39 New Scholar: An International Journal of the Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences Volume 3 Number 1, 2014 | ISSN 1839-5333 | www.newscholar.org.au There is a moment in travel writer Bill Bryson’s account of his travels in Australia, Down Under, when he comments on the large number of local histories he encounters in second‐hand bookshops. They ‘never fail to amaze,’ he reports, ‘if only because they show you what a remarkably self‐absorbed people the Australians are. I don’t mean that as a criticism. If the rest of the world is going to pay them no attention, then they must do it themselves surely.’ He continues: ‘There were hundreds of books ... about things that could never possibly have been of interest to more than a handful of people. It’s quite encouraging that these books exist, but somehow faintly worrying as well.’ Bryson doesn’t explain any further why it worries him, but he then goes on to review with genuine admiration a book he found among these volumes (126‐127). Yet at the same time as local history writing thrives in Australia, within the academy the future of history is increasingly reimagined as transnational (Curthoys 140‐52). There is something approaching zealotry in the transnationalism of Antipodean historians as they repent of nationalist sins past. Just as belonging to an empire—and, by extension, writing imperial history—once reassured those on the margins that they were connected with the ‘centre’ and therefore with the main dynamics of world history, modern transnational approaches to history allow for the readmission of Australian history into an international (or at least Anglophone) mainstream. Transnational history also sits well with the modern, mobile and cosmopolitan identities of many academic historians. The distance of Australia from the main centres of scholarship need not imply the banishment of Australian history to an intellectual backwater. So where does this transnational drive leave Australian local history? It is quite possible to reconcile these impulses. Consider, for instance, the new imperial history, with its rhetoric of webs, circuits, networks and nodal points. The work of scholars such as John Darwin, Catherine Hall, Tony Hopkins, Alan Lester, Tony Ballantyne, Kirsten McKenzie and Zoë Laidlaw has been suggestive of how a transnational history of empire might intersect with local history. According to Alan Lester and David Lambert, both historical geographers, in the new imperial history ‘places are not so much bounded entities, but rather specific juxtapositions or constellations of multiple trajectories ... of people, objects, texts and ideas.’ ‘The differences between places,’ from this perspective, ‘are the result of the trajectories intersecting in varied ways across the surface of the Earth’ (13‐14). Among the most powerful impulses behind the writing of local history has been the desire to know one’s own ‘place,’ to uncover its hidden stories, and to gain a greater The Problem of Belonging: Contested Country in Australian Local History Frank Bongiorno Australian National University & Erik Eklund Federation University