Posts com a Tag ‘Public History Review (PHR)’
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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Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy – WINGO et al (PHR)
WINGO, Rebecca S.; HEPPLER, Jason; SCHADEWALD, Paul (eds). Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy. Cinncinati: Cinncinati University Press, 2020. 225p. Resenha de: FOSTER, Ann-Marie. Public History Review, v. 27, 2020.
This collection of essays, edited by Rebecca S. Wingo, Jason Heppler and Paul Schadewald, introduces readers to digital community engagement, or DiCE, as they call it. The acronym is not only a useful one, but one which situates the book among the intellectual forerunners of the field. As they explain in the introduction, they created this volume because when they needed it, it did not exist. The result is an open access collection of nine case studies, written by people involved in community/academy partnerships, most of which are co-authored, which offer an insight into the collaborative projects with a digital element.
This volume is designed to be read by both academics interested in creating a DiCE project and by partners who are thinking about working with the academy. At times, this seems a little more geared towards the academic side of this partnership. However, all of the chapters are written in an accessible manner and show the competing demands of collaborators. The pedagogy of doing digital community engagement projects with students is often touched upon, showing potential partners how their projects can be aided by those studying in formal educational settings. All case studies are from the US, and while it is recognised that this perhaps narrows the scope of the volume, there is more than enough within its (digital) pages to make up for this.
The overwhelming theme of the collection is how DiCE projects can help enact social change, and all projects have their roots in activism, disrupting the historical status quo. Hubbard’s chapter neatly shows how digital archives can establish resistance to structural racism. Anderson and Wingo’s chapter demonstrates how History Harvests can record the experiences of Black neighbourhoods destroyed by historically racist town planning policies. Beaujot’s chapter discusses how the Hear, Here project in La Crosse helped to pressure local authorities as part of a campaign by the Ho-Chunk Nation to remove an offensive statue from the downtown area. Sullivan’s chapter considers how students can be involved in projects which have their roots in trauma, building empathy with the communities worked with. It is a strength of this volume that all writers touch upon power dynamics and consider them as ongoing issues. It is stressed repeatedly that when formulating a digital engagement project an understanding of the position of various collaborators must be at its core, permeating through all layers of engagement, from project meetings to the licences applied to digitised material.
Contributors stress the community aspects of DiCE, in particular the amount of face-to-face work involved in setting up projects. As Brock, Hunter, Morris and Murrian’s chapter highlights, digital output is not necessarily the most important outcome from a community/academy partnership. This is accompanied by practical guides to setting up a project. And the chapter by Augusto, Bragg, Chafe, Cobb, Cox, Crosby, Deal, Forner, Gartell, Hogan, Jeffries, Lawson, Nelson, Richardson, Sexton and Tyson, aside from being impressively co-written, offers a set of advice for any potential collaborators to consider before entering into a working arrangement.
Chapters discuss the digital side of the projects in varying levels of detail. One of the most involved discussions about this was by Collier and Connolly. They discussed having to use two sites – one to add metadata to the digitised diaries at the core of their project; the other a simpler version which was more user-friendly. While many chapters touch on digital inequalities, Schuette, Telligman and Wuerffel are particularly keen to stress that when doing digital engagement projects thought must be given to those without internet access. Their project, which focused on homelessness, would have excluded those it sought to draw attention to if the digital project was not accompanied by a physical one. It is also in the digital where the open access version of the text shines, with embedded links to all of the projects mentioned. Thompson and Carlisle-Cummins use this to particularly good effect, enmeshing their text with the podcast that inspired the chapter.
Taken together, this collection is a welcome addition to the field of community engagement and one which is designed to stimulate discussion. The editors encourage readers to see the volume as a prompt for further conversations and readers are encouraged to highlight, annotate and connect through it. This volume opens up a conversation about DiCE which is long overdue, with the digital format of the text suggesting it is one that will continue for some time to come.
Notas
1. See <https://ucincinnatipress.manifoldapp.org/projects/digital-community-engagement>.
Ann-Marie Foster – Queen’s University Belfast.
[IF]City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History – DIEFENDORF; DORSEY (PHR)
DIEFENDORF, Jeffry M.; DORSEY, Kurk (Eds). City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Resenha de: SEARBY, Rose. Public History Review, v.14, 2007.
Jeffry Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey’s edited collection of essays, City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History, is ambitious in undertaking to broaden the relevance and appeal of environmental history for historians and provide significant directions and challenges for the field. At the heart of the collection of fifteen essays is the examination of the way human societies create concepts of nature and work with them to expand ideas about cities and landscapes.
By dividing the thoroughly researched, strong essays into the topics of cities, countryside and empire, Diefendorf and Dorsey illustrate the diversity of current research in environmental history whilst at the same time establishing a continuum amongst it as they take the reader from ‘specific urban settings, to broader suburban and rural areas, to an international context.’ (p2) The editors’ comprehensive introduction presents a useful overview of the development of the field of environmental history over the past three decades in America which provides a helpful context for the essays. Equally, introductions at the beginning of each of the three parts of the collection also serve to tie together the themes of city, country and empire.
Taken together, however, the essays explore topics that are larger than the sum of their parts. In this respect, the editorial arrangement of the essays is not as effective as it could be, as the essays are also connected through a number of alternative themes.
Four such themes which are prominent in the collection are, firstly, the concept that nature is a force that cannot be overlooked, a significant and persuasive theme, especially considering the editors’ comment that nature ‘has not penetrated the mainstream of historical thinking to the same extent that race, class, and gender have’ (p1). Secondly, ideas on the re-use of land are specifically explored, for example in Ursula von Petz’s essay on the restoration of the Ruhr Valley. A third theme looks at contentions surrounding ideas of land attachment, as explored by Elizabeth Blackmar in ‘Of Rights and Reits’, where she argues that real estate investment trusts reflect absentee ownership and sever connections to the land by putting development in the hands of corporations, thus removing responsibility from the community. And lastly, the idea of the environment as interconnected through process and systems that are ongoing and dynamic is a significant theme that runs throughout all of the essays in the collection while being specifically explored in Andrew Isenberg’s ‘The Industrial Alchemy of Hydraulic Mining’.
Given the editors’ emphasis on the importance of the internationalisation of environmental history and the call by the eminent founder of the field, Alfred Crosby, in the ‘Afterward’ for environmental historians to widen their considerations from the local to the global, some might find the fact that the essays are predominantly focused on American environmental history somewhat surprising and parochial. The editors’ introduction, ‘Challenges to Environmental History’, does, however, provide a necessary widening of the context for the essays, and the discussion of the internationalisation of the field as illustrative of its development and vitality outside America is welcome here.
Environmental history by its nature lends itself to exploring the local with a global perspective and in this respect historians will be able to consider the significance of some of the essays for the Australian context. Nancy Langston in ‘Floods and Landscape in the Inland West’, for instance, explores the complex and contested relationship between farmers, ranchers, irrigation developers and scientists over water rights in the changing landscape of Oregan’s Malheur Basin. Her essay raises questions about how human responses to flood plains and waterways have shaped landscapes and identities, questions that are equally relevant and significant in Australia. Specific to Australia, too, is Thomas R. Dunlap’s ‘Creation and Destruction in Landscapes of Empire’ which examines the interaction between Anglo-American settlers and the landscapes of Australia, New Zealand and North America, and argues that settlement is a continual process of both a natural (physical) and psychological nature.
In the ‘Afterword’ to the collection, Crosby proposes that ‘the greatest challenges facing humans in general in this new millennium are environmental in nature’ (p232).
While historians of the environment have been answering Crosby’s call to understand the relationship of humans to their physical and living surroundings for some time now, the collection reinforces this need and at the same time opens up the relatively recently defined discipline of environmental history to the history profession more generally, emphasising its relevance and interdisciplinary roots. In this respect, the collection is a valuable resource for anyone who seeks to understand how environmental change and ecological processes dovetail with human and non-human histories whilst more specifically providing a well researched and broad ranging introduction to the field of environmental history.
Rose Searby – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney.
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The Public History Reader – KEAN; KEAN (PHR)
KEAN, Hilda; MARTIN, Paul (Ed). The Public History Reader. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2013. Resenha de: FOSTER, Meg. Public History Review, v.21, p.102-104, 2014.
When confronted with the question, ‘what is public history?” many students and practitioners alike find themselves struggling for answers. Is it ‘the employment of historians and historical method outside of academia’, as Robert Kelley famously declared in The Public Historian? Perhaps it describes ‘practices that communicate and engage with history in public areas’, as Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton assert in their book History at The Crossroads? Following Raphael Samuel, does it refer to an ever changing, social process, the work at any one time of ‘a thousand different hands?’ As Paul Ashton has written in the Public History Review (2010), ‘Public history is an elastic, nuanced and contentious term. Its meaning has changed over time and across cultures in different local, regional, national and international contexts.’ Even the leading body of public history in America, the National Council of Public History (NCPH), has been forced to confront this issue. In their introduction to the subject, ‘What is Public History?’, the NCPH argues that the most apt definition is perhaps the simplest; people should know public history when they see it. For students who are relatively unexposed to the area, and for public historians who are faced with the ever-changing contours of their field, even this description is inadequate. Hilda Kean and Paul Martin’s recent collection The Public History Reader helps to address this uncertainty. In an accessible and engaging way, this book shows readers some of public history’s many faces. 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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Uses of Heritage – SMITH (PHR)
SMITH, Laurejane. Uses of Heritage. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. 368p. Resenha de: WARREN-FINDLEY, Jannelle. Public History Review, v.14, 2007.
Laurajane Smith aims in this wide-ranging and richly documented text to use the themes of memory, performance, identity, intangibility, dissonance and place to explore the process of memory making. Beginning with the notion of ‘process’ instead of ‘thing’ the author redefines the stuff of heritage conservation theory and practice.
Tangible or material culture, she argues, presupposes a Western, elite perspective, privileging a stone cottage over a cement-block dwelling of the same size, for example, or wood over mud, or culturally manipulated landscapes over those without obvious disturbance or reshaping. In fact, she argues in the introduction, There is, really, no such thing as heritage… there is rather a hegemonic discourse about heritage, which acts to constitute the way we think, talk and write about heritage… That discourse leaves out the subaltern and alternative approaches and determines on a global scale what the world ought to see as significant and valuable in the traces of diverse cultures.
Smith, trained as an archaeologist, has worked as a cultural resource manager as well as an academic researcher in both Australia and England. She begins the discussion with two chapters on the idea of heritage. Part two examines authorized heritage and presents case studies of English country houses and Australian cultural landscapes. Part three considers responses to authorized heritage. To lay the theoretical groundwork, Smith grounds her discussion deeply in the literature of memory, identity, performance, archaeology, cultural geography and historic heritage conservation/historic preservation. She argues that the authorized heritage discourse (AHD) relies on expert evaluation and discrimination and is promulgated by official heritage agencies and private groups like the various National Trusts.
Although the continual reference to the acronym AHD puts one in mind of an illness, the notion of the authorized heritage discourse is useful as the explanation of the tangible and material culture that can be touched, can be understood as representative of class and nation and can be identified only by those with technical and aesthetic expertise. Smith argues that a more inclusive and multicultural approach to memory making would define ‘heritage’ as the process of construction of the social and cultural meanings of heritage. She presents a fine history of heritage in western European culture and then unpacks the authority and legitimacy on which preserving the past in western terms relies.
Smith’s second chapter addresses the stages or steps in the heritage process and examines how each comes to shape the doing of heritage work. This chapter is particularly important for the literature of heritage conservation/historic preservation because it addresses each element of the interaction among observers/performers, socio-political markers and prompts, preservationists and place. In the new ethnography of heritage that Smith creates here, this chapter breaks down the steps of the process and examines each in considerable detail.
The book then presents case studies of the authorized heritage discourse and its application in the field as well as challenges to its power. The examples – English country houses, Australian shared cultural landscapes, labour museums and the making of community identity – illustrate well the processes at work here.
The telling or displaying of a particular version of heritage, finally, arises out of political and cultural power and a sense of control by the dominant group. The question of who owns history or heritage provokes dissonance in preservation discussions because of the power involved in maintaining the authorized heritage discourse. The authority of those who establish the standards and definitions of significance is challenged by changes in or additions to the official narrative. Indigenous people are identified by Smith as the most prominent of the groups that question the ownership of cultural heritage by others but many groups too wish to own their own stories and present them or not as they choose. The resulting clash of experts in culture – museum curators or the community whose exhibit it is, for example – is profoundly difficult to resolve.
Smith’s work deserves wide attention. Her marvelous, thick analysis of the situation presents compelling arguments for fully understanding and dispensing with the AHS and its practice. As a guide to thinking, teaching and practicing in the field, this analysis raises the right questions and provides really provocative and solid answers.
Despite the annoying acronym, Smith’s complex, multilayered effort challenges heritage practitioners to be both self-reflective and responsive to change.
Jannelle Warren-Findley –Associate Professor of Public History at Arizona State University and a past President of the National Council on Public History.
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The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City – STANTON (PHR)
STANTON, Cathy. The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. 304p. Resenha de: ASHTON, Paul. Public History Review, v.14, 2007.
Lowell National Historical Park was established in Massachusetts in the United States in 1979. It was part of an experiment which drew on a new economic industry – cultural tourism – to rehabilitate a former textile city, once held up as an exemplar of capitalist industrialisation, that had been devastated by late twentieth-century deindustrialisation.
In her highly readable and original book, The Lowell Experiment, Cathy Stanton explores the politics of public history on a number of levels using this National Historical Park (NHP) as a rich case study. Public history’s role in facilitating change, rather than simply recording or reflecting it (pxiii), is treated as are divisions within the public history movement in the USA and the contested nature of the term ‘public history’. Leia Mais
Between the Flags: One Hundred Summers of Australian Surf Lifesving – JAGGARD (PHR)
JAGGARD, Ed (Ed). Between the Flags: One Hundred Summers of Australian Surf Lifesving. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006. 262p. Resenha de: CORNWALL, Jennifer. Public History Review, v.14, 2007.
Ed Jaggard, in the editorial introduction to Between the Flags: one hundred years of Australian surf lifesaving, acknowledges that, with a few exceptions, the ninety or so Ed largely amateur individual histories of surf lifesaving clubs produced to date have kept to ‘a familiar script’ of self-affirmation – ‘progress, mateship, self-help, legendary stories, competition success and notable acts of bravery’. While celebratory in part, this history of the surf lifesaving movement, the largest volunteer-based organisation in Australia, offers a comprehensive examination and critique of the subject. The book is a collection of chapters exploring particular themes of the movement’s history, including its origins in the emergence of Australian beach culture, the development of surf lifesaving techniques and technologies, courageous rescues, the place of surf lifesaving as a national and international sport as well as an examination of club culture.
The eleven contributors represent an impressive line up of academics and other writers either involved in the lifesaving movement or with an interest in Australian beach culture and sport. Among them are Professor Douglas Booth, who has written extensively about the history of Australian beach culture, and Nancy Cushing, a lecturer in Australian history at the University of Newcastle (one of the three female writers). Leia Mais
Expressions of Mercy: Brisbane’s Mater Hospitals 1906-2006 – GREGORY; The Royal. A Castle Grand, a Purpose Noble. A History of The Royal Newcastle Hospital 1817-2005 – MARSDEN; HUNTER; A Proffesion’s Pathway: Nursing at St. Vincent’s since 1893 – SHEEHAN; JENNINGS (PHR)
GREGORY, Helen. Expressions of Mercy: Brisbane’s Mater Hospitals 1906-2006. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2006. 279p. MARSDEN, Susan; HUNTER, Cynthia. The Royal. A Castle Grand, a Purpose Noble. A History of The Royal Newcastle Hospital 1817-2005. Newcastle: Hunter New England Area Healt Service, 2005. 250p.; SHEEHAN, Mary; JENNINGS, Sonia. A Proffesion’s Pathway: Nursing at St. Vincent’s since 1893. Kew (Victoria): Arcadia, 2005. 218p. Resenha de: GODDEN, Judith. Public History Review, v.14, 2007.
These three hospital histories were written by experienced professional historians, all at ease with evaluating evidence and practised in conveying complicated scenarios to commissioning bodies and the public. The result is three excellent histories which provide a model for other professional historians. Their particular interest to readers of Public History Review is that they are also three very different books, illustrating very different approaches. Which one is best? As always, that depends. It depends most of all on the scope required by the commissioning body and the intended audience.
The narrowest in scope is Sheehan’s book on nursing at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. Sheehan also had the inestimable advantage of being able to draw upon five well-researched secondary sources. Two were relevant to the hospital (Bryan Egan, Ways of a Hospital: St Vincent’s Melbourne 1890s-1990s and Michael Tyquin, A Place on the Hill: The History of St Vincent’s Private Hospitals in Melbourne 1906-1993) and three to the general context of nursing in Victoria (Angela Cushing, A Contextual Perspective to Female Nursing in Victoria; Judith and Bob Bessant, Growth of a Profession: Nursing in Victoria 1930s-1980s; and Richard Trembath and Donna Hellier, All Care and Responsibility: A History of Nursing in Victoria 1850-1993). Sheehan had another great advantage in that she was a St Vincent’s trained nurse before becoming a professional historian. It is not surprising that she straddles with ease the perspectives of the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’. The result is an engaging book, basically written for St Vincent’s nurses but accessible to all interested in nursing or medical history. There are no surprises in the themes – such as the mindless discipline of early nursing, the camaraderie of the nurses’ home or the Sisters of Charity’s resistance to the Hospital being brought under state control – but they are evocatively told. External events are largely confined to introductory sections of each chapter, patient experiences to the last chapter and the nurses’ experience is mostly that of the laity. There are signs of haste in completion but the production values, especially photographs, are generally high.
Marsden’s history of Newcastle Hospital is quite different in concept and scope. She had to skate over nearly 200 years, but also considerably upped the ante by her emphasis on the hospital as community. In one sense all these histories do this in their stress on the staff of their hospital being, in Gregory’s words, a ‘family’, and also in their stress on their hospital’s links to the community. Marsden extends the notion by examining how the hospital shared in, rather than was simply influenced by, community fluctuations of fortune. She also, most innovatively of all, gives broadly comprehensive biographical vignettes. These are regrettably in tiny print but are worth reading. They include the expected senior administrators, doctors, nurses and fund-raisers but also patients, domestic and auxiliary staff and volunteers. These vignettes are all interesting and, as in the description of the life of the first indigenous nurse at the Hospital, revealing equally of broader history and individual character (in this case, resilience). Other aspects of Marsden’s book have much in common with the two others reviewed here, including an admirable attempt at impartiality when dealing with the many controversial issues and personalities that are part of any hospital’s history. She too uses photographs to enliven and add to the text.
Gregory’s history of the seven Mater Hospitals in Brisbane shares with the others the excellent standard of research, the generally high production qualities and attempt to weave individual stories into the broader context. She deliberately chose a broad brush (p336) approach and, it is hard to resist concluding, primarily wrote to meet the needs of her commissioning body. The end result is basically an administrative history which traces the many vicissitudes and triumphs of the Sisters of Mercy as they, or so it appeared to this reader, constantly stretched to the limit their resources and standard of care. The promised board-brush approach translates, especially in the last half of the book, into a sustained argument about state policy and its impact on the hospital. There is also a valiant attempt to conceptualise the history as an expression of Mercy values although the comparative neglect of the health of its nearby Aboriginal community, especially during most of the twentieth century, is an unexplained and glaring anomaly.
Still, this book is a valuable record even if one not as engaging to the general reader.
These then are three excellent hospital histories, all taking a different approach to suit different requirements. Only Sheehan had the luxury of rich secondary sources upon which to draw her more specialised study. Only Marsden could tap into the distinctive Newcastle sense of a community with its hospital as a centrepiece. Only Gregory chose to stress the dominant role of the state in determining the direction of recent healthcare.
These books indicate that hospital history is in good hands which hopefully will encourage more commissions. I am less confident that two other needed developments will be soon achieved. The first need is for a generalised history of Australian hospitals Public History Review, vol 14, 2007 160 so that developments in each hospital can be placed in context. The second need is a work where ‘nuns’ are so mainstream that we, as historians, critique them in the same spirit as we do the laity.
Judith Godden – University of Sydney.
Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, University of Sydney
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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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Craking Awaba: Stories of Mosman and Northern Beaches Comunities During the Depression – HAMILTON (PHR)
HAMILTON, Paula. Craking Awaba: Stories of Mosman and Northern Beaches Comunities During the Depression. Mona Vale, Sydney: SHOROC Council Libraries, 2005. 160p. Resenha de: LUDLOW, Christa. Public History Review, v.12, 2006.
The introduction to this attractively produced book states: Oral histories can sometimes give us information about events which have not been recorded in official publications but they are far more valuable for what would never otherwise be known to posterity, the intimacies and everydayness of people’s lives and the feelings they had about life in this period from their own point of view.
Cracking Awaba does examine the ‘everydayness of people’s lives’ but it does so for a specific group of people, those who lived in an area which at the time had its own distinct character. In the 1920s and 1930s Sydney’s Northern Beaches were difficult to get to from the city and its inhabitants needed a certain amount of self reliance. The Sydney Harbour Bridge did not open until 1932. Internally, the suburbs were linked by the opening of the Spit Bridge in 1924. While Manly could be reached by ferry and was a popular day trip and even holiday location, large parts of other areas such as Clareville, Narrabeen, Avalon and Pittwater were mainly bush, with houses scattered miles apart.
There was variety however: Mosman and Manly were suburban, and had been so since the nineteenth century, while other areas were largely undeveloped. Pittwater featured farming properties, Clareville and Newport were popular for holiday cottages and Narrabeen had a camping area.
The first chapter of the book, suitably, focuses on how the landscape shaped the inhabitants’ experiences. The interviewees recall their childhoods boating on the Narrabeen Lakes, stealing fruit, driving billy carts down Mosman’s steep hills, picking flowers and blackberries, visiting the market gardens and just wandering in the bush. Many interviewees remember the delight of the views of the harbour: I was right up on the very top and we could see way up the coast, north looking north, and of course, way looking south, the heads and everything else — it was really something… And of course being so close to the ocean shaped their lives. This was a time when Sydney’s beach culture and the cult of the lifesaver was at its height. In the 1930s the Port Jackson and Manly Steamship Company built a large bathing area in Manly Cove near the ferry wharf with water wheels, pontoons, diving towers and slippery dips which the Company described as the finest swimming pool in Australia. But the interviewees recall the community aspects of the culture – learning to swim at the local rock pool, the camaraderie at the surf club, the administrative work involved in maintaining the club paperwork, the attractions of the celebrity swimmers who would visit the pools. Fishing and prawning supplemented the family income. Many children were at home in boats and went out on their own on the Lakes or Pittwater, where in the words of one interviewee: ‘if we capsized, well there we stayed until we were rescued’.
The book began as an oral history project on the 1930s for Sydney’s northern beaches suburban councils. As the book focuses on the Depression era, stories of hardship, making do, hard work and sacrifice feature among the tales of games, outdoor activities, social events and school lessons.
Because most of the memories are childhood to early adult, as the author notes, they are tinged with nostalgia or at least recall childhoold as a golden era, where hardship was generally at one remove from their direct experience. The changes brought by the Depression were more fully realized by their parents. The realities of life did, however, hit home when individuals had to leave school because their parents couldn’t afford to send them to high school, or had to leave their home when the bank foreclosed on it.
Here the author skillfully juxtaposes the differing life experiences, avoiding what might be just another trite account of the Great Depression. Evidence of social and economic relationships are teased out through the eyes of the interviewees. Camps sprang up around the bays and beaches, even in the midst of the suburbs, forcing a realization of the scale of the disaster. Some found work labouring for the wealthy inhabitants of Palm Beach in their houses and gardens.
Families sometimes had one member who was better off and was willing to support the others for a time. Children and teenagers of such families were expected to work somehow to support the family. One resourceful interviewee who lived in Warriewood during the Depression caught funnel web spiders for the Commonwealth laboratories at sixpence a spider, then turned his hand to catching red-bellied snakes to sell the skins. He must have had nine lives.
These memories are supplemented with numerous photographs of people and places, some supplied by the interviewees themselves. It is perhaps by looking at an image and then reading the story to which it relates that the value of oral history best comes across to the reader. Many such photographs would be meaningless or misleading without the commentary about the family and social relationships, economic situations and anecdotes behind them. In documenting the Northern Beaches at this time before they became fully suburbanized, the author has recorded memories of a part of Sydney’s past that is hard to imagine now. Land which is today just seen as real estate is rendered part of the landscape of memory, much of which now only lives on in memory and in this enlightening book.
Christa Ludlow – Historian and writer. She was involved in establishing the Police and Justice Museum in Sydney and has worked in heritage.
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Archives: Recordkeeping in Society – McKEMMISCH et al (PHR)
McKEMMISCH, Sue; PIGGOTT, Michael; REED, Barbara; UPWARD, Frank (Ed). Archives: Recordkeeping in Society. Charles Sturt University/Centre for Information Studies, 2005. 247p. Resenha de: SASSOON, Joana. Public History Review, v.12, 2006.
Writing about memory is a popular topic for historians. Public History Review volume 10 had the title Remembering and Forgetting. Historians now recognise museums as memory institutions, with an analytical focus on the exhibition as a representation of contemporary ideas. In order, however, to penetrate the exhibition, the historical processes of collecting, preserving and documenting need to be understood. This kind of archaeology of exhibitions requires a sound understanding of internal institutional processes. To take this further, what is missing in stories historians tell using archival institutions is the purposeful interaction with the histories of that very long food chain of creating and preserving records. Ultimately, historical stories can be enriched through understanding the institutional processes through which historians’ ‘food’ is produced.
If you believe that archives are simply storehouses of raw material, and that archivists are the passive keepers of historical records, then this is definitely the book for you. A whole new world will be opened up. Archival materials and institutional practice are situated firmly within the core of the craft of history, and it can be argued that to undertake sound historical research requires understanding the theoretical framework of archival practice, the processes and power of the recordkeepers and the contexts, functions and nature of the original records. To this end, Archives: Recordkeeping in society introduces readers not only to a theoretical understanding of what the raw materials of history are and how they come into being, but also the conceptual frameworks which shape what recordkeepers do with them. In doing so, this book draws on a wide international archival literature, presenting the arguments in clear and comprehensible prose, through authors who have international reputations. Leia Mais
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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The Powerhouse Museum and its Precursors 1880-2005 – DAVISON; WEBBER (PHR)
DAVISON, Graeme; WEBBER, Kimberley (Ed). The Powerhouse Museum and its Precursors 1880-2005. Sydney: Powerehouse Publisching; University of NWW Press, 2005. 288p. Resenha de: SCORRANO, Armanda. Public History Review, v.12, 2006.
The Powerhouse Museum was conceived by the trustees of the Australian Museum in 1878. By 1880, Australia’s first Technological and Industrial Museum was open to the public. Over the next 125 years, the museum experienced various metamorphoses and name changes, most notably its transformation into the Powerhouse Museum which opened during Australia’s Bicentenary in 1988. On the 125th anniversary of the birth of this world-renown museum comes Yesterday’s Tomorrows: the Powerhouse Museum and its precursors 1880-2005, edited by eminent urban and public historian Graeme Davison and Powerhouse Museum curator of social history Kimberley Webber.
This visually appealing book approaches the history of the museum from a thematic perspective, focusing on innovative exhibitions and bold personalities that have peppered the museum’s past. Broken into three sections – ‘Visions’, ‘Stories from the Collections’, and ‘Tomorrows’ – this collection of essays covers a broad spectrum of topics in the museum’s history. Quirky stories of past curators and popular objects ensure an entertaining read, with copious images providing engaging illustrations of bygone days. The book positions the Powerhouse Museum as an innovative educational institution providing a window on cutting-edge technological advances, bringing the world of technology to the everyday visitor. The history of the museum is dealt with in sufficient detail to ensure the general reader gains a comprehensive understanding of the vision, struggles and triumphs of this pioneering institution. Leia Mais