Together, we can rewrite history

Who still remembers the leaders' debate in the first week of this long and uninspiring election campaign? In his concluding remarks, John Howard didn't talk about his vision for Australia, or the risk of a Rudd government. Instead, he talked about history: 'We need to restore a proper narrative of Australian history. We can't know where to go, we can't understand where we are now without properly understanding where we've come from.' Historian Manning Clark famously began volume one of his six-volume History of Australia: 'Civilisation did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century.' He dismissed the need to provide the continent's non-European history: 'Of the way of life of these [Aboriginal] peoples before the coming of European civilisation, little need, or indeed can, be said.' Not even Keith Windschuttle would say that now. Aboriginal history has become part of the Australian story. But the histories that immigrants bring to this country remain largely excluded from that story. [Introduction]