BackProfessor Jill Roe

Professor Jill Roe

The Challenge of the Past

What is the future of history as a profession? How is history understood in Australia today? Is the Australian situation part of a world wide trend?

Thank you. I must first congratulate the NLA for sponsoring this conference. It is the best evidence yet that, at a time when intellectual culture is itself under challenge in this country, the various stakeholders can stand together. We are here, I take it, on a collective voyage of discovery and renewal, with particular reference to the future of Australian history. It is both my duty and my pleasure to be here today.

Please note that mine is a rather wider brief than the state of Australian history, although that's my main field and I will be taking most of my examples from it. That wider brief is evident from the three questions set out for this session in the program—for which I must also congratulate the Library; I especially like the angle parking in Frank Hurley's Stuart Street, Ballarat—the questions being: (1) What is the future of history as a profession in Australia? (2) How is history understood in Australia today? and (3) Is the Australian situation part of a world-wide trend?

I think you'll agree with me that these are big questions. When I received the Director-General's invitation last November while on leave in Boston I nearly fainted at the challenge which confronted me in the near future, never mind the past. But looking at the questions again, I won't say exactly how recently, I found that I had within me the requisite resources. Reflecting on the Slough of Despond, where thinking about 'the state of history' seems so often to end up these days, it came to me that I should read John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1687); which incidentally Australian historian Beverley Kingston recalls hearing read aloud in primary school in Far North Queensland in the late 1940s. In this conference, we are not called to struggle through all the swamps and valleys and byways from the City of Destruction to Mount Zion; but if we are to even glimpse the Delectable Mountains, we must surely lift ourselves out the Slough of Despond right away.

That must be my first and preliminary task. We won't get far into the inter-related understandings of history, literature, culture and journalism envisaged by the program if there's too much gloom and doom about the state of history at the outset. I cannot offer anything as entertaining as Bunyan's trek; but it was Hopeful who got Christian over his last great obstacle, and as will be seen, I am by now in hopeful mode about the future of the historical profession. What is more, like that hero of our forbears, Bunyan's Christian, previously called Graceless, I mean to make a strong start; and, encouraged by what I take to be wider international trends in history today, which I think have as yet to make an impact in this country, I aim to confront directly what I take to be 'the challenge of the past'. In doing so, you may think I go right over the top; but its whole lot better than crouching in the trenches. I believe we should all take heart from the central thesis of British labour historian Eric Hobsbawm's On History (1997), which is, that 'history is engaged in a coherent intellectual project, and has made progress in understanding how the world came to be as it is today'.

That said, it must be acknowledged that of late 'the challenge of the present' has been preoccupying the historical profession rather more than 'the challenge of the past'. We have heard about the killing and even the end of history; and the Australian Historical Association (AHA), which is the premier organisation of academic and professional historians in this country, has done its best to ensure that people are informed about the state of things here. Thus, in July 1998, the AHA put out a press release headed 'The Crisis of History' detailing an alarming trend in staff losses in university history departments, and the likely effects in terms of undergraduate enrolments, and on the training of history teachers. My own Department features in that press release; and my comment then was that 'like the poor in America, we manage'. We still do. Things have gotten much worse in terms of continuing staff, the number of which will plummet to 8 in 2001 (from 25 in 1994); but not in terms of numbers of students, nor in the production of wonderful young history teachers, nor in opportunities for beginning historians, who now outnumber continuing staff, on a pittance to be sure, but with hope. And at last, a few weeks back, a halt has been called to the budget-driven downsizing.

Meanwhile, the profession is looking to its strengths. And for allies. The AHA Bulletin - not everyone's top reading, but worth a look if you want to know what's going on in the historical profession - has been running a series on 'Saving History', with emphasis on the importance of unity and self help. More generally speaking, since the alarm was sounded in 1998, there have been signs of recovery, for example an important national inquiry into school history is about to report. And if I am not mistaken, this conference will be a rallying point.

Sometimes the challenge of the present seems overwhelming. Historians of all stripes point to a technological transformation of dimensions not seen since the Industrial Revolution began in late eighteenth century Britain, dating from the 1970s and still far from over. I'm thinking here of Hobsbawm, whose essays On History I have just cited, and the brilliant but now curmudgeonly US intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, whose most recent publication is One Nation, Two Cultures (1999), subtitled A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution. This pair would not be likely to agree on much; but on the transformation they are as one; and I should add, both are sticking to their guns.

Just as well, you may say. It is an ongoing worry that the emerging culture seems far from keen on the purer forms of history. It too seems preoccupied with 'the challenge of the present', which is of course great. In this context, you may imagine my concern when I got wind of a rumour that you only need one history department in Sydney. (Thankfully my Vice-Chancellor Professor Di Yerbury is committed to the survival of the Humanities, so I calmed down after a bit.) But, in an unrelated expression, not so long ago a younger colleague in a nearby field who I won't name did suggest in his regular press column that history wasn't needed any more, except perhaps for a bit of memory work.

I doubt that would have been said or even thought a generation ago. But its probably true by now that, for all those who say and really feel that they love history, there are as many who fear the past or even despise it for its alleged conservatism. Despising the past is not new - 'History is bunk' Henry Ford famously said - though it has taken new forms in the IT age. But fear of the past is probably rather more novel, catching up with you, holding you back, and so on. Against this fear, what protection? Traditionally religion and the law have comforted people, but these seem to have become less than reassuring. And what is this fear about? In Australia today it is easy enough to see at least some of what it’s about - loss of property, loss of status, loss of identity. At present, that is to say, the very idea of a past has become a bit of a worry to many Australians.

That's no reason to dispense with it. I am on record as saying there is 'an Australian way', but that it is a narrow way and not always easy to find, especially in what is—to coin a cliche—an age of transition (Contesting the Australian Way, 1998). To pin my flag to the mast, I do not believe that the sources of innovation are exhausted in this country—though I note that my colleague Stuart Macintyre has his doubts, in his splendid new Outline History of Australia (1999)—and I do believe that Australian history is itself a source of encouragement in this regard. Which is not to endorse what Geoffrey Blainey has so effectively dubbed either 'the three cheers' or the 'black armband' view of Australian history— (I'm told the latter has something to do with Australian Rules football.)


I began my address by promising a strong start. Here it is, at last. The challenge of the past is to get it right, a notion I must return to. How simple it sounds. How difficult it is to achieve, especially in Australia, a subtle country as writer David Martin first observed and the eminent Australian historian Geoffrey Bolton later demonstrated, in his contribution to the Oxford History of Australia, Volume 5: The Middle Way (1990). Of particular relevance today is how, and how far, that goal of getting it right can be achieved, as we press forward to 'new narratives'. But let us not be deceived about the alternative. As is plain from Timothy Garton Ash's 'essays, sketches, and despatches from Europe in the 1990s', entitled the History of the Present (2000), getting it wrong has consequences, sometimes dire consequences; and its not hard to appreciate that point right now. To many Australians, we are standing in—Bunyan would have put it all in CAPS—the Capital of Getting It Wrong.

I now seek to emphasise that history is an evolving body of knowledge; to sketch the means by which that knowledge is mostly secured, and if there's time, to indicate what happens when aspects are generally agreed to have been secured; and thereby, to cast light on where we now stand. It needs to be said in our short-run civilisation that historical knowledge is seldom attained at speed, though like any other field of knowledge, from time to time there are great flashes of insight into the issues which confront us, as happened with the four big books on Australian women's history in the 1970s (by Conlon and Ryan, Summers, Kingston, and Dixson) and again with The Other Side of The Frontier (1981) by Henry Reynolds, who is here today. As the publisher Carmen Calill once remarked to me, the trouble with history is it takes so long to do, about four years for a decent book she said. Similarly, there must be in any great intellectual endeavour some dross. Whatever, it takes time to sort; but the sorting does occur, be it by examiners, assessors, reviewers, or as has survived in the ARC Green Paper, peer review, albeit in a somewhat different structure. An equally valid point along these lines is that historical knowledge is inevitably reviewed, recreated and extended in every generation.

The emphasis on historical knowledge may seem surprising. But, I am happy to say, it’s where it’s at in terms of research and scholarship right now. To quote a resume from the AHA's recent submission to the previously noted national inquiry into school history:

Historical knowledge as a concept has been somewhat at a discount in recent years, due to relativistic post-modernist critiques. However it now seems clear that history has effectively re-asserted itself as a discipline making significant truth claims (Evans, 1997, McCullagh, 1998), and that the notion of history as an evolving body of knowledge has re-emerged (Hobsbawm, 1997). Meanwhile, history as a subject has been successfully reinventing itself in various ways ... and community expectations of historical knowledge have never been higher (Davison, 2000).

Closer to home are the recent powerful and admirable statements—and actual demonstrations in published work—by La Trobe historian and 1999 Boyer lecturer Inga Clendinnen. At the NSW History Awards last year, Clendinnen expressed her ‘unfashionable conviction’ that 'history is uniquely useful ... because it is prepared to analyse human situations in their particularity and their complexity'. I expect in the coming sessions to hear that word 'uniquely' challenged; but it is a welcome sign of a changing intellectual culture again valuing history for its own sake. Similarly, there is a growing recognition—or is it just an overdue articulation?—that the relativist position is unable to face the big questions, such as the Holocaust, or the character and costs of social transformation.

Let me now give a tiny but reassuring example of what 'getting it right' really means. Georgia Kamperos, a Mascot teacher and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, tired of hearing that the HSC was biased against boys because girls are doing better in most subjects. So she painstakingly researched some quarter of a million exam results dating back to 1884, when girls were first allowed to sit the matriculating exam, to 1995; and lo! She found that girls have always done better than boys. 'Facts [not ideology]', quoth a Sydney Morning Herald editorialist (11/2/2000) 'should be the basis of decisions made in the NSW school system'. Indeed. But it took a history thesis to ascertain them. Now we can get back to real issues, which are re-establishing history in schools in the States were it has been subsumed into something mysterious and disagreeable called SOSE’ strengthening history teachers in their noble task’ and re-asserting history's right to an independent existence in universities.

Well, I hope we can get back to those issues. Unfortunately there are plenty of examples of the disregard of historical knowledge, for one or another reason. No doubt we have not heard the last of gender bias in the HSC. Likewise, its been a long haul, even with history students, to secure the point that the historic Referendum in 1967 was not about extending the vote to Aboriginal Australia, but about counting Aboriginal Australians in the Census and granting concurrent powers to the Commonwealth along with the States. The fact is that Aboriginal Australia already had the vote at national level in 1967—granted after an enquiry in 1961—even if significant obstacles remained to its exercise, such as voter registration in remote Australia.

Moreover, historical research has shown that in some places, a few Aboriginal Australians had been exercising the vote since before Federation, up to the 1940s, as on some South Australian missions. Take in that it was not until 1948 that any kind of Australian citizenship was established—for which we have to thank India, and the end of empire—and the array of rights which have gradually evolved, for example in the field of social policy, and you begin to see just how complex the story is. But the work has been done; and it offers a crucial perspective, which could be used constructively. Unfortunately as far as I know, it not used at all.

On a lighter note, it doesn't seem to matter how often historians note that it was the Daily Telegraph which put around the idea that a religious sect built an amphitheatre at Balmoral Beach in the 1920s to watch the second coming of Christ through Sydney Heads. As I hope my own work on theosophy in Australia has shown, the reality is much more interesting; but this urban myth seems to be immortal.

A word on actually getting it wrong. In general I would say—and I'm not talking about undergraduate essays here—serious instances are far fewer than you might think, due to the many checks and balances built in to the writing and publishing of history. And there's always public comment, the final and sometimes devastating reality check. Here every writer will surely nod. An instance which springs to mind is Miles Franklin's derision when fellow writer Jon Cleary—I hope I recall this letter correctly—referred to 'dark-eyed sheep', which was verging on the awesome. Everyone in her day knew merinos' eyes were—again I hope I recall correctly—blue. But inadvertent error can be, and in my experience usually is, corrected.

This may seem to avoid the larger questions about the nature of history. But I’m not going to pause long over them, as it will doubtless be appreciated by an audience like this that writing history is not a straight forward matter, either with regard to evidence or to its interpretation, and opinions may legitimately differ. And as many an eager historian has found—there have been some outstanding American examples in the areas of women's work and Inuit land right—appearing in court is something else. Actually I would not pause at all, except that the Prime Minister has been expressing his views on the subject of late. Speaking at Lismore on 4 February 2000, Mr Howard criticised the teaching of history saying there is too much concentration on issues and too little on the sequence of events these days. We are getting used to hearing such strictures, but they should not be allowed to pass without comment. In any event, the difficulty of getting it right' is not just in my perhaps too hopeful view, a matter of answering a 'what is history?' type question.

At this point, I am mindful of the temptations which beset the Pilgrim after escaping the Slough of Despond, such as the lure of Mr Worldly Wise, from the town of Carnal Knowledge, who directs Christian to a village called Morality, where it is supposed his problems can all be solved by Mr Legality. Christian goes part way, but turns back when confronted by a danger. There will always be turnings back in the pursuit of historical knowledge, and for good reason. And more importantly there will often be moments of uncertainty. So I must make myself quite clear at this point on what I think are the real difficulties that confront us as we face the challenge of the past. For the most part, I suggest, we Australians are presently laid about with history which is not yet quite right. Its not so much that what we have is right or wrong, but that in many areas, especially contemporary history, we have a way to go in getting it right.

I do not hesitate to say that the history of children is one of these areas. We are amid a passionate and important debate on the Stolen Generations. But it is as yet trivially phrased. And unfortunately, we do not have a general perspective on the question of child welfare in this country—all eight jurisdictions—over time which would add the requisite depth and sophistication to discussion; which I think is really what the Australian people at their best want to hear. Where exactly does this terrible story fit in with the growth of child rescue and reform organisations in the 19th century, with forced child emigration from Britain from the late nineteenth century until quite recently, and with the forced rendering up for adoption of, to use the old stigmatising phrase, illegitimate children of unmarried mothers, which went on until the 1970s? This is not by now a matter of research but of scholarship/synthesis, an approach which unfortunately neither private not public funding bodies seem to be at all interested. It would be hard work to put it all together, but if we really wanted to know we'd insist it be done. I cannot agree entirely with the journalists who assert that the people respond in an unfeeling way to polls on the plight of Aboriginal Australian because they do not feel responsible for the actions of the few. On the contrary, I would suggest they feel dreadfully implicated in the larger story. One of my sisters adopted three children in the 1960s. But the point is that we have here an incoherency. The whole story would not necessarily be a nice one. But noone expects it to be; and historians should not aim to be popular.

As often as not, I am suggesting, there are serious obstacles to getting things right. I do recommend Bunyan as a wonderful allegory—metaphor?—here especially. Even after finding and entering the wicket gate and shedding his awful burden, and despite a handy new coat of armour, he faced the Hill of Difficulty, then a Valley of Humiliation, even the Valley of the Shadow of Death and then the dangerous and deadly Vanity Fair, not to mention distractions like Mr Talkative, and the awful Giant Despair. But he did also glimpse the Delectable Hills, and ahead lay the Plains of Ease. For historians, this means research libraries, accessible archives, well-funded museums and effective heritage work—the whole panoply of endeavour which we now know as 'the history world'. And all is not well there, either I'm afraid. To put it plainly, as Hobsbawm does in one of his essays, without sources history cannot exist.

Here I don my AHA President's hat. I hope you won't mind. It is after all Canberra, and someone out there may be listening for these important issues to come up.

First, regarding research libraries, last year the NLA's Library Collections Task Force sponsored a nationwide survey in research facilities in University Libraries, based on English and Psychology. The ensuing report, Looking for Books, points to serious defects in the management and funding of this crucial aspect of research infrastructure. The most notable finding was the some 50% of respondents felt their home libraries were inadequate for anything beyond undergraduate teaching. I understand the NLA intends to publicise this finding and some remedies, possibly during this conference. This is very welcome. But it must be said more generally that so far as historical research is concerned, technology can't deliver all the answers, not least because of cost, but also because of the open-ended character of historical sources. The extent to which hopes may rest on technology is suggested in a recent and aptly titled paper by Jose-Marie Griffiths 'Why the Web is not a Library', a copy of which I have brought to donate today (from The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century, n.d.)

And, as one who has had the inestimable privilege of working the Harvard Library—or some eleven of the ninety-odd libraries of which it is comprised—and the wonderful new British Library at St Pancras, I must add that the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated. No doubt the research libraries of the 21st century will be different, but they still have to be chock full of real sources 'New narratives' will emerge only if libraries are sufficiently well-funded to collect and preserve the materials, which are increasingly diverse, on which those narratives can be based.

As well there is the question of the ancillary aids, the intellectual tools required to keep track of those sources. It is of concern that the last big effort in this area was made for the Bicentenary, in the five reference volumes of Australians: A Historical Library. Some of those volumes may well last forever for example the Historical Atlas. But the bibliographical volume was completed for publication in 1984. That's nearly twenty years ago. How is an update to be done? There are these days such things as ( I think) SPIRT grants. But these collaborative projects do not seem to well geared to humanities type projects. My enquiries suggest that neither the Libraries not individual researchers can summon up the requisite seeding money, and that there's a gap in official thinking about research initiatives when it comes to areas like history.

Second, regarding archives, again I will go national in my comments. In 1998 the National Archives of Australia released a discussion paper Making Choices, to which the AHA was pleased to make a response. It was a modulated response. A main concern was with the 'outsourcing' of archival functions, also the appraisal and disposal of records. The AHA response recommended that

a. The Archives Act be revised to specify that the archives are the property of the Australian people;

b. consultative groups be established to enable researchers to have a real say in the disposal of records; and that

c. there be appropriate penalties for the improper destruction of files.

But, we hear, culling is proceeding; and so far as I know, we historians may be remiss here for not pressing the point, no consultation process has been established.

Let this be thought pettifogging, I would like you to hear the remarks made by Janet McCalman, again at the NSW Premier's Awards last year, when she won the Community and Regional History prize for her work Sex and Suffering (1998). This is what she said, in part:

The most important responsibility that governments bear for history is in the making, preserving and public management of records: records of its activities for the future scrutiny of an open society, and records for the stories of human lives its agencies touched, whether as its employees, its clients, its prisoners, patients, students or voters. These latter records of the interactions between individuals and the state and its agencies are often the only historical records we have of ordinary people. Government archives are essential to the writing of history from below.

Mention should also be made of the Butlin Archive at the ANU. The on-off threats to this outstanding collection of business and labour records is a matter of great concern. There are lots of new narratives stashed away there too .

Third, and very briefly, I touch on heritage. You'll be pleased to know I do have any particular policy barrow to push here. All I want to say is that I have been astonished at how 'the material culture' has taken off among students; and that while I have been traversing the rougher bits of the terrain, here the story seems far from depressing. Many people will recall dark and impoverished buildings dating from Victorian times—and to be fair, dreams too. Today's libraries, archives and museums are vibrant institutions of historical culture; and more and more Australians learn their history there. All the more important then that any fraying and actual decay be protested, and that sufficient resources are found to protect achievements to date. The past is after all a great asset, and maintaining access to it is itself a major challenge.


Not much time remains to reflect on where we stand now. To recap, the challenge of the past is to get it right, or rather, more nearly right. There are some real obstacles to be overcome along the way, but also many opportunities. These will undoubtedly foster 'New narratives'. By way of conclusion, I pose the question of just how new these narratives need to be. We may be confronting what Garton Ash has called, in another context, 'a difficult past'. But that only means it requires more attention, not less. Thank you.

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