Australian History: Geoffrey Blainey: Writer, Historian, Controversialist

- Blurb -

Geoffrey Blainey is often described as Australia's greatest livinghistorian, a writer whose prolific output includes such iconic books about thecountry's past as The Tyranny of Distanceand Triumph of the Nomads.However, Blainey has also been a controversial figure. His 1984comments about Asian immigration triggered a major political controversy. Inturn, the reaction of his critics raised fundamental questions about freedom ofspeech and set the scene for the `history wars' fought out in Australia overthe past three decades.Many academic historians were amongst Blainey's critics. After1984, Blainey became stereotyped as a `conservative historian' and thus outsidethe bounds of academic history, yet much of Blainey's historical writing, bothin method and outlook, has been far from conservative. GeoffreyBlainey: Writer, Historian, Controversialist challengessimplistic descriptions of Blainey's work. It sheds an important light not juston Blainey's career, but also on the past and present practice of history inAustralia.