1 Finding a Past We Can Live with – Some of the Challenges of Writing

Finding a past we can live with – some of the challenges of writing public history in the Remembering Territory families exhibition 2012 Eric Johnston lecture Northern Territory Library Distinguished guests Preamble I acknowledge the Larrakia, the traditional owners of the land on which I now stand. I would also like to pause briefly so we can all remember Eric Johnston – he’s been gone a while now. He was a funny sort of bloke – impossible to talk about without invoking clichés like larger than life or real character but he was a good man who did some good things in the Territory. He was a great supporter of Batchelor Institute, where I now work. He was also a great supporter of libraries, a book collector and of course, now the most lasting memorial to him is the lecture that bears his name. So many changes in the Territory, so fast, it is good sometimes to remember. Introduction It is a great pleasure to be here this evening to talk to you tonight about one of my favourite topics, which is discussing some of the ways we write the history of the Territory’s past. Most people in our community have a strong sense of history: who they are, where they come from, family stories, photographs, memories and legends that inform who they are and in a real way define who they will be as well. As events in the past shape our present we look for ways to make sense of our own experience as individuals and as communities. How we perceive the past is not fixed or constant. Anzac Day in 1965 had a different resonance to Anzac Day in 2012. What one person calls Invasion Day, another calls Australia Day. Much of the dialogue about who are and where we come from is not private but played out in the public arena as we search for a past we can live with and feel good about. What exactly is public history? I have been working on Northern Territory history for more than thirty years now and nearly twenty of those have been in the area of public history. 1 To talk about public history as separate from other kinds of history is to make a distinction that most people outside the discipline would probably not make but there is a difference. Academic research usually involves an idea, a research project, but in my experience at least, you often end up doing hours, weeks, months at a time reading archives, manuscripts, newspapers and all manner of mainly written sources which you write up into a paper, an article, a thesis, a book or a research report. You get rewarded for producing this stuff – usually by getting more work. I didn’t hit public history until I became a museum curator. It came at a bit of a turning point in my career. I was offered a post-doctoral fellowship and at exactly the same time, offered the job as History Curator at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. I’ve got to say that at the time I probably didn’t quite realise the difference between an academic and a public history position – but after three years in comparative poverty and isolation writing a thesis, that I looking for a bit of variety and more contact with people. Being a curator is a classic public history job. The other one is working in a school – a history schoolteacher is also a public historian. I am not, by the way, suggesting that either public history or academic history is better, higher or more important than the other. They are dependant on each other to better understand, and appreciate, the different ways we see the past. A key difference about being a public historian is that your audience is not usually academic. Your audience is not informed by the scholarly debate and corpus of information that has preceded your own piece of work – as is usually the case with academic research. Instead your audience is mainly composed of people from the community who have their own ideas about the past. These could be formed by any number of things: what their father told them, what they had read, what they had seen on television, from they believed in their hearts about the nature of an event. Members of the community who disagree with your interpretations of the past are much more likely to abuse you at the exhibition opening, ring up your boss, write to their local member, complain to the chief minister or give an interview to the ABC saying Who is this blockhead and how long have they been in the Territory anyway? I came across all this pretty quickly when my first job was to work on the Cyclone Tracy gallery redevelopment for the twentieth anniversary. The Tracy Gallery is dearly loved now and like a shrine probably never going to be able to be much changed or updated, but in order to put it there, we casually tore out the, very popular, old display at Fannie Bay Gaol. Okay, so the letters to the paper, radio stories, news items, political comment, staff complaints and members of the public weeping to me were a surprise, but a big chunk of me liked it a lot. Even if people were abusing me, at least they were engaging with interpretations of the past in a passionate and vigorous way.i 2 Sometimes there is a vested interest in outcome. I was once asked by a commentator (a southerner by the way – he didn’t last long) on ABC radio to have a regular spot telling tall tales and stories about the Territory’s pioneering past. I said, that’s fine, but you don’t need me – in fact you don’t actually need an historian. A historian’s job is not to promote the clichés of the past but at the same time the narrative you tell has to resonate with the audience as true – it has to be something people can live with. In some ways the intellectual space occupied by a public history is a negotiated outcome. One place that the past is negotiated is in an exhibition. Developing an exhibition Have you ever thought about how an exhibition is put together? Probably every time you go to one that you don’t like. In the back of your head a little voice says, This is hopeless. I could’ve done it so much better. They’ve got it wrong. Look what they’ve missed out… But it’s harder than you think… When Remembering Territory Families came up I was working freelance and I needed work. I had not designed the exhibition brief myself (although curators often do this) and as I read it, it told me both what the funding body expected as well as a lot about the exhibition narrative they would like to see. This is another important element of public history. Someone is paying for you to do the work and like aid to Third World countries, they want to give you the money and tell you how to spend it. Pleasing the funding body in public history is something that is nice to do if you can but you can’t buy slavish sycophancy from a professional historian. At the same time, if a Fisherman’s Association makes funds available to publish a book of its history it probably would not appreciate the majority of the text taken up with arguments for fishing free zones – although it is reasonable to expect that it might be mentioned. When I looked at the exhibition brief for Remembering Territory Families, I had that slight clutching feeling in my gut that told me that I didn’t think I’d be able to deliver absolutely everything the funding body wanted. The brief asked for an exhibition featuring oral histories – historical stories about Territory families from different ethnic backgrounds but at least Indigenous, rural, Chinese, Greek and so on but containing stories that reflect something of the old Territory.ii The exhibition was to be based primarily on oral histories but also include memorabilia and photographs. The exhibition had to be able to tour Territory wide and ideally the content would eventually become part of the permanent record of the Northern Territory Library. Oh, and by the 3 time the project came to me the timeframe for me to deliver on this was about six months. What this suggested to me was that the outcome that the funding agency was hoping for was a way of recognising – and presumably pleasing – the subjects and wider community of the exhibition with histories of the Territory’s colourful and multicultural past. Okay, I could do something on that but even before grappling with the exhibition story, it seemed to me that there would be a few technical obstacles to overcome. The focus on oral history was my first headache. Exhibition text is tough to write at the best of times let alone basing it all on oral histories. Oral histories are very time consuming to collect and it is very difficult to know what you have unless you transcribe. The rule of thumb is that every hour of recording roughly measures up to another twelve hours behind the scenes. In addition to this, undertaking oral history needs to be fairly carefully structured in an atmosphere of trust and information sharing. You can’t just have people raving on because usually it is too rambling and pointless. On the other hand, you don’t want people reading their writing or telling material that has been rehearsed too much because then it sounds stilted.

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