Abstract
In many societies history is kept alive in oral form, through ballads, songs and stories. Some indigenous cultures have passed down oral traditions that reveal geological events dating back over 10 000 years. In many cultures and contexts the first histories were not written. Biblical stories were first transmitted orally. Some of our best-known written stories, including that of Robin Hode (Robin Hood), first published in a broadsheet, were based on oral ballads. In Sicily, storytellers travelled between towns, using painted illustrations and songs to enthral crowds with histories pleasing to the eye and ear. Indigenous people today — Native Americans, Indigenous Australians and many others — are proud of the songs, dances and ceremonial media through which they tell their histories.
I went to visit my four sisters, carrying a tape recorder and my imagined map of the family. It was unsettling to learn that each sister has her own quite individual map of that territory: the mountains and rivers are in different places, the borders are differently constituted and guarded, the history and politics and justice system of the country are different, according to who’s talking.
HELEN GARNER, TRUE STORIES1
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Notes
Helen Garner, True Stories (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1996), 52.
Edward B. Tylor, Anthropology (London: Macmillan, 1881), 179.
Julie Cruikshank, ‘Oral history, narrative strategies and Native American historiography: Perspectives from the Yukon Territory, Canada’, in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Clearing a Path: Theorizing the past in Native American studies (New York: Routledge, 2002).
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Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1 (London: William Collins & Sons, 1972);
Ann Curthoys & John Docker, Is History Fiction? (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 126–8.
John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984);
John Berger, ‘The ambiguity of the photograph,’ in Kelly Michelle Askew & Richard R. Wilk, eds, The Anthropology of Media: A reader (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002);
Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005);
Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
David E. Kyvig & Myron A. Marty, Nearby History: Exploring the past around you, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 2000), chapter 7 ‘Visual documents’.
Humphrey McQueen, Suspect History (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1997), 158–9.
See Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of History (Sydney Allen & Unwin, 2000).
Ann McGrath, A. ‘Being Annie Oakley: Modern girls, new world women’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 28.1, 28.2 (2007): 203–31.
Tim Bonyhady & Tom Griffiths, eds, Words for Country: landscape and language in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 1.
Manning Clark, ‘A discovery of Australia,’ in Occasional Writings and Speeches (Sydney: Fontana/Collins, 1980), 68;
A.L. Rowse, The Use of History (London: Hodder & Stoughton, for the English Universities Press, 1946), 42–3.
For a discussion of this kind of journalism, see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992).
Matt Buchanan, ‘Evolution of the modest hero: Iain McCalman talks to Matt Buchanan’, The Sydney Morning Herald (Spectrum), 14 February 2009, 26.
Luisa Passerini, ‘Work, ideology and consensus under Italian Fascism,’ History Workshop Journals, no. 1 (1979): 82-108. Reprinted in Robert Perks & Alistair Thomson, eds, The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 53–62.
Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and meaning in oral history (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
Lorina Barker, “‘Hangin’ out” and “yarnin”‘, History Australia 5, no. 1 (April 2008): 9.1–9.9.
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© 2011 Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath
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Curthoys, A., McGrath, A. (2011). History in 3D. In: How to Write History that People Want to Read. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30496-3_5
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