Reading The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft – Tom Griffiths's wonderfully subtle and penetrating examination of the 'craft' of fourteen Australian 'historians', among whom he includes Eleanor Dark, Judith Wright, Stephen Murray-Smith, and Eric Rolls – I wondered how Griffiths's previous work had led him to write this series of intellectual portraits. Books of this kind are rare. Dissecting the methods and analytical tools employed by historians is normally an in-house affair. Yet Griffiths is one of the few Australian historians who is determined to explore the 'distinctive creative challenges' of historical writing for a popular audience. The Art of Time Travel is the culmination of more than three decades' scholarship and reflection on 'the art of non-fiction'. Scattered throughout Griffiths's essays on his 'favourite' historians are occasional autobiographical vignettes: reflections on his childhood home, memories of his university days and first jobs, and recollections of his reading – 'the most generous thing a scholar can do' – a roll-call of internally memorialised moments when the words of others inspired the direction of his writing life.

Born in 1957, Griffiths came of age in Balwyn, 'a suburban frontier' in Melbourne's east, where he lived in a 'modernist home' that was both 'a work of art' and an 'intellectual statement'. Built in 1950 on the 'gentle hill of a vacant paddock' by his then meteorologist father and science-teacher mother, its 'open plan' design, 'tall windows', and 'Australian garden' still house the origins of Griffiths's creative imagination. Although the burgeoning middle-class suburbia into which he was born had few civic spaces, little public transport and had resolutely ironed out nature (a lost world he would later go in search of) it was also a place of enviable simplicity: backyard orchards, wood fires, milk and bread delivered by 'horse and cart well into the 1960s', and a 'library bus' that parked in nearby 'Caravan Street' and brought the world's literature to the family's doorstep. So often was Griffiths lost in its book-crowded aisles, the bus could easily have taken him away.

Nurtured by community – his first job was cycling the largest round in Melbourne's eastern suburbs as Balwyn's postman – Griffiths's early career honed his fundamental belief that historical knowledge was not the exclusive domain of the academy. In the 1980s he revelled in his 'cup of tea' job as field officer for the State Library of Victoria, assessing donations of historical documents from all over the state; he helped to mount an exhibition on Victoria's Italian community and as a historian in the Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands he completed heritage surveys on the 'forested mountain country east of Melbourne'. All of these experiences would inform his later work: particularly Beechworth: An Australian country town and its past (1987), Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia (1996), and Forests of Ash: An environmental history (2001). Grounded in the soil and hearth of the communities he knew and loved, Griffiths's histories were at once local, national, and global. He soon became one of the leaders in the rapidly expanding field of environmental history, much of his work bridging the gulf between science and the humanities, dissolving the conventional divide between nature and culture, exploring the chasms of 'deep time', and unearthing history in seemingly past-less landscapes (Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica [2007]). While many of his peers became experts in their 'field', his interests expanded: from the history of fire to climate change, frontier history, historiography, and Australian politics and literature. He collaborated with artists, filmmakers, scientists, and archaeologists, always remaining alive to the practical benefits of his 'craft': how, for example, might greater knowledge of the history of bushfire and the countless failures of human beings to learn from past tragedies help to change community attitudes to fire today?

Tom Griffiths (photograph by Jason McCarthy)When Griffiths joined the 'exodus' of literary-minded students from English to history at Melbourne in the mid-1970s, he came under the spell of a number of gifted teachers and writers, among them Greg Dening, Donna Merwick, and Inga Clendinnen, all of whom are the subjects of outstanding critical essays in The Art of Time Travel. Traces of their influence can be found in Griffiths's writing – Merwick's insistence that the best history requires both 'precision and imagination', Clendinnen's bravura and cunning, and Dening's intensely poetic and self-reflective style, one that imbues historical writing with 'magical', almost sacred qualities as historians engage with what Griffiths describes as the 'mysterious and alchemical power of the archives'. With an eye for the telling biographical anecdote and characteristic acuity and compassion, Griffiths manages to both anatomise the craft of historical writing and retain the sense of awe and wonder he feels when he contemplates the historian's 'lifelong commitment'. If there is an abiding theme in The Art of Time Travel, it is Griffiths's portrayal of historical writing as a 'balance between empathy and perspective, intimacy and distance', which he perceives as 'a highly creative act'. 'Its artistic aspirations', he emphasises, 'are perfectly consistent with the quest to represent the past truthfully'. Time and again, he stresses the interdependence of historians and the writing community at large. Ultimately, no individual's creative output stands alone. All writers feed from the work of others. Politely, Griffiths reproves those who attempt to 'contrive their originality by smoothing away their debts'.

The Art of Time Travel is itself a highwire act: every chapter teems with valuable insights. Griffiths's searching analysis of the work of a select band of writers who 'research the past with a reflective, scholarly purpose' (historians, archaeologists, novelists, and poets) helps to explain not only their motivations and methods, but also how those such as Geoffrey Blainey, Henry Reynolds, Judith Wright, and John Mulvaney have collectively shaped Australia's literary and intellectual culture from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Griffiths pays each writer the ultimate respect: close, considerate, intelligent readings of their work (his chapters on Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land (1941), Judith Wright's The Cry for the Dead (1981), and his sensitive discussion of the work of historians Grace Karskens and Graeme Davison, writer-farmer Eric Rolls, and archaeologist Mike Smith being among my particular favourites). Along the way, his gaze widens to include the work of writers as diverse as Kate Grenville, Noel Pearson, Keith Windschuttle, and Les Murray.

While the majority of Griffiths's time travellers are academic historians and several of the chapters have appeared in earlier published versions, revised and augmented by the new essays that accompany them here, they take on an altogether different shape and form, constituting what is probably the most compelling and powerful attempt by an Australian historian to explain history's allure. Rising above the familiar tropes of history as 'war' and the crude, partisan understandings of literature and culture into which so much of Australia's political class has descended, The Art of Time Travel is a clarion call to readers and writers to rediscover history's fundamental importance to 'meaning and identity'. Resounding on the turn of every page is Griffiths's irrepressible love and enthusiasm for his 'vocation'. He is still walking the aisles of the library bus, eagerly pulling books from the shelf, astonished by the strange, ever-shifting, and 'elusive' past.