THE LURE OF TEXTS AND THE DISCIPLINE OF PRAXIS Cross-Cultural History in a Post-Empirical World BRONWEN DOUGLAS PROLOGUE: NARRATIVE AND TEXTS

The main aim of this paper is to tell stories about interactions between European voyagers and Aboriginal people in New Holland (mainland Australia) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) at the end of the eighteenth century. I start, however, with the terms in the title. First, “texts” and “discipline of praxis”.1 The discipline of praxis is, of course, history, which by professional convention is empirical and objectivist. In the 1940s, R.G. Collingwood outraged this orthodoxy with his “idealist” proposition that history is inseparable from the historian and “the here-and-now” and that “the past” is a creation of “the historical imagination”.2 Since the further outing of history as thoroughly textbound by Roland Barthes, Hayden White and other textual theorists,3 historians with any claim to anti-positivism have been teased by the challenge of how to juggle the tension between narrative and texts: between their core brief to tell interesting stories about the past and the need to incorporate at least some textual analysis — because the past is only accessible through texts of one sort or another.4 Textual analysis requires an historically contextualized grasp of the ideologies, discourses, language, protocols and experiences which informed authors’ perceptions and thinking, but it can clot a narrative and make it less readable.