In your answer refer to at least one area of debate Case study 22: the arrival of the British in Australia Context underpins the approach an historian takes to history, and it is clear that the monumental approach to writing and interpreting the history of the British arrival in Australia has changed over time. John Arnold in the above quote refers to “traditional history’.
In reference to the landing of the British in Australia, “traditional history’ appears to take the form of official British documents, accounts from early British settlers and historicist historians such as Ernest Scott and Keith Hancock and Geoffrey Blaine who place indigenous peoples in “the waiting room of history’, and are unable to view aboriginals outside of endothelial context. Indeed context appears to have an impact on the construction of historical narratives.
As Arnold suggests history has “taken for granted” the things that weren’t recorded Traditional Australian history initially involves accounts of the indigenous peoples and British encounters with them tainted with imperialism and racial superiority from popular racial viewpoints amongst British citizens. Many British official records were written conscious of their role in history and with the aim of maintaining a positive view of the British Empire, no records of the indigenous people exist, accept for those written through a British lenses.
This traditional history appears to take on a British “monotone” as it does not allow a place for other viewpoints. This monotone is underpinned by a lack of historical understanding and displays an undercurrent of social Darwinism. Popular anthropological studies (give it some context – I. E. In the first years after the arrival of the British) placed aboriginals on the same terms as flora and fauna. Not civilized, but doomed to ‘accept a picture of their own extinction”. However many modern historians would argue that indigenous declared a British colony, on the contrary contemporary historians such as Henry
Reynolds argue That indigenous peoples engaged in a fierce opposition against British colonialism, in frontier wars that clammed the lives of at least 20 000 indigenous peoples. It is this specific and unofficial number that has been the subject of much controversy in the so called ‘history wars’ of the sis which were reignited in the 2013 election campaign when prime Minster Tony Abbot claimed that current Australian school “curriculum lacks focus on Australia’s past, “other than indigenous heritage” and has “too great a focus on issues which are the predominant concern of one side of politics”.