Histories
History has been an important discipline in the development of Australian writing. Watkin Tench (1758–1833) - a British officer who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 - later published two books on the subject of the foundations of New South Wales: Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. Written with a spirit of humanity his accounts are considered by writers including Robert Hughes and Thomas Keneally to be essential reading for the early history of Australia.
Charles Bean was the official war historian of the First World War and was influential in establishing the importance of ANZAC in Australian history and mythology, with such prose as "Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valor in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance, that will never own defeat". (see works including The Story of ANZAC: From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign May 4, 1915, 1921).
Australia in the War of 1939–1945 is a 22 volume official history dedicated to Australia's Second World War efforts. the series was published by the Australian War Memorial between 1952 and 1977. The main editor was Gavin Long.
A significant milestone was the historian Manning Clark's six volume History of Australia, which is regarded by some as the definitive account of the nation. Clark had a talent for narrative prose and the work (published between 1969 and 1987) remains a popular and influential work. Clark's one time student Geoffrey Blainey stands as another to have deeply influenced Australian historiography. His important works include The Tyranny of Distance, 1966 and Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia, 1975.
Robert Hughes' much-debated history The Fatal Shore. The epic of Australia's founding, 1987, is a popular and influential work on early Australian history.
Marcia Langton is one of the principal contemporary Indigenous Australian academics and her 2008 collaboration with Rachel Perkins chronicles Australian history from an indigenous perspective: First Australians. An Illustrated History.
Read more about this topic: Australian Literature
Famous quotes containing the word histories:
“The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, “the sweet seriousness of sixteen,” the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,—we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,—where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)