Centenary of Royal Australian Historical Society
Occasional Address by Dr Shirley Fitzgerald, City of Sydney Historian and Chair of the Board of NSW State Records
(Strangers Dining Room, NSW Parliament House, Friday 29th June,12 noon)
'Yet far from being accomplished'
I want to begin with a quotation. It's a long quote and I have to say it gets the thumbs down from my computer, which tells me many of the sentences are too long. And the spell checker went berserk. But bear with me and I think you will see in it some relevance to what we are celebrating here today. The quote is the opening gambit of Laurence Sterne's novel, The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in 1760. This makes it one of the earliest novels in the English language. Over the first pages, Stearn is theorising about the problems of writing biography.
Could a historiographer drive his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, - straight forward;-for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto- without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to left, -he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end;- but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid….he will have variousAccounts to reconcile: Anecdotes to pick up: Inscriptions to make out: Stories to weave in: Traditions to sift: Personages to call upon: Panegyrics to paste up at this door; Pasquinades at that:
[I had to check that one in the dictionary. A panegyric I knew - eulogy or a public statement in praise of someone. A pasquinade is a public lampoon or an insulting verse.] So…Panegyrics at this door… pasquinades at that…
…there are archives at every stage to be looked into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of: - in short there is no ending of it;-for my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could, - and am not yet born: I have just been able, and that's all, to tell you when it happened, but not how:-so that you see the thing is yet far from being accomplished.
Today we celebrate 100 years of the Australian Historical Society - renamed -regrettably some would think- the Royal Australian Historical Society in 1918. We celebrate 100 years of that ambling kind of history that is so well described here by Laurence Stearne in 1760. Not the kind of history that is done, as I often do history, to a deadline, because there are timetables and workplans in place and a salary being paid that requires me to justify my existence. Not the kind of history that is written by academic historians in order to fill some managerial quota of referreed journal articles in order to be eligible for a promotion. Not the kind of history that is written in order to impress fellow historians or to jockey for some greater position in the internal hierarchy of who's who in the professional history world.
Today we celebrate the history written by people who do it for no better reason than that they want to, that they cannot help themselves, that is done because the people who do it know that to do it is rewarding and exciting and essential for a civilised society to do.
There can be no better reasons.
Of course many of those who have written for the Society's journal or lectured or held office for the Society have indeed been academics and professionals but there were, and are, many who were not. And everyone has contributed not for glory or for pecuniary gain - indeed often at a financial cost - but because they thought Australian history was worth it.
It is easy to forget that at the time the Australian Historical Society was established in 1901 there was no Australian history. Or very little. We were just becoming 'Australia' in a constitutional sense, and we were still far from believing it in an everyday sense. And any one who wanted to study Australian history had not much in the way of accessible primary sources. No State or National Archives. No Mitchell Library. No Australian Dictionary of Biography. Nothing much in the way of a body of research to build on.
And there was not much respect for those who believed that there was any history in this country worth studying. It is not even difficult to find historians themselves in the early decades of the twentieth century who had their doubts. Sir Keith Hancock, whom I remember as a grand old man of Australian history when I was a student, wrote in his Australia, published in 1930 :
One hundred years ago Australia was still a gaol. Some of her greatest cities are less than a century old. The poets have seen truly that Australia's life is in the future.
And again:
Without some sending down of roots, no community can live an individual life -there cannot indeed be a community. The roots sent down in the Australian soil by the transplanted British have only here and there struck deep.
And as late as the 1960s the travel writer James Morris (now Jan Morris) could write in the British Guardian:
The history of Sydney, like the history of Australia, is essentially blank, very little of interest ever having happened there….[a place of] immense desolation.
So when Andrew Houison claimed in his presidential address to the new society in 1901 that 'the history of NSW is worth studying' he was really sticking his neck out.
It was not really until the 1970s that writing and publishing of Australian titles took off in any way that acknowledged some kind of parity for Australia next to the histories of other places. And even today many still do not quite believe that Australian studies- Australian history or politics or literature - is quite as important as stories and histories of other places.
But if Australian history was a struggling new infant in the world of history writing, the local historian was the lowest of all its practitioners. If there was not much of interest to be said about the nation, then what on earth could be of interest in the village of Hillend, or the story of Taree or Glen Innes, or for that matter the suburbs of Sydney or indeed of Sydney itself. But that was what many members of the Society were interested in and so they just did it. While many academics looked askance at Australian history and often ignored the local focus altogether, the people who were not bothered by the intellectual snub it might bring, just did it.
And they walked it. And saw the local world as a place or places to belong to. That is not to ignore the political debates, the constitutional issues, the cultural study, but the emphasis on place meant that the Historical Society was early into the business of caring about heritage places, before the National Trust was set up and before the wider community began to value the built past. Burdekin House. The Commissariat Building at West Circular Quay. (expand.)
If we put our mind to it, all of us would be able to produce a list of historical writings that have inspired us. It might include works that are not strictly histories but nevertheless teach us our history. My list includes Ferdinand Braudel's study of the Mediterranean world which insists that a historian must weave into the story the smallest of issues as well as the largest of trends, but it also includes Emile Zola's Germinal, a novel that evoked for me the pain and the brutality of the early stages of the industrial revolution better than any careful historical study of death rates or public health issues ever could. These are some of the 'great works.'
But then there are the lists of work we use and consult on a regular basis. Mine includes people such as Charles Bertie and FA Bland who wrote in the early part of the twentieth century about the City of Sydney - right through to some of my colleagues who are in this room, who still do - and so I find that I go again and again to the journal of the RAHS. Perhaps none of the work reaches the heights or depths of a Zola, but we need it all.
anecdotes to pick up inscriptions to make out stories to weave in traditions to sift rolls, records, documents and endless genealogies…The thing is yet far from being accomplished.
It's a slow and messy business, history. And today, more than ever before, 'doing history' is antithetical to the way everything is commodified in the global economy. The aim of the muleteer was to get from Rome to Loretto. In the getting there the man was changed. What made him was what he chose to do on the way. The past was a part of his present, and he spent his time immersed in it. That is not the way things are today. It is seen as time wasting. We are constantly exhorted to minimalize, to speed up, to hurry. Content and scholarship are pushed into second place, behind gloss of presentation. Form wins out over substance every time. It is the age of the twenty-four hour celebrity, the twenty-second sound bite, instant gratification and enforced superficiality of everything. Politicians act according to the findings of the latest opinion poll, and forget whatever convictions they may have held yesterday.
The journey must always be by the fastest and most efficient route, the place of origin and places along the way are taken as irrelevancies.
It is one of the paradoxes of the twentieth century that while there are many organisations in 2001 that simply did not exist in 1901 that address all sorts of human rights issues and citizens rights issues, the reality of the juggernaut of global capitalism is propelling us in a different direction. Increasingly the market place takes precedence over everything else.
And the nation state that we celebrate in this centenary year -centenary of the 'nation' and of the society - seems ever more ready to hasten its own demise.
2001 is a year for examining the state of the Nation. At the beginning of the 21st century this notion is contested and problematic. In 1901, a century ago, we were just federating to become that nation. Definitions of what it meant were short, powers were limited, the old colonies, now states, remained jealous. But there was widespread agreement about some things. The nation was to be 'one people' - ie British, white and focused on European cultural values. No Chinese, thank you very much. We took no pleasure at being located in close proximity to what was Euro-centrically called 'The Far East'. And the 'nation' as a voting people excluded its own Indigenous nations. The idea of many nations within a nation was an idea whose time had not yet come.
Today global interests make mockery of the notion of the 'nation' in economic terms and yet the idea of who we are is expanding and growing in complexity all the time. If we are to be 'one people' it is not one based on simplistic notions of race. Slowly and not without setbacks, in the later part of the 20th century we have begun to celebrate diversity and complexity. Of race. Of gender. Of ideas and of cultural ways. We now know, more than we knew in 1901, that there are many ways of living in this place, many ways of being Australian. The questions we ask of the past have changed and grown in complexity. We know now that there must be criticism along with praise, rejection along with acceptance, that some things in the past have been done well and some things have not been done well. That some things are a matter for pride and some things are a matter for shame. We know that there are dark and silent places in our past as there are in every past that require illuminating and exploring, not from guilt or because of a perverse need for pain, but because that is what historians should do.
So while we have been gradually learning to be more nuanced and more complex in the way we have examined the nation's past, ironically the national boundary looses meaning. And in this hiatus, the local comes into its own. Local histories, once tossed off as of only second-rate importance we begin to understand, can illuminate the present as much as the grand study can. History is made within places. Between Rome and Loretto. At the juncture of Albury and Wodonga. In Parramatta. In Sydney. And I note with some personal gratification that in the Society's commemorative issue of the journal about to be launched, the most recent 'local' society to affiliate is the new City of Sydney Historical Society. That gets abbreviated to COSHA - and yes it is cosha to be local, even in the centre of the city.
I should briefly put on my State Records hat and say something about the locality of records because it affects how we are going to be doing history in the future. Almost thirty years ago I embarked on a Ph D that involved using information found in thousands of late nineteenth century marriage registers. The core of the study involved analysing occupational information contained in these certificates. The end result was to argue that despite the rhetoric of Australian as a 'workers paradise', it was really just another capitalist society, reproducing all the inequalities of the Old World. This was quite a big question, though the methodology required using very small pieces of information. I couldn't get access to these records centrally, despite the best efforts of many people to get the RG' s Department to co-operate. So I traipsed around from parish to parish, church to chapel. I sat transcribing records at many tables in manses and rectories. I even sat for days using a coffin shaped table that was once the lid of a pauper's coffin in the crypt of St Mary's cathedral. I ate hot midday meals with priests in presbyteries and received homilies from rectors -there was one I will never forget who asked me what I was doing, and when I explained the research project to him he said ' well they're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for Ph D topics these days aren't they?' After several visits to use these particular records he clarified his objections. what he really though was that I should drop the whole academic thing and turn to motherhood. The records of course yielded their own idiosyncrasies - marginal notations to indicate that this one was married in the parson's parlour, that one in the cathedral, that this minister had quite a trade in weddings, this one charged more than that one and so on.
Well today those records are available at various terminals in local libraries. And so they should be. Collecting and digitising and centralising records makes them more available to more people in disparate places. And yet, in that example of my own work, there was a lot of learning along the way from being forced into the localities which I was researching. It wasn't very efficient, but the experience was layered and rich. Similarly no one would wish that the National Library had not collected country newspapers that were in danger of being lost but are now safe and dry in Canberra - except that this means the researcher could theoretically work on a country town without ever visiting it. State Records are now responsible for local Govt records. This will undoubtedly result in more preservation of records that might otherwise mould away under old town halls. But you will read them in Sydney. The National Archives are closing down regional offies and centralising records. It won't get the headlines like the closure of the banks or the stripping out of health services, but it is the same issue. It is the removal of knowledge from the periphery to the centre.
There are pluses and minuses in all of these archiving trends, but we must be vigilant and demanding on behalf of regional and local needs. We must never lose sight of the value of a real connection to the intimacies of the local. To place. The best historians are also geographers.
anecdotes to pick up inscriptions to make out stories to weave in personages to call upon rolls, records, documents… The thing is yet far from being accomplished.