Online Lecture: "The Historiographical Imagination"

This talk emerges out of a larger project on the history of Australian historiography, but in writing this book, I was immediately faced with the question, What Is History? If I was to write a follow-up to E.H. Carr’s famous text, what do I allow in my disciplinary remit of historical studies? And who should I include as a historian? In a settler-colonial society like Australia, the History discipline has been part of the architecture of colonisation, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. This paper looks at the question of what I’ve called the historiographical imagination, to ask whether those of us who study the discipline might be able to draw more creative modes of history-making to better understand the purpose and function of History, as well as our own practices as historians.