Sydney, Australia
Having decided to write up my Australian family history as a blog, as if written by various ancestors at different times, in the language of the day – so great4 grandmother Mary Pitt writing in 1800 would have written in the style of Jane Austen for instance, and her grandson in the mid-1800s in the style of Charles Dickens, and so on, which I thought would be great fun to do, which it was, and to some extent still is – I’ve hit a problem.
It’s one thing knowing your ancestress emigrated to New South Wales in 1801 with her four children and was granted land, thanks to a family connection with Lord Nelson, on the Hawkesbury River. But history is all about detail, and I don’t have the faintest idea what day to day life would have been like for a middle-class but penniless widow in her fifties arriving here in the very earliest days of settlement, at a time when they were still making things up as they went along.
So when I heard there was a one-day history festival happening at the New South Wales Writers’ Centre in Sydney I went along with great expectations.
I’ve attended a few writers’ festivals in my time thanks to my job at The Literary Consultancy back in England, but none was quite so fascinating as this was, for unexpected reasons.
The first session was about ‘The uses and abuses of Australian history’. ‘The dominant history of Australia is colonial, white and male’, said the blurb, ‘so where do Aboriginal people and women fit into the picture?’
Now I know the teaching of history is a thorny topic – especially in England, because there’s so much of it and you can’t possibly cover it all, so what do you leave out? My history rather oddly finished just before WW2 – and I also know that people of my generation here were largely taught British history. These days the focus seems to be on Australian history, but since the current government believes Australians should be celebrating the achievements of the last two hundred years, rather than punishing themselves for the nastier things they did to the people who’d lived here for tens of thousands of years before that, they (the government) are pumping money into a curriculum that focuses on Australia’s involvement in world wars. It’s as if, said the speaker Henry Reynolds – historian, writer, known to everyone here but again, not to me – Australian History began on Anzac Day, 25 April 1915.
It seems to me that no matter what one’s views are on the ‘aboriginal problem’ – which of course is my problem too now I’m an Australian citizen (you can’t have the privileges without the responsibilities) – at the very least children should be taught what happened two hundred years ago when Governor Phillip and his band of merry convicts set foot in Sydney Cove in 1788 and claimed ownership of the land from under the noses of its current inhabitants. At the risk of sounding naïve I don’t see why teaching facts should be deemed politically correct, or left-wing, or party political in any way. But I got the feeling that that is exactly how it’s regarded here.
I’m not about to delve into aboriginal affairs, about which I know very little; but as a periodic traveller to this country over the years I’ve noticed the changes in local concerns. I was here in 2000 when thousands of people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge to protest at the treatment of indigenous Australians, and in particular at the then (and now) Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to say ‘Sorry’ to them for the terrible things the whites have done to them over the centuries – which they have done, and horribly recently too. The sight of all those people (on television) was immensely moving, but I did wonder at the same time what it really meant. I also wondered if saying ‘Sorry’ was anything other than tokenistic, and largely meaningless. I thought much the same the other day when the various chairs began the sessions by saying ‘I acknowledge the traditional owners of this land’. I have no right to say it but I found it a bit cloying, not to say patronising. I wondered what the aboriginal writers present (on the panel, not among the audience) made of it.
But of course I realise that like everything else, the more you learn about something the more complicated it becomes.
An aboriginal joke – courtesy of Ruby Langford Ginibi, one of the writers at the festival: ‘The definition of an aboriginal nuclear family: two parents, two kids, and an anthropologist.’
