Backbencher

Since we brought up Clark and Sinclair again for lecture 10, I thought about both those authors again and tried to measure them up with some of the questions that we were looking at in class. I do think that Clark did care about the Aborigines, but I don’t think that he felt they were important enough to work hard enough to gather up their stories into a history. I think he probably felt it would have taken too much time and the reward for it wouldn’t have been all that great. I don’t feel that he was a bad historian either. His book may have contained quite a bit of rambling stories, but that’s what history mostly comes from anyways. People just shorten them up a bit to make them more interesting. I think that Sinclair did do quite a bit better job with his book though. He spoke of the native people much more than Clark did. However, we you look at what we talked about in class, we too didn’t talk much about the Aborigines. We talked about the Maori quite a bit more though and rightfully so. They had a far greater impact on the shaping of New Zealand than the Aborigines did in Australia. I don’t think that the history that they told is any different than the history that was told in the US. Both are just stories taken into account and recorded down on paper so that they can be retold to later generations. We care about our history because it helps us learn and because it’s simply fascinating to study.