Subjects and Readers: National and Transnational Contexts

Abstract

The tension between national and transnational perspectives in Australian history has two dimensions: the nature of one’s questions and the sources mobilised to answer them; and the readership and places of publication. Drawing on her own experience of editing the journal Meanjin during the 1980s and writing Australian history, including her new biography of Alfred Deakin, Judith Brett argues that one can draw on transnational perspectives on Australian history in writing done primarily for an Australian public readership, that history written for a national readership does not need to be narrowly nationalist, and that transnational perspectives are a corrective to the parochial and sentimental in national storytelling. She also discusses the choice academic historians need to make between writing primarily for a national public and primarily for an international academic readership, and the current pressures pushing academics to the latter.