This is a deceptively simple book, drawing you in to thinking it will be a series of bios, but instead is a profound meditation on historiography, Australia's developing understanding of our history, and ultimately Australia itself. Instead of attempting to comprehensively cover his subjects, Griffith chooses as apect of each to focus on: Judith Wright to explore environmental history; Inga Clendinnen to explore the relationsip between history and historical fiction, and Mike Smith to explore the implications of Australia's 'deep time' - a population that massively predates all but Africa. The journey takes us through frontiers and surburbs, past farming communities, Antartic-huddled public servants, sunday afternoon drives, 50000 year old caves, and rainforests. Again, and again, however, the narrative returns us to the issues of the 'frontier', of the impact and reverberation of invasion, and how slowly our historiography has recovered from Terra Nullius, the refusal to acknowledge Indigenous peoples as significant, or actors, and hence to understand much of what happened here. Which is not to say this book deals in dichotomies. Griffiths does not steer away from the debacle of the 'history wars' and reiterates the certainty now of high death tolls from frontier wars, but he is also critical of narratives which simplify to "settlers arrived and local Indigneous people resisted and died', pointing to the impact of settlement on Indigenous groups well beyond the frontier, and the myriad of responses to this, as well as disease, climate and Indigenous cultural developments. There is a yearning, in the latter part of the book, for a history acknowledges and understands the tapestry of Australian life, before and after 1788.
It may not be a book primarily of bios, but many of the portraits are compelling. Greg Dening's shows a passionate, generous teacher, Keith Hancock's a complex, grumpy man finding peace through history of a loved retreat. Blainey, well, despite Griffith's generally rcar3ful and respectful tone, Blainey manages to come out as a reckless provacateur, a man frustrated by the death of a view of the world that affirmed his values, and willing to allow sloppy and harmful historical ideas to proliferate: even to give them a shove along. Kate Grenville, who is thanked for reviewing the sections she is mentioned in, also cops a bit of a gentle, polite bruising, as Griffiths explores her claim to have been part if the 'history wars' with a novel deliberately designed to be fiction, rather than 'non'. Griffiths understands the history wars as, in part, a fight for history itself: that facts need trump nationalism. He credits both the power of Grenville's fiction to deal with societies griefs and its limitation.
The book is, in short, a wonderful exploration of history and how it shapes, and is shaped by, who we are as a society and who we are as individuals. Great read.