Review by Felicity Berry
I spent my week at the Australian Historical Association’s annual conference, ‘Foundational Histories’, in what has become my usual style for this event: rushing. This is not unusual at a conference, where everyone seems to be making a mad beeline for somewhere or something, whether it’s for coffee, the next paper, the bathroom or warmer buildings. Being prodigiously-organised in normal life, I take a free-spirited approach to “conference life”, being only vaguely aware of the programme and often making spur-of-the-moment decisions about what papers I go to using arbitrary reasons; a quirky title, the promise of something “new” or my current proximity to the room location have drawn me in more times than I care to admit. (Though having said that, in some sessions the decision was obvious, thanks to the excellent AHA Postgraduate Reps who organised a range of timely and beneficial workshops for early-career researchers.)
This carefree approach may help to explain the somewhat eclectic array of history that I am about to summarise in the remainder of this blog; history that traverses place, space and species, but which all piqued my interest for some reason or another. Indeed, it’s this very interest in learning new things about history that I find leads me and others back to such conferences year after year, to sit in chilly rooms in the depths of winter, and hear the latest (or quietly recycled) works of colleagues from near and far.
Demonstrating its continued hold on the imagination of many historians, cultural (material) history was discussed in various forms throughout the conference. Indeed, we saw a plethora of sources used across the days, including human bodies, animal bodies, women’s magazines, early twentieth-century prisoner’s tattoos, paintings, “Nazi” convict films, Welsh mining songs, romance novels and geological exhibitions.
In this vein, a panel by a group of Monash historians, David Garrioch, Jamie Agland and Emma Gleadhill, discussed various late eighteenth-century print and material culture (letters, caricatures and souvenirs), showcasing the ways that individuals could position themselves and others using these material sources. Leading on from Garrioch’s discussion of transnational familial networks that were maintained through correspondence, Gleadhill showed the fruits of women’s social networks in action, with pictures of a snuffbox that Napoleon gifted to Lady Elizabeth Holland. Through careful curation of the exotic souvenirs in Holland House, Gleadhill argued, Lady Holland made her salons a hot ticket for men in London society and was able to mitigate her scandalous background as a divorcée in eighteenth-century England (although “respectable” women, of course, could not risk their reputation by visiting there).
Indigenous and First Nations history was ever-present in many sessions, but more generally discussed in the Indigenous Histories roundtable, featuring Aroha Harris, Michael Stevens and Heidi Norman. This roundtable explored the shifts in the writing of Indigenous, Pacific and First Nations history and some of the key issues attendant with what histories have, and are now being written and who is (allowed) to write them. Issues of gender also surfaced in many papers revisiting the foundational histories of Australia, with questions raised over their apparent omission. Pauline Reynolds, of UNE, melded these questions of visibility in both gender and indigenous history, delivering a fascinating discussion outlining how historians could ‘rediscover’ the invisible women of the Bounty, the Pitcairn and Norfolk Islander women, by studying their material cultural practices, in the making and gifting of tapua.
Resurrecting flagging ‘foundational’ methodologies like economic history, as Hannah Forsyth and Sophie Loy-Wilson advocated, or unsettling stubborn ‘foundational’ narratives about settlement and war was a popular, and fruitful, aspect of many papers. Adding to this theoretical remapping of national histories, Imogen Wegman of the University of Tasmania demonstrated the value in literally remapping using new technology to geospatially map out land grants in early nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land. These mapping techniques show great promise for historians, including how land grant patterns might have contributed to the formation – or fracturing – of communities, both within and between settler and Aboriginal groups.
Sydney University’s Michael Warren helped to explore this idea further in his paper on settler emotions in the nineteenth-century Australian colonial frontier. In particular, his paper prompted wider questions about how we view this uncomfortable aspect of our nation’s past and how our lens may have been coloured by the emotions that settlers described in their letters and diaries, when depicting encounters and relations between settler and Indigenous groups. In examining these texts critically in this way, Warren argues, it is possible to see how settlers used these emotions to construct a sense of “white victimhood” that downplayed their own role in the violence that ensued.
While I can’t pick favourites, I was excited by Nick Brodie’s paper, entitled ‘The Other Pictorial Boards: Rethinking the Iconography of Contact in VDL c. 1815-1830’, on the Proclamation Boards in Van Diemen’s Land, based on research he has completed with Kristyn Harman, both associated with the University of Tasmania. Based on detailed descriptions they found of two forgotten Proclamation Panels, the pair commissioned an artist to reconstruct these lost boards in the artistic style of the period and genre. Indeed, in sharing some of the same stomping ground as the History Wars, this paper has the potential to complicate, and even destabilise, popular historical narratives about colonial settler-Tasmanian Aboriginal relations prior to the 1830s Black War and Black Line. Without giving away too much, the findings promise to be really compelling and will be published in a forthcoming journal, so please keep your eyes open for it.
There were many inspiring papers that have gone unmentioned in this blog, but which have continued to percolate in my mind in the weeks since the conference, long after I have slowly shaken off my conference-induced fugue, reduced my intake of coffee and cake and returned to business as usual. While these were only some of my thoughts on the AHA, please don’t forget to leave your own in the comments section below.
Felicity is a Doctoral Candidate in Modern History at the University of Sydney.
You can tweet her: @historyfelicity This post will be cross-posted on the launch of my new blog, www.onemomentblog.com, which discusses moments in time in the lives of others, and occasionally my own, from a historical, political, and/or personal standpoint.
** Funding from the Postgraduate Research Support Scheme at the University of Sydney assisted me in attending this conference. Thanks go as well to the organisers of the conference, the AHA committee and the University of Sydney, including the General Organiser, Kirsten McKenzie. **
I spent my week at the Australian Historical Association’s annual conference, ‘Foundational Histories’, in what has become my usual style for this event: rushing. This is not unusual at a conference, where everyone seems to be making a mad beeline for somewhere or something, whether it’s for coffee, the next paper, the bathroom or warmer buildings. Being prodigiously-organised in normal life, I take a free-spirited approach to “conference life”, being only vaguely aware of the programme and often making spur-of-the-moment decisions about what papers I go to using arbitrary reasons; a quirky title, the promise of something “new” or my current proximity to the room location have drawn me in more times than I care to admit. (Though having said that, in some sessions the decision was obvious, thanks to the excellent AHA Postgraduate Reps who organised a range of timely and beneficial workshops for early-career researchers.)
This carefree approach may help to explain the somewhat eclectic array of history that I am about to summarise in the remainder of this blog; history that traverses place, space and species, but which all piqued my interest for some reason or another. Indeed, it’s this very interest in learning new things about history that I find leads me and others back to such conferences year after year, to sit in chilly rooms in the depths of winter, and hear the latest (or quietly recycled) works of colleagues from near and far.
Demonstrating its continued hold on the imagination of many historians, cultural (material) history was discussed in various forms throughout the conference. Indeed, we saw a plethora of sources used across the days, including human bodies, animal bodies, women’s magazines, early twentieth-century prisoner’s tattoos, paintings, “Nazi” convict films, Welsh mining songs, romance novels and geological exhibitions.
In this vein, a panel by a group of Monash historians, David Garrioch, Jamie Agland and Emma Gleadhill, discussed various late eighteenth-century print and material culture (letters, caricatures and souvenirs), showcasing the ways that individuals could position themselves and others using these material sources. Leading on from Garrioch’s discussion of transnational familial networks that were maintained through correspondence, Gleadhill showed the fruits of women’s social networks in action, with pictures of a snuffbox that Napoleon gifted to Lady Elizabeth Holland. Through careful curation of the exotic souvenirs in Holland House, Gleadhill argued, Lady Holland made her salons a hot ticket for men in London society and was able to mitigate her scandalous background as a divorcée in eighteenth-century England (although “respectable” women, of course, could not risk their reputation by visiting there).
Indigenous and First Nations history was ever-present in many sessions, but more generally discussed in the Indigenous Histories roundtable, featuring Aroha Harris, Michael Stevens and Heidi Norman. This roundtable explored the shifts in the writing of Indigenous, Pacific and First Nations history and some of the key issues attendant with what histories have, and are now being written and who is (allowed) to write them. Issues of gender also surfaced in many papers revisiting the foundational histories of Australia, with questions raised over their apparent omission. Pauline Reynolds, of UNE, melded these questions of visibility in both gender and indigenous history, delivering a fascinating discussion outlining how historians could ‘rediscover’ the invisible women of the Bounty, the Pitcairn and Norfolk Islander women, by studying their material cultural practices, in the making and gifting of tapua.
Resurrecting flagging ‘foundational’ methodologies like economic history, as Hannah Forsyth and Sophie Loy-Wilson advocated, or unsettling stubborn ‘foundational’ narratives about settlement and war was a popular, and fruitful, aspect of many papers. Adding to this theoretical remapping of national histories, Imogen Wegman of the University of Tasmania demonstrated the value in literally remapping using new technology to geospatially map out land grants in early nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land. These mapping techniques show great promise for historians, including how land grant patterns might have contributed to the formation – or fracturing – of communities, both within and between settler and Aboriginal groups.
Sydney University’s Michael Warren helped to explore this idea further in his paper on settler emotions in the nineteenth-century Australian colonial frontier. In particular, his paper prompted wider questions about how we view this uncomfortable aspect of our nation’s past and how our lens may have been coloured by the emotions that settlers described in their letters and diaries, when depicting encounters and relations between settler and Indigenous groups. In examining these texts critically in this way, Warren argues, it is possible to see how settlers used these emotions to construct a sense of “white victimhood” that downplayed their own role in the violence that ensued.
While I can’t pick favourites, I was excited by Nick Brodie’s paper, entitled ‘The Other Pictorial Boards: Rethinking the Iconography of Contact in VDL c. 1815-1830’, on the Proclamation Boards in Van Diemen’s Land, based on research he has completed with Kristyn Harman, both associated with the University of Tasmania. Based on detailed descriptions they found of two forgotten Proclamation Panels, the pair commissioned an artist to reconstruct these lost boards in the artistic style of the period and genre. Indeed, in sharing some of the same stomping ground as the History Wars, this paper has the potential to complicate, and even destabilise, popular historical narratives about colonial settler-Tasmanian Aboriginal relations prior to the 1830s Black War and Black Line. Without giving away too much, the findings promise to be really compelling and will be published in a forthcoming journal, so please keep your eyes open for it.
There were many inspiring papers that have gone unmentioned in this blog, but which have continued to percolate in my mind in the weeks since the conference, long after I have slowly shaken off my conference-induced fugue, reduced my intake of coffee and cake and returned to business as usual. While these were only some of my thoughts on the AHA, please don’t forget to leave your own in the comments section below.
Felicity is a Doctoral Candidate in Modern History at the University of Sydney.
You can tweet her: @historyfelicity This post will be cross-posted on the launch of my new blog, www.onemomentblog.com, which discusses moments in time in the lives of others, and occasionally my own, from a historical, political, and/or personal standpoint.
** Funding from the Postgraduate Research Support Scheme at the University of Sydney assisted me in attending this conference. Thanks go as well to the organisers of the conference, the AHA committee and the University of Sydney, including the General Organiser, Kirsten McKenzie. **