John Docker

BA (Hons), University of Sydney, 1967; MA (Hons), University of Melbourne, 1970; PhD, Australian National University, 1981.

Honorary Professor in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, John researches and writes in the fields of genocide and massacre studies, cultural theory, the Enlightenment, monotheism and polytheism, intellectual history, historiography, diaspora, ethnic and cultural identity, and the history of Zionism and Israel-Palestine.

John is currently working on several projects. One is a book entitled Sheer Folly and Derangement: Disorienting Europe and the West. Another is a research project entitled “The Rebecca File: The Strange Afterlife of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe’s Rebecca in the Nineteenth Century”. Another is an intellectual autobiography, tentatively entitled Growing Up Communist and Jewish in Bondi: A Memoir.

Passionate Histories »

Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia

Edited by: Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys, John Docker

Publication date: September 2010

This book examines the emotional engagements of both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people with Indigenous history. The contributors are a mix of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous scholars, who in different ways examine how the past lives on in the present, as myth, memory, and history. Each chapter throws fresh light on an aspect of history-making by or about Indigenous people, such as the extent of massacres on the frontier, the myth of Aboriginal male idleness, the controversy over Flynn of the Inland, the meaning of the Referendum of 1967, and the policy and practice of Indigenous child removal. For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.

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