THE ANNUAL HISTORY LECTURE HISTORY COUNCIL OF NEW SOUTH WALES Shaping History through Personal Stories By Tim Bowden Sydney, 2002 Journalists sometimes profess to be historians, but I suspect fewer historians head the other way. They both, however, share a love of good stories. There is nothing like a compelling anecdote to cut through a fog of worthy generalisation AND to concentrate the mind of the reader or listener, trying to make sense of a complex topic.. By the way we know there is an audience of one – at a time anyway – famously identified by Phillip Adams as ‘Gladys’, the listener to whom he speaks every night on Radio National’s Late Night Live. Gladys likes something that she can relate to, a vivid personal story with resonances to the topic that she will remember to pass on to someone later. Like, ‘Did you hear about that doctor who took out his own appendix in Antarctica…’ No matter how earnestly or lyrically the historian or broadcaster might have been trying to stress the absolute isolation of those wintering at a polar station, that particular incident certainly grabbed Gladys’s attention. It also has the merit of being true. I heard of this story and sourced it through an English translation of a Russian medical journal, while I was writing the history of Australians in Antarctica recently. On 30 April 1961, Dr L I Rogazov, isolated on a Russian base on the coast of Queen Maud Land, diagnosed himself with a possibly perforated appendix with local peritonitis and decided to operate on himself under local anaesthetic. He instructed his comrades how to revive him if he passed out during the operation, and a fellow expeditioner held a mirror to help him see what he was doing. He wrote later that he found the bottom of the wound a bit difficult to see. The resourceful medico was back on duty two weeks later. What was not mentioned in the formal prose of the medical journal article was that Rogazov had fortified himself for the ordeal with a couple of generous shots of vodka before he picked up a scalpel. Under the circumstances who could blame him. Journalists traditionally make their living from stealing other people’s words and phrases and stories. It is therefore appropriate that my next example is purloined – with permission – from Professor Hank Nelson, a historian at the Australian National University. It is a splendid illustration of the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction. No novelist would dare to invent what actually happened to an Australian bomber pilot on a night mission over Germany in November 1944. The incident is described in Hank’s book Chased by the Sun recently published by ABC Books. Hank Nelson acknowledges that one of the advantages historians have over other scholars is that they gather great stories. These can be the historians’ great asset – when they are properly verified of course – and indeed the historian’s evidence and art as well as the reader’s seduction. Joe Herman was the pilot of a Halifax bomber with a six man crew that took off from Driffield in Yorkshire in November 1944 to bomb the Ruhr in Germany. He flew as part of a 700 bomber force through the night. Having bombed and set course for home, Herman felt something thud into the Halifax. In his windscreen he could see the reflection of flames behind him. Suddenly the Halifax was hit again and Herman told the crew to bale out. He tried to hold the plane steady for the men to leave and when he saw the mid-upper gunner, a fellow Australian, John (Irish) Vivash dragging his wounded leg along the fuselage to the hatch, he thought he and Irish were the last of the crew still on board. Herman stood up and went to grab his parachute. Just then the plane rolled, spun and exploded. Herman found himself in the air with all sorts of bits and pieces from his Halifax. In the distorting light of the part moon, search lights and flares he thought that he and all the objects were stationary. Then he recognised that they were all falling together towards earth. He even thought he might find his parachute in the debris around him. He fell for a long time. Perhaps through two miles. Suddenly he crashed into something and grabbed it. In his dazed state he heard ‘Irish’ Vivash say, 'Is there anybody around?' Joe then realised Irish had been swinging under his canopy, and Joe falling faster, had hit Irish's legs and grabbed one. With the confusion of plunging through the night and with one leg injured, Irish, quite reasonably, was not quick to grasp that he had his pilot hanging on to him The two descending air men did not talk much – Hank told me - but as they came close to the earth, Irish suggested that just before they hit the ground, it might be best if Joe 'dropped off'. But Joe was noncommittal. 'Maybe', he said. As it was, the ground seemed to rush at them, they brushed a tree, Joe hit the earth first, and Irish landed on him and cracked a couple of Joe's ribs. Battered and bruised, Joe and Irish walked towards Holland for five nights, were captured and became prisoners of war. Annual History Lecture 2002 2 Paul Brickhill, a Sydney journalist, shot down in North Africa was in the same prison camp. He heard Herman's story, and included it in his first book, Escape to Danger. That experience helped convince Brickhill that he might be the writer of the air war. He then wrote The Great Escape, The Dam Busters and Reach For the Sky, all of which became best-sellers and successful films. The story is a good one, but its selection also signals something beyond just that story – the extreme dangers faced by bomber crews night after night and the raw courage of young Australians risking their lives with the statistical odds stacked against them. Their chances of survival were at best, forty per cent. Five times as many were killed as became prisoners. Pilots, with an obligation to hold the plane steady and like the captain of a sinking ship, be the last to leave, had the lowest chance of surviving by baling out. Joe Herman’s story is one of the extreme cases of survival by chance. What makes a nation is the common past it believes it holds. When I went to school, history was tidily laid out. We learned about the discovery of Australia by Captain Cook, the arrival of the first fleet, overland exploration, gold rushes, squatters, federation – it was the ‘no worries’ Anglo Celtic approach. In the 1940s and 50s it was possible to construct a linear and sequential outline of our history. The Australian Aborigines were practically invisible in this But no more. Today we are aware that our history is far more complex. Historians like Henry Reynolds have unearthed aspects of Aboriginal history – there all the time, but not dealt with. We have had the histories of other nationalities, many of them residents of Australia for many generations, Chinese, Greek, Italian, and more recently Vietnamese and Middle Eastern migrants. Let us not forget that Afghans and their camel trains helped open up the outback and their descendants are as Australian as billy tea. In my lifetime the old cosy approach to history has been demolished. Interestingly, the writing of Australian history has never been dominated by universities. There is a strong tradition of historians writing from outside academe. This is particularly evident in the recording of war, with the war correspondents turned historians, C E W Bean in World War I, and Gavin Long in World II were with the Sydney Morning Herald. Mercifully Australian history has not all been written by historians for other historians. There has been room for the knowledgeable and well informed outsider. Australian historians have felt an obligation to write accessible history. One of the relatively modern developments in the chronicling of our past has been the rise of oral history, which began to flourish with the advent of magnetic tape in the 1950s and the ability Annual History Lecture 2002 3 to record voices in a relatively inexpensive way with portable equipment which could be easily taken out into the field. Before that war correspondents such as Chester Wilmot had to venture into combat with cumbersome disk cutting equipment so large it had to be transported in a van and operated by a technician. I have been fortunate to enter broadcast journalism at a time when portable recorders, and the ability to edit speech recorded on magnetic tape with a splicing block, sticky tape and a razor blade was first available. It was an enduring technology and lasted me for forty years, long after journalists on newspapers had forsaken their typewriters, copy paper and hot-metal presses for computers. Reporters were gazing glassily into the green screens of primitive monitors by the late 1970s. As we head into the 21st century with the digital revolution well established, Robyn Williams still constructs his Science Show on a rusty reel-to- reel Tandberg tape recorder. His office floor is littered with varying lengths of magnetic tape sliced from his analogue interviews – my friend Hank Nelson once dubbed this audio detritus as ‘the confetti of stumbling lips’ - recorded on a Nagra battery-operated tape recorder so heavy and strongly constructed as to be almost indestructible. Not for Robyn the feather-light digital recorders the size of a cigarette packet with their in-built hard disks.