Dimensions
136 x 215 x 10mm
In this bleak century, we have seen nations destroyed by false and fatally divisive histories. Inga Clendinnen believes that democratic peoples need true stories about their past. Their close and reflective study of past human situations develops the moral imagination and encourages us to extend to fellow citizens the concern we spontaneously feel for friends and kin. It also teaches us to respect the complex impulses behind human actions, and to learn to trace their likely consequences, intended and unintended.
Clendinnen argues forcefully for the rejection of any single, simple account of the Australian past, and instead urges responsiveness to a multiplicity of stories catching the experience of different individuals in different situations. A woman manhandled on a beach, an old man remembering the hard lessons of his boyhood in a Jesuit mission, an old woman urgently dancing the history of her country - from retrieved fragments like these Clendinnen constructs a frank and challenging review of race relations in this country since first contact, so we may better understand how our nation has come to be what it is today.
