Perspectives of the past: an introduction

Aboriginal history deals with diverse events, and historical processes of variable scale. It also involves cross-cultural perspectives with many different layers of human behaviour and experience. Aboriginal history may be written by Aboriginal historians or by non-Aboriginal historians whose perspectives and insights inevitably will differ. The cross-cultural perspective renders complex both the events of the past and their construction in historical narrative and explanation of Aboriginal history. The 1970s saw the beginning of systematic historical research on Aboriginal-European contact by Australian historians led by Corris, Reece, Reynolds, Hartwig, and some anthropologists, especially Diane Barwick. Aboriginal history during the 1980s also became the province of new players by entering university curricula and establishing its formal place in the historical scholarship of Australian and Aboriginal studies. Aboriginal history is not merely a matter of the frontier and its inexorable movement in time and space across the continent, but a continuing cross-cultural dynamic.