Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

A history-seminar to stimulate some thought

I fulfilled an invitation from a friend to attend a history seminar with him at the State Library building in Perth yesterday. It cost me twenty bucks. The conference title was Passion, pain & partiality in the practice of history.

I think the gathering of minds was in the main stimulated by a trend over the past decade for fictionalised historical accounts to gain legitimacy with vested interests in some sectors of the community, and with certain government agencies.

The arena which particularly comes to mind relates to Aboriginal history.

For many years Aboriginal history has been written by educated, usually dedicated, non-Aborigines, both men and women. The national bibliography amounts to many thousands of books and theses. It has been said that no ethnicity in the world has had more written about them than Australian Aborigines.

In the past twenty years there have been some very significant publications by non-Aboriginal Western Australian authors whom have outlined in graphic detail the discriminatory processes experienced by Aboriginal people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Recently there have been allegations that these injustices have been ignored by historians. Such allegations are blatantly untrue. The evidence is in the publications, many which have been used as school and university texts.

This accumulation of knowledge and observations is a great treasure. However it has become a cause of racialist resentment from modern Aboriginal critics because the authors are not actually Aboriginal, therefore they and their works lack legitimacy.

The fact is there are no laws about who can write history. Anyone can do it. Nor are there any laws or regulations about the subject under study, or the quality of the research attained.

In the past the pitfalls of this great freedom have been largely been dealt with by a peer review process. For example, university theses are supposed to meet certain scholarly and ethical standards. They must enable verification by others, and when generally accessible, be also be written in a way that they deflect harm and hurt to innocent individuals. Sometimes particularly sensitive works are embargoed for a period of time, or have restricted access.

Quality book publishers also adopt standards of excellence, while endeavouring to eliminate some of the dryness found in many theses. This requires an enormous amount of dedicated effort between editors and scholarly authors, but sometimes the results can still draw the ire of casual critics who have little understanding of the demanding processes in play.

There is another arena of publishing which is not so particular - so called 'vanity' or self publishing. There are plenty of such works in this state on obscure subjects. They lie mostly unsold in piles in the corner of people's garages. Often the authors have had no formal guidance on how to make their works more acceptable. They've proceeded with a single minded determination to write a book, as is their legitimate right to do so, but the efforts are usually rejected by discerning readers and scholars.

Similar to these efforts are works which have found a patronising agency, flush with a government grant, to financially back them. Many Western Australian Aboriginal authors have gotten into print in such a way. There is a certain, but quite limited audience for these types of publications. I used to buy them, but have long given up. A five minute flick through at the counter is usually enough. Unfortunately such publishing efforts tend to lack substance and can be imaginatively embellished.

This is fine if the works are presented as fiction, but when they are presented as bona fide historical research tools for others, they need to have adequate referencing, and a decent index. No historian is immune from source verification, and where there is ambiguity, they should be prepared to admit to it.

But interpretation of history is not all about books. Unfortunately there is an increasing trend with indigenous hegemonic processes to dismiss scholarly histories by non-Aborigines and replace them with fictionalised oral accounts akin to urban mythology, and which have a target-audience appeal no matter how outrageously untrue or distorted. A racialist argument is usually presented when criticism is raised.

One such untrue myth being circulated is that colonial authorities set up a guillotine on a Rottnest Island jetty and the bones of the executed were ground up to reinforce mortar in island brickwork. I gather this story has recently been promoted by an indigenous Aboriginal studies lecturer at the University of WA and is currently subject to some sort of scholarly objection.

At the seminar yesterday everyone was polite. There were three speakers claiming Aboriginal identity, one of whom claimed to be descended from what was described as a 'king-like' Aborigine called Yellagonga in the early colonial times and was therefore now the sole traditional owner of the entire Swan River.

Yellagonga existed, but other claims are unverifiable. The concept of kings in traditional Aboriginal Australia was totally alien. However, no one in the audience was prepared to challenge the hegemonic ploy. As I said, it was a polite audience.

My view is that it's not worth getting too worked up about the current trend towards acceptance of Aboriginal fiction as legitimised history. There is nothing anyone can say which will change the believers of any myth, no matter what ethnicity they represent.

Hopefully however, in the distant future there will be a few more diligent Aboriginal scholars emerge who will come to appreciate that writing history is not automatically validated by one's ethnicity, and that the many works by non-Aboriginal scholars are actually worthy and useful research tools to be thankful for.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!