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How to Write a Local History Publishing history A guide for historical societies Sketch of Ballarat by Eugene von Guerard, reproduced with permission of Ballarat Heritage Services. Helen Doyle Katya Johanson 2006 First published in 2006 by the Federation of Australian Historical Societies © Federation of Australian Historical Societies Inc. and the authors. This Book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted by the Copyright Act, no part of this work may be stored, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission of the publisher. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Cataloguing-in-progress: Doyle, Helen , 1967–. Publishing history: a guide for historical societies. Bibliography. ISBN 0959571477 (pbk.) (ISB-10). ISBN 9780959571479 (pbk.) (ISBN-13). 1. Publishers and publishing - Australia. 2. History publishing - Australia. 3. Local history - Australia. I. Johanson, Katya. II. Federation of Australian Historical Societies. III. Title. 070.593 Compiled by Helen Doyle and Katya Johanson for the FAHS. Illustrations by Harry Harrison. Editorial committee: Dr. Ruth Kerr, Associate Professor Don Garden and David Lewis. Produced by G. Hogan (Ascribe Reporting) and J. Davies, for the FAHS. Publish ed by FAHS, GPO Box 1440, Canberra ACT 2601 Web: www.history.org.au E-mail: [email protected] Printed by Instant Colour Press, Belconnen ACT 2617 ii Contents Foreword iv Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 1. Planning your project 7 2. How to publish 11 3. Drawing up a budget 27 4. Contracting an author 29 5. The components of a history book 35 6. A picture is worth a thousand words 43 7. Editing and design 47 8. Identification and access requirements 63 9. Selling the finished product 67 Further reading 69 Local history research and writing 69 General Australian history references 70 Writing and publishing guides 71 Other useful references and further reading 72 Useful websites 72 Examples of local history publications 74 Examples of electronic history publishing 75 iii Foreword An important function of historical societies is to encourage the researching, writing and publishing of local history. For many of their members who undertake the task of writing a history, they may think publication is beyond their reach. To them publishing is a mysterious process and they lack confidence in their ability to produce a work that is acceptable to publishers and to their potential readership. For these individuals, this guide on publishing history fills a long-felt need. It is a work that is packed with advice and information on all aspects of printed and electronic publication. It embraces such topics as planning and financing a project, self-publishing, the structure and elements of a history book, use of illustrations, editing and design, identification and access requirements and selling the finished product. There is even a section on contracting an author for those societies that can afford to pay for the services of a historian to write a local history. Many useful references have been provided, including examples of well-written local histories. The authors of this guide on publishing history, Helen Doyle and Katya Johanson, are to be congratulated. They have followed their own advice and produced a work that is not only informative but is well organised and easy to read. The Federation of Australian Historical Societies (Inc.) is proud to make this publication available to historical societies throughout Australia. Helen Henderson PRESIDENT June 2006 iv Acknowledgements Permission to reproduce illustrations was kindly granted by Ballarat Heritage Services (sketch of Ballarat by Eugene von Gerard) and by Peter Freeman (sketch on page 44). We also wish to thank Harry Harrison for generously providing the original artwork, and Tim Homewood for advice on web services. Thanks also to Don Garden and the editorial committee for guiding the project. vi Introduction History, it seems, is more popular than ever before. While recent decades have seen falling interest in the study of history at schools, there has been a simultaneous leap in public participation in history-oriented activities—including family history, visiting museums and exhibitions, history segments in the media, appreciating heritage, participating in Anzac Day services, and publishing history. As the popular application of history has continued to broaden and grow, so has the scope of history publishing. Local history, which can take as its focus a town, community, region or district, or municipality, is the largest category of history publishing. At the State Library of Victoria, for example, approximately 115 local history books were deposited in 2002.1 Similar figures would be expected from the other states and territories. While the number of these publications continues to grow, the practice of producing local history locally is nothing new. There is a long tradition of church and school histories; these were small, hand-crafted editions with limited print runs, which are the ancestors of modern local history. They were compiled principally as a record of the past but also helped to strengthen community identity and community knowledge. Local history publishing in Australia was once geared mainly around commemorations, and this remains an important motive. When local towns, or their older buildings and organisations—especially churches and schools—reached a jubilee, centenary, or sesqui-centenary, the event was often celebrated with a publication. In the twentieth century, these 1 Hogan, T. Newspaper Librarian, State Library of Victoria, pers. com., 26 November 2003. This figure includes all books that fit broadly in the category of local history, including church and school histories, walking tours, etc. 1 commemorations often coincided with a town reunion or ‘back-to’ celebration. The history books produced for these occasions were often a town’s first published history. Whilst they were a valuable record of the local past, they followed a somewhat tedious standard formula, and suffered from being simply a litany of facts and figures, with poor readability. Academic historians moved into the field of local history writing in the 1950s and 1960s, convinced that they could improve the field with professional research techniques and academic inquiry. Academic history has since contributed many new perspectives on the past, from which local history has benefitted, including the emergence of specialist fields, such as social history, women’s history, labour history, urban history, cultural history, environmental history and Indigenous studies. The influences of urban history and social history made the study of place and community an important new field in the 1980s with works such as Janet McCalman’s history of the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, Struggletown (1984); this continues to be important in urban and regional studies, and the newer field of rural studies.2 The local historian now engages with a range of new approaches to the past, which challenge older ways of telling local history. Importantly, there is now greater acknowledgement of Aboriginal history and the challenge to examine the issue of ‘shared’ attachments to place, demonstrated for example by Shayne Breen, Contested Places (2001) and Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfella’s Point (2002). Academic and professional historians continue to write successful local history, but while there is great benefit in academic or scholarly input, the author’s position as an 2 See Peel, Victoria and Zion, Deborah, ‘The local history industry’ in Spearritt and Rickard (eds), Packaging the Past, special issue of Australian Historical Studies, April 1991, pp. 210–11. 2 ‘outsider’ may be a hindrance in some ways. The bulk of local history continues to be written by non-professional historians. The great benefit of a local writer is that he or she usually has an intimate knowledge of both the place and the research material, but there are still some issues the local writer should be wary of, such as a reliance on too much historical detail without adequate context. The details of local life can indeed be absorbing and contribute to a satisfying book, but readers might not want to get bogged down in detail for its own sake. The challenge for local history publications is to understand the context without losing sight of the detail. The book must successfully address the ‘why’ as well as the ‘who’, what’, ‘where’ and ‘how’. Otherwise the result is ‘scissors and paste’ history, with little context or analysis. No longer restricted simply to the conventional style of traditional local histories, local history enthusiasts are now publishing on all manner of topics, including for example: • heritage walks or tours, with descriptions of important buildings, monuments and sites; • the history of a particular property or site in a district, e.g. pastoral station, factory, hotel, school, cemetery, etc.; • the history of a particular industry, club, organisation or social movement in a district; • oral history, e.g. town-life during war, working lives, etc.; • reminiscences of local residents in a district; • reproductions or facsimiles of old diaries or letters that relate to a particular district; • environmental history—for example, two recent community publications about rivers in western Victoria: Malcolm Brown, Whis- perings of the Wannon (Hamilton, 2002) and 3 Jennifer Bantow et al, Tuuram: Hopkins Estuary and Coastal Environs (Warrnambool, 1991), and one
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