Australian history wars

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The history wars is a term used in Australia to describe the public debate about the interpretation of the history of the European colonisation of Australia and the development of contemporary Australian society, particularly with regard to their impact on Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The term "history wars" emerged in the late 1990s during the term of the Howard government, and despite efforts by some of Howard's successors,^[1] the debate is ongoing, notably reignited in 2016 and 2020.^[2][3]

The "history wars" are often regarded as a culture war; not to be confused with the historical Australian frontier wars, which are an important subject of the debate, the history wars have played out as a cultural conflict between key figures in the Australian political and media landscapes. The term largely refers to the extent to which the history of European colonisation post-1788 and government administration since federation in 1901 may be characterised as having been:

• a relatively minor conflict between European settlers and Indigenous Australians, and generally lacking in events that might be termed "invasion", "warfare", "guerrilla warfare", "conquest" or "genocide", and generally marked instead by humane intent by government authorities, with damage to Indigenous Australians largely attributable to unintended factors (such as the unintentional spread of infectious diseases from Europe) rather than to malicious policies; or
• an invasion marked by violent frontier conflicts and guerrilla warfare between European settlers and Aboriginal Australians involving numerous clashes between Aboriginal people and the new settlers as a result of the former's food gathering practices being at odds with new land-use practices based on agriculture and capitalism, a situation which has been argued to have evolved into a pan-Australian "genocide of Indigenous Australians", which continues to affect Aboriginal people today.

The history wars also relates to broader themes concerning national identity, as well as methodological questions concerning the historian and the craft of researching and writing history, including issues such as the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and the oral tradition (of the Indigenous Australians), along with the political or similar ideological biases of those who interpret them. One theme is how British or multicultural Australian identity has been in history and today.^[4][5] At the same time the history wars were in play, professional history seemed in decline, and popular writers began reclaiming the field.^[6]