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the last 30 years...Likewise the tensions between city and country have been
sharpened by the decline of this belief, in nation-wide development. Curiously in
South-east Asia, most people share - for their country - this vision that we now are
putting to one side. (2001, para. 1, 3)
In a 2004 The Weekend Australian feature on Anna Clark, the following comments were
made emphasising her own position in the history/culture wars as one of linking
contemporary understanding of the world to historical research as being an unavoidable
product of the work of an historian (a view in itself that could be considered contentious), and
to call for what A. Clark terms balance:
…Clark makes the point that calls for balance and demands that scholarship should
not ignore the heroic achievements in the nation's past are as much based in
contemporary political disputes as calls for a focus on the effect of European
settlement on indigenous Australians.
“History is alive today, it sparks passionate debates,” she says. “We all try to
be honest about how we write, but it is very difficult to separate current debates from
historical research – we are interested in the past because it touches us – there has to
be a connection for history to have a bite.” (Matchett, 25 February 2004, para. 8-9)
Reporting on John Howard’s address to Quadrant’s 50 th anniversary celebration, Dennis
Shanahan writes that Howard “...marshalled his allies on the intellectual Right” (Shanahan,
2006, para. 1) by adding an extra topic for the debate in the ongoing history/culture wars. In
addition to education, history and Australian cultural values more broadly, as part of the
common topics, Howard introduced “...Islamic extremism’s threat to democracy” (Shanahan,
2006, para. 3). Therefore, a claim can be made that through the discourse of the
history/culture wars, when a populist idea emerges, it has been appropriated into the debate,
suiting the political purpose of the person who uses the topic as a case in point within the
larger discourse. See, for example, Kunkel’s call for “a new front in the History Wars” (2008,
p. 3) by including economics. In this way, after thirteen years of debate, the history/culture
wars can be seen as encompassing more than the original topic of frontier interactions
between Indigenous and Non Indigenous Australians; and as a result casting a wider net for
people entering the debate.
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