https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59752203-making-australian-history
First review is worth a read
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59752203-making-australian-history
https://historicalragbag.com/2022/03/06/book-review-making-australian-history-by-anna-clark/
Why is this important? For this review it is essential. Making Australian History is about the history of History in Australia, how it has shaped our national identity, but also how History has been shaped.
Clark firmly positions the creation of Australian History at the same time as Australia was forming a national identity, but also at the time the study of History was being formalised and professionalised internationally.
This ‘scientific’ concept of History, where facts are immutable, personal opinion should not come into it, where History is unbiased, is at the core of the book.
Largely, the sidelining of non traditional sources including: oral history, First Nations history (through oral history and art work amongst other sources), family histories, local histories, non professional histories, fiction (including poetry), and other unwritten sources. By bringing these voices and sources back into the traditional view of History Clark makes the History richer, and explores how these alternative sources enable alternative voices to be heard.
First Nations art work, to convict songs, to photographs, to poetry, to fish traps. This is not say Clark excludes traditional sources with: speeches, early histories of Australia and other books also receiving the spotlight. Clark places these alternative sources on the same standing as traditional sources.
It is easy to see First Nations history as being suppressed completely once colonisation occurred, but Clark tells the story of its continuation as First Nations people continued to tell their own stories in many forms to advocate and fight for their rights. Their history is there, even in colonial sources, it is just often put aside by broader History.
Clark’s chronology follows History in Australia. She works from contact through to Federation (where the nation building drove a more blinkered version of Australia national identity that you see in the 1800s).
Continues through convict stories (as in the reality not the romanticised version) and their displacement as a ‘stain’.
Then through the White Australia policy and how History facilitated Australia’s national narrative as white.
On to protest (with an especially illuminating looks the the extremely constructed national History on display at the Australian sesquicentenary).
Along to The Great Australia Silence (the deliberate exclusion of First Nations people from Australia’s history).
Into family history (including her own- Clark is the granddaughter of Manning Clark) with a special focus on Judith Wright’s work.
Along to gender and women’s history, being both written into History but also looking at History overall from a domestic female lens. Continuing to emotion and ‘bias’ and the History Wars.
On to the importance of imagination in History, looking especially at Tony Birch’s poems that draw on the letters of First Nations people living on reserves.
Then examining Country, looking at the concept of ‘Country’ and whether it can be expressed in Western History but also the affect of landscape on History.
Concluding with time looking, at the concepts of deep time and how it supersedes modern Australian History by thousands of years.
Clark concludes with “our understanding and practices of History reflects values and beliefs at a point in time as much as it does any knowledge about historical time: histories shift and change with each iteration, according to their context, author and audience