the subjectivities and social relations of people who do
not make history but who must don new truths about their own past. Aboriginal
people, as well as Anqlo-Australians, had to shift their consciousness as the new topic,
ambiguously called 'Aboriginal history', burgeoned within Australian historiography.
Of most significance to me is how changing judgements of the past are altering the
relationships between these peoples. While the new history is seen as creating a moral
challenge or burden to the nation, it is also assumed to reveal something of Aboriginal
experience as colonial subjects. But historians have paid little attention to how changing
social conditions have affected Aboriginal societies and the sense of self-and one
changing social condition is the new history itself
