Ann Curthoys and John Docker, Is history fiction?, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2006. viii 296 pp., ISBN 0868407348.

This book will interest historians of education for at least three reasons. First, like the mainstream discipline, the history of education has suffered from an incursion of divergent ideologies. Secondly, politicians have displayed active concern about the ideologies pervading school history. Thirdly, historiography has recently been incorporated in the senior secondary school curricula; in New South Wales the Modern History syllabus introduced an Extension course in historical theory in 2001.

Speaking to the NSW History Teachers' Association in March 2006 Ann Curthoys said that, in general, John Docker, wrote the first six (historical) chapters and she wrote the later theoretical ones. Their book has a clear literary style as well as a well-structured index. The argument is aptly expounded in the 11-page Introduction. There the authors might well have answered their rhetorical question 'Is history fiction?' in one word: sometimes. In fact, their Introduction goes well beyond that. 'We do believe in truth and in the search for truth.' No-one would pursue historical research unless 'she and he thought they could arrive, however provisionally, at some kind of truth.' But historians must resist the belief that they can objectively establish the truth about the past. Fortunately, Curthoys and Docker venture well beyond this long-accepted view!

The first two of the eleven chapters are on Herodotus and Thucydides, seeking to identify a 'doubleness' in historical writing. Herodotus is seen as adopting a cosmopolitan, inclusive, non-judgemental, almost relativist, literary approach. Thucydides provides a semi-scientific, structured, somewhat fact-centred analysis. The third chapter jumps to the nineteenth century, where Leopold von Ranke is aligned with one tradition and Sir Walter Scott with the other. Chapter 4 ('History, Science and Art') returns to Ranke, then moving on to Nietzsche and Lord Acton. The authors examine Bury's confident assertion in his 1903 Cambridge inaugural lecture that history 'is a science, no less and no more'. Chapter 5 claims, rather unconvincingly, that from the 1920s to the 1940s historians 'frequently pondered' the question: 'Has History any Meaning?' As examples, the authors cite Croce's assertion that every true history is contemporary history and Butterfield's abandonment of the idea of progress. The next chapter, 'History in the Light of Catastrophe', taking us to the 1960s, accommodates Marxist historians as well as E. H. Carr. In What is History? (1961) Carr argues that the historian should navigate between history as an objective compilation of facts and as interpretation.

With chapter 7, 'The Linguistic Turn', we reach the later 1960s when a flood of new ideologies disrupted western society's house of intellect. The authors see Carr's attempt 'to balance history as objectivity and as multiple perspectives' as being gradually undone by criticism from within by historians and from outside by philosophers, anthropologists, linguists and literary critics. Chapters 8 ('The Feminism Challenge') and 9 ('Postmodernism and Poststructuralism') are the two longest in the book. Chapter 8, one of the best, presents a balanced picture of the various intellectual currents within the feminist movement. In chapter 9 the authors pronounce themselves 'deeply sympathetic to postmodernism in its hospitality to popular genres' and to poststructuralism 'in its stress on heterogeneity, difference, contradictoriness, and indeterminancy; in its drawing attention to fictive elements in scholarly, including historical, writing.'

Chapter 10, 'Anti-Postmodernism and the Holocaust', recounts how, from the early 1990s, Marxists, feminists, anti-theory historians, ex-Marxists turned conservative, and 'die-hard positivists' criticised postmodernism. It reproduces what seems a convincing critique by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob (Telling the Truth about History). These American Marxists see postmodernists as 'deeply disillusioned intellectuals' who denounce Marxism, liberal humanism, communism and capitalism and who deny 'our ability to represent reality in any objectively true fashion.' Foucault made truth nothing more than the will to power within discourse, while Derrida questioned the seeking of truth altogether. Surprisingly, Curthoys and Docker discern in this Marxian analysis the beneficial influence of recent ideologies.

The closing chapter examines three recent 'History Wars', involving competing views on national prestige. In the United States argument erupted in 1992 over a planned exhibition in Washington DC on the merits of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In Japan a long debate started in 1990 over the massacres by Japanese soldiers in the Chinese capital between December 1937 and March 1938. In Australia the chosen example is Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002). Remarkably, apart from a passing mention in their Introduction which omits both the author's name and his challenging sub-title: How a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists, they do not confront Windschuttle's 1994 book The Killing of History.
 
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