At the end of the Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979), less than ten percent of Cambodia’s artists, dancers, musicians, and film makers remained in Cambodia. Marked as ‘undesirables’, members of the arts community, along with professionals, intellectuals, and educated Cambodians, fared particularly poorly under Pol Pot’s regime. While some fled abroad, most died at home from starvation, disease, or the excesses of forced labour, or were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which sought to ‘smash’ anyone who might pose a challenge to its ideology.

History-writing, this seminar suggests, is not the re-creation of a past that is lying mute, waiting for the historian to give it voice. Historiography is instead a code or genre or technology that constructs the past in ways that make it amenable to representation through the code of history. If history-writing is not the truth of the past, and if other forms of relating to it (myth, epic, legend) are erroneous, we can explore the elements that constitute the code of history, prompting us to ask what history-writing is ‘for’, what does it ‘do’.

In Man, the State, and War (1959), Kenneth Waltz identifies Spinoza as a “first-image theorist.” Alongside Augustine, Niebuhr, and Morgenthau, Spinoza holds the view, according to Waltz, that “political ills [are deducible] from human defects.” The description is disputable. And the inclusion of two contemporary thinkers alongside two classics cannot but provoke intellectual historians fearful of anachronism.

In his most recent book, An Australian Band of Brothers, Dr Mark Johnston tells the story of Don Company of the 2/43rd Australian Infantry Battalion – part of the 9th Division, which sustained more casualties and won more decorations than any other Australian division in the Second World War. Like his previous works on Australians at war, the book is a ‘warts and all’ exploration of the life of front-line servicemen.