Inga Clendinnen

Book excerpt: An internationally celebrated historian and highly original thinker, Inga Clendinnen compelled readers to re-examine accepted histories from new angles. Inga Clendinnen was one of Australia’s greatest writers and historians. This selection covers the full scope of her work, from Tiger’s Eye to Aztecs, from her Boyer Lectures to essays on all manner of topics. It is introduced by acclaimed historian James Boyce, who traces Clendinnen’s life and evolving thought. Boyce writes that Clendinnen’s ‘ability to write serious history for a general readership was unrivalled in this country ... Her writings are an enduring testament to the truth that while we might “live within the narrow moving band of time we call the present ... the secret engine of our present is our past, with its plastic memories, its malleable moralities, its wreathing dreams of desirable futures”.’ ‘With the profound moral concern of the best general reader, one of our finest historians brings the Holocaust close up and stares the Medusa down. Inga Clendinnen claims for history the same power as poetry or fiction to enter the silences and make them speak.’ —David Malouf ‘Her respect for the intelligence of her readers, her sacred sense of the moral responsibility of history, and her luminous prose won her a large and devoted public.’ —Tom Griffiths