Every year I ask my students in the Commerce Faculty what was the last history book they read. If anyone can recall ever having read a history book it is almost invariably Manning Clarke's Short History of Australia . This past semester, I was even more alarmed to find an equally negative answer amongst my students in the Arts Faculty. Historians must learn to write history that people read and enjoy. In our role as teachers we must develop strategies that encourage students into archives, and which teach them how to write up the results of their research in an accessible manner.
History needs to be read for pleasure again.
While academic advancement continues to rely upon publication in international scholarly journals there will be little encouragement for us to write for a wider audience. When we were working on our history of Australian wheat, our target audience was the 40,000 wheat farmers who might reasonably be expected to be interested in such a study. Although I think we lost sight of that audience in a couple of chapters, it has been heartening to have responses from farmers and workers in the grains industry who recognised their experience in our history. While I do not want us historians, archivists and curators to abandon our lobbying for more resources, better facilities, higher profiles and greater understanding of our role and achievements, my message is that as innovative and imaginative professionals we can do better yet with what we have.