JOHN Howard's Australia is a solid, sandstone institution, civilised and exemplary, like a private school in fine repair. But wait, what's all that noise? Where's the teacher? Who's in charge? In History House, where the nation's biography should be sagely intoned by dignified experts for the edification of the class, behold a disgraceful mess: pandemonium. Little piles of history lie about, higgledy-piggledy. Some people are on the floor engaged in riotous creative play, others stand about squabbling over how to tidy it all safely away.

When Australia Day came around this year, headmaster Howard decided it was time for an instructive pronouncement concerning communal mismanagement of the nation's history. How can we have any notion of what Australia is, who Australians are, and what we might like to become if we are incapable of a responsible and coherent approach towards our history? The history taught in schools barely merits the name, apparently, and has been downgraded to the point of pointlessness by the influence of confused higher education fads broadly known as postmodernism. The marvellous construction of Australian history has been dismantled into unintelligible bits and pieces, regrouped under ''themes and issues'' and subjected to futile scrutiny. Suddenly, everyone is encouraged to poke about in family, local and national memorabilia, while no one has any idea of the whole story. So let's settle once and for all, Howard proposes, on a narrative that gets us to where we are now, in an orderly march.

So is it time to take history away from the historians? Following the Prime Minister's fretful public outburst, it quickly became clear that he had hit a nerve. The volume went up on a long-term debate. Editorials, letters and reviews tackling the topic appeared in the nation's broadsheets, surprisingly ardent and informed. Historians have hoed in. History is a hot issue.

In universities, salaried experts (or those Wilfred Prest recently tagged the ''history warlords'') have long been engaged in the notorious history wars. Their attempts to establish a decent academic discipline have been forged amid the mess of indigenous oppression, and some say their feuds have gone beyond the point of constructive dispute. Professional historians fear they are leaking relevance and credibility. Meticulous, myopic academic wranglings are doing nothing to improve their market, and university history is losing clients. Careers are at stake.

Meanwhile, in the view of more insecure academics, Howard heads a reactionary cohort hell-bent on ironing out the awkward bits in the story of the nation's ''progress'' to the present. Professional historian Mark McKenna (based at the Australian National University and author of the award-winning Looking for Blackfella's Point) recently referred to this cohort as the ''conservative commentariat''. These are the media mugs and right-wing politicians who think history should be a lumbering, triumphalist, fabricated story of white settler supremacy (forgetting that some historians have been there, too).

Almost more upsetting, at least for McKenna, are those other fabricators, the shoddy raconteurs who pander to the public's undiscriminating lust for a well-massaged tall tale. We're not talking here about lightweight romancers, either. He thinks (as he wrote in an article in December in The Australian Financial Review challenging ''the rise of the novelist as historian'') that a lawless literary rabble has opted to fill the vacuum left by bickering historians, and taken unsanctioned control of Australia's past. Critics such as me are pumping up Australia's top historical novelists, leading them to think it's fine to colonise territory traditionally owned by professional historians, on the basis that it is a terra nullius of truth.

I have praised Roger McDonald (author of Mr Darwin's Shooter and the recent Ballad of Desmond Kale) and other best-selling non-academic authors such as Kate Grenville (The Secret River), Peter Carey (Jack Maggs and The True History of the Kelly Gang) and Tom Keneally (The Commonwealth of Thieves) for vividly reminding us of the desperately hard experience of the earliest British arrivals in this country, as well as the desperately hard experience their arrival inflicted on those already here.

McKenna (in Keneally's generous view poised to become one of Australia's leading professional historians) slapped my hand. Fiction writers are mistakenly being led to believe that they have a ''superior ability to provide empathy and historical understanding''. Such critical support amounts to irresponsibility at best, and evidence of a reactionary agenda at worst; history should be left to the historians.....

Australian history will never be neat, but it will always be needed. Let's not imagine that it is only professional historians, or politicians for that matter, who approach it with integrity. It's too important to be left to either. It was lived, made and messed up by people like us, and our best literary artists can do an excellent job of reminding us of this: it is everybody's.