It is clear, then, that historical understanding requires us to move beyond the national frames of analysis that so often blinker our view of the past. But in repudiating national stories history also risks losing relevance for a national audience. In response to Tyrrell’s original article advocating transnational history, Michael McGerr worried that too strong a turn to the transnational might lead to ‘estrangement from our audiences, which, at least in the United States, still seem intensely nationalistic’.^[20] In this volume, Jill Matthews draws attention to this issue. Speaking of Australia specifically, but it could apply in many other societies as well, she writes:

In their cultural nationalism, film historians are expressing a much wider phenomenon, and Matthews concludes that a transnational approach will not be welcome ‘until the larger political discourse changes’.

There is little sign that political discourse will, at least in the short to medium term, abandon cultural and other forms of nationalism in which history and historians play a significant part. In their recent collection, Partisan Histories, Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney point to the role history plays in national contexts. In national politics, groups seek support ‘by presenting themselves as the only true representatives of the nation through historical narratives that support that claim: the rationale for nationalism is always sought in history’.^[21] Indeed, history ‘can influence such momentous decisions as whether or not to go to war’.^[22] This is as true in Australia as anywhere else; the importance of defining and mining national historical traditions for political purposes is clearly evident in Prime Minister John Howard’s relentless espousal of the virtues of Australia’s military tradition.^[23]

Given the intensely local and national relevance of history, then, it seems to us that there are dangers in transnational histories becoming disconnected from local audiences and by extension national political debates. The issue may not seem so pertinent for historians writing about societies other than the one in which they live and work, but for those who write histories about their own society, and who are thus used to dealing with questions of history’s political relevance and sensitivity, the problem of losing relevance and readers can be quite acute. The temptation to write purely for an international scholarly audience can lead to histories which concentrate on showing local material only when it illuminates international scholarly concerns. It often also means publishing only in specialised journals or in expensive books which are little known and often of little interest to local audiences. As a result, there is the danger that the people whose history we write will know little of our work; even if they do know it, they recognise that we are not really talking to them. Our gaze has moved elsewhere.^[24]

The implications of the tension between national histories and transnational scholarship are especially evident in the example of the history of Indigenous peoples. Such histories provide an excellent illustration of both the promise and the problems that attend transnational approaches. The promise is an enhanced understanding of the interactions between Indigenous and settler peoples and specifically of Indigenous people’s political struggles, as John Maynard’s chapter here so ably demonstrates. The danger is disconnection from local audiences and politics, the very connections that have made Indigenous histories so important and vibrant in the first place. Historians of Indigenous peoples, whether we are Indigenous or not, can thus find ourselves pulled between engaging in a national debate, in which our professionalism and scholarship is directly connected to ongoing political issues concerning Indigenous rights and politics, and contributing to a worldwide historians’ conversation concerning new ways of conceptualising historical processes such as colonialism.