Las colonias penales de la Australia y la pena de deportación | Concepción Arenal
La obra Las colonias penales de la Australia y la pena de deportación de Concepción Arenal ha sido editada por el profesor Manuel Martínez Neira a principios del año 2020. Publicada en la editorial Dykinson, la aparición de este texto se produce con ocasión del bicentenario del nacimiento de la famosa autora gallega. Se trata de una contribución olvidada que tuvo dos ediciones (1877 y 1895) y que por fin ha recibido un merecido reconocimiento. En concreto esta edición reproduce la primera impresión de 1877 con plena fidelidad, subsanando ciertos ajustes ortotipográficos como las tildes. El editor ha tomado el manuscrito conservado en la Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas para su contraste, cotejo y exactitud. Es de agradecer, por tanto, el acceso al manuscrito al bibliotecario de la institución, D. Pablo Ramírez Jérez. La publicación está disponible en acceso abierto –en pdf e epub–, lo cual facilita su manejo y total disponibilidad. En este sentido, la persistente labor editorial y el continuo trabajo del área de Historia del Derecho y de las Instituciones de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid y de Dykinson a lo largo de estos últimos años merecen un caluroso aplauso. Leia Mais
Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia – ATKINSON-PHILLIPS (PHR)
ATKINSON-PHILLIPS, Alison. Survivor Memorials: Remembering Trauma and Loss in Contemporary Australia. Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2019. 338p. Resenha de: SWAIN, Shurlee. Public History Review, v.27, 2020.
As debate rages about memorials from the past Alison Atkinson-Phillips’ monograph, Survivor Memorials, is particularly timely. However, its focus is not on the past, but on a recent shift in memorial making, the commemoration of trauma amongst the living rather than a focus on the dead. She dates this shift to the 1980s and documents eighty memorials constructed across Australia over the following thirty years. The first half of the book situates these memorials within the wider context of griefwork, memory making and public art. The second explores these theoretical considerations through six case studies. These range from the celebratory memory trail at the site of the Enterprise Migrant Hostel in Springvale, Victoria, through several memorials for Forgotten Australians and bushfire survivors and one remembering a homophobic rape.
These new memorials, Atkinson-Phillips argues, are both personal and political. They offer the opportunity for public performances of mourning, but also bring ‘difficult knowledge’ into public view in the hope that it will be inscribed into community memory. Initially they arose as a result of collaboration between survivor groups and individual artists. But in the wake of inquiries into various categories of historical institutional abuse they have become an integral part of government reparation packages.
This shift, the author suggests, has not been without its complications. Survivors find local site-based memorials more meaningful than the national ones. In part this is because local memorials provide a space for more effective ‘memory work’, creating opportunities for gathering and sharing of stories both in official commemorations and more casual visits. Survivors are only one voice amongst many in the planning of national memorials and often harbour suspicions that the money being directed to commemoration could be being diverted from more practical reparation measures and financial redress that continues to be subject to debate.
Atkinson-Phillips is also concerned with memorials as art, looking at the processes by which they are created, and the toll this sometimes takes on the artist. Collaboration and consultation are key. But consensus is not always possible. The artists who undertake this work often come with experience of similar projects and invest them with additional meaning. Those interviewed for this study all reported spending much more on the project than they were paid. Many also talked of the psychological toll and the need to seek help to avoid secondary trauma.
In the short term, the effectiveness of a memorial depends on its acceptance by the group whose trauma it commemorates. In the long term, however, it needs to be embraced by the wider community amongst which it sits. Controversy as to the experience being commemorated can see the memorial neglected or even attacked. The diminution in the survivor group over time can see the significance of the memorial lost, unless there is a public commitment to keeping the uncomfortable story alive.
Survivor Memorials will be of interest to scholars across a range of disciplines from art through to memory studies. It will also be invaluable for people involved in commemoration projects. Atkinson-Phillips’ study ends in 2015, a point at which she suggested that this trend may have reached its peak. However, in the years since there have been more of the inquiries and natural disasters to which these memorials respond. Those involved in developing commemorative projects will learn much from this study.
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De Atenas a Sidney: el cine y la televisión em los Juegos de verano | Juan Gabriel Tharrats
O registro dos Jogos Olímpicos é uma prática cultivada em todo mundo por profissionais e espectadores esportivos. As tentativas de eternizar momentos de superação dos atletas, das nações e do esporte enquanto prática cultural motiva o desenvolvimento de variadas estratégias para documentação. Neste sentido, destacam-se as formas de registros audiovisuais que acompanharam historicamente o nascimento dos Jogos Olímpicos da Era Moderna.
Inegavelmente, o cinema foi testemunho recorrente das transformações do esporte, e, apresentou registros de competições esportivas em produções desde sua origem em diversos países (Grã Bretanha, Austrália e Espanha) e com enfoque em diversas práticas esportivas (MONTIN, 2004). Leia Mais
The Historian’s conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History – MACINTYRE (PHR)
MACINTYRE, Stuart. The Historian’s conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004. 166p. Resenha de: ARROW, Michelle. Public History Review, v.14, 2007.
Working in television making historical programs throughout 2004, my ‘historian’s conscience’ was occasionally troubled and tested by decisions we had to make about the stories we told. Mostly, these decisions were in the name of brevity, and in some ways, this was extremely useful: you cut to the heart of a story very quickly when you are forced to pare it down to its absolutes. Television resists written history’s potential for unruliness, it forces you to get to the point — quickly. While I would stress that I never felt I did anything unethical working in television, I occasionally found myself asking questions, for example, about the way we treated interviewees. Journalists such as Janet Malcolm have written at length about journalistic ethics — that the role of the journalist is to gain someone’s trust and then to betray it. Having to do this, even in small ways, was somewhat of a rude awakening for me.
So you can understand my excitement when I heard that Stuart Macintyre’s followup to the hugely successful The History Wars (co-written with Anna Clark) was a book that promised a series of essays on the ‘ethics of history’. The question of ethics seemed to be an ingenious response to the hullabaloo of the history wars, to deal with some of the issues these debates have raised: what is the purpose of history? What responsibility do historians have to the past and to their present-day readers? These are all big questions that cut to the heart of why and how we write and work with the past.
I looked through the table of contents, hoping to see essays from historians working in a broad array of fields. All historians, academic and public alike, grapple with ethical questions every day. How, I wondererd, do they make difficult decisions that have concrete consequences for our built environment or our public imaginings of our past.
How do historians deal with mistakes in their work? How might the historical profession respond to personal attacks on individual historians that flout professional codes of ethics? How do professional historians deal with political or ethical pressures on their practice? How can historians engage with the media and still feel ethical? How can academics feed community interest in their work but maintain some distinctions about the craft and practice of history? While The Historian’s Conscience has many engaging and challenging essays about history and ethics, it nonetheless disappointed me. Most of the questions I raised above are not directly addressed by the authors of this collection, although there are interesting and thoughtful essays to be found here. The biggest problem with the book is the narrowness of its scope. All contributors are academic historians, writing safely from the position of tenure or retirement. Macintyre notes (more than once) that he sought contributions from public historians but all had to decline his invitation for one reason or another. One has to ask: how hard did he look for contributors outside the academy? For example, we have Graeme Davison writing about his experiences with the National Museum here, but why not ask one of the Museum’s curators to write of their experience of being in the eye of the history wars storm? Why not ask a less well-known professional historian working at the coalface of heritage conservation or community outreach to write of ethical pressures? The close scrutiny of history engendered by the history wars has arguably had a greater impact on public historians because they do not have the luxury of the buffer zone of the academy; they are communicating with people who do not necessarily have a sympathetic ear for historical research. Yet their work is crucial to public understandings of our past. Most people gain their historical understanding not from the works of academic historians, but from the way the work of historians are translated and adapted for a broader audience through professional history, heritage and conservation, family and local history, museums and historic sites and the media. Beverly Kingston writes in her essay that ‘bad history is not life-threatening like a faulty bridge or a wrongly diagnosed illness’ (p83), and she is right, to a point. But if the professional historian or heritage consultant is unable to persuade those in power that a bridge is historically significant, for example, it might be demolished. Bad history does have consequences for our society and environment. But without contributors from public and professional historians, the Historian’s Conscience cannot fully enter into this debate.
The focus on well-known names also conceals some of the other ethical concerns involved in producing history in an era of publish or perish. The fraught process of navigating university ethics committees is of increasing concern to historians: why include not an essay on this vitally important issue? Some contributors — Penny Russell and Beverly Kingston — discuss their research methods and their reluctance to use research assistants. But research assistants are essential contributors to many contemporary history projects. Why not ask one such research assistant to contemplate their role in the production of such history? Stuart Macintyre could have asked Anna Clark to write on her experience of co-writing The History Wars. Macintyre touches on the ‘valuable contribution’ that research assistants can make in the production of histories (p10) but does not extend this to thinking about the ethical issues around these sorts of research collaborations. How historians might, and ought, to relate to each other was one of the central issues of the history wars debate, so it is a shame that this has been left relatively untouched in The Historian’s Conscience.
Nonetheless, one must review the book at hand, not the book one wishes had been written, and The Historian’s Conscience contains many riches, especially the candid, reflective essays of Penny Russell, Marilyn Lake and Iain McCalman. Lake writes of the difficulties of writing history when the sentiments and political outlooks of the Public History Review, vol 14, 2007 154 contemporary age differ from those in the past. This was particularly complicated for her because she sees her ethical obligation as an historian to ‘explain the past — people’s choices and their sense of themselves — to people living in the present’ (p95). Penny Russell explores the relationship of trust that exists between historian and reader in history, a trust she sees as fostered partly by footnotes but mainly by the ‘analytic, interpretive, narrative “voice” of the historian’ (p110) — the historian who has combed the archival record and who is able to tell us what lies there and what it means. Fiona Paisley and Rhys Issac both emphasise the ways in which remembering the past has important contemporary political implications: Paisley through a discussion of finding painful or offensive material in the archives; Issac, intriguingly, through a discussion of the presentation of America’s colonial past at Colonial Williamsburg. John Hirst gives a clear-eyed account of the ways personal circumstances influence the writing of history, outlining how he found new insights into modes of colonial authority whilst parenting an unruly teenager. All these contributors emphasise that good history requires not a disavowal of personal motivations, but honesty, compassion and empathy.
Iain McCalman’s essay is one of the few to explicitly address issues pertaining to history outside the academy and to really underline the very serious issues that are at stake in the history wars debate: In museums, in the media, in the courts and in the universities, professional historians are being required as never before to defend the truth value of our discipline. We must face the brutal reality that it is the public and the government, rather than our own academic peers, whom we must persuade of our social and intellectual worth and who, directly or indirectly, pay for our research. Part of what is at stake in the History Wars is how we are able to assert and defend our authority as expert professionals. (p155) McCalman is right. We do need to persuade the public and government of the value of our research, particularly in an anti-intellectual climate that has grown so florid that Padraic McGuinness can be appointed to the ARC advisory board with barely a word of protest. McCalman writes lucidly of his experience writing history for a mainstream audience. This is surely one of the most urgent tasks for historians — to explain what we do and how we do it to a public that is clearly interested in Australia’s history.
It seems to me that at the heart of the history wars was a sense that academic historians had lost their authority, lost their control over the telling of the national story. I wonder if this loss of authority was because we have, to a great degree, stopped talking to the nation about its past on terms it understands. We have, for the most part, abandoned this ground to filmmakers, heritage consultants and, at the extreme, to the opinion columnists and their cronies. We need to start claiming it back, in both academic Public History Review, vol 14, 2007 155 and public history contexts. The academic rebuttals of Keith Windschuttle’s work that appeared recently are one way to do this. Opening up the academic conversation about history to a broader spectrum of participants is another. The Historian’s Conscience is a good starting point for this but it is not the last word on the questions of ethics raised by the history wars. Let’s hope the conversations continue.
Michelle Arrow lectures in Modern History at Macquarie University and was a historian-presenter on the ABC-TV series Rewind in 2004. Her first book Upstaged: Australian Women Dramatists in the Limelight at Last (2002) was short listed for several prizes, and she won the 2001 NSW History Fellowship.
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Botany Bay: Where histories meet – NUGENT (PHR)
NUGENT, Maria. Botany Bay: Where histories meet. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005. 156p. Resenha de: MURRAY, Lisa. Public History Review, v.12, 2006.
When I was asked to review Botany Bay: where histories meet, I readily agreed. I was keen to read it: it had received from the Australian Historical Association the inaugural Allan Martin Award for innovative research which makes a significant contribution to Australian history. From all accounts, including the five-star quotable quotes on the back cover by Ann Curthoys, Greg Dening and Bain Attwood, it was a good read. And this review, with its necessary deadline, gave me the perfect excuse to queue-jump the book to the top of my tottering ‘to read’ pile that forever grows beside my bed.
But I approached the actual reading with some trepidation. You see, the only ‘spare’ time I had to read this promising book was on my daily train ride to the city. Botany Bay: where histories meet might be a worthy recipient of the Allan Martin Award, but could it compete with and (more importantly) capture my attention from the inevitable distractions of the commuter train: the hot, overcrowded carriage with standing room only; the boisterous high school students conversing loudly in the vestibule; or the snatches of one-sided mobile conversations about Saturday night’s exploits, the awful day at work or ‘who’s going to pick up the milk’? I needn’t have worried. Maria Nugent is blessed with a clear writing style, that makes the complex seem naturally simple, and an ability to meld theoretical discussions with narrative drive. I was captivated.
As the title and the illustrated cover of the book suggest, Nugent presents the layered histories of Botany Bay. The narrative is structured thematically and roughly chronologically, covering the major ‘events’ and urban development that have occurred at and around Botany Bay. Nugent charts the bay’s transformation from sandy ‘wasteland’ for social outcasts to tourist destination, the emergence of and contestation over the Aboriginal reserve and more recent impacts inflicted by suburbanisation and industrial development. She contests the historiographical tradition that Aboriginal people quickly disappeared from the landscape of Botany Bay. A common thread running through the narrative is that there has always been a permanent Aboriginal population living at Botany Bay.
This straightforward structure belies the subtlety in which Nugent presents the historical narratives of Botany Bay. She is concerned not so much with the events themselves than with the stories that have been told and re-told about Botany Bay. She presents the history of a landscape and illustrates how competing stories and histories define a place and its meaning/s in communities, be they local, regional or national. Throughout the book there is an emphasis upon names: the naming and re-naming of the landscape; who is named in memorials and histories; who is remembered and who is not. Such namings, Nugent argues, are important for what they reveal about contemporary historiographical understandings and political needs. Botany Bay: where histories meet is not just a local history. It is also a history about landscape, place-making, memorialisation, historical remembrance, myth-making and national identity.
To some this may sound dry and theoretical but the narrative is driven by the people and their stories. Oral histories and memories feature throughout the book. It is a compelling read. The book is well illustrated with images placed beside the relevant text rather than being presented in plates. The extended captions reinforce Nugent’s points and enhance the overall presentation of the argument.
Botany Bay: where histories meet presents several histories all at once. First, it is a history of a place. Second, it is the history of people’s connection to a place. And third, it is the story of the formation and transformation of historical remembrance of a place. And it succeeds on all levels. This book should become a standard Australian history text in schools and universities and it deserves to be taken up by the general reading public.
Lisa Murray – Research historian at the Sydney City Council.
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Showing off: Queensland at World Expositions 1862 to 1988 – McKAY (PHR)
McKAY, Judith. Showing off: Queensland at World Expositions 1862 to 1988. Rockhampton; South Brisbane: Central Queensland University Press; Queensland Museum, 2004. 128p. Resenha de: SCHAMBERGER, Karen Liza. Public History Review, v.12, 2006.
From axe heads floating in mercury to the night-time ‘light fantastic’ parade, this book traces Queensland’s official contribution to twenty-three world expositions from 1862 to 1988. Grand events and novel presentations contrast with economic struggle and environmental destruction, all for government propaganda agendas to attract the right kind of British settlers, capital, trade and eventually tourists. Complemented by numerous illustrations which are rich in detail, this is the first publication to provide a comprehensive account of Australian involvement in world expositions. As such it provides an important official historical overview. And McKay ‘encourage[s] others to explore this rich and rewarding topic’(p2).
The ‘era of expositions’ coincides with the period of industrialisation, internationalisation and modernisation which provided world expositions with the rhetoric of progress. Queensland’s contribution to expositions is presented in chronological order through seven thematic chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of the changing fortunes of the state and its place in the world: the transition from British colony to Australian state; the rise and fall of industries and the economy; the exploitation of resources; the ebb and flow of trade, people and investment; and a later focus on relationships with the Asia-Pacific region.
The next six chapters are arranged according to the ways in which expositions represent Queensland’s changing self-image and the purposes these projections of identity have served at specific times. To begin with, Queensland portrayed itself as a resource-rich frontier to attract British settlers, then as a tropical paradise – a land with limitless mineral wealth – a farmer’s paradise and more recently as a tourist attraction and place of leisure. McKay documents the innovations and the determination to participate in world expos despite difficulties of transport, drought and economic downturn, so important was their propagandising function. As with expositions themselves, there is a distinct theme of progress throughout the book culminating in the exposition in 1988 hosted in Brisbane.
McKay joined the Queensland Museum South Bank as a curator in 1988 and was able to observe Brisbane’s World Expo of that year. The book began as a doctoral thesis for the University of Queensland but was extended with the support of the museum when she was awarded the Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship in 2001. The fellowship allowed McKay to conduct her research in American, British and Australian libraries and archives.
Thus McKay’s sources are varied but she is largely reliant on official records. Her sources include: the catalogues of various expositions, government papers and manuscripts, speeches and media coverage. They do not, however, necessarily provide material for an analysis of the forces behind expositions. Nor do they distinguish between formative influences or the legitimisation of these events. McKay does treat most of the sources critically and succeeds in pointing out their flaws and blatant propaganda up until the Brisbane Expo of 1988, though McKay portrays this expo in a highly positive light: it ‘brought many thousands of interstate and overseas visitors to Queensland’ and benefited local businesses (pp14-15). One of her few criticisms of Expo ‘88 concerns the ‘modest offering’ of the Indigenous Communities of Queensland display (p108).
Otherwise, McKay only mentions other sensitive issues in passing, such as the forcible clearance of old industrial and working-class residential areas which made way for the new, modern Cultural Centre and the ‘magnificent South Bank Parklands’ (p15). Who really benefited from this: a conservative elite with business interests or the general population? The long-term benefits of the Expo promised by the Bjelke-Petersen government are not assessed. That the expo was an intensely local affair with Brisbane residents averaging 7.8 visits each compared to other exposition cities, where the average was two or three repeat visits, is also left unsaid. Brisbane appears to have demonstrated its capacity to put on a show to its own population. Was it really as successful in bringing foreign tourists and investment as the media and the government claimed? Despite providing an overly rosy picture of the success of the Brisbane expo of 1988, Showing Off is a valuable, well illustrated and comprehensive examination of the history of Queensland through its contribution to world expositions. Hopefully this book will inspire further research into Queensland’s and Australia’s contribution to world expositions.
Karen Schamberger – Assistant curator at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra.
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Australians and Greeks: volume III: The later Years – GILCHRIST (PHR)
GILCHRIST, Hugh. Australians and Greeks: volume III: The later Years. Sydney: Halstead Press, 2004. 432p. Resenha de: ASHTON, Paul. Public History Review, v.12, 2006.
Hugh Gilchrist’s Australians and Greeks: the Latter Years is the third and final volume in a remarkable trilogy. The origins of this enormous project can be traced back to Greece. As Australia’s Ambassador in Athens in the later 1960s, Gilchrist was told the story of the Greek Countess, Diamantina Roma, wife of Sir George Bowen who was the first Governor of Queensland from 1859 to 1868, after whom the town of Roma and the Diamanatina River are named. Fascinated by the links her story signified, he embarked on a research project that literally took over his life. The publication of this handsome volume brings to fruition thirtyfive years of research in both countries into thousands of stories that lie behind the long association between Greece and Australia.
Volumes I and II have already earned Hugh Gilchrist critical praise and a special place within Australia’s Greek community: he was the recipient of the Niki Award by the Australian Hellenic Council and the Cross of St Andrew from the Greek Orthodox Church of Australia. His success as a writer comes not just from dedication but from a talent for selecting material and a very readable style.
The third and final volume reveals in detail neglected aspects of Australian history. There are the Australian who fought for years in Greece behind Nazi lines; and Australia’s leading role in the post-War diplomacy of Southeastern Europe, involving as it did people such as Dr H.V. Evatt and Prime Minister Chifley. Combined with ‘official history’ are intense and moving personal stories which will mean much to those who remember and to descendants of Greeks and Australians of those times.
Gilchrist’s book intersects with a number of different types of history: Australian, Greek and ‘official’ history – as I’ve just mentioned – and oral history which has informed many of the stories he relates. But the work also connects strongly with public history.
Everyday forms of history-making have both transformed and challenged the academic discipline of history. The late Raphael Samuel, a founder of the British History Workshop Journal, proposed that ‘history is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, a historian’s “invention”. It is, rather, a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand hands.’ The writing of books based on thorough research is the most traditional mode of history but it can also constitute public history. And Australians and Greeks can certainly be seen as a work of public history. It is clearly the product ‘of a thousand hands’: there are almost 300 individual acknowledgements in the back of the book. Its engagement with the Greek community also links it to public arenas where history is prized. Australians and Greeks is also an artefact of public history. An artefact is any object created with a view to subsequent use. And Gilchrist most definitely has his eye on the future in writing this and the other volumes.
Its first use relates to history and the community. The past, as we know, is inescapable; it is a vital part of our human existence. From it we derive our cultural identities, collective memories, social authority, mental maps, fond objects and special places. Every social group and movement – ethnic, green, black, nationalist, and so forth – creates its own history. These histories authenticate their stories and legitimate their world views and desires. They give communities a place in the sun. In the process, significant events, people, places and things become woven into individual and collective understandings of the past.
All this is true of this book. Australians and Greeks starts in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of World War II and finishes early in 1953 with the establishment of a full Greek diplomatic legation in Australia: there is a photograph on page 370 of Dimitrios Lambros, Minister of Greece, presenting his credentials to the Governor General, William McKell. The image and the time in which it was taken are significant: the resumption of migration from Greece, dealt with in chapter nineteen, and the extension of assisted passage to Greeks in 1952, marked the political and social rise of the Greek community in Australia. This trilogy, indeed, is in one way a product of this ascent.
A second ‘use’ of Australians and Greeks relates to its function as a documentary. It preserves within its pages images, memorabilia, original written sources, maps and other historical evidence for future generations. It also documents the beginnings of the ascent of the Greek community into mainstream society. Much of this involved ‘generational change in occupations’ which Gilchrist begins to chart in chapter twenty-four. Reflecting a hierarchy of parental aspirations for their children’s professional futures, we see the offspring of Greek migrants moving, in small numbers at first, into 1. Medicine, dentistry and pharmacy 2. Law and accounting 3. Science, engineering and architecture (in that order) 4. Teaching and then into 5. Trade and industry.
This is reflected in the chronology at the beginning of the book. For example, in the entry for 1945, Gilchrist notes: ‘Australian trade unions press Dr Evatt to urge for political reform in Greece… In Melbourne Anthony Shannos graduates in medicine.’ As an artefact, Australians and Greeks has a third use: as a work of reference. In his ‘Epilog’, Hugh Gilchrist quotes Samuel Johnson: Public History Review, vol 12, 2006 122 He who collects is laudably employed; for, though he exerts no great talents in the work, he facilitates the progress of others; and, by making that easy of attainment which is already written, may give some mind, more vigorous or more adventurous than his own, leisure for new thoughts and original designs. (p392) The extensive appendicies, exhaustive notes and sources, meticulous index, chronology and wealth of detail make this a very useful reference book. And Gilchrist has certainly been ‘laudably employed’ for the past thirty-five years. But he is far more than a collector. Australians and Greeks displays keen insights into the shared histories of these two nations and a fine sensibility to antipodean Greek aspirations and to Greek contributions to Australian society.
Paul Ashton – Associate Professor of Public History and Co-Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney.
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