His first major project on return to Australia was a perceptive biography of a West Australian communist and union leader, Militant: The Life and Times of Paddy Troy (1984). Macintyre’s second book, Little Moscows (1980), compared three of Great Britain’s mining and industrial towns, which had become genuine strongholds of communism. His prize-winning doctoral thesis became his first book, A Proletarian Science (1980), an examination of the history of Marxism within the British working-class movement from 1917-1933. He joined the Communist Party of Australia in the early 1970s as a New Leftist student of formidably theoretical tastes, and he transferred that membership to the Cambridge University branch of the British party when undertaking his doctoral studies. The book was launched by former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then Prime Minister John Howard), saying that they suffered from “a failure of imagination”, and said that The History Wars “rolls out the canvas of this debate.” Macintyre’s critics, such as Greg Melluish (History Lecturer at the University of Wollongong), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that “its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War.” Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to “caricature the history debate.” In a foreword to the book, former Chief Justice of Australia Sir Anthony Mason said that the book was “a fascinating study of the recent endeavours to rewrite or reinterpret the history of European settlement in Australia.The crimson thread of communism runs through the work of the great, lamented Australian historian, Stuart Macintyre. At the launch of his book, historian Stuart Macintyre emphasised the political dimension of these arguments and said the Australian debate took its cue from the Enola Gay controversy in the United States. This was a study of the background of, and arguments surrounding, recent developments in Australian historiography, and concluded that the History Wars had done damage to the nature of objective Australian history.

In 2003 Australian historian Stuart Macintyre published The History Wars, written with Anna Clark.

The History Wars by Stuart Macintyre