In 1955, at the age of twenty, she married John Clendinnen, who was then beginning what was to be a distinguished career in the Melbourne University department of history and philosophy of science, where he taught until retirement in 1989. They had two sons and followed parallel careers, his in the field of empiricism in experimental science, hers in what then was termed social history, which encompassed the history of societies, social structures, and social movements. She was a tutor in the history department at Melbourne from 1955–68. In 1969 she took up a post in the newly founded La Trobe University, where she worked in the congenial company of colleagues open to global history informed by the social sciences.

Inga Clendinnen, c. 1954 (photograph courtesy of Richmond Clendinnen)

This was the moment when the English journal Past & Present edged ahead of the French journal Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations as the primary site for the publication of exciting and innovative social history. Once Marxist, and, after 1968, Marxisant and ecumenical, Past & Present had on its editorial board radical historians like E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, as well as distinguished early modern historians, including Lawrence Stone, the historian of Elizabethan England, and the leading Hispanist John Elliott. They welcomed the publication in their prestigious journal of Clendinnen’s two pioneering articles, ‘Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán’ and ‘The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society’, which appeared in February 1982 and May 1985 respectively.

In her first article, Clendinnen thanked her Melbourne colleague Greg Dening for inspiration, and used to great effect the insights of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The second article reflected some of the stimulation of Clendinnen’s time (1983–84) as a visiting scholar at Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Research Center in History, directed by Lawrence Stone. Among other visiting scholars at Princeton at that time were military historian John Keegan and Omer Bartov, historians of war and the Holocaust. Geertz then became a friend, as did Natalie Zemon Davis and others in that wide-open intellectual environment. Rhys Isaac, Clendinnen’s close colleague at La Trobe, had been there in 1981–82. In later years, she remembered with pleasure her visits to the United States, including her time exploring the treasures of Meso-American history in Princeton’s Firestone Library.

In her 1980s publications, drawing on Geertz time and again, Inga focused on the problem of extreme violence in a number of different contexts. The first dealt with the cruelties of Franciscan missionaries faced with back-sliding among converted Indians in the Yucatán, and the second, with the centrality of human sacrifice in pre-Columbian Aztec culture. Both subjects were interpreted as performative cultural systems, in which pain and violent death are ever-present reminders of the fragility and evanescence of the human lifespan in a world dominated by deities to be appeased.

Inga and John Clendinnen's wedding, 1955 (courtesy of Richmond Clendinnen)

Clendinnen both inspired and drew creatively and repeatedly on the American academy. She honoured the great American archival scholar of Spanish America, France Vinton Scholes, by dedicating to him her first book, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517–1570 (1987). To a degree, this book anticipated the influential work of the literary scholar of Latin America, Mary Louise Pratt. In her presidential address to the American Modern Languages Association in 1991, Pratt defined the ‘contact zone’ as a social space in which different cultural groups meet and engage in a range of conflicts, rhetorical as well as violent, the resolution of which depends on the relative degree of power each can exert on the other. Ambivalent Conquests developed Clendinnen’s research previously published in article form on one such contact zone in the Yucatán. In her second book, Aztecs: An interpretation (1991), Aztecs live with and confront intimately prisoners they have doomed to human sacrifice. Her understanding of this danse macabre arose from her patient examination of the sources documenting a society both very similar and very distant from our own. Ambivalent Conquests won the Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for best book of the year in Latin American history in 1988.

In 1991, Clendinnen was struck down by auto-immune hepatitis. She survived a liver transplant operation; the anti-rejection drugs which followed gave her a new lease on life, but had secondary effects which plagued her for the rest of her life. Unable to continue to teach at La Trobe, or to travel to Latin America, she became, faute de mieux, a different scholar, a public scholar, to a degree liberated from academic constraints.

Her first subject was her illness and how it changed her life. The outcome of her reflections on her predicament and the effects of her treatment was a bold and original book, published in 2000 as The Tiger’s Eye. Particularly striking is her account of her terrifying hallucinations and the fragmentation of her command of language into an intermittent access to individual words, syllables, and sounds. Even the approach of insanity was not off limits to this historian of the limits of the human imagination.

Clendinnen’s writing both here and in later works, took on a new and luminous character, not unknown among those passing through a near-death experience. The English historian Richard Southern produced his masterpiece, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), under a similar sword of Damocles.

In this period, Clendinnen saw her writing as an affirmation of life, and used this insight to tackle a particularly difficult problem in the historical interpretation of extreme violence. Reading the Holocaust, published by Cambridge in 1998, is an act of literate defiance of those who pronounced the Holocaust either beyond history or beyond words. She refuted this view, and sided with Primo Levi, who wrote to save his own sanity, and by doing so, stared down the Gorgon which had terrified others into looking away from this monstrous moment in history.

Inga Clendinnen (courtesy of Richmond Clendinnen)Clendinnen’s subject position as neither a Jew nor a survivor gave her a special perspective on these events, and announced a shift in her historical commitments. While retaining a keen interest in Meso-American history, she began to examine her own country’s history. The initial results of her thinking on this subject were broadcast in the Boyer Lectures on the ABC in 1999, and published the following year as True Stories.

What gives her voice its particular resonance is a refusal to approach the writing of history as primarily an exercise in empathy. We are not, she said repeatedly – and at times with anger – the same as people in past times, and we cannot simply imagine that we walk with them and share their emotions, as we share those in our families and of our social circle today. We must accept the bedrock of our radical alterity in order to understand, through a critical examination of sources, what they were capable of doing and why they did it. The Aztecs were not just us in funny clothes, as in an early screen version of Antony and Cleopatra, in which the dancing girls undulated in dresses with zippers. They were both human like us and very different from us. Only by adopting this position of critical distance, tested time and again against the traces, visual and written, that they left behind, can we even have a chance of understanding the bloody world in which these people lived.

Clendinnen’s rejection of empathetic history arises from her firm belief that primary documents, published and unpublished, and not our own sentiments, are the bedrock of historical study. No radical empiricist, she insisted instead that historians must abjure abstract categories like evil, in order to think hard about the motives of those who inflict pain on other human beings. She claimed that a perverse idealism drove forward many of those we call ‘Holy Terrors’, like the Franciscan Diego de Landa, the managers of the Spanish Inquisition, or those who made the Holocaust happen. Since context is all, she had great trouble understanding why some scholars called Australian practices concerning Aborigines genocidal; here her austere approach to historical sources and contexts took on a polemical form which on occasion offended more than it illuminated.

In her Boyer Lectures, Clendinnen deployed to great effect Pratt’s contact zone approach in examining the encounters between Aborigines and settlers from the time of settlement onward. We can see as well how her ethno-historical sensibilities left entirely open the question of whether the violence attendant on white settlement was the only form in which the encounter between white and black took place. The title of the book which followed these lectures in 2003 gives away her answer. It is Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at first contact.

Her scintillating prose is on display in a collection of essays she wrote under the title Agamemnon’s Kiss (2006). In the same year, she published in the journal Quarterly Essay a set of reflections entitled ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’ These were in part sparked by the intervention of the then Prime Minister John Howard on the question of how Australian history should be written and taught. In part it was a defence, at times strident, of history against what she believed to be the pretensions of some writers of fiction that they could raid history for good stories and then tell them better and more deeply than historians could do. Here, Clendinnen erected a road block, and made it clear that history was an arduous intellectual pursuit of the truth that emerged from critical engagement with those archives that disclose the past to us. It was not a pool in which well-intentioned novelists could casually dip their big toes before writing fiction about the past.

Inga ClendinnenEven (or especially) when angry, Clendinnen’s work showed how deeply she was committed to history as a moral discipline. In this, her teacher was the great English social historian E.P. Thompson, whose work and prose she hugely admired. History showed, both Thompson and Clendinnen believed, that men and women make choices; our job is to try to work out why they did so and with what consequences.

Clendinnen’s legacy rests in part on the brilliance of her prose, and in part on the way she bridged the work of a generation of historians who did social history in the 1980s and those who did cultural history in the 1990s and after. For Clendinnen, the difference between the two kinds of history lay solely in the sources historians consulted. In sum, her lasting contribution is as a social historian of the culture of violence which marked societies from the sixteenth century to the present.

Her honours were numerous. In May 2016, she became, along with the Parisian scholar Arlette Farge, one of the first women to receive the International Dan David Prize of $1,000,000, for a lifetime’s work in social history. She donated a substantial part of her award to Médecins sans Frontières, in part as a way of saying thank you to those in the caring professions who had saved her life twenty-five years before. These doctors and nurses had indeed opened a door through which Inga Clendinnen passed to the second phase of her brilliant and creative life.