ABSTRACT
Until 1989 Hobsbawm was a confident believer in the emancipatory purpose of history, but in the post-communist world he takes a more sombre and pessimistic stance. For Hobsbawm a belief in historical truth and reason provides one way to resist the barbarism which he sees around him and to have a sense of history may be one way of dealing with the present. Historians must separate themselves from inventions of the past, insist on the difference between fact and fiction, stand aside from national narratives or rituals, distinguish between myths and history. In Australia it is quite as difficult to be black and Australian, despite a very different history from that of Britain. It is a history which involves recognition and the re-working of memory. A history which shows how fantasised constructions of homogeneous nations are constructed and the other possibilities which are always there.
