Unfinished Business: Rewriting the Past

Abstract

Understanding History’s history requires reading and analysing the texts it has produced across time, and the diverse historians who made them. In settler-colonial societies like Australia, understanding the power and process of that curation is especially urgent. This discussion briefly explores aspects of the recent ‘statue wars’ in Australian history and argues that the one constant across these many understandings of Australia over time, is this: History curates the past.