Private Lives, Public History, written by historian Anna Clark – co-author, with Stuart Macintyre, of the influential and provocative The History Wars in 2003 – is not a book written for archivists, nor is it a book about archives. In a succinct 180 pages, Clark reflects on a research project she undertook at the University of Technology Sydney called ‘Whose Australia? Popular Understandings of the Nation’s Past’, which looked at ‘everyday’ attitudes towards Australian history. Although there is little in the book about the documentary record – the basis for so much of Australian history – there is much about what history means to the ordinary people of the country – to John Howard’s ‘average Australian bloke’, as Clark recounts in her introduction, ‘Thinking About History’ (Chapter 1).
The five main chapters of the book are constructed around concepts of personal historical engagement. ‘Connection’ (Chapter 2) looks at the disconnect Clark believes the average person feels between their personal stories and national narratives of history. ‘Inheritance’ (Chapter 3) considers the notion of passing family stories down through the years. Using the Stolen Generations as a central example, this chapter reflects not just on the idea of transferring history but more on the idea of loss: untold stories, intentional forgetting and the rupturing of history from generation to generation.
‘Commemoration’ (Chapter 4) draws on the Anzac story to discuss how one national narrative overshadows other national and personal memories. ‘Contest’ (Chapter 5) addresses the politics of history, which Clark suggests ‘carries powerful political and cultural capital’ (p. 96). What is the role of the media in the communication of historical ‘truth’? How are competing perspectives addressed in historical narratives: settlement versus invasion, for instance? ‘Place’ (Chapter 6) looks at the notion of pilgrimages to locations, from convict settlements like Port Arthur to stations in the Kimberley. Why do people travel to historic places? To capture the feeling of being where history was made?
The book concludes with ‘Presence of the Past’ (Chapter 7), a meditation on the uneasy relationship between personal and public history. Clark suggests that, ultimately, the connections between individual and collective histories start to fray as history moves from the private and tangible to the more public and abstract. Clark laments this division, asking if popular history must come ‘at the expense’ of scholarship (p. 142).
It is interesting that Clark concludes with this concern for the divide between the personal and academic in history, yet throughout her study she almost never addresses the ‘stuff’ of history – the archives, the artefacts – that serves as the evidence underpinning those narratives. Archives are mentioned but a handful of times, and only then in an offhand way, suggesting that somehow they exist independently of anyone’s conscious decision to make them, keep them and pass them on. While Clark writes eloquently of the ‘pilgrimage’ of poring over her grandmother’s photograph albums – a ‘historical window’ onto her family (p. 129) – she does not seem to connect that personal evidence of a life lived with its value as a passageway to history for a wider public.
One would have to examine Clark’s original research methodology to understand why a discussion of the tangible evidence of history was not included in the book. If the question had been asked, how do historical archives, family photographs, personal diaries and so on connect you with your sense of past?, one must assume some sort of answer would have been forthcoming.
And that answer, no doubt, would have been very interesting. Do people see a relationship between their own historical ‘stuff’, or their parents’ or their grandparents’ documentary remains, and the history they read in books or watch on television? What is their understanding of the relationship between historical materials in a museum or archives and the creation of those photographs or letters or diaries in the first place? Does that relationship matter to them? If not, how do they imagine history comes to be?
One does not want to criticise someone’s apple for not being an orange. But it is unfortunate that there is no discussion of how the average person understands not just history but the sources of history, and the institutions that protect and share those sources, from archives to libraries to museums to community centres.
If Clark did ask those questions, perhaps she will share her findings in another publication. If she did not ask those questions, then perhaps someday she will. They deserve to be asked. And the answers deserve to be heard. If archivists are to help the ‘average Australian bloke’ connect with both personal and public history, surely we need to help connect them more closely with the enduring evidence essential to constructing those histories in the first place.
Archival Consultant, Canada
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© 2017 Laura Millar
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2016.1276846