“ The Past Is Not What It Used to Be: a reflection on the future of the History of WA
AGM Address for the History Council of Western Australia on Wednesday 1 August 2012
Some of you will perhaps remember Flacco, the comedy character created in 1985 by Paul
Livingston, throwing out the line ‘ The Past—is not what it used to be ’ .
It’s good comedy, but there’s a lot more truth to it than one might at first think.
The past—or at least that interpretation of it that we call ‘history’ does indeed change with every new generation of historians; because we all view the past in the light of our own preoccupations.
A really old-fashioned and hardline empiricist would think this a bad thing—evidence of bias. I think it’s actually one of the great strengths of our discipline—that we keep finding new questions to ask, new trajectories through which to view it, and hence new discoveries and understandings arise.
There’s perhaps no better place to observe some of these changes and new directions than the Australian Historical Association conference, held this year in Adelaide, just three weeks ago.
So I’m going to start by some reflections on the conference.
I decided that having taken the trouble to go to Adelaide, I should turn up to the opening plenary, even though I am myself an historian of medieval England, and this panel was entitled Australian History in its Asian Contexts. What did I hear?
At least three things that I think may indicate some of the future possibilities for West
Australian, and Australian, histories.
Firstly, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the opening speaker, Sophie Loy-Wilson, of
Sydney University, investigate the Broome pearl-shelling industry, and more particularly the employment of Eastern Indonesians (‘Kupangers’) in it well into the 20 th Century; and the encouragement of this practice by the Dutch East Indies government.
Now this signals to me a very heartening acceptance of West Australian history—in particular—in the greater scheme of Australian history, and indeed world history.
I think one could reasonably say that up to at least the 1980s and probably beyond, WA was very much the under-acknowledged outsider in general histories of Australia, or indeed the empire.
C.M.H. Clark’s monumental A History of Australia (1973) doesn’t even have an index entry for ‘Western Australia’ in its first volume (admittedly the one to do with early exploration and settlement when one might argue that WA as an entity did not exist; but that only emphasises that the history being written was of formally instituted political entities, a point I’ll come back to later).
And here’s the different between the index entries for WA and Tasmania (Van Diemen’s
Land) in his volume II ‘The Beginning of an Australian Civilization, 1824-1851’.
The distinguished WA historian, Geoffrey Bolton, when he wrote his very thoughtful and judicious imperial history, Britain’s Legacy Overseas (in the same year—1973) had to reduce Western Australia to four very brief mentions.
Yet in the AHA conference this year, quite apart from a number of papers that were actually not focussed on Australian history in particular, at least 8 addressed WA history directly, most in the context of wider geographical connections (eg Amanda Nettelbeck’s
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comparison of the use of mounted police in interactions with indigenous peoples in
Western Australia and Western Canada); plus two WA contributions to panel discussions
(cf. Sophie Loy-Wilson)
And that’s not counting the papers that used WA evidence, though their titles/abstracts didn’t necessarily highlight the fact.
The second thing that struck me was Ms Loy-Wilson’s evident knowledge of the Dutch colonial government sources (note her recent intensive Dutch course).
And that the succeeding paper, by Agneiszka Sobocinska (Monash), on the business relationships between Australians and Chinese, and the image of Australian business people, in Shanghai in the 19 th -early 20 th centuries, used the Mandarin-language sources extensively.
When I was first studying history at University, it was quite rare to find an Australian historian studying any but English-language texts. Now, it seems to me, increasingly the younger generation of historians are coming to terms with the fact that if we want to put
Australian, and WA history, in a wider context than just the British end of the British empire, they, and Australian history generally, will need to become more multi-lingual.
And indeed, papers addressing Western Australian/Australian international connections addressed a very wide range of international contacts—yes, with Britain, but also with
India, China, Indonesia, Canada, and New Guinea—that is, the relationship between colonised countries and societies, rather than between each of them individually and the colonising power.
I think this really may signal the end of that strange phenomenon of Eurocentric Australian history—ie, Australia as if it had no relationship, or no context, outside of Britain.
These exciting developments allow us also to make better sense of our migrant history; addressing it not just in terms of how Australians have reacted to the successive waves of migration that make up about 98% of our population; nor even how those migrants experienced the process of becoming Australian; but in terms of what international, and homeland, concerns continued to engage and affect the lives of migrants in Australia (much more ‘migrant-centred’ questions.
My example here would be the paper at the AHA by Robert Mason: ‘ Losing Goa:
Liberation, memory and nostalgia amongst Portuguese Indians in Australia.
’
However, to return to Western Australian history as it was in the past:
I think the reaction of Western Australian historians to the underwhelming appearance of our state in the national historical narrative was, at first, to localise; to produce political, or economic, or settler histories like the ‘Australian’ ones, but focussing on WA; or to continue a long tradition of writing histories of particular WA institutions (quite often commissioned by the institution themselves):
Examples of the first strategy might be:
 Vera Whittington Gold and typhoid: two fevers: a social history of Western Australia,
1891-1900 (1988)
 Or Lenore Layman’s Organise! A visual record of the labour movement in Western
Australia (1988).
Of the second we might note such enterprises as Eugene Perez’s publication of the
Kalumburu War Diary (1981)
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Or J.S.H. Le Page’s, Building a state: the story of the Public Works Department of Western
Australia, 1829-1985 (1986).
Don’t get me wrong—I don't think either of those are bad ways of writing history, and I’m glad to see that they’re both continuing, with, say, Lesley van Schoubroeck’s The Lure of
Politics: Geoff Gallop’s Government, 2001-2006 (2010); or Fiona Skyring’s Justice: a history
of the Aboriginal legal Service of Western Australia (2011).
But they’re by no means the only way in which the past has changed, in Western Australian and other histories in the last 20 years.
And here I come to my third reflection on the AHA conference; the amazing prevalence of papers concerned with affect, emotion, and cognate topics such as nostalgia, embodied experience in the past, and so on).
Not only was there a whole History of Emotions stream (9 complete sessions!) at the conference, together with its own plenary by David Lederer, intriguingly entitled ‘The
Sexual Revotion of 1525”:
But many papers in the main conference, or in other streams (such as that run by the
Australian Women’s History Network ) also addressed emotion, affect, or its cognates— such as the paper by Barbara Brooks in the Women’s History steam on ‘Sisterly Intimacy and Estrangement’ in a 19 th -20 th C Canadian/European case; or Robert Mason’s ‘Losing
Goa: Liberation, memory and nostalgia’ or Rosemary Kerr’s ‘Connecting Place, Memory and
Emotion: The Great Ocean Road; a Memorial Landscape’.
Both of the latter were in the main sequence of papers.
Indeed, so prevalent has this practice of a history of emotions become, that some historians are now talking of an ‘affective turn’ in history—like the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1970s-
1980s.
But why should this be so? Is it just a whim? A passing interest in something historians haven’t investigated much to date?
What does it, and will it, do for our writing of history?
Answering this question involves us asking, even, ‘What is the history of emotions?’. In common with many new(ish) varies of history, it’s perhaps more often practised than described.
Is it:
• the history of how people have felt/expressed/evoked a set of emotions we already know
(fear, anger, love)? A: well, yes, in the sense that this has been done (Rosenwein, Anger’s
Past, Robin Corey, Fear: the history of a political idea (2004): Jean Delumeau Sin and fear: the emergence of a Western guilt culture, 13 th -18 th centuries (1990).
But this has problems: have the same feelings/phenomena always been classed as emotions? Note that the word doesn’t seem to turn up before c. 1425.
Note that the ‘passions’ (talked about earlier) tend to include things like zeal, or contemplation, or contrition, or godly devotion, which we don’t really recognise as emotions now.
So if we write only this history, are we imposing very simple anachronistic blinkers on our study? And not really getting to grips with the big histories, and major changes, in emotions over time?
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• or is it, then, a history of what emotions are taken to be at any one time, and how these definitions and descriptions change?
A: yes, and some work in this field has been done, but a lot more remains (Cf. Thomas
Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (2003).
Or is it:
• general cultural history of how emotions are regulated, or the social norms governing their expression and reception (Peter Stearns, ‘Emotionology’: cf. TV competitions nowadays) Answer: yes, and that’s important.
The great thing about this kind of cultural history is, I think that it widens our views exponentially of what kinds of history we can study. If history were just the history of politics and states, then inevitably the history of WA cannot really exist before the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829.
Whereas the history of cultures, and the affective relationships between and within them, can be explored wherever there are humans (or perhaps even hominids) to create and reenact them.
No wonder, then that books like Ian Crawford’s We Won the Victory: Aborigines and
outsiders on the northwest coast of the Kimberley (2001) can build the contacts that northwestern Australian indigenous people had with trepang gatherers from Indonesia, and their mutual cultural impacts, from the seventeenth century onwards into a seamless narrative leading to modern Indigneous/white relationships in the Kimberley.
No wonder that historians and anthropologists are beginning to return even to the question of the first Dutch contacts with Indigenous peoples, in the 17 th century.
One of the things our Centre is particularly interested in, is the power of emotional regimes in Europe in the 16 th -17 th centuries, to affect the contact histories of the colonial era.
Cf. the long-standing European idea that children, animals or demons don’t really feel emotions fully, and the effect this has on colonising/colonised relationships.
Cf. Tiffany Shellam’s work on Roshendo Salvado’s recognition of Indigenous love for country.
Or finally: should a history of emotions be the study of
• what ‘emotion work’ do emotions perform—politically, socially, culturally, even economically?
Most psychologists now argue that emotions do decision-work (even what we think of as rational decisions are actually partly emotional ones).
So if human decision-making has any influence in history, emotions are part of it and we need to know what they were and how they produced the effects they did!
But some theorists of the history of emotions—such as Joanna Bourke 1 -- are even more precise in their thinking about the role of emotions in large-scale social and political change.
Bourke, for instance, suggests that emotions act to:
• divide people into categories that may cross class, gender and ethnicity
1 Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History
Workshop Journal, 55 (2003), 111-133.
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• instigate and inscribe power-relationships
• cope with widespread social anxieties (cf. her bombing example).
And here, I think, is where some of the most exciting work is being done.
For my last example from the AHA, I’d like to talk about a fascinating paper by Dr. Sharon
Crozier-de Rosa, from the University of Wollongong, entitled ‘Shame, Feminine Sacrifice and the great War in British and Australian Anti-Feminist Discourse’
This paper investigated the public rhetoric about the anti-conscription debate in Australia, and the combined anti-war and pro-suffragette debate in England.
In both of these, public shame and ridicule were powerfully conveyed by conservative media in both countries (adjectives such as ‘laughable’, for instance, were regularly used of suffragettes, and they were almost always lampooned in caricatures as the opposite of the desirable, good woman—especially in refusing to produce male babies and send them off to be soldiers).
One might well argue that here, power-relationships were re-emphasised (state over women); categories were created (mad women, female traitors to their menfolk and their country); and war anxieties were diverted onto a ‘scapegoat’ group that could be blamed and shamed.
But, as Crozier-de Rosa nicely pointed out, the two processes were not quite the same in
England and Australia.
Probably because Australian women already had the vote, and could use it in the conscription referenda, the shaming mechanisms here seemed devoted not to silencing and, as it were ‘othering’ the female anti-conscription vote; but to producing a kind of
‘repentance and reform’ movement—persuading women who had been wrongly convinced of the evils of conscription to change their views, and become ‘rational’ women citizens.
(And vice-versa in England).
Here, it seems to me, are the ways in which the history of emotions—together with other types of history (eg. Environmental history)—open up possibilities for Western Australian history to become an exciting and integral part of Australian and world histories. With these new types of history, we don’t have to see WA history as just the national history in small and in loco; it can comprise both local institutional studies, and much wider comparative studies. We can reach back even into the era when Dutch sailors first saw the
Australian coastline; we can make distinctive contributions to studies of how affect and emotion inflect contact histories between first peoples and settler-colonists worldwide; we can show how emotional readings impacted on Australian/Asian relationships right through the 19 th to the 21 st century. In a phrase, West Australian history can take its true, and vital, place on in the great narratives of world history.
Winthrop Professor Philippa Maddern
2012
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