Private Lives, Public History

摘要

Private Lives, Public History, written by historian Anna Clark - co-author, with Stuart Macintyre, of the influential and provocative The History Wars in 2003 - is not a book written for archivists, nor is it a book about archives. In a succinct 180 pages, Clark reflects on a research project she undertook at the University of Technology Sydney called 'Whose Australia? Popular Understandings of the Nations Past', which looked at 'everyday' attitudes towards Australian history. Although there is little in the book about the documentary record - the basis for so much of Australian history - there is much about what history means to the ordinary people of the country - to John Howard's 'average Australian bloke', as Clark recounts in her introduction, "Thinking About History' (Chapter 1).