Conference theme

The capacity to ‘change one’s mind’ is a foundational premise in the discipline of history.  Upon encountering evidence that disrupts our existing explanations, the story goes, we might adjust, rework or perhaps even overturn our interpretations.  And yet, historians do not often describe how and why they have changed their minds. While we are comfortable tracing changes in historiography, it seems harder to narrate our own intellectual alterations or confess that we were once, perhaps, mistaken.

As historians, we also tend to be quite interested in how mentalities, attitudes, and beliefs change over time. Might there be a relationship to consider between how we narrate changes in ourselves as researchers and the changes we seek to explain?  Perhaps a more honest account of our own attachments and preoccupations would help us to explain why some changes happen quickly, others take an age and some, though imagined and wished for, never seem to eventuate.

Explaining how we come to interpret history could not be more urgent. Historical narratives, however unencumbered by evidence, proliferate in the polarised political and social worlds in which our work takes place. Troubling and divisive mobilisations all too frequently depend on facile explanations for the predicaments and challenges we face. AI/LLMs are producing histories that bear the hallmarks of our disciplinary commitments but emerge from a ‘mind’ of a very different kind, one that mirrors the labour of humanistic inquiry in a poor facsimile of our endeavours.

Australian universities are being remade in ways that often mobilise these meagre but nonetheless potent historical narratives. ‘Change proposals’ and ‘restructures’ frequently offer diagnoses that seem to obfuscate and displace cause and responsibility. The discipline of history is facing a set of challenges that seem to undermine the legitimacies and infrastructures upon which we have long depended.

So too, The Uluru Statement from the Heart was an invitation to change the story Australia tells itself.  The AHA robustly endorsed this invitation and similarly invited the profession to throw its weight behind the proposal for an Indigenous Voice in the Australian Constitution. 

There were reasons to be optimistic about our capacity to change the hearts and minds of Australians about their national story. Historians of Australia had, without question, reoriented the national story through the careful revelation of the violences of settler colonialism and its continued legacies.  Yet, the misreadings and mistruths that underpinned the ‘No’ campaign remained perniciously potent and resistant to critique. The result of the referendum suggests, perhaps, that we did not equip ourselves with the tools we need to change the stories that pulse in the heart of the nation.

To consider how we might make space for, explain and even produce changes of heart and mind, the 2026 AHA annual meets at Macquarie University, on Dharug Country, in Sydney.