Inga Clendinnen - The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (Quarterly Essay issue 23, 2006)

Read this a while back. Enjoyed it and found it a very lucid and readable account of a commonsense and in many ways appealing position, albeit one that runs completely contrary to a number of strong intuitions and beliefs of my own. Rebuttal and criticism would involve a fair bit of thought and no small amount of theoretical sophistication. But it's hot and I am lazy, so I'll leave it at this: ahem, I think that, in this essay, Clendinnen is engaged, intelligent, clear-headed - and wrong.