I came across this most interesting book via historian Anna Clark’s excellent review at the Sydney Review of Books (links to this on my blog, see below) and – seriously – that is where you must go if you want a proper evaluation of why this is an important book for Australians to read. Anna Clark was one of the historians at the History Summer School I attended in 2008, and she presented a paper about her research into why Australian students think Australian history is boring. It was a compelling argument and it changed the way I taught Australian history – and because I was Director of Curriculum at my school and also not shy about sharing my efforts at reform at conferences and on my professional blog Clark’s ideas went far beyond her audience that day in Canberra. (It was one of the criteria for selection into the Summer School that we brag about what we’d learned in other professional development forums).

In a nutshell, the take-home message from The Honest History Book is that we do ourselves (and our children) a disservice if we focus on Anzac at the expense of other aspects of our history.

When a single thread of our nation’s story is teased out to excess, it strangles the other threads. Australian history is social and cultural, political and economic, religious and anthropological, archaeological and scientific, as well as military. It is made by women, men, individuals, families, artists, philosophers, scientists, businesspeople, public servants, soldiers and politicians. We carry the imprint of the First Australians; the builders of the CSIRO, the Sydney Opera House and the Snowy Scheme; the pioneers of the bush frontier in the 19th century and the urban frontier in the 1950s and 1960s; and ‘boat people’, whether convicts, post-war ‘ten pound Poms’ and ‘New Australians’ and asylum seekers, Australian history is to the credit – and discredit – of all of us, not just our Diggers. (p. 4)

So the book covers some of the territory in James Brown’s Anzac’s Long Shadow, but it also explores our history of progressive nation-building reforms and our economic and environmental history and it does some myth-busting about our egalitarianism, our heroes and the role of women.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/09/30/the-honest-history-book-edited-by-david-step... ( )