AustLit

'History, it seems, remains a discipline under siege in Australia. Politically unloved and not immediately convertible into an agile start up, recent revelations of political interference in the Australian Research Council (ARC) grants process have confirmed the impression that what we do as a discipline is widely misunderstood and frequently undervalued. All too often our work is seen as esoteric and far removed from the hurly burly of what is misleadingly termed the ‘real world’. The current mood is that historians need to be disciplined, enjoined to write in ways that serve the ‘national interest’, cajoled into accepting politically laden centres that devalue the importance of scholarly independence and measured against university-level metrics that view external research funding as an infinitely attainable output and not an increasingly scarce input.' (Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Catherine Kevin & Melanie Oppenheimer : Editorial introduction)