Framing History: some reflections on my work
Marilyn Lake
Historians specialise in placing texts in context but which context? Which
frameworks best illuminate the past?
Colonial/local/national/imperial/regional/world?
I grew up in the small Australian island state of Tasmania. In my earliest work I was
keen to draw attention to the national significance of my subject, the history of the
impact of World War 1 on the Tasmania home front, published as a book A Divided
Society (Melbourne University Press, 1975) when I was just twenty six. The 1970s
was an intensely nationalist decade in Australia that saw the election of the radical
Whitlam Labor government after 23 years of conservative Liberal party rule. We
were all nationalists.
Then I moved to Melbourne to work on my Ph.D on soldier settlement after World
War 1 and argued not just for the national, but also the imperial dimensions of my
subject. Nationalism had fortified our anti-imperialism. It was clear that soldier
settlement was an imperial initiative as well as a national project. Rider Haggard
travelled to Australia in 1916 to persuade Australian governments to settle British
ex-servicemen on Australian land. As I wrote in The Limits of Hope: Soldier
Settlement in Victoria 1915-38 (Oxford University Press, 1987) (two children were
born in 1977 and 1981): ‘The visit of Sir Rider Haggard to Australia in 1916, at
precisely the time Australian government leaders were formulating repatriation
policy, nicely symbolized the “British empire in Australia” and signalled a British
intention to reinvigorate empire strategy. Haggard arrived charged with the mission
of locking Australia back into imperial unity’. (p.31) Soldier settlement continued
moreover the process of Aboriginal dispossession.
I was interested in political history and engaged with the Women’s Liberation
Movement. Women’s history joined scholars from across the world in an
exhilarating international project. The pursuit of the history of feminism and the
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Aboriginal rights movements took me around the world – literally as well as
metaphorically - as I tracked the transnational circulation of ideas and people and
texts. Nations and citizenship we insisted were gendered as well as racialised
constructions and we could explore this across the world. (Marilyn Lake ‘The
Ambiguities for Feminists of National Belonging: Race and Gender in the Imagined
Australian Community’ in Ida Blom et al Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender
Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berg, 2000) Feminism was sustained by
imperial power relations and the privilege of whiteness, but some feminists also led
international protest about the oppression and dispossession of Aboriginal people
and the removal of their children. (Marilyn Lake Getting Equal: The History of
Australian Feminism (Allen and Unwin, 1999, ch. 5: Campaigning for Aboriginal
rights’).
More recently I researched the transnational circulation of discourses on race and
democracy that underpinned the establishment of self-styled ‘white men’s
countries’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Drawing the Global Colour
Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality
(Cambridge, 2008) was, as the sub-title emphasised, just as interested in the
political agency of ‘not-whites’ who also mobilised globally to challenge this new
order. I was especially interested in the historical agency of Chinese Australian
colonists – both their mobility and political mobilisation from the 1870s into the
early 20th century - and the ways in which they invoked universal authorities and
formulated arguments about ‘common human rights’ to contest national exclusions.
I became more interested in the (Eurocentric) historiography on the history of
human rights. (Marilyn Lake ‘Chinese Colonists Assert Their “Common Human
Rights”: Cosmopolitanism as Subject and method of History’ Journal of World History
21,3, 2010).
At the same time I became less satisfied with the sociological concept of ‘race
relations’ which had been enormously influential since the 1970s as a framework in
which to elucidate these histories. ‘Race relations’ were usually always investigated
in a national frame – as constitutive of a national order - and in Australia conflated
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the very different historical conditions of Indigenous Australians, Chinese
Australians and Pacific islanders. It also seemed to lead inexorably to a focus on
racist stereotypes, racist cartoons and (white men’s) racial theory (‘Social
Darwinism’) rather than on peoples’ experience as differently located historical
subjects, or in the case of Chinese Australians in the late 19th century, the subjects of
another empire – the Qing - in encounter with the subjects of the British empire in
Australia. (Marilyn Lake ‘The Chinese Empire Encounters the British Empire and Its
"Colonial Dependencies": Melbourne, 1887' Chinese Australians: Politics,
Engagement and Activism, Journal of Chinese Overseas, Special Issue 9,2, 2013 (to be
republished in Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (eds), Chinese Australians:
Politics, Engagement and Resistance, Brill, Leiden, forthcoming 2015).
At about this time Antoinette Burton’s increasing interest in world history and the
histories of, and relations between, multiple empires (Antoinette Burton ‘Getting
outside the global: re-positioning British imperialism in world history’ in Catherine
Hall and Keith McClelland eds Race, nation and empire: Making histories, 1750 to the
present (Manchester, 2010)) together with Australia’s increasing interest in the long
history of Australian/Asian interaction engagement (see the new national history
curriculum) combined to compel new perspectives on the past. I now think that
Australian history only makes sense in a world history perspective and in relation to
its regional context. This has led me in the last few years to combat the ascendancy
of ‘British world’ approaches that seem to blinker and imprison accounts of the past
just as much as national frames. (Marilyn Lake ‘Colonial Australia and the AsiaPacific region’ in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre eds The Cambridge History of
Australia Vol.1 (Cambridge, 2013).
My current interests focus on Progressive political networks (especially labour and
feminist) that joined Australians and Americans in international activism in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. (Marilyn Lake ‘This great America’: H. B. Higgins and
Transnational Progressivism, Australian Historical Studies, 44:2, 2013).
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I’ve recently been re-visiting the history of the minimum wage (first legislated for
men as well as women in the Australian colony of Victoria in 1896 but not achieved
in the US at the federal level until 1938) a subject that looks back to the legacy of
slavery in the British and Spanish empires and forward to the inscription of labour
rights in international law at the ILO. I’m now interested in exploring the larger
topic of labor and empire and a young colleague Sophie Loy-Wilson and I are
convening a workshop on this subject in Sydney next year.
The contexts for the passage of the Victorian legislation of 1896 are of course
multiple: at one level the growth of Victorian manufacturing industry, at another the
larger national project of ‘state socialism’, at another the encounter of subjects of the
Qing and British empires in urban Melbourne. It is a trans-temporal story as well as
a transnational and inter-imperial one. The legal minimum wage was a radically
inclusive measure animated by sentiments of racial exclusion. And it had, and has,
implications beyond its immediate context, which became evident when I published
a shorter version as an op.ed. in the local Melbourne newspaper, the Age and
received lots of abusive email. (Marilyn Lake ‘Minimum wage is more than a safety
net, it’s a symbol of Australian values’ Age 9 April 2014). The minimum wage is seen
by conservative neo-liberals as a barrier to labour market de-regulation,
competition and productivity. You will see that in this forum – and in the context of
mounting attacks on the minimum wage - I cast my story as a national narrative
(though it wasn’t my title) in an effort to win support for this foundation stone of
social justice. Contexts change.
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