Abstract
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), the famous American writer and humourist, visited Australia in 1895 as part of a moneymaking lecture tour around the equator. He was broke. Of the many things about the continent with which he was taken, one was its ‘picturesque history — Australia’s speciality’, as he called it.2 By this he meant in the then relatively recently established colonies the propensity of individuals and institutions to make convenient pasts that were usable in the present. History was everywhere to be found in public. Civic promoters gave a ‘capital of humble sheds’ the trappings of ‘the aristocratic quarters of the metropolis of the world’. Didactic monuments and memorials were scattered across the landscape. Tall tales but true were built around self-made men .3
Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
M. Twain, The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain’s Adventures in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006), p. 65; extracts from Mark Twain, Following the Equator, first published 1897.
R. Rosenzweig and D. Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1998 ).
M. Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990 )
D. Thelen, ‘History Making in America’, The Historian, 53 (1991) 631–48
R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture ( London: Verso, 1994 )
D. Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History ( London: Viking, 1996 ).
See, for example, K. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 1998), ch. 8 ‘Australia Remembers’, pp. 412–79.
D. Carter, ‘Working with the Past, Working on the Future’, in R. Nile and M. Peterson (eds) Becoming Australia: The Woodford Forum (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), p. 10: emphasis added.
P. Ashton and P. Hamilton, ‘Facing Facts?: History Wars in Australian High Schools’, Journal of Australian Studies, 91 (2007), pp. 45–59.
See S. Macintyre and A. Clark, The History Wars ( Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003 ), pp. 164–5.
D. Casey, ‘Culture Wars: museums, politics and controversy’, New Museum Developments and the Culture Wars, special issue of Open Museum Journal, 6 (2003) 8–10.
See I. Clendinnen, ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’, Quarterly Essay, 23 (2006) 32–68.
See B. Attwood, ‘Introduction: The Past as Future: Aborigines, Australia and the (Dis)course of History’, in B. Attwood (ed.) In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), pp. vii–xxxviii.
P. Hamilton, ‘Memory Studies and Cultural History’, in H. Teo and R. White (eds) Cultural History in Australia ( Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2003 ), pp. 81–97.
W. Tyler, Survey 2000: A Report of the Survey of Member Societies of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies ( Canberra: Federation of Australian Historical Associations, 2000 ), p. 8.
P. Ashton and C. Keating, ‘Commissioned History’, in G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre (eds) The Oxford Companion to Australian History ( Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998 ), p. 140.
B. Kingston, ‘The Use and Function of Local History’, in The Local History Co-ordination Project, Locating Australia’s Past ( Kensington: University of NSW Press, 1988 ), p. 7.
S. McClean, ‘“Progress the Iconoclast”: Campaigns, Ideologies and Dilemmas of Historic Building Preservation in New South Wales, 1900–1939’, Public History Review, 7 (1998) 25–42.
J. Spurway, ‘The Growth of Family History in Australia’, in The Push: A Journal of Early Australian Social History, 27 (1989) 7–12.
T. Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History ( London: Verso, 2005 ), p. 2.
A. Curthoys and P. Hamilton, ‘What makes history public?’, Public History Review, 1 (1993) 8.
M. Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film ( Abingdon: Routledge, 2007 ), p. 32.
A. Ryan, ‘Developing a Strategy to “Save” History’, Australian Historical Association Bulletin, 87 (1998) 42.
C. Young, ‘Historical Revivalism’, Australian Historical Association Bulletin, 88 (1999) 24.
J. B. Gardner, ‘Contested Terrain: History, Museums, and the Public’, The Public Historian, 26 (2004) 12.
H. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life ( New York: Columbia University Press, 2000 ), p. 19.
P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 ), p. 274.
R. Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 ( London: Collins, 1987 ).
S. Macintyre, ‘Hughes and Historians’, Meanjin, 46: 2 (1987) 245.
M. Aveling, review of The Fatal Shore, Australian Historical Studies, 23: 90 (1988) 127.
A. Forst, ‘Fatal ambivalence towards our past’, The Weekend Australian, 21–22 February 1987, p. 14.
Arts NSW, NSW Premier’s History Awards 2006 ( Sydney: Arts NSW, 2006 ), p. 12.
G. Blomfield, ‘Hidden History: Conflict and Community History’, in Community History Program, History and Communities: A Preliminary Survey ( Kensington: University of New South Wales, 1990 ), p. 59.
C. Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City ( Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006 ), p. 8.
G. Denning, ‘Some Beaches are Never Closed: Foundation and Future Reflections on the History Institute, Victoria’, Rostrum, 19 (2001) 29.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2009 Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ashton, P., Hamilton, P. (2009). Connecting with History: Australians and their Pasts. In: Ashton, P., Kean, H. (eds) People and their Pasts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36109-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-23446-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)