In 1961, English historian E. H. Carr described history as ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’. Nearly 60 years later, has anything changed? What does ‘doing history’ mean today? And what does it mean in Australia and other settler societies, where debates about decolonising methodologies, fictions, audiences and authorship challenge the practice and function of history? In this recent roundtable held at the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney, four historians contemplated what history is (and isn’t) and how historiographical changes have influenced their own approaches to historical research and writing.