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The past is another truth

The discipline of history was undergoing a revolution when I began my undergraduate studies at The Australian National University (ANU) in the late 1960s. Of course I did not realise it then, nor did I appreciate how different ANU was from more traditional history departments, though I think that some of our teachers were aware they were in the vanguard of change. My father was an old-style historian and for him, as for most historians, history was the story of public events and public figures— politics, war and great men. Social history was in its infancy, and women’s history did not exist. But at ANU we studied the civil rights movement in American history, which my father thought was not history at all, but current affairs. We studied Pacific history, which my father thought was anthropology. And in my honours year, I took ‘Literature and History’ for my special subject, and wrote a long essay on the work of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann. The women’s movement had started, and I never did ‘straight’ history again—always social, always feminist. A door had opened and ANU swept me through it.