Telling Families and Locating Identity: Narratives of Late Modern Life

Abstract

In the context of debates on personal identity and social relationships in late modern societies, this article explores several narratives through which the Australian Generations Oral History Project's interviewees make sense of themselves. As they ‘re-member’ family connections formed in specific time and place—and often recalled through emotionally significant material objects—some tell life stories marked by stability, others by contingency, while others construct so-called ‘do-it-yourself’ biographies. I conclude that the complexity of these lives, and of their telling, reveals the ways in which a sense of generational location mediates other dimensions of identity and shapes responses to broad structural and cultural developments.

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, all interviews are from the Australian Generations Oral History Project, National Library of Australia, Oral History and Folklore Collection TRC6300; Lisa Jackson, interviewed by Frank Heimans, 22 June and 2 July 2012, in Cremorne, New South Wales, TRC6300/76, session 1, 00:02:42, www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252067/0-162~0-231.

2 E.g. Kerreen M. Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian Family 1880–1940 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985); Michael Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992).

3 Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), 19; Carol Smart, Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

4 John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

5 Gilding, The Making and Breaking of the Australian Family.

6 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).

7 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 3–9.

8 Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002).

9 See Smart; and Michael Gilding, ‘Reflexivity Over and Above Convention: The New Orthodoxy in the Sociology of Personal Life, Formerly Sociology of the Family’, British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 4 (2010): 757–77; Lynn Jamieson, ‘Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the “Pure Relationship”’, Sociology 33, no. 3 (1999): 477–94.

10 For recent discussion see Rachel Thomson, ‘Generational Research: Between Historical and Sociological Imaginations’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 17, no. 2 (2014): 147–56.

11 Alan France and Steven Roberts, ‘The Problem of Social Generations: A Critique of the New Emerging Orthodoxy in Youth Studies’, Journal of Youth Studies 18, no. 2 (2015): 215–30; Dan Woodman and Johanna Wyn, ‘Class, Gender and Generation Matter: Using the Concept of Social Generation to Study Inequality and Social Change’, Journal of Youth Studies 18, no. 10 (2015): 1402–10; Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations', in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952).

12 See Jane Elliott, ‘“Talkin’ 'bout My Generation”: Perceptions of Generational Belonging among the 1958 Cohort’, Sociological Research Online 18, no. 4 (2013), www.socresonline.org.uk/18/4/13; June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, Generations, Culture and Society (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002).

13 Smart; Vanessa May, ed., Sociology of Personal Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

14 Smart, 2–4, conclusion.

15 Vanessa May and Stewart Muir, ‘Everyday Belonging and Ageing: Place and Generational Change’, Sociological Research Online 20, no. 1 (2015), www.socresonline.org.uk/20/1/8.html, DOI: 10.5153/sro.3555.

16 Andrew Jones, Memory and Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. See also Janis Wilton, ‘Telling Objects: Material Culture and Memory in Oral History Interviews’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal 30 (2008): 41–9; Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives (London: Routledge, 1998); and Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, ‘Objects of Affection’, Ploughshares 37, no. 1 (2011): 155–64.

17 See the Australian Generations interview material used in ‘Crowded Houses, Empty Nests’, www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/houses/5320382 .

18 Such methodological issues are discussed by Katie Wright and Julie McLeod, ‘Public Memories and Private Meanings: Representing the “Happy Childhood” Narrative in Oral Histories of Adolescence and Schooling in Australia, 1930s–1950s’, Oral History Forum d'histoire orale 32, no. 4 (2012): 4.

19 Gregory Carroll, interviewed by Catherine McLennan, 16 and 17 May 2012, in Ararat, Victoria, TRC6300/67, http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn6252058.

20 Carroll interview, session 1, 00:17:09, www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252058/0-1029~0-1262.

21 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Canberra: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997).

22 Jackson interview, session 1, 00:16:34, www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252067/0-994~0-1092.

23 Ibid., session 1, 00:08:00, www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252067/0-608.

24 Ibid., session 3, 01:07:33, www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252067/2-4053~2-4239.

25 Jillian Hunter, interviewed by Catherine McLennan, 28 March 2013, in Moonambel, Victoria, TRC6300/166. The interview was not yet online at the time of going to press, so no url is available.

26 Mark Campbell, interviewed by Mary Hutchison, 22 and 23 October 2013, in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT), TRC6300/219, session 2, 00:00:00. The interview was not yet online at the time of going to press, so no url is available. For further discussion of Mark Campbell's interview see the article in this issue by Christina Twomey and Jodie Boyd, ‘Class, Social Equity and Higher Education in Postwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016).

27 Ibid.

28 See for example stories such as that of marriage breakdown by Patricia Barrkman, TRC6300/16, http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn5972545. On informal adoption experience, see for example Kathleen Burr, TRC6300/190; and Indigenous woman Hazel (Peg) Forrest's account of the distress but also survival tactics of living in an orphanage, TRC6300/295. Neither interview was online at the time of going to press, so no url is available.

29 Judith Martin, interviewed by Nicole Curby, 2 and 3 August 2011, in Murrumbeena, Victoria, TRC6300/2. The interview was not yet online at the time of going to press, so no url is available.

30 David Gorovic, interviewed by Mary Hutchinson, 2 and 5 January 2013, Holder, ACT, TR 6300/133; Irene Lorbergs, interviewed by Mary Hutchinson, 8 and 15 January 2013, Holder, ACT, TRC6300/134. These interviews are not open to the public yet.

31 Gorovic interview, session 1, 01:14:06.

32 Lorbergs interview, session 1, 00:34:05.

33 See for example the resistance to rural gender expectations and later accomplishments of Wendy Crebbin, TRC6300/88 (interview not yet online at time of going to press, so no url available), and the story of Donald Grey-Smith's negotiation of spirituality and sexual identity, TRC6300/241, http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn6455338.

34 Kirsty Wallett, interviewed by Hamish Sewell, 17 and 18 April 2013, in South Brisbane, Queensland, TRC6300/170, http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn6290935.

35 Wallett interview, session 2, 00:54:10.

36 Ibid., session 2, 00:54:10.

37 Christian Bow, interviewed by Hamish Sewell, 5 and 6 June 2012, in Brisbane, Queensland, TRC6300/72, session 1, 01:44:21, http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn6252063.

38 Ibid., session 1, 01:45:20.

39 Smart, conclusion.