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The Conversation
The Conversation
Anna Clark, Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Public History, University of Technology Sydney

The book that changed me: I'm a historian but Tony Birch's poetry opened my eyes to confronting truths about the past

William Barak, Figures in possum skin cloaks, 1898. Wikimedia Commons

In this series, writers nominate a book that changed their life – or at least their thinking.

Sixty years ago, when the historian E.H. Carr famously asked What is History?, he determined the answer to be a constant dialogue between the present and the past. The past is “what happened”, he explained. “History” is the process of its analysis and inquiry.

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