The distorting lens of modern and perpetually aggrieved feminism through which author Barbara Minchinton frames her book on the prostitutes of 19th century Melbourne reserves a particular venom for Marcus Clark, who exposed the sordid midnights of Little Lonsdale Street and is charged with reporting from a 'privileged male view of the world'. The rest of the book plumbs even greater depths of silliness

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The problem with the Massacre Map, as with the Dark Emu hoax, is how to correct errors and distortions when those who should be expected to police these things and defend truth in history support the distorters. Instead, as I have learnt, the academics' solution to plagiarism, inaccuracy and invention is yet more plagiarism, inaccuracy and invention

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Historian Tom Griffiths blurbs Henry Reynolds’s new book, Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, as 'a gift to his nation by one of our greatest historians'. Given what is omitted it is a gift not worth the trouble of unwrapping

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Impervious to the real history of our country, either Anita Heiss is tone deaf to its language or her clumsy use of modern vocabulary in 'River of Dreams' is a deliberate device to turn the unforgivable past into the dogmatic present. Still, the cover is pretty, which is the best that can be said of this silly, wretched, race-baiting novel

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From the 1970s, when part-Aborigines became Aborigines, possessing the faith or race of romantic Aboriginality granted absolution for the sins of capitalism and modernity, Westernism and whiteness. With the Dreamtime absolution came racial and moral superiority. Reality and documented history were discarded

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Historians who soften the realities of Aboriginal life before white settlement hide the truth for political purposes, intent on depicting an Arcadian black paradise torn apart by brutal intruders. That's why William Buckley's account of his 32 years with the tribes of Port Phillip has been sanitised, redacted and, above all, misrepresented by broadscale and quite deliberate omission

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Equipped with royal commission powers, Victoria's latest exercise in myth and grievance will impose an authoritarian lock on our history by creating 'an official record of the impact of colonisation on First Peoples'. That, and recommending financial compensation

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Much-garlanded author Tara June Winch offers the sort of history literary award judges support with other people’s money, one notable admirer being the present conservative Prime Minister, who supported her views with a flattering endorsement and his own $80,000 (tax-free) book prize

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On page after page the parallels between Ivan Bunin's past and our present turn this from a book about the past into a warning from our own future. 'One of the most distinguishing features of a revolution,' he writes, 'is the ravenous hunger for histrionics, dissembling, posturing and puppet show. The ape is awakened in man'

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Applying literary analysis to a fairy tale is akin to using paint stripper on a daffodil. If a reader, of any age, does not understand what the stories are about they have opened the wrong book. Tiina Nunnally's new and splendid translation of Hans Christian Andersen's stories understands this and has restored the author's long lost voice. It is very much the right book

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