Australian history wars

They are just fundamentally asking more questions of the past and understanding this kind of discipline that we call history.

One of the things that the history wars showed us and continue to show us, because I think we kind of, under that broad umbrella of history wars, there are lots of different public debates about various aspects of the past.

I think what those history wars shows us, what they can show us, is that history matters to people and history is really important.

And I think that we can look at those history wars as perhaps battles around competing ideas of expertise, that there's been a broader kind of crisis around academic expertise and kind of public understandings.

And then there's also the culture war aspect of that, the kind of idea of elites versus popular thinking and things like that.

But I think one other thing that's really important to sort of take away from those history wars is that they do consolidate and move the field along in some ways.

I mean, if you look at the history wars around Keith Windshuttle and Henry Reynolds and the kind of debates around frontier conflict in the early 2000s, one of the things that happened out of that debate is Professor Lyndall Ryan, after being a target of Keith Windshuttle in those history wars herself, went away and kind of did a new project around investigating massacres of Indigenous people in Australia's history and produced the massacre map.

And then we get from that a kind of building on that through other kinds of works that treat frontier conflict as a form of warfare for country and We then see the production of films like Rachel Perkins' Australian Wars.