Ashton and Hamilton have made a major contribution to Australian history over fifteen years by analysing trends in what they call ‘past-mindedness’ or ‘history-mindedness’. Since the 1960s, and especially in the last twenty years, there has been booming interest in history, even as the proportion of people who study the topic formally has dropped. And yet, the authors argue, professional historians, including academics, teachers, curators, and others, have little understanding of ‘the historical sensibilities or history-mindedness of our own culture’.

In this compact survey of Australians’ ideas about the past, the authors aim to redress this gap in historians’ knowledge, in order that professionals be better equipped to communicate their research to a wider public. Abandoning the title’s overly dramatic metaphor of history at a juncture, they introduce the book with an extended discussion of history as a house with many rooms. In eleven chapters, they hope to break down the house’s internal walls by illustrating a broad range of activities related to the pursuit of history, including genealogy, local history societies, collecting, photography, and celebrating anniversaries. They also discuss a range of sites where such pursuits take place, including secondary schools, museums, television, memorial sites, and the homes of parents and grandparents.

Underlying this wide range of topics are data drawn from a federally funded research survey of 500 Australians. Of these, 350 were interviewed over the telephone, with the remainder interviewed face-to-face. The former method comprised a nationwide ‘statistically valid’ sample, while the latter was conducted with the aim to discover, in particular, attitudes toward history as represented in museums, at school and in the media, and also to unearth the ideas and activities of rural and Indigenous Australians. The survey, conducted from 1999 over three years by twenty-six people, was inspired by a similar undertaking in the United States, the fruits of which appeared in Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998). As in the American case, the Australian survey was designed to elicit responses in four distinct areas: the kinds of historical activities in which people engage (television and photographs are the most common, with saving heirlooms and researching family trees next; visiting museums and attending family or school reunions make up the second most popular tier of activities); under what circumstances they connect to the past (family gatherings win by far); the means by which they connect to the past (objects, then places, come out well ahead of books, photographs, or media); and, finally, the trustworthiness of historical sources (museums do well, academics respectably, but teachers come out a poor seventh out of eleven categories).

This account of past-mindedness is most absorbing when the authors mobilise the evidence collected in their own survey. That might seem a redundant statement, but the book, especially the first half, relies heavily on generalisation and comes to life best when quotations appear and are given due context. Thus the chapter on objects, in particular, is rich with insights into why people collect family heirlooms, for instance, often rarely viewed, and sometimes locked away. Other chapters, written originally for other collections, are less stimulating and do not take advantage of recent published research.

The book falls short in drawing conclusions from the evidence presented. How should educators, for example, adjust their teaching, given what Ashton and Hamilton’s research reveals about the kinds of ideas that history students bring to the classroom? What kind of impact might the research have on curators? For that matter, how much of people’s ideas – especially the allegiance to facts and objectivity – was unknown to those two groups already? My guess is that teachers have a well developed sense of how their students regard the past, even if academics have lost sight of it to the extent that Ashton and Hamilton assume. The book will nevertheless be of interest to teachers of the History Extension syllabus in New South Wales, which includes sections on constructions and recordings of history, ‘how historians work’, ‘forms of historical communication’, and ‘types of history’. Depending on the outcome of ongoing discussions about a National History Curriculum, the book may also find a wider audience among teachers as they grapple with new syllabi.

If resources were available to conduct a follow-up study, there is clear potential to elicit data about further changes in historical consciousness in a truly digital age. It would also be interesting to know if there were any changes in people’s attitudes toward the past, given that the rancour of the ‘history wars’ has waned.