Settler Histories and Indigenous Pasts: New Zealand and Australia
This chapter focuses on historical writing in New Zealand and Australia, which has been transformed since 1945. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the number of academic historians increased exponentially and growing professionalization occurred, a project of constructing a progressive story of masculinist nation-making and nationalism became dominant, while in the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of historians—many of them women and first-generation Australians—challenged this triumphant nationalist story of self-realization as they embraced social and cultural history and their emphases on the differences of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. There is one area in which historical writing in New Zealand and Australia has undoubtedly been distinctive, at least in terms of its public impact; namely, that concerning the pasts of the indigenous peoples. The chapter then looks at the historiography of aboriginal–settler relations in Australia and New Zealand.