502 bad gateway 502 bad gateway nginx archives: recordkeeping in society edited by sue mckemmish, michael piggott, barbara reed and frank upward. centre for information studies: charles sturt university, 2005; 347pp, b+w illustrations, notes, index; clothbound $71.50. riting 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. archives: recordkeeping in society takes a contemporary cultural approach to archives as memory institutions – that there is no political power without control of the archives. in doing so, it introduces readers to the idea that archival institutions are both products and shapers of their particular historical moment. while raphael samuel labelled librarians and archivists ‘the poor bloody infantrymen of the historical profession’, the authors of this book demonstrate that cultural and political power lies with recordkeepers who adhere to international professional standards and ethics so as to appraise and preserve the recordness of records – their authenticity and evidential values. part of this process, which is explored in several chapters, requires an understanding of the lifecycle of records, and what turns a trace or document into a record and potentially an archive. while the idea that only ‘a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of records’ created finally ends up in archives and accessible for research may bring gasps from w public history review, vol 12, 2006 124 historians, this book explains why this is necessarily so. through such understandings it is possible to see that whilst most historians dream that everything will be kept, it is through the judgement of recordkeepers that destruction is professionally managed. this book is intended as a text for recordkeepers and to this end it is an important and internationally significant australian addition to the literature, which for the past decade has been led by canadian thought. the value and reach of this book, however, is much broader than the recordkeeping professions. through reading this book, record-using professions will be introduced to the social and cultural status of recordkeeping in an engaging and intellectually thorough manner and will gain an entrée into the theoretical underpinnings of the professional practice of recordkeepers. each chapter can be used as a standalone in teaching, and this is a great strength for educators across recordkeeping and record-using disciplines. armed with knowledge contained within this book, history students should become better versed in understanding archives and better users of archival materials, particularly during their undergraduate studies. equally, historians may also become more informed about, and involved with, individual recordkeepers and archival institutions who are such powerful partners in public history. joanna sassoon state records office of western australia/ edith cowen university reviewblunden public history review vol 16 (2009): 131–133 © utsepress and the author the museum educator’s manual: educators share successful techniques, anna johnson, kimberley huber, nancy cutler, melissa bingmann, tim grove.
 plymouth: altamira press, 2009; 250 pp; photographs, notes, bibliography, sample forms, index; paperbound $36.95. ince the 1980s, education programs and staff have become an increasingly significant part of museums. thirty years on, the authors of this practical manual believe that there remains a strong need for creativity, excellence and accountability in museum education programs. this manual aims to contribute to this need by offering an ‘all-in-one’, experience-based perspective on the basics of the field and practice of museum education. the authors bring together a great deal of expertise, which they share with readers in a very personal and friendly way. each author introduces themselves and how they came to the museum education field through a ‘personal story’ box: anna johnson, who has worked as a curator, educator, director and consultant mostly in history museums; kimberly huber, who, from background in anthropology and teaching has been a museum volunteer, intern, educator, curator, consultant, administrator, consultant and board member; nancy cutler comes from a background in interpretation and education in botanic gardens; melissa bingmann, assistant professor of history at indiana university, teaches public history and museum studies; and finally tim grove, an education specialist from the smithsonian’s national air and space museum. the manual is structured into four main parts. part 1 ‘training and management’ includes chapters on the role of the museum educator, working with volunteers and training guides and docents. part 2 ‘programs and outreach’ contains chapters on professional development for teachers, family programs (intergenerational learning), planning and managing programs and special events, evaluation and online education. the third section looks at ‘working with others’ both within the museum (as part of an exhibition team) and outside through partnerships and collaborations with schools, libraries and other museums, community groups and sponsors. the final section comprises a very significant appendix containing more that 100 pages of sample forms, checklists, charts and programs – a basic strategic plan table, s public history review | review by blunden 132 volunteer application form and timesheet, sample lesson plans, evaluation forms, event planning timeline, and more – some perhaps more useful than others. the book is friendly, chatty and easy to read, although at times borders on the patronising (‘let’s do a little exercise to help recognise some of the features of a volunteer’). similarly, its fondness for citing dictionary definitions of everyday words (such ‘guide’, ‘volunteer’ and ‘reservation’, as in making a booking) can become a little irritating. more helpful are the boxes and ‘sidebars’ which provide case studies from outside the authors’ experience, checklists and summaries. the chapters cover all the fundamentals and give a clear understanding of what it means to be a museum educator. the standout chapters in terms of moving beyond the basics to a deeper level of discussion that can inform action are tim grove’s chapter on online education and nancy cutler’s on evaluation. my favourite is anna johnson’s chapter ‘taming wild docents’, directed at dealing with docents who put ‘too much spice’ in their tours, although really it’s a chapter about structuring and leading guided tours. perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the book is the focus on ‘homeschool’ teachers and students, suggesting a trend that is obviously far stronger in america (or at in least arizona) than in australia. what’s missing? the manual would benefit from including examples and case studies from a broader range of museum types to support its claim of being useful for those working in or with museums of all kinds, from zoos and botanical gardens to art museums and heritage sites. it would also benefit from an ‘experience-based’ listing of key references and sources of further information as a framework for building a professional library and for taking readers from this general introductory volume and connecting them to more specialised avenues of support. the manual claims to be ideally suited for educators and volunteers working within a broad range of museums, for school teachers as a preparation for museum excursions and for students and teachers of museum studies and museum education. while students, volunteers, beginner educators and those working in small museums or without formal training may find this manual helpful and reassuring, those with even relatively little experience would probably find it of limited value. nonetheless, this is a book that delivers exactly what the title promises – it’s a practical manual where the authors share with readers the methods and experiences that have worked public history review | review by blunden 133 well for them – and delivers them with passion, enthusiasm and great generosity. jennifer blunden university of technology, sydney cracking awaba: stories of mosman and northern beaches communities during the depression by paula hamilton. mona vale, sydney: shoroc council libraries, 2005; 160pp, photographs, notes, bibliography, index; paperbound, $15.00. he 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 t – 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 sydney reviewcastaneda public history review vol 16 (2009): 1?? © utsepress and the author people and their pasts: public history today, paul ashton and hilda kean (eds). basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan, 2009; xiv + 304 pp; photographs, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, £55.0.0. ublic history’ is a term that continues to elude a commonly accepted definition. this may be due in part to the relative newness of the term as well as the very broad nature of the concepts of both ‘public’ and ‘history’. at the very least, the term public history suggests that the general public does have a vital role in making, observing and interpreting history in all of its forms and meanings. certainly, academic public historians as well as those working as archivists, in museums or other related fields are in a unique position to greatly influence how the public perceives history. but public history is a broadly defined field that connects both the academy, nonacademic professionals and the general public. through the broad lens of public history, we can view more clearly the role of the general public in making and understanding history. in people and their pasts: public history today, paul ashton and hilda kean examine through an international perspective the current status of public history. this volume consists of fourteen essays which were based on presentations made at the ‘people and their pasts’ conference on public history at ruskin college, oxford, in 2005. the premise of this book is deceptively simple: ‘that people are active agents in creating histories’ (p1). the contributors represent a wide array of perspectives, from anthropologists and archivists to museum professionals, and public history faculty members. their essays are organized into three sections titled: ‘the making of history’, ‘presenting the past in place and space’ and ‘material culture, memory and public histories’. the first section, true to its name, explores a variety of ways that historical consciousness is constructed in australia, new zealand, europe and the united states. in their leadoff article, paul ashton and paula hamilton examine how australians understand their own history. ashton and hamilton conducted a national survey patterned after the one that roy rosenzweig and david thelen used in the united states during the mid-1990s and analyzed in their book, the presence of the past. the australian survey results to some extent ‘p public history review | review by castaneda 120 are summed up by one participant’s statement: ‘history is not just ancient history or famous people… the everyday person has more interesting history’ (p36). bernard eric jensen’s essay continues this analytic theme and explores the concepts of ‘past’ and ‘history’ from an international perspective while also providing a brief analysis of memory function. he reminds us that culture greatly influences how we approach and value historical consciousness. in her case study of us national park service work, cathy stanton discusses the concept of ‘cultural repair’ with a focus on the interaction of the state, public historians and the audience. and she notes ‘the producers and audiences… are very similar to each other’ (p71). bronwyn dalley also looks at the role of the state by tracing the development of public history and its interaction with the state in new zealand. in section 2, the collective essays examine how history can be organized and presented within the context of a particular place or space. darryl mcintyre addresses the changing role of museums through his study of the museum of london and the national museum of australia. he examines how museums are challenged with the task of integrating stories of traditional national history with more recent history, multiculturalism and new interpretations while incorporating the draw of discovery and even entertainment into their displays. paul gough’s essay examines a different type of space for remembrance in the national memorial arboretum that is both a fascinating site of national memory and a location of sometimes conflicting and contested remembrances while also serving as an arboretum. historical significance of public monuments and statues in london is at the center of john siblon’s essay. he discusses how these monuments tell an incomplete history, one that has left out the black and asian presence in british history. from a different perspective, meghan o’brien backhouse addresses how the process of performing history through re-enactment can lead to new narratives of historical understanding and identity. the final section of the book includes an interesting collection of essays that approach public history from a variety of perspectives. jon newman’s study of the complexities of archival practice examines the challenges of maintaining the integrity of a unique community photo gallery originally developed by a professional photographer; professional archival practice can assure preservation of a collection but inevitably changes its original meaning. from archives to oral history, toby butler relates how he used audio public history review | review by castaneda 121 recordings, including oral histories, to create a ‘sound walk’ along the thames river in what he calls a ‘river-based oral history trail’ (p227). three essays in this section focus on the intersection of personal and family history within the larger context of immigration, education and identity. hilda kean and brenda kirsch carefully examine surviving documents from a working-class primary school in east london left by their former teacher. they confront not only their own personal remembrances of their early school years but their place in the 11+ testing process that determined whether students moved on from primary to grammar school. in an even more personal set of essays, mary stewart’s study of her great-great grandfather tells a story important to her family but also one that evokes broader themes in the larger story of migration from scotland to new zealand. in perhaps the most personal essay, martin bashforth examines the history of absent fathers in his own family as he conducts careful research on those fathers through the development of a personal archive. people and their pasts provides a fascinating collection of perspectives on public history. the essays are thought provoking and insightful, and they admirably cover the wide range of topics that are public history. this book will be particularly useful in public history courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level, but its essays hopefully will serve also as guideposts for people interested in learning more about the many ways in which we all both create and experience the past. christopher j. castenada california state university, sacramento galleytangkilisan public history review vol 19 (2012): 104–110 © utsepress and the author ancient arts of minahasa: a public history perspective yuda b. tangkilisan tudies of indonesian history indicate a new development for analysis. current discussions are not merely concerned with the problems caused by postmodernism, but they are moving to engagements in public arenas. this development leads us to pay attention to public history through which various research and activities have been conducted. the movements from publics (community) have made academicians aware that public history plays an important role in history and has shifted a new paradigm that history is not just dominated by the academic world anymore, but the public are more active in historical activities, analysis and discussions.1 this development is underpinned by publications or mass media, especially television media playing an important role in disseminating public history ideas, channeling historical ideas and writing. it is not clear yet why these television media have done this so far whether to fulfill slots or they are really encouraged to develop culture, especially s public history review | tangkilisan 105 those related to history, which is well packaged. besides television programs, a number of initiatives for safety, conservation and use of historical and cultural heritage have emerged and new communities have been established to save historical sites and museums. those disseminating history around these sites can be history practitioners who have relatively wider coverage of this history dissemination to the community than academic historians who are primarily engaged with ‘scientific’ seminars and other activities. public involvement in cultural and historical heritage has been clearly seen and this community are the pioneers of historical writing according to view from within. despite the absence of scientific matters in term of critical methodologies, the community, equipped with their knowledge of dutch language, presents the writing of their country’s past events. when academic world development, including history ‘science’, reaches the horizon of minahasa intellectual life, a number of historians who have history backgrounds have emerged and make a lot of products. other historical activities such as seminars and meetings have involved the community which is interested in history but does not have enough formal education in history studies. the further development illustrates the fact that minahasa history writing is fully embellished by minahassanists (indonesianists). it is true that the non-academic historians’ attention on minahasa histography continues and they are even more productive to produce related works and other history-related public activities, such as exhibitions, museum construction and art performances. in addition, they often take initiatives to dig up and reveal the past time of minahasa. public history the phenomena of public involvement as discussed above leads to the development of public history.2 various definitions on public history proposed by the number of research institutes in america and australia show that public history exists in the latest development of social history studies, revitalizes popular history and bridges the academic environment and the history-minded public.3 furthermore, in observing this development, the discussion considers it in the long-term diachronic context whose advantage is to show directions, changes and dynamics. the sources used in such perspective are written works and activities. the next analysis frame is concerned with what the history-minded public is. historians previously knew the historical society, referring to public history review | tangkilisan 106 history professional organization, in indonesia called masyarakat sejarawan indonesia (msi, indonesian historical society), which consists of both academic and non-academic historians.4 this analysis frame puts the history public which includes history academicians and nonacademicians in a wider context, covering all professions and institutions who pay attention and actively involve themselves in history development both through history sources and historical remains. we all know that the past leaves written and oral heritages, like materials and oral tradition.5 these heritages are relatively incomplete due to several factors influencing their availability and continued existence. regarding the cultural heritage of minahasa, particularly material/tangible culture, hetty palm wrote in 1958 that a number of minahasa ancient arts were missing and this case resulted from the introduction and development of christian religion which did not give any room for the existence of these traditions and art materials particularly those in connection with religious rituals viewed as bid’ah (blame-worthy innovation).6 the re-excavations of the ancient minahasa culture have been mostly conducted by public through numerous activities related to historical heritages. some of these efforts are on the basis of ancient sources and some others do not use such things, reminding us of the fact that some of the findings are not scientifically accountable. but the public have done the activities much more productively than what academicians have done so far. public history, therefore, as a meeting point for historical public for dialogues and interactions, energizing all maximum efforts in excavating, reserving, developing and using minahasa ancient heritages for the sake of community growth and knowledge development. minahasa ancient heritages should be promoted to national, regional and international levels.7 the development of minahasa heritage in 1981, an annotated bibliography on minahasa and bolaang mongondow which completes and summarizes previously written literary works between 1800 and 1924 was published.8 mieke schouten, who prepared this work, categorizes the writers on minahasa into several categories: missionary and zending (protestant missions, colonial governmental officers and the retired ones), traditional law experts, naturalists, linguists, social science experts and journalists. it is actually difficult to trace back an early writing about minahasa. however, we can see that minahasa writers, among others such as l. mangindaan (1860; public history review | tangkilisan 107 1873), a.b. kalengkongan (1896) and a.l. waworuntu (1893; 1894), have produced literature since the nineteenth century.9 regarding the studies on the development of history writing in minahasa upon the colonial period, taufik abdullah and abdurrachman surjomihardjo apparently proposed the frames of ideological history, value heritage and academics, showing the equality to a certain extent.10 to make the observation easy to do, the simplest and most easily understood categories are minahasa academic historians, such as f.w. parengkuan, a.b. lapian, r.z. leirissa, bertha pantouw, f.r. mawikere (a young historian), alex j. ulaen , nico s. kalangie, e.k.m. masinambouw, and g.y.s manoppo-watupongoh (three of whom are from history science on ancient minahasa), and non-academic historians such as a. pantouw (1926), j.a. worotikan (1933) h.m. taulu (1934; 1937), f.s. watuseke (1968), r.h. kotambunan (1985), bert supit (1986; 1993), jessy wenas (2007) and h.b. palar (trilogi 2009). academic historians from overseas (minahasanists or indonesianists) include tim babcock (1989), barbara sillars-harvey (1984), muriel charas (1987), mieke schouten (1993) and david henley (1995). henley should be particularly appreciated due to his dedication and consistency in developing the ancient time of minahasa through his numerous academic publications.11 the development of academic history writing shows the shifting paradigm of attention and themes. minahasa history has been discussed in both politics and also other fields, like social, economic and cultural perspectives. moreover, the methodological frames show the development from individualistic, structural approaches and linguistic structures. the death of some academic historians seems to result in ‘an empty room’ in research and writing on ancient minahasa. minahasa public history attention to minahasa’s ancient times and culture occurs in academic life. but more attention is given beyond the academic environment which produces many historical outputs and has repopulated ‘the empty room’ through various academic and cultural activities initiated by the minahasa historical public. this creates more opportunities for young historians to sharpen themselves to further develop research and writing on minahasa history. referring back to historical perspectives on historical public activities, we pay attention to the existence of the number of kinship and social-cultural organizations and research institutes. kerukunan keluarga kawanua (kawanua kinship organization) is an organization where public history review | tangkilisan 108 minahasa people who live outside this area, particularly in jakarta (diaspora) meet.12 some organizations which deal with the development of minahasa history and culture are yayasan kebudayaan minahasa (ykm, minahasa cultural foundation), kerukunan antar pemuda kawanua (kapak, harmony among kawanua youths), yayasan penelitian sejarah dan masyarakat (foundation of history and community research), yayasan malesung rondor (malesung rondor foundation) and institut seni budaya sulawesi utara (north sulawesi cultural and arts institute). most of these organisations are fading away and some have even disappeared from minahasa historical and cultural development, except for certain ones which are mentioned above. some of the founding fathers are non tengker, benny j. tengker, bert supit, h.n. sumual, benny j. mamoto, and jessy wenas (a particularly solid, tough and dedicated individual). through the institut seni budaya sulawesi utara (north sulawesi cultural and arts institute), benny j. mamoto shows his attention in developing ancient historical and cultural heritage as a part of the national history.13 in a 2007 speech, wenas stated that: ‘a cultural movement – some of which are marked with series of research, seminars and symposiums, conservation and documentation, training programs/workshops, arts appreciation, and festivals/competitions covering all traditional art branches in north sulawesi (read minahasa, writer) – means to reserve and develop our ancestors’ arts on which culture can be strongly built up for today and future generations.’ the spirit and the objectives behind this initiative and the implementation of cultural movements are further illustrated in his speech: ‘in the past minahasa people exceeded other ethnics all over nusantara. what are the cultural values grounding this excellence? a number of minahasa’s traditional cultural values are relevant, important to understand, and need to be reserved by the present and future generations. an example of these is a cultural value in the following proverb tumani o rumapar (leaving the kampong to set up a new living and to reach the peak of a success) which at the presents equally means the spirit of outtward looking as a mental requirement to be successful in this globalization era.’ bridging historical public practices the question posed by hetty palm over six decades ago seems to be answered by jessy wenas (2007). despite the absence of academic education in both history science and dutch language, wenas as a cultural elite, has tried to read old literature texts, most of which are public history review | tangkilisan 109 written in dutch language to dig up and reconstruct the ancient minahasa arts. his efforts are considered successful. certainly, as we are aware that the ancient time has inherited a limited number of footprints in the present time and the noble dream, but a utopia from modern history founding father, leopold von ranke, an effort to reconstruct the ancient time as it happened (wie ist eigenlicht gewessen), the efforts of excavation still leave the space which cannot be filled in because of time. therefore, as well as rediscovery, this effort needs a creation based on an accountable imagination to answer the present soul challenges (zeitgeist). excavating, reserving and introducing minahasa art heritage in numerous forums mostly initiated by benny j. mamoto show both sides, that is, rediscovery and creation (invention). it is true that these findings have not yet been taken fully on board by academic historians, particularly for research materials and inputs in the contexts of scientific research. however, this gap is closing due to the rise of public history. the key issue is that behind the development of public history is the awareness that rediscovery and invention are not contradictory as long as these are underpinned with a scientific foundation. these efforts are parts of the development of national cultural heritage wealth which is complex and dynamic. endnotes 1 see for example, roy rosenzweig and david thelen, the presence of the past: popular uses of history in american life, columbia university press, new york, 1998 and paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), public history and heritage today: people and their pasts, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2012. 2 see among others s. benson, s. brier and r. rosenweig (eds), presenting the past: essays in history and the public, temple university press, philadelphia, 1986 and internet sites such as: <http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/publichistory/main.htm, www.publichistory.org/what_is/definition.html, http://ncph.org/cms/what-is-publichistory/> and others. 3 as the following definition: ‘public history is history that is seen, heard, read, and interpreted by a popular audience. public historians expand on the methods of academic history by emphasizing non-traditional evidence and presentation formats, reframing questions, and in the process creating a distinctive historical practice…..public history is also history that belongs to the public. by emphasizing the public context of scholarship, public history trains historians to transform their research to reach audiences outside the academy.’ <http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/publichistory/main.htm>. 4 compare this with historical profession proposed by kuntowijoyo i.e. history teachers, history clerks (ancient times, museums, archive and historical research institutes), history recorders (in some institutes, such as angkatan bersenjata republik indonesia (abri, indonesian armed forces), recently known as tentara nasional indonesia (tni, indonesian national army) and kepolisian republik indonesia (polri, indonesian police), historical agents, historical witnesses, historical researchers and historical writers. an interesting point of historical clerks is that they have active contacts with public to disseminate historical awareness and it is said that this is not an easy job because they have to compete with global influences which sometimes give ahistory (without historical foundations) and anational (without national foundations) presentations. see kuntowijoyo, pengantar ilmu sejarah., yayasan bentang budaya, yogyakarta, 1995. public history review | tangkilisan 110 5 oral traditions are different from oral history interpreted as a method to dig up the information from historicl witness through interview techniques. see the history problems at sejarah lisan (oral history) at notosusanto, 1978, pp17-21. 6 hetty palm, ancient art of the minahasa, bandung, masa baru, 1958, originally published as majalah untuk ilmu bahasa, ilmu bumi dan kebudayaan. 7 it is a wise thing that a hope is also given to minahasa community in order to give them an opportunity to contribute their ideas and shares to indonesian development. in this case, the ideas proposed by various experts on how to develop and make indonesia better to become a reference, one of which is proposed by hartarto sastrosoenarto, industrialisasi serta pembangunan sektor pertanian dan jasa menuju visi indonesia 2030, gramedia pustaka utama, jakarta, 2006, pp101-104. to complete these national ideas, see carmelia sukmawati and yuda b. tangkilisan, perjalanan pemikiran dan karya hartarto sastrosoenarto menteri perindustrian 1983-1993 menteri koordinator 1993-1999, yayasan pidi, jakarta, 2012 and an opening speech by benny j. mamoto in jessy wenas wenas, sejarah & kebudayaan minahasa, institut seni budaya sulawesi utara, jakarta, 2007. 8 the periodical limitation is not strict due to the existence of the work of m.r. dajoh, pahlawan minahasa, balai poestaka, djakarta, 1949 and f.s. watuseke, sedjarah minahasa, tp, mando, 1968, p53. 9 their complete titles are in mieke schouten, minahasa and bolaangmongondow an annotated bibliography 1800-1942, martinus nijhoff, the hague, 1981. 10 taufik abdullah and abdurrachman surjomihardjo (eds), ilmu sejarah dan historiografi arah dan perspektif, gramedia, jakarta, 1985, pp27-29. 11 a.b lapian,orang laut bajak laut raja laut sejarah kawasan laut sulawesi abad ke-19, komunitas bumbu, jakarta, 2009; r.z. leirissa, prri permesta strategi membangun indonesia tanpa komunis, pustaka utama grafiti, jakarta, 1991; a. pantouw, minahasa lama dan baru, manadosche drukkerij, mando, 1926; a.j. ulaen, ‘kembara budaya dan diaspora: amatan (dari) luar’, in roy e. mamengko (ed), etnik minahasa dalam akselerasi perubahan, pustaka sinar harapan, jakarta, 2002; a. pantouw, minahasa lama dan baru, manadosche drukkerij, mando, 1926; j. a. worotikan, geschiedenis uit de sagen van de minahasa, 2 jli, lie boen yat, manado, 1933/37; h. m. taulu, hikajat hermanus willem dotulong, opperhoofdof majoor van sonder, (1824-1861) en groot-majoor titulair bij de infantrie v.h. nederlandsch oost-indische-leger, (1825-1830), manado: liem, manado, 1934; f. s. watuseke, sedjarah minahasa, tp, manado, 1968; bert supit, minahasa dari amanat watupinawetengan hingga gelora minawanua, penerbit sinar harapan, jakarta, 1986; jessy wenas, sejarah & kebudayaan minahasa, institut seni budaya sulawesi utara, jakarta, 2007; h. b. palar, wajah lama minahasa, yayasan gibbon indonesia, jakarta, 2009; david e. f. henley, nationalism and regionalism in a colonial context, minahasa in the dutch east indies, kitlv prest, leiden, 1996; muriel charas, ‘une vue generale sur le pays minahasa’, archipel, vol 34, pp49-62; and mieke schouten, minahasa and bolaangmongondow an annotated bibliography 1800-1942, martinus nijhoff, the hague, 1981. 12 see an interesting point on diaspora minahasa in a.j. ulaen, op cit, pp400-8. 13 read the achievement and award obtained by benny j. mamoto in revitalisasi kesenian minahasa at: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-7000/largest-orchestraplaying-on-bamboo-instruments/; http://umum.kompasiana.com/2009/11/01/senibudaya-indonesia-dan-pengakuan-dunia/; http://oase.kompas.com/read/2009/11/05/07410886/bakudapa.di.pasang.surut.kolintang; http://www.fib.ui.ac.id/index.php?limitstart=78&lang. galleytangkilisanindon public history review vol 19 (2012): 104–112 © utsepress and the author kesenian kuno minahasa: dari perspektif sejarah publik yuda b. tangkilisan ajian sejarah indonesia memperlihatkan perkembangan yang menarik untuk disimak lebih lanjut. arah dan jangkauan pembahasannya tidak lagi berkutat pada permasalahan yang ditimbulkan oleh pengaruh aliran posmodernisme, melainkan bergerak ke ranah publik. perkembangan ini memunculkan suatu perhatian pada sejarah publik (public history). berbagai pemikiran, penelitian dan kegiatan dilakukan berkenan dengan pengembangan ranah pembahasan ini. gerakan yang berasal dari publik (masyarakat) menarik perhatian kalangan akademik. sejarah publik menyadarkan mereka bahwa pengembangan sejarah tidak lagi monopoli dunia akademik. justru, kalangan publik lebih giat dan agresif dalam merambah bidang-bidang pembicaraan sejarah. berbagai karya diterbitkan yang secara kuantitas dan kualitas menyaingi produktivitas sejarawan akademik.1 perkembangan ini dimungkinkan oleh maraknya media-media penerbitan atau pers. pemikiran dan penulisan sejarah kalangan publik k public history review | tangkilisan 105 ini mendapat tempat dalam berbagai media. apalagi di indonesia perkembangan media televisi meramaikan lalu lintas informasi dalam masyarakat. tidak jelas apakah karena tuntutan pengisin slot (matriks waktu) tayang atau memang terpanggil untuk mengembangkan budaya, media-media itu tidak jarang mengemas sejumlah tayangan yang berkaitan dengan sejarah. selain media televisi, beberapa prakarsa muncul berkenan dengan upaya penyelematan, pelestarian dan pemanfaatan peninggalan sejarah dan budaya (historical and cultural heritage). pembentukan komunitas pecinta warisan masa lampau bermunculan untuk memanfaatkan keberadaan situs dan museum sejarah. mereka yang bergerak di sekitar penyampaian sejarah itu dapat disebut sebagai praktisi sejarah. sebenarnya, jangkauan upaya mereka dalam memperkenalkan sejarah relatif lebih luas dan efektif, atau langsung kepada masyarakat, ketimbang insan akademik, yang kerap terlingkup dalam lingkungan seminar ilmiah dan sejenisnya. keterlibatan publik dalam kazanah budaya dan sejarah minahasa telah lama tampak. malahan, mereka merupakan perintis penulisan karya-karya sejarah berdasarkan sudut pandang dari dalam (view from within). walau upaya itu tidak disokong oleh pijakan ilmiah berupa perangkat metodologi yang kritis. berbekal kemampuan berbahasa sumber, terutama bahasa belanda, mereka menyajikan tulisan tentang masa lampau negeri mereka. ketika perkembangan dunia akademik, termasuk ilmu sejarah, menyentuh cakrawala kehidupan intelektual minahasa, sejumlah pakar sejarah yang berlatarbelakangkan pendidikan ilmu sejarah muncul dan menghasilkan sejumlah karya. berbagai seminar dan pertemuan ilmiah lainnya digelar yang melibatkan mereka. suatu gejala yang menarik adalah bahwa kegiatan-kegiatan itu tidak meninggalkan para peminat sejarah yang tidak pernah menempuh pendidikan formal di bidang kajian sejarah. perkembangan selanjutnya memperlihatkan bahwa kazanah penulisan sejarah minahasa disemarakan oleh sejarawan mancanegara atau para minahassanists (indonesianists). memang, perhatian kalangan bukan sejarawan akademis terhadap historiografi minahasa tetap berlangsung. malahan mereka tampak lebih produktif dalam menghasilkan karya-karya. selain itu, mereka kerap mengambil prakarsa untuk menggali dan menyingkap masa lalu minahasa. wujud perhatian mereka tidak hanya terbatas pada penulisan karya tertulis tetapi juga kegiatan lainnya yang berkaitan dengan kesejarahan dan bersentuhan langsung dengan masyarakat, seperti pameran, pendirian museum, pagelaran dan sejenisnya. public history review | tangkilisan 106 s e j a r a h p u b l i k gejala keterlibatan publik dalam masalah kesejarahan, sebagaimana telah dipaparkan, menelurkan gagasan tentang pengembangan ranah sejarah publik. berbagai batasan diajukan berbagai kalangan yang memperlihatkan dinamika pengembangan sejarah publik.2 berbagai lembaga penelitian sejarah publik muncul terutama di mancanegara, seperti amerika serikat dan australia. dari berbagai pemikiran itu tampak bahwa sejarah publik berada di antara rentangan antara perkembangan mutakhir dari kajian sejarah sosial dan revitalisasi sejarah populer.3 sejarah publik menjembatani lingkungan akademik dan masyarakat peminat serta pecinta sejarah. selanjutnya, dalam mengamati dan mencermati perkembangan tersebut, pembahasan ini menempatkannya dalam suatu konteks diakronis yang berjangka panjang. manfaat perspektif diakronis adalah memperlihatkan arah, perubahan dan dinamika. sumber yang digunakan dalam perspektif ini adalah karya-karya yang telah dihasilkan, mulai dari bentuk tertulis hingga kegiatan-kegiatan. kerangka analisis berikutnya adalah apa yang disebut dengan publik sejarah (historical public). sebelumnya, kalangan sejarawan telah mengenal apa yang dikatakan sebagai masyarakat sejarah (historical society). istilah ini mengacu pada organisasi profesi sejarah, seperti di indonesia adalah masyarakat sejarawan indonesia (msi), yang sebenarnya tidak hanya berisikan sejarawan akademik tetapi juga sejarawan non akademik. kerangka analisis ini menempatkan cakupan publik sejarah pada konteks yang lebih luas, yaitu kesemua profesi dan lembaga yang memberikan perhatian dan bergiat dalam pengembangan sejarah, baik melalui sumber-sumber sejarah maupun peninggalanpeninggalan sejarah. sebagaimana diketahui bahwa masa lampau meninggalkan jejak-jejaknya tidak hanya secara tertulis tetapi juga tidak tertulis, seperti benda dan tradisi lisan.4 publik sejarah mencakup kalangan akademisi dan non akademisi sejarah.5 peninggalan masa lampau relatif tidak utuh. berbagai faktor mempengaruhi ketersediaan dan keberlangsungan benda-benda itu. tentang warisan budaya (cultural heritage) minahasa, terutama budaya kebendaan (material/ tangible culture), hetty palm (1958) pernah menyatakan bahwa sejumlah kesenian minahasa lama (ancient arts) telah menghilang. faktor penyebab utamanya adalah pengenalan dan perkembangan agama kristen yang tidak memberikan ruang untuk keberadaan tradisi dan benda kesenian itu terutama yang bertalian dengan ritual keagamaan karena dipandang bid’ah. public history review | tangkilisan 107 penggalian kembali budaya masa lampau minahasa banyak dilakukan oleh kalangan publik. melalui berbagai bentuk kegiatan mereka mereka ulang warisan sejarah itu. sebagian upaya itu berlandaskan pada topangan sumber-sumber dari masa lampau, sebagian lainnya tidak melakukan hal tersebut. oleh karena itu, beberapa hasil yang disampaikan tidak dapat dipertanggungjawabkan, terutama dari kacamata ilmiah. namun, dibandingkan dengan kalangan akademik, mereka lebih memperlihatkan tingkat produktivitas yang lebih tinggi dalam wujud karya nyata di ruang publik. oleh karena itu, sejarah publik antara lain merupakan jembatan untuk mempertemukan kalangan publik sejarah ini agar berdialog, berinteraksi hingga bersinergi dalam menggali, memelihara, mengembangkan dan memanfaatkan kekayaan warisan budaya dan masa lampau minahasa, sehingga memberikan manfaat yang optimal terhadap kemajuan kehidupan masyarakat dan pengembangan ilmu pengetahuan. kekayaan minahasa perlu dibawa ke tingkat yang lebih tinggi daripada sekedar konteks daerah, menuju taraf nasional, regional dan internasional.6 perkembangan kajian minahasa pada tahun 1981 terbit sebuah karya bibliografi beranotasi tentang minahasa dan bolaang mongondow yang melengkapi dan merangkum karya-karya sejenis yang dibuat sebelumnya. karya ini membatasai cakupan pembahasannya pada antara tahun 1800 hingga 1924.7 mieke schouten (1981: 1-2), yang menyusun karya itu, mengkategorikan penulis-penulis tentang minahasa ke dalam beberapa kriteria, yakni penyebar agama (misionaris dan zending), pejabat pemerintahan kolonial (dan pensiunannya), ahli hukum adat, naturalis, ahli bahasa, ilmuwan sosial, dan jurnalis. memang, dalam karya ini sulit untuk menelusuri penulisan awal tentang minahasa, namun tampak sejumlah penulis-penulis minahasa telah berkarya pada abad ke-19. beberapa nama yang dapat disebut adalah seperti l. mangindaan (1860; 1873), a.b. kalengkongan (1896), a.l. waworuntu (1893; 1894) dan lainnya.8 menelaah perkembangan penulisan sejarah di minahasa masa pasca kolonial, tampaknya kerangka yang diajukan oleh taufik abdullah dan abdurrachman surjomihardjo (1985: 27-29) berupa sejarah ideologi, pewarisan nilai dan akademik memperlihatkan kesesuaian dalam tingkat tertentu. namun, untuk memudahkan pengamatan, kategori yang lebih sederhana dan mudah difahami adalah sejarawan akademik dan nonakademik. sejarawan nonakademik minahasa meliputi a. pantouw (1926), j.a worotikan (1933) h.m. taulu (1934; 1937), f.s. public history review | tangkilisan 108 watuseke (1968), r.h. kotambunan (1985), bert supit (1986; 1993), jessy wenas (2007), h.b. palar (trilogi 2009) dan lainnya. kalangan sejarawan akademik mencakup f.w. parengkuan, a.b. lapian, r.z. leirissa, bertha pantouw dan yang berasal dari generasi mudanya f.r. mawikere. juga pakar yang tidak dapat dilupakan adalah alex j. ulaen. beberapa pakar lain yang berasal dari disiplin ilmu sejarah ikut menyemarakkan perbincangan ilmiah tentang masa lalu minahasa, seperti nico s. kalangie, e.k.m. masinambouw, dan g.y.s manoppowatupongoh. mereka mengimbangi pandangan tentang perkembangan sejarah dan masyarakat minahasa dari kalangan sejarawan mancanegara (minahasanis atau indonesianis), seperti tim babcock (1989), barbara sillars-harvey (1984), muriel charas (1987), mieke schouten (1993), david henley (1995) dan lainnya. david henley barangkali perlu diberi penghargaan khusus atas ketekunan dan kekonsistenannya dalam mengembangan kajian masa lampau minahasa melalui berbagai karya yang dihasilkannya, baik secara mandiri atau bersama (kelompok). perkembangan penulisan sejarah akademik itu memperlihatkan pergeseran perhatian dan tema. sejarah minahasa tidak lagi dibahas dari sudut politik tetapi telah merambah ke bidang lainnya seperti sosial, ekonomi dan budaya. perangkat metodologinya juga memperlihatkan perkembangan dari pendekatan individualis, struktural hingga strukturistik. namun tampaknya seiring dengan kepergian sejumlah sejarawan akademik, suatu ruang kosong terjadi dalam penelitian dan penulisan masa lampau minahasa. publik sejarah minahasa sebagaimana telah diungkapkan di atas, perhatian terhadap masa lampau dan budaya minahasa tidak hanya berlangsung di lingkungan akademik. justru perkembangan perhatian di luar lingkungan ilmiah itu lebih semarak dan penuh karya. oleh karena itu, ruang kosong yang saat in terasa tampaknya secara tidak langsung terisi oleh kesemarakan dan dinamika tersebut. melalui berbagai kegiatan ilmiah dan budaya, yang diprakarasai mereka, sebagai bagian dari public sejarah minahasa, membuka kesempatan untuk sejarawan-sejarawan muda tampil dan mengasah diri untuk segera melanjutkan pengembangan penelitian dan penulisan sejarah minahasa. merunut kembali ke perspektif sejarah tentang kiprah publik sejarah itu, perhatian akan menuju pada keberadaan sejumlah organisasi kekerabatan dan sosial budaya hingga lembaga penelitian. kerukunan keluarga kawanua merupakan perkumpulan kekerabatan yang public history review | tangkilisan 109 dibentuk untuk wadah bertemu para minahasa di perantauan (diaspora), terutama di jakarta.9 organisasi yang berkiprah langsung dalam pengembangan sejarah dan budaya minahasa antara lain adalah yayasan kebudayaan minahasa (ykm), kerukunan antar pemuda kawanua (kapak), yayasan penelitian sejarah dan masyarakat, yayasan malesung rondor dan institut seni budaya sulawesi utara. sebagian besar lembaga tersebut sudah memudar dan bahkan menghilang dari kegiatan pengembangan sejarah dan budaya minahasa, kecuali yang disebutkan terakhir. beberapa perintis dan pemrakarsa pengembangan itu antara lain adalah mulai dari non tengker, benny j. tengker, bert supit, h.n. sumual hingga benny j. mamoto. seorang budayawan minahasa yang sangat ulet, teguh dan bededikasi tinggi adalah jessy wenas. melalui institut seni budaya sulawesi utara, benny j. mamoto memperlihatkan perhatian dan kerja keras tanpa pamrih dalam mengembangkan warisan sejarah dan budaya leluhurnya sebagai bagian dari kebudayaan dan sejarah nasional.10 sambutannya pada karya benny mamoto (2007: th) menyatakan bahwa ‘suatu gerakan kebudayaan – yang antaranya ditandai serangkaian program penelitian, seminar dan symposium, konservasi dan dokumentasi, pelatihan/workshop, apresiasi seni dan festival/lomba yang meliputi setiap cabang seni tradisional sulawesi utara (baca juga minahasa, pen) – kami tujukan tak lain untuk melestarikan dan mengembangkan seni budaya warisan leluhur yang di atas mana dapat dibangin secara lebih kokoh kebudayaan generasi hari ini dan generasi-generasi mendatang.’ semangat dan tujuannya di balik prakarsa dan pelaksanaan gerakan kebudayaan itu tampak pada pernyataan selanjutnya yang berbunyi adalah ‘bila di masa lampau orang minahasa telah terbukti unggul di hampir setiap bidang kehidupan dibandingkan dengan umumnya etnis lain di seluruh nusantara, nilai-nilai budaya apa saja yang melatarbelakanginya? sejumlah nilai budaya tradisional minahasa sangatlah relevan dan penting untuk dihayati serta dilestarikan generasi kini dan nanti. sebut sebagai missal, nilai-nilai budaya tumani o rumapar (keluar dari kampung halaman untuk membuka lahan penghidupan baru dan mencapai keberhasilan puncak) yang di masa sekarang ini kurang-lebih selaras dengan semangat outward looking yang merupakan syarat mentalitas untuk bisa unggul di era globalisasi’. menjembatani antar komponen publik sejarah kegalauan dan rintisan hetty palm hampir enam dekade yang lalu tampaknya telah ditanggapi oleh karya jessy wenas (2007). walau tanpa public history review | tangkilisan 110 berlatarbelakangkan pendidikan akademik, baik dari bidang ilmu sejarah dan bahasa belanda, budayawan ini mencoba merambah literatur-literatur lama yang sebagian besar berbahasa belanda untuk menggali dan merekonstruksi kembali peninggalan kesenian minahasa dan upayanya dapat dikatakan berhasil. tentunya, sebagaimana yang disadari bahwa masa lampau hanya meninggalkan sedikit jejak-jejaknya di masa kini dan adagium luhur (the noble dream) namun utopis dari bapak sejarah modern leopold von ranke tentang merekonstruksi kembali masa lalu sebagaimana yang terjadi (wie ist eigenlicht gewessen), upaya penggalian itu masih menyisakan rongga-rongga yang tidak dapat disi kembali karena telah menghilang tertelan oleh waktu. oleh karena itu selain menemukan kembali (rediscovery) upaya itu memerlukan suatu penciptaan (kreasi) berdasarkan imajinasi yang dapat dipertanggungjawabkan dan sekaligus menjawab tantangan (jiwa) zaman saat ini (zeitgeist). upaya menggali, melestarikan dan memperkenalkan warisan kesenian minahasa dalam berbagai forum yang dewasa ini banyak diprakarsai oleh benny j. mamoto memperlihatkan kedua sisi itu, yaitu rediscovery dan creation (invention). memang, temuan-temuan ini relatif belum menjadi perhatian kalangan (sejarawan) akademisi terutama sebagai bahan dan masukan untuk penelitian dan penulisan ilmiah. walau demikian, kesenjangan itu tidak lebih sebagai persoalan waktu belaka, karena cepat atau lambat jembatan itu, berupa sejarah publik, telah terbangun dan menanti untuk digunakan. permasalahan yang penting di balik perkembangan sejarah publik di kalangan publik sejarah adalah adanya kesadaran bahwa rediscovery dan invention itu tidaklah bertolakbelakang selama didukung oleh landasan ilmiah, dan selanjutnya upaya itu dimaksudkan sebagai bagian dari pengembangan kekayaan kazanah kebudayaan nasional yang demikian majemuk dan dinamis. endnotes 1 roy rosenzweig and david thelen, the presence of the past: popular uses of history in american life, columbia university press, new york, 1998 and paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), public history and heritage today: people and their pasts, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2012. 2 lihat antara lain dalam benson, brier, rosenweig (1986); juga dalam situs internet seperti: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/publichistory/main.htm, www.publichistory.org/what_is/definition.html, http://ncph.org/cms/what-is-publichistory/ dan lainnya 3 seperti pembatasan sebagai berikut, ‘public history is history that is seen, heard, read, and interpreted by a popular audience. public historians expand on the methods of academic history by emphasizing non-traditional evidence and presentation formats, reframing questions, and in the process creating a distinctive historical practice… public history is also history that belongs to the public. by emphasizing the public context of scholarship, public public history review | tangkilisan 111 history trains historians to transform their research to reach audiences outside the academy.’ (http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/publichistory/main.htm) 4 tradisi lisan berbeda dengan sejarah lisan yang lebih diartrikan sebagai metode untuk menggali keterangan dari para saksi sejarah melalui pada umumnya teknik wawancara. lihat masalah-masalah dalam sejarah lisan pada notosusanto (1978: 17-21). 5 bandingkan dengan profesi sejarah yang diungkapkan oleh kuntowijoyo (1995: 3-6), yaitu guru sejarah, pegawai sejarah (purbakala, museum, monumen, balai kajian sejarah dan arsip), pencatat sejarah (di instansi-instansi seperti abri (angkatan bersenjata republik indonesia), kini tni (tentara nasional indonesia) dan polri (kepolisian republik indonesia), pelaku sejarah, saksi sejarah, peneliti sejarah, dan penulis sejarah. suatu hal yang menarik di sekitar pegawai sejarah adalah tentang tugas mereka yang berhubungan dengan masyarakat untuk menanamkan kesadaran sejarah, yang dikatakannya tidak mudah karena harus bersaing dengan pengaruh globalisasi yang tidak jarang memberikan sajian yang tidak hanya anasional tetapi juga ahistoris. 6 tidaklah berlebihan apabila harapan diberikan juga kepada masyarakat minahasa agar mampu memberikan sumbangsih yang sesuai untuk kemajuan kehidupan bangsa dan negara indonesia. pada konteks ini, gagasan-gagasan yang disampaikan oleh berbagai pakar tentang bagaimana membangun dan memajukan indonesia perlu menjadi acuan, antara lain adalah sastrosoenarto (2006: 101-104). melengkapi pemikiran bernas itu adalah karya sukmawati & tangkilisan (2012). lihat juga sambutan benny j. mamoto pada karya wenas (2007: th). 7 pembatasan periodisasi ini tidaklah ketat karena tercantum karya m.r. dajoh (1949) dan f.s. watuseke (1972) pada halaman 53. 8 judul karya mereka yang lengkap terdapat pada schouten (1981) 9 lihat pembahasan yang menarik tentang diaspora minahasa pada a.j. ulaen (2002). 10 simak pencapaian dan penghargaan yang diperoleh oleh benny j. mamoto dalam revitalisasi kesenian minahasa pada: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-7000/largestorchestra-playing-on-bamboo-instruments/; http://umum.kompasiana.com/2009/11/01/seni-budaya-indonesia-dan-pengakuandunia/; http://oase.kompas.com/read/2009/11/05/07410886/bakudapa.di.pasang.surut.kolintang; http://www.fib.ui.ac.id/index.php?limitstart=78&lang. daftar pustaka abdullah, taufik, abdurrachman surjomihardjo (red.) (1985). ilmu sejarah dan historiografi arah dan perspektif. jakarta: gramedia. charas, muriel (1987). ‘une vue generale sur le pays minahasa’. archipel, 34, hal. 49-62 charas, muriel (1987). ‘le giroflier: evolution de l’agriculture et transformation de l’espace on pays minahasa’. archipel, 34, hal. 143-163 henley, david e.f (1996). nationalism and regionalism in a colonial contex, minahasa in the dutch east indies, leiden: kitlv press. kotambunan, r.e.h. (1985). minahasa ii & iii pemerintahan purba sampai kedatangan voc dan tiga perang tondano. manado: tp. kuntowijoyo (1995). pengantar ilmu sejarah. yogyakarta: yayasan bentang budaya. lapian, a.b. (2009). orang laut bajak laut raja laut sejarah kawasan laut sulawesi abad ke-19. jakarta: komunitas bumbu. leirissa, r.z. (1991). prri permesta strategi membangun indonesia tanpa komunis. jakarta: pustaka utama grafiti. leirissa, r.z. (1997). minahasa di awal perang kemerdekaan indonesia peristiwa merah putih dan sebabmusababnya. jakarta: pustaka sinar harapan & yayasan malesung rondor. notosusanto, nugroho (1978). masalah penelitian sejarah kontemporer (suatu pengalaman). jakarta: yayasan idayu. pantouw, a (1926). minahasa lama dan baru. manado: manadosche drukkerij. palar, h.b. (2009). wajah lama minahasa. jakarta: yayasan gibbon indonesia. palar, h.b. (2009). wajah baru minahasa. jakarta: yayasan gibbon indonesia. palar, h.b. (2009). minahasa benteng terakhir nkri. jakarta: yayasan gibbon indonesia. parengkuan, f.e.w (1983). sejarah sosial sulawesi utara. jakarta: proyek isdn. sastrosoenarto, hartarto (2006). industrialisasi serta pembangunan sektor pertanian dan jasa menuju visi indonesia 2030. jakarta: gramedia pustaka utama. public history review | tangkilisan 112 schouten, mieke (1981). minahasa and bolaangmongondow an annotated bibliography 1800-1942. the hague: martinus nijhoff. schouten, mieke (1993). minahasan metamorphoses leadership and social mobility in a southeast asian society. leiden: disertasi s-3 universitas leiden. schefold, reimar (ed.) (1995). minahasa past and present: tradition in an outer island region of indonesia. leiden: research school cnws. sukmawati, carmelia, yuda b. tangkilisan (2012). perjalanan pemikiran dan karya hartarto sastrosoenarto menteri perindustrian 1983-1993 menteri koordinator 1993-1999. jakarta: yayasan pidi. supit, bert (1986). minahasa dari amanat watupinawetengan hingga gelora minawanua. jakarta: penerbit sinar harapan. supit, bert (tt). sejarah perang tondano (perang minahasa di tondano). jakarta: yayasan lembaga penelitian sejarah dan masyarakat. tangkilisan, yuda b, m.p.b. manus (2002). ‘tinjauan ringkas tentang historiografi minahasa’ dalam: roy e. mamengko (ed.). etnik minahasa dalam akselerasi perubahan. jakarta: pustaka sinar harapan, hal 372-380. taulu, h.m. (1934). hikajat hermanus willem dotulong, opperhoofdof majoor van sonder, (1824-1861) en groot-majoor titulair bij de infantrie v.h. nederlandsch oost-indische-leger, (1825-1830). manado: liem . taulu, h.m. (1937). sedjarah ‘perang tondano’ (1807-1809) ringkasan. manado: liem. ulaen, alex j. (2002). ‘kembara budaya dan diaspora: amatan (dari) luar’. dalam: roy e. mamengko (ed.). etnik minahasa dalam akselerasi perubahan. jakarta: pustaka sinar harapan, hal 400-8. watuseke, f.s. (1968). sedjarah minahasa. mando: tp. wenas, jessy (2007). sejarah & kebudayaan minahasa. jakarta: institut seni budaya sulawesi utara. worotikan, j.a. (1933/37). geschiedenis uit de sagen van de minahasa, 2 jli. manado: lie boen yat. the great wall of jimbour:1 heritage and the cultural landscape michael t. davis public history review, vol 12, 2006, pp103-110 isitors to the homestead complex of jimbour on the darling downs in queensland are immediately charmed by the stately stone residence that is jimbour house and the surrounding ancillary buildings of historical significance. yet, hidden on a grassed and vegetated ridge not far from the northern side of jimbour house, is a dry stone wall that is a rare, important and little-known aspect of queensland’s cultural heritage. extending some four miles and originally constructed to a height of about five feet, the wall stands as a memorial to the tenacity and skills of early pastoral workers and was recently listed on the queensland heritage register.2 once dubbed the ‘great wall of jimbour’,3 it sheds light not only on early technologies of land management but also of cultural and spatial adaptation by european settlers. this article takes a closer look at the history of this fascinating remnant of nineteenth-century pastoralism. background: queensland cultural heritage while the ‘great wall of jimbour’ stands as a relic of a bygone era, recognition of its cultural heritage value is indicative of the ascendancy of the heritage industry and popular understandings of history residing in material culture. it is part of a world-wide trend, a cultural mentality that has taken grip over the last forty-five years at least. for one scholar, the ‘current craze for heritage seems to me likely to last’.4 in australia, there is a broad sympathy for preserving our past, for protecting cultural heritage places as much for future generations as for an empathy with the past of the present generation. the webpage of the queensland environmental protection agency summarises the cultural heritage ethos of many australians: ‘protecting our cultural heritage places is as important as looking after the natural environment. once they're gone, they can never return.’5 it is, therefore, not surprising that ‘worship of the past’ has been referred to as ‘one of the great secular religions’ in australia.6 without much conjecture, the opening line in the preface to a heritage handbook states that heritage ‘is now big business in australia.’7 a whole industry has emerged for the identification, assessment and protection of historic properties and places.8 historians, architects, planners, archaeologists and v public history review, vol 12, 2006 104 conservationists now band together under the rubric of heritage professionals. our cultural property is now covered by an extensive legislative framework.9 on a national level, the first move towards heritage conservation was made in 1972 when the whitlam government established a national estate grants programme and a commission of inquiry to survey australian cultural heritage. the australian heritage commission was subsequently established by law in 1975 and at much the same time some of the states enacted their own heritage acts. the historic buildings act 1974 in victoria was the first, followed by the new south wales heritage act 1977 and the south australian heritage act 1978.10 queensland, however – like western australia and tasmania – was slow to enact heritage legislation. organised efforts to identify and conserve queensland’s heritage were first made by the national trust, which was established in 1963. as valuable and important as such efforts of the national trust of queensland were and still are, it was a community organisation that for the first ten years was managed by volunteers. its operating budget was small and it lacked statutory authority. historic buildings were often destroyed during midnight raids, as queensland development pushed forwards during the 1970s and 1980s with unabated vigour. one local heritage consultant commented: ‘the pace, the enthusiasm, and the broadly held belief… that this is the golden age make legislation for the conservation of the cultural heritage… a low priority in the minds of most of the people’.11 a free enterprise, laissez faire ethic in queensland during this period identified progress with development. this ideology was to be constrained by the enactment of the queensland heritage act 1992.12 the act established the queensland heritage council which advises the minister for environment and heritage on the conservation of cultural heritage, regulates the management of heritage places and maintains the queensland heritage register. while the balance between development and conservation remains at best unstable in queensland, producing complex legal debates over private property and ownership,13 there exists now a general sympathy for and understanding of our historic past. the queensland heritage register, which lists the places, structures and natural formations of heritage significance, provides a record of the value and importance of what was once called our ‘cultural resources’ and it is fitting that the ‘great wall of jimbour’ has now taken its place in the register alongside the other reminders of our past. jimbour the jimbour run was one of the largest pastoral properties on the darling downs, an expansive fertile area discovered by the botanist and explorer allan cunningham in 1827.14 the leslie brothers arrived on the downs in 1840 and took up the first pastoral run of canning downs, before richard todd scougall, owner of liverpool plains, the following year claimed a run of about 3,000,000 acres of an area known as jimba. with the closure of the penal settlement in brisbane in 1842 the area was opened to free settlement and large pastoral runs on the darling downs were selected. when scougall ran into financial problems public history review, vol 12, 2006 105 in 1843, the jimbour run, stocked with some 11,000 sheep, was sold to thomas bell of parramatta and four years later bell’s sons, john alexander and joshua peter, arrived to manage the property following the death of the original station manager, henry dennis.15 it was joshua bell, however, who eventually took full control of managing jimbour, raising a family there in the 1860s and starting his political career at the same time. in 1863-64, the bells applied under the right of pre-emptive purchase for the freehold of nine portions of land along jimbour creek and around jimbour head station. a decade of sustained building activity followed, with the construction of a two-storeyed house built of bluestone, a butchery, worker’s accommodation and a timber chapel. it was in the 1870s, however, that the most significant building works began at jimbour. joshua peter bell became a founding member and director of the queensland national bank in 1872 and, flush with money from the wool boom of the 1850s and 1860s, he was well placed to make handsome improvements to the property. in 1873, brisbane architects richard suter and annesley voysey were employed to design a new main residence at jimbour. suter and voysey had previously worked on other darling downs homesteads16 but none rivalled jimbour for its opulence and grandeur. work on jimbour house commenced in 1874 under the supervision of harry ensor, who later served on the wambo divisional board in the early 1880s.17 constructed from local sandstone, some 200 workmen were employed on the project which lasted three years and cost nearly £30,000.18 until the major improvement work of the 1870s there was little fencing of any consequence on the freehold property and shepherds were employed to control the flocks.19 a survey plan of jimbour dated 2 january 1864 shows a number of timber fences on the estate but not a stone wall along the jimbour ridge.20 it was only during the construction of jimbour house that the stone wall at jimbour was built, in a period when the station reached its peak as a nineteenth-century pastoral enterprise. great wall of jimbour dry stone walling is an ancient craft that relies on the skilful placing of stones, not mortar, to produce the strength and durability of the wall.21 the craftsmen, also known as cowans, would traditionally lay two parallel rows of stones about three feet apart, with the outer walls gently tapering inwards to the top and the core of the wall filled with rubble. the two sides were bound together by the judicious placing of large capping stones across the top of the wall. this technique, requiring great dexterity and patience,22 gained the status of a specialist trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in britain, at a time when the enclosure movement gathered momentum.23 the south of scotland, the lake districts, the cotswolds and wales are particularly rich with dry stone wall heritage, where agriculturalists realised the inherent value of enclosing their fields using this method. often this was simply as a means of demarcation, a way of distinguishing and marking private property. dry stone walls helped clear the public history review, vol 12, 2006 106 geological landscape of an abundance of surface rocks for the purpose of creating arable land as well as being a cost-effective enclosure for livestock: it is low maintenance, fireproof and highly durable. moreover, for britons they not only served a practical purpose but also assumed a certain cultural significance. as hooker has noted, the ‘stone wall of the united kingdom and ireland is an ancient and time-honoured way of signifying ownership and control of the countryside. it has an almost religious importance and is a sign of long habitation – of cultivation and the keeping of domesticated livestock.’24 the jimbour wall (reproduced courtesy of the queensland environmental protection agency) in australia, dry stone walling appeared in the mid 1800s when anglo-celtic and european migrants began plying their trade in the expanding pastoral districts of the country. serving as a means of clearing the land and spatial management, dry stone walls took on a deeper cultural and nostalgic meaning for early european settlers. in a harsh and unfamiliar environment, stone walls helped transform the landscape into something that resembled their homeland, a process that has been described by one scholar as ‘colonisation by mimesis’.25 this manipulation of the public sphere and place-making was ‘a type of grand clearing that instituted one type of memorialisation over another’.26 much of this activity occurred in victoria27 and the contribution of dry stone walls to the shaping of australia’s cultural and historic landscape has recently been recognised and promoted by the establishment of the dry stone walls association of australia in 2002.28 in queensland, there are fewer examples of this historic craft.29 one of the most impressive and well-preserved is the dry stone wall at jimbour. in 1925, public history review, vol 12, 2006 107 following extensive restoration of jimbour house, the queenslander newspaper printed a story about the property to celebrate the formal re-opening of the house.30 the article, written from notes by harry ensor, who supervised the building works at jimbour in the 1870s, records that the first plan was to construct a log fence on the jimbour ridge. the idea was abandoned due to the abundance of available stone and construction of the stone wall was commenced. it was impressive in its original state, extending about four miles in length, five feet in height, two feet six inches wide at the base and eighteen inches wide at the top. it was rightly dubbed the ‘great wall of jimbour’, not only on account of its physical extent but also on the grounds that it was the product of enormous human perseverance and ingenuity. the idea of constructing the wall was first conceived by a fellow affectionately known as ‘stonewall jackson’.31 as supervisor of the work gang that built the stone wall, jackson was responsible for adapting to and overcoming the treacherous conditions of jimbour ridge. the stony ground meant that the bullocks used to move the stones needed to be continuously shod and the workmen were forced to lace greenhide to their boots for extra protection. the difficult terrain and extent of the wall would have made this a time-consuming task and bears testimony to the endurance and spirit of early european pastoral workers. ensor claims that the dry stone wall was built to divide the jimbour run. the exact meaning of this comment is not known but there is no evidence to suggest that it was used as a line of demarcation. an 1877 survey plan of further jimbour pre-emptive purchases, drawn by surveyor martin lavelle, shows the dry stone wall extending the length of the stony ridge to the north east of the station residence. the wall, however, was not used as a boundary for any of the portions surveyed.32 by this time it appears the wall had been in place for several years. the surveyor noted that the wall was in ‘a bad state being full of grass’33 and it seems more plausible that it was constructed as a barrier fence. jimbour in the 1870s was a large sheep station still employing shepherds to manage the flocks. the stony ground, which today remains hazardous to walk across, would have been difficult to patrol on foot and ensor recollected how, in the early days, ‘the grass was on many occasions higher than the sheep and cattle, and one had to watch where the grass was moving in order to locate the sheep.’34 the wall was constructed to the traditional height required to keep in most breeds of sheep and it seems likely that the main purpose of the wall was to prevent flocks wandering over the grassy ridge. it lessened the burden on the shepherds and served to stop sheep from wandering into an area of jimbour infested with dingoes. as ensor explained: ‘dingoes used to give a great deal of trouble, and two men were always kept on to trap these pests, also poison, in order to try and lessen their numbers.’35 the stone wall may also have served a supplementary purpose of keeping wallabies away from the plains adjacent to the head station where blue grass and wild oats grew. in the late nineteenth century, wallabies were a persistent problem for land owners on the darling downs. many were forced to erect fences public history review, vol 12, 2006 108 at great cost in an effort to control the problem. an article in the brisbane courier in 1874, reporting on darling downs selections around jandowae, noted the extent of the issue: i do not exaggerate in stating that as i made my way in, i saw thousands of wallabies retreating quietly before me. these pests would appear to have become perfectly unbearable here, as at the point where the fence runs into the scrub, another fence was in course of construction – running along the exterior of the scrub – for the sole purpose of shutting in these little grass devourers… the selections bordering these scrubs are terribly reduced in value by the ravages of the wallabies, and i noticed their paths more than three miles from the scrub. these are strongly marked, wellbeaten paths, used by the vermin to pass out to pastures even more remote, so that evidently their ravages must be felt even five miles from the scrubs which shelter them.36 at jimbour, the stone wall may have been constructed in an effort to control wallaby damage on the plains. and there seems every justification for this. in 1882, the land commissioner for the darling downs reported to the lands department that portions of jimbour were ‘rendered almost useless by reason of being overrun with wallaby’.37 in the end, the jimbour stone wall was not a very effective means of controlling wallabies, if indeed it was meant to at all. it was about two feet lower than it would have needed to be and today sections are in a state of collapse where wallabies have created trails over the wall. with the repurchase of jimbour in the early twentieth century and subsequent 1909 subdivision of land either side of the jimbour ridge for closer agricultural settlement, the dry stone wall was used as the approximate demarcation line for subdivisions north and south of the wall. the 1909 surveys cross and re-cross the wall many times, but the survey lines mostly follow within a few metres of the stone wall.38 conclusion today, the ‘great wall of jimbour’ symbolises the rise of the cultural heritage industry in australia and more particularly in queensland. its identification and recognition as a site of heritage significance is indicative of the growing popular appreciation of our historic past. importantly the wall stands as a lasting reminder of yesteryear. to wander along the length of this wall is a throwback in time. sections of the wall remain in a relatively well-preserved state, unmoved for over 130 years. the preservation and overall structural integrity of the wall is testimony to the skills of early pastoral workers in the regional areas of queensland. it is an added reminder of the cultural heritage significance of jimbour. alongside the heritage-listed mansion and ancillary buildings is this rare and important example public history review, vol 12, 2006 109 of traditional european technology used by early settlers in controlling, shaping and adapting to their new colonial environment. it is their lasting mark on the landscape, a sign of their time there and an indication of their physical and cultural assimilation. the jimbour dry stone wall is truly one of the most intriguing heritage landmarks, a memorial of nineteenth-century australian history. endnotes 1 i wish to acknowledge that the research on which this paper is based was carried out as a heritage assessment for the queensland environmental protection agency and that the agency is the copyright owner of the written history, description and assessment of significance as included in the queensland heritage register. i am grateful to the environmental protection agency for granting permission to use the research and assessment as part of this article. i would also like to thank david russell and the staff at jimbour house who helped facilitate a research visit to the property. 2 queensland heritage register place id 602415. 3 ‘the story of jimbour house’, in the queenslander, 12 december 1925, p11. 4 david lowenthal, the heritage crusade and the spoils of history, viking, london, 1996, p2. 5 cited from the following webpage of the queensland environmental protection agency: http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/cultural_heritage/protecting_cultural_heritage/protecting_cultural_heritage/ 6 cited in lowenthal, op cit, p1. 7 graeme davison and chris mcconville (eds), a heritage handbook, allen & unwin, north sydney, 1991, pvii. 8 see graeme davison, ‘a brief history of the australian heritage movement’, in davison and mcconville, pp14-29. 9 see maurice evans, principles of environmental and heritage law, prospect media, st leonards, 2000; ben boer and graeme wiffen, heritage law in australia, oup, melbourne, 2006. 10 for a discussion of state heritage legislation see sheryl yelland, ‘heritage legislation in perspective’, in davison and mcconville, op cit, pp43-61. 11 cited in davison, ‘a brief history of the australian heritage movement’, in davison and mcconville, p.25. 12 for an overview of the act see a. innes, ‘application of the queensland heritage act 1992’, australian environmental law news, no 2, 1993, pp7-10. 13 see c. arnold, ‘valuing our built heritage: who pays for its preservation?’, queensland law society journal, vol 23, no 5, 1993, pp451-68; p.l. pan, ‘ownership and control: an analysis of the queensland heritage act 1992’, queensland law society journal, vol 23, no 3, 1993, pp223-42. 14 for the early history of the darling downs district, see maurice french, a history of the darling downs frontier, darling downs institute press, toowoomba, 1989; and maurice french, explorations in frontier history: darling downs, 1840-1860, university of southern queensland press, darling heights, 1997. 15 for the early history of jimbour, see c.w. russell, jimbour: its history and development, 1840-1953, watson & ferguson, brisbane, 1955. for the history of jimbour to 1982, see hilary maude russell, jimbour: its history and development, 1955-1982, the dalby herald, dalby, 1982. 16 suter designed talgai homestead near allora in 1868. see queensland heritage register place id 600006. suter and voysey also designed westbrook hall near drayton in 1873-76. 17 queensland post office directory, hollander wright, brisbane, 1883-84. 18 see a typescript ‘history of jimbour house and its occupants’, 1973, by sybil bell, in university of queensland fryer library, uqfl.68, c.w. russell papers, box 19. 19 g.h. routley, ‘old jimbour and the darling downs’, the bulletin, 31 december 1952, p23. 20 queensland department of natural resources, mines and energy, survey plan d35119 (1864). 21 see lawrence garner, dry stone walls, shire publications, buckinghamshire, 2005. 22 the construction of a dry stone wall was labour intensive and progressed at a slow rate. it is estimated that a solo waller could build approximately five metres per day: ibid, p4. 23 see j.m. neeson, commoners: common right, enclosure and social change in england, 1700-1820, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1993; j.a. yelling, common field and enclosure in england, 1450-1850, macmillan, london, 1977. 24 john hooker, if these walls could talk: a report for the corangamite dry stone walls project, corangamite arts council, corangamite, 1995. 25 paul carter, the lie of the land, faber and faber, london, 1996, p6. public history review, vol 12, 2006 110 26 ibid. 27 rod mclellan, ‘the dry stone walls of victoria’s western district’, historic environment, no 7, 1989, pp28-32. 28 information about the dry stone walls association of australia can be seen at http://www.astoneuponastone.com/index.html. 29 there are only several listings of dry stone walls on the queensland heritage register: sunnyside sugar plantation wall (place id 601700); south sea islander wall (place id 602230); melton hill, townsville, dry stone wall (place id 600885). 30 ‘the story of jimbour house’ in the queenslander, 12 december 1925, p11. 31 the name ‘stonewall jackson’ was first used in reference to thomas jackson, a general in the confederate army during the american civil war. the epithet took its rise from the battle of bull run in july 1861, when general bernard bee reputedly told his troops: ‘see, there is jackson, standing like a stone wall’. it was in reference to jackson’s steadfastness in the face of the enemy. see james i. robertson, stonewall jackson: the man, the soldier, the legend, macmillan, new york, 1997; byron farwell, stonewall: a biography of thomas j. jackson, w.w. norton, new york, 1992. 32 queensland department of natural resources, mines and energy, survey plan a34.41005 (1877). 33 ibid. 34 ‘the story of jimbour house’ in the queenslander, 12 december 1925, p11. 35 ibid. 36 the brisbane courier, 23 may 1874, p5. 37 land commissioner for the darling downs to the lands department, 29 december 1882, queensland state archives, lan/af208, jimbour run file. 38 queensland department of natural resources, mines and energy, survey plan ag.589 (1908); survey plan ag.679 (1909); survey plan ag.680 (1909). customary rights: holding the line edward ellison public history review, vol 13, 2006, pp86-94 oi tu te marae o tangaroa toi tu te marae o tane ka ora ai te iwi determining customary rights cultural identity is underpinned by custom and whakapapa that bind a people to place and resources, the rights that flow, and exercised generation by generation. in the case of kai tahu, establishing who has specific customary rights is determined by the following lore: umu takata: rights through conquest take whenua: an inherited right mahi takata: an ancestral right proven because of discovery and subsequent naming of land and resource tuturu te noho: rights of settlement, which are only valid if there is an established inter generational permanence kai taoka: exchange of land or resource for taoka tuku whenua: the gifting of land and resource in traditional times prior to european contact take tupuna: a right that can be established because an ancestor has asserted themselves over land or a resource all of the above requires scrupulous attention to detail regarding whakapapa, tradition and knowledge of the way ancestors obtained their customary rights, and applied succession over generations to the current day. at any point events could add to or remove customary rights according to the criteria in italics above. this was a natural reality to the ancestors as was the rising of the sun each day, something to be mitigated through careful management of relationships, and attention to customary rules that ordered their society. success or failure in traditional times meant life or death, prosperous families or desperate times, in many instances the key to success was arranging marriages to bring opposing sides together in blood ties. every action had a consequence, all things were inter t public history review, vol 13, 2006 87 connected, values and beliefs were based on a holistic world view, people were a part of and related to the environment that they lived in, traditions, placenames, burial sites, waiata and other cultural appendages that reinforce connection. this is part of lore, influential in determining rights and the nature of relationships that whanau and hapu hold with place, resource and status within the tribal network. treaty of waitangi the signing of the treaty of waitangi locked a window in time for perpetuity, removing the ebb and flow of maori society and stabilizing boundaries and customary rights as they existed at 6 february 1840. the treaty attempted to recognize and protect through article ii, the rights and powers of each party, in particular in this context is the compact to protect the unqualified exercise of chiefly authority maori / kai tahu had over their lands, villages, taoka (treasures), sacred sites and waters. erosion of the spirit of the treaty had a savage effect on the capacity of iwi to make the transition to a post treaty society with customary rights and social structures intact. the colonial parliaments introduced a long period of denial to the rights of tangatawhenua, for example establishing the maori land court system in the 1850’s essentially to alienate lands held by maori to meet the clamour for land by new settlers. maori communal commercial enterprises were to fore in the new colony, able to operate at a lower cost level than their settler ‘free enterprise’ counterparts, it was not long before the maori traders were sidelined by the growing number of immigrants who became less reliant on maori goods and who preferred to trade with their own. meanwhile maori access to lands, resources, to hunt and gather to supplement the needs of whanau and hapu became increasingly difficult through land loss, removal of native flora, poisoning of native fauna and the growth in area of ‘private land’ and application of trespass restrictions. a succession of laws and the associated administration of them was virtually exclusively dominated by pakeha, the maori voice was absent, as a result by the 1960’s kai tahu were a marginalized people, struggling to hold the line on access to customary resources, and depletion of what little maori land was left. the idea that maori/ kai tahu might have a view on all of this did not seem to register, and generations of decision makers must have exercised their ‘authority’ in blissful remoteness from the realities of accountability to the right holders on issues that were central to the cultural health of maori. this is not to say that maori/ kai tahu were altogether silenced, they continued over the generations to seek justice to their land claims and to give life to the promise the treaty of waitangi offered at the time of its signing in 1840. significant events such as the 1975 maori land march, bastion point evictions, environmental issues such as motunui waste discharges, south african ban on maori players and te maori all combined to awaken awareness of the other culture in this country and identify that there were unresolved issues. public history review, vol 13, 2006 88 recognition period so we emerge into and era where the recognition of maori and the treaty was incorporated into some important legislation such as the treaty of waitangi act 1975, state owned enterprises act 1986, conservation act 1987, rma act 1991, maori fisheries settlement act 1992. also introduction of treaty settlement processes offered the chance for our people to have their ‘day in court’, at last being able to express in their own words and in their own settings the pent up feelings and suffering that systematically eroded land holdings, resources and any recognition of the age old rights that the treaty sought to protect. at last our people were able to dream of a better future, for their descendants, a future where the state would acknowledge their sins, and self determination by hapu and iwi would be possible, the grievance mindset put to rest. koiwi tangata: human remains and repatriation this new found enlightenment set the scene for mature discussions on issues such as the holding of human remains as collection items in institutions, public display of toi moko (maori preserved heads) and conducting research on koiwi tangata (human remains) with out the consent or knowledge of the hapu and or iwi from whose burial grounds they may have been taken. attitudes that ‘scientific inquiry’ was legitimate regardless of who the remains might be connected to by way of whakapapa became open to question. the idea that ‘ownership’ of human remains was repugnant, physical handling and research practices with out the consent of the affected kin group gained currency. the fact that koiwi were recognized as having links to real life communities was significant, in the case of kai tahu resulting in a high degree of collaboration by authorities in repatriation of koiwi to designated ‘keeping places’ nominated by kai tahu. the spiritual connections and customs of the tangatawhenua were given legitimacy in this process. it is worth noting that there has been a nation wide response to repatriation of human remains, and recently an international project to seek the return of koiwi held in overseas institutions. kawa hua taiao: cultural materials and customs the definition of indigenous people is ‘the people who are present, who have established customs and connection to place, who are resident when other people arrive from far of lands, who bring with them new values, practices and technology’. another area of customary rights under siege has been the conservation scene, where legislation such as the national parks act 1980, reserves act 1977, marine reserve act 1971, wildlife act 1977 and conservation act 1987 embody a philosophy of protectionism or lock up that conflicts with the sustainable use philosophy that underpins customary use practice of hapu and iwi. an underlying concept in the conservation laws is a belief that people and the environment are not connected, that in order to achieve protection people are best kept out of special places, or admitted under strict rules that have the effect public history review, vol 13, 2006 89 of disconnection for manawhenua. not withstanding the fact that skifields, roading, aircraft landing, deer hunting, grazing, tramping tracks and huts, scientific research, large numbers of tourists and numerous concessionaires are able to utilise our national parks and conservation areas. maori seeking to have customary rights upheld, to retain access to cultural materials on conservation lands run into blockages. despite the fact the tuwharetoa chief te heuheu gifted to the nation the mountain tongariro and as a consequence the nations first national park was created, the laws that grew around conservation lands failed to honour customary rights. in effect the conservation laws have been dominated by the view that maori customary rights are a threat to conservation values, a perception that any ‘concession’ will lead to plunder and pillage of birds and trees. there is a paternalistic hangover at play, a monocultural attitude that clashes with the cultural concept of kaitiakitanga (traditional guardianship) based as it is on a spiritual connectedness and interactive relationship. the gathering of customary materials, making traditional tools, garments and even for particular ceremonies to take edible items are central to the maintenance of age old practices and the retention and traditional knowledge associated with such practice. customary rights customary rights are given specific protection under article ii, they can also be converted to legal status through legislation. customary rights were in place prior to the treaty, the treaty can be viewed as a human rights law. almost every culture, religion or philosophical belief system displays the fundamental principles of human rights to one degree or other, the relationship between the ruled and rulers, how society addresses such questions, is influenced by custom that evolved over the ages, it is not a recent phenomena. precedents were established by the magna carta 1215, 1688 english bill of rights, american 1791 bill of rights, similarly the french revolution was about removing an absolutist monarchy to achieve liberty based on equality of rights. however collective rights as exist for indigenous peoples, which are framed on custom and tradition, have struggled to be recognized. states are clearly recognized in international law, states however focus on individual human rights and not to communal rights which is a core element of indigenous communities. the totalitarian power of our parliament is not exampled anywhere else in the world, we are unique in that respect, checks and balances that might be constrained by the constitution such as the us might have or the various upper houses or senates apparent in other democracies. maori custom is hinged on reciprococity, the treaty reflects that, commonly referred to as ‘partnership’, however equal that may have been intended. the current situation, however, is that all power rests with the state, and customary rights are at the mercy of the decision makers. government response to the court of appeals ruling that hapu and iwi had an avenue to determine ownership of the foreshore and seabed, was to create public history review, vol 13, 2006 90 the foreshore and seabed legislation that effectively constrains interpretation of customary rights to a narrow framework of rights. the reason being to provide certainty for those who use and administer the law, affirming the principle of regulation, public access and customary rights. hapu and iwi took the view that this was a denial of rights, confiscation in effect and objected strongly. united nations the permanent forum on indigenous peoples (pfii) on the domestic scene iwi exhausted domestic options available to them to reverse government intention of legislating over the top of customary rights. actions which included participating in statutory processes of select committee hearings, lobbying and of course the foreshore and seabed march on parliament. ngai tahu and treaty tribes then began to look at international options, noting that nz was a signatory to the international decade of indigenous peoples, and that the general assembly of the un had called on ‘states to ensure indigenous peoples attain meaningful realization of these basic and ostensibly universal rights (resolution a/50/107)’. the united nations have established that the founding human rights instruments codified uncontested rights to: the rule of law access to the courts non-discrimination the right to a remedy for the violation of human rights the international decade on indigenous peoples reinforced that these civil and political rights are also enjoyed by indigenous peoples. so it was on this basis that ngai tahu and treaty tribes took the case to the united nations permanent forum on indigenous issues (pfii) in may 2004, presenting interventions to this assembly on human rights, culture, environment and social development, identifying serious issues associated with the foreshore and seabed bill as follows. culture the government was intending to extinguish our property rights to the foreshore and seabed, irrevocably severing our customary relationships. would require us to go to court to have our ancestral connection recognized by the state, but the courts will apply a statutory test that bears no relationship to our customary law. result in our customary practices being restricted, reduced, and subservient to practices of the state, and third parties. the forum was asked to ‘assert that states should unreservedly, respect customary law and relationships; and the state of nz should take immediate steps to implement the substantive realisation of cultural pluralism through abandoning its intent to pass the foreshore and seabed bill.’ public history review, vol 13, 2006 91 human rights government intervention in due process of the courts for the purpose of legislating over a decision of the court of appeal that upheld maori access rights to the courts. extinguishing the jurisdiction of courts to investigate and declare extant customary property rights. discriminating against maori on the basis of ethnicity for the purpose of political expediency. the bill was drafted subsequent to a specialist tribunal finding that the policy preceding the bill was contrary to domestic and international standards, representing a clear example of: (a) the rule of law being over ridden (b) a breach of the principles of equality and non discrimination (c) no judicial remedy available for those breaches of human rights. economic and social development maori would be denied to ‘benefit commercially from the foreshore and seabed’, despite this being common customary practices and participate, as of right, in the ventures of third parties who will commercially exploit the foreshore and seabed. nor could they benefit from future commercial development of the entire coastal marine area. the main remedy sought from the pfii was that it recommend that the nz government abandon the foreshore and seabed bill; seek a halt discriminatory practices; and support the recommendations of external experts to establish an independent body capable of arbitrating disputes between indigenous peoples and states. the pfii report to the important economic and social committee (ecosoc) of un picked up on the situation in nz including it among the issues in its report to ecosoc. of concern to many indigenous people at the pfii forum was new zealand’s reputation as a champion on the human rights globally following much lower standards at home. un committee on elimination of racial discrimination (cerd) ngai tahu and treaty tribes un strategy included, along with a number of maori groups and ngo’s of presented interventions to the committee on elimination of racial discrimination (cerd). whose role is to review states compliance with the convention on the elimination of racial discrimination, to conduct compliance and reviews, receive complaints from indigenous people, and invoke the important mechanism of ‘early warning and early action procedures’. in march of this year cerd released its report on the nz foreshore and seabed issue, notable among the commentary was: public history review, vol 13, 2006 92 (a) its hope that all actors in nz will refrain from exploiting racial tensions for their own political gain. (b) its concerned at the haste with which the legislation was enacted despite the state party explanation. (c) insufficient consideration was given to alternative responses to the ngati apa decision which might have accommodated maori rights within a framework more acceptable to both maori and all other new zealanders. (d) regretted that the consultation processes did not appreciably narrow the differences between the various parties. (e) noted the scale of opposition to the legislation among the group most directly affected by its provisions, ie; maori, and the very strong perception by maori that the legislation discriminates against them. (f) cerd stated the legislation appears on balance to contain discriminatory aspects against maori, in particular extinguishment of the possibility of establishing maori customary title over the foreshore and seabed and lack of redress options. in contravention of the states obligations under articles five and six of the convention. (g) cerd noted with appreciation the states tradition of negotiating with maori on matters of importance to them and urges the states party, in a spirit of goodwill and in accordance with the ideals of the treaty of waitangi, to resume a dialogue with the maori community with regard to the legislation, in order to seek ways of lessening its discriminatory effects, including where necessary through legislative amendment. (h) cerd also requests the state party to monitor closely the implementation of the foreshore and seabed act, its impact on the maori population and the developing race relations in nz, and to take steps to minimize any negative effects, especially by way of a flexible application of the legislation and by broadening the scope of redress available to maori. (i) cerd also that the nz government was intending to submit its fifteenth periodic report to the un by the end of 2005, and requested that include full information on the state of implementation of the foreshore seabed act in the report. it is significant that cerd rebuked australia in 1999 for amending the native title act 1993, the act originated as a result of the groundbreaking mabo case regarding aboriginal land rights the north of australia. the ‘roll back’ amendment created certainty for government and third parties at the expense of indigenous title, and was applied across the whole of australia. the new zealand situation strongly reflects the actions of the australian action of extinguishing and limiting customary title and rights in favour of government and third parties. the cerd report sent a strong message to the new zealand government. its findings justify the strong objection hapu and iwi made to the foreshore and seabed bill. it also signalled a low point in maori/ government relationships and was the catalyst for the emergence of the maori party as a political voice for public history review, vol 13, 2006 93 maori aspiration of self determination. conclusion much has changed since the colonial days, and yet in many respects so little. the fact is starkly obvious that fudging of human rights can still occur in this enlightened era. the absence of maori presence from the hallways of power and influence for so long during the birthing of this nation has ensured the systems by which this country functions are rooted on the values and beliefs of colonial times. maori communities in their own lands have been behind the eight ball, and their customs and rights are subject to the whims of the majority. new zealand lacks a constitution which embodies human rights that recognize and uphold the customary rights of the indigenous peoples of this land and protects customary rights from political acts of expediency that leave maori in a state of uncertainty. the energy and effort that maori have applied since 1840 to bring these matters to a satisfactory conclusion has been a considerable tax on their resources, an effort that has largely been patient and respectful of the due process of law and order. such patience, however, often sparks tension between young maori who could be termed radical, and the traditional leadership who have a more moderate approach. trade offs have been attempted by various governments to cap their exposure to treaty claims, rejected wholly by maori, despite this rejection legislation has been enacted to give force to such ‘tools’. for example, the treaty settlement process was ring fenced in the mid 90’s to a fiscal cap of one billion dollars value. the sum total of treaty settlements to date has not reached the one billion dollar mark, and government policy recognizes the need to be flexible if all settlements are to be accommodated. the fisheries settlement was set at a much lower level, but since ratcheted up in value through excellent management by the maori fisheries commission and its subsidiaries. politics of convenience and the media have been key in creating the perception that maori privilege is rife, often quantified by the amount of tax-payer funds being channelled into maori initiatives. there is a failure to recognize the fact that maori have who have settled their claims have done so for a decimal percentage, for example, 0.50 cents in the dollar on the ‘dollar value’ of their quantified loss of land and resources. it is not recognised that maori might be taxpayers, that the tax take from maori might exceed that which is applied to maori targeted initiatives. the foreshore and seabed outcome is a very good example for anyone wishing to study the phenomena of the power of the state to override its own principles in the name of political expediency. in my experience, whanau, hapu and iwi efforts to retain their customary relationship with their lands, resources and customs, to sustain cultural vitality and connection is an energy sapping task. public history review, vol 13, 2006 94 holding the line on customary rights is a much more difficult task than can be imagined, despite the efforts of whanau, hapu and iwi. it is a case of ‘might is right’ and ‘rights’ might be ok if it suits. customary rights are central to connectedness with lands, resources, practices and knowledge retention, it is a struggle that particularly afflicts indigenous peoples world wide. despite un declarations such as the decade of indigenous peoples, it is no different here in nz, the foreshore and seabed issue testifies to that. galleypullan public history review vol 20 (2013): 104–114 © utsepress and the author issn: 1833-4989 anastasia’s journeys: two voices in a limited space nicola pullan nastasia’s journeys was a temporary museum display which was developed using the oral history of katiusha patryn, a russianukrainian woman who migrated to australia in 1949.1 the display was installed in the australian history museum at macquarie university, australia, in 2011, where it formed one of three presentations addressing immigration to australia. this review examines some of the theoretical and practical issues which influenced the display audience, design and content. the discussion commences with an explanation of the museum’s mission statement and the direction it gave to the display, followed by a summary of the historical context of the narrative. the design process through which the audio narrative became the core element is then considered, with a discussion of how objects and their placement were used to illustrate the complex and hidden social issues which influenced katiusha’s settlement in australia. the final section a public history review | pullan 105 identifies the attributes of the oral history narrative which made it suitable to become the primary voice of the display. the museum the australian history museum is a small collecting institution which supports the university’s academic programs by collecting primary source material for staff and students of the social sciences, and providing opportunities for museum studies students to research and display objects indicative of many aspects of twentieth-century social history. the museum promotes multi-disciplinary learning opportunities available within the museum context and supports teaching excellence and student engagement within the university.2 it also aims to provide museum access, enriched educational experiences and research resources to a wider audience comprising individuals, school students and members of community organisations.3 this exhibition was primarily designed for adolescents and adults drawn from university tutorial groups and academics from the modern history and museum studies departments, secondary school students in stages 5 and 6 (years 9 to 12), university alumni and casual visitors. the museum display space consists of a single gallery featuring a variety of permanent cabinet and audio-visual exhibitions. themes addressed in these presentations include indigenous australians since 1788, australia and the first world war, australia and the british empire, changing roles of women and the settlement of greek and indian immigrants in australia. anastasia’s journeys complemented the existing immigration displays as it presented the life-story and experiences behind the arrival of an east european participant in the post-world war two displaced persons scheme, the most culturally diverse cohort of immigrants to arrive in australia during the twentieth century. on hearing the story of katiusha patryn’s childhood, the director of the museum suggested using the oral history recording as the foundation of a display which addressed one of the learning modules for years 11 and 12 secondary students studying modern history. the new south wales board of studies stage 6 modern history syllabus section, national studies: key features, includes the elective ‘russia and the soviet union 1917 to 1941’. this requires the students to study the political, economic and social policies of the former union of soviet socialist republics (ussr) under stalin’s five year economic plans and analyse the impact of collectivisation and industrialisation on the society, culture and economy.4 katiusha’s oral testimony was ideal as the core feature of public history review | pullan 106 such a presentation as her account of life in the ukraine in the years following the 1917 russian revolution directly addressed the topic and also revealed how stalin’s policies initiated and shaped her personal experience of migration to australia. historical background in 1917, the provisional government which emerged from the russian revolution gave the population of the russian empire unprecedented social freedoms. this independence was soon curtailed after lenin and the bolsheviks destabilised the elected government. on taking power, they established the communist party, re-introduced conscription and a system of organised terror and initiated industrial, commercial and agricultural nationalisation. the resulting wide spread famine of 1921-22 forced lenin to introduce the more liberal new economic policy in 1924. following lenin’s death, stalin reinstated the previous high rate of collectivisation and, by 1929, had declared the start of the first soviet five year plan and his intention to ‘liquidate the kulaks as a class’. meaning ‘tightfist’, the new term, kulak, was used to describe peasants seen as challenging economic domination by the communist party. liquidation was achieved through allocation of unattainable grain quotas followed by confiscation of all property, then deportation to unviable agricultural land or exile to concentration camps in inhospitable regions. these measures precipitated a second famine which lasted from 1929 to 1934 and caused the deaths of between eight and ten million people in the ukraine and surrounding russian provinces. in 1934, the remaining kulaks were declared to have been ‘rehabilitated’ and could apply for the internal passports necessary to obtain work.5 katiusha’s story katiusha patryn was born anastasia katarzyna sharenko in autumn 1918 into a ukrainian family living in a village close to the russian border. in common with many survivors of stalin’s terror, katiusha began her narrative with stories of civil war which she had heard in her family home.6 she then recounted incidents from her life with her parents after being designated ‘daughter of kulaks’ and sent with them into internal exile, becoming an orphan during the 1929-1934 famine, and growing up in poverty as a worker and then a driver on farms and agricultural collectives in russia, eastern ukraine and the crimea. when germany invaded the ussr in 1941, she was conscripted into the russian army and, on the fall of sevastopol in 1942, was deported to public history review | pullan 107 germany to work as a slave labourer in a munitions factory. her oral history then described escaping the factory, changing her name and being arrested and sent to work on a farm in the middle of germany. anastasia’s narrative concluded with an account of her experiences while evading repatriation to the ussr after liberation in 1945, and finally being accepted for assisted emigration to australia as a displaced person under the international refugee organisation re-settlement scheme. the social dislocation initiated by her family’s designation as kulak and the many journeys which eventuated from this alienation became the theme of the display. display design the new museum display communicated its message to the audience through verbal, non-verbal and symbolic forms of communication.7 verbal communication consisted of two audio-tracks supplemented by text panels and labels.8 photographs facilitated non-verbal understanding, while a cabinet display relied on the selection of objects and the symbolic use of space to communicate the effects of stalin’s policies and to provide a second and alternate ‘voice’. figure 1 anastasia's journeys cabinet display with text panels and photographs (photograph the author) although a museum presentation is anticipated to be first and foremost a visual experience, anastasia’s journeys featured audio tracks as the public history review | pullan 108 primary method of verbal communication. it was decided to give precedence to the aural qualities of katiusha’s testimony for two reasons. firstly, the distinctive characteristics of an oral history are best preserved and conveyed when it is presented in a format which is as close to the aural version as possible.9 secondly, video images with captions can distract the audience from the spoken words as they encourage the visitor to look or to read rather than to listen.10 two supplementary wallmounted text panels comprised an introductory panel explaining the context of the narrative and a time-line panel which listed fifteen of katiusha’s journeys, each followed by a transcribed quotation describing her experience. early exhibition designs allowed for one large context panel, with separate a4-sized text panels allotted for each journey. but this was not possible in the available space. therefore, to reduce the bulk of the large blocks of text on each panel paragraphs were limited in size to a maximum of four lines and the timeline was widely spaced to mimic the appearance of individual panels.11 the one artefact to remain from katiusha’s life before the war was her russian driver’s licence. this absence of objects and images made it difficult to provide an opportunity to engage with the display through non-verbal communication. the licence and four images taken after the war were available for the display and these were complemented by a recent photograph taken during the interviews. in the official russian photograph katiusha looked directly at the camera and showed little emotion. but the post-war photographs revealed her reliance on her husband for emotional security, her excitement when packed on the train to italy to embark for australia, the pride she felt being able to celebrate family occasions in sydney and her satisfaction with having an opportunity to share her story. the objects in the display cabinet were placed symbolically to communicate the social dislocation caused by the introduction of stalin’s policies (see figure 2). as katiusha’s story was divided by the imposition of communist policies, the cabinet was divided into two sections by a diagonal line of communist party propaganda pamphlets selected from the museum’s extensive collection of english-language communist party propaganda. objects on the upper left of the cabinet represented the traditional peasant culture experienced before exile and were lent by members of the refugee community to replace the ‘nowabsent’ possessions mentioned by katiusha in her narrative. those on the lower right were collected by katiusha after the war from various sites in germany and consisted of the few domestic items she could public history review | pullan 109 figure 2 display cabinet presenting traditional items, communist party pamphlets and objects brought from germany (photograph the author) obtain and the labelled wooden suitcase in which they were brought with her on the journey to australia. katiusha’s oral history recounted village life in the newlycommunist ukraine but an opposing voice was needed to balance the display.12 this was supplied by the pamphlets. these booklets promoted the official view of the soviet government under stalin and were published from the mid 1920s to the 1950s by the party-sponsored foreign languages publishing house in moscow, london and sydney. bearing titles such as communism brings happiness, qualities of a communist party and the legal rights of the soviet family, they were published to persuade readers in democratic countries that soviet policies provided a way of life preferable to that experienced under capitalism. while the publications promoted the supposed advantages of public history review | pullan 110 life under soviet hegemony, the oral history provided a direct experience of the negative social impacts of stalinist totalitarianism.13 connecting with an audience through oral history gaynor kavanagh emphasised that history which captures the audience interest and initiates an emotional experience ‘leads to the motivation to learn something’. a successful historical presentation needs to build an emotional connection between the objects, images, or oral testimony which engages with the past and the life experiences of the visitor or audience in the present.14 katiusha’s oral narrative demonstrated four attributes which initiated such a connection.15 firstly, katiusha’s story was a personal account of extreme and dramatic events and her narrative style evoked very powerful images which caught the visitor’s attention and held their interest.16 katiusha began her story by telling the listener that she was ‘born in the revolution’. from the first sentence, the audience was transported back to 1917, then given the opportunity to experience first-hand many largely unrecorded events in twentieth-century russian history. katiusha told of the farmers’ flight into the fields caused by marauding bands of guerrilla soldiers, the requisitioning of their entire harvest, the death of her family from starvation, trying to find work with false papers and bombardment and invasion by the german army. she became the village soldiers saying: ‘we don’t want, we don’t want to fight!’, and one of the women calling: ‘coming… coming… coming the revolutionaries!’ her use of reported speech gave the recount an immediacy which placed the audience within the scene being described and enabled greater identification with the social dislocation which was occurring.17 secondly, the narrative was a first-hand account of emotional personal experiences which created intimacy and encouraged empathy.18 jill cassidy emphasises that ‘it is emotions that oral history is so well suited to highlight’.19 the memories which katiusha holds and recounts are those which have made a deep emotional impression. she told of her life within the family: being loved by her father; cared for by her mother, aunt and grandmother; teased by her brother; and teasing her sister. she recounted the excitement playing in the snow with her brother; the joy shared with other children when racing floating grass ‘ducks’ down the melting snow rivulets ‘we had beautiful time!’; and the comfort when her grandmother taught her to cross-stitch: ‘you come to me, i’ll show you how to do these crosses’.20 she recalled in great detail her mother becoming distraught as katiusha’s first embroidery is confiscated and sold; her confusion and shame at being designated kulak and exiled from public history review | pullan 111 the village; her sense of loss when she wakes in exile to realise her mother has died of starvation while she slept, ‘and when i wake up – mother – it’s gone’; and her desperation when touching the feet of her dead father ‘and try to wake him up’.21 katiusha’s inclusion of her emotions created a shared experience with the audience and fostered audience connections with the events being recounted. thirdly, an oral history useful for an effective museum display needs to give insight into the thoughts and beliefs of the narrator without tending to ‘overstate individual agency and obscure the workings of political and cultural power’, and to avoid the inherent danger of depoliticising events when presenting personal viewpoints.22 katiusha’s oral history included events which she placed in context and thus allowed the display to include the external political and social forces which helped shape her identity.23 the story was recounted as an individual experience of the effects of political domination rather than a ‘direct window on the… meaning of past experience’. and she acknowledged the role of the soviet state and nazi germany in shaping her history.24 katiusha’s narrative included many references to soviet authority under stalin, in particular her anger and frustration at the impotence of the people when confronted by property confiscation and exile. when her family needed help she recalled that ‘we had lot of neighbours, they would like to take me to their house, until they’re ready for a small child, but they’re scared because they shouldn’t – kulaks shouldn’t do for kulaks anything, and it was stupid’. she also remarked that although she didn’t like the sleeping arrangements while staying with these friends, ‘i couldn’t say – because i am “kulak”’. as the display needed to address the social and cultural impact of collectivisation and industrialisation on soviet russia, this oral testimony filled an important role in providing an individual’s responses to the prevailing situation while explaining the political context.25 finally, incidents and events recounted by katiusha placed these experiences in a chronological and political framework which guided the listener into taking an active interpretative role and encouraged exploration of fresh perspectives on documented history.26 katiusha mentions her father and other ukrainian soldiers who were conscripted to fight for tsarist russia in the first world war saying: ‘why, why do we fight?’ and deciding to return home; her father hiding in the fields to avoid recruitment ‘or else we would be starved and died if nobody working’; and the revolutionaries being ‘not very smart’ when they came to the village. such comments included in the audio tracks allowed the public history review | pullan 112 audience the space to question previously accepted interpretations of russian involvement in the first world war and to critically analyse contradictory versions of the narrative surrounding the russian revolution and the subsequent civil war. conclusion gaynor kavanagh highlighted the need for an exhibition to use the connection and sense of identification engendered by an oral history narrative to act as the ‘rope’ for the audience to build a ‘web’ which ‘allows and indeed encourages lateral thinking and logical connection’ by the audience. the ‘rope’ provided by katiusha’s narrative allowed the audience to construct a ‘web’ connecting her experiences in the ussr with her emigration from germany to australia after the war.27 at a time when stalinist communism was openly supported by many socially conscious citizens of western nations, stalin instituted policies of ‘dekulakisation’ in the ukraine and surrounding areas of russia.28 these policies dislocated katiusha from the rich cultural traditions of her ukrainian forebears.29 forced to work for the benefit of the soviet state, for the next twelve years katiusha’s life consisted of constant journeys within russia and the ukraine in search of a secure existence. after the 1942 german invasion of the crimea, her life was further destabilised as she was deported to labour in nazi germany.30 on her liberation by the allied powers in germany in 1945, katiusha had to choose between two possible futures. she could either allow herself to be forcibly repatriated to the ussr to live once more under stalin’s authoritarian regime, where she again would have no control over her life. or she could apply to migrate to a democratic country actively recruiting workers. katiusha chose to undertake yet another journey. she and her husband migrated to australia in 1949. the use of two voices in the display provided a framework to support further audience enquiry into the political, economic and social policies of the soviet states under stalin’s five year economic plans. ludmilla jordanova has observed that the relationship between academic and public history should encourage contemplation and thought, and not interpret the past as the purveyor of a ‘clear, unambiguous lesson’. it, therefore, ‘should raise awkward questions, unsettle received views and the designers should realise that the public can appreciate these points’.31 while the communist party publications promoted the supposed advantages of life under soviet hegemony, the oral history used direct experience to encourage audience connection with the social impact of these soviet policies.32 in presenting one public history review | pullan 113 person’s experiences of the impact of stalinist policies, anastasia’s journeys allowed the audience to connect the reality of these policies with the decision of many former residents of the ussr to leave europe after the second world war. as such hidden and complex social relationships do not exist in an immediately transparent and accessible way, the challenge for the display was to enable them to become more evident and still provide an opportunity for learning as an activity, rather than the passivity of being taught. endnotes 1 katiusha patryn_1, interviewed by the author, 9 february 2011, recording in author's possession. a detailed account of anastasia’s experiences can be found at pullan, n. 'anastasia's journey' (online), e-mus-ine, vol 8, 2011. available: http://amusine.typepad.com/journeys/anastasias-journey.html (accessed 29 oct 2013). 2 australian history museum, strategic plan 2008-2010, unpublished, australian history museum management committee, macquarie university, 2008, p2. 3 ibid. 4 board of studies 2009, ‘modern history stage 6 syllabus’. available: www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au (accessed 17 mar 2011), p35. 5 j. n. westwood, endurance and endeavour: russian history 1812-1971, oxford university press, london, 1973, pp228; 247; 272; 277-8; 292; 296; 297; 299 (ftn 16) and marco carunnyk, ‘malcolm muggeridge on stalin's famine: “deliberate” and “diabolical” starvation’, in the ukrainian weekly (ed), the great famine in ukraine: the unknown holocaust, jersey city, 1983. 6 orlando figes ‘private lives in stalin's russia: family narratives, memory and oral history’, history workshop journal, vol 65, no 1, 2008, p123. 7 gaynor kavanagh, ‘objects as evidence’, in gaynor kavanagh (ed), history curatorship, leicester university press, leicester, 1990, p107. 8 ibid, pp108;109. 9 tim bowden, ‘let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater’, oral history association of australia journal, vol 27, 2005, p63. 10 a similar decision was recounted in anna green, ‘the exhibition that speaks for itself', in robert perks and alistair thomson (eds), the oral history reader, routledge, new york, 1998, p449. 11 peta landman, museum methods: a practical guide for managing small museums and galleries, museums australia, canberra, 2002, 4.1-4.9. 12 paula hamilton, creating, using and preserving oral histories: issues and challenges, unpublished conference paper, new ways with oral history: the use and abuse of oral history, museums and galleries nsw, sydney, 2011. 13 brian crozier, ‘what was it like: a perspective on history in museums’, (online), 2009. available: http://www.nma.gov.au/audio/transcripts/collections09/nma_crozier_200903 27.html .(accessed 14 jan 2012), p3. 14 gaynor kavanagh, ‘making histories, making memories’, in gaynor kavanagh (ed), making histories in museums, leicester university press, london, 1996, pp13; 11. 15 jo blatti, ‘public history and oral history’, journal of american history, vol 77, 1990, pp615; 620. 16 ibid, p618; kavanagh, 'making histories, making memories', p12; christine finnemore, ‘voices of identity: oral history in south australia's migration museum’, oral history association of australia journal, vol 16, 1994, p102. public history review | pullan 114 17 tony taylor, ‘trying to connect: moving from bad history to historical literacy in schools’, australian cultural history, no 23, 2003, p186. 18 alistair thomson, ‘moving stories: oral history and migration studies’, oral history, vol 27, no 1, 1999, p35; kavanagh, ‘making histories, making memories’, p12. 19 jill cassidy 'migration memories on multi-media at a museum', oral history association of australia journal, vol.25, 2003, p91. 20 katiusha patryn_1, op cit. 21 katiusha patryn_2 , interviewed by the author, 9 february 2011, recording in author’s possession. 22 linda shopes, ‘making sense of oral history’ (online). available: http://historymatters.gmu.edu (accessed 10 dec 2010), pp. 3, 5; michael frisch, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history, state university of new york press, albany, 1990, p162. 23 blatti, op cit, p617. 24 frisch, op cit, p160. 25 board of studies, op cit, p. 35; shopes, op cit, p5. 26 blatti, op cit, pp616, 617; richard west, ‘american museums in the 21st century’, humanities research, vol ix, no 1, 2002, p58; kavanagh, ‘making histories, making memories’, p12. 27 kavanagh, ‘making histories, making memories’, p12. 28 carunnyk, op cit, no pagination. 29 for corroboration of katiusha patryn’s experiences in the ussr see miron dolot, who killed them and why?, harvard university ukrainian studies fund, cambridge, mass, 1984; oksana procyk, leonid heretz and james e. mace (eds), famine in the soviet ukraine 1932-1933, harvard college library, cambridge, mass, 1986; roman serbyn and bohdan krawchenko (eds), famine in ukraine 1932-1933, canadian institute of ukrainian studies, edmonton, 1986; ukrainian weekly (ed), the great famine in ukraine: the unknown holocaust, ukrainian national association, jersey city, 1983. 30 for a discussion of the use of ukrainian and russian labour in nazi germany see edward l. homze, foreign labour in nazi germany, princeton university press, princeton n.j., 1967, pp80-87. 31 ludmilla jordanova, history in practice, arnold, london, 2000, p171. 32 crozier, op cit, p3. pdfgardner public history review vol 17 (2010): 52–61 © utsepress and the author trust, risk and public history: a view from the united states james b. gardner s part of our work as public historians, more and more of us are experimenting with web 2.0 – flickr, facebook, youtube, twitter, blogs, wikis, and the like – and we’re finding that engagement with that online world means grappling with very different expectations on the part of the public and new challenges to how we do our work.1 in the public history and museum communities in the united states today there is particular concern about the concept of ‘radical trust’. focusing on fostering public loyalty through open communication and expression, the concept first cropped up within the for-profit marketing and advertising world and is now a keystone of social media.2 in the public history or museum field, radical trust was used initially for much the same purpose – to foster word-of-mouth engagement in our work. but more recently it has been proposed as the next step in public a public history review | gardner 53 engagement: looking to the public for content and direction – and that’s a radical step for public historians to take.3 essentially, we are challenged to demonstrate our ‘radical trust’ of the public by giving up control and letting them develop content for our websites and exhibitions and provide direction for our work. in other words, radical trust means letting the public (via online communities) determine the future of public history. but what is so ‘radical’ about radical trust? if we take this concept seriously, as more than just pop jargon, we must demonstrate complete trust in the public and in a new self-regulated world of usergenerated content that we as public historians do not direct or control. there is no half-way in radical trust. if we mediate or if we filter out unedited, uncensored opinion, then we are breaching that trust. colin douma, one of the first in the marketing world to articulate the concept, warns that the public ‘will disconnect with a brand that silences them, and will align with brands that give them a voice.’4 in other words, the issue is not really including usergenerated content but giving up authority. for public historians, sharing authority and including usergenerated content in exhibits, programs, and other projects is hardly radical. we’ve been doing that for decades and have developed a considerable professional literature, rooted in the pioneering work of michael frisch.5 and we can all point to models of good practice at museums like the smithsonian’s national museum of american history (nmah). for example, nmah’s 2002 exhibit ‘september 11: bearing witness to history’ had a section called simply ‘tell us your stories’ that was essential to the exhibit’s successful navigation of that sensitive subject. with review, what visitors shared in the exhibit and online then became part of a september 11 digital archive that remains accessible electronically today.6 that was user-generated content long before any of us were dealing with web 2.0 and radical trust. but while most of us are happy to share authority with the public, radical trust essentially asks us to give up authority. in embracing radical trust, we seem to be taking historian carl becker’s wellknown phrase ‘everyman his own historian’ and updating it to ‘every person his or her own curator.’7 and what i’ve been reading about ‘curating’ in a web 2.0 world strikes me as very problematic – there seems to be an assumption in online communities that curating or public history review | gardner 54 doing history is mainly about selecting and organizing, about little more than personal point of view or preference.8 an article published in advertiser talk in april 2010 identified a ‘show and tell’ culture as one of the trends for the next decade: ‘in this highly democratized techno-enabled age, people behave as though everyone is entitled to their uncensored, unedited opinion. and those opinions need not be valid or supported by fact, critical thinking or depth of insight.’9 as public historians we know that curating is about much more – it is about making meaning of the past. curating or doing history is creative and scholarly work, requiring critical thinking, not just sharing, but the majority of what you encounter on youtube and the like is not really creative or original. based on data from forrester research, one commentator argues that ‘a minority of social media users are creators – people who write blog posts, upload photos onto flickr, or share homemade videos on youtube … less than 1% of the users of most social web platform [sic] create original content.’10 it’s largely our own fault as public historians if the difference between what is on the web, creative or not, and what we do is not understood. we are often our own worst enemy, failing to share what we do. if we want the public to value what we do, we need to ‘share the process of history – how we use evidence, what we don't know, how we form historical conclusions, and how our understanding of the past changes.’11 that means acknowledging that exhibits (real and virtual) are developed and shaped by individual perspectives and are not the products of some objective institutional authority. we need to help visitors in our museums and online become engaged in history not as a set of facts that they can simply rearrange and share but as a way of understanding and making meaning. the larger problem is the blurring of the line between knowledge and opinion. knowledge is at the heart of our brands as historical organizations. indeed, for institutions like the smithsonian, people assume we speak with authority even when we don’t. we cannot simply walk away from that brand or ignore that expectation. in the same way that we struggle against veneration of ‘great men’ and other elites, we need to resist the current impulse to welcome (and thereby validate) any and all opinions. while i believe strongly that we should share authority with the public (and that memory is critical to what we do as public historians), i do not support abdicating our responsibilities and privileging the public’s voice or simply doing what the public votes for, no matter what that might public history review | gardner 55 be.12 as former nmah curator steve lubar warned in an article in the public historian some years ago, ‘sharing too much authority … means simply telling the audience what they already know, or what they want to know, reinforcing memory, not adding new dimensions of knowledge, new ways of approaching problems, new understanding.’13 as public historians, we cannot just ignore those larger responsibilities. while some cultural institutions may not feel there is much to lose in embracing radical trust, i know from firsthand experience that the subjects we explore as public historians sometimes attract individuals with problematic if not offensive opinions. for example, the museum of american history has had to deal with individuals who deny that japanese americans were wrongly interned during world war ii. we cannot allow such individuals to use us for their own purposes – or our reputations will end up suffering collateral damage. a washington post humorist recently described public comments in response to newspaper columns as ‘spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. it’s as though when you order sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.’14 that’s obviously an exaggeration, but the danger is real. to anyone who argues that there is no evidence that the public will take advantage of radical trust, i can only say that that time will come – and then the damage will be done. as another washington post columnist put it regarding the back and forth in the summer of 2010 about whether to allow a mosque to be built two blocks away from the world trade center site and about whether barack obama is a christian or a muslim, ‘the nastiness index keeps rising, and all of us are getting sullied in the process.’15 indeed nastiness has become something of a game: the pranks initiated by the 4chan message board have sometimes been fun but other times racist and insensitive.16 we in the history field must recognize that the ideas and issues we explore often have political baggage and can be polarizing. they can attract inappropriate and even hateful comments, and we cannot appear to legitimize such views by allowing their posting on our blogs, facebook pages, and other media. stepping back and yielding to open, non-controlled, self-governing public engagement may be a popular way to go these days, but i think the public deserves more than that from us as public historians. public history review | gardner 56 our challenge is to negotiate a role that both builds on who we are and what our strengths are and also engages and challenges the public in new ways, whether in the virtual or the real world. rather than assuming the future is about our being impacted by the web 2.0 world, museums and historical organizations need to figure out how we can have impact on that world. we need to figure out how to be more than suppliers of raw material for public use. unfortunately, this all comes at a time when i think we as public historians and museums are becoming a bit timid. thus far, i’ve argued against taking the risks that i see with radical trust, but now i’m going to argue for taking risks in exhibitions and programs. while that may sound contradictory or inconsistent, i believe risk on the floor of the museum is calculated or manageable risk, one that we have taken in the past and should continue to take in the future. in a curious way, we’re ready today to take risk online, in a world we have little control or even influence over, but we recoil from taking risks in our museums, on our own turf. indeed, in terms of the latter, we’ve become risk averse – afraid to make mistakes, whether for political reasons or financial. we’re producing plenty of ok exhibits, but not many great ones. museums have not always been risk averse. the museum of american history, for example, was at one point known for its edgier exhibitions – including the disability rights movement (2000-2001), between a rock and a hard place: a history of american sweatshops, 1820-present (1998), science in american life (opened 1994), claiming a public place: gay, lesbian, and bisexual pride, 1969-1994 (1994), and men and women: a history of costume, gender, and power (1989). those exhibits explored tricky sociopolitical issues, and the museum knew going in of the potential political consequences. but the sense was that such risk went with the territory – if we are not challenging the public, then we are not doing our job. indeed the mission statement of the museum of american history specifically directs us to focus on presenting ‘challenging ideas’ about the past.17 we should not be afraid to try something different or to experiment. in reinterpreting technology collections within the context of business, social, and cultural history in america on the move (opened 2003) and on the water: stories of maritime america (opened 2009), the museum has taken important steps in that direction, but the reality is that nmah is otherwise shying away from truly innovative approaches and the historically controversial or public history review | gardner 57 ambiguous.18 indeed it is better known for its celebratory exhibit of ‘national treasures’ of popular culture, its first ladies at the smithsonian exhibit (opened 2008) that steps away from the more ambitious goals of the earlier first ladies: political role and public image, and a military history exhibit straight-jacketed by the title the price of freedom (opened 2004).19 the last tries to present a nuanced story (although in a non-challenging way), but that goal is severely hampered by a title that frames the exhibit as an uncritical endorsement of the myopic idea that love of freedom is what always motivates americans.20 the museum should be taking more risks, not backing away. one curator has proposed collecting and exhibiting language, a controversial issue in the context of the immigration debate in the united states. while i’m not sure how the museum would go about doing that, i do believe we should give it a try. unfortunately, it’s not on the fundraising priority list. every now and then, entrepreneurial curators still manage to find the resources to take on challenging topics. for example, nmah’s traveling exhibition bittersweet harvest: the bracero program, 1942-1964 (opened 2010) focuses on guest workers, a touchy topic in the context of the debates over race, immigration, and identity in the united states.21 indeed, race and ethnicity seems to be the one area in which american museums are willing to push the envelope. consider, for example, two challenging but widely acclaimed exhibitions: without sanctuary: lynching photography in america, a traveling exhibition developed by the national center for civil and human rights (opened 2000); and slavery in new york, an exhibit at the new-york historical society (2000-2006). more recently, the american anthropological association and the science museum of minnesota have developed race: are we so different? (opened 2007), a powerful traveling exhibition that uses biological, cultural, and historical perspectives to challenge how americans today think about race. the success of such exhibits does not, however, mean that race has become an easy subject. as important as those and other exhibits have been in tackling difficult issues, historian lonnie bunch remains concerned that museums more broadly are failing to examine ‘the complexities, interaction and difficulties of race in america. in essence, much of what institutions create today is better suited to the world of 40 years ago.’22 public history review | gardner 58 even more problematic than race for american museums is sexuality. a daring effort to explore that taboo is an exhibition at the smithsonian’s national portrait gallery entitled hide/seek: difference and desire in american portraiture (2010-11), a path-breaking look at evolving attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment.23 while the national portrait gallery is arguably a museum of history or biography (using portraiture to explore identity), one can’t help but wonder if this exhibit is viable because it is perceived of as ‘art’ rather than ‘history.’ of course, anyone who remembers the culture wars of the 1990s knows that art exhibits, from ‘the west as america’ to the works of robert mapplethorpe, have been as problematic as history. whether ‘art’ or ‘history,’ hide/seek remains an exception – the first major museum exhibition with this focus and a too rare example of risk-taking, all the more unexpected and daring at a smithsonian museum during a time of considerable political turmoil. apart from such exceptions, the unfortunate reality is that most american museums are choosing to keep their heads down, becoming not the ‘safe place for unsafe ideas’ that elaine gurian proposed, but little more than safe places for safe ideas.24 why? a facile answer would be to argue that this retreat is part of the fallout from the culture wars of the 1990s. while there has certainly been an unfortunate tendency toward self censorship in post ‘enola gay’ america, that alone does not explain our reluctance to take risks.25 i’m more concerned about the impact of changes within the museum culture, changes in how we do business that are shaping and limiting our intellectual agendas. consider, for example, money. as museums raise more and more money from outside sources and make longer and longer commitments to donors in return, we too often settle for ok in our exhibits. we can’t take risks when we’re spending millions of dollars on an exhibit that has to be up for decades. too much is invested and too much is at stake to risk failing. at the same time museums have to deal with donors and other stakeholders who have ideological agendas. we can downplay those points of view, but it’s problematic to tackle them head on. and of course trying to compete in an experience-driven, tourist-driven economy throws off balance our role in contemporary life. museums are becoming places that challenge less and entertain more. with every new exhibit, we feel that we have to have more technological ‘bells and whistles’ to ‘wow’ our visitors – and that’s public history review | gardner 59 where a lot of the money’s going. i’m not arguing for some luddite approach to exhibitions but rather for thinking through how we can use technology and media not simply as entertainment or attention grabbers but as vehicles for engaging the public in the past. the center for the future of museums of the american association of museums brought in a speaker a few years ago to talk about applying the principles of online gaming to museum experiences. she didn’t propose that museums create games based on exhibits or collections so much as that we think about how the structure of gaming can provide a new approach to what we do, new ways to engage the public.26 in other words, she proposed that we can learn from gaming about how to structure knowledge and learning for new audiences, and that’s very different from simply adding in new ‘bells and whistles’ for entertainment. so what is the role of the public historian? on one side we’re told to give up authority to the public, and on the other we’re expected to take the safe route, prisoners of politics, the economics of exhibitions, and infotainment. that’s a pretty bleak situation and likely to get worse. in the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains, nicholas carr warns that our immersion in all things online may have profound consequences for not only our intellectual lives but also our culture: ‘even as the internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.’ he warns of a world in which our brains are ‘rewired,’ where surfing the web is more valued than thinking.27 public historians can either yield to that sad scenario or fight it. we need to be thought leaders, not followers – not wait to see what the future holds for us but rather try to shape that future. at the end of the day, we need to continue to explore history, to do our best to engage the public, to do public history – and to take risks. e n d n o t e s 1 coined around 2004, the term ‘web 2.0’ is used to describe a virtual world that is user-centered and is best illustrated by the collaborative dynamic of wikis, blogs, facebook, and other social media—in contrast to passive viewing of content that is generated by website creators. for a discussion by tim o’reilly, arguably the originator of the concept, see ‘what is web 2.0: design patterns and business public history review | gardner 60 models for the next generation of software’ (online). available: http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (accessed 5 october 2010). 2 see collin douma, ‘radical trust,’ marketing magazine, 28 august 2006 (online). available: http://www.radicaltrust.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2007/10/radical_trust.pdf (accessed 5 october 2010). 3 for a discussion of the concept within the public history community in the united states, see tim grove, ‘history bytes: grappling with the concept of radical trust,’ history news, spring 2010, pp 5-6 (online). available: http://aaslhcommunity.org/historynews/files/2010/07/spring2010-history-bytes.pdf (accessed 5 october 2010). see also follow up online discussion, ‘grappling with radical trust’ (online). available: http://aaslhcommunity.org/historynews/radical-trust/ (accessed 5 october 2010). 4 collin douma, op cit. 5 the term ‘shared authority’ comes from michael frisch, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history, state university of new york press, albany, 1990. 6 for a virtual version of the exhibit, see ‘september 11: bearing witness to history’ (online). available: http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/exhibition.cfm?key=38&exkey=90 (accessed 5 october 2010). for the digital archive, see ‘september 11: tell your story’ (online). available: http://911digitalarchive.org/smithsonian/ (accessed 5 october 2010). 7 carl becker, ‘everyman his own historian,’ american historical review, vol 37, no 2, 1931, pp221–36 (online). available: http://www.historians.org/info/aha_history/clbecker.htm (accessed 5 october 2010). 8 for a discussion of the changing meaning of ‘curating,’ see n. elizabeth schlatter, ‘a new spin: are djs, rappers and bloggers “curators”?’ museum, january/february 2010 (online). available: http://aamus.org/pubs/mn/newspin.cfm (accessed 5 october 2010). 9 ‘2010 and beyond: emerging and evolving trends,’ advertiser talk (online). available: http://www.advertisertalk.com/2010-and-beyond-emerging-andevolving-trends-12282.zhtml (accessed 5 october 2010). 10 for a discussion of creativity on the web, see nina simon, ‘self-expression is overrated: better constraints make better participatory experiences,’ museum 2.0 blog, 16 march 2009 (online). available: http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2009/03/self-expression-is-over-rated-better.html (accessed 5 october 2010). 11 james b. gardner, ‘contested terrain: history, museums, and the public,’ the public historian, vol 26, no 4, 2004, p19. 12 see, for example, david glassberg, ‘public history and the study of memory’, the public historian, vol 18, no 2, 1996, pp7-23. 13 steven lubar, ‘in the footsteps of perry: the smithsonian goes to japan’, the public historian, vol 17, no 3, 1995, pp46. 14 gene weingarten, ‘a digital salute to online journalism’, the washington post, july 18, 2010, pw32. 15 howard kurtz, ‘in journalism's crossfire culture, everyone gets wounded’, the washington post, august 2, 2010, pc1. public history review | gardner 61 16see ariana eunjung cha, ‘4chan users seize internet’s power for mass disruptions’, the washington post, 10 august 2010, pa01 (online). available: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/08/09/ar2010080906102.html?sid=st2010080906103 (accessed 5 october 2010). 17 for the complete nmah mission statement see ‘mission & history’ (online). available: http://americanhistory.si.edu/about/mission.cfm (accessed 5 october 2010). 18 virtual versions of america on the move and on the water are available on the nmah website. see ‘america on the move’ (online). available: http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/ (accessed 23 november 2010) and ‘on the water’ (online). available: http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthewater/ (accessed 15 october 2010). 19 a virtual version of the price of freedom is available on the nmah website. see ‘the price of freedom: americans at war’ (online). available: http://americanhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/ (accessed 15 october 2010). 20 for a scholarly review of the exhibit, see carole emberton, ‘journal article title’, the journal of american history, vol 92, no 1, 2005 (online). available: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/exr_2.html (accessed 5 october 2010). 21 for a virtual version of the exhibit, see ‘bittersweet harvest: the bracero program 1942-1964’ (online). available: http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/exhibition.cfm?key=38&exkey=1357 (accessed 5 october 2010). 22 lonnie g. bunch iii, ‘“people need to remember”: american museums still struggle with the legacy of race’, museum, vol 89, november/december 2010, p47. 23 the catalogue for the exhibit is david c. ward and jonathan katz, hide/seek: difference and desire in american portraiture, smithsonian books, washington, dc, 2010. 24 elaine heumann gurian, ‘offering safer public spaces,’ journal of museum education, vol 21, no 1, 1995, pp14-16. 25 for a discussion of the impact of the culture wars on museums, see lonnie g. bunch iii, call the lost dream back: essays on history, race and museums, the aam press, washington, dc, 2010, pp129-39. 26 for her 2 december 2008 lecture, see jane mcgonigal, ‘gaming the future of museums’ (online). available: http://www.futureofmuseums.org/events/lecture/mcgonigal.cfm (accessed 5 october 2010). 27 nicholas g. carr, the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains, w.w. norton & co., new york, 2010. for an excerpt from the book, see nicholas g. carr, ‘the web shatters focus, rewires brains,’ wired magazine, 20 june 2010 (online). available: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1 (accessed 6 october 2010). pdfread public history review vol 17 (2010): 77–88 © utsepress and the author reanimating lost landscapes: bringing visualisation to aboriginal history peter read n volume eleven of public history review, peter osborne called for the methodologies of environmental history to be brought more securely and more imaginatively into public history.1 environmental history by its own definition, he argued, encompassed indigenous, ethnic and anglo-celtic histories, and heritages natural and built, material and intangible. i believe too that we public historians need to incorporate changing landscapes and topographies as a vital element in understanding why communities and their built heritages constantly transfigure. sometimes a single geographic factor such as the northern gulf stream can go far to explain the spectacular rise of a small island like great britain to world power. equally we can help to explain the precipitous decline of a town like bourke by degradation and siltation in the darling river. i public history review | read 78 thinking through the implications of topography even within a city as intensely urbanised as sydney can be enlightening. the first route from the first settlement to botany bay followed the ridgeline of south dowling road, not, as one might imagine, the more direct route through what were once the redfern swamps and lagoons.2 it is difficult for road travellers on modern motorways and bridges to conceive how differently sydneysiders as well as aborigines used the river system to get about, and how great the journey could be shortened through a knowledge of wind, tide and currents. to float in sly grog in the 1790s and 1800s up the hawkesbury river and the now little-frequented marramarra creek seems today an improbable proceeding, until one realises the comparatively short, convenient and unobtrusive foot track from the creek’s limit of navigation to the windsor point of sales. most historically minded people could guess that the river flats of parramatta were more suitable for agriculture than the sydney sandstone, inviting the colony’s second settlement, and they can understand the way the pacific highway follows the ridgelines, without which road transport would have been much more challenging. it makes historic sense that the centennial park and sydney’s sports ground complex are built on the infertile remains of the great sand dunes once stretching far north into queensland. but it is more rather more difficult to understand the disposition of aboriginal pre and post-invasion settlements of the sydney region because road engineering increasingly ignores what were, to footwalkers, very serious considerations. the lengthy and roundabout – but comfortable – motorway route from mittagong via prospect to the blue mountains can lead us to imagine that was way people always travelled. yet the gundangara people associated with the burragorang valley had close connections with their kinsfolk living in what became known as the gully near katoomba. they walked there on tracks associated with the cox river valley, now flowing into the burragorang dam. from the katoomba region they connected with their kinsfolk living on the western plains, again through walking tracks of which the six foot track to jenolan caves is now a part. it may seem surprising that some of the aboriginal children in macquarie’s school at blacktown came from guringai (kuringai) speaking country near sydney's north coast, until one realises how common it was for aborigines – and everyone else – to use water routes to move about colonial sydney. public history review | read 79 yet we public historians working with museums, monuments, oral history and material heritage sometimes don’t work in the interpretation of historical topography as much as we might. investigation of a farmstead and its surroundings should involve a good knowledge of soils, imported weeds and their effects, contour lines, watercourses and abandoned roads to understand how it functioned as a working farm. thus while carrying out a heritage survey of the route of a projected power line between armidale and texas, queensland, i came upon abandoned cottages in seemingly improbable places, a barely-discernable track which research showed to have been a link on a principal north-south cobb and co coach line, and a chinese-built irrigation dam in an area where water no longer flowed. to make informed and contextualised conservation recommendations on the most desirable route i needed several weeks’ work in the forgotten histories of prickly pear eradication and the declining fortunes of the tobacco industry before i could be confident that i had researched sufficiently the relationship between the route’s topography and its historical land use. it should be obvious that understanding the history of the environment, then, is fundamental to public historians engaged in heritage interpretation. the university of sydney project, ‘a history of aboriginal sydney’, answers the challenge in seeking to demonstrate as well as explicate the reasons why indigenous history developed as it did. very often such explanations rely on topographical data. for example, at least half a dozen aboriginal town camps flourished well into the twentieth century, as well as dozens of smaller family groups, of which today la perouse is the only survivor. one, at sackville reach on the hawkesbury river, was on its own legally declared reserve, but most were traditional gathering places, unsanctioned but to a point tolerated by local councils, just one of perhaps a dozen former stopping places within the group’s former walkabout. for varying reasons these camps coalesced into semipermanent, then permanent town camps until engulfed, at different points in the twentieth century, by the ever-hungry sydney development. sackville reach was abandoned by its inhabitants in the 1930s.3 the gully at katoomba was demolished for a racing car track.4 the aboriginal town camp at the end of narrabeen lagoon became a fitness centre.5 several reserves in the burragorang valley public history review | read 80 were inundated in the 1950s by the construction of the burragorang dam.6 the town camps came into existence, flourished, and were abandoned or destroyed. we know when and why, and sometimes we know where the people went. but the public with whom public historians communicate also ask more subtle and complex questions requiring us to turn again to topography and environmental history. why, for instance, given the destruction of the many large and small town camps, especially after the second world war, were some town camps allowed to survive for so long? historians in the 1990s and 2000s found that using aerial photography of familiar landscapes with aboriginal participants greatly expanded their understanding of indigenous land-use and movement. these included the creative and exciting ‘lifestyle biographies’ created by rodney harrison among the ‘lamboo mob’ in western australia in which each informant was given a separate layer on the gis database and the information of each recorded separately.7 excellent work carried out by denis byrne and maria nugent on the central coast revealed and mapped swimming and fishing spots, and tracks and pathways often now inaccessible or unknown to younger relatives.8 our project, ‘a history of aboriginal sydney’, is identified as historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au.9 currently it focuses on sydney’s northern coastal region, but within two years we plan to depict and explain the indigenous land-use of the whole of the urban area since 1788. through its design the website emphasises place and location. on the interactive time-line we have correlated information on historic individuals with tags like ‘routes and pathways’ and ‘sites: historic’. we found that a useful way to digitally convey a connection between a person and a person and a location, or to highlight the location itself, was by means of an interactive map of the north coastal region, with gps pins locating significant aboriginal historic sites. indeed, of all the techniques i have discussed so far gps site correlation seems the most logical and accessible method of sharing urban aboriginal history where site-specificity is the first requirement. google earth and gps mapping present an instant view of topography as it is today. aerial surveys of the sydney of past decades, of which there are several, can help to indicate what it was. the narrabeen town camp public history review | read 81 one important aboriginal town camp in the twentieth century was at the western end of the narrabeen lagoon 33”43’11.84 s 151”16’03.49e.10 the website digital ‘pin’ describes the site thus: current identification: sydney academy of sport the site was the last community aboriginal town camp to survive in the northern sydney suburbs. probably, before the british invasion, narrabeen lagoon was one of the many coastal occupation sites offering seasonal shelter, fish and wetland resources. until perhaps 1850, the western end of the lake was a community and secular living area standing in relation to the higher country of the collaroy plateau above. this higher and less accessible country was used for ceremonial and educational purposes by the gai-mariagal (camaraigal) people. dennis foley, a descendant, describes the area as ‘the heart of our world’.11 during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most of the other northern town camp sites were resumed for housing or recreation by state and shire governments. similar sites at quakers hat bay, mosman and brookvale were probably gone by 1930. the narrabeen site survived longer because of its inaccessibility, and was not seriously threatened until the opening of the wakehurst parkway in 1946. by the end of the second world war the narrabeen lagoon town camp had become a more or less permanent refuge for koori people having kin connections throughout the north-coastal areas, as well along the hawkesbury river. dennis foley, a remembers visiting the site with his uncles or mother in the later 1950s, by which time perhaps fewer than twenty people were in permanent residence. often his mother brought a bag of flour or a cake. during the 1950s a fifty hectare site was developed as the national fitness centre, including several ovals, a shooting range and accommodation for more than fifty people. the town camp was seen as having no value, and in keeping with the assimilationist thrust of the day, public history review | read 82 the humpies were destroyed and the people forcibly trucked to the western suburbs. no signage today records the presence of the camp within what is now the sydney academy of sport.12 the camp was cleared and destroyed only in 1959. so an immediate historical puzzle is: why was the narrabeen town camp allowed to survive until then, when so many others similar had gone decades before? comparing the satellite images of google earth with the aerial photographs of the 1930s and the 1950s, interesting though they may be, do not explain the camp’s 1959 longevity, though a close comparison of vegetation and housing development may offer some hints. nor can maps and photographs illustrate relationships to the narrabeen/collaroy non-aboriginal people who purchased the kooris’ marine produce and sold them their material needs. the aerial photographs and cadastral maps used as the most advanced tools in understanding environmental history only five years ago leave much unexplained. from 2d to 3d web 2.0, which began to be used widely from about 2004, makes possible most of the modern computer applications such as google earth, facebook and twitter. it also allowed users into the new field of 3d historical re-creation known more commonly as ‘visualizations’. there are hundreds of such examples on the web, from walking tours through ancient rome to a depiction of land-use along the course of an ancient river in what is now the english channel. the popular archaeological tv show time team used the technology to re-create longhouses, even lost villages, for which sometimes only partial or even implied foundations remained. despite a number of practical and ethical concerns – in many visualizations it is sometimes not obvious, for example, which are the extant physical remains and which are recreations – the possibilities for pubic historians are intriguing. indeed, it has been claimed that the introduction of the computer to historical studies may be as critical a watershed as textual deconstruction.13 applying gis and other forms of spatial data opens exciting possibilities for the deployment of 3d visualization to aboriginalhistoryofsydney.edu.au in digitally reconstructing some of the public history review | read 83 now-destroyed and lost aboriginal town camps of sydney. thomas has noted that: extending historical gis, they [historians] might attempt to create ‘lost landscapes’ in ways that fully allow readers to move and navigate through them. these four-dimensional [in the sense of 3d plus temporal change] models might restore buildings, roads, and dwellings to historic landscapes ... readers might do more than query the datasets; they might interact with them too, taking on roles and following paths they could not predict but cannot ignore.14 even more recently, scholars have begun to see the potential of gis learning as more than just a medium of education or entertainment. by visualizing the narrabeen town camp in four dimensions (that is, the marine environment in three dimensions, plus a representation of temporal change) we hope in this way to incorporate anthropological, historical, sociological, environmental, oral and photographic data to our website. visualization promises a research tool which texts, oral histories, re-enactments, aerial photography and maps, even when combined, do not necessarily afford. by understanding how, why and where the people lived, where they came from and how they travelled within a single location, researchers may begin to predict the locations of other sites, and why they, too, were abandoned or destroyed. visualization promises a research tool which descriptive text alone does not afford. as martyn jessop argues, ‘of far greater importance is the ability of these tools to allow visual perception to be used in the creation or discovery of new knowledge. ...[k]nowledge is not transferred, revealed or perceived, but is created through a dynamic process.’15 creating knowledge historical visualisation, then, can create as well as impart knowledge. in this way the history of aboriginal sydney team plans a progression from two-dimensional actuality to three-dimensional historical reconstruction. it seems particularly important for a site like narrabeen where the lack of information about the camp in the usual local sources like council meeting minutes and local papers, is even more acute than in urban aboriginal history generally. public history review | read 84 in the database from which the reconstruction can be created, we have some oral history. dennis foley, who as we have seen was a regular visitor as a young boy, came to the site a few days after its destruction in 1959: uncle gar came out here to talk to the old fellers to see about going fishing. anyway he come home and there were tears rolling down his face and he just said, ‘it’s all gone ... it was all bulldozed, they’ve bulldozed everything, it was just bits of tin’. the huts were built out of odd bits of tin, kerosene tins all flattened out, all this here was bulldozed, all the trees were bulldozed, all levelled, all this was bulldozed, all the trees were bulldozed down and all just smoke and glass and just where the fires had been, all gone. we came back a couple of days to see if anyone had run away, up in the hills, but they were all gone.16 now to animate the historic landscape by considering which of the visualized topographical elements will be most helpful in enabling users to answer the puzzle of why the camp survived until 1959. we need, first, a view of the lake from the viewpoint of the wakehurst parkway, which descends the plateau from oxford falls, and closely follows the northern edge of the lagoon all the way to narrabeen township. for this we will need a very dense series of photographic images of landscape, sometimes through 360 degrees, as the traveller proceeds and, as it were, looks in all directions. what, though, does the 1950s traveller see? to recreate the lagoon scenery we need to visually create ('texture') the trees, bushes, creek, sandy beach, sandstone escarpment and wind on the water; we need to model and texture any huts or humpies revealed in historic aerial or other views. our designer will need to animate tidal flows, vegetation sometimes waving in a breeze and changes in mangrove growth and siltation, to produce a half-size storyboard animation, and a third stage with full frame, textured and composted animation with camera movement. the work is likely to represent at least 650 production-hours, and cost more than $40,000. the area now digitally animated, we now attempt to answer our question. firstly – could the kooris be seen by passers-by? immediately noticeable on the re-creation will be that from its nearest public history review | read 85 point on the bumpy track of the wakehurst parkway – the camp is out of sight! we can calculate that from the view today, and from a 1943 aerial photo, that travellers on the wakehurst parkway would have been able to see no more than a few huts holding fishing gear on the strand, and boats pulled to the shore. dennis foley’s memories confirm that the narrabeen kooris, as other sydney peoples, preferred to live in rocky caves for security and protection. looking from the opposite direction, from the escarpment towards the road, the simulated aboriginal viewpoint reveals that the cave-dwelling kooris could clearly see any traveller or visitor who could not, by any means, see them. an animated trip in a 1950’s ‘putt putt’ boat across the 1950s-configured lagoon, will replicate how kooris travelling to narrabeen township could avoid any non-aboriginal houses on the lakeside if they wished. a simulated view looking west from the eastern end of the lagoon, that is, from the centre of the nonaboriginal population towards the camp, will make it immediately plain that the narrabeen town camp was one of the most hard to see, remote and inaccessible, of all the unsanctioned aboriginal sydney town camps of the twentieth century. that revelation is by no means obvious on a cadastral map even today. though the narrabeen town camp was predominantly a camp of old people, the wetland to the west and the adjacent deep creek to the north were essential for gathering and hunting ducks, eels, fish, prawns, berries, grasses and wildlife. a walk-through recreation will show the area to be unattractive to the whites of the 1950s, who quite probably would have referred to it as ‘the swamp’. yet simultaneously the animated appearance of edible vegetation, frogs hopping or ducks flapping away will demonstrate its great value to the koori residents. finally, the higher plateau country to the west was still visited for spiritual and educational reasons in the 1950s by both the younger residents and their visiting relatives. after fulfilling appropriate protocols and permission from elders, a simulated walking tour up the steep slope of the plateau edge to some of the existing sites will indicate the continuing close economic and spiritual connection of the community to the hinterland. the visualization, then, will demonstrate the economic life of a community that was partly self-sufficient and partly dependent on a cash or barter economy with the whites. it will reveal its sources of spiritual sustenance and, most significantly, its near invisibility at a public history review | read 86 time when, fortuitously, the area was not wanted by anybody else. some elements of survival are more difficult to reproduce. what cannot easily be visualized is the support given by members of the outside aboriginal community (gifts of flour, tea, money), or conversely, the shared despair over lost relatives, the ravages of alcohol and disease, the mourning for lost ways. but through such a visualized topographic understanding, users will be much closer to an intuitive grasp of the social, religious and economic mainsprings of the narrabeen town camp. other town sydney camps pose different historical questions. the salt pan creek is an important tributary of the georges river flowing south into the river from the region of bankstown. here in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lived a number of aboriginal families, some on freehold, though mortgaged, blocks, which made the owners comparatively secure against the unwelcome visits of local council and aboriginal protection board officials. but by 1945 they were gone for reasons which are not, in this case, mysterious: depression-induced payment arrears, increasing numbers crowding illegally onto nearby crown land, and an expanding white population caused the local council to evict any community members who remained. so a different question to be set by visualization of the 1920s salt pan camp is: why was this place, more than anywhere else in sydney, the focus of fierce aboriginal political radicalism for the first two or three decades of the twentieth century? these are the elements that would need to be part of the visualization design of the 1920s salt pan creek. first is the comparatively small white population along the creek, which can be calculated by council records and aerial photography. writing of aboriginal resilience along the river, historians heather goodall and alison cadzow write: ‘so there continued to be areas into which aboriginal people could move at low or no cost and with open space around the residential areas.’ mortdale and peakhurst were ‘just far enough away from a close police scrutiny to make it a good place for outspoken views, hard drinking and some shady dealings.’17 a related element is the country itself: the arid sandstone escarpments were regarded as useless for farming by everyone except those who regarded it as part of their traditional walkabout.18 the waterway was still clear, unpolluted and comparatively free of mangroves. like the narrabeen hinterland, the creek environs were prolific. even young public history review | read 87 boys could earn pocket money by catching prawns and eels, while wallabies and rabbits supplemented a hunting-gathering diet. so far the historical explanations are close to narrabeen’s, but now we would need to visualize the wildflowers and gumtips flourishing on the sandstone, gathered regularly and sold door to door or in the city markets by the women of salt pan creek. men made boomerangs as cultural items carved from gathered mangrove wood to sell to tourists at la perouse, making a much more buoyant cash economy than was possible at narrabeen. perhaps most important was the proximity of the la perouse aboriginal reserve itself, just a couple of hours’ boat ride away down river with a favourable wind and tide. the many people suffering from, or furious about, managerial strictures had an easy option known at few other places in sydney: to leave the official and sanctioned reserve and join their relatives at the salt pan creek town camp. in this way the more radical and independent minds were the first to gather here, out of the reach of managers and officials. here lived, or stayed from time to time, the famous radicals of their day – hugh anderson, jack patten, ‘king burraga’ and william cooper. from la perouse, too, came aboriginal inland missionaries – the salt pan was easy to get to, and they were made welcome. the community regarded the christian networks as a means to link up other aboriginal people state wide also protesting and organising against the increasingly oppressive administrative regime. as its reputation grew as a place of security, of free speech and kinfolk, the salt pan town camp became a way-station for koori people from victoria and elsewhere seeking both a refuge and an audience before taking part in the more public sydney activities.19 our visualization cannot reflect meaningfully on other elements which gave the salt pan settlement its strength: the historical memories shared amongst the kin-group, the feelings of solidarity against a common oppressor, the harmonious relationship with the whites in the 1920s and in the 1930s. or can it? these are still early days of historical visualizations. the future is exciting. e n d n o t e s 1 peter osborne, ‘environmental history method in public history: opportunities and obstacles in south-west queensland’, public history review, vol 11, 2004, p128. public history review | read 88 2 e.w. west, the memoirs of obed west: a portrait of early sydney, barcom press, bowral, 1988, p44. 3 jack brook, shut out from the world, the sackville aborigines reserve and mission, 1849-1946, brook, seven hills, 1994; james kohen, daruganora, darug country – the place and the people, darug tribal aboriginal corporation, blacktown, 2006. 4 dianne johnson, sacred waters: the story of the blue mountains gully traditional owners, halstead press, broadway, 2007. 5 dennis foley, repossession of our spirit, aboriginal history, canberra, 2001; peter read, belonging, unsw press, kensington, 2000. 6 jim smith, wywandy and therabulat: the aborigines of the upper cox river and their association with hartley and lithgow, lithgow district historical society, 1990; smith, 2008. 7 rodney harrison, ‘dreamtime, old time, this time: archaeology, memory and the present-past in a northern australian aboriginal community’, in jane lydon and tracy ireland (eds), object lessons, australian scholarly publishing, melbourne, 2005, p246. 8 dennis byrne and maria nugent, mapping attachment: a spatial approach to aboriginal post-contact heritage, nsw parks and wildlife service, 2004, chapter 7. 9 i would like to acknowledge the historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au development team: julie janson, dr suzana sukovic, andrey inkin, sheena kitchener. grateful thanks also to professor dennis foley and professor heather goodall for additional information and arranging site visits. 10 foley, op cit; peter read, belonging, unsw press, kensington, 2000, chapters 1; 8. 11 foley, op cit, 47ff. 12 sydney academy of sport, a history of aboriginal sydney (online). available: http://historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au/northcoastal/location/sydney-academy-sport (accessed 12 december 2010). 13 johanna drucker and bethany nowviskie, ‘speculative computing: aesthetic provocations in humanities computing’, in susan schreibman, ray siemens, john unsworth (eds), a companion to digital humanities, blackwell, oxford, 2004. 14 william g. thomas, ‘computing and the historical imagination’, in susan schreibman, ray siemens, john unsworth (eds), companion to digital humanities, blackwell, oxford, 2004. 15 martyn jessop, ‘digital visualization as a scholarly activity’, literary and linguistic computing, vol 23, no 3, 2008, pp281-293. 16 interview with dennis foley, 2010 (online). available: http://historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au/videos (accessed 12 december 2010). 17 heather goodall and alison cadzow, rivers and resilience: aboriginal people on sydney’s georges river, unsw press, kensington, 2009, p119. 18 ibid, pp118-9. 19 ibid, pp142-7. galleycarment public history review vol 20 (2013): 68-79 issn: 1833-4989 © utsepress and the author ‘for their own purposes of identity’: tom stannage and australian local history david carment ustralian local history was only one of the areas where tom stannage made a significant contribution but he regularly returned to it throughout his career, frequently speaking and writing about the local past and collaborating with the community organisations that promoted it. he passionately believed that an understanding of local history allowed australians to answer fundamental questions regarding the nature of life and who they were.1 it was about, as he wrote in 1979, ‘placing life experiences in a meaningful social context’ and was an essentially democratic process. while his own approach emphasised ‘the acquisition, maintenance and exercise of power, and the social consequences of its distribution’, there were as many histories of any particular locality ‘as there are people writing or talking about it… that is how should be. that is how it can a public history review | carment 69 only be’.2 in the context of stannage’s perspectives, the work of some other historians3 and my own experiences, this article briefly reflects on the state of local history in australia and the role of local historical societies. the focus is on new south wales and the northern territory, the parts of australia that i know best, but some attention is also given to the rest of the country. stannage studied at the university of western australia during the 1960s under frank crowley,4 who believed that one of the historian’s principal obligations was ‘to mine the local ore and thereby demonstrate the interests and techniques of the professional historian’.5 crowley published on western australian local history, served on the council of the royal western australian historical society and explored much of the state on his motorbike.6 he saw national history having its ‘proper position at the apex of a historical triangle built up on the broad base of district or local history’7 and impressed this view on his students both in perth and later in sydney.8 it was from crowley that stannage would also have learned of the need to develop and document local history archives, an area in which the former was particularly active.9 although stannage completed his doctoral thesis at the university of cambridge on the 1935 british general election, his first intention was to work on a local history of the english city of norwich. it was only after he found that he could not as an outsider properly come to terms with the norwich story that he changed to another topic.10 on returning to the university of western australia as a staff member he resumed his local history interests in the early 1970s. they were perhaps most prominently reflected in carefully researched books like the people of perth, which focuses on western australia’s capital until the early twentieth century,11 and lakeside city, a study of the more recently developed regional city of joondalup that is within the perth metropolitan area.12 the west australian’s obituary of him remarked that the people of perth won wide favour because it ‘told stories of ordinary folk, not just grand families’.13 local history was included in the extraordinarily popular first year subject that he taught on colonial australia, he supervised theses on western australian local topics and he used his roles such as foundation chair of the heritage council of western australia to advance local historical studies.14 stannage’s work with local historical societies was highlighted in 1974 when he cooperated with the subiaco historical society in perth in convening a pioneering and highly successful seminar on local history research methods that brought together academic and community historians and resulted in his much used edited collection of papers local public history review | carment 70 history in western australia. the seminar drew, he wrote, ‘shire and city councillors; librarians; schoolteachers; royal historical society members; staff and students from tertiary institutions; housewife historians; journalists; and so on’ from various parts of the state. many dedicated and enthusiastic local historians like those at the seminar, stannage further commented, were already engaged ‘in the challenging and exciting task of reconstructing westralia’s past’.15 with nan phillips in 1979 he co-authored the chapter on local historical societies in the handbook for aboriginal and islander history that pointed to the considerable value of society collections and publications in documenting the australian indigenous past. it also highlighted the role of society members in collaborating with other historians on aspects of that past. ‘most historical societies have several members whose special interest is aboriginal history’ who were usually ‘only too pleased to assist other researchers’ phillips and stannage noted at a time when this was not widely acknowledged among their academic colleagues.16 stannage was a strong advocate for the community in and identity of the suburb of subiaco where he was born and lived for many years. in 2001 he published a comprehensive history of his own federation house there.17 in june 2011 he was a leading figure in the campaign against a proposed merger of the subiaco and nedlands councils. subiaco, he and others contended, ‘was too special to lose’.18 shortly before his death in october 2012 he spoke at a public forum protesting about planned local government changes in western australia, emphasising the threat they posed to community democracy in subiaco.19 a city of subiaco local history award is now named after him. it is for a report, with images and text, documenting past residents and/or events that relate to a subiaco house.20 early in 2011, i participated in the commemoration of the hunters hill historical society’s fiftieth anniversary and the hunters hill municipality’s sesquicentenary that led to a consideration of stannage’s views and what bill gammage describes as the ‘dynamic of local history’.21 both anniversaries were obviously significant milestones worthy of celebration. a small suburb bordering the north shore of sydney harbour, hunters hill stands out as being not only an important historic area but also one where over a long period residents ensured the preservation of key elements of their heritage and history. the historical society’s establishment in 1961 resulted in the development of a remarkable repository of artefacts, documents and images covering hunters hill’s evolution from its long period as the land of the wallumedegal people to the present day. linda emery’s recent history of the suburb shows how for over a century it was a vital hub for heavy public history review | carment 71 engineering and shipbuilding. it was also the home of an unusual number of french and italian residents and some distinguished contributors to australia’s cultural life. many of its buildings are listed on commonwealth and state heritage registers. the suburb was the location of what is often seen as the world’s first green ban in 1971 that protected kelly’s bush and it remains well known for its community activism. despite some losses, hunters hill has been better in preserving much of its built heritage, particularly its early stone buildings set in leafy gardens and streets, than many other parts of sydney. these elements ensure that it remains a desirable although now expensive place in which to live.22 an examination of hunters hill’s past prompts the question as to why the work of local historians and historical societies such as that in hunters hill matters in understanding the bigger picture of australian history. the various attempts to tell the stories of individual communities like hunters hill, quite frequently by and for local residents themselves, encourage speculation on their contributions to the broader process of historical inquiry. as graeme davison explains, publication of local histories in australia rarely occurred before the gold rushes of the 1850s. after them, as what was known as the gold generation aged, pioneers wrote their reminiscences and journalists compiled substantial histories of the gold towns. by the late nineteenth century, australian local histories were becoming more common. they tended to be stories of material and social progress. they had what davison calls ‘long lists of firsts’ – the first european ‘discovery’, the first river crossing, the first school and so on. in doing so, they established a record for communities still in the process of being formed. some at least briefly discussed aboriginal people. many of the histories are anecdotal and badly organised but the best of them include what davison describes as ‘powerful evocations of past landscapes’.23 it was against this background that the earliest australian state and local historical societies were founded. the royal australian historical society, which despite its name is essentially a new south wales organisation, began in sydney in 1901 but the first local society to affiliate with it, the clarence river historical society, did not do so until 1935. three more affiliated before the second world war. their members wanted to promote what they regarded as the local lessons of history, often with cairns and monuments that commemorated events, people and anniversaries and through collections of documents, artefacts and images. between the two world wars, local history boosted communities’ public history review | carment 72 self-esteem and encouraged the ‘pioneer myth’ that stannage contended in 1985 was used to justify invasion. people who had left their towns and suburbs to live in other places were encouraged to re-visit them in the ‘back to’ celebrations that richard white has researched. the published programs for these usually contained short histories illustrated with photographs.24 big changes came after the second world war, when professionally trained historians entered the field. the young geoffrey blainey, who in 1954 published a history of mount lyell in tasmania,25 famously attacked what he called the ‘scissors and paste’ methods of amateur local historians.26 municipal centenaries saw the establishment of many more historical societies and greater opportunities in local history for new graduates.27 between 1950 and the present, hundreds of new south wales local societies were established.28 as louise prowse shows, by the 1960s historical societies were showing a genuine interest in aboriginal history, an interest that came before most academic research in this area.29 the darwin based historical society of the northern territory started in 1964. jeremy long, a young honours graduate in history from the university of sydney, was its first president. other territory historical societies later emerged, including one at the aboriginal community of hermannsburg.30 academically trained historians such as alan atkinson writing on camden, pauline curby on randwick, grace karskens on the rocks and carol liston on campbelltown in new south wales,31 and leith barter on nightcliff and rapid creek, mickey dewar on darwin, eve gibson on fannie bay and darrell lewis on the victoria river district in the northern territory32 all published notable, sometimes commissioned, contributions to local history. they are usually more analytical than earlier accounts, giving attention to themes such as the lives of aboriginal people and social conflict. many of these authors were also active historical society members. liston, for instance, was president of the royal australian historical society and did much work over a long period with local societies. for many years a council member of the historical society of the northern territory, gibson was co-founder of the fannie bay history and heritage society.33 an outstanding publication illustrating recent approaches to australian local history is darrell lewis’s 2012 book a wild history, which deals with the northern territory’s remote victoria river district between the 1880s and the early 1900s. its emphasis is on early aboriginal-european contacts and the formation of a settler society. there is a thematic focus on the ‘various moments and types of early contact between aborigines and whites, and the formation of a local public history review | carment 73 settler society’.34 the district’s physical environment, its aboriginal people before contact with europeans and its pastoral industry are all covered in considerable depth. a chapter on the ruggedly beautiful jasper gorge conveys a powerful sense of place. the book is based on a thorough examination of relevant sources, including many hard-tolocate unpublished materials and interviews. its narrative is clear and strong with an absence of technical language, making a wild history accessible to a wide audience. lewis has a doctorate in history from the australian national university but has also been a very frequent visitor to the victoria river district for more than 30 years. his meticulous research combined with extensive first-hand knowledge of locations and people result in a study already widely recognised as a major historical work.35 by the 1960s local history played a pivotal role in residents’ efforts to conserve historic towns, suburbs and neighbourhoods. while in the 1950s the battle to preserve the built heritage concentrated on early colonial mansions, by the 1960s and 1970s, when stannage first became actively involved in the heritage movement, interest extended to aboriginal occupation sites, factories, cinemas, gardens, small cottages and even bus and tram stops. commonwealth, state and territory parliaments passed heritage legislation that offered some protection to these places.36 stannage’s significant work with other historians during the early 1990s on the identification of historic themes for the commonwealth’s register of the national estate both reflected and contributed to the process. their recommended themes aimed at ‘comprehending the totality of natural and human history of this continent from the earliest times to the present day’ and emphasised the development of ways of life.37 historical societies, engaged in what tom griffiths calls the ‘assertion of provincial dignity and distinctiveness’,38 set up museums and resource centres that provided those interested in conserving the physical elements of the past with essential information that they needed to do so.39 local identity, griffiths writes, ‘was often forged from collections of paper and things’.40 according to the federation of australian historical societies, in 2012 there were about 100,000 people in australia who belonged to historical societies, most of which had a local focus.41in 2010 paul ashton and paula hamilton estimated the total membership at approximately 50,00042 but that figure may be too low. in 2012 there were over 37,000 members of new south wales societies affiliated with the royal australian historical society.43 societies ranged greatly from small public history review | carment 74 groups of mainly elderly people who gathered together only occasionally to much more vigorous organisations that met several times a month, organised excursions, published books and journals, owned or managed buildings and research collections, had their own websites and employed staff. while the biggest and best-established societies were those like the royal australian historical society and the royal historical society of victoria that had a state or territory role, they frequently provided outreach services such as insurance, newsletters and workshops for their smaller locally based affiliates. there were also some large and prosperous local history bodies. the blue mountains historical society at wentworth falls in new south wales owned a big block of land that included an impressive resource and research centre, a lecture theatre and dining facilities. among its members were many history graduates. audiences of more than 50 usually attended its lectures.44 on the other hand, the once flourishing auburn historical society in sydney before ceasing to exist was reduced to about half a dozen elderly members whose sole activity was an annual general meeting.45 there were, as well, instances of societies being reborn. due to an ageing and declining membership the mosman historical society in sydney was disbanded in 1995 but an energetic group of new members successfully revived it four years later. in 2013 it had regular well-attended activities and an increasing membership of 140. indigenous history loomed quite large among its interests.46 the more successful societies often had positive relationships with their local councils. the randwick city council in sydney, for instance, provided its local society with extensive premises at no cost.47 many societies were founded in the 1950s and 1960s, so the hunters hill society is one of a large number to have celebrated its half-century. in spite of their successes, local history and local historical societies in australia face formidable challenges. in his much discussed 2000 book bowling alone, robert d. putnam showed how during the late twentieth century americans became increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbours and democratic structures. they also belonged to far fewer organisations. he warned that the trend was impoverishing communities and lives.48 some observers contend that a similar situation occurred and is continuing in australia, especially with young adults’ membership of community groups. many of those involved in australian community heritage and history organisations during the 1970s and 1980s were aged in their 20s, 30s and 40s. carol liston first became president of the royal australian historical society in 1988 at the age of 36.49 today that is much less common. as early as 2000, william tyler’s comprehensive survey of australian historical societies public history review | carment 75 emphasised the urgent need for them to recruit new and younger members.50 few of the approximately 120 attendees at the royal australian historical society’s 2012 affiliated societies conference were under the age of 60.51 competing activities, new forms of social media like facebook and twitter that numerous historical societies still do not use and the demands of modern work places are all factors here.52 a further problem is that partly due to local history’s expanded visibility and the diverse uses to which it is put, researching the local past increasingly occurs online and is being quite rapidly commercialised. ancestry.com.au, for example, although mainly intended for family historians, is a vast, much used and quickly expanding local history resource that charges high subscription fees.53 such challenges can and should be met. one of the greatest benefits of local history in early twenty-first-century australia is that it helps provide increasingly mobile populations whose traditional values are sometimes hard to define with a sense of place and purpose. this is very much the case in the northern territory, where indigenous people comprise about a third of the population and an especially large proportion of the non-indigenous residents is from other parts of australia and the world.54 the territory’s governments have long recognised the value of promoting interest in local heritage and history as a means of encouraging a sense of belonging.55 local histories published by the historical society of the northern territory are generally the stories of frontier communities56 linked together by what alan powell identifies as the common themes of ‘isolation from the rest of the continent, nearness to asia, location in the tropics…the powerful influence of aborigines’ and ‘the long colonial experience’.57 what stannage saw as the pioneer myth still receives some support in the territory but its influence is diminishing. throughout australia local history is incorporated into strategies concerned with education, museums, national parks and tourism. there is a quite widespread recognition among decision makers that an understanding of the local past tells people much that is worthwhile about their own communities or places that they visit and themselves.58 as stannage hoped it would, the development of academic and professional history encouraged many local historians and societies to seek more sophisticated ways of collecting, preserving, presenting and using a complex variety of materials. although historical societies vary greatly and some are in far better condition than others, their total membership mentioned earlier shows that the local history movement in australia remains in reasonable public history review | carment 76 health. the societies also make a material contribution to national well being that is all too frequently overlooked. the federation of australian historical societies conservatively estimated in 2012 that australian historical society members undertook about $54 million worth of voluntary work each year.59 the 1979 english committee to review local history sensibly suggested that its growth and popularity were ‘rooted in social and psychological needs brought on by rapid change in environment and life style’.60 further recent factors include more people receiving post-school education, physically active retired people seeking to fill their leisure time, the increased availability, especially through digitisation and the internet, of historical records and the worldwide boom in family history. all these factors are good for local history and many of the community organisations that promote it. it is, as stannage strongly believed it ought to be, usually a democratic phenomenon and one that allows a diverse range of approaches. organisations like the hunters hill historical society survive and develop because they are solidly based in their communities. perhaps even more crucial, the data of the past that local historical societies have often unearthed and recorded help allow australians to shape what stannage so aptly described as a ‘history for their own purposes of identity’.61 some material in this article mainly relating to new south wales also appears in author david carment, ‘local history and local historical societies in twenty first century australia’, history, 2012, no 112, pp2-3. endnotes 1 tom stannage (ed), local history in western australia (a guide to research): papers read at the local history seminar held at subiaco on 29 august 1974, department of history, university of western australia, nd, p1. 2 c. t. stannage, the people of perth: a social history of western australia’s capital city, perth city council, perth, 1979, pp8-9. 3 previous discussions of australian local history include: paul ashton and paula hamilton, history at the crossroads: australians and the past, halstead press ultimo, 2010, ch3; b. j. dalton (ed), peripheral visions: essays on australian local and regional history, department of history and politics, james cook university, townsville, 1991; locating australia’s past: a practical guide to writing local history in new south wales, the local history co-ordination project and the university of new south wales, sydney, 1988; richard waterhouse, ‘locating the new social history: transnational historiography and australian local history’, journal of the royal australian historical society, vol 95, no 1, 2009. 4 lyall hunt, ‘larrikin historian: remembering frank crowley in western australia, 1949-1964’, unpublished paper held by author, 2010, p9. 5 f. k. crowley, australia’s western third: a history of western australia, heinemann, melbourne, 1970 (first published 1960), back cover. 6 hunt, op cit. public history review | carment 77 7 f. k. crowley, ‘problems in local and regional history’, early days, vol 5, no 2, 1956, p25. 8 the author studied under crowley at the university of new south wales. 9 hunt, op cit. 10 part of a recorded interview with tom stannage played at the australian historical association conference, wollongong, 2013. 11 stannage, the people of perth, op cit. 12 c. t. stannage, lakeside city: the dreaming of joondalup, university of western australia press, nedlands, 1996. 13 west australian, 5 october 2012. 14 carment, ‘an unfinished journey’. also see tom stannage – wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tom_stannage (accessed 27 june 2013). 15 stannage, local history in western australia, op cit, pp1-2. 16 nan phillips and tom stannage, ‘historical societies’, in diane barwick, michael mace and tom stannage (eds), handbook for aboriginal and islander history, aboriginal history, canberra, 1979, p77. 17 tom stannage, ‘the federation house: 8 chester street subiaco’, in susan marsden (ed), our house: histories of australian homes, australian heritage commission, canberra, 2001, http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/ahc/publications/commission/books /ourhouse/wa02.html (accessed 27 june 2013). 18 west australian, 14 june 2011. 19 wsa public forum | local. govt and subiaco, http://localgovtsubiaco.wordpress.com/2012/10/11/wsa-public-forum/ (accessed 30 july 2013). 20 oonagh quigley and the city of subiaco, ‘subiaco local history awards – monday 5 november 2012’, newsletter history council of wa, vol 8, no 4, 2012. 21 bill gammage, ‘a dynamic of local history’, in dalton, op cit. 22 discover hunters hill, http://www.huntershill.nsw.au/subsites/index.asp?id=508 (accessed 27 june 2013); linda emery, pictorial history hunters hill, kingsclear books, sydney 2012. 23 graeme davison, ‘local history’, in graeme davison, john hirst and stuart macintyre (eds), the oxford companion to australian history, oxford university press, oxford, 1998, p397. 24 don garden, ‘historical societies’, in davison, hirst and macintyre, op cit, p318; alfred james (ed), much writing, many opinions: the making of the royal australian historical society 1901 to 2001, the royal australian historical society, sydney, 2001; c. t. stannage, western australia’s heritage: the pioneer myth, university extension, university of western australia, nedlands, 1985; a public lecture by dr richard white, http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/news-events/a-publiclecture-by-dr-richard-white (accessed 27 june 2013). 25 geoffrey blainey, the peaks of lyell, third edition, melbourne university press, melbourne, 1967 (first published in 1954). 26 geoffrey blainey, ‘scissors and paste in local history’, historical studies australia and new zealand, vol 6, no 23, 1955. 27 davison, op cit, pp397-398. 28 mari metzke, ‘affiliated societies of the rahs’, in james, op cit, pp104-122. 29 louise prowse, ‘parallels on the periphery: aboriginal history and local history’, paper presented to the australian historical association conference, wollongong, 2013. 30 earl james am, the historical society of the nt: early days, historical society of the northern territory, darwin, 2008. 31 alan atkinson, camden: farm and village life in early new south wales, revised edition, australian scholarly publishing, melbourne, 2008; pauline curby, randwick, randwick municipal council, randwick, 2009; grace karskens, the public history review | carment 78 rocks: everyday life in early sydney 1788-1830, melbourne university press, melbourne, 1998; carl liston, campbelltown: the bicentennial history, allen & unwin, sydney, 1988. 32 leith f. barter, from wartime camp to garden suburb: a short history of nightcliff and rapid creek, historical society of the northern territory, darwin, 1994; mickey dewar, no place like home: australia’s northern capital in the 1950s through a social history of housing, historical society of the northern territory, darwin, 2010; eve gibson, beyond the boundary: fannie bay 1869-2001, historical society of the northern territory, darwin 2011; darrell lewis, a wild history: life and death on the victoria river frontier, monash university publishing, clayton, 2012. 33 personal knowledge. 34 lewis, op cit, pxxi. 35 ibid. the book was reviewed in aboriginal history, vol 36, 2012, pp213-14. see also david carment, ‘local history and local historical societies in twenty first century australia’, history, 2012, no 112, pp2-3. 36 graeme davison, ‘a brief history of the australian heritage movement’, in graeme davison and chris mcconville (eds), a heritage handbook, allen and unwin, sydney, 1991. 37 norman etherington, penny brock, tom stannage, jenny gregory with jane lennon, ‘principal australian themes project. stage 1 draft report for circulation and discussion. uses and identification of principal historical themes: volume 1, report of findings’, centre for western australian history, university of western australia, perth, nd (1993), pp1-11. 38 tom griffiths, hunters and collectors: the antiquarian imagination in australia, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1996, p222. 39 davison, ‘a brief history of the australian heritage movement’ op cit. 40 griffiths, op cit, p222. 41 federation of australian historical societies – e-bulletin_98, http://www.history.org.au/e-bulletin_98.html (accessed 27 june 2013). 42 ashton and hamilton, op cit, p 41. 43 information provided to author by chief executive officer, royal australian historical society, june 2012. this figure is reasonably accurate as it was required for the affiliated societies insurance scheme. each affiliated society seeking insurance has to provide the royal australian historical society with its up to date membership. 44 ibid. also see blue mountains historical society inc, http://bluemountainshistory.com/ (accessed 27 june 2013). 45 oral communication, auburn historical society office bearer, 2010. 46 frequent visits to mosman historical society since 2007. also see welcome | mosman historical society. http://mosmanhistoricalsociety.org.au/ (accessed 27 june 2013). 47 visit to randwick and district historical society in 2010. also see randwick & district historical society, http://www.randwickhistoricalsociety.org.au/ (accessed 29 july 2013). 48 robert d. putnam, bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community, simon and schuster, new york, 2000. 49 anne-maree whitaker, ‘biographical notes on the fellows of the rahs’, in james, op cit, pp77-78. 50 william tyler, ‘survey 2000. the federation of australian historical societies: a report of the 2000 survey of members’, 2000, np. 51 attendance at conference. 52 these comments are based on the author’s active participation in the australian community history movement since the 1970s. 53 genealogy, family trees and family history records online – ancestry.com.au, http://home.ancestry.com.au (accessed 27 june 2013). public history review | carment 79 54 david carment, a past displayed: public history, public memory and cultural resource management in australia’s northern territory, northern territory university press, darwin, 2001, ch2. 55 david carment, territorianism: politics and identity in australia’s northern territory 1978-2001, australian scholarly publishing, melbourne, 2007, ch1. 56 publications of hsnt, http://www.historicalsocietynt.org.au/services.htm (accessed 27 june 2013). 57 alan powell, ‘northern territory’, in graeme aplin, s. g. foster and michael mckernan (eds), australians: a historical dictionary, fairfax, syme and weldon associates, sydney, 1987, p303. 58 this is recognised in the annual promotion of australian heritage week. see australian heritage week | department of sustainability, environment, water, population and community, http://heritage-week.govspace.gov.au/ (accessed 27 june 2013). 59 federation of australian historical societies, op cit. 60 quoted in carol kammen, on doing local history: reflections on what local historians do, why, and what it means, the american association for state and local history, nashville, 1986, p174. 61 tom stannage, ‘introduction’, in barwick, mace and stannage, op cit, pxii. galleykean public history review vol 18 (2011): 1–11 © utsepress and the author 1 introduction hilda kean i think that a pro historian might cloud the issues by having their own strong points of view. i prefer the simplistic way of researching one’s own interests and helping others with similar aims.1 his quote from a member of an internet local history discussion group focused on warrington in the north of england may be depressing reading for public historians interested in exploring different ways of interacting with people, to create, as grele has famously put it, ‘shared authority’. the instigator of this particular debate on the website was a post-graduate student of public history. he found to his chagrin that his previously accepted status within the group, as a resident of warrington interested in the past, was not t public history review | kean 2 enhanced but instead undermined by his academic historiographical knowledge. jorma kalela has recently confronted this dilemma of the relationship between a professional historian and those who make history for their own interest in his new book, making history.2 describing his work with the finnish paperiliitto trade union in the 1980s, he created 40 research circles of 200 workers engaged actively with the past in which they defined their own parameters for the making of history: once they had accepted the idea that they had the same right to define the substance of history as a professional historian, the circles proliferated. this agitation was the hard way in which i discovered that the traditional academic concept of history that i had taken for granted was, by its nature, patronizing… they had to have the right to study what in their view was their own history, rather than take for granted a ready-made concept of it.3 such engagement relies on both experience and personal interest in the subject matter. people need to have ‘affinity with the topics debated’, as ludmilla jordanova has put it, rather than simply acting as ‘audiences for the discussions of others’.4 certainly engaging people other than as mere audiences has been a focus of discussion for many public historians including those working in britain, where public funding invariably raises ‘inclusion’ as a criteria. state strategies for incorporationism are flourishing. laurajane smith, paul shackel and gary campbell have criticised the tendency in the heritage field, particularly in britain, for practitioners to adopt cultural policies of ‘social inclusion’ of marginalised groups, often defined in terms of class and ethnicity. ‘all too often’, they note, ‘these initiatives, though superficially worthy, if overly earnest, do not work to democratise heritage. rather they work in an assimilationist fashion, where members of marginalised groups are urged to emulate the form of cultural consumption of the middle classes’.5 in similar vein drawing on her own experience of working on slavery and racism in the former slaving town of bristol, madge dresser has commented that ‘true public accessibility also involves the cultivation of trusting, organic relationships… this can be a time-consuming process needing imaginative and sensitive approaches. it is not always assessable by the reductionist tick-box methods so often favored by officialdom’.6 public history review | kean 3 criticisms of current practice this issue of public history review discusses aspects of the distinctive role of public historians that goes beyond an approach simply aimed at bringing in people to exhibitions or making historical knowledge ‘accessible’. emily duthie, for example, critically engages with the current projects of the british museum, which include creating new audiences through imaginative trails and exhibitions, not least, the current offer curated by turner prizewinner grayson perry. she notes the imperialist origins of the institution and the way in which the removal of objects from a ‘colonial periphery’ to an imperial centre changed the ways in which they were interpreted. she analyses the way in which neil mcgregor, the latest director, has tried to overturn the perception of the museum as the quintessential imperial institution that looted the world and acquired the trophies of global power for the glorification of britain. nevertheless it has fiercely rejected attempts at returning such looted goods, most famously the so-called elgin marbles, to their countries of origin. far from moving forward in a post-imperial world the museum has, she argues, re-enacted the attitudes and ethics of its imperial founders. rob baum, too, looks critically at museums, specifically two united states holocaust museums. her focus is first on the los angeles museum of tolerance and its intended impact upon the visitor and the creation of ‘experience’ based on techniques ‘lifted from stanislavski, meyerhold and meta-theatre’. she analyses the way in which the museums are seeking to engage an audience and to create a particular emotional outcome. the forms of presentation do, apparently, engage, particularly in the form of computer screens, resembling a video arcade. but as baum asks the reader, ‘what do [children] learn from having this power to manipulate imagery on their consoles – rejecting parts of history they find boring or too remote, looking for action and reveling in violent death?’ turning to the washington holocaust museum her emphasis is upon its ‘self-conscious americanization’ impressing the visitor with an order and aesthetic that is specifically american. thus, she argues, the holocaust is presented as a ‘foreign evil, and liberation of the camps as an event for which americans took physical and moral responsibility’. critical of museums’ emphasis on entertainment she critically engages with what it means to provide ‘an experience of the past.’ this contrasts with what she sees as a worthier mandate, the provision of ‘an observable past, elucidated by those who know more about it than those who visit.’ public history review | kean 4 underpinning both these articles are implicit criticisms of the role of some public historians or curators. certainly their intentions are not usually made explicit in museum displays. a honourable exception is the recent ‘war horse: fact or fiction?’ temporary exhibition in the national army museum in london. this arises from then highly successful play based on the novel by michael murpungo, staged by the national theatre (and now turned into a film by steven spielberg). an explicit feature of the exhibition is an emphasis on remembrance and collective memory. near the end of the exhibition is a large horizontal display cabinet in the centre of the room consisting of rows and rows of small white outline horses with two named from the play. the accompanying text states: ‘you have learnt about a lot of named horses in the exhibition, horses like joey. many of them were not as lucky as him. help us to remember these forgotten heroes by naming them and decorating a paper horse and putting it on the remembrance wall’. the wall already contains such testimony. one of the final panels defines remembrance as a feature of collective memory thus being explicit about the rationale of this part of the exhibition.7 as james gardner argued in the last issue of public history review, ‘we are often our own worst enemy, failing to share what we do. if we want the public to value what we do, we need to share the process of history’.8 opening up the premises underpinning exhibitions (or books) can assist in widening the historical process and, as gardner has described it, facilitating a way of understanding and making meaning. with conventional history this rarely happens. distinguished british historian and former pro-vice chancellor of the university of oxford, sir keith thomas, recently wittily described his ‘technique’ in the london review of books: it never helps historians to say too much about their working methods. for just as the conjuror’s magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead they suggest that histories are concocted by error-prone human beings who patch together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence. public history review | kean 5 perhaps that is why few historians tell us how they set about their task…9 in different vein, but responding to the same problem, kalela has lamented, ‘that the historian selects his or her audience has been tragically covered up: it is an issue disregarded by the profession even though every historian is confronted with it… as regards the research questions asked, a universal single audience remains an undisclosed premise.’10 p r o c e s s e s o f e n g a g e m e n t certainly those who define themselves as imaginative public historians have attempted both to explain the historiographical process and to make it as open as possible.11 alan rice, for example, has done much to bring into the public spaces of the twenty-first century britain’s slaving past. this includes the creation of a public memorial ‘captured africans’ in lancaster, at one time the fourth largest slave trading port in britain, and co-curating the exhibition ‘trade and empire: remembering slavery’ in manchester. as rice realises, history is not about a past that is finished, settled or gone but a process by which the past is brought into the present. significantly, as rice demonstrates in his own practice and analysis, the engagement in different ways with people other than professional historians including artists, teachers and activists as creators of meaning will influence significantly the type of history being developed. in an attempt to challenge the ‘morbidity of heritage’12 the manchester exhibition explicitly included the very debates the curators had had about the objects they should display. the discussion of this process was particularly illuminating over the inclusion of four doll-like models of slaves created by the samuel family to apparently mark the freeing of their slaves. while the figures were individualised and dressed imaginatively they were also crude caricatured images. there was discussion whether the cost of even conserving such models was justified and it was realised that ‘the very unveiling of such troubling objects could prove problematic for many visitors’. eventually the objects were displayed alongside labels showing the discussion amongst the co-curators that revealed that even they did not agree on a reading of the dolls. in addition visitors were invited to add their comments, which included those criticising the curators’ critical stance by arguing that the dolls were not intended to be racist.13 such an exchange is rare public history review | kean 6 particularly when curators are fearful of being seen to permit potentially racist comments. the slave trade arts memorial project (stamp) involved community activists, creative workers, councillors and academics with rice as the project’s academic advisor. this lancaster-based project obtained funding to engage with schools and community groups and to create a memorial that would adequately represent generations to come as well as the past and the present: a ‘memorial that converses memory without being conservative’. the result was ‘captured africans’ by kevin daltonjohnson erected on lancaster’s quay.14 this was not a project in which the ‘expert’ told the ‘people’ the facts of a moment of history and corrected any perceived misunderstandings. rather, it was an exemplary public history project in which, as michael frisch has described it, there was ‘a broadly distributed authority for making new sense of the past in the present’.15 the project achieved new ways of thinking about the past and bringing it into the present not by the scholarship of an individual historian but by all those involved in the project ‘reaching in to discover the humanity they share’.16 rice’s role within the project inevitably drew on his scholarship but this was not separated from his political commitment to facilitating broad understandings of the past, and his belief that there are many pasts that should be remembered. materials for the creation of histories inevitably, as paul ashton and paula hamilton have recently reminded us, there are different perceptions of what it means to be a public historian. the metaphor of a house with many rooms to categorise ‘history’ was one they usefully adopted in their new book history at the crossroads. as they noted, ‘different groups inhabit various quarters… some of these people inhabit more than one room while many make occasional visits to other parts of the house… many from the academy insist that they are in possession of the house. but several of the residents are a little restless’.17 such restlessness might include challenging the historian’s conventional focus on archival ‘sources’ and looking imaginatively at different materials to make the ordinary extraordinary. mandi o’neill takes as a starting point the role of archives, the mainstay of any historian – irrespective of the ‘room’ into which we place ourselves. in a previous issue of public history review joanna sassoon drew our attention to the constructed nature of archives.18 o’neill develops sassoon’s work in a case study that considers the public history review | kean 7 implications of gate-keeping with reference to two community archives in wales, that of the butetown history and arts centre (bhac) which has recorded oral interviews with women from the cardiff community of butetown (‘tiger bay’), and archif menywod cymru/women’s archive of wales (waw) working to ‘rescue’ sources of women’s history across wales. butetown has been seen as an important site of debates on the nature of multicultural britain with the mixed heritage community based on relationships between asian, caribbean and african sailors and welsh women dating back many decades. the very ‘popularity’ of this community has created a number of questions. while interviews with the local people have been conducted, access to them is denied since the intentions of researchers may be deemed to be different to those of the original interviewers. what started as a community project has over time shifted to a more conventional arts and culture project with the original relationship between the community and ‘facilitators’ shifting in the process. as o’neill argues since the project is more concerned with the ways in which people from the community can represent themselves now it means that the recorded voices of earlier generations are rarely heard. in turn, she suggests, the stereotyping and negative representations of these women remain unchallenged. in different vein the waw has used its road shows in which women brought along their own ephemera to intervene in locally held official archives to create awareness of different women’s histories. others have seen a role for public historians in drawing attention to the wide range of material existing outside archives. dwight pitcaithley has recently described the way in which he became a public historian of the united states national parks service. one of his first assignments was analysing the remains of machines for processing bat guano in a cave with a 180-foot vertical drop into which he was obliged to drop. it forced him to ‘recognise that historians could find research material almost anywhere’.19 in similar vein in this volume andrew hassam asks us to recognise the value of thinking about indian jute as a new starting point for histories. he is not concerned as such with what was contained in sacks made of the material – which is often noted – but rather what is not seen, the containers of such goods. the absence of such items in public collections should be rectified, he argues, for jute sacks substantiate the lived experience of those who worked with them, and illustrate collectivities, like socio-economic class, or race or gender that extend beyond the immediate locale. he notes that community–based museums are more likely to contain examples of the quotidian, of what is important locally to the people who donate.20 however, the inclusion public history review | kean 8 of such material is not to reflect back to people what they already know about their own experience but rather it has the capacity to change and destabilise established histories. alexander trapeznik also considers material in the landscape originating from the industrial past of new zealand for the creation of histories in the present. as david atkinson has previously observed in discussing what he calls ‘mundane places’ numbers of people both see ‘more history all around them, while also seeing more of their histories too’.21 while recent work has tended to focus on the non-industrial landscape of new zealand,22 trapeznik considers rather more neglected places, such as those on the dunedin waterfront. by drawing attention to industrial and mercantile buildings he stresses the importance of the legacy of structures resulting from colonial developments in areas such as agriculture, mining, shipping, railways and processing industries. the traces of industrial and mercantile practices in the physical landscape demonstrate, he argues, the interconnectedness and development of commercial enterprises for at least a century from the 1870s. in such buildings the past in brought into the present in physical ways, time being crossed in one space.23 such buildings provide us with opportunities to challenge the notion of the repository of history being in the archive or the curated museum exhibition. as trapeznik concludes, the dunedin waterfront precinct is a cultural landscape that both reflects social institutions and relations, and has helped shape social relations. moving beyond the parameters of ‘history’ many innovative pubic historians have turned their attention to the plethora of forms in which the past is presented. this trajectory was well covered at the international public history colloquia held at uts towards the end of 2010 including discussion on various uses of multimedia and the internet.24 often starting points for the creation of imaginative analysis of the past originate outside the ‘house of history’ constructed by ashton and hamilton. novelists such as kate grenville or sarah waters in their respective fiction25 or artists such as jeremy deller, christine mccauley26 or jane palm-gold have in recent years done much to address the importance of the past in illuminating ways. jane palmgold for example produced an engaging exhibition in london earlier this year originating from the scenes she observed outside her flat in central london, opposite the site of the nineteenth-century rookery. later working with archaeologist sian anthony she both brought to light traces of the cellars and underground passages that helped facilitate easy egress for criminals of an earlier age as well as using hogarth’s images of public history review | kean 9 the locality superimposed on her own work to create different narratives of the area.27 in analysing a joint historian-artist project centred on cannon hall in the west riding of yorkshire, martin bashforth and patricia bashforth argue that inter-disciplinarity and collaboration between historians and experts in others fields such as art open possibilities for moving away from over-interpreted mediation. here they discuss the ways in which artist–historian engagement can lead to the creation of space to bring imagination into play. in explaining their own reaction to being reduced to tears by particular works in the house they say, unconvincingly, ‘perhaps historians with this level of vulnerability should not be let near historical documents?’ yet, as they realise, the opening up of vulnerability leads to different understandings. processes common to historians were destabilised by working with the artistic element leading in turn to new ways of thinking. paul martin takes such discussion further. starting from the assumption that public history can be understood as a field of contestation he argues that one role of a public historian is to problematise, to find fault with or to note omission in a dominant or received narrative and take issue with it. his article focuses on unofficial popular music compilations on cd-r of 1960s music. he too is a participant in this practice. in similar vein, the pew centre for arts and heritage in philadelphia has published a substantial volume entitled letting go? sharing historical authority in a user-generated world. in the introduction, the editors argue that: the traditional expertise of the history museum seems to be challenged at every turn. web 2.0 invites ordinary people to become their own archivists, curators, historians, and designers as they organize images on snapfish, identify artifacts through flickr, post text on wikis, and create websites with wordpress and weebly. bricks-and mortar museums, meanwhile, in pursuit of “civic engagement,” give community members more say in what stories the museum showcases and how they get told. exhibitions frequently shun the authoritative voice.28 paul martin reflects on a survey he conducted with various online practitioners, analysing the responses of those who engage in such compilations. he sees this both as an exchange of ideas and the construction of social knowledge. while acknowledging that the participants themselves would not define themselves as public public history review | kean 1 0 historians, or indeed historians of any sort, he nevertheless states that a historical, archaeological and taxonomic mindset is clearly discernable in the responses. for him, then, his role as a public historian can be to offer another way of seeing and questioning the gate-keeping role of historical authority. it is also about identifying everyday ‘moments’, where the impact of change is shown to be experienced. such discussions on the very practice of history and the varied activities of practitioners are a far cry from an approach to history that sees a monograph as a normative output. in a recent odd article in the (british) royal historical society newsletter ian mortimer wrote a contribution suggesting, as if this was an earth-shattering revelation, ‘that it might be possible to arrest the decline of the academic monograph by encouraging scholars to write for a wider audience’.29 the proposition as such is sound. but the idea is hardly unusual or new. in different vein in a recent discussion on h-net public history there was coverage of the new york historical society’s latest exhibit, revolution! the atlantic world reborn. as one contributor put it, ‘i want to say we need a law that keeps historians away from history exhibits. i say this only half in jest.’30 initiatives such as the colloquia organised in september 2010 by the australian centre for public history at uts or the material analysed in this latest issue of public history review indicate, however, that there is much imaginative practice internationally in the field. it also suggests that there is indeed a role for public historians today. i started with a perhaps troubling quote from one the warrington internet historians. i finish with another of the group suggesting a more positive way of thinking about the role of all of us who engage in historical practice: history you learn is mainly wrong due to any number of reasons, but your own is gathered by your own experience and is partly right. that is why i enjoy the history on here because we share our experience and that gives us a greater knowledge for the truth.31 endnotes thanks to paul ashton for his helpful comments on this introduction. also thanks to graham brinksman for permission to quote from his unpublished research. 1 david h. as quoted in graham brinksman, ‘internet social networking: and the role it plays in public history’, unpublished ma in public history portfolio, ruskin college, oxford, portfolio, 2011. 2 jorma kalela, making history, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2011. 3 kalela, making history, pp55; 63. public history review | kean 1 1 4 ludmilla jordanova as cited in holger hoock introduction, the public historian, vol 32, no 3, august 2010, p18. 5 laurajane smith, paul a. shackel and gary campbell, introduction, class still matters: heritage, labour and the working classes, routledge, london, 2011, p13. 6 madge dresser, ‘politics, populism, and professionalism: reflections on the role of the academic historian in the production of public history’, the public historian, vol 32, no 3, august 2010, pp62-3. 7 for a fuller discussion of the exhibition see hilda kean, ‘challenges for historians writing animal-human history: what is really enough?’, anthrozoos, forthcoming 2012. 8 james b. gardner, ‘trust, risk and public history: a view from the united states’, public history review, vol 17, 2010, p54. 9 keith thomas, ‘diary’, london review of books, 10 june 2010, p36. 10 kalela, making history, p52. 11 see for example the recent collection of mark leone, critical historical archaeology, left coast press, walnut creek, 2010. 12 alan rice, creating memorials building identities: the politics of memory in the black atlantic, liverpool university press, liverpool, 2010, p45. 13 rice, creating memorials, p69. 14 rice, creating memorials, p48. see also, hilda kean, ‘personal and public histories: issues in the presentation of the past’, in brian graham and peter howard (eds), the ashgate research companion to heritage and identity, ashgate, aldershot, 2008. 15 michael frisch, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history, university of new york press, new york, 1990, pxiii. 16 david glassberg, sense of history: the place of the past in american life, university of massachusetts press, 2001, p210. 17 paul ashton and paula hamilton, history at the crossroads: australians and the past, halstead press, sydney, p8. 18 joanna sassoon, ‘phantoms of remembrance: libraries and archives as “the collective memory”’, public history review, vol 10, 2003, pp40-60. 19 dwight t. pitcaithley, ‘taking the long way from euterpe to clio’, in james m. banner and john r.gillis (eds), becoming historians, university of chicago press, chicago, 2009, p61. 20 i certainly found the gundagai museum of interest when i visited a few years ago and viewed specimens of barbed wire found in different australian states. (‘public history and two australian dogs: islay & the dog on the tucker box’, australian cultural history, vol 24, 2006, pp135-62. 21 david atkinson, ‘the heritage of mundane places’ in graham and howard, the ashgate research companion to heritage and identity, p381. 22 see, for example, sally morgan, ‘“to fill this void land”: acclimatisation as mnemonic device in victorian new zealand’, in memory connection, vol 1, no 1, december 2011, pp99113; contained memory http://www.memoryconnection.org/; eds kynan gentry and gavin mclean (eds), heartlands: new zealand historians write about places where history happened, penguin, auckland, 2006. 23 see doreen massey, ‘places and their pasts’, history workshop journal, vol 39, 1995, pp182-92. 24 contributions included those on the work of the new south wales migration heritage centre (john petersen), visualising the past in three d (peter read), opportunities with web 2.0 (tikka wilson) or the online multimedia sydney city biography (lisa murray). 25 see for example, kate grenville, the secret river, 2005, the lieutenant, 2008; sarah waters, the night watch, 2006, the little stranger, 2009. 26 see for example, jeremy deller, the battle of orgreave, a re-enactment of the miners’ strike of 1984-5, folk archive, an investigation of folk /popular/vernacular art <http://www.jeremydeller.org/>; christine mccauley, bedtime stories, timeline http://www.christinemccauley.co.uk/>. 27 ‘london’s underworld unearthed: the secret life of the rookery’, coningsby gallery, london, may 2011. she discussed her work at the public history discussion group at the bishopsgate institute in november 2011, http://janepalmgold.com/>. 28 bill adair, benjamin filene and laura koloski (eds), letting go?: sharing historical authority in a user-generated world, the pew centre for arts & heritage, philadelphia, 2011, p11. 29 ian mortimer ‘new vessels for new history’, newsletter, royal historical society, 5 may 2010, pp4-5. 30 consider this: response to alan singer, darlene roth, phd, <www.h-net.org/~public> 14 december 2011. 31 kenny s quoted in brinksman, ‘internet social networking’, p4. what makes a ‘national’ war memorial? the case of the australian ex-pows memorial lachlan grant public history review, vol 12, 2006, pp92-102 ar memorials play an intricate role in forming australian national identity. as public monuments in remembrance of a generation lost, their importance to the social fabric is the centrality they play to rituals and ceremonies that mark formal aspects of one of australia’s most important national days.1 war memorials represent the biggest communal arts project ever attempted. they seldom attract attention because they are so common amidst the urban landscape.2 war memorials within australia represent both individual communities, within the towns and suburbs, and the nation, within the major monuments in the national and each state capitol. how, then, can a war memorial within a local community be considered a national memorial? why does a war memorial need ‘national’ status and how is this legitimised? these issues confronted ballarat’s australian ex-pows (pows) memorial and revealed how government bureaucracy and party politics can influence the future and potential public significance of a war memorial. initially, i thought that the issues confronting the australian ex-pows memorial were related to place of pows within australian national history and the difficulties of incorporating the pows experience within the anzac legend.3 such difficulties had been inherent in the memorial’s design which incorporated both modernist and traditional approaches to memorial architecture that highlight the tension between the ex-prisoners’ stories and their place in the anzac tradition. on one hand the modernist element in the design highlighted their differences. this comprised of a memorial wall listing the names of all australian pows from all conflicts. traditional memorial forms – obelisks – confirmed the place of pows in anzac and in the australian landscape commemorating anzac.4 in recent years, however, it has becoming increasingly clear that pows have in fact become the preeminent group of veterans following the original anzacs.5 it was, therefore, not an issue of the memorial commemorating and remembering captivity. other factors were at the heart of the matter. the memorialisation and commemoration of pows has chartered a distinctive course compared to other groups of veterans in australia. memorials to pows have only began to be established in the past twenty years. despite the popularity of pows literature the act of public commemoration and remembrance for pows in the form of physical memorials has been, until recently, largely w public history review, vol 12, 2006 93 neglected.6 ‘in the sites of their captivity as at home,’ wrote ken inglis in sacred places: war memorials in the australian landscape, pows have become ‘subjects of delayed commemoration.’7 while the pows story has been kept alive in popular memory through literary means, the war memorial, ‘as a social and physical arrangement of space and artifacts that keep alive the memories of those who were involved in war’, has only in the last twenty years begun to publicly commemorate australian pows.8 before canberra’s duntroon military college opened the national pows memorial in 1988 – the changi chapel, a reerected chapel built from scrap wood and metal by australians interned in changi – very few memorials to pows existed in australia. that the national pows memorial was located in the military college and not on anzac parade alongside other national monuments to servicemen and women is testament to the degree of ambivalence in which pows were held at that time.9 such a delay in commemoration for pows may relate to michael mckernan’s finding that following the war, especially in regards to the issue of reparation payments by the commonwealth government, there was official concern that ‘any special treatment given to former prisoners of war might weaken the resolve of future soldiers and encourage them to hand themselves over to the enemy, no matter how brutal the consequences might be.’10 even so, there are few memorials to pows. they include obelisks raised in lithgow, new south wales, in 1959 and st george, queensland, in 1965. a chapel was built with stone from changi and railway sleepers from the thaiburma railway at the school for military engineering at casula, new south wales, in 1966, and a wall with a memorial stone and seats was installed in king’s park, perth. at ulverstone in tasmania a pows garden was created in 1970 while at mornington in victoria a pows memorial wall and garden was unveiled in 1986.11 the australian services national nurses memorial in anzac parade, canberra, was unveiled by prime minister howard in 1999, highlighting the importance of internment in the popular memory of australian nurses’ wartime experiences.12 most memorials relate to the asia-pacific theatre of the second world war. during the 1990s a sandakan memorial foundation, with the support of the keating government, began creating a series of memorials to australians who had died in borneo on the infamous ‘death marches’ in 1945. two individuals, sir edward ‘weary’ dunlop and sir albert coates, both medical officers on the thai-burma railway, have been honoured with statues, a rarity for individual soldiers in australia. dunlop’s statues are located in melbourne, his hometown of benalla and at the australian war memorial in canberra. coates statue is in his hometown of ballarat. war memorials have also been raised in the places of the prisoner’s suffering. prime minister howard opened the hellfire pass memorial in thailand on anzac day 1998 though the significance of this memorial is the landscape itself – hellfire pass – a notorious 600 metre long cutting on the thai-burma railway). others were constructed at changi, on ambon (1967), at sandakan (1986), ranau in borneo (1985) and at bangka island (1993) where sister vivian public history review, vol 12, 2006 94 bullwinkel, the lone survivor of the japanese massacre of australian nurses, unveiled a stone tablet.13 whereas these memorials are dedicated to specific groups, incidents or local servicemen, the australian ex-pows memorial in ballarat, opened with great fanfare in february 2004, was the first memorial to pows that specifically honoured all australia’s pows both living and dead, from all conflicts by naming on a single memorial each of australia’s 37,000 pows from all wars. shortly after the opening of the australian pows war memorial at ballarat in february 2004 a debate flared over the official status of the memorial. was in fact a ‘national’ memorial? this was sparked by the ballarat city council’s request for an extra $500,000 – in addition to the $200,000 already provided by the department of veterans’ affairs for the memorial’s construction – from the federal government towards upkeep and maintenance.14 this, however, had been a contentious issue since the official launch of the project in 1999. despite this, it seemed that organizers anticipated the issue over the official status of the memorial would dissipate after the memorial’s dedication ceremony. the first inclination that the there would be disagreement regarding the ‘national’ status of the australian ex-pows memorial came in september 1999 when the member for ballarat, michael ronaldson, announced the ambitious project to the federal house of representatives. ronaldson stated that the australian ex-pows memorial ‘will have national status, though it is not to be called a national memorial.’ further confusion arose weeks later in another speech to parliament when ronaldson referred to the project as a ‘national memorial.’15 the federal government, however, did not want the term ‘national’ to be associated with it. in january 2001 the ballarat courier revealed that funding for the memorial was twelve months behind schedule. but it noted that further federal government funding would not be forthcoming since the minister for veterans’ affairs, bruce scott, did not regard the australian ex-pows memorial as a ‘national’ project. the minister had been advised that this was also the view of the rsl. ‘were the federal government to provide significant funds for the construction of a local memorial,’ the veterans’ affairs spokesman continued, ‘it would set a precedent, as funding of that magnitude by the government has been restricted to national memorials on anzac parade and international memorials of important sites where australians have fought, suffered and died.’16 a spokesman for the minister also told melbourne’s herald-sun that while it was ‘a worthy project,’ it was ‘not a national project.’17 the response from the australian ex-pows memorial appeal committee project coordinator les kennedy was one of surprise: ‘we consider it a national memorial and the minister himself mentioned it as a national memorial when he launched the appeal. it cannot be a local memorial when it carries the names of pows from all over australia.’18 kennedy noted too that the only memorial to pows, the changi chapel, was not accessible to the general public and that it was a memorial solely to pows interned by the japanese.19 arguments about public history review, vol 12, 2006 95 accessibility, however, could be equally applied to the site of the ballarat memorial. kennedy also revealed to the courier a letter from the minister for veterans’ affairs office to the chairman of the appeal committee that stated: national memorials are normally but not always located in the parliamentary triangle in canberra, particularly anzac parade, or in the grounds of the australian war memorial. regardless of the memorials intended location, any plan to create a national memorial to honour the australian pows would require full endorsement and support of the national executive of the expow association of australia. kennedy believed such endorsement was gained at the ex-pow associations 1997 national conference.20 to make matters more difficult for the appeal committee, the national president of the rsl, major general peter phillips, weighed into the debate, stating that the proposed ballarat memorial could not be called a national memorial because one already existed. the changi chapel had been declared the national memorial in the 1980s ‘at the urging of the pow association’. but he added ‘that’s not to say australians shouldn’t be chipping in to build this memorial in ballarat.’21 the ballarat courier staunchly supported the australian ex-pows memorial appeal committee. one editorial observed that: ‘the comments would seem to fly in the face of those made by our own federal member, michael ronaldson, in june 1999, when he announced donations to the appeal would be tax deductible. “the tax deductibility status recognizes that this is a national project”.’22 although a nationwide fundraiser does not equal a national memorial, the courier’s editor argued that ‘the claim that the national memorial should be located in anzac parade in canberra is a cop-out’. why, he asked, ‘haven’t the federal government or the rsl moved to establish a proper memorial there to recognize ex-pows?’ the appeal, he concluded, ‘would be better served if bruce scott encouraged australians to donate to the appeal rather than have his spokesmen label it as nothing more than a local memorial.’23 catherine king, labor member for ballarat and federal member following the 2001 federal election, claimed that ‘it is nonsense to suggest that unless the memorial is constructed in canberra it has no meaning for veterans in the wider community.’24 following the dedication ceremony in 2004, king observed that while ‘the government has made it clear that it does not consider the ex-pows memorial as a national memorial for pows… in time our memorial will naturally progress to become a national memorial – a transition that will not seek to take away the significance of the changi chapel memorial in canberra but in my view will naturally occur as people like my brother in law make the pilgrimage to the memorial here in ballarat seeking names of people they have loved.’25 despite the federal government’s claim that national memorials can only be built in canberra, each of the state war memorials built in the decades following the first world war are all officially entitled ‘national’ memorials. although, public history review, vol 12, 2006 96 according to ken inglis, the use of the term ‘national’ in this sense ‘embodies a perception, vigorous of the nineteenth century and not yet extinguished by federation’ that each state of australia represented a nation of its own.26 nonetheless, although a monument in remembrance of the participation of victorians who served the nation during the great war, is not melbourne’s shrine of remembrance a memorial of national significance – and therefore – a national monument? however, symbolism, representation and recognition were not the defining factors regarding the australian ex-pows memorial’s official nonnational status. the significance of federal government’s stance on the memorial’s official status was revealed a matter of weeks after the memorial’s opening. a courier editorial raised the issue of responsibility the city of ballarat now had for the memorial: as all the ceremony dies down, it has become even more evident just how substantial and important a role the memorial will play in ballarat’s identity in years to come. the memorial will not only be a major tourist attraction, it will also be something of a spiritual centre for the city – a site of grieving, courage, of reflection and pride in our ancestry. now, as a city, we must plan to ensure this site remains in the optimum condition it so clearly deserves. ongoing maintenance will be a financial burden in need of attention… the grand efforts and tireless work that secured the construction of the memorial, must now be used as an inspiration for the rest of us to work together to ensure this marvelous monument retains its lofty place in the national consciousness. it, and the names inscribed upon it, deserve nothing less.27 the ballarat city council estimated that the financial burden to be almost $1.5 million for the following five years – a figure nearing the actual cost for the memorial’s construction in the first place. one third of this was expected to be provided from federal government coffers.28 this sum was to cover maintenance, lighting, car parking, landscaping, security and marketing but not the bigger plan which included a restaurant at lake wendouree, opposite the site of the memorial, an interpretive centre to create an ‘experience’, toilets and a tourist information centre. the courier made the contradictory point that if the memorial were in canberra it would be fully funded by the federal government. the ballarat council pledged $50,000 a year to the five-year project, while $100,000 was requested from the victorian state government. in a submission to the federal government, the council estimated that 100,000 people would visit the memorial within twelve months and spend more than $13 million a year while the economic injection into the city was estimated to create 163 full-time positions, along with adding almost $8 million into the victorian economy.29 public history review, vol 12, 2006 97 the city council sought $290,000 in federal government funds. a city delegation led by mayor david vendy met vale regarding the proposal in april 2004.30 in an announcement that ‘outraged the city of ballarat and ex-pow veterans,’ the courier reported that: ‘the federal government will not spend another cent on the australian ex-pows memorial in ballarat’: veterans’ affairs minister danna vale yesterday labeled the memorial as “regional”, therefore ruling it ineligible for future funding. “how could the federal government say that this memorial is not of national significance?” ex-pows memorial appeal project manager les kennedy asked. “there are over 35,000 names here of pows from all over australia.” city of ballarat mayor david vendy received a letter from ms vale yesterday, which rejected a funding request of $290,000 dollars to help complete stage one of the project. “to treat it as a minor memorial is just a disgrace,” cr vendy said. “i would have thought in an election year this would have been looked upon fairly favorably by the federal government, but to dismiss this funding application is very ordinary.” ex-pow viv robinson commented that if was ‘lousy of the federal government when they support all these things overseas and yet they don’t support something of significance here… this is a big national attraction.’31 while the ballarat council and ex-pow committee may have been ‘outraged’ and ‘disgraced’ at the decision, it was hardly surprising. in response, the department for veterans’ affairs issued a media release entitled ‘australian government committed to australia’s pows’ in which vale defended the government’s contribution and commitment to support the ballarat australian ex-pows memorial, while also confirming that the national pows memorial at duntroon was officially considered the ‘national’ pows memorial. the minister took great care to mention the significant benefits provided to veterans that were perhaps more important than expenditure on public memory via an overtly expensive war memorial in regional australia. but she did not mention that whereas in 2001 ex-prisoners of the japanese were awarded $25,000 in compensation, those who were prisoners of the germans or italians were not considered worthy of this payment. on letter writer to the courier, however, raised a simple and pertinent question: was the pow memorial built without knowing where the funds for capital, operating and maintenance were coming from? surely no such project can be approved unless total costs and funding having been established. are we missing some point here? if not, when do heads start rolling?32 public history review, vol 12, 2006 98 this highlighted the ballarat city council’s desperation for the memorial to receive official ‘national’ status. the council did not wish to pay for the expensive maintenance and development costs from its own pockets alone thus the debate over the ‘national’ status of the memorial emerged from the bid to acquire further funds from canberra.33 the debate over the memorial’s ‘national’ status become an election issue during 2004 in the marginally held seat of ballarat. and locals tried to use this to woo the prime minister. howard was the australian ex-pows memorial appeal committee’s preferred choice to dedicate the memorial and the committee even considered a postponement of the ceremony to allow him to attend. but given the committee’s estimates of approximately ten former pows passing away each week, the organisers did not want another delay. howard, too, was preoccupied with the launch of a campaign for the marginal western australian seat of hasluck.34 his absence at the openng was a particular snub to locals. and it was very surprising for some given that the pows story in popular memory speaks to core values seemingly held so dear by the prime minister, especially that of mateship. howard’s veneration of the mateship ethos was evident in a speech made at the opening of the australian war memorial in hellfire pass, thailand, on anzac day 1998: as an english officer stood in the driving rain and watched a group of australians sing, as they trudged back exhausted from their work he asked, ‘just what is it that these australians have?’ the answer, plain now as then, was that they had each other – they had their mates. mateship, courage and compassion, these are enduring qualities – the qualities of our nation. they are the essence of a nation’s past and a hope for its future.35 despite the prime minister’s alacrity at identifying himself with stories promoting nationalist rhetoric and notions of national cohesion political expediency took first place. the debate divided clearly along political lines. this was partly fuelled by the courier and its support for the sitting member in the long absence of a prime ministerial visit to the city. a visit by the federal leader of the opposition, mark latham, in the lead up to the 2004 election added fuel to the fire. stating that latham’s presence was ‘another coup’ for the labor party, the courier editorial claimed that the ‘issues associated with ballarat’s australian ex-pows memorial have all fallen labor’s way.’ ‘the prime minister’, it observed, ‘did not attend the opening of the memorial – a matter that has not gone unnoticed in ballarat… mr latham will today be happy to help consolidate a strengthening position for labor in a relatively marginal seat, knowing that such outcomes across the country are essential if he is to have any hope of winning government.’36 public history review, vol 12, 2006 99 latham did not fail to deliver on the courier’s expectations. visiting the memorial, he told veterans that the memorial’s significance spread further than the region, declaring the memorial to be of ‘national significance.’37 soon after, labor promised a funding package of $150,000. at the announcement the member for ballarat told the press that ‘the howard government’s refusal to provide further assistance and its assertion that the ballarat memorial cannot be “national” is a legalistic smokescreen for disinterest.’38 perhaps the government did not wish to spend money on a seat that it perceived it could not win, especially without support of the influential though usually conservative local paper.39 on the very last day of campaigning for the 2004 federal election, treasurer peter costello came to the party. in what the courier described as a whirlwind visit, costello arrived in ballarat by helicopter. joining australian ex-pows memorial committee members and ballarat ex-pows at the memorial, costello doubled labor’s promise of $150,000: ‘i got out the correspondence’, he told those assembled, ‘i took the opportunity to come and see it and i think it’s the right thing to do… as treasurer, i am making this commitment… i hope it’s a memorial that reminds future australians of the great sacrifices that were made.’ when asked whether the government would reconsider recognizing the memorial’s status as ‘national’, the treasurer replied: ‘the government has just recognized it with a contribution of $300,000. let’s not get hung up with syntax.’40 although far less than the $500,000 requested, project coordinator les kennedy stated – following the election in which labour held the seat of ballarat but the liberal government was returned to power – that it was ‘very exciting’ that the liberals had ‘come to the party. they kept us dangling on the end of a string.’41 costello’s visit was also perhaps enigmatic of an important development in australian politics during the dying days of the 2004 of the federal election. like costello, howard made a whirl-wind visit to australian football’s perennial and most iconic battlers, the western bulldogs in the working-class suburb of footscray, promising $20 million to improve amenities. the circumstances that had arisen regarding the australian ex-pows memorial’s ‘national’ status were telling of the relationship between public history and memory. there was no degree of compromise in regard to this issue. the courier and ballarat leaders painted the issue black and white, stating on numerous occasions that the government had failed to understand the national significance of the memorial in response to the government’s disinclination to provide further funding (even though the government provided a significant contribution to the memorial’s construction in the first place). in response the government did not wish to look as if it had misinterpreted the memorial’s significance and were perhaps embarrassed by the fact that such a memorial did not exist in canberra. the department for veterans’ affairs’ dismissive attitude and the perceived snubbing of the monument and ballarat by the prime minister – a picture painted largely by the courier – was extraordinary. this was especially so given that within popular memory, the story of australian prisoners public history review, vol 12, 2006 100 are prime examples of the anzac ethos and part of prime minister howard’s nostalgic and nationalist vision of australian remembrance. the debate over whether the australian ex-pows memorial was a ‘national’ memorial or not raises a number of issues regarding the construction and continuation of dedicating war memorials in the twenty-first century. key issues are dominant historical paradigms and pork barreling. it seems the trend following the second world war to build utilitarian memorials – such as parks, hospital wards, sports complexes or schools – is out of fashion.42 from this stems the issue of whether or not such money should actually be spent on veterans and the families rather than public monuments. regarding pows, it is an issue that is raised by stephen garton, who asks: ‘which is more important – individual welfare or cultural representation’?43 another underlying issue regarding the memorial’s ‘national’ status is its location in ballarat. the questions of why ballarat, or why not canberra, or melbourne or sydney for that matter, is simple. it was the foresight of a small group of dedicated people in ballarat who saw a niche for such a memorial. committee member tom roberts explained in an opinion article that appeared in the courier that: should the federal government have wished to erect such a memorial, it has had 100 years to do so, and a site available since the establishment of canberra. ballarat acted because noone else has done so. this memorial, acknowledged unique in the world, complements the avenue of honour – the longest in the world – and the arch of victory. it was the foresight of those individuals who initiated the concept, the combined efforts of the sub-committee members, and the generosity of the ballarat city council, the general public and tattersall’s organisation which has enabled the project to be brought to fruition…why shouldn’t citizens of australia and overseas travel to ballarat rather than canberra? currently it is a national monument in all but name.44 whether or not the ballarat memorial should be recognized as more important ‘national’ memorial than the changi chapel in canberra is irrelevant. both memorials are important to the nation and its diverse group of veterans. in a sense, it was a shame that this debate raged only within the pages of the ballarat courier and was not raised in a wider public forum. why the debate? if as robert’s states, the memorial is national in all but name what is the significance of it being recognized as a national memorial? was the issue of the memorial being either ‘national’ or ‘regional’ simply a case of the city of ballarat asking too much from the government? it appears that having realized it had received a white elephant from the ballarat rsl, the city council felt that the federal government should contribute significantly to maintenance and running costs. essentially this issue was about money not the amgiguity of public history review, vol 12, 2006 101 pows within national commemoration. despite the best intentions of those involved in the memorial’s construction, the issue over funding may affect the potential significance and functioning of this particular memorial and more broadly signify how the past, or in this case representations of the past, can become political tools. endnotes 1 on australian war memorials see ken inglis, sacred places: war memorials in the australian landscape, melbourne, melbourne university press, 2001. 2 alan borg, war memorials: from antiquity to the present, london, leo cooper, 1991, p. ix. 3 on the difficulties pows have had incorporating their narratives within anzac see joan beaumont, gull force: survival and leadership in captivity 1941-1945, sydney, allen & unwin, 1988; joan beaumont, ‘pows in australian national memory’, in bob moore and barbara hatley-broad (eds), pows, prisoners of peace: captivity, homecoming and memory in world war ii, oxford, berg, 2005; stephen garton, the cost of war: australians return, melbourne, oxford university press, 1996; robin gerster, big-noting: the heroic theme in australian war writing, melbourne, melbourne university press, 1987; hank nelson, pows: australians under nippon, sydney, abc enterprises, 1985; and, hank nelson and gavan mccormack (eds), the burma-thailand railway: memory and history, sydney, allen & unwin, 1993. 4 on the design and symbolism of the war memorial, see lachlan grant, ‘the australian ex-pows memorial and the incorporation of pows in anzac’, in kevin blackburn and karl hack (eds), proceedings and papers of the japanese occupation: sixty years after the end of the asia pacific war conference, singapore, nanyang technological university, 2005, pp147-158. 5 garton states that pows have been broadly seen as inheritors of anzac in the cost of war, p227. furthermore, beaumont states that the pow story has become a celebration of national identity in ‘pows in australian national memory’, p194. 6 an example of the popularity of pow literature is the fact that both rohan rivett’s behind bamboo and russell braddon’s the naked island have sold over 1 million copies. 7 inglis, p. 374. 8 james mayo, war memorials as political landscapes: the american experience and beyond, new york, praeger, 1988, p1. 9 kevin blackburn has noted that despite the large attendance at its opening, the changi chapel at duntroon has not become the focal point for australian pow commemorations. kevin blackburn, ‘changi: a place of personal pilgrimages and collective histories’, australian historical studies, vol 30, no 112, april 1999, p163. 10 michael mckernan, this war never ends: the pain of seperation and return, st lucia, university of queensland press, 2001, p166. 11 inglis, p368-70; news bulletin: official organ of the ex-pows & relatives association of victoria, august 1997. 12 christina twomey, ‘australian nurse pows: gender, war and captivity’, australian historical studies, vol 36, no 124, october 2004, p273. 13 inglis, pp370-4. 14 the initial grant of $50,000 had come from the department for veterans’ affairs regional war memorials project, entitled ‘their service – our heritage’, which had been set up to aid as many regional communities as possible. the $50,000 was more than twelve times greater than the usual $4000 funding limit under the regional memorials project. additionally, the second injection of $150,000 also came from a similar commemorative program, ‘saluting their service.’ 15 michael ronaldson, ‘statements by members: taiwan and east timor, australian ex-pows memorial’, hansard, 29 september 1999, p10980, at http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/view_document.aspx?id=180669&table=hansardr, and michael ronaldson, ‘grievance debate: east timor, australian ex-pows memorial appeal, ballarat electorate: online australia field day’, house hansard, 18 october 1999, p. 11775 at http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/view_document.aspx?id=183749&table=hansardr, both accessed 26 july 2004. 16 the ballarat courier, 19 january 2001. public history review, vol 12, 2006 102 17 sunday herald-sun, 28 january 2001. 18 the ballarat courier, 19 january 2001. 19 interview with les kennedy, ballarat, 25 november 2004. 20 letter from the minister of veterans’ affairs published in the ballarat courier, 19 january 2001. 21 the ballarat courier, 22 january 2001. 22 ibid. 23 ibid. 24 ibid. 25 the ballarat courier, 17 february 2004. 26 inglis, p280. 27 the ballarat courier, 9 february 2004. 28 the ballarat courier, 2 april 2004. 29 the ballarat courier, 2 april, 24 april and 9 june 2004. 30 the ballarat courier, 9 june 2004. 31 the ballarat courier, 25 june 2004. 32 the ballarat courier, 6 july 2004. 33 in the meantime the victorian state government provided a funding boost of $40,000 (atop the $70,000 it provided for the construction and opening ceremony). but this amount was short of the extra $100,000 the city of ballarat requested. 34 the ballarat courier, 13 february 2004. 35 john howard cited in news bulletin: the official organ of the ex-pows and relatives association of victoria, may 1998. recently available online at ‘address by the prime minister the hon john howard mp at the kanchanaburi war cemetery, 11am, 25 april 1998, at http://pm.gov.au/news/speeches/1998/kanchan.htm, accessed 5 october 2005. 36 the ballarat courier, 14 july 2004. 37 the ballarat courier, 15 july 2004. 38 the ballarat courier, 8 september 2004. 39 the ballarat courier, 21 july 2004. 40 the ballarat courier, 8 october 2004. 41 the ballarat courier, 11 october 2004. 42 on the popularity of utilitarian memorials following the second world war see inglis, pp352-8. 43 garton, p229. 44 tom roberts, ‘national in all but name’, the ballarat courier, 20 july 2004. pdfashton public history review vol 17 (2010): 1–15 © utsepress and the author introduction: going public paul ashton his volume of public history review presents six of the papers delivered at an international colloquia convened at the university of technology, sydney in september 2010 entitled ‘new directions in public history’. (other papers from the colloquia will be published in a future volume of public history review.)1 the colloquia addressed in part the ways in which public historians have recently responded to challenges and opportunities thrown up by, among other things, shifting cultural authority, changing political environments, social movements and globalisation in a digital age. in doing so, it also highlighted tensions in the ways in which public history has been defined and perceived over time. public history is an elastic, nuanced and contentious term.2 its meaning has changed over time and across cultures in different local, t public history review | ashton 2 regional, national and international contexts. in the united states of america, where contemporary public history is most firmly established and widely practiced, the term is commonly attributed to robert kelley, an environmental historian then at the university of california, santa barbara, who is said to have coined it in 1975. ‘public history’, kelley wrote in the first issue of the public historian – the academic-styled journal of the national council on public history – referred ‘to the employment of historians and historical method outside of academia’.3 the name, however, was not universally adopted. some university departments preferred the label ‘applied history’,4 bestowing upon the fledgling field a blue-collar status which it subsequently endeavoured to shrug off. applied history, which technically involved harnessing history to problems in public policy, was often used interchangeably with ‘public history’. but many in the american academy had another preference which was to largely ignore what was to become at one level a sub-discipline of academic history. kelley’s simple, pragmatic definition was adopted and refined by the ‘public history movement’, as professional practitioners broadly termed themselves. ultimately, many in the movement conceded, as witnessed in the editorial policy of the public historian, that there was a ‘considerable diversity of approaches to the definition and practice of public history’.5 but as early as the 1980s two at times overlapping categories of ‘public historian’ had been delineated: the academically trained practitioner and the academic public history educator. (by the beginning of the twenty-first century there were more than 50 graduate public history programs in american universities.) thus in 2003, while acknowledging the interand multidisciplinary nature of public history and trying to accommodate a range of professionals from disciplines such as archaeology, information knowledge management, museum studies, oral history and historical administration, david vanderstel, executive director of the national council on public history, wrote that public historians were ‘those [trained in but] engaged in work outside the halls of the academy and those within the academy who prepare students for careers in government agencies, museums, libraries, historic preservation, and in private business enterprises’.6 this definition neatly described the membership of the national council on public history, which since its establishment in 1980 has contributed greatly to enhancing history’s place in both public and public history review | ashton 3 corporate culture in the united states. and it was reiterated in a special issue of the public historian in 2006 which addressed public history as reflective practice.7 but it excluded large numbers of americans who were making histories or participating in historical pastimes in public spaces. roy rosenzweig and david thelen investigated these historical activities and the social needs and historical sensibilities underlying them in an extensive national survey. amid history wars and in an increasingly politically conservative climate, the presence of the past: popular uses of history in american life8 was important for a number of reasons. firstly, it demonstrated the complex ways in which people used the past in making themselves and their lives, negotiated the present and navigated the future. the presence of the past also discredited conservative and elitist claims that there was a collective national history, essential to civic cooperation and advancement in difficult times, with which the general public was not well versed. such sentiments were in part expressed in 1996 when academic historian, professor sheldon hackney, former chair of the national endowment for the humanities, announced that ‘there is an inclusive historical narrative in which we all recognise not only the stories of our kith and kin but in which we acknowledge that we are playing roles in a common story’.9 at stake were social cohesion, the ‘national character’ and the authority of the professional historian.10 this leads us to the third reason for the project’s importance: it reconfirmed that academic history was but one of a myriad of historical practices. as thelen observed in his afterthoughts on the project, published online, their controversial book provided ‘evidence that academic history differs from everyday history’.11 thelen, however, did not seek to set the academy against the rest. he acknowledges the longstanding gulf between academic historians and what some academics would see as their laity.12 so too does patricia mooney-melvin who among others has traced over the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century the growing insularity and disinterest of the professional historian vis-a-vis robust and rising communities of local and community historians and preservationists.13 and thelen is critical of professionals who dismiss experience as inconsequential, private or self-deceptive14 or fail to respect ‘differences in grandmothers’ stories, museum exhibitions, and manuscript collections as trusted sources for approaching the public history review | ashton 4 past.’15 but he argues for a participatory historical culture where the ‘past should be treated as a shared human experience and opportunity for understanding, rather than a ground for division and suspicion’.16 others share this view. david glassberg, in his book sense of history: the place of the past in american life, has urged professional historians to reach in ‘to discover the humanity they share’ rather than positioning themselves as aloof, superior beings.17 hilda kean has also noted that personal need or attractions to various pasts are fundamental to coming to grips with variant understandings of history.18 thelan too notes the artificiality of separating the public from the private. ‘a fundamentally historical culture centred on individual participation’, he reflected, would invite members to explore just how individuals conform to and resist larger historical trends, how the rhythms and narratives of family life fit or do not fit those of changing power and institutional arrangements in the larger society… it would take seriously how they live lives and meet needs in relationships driven by forces different from those that power institutions and cultures.19 roy rosenzweig’s afterthoughs on the presence of the past came out of another critique of mainstream professional history. some radical historians railed against the new professionals: public historians. ronald grele, a community and oral historian, asserted in an early volume of the public historian that public history was not de novo. it was moving into fields long occupied by practising nonacademic historians… because the public history movement has ignored these debates, it seems to have accepted a much narrower idea of the profession.20 for grele, public history also held out the possibility of a participatory historical culture but one in which people had a firm hand in the making of their own pasts. in the same year, 1981, howard green – later to become president of the oral history association of america and commissioner of the new jersey historical commission – wrote in radical history review of the way in public history review | ashton 5 which non-academic historians in the community felt patronised by their supposed professional betters.21 rosenzweig similarly argued two decades later that professional historians still needed ‘to work harder at listening to and respecting the many ways popular historymakers traverse the terrain of the past that is so present for all of us’.22 unlike thelen, rosenzweig’s underlying motivation was driven by a desire for social justice and support for social change movements that challenged conservative and traditional agendas.23 grele, too, saw as a worst case senario professional historians pouring their ‘energies into hucksterism for the status quo’.24 another radical perspective on public history was to emerge in the united states. perhaps its clearest expression is to be found in radical history review, a left-wing, scholarly journal established in the 1970s. drawing on contributions to this journal, susan benson, stephen brier and roy rosenzweig edited a book published in 1986 which presented public history as politically interventionist, activist and community centered.25 in 1999, under the direction of danny walkowitz, a professor at new york university who ran a graduate program in public history, the journal launched, as a regular feature, a two-pronged series in public history aimed at broadening understandings of the field. the first examined how ‘racial’ others and imperial pasts played out in national histories. the second looked at the extent to which national narratives constructed by previous political regimes were questioned by public representations of the national story commissioned or endorsed by succeeding regimes.26 the series continues to date and has lead to two edited collections.27 this approach to public history focussed attention on the use and abuse of history by the state particularly in terms of collective memory at a national level. ludmilla jordanova has observed that ‘the state… lies at the heart of public history’.28 jeremy black, in his book, using history, also examines ‘the uses that are made of history in the public domain’ by governments, ruling elites and societies.29 the term public history has only recently gained currency in britain. though ruskin college, oxford, has been conducting annual public history conferences since 2000, the first international public history conference in britain – ‘people and their pasts’ – was held there in 2005. one result of this was the publication of the edited collection people and their pasts: public history today.30 a conference public history review | ashton 6 conducted at york university in 2001 entitled ‘historians and their publics’ also in part addressed the field. other public history-named events are now mushrooming and the term is being taken up in different contexts. in contested pasts: the politics of memory, katherine hodgken and susannah radstone rightly contend that much work in the field of cultural and social memory has ‘come to be known as “public history”’.31 public history and the study of memory overlap as both deal with collective memory as well as historical consciousness.32 david glassberg, arguably, wrote the most seminal article on this topic in the united states.33 david lowenthal, one of the numerous respondents to glassberg’s piece, wrote that ‘individual life-histories uniquely illuminate historical sources and context’.34 popular cultural forms such as film, re-enactments and museums, provinces too of the public historian, also contribute to shaping collective memory. public history’s reception by the british academy has in general been more in accord with the north american experience. an academic conference held at trinity college, cambridge, in 2001 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the university’s institute of historical research, had as its theme: ‘what is history now?’. one of the contributors observed that much of the ‘recent explosive growth in history… has been in popular taste and demand, to which professional historians have contributed little and responded hardly at all’. but ultimately academic historians were held up at this gathering as having ‘a certain obligation of guidance, even of leadership’.35 public history rated one specific though fleeting mention by paul cartledge who concurred with ludmilla jordanova on the ‘necessity for historians to engage in and with what has been called, with some imprecision admittedly, “public history”’.36 jordanova had recognised the complex nature of the label ‘public history’ in a stimulating, introductory chapter on the field published in 2000. and she immediately conceded that many of her readers were then ‘likely to be unfamiliar with the phrase “public history”’.37 but history is clearly ‘going public’ in britain today.38 public history’s relatively recent emergence in british historiography has generated debate. some of this has centred on a distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ or personal. academic jill liddington, in a broad ranging, exploratory article in the journal oral history, suggested that ‘[s]ome public historians are surely just “private historians” in cunning disguise: may not writing public history review | ashton 7 a commissioned history for a private corporation be nearer “public relations” than “public history”’?39 this argument was put forward in the 1980s by david cantor, an american historian of medicine, who erroneously contended that ‘good history’ was undermined by the ‘purse-strings and obligations of contract work’.40 commissioned history, for cantor, inevitably takes on the agenda of the commissioner. but critical distance affects all form of knowledge production. this does not exclude fields influenced by ideological fashions and funding regimes for academic work. most controversially, as she admits, liddington questioned the public worth of genealogy, family and local history. positing a binary and i would contend artificial divide, she asks: ‘who are public historians: publically-funded, publically accountable academic historians or enthusiastic grassroots practitioners?’41 the answer was academic historians. public historians, she concludes, ‘provide refreshing, inspiring and necessary expert mediation between the past and its publics.’42 expert public historians, for liddington, would ‘maintain the highest standards of scholarship and critical rigour’.43 ‘purveyors of the past to popular audiences’, she warned, would ignore these ‘historians at their peril’. ‘these’ historians, however, are often overlooked by commercial history enterprises. traditional historians are not known, to use television parlance, for their ‘talent’.44 academic historians have a discourse to shore up their authority, destablised as this may be, which is in one sense unassailable. but some critical history, particularly that with a tendency to moralise or be didactic, has alienated some of traditional history’s audiences in the new, postcolonial global environment.45 now there are those who deem ‘real’ history to reside in academic institutions, where it occasionally works to enlighten lay practitioners, and those who see history as a ‘public thing’. as greg denning has observed, for the latter, history didn’t belong to academic history departments. it didn’t belong to establishment antiquarians … there were historians in museums, galleries, in archives, in newspapers, in schools whose needs were not being met by academic history departments.46 public history review | ashton 8 others, such as jordanova, have recognised that the ‘past is essentially open-ended, and accounts of it are public property, available for numerous uses’.47 raphael samuel, who started the history workshop movement in 1966 and who taught for 30 years at ruskin college, oxford – a labour movement college for adults –48 pointed earlier to the importance of local historians and the diverse, non-traditional range of materials they drew upon to construct their pasts.49 indeed, he returned again and again to the idea of history as an organic form of knowledge, and one whose sources are promiscuous, drawing not only on real-life experience but also on memory and myth, fantasy and desire; not only on the chronological past of the documentary record but also the timeless one of tradition.50 history was thus ‘a social form of knowledge; the work in any given instance, of a thousand different hands.’51 growing out of socialism, the history workshop movement spread to south africa and ireland and later influenced a number of public historians in australia and new zealand. it was concerned with facilitating democratic scholarship in part through the creation of hospitable, collaborative environments for all who had an interest in the past. this included local and community historians, curators, archaeologists, archivists and teachers. the movement promoted the history of everyday life. its founder also rightly contended that the subject matter of history and the process of the production of history were inextricably connected. for samuel, historical content was, as kean observes, directly linked to the history maker. this was not a position he had recently adopted in theatres of memory; it had been at the core of his practice for three decades.52 hilda kean, paul martin and sally morgan similarly noted that public history involved the positive entanglement, rather than the separation, of the personal and the public as well as the utilization of fresh material. public history, they contended acts as an umbrella, under which the historical mind can be brought to bear on areas of research and thought which are too often seen as mutually exclusive. it draws upon the magazine racks of w.h. smith for source material as much public history review | ashton 9 as it draws on academic texts. it looks as much to images and textual conceptions on commercial packaging and television advertising as it does to the art gallery and museum. it seeks oral opinion conveyed through the domestic images recorded by camcorder, constructed images and visual texts on television, and the holistic nature of the idea of knowledge expressed by the internet.53 such entanglements make for a good deal of grey areas; black and white definitions are difficult, indeed undesirable if they stifle creative practices and interventions. this was clear in the wide range of contributions in their collection which aimed to break down traditional boundaries and revisit ‘ideas either relegated to academic practice or dismissed as the concern of enthusiastic amateurs’.54 in australia and new zealand, with their respective populations of just over 22,500,000 and 4,300,000 – history has been forced out of its cloisters for around two decades. the new zealand experience, similar to that of australia, is outlined in bronwyn dalley and jock phillips edited collection, going public. here, they define public history as ‘historical work undertaken according to the research priorities, agendas or funding capacities of another party other than being self-directed by the historian. seen in this way’, they note, ‘public history occurs in museums, in government, sometimes in universities, and in the independent freelance community’.55 graeme davison, now emeritus professor of history at monash university, has neatly described australian public history as the 'practice of history by academically trained historians working for public agencies or as freelancers outside the universities'.56 both definitions adopt, consciously or otherwise, the american ‘public history movement’s’ conception of the field. but both definitions exclude a range of practitioners who undertake history with affect in various australian public arenas. davison, indeed, immediately goes on to note that while the north american term 'public history' was not adopted until the late 1980s in australia, public historians could be traced back at least to c.e.w. bean, who played a major role in shaping the national legend of anzac from world war i and who was largely responsible for the establishment of the australian war memorial, a major museum and a national archives for war records. bean, however, was not an academically trained historian. he public history review | ashton 10 studied law at oxford university and subsequently became a journalist who turned his hand to writing nationalist history. in citing bean, davison hints at tensions over the term 'public history'. i use the work tension since a debate in australia has yet to be ignited. people in the field seem largely content to get on with their practice, leaving reflective work to a handful of individuals.57 professional associations – which were formed in south australia during 1981; victoria in 1983 (as part of the history institute of victoria; self-determining from 1991); new south wales, 1985; western australia, 1989; queensland, 1990; tasmania, 1992; and the northern territory in 2001 – generally limit their activities to workrelated matters and publications such as codes of ethics. the number of freelance historians in australia today – around 350-400 – outnumbers historians employed full-time in the academy. public history in australia has been shaped by specific local conditions, which vary from state to state, region to region and place to place, and by largely british and american influences including britain’s people history movement and the less influential applied history model that emerged in the united states. the rise of graduate university programs in various states led by academics with different styles and ideological persuasions has also impacted significantly on public history. the first public or applied history courses offered at tertiary level were at the university of technology, sydney, and monash university in 1988.58 it has also been moulded by the active worlds of history that exists across the continent, from organised historical societies and family history groups, of which there are around 1000 in australia today, to individual collectors of historical objects. in his use and abuse of australia history, graeme davison recollects that his engagement with public history evolved out of a hobby and a sense of ‘professional obligation’ to enthusiasts. ‘only gradually’, he notes in the preface to this work, did he realize that ‘everyday forms of history-making’ were both transforming and challenging the academic discipline of history.59 elsewhere, davison has depicted public history as an expression of a desire to bridge a perceived gap between academic history and the australian public.60 others see this differently. for raphael samuel, history in the public arena is ‘the ensemble of activities and practices in which ideas of history are embedded or a dialectic of past-present relations is rehearsed’. in this sense, public history is an engagement with such public history review | ashton 11 activities and practices.61 these can range from ceremonies and rituals of ‘social integration’62 to public landscapes, monuments and memorials, museums and exhibitions, school texts and classrooms, historical films and novels, family stories, songs, memories and family and local history-making. most of these activities do not involve academic or professionally trained historians. as ashton and hamilton have argued, in australia ‘for many future historians, the academy – offering training, pastoral care and some opportunities for employment – will be part of a network of organisations and institutions that sustain historical practice.’63 that future has arrived. that the house of history has many rooms, only one of which accommodates academic historians, has emerged strongly in an australia study, australians and the past, which is based on rosenzweig and thelen’s the presence of the past.64 the period in which the public history movement has developed has been one of considerable change. this is not simply a result of the passing of post-war generations. it is also because of the effects wrought by continuing internal and external conflicts, the globalisation of economies, the emergence of new media forms and the major impact of the digital revolution. significant shifts have occurred in the transmission, reception and practice of history. there is an increasing passion with the past both personally and in a range of public arenas. a growing preoccupation with the past for the public consumption of history has been matched by a proliferation of sites – including memorials, museums, television, film and national parks – and practices – such as local history, family history, genealogy, autobiography and re-enactment – which are all now viewed as constituting our cultural memory and its social expression. a boom continues in the popularity of historical novels and biography. this increase in historical activities is not only about consumption; it relates to atomisation (increasingly on an individual level) and to people taking control of making and interpreting the past. while not necessarily changing all practices, new technologies have helped democratise the processes by making written, visual and audio records far more easily accessible and through the facilitation, for example, of on-line publications of work such as biography and autobiography. in this way, relationships between history and different types of media have become stronger. media, too, has become even more central to shaping collective memory, public history review | ashton 12 loosening the hold of traditional, bookish history. these developments have also meant that the boundary between personal and public pasts are increasingly permeable. such significant change has also brought into question, if not undermined, the role of the academic historian. both the many seen and unseen ‘publics’ – from museum visitors to virtual historical communities – and the concept of history itself, have ebbed and flowed so much so that the question of social and cultural authority has become a significant issue. we know now that, more and more everyday, new sources, ideas and forms of historical knowledge are being generated outside the academy. we also know that public historians, those who work in a professional capacity outside universities, do not just translate or popularise history for a lay public or mediate between institutions or different groups. they utilise their professional skills in a variety of ways to make important contributions to how we think about the past and its meaning. as marnie hughes-warrington has noted, ‘there is no “history” apart from historical practices. nor, in consequence, is there any logical, universal or unchanging reason to talk of one practice as “more historical” than another. if we value some historical practices over others, it is because of historical decisions. and because our views on what history is are themselves historical, they are subject to reevaluation and change.’65 endnotes 1 i would like to thank paula hamilton for input into this article. 2 see, for example, hilda kean and paul ashton, ‘introduction’ in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), people and their pasts: public history today, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2009, pp1-20. 3 robert kelley, ‘public history: its origins, nature and prospects’, the public historian, vol 1, no 1, 1978, p16. 4 constance b. schulz, ‘becoming a public historian’, in james b. gardner and peter s. lapaglia (eds), public history: essays form the field, malabar, krieger publishing company, malabar, 1999, p31. 5 see, for example, ‘editorial policy’, the public historian, vol 19, no 2, 1997, p152. 6 david g.vanderstel, ‘the national council on public history’, public history review, vol 10, 2003, p131. 7 see noel j. stowe, ‘public history curriculum: illustrating reflective practice’ and shelly bookspan, ‘something ventured, many things gained: reflections on being a historian-entrepreneur’, the public historian, vol 28, no 1, 2006, respectively pp39-65; 67-74. 8 columbia university press, new york, 1998. public history review | ashton 13 9 sheldon hackney, ‘the american identity’, the public historian, vol 19, no 1, 1997, p22. 10 see, for example, eric foner, who owns history?: rethinking the past in a changing world, hill and wang, new york, 2002, chapter 7, “who is an american?’. 11 david thelen, ‘a participatory historical culture’, http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/afterdave.html nd, p2. 12 ibid. 13 patricia mooney-melvin, ‘professional historians and the challenge of redefinition’, in james b. gardner and peter s. lapaglia (eds), public history: essays form the field, krieger publishing company, malabar, 1999, p9. ian tyrell has argued that the ‘threat to history is a recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood one and that history has adapted to and influenced its changing publics more than the profession is given credit for’. he concludes, however, with ‘a mixed picture of continuity and change, of achievement and failure’. see ian tyrrell, historians in public: the practice of american history, 1890-1970, the university of chicago press, chicago, 2005, pp2; 254. 14 op cit, p3. 15 ibid, p11. 16 ibid, p2. 17 david glassberg, sense of history: the place of the past in american life, massachusetts press, amherst ma, 2001, p210. 18 hilda kean, ‘personal and public histories: issues in the presentation of the past’, in brian graham and peter howard (eds), the ashgate research companion to heritage and identity, ashgate, aldershot, 2008, pp53-62. 19 thelen, op cit, pp7-8. 20 ronald j. grele, ‘whose public? whose history?: what is the goal of a public historian?’, the public historian, vol 3, no 1, 1981, pp44-6. 21 howard green, ‘a critique of the professional public history movement’, radical history review, vol 25, no 28, 1981, pp164-71. 22 roy rosenzweig, ‘everyone a historian’, http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/afterroy.html, p11. 23 ibid. 24 op cit, p48. 25 susan benson, stephen brier and roy rosenzweig (eds), presenting the past: essays on history and the public, temple university press, philadelphia, 1986. 26 daniel walkowitz, ‘series in public history: “around the globe”’, radical history review, vol 75, no 79, 1999. 27 daniel walkowitz and lisa maya knauer (eds), memory and the impact of political transformation in public space, duke university press, durham, nc, 2004 and daniel walkowitz and lisa maya knauer (eds), memory, race and nation in public space, duke university press, durham, nc, 2007. 28 ludmilla jordanova, the practice of history, arnold, london, 2000, p155. 29 jeremy black, using history, hodder arnold, london, 2005, pix. 30 paul ashton and hilda keane (eds), people and their pasts: public history today, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2009. 31 katherine hodgken and susannah radstone, contested pasts: the politics of memory, routledge, london, 2003, p3. public history review | ashton 14 32 see paula hamilton and linda shopes, ‘introdution’, in paula hamilton and linda shopes (eds), oral history and public memories, temple university press, philadelphia, 2008. 33 david glassberg, ‘public history and the study of memory’, the public historian, vol 18 no 2, 1996, pp7-23. 34 david lowenthal, ‘history and memory’, the public historian, vol 19, no2, 1997, p33. the roundtable respondents included michael frisch, edward linenthal, michael kannen, linda shopes, jo blatti, robert archibald and barbara franco. see the public historian, vol 19, no 2, 1997. 35 felipe fernandez-armesto, ‘epilogue: what is history now?’, in david cannadine (ed), what is history now?, palgrave macmillan, houndsmill, 2002, pp158; 160. 36 paul cartledge, ‘what is social history now?’, in ibid, p29. 37 jordanova, history in practice, p141. 38 see, for example, ashton and keane, op cit. 39 jill liddington, ‘what is public history?: publics and their pasts, meanings and practices’, oral history, vol 30, no 1, 2002, p90. 40 paul ashton and christopher keating, ‘commissioned history’, in graeme davison, john hirst and stuart macintyre (eds), the oxford companion to australian history, oxford university press, melbourne, 1998, p141. 41 op cit. 42 ibid, p92 (my emphasis). 43 ibid, p91. 44 see, for example, michelle arrow, ‘”i want to be a tv historian when i grow up”: on being a rewind historian’, public history review, vol 12, 2006, p81. 45 see paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘introduction: the house of history’ and ‘the new professionals: public history’, in paul ashton and paula hamilton, history at the crossroads: australians and the past, halstead press, sydney, 2010). 46 greg denning, ‘some beaches are never closed: foundation and future reflections on the history institute, victoria’, rostrum, no 19, december 2001, p29 cited in ruth donovan, ‘australian public history: growth of a profession?’, phd thesis, department of history, university of western australia, 2007, p157. 47 jordanova, op cit, p155. 48 hilda kean, ‘public history and raphael samuel: a forgotten radical pedagogy?’, public history review, vol 11, 2004, p51. 49 raphael samuel, ‘local history and oral history’, history workshop journal, vol 1, no 1, 1976, pp191-208. 50 raphael samuel, theatres of memory: past and present in contemporary culture, vol 1, verso, london, 1994, px. 51 ibid, p8. 52 kean, ‘public history and raphael samuel’, p52. 53 hilda kean, paul martin and sally j. morgan (eds), seeing history: public history in britain now, francis boutle, london, 2005, p13. 54 ibid, p15. 55 bronwyn dalley and jock phillips (eds), going public: the changing face of new zealand history, auckland university press, auckland, 2001, p9. public history review | ashton 15 56 graeme davison, ‘public history’, in graeme davison, john hirst and stuart macintyre (eds), the oxford companion to australian history, oxford university press, melbourne, 1998, p532. 57 see for example, graeme davison, the use and abuse of australian history, allen and unwin, sydney, 2000; john rickard and peter spearritt (eds), packaging the past?: public histories, special issue of australian historical studies, vol 24, no 96, 1991; and paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘blood money?: race and nation in australian public history’, radical history review, no 76, 2000, pp188-207. 58 see, for example, paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘streetwise: public history in new south wales’, public history review, vols 5/6, 1996-7, p15. 59 op cit, pv. 60 ‘public history’, in oxford companion to australian history, p532. 61 samuel, theatres of memory, p8. 62 e.j. hobsbawm and terrence ranger, the invention of tradition, cambridge university press, london, 1984, p263. 63 ashton and hamilton, ‘streetwise’, p16. 64 paula hamilton and paul ashton (eds), australians and the past, special issue of australian cultural history, vol 22, 2003. see also ashton and hamilton, history at the crossroads. 65 m. hughes-warrington, history goes to the movies: studying history on film, routledge, oxon, 2007, p32. pdfclark public history review vol 17 (2010): 62–76 © utsepress and the author talking about history: a case for oral historiography anna clark hen john howard lost the australian federal election in 2007, a number of politicians and commentators predicted the end of the ‘history wars’. launching thomas keneally’s first volume of australian history, prime minister kevin rudd felt his new government could offer a more synthetic and conciliatory historical approach: ‘i believe the time has now come to move beyond the arid intellectual debates of the history wars and the culture wars of recent years’, he said. ‘time to leave behind us the polarisation that began to infect every discussion of our nation’s past.’1 political scientist robert manne also thought howard’s dismissal marked a move away from the fractured public contest over australian history: ‘with the election of the rudd government … the culture war will come w public history review | clark 63 abruptly to an end’, he considered. ‘without a friendly government receptive to its bilious views, the right-wing commentariat will lose most of its cultural clout.’2 the extent to which that prediction played out is not clear-cut. certainly, history no longer seems to be such a potent weapon in public and political debate. unlike the 2007 election, for example, australian history played no visible part in the 2010 campaign.3 the ongoing public brawls over the past, so prominent during the howard government’s twelve years in office, have abated.4 without tacit government support, there is little momentum for such a contest. that doesn’t mean debate has disappeared, however. to use a syllabus truism, we seem to be dealing with degrees of ‘continuity and change’ in the so-called history wars, rather than an ending of hostilities altogether. i use this curriculum discourse pointedly, because history education is one critical site of debate still playing out today. history may not generate such frenzy these days, but there is still significant disagreement – and the release in 2010 of the draft national history curriculum caused a surge of spirited public discussion. similarly, kevin rudd’s national apology to the stolen generations in 2008 sparked yet another round of often uneasy historical reflection. and in 2009, the australian of the year, mick dodson, controversially questioned whether australia day should be celebrated at all. so the public conjecture over australian history is far from over – as these debates among historians, politicians and public commentators remind us. the question is, does any of this resonate beyond the limited public sphere in which it plays out? what do australians think of their history in light of the history wars? by way of answer, this paper examines the enduring public contest over the past and then investigates more elusive, but no less significant, everyday conversations about australian history around the country. by proposing a method of ‘oral historiography’ to gauge contemporary historical understandings in australia, it brings a critical new perspective to these ongoing debates. a p e r s i s t e n t h i s t o r i c a l d e b a t e the 2010 release of the draft national curriculum documents for years k-10 and senior years 11-12 confirmed australia’s anxious engagement with its history. despite kevin rudd’s prior insistence public history review | clark 64 that divisive historical debate should itself be a thing of the past, the curriculum has been a flash point for political and public discussion. upon its release, then education minister julia gillard insisted the document was ‘neither black armband nor white blindfold’.5 like rudd, she attempted to preemptively evacuate any controversy from the public discussion about the new history curriculum. some commentators felt otherwise. the educationist kevin donnelly wrote a characteristically blanket rejection: ‘schools across australia will soon be forced to teach a new-age and politically correct view of history and australia’s place in the world’, he warned. ‘history, like every other subject in the national curriculum, has to be taught through the politically correct prism of aboriginal, asian and environmental perspectives.’6 the australian family association spokesman bill meuhlenberg was just as concerned, saying that the curriculum ‘looks like it has been influenced by a marxist view of history, which is worrying. we need to be objective, fair and even handed when dealing with young minds.’7 the shadow education minister christopher pyne also objected to a supposed bias in the document. ‘we have a seeming over-emphasis on indigenous culture and history and almost an entire blotting out of our british traditions and … heritage’, he lamented. ‘i am deeply concerned that australian students will be taught a particular black armband view of our history without any counterbalancing.’8 such rhetoric is predictable enough, if slightly alarmist, and could come from any outbreak of historical debate over the last fifteen years. despite the rudd government’s denial that history was being politicised in the draft curriculum, it was proving to be yet another site of heated political discussion. the collective pronouns are the giveaway here, for one of the perennial paradoxes of the history wars is its rhetoric: appealing to unity and collective national identity on the one hand, those markers (‘australian students’, ‘our history’, ‘young minds’) belie a divisive and polarising ‘semantic war’ on the other.9 much has been written about the urgent, anxious language of the history wars as they play out around the world. such work confirms just how politically contested the past has become in recent years, as the polarising language of their battlefield metaphors (‘history wars’, ‘killing of history’, and so on) are repeated in perpetual historical crises around the world.10 students who don’t understand ‘our public history review | clark 65 history’, citizens who fail to remember ‘our nation’s story’, and museums that push ‘political correctness’ over pride comprise the standard headlines of these international history wars.11 reaction to these debates is not all so polemical, however. defending the national curriculum earlier this year, the conservative historian john hirst refused to side with criticism over the draft’s treatment of indigenous history: ‘students sometimes have had far too much aboriginal history and that can be a bit of a turn-off’, he admitted. ‘but now, under the new curriculum, they’re encouraged to compare the history of settler conflict in australia with the settler conflict and the struggle over indigenous rights in another country.’12 stuart macintyre, who oversaw the development of the history stream of the draft curriculum, also dismissed christopher pyne’s complaint. ‘i think anybody who looks at the curriculum online will have great difficulty in finding any armbands’, he said.13 instead, his misgivings about the curriculum process included the level of consultation during its development and the support that would be given to teacher training and professional development upon its release.14 macintyre’s concerns precipitated a significant discussion among history teachers and curriculum officials about teachability of the draft.15 this professional historical discourse has engaged with questions of historical practice, relevance, and pedagogy,16 and as such, it provides an important counterpoint to the narrow partisanism of the history wars. because it has been mostly conducted by teachers and historians in academic and professional journals, conferences, and departmental tearooms, however, this discussion has little resonance beyond the professional context in which it takes place. consequently, the conversation over the draft curriculum that emerged here – concerning the discipline of history – was largely overshadowed by the public debate surrounding the draft curriculum’s release. so despite the incoming labor government’s hopeful plea for a more open and accommodating discussion of australian history, the political potency of the nation’s past has far from abated. i even wonder if this discourse of historical division is now firmer than ever, if any public venture into ‘australia’s story’ is automatically catalogued in the spectrum of the history wars. public history review | clark 66 that catalogue seems to grow every year. for example, support for the national apology to the stolen generations in 2008 was overwhelming, and prime minister rudd was determined to introduce the apology into federal parliament as a unifying and bipartisan act of respect. yet there was considerable public and political disagreement over the merits of the apology as well as the history that motivated it.17 in january 2009, when mick dodson was made australian of the year, his qualified acceptance speech generated considerable media attention and political comment. dodson’s call for australia day to be shifted out of respect to indigenous australians was backed by the melbourne age;18 in the australian, meanwhile, the columnist janet albrechtson dismissed the suggestion: ‘dodson’s award does not honour australia day – it diminishes it. dodson may not like our history, but he cannot change it.’19 again and again, this loaded discourse of national history – ‘our history’ – confirms how politically contested collective memory and national identity are. like other famous rhetorical collectives – such as the mainstream, the battlers, the silent majority – such language demonstrate history’s potency in political debate.20 thus, the language that unifies has the corresponding potential to polarise and divide, as the sociologist mirca madianou has noted.21 madianou’s reading of the rhetorical slippage between ‘us’ and ‘them’ reminds me of john howard’s election slogan from 1996, ‘for all of us’. like so much of the language that dominates the history wars, howard’s ‘all of us’ represented a vague collective australian identity. it also became an astute conservative slogan playing off racial disharmony for political gain; as noel pearson contended, it implied an australia ‘for all of us (but not them)’.22 i should add here that while conservative politicians and commentators have tended to dominate public debates over australian history in the media, this contest is by no means onesided. new south wales labor premier bob carr was active in pushing a compulsory australian history syllabus in years 9 and 10 in the 1990s, which generated significant reaction from teachers and historians. and labor prime minister paul keating’s repeated taunts of conservative australian history fuelled angry reactions from his conservative successor, john howard.23 what’s clear from these debates is just how politically contested national history is. in a sense, we’re talking about the politics of public history review | clark 67 collective memory here: this is why national history is so contested, after all. because so many identify with the nation, and because political parties play off its story for political legitimacy, the relationship between politics and history is a particularly powerful one. as stefan berger has noted, ‘national history writing has been serving national politics everywhere. as long as the nation-state remains an important political reference point, national histories will continue to loom large in historical writing.’24 while international scholarship has increasingly engaged with these issues of the politics of national history, there is little research on how this contested public memory operates privately. to what extent do these debates seep into private consciousnesses, conversations and identities? do the history wars exist beyond the headlines? a c a s e f o r o r a l h i s t o r i o g r a p h y to gauge australian history’s relevance beyond the headlines we simply need to ask. to that end, the second part of this paper hinges on this question: if the history wars are fought over the mainstream, what does the mainstream really think? (i for one find it troubling that the history wars’ collective rhetoric fails to include the very people it fights over.) this venture into everyday attitudes to australian history is based on a research project called whose australia? popular understandings of the nation.25 until recently, i had always considered this to be an oral history project, based as it is on interviews with people from around australia about the nation’s history. but i think its method could more accurately be termed oral historiography, for the way it examines the impact of public historical debate on ordinary australians; this project does not investigate individual’s perspectives on what happened, but on the discipline of history. my own scholarly desire to get in touch with the ordinary is hardly new. i’m thinking particularly here of judith brett and anthony moran’s excellent long-term qualitative study, ordinary people’s politics, which traced the political beliefs and engagement of several australians over many years.26 paula hamilton and paul ashton’s australians and the past project has also been an influential model for this study. their interviews with hundreds of people compiled for the first time a sense of everyday historical consciousness from around australia.27 public history review | clark 68 so what is oral historiography? i have found it used only once in any widely cited work – by david henige, in his survey of the varied practices of oral history.28 for the purposes of this research, however, i use the term as a method of analysis that employs techniques of oral history, focus group work and qualitative research to examine how different historical views are understood in the community. it asks how people engage with different historical readings (historiography) day to day. oral historiography reflects my interest in concepts of historical understanding and historical literacy, as well as a desire to investigate historiography beyond the conventional sphere of public debate. rather than canvassing questions about people’s political engagement or historical interest, this research considers their intersection: how do people engage with australian history in the context of the very polarising debates over the past? the whose australia? project aims to populate these public and political discussions about national history with the voices of ordinary people from around the country. six communities have been chosen to conduct this qualitative study (the suburbs of marrickville and mosman in sydney, st albans in outer western melbourne, rockhampton in central queensland, bega in southern new south wales and derby in western australia’s kimberley). both individuals and focus groups will be interviewed for the project, and on the whole, they will be approached through community organisations such as seniors’ centres, education institutions such as universities and tafes, as well as migrant resource centres, youth groups and so on. this approach has its limitations, of course – the major one being how to get marginal and disenfranchised voices to take part in a project that uses community groups to contact potential respondents. since the aim is to visit people in their own communities and record their conversations about australian history, however, approaching community organisations seems to be a logical way to get an entrance into these conversations.29 to date, the project has interviewed forty people, individually and in groups, in the two communities of st albans and rockhampton – and the second part of this paper provides some initial thoughts and interim findings on those visits. as the national curriculum and national apology were generating considerable debate in the media and in politics, i began asking people about their thoughts on australian history. they offer some public history review | clark 69 predictable and some surprising results: the participants were highly cynical of politicians and the media, and they felt alienated from more formal discourses of australian history – such as those textbook narratives they remembered from school.30 but they were also certain of how important australian history is to know. a group of students at victoria university reeled off horror stories about their formal experiences learning about australian history, yet insisted on its significance nonetheless: interviewer: i was interested that none of you found australian history particularly interesting – either because it’s been badly taught, or it’s too young, or it’s too boring. do you think that it’s important to know about it? manisha: oh i think it is important. silvie: oh, definitely. selena: very important. manisha: i think it’s only now that i’m starting to realise that, yeah, i do need to know more about australia, especially learning world history. and yeah, it is a small part of it – the history isn’t as large as other histories, really – but it is important, because that’s where we live and after our studies, that’s where we’re going to be working – you know, in australian communities. so we need to know where all these and things like that came from. the participants felt as if they had been exposed to an official australian narrative, but that narrative doesn’t really speak to their own experiences. this rejection of the realities of school history, while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of australian history at an abstract level, is certainly shared by countless schoolchildren around the country.31 yet this isn’t simply an issue about school history. when i asked jarred, a student teacher from rockhampton, how connected he felt to australia’s past, he answered with similarly considered reluctance: ‘um, i guess i have to be. i don’t feel it, but i have to be because i was born and raised here. so i am part of it, whether i like it or not. i haven’t got a choice, so yeah.’ in their interviews, respondents generally failed to connect at all with a formal national narrative – what we might call ‘history from above’. public history review | clark 70 such attitudes were also strongly represented in the australians and the past project, as well as the influential study it was modeled on in the us conducted by roy rosenzweig and david thelen. the authors of those studies noted that this reluctance to engage with that formal national story contrasted markedly with the recent boom in heritage studies, genealogy and family histories: people were actively interested in ‘the past’, but didn’t consider themselves particularly interested in ‘history’.32 these results have been mirrored in my own interviews, where participants talked about connecting to their family stories and local histories of place, in contrast to that lack of engagement with australian history i mentioned previously. less obviously, and more critically, respondents were deeply aware of history’s subjectivity. and it’s this awareness, this willingness to engage with history’s complexity, that has implications for the way australian history is spoken about and presented in those political debates over the past. of the forty people i have spoken with so far, for example, only two had actually heard of the history wars, but they overwhelmingly understood why history is so contentious. nastassia was working at a youth centre in st albans, and i asked her why people disagree about history: maybe everyone lived it differently, and comes out with different perspectives on how it happened and stuff. like there’s that bishop guy who believes the holocaust didn’t happen – i don’t know how! anyway, yeah, i suppose everyone just lives it differently. like, i suppose if you look at, like, the australian one with whether it was settlement or invasion, that would depend on which side of the boat you were on, or which side you associate with more closely or something. said ray, an elderly australian from st albans: well i could think of a number of glaring examples … i mean, we read about the second world war, where our australian fellows with the japanese who served – i know fellows who served on the burma railway, and they say ‘war is war’, you know. and they were sort of able to live with the fact that the japanese did what they thought was right, but it was very, very harsh. but you get the other side who find that the mention of japan almost is very, very devastating for them. and i can understand that too. public history review | clark 71 here, ray offers a considered, thoughtful explanation about historical disagreement, which draws on a degree of historical knowledge and experience that may not be typical. nevertheless, his appreciation of historical perspective was shared by many participants. when sylvie from victoria university was asked why she thought people disagreed about the past, she described how historical engagement is so culturally bound and subjective: ‘well you filter everything through your own culture’, she said. ‘so of course, wherever you’re from in the world, you have a strong identity to that particular culture. so the way that you interpret history has to be filtered through some type of cultural form.’ ‘there’s always going to be two sides to it, not just the one’, added tony, another student from victoria university. ‘so that’s why people will get so unhappy about the way, like, history’s being teached in schools or something.’ dorothy was a world (and few generations!) away from sylvie and tony in her group at the rockhampton country women’s association. but she framed her response in similar terms to explain how disagreements over the past develop: yeah, no, but i mean you’d have two people, and this person would tell their side of the story, that person would tell their side of the story. so you’ve got two versions, and then every time it’s repeated… looking at these quotes, it isn’t hard to discern an emergent historical comprehension and analysis. the language may not be sophisticated, but the general ideas point to an understanding of history that is quite complex – these respondents aren’t just talking about the past, they’re talking about history. such responses reveal quite a high level of what could be called a proto or popular ‘historical consciousness’, which includes an ability to critically engage with the past and understand different points of view.33 obviously, this doesn’t equate to a professional critical competency – that developed ‘historical literacy’ we might expect from our students and colleagues. and it certainly doesn’t mean that everyone around australia feels the same about the national story. but this broad capacity for historical empathy, critique and complex understanding evident in the interviews is significant nonetheless. while these are interim results at best, i’m nevertheless interested in how they point to what i would call a basic historical literacy public history review | clark 72 among ordinary australians, where the truth about the nation’s history isn’t at all settled among the public. this has interesting implications not only for history teaching, but those public debates about the subject: it overturns the myth that there is one historical version we should be teaching; and it challenges a core assumption of the history wars, which implies some sort of contest between competing versions that we need to choose from. these results also throw up some interesting questions about the required skills of historical understanding. there has been significant international research into the components of historical literacy or historical thinking. this work, advanced by history educationists internationally, has seen skills such as historical empathy and critical analysis of source material broken down into discrete stages of development.34 a recent report by the australian historical association also investigated the different levels of historical thinking among australian university students and confirmed that these skills are not simply intuitive, but must be built and reinforced over time.35 while it may be true that a refined historical thinking is not represented across the community, my results indicate a widespread capacity for critique and complex historical understanding that warrants attention. jarrod, a student science teacher from rockhampton, struggled to be interested in history at all simply because it cannot be pinned down: ‘well it’s hard to prove history, isn’t it? a lot of it is a theory put into words, i guess, because you’re not there. so you can only extrapolate.’ his frustration with history’s complexity may have been a turn-off personally, but it simultaneously revealed a relatively developed understanding about the difficult nature of the discipline. i cannot pretend that participants were untroubled by the very subjectivity they were describing. some within the one interview, even, recognised that historical interpretation is invariably partial, while also insisting on the importance of finding a ‘truth’ or ‘balance’ to overcome the rigid polarisation of the history wars. but their essential views of history’s subjectivity are a striking counterpoint to the shallow partisanism of the history wars. a group at the rockhampton historical society were even keen to point that out themselves: interviewer: how did people feel last year when prime minister rudd apologised to the stolen generations? public history review | clark 73 jan: i thought it was wonderful. james: long overdue. isabel: it was just symbolism as far as i’m concerned. it did nothing. margaret: i think so too, really. isabel: it made kevin rudd popular. james: it was a start though. it was a start. it’s got to start somewhere. isabel: it didn’t do anything. libby: i was very moved by it, moved by his speech, yes. much overdue. fay: i felt very pleased that someone did get up and say something. yes, very pleased. interviewer: it’s interesting that even within this group we have some disagreement over this. isabel: this is the ‘history wars!’ the problem with the way the history wars have played out is that its dualism simply cannot accommodate the reality that people disagree about the past every day, over any number of topics, and in any number of ways; moreover, their everyday conversations do not seem to register in public debate. the fact that only two out of forty had even heard of the history wars suggests it has been conducted by a select few, for a select few. in other words, although these debates are populist, they aren’t well populated by any means. ultimately, i am hopeful that this venture into oral historiography gives ordinary people a chance to contribute to national discussions about australian history; moreover, there’s a real potential in that effort to challenge some of the more simplistic and troubling assumptions of the history wars. endnotes 1 kevin rudd, ‘launch of first volume of tom keneally’s australians: origins to eureka’, national library, canberra, 27 august 2009 (online). available: http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/6152 (accessed 21 july 2010). public history review | clark 74 2 robert manne, ‘new teeth for aunty: reinvigorating the national broadcaster’, the monthly, december 2007-january 2008 (online). available: http://www.themonthly.com.au//monthly-essays-robertmanne-new-teeth-aunty-reinvigorating-national-broadcaster-749 (accessed 21 july 2010). 3 in the 2007 election debate, howard famously promised to ‘restore a proper narrative and a proper understanding of australian history’: john howard and kevin rudd, ‘transcript of the leaders debate, great hall, parliament house, canberra, 21 october 2007’ (online). available: http://www.alga.asn.au/election2007/pdf/p071023265.pdf (accessed 27 august 2010). 4 for an overview of that contest, see stuart macintyre and anna clark, the history wars, melbourne, melbourne university press, 2003; robert manne (ed), whitewash: on keith windschuttle’s fabrication of aboriginal history, melbourne, black inc., 2003. 5 ‘students to learn “balanced view of history”’, australian broadcasting corporation, 1 march 2010 (online). available: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/01/2833094.htm (accessed 19 july 2010). 6 kevin donnelly, ‘one-sided view of the past’, sunday herald sun, 30 may 2010, p92. 7 laurie nowell, ‘the new history wars’, sunday herald sun, 30 may 2010, p92. 8 ‘critics hit “distorted” history’, hobart mercury, 2 march 2010, p3. see also: ‘new curriculum “blots out british heritage”’, australian broadcasting corporation, 1 march 2010 (online). available: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/01/2833405.htm (accessed 19 july 2010). 9 martin crotty and andrew bonnell, ‘australia’s history under howard, 1996-2007’, the annals of the american academy of political and social science, no 617, 2008, p150. 10 alan m. sears, and emery j. hyslop-margison, ‘crisis as a vehicle for educational reform: the case of citizenship education’, journal of educational thought , vol 41, no 1, 2007, pp47–62; peter seixas, ‘chr forum: heavy baggage en route to winnipeg’, canadian historical review, vol 82, no 3, 2002, pp390–414. 11 for an overview of some these international historical debates as they have played out in the media and in politics, see: macintyre and clark, op cit; gary b., nash, charlotte crabtree and ross e. dunn, history on trial: culture wars and the teaching of the past, new york, alfred a. knopf, 1997; robert phillips, history teaching, nationhood and the state: a study in educational politics, london, cassell, 1998; linda symcox, whose history? the struggle for national standards in american classrooms, new york, teachers college press, 2002. 12 meredith griffiths, ‘rewriting history: curriculum overhaul “left-wing”’, australian broadcasting corporation, 15 may 2010 (online). available: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/14/2900219.htm (accessed 25 september 2010). see also: laurie nowell, ‘the new history wars’, sunday herald sun, 30 may 2010, p92. 13 ‘critics hit “distorted” history’, hobart mercury, 2 march 2010, p3. public history review | clark 75 14 justine ferrari, ‘historian slams school course’, the australian, 25 may 2010, p5. 15 anna patty, ‘battle looms over cuts to history education, sydney morning herald, 20 march 2010, p7. see also dan harrison, ‘fears new history course too ambitious’, sydney morning herald, 1 march 2010, p5, where the president of the history teachers’ association of australia, paul kiem, insisted on the importance of teacher training: ‘it is a subject where so much depends on the passion and expertise of the teacher. if a teacher is not a passionate expert, there is the danger that any teaching of a mandatory subject will be counter-productive.’ 16 questions of historical literacy and historical understanding have generated a significant and diverse literature over recent years. for two influential overviews, see: peter stearns, peter seixas and sam wineburg (eds), knowing, teaching and learning history: national and international perspectives, new york & london, new york university press, 2000; and peter seixas (ed), theorizing historical consciousness, toronto, toronto university press, 2006. 17 melissa nobles, the politics of official apologies, new york, cambridge university press, 2008. for negative public reaction to the apology, see: paul bibby, ‘radio callers outraged: i’m disgusted, says one’, the sydney morning herald, 14 february 2008, p5; michael sherman, ‘letter’, the advertiser, 4 february 2008, p21; misha schubert, ‘liberal division grows on apology’, the age, 30 january 2008. 18 editorial, ‘look to the future for an australia day date’, the age, 27 january 2009. 19 janet albrechtsen, ‘dodson proves an ungracious winner’, the australian (blogs) 26 january 2009 (online). available: http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/thea ustralian/comments/dodson_proves_an_ungracious_winner/ (accessed 27 january 2009; my emphasis). 20 nick dyrenfurth, ‘john howard’s hegemony of values: the politics of “mateship” in the howard decade’, australian journal of political science, vol 42, no 2, 2007, p219. see, for example: rae wear, ‘permanent populism: the howard government 1996-2007’, australian journal of political science, vol 43, no 4, 2008, pp617-634; john warhurst, ‘the howard decade in australian government and politics’, australian journal of political science, vol 42, no 2, 2007, pp189-194. 21 mirca madianou, ‘shifting discourses: banal nationalism and cultural intimacy in greek television news and everyday life’, in richard mole (ed), discursive constructions of identity in european politics, hampshire, palgrave macmillan, 2007, p100. see also michael billig, banal nationalism, london, sage, 1995, p174: ‘“here”, “us” and “the” are so easy to overlook’, he asserted. ‘they are not words that grab attention, but they perform as important task in the business of flagging [the nation]’. 22 noel pearson, ‘open our hearts, and minds’, the australian, november 22, 1996; raymond gaita, ‘not right’, quadrant, january-february 1997, p46. 23 for discussion of carr’s historical enterprise, see: julie lewis, ‘carr calls for a return to educational basics’, sydney morning herald, 6 june 1994, p5; kate cameron and jennifer lawless, ‘securing their future: response from the history teachers’ association of nsw’, teaching history, vol 31, no 3, 1997, pp4-5; nadia jamal, ‘changes to history course fail to reassure public history review | clark 76 teachers’, sydney morning herald, 7 september 1998, p8. for a great introduction of the historical interchange between paul keating and john howard, see james curran, the power of speech: australian prime ministers defining the national image, melbourne, melbourne university press, 2004. 24 stefan berger, ‘introduction’, in stefan berger (ed), writing the nation: a global perspective, hampshire, new york, palgrave macmillan, 2007, p16. 25 this project has been funded as a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellowship at the university of technology, sydney. 26 judith brett and anthony moran, ordinary people’s politics, melbourne, pluto press, 2006. 27 paul ashton and paula hamilton, history at the crossroads: australians and the past, sydney, halstead press, 2010. see also: paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘at home with the past: background and initial findings from the national survey’, australian cultural history, no 22, 2003, pp5-30. 28 david henige, oral historiography, london, longman, 1982. 29 in 2003, 65 per cent of all australians over the age of 14 belonged to one or more community groups. see the community manifesto – valuing australia’s community groups, our community, melbourne, 2003, p7. 30 these results were also confirmed in the australians and the past study. see ashton and hamilton, history at the crossroads, ch5. 31 anna clark, history’s children: history wars in the classroom, new south, sydney, 2008. 32 roy rosenzweig and david thelen, the presence of the past: popular uses of history in american life, new york, columbia university press, 1998; ashton and hamilton, history at the crossroads, op cit; ashton and hamilton, ‘at home with the past’, op cit. 33 peter seixas, ‘what is historical consciousness’, in ruth sandwell (ed), to the past: history education, public memory, and citizenship in canada, toronto, university of toronto press, 2006, pp11–22. 34 there are several works into the skills of historical understanding. a few good ones are: linda s. levstik and keith barton, researching history education: theory, method and context, new york, routledge, 2008; tony and carmal young, making history: a guide for the teaching and learning of history in australian schools, canberra, department of education, science and training, 2003 (online). available: http://www.hyperhistory.org/images/assets/pdf/complete.pdf (accessed 19 january 2007); sam wineburg, historical thinking and other unnatural acts: charting the future of teaching the past, philadelphia, temple university press, 2001; peter seixas, ‘what is historical consciousness?’ in r. sandwell (ed.), op cit, pp11–22; peter seixas, ‘introduction’, in peter seixas (ed), theorizing historical consciousness, toronto, toronto university press, 2006, pp3–24; peter lee, and rosalyn ashby, ‘progression of historical understanding among students ages 7-14’, in peter stearns, peter seixas and sam wineburg (eds), knowing, teaching and learning history: national and international perspectives, new york and london, new york university press, 2000, pp199–222. 35 marnie hughes-warrington et al, ‘historical thinking in higher education: an altc discipline-based initiative’, australian learning and teaching council, 2009. conflicted heritage: values, visions and practices in the management and preservation of cultural and environmental heritage g.w. kearsley and m.c. middleton public history review, vol 13, 2006, pp23-34 he appreciation of cultural and natural heritage has a very long history1 but it has risen to major significance in recent decades, both in daily lives and in an increasingly important cultural tourism.2 traditional styles and perspectives in heritage identification, preservation and management have given way to more recent trends. today, an increasing scale and even newer perspectives mean that the future focus of heritage studies is more likely to be on the consumers of heritage than simply on the product itself. the fragility, scarcity and vulnerability of heritage, in all its forms, mean that preservation and conservation will also be critical, managed as much through visitor management as through material conservation. the diversity of consumer demand, the increasing diversity and plurality of heritage identification, the proliferation of stories that are to be told (or are wished to be told) and the intrinsically perceptual nature of heritage, both cultural and natural, all mean that conflict, both overt and latent, is a fundamental component of heritage and its consumption. the nature of heritage heritage has been defined in many ways but hall’s3 simple definition works well, at least in tourism; heritage, he says, is what we want to keep and hand on to future generations. this can thus apply equally effectively to artefacts, customs, buildings and landscapes. thus, some heritage has been consciously recognised by past generations; we, ourselves, continue both to define and to create heritage. if heritage is what we want to keep, this raises an important question as to whom ‘we’ might be. there are, in fact, of course, many forms of ‘we’, defined by gender, demography, culture and many other things. individual and group perceptions, values and choices define heritage and because there are many groups defined as ‘we’ and ‘our’, and many ‘others’, and because power t public history review, vol 13, 2006 24 relationships and value systems at all levels may be incongruent or even mutually exclusive, conflict and choice are inevitable. we ourselves are the beneficiaries of choices and decisions made in the past. some of these are consciously framed within the concepts of heritage and stewardship that we recognise ourselves; others are more accidental or incidental. thus, we can see the relics of earlier civilisations consciously preserved, in the form of the great icons of material heritage, at stonehenge, the pyramids or in the great wall. of course, such monuments have not always been protected for all of their life, often their survival has lain in their sheer size and durability. many a castle and abbey was quarried for its ready made building stones, many a statue defaced with puritan zeal. in southern new zealand, memorial oaks were planted for those who never returned from the great war;4 only recently have the accompanying markers been restored and some missing trees replaced. as the nineteenth century advanced, it became common to see traditional agricultural landscapes preserved through the actions of private organizations such as the council for the preservation of rural england and later the national trust. later, governments became involved through planning regulations and through agencies such as english heritage or the qeii trust in new zealand. similarly, it was not until advancing technology and human dominance of the landscape made natural environments vulnerable was wilderness venerated in poetry and painting,5 leading eventually to the national park movement, in which new zealand was an early pioneer.6 the choice of where parks should be located (in the ‘waste’ land unsuitable for agriculture and forestry) determined much of what came to be seen as natural heritage. thus, in new zealand, the early parks were established to protect bush and mountains; to this day, native grasslands and wetlands remain under-represented. in england, the parks were not established until nearly a century later than in new zealand, the absence of real wilderness meant that they preserved very different, human modified landscapes. we are also the inheritors of buildings and landscapes that have survived by chance and that might or might not have had significance for past generations. in england, the robust ridges and furrows of saxon cultivation remain throughout much of the north and midlands, despite the imposition of enclosure and dramatic landscape change. similarly, the earthworks and street patterns of lost villages are readily visible from the air or in the rays of low angle sunlight. in new zealand, the central otago goldfields sites have been assembled into a heritage park and protected, despite them being no more than industrial scarring when created. indeed, it is incongruous to note that the department of conservation and the regional council that afford them protection would never allow a modern operation to leave unrestored sites on such a scale. much vernacular architecture and many historic street patterns remain as heritage precincts not so much through preservation as by chance. while london’s architects planned great avenues and piazzas after the great fire, the public history review, vol 13, 2006 25 citizens of the city simply replaced their burned buildings in stone upon their old sites and the mediaeval street pattern was preserved.7 dunedin and oamaru have been the beneficiaries of the absence of development pressures and exciting heritage architecture has remained to be recognised through the absence of competing land uses and structures and the lack of a commercial imperative, later to be discovered in tourism. the geographer h.c. darby saw the modern landscape as a palimpsest, a much used parchment on which the ‘writing’ of past eras could be faintly discerned or else had been retained. celtic fields, roman roads and ancient hedgerows were the inerasable writing of the past over which was scrawled industrial and modern development, but which still can be seen and recognised as heritage landscape. yi-fu tuan8 saw the landscape as ‘a repository of human striving’ it is also a repository of human conflict, both in representation and in choice. the values of heritage heritage is said to confer many values, including scientific value and artistic merit. for those who share a common heritage there is a sense of belonging and a structured self-identity; heritage provides the security of known roots and a shared past. heritage can be an important component of national identity as well.9 through tourism, heritage provides visitor revenue. some of this is derived from admissions, ticket sales and the like, but the vastly greater return comes from accommodation, food and drink, transportation and retail sales. heritage sites, sights and ways of life are increasingly the icons around which marketing campaigns and urban, regional and national ‘brands’ are structured.10 much economic development, whether it be urban or rural, has been based upon heritage tourism; the tourist industry has proved to be one of the few effective counters to the adverse economic re-structuring consequent upon globalisation. dunedin itself provides a clear example of how heritage tourism can be used as the catalyst for economic reform.11 swarbrooke12 identified a number of reasons for the recent growth of heritage tourism; by implication, these highlight the essential economic and nonmarket values of tourism. in market terms, there are higher levels of education and experience, longer active retirements and increased retirement income, together with a massive increase in the frequency of ‘gap’ years and the rise of short break holidays. motivations for heritage tourism are said to include the search for roots, stability and identity, the desire to learn, a search for authenticity in an increasingly commodified world and the perceived high status of cultural experiences. on the supply side, recent years have seen a massive increase in product and promotion, attendant upon a government focus on cultural and heritage identity. in many of the settler societies of the new world, there has been a post-colonial renaissance of indigenous culture, linked closely with heritage tourism; maori, australian aboriginals and the first nations are all examples of public history review, vol 13, 2006 26 this. in europe, the re-emergence of national identity has been accompanied by a focus on culture and heritage. conflict and costs apart from the undoubted benefits, both economic and more intangible, that heritage has generated, often realised through tourism, there are also costs to be borne. heritage maintenance and management incur costs directly and indirectly and in many ways. direct costs involve the conservation and maintenance of sites, interpretation and visitor management, through staffing and through the acquisition of new sites as perceptions of heritage change and new trends in visitor product are realised. similarly, indirect costs are incurred through opportunity cost as alternative uses are foregone, or through the increased cost to visitors and other users of heritage, as new uses and perspectives are found. inevitably, then, when choices have to be made, conflict is always inherent. examples include the conflict between competing visitor demands, as when a tract of national park has the potential to be strictly reserved as wilderness for an elite minority to enjoy, or to be protected from high use damage through the installation of boardwalks, high quality tracks and the like, measures which provide a ‘wilderness’ experience for a large market, but destroy it for others. in the same way, tracks may be open to mountain bikers and waterways open to jet skis or jet boats with all of the conflict that that implies. increasingly, both natural and built heritage are threatened by development options, as when wild rivers are seen as options for irrigation and hydro-power13 or historic buildings cleared under commercial imperatives. the pressures of agricultural change and tourist development have huge consequences for heritage landscapes of natural environments or traditional farming. thus, in new zealand, both popular resort areas, such as the wakatipu basin, and traditional country towns are threatened by development pressures; traditional hedgerows and stone walls and field patterns in europe have given way to large scale agri-business practices. often, conflict among user groups in more traditional settings is exacerbated by the increasing costs and expanding focus of product trends, some of which were identified by swarbrooke14 as including open air museums on a substantial scale and themed heritage centres, with significant entry fees. conflict, interpretation and authenticity heritage values are grounded in the interpretation that is offered, whether on-site or in the broader historic perspectives of a society or group. as has been noted, cultural heritage is effectively a story, but the question of whose story it might be remains of paramount importance. for every story there are many, sometimes conflicting, tellers. some stories, such as those of inarticulate or exploited classes and those of indigenous or colonised peoples have only recently come to be heard, certainly in their own words. some stories now will always be silent. so, just as the victors are said to write history, so too do they define and depict heritage as well. accordingly, different markets will see heritage products in very public history review, vol 13, 2006 27 different lights, especially those relating to war and social conflict, as so many heritage sites do. time may well heal many wounds, but it was nonetheless deemed expedient to label the opposing forces in the 2005 bicentennial of trafalgar as the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ flotillas. clearly, then, sites such as the world war i trenches, the normandy d day beaches, the burma railroad and the atomic memorials at hiroshima will have very different imagery and associations for different groups. in the same way, memorials that represent colonial history, such as the tree at one tree hill, auckland or victoria’s statue in queen’s gardens, dunedin, may be seen as current symbols of oppression by some, fit only to be defaced or destroyed. sometimes, it is questioned whether or not different cultural values, and especially minority cultural values, really exist, or whether they are assumed or exaggerated for political advantage and economic gain, an issue that is addressed below in the context of new zealand. not only are there conflicts of symbolism and meaning, but also there is an ongoing tension between presentations of heritage and expectations of authenticity. thus, an original turner in the dunedin art gallery or an original hotere in the carey’s bay hotel, port chalmers, are equally authentic, although the former may be geographically, if not culturally, far from its original provenance. indeed, the authenticity of heritage items, whether they be the elgin marbles or tattooed heads, remote from their cultural context, raises many ethical and aesthetic questions. much heritage is modified while retaining some authenticity. many of the historic re-creations in new zealand, such as the well-known shanty town and old cromwell and the more humble historic museums such as the taieri historical village near dunedin, balance authentic structures with their placement in an entirely different location and context, as old buildings are relocated and reconstructed for a variety of reasons. some heritage items are entirely inauthentic. some, such as the haggis ceremony in dunedin, are unashamedly invented and do not purport to be anything other than a tourist entertainment; others, such as some souvenirs, are presented with an implication of authenticity when in fact serious issues of intellectual and cultural property exist. the use of maori motifs in cheap souvenirs – taiwanese made tikis or chinese made ‘maori’ patterned tea-towels – are but one local example of a global problem. the whole field of commodification and trivialisation versus authenticity in situ is replete with conceptual conflict of a fundamental nature. the portrayal and expectations of wildlife present a similar range of challenges. old style zoos are giving way to much more authentic habitats, but even in eco-tourism, where authenticity is the sine qua non, swimming with dolphins or the parades of penguins past veritable stadia, complete with floodlights, both in new zealand and australia, raise similar questions of the conflict between staged heritage and authenticity. certainly, when penguins, as at the curio bay petrified forest, come ashore at natural sites, potential conflict between visitors and wildlife is an ongoing issue. some visitors keep their distance, but many encroach upon the birds, seeking the perfect penguin picture. public history review, vol 13, 2006 28 conflict, preservation and the identity of heritage even the need for conservation and restoration raises issues of conflict. if landscapes are evolving palimpsests, it could be asked at what point the process of evolution should be frozen, through permanent conservation. how far should the fossilisation of landscape change be effected through processes of restoration? an example of these conflicts lies in the various goldfields sites of southern new zealand. on the west coast the rapid regeneration of rain forest has meant that many nineteenth century sites have become all but lost through natural processes. in the drier climate of central otago, many sites are preserved in the otago goldfields park. even here, however, wilding pines and sweet briar are over-running former sluicing sites and energetic efforts are required to retain the original barren landscapes of goldfields sluicing, the incongruity of preserving such sites has been mentioned above. further conflicts arise over the meaning and purpose of heritage. few would argue that stonehenge or waitangi are heritage sites, but, increasingly, popular entertainment and the trivial have been awarded heritage status. thus, gracelands, penny lane and coronation street have joined dicken’s house and anne hathaway’s cottage; perhaps never-never land may one day join them. locally, heritage status of sorts has been bestowed upon the remarkably kitsch paua house at bluff. then, too, there is the growing conflict between accurate portrayal and popular nostalgia with a continuing tension between scholarly interpretation and a more popularly palatable sense of comfort and entertainment.15 so, for example, interpretations of past industrial eras are far more likely to show the pub, shops, fairground and school than the workhouse fever hospital or debtors’ prison. similarly, our images of the mediaeval are likely to revolve more around knights, jesters and banquets than around poverty, leprosy and the black death. there is nothing wrong with such portrayals, but the difference between past reality and romantic imagery, heritage and entertainment, is often hard to maintain. tourism and heritage in southern new zealand in southern new zealand, as in so many other places, the conflicts imposed by commercial imperatives, and by tourism in particular, are paramount in ongoing heritage management.16 tourism, in particular, both defends and destroys heritage. as has been noted above, tourist values and revenue protect heritage through nature conservation and eco-tourism as in the protection of albatross and yellow-eyed penguin. tourism provides an alternative to undesirable extractive practices as with the cessation of native forest logging on the west coast. heritage landscapes, both old and new, are protected by their status and value as tourism resources. in the same way, tourism drives the rehabilitation and protection of heritage buildings and townscapes in dunedin, oamaru and many smaller places such as lawrence and ranfurly.17 public history review, vol 13, 2006 29 in the same way, though, tourism and its consequences both compromise and destroy. essential as well as unnecessary infrastructure damage landscapes and experiences. ski-field access roads scar mountain-sides; board walks and bridges reduce wilderness experiences for some. the very popularity of tourism and the numbers it generates lead to changed experiences, crowding and displacement. inappropriate resort development and expansion are instrumental in creating dramatic landscape change. this is happening in major resorts, such as queenstown and wanaka, and in smaller places, such as luggate and hawea, where large sub-divisions are driven by displacement from the larger centres. two examples of how differing perceptions and cultural values are now presented; these demonstrate how apparent conflict arises and how the recognition of difference can lead to better management and, ultimately, heritage conservation and enhancement. perceptions of crowding and of wilderness the concept of wilderness and natural heritage is itself a cultural construct.18 it used to be thought that the main impacts of tourism would be damage to the physical and ecological environments, and, certainly, that is not inconsiderable, but today it is realised that social impacts and crowding, in particular, are the main sources of dissatisfaction and conflict. crowding is the negative perception of the numbers of groups or individuals in a particular setting and, as a perceptual construct, degrees of crowding relate the expectations and perceptions of the individual; crowding is not a measure of density, although, of course, it reflects this. perceived crowding may lead to various avoidance behaviours, displacement and other mitigating strategies, and is often used as an indicator of social carrying capacities having been breached. crowding may potentially be found in all tourism sites and to an extent it is a new zealand wide phenomenon, but at present it is largely confined to a series of popular sites and facilities, notably tramping huts. it is also largely a seasonal phenomenon, but not entirely so.19 higham20 measured crowding throughout south island tramping tracks and kearsley21 undertook a national survey of the backcountry and subsequently measured crowding and displacement in front country settings, where similar patterns are emerging.22 approximately half of the overall samples felt that they had experienced more people than expected on their trip, and this was true for all sub-groups. in the backcountry in general, while thirty per cent overall felt quite uncrowded, some sixteen per cent reported moderate to extreme crowding. this perception is held by both domestic and overseas visitors, with the latter dominating the most popular tracks. in general terms, about a fifth of all respondents expected to see less people than they actually did and thirty-four percent would certainly have preferred to see fewer. crowding has serious implications for satisfaction. twenty-two per cent of kearsley et al’s23 sample said that crowding had affected their enjoyment, and some two thirds of those said that it had done so moderately to extremely. many public history review, vol 13, 2006 30 of those interviewed sought wilderness and wilderness experiences, which they tend to associate with the national parks environment. sixty-nine per cent of the sample expected to encounter wilderness conditions, and most of those did in fact find them. of the minority who did not, most said it was because tracks were too well formed, signed and hardened and a quarter, mainly on the great walks, believed that overnight huts were too comfortable and even luxurious. over a third of each group cited crowding as detracting from wilderness values. boat and aircraft noise were also mentioned by significant numbers.24 many attempts have been made overseas to explore the dimensions of the wilderness image.25 the notion that wilderness could be perceived and encountered differentially by various people in environments that were more or less developed has been taken further. in various studies, wilderness users, the general public or international visitor users of the conservation estate were asked to state the extent to which they accepted various facilities (huts, tracks and bridges), characteristics (remoteness and solitude) or developments (exotic forests and mining) in wilderness areas. kliskey and kearsley26 show how responses to such a question may be used to group people into discrete purism classes and to plot the extent to which specific environments provide wilderness for various groups. in these studies, it appears that the highly purist required a pristine ecological wilderness, but that the majority could find wilderness values in places that had been part developed. visitors have varying perceptions of wilderness and one single definition does not accurately portray the extent of wilderness as everyone regards it. an approach to understanding the spatial extent of such varying wildernesses can be made through gis based wilderness image mapping. wilderness perception maps are produced by ‘buffering’ or excluding those areas of a specific environment that do not accord with a particular group’s view of wilderness.27 thus, areas of mining would be excluded from non-purist wilderness areas and vehicular access and hydro sites would be further excluded to identify neutralists’ wilderness, so that the more purist the perception, the less extensive the wilderness. such mapping has been carried out for a substantial part of the southwest of the south island, especially northwest nelson, the fiordland and mount aspiring regions and adjacent areas. this suggests that the saturation of pristine wilderness might be averted, as many found satisfaction in areas unacceptable to the purist minority. in these places, natural heritage could be sustained as an acceptable form of wilderness for the majority by providing hardened tracks, boardwalks, huts and other facilities. this approach is a significant advance upon the notion that there is one wilderness for all people and that wilderness requirements can be accommodated only in the pristine wildernesses that legislation defines. in the period of its existence, the department of conservation has allowed many structures to be run down and has removed many more, partly to facilitate the promotion of wilderness. while it is necessary to restrict the extent of infrastructure to that which can be adequately maintained, it is false logic to public history review, vol 13, 2006 31 assume that this adds to the wilderness resource, since, for many people, wilderness is compatible with the presence of such structures. for many, they are necessary for wilderness to be enjoyed. conflicting cultural values the images that visitors have of environments can be extended beyond the study of wilderness. as noted above, there is often a perception that differing cultural values may be used for political positioning or economic gain. this is certainly the case in new zealand, where some suspect that such might be the motivations for the assertion of a different attitude towards the natural world. kearsley, coughlan and ritchie28 examined the ways in which international visitors and domestic holidaymakers perceive both natural and developed environments, using multidimensional scaling (mds). an increasing number of tourism researchers have used mds procedures in examining destination image and positioning, although it was first used to indicate the differences and similarities between recreational activities.29 fodness30 examined consumer perceptions of florida tourist attractions, while cossens31 and driscoll32 examined the position held by new zealanders of new zealand, relative to other international tourist destinations. in the study described here, a wide range of popular and less well-known natural and developed areas were used to examine both domestic and international perceptions. forty sites were analysed, ranging from walking tracks, such as the routeburn, to commercial sites such as whakarewarewa. the aim of the mds procedure was to identify the dimensions along which people differentiated destinations and then to show how individual places relate to those dimensions. it was interesting to note that were no great differences in perception between new zealand residents and overseas visitors, neither for natural environments nor for resorts and other built environments. in fact, quite separate groups of people differentiated among places using very similar criteria. in other words, different markets appeared, on the surface, not to use different criteria in making judgements about destinations; most people seemed to see most places in much the same sort of way. specifically maori perceptions of the environment were later examined), also through the technique of multi-dimensional scaling and using the same data set, but isolating out maori from the wider domestic new zealand population. when maori and pakeha (non-maori new zealanders) evaluate the developed world of resorts and facilities they do so in similar ways; there is clearly no separate maori world view in this context, so that for developed places, at least, there is a common set of images that is not affected by ethnicity. this is not the case for the natural world. maori construct their principal images around recreation, holidays and food gathering whereas non-maori perceive the natural world primarily in terms of wilderness, challenge and accessibility and set this against commercialisation, seasonality and family orientation. secondary maori perceptions relate to heritage and a maori focus, seasonality and degrees of commercialisation. the secondary perceptions of non-maori emphasise many of public history review, vol 13, 2006 32 the things that maori select in their first dimension, namely the suitability of an environment for families and holidays. nowhere do maori focus on wilderness, challenge, peace or solitude. in their intellectual environment, the coastline, the periphery of wilderness and the front country are significant for use and recreation, but the deep backcountry seems separate, a notion consistent with the concept of waahi tapu (sacred places). the mountains are venerated as tupuni (ancestors) and as taonga (treasures), to be respected but not necessarily physically used. in accordance with this, most wilderness surveys in new zealand show a relative absence of maori in the back country.33 conservation planning in new zealand is currently based on the need for modelling, monitoring and managing physical impacts upon the environment, while a more recent, growing body of work relates to social impact assessment, through crowding, displacement and the like. maori have a formal consultative status in the preparation ofplans and strategies, as well as a significant role in conservation boards but, in conservation planning, it is apparent that a deeper appreciation of cultural values is required as well. the work outlined above has demonstrated that a different maori wilderness ethic exists and that it can be revealed by accurate scientific analysis as well as by the more traditional qualitative approaches. conclusion the focus of heritage research and management is still focused on the product and its presentation; the focus on visitors is still largely traditional, involving demographics, expectations and market segmentations of a traditional and somewhat routine kind. heritage, though, is fundamentally a personal experience, about the meaning of place and of self in place, so that emotions and beliefs are as important as aggregate statistics, essential though those are. the huge variety of cultures, as providers and consumers of heritage, and the infinite variability of personal perceptions mean that competition, conflict, incompatibility and tension underlie, and will increasingly underlie, the presentation of heritage, especially as a tourism product of increasing significance. inevitably, then, it is here that much future research must be focused, both for the sake of heritage itself and the industries and communities that rely on it. endnotes 1 m. feifer, going places: the ways of the tourist from imperial rome to the present day, macmillan, 1985. 2 c.m. hall and g.w. kearsley, tourism in new zealand: an introduction, oxford university press, auckland, 2001. 3 c.m. hall and s. mcarthur, heritage management in new zealand and australia: visitor management, interpretation, and marketing, oxford university press, auckland, 1993. 4 e. pawson, ‘the memorial oaks of north otago: a commemorative landscape’, in g.w. kearsley and b.b. fitzharris, glimpses of a gaian world; essays on geography and senses of place, in honour of professor peter holland, school of social science, university of otago, dunedin, 2004, pp115-132. 5 c.j. glacken, traces on the rhodian shore, university of california press, berkeley and los angeles, 1967; r. williams, the country and the city, oxford university press, london, 1973. 6 hall and kearsley, op cit. public history review, vol 13, 2006 33 7 h. carter, an introduction to urban historical geography, edward arnold, london,1983. 8 y-f tuan, topophilia, prentice hall, englewood cliffs, n.j., 1974. 9 hall and mcarthur, op cit. 10 g.w. kearsley, s. russell and r. mitchell, ‘the contribution of front country tourist recreation towards increased crowding and dissatisfaction in new zealand’s natural environments’, in m.r. robinson, p. long, n. evans, s. sharpley and j. swarbrooke, reflections on international tourism: motivations, behaviour and tourist types, business education publishers ltd, sunderland, 2000, pp243-252. 11 g.w. kearsley, ‘public acceptance of heritage tourism as an instrument of urban restructuring: the case of dunedin’, in c.m. hall, j.j. jenkins and g.w. kearsley (eds), tourism planning and policy in australia and new zealand: issues, cases and practice, irwin, sydney, 1997. 12 j. swarbrooke, ‘towards a sustainable future for cultural tourism: a european perspective’, in m. robinson, n. evans and p. callaghan (eds), tourism and cultural change, university of northumbria press, newcastle,1996, pp227-256. 13 g.w. kearsley, ‘tourism and resource development conflicts on the kawarau and shotover rivers’, geojournal, vol 29, no 3, 1992, pp263-270; p.a. memon and g.w. kearsley, ‘resource based urban development in the peripheral regions of new zealand’, in g.w. kearsley and fitzharris, b.b. southern landscapes: essays in honour of bill brockie and ray hargreaves, dunedin, 1990, pp329-346; b.b. fitzharris, b.b. and g.w. kearsley, ‘recreational planning and hydro development in the waitaki valley: some lessons for the clutha’, proceedings, ixth new zealand geographical society conference, university of otago, dunedin, 1978, pp80-84. 14 swarbrooke, op cit. 15 ibid. 16 g.w. kearsley, ‘heritage management : a regional approach’, in c.m. hall and s. mcarthur (eds), heritage management in new zealand and australia: visitor management, interpretation and marketing, oxford university press, auckland, 1993, pp197-208. 17 g.w. kearsley, ‘rural tourism in otago and southland, new zealand’, in r. butler and c.m. hall, tourism and recreation in rural areas, john wiley and sons, chichester, 1998, pp81-96. 18 glacken, op cit. 19 j.e.s. higham and g.w. kearsley, ‘wilderness perception and its implications for the management of the impacts of international tourism on natural areas in new zealand’, in tourism down-under: a tourism research conference, 6-9 december, 1994, department of management systems, massey university, palmerston north, 1994, pp505-529. 20 j.e.s. higham, ‘wilderness perceptions of international visitors to new zealand: the perceptual approach to the management of international tourists visiting wilderness areas within new zealand’s conservation estate, unpublished phd thesis, university of otago, dunedin, 1996. 21 g.w. kearsley, d.p. coughlan, j.e.s. higham, e.c higham and m.a. thyne, impacts of tourist use on the new zealand backcountry, research paper no1, centre for tourism, university of otago, dunedin, 1998. 22 kearsley, russell and mitchell, op cit. 23 ibid. 24 g.w. kearsley, ‘tourist numbers and wilderness perception in the south island of new zealand’, in kearsley and fitzharris, glimpses of a gaian world, pp43-254. 25 r.c. lucas, ‘wilderness perception and use: the example of the boundary waters canoe area’, natural resources journal, vol 3, 1964, pp394-411; j.c. hendee, w.r. catton, l.d. marlow and c.f. brackman, ‘wilderness users in the pacific northwest: their characteristics, values and management preferences’, usda forest service research paper pnw-61, portland, oregon 1968; g.h. stankey, the perception of wilderness recreation carrying capacity: a geographic study in natural resource management, phd thesis, michigan state university, east lansing, michigan, 1971; t.a. heberlein, ‘social psychological assumptions of user attitude surveys: the case of the wildernism scale’, journal of leisure research, vol 5, no 3, 1973, pp18-33; j.t. beaulieu, defining the components of the environmental image for use as a predictor of decision to participate, phd thesis, utah state university, logan, utah, 1984. 26 a.d. kliskey and g.w. kearsley, ‘mapping multiple perceptions of wilderness in north west nelson, new zealand: a geographic information systems approach’, applied geography, vol 13, 1993, pp203223. 27 a.d. kliskey, ‘wilderness perception mapping: a geographic information systems approach to the application of wilderness perceptions to protected areas management in new zealand’, phd thesis, university of otago, dunedin, 1992. 28 g.w. kearsley, d.p coughlan and b.w. ritchie, ‘images of new zealand holiday destinations: an international and domestic perspective’, research paper number 2, centre for tourism, university of otago, dunedin, 1998; g.w. kearsley, d.p. coughlan and b.w. ritchie, ‘images of new zealand natural areas: an international and domestic perspective’, research paper number 3, centre for tourism, university of otago, dunedin, 1998. 29 j.r.b. ritchie, ‘on the derivation of leisure activity types: a perceptual mapping approach’, journal of leisure research, vol 7, 1975, pp128-140. 30 d. fodness, ‘consumer perceptions of tourist attractions’, journal of travel research, spring, 1990, pp3-9. 31 j. cossens, positioning a tourist destination: queenstown: a branded destination?, masters thesis, university of otago, dunedin, 1989. public history review, vol 13, 2006 34 32 a. driscoll, destination new zealand's position: a multidimensional scaling approach, masters thesis, university of otago, dunedin, 1990. 33 kearsley, coughlan, higham, higham and thyne, op cit; higham, op cit. docduthie public history review vol 18 (2011): 12–25 © utsepress and the author the british museum: an imperial museum in a post-imperial world emily duthie consciously or subconsciously, archaeological interpretation and the public presentation of archaeological monuments are used to support the prestige or power of modern nation-states. neil asher silberman, ‘nationalism and archaeology’ he british museum was founded in 1753 as one of the first national, public and secular museum in the world. in britain, it is the largest and most prominent museum preserving and documenting classical antiquities. however, the acquisition of these ancient artifacts is highly contentious. increasingly demands for the repatriation of key objects in the museum’s collection have appeared in the public arena. countries including greece, egypt and nigeria maintain that antiquities belong to the particular nations in which they t public history review | duthie 13 were found and demand the return of ancient artifacts to national jurisdiction. the british museum has rejected most demands for repatriation. identifying itself as a ‘universal museum’,1 it maintains that it is a global institution with the right to exhibit artifacts from diverse cultures. in this article, i examine the museum in the context of the loss of british imperial power in a now largely post-colonial world. i argue that the museum remains a trope of empire: that it is still an essentially imperialist institution resistant to attempts to dismantle a dominant british culture of the past. in 1753, sir hans sloane bequeathed the british museum’s founding collection to the nation. a physician and naturalist, sloane had amassed a vast collection of ‘plants, fossils, minerals, zoological, anatomical and pathological specimens, antiquities and artificial curiosities, prints, drawings and coins, books and manuscripts.’2 his private collection at his country mansion in chelsea received a number of notable visitors, including handel and the prince and princess of wales. the prince emphasised the importance of this ‘treasure house’ and ‘expressed the great pleasure it gave him to see so magnificent a collection in england, esteeming it as an ornament to the nation; and how much it must conduce to the benefit of learning and how great an honour will redound to britain to have it established for public use to the latest posterity.’3 his remark was prescient. when sloane died, he left his collection of 79 575 objects to the nation. on 7 june 1753, king george ii gave his formal assent to the act of parliament that established the british museum. two other collections were also brought under the care of the museum at this time: the cottonian library of books assembled by sir robert cotton and the harleian collection of manuscripts from the earls of oxford. these were joined in 1757 with the royal library.4 the collection was originally held in montagu house, a converted seventeenth-century mansion. the british museum’s present building, designed in the greek revival style by sir robert smirke, was built on the site of montagu house between 1823 and 1852.5 the british museum’s specialised interest in classical antiquities began as early as 1772 when the museum acquired a collection of greek vases belonging to sir william hamilton.6 other notable objects acquired included the first ancient egyptian mummy donated to the museum in 1756 as well as a number of ethnographic artifacts given to the museum after captain cook’s three pacific voyages (1767-70). the rosetta stone was acquired in 1802 and the townley collection of classical sculpture, including the discobolosa statue and the bust of a young woman at clytiea was accessioned in 1805.7 the importance of ancient artifacts was public history review | duthie 14 officially recognised when the department of antiquities was founded in 1807.8 in a brochure for the public, under the rubric, ‘don’t miss’, the museum currently promotes the following objects: the king of ife, the rosetta stone, the parthenon sculptures, the assyrian lion hunt reliefs, mummies, oxus treasure, the royal game of ur, lewis chessmen and samurai armour. the elgin marbles, the rosetta stone and the benin bronzes are its most famous objects.9 in 1860, the department of antiquities was divided into three new departments that reflected the priorities of the collection: greek and roman antiquities, coins and medals and oriental antiquities.10 so preoccupied was the museum with ancient artifacts that it was not until the appointment of the curator, augustus franks, in 1851 that the museum began for the first time to collect british and european medieval antiquities.11 promoting itself as a ‘universal collection’, the museum was now accumulating both western and non-western objects. in a british museum publication, the story of the british museum, marjorie caygill, the assistant keeper at the museum, declares that at the height of empire in the nineteenth century it was possible for the inquisitive visitor to bloomsbury to see the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in which a section of an old palace near moscow was displayed next to earthenware from southern america, figures of german miners, chinese and ‘other shoes’; where, before modern principles of classification imposed an element of uniformity… chinese bows and arrows and snow shoes were thought to be fit companions for king william and queen mary cut in walnut shells and a landscape painted on a spider’s web, not to mention the jaw and other parts of an unknown animal from maastricht, stones from the bladders of horses and hairballs from the stomachs of cows.12 undoubtedly, caygill’s remark is typical of the modern british museum’s depiction of itself as an enlightened institution and ‘an ordered representation of the world in miniature.’13 as a custodian of cultural objects, the museum’s professed aims appear to be highly altruistic. on its official website, it is called a ‘museum of the world, for the world’14 and the museum’s present director, neil mcgregor, declares that it is for ‘all mankind.’15 its collections also include representative examples of the world’s artistic legacy prompting james cuno, the director of the art institute of public history review | duthie 15 chicago, to argue that ‘encyclopaedic museums’ like the british museum effectively direct attention to distant cultures and enhance historical knowledge.16 in the contemporary british press, mcgregor has been widely credited with redefining the role of the british museum in public life. he emphasises the importance of an international community of enquiry, maintaining that his museum is ‘not a eurocentric one, and the public perception is not overwhelmingly eurocentric… we have a way of thinking about the whole world.’17 he notes that from the museum’s beginnings ‘the objects were to be available free of charge to all “studious and curious persons” and were stated explicitly to be for foreigners as well as natives.’18 however, such statements quietly elide the relevance and importance of colonial history in the creation and development of the british museum. imperialism is part of the bloomsbury story. ostensibly, mcgregor has introduced an ‘egalitarian ethos’ to the museum. the sunday times observed in 2007 that the museum has evolved from being an ‘imperial war chest’ to a ‘global resource.’19 however, such claims are historically weak and are open to challenge. in the nineteenth century, the museum was a powerful symbol of empire and the representations of the world that it offered were deeply imbued with the culture of british imperialism. as barringer and flynn observe, it was an ‘imperial archive’ and ‘the most spectacular repository of the material culture of empire.’20 the meaning of an object is inflected and even re-invented by the context in which it is displayed. thus, the removal of objects by the british museum from a ‘colonial periphery’ to an ‘imperial centre’ changed the ways in which they were interpreted.21 the movement of objects to the ‘centre’ symbolically enacted the idea that london was the heart of the empire. as a correspondent wrote of the british museum in 1837: ‘there is not a better sight in london; there are few places better worth seeing in the world.’22 more recently, tim barringer and tom flynn wrote: ‘the british museum could never be restricted to british things, for to do so would set a limit to the reach of british power, as well as to the gaze of the all-comprehending and autonomous subject.’23 this ideal is also made manifest in moncure conway’s book, travels in south kensington, which was written in 1882: ‘come’ said my friend, professor omnium, one clear morning, ‘let us take an excursion round the world’… ‘my dear friend’, said i, ‘it is among my dreams one day to visit india, china, japan, california, but at present you might as well ask me to go with you to the moon.’ ‘you misunderstand’, replied professor omnium. ‘i do not public history review | duthie 16 propose to leave london. we can never go round the world, except in a small, limited way, if we leave london… ten thousand people and a dozen governments have been at infinite pains and expense to bring the cream of the east and the west to your own doors.’24 museum building in britain in the nineteenth century was a direct consequence of war, colonialism and missionary expeditions, which returned with ‘exotic’ objects. in london, museums were built after successful colonial ventures with displays of empire and the hope that such displays, like the empire itself, would be a lasting achievement. a poem composed for the opening of london’s imperial institute vaunted the ‘empire of a thousand years.’25 many of the ancient treasures in the british museum were ‘acquired’ through aggressive and opportunistic looting and plundering and by the fraudulent ‘purchasing’ of objects. sir aurel stein’s removal of a whole library of ancient chinese documents from the dunhuang caves in china in 1907 is, in simon winchester’s words, ‘a grisly example of western perfidy.’26 for a paltry sum of £220, stein persuaded the monk, wang yuanlu, to sell the entire contents of the caves. he took at least twenty-four wagonloads of papers and thousands of ancient objects, comprising one of the richest finds in archaeological history – including the diamond sutra, the world’s earliest known printed book.27 the british punitive expedition against benin in 1897 is another typical case of imperial aggression that resulted in the plundering of art.28 the benin bronzes, a collection of more than a thousand brass plaques were seized by a british force from the royal palace of the kingdom of benin (now part of modern nigeria) and given to the british foreign office. around two hundred of these were given to the british museum. similarly, the acquisition of the parthenon marbles in athens was the result of opportunism. thomas bruce, the seventh earl of elgin, had originally intended only to take back to britain drawings and moulds of classical greek antiquities. however, between 1801 and 1812, he removed a number of sculptures from the parthenon in athens and sent them to london.29 the practice of plundering artifacts from their original setting is sometimes referred to as ‘elginism’30 because of the damage that elgin caused. the parthenon and the erechtheum and many of its decorations were sawn in half to reduce their weight and to facilitate their transport. thus, the column capital of the parthenon, the erechtheum cornice and many metopes and slabs were destroyed. elgin’s rapacity was shared by public history review | duthie 17 his associates. thomas lacy suggested the removal of the entire pandrossium and expressed his regret that the transport of the pieces he found in olympia would be too expensive while philip hunt was disappointed that the two lions over the gate at mycenae were too heavy to remove.31 christopher hitchens, a leading advocate for the return of the so-called ‘elgin marbles’ and other antiquities, argues that these objects were removed from their natural environment and from the space that they were intended to occupy.32 when an ancient work of art is removed from its original setting, its value and archaeological interest remain. however, if left in situ it constitutes an aesthetic and historical entity. due to its international standing and the historical significance of its collections, the british museum has been the target for most repatriation requests in the united kingdom. between 1970 and 1999, it received twenty-seven foreign requests for repatriation.33 at the same time, the climate of opinion has increasingly become one of greater willingness to at least consider the possibility of returning certain objects in western museums to their place of origin. the main impetus for repatriation has come from former colonies in which indigenous, minority and suppressed cultures were unable to resist the original removal of historical objects. their relationship with dominant western powers has changed, as they are now sovereign entities in their own right and able to defend their cultural property. greece, egypt and china have enacted strict cultural property laws investing ownership of antiquities found or thought to have been found within their state jurisdiction – they are state property and their export is forbidden without state permission.34 there is now a widespread recognition among museum professionals throughout the world that museums should treat the material products of other cultures as more than ‘exotica’ or ‘primitive’ curios. as robert aldrich observes: ‘most european countries wanted to move on from the imperial age, pushing the ideas that had underpinned imperialism out of the way and sometimes wilfully forgetting the imperial past and neglecting its legacy.’35 this process has been particularly assertive in colonised countries in which indigenous populations were dispossessed. the commonwealth institute, the museum of african and oriental arts, amsterdam’s tropenmuseum and the africa museum have all overturned colonialist language and imagery in their galleries. however, despite considerable pressure from foreign governments, the british museum has refused to follow suit and return the art and antiquities that it acquired under the aegis of empire. its position encapsulates the challenges inherent in presenting empire public history review | duthie 18 and its legacy to contemporary, post-imperial audiences. having inherited a colonial collection, the trustees of the british museum are faced with the multi-faceted problems of exhibiting an imperial heritage within a post-imperial context. robert aldrich describes this predicament of imperial institutions: ‘when the colonial flags were lowered, what was to become of museums that lost their very reason for being?’36 in the case of the british museum, persistent claims to ancient heritage and its inflexible response to demands for repatriation reinforce its past imperialist policies. since his appointment in 2002, mcgregor has tried to overturn this perception of the museum as the quintessential imperial institution, looting the world and acquiring the trophies of global power for the glorification of britain. the museum’s policy of 200737 stipulates that it will comply with the principles set out in combating illicit trade: due diligence guidelines for museums, libraries and archives on collecting and borrowing cultural material (2005). the museum will not acquire objects unless they are legally available for acquisition. if the museum is in any doubt it will not proceed with the acquisition. nor will the museum accept any object without obtaining the confirmation of the donor, executor or seller that he or she owns the object and is able to transfer it. the museum adheres to the convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of cultural property (1970); the return of cultural objects regulations (1994); the dealing in cultural objects act (2003); and the treasure act (1996). in its official policy, the museum condemns the looting of antiquities and damage to archaeological sites. it no longer acquires objects that are known to result from such looting and will usually only acquire archaeological and heritage objects that have documentation to show a legal history back to the unesco convention of 1970. the museum’s official policy concludes with a declaration that it will ‘pay due respect to the moral rights of other individuals, groups or organisations.’38 however, despite its recent legislation, the museum insists that the objects acquired under the british empire are now part of the museum and, more broadly, the cultural heritage of the nation. as the museum’s acquisitions policy states, its antiquities were legitimately accrued ‘in the light of the period during which the material was acquired.’39 the british museum remains unapologetic about the history of its early collections and fails to reconcile its current policies with its past acquisitions. in the guardian neil mcgregor even referred to repatriation as ‘yesterday’s question… questions of ownership depend on the thought that an object can only be in one place. that’s no longer true.’40 moira simpson rightfully refutes this dismissive attitude: public history review | duthie 19 if museums are to demonstrate that they have shaken off the colonial mantle, they must address fully the issue of repatriation. to have a blanket ‘no returns’ policy reflects a failure to recognise or acknowledge the relevance of the concepts of spiritual ownership, cultural patrimony and the cultural importance of certain objects to cultures that did not die out in the nineteenth century, as was expected.41 defending the founding practices and principles of the british museum, the present trustees have retained this ‘colonial mantle.’ as well, the ‘redefinition’ of the principles of the british museum as a universal museum has had some interesting manifestations in the last few years. in 2008, the times declared that the ‘british museum is the best in the world’42 and in a series of well-orchestrated anniversary celebrations, exhibitions and media events in 2003, the british museum sought to reinforce its eighteenth-century enlightenment identity as a universal museum – a showcase of the finest achievements of world ‘civilisation’, which could be surveyed as a grand historical narrative. central to this effort was neil mcgregor’s decision to assemble parts of the museum’s collections that had been dispersed throughout london in order to reunite them with the main collection. many of these objects had been collected by the museum under the british empire for national selfcongratulation and self-satisfaction. as mcgregor declared: ‘we’ll be back to 1753 with the whole world under one roof.’43 another effort to ‘share’ its collection was made in 2005 when the british museum funded an exhibition called ‘hazina: traditions, trade and transitions in eastern africa’ in order to create stronger cultural links with africa. according to mcgregor: ‘it has told the story of the region, the links between cultures over centuries and the things that tie those cultures together.’44 a circumcision mask from western kenya and a headdress made from human hair from uganda were among the 140 artifacts from the british museum that were displayed in nairobi – the first time the museum has lent objects to africa. however, the exhibition sparked debate about whether such objects should be returned to their home countries: ‘we feel this is going to be the central theme [of debate]: why are these objects, which come from here, kept in britain?’, said idle omar farah, director-general of the national museums of kenya.45 farah hoped that by providing adequate security and environmental conditions for the artifacts he might eventually secure longer-term loans for the national museum’s nairobi base. according to kimani wa public history review | duthie 20 wanjiru, of the nairobi-based standard newspaper, most of the objects were taken during the colonial period: ‘we have to ask, what were the circumstances under which they were taken? how were the objects used? what “knowledge” was extracted from them?’46 in response to such questions, the british museum asserts that it is an appropriate ‘custodian’ with an inalienable right to its disputed artifacts under british law. central to its stance on issues of cultural ownership and repatriation is its claim that the museum’s founding legislation prevents them from deaccessioning material from collections: 1st. that the collection be preserved entire without the least diminution or separation. 2nd. that the same be kept for the use and benefit of the public, who may have free access to view and peruse the same, at all stated and convenient seasons agreeably to the will and intentions of the testator, and under such restrictions as the parliament shall think fit.47 more recently, the british museum act of 1963 prohibited the museum from selling any of its valuable artifacts, even the ones not on display.48 a legalistic approach has been applied as leverage in obtaining returns or stemming the illicit flow of art treasures. however, the british museum does not assume this approach. while australian and american legislative changes give indigenous populations ownership over the remains of deceased ancestors, under british law there is no right of ownership over human remains.49 in britain, the matter of repatriation has not received formal consideration from the museums and galleries commissioners. this was demonstrated in the british high court in may 2005 in relation to nazi-looted artworks held at the museum. it was ruled that these could not be returned. the judge, sir andrew morritt, ruled that the british museum act cannot be overridden by a ‘moral obligation’ to return works known to have been plundered.50 the british museum’s other claims to classical antiquities are implicitly imperialistic, particularly its argument that cultural artifacts should remain in london because it is europe’s largest and most visited city. advocates of universal museums maintain that cultural treasures should be stored where they can be visited by a large number of people. by maintaining a worldwide-oriented collection in one location, the british museum prides itself on being a ‘world heritage centre’, a ‘central meeting-point’ and ‘the whole world in one building.’51 it maintains, too, that the museum provides a valuable context for objects that have been public history review | duthie 21 displaced from their original source. cuno argues that the museum’s objects benefit from their setting, where they can be seen free of charge alongside other artifacts from all over the world.52 the british museum is concerned that if restitution demands were met, the world’s great museums would be emptied.53 underpinning the museum’s position is the assumption that the source nations of antiquities are unable to house and maintain their own objects and that they need london to preserve their history and heritage. in defending its refusal to lend the elgin marbles to athens, the british museum recently adopted the position that it is a better custodian of ancient antiquities than greece. dorothy king, who advocates the retention of the elgin marbles in britain, declares: ‘the greek government’s attitude to its history and culture leave much to be desired… through its apathy and indifference it has allowed many of the sculptures and monuments in its care to become damaged.’54 in its various publications on the parthenon marbles, the british museum presents elgin as a ‘lover of antiquity’55 dedicated to rescuing the athenian sculptures from destruction. in his discussion of the acquisition of the rosetta stone, cuno claims that egypt had little regard for the land’s ancient heritage, and that until the final decades of the nineteenth century, egyptians showed little interest in their ancient past, despite the evidence of it all around them. cuno suggests that it was only after europe found the rosetta stone and deciphered its hieroglyphics that the egyptians became interested in their ancient heritage.56 both the british museum and its supporters argue that the museum has provided protection for artifacts that would have been damaged or destroyed if left in their original environment. although this may have been true at the time, it does not necessarily pertain today. hitchens, greenfield and robin rhodes, among others, declare that the artifacts should now be returned to their countries of origin if there is sufficient expertise and desire there to preserve them.57 british claims that greece would have nowhere to display the parthenon marbles if they were returned are no longer relevant. in 2008, the acropolis museum in athens58 was completed to house them. the museum is equipped with sophisticated technology for the protection and preservation of exhibits. the marbles are well lit in the top floor of the museum and exhibited under the natural sunlight that characterises the athenian climate, in the way that the ancient greeks intended them to be seen. about half of the sculptures, inscriptions and architectural columns from the parthenon are now displayed in the museum. however, a visitor to the museum is instantly drawn to a series of veiled public history review | duthie 22 plaster casts representing the absent marbles housed in the british museum without natural light. for as long as classical antiquities are displayed in the british museum it is inevitable that they will be interpreted from a british point of view. the museum is primarily a british institution. it was established by a british parliamentary act for the british people. as the times wrote in 2008, the british museum is ‘an iconic national establishment… the first public institution to be called british and the oldest british organisation.’59 while the museum uses its greek, egyptian and chinese objects to represent and interpret these ancient civilisations, by rejecting repatriation requests, it does not allow nation states to formulate their own interpretations. as philip kohl suggests, the colonised and the conquered have been deprived of objects that are central to their historical narratives of identity.60 classical antiquities serve the interests of a nation by contributing to the formation of historical and nationalist narratives. museum objects foster the self-esteem of the nations in which they were created and discovered and source nations frequently invoke cultural nationalism when they make their requests for repatriation. the greek government, for instance, believes that the parthenon marbles are inherent to greece’s history and culture, declaring: ‘they embody its spirit and connect modern greeks to their ancient ancestors and confirm ancient legitimacy on their modern government.’61 in 1983, the minister of culture in greece, melina mercouri, expressed this notion in very emotive terms: ‘this is our history, this is our soul. they are the symbol and the blood and the soul of the greek people.’62 similarly, zahi hawass, the director of the supreme council of antiquities in cairo, insists that the rosetta stone should be returned to egypt because ‘it is the icon of our egyptian identity.’63 the stone’s significance lies in the role it played in deciphering ancient egyptian hieroglyphs from which the history of ancient egypt has been written as the origins of modern egypt. in the same vein, nigeria insists that the edo people used the benin bronzes to mark important dates in their history and that the removal of these objects left a vacuum in the records of benin history. the centennial of the british expedition in benin in 1997 emphasised the fact that benin artifacts were still housed in overseas museums and this issue became the focus for a campaign at that time. a major exhibition of african art at the royal academy was targeted as a means of highlighting the circumstances under which some items in museum collections were acquired. on their website, the african reparations movement showed images of african artifacts that were included in the exhibition, declaring public history review | duthie 23 that many of them had been acquired by theft. it displayed the photographs emblazoned in red lettering with the word stolen!’64 these debates and the british museum’s response highlight crucial issues about the role and function of museums in general and the ownership of works of art in particular. as john merryman, professor of art at stanford university astutely observes, collecting art has always been the domain of the rich, including individuals and nations. power is a major factor that has distributed art around the globe.65 the issues of who owns antiquity are highly complex. ‘unprovenanced’66 antiquities are ones with gaps in their chain of ownership. antiquities have sometimes originated in cultures that are no longer extant or are of a very different kind from the modern, national culture claiming them. when the rosetta stone was acquired, for example, there was no independent state of egypt: ‘what is the relationship between, say, modern egypt and the antiquities that were part of the land’s pharaonic past? the people of modern-day cairo do not speak the language of the ancient egyptians, do not practise their religion, do not make their art, wear their dress, eat their food, or play their music, and they do not adhere to the same kinds of laws or form of government the ancient egyptians did. all that can be said is that they occupy the same… stretch of the earth’s geography.’67 however, well known cases that have been outstanding for many years, including the greek government’s claim for the return of the parthenon marbles and nigeria’s calls for the return of the benin artifacts are less ambiguous. it should be possible to claim legally all materials that have been taken by force, by unequal treaty, by theft or by fraud. cultural property and its stewardship have long been the concerns of museums, archaeologists, art historians and nations, but recently the legal and political consequences of collecting antiquities have also attracted public attention. in this climate, the british museum, a former imperial museum, is compelled to re-examine the role that it can and should play today. despite its claims that it has re-defined its public image, the museum’s attempted transition to a post-imperial context has been confused and deeply uneasy. it remains an imperial institution in a post-imperial world. by retaining the museum’s original philosophy and principles, the museum is reenacting the attitudes and ethics of its imperial founders. as moira simpson writes, the museum is ‘a mirror reflecting the views and attitudes of dominant cultures, and the material evidence of the colonial achievements of the european cultures in which museums are rooted.’68 public history review | duthie 24 endnotes 1 what does it mean to be a world museum? celebrating the 250th anniversary of the public opening of the british museum: a lecture by neil mcgregor. (online). available: http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/museum_in_london/event_archive/250_lect ure.aspx (accessed 11 apr. 2010). 2 british museum, the british museum and its collections, british museum publications, london, 1982, p5. 3arthur macgregor, sir hans sloane: collector, scientist, antiquary, founding father of the british museum, british museum press, london, 1994, p47. 4 a. e. gunther, ‘the royal society and the foundation of the british museum, 1753-1781’, in notes and records of the royal society of london, vol 33, no 2, 1979, p209. 5 marjorie caygill, the story of the british museum, british museum press, london, 1981, p23. 6 edward miller, that noble cabinet: a history of the british museum, ohio university press, ohio, 1974, p100. 7 antonio paolucci, great museums of europe: the dream of the universal museum, skira, milan, 2002, p124. 8 miller, that noble cabinet: a history of the british museum, p299. 9 see the british museum’s website. available: http://www.britishmuseum.org/learning/families_and_children.aspx (accessed 11 apr. 2010). 10 british museum history of the collection. (online). available: http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/history_and_the_building/history_of_the_co llection.aspx (accessed 11 apr. 2010). 11 marjorie caygill, treasures of the british museum, h.n. abrams, new york, 1985, p199. 12 caygill, the story of the british museum, p3. 13 tim barringer and tom flynn (eds), colonialism and the object: empire, material culture and the museum, routledge, london, 1998, p11. 14 see the british museum’s website. available: http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum.aspx (accessed 11 apr. 2010). 15 ‘neil macgregor lifts british museum’s ambition to new heights,’ the times, 18 july 2009. 16 james cuno, who owns antiquity? museums and the battle over our ancient heritage, princeton university press, princeton, 2008, pxix. 17 bryan appleyard, ‘behind the scenes at the british museum: from imperial war chest to global resource the british museum’s latest plan, suggests its director, neil macgregor, is to let everyone write their own history.’ the sunday times, 6 may 2007. 18 what does it mean to be a world museum? celebrating the 250th anniversary of the public opening of the british museum: a lecture by neil mcgregor. 19 appleyard, ‘behind the scenes at the british museum: from imperial war chest to global resource.’ the sunday times, 6 may 2007. 20 barringer and flynn (eds), colonisation and the object: empire, material culture and the museum, p27. 21 ibid, p12. 22 quoted in caygill, the story of the british museum, p66. 23 barringer and flynn (eds), colonisation and the object: empire, material culture and the museum, p43. 24 moncure daniel conway, travels in south kensington, harper and brothers, london, 1882, pp21-3. 25 see chris brooks and peter faulkner, the white man’s burden: an anthology of british poetry of the empire, exeter university press, exeter, 1996, p285. 26 simon winchester, the man who loved china: the fantastic story of the eccentric scientist who unlocked the mysteries of the middle kingdom, harper collins, new york, 2008, p138. 27 ibid, p138. 28 for descriptions of this acquisition, see philip dark and forman werner, benin art, hamlyn, london, 1960; jeanette greenfield, the return of cultural treasures, cambridge university press, cambridge and new york, 1989, pp141-48; eko eyo, ‘repatriation of cultural heritage: the african experience’, in flora kaplan (ed), museums and the making of ‘ourselves’: the role of objects in national identity, leicester university press, london, 1994, pp 335-42; ormande dalton and charles read, antiquities from the city of benin and from other parts of africa in the british museum, british museum press, london, 1899. 29 for descriptions of the removal of the elgin marbles, see b.f. cook, the elgin marbles, harvard university press, cambridge and massachusetts, 1984; jacob rotheberg, ‘descensus ad terram’: the acquisition and reception of the elgin marbles, arcade, new york, 1997; christopher hitchens, the elgin marbles: should they be returned to greece?, verso, new york, public history review | duthie 25 1998; christopher hitchens, imperial spoils: the curious case of the elgin marbles, hill and wang, new york, 1988. 30 see yannis hamilakis, the nation and its ruins: antiquity, archaeology and national imagination in greece, oxford university press, oxford, 2007, p268. 31 william st. clair, lord elgin and the marbles, oxford university press, london, 1967, p101. 32 hitchens, the elgin marbles: should they be returned to greece?, p82. 33 cressida fforde, jane hubert and paul turnbull (eds), the dead and their possessions: repatriation in principle, policy and practice, routledge, london, 2004, p210. 34 cuno, who owns antiquity?, pxxxii. 35 see robert aldrich, ‘colonial museums in a postcolonial europe’, in african and black diaspora: an international journal, vol 2, no 2, 2009, pp137-156. 36 ibid. 37 british museum, policy on acquisitions (online). available: http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/acquisitions.pdf (accessed 11 apr. 2010). 38 ibid. 39 quoted in moira g. simpson, making representations: museums in the post-colonial era, routledge, london, 2001, p228. 40 quoted in charlotte higgins, ‘into africa: british museum’s reply to ownership debate,’ the guardian, 13 april 2006. 41 simpson, making representations: museums in the post-colonial era, p246. 42 ‘briton of the year,’ the times, 27 december 2008. 43 quoted in alan riding, ‘british museum, at 250, heads to calmer waters,’ the new york times, 24 june 2003. 44 quoted in higgins, ‘into africa: british museum’s reply to ownership debate,’ the guardian, 13 april 2006. 45 ibid. 46 ibid. 47 see ‘museum of the world for the world: london, united kingdom and beyond’, in british museum review, april 2004-march 2006, p21. 48 greenfield, the return of cultural treasures, p103. 49 ibid, p336. 50 ‘ruling tightens grip on parthenon marbles,’ the guardian, 27 may 2005. 51 see louise jury, ‘hidden treasures shown in restored british museum,’ the independent, 11 december 2003. 52 cuno, who owns antiquity?, pxxxv. 53 christopher hitchens challenges this view in the elgin marbles: should they be returned to greece?, pvii. 54 dorothy king, the elgin marbles, hutchinson, london, 2006, p 314. 55 see british objections answered (online). available: http://www.greece.org/parthenon/marbles/answers.htm (accessed 11 apr.2010). 56 cuno, who owns antiquity?, p10. 57 see hitchens, the elgin marbles: should they be returned to greece?; greenfield, the return of cultural treasures; r.f rhodes (ed), the acquisition and exhibition of classical antiquities: professional, legal and ethical perspectives, notre dame university press, notre dame, 2007. 58 the website of the new acropolis museum can be found at http://www.newacropolismuseum.gr/eng/ (accessed 11 apr. 2010); also see ‘acropolis museum opens amid renewed debate over elgin marbles,’ archaeology, 19 june 2009. 59 rachel campbell-johnston, ‘briton of the year: neil macgregor,’ the times, 27 december 2008. 60 philip l. kohl, ‘nationalism and archaeology: on the constructions of nations and the reconstructions of the remote past’, in annual review of anthropology, vol 27, 1998, p235. 61 quoted in cuno, who owns antiquity?, pxxxii. 62 quoted in kate fitz gibbon, who owns the past? cultural policy, cultural property and the law, rutgers university press, brunswick, 2005, p113. 63 quoted in richard girling, ‘king tut tut tut,’ the sunday times, 22 may 2005; cuno, who owns antiquity?, pxxxii. 64 see, for example, the following webpage: http://www.arm.arc.co.uk/art/stolen/stolenindex1.html (accessed 11 apr. 2010). 65 john henry merryman, imperialism, art and restitution, cambridge university press, new york, 2006, p176. 66 for an explanation of ‘unprovenanced’ antiquities, see colin renfrew, loot, legitimacy and ownership: the ethical crisis in archaeology, pp9-12. 67 cuno, who owns antiquity?, pp9-10. 68 simpson, making representations: museums in the post-colonial era, p1. 502 bad gateway 502 bad gateway nginx is the truth down there?: cultural heritage conflict and the politics of archaeological authority ian barber public history review, vol 13, 2006, pp143-154 enerally it is acknowledged that conflict is axiomatic in any contemporary system of heritage (or cultural) resource management.1 tunbridge and ashworth2 argue that dissonance (‘a discordance or a lack of agreement and consistency’) is ‘intrinsic’ to heritage, since ‘selection is inevitable’ and ‘any creation of heritage from the past disinherits someone [else] completely or partially, actively or potentially’. in this process there may be conflict between stakeholders who feel alienated from the physical reference points of their own past, and those decision-makers who would modify or appropriate that past. in overview, the selection pressures that are at the core of cultural heritage conflicts are complex and wide-ranging. disagreement spans differences over the treatment and care of sites through to the targeted destruction of cultural property and associated customary communities.3 affected communities may contest decisions that seem to dismiss their own heritage sites and associated narratives and practices. at the extreme end of the scale, these differences may lead to sectarian violence and the destruction of cultural property. conflict can also occur between cultural heritage practitioners themselves over how, and even whether, to research the contested past.4 the appeal of the material archaeological record is often enhanced where the past is referenced in postcolonial or nationalist conflicts. in these disputes, archaeologists may be found as expert witnesses in legal proceedings (for example, sutton’s article in this volume) or as public advocates for or against communities with customary or other cultural heritage associations.5 newly discovered archaeological features and artifacts may be given considerable if tendentious weight or be subject to critical scrutiny and dismissal. this is powerfully illustrated in the political uses of the archaeological record that have characterized debate over the 1992 destruction of the babri mosque at ayodhya in the northern indian state of uttar pradesh.6 conflict may even be sustained where sectarian groups agree superficially about protecting the same archaeological heritage. for example, catholic and protestant communities of the g public history review, vol 13, 2006 144 late twentieth century have supported the preservation of prehistoric eiman macha or navan fort, but with reference to very different interpretations of the meaning of the place for the traditional heroic past, and present.7 and a broad consensus about the importance of stonehenge cannot mask other differences between planners, archaeologists and nationalist, environmental and new age interest groups over the use and celebration of the larger site area.8 however, while archaeological values may be debated vigorously in these situations, the basic methods and assumptions behind the archaeological evidence are usually accepted as legally admissible and self-evident in judicial hearings (although not necessarily by the affected communities themselves). this article evaluates the authority of archaeology where cultural heritage interpretations are in public conflict. it asks two questions. firstly, how conflicted and (therefore) political are the theoretical foundations of archaeology themselves in the project of documenting, and potentially resolving differences over, the material cultural past? and secondly, has the authority of archaeology proved uniquely conclusive where matters of identity and belonging are in conflict in the present? politics, conflict and the foundations of archaeological theory by the beginning of the twentieth century, archaeology had emerged as a systematic field of anthropological study in the culture history mode. this approach is characterized by the formal classification of artifacts and (less consistently) site types that define chronological sequences of cultural identity and geographical relationships. this early archaeological emphasis on regional sequences represented an intellectual shift away from (if not a reaction against) the universal and unilinear evolutionary scenarios of nineteenth century anthropology, associated with such famous names as e. b. tylor, lewis morgan and john lubbock.9 culture history archaeology did not develop in a sociopolitical vacuum. nineteenth century unilinear cultural evolution had been applied to explain and in some cases justify european progress and superiority, especially over colonized peoples.10 culture history archaeology by contrast was concerned less with universal explanation than with the material culture description of geographically discrete and dispersed archaeological cultures. in this view, change was affected primarily by the diffusion of artifacts and the migration of peoples, or it was assumed rather than explained. it has been argued that culture history was stimulated in part by the emergence of new polities and identities from the collapse of the empires and monarchies of old europe.11 in some cases these earlier twentieth century culture historians or their political patrons ‘attempted to trace the development and origins of extant ethnic groups’, where their work could be used ‘to support nationalist causes’.12 the most notorious example of this support is nazi sponsored archaeology, which was intended to demonstrate the germanic lineage of a dominant european warrior aryan civilization.13 this racial interpretation referenced german scholar gustaf kossinna (1858-1931), public history review, vol 13, 2006 145 who had argued patriotically for the germanic origins and dispersion of creative indo-european peoples based on the archaeological, linguistic and ethnic identification of prehistoric european cultures.14 the archaeology of the soviet union between the 1930s and 1950s incorporated a reactionary mirror image of nazi archaeology. soviet archaeologists were encouraged to identify the slavic influence of the great russian people at the forefront of developments in european prehistory, at the expense of the role of germanic peoples.15 the cambridge marxist archaeologist v. gordon childe (1893-1957), perhaps the most influential european archaeologist of this time, developed a more systematic approach to classification and consequent cultural identification. childe carefully described geographically discrete assemblages of artifacts and (where possible) associated economic, political and religious expressions so as to define a mosaic of archaeological cultures distributed over time and space. these prehistoric cultures were interpreted as mutable chronological and social, rather than racial, entities.16 even then, childe’s early interpretations were also not entirely free of racial speculations. however, these were repudiated in his later works that effectively challenged the essentialist, ethnic culture history assumptions of kossinna’s theory, and later european fascist practice.17 the period of archaeology’s dominance by culture history’s descriptive ‘classificatory-historical’ approach (as described by american archaeologists willey and sabloff )18 was dramatically challenged from the late 1950s by a ‘new’ archaeology. now known generally as processualism, the new archaeology was concerned with cultural process, ecological context and explanation. it built on significant post-war scientific advances (especially radiocarbon dating and chemical and molecular identification and sourcing), while it promoted explicit research design (especially hypothesis testing), and the search for universal laws of human behaviour. the ability to frame and scientifically assess the validity of theories of change is fundamental to processual archaeology. as archaeologist lewis binford, the most prominent theorist and advocate of this school, has argued: ‘without some methodology for evaluating ideas, we are in the position of having a free hand to generate lots of stories about the past, but not having any means of knowing whether these stories are accurate’.19 with a disinterest in particular historical traditions and an emphasis on applied technologies and universal law-like generalizations, the roots of processual archaeology are clearly identified in the postwar period of optimism and conformity that referenced applied science, universal humanism and the economic and political hegemony of the united states.20 as trigger has argued, ‘the new archaeology followed the lead of the generalizing social sciences… by claiming to be able to produce objective, ethically neutral generalizations that were useful for the management of modern societies’.21 the methods of processual archaeology were comfortably integrated into the regulatory requirements for archaeology associated with surging international urban and industrial development. archaeological heritage and other environmental effects public history review, vol 13, 2006 146 of development were now defined, and ‘mitigated’, by conforming and sometimes collaborative scientific approaches (even if the strict intellectual and sampling requirements of research design were often not met in salvage archaeology).22 from the 1970s several archaeologists challenged the search for universal laws and authoritative narratives that had come to dominate the discipline. their ideas have been identified within the postprocessual or interpretive archaeology school. this approach draws variously on debates generated by other ‘post-’ movements, especially poststructuralism and postcolonialism. interpretive archaeology assumes that archaeologists work from a particular and contingent understanding of the world with the remains of a fragmentary past that can never be objectively recovered or known. in this approach, the past may be no more predictable than the future.23 some interpretive archaeologists are motivated by a concern that processual archaeology does not account for the agency of indigenous communities in the past, and the present. to varying degrees, these scholars allow that archaeological narratives and values may have no more authority to account for the past than the views of descendant or other customary communities.24 in its challenge to conformist establishment narratives and scientific authority, interpretive archaeology has provided a theoretical home to emerging postcolonial, minority and gender archaeologies.25 on the face of it, then, contemporary archaeology is caught between the theoretical poles of essentialist conformity and relativism. on closer inspection these extremes frequently bleed into a range of theoretical grey areas and political positions. most archaeologists today continue to objectify material remains and follow standard analytical methods in their research (including, where appropriate, culture history approaches), while acknowledging increasingly that the generation of archaeological knowledge is not a neutral exercise. however, if texts such as bruce trigger’s history of archaeological thought have done much to promote a disciplinary understanding of the role of ideology in archaeology, there are still important differences in some of the assumptions behind the superficially similar products of professional archaeology today. this is not just a matter of theoretical dissonance between archaeological researchers. during the 1990s, the manipulation and destruction of history and archaeology by protagonist ethnicities and nations emerging from the collapse of the soviet union and yugoslavia challenged archaeologists to reconsider the role of archaeological knowledge. the editors of a 1995 volume of essays on nationalist politics and archaeology observe that postprocessual relativism ‘provides no guide for determining when one should encourage the conscious construction of national pride and when one should condemn it as excessively chauvinistic’.26 in his own essay in this volume, bruce trigger responds further that ‘the discipline’s “findings” have promoted bigotry, violence and destruction at least as often as they have promoted social justice’. he adds that extreme relativism does not lend itself ‘to justify political programs in a reasoned fashion’.27 the relatively more relativist editors of a volume on the destruction and conservation of cultural property (including essays on the former yugoslavia and public history review, vol 13, 2006 147 ayodhya) defend ‘the right of all peoples to create a past for themselves’. these editors pronounce against arguments for proclaiming the singular truth of history (even where holocaust-denial is the issue), while asserting that their approach does ‘not preclude the critical evaluation of the use… of archaeological evidence, and of the political values embedded in accounts of the past’.28 however, with respect to ‘the less clear-cut arena’ of identity politics and archaeology, they suggest that ‘it is open to question whether anyone is in a position to decide which viewpoints are too extreme to be included in dialogue’.29 from this review of ideas and literature, archaeology’s potential role in heritage conflict resolution might seem to be seriously compromised by its own theoretical conflicts. the relevance of the discipline may be tested further in emerging nation-states, where official guardians of the sacred traditional past attempt either to suppress archaeology, or conversely, with their political allies, to use archaeological monuments ‘to reinforce their own preeminence’.30 these points are now explored with reference to case studies in a variety of political situations where archaeology has been appealed to or deemed irrelevant (respectively). conflict and the selective appeal to archaeology the destruction of the babri masjid (mosque) at ayodhya, briefly introduced above, is a salient example of the partisan appeal of archaeology in a context of sectarian conflict and violence. according to the hindu epic ramayana, ayodhya was the birthplace and sacred capital of the deity king lord rama. today hindu nationalists identify this legendary capital with the present northern indian town of ayodhya where they believe that an ancient temple had once memorialized the exact site of rama’s birth. since at least about the eighteenth century, various claims have circulated that rama’s ayodhya temple had been razed and replaced by the masjid which was constructed in ad 1528-9 while india was under the rule of the islamic mughal emperor babur. the first clash between muslims and hindus over the ayodhya masjid site occurred in the 1850s. since indian independence, rama’s legendary birthplace at ayodhya has become an important place of pilgrimage and a critical symbol of hindu nationalism. following the installation (or to hindu nationalists, the miraculous appearance) of images of rama and other deities within the masjid in 1949, the mosque was locked up under government orders. calls to pull down the masjid and replace it with a hindu temple grew more insistent and strident through the 1980s, leading to violent demonstrations and death. in the immediate aftermath of the december 1992 destruction of the mosque, communal violence ensued with the death of at least 1000 and perhaps as many as 2000 people. since then india has seen a protracted inquiry into the mosque’s destruction and periodic violence, while majority nationalists continue to press for the construction of a hindu temple on the site.31 the involvement of archaeologists and other scholars in the conflict precedes the mosque’s destruction. the archaeological debate has been public history review, vol 13, 2006 148 vigorous and on occasion, marked by physical confrontation, as occurred at the third world archaeological congress meeting in new delhi in 1994 where the local organizing committee had banned discussion (and therefore condemnation) of the mosque’s destruction. as ‘tempers ran high’, the plenary session was unable to pass a resolution condemning ‘fraudulent manipulation of evidence’ and the destruction of historic structures in support of sectarian claims. a further wac meeting was convened in 1998 in croatia for the free discussion of ayodhya and other issues of cultural conflict and site destruction.32 two published papers from the 1998 conference present archaeological evidence respectively in favour of, and against, the existence of an ancient ayodhya temple to rama on the masjid site (among others on the theme). retired director general b. b. lal of the archaeological survey of india references the 1970s ayodhya component of his ‘archaeology of the ramayana sites’ project. lal describes an excavated trench about four metres south of the masjid where a recorded sequence of occupation began with the ‘northern black polished ware culture’ (ca seventh century bc).33 from the records of this excavation lal refers to a series of ‘brick built bases’ that had ‘evidently’ carried stone pillars from a structure predating the masjid. it is lal’s further contention that fourteen non-islamic black basalt pillars incorporated into the mosque had come from the destroyed hindu temple.34 lal also clarifies his own public contribution to the debate. it is conceded that the brick base evidence was not reported publicly until 1988, ‘since around that time questions had begun to be asked about the discovery of these pillarbases’.35 however, lal points out that his suggestion for further excavations in the area, ‘including that under the mosque’ (a recommendation opposed in the indian press in 1991 by ‘twenty eminent historians’) had come with the recommendation that the masjid structure not be harmed ‘in any way’. lal recites his 1991 challenge: ‘why should the contending parties shy away from further excavation, unless they are afraid of facing the truth?’.36 from the 1998 wac conference indian scholar ram sharma presents an alternative view.37 sharma points out that the brick bases recorded by lal were made of broken bricks from earlier structures, with no evidence of religious affiliation or any connection to the basalt pillars in the mosque. the recovery of glazed islamic ware pottery above the floors of this earlier brick base structure and below the masjid indicate that it had collapsed by the time of the mosque’s construction.38 sharma notes also that the decorative motifs of the fourteen nonstructural mosque pillars cannot be distinguished between buddhist or hindu traditions. ‘by the tenth century there was so much fusion in the elements of art cultivated by different sects that the sectarian elements are, in practice, almost indistinguishable’. the pillar motifs that are most specific, however, appear to have an affinity with east india buddhist art and architecture. sharma also cites evidence that other historic religious structures, including mosques, had been constructed or decorated with materials brought from some distance.39 public history review, vol 13, 2006 149 sharma and lal disagree further over the interpretation of architectural materials and a stone inscription that were reportedly recovered by hindu activists after the masjid had been destroyed.40 lal suggests that these materials ‘must have once constituted parts of the temple’, just as other materials from destroyed temples have been incorporated into other indian mosques. the stone inscription is said to refer to a ‘beautiful temple of vishnu-hari’ constructed at ayodhya, which lal observes, ‘speaks for itself’.41 in response, sharma raises concerns over the lack of stratigraphic control and contextual information for the recovered materials. on the stone inscription, he references epigraphic evidence that the text is seventeenth century, and claims that the name ‘vishnu-hari… cannot stand for rama’. sharma observes further; ‘why and how this seventeenth-century stone inscription… was… concealed in the brick wall of a sixteenth century mosque will remain a mystery’.42 the archaeological debate has been renewed by an unprecedented court ordered archaeological investigation by the archaeological survey of india at ayodhya, published as ‘ayodhya: 2002-03’. the report describes pillar bases of what appear to be the halls of a pre-masjid structure and the circular brick structure of a shrine (ca seventh-tenth centuries ad). however, no distinctive images or epigraphs are associated with these remains.43 a reviewer observes that ‘for those who are trying to “fit” archaeological data with the requirements of “proving” or “disproving” the historicity of religious figures and of temples constructed in their honor, the report is not likely to be as “useful” as the current posturing around it suggests’.44 the ayodhya dispute highlights both the attraction and potential for undue manipulation of material culture history where a clash of values is associated with strongly defended religious and nationalist traditions. this manipulation is also evident in the political context of archaeology in israel where the excavation and interpretation of sites of jewish historical or scriptural significance may be privileged over moslem period sites and the values of palestinian communities.45 in turn, palestinian scholars have more recently begun excavating ottoman period sites and ‘are promoting a canaanite past as evidence of their [preisraelite] origins’.46 however, sectional politics and politicians may also reference the more universal narratives of archaeology in situations of potential or real conflict. this seems to be consistent both with the reality of globalization and archaeology’s achievement of subsuming local narratives of prehistory to ‘universal comparative projects of western origin’.47 in new or postcolonial nations, the authority of the past may be invoked through revisionist narratives that usually follow standard disciplinary conventions, complete with radiocarbon chronologies and typologies celebrating great antiquity, the speed of evolutionary progress, or the relationship of the past to the modern polity.48 in the caucasus, for example, ‘the earliest evidence for domestication, for full-scale metallurgy, for monumental architecture’ find their origins ‘along the western shore of the caspian (for an azeri), in the lush foothills of the great caucasus and along the black sea coast (for a georgian), or in the fertile ararat valley of southern public history review, vol 13, 2006 150 transcaucasia (for an armenian)’.49 it has been suggested that the ‘recurrent, blatantly political interpretations of archaeological materials’ in the caucasus highlights the ‘dangerously naïve postprocessual position’ that any reading of the past ‘is as valid and justifiable as another’.50 politics, identity and the (ir)relevance of archaeology the cases cited above highlight the potential impact of sectarian or politically correct archaeology on the interpretation of local heritage or sequences. there are other conflicts of interests and politics where the practice of archaeology may be allowed, but with a challenge to its disciplinary authority or independence. in china, archaeologists are motivated to convince beijing authorities of the nationalist merit of particular regional traditions, including their contribution to the understanding of chinese culture, to secure support. the interpretive strategy that results has been called the ‘regionalist paradigm’.51 one does not need to indulge conspiracy theories to acknowledge that there are also establishment pressures of varying subtlety on research elsewhere, including the secular democracies of europe, north america and australasia. these may result from political, ethical and resource management concerns and conflicts, where archaeological knowledge production is negotiated with other cultural heritage interests and ‘stakeholders’.52 as rowlands observes, ‘in the differing contexts of nationalism, development and the postmodern, we encounter the silences and gaps in archaeological explanations that determine which sites are excavated, what kinds of artifacts are privileged in the legitimizing of expert archaeological knowledges’.53 the consequent pressures of intellectual conformity on archaeologists seeking promotion or research grants are usually unstated, but well understood, in these situations. there may be tension also in the operation of any national system of heritage management where local communities value their historical places for very different customary and cultural reasons than the state (or the majority). here, western scientific conventions (including culture history classifications) and the non-authoritarian pluralism of interpretive archaeology may be equally at odds with the ways that local communities relate to their archaeological heritage. in these cases, the intervention or even the ideas of professional archaeology may be entirely unwelcome. this happens most frequently in the field of bioarchaeology, but it can occur in other heritage and identity contexts as well. native american leader william means is quoted as rejecting archaeological explanations of indian origins with the affirmation: ‘we do not need your [archaeological] past!’. larry zimmerman refers to other oral traditional native american views that emphasize the spiritual unity of past and present so as to render archaeology’s secular temporal narrative irrelevant, if not spiritually dangerous.54 in southern africa the management value of heritage sites ‘for their potential to inform about bygone days’ can be contrasted with the views of indigenous african communities for whom these places ‘are essentially links to the land, their public history review, vol 13, 2006 151 ancestors, their cultures and traditions’. the importance of such places is as the continuing residence of ancestral spirits rather than their information values.55 the african archaeologists responsible for these observations note also that the archaeological knowledge and formal management of such places in southern africa has become ‘a preserve of the few’, a non-traditional elite ‘focused on the establishment of categories, typologies and chronology’.56 this clash of values is well illustrated by the vandalism of the 2000-10,000 year old archaeological rock shelter paintings at domboshava, zimbabwe. customary rain-making ceremonies at a domboshava rock shelter tunnel had been banned after the site was declared a national monument several decades ago. in the early 1980s part of a local ‘sacred forest’ was also cleared to make way for a museum and visitor facilities, while the ritual tunnel itself was sealed with cement. in this context, a significant area of the protected rock art was painted over in 1998, an act that was greeted with some sympathy by the local community.57 in many of the nations of europe, north america and australasia, archaeological regulation has allowed and even encouraged archaeological excavation to ‘rescue’ the information values of sites so as to ‘mitigate’ the destructive effects of development. archaeologists have referred to this euphemistically as ‘preservation by record’. increasingly, however, local and indigenous communities such as new zealand maori have argued that their customary values are adversely affected by the regulated destruction and scientific priorities of archaeological management, where places with identified scientific values are approved for destruction on condition of prior investigation.58 for these communities, the practice of preservation by record is simply an official excuse to destroy their heritage, in which the participating archaeologists are viewed as collaborators. in hawaii, for example, ‘hawaiian historians and cultural practitioners’ identified a place affected by highway construction (the h3 corridor) as kukuiokane heiau, a temple site. archaeologists interpreted the site as a dryland agricultural terrace only.59 the site’s destruction was consequently approved by the state against appeals by the hawaiian community,60 in the context of the expenditure of 17 million dollars on mitigation (including ‘salvage’) archaeology for the h3 highway.61 conclusion: can archaeology resolve the past? the dilemma for contemporary archaeology is that while the discipline is becoming increasing self-critical and reflexive, ethnic and national identitybuilding patrons and end-users of archaeology are calling for, or proclaiming, greater certainty about the past. indeed, as rowlands has observed, ‘the manipulation of archaeology in the shoring up of identities is now far more widespread than in the 1930s’. furthermore, in spite of the advent of public archaeology, the information values of archaeological investigation may be of no interest, or be perceived as hostile to the concerns of contemporary communities. even where the authority of archaeology is superficially accepted by parties to a dispute, the ayodhya conflict alone offers no assurance that it can resolve public history review, vol 13, 2006 152 contemporary differences. extensive subsurface excavations have not produced any definitive artifact or structure that proves – or disproves for that matter – the existence of hindu temple foundations beneath the masjid, at least as far as contending groups are concerned. close inspection of the available evidence suggests that the stratigraphic and documentary records are characterized by cultural ambiguity. instead of providing evidence of exclusive religious and cultural expressions, the material record at this site highlights considerable flexibility in the reuse of symbols and architectural remains, not least including the incorporation of columns of non-muslim origins (whether hindu, buddhist or other) as visible, non-structural components of the masjid itself. in part this represents the dissonance between the inflexible politics of prescriptive contemporary group identities, and the more fluid cultural boundaries of the historical record. this dissonance is an important factor in archaeology’s seeming inability to resolve conflict in so many heritage contexts, as reported in this essay. however, the unique ability of archaeology to document unexpected historical and cultural inclusions suggests an important, if too infrequent, contribution of the material archaeological record in conflict situations. this contribution is not concerned with the political resolution of competing claims and authority. instead, it is the challenge for contemporary communities in conflict to reflect on the archaeological evidence of acceptance and toleration as well as discord in their own cultural histories. endnotes 1 there is as yet ‘no agreed and undisputed term’ for the public management of the physical (including archaeological) remains of the human past. f. p. mcmanamon and a. hatton, ‘introduction: considering cultural management in modern society’, in f. p. mcmanamon and a. hatton (eds), cultural resource management in contemporary society, one world archaeology (owa) 33, routledge, london, 2000, p3, and discussion generally in chapter 1, pp1-19. among the available options (ibid), the broad term ‘cultural heritage’ is used in this paper in deference to the cross-disciplinary nature of the seminar for which it was first prepared, and the publication in which it now appears. 2 j. e. tunbridge and g. j. ashworth, dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict, john wiley & sons, chichester, england, 1996, pp2021 3 larry j. zimmerman, ‘we do not need your past! politics, indian time, and plains archaeology’, in philip duke and michael c. wilson (eds), beyond subsistence: plains archaeology and the postprocessual critique, the university of alabama press, tuscaloosa, alabama, 1995, pp28-45; m. de la torre (ed), the conservation of archaeological sites in the mediterranean region, the getty conservation institute, la, 1997; robert layton (ed), conflict in the archaeology of living traditions (owa 8), unwin hyman, london, 1989; robert layton, peter g. stone & julian thomas (eds), destruction and conservation of cultural property (owa 41), routledge, london, 2001. 4 for example, see essays in layton (ed), op cit, especially by zimmerman (chapters 4 and 16), in layton et al (eds), op cit, especially with respect to ayodhya and in cressida fforde, jane hubert and paul turnbull (eds), the dead and their possessions: repatriation in principle, policy and practice (owa 43), routledge, london, 2004 (2002), with respect to the repatriation of historic/prehistoric human remains. some of these issues are discussed further in the body of this essay. 5 jonathon d. hill, ‘contested pasts and the practice of archaeology: overview’, in american anthropologist, vol 94, no 4, 1992, pp809-15; philip l. kohl and clare fawcett (eds), nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1995; layton (ed), op cit; layton et al (eds), op cit. 6 summarised in robert layton and julian thomas, ‘introduction: the destruction and conservation of cultural property’, in layton et al (eds), op cit, pp6-11, and discussed further in text below. 7 barbara bender, ‘the politics of the past: eiman macha (navan), northern ireland’, in layton et al (eds), op cit, pp199-211; ann hamlin, ‘archaeological heritage management in northern ireland: challenges and solutions’, in mcmanamon and hatton (eds.), op cit, p68. public history review, vol 13, 2006 153 8 barbara bender, stonehenge: making space, berg, london, 1998. 9 bruce g. trigger, a history of archaeological thought, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1989, pp100; 114-19. 10 ibid, pp110-47. 11 ibid, pp148-74; bruce g. trigger, ‘romanticism, nationalism and archaeology’, in kohl and fawcett (eds), op cit, pp268-70. 12 philip l. kohl and clare fawcett, ‘archaeology in the service of the state: theoretical considerations’, in kohl and fawcett (eds.), op cit, p14. 13 bettina arnold, ‘the past as propaganda: totalitarian archaeology in nazi germany’, in antiquity, vol 64, no 244, 1990, pp464-78. 14 bettina arnold and henning hassman, ‘archaeology in nazi germany: the legacy of the faustian bargain’, in kohl and fawcett (eds.), op cit, pp70-72; ulrich veit, ‘ethnic concepts in german prehistory: a cased study on the relationship between cultural identity and archaeological objectivity’, in s. shennan (ed), archaeological approaches to archaeological identity (owa 10), unwin hyman, london, 1989, pp3556; trigger, a history, op cit, pp163-67. 15 victor a. shnirelman, ‘from internationalism to nationalism: forgotten pages of soviet archaeology in the 1930s and 1940s’, in kohl and fawcett (eds.), op cit, pp120-38; trigger, a history, op cit, pp229-32. 16 see, for example, v. gordon childe, the dawn of european civilization, london, kegan paul, 1925, the aryans: a study of indo-european origins, london, kegan paul, 1926 and piecing together the past: the interpretation of archaeological data, london, routledge & kegan paul, 1956. 17 arnold and hassman, op cit, p71; kohl and fawcett, ‘archaeology in the service of the state’, op cit, p14; trigger, a history, pp167-74. 18 gordon r. willey and jeremy a. sabloff, a history of american archaeology, third edition, new york, w. h. freeman, 1993 [1974]. 19 lewis r. binford, in pursuit of the past: decoding the archaeological record, new york, thames & hudson, 1983, p21. the classic statement of processual archaeology is sally r. binford and lewis r. binford (eds.), new perspectives in archaeology, chicago, aldine press, 1968. 20 trigger, a history, op cit, pp312-16. 21 ibid, p313. 22 ernestene l. green (ed), ethics and values in archaeology, new york, the free press (macmillan). 1984. 23 for two influential articulations of this approach see ian hodder, reading the past: current approaches to interpretation in archaeology, cambridge, cambridge university press, 1986 and michael shanks and christopher tilley, reconstructing archaeology: theory and practice, cambridge, cambridge university press, 1987. the essays in duke and wilson (eds), op cit, provide a more recent application of interpretive archaeology approaches for the north american plains. 24 zimmerman, ‘we do not need your past’, op cit; james f. brooks, ‘sing away the buffalo: faction and fission on the northern plains’, in duke and wilson (eds), op cit, pp143-68; see also relevant essays in layton (ed), op cit. 25 see, for example relevant essays in george c. bond and angela gilliam (eds), social construction of the past: representation as power, (owa 24), routledge, london, 1994; ian hodder, michael shanks, alexandra alexandri, victor buchli, john carman, jonathan last and gavin lucas (eds), interpreting archaeology: finding meaning in the past, routledge, london, 1995 and duke and wilson (eds), op cit. 26 philip l. kohl and clare fawcett, ‘archaeology in the service of the state’, in kohl and fawcett (eds), op cit, p8. 27 bruce trigger, ‘romanticism, nationalism, and archaeology’, in kohl and fawcett (eds), op cit, pp263, 264. 28 layton and thomas, ‘introduction’, op cit, pp16-17 (quotes on p17). 29 ibid, p19. 30 neil asher silberman, ‘promised lands and chosen peoples: the politics and poetics of archaeological narrative’, in kohl and fawcett (eds), op cit, p258. 31 see sarvepallia gopal, anatomy of a confrontation: ayodhya and the rise of communal politics in india, zed books, london, 1993; layton and thomas op cit, pp2-11, nandini rao, 'interpreting silences: symbol and history in the case of the ram janmabhoomi/babri masjid', in bond and gilliam (eds), op cit, pp154-64; nandini rao and c. rammanohar reddy, 'ayodhya, the print media and communalism', in layton et al (eds), pp139-56 and shereen ratnagar [et al. for comments], 'archaeology at the heart of a political confrontation: the case of ayodhya', in current anthropology, vol 45, no 2, 2004, pp239-59. 32 layton and thomas, op cit, pp3-6. 33 b. b. lal, ‘a note on the excavations at ayodhya with reference to the mandir-masjid issue’, in layton et al (eds), pp117-20. 34 ibid, pp119-23. 35 ibid, p119. lal’s work at ayodhya and other sites associated with the hindu epics was reported internationally in his paper ‘the two indian epics vis-à-vis archaeology’ in antiquity vol 55, no 213, 1981, pp27-34. while this report assumes the historical association of ayodhya in uttar pradesh with the ramayana site, it is focused on the northern black polished ware culture period (pp30-32). there is no discussion of the construction of a temple to rama or the masjid itself (see also layton and thomas, op cit, p3). 36 lal, ‘a note’, op cit, pp121-24. public history review, vol 13, 2006 154 37 r. sharan sharma, ‘the ayodhya issue,’ in layton et al (eds), op cit, pp127-38. 38 ibid, pp132-34. 39 ibid, pp130-32. 40 lal, op cit, pp124-26; sharma, op cit, pp134-37. 41 lal, op cit, pp124-25. 42 sharma, op cit, pp136-37. 43 as reviewed by nayanjot lahiri, ‘ayodhya – not a treasure hunt’, in world archaeological bulletin, vol 18, august-september 2003, pp73-78. 44 ibid, p78. 45 ann e. killebrew, ‘the presentation of archaeological sites in israel’, in conservation and management of archaeological sites, vol 3, nos 1 and 2, 1999, pp17-32. 46 ibid, p30. 47 michael rowlands, ‘the politics of identity in archaeology’, in shennan (ed), op cit, p138. 48 silberman, op cit, p257. 49 philip l. kohl and gocha r. tsetskhadze, ‘nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the caucasus’, in kohl and fawcett (eds), op cit, p168. 50 ibid, pp168-69. 51 lothar von falkenhausen, ‘the regionalist paradigm in chinese archaeology’, in kohl and fawcett (eds), op cit, pp198-217. 52 rosemary a. joyce, ‘academic freedom, stewardship and cultural heritage: weighing the interests of stakeholders in crafting repatriation approaches’, in fforde, hubert and turnbull (eds), op cit, pp. 99-107. 53 rowlands, op cit, p141. 54 zimmerman, ‘we do not need your past!’, op cit. 55 webber ndoro and gilbert pwiti, ‘heritage management in southern africa: local, national and international discourse’, in public archaeology, vol 2, no 1, 2001, p33. 56 ndoro and pwiti, op cit, p23. 57 pascal taruvinga and webber ndoro, ‘the vandalism of the domboshava rock painting site, zimbabwe’, in conservation and management of archaeological sites, vol 6, no 1, 2003, pp3-10. 58 harry allen, protecting historic places in new zealand, research in anthropology and linguistics, no 1, department of anthropology, university of auckland, 1998, pp35; 37-41. 59 c. kehaunani cachola-abad and edward halealoha ayau, ‘he pane ho’omalamalama: setting the record straight and a second call for partnership’, in hawaiian archaeology, vol 7, 1999, p76. 60 ibid. 61 patrick kirch, ‘hawaiian archaeology: past, present and future’, in hawaiian archaeology, vol 7, 1999, pp67-68. pdfhansen public history review vol 17 (2010): 16–33 © utsepress and the author there is no ‘i’ in team: reflections on team-based content development at the national museum of australia guy hansen n recent years one of the most important trends in the development of history exhibitions in major museums has been the use of interdisciplinary project teams for content development. this approach, often referred to as the team-based model of content development, has, in many institutions, replaced older models of exhibition production built around the expertise of the curator. the implementation of team-based models has had a profound impact on the way exhibitions are produced. when done well it has helped deliver exhibitions combining a strong focus on audience needs with in-depth scholarship and collections research. in some contexts, however, the tyranny of the team has given rise to a form of museological trench warfare in which different stakeholders struggle i public history review | hansen 17 for creative control of an exhibition. in this article i will explore some aspects of the team-based approach with reference to the development of the opening suite of exhibitions for the national museum of australia (nma) in 2001. my observations are drawn from my experience as the lead curator of the nation gallery, one of the nma’s opening exhibitions. the concept of exhibitions as the product of interdisciplinary teams runs counter to popular perceptions of how content is developed in museums. for the most part the public face of museum content is the ‘curator’, a term usually understood as a person who administers and organises a collection and has oversight over how it is displayed. they are said to possess a ‘curatorial eye’ reflecting a strong sense of connoisseurship and a high level of subject expertise. curators are sometimes thought of as auteurs, selecting what will be collected, displayed, and interpreted. this understanding of curatorial work is reinforced in popular media when curators are used to explain the significance of objects and artworks. auction houses provide curators to vouch for the authenticity and significance of artworks and reassure potential buyers of their discernment. exhibitions are often presented, or reviewed, as being authored by a curator. this public image of curators as key decision makers is far removed from the reality of working life within museums. rather than well-dressed connoisseurs, curators are much more likely to approximate your average stressed public servant. instead of spending their days surrounded by beautiful objects which are now safely stored in a museum warehouse – today’s curator is more likely to be an office worker who spends their time sending and reading emails, drafting letters, answering the phone and attending meetings. this discrepancy between the public image and reality of curatorial work reflects the changing role of curators in museums over the last thirty years. the care and management of museum collections is no longer the sole domain of the curator. the traditional guardianship of collections, implied in the older curatorial title ‘keeper’, has been replaced by the discipline of collections management. registrars and conservators have joined curators as custodians of collections. exhibitions have also become increasingly complex as more display techniques have become available. other communication specialists, including designers and multi-media public history review | hansen 18 experts, are now essential parts of exhibition development teams. as the scope and size of exhibitions has grown there has been an erosion of the curator as the major author of content. curators are now one voice amongst many who contribute to the development of exhibitions. project managers, marketers, educators, collection managers, designers and publicists all play a crucial role in the development of content in museums. rather than being an auteur, curators have now become, to use the language of modern management theory, one stakeholder amongst many in content production. before discussing how the team-based model of content development was introduced at the national museum of australia it is worth considering why it is important to understand the internal production processes used by museums. museum history is often analysed as a distinct type of historical knowledge or discourse. scholars such as david lowenthal, michael wallace, and roy rosenzweig, to list but a few, have dissected museum exhibitions revealing how they present celebratory, partial and mythological accounts of the past.1 reviewing this scholarship provides an insight into how history is used, or appropriated, in museums. while useful in providing cautionary tales about some of the worse excesses of history museums, such discussions rarely look beyond the exhibition hall. the internal world of how exhibitions are produced remains obscure. a critical reassessment of the type of history produced in museums was also a key part the writings associated with the ‘new museology’ which emerged in the late 1980s. the museum time machine2 and the new museology,3 for example, argue that the representations of the past found in museums are constructed and partial, often reflecting the values of the dominant culture of the society in which they operate. individual case studies emphasised how some groups in society, such as women and indigenous peoples, are under represented or stereotyped in museums. the new museology reflected a strong commitment to social inclusion, community access and multiculturalism. it was in effect a manifesto for change: museums needed to be more democratic and accessible. for museums to change, however, changes would need to be made to the way exhibitions were produced. in australia tony bennett’s the birth of the museum is one of the most important books to postdate the new museology. it provided an public history review | hansen 19 account of the formation and development of the museum as a cultural form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. bennett’s objective was to expose the political context and power relations implicit in the way museums function within society. taking inspiration from michel foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopias’, and drawing heavily on australian examples, bennett compared museums to other cultural forms, such as travelling fairs and international exhibitions, leading him to conclude that museums ‘formed a part of new strategies of governing aimed at producing a citizenry which ... would increasingly monitor and regulate its own conduct’.4 bennett’s work has been carried forward by authors such as chris healy and kylie message, both of whom have explored the cultural function of museums.5 the analysis of history museums provided by cultural studies scholars such as bennett explores the history and cultural function of museums. it does not, however, provide an insight into what it is like to do history in a museum. in effect, museums are treated as texts which can be deconstructed or used as examples of social control. while this provides a reading of exhibition content in its finished form it does not examine the mechanics of how exhibitions are produced. this is not a criticism of the cultural studies engagement with museums, but rather a recognition its limits. in addition to the cultural studies assessment of museum history there is also a professional literature designed to serve the needs of museum studies’ students. a leader in this field is the university of leicester, which established its museum studies program in 1966. one of the first universities in the world to provide vocational training for museum professionals, leicester began to produce a series of textbooks which would become staples for museum studies courses around the world. these covered a range of topics, including museum management, public programs, museum education, and conservation techniques and collections management. these references set out to establish new standards of professional practice in a rapidly growing industry. in terms of history curatorship the most important work to be published by leicester was by gaynor kavanagh. kavanagh wrote extensively throughout the 1980s and 1990s exploring the professional practice of history curators. history curatorship, which was published in 1990, remains one of the few books to explore the public history review | hansen 20 development of history curatorship as a distinct profession. kavanagh argues that the rapid growth of history museums in britain in the late twentieth century was not matched by a parallel growth in trained museum professionals. the result was that curatorial practice lacked a firm theoretical foundation. as she describes it, ‘there is no strong central core of theory and there has been little, if any, rigorous consideration of history practice, let alone challenge to it’.6 history curatorship, as such, lacked self awareness: ‘ideas of the curator’s responsibility to record and represent the past are to be found more often implicitly expressed in direct curatorial activities, such as exhibition, rather than explicitly through debate and challenge within the profession itself.’7 furthermore, she said, ‘if there is some form of intellectual basis to the work, say a notion of a “social and material past”, it is largely unexplored other than indirectly through curatorial activity’.8 kavanagh’s analysis is an important first step in understanding the possibilities of history exhibitions. she outlines some of the major interpretative tools at the disposal of curators, including exhibition text, sounds, images and activities. kavanagh also counsels curators to be more aware of their audience, emphasising that a visit to a museum is fundamentally a social phenomenon: ‘museum visitors are not one audience but many, with diverse needs and expectations.’9 this description of exhibition types and museum audiences provides the beginnings of a vocabulary for discussing curatorial practice. these analytical tools allow kavanagh to begin to explore how underlying conceptual frameworks inform curatorial practice. kavanagh’s work still stands today as the most detailed discussion of curatorial practice in history museums and is particularly instructive in understanding the successes and failures of british social history museums. her analysis, however, is still very much focused on the end product of the exhibition development process. in the australian context there is a small but growing literature which is beginning to shed light on the internal workings of museums. for example andrea witcomb has written about the creation of the national maritime museum.10 brian crozier has written about his experiences as curator at the queensland museum.11 richard gillespie has discussed the challenges of the melbourne museum.12 more recently kirsten wehner, and martha sear have written about the challenges of delivering exhibitions at the public history review | hansen 21 national museum of australia.13 these authors have provided a view into the world of how history exhibitions are conceived and executed. for the most part, however, they do not address how the internal management processes of museums impact on content development. this article is designed to provide some preliminary comments on the emergence of the team-based content development model at the national museum of australia. t h e t e a m b a s e d m o d e l the team-based model of content development emerged in the united states in the 1980s and is now used widely used around the world. a description of this model can be found in barry lord and gail dexter lord’s manual of museum exhibitions. under this model exhibition content is produced by a team consisting of representatives of key sections of museums including education, evaluation, finance, collections management, security, design, marketing and curatorial. each team member is seen as an advocate for their own area of interest. the team is overseen by an exhibition coordinator and a project manager. all key content decisions are controlled by the institution’s director.14 rather than content being driven by a single expert, a role usually occupied by a curator, the team-based model for developing content is a process of consensus building. compromises are made; decisions negotiated. this portrayal of the team-based model is a high level description of how many museums operate. the precise details of how this model operates on the ground differ from museum to museum. variations in its operation also occur from project to project. each exhibition brings with it its own particularities and personalities which impact on how content is developed. that said it is clear that there has been a major shift in exhibition development processes around the world toward the team-based model. in the american context a series of informal surveys published in the exhibitionist, the journal of the national association for museum exhibition (usa) indicated that in 1995 60 per cent of major museums were using a team-based model for exhibition development and that this had grown to 100 per cent in 1999.15 while there are no similar figures available for australia, anecdotal evidence suggests a similar pattern holds true. public history review | hansen 22 what then are the reasons for the widespread adoption of the team-based methodology? one of the primary causes is the increasing cost and complexity of exhibitions. it is no longer possible for museums to delegate, to a single curator, the delivery of projects worth potentially millions of dollars. the need for increased accountability has made it essential that modern project management techniques be utilised to ensure that exhibitions are delivered on time and on budget. the range of display techniques used in exhibitions has also expanded. today museums can utilise static display techniques through to high-end multi-media environments. the skill sets used in delivering exhibitions has grown almost exponentially. the combination of these factors has required most museums to move to some form of team-based content development. the introduction of the team-based approach was, however, not simply a function of the need for better project management. elaine guriane, in her anthology civilizing the museum, argues that the team-based approach was developed primarily as a political strategy to break the, ‘closely held monopoly of curators and designers over exhibition creation’.16 this was necessary, she argued, because curators often ignored the needs of museum visitors and produced esoteric exhibitions. this critique of curators was a common feature of the new museology. for example in her 1994 work, museums and their visitors, eileen hooper-greenhill railed against curatorial control. ‘for too long, museums have defended the value of scholarship, research and collection at the expense of (her emphasis) the needs of the visitors’.17 underlying hooper-greenhill’s call for change was the belief that curators traditionally played the role of a power-broker, defining exhibition content according to their own point of view. other museum professionals were expected to fall in line. designers were treated as ‘functionaries’. educators were often brought in at a late stage in a remedial role, and forced to, ‘make the best of a bad job’.18 for hooper-greenhill the 90s ushered in a new era of museums in which, ‘the balance of power in museums is shifting from those who care for objects to include, and often prioritise, those who care for people.’19 by the end of the 1990s hooper-greenhill and guriane, amongst other writers, had helped establish a new rhetoric of inclusion in museum practice. a key part of this rhetoric was that creative control of exhibitions needed to be wrested away from curators. public history review | hansen 23 t h e t e a m b a s e d m o d e l a n d t h e n a t i o n a l m u s e u m o f a u s t r a l i a when i joined the national museum of australia in 1991 it was a modest organisation with approximately 40 staff. the museum’s collections were stored in a number of rented warehouses in the northern suburbs of canberra. it was a museum waiting to happen. this was a frustrating period in the museum’s history as debate raged as to when, where and if to build a national museum. ironically this period of uncertainty provided the curators working at the museum great freedom. there were no restraints on collections access. exhibition development, modest though it was at this time, was led by curators. the pressures of delivering a new museum had not yet made themselves felt. looking back on this period i can now see that the national museum was operating in an older museum culture which emphasised the importance of the collection. it was inevitable that this structure would change as the museum moved from being a small secretariat, who managed the national historic collection, into a fully realised national cultural institution. while changes to the national museum’s work culture began under the directorships of margaret coaldrake and bill jonas in the early to mid 1990s, the tipping point occurred in 1996, when, after years of debate, the commonwealth government finally committed itself to building a permanent home for the national museum. prime minister john howard announced that the museum would open in 2001 as the centrepiece of the australia’s centenary of federation celebrations. in a very short period of time the museum moved from being a sleepy backwater to becoming one of australia’s major cultural institutions. one of the key challenges for museum management in 1996 was how to deliver a $155 million dollar project in a little over four years. this involved the design and construction of a new museum building as well the delivery of a suite of permanent exhibitions. the museum had to rapidly shift from caretaker role to major project delivery. throughout 1997 and 1998 curatorial staff within the museum commenced work on a series of exhibition proposals for the new museum. it soon became clear, however, that the department of communications and arts, the government department responsible for the construction of the museum, seriously doubted the capacity of the museum to deliver the content required in the short time frame public history review | hansen 24 available. the department sought advice from the international consulting firm ralph applebaum and associates on possible ways of delivering the new museum. the applebaum report proposed the creation of a museum which was primarily experiential. their design solutions emphasised the use of multimedia and immersive environments rather than historical exhibits.20 while the applebaum proposal was not pursued it reflected a tendency by the department to look outside the nma for ways of developing content. the growing sense of urgency surrounding the project was reflected in the appointment of dawn casey, a senior bureaucrat from the department of communication and the arts, as the new director of the museum in 1999. casey came to the job with a clear mission: get the museum built. her previous job in the department had been as head of the construction coordination task force responsible for building the museum. one of casey’s key advisors was elaine gurian, an american museum expert well known for her involvement in the washington holocaust museum and the boston children’s museum. partly on gurian’s recommendation casey also appointed sean sweeney, a project manager who had been involved in the construction of te papa, the national museum of new zealand, to provide scheduling and budgeting advice. sweeney and gurian were to work closely with casey to implement a new staff structure and plan the opening of the museum. casey, sweeney and gurian played a key role in transforming the museum into a modern cultural institution. they brought with them a range of assumptions drawn from contemporary museum management theory, particularly as it is understood in the united states. central to this was a team-based model of content development. one of the first decisions made by casey and her support team was that content development would not be driven directly by curatorial staff. rather, exhibition teams would be coordinated by external interpretative planners. these planners were drawn from the boston design firm, amaze. it is important to note that amaze design were not directly in the employ of the nma but were rather part of an alliance of companies building the museum headed by the department of communication and the arts. the role of the interpretive planners was to act as intermediaries between nma staff and designers. under this model curators would no longer be referred to as curators but would instead be known as ‘content public history review | hansen 25 developers.’ this reclassification of curatorial staff sent a clear message that the curators should focus on the research and object identification phase of exhibition development. communication specialists, in this case the team of interpretative planners, would work with designers to realise the shape and form of the exhibitions. the team of interpretative planners from amaze design were highly professional and brought considerable experience in developing large scale tourist facilities. they also benefited from having an outsider perspective and curiosity about australia culture. they lacked, however, any real knowledge of australian history and struggled, at times, to understand the shape and type of stories which could be told in an australian museum. the amaze team initially held a number of workshops with historians, writers and cultural commentators in an attempt to harvest content and quickly identify exhibition ideas. the lack of consensus about a grand narrative in australian history, however, made it far from clear as to the best way to proceed. after tentatively exploring a range of content ideas from outside the museum, the amaze team turned to nmas existing curatorial team for exhibition ideas. while curatorial staff had initially been suspicious of amaze they in the end formed an effective partnership to produce the exhibitions. another aspect of the application of the team-based model at the nma was the decision to employ a team of writers to prepare exhibition text. in what became a laborious and frustrating process ‘content developers’, or curators, would prepare briefing notes on each object or panel which required text. writers would then summarise these notes at the requisite word length. this was done, it was argued at the time, because curatorial staff lacked the skill to write for a popular audience. unfortunately the use of external writers did not achieve the desired results. errors inevitably crept into the text as writers paraphrased notes that they did not fully understand for exhibits they had never seen. for the most part text had to be rewritten by curatorial staff with the assistance of an editorial team. in hindsight the use of professional writers in the content development process would have been more useful if the writers had been fully integrated in exhibition development teams. perhaps the most important aspect of the team-based model was that all exhibition teams were established as projects with clear time lines and budgets. team leaders were required to report monthly on public history review | hansen 26 progress made against agreed milestones. a centralised project management team closely monitored the progress of all exhibitions. in this way the museum’s executive had ready access to information on the status of the development of all exhibitions. this system of surveillance helped ensure that any problems with the development of exhibitions were identified as early as possible. this application of strict project management methodologies allowed the nma’s executive to keep firm control of the content development process. in the context of simultaneously producing several major exhibitions in a building which was still under construction for an opening day which could not be changed, this ability to track the development of each exhibition was vitally important. while curatorial staff at times chaffed under the constraints of the project time line and budget, the unique set of circumstances surrounding the opening of the nma necessitated this highly planned approach. one negative consequence of this adherence to a project management methodology, however, was that the creative process of exhibition development was seen as being equivalent to production line. each exhibition was broken up into a series of inputs which were scheduled on a gantt chart. content development became a phase which occurred early in a project’s life. however, as the project went on it became clear that curators were needed throughout the life of the project. as the staff most familiar with the key messages of exhibitions, curators needed to comment on graphic production, audio visual components and object installation. this experience demonstrated the limitations of the production line model for exhibition development. producing exhibitions is not like building motorcars. whereas workers on a production line install their parts on a chassis and then allow the vehicle to move on down the line, curators need to walk with an exhibition from its inception to completion. the suite of exhibitions which were produced for the opening of the nma were tangled destinies, an environmental history exhibition; eternity, an exhibition which displayed objects in terms of the emotions they represented utilising first person quotes to explain their significance; horizons, a migration history display; nation: symbols of australia, an exploration of australia’s symbolic vocabulary in material culture and gallery of first australians, an exhibition which focused on australia’s indigenous peoples. public history review | hansen 27 significantly all of these galleries emerged directly from proposals developed by curatorial staff and were opened on time and within budget. the exhibition for which i was the lead curator was nation: symbols of australia. this exhibition set out to explore australian history and culture through the lens of national symbols. the intention was to provide a multi-voiced, contingent view of national identity. making symbols the primary focus of the exhibition allowed the museum to play to its strengths by focusing on the visual, aural and material culture record of australian history, rather than struggle with narratives more appropriately explored in a monograph. symbols to be explored included both official symbols such as the flag, coat of arms and anzac, as well as popular culture symbols such as the digger, the kangaroo, suburbia, and the use of indigenous imagery in national celebrations. reviewing the history of these symbols and how they were used provided a range of views or voices about national identity, varying according to the time and context in which they were produced. while the nation exhibition had a strong curatorial argument at its core, it was inevitably adapted as it went through the team-based content development process. a strong desire by members of the museum’s council and executive for a chronological account of australian history saw the inclusion of a time line of major events in australian history. also added to the exhibition were modules dealing with the history of communications and transport. these additions, while attractive and interesting exhibits, were tangential to the exhibition’s central argument and did impact on the overall coherence of the exhibition. the nation gallery was not alone in having its content changed and adapted throughout the exhibition development process. all exhibitions went through an extensive process of design and redesign. at times discussions in relation to the final form of exhibition content were highly charged. under the teambased model the final sign off for content was made by the museum’s director, dawn casey. in this difficult period of finalising the nma’s opening suite of exhibitions it is interesting to reflect on where the major points of conflict lay. surprisingly, despite the later response of some conservative critics, it was not political sensitivities which dominated internal debates over the final form of the museum’s exhibitions. public history review | hansen 28 rather it was the much more immediate concerns over deadlines, available floor space and budget constraints. it was these pragmatic concerns which necessitated some of the largest changes to exhibition content. in the instance of the eternity, for example, the exhibition’s content was reduced by 50 per cent for both budgetary and space reasons. in the case of the nation a third of proposed exhibition modules were cut. changes in the building design also necessitated a significant reworking of exhibition content. battles over window treatments and the positioning of staircases within exhibition spaces became a major source of controversy. the need to get the job done became an all pervasive driving force within the museum. while pragmatic concerns over budget and space dominated the foreground in the lead up to the opening of the museum, significant political pressure was also exerted. the museum’s executive worked hard to protect staff from this pressure. documents obtained by the sydney morning herald via a freedom of information request revealed how david barnett, a museum council member, attempted to intervene in the development of content for the museum’s exhibitions. barnett, a former liberal party staffer and author of the authorised biography of john howard, sent a memo deriding draft exhibition text to tony staley, the chair of the nma council and former president of the liberal party, in october 2000. barnett was alarmed by what he saw as systematic bias in the museum’s displays. ‘the museum should not be a contributor to the reworking of australian history into political correctness, which, as we saw at the [olympic] games opening ceremony, is taking hold.’ he went on, ‘perhaps as i plod through all this i will come across people who served their country, sacrificed themselves for it, made it a better place, or even what it is today’. he was horrified to find that the museum included people such as the antinuclear demonstrator benny zable and lenin peace prize recipient william morrow within exhibits. ‘these people are not my heroes’, he wrote, ‘why benny zable and not hugh morgan, who created wealth for australians and jobs for australians? ... what about h.r. nicholls and charles copeman for the hall of fame ... what about chris corrigan?’. barnett concluded, ‘i would have thought a national museum in the national capital might have managed interesting exhibits dealing with the founding fathers and telling us who past prime ministers have been and something about them without being egregious’.21 barnett’s comments revealed a longing for a more traditional and public history review | hansen 29 triumphalist account of national history, one which was aligned with his own personal ideology.22 after receiving barnett’s memo staley instituted a review of label text. at the recommendation of emeritus professor geoffrey blainey, graeme davison of monash university was approached to provide a second opinion. davison reviewed the text and, while finding some minor errors, concluded that the exhibits were based on sound scholarship. furthermore, davison completely rejected barnett’s allegation of any systematic bias in the label text. he expressed the view that, ‘while individual items may express interpretations that david might read as pc, they are not preponderant’. 23 davison played and important role in reassuring the majority of council members that the exhibitions could go ahead largely unchanged. his role as an independent arbiter also helped to protect staff from direct criticism from council members. while some members of the museum’s council were displeased with the exhibition content the general public responded differently. visitor response to the nma’s opening exhibitions, as gauged by ongoing surveys, found that more than ninety per cent of visitors were highly satisfied with their visit.24 attendance numbers in the opening year also suggested that the museum was a success. by the time the first birthday cake was wheeled in, more than 900,000 people and visited the nma.25 in terms of the critical reviews of the museum the response was again largely positive.26 the exception to this was a small but influential group of conservative commentators who condemned the museum for presenting a ‘black arm band’ view of australian history. miranda divine, for example, argued that the main message of the museum was ‘one of sneering ridicule for white australia’.27 keith windschuttle described the museum as ‘an expensive relic of postmodern theory’.28 members of the nma’s council who had previously expressed their concerns over content again called for a more celebratory account of australian history.29 following these criticisms the government instituted a review of the nma’s exhibitions and programs. known as the carroll review, after the review committee’s chair dr john carroll, the report found that there was no systematic political bias in the nma’s exhibitions. that said however, the review called for a reworking of the museums exhibitions to provide a narrative of nation building that public history review | hansen 30 would showcase ‘exemplary individual, group and institutional achievements’.30 c o n c l u s i o n what conclusions can we draw about the application of the teambased model to the development of the nma’s opening exhibitions? in terms of project delivery the team-based model was a success. the museum opened on time and on budget. the teams of interpretative planners, designers and museum curators, had, in most cases, worked together successfully. not all of the exhibitions, however, were unqualified successes. some areas of the museum suffered from the process of compromise and change that was inherent in a project as large and complicated as the opening of a new national museum. some staff became disillusioned with the exhibition development process and chose to leave the museum prior to opening. while to some extent this ‘churn’ of staff was inevitable, it did reflect the stresses which emerged from struggles over the creative control of exhibitions. perhaps one of the most interesting lessons to emerge from the development of the nma’s opening suite of exhibitions was the central role played by the museum’s curators. while in the early stages of the project efforts were made to source content from outside the museum in the end it was the proposals put forward by nma’s curatorial staff that were developed. similarly the attempt to reclassify curators as content developers failed to gain acceptance with museum staff. as each of the exhibitions were developed it became increasingly clear that curators were essential to maintaining the coherence of the exhibits. while curators remained at the centre of producing content for the nma it is also clear that their creative control of the final product was mediated by both internal and external factors. graeme davison has described this process as building an ‘institutional consensus’.31 for example, in the case of the nation, the content for the exhibition underwent a process of continuous consultation and revision in the lead-up to opening. this included discussions between nma curatorial staff and interpretative planners as well as input from exhibition designers and the building’s architect. advice was also sought from external experts and audio visual producers. the nma’s executive provided guidance, as did the museum’s conservation and registration sections. final approval for the exhibition content was public history review | hansen 31 provided by the museum’s council and director. this collaborative process of content development is far removed from traditional notions of the curator as the major author of exhibition content. while exhibitions are produced by large interdisciplinary teams, curators still have a responsibility to promulgate a clear vision of what an exhibition is trying to achieve. while teams are an effective way of harvesting a range of skill sets and ideas, they can easily become dysfunctional as different team members compete for creative control of content. external factors such as budget constraints or political pressure can also impact on the content development process. in this context it is essential that curators take on a leadership role similar to that of a film director. while many skill sets are brought to bear in realising a film it is the director who has responsibility to ensure the movie makes sense and has an overall integrity. similarly curators need to stress test content as it is developed for an exhibition to ensure it is ‘on message’. exhibitions which are developed without such leadership run the risk of losing coherence. what has happened at the nma since opening in 2001? exhibitions continue to be developed using a team-based model. as part of this approach strict project management methodologies are now considered an essential part of the museum’s work culture. the shift from delivering permanent exhibitions to smaller temporary exhibitions has also seen curators reassert themselves in a leadership role in content development. this is reflected in the way the nma no longer uses interpretative planners as intermediaries between curatorial staff and designers nor does the museum employ external writers to compose exhibition text. in 2004 incoming director craddock morton formally reinstituted the use of professional title ‘curator’ within the nma, partly in recognition of the role they play in developing content within the museum. the nation exhibition, on which the observations in this article are based, remained on display until 2009. producing history exhibitions is a practical business. in classic economic terms, content is generated within a frame work of available resources. as with the rest of the economy the ‘scarcity principal’ is a major driver of decisions about what gets to be represented in public accounts of the past. while driven by ideas and passion for their subject area, curators must inevitably engage in how public history review | hansen 32 projects can be funded and delivered. they must not only develop the content but also build support for a project. it is here that the practice of public history intersects with the realities of project management and institutional politics. project management and team-based content development models are now a key part of curatorial work. understanding this shift in the way museums work provides another layer of understanding into how history is produced in museums. e n d n o t e s 1 see for example, david lowenthal, the past is a foreign country cambridge university press, 1985; warren leon and roy rosenzweig, history museums in the united states, university of illinois press, urbana, 1989; michael wallace, ‘visiting the past: history museums in the united states’ in roy rosenzweig, susan benson and stephen brier (eds), presenting the past, temple university press, philadelphia, 1986. 2 robert lumley (ed), the museum time-machine: putting cultures on display, routledge, london, 1988. 3 peter vergo (ed), the new museology, reaktion books, london, 1989. 4 tony bennett, the birth of the museum, routledge, london, 1995, p8. 5 see chris healy, from the ruins of colonialism: history as social memory, cambridge university press, cambridge, new york and melbourne, 1997; chris healy and andrea witcomb (eds), south pacific museums: experiments in culture, monash epress, melbourne, sydney, 2006; kylie message, new museums and the making of culture, berg, oxford and new york, 2006. 6 gaynor kavanagh, history curatorship, leicester university press, london, 1990, p11. 7 ibid, p55. 8 ibid, p61. 9 ibid, p135. 10 andrea witcomb, re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum, routledge, london, 2003. 11 brian crozier and helen gregory, ‘creating “a lot on her hands”’, labour history, no 8, 2003, pp 89-101. also see ‘what was it like: a perspective on history in museums’, paper presented at national museum of australia collections symposium 2009, transcript (online). available: www.nma.gov.au/audio/collections_symposium_2009. 12 richard gillespie, ‘making an exhibition: one gallery, one thousand objects, one million critics’, meanjin, vol 60, no 4, 2001, pp111–48. 13 kirsten wehner and martha sear, ‘engaging the material world; object knowledge and australian journeys’, in sandra dudley (ed), museum materialities: objects, engagements, interpretations, routledge, 2009. 14 barry lord and gail dexter, the manual of museum exhibitions, altamira press, walnut creek, ca, 2002, p5. 15 martha morris, ‘recent trends in exhibition development’, exhibitionist, vol.21 no.1 spring 2002 pp8-11. public history review | hansen 33 16 elaine h gurian, civilizing the museum: the collected writings of elaine heumann gurian, routledge, london and new york, 2006, p163. 17 eilean hooper-greenhill, museums and their visitors london, routledge, new york, 1994, p1. 18 ibid, p48. 19 ibid, p1. 20 ralph appelbaum associates, national museum of australia: a casebook of concepts, ralph appelbaum associates, 1997. 21 joyce morgan, ‘howard’s man: “those people are not my heroes”’, sydney morning herald, 5 june 2001, p16. 22 for an account of the political controversies surrounding the museum see guy hansen, ‘white hot history’ public history review, vol 11, 2004, pp39 -51 and guy hansen ‘telling the australian story at the national museum of australia’ history australia, vol 2, no 3, 2005, pp90.1-90.9. 23 ibid, p16. 24 submission by the national museum of australia to the national museum of australia review of exhibitions and public programs, 2003, p24. 25 national museum of australia, annual report, 2001-2, p43. 26 submission by the national museum of australia to the national museum of australia review of exhibitions and public programs, 2003, p54. 27 miranda divine, ‘a nation trivialised’, daily telegraph, 12 march 2001, p3. 28 keith windschuttle, how not to run a museum: people’s history at the postmodern museum’ quadrant vol 45 no 9, september 2001, p19. 29 joyce morgan, op cit, p6. 30 review of the national museum of australia, department of communications, information technology and the arts, 2003, p13. 31 graeme davison, ‘museums and the culture wars: in defence of civic pluralism’, open museums journal, vol 8, august 2006, p9. pdfpetersen public history review vol 17 (2010): 34–51 © utsepress and the author though this be madness: heritage methods for working in culturally diverse communities john petersen t is sometimes said that the 1988 australian bicentenary was a catalyst for australians becoming interested in their own history and heritage. if this is true, it was not until a decade later, in 1998, that australia’s two largest cities, sydney and melbourne, established heritage initiatives to ensure that their culturally diverse state histories and associated heritage collections were identified, conserved and interpreted. today, four out of ten people in new south wales are either migrants or their children,1 and they were born in over 200 countries. i public history review | petersen 35 in that year, 1998, both the melbourne immigration museum and nsw migration heritage centre were established, following from the pioneering work of the south australian migration museum in adelaide in 1986 and to a lesser extent the australian national maritime museum in 1991, which explored australians’ links by sea, and within that theme, researched some migration history. it later built a welcome wall for families to honour and record their migration history for posterity. the model favoured by the museums was, and still is, the more traditional but worthy one – of capital city based and centralised museum buildings with community galleries or changing exhibition spaces researched by curators. these collecting bodies invite communities to enter the world of museums and to develop exhibitions showcasing their history, culture and collections through dialogue and facilitation with curators.2 travelling trunks of props (replica or non-collection accessioned objects of limited significance) and touring exhibitions cater for communities who cannot visit the central museum building. increasingly, websites are used as an adjunct to the museum’s core exhibition and public programs. the nsw migration heritage centre was conceived as a strategic project based in the nsw premier’s department. it was a response to community leaders concerned that the generation of post second world war migrants were ageing and that their memories and heritage legacy were in danger of being lost. their stories might never to be collected and mediated by museums as a major chapter in twentieth century australian history, if we do not actively record them now.3 its purpose was defined back in 1998 as ‘to research and promote the contribution made by immigrants to the state and nation’s life’.4 the centre was ‘to reach beyond the notion of a static museum of immigration’. it was founded as a museum without walls and as a virtual heritage centre on the worldwide web. after starting as a research partnership grants program and a website with limited content, the centre moved to the powerhouse museum in 2003. in an attempt to make the virtual museum concept a reality, the centre was re-established with a strategic plan focussing on documenting collections, places and associated memories of migration and settlement. elderly and ageing former migrants were an initial priority. the website was redeveloped.5 public history review | petersen 36 the international council of museums defines a museum as: ‘a non-profit making, permanent institution, in the service of a society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purpose of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment’.6 without a centralised museum building to present exhibitions or a heritage place to interpret, the virtual museum concept has enabled the centre to develop a different approach to collecting. it does not collect objects into a centralised repository. acquisitions are virtual. instead, it documents migration memories, community histories and tangible and intangible heritage legacies and presents these as a virtual collection on the web. the centre not only documents collections and associated memories, it also produces online and physical exhibitions to make historic research accessible. it works with collections held by private individuals, communities and families and draws from items already in museum collections. as a result of its research and interpretation program, significant objects held by private individuals, communities and families may be acquired by local and regional museums. while based in one central location in sydney, at the powerhouse museum, the centre’s research is decentralised and dispersed. it works with and inside culturally diverse communities through contractual research partnerships with trained curatorial and heritage staff in local government run museums, libraries and art galleries. the centre also partners with volunteer run historical societies and ethnic heritage organisations across metropolitan sydney and rural and regional new south wales. the centre recognises that locally based heritage trained staff have established and ongoing relationships with local migrant communities and the centre builds on these relationships of trust and understanding rather than trying to quickly develop them from a position outside communities.7 after discussion, the centre’s partners determine how the research will be interpreted in their communities. the partnerships often result in exhibitions in regional libraries, museums and art galleries, or at heritage places, in the actual locations where communities of former migrants live across the state. the exhibitions are unashamedly local, featuring families, places, organisations and workplaces, contextualised in a broader national migration history. unlike large city-based museums, the centre’s exhibitions are drawn public history review | petersen 37 from local and regional heritage collections research. the exhibitions are not planned or programmed from the outset for their broad popular appeal or need to draw large visitor numbers. the centre aims to record a more representative heritage legacy and more truthful accounts of migration and settlement histories through collections research. a pleasing result of this research is that the centre’s exhibitions and interpretation materials are very popular. a key element of the centre’s work is the presentation of beautifully designed online exhibitions based on the physical exhibitions. the research and exhibitions are ‘centralised’ as content on the centre’s website. this attracts web traffic from school students and teachers, many former migrants, the children of migrants, and anyone accessing themes or key words of interest through search engines such as google, who might have very limited interest in heritage or museums. sometimes research partners prefer to produce and host their own online exhibitions based on the physical exhibitions. the centre’s website cross-links to these and vice-versa. as a virtual heritage centre, the centre does the prerequisite cool and geeky website things – it uses social media to build audiences and draw people to the centre’s website. this is essential because without a centralised museum building, its profile as a cultural institution, in a physical sense, is invisible. it tweets snippets from oral histories on twitter to grab the attention of a large and increasing number of secondary school teacher followers; it loads oral testimony videos on youtube with links to the centre’s website; it will soon promote migrant accommodation centre reunions through websites by creating groups and circles of friends around the 38 known migrant accommodation and reception centres run by the australian government across new south wales between 1946 and 1978.8 the centre has also produced an online story submission project to enable the public to load up migration memories, photos and mementos on its website. being a state-wide organisation the centre serves an audience in rural and regional areas, as well as metropolitan sydney. the heritage studies and resulting online exhibitions, researched through partnerships, are presented on the centre’s website as regional chapters in the state’s migration and settlement history. until recently, many rural and regional website visitors were on dial-up. this restricted the use of video history, oral history recordings, and public history review | petersen 38 even images on the centre’s website which were all affected by slow download times, sorely testing the patience of visitors. broadband allows the fast download of the larger files necessary for online exhibitions presented in multi-media. the web gives the research a national and global audience. broadband is enabling new south wales’ classrooms to play web hosted videos on large screens. history, english, english as a second language and drama teachers use the centre’s heritage collections and migration memories as inspiration for classroom activities. the centre’s work gives recognition to local people and validates migration and settlement experiences which have not previously been acknowledged. it has so far resisted the trend of using the web as a democratic and cultural relativist means for the public to share information in an un-curated and un-moderated virtual place. the web can serve as a dumping ground where any photo, place or collection, personal insight or story can be uploaded, honoured and validated without supporting information, documentation or context. the centre actively curates all the content on its website.9 there are not many museums that open their doors each day and let the public do whatever they want without research, facilitation and curation. at the same time, the web provides a myriad of opportunities for sharing knowledge about collections, places and memories. social media is as much about accessing information and building research relationships as it is about audience development. more democratic interaction in the future might assist the centre in collection surveys and comparative analysis of collections and online facilitation with communities. the use of heritage methods and partnerships is both a research framework and a means to moderate and curate content before it is posted on the centre’s website. the online exhibitions have the same content as the physical exhibitions they are drawn from (each themed panel accessed by a menu with pop-up photo and object images with captions) but some online exhibitions feature a smaller number of objects or images than the physical exhibition it is based on, if the physical exhibition is particularly object or image rich. this is to reduce web production time. the exhibitions are written to be useful for present and future researchers as well as students of migration history. some online exhibitions are not based on physical exhibitions. it depends on the research partners’ needs and capacities, and the centre’s resources. public history review | petersen 39 the online story submission project has a small number of key fields relating to migration and settlement experiences that need to be completed before a memory is posted. moderation is also in the form that racist or potentially libellous content would not be posted. elderly migrants can be vulnerable and they do not always appreciate the power of the web and its highly public nature. the centre would not post a person’s address, or even suburb or real name, if there was a threat of potential harassment. it has an informal policy of not highlighting jewellery or other valuables as migration objects to help prevent theft. migration museums and other organisations interested in migration heritage are grappling with how to identify, record, preserve and interpret the heritage legacy of migration and settlement in their communities. the centre works from a movable heritage framework researched during the 2000 nsw heritage office and ministry for the arts movable heritage project and influenced by the carr government’s 1999 cultural policy. the resulting movable heritage policy and guidelines recognised the historic relationships of collections to people (including families, communities and private individuals) and places (including buildings, cultural landscapes, town or regions). importantly, it broke away from the prevailing ‘that ought to be in a museum’ approach to collecting from context to one influenced by recent knowledge and experience of aboriginal keeping places. it looks at the cultural heritage significance of a collection in context, including its relationships to people and place, and exploring ways to document it and retain it in situ.10 the distinctions between the identification and conservation of heritage collections and heritage places have diminished during the past decade in australia but the museum sector is still one in transition. the revised 2004 edition of the illustrated burra charter: good practice for heritage places,11 the recognised standard for heritage place practice in australia features sections on movable heritage recognising the potentially significant relationships between collections and places. the 2001 heritage collections council’s significance and its revision in 2009 significance 2 set a process and criteria for assessing the cultural heritage significance of collections modelled on those used for heritage places since the 1990s12. both publications are now almost universally accepted by australian public history review | petersen 40 museum workers for the assessment of significance. however, the implications for conservation planning and collecting from context, and the way objects can derive and maintain their significance from being kept in situ is not always understood. the nsw migration heritage centre – with the word heritage in its name – reflects this evolution in museum thinking.13 following from the new found interest in assessing the heritage significance of collections in australian museums the centre has adapted environmental heritage assessment methods for places, such as thematic and typology studies for collections surveys. the surveys and documentation are structured around the principle that heritage collections are associated with people and places.14 the centre’s work is focussed on the use of history – researching key historic themes, timeframes, regions, linguistic and religious groups, and communities – rather than attempting to survey entire state-wide ethnic populations. it focuses collections research on manageable research partnerships with like-minded and locally based organisations around families, communities and private individuals and buildings, cultural landscapes, towns and regions. the centre’s typology and thematic studies usually run for two years. the centre tries to get to know local people and partners to develop and maintain relationships of trust. this is the basis for accessing local collections and knowledge and for fostering ethical approaches and mutual respect. where additional expertise is required, the centre encourages local partners to employ trained historians and heritage workers already living in their region. part of the centre’s role is to strengthen the heritage skills and research capacity in communities. the centre, in turn, learns a great deal from the partnerships. among the benefits in bringing trained and untrained people together in local partnerships is that in many cases the research continues after the project is completed. new heritage skills are developed in local government organisations and the communities. the centre’s virtual museum model is ideally suited to research partnerships across local government areas and the documentation of in situ collections in context. the stories and meanings can be documented and presented on the web without the need to collect the items from families, communities and private owners who may be loathe to donate them to a city based museum. the centre encourages people to retain the objects and documentation as family public history review | petersen 41 heritage items to be passed down through generations along with family photo albums. in other cases, migration heritage objects are donated to local museums. the documentation and family, community and private individuals’ connections are maintained and continued in the region. meredith walker developed a working definition of migration heritage for the centre to assist the sector which tended to confuse migration heritage with multiculturalism, a government policy and model for settlement. the definition is published on the centre’s website: all people in australia share the legacy of migration. migration heritage is the legacy of people’s experiences of leaving one country and culture, travelling, settling in and adapting to a new culture and place, and becoming familiar with it and its people, and continuing and adapting traditional culture. this legacy can be found in many things such as personal belongings, community collections, language, food, music, beliefs, traditions and places all of which have significance for individuals or groups.15 the centre’s model is that of a heritage organisation separating the processes of identification and conservation from interpretation. heritage collections are a form of historic evidence that can take people to another time and place and remember experiences they might otherwise have forgotten. as primary sources of evidence, if documented properly, they will help us communicate the history of migration and settlement in our museums and websites in the future and hopefully be handed down through the generations. like other types of heritage or primary source material, collections provide historical information about people’s experiences, ways of life and relationships with the environment. they also help us to learn about people who may have been left out of written historical accounts, including migrant communities. the centre has commissioned and managed some 40 research projects, fairly equally shared between city and country from 2004-10. so what has worked and what has failed? in the early years it commissioned state-wide overarching ethnic histories, sometimes with community liaison officers.16 while these public history review | petersen 42 successfully documented small numbers of state significant places and collections – perhaps rather obvious ones – they tended to universalise the experiences of migrants across different cultures, generations and regions. the histories dissolved communities that exist within communities and did not meaningfully access regional heritage places and collections or necessarily engage with local people who knew about them.17 migrants were not always given a voice. the overarching nature of the histories did not go to the level of researching local families, communities and private individuals or buildings, cultural landscapes, town or regions – so the histories were not particularly useful for collections survey research because all collections are associated with places and people, or for recording associated oral history. interactions between different ethnic groups and local communities were usually not recorded in the histories. rather than working through peoples’ associations with their countries of birth, the centre has looked at twentieth century migration and settlement as a series of chapters in australian history – reflecting changing federal government migration policies as entry or restriction points – and working through regions and places where different migrant groups have settled. post second world war migration and settlement can be researched through the regions surrounding the 38 known migrant accommodation centres that settled migrants to work in local industries, often under assisted passage schemes. migrants were given temporary accommodation in exchange for two years work on government projects or in facilities.18 work, worship and recreation places have also proved a useful means to focus histories and record heritage legacies.19 a notable feature of locally based research, as opposed to ethno-specific histories, is the way it uncovers relationships between different ethnic groups and local communities, and in many instances, shared experiences of the same heritage places. the centre does work ethno-specifically when communities approach it to develop partnership projects. it assists communities with skilled staff or volunteers and sustainable strategies to record and interpret their history and heritage. these collaborative projects have been particularly successful. the centre tries to be balanced and inclusive of small and large community groups, ensuring that betterestablished communities are not served at the expense of smaller ones. public history review | petersen 43 after decades of multicultural arts and associated migration exhibitions there is now a degree of transference across communities where former migrants give the sorts of responses they think museum workers want to hear, constructions around their community’s ‘cultural contributions’, ‘celebration’ or ‘successful migrants’ for example, or offers of traditional costume or other cultural items as migration exhibition objects. in this regard, the access gallery model used by centralised museums can be fraught with difficulty. this includes the potential limitations of working ethno-specifically and also for curators to treat other people’s cultures as exotic. alternatively, a commissioned history, and using thematic and typology studies to document objects and associated memories, is useful for prompting and anchoring migration and settlement memories in historic evidence, and focussing recollections on the sorts of experiences that might be otherwise regarded by people as unimportant. the centre’s major typology study belongings-post second world war migration memories and journeys, curated and co-ordinated by andrea fernandes has recorded 150 oral histories of migrants, in people’s homes across the state and documented over 400 privately owned photographs and migration collections through research partnerships and andrea fernandes’ own interviews. the project has a series of prompt questions to anchor the oral history to dates, collections and places, in a bid to map the migration. the participant is also given ample opportunity to tell their story in their own words and at their own pace.20 these memories linked to objects, images and places can often be more specific and vivid than traditional oral histories. the photos of conditions in the migrant accommodation centres taken with the box brownies of former migrants participating in belongings are in stark contrast to the thousands of images held by the national archives of australia taken by federal government employed photographers which look very much like propaganda photos in comparison. these official photographs are still used as a form of curatorial shorthand and are heavily featured in australia’s migration exhibitions because of inadequate community collection surveys in the exhibition research and development phase. migration memories show the variation in conditions at migrant accommodation centres during the decades and often show a system public history review | petersen 44 straining to cope with numbers. they also show a very human aspect – tears, people crying at night, grief, brutal and insensitive administrations – are strong themes across the decades represented in the oral histories. the pain and suffering of post second world war migrants are under-represented in many histories and exhibitions – and the experiences of migrants are more diverse and complex than the museum exhibition clichés of suitcases, rotten food and lousy coffee. 21 recent exhibitions in regional museums and art galleries like the bonegilla story at the albury library museum (2009), fairfield: evolution of a migrant city at the fairfield city museum and gallery (2008), half a world away at the orange regional gallery (2007), from all four corners at the museum of the riverina (2007), the other side of the world at the tweed river regional museum (2007) and many others across new south wales reflect recent scholarship and research partnerships with the centre. they draw nuanced narratives from material culture collections and associated oral histories and are helping rewrite our migration histories. in the rather adult world of the web, the centre has been able to move away, to a significant extent, from the more sanitised and celebratory nature of many migration narratives. the web permits more detailed contextual histories and higher word counts than physical exhibitions.22 the centre’s use of history and heritage method drawn from all available forms of historic evidence enables it to present raw and otherwise hidden histories such as the internment of australians from german backgrounds during world war one,23 a curious omission from the australian war memorial’s website and exhibition program, and disturbing memories of former refugees and holocaust survivors. the centre’s thematic study about the child migration scheme at fairbridge farm school, molong with the fairbridge heritage association was researched by david hill in 2007 and culminated in his book the forgotten children.24 on 16 november 2009, former prime minister kevin rudd made a formal apology in the federal parliament to the ‘forgotten australians’. 500,000 people, including over 7000 former british child migrants, were part of the apology, which acknowledged the many instances of neglect and abuse that was the result of their time in government institutions, church organisations, orphanages, homes or foster care. many people were shocked not only by the loneliness and limited education provided, but disturbingly, more than half of the 39 public history review | petersen 45 oral histories of the former migrants, now in their 60 and 70s, recorded physical and sexual abuse. ten unedited transcripts appear in the centre’s online exhibition entitled the forgotten children.25 in 2010, this research, and additional oral histories by andrea fernandes for the centre’s belongings project, informed the australian national maritime museum’s exhibition on their own: britain’s child migrants. collection surveys and the objects reflected the basic conditions and deprivation. smiley bayliff still has a cheque for $1.22 from when he finally left fairbridge farm – his earnings for working there less the farm’s boarding expenses. he recalls, the fairbridge account held your trainee [earnings] and anything people sent. i ended up with $1.22 after all that. i couldn’t cash it because it made me angry. the bank book pages were cut out [so] you didn’t know what money was taken. it shows you the deceit of the fairbridge society.26 when the centre commenced a new project recording video histories with refugees who arrived after 1974, it was commonly believed that refugees tended not to have objects because they fled their countries, lost or traded their personal possessions along the way. the centre’s survey by curator andrea fernandes is finding that refugees do have objects that were secreted away that tell us much about the horrors of fleeing. sometimes the objects were sent to people many years after settling in australia and sometimes they are newly created to help people make sense of their experiences. phiny ung, a former cambodian refugee, fled phnom penh for bangkok and then settled in sydney via brisbane in 1980 has 90 drawings from memory of harrowing experiences. her video history is on the home page of the centre’s website, bunheang, my husband, is trying to put all of his memory into the drawing. we cannot take any photo, we cannot keep anything at all apart from our brain that we witness that kind of horrible situation. we sit together every evening when i arrived in brisbane so we can remember everything to start to draw. after it’s built up for more than 90 drawings, then he start to show people.27 in addition to objects, intangible forms of heritage such as dancing or cooking traditional meals are worth recording and have assisted the centre in recording the experiences of former refugees. like objects, intangible forms of heritage allow former migrants to talk openly public history review | petersen 46 about experiences that might not otherwise be recorded by a traditional oral history interview. rather than the traditional dichotomy of tangible and intangible heritage, object based research is often a window and pathway into the intangible aspects of heritage – or vice-versa. there are limitations to the centre’s work. working in english and presenting history on the web to an english speaking audience distorts the research. it reflects the experiences of communities of former migrants who are better assimilated in australian society. this limitation occurs in the work of all australian migration museums and the heritage sector generally. many elderly migrants have lived isolated by their language barriers. their experiences in the labour market and relative disadvantage in the community would be worth researching as a counterpoint to migrants who successfully learned english. their living cultures and traditions might also be different to those adapted by english speaking migrants. the centre’s work began some years too late to fully explore the experiences of the first wave of post second world war migrants. many had died, others were too frail and ill. some had moved into aged-care accommodation and objects and photos and associated memories were lost in the process. the centre’s project with orange city council, half a world away, became an intergenerational history project where the families of the elderly migrants facilitated and assisted their parents when they experienced difficulty in participating. the memories of the children of migrants and the experiences of intergenerational exchange and adaptation of traditions, cultural practices and languages are worth recording. the centre’s 2004 strategic plan focussed, though not exclusively, on first hand memories of elderly migrants and their collections. this history and heritage legacy had been poorly documented by new south wales’ museums (the state’s historians had also failed to engage with material culture when researching migration history) and was in danger of being lost for posterity. how will this major chapter in australia’s twentieth century history be mediated to students of australian history through collections and stories in our museums or on our websites in 50 years time? the work with elderly migrants has often been in the presence of their children and family for moral support or assistance with language. sometimes the oral histories have been dialogues between public history review | petersen 47 elderly people and memories of other family members. the centre’s models are not rigid but are adjusted to circumstances of families, communities, private individuals and project partners. working in communities and through volunteers requires a loose and exploratory approach to heritage method, rather than rigorous. sometimes the methods have not been more than an outline to work through to get collections documented. the quality of the work depends on the human element of local personalities, relationships, skills and interests. communities do not always know about their cultural heritage. they cannot, and do not always, want to give us clear answers to the questions we as heritage workers want answers to. in the macedonian aprons: hidden treasure partnership project, which later became the ties with tradition: macedonian apron designs exhibition at the powerhouse museum,28 heritage consultant and volunteer meredith walker researched aprons belonging to elderly women in a daycare group run by the illawarra macedonian welfare association at port kembla near wollongong. meredith walker (who pioneered the use of ebay alerts in a typology study as an adjunct to on the ground and face to face apron collections surveys) found that even working through an interpreter, the group of 23 elderly women were not able to decode the meanings behind the patterns and colours of their 40 hand woven village aprons, brought to australia in the 1960s and 70s. this was even though her research uncovered that the patterns and colours were distinctive to their villages. the aprons were perhaps as much a part of their traditions and identities as rugby or football team colours. one woman alluded to the red splashes of colour pattern on black wedding aprons as being associated with blood and wedding nights – but she was too embarrassed or did not know how to elaborate on this to another woman from outside her community. a broader sample of aprons and further interviews are needed to progress this research. although it might seem obvious, it is important to define the community being researched, have a clear project rationale, a brief and an agreed research or heritage method. it produces better quality research than an ad hoc unstructured approach of a heritage worker going out into the community – or a community gaining access to a museum. it also assists heritage workers and communities to shed any preconceived notions or constructions about the migration and public history review | petersen 48 settlement history, establishing a clear process for research and community participation and engagement. a research or heritage method is also useful for museums to manage potential political interference in the form of community leaders keen to infuse their interests in the work, and also to defend conflict with rival communities. sometimes local leaders are keen to be featured (highlighting their political achievements in the community) alongside the oral histories of ‘ordinary’ residents in the centre’s projects. they are able to be dissuaded when they do not fit the project criteria or method. the ties with tradition: macedonian apron designs exhibition at the powerhouse museum attracted an email campaign of complaints from a minority of people angry about the use of the word ‘macedonian’ to describe the aprons from the former yugoslav republic of macedonia, even though this was clearly stated in the exhibition. the centre was able to clarify that the aprons were researched through a typology study and selected from a group of elderly women attending the port kembla day group, run by the macedonian welfare association, who preferred to describe their cultural background as ‘macedonian’ in its efforts to quell speculation that the exhibition had a broader political agenda.29 using a thematic approach is not so much about placing limitations on research but simply the need for any history or heritage project to have a clear topic for investigation. this is preferably negotiated with input from local communities and framed after a review of histories previously written. heritage organisations with limited resources wisely focus their programs on heritage at immediate risk of being lost. during the last six years, many elderly people who participated in the centre’s oral history and collection documentation projects have died, but their memories and heritage legacy lives on. the centre, as a virtual museum, is not presenting a single and centralist grand narrative of the state’s migration history and heritage legacy. its website is a mosaic of regional histories and heritage legacies: places, collections of objects and photographs, oral and video testimonies; that reflect a diversity of voices. these complete and illuminate other narratives of australian history with everyday memories of migration and settlement that are closer to people’s experiences than research produced by outsiders. the public history review | petersen 49 centre’s research is source material that is assisting australian historians in rethinking and rewriting the state’s histories. every project has advanced the knowledge of the state’s migration and settlement history in some way. the places, collections and associated memories that document this major chapter in twentieth century australian history will be useful for highlighting the experiences of the post second world war wave of migrants in australian museums after that generation dies. the result is a legacy for the next generation and a resource for historians, communities, artists and writers. e n d n o t e s 1 webber, k. 2005, australia’s migration history, belongings: post-second world war migration memories and journeys (online). available: http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/belongings/ (accessed 5 october 2010). 2 the melbourne immigration museum advertises in the age newspaper inviting communities to have an exhibition in the museum through a competitive application process. 3 communication with kylie winkworth, nsw migration heritage centre, panel of advisors and former powerhouse museum trustee. 4 nsw ministry for the arts, ‘new body to showcase migrant heritage’, arts bulletin, august 1998. 5 john petersen, ‘migration heritage centre, state of new south wales, sydney, australia’ in l. prencipe (ed) migration museums, centre for migration studies, rome, no 167, 2007, pp556-564. 6 international council of museums statutes 2007, definition of museums (online). available: http://icom.museum/who-we-are/thevision/museum-definition.html (accessed 20 october 2010). 7 john petersen, 2007, the museum, democracy and domesticity: who’s in whose web, paper presented to museums australia national conference (online). available: http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au (accessed 20 october 2010); jennifer barrett, museums and the public sphere, blackwell publishing, west sussex, 2011. 8 ‘migrant hostels in new south wales, 1946-78’ national archives of australia, fact sheet, no 170 (online). available: http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/publications/fact-sheets/fs170.aspx (accessed 20 october 2010). 9 petersen, the museum, democracy and domesticity: who’s in whose web, op cit. 10 john petersen, movable heritage principles, nsw heritage office, parramatta, 2000; objects in their place: an introduction to movable heritage, nsw heritage office, parramatta, 1999. the carr government’s 1999 cultural policy noted in the museum section that “our policies uphold the principle of communities retaining heritage collections in the places where they have most significance”. public history review | petersen 50 11 meredith walker and peter marquis-kylie, the illustrated burra charter: good practices for heritage places, australia icomos inc., sydney, 2004; sharon sullivan and mike pearson, looking after heritage places: the basics of heritage planning for managers, landowners and administrators, melbourne university press, carlton, 1995. 12 kylie winkworth and roslyn russell, significance 2, heritage collections council, canberra, 2001. 13 this evolution in thinking is due to a continuity of methodology development with the influence and support of kylie winkworth on the centre’s panel of advisors from 2003-10 and the influence and support of both kylie winkworth and meredith walker on the nsw heritage office’s movable heritage project reference group 1998-02. 14 meredith walker and kylie winkworth, places, objects and people: retaining significant relationships – a discussion paper, australian heritage commission and museums australia, canberra, 1995. 15 walker, m. 2004. frequently asked questions, nsw migration heritage centre website (online). available: http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/about-us/frequently-askedquestions/#7 (accessed 21 october 2010). 16 later the iemma government’s state plan included the work of the centre under the plan for ‘building harmonious communities’ which encouraged it to draw communities together in its work. in reality, the state plan amplified the way the centre was already working rather than setting it a new direction. 17 petersen, the museum, democracy and domesticity, op cit. 18 mary hutchinson has described the commonwealth government’s assisted passage schemes and provided insight into the administration of migrant centres. non-british migrants were directed to work on government projects under a two year work contract while british migrants could choose their location and type of employment. the newly arrived displaced persons or assisted migrants were housed in temporary and basic accommodation provided by the government until they could afford their own. after two years, rent was paid by those able to find private employment. mary hutchinson, ‘accommodating strangers: commonwealth government records of bonegilla and other migrant accommodation centres’, in public history review, vol 11, 2004, pp 63-79. 19 elisabeth edwards, half a world away: postwar migration to the orange district 1948-1965, orange city council, 2007 is a good example of the benefits of recording oral histories and collections to understand and document the community history of former migrants and the history of a place – in this instance the district of orange and the westinghouse factory. 20 a. fernandes, belongings: post-world war 2 migration memories and journeys, paper presented to moving cultures, shifting identities conference, flinders university, adelaide, australia, 2008 (online). available: www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/belongings/aboutbelongings/belong ings-paper (accessed 19 october 2010); janis wilton, ‘belongings: oral history, objects and an online exhibition’, public history review, vol 16, 2009, pp1-19. public history review | petersen 51 21 john petersen ‘settled and unsettled: accommodating post-second world war migrants in new south wales’, history magazine, no 92, 2007, pp10-12. 22 the conventions and narrative constructions used in migration museum exhibitions are summarised by jennifer cornwell, fruits of our labour: the history of griffith’s italian museum, griffith city council, 2007, p1. 23 thompson, s. 2006, zivil lager (internment camp) world war one prisoners of war at trial bay gaol (online). available: http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/zivillager/history. shtml. (accessed 19 october 2010). stephen thompson, curator nsw migration heritage centre, has documented the material culture of world war one prisoners of war following the centre’s partnership with the nsw department of environment and conservation in 2004. it commissioned a history of internment by gerhard fischer and nadine helmi. this body of research will assist the museum of sydney’s exhibition in partnership with the centre, the enemy at home, in 2011. 24 david hill, the forgotten children, random house, sydney, 2007. 25 nsw migration heritage centre, 2009, the forgotten children (online). available: http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/fairbridge (accessed 19 october 2010). 26 fernandes, a with assistance from hill, d. interview with smiley bayliff (online). available: http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/belongings/bayliff /. (accessed 19 october 2010). 27 fernandes, a. 2010, interview with phiny ung (online). available: http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/homepage (accessed 19 october 2010). 28 powerhouse museum in association with macedonian welfare association inc., ties with tradition: macedonian apron designs, powerhouse publishing, sydney, 2009. 29 local greek macedonians were also been invited to participate in the original project. various contributors and (author) responses, october 2007, nsw state government promoting irredentism (online). available: http://www.greeksoccer.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=235056620&st =0&p=1053123706&#entry1053123706 (accessed 27 august 2010). regaining authority: setting the agenda in maori heritage through the control and shaping of data gerard o’regan public history review, vol 13, 2006, pp95-107 here is an air of conflict to any discussion on the heritage of now minority indigenous groups colonised by the west. indigenous assertions of ownership are fuelled with the grief of dispossession of places, traditions and ancestral remains. they are shrouded with historical, and sometimes ongoing, impoverishment of peoples. if a discussion concerning indigenous heritage does not directly express a tension, then the chances are that it is reporting a new initiative implicit in which is the recent resolution of a past pain. over fifteen years ago layton’s conflict in archaeology of living traditions showed a recognition of the failure of outside research interests to match the concerns of indigenous communities, and the belief by some that the only resolution to the issues was indigenous people taking control over access to their own past.1 in the pursuit of such control the interests and values of the indigenous and non-indigenous parties are often contested in a framework of rights – indigenous rights, human rights, property rights, perhaps native title, and, particularly in new zealand, ‘treaty rights’. in introducing discussion over fifteen years ago that critiqued a narrow and supposedly empirical biological treatment of indian remains in america, layton notes that ‘within the data lies part of the evidence that indigenous burials belong to an alternative cultural tradition. the issue… is one of the right to cultural self-determination, to religious freedom, not the suppression of the objectivity.’2 it is clear from this that the contest for authority over heritage values is often principled and theoretical. this article develops the view that the control of heritage hinges equally on the practical matter of having access to and the ability to shape the data. such information allows the knowledgeable party to set the agenda for the heritage item, regardless of any principled statements and claims. it is suggested here that traction for indigenous peoples in determining the future of their cultural treasures comes with securing that data. only then are they able to reset it in a way that recognises their cultural values and priorities, and a way that most appropriately serves the future of their culture. this idea is explored here through a historical review of the work of ngai tahu, a maori tribe of the t public history review, vol 13, 2006 96 south island of new zealand firstly considering koiwi tangata (tribal human remains) held in museum collections, and the secondly, ngai tahu’s rich rock art heritage. in the course of a twenty-year career in maori heritage management, i have had an active hand in both the series of events case studied. the historical approach adopted in this discussion loosely mirrors my professional involvement in the sector and any observation not otherwise referenced in the following is drawn from my own experience of the event. koiwi tangata: human bones introducing current discussions on the archaeology of indigenous people, smith and wobst note that still ‘without a doubt, the area of greatest contention and potential for conflict is the treatment of the dead’.3 the furore over the ‘ancient one’/‘kennewick man’4 demonstrates how this issue can remain a persistent barrier to resolving relationships between archaeology, museums and the indigenous peoples. a decade and half earlier some american indians were engaged in the intergenerational training of tribes people in preparation for ‘a very long war against those enemies who seek to destroy indian religious practices, customs, and traditions.’5 at the same time in new zealand archaeologists had long been felt by maori to endanger the dead, but attitudinal shifts were afoot among both tribes and the heritage sector6. even by 1985 when i started with the national museum of new zealand, the maori human remains had already been removed from display. this reflected a respect for maori values regarding the display of ancestral remains that was already entrenched in the new zealand museum curators of the day, although it did not then extend to the display of other human remains including those of egypt and some other pacific islands.7 then the focus of activity regarding maori human remains were efforts by the staff and late maui pomare to quietly repatriate to new zealand some of the moko mokai (preserved heads) that had been taken from new zealand during the colonial period. it was also about that time that some new zealand museums holding human remains relevant to ngai tahu introduced new or revised policies on such collections including the then national museum (1988), canterbury museum (1991) and the southland museum and art gallery (1988). a feature common among these museum policies was that any action on koiwi tangata would be at the discretion of the respective museum director.8 this was intended to recognise the high level consideration demanded by the sensitivity of the issue to maori who would also be consulted in the course of any development. despite this shift to formally accounting for maori cultural values, the museum policies were inherently written from a museum perspective and avoided the most fundamental of concerns of maori. these were that, firstly, the decisions over the remains were not being made by those with an ancestral cultural connection to the deceased and, secondly, that the ongoing holding of bones in museum collections continued the desecration of the original burial. public history review, vol 13, 2006 97 at about the same time otago museum in dunedin initiated a review of its policy on human remains and initiated consultation with ngai tahu towards this. rather than see another museum policy developed that pulled up short on the tribal values, local ngai tahu encouraged otago museum to hold back while the tribe developed its own policy statement. the idea of developing such a tribal policy was promoted to the 1991 annual tribal gathering with the result that a committee responsible to the tribal council, te runanganui o tahu,9 was established to tackle the task. the committee membership included ngai tahu professionally involved in museums and archaeology as well as members dealing with koiwi tangata at a grass-roots level at runanga (local tribal organisations). it was therefore able to ensure that the policy clearly addressed issues of concern to museums and anthropology, as well as other matters internal to the tribe. three years in the making, koiwi tangata: te wawata o ngai tahu e pa ana ki nga taoka koiwi o nga tupuna aimed to give full expression to the tribe’s cultural values without being unduly constrained by the interests of museums. it made some blunt statements including: 2.0.1: the only group of people who have the right to manage the [ngai tahu] human remains identified below is the tribal authority of ngai tahu whanui. 2.0.2: …the implementation of this policy must ensure the return of any of our koiwi tangata to our kaitiakitanga [guardianship] and to a location within our tribal rohe [territory]. 2.0.3: ngai tahu whanui has a clear preference that wherever possible koiwi tangata in situ should not be disturbed and that the integrity of the burial remains intact. 2.0.4: … numerous of our koiwi tangata have been removed from burial and have found their way into public, and possibly private, collections. the iwi [tribe] considers the collecting and possession of our koiwi tangata by anyone other than ourselves as abhorrent and culturally insensitive in the extreme. 2.4.13: in respect of koiwi tangata currently held in collections and where reburial is the preferred option…10 the committee identified three general goals with regard to museums that must result from implementation of the policy: authority and control over the bones of our tupuna [(ancestors)] must be re-vested in the tribe and not maintained by museums. public history review, vol 13, 2006 98 were academic research on koiwi tangata to continue it must be on terms sensitive and accountable to the tribe. wahi tapu (designated rooms) operated under tribal authority should be formed in selected museums to facilitate the management and research of koiwi tangata.11 the policy was formally adopted by the tribal council in 1993 and was intended as a starting point for negotiations with the museums. it gave careful attention to practical management issues such as storage of bones and identifying the legitimate tribal connection to particular bones. it was hoped that this would allow discussions with museums to focus on the key question which was whether or not the tribal remains should be returned to tribal control. this was the question te runanganui o tahu presented to a meeting of southern regional museums at arowhenua marae with an expectation of hard negotiations to follow. what followed was entirely unexpected. subsequent to the gathering, in a landmark decision for new zealand museums, the southland museum revised its own policy in favour of the tribal aspirations noting that the ‘southland museum and art gallery acknowledges the ngai tahu policy on koiwi tangata of june 1993 and agrees to place its research collection of maori human remains under ngai tahu management and authority...’.12 as part of southland museum's new policy therefore, a wahi tapu for koiwi tangata was to be constructed within the non-public storage area. in advising the tribe of the acceptance of ngai tahu policy, the museum sought direction as to how the wahi tapu room should be set up. the tribe was totally unprepared for this and was at a loss without having any clear understanding of the quantum and detailed nature of the collections held. this was perhaps the first inkling of the fact that authority over any remains could only be realised with a clear appreciation of the data associated to the koiwi. as it was, the tribe was dependent on the advice and good services of the museum staff to effect the new arrangements. the wahi tapu was formally dedicated by iwi in a special ceremony on 14 february 1994. one of the most contentious issues within maorimuseum relationships had been addressed in southland.13 it is doubtful that the stance of the medium sized southland museum set a benchmark that the major museums felt compelled to rise to. the managerial attitudes of otago and canterbury museums were already generally favourable towards the ngai tahu propositions, but the proactive approach of their small southern counterpart may have helped galvanise the readiness with which the tribal policy was accepted. whatever the case, in july 1994 the otago museum trust board agreed in substance to the tribe’s policy position and established a wahi-tapu room under tribal authority in august of that year14. the small voluntary run clyde historical museum contacted the tribe asking if it would receive a maori skull that had been found locally and placed in the museum’s care. the then public history review, vol 13, 2006 99 museum of new zealand te papa tongarewa (previously national museum of new zealand, now te papa) accepted the policy position of the tribe but sought to defer a return of the bones due to the intense redevelopment it was undergoing. nonetheless, it responded to tribal prodding and prioritised the return of ngai tahu bones held in wellington which were mostly received into the otago museum wahi tapu in march 199815. canterbury museum and the ngai tahu runanga in that region had operated in line with the policy for some years although it wasn’t formally accepted by that museum until september 1998. this left one collection outstanding, that of the anatomy department of the university of otago. it was the biggest. the anatomy department acknowledged aspects of the iwi policy but wanted to have a wahi tapu established in that institution. the wish to retain the bones in that institution was at odds with the tribal preference for a single wahi tapu in dunedin based at the otago museum. it also cast a doubt among tribal members as to the fullness of tribal authority that would be realised. at that time the wider university of otago engaged in a treaty of waitangi audit which reviewed the institution’s overall relationship with maori. discussions with the anatomy department went on hold during this process, but a concern to see the re-vesting of the ancestral remains was a key part of tribal submissions to those conducting the audit. over this period the tribe also put on hold developments around the management future of koiwi held in the other museums so as not to unduly influence discussion with university of otago. at the conclusion of the treaty audit a return of koiwi to the tribe was negotiated with the university which included an opportunity for the anatomy department to ensure current research projects were completed. the team from the anatomy department then worked with the tribe to transfer several hundred koiwi to the nearby wahi tapu at otago museum in may 2003. at this point ngai tahu had gained authority over all the koiwi tangata it knew of being held in new zealand public museums. the tribe had simply stated its position. in some cases it did not even have to wait for response, and in some it simply had to wait politely for a while. even where the tribal position was not fully accepted in the first instance, nor was it vehemently contested – at least not to the tribe – and after a slightly more prolonged wait the bones were returned to tribal care. whatever the case, it is noteworthy that the terse relations, hard negotiations and painful conflict that might have been expected didn’t eventuate. ngai tahu got the bones back without a fight. despite the apparent position of authority the runanga now had over almost 90016 registered human remains, any action or decision making was still dependent on the advice of museum staff which in itself was shaped by nature of information available to them. all the information accompanying the bones had been collected and structured in a way to suit the museum curatorial and research needs. it did not at all reflect how runanga would either think about the bones or be able to make decisions concerning their future. in june 2004 i was engaged by the tribe to facilitate a number of regional meetings to progress public history review, vol 13, 2006 100 runanga management of the koiwi tangata. it was immediately recognised that before the runanga could set in train culturally appropriate management processes the data associated with all the koiwi had to be reconfigured into tribally meaningful categories. the two areas of particular concern were the geographical information about the source of the bones and the description of body parts. the tribal policy is clear that ‘koiwi tangata which can be provenanced to within a runanga rohe [territory] should be dealt with by the runanga concerned’.17 at a conceptual level the idea of assigning a guardian to specific remains based on a correlation of a museum recorded provenance with a geographically detailed tribal district is easy. at a practical level it is fraught with difficulty. in the first instance those making the correlation need to know in detail the different territories. in the case of ngai tahu’s eighteen runanga, these boundaries are generally clearly defined near the coast but loosely defined further inland. in some cases this leads to multiple runanga sharing interests as a result of the lack of definition, such as in the upper reaches of the waitaki river. such shared interests are not always agreed and even within the last decade there are several cases of neighbouring runanga contesting territories in inland canterbury, the west coast and regarding stewart island. in addition to this there are also areas that are traditionally recognised as places of shared interest among multiple runanga such as central otago where nine of the eighteen are recognised as having mana (authority). navigating these issues is necessary as the policy states that ‘provincial, and remains with a wider provenance, should be dealt with by the collective runanga concerned’.18 having identified the appropriate interest in a formal sense, there are further factors that need to be accounted for. for example, under the policy a runanga has an equal responsibility for all the ngai tahu bones found in its area, but there is a reality that those known to have come from the immediate vicinity of the marae (traditional community centre), or a known graveyard are likely to strike a more emotive cord than others that were unexpectedly found in far reaches of the territory where the runanga are not active on a daily basis. notwithstanding that, different families within a runanga may also feel more strongly about koiwi from localities where they have a more intense family association. another challenge is simply accurately matching museum provenance ascriptions to actual places. in the course of history place names change and what once was commonly known is now forgotten. this dogs museum records despite new zealand’s relatively short post-colonial history. the difficulties are exacerbated by multiple uses of the same place name. for example, the name kaik, meaning home or village, is used to refer to several different places around the otago coast. added to this may be poor spelling, unclear handwriting, a neglect to clarify the region of a specific locality or only a note of the regional provenance of a find. in this context it may be difficult for runanga to establish a koiwi’s provenance with sufficient confidence to allow for long term or definitive decisions on the future of the particular bones. public history review, vol 13, 2006 101 the second issue to be addressed with the data derived from museum catalogues was the manner in which body parts were described. at a simple level the scientific terminology adopted in some catalogues, and particularly that from the anatomy department, required translation into common english terminology. at a different level, there is an issue of the different tapu (sacredness) associated with different body parts. a broad theoretical position is that any part of an ancestor should be dealt with as if it is the ancestor. this would mean that all body parts will be managed with the same regard. yet the emotional response is markedly different when dealing with a whole skeleton rather than a single limb bone. this difference is more accentuated when a toe phalange is considered in comparison to a skull given the very scared nature of a person’s head in maori culture. accordingly the data was reconfigured for the tribal meetings into simple categories of (i) a part, being one or a few bones; (ii) skull, being the head of a person and; (iii) skeleton, being the representation of a whole person. with the data so reconfigured into these body part groupings and into culturally relevant geographic areas, the participants of the tribal meetings were able to pursue discussions with a clear focus on the issues at hand. they could see how many of the collections they might relate to as particular individuals as represented by whole skeletons and by skulls. they were clear as to which bones were from their immediate home areas and those that were from further a field for which responsibility may be shared with neighbouring runanga. equally importantly, it became clear that it is not known at all where almost 200 of the koiwi under tribal management were actually from. if cultural practice demanded the reburial of the bones, then the nature and scale of the task was becoming apparent. pragmatic discussions followed on whether or not isotopic analysis of the bones should be undertaken in an attempt to identify the general source of the koiwi in order that they may be re-interred closer to the ancestors’ origins. here some tribal members considered the benefits of getting the bones closer to their home outweighed the negativity associated with intrusive analysis. a point of interest raised at the meeting held in christchurch was an idea that perhaps unlocalised bones could be kept for research but that those of known provenance should be reburied. this particular suggestion came from an individual renowned in the tribe for his strong adherence to matters of tikanga (appropriate cultural practice). tribal members felt confident raising such suggestions as they could clearly see where their discussion was going and why. the koiwi tangata provide a case study of a process that has gone through all the stages of the assertion of authority, the reclamation of the heritage value and the reconfiguration of the associated information so that the heritage can now be managed in a manner that reflects the culture it is a part of. in this sense the very real control and authority over the heritage is now with the tribe. the transitional process has been different in regards to ngai tahu’s rock art heritage but, as illustrated in the following case study, the management and shaping of data remains pivotal. public history review, vol 13, 2006 102 rock art ngai tahu had historically been separated from a lot of its rock art heritage when lands on which the art was mostly found were alienated and access to the local resources denied through the colonial process.19 accordingly even though the vast majority of new zealand’s rock art is found within the tribal area of ngai tahu, and depictions of horses and western sailing ships clearly demonstrate that it continued into the historical period, painting and carving the rocks did not survive as a ‘living tradition’ into the modern era. by the mid 1980’s south island maori rock art had long been considered primarily as a subject of archaeological and museological interest.20 while the local branch committees of the new zealand historic places trust were actively fencing some publicly accessible rock art shelters a greater trust of the pakeha (nz european) scholars and curators was developing among southern maori.21 in 1988 the national museum together with the manawatu art gallery curated a touring exhibition of ngai tahi rock art that included some pieces that had earlier been removed from sites by previous generations of collectors and large photographic panels of some particularly spectacular rock art motifs. tipene o’regan, the then chairman of the ngai tahu maori trust board, wrote the foreword to exhibition catalogue while atholl anderson, a ngai tahu archaeologist, contributed an essay emphasising that the rock paintings appeared to be the intentionally allusive as to their meaning. despite these tribal contributions to the endeavour the exhibition remained a museum, rather than a tribally, organised and driven affair. heralding a change in the future of rock art management, anderson’s article raised the concern that research was obstructed by ‘the lack of any comprehensive catalogue of the south island rock drawings’ and that ‘it was a project worthy of proper funding before sheep, vandals and acid rain finish off what is left after the natural fading and exfoliation of the shelter walls’.22 he himself convened a meeting of interested rock art researchers to foster community buy into a pilot project. with funding from the 1990’s commission and new zealand historic places trust he then engaged a local archaeologist, brian allingham, as the field worker and got the project underway. allingham’s pilot study in north otago had astonishing results. there was a 300% increase in the number of recorded sites, and a considerable increase in the number of unrecorded motifs found in already documented shelters23. as anderson moved to a new position in australia he encouraged a gathering of tribal leaders to explore the possibility of ngai tahu formally adopting the management of the project. te runanganui o ngai tahu accepted this recommendation and in june 1993 the ongoing survey formally became a tribal programme. this was first time the tribe had ever taken responsibility for a project of this nature, and it faced serious funding challenges from the outset. this time preceded any settlement of the ngai tahu land claim and the major tribal energy and funding needed to be prioritised towards the completion of that claim. the results of the pilot study were used to demonstrate the merits of the project and thus contributed to successful sponsorship bid to the energy public history review, vol 13, 2006 103 corporation and the new zealand lottery grants board. this funding saw the project through its initial years and until ngai tahu, in a post land claim settlement position, could afford to pick it up more of the costs. a turning point in the management of the rock art heritage came about a decade ago. the tribal survey was underway and had continued to have success in identifying further sites. the profile the survey gained, although not huge in national terms, was sufficiently high in the small circles of rock art enthusiasts that the tribe came to be recognised as having the most up to date understanding of the rock art heritage. through some tribal publications and programmes more tribal members became conscious of this aspect of their heritage. the largely non-maori heritage organisations and landowners who had previously been leading the way in rock art heritage welcomed a greater maori participation and increasingly sought to engage with maori before acting. whereas some tribal members had had an occasional air of resentment about others in the community undertaking initiatives on the rock art without an adherence to tribal values, a growing recognition of tribal authority over the heritage saw runanga actively consulted with and more directly involved in the activity themselves. an example of this was te runanga o moeraki’s active role with the new zealand historic places trust in the redevelopment of caging and visitor facilities at the takiroa rock art site in the waitaki valley. such was the shift in attitude that there was minimal community resistance, and none directly expressed to the local runanga, when the tribe successfully looked to have the management of the historic reserve at takiroa and another nearby rock art shelter at maerewhenua re-vested in the tribe as part of the 1998 land claim settlement.24 from 1999 ngai tahu undertook several studies towards setting up a rock a centre that would be both a visitor attraction and a base for its rock art management programmes. the ongoing funding required proved prohibitive so the tribe decided not to proceed with the centre at that time, but did favour the formation of a rock art trust as vehicle for advancing various projects. the trust was established at the end of 2002 and became fully operational with the appointment of a rock art curator in july 2003. it’s roles are to continue the ongoing rock art site survey and monitoring work, promote the preservation of the art, develop relevant education programmes and ensure ngai tahu people are culturally enriched by this heritage. although only three years old and with most projects still in development, there are already some key factors emerging of interest to the current discussion. firstly, the trust and the local runanga who support it are widely recognised in the community as driving the rock art agenda. for example, whilst ngai tahu rejected the rock art visitor centre development on costs, several people and bodies in the south canterbury area are enthusiastic about such a centre and are confident they can secure the funding for it. technically these groups, or an entrepreneur among them, could establish such a centre themselves. instead they have petitioned the rock art trust to public history review, vol 13, 2006 104 undertake further feasibility studies and have provided considerable energy, support and finances to the trust to help achieve a successful outcome. secondly, while there is a community expectation that all people will benefit from the efforts of the trust, there is also recognition that it has a priority focus on achieving outcomes for ngai tahu tribal members. where once the focus on the rock art was a scholastic study of ‘ancient remnants from the remote past… seen as part of an academically imposed reference as primitive, early forms of expression’, now ensuring educational, employment and contemporary cultural opportunities for future generations of ngai tahu is accepted as an inherent part of the ongoing engagement with this heritage. indeed some of the current funding for the rock art centre study is conditional upon such outcomes. thirdly, and despite the favourable political environment highlighted in the above, the major restraint upon the rock art trust in realising its goals is the current nature of the knowledge base underpinning it’s work. the survey data upon which the credibility of trust has largely been founded remains in the archaeological format in which it has been recorded. as such it is a rich resource for archaeologists and conservators, but probably wouldn’t generate much enthusiasm in any wider audience. what the motifs represent, how they relate to each other and the space they are in are all things further archaeological research will expand upon drawing from the data in it current format. yet the interests of tribal members and groups are seldom that restricted. whilst ensuring the archaeological integrity of the information, the overall data needs to be reframed into a rich cultural reference base that reflects how ngai tahu people are likely to engage in the heritage in a living context. reconfiguring the information may include integrating other aspects of the environment such as trails, resource areas, rivers and other special sites towards multifaceted local landscapes that maori relate to. maori also think in terms of landscapes that bring together geographically dispersed places based on their common cultural significance.25 this is evident in the collections of place names that derive from particular maori traditions to form oral maps, such as that of kupe, an early polynesian explorer to come to new zealand.26 this is akin to the notion of a contextual cultural landscape such as stoffle et al have proffered for the late nineteenth century revivalist ghost dance movement among american indians and to which paiute rock art in kanbab creek, arizona, has been associated.27 a suggestion that the maori prophet te maiharoa conducted ceremonies that may have related to rock art28 may build towards a similar local example. the reshaping of the information is not just about how the rock art is integrated into a maori view of the past. arising from that view is how the art is relevant to future tribal initiatives. for example, as ngai tahu’s cultural renaissance continues to unfold some tribal members may one day look to restart the marking of places in the landscape. given that the practice has not been continued for over a century, some commentators may be dubious about the cultural integrity of such a development. the same doubt may have been raised public history review, vol 13, 2006 105 at times in regards to the revival in ta moko (tattooing) and in the playing of traditional maori musical instruments. yet these and other revived features of performing arts have over the last decade become well recognised and celebrated aspects of contemporary maori culture. in this light it is not unfathomable to think that the next generation of ngai tahu may re-engage in the practice of rock art. the key issue will be whether the archaeological survey information has been reshaped into a resource base capable of enthusing and informing such a future rather than one limited to another generation of archaeological scrutiny alone. discussion the processes of regaining authority over koiwi tangata and rock art heritage has differed significantly. ngai tahu’s authority in rock art management is underpinned by the information it now holds, albeit not yet configured for runanga use. in contrast it was an assertion of rights that saw the human remains in museums re-vested in the tribe. having reshaped the associated data, ngai tahu are now in a position of decision making authority in regards to koiwi tangata. it is worth noting that despite the heightened cultural sensitivity and emotion that surrounds human remains, they are perhaps the most straightforward part of maori cultural heritage to address. there are no competing commercial or private property rights. the collections are numerically small being in the hundreds, not thousands. the rationales for both scientific and tribal assessments of significance are reasonably straight forward. two major observations can be drawn from the case studies. firstly, the confrontation that ngai tahu might have expected regarding these two examples never really eventuated. there wasn’t a great struggle of reclamation in which the tribe had to endure a terse conflict over ownership. this is not to suggest though, that the management of maori heritage has been free of such struggles. allen documents several cases in relation to archaeological and wahi tapu values.29 ngai tahu once lead court action in an unsuccessful attempt to stop an ethnologist publishing what many thought was a dubious book on maori carving.30 local runanga in dunedin did not have to fight the fight, but they certainly benefited from the shift in museum attitude that evolved as ngati awa of the north island contested, and eventually won, the ownership and return of their carved meeting house mataatua. there have, then, been episodes in maori heritage management that are quite rightly described as ‘conflicts’. more recently, however, the greater shift within the professional heritage sector has been one of maori rights and values associated with tribal heritage increasingly being recognised. whilst this gives a sense of progress, in the same way as the tussle for the remains of the ancient one/kennewick man has set back the sense of trust that had been emerging between american indians and archaeologists under nagpra,31 so the conflict in new zealand over the foreshore and seabed act 2004 demonstrated how shallow progress based on notions of rights can be. the inability of intellectual property law to protect indigenous cultural rights sees public history review, vol 13, 2006 106 new encroachments on maori heritage from both industries looking for new branding opportunities and ‘new age’ groups eclectically re-crafting traditional cultures into contemporary lifestyles. following this, the second observation that can be drawn from the case studies is a confirmation that securing culturally relevant data is as crucial as any ‘fight for rights’ maori might have to engage in to recover authority over their heritage. this idea applies to a broad array of heritage values including the management of written and photographic archives, cultural sites, natural resources of cultural significance and artefact collections in museums. te papa’s national services32 has funded several partnership initiatives aimed at documenting museum holdings relevant to particular maori groups. registering places special or sacred to maori under the historic places act 1993 involves a research and documentation process in which the tribes articulate the significance of a place or landscape in maori terms. ngai tahu in otago have initiated the development of a cultural resource inventory that builds up site and landscape information within the local runanga. through these kinds of initiatives maori are increasingly having heritage information reframed into data sets relevant to them. the adage ‘knowledge is power’ resonates loudly in this discussion, yet ‘knowing’ the data requires a commitment of time and opportunity for tribes people to develop an intimate understanding of the treasures. there are then significant and long term resource implications. in regard to ngai tahu’s rock art and koiwi tangata, the ‘battle’ over recognition has been resolved without too much ‘battling’. over the next few years it will be interesting to see if the same result follows a reconfiguration of the heritage data in the more contested areas of sites on both private and public land, and the artefacts that are among the principal attractions of many museum galleries. if so, maori will be better equipped to set the agenda for maori heritage and ensure the treasures remain relevant to the culture of which they are a part. endnotes 1 robert layton (ed), conflict in the archaeology of living traditions, unwin hyman, london, 1989, p12. 2 ibid, p15. 3 claire smith and h martin wobst, decolonizing archaeological theory and practice, in claire smith and h martin wobst (eds), indigenous archaeologies, decolonizing theory and practice, routledge, oxon, 2005, p9. 4 for example see darby stapp and julia longenecker, pp.171-184, and joe watkins, pp189-203, in claire smith and h martin wobst (eds), indigenous archaeologies, decolonizing theory and practice, routledge, oxon, 2005. 5 jan hammil androbert cruz, statement of american indians against desecration before the world archaeological congress, in robert layton (ed), conflict in the archaeology of living traditions, unwin hyman, london, 1989, p195. 6 stephen o’regan, maori control of maori heritage, in peter gathercole (ed.), the politics of the past. one world archaeology vol. 12, unwin hyman, london, 1990, p100. 7 at the time the national museum displayed a complete skeleton in a ‘paupers grave’ adjacent to an egyptian mummy and a fijian skull was included in an animal bone exhibit. 8 karl gillies and gerard o’regan, murihiku resolution of koiwi tangata management, new zealand museums journal, vol 24, no 1, 1994, p30. 9 at the time ‘te runanganui o tahu’, now named ‘te runanga o ngai tahu’. public history review, vol 13, 2006 107 10 koiwi tangata: te wawata o ngai tahu e pa ana ki nga taoka koiwi o nga tupuna, the policy of ngai tahu concerning the human remains of our ancestors, te runanga o ngai tahu, christchurch, 1993. 11 karl gillies and gerard o’regan, ‘murihiku resolution of koiwi tangata management’, new zealand museums journal, vol 24, no 1, 1994, p30. 12 ibid, p31. 13 ibid. 14 pers.comm. dimitri anson, otago museum, 12/12/2005. 15 pers.comm. dimitri anson, otago museum, 12/12/2005. 16 a list of 898 koiwi was compiled by the author in june 2004 based on the records provided to ngai tahu development corporation by the anatomy department and the canterbury, otago and southland museums. this figure does not differentiate between the number of individuals bones under an entry, with some entreaties being a single bone and others being complete skeletons. 17 koiwi tangata: te wawata o ngai tahu e pa ana ki nga taoka koiwi o nga tupuna, the policy of ngai tahu concerning the human remains of our ancestors, te runanga o ngai tahu, christchurch, 1993, par 2.4.7. 18 ibid, par 2.4.8. 19 gerard o’regan, ‘the history and future of new zealand maori rock art’, before farming 2003/1, p286. 20 tipene o’regan, ‘ka tuhituhi o nehera’, in ka tuhituhi o nehera, drawings of ancient times, national museum of new zealand te whare taonga o aotearoa and manawatu art gallery, 1988. 21 ibid. 22 atholl anderson, ‘the art of concealment, some thoughts on south island maori rock drawings’, in ka tuhituhi o nehera, drawings of ancient times. national museum of new zealand te whare taonga o aotearoa and manawatu art gallery, 1988. 23 gerard o’regan, caring for rock art, new zealand historic places, no 50, new zealand historic places trust, wellington, 1994, p28. 24 o’regan, ‘the history and future of new zealand maori rock’, p288. 25 kai tahu ki otago natural resource management plan, kai tahu ki otago ltd, dunedin, 2005, p69. 26 new zealand geographic board, he korero purakau mo nga taunahanahatanga a nga tupuna, place names of the ancestors: a maori oral history atlas, new zealand geographic board, wellington, 1990. 27richard stoffle, lawrence loendorf, diane austin, david halmo, and angelita bulletts, ‘ghost dancing the grand canyon: southern paiute rock art, ceremony, and cultural landscapes’, current anthropology, vol 41, no 1, february 2000, pp11-41. 28 bill dacker, te mamae me te aroha, the pain and the love: a history of kai tahu whanui in otago, 1844-1994, otago university press, dunedin, 1994, p52. 29 harry allen, protecting historic places in new zealand, university of auckland, auckland, 1998, pp.4142. 30 stephen o’regan, maori control of maori heritage, ‘one world archaeology’, in peter gathercole (ed), the politics of the past, vol 12, unwin hyman, london, 1990, p98. 31 jeff van pelt, ‘bringing back the spirit; bringing back the truth’, in claire smith and h martin wobst (eds), indigenous archaeologies, decolonizing theory and practice, routledge, oxon, 2005, p185. 32 te papa is new zealand’s national museum based in wellington. its national services arm works with other museums and organisations to undertake locally relevant heritage projects throughout the country. galleyshellamsassoon public history review vol 20 (2013): 94–103 © utsepress and the authors issn: 1833-4989 ‘my country’s heart is in the market place’: 1 tom stannage interviewed by peter read tiffany shellam and joanna sassoon ollective memories within small communities have been shaped over generations to winnow out stories that they would rather silence. through this process communities come to a consensus about a version of the past with which they can comfortably live. these agreed historical stories, which are shaped by social and community forces, show the strength of the warp and weft which interweaves past and present. yet it is important to understand how a community comes to shape these agreed historical stories. tom stannage was one among many historians in the 1970s uncovering histories of australia which were to challenge national narratives and community memories. in 1971, tom returned to western australia after writing his phd in cambridge with the passion to write c public history review | shellam & sassoon 95 urban history and an understanding that in order to do so, he needed an emotional engagement with place. what he had yet to realize was the power of community memories in western australia to shape and preserve ideas about their place. as part of his research on the history of perth, tom saw how the written histories of western australia had been shaped by community mythologies – in particular that of the rural pioneer. he identified the consensus or ‘gentry tradition’ in western australian writing and named those he saw as its chief purveyors – the historian and state librarian dr james skyes battye and professors frank crowley and geoffrey bolton. tom’s histories were framed by his desire to show more complex inter-personal and community relations, experiences that likely drew on his childhood as the son of an anglican vicar. in teasing out histories of conflict, he showed how the gentry tradition of rural pioneer histories silenced those of race and gender relations, convictism and poverty which were found in both rural and urban areas. his versions of history began to unsettle parts of the perth community who found the ‘pioneer myth’ framed their consensus world-view and whose families were themselves the living links to these ‘pioneers’. tom saw that ‘the danger for any society is that one view of the past may get enshrined as an orthodox, or even authorized version, which by its nature is exclusive and partial and which contains and even cuts down potential alternative visions of the nature of our society.’2 however, what tom hadn’t realised was that in researching alternative versions of the past, he was transgressing the memory of a small and tightly knit community. as he presented his research, tom began to experience the continuing power of the social and political structures in western australia and what people were prepared to do to maintain the status quo. tom knew that robust debate was the way that historical knowledge progressed. but in researching and writing alternative histories of perth he discovered the depth and tenacity of the social and political forces that had hewn their own line between history, myth and community memory. in his 1985 paper ‘western australia's heritage: the pioneer myth’ he reflected that ‘there have been moments in western australia’s recent history when those putting an alternative view have been subjected not to the normal criticism that one might expect from within the trade or community, but by efforts made to prevent the publication of material and indeed even the writing of it’.3 tom had support from some colleagues, including diane barwick who was engaged in the development of the journal aboriginal history at the australian national public history review | shellam & sassoon 96 university. barwick wrote to tom about the perth community’s reaction to his 1985 paper: ‘i’m not surprised that you are the subject of libellous attacks by the lunatic right in’ western australia. she was more surprised that he had not been ‘tarred and feathered’: ‘if they ride you out of town on a rail you can build a humpy in our backyard’, she wrote.4 while history is necessarily political, too many historians have been subjected to personal attacks for the histories they have written from politicians, their colleagues and the community. peter read interviewed tom in 1991 as part of his research on ‘belonging’, as he was interested in tom’s sense of place in western australia and the suburb where he lived for most of his life, subiaco. during the interview tom reflected on the time when his personal and professional integrity was under attack as a result of his attempts to redraw the lines between history, memory and community. a segment of this interview was played at the australian historical association conference in woollongong in july 2013 in a session organized in honour of tom. the session theme ‘historians under attack’ also included peter read and lyndall ryan, both of whom, like tom, have experienced deep personal vilification for the histories that they dared to write. extract of interview stannage: …but the urban thing, i couldn’t see how one could write urban history, except at a theoretical level, without an engagement with an urban place that was meaningful. so, in 1971 i came back to perth on a one-year position as a lecturer in british history. i lectured in british history, finished the phd thesis which was in the satchel as it were, and immediately determined, in 1973, that i would write a history of perth, that i would now go back and do the urban history that i so badly wanted to do… and i found that i had an emotional commitment to that. over the next five or six years i realized that has drawbacks as well. my start point for that was your [peter read’s] observation about countering different ways of thinking about australia and presentations of australia, and problems i had in the mid seventiess. by beginning the history of perth, and by deciding then and there to move, apart from crowley altogether who was the great guru on western australian history, quite properly so, and then to start with all the primary sources all over again, and with all what i had experienced up to 1973-4 and in 1974 running for the first time my own australian history course, i began the task of writing the history of perth. public history review | shellam & sassoon 97 by 1976 i’d been down to places that no historians had been to – the vaults of the supreme court of western australia – where i found a west australian history totally unlike any i had ever experienced.5 i had moved from the political pages of the local newspapers to what i came to call the social pages. i don’t mean the society pages; i mean pages about the magistrates court proceedings, poor boxes, a whole range of things. by 1975 i was aware, too, of the henderson report on poverty. it was not released until late 1975, and as you know it has remained on the floor of parliament ever since.6 in 1976 i decided i would fire my first shots about what i was discovering about this place that we call perth in western australia, and i did so at a 50th anniversary lecture of the royal western australian historical society in western australia. it was called ‘uncovering poverty in australian history’. and i laid out the historiography of poverty internationally, and then to the astonishment of the audience, came in on western australia and drew from my research, examples of the way in which capitalist structures generate poverty, capitalist structures alienate aboriginal peoples etc etc. and the person moving the vote of thanks slammed the paper, the society refused to publish it initially, they finally agreed to publish it – after all it was one of their half a dozen anniversary addresses, and i had to agree to put dot dot dot dot after the initial of each poor person mentioned. and that’s how it was published in the journal of the royal western australian historical society.7 but i knew from that point what i wanted to do with perth was going to be problematical for this society, so my engagement with perth became a double-edged sword. it released i think, a lot of creative energy within me, and certainly enabled me actually to find a way of speaking to the urban history trade internationally. but it also caused me a great deal of pain locally. indeed when the people of perth [in 1979] was finally published, and it was done so only because of a political situation where two camps of liberals couldn’t decide on who was running the city of perth, that the book somehow slipped through and was published. but on the very day it was launched at least three or four members of the perth city council came up and didn’t thank me for the work, but slammed it. those sorts of things have remained but i guess i am older and sanguine about these things. the last big burst of knowing that you were running against a history which you were exposing in some sort of way, came in 1985 when i read a paper called ‘the pioneer myth’. it had basically picked up some of the ideas that marilyn lake and john hirst and others had been playing around with. and quite a lot had happened public history review | shellam & sassoon 98 to me between the mid 1970s and the mid 1980s. but this paper read at a summer school in perth, led me to having to defend myself and my practices as an historian to the vice chancellor, and to argue why i should not be dismissed and all that sort of thing. it was a very frightening year. a number of the older families had indeed contacted the vice chancellor. the objections were about scholarly research. that is to say that it was felt by some of the old families and certain political groups in perth that i had misused evidence available in the records of the battye library. i will give you a concrete example. i had used the word ‘captured’ in relation to an expedition led by charles harper and others in western australia in 1864. i needn’t tell you about the way they would take an aboriginal from one point, and when the aboriginal had reached the end of his territory he would run away, and they’d catch someone else, and so forth – that system. i thought this was fairly straightforward and i used the word ‘captured’. i’m in no doubt that was in fact what they did. i’d also quoted from the harper diaries in which he talks about the aborigines he met, one in particular being ‘a fit subject for dr darwin’. this is a very early reference actually, it was 1864 [and] it showed an alertness that i was quite ‘impressed’ by. so it was really about what i had written on aboriginal people. remember that it follows 1984, the land rights debate, the seaman land inquiry in western australia etc etc. it was a very sensitive time, mining companies were concerned, the pastoralist and graziers association remonstrated about my paper etc etc etc. it was all very tense. i had to spend private family money defending myself with barristers letters and things, and it was raised in connection with my application for a chair here. it was clearly used against me. one academic on this campus read a paper which was an all out attack on me, as an example of what had gone wrong with australian historical writing. he subsequently read that paper at an australian political studies conference, but the conveners of the conference and editor felt they couldn’t publish it and they didn’t, which was a good thing. read: the standard objection normally against that was ‘you are just a blow in from the east, you don’t know anything about western australian history’. this case is unusual as this was one argument they couldn’t use against you, because was that you were a local boy. did that make it better or worse? stannage: it made it worse for me. i had to take a private phone line because of abusive calls to my family. i arrived home from work one evening to find my wife shaking after someone had come to our place. i public history review | shellam & sassoon 99 don’t know what they thought they were going to do to me, but this person had just left and gone around the corner as i drove down the street. it was a very fraught time and it put a question mark to me as to whether i could continue with this sort of work in the same way. i did respond by insisting that that ‘pioneer myth’ paper be published in fact because it had been illegally taped, transcripts were being produced and passed around [by] people who were quite keen to see me, see my influence reduced and so forth. i look back on that time as a very difficult time, it was only six years ago so its still pretty fresh in my… read: basically you were arguing that the pioneers weren’t the heroic figures… stannage: the little pamphlet itself is, i think for an eastern states historian, and particularly one such as yourself, or henry reynolds, or lyndall ryan, or any people who have been engaged in the field would have thought it was relatively innocuous in 1985, but in the political climate here…8 i always tell my students that history is not written in a political or social vacuum. although i had said that for a decade in classes, i hadn’t actually sort of physically understood what that could mean until the mid eighties. read: so, no-one would say to you: ‘you don’t belong here’, which is what the standard objection would have been. did it have an affect upon you wondering if you ought to stay here, or was there any point in your identity as a perth citizen, or a western australian? stannage: i felt in most ways fairly secure in terms of my place in perth and this is partly because of football. you see football for me has not been just something that i played as a young man. but football and my professional history career have run together. at that time, i was a director of the west australian football league. now, that gives you a certain status in society. there was a constituency ‘out there’ which would never have believed that i was altogether bad, because of my status as a former player, indeed a state footballer, as a club selector, now a football director, indeed a director responsible for development of football in western australia from the little league up to national football. and there was, in a sense, a church constituency which would not believe that the tom stannage that they had known through the reverend stannage, with all it meant – talks to church groups over the metropolitan area over many years – could be all that bad, indeed public history review | shellam & sassoon 100 there might be something in what he was doing. there wasn’t a sort of infrastructure, a support network i could draw on because i decided very early on in all this, that i would rely on my own resources, that i would never ask anyone to stand along side me as it was putting them in a difficult position, especially not colleagues and students, which made it a bit lonely for a time, apart from wonderful family support. in that sense i didn’t feel as if i was going to be cut off from things. and indeed it worked out that way. a couple of years later i needed to walk down st georges terrace to raise money for a wa history foundation and companies like wesfarmers and town & country largely through football and personal contacts over the years, paid $25,000 no strings attached until we had half a million dollars to do some good things for wa history. we give out about a dozen awards each year now… so in that sense i didn’t feel… but i did feel, oh you learn all the time don’t you? i mean i had written about the strength of the old ideas and the way they survive crisis after crisis. and now i could feel their power in a different way. quite fascinating in that way. read: mainly old families objected…? stannage: it was linked to the pastoralists and graziers association in particular. i mean, they were under threat, pastoral leases were going to be coming up for review, it was a very tense time, and here was i saying quite a lot about the need for aboriginal assertiveness, independence and empowerment and the stripping away of ideas that would not carry us satisfactorily into the twenty-first century and laying them all out rather more clearly. you see, people who’ve known about european-aboriginal relations, like paul hasluck, decided many, many years ago that things known were not necessarily things that one would put in print. and you’ll find even in black australians published in about 1942,9 based on an ma thesis a bit earlier, he actually has in his preface, lines about some of the darker side of things but we won’t dwell on them because they don’t carry us through satisfactorily, don’t raise all this. and our generation of historians has raised them all, and the aboriginal people have raised them above all. so paul has always had difficulty with the newer interpretations and so forth. and he is a west australian of course, an eminent west australian. he and lady hasluck advised the state government here in 1979 that a statue should not be erected to yagan, because yagan was an outlaw. and this occasioned a huge controversy here in 1978-79 and it wasn’t until many years later coming up to the bicentenary that yagan was finally cast in bronze. so there are all those sort of things. i’d reviewed paul hasluck’s autobiography very public history review | shellam & sassoon 101 savagely in the uni journal. so, there was certainly a constituency out there that was prepared to put a black mark against me. but they couldn’t quite really succeed. and even paul hasluck was a great football follower and we talked at the local butcher shop. read: but of course yagan, if he had been alive today, might have wanted to get rid of not only those old cocky families, but might have wanted to get rid of you and me too. stannage: oh, of course! read: so how does that affect your sense of belonging in bassendean, or perth or anywhere else? stannage: i sort of feel moderately relaxed about all that. i feel i’m on a sort of odyssey, i’m not always sure of its projection… but i think that aboriginal people, for instance, are on their odyssey. there are points of intersection in both my life and theirs. for instance, i hadn’t expected twelve months ago to be chairing a museum task force which would, in the next eight months, generate, from an all-aboriginal working party, an 80-page report towards a co-ordinated aboriginal heritage policy for west australia. i don’t set out to do those things. i certainly don’t set out to tell anyone anything about how they should live out their lives. i certainly expect as a professional historian to be kicked around the place. i don’t think you become a professional historian unless you’re prepared to give and take criticism. and i certainly don’t expect in that case either, that poor people of west australia bow down and worship an historian who signaled that there was poverty in australian history! and i certainly don’t expect aboriginal people to necessarily think i’m a good thing. and indeed, if they think that i’m part of an ancient and oppressive paternalist system which they can do without, that they needn’t have friends like me, so be it. my own odyssey doesn’t really need them to give me strokes. read: and it doesn’t affect your own feeling of belongingness anywhere in particular? it’s a country that’s got to be shared? stannage: actually at a quite mechanistic part of that, i believe very strongly that the current attempt at national reconciliation, i think that – well i’ve been putting it with a different sort of vocabulary in the last couple of years, mainly in museum circles, about common agenda. it’s public history review | shellam & sassoon 102 about survival, it’s about love, it’s about a whole host of things which i think we need to edge towards. i don’t mean sacrificing things of great significance to us in the process. but oddly enough i think the political climate is so difficult in these areas at the moment that out of the difficulties can come a period of hope that national reconciliation may actually come about in the next few years. we are now a better informed peoples than ever before – thanks partly to the historians, thanks partly to the aboriginal people, thanks partly to the bloody mindedness of the people who wanted to take us back to the late nineteenth century. and, yeah, i feel quite hopeful about all that. i don’t feel threatened by it, i don’t feel i’m going to be left behind or anything like that. read: so coming back to the controversy, were you forced to retract anything, or was you own trajectory… stannage: i retracted nothing. comment the histories we write are shaped by the social, political and increasingly financial contexts of our host communities. when historians choose to run counter to the community collective memory, this tests the social ties that bind the power structures and the robustness of the historian alike. the jury may be out as to the continuing influence of the social and political forces that tom discovered were so tenacious in the 1970s and 1980s. tom’s analysis of the power of the ties that still bind the old families in western australia has shaped generations of history students. through the ‘pioneer myth’ he began to articulate the need to better understand the broader processes which serve to silence historians and their histories. for tom, the archive was always complicated. in his later life, he began to understand that the histories of the construction of the archives was another conduit to understanding the penetration of the pioneer myth and the way that communities construct the myths and histories that they live. acknowledgements this piece has been published with the permission of peter read and maria stannage. the lightly edited extracts come from an interview by peter read with tom stannage in 1992. endnotes public history review | shellam & sassoon 103 1 randolph stow, ‘the singing bones’, in howard sergeant (ed), new voices in the commonwealth, evans bros, london, 1968, pp37-38. tom wrote this quote on peter read’s kitchen wall when he and maria visited for dinner. 2 c.t. stannage, western australia's heritage: the pioneer myth, university extension monograph series, vol 1, university extension, university of western australia, 1985, p1. 3 ibid, p3. 4 letter to tom stannage, 26 september 1985, bari02167, series 10, box 4 ms 13521, state library of victoria. 5 the records of the supreme court are now held at the state records office of western australia. 6 ronald f. henderson, poverty in australia: first main report, april 1975, australia government commission of inquiry into poverty, australian government publishing service, canberra, 1975. 7 c.t. stannage, ‘uncovering poverty in australian history’, journal of the royal western australian historical society, vol 7, part 8, 1976, pp90-106. 8 ‘western australia's heritage’ 9 black australians: a survey of native policy in western australia, 1829-1897, melbourne university press, melbourne, 1942. the lowell experiment: public history in a postindustrial city, cathy stanton. amherst and boston: university of massachusetts press, 2006; pp304 photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index; paperbound (us) $24.95. owell 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’. stanton’s book is split into three parts. the first locates the lowell nhp in the context of the american public history movement. employing an ethnographic approach which draws on theories of cultural performance, this part broadly investigates contestation over the many practices of history making. part two examines guided tours of lowell while providing an historical geography of the region. importantly, it develops a critique of the ways in which professional public historians and historical practices have operated in the lowell experiment. and it looks at attempts to make critical connections between the present and the past. part three considers the overall failure of these attempts at historical connectivity. perceived tensions between history and heritage provide a major theme to the work. stanton takes issue with heritage detractors such as frans schouten who sees heritage as ‘history processed through mythology, ideology, nationalism, local pride, romantic ideas or just plain marketing into a commodity’ (p26). but the main thrust of the lowell experiment centres on the question: ‘how can places be made attractive as tourist sites without trivializing or erasing difficult and complex histories?’ (p7). stanton’s work places her squarely in the progressive – some would say radical – camp of the public history movement in the united states. she notes that the american movement ‘is rooted in part [my emphasis] in a politically progressive, socially democratic impulse to link scholarly historical inquiry with broad public participation and a critical questioning of the status quo’ (pxiv). but in a conservative political climate, and given the corporatisation of public history, she is forced to ask: ‘how much room is there for the progressive component of the public history movement?’ (p28). most if not all public historians would reject the proposition that their work was a mere product of post-industrial capitalism. but it is clear from stanton’s incisive analysis that the very nature of the lowell experiment, being state sponsored and aimed primarily at economic revitalisation, tended to promote ‘celebratory multiculturalism’ and a l public history review, vol 14, 2007 151 reversioning of the grand theme of wealth and progress. stanton, indeed, concludes on a personal note that contemporary developments in lowell ‘simultaneously dismay and feeds me’ (p237). perhaps most importantly, the lowell experiment keeps alive debates over the definition of public history, despite discussion of these in her book being confined to the united states. at one point, stanton muses that ‘“public history” is not the same as “history in public”’ (p8). but her sophisticated reading of the field indicates that ‘public history’ is often indistinguishable from ‘history in public’. public historians are at times participant observers and their work often becomes history in public arenas. ultimately, she concedes, public history is ‘an open-ended concept’ (p17). stanton’s stimulating and reflective work is a timely and welcome contribution to a small but growing body of work that critically examines public history. paul ashton university of technology, sydney reviewfoster public history review vol 21 (2014): 102–104 issn: 1833-4989 © 2014 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. the public history reader, edited by hilda kean and paul martin. oxford and new york: routledge, 2013. paperback isbn 978-0415-52041, casebound isbn 978-0-415-52040-9. reviewed by meg foster hen 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. the reader is structured thematically, and revolves around three different sections. part one sets the tone of the book by detailing the w https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | foster 103 connection between the past and the present. although its chapters vary in topic and scope, all demonstrate the ways in which history is constructed by the public and public historians alike. in the public history reader, the social contours of history making are explored, and these foundational chapters provide reflective studies on the creation and use of history. part two delves deeper into this process, as it focuses on the materials needed to construct these different pasts. the authors featured here examine both the physical objects and methodological tools required to bring the past into the present. finally, part three tackles the complex issue of tangible and intangible presentations of the past. intangible elements of the past, are, by their very nature, controversial. the study of emotion, memory and subjectivity is still seen by many historians as the antithesis of ‘true history’ – that profession based in the ‘solid’ realm of facts. these chapters are to be particularly congratulated in their treatment of such a fraught area. while none of these articles shy away from the difficulties of using intangible sources, they also illustrate these sources’ potential. they show the how tangible sources – such as places and objects – can elicit intangible memories and ideas of the past in the present. they also demonstrate the danger of ignoring intangible sources; some histories will never be told if these new avenues are not explored. the chapter written by sandra prosalendis et al about the district six museum in south africa illustrates this clearly. ‘coloured people’ were forcibly removed from the district six area of cape town during apartheid, and the physical traces of the community were subsequently obliterated by the government. almost the entire district was raised to the ground. as the authors explain, in this context ‘the memories of district six are precious because in reality we have few authentic artefacts from the district... the museum continues to be about abstract issues, about loss, memory and recovery’ (p296) because it is only through these means that the area’s story can be told. the chapters of this reader demonstrate the depth and nuance of public history through their extensive scope. there are many international pieces, which take the reader from the streets of london to the world of print in rural north china and the state of public history in contemporary australia. although each piece is so different and can easily be read alone, they are all conceptually linked. if the content of the chapters do not make this apparent enough, the introductory chapters by martin and kean at the beginning of each section of the book make this connection explicit. each part begins with an outline of that section and public history review | foster 104 the issues that will be covered to help the reader navigate the chapters to come. while this book is a superb text for investigating the complex realm of public history, it is, inevitably, not completely comprehensive. it must be noted that this text is heavily influenced by the british tradition of public history. it concentrates on ‘history from below’ and portrays public history as a site of conflict, cooperation, collaboration and even emancipation that regards the lives of ordinary people. this is a perfectly valid point of view, but it is not the only way that public history is imagined. in an american context, for example, there is a much greater emphasis on the professionalisation of the field; on the public historian as an authority, and their role working with corporations as well as ordinary people. apart from one chapter on digital history by daniel cohen, the reader also does little to explore how web 2.0 has changed public history making. this is a considerable absence given the proliferation of web based mediums, such as blogs, online data collections, and other platforms that are shaping the way that both historians and the public are able to access the past. considering the breadth and controversy of the field, absences such as these are understandable. one book can only do so much. i do feel, however, that these absences need to be stated, especially when this text has called itself the public history reader. this book does a remarkable job of portraying public history. what becomes apparent as one reads, however, is that neither this, nor any other book, can be the definitive text on the field. it is too varied and slippery a terrain to pin down. instead, the public history reader is an achievement because it describes this complexity; it shows its readers some of public history’s many faces. galleytrapeznik public history review vol 18 (2011): 65–82 © utsepress and the author on the waterfront: the historic waterfront precinct, dunedin, new zealand alexander trapeznik sadly neglected area of new zealand's built environment is its industrial and mercantile heritage. until recently, professional and public interest has focused almost entirely on churches, grand and great houses, and public buildings. unfortunately, industrial sites, where the majority of the population worked (or failed to work), have been given scant and perfunctory treatment by professional and government institutions vested with the responsibility of conserving the nation's heritage. industrial and commercial heritage is very much a relevant category of social commemoration. although utility is clearly a primary consideration, peter spearritt is correct when he asserts that money and taste rather than historical or cultural significance frequently determine which industrial sites survive.1 like redundant churches, the fabric and the workings of industrial plants can often be read as a record of a particular phase in our history.2 to the workers a public history review | trapeznik 66 who were employed in them they are a poignant reminder of their working conditions, industrial relations and technology in the same way as a church reminds its congregation of its spirituality and sense of community. in this way heritage can be defined in holistic terms and include the natural and cultural, the tangible and the intangible. the context of this heritage can be revealed by adopting an historical landscapes approach. at an international level in the nizhny tagil charter for the industrial heritage defines industrial heritage as something which consists of the remains of industrial culture which are of historical, technological, social, architectural or scientific value. these remains consist of buildings and machinery, workshops, mills and factories, mines and sites for processing and refining, warehouses and stores, places where energy is generated, transmitted and used, transport and all its infrastructure, as well as places used for social activities related to industry such as housing, religious worship or education.3 furthermore, the charter states that industrial heritage is the evidence of activities which had and continue to have profound historical consequences. the motives for protecting the industrial heritage are based on the universal value of this evidence, rather than on the singularity of unique sites… [also] industrial heritage is of social value as part of the record of the lives of ordinary men and women, and as such it provides an important sense of identity. it is of technological and scientific value in the history of manufacturing, engineering, construction, and it may have considerable aesthetic value for the quality of its architecture, design or planning. these values are intrinsic to the site itself, its fabric, components, machinery and setting, in the industrial landscape, in written documentation, and also in the intangible records of industry contained in human memories and customs… [finally] rarity, in terms of the survival of particular processes, site typologies or landscapes, adds particular value and should be carefully assessed. early or pioneering examples are of especial value.4 new zealand has inherited a significant legacy of structures resulting from colonial developments in areas such as agriculture, mining, shipping and railways, and processing industries. their tangible remains can be found in cities, provincial towns and throughout the countryside. public history review | trapeznik 67 only in recent times have there been endeavours to document and record this heritage. as kathleen stringer has noted, up until ‘the 1980s, the industrial heritage of new zealand was neglected by both the historic places trust and historians in general.’5 from the late 1960s onwards the focus has tended to be not on industrial heritage, but on the natural environment, on the conservation of rivers, parks, flora and fauna. ‘even now, the hpt register does not use the term “industrial” but rather “manufacturing and processing”; this category has 107 listings. “agriculture and horticulture”, on which foundations new zealand was built, has 231 listings. in comparison, there are currently 514 religious buildings and a vast 1680 “residential buildings and associated places” listed.’6 also rather than having a myopic view of heritage we should take a historical landscapes approach, as the nizhny tagil charter exhorts, and move away from single-site approach to a broad spatial context view of industrial heritage. what makes a place historic should encompass the question of recording and interpreting history contextually. it is the construction of contexts which determines the process of historical interpretation when it is applied to traditional or archaeological sites, buildings and structures. the context may embrace a single event, or a series of events; it may represent the nucleus of a geographic place, or be associated with a noted individual or group. a landscapes approach offers a holistic framework which recognises the inter-relationship of both the tangible and intangible elements of heritage. it provides relevance and context to the waterfront community and its visitors and enriches our understanding of the past – connecting it to the present and the future. this article will present a case study of the built heritage of a major nation-wide business, the national mortgage agency (nma). this is one aspect of a larger project examining the historic waterfront area of dunedin, new zealand’s first major commercial and industrial centre. nearly all landscapes have cultural associations because they have been affected in some way or another by human action or perception. the dunedin waterfront commercial buildings can be further categorised as a particular type of cultural landscape: a historic local vernacular landscape, one which has evolved through use by people whose activities or occupancy have shaped that landscape. through social or cultural attitudes of an individual, family or community, the landscape reflects the physical, biological and cultural character of those everyday lives. function plays a significant role in vernacular public history review | trapeznik 68 landscapes. examples include rural villages, industrial complexes and agricultural landscapes.7 a further explanatory framework which is important in interpreting cultural landscapes is a socio-spatial dialectical approach. in any society there is not a single context but a series of contexts at a variety of spatial scales which allow different individuals and groups, depending upon how much access to power and other resources they have, differentially to arrange and modify these different contexts. the poor and less affluent have an impact upon the immediate context of their neighbourhoods while the rich and powerful may leave their mark at the national, or even international, level. regardless of the power of different cultural groups, they all create cultural landscapes to varying degrees and interpret them from their own perspectives. this gives rise to tensions and contradictions. a socio-spatial dialectical approach is useful to understanding cultural landscapes. whilst a term such as ‘historical’ suggests a link to human actions, individual and collective, the term ‘spatial’ or ‘landscape’ typically evokes the image of something physical and external to a social context. traditionally, space is a context for society, a container, rather than a structure created by society. nevertheless, human ideas are expressed in behaviour which then creates cultural landscapes. these landscapes, in turn, affect behaviour and ideas in endless causal loops: cultural landscapes dialectically show cause and effect. social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive and interdependent. cultural landscapes reflect social relations and institutions, and they shape subsequent social relations. while elites create spatial inequalities and homogeneity simultaneously through their hegemony, non-elites create counter-hegemonic landscapes which reflect their own values. behavioural resistance to the dominant culture leads to distinctive cultural landscapes: for example, in the new zealand context, cultural resistance by the maori. in the new zealand context there is a paucity of sources on industrial heritage. geoffrey thornton’s new zealand’s industrial heritage provided the first survey of industrial archaeology in the country. it is an ambitious undertaking in which he attempts to trace the history of industry in nineteenth-century new zealand, but unfortunately does not address any theoretical debate about industrial archaeology and focuses only on buildings. nigel smith, nearly 20 years after thornton’s book, attempted a similar overview of new zealand’s industry and it too lacks a certain cogency and coherence in its approach to the topic.8 historians and historical geographers are showing increasing interest in urban heritage. one influential work is brian graham, g. j. public history review | trapeznik 69 ashworth and j. e. tunbridge’s a geography of heritage: power, culture and economy.9 it analyses the social and political uses of heritage in the cultural sphere, including its relation to national identity and the questions of what is considered ‘heritage’ and to whom it is believed to belong. they also consider the economic role of the ‘heritage industry’. of particular interest here is the authors’ analysis of european urban waterfront heritage developments, in particular their preservation and adaptive re-use. many industrial or former industrial cities see the preservation and development of precincts of historic buildings as a route to economic rejuvenation through tourism. bella dicks, in her heritage, place and community, has made a case study of the rhondda heritage park in south wales and its attempt to revive the local economy and the cultural identity of the community.10 in new zealand, a comparable approach has been taken in the recently revived whitestone heritage precinct in oamaru, north otago. heritage as an economic resource tends to focus on the distinctive and exceptional. but as david atkinson points out in his ‘the heritage of mundane places’, heritage can be more open and accessible: ‘something that can be explored through a series of more everyday, mundane places.’11 the spotswood industrial heritage precinct at hobsons bay near melbourne is analogous to dunedin’s historic waterfront area. it is a large industrial precinct including structures built for a range of processing, manufacturing, transport and refining industries from the 1840s to the mid-twentieth century.12 the study of the relationship between heritage and history has been strongly influenced by david lowenthal’s publications. in possessed by the past he defines the relationship between history and the ‘cult of heritage’ as one where the former explains the past while the latter infuses the past with present purposes.13 this work developed the ideas set out in the past is a foreign country, which traced changing perceptions of the past over the last two centuries.14 more recently, david harvey has discussed the development of theoretical work on heritage and provided a case study of changing attitudes over the past three centuries towards a prehistoric site.15 for new zealand, the development of concern for the historic urban built environment was traced by p. j. perry and k. galletly in ‘the preservation of historic buildings in urban new zealand: precedent, practice and policy’.16 consideration of dunedin's historic waterfront precinct expands on this while also contributing to comparative studies of the heritage of other settler societies such as canada and southern africa, which are public history review | trapeznik 70 discussed by j. e. tunbridge and g. j. ashworth in their dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict.17 a recent critique of the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ that has developed, and which is particularly relevant to this study, is provided by laurajane smith in uses of heritage.18 she argues that the definition of what constitutes heritage is determined by power relations, and is inherently political. heritage is therefore best understood as a dynamic cultural process by which people use the past, rather than simply in terms of buildings or objects; that is, heritage is a ‘discursive construction’ with material consequences for how people relate to historic sites or events. in dunedin, this process is exemplified by the waterfront precinct of commercial and industrial buildings constructed in the last third of the nineteenth century on newly reclaimed harbourside land in the city centre. dunedin’s waterfront buildings this article draws on research for a much larger project covering more than 60 ‘old waterfront’ buildings, most of which were built in the late nineteenth century during dunedin’s industrial golden age, when it was the largest and most industrialised city in colonial new zealand.19 these extant buildings would, could we unlock their histories, tell of a time when dunedin epitomised how feasible it was to achieve relative wealth in a new country thousands of miles away from overcrowded great britain. this fast-changing and rapidly growing settlement was very different to the city we know now. the surviving buildings are a link to the power relations of the past and provide an especially good example of heritage as a dynamic cultural process. most of the boom-time development of the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s occurred in a nucleus around lower rattray and jetty streets – the latter originally so named because the main jetty for shipping was at the end of it. early photographs show a conglomeration of industrial settlement at the water’s edge. as a result of successive reclamations during the second half of the nineteenth century, this development gradually crept seaward as more and more urban turf was poured onto the seabed of the harbour. the land reclaimed in the 1870s was expected to provide ‘the most valuable building sites for the metropolis of the future.’20 beginning with bond street in 1864, by 1875 reclamation had reached as far as the east side of crawford street. by 1898, dry land went all the way to cumberland street, then over a new railway line to the streets around what became known as the steamer basin.21 this reclamation created new land on which to build warehouses, offices and foundries.22 in public history review | trapeznik 71 addition to the reclamations, new buildings were erected in stone or brick in established areas following the various fires that ravaged the closely packed wooden buildings in the 1860s.23 a. h. mclintock summed up the ‘progress’ thus: at dunedin, where former swamps and tidal flats threw wide a challenge to man’s enterprise, the facts themselves speak eloquently. for a city has emerged from harbour spoil, and streets and factories and wharves have taken shape as the waters have receded.24 this area, which for the purposes of this study will be known as the historic waterfront area, is today the southern end of the built-up part of the city, where the ‘one-way’ road systems run north and south. here the average dunedin shopper can find a range of homeware stores, along crawford street in particular. but everywhere around this old waterfront area, the ghostly and often decrepit monuments to dunedin’s former glory remain – numerous victorian buildings and other old warehouses in various states of disrepair. what business did they do? what place in our society did they once have, and still have? dunedin was founded in 1848 on a site that had no earlier permanent settlement. it was a struggling township until it was transformed by the discovery of gold further inland in 1861. it became a ‘small and relatively cohesive community, dominated politically and morally by [scottish] free church [presbyterian] proponents of organized settlement, fast became a large and sprawling population, indifferent or even hostile to the pretensions of the founders.’ its province, otago, became the richest and most populous in the country: £21 million worth of gold was extracted within a decade, after which bullion exports slumped to a level they would remain at for the rest of the century. by 1870, otago contained a quarter of the non-maori population of the entire country and a produced a third of its exports, much higher proportions than became the case in the later twentieth century. the demand created by the gold rush made many farmers, merchants and professional men prosperous. a powerful business elite formed that was ‘increasingly held together by complex family, business, and social links’. many new businesses were established, attracting investment from victoria and scotland in particular. otago had been one of the least industrialised parts of the country, but rapidly caught up with and surpassed other provinces. as olssen has noted, ‘dunedin became the major entrepôt… for much of new zealand.’25 public history review | trapeznik 72 many of the buildings in the historic waterfront area were, in different ways, related to new zealand’s early development in cropping and farming. in particular, they relate to the stock and station industry which provided farmers with the expertise to sell their goods, store them and transport them. their offices and warehouses formed the port-side infrastructure for the storage, sale and shipping of our earliest export offerings. the idea, still often expressed today, that the rural areas underpinned the economic strength of new zealand towns, could not have been more accurate for dunedin’s early development. yet it is a factor in the development of dunedin, and of new zealand more generally, that is often overlooked. it is difficult, in a milieu of what often seem to be clichés about new zealand’s history, to see the tangible early evidence for this so-called vital town/country inter-dependency. yet the evidence, in the form of these buildings, exists in dunedin – but only just. although joint-stock companies began appearing, wealth was still largely personalised and ‘family capitalism’ (characterised by individual or family firms) was the norm. the meat and shipping industries were the most corporatized activities, and provide exceptions to the ‘family capitalism’ model. the nma’s surviving buildings provide a good illustration of this urban-rural interdependency and laurajane smith’s concept of heritage being a ‘discursive construction’. embedded within the histories of these buildings – who used them, and how – is not just a local, but a national history of how colonial new zealand found its industrial and commercial feet. dunedin was at this time at the cutting edge of industrial growth in new zealand, and the most industrialised city ahead of christchurch, wellington and auckland. this makes the surviving buildings important to our national heritage; our sense of where we came from and how we worked when we got here. oamaru has its harbour-side heritage precinct, but the irony is that dunedin, where the head offices and largest warehouses were, and in many cases still are, is yet to achieve any similar recognition. these buildings are for the most part commercially neglected today. historical background: the 1870s and 1880s dunedin was at its industrial nadir in the 1870s. it ‘was still, but only just, the most industrialised city in new zealand… [i]n 1873 solid stores and warehouses were being built on newly reclaimed ground… by 1874, the prosperity initiated by the gold rushes was being stimulated and maintained by the vogel public works and immigration policy. between public history review | trapeznik 73 1872 and 1875, almost 18,000 people arrived in otago – a larger number to arrive than at any other province.’26 many of the businesses established in the 1860s grew rapidly and expanded into other regions, some surviving well into the twentieth century. yet the development of new zealand’s agricultural industry was already underway before the gold rush began. the wool industry provided the bulk of export receipts as early as 1857 along with the trade in wheat, potatoes and oats.27 yet the biggest growth in non-gold trade occurred in the 1870s and early 1880s. dunedin was the commercial capital of the country, ‘a busy, confident place, only gradually modified by the long depression of the eighties and nineties’. many major businesses were established in the 1870s, several of which have survived to the present day. 28 william n. blair gave a snapshot of this industrial era when most of the buildings researched for this project were built. he came to dunedin in 1863 to work as a civil engineer for the otago provincial council – otago’s first major governing body – and later became assistant engineer-in-chief of the new zealand government’s public works department.29 blair noted in 1887 that ‘without agriculture, the establishment of manufactures would be impossible. thus the various branches of settlement and trade create and produce others; they act and react on each other, nourishing and fostering each his neighbour in the general march of progress.’30 he noted that by 1887, otago and canterbury exported two thirds of the nation’s wool, and the southern provinces had developed a clothing and woollen industry of which they could be proud: ‘we make cloth and clothes with the cloth… the new zealand clothing mills produce a great variety of fabrics suitable for all purposes of humanity, old and young, savage and civilised.’ he also observed that the grain market by 1887 had ‘collapsed’, having been ‘swamped in the london market by the cheaper production of america and india.’ the frozen meat trade, however, was on the rise. other industries prospering in the south included agricultural implement manufacturing, brick and tile works, quarries, steel works, brewery plants, export manure, rope, candles, soap and earthenware manufacture.31 william blair’s descriptions are a crucial resource for this study, because without a doubt the major theme of the uses of these buildings is agriculture and processing – in fact the words ‘wool’ and ‘grain’ stores can still be seen on the old nma store in vogel street, and possibly can be made out also on the donald reid and nzlma stores. these two commodities, first grain, and then wool, were the new gold in terms of public history review | trapeznik 74 exports by the 1870s. correspondingly at this time the stock and station industry was in an expansionary phase. the other industries blair mentions were literally spun off the sheep’s back, showing how very quickly new zealand became entrepreneurial, and self-sufficient in making its own clothes and other household commodities – a very different picture to the import-dependence the developed from the 1980s. at the start of our industrial history, new zealand was expected not to compete with britain, but very quickly people like blair felt there was no reason why new zealand could not create its own industries and cater to its own needs.32 this theme also comes through when one delves into the individual histories of these firms: their owners were new zealand’s industrial pioneers with humble immigrant beginnings, but who later acted on opportunities they found here and collectively helped to form new zealand’s industrial backbone. industry grew in a process of interaction – they acted and reacted on each other. as blair put it, ‘thus the various branches of settlement and trade create and produce others.’ jim mcaloon reinforces the point that there was much interlocking of businesses in otago, with many directors sitting on more than one board, and many companies having rich directors.33 this is startlingly obvious in how the nma operated. its manager, john macfarlane ritchie, had board connections to the pioneering union steam ship co, national insurance and the new zealand and australian land co. in the age before telecommunications, all he had to do was walk out of his office in bond street, and down to the corner of water and vogel streets, a stone’s throw away, to do business. there is a good reason why so many businesses, essentially performing different functions within the same trade, were located cheek by jowl in this way: there was no other way of discussing ideas and concepts freely except through face to face contact. in this way, through this process of ‘nourishing and fostering’ each other, financial empires were built, worth a lot of money in their day. as jim mcaloon concludes, we may in general speak not of ‘a single and extensive intercorporate system’, but rather of a relatively small-scale interpersonal system.34 the national mortgage agency and its buildings the national mortgage agency (nma) provides a good example of the large enterprises based in this physically compact area which survived into recent times and which has left an extensive physical legacy in the historic waterfront precinct. it was one of the pioneering stock and station agents in new zealand, associated with the establishment of public history review | trapeznik 75 viable farms and instrumental in many of the earliest selling and shipping innovations. simon ville concludes that there is ‘no doubt that over the last 150 years, stock and station agents have played a central and guiding role in the success of the farming sector in australia and new zealand.’35 the nma was to become a major player in the new zealand stock and station scene for the next century, vestiges of which survived into 1970s and 1980s as wrightson nma. this national firm is now part of agriculture-based firm pgg wrightson (which also took over reid farmers). the nma started with branches in otago, southland, canterbury and melbourne. it also had north island interests, including meat processing ‘freezing works’. fortunately for the purposes of this study, all their dunedin buildings survive. however, its grandest legacy, the former union steamship company head office, is in a very poor state of repair. the nma was formed in 1878 when a london-based company bought two south island stock and station firms.36 as well as wool, the firm also advanced money on land for settler farmers in otago, southland and canterbury. the affairs of the company were conducted from its head office in lombard street in london and board meetings were held there.37 the nma was a ‘foundation member’ of the refrigerated meat export business.38 the firm’s activities developed as the rural economy changed in the 1890s: from the 1890s nma emphasised stock and station agency business rather than mortgage finance. the company concentrated on selling produce on behalf of farmers, supplying them with inputs, and conducting livestock auctions, and it financed farmers primarily by current accounts and to a lesser extent by advances on produce... the changing rural economy reinforced the transformation. the introduction of refrigerated shipping in 1882 had been a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of a prosperous smallfarming sector. from 1891 the liberal government actively promoted closer settlement. at the same time,… many estateowners began to subdivide on their own account, especially as commodity prices rose after 1896. once the land market began to move again, doubtful assets and accounts could be dealt with, and large runholders’ accounts reduced to a satisfactory level. of the greatest long-term importance, closer settlement meant that financiers’ risks were much more widely spread, with many more farmers each borrowing much less.39 public history review | trapeznik 76 the nma’s business was ‘the lending of money on the mortgage of freehold and other securities; consignments of produce, such as grain, wool, tallow, frozen meat, sheep and rabbit skins, hemp, butter and cheese.’40 all these goods were ‘accepted by the company at any of its branches, and liberal advances are made to consigners pending realisation. the company conducts business as auctioneers, and acts as stock and station agents, shipping and general commission agents; and regular and periodical auction sales are held – under the company’s auspices – by its auctioneers.’ the firm also acted as shipping agents.41 in 1970, the head office moved to the capital, wellington, ‘seeking closer proximity to financial, commercial and government contacts’.42 ville shows how the way the nma operated highlights how the dunedin business community networked to create business and increase new zealand’s wealth out of the rural sector: n.m.a. did [its] banking with the national bank of new zealand, much of its shipping was with the u.s.s. co; its insurance was with national insurance and it acquired its agricultural equipment from reid and gray ltd (also a dunedin agricultural implement manufacturing firm in princes and crawford streets). personal business links drew these firms together.43 ville further notes the closeness of these major firms where, in the early twentieth century, j. f. ritchie’s son g. f. ritchie was chairman of the uss co and national insurance, and also sat on the boards of other ‘closely linked companies.’ conversely james mills, the chairman of uss co for many years, also sat on the board of the nma: ‘these firms had contiguous head offices in water street… and indeed exchanged premises on several occasions… in the development of the frozen meat shipments from dunedin to london starting (in dunedin) in 1882, a key figure was william soltau davidson, whose links with nma’s circle were critical in bringing together the various parties for the project.’44 nma buildings and offices there were three headquarters, all still standing, in the water street area, a precinct in the historic waterfront area. the first and oldest, 24 water street,45 was built 1877 and appears to be well maintained and tenanted. this stone, plaster and brick building is located on the corner of water and bond streets, opposite the back of john wickliffe house. in the early days, it probably also acted as the warehouse for the firm. public history review | trapeznik 77 the second head office, 38 water street,46 is one block back towards the railway line, on the corner of vogel and water streets (west side). this plaster-rendered brick building – not as ornate as its predecessor – was their headquarters from 1905. it appears to be empty now, but still seems to be in relatively good condition. it bears the words union steamship company engraved in plaster along the top – as it became the uss co’s headquarters in 1929 in what was effectively a swap of headquarters with the nma. the most recent nma headquarters, 49 water street,47 with frontages to cumberland, water and vogel streets, was built as the uss co’s head office some time before 1890.48 it was designed by david ross, ‘undoubtedly one of the most important architects who have worked in dunedin’.49 the nma took it over in 1929 and moved out in the 1970s. it is ominously called a ‘sadly defaced hulk’ in the dunedin city council’s draft thematic study of june 2009 by michael findlay and salmond reed architects.50 a grant of $20,000 was made by the city council in 2010 towards restoration work, which is now under way.51 the building was given a ‘facelift’ after 1929 when the vestiges of victoriana, most of its italianate architectural ornamentation, were removed from the outside walls. it appears at that time to have been plastered over and made plain, with incised decoration more in a minimalist art deco style. it still carries the name ‘national mortgage & agency coy of nz ltd’ emblazoned on its peeling walls and ‘nma’ cast into the grilles covering the sub-basement windows. the site chosen had prospects for the future, as the local morning newspaper the otago daily times commented in 1883: [the site] is eminently an advantageous one, although it is not at present actually in the commercial centre of the city. nevertheless, by the time the new railway station is opened, and when the newly-made streets shall have become thoroughly populated, the wisdom which has dictated the choice will be pretty generally recognised.52 the union steamship company of new zealand the company that built this originally grand headquarters was started in 1875 by prominent early businessman and landowner johnny jones’ former business partner in shipping james mills (1847–1936).53 after consolidating the port chalmers–dunedin trade, mills worked on establishing links with all other southern ports and obtained a subsidy from the provincial government to do so. according to erik olssen, ‘dunedin thus became the southern entrepôt.’54 mills then sought to public history review | trapeznik 78 secure control over the inter-provincial trade and by 1874 was ‘the uncrowned king of the dunedin waterfront’.55 ‘within three years’, quoting olssen again, ‘the new company had achieved dominance in the coastal trade and the inter-colonial trade, over the next decade freight rates fell by half, and mills had become the leading entrepreneur in otago and one of its wealthiest citizens.’56 by 1880, mills had helped ensure ‘the u.s.s. was the largest shipping company in the southern hemisphere, and before 1940 the largest employer of labour in new zealand outside the government.’57 the uss, or red-funnel fleet as it became known, became a major player in the decade 1875–85, becoming the ‘premier shipping line in the southern hemisphere and in doing so carried the name dunedin into just about every port of consequence in australasia.’ its grand head office on reclaimed land on the corner of water and vogel streets ‘symbolised dunedin’s maritime aspirations’58 and was on the waterfront when first built. the nma’s warehouses three nma warehouses also survive: the first is a large four-storey brick and plaster building in cumberland street next door to the company’s last water street headquarters – with a frontage also to vogel street. it was given a 1920s facelift in the same art deco style as the head office. its date of construction is not known, but it appears from its early photographs to be before 1900. the second is the nma wool and grain store, a large, long and prominent two-storey brick building taking up one side of an entire block. it is unclear when this building was constructed, but in the 1888 and 1892 city of dunedin block plans it shows up as the farmer’s agency wool and grain store, which the nma later took over. this building is now partially occupied by a beaurepaires tyre store. the third surviving nma warehouse is now the spotlight store – in plaster-rendered brick with a saw-tooth roof – was the nma’s most recent dunedin store. this building was constructed in the early part of the twentieth century, and was later known as the orange hirequip building before becoming the spotlight retail store. it shows up on the 1927 fire plan map as a wool and manure store, but not on the earlier 1892 fire plan as an nma building. in the 1888–89 city of dunedin block plan, the same site is marked as being owned by milburn lime and cement works. john mcfarlane ritchie of the nma was a director in the cement works company in 1903. its head office was listed as cumberland public history review | trapeznik 79 street, dunedin – perhaps the same site or building ritchie later acquired for the nma.59 conclusion this precinct of inter-related commercial and industrial premises, aside from its inherent architectural interest, is significant for what it shows about the interconnectedness of commercial enterprises for at least a century from the 1870s, and how they developed over time. it serves as a physical reminder that nineteenth-century dunedin was not merely a boom town based on the profits of gold mining but from the 1860s and 1870s established an enduring manufacturing and financial base. stock and station agents, not least the nma, played a central role in linking the urban and rural economies and connecting new zealand with wider imperial and world trading networks. locally, the close connections between manufacturing, finance and shipping are still evident in the physical layout of the historic waterfront precinct. the precinct is a clear example of an historic cultural landscape that has evolved over time and continues to reflect the activities and occupancy of those people who have shaped the landscape. it reinforces laurajane smith’s argument that heritage is a dynamic cultural process, one that is inherently political as it is determined by power relations. the dunedin waterfront precinct is a cultural landscape that on closer examination clearly reflects social relations and institutions, and has helped shape social relations over the past century and a half. the importance of face-to-face contact in the commercial world, not merely in the nineteenth century but well into the twentieth, is conveyed clearly by the relatively intimate compactness of the precinct. when the nma relocated, each time it moved only a little further down the street. the awareness of the physical dimension to business history forms an important part of the holistic framework provided by a landscapes approach to the historic waterfront precinct, and helps shift the focus away from the traditional emphasis on churches, great houses and public buildings and onto the comparatively mundane places. as the nizhny tagil charter says, such early examples of surviving heritage landscape as the dunedin waterfront precinct ‘are of especial value’.60 a cultural landscapes approach therefore is a particularly valuable one, as it provides a holistic view of heritage, both tangible and intangible. a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s this article is based in part on research conducted by joanne galer and was revised by austin gee. public history review | trapeznik 80 e n d n o t e s 1 p. spearritt, ‘money, taste and industrial heritage’, in j. rickard and p. spearritt (eds), packaging the past? public histories, melbourne university press, melbourne, 1991, p33. 2 ibid, p39. 3 the nizhny tagil charter for the [sic] industrial heritage, july 2003. 4 ibid. 5 kathleen stringer, 'investment, innovation, involvement: clarks’ flour mill, maheno, north otago', pgdip (arts) dissertation, university of otago, dunedin, 2009, p10. 6 ibid. 7 charles a. birnbaum, protecting cultural landscapes: planning, treatment and management of historic landscapes, preservation brief, 36, us national park service, washington, dc, 1994, p1. 8 geoffrey g. thornton, new zealand’s industrial heritage, a. h. and a. w. reed, wellington, 1982; nigel smith, heritage of industry: discovering new zealand’s industrial history, reed books, auckland, 2001. 9 brian graham, g. j. ashworth and j. e. tunbridge, a geography of heritage: power, culture and economy, arnold, london, 2000. 10 bella dicks, heritage, place and community, university of wales press, cardiff, 2000. proposals for similar industrial heritage tourism centred on the jeep factory complex in toledo, ohio, have come to nothing, however, with the demolition of almost all the original buildings. philip feifan xie, ‘developing industrial heritage tourism: a case study of the proposed jeep museum in toledo, ohio’, tourism management, vol 27, 2006, pp1321–30. 11david atkinson, ‘the heritage of mundane places’, in brian graham and peter howard (eds), the ashgate research companion to heritage and identity, ashgate, aldershot, 2008, p386. the chapter, pp381–95, provides examples from waterfront heritage areas of bristol and hull. 12 it is described in the hobsons bay heritage study: city of williamstown conservation study review, vol 1b: thematic environmental history, hobsons bay city council, hobsons bay, 2003. this is available online at: http://www.hobsons.vic.gov.au/ 13 david lowenthal, possessed by the past: the heritage crusade and the spoils of history, free press, new york, 1996, pxi. 14 david lowenthal, the past is a foreign country, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1985. 15 the neolithic stone circle at avebury, wiltshire: david c. harvey, ‘the history of heritage’, in graham and howard (eds), the ashgate research companion to heritage and identity, pp19-36. 16 p. j. perry and k. galletly, ‘the preservation of historic buildings in urban new zealand: precedent, practice and policy’, new zealand geographer, vol 40 no 2, 1984, pp100–4. 17 j. e. tunbridge and g. j. ashworth, dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict, wiley, chichester, 1996. 18 laurajane smith, uses of heritage, routledge, london, 2006. 19 there appears to be very little knowledge of the buildings profiled in this study. a list of buildings included in schedule 25.1 of the council’s district plan (1999), and formulated under the resource management act, lists only a few of those buildings – but with nothing about their histories whatsoever. often there is just a vague guess at the date of construction and an unreferenced assertion they were built by a particular well-known architect of the day. these ‘scheduled’ buildings (from a list compiled by mark garden dated 12.4.2002) lists a former evening star building on the corner of bond and police streets, until recently occupied by forno’s auctioneers. the record says only that ‘this is a colourful well-modelled building with interesting window shapes.’ the otago a&p society’s brydone hall is also scheduled, as ‘previously used for annual a&p winter shows.’ cromwell chambers (donald reid’s first warehouse) is recorded as making ‘a significant contribution to the visual enclosure of queens gardens and also the townscape qualities in dowling street’ (as the building has two street frontages). the dunedin city council has recently been handed a commissioned draft of a socalled thematic contextual overview history for dunedin city. the draft report, which is still to be considered by the council, was prepared by michael findlay and salmond reed architects. there are also some important buildings and structures omitted from the study. some, such as farra bros engineering located in the existing or newer waterfront area, is one of these old established firms still operating. others have been omitted on the basis that they are relatively high-profile and seemingly well looked-after buildings, which would also be listed under historic places trust protection mechanisms. with the exception of a & t burt’s brass foundry building in lower stuart street (now housing r&r sport), the crown roller mill building (now apartments) and the speights brewery buildings (still operative) would fall under this category of high profile. a & t burt’s old showroom, however, also has a relatively high profile in that it is a well-maintained and functioning shop. these three buildings were omitted from this study as they are not in the reclaimed area. public history review | trapeznik 81 20 a.h. mclintock, the port of otago, whitcombe and tombs, dunedin, 1951, p114. 21 ibid, pp228–9. 22 ‘the smallest group of commercial establishments were the warehouses. there were only 118 of these each employing up to 30 workers. may of the bonded and free stores and general warehouses were two or three stories in height and covered an acre or more... the warehouse was often only part of a retail shop or a factory. here produce was sorted, packed and repacked both for export and for local sale. the warehouses dealt with most of the material passing through the port. briscoe’s, one of the larger, but by no means the largest warehouse, had seven travellers on the staff to serve the south island, as well as the normal warehousing staff.’ w. a. v. clark, 'dunedin in 1901: a study in historical urban geography', ma thesis, university of canterbury, christchurch,1961, p53; k.c. mcdonald, city of dunedin: a century of civic enterprise, dunedin city corporation, dunedin, 1965, p77. 23 clark, pp24–5. 24 mclintock, pp367–8. 25 erik olssen, a history of otago, john mcindoe limited, dunedin, 1984, pp56, 58, 66, 69. 26 dunedin city planning department, dunedin’s historical background, dunedin, 1972, pp12–13. (copy held by the dcc planning department.) this material may have come from k. c. mcdonald’s history of the dunedin city corporation. 27 gavin mclean, otago harbour: currents of controversy, otago harbour board, dunedin, 1985, p38. 28 mclean, pp38, 90; mcdonald, pp53, 180. 29 trevor williams, ‘blair, william newsham, 1841-1991’, in ministry for culture and heritage, dictionary of new zealand biography, 1993-2010, http://www.dnzb.govt.nz. 30 w. n. blair, the industries of new zealand (publication of an address given to the industrial association of canterbury, 24 february 1887 – call no: v.055, hocken library, dunedin), 1887, p8; thornton, p1. 31 ibid, pp11, 22, 13. 32 thornton, p1. 33 jim mcaloon, no idle rich: the wealthy in canterbury and otago 1840-1914, otago university press, dunedin, 2002, p62. details of individuals with overlapping interests include ross and glendining, john wright, thomas brydone, j.m. ritchie, john roberts, james hazlett, thomas kempthorne, james mills and p. c. neill: pp63–4. 34 ibid, p65. 35 simon ville, rural entrepreneurs: a history of the stock and station agent industry in australia and new zealand, cambridge university press, cambridge, 2000, p210. 36 gordon parry, n.m.a.: the story of the first 100 years, otago daily times and witness newspapers, dunedin, 1964, pp11–12, 28; jim mcaloon, ‘ritchie, john macfarlane, 1842-1912’, dictionary of new zealand biography; mcaloon, no idle rich, p13. 37 parry, p31. 38 parry, p114. 39 mcaloon, no idle rich, pp68–9. 40 the cyclopedia company of new zealand ltd., cyclopedia of new zealand, vol 4: otago and southland provincial districts, the cyclopedia company of new zealand ltd, christchurch, 1905, p349. 41 ibid. 42 ville, p44. 43 ibid, p65. 44 ibid. 45 parry, p40. 46 ibid. 47 ibid. all three buildings are pictured here. 48 in 1883, according to the city council’s website: http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/services/dunedin-heritage/list-of-assisted-projects/nmabuilding, which also says the building changed hands in 1921 rather than 1929. 49 hardwicke knight and niel wales, buildings of dunedin: an illustrated architectural guide to new zealand’s victorian city, john mcindoe, dunedin, 1988, p208. 50 this statement does not seem to appear in the version (november 2009) published on the city council’s website: <http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/services/dunedin-heritage/dunedincontextual-thematic-history>. 51 the grant was to ‘contribute towards restoration works during redevelopment, including such items as repairs to marble stairs, tiling, cast iron grilles, and re-instating heritage window apertures’: http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/services/dunedin-heritage/list-of-assistedprojects/nma-building. public history review | trapeznik 82 52 otago daily times, 10 september 1883, p4; the permanent (and extant) railway station was not completed until 20 years later. 53 mclean, p90. 54 olssen, a history of otago, p67. 55 ibid. 56 ibid, p68. 57 thomson, p345. 58 mclean, p93. 59 cyclopedia, p364; for its having been designed by basil hooper, see ralph allen, motif and beauty: the new zealand arts and crafts architecture of basil hooper, harptree press, dunedin, 2000. 60 nizhny tagil charter. 502 bad gateway 502 bad gateway nginx pdfmurraygrahame public history review vol 17 (2010): 89–111 © utsepress and the author sydney’s past – history’s future: the dictionary of sydney lisa murray and emma grahame he dictionary of sydney is a groundbreaking, multimedia city encyclopedia that presents the history of metropolitan sydney in a digital format. the historical model and digital repository that underlie the dictionary of sydney were developed through an australian research council (arc) linkage grant, which saw the collaboration of the university of sydney, the university of technology, sydney, the council of the city of sydney, the state library of nsw and state records nsw. the basic idea of the dictionary of sydney is that it is one repository, with many possible deployments. this permanent electronic repository is underpinned by a historical model for defining and connecting information, text and multimedia, which will hold the resources of the dictionary into the future, and continue t public history review | murray & grahame 90 to maintain and present them even as technology changes. the dictionary of sydney trust, which manages the dictionary, aims to deliver these historical resources for free, encouraging knowledge, research, education and entertainment. telling the stories of the city seefeldt and thomas make the distinction between three genres of digital history: 1. digitisation projects; such as the national library of australia’s digitisation of newspapers 2. presentation layers of historical knowledge; a form of digital publication such as online exhibitions or ebooks 3. new-model scholarship; where digital technologies are used to visualise history in new ways, develop new research questions and undertake historical analysis in new ways.1 the dictionary of sydney is a blend of the second and third of these types of digital history; an innovative mix of history and technology that connects people, place and time, and provides a unifying framework for telling the diverse stories of sydney's history and culture, with multiple authors and contested interpretations. the first presentation of the dictionary of sydney, found at www.dictionaryofsydney.org, is a fairly traditional style of website: a digital reference publication with encyclopaedic ambitions. but the repository is such that information can be manipulated and presented in different ways. this means that there could be a smart-phone version, a journal, options for user-selected print-on-demand books, exhibitions, trails and tours, mashed up and semantic interpretations of the city’s history. in other words, through the historical model, the project can utilise digital technologies to visualise history and make new and exciting connections in sydney’s history. the dictionary of sydney is not the first online city encyclopedia, but it is unlike any other digital encyclopedia currently available online. many predecessors have been put online after their publication in print, like the encyclopedia of chicago,2 or the melbourne encyclopedia.3 others are highly curated and planned in advance, public history review | murray & grahame 91 following a published model, such as te ara, the encyclopedia of new zealand.4 the dictionary of sydney is a born-digital urban public history project, conceived as a freely available resource presenting scholarship on sydney’s history. the content of the dictionary is limited in geographical space but not time. so it covers the area of the sydney basin and the blue mountains (greater sydney) and presents sydney’s history from first human habitation to the present. the underlying historical model defines and classifies the component parts of the city, and connects them with resources such as text, images, maps and multimedia. this data structure is at the heart of the dictionary of sydney and it will ultimately drive the new-model scholarship of the dictionary. individual items (entities) are divided into eight categories – artefacts, buildings, events, natural features, organisations, people, places and structures. each can be defined in time (with dates) and place (through geo-referencing and placement on google maps), and connected with others through roles, functions, associations and/or relationships. every entity can be connected to any number of other entities and also to resources such as images, maps, sound, film, entries or essays. entries and essays cover content ranging from individual entities, such as an individual person or building, through larger topics such as opera or trams, to overarching historical themes, such as culture and customs, health and welfare, or religion. the project has also developed a subject thesaurus focussing on urban history, which when fully implemented will provide a way to search by subject throughout the dictionary. everything in the dictionary is placed in context. in the website, contextual ‘paratext’ provides a short description of every linked item, when the mouse is rolled over the link. these descriptions give users information about the link before they click on it, allowing them to choose their path through the dictionary. every time an image is used to illustrate an entry in the dictionary, it has a context-specific caption that indicates why it is relevant to this paragraph of this entry. images can thus be meaningfully applied to more than one place or article, illustrating different historical ideas, subjects or content. as entities (individual items) are mentioned in text, they are linked with other mentions of the same entity, building up layers of connection that are sometimes surprising, and may be unknown to the authors of each text. public history review | murray & grahame 92 content production for the dictionary of sydney is a collaborative cross-disciplinary volunteer venture, drawing upon historians, archaeologists, heritage specialists and historical societies, experts, enthusiasts and amateurs. essays and entries are commissioned by the dictionary of sydney trust, but unsolicited content, feedback and suggestions are also encouraged, and both kinds of entries are flowing in. people are clamouring to contribute to the dictionary. all content passes through an editorial and curation process and is then connected wherever possible to existing material. thus in terms of content generation, the dictionary of sydney is safely (some may say conservatively) embracing a shared authority process, rather than surging forward with the radical trust of web 2.0 engagement, as embraced by open, user-edited websites such as wikipedia. establishing authority the dictionary draws upon many traditional scholarship standards and places them in the digital environment. this helps to establish the authoritative status of the content, while also overcoming the suspicions and concerns some academics and professionals have with digital history.5 many websites are anonymous; this is particularly true of those attempting encyclopaedic coverage, including wikipedia on one end and te ara on the other end of the authority spectrum. in comparison, all entries in the dictionary of sydney are attributed to authors, whose expertise, experience and knowledge is indicated in their contributor records. entries are also dated. small modifications might be made to correct dramatic errors, but the entry as a piece remains persistent, along with its endnotes and references. this provides a stamp of authority and veracity that is sometimes lacking in the digital environment. the dictionary deliberately acknowledges its authors and cultivates multiple voices. it reflects the commitment of the project to public history with contributions from all parts of our community. some of our pieces are very scholarly, others more conversational in tone, and others have a more literary or arty approach to a subject.6 although we have editorial standards, the authorial voice may shine through – a very different editorial approach to, say, that of the australian dictionary of biography. the dictionary of sydney is also interested in presenting artistic and creative multimedia, and public history review | murray & grahame 93 contributions are encouraged from contemporary photographers and artists.7 publishing an unfinished and never-ending digital history does have its challenges. although subjects and topics were defined, a thesaurus developed and entries commissioned, when it came to the content for the first deployment we had to embrace the randomness of the entries that had arrived in time to be edited for the dictionary. unlike hard copy histories, there is no definitive overview, or careful balance in the range of entries. there is no introduction or foreword to guide readers' perceptions of the content. but the upside is that there are multiple publication dates. we add new content every 3-4 months and so we can more readily reflect and embrace new scholarship, historiographical developments, and new subject areas than analog forms of historical publication. the possibility is there for opening discussions and dialog on historical topics and issues. gathering content the majority of contributors to the dictionary of sydney are volunteers and this too can be a challenge. we are grateful for their commitment to their scholarship and the project, and aware of their other commitments and obligations, so we cannot be too precious or demanding about submission dates. unlike an edited collection, publication of the whole does not depend on getting the last article in. this has added somewhat to the randomness of the content. does this matter? how comprehensive will the dictionary of sydney ever be? at first the trust was highly concerned that we have a representative sample of types, topics and styles of content in the dictionary before we went live with our first product. but now we have embraced this slightly anarchic approach. as stephen ramsay has suggested, this is ‘what the world looks like when digital humanities becomes the humanities’.8 so how much content does the dictionary of sydney have? table 6.1 quantifies the different types of content and the contextual information appended to each type of content. there are other tangible benefits of digital history. there are fewer restrictions on word length (within reason) so detailed pieces can be curated and published for niche audiences. similarly, there is no limit on illustrations and they can be seen in glorious colour.9 this is of course very different to physical publications, where many publishers public history review | murray & grahame 94 require authors to supply a publication subsidy to cover extensive illustration. illustrations in the dictionary can also be delivered in high resolution, with zoomable elements.10 table 6.1: content type and contextual data appended to content content type november 2009 (go-live date) august 2010 (2nd rebuild) november 2010 (3rd rebuild) number of entries (written by volunteer authors) 470 504 539 entries word count (written by volunteer authors) 600,000 664,486 739,342 number of entities (created by dos staff) 6200 6587 7095 number of entities with descriptive annotations and factoids <400 2186 2972 descriptive annotations word count (written by dos staff) <10,000 32,218 45,070 images and multimedia (researched by dos staff) 1050 1306 1545 images with content specific captions (written by dos staff) unknown 917 1010 total caption word count (written by dos staff) unknown 25,411 28,806 hypertext links (made by dos staff) <10,000 13,810 14,869 being an online project means we make the most of audio-visual elements. oral histories and archival film footage can be included. the only limitations are copyright and cost. the dictionary includes oral history from the city of sydney's extensive collection.11 film is also included, although the challenges of obtaining footage without a budget are quite steep. examples include footage of the removal of the gpo clock tower in 194212 and the last tram to travel down anzac public history review | murray & grahame 95 parade in 1961.13 digital technologies allow for time-spatial mapping. historical maps can be geo-referenced and stretched over contemporary maps, made transparent allowing comparison with the current street grid, and zoomed for details.14 geographical information can be used to chart places and buildings on maps. because the items are also placed in time, moving the timeline shows how the places appear and disappear in the development over time of sydney’s urban environment.15 an extraordinary amount of history has already been published by the dictionary of sydney and more is in preparation. while those of us closely involved in the project are uncomfortably aware of the gaps and randomness of what is there so far, we share a concern that many users – particularly those interested in sydney’s history in a general sense – may find the dictionary of sydney, with its digital format, overwhelming. work continues to refine the browse and keyword search functions to make sure that results are tailored and focussed to allow readers to find what they want quickly and directly. is the dictionary’s size and complexity a problem? in some ways we want people to get lost in the dictionary; that too can be part of the modern city experience. but we have prepared navigational tools to help browsers and searchers alike. a trail of ‘breadcrumbs’ across the top of the page means readers can retrace their steps and see how they ended up moving from a history of transport to the biographical entry on the noted composer and musician isaac nathan.16 each entity page indicates where this item has been 'mentioned' in entries, allowing an effective cross-referencing that connects in informative and unexpected ways. the ability to browse each type of entity has been provided through a series of browse pages, and the default setting for these highlights those items with rich content, rather than small snippets of information. readers can browse by entities, contributors or resources. and all of our urls (website addresses) are persistent links that are intuitively named to enhance memorability and encourage linking and bookmarking.17 the trust is committed to the ambitious but achievable goal of doubling the size of the dictionary in five years. with an evergrowing digital history that has no physical representation, it can be hard to convey to the public how it is actually growing and what is new in the dictionary. we have no new volume to launch and put on public history review | murray & grahame 96 the shelves. publicising the new material and showing off what has been achieved needs to be done through newsletters, marketing, and social media such as facebook or twitter. finding an audience a key issue for any publication, but particularly digital history, is the matter of audience. allowing free access on the web makes the whole world an audience, theoretically. nevertheless, the writing in the dictionary of sydney is pitched at the educated general user or the professional researcher. user patterns confirm educational institutions – schools, universities – and people who use computers at work are probably our main users, with a distinct rhythm that peaks on mondays and tuesdays and tapers off across the week, so that sunday is most definitely a day of rest. we have not taken steps to lower the reading age required for our content, which regularly measures at year 10 (end of junior high school) or above. the website went live in november 2009 and thus far, with minimal publicity, usage levels have been exceptionally pleasing. google analytics figures indicate that from go-live on 20 november 2009 to 20 november 2010, the dictionary of sydney has received 117,238 unique visitors. monthly figures of unique visitors are now trending up over 13,000 and our first marketing exercise of an advertisement in the 2010 history week calendar – a state-wide celebration of history in new south wales organised by the history council of nsw – saw our unique visitors jump by 25 per cent. the vast majority of our visitors are from australia, but we have received visits from most countries in the world, and we get significant regular traffic from all english-speaking countries. drilling down through the data, it's possible to see that we must have been mentioned by a lecturer at the university of north carolina chapel hill in september 2010 sometime, and that those students spent significant amounts of time on the site over a period of days. this sort of audience information is new for historical writing and research, and will no doubt become more important as part of the measurement of and credit for influence and reach of academic research. it certainly has great potential to help guide the dictionary's strategic planning. data from our first year indicates that local history is extremely popular with suburb entries for la perouse and surry hills topping the pageview list. but the histories of communities are public history review | murray & grahame 97 also frequently visited, with vietnamese and croatians gaining thousands of views. most visits do not start at the homepage. despite all the attention paid to the home page navigation, most people – 85 per cent – first enter the dictionary of sydney at an entry or entity page, direct from google, although the most common search term is 'dictionary of sydney', this is still only around three per cent of our traffic from google. there are two implications from this data. the common use of the search term 'dictionary of sydney' suggests that people have indeed heard of the project but haven’t memorised the web address or bookmarked the site. these users could be browsers or they could be searchers. the second, more radical implication for history is that people are tending not to bookmark sites, and thus don’t enter from the homepage – the equivalent of a title page, contents and introduction in a book. jumping straight into a dictionary of sydney entry from google is how many people first encounter this public history project. discovery is through a search term, rather than browsing. their experience of the dictionary will then be based on whether the content meets their expectations of authority, veracity, and value. if the interconnectivity is rich, then the searcher’s curiosity may be piqued and they turn from searcher to browser – off chasing the serendipity of the city. suggesting that this might be happening, our browse pages are among our most heavily used, indicating that many readers are setting off into our content more generally, after arriving in search of something specific. the challenge of interpreting the huge volume of usage data that is available is one we are still coming to grips with. shaping and changing the practice of public history stephen ramsay argues that the digital humanities are dramatically changing the methodology of our consumption of information. the proliferation of hypertext and interactivity encourages ‘browsing’ or what he calls ‘screwing around’. of course, the digital humanities allow for more powerful searching and research methods. but, ramsay argues, ‘once you have programmatic access to the content of the library, screwing around suddenly become a far more illuminating and useful activity’.18 keyword searches mean jumping into the middle of a historical narrative is easy enough; so is jumping public history review | murray & grahame 98 back out or across to something else. hypertext connectivity means people create and follow their own paths and narratives through the dictionary. this is one of the major defining elements of a digital history. the dictionary is forging a new direction in the production of public history in australia through its historical model connecting time and space. what does this mean for how we write (public) history? when the world wide web became mainstream over 15 years ago, there was broad academic concern about the assault on traditional historical narrative. web designers led the charge in the battle for succinctness.19 there was no guarantee that an article would be read from start to finish. technological constraints of screen size and text legibility suggested that readers' tolerance of long narratives to be read on-screen was low. consequently online writing, it was said, should take a much more journalistic approach than the considered historical narrative favoured by most historians. there is still an element of truth in this assessment. there is a knack to writing online and the dictionary of sydney trust has produced writer’s guides, like any publisher, to encourage certain standards and approaches. the dictionary of sydney has also adopted a chapter style of presentation so that long articles can be broken up into smaller chunks, without scrolling interminably down the screen. this enables us to include articles of 5000 words or more, without losing screen appeal. however, we are now in the second decade of the web and people’s exposure to digital technology means audience tolerance of screen interfaces is much higher than first anticipated. new applications such as instapaper,20 which allow readers to save long web pages to read later, perhaps offline, or on another device, mean that more reading styles can be accommodated. user-generated pdf or print-on-demand solutions may also influence readership. computers are integral to business and education; people interact with and use them every day. and as they have become part of everyday life, people are prepared to use them in different ways. five years ago technology and audience tolerance levels meant that only a couple of minutes of audio-visual material could be displayed. with the advent of television being delivered through the web and personal dvd players, people’s interest in audio-visual content is much higher. a new range of user-friendly mobile and reading public history review | murray & grahame 99 devices, such as the ipad and similar hardware, will further extend the reach of projects such as the dictionary. we are now a highly visual culture. and the presentation of digital history is forcing historians to be much more visually fluent in their historical analysis and writing. there is an expectation that digital history will be richly illustrated and this will gradually lead historians to include visual cultures as a regular part of their source material. nevertheless, it is still a big challenge for the trust to get some historians to include images and audio-visual material in their contributions, or even to give our researchers leads to find the best sources. the dictionary of sydney’s historical model, with its strong emphasis upon place, geo-referencing and time, is also forcing historians to be more specific about where and when things happened. many of our contributors, particularly of larger thematic pieces, have often found it challenging to drag the thematic back down to the particular. noting addresses and consulting maps needs to become a basic part of research. because all entries are authored and dated, it is possible to have multiple entries on the same subject, providing different perspectives, and allowing new scholarship or contested interpretations to be presented. adjacent disciplines, such as archaeology, or sociology can also be included. hyde park barracks, a historic building in sydney, with a highly significant archaeology, is included in the dictionary with two entries,21 one on the building’s history,22 one on the archaeological finds made there.23 over time the layering of articles will document the changing interpretations of a subject and, in the very long term as the layers increase, document the historiography of the subject. the dictionary of sydney is a public history project based on shared authority, drawing upon experts both inside and outside the academy, and presenting history to an educated general audience. in terms of public engagement, it is, at this stage, conservative. it is still a curated, peer-edited site; it is not a wiki. content is commissioned and sought by the editor, but also influenced by user requests and offers to write from authors. so it is (mildly) anarchic in its content production. contributors to the dictionary of sydney retain copyright of their material and license it to the trust for use in the digital repository. however, contributors are encouraged to sign a public history review | murray & grahame 100 creative commons license, which is a new way of sharing research that has been developed for the digital age. with a share and sharealike license, people can utilise research, mash it up and present it in a different way for non-profit purposes. the aim of the creative commons license is to encourage collaboration. and the dictionary of sydney is very supportive of this innovative approach to copyright and licensing as it is a productive and responsive form of license for public history. under the shared authority model, the dictionary of sydney is trying to encourage as many contributors and writers as possible, drawn from many different historical enterprises and professions. the dictionary of sydney provides an accessible and encouraging avenue for graduate students and ‘beginning’ historians to get their work peer reviewed, edited and published. digital histories such as this one can also provide a platform for grey literature, such as reports and assessments in the heritage industry, to find another more accessible form of publication, where studies of specific sites can be placed within a wider context. the dictionary of sydney is opening up avenues for publication and fostering public history. already, entries that were written for the dictionary are appearing on council and historical society websites, as our licensing system enables authors to reuse their content. the dictionary of sydney trust has also developed a strategy to allow academic historians to contribute to this public history project and still get their academic publishing points. it is unfortunate that the stringent and arcane academic publishing regime linked to funding and hierarchy has yet to satisfactorily respond to the opportunities of the digital humanities. to combat this, an online peer-reviewed journal, the sydney journal,24 was established through the open journal system at the university of technology, sydney to allow key thematic essays to be published in a manner that will be recognised by australian universities. it seems probable that connections between digital history projects and peer-reviewed ejournals will become more common in the future to foster interplay and collaboration between public history and academic scholarship. securing funding the greatest challenge of all is funding. the initial five-year research project was funded through an arc linkage grant. arc grants are still geared towards projects that finish, neatly or otherwise, and do public history review | murray & grahame 101 not provide for the ongoing costs merely of keeping information online, much less adding to it. this is an issue for all digital humanities projects that are grant-funded, and will need to be addressed by the research community more generally as digital projects proliferate. the dictionary, being without an institutional home, has taken a self-reliant approach. to ensure the sustainability of the project, a not-for-profit trust – the dictionary of sydney trust – was set up in 2006, giving the dictionary an independent body to carry it forward, outside a university or institutional base. the dictionary of sydney trust, governed by a board of trustees, is defined as a cultural organisation with charitable status, so that philanthropic funds and donations can be solicited with the corresponding reward of tax deductions. it is anticipated that over time the dictionary of sydney trust’s funding sources will change. at the moment there is a high reliance upon grant funding, and technical developments are driven by arc funding. in 2010 the trust successfully secured a one-year sponsorship from the council of the city of sydney, which is allowing the trust to lay the foundations of the organisation and build a strong platform from which to publicise and grow the dictionary. part of that sponsorship is dedicated to developing business, fundraising and marketing strategies and programs that will secure ongoing operational funding from a range of sources. like all arts and cultural organisations, we cannot rely solely on one funding body. the dictionary of sydney trust encourages the collaboration and financial support of all local councils in greater sydney, as well as sydney’s cultural, historical and heritage institutions and universities. generating research questions in important ways we have discovered that the dictionary we have built is more like an exhibition or a library than it is like a book. the roles of the designers, editors and curators of such a history become a major part of shaping the overall product, as individual authors are not the ones who make the connections between their work and that of others. cross-references and connections in time and space emerge that are unknown to all or any of the authors involved. as the project grows, its shape and the connections between different parts of it will public history review | murray & grahame 102 not be under the control of any one author or editor, but shaped by the policies and processes in place. as with any major curated project, the research, checking, familiarity with sources and sheer historical intuition that goes into this cross-referencing is part of the value that the dictionary team, both paid and volunteer, adds to the material we include. encyclopedias have always presented disparate material, with cross references. historians have often done this too, but it seems new to have the cross references present whether or not the individual historians know about them. in the dictionary of sydney, the connections may be made by the research and editorial staff, the images, the maps, and any entity mentioned in the text. each text becomes suspended in a web of connections, and none of them is out of bounds. some may raise questions about the accuracy of the text, its sources or its interpretation. other connections provide insight into larger questions and trends in sydney’s history. an example may better illustrate this. edward flood was a founder of the first australian cricket club in 1826,25 and mentioned as such in the dictionary’s essay on sport,26 which describes him as a publican. but flood was later much more eminent, becoming a builder and developer, landowner, and local and colonial politician. dictionary research undertaken for his entity page found that he was one of the builders of the garrison church and a mayor of sydney during the 1840s, and a member of both houses of the new south wales parliament from the 1850s until his death in 1888. he was recognised by his eminent contemporary and fellow politician w.b. dalley as, a man, trained as a mechanic, occupying at one time a humble position, and proud to acknowledge that position, yet, by his own continuous and steady industry he has elevated himself to a position in which he is admired as a politician, loved as a friend and trusted as a statesman. this illustrated that ‘no man, however humble his birth, might not aspire to the proud position that [flood] occupied’.27 but the entry written about him for the city of sydney’s aldermen webpage (to be uploaded to the dictionary in early 2011) did not mention his early cricketing prowess – it was dictionary research that put the two together. public history review | murray & grahame 103 because historical text is always written with a purpose in view, writers, quite correctly, edit for relevance. an enterprise like the dictionary of sydney undoes this editing, in a new way. a family connection, for instance, that a specific writer deems to be irrelevant and does not mention, will still be present in the historical model, and may inspire new questions of the text. as an example, knowing that convict and forger george crossley’s wife anna maria was the sister of the superintendant of convicts, nicholas devine, may indicate a fruitful line of inquiry into the reasons for crossley’s charmed early life in the colony.28 as the content of the dictionary of sydney expands, the dictionary itself will evolve to provide the structures for historical research. as the relationships between entities and places become richer and more complex, people will be able to query the repository by type or relationship or year or area, and discover new relationships and patterns that can be mapped or further analysed. thus the dictionary will move from being merely a digital presentation of history to becoming a source for historical inquiry.29 richard white, director of the stanford university spatial history project, has written about his project that: something that i did not fully understand until i started doing this work and which i have had a hard time communicating fully to my colleagues [is that] visualization and spatial history are not about producing illustrations or maps to communicate things that you have discovered by other means. it is a means of doing research; it generates questions that might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories upon which we build our own versions of the past.30 as the dictionary of sydney grows, it will go beyond being a site where research is presented, and become a place where research questions are generated. we will not know what those possibilities and questions might be until we’ve reached the level of complexity and interconnectedness where they emerge. daniel cohen argues that digital histories may ultimately transform our understanding of the idea of history. he suggests the public history review | murray & grahame 104 digital histories and archives currently being created by the historians on the web are more like the style of history embraced by herodotus (rather than thucydides), with multiple viewpoints (some of which were contradictory), sources, and formats. herodotus preferred multiplicity to allow others to make the interpretations: i will go forward in my account, covering alike the small and great cities of mankind. for of those that were great in earlier times most have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before. since, then, i know that man’s good fortune never abides in the same place, i will make mention of both alike.31 in this type of digital history there is no grand narrative, no defined pathway. there are multiple pathways, hypertext annotations and stories. the multiple voices and authors in the dictionary of sydney may be seen as a reflection of the diversity of the city itself – the places, the peoples, the histories. this type of digital history, as stephen ramsay rightly concludes, is ‘an invitation to community, relationship, and play’. it is a new kind of urban history that mirrors the experience of the metropolis – the intimate and the personal interact with the impersonal and random nature of city life. and because the content of this digital history can keep growing ad infinitum, it reflects the complexities of the metropolis and indeed the organic, topsy-turvy development of sydney as a city. the dictionary of sydney through its structure and multimedia platform also has the ability to present the auditory experience of the city as well as the physical experience. you can potentially capture the sounds of the city through recordings of ambient sounds and sensory elements. creating a sensory history of the city, and a history of the everyday, are long term goals for the dictionary of sydney. a project such as the dictionary of sydney has some really exciting possibilities for connecting the huge interest in family and local history into sydney’s urban and social history. through the historical model and navigational structure of the dictionary, the fine-grained and detailed history of individual families and places can be juxtaposed with the city-wide, national and global perspective. for example, a number of local histories on their district’s suburbs – camden,32 camden west,33 mount hunter,34 and studley park35 – have been written by camden historical society members, whose public history review | murray & grahame 105 local knowledge and sources enrich their accounts. because the information structures, linking and presentation in the dictionary make good connections between local history and thematic history, we quickly discover that camden’s suburbs are also mentioned in thematic entries on charity and philanthropy,36 economy,37 english,38 germans,39 italians,40 maltese,41 religion,42 and western sydney.43 the dictionary also has the potential to connect family history, much of which is place-based, into the city’s broader urban history. the family relationships that shaped power, inheritance, property and influence in the early colony can be modelled and connected to the larger narratives of politics and development.44 the dictionary of sydney is already showing dividends in the way the amalgamation, layering and linking of articles can make new connections and bring scholarship into new contexts. by making these connections and linking apparently disparate articles through a name, facts can be cross-referenced or triangulated and discrepancies brought to light. research from 20 or 30 years ago is only enhanced by modern research methodologies enabled by digitisation projects. digital history is forcing historians to become more accountable; there can be no more fudging of that newspaper reference since everyone can check it, and many new references have become accessible without spending months in libraries. and in this regard, it should be noted that the dictionary of sydney benefits from and is highly reliant upon many other digital history projects: such as having the australian dictionary of biography online,45 digitised newspapers on trove,46 indeed all the work done on online catalogues and digitisation of records. the national library’s australian newspapers digitisation project is vital to the editors and researchers of the dictionary of sydney, and we use it, and try to help with its ocr correction, every working day. there is now a critical mass of digital history projects out there that make the encyclopaedic and hypertext annotated ambitions of the dictionary a reality. in this sense, the dictionary should be seen as a highly collaborative digital project. but there is no substitute for editorial oversight of content. even in machine-made aggregations of content, there is a degree of free riding on the research and editorial investments of other institutions, and the best information in any aggregated source, such as about nsw,47 comes from the most quality-controlled contributors, such as the australian dictionary of biography. public history review | murray & grahame 106 connecting institutions digital humanities projects such as this one are forcing cultural institutions to look harder at their websites and their connectivity with digital histories. the dictionary of sydney has been created from the start with persistent identifiers and other informational metadata that allow text-harvesting and the sharing of content. many other cultural institutions are playing catch-up. when the dictionary of sydney started five years ago, the state library of nsw didn’t have persistent identifiers in their catalogues, making it exceedingly difficult to link from the dictionary to images and catalogue information. this has since been rectified, and so references are being updated and linked. the dictionary of sydney’s greatest strength is its content. we have already fed into other innovative projects, such as the abc online’s sydney sidetracks,48 developed by sara barnes. and within the next six months the dictionary of sydney will be part of the national library’s trove enterprise. we also have a relationship with sydney wikipedians, which we hope to develop further, bringing the dictionary of sydney into wikipedia as an authoritative source for historical material on sydney, and encouraging wikipedians to refer to content from us in their work. the dictionary of sydney trust is also contributing to methodological research and digital history presentation, and has advised and consulted with other history projects, such as a proposed digital history of adelaide and south australia, an encyclopedia of tasmania and the queensland historical atlas. it is particularly interested in fostering cultural tourism and connecting sydney’s contemporary communities. the thematic homepage of the dictionary of sydney is being used as mechanism to connect sydney’s history with contemporary culture and communities. three entries are selected to highlight people, places, buildings and these often relate to current cultural events, anniversaries and festivals. the front page changes regularly to move with the times. one of the greatest pressures on the dictionary of sydney trust at present is the expectation that the dictionary will produce smart phone applications to take the city’s history onto the streets. there are many new applications currently hitting our phones, but at the moment many of them play with the technology but rarely move public history review | murray & grahame 107 beyond the wow factor. for the time being, the dictionary of sydney is focussing upon increasing its content and media presence. the dictionary of sydney’s digital repository has been designed as a sustainable and expandable digital repository of information so that we can ride the waves of technology. well-structured metadata and content will allow the trust to gradually produce many different presentation layers. ongoing development with the receipt of a second australian research council linkage grant in 2010, the technical capabilities of the dictionary will be enhanced over the next couple of years to take advantage of mobile, augmented reality and geo-spatial applications. this requires more work to provide as many entities as possible with geographical coordinates, so that they can be mapped and queried according to location. there are two associated presentation projects. the first is taking history onto the streets with augmented reality and geo-referenced trails through the dictionary of sydney’s content. this will really put sydney’s history in your hands out on the street and has great appeal from a local government and cultural tourism perspective. at first the content of these trails will need to be curated specially for each project; but as the content in the dictionary increases, these trails will be able to be automatically generated. this presentation of history through mobile personal devices may, in the longer term, impact other forms of historical markers, such as plaques, walking tour brochures and interpretive signage. the second project is living exhibitions, currently being developed in conjunction with the powerhouse museum and the historic houses trust. the idea here is to harness the extraordinary amount of research that feeds into museum and library exhibitions and place it within the wider context of sydney’s history. this project has the appeal of making the ephemeral exhibition more permanent and allowing community engagement, learning and entertainment to continue well after the physical exhibition has closed. another benefit of this type of project is the connections that the dictionary can make between cultural institutions, curators and historians. with the first presentation of the dictionary of sydney just one year old, the radical impact of this new historical model on public public history review | murray & grahame 108 history is only just beginning to emerge. nevertheless, it is clear that the dictionary of sydney can provide a new platform for the publication of public history. it is starting to forge new connections between local history, family history and urban history, producing new scholarship in and contexts for our urban history. finally, the dictionary of sydney provides a unified framework for sydney’s history, allowing public history to flourish and be a visible part of sydney’s culture and communities. endnotes 1 d. seefeldt and w.d. thomas, ‘what is digital history? a look at some exemplar projects’, faculty publications, department of history, university of nebraska-lincoln (online). available: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/98 (accessed 10 november 2010). 2 chicago historical society, 2005, encyclopedia of chicago (online). available: http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org (accessed 10 november 2010). 3 school of historical studies !department of history, the university of melbourne, 2008, emelbourne the city past and present (online). available: http://www.emelbourne.net.au (accessed 10 november 2010). 4 ministry for culture and heritage, 2005, te ara – the encyclopedia of new zealand (online). available: http://www.teara.govt.nz/ (accessed 10 november 2010). 5 daniel j. cohen, ‘history and the second decade of the web’, in rethinking history, vol 8, no 2, 2004, p295. 6 for example hicks, m. 2008, reading the roads (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/reading_the_roads (accessed 10 november 2010). 7 for example hawson, l. 2009, istanbul in sydney, auburn 2009 (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/image/37966 (accessed 10 november 2010). 8 ramsay, s. 2010, ‘the hermeneutics of screwing around: or what you do with a million books’, paper presented to the playing with technology in history conference, niagara-on-the-lake, canada april 2010, p9 (online). available: http://www.playingwithhistory.com/wpcontent/uploads/2010/04/hermeneutics.pdf (accessed 10 november 2010). 9 for example mccormack, t. 2008, tibetans (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/tibetans (accessed 10 november 2010); wotherspoon, g. 2008, shopping (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/shopping (accessed 10 november 2010). 10 for example norman selfe's artistic scheme for his 1901 harbour bridge design, state library of nsw collection [ssv/47], 1901, approaches to bridge and scheme for remodelling the rocks (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/image/25975 (accessed 10 november 2010); and the original order-in-council ending transportation public history review | murray & grahame 109 to new south wales, 1840 (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/image/41788 (accessed 10 november 2010). 11 for example in entries on central railway station and surry hills: dunn, m. 2008, central railway station (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/building/central_railway_station (accessed 10 november 2010); wotherspoon, g. and keating, c. 2009, surry hills (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/surry_hills (accessed 10 november 2010). 12 australia post, 1942, removal of the sydney gpo clock tower (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/video/19127 (accessed 10 november 2010). 13 private collection, 1961, last tram on anzac parade 9 june 1961 (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/video/19048 (accessed 10 november 2010). 14 for example historic maps of willoughby and alexandria: 1917, municipality of willoughby (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/map/24119 (accessed 10 november 2010); 1835, the parish of alexandria (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/map/24111 (accessed 10 november 2010). 15 for example a map of the various schools of arts buildings across the sydney region, over time, (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/map/27564 (accessed 10 november 2010); and a curated map of buildings and places mentioned in the chippendale entry (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/map/20485 (accessed 10 november 2010). 16 nathan was the first person to be killed by a tram and is mentioned in the tram deaths entry: skinner, n. 2008, nathan, isaac (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/person/nathan_isaac (accessed 10 november 2010). 17 for example http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/person/crossley_george will always point to george crossley's entity page. 18 ramsay, op cit, p6. 19 daniel j. cohen, ‘history and the second decade of the web’, in rethinking history, vol 8, no 2, 2004, p295. 20 instapaper, 2010 (online). available: http://www.instapaper.com/ (accessed 10 november 2010). 21 hyde park barracks (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/place/hyde_park_barracks (accessed 10 november 2010). 22 ellmoos, l. 2008, hyde park barracks (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/hyde_park_barracks (accessed 10 november 2010). 23 davies, p. 2010, hyde park barracks archaeology (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/hyde_park_barracks_archaeol ogy (accessed 10 november 2010). public history review | murray & grahame 110 24 sydney journal, sydney’s history from first settlement to the present (online). available: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/sydney_journal (accessed 10 november 2010). 25 flood, edward (online). available: www.dictionaryofsydney.org/person/flood_edward (accessed 10 november 2010). 26 cashman, r. 2008, sport (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/sport (accessed 10 november 2010). 27 ‘complimentary dinner to mr e flood’, sydney morning herald, 18 august 1865, p5 (online). available: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/31125053 (accessed 7 december 2010). 28 soloman, j. 2008, crossley, george (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/person/crossley_george (accessed 7 december 2010). 29 cohen, op cit, p299. 30 white, r. 2010, ‘what is spatial history?’ spatial history lab: working paper (online). available: http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgibin/site/pub.php?id=29 (accessed 10 november 2010). 31 herodotus, quoted in cohen, op cit, p300. 32 willis, i. 2008, camden (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/camden (accessed 7 december 2010). 33 robinson, s. 2008, camden west (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/camden_west (accessed 7 december 2010). 34 akers, j. 2008, mount hunter (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/mount_hunter (accessed 7 december 2010). 35 herbert, r. 2008, studley park (online) available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/studley_park (accessed 7 december 2010). 36 o’brien, a. 2008, charity and philanthropy (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/charity_and_philanthropy (accessed 7 december 2010). 37 wotherspoon, g. 2008, economy (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/economy (accessed 7 december 2010). 38 jupp, j. 2008, english (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/english (accessed 7 december 2010). 39 tampke, j. 2008, germans (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/germans (accessed 7 december 2010). 40 cresciani, g. 2008, italians (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/italians (accessed 7 december 2010). public history review | murray & grahame 111 41 caruana, m. 2008, maltese (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/maltese (accessed 7 december 2010). 42 carey, h.m. 2008, religion (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/religion (accessed 7 december 2010). 43 gwyther, g. 2008, western sydney (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/western_sydney (accessed 7 december 2010). 44 for example the entries on richard and elizabeth rouse: rouse, richard (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/person/rouse_richard (accessed 7 december 2010); rouse, elizabeth (online). available: http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/person/rouse_elizabeth (accessed 7 december 2010). 45 the australian national university, 2006, australian dictionary of biography online edition (online). available: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/adbonline.htm (accessed 7 december 2010). 46 national library of australia, trove australia (online). available: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ (accessed 7 december 2010). 47 about new south wales (online). available: http://about.nsw.gov.au/ (accessed 7 december 2010). 48 abc, 2010, sydney sidetracks: history where it happened (online). available: http://www.abc.net.au/innovation/sidetracks/ (accessed 7 december 2010). galleytrapeznik public history review vol 19 (2012): 43–62 © utsepress and the author the contested white lady: a critique of new zealand cultural heritage politics lindsay neill, eveline duerr and alexander trapeznik his article places a long-term auckland eatery, the white lady – a pie cart established in 1948 – as an exemplar of kiwiana that, because of its mobility, currently sits outside of legislation that otherwise may recognise it as cultural heritage. this article argues that the vernacular nature of the white lady represents yet another obstacle to its cultural heritage inclusion, reflecting the current disposition of cultural heritage in new zealand; that it is viewed toward the elite, rather than toward the ordinary. to gain traction for the argument that the white lady is an item of cultural heritage, a brief history of it is provided and its link to ‘kiwiana’ established. the legislation currently precluding the white lady’s heritage status will be identified and this article will argue that, despite its mobility, the white lady should be considered a heritage item. in doing so, we illuminate the further consideration of other items of vernacular kiwiana culture currently excluded from heritage consideration. such revision, exemplified by the t public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 44 white lady’s inclusion, would reflect a holistic view within new zealand’s consideration of heritage because it would include items ranging from the vernacular to the elite. t h e w h i t e l a d y a s v e r n a c u l a r k i w i a n a c u l t u r a l h e r i t a g e this section presents a brief history of auckland’s white lady pie cart and its contested social meaning by discussing its relevance to c. bell,1 and r. wolfe and s. barnett’s construct of kiwiana – objects and icons in the popular imaginarycreated during the first few decades after world war two that contribute to new zealand national identity.2 this is important because it places the white lady within vernacular or popular culture, themes strongly contrasting the domains of elitism currently permeating cultural heritage in new zealand. t h e w h i t e l a d y : a b r i e f h i s t o r y figure 1 the white lady3 d. mcgill defines pie carts as ‘caravan(s) with a [top-]hinged side door through which fast foods are dispensed, [most notably] pie pea and pud,4 mince pie with mashed potato and peas sloshed over with gravy’.5 eastern southland museum curator j. geddes suggests that the caravan form of the pie cart was influenced by the rural ‘stinker’.6 these were straight-sided horse-drawn wagons covered by an arched roof. ‘stinkers’ were used by farm and field workers as rest huts, gaining their public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 45 distinctive title because of the heady aroma of combined food, sweat and bucolic field work odour. auckland’s white lady pie cart reflects the design dynamics of the ‘stinker’. the cart began trading in 1948. in a volatile industry like hospitality, its survival is a remarkable achievement. as l. neill and others note, the average lifespan of a hospitality business in auckland is a mere 18 months.7 brian alfred ‘pop’ washer started the business by selling non-alcoholic beverages at horse-racing meetings around auckland city. ever the entrepreneur, pop also illegally ran a ‘book’. but when racetrack authorities found this out he was banned from selling drinks at race meetings and, consequently, decided to convert the classic ‘stinker’-shaped caravan into a pie cart selling food.8 initially, pop secured a trading space for the cart in auckland’s downtown fort street. at this time, auckland city boasted a population of around 300 000, with busy electric trams along queen street ferrying workers and others about the town.9 as perrott has noted, ‘after the austerity of wartime rationing, including a scarcity of such feminine essentials as stockings, people could dress for a night out at the movies or the dance halls; the men in suits, the women in hats and gloves’. dance halls were especially popular, with auckland boasting almost 40 of them.10 pop was quick to maximise the benefits of the post-war boom, taking advantage of the public’s penchant for going out to these and other venues by offering a tasty stop-off point at the white lady. pop was keenly aware of what constituted ‘value for money’, pricing his food around the cost of a beer. this suited the largely male clientele of the day who could relate their food experiences at the white lady to their other indulgences, specifically the ‘six o’clock swill’.11 the white lady proved popular and it was not uncommon that customers were three-and four-deep at the counter as dance halls closed and movie theatres emptied. pop’s wife joyce remembers how the now popular white caravan got its name: somehow we began to refer to our business in the feminine; she was a busy night, last night, that sort of thing. everyone talked like that, expressions like “she’s a darn good car, and “i gave her the gun” were common. i named her the white lady because she was painted white. there were no racial overtones in those days. children were still allowed their golliwogs.12 joyce’s reminiscences also reflected how hygiene and customer expectations of it have changed since the late 1940s: public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 46 we also had tomato sauce, bread and butter, and a glass dish of cut tomato, cucumber and onions on the counter [uncovered and for customers to help themselves to]. but no fancy serviettes. we used a communal tea towel and the customers were all happy with that.13 as time passed, the white lady gained a positive reputation for its food and coffee. consequently, business growth occurred and at one stage the white lady employed sixteen people.14 in the 1950s, auckland did not have the café culture it now boasts. however, pop purchased and installed a convection goldie tripolator that produced percolated coffee. again, joyce recalled that this additional offering was: a hit. americans staying at auckland’s top hotel of the day, the trans-tasman in shortland street, regularly visited the cart just for the coffee. they’d often remark that it was the only place [in auckland] where you could get a decent cup of coffee. 15 as well as a reputation for food and coffee, the business also developed a reputation as a social venue, a gathering point for people, many of whom considered that a night out in auckland city was incomplete without a visit to the cart. ‘back then’, joyce remembered, ‘people would head there after protest marches and parties. it was a bit of a ritual.’16 others perceived the white lady as a barometer of auckland’s changing demography. one family of white lady regulars used the cart as an opportunity to show their children that it offers more than just food and beverages. neill notes that the parents often took their four teenagers to the white lady… as a ‘cultural experience’… it’s part of the city’s history, and while it’s changed, it’s still there! the fact that the staff that night were all asian, [shows that] the pie cart over the years has reflected the changing demographic of downtown.17 as well as serving as a barometer of demographic change, the white lady reflects a diverse customer base. this contrasts with the restrictions that more upmarket and plutocratic dining venues provide and suggests that an egalitarian ethos has contributed toward the cart’s longevity. a long-serving white lady cook noted: public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 47 we had everybody [as customers], everybody from sort of street workers to management. really, the thing you saw while working at the white lady is that there is not that much difference between those people. one might be a millionaire, and with another guy boozed to the eyeballs and a lady with a $2000 dress and the $500 haircut will [all] fill a spot in the gutter.18 a taxi driver who frequently drops off hungry white lady diners noted: when you look at the people on the pavement eating their burgers, they could be anyone from winston peters to a bus driver from mangere, you know, the whole gamut.19 peter washer recalls how his customers have changed over time: they’d come after the six o’clock swill. then a surge of customers followed as the pictures got out, and then in more recent times, as nightclubs and bars have stayed open longer, we now have a surge (of customers) at 2am. i remember in the 1970s when marijuana use was big, people would arrive at the cart with the ‘munchies’ and eat a couple of burgers each. we had great food sales, and because everyone was mellow, very little violence. now amphetamine-based party drugs are popular and we have noticed a big increase in water and drink sales as takers stave off dehydration.20 this broad overview of the white lady’s customers is narrowed by other research inputs. a white lady regular and successful auckland businessman offered: yes i go there, not as frequently as i used to, but i would say that you could say there is a lower standard perhaps of clientele at these pie carts throughout new zealand, but conversely at one end of the pie cart you could have someone in evening dress who has just come back from a party and down the other end you could have a couple of surfers who have been surfing all day, partying all night and decided to fill their stomachs, so there has always been a cross-section, but probably favouring the more prosaic or ordinary client.21 public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 48 while these views reflect the white lady’s diverse client base as well as the spectrum of the demographic profile of auckland, the white lady has extended this by active engagement with the city’s less fortunate, specifically the homeless. a cook at the cart recounted: i remember i used to do the morning shifts on saturday and sundays, you know, and all the street guys, the ones that live on the street, they’d been down to seamart, you know, the fish shop there and they had given them some fish heads and they came down to the pie cart, you know, to ask us to cook ‘oh, can you please cook us something to eat?’ i said, ‘if peter finds out that i am cooking fish on the grill he will kill me, give it here.’ so they give me the fish heads, i boil the kettle, fill it up with hot water, salt, pepper and onions and i cook it, up, not on the grill, but in one of those stainless steel containers and after that it’s cooked in about half an hour. buttered some bread up, put it in a plastic container and ‘off you go.’22 this was not an isolated instance. white lady cooks have catered in this way on other occasions, albeit they were worried that peter washer might object to their generosity. the cook continued: i remember one new year’s eve they came down [the street people], and peter [washer, the white lady’s owner] brought us a few drinks, and he [the street person] was telling peter how they used to bring fish heads there and i used to cook them and used to send them away ‘hurry up, go before peter comes and don’t say a word, and then he [the street person] comes and tells peter how i always used to cook his stew! and, i say ‘shhh, i told you not to say’. even when street kids came along you know, if we made a mistake [cooked more items than ordered] we [would] keep it underneath the warmer and if anybody comes up off the street then peter said ‘just give it to them,’ he was like that.23 on another occasion a worker went beyond just providing free food or a boil-up of fish heads: some homeless people come here and one night i took one of them home when we closed the white lady. margarita was a noble lady… she needed a bath tub and we had a bath.24 public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 49 yet despite a solid reputation for food, service and altruism the white lady has not been without its critics, many of whom claim that the business has passed its ‘sell by date’ and should be consigned to ‘auckland’s culinary history’. best exemplifying this position is the auckland city council request that the white lady move from its longterm trading site in shortland street at queen street, when the new deloitte building at 80 queen street was built. multiplex, the property’s developers, successfully lobbied the council suggesting that the white lady was an incongruous part of the ‘upmarket’ streetscape created by their new development.25 despite objection from peter washer, the white lady’s owner, the cart was required to move to the nearby, but less central, corner of commerce and fort streets, a position it still occupies. the attitude of the multiplex developers was compounded by negative publicity that surrounded the newmarket pie cart. this cart is the white lady’s sister business and is also operated by the washer family. sue gunn, manager of the newmarket business association, which lodged a complaint on behalf of property owners and retailers [in newmarket], said that while times had changed, the pie cart had not. it's had its day really. it's past its use-by date. we've pitched ourselves [newmarket] in the marketplace as the premier shopping destination in new zealand. we're like covent garden in london, if you like, and this does not fit.26 yet despite a changing streetscape and claims that parts of auckland city aspire to present themselves as being dominated by upmarket streetscapes, upper-class values and aesthetics, the city comprises a diverse socio-economic demographic. this is evidenced by the clients frequenting the white lady. peter washer considers his business and its customers are unique: my customers ignore the likes of burger king and mcdonald’s to eat what they feel is truly indigenous. i like to think that we are akin to marilyn monroe’s beauty-spot to some an indication of a malignant melanoma, to others a defining uniqueness.27 the claim that the white lady’s customers are unique is evidenced by their vocal radio talk back defence and support when the business was public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 50 under threat of relocation from shortland street to commerce street. while their protests were in vain, and peter washer readily admitted that with declining patronage combined with council pressures to move, the business could close for good, it was the media that came to the aid of the white lady. in 2009, kitchen makeover took on the challenge of rebranding and revising the white lady’s food, service and business systems in a 30minute television documentary. palino, who presented the programme, noted early on that the white lady could no longer rest on its laurels and introduced the realities of real business competition as a motivator for business improvement. palino noted: ‘in this day and age with all this competition it’s just not good enough [the white lady]’.28 while owner peter washer found change difficult, with a new menu, service standards and control systems, he soon realised the benefit of palino’s business expertise as well as the potency of media in increasing business turnover. consequently, after the programme aired and peter had maximised his learning experience with palino, he noted that the white lady ‘is now consequently trading its way out of considerable debt’. 29 shortly after this programme, peter’s longevity at the white lady was recognised by his receiving a life-time achievement award from the prestigious lewisham foundation. as a result of these changes, the white lady continues successful trading in commerce street. the business is now considering a move back to its prime position on shortland street. this possibility has occurred as both developers multiplex and the council came to realise that the upmarket retail business space and the white lady ‘use’ of the streetscape occur at different times of the day and night. a revision and the return of the white lady to shortland street will maximise public access to this area for a variety of different groups over differing time periods. other potentials have been realised for the white lady. it has become part of auckland city council’s advertising campaign big little city. this campaign promoted auckland city as a tourist destination using hospitality-focused themes within the city.30 media coverage has resulted in a white lady renaissance. this renaissance has been further fuelled, not by the sophistication of television but rather the ‘voice of the people’: the internet. subscribers to the 2010 lonely planet guide voted the white lady, in november 2010, number 1 of 180 things to do in auckland as well as number 1 of 870 things to do in new zealand31. in addition to survival, the business is clearly a life marker for its customers and staff and, while the cart has attracted criticism, it has been the decisions of the public that have ultimately decided its fate. ample opportunities have presented public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 51 themselves that could have ended this business, yet it endures. in an ever-changing streetscape that reflects an ever-changing world, businesses like the white lady are more than food sellers. they meld socio-economic history, personal customer/staff narratives and memories/nostalgia, contributing toward an understanding of the present though an evocation of the past. in this sense, the white lady is a key part of new zealand’s cultural heritage as well as a unique kiwiana identifier. it is to this construct that this article now turns. k i w i a n a : a c o n s t r u c t i v e f r a m e w o r k for r. wolfe and s. barnett kiwiana32 consists of five mass manufactured items,33 ten commercial items,34 six food-based items35 and seven objects of new zealand’s flora and fauna.36 many kiwiana items reflect new zealand’s primary industries that have dominated commercial growth and the economy. kiwiana has also provided cultural currency, reflecting the widespread belief that new zealanders can ‘turn their hand to anything’. this section identifies the construct of kiwiana and illustrates why the white lady should be included within its purview. this is an important consideration for the overall aim of this article. by including the white lady within kiwiana, the groundwork is laid for the consideration that other items of vernacular culture also require cultural heritage attention. to aid the accomplishment of this goal, a conceptual model of four items of wolfe and barnett’s kiwiana are noted within figure 2. these items include the buzzy bee, jandals, wattie’s industries and the swanndri. items of kiwiana like these include many objects of new zealand’s material culture that hold significance for new zealanders and are often taken for granted. while bell and wolfe and barnett remind us that items of kiwiana are assumed to be uniquely new zealand, l. neill’s research reveals that many items of kiwiana have their origins in countries other than new zealand.37 however, wolfe and barnett consider that the new zealand popular cultural perception of kiwiana is that it represents symbols of nation and identity, especially for pakeha new zealanders who consider items of kiwiana to be iconic.38 consequently, and despite the fact that many items of kiwiana are not indigenously new zealand, they provide significant points of difference for new zealanders. this is an important consideration within an increasingly cosmopolitanised and globalised world. the four items in figure 2 have a history outside of their claim to kiwiana. the buzzy bee was invented in america, jandals were adapted public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 52 public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 53 from japan and wattie’s industries were modelled on similar overseas canneries. the swanndri, while reflecting the german loden jacket, may be the only ‘true’ indigenous item. these items have, according to wolfe and barnett, become iconic kiwiana because they respectively reflect happy and carefree childhoods, relaxed lifestyles, commercial ingenuity and the dominance of primary industry for the economy and population.39 consequently, many pakeha new zealanders have, over time, taken symbolic meaning from these items that reflect constructs of identity and self. public fascination with kiwiana has fuelled media interest in it and within wider themes of new zealand identity, especially its symbolic forms. this has added to the commercialisation and commodification of these items as reinforcers of a new zealand identity. a compelling parallel exists between figure 2 and the history of the white lady. this parallel aligns the white lady to the construct of kiwiana and is shown in figure 3. the white lady mirrors the constructs that analysis of wolf and barnett’s kiwiana theme reveals. specifically, mobile fast food street traders, like the white lady, can be traced through the cultural histories of england, europe, italy and china within the research of c. spencer, l. civitello, l. mason, c. lashley and a. morrison as well as f. fernandez-armesto.40 contemporaneously, pie carts feature in the culinary history of the united states, australia and many spanish-speaking countries. the loncheras that are ‘operated by latina families… are in many ways similar to the pie carts’.41 pie carts became popular in new zealand during the depression of the 1930s, gaining maximum popularity during the 1960s and 1970s.42 congruent with wolf and barnett’s kiwiana prescriptor, the white lady reflects pop washer’s entrepreneurialism, the informality of new zealand’s dining culture and cuisine and how fast food was embraced by people of various class backgrounds. the combination of longevity and recognition of the white lady’s meaning for its stakeholders clearly parallels the items in figure 2. finally, the media has contributed to the positioning and longevity of the white lady in a similar way that the buzzy bee has been ‘endorsed’ as iconic kiwiana by a young prince william.43 the parallels between figures 2 and 3 are compelling evidence to support the assertion that the white lady is an item of kiwiana. this assertion is further supported by literature that confirms the importance of material culture – kiwiana – that s. tannock emphasises holds potential for participant nostalgia.44 d. lowenthal suggests that items evoking nostalgia act as touchstones of the past.45 these positions represent ‘regimes of value’46 that reflect economic and emotional public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 54 figure 4 prince william and his parents in auckland with a buzzy bee (right), 1983 (courtsey nz history online) elements that i. woodward consequently encapsulates by suggesting that: by studying culture as something created and lived through objects, we can better understand both social structures and larger systemic dimensions such as inequality and social difference, and also human action, emotion and meaning. objects might be seen then, as a crucial link between the social and the economic actor, and the individual actor.47 the relationship between people and their material culture, exemplified by kiwiana, contributes an awareness of how material objects signify affinities and wider social discourses that relate to extensively held norms and values enshrined within society.48 this view supports bell’s claim that items of kiwiana enable pakeha new zealanders to have a sense of identity.49 yet, in the case of the white lady, recognition of it as an item of kiwiana and cultural heritage remains elusive. public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 55 cultural heritage: an overview heritage is not about the past. rather, it is a reflection of what exists at present.50 cultural heritage in new zealand is administered by local council bodies as well as central government including the ministry of culture and heritage and the historic places trust. these institutions embrace the definition of cultural heritage proposed by the international council on monuments and sites (icomos).51 this involves conservation and care of ‘places of cultural heritage value’. icomos defines cultural heritage as something ‘possessing historical, archaeological, architectural, technological, aesthetic, scientific, spiritual, traditional or other special cultural significance, associated with human activity’.52 within new zealand, cultural heritage comprises: the tangible and intangible heritage values of european, maori and other cultural groups of new zealand and includes, but is not limited to, buildings, places, sites, objects, archaeological remains, cultural landscapes and associated people, stories, events and memories, and wahi tapu areas [places of sacred and extreme importance to the local tribe].53 new zealand’s cultural heritage history can be traced to the society for the protection of ancient buildings begun in england by william morris and john ruskin in 1877. 54 as new zealand grew as a british colony, to celebrate 50 years of settlement during the 1880s and 1890s, settlers began museums and the ‘acquiring of artefacts’.55 from this came the first moves to preserve early european buildings and to collect artefacts. maori culture was included within early heritage work.56 this began what a. trapeznik and g. mclean suggest was a distorted view of heritage because ‘heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly invents and frankly forgets and thrives on ignorance and error.’57 this, coupled with the commodification/commercialisation of history further alienates it from the people who actually experience it. one key problem which leads to conflict in any assessment regarding the value of cultural heritage is the failure to recognise and reconcile the multiple values associated with specific places. clearly, interpretations of heritage differ according to subjective positioning, discipline or methodology. this is particularly relevant to the inclusion of vernacular and kiwiana items of culture like the white lady and its place within cultural heritage. public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 56 it is an inescapable fact that businesses like the white lady, just as does the average person, seldom leave behind detailed archival sources such as diaries or memoirs which would directly register their major concerns, or how they became manifest. the cheaply built structures of the poor seldom last as well as the masonry buildings of the elite. as a result, heritage built on wealth, privilege and education looms larger in the landscape than that of the commonplace. inevitably, an unbalanced view of the past has been conserved and protected and this needs to be rectified. cultural heritage legislation g. vossler explains that the historic places act (1993), the resource management act (1991) and the conservation act (1987) provide for the management and protection of new zealand’s cultural heritage. vossler posits that a duality of interest exists within cultural heritage legislation between ‘the zeal and wisdom with which it is implemented, and the adequacy of the administrative and technical systems and financial resources supporting it’.58 the inadequacy holds consequences for items such as the white lady because they do not fit neatly into the categories provided by legislation: those that consider it an historic object do not protect it, while legislation that might protect it does not consider it historic. legislation and the white lady this study positions the white lady within vernacular culture, specifically kiwiana. vernacular culture, according to m. lantis, is about familiarity and places: culture-as-it-is-lived.59 in examining the application of cultural heritage legislation to the white lady, it will become evident that the white lady is not a comfortable fit within existing heritage structures because of its mobility and vernacular status. within schedule 4 of the protected objects act (1975) the categories of ‘protected new zealand objects’ are noted.60 the schedule includes ‘archaeological, ethnographic and historical objects of non-new zealand origin, relating to new zealand… art objects including fine, decorative, and popular art… documentary heritage objects… nga taonga tuturu61… national science objects… new zealand archaeological objects… numismatic and philatelic objects… science, technology, industry, economy and transport objects… [and] social history objects’.62 of these categories, the white lady ‘fits’ within ‘science, technology, industry, economy and transport objects, [specifically] 8.1.(c) vehicles; related to 8.2.(a) air, land and water transport; 8.2.(c) design; 8.2.(l) the public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 57 service and recreation industries’ as well as ‘9.1.(c) cultural life and arts and crafts, (specifically) 9.1.(i) leisure and recreation, including all forms of sport, entertainment, and tourism… 9.1.(k) personal histories… 9.1.(m) social and political issues… 9.1.(o) urban and rural culture’. an object within the noted classifications ‘is included in this category if it is: (a) not represented by at least two comparable examples permanently held in new zealand public collections; and (b) not less than 50 years old’.63 however, under section 22(5) of the historic places act (1993) ‘chattels or objects [must be] situated in or on that place’.64 in this regard, the white lady does not qualify for consideration as a historic place because the historic places trust (hpt) considers that a historic place needs to be a fixed one. this is a contradiction in terms for a mobile fastfood facility. while the white lady does not meet the requirement that a historic place be in a fixed place, under section 23(2) of the historic places act (1993), the trust may assign category 1 or 2 status to any historic place, having regard to any of the following criteria: (a) the extent to which the place reflects important or representative aspects of new zealand history (b) the association of the place with events, persons, or ideas of importance in new zealand history (c) the potential of the place to provide knowledge of new zealand history (d) the community association with, or public esteem for, the place (e) the potential of the place for public education (f) the technical accomplishment or value, or design of the place (g) the symbolic or commemorative value of the place… (h) the extent to which the place forms part of a wider historical and cultural complex or historical and cultural landscape. with regard to section 23(2), a liberal translation of ‘ideas’ and ‘cultural complex’ may include contemporary themes of ‘kiwiana’ and vernacular culture. but this is not made explicit. although the shortland street site – or any other site – where the white lady operated may be classified a historic place, it is the presence of the white lady on that site that makes the site important. because of the mobile nature of the white lady, it would not be considered as a historic place because it has no fixed position. the auckland city council is reluctant to apply the provisions of the icomos charter to public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 58 the white lady. discussion with the council’s heritage experts revealed that while the council has an interest in moveable heritage, this classification [moveable heritage is] used within archaeology and natural heritage, and that the domain of moveable cultural heritage is for museums, especially those interested in education and conservation.65 because the white lady is ‘on the 50-year cusp’, the council perceives difficulty regarding its heritage classification.66 this compounds the legislative problems the white lady faces in gaining heritage status. furthermore, the resource management act (1991) also has an impact on the white lady. under its provisions and the re-development of the white lady’s trading site the resource management act necessitated the relocation of the business. this act contains a provision to allocate a ‘heritage order’ that would provide protective measures for the white lady. however, because the auckland city council does not have a current street trading policy for businesses, including the white lady, it would be unlikely it would administer heritage protection status to the cart given the current legal limbo. legislative shortcomings and the white lady this study has established that the white lady is not aligned to the legislation that might classify it as either a historic place or as part of wider heritage. while self-classification by the white lady’s owner as a protected object would protect it from export – although there is little chance of this happening – and the resource management act (1991) would provide limited protection within auckland city council’s street trading policy, this article shows that barriers exist regarding the classification of the white lady as cultural heritage. clearly, a bias exists within current cultural heritage constructs that aims to identify and define rather than manufacture identity. this positions heritage recognition within a view of the past, yet cultural heritage embraces the cohesion of communities and nationhood, contributing toward a holistic identity, that this article asserts can be achieved within the contemporary streetscape.67 the bias within legislation that excludes kiwiana, like the white lady, reflects p. hooper’s concept that change is often perceived as being for a greater national good. this study suggests this position is erroneous and that vernacular heritage items like the white lady contribute toward themes of nationhood and identity. public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 59 bell posits that ‘kiwiana turns a blind eye to the truths of the post war period: race relations, [the] inequity of society [and] issues concerning individual rights.’68 this study argues the opposite. the white lady presents cultural heritage with an opportunity to list an item that overrides these issues. such a listing would evoke new zealand’s mythologised egalitarianism, a construct evident throughout the white lady’s history, and in its customer and staff perceptions and narratives. also having a negative impact on the white lady’s status as a cultural heritage item is language. a search (using ‘kiwiana’ as key word) of the ministry of culture and heritage web site revealed only one entry referring to ‘kiwiana’ – arts and crafts for the ‘2009 waitangi day fund’. the historic places trust (2010) site had no hits under the same word search, while the auckland city council (2010) site listed only two: an art event and a business/industry event. none of these sites had any obvious accessible alternative term offered for ‘kiwiana’. this gap reinforces d. timothy and s. boyd’s belief that ‘heritage is not allinclusive: it represents some sort of legacy to be passed down to current and future generations and therefore mirrors what cultures value and choose to keep.’69 thus ‘history is what a historian regards as worth recording and heritage is what contemporary society chooses to inherit and pass on.’70 the recognition that cultural heritage is often built on artefacts related to wealth and not the vernacular is reinforced by trapeznik and mclean, who argue that change is necessary within these preferences if a more balanced view of heritage is to be represented. cultural heritage should reflect the values of all communities, not just elitist culture. n. merriman suggests that heritage can be ‘used to describe culture and landscape that are cared for by the community and passed on to the future to serve people’s need for a sense of identity and belonging.’71 if this is the case, it is a potent indicator for the white lady’s inclusion. the official inclusion of the white lady in new zealand’s heritge will provide a starting point of balance that only a long-term functioning business, holding symbolic national identity value, can contribute. given the paucity of hospitality business long-term survival and the white lady’s transcendence of time and social change, it has acquired outstanding survivor status by any measure. the white lady also offers more than business longevity. it is a contemporary and historic mirror of a wider culture and society in action of the sort that timothy and boyd suggest ‘cannot be divorced from the context of its setting’72 despite changing streetscapes. for cultural heritage, the white lady holds vernacular authenticity. public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 60 finally, the white lady contradicts timothy and boyd’s claim that ‘heritage is not about the past. rather it is a reflection of what exists at present’ because it can reflect both past and present.73 because of this uniqueness, we assert that a change in classification structures or flexibility of interpretation and mind-set are needed if items of nostalgia and ‘kiwiana’, such as the white lady, are to be incorporated within new zealand’s cultural heritage. clearly, the most obvious legislative recognition and change needs to occur within concepts of ‘mobility’ and ‘site’. if mobile objects rather than their sites were recognised within heritage constructs, then heritage status for the white lady would be achievable. conclusion the purpose of this article was to critically discuss the politics and policies determining the type of artefacts that constitute cultural heritage in new zealand. this has revealed the restrictive nature of current cultural heritage legislation regarding the recognition of vernacular items of kiwiana like the white lady. the denial of the importance of the white lady by concepts of cultural heritage is not mirrored within academe, where vernacular items, including the white lady, are emphasised as symbols of national identity and narrative. while cultural heritage is a dynamic concept, the white lady is excluded from current listing because of its mobility and the lack of recognition that vernacular items of kiwiana have within heritage concepts. the white lady is a potent symbol of ‘kiwiana’ that participants believe to be iconic. because of this, items of ‘kiwiana’ like the white lady need to be included within cultural heritage classification. their exclusion reflects elitist cultural heritage values. this article suggests that change is necessary because iconic diners, as exemplified by the white lady, hold an important place within new zealand’s social and culinary history and therefore wider cultural heritage. if cultural heritage is to move away from its elitist roots and reflect the values of the ‘ordinary new zealander’ then an eatery that has traded for 64 years, transcended social movement through modernism to postmodernism, gained iconic status with its stakeholders, survived in a highly competitive industry, as well as currently offering consumers hospitality, within a commercial heritage experience, must be a contender for official recognition as a significant item of cultural heritage. public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 61 endnotes 1 c. bell, inventing new zealand: everyday myths of pakeha identity, penguin, auckland, 1996, p114. 2 r. wolfe and s. barnett, kiwiana! the sequel. penguin, auckland, 2001, pp15-30. 3 a. perrott, ‘canvas: where have all the pie carts gone?’, new zealand herald, 6 september 2008, p5-9. 4 a meat pie topped with mashed potato (pud), and then topped with boiled and slightly mashed peas. 5 d. mcgill, the dinkum kiwi dictionary, mills publications, lower hutt, 1989, p101. 6 l. neill, c. bell and t. bryant, the great new zealand pie cart, moa becket hachette livre, auckland, 2008, p143. 7 l. neill, c. bell and n. hemmington, ‘a pie cart story: “the longevity of a vernacular fast food eatery”’, locale: the australasian-pacific journal of regional food studies, vol 2, 2012, p105. 8 neill et al, p36. 9 ibid, p37. 10 ibid, p33. 11 the six o’clock swill came about as workers hurried from work to the nearest pub. there, within the short space of time (from when work ended and the pub closed at 6 o’clock), pub patrons (in many cases) imbibed as much beer as possible. upon leaving the pub, many patrons stopped off at the white lady for a meal. six o’clock closing was amended in the sale of liquor act (1961), ending the six o’clock swill. 12 ibid, p37-8. 13 ibid, p39. 14 ibid, p43. 15 ibid, p39. 16 ibid, p15. 17 l. neill, ‘the contested “white lady”: perceptions and social meanings of the “white lady” in auckland’, ma thesis, auckland university of technology, 2009, p125. 18 neill, p12. 19 neill, p117. winston peters is the leader of new zealand first a coalition partner in the current new zealand government. 20 neill, p126. 21 ibid, p 116. 22 ibid, p140. 23 ibid, p141. 24 ibid, p142. 25 ibid, p117ff. 26 s. gunn, cited in d. austen, ‘snack in the eye for snooty neighbours’, the new zealand herald, 2000, np. 27 neill, p26. 28 j. palino (presenter/director), the kitchen job (television broadcast), auckland, television 3, 27 januaary 2009. 29 p. washer, personal communication, 18 may 2009. 30 big little city, 2009, ‘the white lady’, retrieved 24 june 2009, from: http://biglittlecity.co.nz/dining/item/the_white_lady_ 31 lonely planet, 2010, ‘auckland restaurants’, retrieved 23 november 2010 from: http://lonelyplanet.com/new-zealand/auckland/restaurants/fast-food/white-lady 32 kiwiana includes the everyday items of cultural significance to new zealanders that are assumed to be uniquely new zealand. 33 the buzzy bee, iron roofing, jandals, railway cups and the swanndri. 34 bunjy jumping; rugby; sheep (farming); stamps; no. 8 wire; ‘footrot flats’; ‘4 square’ shops; taranaki gate; (all) black; baches/cribs. 35 watties peas; cheese (ches and dale); ice-cream; baking powder; lemon and paeroa; weetbix. 36 grass; godwits; kiwis; paua; cabbage trees; silver ferns; pohutukawas. 37 l. neill, ‘but wait there's more: you forgot the white lady’, journal of sociology, (in review). 38 wolfe and barnett, pp15-30. 39 ibid. 40 l. civitello, cuisine and culture: a history of food and people, wiley and sons, hoboken, 2004; f. fernandez-armesto, near a thousand tables: a history of food, simon and schuster, new york, 2002; fitzstephen cited in c. spencer, british food, columbia university press, new york, 2003; l. mason, food culture in great britain, greenwood press, westport, ct, 2004; and c. lashley and a. morrison (eds), in search of hospitality: theoretical perspectives and debates, elsevier butterworth-heinemann, oxford, 2004. public history review | neill, duerr & trapeznik 62 41 neill, bell and hemmington. 42 ibid. 43 new zealand history online, 2012, retrieved 22 october 2012 from: http://nzhistory.net.nz/page/prince-william-plays-buzzy-bee 44 s. tannock, ‘nostalgia critique’, cultural studies, vol 9, no 3, 1995, pp453-64. 45 d. lowenthal, the past is a foreign country, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1995, p18. 46 a. appadurai, ‘introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, in a. appadurai (ed), the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspectives. cambridge university press, melbourne, 1986. 47 i. woodward, understanding material culture, sage, london, 2009. 48 ibid. 49 bell. 50 d. timothy and s. boyd, heritage tourism, pearson education, harlow, 2003, p68. icomos, the international council on monuments and sites, is an international nongovernmental organisation of heritage professionals engaged in the conservation of places of cultural heritage value and dedicated to the conservation of the world's historic monuments and sites: icomos, 2005, np. 52 icomos, 2005, np. 53 coromandel peninsula blueprint, 2006, p4. 54 g. mclean, ‘where sheep may not safely graze: a brief history of new zealand’s heritage movement 1890-2000’, in a. trapeznik (ed), common ground: heritage and public places in new zealand, university of otago press, dunedin, 2000, pp25-44. 55 ibid, p27. 56 report of the scenery preservation board, 1918, p2. 57 a. trapeznik and g. mclean, ‘public history, heritage and place’, in a. trapeznik (ed), common ground: heritage and public places in new zealand, university of otago press, dunedin, 2000, p111. 58 g. vossler, ‘sense or nonsense?: new zealand heritage legislation in perspective’, public history review, vol 13, 2006, p66. 59 m. lantis, ‘vernacular culture’, american anthropologist, vol 62, no 2, 1960, pp202-16. 60 protected objects act (1975), new zealand government, wellington, 2009, p76. 61 taonga tuturu means an object that – (a) relates to maori culture, history, or society; and (b) was, or appears to have been, – (i) manufactured or modified in new zealand by maori; or (ii) brought into new zealand by maori; or (iii) used by maori; and (c) is more than 50 years old’: trust waikato, 2008, p5. 62 protected objects act (1975), pp76-81. 63 ibid. 64 historic places trust, 2010. 65 personal communication, n. short, 14 april 2010. 66 ibid. 67 see bell, lowenthal, trapeznik and mclean and neill. 68 c. bell, ‘kiwiana revisited’, in c. bell and s. matthewman (eds), cultural studies in aotearoa new zealand: identity, space and place, oxford university press, melbourne, 2004, p80. 69 timothy and boyd, p6. 70 j. tunbridge and g.j. ashworth, dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict, wiley, chichester, 1996, p6. 71 n. merriman, beyond the glass case, leicester university press, leicester, 1991, p8. 72 timothy and boyd, p87. 73 ibid. galleyscorrano public history review vol 19 (2012): 1–20 © utsepress and the author visions of a colony: history on (dis)play at the museum of sydney armanda scorrano istory museums have long been one of the most popular and trusted avenues through which members of the public gain an understanding of the past. from their inception, public museums have been prime disseminators of knowledge, and while other functions have been added to their repertoire, this continues to play a major role. in australia, progressive museums have in recent decades taken on new ways of representing the past. but while disrupting traditional historical narratives, wholesale adoption of academic fashions has in some instances undermined the museum’s ability to communicate history to the public. when it first opened in 1995, the museum of sydney (mos) received praise from some quarters for its innovative representations of the city’s history, but it was increasingly criticised for its inaccessibility due to its postmodern approach. this highlights the tension between curatorial style and content that museums must negotiate in order to meet the needs of their audiences. taking mos as a h public history review | scorrano 2 case study, this article argues that public history museums are limited in their ability to break new ground when they must also remain accessible and relevant to the publics they serve. in the australian context, as hamilton and ashton have demonstrated, museums are one of the most trustworthy historical sources due to their institutional authority and their use of objects in representing the past.1 as an institution with a mandate for research and education, the museum has had the authority to present the truth as though it were a one-dimensional, static, unquestionable reality. indeed, museums became places where ‘politically organized and socially institutionalized power’ appeared natural and legitimate,2 rendering visitors often unaware of the lenses through which ideas about the past were being communicated.3 the museum thus became a powerful tool of inculcation. the emergence of social history in the 1970s impacted museological practice in a profound way. knowledge – its pursuit, realization and deployment – came to be seen as inherently political,4 and the ways in which differences and inequalities of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class were reproduced in the academy came under scrutiny. consequently, there were calls for greater attention to the processes by which knowledge was produced and disseminated, privileged and marginalized. many museums heeded the call, and before long began to include women, workers, indigenous people, migrants and others who had previously been excluded from historical narratives. a significant component of this ‘new museology’5 – and the historiographical changes that were in part driving it – was a recognition of the multiplicity of historical interpretations. museums were soon promoting themselves as ‘forums for debate’ and ‘meeting places of ideas’ rather than ‘authorities’.6 this is precisely how mos7 and the national museum of australia8 articulated their role, along with overseas institutions such as the museum of london.9 yet the question remains whether it is even possible for museums to effectively communicate divergent historical narratives. perhaps, as dean and rider suggest, public museums are simply not the right place to pursue such ‘highly nuanced ideas or complex concepts’.10 this article examines how mos, in its early days, balanced engagement with historiographical developments on the one hand, with meeting the needs of its various audiences on the other. public history review | scorrano 3 establishment of mos as its full title indicates, the museum of sydney is located on the site of the first government house. although the exhibitions within the museum extend far beyond the site’s interpretation, it is the site and what it means to people that underpinned the museum’s early work. first government house (fgh), built in may 1788, was the first permanent building constructed in the new colony of new south wales.11 until its demolition in 1846, it was the embodiment of colonial power in sydney. the site was largely forgotten until an archaeological survey in 1982 uncovered the footings of the original house, as well as extensive deposits of pottery, glass, bone and metal fragments.12 this generated immediate interest amongst archaeologists, historians and the general public, and the nsw government was called on to protect the find.13 the fierce public pressure to extend the archaeological dig and preserve the site can in part be accounted for by the renewed interest in australian history generally, and of sydney history in particular. this sudden fascination with australia's past paralleled the resurgence of australian nationalism from the late 1960s, spurred on by the celebrations in 1970 commemorating the bicentenary of captain cook’s ‘discovery’ of australia, and the lead up to the 1988 bicentenary of european ‘settlement’.14 groups such as the sydney history group, formed in 1977, fostered scholarship and interest in the city’s past, and cultivated a desire to preserve historic urban sites such as fgh.15 agreeing to protect the site, the government proposed a museum be built to commemorate it. various government institutions were approached to run the museum, including the historic houses trust (the trust). when asked for their opinion on the proposed museum, the trust advised the government not to build one at all, saying it wasn’t necessary, sustainable or viable.16 yet the trust was appointed manager of the new museum in september 1988.17 construction began in august 1990 and the museum opened five years later.18 the then director of the trust, peter watts, explained that the trust’s philosophy of always trying to understand the significance of the place they’re working with underpinned their approach to the fgh site and subsequently to mos.19 the trust, after much internal debate, agreed that the most significant aspect of the site was its symbolism. indeed the remains of the original site were too fragile to be permanently exposed, necessitating their continued preservation underneath bridge street and the plaza pavings. this meant that the museum didn’t actually have a collection to display, which was one of the reasons the trust had been public history review | scorrano 4 opposed to a museum on the site in the first place. however, the lack of a collection also presented a unique opportunity: the trust could now create a museum about ideas and symbolism without the constraints of having to interpret a physical structure or a tangible collection. watts has noted that the real significance of the site – in terms of its future as a museum – ‘was what it stood for, and it stood for the arrival of the british in australia… it was about a tuning point in australian history, but that turning point was of great symbolic significance’.20 thus, rather than the site’s physical components determining its importance, its significance lay instead in what the site represented and what it meant to different groups. despite the enormous amount of painstaking work that went into creating mos, watts has suggested that what the public saw in 1995 was always envisaged as only a first attempt. he explained that, all you can do in the mad rush to get a museum open is a first putt at it. then, as the ideas develop, as the collections develop, and so on, then you start to enrich and enhance, and layer in extra things. this is what has happened at [mos]. so apart from just responding to criticism, it was actually learning… i think a lot of criticism in the early days of institutions is unreasonable and unfair because it takes a while to work them out.21 indeed, watts had intentionally reserved $1 million from the original development budget because he knew that what they were doing was risky and he wanted accessible money to change the approach if necessary.22 so what was it that mos was trying to do, and did it work? emmett’s historiographical vision in terms of its historiographical approach, to a large extent mos was simply following in the footsteps of several of its contemporaries. the introduction of social history in museums had been a catalyst for usurping the single-narrative approach favoured previously. as social history took individual communities, places and people as the foci of study and as subjects for display, the fallacy of a single public – with a single history – began to emerge. the museum could no longer occupy the role of a public space imagining and representing a rigid, linear and singular narrative of the past.23 like hyde park barracks museum before it, mos set out to undermine ‘the dominant consensual models of australian history’.24 public history review | scorrano 5 the philosophical foundations of mos’ approach were largely the work of its first senior curator, peter emmett, who was at mos from 1992 until 1999. emmett was responsible for overseeing the early development of the museum and was the driving force behind the direction the museum took, assembling a team of artists, technicians, musicians, historians and creative thinkers that crafted the museum’s exhibitions. watts has described emmett as ‘brilliant’ but also ‘very strong willed and strong minded’, the latter being that which ultimately resulted in the cessation of his involvement with mos.25 emmett’s approach was controversial, eliciting both derision and praise.26 ann curthoys described it as ‘revisionist, post-colonial, post-modern, conceptual and interdisciplinary’.27 the three main themes underpinning mos were pluralistic historical interpretation, postcolonialism and spatial history.28 the notion of multiple historical narratives arose out of postmodernism. in his seminal work – the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge – french philosopher jean-françois lyotard defined postmodernism as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’.29 lyotard invented the term ‘metanarrative’ or ‘grand narrative’ to attack the belief in historical progress by highlighting the multiplicity of historical interpretations that were available.30 the avoidance of metanarratives was perhaps the most striking element of mos when it first opened. as emmett commented, the museum’s ‘profusion of visual and material culture aims to subvert the common assumption that this period in our history was very simple’, noting that it was instead ‘dense and exciting’.31 suggesting there was a single – white, european, middle-class – history of sydney was a limiting position to hold. the reality of multiple, and at times competing, narratives demonstrates the existence of a richer history to the one commonly understood. mos was keen to facilitate this. as curator sue hunt summarised, this is not going to be a stuffy and boring museum, it’s going to be a museum of interpretation … we’re saying there isn’t one truth in history’.32 emmett argued that there could be no meaningful talk about the fgh site because it meant different things to different people.33 the site was contested ground in 1788 and continued to be contested ground over 200 years later. yet the absence of a consensus as to the site’s meaning should not have precluded meaningful discussion about it. multiple meanings are still each meaningful. however, clarity appeared to be an anathema to emmett. an example of this is his description of a museum public history review | scorrano 6 as ‘a spatial composition, a sensory and sensual experience; a place to enter, senses and body alive. its meanings are revealed through the physical experience of moving through it’.34 he continues, explaining mos’ medium and methodology as being ‘about the poetics of space, the choreography of people, the relation of things and senses, spatial and sensory compositions, to exploit the sensuality and materiality of the museum medium’. his descriptions ventured even further into the obscure when he suggested there was a connection between the words ‘museum’, ‘mushroom’ and ‘murphy’ (an irish name for a potato) based on their proximity to each other in the oxford english dictionary.35 emmett’s vision for mos seemed to be more about creating a sensorial, rather than a knowledge-sharing, experience. he suggested the fundamental role of a museum was to be a cultural space for exploration and reflection, where meanings could be renegotiated.36 in this way, rather than presenting the history of sydney, mos was envisaged as a display house for a range of histories loosely clustered around the ‘theme’ of sydney.37 intertwined with pluralistic historical interpretation, postcolonialism significantly influenced emmett’s approach at mos. he wanted the museum to ‘embrace the historical revisions demanded of a postcolonial collage’. thus the fgh site was framed as a ‘contested’ place and as a symbolic ‘turning point’ in the history of the continent’s inhabitants. at mos there was to be a privileging of indigenous experiences post-1788 alongside a refusal to celebrate the invasion and its consequences. by 1996 the museum was describing itself as ‘a multimedia, multi-disciplinary installation about the nature and narration of this place they called sydney. mos seeks not to enclose colonial histories but to liberate a post-colonial space for other voices to speak, past and present’.38 emmett’s museological approach fell squarely under the purview of ‘new museology’, which was itself influenced by postmodernism and post-colonial theory.39 he was soon lauded as ‘australia’s first postmodern curator’.40 spatial history was the third key influence on emmett’s plan for mos. the term – coined by paul carter in his 1987 book the road to botany bay: a spatial history41 – was frequently used in early documents to describe the museum’s framework. spatial history was seen by mos as an alternative to ‘tired chronology wedded to imperial versions of the past’.42 emmett explained that spatial history sees place as ‘culturally determined: the journeys of people/cultures moving through its space groove the landscape, create borderlands and meet/converge, become entangled’.43 he describes it as refraining from ordering its subject matter ‘into a nationalist enterprise, a cause-and-effect pageant of firsts public history review | scorrano 7 and greats that artificially completes the imperial plan’. rather, it ‘proceeds metaphorically and suggests the plurality of directions across place and time by the dialogue of many criss-crossing voices, past and present’.44 curiously, what emmett appears to be describing could as easily be characterised as part of the well-established field of social history. emmett has explained that, in summary, what mos boils down to is an examination of the nature of authority and power. this in fact extended beyond the history of sydney to include an examination of museological practice. as emmett opined, what ‘is potentially radical about this museum [is that] it brings a self-critical approach to museology, selective traditions and academic disciplines, which become obsessed with how to classify their collections rather than looking at these things as a reflection of human use’.45 emmett was thus concerned with the role the museum had previously played in society: the museum is a colonial inheritance. it has defined so much of what is important by virtue of collecting it and celebrating it and we are opening things up for discussion – questioning a lot of the premises of what is important about the past.46 this was an admirable pursuit on the part of emmett and his team. but were they able to provoke visitors into critically examining what the museum did? or were the displays at mos too esoteric to elicit anything more than confusion? art installations and historical displays emmett’s entire philosophy at mos was on show before visitors had even set foot inside the building, neatly encapsulated in the sculptural installation edge of the trees. created by artists janet laurence and fiona foley, edge of the trees symbolises the encounter of two cultures, which is reinforced by the collaboration of the two artists – foley an indigenous australian and laurence a non-indigenous australian. laurence and foley were chosen by a selection committee to develop this heavily curated piece envisaged by emmett.47 emmett had already prepared a concept brief that defined the role and message he wanted the sculpture to encompass and this was distributed amongst a group of artists that he had invited to compete for the commission. the idea for the installation came from a quote by historian rhys jones that emmet had found inspirational: public history review | scorrano 8 the discoverers struggling through the surf were met on the beaches by other people looking at them from the edges of the trees. thus the same landscape perceived by the newcomers as alien, hostile or having no coherent form, was to the indigenous people their home, a familiar place, the inspiration of dreams.48 jones’ phrase ‘the edge of the trees’ resonated with emmett, and the art installation became the ‘dominant metaphor of place’ for mos and the fgh site. emmett explained the sculpture as an ‘invitation to enter this museum meeting place as a shared and contested site of environmental and cultural memory’.49 he positions it as ‘an extended metaphor on contact, memory, the edge of nature-culture’.50 so while fgh is a symbol of colonial authority, the ‘bigger issue is about contact between two cultures, two world views’.51 thus emmett’s concept brief required the artists ‘to respond directly to the culturally charged symbolism inherent within the site’.52 the sculpture comprises twenty-nine poles, representing twentynine indigenous clans in and around sydney, encasing various materials from indigenous history and culture, including honey, resin, oxides, shells, bones and hair.53 the installation includes sound recordings of indigenous people speaking the names of indigenous groups in the sydney area (sourced from an eighteenth-century fishing map).54 the signatures of members of the first fleet are engraved onto zinc plates, which are recessed into some of the wooden poles. others have the botanical names of local plant species that grew in the original first government house garden burnt into them. the names of indigenous men and women who lived in the region, along with notes from lieutenant william dawes’ eighteenth-century notebooks detailing the indigenous names for local places, are carved onto pillars.55 the sculpture is intended as an approachable piece, with visitors invited to walk amongst the poles, touch the engravings, and put their ears to the sound pillars to hear the whispering voice recordings. in this way they may gain some appreciation for how europeans and indigenous people each experienced the first contact – the former approaching unfamiliar bushland and people while the latter peered out at the invaders from the ‘edge of the trees’. emmett explained that above all, ‘edge of the trees is about the poetic evocation of the sense of place for sydney today, through engagement with the poetics of space, a material sensuality, and the alchemical qualities of flux and transformation’.56 this is in keeping with his poetic descriptions of mos as a ‘contested site, alive, resonating with ghosts public history review | scorrano 9 and demons, hopes and dreams’.57 clearly the sculpture is integral in framing the experience of the visitor, and particularly in positioning mos as a museum concerned with ‘place’ rather than ‘beginnings’. indeed, edge of the trees is a preview of what the visitor can expect to see inside the museum. as architectural critic andrew nimmo observed, in this sculpture ‘myth and history are combined in a way that fuses the past tragedies of the eora peoples, the discarded from england and the land stripped bare, so that the year 1788 might be seen in its context – not merely as a beginning, but as a significant event in a continuous history’.58 the same message is repeated throughout mos as the visitor is urged to understand 1788 as a ‘turning point’ for two cultures rather than as the birth of a nation. upon entering mos, visitors are exposed to the calling to come – an auditory exhibition based on the diaries of first fleet officer lieutenant william dawes in which he recorded his efforts at communication with an indigenous woman with whom he was romantically involved. the exhibition, curated by paul carter, is a recreation of dawes’ and patyegarang’s attempts to understand each other’s culture through language and can be ‘imagined as a dialogue’ between the two – a ‘speaking pantomime of what they might have said’.59 as witcomb notes, the exhibition is difficult to understand, but that, in and of itself, can be construed as representative of the complexities of cross-cultural encounters.60 here, and throughout mos, the method of display forms part of the exhibition itself. mos used innovative audio-visual technology to give visitors a sense of the pluralistic nature of historical interpretation. whereas technology had been used in other museums to transform static displays into interactive exhibitions, at mos it was used to convey the fragmentary nature of historical narratives. one example of this was in the bond store tales, curated by ross gibson. here visitors encountered fictional ‘witnesses’ – played by actors – who were intended to be representative of characters from both colonial history and contemporary society. the exhibition space held various objects that had passed through sydney during the period 1788-1850. as visitors examined a relic, their proximity to the objects triggered a holographic image that would then tell its story. gibson refers to the images as ‘ghosts’, explaining that once they have been ‘conjured by curiosity, these phantoms are compelled to tell about the object’.61 from the colonial period the images included an indigenous woman, a trader, a marine, an irish maid, a tavern singer, and a french woman, while the contemporary characters ranged from an archaeologist to an indigenous public history review | scorrano 10 lawyer.62 all were imaginary figures but were based on historical research. the images of these ‘witnesses’ – which were activated by the movement of visitors around the exhibition space – were projected onto sheets of glass, creating a holographic effect. the characters gossiped, told anecdotes, interpreted events and debated each other across time, constantly undermining received notions of the past, or in witcomb’s words ‘returning to haunt modern understandings’.63 visitors were supposed to understand from this display that many issues of concern in colonial sydney continue to be relevant, in particular nationalism, native title, land ownership and republicanism.64 on level two of the museum is collectors’ chests, an exhibition of cabinets created by artist narelle jubelin, but in fact conceived by peter emmett. indeed, the artist’s name is absent from the display altogether, along with any other explanatory labelling (as was characteristic of mos). jubelin’s collectors’ chests are stainless steel cabinets with glassfronted drawers, each individually lit with small globes that reveal a collection of objects, texts and images while the draw is held open. the drawers contain not only historical relics but also contemporary, sometimes obscure, pieces, such as the artist’s swimming costume alongside accounts of shark attacks, fragments of photographs and newspapers, diaries, letters, invoices, inventories, grass mats, bone needles, shards of bone china, remnants of ladies’ bonnets, whale teeth, cigars, silver spoons and indigenous eating implements.65 each drawer is arranged according to the ‘collage principle’, wherein history becomes ‘aesthetic source material’.66 collectors’ chests would be best described as an art installation, not an historical display. it alludes to historical happenings rather than providing any explanation of them. a prime example of this is the drawer entitled ‘seven small sketches and four open frames’. this drawer was intended to address the gaps left in artist charles-alexandre lesueur’s sketchbook scenes from aboriginal life. next to his last unfilled frame appears the statement ‘removal of children in a cloud of dust’ with the only object in the drawer being a small empty bone frame. such esoteric displays did not faze emmett. he never intended collectors’ chests to ‘inform’ the visitor in the way that most museum exhibitions do. rather, he wanted the visitor to imagine and wonder about the people to whom the artefacts on display belonged.67 instead of the imparting of information, the visitor’s imagination was to be stoked. but was the visitor aware they were engaging with art rather than history? public history review | scorrano 11 avant-garde or indecipherable? when mos opened, it was clear that its creators held what grace karskens has described as a deep distrust of the written word ‘as something which will only confuse, prejudice and corrupt [the] pure and direct examination of material things’.68 in a mos catalogue essay, curator paul carter drew a distinction between captions, which he called neutralising agents of the power of objects, and quotations, which he saw as agents of imaginative liberation.69 carter’s view echoed the sentiments of emmett, who posited that orthodox interpretative techniques incorporating tour guides and label texts were overly didactic and imposed a ‘master narrative’ on the past.70 his curatorial style was predicated on the belief that language itself was a barrier to ‘truth’.71 thus the museum had no text panels clearly explaining the site’s history or why it had been preserved. instead, visitors encountered tracts of quotations from primary sources and voice-overs from actors imparting fictional accounts relating to the ‘idea’ of sydney. ambiguity reigned at mos. archival sources and fictional representations were given equal standing in the museum, and the visitor had no way of knowing whether the stories they were seeing were ‘based on texts from sydney’s colonial past, or the musings of a late-twentieth-century audio-visual producer’.72 visitors conditioned by more traditional museums would perhaps view the displays as authoritative accounts rather than as fictional or artistic ‘responses to the past’. but this was of little concern to the museum as emmett and his team had no interest in providing a factual account of history, seeking instead to impart an emotive experience. curiously, the absence of meaningful interpretation at mos stands in direct contrast to its stated aims in the museum plan september ’93, where it was noted that: as a modern museum [mos] must be a museum of interpretation of historical issues and contexts using all manner of evidence. interpretation is the primary basis, the modus operandi for the museum, not a secondary role to collection and conservation.73 such an explicit edict, that interpretation would be paramount in the new museum, seems contradictory in a situation where exhibitions were almost completely lacking in contextual analysis. rather than allowing for multiple interpretations of history, this approach merely achieved a confused visitor experience. as national museum of australia curator, guy hansen, commented shortly after mos opened, public history review | scorrano 12 the rejection of the use of didactic text and the deliberate use of ambiguity in the presentation of artefacts did not open up new possibilities of meaning, but rather left me frustrated at not knowing what i was looking at.74 while it is true that words can be an ineffective substitute for what ‘the eye falls upon and grasps in an instant’, it is also the case that ‘enlightenment springs from the engagement of objects with narrative, and thus with connections and evaluation’.75 by refusing to narrate, evaluate and communicate, mos could not achieve its goal of overturning the oppressive narratives of race, class, empire and nation. all the visitor was left with were historical fragments – ‘a plethora of beautiful, curious, unexplained objects, jumbled flotsam and jetsam from an unexplainable past’76 – rather than an alternative story to the official accounts they were already familiar with. in this way mos represented a ‘triumph of aesthetics over content’.77 hansen’s concern over the unbalanced weighting given to ‘aesthetics’ over ‘content’ harks back to the debate within museological circles of the primacy of ‘objects’ versus ‘ideas’. witcomb explains that the objects on display at mos are not contextualised according to their history of use, so that although mos is presented as a social history museum its objects are actually treated as art.78 as we have seen, many of mos’ exhibitions were really art installations, having been produced, in several instances, by artists rather than curators.79 as rogers notes, at mos ‘archaeological artefacts have been recontextualised as high art objects and museum displays re-presented as art installation’.80 thus displays such as collectors’ chests and bond store tales, while enchanting, were often impossible for the visitor to decipher. unfortunately, such oblique ambiguity characterised the whole of the museum’s early exhibition approach, with even watts forced to acknowledge that: ‘some of those things, they were beautifully presented, they were highly artistic, they were stunning looking things, but as a method of communication they weren’t brilliant’.81 this needed to be changed because, as jane lydon remarks, artefacts cannot ‘speak’ for themselves: without proper contextualisation, they are ‘lumpen and stolid’, sitting ‘mutely like toads’.82 words, either written or spoken, are necessary to convey the object’s meaning. consequently, for many mos’ early approach rendered it an elitist institution, with its ‘demand for high levels of knowledge on the part of the visitor – both about history and about knowledge production in museums’.83 indeed, in the years immediately following the museum’s opening, social historians were highly critical of the lack of textual public history review | scorrano 13 interpretation, arguing that ‘perhaps there is an ironic outcome in this museum; that is, that its democratic and libertarian urges speak only to those with enough cultural capital to make the link between abstract philosophy and what they see and engage with in the museum’.84 in its attempts to highlight the multiplicity of historical experiences, emmett had created a museum where it was almost impossible to ascertain any declaration of cause and effect such as one would expect from an authoritative institution like the museum.85 thus mos became ‘a museum for museum lovers and for those with an interest in contemporary media installations’ rather than a museum for the general public.86 historians such as peter spearritt continued to level criticism at mos a decade after its opening, observing that it ‘caters for an educated elite and has modest visitation’.87 the museum responded to such criticisms by stubbornly arguing they were ‘a reaction to the potential de-frocking of the historical professionals in museums’.88 indeed, emmett completely approved of the controversy surrounding mos at its opening: the very fact that the museum is controversial is a mark of its success. it is intended not only as a celebration of the architecture and the house but also as a forum for discussion and debate.89 however, while much of the controversy generated by mos concerned its non-traditional interpretations of australian history, there was also a great deal of concern that the displays themselves were too esoteric and therefore inaccessible to the majority of the community. although watts acknowledged that aspects of mos didn’t work because visitors couldn’t understand what they were seeing, he also resisted suggestions it should be simplified, commenting that mos had been pitched ‘at a high intellectual level’ and it didn’t ‘have to be for everyone’. furthermore, he argued, if you want to go and play with games and fiddle around on computer screens go to the powerhouse museum. we don’t have to do it. if you want to go and have kids playgrounds and stuff, go to the national maritime museum or the australian museum. we don’t have any need to do it. as a niche museum organisation that has these niche places, i’ve always felt that quite strongly. it is why each of our museums have very different markets… if people want to criticise public history review | scorrano 14 us for not having every place accessible to every different group, let them.90 watts’ comments speak to the heart of the museum’s need to identify their audiences and craft their exhibitions accordingly. perhaps a museum can aim itself at ‘cultural elites’, but can a public museum do that? a museum that is funded by public money would be wise to consider whether it was accessible to as large a cross section of the public as possible. although watts did not want mos to ‘pitch itself down’,91 he knew that the museum’s poor visitation necessitated an adjustment to its approach. as he noted: there was no point having a few thousand people saying, “we think it is the most wonderful thing in the world”. we are a public institution; we have to be appealing to a much broader group of people than that.92 mos’ adjustments, foreseen by watts when he held back a large part of the development budget, began with a series of internal reviews. internal reviews the museum conducted its first internal review eighteen months after it opened. released in november 1996, the museum of sydney review focussed mostly on the public role of the museum and less on its internal workings. it was conducted by watts with contributions from staff and trustees. unsurprisingly, the review found that although the fundamental themes of the museum were appropriate, mos had not achieved its potential and it was imperative that it improved its visitation numbers.93 in his review submission, emmett confirmed the relevance of the 1993 museum plan as accurately reflecting the aims and character of mos since its opening. he commented on the opposing views of visitors wherein one half were supportive of the museum’s unconventional approach to sydney, while the other half wanted a traditional, chronological narrative of the city’s history since 1788, ultimately arguing that these views could not be reconciled, and therefore the museum had to decide which approach it wanted to take. however, watts – and the trust – disagreed with emmett’s assessment. watts instead argued for the incorporation of both approaches, for the pragmatic reason that the trust could ill afford to alienate a substantial sector of the community by failing to respond to their needs given the paucity of mos’ visitor numbers, which in 1995-1996 was 73,247 – half of public history review | scorrano 15 what had been projected for that period. many people who visited mos – including then nsw premier bob carr – wanted a narrative that would give the museum’s fragmentary displays some form of coherence.94 thus it was recommended that a broad chronological framework of the history of sydney be integrated into the museum, along with additional interpretation including film, labels, audio guides, pamphlets and guidebooks. given watts’ decision to hold back some of the development budget, the trust had available funding to address the public criticisms, but watts had trouble getting traction with staff to implement changes. several members of staff resented the suggestion that what they were doing needed adjustment and little progress was made towards achieving the recommended curatorial changes.95 in fact, it was not until 1999 – three years after the initial recommendation – that the museum added new panels of contextual information adjacent to each major display and a light box display on level three that provided a broad chronological framework.96 watts has explained that the delay was due to personnel issues. the team of people assembled by emmett had invested inordinate amounts of time, energy and creativity in mos’ exhibitions and were unable to accept the review’s criticism of their work.97 emmett, as their leader, supported their work and was similarly opposed to the proposed changes. in his address to the internal forum held to discuss the review, emmett argued against any alteration to the ‘spatial readings of sydney’ that would introduce a chronological perspective. the trustees disagreed, observing that emmett had set up a ‘false dichotomy’ that suggested the museum’s interpretative approach could only be either chronological or spatial but not both.98 in the end, significant personnel changes were required in order to implement the review’s recommendations. in watts’ words, the team had been ‘holding on to a vision, which had been incredibly exciting, but at the end of the day, for many people, didn’t work’.99 although emmett and his team couldn’t accept the public’s negative response to mos, as a public institution mos had to appeal to a broader audience and needed to respond to the public’s criticisms. following a further review of the museum in 1998, the position of senior curator mos – emmett’s position – was replaced with senior curator in the new major projects unit. this involved working on several nominated projects – essentially temporary exhibitions – rather than being responsible for curation at mos as a whole.100 by the time of the march 2000 review the trust had decided on a new management structure for mos to assist it in achieving its longterm goals, specifically an increase in visitation.101 emmett left the public history review | scorrano 16 museum shortly thereafter, either unaware or unwilling to accept that mos was always intended to evolve following his ‘first putt’.102 watts has lamented the slow implementation of the 1996 review’s recommendations.103 he admits that the museum lost a lot of public support in its early years of operation as a result of not having moved quickly enough to address the public’s concerns with its curatorial style. only once personnel changes were made was mos able to improve its accessibility through increased interpretative text panels and the introduction of summaries incorporating a chronological framework that helped to further explain the museum, and sydney, to visitors. as watts had suspected, mos needed to develop from its ‘first putt’ into a more accessible, and thus viable, public institution. conclusion from the outset, mos has engaged with historiographical developments that challenged the notion of a singular, linear narrative of the past and that sought more inclusive interpretations of history. this approach was always going to be controversial, but as a public institution, the trust needed it to also be viable. yet by privileging the aesthetic over meaningful interpretation, mos not only rejected metanarratives, it also alienated visitors who were unable to grasp its mission. in the end, mos’ beautiful and provocative displays failed to communicate emmett’s laudable message because they were incomprehensible to much of its audience. while emmett and his team refused to entertain any suggestion that their vision was not appropriate, the pragmatism of watts and the trust ultimately won out and the displays that did not work were changed to ones that did. watts knew from the beginning that incorporating new academic styles in any museum was risky. he was acutely aware that mos’ approach might need to be adjusted in due course, setting aside money for this very purpose. but emmett could not compromise his vision. mos’ early attempts to incorporate historiographical developments into its displays may lend credulity to dean and rider’s assertions that public museums are not the right place for the exploration of complex concepts.104 however, the criticisms mos encountered centred on its role in communicating the past to its audiences. simply, without narrative and interpretation, a museum’s message remains inaccessible, meaning it hasn’t fulfilled its responsibility to the publics it serves. public history review | scorrano 17 endnotes 1 paula hamilton and paul ashton, 'at home with the past: background and initial findings from the national survey', australian cultural history, no 23, 2003, pp5-30, at pp14 and 17. 2 carol duncan, civilizing rituals: inside public art museums, routledge, london, 1995, p6. 3 ludmilla jordanova, history in practice, hodder arnold, london, 2006, p129. 4 sharon macdonald, 'expanding museum studies: an introduction', in sharon macdonald (ed), a companion to museum studies, blackwell publishing, malden, ma, 2006, pp1-12, at p3. 5 see peter vergo (ed), the new museology, reaktion books, london, 1989. 6 see, for example, dawn casey, 'the national museum of australia: exploring the past, illuminating the present and imagining the future', in darryl mcintyre and kirsten wehner (eds), national museums: negotiating histories, national museum of australia, canberra, 2001, pp3-11, at p3. 7 peter emmett, 'wysiwyg on the site of first government house', sites nailing the debate: archaeology and interpretation in museums seminar 7-9 april 1995, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1996, pp107-120, at p107. 8 dawn casey, 'museums as agents for social and political change', curator, vol 44, no 3, 2001, pp230-236, at p230. 9 darryl mcintyre, 'creating new pasts in museums: planning the museum of london's modern london galleries', in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), people and their pasts: public history today, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2009, pp131145, at pp138-139 10 david dean and peter e. rider, 'museums, nation and political history in the australian national museum and the canadian museum of civilization', museum and society, vol 3, no 1, 2005, pp35-50, at p44. 11 department of planning, first government house site, sydney, p1. 12 ibid, p6. 13 joy hughes (ed), first government house site in the 20th century, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1995, p9. 14 stephen alomes, a nation at last? the changing character of australian nationalism 1880-1988, angus & robertson publishers, north ryde, 1988, p170. 15 the sydney history group, founded by max kelly, jill roe and peter spearritt, was a macquarie university-based group that published the journal, sydney gazette, from 1978 to 1986, and co-published several academic texts on urban history. see paul ashton, 'duncan waterson: public historian', journal of australian studies, vol 25, no 69, 2001, pp17-22, at p20. 16 author interview with peter watts, on 5 february 2007. 17 peter watts, first government house site a report attached to the agenda for a historic houses trust meeting held on 17 october 1988, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1988. 18 hughes (ed), first government house site in the 20th century, p16. 19 author interview with peter watts. 20 ibid. 21 ibid. 22 ibid. 23 andrea witcomb, re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum, routledge, london, 2003, p155. 24 margaret anderson, 'selling the past: history in museums in the 1990s [paper in special issue: packaging the past? public histories, edited by john rickard and peter spearritt]', australian historical studies, vol 24, no 96, 1991, pp130-141, at p133. 25 author interview with peter watts. public history review | scorrano 18 26 kate gregory, 'art and artifice: peter emmett's curatorial practice in the hyde park barracks and museum of sydney', fabrications, vol 16, no 1, 2006, pp1-22, at p1. 27 ann curthoys, 'the museum and new ways of understanding australian history', sites nailing the debate: archaeology and interpretation in museums seminar 7-9 april 1995, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1996, pp217223, at p221. 28 sue hunt, 'the museum of sydney on the site of first government house: a controversial museum on a contested site', paper presented to international scientific-practical conference: history museums as part of town culture, moscow, 1996, pp4-5. 29 jean-françois lyotard, the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, university of minnesota press, minneapolis, 1984, pxxiv. 30 willie thompson, postmodernism and history, palgrave macmillan, houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire, 2004, p15. 31 peta landman, 'the museum of issues', the sydney review, december, 1994, pp4-5, at p5. 32 ibid, p4. 33 emmett, 'wysiwyg on the site of first government house', p116. 34 ibid, p115. 35 ibid, pp115-116. 36 ibid, pp118-120. 37 naomi stead, 'the housing of history: the museum of sydney as contemporary "cabinets of curiosity"', in andrew leach and emina petrovic (eds), formulation fabrication: the architecture of history proceedings of the seventeenth annual conference of the society of architectural historians, australia and new zealand, the society of architectural historians, australia and new zealand, wellington, new zealand, november, 2000, pp85-92, at p91. 38 rebecca haagsma, guwanyi: stories of the aboriginal community, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1996. 39 stead, 'the housing of history: the museum of sydney as contemporary "cabinets of curiosity"', p89. 40 linda young, 'museum of sydney', museum national, august, 1995, pp24-26, at p25. 41 paul carter, the road to botany bay: a spatial history, faber, london, 1987. 42 historic houses trust of new south wales, museum plan september '93, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1993, p21. 43 peter emmett, edge of the trees concept brief, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1993, p7. 44 peter emmett, 'contested ground contested histories contested futures', in amareswar galla, bernice murphy, and don mcmichael (eds), museums and cross cultural understanding: papers from the 5th regional assembly of the asia pacific organisation of the international council of museums 24-27 september 1993, australian national committee of icom, 1995, pp72-76, at p73. 45 landman, 'the museum of issues', p5. 46 ibid. 47 andrew nimmo, 'art in a public place', in dinah dysart (ed), edge of the trees: a sculptural installation by janet laurence and fiona foley from the concept by peter emmett, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 2000, pp8-11, at pp8-9. 48 rhys jones, 'ordering the landscape', in ian donaldson and tamsin donaldson (eds), seeing the first australians, allen & unwin, sydney, 1985, pp181-209, at p185. 49 peter emmett, 'what is this place?', in dinah dysart (ed), edge of the trees: a sculptural installation by janet laurence and fiona foley from the concept by peter emmett, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 2000, pp22-23, at p23. 50 emmett, 'wysiwyg on the site of first government house', p111. 51 landman, 'the museum of issues', p5. 52 nimmo, 'art in a public place', p9. public history review | scorrano 19 53 linda burney, 'the story of sydney', in dinah dysart (ed), edge of the trees: a sculptural installation by janet laurence and fiona foley from the concept by peter emmett, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 2000, pp12-13, at p12. 54 'research and experimentation', in dinah dysart (ed), edge of the trees: a sculptural installation by janet laurence and fiona foley from the concept by peter emmett, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 2000, pp52-53, at p53. 55 'construction', in dinah dysart (ed), edge of the trees: a sculptural installation by janet laurence and fiona foley from the concept by peter emmett, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 2000, pp64-65, at p65. 56 emmett, 'last words from the protagonists', at p96. 57 emmett, 'wysiwyg on the site of first government house', p111. 58 nimmo, 'art in a public place', p11. 59 paul carter, the calling to come, historic houses trust of nsw, sydney, 1996, p5. 60 witcomb, re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum, p160. 61 ross gibson, the bond store tales, historic houses trust of new south wales, glebe, 1996, p4. 62 landman, 'the museum of issues', p5. 63 witcomb, re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum, p162. 64 jon conomos, 'a complex approach to story-telling', art monthly australia, may, 1995, pp18-19, at p18. 65 kay schaffer, 'reconstructing "our" past: the museum of sydney', the olive pink society bulletin, vol 8, no 2, 1996, pp22-25, at p25. 66 stead, 'the housing of history: the museum of sydney as contemporary "cabinets of curiosity"', p90. 67 jo darbyshire, restlessness of meaning: an exploration of how visual artists are working with museum collections, master of creative arts (cultural heritage studies) thesis, curtin university of technology, 2003, p34. 68 grace karskens, 'engaging artefacts: urban archaeology, museums and the origins of sydney', tasmanian historical studies, vol 7, no 1, 2000, pp39-64, at p50. 69 cited in young, 'museum of sydney', p25. 70 guy hansen, 'fear of the "master narrative": reflections on site interpretation at the museum of sydney', museum national, november, 1996, pp18-19, at p18. 71 linda young, 'exhibition review', australian historical studies, vol 26, no 105, 1995, pp666-667, at p667. 72 hansen, 'fear of the "master narrative": reflections on site interpretation at the museum of sydney', p19. 73 historic houses trust of new south wales, museum plan september '93, p19. 74 hansen, 'fear of the "master narrative": reflections on site interpretation at the museum of sydney', p19. 75 karskens, 'engaging artefacts: urban archaeology, museums and the origins of sydney', pp54-55. 76 ibid., p55. 77 hansen, 'fear of the "master narrative": reflections on site interpretation at the museum of sydney', p19. 78 witcomb, re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum, p163. 79 ibid. 80 catherine rogers, 'terra nullius and the museum of sydney', the olive pink society bulletin, vol 8, no 2, 1996, pp9-21, at p17. 81 author interview with peter watts. 82 jane lydon, 'many inventions': the chinese in the rocks, sydney, 1890-1930, department of history, monash university, clayton, victoria, 1999, p176. 83 witcomb, re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum, p163. 84 maryanne mccubbin, 'contemporary culture and curators', insite, september, 1995, pp3-4, at p3. 85 young, 'exhibition review', p666. 86 witcomb, re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum, p163. public history review | scorrano 20 87 peter spearritt, 'positioning: on site and in situ', in graeme davison and kimberley webber (eds), yesterday's tomorrows: the powerhouse museum and its precursors 1880-2005, powerhouse publishing in association with unsw press, sydney, 2005, pp240-253, at p252. 88 mccubbin, 'contemporary culture and curators', p3. 89 peter emmett, quoted in jill sykes, 'the new and revealing museum of sydney', the view, no 1, 1995, pp48-53, at p53. 90 author interview with peter watts. 91 ibid. 92 ibid. 93 peter watts, museum of sydney review, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 1996, p4. 94 author interview with peter watts. 95 historic houses trust of new south wales, review of staff structure and operations at the museum of sydney, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 2000, p10. 96 peter watts and mos management team, report on the implementation of 1997 mos review, historic houses trust of new south wales, sydney, 10 april 1999. 97 author interview with peter watts. 98 historic houses trust of new south wales, 'minutes of forum to discuss mos review: trustees and mos staff', 4 november 1996, pp2-3. 99 author interview with peter watts. 100 historic houses trust of new south wales, review of staff structure and operations at the museum of sydney, p9. 101 ibid, p10. 102 author interview with peter watts. 103 ibid. 104 dean and rider, 'museums, nation and political history in the australian national museum and the canadian museum of civilization', p44. expressions of mercy: brisbane's mater hospitals 1906-2006, helen gregory. brisbane: university of queensland press, 2006; vii + pp379, photographs, notes, bibliography, index; paperback. the royal. a castle grand, a purpose noble. a history of the royal newcastle hospital 1817-2005, susan marsden assisted by cynthia hunter. newcastle: hunter new england area health service, 2005; vi + pp250 + vi, photographs, notes, bibliography, index; paperback. a profession's pathway: nursing at st vincent's since 1893, mary sheehan with sonia jennings. kew (victoria): arcadia, 2005, pp218 + xiii, photographs, notes, bibliography, index; paperback. hese 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 t public history review, vol 14, 2007 159 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 galleyoneill public history review vol 18 (2011): 47–64 © utsepress and the author restoring the ‘mam’: archives, access and research into women’s pasts in wales mandi o’neill the history of welsh people has often been camouflaged in british history yet women have been rendered inconspicuous within their own welsh history.1 t has been suggested that ‘welsh women are culturally invisible’2 in a country which has had a predominantly male workforce in its modern history which resulted in a strong cultural identity around rugby and male voice choirs which excluded women.3 welsh women were strongly identified with the domestic sphere and have been represented as a sort of nostalgic, idealised mother: the ‘mam’, the matriarch of the home, waging a constant battle, often in the face of economic deprivation, to keep her home and family clean and well-fed, often at the expense of her own health. ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, i public history review | o’neill 48 could have been her mantra: her reputation – which was all-important – was one of hard work, thrift and piety. rarely, if ever, working outside the home, social activities revolved around the chapel. pubs and politics were for the men.4 government statistics have tended to reinforce the somewhat homogenous, domestic view of welsh women. in the mid interwar period, only twenty-one percent of women in wales were recorded as economically active5 although oral history interviews reveal that women did take on additional work, often in the home, to supplement family income.6 while the idealised ‘mam’ is rooted firmly in the coalmining communities of the south wales valleys, there were plenty of women in urban areas such as cardiff and swansea and large parts of rural wales who did not conform to this image. so on the one hand a significant proportion of women – the ‘mams’ – are represented in the traditional histories of wales albeit fleetingly and inaccurately, whilst another equally significant group of ‘other’ women are completely unrepresented in these histories.7 these ‘other’ women include, for example, ‘thousands of women’ who were employed on cardiff docks8 as well as women who worked at the freeman’s cigar factory in grangetown, a noted local employer of women in the city, whom we know little about.9 inevitably, then, much of the research carried out by welsh feminist historians has centred on women’s experiences in the home – the ‘private sphere’. this is perhaps due to the dominant hold the representation of the ‘mam’ has had on the perceived identity of women in wales and it has taken a concerted effort to shift her from her pedestal.10 in wales, as elsewhere, feminist historians have long recognised the need for finding alternative ways to discover more about women’s pasts: diaries, autobiographies, letters, pamphlets, photographs and, particularly, oral history. this material has helped counter traditional stereotypes of welsh women11 but there are still a number of areas of potential research that will offer a more diverse picture of women’s lives.12 access to existing material is vital and it is also important to raise awareness of the importance of women’s history and the need to preserve material relevant to women’s lives for future researchers of all kinds. this article touches on these issues and looks at two welsh archives, both of which are concerned with those people whose ‘lives were conducted off-centre-stage in the margins’ and who were not considered important enough to be included in traditional histories.13 it is based on the dissertation i completed for an ma in women’s studies in 2009. the initial idea for the dissertation had been to find out more about the lives of white welsh women in butetown, cardiff, who married african, public history review | o’neill 49 arabic, asian and west indian seamen during the early part of the twentieth century. my intention was to try to ‘find’ and interview some of these women – or, more likely, their children – in order to find out how they had sustained their families and their community in the face of racist employment policies, negative stereotyping and general hostility to their community by outsiders. i also wanted to supplement the interviews with other material from a variety of sources and archives, including the butetown history and arts centre (bhac). two things became apparent mid-way through the dissertation year. the first was that finding interviewees was more complicated than i had anticipated and, secondly, access to bhac’s archives was not quite as straightforward as i had assumed it would be. shifting the focus of my dissertation to ‘access’ meant i could reflect on my experience of doing research in this area as well as thinking about possible ways forward for research into women’s pasts in wales. traditionally, record offices and their archives have generally not been places where many people, particularly marginalised groups – women, ethnic minorities, working class – have found much about their history and as carolyn steedman suggests: what is in the record office is only ‘fragmentary traces of the past’ recorded and kept as history.14 how people connect with the past can be important in helping create a sense of identity by being able to deconstruct dominant histories and produce alternative histories. to help achieve this, some historically marginalised groups have created their own archives and spaces which can be viewed as a way of retaining control over their communities’ cultural property and identity; and still serves as a model for marginal groups today, be they black, muslim or white working class communities.15 for feminist historians in wales this has been complicated by the fact that there is no physical space to hold material relevant to women’s lives which would be easily accessible. for the archif menywod cymru/women’s archive of wales (waw), starting out in 1997, the cost and time involved in raising funds for such a space was measured against the need to ‘rescue’ sources of women’s history which is arguably the more pressing.16 however, bhac began ‘rescuing’ their community’s history nearly thirty years ago and have managed to maintain part of an old docks office building which not only contains their archive material but has a gallery space which is also used for other events. public history review | o’neill 50 a brief history of butetown ‘tiger bay’ is probably the more familiar name to most people for the area of butetown in cardiff that was home to one of the oldest and largest multi-cultural communities in britain. the origins of the community began with the construction of the cardiff docks by the marquis of bute in the mid-nineteenth century to exploit the opportunities provided by the rapid expansion of the south wales coalfield.17 exporting coal across the world’s trade routes, seamen working on the ships arrived in cardiff, many from the countries of britain’s empire as well as from europe. the permanent labour force at the docks in the mid to late nineteenth century comprised mainly welsh and irish workers, with others from scotland and england.18 many seamen arriving in cardiff stayed in boarding houses and then returned to their home countries. others, however, settled in butetown and married local women, many of them welsh women from the south wales valleys.19 these families were the first generation of the multicultural community of butetown – a community considered unique in britain due to the level of intermarriage between local women and immigrant seamen.20 (in the 1940s, it was estimated that there were 45-50 nationalities represented within the butetown community in a population of approximately 5000.21 an early glimpse of the lives of welsh women in the community was provided by paul thompson’s interview with harriet vincent which was included in his book the edwardians, first published in 1975.22 the book was the result of a large-scale oral history project in which ‘over 400 hundred men and women, all born by 1906, and the earliest in 1872’ were interviewed.23 harriet was born to a black west indian father and white welsh mother and grew up in a comfortably lower middle-class family in butetown. the population of the community was still relatively low compared to what it would be following the first world war and cardiff was prospering at this time. amongst other things, harriet’s narrative offers clues that butetown’s borders were not always restrictive particularly as harriet and her first husband – a west indian – moved to the rhondda. however, more importantly, not only did harriet’s white welsh mother and her two sisters marry west indians; they also came from a family who would probably have had something of a respected position in the community due to the fact that harriet’s grandfather was a ship’s pilot in the bristol channel. they were not women who had for one unfortunate reason or another made their way to butetown as later commentators would suggest. but it seems they were part of the settled public history review | o’neill 51 white community which had been in existence in the area since about the 1850s. as with many other dockland areas, there was a distinct ‘sailortown’ character to the district but this was generally confined to bute street,24 the main thoroughfare from the city to the docks which adjoined butetown. the myths and legends of ‘tiger bay’ were fashioned out of the notoriety of bute street.25 some historians and other commentators have rightly considered butetown and bute street to be two distinct areas but in the early twentieth century the wider public in cardiff tended to ‘link the foreignness of the former to the vice of the latter.’26 at the end of the first world war, demobbed white, british servicemen became hostile towards black sailors who had seemingly taken over their jobs and ‘race’ riots erupted at liverpool. following relatively minor disturbances in nearby newport and barry, three black men were killed and dozens injured in cardiff. an alleged flashpoint seems to have been the sight of black men and their white wives returning to butetown from an outing.27 in the aftermath of the riots, butetown began to consciously consolidate and strengthen community bonds. marika sherwood notes that: the people of the bay formed many kinds of associations to defend themselves, to struggle against injustice and inequality, to rally to the aid of colonial causes, and to provide their own social and spiritual needs.28 as a community, butetown was marginalised not only geographically from the rest of the city but also culturally, economically and historically. although not quite a ghetto – perhaps a ‘quasi-ghetto’ as leonard bloom suggests29 – there was a sense of ‘them and us’ and ‘otherness’ between the community and the wider city. this was also a period when butetown’s white wives and their mixed race daughters became very much more visible albeit through inaccurate and lurid newspaper reports and social investigations. research and popular culture much of what is ‘known’ about the women of butetown came from official bodies and investigations as well as academic researchers outside of butetown.30 kenneth little’s phd thesis, ‘negroes in britain’, was published in 1948. part 1, entitled ‘the coloured people of cardiff’, was originally published separately in 1942. it is generally considered to be the most comprehensive survey of butetown and as neil evans puts it, ‘anyone attempting to write on butetown must wage a struggle for public history review | o’neill 52 independence from the work of kenneth little’.31 however, his is the work of an ‘old school’ british anthropologist and so some of his ‘findings’ need to be seen in that context and treated with caution. along with little, the social research organisation mass observation was also active in butetown during the second world war as part of an investigation into ‘labour and morale’ in the liverpool and cardiff docks.32 links between mass observation and picture post and the british documentary movement were evident in the photo-essay published on ‘cardiff’ in 1939 which featured ‘tiger bay’.33 humphrey spender was the photographer following his earlier work for mass observation in 1937-38.34 picture post returned to the area in 1950 and in 195435 and the photographs taken by bert hardy are considered by residents to be a truthful representation of the community.36 during the 1940s and 1950s, newspapers and literature continued to reproduce stereotyped representations of butetown. the girl from tiger bay by roland vane (1950) was one of a number of british ‘pulp fiction’ books produced after the second world war featuring tiger bay as a setting.37 the film tiger bay (1959), part of the british new wave film movement is remembered fondly by older residents of butetown particularly as much of it was shot in the area and locals were also hired as extras. it is one of the first british films to portray a multi-racial community. but it is not without problems in terms of how the women of the community are represented.38 by the time picture post returned to the area in 1954, the docks were in terminal decline and eventually in the early 1960s all remaining coal exports from cardiff were abandoned. the years of negative representations of the people of butetown had a more obvious impact on the community, particularly in relation to the ‘slum’ clearance policy, which emerged as an issue in the late 1930s and was eventually carried out in the 1960s.39 by 1966, most of butetown’s old victorian housing had been demolished and replaced by tower blocks and other new housing and many residents moved to other areas of cardiff. rescuing butetown’s history in 1987, the cardiff bay development corporation (cbdc) was formed to re-develop one sixth of the dockland area with the aim of reconnecting the city of cardiff with the sea. at the same time, deciding that it was urgent that something was done to record the history of the area before it disappeared, iain tweedale, a post-graduate student, offered a community education course called ‘the history of butetown’ public history review | o’neill 53 and it was at these classes that the first recordings of some of the older residents of the community took place. glenn jordan, an africanamerican anthropologist who had come to cardiff to do his doctoral thesis, was also involved and he went on to form an informal group called the butetown community history project with local residents. recording of residents continued to take place through a community education course called ‘the way we were: life histories from tiger bay’.40 jordan described this phase of bhac’s development as a serious attempt to develop a group of locally based indigenous researchers – working-class, organic intellectuals – and to create a space for the production of alternative histories, identities and representations of life in cardiff docklands.41 continuing to record older residents over the next two years or so, the aim was that the transcribed material would be put onto computer where it could be easily accessed. in the summer of 1991 transcription of the recordings began but unfortunately it did not get very far.42 bhac’s oral history collection it is difficult to be specific about what exactly is in bhac’s oral history collection as they don’t appear to have a catalogue which can be freely consulted. however, in 2001 a survey of bhac’s collection was carried out by the caribbean studies black and asian history (casbah), a web-based project funded by the research support libraries programme to ‘map’ resources relevant to caribbean and black and asian history in the united kingdom. the project worked in partnership with a number of organisations including the black and asian studies association (basu), the public record office and the institute of commonwealth studies.43 casbah lists bhac as a ‘specialist repository’ and they ascertained that there are 150 audiotapes of life histories recorded between 1979 and 1989. there are also apparently 45 tapes devoted to women’s lives in the community. access to these and other collections at bhac is at the discretion of the director of bhac, who is at present glenn jordan. other collections include documents from local companies and shipping firms and approximately 5000 photographs. jordan himself has commented that: our oral history archive now includes about 800 hours of audio-recorded interviews and a dozen hours of video… we have not yet been able to make substantial use of this public history review | o’neill 54 material. because of the resources required, transforming audio-recorded interviews into a form that can be shared with a public audience of readers or listeners can pose serious difficulties for groups such as ours.44 depending on exactly what bhac agreed with their interviewees at the time of recording, it may well be that they are not conforming to the ethical guidelines and ideas of best practice set out by the british oral history society.45 firstly, it appears that many of the interviews have not been transcribed. secondly, it seems the intention was to produce life histories of men and women from tiger bay so it is quite likely this is what the interviewees were told was the purpose of the interviews. an obvious solution to this might be to apply for funding which could enable a large-scale transcription project but this would probably raise the issue of wider access and availability which could mean researchers independent of bhac producing work which perhaps doesn’t tie in with bhac’s aims. jordan has acknowledged the irony of not allowing the voices of the ‘most marginalised’ to be heard, ‘despite our lofty, culturally democratic aims’ but ethically bhac do need to make sure these voices are heard.46 in reflecting on the relationship between the researcher and the informant in oral history interviews, karen olson and linda shopes use the word ‘entrusting’ to describe the responsibility that informants give researchers to present their stories to a wider audience, particularly when they are not able to ‘access’ this audience themselves.47 b h a c a n d p h o t o g r a p h i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n bhac’s more recent work has seen a shift to photographic representation as a way of countering traditional stereotypes which means there is less emphasis on historical research into the community: producing books from audiotapes is a long, laborious and costly business. from our early days we have intended to produce two volumes of life histories: women’s lives from tiger bay and men’s lives from tiger bay… to date this has not happened…48 this is a shame as in the mid-1990s they began to publish a number of books written by local people about the history of the area and their memories of life in the community.49 these books are valuable not only because of the people, places and events they describe but also that women feature prominently, particularly in neil sinclair’s book, the public history review | o’neill 55 tiger bay story.50 however, not everyone’s memories are necessarily the same, as sinclair acknowledged in the foreword to the tenth anniversary edition of the book: reading neil’s book was like being in miss ollie’s front room trading stories. strangers would believe it but for those who know, it was a load of rubbish. when, and if, i ever complete my true tales of tiger bay, if people don’t agree with it they can take it up with the folk i’ll have got the stories from…51 sadly, true tales has yet to appear in print. reflecting bhac’s shift to photographic representation are two recent projects, the first of which was somali elders: portraits from wales consisting of portraits taken by glenn jordan and short autobiographies of his subjects which was published in 2004. it was made possible with a grant from the home office via the ‘connecting communities’ initiative.52 the book is devoted entirely to the men of the somali community in wales – mainly cardiff and newport – who were born in somaliland and settled here. the second project, funded by the heritage lottery fund, was ‘mothers and daughter’s’53 which again features photographs taken by glenn jordan. the exhibition aims to challenge stereotyped notions that to be welsh is to be white54 and includes women from all over wales with diverse multi-ethnic backgrounds. accompanying the portraits are brief oral histories which were conducted at the time the photographs were taken and which will be published as part of an educational package for teachers.55 the project has its roots in a group of young somali women approaching jordan to take photographs of their mothers following the somali elders project, mentioned above. the initial exhibition was shown in ireland and was funded by the arts council of wales who awarded an individual artist grant to jordan.56 these projects reiterate notions of ‘otherness’ and the accompanying text is framed around discussions of identity and difference. both of these projects illustrate the shift in bhac’s approach, from what was initially a community history project to a more contemporary arts and cultural organisation. jordan doesn’t see this as abandoning their ‘commitment to cultural democracy’; it allows a broader range of publications, such as those that ‘privilege visual imagery, particularly photographs’.57 public history review | o’neill 56 the bay people’s museum the more recent emphasis on photographs does seem to tie in with bhac’s long-standing aim to create a ‘bay people’s museum’ in cardiff bay ‘which would include the bay people’s archives, together with exhibition halls, a café, a pub, activities for children and so on’.58 bhac had hoped that the cbdc would, as part of their £1.66 billion regeneration fund, establish a museum and arts centre which would be run by bhac and provide ‘an essential heritage attraction in a redevelopment which had paid little attention to the multi-cultural history of the area’.59 unfortunately, this didn’t happen. however, in 2008, plans to renovate the historic pierhead building in cardiff bay were announced by the welsh assembly: we will be working in partnership with the butetown history & arts centre and the merchant navy association and have invited the national museum and galleries to be a partner in the interpretation of the building… i see there being four stories around the pierhead. the first is looking out to sea to tell the seafarer’s history while towards the west is butetown and it is important to tell the history of black culture and its links with cardiff. to the east there is the new democracy shown by the senedd and towards the back we look up to castell coch and the rest of wales.60 on a recent visit to the pierhead, it was disappointing to see virtually no mention of the butetown community, except for an a4 sheet of recollections by neil sinclair, and there didn’t seem to be any evidence of a partnership with bhac. in light of butetown’s historic, cultural and social marginalisation within wider cardiff and south wales, it is possible that an agreement couldn’t be reached over how the history of the area was to be interpreted. there is also the issue of what might be seen as ‘cultural appropriation’61 in that much of the material collected by bhac has been donated by families and so issues arise around how to display material to be viewed in a ‘heritage’ setting. as darryl mcintyre notes: ‘it is never easy for a publicly funded cultural institution to become involved in controversy but that is probably inevitable if the museum is to do its job honestly.’62 in this instance, it seems that the welsh assembly have chosen to avoid the issue entirely. public history review | o’neill 57 archif menywod cymru/women’s archive of wales the bottom line is ‘does it throw light on the history of women in wales, including very recent history’?63 the women’s archive of wales (waw) was founded in 1997 and was the ‘brainchild’ of ursula masson, a lecturer in history at the university of glamorgan, who acted as chair until her death in 2008. along with deirdre beddoe, emeritus professor of women’s history, who is the president of waw, she was active in promoting women’s history to a wider community in wales: [waw] exists to promote the study, and to rescue and preserve the sources, of women's history in wales… we collect a broad range of archival, photographic and other material sources which illustrate the history and heritage of women in wales, and their experience in a range of spheres including the domestic, political, religious, economic, cultural and social. we particularly seek diaries, scrapbooks, the minute books of women’s organizations, literary manuscripts, photographs and similar materials. our collections are deposited in our name in existing record offices in wales, and in the national library of wales, where they are properly cared for, and where they can be accessed by researchers subject to any restrictions put on a collection.64 so although waw, unlike bhac, does not ‘physically’ hold its own collections, it might be described as a ‘portal or gateway’ for researchers.65 it has a formal agreement with the record offices and national library of wales and they work within the collection policies of those institutions. for local record offices it is documentary material and photographs relative to their specific geographical area and the national library of wales takes the broader welsh collections. waw’s collections are listed on the archives network wales website, a publicly funded project allowing searchers to see what material is held across wales.66 an obvious solution for housing a women’s collection might have been a women’s library or similar space. alyson tyler conducted research for her phd thesis into other women’s libraries/spaces in britain, to see whether there was a need for such a space in wales67 and interviewed four members of waw.68 aside from the difficulties of funding and maintaining a ‘women’s space/archive’, another important public history review | o’neill 58 issue in a welsh context would have been where to site such a space, particularly as there has been a perceived (biased?) distinction between the english-speaking south and the welsh-speaking north. it is probably fair to say that the drive to promote women’s history in wales has largely been led by feminist historians from the south and this issue was identified in waw’s acquisitions report of 2005-06 in that most of their collections came primarily from south wales69 although this has now begun to change.70 placing material donated to them into existing record offices also enables waw to ‘promote’ and engage county archivists across wales with the importance of women’s history. being able to utilise new digital technologies which are becoming more widely available was also seen as the way forward.71 because women and other marginalised groups have found little of their own pasts in traditional archives such as local record offices it could be argued that groups such as waw are attempting to redress this, although this will obviously not happen overnight. in terms of waw’s collections, it seems likely that more recent material around events like the miners’ strike in 1984-85 is from and about working class women but the bulk of earlier material is likely to be from middle-class women.72 another important issue is the lack of material from women in ethnic communities across wales. waw’s women’s history roadshows a recent project which has brought waw to a wider public has been the women’s history roadshows project. these, too, were the idea of ursula masson and the project was launched in january 2008 at the senedd in cardiff and the final roadshow took place in merthyr tydfil in june 2009. the project was funded by a hlf heritage grant of £187,000.73 the aim of the project was to encourage people to bring in material relating to women’s lives, to offer them a historical ‘valuation’. specialists in archives and libraries gave advice on conservation of material for people who didn’t wish to donate it but permission was sought to scan items for the waw website and record interviews. historians, including angela john and catrin stevens, were on hand to suggest how the material might ‘throw light on the history of women in wales’.74 where donations were made, the material was deposited in the relevant record office under waw’s name. perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the material appearing at the roadshows was in the form of photographs. however, although waw’s ‘call’ had been for letters diaries and photographs relating to women’s lives, interestingly and perhaps not anticipated, was the amount of non public history review | o’neill 59 documentary material people brought to the roadshows. this demonstrates the many and varied ways people make their own connections with the past and the personal value and ‘meaning’ they attach to different items.75 at a roadshow event i attended in monmouth in 2008, the concert dresses and photographs of marie novello were brought in and donated. originally from maesteg in bridgend, marie was the adopted daughter of dame clara novello and sister of ivor novello but she died at the age of 30 in 1928 and since then had been largely forgotten. the dresses were extremely fragile and bits of beading were falling off them as they were unwrapped. for waw, one of the issues is that local record office collection policies don’t extend to this sort of material which is where museums needed to be involved and a museums advisor has since been sought for the committee. another unexpected bonus from the roadshows was the number of people who were keen to share their memories and stories about the material they had brought in but didn’t want to donate. these interviews have formed an oral history archive which will be made accessible via the archive’s website. another aspect of the roadshows is that at each roadshow there are often other groups present who provide exhibitions, assistance and speakers for the events. one particular group is merched y wawr (women of the dawn) which is a group that broke away from the women’s institute (wi) in the late 1960s after the wi insisted that all meetings had to be conducted in english. the group is active in mid and north wales and working with groups such as these helps to extend links beyond south wales and into welsh-speaking areas.76 a further result of the roadshows has been that the archive has made grassroots connections at a level that local record offices can’t necessarily make. in the course of doing research for my ma dissertation, i came across a company in cardiff called j r freeman, a cigar factory which had been a longstanding employer of women in the docks area. when i contacted the company, i was invited in to have a look at the company’s archive which contained photographs of women who had worked there in the 1920s and 1930s, the period i was particularly interested in. aside from these photographs, the collection includes a substantial number of photographs of women working there from nearly every decade of freeman’s 100-year history in cardiff. the company was due to close for good in september 2009 and there was a possibility that the collection could end up with the parent company in japan. to this end, i passed on the relevant details to the women’s archive and the glamorgan record office has been able to reach public history review | o’neill 60 agreement with the company for the collection to be deposited in the record office under the women’s archive name, which will enable the material to be accessed by all kinds of researchers. i’m not sure that if i hadn’t heard or known about the women’s archive whether i would have thought to mention the glamorgan record office instead. conclusion as can be seen, the core ethos of both bhac and waw has been to ‘rescue’ and preserve material which can be used to produce alternative histories of marginalised groups in wales. bhac has moved on from this to some degree and now seems to concentrate on representing the wider community of multi-ethnic wales in a variety of ways, particularly photography, and much of this is new, contemporary work. this has tended to relegate producing histories of the butetown community, from their existing material, to the sidelines. although bhac is interested in the historical representations of the residents of butetown, it is more concerned with the ways in which people from the community can represent themselves now. this does mean that the voices of earlier generations, in this case, the women of the community, are rarely heard and so the stereotyping and negative representations of these women remain unchallenged. however, it has managed to retain control and access to its own material and to set its own agenda and aims. waw’s approach has been to make any material they can ‘rescue’ accessible in local record offices to all researchers as well as making much of it available digitally where possible. not having a women’s library or similar space in wales might, perversely, be viewed as an advantage. it could be perceived as being too specialist, and there can be difficulties in competing for funding with other british women’s libraries/spaces. there are issues as to how well certain groups of women are represented in waw’s collections but their work does help to raise awareness that more material and more research is needed to expand our knowledge of women’s pasts in wales. the image of the welsh ‘mam’ has been exposed as a nineteenthcentury invention and largely a figment of popular cultural imagination. some of the ‘gaps’ left since the ‘mam’ has been consigned to the old, outdated histories of wales are starting to be filled with new, alternative histories of welsh women and access to new and existing material is essential for this to continue. public history review | o’neill 61 endnotes 1 angela v john, (ed), our mothers’ land: chapters in welsh women’s history 1830-1939, university of wales press, cardiff, 1991, introduction, p1. 2 deirdre beddoe, ‘images of welsh women’ in tony curtis, (ed), wales: the imagined nation. essays in cultural and national identity, poetry wales press, bridgend, 1986, p227. 3 john, our mothers’ land, p1. 4 rosemary crook, ‘‘tidy women’: women in the rhondda between the wars’, oral history: the journal of the oral history society, vol 10, no 2, autumn 1982, pp40-41; beddoe, ‘images of welsh women’, p229; carol white and sian rhiannon williams (eds), struggle or starve: women’s lives in the south wales valleys between the two world wars, honno press dinas powys, 1998, p12 & p15. 5 deirdre beddoe, out of the shadows: a history of welsh women in twentieth-century wales, university of wales press, cardiff, 2000, p78. 6 for example, maggie jones from the rhondda, interviewed in the documentary mam recalled her mother taking in washing and being paid two shillings. interviewed in mam, red flannel films, pontypridd, mid glamorgan, 1988; viewing copy supplied by national screen and sound archive of wales, february 2009, ref: 302. 7 ruth shade, ‘valley girls: reconfiguring the dramatic representation of welsh “mams” and “slags”’, 2001, http://www.theatre-wales.co.uk/critical/critical_detail.asp?criticalid=3 accessed 22nd september 2008, p1. 8 alison benjamin, ‘mixed metaphor’ the guardian, 14 march 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2001/mar/14/guardiansocietysupplement5 accessed 19 february 2008. 9 new research around women and work in victorian cardiff might begin to shed more light. see, for example, phillip davies, migration and women’s work in late victorian cardiff, unpublished ma by research, university of glamorgan, 2008, http://history.research.glam.ac.uk/news/en/2008/jul/09/migration-and-womens-work-late-victoriancardiff/ accessed 11 september 2008. also harry ‘shipmate’ cooke, how i saw it: a stroll thro’ old cardiff bay, butetown history and arts centre, cardiff, 1995, p83, describing the ‘old bay', writes that ‘bay girls no longer work in the brush factory, the sack and bag works or zigmonds…’. 10 deirdre beddoe has suggested that welsh women were subject ‘to a particularly “virulent strain” of patriarchy’, the effects of which lingered longer in wales. beddoe, out of the shadows, p180. 11 see angela v. john (ed), our mothers’ land: chapters in welsh women’s history 1830-1939, university of wales press, cardiff, 1991. this was the first academic book devoted entirely to research into welsh women’s pasts. it covered the period 1839-1939 and demonstrates the variety of material historians use to construct alternative histories. 12 deirdre beddoe has identified areas of potential research that have been neglected. the first is the overall period of 1945-1970. this is a significant time for working class women in wales particularly in relation to employment outside the home, as this was the period when male-dominated heavy industry of all types in wales came under threat. new, light industrial businesses began operating in wales in the early post-war period and offered considerable employment opportunities for women when many of their husbands were losing their jobs. other areas of potential are around women and the trade union movement and women in local government. beddoe, out of the shadows, pp6; 135. avril rolph’s opinion is that ‘far more research is needed into the role women played in virtually all aspects of life in wales through the ages…’. email interview, avril rolph. 30 april 2009. 13 hilda kean, london stories: personal lives, public histories, rivers oram publishing limited, london, 2004, p7. 14 carolyn steedman, dust, manchester university press, manchester, 2001, p69. 15 jon newman, ‘harry jacobs: the studio photographer and the visual archive’, in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), people and their pasts: public history today, palgrave macmillan, london, 2009, p269. 16 this interview extract published in waw, ‘newsletter’, january 2009, p5, illustrates this: ‘my mother was known as the gypsy in our mining community. when anyone was ill or had an accident down the mine they would turn up on our doorstep. she would go out into the wild and collect baskets of plants for her remedies. they always said i was the next in line to carry this knowledge and practice forward. i was young, saw it as old fashioned and refused to take an interest. when mother died i was left note books full of her plant remedies passed down through the family. last year i moved to a smaller flat and had no room for these books, none of my daughters were interested, nor was the local library so they ended up on the bonfire!’ mrs johns, 89 years, rhondda valley. 17 dennis morgan, the cardiff story, hackman print, tonypandy, 1991/2001, p135. public history review | o’neill 62 18 glenn jordan, ‘down the bay’: picture post, humanist photography and images of 1950s cardiff, butetown history and arts centre, cardiff, 2001, p9. 19 brian lee and butetown history and arts centre, butetown and cardiff docks (images of wales series), tempus publishing, stroud, 1999, p8. 20 alison benjamin, ‘mixed metaphor’, the guardian, 14 march 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2001/mar/14/guardiansocietysupplement5 accessed 19 february 2008. 21 jordan, ‘down the bay’, p9. 22 paul thompson, the edwardians: the remaking of british society, routledge, abingdon, oxford, 1992, pp94-102. 23 the interviews are now part of the british library national sound archive and thompson mentions that ‘this unique, now unrepeatable set of interviews has proved an extraordinary rich source for many other historians besides myself’; thompson, the edwardians, ppxix; xx. 24 stan hugill, sailortown, routledge and kegan paul, london, 1967, p128, recalls seamen also referring to bute street as ‘oriental parade’. 25 neil evans, ‘regulating the reserve army: arabs, blacks and the local state in cardiff, 1919-1945’ in kenneth lunn (ed), race and labour in twentieth-century britain, frank cass & company ltd, london, 1985, p70; ross cameron, ‘“the most colourful extravaganza in the world”: images of tiger bay, 1845-1970’, patterns of prejudice, vol 31, no 2, 1997, pp59-90; 68. 26 cameron, ‘the most colourful extravaganza in the world’, p68. this article examines the emergence of the myths surrounding ‘tiger bay’. 27 see laura tabili, ‘women “of a very low type”: crossing racial boundaries in imperial britain’, in laura frader and sonya o. rose (eds), gender and class in modern europe, cornell university press, ithaca, 1996, p166: ‘early twentieth-century observers frequently attributed racial conflict to sexual competition – competition among black and white men for white women.’ for an in-depth account of the riots in britain and the sequence of events in cardiff see peter fryer, staying power: the history of black people in britain, pluto press, london, 1984, pp304-9 and neil evans, ‘the south wales race riots of 1919’, llafur, vol 3, no 1, 1980, pp5-29. 28 marika sherwood, ‘racism and resistance: cardiff in the 1930s and 1940s’, llafur, vol 5, no 4, 1991, pp51-70; 58. 29 leonard bloom’s introduction to kenneth little, negroes in britain, routledge and kegan paul ltd, london, 1972, p44. 30 for example, captain f. a. richardson’s report to the british social hygiene council and the british council for the welfare of the mercantile marine: ‘cardiff has before it a social problem that cannot as yet be solved… the coloured men who have come to dwell in our cities are being made to adopt a standard of civilisation they cannot be expected to understand… they come into intimate contact with white women, principally those who unfortunately are of loose moral character, with the result that a half-caste population is brought into the world.’ quoted in the western mail, 8 july 1935. from alan llwyd, cymru ddu: hames pobl dduon cymru/black wales: a history of welsh black people, hughes, llanishen in association with butetown history and arts centre, 2005, p112. 31 evans, ‘regulating the reserve army’, p109. 32 tony kushner, we europeans?: mass-observation, ‘race’ and british identity in the twentieth century, studies in european cultural transmission series, ashgate publishing, aldershot, hampshire, 2004, p79. 33 picture post, ‘cardiff’, 18 march 1939, hulton press, london, pp21-29. 34 kushner, we europeans?, p80. 35 picture post, ‘down the bay’, 22 april 1950, hulton press, london, pp12-19 and picture post, ‘the best, and the worst of, british cities: 2: cardiff’, 23 january 1954, hulton press, london, pp32-37. 36 ‘well that’s how it was. he has captured how we lived. it’s down to earth, it’s real.’ clara graham quoted from glenn jordan, ‘down the bay’: picture post, humanist photography and images of 1950s cardiff, butetown history and arts centre, cardiff, 2001, p12. 37 ‘why are certain types of white women attracted – apparently irresistibly – towards coloured men? the question has intrigued scientists, psychiatrists and social workers for centuries. now roland vane in this frankly realistic novel delves into the reasonings of a woman of this type. born in a cardiff slum and reared in the sordid sophistication of ‘tiger bay’, his heroine finds herself drifting, through no fault of her own, into the arms of the only individual who has ever shown her kindness – a coloured man!’ back-cover to roland vane, the girl from tiger bay, archer press ltd, london, 1950. quoted from babylon wales website http://babylonwales.blogspot.com/2006/07/girlfrom-tiger-bay.html accessed 20 february 2008. 38 tiger bay, independent artists (productions) ltd, 1959. (reissued on dvd by carlton, 2004.) the portrayal of the women in the film reflects ruth shade’s ‘mams’ and ‘slags’ although there is also a public history review | o’neill 63 racial element. the ‘mams’ in the film (all welsh) are invariably seen wearing aprons, in the home working at some domestic task. they look tired and put-upon, and in mrs parry’s case (rachel roberts), seemingly quite old to have such a young child. no make-up, hair short or pinned back neatly. no obvious adornment or make-up and their clothes are dowdy. the ‘other’ women, anna, the murdered polish woman and christine, the mixed-race, ‘tart with a heart’ are a complete contrast: make-up, jewellery, styled hair, often scantily-clad, exotic and ‘glamorous’ in a sense, these portrayals tap into stereotypes of women from butetown. 39 glenn jordan and chris weedon, ‘when the subalterns speak, what do they say? radical cultural politics in cardiff docklands’ in paul gilroy, lawrence grossberg and angela mcrobbie (eds), without guarantees: in honour of stuart hall, verso, london, 2000, p171. 40 glenn jordan and chris weedon, ‘whose history is it?’, in cultural politics: class, gender, race and the postmodern world, blackwell, oxford, 1995, p141. 41 glenn jordan, ‘voices from below: doing people’s history in cardiff docklands’, in stefan berger, heiko feldner and kevin passmore (eds), writing history: theory and practice, hodder arnold, london, 2003, p304. 42 jordan and weedon, ‘whose history is it?’, p142. 43 casbah, nd, p2 http://www.casbah.ac.uk/index.html accessed 25 may 2008. 44 jordan, ‘voices from below’, p309. 45 oral history society, ‘oral history society ethical guidelines’, nd, http://www.ohs.org.uk/ethics/index.php eg accessed 13 june 2009. 46 jordan, ‘voices from below’, p309. 47 karen olson and linda shopes, ‘crossing boundaries, building bridges’, in sherna berger gluck and daphne patai, (eds), women’s words: the feminist practice of oral history, routledge, london and new york, 1991, p198. 48 jordan, ‘voices from below’, p309. 49 see neil sinclair, the tiger bay story, butetown history and arts centre, cardiff, 1993; phyllis grogan chappell, a tiger bay childhood, butetown history and arts centre, cardiff, 1994; harry ‘shipmate’ cooke, how i saw it: a stroll thro’ old cardiff bay, butetown history and arts centre, cardiff, 1995. 50 neil sinclair, the tiger bay story: 10th anniversary edition, dragon and tiger enterprises, cardiff, 1993/2003. 51 quoted from sinclair, the tiger bay story, pvii. this was a letter from peggy farrugia, a local resident, writing to making waves magazine in october 1993. 52 glenn jordan, somali elders: portraits from wales, butetown history and arts centre, cardiff, 2004, p4. 53 south wales echo, 21 august 2008, ‘mothers and daughters exhibition’, http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/features/2008/08/21/mums-and-daughters-bringwales-rich-tapestry-to-life-91466-21575067/ accessed 5 january 2009. 54 glenn jordan, ‘mothers and daughters: portraits from multi-ethnic wales. a photographic exhibition by glenn jordan’. forum on migration and communications, ireland, 2007, p10. (pamphlet produced for irish exhibition.) 55 education is an important part of bhac’s work and material from their collections has been used in resource packs for teachers and sent out to schools. alison benjamin, ‘mixed metaphor’, the guardian, 14 march 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2001/mar/14/guardiansocietysupplement5, accessed 19 february 2008. 56 glenn jordan, ‘mothers and daughters’, p13. 57 jordan, ‘voices from below’, p311. 58 jordan and weedon, whose history is it?, p150. 59 alison benjamin, the guardian, 14 march 2001, ‘mixed metaphor’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2001/mar/14/guardiansocietysupplement5, accessed 1 february 2008. 60 south wales echo, 29 february 2008, ‘museum planned for historic bay building’, http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/02/29/museum-planned-for-historic-baybuilding-91466-20541205/ accessed 1 march 2009. 61 newman, ‘harry jacobs’, p261. 62 darryl mcintyre, ‘creating new pasts in museums: planning the museum of london’s modern london galleries’, in ashton and kean, people and their pasts, p139. 63 email interview with avril rolph, archif menywod cymru/women’s archive of wales committee member, thursday 30 april 2009. public history review | o’neill 64 64 archif menywod cymru/women’s archive of wales website, nd, http://www.womensarchivewales.org/en/index.html accessed 27 feb 2009. 65 alyson tyler, chapter 1 of thesis, 2006, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/254/21/chapter 1.pdf accessed 1 march 2009. 66 archive network wales, nd, http://www.archivesnetworkwales.info/ accessed 11 april 2009. 67 alyson tyler, chapter 1 of thesis, 2006, http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/2160/254/21/chapter 1.pdf accessed 1 march 2009. 68 email interview, avril rolph, 30 april 2009. 69 waw, annual report, 2005-2006, p14. http://www.womensarchivewales.org/en/membership/index.html accessed 8 april 2009. 70 ‘at the conference last year, members from north wales formed a regional group and have met together on a number of occasions, including organising a conference “sharing our histories” for international women’s day when over a hundred women from across north wales attended.’ archif menywod cymru/women’s archive of wales, annual report, 2007-8, p1. 71 email interview, avril rolph, 30 april 2009. 72 email interview, avril rolph, 30 april 2009. 73 heritage lottery fund ‘waw’, nd, http://search.hlf.org.uk/english/grantsdatabase/grantsproject?applicationid=21754 accessed 28 april 2011. 74 ‘women’s lives revealed… virtual archives to roadshows’, cymal magazine, issue 3, winter 2006, p19, http://cymru.gov.uk/docrepos/40382/deptlgandc/403822131/4038221336/648954/cymal_issue3_e _final.pdf?lang=en accessed 2 june 2009. 75 kean, london stories, pp6-9. 76 merched y wawr carried out a hlf funded ‘oral history of women in wales (1920-1960)’, in which volunteers interviewed 1000 welsh-speaking women across wales about issues relevant to women’s lives. the tapes have been deposited at the museum of welsh life in st fagan’s, cardiff, catrin stevens, who also works with waw, co-ordinated the project – heritage lottery fund ‘merched y wawr’, nd, http://www.hlf.org.uk/ourproject/pages/feb2000/cd09434d-b6ae-4071-b591cb59f6f2262d.aspx accessed 28 april 2011. galleydellios public history review vol 19 (2012): 21-42 © utsepress and the author bonegilla heritage park: contesting and coordinating a public history site alexandra dellios or nearly twenty years, the site of the former bonegilla migrant reception and training centre was publically neglected. it was a derelict site pulsing with personal memories, some fond, others melancholy. these memories form the fragments of many migrant journeys. publically, and in relation to the wider national narrative of the successful post-war migration scheme, bonegilla had little collective significance. it was only in the years leading up to the bicentenary of 1988 that memories surrounding the former migrant camp began to emerge and converge around new narratives, ones that marked the site as place of national significance, progress and success. these narratives have been developing ever since, evolving and responding to changes in our wider attitudes to ‘multicultural nationhood’, heritage preservation and structural changes to bonegilla’s administration and marketing.1 the relaunch of bonegilla’s migrant experience heritage park in september 2010 is but one step in the evolution of bonegilla’s public history, one we f public history review | dellios 22 might typify as part of the move from sporadic ex-resident-led anniversaries to a more concerted heritage and state-led endeavour. this process can also be explained in reference to ashton and hamilton’s theory of ‘retrospective commemoration’: the effort of state authorities at all levels to ‘express a more inclusive narrative of the nation as result of, among other things, multicultural policies by retrospectively commemorating a wider number of communities and people who have contributed to australia’s “national development”.’2 once an integral part of the government’s post-war immigration scheme, bonegilla was a temporary home for some 320 000 european displaced persons and assisted migrants, making it the largest of australia’s post-war migrant camps. the original site of unlined weatherboard huts was quickly converted from an army training camp into a migrant reception and training centre in 1947. this was a modest and makeshift arrangement, much needed in a post-war australia with a severe housing shortage. bonegilla was part of a larger system of migrant reception centres. they were organising points from which to assign employment to displaced persons and assisted migrants who had exchanged two years of their labour for assisted or free passage. bonegilla was located in a remote part of northern victoria, between the border towns of albury and wodonga. this remote location suited the government, which anxiously anticipated an adverse response from ‘old australians’ to the new migrant presence.3 from the organising point of bonegilla, migrants were to be ‘dispersed’ amongst the australian population.4 an assimilationist rationale and post-war demands in the economy directed their movements. after its closure in 1971, bonegilla was handed back to the army. part of the former site became latchford barracks. for the next twenty years most of bonegilla’s remaining original infrastructure was demolished or fell into disrepair. the camp was seen as a slightly shameful footnote to australia’s immigration history. for many, it was a tragic and isolating place and a reminder of australia’s discarded migration policies – of ethnic discrimination, containment, control and assimilation.5 so, by the 1970s, bonegilla had disappeared from the public consciousness, along with the last vestiges of official assimilation. the site remained invisible until the mid1980s when the army made known its plans to sell off, or else demolish, the remaining huts of block 19.6 since this time, efforts to publically commemorate bonegilla, while intermittent, have increased. this has included reunions and anniversaries, state and national heritage listings, the erection of permanent museum displays, temporary and touring exhibitions, the onsite heritage park and popular culture in the form of television and public history review | dellios 23 news-reporting. for the national audience, as well as several ethnic communities, bonegilla now plays a role in the collective imagination of the post-war period and the migrant journey. as sara wills notes, bonegilla is the most publicly ‘remembered’ – for better or worse – of all australia’s post-war migrant camps.7 most importantly, the nature of its public representation has evolved since the late 1980s. bonegilla is much more than a place of personal migrant memory, and its previous negative connotations in the public arena have all but been erased. how do we explain this public transformation? certain actors and processes are easy enough to identify in regards to the construction and evolution of the heritage park. we can point to the role of ethnic communities’ councils, albury and wodonga city councils, state heritage bodies, the victorian multicultural commission, the greek-led exresidents association and the bonegilla migrant experience advisory committee, most of which represent various state interests. but a deeper understanding of the evolution of bonegilla’s public history involves understanding the contestation and co-ordination of collective memories: that is, multiple narratives of bonegilla’s past, which, while in constant dialogue with each other, are framed and sanctioned by the limits of australian multiculturalism and heritage discourses, narratives sanctioned by ‘retrospective commemoration’.8 indeed, as ashton and hamilton highlight, within these narratives ‘communities and organisations need to operate if they are to be officially part of the national story and its regional and local variants’.9 this article progresses from this premise, and takes the evolution of the on-site heritage park as a specific example of the changes to bonegilla’s public history. the heritage park – one expression among many in bonegilla’s chequered public history – is encompassed by wider discursive, spatial and visual elements that shape collective remembrance including national heritage, multiculturalism and the homogenous ‘migrant experience’.10 since glenda sluga’s attempts to trace the ‘bonegilla myth-making’ emerging in the late 1980s, a few concerted attempts have been made to interrogate the nature and function of collective and public memories of bonegilla and other post-war migrant camps.11 these are significant sites in the history of australia’s post-war migration scheme. as historic sites they illuminate and represent the strategic and political motivations behind that remarkable period in australia’s immigration history, as well as the plight of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and, later, assisted migrants. what sluga sees as separate and oppositional discourses – the official and vernacular bonegilla – have continued to converge and co public history review | dellios 24 ordinate in official public history sites. bruce pennay – public historian, heritage consultant, and key member of the bonegilla heritage park advisory committee – has previously explored the construction of block 19 as a public memory place, a process in which he was involved.12 pennay traces the collective significance of bonegilla’s official heritage listings, which not only contributed to the increasing ‘memory bank’ surrounding the site, but also gave the bonegilla narrative official sanction. he stops short of extrapolating from these analyses of the heritage listing of bonegilla, neglecting to comment on their implications for the collective reception and construction of bonegilla memories. he observed: ‘that kind of analysis awaits someone more confident than i am of detecting fine trends in narratives of the nation over the brief twenty year time span of these heritage listings’.13 this statement rightly presumes that narratives of the nation have been central to public histories of bonegilla, and, more importantly, that these narratives have evolved since 1988, especially in regards to the public reception of the contentious policy and ideology of multiculturalism. he states that the national heritage listing of bonegilla in 2007 was proof that bonegilla had become part of other ‘government approved stories of the making of the nation.’14 a more concerted analysis of these narratives requires an understanding of the processes and actors involved in this ‘making’. jayne persian has argued, in opposition to pennay, that bonegilla’s success as a place of national commemoration in particular is debateable. persian is primarily concerned with the involvement of displaced persons in these heritage process. she interprets their lack of active involvement in these official processes as apathy towards bonegilla as a memory site and therefore a rejection of the multicultural narrative. consequently, she argues that the site has been ‘appropriated’ by the nation in the service of multiculturalism – an attempt to ‘infuse australia’s national story with migration as a trope of nationalism’.15 persian has some grounds on which to base her case, having interviewed a handful of former displaced persons, whom she insisted had little interest in the site beyond family memories. but her summarily applied assumptions also undermine those ex-resident groups and individuals implicated in the site’s commemoration. this includes those actively involved in former resident groups and local councils as well as those who attend the anniversaries, donate material or view the bonegilla collection and exhibition at the albury library-museum, travel to the former site with family and friends or those who seek out any mention of the camp at more accessible places like melbourne’s immigration museum.16 some, as ashton also highlights, adhere to a multicultural narrative or migrant success story as a means to feel included in the public history review | dellios 25 national narrative, however limited it may be. the testimonies and writings contained in the bonegilla collection indicate that they feel bonegilla’s public recognition imbues their personal pasts with significance so that their family histories become history with a capital h.17 of course, responses to public history are multiple. encapsulating or typifying the ‘collective’ response to bonegilla’s public history is not only impossible but methodologically insidious. a study that moves beyond representational analysis would consider the processes and peoples that surround public history efforts, how groups and individuals get invested in the site and what responses and uses (however multiple) they make of it. developing schemas for different types of memory studies aim to understand the function and circulation of public histories and their relation to collective and individual memories. with this in mind, i hope not to fall pray to the desire to announce another authoritative account of what bonegilla should mean to us as a migrant nation. in our exchanges, pennay was wary of my using the term ‘collective memory’.18 naturally, he was curious to know whether it was a greek bonegilla, a dutch bonegilla or albury-wodonga’s bonegilla. since 1987, it has become all three, and more, as these actors have involved themselves in the commemoration of the site and sometimes adhered to dominant narratives. overwhelmingly, since the late 1980s, bonegilla has become more than just a place of migrant memory. ownership has been consciously extended through a long and interactive process of contestation and co-ordination, to incorporate local (albury-wodonga) and national communities (heritage). in the process, bonegilla’s public meaning has been simplified on some levels, but also taken beyond its previous narrative as a ‘place of no hope’. bonegilla is ‘received’ by a wider audience/s outside the individual, familial and ethnic memory networks that have previously typified what sluga calls ‘vernacular’ forms.19 sluga remains apprehensive of commemorating bonegilla, believing the official voice is trampling the migrant or vernacular voice in most forms of public history.20 there is a sense that official frameworks, which trumpet the progressive timeline of australian history and bonegilla’s role in the formation of a multicultural present, have the potential to ‘colonise’ or even silence personal or migrant memory with stock narratives about the state and nation.21 but i retreat from this line of inquiry and from the clear separation of official and vernacular memories. on one level, the personal is always somehow framed by a wider collective conception of the self, whether ethnic, familial, national public history review | dellios 26 or local. this approach rest at the centre of most work on collective memory, especially work that places itself at the interdisciplinary nexus of sociology and history, which stems from the earliest theorising done by maruice halbwachs.22 similarly, oral historians have also recognised that we all seek to link our histories to larger historical processes. these narratives allow us to anchor ourselves in time and space. i am not arguing that one version of bonegilla’s collective memory is propagated by, and received at, all public history sites and acts. however, the state narrative’s ‘revisionist conservative’ version of multiculturalism – as the inevitable and harmonious outcome of australia’s post-war immigration scheme – has had an undeniably pervasive effect on how bonegilla is expressed and received by all levels of memory – ethnic, familial, national, local.23 irwin-zarecka prefers to think of this process as ‘framing’ rather than ‘dominating’ the memories of others.24 certainly, the memories of some groups often speak louder than others. but tracing these processes involves understanding their articulation in a given framework. before progressing, it is necessary to place bonegilla’s commemoration in a wider context of public remembering in australia. we have witnessed a boom in heritage advocacy and conservation in the last thirty years, particularly since the 1988 bicentenary. the idea of a ‘multicultural past’ or a ‘multicultural heritage’ is a relatively novel introduction to australian public discourse. since the 1980s, and with bipartisan support for the government-sanctioned policy of multiculturalism, ethnic organisations have become more prominent and vocal, albeit in a framework dictated by the official definition of multicultural nationhood, ambiguously defined as ‘unity in diversity’. nonetheless, ethnic organisations have played their part in celebrating and commemorating their pasts in australia, some more successfully than others. the victorian multicultural commission, the multicultural heritage body under the nsw heritage branch and the nsw migration heritage centre at the powerhouse museum (a separate initiative) have also been active in funding oral history projects and exhibitions on the history of separate ethnic groups. the latter group, as well as staff at history sa are working to create online indexes and information on all former migrant hostels in their respective states. there have been reunions at bonegilla, bathurst, greta and west sale migrant camps (some of them in association with national heritage week).25 the australian national maritime museum, melbourne’s immigration museum, adelaide’s migration and settlement museum and bonegilla itself have erected ‘welcome’ or ‘tribute’ walls or gardens which give migrants the opportunity to pay for a plaque, tile or brick with their public history review | dellios 27 name engraved, commemorating their own journeys and settlement. ‘multicultural’ festivals, celebrating the material contributions of respective ethnic groups – more often, long-settled, european post-war migrants which claim to celebrate our ‘multicultural heritage’ – have also become an annual feature of public life, especially in the self-proclaimed ‘cosmopolitan’ city of melbourne. despite rising opposition to asian immigration, the 1980s can be seen as the peak of celebratory multiculturalism in australia.26 multiculturalism was a political policy and ideology created in the mid1970s. it was explicitly launched by the whitlam government as an alternative to the policy of integration, the weaker heir to assimilation. since then, multiculturalism has received bipartisan support as an ideology and policy that addresses and contains our inevitable cultural plurality. arguably, the 1980s was also a period that trivialised ‘ethnic culture’. an outwardly superficial multiculturalism gained sanction in the popular press. the material contributions of respective ethnic groups were applauded. their distinctive and static ‘ethnic’ cultures, which often translated to an unchanging ‘food and folklore’, were celebrated as something to be guarded and maintained.27 it was in this context that bonegilla re-emerged. it was maintained by the army from 1971 to the late 1980s. the intention was to use only a quarter of the site, allow the remaining huts to fall beyond repair and eventually demolish them and sell the land.28 as the bicentenary approached, and as discussions of national identity and multiculturalism dominated the public sphere, some ex-residents of bonegilla began to express interest in preserving the site for ‘posterity’.29 the bonegilla immigration museum committee, made up of mainly former residents, was established in 1984 in response to the army’s threats of demolition. the committee aimed to garner support for the establishment of an onsite immigration museum commemorating the former migrant camp.30 this idea was supported by the local paper, the border morning mail and melbourne’s sun herald and nominally by the minister for immigration, chris hurford – without the official backing of his government.31 like the oral historians and part-time exhibition curators of the time, some sections of the press began to tell the stories of individual migrants.32 not surprisingly, bonegilla appeared in many of their stories. it became popular to report that over 320 000 australians had passed through the reception and training centre over its twenty-four year history.33 some of those behind the bonegilla museum committee proposed that bonegilla was the beginnings of australia’s multicultural present, a popular trope that recurs to this day.34 however, in the 1980s this particular contention public history review | dellios 28 had to work against the idea, unchallenged since bonegilla’s closure in 1971, that the migrant camp was an embarrassing and tragic reminder of australia’s discarded migration policies which involved ethnic discrimination, containment, control and assimilation.35 in 1986, the bonegilla museum committee was denied permission to include a bonegilla event on the bicentennial program and the australian bicentennial authority (aba) declined to offer financial support to the committee and its plans for a national immigration museum.36 despite tensions surrounding it, multiculturalism and its superficial projections of ethnic food and folklore were key themes in the 1988 bicentennial celebrations. multiculturalism remained, as stephen castles highlights, at ‘the level of trivial pursuit’.37 clearly, bonegilla evoked more than food and folklore. the aba favoured a more accessible and less contentious space in one of the major urban centres to tell the history of immigration.38 this idea which was acceptable to the army, which still owned the bonegilla site and made its own claims over its history as an army camp. in the late 1980s, it was not yet clear which aspects of the bonegilla narrative would dominate its public representation nor how it would come to publically symbolise a collective and homogenous migrant journey, one that could be included in a national narrative. for the wider public, bonegilla still held negative connotations. while many of the more insidious elements of bonegilla’s history remain hidden – child malnutrition in 1949, suicides and enforced family separation – its re-emergence in public history was not in line with the celebratory tone of the bicentenary or the superficial public persona of multiculturalism itself.39 it was neither officially nor popularly integrated into a collective memory of the ‘migrant experience’ as it exists today. although ex-residents failed to garner enough support for a national immigration museum, a massive reunion and festival was held in 1987. more than 2000 ‘ex-bonegillians’ and their families from all over the nation attended this fortieth anniversary and back to bonegilla festival in december 1987.40 they looked on the event as a personal opportunity to reunite and reminisce with old friends.41 this, at least, is what the mainstream press said of the event.42 as sluga suggest in her 1988 monograph, despite the official ‘constraints of the program’ – the presence of mick young, minister for immigration, and his speeches linking bonegilla to the successful realisation of multiculturalism – the ‘vernacular’ interests of ex-residents ‘took over the day and the site for themselves’.43 while the nation did not fully embrace the bonegilla narrative, some 2000 individuals embraced the opportunity to remember their individual bonegilla experiences, whether tragic or joyous. this is public history review | dellios 29 not to suggest that the articulation of their memories were not in some way/s framed by the narrative of the migrant success story—and other discursive frameworks of social identity—and the tempting progress and collective meaning attributed to their lives by a retrospective narrative of multicultural nationhood. despite this burst of attention in the late 1980s, bonegilla remained a small collection of unused and slowly dilapidating huts with no conservation plan pending. in order to be preserved, as per the wishes of the museum committee, the site needed official – that is, the state – backing and funds. this required significant public emotional investment—something bonegilla had not yet garnered. while the army abandoned its plans to demolish the remaining twenty-eight huts after the site was placed on the register of the national estate in 1990, the bonegilla museum committee disbanded in 1991. the committee blamed this on the lack of ‘non-migrant’ interest and support.44 all the materials they had collected as part of the 1987 festival were moved to adelaide’s new migration and settlement museum.45 lack of continuous public and national investment – which necessarily relies on a coherent and appealing narrative – prevented the site’s infrastructure from developing and progressing as an official ‘memory place’. nonetheless, the site continued to hold some significance for individual migrant groups and families. bonegilla’s continued public remembrance depended on these ‘participatory’ and performative forms of commemoration. from 1991, a segment of melbourne’s greek community organised annual ‘sentimental visits’ to bonegilla as part of the greek antipodes festival.46 calls to establish a permanent monument of some sort at bonegilla were intermittent. eventually, albury regional museum acquired the bonegilla collection from adelaide and in 1996 an extensive conservation management plan commissioned by the department of defense was prepared by freeman leeson architects and ruth daniel.47 as a result of this plan, the army relinquished its hold over the site and agreed to transfer block 19 to the victorian government. they in turn transferred responsibility to albury wodonga parklands. the mid to late 1990s was a contentious time in australian public and political life. the rise of new conservatism translated to more concerted attacks on the structural outcomes of multiculturalism and its implications for an australian national identity. a renewed dialogue of ‘citizenship’ entered the discussion about multiculturalism and the term ‘integration’ re-appeared. multiculturalism was often qualified by an end goal of integration—as it still is. the voices of a few notable public history review | dellios 30 conservative academics and politicians dominated the nation’s mainstream media. at times, it seemed that the ‘problem’ of allocating separate resources to ethnic organisations turned multiculturalism into a dirty word for the downtrodden ‘mainstream’.48 this was the context in which pauline hanson garnered support. not long after hanson’s maiden speech to parliament, the friends of bonegilla lobby was formed with the support of the inner-melbourne municipality of moreland.49it was involved in the successful 1997 fiftieth anniversary celebrations at bonegilla.50 despite the contentious political landscape, the ten-day anniversary was a resounding success, with up to 30 000 pilgrims in attendance. the 1997 anniversary prompted a discussion in the national media of the ‘successes’ of multiculturalism. in the face of attacks on multiculturalism and immigration, bonegilla signposted a harmonious present and maintained the myth of migrant social mobility. ex-residents and their children featured homogenously as successful and integrated australian citizens. for many ex-residents themselves, the anniversary was a means to rally against hansonite racism.51 overall, a less trivial and static idea of ‘ethnic culture’ was paraded, one which showcased the growth and dynamism of individual ethnic communities. for their part, the official organisers – albury and wodonga councils and the albury regional museum – had made explicit their aims for the festival: to use bonegilla to celebrate the idealisation of a multicultural present. the anniversary was thus a congratulatory event for both exresidents and a newly constituted national audience. in many ways, the 1997 event was a less personal and more sombre reunion of old friends than the first anniversary. in the print media of the 1990s, bonegilla had evolved to take on a more concentrated image as a site of national historical significance. it came to adhere to the popular trope of the ‘migrant success story’. social mobility in certain sections of the migrant population did become more evident in the 1990s. in this context, bonegilla was on its way to being accepted as a site worth preserving for national posterity – an apparently representative example of the postwar migration experience and a marker for our present demographic reality; the ‘beginnings of multiculturalism’.52 while such a narrative was also promoted by the bonegilla museum committee in the 1980s, it only became affective in the new context of the 1990s in which multiculturalism was struggling to move away from the ‘level of trivial pursuit’ into a more complex and contentious discussion with national identity and the imagined mainstream. in the 1990s, certain migrant groups continued to dominate the memory place on site at block 19. the dutch established their own public history review | dellios 31 exhibition in one of the huts. a group of dutch ex-residents also published a commemorative book on the dutch experience to coincide with the 1997 anniversary.53 the greeks also continued to hold their separate commemorative events. italians from the moreland city council voiced their personal memories, both fond and melancholy, of bonegilla. the army was sidelined in bonegilla’s commemoration and heritage assessments. it occasionally made public claims to its importance in bonegilla’s history. originally, they ‘baulked’ at the prospect of bonegilla being declared a heritage site.54 the fiercest competition over the projection of bonegilla’s public meaning took place in this earliest period. the army only ‘appeared to change its mind’ after the site was placed on the register of the national estate in 1990, with the heritage assessment containing obligatory reference to bonegilla’s role as an army camp as well as a migrant centre.55 however, this narrative remains nominal in bonegilla’s public history. to the nation, it is first and foremost a migrant camp.56 in light of these minor successes in bonegilla’s commemoration, a new festival was planned for 1999. the 1999 festival attempted to capitalise on the former festival’s success. while the 1997 festival had won the city of wodonga's australia day award for most outstanding community event, the 1999 festival fell short of its aspirations. fewer visitors, including ethnic and ex-resident community groups, and less publicity made for a much smaller event. it was marketed as a local one for albury and wodonga. it was a celebration of the region’s cultural diversity, a narrative which pennay is still at pains to promote, but which was clearly pre-emptive in 1999.57 the festival did not draw adequately on the support of respective ethnic groups previously involved in bonegilla’s commemoration, especially the greeks, the dutch and the friends of bonegilla lobby. the 1999 event was supported by the city of wodonga and the city of albury, managed by investment albury wodonga and held in association with annual albury wodonga wine and food festival. while a disappointment, this 1999 festival was an indication of the administrative direction the site was to take in the years to come, relying on the interpretive and financial support of albury and wodonga. throughout this time, ex-resident volunteers, under parklands albury-wodonga, ran the site. this included the beginning place, a small open-air monument to bonegilla migrants built on-site in 2005. the site received grants from the victorian multicultural commission and, after bonegilla’s state heritage listing in 2002, from the victorian heritage council. there was occasional interest shown by councils and public history review | dellios 32 state bodies. but the day-to-day running of the site relied on enthusiastic volunteers. the remaining huts continued to fall into disrepair. excepting the successful anniversary events, the site only received occasional visits from ex-residents. there was virtually nothing onsite except the beginning place. researcher jayne persian captures the visitor’s experience before the september relaunch: when i visited the site in july 2006, there were few signs and the landscape was one of isolation and emptiness – no staff, a huge unopened café (and hence no public toilets), a small outdoor commemorative platform incorporating little explanation, particularly of the unintelligible soundscape wall, small and rusty silhouettes, locked and graffitied buildings, and holiday cabins for army personnel.58 in 2007, after a successful campaign by bruce pennay, bonegilla was placed on the national heritage list. according to the plaque erected outside the main entrance to commemorate its national heritage listing, bonegilla had become, in the span of nineteen years, a ‘symbol of postwar migration which transformed australia’s economy, society and culture’. this is a far cry from its previous status as a discarded and shameful place representing out-dated immigration policies. pennay, referring to the heritage listing, has argued that the local communities of albury and wodonga did not ‘own bonegilla, until the nation owned it’. albury and wodonga became interested in the site as national heritage, as a place of significance capable of capturing the nation’s imagination like eureka or glenrowan, one which they could now claim. with local council and community support, the site was able to be propped up as a viable and ongoing tourist attraction. it is telling, therefore, that despite its heritage listing, the bonegilla migrant experience advisory committee was forced to cancel the 2007 anniversary festival due to lack of funding and resources. it had been scheduled for the weekend after the site was placed on the national heritage list. as pennay has noted, by the 2000s bonegilla’s commemoration had moved away from collective anniversaries, those previously supported by enthusiastic former residents, migrant groups and the ethnic communities council. bonegilla’s commemoration was now typified by the provision of new exhibitions and heritage assessments under the control and administration of the city councils, albury-wodonga parklands and state and national heritage bodies. this was at best an uneasy partnership.59 public history review | dellios 33 in place of the cancelled collective anniversary, the dutch and greek communities organised their own colourful events. these ethnic-led occasions are more than simply a form of ‘vernacular’ as opposed to ‘official’ commemoration. nor do they trump the argument that bonegilla is now encased by processes of retrospective commemoration. officially, these ‘participatory’ events rely on the framework provided by heritage and multicultural discourses to articulate and frame their memories. they celebrate a progression, the migrant success story, and point to the role of respective (often contained and static) ethnic groups in forming the multicultural nation. this may be therapeutic and perhaps constructive for many individuals who identify themselves as members of respective ethnic groups. we cannot deny the collusion and co-ordination of memories that is involved in this process of publically remembering bonegilla. there is a constant dialogue between personal and collective memories which reflect the discursive constitution of all memory practices. public history can involve the coordination, rather than just a contestation, of collective memories.60 journalist lee mylne’s promotional piece on the heritage park, published months before the anniversary’s cancellation, provides a glimpse of an image much akin to persian’s. 61 after mylne’s homogeneous classification of the ‘migrant experience’ – a popular trope in australian journalism – she makes mention of bonegilla’s ‘cafe built as part of the $2 million development [which] sits forlorn, the lack of regular visitors making it unviable for now. they trickle in, with the odd organised tour bringing larger numbers’.62 this ‘forlorn’ image is not allowed to undermine her role as promoter and guest of tourism nsw. indeed, the state heritage involvement in bonegilla’s commemoration is evident. there are token references to funding from victorian government and heritage victoria. the ongoing heritage site, rather than the occasional anniversary, is the focus of a tourism push. bonegilla is even compared to america’s tourist site and monument to immigration, ellis island, a wishful comparison that pennay has also made. while the current site sits forlorn, the promoters hold high aspirations for its heritage and tourism value, for bonegilla holds wider national significance. it is a site for a wider tourist market rather than the migrant pilgrim. administratively, the site of bonegilla has undergone many changes since the failed 2007 anniversary. in 2009, the albury and wodonga councils, parklands albury-wodonga and the bonegilla migrant experience advisory committee (itself consisting of council members and a few local ex-residents) signed a memorandum under the public history review | dellios 34 department of environment, water, heritage and the arts. they agreed to share the maintenance and running of the bonegilla heritage park. parklands remains in control of the site’s physical maintenance and the councils, along with the advisory committee, have taken over the ‘interpretative role’. they have attempted to provide a more concerted and refined narrative, building and including themselves into the epic memory of post-war migration. whilst maintaining the focus on the (homogenous) migrant experience, they have also, in response to pennay’s suggestions, appealed to the local community to build ‘local ownership’ of the site.63 the site was relaunched in september last year. the huts have been repainted and the wooden floors repaired, new exhibitions set up, the dutch exhibition transposed and the visitor centre restocked with new merchandise including t-shirts, mugs, and postcards and a new audio tour. bonegilla heritage park has subsequently attracted a wider range of visitors and garnered more publicity from inside and outside alburywodonga.64 visitors before 2010 were mainly ex-resident pilgrims. but the current site co-ordinator, bernadette zanet, has announced an increase in tourists, particularly the ‘heritage goers’ and the older ‘grey nomads’.65 in april-may 2011, the site attracted approximately 950 visitors. in previous years, it would have expected only thirty per month. while bonegilla could always expect to receive annual busloads of greek ex-residents from melbourne, it now receives regular bus loads of tourist, local community groups and victorian school children.66 individuals come in search of the most obscure connection to bonegilla. when i visited the site in may 2011, i listened to fellow visitors who recalled camping near the site when it was in operation as a migrant camp. this enabled them to include themselves in what is now a larger historical narrative of national importance, a legitimacy bonegilla has gained via its heritage listing and the official discourses that surround this. these processes have implications for the meaning and significance of bonegilla’s collective memory. can it still be called a memory place for migrants? certainly, the current management admit that city councils and the advisory committee now have to seek and prompt migrant community involvement. this is a significant development in bonegilla’s commemoration, one that runs counter to the history of bonegilla’s conservation in the late 1980s its earlier ‘participatory memorialisation’. sara wills suggests that bonegilla might offer a constructive history, a ‘productive sadness’ that reminds us of the values of providing more extensive settlement services for new settlers.67 in the last decade, and especially since september 11, debates over australian immigration have public history review | dellios 35 been usurped by a concern, and near hysteria, over so-called illegal immigration and the policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing for asylum seekers. wills suggests that while bonegilla may provide a positive model for a new ‘ethics of care’ for refugees, we should avoid ‘pride in the nation’s past’ and thus a recovery from our present shame.68 increasingly, bonegilla is used as an example of the ‘national cuddle’.69 and even as volunteer workers at the heritage park refer to the ‘spartan conditions’ and deep-pit latrines of a past bonegilla, the real drama resides in the epic success story – the social advancement of australia’s diverse ethnic groups who passed through the camp. ironically, in the period immediately after its closure in 1971, the shame that partly explains bonegilla’s silencing was most probably a result of the more extensive and comfortable housing on offer to newly arrived southeast asian refugees, in the form of specially-built flats and community housing. thus a system replaced the obsolete and shoddy use of remote migrant camps such as bonegilla. furthermore, the ‘ethics of care’ provided to newly arrived british assisted migrants in inner-city hostels surpassed that on offer in remote migrant camps like bonegilla. bonegilla is now marketed on the back of its national heritage listing. zanet recounts the difficulties of marketing heritage as ‘not just old buildings, but culture’.70 in effect, by arguing that culture can be marketed as heritage – in the same way that heritage discourses have for some time now – the bonegilla heritage park offers distinct cultures as archaic and preserved in time and space, preserved behind glass cabinets and display panels, and, most importantly, as something now owned by the national narrative. this representation of multiculturalism as static and contained is a familiar feature of migration museums and exhibitions of migration or ‘diversity’.71 a homogenous post-war migrant ‘culture’, is presented as unaffected by the layers of time – much like the site of bonegilla itself – as unaffected by the layers of reinterpretation, reconstruction and adjustment that are inherent in any public history site. the new exhibitions themselves, those installed in september, are inevitably inconsistent. to capture the migrant experience of some 320 000 displaced persons and assisted migrants over a twenty-four year history is a neigh impossible task. not all voices will be aired. as such, the exhibitions aim to re-enact and evoke select aspects this migrant experience. most huts contain information panels, organised at first under chronological and then thematic headings: arriving, employment, accommodation, a new land and catering. not all of the panels correspond with the material contents of the exhibitions within public history review | dellios 36 respective huts. the exhibitions themselves rely on the authority of physical objects to retell isolated stories. while the objects are antiquarian, underlining the distance between past and present, there is no historical context in which to place and understand the object. they are a receptacle for a fragmentary memory of the migrant journey. donated or discarded everyday objects – worn shoes, an old basket-ball, national costumes, an old iron – rest behind glass cabinets. examples abound of how the lack of historical context – and an absence of explanation of the processes and outcomes of the migration scheme – renders the heritage park’s attempts at a homogenous narrative of the ‘migrant experience’ fragmentary. some exhibitions reproduce the sights and sounds of bonegilla. in the mess hall, tourists can hear the sounds of communal dining. further on in this display is an elaborate reproduction of a family table setting from the 1950s. such a set-up, with the exception of the staff huts and long-term residents, was not common within the communal dining halls in which most new arrivals ate their breakfast, lunch and dinner. it becomes difficult for the interested tourist to make sense of the huts’ contents. at moments, the site is austere and antiquarian, in others interactive yet trivial. perhaps most importantly, the history of the government’s sometimes neglectful, occasionally heavy-handed, but overall extensive post-war immigration scheme is lacking. perhaps these fragmentary outcomes are inevitable in an exhibition that attempts to appeal to a wide audience – ex-residents and their children, interested locals, inter-state tourist and schoolchildren, each with their own expectations and ascribing and receiving their own collective memories of bonegilla. public history sites can offer a space in which to communicate the multiple viewpoints involved in a contentious historical experience or episode. while the heritage park interacts with a number of mediums – ext panels, videos, audio, physical remnants, life-sized visuals – perhaps the lack of oral testimony relating to bonegilla has thwarted attempts to communicate a multiple and complex history. hamilton and shopes have written about the powerful use and function of oral history in the public arena, including its role in shaping collective memories.72 staff at the albury library-museum, much like site co-ordinator zanet, bemoan the lack of oral testimony from former bonegilla residents, especially in relation to the large and growing collection of physical remnants that exist in the bonegilla collection. they feel a significant part of the bonegilla story is being lost.73 steps are being made in this direction, especially by the online belongings project conducted by the nsw migrant heritage centre, and the written memory pieces sent into albury library-museum’s bonegilla collection by former residents. public history review | dellios 37 overall, the heritage park neglects to sufficiently underline the different experiences of bonegilla and the reasons behind these differences. the site is a de-contextualised and depoliticised representation of a select migrant journey. on one level, perhaps this deficiency is a reflection of the pained and contested layers of management bonegilla has experienced since the late 1980s. the day-today management of the site has shifted from ex-resident volunteers, migrant volunteers from outside the bonegilla community, to state and local heritage bodies with an eye to effective marketing without much significant context. this is not to say that individuals and ethnic groups have not adopted their own use and interpretation of the site. the physical surrounds of the hume weir and the sounds of regional victoria are familiar. and these sights and sounds can still evoke poignant memories for some migrant pilgrims. but the focus here is on publicly articulated versions of a collective past. often, greek and dutch communities dominate the public history of bonegilla. when i visited, the decade-old dutch exhibition, ‘where waters meet’, was contained in the room of one hut, while those nearby remained empty, still smelling of paint, and awaiting the installation of the newest exhibition by the former greek residents association.74 this exhibition, from petronis and ekaterina to peter and catherine: greek journeys through bonegilla, was launched in december 2011 by the victorian minister for multicultural affairs and citizenship, nicholas kotsiras, whose department had provided a $13 000 grant to fund the project. continuing official policy rhetoric, he promoted the exhibition as another commentary on the ‘impact of postwar migrants in shaping a successful multicultural society’. but his position rests at the crossroads between vernacular and official, for he has his ‘own roots to bonegilla’.75 the former greek residents association has been particularly vocal in bonegilla’s recent commemorative history. representations of the greek experience of bonegilla, while containing its own tragic moments, is typically dominated by the often exciting adventures of single men, there being the largest group among the greek bonegilla migrants.76 the leaders of the residents association object to any suggestion that bonegilla was an awful place, a spartan army camp in which the worst injustices of the immigration scheme were played out. their fond views of bonegilla have directed many popular representations, including those in pennay’s newly released booklet on the greek experience at bonegilla, funded by a heritage week grant from the commonwealth government. their narratives often work in collaboration with official public history review | dellios 38 and popular ones: bonegilla as the beginnings of multicultural australia; or an epic landscape in which the early stages of the migrant success story are enacted.77 site co-ordinator zanet has admitted the experiences of these 1950s migrants have dominated the representation of bonegilla on display at the heritage park these migrants arrived as separate national groups and were accommodated as such. earlier displaced persons arrived as a mixed mass exodus, perceived by a naïve australian public as a homogenous whole –‘the balts’. the earliest demographic studies have indicated that these northern europeans are more geographically dispersed, better ‘integrated’ – to adopt earlier sociological definitions – and do not necessarily identify as members of a strong ethnic community.78 pennay has also acknowledged that public memories displayed on site at the heritage park are determined by funding imperatives. to a larger extent, while the current heritage park is run by local government bodies, it also relies on enthusiastic ethnic communities to initiate their own exhibitions and celebrations. the greek and dutch communities have been most forthcoming in their support and encouragement for the commemoration of bonegilla. accordingly, they are successful in obtaining funding from state and commonwealth heritage agencies and the victorian multicultural commission. at the heritage park, the memories of earlier displaced persons are given token reference in the stories of the inadequacies of early camp conditions, the unlined huts, the lack of sanitary cleaning facilities and the standard of the food. these ‘facts’ contribute to the drama of the migrant success story. indeed, these ‘quick facts’ feature on the help sheets given to new volunteers. while frequently cited, in the exhibitions the wider structural implications of these realities and their long-term impacts on the memories of early displaced persons are over-shadowed or sidelined by the experiences of migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. these particular migrants were separated in dormitories by nationality, rather than gender. they also gained superior facilities and confronted a less militarised system than that faced by early displaced persons. accordingly, the recollections of later assisted migrants differ somewhat from those of earlier displaced persons. the new exhibitions launched in september and the interpretation offered by the heritage park of bonegilla’s past has an emphasis on assisted migrants whose experiences are presented in a political and historical vacuum. bonegilla’s newest government grant, and the promotion that surrounds it, further supports the processes of retrospective commemoration which seeks to construct bonegilla as part of a national public history review | dellios 39 memory. wodonga council recently received over $60 000 to develop a ‘business strategy’ that will ‘further extend the visitor experience as a viable tourist attraction and educational experience’.79 simone hogg, the council’s manager of cultural services has stated: ‘the australian government grant will allow us to develop a clear business strategy that will examine potential revenues, improvements to the site entrance and links to other tourist attractions within the region to give the site longterm security. the business strategy will also explore the longevity of the site beyond the pilgrims (ex-residents and their families) and how to best communicate the bonegilla migrant stories’.80 just how bonegilla, as a site representing a unique period in australia immigration history, will be linked to ‘other tourist attractions within the region’, is unclear. what is clear is that bonegilla’s meaning and significance is being consciously extended beyond the ex-residents involved in its earliest participatory memorialisation. inevitably, those who wish to remember their bonegilla experiences, those people most comfortable with placing their personal histories alongside or within a nationalist framework, or even one that simply binds them with other ex-residents, are those most involved in its commemoration. since the late 1990s, these people and groups have collaborated with state and local bodies with their own agendas and claims over the site and its significance. bonegilla, rather than a site of contested memory, features as a homogenous representation of the migrant experience and the long-term successes of the post-war immigration scheme. ex-residents are implicated in this success. even migrant representatives and more localised bodies collaborate in these nationalist narratives that homogenise the migrant experience. sluga also points out that some migrants prefer to concentrate on this potently present narrative of harmonious multiculturalism as a means to heal and give new meaning to past injustices. the narratives on display at the revamped heritage park are public versions of a collective and state-sanctioned past. they sometimes rely on easy-to-assimilate tropes and resonant themes. again, i refer to the migrant success story. we should be aware that not all stories can be easily communicated to local and national publics who hold certain expectations of national heritage sites. experiences too complicated to communicate – desperation and isolation, depression and suicide, the strictures of the contract system and the subsequent family separation, the ongoing and provisional process of constructing belonging and a new sense of place – are necessarily pushed aside. heritage sites or exhibitions on migration and multiculturalism focus on fixed and public history review | dellios 40 instrumental representations of experiences and people, ‘stock narratives’ to borrow a term from mcshane.81 nonetheless, i have tried to demonstrate that an interactive dialogue was and is inevitably at play in the construction of bonegilla’s public history, even as it has been part of a process of ‘retrospective commemoration’, framed by the limits of heritage and national discourses. as ashton and hamilton have observed: although the state endorses certain narratives within which communities must operate, ‘memorial landscapes will reflect, in truly democratic societies, the values, experiences and dominant concerns of its citizens’.82 finally, i wish to assert that we cannot hope to understand bonegilla’s collective memory without tracing the history of the role of certain memory groups and actors and their negotiation within the discursive frameworks of australian multiculturalism and national heritage that have developed since the 1980s. e n d n o t e s 1 david brown, contemporary nationalism: civic, ethnocultural and multicultural politics, routledge, london, 2000, p2. 2 paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘places of the heart: memorials, public history and the state in australia since 1960’, public history review, vol 15, 2008, p4. 3 see, for example, anna haebich, spinning the dream: assimilation in australia 1950-1970, fremantle press, north freemantle, 2008. 4 catherine panich, santuary?: remembering postwar immigration, allen and unwin, sydney, 1988, p187. 5 glenda sluga, bonegilla: ‘a place of no hope’, the history department, the university of melbourne, melbourne, 1988 px. david cassidy and ∏o, ‘a history of bonegilla’, abc doubletake, 10 august 1982. 6 howard jones, ‘historic camp huts up for sale army disposal policy shocks museum group’, border morning mail, 22 november 1986. 7 sara wills, ‘between the hostel and the detention centre: possible trajectories of migrant pain and shame in australia’, in william logan and keir reeves (eds), places of pain and shame: dealing with 'difficult heritage', routledge, london, 2009, p269. 8 see also, paul ashton, ‘the birthplace of australian multiculturalism? retrospective commemoration, participatory memorialisation and official heritage’, in international journal of heritage studies, vol 15, no 5, 2009, pp381-98. 9 op cit, p25. 10 wulf kansteiner, ‘finding meaning in memory: a methodological critique of collective memory studies’, history and theory, vol 41, no 2, 2002, p190. 11 see glenda sluga, ‘displaced: loss of identity in immigrants to australia and expressions of this in australian literature’, meanjin, vol 48, no 1, 1989, pp153-60; glenda sluga, ‘bonegilla and migrant dreaming’, in kate darian-smith and paula hamilton (eds), memory and history in twentieth-century australia, oxford university press, melbourne, 1994, pp195-209; bruce penny, ‘remembering bonegilla: the construction of a public memory place at block 19’, public history review, vol 16, 2009, pp43-63; bruce pennay, ‘“but no one can say he was hungry”: memories and representations of bonegilla reception and training centre’, history australia, vol 9, no 1, 2012, pp43-63; jayne persian, ‘bonegilla: a failed narrative’, history australia, vol 9, no1, 2012, pp64-83. 12 pennay, ‘remembering bonegilla’, pp43-63. 13 ibid, p48. 14 ibid, p47. 15 persian, ‘bonegilla: a failed narrative’, p67. 16 the author volunteers at melbourne’s immigration museum. 17 albury regional museum, ‘bonegilla stories and memories: notebook’, vol 1 and vol 2, from the bonegilla collection’, 1997-2001. 18 personal correspondence, 23 may 2011. public history review | dellios 41 19 sluga, bonegilla, ppxi-xii. 20 sluga, ‘bonegilla and migrant dreaming’. 21 paula hamilton, ‘the knife edge: debates about memory and history’, in paula hamilton and kate darian-smith (eds), memory and history in twentieth century australia, oxford university press, melbourne, 1994, p25. 22 see also, astrid erll, ‘cultural memory studies: an introduction’, in ansgar nunning and astrid erll (eds), a companion to cultural memory studies, de gruter, berlin, 2010, pp1-18. 23 ashton, ‘the birthplace of australian multiculturalism?’, p382. 24iwona irwin-zarecka, frames of remembrance: the dynamics of collective memory, transaction publishers, new jersey, 1994, p4. 25 for greta, see christopher keating, greta: a history of the army camp at greta, new south wales, 1939-1960, uri windt, sydney, 1997. 26 desmond cahill and john ewen, australian youth towards the year 2001: a multicultural perspective, school of community services and policy studies, phillip institute of technology, melbourne, 1988, p10; we might also, in this instance, refer to world expo 88’. 27 stephen castles et al, ‘the bicentenary and the failure of australian nationalism’, in race and class, vol 29, no 3, 1988, pp53-68. 28 bruce pennay, the army at bonegilla 1940-71, parklands albury-wodonga, wodonga, 2007, p19 and howard jones, ‘historic camp huts up for sale army disposal policy shocks museum group’, border morning mail, 22 november 1986. 29tony wright, 'border migrants push for national museum at army site', border morning mail, 12 july 1985. 30 louis maroya, ‘bonegilla immigration museum: a meeting of cultures: a necessity in a multicultural australia. workshop paper’, in fecca congress report: multiculturalism: a commitment for australia, federation of ethnic communities' councils of australia, canberra, 1988/9, pp227-37. 31 ‘hurford visits migrant camp’, border morning mail, 22 november 1986. 32 r. ashbourne, ‘migrant relive the bad old days’, sunday mail sa, 10 february 1980, p26. 33 ‘immigration museum kicks off’, border morning mail, 17 july 1985 and howard jones, ‘museum is closer’, border morning mail, 22 november 1985. 34 gretchen miller, ‘gateway to new life for the dispossessed’, sydney morning herald, 6 february 1997; see also albury city’s bonegilla story website, http://www.bonegilla.com.au/collection/ and bonegilla migrant experience’s website, http://www.bonegilla.org.au/. 35r. ashbourne, 'migrant relive ‘the bad old days', sunday mail sa, 10 february 1980 and sluga, bonegilla, px. 36 howard jones, ‘historic camp huts up for sale: army disposal policy shocks museum gorup’, border morning mail, 22 november 1986. 37castles et al, 'the bicentenary and the failure of australian nationalism', p55. 38this, of course, eventually became adelaide’s migration and settlement museum. 39 for a contemporary discussion of the bicentennial and the aba see peter spearritt, ‘celebration of a nation: the triumph of spectacle’, in australian historical studies, vol 23, issue 91, 1988, pp3-20. 40ann tundern-smith, bonegilla's beginnings, triple d books, wagga wagga, 2007, p2. the event was initially suggested by the museum committee in 1985. 41 sluga, bonegilla, pp131-39. 42 terry mcgovern, ‘return to the unforgettable’, sun herald, 11 october 1987 and pamela bone, 'the chosen people', the age, 28 november 1987. 43sluga, bonegilla, p207. 44 ruth daniel and freeman leeson architects, block 19 bonegilla conservation management plan, vol 1: conservation analysis, prepared for department of defence, october 1996, p36. 45 bruce pennay, ‘significance assessment: the bonegilla collection at albury library museum’, charles sturt university, albury, 2008, p8. 46 vikki kyriakopoulos, ‘migration memorial’, bulletin, 30 september 1997, pp30; 32. 47 ruth daniel and freeman leeson architects, conservation management plan. 48jane braslin, 'insight: bonegilla', insight, sbs, 1997 and leigh dale, ‘mainstreaming australia’, journal of australian studies, vol 21, no 53, 1997, pp9-19. 49 kyriakopoulos, ‘migration memorial’. 50 howard jones, ‘minister cold on plea to preserve migrant camp’, border mail, 11 may 1996. 51 see, for example, jane braslin (journalist), ‘insight: bonegilla’, insight, sbs, 1997. 52 geraldine o’brien, ‘looked down on then, migrants build a nation’, sydney morning herald, 3 july 1997 and l. gans, ‘a suitcase full of memories’, courier mail, 18 april 1997 and gretchen miller, ‘gateway to new life for the dispossessed’, sydney morning herald, 6 february 1997. 53 dirk and marijke eysbertse, where waters meet: bonegilla: the dutch migrant experience, the erasmus foundation, melbourne, 1997. public history review | dellios 42 54 penny, ‘the army at bonegilla’, p19. 55 as pennay himself has demonstrated in ‘remembering bonegilla’. 56 many residents of albury and wodonga still remember bonegilla first as an army camp. 57 city council wodogna and city council albury, ‘1999 bonegilla festival guide’, albury wodonga, 1-4 october 1999. 58 jayne persian, ‘displaced persons (1947-192) representations, memory and commemoration’, phd thesis, department of history, the university of sydney, 2011. 59penny, personal correspondence. 60 mary hutchison, ‘dimensions for a folding exhibition: exhibiting diversity in theory and practice in the migration memories exhibitions’, in humanities research, vol 15, no 2, 2009, pp7173. 61lee mylne, 'return to bonegilla', the australian, august 25 2007. 62 ibid. 63 bruce pennay, ‘framing block 19 bonegilla for tourist and local visitors’, historic environment, vol 21, no 3, 2008, pp27-33. 64 brad worrall, ‘block 19 seen as core of tourism push’, the border mail, 5 january 2010; brad worral, ‘time to make block 19 a tourist magnet’, the border mail, 27 august 2011; sue wallace, ‘a tribute to new arrivals’, the age, traveller, saturday, 9 july 2011; ‘bonegilla a great story’, the border mail, 27 august 2011. 65 bernadette zanet, personal correspondence, 24 may 2011. 66 as according to the new victorian high school curriculum, which includes bonegilla. 67 wills, ‘between the hostel and the detention centre’, pp272-277. 68 ibid, p266. 69 ibid. 70 bernadette zanet, personal correspondence, 24 may 2011. 71 for an extended discussion see mary hutchison, ‘dimensions for a folding exhibition’, pp71-73 and ian mcshane, ‘challenging or conventional? migration history in australian museums’, in negotiating histories : national museums conference proceedings, in darryl mcintyre and kirsten wehner (eds), national museum of australia, canberra, 2001, pp122-33. 72 paula hamilton and linda shopes (eds), oral history and public memories, temple university press, philadelphia, 2008. 73 personal correspondence, 23 may 2011. 74 this exhibition was launched in december 2011. 75 ‘new exhibition celebrates greek odyssey’, november 2011, available: http://www.bonegilla.org.au/block19/whatson/bonegillaexh.htm. 76 bruce pennay, greek journeys through bonegilla, parklands albury-wodonga, wodonga, 2011, pp4-5. 77 ‘new exhibition celebrates greek odyssey’, november 2011, available: http://www.bonegilla.org.au/block19/whatson/bonegillaexh.htm. 78 see, for example, jerzy zubrzycki, immigrants in australia: a demographic survey based upon the 1954 census, melbourne university press on behalf of the australian national university, melbourne, 1960. 79 the bonegilla migrant experience, ‘bonegilla backing to build on visitor boost’, available: http://www.bonegilla.org.au/block19/whatson/bonegillagrant.htm. 80 ibid. 81 ian mcshane, ‘challenging or conventional? migration history in australian museums’, in mcintyre and wehner (eds), negotiating histories, pp122-133. 82 ashton and hamilton, ‘places of the heart’, p26. galleytrapeznik public history review vol 20 (2013): 42-67 issn: 1833-4989 © utsepress and the authors ‘each in his narrow cell for ever laid’: dunedin’s southern cemetery and its new zealand counterparts alexander trapeznik and austin gee ew zealand cemeteries,1 in international terms, are unusual in the fact that there are any historic burials or monuments at all. it tends to be only the countries of british and irish settlement that burials are left undisturbed in perpetuity.2 new zealand follows the practice codified by the british burial acts of the 1850s that specified that once buried, ‘human remains could never again be disturbed except by special licence’.3 this reversed the previous practice of re-using graves and became general in the period in which most of new zealand’s surviving historic cemeteries were established. the concept of each individual being given a single grave or family plot had been established in the early decades of the nineteenth century, following the example of n public history review | trapeznik & gee 43 the hugely influential père-lachaise in paris. in earlier periods, only the graves of the wealthy had been given permanent markers or monuments, as a reader of gray’s elegy will know. family plots are often seen as an expression of the importance given to hereditary property ownership, and this extended further down the social scale into the middle classes in the nineteenth century than it had in previous generations.4 this article will examine in detail a representative example of this new type of cemetery and compare it with its counterparts elsewhere in new zealand. the southern cemetery of dunedin, founded in 1858 and in active use for a century, is a typical example of a modern, urban cemetery of the mid-nineteenth century, though it is unusual in surviving today in a comparatively unaltered state. the significance of denominational division within cemeteries is briefly examined first then we address whether the ethnic and religious pattern of settlement of new zealand urban centres is discernable in differences among their cemeteries. the topography of cemeteries is also considered, then their siting, plantings, specialised structures, maintenance and their vulnerability to vandalism, ‘improvement’ or destruction. we conclude that the cemetery in both its well-tended, active state and in its latter-day condition conformed to notions of the picturesque then current; the 1960s and 1970s were the exception. other aspects of the cemetery such as the nature and design of the memorials, funerals, undertaking and other funerary businesses are dealt with elsewhere.5 introduction the southern cemetery was typical in being established by a local authority rather than a religious denomination. it is also typical of its period in being divided into sections for differing denominations but intended to cater for all burials in its district.6 though it now appears to be a single entity, it is in reality a cluster of denominational cemeteries alongside a large non-denominational burial ground for those whose beliefs prevented their being buried in consecrated ground. anglicans, catholics and jews each had their cemetery, alongside the largely presbyterian general section. it is not the case, as chris and margaret betteridge assert in their comprehensive study of the southern cemetery, that it ‘is unusual in new zealand’ in being a general burial ground divided into denominational sections.7 some, though by no means all, cemeteries established later were not divided in this way. dunedin’s northern cemetery, for instance, was established as nondenominational, but the later karori, linwood and waikumete public history review | trapeznik & gee 44 cemeteries, in wellington, christchurch and auckland respectively, were segregated along denominational lines. it is sometimes assumed that because prominent early personages are buried in the earlier urban cemeteries that these were intended for the upper levels of society only.8 the lack of visible memorials to the obviously poor perhaps reinforces this impression. as with other early cemeteries, all those who died in the town and its immediate vicinity legally had to be buried in the cemetery. the cemeteries ordinance of 1856 set the limit at three miles from dunedin; in 1882 the distance was increased to five miles.9 this means the burials in the southern cemetery, until the establishment of its northern counterpart in 1872, are necessarily representative of the population as a whole. thereafter, the anglican, catholic and jewish populations would still have had no option, as the northern cemetery was non-denominational. the southern cemetery was laid out when dunedin had been settled for just a decade and as it turned out only a few years before the economic boom generated by the discovery of gold inland in 1861. few mid-nineteenth century new zealand settlements apart from dunedin were wealthy enough to be able to lay out large, deliberately picturesque cemeteries. yet the southern cemetery is typical of its period in being set out on a hillside on the outskirts of the town but within easy reach of it. unlike some urban cemeteries, however, it is not within particularly easy reach of the main hospital. its strikingly unusual feature is the morgue, something more usually associated with a hospital or police station. the southern cemetery’s mixture of formal and picturesque layout with informal plantings is again typical of the period. the design and layout of new zealand cemeteries was usually directly influenced by british examples, and international developments were followed closely.10 according to the leading historian of nineteenth-century new zealand cemeteries, stephen deed, the southern and northern cemeteries ‘are the most obviously british influenced of our cemeteries.’11 the southern cemetery occupies a hillside with views of the harbour and ocean, its layout adapted to the existing topography. despite some steep slopes in places, little change was made to the site apart from creating an access road and paths. elsewhere, changes to the landscape are not uncommon, whether in british churchyards where centuries of interments have raised the ground level significantly, or in new zealand such as at linwood cemetery in christchurch, where part of the site was levelled.12 unlike british cemeteries, no boundary wall was built round the southern cemetery to improve security. one major reason for such walls was absent: the otago university medical school, founded in 1875, did not generate a demand for fresh corpses for public history review | trapeznik & gee 45 dissection that might have led to grave robbery.13 the security measures adopted in britain before 1832 against ‘resurrection men’ were therefore unnecessary. hedges and grave railings were necessary instead to keep off wandering domestic livestock. unlike many cemeteries in new zealand and elsewhere, there were no mortuary chapels or gatehouses at the southern cemetery. there was though, as was usual, a residence for the sexton. in common with many other cemeteries, this has been demolished. the southern cemetery’s gradual decline into a period of relative neglect as it began to fill up and the immediate relations of those buried there themselves died off, is also a familiar story to be found in other comparable places. vandalism in the second half of the twentieth century is another occurrence common to cemeteries of this period. what is perhaps untypical is the relative lack of officially-sponsored destruction in the form of removal of monuments or of conversion to a memorial park, or even a lawn cemetery, as has happened in many cases overseas and was recommended locally in the mid-1970s.14 both historic dunedin cemeteries have escaped the destruction for road-building that badly mutilated the symonds street and bolton street cemeteries in the 1960s and 1970s.15 there are not many large mid-nineteenth urban cemeteries in new zealand established at, or soon after, the settlement of the city. the southern cemetery in dunedin is paralleled by the barbadoes street cemeteries in christchurch, bolton street and mount street cemeteries in wellington and symonds street cemetery in auckland. of these, the dunedin example is the only one still largely intact. the southern cemetery is ‘largely intact’; its historic layout ‘remains largely intact’ and its integrity ‘remains high’ despite the removal of some broken monuments.16 the next phase of cemetery building is represented by linwood, karori and waikumete cemeteries in christchurch, wellington and auckland respectively. they were intended as more commodious or remote sites when the original city burial grounds were full or otherwise thought no longer suitable for interments. in dunedin, the northern cemetery of 1872 relieved some of the pressure on the southern cemetery, and later the former eastern necropolis at anderson’s bay of 1862 became the main burial ground. there are no major regional differences between these cemeteries. what regional character they display is the result of patterns of religious and ethnic settlement. the same range of styles of monuments and the inscriptions on them are found throughout the country. anglicans public history review | trapeznik & gee 46 dominate in canterbury, marlborough and taranaki, while catholics are unusually numerous in westland. presbyterians outnumber both in the southern cemetery, dunedin.17 however, about a third of all burials there are anglican.18 denominationalism cemeteries were often but not always divided along denominational lines from the beginnings of european settlement in new zealand. there was never an established church, but nonetheless protestants who were not members of the church of england objected to burial in ground consecrated by an anglican clergyman. a precedent existed for nondenominational burial grounds in the example of bunhill fields on the edge of the city of london. early on at wellington, the bolton street cemetery was established as a general unconsecrated one so that nonanglicans would not be not buried in consecrated ground. the city, laid out in 1840, had a separate catholic cemetery from the start, so bolton street was intended mainly for anglicans, jews, presbyterians and methodists.19 however, plans were soon made for allocating a separate section to anglican burials. objections were raised because the proposed area included existing non-anglican burials. eventually the cemetery was divided into church of england, jewish and ‘public’ or non-denominational sections. a compromise was reached in 1849 whereby relations and friends of the dissenters already interred in the new anglican section could be buried there also.20 wellington’s new cemetery at karori, from its establishment in 1890, was divided into church of england, catholic, jewish and ‘public’ areas.21 at symonds street in auckland the church of england cemetery originally had been used for all denominations indiscriminately. but in contrast to wellington its later restriction and consecration do not seem to have been controversial. the area set aside until 1852 as the general section was eventually allotted to the wesleyans exclusively in 1872.22 founded a decade after wellington as an anglican settlement, christchurch from the start saw the need to provide for other denominations. the barbadoes street site was planned as three distinct cemeteries. however, the proportions assigned to each denomination were markedly different. the church of england cemetery was ten times larger than the catholic and dissenters’ cemeteries combined.23 the latter congregations grew at a greater rate than had been anticipated in the 1850s, so by the time the cemetery was closed in 1885 their sections were full whereas only about a quarter of the land set aside for the public history review | trapeznik & gee 47 church of england cemetery had been used.24 st andrew’s presbyterian church set up its own cemetery in addington in 1858, initially called ‘the scotch cemetery’, in reaction to the ‘exclusiveness’ of the barbadoes street cemeteries. the dissenters’ cemetery there was not confined to presbyterians alone and had in fact been consecrated by the anglican bishop. the new burial ground was part of a rural section outside the planned city, though a suburb began to develop after the railway was built in 1865. the burial ground soon became known as the ‘scotch cemetery’, though it was open to all, not just presbyterians.25 the christchurch jewish congregation had its own burial ground in another part of the city,26 and from about 1890 a section of the linwood cemetery.27 the general section of the southern cemetery in dunedin was administered by the city council.28 the church of england and catholic sections of the cemetery were however run by their respective churches, which controlled the sale of plots and kept burial records. unlike in other the other cities, there was no separate section for wesleyans. records for the jewish section were kept by the congregation.29 in christchurch, the three barbadoes street cemeteries were similarly controlled by their respective churches. the church of england was the legal owner of its cemetery, unlike the catholic and dissenting (wesleyan) churches. their sections were held in trust by the provincial government.30 each of the three denominations appointed boards of clergy and laymen to run the cemeteries.31 symonds street in auckland was also in reality five separate denominational cemeteries sited contiguously and not treated as a single entity until it was closed and redesignated a public reserve.32 the dunedin experience differs from the other large settlements. first a non-denominational burial ground of 1846 at arthur street, it was replaced by a divided one in 1858, the southern cemetery, but then supplemented by a non-denominational one in 1872, the northern cemetery. a presbyterian burial ground was established at anderson’s bay around 1862, which became the eastern necropolis or anderson’s bay cemetery in 1867.33 the first burial in the southern cemetery was probably in the church of england section. the bishop of christchurch, in whose diocese dunedin lay before 1869, was granted land for the burial of otago residents who were members of the ‘united church of england and ireland in the colony of new zealand’.34 the cemetery was authorised by the provincial government in november 1857, though the public history review | trapeznik & gee 48 earliest surviving headstone, possibly for a body moved from the arthur street cemetery, dates from september.35 denominational divisions were clearly evident to the users of cemeteries in the past, but they are much less so to modern visitors. the outer boundaries of cemeteries were generally hedged or fenced,36 but the different denominational sections were not always physically divided from each other. the denominational sections of the southern cemetery had separate entrances, but only the church of england section appears to have been hedged off, with a gate on its eastern side.37 some newspaper reports of funerals confirm that contemporaries regarded the various sections as separate cemeteries.38 physical separation was common elsewhere. at bolton street, for instance, the anglican section was fenced off from the other parts of the cemetery.39 at barbadoes street the cemeteries were formally separate. the dissenters’ and catholic cemeteries were separated by a post-and-wire fence erected at some point between the 1870s and 1915.40 the outer boundaries originally were marked with a gorse hedge.41 the presbyterian cemetery at symonds street once had a very ornate boundary wall with fine, pedimented gate posts, but this seems to have been exceptional.42 from the earliest stages, graves were fenced off if possible. initially this was mainly to keep wandering livestock off the graves,43 and the fences were typically wooden pickets painted white. decay was already evident by the 1880s, though they were still not uncommon at the turn of the twentieth century. picket fences rarely survive, though there are a few at mount street cemetery.44 occasionally, wooden fences were still being erected later in the century. at linwood for example posts made from totara, a now scarce native wood, to mark the corners of a burial plot survive from the 1880s.45 the rapid encroachment of residential areas rendered cemetery sites that had been planned as remote but easily accessible, too close to the settlement. only ten years after they opened it was suggested in 1852 that the symonds street cemeteries in auckland should have been sited further away.46 by the 1860s the barbadoes street cemetery reserves which had been set out in 1850 were already closer to the built-up area of christchurch than was thought desirable. this led to serious consideration of closing the cemeteries after only about twenty years’ use. residents nearby complained of the danger to health caused by miasma produced by burials. the medical officer of health recommended in 1883 closing the cemeteries and planting quickgrowing trees and shrubs to absorb moisture and noxious gases. as at the southern cemetery, after the closure of the barbadoes street public history review | trapeznik & gee 49 cemeteries burials of near relatives were still allowed. burials continued in small numbers until 1959, and ashes were interred until the early 1970s.47 scale the scale of new zealand cemeteries varies widely, even in the larger cities. few of its nineteenth-century counterparts approach the scale of the southern cemetery, with 23,000 interments. the northern cemetery has over 17,000 burials.48 though once physically extensive, the bolton street cemetery contained far fewer burials: approximately half the 8509 interments there were in the church of england section and the remainder in the public section; only 44 jewish burials are known.49 the barbadoes street cemeteries combined are also considerably smaller than the southern cemetery. when closed in 1885, there had been 3693 anglican burials, 638 wesleyans and 640 catholics.50 even the extensive linwood cemetery that replaced them has only about 6500 burials.51 only waikumete, which continues in use, is now much larger, at about 70,000 burials.52 there were always far more burials than memorials in nineteenthcentury cemeteries, not least because the cost of even a simple gravestone was beyond the means of the poor. over the years, many memorials have been removed. the southern cemetery contained 1134 memorials in 1978-80, which named 3450 individuals.53 even this rate of one memorial to twenty burials exceeds that of barbadoes street in christchurch. by 1981 there were fewer than 30 headstones left for the 780 interments in the dissenters’ cemetery.54 at the mount street cemetery in wellington the survival rate is much higher. of possibly about 1150 burials, 200 gravestones remain, marking the burials of 320 individuals. the great majority are stone, the many wooden crosses still evident at the turn of the twentieth century having long gone.55 this is, however, a slightly lower survival rate than had been the case in the symonds street catholic cemetery. when two thirds of it was destroyed for motorway building in 1964, it was discovered that the 400 headstones marked 2000 burials.56 the survival rate of monuments at addington, at least until the earthquakes of 2010-11, was probably closer to that of its near-contemporary southern cemetery, dunedin, helped in recent years by the attention given to the graves of locallyand nationally-famous figures such as kate sheppard.57 there is no conspicuous area of unmarked graves in the southern cemetery, which gives the misleading impression to the modern eye that all burials have a memorial. elsewhere, areas of unmarked burial plots public history review | trapeznik & gee 50 give a clearer picture of the nature of burials. at linwood for instance, an area was set aside for the burial of suicides and stillborn children. this was most likely unconsecrated and used for catholic burials.58 the church of england cemetery at barbadoes street included a multipleburial plot which holds about fifty burials, including drowned or otherwise unidentified bodies.59 at the southern cemetery a large rectangular plot in the ‘free ground’ in the general area was assigned to paupers’ burials. as with burials of prisoners, these were likely to be unmarked.60 seventy-four maori prisoners from the war in taranaki convicted of high treason and sentenced to hard labour were held in dunedin in 1869-72. eighteen died during this time and all but one are thought to be buried in the southern cemetery. twelve are probably in unmarked graves in the ‘free ground’ in the general section, while the remaining five are buried in the catholic section.61 a small area for nonchristian chinese burials was assigned in the general section after the four main sections had been laid out.62 topography generally, the earlier the cemetery the more centrally positioned it is. symonds street cemetery was at first on the edge of auckland but is now very central, as are the two early wellington cemeteries. sites were reserved in 1840 for a general burial ground at bolton street and a catholic cemetery at mount street. both were adjacent to the planned settlement, at the northern, thorndon, and southern, te aro, end respectively. later cemeteries were placed to avoid close proximity to housing or planned urban expansion. in dunedin, the northern and southern cemeteries were positioned, as in wellington, at opposite ends of the town belt, though initially at some distance from residential areas. simliarly, the barbadoes street cemeteries were in the north-east corner of the planned christchurch settlement of 1850, on the edge of the town belt and, initially at least, at some distance from the nearest houses. the site for karori was selected in 1890 as being rural land equidistant from the two ends of wellington, thorndon and te aro.63 this necessitated the construction of a new road, and the karori tunnel and the kelburn cable car route were built only in the course of the following decade.64 given the topography of the cities, unsurprisingly, only the christchurch cemeteries were not laid out on hills. rather, the barbados street site was on a ‘high [sic] ridge overlooking the avon’,65 described elsewhere as a ‘gentle eminence’.66 however, it was thought to have a ‘pleasing aspect’ with river views. the ground however was clay, swampy and poorly drained, ‘full of springs’.67 elsewhere, sites on public history review | trapeznik & gee 51 hillsides or at least rolling land were typical. this was in part because the land was not suitable for other uses such as housing or farming, such as grafton gully, the site of the symonds street cemeteries.68 accessibility was generally not a problem for the earlier cemeteries, which were within easy walking distance of the built-up areas.69 a tram route passing near the southern cemetery was built in 1880 and an extension along the main south road in 1905. but there was no dunedin equivalent of the tramway specifically built to provide access to linwood cemetery from central christchurch in 1884. a special hearse carriage was built in order to make funerals more affordable. it could carry four bodies but was never used as it was considered ‘insensitive’.70 waikumete cemetery, nine and a half miles from auckland, is the major cemetery furthest from the population it serves. it reflects the thinking that led to the establishment of the large necropoleis brookwood near woking in surrey in 1854 and rookwood in 1879, linked by railway to london and sydney respectively, with dedicated stations and rolling stock. the site at waikumete was chosen in 1878 in part because it bordered a planned railway line (completed in 1880) as well as the great north road. the railway facilities were however rather more basic than its australian or british counterparts.71 cemetery sites were also chosen in part for their picturesque setting, though attitudes changed over time. the suburb of wilton gradually encroached on the karori cemetery, which led to trees being planted in 1927 to screen the cemetery from view. the cemetery’s immediate neighbour until the late 1960s was a large rubbish dump, the wilton tip.72 the site of the church of england cemetery at symonds street was generally thought more attractive than the other denominations’ sections across the gully. it was ‘in a most beautiful situation’ with a ‘grand outlook over sea and land’73 but is now blighted by the proximity of an urban motorway. the site of the first dunedin burial ground overlooking the junction of arthur street, york place and rattray street gave a particularly fine view of the city and harbour, and was used well into the twentieth century as a viewpoint for photographers. far more photographs survive of the view over the arthur street cemetery than from the southern cemetery. the site of the latter though was already well established as a picturesque viewpoint, as is shown by edward immyns abbot’s watercolour dunedin from little paisley of 1849.74 four families of weavers from paisley who had arrived in april 1848 had built houses on the land which later became the cemetery. one of these settlers, john barr, became the first sexton. his eldest son william (d1887) is reputed public history review | trapeznik & gee 52 figure 1 the southern cemetery, dunedin, looking north towards the city, the jetties and wharves projecting into the inner harbour, c.1868. the main south road rounds the corner of the rocky outcrop in the middle distance. the hedged enclosure is the church of england cemetery. hocken collections / uare taoka o hakena, otago university, dunedin, c/n e6824/38, j. tensfield, ‘dunedin from the south, cemetery’ to be buried in the southern cemetery on the site of their cottage under what had been the hearthstone.75 despite the expansion of the city and the reclamation of the head of the harbour, the view remains relatively unspoiled and since the main route to the south no longer follows south road, the cemetery is relatively undisturbed by the noise of passing traffic.76 although the cemetery was visible from the main approach to dunedin from the south, the hillside to the cemetery’s north means that it could not easily be seen in its entirety from the main part of the settlement itself. this differs from many similar cemeteries in britain which were set on hillsides partly in order that they could be seen from the cities they served. where flat sites were available, the layout of cemeteries often follows a rectilinear arrangement. the first extension to the church of england cemetery at barbadoes street of 1864-69, for example, set out the burial plots in long parallel rows. the centre was occupied by a planted area, to which serpentine paths led, forming an almond shape in the central area.77 a similar serpentine path in the original section of the cemetery later had to be straightened.78 both addington and the later public history review | trapeznik & gee 53 linwood cemetery, like the city it served, are on a grid pattern.79 elsewhere, as at mount street, the hilly topography dictated meandering paths.80 the southern cemetery has a mixture of both; rectilinear where the topography allows it and serpentine on slopes. part of the catholic section is laid out as a series of concentric rings centred on the bishops’ tomb. the layout is remarkably unaltered from what is known of the original plans. comparison of the surviving plans of 1872 and 1919 suggests, however, that some paths were changed and some burials took place in spaces originally designated as paths.81 planting much thought was given to the planting of decorative and symbolic trees, shrubs and flowers, which were freighted with meaning. initially, cemetery plantings typically followed the established practice of sombre, dark-coloured species. the symbolism was widely known, such as the association of evergreens with the resurrection, or conifers with death, as unlike other trees they die as soon as soon as they are cut. yews, characteristic of the southern cemetery, have for centuries had a close association with churchyards. in britain and europe they sometimes predated the church itself, and symbolised everlasting life:82 some believed their roots found their way into the mouths of the dead. cypresses had been important in ancient roman funeral practices, while weeping willows anthropomorphically appear to be grief-stricken.83 trees such as eucalyptus, poplars, maples, planes and elms that were believed to filter out miasmas were also favoured for cemeteries. many flowers were planted on graves by mourners. these included lilies, roses, violets, camellias, periwinkles and various bulbs. ivy was also planted to symbolise immortality and friendship.84 weeping willows were planted in the church of england cemetery in barbadoes street early on, and had reached a significant size by 1863.85 by then, photographs indicate the cemetery was planted with italian cypresses, irish yews, laurels, elms, blue gums, oaks, sycamores and douglas firs.86 several surviving trees at barbadoes street probably date from the 1850 and 1860s.87 there are no comparable survivals at the southern cemetery, dunedin.88 the oldest tree in the mount street cemetery probably dates from the 1930s or 1940s: as late as 1940 there were no substantial trees there, though thick scrub had developed.89 the symonds street cemeteries similarly were for many decades comparatively bare. they had been compared unfavourably with barbadoes street as early as 1864.90 oaks were planted around one of the earliest graves in the anglican section, that of governor hobson (d1842), public history review | trapeznik & gee 54 and their presumed descendants are now large specimens. symonds street was planted with weeping willows, poplars and in the 1870s with the then-fashionable californian radiata pines. these latter were all felled at some stage after 1900. a photograph of about 1880 shows no mature trees.91 linwood cemetery, christchurch, laid out in the 1880s, was originally planted mainly with pines, cypresses and yews. today, however, only four trees are known to date from before 1900.92 figure 2 the southern cemetery, dunedin, looking north towards the city, the inner habour to the right, c.1900. hocken collections / uare taoka o hakena, otago university, dunedin, c/n e6869/15, guy morris, ‘dunedin: southern cemetery’ the little paisley site of the southern cemetery was originally largely covered with flax, which was burnt off to clear the site.93 some must have re-grown, as there were complaints in the 1860s of rotting, burnt flax in the catholic section, the result of a recent accidental fire.94 photographs provide some evidence of the changes to plantings in the southern cemetery. several mature trees are evident in a photograph of about 188095 and by about a decade later several large cabbage trees had appeared.96 these were used to symbolise immortality.97 some vegetation continued to be removed, the sexton being criticised in 1868 for removing shrubs.98 however, by the early 1960s the hillside was bare. e.d. moyle recorded in 1976 that ‘there used to be a lot more trees in the public history review | trapeznik & gee 55 cemetery but an earlier sexton cut them out because they were in the way of his mowing.’99 a view eastwards from the campbell family monument taken in 1963 confirms this, showing a completely bare graveyard. there are no trees or shrubs to be seen apart from what appear to be two pines and a monterey cypress near the morgue.100 a similar view from more than a decade later shows an almost equally bare landscape.101 by the mid1970s there were several large specimens of eucalyptus and a stand of oaks near the morgue. as moyle noted, ‘apart from these plantings there [was] virtually no shelter’.102 to remedy this, a selection of deciduous trees was planted on about 150 graves in the mid-1970s.103 for many years pupils from the hebrew school planted trees on tu’shvat (arbor day) in the jewish section but this practice was discontinued in recent times.104 the picturesque the modern cemeteries of britain and europe were, and in some cases still are, considered among the sights of their cities. the picturesque future site of the southern cemetery was depicted in edward immyns abbot’s well-known watercolour ‘dunedin from little paisley’ of 1849, a romanticised view from the hill down to the harbour in the distance.105 few photographers, however, followed abbot’s example. it could be inferred from the relative scarcity of photographs of the southern cemetery that it was not, even in its prime, considered one of the picturesque attractions of dunedin. early guidebooks add weight to this impression. neither alexander bathgate’s picturesque dunedin of 1890 nor the edwardian guides for visitors to dunedin mention the cemetery.106 the few surviving nineteenth-century photographs of the cemetery typically show the view over the cemetery towards the harbour and peninsula107 or towards the ocean beyond the south dunedin flat.108 occasionally, the cemetery appears at the edge of a photograph of events at the oval sports ground which lies below it on the flat, as for instance with the review of imperial troops held in february 1901.109 a few photographs have the cemetery as the principal subject. j. tensfield’s view of about 1868 looking north-eastwards shows it in open countryside with only two small houses nearby.110 there are already dozens of new memorials, several of them surrounded by white wooden picket fences. a few graves are surrounded by iron railings, dunedin foundries being the first in the country able to offer decorative railings. the anglican section is already hedged.111 another, later, photograph specifically of the cemetery shows the anglican and general sections public history review | trapeznik & gee 56 from the north across open ground covered with what appear to be daisies.112 this shows that by about 1880 the cemetery was hedged along its upper, eglinton road boundary113 in addition to the hedge that surrounded the anglican section. several trees were by this stage mature, and there were, naturally, many more monuments. the wooden fences evident in the earlier view were now gone. this is confirmed by a photograph of about ten years later, in which several iron railings can be seen. by this time, several large cabbage trees had grown which were not to be seen in the earlier views, though they may not have been deliberate plantings.114 figure 3 the southern cemetery, dunedin, looking south over the south dunedin suburbs towards the sea, cabbage trees in the foreground, c.1890. hocken collections/uare taoka o hakena, otago university, dunedin, c/n 2815/29, burton brothers, ‘the flat–dunedin’ neglect and vandalism by the second half of the twentieth century, few new burials took place and relations or descendants were unwilling or unable to maintain the decaying monuments. neglect and vandalism, in the sense of wilful destruction of monuments or desecration of graves, came to be associated with old cemeteries. in the nineteenth century in contrast, ‘vandalism’ typically meant the theft of flowers from graves.115 the first public history review | trapeznik & gee 57 known instance of deliberate damage to graves was the smearing of ‘some sticky substance like tar’ over the hebrew inscriptions on three tombstones in the jewish section of the southern cemetery in 1900.116 for the nineteenth century, the argument from silence has some validity as instances of destruction were taken very seriously and reported for other comparable cemeteries. in february 1890 an unidentified person fired a gun at a headstone in the northern cemetery, ‘completely spoiling the stone.’117 five years earlier at the symonds street cemetery in auckland a ‘most disgraceful outrage was committed’. nine tombstones were knocked over or broken on two separate occasions, the damage showing ‘that considerable force must have been used by the dastardly scoundrel who perpetrated so vile an outrage against the feelings of the friends of the dead.’118 the feelings of the bereaved were also the main concern of those who complained of the theft of flowers from graves and sometimes plants that had been planted in memory of the deceased. this ‘desecrating the graves of the “blessed dead”’ was considered a ‘scandalous practice’.119 worse was to come. after the symonds street cemeteries were closed and their care entrusted to the city council, there were reports in 1909 of opened vaults and broken coffins.120 illicit activity within cemeteries could also occasionally include clandestine burials. in the 1880s the presbyterian deacon’s court which administered the addington cemetery was concerned about illegal burials, particularly of infants. this was probably in order to avoid paying fees, the result of local poverty.121 nothing that took place in the new dunedin cemeteries was thought comparable to the neglected state of the old arthur street burial-ground. by 1872 the wooden grave fences were destroyed, iron railings damaged, head-boards broken ‘and the whole place reduced to such a state of ruin and desolation as to be a disgrace to a civilized community.’122 even cemeteries still in constant use were seen to become scruffy. there were complaints in the 1860s and 1870s about the neglected, dilapidated and overgrown state of the symonds street cemeteries.123 by the 1920s it was observed that dunedin’s southern cemetery was looking neglected in comparison to its northern counterpart. some paths were untidy and its general appearance was thought less pleasing. there were by then fewer families taking a personal interest in the upkeep of graves, and the city corporation’s reserves department was responsible for maintaining only the general section.124 few families made arrangements with the council for maintenance in perpetuity, not least because of the cost: £25 in 1902, rising to £50 in 1948.125 by 1947, the cemetery was reported to be public history review | trapeznik & gee 58 in ‘a shocking condition’, overgrown with wild daisies and other weeds.126 by the mid-1970s many ornate cast-iron railings had been removed from the southern cemetery and in some cases had been used by monumental masons to reinforce other graves.127 a ‘considerable amount’ of cast and wrought ironwork was removed in this period by the council and either sold or dumped.128 by 1978, however, ngaire ockwell recorded ‘that the cemetery is now well kept overall.’129 in christchurch, once the barbados street catholic and dissenters’ cemeteries were closed and under the responsibility of the city council, minimal maintenance meant they quickly became neglected and overgrown.130 vandalism in the church of england cemetery in first half of the twentieth century was largely prevented by the presence of a resident sexton but the other two sections had no protection and only minimal maintenance.131 vandalism became a particular problem in the period 1960-90. headstones were pushed over, broken, defaced or removed, while iron railings were taken away.132 in october 1955 alone, 21 headstones were pushed over and four damaged. in june 1961, 42 more were pushed over and 26 broken.133 in wellington, once karori was largely supplanted by a new cemetery in 1965, its graves increasingly were vandalised in the 1970s and 1980s. fifty headstones in the chinese section, for instance, were damaged in february 1988.134 at dunedin’s southern cemetery, twenty marble headstones were smashed in february 2006.135 not all of this damage was carried out for the mere thrill of destruction, but in some cases the removal of delicate ornamentation such as angels, doves or crosses was thought to have been for the sake of souvenirs.136 the living had become a problem as well as the dead. from the 1960s, the barbadoes street cemetery grounds were used as ‘temporary accommodation by transients.’137 by the end of the 1960s, mount street cemetery in wellington had ‘become the home of large numbers of… drug addicts.’138 yet this was not as new a phenomenon as it seemed at the time. symonds street cemetery, auckland, had as early as 1909 a reputation for being the haunt of the city’s vagrants.139 while unofficial vandalism damaged historic cemeteries piecemeal, official destruction was more methodical and on an altogether greater scale. the christchurch city council added the church of england cemetery to its existing responsibility for the other barbadoes street cemeteries in 1948. two years later it proposed removing damaged headstones, together with curbs and railings, and levelling the site. it was to be planted with grass and ornamental trees, and part was to become a children’s playground. this scheme was not carried out. the public history review | trapeznik & gee 59 council had taken over the management of the neglected addington cemetery in 1947 and immediately proposed removing all the memorials and using the land as a park or children’s playground: this was not done.140 the burials and cremations act of 1964 allowed councils to clear old cemeteries by removing neglected memorials, and two years later similar plans were revived for clearing the barbadoes street cemeteries. these too were not put into practice.141 an even more radical plan was suggested for dunedin’s southern cemetery in 1976. the horticulturalist e.d. moyle wrote: ‘once the cemetery has been closed i would like to see the bulldozer level the area out and then it should be sown down in grass. in my opinion, most of the graves are not worth keeping either from an aesthetic or horticultural point of view… to continue to maintain this cemetery does not warrant the expense’.142 even without wholesale destruction, the character of historic cemeteries could rapidly be altered. the previously distinct characters of the three adjacent cemeteries in barbadoes street were largely lost under council management in the 1950s, so that by 1969-70 when the boundary hedges, internal fences and separate entrances were removed, the false impression was given that barbados street cut through a single cemetery. this opening-up of the cemeteries was intended to counter vandalism and other anti-social behaviour.143 those areas of symonds street cemetery that had escaped obliteration by the building of motorways in the 1960s lost large numbers of cast-iron railings and monumental elements in officiallysponsored ‘tidying-up’ in the subsequent decade.144 at karori, chemical spraying in the late 1960s to remove weeds had left the cemetery unattractively stark and led to soil erosion. so it was proposed in 1972 that the gravestones be removed and trees planted.145 a similar programme of spraying the southern cemetery in dunedin in the first half of the 1970s also killed much recent planting in addition to the spring bulbs for which the cemetery was once famous. the denuded soil soon began to crack and erode, and junipers were planted on one bank in an attempt to arrest this. the city council’s parks and reserves department planted a large number of specimen trees in the mid-1970s, ‘which will, it [was] hoped[,] take away the starkness.’146 successive programs of maintenance and clearing have meant ironically that the best-preserved graves in some historic cemeteries are those that are relatively inaccessible or invisible. at mount street, the brady plot, covered in vegetation, retains its original picket fence in good condition which is a great rarity.147 public history review | trapeznik & gee 60 figure 4 the present state of the grave of moses wilson gray, a district judge of the otago goldfields and formerly a member of the legislative assembly of victoria, where he was a prominent land reform campaigner. he died at lawrence in central otago but was buried in the southern cemetery in 1875. dunedin city council, cemeteries search: http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/facilities/cemeteries/cemeteries_search structures historic cemeteries typically were accompanied by a range of specialised structures, including mortuary chapels, sextons’ cottages and sometimes even lychgates. the most famous today is perhaps the chapel of st george of the church of england section of the barbadoes street cemetery. designed by benjamin mountfort in 1856, it was completed in the 1860s and demolished in 1955. the cemetery landscape was dominated by the mortuary chapel, to which a carriage drive led from a lychgate in barbadoes street.148 the steeply-gabled building had stained glass windows and is now best known for being portrayed in william sutton’s painting ‘nor’-wester in the cemetery’ of 1950. there were no comparable structures in the catholic or dissenters’ sections.149 the church of england’s mortuary chapel at bolton street cemetery, built in 1866 to the designs of frederick thatcher, has survived attempts to destroy it. it was much plainer than its christchurch counterpart and incorporated some materials from the first anglican church, st paul’s. it was rarely used after the cemetery closed in 1892 and had become public history review | trapeznik & gee 61 decrepit and vandalised by the early 1920s. demolition began in 1924 but was halted by the intervention of the early settlers’ and historical association. by 1928 it was repaired and reported to be in excellent condition. vandalism resumed in the 1960s and the chapel was finally destroyed in the course of motorway building in 1969.150 the church of england cemetery at symonds street also had a mortuary chapel, built in 1866, but no longer extant. a jewish memorial chapel and mortuary survives that was erected in 1954.151 sextons’ cottages similarly do not often survive. the position of sexton in new zealand cemeteries does not necessarily imply an ecclesiastical connection, though anglican sextons were sometimes also vergers of a local parish. other sextons were simply cemetery caretakers.152 sexton’s cottages were a common feature of virtually all substantial cemeteries, though their survival is patchy. the church of england section of the southern cemetery had its own sexton who was provided with a small cottage within the grounds near the entrance. it had been demolished by 1947. another small sexton’s cottage was to its west and this survived until about 1987.153 a sexton’s cottage was built for the barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, in 1871. it was replaced by another house in the 1920s, which, unlike its equivalent in the southern cemetery, is still extant.154 karori cemetery had an ‘elegant villa’ of 1891 for the sexton which was replaced in the 1950s.155 shelters for mourners were never common, though one was provided at karori in 1891 which is still extant. though never intended as such, it soon became known as the mortuary chapel. since it was near the jewish section it was used largely by the hebrew congregation and became known informally as the jewish chapel. the congregation took responsibility for its maintenance in the 1950s and saved it from destruction in the 1960s.156 the unique feature of the southern cemetery, dunedin, is the adjoining public morgue. it is the only one here or in australia known to be located so close to a cemetery.157 the city morgue was originally in the grounds of the public hospital, a not unusual arrangement. it was withdrawn from public service as a result of the behaviour of the crowds who came to view the bodies of victims of the octagon fire of september 1869. for many years thereafter dunedin had no public morgue. corpses were instead taken to the nearest public house, but this led to complaints from the licensed victuallers’ association, not least because the landlords were not remunerated. a new morgue was built in the public hospital grounds in 1884, but the association continued into the 1890s, public history review | trapeznik & gee 62 together with the department of justice, to press the city corporation to build a public morgue.158 epidemics and an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 prompted the council into action. the site next to the southern cemetery was chosen as it was spare ground at a convenient distance from the city, not because of any connection to the cemetery or for the convenience of burials.159 in the initial period, however, the cemetery’s sexton helped at the morgue.160 the architectural firm of lawson & salmond were appointed in june 1902 and the building was handed over a year later. the brick morgue is in tudor style with a crenelated parapet. it remained in use as a morgue until 1949 and in 1953 was converted into a maintenance depot for the southern town belt and cemetery maintenance gangs with a garage for a tractor.161 latterly it has been leased for the storage of surf lifesaving equipment. the roof cladding was replaced in 2000 and the original ridge ventilators removed.162 conclusion the recent rash of detailed historical studies has for the first time made possible a reasonably comprehensive and confident comparative appraisal of the features that distinguish historic new zealand urban cemeteries. it shows that relatively few of the first phase of cemeteries survive in easily recognisable form and that the survival of structures is even less common. their location on the edge of the original settlements meant early cemeteries became surrounded by urban growth, sometimes within their first few decades. denominational division, contrary to a widespread assumption that it was uncommon in new zealand, was a requirement from the first in most historic cemeteries. the loss of visible boundaries has brought with it the modern public perception that denominational segregation was unusual in the past. the common assumption that the great majority of burials are marked by a tombstone or monument is reinforced by the apparent completeness of historic cemeteries. the prominence given to the graves of the famous, and of spectacular monuments to those who are now less well known, obscures the fact that a large proportion of those buried in these cemeteries never had any memorial. cemeteries were intended as places of public resort, their layout and planting designed to create a melancholy but fashionable place of quiet contemplation and recreation. this sometimes backfired. the ‘shady nooks’ at symonds street cemetery also afforded opportunities for ‘spooning couples’ in the 1880s.163 picturesqueness was a driving force in nineteenth-century cemetery design and it is tempting to imagine that public history review | trapeznik & gee 63 the present-day southern cemetery is the culmination of this way of thinking. topographically, it is a classic example of a site chosen for its views and situation on the outskirts of a planned city. though the cemetery now has the appearance of a well-wooded park, this is the result of extensive planting in the 1970s and bears little relation to the cemetery’s appearance for most of its existence. the present-day desire to restore monuments clashes with the consequences of this planting. many trees were planted on graves and their roots now disturb the railings and tombstones. the concept of the contemplative, picturesque cemetery is, however, sufficiently flexible to encompass both the welltended park-like victorian cemetery and the arrested decay of the present day, the result of neglect, vandalism, ‘improvement’ and, latterly, restoration. despite this, the southern cemetery stands as a representative example of a modern cemetery of the mid-nineteenth century in an unusually unaltered state. what would surprise victorian time travellers would be less its physical appearance than the fact that they would probably find themselves completely alone. endnotes 1 the cultural history of death came to life in the 1970s, prompted in large part by the translation of philippe ariès’ influential books, essais sur l’histoire de la mort en occident, translated as western attitudes toward death: from the middle ages to the present, baltimore, [1974], his homme devant le mort, translated as the hour of our death, london, 1981 and his images de l’homme devant la mort, translated as images of man and death, cambridge, mass, 1985. the architectural historian james stevens curl opened up the topic for a wider, non-academic audience with the victorian celebration of death, [newton abbot, 1972]; he published a substantially revised and expanded second edition in 2000. the ground-breaking new zealand study of an individual historic cemetery was prompted by its subject’s imminent destruction: margaret h. alington, unquiet earth: a history of the bolton street cemetery, wellington, 1978. this was a pioneering work even in international terms, but in the short term led to no comparable studies for other new zealand cemeteries. the first major comparative analysis was stephen deed’s unpublished thesis ‘unearthly landscapes: the development of the cemetery in nineteenth century new zealand’, ma thesis, otago university, 2004. in the course of the last fifteen years a great deal of detailed historical research has been carried out for conservation reports on cemeteries, most of them commissioned by local councils. this article takes advantage of the large body of information for comparative analysis that is provided by these reports. 2 in most continental european countries, plots are leased for set periods rather than owned outright. if the lease is not renewed, the remains are removed and either reburied elsewhere or the bones placed in an ossuary, and the grave re-used. old cemeteries therefore remain in constant use and are well funded and maintained, but very old memorials are rare. burial in perpetuity is the preserve of the very wealthy. jewish cemeteries are the main exception as religious law forbids the disturbance of human remains: see ken worpole, last landscapes: the architecture of the cemetery in the west, london, 2003, pp54; 171–3. 3 worpole, p169. 4 deed, p30. public history review | trapeznik & gee 64 5 alexander trapeznik and austin gee, ‘laying the victorians to rest: funerals, memorials and the funeral business in nineteenth-century dunedin’, australian economic history review (forthcoming). 6 as too were the new british cemeteries of the 1850s and 1860s: deed, p72. 7 chris and margaret betteridge, final draft: conservation management plan for the northern & southern cemeteries, dunedin, new zealand, 25 december 2004. revised final draft, randwick, nsw, 2004, pp106; 119. 8 la4 landscape architects and planners, symonds street cemetery conservation plan, auckland, 1996, p22 9 [ngaire ockwell], ‘brief look at the history of dunedin cemeteries’ [typescript: n.p., n.d.], pp1-2. 10 deed, pp105-6. 11 ibid, p121. 12 worpole, p170; robyn burgess, ian bowman, jenny may and david mckenzie, conservation plan linwood cemetery: draft for comment, christchurch, 2005, p40. 13 see dorothy page, anatomy of a medical school: a history of medicine at the university of otago 1875-2000, dunedin, 2008. 14 e.d. moyle, ‘horticultural aspects of cemeteries and crematoria in new zealand’, national diploma of horticulture dissertation, 1976, pp31-32. 15 the encroachment of roads on the bolton street cemetery began in the 1880s, but the massive destruction came with the building of an urban motorway: see alington, pp155-75. 16 betteridge, p108; see also the statement of significance, pp117–19. 17 deed, pp734. 18 betteridge, p43. 19 alington, p10. 20 ibid, pp15-34. 21 greig et al, p15. 22 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p10. 23 ian bowman, john wilson, louise beaumont and katharine wilson, conservation plan: barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch july 2009, [christchurch], 2009, p23. 24 ibid, p23. 25 robyn burgess, david mckenzie and jenny may, conservation plan for addington cemetery: draft version 2, christchurch, 2005, pp6–10. 26 this first jewish cemetery was in hereford street. 27 burgess et al, linwood cemetery, p15. 28 this includes the chinese area, though it is largely presbyterian. 29 ockwell, p3. 30 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp24–5. 31 ibid, p25. 32 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, pp1; 8–9. 33 ockwell, p4. 34 ibid, p2. 35 ibid. 36 the southern cemetery was ‘fenced with a split [rail?] fence’ in 1857 (betteridge, p40). by 1908 the eastern boundary of the cemetery had a wooden picket fence: see otago witness 16 september 1908. at barbados street, hawthorn and gorse boundary hedges were used both for privacy and to keep out livestock: see bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp62-3. 37 this hedge dated from 1862 at the earliest, as in january that year the church of england cemetery committee asked the town board to alter the road line so that their portion of the cemetery could be fenced off: otago daily times, 18 january 1862, p7. 38 james copeland was buried in the ‘church of england cemetery’ according to the otago daily times, 17 november 1875, p3. this was the anglican section of the southern cemetery (block 8p, plot 20). 39 alington, pp37-9. public history review | trapeznik & gee 65 40 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p29. 41 letter to the press, 9 august 1870, p3, quoted in bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p53. 42 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p14. 43 deed, pp99-100. 44 ian bowman, conservation plan: mount street cemetery, wellington, [wellington], 2008, pp16-17. 45 burgess et al, linwood cemetery, p44. 46 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p17. 47 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp31-2; 34. 48 betteridge, p37. 49 alington, p275. 50 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p32. 51 burgess et al, linwood cemetery, p39. 52 auckland city council, ‘waikumete cemetery’, http://www.waitakere.govt.nz/cnlser/cm/index.asp) 53 betteridge, p48. 54 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p35. 55 bowman, mount street cemetery, pp14; 17; the catholic archdiocese of wellington, ‘mount street cemetery’, http://www.mountstreetcemetery.org.nz/. 56 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p21. 57 burgess, mckenzie and may, addington cemetery, pp44-5. 58 burgess et al, linwood cemetery, pp39; 46. 59 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p61. 60 ibid, pp43-4. 61 ibid., pp65; 86; see also d. harold, maori prisoners of war in dunedin 1869–1872: deaths and burials and survivors, dunedin, 2000. 62 betteridge, pp42, 65. 63 greig et al, p12. 64 ibid, pp12; 15. 65 the press, 25 october 1862, p8, quoted in bowman et a., barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p59. 66 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p59. 67 ibid., pp. 52–3. 68 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p9. 69 deed, pp94-5. 70 burgess et al, linwood cemetery, pp12-14. 71 waitakere city council works and services committee, waikumete cemetery conservation and reserve management plan, auckland, 2001, pp15-16. 72 greig et al, p26. 73 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p12. 74 hocken pictorial collections, 14, 414. 75 otago witness, 1 september 1909, p53; block 136, plot 16; betteridge, p38 n6 states six weavers without giving the number of families; betteridge, p63 says john barr was dunedin’s first gaoler, but this is generally thought to have been henry monson. 76 except during the formerly annual street races, which included the section of south road that passes the cemetery in its circuit; the north-eastern slope near the morgue was a popular spot among spectators. 77 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p57. 78 ibid, p59. 79 burgess, mckenzie and may, addington cemetery, pp7; 37; burgess et al, linwood cemetery, p10. 80 bowman, mount street cemetery, p27. 81 betteridge, pp44-5. 82 ibid, p118. public history review | trapeznik & gee 66 83 moyle, p2. 84 deed, p123. 85 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp53; 55; cuttings from the weeping willow at napoleon’s tomb at st helena had earlier been planted in the l’aube hill cemetery at akaroa: deed, p113 n12. 86 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp55-6. 87 ibid, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp65; 68. 88 betteridge, appendix i, pp39-41, lists the species of trees to be found in there in 2004. 89 bowman, mount street cemetery, p34. 90 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p13. 91 ibid, pp13; 15; 33. 92 burgess et al, linwood cemetery, pp41-2. 93 betteridge, p40. 94 ibid, pp44-5. 95 also shown in an undated burton brothers photograph at te papa, c.011209. 96 hocken pictorial collections c/n 2815/29, burton bros, ‘the flat, dunedin’, c1890. 97 deed, p66. 98 betteridge, p45, citing the town clerk’s correspondence. 99 moyle, p28. 100 bernard lunn, head prefect of otago boys’ high school, laying a wreath, in evening star, 3 august 1963, p2; rory sweetman, history of otago boys high school, 1863-2013, dunedin, forthcoming, 2013. 101 moyle, p21 fig14, photograph c1976. 102 ibid, p22. 103 betteridge, p48; moyle, p28, fig24: a photograph showing some of these recent plantings. 104 ibid, p48. 105 hocken pictorial collections, 14,414. 106 alex. bathgate (ed), picturesque dunedin: or, dunedin and its neighbourhood in 1890, dunedin, 1890; william henry fahey, beautiful dunedin, its environs and the cold lakes of otago: a memento from maoriland, dunedin, 1906; beautiful dunedin and surroundings illustrated: containing 52 views, dunedin, c1910. 107 hocken pictorial collections, c/n e6869/15, guy morris, ‘dunedin: southern cemetery’, nd. 108 auckland libraries heritage images 4-7297, james d. richardson, ‘looking south east over st kilda, dunedin’, nd; te papa c.012431, muir and moodie, dunedin from south cemetery, nd; hocken pictorial collections c/n 2815/29, burton bros, ‘the flat, dunedin’, c1890. 109 hocken pictorial collections, c/n f165/16, dunedin oval, february 1901: the southern cemetery is visible in the right foreground. 110 hocken pictorial collections, c/n e6824/38, j. tensfield, ‘dunedin from the south, cemetery’, c1868. 111 betteridge, p93. 112 hocken pictorial collections, c/n e2906/33, southern cemetery, c1880. 113 also shown in an undated burton brothers photograph at the museum of new zealand te papa tongarewa, c.011209. 114 hocken pictorial collections c/n 2815/29, burton bros, ‘the flat, dunedin’, c1890. 115 otago witness, 24 october 1874, p15 and 19 september 1900, p52; flowers and shrubs were stolen from the barbadoes street cemeteries in the 1870s. see also bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p35. 116 otago witness, 19 september 1900, p52. 117 otago daily times, 10 february 1890, p2. 118 auckland star, 15 october 1885, p2. 119 john w. paulin, ‘vandalism in the cemeteries’, 21 march, in otago daily times, 22 march 1887, p4. 120 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p20. public history review | trapeznik & gee 67 121 burgess, mckenzie and may, addington cemetery, p17. 122 otago daily times, 16 february 1872, p3. 123 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p18. 124 betteridge, p. 47, citing the otago daily times 10 february 1925. 125 ibid, pp47-8. 126 ibid, p47, citing evening star, 12 march 1947. 127 moyle, p25. 128 betteridge, p49. 129 quoted in ibid, p49. 130 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp69-70. 131 ibid, p35. 132 ibid. 133 ibid. 134 greig et al, p27. 135 stewart harvey, historic cemeteries conservation trust of new zealand annual report for the year ended 31 march 2006: www.cemeteries.org.nz/cemeteries_annualreports06.htm. 136 bowman, mount street cemetery, p22. 137 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p35. 138 bowman, mount street cemetery, p21. 139 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p2. 140 burgess, mckenzie and may, addington cemetery, pp17-18. 141 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p36. 142 moyle, pp31-2. 143 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, pp70-1. 144 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p25. 145 greig et al, p26. 146 moyle, pp28-31, which includes year-by-year details of the spraying programme. figure 25 on p30 shows a bank after spraying with weedkiller. 147 bowman, mount street cemetery, p17. 148 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p59. 149 ibid, pp29-30. 150 alington, pp176-86. 151 symonds street cemetery conservation plan, p20. 152 alington, p227. 153 betteridge, pp53-55; a photograph of c1976 is in moyle, p25, figure 20. 154 bowman et al, barbadoes street cemetery, christchurch, p30. 155 greig et al, p15, illustrated on p18. 156 ibid, p15, illustrated on p85. 157 betteridge, pp51; 119; illustrated on p52 (hocken collections s4-116i). 158 pamela wood, dirt: filth and decay in a new world arcadia, 2005, p217; betteridge, p50. 159 betteridge, p50. 160 moyle, p26. 161 betteridge, p51. 162 ibid. 163 deed, pp86; 98-99. galleyhawkins public history review vol 20 (2013): 1–23 issn: 1833-4849 © utsepress and the author ‘what better excuse for a real adventure’: history, memory and tourism on the kokoda trail jo hawkins apidly growing numbers of australian tourists visiting overseas battle sites associated with australian military history have attracted academic interest from a broad range of disciplines including history, sociology and tourism. while several historians have examined the motivations of tourists visiting gallipoli and the western front, we know very little about what drives australians to walk the kokoda track – a site much closer to home. between july and november 1942, a group of ill-equipped allied troops fought a successful campaign along the track to prevent japanese forces from capturing port moresby. after the war, the unconventional battleground was slowly reclaimed by the jungle and the track resumed r public history review | hawkins 2 its function as a centuries old route between villages. prior to 2001, few australians had journeyed across the kokoda track, which winds 96km through the owen stanley ranges in papua new guinea. just over a decade later, the track supports a competitive tourism industry, dominated by australian companies, and attracts thousands of australians each year: from middle-aged businessmen, school groups and grandparents to politicians, professional athletes and celebrities. trekking is not an easy undertaking. tourists spend an average of $4000 each on a journey ranging from five to ten days, during which they battle thick rainforest, river crossings, steep inclines and knife-edge ridges – often in torrential rain or stifling humidity. a visit to gallipoli is easily incorporated into a european holiday, but trekking kokoda is costly, requires physical training and presents a higher perceived risk. this study applies an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing upon scholarship from history and tourism studies, to explore what trekking kokoda means to australians who undertake the journey. my analysis will draw from personal testimonies and quantitative surveys of 107 trekkers to more fully understand the duality of battlefield tourism destinations as sites of commemoration and, unavoidably, sites of commerce. in doing so, i will be building upon the pioneering work of hank nelson who interrogated kokoda mythmaking and popular history, recognising that the site had been commodified by memory industries such as tourism and publishing.1 the range of meanings that australians associate with the kokoda trail must be viewed in the context of the anzac legend, a powerful mythology surrounding australian military history and national identity. the idea of war as a creative act, through which men and nations were made, pervaded edwardian military tradition and the gallipoli campaign is often described as the moment of australian nationhood.2 qualities associated with australasian volunteers during the campaign, such as mateship, larrikinism, courage, endurance and sacrifice, were said to exemplify a unique national character.3 many of these qualities predated the first world war, originating from the romantic idealism of the pioneer myth and the noble bushman. indeed, richard white has argued that ‘with the landing at gallipoli in april 1915, the ready made myth was given a name, a time and a place’.4 throughout the first world war, the anzac legend served as a cohesive force during a deeply divisive conflict. the second world war was more public history review | hawkins 3 widely supported and australian servicemen, including those of the kokoda campaign, were incorporated into anzac mythology. during the 1970s, protests against the vietnam war led to anzac becoming associated with social division rather than cohesion. attendances at anzac day services held in australia began to fall and it appeared that the legend was destined to fade from national collective memory. in fact, the opposite occurred. towards the end of the twentieth century, interest in australian military history and commemoration underwent an astonishing resurgence. since this time, attendances at anzac day services have risen and the ‘anzac spirit’ has been increasingly held up as representative of a set of civic values that australians should aspire towards. historians have attributed the resurgence to several factors including a memory boom in the western world since the 1970s, state-sanctioned commemoration and a longing for identity and community in an increasingly secular, multicultural and globalised world.5 several australian historians have explored ways in which federal and state governments have leveraged anzac to endorse policy and promoted the mythology in school curriculums, museums, documentaries and spectacular commemorative events.6 others have outlined ways in which anzac commemoration is participatory and democratic.7 many historians have argued that remembering war entails a great deal of forgetting, and oppose the extent to which anzac now dominates the australian national story. academics including manning clark and, more recently, marilyn lake and henry reynolds have questioned the veracity of the ‘anzac spirit’ as unique to australia and universally represented by all diggers.8 yet, despite critique, age has neither wearied nor condemned anzac mythology. the anzac legend is no longer solely confined to the first world war. not only has the mythology been incorporated into successive military engagements, from the second world war to afghanistan: it increasingly manifests during times of civilian crisis. the western australian returned and services league of australia (rsl) website states that the ‘anzac spirit’ is evoked in ‘times of hardship’ such as floods and bush fires.9 the kokoda campaign did not enlist an anzac (australian and new zealand army corps) fighting force and the dynamic – and thoroughly modern – mythology associated with the site public history review | hawkins 4 must be examined on its own terms. yet it is vital to acknowledge these meanings as an extension of the anzac tradition. tourism to australian battlefields is not a new phenomenon but the anzac resurgence and democratisation of travel ushered in a new generation of visitors. the earliest visits to overseas battlegrounds occurred in the 1920s but were limited to those who possessed the resources to undertake the long and expensive journey. historian ken inglis travelled to gallipoli in 1965 with a group of anzac veterans to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the campaign, later publishing detailed accounts of the experience.10 in 2002 historian bruce scates analysed qualitative testimonies of 200 australian tourists at gallipoli and the western front in an attempt to understand ‘what pilgrimage means to those who have undertaken it’.11 while acknowledging that ‘one might think that such a journey had more to do with tourism and consumption than it does with pilgrimage or history’, scates insisted the experience transcended ‘mere sightseeing’, arguing the journey was highly meaningful for australians, facilitating a personal reckoning with national history.12 mark mckenna and stuart ward believed scates did not go far enough in critically examining testimonies, arguing that meanings ‘pilgrims’ attributed to gallipoli had more to do with the politics of nationalism, than history.13additional studies have explored the relationship between individuals and nation, outlining the ways in which meanings associated with gallipoli are socially constructed (and contested) in australia and the impact of tourism on national collective memory.14 in recognition of the relationship between australian military history and national identity, historians routinely describe tourism to overseas battlegrounds as ‘secular pilgrimage’; journeys in pursuit of meaning and belonging in a society characterised by secularisation, globalisation, individualism and consumer capitalism. tourism scholars also recognise that national identity is central to these journeys but have investigated a broader range of motivations, recognising that leisure travel can have spiritual elements too. in contrast to historians, who have been quick to describe individuals who travel to sites associated with australian military history as ‘pilgrims’, scholars of tourism have increasingly debated the best ways to differentiate pilgrimage and leisure tourism. they argue that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between these two public history review | hawkins 5 categories of travellers. not only do tourists and pilgrims require the same fundamentals of leisure time, disposable income and social sanction; they also share the same infrastructure.15 tourism, too, has been linked to personal growth, search for origins and a hunger for meaning. nelson graburn has compared modern tourism to religious pilgrimages arguing that ‘the rewards of modern tourism are phrased in terms of values we hold up for worship: mental and physical health, social status, and diverse, exotic experiences’.16 over the course of the twentieth century, the sacred began to intertwine with the secular as religious sources of identity that urged servitude and contemplation, shifted to individualist sources of identity prioritising personal fulfilment.17 studies from the discipline of tourism, designed to enhance marketing and management outcomes, recognise the industry is highly competitive and characterised by the search for new experiences: prioritising quantitative data over qualitative interviews and exploring a broader range of tourist motivations. kenneth hyde and serhat harman surveyed 400 people attending anzac day services at gallipoli to uncover motivations for making the journey. they found that tourists who travelled the longest distances displayed motives most similar to those of ‘secular pilgrims’, while young australians based in europe prioritised novelty seeking and social motives – characteristics more closely aligned with leisure tourism.18 insights from tourism scholars assert an uncomfortable ambiguity, reminding us that sites associated with australian military history are simultaneously sites of commemoration and commoditisation. if it were possible to identify the defining moment at which the kokoda track re-entered the australian consciousness, it would surely be labor prime minister paul keating falling to his knees and kissing the base of a memorial at kokoda during the fiftieth anniversary commemorations in 1992, a gesture intended to ‘indelibly mark kokoda in australia's collective memory’.19 the ability of collective memory to unite a diverse population through a shared past and future means it is intimately linked with national identity and keating later proclaimed that kokoda was ‘the place where i believe the depth and soul of the australian nation was confirmed’.20 ten years later, liberal prime minister john howard visited kokoda to unveil the isurava memorial. he hoped the site would become ‘a magnet for young australians, like public history review | hawkins 6 gallipoli’.21 combined with social and economic reform in papua new guinea, the development of tourist infrastructure and increasing public interest, howard’s visit provided the impetus for a period of exponential tourist growth. by the time labor prime minister kevin rudd walked the track in 2006, the tourist industry had undergone five years of rapid expansion. state-sanctioned commemorations contributed to a growing mythology surrounding kokoda and the manufacture of meaning was followed by the inevitable consumption of meaning by australian consumers. politicians were not the only ones who realised that anzac sells. kokoda’s mythology was quickly commoditised by a burgeoning memory industry. the ‘popular image’ of the kokoda campaign tends to reflect keating’s original vision: the heroic defence of the nation against a powerful foreign invader; a series of battles fought by australians, on australian territory, in defence of australia.22 evocative portrayals of wartime history and the trekking experience were not confined to anzac day but communicated throughout the year in news media, television specials, documentaries and film. several bestselling books on kokoda were published from 2000. hank nelson argued that storytelling was characterised by ‘enthusiastic retellings of the story, stronger assertions of kokoda’s importance in world war ii and in australian history, and renewed claims for the qualities of the men who fought there’.23 historians have contested several aspects of this popular history of kokoda. hank nelson and peter stanley have questioned assertions that the allied victory represented the turning point of the pacific war and the idea that the troops ‘saved australia’ from invasion by the japanese.24 the ‘fuzzy wuzzy angels’ forged strong relationships with australian troops and made a vital contribution the war effort. however, alan powell has criticised monolithic representations of indigenous peoples that marginalise the reality that they were a 'subdued, conscripted, colonised race'.25 historical complexities are often absent from popular representations which emphasise the bravery and endurance of australian soldiers and their success against all odds – ordinary men acting under extraordinary hardship. over the past twenty years, kokoda trekking has evolved from a hobby industry, run by military history enthusiasts, to a competitive tourist industry dominated by australian companies.26 early entrepreneurs recognised an opportunity to create a new tourism public history review | hawkins 7 industry on the heels of the growing popularity of gallipoli. tour operator charlie lynn, an australian politician and former vietnam veteran, first trekked kokoda in 1991 and realised that ‘it seemed obvious… if we could somehow identify all the battle-sites and train local guides, then young australian trekkers would want to come – just as they have at gallipoli over recent years’.27 in 2001, the first year trek permits were issued to monitor tourist numbers, seventy-six people walked the trail. just ten years later, over twenty-five thousand australians have trekked kokoda, with a staggering 5621 trekkers making the journey in a single year in 2008.28 rapid growth and overcrowding became problematic, with increasing concerns about safety and the global financial crisis resulting in tourist numbers falling dramatically in 2009. but recent bookings appear to indicate a return to sustainable levels. figure 1: kokoda trail – trek permits sold per annum year 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 trekkers 76 365 1074 1584 2374 3747 5146 5621 4364 2871 source: kokoda track authority (kta) in order to undertake a critical analysis of the tourist experience beyond the paradigms of existing studies, i applied an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporated personal testimony, favoured by historians, that allowed trekkers to share their thoughts about the experience in their own words, alongside a quantitative survey, like those utilised in tourism studies. 29 a self-administered online survey was completed by 107 australians between april-august 2011. public history review | hawkins 8 respondents were targeted with a5 flyers distributed at kokoda and social media and trekker forums were harnessed to raise awareness of the survey and tap into large trekker communities online. demographic and psychographic data was obtained through a series of closed and open-ended questions and trekker motivations were assessed using a likert scale. the written testimony was optional and invited trekkers to write whatever they wished about their experience. there was no word limit: respondents could write a couple of sentences or several paragraphs. very few declined, many offering candid and detailed descriptions of their travel experience. the ensuing analysis is based on a non-representative sample of australian tourists.30 while the sample size was not large enough, nor the acquisition of survey respondents random enough (due to self selection bias) to extrapolate findings to the entire population of kokoda trekkers, written testimonies provided a rich evidence base for thematic analysis.31 (i am deeply indebted to trekkers who assigned me with trust and confidence and generously shared their stories and personal experiences. i respect the intentions of trekkers, the achievement of completing the trail and recognise kokoda as a powerful, and often life changing experience.) figure 2: gender gender % male 73 female 27 total 100 source: self-administered online survey of 107 australian trekkers (2011) figure 3: age age % under 25 11 25-34 24 35-44 31 45-54 25 over 55 9 source: self-administered online survey of 107 australian trekkers (2011) public history review | hawkins 9 figure 4: education education % year 10 7 year 11 3 year 12 7 tafe certificate 7 diploma / degree 66 masters / phd 10 total 100 source: self-administered online survey of 107 australian trekkers (2011) figure 5: rating average what factors influenced your decision to trek kokoda? rating average males females to undertake an adventure 4.23 4.26 4.17 to commemorate and remember the anzacs 4.17 4.13 4.27 unique travel experience that few have undertaken 4.04 4.06 3.97 learn about australian history 3.91 3.87 4.00 challenge my fitness and endurance 3.84 3.87 3.77 celebrate what it means to be australian 3.79 3.79 3.80 to stand on sacred ground 3.65 3.64 3.70 to discover a different culture / environment 3.60 3.48 3.90 a journey of self discovery 3.45 3.38 3.63 personal transformation and growth 3.28 3.14 3.63 this is a spiritual journey for me 3.00 2.86 3.37 i wanted to explore papua new guinea 2.99 2.97 3.03 develop leadership and team building skills 2.64 2.64 2.63 learn about my family history 2.42 2.26 2.83 respondents rated factors that motivated them to walk the kokoda track from ‘not important’ (1) to ‘extremely important’ (5), allowing the calculation of a ‘rating average’ that indicates the popularity of each answer within the sample group. source: self-administered online survey of 107 australian trekkers (2011) the appeal of the kokoda track spans several generations of australians but demographic data reveals insights into this diverse group. middleaged, university educated males were over-represented within the public history review | hawkins 10 sample population with 73 per cent of the trekkers male and 56 per cent aged between 35-54. the appeal of the track to men may reflect the fact that war has historically served, not only a test of australian nationhood but as a test of manhood.32 the white, male anzac digger embodies idealised australian masculinity and this icon has become associated with a set of aspirational values linked to citizenship including mateship, courage and sacrifice.33 several historians have argued that women have been excluded from the anzac legend. yet, it seems critique has not precluded women in contemporary australia from identifying with, and contributing to, the mythology surrounding kokoda. the journey appealed to a significant number of female trekkers.34 an overwhelming majority of them, 76 per cent, were university educated. this finding defies existing tourist archetypes. while heritage tourism is strongly linked to high levels of education, these sites typically attract higher numbers of female tourists.35 neither does the data reflect archetypes for adventure tourism, which tends to attract younger males.36 survey responses and written testimonies can help shed light on these complex journeys. a qualitative testimony invited australian tourists to ‘write whatever they wished’ about the trekking experience, alongside a quantitative survey that required them to rate factors that motivated them to walk the kokoda track from ‘not important’ (1) to ‘extremely important’ (5). responses allowed the calculation of a ‘rating average’ that indicated the popularity of each answer within the sample group. yet tourist motivations are multiple and intertwined and exploring data in order of popularity risks obscuring complexity and meaning. instead, i have taken a thematic approach, prioritising analysis of qualitative testimonies over quantitative data, engaging with survey data to provide context and transparency and explore complexity and contradictions. the resulting analysis can be broadly divided into meanings associated with national identity and those extending beyond this, indicating that the kokoda track has come to represent both a test of nation and a test of self. in addition to an expression of national identity, anzac mythology has been appropriated by australian tourists at kokoda to represent individualistic goals of personal development and transformation – motivations that originate from the site’s military history but extend beyond it. public history review | hawkins 11 the test of nation: kokoda and national identity in 1992, paul keating described kokoda as representing ‘the canon of australian life... the ideals to which we aspire, the values by which we live’. and today kokoda allows individuals to enact a performative demonstration of australian citizenship.37 as aspirational qualities associated with the anzac legend became linked with the unique physical and mental demands of the track, trekking as a public demonstration of these values became increasingly popular. the journey has been attempted by numerous politicians, sporting personalities and australian celebrities, including a miss world entrant.38 most trekkers agreed that walking the track was a way to ‘celebrate what it means to be australian’ (rating average 3.79). john, 47, believed ‘it would be extremely beneficial for as many australians as possible to experience the kokoda track’.39 as an embodiment of australian values, the track is often portrayed in the media as having a transformative effect on those excluded from australian society. walking the track offers an opportunity for redemption. several groups of ‘out-of-control’ australian teenagers have walked kokoda in an effort to learn discipline and teamwork and the journey has even been perceived as an antidote to racial tension.40 during the 2005 cronulla riots, australian-lebanese student, ali ammar stole an australian flag from an rsl club and set it ablaze. after nine months in juvenile detention, the rsl club sponsored ali to walk the track in 2007.41 enthusiastic media coverage of these journeys has reinforced links between citizenship and commemoration. commemoration was a priority for most trekkers, with 79.4 per cent of respondents agreeing that walking the track to ‘commemorate and remember the anzacs’ was ‘extremely important’ or ‘very important’ (rating average: 4.17). attendance at anzac day services in australia and overseas has increased since the 1980s and popularity is expected to grow in the lead up to the anzac centenary in 2015. however, the development of year-round anzac tourism industries now facilitates remembrance beyond this ‘one day of the year’. sam, a 44 year old from sydney, believed that ‘the true kokoda experience’ centred on ‘paying homage to the diggers that defended our country and lifestyle against incredible odds at supreme personal sacrifice’.42 trekker testimonies and survey data reveal important insights into just what australian tourists are ‘remembering’. public history review | hawkins 12 while 70 per cent of trekkers felt it was ‘extremely important’ or ‘very important’ to learn about australian history on the track (rating average 3.91), it was far more common for trekkers to write about the physical and mental toughness required for the journey than its history. this is not evidence that history is absent from the journey, but an indication that it has become intertwined with other motives. academics often link the rise in popularity of battlefield tourism with a surge of interest in genealogy. but my research reveals this is not always the case.43 learning about family history was a low priority for most trekkers, although this was considerably more popular for women (rating average 2.83) than males (rating average 2.26). rachel, 34, admitted she wanted to retrace her grandfather’s footsteps because ‘he never spoke much about his experiences’ and she ‘wanted to find out a little more about where he went and what he did’.44 intriguingly, testimonies revealed a common belief that kokoda’s history has been ‘forgotten’. andy, aged 43, thought ‘australians should be ashamed of how little we as a nation know about kokoda and what was thought at the time as the battle for australia [sic]’.45 joanne, aged 50, was hugely disappointed about the lack of recognition of kokoda, which she felt was ‘often overlooked within our education system, within news coverage and in general aussie culture’.46 the idea of kokoda as a ‘forgotten’ battle site remains a prominent aspect of the site’s mythology, but this is very much at odds with the high levels of coverage in the media and increasing numbers of trekkers and best-selling books. collective memory of the kokoda campaign is inseparable from the natural environment and local communities who live along it. the assistance of indigenous peoples of papua new guinea (png) became fundamental to the success of the allied war effort, with local conscripts providing invaluable service as guides and porters along the track. they became known as ‘fuzzy wuzzy angels’. the majority of tours are led by australian guides, supported by local porters, and interactions with the local people are seen by many trekkers as a highlight of their trip. there is a sense of being part of history; relationships with porters echo the historical relationship between fuzzy wuzzy angels and diggers. george, 52, said: ‘the papuans of today are as helpful as their forefathers were in 1942, simply beautiful people’.47 for jason, 40, meeting one of the fuzzy wuzzy angels was ‘the highlight of my trip’.48 yet, for the most part, australian tourists are driven by a desire to undertake the public history review | hawkins 13 challenge of trekking rather than a desire to explore png. australian guides are preferred by the majority of trekkers as local guides are not perceived as authorities on australian military history, which is generally more important to trekkers than local cultural knowledge. png culture is most often explored in the context of the track’s australian heritage. 49 survey results revealed significant differences in the ways in which men and women contextualised the journey as an experience inside or outside of their own culture. the motivation to ‘explore papua new guinea’ was considered ‘extremely important’ by 23.3 per cent of women surveyed, in contrast to 6.5 per cent of men (rating average 2.99). the motivation to ‘discover a different culture/environment’ reflected a more dramatic gender difference: 43.3 per cent of women agreed this was ‘extremely important’ compared to 11.7 per cent men. these results may suggest that women are more likely to be driven by interests that go beyond the site’s military history and requires further investigation. historian paul connerton has argued that performance is vital to establishing and maintaining relationships between memory and place. 50 historical re-enactments are a common feature of tours, affirming jennifer iles’ conviction that battle sites are often ‘limited in their ability to tell their own story’.51 tim, aged 39, described how ‘we took turns in reading soldiers’ notes while ‘sitting down viewing the same terrain as they would have’.52 similarly, sarah, aged 27, reflected that standing on the exact location of specific battles ‘made real the stories i'd read in books’. an evocative amalgamation of the past, combined with physical immediacy, meant that she ‘could really picture the paths and hardship they followed and imagine how hard it would have been on those paths when it was dark, wet, overgrown and under fire’.53 sarah’s experience brings to mind david lowenthal’s description of the ways in which heritage allows tourists to ‘mourn worlds known to be irrevocably lost – yet more vividly felt, more lucid, more real than the murky and ambiguous present’.54 scott, 36, believed that the physical nature of the experience imbued it with authenticity, saying that ‘the kokoda track really offers a tougher experience [than gallipoli] which gave it ‘a more genuine feel’.55 while lowenthal has argued that the general public ‘neither seek historical veracity nor mind its absence’, several trekkers critiqued assumptions of authenticity.56 pat recognised that tourists were not walking the entire track which ‘started and ended on the coasts’ and public history review | hawkins 14 was disappointed that ‘other villages, their people and history are forgotten’.57 similarly, peter, 37, felt ‘frustrated’ by trekkers who sought to ‘walk in the footsteps of their anzac forebears’ as many of the militia did not walk the entire track.58 the physical discomfort endured while ‘re-enacting’ the trek, which can include fatigue, hunger, blisters (or more severe injuries), humidity and torrential rain, serves to heighten emotions and contribute to perceived historical authenticity. emotions were commonly discussed in trekker testimonies which frequently describe the track as ‘more emotional than physical’.59 trekkers were often unable to put their experience into words. helen, aged 28, admitted that ‘there's no real way to accurately describe the experience, and the mix of emotions along the way’.60 bobby, aged 35, made the journey with his father and said: ‘i'd rarely seen my father cry previously in my 35 years… he cried more on the trip than collectively over my life’.61 emotion has long been recognised as a key characteristic of battlefield tourism. indeed, the very first study of tourism to australian battle sites by bruce scates was an effort to reconstruct the emotional world of travellers at gallipoli. recent investigations from tourism scholars cite emotion as a definitive aspect of consumer culture, and have correlated intense emotions experienced by tourists at gallipoli with higher levels of visitor satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth promotion. while tourism is generally viewed as a hedonic experience, negative emotions, such as grief, fear and anger can make a positive contribution to this consumption experience.62 these findings were reflected in kokoda trekker testimonies which often equated intense emotions with a positive overall travel experience. anzac landscapes are routinely described by academics, politicians, public servants and the media as ‘sacred’ and tourists as ‘pilgrims’, few tourists use this language to describe their own experience.63 while 59.8 per cent of kokoda trekkers believed the motivation to ‘stand on sacred ground’ was ‘important’ or ‘very important’ (rating average 3.65) – 39.3 per cent of trekkers agreed with the statement that ‘this is a spiritual journey for me’ – few described the track or the journey as ‘sacred’ in their testimonies. this does not negate the fact that trekking kokoda is an often deeply meaningful experience for australians. elizabeth weiss ozorak has noted that ‘it is not surprising that the twentieth century with its unprecedented emphasis on psychological self-enhancement has public history review | hawkins 15 seen a resurgence of pilgrimage’ and it follows that trekkers employ the language of self, rather than the language of nation.64 the test of self: kokoda and individual identity the single most popular motivation for walking the kokoda track was not to learn about history or commemorate war veterans but the desire to ‘undertake an adventure’ (rating average 4.23). the motive was shared by both male and female trekkers, 50.5 per cent of whom believed it was ‘extremely important’. kokoda is a packaged tourism commodity, characterised by a seductive combination of potent mythology, physical effort and perceived risk. and the journey offers a unique travel experience for those who wish to ‘get off the beaten track’. there are no mobile phones, laptops, televisions, roads or cars on the track and many tourists relish an opportunity to go back to basics and ‘get away from the hustle and bustle of normal life’.65 the ‘simple life’ of villagers, that appeared so much in contrast to their own, was often romanticised by trekkers. warren, 29, was profoundly affected by locals that ‘live with so little but are so happy in life’.66 in contrast, belinda, 41, was ‘under no illusion as to the lives they lead’, but admired their ‘beautiful positive outlook in life’, admitting: ‘i found myself envious at times’.67 in contrast to those seeking an escape from consumer culture, many trekkers enjoy the social currency and prestige that comes from undertaking such an iconic journey. as travel became democratised over the late twentieth century, where one travelled increasingly came to represent status and identity. both male and female trekkers agreed that the fact that kokoda was a ‘unique travel experience that not many have undertaken’ was an important motivator (rating average 4.04). warren, 29, said that ‘none of my friends had done it and only a few thousand people in the world had done it’ was ‘one of the motivating factors to do the trek’.68 far from being off-putting, the barriers to walking the track are major drawcards. josh, 22, insisted that: ‘i wouldn’t have it any other way’ because ‘if it was going to be an easy and comfortable holiday then everyone would do it’.69 that increasing numbers of tourists could potentially threaten this exclusivity was not apparent in testimonies, an absence that sits in contrast to a recent news articles arguing that ‘kokoda is the new bali’, or that ‘it seems everyone either knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, or has a story about someone who has done the trek’.70 a journey along the track does not public history review | hawkins 16 just provide an opportunity for australian tourists to affirm belonging to a shared national identity: it offers a way to assert difference and individuality. personal development was not cited in surveys as a primary reason for trekking. however, the overwhelming majority of written testimonies speak about personal transformation and change. tony, 50, walked the track with his two sons hoping the lessons learned would translate to their future success. he thought that ‘perhaps in later adult life when others say they can’t do something… they will develop the internal strength to understand that if they can complete the kokoda trek, they can do anything that they are prepared to set their minds to’.71 similarly bette, 51, believed that ‘i emerged physically and psychologically stronger. i'm a lot more confident and calmer, even after four years’.72 several deemed the trip as completely life changing. steve, 31, stated that ‘looking back, the trek was the beginning of a new chapter in my life and only good things have come from that chapter’.73 while the trauma experienced by australian soldiers during the kokoda campaign left an indelible mark on many, few tourists questioned the appropriateness of re-creating this journey as commemoration. paul, 35, walked the track with his father in memory of his grandfather who served in papua new guinea during the second world war. he admitted that his grandfather ‘suffered mentally from the whole thing’ and ‘probably would have called us “bloody fools” for doing it’.74 historian eric leed has argued that travel can function as a test, stating that ‘in the difficult and dangerous journey, the self of the traveller is impoverished and reduced to its essentials, allowing one to see what those essentials are’.75 the physical and mental challenge of kokoda is an archetypal classical heroic or epic journey in which the test is not damaging to the individual, but results in increased stature and certainty of self.76 heroic journeys are generally associated with masculinity but testimonies suggest that this discourse has been appropriated by women at kokoda, for whom personal development narratives resonated far more strongly than men. while 36.7 per cent of women stated that ‘personal transformation and growth’ was ‘extremely important’, only 14.3 per cent of men agreed. similarly, 26.7 per cent of women thought that trekking as a ‘journey of self discovery’ was ‘extremely important’ compared to 15.6 per cent of men. jessica, 31, remarked: ‘i didn’t do it so public history review | hawkins 17 much for the history’; ‘kokoda was, for me, a journey of self discovery. i chose to do it to push my personal limits and see if i could achieve something so great’.77 for some the journey can even provide transcendence: 33.3 per cent of women felt that trekking as a ‘spiritual journey’ was ‘extremely important’, compared to 7.8 per cent of men. tourism studies recognise that women tend to face more constraints than men in seeking access to leisure time due to the fact they may occupy several roles – mother, caregiver, housekeeper, career – and may feel they have less time for, or fewer claims to, autonomous leisure. 78 tourism is also a commodity and several scholars have examined the relationship between consumer capitalism and spirituality arguing that empowerment for western women often equates to the power to spend on themselves.79 my own analysis concurs in that trekking kokoda can represent self-definition and independence for australia women. while survey data does not support the same kind of connection for male trekkers, their written testimonies, which frequently include words such as ‘achievement’, ‘transformation’ and ‘life-changing’, indicate that men are not excluded from personal development narratives, but are less likely to categorise the experience as such. the publicity generated from trekking kokoda has led to the journey becoming a popular method of raising awareness of and funds for charities. the challenge of completing the track ‘against all odds’ has inspired several trekkers to overcome disability or injury to make the journey. paralympian kurt fearnley crawled the track in ten days in 2009 to raise money for men’s health groups beyondblue and movember.80 in 2011 a group of sight-impaired trekkers completed the journey to raise money for guide dogs australia, followed soon after by several australian servicemen as part of their rehabilitation from debilitating battle injuries sustained in afghanistan.81 the idea has become so popular that many tour operators have developed in-house charity and fundraising services. these journeys evince innovative ways in which the mythology surrounding the kokoda campaign has been appropriated to represent symbolic battles against cancer, disability and mental illness. the kokoda trekking industry has been linked to elite sports from early in its development. australian football league (afl) team, the sydney swans, walked the track in 2000, well before it had become a mainstream tourist destination. and since this time the journey has public history review | hawkins 18 become a common pre-season training exercise for professional sporting teams.82 for australians who wish to ‘challenge fitness and stamina’, the 96km journey across the owen stanley ranges can represent the ultimate endurance obstacle course: 71.9 per cent of trekkers agreed that this was ‘extremely important’ or ‘very important’ in their decision to make the journey (rating average 3.84). all trekkers are required to undergo health checks in australia and commit to a preparatory training regime. for alex, 44, the journey was ‘an excuse for a real adventure and to get fit’.83 in contrast, sam, who trekked kokoda with his father, believed that ‘to turn the track into an endurance race is somewhat defeatist on military history’.84 several testimonies indicated that not all tourists found trekking as difficult as they expected. charlotte, 28, stated: ‘i mostly went for my own fitness challenge but i personally didn't think it was that hard’.85 the physical intensity of the journey is a core aspect of kokoda’s mythology but testimonies reveal that this attribute is sometimes contested. kokoda is a highly personal journey for each trekker but sharing the experience with others is also a distinctive feature. david, 42, felt that ‘perhaps the most important aspect of the kokoda experience was to share it with someone you are close to’.86 several parents made the journey with their children, or mentioned they would like to bring them when they were older. the hardships of the trek mean that strangers quickly forge strong and lasting friendships. thomas, 66, met some ‘very close friends’ on his journey. peta, 23, revealed that ‘today i still regularly catch up with these people as the bond we built was very strong’.87 the relationship building aspect of the trekking experience has been commodified by tour operators who offer executive leadership programs to corporate clients and opportunities to host business meetings and retreats on the track.88 the desire to ‘develop leadership and team building skills’ appealed to a niche group of trekkers (rating average 2.64). the strength of the track as social experience, however, is truly epitomised by ‘singles kokoda’, a tour product designed to bring together like-minded individuals to find love on the track.89 conclusion the meanings attributed to sites of war and remembrance by historians are most often examined within the context of national identity but kokoda is not easily categorised. the experience of trekking kokoda cannot be separated from its history as an australian battle site and its public history review | hawkins 19 popularity is undoubtedly linked to the resurgence of anzac. however, trekker testimonies reveal that meanings australian tourists associate with the journey extend far beyond australian national identity. the kokoda track represents a heroic journey, outside the constraints of everyday life, and it follows that the single most popular motive for tourists was to ‘undertake an adventure’, rather than ‘remember the anzacs’. trekking offers tourists a potent synthesis of a physical and mental challenge, alongside a life affirming national mythology of ‘success against all odds’. there is no archetypal trekker. while male, middle-aged, university educated trekkers were overrepresented in survey results, the journey also appeals to female trekkers who are more likely to associate their experience with aspirational goals of self-improvement and transformation. the result is a fascinating manifestation of the ‘anzac spirit’ in consumer culture, where aspirational individual characteristics are harnessed to reflect contemporary personal development narratives. at the centre of this lies an uncomfortable paradox: while trekkers flock to kokoda with the aim of self-improvement, many of the soldiers who served in the campaign returned to australia as broken men. endnotes 1 hank nelson, ‘gallipoli, kokoda and the making of national identity’, journal of australian studies, vol 21, no 53, 1997, pp157-69; hank nelson, ‘kokoda: the track from history to politics’, the journal of pacific history, vol 38, no 1, 2003, pp109-27; hank nelson, ‘kokoda: pushing the popular image’, the journal of pacific history, vol 45, no 1, 2010, pp89-104. 2 henry reynolds and marilyn lake (eds), what’s wrong with anzac? the militarisation of australian history, new south wales press, sydney, 2010, pp32-36. 3 for a historiography of the anzac legend see graham seal, inventing anzac: the digger and national mythology, university of queensland press, st lucia, 2004. 4 richard white, inventing australia: images and identity 1688-1980, george allen & unwin, sydney, 1981, p128. 5 bruce scates et al, ‘anzac day at home and abroad: towards a history of australia’s national day’, history compass, vol 10, no 7, 2012, p528; paul ashton and paula hamilton, history at the crossroads: australian and the past, hlastead press, sydney, 2010, pp48-9. 6 michelle arrow, 'the making history initiative and australian popular history', rethinking history: the journal of theory and practice, vol 15, no 2, 2011, p153-74; anna clark, ‘politicians using history’, australian journal of politics and history vol 56, no 1, 2010, pp120-31; anna clark, history’s children: history wars in the classroom, unsw press, sydney, 2008. 7 jay winter, remembering war: the great war between memory and history in the twentieth century, yale university press, michigan, 2006, p277. 8 for an early critique of the anzac legend see manning clark, a short history of australia (volume 5), heinemann, london, 1981. for a contemporary critique see reynolds and lake, op cit. public history review | hawkins 20 9 the anzac spirit, nd, returned and services league of australia wa branch incorporated (online). available: http://www.rslwahq.org.au/commemoration/anzac-day/anzac-spirit.aspx (accessed 23 january 2013). 10 ken inglis, ‘return to gallipoli’, in john lack (ed), anzac remembered: selected rememberings of k.s. inglis, university of melbourne, melbourne, 1998 (originally published 1966); ken inglis, 'the australians at gallipoli', historical studies, vol 14, 1970, part i, pp219-30 and part ii, pp361-75; ken inglis, ‘gallipoli pilgrimage 1965’, journal of the australian war memorial, vol 18, 1991, p20. see also ken inglis, ‘the anzac tradition, meanjin quarterly, vol 24, no 1, 1965, pp25-44. 11 scates’ original study of gallipoli tourists, published in 2002, drew upon 200 testimonies. in 2006, scates expanded his findings into a book which drew upon 700 testimonies administered over a ten-year period. see bruce scates, ‘in gallipoli’s shadow: pilgrimage, memory, mourning and the great war’, australian historical studies, vol 33, no 119, 2002, pp1-21; bruce scates, return to gallipoli: walking the battlefields of the great war, cambridge university press, new york, 2006. 12 scates, ‘in gallipoli’s shadow’, p2. 13 stuart ward and mark mckenna, ‘“it was really moving mate”: gallipoli pilgrimage and sentimental nationalism in australia’, australian historical studies, vol 38, no 129, 2007, pp141-51. 14 john mcquilton, ‘gallipoli as contested commemorative space’, in jenny macleod (ed), gallipoli: making history, frank cass, london, 2005, pp150-58; bart ziino, ‘who owns gallipoli? australia’s gallipoli anxieties 1915-2005’, journal of australian studies, vol 30, no 88, 2006, pp1-12; caroline winter, ‘battlefield tourism and australian national identity: gallipoli and the western front’, in elspeth frew and leanne white (eds), tourism and national identity, taylor and francis, hoboken, 2011, pp176-89; brad west, ‘enchanting pasts: the role of international civil religious pilgrimage in reimagining national collective memory’, sociological theory, vol 26, no 3, sept 2008, pp258-70. 15 critiques of pilgrimage as a category of analysis have emerged from the discipline of tourism with increasing frequency since the 1990s. nelson graburn, ‘tourism: the sacred journey’, in valene smith (ed), hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism, university of philadelphia press, philadelphia, 1989, pp21-36; valene l. smith, ‘the quest in guest’, annals of tourism research, vol 19, 1992, pp1-17; simon coleman and john elsner, pilgrimage, harvard university press, cambridge, 1995; simon coleman, ‘do you believe in pilgrimage?’, anthropological theory, vol 2, no 3, 2002, pp355-68; peter margy, ‘secular pilgrimage: a contradiction in terms?’, in peter jan margy (ed), shrines and pilgrimage in the modern world: new itineraries into the sacred, amsterdam university press, amsterdam, 2008; noga collins-kriener, ‘the geography of pilgrimage and tourism: transformations and implications for applied geography’, applied geography, vol 30, no 1, 2010, pp153-63. 16 graburn, op cit, p28. 17 several scholars have argued that modern pilgrimages are a response to a growing emphasis on psychological self-enhancement in the modern world. elizabeth weiss-ozorak, ‘the view from the edge: pilgrimage and transformation’, in william h. swatos jr (ed), on the road to being there: studies in pilgrimage and tourism in late modernity, brill publishing, boston, 2006; z. bauman, 'from pilgrim to tourist – or a short history of identity’, in stuart hall and p. du gay (eds), questions of cultural identity, sage, california, 1996, pp19-38. 18 kenneth f. hyde and serhat harman, ‘motives for a secular pilgrimage to the gallipoli battlefields’, tourism management, vol 1, no 9, 2011, pp1-9. 19 don watson, recollections of a bleeding heart: a portrait of paul keating pm, random house, sydney, 2002, p183. 20 imre salusinszky, 31 october 2008, ‘keating rejects gallipoli identity’, the australian (online). available: public history review | hawkins 21 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/keating-rejects-gallipoliidentity/story-e6frg8nf-1111117906152 (accessed 20 january 2011). 21 mark forbes, 15 august 2002, ‘kokoda: a battle that offered hope’, the age (online), 15 august 2002. available: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/14/1029113955945.html (accessed 15 september 2010). 22 nelson, 2010, p104. 23 ibid, p89. 24 nelson, 2003, p118; peter stanley, invading australia: japan and the battle for australia, viking, camberwell, 2008. 25 alan powell, the third force: angaus new guinea war 1942-46, oup australia, sydney, 2003; liz reed, ‘part of our own story: representations of indigenous australians and papua new guineans within australia remembers 1945-1995 – the continuing desire for a homogenous national identity’, oceania, vol 69, 1999, pp157-69. 26 j. carlsen, ‘the economic significance of the trekking on the kokoda track, png in 2011’, report to the kokoda track authority, curtin sustainable tourism centre, curtin university, perth, p4. 27 charlie lynn, 15 february 2006, ‘kokoda – a neglected jungle shrine’, adventure kokoda blog (online). available: http://blog.kokodatreks.com/2006/02/15/kokoda-a-neglected-jungleshrine/#more-474 (accessed 25 march 2011). 28 kokoda trail – trek permits sold per annum, data source kokoda track authority (kta). 29 survey design was a careful process involving an examination of several studies across a range of disciplines. after compiling a draft survey, i undertook a pilot study and finalised survey design in response to feedback obtained during this process. the self-administered online survey was hosted at www.mykokoda.com.au and promoted using a press release, twitter (@mykokoda), online trekker forums and a flyer distributed in png. 30 although my survey data is based on a non-representative sample, demographic data correlates closely with simone grabowski’s representative sample of trekkers. simone grabowski, ecotrekking: a viable development alternative for the kokoda track?, bachelor of management (honours) in tourism thesis, university of technology, sydney, 2007. 31 self-selection bias is the distortion caused when the sample chooses itself. as a result, certain characteristics can be over-represented because they correlate with the willingness to be included. see anthony veal, research methods for leisure and tourism: a practical guide, pearson education, england, 2006. 32 marilyn lake, ‘mission impossible: how men gave birth to the australian nation – nationalism, gender and other seminal acts’, gender and history, vol 4, no 3, autumn 1992, p310. 33 genevieve lloyd, ‘selfhood, war and masculinity’, in carole pateman and elizabeth gross (eds), feminist challenges: social and political theory, allen and unwin, sydney, 1986, pp68-75; marilyn lake and joy demousi, gender and war: australians at war in the twentieth century, cambridge university press, melbourne, 1995. 34 carmel shute, ‘heroines and heroes: sexual mythology in australia 1914-1918', hecate, vol 1, no 1, 1975, p7; liz reed, bigger than gallipoli: war, history and memory in australia, university of western australia press, perth, 2004, p74. 35 d. kerstetter, j. confer and a. graefe, ‘an exploration of the specialisation concept within the context of heritage tourism’, journal of travel research, vol 39, no 3, feb 2001, p269. 36 john swarbrooke and colin beard, adventure tourism: the new frontier, butterworth-heinemann, oxford, 2006. 37 nelson, 1997, p151. public history review | hawkins 22 38 adventure kokoda newsletter, issue 11 july 2008, miss world australia treks kokoda (online). available: http://newsletter.kokodatreks.com/011july_2008.html#1 (accessed 12 july 2012). 39 john, age 47, male. 40 adele horin, 6 november 2004, ‘a walk on the wild side’, sydney morning herald (online). available: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/05/1099547386308.html?from=storylh s (accessed 6 august 2011). 41 rania ghandor, ‘cronulla to kokoda: an aussie sense of belonging’, the west australian, 6 july 2007, p5. 42 sam, age 44, male. 43 ken inglis, sacred places: war memorials in the australian landscape, melbourne university publishing, victoria, 2008, p413. 44 rachel, age 34, female. 45 andy, age 43, male. 46 joanne, age 50, female. 47 george, age 52, male. 48 jason, age 40, male. 49 tours led by australian guides are generally priced up to $5000. however, several major tour companies now offer ‘self-guided’ tours led by local guides under $3500. png led treks, nd, kokoda historical (online). available: http://www.kokodahistorical.com.au/index/index.php/tours/png-led-tours (accessed 24 september 2012). 50 paul connerton, how societies remember, cambridge university press, london, 1989. 51 jennifer iles, 'encounters in the fields – tourism to the battlefields of the western front', journal of tourism and cultural change, vol 6, no 2, 2008, pp138-54. 52 tim, age 39, male. 53 sarah, age 27, female. 54 david lowenthal, the heritage crusade and the spoils of history, viking, london, 1996, pxi. 55 scott, age 36, male. 56 david lowenthal, ‘fabricating heritage’, history and memory, vol 10, no 1, spring 1998, p13. 57 pat, age 41, male. 58 peter, age 37, male. 59 jack, age 53, male. 60 helen, age 28, female. 61 bobby, age 35, male. 62 john hall and anne-marie hede, ‘evolving nationalism through tourism and consumer emotion: an exploratory study of a visit to the gallipoli peninsula for the commemoration of anzac day’, middlesex university business school academy of marketing conference, 4-6 july 2006, middlesex university press, london, 2006. 63 graham seal, ‘anzac: the sacred in the secular’, in makarand paranjape (ed), sacred australia: post-secular considerations, clouds of magellan, melbourne, 2009. 64 elizabeth weiss ozorak, ‘the view from the edge: pilgrimage and transformation’ in w. swatos, jr. (ed), on the road to being there: studies in pilgrimage and tourism in late modernity, brill, leiden, 2006, p61. 65 ian, age 46, male. 66 warren, age 29, male. 67 belinda, age 41, female. 68 warren, age 29, male. 69 josh, age 22, male. 70 rory gibson 6 september 2010, ‘kokoda trek's become the new bali’, courier-mail (online). available: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/kokoda-treksbecome-the-new-bali/story-fn5hj8hz-1225914693120 (accessed 20 april 2011). malcom quekett 6 october 2009, ‘kokoda walk hard yakka, but uplifting’, the west public history review | hawkins 23 australian (online). available: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/travel/a//travel/6207777/kokoda-walk-hard-yakka-but-uplifting/ (accessed 20 april 2011). 71 tony, age 50 male. 72 bette, age 51, female. 73 steve, age 31, male. 74 paul, age 35, male. 75 eric j. leed, the mind of the traveler: from gilgamesh to global tourism, basic books, new york, 1991, p8. 76 ibid p.36. 77 jessica, age 31, female. 78 karla henderson, ‘one size doesn’t fit all: the meanings of women’s leisure’, journal of leisure research, vol 28, no 3, 1996, pp139-54; erica wilson and donna e. little, ‘the solo female travel experience: exploring the geography of women's fear’, current issues in tourism, vol 11, no 2, 2008, pp167-86; kathleen butler, ‘independence for western women through tourism’, annals of tourism research, vol 22, no 2, 1995, pp487-89. 79 kathryn lofton, ‘practicing oprah; or, the prescriptive compulsion of a spiritual capitalism’, journal of popular culture, vol 39, no 4, 2006, p599. 80 ‘fearnley completes kokoda crawl’, 18 november 2009, sbs world news (online). available: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1134687/fearnley-completeskokoda-crawl (accessed 5 july 2011). 81 annie guest 22 july 2011, ‘injured soldiers take inspiration from kokoda’, abc pm radio (online). available: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3275857.htm (accessed 1 august 2011). 82 patrick lindsay, the spirit of kokoda: then and now, hardie grant books, victoria, 2005, p12. 83 alex, aged 44, male. 84 sam, age 37, male. 85 charlotte, age 28, female. 86 david, age 47, male. 87 thomas, age 66 , male and peta, aged 23, female. 88 conference on the kokoda track, nd, adventure 1000 (online). available: http://www.adventure1000.com.au/corporate-programview.php?program_id=3> (accessed 1 august 2011). 89 singles kokoda, nd, adventure 1000 (online). available: http://www.adventure1000.com.au/kokoda-programs.php (accessed 5 january 2011). sense or nonsense?: new zealand heritage legislation in perspective greg vossler public history review, vol 13, 2006, pp66-85 o appreciate the current position that historic heritage assumes in new zealand and other comparable western societies,1 it is important to understand that heritage protection and management largely occurs within a legislative framework established by government. peter james suggests that the role legislation plays in this process is basically one which ‘provides penalties for use against people if they follow a particular course of action’ and that the ‘powers to impose penalties and the enabling powers which allow governments to disburse monies for conservation purposes are the only real roles of the law in the conservation process’.2 this view, however, overlooks a further key role that legislation assumes – the creation of the legal context within which administrative practice is influenced and informed. this is not to say that legislation is always clear in its purpose or easy to interpret. as michael pearson and sharon sullivan observe, the extent to which heritage related laws, for instance, are effective is largely dependent on ‘the quality and comprehensiveness of the legislation, the zeal and wisdom with which it is implemented, and the adequacy of the administrative and technical systems and financial resources supporting it’.3 however, in the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of an interesting dichotomy within many western democracies that has had a pronounced impact on the effectiveness of heritage legislation and its implementation. this dichotomy, david butts suggests, can be characterised as follows: on the one hand governments generally recognize the importance of cultural identity in creating a sense of community and the importance of preserving heritage as a part of that cultural identity. on the other hand the dominant political philosophy advocates a more confined role for central and local government, privatisation of government enterprises, and reliance on competition in the market place to determine value. added to this is the t public history review, vol 13, 2006 67 traditional concept of the rights of the owner of property, particularly rights of landowners, to determine what happens to their property.4 within new zealand this dichotomy is also evident. brett jones notes, for instance, that historically two ‘philosophies’ appear to have influenced the development of its heritage legislation: the ‘first is that it should respect the community’s right to protect such places. the second is that it uphold the freedom of the rights of the property owner to do what they [sic] will with their [sic] property’.5 it is this latter ‘philosophical’ position, however, that generally poses the greatest challenge to legislators. as peter james observes, ‘one of the main bodies of public opinion opposed to most conservation legislation is the property owning and developing lobby. there are obvious reasons, on the face of it, for such opposition because it is the business of those who own and develop property to make money from doing so’.6 any legislation that has at its core an objective to protect places of identified heritage value is, on balance, likely to impinge on the rights of private owners. given the general reluctance of many governments to introduce legislation that interferes with such rights, a precautionary approach is often applied by legislators. to begin to understand and appreciate how legislation affects or influences the way in which we protect and manage our historic heritage it is important, therefore, to recognise that it is inevitably political in nature and, as a corollary, subject to the excesses and vagaries associated with political processes operating at the national, regional and local levels. balanced against this, though, is the need to appreciate that heritage legislation, in whatever guise, is still ‘an expression of the community’s wish for [heritage place] management, and, if properly written or used, is a useful tool’.7 with these sentiments in mind this article will focus on some of the principal statutes affecting historic heritage protection and management in new zealand. historic heritage protection: the new zealand legislative landscape8 the conclusion that can be drawn from a cursory examination of new zealand’s current legislative ‘landscape’ is that the number of statutes that impact on historic heritage is very limited. closer inspection, however, reveals quite the contrary. in reality the range of legislation which either directly or indirectly influences the protection and management of historic heritage is extensive,9 and includes such obvious examples as the resource management act 1991 (rma) and historic places act 1993 (hpa) through to somewhat more obscure statutes as the burial and cremation act 1964.10 in light of the breadth of this legislation, what follows is an attempt to identify some of the more important legislative signposts to assist the process of reading and negotiating this ‘landscape’. public history review, vol 13, 2006 68 resource management act 199111 the rma, along with the hpa and the conservation act 1987 (ca), comprise the ‘key legislation by which the government provides for the protection and management of the historic and cultural heritage of new zealand’.12 the rma came into effect in october 1991 and heralded a significant turning point for land use planning. it not only ushered in the concept of ‘sustainable management’, but redefined how natural and physical resources such as land (inclusive of buildings), air and water are to be managed. inherent within this redefinition is a strengthened legal imperative that requires those exercising policy or decision making powers under the act to actively afford protection to places of identifiable heritage value. (i) purpose and principles the purpose of the rma is ‘to promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources’ [s.5(1)]. included within the ambit of these resources are ‘land, water, air, soil... and all structures’.13 to achieve this purpose the act requires any person14 with responsibilities for managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources to ‘recognise and provide for’ the following matters of national importance:15 • the protection of outstanding natural features and landscapes from inappropriate subdivision and development [s.6(b)]; • the relationship of maori to their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands, water, sites, waahi tapu, and other taonga [s.6(e)];16 • the protection of historic heritage from inappropriate subdivision, use and development [s.6(f)];17 and • the protection of recognised customary activities [s.6(g)].18 within the context of the rma historic heritage is defined as ‘those natural and physical resources that contribute to an understanding and appreciation of new zealand’s history and cultures, deriving from any of the following qualities: archaeological, architectural, cultural, historic, scientific, and technological; and includes: historic sites, structures, places and areas; archaeological sites; sites of significance to maori, including wahi tapu; and surroundings associated with the natural and physical resources’ [s.2].19 in addition to these matters of national importance other matters that those exercising responsibilities must ‘have particular regard’ to include: • kaitiakitanga [s.7(a)];20 and • the maintenance and enhancement of amenity values [s.7(c)].21 public history review, vol 13, 2006 69 overarching these specific requirements is a further obligation to take into account the principles of the treaty of waitangi [s.8].22 (ii) administration the primary agencies responsible for giving effect to the purpose and principles of the rma are regional councils and territorial local authorities.23 the specific accountabilities allied with each of these tiers of local government are outlined in ss.30 and 31. of particular relevance to historic heritage protection and management is the requirement that: • regional councils establish, implement and review ‘objectives, policies and methods to achieve integrated management of the natural and physical resources of the region’ [s.30(1)(a)], and prepare ‘objectives and policies in relation to any actual or potential effects of the use, development or protection of land which are of regional significance’ [s.30(1)(b)]; and • territorial local authorities establish, implement and review ‘objectives, policies and methods to achieve integrated management of the effects of the use, development or protection of land and associated natural and physical resources of the district’ [s.31(1)(a)]. the vehicle by which these functional requirements are implemented is through regional policy statements, regional plans and district plans. regional policy statements and plans are prepared and administered by regional councils, while district plans are prepared and administered by territorial local authorities. (iii) protective measures the protection of historic heritage under the rma is generally facilitated through the policy and regulatory framework contained in policy statements and plans or through the use of heritage orders.24 at the regional level, policy statements and plans provide a means to identify and protect historic heritage considered to be nationally or regionally significant, 25 or which is in or on any foreshore or seabed in the coastal marine area.26 they also act as a mechanism to ensure that such places are appropriately protected in district plans prepared by constituent territorial local authorities.27 at the territorial level, the ‘effects of the use, development and protection’ of historic heritage are generally managed through the identification of important places or areas in a schedule or register annexed to a district plan, and the application of specific rules and associated resource consent processes to these places.28 the range of activities generally covered by such rules include, for example, the alteration/modification or demolition/destruction of listed buildings or sites.29 public history review, vol 13, 2006 70 where such rules exist, any application for consent to undertake work which is not directly permitted by a district plan must include, amongst other matters, an assessment of environmental effects [s.88(2)(b)]. in particular, this requires an applicant to: • provide a description of possible alternative locations or methods for any proposal that is likely to affect a recognised customary activity [cl.1a fourth schedule]; and • consider ‘any effect on natural and physical resources having aesthetic, recreational, scientific, historical, spiritual or cultural, or other special value for present or future generations’ [cl.2(d) fourth schedule]. in the course of preparing regional or district plans local authorities30 are obliged to ‘have regard to any relevant entry in the historic places register’ [ss.66(2)(c)(iia) & 74(2)(b)(iia)]. this, in turn, provides a means of ensuring that places identified in this ‘statutory’ register are not overlooked. during this process local authorities are also required to ensure that their plans: • ‘have regard to’ any management plans and strategies prepared under other legislation [ss.66(2)(c)(i) & 74(2)(b)(i);]31 • ‘recognise and provide for’ any management plan lodged for an adjoining foreshore and seabed reserve [ss.66(2a)(b) & 74(2a)(b);]32 and • ‘take into account’ any recognised planning document lodged by an iwi authority [ss.66(2a)(a) & 74(2a)(a)]. in contrast to the more ‘generic’ requirements relating to policy statements and plans, those that are associated with a notice of requirement for a heritage order are more specifically focused.33 in essence, the purpose of a heritage order is to protect: • places of ‘special interest,34 character, intrinsic or amenity or visual appeal, or of special significance to tangata whenua for spiritual, cultural or historic reasons’ [s.189(1)(a)]; and • any area of land around the place necessary to ensure its ‘protection and reasonable enjoyment’ [s.189(1)(b)]. heritage orders can only be imposed by a recognised heritage protection authority35 and have interim effect from the date that a notice is served on a territorial local authority.36 once confirmed, they are required to be included in the relevant district plan and require the approval of the heritage protection authority prior to the public history review, vol 13, 2006 71 commencement of any work, subdivision or change of use that could nullify the effect of the order [s.193]. although heritage orders are a ‘useful protection mechanism for important heritage places where there is an imminent threat of damage or destruction or where plan provisions are not sufficient’,37 they have only been sparingly applied to date. this, in turn, may be ‘attributable to the clear rights to compensation spelt out in section 198 of the act’.38 regardless of the apparent opportunities to regulate for protection of historic heritage through such mechanisms as provisions in plans and heritage orders, it is also important to recognise that such powers are not unfettered. in particular, s.32 imposes a duty on those wishing to exercise regulatory powers to undertake an evaluation to examine: • the extent to which each identified objective is the most appropriate way to achieve the purpose of the act [s.32(3)(a)]; and • whether, in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, the policies, rules or other methods proposed are the most appropriate means to achieve these objectives [s.32(3)(b)]. in carrying out this task the following factors also need to be considered: • the benefits and costs of the policies, rules or other methods proposed [s.32(4)(a)]; and • the risk of acting or not acting if there is uncertain or insufficient information about the subject matter to which these apply [s.32(4)(b)]. the net result of applying the rigour inherent in this requirement is that reliance on regulatory, as opposed to non-regulatory,39 means to protect historic heritage needs to be carefully assessed and judiciously exercised. (iv) offences and enforcement to ensure that individuals comply with the statutory requirements set out in the act, specific enforcement provisions have been incorporated to address identifiable contraventions.40 these provisions, in turn, are administered by the environment court and extend to include, for instance: • the cessation or prohibition of anything that contravenes or is likely to contravene the act, a rule in a plan or proposed plan, a requirement for a designation or heritage order or a resource consent [s.314(1)(a)(i)]; and public history review, vol 13, 2006 72 • the issuing of specific directions to enforce compliance with the act, a rule in a plan or proposed plan, a requirement for a designation or heritage order or a resource consent [s.314(1)(b)(ii)]. in the event of non-compliance, further powers available to the court include, for example, the ability to convict any person to a term of up to two years imprisonment or to impose a fine of up to $200,000 [s.339 (1)].41 historic places act 199342 the hpa 1993 represents the most recent iteration of legislation specifically directed towards the identification and protection of historic and cultural heritage.43 it primarily focuses on the establishment of a system of registration for historic places, historic areas, wahi tapu and wahi tapu areas and the control of any works that could adversely affect archaeological, maori or other relevant values associated with an archaeological site. the act also establishes the new zealand historic places trust (nzhpt) and the maori heritage council and defines their respective roles and responsibilities. (i) purpose and principles the primary purpose of the hpa is ‘to promote the identification, protection, preservation, and conservation of the historical and cultural heritage of new zealand’ [s.4(1)]. to achieve this, s.4(2) of the act requires those exercising functions and powers under it to recognise a series of principles which include, for example: • that ‘historic places44 have lasting value in their own right and provide evidence of the origins of new zealand’s distinct society’ [s.4(2)(a)]; and • that the ‘identification, protection, preservation, and conservation of new zealand’s historical and cultural heritage should take account of all relevant cultural values, knowledge and disciplines’ [s.4(2)(b)(i)]. to ensure that appropriate account is given to the treaty of waitangi the hpa contains a requirement that it ‘must continue to be interpreted and administered to give effect to the principles of the treaty of waitangi, unless the context otherwise requires’ [s.115(2)]. the act also stipulates that recognition be given to the ‘relationship of maori and their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands, water, sites, wahi tapu and other taonga’ [s.4(2)(c)]. (ii) administration although overall responsibility for administering the hpa rests with the ministry for public history review, vol 13, 2006 73 culture and heritage (mch),45 the agency that is charged with ‘full and proper attainment of the objectives of the act’ [long title] is the nzhpt. a particularly important means by which the trust endeavours to accomplish this role is through the maintenance and ongoing development of its register of historic places, historic areas, wahi tapu and wahi tapu areas [s.22].46 the register, in turn, performs an essential function in that it: • informs members of the public about places and areas of historic heritage value; • notifies the owners of these places and areas where this is required by the act; and • assists in the protection of these places and areas under the rma. although the trust assumes primary accountability for the register, proposals to include additional places or areas can be submitted by any person [s.24(1)]. the ultimate decision, however, as to whether a place or area should be entered on the register rests with the trust or the maori heritage council. in coming to a decision on this matter either body is guided by the extent to which there is clear evidence that the place or area possesses ‘aesthetic, archaeological, architectural, cultural, historical, scientific, social, spiritual, technological, or traditional significance or value’ [s.23(1)]. if a place or area is identified as embodying one or more of these attributes47 s.23(2) outlines the procedure whereby either ‘category i’ or ‘category ii’ status is assigned.48 in determining the level of importance to be applied to a particular place or area the trust is guided by a further series of criteria that includes, for example, such matters as representativeness, scientific or educational potential, ethnic or community associations, rarity, and landscape integrity [s.23(2)(a)-(m)]. in registering historic places and wahi tapu the trust is required to publicly notify the place to which the registration applies and to specifically notify the owner, any person having a registered interest in the place, and the relevant local authority.49 interestingly, there is no right of objection to the outcome of this process although this is compensated for by the fact that registration does not, in itself, confer protection over any place or area included in the register.50 with respect to the registration of historic and wahi tapu areas, the trust can make recommendations to local authorities regarding measures they should take to facilitate the conservation and protection of areas under their jurisdiction. in the event that this recommendatory function is exercised, the local authority concerned is required to ‘have particular regard to the trust’s recommendations’ [ss.31(5) & 32(5)].51 public history review, vol 13, 2006 74 (iii) protective measures protection of historic places and areas under the hpa is largely facilitated by way of heritage orders, heritage covenants, administration of archaeological authorities and interim registration. under the hpa the trust and the minister of arts, culture and heritage are identified as having specific authority to seek a heritage order under the rma for the purposes of protection [s.5].52 places over which a heritage order can be sought include: • the ‘whole or part of any historic place, historic area, wahi tapu, or wahi tapu area’ [s.5(a)]; and • any area of land surrounding these places or areas in order to ensure their ‘protection and reasonable enjoyment’ [s.5(b)]. by contrast, heritage covenants comprise a voluntary form of protection that consists of a contractual agreement being entered into between the trust and an owner, lessee or licensee of a place or area [s.6]. covenants generally include terms and conditions specific to the property and have effect in perpetuity. as they are registered on the title they ‘run with the land’ and consequently bind all subsequent property owners. in terms of archaeological sites,53 the act imposes ‘blanket’ protection over all such sites irrespective of whether they are currently registered or recorded [s.10]. the resultant effect of this requirement is that the consent of the trust must be obtained prior to any activity being undertaken which would destroy, damage or modify the whole or any part of: • any archaeological site; or • all archaeological sites within a specified area; or • any class of archaeological site within a specified area of land [ss.11 & 12]. any declaration, decision, condition or review of any decision made or imposed by the trust in relation to any such consent may, however, be appealed to the environment court [s.20].54 protection is also provided to historic places and wahi tapu under consideration for inclusion in the register [s.27]. any proposal which satisfies the trust’s test of ‘sufficient evidential proof’ enjoys interim protection from the time that it is publicly notified until either final registration is confirmed or a period of six months has elapsed [s.26(3)]. during this period the consent of the trust is required for any work or activity that has the potential to negate the effect of interim protection (eg. the public history review, vol 13, 2006 75 demolition or destruction of a place or site).55 (iv) offences and enforcement in addition to these protective mechanisms, the hpa also affords the court the power to impose a fine on any person who intentionally destroys, damages or modifies any historic place/area or wahi tapu/area that is either under the control of the trust, is an archaeological site, or which is subject to interim protection or a heritage covenant. in the case of the destruction of historic places, historic areas and archaeological sites the maximum fine that can be imposed is $100,000, while intentional damage or modification of such places attracts a maximum fine of $40,000 [ss.97-103].56 where an owner or occupier is convicted of illegally demolishing or destroying any land or place that is subject to interim protection or a heritage order, the act also authorises the court to make an order restricting redevelopment or the establishment of certain permitted activities on that land for a period of up to five years [s.105(1)]. conservation act 1987 essentially the ca establishes the department of conservation (doc) and mandates it to assume a central role in the protection and management of historic heritage located on or off any land that the department owns or administers.57 (i) purpose and principles unlike the rma and hpa there is no explicit purpose or associated principles identified in the ca. regardless of this, the long title states that it is an act ‘to promote the conservation of new zealand’s natural and historic resources’,58 and that in interpreting and administering its statutory duties and obligations doc is required to give effect to the principles of the treaty of waitangi [s.4]. (ii) administration doc is the primary administrative agent of the ca. amongst the range of functions that the department assumes under the act are: • managing land and historic places and areas that it owns or administers [s.6(a)]; • acting as an advocate for the preservation and protection of historic places and areas [s.6(b)]; • promoting the benefits associated with the preservation and protection of historic places and areas in new zealand to present and future generations [s.6(c)]; and • providing and publishing information relating to conservation [s.6(d)]. the basic means by which doc gives effect to its functional obligations is through the public history review, vol 13, 2006 76 preparation of conservation management strategies [s.17d] and associated management plans [s.17e]. together these mechanisms provide an ‘integrated’ policy framework for the management of historic resources under the control of the department. conservation management strategies are essentially conservancy based59 and identify general policies and objectives that cover the wide spectrum of work that each conservancy undertakes. as these strategies are broadly focused they do not include detailed information that relates, for example, to the management of specific historic areas located within a conservancy. this level of detail is generally addressed in any subsequent conservation management plan developed for these areas. once prepared, doc has a duty to ‘administer and manage all conservation areas and natural and historic resources’ in accordance with these strategies and plans [s.17a]. (iii) protective measures to a large extent historic places located on land owned or administered by doc are less vulnerable to the pressures experienced elsewhere due to their crown-owned status and the management obligations incumbent on the department. regardless of this, the act provides for more tailored protection of specific sites or areas through, for example, the conferral of additional protective requirements over such areas by the minister of conservation [ss.18 & 19],60 and by way of covenants [s.27], nga whenua rahui kawenata [s.27a]61 and management agreements [s.29].62 (iv) offences and enforcement like the rma and hpa, the ca includes provision for the court to impose a fine to remedy deliberate damage to any historic features located within a conservation area. the maximum that can be imposed on any individual is $10,000, while corporations are liable to a maximum fine of up to $80,000 [s.44].63 however, in the event that a fine is considered to be an inadequate penalty or deterrent, the act also empowers the court to impose a term of imprisonment of up to one year [s.44]. additionally, the ca enables the crown to forfeit any property that has been used in the process of committing an offence [s.46]. additional legislative signposts despite the important role that the rma, hpa and ca play in facilitating the protection and management of new zealand’s historic heritage, other legislation exists which also actively contributes to this endeavour. to provide some insight into the nature of these contributions, a small sample of those statutes which impact on historic heritage – the reserves act 1977 (ra), the foreshore and seabed act 2004 public history review, vol 13, 2006 77 (f&sa), the antiquities act 1975 (aa), the building act 2004 (ba) and the ngai tahu claims settlement act 1998 (ntcsa) – will now be briefly examined. reserves act 1977 the general purpose of the ra includes, amongst other matters, provision for the preservation and management of areas possessing historic, cultural, or archaeological features or values for the ‘benefit and enjoyment’ of the new zealand public [s.3(1)]. to achieve this purpose the ra enables such areas to be classified as historic and local purpose reserves. under the act historic purposes reserves are required to be administered and maintained in such a way that: • the ‘structures, objects and sites illustrate with integrity the history of new zealand’ [s.18(2)(a)]; and • where archaeological features are present they be ‘managed and protected to the extent compatible with the principal or primary purpose of the reserve’ [s.18(2)(c)].64 similarly, on local purpose reserves any historic or archaeological features present are to be ‘managed and protected to the extent compatible with the principal or primary purpose of the reserve’ [s.23(2)(a)]. accountability for administering the act rests primarily with doc65 although the minister of conservation is empowered to vest reserves in ‘administering bodies’ such as local authorities [s.26(1)]66 and to appoint such bodies to control and manage reserves that are vested in the crown [ss.28-30]. in order to ‘provide for and ensure the use, enjoyment, maintenance, protection, and preservation’ of reserves, the ra requires that every administering body prepare a management plan for every reserve under its control [s.41(1)]. the act also identifies mechanisms to secure the protection of land that is considered to be of importance to the public and/or maori. these include conservation covenants to protect private land which possesses identifiable historic, cultural or archaeological qualities [s.76] and nga whenua rahui kawenata [s.77a].67 to encourage compliance the ra contains penalty provisions that are intended to deter interference with, or damage to, any ‘recreational, scenic, historic, scientific or natural features’ within a reserve [s.94(1)(m)]. where an individual commits any such offence on a nationally important reserve the act permits the imposition of a term of imprisonment not exceeding three months or a maximum fine of $2,500. on all other reserves the potential term of imprisonment is reduced to one month or a fine not exceeding $500 can be imposed [s.103(a)].68 public history review, vol 13, 2006 78 forshore and seabed act 200469 the principal objective of the f&sa is to ‘preserve the public foreshore and seabed in perpetuity as the common heritage of all new zealanders’ [s.3]. to achieve this the act provides for the ‘recognition and protection of ongoing customary rights to undertake or engage in activities, uses or practices in areas of the public foreshore and seabed’ [s.4(b)]. customary rights are rights that have been continuously exercised over an area and which predate the assumption of crown ownership.70 the act codifies common law and provides for the recognition of these rights in the form of customary rights orders.71 antiquities act 197572 the intent of the aa is to ‘provide for the better protection of antiquities,73 to establish and record the ownership of maori artifacts74 and to control the sale of artifacts within new zealand’ [long title]. the act is administered by the ministry for culture and heritage (mfch) and concentrates on three key areas:75 • determining the ownership and custody of artifacts; • regulating the trade of artifacts; and • placing limitations on the export of antiquities. with respect to the matter of export, the removal of any antiquity from new zealand without a written certificate of permission from the chief executive of the mfch is illegal and subject to the imposition of a fine not exceeding $100,000 [s.5].76 in terms of ownership and custody, the act clearly specifies that any artifact found in new zealand is ‘prima facie the property of the crown’,77 including any artifact found during the course of an archaeological investigation under the hpa [s.11].78 however, in circumstances where an artifact is ‘recovered from the grave of any person or persons whose identity is known’, the maori land court assumes jurisdictional authority [s.11(1)]. the maori land court also has jurisdiction to decide traditional ownership of an artifact.79 particular matters that it is empowered to make a determination on include custodial entitlement, the status of a recovered article (that is, whether or not it is an artifact) and the vesting of an artifact in any person for the purposes of preservation and safekeeping [s.12].80 restrictions are also imposed on the sale or disposal of artifacts with those authorised to engage in their purchase being limited to registered collectors, public museums or the offices of a licensed auctioneer or secondhand dealer [s.13].81 building act 2004 amongst the range of matters that the ba endeavours to provide for is the public history review, vol 13, 2006 79 establishment of appropriate building standards to ensure that ‘people who use buildings can do so safely and without endangering their health’ [s.3(a)], and that buildings are ‘designed, constructed and able to be used in ways that promote sustainable development’ [s.3(d)]. to achieve this, those charged with the exercise of any function, duty or power under the act are required to ‘take into account’ the need to ‘facilitate the preservation of buildings of significant cultural, historical or heritage value’ [s.4(2)(l)]. one of the primary ways in which this requirement is given effect is through territorial local authorities issuing project information memoranda (pims) to building owners contemplating any work that requires a building permit [s.32]. information to be provided includes the heritage status (if any) of the building to which the permit applies [s.35(1)(a)(i)]. the inclusion of this information in a pim not only provides a means of drawing to the attention of property owners the existence and importance of heritage buildings located on their property, but also provides a useful catalyst to encourage specialist advice to be sought prior to lodgement of a building consent.82 where an application for a pim relates to any building work that will affect a ‘registered historic place, historic area, wahi tapu, or wahi tapu area’ the territorial local authority is also required to advise the nzhpt [ss.35(1)(f) & 39].83 to ensure that buildings remain ‘safe’, the ba contains specific requirements relating to those considered to be ‘earthquake prone’.84 in particular, the act requires territorial authorities to adopt a policy on earthquake prone buildings inclusive of a statement as to how the policy will apply to heritage buildings [s.131]. the intent of this statement is to outline how the territorial authority intends to manage heritage buildings in light of the particular set of considerations and constraints affecting these buildings including:85 • meeting the requirements of the hpa; • dealing with owners and the nzhpt; • considering the different needs of private and public owners of heritage buildings; and • providing incentives for owners to upgrade their buildings. ngai tahu claims settlement act 199886 the general statutory intent of the ntcsa is to ‘record the apology given by the crown to ngai tahu in the deed of settlement executed on 21 november 1997’ and to ‘give effect to certain provisions of that deed of settlement’ [long title]. included amongst the provisions addressed within the ntcsa is an acknowledgement by the crown of the statements made by te runanga o ngai tahu regarding the cultural, spiritual, historic and traditional association of ngai tahu with a number of identified statutory areas [s.206].87 public history review, vol 13, 2006 80 to ensure that effect is given to this statutory acknowledgement the ntcsa requires that relevant local authorities, the environment court and the nzhpt ‘have regard to’ ngai tahu interests in relation to the management of the statutory areas identified. consequently, in the course of deliberating on such matters as: • parties likely to be affected by a resource consent application; • parties from whom written approval must be sought for non-notified consent applications; and • legal standing before the court. consideration must be given by these agencies to whether the application relates to a statutory area over which te runanga o ngai tahu has a vested interest [ss.208210].88 conclusion what is evident from this overview is that there currently exists within the new zealand legislative landscape a myriad of statutes that impinge on historic heritage. the seemingly disassociated nature of this ‘framework’ of legislative provisions stimulated reviews in the 1990’s that called for the adoption of a more integrated approach to the protection and management of historic heritage, particularly with respect to the rma, hpa and ca.89 as a result of these reviews amendments have been included in the rma, and changes proposed to the hpa, that attempt to promote better integration between these statutes and strengthen the imperative to protect historic heritage through such instruments as policy statements and plans. the effectiveness of these changes, however, will only become apparent as these planning instruments are reconsidered in light of the enhanced requirements. endnotes 1 for the purpose of this article the term ‘historic heritage’ assumes the same meaning as that defined in section 2 of the rma 1991. 2 peter james, a guide to the legal protection of the national estate in australia as at 31 december 1994, australian government publishing service, canberra, 1995, pp3-4. 3 michael pearson and sharon sullivan, looking after heritage places: the basics of heritage planning for managers, landowners and administrators, melbourne university press, melbourne, 1995, p35. 4 david butts, ‘institutional arrangements for cultural heritage management in new zealand: legislation, management and protection’, in c. michael hall and simon mcarthur (eds), heritage management in new zealand and australia: visitor management, interpretation and marketing, oxford university press, auckland, 1993, pp171-172. 5 brett jones, ‘saving our cultural heritage – historic buildings: a critical interpretation of new zealand legislation, its usage, and policy recommendations for the future’, unpublished ma thesis, university of auckland, 1994, p39. 6 peter james, p6. 7 pearson and sullivan, p37. public history review, vol 13, 2006 81 8 as well as the protective provisions currently embedded in new zealand law the government is also a signatory to the unesco convention on the protection of the world cultural and natural heritage. 9 the investigation into historic and cultural heritage management in new zealand that was undertaken by the office of the parliamentary commissioner for the environment in 1996 identified a total of 20 statutes that either provided for, or impacted upon, historic heritage protection. 10 additional statutes identified in parliamentary commissioner for the environment, historic and cultural heritage management in new zealand, parliamentary commissioner for the environment, wellington, 1996, ppa7-a14 include: conservation act 1987; environment act 1986; reserves act 1977; national parks act 1980; the building act 1991 (superceded in 2004); earthquake commission act 1993; queen elizabeth the second national trust act 1977; new zealand walkways act 1990; gaming and lotteries act 1977; museum of new zealand te papa tongarewa act 1992; antiquities act 1975; treaty of waitangi act 1975; local government official information and meetings act 1987; te ture whenua maori/maori land act 1993; state-owned enterprises act 1986; valuation of land act 1951; and waitangi national trust board act 1932. 11 this section incorporates relevant changes introduced by the rm amendment act 2003 (rmaa 2003), the rm (foreshore and seabed) amendment act 2004 (rm(f&s)aa 2004) and the rm amendment act 2005 (rmaa 2005). 12 parliamentary commissioner for the environment, pa7. 13 the term ‘structures’ is further defined under s.2 as ‘any building, equipment, device or other facility made by people which is fixed to land’. 14 the definition of ‘person’ in s.2 of the rma is quite wide ranging in scope and includes ‘the crown, a corporation sole, and also a body of persons whether corporate or unincorporate’. obvious examples of important entities in relation to historic heritage include the department of conservation and city, district and regional councils. 15 despite the strong protective bias embedded within these sections of the act, environment court judge shonagh kenderdine cautions that ‘under the attributes of sustainable management the protection of historic heritage is not an absolute’. sourced from shonagh kenderdine, heritage landscapes: developing legislative frameworks which allow for protection and change, proceedings of the looking forward to heritage landscapes conference, dunedin, 2005, p39. 16 harry allen suggests, however, that maori are ‘poorly served by heritage conservation’ and that the procedures and institutions established by such statutes as the rma do not take wide enough account of maori needs. he points out that a ‘multiplicity of places of significance to maori are forced into categories such as wahi tapu or historic place’ which, in turn, end up being ‘managed through a legalistic process that has more to do with property rights than with negotiated outcomes’. sourced from harry allen, protecting historic places in new zealand, department of anthropology, university of auckland, 1998, p10. 17 geraldine baumann and claire heather observe that although historic heritage has been elevated to a s.6 matter ‘it is yet to be seen the difference this change in the rma will bring to the preservation of historic heritage. current district plans will in due course have to be reconsidered in light of the new emphasis required’. sourced from geraldine baumann and claire heather, ‘protecting historic heritage’ in rob harris (ed), handbook of environmental law, royal forest and bird protection society, wellington, 2004, p505. 18 recognised customary activities were introduced into the act through the rm(f&s)aa 2004. they are defined in s.2 as ‘any activity, use, or practice carried on, exercised, or followed under a customary rights order’. a customary rights order is an order imposed by either the maori land court or the high court over an area of the public foreshore and seabed to recognize a particular activity, use or practice that has been carried out on an area of the public foreshore and seabed since 1840 [refer ss.2, 50 & 74 f&sa 2004]. 19 the rma is the only statute that specifically refers to and defines historic heritage. by contrast, the hpa and ca refer to places that contribute to new zealand’s historic and cultural heritage as ‘historic places’ and ‘heritage resources’ respectively. 20 generally refers to the exercise of guardianship. 21 these are defined in s.2 of the rma as ‘the natural or physical qualities or characteristics of an area that contribute to people’s appreciation of its pleasantness, aesthetic coherence, and cultural and recreational attributes’. 22 the court of appeal in new zealand maori council v attorney general [1987] 1 nzlr 641 established that there are two core principles associated with the treaty – ‘partnership’ and ‘active protection’. the former includes the obligation on the part of both the crown and maori to act reasonably, honourably and in good faith, while the latter involves the crown actively protecting the interests of maori to use their lands and waters to the fullest extent practicable. 23 the term ‘territorial local authorities’ includes both city and district councils. aside from the rma territorial local authorities also play an important role in interpreting and implementing a number of other statutes referred to in this paper including, for example, the hpa, ra and ba. 24 recognised customary activities are an exception. regardless of any restrictions in a plan that might apply to these activities, they can commence without a resource consent where they are (1) carried out by a member of public history review, vol 13, 2006 82 a tribal group that is the holder of a customary rights order or are their authorised nominee and (2) in accordance with any controls imposed by the minister of conservation [s.17a]. 25 most of the regional policy statements that have been prepared to date include a section relating to historic heritage but as the report prepared by the parliamentary commissioner for the environment, 1996, p34, observes: they generally ‘do not develop issues significantly beyond what is currently undertaken by territorial authorities in the region’. it is important to note here, however, that a major exception is the auckland regional council which has assumed a key management role in the auckland region in the areas of inventory, evaluation, resource consent processes and policy development. 26 under s.12(g) any activity that will ‘destroy, damage or disturb any foreshore or seabed (other than for the purpose of lawfully harvesting any plant or animal) in a manner that has or is likely to have an adverse effect on historic heritage’ is restricted unless it is permitted by a rule in a regional coastal plan or resource consent approval has been obtained. 27 district plans are required to ‘give effect to any regional policy statement’ [s.75(3)(c)] and to be consistent with any associated plan prepared by a regional council to assist it with the exercise of its statutory functions [s.75(4)(b)]. 28 although this is the principal method that has been historically relied upon by territorial local authorities to protect historic heritage, it is important to recognise that neither the methods used nor the level of protection provided within a district plan is stipulated in the rma. the ultimate determination of these matters rests with councils and their respective communities through the consultation and decision making process allied with plan development. 29 however, under s.85a of the rma regional and district plans are not allowed to describe an activity as permitted if it is likely to have a significant adverse effect on a recognised customary activity. section 107a(1) further requires that any consent application received by a local authority to do anything that will, or is likely to, result in a significant adverse impact on such activities be declined unless the written approval of the holder of the customary rights order has been obtained. 30 the term ‘local authority’ encompasses both territorial local authorities and regional councils. 31 like, for instance, the conservation act 1987, reserves act 1977 and local government act 2002. 32 the primary purpose of a foreshore and seabed reserve is to recognise the exercise of guardianship by the applicant group and to enable the area concerned to be held for the common use and enjoyment of the general public. 33 refer ss.187-198 of the rma. 34 this includes places that have special cultural, architectural, historical, scientific, ecological or other interest. 35 under s.187 of the rma recognised heritage protection authorities include ministers of the crown, local authorities, the nzhpt and any relevant body corporate approved by the minister for the environment. 36 the date on which the interim effect of a notice of requirement for a heritage order ceases to apply is either the day on which the notice is withdrawn by the heritage protection authority/cancelled by the environment court or the order is included in a district plan. 37 new zealand historic places trust, heritage management guidelines for resource management practitioners, new zealand historic places trust, wellington, 2004, p20. 38 brent nahkies, the economics of heritage buildings: a contribution to the historic heritage management review, new zealand historic places trust, wellington, 1998, p18. 39 non-regulatory means include, for example, rating relief; access to grants aid and low interest loans; provision of information and advice; and reduction or waiving of financial contributions or fees. 40 refer ss.314-321 of the rma. 41 regardless of the perceived severity of such penalties their effectiveness as a disincentive to non-compliance is questionable. in terms of the redevelopment of a prime central city site, for example, the imposition of a $200,000 fine for the illegal demolition of a building of historic heritage value is likely to have a minimal impact on return and may end up being significantly less than the holding costs associated with proceeding by way of a consent process. 42 at the time of writing parliament is considering a bill to amend the hpa. to aid understanding of the impact of the proposed changes included in the historic places amendment bill 2004 (hpab), reference to specific amendments that are relevant to the content of this section are incorporated into the following endnotes. 43 preceding acts of parliament include the historic places act 1954, the historic places amendment acts of 1963 and 1975 and the historic places act 1980. 44 under s.2 of the hpa an historic place is defined as: (a) any land (including an archaeological site); or any building or structure (including any part of a building or structure); or any combination of land a building or structure that forms part of the historical and cultural heritage of new zealand and lies within the territorial limits of new zealand; and (b) includes anything that is in or fixed to such land. in order to clarify that the definition covers more than one associated building or structure the hpab proposes to include a further category as follows: ‘any combination of land, buildings or structures and associated buildings or structures (including any part of those buildings or structures, or associated buildings or structures) [pt.1, cl.3(1)]. 45 the mch is the principal heritage policy advisor to the crown. it also supervises and monitors, on behalf of the crown, the purchase agreement for heritage management services provided by the trust. public history review, vol 13, 2006 83 46 the nzhpt cultural heritage planning manual (1994) notes that the category of historic place not only applies to buildings but that it also includes trees, cemeteries, industrial structures and gardens. additionally, given the broad definition of ‘historic place’ and ‘wahi tapu’ contained in s.2 of the hpa it is possible for buildings located on a marae, for instance, to be considered under either category. 47 it is useful to note here that a place or area does not have to satisfy all of the criteria contained in s.22(1) and may be considered for entry in the register where only one of these criteria has been met. 48 under s.22(3)(a) category i places are defined as those which are of ‘special or outstanding historical or cultural heritage significance or value’ while those in category ii are defined as places which are of ‘historical or cultural heritage significance or value’. 49 in response to a review of registration undertaken by professor peter skelton in 2004 the hpab proposes a number of amendments to ensure more consistent notification and submission processes for proposals [ie. pt.1, cls.9-16]. 50 the principal regulatory means by which protection is achieved is through either district plans or heritage orders. 51 the hpab presently before parliament takes this one step further by proposing that the imperative ‘shall have particular regard’ be replaced with ‘must have particular regard’ [pt.1, cl.13, new s.32d(3)]. 52 the process by which a heritage order can be imposed on a historic place or area is set out in ss.187-198 of the rma. 53 these are defined under s.2 of the hpa as inclusive of any place that was either ‘associated with human activity that occurred before 1900’ or is the ‘site of the wreck of any vessel where that wreck occurred before 1900’ and ‘which is or may be able through investigation by archaeological methods to provide evidence relating to the history of new zealand’. 54 to help clarify when an archaeological consent commences the hpab proposes that any authority granted not take effect until either the relevant rights of appeal have expired or all appeals have been resolved [pt 1, cl.5, new s.20a(1)(a)]. 55 refer to ss.194 & 195 of the rma. 56 refer endnote 30. 57 in spatial terms the land area owned or administered by doc comprises approximately 30%-35% of the total land area of new zealand. 58 under s.2 of the ca the term ‘conservation’ is defined as ‘the preservation and protection of natural and historic resources for the purpose of maintaining their intrinsic values, providing for their appreciation and recreational enjoyment by the public, and safeguarding the options of future generations’, while the term ‘historic resource’ is defined as ‘historic place within the meaning of the historic places act 1993; and includes any interest in a historic resource’. 59 new zealand is divided into a total of 13 doc conservancy areas. 60 this would primarily be achieved through the declaration of an area as a ‘conservation park’. under s.19 of the ca every such park is required to be managed in such a way that ‘its natural and historic resources are protected’. 61 nga whenua rahui kawenata is a form of covenant entered into between the crown and maori that is applicable to land that is either in maori ownership or crown land that is held by maori under a crown lease. its basic purpose is to provide for the management of any such land so as to preserve and protect either the historical value or the spiritual and cultural values that maori associate with it. 62 these include agreements, contracts or arrangements made between the minister of conservation and any other person in order to ensure that the conservation of a historic place located on his or her property is carried out. 63 as these penalties generally apply to offences that have occurred on land which is part of the conservation estate they have the potential to be more effective than those that apply under the rma and the hpa as the potential for pecuniary gain is much more limited. 64 it is important to note here, however, that any work relating to an archaeological feature located on a historic reserve would also need to comply with the relevant provisions of the hpa. 65 the ministry for the environment, however, is charged under s.31(c)(i) of the environment act 1986 with providing the government, government agencies and other public authorities with advice on the application, operation and effectiveness of the ra 66 other bodies identified under s.2 of the ra include, for example, any board, trustees, society, association, or voluntary organisation. 67 refer endnote 45. 68 where an offence is committed by a corporation, the maxima for fines relating to national and other reserves is increased to $5000 and $1000 respectively. in addition to the imposition of a fine or a term of imprisonment for any transgression, s.94(6) of the ra provides that a person may also be liable to pay for the damage incurred. 69 also refer to the preceding section on the rma as the amendments introduced by way of the resource management (foreshore and seabed) amendment bill 2004 provide the principal means by which customary rights are afforded protection. public history review, vol 13, 2006 84 70 ministry of justice, main elements of the foreshore and seabed act: customary rights, 2004, www.justice.govt.nz/foreshore/main3.html 71 refer to endnote 16 above for the definition of customary rights orders. 72 at the time of writing parliament is considering a bill to amend the aa. the intent of the protected objects amendment bill (poab) 2005 is to provide, amongst other matters, a more precise definition of protected new zealand objects subject to export regulation, and to prohibit the permanent export of protected objects that are of such significance that their export would diminish the nations cultural heritage. to aid understanding of the impact of the proposed changes included in the poab, reference to specific amendments that are relevant to the content of this section are incorporated into the following endnotes. 73 the term ‘antiquities’ generally applies to movable objects which include, for instance, artifacts, books, diaries, letters, photographs, film, pictures, animals, plants, minerals, meteorites, bones and feathers of extinct species, and aircraft or shipwrecks which are over 60 years of age [s.2]. the poab proposes to delete reference to the term ‘antiquity’ in the principal act and to replace it with ‘protected new zealand object’. this is defined as ‘an object forming part of the moveable cultural heritage of new zealand that (a) is of importance to new zealand, or to part of new zealand, for aesthetic, archaeological, architectural, artistic, cultural, historical, literary, scientific, social, spiritual, technological or traditional reasons and (b) falls within one or more of the categories of protected objects set out in schedule 4. the categories of objects identified in schedule 4 include, for example, art objects; maori cultural objects; new zealand archaeological objects; science, technology, industry, the economy and transport objects; and social history objects. 74 the term ‘artifact’ as defined under s.2 of the aa is very wide in scope and includes ‘any chattel, carving, object, or thing which relates to the history, art, culture, traditions, or economy of the maori or other preeuropean inhabitants of new zealand and which was or appears to have been manufactured or modified in new zealand by any such inhabitant, or brought to new zealand by an ancestor of any such inhabitant, or used by any such inhabitant, prior to 1902’. the poab proposes to delete reference to the term ‘artifact’ in the principal act and to replace it with ‘taonga tuturu’. this is defined as an object that relates to maori culture, history or society; was, or appears to have been manufactured or modified in new zealand by maori or; was brought into new zealand by maori or used by maori; and is more than 50 years old. 75 ministry for culture and heritage, administering the antiquities act, 2003, www.mch.govt.nz/antiquities 76 a similar regime is proposed for ‘protected new zealand objects’ under the poab [s.5(1)]. however, in determining an export application the chief executive of the mfch must consult two or more expert examiners [s.7b(2)]. if in the course of assessing an application they conclude that the object is ‘of such significance to new zealand or part of new zealand that its export would substantially diminish new zealand’s cultural heritage’, they are required to recommend to the chief executive that the application be declined [s.7d]. the bill also strengthens the penalty provisions for export infringements. any offence committed by an individual will be subject to either a fine not exceeding $1000 or a term of imprisonment not exceeding 5 years, while any offence committed by a body corporate will be subject to a fine not exceeding $200,000 [s.5(2)]. 77 this presumption is included in the aa to prevent newly discovered artifacts falling directly into private ownership. 78 when an artifact is found s.11(3) of the aa requires that the chief executive of the mfch to be notified within 28 days of the find or the completion of archaeological field work. once notified the chief executive has discretion to determine whether the person who discovered the artifact should be given custody or whether custody should be granted to a public institution such as a museum. any person who contravenes this requirement is subject to a fine not exceeding $500. however, under the poab this maxima is proposed to be increased to $10,000 for an individual, and $20,000 for a body corporate, for each taonga tuturu discovered. 79 the application of the maori land court’s jurisdiction is currently governed by the provisions of s.30(1)(f) of the maori affairs act 1953. the poab proposes to instead link the exercise of the court’s power to s.30 (and any other relevant provision) of the te ture whenua maori act 1993. this change has the potential to enhance the processes available to the court when considering the ownership of taonga tuturu. 80 the maori land court is also empowered under s.12(2) to make an order prohibiting the sale of any artifact that was gifted according to maori custom and usage. 81 any person who contravenes this requirement is liable to a fine not exceeding $1000. however, under the poab this maxima is proposed to be increased to $10,000 for an individual, and $20,000 in the case of a body corporate, for each taonga tuturu sold. 82 it is also important to note that any building that has been identified as having ‘heritage status’ is also likely to require both a building consent under the ba and a resource consent under the rma for any work proposed. 83 although the ba imposes a clear duty on territorial authorities to inform the nzhpt of applications for pims and building consents it does not entitle the trust to make submissions on such applications and does not constitute a surrogate means of protection. 84 refer s.122 of the ba and the associated regulations that define ‘moderate earthquake’. this definition is more comprehensive than its 1991 predecessor and now extends to include all buildings excluding small residential dwellings. 85 department of housing and building, earthquake-prone building provisions of the building act 2004: policy guidance for territorial authorities, department of building and housing, wellington, 2005, p.10. public history review, vol 13, 2006 85 86 further examples of related legislation include: ngati turangitukua claims settlement act 1999, pouakani claims settlement act 2000, te uri o hau claims settlement act 2002, ngati ruanui claims settlement act 2003, ngati tama claims settlement act 2003, ngati awa claims settlement act 2005 and ngati tuwheratoa (bay of plenty) claims settlement act 2005. 87 statutory areas are defined by s.205 as ‘areas, rivers, lakes, and wetlands described in schedules 14-77, 100-104, and 108, the general description of which are indicated on the s.o. plans referred to in these schedules’. included amongst the range of statutory areas identified in these schedules are, for example, aoraki/mount cook, lake wanaka, mata-au (clutha river), te ana-au (lake te anau), okarito lagoon, and the waihola/waipori wetland. 88 this is achieved through the inclusion of amending provisions to the rma and hpa set out in ss.223-229 of the ntcsa. 89 these include an investigation into historic and cultural heritage management undertaken by the office of the parliamentary commissioner for the environment in 1996 and a ministerial review of historic heritage management initiated by government in 1998. galleylina public history review vol 22 (2015): 1-7 issn: 1833-4989 © 2015 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. going public, going global: teaching public history through international collaborations na li n july 2014, the first public history faculty training program in china took place in shanghai, as a result of partnerships between shanghai normal university and princeton university. the program covered many areas of common ground in chinese and american cultures, including public history and public/social memory, oral history, museums, archives, urban landscapes, historic preservation, new media, civic engagement, curriculum design and program development. the original objective was to introduce participants to the field of public history, conceptually, practically and pedagogically. the two-week collaborative endeavor also offered opportunities for student and faculty exchanges in an intensely cross-cultural context, which i https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | li 2 provided valuable perspectives on how public history is interpreted differently in two cultures. while collaboration is a regular component of public history programs, going global poses further challenges. first, language barriers and cultural misunderstanding create confusion – even breakdowns – throughout the collaborative process. second, different pedagogic philosophies make some basic assumptions in our field not so basic. sharing authority, for example, does not come easily in classrooms that have long been dominated by one authoritative voice. third, it is difficult to provide valid intellectual justification for training in public history if the field is attached to a strictly market-driven economy and services a commercial vision. fourth, different sets of legal and ethical concerns sometimes complicate, if not stifle, genuine dialogue. thinking about possible ways to address these challenges, i initiated a working group on the issue of teaching public history through international collaborations for the national council on public history 2015 annual meeting. jann warren-findley, the original co-facilitator, and i met in chongqing in november 2014 to lay out the basic framework for this panel. with extensive experience in public history projects outside the united states, jann had been actively involved in building up the partnership between arizona state university’s public history program and sichuan university’s american studies program since 2010. her unexpected death in january 2015 left us many unstated yet valuable lessons. rebecca conard, a veteran public historian leading a successful public history program at middle tennessee state university, generously offered her help. rebecca and i worked together and convened the working group on teaching public history through international collaborations at the national council on public history meeting in nashville, tennessee, in april 2015. objectives we have had four objectives for this working group. our first was to understand specific public history projects in a cross-cultural context, and discuss the possibilities of maturing the collaborative efforts into cases for teaching public history. second, we aimed to utilize local resources to create cross-cultural public history projects, such as museums, archives and urban preservations, and address specific challenges in these collaborations. third, we aimed to understand the broad framework that drives the conversations to move from local to global, when they sometimes become, counter-intuitively, more narrowly focused and end with the simplified label ‘cultural differences’. public history review | li 3 finally, we aimed to tease out factors that help sustain international collaborations, as most public history projects are catalytic, instead of conclusive. six participants and the audience produced a thoughtful and productive discussion in nashville. we asked the participants to add further intellectual strength, and turn their case statements into short articles, four of which follow.1 like the first public history faculty training program in china, these collaborative efforts take place as the field of public history starts to take an international turn in the twenty first century. the ensuing four articles, covering britain, south africa, morocco and brazil, tackle different public history issues, at various scales, in specific international settings. taken together, they contribute to the four goals listed above. quartet elizabeth catte discusses her experience as a foreign heritage worker on the isle of man, a small, quasi-independent island in the middle of the irish sea. she argues that the isle of man deploys what it sees as a universally accessible and consumable heritage brand as a way to create social stability among a diverse and rapidly changing population by offering opportunities to forge a shared identity through the celebration of its unique culture. her analysis of cultural difference, definition of community, understanding of civic engagement and heritage construction intricately links with her own national and cultural identity. britney ghee takes us to ghana. she examines her international experience as a researcher and an intern working in the national museum of ghana. her obroni analysis emphasizes the importance of self-reflection when examining museum narratives and challenges the current method of creating individual exhibitions and then fitting them into the museum’s larger narrative. she discusses the importance of understanding the history and development within international discourses of public history in order to truly collaborate. she also notes that, for collaborations to flourish, each contributor must understand and appreciate the differences within public historiographies to truly understand where approaches converge and diverge. both elizabeth catte and britney ghee have directly engaged in public history projects in cultures outside the united states. their pieces raise many transnational issues that deserve a close reading by those who are interested in working on international public history projects. critiquing ‘authorized heritage discourse’ on the isle of man, elizabeth catte pens her argument on the conflicting priorities in branding the public history review | li 4 island’s heritage in the global economy, and how a sense of ‘otherness’ permeates and shapes its identity. the author’s own identity as an outsider gives her a critical distance to observe and to participate, and it may also make the reader wonder how her ‘foreign’ status affects her focus of observations and subsequent interpretations. similarly, walking us through the five sections in the national museum of ghana, britney ghee’s obroni – foreigner or non-african – perspectives also raise the identity issue. the ghana experience humbles her, and her concluding thoughts about ‘approaching issues with cultural differences in mind’ seem quite fitting. as a part of her thesis research, her piece suggests further potential for developing quality international internships in regular public history programs. richard harker’s discussion on museums connect, a program funded by the us department of state and administered by the american alliance of museums that sponsors transnational museum partnerships, takes up the challenges we face in international collaborations at a different scale. his article, with detailed analysis of the projects involved two university museums – the museum of history and holocaust education (mhhe) in the united states and the ben m’sik community museum (bmcm) in morocco – from 2009 to 2012, suggests a model for teaching public history in a transnational context. an unbalanced power distribution, for example when one partner possesses significantly more professional expertise, presents challenges to a sustainable relationship. in harker’s work, we see actual collaborations take place at institutional levels, which epitomizes and challenges the very idea of ‘sharing authority’ in all phases and details. to sustain a complicated transnational partnership such as museum connect, public historians need extra humility, as he cautions, ‘it is naïve to assume ideas of one culture to be uncritically absorbed by another culture’. among many challenges in museum connect, richard harker tangentially discusses language barriers and cultural misunderstandings that can make or break international collaborations. karina esposito takes up this point, and explores further. she analyzes the immigration of confederates to brazil during and after the civil war, and how the descendants residing in brazil today remember and commemorate their american, brazilian and confederate heritage. she notes that language barriers and cultural misunderstanding often affect cross-cultural identity, memory and commemorative practices, and advocates a global perspective in teaching public history. pedagogically, she encourages students to take on subjects with a transnational perspective, to interpret primary sources and understand multinational historiographies. public history review | li 5 reflections despite different worldviews, social traditions and geographic focus, public history issues are often arrestingly similar across cultures. issues revealed in the four articles echo my own experience of working on behalf of a chinese university with an american university on the public history faculty training program. both sides spent a lot of time communicating and adjusting draft programs, trying to work the best out of mutual interests. time differences, institutional bureaucracies, different planning landscapes and expectations all posed challenges. during the two-week program, i also encountered many ‘surprises’. a visit to nanjing massacre memorial hall, for example, provoked an animated debate. displaying the actual bones of the victims in the recently re-designed memorial hall generated ‘cultural wars’ between chinese and american participants. for chinese, those bones were authentic artefacts, powerful forensic evidence to prove the massacre actually happened. for americans, the graphic display constituted a shameful disrespect for the dead. here we were not struggling for a frontal attack on the controlling and univocal official narratives in a particular culture, but for a public space that engages different cultural voices. as someone who has regularly travelled between the united states and china, i realized that if the program had been conducted in a purely chinese setting, with an emotional assumption of a shared community, the issue would never have come out. it became a source of cultural conflict in the transnational dialogues, with certain historical messages confused or lost when cultural values crisscrossed. so what do we need in international collaborations? points that come readily to mind include: mutual research interests and complementary expertise on the project; institutional commitment, which sustains collaboration cross-cultural skills, which involve a genuine respect for a different culture, a solid grasp of both cultures involved in the project, language fluency and cultural sensitivity and political savvy, which refers to the practical intelligence to negotiate among power differentials and dynamics in a politically charged environment. public history review | li 6 these skills need to be acquired through ‘shoving the dirt’. we cannot expect those who have never travelled outside one’s own country to demonstrate genuine ‘cross-cultural’ sensitivity. it is easy to talk about respecting another culture, but action takes more than a willingness of heart. yet, like other skills, respect gets easier with practice. here the responsibility lies primarily with someone with a cross-cultural background to work as a gatekeeper, a facilitator or a negotiator. also, the pedagogical implications encourage public history educators to develop international collaborative projects or internships. the ‘comparative public history, us and uk’ program at the university of south carolina, a residential program (england field school) based in north yorkshire, england, stands as an excellent example. this thirtyyear-old program reinforces many issues revealed in this special section. l o o k i n g a h e a d this special section presents neither a comprehensive nor a balanced picture of international collaborations on public history. part of the challenge in in-depth discussions on teaching public history through international collaborations lies in the fact that very few collaborations are truly international. dialoguing with public historians in another country may provide valuable perspectives, and possibly comparative lessons. yet conversations do not equal actual practices. transplanting public history experience from one culture to another does not automatically render it ‘international’. as public history is collaborative in nature, it is also deeply local and contextual. this raises the concern about how far we can go in international collaborations. when it comes to the challenges, we seem to ask more questions than provide answers. looking ahead, we need more well-researched analysis on issues related to legal and ethical concerns, social values and cultural idiosyncrasies, institutional expectations and pedagogical implications. while it remains to be seen whether many developing collaborations will mature into successful cases for teaching public history, public history remains collaborative and it continues to push back its borders, be they national, cultural or disciplinary. acknowledgements the national social science of china (project number: 14xss007) and interdisciplinary research projects in humanities and social sciences, chongqing university (project number: cdjkxb14008) funded my travel to nashville in april 2015 for this working group. the author would like to thank paul ashton for his patient guidance and valuable advice through the entire process of preparing this special section. public history review | li 7 endnotes 1 i asked the authors to either describe a particular circumstance at a greater length than was allowed by the case-statement structure, with an illustration or two if appropriate, or argue a particular point with more focus and clarity. i appreciate all four authors’ willingness to revise their drafts in response to my comments and to those of reviewers selected by the editors of public history review. galleybastian public history review vol 21 (2014): 45-69 issn: 1833-4989 © 2014 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. records, memory and space: locating archives in the landscape jeannette a. bastian n 1989, my family and i experienced a powerful category five hurricane with winds reaching 160 miles – 250 kilometres – per hour. this was on a tropical island in the caribbean – a highly hurricaneprone area – where the weather was always warm, the trees always in bloom and the landscape lush and green. like typhoons in the pacific, hurricanes move at varying speeds and often they can stall and almost stop while their winds relentlessly pound and destroy everything within their reach. such was the case with this particular hurricane, hugo, which lingered over the island for more than twelve hours. when we finally emerged from the ruins of our house we found an unfamiliar world. not only were buildings destroyed, telephone poles torn down, power lines blown away, but all the leaves had been stripped from the i https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | bastian 46 trees and bushes, flowers had disappeared, even the grass was all gone. from a familiar green and colourful vista we were now in an alien brown and black landscape. over the next several months as we walked and drove around the island, particularly on those roads close to home, we felt disoriented and kept losing our way. familiar landmarks, both natural and man-made, had disappeared. we could not adapt to this new environment. we felt disturbed and uncomfortable. the lack of green leaves and the black twisted fallen branches turned the once-familiar trees and bushes into strange and unfamiliar objects. the roads were crowded with small birds, refugees from the leafless trees with no place to hide. as the months passed, our feeling of disorientation did not re-adjust, change or dissipate. we continued to feel uncomfortable and lose our way. it was not until almost a year after the hurricane when leaves and flowers began to reappear, trees grow back, power lines were restored and the birds began nesting again, that a feeling of comfort and personal stability began to return. our internal landscape, our very personal memory map, our inner archive, our ‘maps made in the heart,’1 once more harmonized with our physical surroundings – restoring a sense of place and most importantly our own sense of our place. introduction landscape and place were pivotal themes in the centennial ‘shaping canberra’ conference held at the australian national university in september 2013. the contours of the pre-colonial terrain as well as its later purpose-built configurations permeated much of the discussion, as did motifs of archives – as maps, records, and traces – and memory – as personal, collective and cultural. the relationships between collective remembrance, personal identity and historical trace emerged as tightly bound to geography and the sense of place. ‘constancy of place,’ writes sociologist eviatar zerubavel, ‘is a formidable basis for establishing a strong sense of sameness. even as we ourselves undergo dramatic changes both individually and collectively, our physical surroundings usually remain relatively stable. as a result, they constitute a reliable locus of memories and often serve as a major foci of personal as well as group nostalgia.’2 connecting our external location with our internal sense of ourselves, implicitly suggests that the reverse is also the case. as in the case of the hurricane hugo and the subsequent sense of dislocation, when the place is no longer constant and our physical surroundings no longer stable, our personal memories as well as our collective memories undergo traumatic unease. or as public history review | bastian 47 cuban author antonio benitez-rojo writes, ‘one’s identity is, in more than one sense, one’s sense of one’s place. who i am is a function of where i am or where i think i am.’3 the connections between memory and landscape, their relationship to archival records as deep, broad testimonies over time in a wide variety of formats and manifestations, and the implications of these relationships for personal and collective identity, is the focus of this essay first presented as a keynote address at the shaping canberra conference. how records help to define our place within a landscape, ground our ability to locate ourselves and our communities within the larger topography and fuel our collective identity and sense of our cultural selves is explored here from the perspective of archives. linking archives, memory and landscape, this article considers a series of questions and attempts to address some of them: how do archivists and scholars who concern themselves with archives think about place and its relationship to records? why and how is place archival? how are those archival relationships expressed and what do they signify for the people inhabiting that space? what are the memory implications of the relationship between place, archives and community and how are traditional archives both the products of place as well as influencers themselves upon the landscape? and as the presence of the national archives in canberra suggests, the archives of place also cannot be divorced from the politics and power structures of place. questioning whose archives and whose memories define the narrative and whose story of place is being told and privileged is also central to this discussion. expanding the sense of place beyond the personal to the communal, historian william turkel notes that, ‘deciphering the material evidence of human imprints on the earth – or ‘reading the landscape’ –is ‘a humane art, unrestricted to any profession, unbounded by any field.’4 the landscape, therefore, can itself be considered as a text that is continually shaped and re-shaped, a collection of information amassed and redefined over centuries and millennia, layered records of the relationship between the land and its occupiers. but in any interrogation of the links between archives and social phenomena, a cautionary note is also in order. any interrogation is likely to be a multi-faceted process with ambiguous results. archives themselves are not neutral but rather subject to the contexts in which they were created, the perspectives of the creators and the circumstances under which they are interpreted. as communities construe their own spaces, their members often refer to archival records to support their public history review | bastian 48 interpretations, while others, standing outside a particular community or even within the same one may read those same spaces and those same records in very different ways. whose interpretation takes precedence is continually challenged and under siege; the predominant stories and the master narratives compete with the less acknowledged minor narratives for recognition. the archives, the records we have created about ourselves and the records that others have created about us, are always contested terrain. adding to this ambiguity, it is also important to note that throughout history, records are often cast in both benign and sinister roles, used to support and undergird community memory as well as to dominate and restrict a population.5 in these dual roles, the archive may appear as a two-faced mask with memory and cultural heritage on one side, and control on the other, ironically, the same records can serve both roles at once – and often do – as any visit to a national archives with its exhibits of treaties and constitutions reflecting both the winners and the dispossessed demonstrates. but at the same time, these very portrayals also reaffirm the power of archives in defining and locating peoples and nations.6 however, they are read and interpreted, archives are not the unbiased records of events. the fact that they are written by a person or a government to record or reflect particular events or transactions inevitably signals that they are always written from a point of view, out of a particular context, through a distinct lens. but that lack of neutrality does not mean that some truth, or many truths are not there. how archivists think about archives and place archives and archival theory are inherently implicated in the sense of place and location and, by inference, in identity and cultural memory. how have archivists traditionally understood and expressed these multiple relationships? and how have the postmodern definitions of ‘the archive’ that have gained significant purchase within academic disciplines over the past two decades influenced this understanding? archives are often thought of first as physical places, often buildings, sometimes spaces within buildings. the term ‘houses of memory,’ to describe the archives was coined in 1991 by then president of the international council on archives, jean-pierre wallot. by ‘houses of memory,’ wallot referred to the treasures of our past contained within archival institutions, where, he maintained, archivists are the holders of the 'keys to collective memory.’7 he suggested that archives could be both physical spaces and memory spaces. as physical spaces, they stored public history review | bastian 49 and held their contents, as memory spaces they were the containers of the collective memory of their use and their users and of their own creation and institutional past. as both physical and memory spaces they stood as symbolic representations of particular values or ideas. more recently, historical geographers writing in the archival literature have noted that, ‘it is, after all, its very physicality – its location in cartesian space, its shelving, the cataloguing systems, its quietness and capacity to promote a sense of solitude, and not least, its ambience – that helps to “define” an archive.’8 academic interest in ‘the archive’ developed largely in the late twentieth century, initially inspired by the publication of jacques derrida’s archives fever.9 for these scholars, as for archivists, the physical image of a memory house also seems to be an apt metaphor for an archives, one that arises naturally from derrida’s tracing of the word ‘archive’ to the greek word ‘arkheion’ meaning the house or domicile of a superior magistrate where legal documents were housed.10 disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and history have taken a variety of views of the ‘archive,’ for example envisioning it as a ‘sealed, special kind of place from which authenticity and history is judged,’ one that, ‘combines notions of power, durability, origins place and authority,’11 or as giving ‘physical existence to history, for in them [archives] alone is the contradiction of a completed past and a present in which it survives, surmounted. archives are the embodied essence of the event.’ 12 although there is a growing archival literature exploring the connections between archives and memory,13 archivists have not tended to engage directly with the relationship between archives and place or landscape perhaps because ‘place’ and location is implicit both in archival theory as well as within the archives (both the physical archives as well as the archival records) themselves as sites of both history and community.14 but in addition to buildings, place and archive are connected physically in other ways. the first ‘place’ that the word ‘archives’ often conjures, for example, is a cobwebbed attic or a damp and mouldy basement. historian carolyn steedman, in her parody/nod to derrida, equates archives fever with the dust raised by the scholar working feverishly in the archive. she writes, ‘archives fever proper lasts between sixteen and twenty-four hours, sometimes longer… you think in the delirium: it was their dust i breathed in.’15 even though today ‘archive’ has acquired a multitude of other shapes and formats, we still tend to think of archives as old documents – often static, dead, and generally of value primarily to historians and genealogists, located in physical spaces. in reality, while records or public history review | bastian 50 archives are of course those traditional primary documents, manuscripts and photographs, they are also the current emails, digital images, blogs, tweets and facebook pages that we personally create every day, as well as the electronic files, forms, data and records created by the state. rather than static entities, archivists tend to see all records – both personal and state generated – as dynamic, part of an ever-evolving continuum, always in a state of creation, open to new interpretations and offering new dimensions of meaning depending on who is reading them, under what conditions and where. this is particularly true in australia, where archivists have been at the forefront of developing archival strategies around the virtual and evolving relationships between records and society.16 for archivists, finding the synergy between archives and landscape begins with context and relationships, about the places in which the archival records were generated and about locating the records in space, time and authorship. who created these records, where, when and under what circumstances? whether it is the family scrapbook, government memoranda or a database of vital records, without a frame of reference, the records are meaningless. provenance or ‘the context of creation’, are the terms that archivists use to describe these relationships and they are crucial, in both their physical and intellectual manifestations, to determining how archives are located within the larger social framework. core archival principles also reflect this concern, with context becoming a critical factor on many levels of organizing and describing records. in the relationship between archives, memory and place, it is through understanding contexts and locations that the actions and events reflected through the records create a coherent and trustworthy narrative. in my home state of massachusetts, for example, state law mandates that town records must remain in the towns in which they were created. no matter the age of the records or of the town, records cannot be sent to the central state archives. massachusetts has 351 towns, many of them established in the 1600’s. each of these towns, no matter the size, include a municipal clerk’s office where vital statistics – births, deaths and marriages, land transactions, construction permits, sewerage lines and other town activities are recorded and maintained. few of the towns have archives buildings. town records may be, and often are, kept in basements, in offices building, or even in the town clerk’s home. while, on the one hand, the placement of these archival materials presents a continuing preservation concern for archivists and historians, on the other hand, their placeness within the environment that created them assures not only that they will remain among the population whom they public history review | bastian 51 are about, but that they will also remain within the environment in which they are most meaningful and where they continue to tell the narrative of the town. place in archival theory and practice keeping records close to the place where they were created has long been a central archival practice reflecting both the practical recognition that records not only mirror the place and population that created them, but also that it is through the records of their communities and groups that people develop and hone their collective memory and their own sense of place and identity. historical societies, community archives and local history rooms in public libraries all reflect this relationship between people, place and archives. ‘place,’ notes public historian delores haydon, ‘is one of the trickiest words in the english language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid. it carries the resonance of homestead, location, and open space in the city as well as a position in the social hierarchy.’17 archivists call the principles underlying context, custody and provenance. custody refers to the succession of families, or persons or government offices who own or hold a collection of materials from the moment they are created.18 being able to demonstrate an unbroken chain of custody or ownership in a court of law, whether it is a land claim or some other type of suit, is critical to establishing the integrity, authenticity and reliability of a particular group of records. the location or the persons who physically hold the records in a specific place is an essential element in the legitimacy of the records themselves, in the validity of the records as evidence. for example, generations of birth records of the citizens of those small massachusetts towns held in the same place in which they were first issued not only establishes a chain of community identity, but also constitutes legal evidence. these records may enhance collective memory but, importantly also support inheritance claims. provenance, closely related to custody, refers to the person, the family, the branch of government or the organization that created the records. in a wider sense it can refer to the community or society in which the records were created. knowing where and by whom the records were created is critical to understanding what they are about. locating archives within particular and specific context connects them to the actual events that they reflect. without context, without these relationships, records become useless piles of paper or random collections of electronic bits. public history review | bastian 52 the archival principles of custody and provenance, and the context of creation that they reflect, are not just abstractions but practical ways of conceptualizing the relationships and connections between people and their surroundings. and the practical results of analyzing those relationships from that perspective can have profound results. archival context can do more than just describe the landscape, it can be instrumental in demonstrating habitation and territory. an australian example of the impact of this relationship is the single noongar claim, the currently active land claims of the noongar people of western australia. in 2006, the noongar people successfully pursued their legal title claim to the land that they had inhabited for centuries. they pursued this claim through the generations of records carefully created by anthropologists and welfare workers. the validity of the single noongar claim rested on proving that the noongar peoples had continuously maintained their cultural connections to the land over time. primarily an oral culture, this indigenous community produced few written records of its own, but the records of these many visitors, created consistently in a particular place about the same people, became evidence of their unbroken connection regardless of the fact that they had moved around within the same place.19 this intertwining of archives and place, where the physical evidence of movement and location intimately connects the landscape and the people who inhabit it suggests that the landscape itself may be the archive. the land becomes a recording medium, an embodiment of the context of creation. mapping the landscape if archives are intimately connected to physical spaces through custody and provenance, nowhere is that context of creation made more explicit than through maps. indeed, maps and their innate recordness make the connections between archives and place clear and explicit.20 vital to establishing both physical and intellectual relationships to place, maps provide us with mental and physical models, locating ourselves to ourselves, to one another, and to a global network. in maps, ‘the plotting of point observations, which is the essence of cartography, reveals patterns in the physical and human landscape… the map is thus a model, or simplification of reality, and like all successful models it helps in the extraction of understandable patterns from complexity.’21 through digitization, maps have become even more powerful plotters of points and patterns, memory makers and keepers, shaping our realities. in our digital era, archivists – and indeed everyone else – public history review | bastian 53 have tools that take full advantage of all the spatial and temporal implications of place, context and records. geographers also envisage the location implied by the archives as no longer being in physical space. withers and grout have written: ‘yet what is crucial is the fact that making data available via new information technologies has the capacity to displace the physical sense of an archive as we have historically understood the term, by allowing an archive to exist and to be accessible in “virtual space”.’22 taking full advantage of both the physical and virtual map archives, overlaying maps from different generations, even centuries and combining them with written records produced in and about that place, for example, enables deep and rich interpretations of archaeological sites, economic and population movements and historical events. maps can add physical substance to oral histories by pinpointing the location of narratives and thereby enhancing an understanding of that narrative by placing it within an environment that can be immediately and visually comprehended. maps locate collective memories within the populations and surroundings that created them. ‘a sense of place encompasses more than just recorded history. it’s not just that ‘something happened’; it’s that ‘something happened here’ – in this particular location,’23 writes archivist david dwiggins discussing the relationships between maps and records. at the same time, while maps may help to locate events, maps as archives and records significantly impact interpretations of place. through the defining of boundaries and the delineation of spaces, maps impose borders and mark barriers, assisting in both the control and the definitions of populations. the ‘archive’ of maps, both as boundary-definers and population records has been powerful and compelling shapers and controllers in colonial imperialism. for example, the deliberate and comprehensive gathering and storing of data about their vast and far-flung empire, primarily by mapmakers and surveyors, was key to the success of british colonialism. the late twentieth-century historian thomas richards described an ‘imperial archive’ that he defined as ‘a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and empire.’24 because the archives also defines the borders and sets the boundaries, maps were – and are – crucial instruments in delineating and imposing colonial power. in this way, maps are also instruments in effecting those benign and sinister aspects of the archives discussed earlier. subject to the cultural and political winds of the times in which they are created, maps impose their own definitions on the topography. because a map is public history review | bastian 54 to some extent only an abstraction of reality, it is subject to the perspective and preferences of the map creator. maps establish the boundaries and the borders that keep people in as well as out; that include as well as exclude. maps may place us, but they also let us know our place, and as records, often keep us in our place. content and landscape the contents of archival records also make useful and important connections with the landscape as archive – diaries, vital statistics, photographs combined with maps and oral histories can often explain physical and natural phenomema, why a building appears in a particular place, why mining was carried on in a certain district. in particular, this combination of records is notably effective in constructing and understanding the collective and cultural memory of a place – in particular, a well-populated place. hayden observes that: ‘urban landscapes are storehouses for these social memories because natural features such as hills or harbours, as well as streets, buildings, and patterns of settlement, frame the lives of many people and often outlast many lifetimes.’25 information in archival documents also helps link field observation with oral tradition in understanding landscape questions. geographers write about ‘the explanatory power that obtains from a cross-fertilization of archival information and field observation.’26 at the same time, archives, both as physical buildings and physical documents, also make their own statements about the landscape. as mentioned earlier, the presence of australia’s national archives in canberra, similar to the presence of the national war memorial, immediately identifies canberra as the site of the australian national narrative, the official memory as well as a centre of national energy and political gravitas. while the location of the national archives in canberra helps to define the city as the capital, the very existence of the archives in the capital re-affirms the power of the records, both as history and heritage as well as evidence of government authority. cultural memory ‘things are at the heart of the process of constructing an archive of a place,’27 observes a geographer tracing the historiography and collective memory of a particular landscape over generations. how is cultural or collective memory connected with the archives of place? sociologist maurice halbwachs’ insight in the early part of the twentieth century that collective memory is a social construct and that public history review | bastian 55 individuals view the past in the present through multiple social frameworks became the foundation for modern collective memory studies. halbwachs wrote that: ‘while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember… every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in time and space.’28 although halbwachs published his classic collective memory in the 1920s, and while memory studies has a long history beginning in the nineteenth century,29 it was not until the 1970s that the ‘memory boom’ exploded and memory studies emerged as a legitimate pursuit. the reasons for this explosion are multiple but came about at least partially through the recognition that certain human actions and collective aspects of events could not be completely explained by traditional historical sources alone. memory studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had focused on memory in the formation of national identities. memory in the late twentieth century became a path to studying the undocumented and under-documented aspects of history. it continues on this path today. the tools of memory studies – memorials, monuments, rituals, performative expressions, commemorations, landscapes, folkways, artefacts, oral testimony – have also been particularly effective in broadening an understanding of those communities which, for a variety of reasons, often stand apart from the documentary mainstream. location and landscape are critical tools for both personal and collective memories. as a canadian historian brian osborne observes: ‘places are defined by tangible material realities that can be seen, touched, mapped and located’. and for this reason, ‘sense of place, as a component of identity and psychic interiority is a lived embodied felt quality of place that informs practice and is productive of particular expressions of place.’30 for archivists, place is a natural tool through which records may become meaningful. halbwachs’ emphasis on memory as communal suggests ways in which archives elucidate these memories collectively through the lense of place. while the records created about a place may influence the way a place is envisaged and how they fit it into cultural memory, the way a particular place is imagined may also influence the records created about that place. colonial letters, diaries and government reports are replete with such ‘imaginings’, demonstrating that cultural memory often depends on the cultural lense of the recorder. what frame creates the context, whose hand constructs the records, what landscape are we looking at? records, therefore, become potent definers of places and public history review | bastian 56 spaces, with the power to shape and control how the landscape is perceived, and, by implication, whose memories prevail and whose are forgotten or set aside. whose place? whose archives? whose memories? in the synergy between archives, place and cultural memory, the extent to which the landscape itself is the memory frame, the ‘context of creation,’ is an important consideration. current scholarship, in particular geography and archaeology, no longer sees spaces and landscapes as neutral. rather, ‘cultural landscapes are looked upon not only as products of human intervention in general but also and in particular as the result of human desire to leave an imprint of control and power.’31 while man-made landscape markers such as memorials can be approached and interrogated as single isolated artefacts, their full meaning as records is best comprehended within the context of their placement within a larger environment. in 1979, the australia international council on monuments and sites (icomos) adopted the burra charter in an effort to help define and identify places of cultural significance. the charter states that: ‘places of cultural significance enrich people’s lives, often providing a deep and inspirational sense of connection to community and landscape, to the past and to lived experiences. they are historical records that are important as tangible expressions of australian identity and experience.’32 several years ago on a trip to aberysthwyth, a small seaside town in wales, i came upon a monument on a small hill on one side of the town. with its angel of peace on the top and its list of names around the sides, it was instantly recognizable as one of many commemorative world war i monuments erected in hundreds of towns and villages after the great war of 1914. it was visually arresting but otherwise unremarkable – until i read the dates and counted the names of well over a hundred young men – many with the same surnames – killed in action. in this small village, families had lost many sons and an entire town had lost a generation. within the landscape of this remote and peaceful town beside the sea, the tragedy of the war, symbolized by the memorial, became visceral and real. considering memorials as contextualized archival records in themselves adds an additional dimension to an understanding of these remembrances where ‘the process of memorialisation is frequently not well documented in the archives, and thus can sometimes be overlooked when the history of the memorial is being written.’33 public history review | bastian 57 conclusion: reading the textual landscape the landscape is both a text and a context. the meaning of the text invariably depends upon the reader or interpreter. and of course the records of the land send different messages to different groups of people. in an environment often overwhelmed by the dominant cultural narratives, absorbing the nuances of a textual landscape that embraces the histories and stories of all its varied inhabitants over time offers opportunities to access the minor narratives. archaeologist clayton fredericksen, considering the input of the tiwi community as he interprets the historical site of fort dundas/punata in northern australia, writes: ‘narratives relating to a place are linked in space to form a culturescape, a physical place composed of localities where the events of the remembered past took place. ‘34 he considers context and the textual landscape of local knowledge, acknowledging ‘the legitimacy of community prerogative to nominate those parts of the physical and metaphysical past that are relevant, and to have the final say in how places and objects are managed [or if they are managed at all]’.35 in thinking about the relationships between archives, memory and place, it is important to recognize that pieces of the text of the landscape are specific to each of its multiple populations over time. the indigenous peoples, the settlers, the farmers, the city dwellers – all are implicit parts of the entire text. the landscape may be a cultural frame for memory but it is also itself a memory text. how it is read depends on the persons doing the reading. the broader the reading, the broader becomes our understanding of the landscape and its many peoples. endnotes 1 edward baugh, ‘“maps made in the heart”: caribbeans of out desire’, journal of west indian literature, vol 18, 2010, p7. 2 eviatar zerubavel, time map:. collective memory and the social shape of the past, university of chicago press, chicago, 2003, p41. 3 antonio benitz-rojo quoted in baugh, op cit, p7. 4 william turkel, the archive of place: unearthing the pasts of the chilcotin plateau, university of british columbia press, vancouver, 2007, pxi. 5 for example, the french populace stormed the bastille in 1789, destroying what they considered to be records of oppression and domination, while the bosnian serbs targeted and bombed the manuscripts in the libraries of sarajevo in 1992, destroying records of heritage and identity. for more information on records destruction see, ian wilson, ‘the fine art of destruction,’ address, ottowa, ontario, 1 may 2000 http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/government/001/007001-3004-e.html accessed 16 august 2014. 6 the relationship between archives and power is a continuing one in the archives literature. some example include, joan m. schwartz and terry cook, ‘archives, records, and power: the making of modern memory’, archival science, vol 2, 2002, p2. 7 jean-pierre wallot, ‘building a living memory for the history of our present: new perspectives on archival appraisal’, journal of the canadian historical association, vol 2, 1991, public history review | bastian 58 p282. for a further discussion of wallot's meaning, see terry cook, ‘what is past is prologue: a history of archival ideas since 1898, and the future paradigm shift,’ archivaria, vol 43, 1997, p18. 8 charles j. withers and andrew grout, ‘authority in space?: creating a digital web-based map archive,’ archivaria, vol 61, 2006, p34. 9 jacques derrida, archive fever, a freudian impression, university of chicago press, chicago, 1996. 10 michael lynch, ‘archives in formation: privileged spaces, popular archives and paper trails,’ history of the human sciences, vol 12, 1995, p66. 11 tim cresswell, ‘value, gleaning and the archives at maxwell street, chicago’, transactions of the institute of british geographers, vol 37, 2012, p166. 12 claude levi-strauss, excerpt from the savage mind in jeffrey k. olick et al, the collective memory reader, oxford university press, 2011, p175. 13 some examples include: brian brothman, ‘the past that archives keep: memory, history, and the preservation of archival records,’ archivaria, vol 51, 2001, p62; eric ketelaar, ‘tacit narratives: the meaning of archives,’ archival science, vol 1, 2001, pp131-141; jeannette a. bastian, ‘the records of memory, the archives of identity, celebrations, texts and archival sensibilities, archival science, vol 13, 2013, pp121-31. 14 see for example, ricardo punzalen, ‘“all the things we cannot articulate”: colonial leprosy archives and community commemoration’, in jeannette a. bastian and ben alexander (eds), community archives: the shaping of memory, facet, london, 2009, pp197-220; and andrew flinn, mary stevens and elizabeth shepherd, ‘whose memories, whose archives?: independent community archives, autonomy and the mainstream’, archival science, vol 9, 2009, pp73-75. 15 carolyn steedman, dust: the archive and cultural history, rutgers university press, new jersey, 2001, p19. 16 see for example, sue mckemmish, michael piggott, barbara reed and frank upward (eds), archives: recordkeeping in society, chandos, 2005 and michael piggott, archives and societal provenance: australian essays, chandos, 2012. 17 delores haydon, the power of place, mit press, cambridge, ma 1997, p15. 18 richard pearce-moses, glossary of archives and records terminology, http://www2.archivists.org/glossary accessed 16 august 2014. 19 there is a growing body of literature on the single noongar claim. for a history of the claim see south west aboriginal land and sea council et al, ‘it's still in my heart, this is my country’: the single noongar claim history, university of western australia, perth, 2009. for the relationship to archival records see glenn kelly, ‘the single noongar claim: native title, archival records and aboriginal community in western australia,’ in bastian and alexander (eds), op cit, pp49-64. 20 an excellent example of this connection is the ‘discovering anzacs’ site constructed by the national archives of australia, http://discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au/browse/places accessed 16 august 2014. 21 christopher merrett, ‘spatial representations: the map, its use and abuse,’ south african archives journal, vol 32, 1990, p2. 22 withers and grout, op cit, p38. 23 david m. dwiggins, ‘putting the “where” in the archives: internet mapping and archival records,’ library student journal, june 2010, http://www.librarystudentjournal.org/index.php/lsj/article/view/112/275. 24 thomas richards, the imperial archive: knowledge and the fantasy of empire, verso, london, 1993, p6. 25 haydon, op cit, p9. 26 karl b. raitz, ‘field observation, archives, and explanation,’ geographical review, vol 91, 2001, p122. 27 tim cresswell, ‘value, gleaning and the archive at maxwell street, chicago’, transactions of the institute of british geographers, vol 36, 2011, p165. 28 lewis a. coser (ed and trans), maurice halbwachs, on collective memory, university of chicago press, chicago, 1992, p22. 29 jeffrey olick et al (eds), the collective memory reader, oxford university press, new york, 2012, pp3-5. 30 brian s. osborne, ‘landscapes, memory, monuments and commemoration: putting identity in its place, report commissioned by the department of canadian heritage for the ethnocultural, racial, religious, and linguistic diversity and identity seminar’, halifax, nova scotia, 1-2 november 2001, p4. 31 leif sahlqvist, ‘territorial behaviour and communication in a ritual landscape’, geografiska annaler, vol 83, 2001, p79. public history review | bastian 59 32 australia icomos, the burra charter: the australia icomos charter for places of cultural significance 1999, australia icomos, deakin university, burwood, 2000, preamble 1, cited in lisa murray, ‘comparing criteria; assessing the significance of memorials,’ public history review, vol 15, 2008, p137. 33 ibid, p148. 34 clayton fredericksen, ‘caring for history: tiwi and archaeological narratives of fort dundas/punata, melville island, australia’, world archaeology, vol 34, 2002, p299. 35 ibid, p289. introduction (public history in aotearoa new zealand) ako: learning from history? fiona mckergow*, geoff watson, david littlewood, carol neill corresponding author: fiona mckergow, f.mckergow@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8448 article history: published 06/12/2022 we never knew about parihaka it was never taught anywhere except maybe around the fires of parihaka itself at night when stories are told of the soldiers who came with guns to haul us up by the roots like trees from our land though the prophets called peace peace it was never taught at school it was all hushed up how we listened to the prophets tohu, te whiti who called peace ‘rire rire paimarire’ public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: mckergow, f., watson, g., littlewood, d., neill, c. 2022. ako: learning from history? public history review, 29, 38–43. https://doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8448 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 38 mailto:f.mckergow@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8448 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8448 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8448 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj but the only peace the soldiers knew spoke through the barrels of their guns threatening our women children it was never taught or spoken how we were shackled led away to the caves and imprisoned for ploughing our land apirana taylor’s poem ‘parihaka’, drawn from his 2009 collection a canoe in midstream: poems old and new, acknowledges the ancestral pain at the heart of history in aotearoa new zealand.1 it takes readers directly to ‘the fires of parihaka’ to lay bare how history has been taught – or not taught – in the nation’s schools over many generations. prophets te whitiorongomai and tohu kākahi established a community in taranaki in 1866 with the intention of setting themselves apart from british colonial rule. their political and spiritual leadership rested on living by their own laws and faith. confiscated land was reclaimed by the community of 300 by ploughing and sowing crops and many arrests were to follow. on 5 november 1881, parihaka was surrounded and occupied by 1,600 armed constabulary and volunteer militia led by native minister, john bryce. under instruction from te whiti and tohu the residents of parihaka, by now numbering more than 1,300, demonstrated no resistance: ‘be patient and steadfast, and even if the bayonet comes to your breast do not resist.’2 known as te rā o te pahua, or the day of plunder, the legacies of parihaka have become more widely known across aotearoa new zealand with the passing of the 2017 parihaka reconciliation bill. an official apology has been delivered by prime minister jacinda ardern and financial redress has been negotiated. our special issue of public history review focuses on public history in aotearoa new zealand. it derives from papers presented at ‘ako: learning from history?’, the 2021 new zealand historical association (nzha) conference held by massey university te kunenga ki pūrehuroa. the term ‘ako’ signifies customary māori educative processes that are centred on māori epistemologies and applies to reciprocal modes of teaching and learning in all areas of life. from 2023, the teaching and learning of history is set to enter a period of profound change with the introduction of aotearoa new zealand’s histories/te takanga o te wā, a new curriculum for children aged five to fifteen that will be taught in highly localised ways within schools and kura (schools in which lessons are primarily taught in te reo māori). when the new zealand government agreed that aotearoa new zealand’s histories would be compulsory for this age group in a landmark decision taken in 2019, the practice of public history in this country entered a new and rapidly evolving phase of development. the new zealand government has been involved in the production of what is now known as public history since the midnineteenth century, that is, right from the outset of its own establishment. key nationforming events of this time include the signing of he whakaputanga/declaration of independence (183539), te tiriti o waitangi/treaty of waitangi in 1840 and the introduction of selfgovernance with the passing of the 1852 new zealand constitution act. it is revealing that history and colonisation are stitched together in the person of governor george grey, whose governorships (184553; 186068) are noted for fostering significant historical research as well as ruthless confiscation of vast tracts of māori mckergow, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202239 land. ngāti rangiwewehi scholar and leader, wiremu maihi te rangikāheke, in whose name the nzha has held a biennial lecture since 2011, produced numerous manuscripts while in grey’s employment prior to 1854.3 john white, a selftaught scholar and linguist, who also attracted grey’s attention, was commissioned to write a sixvolume history of māori in the 1880s.4 major governmentfunded historical projects of the early twentieth century were the official history of the first world war, which ran to five volumes, alongside a history of the new zealand wars (1845–1870) prepared by james cowan in the 1920s.5 the centennial branch of the department of internal affairs was formed to produce a suite of publications for the nation’s centennial celebrations in 1940. since the department’s war history branch was formed in 1945, there has been continuous government support for historical research with a public purpose. major projects, initiated in 1983 and 2001 respectively, are the dictionary of new zealand biography (dnzb) and te ara: the encyclopedia of new zealand. a new ministry, manatū taonga, the ministry for culture and heritage, has been responsible for the production of publicly funded history since 2000. an extensive fiveyear first world war centenary programme was undertaken in which activities included official ceremonies, the building of a national memorial park as well as numerous publications, exhibitions, films, artworks and archival projects. a new national day, te pūtake o te riri, he rā maumahara, was established in 2016 to commemorate the new zealand wars. texts commissioned to complement new zealand’s 1990 sesquicentennial commemorations of the signing of the treaty of waitangi were influential in engendering ‘a growing cultural nationalism’ among new zealanders.6 among these, the dnzb, edited by prof w. h. oliver (198390) and dame claudia orange (19902003), was the single most significant public history project of the late twentieth century. a focus on individual achievement was tempered by the inclusion of representative individuals from many fields. over 3,000 biographies representing new zealanders in diverse walks of life were produced. among these were 500 biographies of māori individuals, prepared in english and translated into te reo māori by tairongo amoamo and angela ballara. this was a groundbreaking effort that seeded a burgeoning literature in te reo māori, both in print and online. the dnzb was launched on its own website in 2001 and integrated into te ara: the encyclopedia of new zealand in 2010.7 digitisation allows a deeper cross hatching of connections and influences than the original print volumes and integration into te ara provides further context for those lives. since 1985 an ongoing process of historical redress for māori has given rise to an equally substantial body of research that is publicly available in the form of waitangi tribunal reports. initially founded in 1975 to address contemporary claims by māori against the crown, the tribunal has, since amending legislation awarded it retrospective powers ten years later, investigated deepseated historical grievances such as those relating to parihaka. these include the removal of indigenous authority and custodianship over land, water and other natural resources and the systematic erosion of culture, including language. the process of investigating these claims has generated detailed block histories relating to virtually every piece of land in aotearoa new zealand. moreover, the process of conducting this research has provided employment opportunities for a generational cohort of historians. settlements have now been made with most iwi and in the wake of this development some are choosing to produce their own innovative forms of public history. meanwhile an earlier emphasis on lives as they were lived in the public domain – at the expense of private lives – has revealed the potential for the family contexts in which individuals operated to be brought to the fore. family history is without doubt the most widely practiced form of historical research that takes place in aotearoa new zealand and it takes many forms. closely guarded whakapapa books held on marae are now complemented by open access websites, such as whakapapaonline.com, and those that require registration with an iwi based on whakapapa. pākehā family history research bears little similarity to the processes of establishing whakapapa in te ao māori. genealogists find a sense of structure and purpose in notions of descent and kinship and localities associated with departures and arrivals, but driven by mckergow, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202240 commercial tools such as ancestry, it often branches thinly across time and space, rather than towards the deep sense of belonging associated with turangawaewae. increasingly, the ready availability of sources is at once an enormous benefit and a methodological challenge for those engaged in public history. on the one hand, thanks to the success of papers past – a digital repository of newspapers, magazines, letters, journals, parliamentary papers and books dating from 1840 to 1970 – historians have instant access to literally millions of pieces of information on virtually all aspects of aotearoa new zealand’s history. detailed historical research is no longer the preserve of a committed few dedicating hours of their time to scrolling through microfilm. on the other hand, it might be argued there is a risk that the ready availability of text has come at the expense of context. because it is so easy to find references to particular events, members of the public can easily find a few, interesting quotes courtesy of a search engine and feel that the history has been ‘done’ because the sources ‘speak for themselves’. with new zealand history being taught in schools and digital resources likely to feature heavily in course materials, there is a greater need than ever for public understanding of how to interpret historical sources.8 there are close to 500 museums in aotearoa new zealand.9 on the whole, they tend to resist large scale historical narrative. this is especially true of volunteerrun museums situated in smaller centres. the usual mode of museum history is the vignette derived from discrete collections with particular historical or aesthetic value to a locality. overviews of the histories of regions tend to maintain a distance between tangata whenua (people of the land) and tangata tiriti (people here by means of the treaty) galleries. a disinclination to present ambitious or challenging stories is in part an outcome of the reliance of museums on limited sources of public funding. history collections are often dominated by artefacts from british migrant families, businesses and communities. many of the tenets that underpin māori ways of being have been integrated into museum practice in the past half century, yet even national institutions remain wary of addressing difficult histories and by and large maintain an upbeat and celebratory approach to the past.10 the articles selected for this volume reflect a growing diversity in both the conceptualisation and forms of public history in new zealand. first, they reveal the topicality of new zealand history and the intention to understand the diverse histories of new zealand without necessarily needing to locate them in a globalised context. second, history has become increasingly democratised. the government, while still important, is not the primary producer of public history, which now tends to be driven by localised community interests. the articles foreground relationships and connections between people and place, rather than being centred on statedefined ‘significant events’. they have a common focus on specific communities telling their own stories and sometimes departing from established orthodoxies in doing so. the collection begins with an article adapted from the 2021 wiremu maihi te rangikaheke lecture. by drawing on the example of his tūpuna (ancestors) from te tauihu o te waka a māui (northern south island), peter meihana opens the special issue with an analysis of how māori have used past events for presentday purposes. in ‘navigating the politics of remembering’ readers are also shown how māori have utilised oral traditions and archaeological research to assist in treaty claims and to press for the return of their taonga, alongside using whare tupuna and pou whenua to turn european memorials into bicultural sites. the importance of familial connections in and beyond aotearoa new zealand lies at the heart of the two articles that follow. in ‘tupuna wahine, saina, tupuna vaine, matua tupuna fifine, mapiạg hạni: grandmothers in the archives’ a group of six indigenous scholars – hineitimoana greensill, mere taito, jessica pasisi, jesi lujan bennett, marylise dean and maluseu monise – gather together in friendship and hospitality from across te moana nui a kiwa to explore the voices of their grandmothers as indigenous storytellers. the tagata niue authors of ‘niue fakahoamotu nukutuluea motutefua nukututaha: critical discussions of niue history in and beyond aotearoa new zealand’ – jessica pasisi, zoë catherine mckergow, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202241 lavatangaloa henry, ioane aleke fa’avae, rennie atfield-douglas, birtha lisimoni togahai, toliain makaola, zora feilo and asetoa sam pilisi – demonstrate further that public history in a nation of migrants should not be constrained by geographic boundaries. in the next sequence of articles, the theme of relationships continues with a shift of focus to specific landforms. aotearoa is a land of many harbours. marama muru-lanning, keri mills, ngāhuia harrison, gerald lanning and charmaine tukiri apply the concept of kaitiakitanga to three highly significant harbours – kāwhia (including aotea), whāngārei and manukau (including ihumatao) – as ‘critically important and threatened environments’. aotearoa new zealand is also a land of many mountains, stretching from te raupua and tutamoe in te tai tokerau to hananui on rakiura. lee davidson offers a description of how pākehā viewed mountains as without culture, there to be named, mapped and known for the purposes of tourism, in contrast to conceptions of ancestral maunga for māori. ewan morris takes a case study approach that considers the contests over the name of taranaki maunga as they have played out through public debates and political decision making since the 1970s. another suite of articles address public history in its varied institutional settings: schools, museums, state care facilities and department stores. analysis of the new history curriculum in schools is a significant endeavour for public historians and two articles explore different aspects of teaching history. in ‘consulting the past: creating a national history curriculum in aotearoa new zealand’, carol neill, michael belgrave and genaro olivera, compare responses to the new aotearoa new zealand histories curriculum from historians, teachers and the public. canvassing past, present and future, liana macdonald introduces and explores the concept of channelling a haunting with a group of trainee secondary school teachers visiting history exhibitions at national institutions. difficult histories of a different kind are canvassed by hilary stace, who highlights the importance of the voices of the disabled in the public’s engagement with disability history. through her examination of a rooftop playground and the materteral figure of ‘aunt hayzl’, katie pickles explores how the fantastical elements of public memory and nostalgia are upheld in urban retail environments. most of the authors in this volume focus on public histories that pertain to relationships between people and place, defined here as unique blends of physical and cultural elements. by contrast, the authors of the articles that conclude this volume turn the spotlight on two important modes of public history: digital public history and historical fiction. with reference to the soldiers of empire project, which provides a database of british army soldiers who served in aotearoa new zealand during the 1860s, rebecca lenihan argues in favour of the democratising effects of making digital history accessible to the public. in ‘interpreting history through fiction’ thom conroy, joanna grochowicz and christina sanders discuss the genre of historical fiction in which the story element of history is their imaginative gateway to the past. together the articles in this issue provide a snapshot of public history as it is practiced in aotearoa new zealand today. when compared with going public: the changing face of new zealand history, a volume on the state of the field edited by bronwyn dalley and jock phillips in 2001, the most striking development is one of increased inclusivity in terms of who is engaged in public history. twenty years ago, there was a focus in public history circles on how history was delivered for ‘the public’ – be that through a historic site, television programme, official war history, museum exhibition, website, reference text, or waitangi tribunal working paper.11 indigenous historians from aotearoa me te wai pounamu and te moananuiakiwa are now shaping public history in their own ways, especially through an emphasis on storytelling methodologies and histories made within the many contexts of kinship. finally, we might consider the maturing of public history in the region by reflecting on a question posed by david dean: ‘what do we have in mind when we speak of history for, by, with or about the public?’12 taken as a whole the contributions to this issue span these stances in relation to their respective ‘publics’, suggesting a rich field from which to move forward into the future and a unity with his view that ‘all history mckergow, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202242 is public history’ in one sense or another.13 but ‘good history’ involves learning from history; ‘good history’ involves ako. endnotes 1 reproduced with permission from apirana taylor, a canoe in midstream: poems old and new, canterbury university press, christchurch, 2009, pp6061. 2 evening post, 7 november 1881, p2. for further details, see waitangi tribunal report: kaupapa tuatahi, legislation direct, wellington, 1996; hazel riseborough, days of darkness: taranaki, 18781884, rev ed, penguin, auckland, 2002; rachel buchanan, the parihaka album: lest we forget, huia, wellington, 2009; atholl anderson, judith binney and aroha harris, tangata whenua: an illustrated history, bridget williams books, wellington, 2014; rachel buchanan, ko taranaki te maunga, bridget williams books, wellington, 2018. 3 j. curnow, 1990, te rangikāheke, wiremu maihi (online). available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t66/te rangikahekewiremumaihi (accessed 2 september 2022). 4 michael reilly, ‘john white: the making of a nineteenthcentury writer and collector of maori tradition’, new zealand journal of history, vol 23, no 2 (1989), pp16970. 5 for a fuller discussion of public history in new zealand see bronwyn dalley and jock phillip (eds), going public: the changing face of new zealand history, auckland university press, auckland, 2001, especially the chapters by bronwyn dalley, ‘finding the common ground: new zealand’s public history’, pp1629; chris hilliard, ‘a prehistory of public history: monuments, explanations and promotions, 190070’, pp3054; and peter gibbons and jeanine graham, ‘adventures in scholarship: statesponsored reference works, 19402000’, pp7490. 6 dalley and phillips, op cit, p11. 7 see dictionary of new zealand biography (online). available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/dnzb (accessed 2 september 2022). 8 caroline daley, ‘papers from the past, and problems from the present’, turnbull library record, vol 43, no 1, 2010, pp6472. 9 see museums aotearoa homepage (online). available: https://www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz/ (accessed 2 september 2022). 10 carol neill, elizabeth ward, keri cheetham, michael belgrave and peter meihana, ‘aotearoa nz regional resources stocktake: milestone report august 2022’, report commissioned by the ministry of education, wellington, 2022. 11 dalley and phillips, op cit, p9. 12 david dean, ‘publics, public historians and participatory public history’, in joanna wojdon and dorota wiśniewska (eds), public in public history, routledge, new york, 2021, p2. 13 ibid, p13. mckergow, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202243 https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t66/te-rangikaheke-wiremu-maihi https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t66/te-rangikaheke-wiremu-maihi https://teara.govt.nz/en/dnzb https://www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz/ public history review vol. 27, 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: swain, s. 2020. alison atkinson-phillips, survivor memorials: remembering trauma and loss in contemporary australia (crawley: university of western australia publishing, 2019). pp338. paper $39.99. public history review, 27, 1-2. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj book review alison atkinson-phillips, survivor memorials: remembering trauma and loss in contemporary australia (crawley: university of western australia publishing, 2019). pp338. paper $39.99. reviewed by shurlee swain national school of arts australian catholic university 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 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj 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. swain public history review, vol. 27, 20202 public history review vol. 27, 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: foster, a-m. 2020. rebecca s. wingo, jason heppler and paul schadewald (eds), digital community engagement: partnering communities with the academy (cinncinati: cinncinati university press, 2020). pp. 225. paper $32.95, e-book, free1. public history review, 27, 1-2. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj book review rebecca s. wingo, jason heppler and paul schadewald (eds), digital community engagement: partnering communities with the academy (cinncinati: cinncinati university press, 2020). pp. 225. paper $32.95, e-book, free1 reviewed by ann-marie foster queen’s university belfast 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 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj 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-toface 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. endnotes 1. see <https://ucincinnatipress.manifoldapp.org/projects/digital-community-engagement>. foster public history review, vol. 27, 20202 https://ucincinnatipress.manifoldapp.org/projects/digital-community-engagement galleykalela public history review vol 20 (2013): 24-41 issn: 1833-4989 © utsepress and the author history making: the historian as consultant jorma kalela no one owns the past, and no one has a monopoly on how to study it, or, for that matter, how to study the relation between past and present… we are all historians today.1 he conditions of representing the past have been transformed in the early twenty-first century by ‘web 2.0, including flickr, facebook, youtube, twitter, blogs and wikis. the new kinds of expectations from and challenges to the historian created by the online world have been discussed by james gardner in public history review. he argued that historians who take seriously their audience should ‘not wait to see what the future holds… but rather try to shape that future.’ like many of his colleagues he is ‘happy to share authority with the t public history review | kalela 25 public’, or adapt to ‘user-generated content’, but not ready to accept the demand to give up all authority.2 ‘if we want the public to value what we do’, writes gardner, ‘we need to share the process of history’. in her introduction to a special issue of public history review, in which the contributors discuss going beyond bringing people to exhibitions or making historical knowledge ‘accessible’, hilda kean asserted that ‘premises underpinning different forms of historical representation’ must be opened up.3 this article seeks to specify what this pattern of thought requires of the university-trained historian and starts from the new way of looking at the historical profession that is presented in my book making history: the historian and uses of the past.4 history is not just a genre of knowledge but also a basic feature of human life. accounting for the past, or creating histories, to quote david thelen, is ‘as natural a part of life as eating or breathing’.5 casual references to what has taken place make up the vast majority of these accounts. but there are also a great number of deliberately created expositions of the past. they are produced in every field of society and by a wide variety of actors, from private persons to, for example, politicians and various media. the totality of them can be called everyday history. these accounts of the past serve present purposes – histories have innumerable functions and are of countless types. divergent accounts also influence each other, and my suggestion is that their interaction be called the never-ending social process of history-making. history making, in other words, is not the preserve of academicallytrained historians. they are experts but not outside observers. scholarly historians are inescapably involved in the social process of history making. their work goes beyond prevailing histories: they seek interpretations that make better sense of the past than the existing ones. embedded in this effort is another constructivist function: they demonstrate ways to think about the past and how to use it. when demonstrating ‘that’s not how it was’, historians at the same display ‘how the presentation should have been constructed’. even if they don’t think of themselves as consultants on history making they act in this capacity. in other words, historians are in two ways active agents in the social process of history-making. and since their inquiries are signified by the everyday history that surrounds them, trained historians should reflect on their profession in the first place as a cultural institution and only after that in terms of an academic discipline. the research done is directed by its culturally constructivist side even if embedded in it is public history review | kalela 26 scholarly criticism of ill-founded and unjustified views of the past that results in the upgrading of prevalent knowledge. when constructing a representation of the past trained historians aim at reconstruction.6 their effort is distinguished by an attempt to recreate the subjective world of the people studied: their goal is a fair interpretation of their actions and thoughts. that is to say, historians reconstruct the past by presenting the people studied in their own terms. however, this scholarly side of the undertaking does not constitute its rationale. historians aim at calling the audience’s attention to particular past matters they have selected and arranged in order to demonstrate their present relevance. this cultural idea is the core of their endeavour and it summarises the historian’s message. the message makes the objective concrete by displaying the study’s significance; that is, it crystallises the fruitfulness of the new knowledge and the lesson embedded in it. thus, the specialist produces knowledge that is sustainable, both meaningful and sound. the idea of the dominant, cultural side of the undertaking is to demonstrate what makes the selected past matters significant, bring to light the meanings embedded in them. still, this effort is justified only if the interpretation produced is sound; if it conveys a fair description of the people studied. in other words, trained historians serve as cultural critics who act simultaneously as consultants on history-making and as referees in the usage of the past. while concentrating on consultancy, this article also discusses the ways in which the constructive and the critical sides of the historian’s work are connected to each other. acting constantly as the referee on one’s own work is the crucial capacity required of a historian. underlining this characteristic sounds odd to a trained historian since it refers to a self-evident aspect of the scholar’s work. that is why asking ‘what is the point of such a formulation?’ is a justified reaction. the answer conveys the message of this article in a nutshell. acting as a consultant on history making also outside the academic world is, when one pauses to think about it, a self-evident aspect of the scholarly historian’s job. it is thinking about the meanings of this capacity rather than new practices that is called for. the historians’ traditional view of their fellow people has been articulated by johan huizinga, among others. history, he writes, differs from other disciplines in that its ‘privilege and heavy responsibility is to remain comprehensible to all civilized people’. when the trained historian acts as a consultant on history making for their fellow people they take just one step further. the question is not only of showing how to think of past matters, but also of instructing the purposeful public history review | kalela 27 production of histories. this article explores what follows when the expert thinks about this capacity that they have even if they deny it. what is implied in thinking about the study of history, as hilda kean puts it nicely, ’in the landscape of everyday life’?7 the context of the historian’s work history in ‘the landscape of everyday life’ expresses the idea of public history from the vernacular perspective. as it has been defined by hilda kean public history denotes neither a distinct field of history nor an orientation in historical investigation. public history refers, as she sensibly emphasises, to the processes by which history is constructed and to the practices ‘involving people as well as nations and communities in the creation of their own histories’.8 the idea of public history – ambiguously defined earlier on – had for a long time similar status as the onetime ‘new histories’, orientations like oral history or history of sexuality. until their breakthrough during the last third of the twentieth century all of these strands had led their lives on the margins of ‘proper’ history; they had been repressed by professional ‘orthodoxy’. by allowing earlier heretics to enter the mainstream the profession questioned its received notions about the actors, themes and approaches of historical research. this was the first of two passages to the transformation of the parameters of historical research, the paradigmatic change. the second route was provided by the concurrent linguistic turn that was common to all fields in the study of society and culture.9 being an integral part of the social process of history making is the key lesson taught to the historical profession by the paradigmatic change. until the end of the twentieth century the majority of historians had been deceiving themselves in thinking that there was a vantage point outside the history they were studying. figure 1 presents the scholarly historians’ position in the social process of history making.10 the three elements of the figure bring to the fore history-in-society,11 a whole constituted by three different kinds of accounts of the past with their interaction. this is the context in which any scholarly historian works. in spite of participating in the social process of history making they have a distinct identity even if trained historians have not always distanced themselves from public narratives. the dividing line was blurred in many countries by nation building during the nineteenth century and has often been unclear even after that due to the national bias common to many scholars. public history review | kalela 28 figure 1 the dynamics of the social process of history-making heritage illuminates the relation of public narratives12 to vernacular histories13 since no dividing line can be drawn between them. in spite of the ceaseless mutual influence there is a strong tendency of public narratives to dominate over popular histories. scholarly historians function as consultant and referee in relation to accounts in both categories. however, as will be repeatedly argued below, their connection to vernacular history making should be dominated by constructive support while criticism should prevail in relation to public narratives. when clarifying one’s stance on the social context of the case at hand the consulting historian must keep in mind, first and foremost, that both public narratives and vernacular histories have their own rationales that are different from the logic of scholarly history – their idea is not to convey epistemologically warranted knowledge of the past. it is also useful to remember that these diverse accounts of the past originate, in metaphorical terms, respectively ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. their multifaceted roots notwithstanding, public narratives tend to serve as instruments in the use of power14 while vernacular histories rather reflect people’s intentions to mould their own life. memorialisation, for instance, may well result from people’s collective appreciation or mourning rather than serve the use of power.15 still, museums and memorial sites reflect in many cases a hegemonic, often national master narrative. history education, an essential part of public histories hhhhistoriesnarrat vernacular histories scholarly histories public history review | kalela 29 public narratives, highlights the many aims and purposes that uses of the past can support. on the other hand, vernacular histories and memory work ‘from below’ often counteract views on the past that are supported by those in power. a case in point is the ‘new histories’ mentioned above since many of them gave a say to previously voiceless people. it is also good to remember that moral purposes and guidelines are more often than not the crucial element in vernacular histories. these accounts are usually sustained, as are public narratives, by strong mythical views on guilt and victimhood. nor must it be forgotten that there is, both in public narratives and vernacular histories, the risk of disseminating, for example, racist views.16 denouncing the setting provided by public narratives and vernacular histories, as many historians do, impedes disciplining the research work. influences from the surrounding culture may divert the historian to describe the past people studied in terms of the present, instead of making sense, for instance, of their actions in their contemporary conditions. to avoid such risks the sensible historian recognises that the subject they intend to investigate implies an opinion on the social circumstances in which they work as well as that the finished study influences its audience. thinking about the research process in terms of specifying one’s message and increasing its sustainability is, in addition, a fruitful mode of organising the research work as making history demonstrates in detail. but this present article focuses on trained historians as consultants on vernacular history making, a function that has become constantly more urgent from the end of the twentieth century due to the renegaded features of democracy, especially the minimal say of citizens in public affairs in all western countries. i am agonised, to paraphrase eliane glaser, by ‘a political system that protects elites and provides a mere illusion of democratic choice relying on a population enthralled’ not just ‘by the latest iphone’ but also by seemingly self-evident, yet unsound interpretations of the past coming ‘from above’.17 the idea is to discuss the ways and conditions in which my profession can strengthen vernacular history making as a method of enhancing citizens’ critical capabilities and contribute to the usage of their own past as a means of coping with the conditions that dominate their lives. in this sense the article carries on one of the main aims of making history – searching for, creating and upholding a participatory historical culture and fostering social practices based on a collaborative relationship between trained/specialist and ‘lay’/non-expert engagements with the past. public history review | kalela 30 the nature of vernacular history making creating a printed photographic book with pieces of text on the past – for example, about a family or group – is inexpensive nowadays. producing these kinds of histories, most often addressed only to the people immediately concerned, is also quite an ordinary social practice today. the opening up, mainly thanks to internet, of access to the tools, artefacts and texts of historical inquiry has blurred the dividing line between historians and non-historians. the hopelessness of academic gate-keeping efforts regarding the study of the past is starkly illustrated by web 2.0. justifying the continued existence of the history profession has to take place with reference to arguments that convince people enfranchised to create their own histories.18 when discussing vernacular history making it is good to keep in mind raphael samuel’s basic point: ‘if history was thought of as an activity rather than a profession, then the number of its practitioners would be legion’. equally important is to remember another perspective emerging from samuel’s works: studies of past matters had been conducted for centuries before history was established as an academic discipline of professionals about two centuries ago.19 a novelty of the late twentieth century is a change in the thinking of history scholars. taking in the notion of history making as a basic social practice is one aspect of the paradigmatic change, albeit one that has only slowly made headway. the normality of purposive vernacular history making illuminates the vastly enlarged potentials of public history and invites academically trained historians to reflect on the resulting histories. indeed, the idea of consulting on history making outside the academic world has been transformed into a moral imperative to the history scholar.20 conferences on unofficial histories – held in may 2012 in london and june 2013 in manchester – demonstrated that the past is constantly being represented by the most varying ways from different exhibitions to videogames and by people from many other walks of life.21 analysing the current multitude of histories has also made it apparent that uninhibited commercial and political uses of the past characterise our globalised online world. a useful critical examination of these usages of the past has been produced by jerome de groot with his book consuming history. my own making history, in turn, opens a trained historian’s perspective and is based on my own experiences from history making outside the academic world during the last three decades.22 public history review | kalela 31 when working in 1979–86 as the full-time commissioned historian of paperiliittoo – the trade union of workers in the finnish paper and pulp industry – i directed a project the original idea of which was to give to the members a say in producing the union’s history. fairly soon i had to acknowledge that a fundamental change had taken place: i was consulting more than 200 workers on doing research in what was, in their view, their own history. having lectured in history for thirteen years at the university of helsinki i had to admit that ‘ordinary people’ approached the meaning of the past in a way that was quite different from the professional mode that i had taught to my university students.23 as an academic i had also to settle on to distinctive feature of history making outside the university world: these activities are undertaken by ‘self-organised historians’, as hilda kean characterises them.24 it has become crystal clear during the following decades that the consultant has to adapt to a situation where the research agenda has been determined before they became involved. what they can do is to help manage project already in progress. the experiences from paperiliitto resulted in a new way of thinking about the trained historian in society – even if i coined the ‘consultant on history-making’ only after making history had already been published.25 rather than just transmitting knowledge of the past it is our task also to encourage and support other people engaged with history making and to be available when assistance is requested. involvement with various projects of vernacular history-making since the paperiliitto years has underlined four essential lessons taught to me during my time as a full-time consultant. it was, first, quite an experience for a scholar to learn that sly and wily are epithets often assigned to trained historians. the same thing was found by roy rosenzweig and david thelen in their project on the popular uses of history in american life in the 1990s. one of the greatest obstacles to their efforts turned out to be people’s fear of ‘being manipulated by people who distort the past to meet their own needs – whether for commercial greed, political ambition, or cultural prejudice’.26 the second crucial lesson learned thirty years ago can be summarised as a piece of advice: beware of patronage. it was indubitable that the incentive to engage with the past was the workers’ own situation, not the history of their union or of some other formal institution. that the risk of patronage is a permanent one has also been demonstrated by rosenzweig and thelen. when people had the opportunity to approach the past on their own terms, that is, ‘not as a public history review | kalela 32 classroom progress from election to election’, they ‘grounded historical inquiry in the present circumstances, perceptions, and needs’.27 the third lesson was that the basic demands on a trained historian are not alien to present-day common sense: what is required is taking seriously the deeds and thinking of past people and being fair to them.28 the problem is that acquiring the necessary skills as well as learning to present the findings in a way that convinces the people addressed takes time without a trainer. this is also the reasonable perspective in which an expert should think about their role as consultant. the most fundamental message was that neither the concept nor the substance of ‘history’ can be taken for granted. consulting on vernacular history making has given me as a scholar countless incentives to explore how and why the past becomes history. in a more practical perspective, i have learned that the academically-trained historian must always detach themselves from disciplinary views in order to avoid imposing them upon their audience. the key to success is to find the balance between the consultant’s two tasks: strengthening the motivation of people to be consulted while conveying the skills of a trained historian. focusing on the idea of the project at hand creating histories originates in the intuition that there is something to be gained from engagement with the past or, as i would specify this notion, from a metaphorical dialogue with people who have lived under different conditions.29 accepting this idea means that the consultant, if they want to avoid patronage, must start with finding out the incentive to launch the project at hand and then strengthen the initiators’ motivation. in other words, conveying the trained historian’s skills begins only after the consultant is familiar with the project’s rationale. a useful way of becoming aware of the initiators’ ideas is to create conditions in which they collectively hone the idea of their project: why have these particular past matters been chosen? what makes these very aspects of the past fruitful? introducing these kinds of questions is a practical way for the consultant to give rise to a discussion about the significance of the anticipated findings. the concrete aim that directs these exchanges of views is refining the message the people involved have in mind, and in this way specifying the significance they have attached to the anticipated findings. priority given to the rationale of the project at hand is the foundation of the consultant’s subsequent work. the aim is both to fine-tune the idea of the project and to ensure the fairness of critical remarks at the latter stages of the consultation. helping the people involved in dealing with the agenda of the inquiry they have determined and in managing a public history review | kalela 33 project already in progress also gives the consultant the opportunity to direct attention to two less obvious, but absolutely essential themes with regard to the project at hand. one is about the chances of historical inquiry in general and the other about the consequences of the results achieved. the reason for raising discussion about the limits of historical knowledge is that the past is made knowable only by an active process of construction: the common belief in a solid past is misleading. in contrast to the tendency to think about stable and unambiguous past entities, the past is constituted by the interchanges of innumerable people’s actions and thoughts in wildly variable locations. a simple way to demonstrate this characteristic of the past is to refer to the missing unanimity among the people involved in the project when they aim at explaining the reasons for a current event. what follows in the case of an historical inquiry is the imperative that reasons for focusing on the particular past affairs selected must be defined. another imperative to engagement with the past is making sure that the chosen matters will be approached fairly. this means, in practice, focusing on the connection to the people studied and paying attention to what is required in establishing the link with them. the point is that the virtual dialogue with these people makes sense only if they have been given a fair hearing and their world has been described adequately. what is called for is discovering the way they understood their reality, finding out their patterns of thought and aiming at the knowledge upon which they acted. the idea is that fairness is the criterion of sound knowledge in historical inquiry, a stand that requires learning to keep one’s own views separate from those of the people studied. to make, in one way or another, the people consulted aware of the limits on acquiring knowledge of the past is the consultant’s responsibility. presenting reservations must, however, be done in a way that strengthens their motivation instead of leading to defeatism. the key lies in finding the balance between two views that are ostensibly mutually contradictory. one is that an inquiry into the past does not result in reconstruction in the sense of presenting the past circumstances ‘as they really were’ since producing such a description is beyond the capability of even the best trained professional. what is within the bounds of possibility is intending to reach the subjective world of the people studied. yet, this position does not undermine the idea of the project at hand. on the contrary, the very way of aiming at fairness towards the past people increases the awareness of our own thinking and enhances it as well as producing fruitful knowledge. public history review | kalela 34 introducing the paramount reservations about knowledge of the past is the most demanding part of the consultant’s work and calls for careful planning. an express discussion of the issue is in all likelihood self-defeating; it is difficult to stimulate such an exchange of views even among university students of history. proceeding in terms of condensing the fruitfulness of the research agenda is probably the best solution, especially since as a context this aim invites discussion also about the consequences of the anticipated results. connecting to the present concerns of those addressed why do people engage with the past? what for? their inquiries serve present purposes, and are based on ideas embedded in their present world. here, it is pays to take on board raphael samuel’s point: ‘the past that inspires genealogists, local historians and collectors is not random’ but connected to what is important for them.’ for many of the local trade union activists i trained in the 1980s, engagement with the past resulted from their political views. they were worried about the future of the working-class movement and wanted to restore its traditions. the means to that end was to explore their personal life experiences and to establish connections between these and those of earlier generations. in other words, the key to the purpose that the project at hand serves lies in the link to the people studied. it is the consultant’s job to get the people involved to analyse their own situation in order to identify those current concerns. it goes without saying that the relevance of the past varies depending on the people being consulted. hilda kean’s description of british ‘researchers of family, locality and place’ illustrates the situation the consultant is confronted with. some engaged with the past are looking ‘in a vague way for a wider family’, others for an ‘educational hobby’ and some ‘for filling in gaps in family stories’. but there are also those who seek ‘the fantasy of connection with someone in the past’.30 keeping in mind this multitude of potential concerns is worth the consultant’s while when helping the people involved to specify the purpose/s that their engagement serves. a useful method of identifying the relevant present concerns is collective discussion about available knowledge. the question is now of an activity much broader than the usual scholarly analysis of previous research. what i refer to was, for instance, the spur for the non-academic projects of history making in practically all developed industrial countries in the late 1970s and 1980s. in sweden, for example, the incentive was that many aspects of industrialization and the workers’ past conditions were public history review | kalela 35 unknown as gunnar sillén highlighted. or, as raphael samuel put the unexplored, diverse past which inspired the history workshop movement, one could see in industrial archaeology and the retrieval of oral memory, for instance, that it was a sense of cultural loss that animated the growth of popular enthusiasm for study of the past. another method of approaching the link to the past people studied is to think about the project in terms of its audience.31 to whom do we want to demonstrate the relevance of the past matters we have selected? why is this particular part of the past relevant for the people we have in mind? the consultant has to emphasise that answering these kinds of questions is crucial since in any society different people appreciate divergent aspects of the past and because one can overestimate the proficiency of one’s own explanation. the initiators of the project have to learn two things. the first is that the message they are outlining may not be important for everyone. and the second, that instead of taking their own assumptions for granted they must constantly assess critically their beliefs. openness for various perspectives is one of the useful aspects of thinking in terms of the audience. another profitable aspect to which the consultant should direct attention is that the people whom the project is addressing are not passive consumers of research results: they have their own ways of turning reminiscences and other fragments of the past into histories. for the purpose of making this point the expert has an ample means at their disposal, demonstrating to those advised that it is useful to think about the process of inquiry as a constant exchange of views with the audience. there comes always, for example, to light situations where looking at the alternatives from the audience’s perspective offers new solutions. this second metaphorical dialogue characteristic of historical inquiry gives insights both to the views of the people addressed and to their way of thinking; that is, one learns to take their world seriously. the point the consultant should emphasise is that getting the message across depends in part on the degree to which the performers have come to understand how the audience understands its reality. the more relevant the meanings in the findings and the lesson embedded in them are to the current concerns of those addressed the more readily they are accepted. one method to this end is to think about the implications and consequences of the expected findings from the perspective of those addressed. furthermore, swaying the audience depends on the language spoken and on the mode in which the findings will be presented. public history review | kalela 36 when those responsible for the project choose the mode of the final presentation a tricky situation arises for the consultant who is a trained historian. they should discard the academic way of thinking in terms of written texts. in paperiliitto, by far the most popular way for my trainees to convey their findings was to put on an exhibition of captioned old photographs. they also conveyed the results of their inquiry in plays, processions, videos, music programmes and recitations as well as one long-playing record. several books and dozens of articles also emerged but they did not have any privileged status. this is what took place in 1980s, well before the world of web 2.0. the awkward questions about the modes of disseminating the findings a historical inquiry produces are, in a way, just the tip of the iceberg. the underlying, fundamental issue will be revealed when one thinks about assessing the results, not to speak of prioritising an exhibition, a poem or an article. it is possible to examine the soundness and meaningfulness of the findings but it is self evident that such a perspective is far too narrow. vernacular history making cannot be assessed in the same way as scholarly research. and the difference does not arise only from the absence of the processes of reasoning in the endproduct. analysing and comparing the divergent potential modes of final presentations arouses philosophical and theoretical problems that fall beyond my competence. nor is this the place to deal with the essence or qualities typical of vernacular history making, still less to discuss the necessity or sense of such a definition. it suffices to condense the activities the consultant can and should perform while not trespassing on the nature of vernacular history making. conveying the skills of a trained historian as regards the academically trained historian, a key theme in orientation towards the role of a consultant has been provided by the linguistic turn. it is good to remember that one’s own concept of reality and one’s own expressions condition one’s thinking about the past. this lesson was taught to me while working in paperiliitto. the people whose research work i was advising shared the same mother tongue and were roughly of my generation. yet it took more than one year’s full-time work to feel i could get my points across in the way i had intended. creating trustworthiness is another important aspect of the consultant’s work and takes more time than learning to avoid misunderstandings. on the other hand, it was quite an experience to discover eventually, being an openly social-democratic person, that i public history review | kalela 37 was not suspected by the communists as having ulterior motives. during the years after paperiliitto i have learned that it is in the trained historians’ interest to take seriously even less extreme misgivings. the risk of scholars being regarded as patronising, and sometimes even arrogant, is a real one. giving respect is the positive way of inspiring confidence among those to be consulted. what is called for in general is taking seriously the agenda they have made up for the inquiry and to pay attention, when it is warranted, to such aspects of the agenda that are significant also for advancing historiography. this was a much simpler task three decades ago, before the breakthrough of the ‘new histories’. but people’s ingenuity has by no means disappeared and continues to strengthening their motivation. to sum up: success in conveying the skills of a trained historian depends, first, on the self image the consultant creates. acknowledging the key role of the trainees’ disposition towards the expert demands an attitudinal change, detaching oneself from scholarly patterns of thought and identifying one’s socially and culturally preconceived ideas. secondly, the consultant is more successful if they are in touch with the current concerns of those being advised – with the reasons that led them to engage with the past. on the other hand, the consultant can create, based on their professional experience, a justified, sustainable position of authority. they need to establish a down-to-earth approach but not stifle enthusiasm; convey the necessity of finding the right balance between the aims and the resources; and raise the question of planning in general, the division of duties and the carrying out the work in distinct stages. in paperiliitto it turned out that an exhibition of photographs was a useful first intermediate target: it was not too difficult to realise and achieving it was a great boost to the next stage in the project. regarding substance, the consultant’s central message must be that anyone moving from passing everyday remarks on the past to the creation of histories faces the same problems that have given rise to the history profession. the crucial task is to discipline oneself and proceed fairly on the basis of evidence. one does, however, need to learn to tap the primary sources for all the fruitful information embedded in them instead of just assessing their reliability.32 but fairness towards those advised, and especially taking seriously the rationale of their effort, does not mean taking their ideas at face value. it is an essential part of the trained historian’s job to try to prevent people from relying on prejudiced, simplistic or outdated interpretations of the past and to demonstrate and public history review | kalela 38 correct weaknesses in prevalent histories. trained historians should develop and strengthen people’s critical capabilities. independent thinking as the foundation of democracy learning to distance oneself from one’s thinking is what historical inquiry can offer those who engage with the past with an open mind. this critical capacity embraces also the ability to relate one’s interpretations of the past to existing knowledge. this is part of the consultant’s tasks. other goals are to get those advised to assess their intentions in terms of the prevailing interpretations, to bring to light silenced aspects of the past, question common explanations and to substitute hearsay for verifiable accounts or a combination of these this kinds of aims. divergent histories influence each other in the never-ending social process of history-making which highlights the dynamics embedded in the totality of accounts termed everyday history. it is easy to see that the interaction of the various histories cannot be peaceful because of the different interests behind them and to learn that, as a consequence, all historical knowledge is contested by its nature. this characteristic of history is the bread and butter of a scholarly historian and historians without formal training have to get accustomed to this. the social process of history making is actually a battleground of rivalling interpretations – the field of the politics of history – and the project at hand must be located in this theatre. it is the consultant’s job show to those responsible for a project that an inescapable involvement in current debates is the result of the message their undertaking seeks to convey. being a participant in the politics of history is the way those engaged with a historical inquiry are connected to the surrounding society. this link has two sides: they are concurrently influenced by the present conditions and seek to have an impact on them. since the two-way connection to society is true of all histories, analysing this link displays the adequate method of evaluating the prevailing presentations of the past. in whose desire for knowledge do the interpretations criticised originate and to what kind of concerns they are connected? who are the people that constitute the audience to which these views on the past have been addressed? and since history is an integral part of justifying all policies, analysing the references to the past in these policies is a useful means of learning also their aims which are not always manifest. it is also the consultant’s responsibility to demonstrate that an interpretation that fails to meet the demand of fairness to those in the past being studies is problematical. at best, these public history review | kalela 39 kinds of histories mislead both their creators and their audience because they strengthen existing preconceived ideas and prejudices and, at worst, are pieces of political propaganda. the consultant must persuade those involved in a project to distance themselves from their place in the politics of history. they have to dissociate themselves not only from the prevailing interpretations but also from their own alternative view. performing this requirement of double detachment is the reasonable version of the same intention that is misleadingly called objectivity; it is possible to discipline one’s feelings and opinions but not to get rid of them. in paperiliitto i experienced a dilemma connected to my identity. having transcended the social and cultural gulf between an academic historian and industrial workers it became increasingly difficult to distance myself from the views of my collaborators. the dilemma is a general one and has been aptly characterized by roy rosenzweig: it really is not easy to be simultaneously ‘a trusted insider and a dispassionate outside expert’.33 the common cause suffers if the specialist loses their integrity. the specialist takes part in discussions of the significance of particular aspects of the past studied, but their prime role is to act as a one who provides expert advice. remembering this does not lead either to subordination of the needs and aspirations of the laypeople involved to academic protocols nor to sacrificing scholarly aims to nondisciplinary goals. the forms for a participatory historical culture along these lines can be positioned, for example, on a continuum with one end made up of common research projects and the other end by plays or other historical performances with trained historians as consultants in the wings. the new pattern of thought suggests a dynamic and reciprocal cooperation between professional and other historians, a collaboration in which both sides learn from each other. contributing to the emergence of the kinds of collaborative practices suggested above is the way in which trained historians have the opportunity to strengthen independent thinking as the key prerequisite of democracy. considering the extent to which vernacular history making has grown, initiating a deliberately conceived participatory historical culture would also be a way of the history profession justifying its continued existence. acknowledgements i am grateful for comments on the earlier versions of this article on one side to ian gwinn, and on the other, to sirkka ahonen, jan löfström and jukka rantala. public history review | kalela 40 endnotes 1 hayden white, ‘afterword: manifesto time’, in keith jenkins, sue morgan and alun munslow (eds), manifestos for history, routledge, london and new york, 2007, p231. 2 james b. gardner, ‘trust, risk and public history: a view from the united states’, public history review, vol 17, 2010, pp52-6. 3 hilda kean, ‘introduction’, public history review, vol 18, 2011, pp1-11. 4 palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2012. 5 ‘a participatory historical culture’, in roy rosenzweig and david thelen, the presence of the past: popular uses of history in american life, columbia university press, new york, 1998, p190. 6 paul ricoeur, time and narrative, volume 3, the university of chicago press, chicago and london, 1988, pp142-144. see also raphel samuel, theatres of memory, vol 1, past and present in contemporary culture, verso, london and new york, 1994, pp434-35. 7 hilda kean, ‘introduction’, in hilda kean and paul martin (eds), the public history reader, routledge, london and new york, 2013, pxx. 8 ibid, ppxiii; xvi-xviii. 9 more comprehensively about the paradigmatic change, see jorma kalela, making history: the historian and uses of the past, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2012, chapter 1, especially pp3-5. 10 the first version of the figure was published in jorma kalela, historiantutkimus ja historia, gaudeamus, helsinki, 2000, p65. the idea of this book, the predecessor of making history, is to criticise the conventional, restricted mode of reflecting on the historian’s theoretical and methodological questions. 11 about the concept see kalela, making history, ppxii-xiii. 12 when referring to these accounts in making history, as i did in kalela, historiantutkimus ja historia, i used the term ‘public histories’ instead of ‘public narratives’. reformulation is called for in order to avoid confusion with ‘public history’ in singular. 13 in making history i used the term ‘popular histories’ instead of ‘vernacular histories’. the former doesn’t connote the similar kind of difference from public narratives that there is in architecture between ‘domestic and functional rather than public buildings’ (according to concise oxford english dictionary). 14 this tendency has been strikingly demonstrated by sirkka ahonen in her study on coping with the past in three different countries that have experienced a civil war: finland, south africa and bosnia-herzegovina. sirkka ahonen, coming to terms with a dark past: how post-conflict societies deal with history, peter lang, frankfurt am main, berlin, bruxelles, new york, oxford, wien, 2012. 15 here see, for example, paul ashton, paula hamilton and rose searby, places of the heart: memorials in australia, australian scholarly publishing, north melbourne, 2012. 16 the crucial role of ach-typical myths is one of the treads through ahonen 2012. 17 quotation from glaser’s article, ‘we are just more subtle about our propaganda’, guardian weekly, 24 may 2013. see also kalela, making history, p146. 18 to introduce this challenge is one way of putting the message of making history. on ‘enfranchising the historical consumer’ see jerome de groot, consuming history: historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture, routledge, london and new york, 2009. 19 quotation from samuel, theatres of memory, p17. together with the posthumously published second volume island stories: unravelling britain, verso, london and public history review | kalela 41 new york, 1998, this book should actually be compulsory reading for every history student. 20 the ensuing challenge has been met, in addition to public history review, vol 19, 2012, by hilda kean and paul martin (eds), the public history reader, routledge, london, 2013. 21 about the conferences on unofficial histories, see http://unofficialhistories.wordpress.com/. 22 degroot, consuming history; the chapter of making history that presents conclusions based on these experiences – ‘the people addressed’ – has been republished in kean and martin, the public history reader, pp104-128. 23 a more comprehensive description of the fundamental change referred to here, see kalela 2012, 54-57. 24 kean, the public history reader, pxxi. 25 included in the role of the ‘consult’ are elements of ‘mentor’ and ‘sparring partner’. 26 kalela, making history, p162; rosenzweig and thelen, the presence of the past, pp1213. 27 thelen, ‘a participatory historical culture’, p192. that vernacular history making opens a new perspective on traditional adult education was the theme of my unpublished paper at the 1991 world conference on comparative adult education, ibadan, nigeria, 7-10 october 1991, ‘patronage as a problem of adult education. the significance of research done by ordinary people.’ 28 ibid, p201. 29 more about the virtual dialogue with the people studied, see kalela, making history, p136. 30 hilda kean, london stories: personal lives, public histories, rivers oram press, london, sydney and chicago, 2004, pp12–15. see also paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘at home with the past: background and initial findings from the national survey’, in paula hamilton and paul ashton (eds), australians and the past, special issue of australian cultural history, vol 22, 2003, pp5–30. 31 thinking in terms of the audience pays off also in cases where the initiators have only had their own group in mind. this approach, too, may even lead to an insight that the findings expected may interest outsiders. 32 more about the approach misleadingly termed by the professionals as sourcecriticism and about the transition from the primacy of ’reliability’ to the priority of ’fruitfulness’ in reading the sources, see kalela, making history, pp31-32. 33 roy rosenzweig, ’everyone a historian’, in rosenzweig and thelen, the presence of the past, p184. four corners television history: gallipoli and the fall of singapore kevin blackburn public history review, vol 14, 2007, pp97-114 ince 1961, the long-running, award-winning four corners australian broadcasting corporation (abc) current affairs programme, has represented two well-known events of australian military history in gallipoli: the fatal shore, aired on 25 april 1988, and no prisoners on australian deserters at the fall of singapore, which aired on 11 march 2002. both programmes, reported by chris masters, purport to investigate anzac mythology. comparing and contrasting them provides insights into the genre of documentary history and the particular investigative style of four corners. media studies analysis of four corners by alan mckee, stuart cunningham, toby miller and robert pullan notes that its style is that of setting out to ‘expose the truth’ in a way that is not objective but is guided by a sense of partiality driven by the journalists’ idea that they are reporting in the ‘interests of the public’. rather than objectively setting out both sides of an argument, the style of four corners is to partially pursue a line of inquiry that is meant to ‘expose the truth’ by taking the side of the argument that the reporters believe is in the public interest.1 what type of history does adapting the investigative style of four corners produce in the programmes covering australian military history in the television documentary genre? the debate over television history documentaries the phenomenon of historical documentaries on television has produced a nuanced debate among historians and documentary makers about the ways television history works. this debate provides insights into understanding four corners’ approach to history in these two programmes on the anzac legend. the investigative and argumentbased format that australian media analysts have described four corners as regularly employing in its documentaries echoes bill nichols’ classic description of the expository genre of documentary film.2 nichols noted that documentary claims to be one of the ‘discourses of sobriety’, such as science, economics, politics and history, which purport s public history review, vol 14, 2007 98 to describe what is ‘real’ or ‘tell us the truth’. nichols, however, argues that documentaries only represent the world and give us a likeness of it; they do not reflect it. he refers to documentaries as being ‘instrumental’, meaning that they outline an argument that seeks to change peoples’ opinions. the format that nichols outlines imposes a strong narrative structure on many historical documentary makers. writing from the perspective of an historian, rather than a film maker, david cannadine suggested a contrast between historical writing and documentary making when he wrote that ‘work being undertaken by historians today tries to present many voices and different viewpoints; but as written and presented, media history is still largely confined to linear narrative.’3 taylor downing, a television documentary producer, has reiterated cannadine’s point that the medium of television tends to go for ‘great narrative, great story telling’.4 in making out a narrative argument using film, often complex historiographical debates are ignored. ian jarvie, philosopher and film theorist, argues that in television history, such as the bbc’s 1997 the nazis: a warning from history, ‘it is not made explicit that what the viewer is getting are interesting and provocative interpretations that may or may not gain the assent of other historians.’ he noted that ‘the narrator sets out the interpretation, sometimes with graphics, and then interview selections are deployed to give factual feel to the interpretation.’ jarvie remarked that given the need to have a clear uninterrupted story line it is not surprising that ‘the point the interview makes always coincides with that being made by the narration!’5 it is also worth assessing the ideas of ken burns, whose historical documentary format was much vaunted in the 1990s with both the popular and critical success of his film the civil war (1990). outlining his approach in 1995, burns attacked historians ‘for having abandoned their role as tribal story-tellers who craft tales about the past in which the nation can find its identity’.6 burns assumes that film cannot approach the analytical and interrogative approach of text and is best left to dealing with emotion and the story-telling process. he says: ‘film is not equipped to do what a book does, which is to attain profound levels of meaning and texture. but film has the power to reach profound levels of emotion’.7 in the context of debates on television history in australia, sue castrique, a script writer and film maker, has also made the point that because of the importance of the narrative in many australian documentaries, ‘the audience is stuck with a narrator who like a bossy tour operator drives you in a straight chronological line’.8 michelle arrow, a collaborator in the making of australian documentaries, has noted that this need to follow a strong narrative means that differences in interpretations among historians seldom get airtime in australian television history documentaries. she argues that television seems to be better at personal narratives than debates and that the format strongly requires a beginning, middle and an end.9 public history review, vol 14, 2007 99 the four corners historical productions gallipoli: the fatal shore and no prisoners quickly outline tough questions the programmes will tackle in probing the meaning of the anzac mythology associated with gallipoli and the fall of singapore. in the programme on gallipoli, it starts off with asking why thousands of young australians go so far out of their way when travelling in europe to visit the gallipoli battlefield that the programme is filming. chris masters says: ‘it is very difficult to get a clear expression of why they have gone to such considerable trouble to be here’. he then looks at the prominent place that gallipoli and anzac have in australian contemporary life and asks deeper questions: ‘why do we celebrate war? why do we celebrate defeat?’10 in the four corners episode on the fall of singapore, no prisoners, the questions asked appear much more pointed and uncomfortable as they are outlined in the images and interviews that opened the show: chris masters: tonight, four corners confronts the big questions that emerge from the debacle that end the british empire. why were the allied forces so comprehensively defeated and how much was desertion among australian troops to blame? peter elphick, (historian and author of singapore: the pregnable fortress, 1995, first major book to make the accusations that large numbers of australians deserted at the fall of singapore): i believe the australians were the first to desert in any great numbers. chris masters: this british author has named alleged australian deserters. we go in search of them.11 from these introductory remarks, it seems the approach of four corners is the investigative journalism style, ‘exposing the truth’ through a convincing argument format, usually found in four corners’ regular coverage of contemporary social and political issues.12 but in dealing with anzac mythology, which is strong in the media and popular culture, can the four corners investigative style completely pursue difficult questions that can lead to uncomfortable answers? anzac mythology in four corners’ argument on gallipoli the four corners historical productions on anzac mythology, having stated the questions that they will tackle, quickly set out to construct the arguments that the programmes will pursue and substantiate using sound and images. this is done very much in the manner that jarvie has described in his assessment of television history, whereby only the images and oral history interviews that confirm the argument presented by the narrator are used. key elements of these arguments are grounded in the very anzac mythology that one would expect four corners to be investigating. perhaps this is public history review, vol 14, 2007 100 due to the documentary style of the producer of the programme, harvey broadbent. he had migrated from britain to australia with a degree in middle eastern studies. broadbent has regularly indicated in his publications a willingness to uncritically embrace the anzac legend.13 he had worked on a number of historical feature programmes for the abc and had prepared for a decade to do a documentary on gallipoli using oral history testimony he had gathered on film. in 1990, he used these interviews, which he had cut down and heavily edited for four corners, in the maudlin but fascinating documentary featuring extended interviews with veterans from both sides of the conflict, gallipoli: the boys who came home.14 broadbent wrote of his approach: ‘i have become consciousness of not wanting to debunk myths purely for the sake of journalistic impact, particularly because some of the events and performances of the anzac initiation to war are worthy of admiration’.15 in gallipoli: the fatal shore, the voice narration (done by chris masters, the programme’s reporter who also seems enamoured of the anzac legend) starts with the argument: ‘australia is different. australians are different because of gallipoli.’ the programme at its beginning ties gallipoli and australian nationalism together suggesting that an over-sentimental trip through anzac mythology is about to begin. this is at odds with the asking-difficult-questions approach that is part of the four corners style. the programme compares the young visitors to the gallipoli battlefield to the young anzacs of 1915 and suggests a mystical communion between the two groups: about 13,000 australians and new zealanders are buried in these hills. each year about the same number find their way here. for every anzac gravestone there is a visitor every year. mostly they are the same as their forebears. they are as brown, if not as sleek. they are as adventurous, curious, open-hearted. they are as keen to be admired, to return home with a bevy of souvenirs. they are as hard drinking, as chauvinistic and as callow. weeks earlier they may well have been stealing trams and carousing at the munich beer festival. but as they near anzac cove they become quiet. there is something about this place that they find bewildering. given this comparison, it is not surprising that videotapes of gallipoli: the fatal shore are used by turkey-based travel agents to show their australian visitors on their package tours on the day-long bus ride down to the gallipoli peninsula from istanbul. on their pilgrimage to the original anzacs they are also shown peter weir’s 1981 film gallipoli, which also plays up the links between anzacs and australian nationalism.16 this use of the four corners programme on gallipoli suggests that it is not likely to be a rigorous examination of anzac mythology. rather, it is more likely to be cast in the model of ‘tribal public history review, vol 14, 2007 101 story-teller’ and leave australians with their myths upheld rather than analysed and exposed. when describing the anzacs of 1915, masters is just as sanguine about embracing the anzac mythology as peter weir. he concludes when narrating over the excerpt from the country athletic track race of weir’s fictional movie gallipoli a film in which weir certainly fulfils the role of ‘tribal story-teller’ for the australian nation in that he portrays the anzacs as handsome heroes who were pioneers from the australian frontier:17 the first men to sign up, as in the movie gallipoli, were of the finest physique. after a century of coping with the endurance course that was pioneer australia we had created a nation of athletes, if not a nation. masters’ words echo those of c.e.w. bean, the australian official historian of world war i. in the 1920s, bean fashioned the anzac myth which cast the men that were going off to war as part of a nation of ‘rugged bushmen’ and that the characteristics they had developed in the bush made them the best soldiers.18 four corners draws freely upon bean as a source. an actor even re-enacts bean’s life as the chronicler of the anzac story at gallipoli. masters endorses bean’s mythology surrounding the anzacs when he says: ‘charles bean wrote admiringly of their casual unmistakable gait, their carelessness under fire, their absence of display. bean began to see something that he would come to describe as the anzac spirit’. four corners actively and uncritically employs bean’s literary techniques to build the anzac legend rather than analyse it. when covering anzacs at the battle for lone pine, it notes that ‘bean records their muted conversation.’ ‘“can you find room for me beside jimmy there”, says one young australian, “him and me are mates, an’ we’re goin’ over together.”’ bean uses the quote as indeed four corners does, to prove in beans’ words: ‘the strongest bond in the australian imperial force was that between a man and his mate.’ 19 four corners, however, omitted the work of more recent historians who interrogated this aspect of anzac mythology using statistical analysis of the recruitment of the first australian imperial force. the military historians appearing in the programme, james robert rhodes, from britain, and denis winter and peter andreas pedersen, both then at the australian war memorial, are mainly used to analyse the strategies behind the battle rather than assess the anzac legend. however, winter’s ideas that he would later publish from his work at the australian war memorial, that the anzacs were not ‘country boys’ but comprised of many recent british immigrants to australia still very loyal to britain, are not used.20 public history review, vol 14, 2007 102 the historians who had done critical research on the anzac legend that bean fashions from gallipoli, did not participate in the programme. this supports cannadine’s and arrow’s point that television history has problems dealing with presenting the different interpretations of historians as it interrupts the flow of the narrative or story being told. in the 1980s, as jenny macleod has documented, bean and the anzac legend were undergoing intense scrutiny and debate by historians in australia.21 the statistical analysis of who were the first anzacs done by historian lloyd robson in the 1970s was widely circulated in university history courses during the 1980s and suggested that most anzacs did not come from the australian bush but from urban areas. historian ken inglis’ work on how bean fashioned the anzac legend in the official war histories was also well-known.22 robson was very critical of bean’s constant attempts to play up the anzacs as ‘boys from the bush’ who drew their values from the frontier, and that these bush values were at the core of those of the australian forces, and indeed the values of the australian nation. the most common occupations, according to robson, were industrial workers from new south wales, a dominant state, while recruits from farming occupations were negligible in victoria, also a major state. the more rural states of queensland and tasmania had a greater number of men from the country but these were small in comparison to the large numbers from urban occupations.23 in the four corners programme on gallipoli, as in bean’s work, we hear of ‘wine growers from barossa valley and cane growers from north queensland’ but urban recruits are not mentioned. this is odd given the testimony from the veterans used in the programme that hints that they were urban workers. frank parker briefly mentions in passing regularly seeing ships during his pre-war life at port melbourne and never guessing that he would be one day on one in uniform. leopold ‘bill’ de saxe speaks of gladesville in sydney, and nothing about the bush. even when we hear the turkish side of the gallipoli story, the bush image continues. masters introduces adil sahin, a turkish veteran aged seventeen in 1915, with the words, ‘like many of the australians, adil sahin, was a farmer training to be a killer’. thus, it is no surprise to hear in the next sentence that ‘the turks, were, as they are now, a rugged lot’. four corners uses the mythology of the anzacs as bushmen to explain the success on 25 april 1915 of a few small advance anzac parties approaching the top of chunuk bair, the crest of a high ridge, far inland, which had commanding view of the surrounding country, including the dardenelles waterways on the other side of the gallipoli peninsula. the programme implies that if these few anzacs had taken chunuk bair they could have won the entire gallipoli campaign.24 masters says ‘to have got this far so quickly was a remarkable feat of physical endurance alone’. we are then told that the anzacs who reached the slopes of chunuk bair ‘were a mixed lot from the backblocks of australia and new zealand’. the programme quickly cuts to an excerpt from an interview with public history review, vol 14, 2007 103 veteran frank parker, who remembers how they could see the sea on the other side of the gallipoli peninsula when members of his battalion were approaching the slopes of chunuk bair on that day. frank parker, however, was certainly not from the ‘backblocks’. according to the embarkation records of the first australian imperial force, frank parker, before he enlisted, was a railway porter who lived in port melbourne. other gallipoli veterans interviewed, judging from their enlistment records, also appear not to be bushmen: tom usher from queensland was a planning machinist from inner city brisbane; ‘bill’ de saxe was a bank clerk from the new south wales coastal town of moruya; basil holmes seems to be an orchardist from a family in sydney’s affluent north shore; while lionel simpson, who was in the 8th light horse and could perhaps be expected to been a bushman, was a carpenter from the victorian town of alexandra, up in the mountains around melbourne.25 we hear nothing, however, of the veterans’ backgrounds, as that would ruin a good story. every time a veteran is interviewed, their age when they joined is given. seventy years after the event, not many men who joined in their thirties and forties are going to be around to give testimony. the impression conveyed by having interviews with all but one who joined when they were teenagers or in their early twenties is the anzacs were, as bean claimed, ‘country boys’. four corners uses this to reaffirm the connection with the young visitors on pilgrimages to anzac cove as being cast in the same mould as their ‘forebears’. this point is made in the introduction to the programme and affirmed at its conclusion. robson also debunked the impression that the anzacs were ‘country boys’ by highlighting statistically a good proportion of older men in their late twenties and thirties, even a small number in their forties. according to his data, fourteen per cent were between eighteen to nineteen years of age, and thirty-eight per cent were between twenty and twenty-four years of age. the rest were over twenty-five years of age.26 four corners also heaps high praise on australian journalist keith murdoch, depicting him as a frank and plain speaking australian whose account of gallipoli as a disaster pursued by incompetent british commanders single handedly put an end to the campaign. masters notes that the gallipoli campaign by september 1915 had resulted in thousands of men being killed unnecessarily and says ‘they probably would have lost a lot more but without the intervention of this man [picture of murdoch]’. murdoch’s september 1915 letter to the australian government, which was also circulated among members of the british government, did add to the british government’s re-evaluation of the gallipoli campaign. but even bean in his official history puts it in the context of the review of the campaign that was going on in the war office, whitehall, and the government; he does not go as far as the four corners’ judgement that one frank australian journalist’s report put an end to the slaughter.27 here, four corners seems to be making a subtle connection between its own reputation for investigative journalism exposing the truth in the public interest with that of murdoch. public history review, vol 14, 2007 104 the letter is certainly part of the anzac mythology. murdoch wrote that the anzacs, whom he idealised, were being sacrificed in a senseless slaughter because of british incompetence. masters interprets the murdoch letter in nationalistic terms: the murdoch letter comes close to a declaration of independence. there is nothing restrained, measured, or discreet about it. in this sense, it is a masterpiece of plain speaking. it is passionately proaustralian and vitriolically anti-british, or rather anti-british command. murdoch described how british commanders in their yachts well off shore and away from the front made bad decisions that sent thousands of anzacs to their deaths. he went further and wrote that ‘the continuous and ghastly bungling over the dardenelles enterprise was to be expected from such a general staff as the british army possess, so far as i have seen it’. four corners plays up anti-british sentiment and australian nationalism when it uses just one quote from the letter: ‘what can you expect of men who have never worked seriously, who lived for their appearance and for social distinction and self satisfaction, and who are now called on to conduct a gigantic war’.28 four corners does interrogate anzac mythology only once in the ninety-two minutes of the programme. and this interestingly deals with the anti-british theme of the mythology. it examines the reality behind the well-known scene of the end of the movie gallipoli. this is when the western australian 10th light horse regiment is about to go over the trenches in an attack on the infamous nek on 7 august 1915 knowing they faced certain death. to build up the image of the anzacs as rugged men from the bush who are irreverent to british authority, four corners has previously drawn freely upon the movie, suggesting that it represents reality. for the scenes at the nek, the movie gallipoli is by and large accurate, with a failure to synchronise watches leading to the bombardment of turkish trenches stopping seven minutes too soon, enabling the turkish machine gunners to get back into their trenches. the first wave of 150 men from the light horse was cut to pieces, as were the second, third, and fourth waves, each of 150 men. four corners checks the film gallipoli for accuracy and discovers the movie’s impression that a british officer ordered the attack at the nek to continue despite pleading by an australian officer is wrong. it was actually an australian officer, lieutenant-colonel john m. ‘bull’ antill, the brigade-major, who gave the order for the attack to continue after the second wave. the programme shows correspondence that reveals that antill’s fellow officer lieutenant-colonel noel murray brazier, who attempted to have the third wave of attacked stopped, was very critical of antill’s decision to persist. on the day, brazier pleaded with antill to stop the third wave because he was unable to public history review, vol 14, 2007 105 contact brigadier-general frederick hughes who eventually called the attack off. in the confusion, however, a fourth wave also went over to their deaths.29 the programme, however, uses this well-known climax of the movie gallipoli to illustrate the memories of trooper lionel simpson, aged twenty-six, the last survivor of the nek to pass away. simpson’s words are used as a voice over when in the movie the character, archy hamilton, a champion runner, keeps sprinting towards the turkish trenches and is riddled with bullets. in contrast, simpson, of the 8th light horse from victoria, which had carried out the first and second waves, was carrying a plank to be thrown over the turkish barbed wire and noticed that everyone was falling behind him until he too was shot, and then he ambled back to the australian trenches. using the fictional film gallipoli to illustrate simpson’s memories confirms nichols’ idea of documentary being representative of reality rather than simply reflecting it. at other places, four corners uses film footage in a similar manner. earlier in the programme, footage of the austro-hungarian battleship szent istvan on 10 june 1918 capsizing and sinking with its crew running up its side onto its bottom like squirrels before the ship quickly sinks is used to illustrate how one of the six lost battleships of the british and french fleet, the bouzet, was sunk in a similar manner by the turkish forts and mines in the dardenelles on 18 march 1915. no archival film footage of this exists. the purpose is to represent how british naval arrogance and incompetence led to defeat, which is part of four corners’ argument. in gallipoli: the fatal shore, it is clear that four corners abandons much of its traditional role as an investigative programme when it embraces the argument that the anzacs laid down national values. the reasons for this could due be the nature of television history as a story teller as has been observed by cannadine, downing and burns overseas and castrique and arrow in australia. it could, however, also be due to broadbent as the producer who discarded four corners’ usual investigative journalism style in making gallipoli: the fatal shore. anzac mythology in four corners’ argument on the fall of singapore broadbent’s strong influence over gallipoli: the fatal shore makes it worth examining another programme in which four corners explores anzac mythology to see if it employs the usual investigative journalism approach without him as producer. the four corners documentary on the fall of singapore, no prisoners, marked the sixtieth anniversary of the battle. it is only forty-five minutes long, compared to the ninety-two minute long special on gallipoli. sticking to the four corners regular running time may mean that the fall of singapore programme could have less an aura of being in the mould of an epic story. no prisoners was produced by its regular current affairs executive producer, bruce belsham, and regular current affairs producer lin buckfield. belsham himself had worked in the abc documentary unit and produced the 1997 challenging television public history review, vol 14, 2007 106 history on aboriginal and european relations, frontier. buckfield was an awarding winning current affairs producer. although no prisoners begins by setting out to answer the question of whether australian soldiers deserted the front in the final days of the fall of singapore, just one veteran is questioned about this topic, roydon cornford. he was named as a deserter by peter elphick in his 1995 book, singapore: the pregnable fortress. only the last ten minutes of the programme no prisoners deals directly with the issue of australian deserters. like the four corners programme on gallipoli, most of no prisoners uses the recorded testimony of veterans and plays up the anzac mythology of australians as the best soldiers because their rugged character, which was supposedly shaped by the australian bush. to devote less than ten minutes to seriously examining this issue is not surprising. among historians of the malayan campaign, it is common knowledge that australians were absent without leave from the front in the last days of the fall of singapore. at its very end the programme asks three historians, peter elphick, peter dennis and brian farrell whether australians did desert. all three historians agree that australian soldiers did desert. faced with all this, four corners still sets out to debunk the claims that australians did desert by trying to discredit peter elphick, who had revived the controversy over australian ‘stragglers’ or ‘deserters’ at the fall of singapore in his 1995 book. four corners uses the investigative journalism style that it employs in its current affairs programmes which take one side of the argument and pursue it because the journalists believe it is in the public interest. four corners sets its sights on elphick by attempting to prove that the two australian soldiers that he names as deserters in his book, ‘captain blackwood’ and roydon cornford, were not deserters. a ‘captain blackwood’ was named by elphick as having led a group of australian deserters on board the ship, the empire star. in the interview excerpt masters tells elphick: chris masters: there’s no record of captain blackwood in the [australian] 8th division. what do you make of that? peter elphick: er, well, maybe they got the name wrong. four corners is right, but from the website set up by the programme with the full transcript of the interview, elphick’s response is much longer than this, and he discusses his source. it would have been more objective and fairer to hear the whole response from elphick. just taking the first sentence from a much longer response to the question that discusses the source makes elphick appear to be arguing against the evidence. his longer response seems to indicate he believes that his own source may be mistaken. elphick says that the name came from information from a royal air force squadron leader, steve stephens, who had permission to be evacuated from singapore aboard public history review, vol 14, 2007 107 the empire star, and recalled hearing over the ship’s internal speaker system requests for a ‘captain blackwood of the aif’ to report to the bridge.30 steve stephens may have got the name wrong, not the list of officers in the australian 8th division. still, of course, elphick should have cross checked the list of 8th division officers. four corners also then takes up the case of roydon cornford. cornford is heard describing the chaos in the last few days of the fall of singapore and how he and his friends in the 2/19th battalion were ‘left cut off and leaderless’ when retreating from the advancing japanese. the excerpts from the interview with cornford do not shed much light on what he was doing or why he was doing it at all because it is cut up into parts that don’t seem to run together. one moment he is describing how he is ‘pushing through the jungle’ then he is interrupted by the narrator, who only describes cornford and his four friends as ‘cut off and leaderless’. then all of a sudden they are in a little boat which encounters the empire star with hundreds of soldiers on it. the soldiers on board lowered a scrambling net, and cornford and his friends climbed aboard the empire star. four corners fails to mention that it is 12 february, three days before the surrender of singapore. only when all the soldiers became prisoners of war could they legitimately escape without permission. escaping without permission is technically desertion. the narrator then tells the audience that cornford helped defend the ship from attack by japanese aircraft, and ‘upon arrival in java, he was briefly detained before volunteering to return to the line until captured by the japanese.’ he was a prisoner on the burmathailand railway. then he miraculously survived one of the japanese hellships, the rakuyo maru, which was transporting prisoners to japan when it was sunk by an american submarine on 17 september 1944. he described how he floated on a raft for three days before an american warship picked up the surviving seven out of the original eighteen who were on the raft. after this description is given, chris masters starts questioning elphick: chris masters: you’ve also named a ‘roy cornford’ – you say deserted by his own admission. this he denies. he gives a good account of what happened to him. indeed, he joined the frontline again when he was returned to java. were you wrong to call him a deserter? peter elphick: no if i am wrong then so was the author of the book who actually interviewed roy cornford, and he said that roy cornford, on his own admission, was a deserter. and i took that verbatim from the book. chris masters: did you talk to roy cornford? peter elphick: no, i didn’t. public history review, vol 14, 2007 108 chris masters: but you should have, shouldn’t you if you are going to call him a deserter. peter elphick: well, it’s a moot point. would it have been worth my while to journey out to australia to interview one man? i don’t think so. neither masters nor elphick are being as open and frank about things as they could be. in his own book, singapore: the pregnable fortress, elphick cites as his source cornford’s interview in joan and clay blair’s return to the river kwai. although cornford appears to have given to the authors an open description of what happened to him, he does not say he is a deserter.31 thus, elphick is certainly misusing his source to get the interpretation that cornford is ‘a self-confessed deserter’. according to return from the river kwai, cornford and his friends were taken off the empire star at java before it left to go to australia and they were jailed. the captain of the ship accused them of being among the australian and british soldiers who forcibly boarded the ship with tommy guns. of course they had not been involved in this, as is clear from cornford’s testimony on four corners. masters, however, also certainly knows that cornford escaped from singapore well before he became a prisoner of war, and hence was technically a deserter, and also has most likely read the account in return from the river kwai from the authors’ interview with cornford. the most interesting question that emerges is perhaps why he does not consider what they were doing as desertion and what were his motives for escaping even though he most likely knew that it was technically deserting. also, one of the documents that four corners briefly shows in between cutting from elphick to cornford is that drawn up by the australian army listing australian soldiers who escaped from singapore without permission and who are to be regarded as deserters. this is from brigadier arthur blackburn, commander of the australian forces in java, giving a list of ninety-five deserters from malaya, singapore and elsewhere which was drawn up ‘to prevent any of them being confused with genuine escapees’.32 in the document there were seventy-five ‘names of deserters from malaya and singapore and 16 were members of reinforcements returned from singapore.’33 cornford’s name is on that list. having acquired this document and presumably others in the file, four corners ignores them. in the programme, the voice narration simply says ‘documents reveal no evidence of australians court-martialled for desertion’ to suggest there were no desertions. the documents in the same file as the list of deserters on the empire star suggest that the australian government was unlikely to initiate court martials after what was described as the already ‘undesirable publicity’ given to reports of australians deserting. these and other documents that four corners presumably got hold of in addition to those that it public history review, vol 14, 2007 109 showed briefly on camera must have indicated that something significant was going on. the commander of the australian 8th division general bennett’s own report says that ‘under 5,000’ australians were holding the perimeter at the front at the time of cease fire on 15 february 1942.34 on 17 and 18 february 1942, over 14,000 australians reported to changi as prisoners of war. of these, about 3000 australians were in hospital as patients and personnel.35 the report on operations of the 8th division compiled by colonel j.h. thyer also suggests a high figure of australians absent without leave when he writes that ‘in the last stages at most two-thirds of those fit to fight were manning the final perimeters’.36 the figure of lieutenant-colonel maurice ashkanasy, the deputy assistant adjutant general (daag) of the 8th division, was only 4500 australians manning the perimeter on 12 february 1942.37 ashkanasy himself escaped from singapore with forty men in a small sampan before surrender and later joined australian soldiers fighting the japanese in new guinea. so the real question is what were approximately 6000 australians who appear to have been absent without leave doing? but this is not the question that four corners asks. instead it says there are unfounded rumours of australian deserters, and let’s go and find out by asking one or two veterans. masters simply asks cornford: ‘are you a self confessed deserter?’ conford says no, and that is it. work published by one of the historians interviewed by four corners, brian farrell of the national university of singapore, uses all these documents and indicates that a large number of australians were not at the front, and attempts to explain this.38 given that the four corners team had come to singapore to interview him, surely they had read what he had written. what four corners tries to do is suggest that these allegations are those of a lone ‘pommy’ historian, peter elphick, who has not checked his facts. thus, by discrediting elphick they seek to dismiss the allegations. at a seminar a few days after the interview, farrell expressed frustration with the four corners team in that they seemed unable to accept what he was telling them.39 farrell’s answer to the question as to why there were so many australians absent without leave is a very perceptive. a hint of it is given in the excerpt taken from the interview he gave to four corners about the army being trapped and falling apart from the top down.40 in 1999, farrell had published on how badly led the australians were in the defence of singapore. he described how in the final days before the fall of singapore lieutenantgeneral gordon bennett, commanding the australian 8th division, was too busy planning his own escape and how his brigade commanders failed their troops. the commander of the australian 27th brigade, duncan struan maxell, believing that everything was lost and that continuing the fight would only cost more lives, wanted to surrender even before the invasion of singapore island. harold burfield taylor, commander of the 22nd brigade, assumed that the main defence plan would not succeed and withdrew his troops too soon. thus farrell wrote that: public history review, vol 14, 2007 110 the rank and file of the 8th australian division was tired, but not stupid. they could not have failed to note the attitudes of their commanders and the lack of clear direction and harmony in the chain of command. as percival himself admitted, when no one told them otherwise they decided the battle was futile. when the front fell apart and no one stepped forward to restore the situation, many – twice provoked – gave up. mass desertion there was, but the main cause is also clear: left to fend for themselves by an incompetent command, the troops did just that.41 four corners, however, does not seem to be interested in him making this argument in the programme and it concludes that there was no mass desertion. throughout most of its forty-five minutes, four corners does not address the question that it set out to answer on australians deserting at the fall of singapore but constructs an argument that affirms the anzac mythology about australian soldiers, just as it did in gallipoli: the fatal shore fourteen years before. bean’s ideas that permeated the 1988 programme are strongly present in no prisoners. these are principally that the australian bush had made australians the best soldiers because it had created them as more rugged, more resourceful, more independent and bound together in mateship by the very ruggedness and trials and tribulations of bush life. in no prisoners, the country image of the australian digger fashioned by bean is still trotted out as it was in gallipoli: the fatal shore. the programme uses a quote by david griffin of the 2/3rd medical auxiliary corps of the australian 8th division in malaya and singapore, which follows the anzac legend: it [the australian 8th division] was made up of absolutely wonderful australians, which are now almost an extinct race, i think… a lot of country chaps that are absolutely marvellous types of people. just marvellous. australians are also played up as superior fighters. a great deal is made of australians ambushing the japanese at the gemencheh bridge near gemas in mid-january 1942, while nothing is heard of kampar, where british and indian troops were able to hold back the japanese. masters says of gemas: ‘the japanese later said that the australians fought with a bravery not previously encountered’. in other words, four corners is saying that australians were the first to stand up bravely to the japanese. in contrast, british and indian troops are mentioned only in unfavourable terms. comments, such as the excerpt from ray steele, australian public history review, vol 14, 2007 111 veteran from 2/15th field regiment at muar, are not balanced by accounts of stubborn resistance by indian troops, such as at kota bharu and kampar: ray steele: as soon as the heat turned on, they didn’t know what to do. they [an indian brigade] finished up, a lot of them, running off – throwing their rifles away, taking their boots off, and running like hell. just as gallipoli: the fatal shore refused to question much of the anzac mythology, so, too, does no prisoners. this means it has trouble dealing with the issue of desertion in terms of offering an explanation of what happened. elphick’s book cites the explanation of keith murdoch, a ‘hero’ in the 1988 four corners gallipoli programme. murdoch, as managing director of the herald newspaper group, suggested in august 1942 in a famous article in the melbourne herald, that the very qualities that made up the anzac legend helped explain the large number of australians not at the frontline in the last days of the fall of singapore. he blamed the ‘distorted tradition of the last war, that discipline is not necessary to attain high fighting value’ for the indiscipline that led to many australian soldiers to fend for themselves rather than stay in disciplined formations at the front. murdoch remarked that ‘it was notable that the men who did not stand were the boozy “tough” men who had always had wrong ideas of discipline and were noisy and boastful’. he was also critical of the aspect of the anzac legend that said australians were the best fighters and that others were inferior at the fall of singapore: ‘our own part was marred by a constant jarring and belittlement of our british and indian comrades’ and this ‘led to inadequate cohesion in the battlefield and did no good to our own morale: troops are not helped by being told that those on their flanks are unreliable’.42 in gallipoli: the fatal shore, four corners had drawn upon murdoch extensively and praised him as a frank journalist when he was upholding the anzac legend in 1915. but when he was scrutinising it in 1942 he was ignored by the programme. many viewers responding in the no prisoners’ online forum expressed admiration for the programme for upholding the anzac mythology: they despised elphick for questioning it. they also remarked that the programme was in the tradition of four corners’ investigative journalism style.43 ‘shirley n’ commented: ‘i would like to again congratulate four corners on a great piece of insightful history on our war time past. this is a great objective piece of journalism by chris masters and his team and important to recognise these incredible brave australian blokes’. ‘s rogers’ wrote: ‘yet again, another excellent program by four corners. i’m a brit living in australia and i’d like to say that’s lucky for my countryman mr. elphick. what an arrogant bloke and someone should take this ignorant, bombastic twit to the cleaners. legally of course!’ ‘garry’ compared no prisoners to gallipoli: the fatal shore: ‘thank you very much for the excellent public history review, vol 14, 2007 112 program, like the fatal shore it was very informative and didn’t pull any punches. i look forward to more of these programs from you and your team.’ what is significant with no prisoners is that viewers saw its approach as that of examining the anzac legend within the tradition of four corners of ‘exposing the truth’ through an investigative style that makes out a partisan argument. the programme did have an argument, but that argument was not to question the anzac mythology; it was to cross examine anyone questioning the anzac legend, principally elphick. both gallipoli: the fatal shore and no prisoners offer insights into how the investigative journalism style of four corners is applied from current affairs to historical documentary making. in this process, there was little rigorous examination of the ‘truth’ behind the anzac mythology that can be found in the printed work of historians. in the four corners’ current affairs programmes, partiality is deemed acceptable if it is in the ‘public interest’, which equates in this instance with shoring up old nationalist certainties in an unstable cultural environment. in its historical documentary making, four corners did not ‘expose the truth’ but obscured it by simply arguing one view in a complex historical debate. this confirms the point made by scholars of television history that the medium in its current form is not amenable to drawing out historiographical debates but is driven by the needs of a simple, linear narrative story telling structure. endnotes 1 see ‘chapter 2: four corners: convincing bias’ in alan mckee, australian television: a genealogy of great moments, oxford university press, melbourne, 2001, pp33-50; ‘four corners and the truth’ in stuart cunningham and toby miller, contemporary australian television, university of new south wales press, sydney, 1994, pp5358; and ‘introduction’ in robert pullan, four corners: twenty-five years, abc enterprises, sydney, 1986, pp310. 2 bill nichols, introduction to documentary, indiana university press, bloomington, 2001, p105. 3 david cannadine, ‘introduction’, in david cannadine (ed), history and the media, palgrave macmillan, new york, 2004, p4. 4 taylor downing, ‘bringing the past to the small screen’, in david cannadine (ed), history and the media, p10; and taylor downing, ‘history on film/film on history’, history today, vol 56, no 1, september 2006, p62. 5 ian jarvie, ‘history on television’, historical journal of film radio and television, vol 21, no 1, 2001, p98. 6 these words are thomas cripps’ paraphrasing of ken burns in thomas cripps, ‘historical truth: an interview with ken burns’, american historical review, vol 100, no 3, june 1995, p741. 7 cited in mathew melton, ‘ken burns’ civil war: epic narrative and public moral argument’, sync: regent journal of film and video, vol 1, no 2, june 1994 (online). available: http://www.regent.edu/acad/schcom/rojc/sync2.html (accessed 20 october 2006) 8 sue castrique, ‘beyond text: reflections on historical television’, public history review, vol 9, 2001, p98. 9 michelle arrow, ‘television program yes, history, no: australian history according to rewind’, history australia, vol 2, no 2, 2005, pp46-1-46-6; and michelle arrow, ‘i want to be a tv historian when i grow up! on being a rewind historian, public history review, vol 12, 2006, pp80-91. 10 see the commercial abc videotape of the ninety-two minute four corners programme, gallipoli: the fatal shore, abc video, sydney, 1992. 11 see the transcript on the website for this particular four corners episode, no prisoners (online): http://www.abc.net.net.au/4corners/stories/s498399.htm (accessed 20 october 2006). 12 pullan, four corners: twenty-five years. 13 harvey broadbent, gallipoli: the fatal shore, viking, camberwell, victoria, 2005. public history review, vol 14, 2007 113 14 gallipoli: the boys who came home, abc video, sydney, 1990. 15 harvey broadbent, the boys who came home, abc books, sydney, 1990, px. 16 for use of the two videos on the gallipoli tours, see for example the istanbul hotels tour (online) available: http://www.istanbulhotelsonline.org/anzac2.htm; and the turkey tours (online) available: http://www.turkeytoursonline.com/english/minitour2.htm (both accessed 20 october 2006). 17 alistair thomson, anzac memories: living with the legend, oxford university press, melbourne, 1994, pp196-97. 18 c.e.w. bean, official history of australia in the war of 1914-1918: volume 1: the story of anzac, from the outbreak of war to the first phase of the gallipoli campaign may 4 1915, angus and robertson, sydney, 1939, 9th edition, originally published in 1921, pp4-5. 19 bean, official history of australia in the war of 1914-1918: volume 1, p6. 20 denis winter, 25 april 1915: the inevitable tragedy, queensland, university of queensland st. lucia, 1994, pp31-32. 21 see jenny macleod, reconsidering gallipoli, manchester university press, 2004. 22 leslie lloyd robson, ‘the origin and character of the first a.i.f, 1914-1918: some statistical evidence’, historical studies, no 61, 1973, pp737-749; and leslie lloyd robson, the first australian imperial force: a study of its recruitment, 1914-1918, melbourne university press, 1970. for ken inglis, see the compilation of his work in john lack, (ed), anzac remembered: selected writings of k.s. inglis, history department, university of melbourne, 1998. 23 robson, ‘the origin and character of the first a.i.f’, pp737-49. 24 among accounts given by historians, the only one to speculate this way is the australian journalist alan moorehead, gallipoli, harper and brothers, new york, 1956, pp138-139. even c.e.w. bean does not allow himself this type of claim when he returns to gallipoli in 1919 and tries to find out how far the anzacs got up the slopes of chunuk bair as reported in his gallipoli mission, abc books, sydney, 1990, originally published in 1948, pp84-107. 25 see the embarkation roll on the first australian imperial force online at the australian war memorial (online). available: http://www.awm.gov.au/database/nroll.asp (accessed 20 october 2006) 26 robson, ‘the origin and character of the first a.i.f’, p743. 27 c.e.w. bean, official history of australia in the war of 1914-1918: volume 2: the story of anzac, from 4 may 1915 to the evacuation of the gallipoli peninsula, angus and robertson, sydney, 1939, 9th edition, originally published in 1924, pp763-97. 28 keith arthur murdoch papers, ms, ms 2823-2-1, australian national library, canberra (online). available: http://www.nla.gov.au/gallipolidespatches/2-2-1-murdoch.html (accessed 20 october 2006). 29 bean, official history of australia in the war of 1914-1918: volume 2, pp618-619. 30 no prisoners (online). available: http://www.abc.gov.au/4corners/specials/noprisoners/interviews/elphick.htm (accessed 20 october 2006). there is also discussion of no prisoners in karl hack and kevin blackburn, did singapore have to fall? routledge, london, 2004, p160. 31 peter elphick, singapore: the pregnable fortress, hodder and stoughton, london, 1995, p454; and see joan and clay blair jr, return from the river kwai, penguin, harmondsworth, middlesex, 1989, originally published, 1979, p29. 32 see the document cable from britgen batavia to air board for prime minister, 2 march 1942 ref abdacom opx o 1428 17/2 in file alleged offense of members of a.i.f. in departing from singapore without authority a5954 item 527/9 (australian archives). 33 see awm 54 553/62 (australian war memorial). 34 see paragraph 11 of bennett’s report to the war office on 27 march 1942, war cabinet agendum 192/1942, report on the malayan campaign, a2671 (australian national archives). there is also a copy in a5954, item 653/1 (australian archives). 35 callaghan to d.m.o. & p of 27 january 1947, awm 54 553/1/6 (australian war memorial). 36 see paragraph 228 of operations of 8 australian division in malaya 1941-1942. report on operations of 8 division aif in malaya, compiled by colonel j h thyer cbe dso from narrative prepared by colonel g h kappe obe psc, awm54 553/5/23 part 1 (australian war memorial). 37 awm 67, item 1/5, long, diary 5 (australian war memorial). 38 brian p. farrell, ‘controversies surrounding the surrender of singapore, february 1942’ in murfett, malcolm h., et al, between two oceans: a military history of singapore from first settlement to final british withdrawal. oxford university press, singapore, 1999, pp341-364. 39 at the seminar given by paula hamilton, for the people, by the people: the practice of history in the united states, history department of the national university of singapore, 20 february 2002. 40 brian p. farrell, the defence and fall of singapore 1940-1942, tempus, stroud, gloustershire, 2005, p364. 41 brian p. farrell, ‘controversies surrounding the surrender of singapore, february 1942’, p359. 42 herald, 15 august 1942. 43 no prisoners (online) available http://www2b.abc.net.au/4corners/sforum81/ (accessed 20 october 2006). public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: baxter, c. 2021. erasing history?: monuments as archaeological artefacts. public history review, 28, 1–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7487 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj erasing history?: monuments as archaeological artefacts claire baxter doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7487 in 2019, as an archaeology master’s student, i wrote a thesis about contextualising relocated monuments. i travelled around eastern europe looking at postsoviet statue parks and the way in which they had presented the context of their relocated statues. one of the strongest arguments for keeping statues, or placing them in museums, had been their educational value. the aim of my analysis was therefore to assess the effectiveness of the statue parks in hungary, lithuania and russia in achieving this objective. i used a framework created by educator melanie l. buffington, in which she identified three different types of context – the history of the person or event being depicted, the time in which the object was created and the present time in which the work is being viewed and understood.1 to this i added physical context – where the object was placed and its relationship to its surroundings. my conclusion was that none of the parks had really been effective in presenting these different contexts. 2 park of arts in moscow presented almost no context at all. grutas park in lithuania was heavy on biographical detail but little social information, although a few statues did make good use of photographs to present the physical context, and memento park in hungary had some good information available in their guidebook and through a guided tour, but these cost extra and therefore weren’t taken advantage of by the majority of visitors. without information about how individuals reacted to the statues, and behaved around them, there was little sense of how the statues were used to spread ideology or impact everyday life. to me, this information was of more educative value than just knowing who or what event the statue commemorated. with this in mind, when 2020 saw public statues once again become a focus for protest and debate across the world, and once again seeing arguments such as, ‘tearing them down would be erasing our history’ or ‘we don’t need a statue to teach the history of colonialism’ from their respective sides of the debate, it occurred to me that many people are misunderstanding the meaning of public monuments. by thinking of statues as archaeology, rather than history or historiography, although partly semantics, it changes the view of them from being about the individual being memorialised and instead focuses on what they tell us of the societies that created the statues, erected them, and perhaps altered, removed, or replaced them. archaeology is the study of human activity, beliefs and values through material culture. material culture being the physical objects that were created and used by humans. this includes us. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7487 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7487 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7487 the fact is that statues in their current form teach us very little about history. most just have a small plaque perhaps mentioning the name of the person, perhaps their job or major achievement, who raised funds for it, or the year it was installed. often it just comes down to a couple of words, like on the cook statue in sydney’s hyde park, saying ‘captain cook: discovered this territory’. not only is this not teaching us history. it is actually itself erasing history because it is not correct, and only presents a very europeanised version of the story. but having these memorials, and only these kinds of memorials, normalises this version of history, and perpetuates a founding myth and excluding other versions. by seeing these statues as archaeology, we can then come to see them as a story about us, whom we celebrated, what histories we told, what values we upheld and who held power in our societies. at present, our memorial landscapes are largely celebrating white men. for example, i performed an exercise in melbourne where i walked the twokilometre stretch of st kilda road and swanston street from king’s domain to the state library – one of the major roads through the city of melbourne. i looked at all the memorials to named individuals in that space. there are fourteen, thirteen of which are men. with the possible exception of st george, all of them are white. thinking of these as the archaeological record of our society, is it reflective of who we are and whom we look up to? if people of the future were looking back at us and interpreting us through this record, what is it communicating about us, who was celebrated and who had power? who is missing from this record? and is this what we want our record to say? we often hear talk about context in the debates about statues. for example, they are reflective of their time – a kind of context. or the suggestions to leave them where they are but add additional historical context. or move them to a museum where they can be properly contextualised. archaeologists know that removing an object from its location can change its meaning. objects get their meaning from their use, surroundings and relationship to other objects and the landscape. so a statue’s location can alter its meaning. a statue of a confederate soldier, created at the end of the civil war and erected in a cemetery, has a different context and meaning to one that was erected on the steps of a capitol building at the height of the white supremacist movement in the 1920s. the first statue might be a genuine reflection of loss and sorrow. whereas the latter is a message of intimidation and power. similarly, a statue of captain cook at botany bay has some relevance, whereas one in the northern suburbs of melbourne, a place he never visited, much less so. or, along st kilda rd, the fact of there being twelve monuments to white males and only one female on a twokilometre stretch of road tells us more about our society than does any single one of those monuments on its own. we deal with archaeological artefacts in many different ways. they may be uncovered, recorded in place and covered over again. or they may be left in place, uncovered, with some protection and interpretation. or they may be recorded, removed and placed in a museum or research collection. a new museum may be created specifically for the objects. there are examples of all these approaches with regards to statues. the maitland brown memorial in fremantle has been left in place but has had additional information added.3 a jefferson davis statue at the university of texas was removed to the campus museum with detail about why it was created and why it was removed.4 and then there are the statue parks in hungary, lithuania and russia which were purposebuilt to house their unwanted statues. whichever option is taken, recording the objects is the common theme throughout each archaeological treatment. the purpose of recording is to preserve the context. we already have the historical context through documents – both biographical details and in many cases other things like council records about the creation of the statue – who proposed, authorised and paid for it. what we need to record now is the physical context before the statues are removed and what if any alterations took place. this can be done by photography, laser scanning, mapping, photogrammetry and other techniques. if the choice of what monuments get erected is a reflection of our society, then so is the choice of which ones get preserved, vandalised or torn down. this is another form of context which should also be recorded. baxter public history review, vol. 28, 20212 multivocal oral histories are a good way to approach this to obtain various points of view. how did different people feel in the space around the statue? when and why did the statue become controversial? what changes have they gone through over time, for example through vandalism or protest? what groups were involved in the decision to retain or remove them? thinking of these objects as an archaeological record, rather than just historical objects, allows for a more nuanced discussion. if we see them as a current reflection of our social values, it feels like they are somewhat out of date, and that there is room to even up the score. a captain cook statue at botany bay, for example, might be appropriate in its context as a historical marker. but it could be accompanied by an art piece commemorating the victims of colonialism – those who died on convict transports, who faced rape and violence on arrival, to the indigenous people who died from violence or disease and had their culture and way of life disrupted. this would give a fuller picture and change the way in which we think about this event. we should also put some time into recording the objects so that they can be studied and questioned in future and provide an insight into the archaeological record of those who created them. this would enable us to use these objects to their best educational advantage and encourage critical thinking about the way in which we present history, what versions get told and whose voices are valued. public monuments are our archaeology and we should consider what record of our society we want to leave behind. endnotes 1. melanie l. buffington, ‘confronting hate: ideas for art educators to address confederate monuments’, art education, vol 72, no 1, 2019, pp1420. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2019.1534435 2. claire baxter, ‘contextualising relocated monuments: how have the postsoviet statue parks presented the contexts of their relocated monuments, and could this be applied to other societies looking for a similar solution?’, master of conflict archaeology dissertation, university of glasgow, 2019. available from: https://www.academia.edu/44263940/ contextualising_relocated_monuments_how_have_the_post_soviet_statue_parks_presented_the_contexts_of_their_relocated_monuments_and_could_this_be_applied_to_other_societies_looking_for_a_similar_solution. 3. paul daley, ‘how do we settle the “statue wars”? let’s start by telling the truth about our past’, the guardian, 28 june 2018. available from: https://www.theguardian.com/australianews/postcolonialblog/2018/jun/29/howdowesettlethe statuewarsletsstartbytellingthetruthaboutourpast#comment117594733. 4. rick jervis, ‘when a bronze confederate needed to retire, university of texas found a home’, usatoday, 19 august 2017. available from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/18/confederatestatueretirementhome/580041001/. baxter public history review, vol. 28, 20213 https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2019.1534435 https://www.academia.edu/44263940/contextualising_relocated_monuments_how_have_the_post_soviet_statue_parks_presented_the_contexts_of_their_relocated_monuments_and_could_this_be_applied_to_other_societies_looking_for_a_similar_solution https://www.academia.edu/44263940/contextualising_relocated_monuments_how_have_the_post_soviet_statue_parks_presented_the_contexts_of_their_relocated_monuments_and_could_this_be_applied_to_other_societies_looking_for_a_similar_solution https://www.academia.edu/44263940/contextualising_relocated_monuments_how_have_the_post_soviet_statue_parks_presented_the_contexts_of_their_relocated_monuments_and_could_this_be_applied_to_other_societies_looking_for_a_similar_solution https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/jun/29/how-do-we-settle-the-statue-wars-lets-start-by-telling-the-truth-about-our-past#comment-117594733 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/jun/29/how-do-we-settle-the-statue-wars-lets-start-by-telling-the-truth-about-our-past#comment-117594733 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/18/confederate-statue-retirement-home/580041001/ galleyconard public history review vol 22 (2015): 69-77 issn: 1833-4989 © 2015 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. take-away thoughts: reflecting on four case studies rebecca conard ow that public history, both as professional practice and academic field, has generated an international network, the commensurate traffic of ideas quite naturally is leading to collaborative ventures to see what we can learn from one another, or learn together. the four case studies presented here are only a sampling of activities that fall under the broad heading of international, or transnational, collaboration. nevertheless, this quartet helps to clarify the challenges involved in developing successful partnerships and sustaining them beyond one or two projects. financial considerations and administrative systems loom large as challenges to sustainability, but the case studies also point to a commensurate need for an intellectual apparatus that can integrate collaborative ventures into the pedagogy of public history and provide a rationale for sustainability. n https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | conard 70 each author, however, offers individual insights and suggestions based on his or her experience, and each study merits consideration before turning to the broader implications. richard harker’s incisive retrospective critique of the transnational collaboration between the museum of history and holocaust education at kennesaw state university in the united states and the ben m’sik community museum in casablanca, morocco, provides a coda to the more descriptive coverage this collaboration received in the public historian (tph) in 2012.1 together, harker’s assessment of the pedagogical values and the project leaders’ roundtable in tph convey a more complete sense of the logistical challenges to implementing transnational collaborative undertakings, only some of which can be facilitated by communications technology; the tremendous satisfaction that attends successful projects; the intangible benefits of cross-cultural learning; the need to consider, at the outset, the relative positions of institutional partners, in terms of professional development, financial resources, and the larger cultural milieu in which each institution exists; and the long-term financial realities that limit the sustainability of transnational partnerships. the 2012 roundtable highlights the first three aspects of the project, while harker takes on the issue of power differentials forthrightly. both frankly acknowledge the sustainability issues. harker begins his critique by noting that the central aim of the first grant-funded project, a comparative oral history project that engaged american and moroccan undergraduate students in people-to-people research, was to break down cultural stereotypes and build trust. similarly, the second project, also grant-funded, sought to deepen crosscultural knowledge by engaging a new group of american and moroccan undergraduate students in creating an online exhibit that incorporated oral histories conducted by the first group. to sharpen his focus on the power differentials that became obvious during the process of each undertaking, harker draws on the concept of ‘shared inquiry’ as articulated by katharine corbett and howard miller, which, in turn, builds on michael frisch’s concept of ‘shared authority’ and donald schön’s related concepts of ‘reflective practice’ and ‘reflection-in-action’. ‘shared authority’, corbett and miller point out, keeps issues of agency ‘at the forefront’, while collaborators are reflexively ‘monitoring and adjusting’ their responses and ‘behavior’ – or reflecting in real time – throughout the processes of ‘shared inquiry.’2 in the context of this methodological construct, harker examines the inherent power imbalance between the two partners and two particular instances of conflict in the collaborative process. first, he points to public history review | conard 71 specific imbalances in professional expertise, public history training and financial resources that opened the american team to charges of ‘cultural imperialism’. he intimates that moroccan critics were not able to exploit this charge because the moroccan coordinator operated with enough autonomy, or cultural authority, that he could navigate the oral history project to a to successful outcome. although the american facilitators certainly were sensitive to the power imbalance, and adjusted accordingly, one has to ask whether more collaboration in the planning phase might have resulted in additional project components to address specific imbalances before bringing students into the process. as a case in point, had there been more collaboration on the planning end, the american and moroccan partners would have confronted early on the cultural differences over paying oral history narrators and thus avoided the conflict that ensued when the moroccan team and their narrators jointly decided to use funds budgeted for paying narrators to purchase computers for a school. the second incident, resolving an ‘impasse’ that american and moroccan students reached in deliberating the design elements of a logo for the online exhibit, underscores the subtleties of building trust. making an ‘executive decision’ that placed the final design in the hands of an american graphic designer resolved the impasse expediently. however, even though all the students professed that the final design was a satisfactory compromise, the american coordinator was left with an uneasy feeling that the logo might ultimately be viewed a symbol of the power imbalance that marked the whole undertaking. by focusing on the power differentials and examining two episodes that brought cultural differences into sharp relief, harker teases out the methodological and pedagogical challenges of transnational collaboration. ultimately, the long-term costs of creating sustainable collaborations may dwarf the intellectual challenges. however, when circumstances and funding make transnational collaboration feasible, harker’s critique suggests that public historians be more mindful of methodological issues and cultural differences in the planning phase rather than sorting things out on the fly once the effort is underway. planning, of course, takes time, which is always in short supply when an application deadline is looming. but something as simple as involving all key partners in constructing the budget could at least flag issues that need further discussion before a project starts or that need time for discussion during a project. this might enhance the pedagogical value of transnational collaboration, especially grant-funded undertakings that are likely to be episodic rather than ongoing efforts. public history review | conard 72 karina esposito raises the intriguing proposition of using the history and heritage of americana, a town near santa barbara d’oeste in san paulo, brazil, to open up a dialogue about the american civil war (18611865) in a transnational context. specifically, she sees the historicalcultural traditions of this south american enclave as an opportunity to engage students in a more honest discussion of us history by ‘removing the barriers that sometimes generate an immediately defensive posture’. americana and santa barbara d’oeste form the cultural center of the confederados, descendants of several thousand confederates who, at war’s end, fled to brazil, some with their former slaves, rather than stay in the re-united states. now, several generations later and intermarried with native brazilians or other immigrant groups, the confederados represent a culture group that, on the surface at least, is oddly familiar to americans, yet strikingly different. the most prominent display of culture occurs at an annual festival, festa confederada, where an increasingly diverse population of descendants gathers to perform white southern culture – dress in hoop skirts and confederate uniforms, square dance to fiddle music, eat fried chicken and banana pudding and fly the confederate flag while singing the brazilian national anthem. accounts of the festival by american tourists tend to dwell on the seeming lack of racism, or even racial overtones, and it is this quality that esposito seizes upon as framework for discussing (with us students) the history and commemoration of the civil war in a transnational context in order to move beyond racially charged engagement in ‘opposing viewpoints.’ unfortunately, although esposito indicates that she uses such a cross-cultural approach in the classroom, she does not explain how she structures and guides discussion to arrive at a moment when students can begin to engage in open and honest dialogue about the comparative legacies of slavery in america, brazil, and the caribbean; institutionalized racism in the us and elsewhere; or the contemporary, international problem of human trafficking. the critical pedagogical piece remains elusive but tantalizing with possibilities. all too often classroom discussions of the civil war and interpretations at civil war historic sites are exercises in avoiding the elephant in the room, and we need creative frameworks that encourage more reflective thinking about the causes, consequences, and continuing relevancy of a transformative event that had international as well as national effects. elizabeth catte takes cross-cultural research in a different direction by examining the public historical practices of another country. reflecting critically on her experience working for manx national heritage (mnh) on the isle of man, in a manner that resembles the public history review | conard 73 participant observation method of qualitative research, catte elucidates how she came to understand more clearly the power of cultural policy to shape national identity and social cohesion in this island nation. while noting that there are limits to what mnh can ‘brand’ as distinctive national heritage, catte demonstrates that this statutory body nonetheless wields considerable authority in using history and heritage to shape manx cultural identity. among other things, it does this by controlling the narrative of national history, promoting public events that celebrate viking and celtic heritage, and reviving manx gaelic as a ‘symbolic public language.’ catte notes that mnh draws its strength, in part, from a long history of manx celticism dating back to the latenineteenth century, which sought to separate manx from the ‘collective’ british identity. but, she asserts, mnh’s subtle ‘construction’ of manx history and cultural identity through a state-controlled heritage delivery system also alienates many migrant workers and working-class natives. drawing on her training in public history in the united states, catte points to comparisons she began to make while she was living on the isle of man. among them, she observes that the manx museum emphasizes the island’s role as a holding place for ‘enemy aliens’ during world war ii and marginalizes its military contributions to winning both wars, a choice she and other critics attribute to mnh’s dedication to promoting manx ‘otherness’. while the us national park service interprets america’s own shameful incarceration of japanese-american citizens during world war ii at manzanar national historic site, she notes that associating the isle of man’s wartime internment camps with the history of british oppression of minorities stands in stark contrast to the triumphal interpretations of both world wars that one finds more generally throughout the uk and us. catte’s critique of the isle of man’s heritage industry implicates public history institutions as central players in identity politics. but she stops short of examining the lessons for public history pedagogy. her experience working with the education department of manx national heritage suggests that we might begin by expanding pubic history curricula to include comparative courses that examine, through transnational case studies such as hers, the role that public history institutions play in facilitating not only the teaching of history but also the transmission of national identity through curriculum-based public programming and interpretive materials. brittany ghee presents another case study that is well suited for comparative analysis. ghee admits at the outset that ‘a bit of self reflection’ after her internship with the national museum of ghana led public history review | conard 74 her to a much deeper understanding of the museum’s collections and interpretive ‘rhetoric’ in relation to ‘the formation of national identity’. her admission, and the more reflective museum evaluation that is the heart of her article, provides a sense of the pedagogical value of integrating transnational case studies into public history curricula. on one level, such case studies could examine differences in preservation, curatorial, or interpretive techniques, but moving to the level of institutional history creates a pathway for comparing the ways that museums in different countries use their collections to transmit cultural policy. in her case study, ghee discovered that the narrative confusion produced by the five different elements of the permanent exhibition, related only in the sense that all of them focused on ghana’s cultural diversity, made more sense once she understood the origins of the museum as an institution and key transition points in its history. many of the museum’s collections were donated by british collectors associated in one way or another with the operations of the british empire in west africa. between the museum’s creation in 1924 and 1957, when the gold coast became the independent country of ghana, these artifacts were meant to cultivate respect for distinctive indigenous cultures, and thereby, british colonials hoped, foster harmonious relations among tribal chiefs and native leaders in order to maintain a system of indirect rule. when kwame nkrumah came to power in 1957 as ghana’s first president, he promoted pan-africanism and solidarity among other new african nations in order to present a united front in international affairs. the national museum’s collections thus took on added value for promoting a cultural policy of ‘unity through diversity’. in reflection, ghee realized that the ‘unity through diversity rhetoric’ was everywhere represented in the museum’s permanent exhibition. what was perfectly intelligible to ghanaian visitors without an interpretive apparatus needed explanation to outsiders like herself. she found that meaning by delving into the museum’s own history. from this historical perspective, ghee then was able to see the fifth element of the exhibition, which focuses on the transatlantic slave trade, not as an odd juxtaposition to the cacophony of culture presented elsewhere but evidence of an evolving metanarrative. initially preserved as examples of european architecture, the forts and castles that once served the slave trade are now interpreted in an international context as sites associated with the african diaspora, thus extending the unity through diversity message to include the descendants of once-enslaved africans. reflecting on these four case studies, the first thing to note is that only one of the four addresses an actual collaborative venture. however, public history review | conard 75 international or transnational collaborations will surely increase as the public history network expands globally. the museums connect grant program, a joint initiative of the us department of state’s bureau of educational and cultural affairs and the american alliance of museums, which funded the collaboration between kennesaw state university’s museum of history and holocaust education and the ben m’sik community museum in casablanca, provides one source of funding for short-term collaborations. museums connect funding guidelines also provide a template of sorts inasmuch as the program encourages projects that fit its mission: ‘to build global communities through cross-cultural exchanges while also supporting u.s. foreign policy goals, such as youth empowerment, environmental sustainability and disability rights awareness.’3 in the last three rounds (2013-2015), the museums connect program has funded twenty-seven collaborative projects; eight of them represent partnerships that use history or cultural heritage as a basis for cross-cultural exchange through people-to-people projects. other types of grant programs encourage international collaboration between humanities scholars and research groups, such as the netherlands organization for scientific research (now), humanities division; the us national endowment for the humanities; and the new ‘uses of the past’ grant program organized by humanities in the european research area and jointly funded by the european commission and twenty-four national funding bodies in europe and the uk. philanthropic sources of funding also will drive international collaborations, such as the ongoing joint conservation project between the getty conservation institute in los angeles, funded by the j. paul getty trust, and china’s dunhuang academy to preserve and manage the ancient magao grottoes, a world heritage site in gansu province.4 the most important lesson learned over the years, according to three of the principals involved in this conservation project, is that ‘collaborations must be relationship focused.’ elaborating on this point, they caution that: good relations and working practices take time to build and are established at the personal level, not at the signing of the agreement. in other words, a successful partnership is built up, not down.5 richard harker’s critique amplifies their observations and demonstrates that ventures undertaken with short-term funding, even when they are public history review | conard 76 processrather than product-focused, truncate the relationship-building process. this, in turn, exacerbates sustainability issues. the guantánamo public memory project (gpmp) offers an alternative model for collaboration.6 although this project is us-based, its aim is to use the history of guantánamo naval station in cuba to stimulate international dialogue on a divisive contemporary issue of global importance: the quasi-legal and secretive detaining of individuals deemed to be a threat to national security. initiated in 2009 by the international coalition of sites of conscience and managed by the institute for the study of human rights at columbia university, the gpmp partners with many universities and organizations who ‘collaborate’ through a web interface that keeps track of a steadily growing number of separate projects. to date, partners have included the public history programs at brown university, indiana universitypurdue university at indianapolis, new york university, university of california riverside, and university of massachusetts amherst. the financial cost of sustaining the gpmp is borne by the individual partners, who design and develop projects – such as digital and physical exhibits, oral histories, online research resources, curriculum materials and public events – suited to their own resources and audiences. the case studies of karina esposito, elizabeth catte and brittany ghee suggest a different approach to international collaboration: integrating cross-cultural studies of public history practice into public history curricula. the pedagogical value seems clear. both catte and ghee note the extraordinary power that museums and historic sites have to create national identity. ghee further observes that successful collaboration depends upon ‘international discourses of public history’. such discourse already takes place in conference settings, but at present, few universities offer comparative public history courses. while many public history educators surely incorporate comparative examples of public history practices in other countries into their courses, the internationalizing of public history opens a path to more rigorous transnational discourse. the major challenge comes in designing comparative courses that stimulate critical thinking in addition to expanding practical knowledge and skills. this would require in-depth case studies that have already been subjected to some level of analysis. a related concern would be devising strategies for incorporating actual cross-cultural dialogue so that learning is not filtered through one cultural perspective. building international discourse into the curriculum provides, as ghee notes, a platform for developing long-term initiatives that involve collaborative field projects. it should be noted that transnational collaboration is not exactly a new trend in public public history review | conard 77 history pedagogy, as evidenced by the long-running summer program developed by constance shultz in 1990, which partnered the university of south carolina public history program with kiplin hall, a historic site in north yorkshire, england.7 still, these four case studies point, each in its own way, to the more deeply humanistic value of transnational discourse in public history and the comparative study of public history practices worldwide. none of the challenges to international collaboration, whether onthe-ground, people-to-people projects or partially processed case studies for indirect, reflective study, pose insurmountable problems. as william willingham concluded, after reflecting on his own experience working with water resource historians in holland to produce a retrospective study comparing dutch and us water resource management practices, ‘the contribution to historical scholarship that such international public history projects can produce and the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from international partners make any potential problems minor in comparison.’8 but the contributions can be extended beyond scholarship and cross-cultural learning to include changes in public history pedagogy, which may lead to a more critical examination of the role that public history plays is shaping the cultural contours that divide as well as unite us. endnotes 1 catherine lewis, jennifer dickey, samir el azhar, and julia brock, ‘exploring identities: public history in a cross-cultural context’, the public historian, vol 34, no 4, 2012, pp9-29. 2 katharine t. corbett and howard s. miller, ‘a shared inquiry into shared inquiry’, the public historian, vol 28, no 1, 2006, pp17-8. see also michael frisch a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral history and public history, suny press, albany, ny, 1990 and donald schön, the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action, basic books, new york, 1984. 3 museums connect program statement, american alliance of museums website, http://www.aamus.org/resources/global-partnerships/museumsconnect, accessed 12 october 2015. 4 neville agnew, martha demas, and wang xudong, ‘the enduring collaboration of the getty conservation institute and the dunhuang academy in conservation and management at the buddhist cave temples of dunhuang, china’, the public historian, vol 34, no 3, 2012, pp7-20. 5 ibid, p19. 6 see http://gitmomemory.org. 7 constance shultz, comment from the audience, working group on ‘teaching public history through international collaboration’, national council on public history conference, 15-18 april 2015. 8 william willingham, ‘international collaboration and comparative research’, blog post on public history commons, 22 june 2015, hosted by the national council on public history, www.ncph.org. public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: piper, a. j. 2021. alana jayne piper, what is digital history? (cambridge: polity press, 2021). pp338. paper $39.99. public history review, 28, 1–2. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7745 issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj book review alana jayne piper, what is digital history? (cambridge: polity press, 2021). pp338. paper $39.99. reviewed by alana jayne piper australian centre for public history university of technology sydney doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7745 digital history is a field that escapes easy definition due to its incorporation of an evergrowing variety of methods, disciplines and endeavours. however, this slim volume – part of polity’s what is history series – provides a solid introduction to the terrain as it lies at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century. as salmi comments in the book’s opening, the digital ‘tends to emphasize the present tense’ (p1). this means that any work attempting to capture the state of the field risks potential obsolescence in the face of the rapid development of new tools, projects and approaches. salmi’s work though not only charts digital history’s past and present, but looks to the future of the field in ways that mean it is likely to remain a useful reference point for some years to come. the book begins with a brief but useful overview of the rise of digital history, with salmi pointing out that computerised historical analysis date back to the early 1960s. discussions of early digital humanities projects from the 1970s-1990s appear throughout the book, offering fascinating insights into how early adopters of technologies influenced their later development and take-up. the book as a whole, however, makes clear how pivotal the last twenty years has been in accelerating the expansion of humanities computing. the first chapter examines one of the most common areas of digital history, which even historians who do not identify as digital practitioners now interact with on a daily basis: digital sources. salmi focuses in particular on the problems that accompany such sources, from biases in the archives selected for conversion to digital formats to the ephemeral nature of the borndigital sources of our own age. these are methodological challenges relevant to historians as a whole, as well as to those working in collecting institutions. the second chapter considers textuality and how distant reading has the power to transform our understanding not only of sources but the practice of history itself. if the fundamental task of a historian is to read intensively and extensively in order to identify patterns and changes declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7745 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7745 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7745 across sources and time, then machine-reading can now allow us to do this at an unprecedented scale. salmi concurs with other scholars, though, that such approaches are best balanced alongside traditional close reading approaches. this is followed by a chapter investigating visuality as a method of presenting and understanding history, from the increasing availability of visual sources online to groundbreaking techniques in spatio-temporal mapping and data visualisation. the final two chapters are brief. the fourth chapter outlines the various disciplines that have contributed to the growth of digital history, and the challenges such interdisciplinarity presents for researchers when it comes to developing shared resources. the last chapter will be of particular interest to public historians as it concentrates on the use of digital tools for presenting the past to different audiences. for novices to digital history, the book offers a highly accessible introduction to the methods and problems of computerised historical analysis. it traverses digital history projects from across several continents and a number of useful tools and platforms, from social network visualisation generator gephi to the user-friendly workshop site the programming historian. for existing digital history practitioners, the book will provide a useful reference point, especially for current challenges faced by the field. some of the most pressing ones identified by salmi include: the inaccessibility of digitised sources kept behind paywalls, and the issues this presents to increasing efforts at data linkage; lack of visibility of sources that have been digitised with preservation, not searchability, in mind; and the availability of digital research materials dictating historical research agendas and thereby limiting the questions asked. although not mentioned by salmi, this last concern must be a particularly pressing one in light of how covid-19 is likely to prompt increased reliance on digital sources by historians. piper public history review, vol. 28, 20212 public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: yeats, c. 2021. should they stay or should they go?: contested statues. public history review, 28, 1–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7512 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj should they stay or should they go?: contested statues christine yeats doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7512 percy bysshe shelley and horace smith both wrote poems inspired by the announcement by the british museum in 1817 that it had acquired a bust of the egyptian pharaoh ramesses ii, a fragment of a huge statue from the thirteenth century bce. both poems were titled ozymandias – greek for ramesses. and they explore the theme of the inevitable passing of the memory of rulers despite their pretensions to greatness and the erection of monuments to perpetuate memory of their greatness. for shelley, the monument to ramesses had suffered the ravages of time: two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. near them, on the sand half sunk, a shattered visage lies… today there are some who are unwilling to allow time to take its toll on the statues of those whose role in our history is contested and, in some instances, reviled. there are calls for removal and obliteration. debates about the place of monuments, such as the statue of captain cook in sydney’s hyde park, reached a recent high point during the black lives matter protests across australia in mid 2020. as bruce scates notes in his opinion piece ‘call to topple monuments is an opportunity for debate’ this monument is an instance of what historian graeme davison called ‘the heroic age’ of colonial statuary. scates adds: viewed from every angle the statue proclaims dominion: a hand raised triumphantly… in 1770, without the knowledge or consent of aboriginal people, this junior naval officer claimed possession of all of eastern australia for the british crown. cook thus set in train a tragic collision of cultures we still live with today.1 considered in this context it is hardly surprising that there are demands from australia’s first nations people and others for the cook statue to be removed. the removal of statues to historically contentious figures has been a persistent theme both nationally and internationally for some time. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7512 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7512 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7512 we have already witnessed the toppling of some notable statues dedicated to ‘heroes’ revealed to be perpetrators of slavery, racism and oppression – often carried out as part of imperial conquest. journalist tyler stiem’s thought provoking article ‘statue wars: what should we do with troublesome monuments?’ examined the ‘global protest movement to tear down urban memorials that reinforce racism’.2 stiem highlights the removal of the 1902 statue to cecil rhodes in cape town. that statue came down within months of the start of the ‘rhodes must fall’ protests in march 2015 which began with a bucket of excrement being thrown over it. ‘the incident,’ he noted, ‘attracted national attention and within days had grown into a fullscale protest.’ in june 2020 the world watched as the statue of the seventeenth century slave trader edward colston was pulled from its pedestal in bristol and thrown into the harbour as part of the ‘black lives matter’ protests. according to the smithsonian’s website, during his tenure as the deputy governor of the royal african company colston was responsible for the transportation of ‘84,500 kidnapped african men, women and children’. the statue was later retrieved and the bristol city council put it into storage. there are plans to eventually rehouse it in a museum and exhibit it alongside black lives matter placards. while removing contentious statues from public view may address concerns about their unwanted presence, it is important to ensure that the contested history they embody is not also erased from society’s memory. we need to develop an acceptable framework for dealing with such monuments within their historical context. opening this up to public discussion will no doubt help in devising possible options. however, commentary following the removal of the colston statue reveals a division in community attitudes. suggestions as to the fate of unwanted statues include breaking them and returning the resulting dust and metals to the soil; reinterpreting them to provide both sides of history with the use of modern technology; adding plaques to explain history from a modern perspective and interpretation; taking the statues off their plinths to bring them down to our height; adding statues of victims as a means of offering a reinterpretation of the past; moving them from their present location and placing them in museums where they could be contextualised and interpreted from varied perspectives or using them to create statue parks. in the abc news item ‘four ways to help settle australia’s colonial statue debate’ on abc news indigenous elder aunty rhonda dixongrovenor is quoted as saying that she would like to see statues ‘replaced with statues of aboriginal people’.3 this is a telling comment given the absence of statues commemorating australia’s first nations people. australia like other countries that began life as colonial outposts has an overabundance of statues of white males. the destruction of statues of those who have fallen from power, and who represent now discredited regimes or were in some way responsible for crimes against humanity, is a vexed issue. understandable on one level, it nevertheless raises questions about the impact destruction would have on the fabric of history. just as we cannot – and should not – censor or destroy the records of past regimes, for the reason that we need to know how good or bad they were, statues also contribute to our understanding of the past. while generally agreeing with daniel libeskind – architect of berlin’s jewish museum – who is quoted as asking: ‘how can a country go on with statues of oppressors and of dictators?’ – the destruction of unwanted statues creates risks.4 not only do we risk erasing history’s ‘memory’ we also risk pandering to every temporary fashion and legitimising the turnover of cultural values according to the fickle attitudes of those in power from time to time. this is a feature of totalitarian regimes. in order to avoid these risks we need to consider other options. statue parks offer an alternative to locking them away from view. lithuania’s grūtas park, about 130 kilometres south west of the capital vilnius, is the home of a privately funded outdoor museum housing a collection of soviet statues which were taken down and dumped in different places after lithuania became independent in 1990.5 other examples include memento park (hungary), fallen monument park yeats public history review, vol. 28, 20212 (moscow) and coronation park (delhi). while statue parks may not be everyone’s ideal they do provide an opportunity for society to deal with the unwanted and discredited remnants of the past. displaying the statues in this way provides the opportunity to explain the context in which they were created and the reason why the figures represented are no longer honoured. whether discarded statues are maintained in museums or parks there are ongoing cost associated with their maintenance. this could be a factor influencing decisions about their future. however, it is now possible to preserve digital images of statues as they appeared in their original positions even if the statues are to be removed or destroyed. while not advocating the wholesale pulverising of unwanted statues and monuments and replacement with digital surrogates, we are fortunate that there are ways of documenting their existence if that is to happen. in july 2020 the council of the royal australian historical society (rahs) considered its public position on the future of now unwanted statues, given the widespread and ongoing dialogue. councillors agreed that ‘context is fundamental to the practice of history, which requires a nuanced approach to interpreting multiple sources so we can understand past experiences’. its position statement notes that: as public statues, memorials or plaques embody cultural memory, the rahs neither condones nor supports their arbitrary defacement, removal or destruction. instead, the rahs suggests that alternative interpretations of public statues, memorials or plaques could be displayed and/or communicated to address any expressed issues of contention or validity. the rahs supports the establishment of a communitybased process that could: determine the heritage significance of public statues, memorials or plaques in terms of the burra charter;6 address, develop and communicate contemporary interpretations of public statues, memorials or plaques; and review and advise upon any formal applications made to civic authorities to alter, remove or destroy public statues, memorials or plaques. ultimately, the rahs does not have a single answer to the question: should these vestiges of flawed historical narratives stay or go? it depends on the circumstances of each case. but some things are clear. there is a need for australia to redress historical and current wrongs against first nations people. the issue of statues should not distract us from the failure of successive governments to achieve that redress in practical ways affecting the daily life of people and we need to persuade government to recognise that continuing failure and correct the situation. however, there is also a need to achieve redress in matters of symbolism. in that context there is a need for ongoing consultation – in particular with australia’s first nations people – about the future of contested memorials. endnotes 1. sydney morning herald, 12 june 2020. 2. guardian, 26 september 2018. 3. posted online 16 june 2020 available at https://www.abc.net.au/news/20200616/fourwaystohelpsettle australiascolonialstatuedebate/12356234 (accessed 18 november 2020). 4. bbc news 25 june 2020. 5. economist, 30 august 2017. 6. australia icomos, the burra charter: the australia icomos charter for places of cultural significance, australia icomos, 2013. yeats public history review, vol. 28, 20213 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-16/four-ways-to-help-settle-australias-colonial-statue-debate/12356234 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-16/four-ways-to-help-settle-australias-colonial-statue-debate/12356234 public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: clark, a. 2021. unfinished business: rewriting the past. public history review, 28, 1–4. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7753 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj unfinished business: rewriting the past anna clark doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7753 you could argue that history itself, the stories we tell ourselves, is unfinished business. the idea of rewriting history happens again and again. each generation revisits the historymaking of forbears. within one generation there’s disagreement over history. so history is unfinished business, driven in part by debates over colonisation, sovereignty, injustice and decolonisation.1 think about captain james cook. he comes to australia in 1770 and claims it on behalf of the british crown. but his statue is not erected until 1879. why is that? cook is killed in hawaii in 1779. a hundred years later, the colony of new south wales seeks to memorialise his contribution to australian history. why 1879? arguably it’s a moment of increasing national sentiment in australia and nearly a century after colonisation. there’s a sense that australian history begins with colonisation. there’s a sense that colonial australian history has something to commemorate. so, towards the end of the nineteenth century the colonies are moving towards federation. there’s a feeling that history is needed to tell the story of the white australian nation and that monuments commemorate and celebrate this progression. so, in that time history was about progress: white australia, nationbuilding and celebration.  fast forward another hundred and forty years. history means something quite different to many if not all people. so if we look at the interpretations of the captain cook statue we’re seeing those different layers of history and the fact that history is unfinished business. in 1879 there’s a very strong sense of what history is. in 2020 our understanding of history is different. we read those attempts to pull those statues down – and whether or not you agree with that move – as another interpretation of what history is and how we should understand australia’s past.  there’s a tendency with big monuments to see their concreteness. there’s this big statement about australian history – literally cast in bronze or written in stone. but as with all historical sources, whether you’re in year 10 or you finished your phd in history twenty years ago, you need to ask: who, when, where and why? who put up the cook statue? when was it put up? why hyde park south? and why? moves to pull it down, spruce it up for a celebration, vandalise it or protect it can create a sort of a hybrid reading of that statue. and it gives you a very clear sense that readings and understandings of history have changed over that time. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7753 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7753 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7753 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7753 statues can also lie. maria nugent has written about ‘lies in the landscape’ in relation to cook and the national park at kurnell at botany bay where cook came ashore at inscription point. take the hyde park cook statue. inscriptions on the monument read:  [front face, northern side] ‘captain cook/ this statue was erected by public subscription,/ assisted by a grant from the new south wales government, 1879’ [part lie: most of the money came from the government; subcriptions from the public were small.] [on the eastern side] ‘killed at owyhee, 1779’ [yes.]  [on the southern side] ‘discovered this territory, 1770’ [discovered? really?]  [on the western side: approved by the sydney city council on 3 march 1908] ‘this tablet was affixed by the yorkshire society of n.s.w., as their tribute to the memory of captain james cook, 1908’ [cook was born at morton in yorkshire in 1728. new south welsh yorkshire men were carving themselves a place in the sun in australian history] police guarding the captain cook statue during the black lives matter protest, 12 june 2020 there was a huge crowd for the unveiling of the cook statue. but at the same time there was a growing sense in the 1880s and 1890s – from the bulletin school of radical nationalists including people such as henry lawson – that australians were learning too much about imperial history and not enough about their own history. there’s a great article that lawson wrote towards federation where he says: ‘our school children know all about the kings and queens but don’t know anything about their own country’.2 so it’s clark public history review, vol. 28, 20212 not straightforward. it was opened to great fanfare and no discussion was had. but at the same time we can’t deny the fact that at that time there was a strong sense that australia had a history that should be celebrated. and there was a sense of progress. but progress for whom?  who’s left out of that narrative of progress? w.e.h. stanner wrote that a whole quadrant of australian history is excluded from the official narrative – aboriginal and torres strait islander people. what does that exclusion mean? and what does it mean to include those perspectives? what does that do to history? does it change what we know as capitalh history that we formally teach and learn? there’s an increasing recognition that history is not impartial – that it’s not objective. this isn’t something that’s just happened in the last five years. you can see a growing awareness of this particularly from the 1970s and 1980s. consider the tent embassy and the signs that are there: aboriginal tent embassy, canberra, c1973 (national archives of australia) ‘white invaders, you are living on stolen land’. that’s a very different rereading of australian history to what had been the sense of progress until then. so this is a conversation that’s been happening for fifty years in the academic history profession, and even longer than that in aboriginal and other communities. there are other forms of cultural remembering: 1938 – the sesquicentenary – the day of mourning; xavier herbert’s capricornia; eleanor dark’s timeless land; louis nowra’s inside the island. these conversations about whose history, whose ‘progress’, have been happening for a long time. but they’ve come to the fore, particularly now with black lives matter and the uluru statement from the heart, calling for a truthtelling about our history. it’s really important to remember if you think about what history is that this isn’t just a matter of a cultural turn, where anything goes or every perspective is valid. this is actually saying: ‘no, there is a truth, and it needs to be told. and without it we’re living a lie.’ this is not healthy.  there is also a changing understanding of who is a historian. there aren’t many indigenous historians in university history departments in australia. but the idea of indigenous historians in other institutional and community contexts is becoming more and more widespread. changes will continue to happen and there’s growing indigenous perspective within the formal discipline. history in the academy is also at a critical crossroads and it needs to take community engagement seriously. the statue wars has starkly highlighted the current situation.  clark public history review, vol. 28, 20213 endnotes 1. this commentary is an edited transcript of a talk which i gave for the university of technology sydney australian centre for public history webinar on the statue wars on 11 september 2020 available at https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/ ?v=972479913267957&ref=watch_permalink (accessed 11 october 2020). 2. henry lawson, ‘a neglected history’, the republic, 1888. clark public history review, vol. 28, 20214 https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=972479913267957&ref=watch_permalink https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=972479913267957&ref=watch_permalink ‘a matter of history’: or what to do with an empty plinth public history review vol. 28, 2021 ‘a matter of history’: or what to do with an empty plinth nathan ‘mudyi’ sentance doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7747 i am a wiradjuri man. my family is from mudgee but i grew up in darkinjung country. i’m not a historian; i’m more of a history communicator. i’m a librarian and have worked in museums, archives and libraries for over a decade. i currently work at the australian museum as a first nations public programmer and at the university of sydney, both of which are on gadigal country. i’d like to preface my remarks by saying that the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect either of my employers. in saying that, part of the work me and many first nations people in museums or libraries engage in is often about getting visitors to memory institutions to interrogate public memory: in regards to history, what stories do they hear? who tells these stories? what stories, and more importantly, whose voices are missing or disregarded? whose voices and what stories are being privileged over them, and why?1 our hope is to get visitors to be constructively critical about public memory. but also to see how whiteness and the patriarchy can inform what museums preserve and how exhibitions are constructed and perceived. part of this is also trying to get visitors to engage with brutal histories and uncomfortable facts. it is important to understand that those past injustices are connected to the injustices of now and that people do not live outside of history. we reside in its legacy and we need to reckon with brutal history so we can better understand the present and change it to be more just. however, this is often difficult. i was recently involved in a museum program for university students where we discussed the stolen generations and intergenerational trauma. after the program a few students anonymously commented on their feedback forms that they felt like they were being reprimanded and made to feel bad for being white. i found this to be an odd response. we never assigned blame. we were just discussing a reality – an issue that affects many first nations people. but some of these students chose to disengage because what we were talking about made them feel uncomfortable. i think this is ever-present in discussions around colonial statues. there’s often a defensiveness. people feel the need to defend these statues, to defend inanimate objects. i believe this has less to do with history and more to do with an avoidance of the uncomfortable aspects of history. i witnessed this in the last week. john mackenzie, a newcastle councillor, said he wanted to remove two plaques on the captain cook memorial fountain in civic park commemorating his ‘discovery of the east coast of australia’. he was going to put a motion up to remove them as they were historically inaccurate. this was met with a lot of social media outrage. many said that the removal of this erased history. they did not understand or deliberately dismissed how this plaque itself erases history – how the plaque and the monument disregard more than 60,000 years of history, especially awakbakal history in newcastle. or how the celebration of this event and this man hides the pain that they’ve caused, and still cause, and obfuscates the ongoing injustice that stems from this event. or how often these monuments are part of privileging certain types of individuals while excluding many people, especially first nations women, from the official national narrative. i feel that many of these people aren’t really defending history. these sort of discussions are ideologically driven. this is why many people even have trouble articulating why certain anniversaries or statues are important. for example, former nationals deputy leader bridget mckenzie, in attempting to explain why the country celebrates australia day on 26 january, said it was because it was the day james cook came to these shores. the actual date was 29 april. similarly, people will tell me that statues of james cook need to be protected because he was a great man. but they can’t tell me anything about james cook besides the fact that he came to australia on a ship called the endeavour. another argument against the removal of statues is often that these statues can help tell the dark side of this country, the dark history of men like cook, macquarie and brisbane. as they say, you can’t change history but you can certainly learn from it. however, for all the statues and things named after governor macquarie, very few people are aware of his involvement in events such as the 1816 appin massacre. colonial statues rarely do anything but glorify colonial figures and their actions, including the genocide of first nations people. they have limited capacity for nuance in many cases. they were not built to be conversation starters or to be cautionary tales of white supremacy. in fact they do the opposite. they were built to solicit admiration, to celebrate colonisation and colonisers in spite of the suffering we first nations people have experienced and continue to experience. many people defend statues, i believe, because they do not want to admit both the reality that australia is built on injustice, and their potential complicity with this injustice. this could tarnish the white australian self-image of innocence, and bring up feelings of guilt, and of course we do not want to feel guilt – it’s uncomfortable. but avoiding truth and defending certain narratives to avoid it is in my opinion the antithesis of what history should achieve. there’s that old saying: ‘those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’. nevertheless, there are many non-indigenous australians who do not want to learn from history because they do not want the guilt associated with that knowledge. the defence of monuments to colonialism also begs the question: ‘what do we as a society value?’ what do we think needs to be protected and preserved? just as the conversation on public monuments got reignited, rio tinto destroyed a 46,000 year-old cultural site in western australia, near the juukan gorge. many commentators who jumped to the defence of statues of cook were silent when it came to this outrageous act. this makes their apparent motivation of defending history feel hollow. this site and many sites like it contain so much more heritage and knowledge than any statue of cook would ever be capable of imparting. recent images in the media of police surrounding the statue of captain cook in hyde park during a small black lives matter demonstration in sydney, gadigal country, were cruelly ironic. throughout my life i’ve never seen this type of police presence at a first nations sacred site. we were shouting: ‘black lives matter’. in response the state tells us that statues need protecting. i think it’s important to ask questions about what matters to us. for me, community matters, not just individuals. and for me what matters are actions based on values rather than symbols or figures that we think embody them. that leads us to what’s next. what to do with an empty plinth if the statue is removed? i think it’s a great opportunity to create space for more truth telling about this country. to figure out how we got here, how talking about how different structures, different systems of power have come from this legacy of invasion. what does that legacy mean? at the same time we should also be restoring places, learning from country. there are lots of sites that need protecting. but also a lot of monuments that occupy stolen land. it would be great to have more opportunities to learn about that stolen land, to learn about the people who have a millennia of connection to our country. and in ways that may not just be monuments; in ways that we can look to country to learn from, learn about history, look to place, to learn about history without the need of statues. i think we need to dismantle the system that the statues represent rather than just the statues themselves. at the end of the day, what the black lives matter movement is really talking about, especially in australia, is the need to overhaul the criminal (in)justice system. many colonial statues are symbols of injustice. removing them can be a symbolic way of saying that we want to step towards justice. but it can’t just be the removal of the statue in and of itself. the goal is to make a more just society. and this is one of the first steps that we can do. so i’m going to finish on this quote from reuben rose-redwood and wil patrick.2 ‘whether colonial statues must fall or remain is not a matter of history alone, it is part of the process of the reckoning with the ongoing injustices of settler colonialism in the present.’ i think that’s very much what this is about. it’s reckoning with settler colonialism and all the ways it manifests. endnotes 1. this commentary is an edited transcript of a talk which i gave at a history council of nsw webinar on the statue wars on 20 july 2020. 2. ruben rose-redwood and wil patrick, ‘why activists are vandalizing statues to colonialism’, the conversation, 18 march 2020, https://theconversation.com/why-activists-are-vandalizing-statues-to-colonialism-129750, accessed 27 aug 2020. galleycatte public history review vol 22 (2015): 8-22 issn: 1833-4989 © 2015 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. ‘manxness’: uses of heritage on the isle of man elizabeth catte n her 2006 work uses of heritage, archaeologist laurajane smith argues that heritage is a social construction dominated by an ‘authorized heritage discourse’ in which experts and authorities ‘forge a sense of common identity based on the past’ from ‘materially pleasing objects, sites, places, and/or landscapes’.1 this argument suggests that the construction of heritage is often a top-down process managed by governments in order to naturalize narratives and identities the state finds valuable. as a challenge to future researchers, smith encourages additional work that explores ‘the links between heritage and expressions of identity’ as a way to shift heritage studies away from what heritage is to what heritage does.2 in this article, i analyze the construction of heritage – both as a discourse and an industry – in the isle of man, a small quasi-independent island in the middle of the irish sea with an ambitious model of heritage branding. rather than focusing i https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | catte 9 on what heritage is in the isle of man, i examine, as smith suggests, what its heritage does. i argue that the isle of man deploys what it sees as a universally-accessible and consumable heritage brand as a way to create social stability among a diverse and rapidly changing population by offering opportunities to forge a shared identity through the celebration of its unique culture. by constructing a highly symbolic identity that is heavily dependent on its tangible and intangible heritage assets, the isle of man is an exemplar of what smith calls the ‘vital and representative role’ of heritage in the creation of national identities.3 as rodney harrison notes, however, critical heritage studies that ‘focus on the role of heritage in the production of state ideologies’ often overlook that ‘heritage is fundamentally an economic activity.’4a central element of my argument is that the isle of man’s dual and sometimes dueling cultural and economic priorities have produced widespread ambiguity as to what its national identity actually is. as a cultural and economic enterprise, the isle of man’s heritage branding model emphasizes the island’s ‘otherness’ – its cultural distance from neighboring british countries – as a way to shore up the uniqueness of its heritage assets for the purposes of tourism. this ‘otherness’ implies that the isle of man is perpetually vulnerable to outside influences and the forces of globalization that threaten dilute or displace the very elements that make the island so different and inviting. yet, the isle of man is globalized. approximately thirty-four per cent the island’s income – approximately £1.1 billion annually – is generated by a finance sector heavily populated with foreign workers.5 therefore, ‘authorized heritage discourse’ on the isle of man is rife with tensions that arise between the competing demands of multiculturalism and nationalism in an environment that seeks to balance its sense of past alongside a globalizing economy. how the isle of man uses heritage to create what ien ang calls the ‘symbolic glue of unifying cultural nationalism’ is a complicated but fascinating process and requires us to examine how the island’s definitions of heritage change over time.6 i conclude by sharing my experiences as a foreign heritage worker on the isle of man. i moved from the united states to the isle of man in 2007 at a time when the isle of man government took an unprecedented interest in its international identity. that year, britain experienced ‘one of the biggest waves of immigration’ in recent history as a result of the accession of ten new countries to the european union in 2004.7although immigration to the island was more limited, the government issued hundreds of work permits to eastern european migrants while the local papers announced that migrant workers were ‘quite a large percentage public history review | catte 10 of the island’s population.’8 the same year, the isle of man introduced a citizenship test as an immigration requirement and, as a separate but related enterprise, formalized an agreement that clarified the island’s constitutional relationship with the united kingdom. as an outsider and particularly as a heritage worker, i observed a range of actors – from politicians to academics to ordinary members of the public – express contradicting opinions as to what values the island represented and what image it should project in the wider world. the isle of man and ‘manxness’ the isle of man is a self-governing british crown dependency located in the center of the british isles in the irish sea. its total area is just 221 square miles – thirteen miles wide by thirty-nine miles long. as of its last census in 2011, the island’s population was 84,497 and approximately forty-eight per cent were born on the island. called ellan vannin in the native manx language, the island has a historically gaelic-norse culture that reflects periods of settlement by both briton celts and vikings. in the twenty-first century, the isle of man is perhaps best known for its annual tourist trophy (tt) races, which can draw as many as 40,000 visitors to the island.9 with no corporation tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and capped income tax, the isle of man is viewed by many as a ‘tax haven’ and as such generates a substantial amount of revenue through international banking. the changing economic profile from tourist destination to off-shore banking juggernaut in the 1980s resulted a shift in demographics that reflected an influx of migrants – called ‘comeovers’ in the local vernacular – from england, scotland, wales and ireland. these social changes triggered a broad national concern for local autonomy and a parallel desire to protect the island’s sovereignty from undue outside influence. in this way, the island’s voluntary ‘othering’ of its traditions and history underscored its cultural if not territorial distance from the united kingdom. while this ‘othering’ had the immediate effect of bolstering the isle of man’s claim to a separate political identity, it also create the basis for a powerful model of heritage branding used to reinforce a national identity for the purposes of social stability.10 in 2007, the chief minister of the isle of man and the united kingdom’s secretary of state issued ‘a framework for developing an international identity of the isle of man’. amongst other points that clarified the constitutional relationship between the two entities, the framework summarized a millennium of historical debate bluntly and briefly: going forward, it could forever be said that ‘the isle of man has public history review | catte 11 an international identity which is different than the uk’. while a desire to enshrine the unique qualities of manx culture had been present on the island since the late-victorian era, this modern revival activity was distinctly political in nature, organized largely through the department of education and the island’s statutory heritage body manx national heritage. through the introduction of a new national curriculum and heritage programming that placed manx history, culture and language at the center of all educational initiatives, the government made ambitious plans to teach both students and adults what it meant to be authentically manx. so what, then, is manx? it is a surprisingly difficult quality to define. for example, for all its posturing about the isle of man’s international identity, the island’s government offers little guidance about specifically who or what is authentically manx. only in political documents that articulate the island’s relationship, or lack of, with the european union does the isle of man come close to defining ‘manx’ as a discrete category of persons. these documents make reference to ‘manxmen’ as a category of persons born, adopted, naturalized or registered in the isle of man without close family ties to the united kingdom or a period of continuous residency in the united kingdom for a period of more than five years. these documents stipulate that ‘manxmen’, although british for purposes of citizenship, have no right to benefit from the united kingdom’s membership in the european union and must carry a stipulation of such in their passports and travel documents.11 by recent estimates, this category could be less than five per cent of the population and, by definition, would include certain categories of migrants coming from outside the european union.12 informally, individuals on the isle of man refer to most persons born on the island as ‘manx’, although children born to parents from outside the british isles occupy a somewhat ambiguous space in the island’s identity politics. beyond these narrow definitions, the island’s more common way of expressing its ‘manxness’ as a shared culture is through the celebration of traditions that emphasize its uniqueness and cultural difference from the united kingdom. manx politician d.g. kermode wrote that the ‘essence’ of the isle of man’s separate identity can be found in tynwald, the isle of man’s legislative body which the island claims as the world’s oldest continuous parliament.13 festivities during the annual tynwald day holiday celebrate the island’s ancient viking and celtic roots and heritage as well as its distinct political status. the island’s cultural differences are also expressed through the recent manx language revival. in 2009, unesco declared manx gaelic – a written and spoken public history review | catte 12 language similar to irish and scottish gaelic – officially extinct, much to the frustration of manx gaelic speakers on the island. as a symbolic public language, manx gaelic is used by the (now) bilingual government, through manx gaelic radio broadcasts and most significantly through the island’s language curriculum and dedicated manx gaelic schools such as the bunscoill ghaelgagh, which delivers primary instruction to students using only manx gaelic. since more than half of the island’s population hails from elsewhere in the british isles, embracing resurrected manx customs and manx gaelic are important ways that newcomers proclaim that they are, at heart, manx people.14 individuals in the isle of man also proclaim their ‘manxness’ – a state that historian frank kermode once described as ‘mild alienation’ and ‘qualified foreignness’ – through a range of other activities, from buying manx products to christening their children with traditional manx names.15 sociologists who have studied the isle of man have noted the enthusiasm with which new residents attempt to embrace a shared identity and assimilate.16 such studies stress the island’s opportunities for ‘communal participation, irrespective of place of origin’. but it must be said that within this work there is little attention as to how ‘manxness’ might or might not be embraced by individuals who are non-white or not ethnically similar to the island’s white british majority.17 although i am white, i often sensed the limits of ‘manxness’, especially during my employment with manx national heritage, which required me to learn token manx gaelic and perform living history re-enactments assuming the identity of a native born manx individual. i found this exclusion to be somewhat ironic as, for the purposes of immigration, i was one of the five per cent of individuals defined as a ‘manxman’ by the government due to my naturalization on the island. the use of ‘manx’ as a quasi-ethnic identity requires further consideration. a poll conducted by the newspaper isle of man courier in 2009 indicated that sixty-eight per cent of residents felt that racism was a problem on the island, and a further forty-three per cent expressed sympathy toward ‘racist views’.18 as migration to the island grew to include incomers not only from the british isles, but also eastern europe, africa and asia, so did pushback that argued the ‘real’ targets of racism were ‘indigenous’ manx individuals.19 indeed, variations on this refrain – that native manx individuals are treated as a minority in their own land – are repeated in the heritage policy documents (discussed below). it is tempting to view this pushback and voluntary ‘othering’ of ‘manxness’ as part of an ongoing cultural project in which the decline of a collective british identity is replaced by a preference for separate identities such as english, scottish or welsh. however, the manx claim to a separate public history review | catte 13 cultural identity has much different historical and political dimensions due to the island’s distinct constitutional status, declining island-born population and dependence on the tourist industry. as we will see, these claims take root during the victorian era as individuals associated with manx arts refashioned the island’s celtic identity during the peak of english tourism on the island. the construction of a people’s history it is possible to trace to the isle of man’s preoccupation with ‘manxness’ to a broad celtic revival that occurred in the british isles in the mid1800s, although historian john belchem notes that celticism appeared later in the isle of man due to an absence of antiquarian societies on the island.20 these groups, once they began to flourish, did so with an intense ambition to create and protect a national spirit that was distinctly nonenglish and would exist in contrast to the ‘imperial pride’ in the ‘racial discourse of late victorian british politics.’21archaeologist catriona mackie argues that the island’s separate political identity allowed manx antiquarians and revivalist to focus on the development of a separate cultural identity based on celticism through ‘the study of archaeology, language, and folklore.’22 in essence, manx revivalists in the pursuit of celticism used intangible elements of culture to create cultural capital for themselves in a process that rodney harrison calls heritage as a social action.23 the rise of celticism in the isle of man also coincided with the development and investment in the island’s tourism industry, which brought frequent visitors from the north of england to the place. by the turn of the century, tourism replaced traditional industries such as fishing and mining as the island’s dominant enterprise. the island’s economic dependence on tourism generated a broad interest in the unique qualities of the isle of man, both as a means to shore up is nascent tourism industry and enshrine the cultural difference of the manx people from their english visitors. according to belcham, celticism achieved both ends by offering manx individuals a way to strengthen their cultural capital through ‘indigenous cultural productions.’24 at the first pan-celtic congress held in dublin in 1901, it was proudly proclaimed that ‘the isle of man was at the centre of the celtic peoples… though mountains and wastes of seas divided, yet still the blood remained.’25 the birth of celticism in the isle of man can be traced to a small cohort of english-educated manx artists and writers who wished, belchem notes, to position ‘an essential celtic racialism’ as the key aspect public history review | catte 14 of a new national spirit.26 this cohort – which included manx artist t.e. brown, antiquarian a.w. moore and folklorist sophia morrison – often fused history with myth to bolster their belief in cultural separatism, resurrecting, for example, the irish sea god manannan mac lir as a composite stand-in for the island’s ancient rulers. this resurrection of cultural symbols continued with the manx coat of arms: a triskelion (or ny tree cassyn in manx) above a latin motto quoqunquejerecisstabit (where so ever you throw it, it will stand).27 these scholars also helped preserve manx gaelic, already dying out, but faced difficulties learning the language themselves and eventually resigned it to scientific study without elevating it to the level of national passion seen in the twentyfirst century. while much of the work of antiquarians was intended to be consumed by other well-educated and curious scholars, a growing number of manx revivalists believed that their efforts should be directed at the general public as well. sophia morrison, in particular, is still best known on the island for her collection of fairy lore, which had great popular appeal. although manx celticism lacked the political bite found in irish celticism, there were moments when the isle of man’s national revival had political implications. for example, the folklore publication mannin occasionally received correspondence from ‘rabid’ sectarians who favored complete legislative annexation from the united kingdom.28 this strife made the leaders of manx cultural revival anxious, as they believed that one of the chief hallmarks of the isle of man’s national spirit was the absence of the ‘internal schism’ characteristic of other celtic nations and especially, at this time, ireland.29 the specter of world war i also raised political questions regarding the limits of the isle of man’s independence, but such conversations never rose above intellectual challenges. indeed, modern manx revivalist breesha maddrell has argued that manx celticism ‘promoted, consciously or not, a duality of identity, of manxness and britishness.’30 while sometimes impatient with those who questioned their credentials as an ethnic minority, the people of the isle of man nevertheless remained, in the opinion of belchem, pragmatic in their nationalist politics: ‘as a political program, manx nationalism has always sought to exploit offshore independence to attract ‘strangerresidents’ vital for the island’s economic well-being’. the most recent of these ‘stranger-residents’ were off-shore banking executives and tax exiles.31 the development of manx cultural identity at the turn of the century reflects these tensions between economic dependence and cultural independence. while revivalists created and re-created cultural products as a form of resistance to the influence of english holiday public history review | catte 15 makers, those in the tourist industry packaged this new distinct manx culture as an attractive feature to visitors. although the development of a manx identity takes place in a different historical and political context than the rise of englishness or scottishness as a cultural process, what is true and shared is that the isle of man relies on heritage assets to communicate what this identity is and who can claim it. in the 1980s, the rise of statutory heritage bodies in the united kingdom such as english heritage brought with their development a new era that privileged cohesion with the past as a source of social stability. this also describes the transformation of a statutory heritage body on the isle of man, although its most active period was the 1990s which saw an intensification of globalisation. returning to smith’s argument, what is particularly striking about the rise of authorized heritage on the isle of man from the 1990s to present is the creation of a boundary between ‘those who have the ability or authority to “speak” about or “for” heritage… and those who do not.’32 in the victorian era, the development of a manx cultural identity became a collaborative enterprise in which individuals together explored what it might or might not mean to be manx. in the twenty-first century, however, most definitions of national identity must flow through the government using manx national heritage as its proxy. the modern heritage industry on the isle of man the isle of man government created manx museum and national trust in 1951 as its statutory heritage body and its oversight is provided by a traditional board of trustees. in 1991, this entity transformed into manx national heritage. catriona mackie argues this transformation ‘reflected a shift in the operational policy of the organization, which has become more firmly centered on improving community involvement, more actively engaging with the tourist market, and continuing the promotion of a positive national and international identity for the island.’33 manx national heritage is headquartered in the manx museum in douglas, which opened in 1922, and it manages twelve other primary heritage sites and further operates a national museum service, a national monuments service, a national trust, a national library and archive and a national art gallery. the mission of manx national heritage is, in part, to ‘lead the island’s community in recognising, understanding, valuing and promoting its cultural heritage and identity to a world-wide audience’ in order to ‘strengthen the manx identity and community by giving opportunities for enjoyment, learning and development.’ manx national heritage receives an approximately £4m budget from the isle of public history review | catte 16 man government and serves roughly a quarter million visitors per year at its combined heritage sites. narrative cohesion at the organization’s diverse sites – which range from animatronic-heavy museums to ancient monuments – was maintained for many years through ‘the story of mann’, a slick presentation of the island’s history designed for easy visitor consumption. ‘the international prestige and image of the island will be considerably increased in the future by a continuation of the quality controlled presentation of the island’s unique cultural and natural assets’, stated the isle of man government in 1999.34 just five privately-run heritage sites exist on the island: the manx transportation museum, the leece museum, the manx aviation museum, the milntown estate and the jurby transportation museum. as a result, responsibility for the island’s cultural branding rests largely in the hands of the government and its organ, manx national heritage. the influence of manx national heritage can be seen in its attitude toward a unified heritage strategy concept. in 2002, for example, the former director of manx national heritage, stephen harrison, asserted that his organization held ‘largest museum identity in the british isles’ by claiming all 227 square miles of island as interpreted space through ‘the story of mann.’35 the expansive remit was justified, harrison commented, by the fact that ‘the changing nature of the social structure – the new financial markets bringing new families to live in the island with no background knowledge of its life and traditions, is resulting in a situation… where the native-born manx people are now an ethnic minority in the own land.’36 under harrison’s directorship, manx culture largely became the intellectual property of the government to be conserved and protected against outside influence. with few exceptions, manx national heritage presents an idealised image of manx life that promotes political and cultural unity, industriousness and the achievements of legendary figures. tony gilmour observed similar values at work during the growth of the english heritage industry in the 1980s.37 critics such as robert hewison and david lowenthal have argued that an obsession with these values is indicative of a distinctly conservative view of the past that risks exploiting heritage for commercial and political gain.38 smith and rodney harrison, however, have emphasized in their work the ways that local culture, history and heritage ‘competes’ with official, national discourse to destabilize what harrison calls the ‘cannon’ of authorized heritage sites and practices.39 the potential of such competition in the isle of man is complicated by the lack of ‘unauthorized’ heritage sites and bodies. heritage attractions and organizations that exist independently of the public history review | catte 17 government occupy a niche market that is not supported by the same robust financial backing that national heritage sites enjoy. a number of examples illustrate the tensions embedded in the isle of man’s ‘authorized heritage discourse.’ since the late 1930s, the isle of man government has owned and maintained structures – cottages and agricultural buildings and their associated lands – in the village of cregneash as an open-air museum that interprets elements of traditional manx farming and rural life. interpretation is provided through an interpretive center opened in 1984 and by costumed heritage workers that interact with visitors and demonstrate period crafts and farming techniques. the setting is intended to provide visitors with a glimpse into the ‘unspoiled’ and ‘traditional’ character of an authentic manx village.40 as such, manx national heritage maintains considerable interest in the village at large and routinely acquires additional property as it becomes available while leasing uninterpreted cottages to local residents. many residents of cregneash feel that manx national heritage has trapped their village in the past for the benefit of its museum by using its government influence to prevent homeowners and tenants from modernizing their structures. in 2007, manx national heritage won a ‘landmark’ case against a homeowner in cregneash to prevent the construction of a modern property addition that the organization felt ‘threatened the integrity of a national folk museum.’41a year later, a flower show in the village highlighted residents’ frustration with manx national heritage when residents transformed the set theme ‘hope springs eternal’ into ‘hope for planning permission’ and constructed floral exhibits that featured miniature dilapidated manx cottages. the outsized influence of manx national heritage became an issue in cregneash once again in 2014 when the community met to discuss renovation plans for st peters church, one of the most recognizable and visited yet privately owned structures in the village. several residents left the meeting with the impression that manx national heritage would attempt to block renovation attempts unless the congregation allowed the organization to use the church for its own secular events. one resident who was born in cregneash commented, ‘mnh has destroyed a living village… just walk around and look what they have done to it.’42 although manx national heritage has insisted that it exists at the pleasure of the ‘community’s terms’ at times the community’s desires to celebrate its heritage have been out of sync with branding priorities.43 in 2010, manx national heritage, labelled as ‘the guardians of the isle of man’s culture’ in the press, angered locals when it issued a statement public history review | catte 18 that the much beloved manx attraction fairy bridge was not culturally significant.44 in rejecting an application to create an official heritage attraction at fairy bridge – a site significant in local folklore – the organization stated ‘manx national heritage have a duty to protect the island's heritage, and their expert view is that this bridge is not an important part of the heritage.’45 while their rejection continued to list a number of practical considerations including potential disruption of traffic and public access, the tone of the organization’s pronouncement frustrated some. although the bridge is one of the more whimsical elements of manx culture, it nevertheless serves as an important cornerstone of what many on the island find endearing about the isle of man and it is a frequent stop for tourists. as one commenter lamented, ‘no matter whether manx national heritage believe it or not, the fairy bridge is as much a part of island life as the government itself.’46 the above examples indicate that the ‘quality controlled presentation’ of the island’s heritage elevates certain aspects of ‘island life’ while omitting others. the interpreted experience of the isle of man during world war ii is also representative of this process. to underscore the island’s uniqueness, manx national heritage uses a narrative of enemy alien internment to position the island’s cultural difference from the united kingdom. although the isle of man sent, per capita, more men to serve in the british army than anywhere else in the british isles, the dominant story of world war ii on the isle of man is that of internment.47 during world war ii and through orders from the westminster government, the isle of man interred approximately 14,000 ‘enemy aliens’ at ten internment sites. unlike controversy in the united states related to the historic legacy and subsequent interpretation of japanese-american internment during world war ii, the isle of man and manx national heritage are not hesitant about laying claim to a perhaps shameful and inglorious past. in manx’s natural heritage’s primary social history museum, the manx museum, the beginning of world war ii is conveyed through the presentation of the bedroom of a seaside holiday resort. a dividing line cuts across the bedroom, representing the threshold between war and peace. the last moments of peace are conveyed through the display of a suitcase, cheery bedding and a collection of trinkets, while war comes as the same room is shown sparsely decorated with striped pajamas resting near the bed to signal internment. manx national heritage interprets the experience of internment as largely suffered by enemy aliens and the manx alike – a dual humiliation thrust upon them by a foreign government that both groups endured as best they could. public history review | catte 19 the answer to why this is so and how these choices came to be to be lies on the long history of manx ‘otherness’ combined with the more recent focus on neatly presented and consumable heritage. historians daniel travers and stephen heathorn have argued that in privileging the narrative of internment, manx national heritage has ‘on a whole… marginalized the military heritage of the manx’ in order to tell a story that cannot be duplicated in the united kingdom.48 thus the collective memory of world war ii on the isle of man is not that of britain and a victorious ‘people’s war’ but a morally ambiguous episodic event that nevertheless conforms to island’s branding as culturally unique and somewhat long suffering of british whims. this is not to say that the decision to use internment as the dominant interpretive theme is inappropriate. manx national heritage, particularly in its function as the national library and archives, possesses unparalleled collections relating to internment, including material culture, works of art, and full complement of archival resources unavailable in the united kingdom. to commemorate the centennial of the great war in 2014, manx national heritage has produced a temporary exhibit this terrible ordeal and corresponding published letters collection, as well as sponsoring an international conference on internment during world war i.49 smith argues that ‘heritage and the identities and of both the past and the present it creates do not simply exist internally to the group or other collective that has created them – they do work, or have a consequences, in wider social, cultural, economic and political networks.’50 in the examples and discussion above, i hope that i have given readers an understanding of what heritage is and does on the isle of man. however, i can offer no clearer evidence of how heritage and identity politics function together and do the work that smith describes than to offer my own reflections of my time as a foreign heritage worker on the isle of man. are we manx yet? in 2007 and already a resident of the isle of man, i accepted a position within the education department of manx national heritage. although the education department managed adult education and community outreach as well, its primary function at the time was to facilitate a partnership with the island’s department of education to deliver manx curriculum-based workshops at the organisation’s heritage sites. these hands-on lessons exposed children not only to manx history, but also manx geography, language, arts and natural conservation. in other words, it was my job to assist young learners to grasp what it meant to public history review | catte 20 be manx and to promote the isle of man’s cultural vision through its heritage assets. in more ways than i was prepared to admit at the time, this became a mutual learning experience. garth stevenson writes that ‘the disadvantage of cultural nationalism is that it arouses little or no interest on the part of minorities that may be present on the territories, and who do not share the culture in question. in fact, it might even repel them.’51 to a large extent, manx national heritage is content to tell individuals what it means to be manx, rather than create the space for conversations in which aspects of ‘manxness’ may be teased out, explored and questioned. although the isle of man government and manx national heritage consider much of this reinforcement to be in the service of promoting inclusion, i found that these accumulated messages made it more difficult for me to relate to individuals as immigrants. because the island is so proudly ‘othered’ there is little room to tell the stories of individuals who grappled with a sense of belonging. it is generally true on the isle of man that the island becomes more ‘manx’ during periods of heavy immigration and migration, and therefore we assume that ‘manxness’ could never be obtainable to us because it is designed to serve as a foil to us. ‘manxness’ also functioned as a class status in ways that made my exclusion feel sharper. as smith argues, ‘within the narrative of nation, heritage discourse also explicitly promotes the experience and values of elite social classes.’52 she further explains that heritage discourse recreates class ‘by privileging the expert and their values over that of the nonexpert, and by the self-referential nature of the discourse, which continually legitimizes itself and the values and ideologies on which it is based.’53 this is particularly true of the isle of man. as in ireland, for example, most speakers of gaelic – which in the isle of man is a wellregarded form of ‘manxness’ – are from an educated and middle-class cohort.54 the audience for the island’s heritage programing is largely educated and middle-class as well. although the isle of man government and manx national heritage does aspects of community outreach extremely well – a robust variety of low or no-cost programs is always on offer – there is room for the organization to stretch the definition of its community. as a historian, i spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about how other non-british migrants and/or working-class individuals experienced the island and navigated its complicated identity politics. it was disappointing that my most enduring answers to those questions came not through my time working for the island’s heritage body but through my brief employment in the financial sector before i returned to the united states. there, i encountered migrant workers raising dual public history review | catte 21 identity children while struggling with the same exclusion i felt upon arrival along with native-born individuals who maintained a much more flexible and less hegemonic sense of identity. in the more globalized world of the financial sector, the ambiguities of ‘manxness’ at last revealed themselves to be something that we could all share. endnotes 1laurajane smith, uses of history, routledge, new york, 2006, p11. 2 ibid, p308. 3 ibid, p48. 4 rodney harrison, ‘what is heritage?’, in rodney harrison (ed), understanding the politics of heritage, university of manchester press, manchester, 2009, p14; italics in original. 5 ernest & young, ‘isle of man: economic research report’, may 2012. accessed 28 september 2015. accessed via: <http://goo.gl/zmmkul>. 6 ien ang, ‘between nationalism and transnationalism: multiculturalism in a globalising world’, institute for culture and society occasional paper series, vol 1, no 1, 2010, p5. 7 ‘wave of polish immigration over says ambassador’, independent, 21 april 2014. accessed 16 may 2015. accessed via: <http://goo.gl/1vo6ya>. 8 ‘island welcomes polish workers’, isle of man today, 10 october 2007. accessed 16 may 2015. accessed via: <http://goo.gl/9zq4xy>. 9 see isle of man tt website. accessed 16 may 2015. accessed via: <http://www.iomtt.com/>. 10 stephen harrison, ‘culture, tourism and local community – the heritage identity of the isle of man,’ brand management, vol 9, no 4-5, 2002, p359. 11 fiona murray, the european union and member state territories: a new legal framework under the eu treaties, t.m.c. asser press, the hague, amsterdam, 2012, p158. 12cheryl cheek, sue nicol and sarah grainger, ‘manx identity and the comeovers’, in jodie matthews and daniel travers (eds), islands and britishness: a global perspective, cambridge scholars publishing, newcastle upon tyne, 2012, p70. 13 d.g. kermode, offshore island politics: the constitutional and political development of the isle of man in the twentieth century, liverpool university press, liverpool, 2001, p4. 14diarmuid o'néill, rebuilding the celtic languages: reversing language shift in celtic countries, y lofta, wales, 2002, p415. 15 quoted in john belchem, ‘the little manx nation: antiquarianism, ethnic identity, and home rule politics in the isle of man, 1880-1918’, journal of british studies, vol 39, no 2, 2000, p218. 16 cheek et al, p75. 17 ibid. 18 ‘racism: a dirty little manx secret’, isle of man today, 21 december 2009. accessed 16 may 2015. accessed via: < http://goo.gl/zkytlm>. 19 ibid. 20 belchem, op cit, p218. 21 ibid, p217. 22 catriona mackie, ‘open-air museums, authenticity and the shaping of a cultural identity: an example from the isle of man’, in chris dalglish (ed), archaeology, the public and the recent past, boydell and brewer, suffolk, 2013, p17. 23 r. harrison, op cit, p38. 24 belcham, op cit, p220. 25 quoted in belchem, p220. 26 ibid, p221. 27 queen elizabeth ii recognized the isle of man’s coat of arms as ‘the arms of her majesty in right of the isle of man’ in 1996, although manx dignitaries have used the coat of arms – believed to date from the 13th century – since 1872. 28breesha maddrell, ‘speaking from the shadows: sophia morrison and the manx cultural revival’, folklore, vol 113, no 2, 2002, p230. 29 ibid, p233. 30 ibid. 31 belchem, op cit, p240. 32 smith, op cit, p12. public history review | catte 22 33 mackie, op cit, p28. 34 quoted in daniel travers and stephen heathorn, ‘collective remembrance, second world war mythology, and national heritage of the isle of man’, national identities, vol 10, no 4, 2008, p442. 35 s. harrison, op cit, p336. 36 ibid. 37 tony gilmour, sustaining heritage: giving the past a future, sydney university press, sydney, 2009, p87. 37 s. harrison, op cit, p357. 38 see robert hewison, the heritage industry: britain in a climate of decline, metheun, london, 1987 and david lowenthal, possessed by the past: the heritage crusade and the spoils of history, free press, new york, 1996. 39 r. harrison, op cit, p14. 40 mackie, p24. 41 ‘mnh win cregneash planning case’, isle of man news, 13 february 2007. accessed 16 may 2015. accessed via < http://www.isleofman.com/news/details/46858/mnh-wins-cregneash-planning-case>. 42 ‘stormy meeting over future of cregneash church’, isle of man today, 23 march 2013. accessed 16 may 2016. access via: <http://goo.gl/nqckot>. 43 s. harrison, op cit, p357. 44 ‘fairy bridge “not important” says manx national heritage’, isle of man today, 28 july 2010. accessed 16 may 2015. access via: <http://goo.gl/9jpjd1>. 45 ibid. 46 ibid. 47 travers and heathorn, op cit, p438. 48 ibid, p442. 49 ibid. 50 smith, op cit, p276. 51 garth stevenson, parallel paths: the development of nationalism in ireland and quebec, mcgillqueens university press, montreal, 2006, p357. 52 smith, op cit, p30. 53 ibid. 54 james mccloskey, ‘irish as a world language’. accessed 15 may 2015. accessed via: <http://ohlone.ucsc.edu/~jim/pdf/notre-dame.pdf>. galleyesposita public history review vol 22 (2015): 23-37 issn: 1833-4989 © 2015 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. confederate immigration to brazil: a cross-cultural approach to reconstruction and public history karina esposito just returned from a research trip to brazil. as i immersed myself in a vast array of primary sources that will be the foundation of the transnational perspective that informs my dissertation, i was reminded of the importance and challenges of cross-cultural studies. a transnational approach is grounded in multi-national, multi-archival research, and an in-depth analysis of the historiography of all of the countries involved in the narrative. pursuing a research topic that examines the way international relations take place outside of formal state-to-state relations also enhances transnational studies. learning how different nations, and people across borders interpret and remember events, helps us better understand our own past within a global perspective. for instance, in his innovative work, the war of 1898: the i https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | esposito 24 united states and cuba in history and historiography, louis a. perez jr emphasizes on the importance of transnational research in uncovering historic silences, and in refining our understanding of memory. perez asserts that everything americans had been writing about the spanishamerican war was based on other united states (us)-produced historiographies, resulting in a self-perpetuating narrative that limits the framework used to understand the context of the war. as perez points out, ‘that cubans developed profoundly different memories of 1898, from which they derived radically different meanings, goes a long way towards understanding the capacity of the past to shape the purpose of policy and the place of power.’1 the limited perspective that perez identifies is also evident in the field of public history, a result of the fact that cross-cultural studies can be cost prohibitive and uniquely challenging. as a brazilian who finished high school in brazil and attended college and graduate school in the united states, i have always been interested in transnational studies. as a us history teacher in the united states, and as a doctoral student researching us-latin american relations and public history, i have been exposed to cross-cultural studies and faced some familiar but also unique challenges both in my teaching and research. the arduous undertaking of efficiently perusing voluminous archival holdings in different languages and different countries conflicts with strict limits of time and funding for overseas study. but the task is worth the reward. in the classroom, my students are consistently engaged with discussions, debates, and exchanges that incorporate a non-us viewpoint, even in us survey courses. in addition to expressing general interest, students have been better able to think objectively about potentially controversial topics when the actors involved in the discussion are removed from the politicized internal debate in the united states. this allows, at times, for the opportunity to open a discussion about us history indirectly by removing the barriers that sometimes generate a defensive posture among undergraduates, and the public in general. discussions on race, ethnicity and foreign policy, for example, are sometimes difficult to discuss in a classroom setting with undergraduates or in a historic site. once the conversation has begun, however, students are more apt to engage opposing viewpoints. we are then able to connect our discussions to some contested memories in us history and to explore how major events have been remembered and interpreted at battlefield sites, monuments and museums. in approaching our discussions from a transnational perspective, we are able to place our interpretations in a global context, while drawing public history review | esposito 25 comparisons, finding common backgrounds and analyzing case studies to better understand the intricate connections between domestic and international histories. importantly, we can explore these connections in our memory and commemoration studies. transnational research has also proven critical in developing my understanding of the subjects of my inquiry. examination of brazilian records for example, demonstrates a complexity to us-brazilian relations, specifically a brazilian perspective and agency for which endless mining of records in the united states simply cannot provide. likewise, no amount of library technology can provide the vast historiographical materials accessible by interacting with knowledgeable scholars in another country. one particular case study that makes a unique and important contribution to transnational studies, as well as in the field of public history writ large, is the immigration of confederates to brazil during and after the civil war. specifically, it is useful to consider how the descendants residing in brazil today remember and commemorate their american, brazilian, and confederate heritage. in engaging in this cross-cultural scholarship, i was able to overcome some of the usual challenges involved in transnational studies. moving forward, this case study can shed a light on the increasing relevance of transnational studies and cross-cultural collaboration to our interpretation of the past. the historiography of the american civil war and reconstruction encompasses a complex set of arguments including debates over the principles of the american revolution, expansion, free labor ideology, military strategies, and slavery. specifically, scholarly interpretations of reconstruction have ranged from the lost cause and the romanticized version of the period, to an increasing emphasis on the protection of civil liberties for african americans in particular. studies of social, political, and economic factors involved in the civil war and reconstruction, and how those variables have been presented to the public, offer a valuable insight into the motivations of politicians, elites, and ordinary citizens and soldiers during and after the conflict. in order to fully understand the domestic imperatives and international implications of the civil war, however, one must explore the conflict within a global context in the classroom, and in our public history studies. as historian henry blumenthal points out, ‘the dissolution of the federal union was certain to produce far-reaching-international consequences, whatever the reason that had brought it about.’2 accordingly, other scholars of us history have successfully connected the major historiographical themes of nineteenth century america to public history review | esposito 26 global events of the time. in generations of captivity, a history of african americans slaves, for instance, ira berlin relates technological advancements and international market demand to the progression and strengthening of a slaveholding society in the american south. berlin argues that eli whitney’s invention of the cotton gin and the increased exportation of southern cotton was evidence of a global dynamic underpinning the growth of the southern economy and the expansion of slavery.3 similarly, in mastering america, southern slaveholders and the crisis of american nationhood, robert e. bonner argues that southern slaveholders’ perspectives changed in response to both domestic and international changes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which led to a shift from southern american unionism to a southern nationalism at the advent of the american civil war.4 bonner shows a shift from a southern master class who looked to the federal government as the guarantor of southern social and financial stability, to a more confident, globalized southern nation, who no longer believed the south’s best interests laid with the survival of the union. as the scholarship diversified, and as the contemporary political landscape changed, the interpretation of the civil war in the public realm, as well as the memory of the war also changed. as robert j. cook points out in troubled commemoration, the american civil war centennial, 1961-1965, ‘federal interest in commemorating emancipation’, as part of centennial commemoration efforts, ‘had diverse political roots’.5 referring to the american political landscape at the height of the cold war, cook also explains that the us civil war centennial commission (cwcc) ‘had already decided that some formal recognition of the abolition of slavery was essential if they were to restore public faith in the centennial project.’6 cook added that, ‘kennedy’s leading advisers probably reasoned that too close an association with civil rights might damage the democratic cause in the forthcoming midterm election.’7 undoubtedly, contemporary politicization of a particular event influences how societies choose to remember their history, which often results in the perpetuation of an official collective memory of the past. balancing current politics and history is a challenge faced by all nations. recently, for example, some critics of japanese prime minister shinzo abe have argued that his public statements during celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the end of world war ii were an attempt to subtly shift the narrative about the war’s end.8 like cook, in remaking america, public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century, john bodnar examines cultural pluralism in american commemorative activities. in doing so, he demonstrates the constant struggle between official and vernacular, or more local memory, and public history review | esposito 27 how they have shaped collective memory and commemoration efforts.9 as bodnar explains, ‘more suggestive is the widespread effort on the part of ordinary people to celebrate symbols such as pioneer ancestors or dead soldiers that were more important for autobiographical and local memory than for civic memory.’10 similarly, in mystic chords of memory, historian michael kammen explores the process in which collective memory and national identity have intertwined throughout history. his study examines the groups involved in perpetuating traditions and in the building of a collective historical memory. kammen asserts that, ‘societies in fact reconstruct their past rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mindmanipulating the past in order to mold the present.’11 thus, commemoration studies demand an understanding that societies have a tendency to use a reimagined past to justify contemporary interests, or to reinforce a national identity. this case study shows that the politicization of the memory of the american civil war and reconstruction has not followed the same pattern in brazil as in the united states. as a result, this transnational example contributes to commemoration studies by presenting historians with an opportunity to expand their analytical scope to a global scale when exploring the most important factors influencing heritage preservation, commemoration and memory. as discussed above, the scholarship of the civil war and reconstruction era has expanded its analytical framework over time. moreover, as the field of public history continues to grow, historians increasingly explore the commemoration efforts around the country and how the nation has remembered and interpreted the war. as we explore the myriad reasons for the war, and appreciate the enduring consequences of its aftermath to united states history, we should continue incorporating transnational studies into our interpretations of the period. furthermore, we must apply this complex and evolving scholarship to our teaching, historic site interpretation, local history studies, and commemoration and memory analyses. in undertaking transnational and cross-cultural studies, however, historians face unique challenges, including language barriers, high costs for international travel and cultural misunderstandings. case study: the confederate migration to brazil during and after the civil war throughout the 1860s, and increasingly after 1865, confederate expatriates settled in diverse regions in brazil, in both northern and southern colonies, including para, bahia, pernambuco, espirito santo, rio de janeiro, minas gerais, parana, and santa barbara d’oeste in the public history review | esposito 28 state of sao paulo.12 although the confederates immigrated to many different locations in brazil, the migration to santa barbara d’oeste region, in sao paulo is unique in that, unlike the other brazilian colonies confederates temporarily established, it persisted as a successful confederate settlement. as the times union and journal reported in 1982, ‘about 80 percent returned to the united states, and the only successful settlement was americana’, in the santa barbara d’oeste region.13 having faced different challenges from the confederates who stayed in the united states, this case study illuminates distinct memory and commemoration patterns obscured absent a comparative transnational context. in this particular case, reconstruction takes on a new light when viewed through the prism of confederate immigrants to brazil and their descendants. confederate migrants went through the reconstruction era and beyond from a different geographical location, with a distinct set of political, economic and social changes than from southerners who remained in the united states. significantly, the descendants who remained in brazil have remembered and commemorated their heritage largely detached from changing political landscape that shaped narratives in the post-civil war united states. this study is reflective of local communities’ pattern of remembering, removed from an official or government-sanctioned memory of the past. importantly, this vernacular study highlights how communities separated by geographical boundaries developed distinct patterns of remembering their past, influenced by local, national and international events. in santa barbara d’oeste, sao paulo, the first community of confederates was founded around the machadinho farm that colonel william h. norris from alabama purchased in 1866. norris also purchased three slaves in brazil.14according to descendant eugene c. harter in the lost colony of the confederacy, ‘in the 1870s, when the railroad from sao paulo was completed, the confederados had begun to build their houses near the railroad station, several miles east of santa barbara’. harter added, ‘for approximately twenty five years the cluster of homes and shops grew and the settlement took on the name estacao (the station). the brazilians, however, always called the town villa americana [american town]’.15 the ‘american town’ eventually became the town of ‘americana’. today, americana is about ten minutes by car from santa barbara d’oeste, about thirty minutes from the campinas metropolis, and a hundred miles west of sao paulo city. in the summer of 2012, i visited the region and was able to research the history of the migration at the local archives, while also exploring the brazilian historiography on the subject, including monographs, thesis and videos. preliminary research revealed that the confederate immigrants travelled public history review | esposito 29 in large groups and usually were acquaintances in the united states prior to moving to brazil. according to a newspaper article in the town’s historical archives, ‘many immigrants that fought alongside norris’ sons during the war of secession established themselves around the same area’.16 during my visit, i also had a chance to speak to some of the confederates’ descendants in order to learn their perspective about the civil war, as well as their efforts to preserve and commemorate their heritage. in 1954 the descendants formed the fraternidade descendencia americana, the fraternity of american descendants. in addition to its routine activities, the fraternity holds an annual party to commemorate the community’s culture and heritage. during the ceremony, some women dress as southern belles, and some men dress as confederate soldiers. the fraternity also has bulletins and a website to inform members across different regions in brazil of news related to civil war commemorations in the united states, as well as to educate the members on the history of the war.17 these bulletins include a substantial number of primary sources that historians can draw on to incorporate transnational perspectives into studies of memory and commemoration. moreover, the fraternity uses the confederate flag as a symbol of the migrants’ heritage, incorporating it into many of their sites and commemorative efforts. the fraternity also oversees the confederate cemetery in town, another symbol of the descendants’ heritage. at the cemetery there is an obelisk with the confederate flag and the names of many of the confederate families who first migrated to the region. honouring those families and remembering their journey is central to the preservation of the descendants’ heritage. personal histories and families’ stories, as well as artefacts, have been preserved and celebrated to enhance the local aspects of the region’s history. some of these artefacts are displayed in the local museum, serving as a window into the lives of the southerners in the united states. the objects tell a story to those who visit the gallery, primarily of an ‘old south’, and of pioneers from the former confederacy. this material culture is powerful in preserving their heritage, but also lacks the fluidity of civil war and reconstruction interpretations that we see in the united states over time. aside from understanding the complex history of the american civil war and why these confederates left the united states, it is critical that historians also explore the pull factors drawing them to brazil. the pioneer symbolism that descendants celebrate is enhanced by the motives behind the brazilian government’s encouragement of the migration. coupled with the contested reasons that led to the war, these public history review | esposito 30 pull factors allow the descendants to move the discourse beyond oversimplified narratives that explain the migration as a consequence of slavery’s legality in brazil at the time. these pull factors have influenced the descendants’ memory of their ancestors, emphasizing on more positive attributes of the confederate migrants, such as their economic and cultural contributions to the brazil. as harter points out, the emperor of brazil at the time ‘had his agents meet with prospective colonizers and opened immigration offices at the brazilian embassy in washington and the consulate in new york city.’18 acknowledging the brazilian government’s encouragement of the migration, detailed in brazilian archives and historiography, complicates the narratives and contributes to the community’s pattern of remembering their history. this is an important factor in understanding how subsequent generations celebrated their heritage, and what they think the reasons were for their ancestors’ immigration to brazil. the confederates’ initial settlement followed a peculiar pattern as a result of their focus on building a community in brazil grounded in southern customs and in what they defined as southern values. primary research indicates that once the confederates settled in santa barbara d’oeste they set out to develop a community of their own, isolated from the local citizens. they focused on creating social connections and organizations that would help maintain their southern us culture. as harter points out, ‘first generation confederates like colonel norris continued to consider themselves americans. they were from the csa not the usa; but still they were americans, linked firmly to george washington, thomas jefferson, james madison, and the colonial heritage’.19 the national enquire also reported a migrant’s account: ‘the land here is so much like the old south, we raise cotton and corn and we even have magnolias here’.20 despite their initial insistence on remaining apart from the local culture, the confederates eventually assimilated into brazilian society. one of the descendants explained, ‘the first and second generations spoke portuguese but few married brazilians, and the third generations and older members of the fourth have clung together somewhat as a group, but the younger fourth and fifth generation “think brazilian and marry brazilians”, so the line is fading.’21 harter also explains that, ‘one of the changes more evident in the confederados of my youth [the 1920s and the 1930s] was their belief in tolerance among races. this they had acquired from the brazilians.’22 investigating which traditions were most important to the subsequent generation of confederate descendants in brazil can also help public historians better engage in cross-cultural studies, explore transnational commemoration efforts, and illuminate relevant patterns in public history review | esposito 31 the preservation of one’s heritage. as harter noted of his own family, ‘grandfather and the colonists took their cultural baggage with them on their sailing ships of the 1860s. even unto the third generation it was easy to note the romanticism, the dignity, the fanatic family cohesion, the love of heroics, and the sentimental snobbish.’23 without a doubt, the cultural baggage to which harter refers to was transmitted to subsequent generations and influenced the memory of the civil war in the confederate communities in brazil. absent the changing political landscape evident in the us after the civil war, which influenced how americans remembered and commemorated the conflict, the confederados relied on personal stories, material culture, southern cuisine passed down through generations and music to shape their memory of the ‘old south’. as technology improved, the descendants were better able to keep up with civil war news and history as it is interpreted in the us, but they maintained their unique pattern of remembering and commemorating their heritage. this is a fascinating case study for scholars of public history because it encourages us to explore local histories within a more global context. comparing civil war commemoration in brazil and in the us allows scholars and communities to address a variety of issues, including what factors influence how an individual, a community, or a nation chooses to remember their heritage, how and why does that memory change over time and what can this case reveal about cultural wars, cultural exchange and memory across geographical boundaries. as the historiography of reconstruction has broadened to include a more complex and intricate analysis of gender, labor and political forces, further exploration of the confederate immigration to brazil adds another unique perspective to the analysis of the era, one that goes beyond just discussing how reconstruction impacted all levels of us society. in the same way that us citizens experienced the conflagration and its consequences differently, so too did the rest of the hemisphere. moreover, the story of confederate immigrants suggests that the seismic effect of the american civil war had reverberations that impacted the rest of the hemisphere. in addition to enhancing reconstruction historiography both in the scholarship and in the classroom, and the understanding of commemoration patterns, this phenomenon also contributes to the historiography of us-brazilian relations. this case study sheds a new light on the relationship between the two countries, which can be useful in teaching and interpreting the history of american foreign relation as well. examining the confederate immigration, and especially the public history review | esposito 32 complex cooperation between brazilians in both official and unofficial capacities working to facilitate the process, helps increase our understanding of the motives and development of us-brazilian relations. in this case, confederates’ response to internal drivers and external stimuli was to relocate to brazil, in the process carving out an unintentional role as agents of diplomacy. the confederates engaged in a process of cultural exchange with brazilians at the initial stage of their settlement. but most importantly, as evident in many immigration studies, they entered into a cultural exchange that evolved over the years. this gradual exchange can elucidate unique regional developments since the immigration took place. initial research suggests that scholars would do well to consider the influence and impact of technological and education exchange, as well as religion in this specific case. as the factors above suggest, this cross-cultural study offers an opportunity for a new, transnational interpretation of the civil war and reconstruction era. in exploring how the fraternity in brazil commemorates their heritage, it is clear that the descendants view their ancestors’ immigration to brazil as a story of triumph. as harter points out, ‘in brazil, southerners could survive with honor’.24 the community proudly preserved objects brought from the southern united states by their ancestors, and maintained a confederate cemetery in the region. the cemetery creates a connection between the descendants and their heritage, and it is a crucial symbol in their fraternity as well as of their southern heritage. this is an interesting point from which public historians can benefit from crosscultural studies when comparing civil war commemoration in brazil and in the us, which would greatly enhance the teaching of public history in the classrooms as well. more recently, the controversies surrounding the display of the confederate flag in public spaces makes it clear that the confederacy’s place in the civil war commemoration discourse remains contested in the united states. in contrast, the history of the united states civil war and its commemoration has not been politicized in brazil in the same way, as discussed above. hence, the fraternity’s purpose, commemoration efforts, and preservation of their southern us heritage has taken a different form. as harter notes of his own experience when he returned to the us, ‘we had not experienced the same kind of trauma and change that had overtaken the southerners who stayed in the united states after the civil war and reconstruction period, and we had to learn about the unique race relations… and how different northerners and southerners were from each other.’25 this phenomenon not only offers historians the opportunity to include a transnational approach to public history review | esposito 33 interpreting reconstruction, but it also provides public historians with an opportunity to include a cross-cultural approach to civil war commemoration and to explore the memory of the confederacy through a more complex lens, across geographical boundaries. as we continue to enhance civil war and reconstruction studies and interpretations, this unique episode in the country’s history deserves further investigation. challenges encountered in cross-cultural studies although public historians involved in cross-cultural studies encounter various challenges, the benefits of pursuing multinational research and developing transnational studies are multifaceted. transnational studies provide historians with the opportunity to enhance the historiography by including broad perspectives obscured, ignored or misunderstood in traditional scholarship. moreover, successful case studies can help future scholars overcome some of these barriers. one significant limitation to transnational studies is the language barrier. in this particular case study, confederate descendants in brazil assimilated into the brazilian culture over the years and speak brazilian portuguese. thus, it is difficult for civil war scholars, and us historians in general who might not speak portuguese, to engage in oral history projects or peruse the local archives, which contain most of the material about the migration. there are several informative brazilian authored secondary sources, as well as theses and dissertations that have been published on the subject. however, if the researcher does not speak portuguese proficiently, it would be difficult to explore these sources. in my own research, i found that my fluency in portuguese was essential to completing this project. this allowed me to quickly conduct research at the local archives, which contained documents in both english and portuguese. i could easily navigate through the collections and speak to the archivists in charge of the materials, while also being able to record the information i needed in a timely manner that was crucial given the financial constraints of international travel. moreover, my language skills allowed me to speak to the descendants of the confederacy in brazil who did not speak english. the person-to-person engagement was perhaps the most crucial part of my research. i was able to visit descendants’ homes, see the historic artifacts their ancestors had brought from the south, visit the confederate cemetery and go to the store where the southern-style clothes were made for their annual confederate party in town. most importantly, i heard directly from the descendants about their views on the civil war, reconstruction, and their ancestors’ settlement in brazil. public history review | esposito 34 it was also valuable to my research to obtain the descendants’ opinions on how the civil war is remembered and commemorated in the us. in doing so, i was able to understand the values and heritage that the descendants believe they are commemorating as they preserve their ancestors’ symbols and culture. in this case study, my language skills were essential. while there is no substitute for speaking the language of the subjects of your research, there are ways to address linguistic limitations. for example, a scholar could overcome the language barrier by working in partnership with a foreign university, or working with a foreign student who speaks both languages. there were some preservationists and local historians at the regional archives where i did my internship and research that spoke english, and had a deep understanding of what the confederate immigration meant to their community. moreover, brazilian students and professionals were resourceful in finding secondary sources, such as local thesis and dissertations, as well as introducing me to the descendants. a crosscultural project could greatly benefit from exploring these types of collaborations further. institutionally, history departments should encourage their students to approach their research topics from a transnational perspective. in doing so, advisers should suggest that students examine primary sources from foreign archives, as well as familiarize themselves with multinational historiographies. encouraging students around the world to collaborate with one another would not only help address the language issue, but also eliminate some of the cost involved in international travel, another challenge to transnational studies. research funding for international travel can be scarce, limiting one’s ability to include foreign archives and perspectives in their studies. some of the larger and more established archives around the world sometimes offer online access to their materials. however, in instances where archives do not have digitized collections, collaborative efforts would prove useful. in point of fact, some archives also provide copying services for a fee, which could also facilitate transnational studies. smaller, local archives with fewer resources, however, might not offer these services. the local archives i visited for my research on the descendants of confederates in brazil for example did not have those services available. in my case, department and university research funding and encouragement were essential for my research. beyond defraying costs, perhaps most importantly, collaborative research is inherently transnational and will by its very nature enrich the subject under examination. aside from language and international travel costs, researchers may also face challenges derived from cultural misunderstandings. scholars public history review | esposito 35 must take into consideration the background and history of the people they are studying. in the case of the descendants residing in brazil for instance, my general knowledge of brazilian history, civil war and reconstruction historiography and us-latin america foreign policy, allowed me to more effectively connect with local historians and be better prepared to converse with the descendants of the confederates. some brazilian researchers, for example, might not have been as exposed to civil war and american history in general, as someone living in the us. similarly, some historians from the united states who study the civil war might not have a nuanced understanding of brazilian history, which could lead to contemporary cultural misunderstandings. given the politicized and controversial nature of civil war memory and commemoration in the united states, particularly pertaining to the confederacy, the descendants of the confederacy community in brazil might have reservations about adding their history and commemoration efforts to the contentious civil war discourse outside of their community. moreover, the descendants might be hesitant of outsiders who they fear may want to fit their story into narratives that conflict with their personal and community memories. hence, in pursuing transnational projects, scholars need to immerse themselves in archives, historiographies and personal stories from the nations involved in order to more accurately analyze contemporary efforts of remembering and commemorating one’s past. conclusion cross-cultural studies, although not without challenges, can enhance our understanding of the past and present. in this case study, further research on the confederate immigration to brazil will highlight the importance of transnational history and cross-cultural collaboration by acknowledging that identities, cultures and even technologies are influenced, but not contained by political boundaries. including the story of these confederate immigrants provides depth to studies of american history, particularly in illuminating strong southern convictions to preserve the antebellum culture. explaining the challenges they faced, and particularly what they aimed to achieve when they moved to brazil, also sheds light on which aspects of their culture were most valuable to them at the time, enhancing our civil war commemoration studies. furthermore, the immigrants’ experience helps explain the origins, possibilities, and limits of cultural exchange and the ways that culture can impact relations between nations. such transnational approach would be valuable both in teaching civil war and reconstruction, and in public history review | esposito 36 connecting that history to the public. this unique case study draws considerable attention from the public due to its cross-cultural nature. hence, it could be useful in engaging a wider audience in the studies of civil war and memory both in the us and brazil. as historians continue to explore civil war history and commemoration in particular, it will be critical to consider that changes in the social, political, cultural and economic factors in the nation are intimately connected with global dynamics. hence, cross-cultural studies and collaboration can help us better understand our past. the more we engage in such studies, the more we can continue to identify challenges and most importantly, how to overcome them. moreover, we must continue encouraging students in the classroom to view their history as part of a more intricate web of global trends. finally, as we expand our analytical scope to explore these factors within a cross-cultural and transnational framework, we can enhance our understanding of memory and commemoration of one’s heritage. as the field of public history continues to diversify and reach wider audiences, cross-cultural collaborations are essential in engaging scholars and the public worldwide, promoting a more dynamic venue to address past, as well as present issues. endnotes 1 louis a. perez jr, the war of 1898: the united states & cuba in history and historiography, the university of north carolina press, chapel hill and london, 1998, pxiiii. 2 henry blumenthal, france and the united states: their diplomatic relations, 1789-1914, the university of north carolina press, chapel hill, 1970, p75. 3 ira berlin, generations of captivity: a history of african american slaves the belknap press of harvard university press, cambridge and london, 2005, p178. 4 robert e. bonner, mastering america: southern slaveholders and the crisis of american nationhood, cambridge university press, new york, 2009, pxvi. 5 robert j. cook, troubled commemoration: the american civil war centennial, 1961-1965, louisiana state university press, baton rouge, 2007, p170. 6 ibid, p171. 7 ibid, p175. 8 anna fifield,“japan’s leader stops short of world war ii apology,” washington post, august 14, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/abe-offers-condolences-as-anniversaryof-world-war-ii-surrender-nears/2015/08/14/30489c66-4030-11e5-b2c4af4c6183b8b4_story.html, accessed 15 october 2015. for a full text of abe’s speech, see: j. freedom du lac, ‘“sincere condolences”: full text of shinzo abe’s statement on world war ii’, washington post, 14 august 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/14/sincerecondolences-full-text-of-shinzo-abes-statement-on-world-war-ii/, accessed 15 october 2015. 9 john bodnar, remaking america: public memory commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century, princeton university press, princeton nj, 1992, p13. 10 ibid, p18. 11 michael kammen, mystic chords of memory: the transformation of tradition in american culture, vintage books, new york, 1991, p3. 12 judith macknight jones, soldado descansa, uma epopeia norte americana sob os ceus do brasil, published by the fraternidade descendencia americana, 1967, p318. public history review | esposito 37 13 ‘a little bit of dixie in brazil, the accent is southern but there are no fire works on 4th’, times union and journal, 5 july 1982, file number t. 03136, cjmj rg 022, a-4, centro da memoria, santa barbara d’oeste, brazil (hereafter, centro de memoria). 14 macknight jones, soldado descansa, uma epopeia norte americana sob os ceus do brasil, p150. 15 eugene c. harter, the lost colony of the confederacy, (texas a&m university press, 2000), 70 16 a newspaper clip in the ‘immigracao americana’ box, undetermined date, translated by author, centro de memoria. 17 http://fdasbo.org.br/site/. 18 harter, the lost colony of the confederacy, p37. 19 ibid, p69. 20 robert h. abborino, ‘among descedents of civil war refugees… spirit of the old dixie still lives in brazil’, national enquire, centro de memoria. 21 henry lee, ‘descendents of the confederate emigrants still maintain a society in brazil but it’s being assimilated’, the washington post, 20 march 1966, centro de memoria. 22 harter, the lost colony, p23. 23 ibid, p77. 24 ibid, pix. 25 ibid, pxi. galleybrown public history review vol 21 (2014): 81-101 issn: 1833-4989 © 2014 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. never lost for words: canberra’s archives nicholas brown free of the rot of politics s a city created largely from nothing to accommodate a national parliament and bureaucracy – and having from the start a rather ambivalent relationship to other roles and functions – canberra has always had a rich official archive. the capital has never been lost for words. high levels of education and income characterised many of those who came to it in the service of the state, and who shaped rich worlds of paper and speech in its spare landscape. in 1973 the british political scientist, david butler, identified a ‘canberra model’ of government that was distinctive in the dynamics, candour and interdependencies fostered in the close proximities the capital encouraged between politicians, a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | brown 82 bureaucrats and journalists. there was ‘gold’, butler declared, simply in those seams of information and exchange, spanning from the formal to the candid and the confidential – and with a great deal of porosity between them. canberra’s existence in the currency and authority of the written record, the hansard, file, memorandum, legislation, precedent, plan, press release or headline has never been beyond doubt or fascination.1 whether registering the issues gaining access to policy and political attention at the heart of australian government, or adroitly keeping the gates against public accountability for things done or undone, that archive is synonymous with the city – and inevitably shaped a pervasive sense of its public history. alongside that repository of politics and politics, however, has developed another more diverse archive of experience and identity. this second holding often runs against the official grain, reflecting other aspects of an essentially experimental community. like the residents of washington dc, canberrans since the proclamation of the federal capital territory in 1911, and until the conferral of self-government in 1989, were excluded from any franchise for local political representation. their first seat in federal parliament, created in 1949, came only with strictly limited voting rights. and, unlike the neat precinct of washington, that exclusion encompassed the full extent of the residential and surrounding areas intended to serve the capital. for some, the lack of a vote was a virtue, just as the insistence that land could only be leased in the territory would raise it above the speculative distortions and self-interests of private property. as one of its earliest advocates, maverick politician king o’malley, declared, canberra must sit in an enclave at least ten times the size of washington’s district so that all its residents ‘can hope’, free of ‘the rot’ of petty politics.2 the consequence has been that this same affluent, informed, articulate community – proud of the ‘common wealth’ – has also often railed against being the mere subjects of the same arts it refined and practiced in their day jobs. in that process they have built an alternative record of themselves, defining forms of citizenship in ways that were remarkably skilled, active, and innovative, drawing on the social if not political capital ready to hand. a record of organisation, lobbying, voluntarism and networking challenges the passivity alleged to be a consequence of the city’s privileges. the relationship between these two parallel but interdependent archives is a significant aspect of canberra’s history – and history-making – as well as being an element of the ‘model’ the city continues to present in governance. sustained reflection on the interface between history and ‘the archive’ often arises from an awareness of the stark power imbalances public history review | brown 83 reflected in the active production of the former – the voices to be heard – and the rigid classifications practiced by the latter. critical engagement with these processes is usually energised by the extent to which the acts of selection, preservation and organization implied by the archive are inevitably political, whether in overt exclusions or more subtle forms of regularisation and the sanctioning of standing and authority. canberra, of its essence as a city of government, even a ‘city state’, does not throw up much in the way of such stark imbalances. even its inequalities, and its marginalised populations (and they are there) have never lacked expert documentation and commentary. such processes in themselves have often served to defuse politics into procedures of policy and planning. but canberra does offer a perspective on the ways in which, even in a relatively homogenous community, gradations in access to ‘the record’ emerge and impose regularities and boundaries of their own. this article offers a survey of some of canberra’ official and representational archives, assessing the ways in which – as joanna sassoon argues – they have been ‘active participants’ in the construction of its history, at once highly selective, but also remarkably inclusive. this activity in turn relates to the terms in which, in the domain of public memory, these archives have, and could, serve to shape connections between present and past.3 as aleida assmann phrases a point descending from pierre nora, in the shift from ‘living memory’ to ‘cultural memory’ a past is ‘produced’ with purposes that are, implicitly or otherwise, in contrast to the past left to ‘waste’ outside the archive’s regime.4 canberra might lack the drama of many such acts of production and wastage, but it still alerts us to how, even within the ordered spaces of an emblem of urban design and amenity, such a shift still goes on. what follows reflects my experience in preparing a concise, general history of canberra, with a publisher’s brief to capture both the character of its community and its significance as a national capital. my research – necessarily at broad scale rather than in-depth enquiry, and working with the (themselves voluminous) already published records of a community – revealed the complexities of canberra’s archival history as a vital element of those two dimensions. jacques derrida begins his archive fever with the etymological analogy of the archive as ‘house arrest’, a ‘domiciliation’ of public authority and home-based safekeeping.5 this formulation sets aside a polarisation between the archive as controlled public space and the privacies it seeks to regulate. it suggests instead the relationship between the two: between (borrowing gane and beer's terms) the ‘act’ of ‘commencing’ an archive and the ‘place’ from which its conditions of access and use are ‘commanded’.6 public history review | brown 84 canberra neatly fits this analogy, not least in the proximities yet boundaries fostered between those acts of commencement and commandment in the often self-aware ‘house arrest’ of its people. silent revolution as a city, canberra existed first on paper, in the concept-driven scheme for the capital by chicago architects walter burley and marion mahony griffin which won an international design competition in 1911. but paper – notoriously in the case of the griffins’ experience – scarcely guaranteed action. the city’s name itself emerged from a carefully guarded solicitation of popular views, in which a play of textual allusion, in part-high-minded (‘democratia’, ‘pacifica’ or ‘empire city’), in part sardonic (‘swindleville’; ‘gonebroke’) was officially trumped by a word that struck a neat balance between an authenticity extracted from an aboriginal past and a pastoral present about to be superceded by an idealised symbol of the nation. ‘canberra’, it is now accepted, derived from a local aboriginal language, but the continuing lack of certainty as to how best to describe that group or the meaning of the word is testimony to the speed of dispossession in the region and the ready sentimentalisation of a people falsely declared as early as 1834 to be ‘no more’.7 as ken inglis noted, ‘canberra’ made a deft transition between ‘pioneers’ and ‘citizens’, obliterating much unresolved business in the process.8 the carefully coached vice-regal first pronunciation of the chosen name (so as not to appear too ‘upper class’), which was then cabled from nearby tents at record speed, was in turn greeted by a nation reassured – according to brisbane’s courier – by its ‘wholesome manly burr’.9 in the often halting progress of the capital project, such mixes of the ‘living’ and the ‘cultural’ recur with an obviousness reflecting how little separated commencement and commandment in the capital. as its first historians observed, the city descended on a largely side-lined rural enclave that had ‘no official status’ of its own.10 by decree, it soon acquired much – while at the same time stripping from existing residents both ‘the rot’ of the franchise and the temptation to self-interest associated with the right to own – rather than lease – private property. such interventions were widely endorsed as ‘a brand of municipal socialism’, presenting (according to victorian liberal parliamentarian hume cook) ‘a spectacle the world has not previously seen – an entire city… owned and managed for the people of australia’.11 they were not exactly matched in commitment to the place itself: if the future beckoned canberra, the present was less well provided for, and the past scarcely featuring at all. in the modest, temporary accommodation envisaged for public history review | brown 85 first public servants to be transferred from melbourne in the 1920s an exception from timber construction was proposed only for agencies and records ‘deemed especially important’ for preservation from fire.12 but in the first stage of that move, all records relating to the functions of the commonwealth parliament to that point were destroyed to save expense in freight.13 in that sense, among many others, the new city – still existing largely on paper – carried no history. in fact, no provision at all was made for a national government archive in canberra (or anywhere else) throughout the inter-war decades. while the cause had several advocates, as michael piggott observes, ‘no cultural or administrative reason’ emerged from the ruck of politics to trigger an ‘archival response’.14 scepticism towards the new city was compounded by vigilance regarding any extravagances in government. even early ideals of the capital hosting some equivalent of the united states’ library of congress were chiselled back by the temporising argument that the ‘national library’ in canberra, only likely to serve the servants and sittings of parliament, needed no higher remit or budget.15 with the outbreak of world war ii, paul hasluck – official historian of australian society and government during the conflict, and a participant observer in the capital through those years – recalled the deep unreality of ‘typists… rattling away in the government departments [in canberra], copying important documents’ in case the functions of the rudimentary bush capital needed to suddenly relocate or cope with air raids.16 that panic was perhaps one element in the initiative of 1942 to at least do something to coordinate the handling of official records, civilian as well as military, given that the conduct of war steadily encompassed so many aspects of national government. a ‘provisional archives repository for the administrative records of nonservice departments’ joined many other temporary arrangements in the capital – but would remain among the last such ventures to graduate to permanent accommodation over the following decades.17 not only did a home for official archives remain low on the long list of priorities for the capital, it also became captive to a tussle between versions of the historical project the nation required. the kind of ‘home’ – in terms both of commencement and command –became an issue itself, even as a default option while waiting for a clear determination of an ‘archival response’. on the one hand, there was the established repository, research and curatorial capacity of the australian war memorial, geared to preserving the records of a nation seen as forged in war and sacrifice, and defined by such ministrations. on the other, there public history review | brown 86 were the less developed facilities but restive ambitions of the commonwealth national library, with its ideal of building a collection infused by ideals of ‘national life and development’, and broader goals of representing a narrative of cultural inheritance (acquiring the only copy of the magna carta outside britain in 1952, the library spoke of capturing a vital aspect of ‘our constitutional life’).18 in what was at the time, given professions not known for heat, a spirited debate, the national library won the first engagement, one consequence being an enduring tension between the systematic ‘organic’ record-keeping advocated by archivists and the more selective classificatory aims of librarians.19 in 1953, h.l. white, appointed commonwealth parliamentary librarian in 1947, and an exemplar of the latter ambition, took pride in the ‘60 000 linear feet of records now in the custody of the library’. among the virtues of this holding, he added, were the savings in office space it enabled many departments to make once freed of such material, the efficiency with which the library could make available to officers any file they needed to consult again in their business, and the generation of ‘schedules… to guide… the future destruction of valueless records’. adding the role of these holdings in assisting ‘citizens wishing to establish or protect their rights’, white – ever zealous in boosting the standing of his institution – placed such holdings in a daunting synthesis of roles.20 skirmishes over the place and organisation of the personal and official papers of senior politicians, over the reach of such a national project into colonial periods, and over the curating of diverse materials within collections, soon began to test and fracture such a web, and ironically to generate tensions that would in time see a ‘national collection’ dispersed across a thickening landscape of collecting institutions in the capital, each marking its own place in the balance of ‘living’ and ‘cultural’ heritage.21 from the national film and sound archive, established in 1984 to the museum of australian democracy (1999), canberra has seen several more recent public interventions to preserve and commemorate aspects of the australian ‘experience’, marking points in both its political symbolism and endangered heritage. that debate in relation to official archives through the 1950s can be seen to mark equivalent dynamics, if less in terms of a vulnerable resource than it seeking to capture distinctive practices. if the ‘archive response’ came first from the demands of war-driven mobilisation, regulation and coordination, the consequence was that its drive remained linked to functions of central government which were unlikely to cease with peace, and which became increasingly integral to public history review | brown 87 the image of canberra as national capital. as steve stuckey argues, australia came late to the coordination of a national archive. in doing so, however, it broke from conservative english and european models at a time when governments were spurred by expanding policy agendas and capacities. white’s precursor, kenneth binns, lobbied senior politicians that the value of official records related not only to documenting the actions of government but also in reflecting enough of the contexts of policy formation to inform assessments of changing administrative roles and functions.22 appointed archives officer in the national library in 1944, and a central figure in the evolution of archives memory as well as practice, ian maclean similarly noted that the distinctive functions of australian commonwealth government had resulted in a ‘free trade’ in files that related ‘not so much to the formal functional or organisational pattern of the office, as to the flow of administrative work’ among officers, dispersed, mobile, and pragmatic.23 by 1956, surveying the ‘silent revolution’ in which ‘the management of records as well as the organisation of materials for the study of national affairs’ had become interdependent activities, white continued to lobby for the centrality of the national library to custody of such processes, and facilitation of such exchange.24 an enquiry of 1961, however, found against him, and recommended the formal separation of national archival and library functions. the ‘silent revolution’ was best to be comprehended in questions relating not only to the accessioning materials, but also the obligations imposed on departments to keep their own day-to-day business in order, and on the record, for eventual deposit. as stuckley adds, as a result of recognising this ‘continuum’ there developed in the national archives a regime of ‘intellectual control among the best [exercised by any archive] in the world’.25 it is beyond the scope of this article to trace the history of australian archival development. the point, however, is to note some of the influences on the official archive project as it unfolded in canberra in this form of ‘house arrest’. in 2012, michael piggott, drawing on a long career in canberra’s several archives, reflected evocatively on the ‘societal provenance’ that must become an integral part of studying their history – understanding what was culturally embedded in records, and in the questions to be asked of their assembly.26 he urged researchers to explore the ‘terrior’ – an awkward term, piggott conceded, as he sought some kind of metaphorical sense of place in the archive – reflected in the creation of records as a social practice.27 it was strange, piggott lamented, public history review | brown 88 that australians’ alleged ‘talent for bureaucracy’ had generated so little reflection on the exercise of that skill. yet from the start canberra had heightened awareness of what was encompassed in the fashioning of the figure of the public servant, and of public service work, that was central to its identity. the reluctant, resented transfers of officials from offices elsewhere were accompanied by promises (inducements? threats?) that ‘an even higher degree of efficiency and a keener desire to render valuable service to the public’ would result from relocation to canberra, particularly as that move was associated with a recasting of the temperament of national administration from merely procedural to managerial skills, and from hierarchies of seniority in service to those of capacity in policy.28 again, it was world war ii that heightened these expectations, not only in freeing the exercise of commonwealth power from the ‘passive resistance’ exercised towards change in the older, established cities;29 but because of the kind of generational change the war was seen to usher. in 1947, the public service board presented a profile of its new, ideal senior officer: men must have an opportunity of executive practice and… to make mistakes before the age of 30 if they are ever to reach the ranks of successful executives. delay in giving this experience often means that an officer is called on to take an important executive post at a time when he has lost the mental resilience which would make him fully effective.30 canberra was seen as central to the culture of such figures, just as the government in which they served was expected to become ‘more diversified [and] firmly rooted in an alert canberra community’.31 kenneth bailey, before leaving his professorship in law in melbourne to join the attorney-general’s department in canberra as one member of a broad infusion of new expertise into the national bureaucracy, declared ‘the classical age of parliamentary legislation is over’: this was the age of the administrator’.32 administration as an ascending practice – including mistakes and building ‘resilience’ – was to assume a distinct embodiment in canberra. its archives should be read through this perspective – especially, as hasluck reflected in 1951, because the kind of record they offered of an ethos of government and its moments of decision-making in itself entering a period of marked change.33 in his biography of h.c. coombs, one of the pre-eminent public servants associated with these wartime and post-war transitions, tim rowse identifies their shared ‘competitive collegiate’ style.34 to a public history review | brown 89 remarkable degree even the driest files, exchanges and reports can often be read as records of the kind of ‘house arrest’ – the meshing of intimacy and regulation – that has characterised the scales at which, and phases through which, government took shape in canberra in various acts of mentorship, mobility and sociability. coombs’ colleagues would often use the image of a ‘family’ – ‘official’ or otherwise – to evoke the kinds of relationships or ‘trade’ that developed among them. one of the most recent initiatives in political science has been the anthropological recovery of the role of everyday practices in sustaining the ‘rules of the game’ of politics, and in the particular fusion it brings to the lived experience and the formalised processes of government.35 canberra, as butler argued over forty years ago, has long offered a microcosm of such processes. in approaching the history of canberra, and reflecting on the need for such a history to be attentive to its own actors, these ‘rules of the game’ need to be actively explored in informalities as well as formalities. the ‘real’ canberra is not to be recovered despite, or instead of, such identities, but by engaging instead with the self-fashioning and self-actualisation they involved. such recovery might be enabled by thinking more laterally about ways of reading files, establishing ‘terrior’. in a novel set in canberra in the late 1970s, sara dowse – herself a participant observer in that bureaucracy – followed closely one of her central character’s attempts to negotiate the political and policy currents of the time, returning to the mantra: ‘when in doubt, remember your terms of reference’. historians, particularly those who seek to build connections between audiences who feel their pasts have been left to ‘waste’, might attend to such a reflex in understanding the experiences of government: the tension between commencement and command.36 humphrey mcqueen has identified among australian historians a particular propensity to ‘archivitis’, arising from the assumption that the orderly sequence of files that are one part of the success of australian archives, can be read as the story in themselves – a danger perhaps only accentuated by the digitisation and word-searchability of files. a corrective to this is perhaps in attending to the context, and the continuum, that archival practice can still reveal. the naa has continued to provide leadership in the management of digital records, recognising the need to capture them as, in adrian cunningham’s terms, ‘performances’, and ‘evidence of decisions and activities’, rather than merely ‘data’.37 the actual ‘place’ of the archive in canberra’s landscape is itself part of these processes, the designed landscape allocating its own priorities and relationships. the national library might have acquired a marble public history review | brown 90 clad, neo-grecian, lake-side temple-like permanent home in 1968. but the national archives were much slower in finding a home. the higher calling to provide a site for a national gallery impelled the archive’s graduation from a series of temporary premises in lakeside nissen huts – ‘elegant igloos’, prime minister menzies called them in 1960 – but only to a morbid concrete building in a remote industrial suburb, shadowed by the chimney of a surgical waste incinerator, and neighboured by sex shops: in itself, perhaps, a symbolic collocation.38 in 1998 the move of at least its reading room to historic premises in the central parliamentary precinct related more to the archive’s role in the capital’s emerging profile of ‘national cultural institutions’, broadening the image of canberra from a government-dispensing to a service-delivering town, and as a ‘cornerstone of democracy’ at a time when such improving civic messages again surged to the fore.39 the accountability of government, reflected in ideas of ‘open’ procedures and ‘freedom of information’ taking shape in the 1970s, leading to enforceable rights of access to government records in the commonwealth archive act (1983), underwrote this move. in the process, canberra’s official archive has reflected the ‘interesting balancing act’ lionel orchard has seen in australian political culture over recent decades, negotiating pressures to ‘responsive government’, disciplines of program budgeting for specific agencies and services, and the recognition of rights in a population cast as stakeholders as much as citizens.40 it is certainly appropriate that the national archives’ headquarters is now in one of the two modest if graceful secretariat buildings constructed in the 1920s as provisional accommodation for the core agencies transferred to canberra. but that rightful ‘home’ should not obscure the journey preceding it. ‘terrior’ might be seen as the dust on the shoes of the nation’s itinerant official memory as much as the slow settling of a vintage in such revered cellars – as an expression of a ‘flow’ reflecting the processes of work of national government but struggling to find recognition in its official landscape. not far from the naa’s current headquarters, a slightly larger than life size sculpture by peter corlett, dedicated in 2011, shows two labor leaders of the 1940s, john curtin and ben chifley, in deep conversation as they stroll from austere hostel rooms to the provisional parliament house. arresting in its intimacy, this sculpture is a fitting reminder of what needs to be captured in the political history of the city. imaginative and experimental public history review | brown 91 alongside these official processes, canberra as a community has always wrestled with its social as well as official engineering. what did it mean to ‘live’ in such a place? sir robert garran, effectively australia’s first commonwealth public servant on his appointment as head of the attorney-general’s department in 1901, and resident in canberra since 1926, encouraged new arrivals in the early 1950s with the reassurance that the ‘snobbery’ of rank that had been mapped exactly over the city’s suburban hierarchies was steadily disappearing amid the equivalent of the collegialities that marked post-war administration. yet garran still confided – as an inducement to recruits – that while the capital might be destined to be ‘a city of public servants’, most ‘outside the office are quite good fellows, and on the central staffs we have the pick of them’.41 this mixed message went to the core of an ambivalent identity: the privileges bestowed on the national capital, as a proof of its role, ranged against a community keen for an integrity of its own. there were earlier formulations of this tension. in the inter-war decades ‘community’ as an ideal had itself been evoked to mediate these conflicting identities. the federal capital commission, established in 1924 to bring greater coordination to the development of the city, had proclaimed canberra to be ‘the world’s biggest experiment in the systematisation of the happiness of humanity’. yet that experiment was underpinned by a sterner message. the second issue of the fcc’s monthly canberra community news, launched in late 1925, argued that the ‘herd instinct’ of cities, the easy access there to ‘cheap amusement’, even ‘the kaleidoscopic movement of metropolitan populations’, all had allure, but did little to ennoble an individual. the spirit at canberra was instead ‘work’ towards the building a city ‘the like of which has never sprung up on virgin soil’, in an environment that was healthy for the body, restorative to the mind, and affirming of character.42 community groups were encouraged to assemble under this ethos, and subsidised to build tangible evidence of it, including playgrounds, or – in one celebrated initiative – a hall to serve as a focus for ‘improving’ activities in one of the most lowly early subdivisions, the causeway. but any move beyond uplifting voluntarism among those rallying to this message, towards advocacy of specific interests let alone criticism of fcc priorities, was discouraged, even penalised.43 the fcc undertook covert surveillance of the extent to which activities in its name observed its ideals; it attempted actuarial calculations of the relationship between participation, subsidies, and outcomes. the public sphere in canberra would for a long time be caught in such calculus, defined by as much as despite it. public history review | brown 92 steadily, however, community groups pushed for their own influence – and made their case by engaging with such formulations in their own terms, and on their own initiative. among the most effective was a mothercraft movement which grew beyond the provision of services for relatively isolated new mothers to include the provision of professionalised advice on nutrition, child-rearing and education. gaining leverage from the move of the commonwealth department of health to the city in 1928, with its public health agenda, and then from the rather eclectic resources of the institute of anatomy, established in 1931, with it research into national hygiene, the still voluntary leaders of the canberra mothercraft society were welcomed by a melbourne medical specialist for their success in giving ‘a definite lead’ in a new context where ‘there are no mistakes to rectify and no vested interests to compensate’.44 the society was innovative in its practices and lobbying, and made its own impact of the landscape of the city in clinics, visiting nurses and eventually child care centres. it was committed to inclusiveness in providing services extending across the class boundaries already evident in canberra, and – like the local ywca – extended its reach to the aboriginal community at wreck bay, which almost inadvertently had been included in the land allocated to the capital territory at jervis bay, in the coast, in the withering prospect that one day the city would need a port. the relatively high levels of education and policy literacy, and the governmental resources accessible to canberra’s population, underpinned the increasing competence with which such claims were advanced for public provision. equally, a government, keen to test the prospects for the expansion of such social assistance, often welcomed the opportunities a still isolated, or at least insulated, capital provided as a laboratory. into the 1940s for example, officials of the department of post-war reconstruction, and their wives, were prominent in the leadership of neighbourhood, suburban and community groups which now deployed a language of ‘welfare’ in representing ‘local people [who] must obtain the services to which they are entitled’. 45 these new emphases, in place of the supplicant civic voluntarism of the inter-war years, produced an archive of their own, in the minutes of meetings, petitions, correspondence, newsletters and flyers. these – along with a wide range of less tangible forms of solidarity – emerged from a community which had always relied heavily on its own resources to build a shared identity but now found the means to formally argue for the recognition of their work. a changing language of government informed such lobbying, and in turn defined a public sphere constructed in canberra that was distinct from that of government itself. public history review | brown 93 histories of canberra routinely defer to the creation of the national capital development commission in 1957 as the salvation of the city from the neglect that had largely prevailed since 1913. a statutory planning and construction authority with relative independence in funding and execution, the ncdc gained deserved admiration for its achievements in consolidating both the national capital and suburban elements of the city.46 its concepts, calculations, models and projections round out the formal archive of canberra’s planning in reviews and reports that sought to garner national pride to the city, and envisaged a landscape of order. but the public history of canberra needs to capture a citizen effort, and its own archive, that established many of the preconditions for such visions, and kept them to a measure of account for the more localised experience of place. there are many areas in which this effort was marked through the 1950s into the 1970s. the distinct contribution of canberra’s activists to the women’s electoral lobby is one example.47 the archive produced in these campaigns has its own distinct dimensions. the educational and political resources of the canberra community were, again, obvious elements in much of the work produced to advance these causes: in the networks activists drew upon, the analysis of issues available to them, and access to influence. that archive could include, for example, demonstrations and theatre events, or the screen-printed t-shirts, posters and tea-towels that became such a strong feature of canberra women’s campaigns, produced in backyard workshops and forging an idiom that made an arresting connection between a suburban vernacular in imagery and a directness of political message that was, in itself, redolent of canberra. building on these foundations, such print-making remained a distinctive element of socially-engaged art practice in canberra through the 1970s. but while the records of the leading workshops, megalo print studio, are now held by the national gallery of australia, one of its leading practitioners, alison alder, has also observed that for many years the same progressive aspects of the canberra community kept recognition of such work at a level always just below the professional, as ‘protest’ rather than ‘art’, and always with the taint of amateurism in a city that recognised no other industry than government. ‘because canberra is such a small place’, alder recalls, ‘if you keep doing something then people will think that you are ok’, and take it for granted.48 similar factors shaped the campaign of a group including local lawyers and academics who, from the late 1960s, drove a campaign that gained national prominence for homosexual law reform. surely, they public history review | brown 94 argued, canberra might provide a model for tolerance and decriminalisation in this area of personal rights? but as the wider movement for gay rights built from their case, it was also noted that while the capital might support political lobbying it was less congenial to the assertion of identity. relative to other cities, canberra might be highly literate in such lobbying but a good deal more circumspect in open solidarity, since many potential supporters were ‘public servants who are afraid of losing their jobs’.49 the ‘public’ of such campaigns was a far from simple entity; their archive requires careful reconstruction and reading for its own variations on ‘house arrest’ – sometimes quite literally in terms of the places from which people could speak. perhaps the most revealing of these campaigns was that which developed through the late 1960s, seeking to create a secondary school system better suited to the particular circumstances of the canberra community. in 1966 a vigorous parent-initiated public campaign began registering dissatisfaction with the increasingly under-resourced nsw system which had long provided education the australian capital territory (act). a series of newspaper articles, public meetings and conferences reflected an engaged and effective local leadership and constituency. the australian national university (anu) economist, noel butlin, calculated that the taxation paid by act residents – reflecting higher average incomes – could support an independent school system better tailored to their needs. don anderson, head of the university’s recently established educational research unit, undertook an innovative survey of students, documenting both their aspirations and discontents. richard campbell, an anu philosopher, chaired the committee that formulated a model system. the driving force, however, remained with citizens, and the proposed senior secondary college system reflected their participatory ideal of schools governed by boards on which parents and teachers would share influence over staffing and curriculum.50 canberra, it was argued, deserved an ‘imaginative and experimental’ approach to education, recognizing the ‘professionalism’ of teachers and avoiding the ‘conformity’ imposed on them and their classes by public examinations. tasmania had adopted a matriculation college system to prepare a ‘critical mass’ of students for university. canberra, however, faced a different problem. most act students stayed until their final year, an affluent community building their aspirations but also exerting ‘greater pressure to succeed’ and producing (anderson found) high levels of anxiety. the ‘discernibly hierarchical’ nature of a public service town and the relatively high proportion of married women in paid work were among the factors judged to be public history review | brown 95 building a mounting pressure of expectations among canberra’s youth. if increasing levels of alienation among them was to be avoided, they needed an education more attuned to the development of a sense of individual responsibility and choice. critics derided the ‘privileges’ the capital once again assumed in arguing for such a model, but the capital’s self-conscious status as a vanguard of ‘post-industrial society’ also meant it was increasingly troubled by the demands students felt to conform to the narratives of career, status and security driving their parents.51 their lobbying, again finding a commonwealth government, and a commonwealth department of education, aware of the need for reform, led by 1974 to the establishment of a system of secondary colleges judged ‘one of the most dramatic and important [australian] experiments in educational administration’.52 while that achievement in policy is considerable, as is the process of representation that drove it, so is the troubled image the community assembled of itself in making its case. canberra, clearly, has a population skilled in the creation of an ordered repository of its business and goals, but the tension between the dominant identity of government and its capacities and a residualised if articulate concept of community is part of its living as well as cultural memory. when the severe contraction of public investment in the capital in the late 1970s accentuated this tension, commentators noted with alarm how the once relatively settled, or at least creative, balance between benevolent, still unelected government and a heightened sense of voluntaristic, community engagement in the creation and projection of identity, descended quickly into marked conflict and confusion.53 the largely unsought bestowal of self-government for the act in 1989 struggled against that legacy, and attempts to reimagine the ‘public’ of the city and its community continue to negotiate an unsteady popular distancing from being a ‘government town’ while still so clearly dominated by the business of government. attempts to apportion responsibility for the ‘capital’ and ‘city’ or ‘community’ aspects of canberra, and to allocate funds and lines of accountability for them, have proved challenging. a split has been forced between identities once cultivated as united, turning the city into a laboratory for new cultures of privatisation in services, performance contracts in government, and developer-driven planning.54 as more of the community’s past is, in assmann’s term, left ‘waste’ in the search for a culture appropriate for the new image of metropolitan dynamism, it is worth reflecting on the archives that once existed in that earlier creative synthesis of government and community. public history review | brown 96 like no other australian town or city along with the official and community archives, canberra has also produced, over recent decades, a third repository of more resolutely local testimony. comprising memoire, testimony, recollection and oral history, it is a repository in which ‘living memory’ seeks incorporation rather than consignment in the ‘cultural memory’ of a community so pre-occupied by its perennial refashioning as a created, artificial city. always tormented by the capital-yet-to-be, a rich seam of local history has sought to account for the several phases of migration, community and culture that have characterised at least the past one hundred years of canberra’s growth, and fallen largely outside the syntheses noted above. a related stand of local aboriginal history has even more emphatically worked with that distance to make a more fundamental point about dispossession and resilience. the social archive produced in this process counters the ‘artificiality’ that is often attributed to the canberra project and also, to some extent, the ‘laboratory’ of activism and innovation. but its emphatic ‘authenticity’ shows its own traces of a ‘house arrest’ in dealing with the boundaries canberra inevitably brings to the experience recorded. the ‘pioneer’ as a resolute figure in australian public history, has had serial incarnations in canberra’s narrative, in part as a reflection of these phases of commitment to the capital, and in part in gestures to reclaim what is seen to be distinctive against an imposed narrative of experimentation and ‘nation building’. ironically, perhaps, the pioneer has dominated the capital’s local history long after it has faded elsewhere, precisely in reaction to the dominating stories of planning and politics. canberra’s community historians, defined by their engagement and representation of these phases and antithesis, have created a sequence of such ‘pioneers’: those of pastoralism, those of inter-war settlement, or those of ostensibly transitory wartime or more permanent post-war transfer, each set against the less authentic infusions of people, policies and experience to follow. overall, the pioneer past that canberra’s local historians have worked to recover has been framed more by a desire to rescue ‘the people’ from the imprint of government, and to push past always slightly patrician initiatives to an attention to those who were the subjects rather than the agents of an imminent, if not omnipresent state. this push, however, has created tensions of its own. since its foundation in 1953, the canberra and district historical society has sought to reconcile a determination to counteract the increasing ‘invisibility’ of the past in a city so determined on public history review | brown 97 transformation with an approach that might reconcile the local and more ‘academic’ interests compromising its membership – the ‘pioneers’ versus the ‘intelligentsia’.55 at its first meeting, for example, those present ‘were asked to record the date of their families’ first association with the district’, and local enthusiasts spoke of their careful collections of aboriginal artefacts, found on their properties and treasured as souvenirs. the society’s energy was undeniable, pushing through lapses in membership in the 1960s to tap a revival in family and community history in the following decades. ‘pioneers’ stood outside the ambitions of government; they represented variations of resilience, of ‘truthing’. advocacy for a range of heritage and preservation causes, including built and natural landscapes and aboriginal sites, surged into the 1980s in association with the bicentenary and countered a pervasive view that canberra lacked ‘a past worth preserving’.56 a journal launched 1966 reflected this enthusiasm, but generated its own debates over the ‘local’ and the popularly accessible, and more research-driven material, reflecting aspects of the readership.57 an act heritage committee, established in 1972, advocated the establishment of a museum to foster a ‘stronger sense of identity… in a population still largely comprised of persons born interstate or overseas’. over following years, the restorations of pastoral properties such as lanyon homestead (to capture the convict era of the 1830s) or suburban homes such as calthorpe’s house (middle class domestic life of the 1930s) were innovative in their attention to issues of labour, gender and rank. but still the ‘pioneer’ image prevailed, individualising and perhaps sentimentalising the terms in which local history was presented. local history has fostered engagement with a rich and evolving historiography, moving into a second phase of critical synthesis, and finding its place – for example – within the recent revitalisation of australian colonial history.58 it has engaged with the expansion of oral history, memory and testimony. it has also given a voice to people otherwise marginalised from the narrative of high politics that has dominated the history of canberra, to the exclusion of the efforts of those who made such a narrative possible. sara dowse, who wrote so evocatively of the workings of bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s, also reflected on the strength of women writers emerging from the small, collegial groups the city encouraged in its mix of affluence and alienation. these writers, dowse noted, negotiated the ‘transience’ of new suburbs and the ‘renewal’ they could offer in ‘children, building, planting, and people reaching out’.59 equally, committed and prolific public history review | brown 98 community-based historians such as ann gugler and alan foskett have marshalled archival research and personal recollection to ‘recover’ the lost places of canberra’s early development as a city of workers and migrants.60 into the 1990s processes of heritage classification generated opportunities for grants and consultancies that could move such work into more professionalised foundations, just as community grants assisted in bringing groups of writers together. over the past decade the act heritage library, a specialised collection developed within the act government library service, has amassed a diversity of materials relating to local and regional history – if in an unsteady demarcation from the national library, as much driven by limited resources in both institutions to systematically acquire materials. the canberra museum and gallery has mounted a similar, and increasingly bold, enterprise of marking out its role in a city dominated by national cultural institutions. steadily canberra is beginning to produce an archive that rises above imperatives to reclaim the integrity of local experience to also begin make a contribution to understanding the ways in which such experiences were a part of wider stories of class, conflict, identity and isolation. in hope, for example, ann-marie jordens has explored the solidarity emerging across generations of immigrants and refugees in the particular context of canberra. here, in an older spirit of community volunteerism, combined with an awareness of falling outside the stereotypes of the planned and soulless city, people from europe, then asia, now africa, have experienced the many dimensions of being ‘new australians’ in a new community.61 a new wave of writers and visual artists are portraying the same diversity in canberra’s suburbs – but with the revealing emphasis that there suburbs are familiar in any australian city.62 just as the found object, the assembled life, the bric-a-brac of experience in juxtaposition to a sparse landscape, has defined a prevailing aesthetic for canberra – most famously in the work of rosalie gascoigne – it is appropriate that the canberra community should exist in these individual narratives of experience, surprise, reinvention and adaptation. but if public history, and our understanding of the archive, is to move beyond such personalised memories, testaments and deposits to consider the circumstances of their creation, then the history of canberra suggests ways in which we might foreground these fundamental acts of invention and performance as artefacts in themselves. canberra, in its peculiarities, it might be argued, demands this foregrounding more than most places; but it also offers more general reflection on what they represent in the australian project, whether in public history review | brown 99 the long-delayed ‘archival response’ in government or the dynamics of social advocacy. for all its insularity and seductive privileges, canberra is, as don watson concedes, ‘like no other australian town or city, yet no other australian town or city is more australian’.63 it has been presented as a ‘laboratory’ for what the nation might aspire to, in planning, service provision and amenity. it is also the centre in which the wheels of government, its agencies and agents, are portrayed as grinding on in their relentless, unaccountable paths. the official, community and local archives point to other aspects of the city, not set in contrast to these images, but interdependent with them in commencement, commandment, action and place. in this synthesis, too, canberra is – as jeanne mackenzie reflected before watson – ‘not like australia and yet it could not be anywhere else’.64 endnotes 1 david butler, the canberra model, macmillan, london, 1973, pp4-6. 2 king o’malley, commonwealth parliamentary debates, 19 july 1901, p30. 3 joanna sassoon, ‘phantoms of remembrance: libraries and archives as the “collective memory”’, public history review, no 10, 2003, p40. 4 aleida assmann, cultural memory and western civilisation: functions, media, archives, cambridge university press, cambridge uk, 2011, pp6; 13. 5 jacques derrida, archive fever: a freudian impression, trans by eric prenowitz, university of chicago press, chicago, 1996, p2. 6 nicholas gane and david beer, new media: the key concepts, berg, oxford, 2008, p73. 7 john lhotsky, a journey from sydney to the australian alps, blubber head press, hobart, 1978, pp67-9. 8 k.s. inglis, ‘ceremonies in a capital landscape’, daedalus, vol 114, no 1, 1985, p86. 9 see nicholas brown, ‘canberra 1913’, in michelle hetherington (ed), glorious days: australia 1931, national museum of australia press, canberra, 2013, pp76-77. 10 frederick watson, a brief history of canberra, federal capital press, canberra, 1927, p69. 11 quoted in frank brennan, canberra in crisis: a history of land tenure and leasehold administration, dalton, canberra, 1971, p24. 12 paul reid, canberra following griffin: a design history of australia’s national capital, national archives of australia, canberra, 2002, p170. 13 michael piggott, archives and social provenance: australian essays, chandos, oxford, 2012, p58. 14 michael piggott, ‘beginnings’, in sue kemmish and michael piggott (eds), the records continuum: ian maclean and australian archives first fifty years, ancora press, melbourne, 1994, pp4; 13. 15 peter biskup, library models and library myths: the early years of the national library of australia, historical bibliography monographs, no 11, canberra, 1988, pp12-13. 16 paul hasluck, the government and people 1939–41, australian war memorial, canberra, 1952, p125. 17 official year book of the commonwealth of australia, 1944-45, p.210. 18 canberra times, 20 august 1952. 19 piggott, archives and social provenance, p90; p.r. eldershaw, ‘archives’, public administration, vol 15, no 4, 1956, p335. 20 h. l. white, ‘the commonwealth national library’, education news, vol 4, no 1, 1953, p2. 21 stuart macintyre, ‘the library in the political life of the nation’, in peter cochrane (ed), remarkable occurrences: the national library of australia’s first hundred years, national library of australia, canberra, 2001, pp130-34. 22 steve stuckey, ‘keepers of the flame’, in kemmish and piggott (eds), records continuum, pp39-40. 23 ian maclean, ‘an analysis of jenkinson’s manual of archive administration in the light of australian experience’, in peter biskup et al (eds), debates and discourses: selected australian public history review | brown 100 writings on archival theory 1951-1990, australian society of archivists, canberra, 1995, pp60; 76. 24 h. l. white, ‘the development of the commonwealth archives programme’, public administration, vol 15, no 4, 1956, pp290-91. 25 stuckey, ‘keepers of the flame’, p45 26 piggott, archives and social provenance, p3. 27 stuart macintyre, ‘archives’, in graeme davison, john hirst and stuart macintyre (eds), oxford companion to australian history, oxford university press, melbourne, 1998, p38. 28 jill adams and chris oates, serving the nation: 100 years of public service, national council for the centenary of federation, canberra, 2001, p89. 29 f. a. bland, ‘public administration in wartime’, australian quarterly, vol 14, no 4, 1942, p52. 30 public service board, twenty-third annual report, agps, canberra, 1947, p7. 31 p. w. e. curtin, ‘politics and administration ii’, public administration, vol 8, no 1, 1949, p18. 32 k.h. bailey, ‘the war emergency legislation of the commonwealth’, public administration, vol 4, no 1, 1942, p12. 33 paul hasluck, ‘problems of research on contemporary historical records’, historical studies, vol 5, no 17, 1951, pp1-13. 34 tim rowse, nugget coombs: a reforming life, cambridge university press, cambridge, 2001, p154. 35 see r. a. w. rhodes, everyday life in british government, oxford university press, oxford, 2011. 36 sara dowse, west block, penguin, ringwood, 1983, pp20; 71; 73; 234-5. 37 adrian cunningham, ‘digital curation/digital archiving: a viw from the national archives of australia’, american archivist, vol. 71, 2008, pp536; 539. 38 quoted in biskup, ‘library models’, p35. 39 gabrielle hyslop, ‘for many audiences: developing public programs at the national archives of australia’, archives and manuscripts, vol 30, no1, 2002, p51. 40 lionel orchard, ‘managerialism, economic rationalism and public sector reform in australia’, australian journal of public administration, vol 57, no 1, 2008, p20. 41 sir robert garran, foreword, canberra today, department of the interior, canberra, nd, p4. 42 canberra community news, 14 october 1925, p1; 11 november 1925, pp1-2 43 freeman wyllie, ‘constructing a community: the canberra social service movement 19251929’, m.litt, anu, 1994, pp12, 23. 44 helen crisp and loma ruddock, the mothering years: the story of the mothercraft society 19261979, canberra mothercraft society, canberra, 1979, pp20; 41; canberra community news, 9 may 1927, p3; libby robin, how a continent created a nation, unsw press, sydney, 2007, pp84-87; james gillespie, the price of health, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1991, pp53-4. 45 canberra parents bulletin, march 1945, april 1945; minutes of the griffith progress and welfare association, 13 january 1944, 28 october 1946; minutes of canberra citizen’s rights league, 25 july 1944: bill fanning papers, nla ms 7881. 46 see, for example, hugh stretton, ideas for australian cities, griffin press, adelaide, 1970, p103. 47 marian sawer, making women count: a history of the women’s electorial lobby in australia, unsw press, sydney, 2008, pp8-9; 22; 33; 37; 40; 94. 48 anni doyle wawrzynczak, ‘canberra’s bitumen river gallery’, art monthy, no 259, 2013, p38; see generally julia church and alison alder (eds), true bird grit: a book about canberra women in the arts 1982-83, megalo, canberra, 1983, p14. 49 camp ink, may 1972, p8. 50 clifford burnett, ‘how the act schools authority came into being’, australian education review, no 10, 1978, pp13-17. 51an independent education authority for the act, anu press, canberra, 1967, pp5-7; 14. secondary education for canberra, agps, canberra, 1973, pp10; 12-15; 21-24. 52 barry price, ‘planning a new school system’, chj, march 2004, pp23-34; grant harman, ‘the new act school system’, australian education review, no 10, 1978, pp89. 53 tony vinson, victor coull and robyn walmsley, review of welfare services and policies in the australian capital territory, agps, agps, canberra, 1985, pp4; 6–8; 9; 11; 42. 54 phillip grundy, bill oakes, lynne reeder and roger wettenhall, reluctant democrats, federal capital press, canberra, 1996. 55 patricia clarke, ‘the society begins…’ in chris clark (ed), canberra history 1953-2003, kelly & sons, canberra, 2003, p8. 56 alan fitzgerald, ‘the case for an act museum’, canberra historical journal, no 15, 1985, pp27-28. 57 graeme barrow, ‘from a humble start’, in clark (ed), canberra history 1953-2003, pp23; 25. public history review | brown 101 58 see for example david meyers, lairds, lags and larrikins: an early history of the limestone plains, sefton press, canberra, 2001. 59 sara dowse, ‘foreword’ to majura writers’ group, home grown anthology, majura writers group, canberra, 1993, pix. 60 see, for example, ann gugler (ed), true tales from canberra’s vanished suburb, on demand, canberra, 1999; alan foskett, homes for the workers, narrabundah pre-fabs history group, canberra, 2012. 61 ann-marie jordens, hope: refugees and their supporters in australia, halstead press, canberra, 2012. 62 see, for example, lee grant, belco pride, everbest, canberra, 2012; christie thompson, snake bite, allen and unwin, sydney, 2012. 63 don watson, recollections of a bleeding heart: a portrait of paul keating pm, vintage, sydney, 2003, p249. 64 jeanne mackenzie, australian paradox, cheshire, melbourne, 1961, p32. galleyli public history review vol 21 (2014): 20-40 issn: 1833-4989 © 2014 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. public history in china: is it possible? na li n 2010, when i studied a few historic districts across china, i concluded that authority-sharing – giving residents a chance to tell their own stories in their own way – may seem an advanced application in china, where civic dialogues are still at peril. but such sharing points preservation efforts in a positive direction.1 the inquiry, however, did not end there: how much further have we progressed in the past three years? is it possible to integrate public history into urban preservation in china? is public history possible in china after all? when robert kelly wrote his ground breaking 1978 article on the origin, nature and prospects of public history, he was right to focus on the idea of ‘public’ in training methods.2 no matter how vaguely the idea was defined at the time, public history since then has grown into an engaging intellectual discipline and active social movement in the i https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | li 21 united states. articles in the public historian, the leading journal of the field, have explored the concept from different dimensions across different cultural contexts. nevertheless, the core philosophy stays the same. from carl becker’s call for ‘everyman his own historian’3 to michael frisch’s ‘a shared authority’,4 public history reaches out to multiple publics for a more inclusive historical interpretive power. the approach has always been critical, collaborative, entrepreneurial and, above all, self-reflective. during my research in historic cities around the world, i found my training and experience failed to address some of the elementary issues in historic preservation: for example, whose history have we preserved, and is there anything missing from the preserved urban landscape.5 i stumbled upon public history in a conversation with david glassberg at the university of massachusetts amherst, where a graduate program in public history was thriving. the very idea of authority-sharing has stayed with me, though my understanding of public history has evolved in the subsequent years. i have engaged in various public history projects since 2007, as part of my training, in massachusetts. central to those practical experiences are a different set of values and approaches to preservation and their impact on the urban environment. in 2009 i went to canada for a research project on one of the most sustained urban neighborhoods in one of the most multicultural gateway cities in north america, kensington market in the city of toronto. my search for historic clues acquired a firm vernacular bent: public history, especially oral history, presented an effective way to engage collective memories embedded in the historic built environment. despite a different cultural context, the public history theories and skills that i learned in the united states found a seamless transition to canada. what about a radically different cultural context? in february 2013, on my way to chongqing, china, i was again dwelling upon the question: is public history possible in china? my task this time was to teach a public history graduate seminar with historic preservation practicum at chongqing university, one of the key national universities within the ‘985 project’ frame,6 and certainly the best one in chongqing, the fourth municipality in china. in one sense, i was excited because this would be the first time i was able to ground public history in a culture where government plays a pervasive role in almost all preservation projects and decision-making remains largely top-down, no matter how the propaganda frames it. but the potential challenges came in many ways. first, i was expecting it would meet suspicion, if not an outright pejorative response, from intellectuals in china, similarly to the way public history review | li 22 public history was greeted in the united states in the late 1970s.7 most classically trained historians and professionals believe, rather stubbornly, that knowledge generated from the public does not constitute real knowledge. by the same token, public history, with its utilitarian objectives, remains a fringe intellectual exercise with little prospect of securing a footing in the traditional intellectual world. highly prized professional aims, such as objectivity and authenticity, enshrined in established academic disciplines, seem out of place.8 the second challenge public history faces in china lies in geographic focus. in the united states, public history programs usually favor large urban centers, for a good reason: the large employment opportunities and networks associated with those areas. so in china, the logical testing ground for public history should be metropolitan cities such as beijing, shanghai and guangzhou. in chongqing, a relatively isolated inland city of industry and commerce located in the southwest of china, on the upper reaches of yangtze river, embracing a more cosmopolitan worldview has come rather recently, if at all. so, naturally, it poses more challenges to historical approaches that emphasize the importance of employing a more inclusive interpretive power in urban space that incorporates diverse perspectives. at stake here is not only academic authority, but also political agendas and public accessibility. the third challenge involves the tradition of chongqing university. established in 1929 as a school for engineering and natural science, the university has largely stayed within this established academic culture.9 although a new institute for advanced studies in humanities and social science was established to bridge this gap, disciplines in the humanities and liberal arts are still overshadowed by their engineering and science counterparts. to teach public history in an educational institution where the place of history and the liberal arts remains weak seems daunting. just as preservation issues in china take on different philosophic meanings,10 so too does public history. with those challenges in mind, i tried to grasp a sense of scale of the whole idea of teaching public history in china. when my plane touched down on the tarmac of chongqing jiangbei international airport, my heart beat fast and emotions ran high. i could not wait to see if the vitality and creative energy of public history would find a niche here. a reflective and collaborative curriculum my first public history course at chongqing set out to introduce key concept and practice in the field of public history, and to encourage students to develop public history products with local historic resources. public history review | li 23 i wanted to get students into the field to talk to people, to see how public history could help improve historic preservation practices and, eventually, to use public history skills in whatever field they chose to practice in the future. to these ends, i structured the course in the style of seminars and practicums. the design philosophy behind it was donald schon’s reflection-in-action, ‘in an action-present – a period of time, variable with the context, during which we can still make a difference to the situation at hand – [where] our thinking serves to reshape what we are doing while we are doing it.’11 schon argues that professionals can turn to multiple publics, stakeholders or constituents to help better define who they are and make the services that they offer society more effective. this ‘professional relationship’ compels us, with a salutary sense of urgency, to situate our technical expertise in a meaningful social context, and to further re-define the authority issue in the context of ‘reflective conversation’. modelled in part upon the public history program at the university of massachusetts amherst,12 the curriculum included five themes: philosophy and practice of historic preservation, historic interpretation at different scales, cultural landscapes, collective memory and oral history interviewing. the seminars explored key concepts and the evolution of public history in the context of historic preservation, which in china is still largely expert driven with little input from the general public. i also used my book, kensington market: collective memory, public history, and toronto’s urban landscapes, as a prototype for a different kind of historic preservation practice.13 a democratic teaching style was integral to this course. born and raised in china, i know from my own experience that traditionally the classroom is dominated by professors, with zero space for authority sharing. students, comfortably sitting at the receiving end, are used to traditional lectures that emphasize rote learning. they are trained to respect and obey official authority, so class participation generally meets with derision. voicing one’s own opinions seems abnormal, much less to challenge the conventional wisdom. my seminars, on the contrary, invited active participation and frequent interactions. with no prerequisite, the course was open to graduate students from all disciplines across the campus. the fifteen students who finally enrolled in class came from different yet related disciplines: they were graduate students in architecture, landscape architecture, urban and rural planning, fine arts and design. despite this diverse educational makeup, they all came into this course with some practicum experience.14 most of them had dabbled in historic preservation and public history review | li 24 some had practical experience in the field. as graduate students, they were equipped with some research skills and a reasonable level of english reading capability. the size of the class made possible an intimate climate for classroom discussions and group projects. instead of handing in one big paper at the end, as the students usually expect, i asked them for bi-weekly journals, as a reflective practice throughout the semester. in those regular writing exercises, students had an opportunity to hone their skills of writing in a logical and coherent manner, based on sound historic research. this is a critical capability that students in public history need to master and continually polish throughout their academic careers. it also provided some psychological space for students to reflect upon the past projects that they had done, or rather, find a new perspective into old practices. the last critical component of the course was a six-week collaborative public history practicum. as a protean and fresh concept, public history training is more efficient if situated in specific projects that are local, immediate and relevant. for this course, students were required to analyze the preservation of major historic districts in the city, to find out hidden or under-documented histories or to offer alternative perspectives into preservation practices in those places. they worked in a three-person group, delved deeply into their chosen sites, connected the locale with a larger theme and articulated new research questions. as noel stowe notes, ‘public history students must become actively and consistently engaged in discovering and learning how to relate the thinking of the discipline to the types of topics and situations that will emerge from their practice. specifically, how will they deal with audience issues (especially, a contested history or conflicting voices projecting from the past)? how will they handle a wide range of professional situations (e.g., from working at historic sites to museums or historical research offices)? how will they work with professionals from their own or other disciplines, particularly the latter, who will likely introduce quite different intellectual approaches?’15 with such a list of concerns, i encouraged students to deliver their final products with creativity and intellectual depth, based on rigorous scholarly research. i also asked them to practice their group presentations at least twice prior to our class conference. the hidden agenda was to hone their capacity to communicate their final products to the public with clarity and empathy. i anticipated that the last part would be awkward for most students in chinese culture, because they simply are not used to expressing their views in the limelight. at the end, students were not obligated to write a traditional research paper. public history review | li 25 instead, they handed in a reflection paper a week after the conference in which they gave their final group presentations. from the field: critical reflections on urban preservation16 at the beginning of our class, i asked students to think deeply about the fundamental goals of historic preservation. most of them had engaged in actual preservation projects and, not surprisingly, they were too preoccupied to reflect upon what they were doing. i posed a list of questions that included, for example, why preserve? whose history and whose memory are kept in the preserved historic districts? are those ‘historic districts’ truly preserved? these questions were aimed to help them re-think the intellectual and moral aspects of preservation. the reflective process, accumulative in nature, is also a process of constantly questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions in practice, differentiating problem setting and problem solving. in the beginning, with all of our technical expertise, have we targeted the right questions? in china, developers and politicians work hand-in-hand against preservationists and scholars; the former decide what to build or demolish, with little or no consultation or input from the latter. public participation in this hierarchy remains nominal at best. students trained in relevant disciplines such as architecture and urban planning have very little political savvy to handle preservation projects in the real world. so the initial responses from my students was bewilderment: is public involvement in the preservation process really necessary? with our discussions on those issues moving along, students turned to those often ignored aspects of preservation. one student observed: historic districts carry a living life style, and preserving them needs to go beyond the material aspects. we need to analyze the traditional street patterns as an organic part of the traditional way of life. when ‘inserting’ modern architectural elements into a historic environment, we need to take those traditional patterns into consideration, or we will disrupt historic continuity. what i feel unsettled about, however, is how to accomplish this goal? how to connect modernity with history? if renovated districts truly integrate the past? historic culture cannot be remolded, so can renovated ‘historic’ architecture mimicking the past truly lead us a way home? where is this sense of home in today’s preservation? my training does not answer those questions. another student wrote these lines from the field: public history review | li 26 meandering through the historic neighborhood with a continuous grape trellis and flagstone path covered with moss, i felt an instant connection with this place. it was a rich and poetic space; lower structures lined along the path all in harmonious scales. i have been here twice, and came back with different afflatus. the tranquility is pure and emotional. i was wondering what we actually need to preserve in this kind of space. urban texture, part of what we applaud as urban character, makes one city differ from another. it includes form and function, such as architectural scale, geometry, and space. it seems impractical to try to maintain the exact original style; those streets are, accumulated through years across seasons a direct reflection of urban spatial character and living history. what we need to preserve is ancient streets with such a pleasant scale. if we ignore those humane elements in preservation, we lose cherished opportunities to appreciate history. one key issue which emerged from the field concerned authority: who owns history? who owns historic space? what kind of urban and public history do we confront? one student asked: during historic preservation, whose history are we trying to preserve, urban history, architectural history, or human history? it is different to preserve a piece of architectural wonder and a more vernacular version of historic districts, because the latter represents a living history and memory. a large number of original residents are still living in the districts, over the years across the seasons; their life style has been interwoven into the organic urban symphony. they should have a say in preserving their own space. our field investigation shows that many have moved out of the area, with little intention of coming back. the government could care less about this. i cannot help but wonder who will continue this unique cultural tradition? who actually owns this historic district? students also realized something was left out of their normal scope of professional knowledge, as the following quote suggests: during the preliminary research phase, we have rattled through all sorts of relevant data, with a hope to get a thorough understanding of the site – it was not as smooth as expected: we public history review | li 27 found many contradictory descriptions from archival documents. we started to question the textual authenticity; many issues were raised yet few answers given. the materials seemed empty, repetitive, and dry. worse, most of them were filled with political biases, and therefore misleading. similarly, one student noted: when i first visited shibati (eighteen ladders) area,17 witnessing dilapidated stilted houses, i saw a village sandwiched in between a prosperous commercial district (jie fang bei). my interviews with a few original residents in the area, however, changed my initial prejudice. they greeted us with caution, but gradually, with trust and confidence, as if we were part of their lives. this sense of being welcomed into a big family has touched me, then reshaped my professional perspective, as we seldom take humanity as part the site investigation. the skepticism further challenges what schon calls ‘technical rationality’ – the view of professional knowledge which has most powerfully shaped both our thinking about the professions and the institutional relations of research, education, and practice: that professional activity consists solely in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique.18 the meaning of historic ‘facts’ changes as our understanding of history evolves. gradually, students started to meditate upon the fundamentals of preservation, especially the moral aspects of it. one student with an architectural design background wrote, with a tinge of cynicism: ‘historic preservation requires more ‘thinking’ about the past. we are often in a rush to judge, to evaluate, to criticize, yet slow to think about the educational values of the architectural heritage. when we hastily categorize the architecture, or conveniently freeze the architectural environment, or we subjectively insert our current value system, without a sense of history, so we end with a garbled history. there lies an interval between my practice and my thinking.’ connecting a sense of history with a sense of place resonates well with what david glassberg has suggested: ‘although a sense of history is not based in physiology like a sense of smell or sight, reminders of a past even not personally experienced can evoke sensations deeply felt, such as feelings of loss, or reverie, or intense pride. sense of history is… but a sense of locatedness public history review | li 28 and belonging. sensing history, we explore fundamental questions concerning personal and group identity and our relationship to the environment. a sense of history locates us in space, with knowledge that helps us gain a sense of where we are.’19 three men walking together confucius says: ‘if three of us are walking together, at least one of the other two is good enough to be my teacher.’ collaboration in public history projects, however, takes more than humility and mutual respect. elizabeth belanger discusses teamwork skills in a recent article about a collaborative project between a small liberal arts undergraduate institution and a community social service agency in the united states.20 teamwork forces us to face up to our own insecurities, to build up new relationships, to surrender part of one’s ego and, on top of all, to work patiently and diplomatically with people who are different from us. in chinese culture, however, individual excellence and teamwork seems strange bedfellows: conventional wisdom tells that one chinese is a dragon; three chinese becomes a worm.21 teamwork, if unavoidable, takes on a different connotation: it often means parallel working at one’s own capacity, then higher-ups, usually professors, make final decisions. so students rarely bother to genuinely interact with each other, and there exists little space for discussion about conflicts, contradictions and uncertainties. for the practicum, i encouraged students to work with those from a different field, or with those whom they did not know well. fifteen students were divided into five groups, basically out of their own choices. relationship building took place at different levels: with academic cohorts, with informants and with the audience, and it did not come easily. one student reflected on his collaboration with two other members: our teamwork started with all sorts of conflicts, and many have gotten worse. three of us come from different regions in china, with different educational backgrounds and upbringings – regional cultural differences lead to different character and ways to express and deliver ourselves. furthermore, as graduate students, we entered our graduate study with high expectations and some established, if not stubborn, thoughts and expectations, which we refused to compromise. simple things such as finding a time to meet each other became a source of conflict. also, three of us had to adjust our own schedules, or work at hours that we were not used to – all pose public history review | li 29 challenges to the fieldwork and our relationship with each other as a team. during the long hours of discussions in our studio and field, we have learned, quite gradually, that if we are going to work this out, we have to surrender part of our egos, and deal with those rudimentary differences. the reflection went further: setting back and pondering over the situation, we realized that, none of those conflicts were irresolvable and more important, once we started to put ourselves into each others’ shoes, and put things in perspective, themes emerged out of ‘common grounds’. it has taken a lot of patience and heart to reach this point. in retrospect, we think this somewhat painful process is simultaneously educational and worthwhile. we see those blind spots through others insights, and we gradually enjoyed the dynamics of working together for the best efficiency. another team acknowledged the individual differences, and consciously took advantage of them: we compensate for each other very well: my partner is from urban and rural planning, and my background is architecture. this means we process the built environment at a different scale, but we took this difference seriously, and quite pleasantly, we enjoyed our different perspectives and analytical methodology to research issues. she collected data on urban changes and preservation policies of the site, while i dealt with architectural documents. we got along pretty well! at our class conference, which was open to the public, in presenting their final products, students had to confront their own weakness in public speaking.22 they also needed to work with other members to deliver the message in a controlled time limit. most of my students were not used to public speaking, as one student admitted: ‘i am not good at expressing myself. i felt a little nervous when presenting in public, so i missed some important pieces of information.’ another student added time into the equation: ‘as each one of us have only ten minutes, i am forced to cram a lot of information into such a short time limit. i am really nervous.’ although nervous, most students found it helpful to share their work with the public, a skill that would benefit them in their future careers. public history review | li 30 oral history: elements of surprise one limit of the technical approach to historic districts is that memories embedded in the material environment are often inadequately analyzed. ‘by constructing and sustaining the essence of urban places,’, elisabeth hamin and i have written, ‘collective memory can help us make intellectual and personal connections with physical landscapes.’23 for decades, scholars have written about memory and history, but david glassberg is among the pioneers in linking public history and memory. he suggests, in his seminal article ‘public history and the study of memory’, how the invention of a collective sense of place, like the invention of a public history, is part of the struggle for cultural hegemony, the product of power relations between various groups and interest.24 by making memories public, oral history provides a means for us to confront the emotional, contested and sometimes surprising elements of our present. i have gradually built this understanding from my own firsthand experience. i see a city and its architecture as ‘a collective set of memory spots that enable people to create meaning to reproduce, recall, and retain their history through informal and collective actions.’25 however, as a scholar, i am trained to stay objective and pursue authenticity with professional rigor. a significant portion my education has led me to this glorious goal. so the initial suspicion from my students – most of whom came into this course with a strong technical expertise, but little interaction with the subjects of, or audiences for their design and planning practices – was to be expected.26 the emotional and sensual aspects of historic environments raise a different set of concerns in historic preservation. for example, how can we communicate private memory in a public space? how do we incorporate the ‘power of shared memory’27 into public understanding of the built environment? ultimately, why does having the right version of it around us seem to matter so much? most students in my class had not yet used oral history as a method in fieldwork or participated in projects that involved oral history. i conducted an oral history workshop, going through basics issues and techniques. yet experience tells me that, as many issues emerge from the field, one has to learn those skills from the field too. so when the students returned from fieldwork, we organized multiple sessions dealing with those issues. i encouraged them to brainstorm as a group first then go to the site with a general interview outline. then we worked together to analyze the first round of interviews, adjusted research public history review | li 31 issues, and modified our interview questions based on the evolving themes. after making those adjustments, students went again into the field to gather further data. from the classroom to the field, i designed the course as an open process involving ongoing conversations. in this way, students were forced to confront ambiguity, conflicts and uncertainty. most of the situations involved politics, and they had to maneuver around those issues with patience, diplomacy and professionalism, or they could not create an effective product. it was a crash course in politics for my students. when they got into the field, they automatically turned to the spatial elements, including the building materials, architectural styles, site planning, to name but a few. it was tempting for them to take what they collected from the internet, neither processed nor questioned, plus what they saw from the field, as ‘authentic’ history, the avowed goal for historic preservation. talking to actual people, anecdotally, to find out how they ‘feel’ about the environment seemed either unnecessary or unnatural. not surprisingly, suspicion reigned at the initial phase of inquiry. as one student wrote: before we get into fieldwork, i doubted if oral history was necessary at all, along with a seemingly unbridgeable gap between theories we learned from class, and lessons we learned from field investigation. the process came not as easy as we expected. information collected seemed scattering and misleading; we found it difficult to develop any serious research question. so we decided to take a more liberal approach, to let the interviewees’ responses get us oriented. during their first venture into the field, i got the following response from one student: it was getting late, but i managed to interview two persons: one is a manager of a youth hostel, whose knowledge of the house remains largely bookish and superficial (this makes me think more on the meaning of ‘public’ history); another is a ‘semioriginal resident’, for lack of a better word here, who has lived in the area for 30 years, 20 years renting the same place. the apartment he owned in the last ten years was demolished though. his memory of the area falls within the last 30 years. also, i almost had an opportunity to interview an original resident who has been around the area for more than 60 years. he was well-educated, and started to share with me his stories public history review | li 32 with admirable clarity and detail. yet his wife intervened, explaining that he could not talk too much because of high blood pressure. i had to suspend the interview. on the way back, i reflected on the interview strategies. local residents were sensitive to demolition issues and tried to avoid discussing them, so we should hold off on them until when they felt emotionally secure to share. the interviews today went not as smoothly as expected, but surprisingly, i came back with more confidence, and even a vague sense of excitement. i am jazzed up for the next round of oral history. this ‘vague sense of excitement’ epitomizes what schon calls ‘an element of surprise’,28 the something that failed to meet our expectation, on which most reflection-in-action hinges. as he observes: ‘when intuitive, spontaneous performance yields nothing more than the results expected for it, then we tend not to think about it. but when intuitive performance leads to surprises, pleasing and promising or unwanted, we may respond by reflection-in-action.’29 once students got oriented, they were galvanized for action. yet more new issues emerged: ‘when getting into the field, we tend to understand the physical environment, but feel awkward in talking to people: we are a little at a loss. how to talk to total strangers? how to develop rapport with them to dig out stories and memories? we have no answers to those questions. worse, our group has not yet worked out a theme, so we feel it is difficult to navigate the interviews.’ equally compelling but hard to document is the emotional quality of the physical environment. layers of memories have accumulated in the public space, representing a different kind of urban history: it takes place at a micro level, is deeply personal, and emotionally charged. ‘it is a process full of emotion’, one student wrote: after talking to this old gentleman, i felt deeply frustrated: his memory started failing as did his body. most of the time, he just repeated his personal experience, with little recollection of the environment. when talking to him in this crowded and dilapidated space, dwindled by the toweringly trendy central business district nearby, i had to doubt if historic preservation was all that necessary in the first place? could we, professionals and scholars, just struggle for a purely authentic historic district without taking care of those living in this type of environment? yes, we regretted the demolished buildings because part of the history was gone with their disappearance, but what about those who resided in those buildings? their living conditions public history review | li 33 were in such a sharp contrast with prosperity and modernity just next door. my students’ narratives reveal a deep psychology engagement with the material environment. an inkling of uncertainty, fear, discomfort and anxiety, accompanied with a strong sense of responsibility, prevailed. this probably explains why insight distilled from oral history often enables us to get more closely in contact with the complex layers of memories behind and beyond the historic districts. students started to reevaluate many preservation issues, one of which concerned affordable housing. ‘the couple is in their 60s, and has lived in this area for more than three decades’, one student observed: they remembered how thrilled they were when first moving here. they were really satisfied with a 20-square-meter apartment, and the clean and friendly neighborhood. but everything has changed, unfortunately, to the worse: mice were rampant, trash scattered around. most of the residents chose to move out, and leased their apartments at a fairly affordable price to the lowest and meanest in society. you can imagine how this has affected the neighborly relationship; the area, filled with social outcasts, becomes unsafe to walk at night. the government, in a rush for modernity, provides only too expensive housing for the original residents, so the supposedly affordable housing becomes, ironically, unaffordable. that is why this area turns to a blind spot, with an increasing crime rate and public health issues, yet is ignored by urban planners, policy makers, and government officials. here the students felt their role as professionals was compromised. to preserve historic districts, they often romanticize public memories and painstakingly follow rules and regulations for an objective and true history. they asked: ‘where is the humanity in all those preservation efforts? if affordable housing, built for those residents, is stripped of all humane elements, are we actually preserving for the right reason? maybe we are playing an important role in preserving local history, but our position is embarrassingly difficult: we are sandwiched between the authority and the public.’ only when students get into the field do they realize that the gap between historic documents and reality is wide, and their technical expertise does not bridge this gulf. at the same time, oral history offers ways to approach a culturally specific history. students encountered public history review | li 34 many surprises, big and small, during fieldwork, which motivated them to immerse themselves more deeply. when talking with local residents, they confronted a living history, the impact of which is unimagined with documents. all groups reported that from the field, they found problems insufficiently addressed in textual analysis, which prompted them to reflect upon the many hidden premises of historic preservation. as one student wrote: we have encountered many unexpected issues during interviews. we had worked out an interview outline, but not all the questions were responded to effectively. actually, we were not expecting that they would be. also, we were not expecting such a variety of interviewee responses: some did not want to talk too much; some needed our step-by-step guidance; still others were eloquent, eager to share their stories, so we just kept the conversations flowing. they further compared the advantages of both documentary research and oral history: with documents, we collected detailed data on the urban natural and built environment, which helped us tremendously in understanding the site from a macro-level; oral history, however, offers another way of reconnecting with history. we dig out many warm and fresh materials about the spirit of place, regional character, and urban soul – all, springing from one’s most poetic and creative faculties, bring history back to life. one dug deeper: the more we talk to people, the closer we approach the historic truth: maybe this is the attraction of oral history. it recovers stories and memories, so we hear the very beat of historic evolution. it enlivens history; it makes me think deeply and critically into historic issues bounded by their material existence. another student had a similar response: with oral history, we are writing another type of urban history, mainly from the grassroots. it provides not only traces and clues for personal life, emotional journey, social relationship, public history review | li 35 and linguistic character, but also public understanding and presentation of history. those living and active dialogues better situate us in the historic environment; public memory as part of historical information should be integrated into architectural preservation. reflection-in-action30 in line with the above reflections from the field, i argue that a reflective practicum, the core of a public history curriculum, works well in chinese culture.31 similar to business schools, public history programs need to provide their students with a pool of antecedents, exemplars and, above all, quality primary experiences; a unique theoretical framework to make sense of those experiences; and a unique repertoire of skills, qualities, evaluation systems and intellectual traditions.32 when i first introduced public history as a concept and a discipline to my colleagues in china, i sensed a tension between disciplineand professional-oriented faculties, which was not all unfamiliar. one question i often encounter is: ‘where is the theory of public history?’ the logic is straightforward: if you could not articulate a list of core readings, why should the university bother to offer it? another more implicit yet equally poignant question is: ‘what is the role of our professional authority as professors?’ how can we claim that those bits and pieces of ‘things’ generated from the ‘public’ are ‘knowledge’? a deep sense of insecurity prevails. the first question breaks down to where the inquiry begins, and then, how to pose the right questions. when public history started in the united states, its forebears asked similar questions. cross-referencing the evolution of public history in other countries,33 i suggest that for public history to develop in china, instead of seeking pure and abstract ‘theories’, we should ‘shovel for dirt’ through developing local cases through practicum, then develop theories out of them. not until we have established those cases can we advance beyond the introductory level. public history, collaborative and cross-disciplinary in nature, is also political. students have learned from their first hand experience that public history has to overcome political nonexistent or unapparent barriers in western democracies. one student detailed her experience in this way: the typical chinese way of handling preservation issues just irritated me. it took us a lot of efforts to get the telephone number of the local office in charge of preservation and demolition issues of this district, but when we called in, nobody answered. finally when we got through, after we told them our public history review | li 36 intention of locating original residents from a recent demolition project, they responded, ‘wrong number!’ another student commented more philosophically about how, for today’s china, rapid economic development drives historic preservation, and how the government plays a predominant role in decision-making. this type of profit-driven preservation often comes at the price of historical truth: history and memory generated ‘from below’ are marginalized. for public history to survive and thrive in a nondemocratic culture, there is still a long way to go. working with the public, we try to truly understand what historic preservation is all about. while we can easily attribute the fate of public history projects to political will, i share a positive attitude with my students. the final products they shared out of their fieldwork for this course have demonstrated that a legitimate public space exists for citizen dialogues and for authority sharing, and we should take advantage of this dynamic and thinking space. being political also means being culturally specific, and sometimes idiosyncratic. for the last three decades, visionary chinese scholars have tried constantly to introduce public history as practiced in the west to local audiences. yet they have consistently failed to go beyond the elementary step. the idea remains a vision, rather than a plan or a practice. from the early 1980s to today, public history in china has failed to yield its own original literature, to provide intellectual basis, shape public discussions and offer guidance on practical issues in the field. why? the reason is simple: we have not yet established programs to train educators and students to develop our own skill repertoires. we have not yet made sustained efforts to develop quality case studies from the field, on which a culturally specific theoretical framework should rest. only when this emerges can we truly change the equation. to address the second question, i believe it is more than the professional authority of college professors that feels challenged. in the world of journalism, defensive journalists deride social media on the grounds that ‘citizen journalism’ undermines professional reporting. despite this fear, ‘photographs, videos and tweets from ordinary people are improving and expanding news coverage.’34 just as citizen journalism creates work for journalists who know how to curate, authenticate and analyze information from social media,35 i believe that public history, instead of threatening traditional historians, offers more opportunities to bring history alive, and therefore make history more relevant to its large and diverse audience. i will not mince my words: my students seem more receptive to the theory and practice of public history public history review | li 37 than my colleagues. seeing little distance between practice and theory, my students’ thinking is less bounded by discipline, and more apt to find practical approaches to problems. public history serves well in this process: its success does not depend on academically generated debates. jack holl writes presciently about the fundamental difference between public historians and academic historians. the problem with academicbased definitions of public history, holl comments, is that ‘they are products of an academic culture’.36 this somewhat ironically reminds me of what i discussed with my academic peers from some key universities in china in late may 2014.37 the discussions, peppered with ponderous academic jargon, seemed liberating. while we were sitting comfortably in the air-conditioned rooms arguing back and forth about different chinese versions of the term ‘public history’, my students were, in over 30 degree celsius, steamy heat, out conducting interviews in the field. all student groups came back with precious oral history data, a changed understanding of the historic districts in which they were working and, most important of all, a more persuasive understanding of what public history is all about. a field that seems to lack a theoretical framework yet is amply practiced, needs especially strong institutional supports. once, however, public history courses are institutionalized in the disciplinary-driven structure of chinese universities, i am afraid the field may lose the critical edge that makes it so unique in the first place. suggestions for establishing public history programs in china to establish public history programs in china, a well-structured approach needs to be taken to get students in touch with the core scholarship of the field, and with a range of public work environments as well. to break this down, i have come up with the following three suggestions. first, public history can actually foster cross-disciplinary collaborations. comprehensive universities, such as chongqing university, should take advantage all of its campus resources, encouraging students to take courses from different departments based on the tracks they choose to take on. as systematic methodological training is still unavailable in most graduate schools in china, the public history seminar model in which students genuinely engage with the public, works at a minimal level as a method course or a module. second, local historical study and experience should be integrated in the core history curriculum. urban preservation projects in china, for example, are grounded in a local setting, so collecting sources and data public history review | li 38 must take place at a local level. by focusing on local pasts and taking advantage of local resources, students can be encouraged to practice oral history to bring the past alive for local residents. third, a selection of skill-oriented classes specifically designed for chinese culture should be part of a public history program. as a new discipline, public history programs need specially trained educators.38 faculties should engage with people already practicing ways of relating to the past, participate in the process of sharing and establish a professional relationship with the public and other ‘stakeholders’. the vitality and creative energy of public history has made its way into china. shortly after finishing up this course, one doctoral student in my class decided to focus his dissertation on five major ethnic minority cultural districts in china, with public history as the key methodology. a few master students have, in their follow-up correspondence, shared with me their interest in using public history in future projects. most of them noted that, given more time, they would improve their interviewing skills, and thus the quality of their oral history data. on my flight back to the united states, i received notes and email from students, saying the idea of public history has greatly expanded their intellectual horizon and motivated them to think deeply, critically and historically about preservation issues. it is gratifying to read through those letters. the semester seemed a crash course for me as well. my students in chongqing university were truly inspirational. they have taught me that we do not have to surrender different interpretations of historic districts to notions of technical expertise in the service of political power. in a nut shell, public history is taking shape in china. a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s this project is co-funded by national social science of china (project number: 14xss007) and interdisciplinary research projects in humanities and social sciences, chongqing university (project number: cdjkxb14008). the author would like to thank marla miller and david glassberg for commenting on the early draft of this article. jannelle warren-findley, paul ashton and paula hamilton have contributed to this work in various ways. endnotes 1 na li, ‘preserving urban landscapes as public history: the chinese context’, the public historian, vol 32, no 4, 2010, pp60. 2 robert kelly, ‘public history: its origins, nature, and prospects’, the public historian, vol 1, 1978, pp16-28. 3 carl becker, ‘everyman his own historian’, the american historical review, vol 37, no 2, 1932, pp221. public history review | li 39 4 michael h. frisch, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history, suny series in oral and public history, state university of new york press, albany, 1990. 5 na li and elisabeth m. hamin, ‘preservation’, in rachel weber and randall crane (eds), oxford handbook of urban planning, oxford university press, oxford, 2012, pp183-187. 6 the 985 project, started in 1998, is an effort to build world-class research universities by chinese government, which provides policy and financial supports for innovative systems, team-building, research flat-forms and centers, and international collaborations. about 30 universities across china are selected into this highly reputed project. 7 this expectation was proved right. on 17 april 2013, i gave a lecture on public history and urban landscapes at chongqing university. the idea of ‘a shared authority in urban space’ met overwhelming suspicions. the disciplinary base of public history was questioned by my academic peers at chognqing university. about details about my talk, please refer to http://ias.cqu.edu.cn/gyy/chinese/detail.aspx?newsid=6331. 8 david glassberg cautioned in 2013, ‘[difficulty] winning over “objective” academic historians at your university, is to be expected and really echoes what goes on here (not every university in the us is as friendly to public history as umass amherst).’ he also noted the difficulty of determining ‘the place of knowledge generated from the ground up (from the people) in a society that still seems very hierarchical and authoritarian.’ correspondence with david glassberg 28 april 28 2013. 9 the university has a high-ranking architecture and planning program in the country. 10 na li, ‘preserving urban landscapes as public history: the chinese context’, the public historian, vol 32, no 4, 2010, pp52. 11 donald a. schön, the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action, basic books, new york, 1983, pp26. 12 marla miller, director of public history program at the university of massachusetts amherst, has been extraordinarily helpful in offering guidance on my curriculum design. 13 na li, kensington market: collective memory, public history, and toronto’s urban landscape, university of toronto press, toronto, forthcoming 2015. 14 studios are requirement for obtaining ba in those fields. 15 noel j. stowe, ‘developing a public history curriculum beyond the 1980s: challenges and foresight’, the public historian, vol 9, no 3, 1987, pp52. 16 all quotes are taken from students’ journals, reflection papers, assignments and conversations. students consented to the use of those materials under the condition of anonymity. 17 legend says that shibati means eighteen stone ladders leading to the only well in this region. 18 schön, the reflective practitioner, p23. 19 david glassberg, sense of history: the place of the past in american life, university of massachusetts press, amherst, 2001, pp7. 20 elizabeth belanger, ‘public history and liberal learning: making the case for the undergraduate practicum experience’, the public historian, vol 34, no 4, 2012, pp30-51. 21 dragon, an imaginative animal in chinese culture, here symbolizes and outstanding individual who brings glory to the family and the community. in contrast, worm means someone at the lowest social ladder. this saying indicates how chinese lacks quality and spirit to work together. 22 we posted our class conference via social media such as we-chat and a poster. a few people who are engaged in the old chonqing and memory project turned out and raised many questions. 23 li and hamin, ‘preservation’, p186. public history review | li 40 24 david glassberg, ‘public history and the study of memory’, the public historian, vol 18, no 2, 1996, pp19. 25 li and hamin, ‘preservation’, p187. 26 this has something to do with the strong emphasis on physical aspects of urban design and planning in china. 27 frisch, a shared authority, p88. 28 donald a. schön, educating the reflective practitioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions, jossey-bass, san francisco, 1987, p27. 29 schön, the reflective practitioner, p56. 30 stowe references donald schon, nicolas maxwell and ernest lynton to conceptualize public history as a reflective practice. this part extends his argument. see noel j. stowe, ‘public history curriculum: illustrating reflective practice’, the public historian, vol 28, no 1, 2006, pp39-65. 31 i have then taught the similar course in the subsequent two semesters, and the practical reflections from students reinforce this argument. 32 schön, educating the reflective practitioner, p312. 33 many articles published in the public historian touched upon public history practices outside the united states but mainly in the english speaking world. for example, vol 32, august 2010, on professional practices of public history in britain and vol 21, february 2009 on public history in canada. i was fortunate to work as international affiliate at centre for oral history and digital storytelling, concordia university, and as visiting research fellow at australian centre for public history, university of technology sydney, to learn how public history is practiced and taught in canada and australia. conversations with steven high, paul ashton and paula hamilton have greatly helped me think through establishing public history in china. 34 ‘citizen journalism: foreign correspondents’, the economist, 1 june 2013 p61. 35 ibid. 36 jack m. holl, ‘cultures in conflict: an argument against “common ground” between practicing professional historians and academics’, the public historian, vol 30, no 2, 2008, pp48. 37 on 24 may 2013, a nation-wide seminar on public history – its concepts, theories, practices, and development in china – took place at the institute for advanced studies in humanities and social sciences, chongqing university. participants included thirteen scholars who have engaged in public history from major universities across china. this is the first conference that is dedicated to public history in china. 38 the first public history faculty training program took place in shanghai from 1830 july 2014. see my forthcoming article (in chinese): na li, ‘public history in a cross-cultural perspective: the first public history faculty training program in china’, world history review, vol 1, 2015. righting history: monument avenue, richmond, virginia public history review vol. 28, 2021 righting history: monument avenue, richmond, virginia paul kiem doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7786 despite the widely accepted view that only victors get to write history, commemoration of the losing confederate cause has been far more widespread in the united states than union commemoration. while there may have been only a limited long-term impact on the writing of scholarly history, confederate commemoration has been able to impose its often heavily sanitised southern heroes and dubious history – that the ‘lost cause’ was about defending states’ rights – on many public spaces. this commemoration has taken many forms, including the erection of statues, the placement of plaques and the naming of schools, military bases and public buildings.1 confederate commemoration has always been contested. black american politicians, who had been elected to the post-civil war virginia legislature prior to black disenfranchisement at the start of the twentieth century, spoke out against the first efforts at confederate commemoration. as early as 1871, senator frank moss objected to a proposal to display a portrait of general robert e. lee in the state capitol. ‘gen. lee had fought to keep him in slavery’, moss reasoned, ‘he couldn’t vote to put his picture on these walls.’2 in 1890, when confederate commemoration in richmond began in earnest with the erection of a statue to lee on monument avenue, black newspaper editor john mitchell jr was prescient in his understanding of the deeper ramifications: ‘the south may revere the memory of its chieftains. it takes the wrong steps in so doing, and proceeds to go too far in every similar celebration. it serves to retard its progress in the country and forges heavier chains with which to be bound.’3 however, the widespread dismantling of confederate memorials is a recent phenomenon, given impetus by a number of key events. in 2015 a white supremacist murdered nine parishioners in a historic african american church in charleston, south carolina. in 2017 a rally by the far-right in charlottesville, virginia, erupted in violence resulting in one death. in both cases the white supremacists involved displayed confederate symbols and images, including the confederate battle flag. this violence, and its association with neo-confederate extremists, helped to galvanise calls for action and prompted the removal of confederate memorials across the south. mitch landrieu, mayor of new orleans, offered a comprehensive rationale for this response: ‘to literally put the confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.’4 the eruption of black lives matter protests, prompted by the death of george floyd at the hands of police in may 2020 but continuing throughout the year, further fuelled the momentum for the removal of confederate monuments. the state of virginia has had more sites of confederate commemoration than most other states in the united states. in richmond, the former confederate capital, the most important of these sites has always been monument avenue. this beautiful tree-lined boulevard, which traverses one of the city’s historically affluent white districts, has a wide median strip along which a series of imposing monuments to confederate heroes were erected. following the erection of robert e. lee’s eighteen-metre-high statue in 1890, others were added over the next four decades. in 1907 large memorials to confederate president jefferson davis and confederate general j.e.b. stuart were unveiled, in 1919 confederate general stonewall jackson’s statue was unveiled and in 1929 a memorial to confederate naval officer mathew fontaine maury was completed. there would be no more additions until 1996 when, as outlined below, the confederate theme was disrupted. in mid-2017, as confederate memorials were coming down across the south, richmond’s city council established a commission to determine what to do with monument avenue. the results of the monument avenue commission’s research and community consultation were published in the monument avenue commission report in july 2018. the report noted the need for a comprehensive historical narrative as a guiding principle in its work and observed that this ‘narrative requires coming to terms with elements of history that are far more cautionary than celebratory, more tragic than triumphal and recognizing – in some cases – these concepts can exist around the same subject.’ richmond mayor levar stoney was clear in his view of the narrative presented by monument avenue: ‘the story is, at best, an incomplete story – equal parts myth and deception.’5 the report went on to provide a concise history of monument avenue and brief discussion of its ‘complicated legacy’. a key element in the historical context of confederate commemoration was its connection with southern attempts to push back on the result of the civil war and reinstate a new form of white supremacy. the peak of monument building occurred in the early twentieth century. this was the period when black voters were being disenfranchised, the era of jim crow segregation was being consolidated and lynching was rife. rather than being merely an innocent celebration of southern heritage, the surge in commemoration and its distortion of the past was inextricably linked with white southern determination to turn back the clock and impose values and structures that would cause widespread personal misery and ensure lasting division in the united states. the full significance and danger of the commemoration was clear to john mitchell jr as early as 1890 when he described the crowds who attended the unveiling of robert e. lee’s statue: ‘rebel flags were everywhere displayed and the long lines of confederate veterans who embraced the opportunity and attended the reunion to join again in the ‘rebel yell’ told in no uncertain terms that they still clung to theories which were presumably to be buried for all eternity.’6 as the monument avenue commission report concluded: at the root of the ‘lost cause’ movement and confederate memorialization was a sustained and deliberate effort to reshape the memory of the civil war, its causes, and the role and nature of slavery. … built largely in an era of african american disenfranchisement, racial violence, and jim crow segregation, the monuments reflect the dominance of those who constructed a new apparatus of white supremacy after the demise of slavery.7 robert e. lee, the most revered figure in the confederate pantheon, was the first to be commemorated on monument avenue when his statue was unveiled in 1890. at the time of writing, in mid 2021, he is the last man standing of the confederate heroes. however, his memorial has been re-purposed as a rallying point and canvas for black lives matter and other protestors. (photograph by mk17b own work, cc by-sa 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91805269) the monument avenue commission report identified four ‘main opinion groups’ with views about the future of monument avenue’s confederate monuments: 1. keep the monuments – this group was largely concerned about their heritage being destroyed, with someone arguing that the monuments should ‘not be erased as isis would do’. 2. keep and contextualise – this group wanted to keep the monuments but contextualise them, use them for education or add additional monuments. (see ‘foundation story: melbourne’ for an australian case study on how this approach has been applied to melbourne’s batman memorial – htaa learning sequences, historyteacher.net.au/index.html) 3. relocate the monuments – this group wanted to move the monuments to, among other suggestions, a fallen monuments park (‘as other countries have done’) or a jim crow museum. 4. remove the monuments – this group simply wanted the monuments removed, with comments referencing both history and current events. it was argued that the monuments were offensive ‘relics of white supremacy’. at the same time, it was pointed out that they had now been ‘formalized as racist symbols after the alt-right rallies’.8 the commission’s ‘recommended options and opportunities’ were a cautious reflection of the views of these four main opinion groups. the overall effect was to favour an approach that would create greater contextualisation for the existing monuments. an immediate outcome, prompted by the ‘number of historical inaccuracies being repeated by the public throughout the public meeting process’, was the creation of an on monument avenue website (onmonumentave.com). the jefferson davis monument was singled out for consideration for ‘removal or relocation’. of all the statues, it was ‘the one most unabashedly lost cause in its design and sentiment’. in other words, its inscription perpetuated the myth that the civil war had been about a noble cause to defend states’ rights while omitting the truth that the only right being defended was the right to own slaves.9 in mid-2020 events quickly overtook ongoing careful deliberations about the fate of monument avenue’s confederate statues. the location became a focus for black lives matter demonstrations and on 10 june jefferson davis was toppled from his low pedestal by protestors. on 1 july, richmond mayor levar stoney responded by announcing that the remaining confederate statues on city-owned land would be removed. in announcing this sudden decision stoney made it clear that a public safety crisis had provided an opportunity to implement a decision that he felt was ‘past time’. within a week, the maury, jackson and stuart statues had been removed. at the time of writing in mid 2021, robert e. lee is the last rebel left on monument avenue, situated on state rather than city-owned land, subject to a number of legal actions and, unlike davis, well out of reach of protestors.10 the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s coincided with a last surge in confederate commemoration. nevertheless, despite early resistance, this period marked the beginning of change throughout the south as segregation and the worst aspects of official discrimination were gradually dismantled. and even though prominent images and symbols of the confederacy remained in place, the diverse heritage of many southern communities began to be more widely acknowledged. in 1973 richmond’s first statue of a black man was erected – in honour of tap dancer and film star bill ‘bojangles’ robinson. bojangles’ statue was located in richmond’s historically black district of jackson ward. the decision to honour another famous former black resident, tennis great arthur ashe, proved to be more controversial when it was decided to add his statue to the line of confederate heroes on monument avenue. initial proposals were met with objections that ashe’s statue would be out of place because it would not have a sufficiently martial appearance. one newspaper correspondent used less coded language when he argued that ‘the ashe statue is the symbol of racially factional commemorative turf invasion, conveniently using a sports arriviste for a pretext’. when ashe’s statue was unveiled in 1996 – depicting him brandishing a book and a tennis racket, surrounded by children – a group of protestors held signs proclaiming that ‘southern heritage’ was being destroyed.11 twenty-five years later the former interloper has monument avenue almost to himself. the now graffiti-covered lee monument, which had a barrier fence built around it by civic authorities in january 2021, has become a major site for protest art.12 these developments reflect the end of segregation in society at large and a much more inclusive approach to southern heritage. monument avenue provides a great case study for school and university teachers interested in current controversies around memorials and commemoration. the monument avenue commission report, available online, is also a useful resource. more engaging than the usual document emerging from a committee-driven, bureaucratic process, it highlights how history is integral to the daily life of communities and demonstrates the need for informed and nuanced understanding of the past. the concise historical overview and collection of relevant documents provides an ideal framework for the report’s detailed analysis of community views about monument avenue’s confederate memorials. there is an obvious opportunity here for year 11 modern history teachers to create a unit addressing almost any of the components explored in the nature of modern history, particularly if they want to link it to an american civil war case study. also, monument avenue might be a rewarding focus for either a year 11 historical investigation or year 12 history extension project. acknowledgement this article has been adapted from paul kiem, ‘monument avenue, richmond, virginia’, teaching history, vol 54, no 4, 2020, pp28-33. endnotes 1. generally, see saeed ahmeed, ‘there are certain moments in us history when confederate monuments go up’, cnn, august 2017 (cnn.it/3kjzlkq); american historical association ‘statement on confederate monuments’, august 2017 (bit.ly/2qjiktx); edward ayres, ‘our silent civil war: debate over statues didn’t come out of thin air’, salon, 21 october, 2017; robert draper, ‘toppling statues is a first step toward ending confederate myths’, national geographic, 2 july 2020 (on.natgeo.com/3mrdev6); kevin m. levin, ‘richmond’s confederate monuments were used to sell a segregated neighborhood’, the atlantic, 11 june 1920 (bit.ly/34tfznd); ‘mayor stoney orders immediate removal of confederate monuments’, youtube, (bit.ly/3emn4f7); monument avenue commission report, city council of richmond, virginia, 2018 (bit.ly/3kmqsxn); on monument avenue website (onmonumentave.com). 2. senator frank moss, quoted in monument avenue commission report (macr), p25. 3. john mitchell jr, richmond planet, 31 may 1890, p1. 4. quoted in the macr, p9. 5. macr, pp7-9. 6. mitchell, op cit. 7. macr, pp22-23. 8. macr, pp15-16. 9. macr, pp11; 32-33. 10. ‘mayor stoney orders immediate removal of confederate monuments’, youtube; robert draper, ‘toppling statues is a first step toward ending confederate myths’, national geographic, 2 july 2020. 11. ‘“an avenue for all people”: how arthur ashe came to monument avenue’, onmonumentave.com blog, 22 november 2017. 12. thessaly la force, zoë lescaze, nancy hass and m.h. miller, ‘the 25 most influential works of american protest art since world war ii’, the new york times, 15 october 2020. public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ballantyne, t. 2021. toppling the past?: statues, public memory and the afterlife of empire in contemporary new zealand. public history review, 28, 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7503 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj toppling the past?: statues, public memory and the afterlife of empire in contemporary new zealand tony ballantyne doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7503 the spectacular toppling of the statue of edward colston, a bristol merchant and politician who built his wealth through the atlantic slave trade, in june 2020 spurred a number of protests focused on memorials to explorers, imperial rulers, colonial officials and slaveowners across the globe. monuments in stone, marble and metal were decapitated, defaced, toppled and smashed. in some cases memorials were swiftly taken down, removed to museums or sealed in protective coverings in the face of protesters who drew on both the energy of the black lives matter movement and longstanding local frustrations at these memorials to slavery and empire. in many cases, these protests have elicited anxious responses. some commentators worried that the removal of statues would reduce historical understanding. others believed that important parts of the past were being erased. the british prime minister boris johnson wove those arguments together when he suggested ‘those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. to tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.’1 in new zealand, these global currents reignited debates about statues that have periodically erupted over the last few decades. there were renewed calls to remove the statue memorialising colonel marmaduke george nixon in ōtāhuhu, in south auckland. nixon was wounded at rangiaowhia in 1864, when he led british forces in an engagement that killed māori women and children. there was an earlier extended debate about this statue in 2017 when the former member of parliament shane te pou called for the statue to be removed, describing nixon as a ‘thug’.2 in the wake of the toppling of colston, the statue in albert park in central auckland that commemorates the colonial governor and prime minister sir george grey was splashed with red paint and it was inscribed with graffiti labelling grey a ‘racist’.3 a few days later, the statue was attacked again, with grey’s nose and right thumb being removed.4 further south, the statue of the british naval officer john fane charles hamilton, who had served in the crimea, china and south america before commanding the hms esk during the new zealand wars, was swiftly taken down by the hamilton city council in response to calls from waikatotainui leaders.5 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7503 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7503 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7503 these statue wars can be read as part of a longstanding new zealand tradition, which has seen many attacks on statues of royalty, colonial rulers and military leaders as well as heated debates over whether various statues remain appropriate memorials giving shifting cultural values. in a recent study, nick wilson and his colleagues found that 23% of highly visible new zealand statues had been subject to some sort of attack since the 1930s.6 but there is no doubt that the upswing in these attacks in the middle of 2020 were catalysed by the toppling of colston and the black lives matters protests. this was made clear with the graffiti inscribed on the james cook statue on the waikanae beachfront in tūranga/gisborne: ‘black lives matter and so do maori’ and ‘take this racist headstone of my people down before i do’. this was the latest in a long series of graffiti and paint attacks on cookrelated statues in tūranga, actions that underline the ongoing anger and pain felt as a result of the use of violence and kidnapping by cook and his men when the endeavour arrived at tūranga in 1769, an issue that i will return to again shortly. the political and cultural commentator morgan godfery (ngāti awa) suggested that similar statues should all be torn down. writing in the guardian, godfery explained why he and his partner spat at the foot of statue of sir george grey, who godfery characterised as a ‘british warlord’: it’s our duty as waikatotainui descendants to disrespect the governor who sent the british empire into our land, pinching and plundering from our ancestors as they went, and it’s our responsibility to resist clean commemorations. the statues commemorating grey  – like the stone rendering in albert park – the street names honouring his memory, and the towns that take his name (‘greytown’) aren’t ‘history’. they’re a tribute to one people’s violent victory over another. given the poisonous legacies of colonialism – ‘where māori are on the wrong side of every statistic, from incarceration to joblessness’ – godfery asserted the kind of history created by grey had to be torn down. 7 as a professional historian, i am more cautious about the urge to totally strip away these aspects of our built environments. i have a duty to both the people of the past who i study as well as the contemporary audiences i write for. in balancing those responsibilities, i support the removing of statues of figures who propelled colonialism such as grey and whose values and actions are now fundamentally at odds with those of our contemporary communities. places and cultures are dynamic, they are constantly made and remade: statues need not be forever. where local authorities and governments move too slowly or fail to recognise continuing reminders of hurt, it is likely that statues and memorials will be the focus of graffiti, protests and crowbars. the durable materials that statues are fashioned from encourage us to see them as enduring, but in reality public memory is profoundly dependent on the shifting currents of political debate and cultural sentiment. what comes after the removal of statues is important too. godfery is not a supporter of removing these statues to museums. he rejects the idea that statues can be recontextualised in such institutions, making the important observation that colonised communities do not need to be introduced to the context of oppression as they experience it routinely. the noted tūhoe artist and activist tame iti offered another way forward, arguing that statues should not be destroyed: don’t destroy the statues!! put them in a place altogether where people can talk about them... like a racist museum... having them all together in one space as racists and no  longer as upstanding citizens is way more useful than having them at the bottom of a river.8 the māori party coleader debbie ngarewapacker offered yet another perspective. she called for an inquiry into statues, monuments and place names. such an inquiry would help extend critical reassessments of new zealand’s colonial past and its legacies. this proposal has gained little purchase. if it was to be viable, it would need to be mobile, deeply engaging with a range of perspectives in locations across the islands that make up new zealand. the voices of mana whenua – the particular māori communities that exercise ballantyne public history review, vol. 28, 20212 traditional authority in any specific location – would need to be prominent in any potential inquiry. but ultimately, this was always going to be an unlikely initiative. much attention has been directed to the importance of the waitangi tribunal’s role in addressing both contemporary infractions of the provisions of the treaty of waitangi/te tiriti o waitangi and historic breaches as well. but it is important to remember that the tribunal’s attention is fixed on the actions of the state and the actions of individuals or communities are beyond its scope. as i have argued elsewhere, this limited focus is one mechanism that makes the function of the tribunal politically acceptable.9 ngarewa packer’s proposal had the potential to open a whole range of questions that are culturally significant, but politically combustible. we have already seen that in tūranga/gisborne that the image of cook has been particularly contentious. the first collisions with tangata whenua (the people of the land) were studded with violence, as at least nine were shot by the british and cook ordered the kidnapping of three rongowhakaata youths with the intention of taking them onboard the endeavour to establish the ‘friendliness’ of the british. despite this violence, which has often been glossed over, tūranga/gisborne is prominent in national memory as cook’s first landing site in new zealand and cook’s visit is pivotal in local understandings of history and identity. for a very long time, civic authorities and many pākehā (new zealanders of european descent) in the region took great pride in the locality’s connection to cook. community leaders were key movers behind the erection of a large monument to mark his landing and his significance on the kaiti foreshore in 1906. in 1940, a later generation of pākehā east coast businessmen and politicians fought hard for cook to be accorded a prominent place in the centennial programme, events that were really designed to celebrate nationhood and the progress made in the hundred years since formal colonization was initiated. and in 1969 tūranga/gisborne was afforded a special place in the national celebrations of the bicentennial of the endeavour’s arrival. in early october, the city marked ‘cook week’ with a long and complex sequence of events, marked by the visit of many naval vessels from around the world, foreign signatories, and a huge civic parade. in light of this tradition of pākehā celebration as well the violent nature of those first meetings, there remains a great deal of pain and anger surrounding the history of colonialism in new zealand. when the governmentsponsored commemorative programme tuia 250 was announced, rongowhakaata kaumātua thelma e. karaitiana suggested that cook was in effect a terrorist and identified the endeavour voyage as initiating efforts to undermine māori sovereignty. karaitiana rejected the use of the language of ‘discovery’, framing the endeavour’s arrival as a violent intrusion: ‘the violence committed against turanganui a kiwa people by cook was the first act of terrorism in aotearoa.’10 the public debate in tūranga/gisborne has been fraught and intense, underlining the deeply contested nature of the past in a community that remains scarred by the lingering consequences of colonialism but where many pākehā still are committed to celebrating cook. even though these questions are deeply contentious, it is important to recognise that the landscape of memory in tūranga/gisborne has been fundamentally reshaped in the last two years through three different dynamics. first, in keeping with the kind of aspiration articulated by morgan godfery, a key statue has been removed. this was the socalled ‘crook cook’, which had been erected on titirangi/kaitī hill as part of the cook bicentennial commemorations in 1969. in 1884 the captain cook brewery of auckland had imported a marble statue of the navigator from sydney and this was affixed on top of their khyber road premises. an agreement to source a bronze cast of the statue had been concluded with the brewery (by then operating as nz breweries ltd) by the committee established in 1966 to select an appropriate memorial for gisborne.11 this bronze cook was mounted on a small reserve on titirangi, enjoying a commanding view over the city and across the harbour to te kurīapāoa/young nick’s head, the landform supposedly first ballantyne public history review, vol. 28, 20213 sighted by nicholas young on the endeavour, as it approached te ika a māui, new zealand’s north island in early october 1769. from the outset the statue was controversial, gaining the nickname ‘crook cook’. this was not initially because cook himself was contentious, but because there were concerns that key elements of his uniform as well as the form of the statue’s face meant its resemblance to the navigator was questionable.12 but by the 1990s cook was a more contested figure and the statue was subject to frequent attacks. in june 2016 it was defaced three times in that single month.13 these interventions can be read as a response to a strong tradition of pride in cook in gisborne and the district, particularly amongst some pākehā. in october 2018, during the midst of the planning for tuia 250, the gisborne district council decided on the recommendation of its future tairāwhiti committee, to remove ‘crook cook’.14 the report that recommended this move recognized that the removal and rehousing of the statue would be in keeping with the request from ng[ā]ti oneone and other t[ū]ranga iwi’ and ‘would demonstrate support for authentic storytelling’.15 locals were split over decision. fiftytwo per cent of respondents to a poll run by the gisborne herald in the wake of the council decision opposed the move. one respondent very optimistically suggested that the reserve, which was often overgrown and inscribed with graffiti, was a ‘vibrant recent historical site’. another suggested that the council had ‘sucked up to a pressure group’s wishes’. but forty five per cent of those who took the poll supported the move, making a range of arguments. one supporter of change reflected: ‘titirangi maunga [hill] is a great place to honour the original navigators. well done council for thinking biculturally.’ another observed: ‘i would prefer the “crook cook” was removed. speaking as a kiwi of british descent, maori don’t deserve to have him up there.’16 the statue was removed and is now in the collection of tairāwhiti museum, which is currently assessing if the statue might be displayed in the future and if so, what kind of interpretative framings would be most appropriate. at the foot of titirangi, a second approach has played out as an old colonial memorial to cook has been radically recontextualized in a project led by the ngāti oneone historian and artist nick tupara. this project has profoundly reshaped the memorial reserve which now carries the bilingual name, puhi kai iti/ cook landing site national historic reserve. the erection of the memorial obelisk in 1906 to mark the site where cook first landed in new zealand was part of the marginalisation of ngāti oneone and its mana (authority) over the surrounding area. their presence and historical significance was overwritten as the river was rerouted, land reclaimed and the port was redeveloped. those processes also meant that the historic reserve was also increasingly hemmed by cargo storage, eventually including shipping containers and piles of logs, cutting the site off from the sea. in 2019 puhi kai iti/cook landing site national historic reserve was significantly redeveloped. while the funding for this was provided though government bodies, ngāti oneone played a pivotal role in the project. the surrounds of the cook memorial were reworked and now feature a complex series of artworks. the site now also acknowledges the landing of the ancestral waka (canoe) te ikaroaarauru and its navigator and tohunga (ritual expert) maia. the waka is memorialized through a striking statue in the form of a steel freize of te ikaroa, framed by representations of the other waka that connect te ika a māui (the north island of new zealand) to the pacific. the statue also marks the whare wānanga (traditional school of learning) puhi kai iti established by maia, a centre that enabled pacific knowledge to be transplanted to a new location.17 tupara’s design not only makes visible the long history of māori settlement in the region. it also foregrounds a common thread of botanical knowledge that long predated the arrival of cook and his naturalist joseph banks. te ikaroaarauru carried hue (gourd) seeds and traditional knowledge of gardening and these are celebrated in the form of large sculptures on the western side of the redeveloped site. physically, the site looks radically different with a sequence of striking steel tukutuku panels which are woven together using the kaokao (cheveron) pattern, gesturing towards the importance of cooperation.18 a ballantyne public history review, vol. 28, 20214 large sculpted installation was also erected featuring twentythree pou (pillars), nine of which are topped by hoe or paddleshaped forms. these are inlaid with tikifigures commemorating the nine tangata whenua (people of the land) who were shot during those initial collisions with the crew of the endeavour. eight of these tiki are coloured a fiery orangered, which refers to musketfire, while the ninth is an intense blue, referring to the trade bead left on the body of te maro by the british. the violence of empire and the pain and suffering it caused was now bought into dialogue with the 1906 memorial, a marker of imperial memory. tupara stresses that the redeveloped site is designed to invite people to reflect and converse as they process the meaning of the forms that surround them and make sense of the juxtaposition of the new māori elements and the stark imperial obelisk. thirdly, the city’s memory landscape was not only reshaped by the removal of the ‘crook cook’ statue and the transformation of puhi kai iti/cook landing national historic reserve, but also by the addition of a striking new sculpture produced by tupara. he led the creation of the new ruatanuika lookout on the lower slopes of titirangi, kaiti hill. at the heart of the site is a striking new sculpture of te maro, a notable ngāti oneone tupuna (ancestor), who was also the first to encounter europeans, and was shot and killed soon after cook’s party landed for the first time. at some 10 metres high, this finely worked nineton disc of steel makes te maro and the mana of ngāti oneone clearly visible cross the landscape of tūranga/gisborne. it is a potent reminder of the weight of cultures and histories that longdated the arrival of the endeavour. this image of te maro makes no reference to cook, but rather rematerialises the mātauranga (knowledge) of the ngāti oneone. the circular shape of tupara’s work invokes seasonality and the cycles of time, the rhythms of nature that te maro gained a deep understanding of through the wānanga puhi kai iti. te maro himself occupies the centre of the disc, grasping a hue (gourd), which gestures towards the utility of his knowledge and the importance of gardening in te ao māori. he is surrounded by a mix of water and plant motifs, which allude to the crucial connections that lace humans into the natural world within māori knowledge traditions.19 this sculpture is an important part of the local recognition of ngāti oneone’s mana, restoring their presence to a landscape where colonisation and the drive for regional development had long rendered them marginal in the public imagination. tupara explains the broad importance of his framing of te maro in this work in the following way: the story of te maro gets a bit lost in the story of the last two seconds of his life, but he was a grower of food and feeder of people; he read the stars and the sun and the wind and advised people about what they needed to do to keep their families fed and well, and we wanted to tell that story. we have an understanding of a māori chap killed by cook’s crew – now he has a name, a character and a story we can take some lessons from in terms of growing food and keeping people’s wellbeing strong.20 tupara saw the governmentsponsored tuia 250 programme – which used the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the endeavour to reflect on new zealand’s ‘dual heritage, shared future’ – as opportunity to seek resources and cultural space to help tell ngāti oneone stories in a way that enhanced the mana (status, authority) of his ancestors and kin. against the backdrop of the longstanding celebration of cook in tūranga/gisborne’s civic culture, tupara explained that tuia 250 was an opportunity to move the focus way from cook: a big part of these commemorations is an opportunity for us to articulate our place and find new strength to live in a cook town… i come to celebrate te maro and that ancestor is my sole purpose for being involved in anything this year. and i’m only involved to the extent that i can successfully assist in putting our tipuna [ancestor] on our maunga [mountain].21 here tupara is emphasising the ways in which understandings of the past can be remade through positive interventions, through the telling of new stories or the retelling of old stories that are not well known, and ballantyne public history review, vol. 28, 20215 by offering a deeper indigenous perspective that shifts public attention away from cook, to the prior history and set of beliefs and practices that had developed in a particular location. in keeping with the importance of critical situated scholarship in the wake of empire, what about the location i am writing from, ōtepoti/dunedin? in the wake of the toppling of the colston statue and against the backdrop of the black lives matter protests there have been some criticisms of the statue of the poet robbie burns that sits in the octagon in the heart of the city. banners inscribed ‘rapist’ and ‘complicit in slavery’ were attached to the statue, echoing charges that have been made elsewhere against the poet and which had been subject to some debate in new zealand in 2018.22 but the evidence for reading him as a rapist is both thin and contested and with regards to slavery, burns abandoned plans he made when he was at his lowest point to work as a clerk on a jamaican plantation. burns was sympathetic to the aspirations for liberty and equality at the heart of the american and french revolutions, was a consistent critic of political tyranny and railed against british imperial aggression, especially towards scotland. but he also failed to extend his sympathy to enslaved peoples or fully imagine the ways in which they were exploited.23 the claims against burns have gained only limited traction in a city where the bard is not only loved for his songs and verse, but where the idea of burns as embodying a deep scepticism towards authority as well as a marker of scottishness continues to have real currency. moreover dunedin was shaped by a significant connection to the burns family, through his nephew thomas burns, who was minister to the colony of otago at its foundation in 1848 and subsequently played a key role in the city’s development. burns remains a prominent part of the city’s culture even if dunedinites may well be sceptical about the bard’s own morality.24 shortly after the placards were attached to the burns statue, the city’s queen victoria statue was garlanded with potatoes and a placard denouncing her as a ‘famine queen’. the dunedin man responsible for this, andrew tait, wanted to draw attention to britain’s exploitation of ireland and its consequences.25 the queen victoria statue has long been a target of protesters who have seen her as an icon of empire. in 2019 ‘uphold te tiriti’, the treaty of waitangi, was graffitied on the statue. in 2015 the statue’s tiara was removed and replaced with an orange road cone. and in the 1990s the statue was subject to several graffiti attacks and its nose was broken off. queen victoria remains a contentious figure because of the authority she wielded over an empire that disempowered māori and other indigenous and colonised peoples. but at the same time she remains the sovereign in whose name the treaty of waitangi was signed, a key touchstone for māori politics for over 150 years. it is notable that edward ellison, a senior figure from the local ōtākou rūnaka (tribal committee) and chairman of the new zealand conservation authority criticised the 2019 graffiti attack, stressing that these preparators did not speak for the iwi of kāi tahu.26 in response to the debates in june 2020 ellison told the media that while he was highly aware of ‘racism and its negative legacy’, the focus of his people was ‘seeing our stories being seen and told… our focus is on developing our own narratives and seeing artworks that convey our stories, place names and associations, an area that has been neglected, we would suggest, for a long time.’27 in this regard, the announcement earlier in june that the kāi tahu artist ayesha green had been commissioned to create a large piece of public art, ko te tūhono, for the octagon was very significant. this work, which will take the form of a large gateway which celebrates both connection to place and movement, was developed through consultation with ōtākou rūnaka (kingroup committee). this striking largescale work will explicitly acknowledge the centrality of mana whenua in the city. ellison’s argument is crucial in my view: in weighing up how best to manage these memorials, communities should take their lead from the guidance of their local indigenous leaders. empirebuilding and colonialism produce stark inequalities and deeplyfelt pain. those are the central facts of new zealand history and they are profoundly troubling. removing statues to agents of empire will signal an important shift in our values. but we must recognise that we cannot undo the past, nor can it be wished away. there is no easy way of settling our history or coming to terms with it. that is especially ballantyne public history review, vol. 28, 20216 the case when the past is painful, studded with violence, dispossession and marginalisation. history and democracy are both underpinned by the importance of conversation and dialogue. both are openended and argumentative. even if progress is made in the political sphere, each new generation discovers that bitter past anew and grapples with its very real consequences, developing new arguments and insights. and, of course, we must be prepared for those future generations to criticise our initiatives, and even tear down any monuments we might construct in light of their own priorities and aspirations. our understanding of the past, like that of those who proceeded us, and those who will follow, is itself a product of historical change, is both contingent and contestable. endnotes 1. ‘boris johnson says removing statues is “to lie about our history”’, guardian, 12 june 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2020/jun/12/borisjohnsonsaysremovingstatuesistolieaboutourhistorygeorgefloyd. 2. ‘south auckland’s uncomfortable memorial’, newsroom, 8 september 2017, https://www.newsroom.co.nz/south aucklandsuncomfortablememorial. 3. ‘sir george grey statue in auckland vandalised, smeared with red paint’, stuff, 15 june 2020, https://www.stuff.co.nz/ national/300035275/sirgeorgegreystatueinaucklandvandalisedsmearedwithredpaint. 4. ‘police investigating as auckland’s sir george grey statue loses thumb and nose’, stuff, 19 june 2020, https://www. stuff.co.nz/national/121882669/policeinvestigatingasaucklandssirgeorgegreystatuelosesthumbandnose. 5. ‘hamilton city council takes down captain hamilton statue’, stuff, 12 june 2020, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/ 300033147/hamiltoncitycounciltakesdowncaptainhamiltonstatue. 6. nick, wilson, amanda c. jones, andrea teng, and george thomson. 2020. ‘attacks on statues associated with social injustice and militarism: new zealand as a case study’, socarxiv, 13 june 2020, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/e6agq/. 7. morgan godfery, ‘the removal of hamilton’s statue is only the start, we should tear them all down’, guardian, 12 june 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/12/theremovalofhamiltonsstatueisonlythestartwe shouldtearthemalldown. 8. ‘public statues should be kept to remind us about our history – professor’, te ao māori news, 17 june 2020, https:// www.teaomaori.news/publicstatuesshouldbekeptremindusaboutourhistoryprofessor. 9. tony ballantyne, webs of empire: locating new zealand’s colonial past, bridget williams books, wellington, 2012, 2912. 10. gisborne first in 2019‘, gisborne herald, 4 february 2017, thelma e. karaitiana comment, http://gisborneherald.co.nz/ localnews/2651338135/gisbornefirstin2019. 11. eloise wallace, ‘gisborne’s “crook cook” – the story behind the statue’, https://tairawhitimuseum.org.nz/2019/03/26/ thecrookcookthestoryofthestatue2/; christopher paxton, ‘a likeness of captain cook?’, https://sites.google.com/ site/chrispaxtonfreelancewriter/home/alikenessofcaptaincook. 12. wallace, ‘gisborne’s “crook cook”’; paxton, ‘a likeness of captain cook?’. 13. ‘time for “cook” to go?’, gisborne herald, 21 july 2016, http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/localnews/20160721/time forcooktogo/. 14. ‘gisborne captain cook statue to be moved’, newshub, 2 october 2018, https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new zealand/2018/10/gisbornecaptaincookstatuetobemoved.html. 15. ‘plaza removal mooted’, gisborne herald, 26 september 2018, http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/localnews/20180926/ plazaremovalmooted/. 16. ‘poll shows disquiet over gdc’s plans for cook plaza on titirangi/kaiti hill’, gisborne herald, 6 october 2018, http:// www.gisborneherald.co.nz/localnews/20181006/pollshowsdisquietovergdcsplansforcookplazaontitirangikaiti hill/. 17. ‘tipuna te maro’, gisborne herald, 25 september 2019, http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/localnews/20190925/tipuna temaro/. 18. ‘reserve transformed with stunning installation’, https://www.waterfordpress.co.nz/business/currieconstruction/. 19. ‘telling stories of tairawhiti’, 30 september 2019, gisborne herald, http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local news/20190930/twosculpturesunveiledonsaturdayontitirangikaitihillcelebrateimportantfiguresandvoyaging/. 20. sally blundell, ‘tuia 250: the effects of captain james cook’s arrival on tangata whenua’, listener, 8 october 2019. 21. ‘capt. cook: a “genocidal murderer: indigenous scholar tina ngata’, te ao māori news, 16 july 2019, https://www. teaomaori.news/captcookgenocidalmurdererindigenousscholartinangata. ballantyne public history review, vol. 28, 20217 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/12/boris-johnson-says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/12/boris-johnson-says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd https://www.newsroom.co.nz/south-aucklands-uncomfortable-memorial https://www.newsroom.co.nz/south-aucklands-uncomfortable-memorial https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300035275/sir-george-grey-statue-in-auckland-vandalised-smeared-with-red-paint https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300035275/sir-george-grey-statue-in-auckland-vandalised-smeared-with-red-paint https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/121882669/police-investigating-as-aucklands-sir-george-grey-statue-loses-thumb-and-nose https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/121882669/police-investigating-as-aucklands-sir-george-grey-statue-loses-thumb-and-nose https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300033147/hamilton-city-council-takes-down-captain-hamilton-statue https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300033147/hamilton-city-council-takes-down-captain-hamilton-statue https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/e6agq/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/12/the-removal-of-hamiltons-statue-is-only-the-start-we-should-tear-them-all-down https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/12/the-removal-of-hamiltons-statue-is-only-the-start-we-should-tear-them-all-down https://www.teaomaori.news/public-statues-should-be-kept-remind-us-about-our-history-professor https://www.teaomaori.news/public-statues-should-be-kept-remind-us-about-our-history-professor http://gisborneherald.co.nz/localnews/2651338-135/gisborne-first-in-2019 http://gisborneherald.co.nz/localnews/2651338-135/gisborne-first-in-2019 https://tairawhitimuseum.org.nz/2019/03/26/the-crook-cook-the-story-of-the-statue-2/ https://tairawhitimuseum.org.nz/2019/03/26/the-crook-cook-the-story-of-the-statue-2/ https://sites.google.com/site/chrispaxtonfreelancewriter/home/a-likeness-of-captain-cook https://sites.google.com/site/chrispaxtonfreelancewriter/home/a-likeness-of-captain-cook http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20160721/time-for-cook-to-go/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20160721/time-for-cook-to-go/ https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/10/gisborne-captain-cook-statue-to-be-moved.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/10/gisborne-captain-cook-statue-to-be-moved.html http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20180926/plaza-removal-mooted/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20180926/plaza-removal-mooted/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20181006/poll-shows-disquiet-over-gdcs-plans-for-cook-plaza-on-titirangi-kaiti-hill/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20181006/poll-shows-disquiet-over-gdcs-plans-for-cook-plaza-on-titirangi-kaiti-hill/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20181006/poll-shows-disquiet-over-gdcs-plans-for-cook-plaza-on-titirangi-kaiti-hill/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20190925/tipuna-te-maro/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20190925/tipuna-te-maro/ https://www.waterfordpress.co.nz/business/currie-construction/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20190930/two-sculptures-unveiled-on-saturday-on-titirangi-kaiti-hill-celebrate-important-figures-and-voyaging/ http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/local-news/20190930/two-sculptures-unveiled-on-saturday-on-titirangi-kaiti-hill-celebrate-important-figures-and-voyaging/ https://www.teaomaori.news/capt-cook-genocidal-murderer-indigenous-scholartina-ngata https://www.teaomaori.news/capt-cook-genocidal-murderer-indigenous-scholartina-ngata 22. ‘robert burns: was the beloved poet a “weinsteinian sex pest”?’, guardian, 24 january 2018, https://www.theguardian. com/books/booksblog/2018/jan/24/robertburnswasthebelovedpoetaweinsteiniansexpest; helen speirs, ‘was robbie burns a rapist?’, the spinoff, 14 february 2018, https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/14022018/wasrobbieburnsarapist andshouldhisstatueindunedinbetoppled/. 23. gerard carruthers, ‘robert burns and slavery’, the drouth, 26 (2008), pp2149, here 22; liam mcilvanney, ‘robert burns and slavery’, address to scottish heritage council, dunedin, 4 august 2020. 24. for a rich and judicious exploration of these connections see liam mcilvanney, ‘the view from the octagon: robert burns in new zealand’,gerard carruthers (ed), the oxford handbook of robert burns, forthcoming, oxford university press, 2021. 25. ‘”rapist”: dunedin protesters target two statues of historic figures’, otago daily times, 15 june 2020, https://www.odt. co.nz/news/dunedin/rapistdunedinprotesterstargettwostatueshistoricfigures. 26. ‘queen victoria statue vandalised in treaty protest’, otago daily times, 23 november 2019, https://www.odt.co.nz/ news/dunedin/queenvictoriastatuevandalisedtreatyprotest. 27. ‘no plans to remove statues in dunedin’, otago daily times, 13 june 2020, https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/no plansremovestatuesdunedin. ballantyne public history review, vol. 28, 20218 https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jan/24/robert-burns-was-the-beloved-poet-a-weinsteinian-sex-pest https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jan/24/robert-burns-was-the-beloved-poet-a-weinsteinian-sex-pest https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/14-02-2018/was-robbie-burns-a-rapist-and-should-his-statue-in-dunedin-be-toppled/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/14-02-2018/was-robbie-burns-a-rapist-and-should-his-statue-in-dunedin-be-toppled/ https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/rapist-dunedin-protesters-target-two-statues-historic-figures https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/rapist-dunedin-protesters-target-two-statues-historic-figures https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/queen-victoria-statue-vandalised-treaty-protest https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/queen-victoria-statue-vandalised-treaty-protest https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/no-plans-remove-statues-dunedin https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/no-plans-remove-statues-dunedin public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: moody, j. 2021. off the pedestal: the fall of edward colston. public history review, 28, 1–5. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7776 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj off the pedestal: the fall of edward colston jessica moody doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7776 on 7 june during a black lives matter protest in the centre of bristol activists pulled down the statue of slave trader edward colston which had stood on that spot since 1895. the protesters cheered, as many climbed the plinth, one woman giving the black power salute from where the statue once looked over innercity bristol. one protester knelt on its neck for eight minutes, symbolically replicating the police action which had killed an africanamerican man, george floyd, on 25 may. his killing ignited the black lives matter protests around the world.1 the plaque on the side of the statue’s plinth had originally said only this about the statue and edward colston: ‘erected by: citizens of bristol as a memorial to one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city, ad 1895.’ during the protest this was edited to read instead that the citizens of bristol rejected edward colston. the protesters then rolled the heavy statue around the waterfront and dumped it into bristol harbour by pero’s bridge which was commemoratively named after an enslaved man living in bristol in the eighteenth century. this historic event marked the first time a monument to a slave trader was pulled down or otherwise removed in britain. but it did not come out of nowhere. there has been a long history of challenge to this statue as well as numerous other streets, pubs, schools, institutions, stained glass windows in bristol cathedral, religious ceremonies long acted out around colston’s birthday – colston day – on 13 november and a colston bun – a type of fruitcake given to children on the day, all designed to celebrate him in bristol. protests have been particularly pronounced since the 1980s following riots and resistance across a number of british cities against racism, police brutality and institutionally racist practices. activities in the 1990s surrounding slavery and memory in britain were partly prompted by the riots of the 1980s. they focused on projects aimed at facing up to the past as a way of encouraging racial healing in britain’s fractured multicultural cities. thus many people have been actively critical of the statue of colston for at least the last thirty years. the grassroots campaigning group ‘countering colston’ have sought to challenge celebrations of colston across the city through protest, campaigns on their website and through public history work including walking tours of the city. countering colston have consistently challenged the broader ‘cult of colston’ in the city.2 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7776 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7776 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7776 so, who was edward colston and why has the city of bristol celebrated him so much? born in bristol in 1636, edward colston joined the royal african company in 1680. at the time it held a monopoly over the british slave trade and was responsible for the enslavement of over 84,000 african people who were taken to the americas by british ships. nineteen thousand of these people died on the middle passage. even after withdrawing from the royal african company in 1692, colston continued to slave trade privately, before retiring in 1708. he was also a tory member of parliament for bristol and a prominent member of the society of merchant venturers, which had been formed in the thirteenth century. this was and remains an unelected group of bristol elites which continues to exert power in bristol today and is deeply embedded within colonial and imperial history. it funded the fifteenthcentury voyage of john cabot to canada and traded in enslaved african people from 1689, lobbying the british parliament to open this up beyond the monopoly of the royal african company. colston was also a philanthropist. he made some charitable donations for local causes, especially the establishment of boys and girls schools. the various schols that were dedicated to educating boys also served as a useful place to drum up sailors for his ships. more bequests followed his death in 1721, though a lot of the claims to his great philanthropy do seem to be exaggerated and poorly supported. the society of merchant venturers have been influential in promoting the celebration of edward colston in the city as one of their greatest members, most of whom have been white males. so why has the city of bristol celebrated him so much? this really is the key question when it comes to historically contextualising the statue and the public memory of edward colston in bristol. why was so much named after him? why were weird rituals and ceremonies instigated and why have they been carried out for so long? and why was a statue of him erected in 1895, some 125 years after his death? in many ways, the cult of colston, which gathered pace in the late nineteenth century, wasn’t all that much about edward colston the person at all. as bristol historian madge dresser has shown, the statue was part of a late victorian memory cult.3 it was intent on foregrounding good christian moral values through the celebration of a civic hero to buttress civic pride and boost provincial bristol’s identity and sense of self in an age that invented tradition.4 civic authorities in bristol chose a figure who they framed as a good christian philanthropist, a wealthy merchant father of bristol and a patriarchal and paternal figure head for bristol citizens to look up to. this was particularly aimed at the urban poor of the city who between 1889 and 1890 led largescale protests and strikes over living and working conditions in the city. as james watts puts it, ‘the erection of the edward colston statue can be seen as an attempt to reassert paternalism in the face of anxiety over working class unrest’.5 the narrative of colston as a patriarchal philanthropic father of the city has been fed into school education and political discourse and inscribed on the fabric of the city. streets were renamed after him. twentiethcentury concrete officeblocks which bore no historical links to colston had his name emblazoned on their towers. the citizens of bristol, black and white, were for over a hundred years taught that they should love this man, find pride him in him as an emblem of their city and consider colston a key part of the heritage of bristol. however, challenges and protests to the statue are also part of this heritage. activism and artistic interventions with the statue have long been a focal point for what alan rice has called ‘guerrilla memorialisation’, unofficial acts of engagement and interaction which challenged the public narratives of this statue.6 the statue has been graffitied and had alternative unofficial plaques added to it. it’s been yarnbombed with knitted chains. to carry on this heritage, after the statue came down, a number of other figures have gone up in its place. there was a figure of a bald man in a rubbish bin with the words: ‘spoiler: st george was turkish’; a mannequin of british tv personality and now renowned paedophile jimmy saville with a placard criticising the bbc; and most recently a statue of black lives matter protester jen reid, by london artist marc quinn, in the pose she took when the statue came down. whilst powerful in its imagery of black female moody public history review, vol. 28, 20212 agency, this latest intervention, called ‘a surge of power’, has also been criticised for being the work of a white artist, from london, using this platform for himself.7 many people hoped the work of local black artists could instead be supported. the sculpture was removed by bristol city council within twentyfour hours of it going up and, at the time of writing, is being held by the museum service. there will no doubt be many more interventions. one suggestion has been to use the existing plinth as a place for revolving temporary artworks by local artists. other suggestions have included statues of notable black figures such as paul stephenson who organised the bristol bus boycott in 1963, in protest over bristol omnibus company’s refusal to hire black or asian people. bristolborn street artist banksy suggested that a new sculpture depicting the statue being pulled down should be put in the empty spot. many people, including figures of government, have criticised the protesters for being vandals. even if most people in bristol generally agree that there probably shouldn’t be a statue celebrating a slavetrader in the middle of their city in the twentyfirst century, a number certainly felt that the protesters should have gone through the ‘proper channels’ and this was the position laid out by most politicians, including home secretary priti patel who described the protesters as a ‘mob’.8 the proper channels, however, have repeatedly failed over the years.9 groups have been calling for the statue’s removal tirelessly with no effect. in the last few years the city council has been working with a group of historians and local activists on an additional, alternative plaque to put on the statue’s plinth, next to the one that says nothing of where colston got his wealth. there was great debate about the wording of this plaque. the society of merchant venturers wanted to tone down the language and minimise information about the extent of colston’s slavetrading activities. others felt this would be an unacceptable sanitisation of the past. so even the addition of a contextual plaque failed due to power politics in the city. as many historians such as david olusoga and olivette otele have been at pains to stress, pulling these statues down does not erase history – it creates it.10 historians can play a part in remembering both why these statues went up and why they came down. these statues are symbols in our public spaces. we should not forget how and why they were put up in the first place. we should tell these histories because of what they reveal about public sculpture, monuments and statues as part of the architecture of white supremacy. the statue of edward colston being thrown in bristol floating harbour, 7 june 2020 moody public history review, vol. 28, 20213 examples include confederate monuments erected during jim crow, or the celebration of imperial might and heroes of empire, as with figures of cecil rhodes in oxford or king leopold in belgium. as artefacts they are mechanisms for building a mythology about a place’s past as a way to create philanthropic heroes, constructed and celebrated to inspire civic pride and keep order. to tell the histories of these monuments, in their messy, complex and sometimes contradictory ways, is to destabilise their assumed place as ‘heritage’. the empty pedestal, 7 june 2020 the discourse of heritage is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of kneejerk reactions to keep statues of slavetraders and racists on their pedestals. ‘official heritage discourse’, as laurajane smith has argued, especially in britain and the west, is a conservative discourse and privileges old material culture as being inherently valuable in and of itself.11 this idea gained particularly strong traction from the nineteenth century onwards, when a lot of these monuments were first erected. they were concerned with the construction of both the nation state and civic hierarchies. these ideas have worked hard to construct moody public history review, vol. 28, 20214 racialised notions of a socalled ‘shared heritage’; that the buildings, statues, lavish countryhouses and castles of a country like britain are our heritage, that we should all feel a shared sense of ownership and inheritance for the nationstate through them. by telling their history, we show that statues are memory, not history. but they don’t even represent the past they’re supposed to be depicting. they reveal instead the attitudes, anxieties and contexts of the times in which they were created. we should also not forget the circumstances in which these monuments are coming down in the present. as much as they represent the contexts of the times when they went up, they also embody the context of the present where they came down. these monuments were removed by the collective action of activists and protesters in the name of the black lives matter campaign – in the name of confronting and calling out racial violence against black people and institutionalised racism around the world. too much of the public debate around what has been done and what should be done with the statues of white supremacists, slavetraders and imperialists has decentred the black lives matter movement. much of the media, especially the rightwing press, have instead engaged in an often abstract debate about what to do with all statues in general, often lamenting the loss of monuments no one has raised any issue with, or cares about, as the logical end of ‘erasing of history’. the danger is that debating what to do with statues can be used by some people to sideline the critical issues raised by the black lives matter protests and divert attention away from calls for racial justice in the present. endnotes 1. this is an edited transcript of jessica moody’s talk ‘vandalism or vindication and what to do with the empty plinth?’ in the history council of new south wales’ panel session ‘history now: statue wars’ on 20 july 2020. 2. see https://counteringcolston.wordpress.com. 3.  see madge dresser, ‘colston revisited’, history workshop online, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/colston revisited/; slavery obscured: the social history of the slave trade in an english provincial port c1698c1833, redcliffe press, bristol, 2007; ‘obliteration, contextualisation or ‘guerrilla memorialisation’? edward colston’s statue reconsidered’ https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/madgedresser/obliterationcontextualisationorguerrilla memorialisationedwardcolst  (accessed august 2016). 4. e.j. hobsbawm and t. o ranger, the invention of tradition, canto classics, 2012. 5. james watts, ‘the history behind the edward colston statue pulled down by antiracism protesters in bristol’, the conversation, 11 june 2020 https://scroll.in/article/964230/thehistorybehindtheedwardcolstonstatuepulleddown byantiracismprotestersinbristol (accessed 12 june 2020). 6. alan rice, creating memorials, building identities: the politics of memory in the black atlantic, liverpool university press, liverpool, 2010. 7. lanre bakare, ‘allyship or stunt? marc quinn’s blm statue divides art world,’ the guardian, 15 july 2020 https://www. theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/allyshiporstuntmarcquinnsblmstatuedividesartworld. 8. vincent wood, ‘cecil rhodes: how black lives matter and bristolian vandalism renewed hope that oxford’s imperialist benefactor could fall,’ the independent, 10 june 2020. 9. tristan cork, ‘how the city failed to remove edward colston’s statue for years,’ bristol post, 10 june 2020 https://www. bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristolnews/howcityfailedremoveedward4211771. 10. david olusoga, ‘the toppling of edward colston’s statue is not an attack on history. it is history,’ the guardian, 8 june 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edwardcolstonstatuehistoryslavetraderbristol protest; olivette otele, ‘these antiracism protests show it’s time for britain to grapple with its difficult history,’ the guardian, 9 june 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/09/protestsbritishhistory. 11. laurajane smith, uses of heritage, routledge, london, 2006. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203602263 moody public history review, vol. 28, 20215 https://counteringcolston.wordpress.com https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/colston-revisited/ https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/colston-revisited/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/madge-dresser/obliteration-contextualisation-or-guerrilla-memorialisation-edward-colst https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/madge-dresser/obliteration-contextualisation-or-guerrilla-memorialisation-edward-colst https://scroll.in/article/964230/the-history-behind-the-edward-colston-statue-pulled-down-by-anti-racism-protesters-in-bristol https://scroll.in/article/964230/the-history-behind-the-edward-colston-statue-pulled-down-by-anti-racism-protesters-in-bristol https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/allyship-or-stunt-marc-quinns-blm-statue-divides-art-world https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/allyship-or-stunt-marc-quinns-blm-statue-divides-art-world https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/how-city-failed-remove-edward-4211771 https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/how-city-failed-remove-edward-4211771 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edward-colston-statue-history-slave-trader-bristol-protest https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edward-colston-statue-history-slave-trader-bristol-protest https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/09/protests-british-history https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203602263 microsoft word articleread.doc the bay of pigs: revisiting two museums peter read and marivic wyndham public history review, vol 14, 2007, pp80-96 he museum of playa giron – the bay of pigs – in the region of cienega de zapata, cuba, celebrates the repulse of brigade 2506 as the first reverse of united states (us) imperialism on the american continents. the equivalent brigade 2506 museum in miami, dedicated to and maintained by the members of brigade 2506, celebrates defeat at the bay of pigs as moral victory for the cuban exile community. the forces were indeed implacable foes. yet both museums present the common theme of the confrontation between forces of good and evil. both celebrate the common philosophy that dying for one’s country is the greatest good a citizen may achieve. both museums fly the common cuban flag. finally, both museums share a common culture and identify a common enemy: the united states of america. before examining the narratives of either museum we need to understand what actually did take place at the bay of pigs between 13 and 18 april 1961. by the end of 1960, two years into revolutionary power, castro had strongly consolidated his forces. in popular appeal and in the organization of the citizen militia, his regime had become much more formidable than was realised by either the exiles or the cia. though a sizeable number of dissidents worked or were ready to work against him, and though he had yet to declare himself a communist, eastern bloc arms were already flowing strongly into the country. castro’s revolutionary army, though not well trained in the use of these light and heavy weapons, was huge compared to anything the miami exiles were likely to muster. his few naval craft and dozen serviceable war planes were matched by the exiles’ expectation that the us would be willing put some of theirs at the brigade’s disposal: the exiles themselves had none. despite the huge imbalance, the counter-revolution, that is, the invasion designed to unseat castro, was certainly expected. by the end of march 1961 castro was waiting, minute by minute, for the first intimations of the assault which he knew would come soon. but when and where? which would be the decoys and which the real assault force? and at which points would the americans and what he called the t public history review, vol 14, 2007 81 ‘mercenaries’ strike? the brigade members were not, of course, mercenaries, but volunteers backed by a large arsenal, from revolvers to tanks, supplied by the us. the exile army comprised 1500 troops of the volunteer brigade 2506, not a large proportion of the 80,000 able-bodied cuban men already in exile. it contained very few professional soldiers, mostly young men in business or university, untrained in arms until formally enlisted in january or february 1961. by april they waited at the invasion stepping off point in guatemala, united in their desire to overturn castro, to recapture the island for their families and the exile community and to restore the 1940 constitution. they had no uncertainty as to whether they would succeed, and when, from january, they began to farewell their friends, it was no secret they were bound for advanced training in central america. they understood that everyone, civilians and soldiers, would be reunited in cuba; for after the military victory was won and the provisional government established, all the exiled miami cubans would be returning home. the campaign to retake the island had been formally endorsed by eisenhower in march 1960, six months before the end of his second term. the incoming president was john f. kennedy, no older, as soviet premier nikita kruschev tartly put it, than his own eldest son. in january 1961 his new administration was still unsure of itself, somewhat over-respectful of eisenhower’s military opinion and the previous planning and unfamiliar with how to manage relations between the state department, the united nations, the defence department, the joint chiefs of staff and the cia. the administration was even unfamiliar with bureau-speak: kennedy’s inner circle did not understand, until several weeks after the bay of pigs invasion, that the true meaning of the joint chiefs of staff opinion of ‘a fair chance of success’ was in fact only thirty per cent. influenced by the current political philosophy ‘liberal anticommunism’, and fearful of the soviets raising the stakes in berlin if the us acted too openly in cuba, kennedy vetoed the initial invasion plan at trinidad de cuba because it ‘was too much like a world war two landing’. in march he made it perfectly plain, publicly and face to face with the cuban american leaders, that he would not authorise any overt us commitment beyond what was already promised. what had been promised was the use of bases in vieques (puerto rico), guatemala and nicaragua as training and embarkation points for troops and planes, the supply of arms, payment for the freighters for troops and arms, the supply of two large landing ship docks (known as lcds), the use of a small number of outdated warplanes, to be flown, preferably, by cuban americans, a number of training grounds in the united states itself, a number of ‘military advisers’ – and the invasion plan itself.1 by no means all of this was known to every relevant government agency. of all the us players, the cia understood best the dangers and the possibilities though, as it soon transpired, many critical details had escaped its over-optimistic planning briefings. the bay of pigs invasion was masterminded by the cia chief of operations, richard bissell. to the pessimists (that is, the realists), bissell pointed to the successful overthrow of the left-leaning government of guatemala in 1954 by a public history review, vol 14, 2007 82 somewhat analogous combination of an invasion force of dissident exiles coupled with an internal revolt. bissell argued that the guerillas trying to foster revolt in the sierra maestra mountains were making no progress while castro daily grew stronger. a large number of dissidents were evidently ready to rise in revolt. his infective optimism and senior position caused other officials to encourage their cuban allies, more confidently than they should have, of the probability of ultimate us intervention. surely, the exiles themselves believed, the us would not permit things to go badly wrong. bissell’s ‘operation pluto’ called for troops and equipment to be ferried from guatemala by five lightly armed freighters and two heavy landing craft large enough to carry tanks. they would stand offshore during the night invasion providing first and follow up supplies, ammunition, logistics and communications, protected by aircraft. the landings themselves were to take place on the south coast of cuba in the area known as cienega de zapata, ‘the great swamp of the caribbean’. though chosen as the invasion point so late that the senior officers had no time to ‘war game’ the plan, the location seemed sound tactically. it was within a few hours drive from havana. it was underdeveloped, even backward, and believed to contain few people. its swampy terrain and spiky, almost impenetrable vegetation should force the retaliatory castrista troops along its three narrow access roads. the landings themselves would be at red beach (playa larga, at the extreme inland end of the bay of pigs), blue beach (playa giron) and green beach, a point thirty kilometres east of giron, to cut the road to cienfuegos. the fourth prong of the assault was to be three co-ordinated paratrooper landings twenty kilometres inland, centring on san blas. simultaneously the guerillas, and what was assumed to be a huge number of dissidents, would emerge from either forests or city apartments to continue the internal overthrow of the regime. the successful landing of a sizeable amphibious assault force on unknown beaches is the most difficult military manoeuvre of all to accomplish – and even more so at night. the plan, indeed, might have been sound, even ingenious, but in the end success depended on complete mastery of the air both to protect the landing craft and to harass the troops which would undoubtedly be rushed from havana to oppose the brigade. other potential problems were not seriously discussed: the inadequate airstrip, the massive imbalance in troop numbers and the unknown number of cubans who might – or might not – join the brigade after the invasion. other problems were not discussed at all. it was assumed rather than demonstrated that hardly anyone lived in the cienega de zapata region, that the dark shadows appearing in air reconnaissance photos of the planned invasion site at playa giron were seaweed, that the brigade members, in the event of difficulty, would be able to fight their way to the escambray mountains to set up guerilla bases – even though they stood many kilometres away across almost impenetrable country. the plan continued: the area of brigade control, some sixty kilometres wide, would be held for at least seventy-two hours until members of the provisional government in exile flew from miami to establish themselves. at this point the public history review, vol 14, 2007 83 invasion could be officially regarded by the united states as legitimate. protection would need to be continuously provided from war planes and ships. supplies would continue to be landed for thirty days. things went wrong for the brigade even before the landings. operation pluto’s preliminary phase was the intended destruction of the small cuban air force by brigade pilots, aided by some americans. two days before the invasion they would use sixteen twin engined, and somewhat antiquated world war two b26 attack bombers to destroy castro’s tiny air force then provide protection for the ground troops on shore. shortly before the raid kennedy, fearful of international criticism and escalation of the cold war, ordered the number of planes reduced to eight. damaging strikes were made, for the loss of two aircraft, but the plan failed in that castro retained a small number of t33 jet aircraft and british-built sea furies, against which ships had proved especially vulnerable. for the same reason kennedy cancelled the second strike planned to coincide with the land invasion itself at dawn on monday 17 april. at 11.45 pm on 16 april frogmen approached the beach of playa giron. eighty metres from shore their craft encountered the coral reefs, wrongly identified by cia reconnaissance as seaweed, forcing the men to jump overboard and wade ashore. commander in chief jose perez san ramon ordered the 4th battalion ashore several hours earlier than planned. the men began hurriedly to disembark in some disorganisation. but by dawn almost all the troops and equipment planned to land that night had done so and the castrista militia was temporarily in retreat. thirty kilometres away at playa larga, erneido oliva, second in command, successfully landed the 2nd battalion. del valle established his paratroopers as planned at san blas and dug in to repel the expected assault by castro’s arriving troops. by three am castro had taken the critical, and correct, decision to attack the supply ships at first light by air. shortly after dawn houston, carrying a huge quantity of petrol and ammunition, was hit by rockets from a sea fury (a single engine world war two attack bomber) and was beached by her captain not far from the shore. then at 8.30am the rio escondido, carrying the main communications link, was attacked and sunk. without the expected air cover, and extremely vulnerable to attack, the other three transports retreated out of range without unloading any of their supplies for what was intended to be the consolidation of the brigade front. probably the battle could not at this point have been won by the brigade unless, possibly, air protection had allowed the remaining equipment and troops to be landed. on the ground, though, oliva first held out, then advanced against the militia. he confronted at least 2000 enemy troops at what was later known as the battle of the rotunda, a strategic intersection of major roads amidst the swamps and impenetrable ground. by evening of the first full day’s fighting, the paratroopers held their position at san blas. the brigade troops defending the three roads allowing access to the area could last indefinitely provided, firstly, that their ammunition held out and, secondly, public history review, vol 14, 2007 84 that castro did not continue his assault for twenty-four hours a day. but without air support neither could they advance. all night the castrisas kept coming. the brigade’s orders were to resist and where necessary to stage a tactical and destructive retreat. by mid afternoon of the second day oliva himself was falling back before a huge advance led by tanks. that evening, almost out of ammunition, he withdrew to giron. late in the day supplies were dropped but most were blown off course by the wind into the sea or the inaccessible swamps. as further distraction four b26s were to attack the castrista land forces. the third and last day of the campaign, wednesday 19 april, began with the scheduled raid by the brigade planes. two were shot down but the devastating effect of aerial attack on the incoming castrista troops (unacknowledged in the playa giron museum) indicated how air support provided by even a few b26s might have changed the battle at least long enough for all the supplies to be landed. at a war council oliva proposed to consolidate all forces, including the paratroopers, and fight their way to the escambray mountains to continue as a guerilla force. by mid afternoon the whole brigade was under sustained attack from north, west and east and from the air. kennedy ordered two destroyers to escort the supply ships in a different role: to rescue the brigade. they did not arrive until evening, too late to save any but a few of the brigade soldiers. one hundred and forty brigade members died. almost all the rest – some 1190 – were taken prisoner under conditions which varied at first between fair and appalling. sixty of the most seriously wounded left cuba in april 1962. but the others did not return to the us until 23 december, twenty months after the invasion and after the missile crisis. bitterness over the ‘betrayal’ at the bay of pigs, the foundational narrative of the brigade 2506 museum in miami, was born at giron and fed in the long months of captivity. the cubans, according to print sources no longer unobtainable, and whose existence is now denied, may have lost some 1650 men and 2000 wounded. such sacrifices lend moral force to the museum of playa giron’s principal claim that the failed assault was the first major setback of american imperialism in the continent. these are the essential facts as far as the now fairly extensive sources allow. the most salient facts to recall in the discussion of the museum narratives is that the assault force was certainly expected from guatemala but no castrista knew where the landing or landings would occur. the us masterminded and backed the first stage of a counter-revolution which could not have taken place without the serious involvement of the exile and internal dissident communities themselves. the cia drastically overestimated the number of internal dissidents who would, or could, take up arms in support of the brigade and they were in any case seriously uninformed of much crucial geographical data. despite some less than heroic actions by a minority on both sides, both forces fought with extraordinary courage and valour. none of the cuban members of the brigade were mercenaries.2 public history review, vol 14, 2007 85 geographically, the reference in cuba furthest from the site of the battle itself is to be found outside the museum of the revolution in havana. here stands a tank with the inscription: sau 100 soviet tank from which fidel fired direct hits on the ship ‘houston’ equipped by the central intelligence agency (cia) for the mercenary invasion of giron in april 1961 that wouldn’t have been very difficult because by the time that casro fired his shots the houston was already grounded and wrecked. two and a half hours drive from havana lie the zapata swamps. though tourists flock to the beachside resorts, access is still difficult and the hinterland comparatively underdeveloped.3 the road is wide and flat and cleared twenty metres on each side before the palm trees and bananas. traffic from the capital still takes the visitor past the area known, oddly, as central australia where castro held his advanced headquarters. a rather unprepossessing concrete monument nearby marks the site where a castrista soldier died. approaching playa larga the visitor encounters a phenomenon familiar in eastern europe where publicly displayed historical artifacts and signage reinforced the prevailing political philosophy. there, memorials were utilised to preserve what the dominant (non jewish) group wanted to remember. the communist regime insisted on the equation of communism with the long polish struggle for independence: ‘the jews were eliminated physically by the nazis; the memory of the jews has been eliminated systematically by the poles’.4 thus the visitor views the thickening roadside monuments erected to castrista soldiers each at the site of death. a huge hoarding depicts a regional map positioning playa larga and playa giron with the slogan: what you will see here in this municipality is the work of the revolution. one passes one of the huge three way intersections – the rotunda along which the brigade advanced, then held the counter-attack – the scene of the most courageous and desperate fighting. a hoarding reads: here was waged a decisive battle towards victory. a concrete monument is inscribed with the names of twenty-seven castristas who fell. a huge hoarding proclaims the site of playa giron as ‘the first great defeat of imperialism in latin america’. public history review, vol 14, 2007 86 the play giron museum is a further twenty kilometres away at the town of buenaventura, at playa larga. it is a long, low building in front of which stand a sea fury and a tank. the signage on the aeroplane identifies it as having been used at giron. the tank is said to be ‘similar to that used by the commander in chief in the destruction of the ship houston’. entering, the visitor finds a vestibule leading to the display in the right of the building – events leading up to the battle – and the left – the battle and its aftermath. in the center of the vestibule is collected a large display of press cuttings, the only concession to modern display design in the whole collection. on a red board some four metres long the letters giron are printed with a photographic montage drawn from newspapers drawn from 1950s cuba. this is the state’s nod to its version of pre-revolutionary cuba. the cuttings on the ‘g’, for example, contain a sign ‘whites section only’ showing a black man staring at a wire fence, a newspaper article beginning ‘cuba, factory of capitalism’ and a more modern caption: ‘the people reject the eviction law’. underneath reads: victory of socialism. another letter of the word ‘giron’ contains the cutting: new attacks by pirate planes from the north an introductory panel of the display reads: our national revolutionary militia, the rebel army, the national revolutionary police, the revolutionary navy joined to the efficient action of the reduced air force eliminated in some 65 hours the well equipped invasion sent by the united states. this battle destroyed on the continent the myth of the invincibility of imperialism, encouraged the struggle of the american peoples and consolidated our socialist revolution. testimonies of the heroic struggle waged by the cuban people in those days figure in this museum. the so-called mercenaries have not even been mentioned. it is the united states, not the brigade, which this museum holds responsible for the invasion. to enter the right hand section the visitor passes a sectioned series of life sized photographs showing the defeated brigade members, heads mostly bowed, marching into captivity. to enter the left, one passes a similar display of castrisas marching with heads erect. the first part of the exhibition proper is given over to the description of the cienega region before the revolution: public history review, vol 14, 2007 87 the deep process of transformation begun by the revolution was put in the hands of the people, gave the land to those who worked it and eliminated forever the large estates. the nationalisation of banks and big businesses, the property of yankee monopolies and the national bourgeoisie, the law of urban reform and the control of teaching concluded the phase of national liberation. the imperialists and the bourgeoisie expelled from power began terrorist acts, diplomatic blackmail economic blockade and armed aggression with the aim of destroying the revolution. the social structure of the brigade is analysed: the composition of the ‘mercenary brigade’ revealed the interests that the [now] stateless persons sought to reintroduce. an analysis of the prisoners showed that 800 of them, or their families, possessed 370,268 hectare of ground, 9666 houses and buildings, 70 industries, 10 sugar complexes, five mines and two banks. there figured also 135 ex-military from the batistan tyranny, and 65 criminals, among them 3 known assassins and torturers. for several days television and radio carried to the country the actual interrogation of the mercenaries. the destruction of brigade 2506 showed to the world its reactionary and criminal nature. this first section of the display is more like a polemic on walls than a modern exhibition text. of the paper exhibits, only one pronouncement by castro appears to be original. it reads in part: the country will resist with a firm foot at six in the morning today, the 15th of april 1961, b 26 aeroplanes of north american make simultaneously bombarded points in the city of havana, san antonio de los baños and santiago de cuba according to reports received to the present… our country has been the victim of imperialist criminal aggression which violates all the norms of international rights… if the attack should be a prelude to invasion the country, on a war footing, will resist and destroy each force which intends to land on our land with an iron hand. further down the wall the visitor reads: public history review, vol 14, 2007 88 the aerial bombardment of 15 april provoked the popular rebuff, tightened revolutionary cohesion and confirmed the unshakeable decision to defend the patria at whatever cost was necessary. a series of coloured and detailed maps trace the dispositions and movements over the three days of the combat. clearly the information of the brigade’s intentions and disposition has been drawn from the many books published by the former brigade members themselves: our pilots and artillery shot down 11 bomber planes. another caption, more accurately, claims five. the second wing of the museum presents the stages of battle in close detail in which guns of every variety form the majority of the exhibits. in the centre of the second wing is arranged an exhibitions of light and heavy weapons used both by the brigade and by the castristas. one, on a browning 50mm machine gun, used by the brigade, carries the caption: the invading mercenaries brought with them a fabulous amount of this style of weapon in proportion to the number of men. james delgado, executive director of the vancouver maritime museum, describes the exhibits as ‘more a triumphant display of the enemy’s weapons than a museum’.5 most of the final wall space is dedicated to the ‘heroes of giron’. some 170 photographed faces stare grimly from the wall, above the artifacts in glass cases of clothing, equipment, tobacco tins and letters. one photograph, for example, of a young man seeming no more than 17, carries the caption: luis fernandez rodriguez born in vedado, havana, 21 june 1942. worker for artes graficas… participated in the cleansing of escambray [against guerillas in the escambray mountains] the third detachment of light infantry. mechanic of bon 1213, mobilized to playa giron. died 18 april 1961 photographs include the word fidel allegedly written by a soldier with his dying blood. exhibits in this section contain a pair of high heel shoes destroyed by a bullet and the clothing of five civilian women also killed in the bombing. the concluding caption relating to the assault reads: at dawn on the 19th began the simultaneous advance of our forces. from the west they spread and battered the points of enemy resistance two km from giron, where the enemy made themselves strong. there they held up the advance and located the artillery again. in the east public history review, vol 14, 2007 89 and northeast the spread of our forces enabled us to capture those trying to escape. at 2 pm they attempted a re-embarkation which was frustrated by artillery fire and aviation. at 17.30 play giron fell, the last stronghold of the mercenaries. castro has the last word: this day yankee imperialism suffered in america its first great defeat, according to the commander in chief, fidel castro. thus the cuban state presents its account of the campaign. while the military details of the campaign are reasonably accurate, the historical interpretation, as everywhere in cuba from museums to cemeteries, follows the castrista position. in a lecture to a national cuban congress in 1999, one of castro’s key subordinates, jose ramon fernandez, drawing upon a number of named us and brigade histories, told a very similar story.6 both the museum’s and fernandez’ account hammered, above all, at the twin themes: the supposedly mercenary status of the brigade soldiers and the profound involvement of the us. it is the interpretation of the casualties that is most at fault. the number of castrista death is likely to have been much closer to 2000 than the 200 claimed in the museum. the prisoners are asserted to have been treated well but no mention is made of the nine men who died in an overcrowded airless sealed truck taking them to havana.7 everywhere, in defiance of good sense, the cuban born brigade members are labeled ‘mercenaries’. it is not at all obvious, given the enormous list of farms, houses and businesses which they had allegedly lost, why the exiles would have had to be paid to attempt to retake their lost possessions. the soldiers need, for propaganda purposes, to be mercenaries because the principal purpose of the museum is to denigrate the failure of ‘yanqui’ imperialism. finally, the castrista interpretation of the assault ends on the 18th of april. yet for the brigade members themselves, the second and equally important part of the story begins at the moments of surrender. the standard account of the brigade commanders, the bay of pigs, published in 1964, devotes a further 150 pages to the period of imprisonment and negotiation by the cuban families and the tractors for freedom committees. imprisonment in a number of cuban locations bonded the brigade men more much tightly than the three-day battle itself. it was in twenty months of intimidation and interrogation in cuban prisons, when a different outcome of the missile crisis might well have ended their lives, that the strongest bonds between the brigadistas were formed. they applaud themselves, with justification, for having answered a call to arms and endured bitter defeat while still achieving their own moral victory in withstanding intimidation in clandestine and public trials. here courage was tested, assessed and enshrined in their collective memory. they saw themselves in extremis, emerging with a foundational narrative of coherence and moral conviction. their victory comes at the expense of those brigade public history review, vol 14, 2007 90 members who remained on the ships, and worse, those who merely talked of their patriotism and stayed in miami. at midnight on every seventeenth of april the remaining cuban-american brigadistas meet at the cuban memorial boulevard in the cuban american downtown in miami. here at first, in silence, the ageing soldiers recall their comrades, the event and, in particular, the martyrs. they gather round the concrete column topped by an eternal flame surrounded by two chain barriers, the innermost supported by four sixinch shells. the inscription reads, in spanish: cuba to the martyrs of the assault brigade 17 april 1961 here stands, then, no monument to the brigade itself but to its martyrs. patria o muerte, country or death, resonates as strongly here as it does in cuba. que morir por la patria es vivir, to die for the patria is to live, is the key element of the cuban national anthem. any soldier who had written ‘la brigada’ with his dying blood would be honoured here as surely as the castrista hero. the service ends. the brigadistas will meet here tomorrow for a more convivial gathering of memorialising and celebration. they pride themselves that after fortyseven years of cuban american threat, menace and empty talk, they are the only ones who have actually done anything about rescuing their country from the fidelistas. and it is now clear, after more than four decades of futile exile rhetoric, that that there will be no more attempts. miami today holds more than a million cuban exiles. the embarrassment felt by younger exiles that the assault brigade was both the first and last permeates macho cuban miami society. yet for the overfifties the brigade history is both a source of patriotic pride and an unwelcome reminder of their own failures. that essential dichotomy underpins all that the brigade stands for, between those who went and those who only talked. a visit to the brigade 2506 museum in little havana, miami, is part of the florida cuban heritage trail.8 described in the brochure as ‘quaint’ and ‘homelike’, it is housed in an unpretentious bungalow in miami’s little havana. from outside it resembles a house or family museum: and so indeed it is – the family of brigadistas. perhaps, too, like the exiles who died and were buried in simple graves in the early 1960s, they expected only a short stay in miami. the brigadistas raised funds for its purchase by pooling their financial resources. its is clear that no professional curator has worked here. rather, the presentation seems to be the work of the brigade members themselves. the presentation, too, most unusually makes no overt public history review, vol 14, 2007 91 connection between the brigade and the usual cuban antecedents of the war of independence heroes maceo or martí. the first martyr whom the visitor confronts is not a hero of the spanish war but nestor izquierdo, the first brigade soldier to die in combat. the brigade is writing its own contribution to cuba’s continuing war of independence. just inside the entrance, where, equivalently, the playa giron museum presents the massive display heroes of giron, are testimonies to the present and past brigade leadership. in 1996 a discordant note resounded in the tiny space. amidst the solemnity stood a large, garish coke machine and a dwarf statuette of uncle sam, inviting the visitor to drop ash and cigar stubs into his hat. it is intentionally disrespectful. today that uncle sam has gone. but another, only slightly less disrespectful caricature occupies the same space. the awkward, ambiguous tone which foreshadowed the anti-americanism of the 1996 narrative is no more resolved than a decade ago.9 it is no accident that the museum’s most recent website describes one of its purposes as outlining the changes in the lives of millions of people that live in the americas as a result of ‘this fiasco’. leaving the vestibule, the visitor walks through the dr manuel f. artime library. the library’s conference table and thousands of dark shelved books establishes the credentials of sobriety, rationality and truth of those who were once young and angry and who later became the pillars of the male miami exile society. many conference rooms in cuba, thanks to the blockade and to the general impoverishment of cultural facilities, today resemble nothing better than undergraduate meeting rooms of australian universities. the dignified artime library resembles a company boardroom, representing, accurately enough, the minor family corporation which the brigade has become. here, then, is a family sanctuary as much as museum. here the cuban virtues of courage in adversity are displayed and celebrated. the central hall, the dark brown and white chamber of arms, continues the theme of serious reverence. ten rows of chairs are arranged like a chapel, looking to an altar-like depiction of a running figure, bayonet outstretched. above the figure is the banner on which is inscribed brigada asalto. a cuban flag adorns the right hand side, a us flag, required by law, is on the other. to the right is furled the flag of the brigade itself, presented to kennedy on his promise that it next would fly in a free cuba, embargoed amongst his state possessions after his assassination and only returned to the museum after an unseemly legal battle with the curators of the kennedy library. on the wall facing the audience, reaching to the floor and above the doors, are fixed the 140 a4 sized black and white photographs of the martyrs, under the modestly lettered caption ‘martires de giron’. these identically serious young men present themselves mostly in suit and tie: there was neither time nor opportunity to photograph them as they prepared themselves for training in guatemala. to the right stands a three-dimensional full size sculptured soldier. the ambience presents the climax of struggle, yet the chamber remains a room of mourning. the icons are not triumphant young soldiers in combat fatigues but dead heroes presided over by public history review, vol 14, 2007 92 priests of equal stature, held in the temple of respect and worship. on the left are photographs of the martyrs, those who died during the assault or in prison. on the right are photos of the ‘heroes’, jowly, respectable, middle aged or older. the guide, a proud brigadista, makes clear what is already implied in the display: that one only becomes a hero through death. for even a brigadista, regrettably, is capable of unworthy action later in life. only on death does he become incapable of dishonourable action; only now does he become a martyr. what would be dishonourable? the answer is clear for some whose names are proscribed on an undated list. to have been a dialoguero, one who went to dialogue with the cuban government, is an action heinous enough to the brigade association management to have one’s name expunged not only from the rolls of honour but from brigade memory. another list names two men expelled for having flown from cuba to negotiate the release of their fellow prisoners but who did not, as promised, return. the spaces filled not with a photograph but the brigade emblem reveals, at this most solemn site, the bitter divisions within the exile community. on the third wall of the chamber of arms are the historical exhibits, principally narrating the events after the surrender, photographs of capture, imprisonment, interrogation, release and return. the actual details of the three-day battle are much less clear than in the cuban museum, for the brigade’s claim to moral victory lies not in what happened on the beaches. only key pictorial incidents follow, such as the shooting of the us pilots: assassins bodies of pete ray and francis leo baker on the floor of the australian sugar mill after been shot in the head by fernandez mel. both pilots were captured alive but wounded and cold bloodily executed. and: body of a brigade tanker crew killed in action, his boots were taken as souvenirs by the castro communist forces. the aftermath: ten die of hunger and thirst a third ‘key’ incident is the moment during the trial of the defeated exiles, at which the soldier afro-cuban tomas cruz was asked by castro why he had returned when under batista he hadn’t been allowed on the beaches. he replied: ‘i did not come to cuba to swim on the beaches.’ the brigade, given its level of american support, could hardly have succeeded: the strong implication holds that kennedy’s administration never gave it a fair go. by far the most space is given over to the return of the prisoners to miami, more public history review, vol 14, 2007 93 significant to the brigadistas than the assault itself. photographs depict the queuing in havana to board the aircraft, scenes inside the aircraft and people disembarking and greeting relatives. almost every miami cuban over fifty five recalls the extraordinary moment of silence when, on 14 april 1962, the planes carrying the badly wounded arrived at miami airport: gloria morena, then 13 years old, recalls: imagine! they made it! they were on our side! we saw the red carpet with cuban and american flags. it was really the return of grand grand heroes. i just remember the long strip of red carpet leading to the stairs, and this gasp of expectation and joy. joy. i think there was silence first. in the midst of is much tragedy we had extracted these lives. as soon as that door opened. and each stood at the top of the stairs with colonel bogey playing, and they saluted the flag as best they could. some were on crutches, some had no legs, some had no right arm to salute with. such pride, they were standing as tall as they could even in the wheelchair. it was done very slowly. each man was given his moment. there i remember women in the crowed fainting, just fainting from sheer emotion, sisters and grandmothers. we were so proud. it was really a moment when all the best of cuban history had taught us, we were witnessing it again. they were our mambices [freedom fighters against the spanish] of our generation. to me it was the most moving moment in the whole of the playa giron saga. to see these men who had come home, and they were proud and they were saluting the flag. they didn’t come in a despondent mood, they came in a triumphant mood and i think that triumphant mood has carried the brigade ever since.10 yet none of the joy felt so strongly by seemingly everyone present is alluded to. nor does the visitor feel the tumultuous occasion as the guard of honour formed for the president by the brigade members as he entered the miami orange bowl. nor is the roar of approval which followed his promise to return the flag to a free cuba. rather, the photograph of kennedy receiving, from san ramon, the flag which had flown for three days at the command post is reproduced with the ominously simple caption: i can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free havana. the anti-americanism is implied in what is not said. the principal emotion which the brigade museum communicates is the quiet responsibility of the mature macho. in this museum, as in cuba, there is no moral uncertainty. conclusions are already drawn, there can be no alternative view. silences, omissions, oblique references to kennedy’s alleged failed support replace explicit condemnation. but the message is clear. if there is an enemy at all within these walls it is not the castristas nor the cia but kennedy himself. the president is shown shaking hands with the public history review, vol 14, 2007 94 soldiers whom he had earlier – so runs the least sympathetic interpretation – betrayed. a display of congressmen’s letters in tribute to the brigade accentuates the dichotomy between what the president did and what he should have done. outside in the parking lot, in 1996, an old thirty-foot launch lay becalmed on the asphalt. she was ‘la libertad’. the guide explained that she had been used on a number of clandestine missions to cuba and that he would next captain the boat to the island after liberation. thereafter he would never set eyes again upon the us. such a provenance, written out, would be unacceptable: self-censorship is part of the unwritten contract between the brigade and the us administrations. nor have such anti-american sentiments diminished over time. a statement released in march 2005 by the brigade leaders promises that although they ‘do not know hatred’, they ‘reject any kind of dialogue with the dictatorship’ but add, significantly, that ‘they will not permit any foreign interference, whatever it may be, that violates the sovereignty of the republic of cuba’.11 the more subtle messages await the sharp-eyed visitor who has time to talk to the guides and read the closely-typed documents. a pamphlet of the time disingenuously describes the brigade as composed of many races: argentinians, peruvians, north americans, cubans, ‘some military personnel of castro’s army’ and ‘some from the former army’, as if the force was an international peace-loving, anticommunist, well-meaning crusade. the overthrown president batista’s name is nowhere mentioned in the captions. yet a file marked ‘your eyes only’, recently released from the us archives, reveals that the successful brigadistas were to dissociate themselves clearly from the previous government. it was sound advice: few cubans remaining on the island would have welcomed a return of the batistianos after a brigade victory. the guide – but no caption – explains ‘nearly all of us were trained by batista’s army or police – that’s why we went back!’. elsewhere in miami the visitor may even learn a few points not mentioned in the display. a city plaque at some distance from the museum entitled ‘impact of the “bay of pigs” on miami’, reads that the failed assault: did not destroy the dream of returning to cuba but it did make many more look at miami as more than a temporary refuge. careers, education and the starting of new lives became important concerns of the refugees. probably all the brigade members would privately admit this to be true but not everyone would wish it said so publicly. our introduction proposed that the museums share a common culture. one element, as we argued in our 1998 article in this journal, is machismo.12 some of the faces displayed in the chamber of arms of the brigade museum appear, though unidentified, in photographs of the young revolutionaries of 1956-9 in the museum of the revolution in havana. some photographs appear, though with different captions, in both the brigade and the bay of pigs museums. all the brigade members lived in public history review, vol 14, 2007 95 cuba in the 1950s. their leaders were prominent pro-castro revolutionaries before and soon after january 1959. the now deadly foes drank at the same well of armed struggle, brotherhood and guns. of the thousands of revolutionary cubans who later called themselves socialists, patriots, communists or democrats, many had wanted batista to be overthrown and had shouldered arms together to that end. they fought under the same flag, even after they became enemies. nearly all the brigadistas at the time of the invasion had family members still living on the island. some were taken prisoner by their own cousins. castro knew all the brigade leaders by name. once or twice he came to their cells to chat, brandish a pistol at them, offer a drink or ask them why they had changed sides. equally important today is a shared anti-americanism. while castro’s name as ‘villain’ is scarcely mentioned, kennedy’s – pejoratively – is everywhere. in the brigade museum the president makes the (unsourced) remark as the campaign began: ‘if it’s cuba they want to go to, dump them there’. at some points the message is more explicit. a brigade soldier is seen to state: ‘the people we trusted let us down’. at other points the opprobrium is universal: ‘the loss [of the brigade] has caused death, unrest and instability for south american, central american, caribbean and african countries for the past four decades’. the old guard will not resile from its perceived betrayal. ‘we were your allies, your cousins, your family’, whispers the museum, ‘yet you would not help us in our hour of greatest need’. featured is an account of perez garcía, the cuban patriot who became the most highly decorated soldier in the pacific theatre of world war ii: look how much, runs the implication, cubans have helped the americans in battle. nothing is to be found here of the re-assessment of historical interpretations in us museums affecting, for example, slavery. for most of the twentieth century the us heritage industry suffered from slavery-amnesia. in the interpretations of most museums, civil war soldiers fought to save the union rather than to end slavery. tour guides of southern mansions referred to ‘servants’; slave quarters were not part of the tour. guilt and shame seemed to prevent a more open discussion. the attitudes of ‘middle america’ began to change only after television and film spectaculars like roots and amistad.13 yet it is not as though the brigade view of itself is unchallenged. the john f. kennedy presidential library and museum website obliquely blames the landing place, eisenhower, the cia, the miami exiles and the cuban people who failed to rise in support and features a photograph kennedy at the miami bowl.14 while the leadership of each museum remains no new interpretation is at all probable. playa giron will remain locked in a modern-looking but in fact oldfashioned model of public propaganda that is by no means shared by many cuban youth.15 in miami, the brigade museum is more likely to be by-passed without change. a new bay of pigs museum, coupled significantly with the history of the cold war, is planned by a younger generation of cuban exiles. its curators seem less preoccupied with individual heroism while seeking to set the events in a wider latin american context. they aim to: public history review, vol 14, 2007 96 create a modern, world-class cold war museum in miami honoring the ustrained brigade 2506's heroic fight against fidel castro's communist dictatorship in cuba. the high-tech, multimedia museum will preserve the history of the dramatic bay of pigs invasion and describe brigade veteran actions in other conflicts with castro worldwide. it also will honor others who fought for freedom in cuba. the museum will place all these events in the broader cold war context and show how miami was on the front lines in the battle for freedom.16 the playa giron museum is accurate in the microcosmic analysis of the campaign but fails grossly in its interpretation of the reasons for the invasion. its antiimperialism, for political and strategic reasons, is markedly overstated. the brigade museum excludes every emotion except that of quiet and corporatised manly virtue. what unites both museums is the sense of moral victory, not over each other, but over the united states of america. endnotes 1 eduardo garcia, head of the only cuban shipping line still trading with havana, provided five freighters, contracted to the cia, for ‘direct operating costs’ only. 2 this section has been drawn from a variety of sources, including lawrence freedman, kennedy’s wars, oup, new york 2000, ernest may and philip zelikow, the kennedy tapes, belknap press, harvard university press, cambridge, mass., 1997, peter wyden, bay of pigs, simon and schuster, ny 1979, haynes johnson, with manuel artime, jose perez, san roman, erneido oliva and enrique ruiz-williams, the bay of pigs, norton and co, new york, 1964, albert persons, bay of pigs, mcfarland and co, jefferson nc, and nestor carbone, and the russians stayed, william morrow and co, new york, 1989. 3 the most popular tourists spots are a crocodile farm and the recreation area spreading along the road from playa larga to ‘blue beach’ at giron. 4 s. kaprallski, ‘battlefields of memory: landscape and memory in polish-jewish relations’, history and memory, fall 2001, 13, pp35-50. 5 for delgado’s account of the cuban bay of pigs museum see james p. delgado, ‘back to the bay of pigs’, us naval institute [journal], proceedings, april 2001; www.usni.org/proceedings/articles01/prodelgado4.htm; accessed 5 november 2006. 6 josé ramón fernández, ‘la invasion de playa giron, presentado en el proceso judicial por la demanda del pueblo de cuba contra el gobierno de estados unidos por daños humanos, llevado a cabo ante la sala de lo civil y administrativo del tribunal pronvincial popular de cuidad de la habana en mayo de 1999’, in josé ramón fernández and josé pérez fernández, la guerra de eeuu contra cuba, ocean press, la habana, 2001. 7 johnson et al, pp188-9. 8 1821 sw 9th street, sw. 9 for a brief description of the brigade museum in 1996, see m. wyndham and p. read, ‘two museums’, public history review, vols 5/6, 1996-7, pp125-35. 10 interview, miami, 2004. 11 asociación de veteranos de bahia de cochinos. brigada de asalato 2506; ww.brigada2506,com.conf032205.htm, accessed 10 november 2006. 12 wyndham and read, ‘two museums’. 13 ruffins, pp396-434. 14 www.jfklibrary.org/historical+resources/jfk+in+history/jfk+and+the+bay+of+pigs, accessed 21 november 2006. 15 it is unwise to quote opinions verbatim or to name speakers but the authors have obtained a clear sense of dissatisfaction with the current leadership (though not necessarily the prevailing political philosophy) among young cubans. 16 www.bayofpigsmuseum.org/vision.html, accessed 21 november 2006. public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: daley, p. 2021. assorted bastards of australian history. public history review, 28, 1–4. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7788 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj assorted bastards of australian history paul daley doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7788 the image of explorer james cook, sculpted in stone or cast in bronze, is probably the most ubiquitous representation of any historical figure in the australian consciousness and landscape. certainly, it’s hard to think of any long dead person pivotal to australian history and all of its contests whose image is more recognised or recognisable. cook looms as large in australian statuary as he does in nomenclature and, perhaps especially, psyche. to those who still deify him as the explorer at the vanguard of whitehatted colonial enlightenment he remains the neil armstrong of his day – he who sailed where dragons be to bring english light and civility to the oldest continuous civilisation on the planet. to others of this continent, he is a sinister bogey man and a monster, the doorman who ushered in later colonisation with all its extreme violence, dispossession and ills with his east coast arrival in 1770 – in which his first act (just saying) was to personally shoot two gweagal men at kamai. cook’s stylised head – the regal nose and broad lips, that chiselled chin and firm jaw framed by the flowing hair, often peaked by the triangular admiralty commander’s hat – is as ubiquitous in our cultural, natural and urban landscape as he is in our white history books and black oral histories. in 2013 aboriginal sculptor jason wing reinforced this point with his bronze bust captain james crook, the statue’s head covered like that of a cat burglar or bank robber with a balaclava. the head of cook – crook – is instantly recognisable even though it is obscured. indigenous australians and many others have drawn offence from white australia’s deification of cook as continental discoverer since governor thomas brisbane’s 1822 dedication of the first plaque to the great navigator (who the hawaiians had long since chopped into pieces and fed to the fish) on the cliffs close to where the endeavour anchored at kamay. other white men (and women) personally killed more aboriginal people than cook or his crew. yet for indigenous people cook – his name, his image, the contested history of him – is perhaps the most despised and offensive cultural shorthand for dispossession and oppression. in early 2021 a person – or persons (as the cops said) – used a stencil and paint to impose an image of cook’s unmistakable noggin onto the memorial dedicated to tasmanian nuenonne woman, truganini, on bruny island, southeast tasmania. as an exercise in exocettargeted offence against indigenous sensibilities, this act of vandalism could hardly have been more declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7788 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7788 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7788 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7788 pointed. truganini, wrongly cast in nineteenth and twentiethcentury white australian history and anthropology as the ‘last of the tasmanians’, is actually a profound embodiment of indigenous endurance and survival. she lived through the virtual apocalypse that descended on her people and never lost her agency, except perhaps in death when the tasmanian museum put her skeletal remains on display and later traded copies of various of her bones across the globe including with new york’s museum of natural history which, in return, sent the skull of a tyrannosaurus. the modest monument on bruny – vandalised several times previously – makes no grand claims about truganini’s life (of the sort to which she is entitled) simply noting: this memorial is dedicated to the memory of truganini 18121876 compare this to the more than 100 official and unofficial cook statues and memorials across australia – not least the most famous (or infamous) one that has stood in sydney’s hyde park since 1874. it bears the inscription, ‘discovered this territory 1770’. since at least the early twentieth century indigenous rights activists had rightly viewed with mirth and contempt this giant bronze image of cook and its discovery assertion. their objections, if ever they were made publicly, would have fallen on deaf ears (as they still mostly do today) given that the colonists fallaciously believed they were witnessing the extinction of the eora just as they were the passing of truganini’s nuenonne, and that the continent was (given the apparent absence of ‘civilised’ agriculture and archaeology of ancient monumental buildings) already effectively unsettled in 1770. indigenous activism has long focussed on this most distinctive of cook statues, not least during the bicentenary of 1988 when the replica tall ships sailed into the harbour amid the invasion day mass aboriginal protests around sydney. it is testimony to the enduring potency of american cultural ‘crook’ – cook bust with balaclava – by jason wing (national gallery of australia) daley public history review, vol. 28, 20212 imperialism, however, that it was only really in mid 2017 that the statue became a matter of public/political controversy when the television personality stan grant wrote something about how understandably offensive he found it. he did so off the back of an unrelated controversy in the united states about donald trump’s defence of confederate statues. other writers and many prominent indigenous people had long been critiquing the white blindfold nature of monuments, statuary and nomenclature. as you drive around this continent, stop and think about some of the names you’ll see on creeks, roads and beaches. it’s no coincidence there are so many places named skeleton creek in queensland and skull creek in gippsland, the northern territory and western australia. there is a murdering gully in victoria, a skull hole in queensland and a massacre waterfall in centralwest new south wales. i’ve walked the length of a lichenlined furrow through a field of golden native grassland on the atherton tableland, wondering if the howling wind might not be the spirits crying. for the place, boonjie – which was renamed butchers creek with the massacre of its custodians in 1887 – is replete with distressed spirits, a descendant of the dead has assured me. the continent, seeded with indigenous names and stories, has been progressively renamed. cook started this process from the sea as he navigated endeavour up the east coast in 1770. in many places this has been done not to commemorate the deaths of first nations people, but the very act of mass murdering them. leading indigenous activists, historians gary foley and tony birch, have for decades, for example, been blazing the trail on this nomenclature question, successfully taking on major conservative institutions, not least the university of melbourne, over their dedication of bricks and mortar to eugenicists, radical assimilationists, the thieves of ancestral remains and other assorted bastards of australian history. and yet suddenly, in 2017, the fuse was lit about the cook statue in hyde park by stan grant and we had the ‘statue wars’. things subsided. but the issue – the ‘wars’ – would flare up intermittently when statues of cook and colonists who followed began to be vandalised with paint. one of those targeted was the statue of lachlan macquarie, the fifth governor of new south wales. the statue was dedicated in january 2013, an inscription associated with the monument reading, ‘he was a perfect gentleman, a christian and supreme legislator of the human heart’. this is laughable and should, given all that was known about macquarie’s bastardry by 2013, never have been put on the dedication. for if he was a gentleman, macquarie was also a murderer – a syphilitic, calculating killer of aboriginal men, women and children, and thief of indigenous infants from massacre sites, as well as an early proponent of the tactic of ‘terror’ against the blacks around appin, at the foot of the central highlands, whom he regarded as the enemy of his expanding civilisation. the cook statue in hyde park now attracts significant media attention. at best it belongs in a statue museum and, as fallacious as its dedication remains, it can perhaps be dismissed as a contemptible reflection of its times. the same can’t be said of the macquarie statue. it is not a colonial statue. there is no excuse for it. as i’ve written elsewhere, ‘its dramatic misrepresentation of macquarie, given all that was already known about his humanitarian failings at the time of its casting, cannot easily be dismissed with claims that it merely reflects the prevailing sentiment of a bygone era. this statue and the words that accompany it could not be justified in 1816, let alone in 2013 or today. it is, arguably, of negligible historical or cultural value.’1 fast forward to 2020 and the black lives matter resurgence in the wake of the murder of george floyd in the united states, continuing controversy around confederate statues and symbols and the toppling of statues of slavers in the united kingdom. black lives protests naturally followed in australian capitals. daley public history review, vol. 28, 20213 in sydney, protestors converged on hyde park. police, anticipating that cook would be a target, moved in. perhaps the most potent image of that protest remains the photograph of mounted police – side by side with white, right wingers – protecting the 1874 cook statue. as greens mp david shoebridge tweeted, ‘this image tells you just who @nswpolice think they are here to protect and serve #blacklivesmatter’. the cook statue still stands, of course. protected by all sorts of ongoing surveillance and patrols. it is likely to remain in hyde park, just a stone’s throw from that of macquarie… at least until australia gets a statue museum. this seems like a good place to return to that first ever cook monument dedicated in 1822 by governor brisbane – again, not friend of this continent’s indigenes. he waged war against them in bathurst and killed hundreds with musket fire and poison after macquarie retreated to london, syphilitic, alcoholic, lost. the dedication on the plaque reads: under the auspices of british science these shores were discovered by james cook & joseph banks the columbus and maecenas of their time this spot once saw them ardent in the pursuit of knowledge it would overly credit brisbane and his lot to suggest they were somehow cognisant of an indigenous sensibility for animated landscape – a country that at once encapsulates and is created by the stories of emergent men, women and their totems and the events and experiences that unfolds upon topography. but that is what those who cast this monument unwittingly did. for kamay – this spot – saw them arrive. it’s one cook memorial that is worth its weight in irony. endnotes 1. paul daley, ‘heroes, monuments and history’, meanjin quarterly, autumn, 2018. daley public history review, vol. 28, 20214 public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: ashton, p. 2021. statue wars. public history review, 28, 1–12. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7746 issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj statue wars paul ashton doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7746 protest sydney, friday 12 june 2020, 6pm it was cold and raining lightly. a crowd of over 300 people had gathered around sydney town hall. most of them were wearing face masks. it was surrounded by some of the 600 police on special duty in the city. they were standing in front of a temporary orange and yellow plastic road barrier. all of them had face masks on. the crowd was displaying placards. written on these were catchphrases such as: aboriginal lives matter black lives matter we live on stolen land no more black deaths in police custody 434 deaths since 1991 royal commission into indigenous deaths in custody one large placard read: david dungay hill jr 26-year-old dunghutti man killed in long bay jail 29 december 2015 lest we forget wide banners displayed the names of some of the organisations involved: indigenous social justice association autonomous collective against racism anticolonial asian alliance one of the organisers raised a megaphone to her mouth. ‘attention everyone… please.’ the protestors quietened down. ‘the police have informed us that this demonstration is illegal.’ the protestors got a little agitated. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7746 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7746 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7746 ‘hang on,’ said the organiser. ‘they’re actually right. we didn’t lodge an application to hold it. but it’s not illegal to walk around hyde park. so let’s all go there. and don’t forget to social distance at least 1.5 metres apart. you can be arrested under the covid-19 regulations for getting too close to other people.’ jaya and asha were sisters. jaya, the older one, was doing cultural studies and history at university. asha was studying law and politics. they were standing with the other protestors in the drizzle. ‘should we go to the park?’ asked asha. ‘why not,’ said jaya. ‘as long as we don’t break any laws the police can’t arrest us.’ ‘but what if something goes wrong?’ ‘don’t worry ashie. aunty pauline gave me fifty bucks. she said if things go bad we should jump in the first cab we see and go home.’ hyde park was two blocks east of the town hall. the crowd started moving towards it. ‘let’s go to hyde park south’, said jaya. ‘and see what happening around the cook statue.’ the larger-than-life statue of captain james cook stands on a huge granite pedestal. he holds out a telescope in his left hand. his right arm is extended upward. he gazes over to the harbour. in the mid 1860s some rich sydney society people decided that the city needed a statue of cook. when they found out that queen victoria’s second eldest son – prince albert – was coming to australia they got very excited. this was the first royal visit to the colonies. perhaps the prince could unveil the statue? but there was a problem. no one in australia could make the bronze sculpture. so it had to be cast overseas and shipped to sydney. but there wasn’t enough time. the sydney society people had an idea. they could commission a foundation stone for the statue. and the prince could unveil that. brilliant! prince alfred unveiled the foundation stone on 27 february 1868 in front of a huge crowd. two weeks later he was shot in the back at clontarf by an angry irish catholic, henry o’farrell. the prince didn’t die. he sailed home on 4 april 1868. henry o’farrell was hanged in darlinghurst jail 17 days later. another problem arose. a committee was formed to raise money for the statue from the citizens of sydney. it put adds in the papers asking for contributions. but hardly anyone gave money. the committee got annoyed. it had nowhere near enough money to commission a statue. so it decided to get someone to make a huge granite pedestal out of polished granite from moruya. they could engrave things on it like: discovered this territory, 1770 born at marton in yorkshire, 1728 killed at owyhee [hawai’i], 1779 but they didn’t even have enough money to do that. so the centenary of cook’s ‘discovery’ of eastern australia came and went – statueless. eventually the colonial secretary sir henry parkes – who later became premier – got fed up. he wrote to the english sculptor thomas woolner and commissioned him to send a design for the statue. the statue was unveiled on 25 february 1879. twelve thousand people marched in a procession from the domain to the town hall and then to hyde park. sixty thousand people watched the event from the footpaths along the way. ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20212 the cook statue asha and jaya walked down park street in a stream of protestors. police were everywhere. they crossed castlereagh street, then walked along elizabeth street to traffic lights halfway down the block, then over a zebra crossing to some stairs. they climbed them into hyde park south. they stopped at the top of the stairs. ‘oh my god!’ said jaya with surprise. around 100 protestors were scattered across hyde park south. but there were just about as many masked police. a dozen of them formed a ring around the cook statue. ‘i’m not surprised,’ said asha. ‘statues like this have been trashed everywhere. like the one of edward colston – the slave trader. his statue got pushed into bristol harbour last week.’ ‘yeah. i saw footage of that on a bbc broadcast. and there’ll be tonnes of other statues targeted here.’ ‘yep. that’s why they’re here. though we couldn’t get cookie into the harbour. he’s too big and it’s too far away.’ ‘true. but someone might spray paint him.’ ‘wouldn’t be surprised. but not while all those cops are there.’ ‘let’s have a wander around the park,’ said jaya. ‘but don’t forget to keep apart. those police don’t look to happy.’ after walking for a few minutes they came across a young woman having an argument with a policeman. ‘that’s rachael,’ asha whispered to jaya. the policeman was angry. ‘listen,’ he said glaring. ‘it was made clear during the week that this protest is unauthorised. you shouldn’t be here. and i’ve directed you to move on.’ ‘i don’t care,’ rachael replied. ‘someone has to make a stand about black deaths in custody.’ ‘i know you don’t care. but what you also don’t care about is other people’s health.’ ‘what?’ snapped rachael. ‘you’re breaching a public health order about not meeting in big numbers. the pandemic’s still a serious risk. and you’re endangering the lives of members of the public – not to mention police officers. and now you’re refusing to follow my instructions. do you want to be arrested?’ ‘no!’ ‘are you going to move on and go home?’ ‘no!’ ‘well that’s too bad.’ ‘what do you mean?’ ‘i need to inform you that you are under arrest for failing to comply with a move on direction. you’ll be taken to central police station, charged for breaching a public health order and issued with a penalty.’ ‘do i have to go to jail?’ ‘no. after the notice has been issued you’ll be free to go. but you’ll have to appear in court later over the matter. okay. come with me.’ the officer lead rachael away. ‘bloody hell,’ said asha. ‘i’ve never seen anyone arrested before – except in movies or on tv.’ ‘me either,’ said jaya. ‘what should we do?’ ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20213 ‘well we’ve been here a couple of hours. and the weather’s not too good.’ ‘maybe we should use aunty pauline’s money and get a uber home?’ ‘i think you’re right, ashie,’ replied jaya. ‘the last thing an undergraduate law student needs is a criminal record.’ very early the following morning two other young women caught the train from panania to museum station – under hyde park south. they crept into the park and made their way silently to the cook statue. they were carrying a grey backpack. the protestors and police had been long gone. and it was still drizzling. ‘there’s the statue,’ said one of them. ‘be quick. i saw a police car driving along college street a moment ago.’ the other young woman unzipped the backpack and pulled out two cans of black spray paint. ‘here,’ she whispered, shaking one can and passing it to her friend. ‘you know what to do.’ over some of the inscriptions on the pedestal they sprayed: change the date no pride in genocide to spray or not to spray asha and jaya were having breakfast in the kitchen of their little flat in erskinville. ‘anything interesting in the paper?’ asked jaya. asha passed the newspaper to her. ‘there’s a front-page story about the protest. and a picture of the police surrounding the cook statue.’ jaya scanned the article. ‘hey. it says that two women – aged 27 and 28 – were arrested near the park early this morning. the statue had been graffitied. and they were caught with a bag containing two spray cans of black paint.’ ‘what did they spray on the statue?’ ‘it doesn’t say.’ she read out part of the article. ‘council workers moved quickly this morning to clean the statue, according to a city of sydney spokesperson.’ she kept reading. we are not aware of any other statues having been vandalised. the women have been refused bail and will appear at bankstown local court today… police said they would continue “proactive patrols” in the hyde park area. historical statues all over the world have been defaced, damaged or pulled down by protestors or removed or boarded up by authorities for protection. this followed the death of african american man george floyd in minneapolis on 25 may. protests have been held globally against racism and police brutality. nsw premier gladys berejiklian said “let’s not forget that those who are disrespecting these statues or monuments are a very small number of people and i think the vast majority would be very upset at what’s occurred.” ‘i don’t think that’s right,’ said asha. ‘neither do i,’ jaya replied. ‘this article even said that this is happening all over the world.’ ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20214 ‘and it’s happening all over australia,’ said asha. ‘someone put red paint on the hands of a statue of robert towns in townsville. it was on the news. he was involved in the slave trade. his ships brought people from pacific islands to work on plantations in queensland.’ ‘wasn’t he one of the founders of townsville?’ ‘i think so.’ ‘i’ll google him.’ asha picked up her phone. ‘um. let’s see. robert towns. here it is. it says that he claimed that he was not involved in kidnapping islanders or forcing them to work on plantations. but people working for him were.’ ‘that’s ridiculous.’ ‘i know.’ ‘so what bad things did cook do?’ ‘let’s look on your laptop.’ jaya got her computer from her bedroom. ‘there’s an entry on him in the australian dictionary of biography.’ she ran her eyes quickly over it. ‘it really doesn’t say anything bad about him. apart from opening up the way for the british colonisation of australia.’ ‘does it say anything about what he did while he was here?’ ‘not really. just that he reached the east coast in april 1770 and sailed up it. but it does say he was… severe on uncompliant natives whom he met on his voyages, and his readiness to use force contributed to his untimely death. ‘how did he die?’ asked asha. ‘it doesn’t say. i’ll check wikipedia.’ ‘ah,’ she said moments later, ‘he was killed on 14 february 1779 at kealakekua [karakakooa] bay in hawai’i after he tried to kidnap the island’s king to get back a boat that had been taken by ‘natives’ from one of his ships. and it mentions that he wrote detailed daily entries in his journal.’ ‘can you find it online?’ ‘let’s see.’ she typed in james cook’s journal. ‘here it is.’ asha moved her chair next to jaya’s. ‘cool. it’s a web edition of cook’s endeavour journal. his ship was called the endeavour. find the entries for april.’ jaya started skimming through the daily entries for april. she was a fast reader. ‘sailing west from new zealand. no land sighted. gentle breezes. swells. more breezes. still sailing west.’ she got to 19 april. ‘land ho, asha!’ she read from the entry. the southermost point of land we had in sight which bore from us w1/4s i judged to lay in the latitude of 38°..0’ south and in the longitude of 211°..07’ west from the meridion of greenwich. i have named it point hicks, because leuit hicks was the first who discover’d this land – ‘there’s that word,’ said asha. ‘discovered.’ ‘yeah. funny that cook writes about seeing smoke rising from lots of places along a beach. they would have been lit by aborigines to cook fish.’ ‘where did they first land?’ jaya kept scrolling through the journal. ‘here it is, asha,’ she said reading out part of the entry. ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20215 saturday 28 april in the pm being now not above two miles from the shore mr banks, dr solander, tupia and myself put off in the yawl [boat] and pull’d in for the land to a place where we saw four or five of the natives who took to the woods as we approached the shore which disappointed us… ‘does it say where?’ ‘not on this page.’ jaya scrolled to the next entry. ‘but i’m pretty sure it was botany bay. listen to this.’ sunday 29 april in the pm saw as we came in on both points of the bay several of the natives and a few hutts, men, women and children on the south shore abreast of the ship to which place i went in the boats in hopes of speaking with them accompanied by mr banks dr  solander and tupia  – as we approached the shore they all made off except two men who seem’d resolved to oppose our landing… we then threw them some nails, beeds etc a shore which they took up and seem’d not ill pleased in so much that i thout that they beckon’d to us to come ashore but in this we were mistaken for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us upon which i fired a musket between the two which had no other effect than to make them retire back where bundles of their darts [spears] lay and one of them took up a stone and threw at us which caused my firing a second musquet load with small shot and altho’ some of the shot struck the man yet it had no other effect than to make him lay hold of a shield to defend himself… ‘he was quick to use force,’ said asha. ‘yeah. and he certainly knew they weren’t welcome. look at this bit.’ monday 30 april … in the afternoon 16 or 18 of them came boldly up to within 100 yards of our people at the watering place and there made a stand – mr hicks who was the officer ashore did all in his power to entice them to him by offering them presents… but it was to no purpose  all they seem’d to want was for us to be gone – after staying a short time they went away they were all arm’d with darts and wooden swords, the darts have each four prongs and pointed with fish bones and those we have seen seem to be intend more for striking fish than offensive weapons… jaya moved on to the next page. ‘do you want to know how sutherland shire got its name?’ ‘how?’ ‘listen to this.’ tuesday 1 may last night torby sutherland seaman departed this life and in the morning  his body was buried ashore at the watering place which occasioned my calling the south point of this bay after his name. this morning a party of us went ashore to some hutts not far from the watering place where some of the natives are daily seen, here we left several articles such as cloth, looking glasses, combs, beeds, nails & etc… ‘so it is botany bay,’ said asha. ‘definitely. but it must have been renamed that. listen to this.’ ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20216 sunday 6 may in the evening the yawl [boat] return’d from fishing having caught two sting rays weighing near 600 pounds [272 kilos]. the great quantity of this sort of fish found in this place occasioned my giving it the name of sting-ray harbour… asha typed something into her phone. ‘what are you looking for asha?’ ‘remember that rhyme we used to say in primary school?’ ‘which one?’ ‘captain cook chased a chook.’ ‘vaguely.’ ‘i just found it.’ she read from her phone. captain cook chased a chook all around australia when he got back he got a smack for being a naughty sailor ‘well a lot of indigenous people would’ve liked to have smacked him,’ said jaya. statue tour ‘are you doing anything this afternoon?’ asked asha as she washed the breakfast dishes. ‘nothing much,’ replied jaya. ‘got any plans?’ ‘there’s a tour of city statues at three o’clock advertised in the paper. do you want to go?’ ‘okay.’ ‘are you sure? it looks like it might rain.’ ‘a bit of rain won’t hurt us. we’ll can take our storm sticks.’ ‘what’s a storm stick?’ ‘our brollies.’ ‘oh. very funny. i’ll book a couple of tickets online.’ asha and jaya caught a bus to central station and walked to the town hall. the tour guide was waiting at the bottom of the front stairs. her name tag read ‘vij’. she was carrying a red umbrella. ‘hi there,’ said the guide. ‘i’m vij. and you guys must be asha and jaya.’ ‘how did you know?’ asked asha. ‘you’re the only ones taking the tour today. all the others cancelled due to the weather.’ ‘that’s great for us,’ said jaya. ‘it’ll be like a private tour.’ ‘sure will,’ said the tour guide. ‘well, we might as well get started. we don’t have to wait for anyone.’ ‘what’s up first?’ asked asha. the guide pointed across the road. ‘queen victoria’s statue.’ the guide pushed the walk button on the traffic light. while they waited she pointed out a small bust of a man on a sandstone plinth on the edge of the footpath. ‘he’s not on the tour but that’s llyod rees. he was a famous artist. and he loved sydney.’ ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20217 ‘i’ve heard of him vij,’ said jaya. ‘me too,’ said asha. ‘most people haven’t,’ said the guide. ‘and it’s amazing how many people walk past the sculpture without noticing it. for some people it’s sort of invisible.’ the lights changed. they walked across druitt street to the large bronze statue of queen victoria. ‘okay,’ vij began. ‘you need to know something about the building behind it to understand this sculpture. it opened in 1898 to commemorate the queen’s diamond jubilee and was know as the queen victoria market buildings. it was a produce market. you could buy fruit and vegies, flowers, chooks and rabbits – all sorts of produce. over the years it got run down and in the 1980s a developer – ipoh gardens – restored it. but they wanted to put an old statue of the queen in the square in front of the building… how am i going girls?’ ‘great,’ they said. ‘good. the hunt for a suitable statue began in 1983.the guy in charge was neil glasser. he travelled through india, pakistan, south yemen and turkey looking for a statue. he found a few good ones. but nobody wanted to part with them. finally he found one dumped in a farmhouse in ireland. it had been removed from the front of the irish parliament in dublin after the granting of irish independence from the british.’ ‘fascinating,’ said jaya. ‘the irish connection is really interesting.’ ‘our family name is keaney,’ said asha. ‘it’s irish.’ ‘yes, i noticed,’ said the guide. ‘there are lots of layers to these statues. you have to know a fair bit about them to read them properly. otherwise you can’t really understand them.’ ‘i see,’ said jaya. ‘have a look at the plaque here at the front,’ said the guide walking over to it. ‘why don’t you read it to us asha.’ ‘okay,’ said asha. at the request of the city of sydney this statue was presented by the government and people of ireland in a spirit of goodwill and friendship until 1947 it stood in front of leinster house dublin the seat of the irish parliament sculptured by john hughes rha dublin 1865-1941 unveiled on 20th december 1987 by sir eric neal chief commissioner l.p. carter obe town clerk sir nicholas sheadie [sha-hay-dee] obe deputy chief commissioner m. norman oakes ao commissioner ‘so, vij, what does this mean?’ asked jaya. ‘well it’s like a potted history of the statue. and a record of all the important men who unveiled it here. but there are some other clues.’ ‘like what?’ asked asha. ‘look at the first line. it says city of sydney.’ ‘yes,’ said asha. ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20218 ‘that’s a council, isn’t it.’ ‘yeah. the sydney city council.’ ‘okay. who’s the head of a council?’ ‘the mayor?’ ‘yes. and in sydney’s case it’s a lord mayor.’ ‘so?’ ‘so where’s the lord mayor’s name?’ asha and jaya looked at the plaque again. ‘there’s no lord mayor,’ said asha. ‘that’s right! in the lead up to the bicentenary in 1988 the state government wanted the sydney city council to approve a huge amount of development in the city – mainly hotels. but it wouldn’t. it was controlled by independent councillors. one of them was jack mundey. he was the famous trade unionist who was involved in the 1970s green bans in sydney. so the state government sacked the council and replaced it with commissioners. this was the fourth time in its history that the council had been sacked by the state government.’ ‘so this statue’s really about politics,’ said asha. ‘all statues are about politics,’ replied the guide. ‘we better get moving,’ said the guide. ‘we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.’ they walked through the centre of the city for over an hour visiting captain cook’s statue in hyde park south; the archibald fountain; another statue of queen victoria and of her husband – albert the good – near hyde park barracks; down macquarie street to the statue of matthew flinders at the state library – and his cat, trim; to the statue of governor bourke – who approved a new settlement on the yarra river in 1835 and named it melbourne; then to the shakespeare statue; and finally to a statue of henry lawson in mrs macquarie’s road. ‘well, asha and jaya,’ said the guide, ‘this is the last one.’ ‘henry lawson,’ said asha gazing up at the life size bronze statue. ‘is that a sheep dog vij?’ ‘yes, asha,’ the guide replied. ‘and that’s a swagman sitting down just behind him.’ ‘so what does this tell us?’ asked jaya. ‘it tells us a few obvious things. his years of birth and death – 1867 to 1922; the things that he wrote about – bushmen, the bush, mateship, ordinary people and the important roles that animals have played in australia history – and that he stood up for ordinary people.’ ‘i can see that,’ said jaya walking slowly around the statue. ‘but you have to ask yourself a question.’ ‘what question?’ asked jaya. ‘which people?’ ‘i don’t get it?’ said jaya. ‘these monuments are often silent about many things. for example, it doesn’t tell you that lawson was an alcoholic. he wrote a short story called the boozer’s home. it was about a place that lawson was sent to dry out. in it he talks about the superiority of white people.’ ‘so was he racist?’ asked asha. ashton public history review, vol. 28, 20219 ‘yes. and it’s scattered through his writing. during the nineteenth century some people went around digging up aboriginal skeletons.’ ‘why?’ asked jaya. ‘they’d sell them to museums and collectors. lot’s of british and european museums had – and still have – aboriginal skeletal collections.’ ‘what’s that got to do with lawson?’ asked asha with great interest. ‘did lawson dig up aboriginal bones?’ ‘i don’t think so. but he wrote about it in one of his stories – the bush undertaker. and the way he wrote about it made it look as if there was nothing particularly wrong with doing it.’ the guide took her phone from her back pocket. ‘i’ve got some notes here. let’s see. these are a few lines from the story. it’s christmas day. and an old shepherd and his sheep dog are living in a slab-and-bark hut near a creek on an isolated property. he says to his dog: ‘i’ll take a pick an’ shovel with me an’ root [dig] up that old blackfellow’: he set to work to dig it up and sure enough in about half an hour he bottomed on payable dirt… when he had raked up all the bones he amused himself by putting them together on the grass… henry lawson memorial, mrs macquarie’s road, sydney (photograph paul ashton) ashton public history review, vol. 28, 202110 ‘you can understand why people get so furious with some of these statues,’ said asha. ‘that’s true ashie,’ said jaya. ‘but i’m not sure how many people would know this stuff about lawson.’ ‘so how did you get to know all this stuff, vij,’ asked asha. ‘research.’ acknowledgements this short story has been primarily written for students in upper primary school to junior high school. the main sources drawn on are louella mccarthy and paul ashton (eds), sydney open museum historical survey, sydney city council, sydney, 1994 and james cook’s journal daily entries available at http:// southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/cook/17700428.html (accessed 19 october 2020). thanks to naomi crago, archivist at the sydney city council archives, for assistance regarding the cook statue. teacher notes this story is one of the titles in the forthcoming young people’s book series published by halstead press (sydney and canberra). the following teacher notes and activities for students are based on the australian national history curriculum. key themes australia and the world australia in the nineteenth century australia in the twentieth century civics and citizenship colonial australia sub themes aboriginal and torres strait islanders crime democracy heritage law monuments and memorials nation and nationalism racism australian curriculum connections history year 5 inquiry questions what do we know about the lives of people in australia’s colonial past and how do we know? what were the significant events and who were significant people that shaped australian colonies? humanities and social sciences year 6 inquiry questions how did australian society change throughout the twentieth century? ashton public history review, vol. 28, 202111 http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/cook/17700428.html http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/cook/17700428.html english: literature year 5 literature and context identify aspects of literary texts that convey details or information about particular social, cultural and historical contexts. responding to literature present a point of view about particular literary texts using appropriate metalanguage and reflecting on the viewpoints of others. english: literature year 6 literature and context make connections between students’ own experiences and those of characters and events represented in texts drawn from different historical, social and cultural contexts. responding to literature analyse and evaluate similarities and differences in texts on similar topics, themes or plots. examining literature identify, describe and discuss similarities and differences between texts, including those by the same author or illustrator, and evaluate characteristics that define an author’s individual style. activities • use information in section 1. design a placard or a banner for the protest march. • from section 1. make a timeline about the planning and building of the captain cook statue. • from sections 1 and 3. where was captain cook killed? why was he killed? • from section 2. who was edward colston? use the internet to find out more about what happened to the statue of him in bristol. • from section 3. who was robert towns? find out more about him. • from section 3. pretend you are an officer on board the endeavour. write a journal entry for one of the days you were in botany bay. use some of cook’s journal entries to do this. • from section 3. cook’s entry in the australian dictionary of biography says that he was quick to use force on natives who did not do what he wanted. can you find evidence in one of his diary entries to support that claim? • at the end of section 3 asha read out part of rhyme called ‘captain cook chased a chook’. write a verse of your own. • from section 4. write a paragraph about henry lawson. • find a statue somewhere in australia. do a powerpoint presentation on it. • write a paragraph about the following question. what would you do with an old statue that has now become offensive to some people? present your answer to the class. • what were the statue wars? write three paragraphs or design a poster about them. ashton public history review, vol. 28, 202112 public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: kean, h. 2021. making public history: statues and memorials. public history review, 28, 1–7. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7763 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj making public history: statues and memorials hilda kean doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7763 in working on this edition keira lindsay and mariko smith have asked ‘whether monuments should be deconstructed, reconstructed or destroyed.’1 clearly attention to statues and memorials has recently been explored in many countries. certainly in britain there has been much discontent as i shall explain, yet opposition to particular statues has seemed to ignore and overlook progressive memorials and historical measures – towards black and ethnic minority groups that have been widely developed and supported in the past. now but then … bristol, a former slave port in the west of england, has been critically and historically discussed for decades. madge dresser’s work, for example, has critically analysed the properties of slave owners and discussed the hostility of local workers to black bus drivers.2 over twenty years ago sally j. morgan looked carefully at the bristol opposition to edward colston, a former slave owner, a statue of whom has been displayed in the centre of bristol for many years. as she explained, there was a significant history of attempts to remove the statue which was ‘traced to the city’s controlling mercantile class as represented by the society of merchant venturers, established in the 16th century and still going strong, who have contrived to forget almost as much as they demand we remember.’3 yet in recent months under the aegis of black lives matter the statue was quickly destroyed as if this was almost a new position.4 court action against the four people who took down and damaged the colston statue in june 2020 has initially taken place and now due to be heard at the bristol crown court in december 2021. the four men have previously pleaded ‘not guilty’ and are on unconditional bail.5 in just recent days in june 2021 the damaged edward colston statue was displayed in the m shed museum in bristol, now open. visitors are asked to fill in a survey explaining what they think should happen next. that is, the display is seen as the ‘start of the conversation, not a completed exhibition’. comments will be considered. ‘we are bristol history commission’ was established by the local labour mayor, marvin rees, who was reelected in may 2021. its role is to ‘build an improved shared understanding of the city’s story’. several local historians are members including, positively, dr madge dresser, noted in this article.6 yet while the council acknowledges the former role of several historians this needs to be considered declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7763 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7763 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7763 appropriately. for example, on a recent bbc2 documentary, alongside the recent display of the statue, entitled statue wars: one summer in bristol, no attention was paid to the past historical antislavery issues over many decades.7 in addition to bristol, other slavery memorials seemed to go untouched and unrecognised. in the city of london the statue of william beckford remains almost unknown in the guildhall. as madge dresser explained thirteen years ago: ‘the evidence linking william beckford (1709–70) to slavery is widely available and overwhelming. beckford, twice lord mayor, was the freespending son of a wealthy sugar planter and owed much of his position to his ownership of some 3,000 africans enslaved on his numerous jamaican plantations.’8 he wrote and spoke in defence of political freedom to which his statue attests but not the sort of freedom that was the source of his wealth.9 although this too has been discussed by historians it seems largely unknown by recent activists. former nineteenthcentury memorials in london and edinburgh in london’s trafalgar square a column was erected in 1843 to horatio nelson who died at the battle of trafalgar in 1805. while the nature of statues throughout the square have been somewhat criticised in recent years,10 attention is rarely paid to the presence of a black sailor positively engaged in battle,11 present on the column’s black plaque. this is even overlooked when radical demonstrations are held in the square!12 there exists a memorial in old calton burial ground in edinburgh in scotland to past military events. george bissell’s work was unveiled in 1893 ostensibly in memory of five named scottishamerican soldiers who had fought in the american civil war. however, on top is a statue of abraham lincoln and at the bottom a bronze lifesized figure of a slave promoting a more specific antislavery message.13 former slave, looking upwards to abraham lincoln, old calton burial ground, edinburgh, 1893 (photograph hilda kean) rereading past histories there have also been alternatives to statues and commemorations occurring through local organisations but these have been completely overlooked in recent activities. in the financial city of london, a representation kean public history review, vol. 28, 20212 exists in stark juxtaposition to that of william beckford’s. ‘the gilt of cain’, a sitespecific work in fen court, is near the lloyds building and was erected twelve years ago. this city garden is the site of a churchyard of the former st gabriel’s fenchurch street, now in the parish of st edmund the king and st mary woolnoth. the latter church had strong connections to the abolition movement. john newton, the former slave trader, and subsequently antislavery campaigner, was rector from 1780 to 1807. ‘the gilt of cain’ combines material of the scottish sculptor michael visocchi with lemn sissay’s poetry and was opened in 2008 by desmond tutu. visually, the sculpture consists of variously sized cylindrical columns, resembling sugarcane – or possibly human figures. gilt of cain by michael visocchi (with lemn sissay), city of london, 2008 (photograph hilda kean) as visocchi explained, ‘the idea was that i could somehow use these sugar cane shapes so that they could be read on the site as figures, as anthropomorphic forms – and therefore could they not then surround a pulpit as a congregation?’14 the work was initiated by black british heritage, chaired by ken martindale, who was involved in community politics for many years, including the notting hill carnival.15 near lancaster, once the fourth largest slave port in england, a grave to sambo (sic), a slave who died shortly after arriving in the 1730s, was subsequently commemorated in the early nineteenth century with a gravestone and an engraved plate in sunderland point.16 in the early twenty first century signposts were erected to the grave and visitation was encouraged. teachers brought children who placed painted and decorated stones nearby. other work in lancaster included the erection of a memorial outside the former customs house in st george’s quay recalling ‘captured africans’. it was sculpted by kevin daltonjohnson using stone, steel and acrylic. although funded by public money, the initiative was created by local people, encouraged by alan rice, an advisor to the slave trade arts memorial project (stamp). much of his academic work included ‘the politics of memory in the black atlantic’. by simply living locally in the town he helped create further attention to the nearby history of the slave trade.17 kean public history review, vol. 28, 20213 such histories critical of former racism and positive public memorials in various formats are obviously not just part of the british experience. for example, in australia, an article of 2006 discussed the location of the dog on the tucker box in gundagai, in new south wales, while referring to the place of ‘the most famous flood in australian history’ of 1852 where a local aboriginal man, yarri (and subsequently jackey jackey), rescued sixty nine white people from the massively swollen and dangerous waters of the murrumbidgee river. in recent years a concrete bridge was named after him and a new monument was erected in north gundagai cemetery18 since this had been ‘in the memory of gundagai people for generations’.19 a later monument to yarri and jackey jackey – who both saved white people – was unveiled locally in june 2017 in central gundagai.20 yet a recent article referring to gundagai describes the dog as ‘one of australia’s most successful purposebuilt tourist attractions’ but gave no attention to local rereadings of aboriginal contributions to past events and more recent recognition of this.21 public history and local people local commemorations of groups of ethnic minority people have clearly developed in different ways. it has also been the case – despite coverage in, for example, the guardian22 – that books, societies and campaigns ‘captured africans’ by kevin daltonjohnson, lancaster, 2005 (photograph hilda kean) kean public history review, vol. 28, 20214 have existed positively for many years. one of the most popular books – apparently widely ignored by many activists in recent events – is peter fryer’s staying power: the history of black people in britain published by pluto press in 1984 and only recently promoted on a particular british library website.23 however, specific attention paid in schools to antiracist historical curriculum had been widely abolished beyond recognition such as that developed by the ilea alongside radical teachers in altarf from 1978 into the 1980s. their publication challenging racism explored the strategies implemented in a range of schools.24 from the early 1990s academics particularly emphasised black history including kushner and lunn who edited the politics of marginality.25 in 1991 the black and asian studies association (basa), a public organization, was developed ‘to foster research and to disseminate information on the history of black peoples in britain’.26 beyond the status quo of the government’s proscriptions on black history, radical teachers, such as martin spafford, developed black history in schools, though this was not a common practice. basa’s lobbying of the government’s curriculum position, including bringing teachers and school students to confront a dfe official, resulted in agreed new historical curriculum. subsequently spafford and others issued textbooks of migration, empire and the historic environment arising from changes agreed in the gcse history curriculum from 2016 with the first exams in 2018.27 such progressive activity towards people’s own interest in radical history and their own positions has been seen in many public history works. public history books have often referred to local community groups in the making of history, for example district six museum in south africa, the golconda oral history in trinidad and maori developments in new zealand.28 others also emphasised the projection of public historians towards people’s projects and the actions and agency of people themselves. yarri’s monument , north gundagai cemetery, erected 1990 (photograph hilda kean) kean public history review, vol. 28, 20215 certainly those interested in public history have recently pursued activities commemorating, say, a drowned black south african from a nearby southeastern channel or analysing the commemoration of african and caribbean troops, also from the first world war, in london.29 but at a recent zoom conference called ‘doing public history in lockdown and beyond’, public history was distinctly an area of higher education.30 one contributor explained online; ‘we want to find new ways to engage as academics with contemporary struggles, to learn from activists, and to see how we can use what expertise and institutional resources we have to provide active solidarity.’31 whether this suggests strengthening the role of academic historians and telling activists what to do seems somewhat ambiguous about acknowledging other people’s positions. recently my article in a companion to public history emphasised the question: ‘where is public history seeing different approaches to a set definition?’ i referred positively paul martin’s view that ‘it empowers the individual in their sense of ownership and as a contribution to what history is and how it is made.’32 perhaps thinking broadly and creatively about public history in the current climate still needs consideration. endnotes 1. see https://www.uts.edu.au/researchandteaching/ourresearch/australiancentrepublichistory/eventsand seminars/historyweek2020/publicprotestandpublichistorystatuewarsiipublichistoryhourarchive (accessed 6 october 2020). 2. madge dresser, slavery obscured: the social history of the slave trade in an english provincial port. continuum new york 2001 (and 2016); black and white on the buses: the 1963 colour bar dispute in bristol, bristol broadsides, bristol, c1986. 3. sally j. morgan, ‘memory and the merchants: commemoration and civic identity’, international journal of heritage studies, vol 4, no 2, 1998, p104. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527259808722225 4. ‘court action now continues’, daily telegraph, 18 september 2020, p8 https://thebristolcable.org/2021/03/colston4to standtrialatbristolcrowncourton13december/ from court decision on 2 march 2021 (accessed 11 june 2021). 5. ibid. 6. see https://exhibitions.bristolmuseums.org.uk/thecolstonstatue/?utm_source=whatson&utm_medium=referral& utm_campaign=colston (accessed 11 june 2021). 7. see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wvzx 10 june 2021 which has been available for eleven months. 8. dresser, ‘set in stone? statues and slavery in london’, history workshop journal, vol 64, no 1, autumn 2007, pp162– 199. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbm032 9. john siblon, ‘“monument mania”?: public space and the black and asian presence in the london landscape’, in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), people and their pasts: public history today, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2009/2012, pp146162. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_9 10. see, for example, leon kuhn and colin gill, topple the mighty, friction books, kilmarnock, 2005. 11. siblon, op cit, pp150152. 12. afua hirsch, ‘toppling statues? here’s why nelson’s column should be next’, guardian, 22 august 2017 https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/22/topplingstatuesnelsonscolumnshouldbenextslavery (accessed 10 september 2020). 13. see ‘the only monument to the american civil war outside the us. a statue of abraham lincoln standing over a freed slave’, the scotsman, 15 february 2016 available at https://www.scotsman.com/whatson/artsandentertainment/why theremonumentabrahamlincolnedinburgh1482881 (accessed 6 september 2020). 14. alan rice, creating memorials building identities: the politics of memory in the black atlantic, liverpool university press, liverpool, 2010, p18. 15. hilda kean, ‘where is public history?’, in david dean (ed), a companion to public history, wiley blackwell, chichester, 2018, pp 3840. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118508930.ch2 16. hilda kean, ‘personal and public histories’, in brian graham and peter howard (eds), the ashgate research companion to heritage and identity, ashgate, aldershot, 2008, pp5658. 17. rice, op cit, pp3254. 18. hilda kean, ‘public history and two australian dogs: islay and the dog on the tucker box,’ ach: the journal of the history of culture in australia, no2425, 2006, pp1501. kean public history review, vol. 28, 20216 https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/australian-centre-public-history/events-and-seminars/history-week-2020/public-protest-and-public-history-statue-wars-ii-public-history-hour-archive https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/australian-centre-public-history/events-and-seminars/history-week-2020/public-protest-and-public-history-statue-wars-ii-public-history-hour-archive https://doi.org/10.1080/13527259808722225 https://thebristolcable.org/2021/03/colston-4-to-stand-trial-at-bristol-crown-court-on-13-december/ https://thebristolcable.org/2021/03/colston-4-to-stand-trial-at-bristol-crown-court-on-13-december/ https://exhibitions.bristolmuseums.org.uk/the-colston-statue/?utm_source=whatson&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=colston https://exhibitions.bristolmuseums.org.uk/the-colston-statue/?utm_source=whatson&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=colston https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wvzx https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbm032 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_9 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/22/toppling-statues-nelsons-column-should-be-next-slavery https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/22/toppling-statues-nelsons-column-should-be-next-slavery https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/why-there-monument-abraham-lincoln-edinburgh-1482881 https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/why-there-monument-abraham-lincoln-edinburgh-1482881 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118508930.ch2 19. wardiningsih soerjohardjo, ‘remembering yarrie: an indigenous australian and the 1852 gundagai flood’, public history review, no 19, 2012, p128. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v19i0.3096 20. see also a photograph of the statues of the two men https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitvnews/article/2017/06/13/ wiradjuriheroeshonouredgundagaisculpture (accessed 29 september 2020). 21. richard white, ‘the true story of gundagai’s dog on the tuckerbox: tourists, truth and the insouciance of souvenirs’, journeys, vol 17, no 2, 2018, p118. https://doi.org/10.3167/jys.2016.170207 22. the guardian issued a sixday black history timeline in print, not primarily on britain but also covering the usa. (in press 1317 july 2020.) 23. see: https://www.bl.uk/collectionguides/blackbritainpublications (accessed 20 september 2020). 24. all london teachers against racism & feminism, challenging racism, altarf, 1984. it included materials particularly provided in london’s quintin kynaston school. 25. tony kushner and kenneth lunn (eds), the politics of marginality: race, the radical right and minorities in twentieth century britain, cass, london, 1990, reissued 2006. 26. see: http://www.blackandasianstudies.org/ (accessed 20 september 2020). 27. ibid; martin spafford, dan lyndon, marika sherwood and auth hakim adi, ocr gcse history explaining modern world: migration, empire and the historic environment history explaining modern world, hodder education, london, 2016. 28. see, for example, hilda kean and paul martin (eds), the public history reader, routledge, abingdon, 2013; dean, op cit; paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally? working with the past in the present, bloomsbury, london, 2019. 29. see the black south african flag now attached to cpl nagozo’s gravestone in hastings in 2016. http://hildakean. com/?p=3397 (accessed 26 august 2020); john siblon, ‘negotiating hierarchy and memory: african and caribbean troops from former british colonies in london’s imperial spaces’, the london journal, vol 41, no 3, 2016, pp299312 https://doi. org/10.1080/03058034.2016.1213548 and commemoration. http://hildakean.com/?p=3378 (accessed 10 june 2020). 30. doing public history in lockdown and beyond 7 sept 2020, organised by the raphael samuel history centre and manchester centre for public history available at https://raphaelsamuelhistorycentre.com/2020/08/03/doingpublichistory inlockdownandbeyond/ (accessed 8 august 2020). 31. history acts available at https://www.history.ac.uk/seminars/historyacts (accessed 8 september 2020). 32. kean in dean, op cit, p35. kean public history review, vol. 28, 20217 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v19i0.3096 https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/06/13/wiradjuri-heroes-honoured-gundagai-sculpture https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/06/13/wiradjuri-heroes-honoured-gundagai-sculpture https://doi.org/10.3167/jys.2016.170207 https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/black-britain-publications http://www.blackandasianstudies.org/ http://hildakean.com/?p=3397 http://hildakean.com/?p=3397 https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2016.1213548 https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2016.1213548 http://hildakean.com/?p=3378 https://raphaelsamuelhistorycentre.com/2020/08/03/doing-public-history-in-lockdown-and-beyond/ https://raphaelsamuelhistorycentre.com/2020/08/03/doing-public-history-in-lockdown-and-beyond/ https://www.history.ac.uk/seminars/history-acts public history review vol. 27, 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: wyndham, m. and read, p. 2020. chilean history and the sine wave: changing interpretations of pinochet’s dictatorship. public history review, 27, 1-11. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj chilean history and the sine wave: changing interpretations of pinochet’s dictatorship marivic wyndham and peter read in a recent essay, katherine hite reflected on her concern at the evident confusion among her us students as to their role as citizens. confronted by historical exhibitions on pinochet’s chile, in which their own country had been implicated, she wrote: ‘call it the decline of empire, chickens coming home to roost, whatever you wish, but i am surrounded by young people, smart, engaged, yet also alienated, confused, even disgusted.’ they questioned why and where they fitted in, asking each other what was the point? her focus on their malaise was the interaction between her us students and chilean guides at the museum of memory and human rights in santiago. listening to the guides’ descriptions, surrounded by the graphic videos and artefacts relating to the pinochet dictatorship, she wondered if and how her students might reimagine less ‘structural violence’. would they get it? might they glimpse a possible way to fit in? the results were not encouraging.1 in this article we continue our investigation as to how chilean museum guides impart factual and emotional knowledge, this time to students of their own country.2 our focus is on what is presented not at the museum but the national stadium. besides the museum itself, this internationally-recognised site of conscience has become the chilean state’s own principal memorial to the victims of pinochet.3 compared to other well-known santiago sites such as parque por la paz villa grimaldi, where tours have been conducted for two decades, student-directed historical tours have begun fairly recently at the stadium, partly because of the previous uncertainty as to the stadium’s future.4 the history of the dictatorship presented at santiago’s sites of conscience generally, whether in monument, plaque or guided tour, has changed greatly since the first visit of the authors in 2006. it is changing still. we observed, over more than a decade, not much homogeneity either in the memorialisation of the different sites of torture and disappearance, or in the changing interpretation of any single site. the reasons are several. first, for the two decades in which public memorialisation has been allowed, the attitude of the state has determined decisively what could be displayed, written and said at any place at which it had administrative or financial control, including the national stadium. local interpretations elsewhere have depended on the literacy level of the guides and plaque-writers, funding and the political position of the guides – from the centre left such as the communists, to the far left, such as the revolutionary left movement (mir). among the guides, men tended to be more dominant than women, the educated elite more than those from the poorer poblaciónes declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj (towns or settlements). most dominant have been the voices of the once clearly defined political parties such as the marxist-leninist-guevarist mir, the communists and the socialists.5 we can now recognise that the most significant turning point in what is imparted occurred sometime after 2013. that year was the fortieth anniversary of the coup. from this point, little by little, historical interpretation would no longer be led by the generation which suffered the repression. the next generation learned of it second-hand from their parents and grandparents – when the generation that suffered under pinochet’s dictatorship as survivors or relatives of the detained-disappeared and politically executed ceased to act as guides and were replaced by those who were removed from that experience. thus it was not just the historical interpretation which had changed, but the guides themselves. the relationship between guide and listener began to slip from a monologue to something closer to a dialogue between equals. though the mantle of interpretation has only recently passed to the ‘nineties’ generation, the ignorance of the young about the dictatorship had concerned the older generation for some time. their chief concern lays not so much in student apathy but a basic ignorance of the deadly events which occurred in their own lifetime. politically committed students from 2010 demanded free tertiary education rather than the socialist republic of chile that their parents had fought for. the founder of the memorial at 1367 casa de memoria josé domingo cañas in santiago, dr laura moya, lamented that the young took only a shallow and passing interest in rebuilding their society.6 curators at the parque por la paz villa grimaldi (henceforth parque por la paz) occasionally reprimanded youngsters for ambushing each other in the reconstructed series of tiny wooden cells at the tower. more generally, children often seemed unaware that pinochet and allende were much more than simply two significant figures of the recent past!7 in 2016, where our article begins, forty-three years after pinochet’s coup, the polarities that had divided the nation so bitterly were softening. the founder of the far-right fatherland and liberty political grouping, roberto thieme, now believed that pinochet had been a traitor –that at the time of the coup pinochet had lacked political sense.8 on the other side, dozens of exiles from the intellectual left had spent the later 1970s and 1980s in eastern europe learning that the imposed socialist state held unsuspected and unwelcome strictures on freedom of speech and personal movement.9 by contrast others had spent years in western europe absorbing the subtleties of euro-communism.10 in exile they had learned, like thieme, that politics were complex, that chile is at base a conservative country and that much desirable change could be accomplished by compromise. from the 1990s the exiles returned home not only older but wiser. changing interpretations most complex of all were the changing interpretations that occurred at parque por la paz. probably the greatest number of political prisoners of pinochet’s regime were held here – perhaps 450 detained and at least 229 detained-disappeared. since opening in 1988, the site has experienced a variety of interpretations by its voluntary collectives, composed both of survivors and relatives of the disappeared and politically executed. one survivor in 2002, pedro mata, took every group of visitors to the memorial to the politically executed and openly and unselfconsciously wept.11 the governing collective of the time, never fully united on what should be preserved or taught to visitors, were uneasy at matta’s overt emotionalism. his guided tours were terminated. several years later another wyndham and read public history review, vol. 27, 20202 survivor-guide, having since completed a foucauldian phd at the sorbonne, spoke of the ‘epistemological rupture that speaks of pain, suffering and torture’.12 the ‘mercantilist production of social relations allowed an array of possibilities for every individual, such as the solidarity of rubbing one’s skin, while blindfolded, against an unknown fellow detainee’.13 another survivor and collective member, claudio durán, was interviewed as part of an oral history project. he was concerned that several significant experiences were unrepresented in the sometimes graphic accounts of imprisonment and torture. where was comradeship? where was resistance? agency, rather than victimhood, was beginning to enter the discourse of the survivors.14 the restored democratic state, however, seemed intent on channelling the interpretation of these terrible events into its own purposes. president michele bachelet had presaged such a development while announcing the construction of today’s museum of memory and human rights in march 2006. ‘the violations of human rights can have many explanations’, she proposed, ‘but absolutely no justification’. her words implied that one did not need to know everything that had happened at every site of torture and death. the point was that human rights had been seriously violated. one did not need to know exactly how.15 oswaldo torres, a survivor of villa grimaldi, had anticipated such a betrayal of experience. he wrote in 2006: should an educational memorial reinforce the values of the pluralist state in reifying reconciliation and democratic values; or should visitors be given the full catalogue of horrors? [a] museum of memory and human rights is of a different nature. the memory is ours, the testimonies are ours, the multiplicity of interpretations flow through our communication channels, different types of schools and family chats. in this sense it is not a museum of the republic which sets out epic lectures on the construction of representative democracy, but rather a piece of history which contains unshakeable truths and various interpretations.16 the memories were his, the testimonies were his. but when would his experiences be valued in their own right? at a time when the national stadium still had no organised tours, the interpretations at parque por la paz drifted towards the restrained, factual and bland. in 2016 a self-guided audio-tour for adult visitors, in spanish and english, outlined dates and sites, but avoided the personal. only by entering ‘further information’ could visitors learn of the solidarity of women prisoners (that of the men was not mentioned at all) while the most personalised part of the display, the ‘memory room’ of memorabilia of individual victims, was usually locked. memorialisation at the national stadium by about the turn of the twenty-first century there occurred two not unrelated developments. one was that many of the exiles, the left wing highly-educated intellectuals whose youthful enthusiasms for the teachings of che guevara had so brought down pinochet’s repression upon them, had risen to senior government and administrative positions. they were concerned that they, the survivors, had been robbed of their voice. the factual historical interpretations found in schoolbooks and at the museum of memory and human rights had drifted too far from the particulars that they had personally endured. secondly, many of the former survivors and exiles were rising to senior roles in government and administration for which their education and class had prepared them. since the government, with their assistance, chilean history and the sine wave: changing interpretations of pinochet’s dictatorship public history review, vol. 27, 20203 had concluded that the national stadium would become the focus of its entire on-site memorialisation of the dictatorship, the chance had presented itself to inscribe their actual and bodily experiences on the historical record by inviting visitors to share their emotions at the same national icon of repression where very many of them had been incarcerated. it was too good an opportunity to miss. gone would be the bland and opaque. the new memorials, the signage for which would be supervised by themselves, were to prioritise the survivors rather than the detained-disappeared and politically executed. women would take precedence over men; emotions over raw data and political allegiance. the lexicography would be metaphoric; personal in its appeal to the intuitive and the poetic; quite unlike anything previously inscribed on any chilean memorial. the following example is drawn from the precinct of the place where the women were held – the swimming pool changing-room, opened by bachelet in 2016. it is almost the first building the adult (not school) visitor sees on entering the stadium:17 within these walls, curling up round each other against the claws of the jailers, daughters, sisters and mothers were the first women in chile who had to endure the beginning of a long and dark night of cowardice.18 if the generation of the survivors had intended these words to be their valediction, their ambition has been achieved through the signage. they created the milieu in which the young guides were to function at the stadium from 2018. but what would this next generation of guides make of such passionate outpourings when their first task, as agreed in the kunstmann plan, was to seek a responsible and practical response from chilean youth?19 december 2018. our guide was gonzalo, a part-time volunteer and full-time music student. most of the guides, he said, were like him: dedicated to inculcating what he termed a new spirituality to their secondary and tertiary students. a variety of tours are conducted at the stadium, some mostly connected with sport. but gonzalo’s focus, and that of all the young peoples’ guides, is pedagogic.20 let’s accept, he begins, that the stadium has many personalities. for eighty years it has been the home of the national football team. it functions as an electoral polling station. national festivals are held here. it is where president aylwin addressed the first grand post-pinochet convocation and where two women symbolically danced the cueca sola before seventy thousand people.21 the homeless have been allowed to take nightly shelter here. he reprises the historical parameters that the children learned, or should have learned at school: the cold war, the fear of a cuban-style dictatorship, the interference of the cia, the refined techniques of torture learned from the brazilians and the school of the americas, the strikes that were organised by the right against the elected socialist government. between 12,000 and 20,000 people, he recounts, were held here in the stadium in the first three months after the coup of 11 september and 9 november 1973. an unknown number were disappeared here. he explains his terminology: pinochet regarded the radical left generally as ‘enemies of the state’. in the past, the incarcerated have been referred to as victims, heroes, militants or activists. in this tour he will use the terms ‘prisoners of war’ and most importantly, survivors.22 in words that would have offended osvaldo torres and the many who wish their horrific experiences validated, gonzalo affirms: ‘we need to know the legacy, yes, but the important thing is, how do we resolve it? we’re all young chileans: what we need now is social mobilisation, a resignification of the events, an adoption of a new ethic of moral living.’ wyndham and read public history review, vol. 27, 20204 gonzalo, in accordance with the guides’ guidelines, explicitly does not believe in reciting a ‘pedagogy of violence’ but prefers to emphasise ‘virtue’. rather than the terror of being identified by an informer or the brutality of the daily interrogations, he cites an officer who tried to compensate for the stadium violence, a soldier who offered surreptitious cigarettes to the prisoners of war, the swedish ambassador harald edelstam who allowed refugees to shelter in his embassy in defiance of the military.23 we shall see below how the women, seemingly so fragile, portrayed themselves as turning to each other to form a carapace of protective sisterhood. they constructed a living room inside the swimming pool changing room doubling as a prison, and even picked flowers to decorate it. ‘we didn’t try to escape’, they said. ‘we’re women, not soldiers’. gonzalo continues: ‘the direction we want to encourage is the prisoners’ example of not dwelling on the horrors but their solidarity’. ‘the places i’m about to show you,’ he announces, ‘are not static memory sites, but invitations to reflection and social mobilisation.’ yet the purpose of not dwelling on the prisoners’ horrors is greatly at variance with the poetic yet pungent affirmations in the women’s precinct, written only three years earlier, and by the female survivors themselves. any student passing through the main gate would have walked past the following inscription, but few would have had time to read it: here in the former changing room of the swimming pool was the place where hundreds of women suffered the brutal repression of the military coup. it was here in this sombre place where the dream of thousands of chilean and foreign women was disrupted by political detention, the horror of torture and of death. within these walls, huddled together against the taunts, hundreds of women, housewives, students, workers and professional women paid in pain and blood for their decision to be part of the construction of a more just and decent new homeland for all. here inside, through these walls and in the claws of the jailers, daughters, sisters and mothers were the first women in chile who had to endure the beginning of a long and dark night of terror. yet, it was also here that pain wove the unbreakable net of solidarity which gave the prisoners mutual protection against terror, as they cared with their lives for their pregnant comrades because tomorrow outside these walls life will continue and their hopes will be fulfilled. in memory of all those who suffered within these walls and those who hoped, in the darkness, to see the light of justice and liberty.24 only four years since the plaque was installed, the appalled anguish of the women survivors is about to be eviscerated in the guided tour. the standard tour involves progressing, by walking, through all the significant sites of the stadium, from the plaques at the main entrance, to the pool of remembrance, the escotillas (the entrances into the stadium proper), the changing rooms, the stadium bleachers and the ‘via dolorosa’ along which the prisoners were forced to march towards, finally, the velodrome and torture chamber in the changing-room, known as the caracol. stopping outside the arena, gonzalo borrows an idea from the tours practised at villa grimaldi where students are asked to choose one of the 30 articles of the universal declaration of human rights. he forms groups to discuss how they might use the principles chilean history and the sine wave: changing interpretations of pinochet’s dictatorship public history review, vol. 27, 20205 to resolve a contemporary issue. in the tour in 2018 in parque por la paz in which we accompanied the students, most chose the right to free assembly. ‘in these circumstances, what would you do?’25 asks gonzalo who relates that those seated in the stadium awaiting interrogation quaked before the advance of the ‘encapuchado’, a masked and hooded figure who identified prominent members of the left to the interrogators. he says: ‘he was promised his freedom if he identified, that is, if he betrayed – his friends. what would you do?’ in the stadium, gonzalo again asks: ‘how do we confront “never again”.’ he invites the students to choose two of the articles of the universal declaration of human rights ‘from your own home or school, discuss how you can recognise or enact one of these. it’s easy to be horrified by these events, but we still live in a society riddled with class prejudice and racism directed against the mapuche indigenous people. how does the universal declaration, and our sense of responsibility, help us to confront these contemporary demands?’26 camarín (changing room) number 8, in conditions once so packed that a few men had to sleep on the clothes racks near the ceiling strapped by their belts, now holds some fifty photographs and testimonials of the survivors. here the themes of fellowship at the expense of brutal experience are displayed. that of josé manuel mendez, who also acts as an occasional stadium guide, reads: here was lost all pride, here was born generosity; we became better friends, here we shared our secrets. if i stumbled, several helping hands would cheer me up. all of us were as one. they asked me my birthday (the ninth of october) and soon everyone in the camarín began to sing happy birthday with two hallullas (chilean celebratory bread) with a lighted match in each one. it was the most delicious birthday cake in my entire life.27 this is the first time, in our experience, that the expressions of comradeship among the men has been displayed – or perhaps we should say – have been ‘allowed to be displayed’. meanwhile the designers and curators have been busy in the wide display spaces beneath the stadium seating in reinforcing this philosophy which we might call heroic acceptance. in the centre, a requiem mass for the souls of the politically executed and disappeared is held annually. on each side, perspex screens carry inscriptions as touchingly poetic as those in the women’s changing rooms, but without the fury: when i left the stadium, some children ran towards me. i did not recognise them. they were my daughters.28 i used to gaze at the night sky, thinking that beneath that vast blue motionless sky, my children were sleeping far away.29 i return and am seeing all that has happened, i weep neither for pain, nor for cowardice, rather it makes me furious, because if my country needed me to fight in a war to defend my home, my country, i am not a coward, but this, given we are all chileans and the things that they did: what for? gonzalo argues: ‘historians deal with the past, and in fact have questioned some of the survivors’ accounts. let them get on with it while we deal with the present’. the most overt political commentary here carries the same tone of urgent outrage as that of the women’s prison while skirting around any reference to gaolers’ claws or a long dark night of terror. the emotions run almost as high but the rationale is less precise. this signage, perhaps the wyndham and read public history review, vol. 27, 20206 strongest in the current display, implies that although responsibility lies with the young, we older ones must help them to absorb (‘interiorarse’) the meaning of the events: forty years have passed and the spaces remain silenced, hoping that what happened will not be forgotten, hoping that we will not forget what happened, hoping that we will rescue the history that happened there, so the new generations can know and absorb that this great national colosseum is not only a sporting and artistic cultural centre but a place in which thousands of men, women and children saw their human rights trampled by their own countrymen.30 perhaps, in the mood of this display area under the seating, there is a hint, if not of victimhood, but of the resigned pathos which the plaque-writers of 2015 were so determined to put behind them. the raw violence that characterised the first few weeks of imprisonment after the coup is drained in the apparent belief and assumption that one does not need to know any more than that which is imparted by the guide to get visitors to ‘get themselves to a different place’. significantly gonzalo’s tour ends here. he does not normally take his students to the most infamous part of the stadium dictatorship apparatus, the cycling velodrome and its changing room where the most terrible of the tortures were enacted. the students bypass it as surely as they have bypassed the excoriating inscriptions at the main entrance. and indeed, if the students’ journey had extended to the velodrome, they would have read on a plinth nearby: the patrols pound the pavement of the interior paths resounding with the echo of orders, the sounds of greased metal, the shouts and the discharge of rifles and heavy machine guns. the gunpowder that stings in the nostrils paralyses the prisoners’ hearts of those incarcerated in the cells as in gateway 8. the three long-haired teenagers were taken away with their heads covered under a blanket and they never returned to our ministrations in gateway no 8. neither did the two workers in dressing-room 4 taken off to interrogation in the frightful velodrome. many years later, we discovered that their relatives had found their mortal remains.31 gonzalo’s concluding observation is that ‘many chileans seem to despair of the future: but here we have more and more visitors, from children of private schools to army cadet officers… to them, and to all chileans, i say, “come and do what i do as a guide and put yourself in touch with the new generation. this will get us to a different place. this is my hope for chile.”’ such invitations, though, mean some deflection from the larger human rights agenda which flourished in chile from about 2005 to the present, which encompasses such issues as racism and poverty, to name but two, which are irrelevant to the current interpretation at the stadium. allende’s government is still presented as the much-lamented gold standard while the issues raised by the guides, perhaps inevitably, have become those of most concern to the generations which live them. we sympathise with the new interpretation, laudable, earnest and necessary as it may be. for if young chileans despair of the future, there is indeed nothing uplifting or constructive to be gained by learning about the truly terrible excesses of the regime. guides at the stadium and those at villa grimaldi will only admit to accounts of rats being introduced to the vagina, asphyxiation by plastic bag or the young conscript whipped to death with chains while hanging from the tallest tree in villa grimaldi – only when they are specifically asked by individual students. the new pedagogy, which to judge from the behaviour of students at both chilean history and the sine wave: changing interpretations of pinochet’s dictatorship public history review, vol. 27, 20207 sites of conscience, seems to be seriously received and may well meet the changing needs of the state. yet we believe that there is a further and negative dimension to the new education. we reason thus: technicians of radio programs reduce the high frequencies of a recording to make it less shrill and reduce the lower to minimise distortion. the resulting broadcast will be acoustically acceptable to almost everyone. national stadium guides following the new spirituality evidently have proceeded as if the bottom frequencies of the sine wave are to be lost then the top frequencies must be lost in equal measure. but in setting aside the poetic passion inscribed on the entrance and the velodrome monoliths something important has vanished. the architects of the memorial which greets (or is ignored by) visitors at the main stadium entrance worked so hard to be all-inclusive. unlike practically all previous memorialisation, the inscribers avoid identifying their political allegiance. all of us, runs the implication, were women survivors together, touched and forever affected by our common experience, we housewives, students and workers. these emotions are surely but another form of the dynamic that drove these same, much younger chileans of the 1970s to conceive and create a more just and equal chile. the passion of the valediction on themselves, in full view of every visitor, surely could alleviate a little of gonzalo’s despair for the future or the alienation of katherine hite’s students.32 yet we suspect that the strength of the words would be an embarrassment to him. nor does it appear that visitors have perceived any disjunct between the signage and the guided tour. it seems that most tend to follow one or the other, perhaps more out of convenience than any other motive. the story of the dictatorship also holds many poignant moments which the guided tours, nor, for that matter, the national museum, do not encompass. for instance, the mirista muriel dockendorff navarrete, detained with her husband juan molina manzor in another centre called cuatro alamos, scribbled a message to her friend and fellow detainee sandra machuca, and a poem to juan, on a cigarette packet and entrusted it to sandra. muriel was disappeared. juan, sandra and the cigarette packet somehow survived. muriel’s message to her friend reads: i remember when i met you in the house of terror, what you gave me and shared with me. in those moments in which a light was a dream. or a miracle. but you were light in those shadows. we were one in misfortune. today thousands of misfortunes. later i see you as you were, as i always am still, in some place always looking to windward. we shall meet again through the mist that we will dissolve. do not forget me comrade. rucia. in the month of despair in the year of torture.33 a second national treasure is the story of gladys díaz armijo, mirista and well-known journalist incarcerated in a tiny cell for three months at villa grimaldi. immediately on arrival at villa grimaldi she was beaten. an unidentified voice snarled: ‘leave this bitch for me’. her blindfold was caked in old blood: ‘don’t worry about it, you won’t be getting out alive anyway’. wyndham and read public history review, vol. 27, 20208 strapped to the electrified wire frame, the parrilla, she regained consciousness to recognize the voice of the same man raping her. during each of the several sessions of electrical torture her screams became so high pitched and continuous that she could not recognise her own voice. after each session she bled from every orifice, including her breasts and her navel. ‘i didn’t give myself permission to feel the pain… so much electrical current that it’s hard to understand that the body can resist it.’ she was forced to watch her partner being tortured. some of her many bones smashed by beatings have never healed. afterwards gladys díaz reflected: ‘the worst part of torture is not the physical pain that you suffer – i think that the worst part of torture is to have to realize in such a brutal way that human beings are capable of doing something so aberrant to another person as torturing them.’ from her experiences grew a love of humanity: ‘i believed, and still believe, in humanity despite such unbelievable crimes… i gained a profound admiration of the human being. i felt such a capacity of love so unconditional that i had never felt before. and that remains.’ she found that ‘the ways that one finds to defend oneself are unlimited. i sometimes dreamed about beautiful things… i remember having awakened to the sound of a little bird that was outside, and how i was able to keep the sound of that bird’s singing in my ears for days.’34 the words of dockendorff navarrete and díaz armijo are among the most noble moments to emerge from the dreadful saga of the dictatorship. the heroism of these women, of the students’ own country, and within the lifetime of their own grandparents, can be set alongside the heroic actions of, for example, the chilean military hero arturo prat in the battle of iquique in 1879. or anne frank. surely they must rank among the very finest treasures of the national story. chileans, do not forget them. endnotes 1. katherine hite, ‘teaching the politics of encounter’, radical history review, january 2016, pp8-9; doi 10.1215/01636545-3160086. the chilean guides were especially perplexed by the students’ reaction. did their polite silences signify a mix of self-consciousness about historic complicity, faulty spanish, not wanting to appear offensive, or about how difficult it can be to express emotion or pain in any language? 2. our principal work in this field is a chronological examination of the changing interpretations of seven sites of torture and extermination in santiago, p. read and m. wyndham, narrow but endlessly deep: the struggle for memorialisation in chile since the transition to democracy, canberra: anupress, 2016. 3. the designation comes not from a formal pronouncement but from the large scale and expensive memorialisation carried out at the state’s expense within the precinct, and recent signage which identifies the stadium as ‘national stadium national monument’. 4. often this was a three-way contest between the mayor in whose jurisdiction the stadium fell, the department of sport and the department of historical monuments. 5. the authors have visited these sites to participate in official or spontaneous tours, in some of which chilean children were included, for many years. each presentation we have recorded and noted the changing signage, for example, peter read and marivic wyndham, ‘the disappearing museum’, in rethinking history, routledge, http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showaxaarticles?journalcode=rrhi20 2014. 6. laura moya, interview by marivic wyndham, 22 april 2014. 7. adolescent misbehaviour has been observed by the authors themselves at parque por la paz. 8. interview with tomás maciatti, youtube, 17 september 2013, wwww.youtube.com/ watch?v=b3usy7jayw4 (accessed 3 may 2017). 9. for instance, antonio leal, cited by katherine hite, when the romance ended: leaders of the chilean left, 1968–1998, columbia university press, new york, 2000, pp137-145. 10. for a development of this argument, see peter read and marivic wyndham, ‘eurocommunism and the concertación’, journal of iberian and latin american history, 2015, vol 1, no 21, pp116-125. https://doi.org/10 .1080/13260219.2015.1040210 chilean history and the sine wave: changing interpretations of pinochet’s dictatorship public history review, vol. 27, 20209 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showaxaarticles?journalcode=rrhi20 wwww.youtube.com/watch?v=b3usy7jayw4 wwww.youtube.com/watch?v=b3usy7jayw4 https://doi.org/10.1080/13260219.2015.1040210 https://doi.org/10.1080/13260219.2015.1040210 11. pedro alejandro matta, ‘a walk through a 20th century torture centre villa grimaldi, santiago de chile. a visitor’s guide’ (written in english), 2000. see also diana taylor, ‘memory, trauma, performance’, aletria, vol 1, no 21, 2011, p70. 12. michel foucault in his seminal work discipline and punish examined the relation between the state, representing sovereign power, and the imprisoned or executed individual. this guide’s interpretation of his experience we see as trying to make more meaningful intellectual sense of the events beyond the simple binary of the left/right political spectrum. 13. roberto merino jorquera, recorded guided tour, nov 2013 14. some of this discussion on the changing interpretations of the sites of trauma is drawn from peter read and marivic wyndham, narrow but endlessly deep: the struggle for memorialisation in chile since the transition to democracy, anu press, canberra, 2017. 15. cited, peter kornbluh and katherine hite, ‘chile’s turning point’, the nation, 17 february 2010. 16. osvaldo torres in a museum in villa grimaldi: space for memory and education in human rights, international seminar, august 2005, corporación parque por la paz villa grimaldi, muncipalidad de peñalolén, santiago, nd, c2006, p132. 17. wally kunstmann, president of the metropolitan region of political prisoners, in planning documents stressed the centrality of women detainees at the expense of the attention thrown on male detainees memorialised (or supposed to be memorialised) within the stadium itself. if the authorities had elevated the status of anybody, it was that of the detained-disappeared and politically executed. the survivors had remained forgotten since the transition to democracy. the circumstances of the men generally were well known, she declared, but those of the women, hardly at all. (claudio metrano, ‘este martes se inaugura el memorial a prisioneros políticos en estadio nacional’ [opening of the memorial to the political prisoners in national stadium on tuesday], diariouchile, 3 march 2014.) 18. we develop this argument in read and wyndham, pp285-289. 19. the first design principles, which the current display broadly follows, were developed by wally kunstmann, president of the metropolitan region of political prisoners, and a composite group of a lawyers, a historian and several architects, in the document projecto nacional, memorial nacional, comité estadio nacional 2002-2007. 20. stadium tour with gonzalo reproducing, at our request, a student visit, 6 december 2018. 21. the cueca is a lively chilean dance for one or more couples. since the transition to democracy the ‘cueca alone’ is danced by one or more women without a partner. the ‘ceca sola’ has been adopted by the agrupación de familiares de detenidos desaparacidos as an emblem of their struggle. 22. on 12 october 1973, in an effort to display the even-handedness of the regime, 327 detainees out of a group of 3,500 were released; steve stern, battling for hearts and minds: memory struggles in pinochet’s chile, 1973–1988, duke university press, durham, 2006, p59. 23. during the dicatorship edelstam allowed diplomatic protection to many hundreds of chileans, cubans and others wanted by the pinochet regime and arranged their refugee status in sweden. 24. fue aquí en este viejo camarín de la piscina, el lugar donde cientos de mujeres padecieron la brutal represión de los militares golpistas. fue aquí en este sombrío lugar, donde el sueño de miles de chilenas y extranjeras se vió interrumpido por la detención política, el horror de la tortura y la muerte. tras estas paredes, acurrucadas contra el vejamen, cientos de mujeres, amas de casa, estudiantes, obreras y profesionales pagaron con dolor y sangre por incorporarse con decisión a la construcción de una nueva patria más justa y digna para todos. aquí adentro, tras estas paredes y bajos las garras de sus carceleros, hijas, hermanas y madres fueron las primeras mujeres de chile que debieron soportar el comienzo de una noche cobarde, larga y oscura. sin embargo, también fue aquí que el dolor tejió la red irrompible de la fraternidad, que hizo a las prisioneras protegerse mutuamente del terror, cuidar con sus vidas a sus compañeras embarazadas porque mañana fuera de estas paredes, es cierto que continua la vida y se realizan las esperanzas. 25. tour conducted for senior secondary school students, villa grimaldi, 6 december 2018. 26. identification by a masked informer, see the evidence of esteban carvajal ‘patricio’ in villegas, el estadio, pp28, 38–39. 27. jose manuel mendez conducted the authors on an individual tour of the stadium, 7 december 2018, in which he stressed the solidarity of male detainees rather than the horrors of incarceration. the camarín, he declared has become his ‘second home’. his inscription reads ‘aquí se perdio el orgullo, aquí nació ser generoso, aquí nos hicimos más amigos, aquí nos contamos los secretos. si yo caía varias manos más estaban dándome animo. todos nosotros éramos uno. llego un día en que me preguntaron la fecha de nacimiento (9 de octubre) al rato todos dentro del camarín, empezaron a cantar el cumpleaños feliz con dos hallullas en cada una, un fósforo incendido. fue la torta más rica que he comido hasta hoy.’ wyndham and read public history review, vol. 27, 202010 28. al salir del estadio, unas niñas corriéron hacia mí, no las reconocí, eran mis hijas. 29. en las noches miraba al cielo y pensaba que bajo la amplia azulada de ese cielo inmovil, lejos dormían mis hijas. 30. han pasado más de 40 años y los lugares estan silenciosos esperando que no se olvido lo occurido; esperando que no se nos olvide lo occurido, esperando que rescatemos la historia que allí sucedió para que las nuevas generaciones puedan conocer e interiorizarse de que el maximo coliseo nacional no es solo un recinto deportivo y de actividades artisticas culturales, sino un lugar en que miles de hombres, mujeres y niños vieron sus derechos humanos atropellados por sus propios compatriotas. 31. taconean las patrullas en el pavimento de calles interiores, dejan entrando el eco engrasado en metal con órdenes, gritos, descargas de fusiles y ametralladoras pesadas. la picazón de la polvera en las narices paraliza el corazón de los encerrados en las celdas como en la escotilla 8. los tres muchachos de pelo largo sacados con la frazada cubriéndoles la cabeza, tampoco volvieron a nuestras curaciones en la escotilla. como no regresaron los dos obreros del camarín 4 llevados al interrogatorio en el temible caracol del velódromo. después nos enteraríamos que tras muchos años después sus familiares hallaron restos de sus huesos. trans. paula gonzález dolan. 32. the focus on women survivors, rather than all survivors, or all the politically executed and disappeared, is seen by hite and sturken, in the ‘context of feminist tactics of solidarity and resisting political violence, among older generations of women who were revolutionaries and former political prisoners and younger generation of progressive activists, as well as the history of feminist womens’ activism through the tactic of intervention into public space’. katherine hite and marita sturken, ‘the estadio nacional de chile and the reshaping of space through women’s memory’ in ayse gül altinay, maria josé contreras, marianne hirsch, jean howard, banu karaca, alisa solomon (eds), women mobilizing memory, new york: columbia university press, 2019, np. (on-line) 33. me recuerdo cuando te conocí en la casa del terror, de lo que me diste, me entregaste. en esos momentos en que una luz era un sueño. o un milagro, sin embargo, fuiste luz en esas tinieblas. fuimos una en un revés. hoy miles de reveses. más tarde te veo como entonces, como sé estarás hoy, en algún sitio, siempre mirando al frente. nos encontraremos a través de la niebla que despejaremos. no me olvides, camarada. rucia. mes: de la desesperada año: de la tortura 34. we may note that these profound emotions are in essence non-political. the examples we cite here should rise above national politics to the same level of heightened emotion as that forgiveness shown by the rwanda massacre alice mukarurinda. twenty years after the massacre which killed 800,000 of her countrymen and women, she works alongside the man who killed her baby and cut off her own hand with a machete, in a project building brick homes for other massacre survivors. see (http://news.nationalpost. com/2014/04/07/dozens-of-traumatized-mourners-carried-from-stadium-as-rwandans-mark-20thanniversary-of-horrific-genocide/”%5d (accessed 15 january 2019). chilean history and the sine wave: changing interpretations of pinochet’s dictatorship public history review, vol. 27, 202011 http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/07/dozens-of-traumatized-mourners-carried-from-stadium-as-rwandans-mark-20th-anniversary-of-horrific-genocide/ http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/07/dozens-of-traumatized-mourners-carried-from-stadium-as-rwandans-mark-20th-anniversary-of-horrific-genocide/ http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/07/dozens-of-traumatized-mourners-carried-from-stadium-as-rwandans-mark-20th-anniversary-of-horrific-genocide/ public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: scates, b. 2021. set in stone?: dialogical memorialisation and the beginnings of australia’s statue wars. public history review, 28, 1–12. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7494 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj set in stone?: dialogical memorialisation and the beginnings of australia’s statue wars bruce scates doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7494 monuments proclaiming the white colonisation of aboriginal and torres strait islander lands are scattered across the australian landscape. over the length and breadth of the continent, possession is marked and proclaimed – from placenames that subvert indigenous understandings of country, to plaque, cairn and statue marking the passage of white ‘pioneers’. the explorers’ memorial, set in the esplanade reserve in fremantle, western australia, typifies the later genre. raised in 1913 it honours three white men killed in the far north west over fifty years earlier. their deaths occurred after several months of white violence and provocation. in western australia, as elsewhere, blood marked the shifting boundaries of the black/white frontier.1 the memorial harks back to ‘the heroic age’ of australian statuary. at the turn of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, white australians hungered for founding myths of nationhood. australia, as graeme davison put it, ‘seemed to be a land without monuments’. ‘attuned to the classical traditions of europe’ and ‘blind’ to countless millennia of ‘aboriginal history beneath their feet’, the new settlers craved some ‘tangible reminder… of past triumphs and departed heroes’.2 and so – through stone and bronze – they crafted a coloniser narrative. it was a ‘pioneer mythology’ of white valour and aboriginal ‘blood lust’ that would long pass unchallenged into western australia’s history books.3 it rationalised the dispossession of first nations peoples as progress and exonerated the theft and occupation of aboriginal lands. charting commemorative contours public history is an historical practice embedded in place and much of the focus of our work has been on the shaping and reshaping of civic landscapes.4 with that in mind, let us walk (vicariously) around the base of this memorial, alert to its form, purpose and symbolism. the monument is ringed by four bronze plaques, each sculpted by the italian artist pietro porcelli. green with age and worn by the brisk salt air, they are read each day by eager tourists, passersby, the idle and the curious. their purpose is instructive – they tell a story and fashion declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7494 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7494 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7494 a mythology. frederick panter, james harding and william goldwyer, the fronting plaque declares, were attacked at night and ‘murdered’ in their sleep by ‘treacherous natives’. no explanation is offered for the killings but that single word ‘murder’ served to attribute blame. the land where these men died is portrayed as hostile and alien, ‘lone wilds’ peopled by no one of consequence. this was a ‘terra incognito’, a blank space on the map awaiting discovery by europeans. aboriginal people are caricatured as savages, the explorers eulogised as ‘intrepid pioneers’.5 as we turn the corner, those dead white men stare back at us, each of the explorers’ faces rendered in bas relief by porcelli’s steady hand. portraits in bronze, their features are idealised, sanctified by martyrdom. they bear no resemblance to the battered skulls maitland brown scraped clean in the bush and carried back to fremantle. ‘sanctified by their martrydom’ – a memorial portrait commemorating the explorers’ murder by aboriginal people. these photographs were used as a model for pietro porcelli’s bas reliefs (below), the commanding visual text of the explorers’ monument. (battye library) brown is described as the ‘intrepid leader of the government search and punitive party’. the monument stands as ‘an appreciate token of remembrance’ to this service to the state. a life substantial bust of this ‘pioneer pastoralist and premier politician’ crowns the granite pedestal, its gaze fixed upon the indian ocean beyond. across these waters brown and his party travelled over a thousand miles north, determined to find the explorers and to avenge them. finally, the memorial pays tribute to its sponsor. turning the corner, we are confronted by george julius brockman, portly but dignified, dressed in a style that befits a public benefactor. for brockman, this monument served to enshrine himself in history. he would die six months before it was completed, but not before commissioning that bas relief of himself. this reminds us of the power and privilege that arguably lies behind the building of every great memorial. lady forest herself would unveil the structure, lending imperial sanction to this statement in the public domain. and white power and privilege was expressed scates public history review, vol. 28, 20212 in other ways as well. in a sense, brockman was the heir to the explorers’ ‘sacrifice’. he made his fortune on the land that they died for, a fortune based on the rich runs of the northern cattle stations worked by cheap – often unpaid – aboriginal labour. so this monument was much more than three mens’ memorial. it was raised as a tribute to brockman’s generation, rugged pioneers, men of destiny and consequence, the enterprising white colonisers of what was seen as an ‘empty’ black continent.6 a fourth and final plaque depicts maitland brown’s discovery of the explorers’ remains. two bodies are framed by a makeshift tent, visual ‘confirmation’ that these men were butchered in their sleep. a third body lays several feet distant, a revolver (with four shots discharged) suggestively beside it. approaching the scene are two figures chained by the neck. these are the ‘hostages’ who led brown to the camp. for days these karajarri men had been locked in the hold of brown’s boat, subject to interrogation and abuse. white men flanked by their horses complete the scene. wellequipped and heavily armed, the punitive party took the guise of a military expedition. and the figure of brown himself commands this visual ensemble one hand raised in the air, mounted tall on horseback. regardless of ‘risk’ to himself, he would bring black ‘murderers’ to ‘justice’.7 the killing began with the hostages, amongst the first of many black deaths in custody. brown never bothered recording their names. one of the prisoners died quickly, shot in the back as he ran for the safety of a thicket. the other lived just long enough to confess to the explorer’s ‘murder’; at least that is what maitland brown would tell the authorities back in fremantle. one thing is beyond dispute: the shooting of the hostages began a killing spree of terrible proportions. a few days later brown and his party encountered a group of hostile ‘natives’. they were ‘ambushed’, he told the governor, yet another claim historians must read with scepticism. that skirmish cost the lives of around twenty aboriginal people. none of the ‘ambushed’ whites were killed or seriously wounded. brown’s account of the incident laboured a by now familiar narrative of white courage verses wanton savagery: the natives stood their ground with the savage, though not cool, pluck of an englishman, and not one of the number wounded uttered a sound expressive of either fear or pain… they disdained to throw down their arms, resisting savagely to the last. it was evident that this was the first lesson taught to the natives in this district of the superiority of civilised men and weapons over the savage… they live only for the present these natives – strategy, cunning, lying and a thirst for blood are the first creeds taught to them.8 pietro porcelli’s bas reliefs (photograph bruce scates) scates public history review, vol. 28, 20213 in truth, it was brown’s ‘thirst for blood’ that seemed insatiable. in the same week he sailed for fremantle, brown took two more ‘natives’ captive, presumedly to stand trial for the deaths of the explorers. one escaped, the other died trying. for each of the dead explorers, at least three aboriginal people had been killed. such was the arithmetic of white terror on the frontier. contested commemoration in many ways the memorial raised in fremantle typified the monuments of its age. ‘australian frontier history’, as don watson had observed, ‘was rapidly followed by the erection of [such] monuments’. tributes to the imagined virtues of white settlers, they rationalised the occupation of first nations’ lands ‘the killing began with the hostages’. the london illustrated news (7 october 1865) reports the murder of white explorers on the westralian frontier. the claim that these men were ‘murdered in their sleep’ by ‘treacherous natives’ was a convenient fiction. the evidence of the inquest revealed that goldwyer stood guard outside the tent and that his revolver had been fired several times. porcelli’s bas relief of the killing. note the position of the body. (photograph bruce scates) scates public history review, vol. 28, 20214 as the inexorable march of progress.9 and yet – in other ways – this memorial is quite exceptional. white violence on the frontier often had – as watson, griffiths and others have remarked – a secretive character. pastoralists and police spoke of ‘dispersing’ the natives; that very phrase ‘settlement’ belied the forcible dispossession of aboriginal people from their lands.10 the explorers’ monument, by contrast, reflects what bernard smith once called ‘the ethics of conquest’.11 there are few explicit references to the murderous work of punitive parties on colonial monuments. but here white violence against aboriginal people is publicly proclaimed, acknowledged and exonerated. a ‘subversion of the whole commemorative framework’. rae minniecon speaks at the installation of the counter memorial in april 1994. the new plaque was one of the first public recognitions of prior sovereignty in australia. an instance of dialogical memorialisation, it critiques the lies of white history. (photograph bruce scates) and there is a second (and for the purposes of this article) far more critical point of distinction. tributes to white pioneers once sat comfortably in white australia’s civic landscape. calls to remembrance, they enshrined, paradoxically, a ‘cult of disremembering’.12 the explorers’ monument, by contrast, became a site of active contestation, its remaking a subversion of a whole commemorative framework. in 1994, the united nations year of indigenous peoples, a fifth plaque was laid at the memorial’s base. it acknowledged ‘the right of aboriginal people to defend their land’, outlined ‘the history of provocation that ended in the explorers’ deaths’ and commemorated ‘all … aboriginal people who died during the invasion of their country’. this is a striking instance of what historians have called dialogical memorialisation, one view of the past taking issue with another. from its opening line ‘this plaque was placed here by people who found the monument before you offensive’ to its closing statement in language – mapa jarriyanyalaku – this counter monument decries a history ‘from one perspective only’. it displaces ‘the perspective of the white ‘settler’ and offers an indigenous reading of violence on the frontier.13 the remaking of the explorers’ memorial was one of the first australian expressions of what’s come to be called ‘the statue wars’. in time, the processes of dialogical memorialisation undertaken in fremantle may well be adopted elsewhere.14 for over a century, monuments to cook, macquarie and others reduced complex and often contradictory historical actors to simplistic, onedimensional caricature. heroic statuary bled the past of its complexity and rendered it lifeless in stone or bronze. but, as the articles assembled here scates public history review, vol. 28, 20215 attest, there is a pressing need for new, inclusive and explicitly disruptive narratives. and that willingness to reckon with and repudiate a racist present and past is at once local and global in its span. in recent months the black lives matter movement has highlighted the moral and political imperative to remove those great white men figuratively if not literally from their pedestals.15 such monuments, as we’ve seen, were planted in public spaces as statements of white power and privilege. and their continued presence there – unaltered – perpetuates a historical continuum of violence, discrimination and dispossession. it denies indigenous sovereignty and traps australia in its past. the fate of the monuments examined in this volume will almost certainly be decided on a casebycase basis. local communities, not government edicts, are likely to drive that process. this purging of the past may be a necessary corrective to white history. but how these decisions are taken, and whose voices are empowered in that process, is equally important. for generations, white history has marginalised or excluded indigenous perspectives. the challenge now is to enter into dialogue, embrace what the constitutional convention at uluru called a process of ‘truth telling’ and transform symbols of a racist past into platforms for reconciliation.16 reflection and reappraisal it is now three decades since agitation to change the explorer’s memorial began. at this critical juncture in australia’s history, as we grapple with the legacy of a deeply troubled past, now might be the time to take stock. accordingly, the remainder of this article will shift our focus, away from what maria nugent called the ‘the history told on [a] memorial’, to ‘the history of the memorial itself ’.17 this inquiry into the politics of remembrance will address three related questions, and all at the core of critical public history. firstly, when, how and why was that monument remade in fremantle, what was significance of the project, and how did it proceed? secondly, and equally importantly, what did that project fail to do? recent work on memorial cultures shifts our focus to alternative visions, asking us to consider the monuments and antimonuments that were never actually raised. what might those other possibilities have been in fremantle? finally, and most importantly, what remains to be done? decolonising australia’s commemorative landscape is a vast and daunting project. as any number of indigenous commentators have noted, there is much unfinished business here. we begin with what was achieved. a counter monument was raised in fremantle. and when this project began back in 1988, that did not seem likely at all. agitation to change the explorers’ monument took place against the divisive backdrop of australia’s bicentenary celebrations. it was an unfortunate time for the practice of history. from the spectacle of tall ships arriving in sydney harbour to the concocted community of ‘bicentennial barbies’, australians were enticed to celebrate their nationhood, a common destiny in which, we were told, we all had an equal share. at one level, the rhetoric and reenactment of 1988 was comical and carnivalesque, a bicentennial ditty, bellowed inanely across the airways, capturing the mood of the day: let’s lend a hand and show the world how great we all can be all those years of sweat and tears it’s our bicentenary18 at another, that repeated refrain – ‘celebrate, let’s make it [great]’! – embraced that ‘cult of disremembering’ again. it enshrined the beginnings of an ancient continent from the moment of white occupation and wilfully, brazenly, ignored the dispossession of aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples from their lands. scates public history review, vol. 28, 20216 as with other protests that erupted across the country, the critique of the monument challenged this pluralist and unproblematic construction of australia’s past. it was predictably condemned, in some quarters, as unwelcome and unnecessary, a precursor to what came to be called the ‘black armband’ view of history.19 the fremantle gazette pilloried critics of the monument as ‘emotional and subjective’, historians were accused (bizarrely) of misusing public funds and ‘urging a sense of guilt on the white community.’ letters in response (and some plaintive protest at misquotation) were seldom published in reply.20 the use and abuse of the past in australia’s bicentenary has been the subject of considerable inquiry, including scholarly reflection on the nature of public history itself. in a volume exploring the politics of 1988, graeme davison drew a stark dichotomy between what he called monumental history – a history sanctioned and solid in the public domain – and critical history – engagement with, and contestation of, the meanings of the past. critical history, he concluded, often had an ‘essentially ephemeral’ character. in contrast to cairn, plaque and statue, its memory traces are ‘tattered banners’, ‘discarded handbills’, ‘faded graffiti’.21 fleeting and physically fragile, these memory traces lack the authority of what chris healy aptly dubbed ‘brass dogma’.22 davison would probably qualify that argument today (he is too reflective a historian not to) but there may be an echo of his thesis in recent commentary on australia’s statue wars. ‘what has happened to statues?’ julia baird asked in a bristling and brilliant opinion piece, ‘they have been rolled into harbours, set aflame on their plinths, defaced with graffiti, hung with signs… public reckoning[s] with the ongoing legacy of slavery, the horrors of colonial expansion, and the fact that we have not considered violence against people of colour, or women’.23 public reckonings, yes – and necessary ones. but also actions that usually leave no physical trace. banners and handbills are buried in waste tips or ephemera collections, dissenting graffiti is quickly scrubbed away. an image of edward colston’s empty plinth after the statue of the slave owner had been cast in bristol harbour is telling: history defined by its absence. one wonders what future generations will make of such empty space. will absence induce, as a recent online forum on the statue wars suggested, a kind of historical amnesia?24 monument means ‘to remember’ – and, in the case of the slave trade, there is surely a moral injunction not to forget. in other circumstances, the explorers’ memorial may well have suffered a similar fate. in june 1990, after long delay over the construction of the counter memorial, maitland brown’s bust was ‘chiselled’ from its granite pedestal and carried off in the night.25 some would view this as a wilfully destructive act, an erasure of history. but there is another reading. the severing of aboriginal heads was commonplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes in the name of science, often, as was the case with the resistance leader yagan, a ghoulish instance of trophy hunting on the frontier.26 in that light, the beheading of a statue had enormous symbolic power. a subversion of longstanding historical practice, it was a creative reworking of a ugly colonial past. even so, a replica of brown’s bust was quickly reinstated, proving, some would say, graeme davison’s point. this was a powerful protest, but also an ephemeral one. in that light, the triumph of the counter monument is it’s permanence. far more than that rusting dogma in bronze, it adds a new voice, a strident voice to the public domain. and what a powerful statement it is making. today, it is accepted protocol (in many quarters) to acknowledge country, to recognise prior sovereignty, and even words like ‘invasion’ are at last entering public discourse. that was not the case in 1988. the counter memorial in fremantle was approved four years before mabo, two decades before the constitutional convention at uluru, and long before the black rights movement took to our streets. i am not claiming this statement was unprecedented. hardly. from the moment of the first incursion on aboriginal lands, first nations people have asserted and reasserted their sovereignty. what i would suggest is that this plaque, acknowledging the right of aboriginal people to defend their land, and addressing ‘settlement’ as ‘invasion’, is a measure of shifting public perceptions. a statement that was at once long overdue, and yet – paradoxically – ahead of its time. scates public history review, vol. 28, 20217 that counter monument made a powerful statement but equally important is the way that statement was made. the project began, as historical work often does, with a lecture in a classroom. informed by the work of scholars like henry reynolds and tom stannage, the killings at la grange were used to chart the changing pattern of violence on the frontier. that lecture was subsequently published, part of a collection edited by stannage and lenore layman examining the politics and practice of commemoration in western australian. arguably all history is an act of collaboration – but public history more so. what might have remained solitary research in the archives, framed by a single authorial voice, quickly widened out to a major civic campaign.27 that campaign has left its memory traces. the submissions of what was styled ‘the public action project’ can still be found in the archives: circularised letters to the mayor and councillors of fremantle, reproductions of archival evidence in weighty appendices; careful reassessment of primary and secondary sources; liaison with press and government, endless factchecking time and again. that labour was a vast and collective undertaking, all in the working party (and many others besides) played a part.28 the frame of reference here was wide, expansive and inclusive elders of perth’s indigenous communities, historians and community leaders rallied around, reshaped and refined the submission.29 by far the most important part of that campaign was the involvement of indigenous communities. this was facilitated by the work of ray minniecon, now a revered elder within first nations communities, then a young aboriginal theology student at murdoch university. a descendent of the kabi kabi nation and the gurang gurang nation in south east queensland, ray minniecon travelled to bidyadanga (la grange) and gathered stories from the vibrant oral culture of the karajarri people. at la grange, they still remembered the massacre. and they numbered old men, women and children amongst its victims. ray minniecon would continue to work with both the baldja network in perth and karajarri people up north. in 1994, he would speak at the installation of the counter memorial, in a ceremony ‘initiated and controlled by aboriginal people’.30 what was achieved and how it was achieved is important. but like most movements for social change this project manoeuvred across a spectrum of possibilities. yes, a counter memorial was raised – but not the first preference put to the fremantle city council. that involved not one plaque but several. they encircled the original monument, engaging not just with its text, but also with the visual narrative of its bar reliefs. through text and image, the explorers’ monument spoke to the public. in this proposal, a series of counter memorials would speak back critiquing each of the original monument’s claims, holding it accountable to history.31 that counter history would reproduce extracts from the explorer’s diaries and contemporary accounts of the punitive expedition – demonstrating the murderous racist mindset of white colonialism. what the fremantle city council ultimately agreed to was a truncated version of that extended counter narrative. arguably that was a lost opportunity, an opportunity to treat the explorers’ memorial for what it is, an artefact in civic space, inviting further, deeper and ongoing interrogation.32 that call for ongoing interrogation suggests yet another lost opportunity. encouraged by the project’s initial success, ray minniecon and the la grange community proposed a second memorial to frame the plaque that was passed by council. it was a brilliant example of aboriginal irony. the explorers killed and died for water; the new monument they suggested was a stylised version of a water hole, a central fountain offering water to all. the original monument was built by pietro porcelli, an italian sculptor whose ancestry and artistry assured him of an honoured place in a city of immigrants. this new monument was designed by ronny cameron, an aboriginal artist then incarcerated in fremantle jail. the explorer’s memorial is an incitement to racial hatred – the proposal from bidyadanga announced a gesture of reconciliation. ‘let us all sit down together in peace’ is inscribed in language at the base of the memorial.33 the council – long divided over the question of the monument34 – had no funding line for so visionary a project, and the fremantle gazette warned ratepayers would be asked to foot the bill. so, what the council scates public history review, vol. 28, 20218 termed an additional memorial was never raised. in the six years to follow, the explorer’s tribute occupied a kind of limbo. it was discredited but not publicly repudiated, symbolic – perhaps – of white australia’s failure to come to terms with its racist past. then in 1993, during the festival of fremantle, ‘the monument idea was resurrected’ by the baldja network. baldja means coming together – and the monument would be a focal point for that group and others during the united nations year of indigenous people. the original proposal was reaffirmed, this time with unanimous approval – and funding – by the fremantle city council. the first report of the council for aboriginal reconciliation described this process as a ‘rewriting of history’: an important aspect of the whole recognition was the participation of all parties  – the baldja network, city of fremantle, the historians, and in particular the people of la grange, whose history they were commemorating. “we wanted the interpretation that murderers were justifiably punished amended to show aborigines died defending the country from white invaders,” glad milroy of the baldja network said, “and it was important that it be done with the support, approval and involvement of people from la grange”.35 that brings us to the final theme of our inquiry. what remains to be done? there are many who feel dialogical memorialisation offers a chance to ‘amend’ a ‘onesided history’.36 the australian heritage council recently cited the case of the explorers’ memorial as an instance of indigenous communities contesting colonial narratives, asserting their sovereignty, and turning symbols of a racist past into positive statements of reconciliation. it notes that the intervention in fremantle was not an attempt to ‘edit history’. rather it was an attempt at a more open and expansive dialogue with the past. it sees history not as some final statement – but a contingent and contested narrative.37 fremantle, in all this, seems to signal ‘a way forward’.38 and indigenous communities, as the council of aboriginal reconciliation put it, invite all to ‘walk together’. but reflecting on the chequered history of the explorers’ memorial and on recent controversies inflamed by the statue wars might well take that invitation literally. dialogues begin conversations – they should not end them. walking together the plaque raised in fremantle was a necessary corrective to old lies writ deep in australia’s history, the lie of terra nullius, of peaceful settlement, of brave pioneers murdered in their sleep. but correcting the history books, the plaques, the bronze dogma, isn’t enough. how do we truly decolonise the commemorative landscape? how, as mariko smith aptly puts it, can we ‘resignify monuments’? how do we bend cold stone to accommodate multiple and complex narratives? and, most important of all, how can we ensure the centring of an indigenous voice?39 as earlier noted, the statement from the heart at uluru appealed to all australians to embark on a journey of truth telling. to do that, white australians must listen now to new stories, stories that transcend the particularities of white archives, stories told in new and often challenging ways. ‘the whitewash was scrapped away’ – reads a headline from the herald after that ‘historic ceremony’ in fremantle.40 but what lay beyond the whitewash, what did we see and hear in its place? we saw noongar men from pinjarra dance as they have done since time immemorial, steeping through and beyond history, keeping culture, alive and vibrant and strong. we heard doris edgar and john dodo speak to us in language, a living testimony too long denied legitimacy in the history books – community memories of the trauma colonisation visited on this country, and words that stood witness to the triumph of survival. their voices took issue with deep and enduring injustices. but they also offered choice and hope and healing. they addressed this country’s future as much its past. the ceremony ended as elders from scates public history review, vol. 28, 20219 bidyadanga scattered dust from the site of the massacre and two white children laid wreaths of flowers decked in aboriginal colours.41 this article ends then where it began, on whadjuknoonyar land in the esplanade park fremantle. on that sunny april day in 1994, ray minnicon also stepped forth to speak. his life and work are an example of the bridging of cultures, and he told us how monuments that had once narrowed and distorted our view of the past can now open hearts and minds. this particular monument is a window into our past. it is a window into the way in which our country was invaded and the atrocities which have taken place with that invasion. but it is not only a window into our past, it is also a window into our present and if we want to understand the particular situation which we as aboriginal people and nonaboriginal people face in this country, then we would do well to look into and explore the windows of the past. monuments like this are dotted all across the australian landscape.42 noonyar dancers circle the explorers monument: ‘alive and vibrant and strong’. white observers, including local, state and federal politicians, witnessed the ceremony, but none spoke at the podium that day. this was an event that would centre indigenous voices. (photograph bruce scates) endnotes 1. for an extended account of events that led to the creation of this memorial see bruce scates, ‘a monument to murder’, in studies in western australian history, vol 10, 1989, pp2131. the author thanks paul ashton and the editors for the invitation to contribute to this volume, two anonymous referees and rae frances for critical comment. 2. graeme davison, the use and abuse of australian history, allen and unwin, sydney, 2020, p37. 3. see, for example, j.s. battye, western australia: a history from its discovery to the inauguration of the commonwealth, oxford university press, oxford, 1924, p200; l.c. burgess, pioneers of nor’west australia, constantine and gardner, geraldton, 1905; for the first extended critique of this ethos see tom stannage, western australia’s heritage: the pioneer myth, university extension, university of western australia, nedlands, 1985, pp2131. 4. see, for example, delores hayden, the power of place: urban landscapes as public history, mit press, cambridge, mass, 1995, passim. 5. these cite the original inscription. for an early and revealing analysis of explorer narratives of landscape see simon ryan, the cartographic eye: how explorers saw australia, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1996. 6. ‘maitland brown memorial’, sunday times, 5 february 1913; mary anne jebb, blood, sweat and welfare: a history of white bosses and aboriginal pastoral workers, university of western australia press, nedlands, 2002, ch 1. 7. aside from the reading of the plaques see david francisco, the panterhardinggoldwyer relief expedition of 1865: being a copy of a diary kept by one of the members of the expedition led by mr. maitland brown to the roebuck bay district in search scates public history review, vol. 28, 202110 of messrs panter, harding and goldwyer, whose murdered bodies were found at their camp on lake ingedana, royal western australian historical society, nedlands, 1928. 8. maitland brown, journal of an expedition in the roebuck bay district under the command of maitland brown, esq., in search of messrs. panter, harding and goldwyr, perth, 1865, pp1720, reprinted from the perth gazette and w.a. times, 19 and 26 may 1865. 9. i owe this quotation to tom griffiths, ‘past silences: aborigines and convicts in our history making’, in australian cultural history, no 6, 1987, pp1819; see also don watson, caledonia australis: scottish highlanders of the frontier of australia, penguin, sydney, 2009. 10. ibid ; chilla bulbeck, ‘aborigines, memorials and the history of the frontier’, australian historical studies, vol 24, no 96, april 1991, pp16878. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314619108595878 11. bernard smith, the spectre of truganini, australian broadcasting commission, sydney, 1980. 12. to borrow stanner’s oft cited phrase, weh stanner, after the dreaming: black and white australians: an anthropologists view, australian broadcasting commission, sydney, 1969, p25. 13. text taken from the counter memorial. 14. bruce scates, ‘monumental errors: how australia can fix its racist colonial statues’, in the conversation, 28 august 2017 (online). available: https://theconversation.com/monumentalerrorshowaustraliacanfixitsracistcolonial statues82980 (accessed 5 october 2020). 15. bruce scates, ‘call to topple statues is an opportunity for debate, in sydney morning herald, 11 june 2020 (online). available: https://www.smh.com.au/national/calltotopplemonumentsisanopportunityfordebate20200611 p551qs.html (accessed 25 september 2020). 16. the first nations national constitutional convention 2017, ‘uluru statement from the heart’ (online). available: https://fromtheheart.com.au/ulurustatement/thestatement/ (accessed 19 september 2020). 17. maria nugent, ‘historical encounters: aboriginal testimony and colonial forms of commemoration’, in aboriginal history, vol 30, 2006, p36. https://doi.org/10.22459/ah.30.2011.04 18. ‘celebration of a nation’, reproduced in kim anderson, jacqueline kent and clare craig (eds), australians 1988, fairfax, syme and weldon associates, willoughby, 1989, p20. 19. anna clark, ‘history in black and white: a critical analysis of the black arm band debate’, in journal of australian studies, vol 26, no 75, 2002, pp111. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050209387797 20. see, for example, ‘we’re not often wrong’, in fremantle gazette, 1 november 1988. also, ‘memorial idea sets problem’, in west australian, 19 october 1988 and my letter in reply, ‘story behind nw deaths’, ibid, 24 october 1988. 21. graeme davison, ‘the use and abuse of australian history’, in susan janson and stuart macintyre (eds), making the bicentenary, australian historical studies, melbourne, 1988, pp5576. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314618808595790 22. chris healy, from the ruins of colonialism: history as social memory, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1997, p23. 23. julia baird, ‘the toppling of statues is enriching not erasing history and it has thrilled my heart’, in sydney morning herald, 13 june 2020 (online). available: https://www.smh.com.au/national/thetopplingofstatuesisenrichingnot erasinghistoryandithasthrilledmyheart20200612p5523r.html (accessed 1 september 2020). 24. see the discussion between paul ashton, anna clark, kiera lindsay, and mariko smith on the ‘public protest and public history: the statue wars’, hosted by the australian centre for public history, history week, 2020 (online). available: https://www.facebook.com/australiancentrepublichistory/videos/659011108297512/ (accessed 9 september 2020). 25. ‘statue loses its head’, in fremantle herald, 14 june 1990. 26. see paul daley’s account of the comparatively recent repatriation of yagan’s remains, ‘the story of yagan’s head is a shameful reminder of colonialism’s legacy’, in the guardian (online). available: https://www.theguardian.com/australia news/postcolonialblog/2017/aug/31/thestoryofyagansheadisashamefulreminderofcolonialismslegacy (accessed 7 september 2020). 27. bruce scates, ‘frontier violence in western australia’, lecture delivered at murdoch university, 21 march 1988, author’s archive; ‘a monument to murder’, passim. 28. author’s archive. these documents can also be sourced in the fremantle city archives and are reproduced in public action project, ‘unmasking the monument’, raelene frances and bruce scates (eds), the murdoch ethos: essays in australian history in honour of foundation professor geoffrey bolton, murdoch university, murdoch, 1989. the project began at murdoch university and included staff, bruce scates (project leader), rae frances (coconvenor of the course on black/ white relations in which this project was based) and students brian aldrich, justin carroll. chris carter, michael gallagher, steve hall, vicky hart, carol mann, judy martin, vicki mcfadyen, rae minniecon and elizabeth thornber. 29. signatories included indigenous spokespersons from both community and government agencies, namely tom babban, robert bropho, ken colbung, len colbung, len collard, dannie ford, sealin garlett, elizabeth hayden, cedrick james, darryl kickett, gladys milroy, sally morgan, isobelle proctor, keith truscott, mara west, joan winch and ken wyatt. scates public history review, vol. 28, 202111 https://doi.org/10.1080/10314619108595878 https://theconversation.com/monumental-errors-how-australia-can-fix-its-racist-colonial-statues-82980 https://theconversation.com/monumental-errors-how-australia-can-fix-its-racist-colonial-statues-82980 https://www.smh.com.au/national/call-to-topple-monuments-is-an-opportunity-for-debate-20200611-p551qs.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/call-to-topple-monuments-is-an-opportunity-for-debate-20200611-p551qs.html https://fromtheheart.com.au/uluru-statement/the-statement/ https://doi.org/10.22459/ah.30.2011.04 https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050209387797 https://doi.org/10.1080/10314618808595790 https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-toppling-of-statues-is-enriching-not-erasing-history-and-it-has-thrilled-my-heart-20200612-p5523r.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-toppling-of-statues-is-enriching-not-erasing-history-and-it-has-thrilled-my-heart-20200612-p5523r.html https://www.facebook.com/australiancentrepublichistory/videos/659011108297512/ https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2017/aug/31/the-story-of-yagans-head-is-a-shameful-reminder-of-colonialisms-legacy https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2017/aug/31/the-story-of-yagans-head-is-a-shameful-reminder-of-colonialisms-legacy 30. ‘history rewritten: city of fremantle monument’, council for aboriginal reconciliation, walking together: the first steps, report of the council for aboriginal reconciliation to federal parliament, 199194, australian government printing service, canberra, 1994, p203. robyn ninyette and peter scott also facilitated liaison between noonyar people in perth and the la grange community. 31. ‘report and minutes of ordinary meeting of the finance and expenditure committee of the fremantle city council… 16 november 1988: item fe124, pp.15, author’s archive (and fremantle city archives). 32. this testimony would include panter’s report to his superiors in perth not long before the explorers’ deaths, offering aboriginal people ‘a pass to kingdom come’; f.k. panter to w. hogan, 19 october 1864, special police files, acc no 129, 7/22. 33. r.j. cameron, ‘plan of the proposed memorial in remembrance of the aboriginals that died at the injudinah swamp massacre’, june 1989, author’s archive (and fremantle city archives). 34. in 1988, opinion on the council was divided. whilst a majority supported proposal for a counter monument some councillors called for the memorial to be removed, describing it as an ‘unfortunate reminder’ of western australia’s past. the former labour leader alderman bill latter was the proposal’s most vocal supporter. author’s notes on discussion by the fremantle city council, 18 october 1988; ‘a case of black and white’, fremantle gazette, 25 october 1988. 35. ‘history rewritten’, pp202203. along with gladys milroy (a signatory to the original submission) mike cox, wendy casey, charlie and everett kickett and john roe played a key part in this process. valuable assistance was rendered by council officers ken posney and ros porter. 36. ibid. 37. australian heritage council, march 2018, ‘protection of australia’s commemorative places and monuments: report prepared for the minister for the environment, and energy, the hon josh frydenberg mp’, pp1617. (online). available: https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/4474fb91bd904424b6719e2ab9c39cca/files/protection australiacommemorativeplacesmonuments.pdf (accessed 10 september 2020). 38. scates, ‘monumental errors’. 39. see mariko smith’s observations on a discussion as part of ‘public protest and public history: the statue wars’. see also mariko smith, ‘tear it down’, australian museum (online). available: https://australian.museum/learn/firstnations/ tearitdown/ (accessed 19 september 2020). 40. ‘fremantle review’, in fremantle herald, 16 april 1994. 41. for an account of the ceremony see bruce scates, ‘remaking out history’, labour history, no 67, november 1994, pp1645. https://doi.org/10.2307/27509287 42. the full text is in the author’s archive but ray minniecon’s speech is also cited in scates, ‘monumental errors’. scates public history review, vol. 28, 202112 https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/4474fb91-bd90-4424-b671-9e2ab9c39cca/files/protection-australia-commemorative-places-monuments.pdf https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/4474fb91-bd90-4424-b671-9e2ab9c39cca/files/protection-australia-commemorative-places-monuments.pdf https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/tear-it-down/ https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/tear-it-down/ https://doi.org/10.2307/27509287 hayesgalley public history review vol 24 (2017): 38-53 issn: 1833-4989 © 2017 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. causing a ruckus: complicity and performance in stories of port moody matthew hayes his article is about the suicide of a small-town chief of police, which – according to some – did not actually happen. it is certain that albert william kruger, of port moody, british columbia, died on 24 may 1960 after serving as chief of police since 1946. but i encountered three versions of the story of his death. first, that it was not suicide at all, but rather a heart attack that claimed his life while he was at home. second, that it was indeed suicide, and he shot himself in the head in his home. third, and most sensational of all, that he attempted to commit suicide by gunshot in his car, but that he failed and dragged himself to his home where he shortly thereafter died, having left a trail of blood behind him. t https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ public history review | hayes 39 the disagreement over this story became central to what was otherwise a conventional public history job. during the summer of 2011, i was employed by the port moody station museum to research and help write a history book on the city of port moody’s first 100 years. at the time, i was an ma student in anthropology at simon fraser university, hired for my research, interview and writing skills but also because the funding for the position came from a federal government grant intended to hire students. the job required me to comb through the museum’s archives – a collection of several hundred artefacts, nearly ten thousand photographs, dozens of hours of recorded oral histories dating back to the 1970s, and hundreds of pages of written material – in order to build up a history of the city’s early days according to a collection of themes. the chapters eventually published in the book tracks in time1 give a survey of life and work in the small city, including the importance of the canadian pacific railway, local mills and refineries, and the city’s struggle to differentiate itself from the emerging metropolis of vancouver. the book also provides a look at some of port moody’s memorable characters and events, an aspect on which i focused my energies. in the end, i served as the lead researcher, contributing text to seven of the book’s eleven chapters. the job was one firmly rooted in a philosophy of public history. the museum was run on a day-to-day basis by the full-time general manager and curator and took on special projects during the summer by hiring several students. however, the port moody heritage society, a board of volunteers, oversaw the museum’s operation, and it is this organization that published tracks in time. the board members were long-time community members, several of which contributed text to the book. one of the main goals of the project was to involve the community in the research and development phase in an integral way, reflecting michael frisch’s seminal notion of ‘shared authority’.2 despite hiring me as an ‘expert’, it was always intended that one of the main sources of information would be those community members who had lived through some of the times and events i was to research. this collected wealth of first-hand experience was a resource to use. but the expectation to also take into account the desires of those providing the stories led to some simmering tension. i was told on more than one occasion to ‘put the good stories in’. what became clear is that this actually meant leave out the bad ones. the story of the chief of police who may or may not have committed suicide was clearly one of the bad ones. public history review | hayes 40 this story of potential suicide – although there were other sensational and outlandish stories like it – marked a turning point in the project. it opened up a way into an analysis of this experience as one shaped by an expectation to conduct a rigorous history, in tension with the community’s desire to portray a rosy picture of the city. historians have described this tension as the difference between doing ‘history’ and ‘heritage’. ‘history explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time’, david lowenthal writes, whereas ‘heritage clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes.’3 ludmilla jordanova articulates this distinction in terms of the ‘historian’s imagination’, central to which is the capacity to ‘understand conditions that are not part of their own immediate experience’ and in so doing resist the appropriation of history by ‘special interests’. she writes that this position exists in tension with the aspect of public history that is innately interested, which tends to become aligned with these so-called special interests.4 steven high describes this as the difference between ‘memory recovery’ and interrogating stories for their meaning.5 indeed, the very idea of the ‘community’ the museum mobilized for this project is contested and deeply affected how stories were told and received. this article uses the concepts of complicity and performance – theory derived from the discipline of anthropology – to reflect on doing public and oral history in small towns. it explores the controversy around chief kruger’s suicide as a way into a discussion on ethics, expectations, and shared authority. causing a ruckus in its very early days port moody was on the verge of good things. in 1879, the small town was named the western terminus of the canadian pacific railway and business immediately boomed. businesses and workers – many of them chinese immigrants – flooded into town and a prosperous frontier community began to develop. the success was short-lived. just five years later vancouver was named the new terminus. despite a number of court cases and blockades by landowners who attempted to stop further construction of the railway, vancouver became the end of the line on 23 may 1887.6 port moody immediately entered a depression with people leaving almost as quickly as they arrived. the decision to relocate the terminus profoundly affected the town, and still frames its history even today. the history of port moody is one of being jilted. the citizens became victims of events and decisions outside their control, and this narrative has structured subsequent historical renderings.7 people have of course public history review | hayes 41 moved on. but the bitterness about this decision over one hundred years ago is still apparent. tracks in time begins with this moment and everything that comes after is implicitly framed as a result. this might help account for why there was so much insistence on ‘putting the good stories in’. the old-timers i spoke to clearly wished for a book that portrayed their city in a golden light. except for the founding story of victimhood controversy was to be avoided. all else was just having fun, causing a ruckus. i encountered a frontier mentality8 while doing the research, especially in the recorded oral histories and during a number of focus groups. to help achieve the goal of community participation, monthly ‘reminiscing meetings’ were held at the local municipal hall. with refreshments provided, i met with a group of ten to twenty ‘old-timers’ – as they liked to be called – to talk about the old days and glean stories and information from them. the audio from these sessions was recorded, which i used for my research. the recordings were never transcribed and to my knowledge no one ever reviewed them. they did become part of the museum’s oral history collection but seemed to sit slightly apart from the main body of oral histories, being qualitatively different from the previous interviews. no release forms were ever signed for them, likely because the museum and those who attended did not think of them as formal oral history interviews meant to pass on original knowledge. they thought of them more as mere aids to research already underway that simply needed some assistance with ‘memory recovery’, or as group tellings of the story that were meant more for entertainment and building social ties. however, the intention was to use these meetings not only as a supplement to my research in the museum’s archives. frisch has described the use of oral history in this way as ‘salsa’, merely added flavour.9 i was to collect quotes and fill in gaps left by the historical record. but i was also to use the meetings as a means of determining what the ‘community’ thought was most important to include in the book. there was no shortage of stories. the task was to whittle them down to a manageable and publishable amount, in a way that would capture the essence of the town. many of these old-timers had lived in port moody their entire lives. as an outsider – i came from ontario – i expected a certain amount of ribbing. but even those who had lived in port moody for decades received the same treatment. at one meeting, a woman complained to me: ‘i’ve lived here for nearly sixty years, and i’m still one of the newcomers!’ public history review | hayes 42 the issue of insider/outsider status is ever-present when doing community research. jeremy brecher described how, even after several years, he was not accepted as an insider by a group of former brass workers with whom he was doing his research. at the very best, he achieved the status of ‘pet outsider’.10 my own position in port moody was similar. i never expected to be accepted as an insider, considering my tenure there would only last several months. but i was accepted as an expert because of the museum’s endorsement. with the blessing of this gatekeeper, i was given access to the community. they granted me a certain level of trust, knowing that whatever i did would be guided and checked by the museum’s staff, who by virtue of working in the community full-time, possessed more social capital.11 but this trust only extended so far. and this became clear during one of the reminiscing meetings. i may not have come across the story of chief kruger at all if it had not been for a slip of the tongue. while asking about the police force during the post-war period kruger eventually came up. then, in the kind of hushed voice that immediately invokes the feeling of being ‘off the record’,12 they said: ‘and you all know what happened to him.’ sitting in the meeting, i saw the other old-timers nod. clearly the story was a public secret. but i had not yet heard it. i asked what had happened and was given a very rushed version before the topic was abruptly changed. afterward, i asked the other employees of the museum about the story, and was told the part about the suicide was likely untrue. the sensational story was shrugged off as something the old-timers had probably exaggerated over time. it was clear that the story was taboo, and also not a priority for the book.13 over the rest of the summer i heard the other versions of the story from different people. some scoffed at the more graphic versions, also denouncing them as exaggeration. others would nod solemnly, agreeing that there was truth to the suicide tale. community in transition for the purposes of this article, it does not necessarily matter what actually happened, although i did eventually find out. what i want to highlight instead is how the composition of the community members, and their nostalgic recollections, shaped the final product. port moody, in its early days, was a frontier town. many of the people and events i was told about reflect this in the way that the stories, decades and generations removed, were filtered to serve specific purposes. the old-timers with whom i worked often referred to the ‘good ol’ days’, but it was at first unclear to which days, specifically, they public history review | hayes 43 were referring. no one who had seen the founding years of port moody was still alive. the old-timers in the reminiscing meetings spoke about their own childhoods and adult lives, which generally covered the 1930s through to the 1960s. it became obvious that the old-timers had specific recollections from this latter period, having lived through it, and so did refer to it as the good old days. but they also regularly referred to the late nineteenth-century years in the same way, clearly the result of hearing stories about them from their parents and grandparents. the same rosy tint covered practically every period up until the very recent past, beginning perhaps when the old-timers started retiring and seeing a new population move into town and take up work. port moody in the twenth-first century was rapidly changing. it was expanding with a surge of newcomers migrating outward from vancouver. a common concern among the old-timers was that the town would simply become a dormitory community for those who worked in vancouver. the old mills and factories that employed the men who attended the reminiscing meetings had long since closed and new employment was difficult to obtain. what new jobs that were available tended to be in the emerging creative sector, something with which the old-timers found it difficult to connect. i was more than once exposed to a lowly opinion of cell phones and kids-these-days who were born with the knowledge of how to swipe screens with their fingers. what the community members feared was, in fact, a loss of community. this is not by any means a unique situation.14 but it permeated the discussions at the reminiscing meetings, focused as they were on the past, on the good old days. further complicating the situation for them was the recent influx of new immigrants to the city. without exception, the community members with whom i was tasked to work were white and middle-class. that is, the community that was to help determine the priorities for the book was homogenous in race and age. racism was never explicit during these meetings. but certain wellworn stories attested to historical racial tension in the town. when port moody was named the western terminus of the canadian pacific railway, a number of chinese men were hired to work the track.15 they were said to have lived together in a shack, their wives and children left behind in china. it was always made clear that the shack was located on the outskirts of the town and none of them ever moved into better accommodations in town. among the stories were also featured the ever-present chinese laundry – offering the cheapest rates – and a chinese fish vendor, pushing his cart through the streets.16 public history review | hayes 44 the common thread in stories of racial minorities was amazement at their clever entrepreneurship or their unflagging stamina and hardiness. one story tells of a train accident in 1913 that claimed the lives of five sikh men who all became pinned between two cars that crashed into one another. according to long-time resident, allan ottley, another sikh man had his nose struck off in the accident. but promptly ‘picked it up and carried it with him to the hospital, where it was sewed back onto his face.’17 these kinds of stories made for entertainment, but of a certain kind. they were the safe stories to tell. the poor living conditions of immigrant men were known, but never discussed as a result of discrimination. it was simply how it was. and it was clear that racial minorities and the white population in port moody rarely mixed.18 the stories i heard of the general population emphasised the frontier mentality of simply having a good time, despite the bad luck and the resistance of the natural landscape the town had encountered.19 boys would be boys, especially when it came to drinking in bars and the occasional fisticuffs. meco alvero, the proprietor of the popular tourist hotel, was recorded in one oral history recounting the story of a man who, after being ejected from the bar for excessive inebriation, later came back with a chainsaw. after the bartender refused to serve him, the man fired up the chainsaw and began cutting down one of the building’s support beams. other stories told of local boys and men committing petty crimes, of robberies and assaults – ‘ding-dong fights’.20 but these stories were nostalgic. they were told amidst laughter, clearly intended to convey the sense that these incidents were not serious, and in fact hearkened back to a time of more conservative values and morals that made the town safe for these kinds of antics. they were values that the old-timers felt were slowly eroding. port moody had become, in the words of leon fink, a ‘lost cause’, ‘dedicated to the disappeared millworking family.’21 this romanticisation belied the fact that much of the work the men did was incredibly dangerous and in many cases resulted in injury or death.22 it also served to hide racial tensions and excuse the fact that men spent significant time at local watering holes, leaving their wives at home to raise the children. the myth-making i encountered revealed a desire to strategically frame port moody’s history by omitting embarrassing details and focusing instead on ‘the good stories’. in the case of minorities, this inevitably meant leaving out all mention of them, glossing over their stories as curiosities or including them as a way of displaying the benevolence of the white population.23 as cauvin writes in his discussion of historic sites, ‘[f]or a long time, historic preservation public history review | hayes 45 focused on the “legacy of wealth and power”. in doing so, it contributed to silencing the memories of minorities.’24 in the case of port moody, the legacy of wealth and power inevitably meant focusing on stories of the white middle-class, such as those who attended the reminiscing meetings. sommer notes that with the rise of social history in the 1970s, ‘stories of the past began to become more nuanced. those that had been suppressed, such as those uncovered by new social history studies of class, race, gender, and family, began to surface.’25 however, this change was not overly obvious while sitting in the reminiscing meetings. mention was made of minorities but only ever in the superficial way described above. jordanova writes that it is the historian’s ethical obligation to understand that the past ‘is constantly being used and re-presented, and ideally should not be appropriated by special interests.’26 attempting to strike this balance was especially challenging considering one of the stated goals of the port moody history book was to provide newcomers – the majority of which were secondor thirdgeneration immigrants – with a means of accessing port moody’s past. it also created an uncomfortable situation for me, tasked as i was with researching and writing an accurate history. authority, complicity, performance historians have described a distinction between doing history and heritage. ‘while the latter upholds a standard of distanced reflection and continual reinterpretation,’ leon fink has noted, ‘the former aims for fixity and wholeness, evoking emotions of pride and sometimes even reverence.’27 this nicely captures the problem i encountered in port moody: the museum had hired me to write history, under the constraints of a heritage project. in lowenthal’s words, heritage was ‘misconceived’ as history.28 this led to certain ethical questions. what if the museum or community members requested i change what i write? should i continue to research stories like the police chief’s suicide if it was made clear they were not wanted for the book? how would i negotiate the inclusion of potentially embarrassing stories – like the treatment of minorities – to ensure a more comprehensive account was achieved?29 rebecca conard clearly tackles this issue when she writes: [h]istorians who enjoy a constitutional right of free speech, supported by an academic tradition that encourages the open expression of ideas, have license to protest when this freedom is threatened. public historians, in contrast, are likely to find that their freedom of expression is constrained in one way or another, and as public historians nudge the process of social change by insisting on public history review | hayes 46 interpreting controversial events and contested history with scholarly integrity, the more clearly these constraints are revealed.30 the story of chief kruger’s suicide revealed these constraints because it was so sensational. it struck an entirely different chord than the rest of the stories, and for the museum went too far in insisting on interpreting controversial events. what is interesting is that i rarely felt these constraints otherwise. i was only present at the museum for a short time. but because of the vast amount of material i went through i quickly became an expert in the eyes of the old-timers. while at first i listened attentively and took notes when the old-timers told me stories, i was eventually able to participate in the telling. in many cases i even provide details they either did not know or had forgotten. in several instances, i was approached by community members looking for information about people they had personally known who i had only encountered through the archival record. i became an authority on the history of port moody. this is somewhat ironic, considering i remained an outsider and there was still a level of distrust, evident every time i tried to bring up stories like the suicide. but i realised that for the rest of the city’s history, i had a power over what was written. there existed a formal contract between myself and the museum, laying out the division of labour and responsibilities. i was responsible for doing the research and writing the first drafts. final copy editing and arrangement was up to the museum. the museum reserved the right to fact-check everything i wrote, as well as bring in other contributing writers or local historians to look over my work. but they never did so. the facts i included in my writing were never questioned. in one instance i was researching one of port moody’s various pubs, trying to determine when it closed. i had narrowed the year to either 1960 or 1961 and eventually decided on the former, based on the written material i had at hand. one of the old-timers openly disagreed with me, insisting the bar closed in 1961. in the end, the museum endorsed my choice. this is a relatively innocuous example. but it served to highlight how much trust i did indeed have, that the museum would take my word over a long-time resident who was there when the bar actually closed. also contributing to this decision, and others like it, was the gender of the community members who attended the reminiscing meetings. the group was certainly homogenous in terms of race, class and age. all were white and in their senior years. despite many stories of hardship during the 1930s, they were also all comfortably middle class. and they were mostly men. several women did attend the meetings and they did public history review | hayes 47 speak up and provide stories of the town and its people. but that was usually the only thing they provided: stories. the facts – dates, locations, names – were provided by the men in attendance. without it ever being stated explicitly, it became clear that when a specific fact was in doubt, we were all to turn to the men. they were the repositories of a more official account of things. by the end of the project, this authority was also extended to me. in the case of the above example, of the year the pub closed, it was one of the women at the meetings who disputed my claim. i suspect this combination of factors determined the museum’s decision to take my account as official.31 results from ‘the canadians and their pasts’ project – a mass survey project that aimed ‘to probe people’s historical consciousness’ – indicate that ‘museums were rated as the single most trustworthy source’ of historical information. this was due to ‘the presence of artefacts and primary documents, the belief that museums were neutral and run by professionals, and the confidence resulting from using multiple sources of information.’32 second only to museums in trustworthiness, the survey respondents said, were fact-based historical books. this certainly helps account for why my conclusions were trusted, despite being a newcomer. yet, there was one distinction that does not entirely agree with the results of this project. instead of valuing the supposed neutrality of museums, the community members with whom i engaged came to trust me because they thought, in effect, i was on their side. i do not mean sides in the sense of a pitched battle between opposing forces. rather, on their side in the sense of working with them toward a clear goal: that of painting a mythical portrait of port moody. in one sense, i was considered an advocate. my job was to collect all the stories and ensure that they were shepherded carefully and translated appropriately so that the goals were achieved. the anthropologist george marcus describes this relationship as one of complicity. he intends this term not in its usual meaning of ‘partnership in an evil action’, but rather that of the ‘state of being complex or involved.’33 ethnographers are required to construct their field of study from an assemblage of sites, and any one of these sites – whether a physical location or an intangible network of friends and acquaintances – may demand an allegiance or ‘circumstantial activism.’34 these various allegiances are enacted ‘to greater or lesser extents’ at each site,35 and they serve to turn the ethnographer into a de facto activist. the term is meant here as dedication to a person or group in the field. public history review | hayes 48 the community members in port moody articulated my role in the project as an activist in this sense, working toward their goals, which had been imparted to me through the process of actively listening to their stories.36 i believe this was the case based on what happened after it became clear i was not entirely dedicated to this task. in the act of repeatedly asking about the police chief’s suicide, despite the request to leave it alone, i betrayed the complicity.37 i began to sense a much cooler response from some community members nearer the end of the project.38 it was as if they felt i had betrayed the trust the museum had bestowed on me. if i had wished to sensationalise my own story, i imagine several of the regular community members would have harboured suspicions of me as some kind of spy. this suspicion had as much to do with performance as complicity. when stories of port moody were told during the reminiscing meetings they were exciting. the old-timers clearly had a good time reliving the memories, and the fun of it was piecing together the stories, with multiple tellers each contributing a part. the liveliness of the sessions made for a stimulating introduction to the stories and what they lacked in concrete historical detail they made up for in spirit. but the telling was only good in the group. at several points in the research i telephoned or met in person with some old-timers and spoke to them individually. i asked them to repeat a story they had told in a meeting. on these occasions, the telling was sterile. rather than the liveliness to which i had become accustomed, the telling was purely factual. in some cases, it became an interview rather than a telling; i had to prompt the old-timer with questions in order to even get the whole story out.39 on the phone, or one-on-one in person, the laughter and nostalgia of the stories disappeared. they became stilted. this speaks to the understanding the museum and the old-timers had between a formal oral history interview and the telling of a story. a formal interview was one-on-one, meant to convey information in as direct a manner as possible. a telling was a group collaboration that aimed more at solidifying community than passing on historical details. according to richard bauman, every ‘oral performance, like all human activity, is situated, its form, meaning, and functions rooted in culturally defined scenes or events’. he further writes that ‘every performance will have a unique and emergent aspect, depending on the distinctive circumstances at play within it.’40 the stories were not a simple recitation of events and words, told the exact same way every time. they changed depending on the circumstances. keith sawyer writes that everyday conversations, such as the stories told in the reminiscing meetings, are actually fundamentally improvisational.41 the public history review | hayes 49 people involved play off one another and so their words and these scripts can easily be changed. in this sense, oral history is also fundamentally collaborative.42 it does not happen in isolation. it only happens during and through contact with others. the difference between telling a story in a group and being interviewed for it also speaks to the division between oral history and ethnography. in a way, the vibrant tellings that occurred in the group speak more to ethnographic immersion. micaela di leonardo outlined a number of key differences between oral history and ethnography. most significantly, ethnographers define themselves through the practice of participant observation and immersion within the culture being studied. in so doing they focus more on analysing behaviour within group settings, whereas oral historians tend to focus on ‘narrative and artefactual modes of data collection’ confined to encounters between the smallest possible group – that is, between the interviewer and interviewee.43 the same information was given in the reminiscing meetings as during the telephone interviews. but the group setting brought out participant emotions in a way the one-on-one setting did not. this is because, rather than the content of the stories themselves, the social bonds built during the telling of the stories was the main focus for the old-timers. they strove to tell the stories as accurately as they could, but i understood that they actually wanted to get together and interact. these sessions were about solidifying their friendships and their common histories. and in some cases, they were about rebuilding forgotten memories, using all the bits of various people’s memories in order to piece together the puzzle of port moody’s history. the sessions were thus not a matter of simply recollecting stories, but more a matter of making their history, in the moment, and remaking it every time they met. as an outsider, i could only participate in this activity to a limited extent. eventually, i was able to provide obscure factual details that could help spark a story, or help move it along if it became grounded. but i could never fully participate in the act of piecing it together as the old-timers could as a result of their lived experience. the best i could do was sit on the outside of the reminiscing meetings and try to soak in their energy while observing behaviour. this disconnect was further highlighted when i asked questions about stories like chief kruger’s suicide, which was a memory the old-timers thought best forgotten. it did not fit into the lively performance of the meetings they attended, and so reminded them of my ambiguous – perhaps, suspicious – status. public history review | hayes 50 in reality, the situation was not this dramatic. by this time the project was winding down and the reminiscing meetings were occurring less frequently. but it was evident to me that the relationship had changed. the frameworks of complicity and performance are helpful here. but perhaps it is more effective to say that what actually occurred was a misunderstanding, one of expectations and goals.44 what some thought was a complicitous relationship was in reality one structured from the beginning by the differences between doing history and heritage. the good stories anthropologist karl heider raised the problem of conflicting interpretations of events in his article ‘the rashomon effect’. the classic 1950 film rashomon, by the japanese filmmaker akira kurosawa, is about an encounter in the woods between a bandit, and a samurai and his wife, which leads to the samurai’s death. the film provides four different interpretations of how the death occurred, each of them presented visually and convincingly: ‘unlike the familiar detective story on film, where accounts that are later impeached are given only verbally, rashomon commits itself to, and convinces us of, the truth of each version in turn. and unlike the detective story, we are not given an explanation wrapped up nicely in truth at the end.’45 the rashomon effect is certainly a tidy way of framing controversies such as chief kruger’s suicide, as it highlights the fragmentary nature of storytelling. however, in the end i did in fact find out the truth about chief kruger. his death certificate states cause of death was ‘termination of brain stem due to gun shot wound of head’. it was a suicide after all. what is more, the death certificate also notes the location of the death as ‘highway’.46 so perhaps kruger’s attempt did indeed fail, and he dragged himself home. or perhaps it succeeded and he was found in his car. i would have liked to include this story in tracks in time. as an outside researcher, i felt it spoke to the underlying tensions in the city’s history. but it was not included. while i had control over my own contributions, the museum staff and advisory board made the final decisions on which ones to include. i wrote up a number of stories of people and events that did not make it into the book. the suicide was just one story among these and i never did write it up. when the museum staff made it clear that kruger’s story was not a priority, i was forced to leave it aside in favour of the others. it was not until i revisited my experience and began writing this article – years later – that i searched the provincial archives and found kruger’s death certificate. public history review | hayes 51 in any case, the story of a grisly suicide by a respected civil servant was unacceptable material for the kind of book port moody wished to see. or, as i have argued in this article, the kind of book that the small group of community members with whom i worked wished to see. the book was a means by which this group was able to meet and relive certain memories. it was a way of contributing to a legacy of their choosing, ensuring that only the good stories were put in.47 the good stories were inevitably ones that reflected specific values, shaped by their experiences of race, class, gender and age. what the old-timers were looking for in this project was a confirmation of these values, which impacted upon, and at times conflicted with, my own experience of doing public and oral history. while in the end finding the concrete information about chief kruger was fascinating, the fact of it ceased to hold as much meaning for me. what meant more is how the controversy over this story cracked open the relationship i had with the community and the museum, allowing me to identify the disconnect between our expectations and goals, and to understand the stakes involved in this project for the old-timers. endnotes 1 jim miller and rebecca clarke (eds), tracks in time, port moody heritage society, port moody, british columbia, 2012. 2 michael frisch, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history, state university of new york, albany, 1990. 3 david lowenthal, possessed by the past: the heritage crusade and the spoils of history, free press, new york, 1996, pxi; see also leon fink, ‘when community comes home to roost: the southern milltown as lost cause’, in journal of social history, vol 40, no 1, 2006, pp119-45; steven high, ‘sharing authority in the writing of canadian history: the case of oral history’, in christopher dummitt and michael dawson (eds), contesting clio’s craft: new directions and debates in canadian history, institute of latin american studies, london, 2009; margaret conrad, ‘public history and its discontents or history in the age of wikipedia’, in journal of the cha, vol 18, no 1, 2007, p9. 4 ludmilla jordanova, history in practice, 2nd edition, bloomsbury, london, pp144-145. 5 high, op cit, p39. see also andrée gendreau, ‘museums and media: a view from canada’, in the public historian, vol 31, no 1, 2009, p39. 6 miller and clarke, op cit, p8. 7 such as: d.m. norton, early history of port moody, hancock house, blaine, washington, 1987. 8 frederick turner, beyond geography: the western spirit against the wilderness, viking press, new york, 1980, and roderick nash, wilderness and the american mind, yale university press, new haven, 2001. 9 michael frisch, ‘working-class public history in the context of deindustrialization: dilemmas of authority and the possibilities of dialogue’, in labour/letravail, vol 51, 2003, p160. 10 jeremy brecher, ‘how i learned to quit worrying and love community history: a “pet outsider’s” report on the brass workers history project’, in radical history review, vol 28-30, 1984, p191. for this discussion in anthropology, see donald public history review | hayes 52 messerschmidt (ed), anthropologists at home in north america: methods and issues in the study of one’s own society, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1981; kirin narayan, ‘how native is a “native” anthropologist?’ in american anthropologist, vol 95, no 3, 1993, pp671-86; john l. jackson jr., real black: adventures in racial sincerity, university of chicago press, chicago, 2005, pp153-62. 11 gendreau, op cit, p37. 12 anna sheftel and stacey zembrzychi, ‘introduction’, in anna sheftel and stacey zembrzychi (eds), oral history off the record: toward an ethnography of practice, palgrave macmillan, new york, 2013, p14. 13 on the silencing of alternate memories, see nicole neatby and peter hodgins, ‘introduction’, in nicole neatby and peter hodgins (eds), settling and unsettling memories: essays in canadian public history, university of toronto press, toronto, 2012, p5. 14 see, for example, anne o’connell, ‘an exploration of redneck whiteness in multicultural canada’, in social politics, vol 17, no 4, 2010, pp536-63; carrol clarkson, ‘who are ‘we’? don’t make me laugh’, in law critique, vol 18, 2007, pp361-74; carol schick, ‘white resentment in settler society’, in race ethnicity and education, vol 17, no 1, 2014, pp88-102. 15 miller and clarke, op cit, p6. 16 fred ungless, ‘port moody recollections’, in port moody station museum archives, 2011.015.001 (undated). 17 miller and clarke, op cit, p48. 18 in contrast, the story of german immigrants who worked at the steel mill was often told. the germans, it was said, were always impeccably dressed and clean. they showed up to work wearing suits and carrying briefcases, unlike the other workers who showed up already in their grimy coveralls. at the end of the day, whereas most workers went home to shower, the germans did so at the plant, and returned home – their houses always in town – looking spectacular. 19 port moody has been affected, for instance, by multiple mud slides, notably one in 1979, and a more recent one in 2009. 20 fred ungless, in his recollections, recounts several stories of port moody antics, including the time when a couple of boys stole a goat and drove it into the community hall during a packed all-ages dance, and the time when two men locked the town butcher, matthew urquhart, into the freezer overnight and then made off with the till. see ungless, op cit. 21 fink, op cit, p135. 22 one man, who worked for one of the sawmills, almost drowned in the inlet after an octopus allegedly grabbed his leg and pulled him under. he only made it to safety after pulling a knife from his boot and cutting away the tentacle. see miller and clarke, op cit, p80. there was also a story of a man who donned a wetsuit to help unplug one of the drainage sewers, and who was caught up in the sudden swell and carried clear under the town through the flooded sewer. he survived, and was apparently fine except for the foul mess in the backside of his suit. 23 such as several stories of upstanding men who employed minorities in their shops or factories. 24 thomas cauvin, public history: a textbook of practice, routledge, london, 2016, p62. 25 barbara w. sommer, practicing oral history in historical organizations, routledge, london, 2015, p19. 26 jordanova, op cit, p144. 27 fink, op cit, p119. 28 lowenthal, op cit, pxi. 29 sharon babaian, ‘so far, so good: ethics and the government historian’, in the pubic historian, vol 28, no 1, 2006, p104. 30 rebecca conard, ‘editor’s introduction’, in the public historian, vol 28, no 1, 2006, p75. 31 also among these factors is the higher degree of trust placed on the written over the oral record, a problem that has plagued oral historians more generally. see, for public history review | hayes 53 example, alexander freund, kristina r. llewellyn and nolan reilly, ‘introduction’, in alexander freund, kristina r. llewellyn and nolan reilly (eds), the canadian oral history, mcgill-queen’s university press, montreal and kingston, 2015, p16, and high, op cit, p34. 32 margaret conrad, jocelyn létourneau, and david northrup, ‘canadians and their pasts: an exploration in historical consciousness’, in the public historian, vol 31, no 1, 2009, p31. 33 george marcus, ethnography through thick and thin, princeton university press, princeton, 1998, p105, and linda shopes, ‘sharing authority’, in the oral history review, vol 30, no 1, 2003, p107. 34 marcus, op cit, p6. 35 deepa reddy, ‘caught! the predicaments of ethnography in collaboration’, in james faubion and george marcus (eds), fieldwork is not what it used to be: learning anthropology’s method in a time of transition, cornell university press, ithaca and london, 2009, p96. 36 on the importance of listening, see henry greenspan and sidney bolkosky, ‘when is an interview an interview? notes from listening to holocaust survivors’, in poetics today, vol 27, no 2, 2006, pp431-49. 37 audra simpson, ‘on ethnographic refusal’, in junctures, vol 9, 2007, pp67-80. 38 daniel bradburd, ‘fuzzy boundaries and hard rules: unfunded research and the irb’, in american ethnologist, vol 33, no 4, 2006, p496. 39 one of these stories was about a local man who lived on a houseboat on the inlet. he had trained a pet seal to follow him up the wharf to the pub, where it would sit with him at the bar. this story was a favourite in the reminiscing meetings, but was clinical when told over the phone, as if it was completely unremarkable. 40 richard bauman, story, performance, and event, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1986, p4. 41 keith sawyer, creating conversations: improvisation in everyday discourse, hampton press, new york, 2001. 42 luke lassiter, the chicago guide to collaborative ethnography, university of chicago press, chicago, 2005. 43 micaela di leonardo, ‘oral history as ethnographic encounter’, oral history review, vol 15, 1987, p4. 44 on the potential of misunderstanding, see jo blatti, ‘harry miller’s vision of arkansas, 1900-1910: a case study in sponsored projects’, in the public historian, vol 28, no 1, 2006, p82. 45 karl heider, ‘the rashomon effect: when ethnographers disagree’, in american anthropologist, vol 90, no 1, 1988, p74. 46 royal bc museum, province of british columbia department of health services and hospital insurance division of vital statistics, registration of death, albert william kruger. 47 an indication of this can be found at the end of tracks in time: rather than a standard index of keywords, the author can browse through an ‘index of people’, clearly intended for the convenience of old-timers wanting to quickly look up old friends. public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: shanahan, f. 2021. flying below the radar: civil aviation heritage in australia’s northern territory. public history review, 28, 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7452 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj flying below the radar: civil aviation heritage in australia’s northern territory fiona shanahan doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7452 the first flight to arrive in the northern territory (nt) of australia is surrounded by debate. wrigley and murphy landed in the territory after flying from point cook in victoria on 8th december 1919. yet the location of this event remains unclear. was it alexandria station or avon downs station? and why was such an important event not well recorded? perhaps it was overshadowed by the arrival of the vickers vimy and its crew on 10th december 1919 after they successfully completed the world’s first great air race from london to darwin. the arrival of these aircraft highlighted their ability to fly long distances, and this must have impressed many territorians and hinted at the potential for aviation in the territory.1 arrival of the great air race vickers vimy aircraft in darwin (image reproduced with permission from the aviation historical society of the northern territory) declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7452 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7452 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7452 other great aviators arrived throughout the 1920s and 1930s on their quest to break world records. the challenging and far-flung locations of the territory now appeared within reach of settler colonial industries and development. alongside industry, civilian services were established, including religious and medical, airmail and air cargo, passenger travel and recreational activities, which transformed remote lifestyles and generated opportunities for territorians and their businesses.2 the nt felt the negative impacts of the capabilities of aviation throughout world war ii. defence infrastructure relating to japanese air raids remains visible today throughout the top end of the nt, with world war ii runways remaining alongside the stuart highway, the major road that links darwin with katherine. the use of both civil and military aircraft after cyclone tracy generated an appreciation of the positive impacts of aviation. in december 1974, as part of the evacuation of darwin after the cyclone, qantas pilot, donn howe, flew 674 passengers and 23 crew from darwin to sydney. it was the largest number of people aboard a boeing 747 and was part of the huge effort to evacuate over 30,000 people safely and quickly.3 aviation continues to play a vital role in the lives of territorians today. the australian military, including royal australian air force (raaf) squadrons, maintains a noticeable presence in the region. examples include raaf bases darwin and tindal, larrakeyah/hmas coonawarra, robertson barracks, defence establishment berrimah, norforce (north-west mobile force) alice springs, joint defence facility pine gap, and mount bundey and bradshaw field training areas. everyday civil aviation flights ensure remote communities are accessible and include scheduled flights by commercial operators, like air north, as well as chartered flights for construction, mining, rescue and medical. however, despite a century of civil aviation and its impact on development and society, especially between the 1920s and 1980s, there are few written histories, and it appears that little remains of its physical past. on the other hand, military aviation is well recorded and well represented in the territory’s heritage institutions. the impression that defence narratives are more prominent would benefit from rigorous investigation.4 the aim of this paper is to explore this claim through an audit of heritage places and collections, alongside the investigation of primary and secondary historical sources and current ways in which civil aviation heritage is portrayed in the territory. this research therefore aims to identify gaps and trends in the way civil aviation heritage is portrayed in the territory and suggests ways in which this history and heritage could be better understood and presented to the public. histories of civil aviation in the northern territory the recent literature produced on nt history and heritage is diverse. awards for history grants have focused on significant individuals, sporting groups, indigenous people and the military. recent editions of northern territory historical studies have seen a similar focus with work on individuals such as lieutenant robert oestreicher, world war ii pilot (powell), nemarluk, aboriginal man (ivory) and sergeant james ‘jim’ bowditch, australian solider in world war ii and editor of the northern territory news (powell) and on the different cultures present throughout nt history including indigenous, chinese, european and japanese.5 due to the recent centenary the 2020 edition includes an article on the great air race.6 the theme of biographies is also evident in published books available through the nt historical society such as buffalo johnny (overall), bert nixon (cameron) and john anderson gilruth (egan).7 in recent years such histories have also focused on specific families who made an impact on the nt and the people who live there. titles include derrick’s sheer hard work and plenty of guts: the farrar family of the northern territory, bisa’s remember me kindly: a history of the holtze family in the northern territory and cadogan’s the book of harry, eric and bronte.8 most of the earlier historical texts, like those by lockwood, parsons and price, relate nt settler colonial history with a focus on the intertwined themes of isolation, distance, and failure. for example, lockwood’s chronological history details the settlement of darwin, from the first few attempts and their failures.9 shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20212 price also wrote a chronological history of the region, divided into two distinct time periods. the first encompasses 1870 to 1889, a time that price describes as a period of ‘booms’ and ‘excitement’ because of the perceived possibilities the region could provide. he contrasts this era with the period 1890 to 1910, which he describes as a time when the nt stagnated and awaited commonwealth administration.10 parsons headed a government inquiry into the settlement of the territory and its difficulties for the south australian administration.11 after the introduction of aviation, there was less emphasis on the difficulties of settlement, frontier themes and failures in later histories of the region. grant saw the need for the territory to be more connected and argued rail would be the best approach. however, he does state that, due to world war ii defence efforts, the construction of roads provided some relief to the issues of isolation and distance, which promoted successful ‘frontier settlement’.12 carment, gunn and the museum and art gallery of the nt (magnt) all acknowledge that the administration of the nt and lifestyle of settler territorians were hindered by isolation due to its expansive size and challenging climate and landscape.13 the written narratives of civil aviation in the territory include both primary and secondary sources. for this article, they have been divided into three categories: chronological, thematic/event specific and biographies. chronological there are only a few examples of this type of history specifically regarding civil aviation in the nt. north of capricorn published by the department of civil aviation in 1987 is a short book dedicated to aviation related events which also highlights the impact of aviation in the top end.14 vic pedersen, the best known nt flying padre, wrote a history covering three-decades of the salvation army’s flying padre service in northern australia from 1944 to 1974.15 edward connellan, pioneering aviator and founder of connellan airways (later connair), wrote an unofficial and unpublished short history of civil aviation up to the late 1970s as it expanded throughout the territory. it was not written strictly chronologically but rather through a series of events connellan witnessed or knew about. the stories are anecdotal and unlikely to be included in an official history as they often relate to adventures and fun had by friends, such as the shorting of a control column so that it gave the pilot a small electric shock whilst flying, or unhelpful advice regarding oil leaks from aircraft prior to world war ii.16 more recently, local historians peter and shelia forrest published a history of aviation in the territory at the request of airports nt.17 it focuses on specific events with images to accompany the stories. unlike vic pedersen standing next to his flying padre aircraft (courtesy of the salvation army australia museum) shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20213 previous texts, it includes historic timelines. several stories include people made famous by aviation like that of the ‘koepang kid’ (bas wie)18 who created national headlines in australia after he was found unconscious in the upper part of the undercarriage of a dc-3 after stowing away on a flight from west timor, indonesia. thematic and event specific histories thematic and event specific histories are arguably the most common type of history written about aviation in the territory. most focus on world war ii and the bombing of darwin. as the emphasis in this article is on civil aviation, it is significant to note that many pilots who flew in world war ii, in either the nt or papua new guinea, also flew in both locations as civilian pilots before and/or after their war service. sam calder, vic pedersen, clyde fenton and others flew for the raaf or were involved in the defence of darwin from a civilian perspective. edward connellan ran charters for the defence department during the war.19 it appears that the climate, challenging landscape, remoteness and relaxed nature of communities in both locations encouraged pilots like eileen steenson, charter pilot in the nt and png, to remain in the region.20 other event histories include 14,000 miles through the air,21 which is the first of a growing number of books to be written about the first great air race to celebrate the centenary of its arrival in darwin in 1919.22 territory authors have written about other niche subjects. bob alford wrote a history of civil aviation in katherine. pearl ogden wrote a history on mustering and helicopters. and shirley brown recorded interviews with centralians (locals to central australia) about the development of central australia.23 pamphlet of the connellan airways mail routes (aviation historical society of the northern territory) shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20214 the theme of providing services – rescue, medical and spiritual – is widely recorded. civil aviation enabled medical emergencies to be attended in a shorter time, whilst also enabling supplies and news from major hubs around australia. organisations like the salvation army and milingimbi historical society wrote of these services as did three former flying padres who have published books on their experiences. pedersen and parker wrote of their time with the salvation army flying padre unit. langford smith recorded his experiences and adventures whilst flying in and out of a remotely based mission in the nt.24 dr clyde fenton emphasised the importance of being able to attend an emergency at any time. it was for this reason that he practiced flying at night when there was a full moon.25 buchanan highlights the importance of air mail routes for territory stations and communities in his biography of sam calder.26 however, this diversity of experiences and historical actors can be obscured in public memory by the current focus on the royal flying doctor service. of other services made possible by aviation, little is written about the firebombing and firefighting aircraft utilised even today across the territory. it is also surprising that the subject of fly in, fly out (fifo) mining work and farming aviation, so important to the territory’s economy, have not been formally researched. nor have the delivery of passengers, cargo and supplies to remote communities or recreational flying and the aircraft that undertook these activities.27 memoirs, autobiographies and biographies the third type of history written about nt civil aviation are those that focus on specific individuals. these take the form of autobiographies and biographies and include texts about well-known aviators, like charles eaton and sam calder, as well as memoirs, like those of edward connellan, keith langford smith and clyde fenton.28 these biographies tend to focus on the period when aviation was a significant aspect of the subject’s life. they are important as they include stories that were unlikely be recorded officially due to the everyday nature of events involved. yet they had a lasting impact on the nt, its development and its people. in each of these three categories of written history, the dominating focus remains largely on the stories of european males. thus, a key gap in understanding nt civil aviation history relates to the broader social histories of the territory’s ethnically diverse communities and the experiences of women and indigenous communities.29 an exception is black’s 2019 article ‘clearing country and opening the skies: aboriginal workers and the australian aviation industry’. other narratives of civil aviation in the northern territory the written record is not the only way in which historical narratives can be conveyed and distributed. other ways in which the public can engage with the past include films, tours and public talks or presentations. prompted by the death of local legend vic pedersen, the abc produced two short documentaries on the salvation army flying padres in 2002 and 2008.30 in 2008, baz luhrmann directed australia, a major historical movie set in the nt. aviation featured mainly in relation to the bombing of darwin, which was recreated in graphic detail. in 2016, a reality television program, outback pilots, was released. whilst not historical, it was an observational documentary focusing on pilots flying to remote areas in the territory.31 in 2019 exposure productions, commissioned by nt airports, produced the documentary the sweet note of the engine to celebrate their anniversary and the centenary of the great air race of 1919.32 it focused on material locals could relate to, like that of well-known identities or little known locations and events, and presented a short history of civil aviation and its impact in the territory.33 like the heritage institutions and the literature, the above listed films focus mainly on significant but already well-known aviation events and identities. however, in some respects, the abc documentary on pederson and the nt airports documentary touch on previously untold stories. shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20215 historical tours that include aviation in the darwin region relate mainly to defence during world war ii.34 they are available as either self-guided, specialised defence of darwin tours or broad range tours, which include the defence of darwin story.35 there are currently none relating specifically to the civil aviation story. however, when discussing the matter with ‘walk darwin’ owner john hart, he noted that the generic tours could include a visit to the darwin aviation museum (dam) and, therefore, civil aviation stories could be experienced. he also stated that historical aviation sites were occasionally mentioned to tourists during tours.36 the two other tourist hubs in the territory are alice springs and katherine. if the katherine museum is visited, then the story of clyde fenton – the territory’s first flying doctor – is likely to be experienced.37 in alice springs, the central australian aviation museum offers visitors the opportunity to explore several civil aviation stories including the story of the kookaburra crash.38 in the darwin region, the nt archives and library organisation host a series of public talks at least once a month throughout the year. although they cover a broad range of topics, until recently they have not included any mention of civil aviation. in 2019, on behalf of dam, ken lai, fiona douglas and i presented five talks in relation to the 1919 great air race centenary.39 the fact that the public is interested in civil aviation heritage was reflected by the high attendance at these talks. all were booked out with over 100 people present. usually, most history talks in the darwin region attract approximately 40 to 50 people.40 two of the three presenters, ken lai and the author, for the great air race talks in the second half of 2019 (the author, 2019) steve farram of charles darwin university hosts an annual darwin history colloquium in the nt state library.41 the talks at this event are also not specifically related to civil aviation. but recently they have included at least one talk on this topic. in 2019, i presented a short history of ultralight aircraft in the darwin region and, in october 2020, i presented a paper on the flying padres. in may 2021, as part of national archaeology week, dam hosted a public history talk on aviation archaeology. government funding plays a crucial role in the presentation of heritage for the broader community throughout australia. each year the nt government funds aviation heritage events, which include the bombing of darwin, anzac day, victory in the pacific (vp) day commemorations and the anniversary of the 1919 great air race. only twenty-five percent of these events are civil aviation heritage focused. each year, dam hosts an open cockpit day to encourage people to attend the museum and engage with the shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20216 aviation heritage of the territory. while northern territory government funding is available for heritage listed sites, a significant proportion of funding goes to military sites. heritage audit current heritage collections and heritage listed places were investigated from may 2019 to may 2020 to establish a baseline from which to assess and compare the representation of military and civil aviation heritage within the nt. the audit recorded only physical heritage objects, places and public collections. private collections were not included to ensure that the audit was manageable within my time frame. heritage institutions, historical societies and heritage registers were investigated. (see table 1.) a total of 54 objects and places relating to aviation were recorded in the nt heritage register, of which 78% related to defence. civil aviation objects and places include vh – clw heron aircraft, alice springs; qantas/new guinea airways hangar, darwin; ross smith memorial, darwin; former katherine airport; connellan hangar, alice springs; john flynn memorial church, alice springs; the john flynn grace historic reserve; and flynn victoria hotel – ‘the vic’ – darwin. the vic was the only hotel where early aviators could stay when they arrived. the daly waters aviation complex and 7 mile aerodrome alice springs, both of which relate to both civil and defence uses, were also included. table 1. list of resources approached for data during the heritage audit collecting institutions data available historical societies data available heritage place registers data available central australian aviation museum yes aviation historical society of the northern territory yes, via darwin aviation museum northern territory heritage register yes darwin aviation museum yes fannie bay history and heritage society no national heritage listed sites register yes darwin military museum yes northern territory national trust register yes museum and art gallery of the northern territory no national estate archive (closed 2007) yes royal flying doctor service tourist facility no katherine museum yes shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20217 a major issue for this study is the destruction of physical objects and their associated documentation through two major events: the bombing of darwin (1942) and cyclone tracy (1974). furthermore, materials from which early civil aviation objects were constructed are not conducive to preservation in northern australia’s harsh climate. the lack of a heritage policy in the nt until 1991 saw objects acquired by institutions in other states and removed for display in the south.42 an example of this is the first tiger moth flown by the flying padre vic pedersen, the first and most famous flying padre for the salvation army in australia. this aircraft crashed in 1946 and, when the wreck was rediscovered in 2007, it was sent to the salvation army museum in melbourne.43 another issue for my study was that, for various reasons including the covid-19 pandemic, not all collections listed above were available for audit. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 central australian aviation museum darwin aviation museum darwin military museum katherine museum northern territory heritage register nu mb er of ite ms an d p lac es figure 1. heritage audit by nt heritage institution note: the central australian aviation museum was the only heritage institution that contained only civil aviation objects. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 central australian aviation museum darwin aviation museum darwin military museum katherine museum northern territory heritage register nu mb er of he rit ag e i tem s a nd pla ce s civil defence both unknown figure 2. heritage audit by category thirty of the 200 aviation related objects and places listed in the heritage audit are specifically related to civil aviation. defence-related materials account for 77.5% of the entire audit, with six items (3%) relating to both civil and defence use. nine items (4.5%) have no known provenance or recorded history and therefore they were unable to be differentiated. (see figure 2.) shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20218 discussion the results of the audit confirms that most aviation collections and heritage places are defence related. yet the audit needs to be considered in relation to several other factors such as the current state of various heritage institution catalogues and their ability to share their data. with a complete catalogue from the ahsnt or magnt the results may have differed and this is a potential study for the future. that defence accounted for more than three quarters of the heritage items suggests strongly that those who collected aviation materials or nominated aviation heritage sites thought that defence history and heritage was more important than civil aviation. dmm and dam were both formed (initially) to preserve military objects. since then, dam and the associated ahsnt have expanded their aims and objectives to include civil aviation objects, history and heritage in their displays. yet, its limited catalogue is still defence oriented. the 54 sites and objects on the nt heritage register list all nominations (including those rejected after assessment by the heritage branch). the overwhelming number of defence related nominations supports the argument that aviation defence materials and sites are considered more important than civil. this may be because more defence objects are collected and conserved, more has been written about world war ii and the bombing of darwin, and more films, tours and public talks have focussed on those events to the exclusion of civil aviation events. apart from loss and destruction, this under-representation of civil aviation objects is in part due to government funding that prioritises military heritage – note the current $500 million expansion of the australian war memorial – and the spending of large amounts of funding on anzac commemorations. governments are also less likely to fund collections based on private airlines, other companies or charitable groups. this situation also reflects the focus on certain popular subjects by collecting institutions.44 for example, the ahsnt opened dam with the initial aim of preserving the history and memorabilia of world war ii. the royal flying doctor tourist facility specifically focuses its collection on the stories and objects that relate directly to its aim of showcasing two iconic territory stories, the royal doctor flying service and the bombing of darwin. and finally, dmm focuses on objects and displays relating solely to the nt’s defence history and heritage. many historians in the past few decades have explored the influence of military history on cultural identity and memory in australia, with a particular focus on anzac.45 in 1967, geoffrey serle first expressed the term ‘anzackery’ but does not go into his meaning behind the word.46 however, others since then have attempted to define it. the australian national university defines anzackery as ‘the use and promotion of the anzac legend, especially in ways seen to be excessive or misguided’.47 the australia defence association acknowledges the definition continues to evolve and argues one of the uses of the term can be ‘hyperbolic rhetoric extolling the supposed place of anzac in history’.48 the results of a survey conducted by donoghue and tranter (2015) into the anzac identity and australian identity found that 90% of australians associated with the two identities. additionally, a department of veterans affairs report found that australian characteristics are seen to come from the australian military.49 an example of the recent increased interest in the anzac story is the 2015 commemoration of world war i. prior to the event, it was believed that all australian battlefield tour companies were fully booked and therefore it was possible that it would result in the largest ever peacetime gatherings of australians in one location, outside of australia.50 the advent of recent australian military commemorations (centenary of world war i and 75th anniversary of world war ii) has provided an opportunity for anzac stories to reach the australian public. it was during this time that authors like peter fitzsimons had great success with populist books like shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 20219 gallipoli.51 whilst not all these examples and anniversaries relate to events that involve aviation in wartime, they do demonstrate that defence related activities and histories have been pushed to the fore of people’s awareness in relation to the australian identity, heritage and history and occupy a prominent role in public history narratives. the opening of the royal flying doctor service and bombing of darwin tourist facility in darwin further supports the idea of the historic military influence on the territory identity. additionally, the presence of the raaf and other defence forces in the nt has made many territorians aware of northern australia’s military history through their employment as defence personnel working in catering, construction, youth programs and transport. the runway infrastructure and associated heritage signage remaining alongside the stuart highway serve as a physical reminder to both locals and tourists of world war ii aviation stories. yet, the good attendance at the 2019 civil aviation heritage talks, based around the 1919 great air race, demonstrates that there is a public demand for civil aviation histories to be explored and shared.52 although civil aviation histories relate mostly to individual experiences, they do tell the civil aviation story more fully. the flying doctors, padres and commercial pilots all write about an industry that made possible what was previously an almost insurmountable challenge. medical and spiritual assistance was now within reach and the ability to travel or transport mail and cargo in a timely manner across the vast and remote terrain of the nt was now possible. but despite these events having a profound impact on the people and development of the territory, today they seem routine, and the history and heritage of civil aviation are little understood. on the other hand, defence related narratives, like those of world war ii, retain the greatest hold on the public imagination.53 conclusion this article has highlighted that the aviation story in the nt is focused on defence. several significant areas of civil aviation are absent from the narrative, both physical and in written and other forms. civil aviation continues to play a vital role in the lives of territorians. yet these other stories of aviation, although significant, are seldom represented in museums, discussed on public tours or at seminars and little is written about them in territory histories. it is hoped that this research will create an awareness of the gaps in the civil aviation story and promote discussion in organisations and public forums that have an interest in territory heritage. once these gaps are recognised, then steps can be taken to ensure these important stories are not forgotten. acknowledgements thank you to all those within the organisations listed below who have spent time talking with me regarding this research. your knowledge, time and resources are greatly appreciated: aviation historical society of the northern territory, central australian aviation museum, darwin aviation museum, darwin military museum, heritage branch (northern territory department of tourism, sport and culture), katherine museum, museum and art gallery of the northern territory, northern territory archives (darwin and alice springs) and northern territory library. thank you to my supervisors, tracy ireland and sally brockwell. your advice, support and encouragement is greatly appreciated. my research is supported by an australian government research training program (rtp) scholarship and heritage of the air (australian research council linkage project lp160101232). my thanks to the university of canberra that granted me this funding opportunity. shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 202110 endnotes 1. peter forrest, ‘the northern territory’, in australian heritage commission (eds), the heritage of south australia and northern territory: the illustrated register of the national estate, sun books pty ltd, melbourne, 1985, p143. 2. david carment, looking at darwin’s past. material evidence of european settlement in tropical australia, north australia research unit, the australian national university, darwin, 1996, p44. 3. peter and sheila forrest, the world flies in … and darwin takes off, shady tree, darwin, 2016, p166; qantas travel insider 2020, from cyclones to change for good: qantas in the community (online). available: https://www.qantas.com/ travelinsider/en/trending/top-100-guide/qantas-centenary-history-community-spirit-cyclone-tracy-bushfire.html (accessed 1 july 2021). 4. i became aware of this due to conversations i had with territorians over a two year period. 5. alan powell, ‘courage and common sense: lieutenant robert g. oestreicher in the aerial defence of darwin’, in northern territory historical studies, issue 30, 2019, pp1-17; bill ivory, ‘nemarluk: “killer” or “crusader”’, in northern territory historical studies, issue 30, 2019, pp18-27; alan powell, ‘sergeant james “jim” bowditch: a memory of world war 2’, in northern territory historical studies, issue 29, 2018, pp80-83. 6. james potter, ‘somewhere in the silent spaces: a lesser known story of the great air race of 1919’, in northern territory historical studies, issue 31, 2020, pp1-14. 7. mary overall, buffalo johnny: portrait of an aussie battler, northern territory historical society, darwin, 2019; james cameron, my name is bert: bert nixon’s memories of katherine 1931-1990, northern territory historical society, darwin, 2017; ted egan, john anderson gilruth: a complex man, northern territory historical society, darwin, 2017. 8. northern territory historical society 2020, publications (online). available: https://www.lynhistory.net/publications (accessed 1 july 2021). 9. douglas lockwood, the front door darwin 1869-1969, rigby, adelaide, 1968, p2. 10. herbert parsons, the truth about the northern territory: an enquiry, unpublished, adelaide, 1907, p3. 11. archibald grenfell price, the history and problems of the northern territory, australia, unpublished masters thesis, university of adelaide, south australia, 1930, p2; ernestine hill, the territory: the classic saga of australia’s far north, harper collins, sydney, 1951, p1. 12. arch grant, palmerston to darwin: 75 years service on the frontier, frontier publications, dee why, 1990, p79. 13. david carment, looking at darwin’s past: material evidence of european settlement in tropical australia, north australia research unit, the australian national university, darwin, 1996, p44; jeannie gunn, we of the never-never, hutchinson, london, 1908; museum and art galleries board of the northern territory, ‘“the territory”: an historical perspective from 1623’, government printer of the northern territory, darwin, 1981, p1. 14. department of aviation, north of capricorn. a history of aviation in australia’s top end, australian government publishing service, canberra, 1987. 15. victor pedersen, the salvation army in north australia. christmas 1944 – christmas 1974, salvation army, australia, 2002. 16. edward connellan, brief history of aviation in the northern territory, unpublished, accessed via northern territory archives in november 2018, 1979, pp4; 8. 17. forrest, op cit. 18. he had climbed into this part of the aircraft in timor prior to take off as he thought it would enable him to escape to australia. the location he chose led to him being hospitalised for burns, poisoning and cuts caused by the undercarriage retracting. despite the white australia policy, bas wie was granted permission to stay in the northern territory and he was adopted by locals: ibid, pp150-151. 19. bobbie buchanan, not so silent sam: a biography of stephen “sam” calder obe, dfc, jp: northern territory pilot, pastoralist, politician, central queensland press, rockhampton, 2000, p50. 20. eileen steenson, flight plan png, rigby, adelaide, 1974. eileen steenson was the first female pilot for almost all the charter companies she flew for in papua new guinea. she also flew as an instructor in victoria and flew for a time in the northern territory. 21. ross smith, 14,000 miles through the air, mcmillan, london, 1922. 22. lainie anderson, long flight home, wakefield press, adelaide, 2019; michael molkentin, anzac and aviator, allen & unwin, crows nest, 2019. an extensive list of resources is available in relation to the great air race. available: https:// epicflightcentenary.com.au/recommended-reading/ (accessed 1 july 2021). 23. bob alford, katherine’s aviation history, unpublished, 2005, accessed via northern territory archives in november 2018; shirley brown, chatting with centralians: the lives of 30 centralians and their contributions to the growth of the northern territory, historical society of the northern territory, casuarina, 1998; pearl ogden, chasing last light: aerial mustering 1968-1978, pearl ogden (self-published), winnellie, 2000. shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 202111 https://www.qantas.com/travelinsider/en/trending/top-100-guide/qantas-centenary-history-community-spirit-cyclone-tracy-bushfire.html https://www.qantas.com/travelinsider/en/trending/top-100-guide/qantas-centenary-history-community-spirit-cyclone-tracy-bushfire.html https://www.lynhistory.net/publications https://epicflightcentenary.com.au/recommended-reading/ https://epicflightcentenary.com.au/recommended-reading/ 24. merle linnett, vic pedersen: flying padre, salvationist publishings and supplies, london, 1982; milingimbi historical society, harold shepherdson – a man with a mission: introductory pamphlet, milingimbi historical society, northern territory, 2001; lionel parker, shadow of a tiger, queensland complete printing services, nambour, 1994; lionel parker, grass strip landings and camp fire faces, queensland complete printing services, nambour, 2000; victor pedersen, the salvation army in north australia. christmas 1944-christmas 1974, salvation army, australia, 2002; keith langford smith, sky pilot’s last flight, angus and robertson, sydney, 1936. 25. clyde fenton, flying doctor, georgian house, melbourne, 1942. 26. bobbie buchanan, op cit, pp47; 50-51. 27. shanahan, ‘flying by the seat of their pants’, op cit. 28. bobbie buchanan, op cit; edward connellan, op cit,: edward connellan, the connair story: a brief summary, unpublished, 1979, accessed via northern territory archives in november 2018; edward connellan, failure of triumph: the story of connellan airways, paradigm investments, alice springs, 1992; steven farram, charles ‘moth’ eaton: pioneer aviator of the northern territory, charles darwin university press, darwin, 2007; clyde fenton, op cit; keith langford smith, op cit. 29. prudence black’s paper in 2019 is a recent example of this gap being addressed. prudence black, ‘clearing country and opening the skies: aboriginal workers and the australian aviation industry’, in journal of the european association for studies of australia, vol 10, no 2, 2019, pp49-57. 30. flying padre, television program, stateline, australian broadcasting corporation, december, 2006; the flying padre, television program, compass, australian broadcasting corporation, 2008 accessed via dvd on 22 february 2020. 31. prospero productions 2019, outback pilots (online). available: https://www.tvcatchupaustralia.com/outback-pilots (accessed 1 july 2021). 32. darwin international airport 2019, media release: northern territory airports celebrates milestone year, with the world premiere of aviation history film, the sweet little note of the engine (online), 3 july. available: https://www. darwinairport.com.au/node/896/attachment (accessed 1 july 2021). 33. personal communication with andrew hyde (director) in regard to his targeted audience and the reasoning behind his selection of material and events. 34. tourism nt 2021, history and heritage (online). available: https://northernterritory.com/things-to-do/history and-heritage (accessed 1 july 2021). 35. this conclusion was made after discussions with various historical tour guide companies and investigating the tourism nt 2021, (online). available: https://northernterritory.com/tours/history-and-heritage (accessed 1 july 2021). 36. john hart pers comm, 2020. 37. the katherine museum 2019-2020, collections (online). available: http://www.katherinemuseum.com/the-museum/ collections (accessed 1 july 2021). i was also advised by the manager of the museum via email whilst undertaking an aviation heritage audit between may 2019 and may 2020. 38. central australian aviation museum 2021, westland widgeon 111 ‘kookaburra’ (online). available: https://central australianaviationmuseum.org.au/exhibit/westland-widgeon-111-kookaburra (accessed 1 july 2021). i also viewed it in person in november 2019. the kookaburra was flown by keith anderson and bobby hitchcock to locate charles kingsford smith who was reported missing in 1929. the kookaburra experienced engine issues and both men died after they were forced to land in the tanami desert. the kookaburra was not located until 1978 and is now displayed in the central aviation museum in alice springs. 39. i was one of three presenters involved in this series of talks in 2019. further information from library & archives nt 2019, celebrating the centenary of the great air race (online). available: https://ntl.nt.gov.au/announcement/celebrating centenary-great-air-race (accessed 1 july 2021). 40. these attendance numbers are known to the author through attending a number of these events, as well as discussions with staff at the northern territory library and archives. 41. charles darwin university 2019, annual history colloquium (online). available: https://www.cdu.edu.au/events/ annual-history-colloquium (accessed: 5 august 2019). this information is known to the author due to her involvement in the past few years. 42. anita angel, ‘collecting and exhibiting the northern territory: retracing a museum history on the frontier from pre-federation to the early twentieth century’, in lesley mearns and leith barter (eds), progressing backwards: the northern territory in 1901, historical society of the northern territory, darwin, 2002, pp115-158. 43. salvation army 2021, aircraft of the flying padre (online). available: https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/locations/ northern-territory/our-services/the-salvation-army-flying-padre-and-outback-services/aircraft-of-the-flying-padre/ (accessed 1 july 2021). 44. an example of this focus on very specific aviation themes and stories is discussed in shanahan, on a wing and a prayer, op cit. shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 202112 https://www.tvcatchupaustralia.com/outback-pilots https://www.darwinairport.com.au/node/896/attachment https://www.darwinairport.com.au/node/896/attachment https://northernterritory.com/things-to-do/history-and-heritage https://northernterritory.com/things-to-do/history-and-heritage https://northernterritory.com/tours/history-and-heritage http://www.katherinemuseum.com/the-museum/collections http://www.katherinemuseum.com/the-museum/collections https://centralaustralianaviationmuseum.org.au/exhibit/westland-widgeon-111-kookaburra https://centralaustralianaviationmuseum.org.au/exhibit/westland-widgeon-111-kookaburra https://ntl.nt.gov.au/announcement/celebrating-centenary-great-air-race https://ntl.nt.gov.au/announcement/celebrating-centenary-great-air-race https://www.cdu.edu.au/events/annual-history-colloquium https://www.cdu.edu.au/events/annual-history-colloquium https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/locations/northern-territory/our-services/the-salvation-army-flying-padre-and-outback-services/aircraft-of-the-flying-padre/ https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/locations/northern-territory/our-services/the-salvation-army-flying-padre-and-outback-services/aircraft-of-the-flying-padre/ 45. marilyn lake, henry reynolds, mark mckenna and joy damousi, what’s wrong with anzac?: the militarisation of australian history, newsouth, randwick, 2010; alistair thomson, ‘popular gallipoli history and the representation of australian military manhood’, in history australia, vol 16, no 3, 2019, p518. https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2019.1636675 46. geoffrey serle, ‘austerica unlimited?’, in meanjin quarterly, september, 1967, pp237-250. 47. australian national university, nd, word watch: anzackery (online). available: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/allnews/word-watch-anzackery (accessed 1 july 2021). 48. australia defence association 2018-19, ‘“anzackery”: a draft dictionary definition’, (online). available: https://www. ada.asn.au/commentary/formal-comment/2018-19/anzackery-a-draft-dictionary-definition.html (accessed 1 july 2021). 49. jed donoghue and bruce tranter, ‘the anzacs: military influences on australian identity’, journal of sociology, vol 51, no 3, 2015, pp445; 453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783312473669 50. jim mckay, ‘a critique of the militarisation of australian history and culture thesis: the case of anzac battlefield tourism’, portal journal of multidisciplinary international studies, vol 10, no 1, 2013, p1. https://doi.org/10.5130/portal. v10i1.2371 51. alistair thomson, op cit, p521. 52. examples of flying padres who flew in the nt but were not associated with the salvation army include ron watts (mission aviation fellowship), keith langford smith (church mission society) and ray shepherd. this is not an extensive list but it does demonstrate that there are flying padres working within the territory region who are not acknowledged. 53. this statement is supported by discussions had with locals recently in regard to the fire fighting aircraft and helicopters. those whom i spoke to knew little about the service provided by the aircraft and the danger and challenges faced by the pilots. yet once they have seen them in action (in person), they have a greater appreciation of the work undertaken by the pilots and they begin to search out more information about them. shanahan public history review, vol. 28, 202113 https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2019.1636675 https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/word-watch-anzackery https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/word-watch-anzackery https://www.ada.asn.au/commentary/formal-comment/2018-19/anzackery-a-draft-dictionary-definition.html https://www.ada.asn.au/commentary/formal-comment/2018-19/anzackery-a-draft-dictionary-definition.html https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783312473669 https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v10i1.2371 https://doi.org/10.5130/portal.v10i1.2371 public history review vol. 25, 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: donnelly, d. j. and shaw, e. l. 2020. docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age. public history review, 25, 1-14. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age debra j. donnelly and emma l. shaw with the proliferation of digital technologies and the resulting democratisation of historical records the past is more accessible to consumers than ever before. this has propelled the rapid evolution of what is now the multi-billion-dollar family history industry. proclaimed an ‘epidemic’,1 genealogy and family history research has become ‘the fastest growing hobby in both britain and america as well as mainland europe, canada and australia’.2 indeed, after pornography, family history is the second most accessed website genre currently accessed daily across the globe.3 accompanying internet interest in family history research, there has been an explosion of family history themed media productions such as documentaries, docudramas and reality tv shows. historical docudramas that focus on family history are a contemporary television phenomenon. these productions are often investigative and use simulation and location to explore family and social history repackaged for public consumption. this research investigates the mechanisms at work in family history docudramas which it situates as public history for a didactic as well as an entertainment purpose. the analysis takes a case study approach and compares two recent and popular docudramas, the australian versions of who do you think you are? and back in time for dinner. these texts were chosen as the latest contribution to what has been a long line of this type of docudrama televised in australia and because they were produced and released within a few months of each other. they were analysed incorporating a content analysis approach and subsequently utilising peter seixas’ historical thinking concepts.4 the findings are represented in the form of a model for the repackaging of history in docudrama. popular culture, film and history the family history industry can be positioned as a manifestation of popular culture in that it has broad mass appeal, is widely accessible for most of society, it is constantly changing and has a reliance on mass communication technologies. according to paul ashton and paula hamilton, television and the internet have become important in ‘mediating between the personal experience and the public memory of events and also genders and generations’.5 their australians and their pasts survey showed that watching television and documentaries were the most preferred historical activities of a cross-section of australian citizens. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj this ‘visually inundated world’6 with the prevalence and pervasiveness of the image, sees historical films connecting to societal knowledge, popular culture and the world beyond. the population, it is argued, now have greater access to popular culture, including film, than ever before with the popularity of theatre-going, easy access to dvds and downloading from the internet. last year it was estimated that adults spent eleven hour per day on media consumption with at least six of those hours being devoted to watching tv and video. younger viewers reported preferring their media consumption on digital platforms such as apps/web via smartphones and tablets.7 historical films’ engagement with the past is different to that of scholarly research. when weighing up their respective advantages, it is more likely that the scholarly research would align more closely with the evidence, but that films reach a wider audience and can present strong visual representations. postmodernists argue that every history, written or otherwise, is above all a representation and as such cannot be an adequate account of the past. robert a. rosenstone argues that written research and film are both legitimate forms of historical knowledge: ‘it is time for historians to accept the mainstream historical film as a new form of history… movies create a world of history that stands adjacent to written and oral history’.8 robert toplin points out that written history has time to speculate and suggest alternative interpretations while filmmakers must present a complete and coherent account on screen or risk losing their audience. toplin sees the appeal of film as having an intellectual and affective dimension. he contends that film ‘pulls audience interest toward a study of the subject… movies give audiences a feeling for life in a distant time and place’.9 historical docudramas combine evidence and narrative with dramatic and affective elements to produce a representation of the past for public consumption. docudramas as public history an historical docudrama, also known as non-fiction drama, is a performance of the past designed for contemporary audiences that combines elements of drama with the documentary form. there is an obvious tension in the hybridity of the term docudrama. ‘drama’ suggests fiction and emotion. ‘documentary’ has connotations of objective reality, often with a didactic purpose. like other forms of historical films, the docudrama ‘regularly structures material into the conventions of drama, with a story that begins with certain problems, questions, and/or characters at the outset, develops their complications over time, and resolves them by the end of the film’.10 compared to historical feature films, docudramas tend to adhere more closely to an evidentiary record and may not sacrifice history for entertainment value. docudramas can be effective vehicles for the examination of social structures and codes of a specific time and culture, and so highlighting similarities and contrast to present-day circumstances, values and expectations. commonly emphasising biography, these films set micro-narratives of individuals or groups against the backdrops of macro-historical events. docudramas employ a variety of narrative and literary techniques to explore the past such as dramatic irony and tension.11 as they adopt conventions from drama, docudrama draw on performance modes from fictional television forms and invites audiences to use their knowledge of codes used in fictional filmic narratives. these facilitate presentations of the historical narratives that are engaging, memorable and elicit empathetic responses.12 the research has introduced the term ‘histotainment’ for this fusing of history and entertainment. donnelly and shaw public history review, vol. 25, 20202 the term historical docudrama covers a wide continuum of productions from films claiming to be ‘based on true events’ and so presenting a re-creation of the past with sets and actors to works whose claims of historical veracity are supported by explicit use of evidence and the omnipresent narrator. this article uses two examples of the later style of docudrama in which the journey from the present to the past is explicitly told and where evidence, location and recreation are melded to reveal and perform the past in and for the present. backgrounding the objects of study by 2007 who do you think you are?, originally airing in britain in 2004, had ‘become the second most popular non-fiction program ever shown on british television’.13 mirroring jose van dijck’s term of ‘mediated memories’, the producers used family history research for ‘creative acts of cultural production and collection through which people make sense of their own lives and their connection to the lives of others’.14 the australian version of who do you think you are? is currently in its tenth season,15 which speaks to its popularity and its connection in the australian context. who do you think you are? is meticulous and transparent in its use of sources and is publicly pedagogic in that it demonstrates how the viewers can undertake their own genealogical journeys. using a celebrity avatar, the program fuses genealogical processes to the simultaneous exploration of issues of social morality, cultural and institutional change, immigration and class mobility.16 there is a clear documentary narrative deployed, with voiceovers explain the relevance and importance of key findings and providing the audience with the historical context and information as it is disclosed to the celebrity avatar.17 the program is at once biographical and autobiographical.18 and the metaphor of the journey frames the program: the journey through time; the journey through class and social constraints; the geospatial journey; and indeed the journey through history itself. back in time for dinner was released in australia in 2018. an australian broadcasting corporation production, this program was a six-part series foray into a docudrama format. it featured a conglomerate of historical re-enactment, nostalgia, artefacts and anachronism to trace an australian family from 1950s to the present and beyond. as with other docudramas, the australian back in time for dinner was modelled on a british original and its spin-offs.19 the unashamedly contrived series is built on the conflict experienced by the ferrones, a ‘contemporary everyday australian family’ caught in a time shift that sees them cooking and eating unfamiliar food and being subject, and in many cases constrained by, the mores of the decade of the week. the narrator, commentator and master of ceremonies of the series is the well-known australian presenter, annabel crabb, who has her own retro vibe. the programs are episodic encounters and collisions between history and the present and feature the use of historical artefacts such as archival film, classic cars, decade appropriate ephemera and architectural time-shifted kitchen and living spaces. research design our research utilises a content analysis approach as a qualitative methodology for analysing docudramas as histotainment and how they repackage the past in the present. following figueroa’s20 approach to the analysis of audio-visual texts, the two-phased analysis involved constructionist grounded theory procedures with an initial focus on the documentary as a ‘whole’ and a subsequent analysis using an historical understanding framework.21 this method allowed for the texts to be analysed for meta-historical skills and concepts – the juncture docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age public history review, vol. 25, 20203 between the past and the present – as well as elements related to the theatrical form of the docudrama. emergent perspectives and ideas were identified, coding nodes were developed in nvivo data analysis software and thematic trees established. an analytical framework was developed from the data coding and four thematic domains were identified: history disciplinary practices; metahistorical concepts; past/present (dis) juncture; and popular culture and theatre (see figure 1). to further examine and compare the attributes in each domain an analytic rubric was devised (see table 1). this scored each attribute from 0-5 based on coding frequencies. the rubric scores allowed for comparison of attributes and domains in and across both docudramas (see table 2). this analytical procedure sought to answer the research questions: how do these docudramas repackage history for public consumption and what factors contribute to the impact of these narratives? findings and discussion figure 1 histotainment: repackaging the past in the digital age table 1 quantified data rubric coding frequency not present minimal a few instances evident strongly evident evident throughout assigned score 0 1 2 3 4 5 donnelly and shaw public history review, vol. 25, 20204 table 2 quantified data frequency for elements and domains domain elements back in time for dinner who do you think you are? history disciplinary practices historical inquiry 0 5 artefacts and evidence 5 5 institutional authority 1 4 use of experts 5 5 eyewitness testimony 3 3 historical sites and locations 2 5 domain score 16 27 metahistorical concepts ethical and moral judgement 4 3 cause and effect 5 5 historical significance 4 5 change and continuity 5 5 historical imagination 4 3 perspective taking 4 5 domain score 26 26 past/present (dis) juncture micro narratives 5 5 presentism 5 3 anachronism 5 2 empathy and sympathy 5 5 reconciliation 2 5 narrative quest 3 5 domain score 24 25 popular culture and theatre celebrity avatar 4 5 tension of discovery and the reveal 4 5 simulation and re enactment 5 1 audience identification and vicarious experience 5 3 platform semiotics 4 5 conflict and resolution 4 3 domain score 26 22 docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age public history review, vol. 25, 20205 discussion of the domains history disciplinary practices in back in time for dinner back in time for dinner (2018) is dressed in the apparel of an historical investigation but does not present as an inquiry, hence its relatively low score of 16/30 on this domain. the program assumes that the past is uncontested and knowable, so able to be set up by the production team, for the forrone family to explore and experience. the device of an authoritative voiceover is used to carry the historical narrative giving an account of trends and changes as well as the action of the re-creative events, such as going to a drive-in in the 1950s and the 1980s popularity of exotic take away cuisines such as thai and vietnamese. archival film, such as newsreels, sets the scene and provides contextualization, such as the footage of the 1983 america’s cup win and the dismissal of the whitlam government in 1975. the voice-over narrative is reinforced by on-screen text that provides seemingly reliable, yet unsubstantiated statistical information, such as ‘women still do more than twice of the housework in 1970s as compared to men.’ historical documents and spaces set the scene for the action in this program and lend an authenticity to the action. the family are not seen visiting libraries or historical archive repositories. but the archives come to them. every week the family home is morphed into a new decade and so the house re-creates the past and the family are actors in the space. the artefacts in the form of recipe books, retro kitchenallia and decade-typical architecture are used to set the scene, and as prompts to the action and tension. for example, when carol struggles to replicate a chicken liver pineapple dip from the 1953 better homes, garden new cookbook, and uses the wringer washing machine. the device of the visitors also propels the action with prominent people such as deportment and style entrepreneur june dally-watkins, michelle bridges from biggest loser fame and restaurateur and food educator, stephanie alexander dropping by to give their perspective on their life and times. they are eye-witnesses to the past and provide testimony as well as memory. an intriguing visitor encounter was from swimming icon and now 81-year-old dawn fraser. in what was a post-modern twist, the family gathered around the radio cheering fraser on in her 1956 melbourne olympics win. there was real excitement as the family urged her on and cheered and congratulated her when she won, even though they all knew that the win was many years ago. the event was made even more stimulating as fraser claimed never to have heard the race before. her revelation of the gender and class bias that she faced in 1950s added to the triumph. fraser claims that she was told that she would ‘never represent australia as you are working class.’ the use of evidence lends authenticity to the action. but it is highly selective and designed to provide very general easily digestible information and targeted at the perceived entertainment value for a modern audience. there is a certain smugness that suggests the production team and actors subscribe to the notion that the present is ‘better’ than the past and the docudrama aims to confirm this to the contemporary audience. such judgmental and over generalised statements are evident even in the voice-over narration as ‘50s cooking was a basic affair’ (episode 1) and from the 1980s (episode 4): ‘it wasn’t enough to dress foolishly and work out. you had to be on a diet.’ the underlying notion of technology and change always being positive is tedious to anyone interested in a serious consideration of the question of societal progress or decline. there is no attempt at balancing the historical record and many of donnelly and shaw public history review, vol. 25, 20206 the ideas are based on sweeping generalisations about thought and action in each decade with no concession to differences between individuals or groups. history disciplinary practices in who do you think you are? unsurprisingly, the history disciplinary practices domain was strongly represented in the analysis of who do you think you are? the program is meticulous in its use of sources and expert testimony which lends an authority that is lacking in back in time for dinner. every episode follows the unique and personal journey of a celebrity avatar and each historical inquiry is different. often, the celebrity in question has no real idea of what they are looking for prior to the show. but they quickly develop a focus of investigation after the first pieces of evidence about their familial pasts are revealed. mostly, it seems as if the (selected) evidence itself initiates and drives the investigation rather than the questions and desires of the celebrity themselves. unlike the inquiry process(es) of most family historians, the celebrities on who do you think you are? do not personally undertake the research. rather, they are taken on a journey of discovery, as opposed to adhering to the methodological rigors of the historian for themselves. the use of artefacts and evidence is paramount to the historical journey and a wide range of historical evidence is used from letters, wills, shipping and immigration records, to insaneasylum, workhouse and hospital records. electoral rolls, land records, certificates – births, deaths and marriages – and census data are often referred to as are more tangible artefacts such as buildings, paintings, photographs and audio recordings. the program also uses established institutions to add gravitas to its investigation. on location, experts provide background information and contextualise the significance of the documents they reveal as they guide (and drive) the understanding of the celebrity. the experts include a range of notable australian historians, a host of local and family historians, tour guides, specialised social historians, archivists, librarians, university lecturers, teachers and aboriginal elders. while eyewitness testimony is not as strong as other domain attributes (3/5) it is still evident in the data. in this context, ‘eyewitness’ usually took the form of someone known to the celebrity’s family who could provide some personal insights into their ancestors’ story. further, personal narratives were recounted at significant historical sites and/or locations. jennifer byrne is told of her connections to the court of king henry viii through her 12xgreatgrandfather edward neville on location at the tower of london. metahistorical concepts in back in time for dinner acknowledging that the scoring system is based on quantity as opposed to quality, back in time for dinner scores a strong 27/30 in the metahistorical concept domain. just as their ‘time travelling’ adventure highlights the unity of the family, the alien environment of the past creates tension as the forrones are subjected to now outmoded value systems and role expectations. a central concern is continuity and change as the series is contrived as an examination of what changes and what remains constant. flash backs to earlier episodes are used to demonstrate the changing nature of life. for example, tracing women’s housework from heavy manual labour of the wringer washing machine to the robotic sweeper. family relationships and home are stabilizing themes in the dynamic historical national and international landscapes over a time span of 60 years. the children’s reaction to their parents ‘romantic’ wedding video and to their parents dancing around the jukebox at the drive-in is timeless and identifiable for anyone with ‘embarrassing’ parents. docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age public history review, vol. 25, 20207 the metahistorical concept of cause and effect is also strongly represented in the back in time for dinner. the program is an examination of the impact on the lives of a ‘typical australian family’ as it is subject to historical and social forces beyond its control. the trends in food, fashions as well as technological developments and innovation are examined against a backdrop of historical, socio-cultural, political and economic factors in the second half of the twentieth century. this included post-war immigration policies and the resulting multiculturalism in australian society and the food evolution from primarily british fare to encompass a wide variety of international cuisines as well as social change in response to changing work patterns. the reactions of the family to their encounters with the past and in their video diaries as well as the perspectives added by the visitors provide a range of perspectives on history and the re-created historical experiences, albeit mostly from a white middle-class perspective. for example, on the issue of no parental supervision after school, olivia’s attitude stands in sharp contrast to her mother’s. carol feels guilty and neglectful of her motherly duties while olivia explains: ‘i enjoyed being a latch key kid… we could do whatever we wanted and eat lollies, we don’t usually do that.’ ethical and moral judgements abound, often undercut by inherent presentism of the program construction. for example, carol is unable to enter into the past lives of women and is constantly judging the experience by the standards of her own time. in her view, all women working in the home were unhappy and waiting to be released from the servitude. she is distressed and lonely, with no thought beyond the experiment of the back in time for dinner format to consider such things as the support of community and the differing expectations and aspirations of other times. in the1950s, carol is the modern professional woman caught in an unfamiliar and unappealing role of homemaker: ‘[you have] no time for yourself, how any woman would find this fulfilling?’ a strong example of ethical and moral judgement in play can be seen in the 2000s episode when carol and peter grapple with the human tragedy of the stolen generations as they watch the kevin rudd giving the 2008 apology to australia’s indigenous peoples. carol identifying with the separated families says: ‘i just can’t imagine not knowing… you wouldn’t even know if your child as alive… it really hit me hard… i can’t even imagine how those women went on. this decade was a very emotional experience for me personally.’ the historical significance is engaged at global, national and personal levels in back in time for dinner. major historic events are presented and with commentary on their impact. for example, the family and annabel crab watch the fall of the berlin wall on tv and annabel explains: ‘this was tearing down a major symbol of the cold war’ and ‘[it is] impossible to underestimate what a celebratory thing this was to watch the wall coming down.’ post-war immigration and the changes it wrought is a strong theme in this program, primarily due to the focus on food culture. for peter, this is a story of the nation and of his immediate family. his parents were italian immigrants and his family’s journey is traced with the help of shipping records and family photos. the experience causes peter to muse on the nature of history, ‘everything has come in waves and circles… revolution of backwards and forwards.’ metahistorical concepts in who do you think you are? metahistorical concepts scored also strongly in the domain score (26/30). yet this was not a result of the celebrities understanding, or even having a familiarity, with these concepts prior to their familial investigations. it is important to note that the visibility and utilisation of the donnelly and shaw public history review, vol. 25, 20208 concepts was only possible through the guidance of the ever-present experts. considering the concept of perspective-taking the celebrity was able to better understand the actions and motivations of their ancestor(s) when familial information and/or narratives were contextualised by the expert within the time-period in question. likewise, the concept of historical significance was understood when the expert explicitly informed the celebrity of the importance of the document/ event/narrative. cause and effect were better understood by most celebrities because they could see that events in the past were impactful on the present. change and continuity was also strong. but most celebrities demonstrated an understanding of this concept through a perceived inheritance of personal character traits. ethical and moral judgement was evident. while ancestral transgressions were often initially despised by the celebrity, their views ultimately shifted with additional information or context. for example, kerry-anne kennerley found her grandmother’s abandonment of her mother at age twelve abhorrent. she admitted that she felt she was more affected by it than her mother but scathingly questioned: ‘what sort of woman just ships off her kids to be a glorified babysitter?’. she subsequently finds out that her mother was sent away as the family were impoverished and could not look after her properly. after this revelation she said: ‘it makes you realise you should never be judgemental about people’. rodger corser was disapproving of his 5xgreat-grandfather who abandoned his family numerous times, yet concludes the episode aligning his ancestor to a well-established australian trope of triumph over adversary: ‘risen from a convict and a deserter of families to the rank of gentleman. it certainly is an interesting story’. there is also a lack of ethical and moral judgement in this attribute. scott cam enthusiastically claims an ancestor who was ‘a risk taker and an adventurer… just the sort of bloke i was hoping to find’. jennifer byrne, upon finding out her ancestor was the mistress of king edward iii and they had four illegitimate children delights in asking: ‘so now we have scandal as well as power? excellent! excellent!’. she reflects upon the revelation of scant evidence: ‘i love the fact that lady joan has leapt out of history for me. it’s been really lovely to realise that there’s this ancestor that is everything you would want. she was strong, she fought for her family – not just her daughters, but her daughters-in-law. that’s a good proto feminist. i love that. i’m very proud of her’. one cannot help but wonder how many female ancestors were ignored in favour of lady joan? past/present (dis)juncture in back in time for dinner back in time for dinner scores high (24/30) in the past/present (dis)juncture domain. the program creates an historical microcosm in a suburban house set against the grand narratives of global and national history, focusing on the micro-narratives of social history. the series uses anachronism and presentism as primary drivers, with the family constantly feeling out of place and with audience engagement hinging on the family finding the past uncomfortable. there are attempts to reconcile the past, present and future in this series. it is noticeable, if not surprising, that the closer the family comes to the present the less anxious they feel. as the older daughter, sienna, says as she is handed a recognizable mobile phone: ‘i am beginning to feel like my normal self.’ the last episode attempts to complete the family’s journey through time by making predictions about life in the future by taking already existing discoveries to their logical conclusion. at the end of the series, there is an attempt to resolve the journey for the family. as the narrator explains: ‘you spent the last six weeks working back yourself to the future docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age public history review, vol. 25, 20209 where you felt comfortable and now we are going to make you quiet uncomfortable again by parachuting you into something quiet strange, the future.’ in this way the series reconciles the journey from the 1950s to the present and, following the themes of food, family and social change, looks to the future. there are elements of a quest. the quest to find meaning in change and to come to a deeper understanding of the meaning of history for the present. at the end of the series annabel asked the son, julian, a self-confessed history buff, to reflect on his time-travelling experience. ‘well when you study history, you tend to study all the… great people who did stuff – but when you travel back there is a lot more seeing history through the eyes of your average person. it is sort of interesting cause it is a different perspective.’ this is a major objective of the program to bring the macro and micro into focus simultaneously. past/present (dis)juncture in who do you think you are? the juncture between the past and the present is the core of the program scoring a high 25/30. the premise of each episode is framed around the narrative quest, as the celebrity (and by default, the audience) is taken on an emotional journey through their ancestral past. such quests traverse vast swathes of historical time, with some reaching back as far as the fifteenth century. always present is the seeking of the story, as ancestral narratives are pursued to flesh out the, at times scant, evidence. often the experts revealing the evidence provide enough historical context to enable the celebrity to jointly-construct the family narrative. the confluence between micro-narratives and broader historical accounts were common. in bowraville, casey donnovan’s family story was connected to the freedom rides. kerry-anne kennerley uncovered links to the english whaling industry. jennifer byrne’s long-lost ancestry placed them at the tudor court. and dr karl’s family were victims of the holocaust. rodger corser found convicts and irish orphans. more broadly, all episodes showed strong links to wider historical themes such as immigration, emigration, social class stratification, loss, trauma, triumph and sacrifice. it was often through the process of overcoming the disjuncture between their familial experiences in the present, and their ancestral experiences in the past, that the celebrities were able to contextualise unsettling or troubling familial information which led to a reconciliatory process. the notion of presentism, whereby the people of the past are judged according to twentyfirst-century values, is evident, but not strong in the data, as the celebrities always had an expert to provide context to the narrative. if a celebrity started the program with preconceived judgements about an ancestor, these were usually rectified by the expert’s contextualised evidence. anachronism too was evident but not strong. usually, anachronism was seen in the utterances of the celebrity in reaction to new-found familial evidence, and not through the production of the program itself. popular culture and theatre in back in time for dinner as a historical simulation, back in time for dinner draws strongly on the popular culture and theatre domain (26/30) and uses familiar film semiotics to create meaning and signal to the viewers that costume, technology and architecture will be important constants. the series constructs the physical and psychological geography of the past and sets out to have the forrones re-enact ‘out of time’ experiences as entertainment. every episode there is a reveal of the new decade as imaged in the re-constructed and decorated house and signaled by the golden key and the unlocking of the front door. the first segment of each episode is a journey donnelly and shaw public history review, vol. 25, 202010 of discovery for the family and the viewers as they explore the house’s evolution. segments like the drive-in in the 1950s and the video arcades of the 1990s appeal to nostalgia for the recent past and provide a break from the domestic set of the family home. the series uses a consistent structure that turns on the ‘reveal’ and ‘discovery’ and emotive reaction to create tension and dramatic irony. as the new decade takes over the interior of their house, the ferrones’ reactions to their new décor and demands of the new decade are a vital part of the drama. the distance between past and present is intentionally extended and exaggerated as the family experiments in their time capsule. for example, the choice of tripe as the first meal that carol has to prepare for the family is designed to create maximum distress for them, even bringing olivia to tears. similarly, the presentation and eating of insects as a future food (episode 7) is designed for maximum disgust. annabel crabb has a retro vibe that suits her role as facilitator and is a well-known celebrity for the abc docudrama watching audience. the different family members resonate across a wide demographic, enhancing the vicarious experiences for the viewers. with each episode, the viewers are drawn into the family characters and their interactions with the past. this is enhanced by video diary pieces to camera during which individual family members give their version and opinion of events. carol’s genuine reaction to the food bank and stolen generations (in episode 6) and the visit of peter’s mother (episode 2) to the set are instances of an affective dimension that arise from the family’s conformation of the past. viewers can readily identify with carol’s fear for her children who have to walk rather than be driven and are without mobile phones and the parent’s time bending experience of going out on a date in the 1990s. ‘i felt like i was 18 and dating him again,’ carol comments as the pair drive around in the ford capri. the viewers come to know the family and can identify with their attitudes, dilemmas and struggles. it is history as entertainment and although it is historical in nature, entertaining viewers is a primary driver. popular culture and theatre in who do you think you are? who do you think you are? is a manifestation of popular culture and theatre, yet scored a comparatively low 20/30 on the domain score. while the journeys of the celebrities vary, certain formulaic traits are observable in the platform semiotics. for example, the tension of discovery and reveal is identical in every episode. the celebrities are ‘drip-fed’ information from the expert(s), and the camera pans in to capture their reactions. documents to support the narrative are revealed singularly and often at locations of importance as the expert provides historical context. for example, dr karl kruszelnicki is told a harrowing account of jewish elders and children murdered during the holocaust in front of the train cars used to transport them to their demise. it is then revealed that his own grandmother was among the elderly who were also killed. ‘i’m feeling like i’ve been through an emotional wringer. i had no idea the being in the place where my grandmother and mother were processed, with the express goal of killing them… just came up on me’. this resulted in an extremely complex and multi-layered affective reaction for both the dr kruszelnicki and the audience. there is a clear affective intent, for both the celebrity and the audience. through tales of tribulations and triumphs, the celebrities are indeed put through ‘an emotional wringer’. simultaneously, the audience at home reacts and identifies with the celebrity through the notion of vicarious experience. yet this does not occur from the documents or stories alone. these emotional reactions of the program are undeniable but they are nonetheless staged. docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age public history review, vol. 25, 202011 background music and the location shots where the celebrities are seen processing their familial news ensures we at home are told how to react to the tension of discovery and reveal of the celebrities. the idea of discovery is also contrived. as each episode commences, the celebrity either muses about what they hope to discover or the narrator tells us about the life of the celebrity. in every instance, these hopeful musing are ‘discovered’ in the journey and so set the theme of the episode. personal character traits are usually emphasised and links are often made to ancestors who are seen to share the same. scott cam, positioned as someone fond of water in the opening scenes of the program, made constant links to it on his journey. also portrayed as ‘hard-working’, he draws constant links to this positive characteristic among his ancestors. of his female ancestors coming to australia, he says they ‘must have been strong women to survive…classic cam women. very strong and hardworking’. of particular note here is the narrative of their sea journey. no mention of their work experiences was made. for kerry-anne kennerley, determination and ‘sheer grit’ are the themes of the episode, as is a strong focus on her marriage, touted by the narrator as one of the ‘greatest love stories’. throughout the journey we find ancestors who display ‘grit’. her familial journey is brought full-circle by her rather tenuous claim that her previously-unknown ancestor had ‘deep and meaningful love affair with her husband. i understand that because of my husband’. for casey donnovan, ‘strength and determination’ is emphasised, as is a fear that she is ‘not aboriginal enough’. these fears were soon unfounded as connections with her determined and strong aboriginal family were made through documents, music and personally visiting locations of ancestral significance. through tears, she says: ‘it makes me feel like i belong’. in most episodes the questions raised by the journey are resolved. however, the attribute of conflict and resolution is not as strongly represented in the data as others in this domain. conflict here refers to the inner conflict of the celebrity as they struggle to understand and accept any familial narratives they find unsavoury. usually the conflict is only resolved after the expert who revealed the narrative contextualises the information for them. kerry-anne kennerley travels to hull in england on a quest to prove/ disprove a paternal family rumour of a ship’s captain. she is horrified and disappointed to discover he commanded a whaling ship. ‘i’m not really into whaling… i like the whales’. after the expert then informs her how crucial whaling was for the society at the time she is visibly more accepting. her internal conflict, through the historical context provided by the expert, is resolved. she says: ‘i never expected to be related to a whaler… but you can’t judge another time in history by the standards we have today’. conclusion this article has explored how history is repackaged for public consumption through an analysis of two contemporary family history docudramas. it identifies and quantifies the domains and their individual attributes which explain the appeal and impact of historically-based docudramas and introduces the term ‘histotainment’ to describe the blending of history and entertainment. the australian tv versions of back in time for dinner (2018) and who do you think you are? (2019) were selected for analysis as recent examples of popular family explorations. this paper proposes a conceptual model, entitled histotainment: repackaging the past in the digital age, which represents the melding of history and drama to produce creative works with entertainment as well as didactic intent. donnelly and shaw public history review, vol. 25, 202012 the four domains of the model – history disciplinary practices, metahistorical concepts, past/present (dis)juncture, and popular culture and theatre – were all represented in the data to varying degrees. the strongest result for both television programs was in the metahistorical concept domain. this is indicates that they deal effectively with ‘big picture’ notions of how history is perceived and understood by the present. this underscores the significant role of infotainment media in making the past accessible and presenting the public with sophisticated notions of the nature of history. this finding also has broad implications for more formal educative settings as it highlights the uses of docudramas for teaching and learning about historical concepts and understandings. the past/present (dis)juncture domain was also strongly represented in the data for back in time for dinner (2018) and who do you think you are? (2019). the attributes of this domain highlight the tensions inherent in bridging time and space and the dynamic nature human history. these programs explore the connections that pull us back in time, and highlights the distance caused by technological shifts and changing values. the strong emotional underpinnings that develop between, and connect, the viewers and the programs’ avatars underscore the (re)accessibility of the past to individuals who may not be interested in ‘traditional’ history. in sharp contrast to these strong and almost identical quantitative scores in metahistorical concepts and the past/present (dis)juncture domains, the programs differed significantly in the other two domains. back in time for dinner had strong appeal to popular culture and theatre with its use of filmic semiotics to develop the present-day characters thrown back in time. this created a vicarious experience for the viewers as they identified with trials and tribulations of the family. the dominance of the generalised historical narrative led to the neglect of history disciplinary practices which aligns with its more lighted-hearted approach to historical inquiry. this is reflected in its being awarded the lowest score of any domain, despite its strong use of artefacts and experts. antithetically, who do you think you are? scored highly in the historical disciplinary practices domain indicating that the program used many of the methodologies of the historian to construct the stories, and that the narrative is fortified and verified by the use of evidence and experts. this explicit adherence to history disciplinary practices lends a solemnity to the program which contrasts with the use of the celebrity avatar. despite the tensions created in the quest, this tv program scored less in the popular culture and theatre domain, primarily due to the lack of simulation and re-enactment. this promising model has the potential to be applied in a wide variety of other analytical contexts to investigate the repackaging of the past in the digital present. further work with docudramas and other historical filmic representations, such as documentaries and feature films, will provide further verification of its validity and reliability as an analytical tool. further research needs to be undertaken to apply this research design to other platforms beyond the filmic form. such application will determine its transferability to other historical representations such as historical fiction in traditional and graphic form, real and virtual museum exhibitions, virtual reality and gaming experiences and commemorative rituals and traditions. endnotes 1. paul ashton and paula hamilton, history at the crossroads: australians and the past, halstead press, sydney, 2007, p29. docudrama as ‘histotainment’: repackaging family history in the digital age public history review, vol. 25, 202013 2. fenella cannell, ‘english ancestors: the moral possibilities of popular genealogy’, journal of the royal anthropological institute, vol 17, pp462-480. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01702.x 3. ashely barnwell, ‘the genealogical craze: authoring and authentic identity through family history research’, life writing, vol 10, no 3, 2013, pp261-275. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2013.802198 4. peter seixas, ‘assessment of historical thinking’, in penney clark (ed), new possibilities for the past: shaping history education in canada, university of british columbia press, vancouver, canada, 2011, pp139153. 5. ashton and hamilton, op cit, p115. 6. landra rezabek, ‘why visual literacy: consciousness and convention’, tech trends, vol 49, no 3, 2005, pp19–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02763642 7. nielsen, ‘time flies: us adults now spend nearly half a day interacting with media’, july 31 2018, viewed on september 5 2019, <www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/time-flies-us-adults-nowspend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media/>. 8. robert a. rosenstone, history on film/film on history, routledge, london, 2017, p65. 9. robert b. toplin, ‘in defense of the filmmakers’, in r. francaviglia and j. rodnitzky (eds), lights, camera, history: portraying the past in film, texas a7m university press, college station, 2007, pp113-135. 10. robert a. rosenstone, ‘confessions of a postmodern historian’, in a. munslow (ed), authoring the past: writing and rethinking history, routledge, london, 2012, pp149-166. 11. steven n. lipkin, docudrama performs the past: arenas of argument in films based on true stories, cambridge scholars publishing, london, 2011. 12. vrinda varnekar, docudrama: meaning, characteristics and examples updated february 26, 2018, viewed september 10 2019, <https://entertainism.com/docudrama-meaning-characteristics-examples>. 13. cannell, op cit, p466. 14. jose van dijck, ‘mediated memories: personal cultural memory as object of cultural analysis’, continuum: journal of media and cultural studies, vol 18, no 2, 2004, pp261-277. https://doi. org/10.1080/1030431042000215040 15. the british original of who do you think you are? is now in its fifteenth season, and has a host of regional offshoots, including american, australian, canadian, irish, south african, israeli, swedish, norwegian, danish, dutch, portuguese, russian and czech versions of the original program. 16. jerome de groot, consuming history, routledge, oxford, 2009; cannell, op cit; anne-marie kramer, ‘kinship, affinity, and connectedness: exploring the role of genealogy in personal lives’, sociology, vol 45, no 3, pp379-345. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038511399622 17. anne-marie kramer, ‘mediatizing memory: history, affect, and identity in who do you think you are?’, european journal of cultural studies, vol 14, no 428, 2011, pp428-445. https://doi. org/10.1177/1367549411404616 18. de groot, op cit. 19. in britain there is varied array of spin-offs of the original back in time for dinner which first aired in 2015. these are testament to the enduring popularity in britain of the format – back in time for the weekend (2016), for christmas (2015), for brixton (2016), further back in time for dinner (2017), for tea (2018), for the factory (2018) for school (2019). canadian version of back in time for dinner (2018). 20. silvana k. figueroa, ‘the grounded theory and the analysis of audio-visual texts’, international journal of social research methodology, vol 11, 2008, pp1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645570701605897 21. seixas, op cit. donnelly and shaw public history review, vol. 25, 202014 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01702.x https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2013.802198 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02763642 http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media/ http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2018/time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media/ https://entertainism.com/docudrama-meaning-characteristics-examples https://doi.org/10.1080/1030431042000215040 https://doi.org/10.1080/1030431042000215040 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038511399622 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549411404616 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549411404616 https://doi.org/10.1080/13645570701605897 public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: gregory, j. 2021. dark pasts in the landscape: statue wars in western australia. public history review, 28, 1–9. http://dx.doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7504 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj dark pasts in the landscape: statue wars in western australia jenny gregory doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7504 statues preserve the memory of leaders and heroes and transmit archetypal stories. they represent the past, often so far past that the values represented by the statue hold no meaning for passers-by. at times, however, statues evoke new memories that replace or build on the old.1 then they become visible again, particularly in moments of crisis, when ‘they polarise public life by serving as lightning rods of social conflict’.2 when statues are removed it is as if they are being excised from history. in eastern europe, for example, statues tumbled as regimes collapsed after the disintegration of the soviet union in the 1990s. in iraq the statue of saddam hussein in bagdad was toppled in 2003 during the iraq war and in spain statues of the dictator franco were destroyed in 2005 in an attempt to erase his memory and the memory of his regime.3 the idea of toppling statues has gathered strength around the world. in the largest wave of student activism in democratic south africa the statue of rhodes, now seen as a symbol of colonial power and generations of black oppression, was removed from the university of cape town in 2014.4 a statue of rhodes in oxford remains a target of student protest.5 in the united states in recent years, an escalating climate of racial tension and the emergence of the #blacklivesmatter movement, has led to the removal of or threats to confederate statues.6 in britain, the statue of a slave-trader was thrown into bristol harbour.7 in australia, statues of captain cook and governor macquarie have been graffitied or had paint thrown at them. statues have become a symbol of an intensifying call for truth telling and reconciliation to address histories of violence, subjugation, trauma and racism. in this article, i discuss statue wars in perth in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the statues of a british governor and of a nyoongar warrior became the focus of social conflict. the responses to these statues reveal a society split in its attitudes towards past conflict between european colonisers and aboriginal people in western australia. drawing on examples from australia and north america, i then discuss the difficult question – how should we respond to statues which evoke a dark history? declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7504 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7504 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7504 two statues: a governor and a warrior in the lead up to western australia’s sesquicentenary of its foundation as a british colony in 1829, when commemorative monuments and statues were under consideration, some expressed surprise that no statue of james stirling, its founding governor, had ever been erected. a statue was duly commissioned.8 the statue, sculpted by clement somers and donated by channel 9 and radio station 6ky, was unveiled with due ceremony by hrh prince charles on 10 march 1979. earlier that day an aboriginal contingent from the black action group had shouted ‘go home to pommy-land’, when a boat re-enacting stirling’s exploratory expedition of the swan river in 1827 landed on the city’s foreshore. speaking a few days before the event, an aboriginal spokesman for the group said that the protest would be aimed at prince charles: ‘we want him to realise it was his ancestors, with their ideas of expanding their empire, who started all this trouble for aborigines.’ the federal minister for aboriginal affairs, senator fred chaney – son of perth’s lord mayor – said he agreed with aboriginal campaigns over land rights.9 however, a key aboriginal leader then spoke against the planned protest and only about twenty people were reported to have taken part. nevertheless, the protest included a headline grabbing, though unsuccessful, attempt by a leader of the black action group to hand a petition calling for land rights, housing and the right to govern themselves to prince charles as he walked from the reenactment to the site where he would unveil the statue of stirling. in 1979, stirling’s role in the dispossession of aboriginal peoples was rarely acknowledged. nor was his role in the massacre of pinjarra, when he led an armed party of 25 police, soldiers and settlers to the murray river at pinjarra to retaliate for the deaths of several white settlers and attacks on property. estimates of the number killed vary. it is likely that 80 or more bindjareb nyoongar men, women and children camped on the river banks were slaughtered. some women and children were taken prisoner. one police superintendent was killed and another speared in the arm. accounts of the event differ and until recently the event was known as the battle of pinjarra. john septimus roe, surveyor-general who was a member of the armed party, described the attackers as ‘sufficiently exemplary’. but the diary of joseph hardey, farmer and wesleyan preacher, described it as ‘a shocking slaughter’.10 since its unveiling, the stirling statue has had a chequered career. initially located near the perth town hall and the supposed location of the ceremony marking the foundation of perth, it went into storage for some years during the redevelopment of nearby building sites. it is now located outside the city of perth library not far from the original site. in june 2020, on the eve of a black lives matter rally, a protestor painted the hands and neck of the statue with red paint and spray painted the aboriginal flag over the inscription on the plinth below. he was arrested, charged with criminal damage and ordered to carry out 50 hours of community service. over the next few days, a wide range of comments, ranging from ‘pathetic nothing but vandalism’ to ‘do what america is doing – damage, harm or vandalize and go direct to jail’ to ‘so genocide isn’t offensive? good on him!!’, appeared on the west australian newspaper’s facebook site. but overall, few supported his action.11 when the erection of the stirling statue was under discussion fifty years earlier, in the mid-1970s, some suggested that aboriginal people should be acknowledged during the sesquicentary. but many held negative attitudes toward aborigines or simply ignored them and their place as western australia’s first peoples. typical of this view was a government pamphlet ‘the way west’ released for the sesquicentenary. it read: ‘it was only 150 years ago that man came to stay… the land that lay dormant for a million years has changed. the men of 1829 changed it.’12 premier sir charles court, when pushed, had announced that the government intended to find ‘ways of recognising aborigines and their role in the state’s history over the past 150 years’.13 but when plans to send an aboriginal group to plymouth in the uk to perform at the start of the commemorative parmelia yacht race were mooted the premier was advised that ‘we should try and nip this in the bud’. aborigines had been gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20212 clashing with amax over drilling programme at noonkanbah station claiming company wants to drill on sacred sites. amax are not aware of the plans to have aborigines at start functions and i am sure would not be happy at the prospect.14 when archaeologist sylvia hallam suggested that a statue of yagan be commissioned, sesquicentary funds were said to be ‘almost fully committed’.15 yagan was a renowned whadjuk nyoongar warrior who led resistance against settlers after several years of relatively peaceful co-existence following british colonisation in 1829. this was the result of increasing settler numbers, land grants to new settlers, the government’s edict forbidding nyoongar people to ‘trespass’ on their traditional hunting and fishing lands and floggings meted out to aboriginals who raided flour mills and vegetable gardens. in 1831, after a whadjuk man was shot and killed by a white settler during a raid on a potato patch, retaliatory killings led by yagan followed. he was outlawed and eventually captured with two kinsmen. they were imprisoned on an offshore island but escaped. in april 1833, yagan, with his father midgegooroo, led the first significant aboriginal resistance to white settlement, just after his brother had been shot and killed raiding a storehouse. up to 40 aboriginal men were reported as having ambushed and killed two men driving a cartload of stores. yagan was again declared an outlaw, with a bounty of £30 offered for his capture – dead or alive.16 midgegooroo was later captured and executed by firing squad.17 in july that year, yagan was killed by two young men he had befriended. at the time, the perth gazette referred to yagan’s killing as ‘a wild and treacherous act... it is revolting to hear this lauded as a meritorious deed.’18 yagan’s head and the skin of his back with its tribal markings were sent to britain where the head was exhibited in the liverpool city museum until 1964 when it was buried.19 after a long campaign, beginning in the 1980s, his remains were returned to western australia in 1997 and were buried in a memorial park by nyoongar elders in 2010.20 the city of perth council agreed to make a site available for a statue to yagan on heirisson island at the eastern entry to the city in 1978 despite the 150th anniversary board’s rejection of the idea of commissioning a statue of him.21 ronald berndt, professor of anthropology, wrote to the west australian newspaper: not to honour yagan as a present-day symbol is to lose sight of our own history, and to ignore the immense and painful struggle of aborigines over 150 years to regain their self-respect and identity as significant citizens of this state. but a petition to the government with 312 signatories requesting the erection of the statue had no impact.22 mrs elizabeth hansen, a well-known aboriginal campaigner, approached the state government in 1980 for funding on behalf of the aboriginal rights league which had set up a yagan trust fund. the government again refused. but the league gained approval from the city council to erect the statue and received funding from the lotteries commission of wa to add to trust funds. by then a labor government, which supported the project, had come to power. on 11 september 1984, at a ceremony opened by mrs hansen, the statue, sculpted by robert hitchcock, was unveiled by the federal minister for aboriginal affairs clive holding on heirisson island where it was believed that yagan had first sighted captain stirling and his men rowing up the swan river.23 the story does not end there. the statue was vandalised three times between 1984 and 1997. first, paint was splashed on it and the spear stolen. then, in september 1997, when an aboriginal delegation was in london applying for the repatriation of yagan’s head, vandals removed the head from the statue with an angle grinder. it was replaced. but two months later the statue was again decapitated, this time by a selfproclaimed ‘british loyalist’ on the day of lady diana spencer’s funeral. this is thought to have been in reaction to nyoongar elder ken colbung’s alleged comment that her death was ‘nature’s revenge’ for yagan’s killing by the ‘english’. it was replaced again shortly after.24 gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20213 the statue of stirling evokes memories of the earliest years of colonisation. ostensibly, for many it celebrates the foundation of western australia as an outpost of empire. but for others it conjures the memory of invasion. the statue of yagan evokes memories of colonisation from the other side of the frontier. well before the more recent attacks on statues in australian cities, these statues acted as lightning rods for both demands for aboriginal rights and action by white supremacists. these statues laid bare the continuing legacy of colonisation and conflict in western australia. the sesquicentenary had encouraged the community to reflect on their state’s past. a new history was emerging – one that reflected a more diverse society and engendered a new understanding of the past. but it would be some decades before this was more widely accepted.25 what to do with statues with a dark history? many of us, without sufficient knowledge of the past, have walked past statues barely giving them a second glance. we have assumed that they are of their time, obsolete survivors from the past. but, for many indigenous people, they are instead reminders of invasion and colonisation and of subjugation and racism for african-american people. as historical knowledge advances, collective understanding of these spatial and temporal landmarks has been reconstructed. so what can we do when we uncover pasts that no longer seem heroic, but instead tell of invasion, colonisation, frontier warfare, subjugation and dispossession? what to do about difficult statues remains a vexed question. the range of opinions recently discussed in a debate by us anthropologists provides a glimpse of the dilemma. one observed that the presence of monuments representing racist ideologies has had a mental, emotional and physical toll on people of colour. another that white working-class americans have been alienated because the removal of statues cannot undo structural inequalities. one result of this alienation in some southern states of the us has been the enactment of legislation to prevent changes to public monuments. an additional suggestion was that statues could be moved into museums, as museums are the right places for intellectual dialogue that enables people to confront uncomfortable truths. the alternative position was that this was unlikely because museums were already imbued with their own politics and ideologies. the impasse was summed up by one of the participants who admitted: ‘i am both professionally and personally exhausted with discussions over monuments and whether they should be removed from public spaces in united states cities.’26 media coverage by journalists, commentators and others has been extensive and, in many cases, has provided careful consideration of the issues. it has focussed on five main options: pull statues down, place them in museums or public parks, make them portals to honest history, build new statues or amend existing statues. national memory is an invented tradition, as jane jacobs observed, with multiple pasts jostling for recognition. its construction is within our control.27 hence, in many parts of the world in an attempt to reconstruct history through symbolic decolonisation, statues have been pulled down. this, however, has often been divisive and has set back reconciliation between groups. historian madge dresser has also made the case that pulling down a statue means that an opportunity is lost. ‘if we get rid of problematic statues’, she argued, ‘we foreclose the discussions we can have about those statues, which is important to the evolution of our shared identity.’28 should we then move statues into museums? in the us context, a number of art historians and critics have suggested that they would be in a controlled environment in a museum. not only could they be displayed, interpreted and exposed as propaganda. but their presence might encourage encyclopaedic museums to become ‘truth-telling institutions’.29 others point to the moscow example where, after the dissolution of the soviet union, hundreds of statues (some damaged but not repaired) honouring communist leaders were moved into a large open-air sculpture garden within the muzeon park of arts. it is sometimes called the fallen monument park. and each statue has a panel that details the work, its gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20214 composition and the history of its display. it has been argued, however, that relocation has decontextualized these statues and that emphasis on their historic and artistic value has depoliticised them.30 could statues be used as portals to inquiry that leads to honest history, as paul daley has argued?31 reflecting this desire to present honest history, sydney historian lisa murray queried whether the graffiti on the statue of captain cook should have been removed, suggesting that the words were part of the changing meaning of the statue. ‘this act is not obliterating australia’s history,’ she said. ‘it is part of a growing public consciousness to recognise australia’s history and to point out the complexity of our past.’32 dresser observed of british statues that: ‘as a historian, i love the idea that you have all these different statues from different eras that represent changing value systems – a palimpsest that enriches the urban landscape.’33 amin husain, one of the organisers of a protest in new york that saw a statue of theodore roosevelt splattered with red paint, argued: ‘the problem with keeping but modifying statues, is that it’s still the dominant group that sets the terms of the debate. shouldn’t affected communities have a say?’ this view was echoed by dresser who, in considering the impact on black students of keeping statues redolent of colonialism, questioned whether they would feel excluded by a ‘white imagination’.34 maintaining that we need ‘new statues to new heroes’, historian clare wright contended that new statues would tell stories and start conversations about the ideas and forces that have made modern australia, stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, of imperialism and republicanism, of genocide and assimilation, of war and of peace, of exclusion and inclusion, and of alienation and belonging.35 on the other hand, dresser cautioned that calls for new statues in britain dedicated to enslaved africans or new inscriptions on existing statues have been resisted with arguments including you can’t rewrite history or disparaging comments about ‘political correctness’.36 the idea of erecting new statues suggests that public art may have a role to play in reconciliation. after consultation with the la perouse aboriginal land council and the wider community, the nsw and federal government’s kamay 2020 project board commissioned designs for several bronze sculptures to commemorate the 250th anniversary of cook’s landing. they were installed at the site of his landing at kurnell on the eve of the anniversary.37 one in particular – ‘eyes of the land and sea’ by alison page and nik lachacjzak – specifically attempts to bring together different perspectives on our shared history – the bones of a whale and the ribs of a ship  – and sits in the tidal zone between the ship and the shore where the identity of modern australia lies. the first encounter between james cook and the first australians was a meeting of two very different knowledge systems, beliefs and cultures. the abstraction of the ribs of the hmb endeavour and the bones of the gweagal totem the whale, speaks to the different perspectives of those first encounters, providing a conjoined narrative of two very different world-views.38 this, however, may be an exception. examples of public art commissioned to provide interpretation of heritage sites by representing aspects of their past are not always successful as their meaning is often opaque.39 yet new inscriptions on statues can ‘amend and expand’ the meaning of a monument. an example is the explorers’ monument in fremantle sculpted by pietro porcelli in 1913. it was erected to honour maitland brown and three western australian explorers killed by aborigines in 1864 near la grange (bidyadanga) on the west kimberley coast. when they did not return brown led a search party which found the bodies. the monument describes how the explorers were murdered ‘after being attacked at night by treacherous (sic) natives’. a plaque shows aborigines in shackles.40 but the events depicted on the monument gave a onesided account. at least eighteen aborigines killed in a punitive massacre by the search party are ignored.41 gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20215 in 1990, like yagan’s statue later in that decade, the bust of brown on top of the monument was decapitated, though the head was eventually returned. in 1994, following research and negotiation by historian bruce scates, a ‘counter-memorial’ in the form of a second plaque – acknowledging the right of indigenous people to defend their country and commemorating ‘all those aboriginal people who died during the invasion of their country’ – was added by the local indigenous community.42 this added to the story, not editing it but providing a dual record of frontier history and illustrating the contested nature of history. this approach has been used in canada. in 2014, vancouver declared itself a ‘city of reconciliation’, formally recognising its occupation of unceded territories and, with local first nations peoples, beginning a long-term plan to decolonise and indigenise the city. amending existing monuments to tell the whole story was an important aspect of the process.43 a first step, however, is an analysis of the scope of the problem and the establishment of a decisionmaking process. new york city has established a mayoral advisory commission on city art, monuments and markers to review all ‘symbols of hate’ on new york city-owned land.44 comprised of museum administrators, historians, archivists and educators with expertise in preservation, cultural heritage and diversity and inclusion, the commission was given a timeframe for completion within 90 days. public hearings were held in each city borough at which verbal testimony was given by 200 residents, written testimony was accepted and an online survey for public comment received more than 3000 responses. in its 2018 report, the commission developed five guiding principles – reckoning with the power associated with representing history in public; historical understanding; inclusion; complexity; and justice. they applied these principles to three controversial statues in new york, as a means of providing examples of an evaluation process. competing interpretations of the christopher columbus statue led the commission to recommend that context should be added. but the commission could not come to a consensus decision on the 1939 equestrian statue of president theodore roosevelt, which includes an indian and a negro man walking at his stirrups. some see this as an image of racial hierarchy. the statue stands on the steps on the american museum of natural history and, at the time of writing, the museum was holding an exhibition – ‘addressing the statue’ – which presents the history of the statue while acknowledging ‘its troubling aspects… to create a foundation for honest, respectful, open dialogue’. highlights of the exhibition are online together with visitor perspectives on the statue. the statue is to be moved.45 conclusion statues are not simply timeless stone or bronze images, obsolete survivals from the past. they are animated by collective memory as it continually reconstructs the past according to the beliefs and needs of the present. in perth, protests against the statue of governor stirling were brushed aside in 1979 and aboriginal dispossession was rarely acknowledged when the statue of yagan was under consideration. today his role as a nyoongar leader and resistance fighter is well recognised. stirling’s role in the massacre of pinjarra, however, is still not widely acknowledged. in australia, there are statues of colonial icons in towns and cities throughout the nation. we now know that many of these icons were implicated in australia’s frontier wars and this aspect of their history should be revealed. it is clear that there are many options, as canvassed above. from my perspective, as an historian of anglo-celtic heritage, to pull these statues down would distort history. the most reasonable response would be to leave them in situ with amendments that reveal previously hidden histories – as in the case of the explorers’ monument in fremantle – or to relocate and interpret them in museums or public parks as has occurred overseas. but it is clear that wide consultation will be essential before a consensus position could be reached. a first step could be to audit each town and city’s statues and public art in order to determine who is represented and who is left out. gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20216 acknowledgements this article is a much-abbreviated version of an article in press with the journal history australia. it originated in a paper that i delivered at the western australian state heritage and history conference, perth, in april 2019. endnotesendnotes 1. maurice halbwachs, the collective memory, paris 1951, harper & row, new york, 1980, cited in barry schwartz, ‘the social context of commemoration: a study in collective memory’, social forces, vol 61, no 2, 1982, p375 https://doi. org/10.2307/2578232. see also katherine verdery, the political lives of dead bodies: reburial and post socialist change, columbia university press, new york, 1999; and madge dresser, ‘set in stone? statues and slavery in london’, history workshop journal, vol 63, 2007, p164. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbm032 2. david morgan, ‘soldier statues and empty pedestals: public memory in the wake of the confederacy’, material religion, vol 14, no 1, 2018, pp153–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2017.1418231 3. aleksandra hadzelek, ‘spain’s “pact of silence” and the removal of franco’s statues’, in diane kirkby (ed), past law, present histories, anu epress, canberra, 2012, pp153–76. https://doi.org/10.22459/plph.09.2012.09; benjamin forest and juliet johnson, ‘monumental politics: regime type and public memory in post-communist states’, post-soviet affairs, vol 27, no 3, 2011, pp269–88. https://doi.org/10.2747/1060-586x.27.3.269 4. britta timm knudsen and casper andersen, ‘affective politics and colonial heritage, rhodes must fall at uct and oxford’, international journal of heritage studies, vol 25, no 3, 2019, p242. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1481134 5. oriel college commission of inquiry, 2020 (online). available: https://www.oriel-rhodes-commission.co.uk/ (accessed 1 august 2020). 6. there are an estimated 780 confederate statues and monuments in the us. southern poverty law centre, ‘whose heritage? public symbols of the confederacy’ (online), 2019. available: https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose heritage-public-symbols-confederacy (accessed 16 may 2019). 7. ‘edward colston statue: protesters tear down slave trader monument’, bbc news, 8 june 2020. 8. s.w. dallywater, director western australia 150th anniversary celebrations (way ’79), to g o edwards, town clerk, letter, 25 may 1978, perth city council, ‘administration – historical sesquicentenary of wa’, file, battye library, cons 4013, was 72, #432/78, 1977–78. for a broad discussion of the sesquicentenary see g.c. bolton, ‘way 1979: whose celebration?’, celebrations in western australian history: studies in western australian history, vol 10, 1989; and jenny gregory, city of light: a history of perth since the 1950s, city of perth, perth, 2003, chapter 5. available: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ monuments/downloads/pdf/mac-monuments-report.pdf (accessed 29 september 2020). 9. sunday times, 5 and 11 march 1979; daily news, 5 march 1979, p4; west australian, 5 march, p1, 6 march, p12, 7 march p6, 10 march 1979, p2. 10. len collard, ‘massacre, pinjarra’, in jenny gregory and jan gothard (eds), historical encyclopedia of western australia, uwa press, crawley, 2009, pp561-62. the site was placed on the interim register of the national estate in 1992 and permanently entered on the state heritage register in 2007 as the pinjarra massacre site (battle of pinjarra memorial area, pinjarra massacre memorial site) (online). available: http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/admin/api/file/82ab22f4-f802df7c-12e2-14a73aebddc8 (accessed 9 june 2019). 11. jacob kagi and james carmody, ‘captain james stirling statue vandalised in perth on eve of black lives matter rally’, abc news, 12 june 2020 (online). available: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-12/captain-james-stirling-statue vandalised-before-blm-rally/12348328 (accessed 20 august 2020); west australian, facebook (online). available: https://www.facebook.com/thewestaustralian/posts/a-perth-musician-says-he-defaced-a-statue-of-james-stirling because-he-believes-/10158629042939439/ (accessed 17 july 2020). 12. j.l. bannister, director, wa museum, to k. shimmon, executive director, way ’79 150th celebrations, letter, 21 november 1978, premier’s dept, ‘aboriginal groups: 150th anniversary board’, file, state records office, acc 1706, an 2/12, box 12, item 150.5.8, 14 april 1975-18 january 1980. 13. sylvia hallam, department of anthropology, uwa, to premier, letter quoting that day’s west australian, 18 october 1978, premier’s dept, ‘aboriginal groups: 150th anniversary board’. 14. slade drake-brockman, executive chairman of 150th anniversary board to hon premier, quotes from telexes, 2 and 29 july 1979, premier’s dept, ‘aboriginal groups: 150th anniversary board’. 15. sylvia hallam, department of anthropology, uwa to premier, letter, 18 october 1978 and r c old, acting deputy premier to mrs s hallam, uwa, letter, 28 november 1978, premier’s dept, ‘aboriginal groups: 150th anniversary board’. 16. perth gazette and western australian journal, 4 may 1833, p70. 17. ibid, 25 may 1833, p84. 18. ibid, 20 july 1833, p114. gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20217 https://doi.org/10.2307/2578232 https://doi.org/10.2307/2578232 https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbm032 https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2017.1418231 https://doi.org/10.22459/plph.09.2012.09 https://doi.org/10.2747/1060-586x.27.3.269 https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1481134 https://www.oriel-rhodes-commission.co.uk/ https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/monuments/downloads/pdf/mac-monuments-report.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/monuments/downloads/pdf/mac-monuments-report.pdf http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/admin/api/file/82ab22f4-f802-df7c-12e2-14a73aebddc8 http://inherit.stateheritage.wa.gov.au/admin/api/file/82ab22f4-f802-df7c-12e2-14a73aebddc8 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-12/captain-james-stirling-statue-vandalised-before-blm-rally/12348328 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-12/captain-james-stirling-statue-vandalised-before-blm-rally/12348328 https://www.facebook.com/thewestaustralian/posts/a-perth-musician-says-he-defaced-a-statue-of-james-stirling-because-he-believes-/10158629042939439/ https://www.facebook.com/thewestaustralian/posts/a-perth-musician-says-he-defaced-a-statue-of-james-stirling-because-he-believes-/10158629042939439/ 19. rosemary van den berg, ‘aboriginal resistance, south-west’, in gregory and gothard (eds), historical encyclopedia of western australia, pp37-8. see also neville green, broken spears: aborigines and europeans in the southwest of australia, focus education services, perth, 1984, p80; and bob reece, ‘“a most complete and untameable savage”: yagan’, early days: journal of the royal western australian history society, vol 14, no 4, 2015, pp604-6; ‘yagan’, monument australia (online). available: http://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/indigenous/display/61054-yagan (accessed 21 april 2020). 20. ‘aboriginal warrior buried after 170 years’, abc news, 10 july 2010 (online). available: https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2010-07-10/aboriginal-warrior-buried-after-170-years/899582 (accessed 24 may 2019). for a full discussion see cressida fforde, ‘yagan’ in cressida fforde, jane hubert, paul turnbull and deanne hanchant (eds), the dead and their possessions: repatriation in principle, policy and practice, routledge, abingdon, oxford, 2015, pp229-41. for location of yagan memorial park (online) available: https://www.swan.wa.gov.au/parks-recreation/yagan-memorial-park (accessed 4 july 2019). 21. sylvia hallam, uwa, to premier, letter, 18 october 1978; w f ellis to g c mackinnon, minister for tourism, letter, 27 october 1978; g c mackinnon, minister for tourism, to mr w f ellis, letter, 13 november 1978, ‘aboriginal groups: 150th anniversary board’, state records office, acc 1706, an 2/12, box 12, item 150.5.8, 14 april 1975–18 january 1980. 22. details of the controversy surrounding the proposal to erect a statue of yagan are from wa legislation council, 10–12 october 1978; west australian, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 30 october1978; wa legislative assembly, 23 november 1978, 16 august 1979. 23. premier to mrs elizabeth hansen mbe, letter, 9 january 1980, premier’s dept, ‘aboriginal groups: 150th anniversary board’; perth city council, ‘heirisson island – commemorative statue’, minutes, 18 july 1983; ‘placement of yagan sculpture on heirisson island’, minutes, 20 august 1984. elizabeth hansen was a foundation member of coolbaroo league, vice-president of new era aboriginal fellowship and treasurer of aboriginal rights league and old people’s home. she was awarded an mbe for ‘aboriginal welfare’ in 1979. west australian, 12 and 25 september 1984. 24. hannah mcglade, ‘the repatriation of yagan: a story of manufacturing dissent’, law text culture, vol 4, no 1, 1998, pp245-55 (online). available: https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/documentsummary;dn= 980808137;res=ielapa (accessed 10 june 2019). 25. the influence of historians in bringing european-aboriginal history to the fore should be noted. see especially c.t. stannage, people of perth, city of perth, perth, 1979; c.t. stannage (ed), a new history of western australia, uwa press, nedlands, 1981; bob reece and tom stannage (eds), european–aboriginal relations in western australian history: studies in wa history, vol 8, 1984; green, broken spears. it should be noted that no odium has been attracted to other statues of great men in western australian history, such as the forrest brothers, whose careers in late nineteeth century when frontier conflict moved north, suggest that their statues could equally be foci for social conflict. 26. gwendolyn w. saul and diana e marsh, ‘in whose honor? on monuments, public spaces, historical narratives, and memory: expanded commentary’, museum anthropology, vol 41, no 2, 2018, pp117-120. https://doi.org/10.1111/ muan.12178. those participating in the debate were the authors, alex barker, bailey duhé, eric gable and richard leventhal. the quote is from chelsea carter. 27. jane m. jacobs, edge of empire: postcolonialism and the city, routledge, london and new york, 1996, p5; m. azaryahu and a. kellerman, ‘symbolic places of national history and revival: a study in zionist mythical geography’, transactions of the institute of british geographers, vol 24, 1999, p109. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.1999.00109.x 28. quoted in tyler steim, ‘statue wars: what should we do with troublesome monuments?’ guardian australia, 26 september 2018 (online). available: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/26/statue-wars-what-should-we-do-withtroublesome-monuments (accessed 18 june 2019). 29. see for example, comments of pulitzer prize-winning art critic holland cotter, ‘we need to move, not destroy, confederate monuments’, new york times, 20 august 2017 (online). available: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/arts/design/ we-need-to-move-not-destroy-confederate-monuments.html (accessed 19 june 2019). 30. benjamin forest, juliet johnson and karen til, ‘post‐totalitarian national identity: public memory in germany and russia’, social and cultural geography, vol 5, no 3, 2004, pp372. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936042000252778 31. paul daley, ‘how do we settle the “statue wars”? let’s start by telling the truth about our past’, guardian australia, 29 june 2018 (online). available: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/jun/29/how-do-wesettle-the-statue-wars-lets-start-by-telling-the-truth-about-our-past (accessed 19 june 2019). 32. andrew taylor, ‘historian questions whether graffiti should have been left on captain cook statue’, sydney morning herald, 18 april 2018 (online). available: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/historian-captain-cook-statue-graffiti indigenous-20180418-p4zade.html (accessed 16 april 2019). 33. dresser quoted in steim, op cit. 34. ibid. 35. clare wright, ‘where are the memorials to our female freedom fighters?’, guardian australia, 8 march 2019 (online). available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/where-are-the-memorials-to-our-female-freedomfighters (accessed 19 june 2019). although commemoration of the lives of women is limited, an exception is the statue of ‘joy’ in east sydney, which commemorates the lives of prostitutes. it elicited widespread controversy when erected as gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20218 http://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/indigenous/display/61054-yagan https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-07-10/aboriginal-warrior-buried-after-170-years/899582 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-07-10/aboriginal-warrior-buried-after-170-years/899582 https://www.swan.wa.gov.au/parks-recreation/yagan-memorial-park https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/documentsummary;dn=980808137;res=ielapa https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/documentsummary;dn=980808137;res=ielapa https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12178 https://doi.org/10.1111/muan.12178 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.1999.00109.x https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/26/statue-wars-what-should-we-do-with-troublesome-monuments https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/26/statue-wars-what-should-we-do-with-troublesome-monuments https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/arts/design/we-need-to-move-not-destroy-confederate-monuments.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/arts/design/we-need-to-move-not-destroy-confederate-monuments.html https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936042000252778 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/jun/29/how-do-we-settle-the-statue-wars-lets-start-by-telling-the-truth-about-our-past https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/jun/29/how-do-we-settle-the-statue-wars-lets-start-by-telling-the-truth-about-our-past https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/historian-captain-cook-statue-graffiti-indigenous-20180418-p4zade.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/historian-captain-cook-statue-graffiti-indigenous-20180418-p4zade.html https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/where-are-the-memorials-to-our-female-freedom-fighters https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/where-are-the-memorials-to-our-female-freedom-fighters discussed by rae frances and julie kimber in ‘“joy”: memorialisation and the limits of tolerance’, public history review, vol 15, 2008. 36. dresser, ‘set in stone’, p191. 37. murray trembath, ‘bronze sculptures quietly installed for 250th anniversary of cook’s landing and meeting with aboriginal inhabitants’, st george and sutherland shire leader, 28 april 2020 (online). available: https://www. illawarramercury.com.au/story/6737315/bronze-sculptures-quietly-installed-for-250th-anniversary-of-cooks-landing/ (accessed 28 april 2020). 38. ‘fabrication of kamay 2020 sculptures underway’, media release, kamay 2020, nsw environment energy and gov ern ment, 31 march 2020 (online). available: https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/parks-reserves-and-protected areas/park-management/community-engagement/kamay-botany-bay-national-park-public-consultation/fabrication-of sculptures (accessed 29 april 2020). 39. see for example the discussion in jenny gregory, ‘obliterating history? the transformation of inner-city industrial suburbs’, australian historical studies, vol 39, no 1, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314610701837250 40. west australian, 10 february 1913, for an account of the unveiling. for further details see bruce scates, ‘a monument to murder: celebrating the conquest of aboriginal australia’, celebrations in western australian history: studies in western australian history, vol 10, 1989, pp21-31. for a more recent comment by bruce scates, see his ‘monumental errors: how australia can fix its racist colonial statues’, the conversation, 28 august 2017 (online). available: https://theconversation. com/monumental-errors-how-australia-can-fix-its-racist-colonial-statues-82980 (accessed 27 april 2019). 41. ‘journal of an expedition under the command of maitland brown esquire’, perth gazette and west australian times, 26 may 1865. 42. victoria laurie, ‘bust bears scars of when row came to a head’, australian, 31 august 2017. 43. for further information see city of vancouver, ‘city of reconciliation’ (online). available: https://vancouver.ca/people programs/city-of-reconciliation.aspx (accessed 20 june 2019). 44. mayoral advisory commission on city art, monuments, and markers, report to the city of new york, january 2018 (online). available: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/monuments/downloads/pdf/mac-monuments-report.pdf (accessed 29 september 2020). 45. american museum of natural history, new york, ‘addressing the statue’, exhibition, 2020 (online). available: https:// www.amnh.org/exhibitions/addressing-the-theodore-roosevelt-statue (accessed 24 may 2020). gregory public history review, vol. 28, 20219 https://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/6737315/bronze-sculptures-quietly-installed-for-250th-anniversary-of-cooks-landing/ https://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/6737315/bronze-sculptures-quietly-installed-for-250th-anniversary-of-cooks-landing/ https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/parks-reserves-and-protected-areas/park-management/community-engagement/kamay-botany-bay-national-park-public-consultation/fabrication-of-sculptures https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/parks-reserves-and-protected-areas/park-management/community-engagement/kamay-botany-bay-national-park-public-consultation/fabrication-of-sculptures https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/parks-reserves-and-protected-areas/park-management/community-engagement/kamay-botany-bay-national-park-public-consultation/fabrication-of-sculptures https://doi.org/10.1080/10314610701837250 https://theconversation.com/monumental-errors-how-australia-can-fix-its-racist-colonial-statues-82980 https://theconversation.com/monumental-errors-how-australia-can-fix-its-racist-colonial-statues-82980 https://vancouver.ca/people-programs/city-of-reconciliation.aspx https://vancouver.ca/people-programs/city-of-reconciliation.aspx https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/monuments/downloads/pdf/mac-monuments-report.pdf https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/addressing-the-theodore-roosevelt-statue https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/addressing-the-theodore-roosevelt-statue public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: trenter, c., ludvigsson, d., and stolare, m. 2021. collective immersion by affections: how children relate to heritage sites. public history review, 28, 1–13. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj collective immersion by affections: how children relate to heritage sites cecilia trenter, david ludvigsson and martin stolare swedish elementary schools have a twentieth-century history and strong tradition of field trips to heritage sites in local areas.1 a core component in the commemoration and understanding of history is actually visiting the sites where events occurred and where people lived and worked. this motivates research on how children relate to heritage sites. this article explores how elementary pupils in group interviews relate to cultural heritage when visiting heritage sites. the article investigates how pupils collectively in the peer culture charge the heritage site with values reflected in a variety of affections, drawing on research into historical empathy and critical heritage studies. the following research questions are asked: how do the pupils position themselves in relation to the past and present? what kind of affections are evoked? which situations and circumstances, during the site visit, mold impressions and immersion in the collective recalling? the article strives to add to and nuance the field of history education by underlining the agency of the schoolchildren by introducing the term ‘heritaging’. experiencing the past: overall standpoints at the core of our interest are the tensions that exist between the ways in which the past is put to use in a school context as compared to how this is done in other societal contexts such as at heritage sites. an important strand of research has shown an interest in educational aspects of museums, heritage and historical sites, emphasizing the potential that heritage may have for young people.2 these and other studies have demonstrated the complex links between the sensory and cognitive systems3 and the importance of historical empathy and thereby the relevance of affection and emotions in learning processes.4 in addition to the studies mentioned, other researchers have investigated sensitive pasts or traumatic experiences in relation to heritage5 and the makingprocesses of heritage by experiences.6 our contribution to the existing field is to broaden the perspective by exploring heritage sites not only as complementary teaching aids but as important resources for experience and learning. so far, explorations of historical empathy and affections in relation to encounters with the past have primarily been made in steered situations and laboratory-like environments in order to measure in which ways or to what extent the pupils have learned history.7 teachers have consequently been considered as axiomatic leaders and authorities on educational methods and applied regulatory documents. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj by contrast, our study questions the traditional way of examining teachers as the outspoken leaders – who define the heritage site – and the children as followers – who learn history at the heritage site. instead, we include the agency of children as equally defining and exploring the past. we hereby take a starting point in the theoretical fields of agency-driven theory embodied in the material, affective, performative and haptic aspects of the field trips. david crouch has even invented the term ‘heritaging’ to catch the activity of meaning-making at heritage sites.8 method this study was conducted as part of a broader project investigating the uses of heritage sites in school education. in that project, researchers observed the visits of elementary school classes to a variety of historic sites such as cottages, churches, noble palaces, industrial sites and a monastery ruin, all located in the region of östergötland in south-eastern sweden. pupils, teachers and on-site educators were interviewed. site materials and student-produced materials were collected. in addition, an online survey with several hundred teachers was conducted.9 the sites this article is based on interviews made with pupils visiting three heritage sites: a castle, a forest and a cathedral. vadstena castle is a former royal castle built as a fortress in 1545 and is closely connected to the royal dynasty of vasa. the castle is now the responsibility of the swedish national heritage board. part of the castle is now used as an archive. other parts are preserved as a museum. there are guided tours and in summer the castle is a concert venue. vadstena castle is located in the small town of vadstena, near the abbey of our lady and of st. bridget, more commonly referred to as vadstena abbey church, which includes the remains of st. bridget, an important political actor during the 1300s. witches’ forest was a site where in 1617 nine women accused of witchcraft were interrogated, tortured and executed. the site does not have any architectural remains but consists of a cave where the witches hid, the pool where the water torture took place and finally the rock from which the women were thrown to their death in a fire. linköping cathedral was erected in the middle ages and is still used as a cathedral. among the visitor programs is the ‘middle ages in the cathedral’, a reenactment of everyday lives of nuns, stoneworkers and medieval students in the building. participants and learning sessions all pupils in the study were preadolescents of mixed gender and ethnic background, from as many urban as rural areas and ten to twelve years of age. they were recruited from school classes that had booked a visit at one of the three sites. the learning sessions taking place at the sites were in the form of guided walks – vadstena castle and witches’ forest – and as a re-enactment program – linköping cathedral. at vadstena castle a full class was accompanied by their teacher and a guide. at witches’ forest three classes were split and divided in two groups. each was accompanied by teachers and a guide. at linköping cathedral one class was split in three groups. each was accompanied by a teacher and a site educator who led them through the re-enactment session where additional adult site actors participated. interviews the interviews were conducted by david ludvigsson up to one week after the field trip. in the cases of vadstena castle and linköping cathedral, all pupils were interviewed. in the case of witches’ forest, five pupils from each of the three classes participating were interviewed. the selection was made by picking the trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20212 first from an alphabetic list of the classes. the witches’ forest interviews were made on the last day of the semester. while the pupils had agreed beforehand to be interviewed some changed their mind, probably due to the general atmosphere at school with summer vacation approaching. the interviews were semi-structured with follow-up questions on the experiences and remembrances from the field trip. all interviews were conducted at school. altogether eleven interviews (ten to nineteen minutes) were conducted, with four to five children in each group. the interviewer deliberately avoided questions that might be associated with a homework quiz. he referred to the excursion in broadly formulated questions in order to invite all kinds of starting points for the conversation. the interviews started with ‘what did we do last week?’ or ‘we went on an excursion last week. what happened then?’. the interviewer used three different strategies to identify in what way the pupils had received common components in the stock of knowledge. the first was to ask about how the guides acted and what they said. the second was to ask to what extent the class had been prepared before the excursion. the third aimed to find out if the children assessed that they knew more about the period and place after the visit. the interviews were transcribed in full. in order to achieve a nuanced and rich basis for the analysis all sounds, such as laughter, sights, cries, and similar non-articulated verbal expressions and noises, were transcribed. these were, alongside verbalized communication, analyzed in terms of reactions that reflect affections. the interpretative context of the interviews is defined as acts of peer culture including social strategies during the interviews and how sounds, comments and laughter steer the communication. furthermore, the exploration of the peer cultural activities was related to affections and emotions that lead to immersion. finally, the reactions were related to the specific places in order to see how the materiality at the heritage site influenced the negotiation of experience. peer culture we evaluated pupils’ chats and communication during interviews in terms of peer culture, which means that we did not analyze elements such as sniggers, soundings and jargon as less ‘heritaging’ than accurate references to the guide or briefs from schoolbooks. we considered the communication as a collective calibration, in order to make sense of the encounter with the heritage sites. peer culture is a sociological term with its starting point in the idea that children are active agents who produce routines, artefacts, values and concerns. activities where they participate should be regarded as cultural interaction on its own terms and not be reduced to mirroring adult culture. doing things together is a crucial element in children’s peer cultures.10 when talking, sounding and moving while playing, children produce and reproduce social categories such as friendship and gender, appropriated from adult culture in ways that make sense in the specific context, reflecting the personalities and agendas in the culture of peers.11 based on the assumption that making sense of the past is a process and a correlation between the past and the present, steered by the realm of practical life,12 we interpreted the experiences at the heritage sites filtered by collective recalling in the interviews as an ongoing negotiation within the peer group. this reflected life-world references which affect how children relate to the past. the stock of knowledge, imagination and immersion in peer culture by broadening the interpretations of learning with the focal point on how affections and moods steer impressions at heritage sites, we strove to get insights into how emotions are expressed and become part of the peer culture displayed in the interviews. this can pave the way to understanding the relationship between affections, visits to heritage sites and the development of pupils’ historical understanding. martin selby presents a model of how the encounter between the group and the heritage sites should be understood. he uses the concept ‘performance’ to explain what is happening when people experience heritage sites. drawing on the concept ‘stock of knowledge’, selby suggests that the visitors carry layers of trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20213 knowledge that are mobilized during the visit in order to make sense of the visual and interpretive material at the site. in familiar situations, previously proven formulas for acting are activated and socially transmitted within the group of other visitors. selby argues that the individual experience glides between mediation, leaning on the stock of knowledge and mediated in representation at the site, and the immediate experience, steered by expectations based on earlier experiences. when the representation at the heritage site contradicts the stock of knowledge, the visitor strives to confirm or reject the message by accumulating further information. this negotiation is a collective entangling of stocks of knowledge within the tourist group or school class that visits the site.13 selby’s discussion is a fruitful starting point when analyzing the interviews with school classes in the present project. the stock of knowledge is gathered by preparation in school before the excursion, and furthermore by expectations from earlier visits to similar sites and every-day knowledge. the immediate experiences at the site might be peculiar, odd and even frightening, not because the children have other interpretations of the historical representation, but because they confront unexpected and unknown areas at the heritage site. we define the interviews as collective negotiation and, as david crouch puts it, as a way of ‘heritaging’. just as central as the idea of experiences and stock of knowledge is the function of imagination while connecting the dots and filling in what is missing, in order to make sense of what was happening during the excursion. the practicing of imagination is present in the research on historical thinking and historical empathy. yeager and foster argue that historical empathy is interleaved with imagination in learning processes and historical interpretation.14 the need for imagination is furthermore connected to placeand identity-making. benedict anderson, as a critique of nationalism, initially raised the idea of imagined communities in relation to places. however, the function of imagination has become a tool to explore remembrance processes when people collectively make meaning of places and the past. as sarah de nardi puts it in her studies about imagination and visualization of places, the ‘realm of the imagination bridges the inner and outer nuances of place-making and place understanding and influences knowledge-building in myriads of ways.’15 we also employed the idea of immersion, a concept used in game studies to catch immersive systems of embodied cognition through multimodal, kinesthetic and somatic media, to formulate situations when affections result in reflections.16 immersion is a condition where a person’s undivided attention is directed to the ongoing experience, to the present moment. being in an immersion, the individual starts to ponder, reflect and – in this case – ask questions about the past. immersion is understood as associated with specific events and episodes highlighted by the pupils in relation to their visits to heritage sites, or rather when retelling these visits. different kinds of affections had a prominent role that set the tone of the group interviews in the study. we focused on how affections evoked during the conversation put them in a state of immersion, that is, an affective and collective commemoration practice. findings the interviews should be considered as a collective process of the remembrance of the excursion, dominated by negotiation of what was happening and what the excursion actually presented in terms of knowledge of the past. the analysis of the students’ peer culture also suggests that evolution of a historical understanding is a process that takes place on an individual as well as a collective level.17 pupils talked mostly one at a time in dialogue with the interviewer or in conversations with each other. they seemed eager to understand what was asked of them and answered carefully – sometimes even literally. for example, when the interviewer asked if they, considering the cruelty of the act, believe that the witch hunt actually took place: trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20214 ‘i: did they really do that [burn witches]? p: well, they burned people, but i don’t know if they were witches.’18 the difficulties in interpreting the exact meaning of ‘understanding’ appear in particular in one response. the pupil tries to cover both possible perspectives in the following line: ‘i: is history weird? [is it hard] to understand what it used to be like? p: no, it’s not hard to understand, but it’s hard to understand how they thought.19 the pupils referred to common public culture – for example, such as television documentaries or common knowledge – when comparing the green and verdigris copper roof at the cathedral with the likewise verdigris statue of liberty in new york city.20 typically, there was a sense of learning related to the status of the experience. in a group from the witches’ forest a pupil found that a tv show she had seen was more informative than the excursion: p: and i think that i learned more from 8 minutes [in the show] than in the forest!21 the children supported each other in the retelling. previous research into peer talk on school-related communication underlines the differences between academic talk outside school with peers and family and that of schooling.22 peers tend to turn the teaching talk ‘into a collaborative knowledge exploration’.23 when the interviewer asks about what was happening at the re-enactment in the cathedral, the pupil answering was unsure about the status of the person who met the class: p1: we were met at the castle yard by the pope, i think. p2: no, the bishop! [everyone agrees in chorus]: yes, the bishop it was!24 they furthermore helped each other to navigate between the present and the past by adding details or by correcting each other. a schoolmate corrected the pupil who express disappointment over the size of the pond at the witches’ forest: p1: the lake... i thought it would be a normal lake. it was a mega-weird lake, without a jetty! p2: it has grown [since then]!25 whether the pupils defined the interview as a place to play or to listen and answer the questions, they showed different strategies to get in and out of the referred events. when using expressions and words that are familiar to the group of peers, they mediated what the guide or the school had taught, but translated it into apprehensive terms. for example, when recalling the hats of workers during medieval times, pupils compared them with a mushroom.26 by using words such as ‘sort of ’, ‘kind of ’ or ‘-ish’, they tried to catch the supposedly correct term yet also connected to their own experiences to fulfil the answers. when trying to find the word for tapestry a pupil used ‘sort of fabric’.27 king albrecht of mecklenburg was referred to as ‘king something of mecklenburg’.28 bodily references were used when recalling physically complex situations, such as how the women, accused of being witches, were tied during the water torture. gestures and bodily illustrations were verbally confirmed in the interviews by the phrase ‘like this’.29 there were different strategies of re-telling: the fragmented presentation when the narrative is steered by the mediation of separate associations; the teller oscillates between different layers of the past; the recalling of the excursion; and the past that was highlighted at the site. there were also retellings that are coherent and consistent and quite in line with the guide. the discrepancies appeared when the complexity of the trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20215 witch trials was retold in order to explain both the ideas of witchcraft, the story of the specific events in the witches’ forest and the recalling of the excursion: pupil 1: ‘they knew a lot about diseases, kind of doctors who can cure. and one day (this is what we learned)… that a cow… they thought they were witches at first but they weren’t quite sure (that’s what we’ve heard)… and then a cow had dropped all milk... they couldn’t get milk from the cow. and then, they thought that it was them next door (it was the neighbor’s cow) who stopped giving milk, and then they thought that the doctors (so to say) had prepared the milk. they hid in a cave. then it was winter, and they were starting a fire. they [people] saw the smoke and then they did the water test.’30 in the next example, the pupil had a meta-perspective that contains both the field trip and the historical event: pupil 2: we were at the so-called witchcraft forest, and we learned what happened when women were accused of being witches, and what they did and such ... (another pupil): three women, one elderly, one a little younger, found out that the authorities were looking for them…’31 by using the terms ‘so-called’ and ‘we learned’, the pupil marked a distance between the subject (the pupils) and the past (the 1600s) while pupil 1 shows how the teller in terms of inserted or discontinued sentences did not position the subject from the past (neither the 1600s nor the excursion). the parallel spaces of today in the recalling of the excursion and the past were highlighted in the reenactment in the cathedral when the interviewer asked about the drama in which the king tried to kill the bishop during the ceremony when the ‘nuns’ were consecrated: i: you did not try to save the bishop then, like to overturn the king? p1: sure, we used* have to run forward with a karate chop against the king… (in a theatrical voice) p2: no, he had weapons! p3: i do not think it was meant for us to move forward.32 the three parallel answers show that the pupils were moving between different standing points while speaking with the interviewer, both the past in terms of last week during the excursion (pupil 3) and the past in terms of the medieval times (pupils 1 and 2). pupil 1 played with the situation. pupil 2 answered from a position as the nuns. laughter, noises and voices as markings of positions an overall occurring activity was laughter. it appeared as a means of ‘packaging’ and communicating different affections, positive as well as negative. laughter became a social marker within the group. however, in this context, laughter also expressed an interpretation or understanding of the site visited on the field trip. a humorous approach was also useful when relating to arrangements that occurred odd or enigmatic in relation to the children’s definition of normality. children used dramatic effects and humorous substitutions. they performed collaborative storytelling and related humorous stories. gossip was important in their roles in the peer group.33 asa berger suggests no less than 45 reasons for laughter when analyzing humorous plays.34 he notes that the techniques can be combined and refers to robert provine who argues that most laughter comes from banal remarks. research has shown that there is no clear-cut case between laughter and the presence of humorous discourse. laughter, for instance, can be present in talking about difficult things.35 shared laughter is common in setting boundaries, terminating topics and moving on to a new trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20216 matter.36 by noting in which situations laughter occurs and if the laughter is shared or not, one can interpret how the situation, both during the interview and when recalling the visit to the heritage site, affected the group and individuals. in the interviews, the children were giggling and laughing in different situations. when the interviewer asked: ‘how did it feel to get to these places?’ a pupil answered: ‘it felt as if there were a lot of gnats’. this comment aroused laughter because it was obviously not what the interviewer referred to.37 laughter can also underline a statement. when the interviewer asked: ‘did it look like you thought it would?’ the children laughed, responding: ‘no, absolutely not, absolutely not!’38 when talking about the king who wanted to kill the bishop, the children giggled indicating that the attempted murder was a cross-border action.39 another group dramatically vocalized this when recalling the conflict between the bishop and the king: p1: because the bishop hasn’t paid the taxes! p2: so, he thought he could get more taxes! but he had already received everything the church would give. [in a deep voice] and then the king got angry!40 the pupils who used the interview to initiate or to try to initiate play often responded with audio references. the sound of a sword in action, the creaking of a heavy door or the sounds of a falling stone are rewarding ingredients for acoustic images.41 they also used their body or voice to illustrate events, for example by using expressions similar to those used by the guide or transformed into their own sphere of experiences. they also used types of jargon such as catchy comments in english. for instance, a group that re-enacted medieval characters referred to the mantles they wore in terms of ‘“superswag” [expressed in english], like you know… superman!’42 the voices were used to underline a feeling or to create a mood. in some situations, pupils used their voices and sounds to illustrate the story. and they used voices and sounds that might sound corny. they related to child labor when discussing the re-enactment in the cathedral, commenting that the workers did not get paid. the fact of not getting paid for work, which differs from values of contemporary times, was expressed dramatically by a pupil using a mincing voice: ‘they never got paid!’ the children laughed and the teller added with a dramatic voice: ‘it was child labor… it’s horrible… it’s awful, it’s fraud!’43 in front of peers: embarrassment embarrassment, often guided by laughter was, not surprisingly, present during the interviews. the group situation provoked self-conscious emotions. being embarrassed is not necessarily connected to negative emotions such as shame or guilt. more likely it is accompanied by blushing, smiling and feeling foolish.44 the feeling was present among the peers when sexuality – in this case nudity – was the focus of discussion. the pupils reacted to paintings of naked people at vadstena castle, distancing themselves and saying: ‘they thought it was elegant then… during the stone age.’ the pupil who made that comment certainly knew that the painting was from the renaissance. but in order to put distance between the group and the embarrassing nudity the pupil exaggerated the time span.45 embarrassment in coping with the social situation within the peer group was, similarly, mixed with insight into how it would be to live in a convent during the middle ages. the re-enactment seemed more challenging. for instance, handling the situation when dressing up like a medieval person, especially the group of nuns which required gendered cross-dressing for some boys. you face the class in a rather unusual costume [giggling] and then you answer ‘yes’ to a lot of strange questions from an old bishop, who you do not even know the name of. and then the king enters and is going to kind of kill the bishop!46 trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20217 sensations: multisensual reactions affections are embodied in multi-sense experiences such as fear provoked when a child recalls the inside of the vadstena castle and describes the dark interiors of the basement, including the real-size figure of a soldier standing by a canon: ‘[it was] a bit dark and a little scary inside the castle. the stuffed man was scary.’47 it is not clear whether it was the experience of standing close to the stuffed man in dark surroundings that caused the child to express these feelings, or if the child did physically touch the soldier. but this quote indicates that the pupil did have an emotional experience. in a similar way, but not negatively, there were sensations from multi-sense experiences that made impressions on the pupils. when recalling the excursion to vadstena several pupils highlighted the echoes and sounds at the abbey church.48 in this case, experiencing the historical building activated not just the pupils’ eyes but also their ears, adding to their total experience. the sensational idea that evoked potential fear was not only aroused by physical experiences but by the idea of a situation. when talking about what would have been scary in relation to the torturing and killing of women accused of witchcraft, one pupil argued that the lack of sensation of fear felt during the visit was due to the fact that the information was orally mediated by the guide. the interviewer asked whether it would have been different if they had heard the women, and the children confirm this with laughter and a ‘yes!’49 the marking of a potentially scary scenario with collective laughter happened when a pupil expressed a wish to return to the witches’ forest ‘ideally at night! [everyone laughs] you say that night is the ghost time.’50 the comment was directed to the group rather than to the interviewer. the pupil’s supposed courage, evoked by the imaginary nocturnal visit to the site, was confirmed by the others by their laughter. here, imagination filled in the gaps and the sense of fear was provoked after the excursion when recalling what it might have been like at night. imagination when recalling the tour the examples above show how these positions are embodied. yet there is another ingredient in the collective heritaging – imagination. the imaginary plays a central role when making sense of the past. it also put words to affections and reactions during the interview when recalling the tour, for instance when the pupils expressed potentially scary experiences. imagination was typically in action when pupils responded to the question: ‘did you feel what it was like to live at that time?’ they used ‘images’ in the answers. for instance, ‘you got your head full of little images of what it looked like then’.51 imagination was further mobilized when pupils reflected on their future lives as adults. when they discussed the interrupted ceremony of consecration by congratulating the nuns, the interviewer asked: ‘how come?’ one pupil gave a lengthy explanation by arguing that if they had become nuns, they would not have been allowed to live a free life. when saying ‘free life’ the peers responded simultaneously with: ‘why?’ and ‘what do you mean?’ the statement was followed by a discussion about the meaning of lack of freedom, and was exemplified by the fact that the nuns never got married.52 imagination is thus not contradictory to historical facts but is a crucial act of practicing insights and knowledge of, in this case, life in a medieval nunnery. the act of imagination includes comparisons with an expected future life in adulthood. confronting the stock of knowledge: expectations expectations can confirm already acquired knowledge. there is somehow a friction or gap between expectation and experiences in conversation that evokes reflections on the past. surprise is an emotion that can possess either bad or good valence. the response to an unexpected event can be preceded by either positive or negative starting points. such emotions were expressed by pupils when commenting on the cave trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20218 in the witches’ forest and how cramped the crevice was, and therefore how difficult it must have been to live there. this insight was connected to their physically experiencing the site and crawling into the cave. surprise was further discussed in order to draw lines between cognitive and emotional expressions. barbara mellers et al. support the thesis that surprise should be regarded as an opportunity to learn, arguing that we learn more from surprising information. based on investigations in decision-making in a wide range of situations, they claim that results stemming from expected or non-expected results of actions lead to a stronger feeling regardless of negative or positive results.53 frustration is another reaction found in the interviews. when talking about the witch hunts, one child exclaimed: i don’t understand, why did they hide in the cave? did they decide that before? why did they hide right where all the witches were killed? right at the pool!54 this is an important comment as it signals that pupils wanted to feel that they understand things. yet often the past is a foreign country, colored by the mysteries of the adult world, and is difficult to understand. a clash between the past and the present can be seen when the differences between real and false are caused by replicas in relation to originals. when re-enacting stonecutters at the medieval times in the cathedral, pupils reacted to the clothing the workers used when building the cathedral. during the re-enactment, the pupils used fabric hats and they argued that such a hat could not possibly protect the workers from falling stones when building the cathedral. the perceived incongruity between the soft fabric that they wore during the re-enactment and the original hats that they did not actually see made the pupils delve into thoughts of the risks that the medieval workers were exposed to. it is possible that peer cultures include similar effects even without the experiences at the heritage site, or that a reaction such as fear could be evoked by a movie or a story in the classroom. are there any significant affections and reactions connected to material sites? what triggers immersion by affections at heritage sites? material inter-referential points at the site and imagination there is a good chance for immersion and reflection when there is a distance between expectations and experiences. the result is quite in line with research on cognitive-emotional phenomena within the affections caused by surprise, defined as ‘the sense of astonishment and wonder one feels toward the unexpected’.55 studies show that surprises, regardless of negative or positive outcomes, improve learning.56 that is, even when disappointed, pupils do experience and reflect. this happened when there was a gap between what they thought should happen at the site and what actually happened, or when replicas were used instead of original artefacts, where frictions occur when expectations were let down in the witches’ forest. authenticity is not necessarily similar to historical correctness in terms of originality. but it is created in inter-referentiality between material points at the site. materiality is mediated by the guides and by signs, for example by heights in meters and by function. but materiality also creates immersion in relation to stories told or experiences during the tour. connections between physical points at the site create the opportunity to develop and immerse insights. affections related to material and inter-referentiality within the space seemed to evoke collective reflections and imagined scenarios. the tour guide at vadstena castle showed the canons and told the class about their functions and positions, which evoked positive feelings in terms of impression. the canons’ weight, the way they were transported by oxen and the method by which the heavy cannons were lifted by ropes from the ground to the tower were retold in every group. the combination of the concrete canons, the challenging freight by oxen and ropes and the fact that the children could easily relate to all elements in the story attracted the class’ attention.57 trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 20219 another example is the place of the chamber pot in the queen’s bedchamber in vadstena castle. the guide told of the servants who emptied the queen’s chamber pot in the moat at night, using the slippery stairs from the chamber down to the ground floor. visualizing the process, and intrigued by thought of managing the content in the chamber pot, the pupils discussed the consequences for future foes who, when attacking the castle, would have to cross the disgusting water in the dirty moat. pupils also talked of the conditions of the stairs, if the servant was lazy and perhaps decided to empty the pot not in the moat but on his way down. the procedure with the pot, which did not actually figure as a physical artefact during the tour, became incarnated by the physical way from the chamber, by the stairs and to the water in the moat.58 conclusion this article has investigated the ways in which children negotiate experiences from school excursions to heritage sites. the study belongs to the growing research field on historical empathy that focuses on whether and about what pupils learn by affectively connecting to the past. attention has been paid to the relation between the pupils and the past, as represented by the curriculum mediated in schools or museums. our current investigation has widened this to include ways in which historical empathy is mobilized with an emphasis on the agency of pupils when relating to the past. by drawing on affection, peer culture and the critical heritage studies’ term ‘heritaging’, we have examined how pupils collectively load the heritage sites with values reflected in immersion by affections, and what significance immersion of affections can have on pupils’ process of historical understanding. the analysis of the pupils’ peer culture also suggests that evolution of a historical understanding is a process that takes place on both an individual and a collective level.59 we have explored different circumstances of immersion to understand how heritage sites – in terms of being material and physical places loaded with narratives of the past – affects children. pupils’ experiences of the heritage site are characterized by social interaction within the peer group; their interpretations of the heritage site; and the interview as social arenas set the frame for the investigation. emotions are part of the pupils’ peer culture and affections are associated with specific sites. the affections are connected to immersions, a condition of profound mental involvement. the interviews indicated how pupils circulate between three time frames: the interview situation, the past in terms of the excursion and the past in terms of history. the norms of the peer culture steer the experience into a collective remembrance process in which individual and collective contribution shape understandings of the heritage site. immersions are seen as positive ‘windows’ for learning processes because they attract attention and make the past come alive. from the interviews, it seems that the multi-sense experiences from visiting sites have stimulated the pupils’ emotional response. in the interviews, six different types of affections were linked to immersion. three of them – fear, sensation and embarrassment – have a pre-reflective and embodied dimension. the fear pupils encountered in the basement of vadstena castle was undoubtedly intense. however, if a sense of fear is to contribute to historical learning, pupils must be able to free themselves from the egocentric position and connect to a historically specific experience, thereby building a historical understanding.60 the three other affections expressed in the group interviews were: anticipation, frustration and surprise. these are affections that are formulated in relation to what is expected, or at least mirrored in the pupils’ frame of reference. this frame of reference can be an everyday experience. but in this case it also activated a historical frame of reference. a notion of one’s position in relation to the past is built into these affections. it is the meeting, or the collision, between the experiences created on the site and the frame of reference that generates the affections leading to immersion. this approach can be related to the development of historical perspective recognition,61 a concept that captures the awareness of one’s own temporal anchoring in relation to the trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 202110 relevant past. affections and immersions can be triggered by visits to historical sites and thereby function as tools for pupils to deepen and broaden their historical understanding. we localized three situations that led to surprise and thereby friction between the expected – the stock of knowledge – and what was experienced at the site – the immediate experience – namely conflicts caused by expectations and experiences at the site and conflicts caused by replicas in relation to originals – and finally conflicts between lived experiences and insights at the site. the results of this study contribute to the research field of history education and the use of heritage sites and that of affections and haptics in learning processes. by studying pupils as active agents in their own cultural context, the article has demonstrated that experiencing heritage sites is a complex communication which includes cognitive and affective senses on both individual and collective levels, steered by expectations at the site and social actions in the peer culture. thus it is important to include the children at heritage sites as far more than vessels for and objects of communication when exploring the position of heritage sites in school contexts. endnotes 1. petra rantatalo, den resande eleven: folkskolans skolreserörelse 1890-1940, umeå, umeå university, 2002 and peter aronsson, platser för en bättre värld: auschwitz, ruhr och röda stugor, in peter aronsson (ed), lund, nordic academic press, 2009 and amy wilson and george hollis ‘how do we get better at going on trips? planning for progression outside the classroom’, in teaching history, issue 126, pp22–27, 2007. available at https://www.history.org.uk/secondary/resource/586/ how-do-we-get-better-at-going-on-trips-planning-f and ian dawson and joanne de pennington, ‘fieldwork in history teaching and learning’, in alan booth and paul hyland (eds), the practice of university history teaching, manchester up, manchester, 2000, pp166-178. 2. david ludvigsson, ´student perceptions of history fieldwork’, in enhancing student learning in history: perspectives on university history teaching, david ludvigsson (ed), uppsala, opuscula historica upsaliensia, no 48, 2012, pp63-93 and noel lonergan and lee w. andreson, ‘field-based education: some theoretical considerations’, in higher education research and development, vol 7, no 1, 1988, pp63-77. https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436880070106 3. see, for example, helen j. chatterjee and leonie hannan (eds), engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education, farnham, ashgate, 2015. 4. keith c. barton and linda levstik, ‘empathy as caring’, in keith. c. barton and linda levstik (eds), teaching history for the common good, mahwah nj, lawrence erlbaum associates, 2004 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410610508 and jada kohlmeier, ‘“couldn’t she just leave?”: the relationship between consistently using class discussions and the development of historical empathy in a 9th grade world history course’, in theory and research in social education, vol 34, no 1, 2006, pp34–57 https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2006.10473297 and sarah brooks, ‘displaying historical empathy: what impact can a writing assignment have?’, in social studies research and practice, vol 3, no 2, 2008, pp130-146 and jason endacott and sarah brooks, ‘an updated theoretical and practical model for promoting historical empathy’, in social studies research and practice, vol 8, no 1, 2013, pp41-58 and heerde bartelds, geerte saavenije and carla van boxtel, ‘students’ and teachers’ beliefs about historical empathy in secondary history education’, in theory and research in social education, vol 48, no 4, 2000, pp529-551. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2020.1808131 5. nikki spalding, ‘learning to remember slavery at the museum: school field-trips, difficult histories and shifting historical consciousness’, phd thesis, newcastle university, 2012, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication /272577940_learning_to_remember_slavery_school_field_trips_and_the_representation_of_difficult_histories_in_ english_museums; alan, s. marcus, jeremy d. stoddard and walter v. woodward, teaching history with museums: strategies for k-12 social studies, new york, routledge, 2012 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203136416; sarah de nardi, visualising place, memory and the imagined, routledge, london, 2020 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315167879; and brenda trofanenko, ‘affective emotions: the pedagogical challenges of knowing war’, in review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies, vol 36, no 1, 2014, pp22-39 available at file:///c:/users/ctrhum/downloads/affective_emotions_the_pedagogical_chall.pfd. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2014.866820 6. divya p. tolly-kelly, emma waterton and steve watson (eds), “heritage, affect and emotion” politics, practices and infrastructure, routledge, london, 2018 and jane lovell and chris bull, authentic and inauthentic places in tourism: from heritage sites to theme parks, routledge, london, 2018 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315676685 and laurajane smith, margaret wetherell and gary campbell (eds), emotion, affective practices, and the past in the present, routledge, london, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351250962 7. bartelds, saavenije and van boxtel, op cit. 8. david crouch, ‘the perpetual performance and emergence of heritage’, in emma waterson and steve watson (eds), culture, heritage and representation: perspectives on visuality and the past, routledge, london, 2010, p69. 9. the results are published in d. ludvigsson, m. stolare and c. trenter, ‘the haptics effect: the learning of school children at historical sites’, forthcoming in education 3-13. international journal of primary, elementary and early years trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 202111 https://www.history.org.uk/secondary/resource/586/how-do-we-get-better-at-going-on-trips-planning-f https://www.history.org.uk/secondary/resource/586/how-do-we-get-better-at-going-on-trips-planning-f https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436880070106 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410610508 https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2006.10473297 https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2020.1808131 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272577940_learning_to_remember_slavery_school_field_trips_and_the_representation_of_difficult_histories_in_english_museums https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272577940_learning_to_remember_slavery_school_field_trips_and_the_representation_of_difficult_histories_in_english_museums https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272577940_learning_to_remember_slavery_school_field_trips_and_the_representation_of_difficult_histories_in_english_museums https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203136416 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315167879 https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2014.866820 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315676685 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351250962 education and m. stolare, d. ludvigsson and c. trenter ‘the educational power of historical sites and places’, forthcoming in the history education research journal. 10. william a. corsaro, the sociology of childhood, indiana university press, bloomington, 2018. 11. amy kyratzis, ‘talk and interaction among children and the co-construction of peer groups and peer culture’, in annual review of anthropology, vol 33, 2004, pp626-627. available at https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146 /annurev.anthro.33.070203.144008. 12. jörn rüsen, evidence and meaning: a theory of historical studies, berghahn, oxford, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctvw04dhg 13. martin selby, ‘people-place-past: the visitor experience of cultural heritage’, in culture, heritage and representation. perspectives on visuality and the past, emma waterson and steve watson (eds), routledge, london, 2016, pp49. 14. e.a. yeager and s.j. foster, ‘the role of empathy in the development of historical understanding’, in o.l. davis jr, e.a. yeager and s.j. foster (eds), historical empathy and perspective taking in the social studies, rowman & littlefield publishers inc, lanham md, 2001, pp13-20. 15. de nardi, op cit, p22. 16. see, for example, sarah kenderdine, ‘embodiment, entanglement, and immersion’, in susan schreibman, ray siemens, john unsworth (eds), a companion to digital humanities, wiley-blackwell, hoboken, new jersey. available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118680605.ch2. 17. james v. wertsch, voices of collective remembering, cambridge university press, cambridge, 2002. https://doi. org/10.1017/cbo9780511613715 18. witches’ forest, interview 1, 0:48. 19. witches’ forest, interview 3, 3:40. 20. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 1, 10. 21. witches’ forest, interview 2, 8:18. 22. miriam morek, ‘show that you know: explanations, interactional identities and epistemic stance-taking in family talk and peer talk’, in linguistics and education, vol 31, 2015, pp238-259 available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/s0898589814000746. 23. ibid, p253. 24. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 1, 0:30. 25. the witches’ forest, interview 2, 10:35. 26. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 1, 3:54. 27. vadstena, interview 2, 1:46. 28. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 2, 7. 29. witches’ forest, interview 2, 1:06. 30. witches’ forest, interview 1, 2:19. 31. witches’ forest, interview 3, 0:23. 32. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 2, 5:01. 33. see kyratziz op cit for a further discussion. 34. asa berger, ‘why we laugh and what makes us laugh: the enigma of humor’, in europe’s journal of psychology, 2013, vol 9, no 2, pp210-213 available at https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/599. 35. elisabeth holt, ‘the last laugh: shared laughter and topic termination’, journal of pragmatics, volume 42, no 6, june 2010, pp1513-1525, p1514 available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s037821661000024x. 36. holt, op cit, pp5017-5020. 37. witches’ forest, interview 2, 2:53, see also vadstena interview 2, 11:24. 38. witches’ forest, interview 2, 4:11, see also vadstena interview 1, 4:53. 39. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 1, 6:19. 40. ibid, 1, 11:40. 41. r. whalen marylin, ‘working toward play: complexity in children’s fantasy activities’, language in society, vol 24, 1995, pp315-47, available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4168623. 42. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 3, 11:55. trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 202112 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.144008 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.144008 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04dhg https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04dhg https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118680605.ch2 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613715 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613715 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0898589814000746 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0898589814000746 https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/599 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s037821661000024x https://www.jstor.org/stable/4168623 43. reenactment in the cathedral, interview 1, 3:33. 44. june p. tangney, rowland s. miller, laura flicker and deborah hill barlow, ‘are shame, guilt, and embarrassment distinct emotions?’, journal of personality and social psychology, 1996, vol 70, no 6, 1996, pp1256-1269 available at http:// www.gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych3131_spring2015/documents/6.2_tangney_1996_shameguiltembarrassment.pdf. 45. vadstena, interview, 5, 3:10. 46. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 2, 4:35. 47. vadstena, interview 5:2. 48. vadstena, interview 1, 10:23. 49. witches’ forest, interview 1, 6:30. 50. witches’ forest, interview 1, 11:10. https://doi.org/10.7748/ldp.10.10.11.s15 51. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 2, 3:19. 52. medieval reenactment in the cathedral, interview 1, 6:28. 53. barbara mellers, katrina fincher, caitlin drummond and michelle bigony, ‘surprise: a belief or an emotion?’ in v.s. chandrasekhar pammi and narayanan srinivasan (eds), decision making neural and behavioural approaches, vol 202, 2013, pp 502-506. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-444-62604-2.00001-0 54. witches’ forest, interview 2, 6.36. 55. ibid. 56. ibid. 57. vadstena, interview 1, 7:48; vadstena, interview 2, 4:44; vadstena, interview 3, 7; vadstena, interview 4, 6:30. 58. vadstena, interview 3, 5:20. 59. james v. wertsch, voices of collective remembering, cambridge university press, cambridge, 2002. https://doi. org/10.1017/cbo9780511613715 60. jason l. endacott, ‘negotiating the process of historical empathy’, theory & research in social education, vol 42, no 1, 2014, pp4-34 available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270285735_negotiating_the_process_of_ historical_empathy. 61. keith barton and linda s. levstik, teaching history for the common good, l. erlbaum associates, mahwah nj, 2004. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410610508 trenter, et al. public history review, vol. 28, 202113 http://www.gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych3131_spring2015/documents/6.2_tangney_1996_shameguiltembarrassment.pdf http://www.gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych3131_spring2015/documents/6.2_tangney_1996_shameguiltembarrassment.pdf https://doi.org/10.7748/ldp.10.10.11.s15 https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-444-62604-2.00001-0 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613715 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613715 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270285735_negotiating_the_process_of_historical_empathy https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270285735_negotiating_the_process_of_historical_empathy https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410610508 public history review vol. 27, 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: alsford, n.j.p. 2020. the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history. public history review, 27, 1-16. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history niki j.p. alsford at ten minutes to midnight on 6 february 2018 an earthquake of magnitude 6.4 hit the coastline of hualien on taiwan’s eastern shore. with an intensity of viii (severe) on the mercalli intensity scale, hualien was severely affected. at least seventeen deaths were reported with people 285 injured. exactly two years previously, at three minutes to four in the early morning of 6 february 2016 the people of taiwan woke to the shaking of an earthquake that would later also be confirmed as measuring 6.4. due to its geographical location, taiwan is prone to frequent temblors. however, this particular quake struck the meinong district of kaohsiung – the second-most populous urban area on the island – with a relatively shallow depth of only fourteen miles – giving it a maximum intensity of vii, or very strong, on the mercalli scale. the most affected area was the city of tainan – 26 miles from kaohsiung – where numerous buildings collapsed killing 117 people. the seventeen-storey weiguan jinlong apartment complex in yongkang district serving as the centre for rescue efforts. the history of natural disasters – and earthquakes in particular – in taiwan has, to a certain extent, been inadvertently linked to the practice of historical preservation, archival science, oral history and museum curatorship. all of these are hallmarks of a broad range of activities that fall under the umbrella of public history. what i mean by this is that these practices were not necessarily the main intention. but the very impact of natural disasters leave behind visual reminders such as longteng bridge (longtengqiao龍騰橋) in miaoli, the remains of siaolin village in kaohsiung following the mudslide caused by typhoon morakot in 2009 or, the best-known site, the former guangfu junior high school in taichung which houses the 921 earthquake museum of taiwan. these physical remnants have become a permanent reminder of an earthquake. these sites have a shared meaning, but with different understanding, among the local population. this is at the heart of what kean and ashton refer to as ‘people and their past’,1 the framework of which is concentrated on the complex issue of ‘heritage’. this is as much about the contested narratives as it is the building remains. heritage is, as argued by hodges, political. ‘the very act of bearing witness to someone’s past [has] immense power to change how the past is interpreted’.2 recognising this is vital in documented sites with shared histories. heritage museums and sites found in abandoned areas such as those in taiwan are not unique. dead economies of the past frequently find their ‘ghost towns’ forming parts of historical trails and places of memory and local history. senka božić-vrbančić, in her chapter declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj on kauri gum stories in new zealand, highlights how narratives that have tended to be excluded from official histories have often remained within local communities close to abandoned sites.3 the problem, however, according to paula hamilton and linda shopes, is that although there is extensive scholarship on the oral histories made by these communities, and although some of these have subsequently translated well into method and practices, few ‘take it out of the house and past the front door’.4 for hamilton and shopes these histories are semi-private and marginal. yet when they are linked to public memory they successfully entwine the past and present via a wide range of cultural institutions that is then narrated to a wider audience. linking public history to natural disasters, and in this case, earthquakes, augments a number of important antecedents. most important of these are the role of heritage museums situated on or close to sites of historical memory. however, this does not necessarily end here, nor does it need to. it is possible that these sites can draw upon public memory and representation of disaster via other cultural institutions such as amateur historical societies, public and private archive collections as well as memorial associations and heritage projects – both within and without the government. in certain contexts, these historiographies can enlighten readers with information about specific events that have been overlooked in official accounts. what is more, as argued by ashton and hamilton, is that these ‘sites of memory’ are not just object histories – physical reminders. they also correspond to changes in meaning – their interpretation. they are diversified in their purpose.5 this article uses the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake as a case study. it explores how sites of natural disasters can function as places of public memory in taiwan. in what ways can this serve as a model for the understanding of disaster history as an important element in comprehending the social history of major disasters and subsequent humanitarian crises, as well as matters of preservation and heritage? context the island of taiwan sits on one of the most seismically active zones in the world. known as the pacific ring of fire, it is a 40,000 km horseshoe-shaped ring of oceanic trenches and volcanic arcs, as well as home to roughly 75 per cent of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes. almost 90 per cent of the world’s earthquakes occur along this ring, with at least 80 per cent of them being the largest. taiwan, the geological topography of which is scarred by this violence, has 42 known active fault lines.6 the island is divided through the middle by a central range of rugged mountains, with several peaking at over 3,500 m. the highest, yushan, stands majestically at 3,952. it is the largest on the asian continent east of the himalayas. this geography, both a blessing and a curse, has played a vital role in the island’s history. in 1683, when taiwan was incorporated into the qing empire, a key factor in its acquisition was the mining of sulphur from the dormant volcano, qixingshan七星山, in northern taiwan. this commodity was known to chinese traders who had visited the island prior to the sixteenth century and was later brought to the attention of the spanish who colonised the north of the island in 1626. its importance to the qing was further reinforced following an explosion at the fuzhou gunpowder store in 1696 and the subsequent naming of the mountain range datun大屯 (grass mountain) in light of its lack of overgrowth due to the regularity with which the mountain was set ablaze in order to prevent theft of sulphur deposits.7 the subsequent surveys of the mines, following the explosion, were made by yu yonghe郁永河who later memorialized his journey in the alsford public history review, vol. 27, 20202 small sea travel records (bihaijiyou裨海紀遊).8 the hot springs and filtered water which surface close to the mines have become havens for the affluent. beitou emerged as a spa town following the establishment of the beitou public bathhouse in 1913 by architect matsunosuke moriyama.9 following the cession of the island to japan in 1895, and improvements in seismic technology, a more detailed collection of data was made available.10 the first recorded earthquake filed by the japanese colonial authorities was on 15 march 1897 when a quake of unknown magnitude hit yilan and taipei killing 56 people. the following 6.1 quake that hit chiayi at 2.39 pm on 24 april 1904 killed three. seven months later a 6.1 ml (local magnitude) quake hit at 4.25 am on 6 november 1904 – the 1904 douliu earthquake – killing 145.11 prior to the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake, the most notable in terms of death and destruction was the 1906 meishan earthquake or the great kagi earthquake, jiayi dadizhen嘉義大地震. it hit at 6.43 am on 17 march 1906 killing 1,258 and destroying almost 7,000 properties. yet it was the 7.1 ml quake in sanyi, miaoli county, on 21 april 1935 that earned the laurel of being the deadliest quake to hit the island. before an examination is made of how the earthquake of 1935 arrived at a point of public history in the twenty-first century, it is important that a detailed account of the quake, and its response from the japanese colonial government, be given. this will give necessary contextualisation for the following analysis. the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake (map the author) the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history public history review, vol. 27, 20203 at two minutes past six on sunday morning 21 april 1935 the prefectural governor of hsinchu, utsumi chūji, woke to violent shaking as a magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit sanyi, in miaoli county 63 kilometres south of his home. his diary entry for that day was markedly different from his usual intimate style. instead, he wrote with a degree of authority, knowing that this could be a defining moment in his career as a colonial official: 21 april, 1935. sunday, sunny. at 7 am it was reported that hsinchu city was hit by an earthquake and four persons died. later on, there was another report that in houlong five hundred houses were destroyed by the same earthquake, and fifteen persons died. i immediately made arrangements, and paid visits to the governor general, the bureau chief of the interior, the bureau chief of police affairs, and the commander of the military. after going around to exchange greetings in the official residence of the governor general i returned to the office by car at 9.30 a.m. upon receiving the report from takahara, the department head of police affairs, and yano the section head of education, i right away sent general assistant officials and police inspectors to inspect the four earthquake stricken counties. with regard to the rescue work, i ordered county chiefs and city mayors to handle the emergency treatment. automobiles were brought to a stop to the south of zhudong, and tele-communication was suspended. a bit more information came in after nightfall, with reports of one thousand deaths and eight thousand collapsed houses, so i continued to send rescue squads. the condition was like a wartime crisis. returned home at 3 am.12 the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake – 1935nian xinzhu-taizhong dizhen1935 年 新竹-台中地震 – was one of the largest earthquakes to hit taiwan. although smaller in magnitude than the 8.3 hualien earthquake that hit on 5 june 1920 – claiming five lives and destroying 273 houses – it was by far the deadliest, killing 3,276 and causing damage and destruction to almost 55,000 properties.13 the major factor behind this disparity was largely due to population density and topography.14 the population of hualien in 1920, according to official figures, was 49,764. the combined population of hsinchu and taichung in 1935 was 1,874,556.15 the haiyuan (gansu) earthquake in 1920, for example, which had a similar magnitude to the hualien quake – ranging between 7.8 and 8.5 – with a category xii intensity on the mercalli scale – incurred a total loss of life between 234,117 and 314,092 people.16 key to this was the severe destruction over an area of more than 20,000 square kilometres. response the four-month rescue effort that was overseen by chūji was indeed a defining moment in his career as a colonial official. the japanese colonial government responded to his requests by sending out red cross teams as well as mobilising the military. on 23 april, chūji’s diary entry affirms how he and his 13-man team coped with the chaos: 23 august, 1935. tuesday, sunny. at 6 am, i invited takahara, nishumura, yano, and hoshi to the official residence of governor to discuss the use of the disaster rescue fund. [i] decided to allocate 140,000 yen from the funds, inform all counties and cities of the funding distribution, and send food and rescue goods to the stricken areas. rescue teams were largely posted alsford public history review, vol. 27, 20204 in localities yesterday. the disaster emergency measures for the time being came to an end today. the bodies of the dead, totalling over 1,300, have also been disposed of, and construction materials for building shelters to house victims are being shipped by trucks to affiliated areas. one after another visitors flooded in from the government general of taiwan, and the military also sent visitors. i was overwhelmed with the reception. at night i decided on the outline for constructing shanties to accommodate severely injured persons.17 chūji’s diary entries following the quake are particularly revealing in the lack of emotion that they seem to offer. it was, after all, a personal diary and not an official correspondence; it was a reflection of something private and not material that was to be read publicly. chūji thus seems to adapt to more official ruminations rather than continue to be personal even in his diary. although there is no known specific reason for this – his other diary entries both before and after the earthquake reveal much more of his individual character – his choice to adopt this stance may well reveal an internal struggle to be the man that he is supposed to be. in this sense it is revealing but in different ways. by writing in this style he is affirming his difficulty in separating his public life from his private one. the overwhelming loss of life and destruction of property not only led the colonial government to promptly review safety standards. it also provided a moment for the authorities to tighten their grip on non-governmental institutions, in particular the missionary-run hospitals. new regulations were issued not long after the quake on the running of the two largest private hospitals – taihoku, present-day taipei, and tainan. the government demanded that improvements in services were needed, noting that the response to the quake had been inadequate.18 this was occurring in the midst of a growing sense of ‘aggressive nationalism’ within japan.19 only a year prior, it had officially removed itself from the league of nations and was only two years away from its full-scale invasion of china. chūji’s personal response to the quake was firmly part of an ongoing colonising project. how they presented themselves collectively mattered more to their non-japanese and non-taiwanese audiences irrespective of the format in which it was being written. greg clancey in his book earthquake nation presses this point in the initial japanese response to the 1906 meishan quake.20 in the reporting of the earthquake, japanese authorities pointed to the ‘bad construction of native homes’ in contrast to the newer-built japanese buildings that ‘received no particular damage, except cracking of plastered walls and disturbance of roof tiles’.21 as such, the way the japanese response to the disaster was reported on in foreign press mattered greatly to them. in the case of the 1906 quake, it was the performance of the japanese buildings in contrast to other ‘asian peoples’ that took precedence.22 in the 1935 earthquake, what seemed to matter most was how they executed their relief efforts and, more importantly, how this was broadcast abroad. on wednesday 24 april 1935, the north-china herald – an english-language newspaper published in shanghai – posted a front-page article titled ‘the formosa earthquake’. in it, the correspondent wrote: the telegrams necessarily give but the barest details, but it is evident that the administration is efficiently and calmly taking measures to relieve distress and bring succour to the unfortunate victims of a big natural disaster. it is satisfactory to learn that the british authorities in [hong kong] are preparing to render the royal navy. the japanese army has been true to its traditions in promptly tackling the situation and in spite of the dislocation which the earthquake must have caused at the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history public history review, vol. 27, 20205 taichu [taichung], the troops there were able to despatch relief parties with medical personnel in rapid reinforcement of civil aid.23 by the following day, after the main quake, and despite the frequent aftershocks – some reaching as high as 6.0 – major railway services along the coast had resumed. regardless of the relief efforts people in the central districts were advised to pass each night ‘in the open air’ in light of the frequent aftershocks. the japanese ministry of overseas affairs had reported that, by the end of the first day, they had initiated a relief fund drive and agreed to donate a hundredth part of their monthly salaries and pay the costs of advertising in local newspapers with a call for donations. the japanese home office at the same time had ordered all provincial governments to expedite financial aid in their respective districts. tokyo city, for example, instantly subscribed and the ministry of finance issued a grant of 7 million yen to the rehabilitation fund. agencies in the west mobilised at the same time. the american red cross made ready its resources to help alleviate the suffering with an offer of food, blankets and medicine.24 a year after the earthquake, the presbyterian church of england (pce) reported to the messenger – a monthly magazine produced by the foreign mission committee – their appreciation for the donations received via a purposely set-up relief fund.25 as reports continued to come in from the united press, in the days following the disaster, these shifted from praise of the japanese response to focus instead on anecdotal narratives of local heroism: grandmothers who knelt on hand and knees above children took upon their backs the shock of falling debris. in dozen villages, mothers of new-born babes [were] nursing at their breasts the infants of women killed in the catastrophe. japanese doctors braved tottering ruins and it was reported that they had saved hundreds of lives, their prompt first-aid measures saving many with gaping wounds and gashes from bleeding to death. work of the medical men was handicapped by a great shortage of bandages and medicines. so far, there is little evidence of any shortage of food, except milk for lack of which mothers are feeding their babies rice gruel.26 the focus on the efforts of ‘japanese’ doctors, rather than others, points to the systematic attempts made by the colonial authorities to be seen responding to the crisis in an efficient manner. the english-language newspapers’ most immediate response was to report that no serious damage had occurred to foreign property and that the population of forty british and twenty canadians were safe and outside of the impact region.27 this was followed by a statement suggesting that, in spite of the ‘rumoured’ tidal waves, ‘japanese destroyers [were] rushing medical supplies and doctors’ to the disaster area.28 it was just the kind of media coverage that the japanese were hoping for. how the state is perceived and the mediated efforts put in place by central and local authorities in response to earthquakes and other natural disasters is well documented. cover up is not uncommon, and neither is the case of multiple narratives of the same disaster. in 2007, for example, the response to the sichuan earthquake, which killed 87,000 people and displaced 14.4 million, was almost entirely dominated by the chinese government. few international ngos engaged directly in emergency response, their role being directed from central government to provide humanitarian assistance when and where they demanded it. the coverage of the response, thus, needed to be orchestrated. the chinese government ensured alsford public history review, vol. 27, 20206 that global press were aware that, despite the scale of devastation, outbreaks of infectious diseases were avoided,29 populations in danger of aftershocks and possible flooding and landslides were safely relocated30 and baseline mortality rates were restored.31 controversy, however, spread with the disturbing number of schoolrooms that collapsed – over 7,000 – in the wake of the earthquake killing 5,335 students. the commemoration of the sichuan earthquake is thus particularly revealing. bin xu argues that the creation of a ‘topography of forgetting’ ritualises specific sites where possible ‘natural explanations’ occurred; where the ‘unnatural’ happened, these were either removed or covered. for xu, the ‘naturalness’ of the earthquake refers simply to the geological phenomenon, while the ‘unnatural’ references a response to the social problems associated with the disaster. in the case of sichuan, it was the schools that were covered and removed in order to assist in the ‘forgetting’ of parental and public concerns and their belief that the sheer number of collapsed schoolrooms were directly caused by ‘government’s negligence and corruption as well as contractors’ greediness’.32 following the 1935 earthquake in taiwan, disgruntlement was comparable. yang kui, a taiwanese writer who had decided to journey to the most affected areas, reported that the people were critical of the attitude of the colonial government and highlighted the frustration being felt toward their rescue methods.33 yet in the case of the 1999 earthquake in taiwan, this was different. instead, the collapsed school became the ritualised site of remembrance and a museum. what is clear from this is that there is no single narrative of commemoration concerning natural disasters. writing on the anniversary of hurricane katrina, sue robinson witnessed two competing narratives. at a national level the press demonized new orleans as a place that needed to be avoided. the local agenda insisted on the importance of recreating a ‘lost community’ through documented oral histories and sites of commemoration.34 this disparity between national ideals and local interest leads to the important question of historical authority. understanding how authority is asserted in public memory is important. when crises becomes an issue for the governing elite, officials attempt to spin information, as was seen in the case of the sichuan earthquake and to a certain extent the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake. attempts are thus made to control the narrative and redirect the story frame on how the event is remembered. the following section will look at this issue of authority in the concerns of remembrance and public historical memory. remembrance and public history the spectre of earthquakes remains close to many in taiwan. for the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake, the remains of the longteng bridge that was built in 1906 and designed by american architects theodore cooper and c.c. schneider stand today as a testament to the deadliest earthquake to strike the island. discussions concerning the earthquake are relatively absent within taiwanese society. they occasionally feature on travel shows with all but a few referencing longteng bridge. following contemporary earthquakes, taiwanese shows, such as taiwan yanyi台灣演義on formosa tv, have referenced the 1935 quake in their historical features. it is perhaps the second-most deadly quake, which occurred on 21 september 1999, that features much more prominently in both collective remembrance as well as public history. it is known simply as the 921 earthquake jiueryi dadizhen九二一大地震 in reference to its date. the 7.3 quake the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history public history review, vol. 27, 20207 hit nantou county at 1.47am killing 2,415 and causing over nt$300 billion worth of damage.35 longteng bridge (photograph the author) 921 earthquake, dazhi (public domain) on the former site of guangfu junior high school, which sits directly on the fault line, lies the 921 earthquake museum of taiwan guoli ziran kexue bowuguan jiueryi dizhen jiaoyu yuanqu國立自然科學博物 館九二一地震教育園區. it opened on 13 february 2001 in remembrance of the victims who perished. the museum has five fine galleries: chelungpu fault gallery, earthquake engineering hall, image gallery, disaster prevention hall and the reconstruction records hall. but it is in the grounds of the building and the second and fifth halls that the museum serves as public history.36 no attempt has been made to reconstruct the buildings – apart from securing them – or to clear debris following the initial quake. alsford public history review, vol. 27, 20208 the grounds of the 921 earthquake museum (public domain) the museum’s narrative focuses on science. through interactive displays, the content is principally on the cause of the earthquake, rather than its course and consequences. very little has been said on the response to the earthquake and even less on public perceptions of the museum. remaining in situ not only continues collective mourning. it also serves as a powerful reminder of the strength and scale of natural disasters on the island. one major fact for this is that the quake occurred in the early hours of the morning and no one was in the school at the time. had there been a loss of life – and in particular young life – i am not certain that the site would have been used in its current form. as it stands, it is representative of the ‘natural’ happenings as opposed to the ‘unnatural’. the two earthquakes, although very different, have certain similarities, especially concerning response. both focussed on changes to building practices, in particular with regards to legal codes and the enforcement of them. when buildings collapse and loss of life occurs, public perception turns towards building practices. yet damaged buildings and other forms of construction are often used as sites of public memory. it is as if there is an evolution in building regulations that follow natural disasters and that the sites of disaster remain a reminder of that ‘before period’. the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history public history review, vol. 27, 20209 in places such as taiwan, with its high population density and complex historical narratives, debates surrounding space often take place in much more contested terrain. more often than not, these are set against a backdrop of cultural programming in the form of nation-building. each government or colonial period will use responses to natural disasters as a means of legitimacy. the japanese did this in 1935. the kuomintang party (kmt) and later democratic progressive party (dpp) did this following the 1999 earthquake and every large quake and other natural disasters since. as historiography, this is often included in national curricula and is associated with the inculcation of civic values in particular, according to chia, the formation of a national identity.37 developments of legitimacy have often gone hand-in-hand with urban development in the case of taiwan. and while the advancement of an urban landscape may play a lesser role, there are far more claims made on it for public history and public culture than is realised. although the practice of public history has had a much longer period of recognition in the united states,38 the process of gaining ‘legitimacy’ in taiwan during the post martial law period (1947-1987) has given rise to historical societies and local history groups. the only difference is that they have not been recognised as being part of a more formalised profession. the bridging of oral history and public history introduces a better language in taiwan. this is perhaps most evident through the medium of documentary film, which since the advent of digital technology has tackled various issues that stem from taiwan’s complex social and cultural environment.39 yet, in spite of this, the term public history or dazhong shixue大眾史學 in the sinophone context remains largely absent.40 what i think has been missing is a more collaborative spirit. the social sciences and the arts and humanities have maintained a degree of regimentality particularly in the writing of history. cross-disciplinary research in the context of taiwan is not common. yet, public history is by its very nature collaborative. it illuminates a shared authority over a much broader area. it needs to. it has to incorporate different audiences and employers and integrate them into a much wider perspective of a variety of partners and fields.41 if we take, for example, the subject matter of taiwan indigenous peoples, the participation of anthropologists, archaeologists and cultural management, has to be coupled with that of linguists, art historians, historians and sociologists, among others. yet museums in taiwan such as the shung ye museum of formosan aborigines, national museum of prehistory and the bunun cultural museum (bunongzu wenwuguan, 布農族文物館) in taitung county are all good examples of collaborative efforts. a natural synergy to this – and one that in my opinion taiwan is a leading example of – is the field of digital history, with its emphasis on access and broad participation in the creation of knowledge.42 for taiwan, the digital humanities platform provided a framework for the collection of oral histories. this is arguably most prevalent in the oral histories of the white terror (19491987), a martial law period of political suppression. difficult heritage, such as this, can, as argued by shu-mei huang and hyun kyung lee in their germinal work on colonial prisons, be considered ‘heritage off diplomacy’, one where heritage is seemingly ‘turned off ’’ when diplomatic challenges arise.43 this is particularly the case in cross-border networks of japan, korea, china and taiwan. it can also be domestic. prisons left behind by processes of colonisation as well as during periods of authoritarianism are sites embedded in the memories of punishment and imprisonment. turning them into heritages of peace and freedom are forms of corrective memory and form a significant part of transitional justice efforts and collective memory.44 oral history – and by extension public memory, as advocated by michael frisch – is useful in breaking down alsford public history review, vol. 27, 202010 institutional barriers by offering useful paradigm shifts within the fields of public history.45 the concept of ‘shared history’, as argued by adair et al proposes an important question on whether changes in ideas of culture challenge representation and interpretation within museums by ‘their constituencies’.46 for adair et al, it is digital technology and social media that partially account for shifts in how museums explore historical authority. oral history and other bottom-up histories have informed a change in the narrative of museum storytelling. the use of digital media to decentre historical narratives has impacted changes in areas much broader that museums, not least on the topic of disaster history. a problem for taiwan, though, concerns the legitimacy of the narrative. in the case of the 1935 and 1906 earthquakes, the japanese colonial authorities through their necessary agencies made certain that the government response was seen in a positive light. the kmt attempted to do the same in 1999 but lost the general election the following year to the dpp. this is particularly clear in the reconstruction records hall in the 921 museum. designed over five ‘chapters’, the gallery opens with a room showcasing a site of the earthquake with newspaper headlines and photographs. this is followed by a ‘second chapter’ that highlights the government mobilisation effort and processes of reconstruction. the ‘third chapter’ follows this up with the actions of resettlement for those affected and immediately leads to the next chapter which explores the volunteer efforts made within communities. the hall ends on a ‘reflection and change’ chapter, whereby the government seeks to raise awareness of ‘disaster prevention, [improved] engineering systems [and] the quality of law and education.’47 it is, therefore, natural that the museum opts to carry such political undertones wherein the government is portrayed as having played the greater role to the best of its capacity.48 there is little, if any, discussion of the government response or relocation efforts in a negative light. if a similar museum was built in recognition of typhoon morakot, for example, could an entirely similar narrative be conveyed?49 after all, the purpose of a public historian is to facilitate ‘a constructive use of the past to inform global and national citizenship and [to critically engage] with structures of inequality and power’.50 the case of typhoon morakot could easily engage critically with disaster management. the establishment of the office of disaster management following the disaster is a good example of this.51 the methods of reporting also played an important role in not only broadcasting peoples’ dissatisfaction with government relief efforts. it highlighted the enormous contribution made by aid agencies and emergency services. the association of digital culture taiwan (adct), a non-profit organisation established in 2007, built a peer-distributed integrated website morakot online disaster report center – which collocated significant online sources such as twitter, facebook, ptt bulletin board and media outlets.52 the scope of digital material that emerged following typhoon morakot has, according to the national archives administration, undergone a process of digitisation, in particular the experiences of those involved in reconstruction efforts.53 on efforts to preserve oral accounts on typhoons, taiwan historica (guoshiguan taiwan wenxianguan 國史館臺灣文獻館), an institute located in chung hsing new village, nantou city, has an online database of typhoons from 1945 to 2009 titled zouguo fengyu: daoyu renmin taifeng jiyi走過風雨：島嶼 人 民颱風記憶 (walking through the storms: islanders’ typhoon memories).54 although this database is somewhat poorly maintained, it is a step in the right direction towards preservation and public history in digital format. academia sinica manages a digital database of earthquakes in taiwan from 1624 to 2000 with its primary focus on the 921 earthquake.55 in terms of other digital archives, the central the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history public history review, vol. 27, 202011 weather bureau in taiwan has a collection of photographs of disaster history and in particular the 1935 quake.56 the potential for experimentation with digital media for public history is not new. specific problems associated with ‘history online’ has, as argued by fien danniau, largely to do with a lack of narrative, a lack of self-criticism and illiteracy in the digital language.57 projects such as children of the lodz ghetto and the proceedings of the old bailey, for example, offer new ways of presenting historical knowledge. digital media offers two important components: accessibility and flexibility, both of which acknowledge the dialogical dimensions of public history. thus, the link between archives and the public has now gone beyond that ‘obsolete and abandoned [place] where usually the archivist or the caretaker is someone swallowed up in the dusty corridors of bureaucracy,’ to something more accessible. they’re ‘popping up everywhere’ in the realms of ‘software-based interactions’ to borrow from jussi parikka.58 as a consequence, it is in digital media that archival material is becoming synonymous with public history in taiwan. it is easy and cheap, and thus there is a low threshold for presenting and sharing data online. the flexibility and accessibility of digital media, however, has consequences in how data is consumed and perceived. the interpretation of the data and the immense amount of big data that can be searched has an impact on how history is presented. this impact goes back to what frisch terms ‘the complex sources of historical interpretation’.59 the closeness between authorship and interpretive authority is especially important in the concept of ‘place of memory’. with regard to disaster history, memory is critical. the work on history, memory and disaster by dena shenk et al argues that specific memories, values and views of disaster affect not only the experience of memory; they also affect specific coping strategies.60 this is particularly the case when people unaffected by the tragedy nevertheless remember having taken part in the cultural moment as a spectator via media reports on the disaster. how disaster is mediated is important. it has the potential to function as a mnemonic device that links global public communities to historical experiences. both the 2004 indian ocean earthquake and tsunami as well as the 2011 tōhoku earthquake and tsunami captured an international audience. maria kyriakidou argues that distant suffering and globally shared memories can form the basis of a transnational movement of memory discourses. according to kyriakidow, the holocaust has been theorised as being a globally shared memory and is thus central in the construction of a ‘global moral space, where distant others become part of a common global past’. the relevance of this to the study of the 1935 earthquakes is that, as a site of memory, it offers a major assessment of places of collective cultural understanding. it is clear that this lieu de mémoire can, and does, extend beyond its immediate location. the 1935 earthquake does not exist in public memory today. however, the 921 earthquake most certainly does. the remains of longteng bridge are a critical trigger point in the existence of a collective site of memory that moves beyond its immediate history. those who have directly experienced an earthquake have a shared experience with those who have experienced a distant suffering by seeing the effects of earthquakes through the media. longteng bridge serves as a site of memory and collective cultural heritage. this has applications to all histories of natural disasters. simon winchester’s book on karakatoa, for example, has similar applications. a collective global shared memory that is a distant suffering can engage with the gravity of trauma of the volcanic explosion through this shared interpretation. pompeii is no different. the cast of a dog, frozen in agony, is a wellknown image from the aftermath of the vesuvius explosion in 79ce. this single image is presented to elicit a shared response that uses the experiences of memory and reflection. the alsford public history review, vol. 27, 202012 national museum of naples, which houses many of the casts – including the dog – is labelled with the following account: you could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. people bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore.61 the text, written by pliny the younger in two letters to the roman historian cornelius tacitus 17 years after the eruption, accompanies the casts of the people and the dog. the words resonate through distant suffering to form a collective interpretation of the disaster. lorena rivera-orraca’s paper are museums sites of memory? takes it further by situating the role of museums in the discourses of ‘theoretical perspective, issues on history, past memory and their ongoing construction in cultural institutions.’ rivera-orraca argues that museum spaces ‘can be creative entities that open up the possibility of dialogue between past and present: a meeting point between history and memory’.62 in the context of the 1935 earthquake, using notions of disaster as public history – whether physically, as in the case of a museum, or digitally in the form of digital humanities – has the potential to go beyond simple aesthetic appreciation to encapsulate the issues of preservation, heritage and shared memory.63 the focal point of place thus needs, through the notion of heritage, to ‘affect’ one’s understanding of the meaning of heritage and sites of preservation. laurajane smith sums this up by arguing that ‘heritage as place, or heritage places, may not only be conceived as representational of past human experiences but also of creating an affect [my italics] on current experiences and perceptions of the world’.64 this in no way casts ‘place’ as a simple expression of past experiences; it is increasingly being used within the literature on heritage and the management of conservation policies and practices as a means of embracing the concept of public history. the ability to accept a degree of flexibility, whether this is within the disciplines of academia or in the issues of heritage and preservation, raises important questions for taiwan historiography and the role of social history and oral history. the longteng bridge, a reminder of the earthquake of 1935, functions as a site of collective memory. since specific sites are often creations of a ‘topography of forgetting’, the shared memory of disaster sites ritualises possible natural explanations for earthquakes – a shared experience whether real or imagined from afar – while allowing an interpretation of the ‘unnatural happenings’. understanding how authority is asserted in public memory and recognising the disparity between multiple interpretations of disasters such as those discussed here points to the complexities of heritage. at the same time, it points to the specificity or national and cultural constructions of memory and further highlights the need for greater inter-disciplinary research into disaster history in taiwan. endnotes 1. hilda kean and paul ashton, ‘introduction: people and their pasts and public history today’, in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), public history and heritage today, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2008, p1. 2. sue hodges, ‘building peace: the role of heritage interpretation’, public history review, vol 26, 2019, p 29. 3. božić-vrbančić, ‘“scars on the ground”: kauri gum stories’, in paula hamilton and linda shopes (eds), oral history and public memories, temple university press, philadelphia pa, 2008, p146. the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history public history review, vol. 27, 202013 4. paula hamilton and linda shopes, ‘introduction: building partnerships between oral history and memory studies’, in hamilton and shopes, pvii. 5. paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘places of the heart: memorials, public history and the state in australia since 1960’, public history review, vol 15, 2008, p3. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v15i0.776 6. see bethany d. rinardhinga, ring of fire: an encyclopedia of the pacific rim’s earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, abc-clio, santa barbara, ca, 2015. 7. the mountain range, designated a national park since 1937, is now referred to as yangmingshan 陽明 山 in commemoration of ming scholar wang yangming王陽明 in 1950. 8. see macabekeliher, out of china or yu yonghe’s tales of formosa, smc publishing inc., taipei, 2003. 9. constance woods, ‘a public arts venue in taipei: beitou hot springs museum’, in david blundell (ed), taiwan since martial law, national taiwan university press, taipei, 2012, p71. 10. deborah r. coen, the earthquake observers: disaster science from lisbon to richter, university of chicago press, chicago, pp8-9. 11. it is important to note here that ml refers to data reported by national and local seismological observatories. the more family richter scale was not developed until the 1930s and is based on much more complex logarithms. 12. in hui-yu caroline ts’ai, ‘diaries and everyday life in colonial taiwan’, japan review, vol 25, 2013, p154. 13. sen xuanxiong and wu ruiyun, 臺灣大地震: 1935 年中部大震災紀實taiwan dadizhen: 1935 nian zhongbu dazhenzai jishi [great taiwan earthquake: the 1935 central taiwan earthquake disaster report], yuanliu, taipei, 1996. 14. hualien, on taiwan’s east coast, faces the pacific ocean to the east, and the central mountain range to its west. earthquakes, which are frequent on the east coast are generally absorbed by the central mountain range. 15. taiwan sōtokufusōtokukanbō台灣總督官房調查科. 臺灣總督府第二十四統計書[taiwan governorgeneral statistic book no 24], 1920, p38; and taiwan sōtokufusōtokukanbō台灣總督官房調查科. 臺灣總督 府第三十九統計書[taiwan governor-general statistic book no 39], 1937, p47. 16. pierre fuller, haiyuan (gansu) earthquake, 1920, disasterhistory.org, accessed, 16 february 2016, http://www.disasterhistory.org/gansu-earthquake-1920#more-388. 17. in ts’ai, 2013, p154. 18. edward band, the history of the english presbyterian mission, 1847-1947, presbyterian church of england, london, 1947 republished, ch’eng wen publishing company, taipei, 1972, pp165-66. 19. elise k. tipton, ‘in a house divided: the japanese christian socialist abe isoo’, in sandra wilson (ed), nation and nationalism in japan, routledge, london, 2002, p81. 20. gregory clancey, earthquake nation: the cultural politics of japanese seismicity, 1868-1930, university of california press, berkeley, 2006, pp174-75. 21. ibid, p175. 22. ibid, p176. 23. north-china herald, wednesday 24 april 1935, p1. the main article on the quake is found on p132. 24. anon, ‘formosa rocked by earthquake: fire, famine, & tidal wave add to horror’, the queenslander, 25 april 1935, p46. 25. the presbyterian messenger, january 1936, p62. 26. north-china herald, p132. 27. pce/wma/05/01/08, earthquake in formosa, may 1935; and the queenslander, 25 april 1935, p46. 28. the queenslander, 25 april 1935, p46. 29. world health organization, disease outbreak prevention crucial in china earthquake aftermath, accessed 8 october 2019, https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr13/en/. 30. china org cn, beichuan relocation process completed, accessed 8 october 2019, http://www.china. org.cn/government/local_governments/2008-12/03/content_16890328.htm. 31. brian hoyer, lessons from the sichuan earthquake, humanitarian practice network, accessed 8 october 2019, https://odihpn.org/magazine/lessons-from-the-sichuan-earthquake/. 32. bin xu, ‘commemorating a difficult disaster: naturalizing and denaturalizing the 2008 sichuan earthquake’, in memory studies, vol 11, no 4, 2018, pp486-484. alsford public history review, vol. 27, 202014 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v15i0.776 http://www.disasterhistory.org/gansu-earthquake-1920#more-388 https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr13/en/ http://www.china.org.cn/government/local_governments/2008-12/03/content_16890328.htm http://www.china.org.cn/government/local_governments/2008-12/03/content_16890328.htm https://odihpn.org/magazine/lessons-from-the-sichuan-earthquake/ 33. yangkui楊逵, first-hand investigation in the post-earthquake taiwan, 台灣地震災區勘察慰問記taiwan dizhenzai qukancha wiwenji social commentary 社會評論shehuipinglun, vol 1, no 4, 1935. 34. sue robinson, ‘”we were all there”: remembering america in the anniversary coverage of hurricane katrina’, memory studies, vol 2, no 2, 2009, p235. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008102054 35. for a detailed study on this quake, see anshel j. schiff and alex k. tang (eds), chi-chi, taiwan, earthquake of september 21, 1999: lifeline performance, asce, virginia, va, 2000. 36. 921 earthquake museum of taiwan, accessed 16 february 2016, http://www.921emt.edu.tw/e_content/ exhibitions/exhibitions01.aspx. 37. yeow-tong chia, ‘history education for nation building and state formation: the case of singapore’, citizenship teaching & learning, vol 7, 2012, p192. https://doi.org/10.1386/ctl.7.2.191_1 38. denise d. meringolo, museums, monuments, and national parks: toward a new genealogy of public history, university of massachusetts press, boston, 2012, pxiv. 39. tze-lan d. sangand sylvia li-chun lin, ‘introduction’, in sylvia li-chun lin and tze-lan d. sang (eds), documenting taiwan on film: issues and methods in new documentaries, routledge, london, 2012, p3. 40. see daw-ming lee, ‘re/making histories: on historical documentary film and taiwan: a people’shistory’, in lin and sang, documenting taiwan on film, pp1-38. 41. meringolo, xxiv. 42. a notable example of published work on this include jieh. hsiang, s.p. chen, h.i. ho and h.c. tu, ‘discovering relationships from imperial court documents of qing dynasty’, international journal of humanities and arts computing, vol 6, pp1-2, 2012, pp22-41; kuang-hua chen, muh-chyun tang, chun-mei wang and jieh hsiang, ‘exploring alternative metrics of scholarly performance in the social sciences and humanities in taiwan’, scientometrics, vol 102, no 1, 2015, pp 97-112; and jen-shin hong, bai-hsuan chen, sheng-hao hung and jieh hsiang, ‘toward an integrated digital museum system: the chi nan experiences’, international journal on digital libraries, vol 5 no 3, 2005, pp231-251; and hsiang jieh (ed), shuwei renwen zai lishixue yanjiu de yingyong, 數位人文在歷史學研究的應用 [digital humanities: new approaches to historical studies], ntu press, taipei, 2011. 43. shu-mei huang and hyun kyung lee, heritage, memory, and punishment: remembering colonial prisons in east asia, routledge, london, 2020, p116. 44. vladimir stolojan, ‘transitional justice and collective memory in taiwan’, china perspectives, accessed 8 october 2019, file://lha-022/pers-i/0007ecc6/downloads/chinaperspectives-7327.pdf. 45. michael h. frish, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning or oral and public history, new york state university press, new york, 1990. 46. bill adair, benjamin filene, and laura koloski (eds), letting go?: sharing historical authority in a usergenerated world, the pew center for arts & heritage, philadelphia, 2011, p11. 47. 921 earthquake museum of taiwan, reconstruction records hall, accessed 16 february 2016, 48. in the context of emergency management (em), dean karalakas and gregory coutaz, contend that the paternal view of the government, with high power-distance levels is common within east asian cultures. see dean karalakas and gregory coutaz, ‘emergency management in taiwan’, in evan berman and m. shamsul haque (eds), asian leadership in policy and governance, emerald group publishing, bradford, 2015, pp399-419. 49. on criticisms of the government following the typhoon see andrew jacobs, ‘taiwan president is target of anger after typhoon’, new york times, 12 august 2009, accessed 16 february, 2016, http://www. nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/asia/13taiwan.html?_r=2; and jenny w. hsu and ko shu-ling, ‘morakot: the aftermath: mofa’s hsia tenders resignation’, taipei times, 19 august 2009, p1; and wei-chun wen溫 偉群, and tzu-hsiang yu游梓翔, baba shuizai jiuzai guocheng zhong matuandui duiwai chuanbo de jiantao yu qishi八八水災救災過程中馬團隊對外傳播的檢討與啟示[a study of external communication on ma administration’s relief efforts to the crisis of typhoon morakot], the journal of election review 選舉評論, vol 8, june 2010, pp1-17. 50. m. blake butler et al, ‘can the history of veiled women inform an ugly election campaign in canada’, history workshop online, accessed 16 february 2016, http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/. 51. see jet chau wen et al, ‘typhoon morakot and institutional change in taiwan’, in rajib shaw (ed), disaster recovery: used or misused development opportunity, springer, london, 2014, p71. 52. shu-fen tseng et al, ‘online social media in a disaster event: network and public participation’, in hocine cherif, jasni mohamed zain and eyas el-qawasmeh (eds), digital information and communication technology and its applications, springer, london, 2011, p259. 53. see chung chii-day et al, ‘archival selection of the morakot post-disaster reconstruction council, executive yuan’s–the proce [sic]’, national archives administration, national development council, http://www. archives.gov.tw/english/book/mpbook.aspx?cnid=400&i=3, accessed 8 march 2016. the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake: natural disasters as public history public history review, vol. 27, 202015 https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008102054 http://www.921emt.edu.tw/e_content/exhibitions/exhibitions01.aspx http://www.921emt.edu.tw/e_content/exhibitions/exhibitions01.aspx https://doi.org/10.1386/ctl.7.2.191_1 file:///\\lha-022\pers-i\0007ecc6\downloads\chinaperspectives-7327.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/asia/13taiwan.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/world/asia/13taiwan.html?_r=2 http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/ http://www.archives.gov.tw/english/book/mpbook.aspx?cnid=400&i=3 http://www.archives.gov.tw/english/book/mpbook.aspx?cnid=400&i=3 54. taiwan historica, zouguo fengyu: daoyu renmin taifeng jiyi走過風雨：島嶼人民颱風記憶 [walking through the storms: islanders’ typhoon memories] http://ds2.th.gov.tw/ds3/app101/, accessed 8 march 2016. 55. academia sinica, jiueryi dizhen shuwei zhishiku , 921 地震數位知識庫 [921 earthquake digital database] http://921kb.sinica.edu.tw/history/ching.html, accessed 8 march 2016. 56. the 1935 hsinchu-taichung earthquake, central weather bureau, accessed 19 february 2016, http:// scman.cwb.gov.tw/eqv5/10eq/1935/1935main_new.htm. 57. fien danniau, public history in a digital context: back to the future or back to basics, low counties historical review 128:4 (2013): 118. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9355 58. jussiparikka, ‘archival media theory: an introduction to wolfgang ernst’s media archaeology’, in wolfgang ernst (ed), digital memory and the archive, university of minneapolis press, minneapolis, 2013, p1. 59. frisch, xxi. 60. dena shenk, blanca ramos, karel joyce kalaw and ismail tufan, ‘history, memory, and disasters among older adults: a life course perspective’, traumatology: an international journal, vol 15, no 4, 2009, pp35-43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534765609359729 61. flavio dobran, versuvius: education, security and prosperity, elsevier, amsterdam, 2006, p117. 62. lorena rivera-orraca, ‘are museums sites of memory?’, the new school psychology bulletin, vol 6, no 2, 2009, accessed 19 february, 2016, file:///c:/users/na/downloads/58-77-1-sm.pdf. 63. an important contribution in the taiwan context on this is yi-fu tuan, space and place: the perspective of experience, edward arnold, london, 1977) and yi-fu tuan, ‘time-space imagination of national identity: the formation and transformation of the conceptions of historic preservation in taiwan’, journal of planning, vol 33, 2006, pp91-106. 64. laurajane smith, uses of heritage, routledge, oxon, 2006, p77. alsford public history review, vol. 27, 202016 http://ds2.th.gov.tw/ds3/app101/ http://921kb.sinica.edu.tw/history/ching.html http://scman.cwb.gov.tw/eqv5/10eq/1935/1935main_new.htm http://scman.cwb.gov.tw/eqv5/10eq/1935/1935main_new.htm https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9355 https://doi.org/10.1177/1534765609359729 file:///d:/uts_localwomat/process/../library/containers/com.microsoft.word/na/downloads/58-77-1-sm.pdf public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: smith, m. 2021. ‘who controls the past… controls the future’: a case for dialogical memorialisation. public history review, 28, 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7787 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj ‘who controls the past… controls the future’: a case for dialogical memorialisation mariko smith doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7787 during the first history council of nsw and australian centre for public history at the university of technology cohosted seminar ‘vandalism, vindication and what to do with the empty plinth?’, my australian museum colleague, wiradjuri man nathan mudyi sentance, saw the prospect of the empty plinth as ‘a great opportunity to create space for more truth telling about this country’.1 the newly vacated space would present an opportunity to take the statue or monument’s physical domination of place completely out of the equation and instead refocus our collective attention towards the stolen aboriginal land upon which it was situated. in doing so this would open up space to ‘restoring places [and] learning from country’. during the second seminar ‘public protest and public history’, i expressed my own critical engagements with the australian memorial landscape in answering that same question of what happens once a statue or monument is removed.2 in my view, an empty plinth or field does not automatically create a more just society. and the complete removal of a contested statue or monument could in fact give rise to more injustice in the sense that it tends to turn what should be a constructive shared dialogue about history into a potentially dangerous onesided, zerosum game which further pits groups of people against each other in divisive identity politics. to begin with, aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples were effectively removed from this country’s history with the advent of british colonisation. speaking as a yuin woman, we first nations peoples experienced our rich, diverse cultures and knowledges being supplanted by colonial narratives which disregarded hundreds of generations of first nations custodianship of country and reset the clock to deem that the only australian history that should count began with the likes of cook and the first fleet from the late 1700s.3 this is the state of affairs inherited by us today, and at the heart of the issue is belonging: we (in the broader collective sense of indigenous and nonindigenous australians) find ourselves in a situation where the removal of representations marking one group’s history and connection to this place results in division and a sense of being erased. i am not only referring to the experiences of first nations peoples being subjected to dispossession and genocidal practices. but also to the experiences of nonindigenous australians who descended from ‘currency lads and lasses’ and that they themselves know no other sense of belonging than to this land, albeit in a very different way to aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples.4 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7787 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7787 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7787 dialogical memorialisation as a pragmatic approach to this end, i advocate for a pragmatic approach which provides an avenue for intergenerational and cross cultural dialogue that includes multiple perspectives and accounts in ways to represent a more complete, layered and nuanced history. personally, i first came across the concept of ‘dialogical memorialisation’ from reading brad west’s 2010 article ‘dialogical memorialization, international travel and the public sphere: a cultural sociology of commemoration and tourism at the first world war gallipoli battlefields’, which presents this approach to commemorating events that involved multiple actors, in this case the turkish, australian and new zealander people in respect of the gallipolli campaign in world war one.5 west unpacks the importance of dialogue in dialogical memorialisation as a participatory discourse involving more than one person’s point of view, through adopting russian scholar mikhail bakhtin’s conceptualisation that ‘language is half someone else’s’.6 he also considers this method of recalling and engaging with the past through the lens of erving goffman’s dramaturgical analysis on the importance of social interaction, in how a dialogical approach ‘fundamentally alters the stage on which history is narrated and performed’.7 fellow contributors to this special issue of the public history review, bruce scates and tony ballantyne, both contribute pieces about countermemoralisation with examples from australia and new zealand respectively. these describe processes which are methodologically consultative and capable of accommodating not only multiple voices of the past, but also facilitating the inclusion of first nations perspectives.8 in the australian context, i was especially inspired by what can be described as a great instance of dialogical memorialisation, in the form of the explorers’ monument in fremantle, western australia. this had finally included local aboriginal peoples’ perspectives previously omitted from the colonial memorial commemorating three colonisers killed by aboriginal people on the far northwestern frontier in western australia in 1864. scates himself was involved in the ‘public action project’ with the bidyadanga and baldja communities, city of fremantle councillors and historians which worked on adding a plaque to the 1913 monument in 1994 that aimed to acknowledge aboriginal people’s right to defend against those who invaded, as well as to pay respect to all first nations peoples who died in resistance to colonisation.9 the debates about the history of as well as the future for confederate statues in the united states of america have played out against the backdrop of the new york times’ 1619 project10 and the black lives matter movement. this has provided a masterclass in dialogical memorialisation strategies and techniques. in 2019, the american 60 minutes program sought political and academic responses to the issues raised about richmond virginia’s monument avenue of confederate statues. in his interview professor julian hayter (a historian at the university of richmond) suggested as another option to removing statues that ‘we use the scale and grandeur of those monuments against themselves’.11 he elaborated on this idea by saying: i think we lack imagination when we talk about memorials. it’s all or nothin’. it’s leave ‘em this way, or tear ‘em down. as if there’s nothin’ in between that we could do to tell a more enriching story about american history.12 with the dangers of a zerosum game being very real in the united states, where tensions have at times become violent because groups of people have resorted to physically defending legacies of the past that they identify and connect with, i find professor hayter’s argument compelling. he sees a way forward in finding ‘a useable way to tell two stories, or tell multiple stories’. in this case it involves including both the descendants of confederate soldiers from the american civil war (18611865) as well as the descendants of enslaved people so the statues can be recontextualised and resignified to enable an intergenerational dialogue that contributes to a multifaceted and more participatory american history. ultimately, it is a way to promote critical thinking and engagement with these old statues, moving away from viewing them as smith public history review, vol. 28, 20212 nineteenthcentury memory culture relics and transforming them into more dynamic parts of society which more accurately reflect the many different people now residing in it. a local case study in hornsby i wish to describe another guiding example of dialogical memorialisation inspiring my recent research and praxis, which is from australia and involved the inclusion of essential local first nations history and voices. it occurred close to where i now reside on the lands of the darug and guringai13 peoples in the hornsby shire local government area in sydney, new south wales. this example centres on a collaboratively drafted statement by aboriginal and nonindigenous local community members plus local government representatives which responded to the fiction of cook’s ‘discovery’ of australia in 1770. this statement has been produced in the form of two plaques, dated 2006 and 2020 respectively. both versions have the same wording as follows: hornsby shire council acknowledges that when captain james cook claimed possession of the east coast, the land which is now hornsby shire had already been occupied by the darug and guringai peoples for many thousands of years. the descendants of the indigenous people continue to live in our community. they remain traditional custodians – still caring for country. dyaralang gnia norar (darug) maniau oomillayn goorri (guringai) in 2006, the first of these additional plaques was created and installed on the ornamental fountain in hornsby park which was named the bicentenary fountain (it was also known as the captain cook fountain) to commemorate the 200th anniversary of captain cook in 1970. it was an inspiring collaborative act between the local aboriginal community, members of the hornsby area residents for reconciliation group and hornsby shire council councillors and staff. this additional plaque was an emphatic response to the original plaque’s assumption of terra nullius before cook’s arrival – the legal doctrine meaning ‘land belonging to no one’ in latin which was overturned by the 1992 mabo high court of australia decision. the wording on the original plaque was: this fountain was erected in 1970 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the discovery and exploration of the east coast of australia by captain james cook.14 bicentenary fountain 2009 (hornsby shire council) https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov. au/library/cataloguesandresources/localhistory/hornsbyparkhistory smith public history review, vol. 28, 20213 https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history original plaque (undated) (hornsby shire council) https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov. au/library/cataloguesandresources/localhistory/hornsbyparkhistory additional plaque 2006 (hornsby shire council) https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/ library/cataloguesandresources/localhistory/hornsbyparkhistory for a number of years, the two plaques sat together in dialogue until the fountain was eventually removed by 2017 as part of redevelopment plans within hornsby park for the aquatic centre.15 both plaques were thankfully salvaged by hornsby shire council and placed in storage until the council could reach a decision, as guided by its hornsby aboriginal and torres strait islander consultative committee (the hatsic committee),16 on whether to reinstate either both plaques or just the 2006 one (since without the fountain being in existence, the original one has somewhat lost its context) somewhere in the local vicinity in order to continue honouring that important local shared history. as an aboriginal person and local hornsby shire smith public history review, vol. 28, 20214 https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history resident i am a member of both the hatsic committee (also serving as cochair) and hornsby area residents for reconciliation group. from 2019 to 2020, hornsby shire council and the hatsic committee collaboratively worked on plans for a newly constructed plaque which would retain the 2006 plaque’s wording and be placed on a new plinth of sandstone featuring carvings that depict two local animal totems of stingray (for guringai) and possum (for darug). it was decided that a new and prominent location in the garden bed in front of the council chambers – an important site of local decisionmaking – be chosen to emphasise the visibility of the local aboriginal community and the priority of achieving reconciliation in the hornsby shire. the two plaques from 1970 and 2006 were certainly not to be forgotten. in the leadup to the eventual unveiling of the new sandstone monument in 2021 (delayed from the firsthalf of 2020, the year of the 250th anniversary of cook, due to covid19 social restrictions) they were moved up to a display case inside the council chambers general meeting room.17 together, they share value in presenting an intergenerational dialogue which demonstrates the significant shift in community attitudes when residents in hornsby shire understood the history of australia within their own local setting and showed their acceptance and appreciation of other perspectives besides that of europeans.18 local newspaper article about the 2006 plaque (photograph helen white – member of hornsby area residents for reconciliation) smith public history review, vol. 28, 20215 clashes of class it is important to point out that the use of dialogical memorialisation is not a recent or ‘woke’ strategy that has been limited to use for the benefit of nonwhite people in relation to race. white people have also engaged with memorials in this way. they too have a history of protesting statues and monuments for their own reasons. of course, this is not intended to be an over generalisation or particularly novel observation. but in the current political climate this point could easily be overlooked and result in simply casting these new plaque and sandstone plinth 2020 (hornsby shire council) https://www.hornsby. nsw.gov.au/library/cataloguesandresources/localhistory/hornsbyparkhistory new plaque (2020), photograph councillor robert browne of hornsby shire council smith public history review, vol. 28, 20216 https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history statue wars as racial culture wars fodder. i was able to consider dialogical memorialisation through the lens of power dynamics and class through an example of an 1879 (the same year as “old mate” cook was erected in hyde park, sydney) monument dedicated to a figure in american revolutionary war history whose memorialisation prompted debates around ‘old’ and ‘new’ american ideals and values that are intrinsically linked to class. major john andré was a british army officer involved in the american revolutionary war who is wellknown in history not only for plotting with the notorious benedict arnold (who was an officer of the american continental army before he defected to the british side, with arnold’s name becoming synonymous with the word ‘traitor’) to betray the strategic fort of west point but also for being caught behind american lines and hanged as a british spy in october 1780 in tappan, a town in new york state.19 in 1879, the site of his execution and initial burial (before his body was repatriated to england in 1821 to instead lay in glory within westminster abbey) was marked by a large granite monument, paid for by american businessman cyrus w. field.20 the main inscription on the monument was written by the then dean of westminster abbey, arthur stanley. it stated: here died october 2, 1780 major john andré of the british army who, entering the american lines on a secret mission to benedict arnold for the surrender of west point was taken prisoner, tried and condemned as a spy. his death, though according to the stern code of war moved even his enemies to pity; and both armies mourned the fate of one so young and brave in 1821 his remains were removed to westminster abbey a hundred years after the execution this stone was placed above the spot where he lay by a citizen of the united states against which he fought not to perpetuate the record of strife, but in token of those better feelings which have since united two nations, one in race, in language and in religion, in the hope that the friendly understanding will never be broken.21 even after nearly one hundred years following the revolution, the memorial to a british spy was not received well by american community members who felt it was an insult to the memory of general george washington.22 there were comments made at the time that field was ‘falsifying history’ and that no local would support the monument ‘unless the inscription is amended according to historic truth.’23 the americans who attended his execution could not have helped but admired andré’s demeanour in the face of death – while he was condemned to be hanged as a common spy rather than shot according to his status as an officer, he was dignified and refined till the end. he was also recognised as a worthy adversary with his bravery, loyalty and patriotism (even if it was for the other side). nevertheless this sentiment would not necessarily extend to the need to venerate an enemy agent with a monument on american soil.24 significantly, the three smith public history review, vol. 28, 20217 soldiers of humble backgrounds in the american countryside – john paulding, isaac van wart and david williams – who caught andré as he attempted to escape, and were for a time were considered true patriots for their deeds, were not honoured in quite the same way as andré.25 the andre monument, 2012 (photograph joe schumacher) https:// jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/theandremonument.html such was the impression made by andré during his short life – dying just shy of thirty years of age – that postdeath in england his name ‘had become a byword for fidelity, his death a symbol of the stoicism britain expected from its officer class’.26 even when the british consul travelled to tappan in 1821 to witness the exhumation of andré’s remains and see to their safe departure to england, he was met with a relatively peaceful reception from a number of prominent and respectable american residents including the local gentry and clergy of the town.27 john knight notes in his article about the resurrection of andré’s character ‘from dishonourable criminal to venerated martyr’ that the ones who were against the event were typically ‘of a lower caste’ who had believed that this favourable treatment of a convicted criminal was ‘a disgrace to the memory of george washington’, as well as to paulding, van wart and williams.28 as knight observed in his analysis, even in the united states of the early decades postrevolution, apparently ‘class played as large a part in honouring virtue and commemorating patriotism as it ever did in aristocratic britain’.29 the aspirations and ideals of america’s founding fathers and other influential men – denoting the strong gender bias of the time – led to debates about who, in the absence of a british monarch because of obvious reasons, should be in charge of the republic’s destiny and future. the federalists, including the likes of alexander hamilton and john jay, would see to it that only men of a certain class, education and breeding should have the right to govern and rule.30 knight identified that andré would have fitted in with this crowd – again, despite obvious reasons.31 on the other hand, men like paulding, van wart and williams from more humbler backgrounds as ‘yeomen farmers’ were often the supporters of an ‘agrarian democracy’ which came to define elements of republicanism championed by the likes of thomas jefferson, who noted that ‘cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens’ in terms of patriotism and morality.32 however, in time these three men would be characterised in a negative light influenced by an assessment of their class as opportunistic thieves rather than patriots – labelled as ‘loyalist military freebooters’ (also known as ‘cowboys’) – who decided to turn over andré to their advantage, despite it being a clearcut case that andré indeed violated the rules of war by engaging in espionage.33 smith public history review, vol. 28, 20218 https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html plaque to washington 2012 (photograph joe schumacher) https:// jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/theandremonument.html due to the controversy the monument was vandalised and several bombs were thrown at it monument, causing damages that needed to be repaired along with the erection of an iron fence around it for protection.34 an additional plaque was added to it in 1905 by the american scenic and historic preservation society to specifically pay tribute to ‘the fortitude of washington and his generals in one of the crises of the american revolution’, referring to arnold’s treachery and defection.35 critically, this plaque not only added another perspective to the context of andré’s story – that of washington and his men. but it mentioned preserving ‘the identity of a place of historic interest’ – that is, it supported adding to the existing narrative in place rather than participating in its obliteration.36 indeed, one motivation behind including the andre monument, 2012 (photograph joe schumacher) https:// jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/theandremonument.html smith public history review, vol. 28, 20219 https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html this additional plaque was to help deter any ‘destructive ideas’ and further attacks by shifting the narrative favourably towards washington and the justice that he meted out back in 1780.37 this demonstrates the potential of dialogical memorialisation across various power dynamics. this monument and the history of people’s engagements with it shows a robust dialogue between revolutionary era and postwar american values. contextually, we can learn about the tugofwar between hamiltonian federalists and jeffersonian republicans’ visions of what they envisioned the republic of america to become, as well as the ideal type of man they wanted to run it: whether this is an affluent gentleman like andré or rather a man of the people who represented those like paulding, van wart and williams. we can see this through andré’s valorisation in comparison to the three ‘peasant patriots’ who caught him.38 dialogical approaches to memory, history and shared dialogue i have used other modes of dialogical memorialisation in my practice as a first nations museum curator at the australian museum in sydney. i worked as the assistant curator alongside the curator, wailwan and kooma woman laura mcbride on the unsettled exhibition. this is a temporary exhibition showing from 22 may to 10 october 2021 in the museum’s new basement touring exhibition space. it is a first nations led and informed truthtelling exhibition about australia’s foundational history. while it was developed primarily from a first nations perspective, it also includes colonial accounts and documents relating to people like james cook and sir joseph banks. these were not used to dominate the story as the only authoritative voice. they were used to accompany a range of perspectives including voices such as the kaurareg first nations people who dispute cook’s records of a landing and annexation ceremony on their island of tuined (now called possession island because of cook’s account). rather, we present the various and at times conflicting accounts regarding cook and possession island, not to suggest that they corroborate the narrative, but instead to highlight the diversity of viewpoints of that event between a number of different participants. visitors can read and consider these various perspectives together to gain further knowledge and understanding about the complex and multifaceted nature of australian history. acknowledgement the article’s main title is taken from george orwell’s 1949 novel nineteen eightyfour: ‘who controls the past,’ ran the party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ endnotes 1. see https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/historynowstatuewarsvandalismorvindicationandwhattodowiththe emptyplinth20july2020/ (accessed 16 june 2021). see also nathan sentance’s commentary in this volume. 2. see https://www.uts.edu.au/researchandteaching/ourresearch/australiancentrepublichistory/eventsand seminars/historyweek2020/publicprotestandpublichistorystatuewarsiipublichistoryhourarchive (accessed 16 june 2021). 3. this history is critically examined in the unsettled exhibition i cocurated with wailwan and kooma woman laura mcbride at the australian museum, sydney. unsettled is a temporary exhibition showing from 22 may to 10 october 2021 in the museum’s new basement touring exhibition space. it is first nationsled and informed truthtelling exhibition about australia’s foundational history: https://australian.museum/exhibition/unsettled/ (accessed 16 june 2021). 4. see definition in helen doyle, ‘currency lads and lasses’, in the oxford companion to australian history, oxford university press, melbourne, 2001 retrieved 13 june 2021 from https://wwwoxfordreferencecom.ezproxy.library.sydney.edu.au/ view/10.1093/acref/9780195515039.001.0001/acref9780195515039e396; and b.t. jones, ‘currency culture: australian identity and nationalism in new south wales before the gold rushes’, australian historical studies, vol 48, no 1, 2017, pp68–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461x.2016.1250789 5. b. west, ‘dialogical memorialization, international travel and the public sphere: a cultural sociology of commemoration and tourism at the first world war gallipoli battlefields: contemporary tourist studies in australia’, tourist studies, vol 10, no 3, 2010, pp209–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797611407756 smith public history review, vol. 28, 202110 https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/history-now-statue-wars-vandalism-or-vindication-and-what-to-do-with-the-empty-plinth-20-july-2020/ https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/history-now-statue-wars-vandalism-or-vindication-and-what-to-do-with-the-empty-plinth-20-july-2020/ https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/australian-centre-public-history/events-and-seminars/history-week-2020/public-protest-and-public-history-statue-wars-ii-public-history-hour-archive https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/australian-centre-public-history/events-and-seminars/history-week-2020/public-protest-and-public-history-statue-wars-ii-public-history-hour-archive https://australian.museum/exhibition/unsettled/ https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezproxy.library.sydney.edu.au/view/10.1093/acref/9780195515039.001.0001/acref-9780195515039-e-396 https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezproxy.library.sydney.edu.au/view/10.1093/acref/9780195515039.001.0001/acref-9780195515039-e-396 https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461x.2016.1250789 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797611407756 6. m.m. bakhtin, the dialogic imagination: four essays. austin: university of texas press, austin, 1981, p293 cited in ibid, pp209–225; 210. 7. e. goffman, the presentation of self in everyday life, penguin, london, 1959 and j.c. alexander, j. c. (2004) ‘cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy’, sociological theory, vol 22, no 4, 2004, pp527–73: cited in west, op cit, pp213; 211. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.07352751.2004.00233.x 8. see kiera lindsey and mariko smith, ‘a most ungrateful citizenry?: the power of protest and public histories’, in this volume’s article section. 9. see bruce scates’ article in this volume and bruce scates, ‘monumental errors: how australia can fix its racist colonial statues’, the conversation, 28 august 2017, https://theconversation.com/monumentalerrorshowaustraliacanfix itsracistcolonialstatues82980 (accessed 14 june 2021). 10. ‘the 1619 project’, the new york times, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619 americaslavery.html (accessed 14 june 2021). 11. cbs news, 2019, ‘the history and future of confederate monuments’, 60 minutes television program, 12 july 2019, transcript, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60minutesthehistoryandfutureofconfederatemonuments20200712/ (accessed 14 june 2021). 12. ibid. 13. guringai (also written as guringai) refers the local aboriginal people who are connected to country by ancestry in parts of northern sydney and parts of the central coast of new south wales. the name of these people derives from how they describe themselves in their language, using the words guri (man) and ngai (woman). 14. hornsby shire council, ‘history of hornsby park and the fountain plaques’, local history, 2020, https://www.hornsby. nsw.gov.au/library/cataloguesandresources/localhistory/hornsbyparkhistory (accessed 14 june 2021). 15. ibid. 16. as an aboriginal person who resides in hornsby shire, i joined the committee as a member and have been in a role of cochair for several years now. it was wonderful to be part of the recent iteration of the plaque which responded to the fiction of cook’s ‘discovery’. 17. hornsby shire council, 2020, op cit. 18. hornsby shire council, ‘captain cook fountain’, hornsby shire recollects, nd, https://hornsbyshire.recollect.net.au/ nodes/view/5162, accessed 14 june 2021; and hornsby shire council, 2020, op cit. 19. j. schumacher, ‘“the andre monument”, what about the plastic animals?’, blog, 22 march 2012, https://jschumacher. typepad.com/joe/2012/03/theandremonument.html (accessed 14 june 2021). 20. field was influenced by the dean of westminster abbey, arthur stanley, who in fact wrote the plaque’s inscription. r.e. cray, (1996). ‘the john andré memorial: the politics of memory in gilded age new york’, new york history, vol 77, no 1, 1996, pp6, 1215. see also schumacher, op cit; rockland county, ‘42 andre hill, tappan’, andre monument, 2016, http:// rocklandgov.com/departments/environmentalresources/countyparksanddogruns/andremonument/ (accessed) 14 june 2021; j. knight, ‘the death and resurrection of major john andre’, journal of the american revolution, 14 august 2018, https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/08/thedeathandresurrectionofmajorjohnandre/ (accessed 14 june 2021). 21. cray, ‘the john andre memorial’, pp1718. 22. ibid, p5. 23. ibid, p91. 24. see descriptions detailed in j. knight, ‘the death and resurrection of major john andre’, journal of the american revolution, 14 august 2018, https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/08/thedeathandresurrectionofmajorjohnandre/ (accessed 14 june 2021); r.e. cray, r. e. (1997). ‘major john andré and the three captors: class dynamics and revolutionary memory wars in the early republic, 17801831’, journal of the early republic, fall, 1997, pp379380 https://doi. org/10.2307/3123941; cray, ‘the john andré memorial’, op cit, pp78. 25. knight, op cit. see also cray, ‘major john andré and the three captors’ op cit, p381. the captors monument in tarrytown was overshadowed by the andré monument. see cray, ‘the john andré memorial’, pp1920. 26. knight, op cit. 27. ibid; cray, ‘major john andré and the three captors’, pp389391; cray, ‘the john andré memorial’, p9. 28. j. knight, ‘the death and resurrection of major john andre’, journal of the american revolution, 14 august 2018, https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/08/thedeathandresurrectionofmajorjohnandre/, accessed 14 june 2021; cray, ‘major john andré and the three captors’, pp388391. 29. knight, op cit. 30. ibid; cray, ‘major john andré and the three captors’ pp379380. 31. see also cray, ‘the john andré memorial’, p8. smith public history review, vol. 28, 202111 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0735-2751.2004.00233.x https://theconversation.com/monumental-errors-how-australia-can-fix-its-racist-colonial-statues-82980 https://theconversation.com/monumental-errors-how-australia-can-fix-its-racist-colonial-statues-82980 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-the-history-and-future-of-confederate-monuments-2020-07-12/ https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history https://www.hornsby.nsw.gov.au/library/catalogues-and-resources/local-history/hornsby-park-history https://hornsbyshire.recollect.net.au/nodes/view/5162 https://hornsbyshire.recollect.net.au/nodes/view/5162 https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html https://jschumacher.typepad.com/joe/2012/03/the-andre-monument.html http://rocklandgov.com/departments/environmental-resources/county-parks-and-dog-runs/andre-monument/ http://rocklandgov.com/departments/environmental-resources/county-parks-and-dog-runs/andre-monument/ https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/08/the-death-and-resurrection-of-major-john-andre/ https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/08/the-death-and-resurrection-of-major-john-andre/ https://doi.org/10.2307/3123941 https://doi.org/10.2307/3123941 https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/08/the-death-and-resurrection-of-major-john-andre/ 32. ibid, pp393394; knight, op cit. 33. cray, ‘major john andré and the three captors’, p372. 34. cray, ‘the john andré memorial’, p26. 35. rockland county, op cit; schumacher, op cit. 36. an existing inscription on the monument provided a quotesaid by washington about andré. this still centred the narrative around andré rather than about washington himself. see cray, ‘the john andré memorial’, p17. 37. cray, ‘the john andré memorial’, p31. 38. knight, op cit; cray, ‘major john andré and the three captors’. smith public history review, vol. 28, 202112 the age of public history public history review vol. 30, 2023 editorial welcome the age of public history paul ashton university of technology sydney corresponding author: paul ashton, paul.ashton@uts.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8373 article history: published 30/03/2023 what is public history – now? definitions of public history have evolved over the past four to five decades. some choose to represent it narrowly often to the exclusion of people without formal, academic training in history. others say that it is an impossible term that is too broad and elastic – it can be stretched over almost anything. a more expansive characterisation sees public history ‘as a process by which the past is constructed into history and a practice which has the capacity for involving people as well as nations and communities in the creation of their own histories.’ discussion ‘of the process is an integral part of the practice’ in this definition.1 but however defined two things are clear. public history is a complex, nuanced, non-­traditional field that is multi-­ and cross-­disciplinary. and it is rapidly emerging around the world. undoubtedly debates about the nature of public history will continue into the future, though some have questioned their utility.2 these will be shaped by specificities in particular countries and cultures.3 but public history has come of age. public historians and others have developed institutional and other infrastructure in several countries including australia, canada, britain, indonesia, italy, new zealand, scandinavia, south africa and the united states. founded in 2010, the international federation provides a network of public history programs, academics and practitioners and produces a refereed journal, international public history – though some would argue that there is not necessarily a ‘global’ public history practice. academic and other publishers have also embraced the field as have cultural institutions of all modes and sizes.4 patricia money-­melvin noted over twenty years ago that for many professional historians ‘the definition of historian is treated as a fixed category, unrelated to time and place. the only time and place of importance in the defining process, at least as far as the professional historical community is concerned, is that of the period when the professionalizers’ construct of historian emerged and took root.’5 she was concerned with ‘the dynamic tensions between past, present, and future and of the opportunities as well as the constraints [in the culture] inherent in that tension’ for professional historians, both inside and outside the academy.6 more recently marnie hughes-­warrington has noted similarly ‘that there is no “history” apart from historical practices. nor… is there any logical, universal or unchanging reason to talk of one practice as “more historical” than another… our views on what history is are themselves historical… [and] are subject to re-­evaluation and change.’7 while public history has come of age, it has done so at a time of great uncertainty in a world that changes constantly. old binaries of producer/consumer and professional/amateur have blurred in a post-­colonial, digital world. historical authority which was monopolised by academics in the mid twentieth century, has been democratised, though democratisation is also an unstable process. neoliberal managerialism also continues to undermine the role and practice of history in most of its manifestations in many countries, especially in universities. jorma kalela argues convincingly that academic historians need to see themselves as consultants. ‘rather than just transmitting knowledge of the past,’ he wrote, ‘it is our task also to encourage and support other people engaged with history making and to be available when assistance is requested.’8 some historians have stepped up to these challenges. they have acknowledged that historical knowledge and consciousness have multiple sources – film, documentaries, public art, heritage, exhibitions, historical novels, family history and community history, re-­enactment and schools. established in 2011, historypin has shared hundreds and thousands of sources and memories with thousands of archives, libraries and museums.9 taking a lead from citizen science, citizen history is booming across the world. as alana piper has written, ‘digital humanities are… revolutionising the ways that history is transmitted to, received by, and – perhaps most importantly – performed with public communities.’10 history from above is obsolete. but this does not mean privileging ‘history from below’. rather, there is a strong and growing recognition that history in general comprises a wide spectrum of practices across a vast number of agents, actors and audiences, none of which are necessarily superior to one other. public history will continue to evolve in different places, in different ways and for different reasons – conciliation, reconciliation, renewal, recognition, revival. some speculate that the term public history may perhaps disappear if it is stretched beyond its elasticity. ‘urban history’ dominated the western history profession in the late 1960s and 1970s in the context of environmental crisis. it ultimately fragmented and was absorbed into the new social history in the 1980s. public history on one level has grown out of rights movements – human, indigenous, labour, gay and lesbian, green and minority: will it eventually melt into air? perhaps public history might be best thought of as an ongoing, entangled negotiation – as a set of evolving relationships – cultural, economic, environmental, political and social – involving a range of knowledges and a diversity of people, groups and organisations. endnotes 1 hilda kean, ‘introduction’, in hilda kean and paul martin (eds), the public history reader, routledge, london and new york, 2013, pxii. 2 robert weible, ‘defining public history: is it possible? is it necessary?’, perspectives on history, march 2008, available at https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2008/defining-public-history-is-it-possible-is-it-necessary (accessed 31 may 2021). 3 see, for example, paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally? working with the past in the present, bloomsbury academic, london, 2019, part i, which explores conceptions and practices of public history in eleven countries. see also, for example, marko demantowsky, marko, ‘public history in, from and about russia’, monthly editorial, october 2019, in public history weekly, no 7, 2019, 28, doi: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2019-14340. 4 see, for example, the public history series recently launched by de gruyter: https://www.degruyter.com/serial/phip-b/html (accessed 31 may 2021) and bill adair et al (eds), letting go? sharing authority in a user-generated world, the pew centre for arts and heritage, philadelphia, 2011. 5 patricia mooney-melville, ‘professional historians and the challenge of redefinition’, in james b. gardner and peter s. lapaglia (eds), public history: essays from the field, krieger, malabar, 1999, p7. 6 patricia money-melvin, ‘professional historians and “destiny’s gate”’, the public historian, vol 17, no 3, 1995, pp9-24. https://doi.org/10.2307/3378750 7 marnie hughes-warrington, history goes to the movies: studying history on film, routlegde, london and new york, 2007, p32. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203390948 8 jorma kalela, ‘making history: the historian as consultant’, public history review, vol 20, 2013, p31. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v20i0.3631 9 paul ashton and meg foster, ‘public histories’, in sasha handley, rohan mcwilliam and lucy noakes (eds), new directions in social and cultural history, bloomsbury academic, london and new york, 2018, p162. 10 alana piper, ‘crowdsoursing: citizen history and criminal characters’, in paul ashton, tanya evans and paula hamilton (eds), making histories, de gruyter, berlin and boston, 2020, pp199-210. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636352-017 introduction: public history in the global context public history review vol. 30, 2023 editorial welcome introduction: public history in the global context na li east china normal university corresponding author: na li, linalarp@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8372 article history: published 30/03/2023 overlooking the pacific ocean, i am writing from my apartment. the beauty of working in the field of public history, like living near the coast, is that waves of surprises, opportunities, challenges, uncertainties emerge every day; the continuous expansion of the boundaries is a daily reality. back in february 2019, i was planning on flying back to hangzhou to teach my regular public history seminar. the covid-­19 pandemic hit and it has subsequently changed not only my plan but the rest of the world. i adjusted the field project, an integral part of public history training, and re-­designed a remote oral history project, experiencing history: listening covid-­19 pandemic in place (name of your city/town/village). ten student projects, the final products of this seminar, ranging from frontier workers, students, entrepreneurs, migrant workers, across professional and geographical boundaries, send a powerful message: the splintered, even conflicting uses of history, is indeed not an isolated endeavor: the world is connected as a global village. as the pandemic has evolved across the world, it has also unleashed a series of hidden social sentiments, from racism, hate, xenophobia and scapegoating to populism and nationalism. black lives matter, or rather, new civil rights movement, and stop asian hate in america epitomize the fights against white supremacy. such radical social movements are not only unique to a specific country; they are indeed part of a global movement. what does this mean for public history as a field and as a social movement? we face a critical moment to experience history, to reflect upon how history is reinterpreted, contested and commemorated in the public space, and further along the line, how that space is going global, and how public historians confront an evolving, thinking public. we also stand at another threshold to revisit the idea of ‘public’. in her influential writing about justice and the politics of difference, iris marion young analyzed the primary meaning of public is what is open and accessible. she elaborated that’in open and accessible public space and forums, one should expect to encounter and hear from those are different, whose social perspective, experience, and affiliations are different.’1 thirty years later, her ideal of ‘a heterogeneous public’ still resonates. as public history has engaged in a dynamic process of self-­definition, innovation in media technology has allowed the public to access, produce, interpret and disseminate historical knowledge. various public history practices around the globe have prompted scholars and professionals to reflect on theories and methodologies that dissolve boundaries between professionals and the public. increasingly, we are confronting a more demanding public that yearns for a more complex understanding of the past. this special issue of public history review responds to such urgent global debates. it explores public history in the global context. nine essays from nine countries represent diverse ways of how public history works, struggles or fails in different cultures. together, they inspire us to ponder public history in an increasingly diverse and polarized world. we hope our authors’ insights prove useful to such a collective quest for our professional identity. a note on the editorial process. exploring public history globally, this issue is a global collaboration on many scales. paul ashton, founding editor of public history review and former director for the australia center of public history at university of technology sydney, and marla miller, former director of the public history program at the university of massachusetts amherst, and past-­president of the national council on public history, have offered their insights to frame the idea. three doctoral students, guanhua tan from the university of massachusetts amherst, yushi liu and lishi you from zhejiang university were actively involved in the production of this issue. their creative and diligent work make it all possible. most important of all, our reviewers, who adjusted their hectic schedules during this time of deep uncertainty, have provided critical comments: paul ashton (university of technology sydney), sharon babaian ( canada’s museums of science and innovation), james brooks (university of georgia), david dean (carleton university), jerome de groot (university of manchester), theodore karamanski (loyola university chicago), constance schulz (university of south carolina), julia wells (rhodes university) and yafu zhao (beijing normal university) at the end, discussions about public history in the global context are nothing novel. in what is public history globally, the editors question the possibility of ‘global public history’.2 with the public turn in history, national forms of public history are now internationally connected through the internet. ‘public historians focus on local case studies that are now compared internationally; that is, they create new glocal forms of public history.’3 we leave our readers to ponder: how history making in the public has transformed, and what kind of role we are call to play in this transformation. enjoy the journey! endnotes 1 iris marion young, justice and the politics of difference. princeton university press, 2011, p119. 2 paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally?: working with the past in the present, bloomsbury academic, london and new york, 2019, p6. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350033306 3 serge noiret and thomas cauvin, ‘internationalizing public history’, in gardner, james b. gardner and paula hamilton (eds), the oxford handbook of public history, oxford university press, new york, 2017, p26. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.1 public history review vol. 27, 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: foster, m., burton, t., finnane, m., fraser, c., hobbins, p. and pich, h. 2020. a history of now: historical responses to covid-19. public history review, 27:2020, 1-18. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 meg foster, toni burton, mark finnane, carolyn fraser, peter hobbins and hollie pich the connection between history and covid-19 might appear counter-intuitive. we are used to being told by media outlets and employers, government officials and friends that we are ‘living in unprecedented times’. the covid-19 pandemic has changed the rhythms of our daily lives, but not every response to covid-19 has been new. it has also been understood through history. this article comes from a roundtable discussion that was held as part of nsw history week on 11 september 2020. bringing together historians, curators and archivists, this panel explored the way that history has been used to understand covid-19. particular attention was paid to attempts to record and archive our experiences through the pandemic, comparisons between covid-19 and the ‘spanish’ flu as well as shifting understandings of temporality during the pandemic. although the covid-19 pandemic has ruptured our quotidian experience, it is not a moment beyond history. this panel examined how history is being used as an anchor point, a source of inspiration and an educational tool with which to tackle ‘these uncertain times’. this roundtable was hosted online via zoom. at the time, 11 september 2020, several covid-19 vaccines were being developed worldwide. but it was too early to know which of these, if any, would prove effective. victoria was in the midst of a strict, state-wide lockdown after a hotel quarantine breach led to an outbreak of the virus. the covid-19 pandemic changes rapidly. it is experienced differently depending on a wide range of factors including geographical location, and so context is crucial. the following is the australian federal government’s covid-19 briefing for 11 september 2020 to situate the reader in the context in which the presenters were speaking. as at 3pm on 11 september 2020, a total of 26,565 cases of covid-19 have been reported in australia, including 797 deaths, and 23,211 have been reported as recovered from covid-19. over the past week, there has been an average of 63 new cases reported each day. of the newly reported cases, the majority have been from victoria. covid-19 cases were reported across all ages. the median age of all cases is 37 years (range: 0 to 106 years). the median age of deaths is 86 years (range: 30 to 106 years). there is a relatively equal ratio of male-to-female cases across most age groups. following the peak of cases at the end of march, there have been a relatively low number of new cases reported daily between midapril and early-june 2020. cases have increased since mid-june. since mid-august 2020, declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj the number of newly reported cases has begun to decrease, but high numbers continue to be reported. of cases with a reported place of acquisition, 80% were locally acquired. the overall proportion of cases under investigation in each state and territory is relatively low, indicating that public health actions, including case identification and contact tracing, is occurring in a timely manner. to date, over 6,928,000 tests have been conducted nationally. of those tests conducted 0.4% have been positive.1 fig 1 australian department of health summary of covid-19 in the country on 11 september 20202 panellists dr meg foster is a historian of bushranging, banditry, settler colonial and public history, the mary bateson fellow at newnham college, university of cambridge, and a visiting research fellow at the university of new south wales. meg is currently investigating the connections between british highway robbery and the origins of australian bushranging. she is an intersectional historian who has experience working across race, class and gender histories as well as imperial, colonial, ethnographic and public histories. meg has published widely, contributing articles to rethinking history and public history review as well as australian historical studies, where her most recent piece won the aboriginal history award from the history council of new south wales. meg has also contributed book chapters to publications by routledge and bloomsbury academic. combined with reviews, newspaper articles and blog posts, meg has a breadth of experience writing for academic and public audiences and a passion for making connections between history and the contemporary world. dr peter hobbins is a historian of science, technology and medicine, and a principal at artefact heritage services. his first degrees were in english literature and biomedical foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 20202 science and he worked as a professional medical writer before pursuing his love of history. passionate about public history, in 2018–19 peter coordinated a project to encourage community historians to research the local impact of the 1918–19 pneumonic influenza pandemic. throughout 2020 he has been involved in many media queries about the role of history in facing the current pandemic. peter also encouraged informal archiving of its impact on social media via the #covidstreetarchive hashtag. professor mark finnane is a historian at griffith university where he is director of the prosecution project and also director of the harry gentle resource centre. his historical research focusses on the history of policing and punishment, a legacy of his original work on the history of mental hospitals and lunacy incarceration. over the last decade he has undertaken a series of studies in the history of security in australia, including the policing of migrants and borders as well as terrorism and political violence. during 2020 he has been investigating the history of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic in the context of these longer histories of policing, law and government in australia. toni burton is the collection curation and engagement manager at state library victoria and oversees the development of the state collection, with a focus on rare and original material collections. managing a team of specialist librarians, whose daily work involves hands on engagement with the collection, donors, researchers and the community, toni’s work has looked very different over the past 6 months [the 6 months prior to september 2020] whilst the library has been closed. with a pause placed on assessing collections for potential acquisition, much of the team’s focus has been on how the library might collect, record and document the experiences of victorians living through the pandemic. the state library of victoria has employed a number of projects that look at creating a documentary archive of this global event, including memory bank and photographing the pandemic. carolyn fraser is senior curator at the state library of victoria. she has published widely on social history topics, with a particular focus on the history of craft practices. in 2019, she curated velvet, iron, ashes, the inaugural exhibition in the state library of victoria’s new victoria gallery. in march 2020, she led the development of the memory bank, the library’s collective memory project responding to the covid-19 crisis in victoria. dr hollie pich is a historian and writer who lives and works on the unceded land of the gadigal people of the eora nation. her academic research focuses on the intersections of race, gender and the law in the united states. hollie has written about australian efforts to create a covid-19 archive and is more broadly interested in how individuals and institutions are working to create a record of this ‘historic moment.’ the panel session mf i’d like to start the discussion by picking up on the end of hollie’s introduction. what do we mean when we say we’re ‘living through a historic moment’? what do we mean when we say we’re living through history? from a historian’s perspective, we’re constantly creating history. we’re always moving forward in time. so, what do we think makes this moment different? tb i think for the pandemic, what’s different about this moment in history is that pretty much everyone on the planet is experiencing it to a degree. it’s not only happening to a certain part of the world, or a certain part of the country, or certain sections of the community. although we’re all experiencing it differently, everybody is experiencing a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 20203 this at global, national and local levels. and for me that’s what makes this different from other events in history that we might look to document. hp historians are always looking for moments of rupture and disruption, where we can see the way that things normally are, and then this changes rapidly. that’s what’s happened in the context of covid and that’s how we know or suspect that people in the future are going to be really interested in the pandemic. that’s what makes this a ‘historic moment’ – even though this is a label that historians are pretty leery about applying in a present-tense situation. cf i would add, though, that many events create a sudden rupture and one of the things that i think is really interesting about this experience is how it’s unfolding in a kind of slow-motion way in some respects… or rather, that the temporal nature of it is changing so some things seem to happen very suddenly and other things seem to stretch out. despite all of the work that we do as historians looking at past experiences of pandemics, there’s no way to be certain about how this pandemic will end and what that resolution will be. i think that is another aspect which is really drawing people’s attention to this moment of time: that they’re living through it in a way that people – most people, other than historians – don’t normally do. mf i just want to pick up on that point that you made, carolyn, about time. some people are casting this pandemic as a rupture in time, but there are obviously some continuities. while there are people on twitter arguing that time can be carved up to into bc – before corona, and after – there are also people arguing that these ‘ruptures’ we are experiencing are not actually ruptures at all. the pandemic is just bringing the fault lines of our societies into stark relief in a way that we wouldn’t normally be aware of in our daily lives. time is experienced subjectively as well. carolyn and toni, you’re currently in melbourne, and i imagine time feels quite different for you there compared to someone like me, in sydney, with a bit more freedom. so, i was wondering if you could speak to idea of temporality? what do we think about the notion of time in this pandemic? ph i think one of the interesting things that we’ve seen is the sense that there is a suspension of time and there’s also this real feeling that this is almost redefining an epoch. for many of us the last time we felt that was this day nineteen years ago – september 11, 2001. i also remember just back in april as things slowed down in sydney, i was saying to some of my work colleagues: ‘you know the last time i remember sydney being like this was in 2000 during the olympics, when people were by and large leaving the city – except of course for all the tourists who were coming.’ in that case there was also a weird sense of time. the world was converging on sydney but the rest of us were actually leaving and so the streets behind the main tourist areas were almost as dead as they were this year. in these instances we have these sort of strange loops of time going on. but there’s certainly a sense that this is a time apart and perhaps things have slowed down for us while we face the enormity of what’s going on. hp i think it’s this simultaneous sense that time slowed down but the year is also going really fast. we see a lot people asking: ‘are we on day 300 of march?’ because march felt like it went for so long as we entered this new routine of ‘sameness’. now you look around and go: ‘oh is it getting warm again already? are we really going into summer? where has the year gone?’ people are thinking about this as a lost year foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 20204 and we see this expressed a lot on social media. there are so many memes about this specific sensation. time is always kind of meaningless but it feels very meaningless this year. tb i think without the normal structures of society, life and community – the ebbs and flows of celebrations and events – it feels that there is no structure to time and that every day is the same. if you compare it to the natural world, we’ve gone into some form of hibernation over what is our winter and our autumn and hopefully we’re going to re-emerge in spring and summer. it feels to me very much akin to the natural world where there are cycles of growth and cycles of when things die away. mfin toni’s comment really points out the importance of understanding the variety of experience not only within our country but across the world. so for some, as in 1919 during the outbreak of ‘spanish’ influenza, this is a very intense experience of prolonged incarceration and harm. for others it’s just a little bit disruptive. that distinction is really important, particularly in terms of how this will be remembered as a moment in time. mf following on from this point, can you see any connections between the covid-19 pandemic and other historical events? mark brought up the ‘spanish’ influenza pandemic. there are many comparisons being made in the media between the current pandemic and the ‘spanish’ influenza outbreak. but there was a huge gap in historical memory. the ‘spanish’ flu after world war i hasn’t really been in global consciousness until our current moment. did people at the time feel that they were living through history in the ‘spanish’ influenza pandemic or during any other period of crisis or rupture that we’re familiar with? can we think of any sources where historical actors framed their experience in that way? mfin i think the extraordinary thing about the absence of material from 1919 is that it came at the end of a war during which people did take the trouble to record their lives at length. we have massive archives from wartime of how people recorded their emotions and feelings in communications with their family and with others and that’s a really striking difference for me between the great war and 1919. ph i’d be happy to affirm that point. if you do go and read the diaries of australian soldiers and nurses who were serving overseas in 1918, for many of them keeping a diary or writing letters home was part of that great – i hate to use the word ‘adventure’ – but that great time out of their normal lives, and so they often folded their experiences of the ‘spanish’ flu into their diaries and letters home. but for many of them when they came back – when the ship pulled into sydney harbour or to point nepean or fremantle – they stopped keeping the diary or they stopped writing the letters. that’s a pattern that goes well back through the nineteenth century as well. their journey ended when they came back to their home territory. so we have a weird dichotomy between some very well-recorded histories of living through the influenza pandemic overseas by people who then stopped keeping personal records when they returned home. certainly there’s a great absence of records of the impact of the pneumonic influenza pandemic on ordinary people in australia. the other point i would make relates to my project working with local communities. when i was digging into local council archives of 1919 you can actually see the system breaking down there. you can see correspondence tailing off. you can see infectious diseases registers that were listing cases of other diseases like scarlet a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 20205 fever or diphtheria in the community and then you see pneumonic influenza cases tumbling into the records. from that point onwards the records just jumble out of order and in fact break down in cases. so you can actually feel that process happening as you work through a chronological archive. it had quite a powerful impact on me. it was a real eye-opener looking at local council archives for the first time in my career. mf is there also a sense that there’s an element of human agency in wartime? war is obviously something entered into by individuals. there are declarations of war, there’s a sense that this is a man-made crisis or ‘adventure’ if you want to couch it that way. but something like a virus is relatively invisible. although there were attempts to contain it and prevent it from moving certain places – i know mark’s written on quarantine in particular – there’s a sense that disease is something beyond the scope of human agency. do you think that influenced how people wrote about pneumonic influenza? how did people reconcile the fact that the world war was over with the sense that they were now facing an invisible enemy? ph i think there’s certainly a sense of that and you see it with other epidemics and pandemics as well – the sense that it is an invisible and inscrutable agent that you never quite know. we’re all feeling that now. we still don’t know if the door handle that we just touched is infected. are we going to pick up something by going out and getting a coffee? you certainly get that feeling from archival collections from 1919 but also from the bubonic plague of 1900 in places such as sydney, or even going back to some of the smallpox epidemics that affected some of the major cities in the nineteenth century. nobody really knew where it might strike or how it might reach them. that makes the disease ubiquitous and different from military experience which obviously involves training and then being posted to a combat zone where you know you’re putting yourself in a particular form of danger. one of my thoughts coming out of 1919 was that it was the very ubiquity of the disease that meant that they didn’t need to mark it. nothing that stood out about it. it was a communal experience unlike the sacrifice of those who had served during the war. cf in a pandemic there’s no identifiable hero. in a battle there often is. in wartime there can be narratives that can kind of coalesce around figures – humans who become superhuman in some way. in the history of pandemics those figures don’t really exist. in the case of victoria during this pandemic, very early on there was quite a lot of real interest in brett sutton, the chief health officer and i wondered whether he might rise to have a kind of hero-like role. things have not gone quite as well in victoria as might have been necessary for that to happen, but it’s interesting to think about in relation to how events are remembered or forgotten. mf following on from that point, carolyn and toni, can you comment on the archive that you’re involved in at the state library of victoria? can you walk us through the creation of the archive, the type of material you’re trying to attract and if there are any comparisons you can see between your archive and that of the ‘spanish’ flu? tb one thing to point out is that during the covid-19 pandemic we’ve had repeated requests from journalists and media agencies to provide documentary evidence – for example, photographs of people wearing face coverings during ‘spanish’ influenza. but we don’t actually have a huge amount of original material relating to that. this has been interesting in terms of our collections, because you can almost use that lens foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 20206 of what the journalists, researchers and writers of today are looking for to link 1919 with 2020. in 100 years’ time, it’s feasible that the journalists of the future are going to want similar information. so that’s provided a perspective through which we can think of our current collecting initiatives. one of the things we did quite quickly, when the library closed and staff were sent home, was come up with a series of think tank projects. one of them was photographing the pandemic. this project involved redeploying our staff across the organization to capture their local communities’ response to covid-19. we’ve collected probably about a thousand images to date as well as their associated, descriptive metadata documenting these six months. this initiative acts on a very local and suburban level, capturing stories of how businesses have been affected, how public space has been impacted, how communities have become resilient and what they have done to find joy in small, daily interactions. we’re just about to extend that to an oral history project as well to document some of those story-based practices. the other thing we did quite early on, which was inspired by the state library of queensland, was to engage a number of photographers living in rural and regional victoria to capture the experiences of those communities. from a horrific bushfire season into the covid pandemic, it was particularly important to respectfully capture the unique experiences of people living in rural and regional victoria. we find it very easy to collect metro melbourne, but we’re a library for victoria and capturing those other experiences is really important to us. cf i can talk a little bit about the memory bank project. this project involved taking the work that toni and her team do already and creating a public face that could exist digitally, because that would be the way that people would be interacting with the library when we were closed. the memory bank was developed in two stages. the first stage of the project was a stage in which a group of us were drawn together from around the library to issue a prompt every week on social media for people to create content in response. each prompt aimed to address something that seemed particularly momentous to that week. this approach was inspired by the work that was done by the mass observation project in the uk which began in 1937. i was thinking of the memory bank project selfishly, on behalf of the person who will be in my role 100 years from now. we really wanted to stress to people how important the everyday, ordinary experiences of this pandemic are. historians and governments are going to have records of some of the bigger aspects of this experience, but we should also document the experience of individuals, of so-called ‘ordinary people’. for me, it was really important that the prompts that we issued shifted between those very small, domestic, local concerns and bigger questions about the experience itself. we also aimed to create a loop with our collection so we were looking at items in the collection that had some relevance or perhaps would provide a visual prompt to people. we are constantly collecting material and so i was really keen that the project both have a function in terms of driving potential acquisitions for us and also an educational aspect. people would understand that the collection is vast and that it’s not comprised simply of works of great art or important manuscripts but that it’s extremely broad. so that was the beginning of the project. in the latter part of the project it really shifted much more into a social media campaign. a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 20207 tb it’s been interesting to see the memory bank develop as it switched from a collecting priority to being an engagement priority for the library. people have formed connections within its facebook group and are supporting and providing advice to each other based on what they’re posting. or they might be providing emotional support or suggestions for recipes – for example how to make their sourdough starter more effective. so that’s been an interesting community outcome. i think that we have built up to 2000 people around that concept of a memory bank. mf it sounds like the project challenges our idea of an archive as well. we usually think of archives as quite static, but this is an ongoing process of connection and engagement. the memory bank is obviously constantly unfolding so that in itself is quite remarkable too. mfin i agree with you totally meg. and this really highlights the difference again between 1919 and now. the archive of 1919 is in some ways an accidental archive. it’s a by-product of other purposes, mostly of government. we didn’t have the cultural institutions in 1919 of the scope that we have now, particularly with dedicated staff who are taking their own role in informing communities of memory through this. one of the questions that i think arises in relation to the enormous volume of information that’s available now is the difference between the sort of work that these public memory custodians are doing and that which is present in the world of social media. facebook and twitter are producing massive quantities of information which people are harvesting in various ways. i recently attended a presentation by my criminology colleagues at griffith university who’ve been conducting surveys of people’s responses to lockdown using the facebook community as the community of interest, so there are all sorts of inquiries going on. the whole area of social media is going to produce its own challenging questions about how that relates to the picture of memory of this year that we’ll get through institutional collections at the state library of victoria and many other institutions. mf i’d like to ask a broader question about digital archives versus material archives. i know that elsewhere peter has written about challenges presented by digital connectivity. although it is so much a part of our lives – and it’s keeping us sane! – it is also relatively ephemeral. how do we capture digital material and use it in a meaningful way? and how are we doing this alongside gathering tangible, archival evidence? tb i think the victorian state library collection relating to covid is going to be predominantly ‘born digital’ as most of the submissions are coming through our digital base. we’re keeping emails as a form of correspondence in the same way we would have kept letters from when people corresponded that way. although there are physical elements of the collection around ephemera it is predominantly a ‘born digital’ collection or a collection of websites through ‘pandora’. i think that’s going to be useful for the archivist or the researcher or the historian of the future in that its intangible nature is very different to things that we often perceive of as being an archive or a museum-style collection. mf are there unique challenges in terms of securing digital information? even for this presentation i was trying to look back through tweets that i’d liked and it was hard. you really need to consciously keep track of what you’re seeing and what you think is important. especially when scrolling through a social media feed you’ll see something foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 20208 that might resonate but then going back to find it is difficult on many digital platforms. tb archiving social media has its own challenges which we have not necessarily come up with a solution for. i think that’s pretty common across cultural institutions. how do we collect facebook commentary? how do we collect instagram? we’re fortunate in that one of our collecting tools at the library is something called ‘pandora’ and that harvests websites and makes them digitally available as an archive. twitter can also be harvested that way and through hashtags. for prominent figures we might want to collect their whole twitter feed. i’m sure there’re ethical considerations around how that information is made available into the future. this is certainly important when archiving things like facebook and instagram where the intention of those posters was not necessarily to have that information collected in perpetuity by any organization. i think preserving digital media is a challenge. but there’s a lot of work that’s been done on digital preservation. we have a tool to preserve ‘born digital’ content in its intact nature so that it doesn’t diminish over time in the same way that we will preserve a physical artifact in the library. hp one of the things that i’ve been thinking about a lot is the difference between the prompted archives and the unprompted archives. what we’re seeing are institutions reaching out to people and saying: ‘this is a historic moment. we want to hear from you.’ this isn’t just something that’s happening in australia. if you look at international archiving efforts in the us, the uk and japan it’s remarkably consistent in terms of what institutions are saying. they’re saying: ‘we want your experience as an individual. we want the details of everyday life. we want you to keep a diary.’ as a historian the first thing i think is that the things that you collect or the things that you write down when you’re prompted – and you’re writing them in the context that you think a historian might read them 100 years in the future – are very different to you sitting down writing your unmediated thoughts. the question in these circumstances such as these is always: ‘what are you not saying if you think that people are going to come back and look at this?’ cf as one of the organisers who’s been asking people to do these kinds of things, i felt an enormous obligation to respond to our prompts myself. a couple of the prompts that we issued as part of the memory bank took me weeks! when we asked people to inventory their pantries, i had no idea that it would take me months to really do it properly. in regard to a diary, i found myself in a situation where i kept three diaries and it became very complicated. i really feel like we ought to be offering some kind of service to teach people about the idea of audience because it is a very confusing form, particularly for people new to the genre. mf i’d like us to think through the idea of inequality in terms of the voices that are being represented in the archive that we’re currently creating. on one hand this is a unique opportunity because we have a social history archive that’s being developed in real time, where people get to contribute things that they think are important. but there are certain voices that aren’t being represented in these initiatives. for example, essential workers who are on the front line don’t have the same time to write diaries. people from different socio-economic backgrounds don’t necessarily have the same access to technologies or want to engage in institutional platforms. a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 20209 can we think of how we might tackle this issue in the creation of covid archives? tb that’s something carolyn and i really wrangled with in terms of the memory bank project because it’s predominantly a digital engagement platform. although they can choose to do things a bit more manually, the way people are going to find out about that project is through social media channels. some people make a choice to stay away from that kind of media and don’t access these platforms. so, this was something that we talked about at length but didn’t really come up with a solution. it was definitely in our minds that we were going to be able to reach a certain section of the community through this call out for information and i think it caused quite a lot of discord, internally, around the competing demands of whether this was primarily a collecting project or whether it was an audience engagement project. where it finally landed was that it was primarily an audience engagement project and that was the moment where the responsibility for the project shifted entirely to another team within the library. whilst i certainly understand that from a resourcing position, i do think it severely limited the way in which we were able to do outreach and the kind of outreach that we had initially designed for the project. mf peter, could you speak about the community archiving projects that you’ve been involved in and whether they intersect with these institutional projects or are in fact quite different? ph i used to work at the national archives of australia so i had some sense of the proactive collection policies that are always in place with statutory authorities, whether it’s the national archives, state archives or public records offices. it’s their job to go out and to capture and assess and then ‘ingest’ the records of government. there are organizations that sometimes don’t call themselves ‘cultural institutions’ but do go out and actively seek information. they’ve had to deal for a long time with this problem of the transition to digital records and all the issues that come with them: around platforms, the readability of data and the interlinks across multiple platforms. so i came to this pandemic primed to think about this when i started seeing, for instance, local historical societies and particularly local councils creating these sorts of archiving projects. i laud them for their initiative and i support what they’re doing. but i’m concerned that maybe there’s not going to be digital longevity planned into these programs in the way that we see at our state libraries and our major state and the national archives. we always see that problem. i had the same problem looking at council archives from 1919. over the last hundred years many councils have merged or they’ve chucked out their archives. one of those things that worries me is an ongoing equity issue. a lot of small-scale local initiatives – let alone the ones that play out informally on social media – may disappear over time because the basic digital infrastructure isn’t there. then there’s the bigger issue of what’s driving some of these collections. who’s capturing the algorithms that are actually helping make these decisions? who’s capturing the way in which the covidsafe app works and tracks data, not just the information, but actually the algorithm itself ? who is thinking about how that was programmed, the choices that were made in it, the machine learning that went into that and how we’re going to be able to interpret that 100 foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 202010 years from now, let alone the diary left by an individual after a prompt on a state library website? mfin i just want to follow up on the question of inequality. it’s quite a complex issue because there are some ways in which a population’s experience of a pandemic as it’s preserved for us in historical memory is inevitably a biased legacy. i have a lot of interest in policing and what police do during events like the pandemic, but that in itself produces a very skewed picture of what the pandemic is about. we all know the story of karen from bunnings and that may represent a particular type of experience of the pandemic, but it’s not a majority experience. all archives have these inbuilt biases that are the product of various kinds of historical factors. i think that’s a really important thing to remember when we come to write the histories of these kinds of events. i’m also interested in what i referred to earlier as the ‘accidental archive’. i’ve discovered a couple of extraordinary, completely forgotten but quite important constitutional issues in the national archives of australia which have been ignored in australian political history. even the very survival of these memos is an accident of history. these are really important things for us to consider when we try to understand or approach an archive and interpret it. hp if we’re talking about the types of archives that are being produced, i can’t help but think we’re going to have a ‘front heavy archive’ especially if we’re talking about individuals’ experiences. as we said earlier, this pandemic was originally experienced as a rupture, but it’s now been going for a pretty long time. at the beginning a lot of people were writing in their diaries and taking photos when they went out thinking: ‘this is really different. i have to record everything.’ but it feels sort of normal now. if you go out you keep a bit of space between yourself and others. seeing people in masks isn’t really throwing anyone anymore and we’re not recording that. the lack of a record is telling in and of itself and future historians will talk about that. but i can’t help but think there’s going to be a drop-off point for future historians. there’s going to be such an abundance of material for march and april in australia. then once the first wave is over, people are either acting as if covid is done and they don’t want to think about it anymore, or they’re just exhausted by it: the novelty has worn off. thinking about that in terms of the archive is really interesting. cf your experience of covid is very much dependent on where you are. the experience in victoria and particularly in metropolitan melbourne at the moment is quite different from the rest of the country. one of the things that i’m really conscious of is that it’s a very particular kind of archive when the people that you’re asking to do the work – to collect and make observations – are shut in at home. i would really like to see what it’s like in the city after curfew but due to the nature of curfew you can’t go into the city. there are people in an official capacity who are able to document that experience, but i do think that the domestic nature of many people’s experience poses interesting questions about what is worth recording. the idea of ‘the home’ as a particular form of space comes to bear on this question as well. a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 202011 fig 2 instagram meme. sourced 11 september 2020. mf i want to move us from ‘citizen archivists’ – as carolyn has called these everyday people contributing to the archive – to historians. if we’re looking at an archive that’s being created by everyday people what is the role of historians? i think this meme encapsulates the issue (see figure 2). what can historians do in this moment of catastrophe? what can we bring to the table? what’s our unique contribution to this moment? hp one of the things that the vast majority of people have felt at certain points during this year is uncertainty and loneliness. history for me is a type of empathy; looking to the past and seeing that people had similar experiences. i think that the role of history and historians in this moment is to say: ‘yes, this is unprecedented in a lot of ways but it doesn’t stand alone, out of time.’ there is comfort in reading the experiences of people who went through the ‘spanish’ flu and realising that is a bookended event. historians aren’t fond of the phrase: ‘those who can’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it’ because history doesn’t repeat. but i do think there are themes that emerge when we look at the past. as historians we can sometimes draw on those to help people feel a little less confused and a little less alone. mfin empathy is what historians struggle to achieve when they approach the past and especially when the past may be quite distant. empathising with victims of the black plague is quite a different challenge to empathising with victims of 1919. it is even difficult for historians working in one place to understand the experience of people in far distant places or even distant places within our own country. for example, we foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 202012 know little about the fact that aboriginal people in 1919 in queensland probably had the worst mortality rate from pneumonic influenza per head of population. as hollie suggested, historians hate the idea that we can learn lessons from the past. but for me, particularly in thinking about law and politics, what historians can do is to show the way in which the past is actually in the present. nothing illustrates this better than the struggle between the commonwealth and the states; between the prime minister and the state premiers; and the mechanisms that are used to try and get past those blockages. this is entirely a product of a particular arrangement entered into in the 1890s. for people to understand that better is also an act of empathy. a very important function of history at a time like this is to think through what bits of our past have conditioned our present. all histories are about the present. they’re not about the past. that’s why history – the way it’s written and the way we talk about it – constantly changes. ph this certainly has been a year for contemplating meta-historical questions about the function and process of history. but more broadly, what surprised me very early in march, when i started to receive more and more media calls about 1919, was how it tied in with today. i realised pretty quickly that i had a moral imperative. i had to decide what story i was going to tell and how i was going to relate it so that audiences today – who didn’t know what happened 100 years ago – actually felt some meaning coming out of it. i was pleased in one sense that i was able to genuinely draw upon the messages i delivered last year when i was doing centenary projects with ‘spanish’ flu to say: ‘look, my take-home message from 1919 was our community came together. they had no effective vaccine. they had no effective treatment. public order did run the risk of breaking down because of the sheer rate of infection and the incredibly high mortality. and yet by and large we saw communities trying to do the right thing, trying to follow their measures, looking after each other at a very local level: neighbours, neighbourhoods, small towns and suburbs and so on.’ the other message that i didn’t foreground as much, though i was aware of it, was that if you go back to the 1880s or 1900s there were much more potent racial overtones to the way that disease was understood, particularly in the ‘white australia’ moment. epidemics in the past have been used to stigmatize groups but i’ve been really proud of the way that in 2020, we’ve rarely seen particular racial or socioeconomic groups associated with covid-19. we’re not calling it the ‘wuhan virus’. we’re still calling it covid. that was a very deliberate policy on behalf of the world health organization but it also hasn’t lapsed into any informal blame-shifting in australia. of course, there are commentators all around who will point the finger. but broadly as a community we have seen this as a communal challenge in the way that we did in 1919. i see it as part of my moral duty to emphasize that and to reiterate that there’s value in looking after each other because that did help our ancestors exactly 100 years ago. cf i’d like to respond to one of the comments that is already up on the chat. we haven’t acknowledged the hiv/aids pandemic. the way in which the hiv/ aids pandemic has been incorporated into our culture or into our histories is very different because of stigmatization. the covid pandemic is a situation in which the trauma is being shared across all groups – not equally – but perhaps that shared experience does change the way that people understand what’s going on. i think that paul van reyk, who’s made this comment, is also stressing the trauma of the hiv/ a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 202013 aids pandemic and how it has taken a long time for that trauma to be incorporated into our collective consciousness and responded to. it’s only now that some of those accounts of hiv/aids are appearing. ph although i have never particularly researched hiv i do agree that it was another period where a community did come together, often in the face of extraordinary stigmatization. citizens and particular lobby groups and support groups did make fundamental changes to the way that our health system worked, to the way that drug development and trials were managed globally and to the way that we saw people with different sexualities. i do sometimes make that point that hiv is a pandemic and that we have tended to forget about that because it is largely treatable in australia as opposed to other parts of the world. there is no vaccine for hiv and this is also something we may have to face with covid. this is not necessarily a vaccine solvable situation. maybe covid will be with us for decades to come. we haven’t really thought about how that’s affecting us as a society. mf our next question from the audience comes from alan phillips. he asks: ‘how long after the pandemic subsides can we make a truly objective historical evaluation of covid’s impact? how do we make sure we have harvested all the necessary data inputs?’ hp the answer to this question is a little like the saying: ‘how long is a piece of string?’ it depends what kind of history you’re doing. for example, there are some historians who are doing histories of the carceral state in the us and are looking at things in the 2000s. now some people would say that’s too soon, that you need a bigger time span to be able to tell that history. but it depends on the type of historical project. i think we could see people writing histories of this in a decade’s time and in a century’s time, but they’ll be different projects working with different archival materials. in terms of objectivity, that’s something we strive towards but i don’t know that it’s really possible. i think historians are going to write their own spin on this history, starting whenever they want and going for as long as they want and picking materials as they go. mfin one of the most valuable historical accounts of 1919 in australia was produced by the nsw public health department in 1919-20, very close to the events of the pneumonic influenza pandemic. it is really a very good historical account of what it’s like to work through a pandemic at a medical and government level and the challenges of that time. the fact that we can now write about 1919 is dependent on those kinds of accounts. but hollie’s also completely right. what history is for and who needs it at a particular time is so crucial. one of the other things about 1919 is that it was forgotten as a history and it has been recovered at various points in the last thirty years. what history gets written is a product of the questions that people want to ask. cf this is an interesting question in relation to exhibition making. as a curator, it’s something that i am often thinking about in terms of exhibitions that are designed to address social movements or issues that are really important to people in the present day. at the beginning of the memory bank project there was an excitement within the library that perhaps when we reopened that we’d be able to have an exhibition of materials that had been gathered through this mechanism. this was something that i felt a lot of alarm about straight away in part because of a concern around what was foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 202014 potentially going to be a traumatic experience. i think that the covid-19 pandemic is a traumatic experience for many and we don’t really know the breadth or depth of that yet. there is a history within institutions of mounting exhibitions around events of this kind and i think it’s instructive to look at how they were done at different places in different times. for example, the natural history museum in new york mounted an exhibition during the polio epidemic in new york city. it was both a historical documentation of pandemics until that point but also a public education program in terms of trying to spread information about ways that people could protect themselves from polio. in the same way that books will be written about this moment, i imagine there’ll also be exhibitions of different kinds and scale and with different focuses and it will be valuable to see how they’re received. tb there will be exhibitions in the future and there will be written accounts and other kinds of documentary accounts of this pandemic. but for collecting institutions such as the state library, one of our primary goals is to make the collection as accessible and discoverable to our community as soon as we possibly can. although some of this covid related material might have restrictions on it due to privacy or copyright or other kind of negotiated embargoes, we intend to make it available via our catalogue and retrievable to the public that come into our reading rooms as soon as we can, so people will be able to start drawing their own narratives and their own connections to this experience through the material that we have collected. mf the next audience question is also about future histories. how useful do we think covid archives will be for broader histories of everyday life in the early twenty first century? will this be a case of routines being most thoroughly documented when they break down? ph a lot of my work as a historian has been around dramas and tragedies. i sometimes accuse myself of being a rather ghoulish historian! but the reason that i focus on these calamities is not for the salacious details, but because those events – whether aircraft accidents, pandemics, quarantine episodes or shipwrecks – all of these sorts of events cut across everyday life. i see that some of the other comments in the chat made this point as well. it’s in intersecting with everyday life – and taking a slice out of it – that we often find out how normality looked. if you look, for instance, at royal commission proceedings or commissions of inquiry, you’ll often find that they’re the places where it took something to go wrong for people to explain how things normally work. that’s one of the main reasons that i’m interested in those sorts of disastrous events in addition to understanding the pathos that goes around some of them. hp as a social historian, the thing i find the most exciting about the covid archives is their documentation of everyday life. i can just see a future historian giddy with joy over lists of pantry items – which will be incorporated into food histories – or photos of suburbia – which will be used in histories of architecture and domestic spaces. people are thinking about these documents in the context of covid but there’re intersections with other crises. future historians are also going to be talking about this archive in terms of climate change and black lives matter and a million other things that we haven’t even thought of yet. cf i have a colleague, des cowley, at the state library who describes this as ‘evidential detritus’. it’s a wonderful phrase because it encapsulates how a lot of archival material a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 202015 begins on the edges. their creators often had no intent of them meaning what that they now mean to us. mf our next audience question is on the issue of digital verses material archives. will historians and archivists be inclined to give written accounts from this period more weight than technological accounts? does the ease and spread of technological perspectives during this period lessen the weight of the digital account when compared with written ones? mfin the challenge for digital archives is the question of interpretation and the fact that they are often more accessible than written accounts. this makes them very attractive to historians but there are challenges to dealing with potentially billions of twitter messages. we’re yet to develop analytic tools to write the kinds of histories we might imagine in the future. tb we can’t yet imagine how the technology of the future will enable historians or researchers to interpret and use digital material. as a curator and someone who has a museum background, i think there’s always something special in the tangible, the material culture, something that is ‘real’ and you can see, touch, smell. but with material culture you actually have to be with the object to have that experience. with digital resources it’s so much easier to have this kind of a quality of experience because they’re available through an interface. you can interact with them from wherever you are in the world. you’re not getting a digitized version of the real; you are actually getting the real thing which was born in a digital way. there can be more equity of use in the future with digital archives and digital material. cf i totally agree with toni. as a curator i want to know: ‘how big is it? what colour is it? is it an object has a kind of presence in an exhibition space?’ it’s not always the most important thing in the history of an event but it might be appealing in some way that’s going to draw people in and allow you to tell a story because that object has an aura about it. i think that the aura of an object is something that we’re very attuned to in this moment and with the kind of education that many of us have had. i feel very concerned about moving to a time in which most things exist in the digital realm and they’re born digital. i worry about whether we will have lost something if there is no longer an ‘object’. but as toni says, not only will people have different tools; they also will have had a very different experience and relationship to that kind of material. the aura that i imbue an object with is a product of me at this moment in time and that somebody in the future – my kind of curatorial counterpart 100 years from now – might have that same feeling toward digital materials. the way in which digital material can be shared can only be a good thing in terms of the distribution of stories and access to them. ph a lot of it comes down to who the historians of the future are going to be and their cultural backgrounds, as well as the things that intrigue them. so many kids these days have far fewer toys or material possessions and their existence is much more online – whether it’s learning or gaming or interacting. so for them, that will be the sphere that they imagine is the most important way to analyse the world. back in the 1960s one of the dominant modes of telling history was through economic history – crunching large amounts of economic data in order to discern larger patterns and to tell stories out of that. that mode of history fell out of favour through the 1970s and 1980s, but it was a predominant mode in history writing for foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 202016 a long time. there are, and have always been, different ways that we can tell history from the records. this ties in with one of the other questions that’s come up on the chat: how do we get at the histories of marginalised and underrepresented groups who don’t necessarily leave their own message? these groups often leave traces in other sorts of records – health, police or centrelink records. it may be through these sources that we find ways to give voice to those people’s experiences, even though they weren’t consciously trying to leave an account for us through their interactions with those agencies. mf the next question from the chat is about the place of science in pandemics. graeme woodrow asks whether there was a general acceptance of the medical science underpinning pneumonic influenza in 1919-20 and how does that compare to today? ph in 1918 in australia, two major vaccines were being developed against pneumonic influenza. it was basically created by scooping the gunk out of the lungs of people at the point nepean quarantine station in melbourne, which was where the commonwealth government was based at the time, and also the north head quarantine station in sydney. vaccines were created from this gunk – which was basically a mixture of various bacteria including one that was haemophilus influenzae. this was believed to be possibly responsible for the ‘spanish’ flu. the commonwealth offered up about three million doses of it and in new south wales we offered up nearly a million doses. about 440 000 people, or a quarter of the state’s population, agreed to receive this vaccine. it took two doses – a mild lower dose and then a booster dose – and yet it didn’t work. there are a couple of reasons for that. primarily it was because the vaccine was created against bacteria and the ‘spanish’ flu was caused by a virus. in 1919 you couldn’t prove that a virus existed. the microscopes weren’t powerful enough. in terms of the power accorded to modern medicine in 1919, the fact that a quarter of the population willingly accepted these vaccines, without any proof of their efficacy and really with almost no testing of their safety, gives you a sense the desperation of the population for some sort of intervention and their trust in modern medicine. medicine also had an extraordinary impact at reducing the number of deaths due to infectious diseases through world war one. it was the first major conflict where the number of deaths on the battlefield exceeded those due to infectious diseases, so it was another reason for confidence. that confidence suffered a knock as 1919 played out. mf our final question comes from mary sheen. will the covid-19 pandemic be forgotten in public memory as it was in 1919? is this moment in time any different politically than in 1919 especially with the imperative to realign the economy? hp it’s a bit too early to tell as it depends on what happens. will we have a covid vaccine? how long is this pandemic going to go on? i think these questions play a really big role because, if we think about public memory more broadly, our public memories tend to feed into our national narrative, into who we are as australians and how we make sense of the world. if you don’t need an event to help you make sense of the world in some concrete way, then you don’t really need to remember it in your day-to-day life. so it depends on what happens from here. ph i was really influenced by frank bongiorno in the way i looked at this year’s pandemic. as a medical historian by training, i was thinking about 1919 and about how that was really an unprecedented pandemic in its impact. but very early on, i a history of now: historical responses to covid-19 public history review, vol. 27, 202017 think in april if not march, frank said: ‘we have to think about this in terms of 1929 or 1942.’ he was talking about the great depression but more particularly the middle of world war two when the commonwealth took on an extraordinary number of powers as well as enormously increasing taxation. in 1942 we were facing the prospect of japanese invasion and that profoundly realigned our relationship with our government at a state and particularly national level. mfin to go back to what hollie said before, it is too early to tell, but there are some important differences between our context and that of 1919. one is that in 1919 australia had just come out of war; the world had just come out of war. so that was a very different starting point. there’d been a massive impact on mortality with the combined impact of the war as well as the pandemic. i think those couple of things make a very different kind of world for a start. but the other big difference is the interdependence of national economies in a globalised economic system which is obviously a very important consideration now. we’re at a crossroads about whether we can rebuild little national economies. i think not. we’ve gone too far down the road of globalisation. there are many other kinds of other factors as well, but these are important contextual factors that will shape what happens from here. endnotes 1. australian government, department of health, ‘covid at a glance – 11 september 2020’. accessed 24 november 2020 via: https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-at-a-glance11-september-2020. 2. australian government, department of health, ‘covid-19 snapshot, 11 september 2020’. accessed 24 september 2020 via: https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020/09/coronavirus-covid19-at-a-glance-11-september-2020.pdf. foster, et al. public history review, vol. 27, 202018 https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-at-a-glance-11-september-2020 https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-at-a-glance-11-september-2020 https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020/09/coronavirus-covid-19-at-a-glance-11-september-2020.pdf https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2020/09/coronavirus-covid-19-at-a-glance-11-september-2020.pdf public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: lindsey, k. and smith, m. 2021. setting the scene: statue wars and ungrateful citizens. public history review, 28, 1–11. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7789 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj setting the scene: statue wars and ungrateful citizens kiera lindsey and mariko smith doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7789 let’s take a walk in a park.1 we are going to visit a statue on the day of its unveiling. it is 1879 and one of those sweltering hot sydney afternoons when the air is so fetid with dust and sweat and horse shit, that most people would probably prefer to preserve their energy until the southerly comes through. 2 not that there is much chance of that for the twelve thousand or so respectable gentlemen who are now dressed in their military uniforms and sunday best and making their way through the gardens to where a colossal form stands, surrounded by clusters of evergreens, seventy flagpoles, each nearly fifty feet high, and a grandstand packed with approximately one hundred thousand sydneysiders, all munching on their peanuts and drinking ginger beer as they wait for the formalities to commence.3 at last, drums and trumpets heralds the arrival of the procession and those in the stalls lean forward to watch the portly figure of the colonial secretary lead the parade to the foot of the giant plinth. many of us might now recognise henry parkes from his stocky physic, glowering eyes, and abundant beard. on that day, however, there are probably quite a few in the grandstand who can still remember the colonial secretary from his earlier days as one of the colony’s most radical agitators and are less convinced by his new taste for imperial pomp.4 ‘he’s come a long way’, one old union leader mutters to his mate as they watch parkes assume pride of place upon the platform erected for the dignitaries. ‘cunning to the last’, his companion nods. although, if parkes was to overhear these comments, he would no doubt insist that rather than wily politicking, his accomplishments were the result of persistence and perseverance. and perhaps, in this instance, parkes has a point, for it has taken more than a decade for the statue committee to realise this moment because, despite numerous funding drives, the public has remained reluctant to put their hands in their pockets.5 indeed, one newspaper was even compelled to condemn the people of new south wales for being ‘a most ungrateful citizenry’.6 and yet, since the government declared the day a public holiday, thousands upon thousands have come to cheer the men in frockcoats as they make their speeches and before triumphantly unveiling thomas woolner‘s giant statue of captain james cook.7 ‘clouds of spectators’ now cover the roof of the nearby australian museum, while hundreds perch upon the arms of gas lamps’ and a few ‘venturesome urchins’ have even climbed out ‘upon the limbs of trees. among the dense crowd of pale faces’ there are also, a newspaper notes, several “gentlemen of colour”, including a few ‘australian aborigines’ who are wearing most ‘sombre visages’.8 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7789 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7789 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7789 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7789 as the band strikes up a rousing round of ‘rule britannia’, ‘hoary colonists’ and pretty schoolgirls’ rise with many military forces and members of the grand united order of the fellows and begin to sing. never has ‘a more imposing spectacle’ been ‘witnessed across the entire continent of australia’, the paper coos in patriotic satisfaction. and yet, there are probably a few among the grandstand, perhaps those two old union mates, who suspect the public spectacle dedicated to the giant bronze figure now glistening before them, is just as much a celebration of parkes’ political ambition, as it is the accomplishments of the eighteenthcentury explorer in question. not that the statue itself is overlooked. instead, a contemporary reviewer admires ‘mr woolner’s chef d’ouvre’ as a work of ‘force and spirit’ before concluding with a rather prescient comment that it is ‘in character sensational’. ‘unveiling captain cook’s statue: view looking towards port jackson’s heads’, illustrated news, 22 march 1879 and right they were. for fast-forward now to a wet winter friday evening in june 2020 as a party of mounted police defend the same statue with a group of armed colleagues as a posse of demonstrators march towards them, retracing the same steps of the colonial secretary and those twelve thousand well-dressed nineteenth-century gentlemen. ‘always was, always will be, aboriginal land’, the protestors chant through their covid-19 safe masks, waving their banners and placards as they call for an end to the narrative of colonial progress that was so energetically promulgated on that hot afternoon in 1879. despite the rain, the mood is hot and prickly, and any moment now there will be a confrontation, followed by two arrests and a lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20212 further explosion of outrage which ignites when a policeman allegedly gives one of the protestors a hand signal which the protestors associate with white supremacy.9 ‘police officers stand guard around the statue of british explorer captain james cook as they deter demonstrators from taking part in a protest against police brutality and the death in minneapolis police custody of george floyd, in solidarity with the black lives matter protests in the united states, in sydney, australia, june 12, 2020’ reuters/loren elliott: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-australia-iduskb two moments of history-making; both at the base of one of australia’s most contentious statues, both demonstrating how this mute monolith continues to speak with such symbolic potency to both the past and contemporary politics. the first occurred during ‘the heroic age’ of australian statuary and involved the sort of ‘brass dogma’ we now associate with the period of nation-building when politicians, such as henry parkes, were particularly anxious to settle a narrative of progress upon the yet-to-be federated country and its ‘ungrateful citizens’.10 the second is a much more recent clash in which a new generation of ungrateful citizens were yet again condemned for their ambivalence toward the same statue. only this time, instead of consuming a triumphalist narrative of national progress with their peanuts, these ungrateful citizens marched through the rain to demand an end to the systemic social injustice that has flourished because of the very stories and structures cook’s statue celebrates. for the front cover image of this special issue of public history review, we have chosen this 2019 digital print by gamiliaroi artist travis de vries, entitled ‘tear it down (cook falling)’, which now also seems prescient of the 2020 statue wars for it imagines a scene of aboriginal people, who might also be characterised as ‘ungrateful citizens’, physically pulling down that celebrated cook statue in a pose which evokes the flag-raising on iwo jima in world war two – another iconic history-making moment. the plinth itself is graffitied with counter statements that emphasise the connection between this nineteenthcentury statue and the harmful national histories which glorify colonial regimes at the expense of the aboriginal and torres strait islander traditional owners and custodians of these lands.11 de vries’s image not only reminds us that we are living at a moment when long supressed counter narratives are defiantly resurfacing and demanding to be heard; it also suggests a metaphorical connection between these protestors and ‘the australian aborigines’ who stood ‘sombre faced’ among the celebratory crowds in 1879, who may, lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20213 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-australia-iduskb in turn, have been descendants of the warriors who first discouraged the naval navigator from proceeding further into their country. as these images and examples suggest, this special issue is concerned with episodes of conflict and collision, consultation and collaboration, contradiction and complexity which have been stimulated by various statues and engaged all sorts of different publics and history practices. as these practitioners have used not only their intellect, wit, and creative imagination, but also their bodies and emotions, even their spray cans, to emphatically reject (and defend) such contentious symbols of the past, we thought it a highly appropriate topic for the public history review. drawing inspiration from city of sydney historian lisa murray, who responded to conservative indignation about the graffiti which appeared on many statues in 2019 by suggesting that such ‘vandalism’ should be understood as an act of contemporary history-making because it demonstrates investment in place, memory and identity, we wanted to reflect upon the many different types of history practice these recent statue wars have stimulated. in the process we also wanted to consider if murray’s argument could be applied to the police who protect these public works and the politicians who spent taxpayer monies to defend their version of the past from such ‘ungrateful citizens’? 12 most importantly, perhaps we wanted to reflect upon what these statues wars reveal about our changing historical consciousness, the way we are reckoning with our pasts and the role of public historians in this complicated but vital process. although such contestations are hardly new, there was something distinctive about the way the brutal police murder of african-american man george floyd on 25 may 2020 in the united states of america inspired thousands across the world to defy the covid-19 lockdowns, step beyond the safety of their homes and onto the streets to express their outrage at that terrible moment of injustice. as they did so, many statues, which were already subjects of considerable contestation, suddenly became sites of intense artwork: tear it down (cook falling), 2019 artist travis de vries (travisdevries.com). a print of this artwork was acquired by the australian museum for the ‘unsettled’ exhibition. lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20214 http://travisdevries.com drama. some were defaced, decapitated and in one notorious incident, dragged into the sea, triggering a conservative backlash among those who feared their ‘relaxed and comfortable’ perspective of the past was being fundamentally threatened.13 it was the way these long held tensions were unleashed in such vivid acts of public history making that compelled co-editor kiera lindsey to convene two seminars dedicated to the statue wars which were hosted by the history council of nsw and australian centre for public history at the university of technology sydney. in the first of these, ‘vandalism, vindication and what to do with the empty plinth?’, lindsey asked wiradjuri man and australian museum project officer nathan mudyi sentance, bristol public historian dr jess moody and melbourne archaeologist claire baxter to consider these events from their professional perspectives, before reflecting upon the various collaborative and creative practices being employed while engaging with questions of removal or revision.14 are we encouraging effective conversations and community consultation about these processes, she asked; and how might we foster collaborations between historical research and creative practice to stimulate and support this process? in the second session, ‘public protest and public history’, lindsey invited yuin woman and fellow co-editor mariko smith, public historian paul ashton and historiographer anna clark to discuss that contentious statue of cook in sydney’s hyde park.15 while ashton and clark provided insight into the historical and historiographical contexts of this monument, smith outlined the motivations and methods she was then contemplating while co-curating the now critically acclaimed ‘unsettled’ exhibition at the australian museum.16 taking as her starting point the hypothetical idea of removing cook’s statue (located across the road from the college street institution) and recontextualising it within the museum as part of that exhibition which itself is a response to the 250th cook anniversary of 2020, smith described how the dialogical responses from australia’s first nations communities were providing powerful counter perspectives that promised to not only challenge the celebratory narratives of so-called ‘peaceful’ settlement but also figuratively ‘unsettle’ that statue from its plinth, just as de vries print suggested. as this special issue is based upon the above two-part discussion, we invited contributors to use a conversational tone in either a short opinion piece or longer scholarly reflection that shared their professional experiences and research interests. eager to extend the conversation to other communities also wrestling with comparable challenges, we also invited several other history practitioners from new zealand, the united kingdom and australia to write about specific case studies. thus, the collection offers a series of both theoretical stimulations and practical provocations come from first nations and non-first nations archivists, activists and academics, councillors and curators regarding a host of different statues across the world. in so doing we hope this collection will illustrate, as anna clark observes in her contribution here, that while all history is ‘unfinished business’, public histories are often particularly dynamic because they demand a dialogue between stakeholders who frequently hold deeply different investments and understandings of the past in a particular area. nor is the unfinished nature of public history-making confined to the past, as tony ballantyne reminds us in his rich reflection about the new zealand context. for whether our responses are expressed with red paint, police guards, public decapitations or additive approaches to memorialisation or even special issues, the way we currently understand and practice the past is a product of historical change that is also likely to be subjected to scrutiny and change by future generations. of course, ballantyne’s call for consciousness regarding our own historiographical context is something many contributors have been reflecting upon for some time. their sustained consideration of such questions ensures that the collection offers careful insight to a swathe of questions relating to the removal, replacement or revision of these statues, as well as what it means to weigh the educative value of these works against their professional reverence for historical archives and the pain such monuments continue to elicit among those who have already suffered so much that they do not, as ballantyne notes, need to be further educated about the oppression that still routinely shapes their lives. but even while many contributors express professional lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20215 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iir4ul2voo https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=972479913267957&ref=watch_permalink queasiness about having such historical evidence destroyed or removed and also differ about which strategies should be deployed to this purpose, most agree that as these acts of nineteenth-century history-making have become so incompatible with contemporary aspirations for a diverse and inclusive nation-state as well as growing demands for greater truth-telling that something must be done. the question is not only what, but also how and by whom. together, our contributors draw upon numerous case studies that consider these complex issues from a range of perspectives in ways that we hope will encourage you to develop your own thoughts and practical responses. many offer practical suggestions to the questions explored in the two seminars, namely: ‘should there be no statues, more statues, statues about statues, or perhaps no statues at all? where should old statues go to die when the public declares them officially dead? and what precisely is the true historical value and educative merit of such public monuments anyway?’ this special issue also reviews the various frameworks developed by artists, activists and historians as they consult and collaborate with different communities about these contested objects and pasts. despite this diversity of approaches and case studies, the contributions are connected by a common theme concerned with the various ways contemporary societies are now reckoning with the painful legacies of imperialism and colonialism. while we were initially drawn to produce this special issue because we struck by the way the 2020 statue wars dramatised many of these tensions and sensitivities, we also agree with nathan sentance’s observation in this collection, that such reckoning is no longer ‘a matter of history alone’, but rather something that must concern us all because it is so inextricably connected with ‘the ongoing injustices… in the present.’17 indeed, sentance cautions us that however compelling the public spectacle of the statue wars, we must not allow this topic to distract us, for ‘the goal’ of the black lives matter protestors which was to use the symbolism of those statues to expose ongoing systemic injustice and focus our attention and energies upon the creation of ‘a more just society’. and to do that, sentance insists, we must not only avoid the impulse to blame or become hyper defensive but also develop methods that encourage us to reflect carefully and collectively about what we preserve and protect and why. despite their common connections, the transnational case studies in the collection also demonstrate how distinctive contexts produce particular pasts that then shape different publics and public history practices. bristol public historian, jess moody, for example, offers valuable context regarding the now infamous statue of british slave trader edward colston. detailing the various ways local authorities had consistently ignored repeated requests made by community groups to have that statue removed, moody reminds us that the dramatic events associated with the violent removal of colston’s statue in june 2020, were the climax on an ongoing feud which had been fuelled by decades of frustration felt by the systemic racial inequity in that town. and yet, as respected british public historian hilda kean observes in her contribution, despite the fervour of these current statue wars there has also been, she shows, a long history of public historians working with ‘black and ethnic minority groups’ to produce ‘progressive memorials’ that are based upon counter narratives. in addition to citing examples across great britain and australia, kean refers to a sitespecific work entitled ‘the gilt of cain’, which was initiated by the black british heritage and erected in the financial heart of london in 2008, near a church with strong historical connections to the abolition movement. such works, kean argues, remind us that history-practitioners, artists and communities can work in solidarity and resistance against both the actual injustice but also its legacies in the present. just as english public historians continue to wrestle with the imperial legacies of racism and slavery, australian and new zealander practitioners are also grappling with the impact of settler-colonialism upon first nations communities and culture. in her contribution in this collection, western australian historian jenny gregory recalls how a series of bitter contestations associated with a statue of a noongar warrior named yagan (circa 1795-1833), and that of western australian governor, sir james stirling. she describes how repeated acts of destruction are indicative of much deeper political tensions which frequently surface in the city of perth because that society continues to be ‘split in its attitudes’ as ‘multiple pasts’ ‘jostle for recognition’. lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20216 in response to mariko smith’s in-seminar question about how we might ‘re-signify monuments’ and ‘bend cold stone’ to accommodate more complex narratives, bruce scates describes the ‘public action project’ he undertook with colleagues, fremantle councillors and several western australian first nations communities in 1994 to revise a 1913 explorer’s monument which commemorated a group of ‘intrepid pioneers’ who perpetrated a massacre on that colony’s shifting frontier. that monument was particularly distressing, scates observes, for the way it not only proclaimed ‘the white colonisation of aboriginal and torres strait islander lands’, but quite explicitly celebrated the ethics of conquest and its practices of violent dispersal and dispossession. his fascinating contribution charts the process through which he and other collaborated with local councillors and first nation communities to challenge the ‘cult of disremembering’ and eventually produce a form of dialogical memorialisation that now centres previously neglected first nation voices and perspectives in ways that has stimulated an entirely new public conversation. scates detailed reflection about the process of creating ‘new, inclusive and explicitly disruptive narratives’ about our ‘deeply troubled past’ also shows how such work involves ‘a vast and collective undertaking’ which required historians and community leaders to ‘rally, reshape and refine’ their collaboration skills to ensure that such acts of counter memorialisation are also effectively ‘initiated and controlled by aboriginal people’. while many contributors refer to those who paul daley colourfully describes to in his expose as the ‘assorted bastards of australian history’, captain james cook is unquestionably the most controversial and reoccurring figure throughout this collection. this is so, not only in australia but also, as tony ballantyne shows, in new zealand, where maori communities and artists have recently transformed the puhi kai iti/cook landing site national historic reserve in new zealand into a location which troubles the triumphalist narrative of cook’s ‘discovery’ of that area, by resurfacing ancient stories of maori exploration and occupation. at the risk of too many ‘cooks’ spoiling the collection, we close with paul ashton’s short story which has been written for children and follows two university students as they participate in that winter protest at cook’s statue in hyde park in june 2020 before taking a tour of sydney’s statuary. ashton’s story exposes many of the grim realities concealed by the celebratory stories which are over privileged in many of sydney’s statues. this counter narrative raises rich questions about public memory that are likely to be particularly useful to teachers seeking to engage school children in this topic and for this purpose, ashton includes a set of teachers’ notes, activities and ‘connections to the australian curriculum’ at the conclusion of his work. in her contribution, archaeologist claire baxter suggests that it can be useful to sidestep the historical debates about the value of these statues, by thinking of them instead as archaeological artefacts which offer evidence about ‘human activities, believes and values’. to explore this idea, she takes us to the eastern european statue parks she visited in hungary, lithuania and russia. while such parks offer a potential solution regarding the relocation of works that no longer resonate with public tastes, it is essential each statue include sufficient contextual information about their creation, erection and removal, she argues, if they are to be of any educative value. baxter is also interested in the potential of modern technology for including multivocal oral histories which recount when and why a statue became controversial, and also function as a repository for public responses to these works. alive to the possibilities of less permanent, more performative forms of counter-memorialisation which use wit and ridicule to ‘address the statue’, baxter also reminds us of public acts of defiance such as the eastern european woman who regularly visited one statue to hang a basket of rotten fruit from the marble hand of a fallen dictator. paul daley, likewise, admires the playful public performativity of the protestor who hung a garland of potatoes around the neck of queen victoria, accompanied by a placard declaring her ‘the famine queen’, and another who graffitied the statue of western australian governor, sir james stirling, by painting his imperial scroll with the colours of the aboriginal flag. in her survey of the various strategies used to counter what she calls ‘the unwanted and discredited elements of the past’, christine yeats reflects upon the efficacy of other statue parks in lithuania, hungary, lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20217 moscow and delhi. she suggests that rather than eradicate such works entirely from the public sphere, it may be of greater value to simply remove them from their pedestals and place them at ground level so that they are forced into democratic dialogue with those over whom they once towered. another effective strategy yeats considers involves reducing the most offensive of works to dust and metal before recycling them into monuments that explore ‘both sides of history’. in addition to plaques or counter monuments, more consideration should be given, yeats argues, to the idea proposed by first nations elder aunty rhonda dixon-grovenor, that some statues should be replaced with those of aboriginal people’.18 reflecting upon the way we deal with not only the past but also the future, yeats concludes that before we embark upon active collaborations it is crucial to develop new ‘frameworks’ that can acknowledge and accommodate divergent opinions so that communities are adequately supported as they ‘open up’ to painful discussions. like yeats, many contributors observe that there can be no ‘one size fits all’ approach and that each monument needs to be assessed on an individual, case-by-case basis because there are, as lindsey suggested in the seminar series, probably as many solutions as there are problematic statues. some contributors are particularly interested in replacing the giant plinths and stone monuments associated with masculine models of nineteenth-century history making, with more transitory and playful, pluralistic and performative forms of contemporary commemoration such as walking tours, multimedia displays and dance. whatever the approach, it is nonetheless vital that all future forms of memorialisation be subjected to and evolve from public discussions which are sensitive to the fact that both these statues and the pasts they represent have been a source pain to many in our community for a very long time. to this end, bruce scates and tony ballantyne both outline the delicate negotiation process undertaken by local authorities, communities, and artists as they sought to produce these counter-memorials. each illustrate, in distinctive ways, how such processes must seek out stories ‘beyond the particularities of white archives’ to ensure they effectively accommodate multiple voices and centre those who have been previously silenced and marginalised. in her contribution, mariko smith draws upon a local case study on the lands of darug and gurinngai in northern sydney to expresses a preference for an additive, rather than subtractive, approach that allows for intergenerational, dialogical memorialisation. rejecting a zero-sum game where some are made to feel that their history or sense of belonging is completely taken away from them, she outlines an alternative which can avoid destructive deficit and divisive identity politics. nor has it only been non-white people protesting statues and monuments, smith stresses. although she concedes that it is not necessarily a novel observation, smith nonetheless insists that such qualifications are important in the current political climate where the diversity of protestors are often overlooked by those seeking to cast the statue wars in simplistic ways that threaten to reduce them to nothing more than racial culture wars fodder. by investigating a case study of the major john andré (of revolutionary american history fame) monument in tappan, new york state, smith highlights how the dimension of class and power dynamics in respect of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ american values played out when it comes to the white americans protesting and vandalising the monument.’ also drawn to the american context, paul kiem describes how contemporary events have responded to the different forms of confederate commemoration which have imposed a sanitised history of civil war heroes upon the south since the late nineteenth-century in ways that include a set of highly contested statues along monument avenue in richmond. following the murderous acts of a white supremacist in 2015 and then a far-right protest in 2017, the richmond city council commissioned a report outlining four potential responses to these works, ranging from keeping these monuments, keeping and contextualising them, relocating or removing them altogether. despite some dissatisfaction with the public meeting strategies associated with these recommendations, a decision was made to add contextualisation to these statues until the 2020 statue wars ‘quickly overtook’ that process by toppling one of the more lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20218 offensive statues from its pedestal and the local major then announced that all remaining confederate statues on city-owned land would be removed. eager to experiment with the strategies outlined in this collection in ways that also respond to clare wright’s proposal that we need ‘new statues for new heroes’, lindsey offers a hypothetical artist brief for a little-known female colonial artist, republican and mystic named adelaide ironside (1831-1867), whose status as a member of the so-called ‘native-born’ (early generation european-australians born in the colony) implicates her in australia’s colonial project in ways that demand careful consideration.19 to address the fact, noted by baxter, that our memorial landscapes still largely celebrate white men, lindsey proposes a new monument based upon the yurong peninsula of the sydney’s botanic garden in a place where ironside once dared to step in the public sphere and assume her own voice before a large male audience.20 engaging with ideas proposed by both ballantyne and yeats, she also suggests consciously grounding this monument on gadigal country and surrounding it with the local wildflowers ironside painted, in ways that might both ‘re-surface’ the first nation’s people and their millennia-old use of these plants and problematise ironside’s status as a colonial agent. thus, lindsey, concludes, it may be possible to produce a contemporary monument of a nineteenth-century woman that consciously ‘talks back’ to the masculine monumentalism of sydney’s statues and subtly ‘alter’ the stage upon which colonial history is performed in that specific public sphere. many contributors have raised questions about the context of the statue wars themselves. by concentrating upon the particularities of the covid-19 context and the police murder of george floyd, they invite us to consider why in a year when we were repeatedly confined to our homes, did so many suddenly care so much about that which jess moody evocative described as ‘the lumps of stone and steel’ standing silently in our public spheres? others suggest there are important insights to be gained from framing these recent flashpoints within the culture wars which have been raging for several decades and have, as daley and others notes, drawn into their orbit other debates about placenames, national anniversaries and national curricula. such contextualisation reminds us that while there was something about these current contestations, those most effected by the legacies of these statues have, in fact, been speaking out against them for generations. indeed, we agree with nathan sentance that the visual spectacle of the 2020 statue wars has the potential to distract from the pressing issues raised by the black lives matter protests in ways that divert our attention from addressing the systemic injustice which still underpins our societies. rather than get caught up in the bitter tug-and-war about these objects, our energies would be better spent, he argues, in asking why the government deemed it appropriate to spent taxpayer funds protecting these late nineteenth-century blocks of stone and steel when they did nothing to stop the mining company, rio tinto, from destroying juukan gorge in western australia earlier that year, despite the fact that this site was over 46,000 years old and inarguably of much greater cultural significance. we might also reflect upon the bitter irony, that when police arrested people for contravening covid-19 lockdown restrictions at the cook statue in june 2020, those protestors were calling for an end to the endemic discrimination which ensures first nations people not only continue to be overrepresented in statistics relating to deaths in custody but still suffer the worse life expectancy in australia. ‘there is no easy way of settling our history or coming to terms with it’, ballantyne reminds us. it requires curiosity and a willingness to be uncomfortable, as well as empathy and sensitivity to reckon with these painful and problematic pasts. very often, as this collection shows, tempers are frayed as people explode from sheer frustration or the terror of having their tenuous grasp of ‘the comfortable’ present challenged. while we agree with nathan sentance that satisfactory solutions to the removal or revision of statues can create a false sense of resolution for societies which must keep reckoning with the unfinished business of the past, this collection offers many examples of the sorts of productive roles that public historians can perform as they collaborate with communities which are struggling to accommodate divergent perspectives, acknowledge painful legacies and engage with greater truth-telling and healing. indeed, we hope that by lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 20219 actively participating in such activities public historians are not only able to encourage more diverse and dynamic forms of history making but to also cultivate the sort of conscious and collaborative collective skills we so desperately need if we are to create, as sentance rightly insists, ‘a more just society’. endnotes 1. this opening narrative is based upon both the newspaper evidence cited below and that which canadian historian, natalie zemon davis first referred to as ‘informed imagination’. it is indicative of ‘the speculative method’ lindsey has developed and theoretically reflected upon throughout her australian research council discovery early career research award, de180100379, ‘historical craft, speculative biography and the case of adelaide ironside’, 2018-2021. for further discussion, see, kiera lindsey, ‘the speculative method: scientific guesswork and narrative as laboratory’, in donna brien and kiera lindsey, speculative biography: opportunities, experiments and provocations, routledge, new york, 2021. while many details of the 1879 unveiling of cook’s statue, have been taken from newspapers, we cannot confirm the presence of the two union mates at this event, nor their consumption of peanuts. 2. ‘our illustrations’, illustrated sydney news and new south wales agriculturalist and grazier, 22 march 1879, p6. retrieved 12 june 2021, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article63335424. 3. louella mccarthy and paul ashton (eds), sydney open museum historical survey, sydney city council, 1994, item 21, pp1-3; i-iii. 4. much has been written about henry parkes, the most recent biography is by stephen dando-collins, sir henry parkes: the australian colossus, melbourne, vintage australia, 2014. a most useful reference the early career of henry parkes can be found in peter cochrane, colonial ambition: foundations of australian democracy, melbourne university press, 2006. 5. ibid. 6. mccarthy and ashton, op cit. 7. ibid. see also caroline anne clemente, ‘thomas woolner: a pre-raphaelite sculptor in australia’, australasian journal of victorian studies, vol 22, no 2, 2018, pp24-46: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/ajvs/article/ view/10972 (accessed 17 june 2021). 8. our illustrations, op cit, 1878 march 22. 9. rachel clun, ‘police officer made gesture associated with white power at sydney rally’, sydney morning herald, 13 june 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/police-officer-made-gesture-associated-with-white-power-at-sydney-rally 20200613-p55295.html. 10. chris healy, from the ruins of colonialism: history as social memory, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1997, p23. 11. mariko smith, tear it down, australian museum website, 2020 https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/tear-itdown/ (accessed 13 june 2021). 12. our thanks to jenny gregory who refers to lisa murray in andrew taylor, ‘historian questions whether graffiti should have been left on captain cook statue’, sydney morning herald, 18 april 2018 (online). available: https://www.smh.com.au/ national/nsw/historian-captain-cook-statue-graffiti-indigenous-20180418-p4zade.html (accessed 16 april 2019). 13. at the time of the blm protests both the australian and great british prime ministers, scott morrison and boris johnston spoke in favour of protecting statues due to their historical value. see kate burgess, ‘“this is not a licence for people to just go nuts”, scott morrison condemns statue toppling’, canberra times, 11 june 2020, https://www. canberratimes.com.au/story/6788991/this-is-not-a-licence-for-people-to-just-go-nuts-pm-condemns-statue-toppling/; ‘peter walker, alexandra topping and steven morrison, ‘boris johnson says removing statues is ‘to lie about our history’, guardian, 12 june 2020. then american president donald trump enacted legislation in 2020 to protect statues: https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53201784. see legislation “protecting american monuments, memorials, and statues and combating recent criminal violence” (executive order 13933): https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/ 2020/07/02/2020-14509/protecting-american-monuments-memorials-and-statues-and-combating-recent-criminal violence. the term ‘relaxed and comfortable’ was coined by prime minister john howard (1996-2007) in reaction to what he deemed an excessively negative view of australian history promulgated during the leadership of the previous prime minister, paul keating (1992-1996). historian judith brett discussed the development and context of this term in judith brett, ‘relaxed and comfortable: the liberal party’s australia’, quarterly essay, 1 august 2005, black inc. books. 14. ‘history now: statue wars: vandalism or vindication and what to do with the empty plinth’, history council of new south wales, 20 july 2020, first posted 13 september 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iir4ul2voo. 15. ‘public protests and public histories: the statue wars, part 2’, 11 august 2020 https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/ ?v=972479913267957&ref=watch_permalink 16. unsettled is a temporary exhibition showing at the australian museum, sydney from 22 may to 10 october 2021 in the museum’s new basement touring exhibition space. it is first nations-led and -informed truth-telling exhibition about australia’s foundational history: https://australian.museum/exhibition/unsettled/. lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 202110 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article63335424 https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/ajvs/article/view/10972 https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/ajvs/article/view/10972 https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/police-officer-made-gesture-associated-with-white-power-at-sydney-rally-20200613-p55295.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/police-officer-made-gesture-associated-with-white-power-at-sydney-rally-20200613-p55295.html https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/tear-it-down/ https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/tear-it-down/ https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/historian-captain-cook-statue-graffiti-indigenous-20180418-p4zade.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/historian-captain-cook-statue-graffiti-indigenous-20180418-p4zade.html https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6788991/this-is-not-a-licence-for-people-to-just-go-nuts-pm-condemns-statue-toppling/ https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6788991/this-is-not-a-licence-for-people-to-just-go-nuts-pm-condemns-statue-toppling/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53201784 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53201784 https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/07/02/2020-14509/protecting-american-monuments-memorials-and-statues-and-combating-recent-criminal-violence https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/07/02/2020-14509/protecting-american-monuments-memorials-and-statues-and-combating-recent-criminal-violence https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/07/02/2020-14509/protecting-american-monuments-memorials-and-statues-and-combating-recent-criminal-violence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iir4ul2voo https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=972479913267957&ref=watch_permalink https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=972479913267957&ref=watch_permalink https://australian.museum/exhibition/unsettled/ 17. ruben rose-redwood and wil patrick, ‘why activists are vandalizing statues to colonialism’, the conversation, 18 march 2020, https://theconversation.com/why-activists-are-vandalizing-statues-to-colonialism-129750 (accessed 27 aug 2020). 18. posted online 16 june 2020 available at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-16/four-ways-to-help-settle australias-colonial-statue-debate/12356234 (accessed 18 november 2020). 19. thanks again to jenny gregory who provided the quote from clare wright, ‘where are the memorials to our female freedom fighters?’, guardian australia, 8 march 2019 (online). available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2019/mar/08/where-are-the-memorials-to-our-female-freedom-fighters (accessed 19 june 2019). 20. for further discussion see lindsey’s contribution. an example of the newspaper coverage associated with this event is, ‘presentation of colours to the volunteer corps’, people’s advocate, 23 june 1855, p2. lindsey and smith public history review, vol. 28, 202111 https://theconversation.com/why-activists-are-vandalizing-statues-to-colonialism-129750 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-16/four-ways-to-help-settle-australias-colonial-statue-debate/12356234 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-16/four-ways-to-help-settle-australias-colonial-statue-debate/12356234 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/where-are-the-memorials-to-our-female-freedom-fighters https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/where-are-the-memorials-to-our-female-freedom-fighters public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: chitralekha. 2022. self-writing in tral, kashmir: struggles in public history. public history review, 29, 31–37. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v29i0.8194 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj articles (peer reviewed) self-writing in tral, kashmir: struggles in public history chitralekha jawaharlal nehru university corresponding author: chitralekha, jawaharlal nehru university, d.chitralekha@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8194 article history: received 21/05/2022; accepted 05/09/2022; published 05/09/2022 during the last leg of my ethnography in (indian) kashmir, conducted over the summer months of 2017, mostly in its southern districts, students i met would often narrate in lengthy written or spoken accounts, how mediated representations of their lives were so different from the bitter experiences of their collective history. the region had seen, in the previous summer, the killing of burhan wani, a local kashmiri youth-turned hizbul mujahideen militant, in an encounter with security forces. the first in a generation of educated, digitally active millennials to join militancy, wani had an unprecedented following amongst ordinary kashmiris in a region suffering prolonged disillusionment with both indian and kashmiri political leadership. his death was followed by widespread protests which were put down by severely repressive measures. the valley was also clamped under complete curfew, for months on end, with particularly severe consequences for school-going and college students. these intense efforts that i witnessed amongst students to persistently engage in (re) telling their histories, a critical epistemological and political task of public history, is hardly new to kashmir. while academic and journalistic scholarship on kashmir has been by far more concerned with questions of validity of its accession to india in 1947, wars fought over it by india and pakistan, or consequences of the conflict for the region,1 kashmiris themselves have persistently attempted to recover, re-write or keep alive their own indigenous histories. in a recent essay, faheem describes for instance how inside kashmir, collective memories of bitter remembrances of accession to india in 1947, or the signing of the accord in 1975 between sheikh abdullah and indira gandhi, were informed by vernacular, public memorializations.2 he details how what many analysts see as a period of relative calm in kashmir between 1975 and 1986 – with kashmir having accepted indian ruleor citizenship as india would like to see it – was in fact one of intense political activity. during this time, people critiqued the accord and articulated their displeasure with dominant indian power structures through ‘hidden transcripts’, circulated in the cultural declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 31 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8194 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8194 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj mailto:d.chitralekha@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8194 idioms including poetry, novels and anecdotes. youth-led organizations openly discussed political betrayals and compromises in underground literature, including books and news-letters but also jokes or cartoons.3 if memory of sheikh abdullah challenging the indian state served once as phenomenological ground for constitution of kashmiri identity that shaped contours of later political developments, from the 1950s to 1980s, collective memory of kashmiris mediated between the slogans raishumaari (plebiscite) and azadi ya maut (freedom or death), critiquing what was seen as abdullah’s betrayal, constituting ground for the 1990s armed uprising.4 the writings of those such as prem nath bazaz or the painful political poetry of agha shahid ali, can in this light also perhaps be seen as kashmiri renditions of a freedom struggle – or experiences of the brutality of its suppression that contest dominant historical imaginings of kashmiris as merely helpless victims of an unresolved conflict between its two neighbouring nations.5 in modes not dissimilar to history-making of past decades, kashmiri scholars and activists i met in the course of my fieldwork in the region had also made efforts to rewrite histories of contemporary events and of the repression of unarmed protests in recent years.6 akin to accounts of historical moments of political loss or betrayal in the past, the telling, or re-claiming, of real experiences of 2016 was also a collective project, located in and arising out of the attempts by a historically denied people to reclaim their own history. these projects of history-making in the present included older modes of rewriting history such as political poetry.7 but they are also now being produced via newer modes of rap music, political blogs, photographs and videos circulated in digital places.8 i repeatedly encountered such efforts to rewrite history, also in the form of letters, notes, poetry and sketches, which were given to me by ordinary students i met in repeated visits to high schools, colleges and universities in the region, including in the troubled districts of south kashmir. many of these students were protestors and stone-pelters. and their attempts to narrate and make sense of – experiences of 2016 were often informed by painfully inscribed experiences of place and locality. i refer to these reflexive engagements of students with their own lived histories that were evinced in these letters as self-writing, drawing from foucault’s rendition of the complex discursive inscription of self and thought.9 yet, even as they narrated a given historical past, these letters were testimonies of personal experiences – interpretations of and struggles with a bitter present and the looming despair of unresolved futures. located in collective history and framed by its experiences, they were contoured by technologies of writing particular to a period and a location. but the political imaginations expressed in them were not determined by it. this article pays heed to such struggles with writing the self and rewriting history in a moment and particular site of historical experience, reading excerpts from a few of the many letters written by students i met in tral tehsil in the pulwama district. i delimit the field of study to a single site (of the several i visited in the wake of the bitter experiences of 2016 and through my fieldwork in the years before) to attend to critical relationships between locality, time and the possibilities of self-writing. the tral region of pulwama district became visible to both indian and international publics in 2016, as home to wani, the hizbul militant from sharifabad village of tral, who was killed in an encounter with indian security forces in july that year. wani, his parents and friends say, was no different from any other ordinary teenager until an incident wherein he was beaten and humiliated by security forces, after which he left home to join hizbul. he was the first kashmiri militant to reveal his identity on digital media, inspiring through his digital discourses what came to be known as a ‘new militancy’ in the region. in 2016, after his death, angry protests and episodes of stone-pelting racked tral and other sites in pulwama. in sections that follow, i quote first, at length, from excerpts of a few of the several letters, written by students of an undergraduate college in tral, who came mostly from adjoining villages. as their letters indicate, they shared a deeply remembered history. in a following section, i reflect on how these letters evince particular histories of having belonged to tral, whose everyday realities were not the same as those of students i met in sites of relative privilege, such as convent schools or private schools in srinagar district. but they were also different from those struggles expressed in letters written for instance by graduate chitralekha public history review, vol. 29, 202232 students of literature i met in universities in baramullah and anantnag. letters written in tral were efforts by students to re-tell the history of their land, through forms of memorialization such as poetry about collective memories of loss, sacrifice and long failures of justice in kashmir. but they were also urgent, troubled and complicated narrations of experience of, and reflective struggles with, zulm (oppression), humiliation and, overwhelmingly, in the recent wake of events of 2016, everyday encounters with mediated misrecognition. in tral, which has a distinctive historical past of political associations linked to factors such as long mobilization by jamaat-e-islami, armed struggles of the nineties, and bitter memories of a brutal counterinsurgency, the critical presence in most letters was an urgent seeking of azadi – freedom. the complex writing in these letters, however, and their imaginings of azadi, were neither determined (or constituted) only by shared locality or linear imperatives of historical longings. they evinced the reflective despair of struggles against the failure of others to apprehend their lives and political agency. in the light of this empirical material, i conclude with some reflections for the doing of public history and its epistemological possibilities. three letters from tral several students in tral wrote to me in the summer of 2017. excerpts from three letters are presented here. the first writes about, and attempts to re-write the idea of their political practice as `terrorism’. the second writes about (why) ‘azadi’, as political desire constituted and yearned for within lived frames of historical experience. the third attempts to rewrite who it was who was in fact dying in kashmir and why peace between india and pakistan was so important for kashmiris (not india or pakistan). while the specific struggles articulated in other letters were often similar, and sometimes different, it is their mode of reflexive argumentation and their possibilities for public history that i draw attention to.10 letter one: daishathgarh (terrorism) we belong to a district in kashmir which is called pulwama. this is the place where on 8th july 2016, burhan wani was martyred … that day the whole of kashmir was grieving. the people of india call him a terrorist ... i want to tell the people of india that if burhan wani was a terrorist, then the whole of kashmir would not have gathered at his funeral. what the conditions in kashmir were after his martyrdom, i have witnessed myself how unjust and oppressive they were … since that day the conditions here are the same. perhaps these conditions will change now only once kashmir gets freedom. if asking for your right is terrorism, then india too was once terrorist … i have a desire that i too may be martyred one day, for my dear kashmir, for our islam. the oppression against us has reached its pinnacle but we will not back down. i am a girl … the last paragraph of the letter begins by citing from allama muhammad iqbal’s famed lines: wo kehte hain ne, yaqeen mohkam, amal peham, mohabbat faateh-e-alam, jihad-e-zindagani mein hain yeh [mardon ki shamsheerain] (they say, don’t they that firmness of belief, eternal action, love that conquers the world. in the holy war and struggle of life these are [the swords of men]).11 chitralekha public history review, vol. 29, 202233 the letter concludes with an anguished question: wo jawan jo apna khoon bahan rahe hai, apne liye, unko aap daishathgarh kehte hai … kuch logon ne yeh bhi kahan yeh log 500 rupaiye ke liye pathar maar rahe… kya sach me 500 ke liye koi apni jaan dega? (these boys who are giving up their lives for us, you call them terrorists … some people have even said they are paid 500 rupees to throw stones … will anybody give up their own life for just 500 rupees [us$8]? letter two: isliye azadi (this is why freedom) this second letter – also written by a female student – begins with words that are indigenous to the history of the valley. but they acquired a different resonance amongst young people in the wake of 2016 – ‘hum kya chahte – azadi [what do we want – freedom]!’. it continues with the author’s explanation of why azadi was so desired and so important. yahan ke halaat din be din kharab ho jate hai. yahan par har din kisi ka bhai, kisi ka beta mar jaata hai. hum isi wajah se dar jaate hai. hum man se padhai nahin kar sakte hai. isliye main allah se dua karti hoon ki hum ko azadi de. [the conditions here become only worse with time. everyday someone’s brother, someone’s son is killed. we live in fear because of this reason. we cannot put our mind to our studies. this is why i pray to allah to give us freedom]. the student’s letter concludes with an appeal for help: hum kashmir ke student hamesha peeche rehte hai. hum log bhi agey jaana chahte hai. hum logoon ko is museebat se bahar nikalne main hamari madad kare. [we, the students in kashmir, are always lagging behind. we wish to go forward too. please help us to get out of this trouble]. her last lines, written in english, are: ‘thank you so much. go india go back. we want freedom’. letter three: ‘kashmir main … kaun marta hai’ [who is being killed in kashmir]? the third letter is written by a student who identifies himself as an undergraduate student in the first semester of his first year. he regrets that he has received no education in his college so far: ek din ek ustaad padhata hai aur doosre din doosra ustaad padhane aata hai. wajah yeh hai ki halaat theekh nahin hai… hamare kashmir main aaj bahut zulm horaha hai. khas kar talibi ilmoon ka nukhsaan ho raha hai. [one day a teacher comes to teach, the next day someone else. the reason is that conditions are not good in kashmir. there is oppression and injustice in our kashmir today. we students are losing out the most] … towards the end, the letter, like the others, makes a plea for justice: meherbaani kar ke kashmir ke logon par taras khao. kashmir main log marte haikaun marta hai? kashmir main hindu marte hainahin. kashmir main agar marte hai toh kashmiri log marte hai. mujahid shaheed ho rahe hai, who bhi kashmiri hai. police wallah marta hai toh who bhi kashmiri. nuqsaan kashmir ka ho raha hai. [for god’s sake, have mercy on kashmir. who is dying in kashmir today? hindus? no. those dying in kashmir today are only kashmiris. the mujahids who are martyred are kashmiri. the policemen being killed here are also kashmiri. the loss is only kashmir’s.] chitralekha public history review, vol. 29, 202234 the writer continues, articulating hope for peace in the subcontinent and in kashmir: inshallah mujhe umeed hai ki kashmir phir se jannat banega. aur hindustan aur pakistan ek doosre se dosti karle. is me donon mulkoon ki bhalayi hai. jang se gareeb log marte hai … hum khoon kharaba nahin chahte hai. [god willing, i hope kashmir may once again become paradise. and india and pakistan friends. both countries would benefit. war kills the poor … we don’t want bloodshed.] the letter concludes with a prayer for the wider acceptance of islam in india and an affirmation of faith in the goodness of islam: ‘inshallah hindustan main islam aam hoga. deen e islam ek acha deen hai.’ [if allah wills, islam will be common in india. islam is a good religion.] historical reflexivities, self-writing and history-making for foucault, subjectivation presents itself a condition, or as he puts it an ‘attitude’ – ‘a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people. in the end, it is a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task’.12 this belonging is a relation to society in its historical and political determinations with its embedded and embodied strictures, its sedimented orders of thought.13 what kinds of relationships may such shared historical reflexivities have with possible forms of history-making in kashmir? in circumstances of sustained collective denial, what possibilities remain for writing the ‘self ’? is it also possible to see struggles, and imaginations of agency in these reflections of students within the historical specificity of a particular locale in kashmir (tral), and even in these ‘historical tasks’ of self-writing? it is difficult to miss the threads of shared historical location and experience that constituted the modes of writing in these letters in particular ways. there would seem to be at least three distinct tropes that consume the writing of all three letters in tral. the first is the urgency to (re) claim their true location as that of victims – and survivors – and not aggressors or perpetrators. secondly, the letters speak in aggrieved response to, and seek to counter, not so much the histories perpetuated by the indian history book, but by indian media discourses which are in context of both circulation and censorship of local media, recursively – mostly digitally – consumed, also by these students who write thus in tral. thirdly, there is the dialogic and discursive tone of all three letters – even the first letter which expresses the willingness to be martyred, does not speak of killing the other. it quotes from iqbal’s famed lines on the real nature of jehad and the true weapons of men who wage the holy war and struggle of life: firmness of belief, eternal action and love that conquers the world. the writing in these letters evince not hate – as in fact does much of the recent writing in india on tral, or its kashmiri muslim residents – but stubborn hope that it may render the realities of their lives not just visible, but to use judith butler’s evocative words, apprehendable, and thereby grievable.14 letter one on terrorism speaks to the contemporary circulation in indian media texts of terms such as ‘militant infested’ or site of ‘islamic terrorism’. these letters – as the spoken narratives of several other students – were painful reflections on circulations of such mediated perceptions of tral or of pulwama, which they said were far from the realities of their everyday life and of the events of 2016. this is an attempt to rewrite tral’s history as a struggle for freedom, not terrorism. identities of those who fight for that freedom, it insists, are therefore to be seen as those of martyrs, not terrorists. the writing is an endeavour to reveal themselves as victims of state repression. (tral has over the decades been amongst the sites in kashmir that have seen the harshest face of counterinsurgency measures.) this letter – as again did many students who spoke to me – asks the fundamental question: what makes their political struggle for freedom less legitimate than india’s quit india movement against british rule? the author of this letter says she wishes to give up her life for kashmir, and for islam; the two causes are for her interlinked. chitralekha public history review, vol. 29, 202235 the second letter – on why azadi – also reiterates the deep and fervent desire for freedom and explains why. azadi here is not a handed down historical cause, but the only way she believes kashmiris will have freedom from fear of death and life. the writer thanks the bearer and (hoped for) carrier of her letter in advance for its circulation to those who matter. the fervent kashmiri slogan ‘go india, go back’ is here a plea for reason and understanding from the other. the third letter – about who is dying in kashmir – is a compelling reminder of the real statistics of death in kashmir. while india mourns the losses of its soldiers posted in kashmir, the writer gestures towards the several hundred thousand dead and disappeared in kashmir over the long decades. he points out that even today it is kashmiris – police and ordinary people – who make up the numbers of those being killed every day in kashmir. he evokes the conditions wherein students and young people also face symbolic death, with no good education possible in these war-torn conditions, and with no prospects of peace and reconciliation in sight. he asks india – the state but also its people – to have mercy on kashmiris, to leave them alone. he ends with hope for a discursive peace between india and pakistan with a reminder that war hurts the poor the most. this letter also writes the hope that, one day, islam will be accepted in india – inshallah hindustan main islam aam hoga. it concludes with the poignant reminder that islam is a good religion – deen e islam ek acha deen hai. while some of those reading this essay may be quick to point out the seeming irrelevance of this plea, addressed to a nation-state that is home to amongst the largest muslim populations in the world, the letter-writer’s prayer speaks not just of the true particularities of lived conditions in tral, but of the affective sensibilities of those rendered subjects of this material and symbolic marginalization. each of these letters in tral then seek at once the outcome of both azadi itself– freedom from india which they advocate for– but also as deeply freedom from misrecognition. they articulate in that sense the desire to re-write history both in the real terms of materially lived realities but also in the discursive terms of the words they (re) write, and the meanings they intend to convey. azadi is sought in tral then from a dual injustice: violations of rights to life and dignity, but also from unfairness of public perception. these letters by ordinary students in tral unlike other writing in digital spaces which i discuss elsewhere sought not so much to speak with or be heard by international publics but by indian and pakistani publics – to urge them to think of kashmiris. they also make evident the urge to (re) make the history of and in kashmir as a shared yearning in tral. but its imagined outcomes are varied. the first letter articulates azadi as a long sought political desire of a historical collective with (in tral) thick ties to both piety and muslim nationalism. the second letter explains why freedom is so critical in tral as the only envisaged way to lasting peace and for the wellbeing of kashmiri students. the third letter sees life under indian rule as having brought death, both real and in symbolic terms for the young. azadi then is a common desire in tral. but even here, it is mediated by and carries imaginings of different futures of freedom. the criticality of foregrounding the self-writing of ordinary young people in tral follows the importance accorded in public history practices not so much to translation of specialized historical discourse for lay audiences, but of furthering knowledge of the different sites and technologies through which historical knowledges are constituted, articulated and find legitimacy amongst wider publics. these letters evince both how deeply removed the meanings of lived history in tral are from statist and mediated discursive circulations of their lives and its politics. and they witness the despair that misrecognition brings for populations who are given no chance to speak for themselves. at the same time this work of public history contends with the task of cognition of conflictual subjectivities, always difficult, but more complex in sites that have lived long historical denial of spaces for political articulation and belonging. public history, like all history perhaps, is in its spirit a collective project, leaving residual questions of what justice may be possible in contexts of collective denial, for other yearnings, ordinary desires, marginal subjectivities and post-nationalist imaginings, so often difficult to address. these letters, while reflecting the dominant imagination of a moment, in a particular site, still do not describe its complex subjectivities. a few letters from students from the minority sikh community in tral also narrated at length the unprecedented chitralekha public history review, vol. 29, 202236 measures used to suppress student protestors in 2016. this included the harsh use of pellet guns on stonepelters, the complete denial of what was in fact happening in kashmir in indian national media and the misrecognition of kashmiri muslim students as terrorists. but this self-writing of sikh students (as well as a few kashmiri muslim students) in the same college, articulated imaginings not of freedom from the indian state but for justice and autonomous government. the context in which this essay goes to press is bitterly different from when it was researched and first drafted. the indian government has since repealed article 370 and article 35-a of the indian constitution that conferred special political status to the historically disputed region of jammu and kashmir. these decisions, and the failure of the indian state to apprehend the rights of those whose lives are most at stake, to be involved in political decisions that concern them, have surely had harsh consequences for students in tral. in a context where any attempt to discuss the efforts by ordinary young people in tral to write their history may be considered seditious, the task of public history is vested with multiple urgencies. one of them certainly is to make public the voices of those who have hardly been heard, those forgotten in the nationalist discourses of warring nation-states. but a second task, critical at this juncture, is the task of nuance, of calling attention to constitutions of histories, with all their complexities, and conflictual dimensions. perhaps the most urgent task of public history is the desperate need to build bridges of human cognition; for historical ‘others’ to (re) learn why azadi mattered so much in kashmir. and why it mattered so bitterly. it was not just that their historical aspirations were not fulfilled – they were not even apprehended. endnotes 1 for rich exceptions that unsettle this terrain of scholarship on kashmir in different ways, see mridu rai, hindu rulers, muslim subjects: islam, rights, and the history of kashmir, princeton university press, princeton, 2004 and chitralekha zustschi, languages of belonging: islam, regional identity, and the making of kashmir, oxford university press, new york, 2004. 2 the political mobilization of kashmiris for twenty-two years, from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s, was in historical continuity with a longer struggle against oppression, which had its genesis in the early 1930s. 3 the plot of shabnam qayoom’s widely read and later banned novel yeh kiska lahu, yeh kaun mara (whose blood is this who died) published in 1975, for instance, traverses the questions that many kashmiris had for abdullah, a once beloved leader. 4 farrukh faheem, ‘interrogating the ordinary. everyday politics and the struggle for azadi in kashmir’, in haley duschinski, mona bhan, ather zia and cynthia mahmood (eds), resisting occupation in kashmir, university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, 2018, pp230-247. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294965-009 5 see prem nath bazaz, the history of struggle for freedom in kashmir, kashmir publishing company, new delhi, 1954 and agha shahid ali, the country without a post office, ravi dayal publishers, delhi, 1997. 6 rao farman ali, history of armed struggles in kashmir, jay kay books, srinagar, jammu and kashmir, 2017 and javaid iqbal bhat, scars of summer, jay kay books, srinagar, jammu and kashmir, 2017. 7 see, for example, bhat, scars of summer. 8 see sanjay kak (ed), until my freedom comes: the new intifada in kashmir, haymarket books, chicago, 2013 for documentation of such efforts particularly in the wake of the 2010 protests. 9 m. foucault, ‘self-writing’, in p. rainbow (ed), ethics: subjectivity and truth: essential works of foucault 1954-1984 vol 1, the new press, new york, 1997, pp207-222. 10 these three letters (as many in tral) were written in urdu, and the words here are translations. 11 i include a few missing words in this well-known quote in parenthesis. 12 foucault, ‘self-writing’, p309. 13 rabinow, op cit, introduction. 14 judith butler, frames of war: when is life grievable?, verso, london and new york, 2009. chitralekha public history review, vol. 29, 202237 https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294965-009 public history review vol. 27, 2020 © 2020 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: fedele, g., gaiaschi, z., hughes, h., and pesaro, a. 2020. public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy. public history review, 27, 1-18. issn 1833-4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy greta fedele, zeno gaiaschi, heather hughes and alessandro pesaro in recent years public historians have made concerted attempts to internationalise their practice.1 the editors of a recent collection note that public history remains rooted in ‘the local’, although it may acquire regional or national significance.2 the goal of internationalisation is therefore ‘about applying universal methods locally’,3 even though applications have developed differently in different national settings. digital public history has assisted the process of internationalisation.4 the greater the spatial spread, however, the more likely it becomes that public historians must confront contested understandings of the past. in few localities, whether in actual or virtual environments, is there a single, accepted version of events and meanings.5 little attention has as yet been paid to public history projects that function at the national level. this article addresses an example: the international bomber command centre (ibcc) digital archive. it operates across national boundaries – in this case italy and britain – and attempts to embrace vastly different meanings associated with the bombing war in europe, 1939-1945. it begins with an account of the development of public history in these two countries and of the ways in which the bombing war has been remembered. it then sets out the authors’ understanding of the cultural and political sensitivities that have had to be considered, and the efforts of participants to develop and practice an inclusive approach to digital public history. finally, it reflects on the limitations and achievements of the chosen approach. public history and contested heritage in two countries in britain, the public history movement grew out of popular radicalism from the late 1960s which stimulated a focus on gathering people’s history, or history from below, largely through oral testimony. at its centre was raphael samuel and an ma program in public history at ruskin college, oxford, co-founded with hilda kean who was its director for almost twenty years. ruskin’s graduates spread its influence far and wide.6 mark donnelly notes that it was some decades before public history was institutionalised in higher education, with its own courses, conferences and journals. there were two main stimuli. the first was the requirement of higher education funding bodies that researchers demonstrate the public impact of research as a condition of funding. the second was the prevailing national ethos of heritage as a public good, articulated by powerful organisations such as the national trust and the declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj national lottery heritage fund. there has been concern, however, that academic acceptance of these realities risks a reduction in public historians’ capacity to contest contemporary power relations.7 in his overview of public history in italy, serge noiret observes that, in common with britain, public history has been named and given an identity relatively recently. for example, the italian association of public history was only formed in 2016. he points out that institutions such as archives, libraries and museums have also adopted the term public history, suggesting that the base for shaping collective memory and identity is broader than universities. in line with this observation, noiret argues that the institutionalisation of public history has been a response not only to crises within italian universities, in particular the role of the humanities, but externally as well. at stake is ‘the role and future of history in italian society, in a country whose citizens constantly question their national path and identity at every level’.8 one important feature of this ongoing citizens’ debate is the network of italian historical institutes that function independently of universities and have no equivalent in britain.9 examples include the istituto per la storia del risorgimento italiano, istituto luigi sturzo, fondazione gramsci and the istituto nazionale ferruccio parri: rete degli istituti per la storia della resistenza e dell ’età contemporanea. revealingly, the main reason behind the foundation of istituti was the desire to keep control of the sources for the history of the resistance movement in italy, at a juncture when state archives were deemed inadequate to value, promote and enhance them.10 if there are at least some overlaps in the development of public history in the two countries the same cannot be said of the legacy of the second world war. in britain – and to some extent in other allied nations – a victor narrative has been so deeply embedded that scholars rarely make explicit the ways in which it has shaped post-war culture and politics. commentator simon jenkins has argued that the victor narrative has acted as social glue through difficult phases of national life, such as the loss of empire and de-industrialisation. moreover, it is a narrative that is constantly reinforced: britain’s remembrance day is not fake history. the agonies it recalls were real enough, and there is no danger of them being ignored. but i sense we would not celebrate them were they defeats. we remain fixated on the german wars, with war histories, war biographies, was movies and war memorabilia … every night is nazi night somewhere on british television.11 memorials to the armed forces are important signifiers of victory in war – and far more prominent in the urban environment than those to civilians who lost their lives. the ‘glorious dead’, whose sacrifice was not in vain, have been commemorated in various monuments since the immediate post-war years. as the living link with veterans weakened perceptibly from the 1990s, a strong wave of memorialisation re-emerged, to pay tribute to what had become known as ‘the greatest generation’.12 this included, in london alone, the royal tank regiment memorial (2000), the commonwealth memorial gates (2002), australian war memorial (2003), animals in war memorial (2004), monument to the women of world war ii (2005), battle of britain monument (2005), the new zealand war memorial (2006) and the bomber command memorial (2012). even though it is now several generations since the war, and even though some scholars have pointed to the myths to which a victor narrative gave rise, such as ‘the blitz spirit’,13 the victor narrative continues to shape britain’s relations with the rest of europe. a central fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 20202 argument of fintan o’toole’s recent study of the brexit debacle is that britain has never recovered from winning the second world war,14 one consequence of which is ‘continental europe’s longstanding mistrust of britain’s loyalty.15 the allies’ aerial bombing campaigns, however – in particular the deliberate targeting of civilians – have not fitted comfortably into the dominant victor narrative. while most britons supported bombing at the time, sentiments changed in the years following. as noble frankland, one of the authors of the official history of britain’s bombing war, remarked, ‘most people were very pleased with bomber command during the war and until it was virtually won; then they turned round and said it wasn’t a very nice way to wage war’.16 veterans of raf bomber command – in which over fifty nationalities were represented – had long been sensitive about the very high loss rate – over 56,000 of a total of 125,000 aircrew. from the mid 1980s, they established the bomber command association to campaign for recognition in the face of what they considered official neglect of the dangerous and essential role they had played in the defeat of nazi germany. their efforts, which divided opinion in britain and attracted hostility from a reunited germany, culminated in the unveiling of the large bomber command memorial in london in 2012.17 italy was bombed by allied air forces from immediately after the declaration of war until the last weeks of the conflict. estimates put the civilian death toll in the region of 60,000. figures pale in comparison with other second world war theatres. but nonetheless the bombing war has profoundly affected collective memory.18 unlike other european countries, italy was bombed as foe until the armistice in september 1943, then as friend. in the wake of the armistice, allied bombing operations inflicted death and destruction on an unprecedented scale, while at the same time carrying the promise of liberation from german occupying forces and the italian social republic puppet state.19 the conflict lasted for almost two more years as the allies slowly advanced along the peninsula, supported by resistance forces beyond the lines.20 this situation created a complex narrative, as de bernardi explains: another italy was forged in the resistance alongside the allies, an italy which in a paradox that historical research cannot help revealing, welcomed the winners enthusiastically and saw those who bombed its own cities, killing thousands of its own people, as ‘liberators’.21 the allied forces presented bombing as necessary to hasten victory by targeting occupying forces, destroying the enemy’s industrial capacity, disrupting communications and breaking morale. on the ground, the notion of being at the mercy of a brutal and impersonal force which could kill unpredictably merged with other apparently irreconcilable ideas: the desire for peace, the use of destructive technology as an instrument of change and deliverance from powers, either occupation forces or puppet state, which lacked legitimacy. propagandists immediately exploited the contradictions inherent in the word liberatori (liberators) mocking the problematic nature of the concept on posters and flyers, in graffiti on ruined buildings and in broadcasts.22 some later interpreted being bombed as a form of atonement for having entered the war on the side of the german aggressor and therefore a legitimate price to pay for living in a democracy. yet the idea of being bombed has remained profoundly dissonant within the received liberation narrative. ‘why did they kill us?’ is the angst-ridden question which regularly emerges from testimonies. the issue is eloquently summarised by alessandro portelli: public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 20203 from this contraction stems a problematic and internally divided memory: how is it possible to hold together gratitude for the liberators with the fact they destroyed your home and killed your relatives? therefore, some memories had to be suppressed for being incompatible with others more acceptable and sanctioned. then the question ‘who bombed’ frequently clashes with unexpected aphasias, silences, and contradictions: many recollect ‘the war’ in abstract terms, as a fatality. in more than isolated cases, a surprising short circuit of memory ascribes the bombings to the absolute evil, the nazis.23 in short, how to account for the victims of the bombing war has been highly problematic. compounding this situation was the status accorded the liberation struggle as a cornerstone of the new republic: the 1948 constitution is widely understood as being inspired by and founded on its ideals.24 the notion of a ‘courageous mobilization of young and very young citizens who rebelled against foreign power’25 became a defining moment of national identity, supplemented by the mythology of the ‘good italian’.26 these means allowed a clean separation of italians from fascism and nazism, offered a symbolic moment of national regeneration and stressed italy’s role in the allied victory in europe. italy joined the north atlantic treaty organization (nato) in 1949 and benefitted massively from $(us)1200 million of aid under the marshall plan, or european recovery programme.27 post-war recovery was rapid, ushering in the socalled economic miracle: strong and sustained economic growth, elevated standards of living and momentous social change. a sense of resentful victimhood was largely at odds with this new situation. the prevailing sentiment was to forget and move on.28 large-scale bombing memorials are therefore conspicuously absent from a symbolic landscape dominated by prominent resistance figures, deeds of the liberation struggle and reprisal victims. two imposing exceptions are the gorla memorial in suburban milan and the statue of pope pius xii in rome. the gorla memorial stands on the site of the former francesco crispi elementary school where 184 children were killed by allied bombs on 20 october 1944. altogether, some 600 people were killed in this attack. erected in 1952, the memorial was a local, privately funded initiative rather than an institutional one. its monumental scale matches the enormity of the event and the lasting impression it made on the neighbourhood. the youthful victims are referred to as martiri (martyrs), instead of the more usual vittime or caduti (victims, fallen). in common with other smaller-scale inscriptions, artworks and plaques the wording on the memorial is devoid of agency. the bombs simply ‘fell’.29 the statue of pope pius xii comforting the victims of the san lorenzo bombing celebrates the empathy and compassion a public figure. this contrasts with recurring allegations of public silence in the face of genocide and the objections to the vatican’s ambiguous policy towards hitler and mussolini.30 since the end of the cold war the contentious nature of the bombing war has resurfaced. this has been fuelled in part by a re-emergence of right-wing nationalism and populism and, as gabriella gribaudi suggests, by the declining influence of the political parties associated with the ideals of the resistance.31 the result is that unsettled memories mesh with contemporary divisions, ‘unable to find either a context in which they can be revised or any reasons sufficiently shared by those who experienced them to make living together in mutual recognition possible’.32 these, then, are the contours of the difficult and contested heritage that the makers of the ibcc digital archive have had to negotiate. there is little in the public history literature indicating possible approaches. na li, who has been an important moving force behind the fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 20204 consolidation of public history in china, acknowledges the challenges in crossing cultural and national borders: first, language barriers and cultural misunderstanding create confusion – even breakdowns – throughout the collaborative process. second, different pedagogic philosophies make some basic assumptions in our field not so basic … third, it is difficult to provide valid intellectual justification for training in public history if the field is attached to a strictly market-driven economy and services a commercial vision. fourth, different sets of legal and ethical concerns sometimes complicate, if not stifle, genuine dialogue.33 despite such potential obstacles, li also holds that public history issues ‘are often arrestingly similar across cultures’ and stresses the importance of ‘someone with a cross-cultural background to work as a gatekeeper, facilitator or negotiator’.34 these observations were made of a public history education project in which students physically crossed borders to learn together. arguably such considerations become even more important in a digital environment which connects users across multiple borders wherever there is an internet service. the few general surveys of the field of digital public history are curiously silent on such matters. sharon leon’s is the most sensitive about working crossculturally, suggesting that the planning of a public history project ought to be ‘equal measures technical and qualitative’ and that digital public historians should honour the ‘complexity and contingency of history’.35 the establishment of the ibcc digital archive the ibcc project is based in the city of lincoln. it was initially established to commemorate raf bomber command crew who had flown from the county of lincolnshire where many bomber stations have been concentrated during the war. the university of lincoln became involved in 2012. historians with expertise in the interpretation of contested heritage helped to develop the project into an international, rather than a regional, one. it would contain a memorial as well as a visitor centre housing extensive interpretation of the bombing war in a way that took into account its legacy of divided memories.36 the university took primary responsibility for a ‘from scratch’ digital archive and the content of the exhibition.37 these and other heritage-related aspects of the project were supported by a £3.1 million grant from the national lottery heritage fund in 2015. the concept of an ‘orchestra of voices’ informed the project from the start. this inclusive approach was considered to be the most effective means of approaching contested heritage. it meant embracing the experiences of all those who were caught up in the bombing: the million or so personnel of bomber command – including the 125,000 aircrew – and other military personnel and civilians on both sides of the conflict. uncountable millions whose experiences have been told or not told within such a framework.38 these voices would not all sing in harmony. this was, after all, a total war that sucked every corner of the world into it, and involved intense and extreme differences of ideology, mass loss of life and large-scale destruction of property. yet the intention of the archive has always been to understand an array of shared experiences of service, suffering, loss and survival. reconciliation, along with remembrance and recognition, has also been an important theme, implying an acknowledgement that not everything done in the name of victory was necessarily justified or defensible in terms of the prevailing conditions at the time. this more public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 20205 open approach reflects the ethos to which participants have been committed and has served also to complicate the victor/vanquished dichotomy of the uk victor narrative, particularly in view of the much-changed realities of identity and belonging across europe today.39 in these various ways we have asserted ourselves as a sort of conductor of the orchestra. the digital archive is a collection of primary material consisting of two kinds of material. the first is born-digital eyewitness testimony. the policy has been to record life histories rather than episodic war memories. not only does this contextualise war memories and act as a reminder that these memories have been refracted through seventy-odd years of life since the war. it also serves to humanise subjects instead of portraying them as ‘heroes’, ‘villains’ or ‘victims’. the second type of material is digitised versions of memorabilia relating to bombing experiences including letters, diaries, logbooks, photographs and personal possessions. there are no paper or physical equivalents in the archive’s possession. the advantage of digital is that we are able to digitise and share items while the originals remain in the owners’ possession.40 the result has been an eclectic collection. the archive team has depended to a great extent on individuals coming forward with items and information in response to requests published via multiple channels. an important element of the ibcc digital archive voice is the way in which vocabulary is selected for retrieval purposes, descriptive language used and temporal and geographic information captured. metadata are normally understood as governed by standards and guidelines that are procedural or technical in nature. what sits at the intersection of technical norms and the broader social and cultural landscape has received little attention.41 a key element of our strategy was to compile a controlled vocabulary prescribing the use of authorised, warranted terms that would reflect our ethos as well as maximise user access. we discovered there was no existing controlled vocabulary that would suit our purposes so one was created. the first part, the ‘soft’ vocabulary, is mainly cultural in nature and spells out how our commitment to inclusivity has been translated into general principles. it recommends terms for broad concepts such as people, ideologies, values, beliefs and other recurring cultural elements. and it stipulates avoidance of cultural clichés to do with the course of the war – ‘they started it’ – dramatic, overused statements which are also factually incorrect – ‘britain stood alone’ – and slang terms such as ‘hun’, ‘tommy’ and ‘jap’. in the same vein acronyms and abbreviations are spelt out as far as possible to aid understanding of military parlance. the second part, or ‘hard’ vocabulary, is chiefly technical and consists of a list of descriptors and their deprecated variants for aircraft, pieces of equipment, places and specific military terms and concepts. we have deliberately chosen to use the tag ‘bombing’ without further qualifiers so as to include both the act of dropping bombs and the situation of being at the receiving end. civilians normally understand it as a passive experience whereas military personnel frame it as an active part of service life. bringing together experiences of bombing and being bombed has many benefits: it demonstrates the archive ethos more than a generic statement of intent would; suggests the existence of conflicting narratives rather than a single, unproblematic discourse; and reveals the bombing war as an experience of shared suffering rather than a ‘us v them’ matter. the purpose is to generate a critical mass of items likely to form spontaneous aggregations around nodes of dates, places and concepts. the same approach has been used for other terms encapsulating wartime experiences such as ‘fear’, ‘evacuation’ and ‘prisoner of war’. again, we use ‘resistance’ for a wide range of fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 20206 positions, practices and experiences within the overarching umbrella of asymmetrical warfare: non-cooperation, propaganda, hiding, supporting and spiriting away allied personnel and recapturing strongholds. this approach increases the chances of generating new, unexpected meanings, simply by juxtaposing items that were not intended to be seen together. an advanced search interface allows users to filter experiences according to place, force, context and to combine tags. unlike the united states army air force that flew operations by day, most bomber command operations were conducted at night, thus straddling two consecutive calendar days. these are usually captured in the format ‘14/15 may 1944’. from the civilian perspective, the same event is likely to be logged (and remembered) as either 14 may 1944 or 15 may 1944, according to the exact time aircraft reached the target. accordingly, dates are repeated and entered as two distinct items of metadata: 1944-05-14 and 1944-05-15. this increases the chances of different perspectives on the same event being brought together for visualisation and display. geographic information is normalised and entered according to the library of congress subject headings (lcsh) which contains controlled entries for inhabited places and salient geographical features. while some choices reveal a united states perspective, the opportunity for grouping items about the same place under the same spatial heading is a cornerstone of our inclusive strategy. this is especially relevant for places that have a well-established english form and a local one – such as brunswick/braunschweig, livorno/leghorn and dunkerque/ dunkirk. it is also useful for places that were renamed following decolonisation – salisbury/ harare – have been affected by shifting borders – gdańsk/danzig – or are regularly misspelled in archival sources – düsseldorf/dusseldorf. lcsh headings are accessed through the fast interface developed by online computer library center. in line with our commitment to inclusivity, geographic information is hospitable to variants. authority control items have a heading corresponding to the normalised form used across the archive with listed variants likely to found. thus, even if someone uses an unconventional query the system takes them to an equivalence page and from there to all the associated resources. for instance, die baai – afrikaans – and ibhayi – in xhosa – return no direct hits in the archive, but point to an authority control page which in turn is associated to south africa – port elizabeth. this is the normalised form to describe all items about that place. this solution acknowledges the sensitivities surrounding some geographic names – perhaps politically laden or saturated with emotional connotations – while at the same time assisting users to avoid spending an inordinate amount of time searching for the right term or to miss locating items. oral testimony and some textual documents are transcribed. even if the inherent limits of full text search are well known,42 this approach has the advantage of restricting a cataloguer’s subjectivity and perception of what is worth capturing in metadata. since it is difficult to predict future users’ needs, this also has the advantage of overcoming the risk that cataloguers may miss or downplay something which may be vital for those who will engage with archive items from very different perspectives in years to come. both our collections policy and our design of mechanisms for categorising and retrieving information have, then, been carefully planned to support our ‘orchestra of voices’. equally important in supporting this approach has been our method of working. as leading public historian hilda kean suggests, the ways in which the evidence and documentation are created is vital to understanding the possibilities for interpreting that evidence.43 in short, public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 20207 we have attempted an inclusive approach to collecting and processing, as well as to content: a combination of crowdsourcing and professional oversight, of precisely the type indicated as desirable by noiret and cauvin.44 as owens has noted, ‘the most successful crowdsourcing projects in libraries, archives, and museums have not involved massive crowds and they have very little to do with outsourcing labour’.45 this wry observation is true of our project. we have worked with around 200 volunteers, who scarcely constitute a crowd. in fact, although the term crowdsourcing now covers a range of practices, commons-based peer production would be a more accurate description of our archive participants.46 they have received individualised training for the tasks they have elected to fulfil, such as interviewing eyewitnesses, scanning or photographing documents, cropping and watermarking images, transcribing text and interviews and producing metadata. varying levels of expertise have been accommodated. all volunteer tasks have been closely integrated into archive workflows. the small archive team makes great efforts to include volunteers in all processes. each completed task is reviewed, either by a member of staff or an experienced volunteer with subject expertise, before items are published. moreover, we have been at pains to avoid accusations of outsourcing, which carries connotations of exploitation of labour and, further, can undermine the position of employed staff.47 the vast majority of volunteers are retired and on a guaranteed income and looking for rewarding ways to occupy time. in addition, we have accommodated volunteers in search of a placement or archive task to meet the requirements of a course of study or who have been classified as unable to work owing to a disability. italian memories in the ibcc digital archive the result of the british referendum in june 2016 to withdraw from the european union had the potential to undermine the entire project. the promotion of cross-cultural tolerance has more generally faced challenges from rising populist, exclusionary nationalism in many settings, from the united states to india. this phenomenon is at least in part symptomatic of a failure of liberal democracy and the emergence of a politics of ‘unreasonableness’.48 one of the authors – pesaro, who joined the project in early 2015 – had begun to explore ways in which the concepts of contested heritage and an orchestra of voices might be mobilised in italy. he made contacts with interested parties. in other words, he acted precisely in the role of cultural broker, as described by li. in the archive’s dealings with partners elsewhere in europe, it has been made clear that the ideological underpinning of brexit was – and remains – contrary to our ethos. two key partners in italy have been laboratorio lapsus and memoro. lapsus is a non-profit organisation whose aims are to research and promote public understanding of contemporary history. committed to exploring the relationship between historical evidence and commonly held belief, lapsus members have taken on a number of challenging topics. these include chi è stato? la strategia della tensione e le stragi impunite – an exhibition on italian neo-fascist terrorism between 1969 and 1974; 900 criminale. mafia, camorra, ‘ndrangheta – a multimedia exhibition based on the history of organized crime in italy; and storia e memoria delle deportazioni nazifasciste – an online course aimed at deconstructing common stereotypes of italian involvement in political and racial deportation during the second world war, including interviews with victims.49 in 2016, lapsus members, including fedele and gaiaschi, agreed to undertake the training for ibcc oral history interviews. over the next two years, they collected twenty-nine personal fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 20208 stories of civilians who were at the receiving end of allied bombing during the second world war. of these, ninteen were women and ten were men. twenty-two were in milan with the rest collected in bologna, varese, como and monza. with the exception of evacuees, interviews were recorded in the same place where the informant lived during the war. lapsus has also been involved in transcribing these oral histories. memoro – esperanto for ‘i remember’ – is an international non-profit project devoted to the preservation and sharing of life stories of people born before 1950. the project started in turin in august 2007 and has since spread to other countries in europe and further afield. since september 2009, the project has been managed in italy by banca della memoria onlus, a cultural organization with charitable status. memoro is underpinned by a public history ethos. participants act as ‘memory hunters’, recording and sharing content on a dedicated publishing platform – www.memoro.org. rather than full-length, unabridged oral history interviews, memoro’s standard practice is to upload short, recut snippets, each being about a specific memory or event: being bombed, evacuation, life in air raid shelters and the like. memoro italy has generously shared sixty-eight items about civilian life under the bombs with the archive, while a further eighteen were provided by memoro germany. these testimonies have significantly improved the coverage of underrepresented areas in italy, especially south and mid-italy. the thirty-one memoro interviews with german subjects constitute more than half of the stories about that country currently in the archive. licencing previously recorded materials has thus allowed the archive to overcome otherwise unsurmountable language and cultural barriers. there are substantial differences between the national components of the archive. interviews recorded in english-speaking countries are routinely accompanied by photographs and memorabilia. these are normally deeply interwoven. this is largely to be explained by the high number of veteran interviews. they have normally taken great care of their evidence of wartime service. civilian memorabilia differ very greatly from their military counterparts. thus only one italian interview came in with associated physical items, although in an indirect way. the informant donated a set of toy soldiers to a local collector who in turn permitted the archive to publish digital copies. the link was re-established through descriptive metadata enabling a virtual recompositing.50 other informants offered photographs. but these could not be accepted as they were already under copyright in published sources. some remarkable items have nevertheless been added thanks to the willingness of italian donors. these include a selection of the works of alfonsino ‘angiolino’ filiputti (1924-1999). this self-taught painter depicted some of the most dramatic and controversial aspects of the second world war as seen from the perspective of san giorgio di nogaro, a small town in the friuli region.51 rationing cards, propaganda materials and toys are represented in the maurizio radacich collection. the highlight is a board game intended to teach children anti-aircraft precautions.52 it and one of angiolino’s temperas are also featured in the ibcc exhibition.53 documents have also been licenced by members of the istituti della resistenza network which has also helped with translation and transcription. in britain and other english-speaking countries, recording oral history interviews has largely been a matter of matching veterans with trained interviewers. this process has been managed by a member of the archive staff to optimise resource allocation. nothing similar was possible in italy. to begin with, being at the receiving end of the bombing affected a whole generation of italians. no such thing as a list of survivors was ever feasible. furthermore, the pool of interviewers was not only small but also limited to places where an existing public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 20209 www.memoro.org professional or personal network existed, or where successful professional relationships could be forged. the interviewee/interviewer match thus followed informal and multiple referrals and leads. interviews were also delivered by university students, either working on their ba/ ma dissertations or being temporarily attached to a local organisation as part of an internship program with an italian university. in both cases, formal arrangements were in place to make sure the recording took place according to ibcc protocols and legal permission to publish was obtained. these collaborations were goal-oriented, bounded and time limited. attempts to build a network of informants outside the conditions described above were either short-lived or unsuccessful. as a result, interviewers quickly became proactive, requiring a very different interviewing technique to that anticipated in the ibcc training. they discovered that interviewees were likely to recall the most painful memories immediately – hunger, bombs, shelters, soldiers – rather than providing a lot of background first. in englishspeaking countries, informants have tended to complete permission forms without question. in italy a spoken form of permission had to be devised in the face of some informants’ stiff opposition to forms. in short, trusting partners and resisting the temptation to micromanage have been key to success.54 there have been some moments of regret. in line with the policy not to edit spoken testimony collected by – as opposed to licenced to – the ibcc and its partners, it has not been possible to publish some interviews. an example serves to illustrate the dilemmas faced.55 maria survived a 1944 allied bombing attack on a northern italian industrial city. she subsequently pursued a successful career in a major company and became a respected figure in her community. lapsus interviewed her in early 2017. after preliminary explanations, the recorder was switched on and remained in her sight throughout the interview. maria talked with gusto and fluency, recalling war-related stories which provided a fascinating insight into a young girl’s view of the conflict. in one of these she found herself buried under rubble after a bombing attack, narrowly escaping death. when the debris was removed, maria was horrified to realise that her father had been killed in an attempt to save her life. she dwelled on her survivor guilt and the hatred of the bomber crew who ‘murdered my poor papa’. she was aware that bitter resentment was a means of coping with the trauma of loss. after the end of the recording, maria asked to listen to the interview before signing the permission form. she wished for the passage about her attitude to the bomber crew to be removed from the recording. this posed a severe dilemma. had she avoided telling these stories the interviewers would never have known. however, the idea of tampering with a historical resource went against the archive’s ethics which are in line with those of the international council on archives (conseil international des archives): the primary duty of archivists is to maintain the integrity of the records in their care and custody. in the accomplishment of this duty they must have regard to the legitimate, but sometimes conflicting, rights and interests of employers, owners, data subjects and users, past, present and future. the objectivity and impartiality of archivists is the measure of their professionalism. they should resist pressure from any source to manipulate evidence so as to conceal or distort facts [emphasis added].56 maria refused to re-record the interview or to sign any paperwork. with extreme reluctance the archive complied with her request to delete the recording. there were other, similar examples. amy c. edmondson has outlined a continuum of failure management of exploratory testing on which these two examples might be placed. they are instances of ‘unintended fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 202010 consequences’ which she describes as ‘a lack of clarity about future events [that] causes people to take seemingly reasonable actions that produce undesired results’.57 at the opposite end are ‘completely preventable’ instances, violating established principles. in the case outlined above, the action of the informant was perfectly rational at the time, although the consequences left the archive poorer. as such, there is much for us to learn about the tormented memorialisation of the bombing war in italy. maria is an example of the insoluble duality of the allied forces. not only did the innocent suffer but altruistic behaviour caused intolerable loss. conversely, as discussed earlier, american aid led to industrial recovery. ‘american’ was used in spoken informal italian to indicate something fashionable, desirable, up-to-date and plentiful. seeing the allies as killers is profoundly dissonant with the received narrative of saviours who give their lives to bring freedom to others. finally, maria and other informants shared a suspicion about formal arrangements in writing, while at the same time acknowledging the benefits of the interview. a dictum attributed to journalist, writer and publisher leo longanesi (1905-57) captures eloquently this mindset: ‘chi si firma è perduto’ (‘whoever signs their name is doomed’). the word play alludes to a deep-seated mistrust of authority, combined with reluctance to put in black and white what can backfire in the future. in view of the above, we have devised the following possible solutions: • offer multiple alternatives, rather than following a prescribed protocol. informants seem to be more at ease when offered multiple choices. • keep complexity to a minimum within given legal and ethical constrains. • avoid assumptions about transferring practices across cultures. reasons for volunteering range from disinterested generosity to a pragmatic match between ibcc goals and volunteers’ own agenda. the former appears to be prevalent in britain while the latter captures better the sentiment in italy. • use of the phone for oral history interviews is sometimes the only realistic way to capture a source that would be otherwise lost. but there are limitations where there are strongly emotional memories being recalled. mutual trust elicited by physical proximity and non-verbal communication is largely missing. the resource implications for international projects are evident. experiences of using the ibcc digital archive the ibcc digital archive launched online in september 2018.58 because of the nature of the source material and the age of potential informants we made an early decision to collect as much as possible even though this resulted in a substantial queue of material to process. to date, over 10,000 items have been published, around one tenth of digitised content. over the first eighteen months, the archive has had 259,165 unique pageviews, defined as the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once.59 the following table breaks down traffic for countries. table 1 unique pageviews, september 2018 to march 2020 rank country traffic share 1 united kingdom 65.22% 2 italy 6.98% public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 202011 rank country traffic share 3 united states 6.58% 4 australia 4.94% 5 canada 3.47% 6 france 1.79% 7 netherlands 1.45% 8 germany 1.14% 9 new zealand 0.86% 10 poland 0.72% table 2 top ten languages, march 2020 rank items language 1 7679 english 2 606 italian 3 127 german 4 70 french 5 48 polish 6 23 latin 7 19 dutch 8 3 danish 9 3 hungarian 10 3 russian the figures in table 1 reveal a clear pattern. positions in the table match major national contributions to bomber command (australia, canada, new zealand, poland), wartime alliances (united states), and recurring targets: france, netherlands and germany. the position of italy at number two (mirrored in table 2) is justified by a pull factor – the large number of items in italian or items about italy. table 3 top ten spatial coverage descriptors, march 2020 rank items spatial coverage 1 5328 great britain 2 1338 england-lincolnshire 3 1336 germany 4 811 italy 5 770 france table 1 continued fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 202012 rank items spatial coverage 6 690 poland 7 543 poland-żagań 8 897 england-london 9 364 canada 10 323 england-yorkshire the prominence of ‘great britain’ and ‘england-lincolnshire’ in table 3 reflects the fact that lincolnshire had the highest concentration of bomber command stations. that ‘germany’, ‘italy’ and ‘france’ are in the top five demonstrates the archive’s commitment to a more balanced coverage of the bombing war. the substantial number of items about żagań reflects a considerable collection of letters sent from a prisoner of war camp. this kind of material – unlike official documents about wartime actions – opens new ways of researching the human dimension of the bombing war. these figures, however, are meaningful only in a broad sense. there are, for instance, items about places in italy which are written in english. furthermore, an artwork or a photograph can be matched accurately to a specific place despite having no textual content to be formally captured as language. and some archive items such as logbooks may contain plentiful references to a great number of places, while others subsume various different experiences into a generic designation. some of the many examples include ‘the ruhr’, ‘germany’ and ‘occupied europe’. it is also worth noting that the traffic generated by the archive is extremely scattered. unlike other platforms where there may be a core collection attracting constant and widespread interest, the whole platform has just eleven pages totalling more than 0.5% of overall traffic. moreover, some of those are not content but rather service pages, such as the main landing page, maps, user guides, tutorials and legal disclaimers. the most viewed content is the ‘interview with john whitworth’ which accounts for a meagre 0.38% of traffic, at position thirteen. the most viewed italian item is the ‘interview with alessandra rivalta’ – 0.05%, 232 position. the reason for this imbalance can be traced to a self-reinforcing cycle. having an italian team member significantly reduced cultural and language barriers which led to the rapid establishment of a network of volunteers, researchers and organisations. this factor greatly facilitated presentations, seminars, lectures and other related events, which in turn generated more traffic and interest. having italian items available online to demonstrate that the archive was hospitable to non-british sources also acted as a pull factor and prompted further contributions. it is worth pointing out that nothing comparable has been achieved so far in germany. despite the valuable contribution of native-speaking german volunteers, contributions have been intermittent and sparse. in mitigation, it should be noted that this is still a work in progress. since going live we have received a fair amount of feedback from users in italy. sources consist of feedback in writing, social media interactions, email exchanges and q&a sessions following presentations and lectures. we have no way to analyse and compare such disparate table 3 continued public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 202013 sources in a quantitative way although it seems possible to cluster opinions around some recurring themes. • unique content not available elsewhere. users have applauded the decision of making available sources kept in private hands, especially documents about the human dimension of service life which tends to be neglected by major national archives. • the opportunity to see the same event from multiple perspectives. this is either framed as a novel perspective incorporating multiple voices, in a way which is conducive to sound historical research methodology, or a means to bring about a shift in perception, especially when events have been mainly interpreted by using italian sources. • technical architecture. extensive full-text search capabilities of oral and written sources, description at item level, virtual aggregation of discrete collections in a bigger metaarchive and direct access to geolocated items have attracted considerable interest. tellingly, no feedback has ever framed the archive as evidence of sacrifice, atonement, suffering or an attempt to bring to the fore the complex nature of the bombing war in italy. a specific stream of inquiries has come from aviation archaeology groups. in this case, the drive has been to look for documentary evidence to help pinpoint the specific location of a crash usually with a degree of confidence high enough to allow for an excavation. unfortunately, very little in the archive can be used to this end. users seem to expect ‘hard’ data. some dismiss oral testimony as mere stories.60 some users express frustration that they are unable to obtain quick, reliable and immediately actionable answers to a specific question, rather than being prepared to undertake a detailed and frequently painstaking process of evaluating documents to obtain knowledge. the shift in perception may be related to the evolution of the world wide web and major search engines which promote unfettered access to highly relevant, accurate, personalised and up-to-date information in an unmediated way.61 users are also sometimes bewildered by the non-systematic nature of the archive and its frequent gaps notwithstanding an explanation about derivation of content. there is clearly an expectation that all information about events in the past must exist somewhere in an officially sanctioned and authoritative form. scholarly literature has established the socially constructed and provisional nature of even the most apparently ‘complete’ archive.62 we need to do more to explain the different configurations of power, not to mention the fragile nature of holdings, that are characteristic of any archive, digital or not. finally, some users have expected to find heroic stories and compelling tales or instances of extreme exemplar behaviour fully conforming to recognised cultural models. an italian user even requested via email how to filter for ‘immagini sfiziose’, sfiziose meaning something like ‘tasty’, with additional connotations of being fanciful, desirable and rare. conclusion in design and construction, the intention of the ibcc digital archive has been to tell the story of the bombing war in a new way, bringing together multiple perspectives. to a very great extent, the archive has been at the mercy of what material has been made available by donors in order to tell such a story from a distance of eight decades. being a uk-based and ukfunded project there has been a perhaps inevitable imbalance in the holdings. most support has come from those with family connections to bomber command veterans. conversely, coverage where most bombs were dropped – or for opposing armed forces – remains patchy.63 fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 202014 yet it is these contributions from italy and to a lesser extent other areas of mainland europe that have at least enabled veterans’ role to be treated in a different way: to examine the effects of bombing operations rather than to treat operations as ends in themselves. this provides a perspective almost entirely absent from the bomber command memoir, now a considerable genre in its own right, as well as most histories on the subject.64 anecdotal evidence suggests that users of the archive are intrigued by the resulting insights. a complex project such as this must of necessity be framed as a work in progress. it will change and grow as the archive attracts more users and finds new opportunities for partnerships and as the socio-political context evolves. as such, it is important to maintain a willingness to adapt to a range of cross-cultural circumstances without relinquishing the core values of the project.65 endnotes 1. serge noiret and thomas cauvin, ‘internationalizing public history’, in james b. gardner and paula hamilton (eds), the oxford handbook of public history, oxford university press online, 2017, pp122, https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.1, (accessed 18 october 2019); thomas cauvin, ‘the rise of public history: an international perspective’, in historia crítica, vol 68, 2018, pp3-26, https://doi. org/10.7440/histcrit68.2018.01; paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally?, london, bloomsbury, 2019. 2. ashton and trapeznik, ibid, p6. 3. noiret and cauvin, op cit, p2. 4. roy rozenzweig, ‘scarcity or abundance? preserving the past in a digital era’, american historical review, vol 108, no 3, 2002, pp735-762. https://doi.org/10.1086/529596 5. for an account of the sensitivities involved, see john peterson, ‘though this be madness: heritage methods for working in culturally diverse communities’, public history review, vol 17, 2010, pp34-51. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v17i0.1802 6. samuels’s most influential work is theatres of memory. past and present in contemporary culture, london, verso, 2012 (first published 1994). an example of ruskin’s reach was the trade union-supported workers’ college movement in south africa in the 1990s, founded by ruskin graduate june-rose nala. one of the current authors (hughes) acted as academic director of the durban workers’ college which adopted its approach to people’s history and whose qualifications were validated by ruskin. 7. mark donnelly, ‘public history in britain: repossessing the past’, in ashton and trapeznik, op cit, pp23-35. 8. serge noiret, ‘an overview of public history in italy: no longer a field without a name’, international public history, vol 2, no 1, 2019, p2. https://doi.org/10.1515/iph-2019-0009 9. the institute for historical research and the victoria county history, for example, are an integral part of the higher education establishment in the uk. 10. elisabetta arioti, ‘cenni storici: le origini del sistema archivistico degli istituti della resistenza’, in storia e memoria, vol 11, no 1, 2002, pp107-124. 11. simon jenkins, ‘no more remembrance days – let’s consign the 20th century to history’, in the guardian online, 9 november 2017 available from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/ nov/09/no-more-remembrance-days-consign-20th-century-history (accessed 20 august 2019). 12. erika doss, ‘war, memory and the public mediation of affect: the national world war ii memorial and american imperialism’, in memory studies, vol 1, no 2, 2008, pp227-250. https://doi. org/10.1177/1750698007088388 13. angus calder, the myth of the blitz, london, pimlico, 1991. 14. fintan o’toole, heroic failure: brexit and the politics of pain, london, apollo books, 2018. 15. nicoletta pireddu, ‘europe at the end of the chunnel: malcolm bradbury’s and tim parks’s eurosceptic albion’, english studies, vol 98, no 6, 2017, p627. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2016.1254471 16. noble frankland, ‘some thoughts about and experience of official military history’, in royal air force historical society journal, vol 17, 1996, p20. for an overview, see andrew knapp, ‘the horror and the glory: bomber command in british memories since 1945’, mass violence and resistance research network, 2016, available at http://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/horrorand-glory-bomber-command-british-memories-1945 (accessed 20 august 2019). public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 202015 https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.1 https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit68.2018.01 https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit68.2018.01 https://doi.org/10.1086/529596 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v17i0.1802 https://doi.org/10.1515/iph-2019-0009 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/09/no-more-remembrance-days-consign-20th-century-history https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/09/no-more-remembrance-days-consign-20th-century-history https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007088388 https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007088388 https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2016.1254471 http://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/horror-and-glory-bomber-command-british-memories-1945 http://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/horror-and-glory-bomber-command-british-memories-1945 17. damien williams, ‘once more, with feeling: commemorating royal air force bomber command in late modern britain’, in keir reeves et al (eds), battlefield events: landscape, commemoration and heritage, london, routledge, 2015, pp121-143. 18. andrew knapp, claudia baldoli and richard overy, bombing, states and peoples in western europe, 1940-1945, london, continuum, 2011. 19. claudia baldoli and marco fincardi, ‘italian society under anglo-american bombs: propaganda, experience, and legend, 1940–1945’, in the historical journal, vol 52, no 4, 2009, pp1017-1038. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0018246x09990380 20. the liberation struggle is variously understood as a national liberation war, in which german forces and their allies were the foes; a civil war, with fascist forces opposed to partisans; and a class war in which fighting the regime was treated as a working-class struggle against its oppressors. claudio pavone, una guerra civile. saggio storico sulla moralità della resistenza, torino, bollati boringhieri, 2001. 21. alberto de bernardi, ‘the world wars and the history of italy: public shared and disputed memories’, in elena lamberti and vita fortunati (eds), memories and representations of war: the case of world war i and world war ii, amsterdam, rodopi, 2009, p76. 22. giovanni sciola, ‘l’immagine dei nemici. l’america e gli americani nella propaganda italiana della seconda guerra mondiale’, italie et etats-unis – interférences culturelles, vol 5, 2001, pp115–134. tellingly, ‘liberator’ is also the name of the consolidated b-24, a mass-produced usaaf bomber. 23. alessandro portelli and ron j. grele, storie orali. racconto, immaginazione, dialogo, roma, donzelli, 2017, pp200-201. original in italian. 24. piero calamandrei, ‘discorso sulla costituzione’, società umanitaria, milano, 16 january 1955. the speech has been widely reproduced: a transcription is available from http://www.napoliassise.it/ costituzione/discorsosullacostituzione.pdf (accessed 3 march 2020). 25. giorgio napolitano, ‘address’, rome, 25 april 2014. società umanitaria, rome, 25 april 2014, available from https://www.ilmessaggero.it/roma/cronaca/festa_liberazione_roma_vittoriano_napolitano_ renzi-385467.html (accessed 3 march 2020). 26. filippo focardi, il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano. la rimozione delle colpe della seconda guerra mondiale, bari, laterza, 2013. 27. martin schain, the marshall plan fifty years after, new york, palgrave, 2001, p137. 28. oral historians have frequently noted how the ‘allies as liberators’ frequently cancel out the ‘allies as killers’, often in the same story; bombings are explained away as errors or misidentifications of legitimate military targets. gabriella gribaudi, ‘le memorie plurali e il racconto pubblico della guerra. il ruolo delle fonti orali nella riflessione storiografica sul secondo conflitto mondiale’, in italia contemporanea, 2014, pp217-249. 29. john foot, italy’s divided memory, new york, palgrave macmilllan, 2009, pp108-109. https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230101838 30. frank coppa, ‘pope pius xii: from the diplomacy of impartiality to the silence of the holocaust’, in journal of church and state, vol 55, no 2, 2013, pp286-306. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csr120 31. gabriella gribaudi, ‘guerra, catastrofi e memorie dal territorio’, in mariuccia salvati and loredana sciolla (eds), l’italia e le sue regioni, vol 3, rome, treccani, pp251–273. 32. de bernardi, op cit, p88. 33. na li, ‘going public, going global: teaching public history through international collaborations’ in public history review, vol 22, 2015, p2. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v22i0.4754 34. ibid, p6. 35. sharon leon, ‘complexity and collaboration: doing public history in digital environments’, in james b. gardner and pula hamilton (eds) the oxford handbook of public history, oxford university press online, 2017, pp4 and 6, https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.2, (accessed 18 october 2019). 36. one author was part of this consultation and remains involved as head of the ibcc digital archive. her experience of participating in the south african truth and reconciliation commission as a researcher was useful in understanding the nature of reconciliation in this project. also involved in the early planning phase from the university’s side was dr dan ellin who continues his involvement in the archive as its subject specialist. 37. the ibcc site, including the visitor centre, opened in january 2018. this article of necessity excludes the exhibition content for which the archive team was responsible. 38. dan ellin and heather hughes, ‘ibcc interpretation plan’, 19 june 2015, ibcc digital archive document ibcc-ts-01, available on request. fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 202016 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x09990380 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x09990380 http://www.napoliassise.it/costituzione/discorsosullacostituzione.pdf http://www.napoliassise.it/costituzione/discorsosullacostituzione.pdf https://www.ilmessaggero.it/roma/cronaca/festa_liberazione_roma_vittoriano_napolitano_renzi-385467.html https://www.ilmessaggero.it/roma/cronaca/festa_liberazione_roma_vittoriano_napolitano_renzi-385467.html https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101838 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101838 https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csr120 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v22i0.4754 https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.2 39. for debates about social cohesion in the uk, see chris weedon, ‘identity, difference and social cohesion in contemporary britain’, in journal of intercultural studies, vol 32, no 3, 2011, pp209-227. https:// doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2011.565733 40. this arrangement has had implications for copyright as well as maintenance and backup. 41. for an exception, see joanne evans and jacqueline z. wilson, ‘inclusive archives and recordkeeping: towards a critical manifesto’, in international journal of heritage studies, vol 24, no 8, 2018, pp857860. martinez-avila and budd have recently introduced the notion of an ‘ethical’ warrant for controlled vocabularies which implies cultural sensitivity. see daniel martinez-avila and john budd, ‘epistemic warrant for categorizational activities and the development of controlled vocabularies’, in journal of documentation, vol 73, no 4, 2017, pp700-715. 42. david c. blair and m. e. maron, ‘an evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text documentretrieval system’, in communications of the acm, vol 28, no 3, 1985, pp289-229; robert moskovitch et al, ‘a comparative evaluation of full-text, concept-based and context-sensitive search’, in journal of the american medical informatics association, vol 14, no 2, 2007, pp164-174. 43. hilda kean, ‘public history as a social form of knowledge’, in james b. gardner and paula hamilton (eds), the oxford handbook of public history, oxford university press online, 2017, pp1-23, https://10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.22 (accessed 18 october 2019). 44. serge noiret and thomas cauvin, op cit, especially p8. 45. trevor owens, ‘digital cultural heritage and the crowd’, in curator: the museum journal, vol 56, no 1, 2013, p21. https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12012 46. victoria van hyning, ‘harnessing crowdsourcing for scholarly and glam purposes’, in literature compass, 2019; 16:e12507, pp1-11, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12507 (accessed 4 october 2019). 47. for a critique, see l. harald fredheim, ‘endangerment-driven heritage volunteering: democratisation or “changeless change”’, in international journal of heritage studies, vol 24, no 6, 2018, pp619-633. 48. gabriele badano and alasia nuti, ‘under pressure: political liberalism, the rise of unreasonableness and the complexity of containment’, in the journal of political philosophy, vol 26, no 2, 2018, pp145-168. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12134 49. further information about the projects is available on the website: http://www.laboratoriolapsus.it/. 50. ‘toy soldiers’ at https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/273. 51. ‘filiputti, angiolino’ at https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/27. 52. ‘radacich, maurizio’ at https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/38. 53. ‘british prisoners of war escaping from the torviscosa camp are helped by civilians’ at https:// ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/133. 54. capezzuto recently provided a reflection on success and failure in three italian digital public history projects. among his recommendations for avoiding failure are to allow participants to be ‘designers’ rather than mere ‘implementers’. stefano capezzuto, ‘digital public history e design della partecipazione. riflessioni e proposte a partire dalla società storica spezzina’, in umanistica digitale, no 3, 2018, pp69-84, http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8189 (accessed 30 october 2019). 55. because of the circumstances, names and other details have been changed to protect anonymity of informants. 56. international council on archives, code of ethics. adopted by the general assembly in its xiiith session in beijing (china) on 6 september 1996, available at https://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/ica_1996-0906_code%20of%20ethics_en.pdf. 57. amy c. edmondson, ‘strategies for learning from failure’ in harvard business review, vol 89, no 4, 2011, pp48-55, available from https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure (accessed 3 march 2020). 58. the home page is at https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk. 59. this figure has been filtered to exclude users internal to the university of lincoln. 60. monica emmanuelli and alessandro pesaro, ‘la guerra di bombardamento in friuli nelle fonti dell’international bomber command centre digital archive. temi di ricerca e problemi aperti’, in storia contemporanea in friuli, no 48, 2018, pp223–232. 61. archive patrons tend to use internet-like, name-driven search strategies while the standard description is based on provenance which they can struggle to grasp. wendy duff and catherine johnson, ‘where is the list with all the names? information-seeking behavior of genealogists’, in the american archivist, vol 66, no 1, 2003, pp79-95. public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy public history review, vol. 27, 202017 https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2011.565733 https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2011.565733 https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.22 https://10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.22 https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12012 https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12507 https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12134 http://www.laboratoriolapsus.it/ https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/273 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/27 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/38 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/133 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/133 http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8189 https://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/ica_1996-09-06_code of ethics_en.pdf https://www.ica.org/sites/default/files/ica_1996-09-06_code of ethics_en.pdf https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk 62. see for example antoinette burton (ed), archive stories: facts, fictions and the writing of history, durham, n.c., duke university press, 2005. 63. this may hamper attempts to use archive items for non-scholarly purposes, for example for pinpointing unexploded bombs before the start of engineering projects. alessandro pesaro, ‘fonti inedite da un archivio digitale britannico. 1939-1945, i bombardamenti in friuli venezia giulia’, in rassegna tecnica del friuli venezia giulia, vol 70, no 372, 2019, pp20-23. 64. for a study of the bomber command memoir, see frances houghton, ‘the “missing chapter”: bomber command aircrew memoirs in the 1990s and 2000s’, in lucy noakes and juliette pattinson (eds), british cultural memory and the second world war, london, bloomsbury, 2014, pp155-174. 65. the world is now in the grip of the covid-19 pandemic which has already overwhelmed the region of italy where our most important partners are based. such a profound event has widely been likened to a wartime condition. as such, it is likely to affect the public historians’ perspectives and contributions to collective knowledge at every level including ‘the national’. fedele, gaiaschi, hughes and pesaro public history review, vol. 27, 202018 public history review vol. 28, 2021 © 2021 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: lindsey, k. 2021. ‘remembering aesi’: women’s history, dialogical memorials and sydney’s statuary. public history review, 28, 1–16. http:// dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v28i0.7760 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj ‘remembering aesi’: women’s history, dialogical memorials and sydney’s statuary kiera lindsey doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7760 when adelaide eliza scott ironside (1831-1867) became the first native-born artist to leave australia to train as an artist in mid 1855, she did so with the explicit intention of returning home to fresco the public buildings of sydney with the ‘future history’ of her country.1 her vision was not only explicitly republican and public but also extended to statues. writing to her ’sincere friend’, the controversial pastor and politician, dr john dunmore lang (17991878), while living in rome a few years later, ironside expressed her desire to one day see him in ‘statued marble somewhere on the coasts of the city’. for there, she enthused, her ‘patriot father’ would be ‘hailed’ as he so ‘fully and richly deserved’.2 although aesi, as she preferred to be known, left no directions about how she wished to be memorialised, there is much to suggest that the woman sir charles nicholson (1808-1903) once described as ‘the founder and acknowledged mistress of art in the southern hemisphere’, was also keen to occupy her own ‘conspicuous niche in the colonial valhalla’.3 there were certainly many others who deemed her worthy of such memorialisation. in addition to winning colonial and international awards for her art, queen victoria’s favourite sculptor, john gibson, was convinced that the three paintings she displayed at the 1862 london international exhibition would ‘smash’ the works of the famous pre-raphaelite brotherhood member, william holman hunt, ‘out of the park’.4 others were so taken by aesi’s ‘genius’, that they composed poetry and hosted london soirees in her honour.5 for several decades after her death in 1867, newspaper articles episodically asserted that something should be done to acknowledge the status of ‘sydney’s fairest daughter’ as a courageous female pioneer and patriot, whose republican poetry had been frequently published in the people’s advocate, and whose ‘exquisitely executed’ art had been purchased by many eminent victorians, including the prince of wales.6 in addition to stephen brunton’s poem which declared her the ‘new born delight of the ransomed and free’, several articles to this effect were published during the late victorian era, at a time, which jess moody associates with the development of a particular type of memory culture that was to inspire many of the now contentious statues in sydney’s public sphere.7 and yet, while aesi’s male contemporaries and fellow republicans, dr lang, daniel deniehy (1828-1865) and william bede dalley (1831-1888), were each commemorated in declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7760 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7760 http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7760 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7760 stone at this time, nothing was done to acknowledge the fact that aesi devoted her life, as she once declared, to not only ‘elevating her sex’ but also ‘hoisting the colours of her country’ abroad.8 having now spent more than six years working with her artwork, poetry, letters and realia i have had plenty of time to consider how we might address the gender bias of colonial statuary by remembering aesi.9 and yet, as a group of british historians recently observed in their discussion about the intersections between public history and women’s history, there are now numerous challenges associated with putting anyone upon a public pedestal. 10 this is particularly so for a nineteenth-century colonial woman who not only shared many of the social privileges and ideological limitations of her age, but, as a passionate patriot, was also an enthusiastic participant in australia’s colonial project. such contexts mean that in contrast to the sort of celebratory statuary that was produced by and for her nineteenth-century contemporaries, any monument dedicated to remembering aesi must now grapple with her ambivalent status as someone who was not only a nineteenth-century woman and artist but also a colonial subject. her position as a member of the ‘rising generation’, ‘native-born’ or ‘currency’ (people of european ancestry born in the colony), also requires careful consideration, for, as historians john molony and ben jones and myself have elsewhere noted, this demographic of colonial society wrestled with the ‘double bind’ of being both ‘the coloniser and the colonised’ in ways that were often expressed in a strident forms of colonial patriotism, the strains of which can still be detected in the more parochial expressions of contemporary australian nationalism.11 ‘addie ironsides [sic] taken a short time before her death, 1867’ (slnsw mitchell ironside family papers, mss 272/1/357, 15-19) lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20212 but should a woman who negotiated the gender limitations of her age in such idiosyncratic and intriguing ways be denied all public recognition because she was also a product of her time? such neglect risks perpetuating not only the gender biases of her age but also a distorted perspective of the past that also dr lang’s statue is located at wynyard square, where he delivered many public orations (photograph by peter f williams). daniel deniehy’s statue is located within a niche of the department of lands building in recognition of his legislative contribution to the 1860 land act (photograph by peter murphy). both were erected in the final decades of the nineteenth century. william bede dally’s memorial, installed in hyde park north in 1898 (state library of nsw) lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20213 https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/religion/display/23214-reverend-john-dunmore-langhttps://archives.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/nodes/view/573810?keywords= deny the public an opportunity to not only celebrate new heroes but also wrestle with complex questions associated with who, how and why we remember and forget. in this article i therefore want to consider how a contemporary monument dedicated to aesi might be designed to not only ‘talk back’ to the triumphalist individualism, male heroism and scientific reason which infuses the nineteenth-century statues of her hometown, but also ‘converse’ with more recent acts of history making in that public sphere. to do so i engage with a definition of ‘dialogical memorial’ offered by brad west in his analysis of the world war one monuments on the turkish peninsula of gallipoli.12 west’s definition provides a useful way of exploring monuments exist in dialogue with one another when they are in their geographical proximity and as such invites consideration about how aesi’s monument might dialogue with not only the sydney statues of her contemporaries but also more recent works such as the pioneer women’s memorial, which is situated in the jessie street gardens in sydney, and the ‘four season’ statues, three of which adorn the palace gardens steps of sydney’s botanic gardens, and were shipped from rome in 1883 after the australian-born sculptor, charles francis summers, followed aesi’s footsteps there. there is also that statue of henry lawson on the art gallery road not far from where i recommend situating her monument.13 while she was an early and less celebrated native-born republican poet than lawson, he has since been criticised for the strains of overt racism and misogyny which permeated both his radical nationalism and writing.14 could a monument to aesi help to destabilise some of the impulses celebrated in lawson’s statue, perhaps by placing such celebrated colonial patriotism in the broader context of the imperial project? are there ways to also gesture to other more recent and abstract works such as ‘bara’, the monument by judy watson on the precinct law of the botanic gardens which reimagines the ancient gathering spaces of the eora by referencing the fishhooks crafted and used by gadigal women for thousands of generations? here i offer something of an experimental artist brief for a twenty-first century memorial that strives to represent this nineteenth-century woman in more complex and nuanced ways which self-consciously situate it in dialogue with other acts of history-making in sydney’s public places. combining mikhail bakhtin’s theories of the dialogical with jürgen habermas’s understanding of the public sphere as a zone where the central value system of a society is always being ‘emotionally debated and ritually contested’, brad west argues that dialogical memorials provide a potent way of ‘anchoring new historical understandings to a physical environment’.15 recalling and reimagining different histories, these works have the potential, west argues, to fundamentally ‘alter the stage on which history is narrated and performed’, and in so doing, allow for a new and ‘greater sharing of a sacred space’.16 most importantly, by providing opportunities for what he calls ‘doublevoicedness’, dialogical memorials also, he concludes, remind us that history-making is an ongoing practice that always involves debate and contestation and that public memory is therefore an ‘unfinished business’.17 here i focus upon elements of aesi’s character and context that might prompt such possibilities. in contrast to the familiar figure of the individual hero, which we associate with the statuary of aesi’s age, i suggest a group monument that acknowledges the intimate intergenerational female network which shaped her life and in so doing also ‘re-presents’ – a term coined by the historian greg dening – a number of other native born and convict women from the georgian, regency and victorian eras where were particularly influential to her.18 instead of elevating aesi upon a plinth, i recommend grounding this monument on gadigal country and surrounding it with the australian wildflowers she painted this the intention of drawing to the millennia-old first nation uses of these same plants and the extent that her response of belonging to her native land was predicated upon an act of dispossession. by using water to acknowledge both ancient indigenous cultural practices as well as aesi’s deep interest in ‘scrying’ crystal balls, i also suggest that this monument might be able to challenge the hyper-masculine rational ideologies that are infuse most of sydney’s nineteenth-century statues and which represent a set of ideologies that were so integral in the denigration of ancient forms of knowing associated with both the so-called native lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20214 and primitive, and the feminine and irrational. and finally, by situating aesi’s monument in the outer domain (behind the new south wales art gallery in sydney’s botanic gardens and to the east of the yurong pennisula, near woolloomooloo bay), in an area where she boldly dared to defy gender conventions and assume centre stage before a large male audience in a flamboyant moment of her own assertive and theatrical history-making, this memorial might also assume the power to not only speak to these other works, but also for itself and in ways, as west suggests, that can ‘alter the stage on which history is narrated and performed’. infusing the feminine while such a monument can help to address the ongoing gender imbalance of public statuary in aesi’s hometown in ways that shed fresh light upon the lives of other colonial women, it must now do more than celebrate individual achievements in the ways that aesi probably envisioned for dr lang and herself. fortunately, her life presents us with multiple opportunities to do so. but first, a caveat. while aesi’s artwork was admired by many contemporaries when it was exhibited at international exhibitions in paris, london and dublin, it is unlikely to easily appeal to contemporary tastes.19 nor are her artistic achievements what i consider most interesting about her life. instead, while some attention has been given to her best-known works, i have been drawn to the incomplete sketches she produced of dreams, angels and visions which she probably composed in an exalted even trance-like state while consulting a crystal ball. both her diary and poetry is punctuated with references to ecstatic moments which she experienced while learning to see through ‘closed lid spirit-eyes’ until the ‘soul words of song’ ‘gushed forth’ with ‘wild impassioned zeal’. 20 together such fragments offer tantalising glimpses into aesi’s spiritual experiences as a mystic and medium and also offer a new insight into colonial republicanism which suggests these ideas were not only stimulated by the revolutionary events of the age, but also ‘strong, passionate and deep’ spiritual visions which came, as she said, ‘wildly from the heart’.21 while these elements of her character and archive have been previously ignored because of what one group of historians have recently described as the ongoing ‘dogmatic secularism’ of historical practice, i recommend resurfacing these ancient forms of mystical knowing so that her monument can ‘talk back’ to the hyper rationalism of sydney’s nineteenth-century statuary. 22 for example, by depicting aesi as an explorer, albeit of ancient forms of knowing associated with the interior world of intuition and imagination rather the naval navigation or geographical interiors of the continent, this public work might stimulate some reflection about different modalities of discovery. in contrast to that now highly contested statue of james cook in hyde park, which shows him with one arm raised aloft, and the other holding a telescope, aesi could be depicted in deep in communion with ‘the celestial spheres’ or scrying a crystal ball.23 depicting aesi thus could draw attention to the way men of scientific reason from this period were prone to impose false binaries – rational/irrational, male/female – upon the world in ways that allowed several male colleagues to dismiss aesi for being a ‘wild, impulsive and (often) irrational creature’.24 thus her monument could insist that such mystical interests represent an equally valid, though repeatedly denigrated form of thinking and being that was to become of increasing significance to many colonists in the latter portion of the nineteenth-century. as themes of failure and disappointment marked aesi professional life her memorial could also be designed to stimulate reflection about artistic struggle in ways that could counter the tropes of heroic triumph which suffuse these same nineteenth-century statues.25 while aesi was known for putting ‘her hand to the plough’ and working up to ‘fourteen hours a day’ in her studio, she never become ‘the founder and acknowledged mistress of art in the southern hemisphere’, as she hoped.26 she was also, the records suggest, particularly disappointed that she never secured official colonial patronage.27 nor did she ever live to see the people of her ‘wondrous continent’ shirk off ‘the monarchies of old’ to become ‘a republic of lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20215 true nobles’, as she envisioned in her poems.28 instead, her life and convictions are indicative of what one biographer described as a particularly ‘luminous moment’ in the early 1850s; when a set of political, social and artistic ideals she and other male contemporaries espoused, ignited great, but short-lived excitement. as such, the act of remembering aesi provides us with an opportunity to contemplate ‘the still fluid context’ in which all historical actors live as well as the themes of failure that are often suppressed in such statuary.29 who? aesi’s archival remains include more than a hundred letters, artwork of diverse mediums and subjects as well as an array of realia which offer unique insight into both her life and that of a demographic of sydneybased native-born women to which she belonged, and who have received little historical attention.30 in contrast to the dearth of historical sources associated with many nineteenth-century women, aesi’s archive also contains letters and portraits of previously little-known colonial women and as such allow us to see and hear those who were often rendered invisible by the gender bias of that age. there is, for example, a portrait which was executed in the late 1830s of adelaide’s grandmother, mary redman (nee george) who was transported for forgery and most likely, the first person to teach aesi to paint.31 this portrait is of a convict woman who, like many others, recovered from her infamy to become a respected wife, mother and property owner. incorporating mary redman into aesi’s monument helps to acknowledge the contributions such women made both to their families and colonial society.32 aesi also produced two works of her mother, martha rebecca ironside (1814-1869) who separated from her husband in 1834, when aesi was three years old. martha had the temerity to raise her daughter as a single parent in the fraught social and economic climate of colonial sydney. she also secured the resources that allowed the two women to travel to europe unchaperoned, so that aesi could undertake her training. ever the idealistic romantic, aesi conceived of their ten-year artistic exile as a pilgrimage of art and produced a work entitled ‘the pilgrim of art’, which celebrated mother and daughter accordingly. sadly, soon after that much-admired work was returned to sydney, it was stored in ‘a sort of three-sided shed’ where it eventually deteriorated beyond repair. 33 as all that now remains of that work is a black and white photograph (below), referencing this in the design of the figures could also draw attention to how previous prejudices have deprived us of women’s stories and left us with a distorted perspective of the past. aesi’s archive also includes a portrait of louisa australia blaxland, another native-born woman who supported aesi and shared her younger friend’s passion for australian wildflowers.34 including blaxland in this work reminds us that intergenerational friendships often flourished across both class and religion divisions within colonial society. aesi’s most intimate friendship was however with another native-born woman named caroline clark, with whom she exchanged three now almost illegible cross-hatched letters.35 writing from rome in 1862, aesi described how she was depicting her friend’s ‘sweet face’ in her oil painting, the marriage of cana, to which clark responded enthusiastically, declaring that she was ‘wonderfully ambitious’ to support her friend ‘hoist the colours of our dear old country abroad’.36 five years before aesi and her mother left for europe, both women put their names to a petition that was signed by more than nine thousand ‘female inhabitants of sydney’ in 1850.37 like many colonists, these women were incensed by earl grey’s repeated attempts to reinstate convict transportation in new south wales and they addressed their concerns directly to queen victoria, requesting that she legally ratify new south wales as a free society so that it could never again be downgraded to a penal colony. this bold declaration now represents the first female-only petition in australia and proves that the colony’s ‘sister politicians’ were not only actively engaged in local politics but willing and able to speak for themselves.38 incorporating some element of this document into aesi’s monument would complicate assumptions that victorian women were happily confined to the private sphere as domestic angels and also confirm that aesi’s political passions were representative rather than exceptional. lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20216 by incorporating the particularities of these five colonial women into the monument, this work would offer a stark contrast to the ‘great man of history’ theory which was espoused by nineteenth-century historian, thomas carlyle (who aesi may have met when she was training with ruskin in 1865) and which infuses many of the statues in her hometown.39 we might imagine these five women sitting together on the yurong peninsula of their much loved ‘free sea city of sydney’ as aesi regales them with the speech she gave before a large public gathering just weeks before she and martha left the colony forever. where and why? on a late winter afternoon in mid-june 1855, twenty-three-year-old aesi took to a wind blasted rise of the outer domain to present an ‘elegant and elaborate specimen of needlework’ to the colony’s first volunteer corps.40 although the weather was apparently unfavourable, the one hundred members of ‘the artillery, cavalry and rifles’, which had been recently formed in response to the crimea war, assembled on the sodden parade grounds. soon after the official signal was given, aesi stepped forward to address the troops. ‘soldiers and countrymen!’ she called. ‘on the eve of leaving my native land for a season to study the great models of european art in the cities of the old world, i, a devoted daughter of australia, place into your hands a memorial of my devoted attachment to the land of my nativity.’41 according to the colonial newspapers, this ‘very interesting and novel ceremony’, concluded with ‘three hearty cheers’ from the troops.42 days later a poem in honour of her presentation was published in the sydney morning herald and for years afterwards, aesi’s ‘tasteful and elegant piece of workmanship’ was proudly flown by the troops and her gesture imitated by other women elsewhere in the colonies.43 and yet some time during the end of above: likely a portrait of mary redman, adelaide ironside’s grandmother by richard reed jnr (1765– 1829) below: adelaide ironside, ‘mri from life’ (both private collection) lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20217 the nineteenth century, aesi’s banner disappeared and, despite the efforts of several descendants, remains missing.44 indeed, like the pilgrim of art, this work is probably long-since destroyed. thankfully there are a few contemporary sketches of the volunteer troops in review that now evoke something of that occasion. both images indicate that ‘reviewing of the troops’ typically attracted considerable crowds, including, as we see in the first image, aboriginal people, who are sitting in the front row beside two boys wearing cabbage-tree hats, the well-recognised emblem of native-born men.45 by incorporating elements of this image into aesi’s monument it might be possible to not only dramatize this important moment of her life but also stimulate reflection about relations between the traditional owners of the land and the native-born who adopted the term ‘native’ to assert their primacy over both the original clockwise: adelaide ironside, the pilgrim of art, (1859), now destroyed; adelaide ironside, ‘louisa australia blaxland’ benalla art gallery, nd; adelaide ironside, a small detail depicting caroline clark from the marriage of cana, 1861 (reworked 1863) art gallery of nsw. lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20218 inhabitants and immigrants? in so doing consideration would also be prompted about aesi’s complex status as agent of the colonial project in ways that might also stimulate reflection about the racial assumptions inherent in both native-born patriotism and contemporary australian nationalism. review of the nsw volunteer corp in front of government house, rather than the outer domaine (daniel solander library database) edmund thomas’s image of the volunteer corp amassing in the outer domain earlier that year provides a sense of the drama of the occasion. ‘the grand review and inspection of the regular and volunteer troops in the outer domain’ (illustrated sydney news, 10 mar 1855, 10) lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 20219 although reports differ about whether this banner was made of blue or white silk, all concur that it included the initials – aesi – and a centrepiece comprising four ‘exquisitely embroidered representations of the most beautiful indigenous australian wildflowers’.46 while we will probably never know which flowers aesi chose to depict on her banner, it is likely these were inspired by the forty-three australian wildflower watercolour illustrations she exhibited at the australian museum in december 1854.47 in addition to being the only woman to receive a silver medal for her artwork on this occasion, aesi’s wildflowers were so admired for their ‘vivid titian-like colouring’ and ‘delicacy of feeling’ that they were selected to form part of the first colonial display at an international exhibition, the 1856 paris universal exhibition (1855).48 when she and martha followed her collection to france and her wildflowers received further accolades, aesi took to styling herself as ‘il fiore d’australia’ – from the italian, ‘the australian flower’ or ‘flower from australia’.49 while such elements immediately invite a romantic rendering of aesi in keeping with familiar tropes of nineteenth-century femininity which valorise female beauty and motherhood, it is worth remembering that aesi never married, nor had children and was apparently little interested in her own appearance. instead of including flowers that reinforce such well-known stereotypes, it might be provocative to chose specimens from her collection such as the bristly native heath and grey spider grevillea which are not only plain and prickly, but even peculiar. throughout the eleven years aesi lived in rome, she trained with acclaimed artists and associated with other ‘jolly female bachelors’ who were likewise keen to escape the strictures of their societies and enjoy greater artistic and personal liberty on the continent.50 during that time she secured permission from pope pius ix to learn the difficult art of fresco from a community of reclusive monks and also made a strong impression upon her contemporaries.51 while the poet, robert browning, was suspicious of what he referred to as ‘miss iremonger’s wild and enthusiastic ways’, others were deeply struck by her ‘heightened sensibility’.52 browning’s antagonism was probably provoked by aesi’s celebrated ‘faculty with crystal balls’.53 indeed, one of browning’s expatriate friends even compared the ‘paintings of the imagination’ which she produced for him while staring into one of his crystals, with the works of his old friend, william blake.54 her reputation as a medium may have also helped aesi to lubricate her connections with the president of the royal academy, sir charles eastlake, and his adversary, the celebrated art critic john ruskin.55 throughout this period aesi also became a close acquaintance of sir james clark, who was then best known as queen victoria’s physician but also remembered as the doctor who tended to the poet john keats during his final days in rome in 1821.56 sir james was generous with medical advice when aesi began to show symptoms of ‘rapid consumption’ and then became too ill to hold a paint brush.57 heeding his warning, she and martha left london for rome in late 1866, intending to prepare for their long-awaited return to ‘the beautiful shores’ of their ‘native land’.58 as aesi told dr lang in what was to be her last surviving letter, she and martha were desperate to return home, hoping that there ‘among the mimosa’ she might ‘regain a portion of her health and power’ and finally fulfil her ambitions.59 before the ironsides left london for rome, louisa blaxland helped aesi secure a publisher for her fortythree australian wildflowers.60 an agreement was reached for the production of a ‘gilt trimmed folio’ which required a number of subscriptions at £3 3s each. friends rallied to the cause, but, before these terms were met, aesi, then aged thirty-six, died of tuberculosis. deeply grieving martha decided to have her daughter’s remains embalmed so that she could return to london, secure the outstanding subscriptions and have her daughter’s wildflowers published before sailing home to bury her ‘adored child’ in sydney.61 however, after ‘traipsing the streets’ for more than a year as she tried to drum up the outstanding commitments, martha also became ill.62 and when the publisher declared bankruptcy she too succumbed to tuberculosis.63 the two women were then buried together in london’s west norwood cemetery and while the majority of aesi’s artworks were eventually returned to sydney, her wildflower watercolours were scattered to the winds.64 lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 202110 indeed, having scouring of international and national sources i have found only a handful of newspaper descriptions, one or two possible copies and the original subscription pamphlet, which fortunately lists each specimens she painted. this document confirms that with one exception, these flowers were from new south wales and mostly local to sydney.65 australian wild flowers painted by the late miss adelaide e. ironside, 1866 (courtesy state library of new south wales) what? as christine yeats suggests in her contribution in this collection, one way to counter the imperiousness of nineteenth-century statues is to quite literally remove them from their pedestals.66 it would suit aesi’s republican and democratic politics if, instead of towering above us on a plinth like the statues of her republican colleagues, her monument was set at ground level. i imagine mary and martha, louisa and caroline, picnicking with aesi on a portion of the yurong peninsula where she presented her banner to the voluntary corps in 1855, perhaps as aesi regales them with her poetry or rehearses for the speech she is planning to give when she presents her banner. consciously grounding this monument on gadigal country will also help, as tony ballantyne notes in his discussion of the puhi kai iti/cook landing site, to acknowledge the ‘deeper indigenous perspectives’ and connections with that particular geography.67 surrounding the monuemnt with aesi’s wildflowers, could help to acknowledge the ancient knowledges of the eora people who used these plants for numerous functions. thus far, for example, my consultation with elders has revealed that the bloom of warra garria, lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 202111 grey spider grevillea, indicated when it was time to hunt for shellfish, while the purple flowers of the warraburra, false sarsaparilla, signalled when it was time to fish for fat bream in the saltwater streams.68 the thorny mountain devil, lambertia formosa, which aesi also painted, was one of many that provided sustenance for it released a sweet honey nectar that made for a refreshing energy drink when it was swished in water. 69 in contrast, the nirra nirra or pokulbi, also known as flax lily or dianella, produced a purple berry that was eaten and used for dying baskets. aesi also painted the warada (waratah) which is sacred to numerous aboriginal groups, and only ever used for special ceremonies.70 by collaborating with indigenous experts some off these previously denigrated ancient cultural practices could be restored to country in ways that simultaneously raise awareness about ancient custodianship of the land and highlight aesi’s problematic status in the colonial project. such gestures might also place her monument in dialogue with other indigenous sculptures such as bara, by first nation’s artist judy watson which stands near bennelong point to remind us of the fishhooks that gadigal women made and used for thousands of generations.71 selected lines from aesi’s poems could also be incorporated into her monument in graphic and audio mediums to capture something of her voice and reminds us that there were female republican poets well before henry lawson. 72 the monument might also include a ‘scrying pool’ that uses the reflective and refracting effects of water to invite others to explore aesi’s esoteric interests in ways that put her monument in conversation with other water-based sculptures throughout sydney such as swellstone, which was designed by lucy bleach in ultimo and acknowledges this area as one where the gadigal and local settlers contested the local water supplies.73 and finally, as both aesi and martha were buried together in a distant grave in london, this monument could serve to symbolically return both women to sydney, so they can finally rest, surrounded by the wildflowers that first compelled them upon their pilgrimage.74 conclusion while a monument depicting a party of colonial women picnicking on the yurong peninsula, is a far cry from the furious urgency of the black lives matter protests and statue wars of 2020, i wanted to develop this explorative artist’s brief to experiment with some of the ideas proposed by other contributors regarding the way we might design contemporary monuments to counter acts of memorialisation that have become distressing. to do so, i identified several elements of aesi’s character and context that might ‘talk back’ to the dogmatic secularism of that problematic statuary and converse with more recent form of history-making within sydney’s public sphere. i also suggested that situating aesi’s monument at a location where she once performed her own highly theatrical history-making in ways that challenged many of the gender stereotypes of her age might ensure that her monument speaks on its own terms and in ways that address the ongoing under representation of colonial women in sydney’s statuary. there are certainly many challenges associated with putting anyone on a public pedestal, let alone a nineteenth-century woman who was an energetic participant in australia’s colonial project. nonetheless, by engaging with contemporary ideas of memorialisation outlined in this special issue it may be possible to counter the triumphalist individualism and male heroism of sydney’s statuary in ways that further trouble celebratory narratives regarding the colonial project and its dispossession of australia’s first nation people. in so doing, a public memorial dedicated to remembering aesi can help to ‘alter the stage’ upon which colonial history is ‘narrated and performed’ within the city of sydney. indeed, by grounding the figures of those five women on gadigal country, and surrounding them with indigenous wildflowers as well as a water features that gesture to multiple forms of ancient knowledge, this work is likely to encourage public engagement. thus, ‘the wild and enthusiastic’ aesi might even enjoy the last laugh, for while the remote statues of her republican contemporaries now tower above us in ways that render them increasingly ‘on-thenose’, her monument would be tactile and playful and therefore probably also much more memorable. lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 202112 acknowledgements this research has been funded by the australian research council discovery early career research award, de180100379, ‘historical craft, speculative biography and the case of adelaide ironside’, 2018–2021. special thanks to miguel garcia, librarian at the daniel solander library, sydney botanic gardens for his assistance and encouragement. endnotes 1. adelaide ironside to dr john dunmore lang, 24 october (due to illegibility the date is ambiguous and could be december) 1859, rome, sl nsw mitchell john dunmore lang papers vol 9 ml a2229/203. ‘native-born’ was the term then used to describe europeans born in the colony. the political implications of this are discussed throughout. see also footnote 11. 2. ibid. 3. the phrase about ‘a niche in the colonial valhalla’ is used in ‘dr lang’, colonial times, friday 31 may 1850, p2; charles nicholson to adelaide ironside, 10 january 1860, ‘adelaide eliza scott ironside, correspondence mainly letters received’. ml ms 272/188 cy reel 1036. when adelaide eliza scott ironside was fourteen years old, she added ‘scott’ to her middle name and coined the nickname ‘aesi’. thereafter she signed much of her artwork accordingly and many letters refer to her as ‘miss i’, ‘aei’ and ‘aezi’ as well as aesi. see, for example, wilhelmina lang, 9 february 1853, sl nsw ml lang papers vol 9 ml a2229/203. 4. adelaide ironside to caroline clark, 7 february 1862, adelaide eliza scott ironside, correspondence, ml ms 272/188/97. 5. robert browning to wiliam wetmor story and his wife emelyn edlredge, 19 march 1862, in gertrude reese hudson, browning to his american friends: letters between the brownings, the storys and james russell lowe 1841-1900, bowes and bowes, london, 1965, p104. see also ‘the pilgrim of art’, a poem composed by francesco giocchieri in 1863 in honour of her inclusion within the roman academy of quirites. 6. j. brunton stephens, ‘adelaide ironside’, marlborough chronicle, 20 may 1873, p4; alciphron jones, ‘artidotes: adelaide ironside’, sydney mail, saturday 26 march 1881, p488; ‘the fairest daughter of sydney: adelaide ironside, catholic press, 3 february 1900, p4. 7. jess moody, ‘part 1: statue wars: vandalism or vindication and what to do with the empty plinth?’, history council of nsw webinar history effect series, 20 july 2020. 8. both terms were used by ironside in her letters to caroline clark. see ironside to clark, 7 february 1862. in an early letter clark refers to ironside’s banner presentation, 30 january 1862 society of genealogists 4/12973; although ironside’s art is held by several state and regional galleries there is no publication monument dedicated to her. there is a plaque dedicated to ‘pioneering female artist’, adelaide ironside on the corner of miller and mclaren street in north sydney, where she lived from 1848 to 1853 at burton’s lodge, which her father rented for his estranged wife and child from sir william westbrooke burton. see ‘north sydney, historical plaques walk 2, cammeray to lavender bay’, published by north sydney heritage centre, miller street, nd. 9. archives associated with adelaide ironside are in state library of new south wales’s mitchell library: ml a1826, pxa1759, mss 272/1 & pa1759 cy2620 and the society of australian genealogists (4/12973). other relevant records are located in the new south wales’ state records. in australia, ironside’s artwork is held in the national gallery of australia, museum of tasmania, newcastle regional art gallery and benalla regional art gallery. her descendants have corresp., art and realia. 10. ‘the big questions of women’s history, history extra podcast, 8 march 2021. participants maggie andrews, chair of the women’s history network; stella dadzie, author of a kick in the belly: women, slavery and resistance, helen mccarthy, author of double lives: a history of working motherhood and nicola phillips, director of the bedford centre for the history of women and gender. https://www.historyextra.com/period/21st-century/big-questions-womens-history-panel-2021 podcast/. 11. benjamin t. jones, ‘currency culture: australian identity and nationalism in new south wales before the gold rushes’, australian historical studies, vol 48, no 1, 2017, pp68-85 https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461x.2016.1250789; kiera lindsey, ‘sydney 1844: lanty o’liffey and the currency lass’, visual material and print culture in nineteenth century ireland. editors ciara breathnach and catherine lawless, dublin: four courts press, 2010); john molony, the native born: the first white australians, melbourne university press, melbourne, 2000, pp1-38. 12. brad west, ‘dialogical memorialization, international travel and the public sphere: a cultural sociology of commemoration and tourism at the first world war gallipoli battlefields’, tourist studies, vol 10, no 3, 2010, pp209-225; 210. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797611407756 13. henry lawson’s statue is located on mrs macquarie’s road in the sydney botanic gardens and was commissioned in 1927, five years after his death and officially dedicated in 1931. 14. although at times seen as contentious, readings emphasising lawson’s bigotry emerged across the 1970s and 1980s, with notable examples including humphrey mcqueen, a new britannia: an argument concerning the social origins of lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 202113 https://www.historyextra.com/period/21st-century/big-questions-womens-history-panel-2021-podcast/ https://www.historyextra.com/period/21st-century/big-questions-womens-history-panel-2021-podcast/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461x.2016.1250789 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797611407756 australian radicalism and nationalism, rev ed. penguin, ringwood, 1976, pp104-16 and xavier pons, ‘henry lawson and the australian racism’, anglistik & englischunterricht 16, 1982, pp73-83. feminist scholarship of the period placed new emphasis upon the masculinist nature of ‘the bush’, with miriam dixon describing lawson as representative of a largely misogynist tradition. see miriam dixon, the real matilda: woman and identity in australia, 1788 to the present, rev ed, penguin, sydney, 1984, pp11-12. for a contemporary reading of lawson’s racism and xenophobia, see manu samriti chander, brown romantics: poetry and nationalism in the global nineteenth century, bucknell university press, lewisburg, pa, 2017, pp83-85; 109-110. for recent critical commentary on lawson’s abusive marriage, and its implications for viewing his statue, see kerrie davies, a wife’s heart: the untold story of bertha and henry lawson, university of queensland press, st lucia, 2017, pp2-5. 15. west, dialogical memorialization, p214. 16. ibid, p216. 17. ibid, dialogical memorialization, p221. 18. greg dening, performances, melbourne university press, melbourne, 1992, p37. 19. ironside mentions positive reviews received from sir william stirling, ‘a classical critic and judge of the highest art’, adelaide ironside to dr john dunmore lang, 17 september 1862, london, sl nsw mitchell john dunmore lang papers vol 9 ml a2229/203. 20. adelaide ironside, ‘to one of the haters of the people’, the people’s advocate, 4 march 1854, p4; adelaide ironside, ‘the eternity of hell, the people’s advocate, 2 april 1853, p8; adelaide ironside, ‘dirge on the duke of wellington, the people’s advocate, 26 march 1853, p8; adelaide ironside, ‘to thomas o’meagher’, the people’s advocate, 12 march 1853, p8. 21. adelaide ironside, ‘dirge on leichhardt’, the people’s advocate, 19 march 1853, p4. 22. luke clossey, kyle jackson, brandon marriott, andrew redden, and karin velez, ‘the unbelieved and historians, part i: a challenge’, history compass, vol 14, no 12, 2016, pp594-602. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12360; luke clossey, kyle jackson, brandon marriott, andrew redden. and karin velez, ‘the unbelieved and historians, part ii: proposals and solutions’, history compass, vol 15, no 1, 2017, pp1-9. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12370; roland clark, luke clossey, simon ditchfield, david m gordon, arlen wisenthal and taymiya r. zaman, ‘the unbelieved and historians, part iii: responses and elaborations’, history compass, vol 15, no 12, 2017, pp1-10. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12430 23. elizabeth barrett browning to isa blagden, 17 september 1857, the brownings’ correspondence, 24, pp140-142. 24. charles nicholson to adelaide ironside, 10 january 1860, ml mss 272, 188. 25. martha ironside to dr john lang, 18 june 1867, sl nsw mitchell lang papers vol 9, ml a2229/251. see for example, alciphron jones, ‘artidotes: adelaide ironside, artist, sydney mail and new south wales advertiser, 26 march 1881, pp488489. 26. nicholson, op cit. 27. adelaide ironside to dr lang 17 september 1862, sl nsw mitchell john dunmore lang papers vol 9, ml a2229/224; adelaide ironside to dr lang, 25 september 1862, sl nsw mitchell john dunmore lang papers vol 9, ml a2229/224/232. 28. these phrases are from ironside’s poem ‘australia’ which was published over several months in the people’s advocate, commencing 18 june 1853. 29. peter cochrane, ‘exploring the historical imagination: narrating the shape of things unknown’, griffith review, vol 31, 2011, pp83-97 is quoting hugh trevor-roper, history & imagination, gerald duckworth, london, 1981. 30. kiera lindsey, the convict’s daughter, allen & unwin, crows nest, 2016; kiera lindsey, ‘the convict’s daughter: speculations on biography’, australian women’s history network blog. accessed october 10, 2016. http://www.auswhn.org.au/ blog/speculations-on-biography. 31. slade private collection. unknown (possibly richard reed jnr (1796-1862) thought to be a portrait of mary redman, adelaide ironside’s grandmother watercolour on paper 17.3x12.5cm original frame. reed was a portrait painter based on pitt street. no conclusive connect exists between him and richard reed the elder. 32. much has been written about the reputation of convict women as polluted whores. most notably and in chronological order) ann summers, damned whores and god’s police, new south publishing, sydney, 1975; deborah oxley, convict maids: the forced migration of women to australia, cambridge university press, melbourne, 1996; joy damousi, depraved and disorderly: female convicts, sexuality and gender in colonial australia, cambridge university press, melbourne, 1996 https://doi. org/10.1017/cbo9780511470172; sian rees, the floating brothel, hodder, sydney, 2001; babette smith, a cargo of women: susannah watson and the convicts of the princess royal, allen & unwin, crows nest, 2008. 33. re pilgrim of art, the art gallery of new south wales holds a letter from martha ironside’s brother, 21 july 1871, asking them to ‘find room for miss ironside’s principal pictures in a suitable position upon the walls’; see also poulton, pp86-87 citing margaret preston, ‘pioneer women artists, in flora eldershaw, the peaceful army, arthur mcquilty & co, sydney, 1938, p126. 34. there are two letters between the women, the first of which has been overlooked because it was cited as being from ‘mr ironside’, adelaide ironside to louise blaxland, london, 23 august 1866, sl nsw mitchell-blaxland family papers, mlmss 9704; blaxland to ironside, 26 february 1867, sl nsw mitchell ml ms 272/1-4. lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 202114 https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12360 https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12370 https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12430 http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/speculations-on-biography http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/speculations-on-biography https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511470172 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511470172 35. ironside to clark, february 7 1862, op cit 36. clark to ironside, 30 january 1862, op cit. 37. parliament of nsw first legislative council petition from citizens of sydney on the renewal of transportation. tabled wednesday 25 september 1850. (hyperlink petition from citizens of sydney on the renewal of transportation. 38. kiera lindsey, ‘sydney’s 9189 “sister politicians” who petitioned queen victoria’, the conversation, 18 october 2019. 39. thomas carlyle, on heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history, james fraser, london, 1841. 40. the volunteer corps were first formed in response to colonial fears of a russian invasion during the crimean war 1853-1856. ’the volunteers’, tasmanian daily news, 8 august 1855, 1; sydney morning herald, 19 june 1855, p1; ‘presentation of colours to the volunteer corps’, sydney morning herald, 21 june 1855, p5. 41. ‘new south wales’, colonial times, 3 july 1855, p2. 42. ‘presentation of colours to the volunteer corps’, people’s advocate, 23 june 1855, p2; 43. of the poem see henry halloran, ‘on the presentation of the banner by miss ironside to the united volunteers’, sydney morning herald, 13 july 1855, p2; on the imitation of this event see ‘presentation of camp colours’, sydney morning herald, 11 february 1861, p4; ‘volunteer flag’, illawarra mercury, 22 november 1870, p3. this article ‘directs attention to the ladies of wollongong’ regarding the ‘want of company colours’ for their volunteer corps. while ‘every company… in the colony have their particular flag or colours… invariably performed by the ladies of different localities where each corps is established… the first ceremony of that kind’ to take place, the paper notes, was by ‘the late lamented miss adelaide e scott ironside’. 44. sl nsw ml a1826 ironside paper and sketches 1863-1921, includes a lengthy exchange between two descendants which are dated from the 1890s. a december 1900 letter to the sydney morning herald presents the reminiscences of george r. dibbs, a former member of the volunteer corps who describes a beautiful blue silk banner created by ‘one of australia’s most gifted and brilliant daughters’. despite his belief that ironside was a great ‘patriot’, dibbs curiously claims that the banner was motivated by romantic sentiment rather than political ideals. ‘early colonial volunteers’, sydney morning herald, 20 december 1900, p4. 45. kiera lindsey, ‘a mistress of her own consent: the abduction of mary ann gill, sydney 1848’, melbourne historical journal, university of melbourne, december 2009, pp47-70. kiera lindsey, ‘sydney 1844: lanty o’liffey & the currency lass’, in ciara breathnach and catherine lawless (eds), visual material and print culture in nineteenth century ireland, four courts press, dublin, 2010. 46. people’s advocate, 23 june 1855, p2. 47. ‘new south wales brach of the paris exhibition’, people’s advocate, saturday 20 december 1854, p4. 48. catalogue of the natural and industrial products of new south wales exhibited in the australian museum by the paris exhibition commissioners, sydney, november 1854. 49. adelaide ironside, commonday book, private collection. 50. the most famous of these was the american sculptress harriet g. hosmer who was extremely successful in her profession and notorious for flouting social conventions and conducting her relationships with other women in public. hosmer was a colleague of ironside, and perhaps a rival for the attention of the welsh sculptor, john gibson, who was the doyen of the expatriate artworld in rome. see also see barbara caine, ‘introduction la bella liberta’, women’s writing, vol 10, no 2, 2003, pp237-240; deb cherry, beyond the frame: feminism and visual culture 1850-1900, routledge, london, 2000; ros pesman, ‘the italian renaissance in australia’, parergon 14, no 1, 1996, pp223-239. https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.1996.0088; ros pesman, ‘in search of professional identity: adelaide ironside and italy’, women’s writing, vol 10, no 2, 2003, pp307328. 51. while neither the famous poetess, elizabeth browning, nor harriet hosmer were granted access to see the celebrated frescos of fra angelo in st marco in florence, ironside received the pope’s permission and several letters from the monks of chapel san savero in perugia, indicate she earned their admiration. see for example bonsiglio, giovannigualtberto to adelaide ironside, 29 october 1858, sl nsw mitchell ironside family papers, ml a2229/305; adelaide ironside to john dunmore lang, rome, august 1861, sl nsw mitchell lang papers vol 9 ml a2229/203; ironside to lang, october 1859, op cit. 52. pesman, ‘professional identity’, pp314–315, describes browning’s attitude to ironside, citing his letters to american sculptor william wetmore story, march 19, 1862 (see hudson, browning, p104), and isa blagden, june 19, 1867 (see mcaleer, dearest isa, 269); ‘obituary: adelaide ironside’, the athenaeum, 11 may 1867, pp624-625. 53. full further discussion about ironside’s mediumship see kiera lindsey, ‘scrying the lost wildflowers of wee witchee wee’, donna brien and kiera lindsey (eds), speculative biography: experiments, opportunities & provocations, routledge, london, 2021, in press. 54. seymour kirkup to joseph severn, june 23, 1864, life and letters, pp260-261. 55. there are fourteen letters from sir james clark to adelaide ironside, sl nsw mitchell ironside paper and sketches a1826. lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 202115 https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/rdgucwlv8zfzweoyhmh5jk?domain=parliament.nsw.gov.au https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.1996.0088 56. george whitfield, beloved sir james: the life of sir james clark, bart, physician to queen victoria, 1788-1870, unpublished gift to birmingham university ya 2001.a.8333, 2001. 57. martha ironside to lang, london, 18 june 1867, op cit. 58. adelaide ironside to dr lang, rome, 10 january 1867, lang papers vol 9 ml a2229/203. 59. ibid. 60. blaxland letters op cit; john d day to adelaide ironside, 18 august 1866, society of genealogists, 4/12973. 61. martha ironside to lang, op cit. 62. laura wentworth to thomasina fisher, 29 january 1869 and 25 march 1869, sl nsw mitchell-wentworth family papers, ml a868-74. 63. wentworth to fisher, 25 march 1869, wentworth family papers, ml a868-74. 64. ‘fine art exhibition: paintings and studies of the late a e ironside 235 pitt street, sydney morning herald, 29 december 1870, p8; ‘fine arts exhibition: miss ironside’s paintings’, sydney morning herald, wednesday 29 march 1871, p5; ‘removal of miss ironside’s paintings and work of art (valued at £5000) to 300 george street’, sydney morning herald, 1 april 1871, p9. 65. in addition to the consulting the following texts and databases i also interviewed the following re: the indigenous significance of ironside’s wildflowers. texts and databases: fran bodkin, d’harawal: dreaming stories, envirobook, sussex inlet, 2013. originally accessed december 10, 2020. https://dharawalstories.com/stories-about-animals; alan fairley and phillip moore, native plants of the sydney region: from newcastle to nowra and west to the dividing range, jacana books, crows nest, 2010; beth gott and rod mason. ‘ethnobotany of south east australia’, australian institute of aboriginal and torres strait islander studies, ms 4449; les robinson, field guide to the native plants of sydney, kangaroo press, east roseville, 2003. interviews: fran bodkin (dharawal elder), the australian botanic gardens, mt annan, 12 march 2020; peter cuneo (manager of the seedbank), the australian botanic gardens, mt annan, 11 march 2020; lesley elkan and catherine wardrop (botanic illustrators), sydney botanic gardens, 9 december 2019; lesley neuhold (horticulturalist), the australian botanic gardens, mt annan, 13 march 2020. 66. christine yates, ‘should they stay or should they go?’, in kiera lindsey and mariko smith (eds), ‘‘the statue wars’, public history review, june 2021. 67. ballantyne, ‘toppling the past?’. 68. kiera lindsey, ‘indigenous approaches to the past: “creative histories” at the hyde park barracks, sydney’, australasian journal of popular culture, vol 9, no 1, march 2020, pp83-102; 94-95. https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00017_1 69. ibid. 70. bodkin, d’harawal: dreaming stories includes one dedicated to the waratah which differs from another told by aunty julie freeman who is a gorawarl/jerrawongarla senior cultural knowledge holder. see youtube, julie freeman, 2013, waratah creation story (online) available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qflno3fz_a8 (accessed 3 may 2021). see also stories with aunty julie freeman (online) 2016 available: http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/event/stories-with-aunty julie-freeman (accessed 3 may 2021).wiradjuri kamilaroi artist, jonathan jones discusses freeman’s story of the waratah in his interview with the author, 23 august 2020. see kiera lindsey, anna clark, mariko smith, craig batty, donna brien and rachel launders, ‘creative histories and the australian context’, history australia, forthcoming 2021. 71. re ‘bara’ see: https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/bara/, accessed 12 december 2020. 72. henry lawson, ‘song of the republic’, the bulletin, vol 8, no 400, 1 october 1887, p4. although scholars such as mark mckenna have attempted to highlight the importance of women to early australian republicanism, others have elided their contributions to simply present lawson’s poem as a foundational text. mark mckenna, the captive republic: a history of republicanism in australia 1788-1996, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1996, p154; george williams and david hume, people power: the history and future of the referendum in australia, unsw press, sydney, 2010, p181. some scholars have also articulated the need for ironside to be placed in republican tradition, with david headon and elizabeth perkins declaring in 1998 that ‘this forgotten republican has to be re-claimed’. david headon and elizabeth perkins (eds), our first republicans: john dunmore lang, charles harpur, daniel henry deniehy: selected writings 1840-1860, the federation press, annandale, 1998, p133. 73. re ‘swellstone’ see, https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/swellstone/, accessed 12 december 2020. 74. adelaide ironside quoting martha to dr lang, 24 october 1859, op cit. lindsey public history review, vol. 28, 202116 https://dharawalstories.com/stories-about-animals https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00017_1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qflno3fz_a8 http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/event/stories-with-aunty-julie-freeman http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/event/stories-with-aunty-julie-freeman https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/bara/ https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/swellstone/ public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: collay, j. 2022. a queer search for ancestral legitimacy: english-language gay lists as historical memory before 1969. public history review, 29, 20–30 https://doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8130 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj articles (peer reviewed) a queer search for ancestral legitimacy: english-language gay lists as historical memory before 1969 jay collay independent scholar, massachusetts, united states corresponding author: jay collay, independent scholar, massachusetts, united states, jcollay@protonmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8130 article history: received 24/03/2022; accepted 12/08/2022; published 12/08/2022 this article examines the making of ‘gay lists’—identifying (in)famous historical figures as queer by assembling wide-ranging roll calls—as a longstanding mechanism of historical memory. there is a tendency in the present cultural imagination to conceive of queer history as something new. not the history of queer people, who may, we are often assured, be identified in all places and all times as a historical constant. but history as told by queer people. actively queered history, one might say, where queering serves as a verb that implies reading with intent to develop a queer connotation.1 a common assumption is that queer history did not emerge until the zeitgeist of the 1970s codified ‘queer’ as a political identity in america, and consequently any history was constructed in accordance with a newly developing identity politics. when linked with a narrative that uses the stonewall uprising to mark the beginning of the modern lgbtq+ rights movement, this sensibility creates an impression of queer lives in the first half of the twentieth century and earlier as universally suppressed, contained or otherwise isolated. the research provided here seeks to demonstrate how prior to the abovedelimited timeline, individual english-language writers used their knowledge of the past to contextualise queer subjects and place them within historical narratives. the application of particular labels ascribing gender and sexuality to figures who lived and died before those labels were introduced is generally considered poor practice. ‘queer’ is broad enough to draw fewer complaints than, say, homosexual, but it still seems prudent to clarify its use in this article. the term here applies to any individual expressing gender affiliations or sexual desires that noticeably deviated from contemporary societal expectations. it is intentionally broad, and in keeping with norms of the eras examined, considers gender and sexuality as facets of identity that inform each other. also in keeping with the norms of declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 20 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8130 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8130 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj mailto:jcollay@protonmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8130 the eras examined, certain expressions of gender are highlighted as deviant and privileged with notation in historical sources over others; individuals mentioned are most likely to have been men engaged in samesex relations or viewed as men engaging in gender-nonconforming dress or expression. while certain lists include women or figures visibly affiliating themselves with a gender other than the one they were assigned by society, most of the people whose names have been preserved can be classified as men, as is the case for most of the field of history. the question of ‘identity’ is tangential to this article. various documents examined herein have already been identified as queer by other researchers. there are different arguments on whether it is ahistorical to claim a sense of queer community identity before the late twentieth century. this issue will not be directly addressed here, though to a certain extent the extant data self-select in favor of those people who collected disparate materials to create a sense of community. said self-selection was often performed in the context or connection with the slowly growing homophile movement that began to flourish in the wake of sexology’s growth as a field, though not all of the documents included can be described as homophile publications. consequently, though this researcher only set a hard upper bound on the period under examination, the majority of the documents examined in this paper were published after 1900. research was limited to english-language documents from the outset so the works examined might have the potential to be in conversation with each other. however, this article does not argue that all of these documents are expressing different facets of the same immutable identity that all of the writers shared. all of these documents are in line with what may be considered queer from a modern perspective, and approaching them as a collective offers modern readers the chance to examine the multiplicity of past ideas that are contained in our perspective. here i choose to approach queer history as history, and not as an area of queer theory to be expanded using the literary analysis techniques that have often featured in the methodological toolbox of queer studies. in addition to materials from the field of queer history, the following analysis considers work on historical theory and historiographical trends. queer history has not been immune to the evergreen attitude that queer theory is a young field of study, as discussed by gayle rubin in her 2003 lecture ‘geologies of queer studies: it’s deja vu all over again’. in the context of queer history, this prevailing sensibility of the field as eternally just-born means that there has been little specific analysis of overall methodologies, trends and specifics. where it would not detract from analysis, comparisons to wider historical methodology and trends have been incorporated to see how queer history has followed or defied them. the historiographical emphasis is an area that this author feels is particularly ripe for further analysis, as queer history both requires and offers unique tools and perspectives for historical thinking. gay lists are one of the most enduring and under-examined threads of not just queer history but revisionist history in general. ‘gay’ here is used as a general catch-all term for ‘men and women known to be attracted to other members of their sex’, though the various collections of biographies and collected encyclopedic entries have had their own criteria and focuses, including where the trans* community has joined in on the fun.2 these lists are reminiscent of the sort of history that has been described as ‘add women and stir,’ the sense that the most widely known narratives have excluded certain figures and the way to fix it is to chop those figures out of their original context and shove them in. while frequently perpetuated and noticed, the concept has not really been named, and so this article sticks to ‘gay lists’ for ease of referral and in the casual spirit of their use. despite the lack of a particular term, it would be ludicrous to claim the concept has not been studied at all. christopher nealon identifies gay lists as ‘the simple yet enduring practice’ which provides both content for and evidence of gayle rubin’s ethnic model of homosexual identity.3 gerard koskovich’s pre-history of queer history notes that ‘medical, psychological, and legal publications dealing with sex not infrequently featured historical details…of the supposed prevalence of homosexuality among noted figures of the past.’4 michael bronski criticizes the modern iterations of the trend, which he calls the ‘family album approach’, as collay public history review, vol. 29, 202221 ‘appealing because it provides a sense of identity and history, but… ultimately misleading.’5 (he also makes the ‘add one woman and stir’ comparison.) rictor norton’s the myth of the modern homosexual, though occasionally descending into disdainful critiques of constructionist theory, spends an entire chapter on ‘the great queens of history’ and the people who have named them, in one section collecting lists as evidence for a shared notion of communal identity as far back as the sixteenth century.6 he proceeds to trace them even further back in languages other than english, noting that boccaccio’s genealogia deorum of 1375 provides a list of homosexual pairs among the gods, and that several twelfth century debates ‘cite the loves of jupiter and ganymede, apollo and hyacinthus, silvanus and cyparissus.’7 norton makes an extensive argument for gay lists as both markers and makers of community, positing the notion that these lists exist to refute a homophobic society’s idea of an inherent queer inferiority as a secondary purpose, behind establishing cultural unity. in the name of cultural unity, his definition of lists draws on citation of both mythological and historical precedent. history and myth do very much blur in queer history, not just in time periods where it is common for mythology to serve as record or precedent, but also in more recent events elevated to mythological status. one example is oscar wilde’s infamous speech while being cross-examined during his 1896 trial on the subject of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’, invoking plato, michelangelo, shakespeare and david and johnathan.8 the phrase itself originates from a poem, read as part of the cross-examination, written by lord alfred douglas, the man whose affair with wilde led douglas’s father to take wilde to court. the trial in general and this speech in particular have been the primary sources of wilde attaining a certain fabulous status in queer discussion. however, invoking historical and mythical references as the same analytical category is reductive. i have chosen to distinguish the presence of mythological figures in lists and references from the presence of historical figures. the body of available evidence certainly expands when regarding myth as an aspect of history. but to conflate them is to obscure certain variations in the ways icons from each are collected and deployed, in favor of only examining the places where they blur. some historical surveys, like the reprinted editorial featured in female mimics or wilde’s speech, do principally act as political defense. others are, as norton champions, for the sake of building a cultural identity. sometimes lists are invoked simply for the sake of gravitas, to add to the solemnity of the situation. often, thanks to the flexibility of interpretation and the communal aspects of building queer identity, they are many things to many readers. including, because this is the queer community and camp humor is a way of life, something to be questioned and perhaps mocked. in the first edition of the second volume of one magazine, a monthly homophile publication created by a group that split off from the mattachine society to pursue more radical goals, the editors publish an ‘excerpt from a reply to a letter in which a friend asked for a donation to one’. the letter announces: i’m not sending you a check to help support the magazine you wrote about simply—and i hope i won’t offend you by being quite frank about it—because i can’t see what possible need there is for such a magazine or how it could possibly do any good. i haven’t seen it, to be sure, and so have no real right to form any judgement about it; but i can imagine the kind of articles that will appear in it: a certain percentage of them will drag in various tag ends of plato and infer, without being able actually to say so, that he advocated homosexuality as an institution; others will point to great artists, writers, and musicians of the past who are known to have been homosexual, and the inference will be: “see! these men were great because they were homosexual!”… it will be a beating of the drum with no one around to hear.9 clearly, gay lists do not provide a universal sense of cultural unity, nor do all members of the queer community perceive them as adequate. though given that the unquoted portions of this letter took a similarly negative attitude toward potential magazine articles quoting psychologists and went on to defend the writer’s disdain as being principally owed to what they saw as the magazine’s inability to attain collay public history review, vol. 29, 202222 circulation outside the homosexual community, it can hardly said there was a particular enmity towards historical lists. the letter may be read on its own as a wider example of attitudes towards homophile organizing methods of the time. one thing the letter does make clear regarding gay lists is the sense that they are ubiquitous. if the evocation of past events is understood to qualify as history, they are perhaps the most frequent and widespread examples of engagement with queer history. both the lists themselves and commentary on them—such as this letter—represent a long conversation full of tension over questions of legacy, inheritance, and validity. this is not a conversation conducted only among identified members of the gay community, or the queer community at large. in a 1913 pamphlet on the subject of ‘walt whitman’s anomaly’, w.c. rivers—who did not, himself, identify as homosexual—makes an extensive case for whitman possessing an ‘inverted sexuality.’ his chief subject of analysis is whitman’s own poetry. but he also makes use of biographical information and excerpts from letters in the spirit of a full examination of whitman’s life. one inconsistency rivers addresses, describing it as ‘another thing that cannot quite be accounted for,’ is ‘the absence of any recorded liking for literature of a type similar to his own calamus’—the piece of whitman’s that rivers identifies as having the most explicitly gay content. yet although he talks about socrates, and although translations and classical dictionaries must have been within his reach, and although plenty of better-educated friends could have pointed out to him his forerunners, he has nothing to say of sappho, of the banquet, or of other greek literature in which the influence of the homosexual may be seen. several times he descants on shakespeare, but there is no word (or rather, no word preserved) of the sonnets.10 this passage is not sufficient evidence of absence concerning whitman’s own sense of history to analyze what narratives he may have been familiar with—note the awareness of ‘no word preserved’—but it does provide some extremely interesting insights on an outsider’s expectations of queer history. in the foreword of the book, rivers calls the current common approach towards any literary discussion of sexual behavior ‘dumfounded and nihilistic; in the case of inversion, very markedly so’.11 rivers goes on to optimistically predict that the advancements in sex study made by the freudian school will help combat prejudice against examining ‘the human sex-instinct’, and sees himself as filling a void that exists because ‘scientific study of sex’ was not contemporary with whitman’s writings.12 despite rivers’s understanding that his undertaking is treading fairly uncharted ground, he is confident in his belief that whitman, as a gay man, should be interested in reading known gay literature and seeking out his ‘forerunners’. rivers also assumes his readers will believe this, to the point where they will find his failure to find any evidence of whitman’s familiarity with a gay literary tradition as a fault in his argument. it is also taken for granted by the author that shakespeare’s sonnets and the works of sappho depict homosexual attraction. the idea that these works are emblematic of queer literature is widely accepted today, even as this status is presented as a sign of recent enlightenment where queer acceptance and visibility is concerned.13 rivers’s impulse to assume the drive towards listing is an inherent aspect of homosexuality is perhaps a product of his time. though the most famous data from the sexologists’ sexuality research primarily focused on psychological causes, norton sources many of the lists cited throughout the twentieth century to notable sexologist havelock ellis’s work sexual inversion, in particular the chapters where john symonds assisted.14 the material for ellis’s book largely came from symonds’s own experience as an art historian specializing in the renaissance and ancient greece.15 one wonders if the preoccupation of queer history (or at least queer mythology) with these periods today is at least partly due to the specialization of a primary practitioner at a time when the field of queer history was far narrower. collay public history review, vol. 29, 202223 symonds’s own book, a problem in modern ethics, has very little to do with lists. at one point he translates a historical survey composed by french author dr paul moreau in order to rebut his arguments, but speaks of general arguments rather than repeating specific names.16 in this case, the lack of lists may be attributed to the framing of symonds’s attempt to appeal to doctors and jurists of the present day and rebut several arguments against homosexuality where ethics are concerned. this pattern of multi-disciplinary approaches—turning to questions of psychology, legality and religion—recurs in the homophile magazines of the mid twentieth century. another book of the same time period, which features numerous lists, is edward prime-stevenson’s the intersexes. it did not attain the reach of havelock ellis’s book, with its limited printing in italy of only 125 copies. but there are several compelling reasons for using it as a case study in queer historiography. the first is that it exists, and that its limited printing has made it so far somewhat under-examined (the internet has solved many accessibility issues). the second reason is that the text was assembled as ‘a very full, carefully systemized, minutely complete history of homosexualism... reviewing it in every social phase, every relationship to human civilization’.17 while his success in this endeavor is arguable, the scale of his ambition is compelling. the third reason is that prime-stevenson remained in correspondence with several other upper-class ‘uranians’18 during the writing of the book, sending some of them copies afterwards, and consulted a work annually published in german and edited by magnus hirschfield with numerous contributors.19 the book may therefore be understood as a document constructed from communal knowledge. if it is not directly linkable to some of the communal queer archives of the late twentieth century, it at least provides an interesting study in contrasts. a fourth reason to study the book, and one that applies most directly to the other materials examined in this paper, is that it was assembled in direct response to prime-stevenson’s experience that there were very few english-language texts about homosexuality available for perusal. his motivations extend beyond merely making information more accessible to english-speaking readers. the author uses ‘anglo-saxon’ to both succinctly describe the anglophone world and integrate eugenic and racial ranking ideology, sometimes falling into and sometimes arguing with the common scientific thinking of the time that viewed sex habits as a subset of racial differences. symonds called out the inconsistency of these same arguments in his a problem in modern ethics, insisting ‘it is illogical to treat sexual inversion among the modern european races as a malady, when you refer its prevalence among oriental peoples and the ancient hellenes to custom’.20 both symonds and prime-stevenson are in conversation with racialized ideas of sex and ideas of the exotic, and addressing this topic in full would be the work of another complete paper. the exchange of ideas among eugenicists and sexologists deserves extensive study. while lacking the space to explore it extensively, this analysis works to remain conscious of its influence. some places the racist influence is very obvious, such as prime-stevenson’s comparison of ‘savage’ and ‘refined civilizations’ as he catalogs the appearance of homosexuality across ‘the brute world; in primitive, barbarous, and semi-civilized man.’21 the most obvious influence is his tendency to list figures from european history and only glance at general societal trends from anywhere else. the book’s lists appear for different purposes. often they are broad catalogues to illustrate a larger point, such as the one filling out the section on ‘degrees of uranianism in men’ (reproduced on page seven in full).22 in the opening chapter, prime-stevenson lists out several famous examples of close friendships between men that have shaped the course of history to demonstrate the necessity of a history of what he refers to as ‘similisexual’ (homosexual) attraction. his analysis of ‘the types of great “friendships”, of passionate intimacy, between two men of sensitive mutuality’ makes the bold argument that ‘however displeasing to the reader, let it be affirmed that all real friendships between men have a sexual germ.’23 this claim is especially fascinating and delightful to those historians and literature analysts commonly chastised for projecting homosexual implications onto male friendships. collay public history review, vol. 29, 202224 chapter eight provides the categories of ‘the uranian and the uraniad in the military and naval careers; in the athletic professions: and in royal, political and aristocratic social life: types and biographies’, sorting out several examples of (in)famous men and women he identifies as connected to his definition of ‘similisexualism’.24 as the book is 640 pages long, historiographic analysis will focus largely on this one chapter in the name of conciseness. prime-stevenson distinguishes the female ‘urianiad’ from the male ‘uranian’, and spends separate chapters on the ‘general physical and psychological diagnosis’ of each.25 thereafter, he lists both men and women in chapters grouped by topic, spending the last eleven pages of chapter eight (seventy pages long) on topics such as ‘the royal uraniad’, ‘the soldier-uraniad’, catalina de eraso, angela postovoitow and ‘the uraniad as a sailor’.26 he is interested less in confirmed same-sex attraction, and more in evidence of gender-nonconforming behavior, providing some interesting examples—such as a catalogue of numerous female sailors, including nearly three thousand on the brittany coast of france alone.27 his inclusion and criteria raise interesting points about the connection of women’s sexuality to their social roles and the overlap of marginalized histories. prime-stevenson’s broad categories of lists allow him to make specific arguments with each section, in addition to providing an organizing schema. chapter eight opens by pushing back against ‘the notion that the man-loving man is always effeminate in body and temper’, and goes on to argue that the army and navy are actually more likely to contain men and women inclined towards same-sex attraction.28 in this argument, there is initially a brief listing of names—vasco de gama, cornelis van tromp, magellan, domingo magalhaes, and ‘[o]ne of the most eminent of english naval commanders of the century just closed’, whose involvement in a homosexual scandal was apparently suppressed vigorously—before expanding into general analysis of british naval life.29 the general analysis draws from specific letters to describe contemporary reports of homosexual activity in the british navy, but cites a novel, roderick random, to make the case ‘[t]hat the british navy long ago was remarked for homosexual cultures’.30 prime-stevenson continues using fiction to bolster his historical evidence, relating specific reports in the form of recopied or translated news articles with names redacted or synopses of particular novels and operas, as well as making general reference to sexuality-related scandals by mentioning that ‘several such dramas may be fresh in the minds of reader of this study’.31 since prime-stevenson’s book had such a limited printing, and therefore a limited effect on which figures recurred on gay lists throughout the twentieth century, some of his lists are often a surprising mix of familiar names and what today seem to be outrageous claims. there is certainly something to be said for establishing a historical figure as gay through dint of repetition. the list of male friendships he claims as homosexual relationships, for example, contains the familiar figures of alexander the great and hephaestion, and the much less familiar figures of john the baptist and jesus christ, horace walpole and sir henry conway, and general gordon and lord arthur hamilton.32 one aspect of his writing more useful to a study of history than historiography are the parts where prime-stevenson applies a critical lens to certain ethical problems that persist within ‘uranian’ circles thanks to the refusal of polite society to address or acknowledge homosexuality. some of them, like the threat of blackmail, are familiar and expected to a twenty-first-century reader. others are unusual and convey a much more practical and complex view than is generally assumed of the subculture of homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century. for example, prime-stevenson devotes several pages to analyzing the phenomenon of the ‘soldier-prostitute’, and the issues that arise when soldiers are viewed by wealthy men as preferred sexual partners because the livelihood of a soldier or sailor is dependent on the liaison not becoming public.33 he also discusses the potential for abuse within the chain of command, exacerbated by a need to maintain silence, something that remains an issue within various militaries today.34 collay public history review, vol. 29, 202225 one particular list on degrees of uranianism in men on pages 77-78, referenced earlier in this paper and reproduced below in full, brings both the issues of complexity and of unexpected names to the forefront. after providing the list, prime-stevenson proceeds to sort some of these figures into either complete uranians, with ‘sexual desire only towards the male’, or those with ‘a strongly masculine sexualism… mixed, illogically, with powerful similisexual instincts… the individuality seems to be fairly split into two’, that is, men who are recorded as sometimes being gender non-conforming, or finally those ‘examples of almost complete and normal manliness of sex-instinct.’35 prime-stevenson states that the classification of ‘minuter grades’ are a staple of other contemporary sexological texts—given that the intersexes is confirmed as one of numerous books on sexology acquired by alfred kinsey for his sex research, we can reasonably trace the threads of this classification theory down to kinsey’s more famous scale of sexual attraction.36 the… man out of any sort of similisexual tendency, usually is termed dionian, dionid, or dionist. hence the use of such qualifying phrases in speaking of modified uranians… minuter grades can be dismissed by the average reader as needlessly precise. the complete uranian, the dionian-uranian, and the (similar) uranian-dionian cover all essential grades between intersex and entire masculinity. they take in all the degrees of similisexual love and its physical expression, in hundreds of instances of complete or partial expression. such types are alexander the great, martial, beethoven, rafaello, oscar wilde, robespierre, william rufus, nero, lord byron, sir isaac newton, gilles de rais, david, jonathan, pope alexander vi, general tilly, prince eugene of savoy, henri iii, shakespeare, platen, cellini, heliogabalus, jérome duquesnoy, st. augustine, molière, frederick the great, michel-angelo, charles xii of sweden, peter the great, montaigne, pausanias, beza, tschaikovsky, grillparzer, erasmus, bishop atherton of waterford, winkelmann, servetus, gonsalvo de cordova, socrates, hfilderlin, abu nuwas, hadrian, the caesars, alexander i of russia; innumerable other indisputable instances of the emotion among, especially, notable minds and men; met under all environments, in all professions and social standings.37 some of these names are familiar evocations in the context of queerness to a modern reader. others are more obscure. others are familiar, but for reasons far removed from queerness—most notably, robespierre and gilles de rais. prime-stevenson provides evidence for all of them. the inclusion of robespierre and gilles de rais—most famous for the lives they took—raises an instinct to protest. in the pages following this list, prime-stevenson devotes a section to ‘the uranian’s widelygraded moral nature’.38 this adds a certain unexpected complexity to his lists, given that list-making operates as any history must in a complex and often hostile political climate and those compiling lists today popularly choose to laud famous names with a demonstrable positive influence.39 coming from a time when same-sex attraction was far more closely associated with degeneracy, it seems strange that he would yield any ground on the subject of morality. he does state directly: ‘there is no truth in the idea that the similisexual40 is necessarily morally bad’, but perhaps even more important for his argument as a whole is the statement preceding that one that the ethical nature of ‘similisexuals’ ‘ranges from the finest moral and spiritual feelings and practices to the feeblest sense of morals of any kind; much as is the case with the dionian man.’41 from there, the argument does fall back into reductive contemporary patterns that link promiscuity and morality, but as a whole, it encapsulates the book’s argument for complexity. the historical lists of the intersexes serve two purposes: offering evidence that ‘many lofty types of all philosophies, all creeds, too many respected officials and model private citizens have lived and died uranistic’ and attempting to integrate historical examples of uranians and uraniads so closely with accepted historical narratives that those alive today must be accepted on their own terms.42 whether those terms are good or bad is positioned squarely on the individual, not on any deficiency of character linked to same-sex attraction. arguing only for the inclusion of admirable individuals or ignoring any unique consequences of the gay collay public history review, vol. 29, 202226 lifestyle—such as military prostitution—is recognized as being as false of a narrative as the inverse, of using weaponized accusations of homosexuality to disparage and discredit people. the defining quality of a gay list is its biographical emphasis, which is both a weakness and a strength as a mechanism of memory. one aspect of the weakness of these lists as a primary form of queer history was identified by gordon rattray taylor in his chapter contributed to a 1965 book, sexual inversion (no tangible relation to ellis’s book of the same name). taylor notes that for the medieval period in england ‘direct evidence [of homosexuality] is almost nonexistent’, and instead of assuming homosexuality itself was nonexistent, points out that ‘it is only when eminent persons displayed overtly homosexual traits that history recorded the fact.’43 lists are often, as a consequence, a greatest hits of the most obvious, visible signs of homosexuality in already prominent figures. moreover, given that historians of queerness often look for histories of prosecution, they contain primarily visible signs of homosexuality that were unfavorably looked upon. therefore, behavior that was seen as excusable, normal, or insignificant, even if it might indicate queer experiences, is likely to have passed without comment and therefore remain overlooked. taylor points out that many female saints and holy women in the early christian church dressed in men’s attire and lived as men with church approval, citing the acta sanctorum includes accounts of ‘brother marinos’, whom the other monks supposed to be a eunuch from his voice and beardlessness, who was even accused of seducing a local girl and who turned out at death to be female; of frater pelagius monachus et eunuchus, also a girl; or marina, margarita, and others. other instances noted by delcourt (1961) include athanasia of antioch, eugenia of alexandria, apollinaria, papula of gaul, and hildegonde of neuss. hagiography includes such stories of girls dressing as men as those of thekla and glaphyra. an especially striking instance is that of joan of arc; her refusal to resume female attire was the primary cause of her condemnation to death. the story of the monk only outed upon death suggests a reminder of figures like dr. james barry, billy tipton and charley parkhurst, who had all socially transitioned fully at the time of their respective deaths to the point that they were only outed as trans* post-mortem when their bodies were examined.44 and yet, today, despite a movement for greater awareness of transgender history, the most well-known figure from taylor’s list remains joan of arc, cited in the title of leslie feinberg’s transgender warriors. she remains ‘especially striking’ for being put to death for cross-dressing, which perhaps illustrates a tendency of trans* history to expand on looking for prosecution, as mentioned above, to the extent that violence against trans* bodies becomes in itself a search criteria for trans* history. the acceptance of brother marinos into a male space as an assumed eunuch provokes an interesting question in trans* history, though taylor does not follow this thread. if there is an acceptable way to explain failures in social gender presentation, how may deliberate transgression be folded into the fabric of society? though piotr o. schulz points out that castrati and eunuchs are not necessarily the same thing, he also documents how the practice of ritual castration has appeared in several different societies with different but specific roles and duties attached to the position of the eunuch in each one.45 eunuchs are perhaps one of the best-documented examples of gender transgression and complication throughout time, and one of the least-examined. what other room has been made for gender flexibility using their context that we are not aware enough to recognize today? taylor directly links the lack of evidence for homosexuality with the lack of sources as a whole, pointing out that ‘the kind of source material we really need… diaries and travel books in which the social scene is reported frankly and in detail’ are not available until the seventeenth century.46 this lack of sources brings us to the enduring popularity of lists as a form of queer history, and their strength—biographical practice is one of the most wide-reaching and accessible forms of history as a whole. one could not reasonably outline the culture of the average macedonian soldier without extensive archaeological research and extrapolation, collay public history review, vol. 29, 202227 much less discuss associated dynamics of sexuality and relationships. alexander the great, however, lived a life whose particulars are well-documented, including his relationship with haephestion. another item that differentiates the fantastical evocation of ancient societies and myth from the collection of historical figures in queer discourse is that cultural differences ultimately draw a clear distinction between the life of modern fantasizer reaching for antiquity and the object of fantasy. to see oneself in a mythic era requires a removal from the present day—effectively, a severing of continuity even as one feeds a sense of connection. lists do not, by themselves, carry this same distinction between then and now. they simply require the person collecting or repeating names to find some kind of resonance with those subjects; some sense that even separated by the centuries, there are parts of this historical figure’s life that allow for connection and solidarity. historical lists in the queer community are, ultimately, a search for ancestors. despite the claims of dozens of studies there is no gay gene; queer identity is not hereditary, queer genealogies cannot be proved through a dna test. unlike many other minority identities, a biographical tradition cannot be traced through a family tree. a queer genealogy must be constructed through identification with archived materials. recently, the conversation around queer archives is shifting to center the possibilities of data inherent in mess, chaos, space, and other unconventional spaces that record information.47 queer archives, whether modern or identified from materials of the past, are deeply built on emotional affect. as, in fact, is most queer studies, which is fundamentally and constantly circling questions of identity, resonance, impact, emotional attachment, and political power or lack of it as a motivating factor. consequentially, lists demonstrate an attachment to a very particular kind of euro-american great man—or, to steal a phrase from norton, ‘great queens’—theory. david halperin makes the point in how to do the history of homosexuality that identification with historical figures is not driven by accurately describing the identity of the figures in question as much as it is by the historian’s own desire serving as a form of cognition, recognition of the self through recognition of the past.48 consequently, the desire to identify with the potential for greatness that has shaped the ‘great man’ structure of history is further compounded within queer history’s sphere. at the end of the nineteenth century, white, european upper-class men of leisure who had the resources to undertake historical searches most often found themselves accumulating more examples of white european upper-class men of leisure. as these lists are passed down, through repetition, they are transmitted through a cycle of curators and re-curators hungry for good presentations of people they can resonate with in the pages of official history written by power. lists are at once the very simple desire for ancestors whose chosen contents are shaped by the very complicated factors that shape the rest of the world—colonialism, patriarchy, classism, classicism, inheritance. they are a very simple presentation of names that allows each generation to return to the complex remaining evidence of particular lives and re-examine endlessly relevant questions of self, of gender, of sexuality, of love, of identity. they offer a chance for definition through redefinition, and an argument against the concept of the unnatural or degenerate—if a large enough catalog of greatness is assembled, surely it will be impossible to argue with. lists also require no extensive historical training to read and repeat and claim, so they have a very low barrier of access. at the same time, gay lists are reductive, easy to remember, easy to spout, easy to flinch from. who after all wants to be identified with someone remembered for murder? they are much more comfortable as historical mechanisms of valorizing, which is how most listicles use them today. despite certain structural weaknesses of gay lists, and despite the conflicting sentiments influencing how communities relate to them, it seems unlikely that they will go away if only the serious historians ignore them long enough. gay lists feed a compelling, enduring desire for legitimacy within the queer community; legitimacy here used deliberately, as in, to be someone’s legitimate child. historian and theorist alan munslow argues that histories should be understood as ‘desiring-mechanisms… the means by which collay public history review, vol. 29, 202228 historians give voice to their future needs, their present dreams as well as their aspirations of the past’.49 the introduction to this paper mentioned the unique tools and perspectives queer history offers the field of historiography. the phenomenon of gay lists exists as both a tool for articulating a desire for continuity within the queer community, and a perspective on the past that is not a failure or glossing-over of historical rigor but a long-standing folk methodology in its own right. endnotes 1 for an example of queering in practice, see jonathan goldberg and madhavi menon, ‘queering history’, pmla, vol 120, no 5, 2005, pp1608–1617. https://doi.org/10.1632/003081205x73443 2 see, among others, dell richards, lesbian lists: a look at lesbian culture, history, and personalities, 1st ed, lgbt thought and culture, alyson publications, boston ma, 1990; leigh rutledge, the gay book of lists, 3rd edition, 3rd edition, alyson books, los angles, 2003; leslie feinberg, transgender warriors: making history from joan of arc to rupaul, beacon press, boston, 1996. 3 christopher s. nealon, foundlings: lesbian and gay historical emotion before stonewall, series q, duke university press, durham, 2001, p5. 4 gerard koskovich, the history of queer history: one hundred years of the search for shared heritage, berghahn books, ney york, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1850gww.7 5 michael bronski, a queer history of the united states, revisioning american history, beacon press, boston, 2011, pxiv. 6 rictor norton, the myth of the modern homosexual: queer history and the search for cultural unity, cassell, london and washington, 1997, p220. 7 ibid, p220. 8 ‘testimony of oscar wilde’, accessed february 6, 2021, https://famous-trials.com/wilde/342-wildetestimony. 9 ‘letters’, one, january 1954, p23. emphasis in original. 10 w. c. (walter courtenay) rivers, walt whitman’s anomaly, george allen & co, london, 1913, pp60-61. 11 ibid, p2. 12 ibid, p3. 13 roisin o’connor, ‘william shakespeare was undeniably bisexual, researchers claim’, the independent, 23 august 2020, sec culture, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/shakespeare-bisexual-sexuality-evidence-plays-a9684056.html. 14 norton, op cit, p218. 15 ibid. 16 john addington symonds, a problem in modern ethics: being an inquiry into the phenomenon of sexual inversion, addressed especially to medical psychologists and jurists, london, 1896, p30. 17 james gifford, ‘what became of the intersexes?’, the gay and lesbian review, october 2011, p25 and edward prime-stevenson, the intersexes: a history of similisexualism as a problem in social life, 1908, pxi. 18 uranian’ is a then-contemporary term for a man attracted largely or exclusively to other men, a term coined by karl heinrich ulrichs in booklets published from 1864-65. despite the book’s title referring to ‘similisexualism’, prime-stevenson seems only to have used this term for the concept of same-sex attraction as a whole, and not as an identifier. 19 gifford, op cit, p27. 20 symonds, op cit, p35. 21 prime-stevenson, op cit, p39. 22 uranianism being another contemporary term for homosexuality. 23 prime-stevenson, op cit, pp33; 35. 24 ibid, p184. 25 ibid, pp72; 123. 26 ibid, pp243-245; 251-253. 27 ibid, p253. 28 ibid, p184. collay public history review, vol. 29, 202229 https://doi.org/10.1632/003081205x73443 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1850gww.7 https://famous-trials.com/wilde/342-wildetestimony https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/shakespeare-bisexual-sexuality-evidence-plays-a9684056.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/shakespeare-bisexual-sexuality-evidence-plays-a9684056.html 29 ibid, p185. the eminent english naval commander in question was most likely horatio nelson. 30 ibid, pp185-186. 31 ibid, p194. 32 ibid, pp33-34. 33 ibid, pp212-226. 34 ibid, p222. 35 ibid, p78. emphasis in original. 36 gifford, op cit, p27. 37 ibid, pp77-78. 38 prime-stevenson, op cit, p81. 39 adam schubak, redbook. ‘26 famous gay people in history – lgbtq rights movement facts for pride month’, accessed 10 august 2022, https://www.redbookmag.com/life/g21288608/famous-gay-lgbtq-people-in-history/?slide=1, ‘famous gay people’, accessed 10 august 2022, https://www.thefamouspeople.com/gays.php, ‘famous gay people – history’s most influential lgbt people’, accessed 10 august 2022, https://www.out.com/famous-gay-people; biography online, ‘famous gay people’, accessed 10 august 2022. https://www.biographyonline.net/people/famous/gay.html; chris flynn, ‘the richest 10 of the most powerful gay men of all time’, 19 october 2015, https://www.therichest.com/mostinfluential/10-of-the-most-powerful-gay-men-in-history/. while search engines are algorithmic and influenced by many factors, including individual search history, it is still worth noting that these were all in the top ten results when i searched ‘gay people history’ on duckduckgo on 10 august 2022. 40 ‘similisexual’ being prime-stevenson’s seemingly preferred term for people experiencing same-sex attraction. 41 prime-stevenson, op cit, p81. 42 ibid, pp81-82. 43 gordon rattray taylor, ‘historical and mythological aspects of homosexuality’, in judd marmor (ed), sexual inversion: the multiple roots of homosexuality, basic books, new york, 1965, pp140-164. 44 irvine loudon, ‘scanty particulars: the strange life and astonishing secret of victorian adventurer and pioneer surgeon james barry’, british medical journal, vol 324, no 7349, 1 june 2002, p1341; diane middlebrook, ‘the double life of billy tipton’, allegro, vol 113, no 4, 11 april 2013, https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/the-double-life-of-billytipton/; ‘thirty years in disguise: a noted old californian stage-driver discovered. after death. to be a woman’, new york times, 9 january 1880, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1880/01/09/98876579.pdf. 45 piotr o. scholz, eunuchs and castrati: a cultural history, trans. john a. broadwin and shelly l. frish, princeton, c2001, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106016665173. 46 taylor, op cit, p141. 47 anjali arondekar et al, ‘queering archives: a roundtable discussion’, radical history review, no 122, may 2015, pp211–231. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2849630 48 david m. halperin, how to do the history of homosexuality, the university of chicago press, chicago, 2002, p15. 49 alun munslow, a history of history, routledge, new york, 2012, p81. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203102565 collay public history review, vol. 29, 202230 https://www.redbookmag.com/life/g21288608/famous-gay-lgbtq-people-in-history/?slide=1 https://www.thefamouspeople.com/gays.php https://www.out.com/famous-gay-people https://www.biographyonline.net/people/famous/gay.html https://www.therichest.com/most-influential/10-of-the-most-powerful-gay-men-in-history/ https://www.therichest.com/most-influential/10-of-the-most-powerful-gay-men-in-history/ https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/the-double-life-of-billy-tipton/ https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/the-double-life-of-billy-tipton/ https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1880/01/09/98876579.pdf http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106016665173 https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2849630 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203102565 public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: li, n. 2022. public history: the future of teaching the past in china. public history review, 29, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.5130/ phrj.v29i0.7859 issn 18334989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj articles (peer reviewed) public history: the future of teaching the past in china na li doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.7859 article history: received 14/08/2021; accepted 10/02/2022; published 18/02/2022 history is going public in china. the history written in textbooks, published in academic journals and taught in classrooms have become only a few of the many forms of representing the past. and they are often not the most effective forms. into the twenty-first century, monographs have stopped being the only medium. history – depending on how one interprets it – is ‘already on your phone’,1 and no one needs a license to write history on digital platforms. so the previously unquestionable authority has become questionable. the traditional history education, an integral part of the national nine year compulsory education in china, is at a crossroad: memorizing established facts, names, numbers and dates and treating historical knowledge as a privilege for only a chosen few is no longer the status quo. a more sophisticated public yearns for history that surprises and startles. this article tackles this challenge. it argues that public history, as an emergent and reflective practice, constitutes an effective intervention into the traditional history education. with an in-depth analysis of three national public history faculty training programs (2014-2019), this article suggests that public history points to the new direction in teaching the past in china. when traditional history education is challenged why learn history? the national history curriculum standards, also known as the standards for history in the national compulsory education (yiwu jioayu lishi kecheng biaozhun) – referred to as the standards)2 and issued by the ministry of education of the people’s republic of china – states that ‘the purposes of learning history include: to cultivate a national spirit, to inherit the excellent tradition and culture of chinese civilization, to provoke a national spirit and patriotism, and to build a sense of pride, mission and social responsibility for being chinese.’3 in report-style language, the standards leave vague terms such as ‘national spirit’, ‘tradition and culture’, ‘a sense of pride’ and ‘social responsibility’ largely undefined and offers no concrete advice on how to evaluate core competencies. using history as a booster for national myth, civic passion and social cohesion is certainly not unique to china, as cultures, ideology and patriotism constitute an indispensable part of history education around the declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.7859 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.7859 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.7859 globe. however, in china where the state has played a paramount role, history education has long been engineered to shape collective historical consciousness. as zheng wang notes, ‘china’s one hundred years of humiliation when it was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists and how this historical memory has been reinforced by the regime’s educational socialization of the chinese citizenry.’4 the teaching of history has been integral to the national compulsory education administered by the ministry of education of the prc. according to the standards,5 history curriculum should be designed from three aspects – knowledge and capability; process and methods; and empathy, attitude and value system. the ministry of education exercises direct authority over both the content of history textbooks and teaching methodology. since 1992, modern and contemporary chinese history has become a required core course in high school. the official version of modern chinese history is stated as follows: ‘chinese modern history is a history of humiliation that china had been gradually degenerated into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society; at the same time, it is also a history that chinese people strive for national independence and social progress, persisted in their struggle of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism, and was also the history of the success of new-democratic revolution under the leadership of the ccp.’6 in 2011, the standards’ core competence was updated to include five components: historical materialism, the ideas of time and space, historical source analysis, historical explanation and family-state empathy.7 following the standards, history has been consistently taught in essentially the same manner over a long period of time. in the chinese virtuoso model, a term coined by lynn webster paine, teachers resemble a musician.8 they perform for the whole class, and the students become the audience. the focus in teaching is on performance and the goal is to produce an outstanding and virtuoso performance. the goal of such model is to transmit knowledge to students, with the textbook as the source of knowledge, and the teacher represents that knowledge.9 as a result, history classrooms are generally characterized by rote memorization and a lack of critical thinking.10 historical thinking is frequently measured against the holy grail of memorization: as long as students collect and remember a large number of facts, they are more ready to make historical judgments and generalizations or offer analysis and explanations. controversial histories are either glossed over or eliminated in the history textbooks. the materials are carefully selected and presented based on ideological concerns, and students are indoctrinated to trust that history is about answering questions. disagreement is socially appalled. students stand out in the process of memorizing certain factual statements and rarely bother to inquire about how or why. since the first decade of the twenty-first century, the nature and purpose of history-making has altered in a rapidly changing chinese society. a flurry of historical activities, under the umbrella term ‘public history’, emerged rangining from oral history, family history, historical performance, historical video games and live interpretation at museums and heritage sites. these activities represent a sobering and urgent reality: history is thriving outside of traditional classrooms. students taught and trained in the traditional way simply cannot live up to the new expectations or are ill equipped to intervene in history-making responsibly and meaningfully. the traditional pedagogy has met unprecedented challenge. how can public history contribute? public history in china, an emergent and reflective practice, has come of age by remarkably diverse routes: unofficial sources and presentations prevail; oral history, as a methodology and historiography, enjoys enormous popularity; memory studies has grown; visuals speak boldly and challenge the evidentiary status of written documents; heritage, from a pastime to an industry, plumbs the same historical truth; and virtual history, fueled by media technology, whets the public appetite for immediacy and efficiency.11 it is emergent, because if we situate history learning and teaching as a dynamic and complex adaptive system,12 the process of public history making generates outcomes from action and interaction of agent, or generators li public history review, vol. 29, 20222 of emergent behaviour. it is reflective because it ‘tends to focus interactively on the outcomes of action, the action itself, and the intuitive knowing implicit in the action.’13 how can public history contribute to traditional history education? i will explore the issue from three significant perspectives, all of which are undervalued and poorly incorporated into training in traditional educational settings in china. i make no claim of originality in raising these three points but ask the questions from a somewhat different angle and offer thoughts on how public history can provide practical advice. historical thinking chinese historical thinking is closely associated with moral thinking. with a strong belief in the ultimate good, justice, and beauty: ‘chinese historical thinking is ultimately a moral thinking’14 at the very core lies the notion that connotes both heavenly principles and human norms: dao means principles or norms, and li refers to pass judgment upon historical actuality. the li and dao obtained by observing history became the concrete general norm and lever whereby historians judged, admonished and even remonstrated with rulers. the intense sense of the meaning of history can be extrapolated and appropriated from historical facts.15 the chinese perceive time in a continuum along which the past, present and future are seamlessly integrated. historical time does not literally mean time exists in the past; instead, it implies continuity, with a particularity in the constancy of change. hence, historical events happened in the past but exist in the present and point to the future. confucius (551-479 bc) metaphorically interpreted time as a ‘river’ and stood at the bank of the ‘river of time,’ noting how it flows day and night without ceasing. the flowing, continuous and irrevocable nature of time is embedded in chinese historical thinking. thinking historically, one simultaneously connects time at three intimate scales: past, present and future. the unbroken continuity of past-present-future is not unique to china. as in western historical thinking, the past is also interpreted as a living present. there is the ‘logical necessity of the past-of-the-present, and the present is the-past-of-a-future-living present’.16 it is in china that personal experience is legitimately blended into national history. as mu qian has noted, ‘national history awakens the soul of a nation, for history is the whole experience of our life, the whole life past. we can understand our life by referring ourselves to history. history can thus allow us to appropriately project our life into the future.’17 in other words, history in china is taken as the crystallization of past personal life experiences. ‘personal’ means that the meaning of one’s life is discovered, interpreted and shaped by the history in which one is situated. to live humanly is to be historically oriented. thus, historical thinking is analogical-metaphoric thinking as an organic whole: ‘the basics of historical research is this: identify the questions from the present, while find the answers from the past.’18 the moral bent in chinese historical thinking is culturally conditioned. chinese philosophy emphasizes the harmony of the heavens and the earth in a poetical pursuit of immortality. zhuang tsu believes in the ultimate unity between body and spirit in which spirits symbolically and aesthetically morph into butterflies, or hua die. chinese painting, filled with metaphors and breathtakingly beautiful, leaves those who do not understand the historical narratives behind the brushes and strokes strangely perplexed. chinese characters, based on hieroglyphs, are intimately connected with visual and graphic thinking; inference, judgment and calculation are a set of purely abstracted symbols from which we derive meaning and significance. historian zhaoguang ge explains that this kind of historical thinking takes little note of logic, rules and order.19 chinese poems and prose are a well-nigh perfect blending of the signifiers and the signified, of text and images and of actual meaning and metaphorical significance. none of these implications are directly related to history. but all of them, in various capacities, influence the chinese modes of historical thinking, which are essentially diffusive, divergent, analogical, metaphoric and, fundamentally, tacit. li public history review, vol. 29, 20223 when the abstract and universal rule over the empirical evidence of historical facts, the reasoning process is premised on a morally prejudged right or wrong, and the rest of the analysis follows or justifies that judgment. the intricate connection with moral history defies a clean and clear logic. in historical documents, one encounters more statements and fewer arguments precisely because moral judgment takes precedence over causal explanation embedded in these documents. furthermore, nothing is intrinsically historical, and not all facts are historical facts. any fact may be promoted to the status of historical fact once its relevance and significance is discerned. history begins with the selection and marshaling of facts by historians to become historical facts, so historical inquiry is an affair of selection and arrangement, controlled by the dominant problems and conceptions of the cultures of the period in which the inquiry is written. with new materials for constructing knowledge and a shifting analytical frame, new presents emerge. thus, the past becomes a past of a different present, and arguing by analogy becomes questionable. if we situate chinese historical thinking in a broader intercultural context, as rüsen20 advocated that culturally different manifestations of the logic of historical thinking ought to be framed in such a way that they do not exclude one another but rather interpret one another, public history can help students develop reasoning skills, cultivate analytical thinking and ignite historical imagination, all of which tangibly contribute to historical thinking. for example, teaching with historical video games as a counterfactual thought experiment, developing museum exhibits based on certain historical themes and doing live interpretations at museums and historic sites all stir historical imagination and even boast of potential for a new mode of historical thinking. methodological implications morality rules over historical facts, revealing an uneasy relationship between theory and practice. traditional chinese education favors the theoretical over the empirical and rules and laws over facts and information, as if the latter are self-evident, while the former require intellectual engagement. while the standards state that students should ‘acquire a sense of history through a variety of venues’, it does not specify the possible ways of doing so. suggestions for educational activities to reach the goals listed in the standards indicate that practicum such as visiting museums with certain historical themes, watching historical movies and documentaries and completing group work based on collecting historical artifacts should be incorporated. some even raise the idea of doing history: guiding students to actively participate in historical field investigations, discovering problems in practice, and then applying the knowledge that has been acquired to resolve the problems. this practice can include, for example, engaging with the historical analysis of nearby historical sites, communities, villages and enterprises; collecting relevant materials and information; and organizing, analyzing, narrating and formulating one’s own interpretation. as positive as these statements are, none provide actual guidance on how to do history, and in reality, very little has been achieved. similarly, while field work has earned an official status in students’ overall evaluation, it lacks clearly defined project goals, much less systematic step-by-step guidance. the practical dimension built into public history, reflective by nature, may not be a novel addition to textbook reading in the west, but they are in china. when public history was first introduced a concept and a discipline to china, the tension between disciplineand professional-oriented faculties, which was not all unfamiliar, loomed large. however, instead of seeking pure and abstract theories, public history encourages history educators to ‘shovel for dirt’ through practicum to develop substantial local cases, then develop theories out of them. a reflective practicum lies at the core of a public history curriculum: working with the public in various settings has demonstrated that a legitimate public space exists for citizen dialogues and for authority sharing.21 for example, family history and oral history projects, driven by a democratic impulse, have become new modes of inquiry. additionally, students now learn how to mount a museum exhibit that ties into certain li public history review, vol. 29, 20224 historical subjects, working with local museums to use primary sources to do historical work while engaging historical thinking. in other words, they learn how to ‘analyze, comprehend, summarize, [and] compare’, to formulate their own ideas and interpretation of history, discern patterns in historical changes and eventually generate a more sophisticated understanding of past and present. practicum and fieldwork push the burning question of the day upfront, encouraging students to participate in the intelligent discussions of a debating society instead of treating history as something that is antique and irrelevant to contemporary needs and wants. ethics and professionalism in chinese historical thinking ethics are grounded in metaphysics. the morality and ethics of historians mean ‘moral integrity’. ‘one who possesses historical insight must already have a historian’s moral integrity’ (neng ju shi shi zhe bi ju shi de), so the morality of the historian has to be at the core of ‘historical insight’. the ‘historian’s moral integrity’ (shi de), according to historian zhang xuecheng, is embedded in classic arguments about objectivity and evidence-based arguments. such integrity also helps historians discern the relationships of events and agency in people’s lives. in light of this logic, if historians are objective – that is, if the meaning they attach to an historical incident is able to present the dao correctly – that objectivity depends on how the historians treat themselves as human beings – how they treat their naturally equipped ‘emotions’ (qing) and ‘temperament’ (qi). the process of connecting reason to human nature is regareded as the ‘nourishment’ (yang) of the ‘moral constitution of the heart-and-mind’ (xinshu), and nourishment can only be achieved by gradual accumulation. here lies the main difference with the neo-confucian school: the morality and ‘nourishment’ of the ‘moral constitution of the heart-and-mind’ can be achieved neither by speculation nor by interpretation and textual criticism of the six canonical books. instead, it has to be acquired through practice. zhang explains the practical implication as the ‘nourishment’ of the ‘moral constitution of the heart-and-mind’ that he believed could only be acquired through practical work. that is, a person can only acquire and develop such moral constitution by studying history: ‘one has to study history in order to accumulate morality’ (dushi yi xude).22 historical impartiality was established in a circular process of studying historical examples, understanding the universal truth of dao and, after a period of accumulation, once more returning to the interpretation of history to further ensure the objectivity of historical writing. however, this process does not present the moral tension between what one should do and what one actually does. and the ethical issues rarely take priority in traditional history teaching, simply because what one should do seems deceptively obvious. educators diligently promote the lofty idea of authenticity and objectivity and walk around telling their students that the primary ethical responsibility of historians is to ‘never utter an untruth’. what these educators often refuse to acknowledge is that, despite all good intentions, it is not easy to tell the truth. when history goes public it gets messy. how can one work in a complicated situation and resolve real problems without losing one’s moral and intellectual integrity? this is one of many challenges that today’s students face after they leave school. for example, when students investigate historic districts, interviewing original residents on the one hand while meeting with developers and planning officials on the other, they are stuck in a paradoxical relationship between their avowed professional goals and what truly matters for local residents. which side should they represent? how can they forge a compromise among multiple stakeholders while still holding up their ethical responsibility? oral history projects with family members, for example, often reveal emotionally difficult histories and memories. how can these projects be approached in an ethical manner? at what point should the students push forward or stop? public history foregrounds many ethical issues that require more than a mechanical and naïve textbook approach towards truth, objectivity and authenticity. instead it requires moral choices to be made on a case-by-case basis. li public history review, vol. 29, 20225 compromises are inevitable and students should not see inevitable compromises as demoralizing. the past is inherently complicated and public history exposes students to that complexity. public history also embraces the idea of professionalism. while a minority of students will seek further education and eventually teach in educational settings, the majority will live a life with a professional calling. a certain level of professionalism should be taught and trained prior to that point. however, professionalism is not easily taught in classrooms with the artificial assistance of hallowed rights and wrongs. developing professionalism requires a real historical context with real guidance from professionals. such training also occupies a specific public role in society. edward said elegantly argues that being public is essential for the intellectual who is ‘unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, everso-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say... not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public.’23 the public quality of history demands requires a true spirit of service, for a greater good and for the needs of the present. can the aforementioned three aspects be taught and trained? the answer is a qualified yes. betterinformed and better-resourced individuals make learning decisions based on the kind of information available, previous knowledge structures and personal experience – also known as tacit knowledge, which that cannot be easily summarized or conveyed to others.24 history learning is no longer the same old familiar business it was in the preceding few hundred years, as is history teaching. the real question boils down to who is capable of teaching history with public history thinking and skills. if the spirit of a shared interpretive authority runs against an authoritative climate, and if public history challenges some of the basic epistemic beliefs about the nature of history along with some of the fundamental assumptions of traditional history education in china, the remedy has to come from outside the established frame of reference – that is, history teachers equipped with public history knowledge and skills. educating the educators: national public history faculty training programs since the first national public history seminar held at chongqing university in 2013 and the first national conference on public history in suzhou later that year, discussions within the academy have transformed from theoretical debates to more practically oriented explorations. a small group of intellectual visionaries are sounding the call for educating the educators. three national public history faculty training programs (referred to as the programs) have since taken place in this context to conceptually, practically and pedagogically introduce public history, to create the first generation of university-based public historians in china (see table 1.) the programs were funded and hosted by three key universities. central to the program rationale is the idea of authority and reflexivity. a shared authority invites a genuine dialogue between the professionals and the public25 and reflexivity calls for the practice of actively locating oneself within the research process.26 both requires a critical understanding of power in a space of convergence. the programs broke down the barriers between academics and professionals, between professionals and the public. the author, working with the host institutions and local community partners, designed the training themes and organized the programs. the participants came from a diverse range of colleges and universities across china with good geographic representation. the selection committee, composed of public historians, practitioners and educators, recruited the participants based on their experience, interest and plans to teach public history, either starting up a public history course/program or incorporate public history into existing history curriculum. approximately 90 percent of the participants came from history departments. the remaining 10 percent came from the fields of journalism, anthropology, archaeology, museum studies, archival management, film studies and comparative literature. the participants were at various phases of their li public history review, vol. 29, 20226 professional lives, with assistant professors accounting for approximately 60 per cent, associate professors accounting for 25 per cent and professors accounting for 15 per cent. museum studies, archival management and library/information studies in china are entirely separated from history, each working within a closed system. however, these public institutions are increasingly facing a much better-informed public and a few have realized that the old ways may not work effectively. though many did not use the term ‘public history’, the programs, designed with an inclusive mentality and broad thinking, covered key themes about the definition, theories, debates and methodology of using public history, including public memory, oral history, archival management, museums and historic site interpretation, library/information studies, media representations, environmental history, historic preservation, historical performance, digital humanities and ethics. key modules the two-week programs zerored around four key modules. each key module includes approximately threeday lectures, seminars, workshops and debates on a wide range of public history issues, along with field visits to a selective local historical sites and institutions. first, new approaches to old contested or difficult histories were considered. this type of history, censored by the state, has traditionally been shunned by professional historians due to a lack of access to proper archives, or has not yet found a way into the official narratives due to draconian political censorship. nevertheless it has already made visible appearance in the public space. one example was oral history projects about the cultural revolution (1966-1976, referred to as the cr). history textbooks provided table 1. overview of three national public history faculty training programs theme time place host institution partner participants 1 history, memory and the urban future july 18-30, 2014 shanghai shanghai normal university princeton university, department of history at the shanghai normal university 16 2 public history and the urban environment july 20-22, 2015 chongqing chongqing university institute of the advanced humanities and social sciences at the chongqing university 22 3 public history, oral history and digital humanities july 5-15, 2019 hangzhou zhejiang university center for public history, the world history institute at the zhejiang university 14 source: the author li public history review, vol. 29, 20227 scant description of the cr, with the grisly details glossed over. but oral histories of those who witnessed and survived the cr revealed a complicated psychological world. shu he, a prominent chongqing-based historian, discussed his experience with interviewing one hundred and forty seven survivors of the cr and demonstrated how oral history worked as an effective tool for understanding the cr. intense emotions or a victimized mentality can sometimes cloud rather than illuminate truth of such difficult chapters in chinese history, so the work has to be approached with methodological rigor and professional ethics.27 the second module looked at public history as an emergent methodology. ‘emergence’ begins with the empirical world and builds an inductive understanding of it as events unfold and knowledge accrues. it is ‘inductive, indeterminate, and open-ended’, and the method resides within the research process.28 methodology, for the purpose of our discussions, refers to ‘a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed’.29 public history, in this vein, offers fresh perspectives, or a ‘theory of social reality’.30 this module focused on wildly popular public history subjects that nevertheless lacked proper methodologies in china. for example, oral history and digital humanities have caught on during the past decades. among the noise of writing history from the bottom lies the tendency to transform history into a form of populism. many oral histories are conducted without methodological rigor or a sufficient level of professionalism, so what people hear in public oral history pieces may skew toward propaganda without anyone fully realizing that stories from individuals only hold as much truth as other corroborating stories told.31 when should one probe further or stop asking questions when dealing with emotionally difficult issues? how can the narrators be informed of their rights in oral history projects? what kind of questions should one ask and in what way? how can we deal with discrepancies between what is officially taught and what is communicated anecdotally or tacitly? how can we discern nuances and hesitation, and how can we interpret what is left unsaid? factually incorrect statements may still be psychologically or emotionally true. but the narrators – including the victimized, the vulnerable and the marginalized – all have their own agenda for telling a story in a certain way, as do the interviewers when asking their questions. the third module examined the ethical responsibilities of the historians. as wineburg writes with a slightly cynical tone, ‘in an age when no one regulates the information we consume, the task of separating truth from falsehood can no longer be for extra credit. google can do many things, but it cannot teach discernment. never has so much information been at our fingertips, but never have we been so ill-equipped to deal with it.’32 how can one work in a complicated situation and resolve real problems without losing one’s moral and intellectual integrity? this is one of many challenges that today’s students face after they leave school. oral history projects with family members, for example, often reveal emotionally difficult histories and memories. how can these projects be approached in an ethical manner? at what point should the students push forward or stop? another workshop, moderated by an academic historian commissioned by the municipal government to document and interpret local heritage resources, engaged intense moral debates on historians’ role in preserving and selling heritage: how to balance truth-seeking, ethical responsibility and making profit? this module foregrounded many ethical dilemmas and invited heated debates among the participants. the fourth module utilized local historical resources.this was locally grounded and elicited a tangible sense of past and present at three cities at different regional scales. it also aimed to train the participants to teach at particular historical sites where learning interacts with material culture and where one’s intellectual capacity was expanded and potential fulfilled. the 2014 program incorporated a one-day walking tour around colonial architecture in british and french concessions in shanghai. narrated by two historians from princeton university and one shanghaibased architect, the tour explored a range of issues concerning preserving urban built environments. the participants learned how to investigate and interpret historical architecture, and how to communicate that interpretation with the public. li public history review, vol. 29, 20228 in 2015, the program collaborated with chongqing china three gorges museum, one of the key urban museums in chongqing, to help participants acquire exhibit and site interpretation skills. traditional exhibit design in china rests on the assumption that visitors come to museums as passive recipients of information, ready to absorb whatever is presented. public history perspective reveals the flaws in this assumption. exhibitions fail if they do not engage with what the visitors bring to the museum.33 the workshop focused on one of the permanent exhibits, the journey towards a city, which records changes in the urban landscape and in doing so triggers local memories and collective nostalgia. as the only exhibit in the museum that attracted mostly local residents, it offered an inspiring space for engaging local voices and teaching interpretation skills. the question of how museums can make exhibits more relevant generated some fruitful conversations from the participants. in 2019, a workshop was designed to analyze the dredging history at the museum of west lake in hangzhou. with dredging, west lake has evolved from a natural lagoon into a cultural landscape. the process represents an unfolding history, a sustained, intentional human intervention and a fluctuating journey subject to political whims and intellectual visions.the workshop provided multiple perspectives on public environmental history in the local context. how can environmental history be interpreted with the public? how can environmental history be communicated in the public space? how can a well-informed public be imbued with growing environmental consciousness? authority and reflexivity approximately one third of each program involved professionals. public history professionals were either invited to the training site or activities took place at their work place so that they could share their experience. for example, workshops on historical video material analysis, historical performance, site visits and mock interviews were undertaken at television stations in shanghai and in chongqing, and workshops at shanghai audio visual archives. the training created an interactive and reflective ambiance, something that the participants would later emulate in their own specific teaching environment. consider ‘from a shared authority to the digital turn in oral/public history’, the three-day workshop on oral history and digital humanities.34 it integrated discussions on a shared authority in the digital age, and the nature and skill of oral history interviewing, into hands-on work with free web-app pixstori, a digital platform adding voice to photos, recording brief stories, memories or comments prompted by and played along with the photo. the short-form photo-response mode, with other forms of digital storytelling, stirred instant enthusiasm.35 such workshops can be modeled at various scales. in a well-designed practicum, students learnt how to ‘analyze, comprehend, summarize, [and] compare’, to formulate their own ideas and interpretations of history, discern patterns in historical changes and, eventually, generate a more sophisticated understanding of past and present. the practical implications in history education may not be a novel addition in the west, but they are in china. in a culture long dominated by state power and historiography as an inseparable part of statecraft, despite the liberty of discussion and suggestion still being in peril, the authorities have talked at an increasingly diminished volume during the past decade. willingly or unwillingly, with the issue of authority and authority-sharing in an authoritative regime becomes prominent, independent and broad thinking about historical issues becomes more critical. a global perspective when history goes public, it also goes global. cross-cultural elements were built into each program to encourage cross-referencing public history issues in the transnational context. participants could interpret public history in a convergent space for broader and deeper historical thinking. the first training program was an institutional collaboration between shanghai normal university and princeton university. it was li public history review, vol. 29, 20229 a bold experiment for a cross-cultural exploration of how public history is interpreted in two different cultures. a trip to the nanjing massacre memorial and museum in 2014 with the group from princeton provoked an animated cross-cultural debate.36 is it possible to achieve a shared historical understanding that transcends national boundaries and possibly other fault lines?37 places as controversial, traumatic and highly political as the nanjing massacre memorial and museum should have the opportunity to confront the very complexity of their histories, to teach students how to tolerate complexity, cherish nuance, challenge moral judgment and to gain the ability to deal with controversies with confidence. unfortunately, the exhibits failed to encourage multiple perspectives, provoke the audience to meditate and ponder or present multiple understandings, insights and interpretations. it also failed to provide a public space that engaged critically thinking citizens. displaying the actual bones of the victims generated a ‘cultural war’ between the chinese and american participants. for the chinese, these were artifacts, forensic evidence that proved that the massacre actually happened, despite denial from the japanese. for the americans, the display of human remains constituted disrespect for the dead. in a group of only chinese visitors, with an emotional assumption of a shared community, the issue would never have even been raised. but it became a source of conflict and misunderstanding in the transnational dialogues, as certain historical messages become confused when cultural values cross paths. while it takes some goodwill to achieve a shared understanding or mutual recognition of history that transcends national borders, historical events often embody distinct moral and cultural assumptions that do not travel across borders, and any interpretation has to go beyond simple comparisons.38 additionally, senior public historians from the united states were invited to the programs. the cultural differences humbled both the lecturers and the participants. one american public historian candidly acknowledged that his interpretation of history and his experience with oral history are shaped by the culture in which he lives, elaborating that ‘the same holds true for all of you. i would never presume to tell you what to do. i hope that you will find some of the things that i am going to share with you to be helpful and useful. i also expect to learn a great deal from you.’39 here, the spirit of sharing-authority presented a radically different perspective to the traditional history education in china that authority is rarely challenged. it also inspired the participants to work with an increasingly more demanding and educated public, to explore alternative historical narratives and to create more complex public history products in a range of settings from museums, archives, heritage sites, historical reenactments to virtual space that embraces digital humanities. the cross-cultural sharing also highlighted many similar challenges that public historians encounter globally. for instance, another american public historian reflected upon the second program saying: in my chongqing lectures, i explained how in the early 1980s we built a program at my home institution. two keys to success were first, to tailor the program to the urban setting, civic resources, and community needs of chicago, the metropolis of the american midwest; and second, to align our program with the philosophy and mission of our host university. here, it meant making clear how public history fit the educational philosophy of the catholic jesuit order which was committed to social justice and a pedagogical system that encouraged students to move from knowledge to reflection to action. in the united states, the basic curriculum is often the same at public history programs but the best programs in various parts of the nation are in some way unique to their setting. the ethics of doing public history is another area for fruitful cross-cultural sharing.40 his reflection resonated with many participants who planned to start public history courses or programs in their own institutions, each with unique disciplinary strength and local historical resources. li public history review, vol. 29, 202210 result and impact approximately thirty schools have started public history courses since 2014.41 foundational courses, such as public history, appeared immediately after the first national public history faculty training program in 2014, and evolved with the subsequent training programs. each training program invited participating faculty to share the potential syllabus during the sessions on pedagogy, and the discussions centered around four aspects: different levels of public history courses; curriculum design; program design; and integrating public history into current course. based on these fruitful exchanges, a variety of track courses are developed and improved over the years, including oral history, public archaeology, environmental history and public history, museum and heritage conservation, public history and history education, urban landscape and public memory, cultural theory and practice, historic preservation, writing history and digital history. unlike their public history counterparts in the united states, top-ranking universities such as tsinghua university, zhejiang university and fudan university have played an important role in building public history into the current history curriculum and establishing public history programs. conclusion when history goes public, what happens inside and outside the classroom has evolved into not merely a gap but rather a gulf. a diverse and dynamic representation caters to a thinking public, especially to brighter and more imaginative minds. students no longer dance on the wires of the early expectations of their teachers and parents. they absorb and interpret a vast amount of information in unaccustomed ways. historians and history educators are facing a better-informed and technically savvy young public who are more empowered than ever to participate more meaningfully in history-making. yafu zhao, a leading voice in history education in china, draws a positive connection between public history and history education: ‘history education should absorb and practise the basics of public history, transforming from the traditional sense of “learning history” to a more advanced idea of ‘doing history’.42 when the basic pedagogical assumption of traditional history education is challenged in this liberal ethos, public history presents an effectual intervention. the newly emerged public history courses and programs, as the result of the programs, have testified to this. the extent to which these emerging public history courses prove effective and sustainable remains uncertain for the moment. what does matter, however, is that, after three faculty training programs many history educators have continued to engage in open and stimulating debates on a wide range of historical issues, and to exchange their teaching experience both in classrooms and in the field. the way they approach these issues and involve students has been significantly different. at bottom, public history represents a vision of reality in which it lies the future of teaching the past in china. endnotes 1. sam wineburg, why learn history (when it's already on your phone), university of chicago press, chicago and london, 2008. 2. according to the standards, history education includes six key parts, that is ancient chinese history, modern chinese history, contemporary chinese history, ancient world history, modern world history, and contemporary world history. the standards is part of the 19 subjects required by the national nine year compulsory education, applies to all schools across china. refer to: the ministry of education of the people’s republic of china (2011). the standards for history in the national compulsory education (yiwu jioayu lishi kecheng biaozhun), beijing normal university publishing group. 3. the national compulsory education in china refers to 1-9 education. 4. zheng wang, ‘national humiliation, history education, and the politics of historical memory: patriotic education campaign in china’, in international studies quarterly, vol 52, no 4, 2008, p784. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00526.x 5. according to the standards, history education includes six key parts, that is ancient chinese history, modern chinese history, contemporary chinese history, ancient world history, modern world history, and contemporary world history. the standards is part of the 19 subjects required by the national nine year compulsory education, applies to all schools across li public history review, vol. 29, 202211 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00526.x china. refer to: the ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, the standards for history in the national compulsory education (yiwu jioayu lishi kecheng biaozhun), beijing normal university publishing group, 2011. 6. the ministry of education of the people’s republic of china, teaching guideline for history education ( lishi jiaoxue dagang), people’s education press, beijing, 2002. 7. empathy (qing huai) means an empathetic connection between family and state and it is alternative way to express ideological and humanistic patriotism. 8. lynn paine, ‘the teacher as virtuoso: a chinese model for teaching’, in teachers college record, vol 92, no 2, 1990, pp49-81. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146819009200105 9. shibao guo, ‘exploring current issues in teacher education in china’, alberta journal of educational research, vol 51, no 1, 2005, p73. 10. yafu zhao, ‘zhuixun lishi jiaoyu de benyi–jianlun lishi kecheng biaozhunde gongneng’, kecheng, jiaocai, jiaofa, vol 3, 2004, pp59-65. 11. na li, ‘the origin of modern public history’, history workshop journal, vol 88, no 2, 2019, pp252-273. https://doi. org/10.1093/hwj/dbz033 12. john holland, emergence: from order to chaos, basic books, new york, 1998. 13. donald schön, the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action, basic books, new york, 1983, p56. 14. chun-chieh huang, ‘the defining character of chinese historical thinking’, history and theory, vol 46, no 2, 2007, p188. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00398.x 15. ibid, p180. 16. john dewey, logic, the theory of inquiry, h. holt and company, new york, 1938, p374. 17. mu qian, the spirit of history (zhongguo lishi jingshen), jiuzhou press, 2012, p18. 18. ibid. 19. zhaoguang ge, chinese intellectual history (zhongguo sixiangshi), fudan university press, fudan, 2013, p44. 20. jörn rüsen, ‘crossing cultural borders: how to understand historical thinking in china and the west’, history and theory, vol 46, no 2, 2007, pp191-192. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00399.x 21. na li, ‘public history in china: is it possible?’, public history review, vol 21, 2014, pp35-36. https://doi.org/10.5130/ phrj.v21i0.4135 22. chun-chieh huang and jörnrüsen, ed., chinese historical thinking: an intercultural discussion, v&r academic, 2015, p68. https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737004978 23. edward said, representations of the intellectual,vintage books, new york, 1994, p23. 24. michael polanyi, the tacit dimension, anchor books, 1967. 25. michael frisch, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history, suny press, 1990. 26. sharlene hesse biber, sharlene nagy hesse-biber and patricia leavy (eds), emergent methods in social research, sage, thousand oaks cal, 2006. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412984034 27. shu he’s lecture, oral history and local memory: voices from eye-witnesses of the cultural revolution, july 13, 2015, chongqing. 28. hesse-biber, sharlene nagy, and patricia leavy (eds), handbook of emergent methods, guilford press, 2010, pp155; 161. 29. sandra harding, ed., feminism and methodology: social science issues, indiana university press, 1978, p2-3. 30. hesse-biber, nagy and leavy, handbook of emergent methods, p28. 31. na li, ‘public history in china: past making in the present’, in paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally?: working with the past in the present, bloomsbury publishing, london and new york, 2019, pp51-62. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350033306.ch-004 32. sam wineburg, why learn history (when it's already on your phone), university of chicago press, chicago and london, 2008, p8. 33. na li, ‘museums and the public: visions for museums in china’, in the public historian, vol 42, no1, 2020, pp 29-53. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.1.29 34. the workshop was run by professor michael frisch 10-12 july 2019 as part of the third national public history faculty program in hangzhou. 35. www.pixstori.com. 36. a visit to the nanjing massacre memorial and museum, 27 july 2014, nanjing. li public history review, vol. 29, 202212 https://doi.org/10.1177/016146819009200105 https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbz033 https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbz033 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00398.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2007.00399.x https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v21i0.4135 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v21i0.4135 https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737004978 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412984034 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350033306.ch-004 https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.1.29 http://www.pixstori.com 37. for more discussions, see na li and martha sandweiss, ‘teaching public history: a cross-cultural experiment’, the public historian, vol 38, no3, 2016, pp78-100. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.3.78 38. ibid. 39. philip scarpino, reflections on public history in china and the internationalization of public history. a reflective essay sent to na li after the second national public history faculty training program in july 2015. 40. theodore karamanski, a midwestern american’s perspective on public history in china. a reflective essay sent to na li after the second national public history faculty training program in july 2015. 41. the center for public history, zhejiang university, 2020. 42. yafu zhao, proceedings of the first national conference on public history, 2013. li public history review, vol. 29, 202213 https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2016.38.3.78 public history in australia public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) public history in australia tanya evans macquarie university corresponding author: tanya evans, tanya.evans@mq.edu.au doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8379 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords public history; network; collaboration since 2017 i have sat on the steering committee of the international federation of public history (ifph).1 this organisation was first established as an internal committee of the comité international des sciences historiques-international committee for the historical sciences to promote the development of a worldwide network of scholars and practitioners working in the field, sharing details of public history courses, experts and events.2 the ifph now includes members from across the world working on and in public history, in and outside academia, the galleries libraries and museums (glam) sector and heritage. over the past few years increasing numbers of national associations have been established in italy and brazil, and regional networks include south asia and elsewhere. recently the ifph discussed the affiliation of these varied groups and their relationship with the international network. it was at that moment that it occurred to me that australia and aotearoa new zealand did not have a network of public historians encompassing the region. i could not quite believe it took me until late 2020 to realise this. i have been working as a public historian in sydney, australia, for over a decade! perhaps covid-19 had forced me to concentrate on home a little more than i was used to. having trained as a historian in britain and moved to australia in 2008, i have long enjoyed my transnational links and international travel. with dual british and australian nationality, i have spent most of my career trying to break down intellectual, epistemological and other divisions between nations. but it seemed to me, following the impact of covid-19 in 2020, that a personal and professional focus on the local for the next few years might be wise. globally public history has waxed and waned in popularity and strength over the past thirty years. emerging in australia in the late 1970s as this sub-discipline took hold in the us, history graduates took up jobs as public historians, becoming heritage workers, curators, museum professionals, screenwriters, television and radio documentary producers and creative non-fiction writers as academic opportunities diminished.3 public (applied) history was taught at masters level for many years at the university of technology sydney (uts), established by ann curthoys and paula hamilton in 1988 and joined later by heather goodhall and paul ashton, and at monash in melbourne, led by graeme davison from the same year.4 the term ‘applied history’ fell out of favour in the 1980s due to its association with public policy and, as paul ashton suggests, its ‘blue-collar connotations’ at the time.5 other public history programs were established at murdoch in 1991, queensland in 1994, sydney in 1994 and adelaide in 1996.6 it has been discontinued at most of these institutions but survives, for the time being, at the university of new england, university of new south wales and deakin university. public history is also taught as part of courses on heritage, museums and digital history, for example at the university of western australia, the university of sydney, flinders university in south australia, the university of queensland and the australian national university in canberra. the university of technology sydney established its australian centre for public history in 1999 but its future remains uncertain, like many similar centers and institutes, in the current turbulent australian tertiary context. outside of universities, in the early 1980s professional historians’ associations were established across australia, starting with the south australian association in 1981. a professional association formed under the umbrella of the history institute of victoria and the professional historians association of nsw inc followed in 1985, queensland in 1990, western australia in 1989 and tasmania in 1992.7 the organization of public historians in academic departments and professional organizations suggested a lively growth in and outside of academic contexts. however, the relationship between the two groups of historians remained fractious. in 2013 one of australia’s most prominent and prolific public historians, paul ashton – originally based at uts and now holding adjunct positions at uts, the university of canberra and macquarie university, suggested there were 300 freelancers practicing history in australia.8 this figure is now just over 350.9 in 2021 he calculated that there were about 150 academic historians working across new south wales and 100 members involved with the professional historians association in nsw.10 in australia there were about 500 historians employed as academics (down from around 1750 in the mid 1970s). the recent cut in government funding for australian universities and retrenchments and redundancies across all universities may have had an impact on these figures.11 freelance work in history is concentrated in new south wales and victoria, australia’s most populous states. these professionals are engaged in the private, public and community sectors.12 the number of freelance professional historians will probably increase in the future, and it would be wonderful to see other figures calculated beyond australia – i encourage public historians in these areas to collect this data. despite many attempts to bring these groups together, academics, freelancers – both professionals – and other types of historians continue largely to work in silos and communicate infrequently. there is no doubt that divisions, rivalries and hostilities continue to exist among these different groups as numerous commentators and writers suggest.13 i became much more aware of the field of public history and its varied practitioners and projects when i moved to australia in 2008. for over twenty years i have worked as a social and cultural historian of the family in britain and australia. after training in britain, i now teach modern history and public history at macquarie university in sydney, australia. trained as a social historian, i have always been drawn to researching ‘ordinary’ people and places in the past and relating their stories in ways that appeal to diverse audiences. i have become increasingly committed to incorporating non-academic historians and enthusiasts into the process of my research, co-creating historical knowledge with diverse constituencies and organisations to produce a range of outputs. as a public historian, i try to make clear the nexus between my teaching, research and community engagement activities. as i suggested above, i only began to think of myself as a public historian after i moved to australia from london in 2008. but while i was based in britain – where the sub-field was emerging and naming itself14 – my identity as a public historian was taking shape. the organisation ‘history and policy’ was set up in 2002 and was based at the centre for contemporary british history at the institute of historical research, london. at that time, i was working as a research fellow under the leadership of professor pat thane on a project entitled ‘unmarried motherhood in twentieth-century england.’ i understand now how much i learned then about the benefits of collaborating with cultural institutions, charities and non-government organisations (ngos) on academic research projects, and the pleasure involved in engaging with different audiences, seeking to use historical research to make an impact on policy makers and the general public.15 this economic and social research council funded project had diverse outputs, including an academic book on the history of lone motherhood in twentieth-century britain, journal articles, an exhibition at the women’s library and a bbc television documentary.16 i learned to cherish teamwork with partners outside an academic context and the benefits of engaging with different producers of history who were hoping to find new and expanded audiences for our work. after arriving as a research fellow in australia in 2008 i became involved with the history council of new south wales in 2009, serving as president from 2017 until 2019. this is a peak body representing historical organisations and people interested in history across new south wales.17 my engagement with the history council led me to become friends and acquaintances of many freelance public historians working throughout the state and nationally. this was how i became better informed of their work and contribution to historical knowledge and public history practice in australia. this new-found knowledge encouraged me to join the professional historians association of nsw. my increasing awareness of their work and the obvious divisions between historians who had followed diverse career paths and training was one of the main drivers for the establishment of the centre for applied history at macquarie university, which i direct, in 2016.18 i hoped to create a hub where these different historians would come together and communicate better, to work on public history projects in partnership. as most of us know, the term public history was first used in 1970s’ america and came into common use in australia in the 1980s. it did not take off in britain until the 2000s. that said, as australian historian graeme davison reminds us, public history ‘is a new name for the oldest history of all’.19 for centuries public history was practiced as local, family and community history and flourished outside academic contexts following the formalization, professionalization and masculinization of the discipline within universities in the late nineteenth century.20 during the 1970s following the growth of social history, public history facilitated the kinds of political and community engagement that had been key to many international social history projects, academic and otherwise. this was especially the case in britain where ‘people’s history’ thrived. applied history dominated the us scene, while australia practiced and produced a mixture of both. one of the reasons why i have come to understand my scholarly work as public history in recent years is due to its political purpose. i, like others, use my work to critique the elitist, professionalized, hierarchical and exclusionary discipline that some historians work hard to protect. i want to encourage others to collaborate with audiences and researchers outside of academia, working with history in everyday life. in australia many public historians remain inspired by the early work of the british history workshop movement and are committed to engaging everyone in their passion for history. this was why, like many other public historians intent on making our discipline more democratic and inclusive, i became set on a path of collaborative endeavor as i planned my history research projects from the late 2000s. these projects and passions explain why i became involved in the #historianscollaborate network and seminar program, based in the uk, in 2019. this aims to be a ‘collaborative network for family, local, social and community histories’. we want to encourage a network of scholars working in the arts across the uk and australia on community collaborative projects, especially those working with family, local and community historians. each one of us seeks to challenge the hierarchies and boundaries that exist between family historians, academic and other historians in the galleries libraries and museum sector and elsewhere that prevent meaningful dialogue between us. we have established a set of online seminars that will take place in 2021, through the british institute of historical research’s seminar program, continuing our conversations and collaborations between diverse producers and consumers of family history around the world. the seminars have so far attracted a global audience on zoom.21 this helps to explain why i and many others have become increasingly interested in creative engagements with the past and why these kinds of projects have increased in number in recent years. some of the most successful public history projects are media-based and as part of a current australian research council funded project i am working on with a team of archaeologists, heritage consultants and historians in the blue mountains i hope to encourage public history scholarship and creative outputs. creative public history has the potential to reach far wider audiences than scholarly and only written outputs of public history. one of the most successful public history projects in australia in recent years is the killing times. this involved a team of academics based at the university of newcastle and journalists working for the guardian newspaper creating a fantastic online resource revealing the history of frontier wars across australia – wars that many families were deeply imbricated within.15 the project won a nsw premier’s history award in 2019.16 academic and public historians have long complicated the picture of the settlement of australia, providing evidence of the relations between white settlers (whether forced migrants or free) and indigenous peoples. australians have become increasingly aware of these discoveries and their implications and how they can encounter history through genealogy. this site is an excellent example of collaborative public history practice having a significant social and political impact.17 it is clear from examples like these that networks and teams help to facilitate our work as public historians. while uts’ australian centre for public history still undertakes fantastic public history research and outreach work in late 2020, as i suggested above, it became clear to me that there was no network that bound us all together nationally and/or regionally. after discussing the possibilities with my canadian colleague david dean (who sits on the ifph committee and has been involved with a network of canadian public historians) and my australian colleagues paul ashton and paula hamilton, we decided to establish a national network for the australasian region.22 the aim of the new australian and aotearoa new zealand public history network is to develop public history across australia and aotearoa new zealand by creating opportunities to communicate, meet and share knowledge among individuals and organisations who practice public and applied history in the academy, communities, industry and professions. we aim to promote teaching, research and engagements between these diverse communities and encourage best practice through an online portal. there are a number of history organisations across australia and new zealand such as museums australia, museums aotearoa, the australian historical association, the history council of nsw, family and local historical societies, heritage councils, heritage new zealand pouhere taonga, aiatsis, the history teachers associations, oral history australia, the national oral history association of new zealand and the federation of australian and new zealand historical societies. however, members of these groups who understand themselves as public historians do not always communicate effectively with each other about public history. this network will encourage national and international communication and collaboration at a time when we need to emphasise the cultural and social benefits of public history learning, teaching and community engagement for everyone. it fosters citizen public history. the main vehicle of the association will be a website based at macquarie university’s centre for applied history which will feature, for example, publications of different kinds related to public history, new courses, notices of events, discussions between members and information about current projects seeking assistance. it will be open to all who subscribe – our models are the australian women’s history network and australian migration history websites – and we aim to host an annual/biannual public history award for an outstanding publication or project.23 in 2020 the centre for applied history partnered with the professional historians association to award a new applied history prize.24 the purpose of the award is to encourage historians, at all stages of their careers from students to retirees, to produce a creative work of applied history drawing on their research. it aims to promote the value of public history and the pursuit of history as a rewarding professional career and productive interest. the winners in 2020 were martha ansara and robynne murphy for their entry, the documentary women of steel. the film represented the history of wollongong’s prolonged 1980-94 ‘jobs for women campaign’ to gain employment at the bhp steelworks. at the heart of their story was the demands of migrant working-class women battling for equal opportunity to work at the steelworks.25 the professional historians’ association and the centre for applied history hope to encourage the production of diverse creative history projects, like this, bringing as wide an audience to public history in australia and beyond as possible. we soft launched the network website in 2022 and began with blog contributions from historians in and outside academia and heritage professionals from across australia and aotearoa new zealand describing the state of the public history field in their respective areas.26 authors have traversed the history of public and applied history across new zealand, the northern territory and western australia and we are expecting submissions on victoria, tasmania and queensland. one author’s take may not be the same as another’s and we hope to facilitate the writing and publication of further blog posts from all these different parts of australasia. we hope all public history practitioners and scholars from across the region will participate in a collegial conversation about the state of public history so that we might learn from each other productively. in her post for the website professional historian fiona mckergow writes about the valuable bi-cultural commitment to history in public across diverse forms in new zealand and an attentiveness to kaupapa maori – maori ways of doing, being and thinking. while aboriginal public history, especially with regards to land rights, native title and family history is thriving in australia we lack this valuable bi-cultural new zealand perspective and approach. other authors including robyn smith in the northern territory, jane lydon and kate gregory in western australia, kate bagnall in tasmania, alicia cerreto in victoria and others who reveal the diverse practices of public historians across australia. public historians in australia are, however, keeping a close watch on the reconciliation action plans – raps – which various state and federal government agencies are adopting including nsw’s treasury, the most powerful department in the state, which emphasise the recognition of aboriginal ways of acting and knowing. members of the network hope that many public historians working in a variety of fields will consider joining with us. if you have any questions about the network and would like to join, please get in touch with me. if you are interested in this regional network, you may also be interested in joining the international federation for public history or perhaps creating your own regional or national network. the ifph is committed to encouraging the development of national and regional networks globally. public history is one of the most rapidly growing fields of history and these recent global initiatives demonstrate that. there are new programs, degrees, associations, journals, conferences and discussions appearing in all parts of the world, as you can see by reading the ifph’s most recent newsletters. the ifph encourages new profiles, approaches and languages in public history with the aim of making public history more diverse and international. it offers online workshops, supports conferences, encourages networking, facilitates discussion and offers resources for new programs and associations, and for new scholars and practitioners. it has a dynamic social media presence, a dynamic blog and its own vimeo channel (all available on the website).27 successful public history practice in australia and elsewhere is founded on teamwork. i hope that the kind of collaborative project work undertaken at the centre for applied history at macquarie university and the australian and new zealand aotearoa network of public history will expand in the future and make an impact on the academy and outside of it. we live in an age seemingly so self-centered and narrow-minded and we all need greater hope for the future. therefore, we need to focus on teamwork and collaboration now and in the future. i want public historians to make clear to everyone the significance and value of history in all of our lives. public history needs to work together to produce scholarship and clear evidence of its value and significance to the academy, myriad organisations as well as ‘ordinary people’. endnotes 1 ifph hypothesis, https://ifph.hypotheses.org/ (accessed 4 febuary 2021). 2 serge noiret, ‘internationalizing public history, public history weekly, the open peer review journal, 9 october 2014, https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/2-2014-34/internationalizing-public-history/ (accessed 4th feb 2021). https://doi.org/10.1515/phw-2014-2647 3 graeme davison, ‘public history’ in graeme davison, john hirst and stuart macintyre (eds), oxford companion to public history, oxford university press, oxford, 1998, 2001, pp538-539. https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195515039.001.0001 4 ann curthoys and paula hamilton, ‘what makes history public, ‘public history review, vol 1, 1992, pp8-13. 5 paul ashton, ‘public history’, in anna clark and paul ashton (eds), australian history now, new south, sydney, 2013, p170. 6 davison, ‘public history’, p538. 7 on the professional historians association see https://www.phansw.org.au (accessed 1st april 2021). 8 ashton, ‘public history’. 9 paul ashton and paula hamilton (eds), the australian history industry, australian scholarly publishing, north melbourne, 2022, appendicies 1 and 2. 10 paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘public history in new south wales’, blog post for australia and aetearoa new zealand public history network, https://mq-cah.github.io/anzphn/public%20history/nswph_paul_paula/ (accessed 31 march 2021). 11 ‘the impact of the government’s university funding cuts,’ https://www.gooduniversitiesguide.com.au/education-blogs/education-news/the-impact-of-the-governments-university-funding-cuts (accessed 1 april 2021). 12 lisa murray and mark dunn, ‘public history in australia’, in paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally? working with the past in the present, bloomsbury academic, london, 2019, pp11-22. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350033306.ch-001 13 paul ashton and paula hamilton, history at the crossroads: australians and the past, halstead press, sydney, 2010, pp8-9. 14 the historical association in britain established a public history committee in 2009 four years after the first, modest international conference on public history was convened by hilda kean at ruskin college, oxford, which had been established as a workingman’s college in 1899. kean also ran the first public history program at ruskin from 1996. see hilda kean and paul ashton, ‘introduction: people and their pasts and public history today’, in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), people and their pasts: public history today, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2009, pp1-2. see also paul ashton and meg foster, ‘public histories’, in sasha handley, rohan mcwilliam and lucy noakes (eds), new directions in social and cultural history, bloomsbury academic, london and new york, 2018, p153. 15 history and policy ‘what we do’ http://www.historyandpolicy.org/about-us/what-we-do (accessed 31 march 2021). 16 pat thane and tanya evans, sinners, scroungers, saints: unmarried motherhood in modern england, oxford university press, oxford, 2012, jamelia: shame about single mothers, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0140p9n (accessed 32st march 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199578504.001.0001 17 history council of nsw, https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/about/general-council/ (accessed 19 november 2018). 18 on the impact of the pha see terry cass, ‘what use is the pha?’, https://www.phansw.org.au/what-use-is-the-pha/ (accessed 7 april 2021) and terry cass and carol liston, ‘the pha’, australian historical studies, 1991, vol 24, no 97, pp217-221 and paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘the new professionals: public history’ in their history at the crossroads: australians and the past. 19 graeme davison, ’paradigms of public history’, australian historical studies, 24: 96, pp4-15, 4. see also his ’yarning in the street’: the evolution of australian public history’ in stuart macintyre, lenore layman and jenny gregory (eds), a historian for all seasons: essays for geoffrey bolton, monash university publishing, clayton, 2017, pp71-97. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314619108595865 20 graeme davison, ’public history’, oxford companion to australian history, oxford university press, oxford, 1998, p538. 21 institute of historical research partnership seminars 2021-2022, https://www.history.ac.uk/whats/ihr-partnership-seminars (accessed 24th january 2021). 22 paul ashton, tanya evans and paula hamilton (eds), making histories, de gruyter, berlin, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636352 23 australian women’s history network, http://www.auswhn.org.au/ and australian migration network, https://amigrationhn.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/australian-migration-history-network-launch-and-roundtable/ (both accessed 7 april 2021) 24 history council awards and prizes, https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/awards-and-prizes/ (accessed !st april 2021). 25 women of steel, https://www.womenofsteelfilm.com/ (accessed 1 april 2021). 26 australia and aotearoa new zealand public history network, https://mq-cah.github.io/anzphn/ (accessed 8 april 2021). 27 https://ifph.hypotheses.org (accessed 1 april 2021). articles (peer reviewed) the public good of digital (academic) history rebecca lenihan corresponding author: rebecca lenihan, rebecca.lenihan@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8192 article history: received 20/05/2022; accepted 08/11/2022; published 06/12/2022 introduction the promise of digital technologies for public history is vast: new audiences, dynamic content, increased engagement, largescale collaboration. but to achieve this promise, we must focus on the goals of public history and adapt our working practice to the new conditions created by the digital environment.1 take the word ‘public’ out of sharon leon’s statement and it becomes true for history carried out in university contexts. in an age where interested nonhistorians turn first to google rather than a library for their history, and where google searches on historical topics return wikipedia articles and youtube videos as the top results, it may be time that academic historians rethink the goals of their research. a common criticism of academic historians is that we write and publish with an audience comprised only of fellow scholars in mind, while public historians ‘share a commitment to making the study of the past accessible to members of the general public’.2 while in the case of new zealand history, at least, this criticism is overstated, with many of these historians writing with a wider audience in mind and their books on aspects of new zealand history frequenting mainstream bookstores nationwide, it is still true that our primary outputs remain monographs and paywalled scholarly articles. there will always be a place for scholarly articles and monographs that get into the devilish details, the greater intricacies of the subject, and push the boundaries of knowledge. but is that a sufficient goal today? as the subject specialists on topics of public interest, is it also our duty to ensure that our research is available to that interested public in an accessible way, both in terms of not being held behind paywalls, and in terms of tone and mode of communication? if we fail to do this, we run the risk, as serge noiret argues, ‘of seeing academic specialists, who know about critical historical methods and historical knowledge, as no longer relevant in the digital turn’.3 creating a more accessible digital presence for our research alongside traditional scholarly publications (that might be available in a digital format but nevertheless inaccessible due to cost) enables us to reach a wider audience, both directly among those who find it in public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: lenihan, r. 2022. the public good of digital (academic) history. public history review, 29, 185–194. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v29i0.8192 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author received no funding support specifically for this article. however, the soldiers of empire project, which is the subject of the article, was funded from 2015 to 2018 by a marsden research grant (vuw1414) awarded by the royal society of new zealand te apārangi. 185 mailto:rebecca.lenihan@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8192 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8192 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8192 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj google searches, and indirectly if it is used as a source by those publishing wikipedia articles and youtube videos. but how do we make that transition from an audience of readers of scholarly monographs and articles to a public audience of anyone with internet access? if making our research available in an easily discoverable and freely accessible digital way involves actively thinking about an audience beyond traditional readers, does that make ‘digital history’ ‘public history’? if so, do we need to consciously acknowledge that? do we need to ‘adapt our working practice to the new conditions created by the digital environment’?4 if so, how far? noiret notes several ‘academic digital history projects’ that, although online and public facing, are not ‘digital public history [projects], either because of the way in which they were designed, their intended audience, or the absence of the public as direct facilitators of the projects themselves’.5 the soldiers of empire project highlights several of the challenges of making traditional academic history a digital public history, including different audience expectations, time and resources, the disruptive nature of adapting our working practice to meet the demands of the digital environment, and finding appropriate ways to present sensitive material. the project the soldiers of empire project is an investigation that focuses on the british army soldiers who served in the new zealand wars, primarily in the 1860s.6 we are posing a range of broader questions than those traditionally considered within the ambit of military history, including linking the history of war with questions of imperial mobility, settler colonialism, and reform movements within the victorian institution of the army. the project was funded by the marsden fund te pūtea rangahau a marsden, from the royal society of new zealand te apārangi, between 2015 and 2018.7 the principal investigator is professor charlotte macdonald and the research was carried out in the history programme at te herenga waka victoria university of wellington.8 a major component of the soldiers of empire project has been the construction of a database identifying the soldiers, ‘putting a face’ to the men, as far as possible, by linking pieces of information about them from across multiple war office files.9 it is still under construction, but at the time of writing includes 14,645 individuals and over 240,000 pieces of data. the database brings together service details alongside biographical information about the men. it is important for our own research into the soldiers, enabling some analysis of who comprised these forces, rather than treating the regiments as a largely faceless mass. we knew there was wider scholarly interest in the topic. rising public interest in the subject was also evident, in part due to the 150th anniversaries of some of the major events in the wars and because of the success of the ōtorohanga college students’ 2015 petition for a national day of commemoration for the new zealand wars and for that history to be taught in new zealand schools.10 further, it has been clear from the beginning that descendants of the men were interested in a freely available dataset that included their ancestors. perhaps as many as a quarter of the men who served with the british army in the colony over this decade took their discharge (left the army) in new zealand, many of them becoming settlers.11 academic articles and monographs, in the humanities at least, work on a long time scale. from a first draft to a final publication, through peer review, editing and fitting into publication schedules, the time frame for an article is likely 12 months at a minimum, rising to several years for a monograph. from the outset, the decision was made to have a public face for the project by way of a website, to accompany these traditional outputs, to show some fruits from the research and existence of the project, before these traditional publications began to appear. an early version of the soldiers of empire website went live within a few months of the project beginning in 2015, with information about our aims and objectives, the research team, and a blog. a first set of data was available to be searched on the website before the first rā maumahara, national day of commemoration of the new zealand wars, on 28 october 2017. lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022186 between november 2015 and august 2022, the website had 57,532 unique users and 65,089 individual ‘sessions’; 182,915 page views, of which 80,532 were unique (the difference between these page view figures being the same user visiting a page they have viewed previously); 46 per cent of unique page views were of the home page and 14 per cent of the database. peak use occurred around dates when charlotte or myself presented on the project or used the website in our own teaching.12 audiences and access in considering whether digital history is public history, the present article focuses on audience and access to historical information. in the new zealand context, te ara – the encyclopedia of new zealand and nzhistory are two excellent and widely used digital history outputs that are specifically public histories.13 the content is written by professional historians, the sites are produced by manatū taonga ministry for culture and heritage and a general public audience is to the fore. te ara, first published in 2006, reports more than 500,000 users monthly, making it one of the most popular websites in new zealand.14 many of the users are school students and teachers, but also others in the professional historical field, including museum curators and university lecturers. users are encouraged ‘to submit their own stories and to comment on image and media pages’ and ‘flickr, twitter and facebook’ are used to ‘interact with users’.15 nzhistory was launched on 16 march 1999. as well as short historical essays and a calendar that outlines events ‘on this day in history’ for every day of the year, it includes ‘classroom’ and ‘hands on history’ sections specifically for teachers and students.16 these government produced digital histories are very explicitly also public histories. but digital history does not have to be public. we can use digital tools and methods in the privacy of our own computers to interpret, analyse, interrogate and display our historical research without it being accessible to anyone else. if we do make any of it available online, we do not have to make it accessible for a wider audience, or to think about audience at all. as will be outlined in further detail below, creating and maintaining a public digital platform for academic research requires adaptation of ‘our working practice’ to meet the demands of ‘the new conditions created by the digital environment’ that can be, ultimately, too disruptive to ever implement fully.17 if we do choose to go some way down the path of making our research and digital outputs publicly available, and if we choose to actively think about and consciously acknowledge an online audience, we need to think more carefully about how we transition from an audience of traditional scholarly article and monograph readers to an audience of anyone with internet access. an important first step is identifying just who that ‘online audience’ is. we are unlikely to be able to satisfy every conceivable user of a website, but we probably can imagine the main groups or user types that are likely to engage with the history we are presenting. as leon puts it, ‘we must be specific in identifying the audience and understanding the needs and assumptions that they bring with them to our work.’18 for the soldiers of empire project, we had four major user groups in mind – fellow scholars, interested general members of the public, family historians, and, with a new new zealand history curriculum (te takanga o te wā and aotearoa new zealand’s histories) being released this year for implementation in 2023, high school teachers and students looking to engage with this history.19 as the project progressed, it became apparent that our scholarly audience would be served by our usual scholarly outputs. the website was ultimately created with a more public audience in mind. the database component has been shaped in particular by use by family historians, to enable them to answer for themselves the questions most frequently coming through to us from the website contact form. as well as considering audience, we considered access to, and longevity of, our data. collections of historical data, such as that used in soldiers of empire, have often been kept in the private collections of the researchers who compiled them, with no way for other scholars to access them for reuse or to scrutinise lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022187 them to replicate the results. many of the data collections eventually become unusable even by the scholars who created them, given that technology moves on and leaves the dataset behind on magnetic tape, cassettes, cartridges, floppy disks, or in file formats that are no longer supported.20 more recently, it has become much easier to share such datasets alongside publication of the research, and an increasing number of historians, and humanities scholars in general, are doing so. the journal of open humanities data, launched in 2015, is one vehicle for such sharing, publishing both research papers based on humanities data and short data papers on datasets that have been made available for reuse. the data papers describe the dataset, how and why it was constructed, and how it might be reused.21 as the ‘about’ page of the journal succinctly notes: making research outputs available for others to work with and build upon is part of the social contract of academia… it is difficult to argue that the results of publicly funded research should not be made publicly available… [it] leads to more efficient science, as well as new kinds of studies previously not possible that involve the combination of multiple data sources… [and] can be reused by the wider public for a range of purposes including teaching, journalism and citizen science projects.22 for such reasons as these – scholarly transparency and the ‘social contract of academia’ – and because we knew the data we were gathering would be of interest to others, it was important to us from the beginning that the soldiers of empire database would eventually be made publicly available and accessible. rather than leave sharing the dataset until the end of the project, we have chosen to have iterations on the website since 2017. the r shiny app created to host the dataset online presents transcriptions of war office files in filterable and searchable data tables, but also offers ways to interrogate the datasets, in graph and map form. this not only makes it easy to find and understand individual records, as someone searching for their ancestor would want to do, but also aids in seeing trends from the aggregate data, as a teacher, student, journalist or fellow scholar coming to the dataset would be more likely to want to do.23 the benefits of the database being publicly available have not been oneway. our data, and consequently our research as a whole, has benefitted greatly from feedback from the descendants who have found information on their ancestors recorded incorrectly or simply missing, or who have sent their copious family history research notes or unpublished family histories to us.24 a further motive for making that application the primary focus of the project’s digital space is that the data collected for it is increasingly being held behind paywalls, even though it is all public record. the data is primarily comprised of war office files held by the national archives of the united kingdom but has been transcribed and made available by family history websites, available only through those websites (though without a personal subscription) even when you are standing in the national archives building (unless you have special permission to view the originals). having transcribed the data and knowing it was useful and interesting for family historians in particular, we wanted to make it publicly and freely available, because it felt wrong that it should only be available digitally from anywhere in the world to those who could afford a subscription to a family history website, or could travel to a public library that provided access as a service. ideally, of course, the institutions that host the original documents would make access freely available. however, digitising these records is a mammoth task and, given their tight budgets, it is understandable that these institutions take help from family history websites whenever they can. by making the soldiers of empire data, collected for our own scholarly purposes, publicly available, we provide a twofold service: we make our research process more transparent and replicable for other scholars, and we make this data, that is public record, freely available to anyone with internet access. because our dataset is geared towards research of the soldiers as a whole, it also enables use and searching of the data in a more open and flexible way: users can interrogate the full dataset for patterns that might be derived from it. lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022188 this contrasts with family history websites that require searching for a specific name – a product of focusing on their primary audience, which is looking for individuals. if the major determinant of whether digital history is public history or not is accessibility, then we must also consider the mode of communication. the primary change to our usual practices in the soldiers of empire project is in simplifying the language used across the website and database app. as one example, if we were writing with only a scholarly audience in mind, we would refer to our sources with a full archival reference, confident that our readers would know how to find that source and how it fits within the context of the archive it belongs in. instead, we have provided descriptions of the sources, detailing their creation and any issues with them as they have been made available today. in presenting the data table for the wo12 dataset, for example, if we had only fellow scholars in mind, we might simply have prefaced it by saying: source: ‘effects and credits’ pages, tna series: wo12, commissary general of musters office and successors: general muster books and pay lists (ajcp ref: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj 728688653). instead, this data table includes the following preface: this tab contains data drawn solely from the effects and credits pages of the wo12 archive series – the quarterly muster rolls of the regiments. these files were copied by the australian joint copying project (ajcp), and have since been made available digitally via trove (wo 12, ajcp, trove). the effects and credits pages recorded, essentially, what a man owed the regiment, or what he was owed by the regiment, upon his departure from the regiment, usually by death, desertion, or discharge, but also occasionally by transfer to another regiment and other such less permanent departures. while one might expect that this would mean every man is entered into these records just once, in the case of soldiers who deserted and were later returned to the regiment, they will appear for each desertion, and later for their discharge or death also. men also appeared in these records at each successive quarterly muster until the clerk had completed all the relevant details about the man. that is, at the first muster they may not have had the full details of what the man owed or was owed at hand, and so their name is carried forward to the next muster, and so on until full details are available. at some future point, this data will be tidied up further so that each ‘event’ a man is entered for appears only once, but at this stage every time they were recorded in the effects and credits pages appears in the data table below.25 as is always the case, making information more accessible for one purpose or audience makes it more accessible for everyone, and filling in these details saves extra work on the part of any fellow scholars who subsequently come to the data. a probable next step for our web presence (alongside continuing to update the database) will be with the release of the new history curriculum. how can we make the web presence for this research more useful for teachers and their students? this is a question all new zealand historians whose subject matter touches on aspects of the new curriculum might be asking themselves. making the web presence more accessible will support this audience, which generally has less access to the paywalled scholarly articles we write. as teachers are finding their way with the new curriculum and the first generation of new zealand children are being introduced to aotearoa new zealand’s history in a comprehensive way, ensuring we change our ways of working to address this audience by producing our research in a digital, and public, format is a worthy use of our time and resources. lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022189 https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-728688653 https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-728688653 https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-728664549/findingaid#nla-obj-728688653 time and resource constraints; or limitations on making digital history public history as might be gathered from the above, there is a considerable amount of extra work in considering diverse audiences and ‘adapting our working practice’ accordingly. just because something is online and freely available, does not mean it is ‘free’ in terms of the production of content or the time required to craft that content for the digital environment. looking back over the soldiers of empire project, we can see that we underestimated how much we would need to ‘adapt our working practice’ in order to create our desired public face. initially, we envisioned a regular blog with updates on the research; regular tweets about the research and engaging with related content; an uptodate news feed of our seminars, lectures, conference papers and other such activity about the project; a space for people to learn about our goals in the project and who we were; and a way to access the database. however, ‘we’ are a core team of two: myself and professor charlotte macdonald. both of us also had other academic work to attend to on top of undertaking the actual research that would feed this digital presence. without making the digital presence the primary focus of the project, or without a dedicated assistant to work at keeping everything uptodate while other work was being undertaken, it simply was not feasible to bring this vision to full fruition. blog posts seemed to strike a suitable balance. they seemed a natural output for a public face to the project. we always had new snippets of research we could potentially share in this format, and we had maintained a regular series of blog posts in a previous, smaller, related project.26 scholarly blogs are becoming increasingly common and are a simple, efficient and accessible way to reach new audiences, and to get early feedback on research.27 however, they were not straight forward, requiring us to significantly alter our usual writing styles, and to be prepared to share ideas in written form before we felt entirely ready to do so. leon notes, ‘writing for a blog requires a willingness to write quickly and frequently. driven by users’ desire for fresh content… blog content is perceived as being much more spontaneous, relaxed, and casual’.28 neither of us would claim our scholarly writing to be ‘spontaneous, relaxed, and casual’, so this was always going to be a hurdle. in addition, given the sensitive nature of the research, relaxed or casual may have been inappropriate. we did not consider it viable to write a ‘scholarly’ blog that was less frequent, fully referenced and written with fellow scholars in mind, because we were very conscious that the website’s primary audience was public. further, spontaneity risks something being put on the page we might later have wished we had framed in another way. being in the middle of a long term project, our thoughts on many matters are still yet to be fully formed, and so we have been reluctant to put those still evolving ideas into the world in such a public and semipermanent way. we have presented our emerging work in unrecorded academic conference and seminar papers, which are fairly ephemeral in comparison to public facing blog posts. in addition, when the audience is fellow scholars, such preliminary thoughts are also less likely to be taken, or used, out of context; we can assume that audience is familiar with all the spoken and unspoken caveats one places on such findings when the research is not yet complete. in contrast, a member of the public may naturally assume that something published by an academic on their project blog is gospel truth rather than a work inprogress, which raises the question of peer review of scholarly website content. is a peer review process consciously or unconsciously expected by readers of a scholarly website? a question for another day is how such a process might work, if it would too considerably add to turnaround times, and whether it would negate the ‘spontaneous, relaxed, and casual’ nature of blog posts, rendering them less relevant. in the end, most of the soldiers of empire blog posts have been written by students as part of their work for the project, or by us about the work students have done on the project and pointing to their digital outputs.29 this has, for us, been an acceptable compromise. in each of those cases the student’s research had come to an end – this was their final work on the project, the culmination of a discrete piece of research. lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022190 it meant we were still offering something on the blog, but without having to put our own, still evolving, thoughts into the world. nevertheless, these posts are still much more toward the scholarly end of the blogwriting spectrum, not ‘spontaneous’, ‘relaxed’, or ‘casual’. indeed, a few are essentially short essays, fully referenced and written in usual academic vernacular, but online. the leap from careful, long form, scholarly writing to something less formal (that is, more suitable for regular blog posts, or written specifically with a ‘public’ audience in mind) was a larger leap than we were ready to make or to ask our students to take. in short, without a fundamental shift in the way we work and the way we write, or a refocusing of our time to make such a digital output a priority, a regular blog series was impractical. maintaining a social media presence to engage an online audience for historical research is another task that can conflict with researchers’ available time or skillset. leon writes ‘the key to successful writing for [social media] platforms is frequency and engagement. unlike other venues for public history, a successful social media strategy is driven by a commitment to timely updates.’30 there is a good reason businesses, government ministries, museums, and even universities, have dedicated social media teams. if posting to social media is not already a part of a daily ritual, adding this to one’s plate of things to do in a given work day or work week is a huge and time consuming step. leon adds that social media posts should be crafted as headlines: ‘punchy, bright, and provocative is much more the order of the realm than staid. for historians concerned about sensationalism and nuance, this can be a difficult adjustment.’31 this is a concern for us with the soldiers of empire project. we are researching, and to some extent aiming to humanise, the men who comprised the british forces who fought battles that paved the way for generations of māori to be stripped of their land, language and culture. we are presenting these findings at a time when there are still people who see any reparations or attempt at rectifying these historical wrongs as evidence of racial preference.32 british soldiers and their activities during the new zealand wars are far too easy to make into sensationalised clickbait, and that is not something we want to do, even if we could ‘take comfort’ that the tweets would mostly ‘point to existing web content that… reflects a more considered approach’.33 attempting to encourage engagement in the project and its website via twitter while finding, then walking, the fine line between staid and clickbait, we had two twitter ‘campaigns’ early in the project.34 in both, we aimed to bring to light the men beneath the red coats, so to speak. in the first campaign, we tweeted cropped images of the moustaches of the men throughout ‘movember’ 2015, linking to the digitised records of the images.35 in the second campaign, we tweeted excerpts from a soldier’s diary between 29 january and 4 may 2016, which john mclellan, one of our summer scholar students, had transcribed.36 some of the excerpts are just as one would expect from a diary of a man at war, for example, describing being injured on his first day of active combat in new zealand, at the battle of gate pa on 29 april 1864: ‘i suddenly felt as if something hot had taken off the top of my head and i fell against the side of the pit.’37 however, we also tweeted excerpts that, in the broader context of the conflict he was in new zealand to fight, border on ridiculous, but that in the context of one man’s life and personal diary make perfect sense. writing on 21 june 1864, the date of one of the bloodiest battles of the new zealand wars, he pines for his beloved evy: ‘my darlings birth day. how i have looked forward to this day for the last month’; ‘i wonder if she ever thinks of me now’; ‘how well i remember this day last year. i wonder if she ever guesses the reason why i went to hythe.’38 while satisfied with how we managed to walk that fine line in both twitter campaigns, they required careful planning and time, once again time that could have been spent elsewhere on the project. in addition, we did not reach a ‘public’ audience with these tweets: instead we predominantly reached an extension of our usual scholarly audience. after these two pushes, the project’s twitter feed became mostly short tweets pointing to student work or blog posts, links to articles by others working in the field, or retweets of relevance to the project. had we made this social media outreach a greater focus of the project, we might have reached a wider public audience, who might have contributed further information about the men from family histories, as the family historians who have been in touch through the website have done. it would lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022191 not have been without benefit to the project, but the time required did not, for us, merit the time lost for other parts of the research, or the risk of sensationalising something unnecessarily. despite the website and social media presence not taking the form we had initially envisioned, i do not see this as a failure, but rather as a coming to terms with what we ultimately wanted from the project’s digital presence and the time we had available. it took some months to accept that much of that vision of the website was not going to come to fruition due to time pressures and the primary focus of the project being to get the actual research done. when i look at the website now, seven years after it was first launched, it is obvious why it ended up taking the shape it did. our scholarly audience were being served by journal articles and conference and seminar papers that were being presented regularly throughout the project. this website presence was not primarily for them. taking those making contact with us via the website as a proxy for website usage, the majority of our audience were family historians looking for their ancestors, who had found the website via google. they primarily wanted to know if their specific ancestor was in our datasets and what else we knew about them. so, it was natural that we spent time on a resource for that audience, updating the app that presents the database of these men, so they could search for them in our datasets for themselves. conclusion the promise of digital technologies for… history is vast: new audiences, dynamic content, increased engagement, largescale collaboration. but to achieve this promise, we must focus on the goals of… history and adapt our working practice to the new conditions created by the digital environment.39 is digital history public history? it does not have to be, but it probably should be. if we are utilising digital technologies as tools and methods for our own research purposes, we can fairly easily share these online. if we can let those digital tools do double duty, serving our scholarly purposes and allowing our research to reach a wider audience, we should do so. we are living in an age where archives are increasingly digitised and available to anyone with access to the internet. it is also a time when professional skills and training are not as valued as they once were by the general public.40 this combination has created perfect conditions for a world in which anyone can think of themselves as a historian, not understanding that ‘history’ is not just ‘facts about things that happened in the past’. meg foster spoke to these concerns in an article published in this journal in 2014, citing james gardner: left to their own devices, gardner predicts that the public will use the past to reinforce their own expectations and prejudices. ‘history’ will apparently signify the rearrangement of facts for present purposes, and become devoid of true, historical meaning.41 foster continues: this apocalyptic vision of the future has been compounded by public misconceptions about historians and their work. a recent study in australia suggests that most ordinary people have little idea what academically trained historians actually do, apart from work with ‘old things’.42 in this context, it is important that trained historians put their research and findings in the places the public can find it using a simple google search, and not hide it away in articles and books that are inaccessible outside of a university library. digital technologies offer significant promise and opportunities to historical researchers. above and beyond these opportunities, we may have to ‘adapt our working practice to the new conditions created by the digital environment’ to avoid perceived obsolescence as a discipline. we should more fully engage with digital history and work to make that digital history public history.43 lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022192 acknowledgements the author would like to thank dr lauren anderson, professor charlotte macdonald, two anonomous reviewers and the editors of this volume for their feedback on drafts of this article. the ‘soldiers of empire’ project was funded by the marsden fund te pūtea rangahau a marsden, royal society of new zealand te apārangi, between 2015 and 2018 under the title ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, settler’. endnotes 1 sharon leon, ‘complexity and collaboration: doing public history in digital environments’, in paula hamilton and james b. gardner (eds), the oxford handbook of public history, 2017, p45. leon’s chapter works in many ways as a ‘how to’ guide for public historians working in a digital environment and has been very useful to my thinking about whether, and how, those same principles should apply to academic historians bringing their work to a digital space. 2 ibid, p45. 3 serge noiret, ‘digital public history’, in david dean (ed), a companion to public history, john wiley & sons, 2018, p116. 4 leon, op cit, p45. 5 noiret, op cit, p115 6 for a concise overview of the new zealand wars, see keenan, d. 2017, new zealand wars (online). available: https:// teara.govt.nz/en/newzealandwars 7 the title of the project for this funding is ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, settler’. 8 see soldiers of empire home (online), 2021. available: www.soldiersofempire.nz/ 9 for more on these files, and on some of the difficulties of bringing the details on these men together, see charlotte macdonald and rebecca lenihan, ‘paper soldiers: the life, death and reincarnation of nineteenthcentury military files across the british empire’, in rethinking history, vol 22, no 3, 2018, pp375402. 10 mclachlan, lm. 2016, students call for day to remember land wars (online). available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/ news/temanukorihi/298505/studentscallfordaytorememberlandwars. this petition resulted in a decision to make the teaching of new zealand history a part of the core curriculum: ardern, j. and hipkins, c. 2019, nz history to be taught in all schools (online). available: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nzhistorybetaughtallschools 11 for more on these ‘soldier settlers’ see john mclellan, ‘soldiers & colonists: imperial soldiers as settlers in nineteenthcentury new zealand,’ ma thesis, victoria university of wellington, 2017. 12 data from google analytics for the website accessed on 30 august 2022. 13 https://teara.govt.nz/en; https://nzhistory.govt.nz/ 14 te ara – a history – users, responses and influence (online), 2014. available: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/tearaa history/page12 (accessed 30 august 2022). 15 te ara – a history (online), 2021. available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ara-a-history (accessed 30 august 2022). 16 about this site (online), 2021. available: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/about-this-site (accessed 30 august 2022). 17 leon, op cit, p45. 18 ibid, p57. 19 for further detail on the new curriculum, see aotearoa new zealand’s histories and te takanga o te wā (online), 2022. available: https://www.education.govt.nz/ourwork/changesineducation/aotearoanewzealandshistoriesandte takangaotewa/ 20 personal observations of the author, who will not name and shame the scholars in question! 21 https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/ 22 about (online), nd. available: https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/about/ (accessed 20 march 2022). 23 soldiers of empire data explorer (online), 2021. available: https://empiresoldiers.shinyapps.io/soldiers_of_empire_ data_explorer/ (accessed 20 march 2022). 24 though a quite different output, a comparison might be made here with arguments made by tanya evans with regard to the australian dictionary of biography (abd). she notes that ‘for centuries public history was practised as local, family and community history’ and that ‘the abd has long relied on the contributions of nonacademics’ drawing on that ‘local, family and community’ history. tanya evans, ‘biography and lifewriting can remake the nation: a review of australian dictionary of biography, volume 19, 19911995 (az)’, in australian historical studies, vol 53, no 3, p484. 25 see soldiers of empire data explorer (online), 2021. available: https://empiresoldiers.shinyapps.io/soldiers_of_ empire_data_explorer/ (accessed 20 march 2022). lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022193 https://teara.govt.nz/en/new-zealand-wars https://teara.govt.nz/en/new-zealand-wars http://www.soldiersofempire.nz/ https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/298505/students-call-for-day-to-remember-land-wars https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/298505/students-call-for-day-to-remember-land-wars https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nz-history-be-taught-all-schools https://teara.govt.nz/en https://nzhistory.govt.nz/ http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/te-ara-a-history/page-12 http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/te-ara-a-history/page-12 https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ara-a-history https://nzhistory.govt.nz/about-this-site https://www.education.govt.nz/our-work/changes-in-education/aotearoa-new-zealands-histories-and-te-takanga-o-te-wa/ https://www.education.govt.nz/our-work/changes-in-education/aotearoa-new-zealands-histories-and-te-takanga-o-te-wa/ https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/ https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/about/ https://empiresoldiers.shinyapps.io/soldiers_of_empire_data_explorer/ https://empiresoldiers.shinyapps.io/soldiers_of_empire_data_explorer/ https://empiresoldiers.shinyapps.io/soldiers_of_empire_data_explorer/ https://empiresoldiers.shinyapps.io/soldiers_of_empire_data_explorer/ 26 looking down the barrel of history: the battle of te ranga (online), 2014. available: http://lookingdownthebarrelof history.weebly.com/ 27 andrew mcgregor presents a strong case for the use of blogs by scholars, arguing, among other things, that as well as potentially fostering a more cohesive and collaborative community, as it has in his subfield of american sport history, this form of scholarly communication is also more democratic, being less formal and written for a public audience. andrew mcgregor, ‘the power of blogging: rethinking scholarship and reshaping boundaries at sport in american history’, in journal of sport history, vol 44, no 2, 2017, pp23956. 28 leon, op cit, pp6061. 29 soldiers of empire blog (online), 2022. available: http://www.soldiersofempire.nz/blog 30 leon, op cit, p62. 31 ibid, p63. 32 see, for example, remarks by former national party leaders don brash and judith collins: brash speech returns to orewa themes (online), 2022. available: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/donbrashreturnstoorewawithfamiliar themesofracebasedprivilege/xs4h5xh23q6idp2gujlwtws66e/ (accessed 27 march 2022); hobson’s pledge, nd, about us (online). available: https://www.hobsonspledge.nz/about_us (accessed 27 march 2022); collins says her party won’t stand for ‘racist separatism’ new zealand (online), 2021. available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/441350/ collinssaysherpartywontstandforracistseparatismnewzealand. 33 leon, op cit, p63. 34 facebook was not seriously considered as an option for social media engagement for the project as it is less ‘scholarly’. twitter was, and is, used more by digital humanities scholars for communication of their work and was the natural choice. as the ‘twitter for scholarly networking’ guide published by the digital humanities centre at berkeley university notes ‘twitter has evolved as a key space for digital humanists (and a variety of researchers from other fields) to discover peers at other institutions, share information, discuss, debate, and form communities of interest.’ (https://digital humanities.berkeley.edu/twitterscholarlynetworking (accessed 30 august 2022). anabel quanhaase, kim martin, lori mccaypeet, ‘networks of digital humanities scholars: the informational and social uses and gratifications of twitter’, in big data and society, vol 2, no 1, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715589417 was published at the same time we were making this decision but not read at the time. their findings ‘show that twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within dh invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to ‘twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists).’ 35 beginning on 1 november 2015 with the moustache of captain w. t. croft of the 65th regiment: https://twitter.com/ empiresoldiers/status/660535350087958528?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r8koyfpdcjg 36 https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/692870389953761281?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r8koyfpdcjg. the full transcription of this diary is available on the project website: http://www.soldiersofempire.nz/ensignnicholljournal.html 37 https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/712367275689512961?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r8koyfpdcjg 38 https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/725818701883166720?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r8koyfpdcjg; https://twitter. com/empiresoldiers/status/726914948954120192?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r8koyfpdcjg; https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/st atus/727662016303792128?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r8koyfpdcjg 39 leon, op cit, p45. 40 as evidenced during the covid pandemic by the hundreds of thousands of people who would rather believe the theories of untrained members of the public read on social media than trained epidemiologists and the world health organisation, when it comes to appropriate public health measures, to the point where these experts are actively threatened – see, for example, maclean, h. 2022, otago covid19 experts copping abuse (online) available: https:// www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/459107/otagocovid19expertscoppingabuse; neilson, m. 2021, covid 19 delta outbreak dr siouxsie wiles hits back at claims she broke lockdown rules (online). available: https://www.nzherald. co.nz/nz/covid19coronavirusdeltaoutbreakdrsiouxsiewileshitsbackataccusationsshebrokelockdown rules/2t7ogkya3x3iptrzx45dvjtwqu/ (accessed 27 march 2022); livingstone, h. 2022, new zealand covid experts take legal action against employer over alleged failure to protect them from abuse (online). available: https://www. theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/newzealandcovidexpertstakelegalactionagainstemployeroveralleged failuretoprotectthemfromabuse. or, more specific to the subject matter at hand, by the comments made by members of the public about the new aotearoa new zealand history curriculum, who, having an interest in history and reading it in their leisure time, consider their opinion superior to the professional historians who contributed to the curriculum. grant, d. 2022, if this history curriculum is shaping our future, the outlook is bleak (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/ opinion/128161959/ifthishistorycurriculumisshapingourfuturetheoutlookisbleak. 41 james b. gardner, ‘trust, risk and public history: a view from the united states’, in public history review, vol 17, 2010, p53, cited in meg foster, ‘online and plugged in? public history and historians in the digital age’, in public history review, vol 21, 2014, p5. 42 foster, p5, citing paul ashton and paula hamilton, ‘at home with the past: background and initial findings from the national survey’, in australian cultural history, vol 22, 2003, p17. 43 leon, op cit, p45. lenihan public history review, vol. 29, 2022194 http://lookingdownthebarrelofhistory.weebly.com/ http://lookingdownthebarrelofhistory.weebly.com/ http://www.soldiersofempire.nz/blog https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/don-brash-returns-to-orewa-with-familiar-themes-of-race-based-privilege/xs4h5xh23q6idp2gujlwtws66e/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/don-brash-returns-to-orewa-with-familiar-themes-of-race-based-privilege/xs4h5xh23q6idp2gujlwtws66e/ https://www.hobsonspledge.nz/about_us https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/441350/collins-says-her-party-won-t-stand-for-racist-separatism-new-zealand https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/441350/collins-says-her-party-won-t-stand-for-racist-separatism-new-zealand https://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/twitter-scholarly-networking https://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/twitter-scholarly-networking https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2053951715589417 https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/660535350087958528?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/660535350087958528?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/692870389953761281?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg http://www.soldiersofempire.nz/ensign-nicholl-journal.html https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/712367275689512961?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/725818701883166720?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/726914948954120192?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/726914948954120192?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/727662016303792128?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://twitter.com/empiresoldiers/status/727662016303792128?s=20&t=i51eiuvai2r-8koyfpdcjg https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/459107/otago-covid-19-experts-copping-abuse https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/459107/otago-covid-19-experts-copping-abuse https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-delta-outbreak-dr-siouxsie-wiles-hits-back-at-accusations-she-broke-lockdown-rules/2t7ogkya3x3iptrzx45dvjtwqu/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-delta-outbreak-dr-siouxsie-wiles-hits-back-at-accusations-she-broke-lockdown-rules/2t7ogkya3x3iptrzx45dvjtwqu/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-delta-outbreak-dr-siouxsie-wiles-hits-back-at-accusations-she-broke-lockdown-rules/2t7ogkya3x3iptrzx45dvjtwqu/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/new-zealand-covid-experts-take-legal-action-against-employer-over-alleged-failure-to-protect-them-from-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/new-zealand-covid-experts-take-legal-action-against-employer-over-alleged-failure-to-protect-them-from-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/new-zealand-covid-experts-take-legal-action-against-employer-over-alleged-failure-to-protect-them-from-abuse https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/128161959/if-this-history-curriculum-is-shaping-our-future-the-outlook-is-bleak https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/128161959/if-this-history-curriculum-is-shaping-our-future-the-outlook-is-bleak for a new international public history public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) for a new international public history thomas cauvin université du luxembourg corresponding author: thomas cauvin, thomas.cauvin@uni.lu doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8382 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords public history; international; glocal; decentralization the way we communicate and engage with knowledge has greatly changed in the last few decades. the rise of the internet, the spread of digital devices and the use of new media have made much easier the production and sharing of contents. this revolution of communication has many consequences on the way we produce, share and consume information. the impact is not limited to medias and communication but affects many academic disciplines such as history. in many aspects, the growing interest in public history reflects new understanding and practices of knowledge production. first used in print in eighteenth century england, ‘public history’ had initially a very political dimension, connecting history with national identity building.1 a modern approach to public history developed in the united states in the 1970s and has now an international presence. the map from the international federation for public history (ifph) lists dozens of programs and centers all around the world.2 if public history developed largely in north america and europe, growing numbers of projects and networks appear in latin america and asia. ten years after the creation of the ifph in 2011, the field of public history is now richer, more diverse but also more complex. in this article, i discuss the different processes of internationalization since the development of the public history movement in the united states in the 1970s. i argue that we are currently witnessing a new phase of international public history based on collaborative adaptations between international discussions and local existing practices. how old is public history? answering this very simple question depends on how one defines public history. if public history is the practice or the communication of history in a public space, then there are very old examples. for instance, museums have displayed historical objects for different publics at least since the nineteenth century – and the birth of public museums. likewise, if one considers collecting and archiving documents as doing history for the public goods, then very old sites such as the library of alexandria (created in the third century bc in egypt) of public history exist. rebecca conard shows that the development of public history in the united states had very pragmatic roots connected to local and applied history.3 however, those examples are evidence of certain practices – perhaps public historical practices – but not of an identified self-­aware field of knowledge production. if one considers public history as a structured field with identified practices, methodology, training, theory and institutional development (journals, university programs, conferences), then its development is far more recent. robert kelley used public history as an identified set of practices in the 1970s. professor at the university of california at santa barbara (ucsb) in the united states, environmental historian, consultant and expert witness on matters related to water rights, kelley represented an attempt to redefine the history profession to include more practical applications.4 the first university program in public history opened at ucsb in 1976, the academic journal the public historian appeared in 1978 and a series of public history conferences were organized in 1979 and 1980, leading to the creation of the national council on public history in 1979.5 the new association, the journal and the creation of university programs institutionalized public history as a specific field of study, research and practice. defining public history has not been an easy task and its definitions have also evolved since the 1970s. defined initially as the history done outside of the classroom, more complex approaches have since appeared.6 i have recently used the metaphor of a tree to define public history as a process based on certain steps. the roots represent the creation and preservation of sources (oral history, archiving, historic preservation for instance), the trunk gathers the acts of interpreting sources (the traditional tasks of historians), the branches are the many ways of communicating history through various medias while the leaves are the different uses of history among public groups and individuals. as every metaphor, the public his’tree bears some flaws: for instance, it could let us think that there would be a straight process from creating to using history whereas the process is in fact more complex with some influences from public demands on the decisions to preserve some sources (and buildings) and not others. nevertheless, the comparison with a tree raises important points. first, the public history process may very well go beyond the simple act of interpreting sources. historians can work and collaborate with archivists, curators, and other agents to preserve and communicate history to large audiences. the multiple branches of the tree represent the wish to make history more accessible and available to different publics. second, public history has at its core a deep participatory approach that invites to work with a variety of partners, including members of the public. in addition to debates over its definitions, public history also raises questions regarding its spatial and cultural origins and development. if the term ‘public history’ was first used in the united states in the 1970s, was there a single model? would international public history be the mere spreading of practices from the united states to the rest of the world? public his ’tree7 from the unites states to the anglosphere: the first international public history it is almost impossible to identify clear-­cut specific national productions of knowledge. any national framework would be overtly simplifying very complex processes and exchanges. french history may relate to the study of the past for what has now become france. but it is by no mean a single way of doing history in france. similarly, it would be futile to gather all approaches, definitions and practices from one country into a single model. in the book ‘what is public history globally?’, various authors propose chapters on public history in different countries – including the united states, canada, germany, china and indonesia.8 however, much more than identifying a single concept, the chapters rather attempt to highlight some specific issues, approaches and practices of doing public history in certain countries. despite the challenging attempt to divide the field into strict national currents, one can wonder whether the rise of public history reflects specific approaches of history. would public history be a cultural approach associated with the united states where it was first used? in 1984, french historian henry rousso perceived public history as being very much connected to the context in the united states. he therefore doubted the possibility to develop it in france.9 this perception of public history as a phenomenon from the united states was reinforced by the presentations given all around the world in the 1980s by some founding members of the movement. wesley g. johnson – one of the tenants of the movement in the united states – was a restless advocator for public history. he toured europe – italy, germany, france and holland – several times in the early 1980s to both introduce public history and to evaluate the opportunities for collaboration.10 johnson’s involvement into public history in europe was such that dutch historian paul knevel compared him to a public history ‘missionary’,11 bringing – almost in a religious manner – knowledge to other parts of the world. initial international development of public history took place through english-­speaking networks. johnson was in contact with british historian anthony sutcliffe to develop a public history program in britain. if the creation of a public history program ultimately failed, their collaboration contributed to the organization of the first conference of applied history (co-­organized by the british social science research council) – another name given to public history – in rotterdam, holland, in 1982. likewise, historians from the united states jan warren-­findley and jim gardner worked with colleagues in australia (paul ashton and paula hamilton) to establish collaboration between the two countries. a public history program was set up in 1988 at the university of technology sydney and the public history review was launched in 1992. the collaboration within english-­speaking networks unsurprisingly led to public history resources and literature being almost exclusively published in english. the reception of public history in britain matched local debates. although the expression public history was not used until very recently in britain, new approaches of public participation emerged in the 1970s.12 raphael samuel created the history workshop at ruskin college (a trade-­union, adult-­education institution, oxford, britain). the approach he adopted came from a ‘desire to lessen the authority of academic history and thereby further a democratisation of the study and uses of history.’13 it is no coincidence whether the first master of public history in britain was created in 1996 at ruskin college – where samuel had been based. by the end of the 1990s, the extreme majority of public history programs, journals, projects and conferences had taken place in the united states, canada, united kingdom, and australia. if the first process of internationalization of public history largely developed from the united states to the anglosphere, the situation clearly changed in the last decade. what’s new in international public history? as a pretty young and dynamic international field, public history is fast changing – so in that sense, a new international public history is pretty much stressing the obvious. supporting a new international public history is not asking for a brand-­new field but to highlight specific aspects of the process that make public history more diverse and more collaborative. while acknowledging and praising the passionate work done by tenants of public history in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, this first process of internationalization of public history was rather a spread of a phenomenon limited to some english-­speaking countries. what we have been witnessing since the late 2000s is rather an increasingly decentralized and participatory international public history. this new international public history allows for broader discussions on what it means to do, communicate and share history in contemporary societies. a false start or a new synergy? the new international public history in the age of infancy whereas public history developed almost exclusively in the anglosphere in the 1980s and 1990s, things started to slowly change in the 2000s. however, the change was initially not obvious, repeating previous steps. during its 2004 annual conference, the board of the national council on public history (ncph) created a sub-­committee to explore options of international public history. the sub-­committee received the support of many historians – like connie shultz, rebecca conard and mark tebeau – who were either interested or already part of international networks.14 it took a few years but in 2009 an international task force was created within the ncph with anna adamek – curator at the canada science and technology museum – as chair. she explains ‘the ncph board had just voted to establish the task force to achieve greater visibility for the ncph globally, and identify ways in which ncph, as the leading professional organization in the public history field, could better serve historians outside the u.s.’15 what looked like a repetition of the 1980s – a spread from the united states to international english-­speaking networks – turned ultimately out to be more complex. unlike the 1980s, there was a growing interest in public history coming from outside the united states, especially among european historians. adamek stresses that ‘they (european historians) were not ready to join what they perceived as an organization focused on predominantly american issues.’16 the international interest was not in ready-­to-­use models of public history but rather in broader international discussions on how to conceive, develop and practice a public history. however, under the guidance of adamek – born and raised in poland – the task force quickly turned into a true international discussion. the task force proposed a working group on the internationalisation of public history for the ncph’s 2010 conference. rather than north americans meeting to discuss how to spread public history, the working group included historians from italy, germany, romania, france, czech republic, cambodia, bangladesh and china who put forward proposals. this led to the creation of the international federation for public history in 2011 with a very international board.17 in many ways, the federation helped international public history to move from the age of infancy to an age of maturation. international public history in the age of maturation in 2019, i gave a presentation in japan about international public history. after the talk, i received one comment that i was presenting a very western definition of (public) history that was also a form of new imperialism. working in the united states after an education in europe, i could see some valid questioning on the type of history i was presenting. if i could totally concede the need for questioning, the reference to imperialism was the opposite of what i have been calling for. for one, the talk was given at the annual meeting of the japanese association of public history that, since its creation in 2019, gathers scholars and professionals interested and practicing public history in japan. i was therefore not importing public history as a missionary but rather proposing avenues of discussions for what public history meant in various contexts. more broadly, the field of international public history had greatly changed since the 1970s. the very structure of the international federation for public history (ifph) symbolizes the wish to set public history into a multilateral international framework of discussion. it was created in 2011 as an affiliated association to the international committee of historical sciences (ichs) that itself works as an umbrella for historical associations all over the world. although originally connected, the ifph emancipated from public history in north america. the first conference of the ifph took place in holland in 2014, followed by a second international meeting in jinan (china) during the 2015 international committee of historical sciences meeting.18 another symbolic aspect of the maturation of international public history has been the creation of national groups and associations. beyond the very established national council on public history in the united states and the japanese association of public history that formed in 2019, there are today national groups in brazil, spain, italy and australia and new zealand. some initial discussions exploring the possible creation of an italian association of public history took place in china (jinan) during the 2015 ifph conference. this decentralized international public history is crucial. created in 2016, the associazione italiana di public history was one of the first official examples (with the case of the brazilian network of public history) of a public history network in a non-­english speaking country. in this new decentralized international public history, projects, approaches or understandings of public history coming from the united states merely represent some of the many international voices. the constant relations between the local, national and international discussions create interesting public history frameworks. previously presented in a chapter on international public history, the ‘glocal’ concept invites to relate local and global perspectives and seems appropriate to define the current status.19 the glocal scope represents very much the development of public history in italy. on the one hand, the link with the development of public history in the united states is openly acknowledged in the very title of the associazione italiana di public history (aiph) by the use of the english expression. the choice of the english term ‘public history’ is motivated by the explicit intention to refer to a vast international movement and to a discipline that has its origins in the late seventies in the anglo-­saxon world.20 however, the english expression is by no means a simple use of a north american model but rather a conscious selection, adaptation and reinvention. the italian association wrote a manifesto in 2018 that sheds light into the new international public history. it highlights the ‘national approach to international field.’ in this glocal process, the specificities of the local and national italian contexts framed the development of public history. if public history is a new field, it connects to long existing italian practices. the manifesto pointed out: the acknowledgement and the ties with important italian traditions are explicit. in our country there are many cultural institutions that can proudly claim a long activity of civil commitment and of history practices in the public and with local communities, and that have contributed to innovating with originality the forms of communication of historical knowledge.21 another reason to develop public history in italy was, according to the manifesto, the previous development of oral history – and their collaborative practices – as well as the lessons of microhistory that had profoundly impacted how history has been practiced in the country. whereas the public history movement in the united states in the 1970s highlighted its differences with traditional practices, the development of public history in italy also stresses the fact that historians, institutions and projects had been doing public history without the name. the glocal approach also means that local practices can affect international public history discussions. translated in english, the italian manifesto has been presented and used in other countries – testifying of the new decentralized international public history. other national associations look at it as possible examples for their own local development. the specificity of the italian context – with its classical heritage – contributed to the relevance of public archaeology in the broader development of public history. this appears particularly insightful for countries such as greece, egypt or the united kingdom where public archaeology has become popular. besides, international public history can develop from local disconnected examples. for instance, the multiple local and national examples of increased political pressures on historians and on the public uses of the past – including but by no means limited to brazil, colombia, poland or the united states – led to international discussions on how they affect public history.22 in this case, local decentralized practices enrich international public history. east and south of the west: burgeoning of public history in other parts of the world international public history moved from a rather negative process of definition – what public history was not – to a more confident acceptation of the multiple approaches. in the 1970s, tenants of the public history movement in the united states argued for the validity of the field by defining public history by what it was not. for instance, kelley and johnson viewed public history as being practiced outside of the classroom – therefore as not only being driven by educational standards – as well as in opposition to traditional practices of historians viewed as isolated in their ivory tower.23 defining public history was also marked by recurring controversies. in 2007, a new proposed definition by the ncph led to intense controversies. many opposed the term ‘mission’ used in the proposal because they thought it was a top-­down approach going against the collaborative construction of public history.24 given the many different approaches and contexts of practice, defining international public history – or defining public history in an international framework – could have led to many bitter disagreements. however, the amount of controversies has remained rather limited. certainly, some criticisms against public history have emerged, but few disagreements appear about what public history is or should be. this rather appeased framework of discussion comes partly from the absence of any unilateral and strict definition of public history. for instance, the international federation for public history does not propose a single – one for all – definition of the field. it presents instead some of the core issues for those who practice, teach or research public history. unlike the spread of public history from the united states in the 1980s and 1990s, the new international public history provides frameworks to collaboratively construct public history approaches. the age of wisdom is also symbolized by its multilingual dimension. whereas the majority of resources and publications about public history had, until very recently, been in english, there is an increasing number of works in portuguese, spanish, german, italian, chinese, japanese, french and polish among others. the fact that the english expression ‘public history’ does sometimes not translate well in other languages has actually led to rich debates on what the core issues of the field are. in several places – japan and poland for instance – the expression history in the public space or public sphere is more easily translated.25 writing, debating and practicing public history in different languages is not only about linguistic concerns, but it contributes to better constructing the field itself. the ifph has therefore been encouraging events, discussions and publications in spanish, italian or polish for instance. in a similar vein, international public history should very much accept the multiple understandings of what ‘public’ means. a recent conference organized in poland – and soon to be published – a book explored the multiple approaches and understandings of the term ‘public’ in ‘public history’.26 debates are not only about different translations but also from various understanding of whom the public(s) is/are and their roles in the process. for some public history projects and actors, public history consists very much in communicating history to a large and non-­academic audiences.27 for others, the public(s) take a much more active role, contributing to the production of history. for other projects based on socio-­economic activism, history serves as a source of empowerment for public groups.28 to conclude on a dynamic and fast-­changing field such as international public history, it is always useful to go back to what historians do best: contextualizing. international public history has undergone several different stages and processes. whereas the initial phase that followed the creation of the movement in the united states in the 1970s was driven and influenced by the united states and the anglosphere, the new international public history appears more interactive and multilateral. it is striking to see how international public history is today as much impacted by projects in europe, latin america and increasingly asia as it was by north america in the 1980s. at the image of a field that encourages collaborative production, the new international public history is a constant collaborative appraisal of what history is, what historians can do, and how the term ‘public’ affects the whole history discipline. decentralizing international public history allows for the inclusion of sometimes long-­existing practices into our understand of the field. endnotes 1 william paley, the evidence of christianity (1794), in edmund paley, the works of william paley, d.d. (london: longman, 1839), p292. reference mentioned in paul ashton and meg foster ‘public histories’, in sasha handley et al, new directions in social and cultural history, bloomsbury, london, 2018, p152. 2 ifph, ‘public history programs and centers’, ifph website, https://ifph.hypotheses.org/public-history-programs-and-centers (all links were accessed in march 2021). 3 rebecca conard, ‘the pragmatic roots of public history education in the united states’, the public historian, vol 37, no 1, 2015, pp105-120. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2015.37.1.105 4 see rebecca conard, ‘complicating oreigin stories: the making of public history into an academic field in the united states’, in david dean (ed), a companion to public history, wiley-blackwell, london, pp17-32. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118508930.ch1 5 wesley johnson, ‘the origins of the public historian and the national council on public history’, the public historian, vol 21, no 3, pp168-169. https://doi.org/10.2307/3378969 6 robert kelley, ‘public history: its origins, nature, and prospects’, the public historian, vol 1, no 1, 1978, p16. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377666 7 thomas cauvin, ‘new field, old practices: promises and challenges of public history’, in magazen, vol 2, no 1, 2021, https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/media/pdf/article/magazen/2021/1/art-10.14277-10.30687-mag-2724-3923-2021-03-001.pdf?fbclid=iwar1aydpfkqgrucuhqt0wh5oj5fexmr2q7bzo-whcziltdkprzvhuqhyt78a. 8 paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally? working with the past in the present, bloomsbury, london and new york, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350033306 9 henry rousso, ‘l’histoire appliquée ou les historiens thaumaturges’, vingtième siècle, vol 1, 1984, pp105-122. https://doi.org/10.3406/xxs.1984.1771 10 wesley g. johnson, ‘an american impression of public history in europe’, the public historian, vol 6, no 4, 1984, pp86-97. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377384 11 paul knevel, ‘public history. the european reception of an american idea?’, levend erfgoed. vakblad voor public folklore & public history, vol 6, no 2, 2009, pp4-8. 12 for a survey of public history practices in britain, see the special issue of the public historian, ‘history and the public in britain’, the public historian, 1995. holger hoock, ‘introduction’, the public historian, vol 32. no 3, 2010, pp7-24. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2010.32.3.7 13 bernard eric jensen, ‘usable pasts: comparing approaches to popular and public history’, in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), public history and heritage today. people and their pasts, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2012, p46. 14 anna adamek, ‘building a forum for international dialogue: from ncph task force on internationalisation to the international federation for public history’, in nicole belolan and marianne babal (eds), perspectives on the national council on public history on its 40th anniversary, ncph, indianapolis, 2022, pp37-41. 15 ibid, p37. 16 ibid, p37. 17 anna adamek (canada), serge noiret (italy), jean-pierre morin (canada), andreas etges (germany), michael devine (usa) and arnita jones (usa). andreas etges had, for instance, been involved in the creation of the first master of public history in germany (free university berlin) in 2008. 18 other annual events took place in colombia (2016), italy (2017) and brazil (2018). 19 serge noiret and thomas cauvin, ‘internationalizing public history”, in james gardner and paula hamilton (eds), oxford handbook of public history, oup, new york, 2017, pp25-43. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.1 20 aiph, ‘the italian public history manifesto’, aiph website, 2018, https://aiph.hypotheses.org/5442. 21 ibid. 22 ifph, ‘public history and political pressure: challenges, threats, and possibilities”, ifph vimeo channel, https://vimeo.com/484027141. 23 robert kelley, ‘public history: its origins, nature, and prospects’, the public historian, vol 1, no 1, 1978, pp16-28. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377666 24 kathy corbett and dick miller, ‘what is public history?’, h-net discussion networks, may 2007,https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-public&month=0705&week=c&msg=hauuhywqgvcigxbxegkpgw&user=&pw=. 25 michihiro okamoto, public history in japan’, international public history, vol 1, no 1, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/iph-2018-0004 ; joanna wojdon, historia w przestrzeni publicznej, 2018, https://ksiegarnia.pwn.pl/historia-w-przestrzeni-publicznej,739784302,p.html. 26 joanna wojdon and dorota wiśniewska (eds), public in public history, routledge, london, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003122166 27 see for instance the history communicators group, https://publichistorycommons.org/introducing-history-communicators/ . 28 see for instance the activist history review https://activisthistory.com. public history, national museums and transnational history public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) public history, national museums and transnational history james b. gardner independent scholar corresponding author: james b. gardner, gardenerjb@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8381 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords transnational; nation; identity; narrative; recentering public history encompasses the full range of history-making, from the local level to the national and, arguably, the transnational. while much has been written about the challenges of doing public history at the local level, the impact of globalization on the national level (particularly in national museums) has been examined far less. globalization challenges both the premises on which national institutions were established and the conventional practice of those public historians working in them. but the need for reconceptualizing national museums is not just compelled by globalization. the concept of a ‘national museum’ is fundamentally at odds with the theory and practice of public history, with public historians’ understanding of the messiness and complexity of history, their knowledge that historical experience does not always obey the national borders that define their work, that the nation is not always the center of human experience and culture. this article argues that transnational history – history that crosses borders, that challenges the privileging of the nation state – constitutes an opportunity for national museums to transcend national identity and the confines of the nation state. comparative perspectives that look at differences among nations and global or worldwide issues are also important but not the focus here. nor is this about sub-national experiences—­local, state, or regional history. and while some of what follows encompasses multiculturalism, that ideal or challenge is arguably a limited concept that still assumes the primacy of the nation state by focusing on change within national borders, rather than re-centering the story on the movement of people across borders. when geo-political borders define public history, our view of the past is limited—­as darryl mcintyre and kirsten wehner argue in the introduction to national museums: negotiating histories. national museums need to embrace ‘different geographics of reference’ that ‘contest and shape the imagination.’1 for national museums, the tension between the nation state frame and transnational experience is not just an intellectual issue – is tied up in their identity as institutions and in their collections. that tension challenges their ‘brand,’ what their missions are. according to sir david wilson, historically there have been at least three types of national museums:2 • monolithic museums like the british museum and the hermitage, holding large public collections that embrace the world. but in looking beyond the nation to the universal, these museums actually reinforce national identity. as graeme davison and others have noted, the great museums of the nineteenth century defined the nation by juxtaposing the ‘other,’ the latter represented through collections often built through conquest and colonization.3 according to david lowenthal, the argument was that ‘comparing the fruits of every culture would make british museum visitors more thoughtful, more benign, more truly british.’4 • specialist national museums include, for example, the national portrait gallery in london, the greek national archaeological museum and the australian war memorial. these ‘niche’ museums address a piece of the national narrative (as in museums of war) or from a particular perspective (that of a portrait gallery). • state museums of national culture, such as the national museum of australia, the german historical museum and the national museum of american history (nmah), contribute very deliberately to the construction of national identity. in these museums, shaping identity ‘has become overt, rather than implied.’5 indeed, these museums could be said to ‘perform’ identity, not only for the nation but to other nations, representing, legitimating, stabilizing national identity.6 the last type is the focus of this article, not just because the author worked in one but because it is where the challenge of transnational history is arguably the most salient. more specifically, the focus is on the smithsonian’s national museum of american history (snmah), one of nineteen museums currently in the smithsonian system (two more are in development), each approaching its responsibilities from a different vantage point. the newest smithsonian museums—­the national museum of the american indian (nmai) and the national museum of african american history and culture (nmaahc)—­stand apart not so much because they are culturally specific in focus but because they reflect, arguably, a new paradigm for or fourth type of national museum, transnational in scope despite names that suggest narrower agendas. the nmai does not confine its focus to native american tribes or even to the indigenous peoples of the larger north american continent but indeed reaches out across the western hemisphere to embrace the indigenous peoples of south america.7 even without that larger geopolitical agenda, the history represented at nmai is inherently multinational and transnational, rooted in the treaties and political acts that established unique (if often ignored) status for native peoples and nations within what is now the united states. the national museum of african american history and culture is the most recent addition to the smithsonian, exploring through its research, collecting, and exhibitions not just the african american experience in what is now the us but the experience and cultures of the larger african diaspora.8 it is not coincidental that transnational identity is especially strong for those two museums, museums that collect and interpret the history and culture of those who have been deemed ‘other’, who have not been in power, who have not been treated as full citizens, whose identities are thus not, as historian robin kelley maintains, grounded in that of the nation.9 this is more than theory. that perspective has been documented in the pioneering study that historians roy rosenzweig and david thelen did on history-making in the united states, which found that both native americans and african americans identify with the nation and national history at significantly lower rates than do euro-americans.10 in contrast to those two, the nmah represents the more traditional paradigm – it is unquestionably a state museum of national culture. david thelen argues that the discipline of history in the 1960s was defined by the nation state – the museum of american history (originally named the museum of history and technology), born in that same decade, similarly rests on an assumption of the centrality of the nation state, of ‘nation-centered narratives.’11 that frame has basically trapped the museum – the more it assumes the mantle of ‘national’ museum, the more the public sees ‘the nation’ as its sole subject and expects stories of american exceptionality, indeed a triumphalist narrative. even as nmah has tried over the decades to explore arguably complicated and contested questions such as ‘what has it meant to be an american?’, the public has continued to expect simple stories of shared values and experiences. between the agendas of the new culturally specific museums on the one hand and the public’s perception of the civic role of the museum on the other, nmah too often seems left with only a part of history (that of white america), even as it tries to claim ownership of the whole, of an integrated, interwoven narrative. thus while defining national identity may have been the core purpose for nmah’s establishment nearly sixty years ago, today its role as a museum too often ends up being defined by national identity, by external agendas of uncritical patriotism, and not just from the political and cultural right. but is transnational history really that new a responsibility for national museums such as the museum of american history or is what is different the consciousness of it? has sorting out ‘national’ from ‘transnational’ ever been that simple? what is ‘national’ history? is it about nationhood – the genealogy of nation, myths of inevitability and exceptionalism – or something more complicated? is the clarity of nationhood more in hindsight than as experienced? in other words, has the nmah been guilty of what sociologist tony bennett calls the ‘nationing of history’ and the ‘historicizing of nation’? has the museum manipulated history to establish a mythic and inevitable national identity?12 has american history and culture, as it moves from colony to empire, instead always been inherently transnational? is there any other way to characterize the history of a place that, until the twentieth century, was not indeed a single nation? in other words, is it really possible to define and do american ‘national’ history given the complexities of change and growth over time? the us is not alone in this regard. the history of the world is a complex mix of shifting geopolitical borders, changing national regimes, constant migration and movement and contested cultural power. have national museums so deliberately ‘imagined’ nation that they have obscured the reality of the richer history that transcends the national narrative?13 have they become so focused on the center that they have lost the perspective from the periphery and beyond? have they latched on to the idea of national history because, as historian ian tyrrell has suggested, a national perspective is easier and safer than the more complicated challenge of weaving together the strands of a complex and contested past?14 but isn’t history fundamentally about more than nation? rather than always defaulting to an at best questionable concept of nation, museums like the museum of american history should engage the public in the richer transnational nature of history and culture. indeed, they are well positioned to do this because they deal not only in ideas but in objects, the material culture of times and places that did not so easily sort out into ‘nation’ and ‘other.’ museums can make the theoretical real, illuminating how national identity has been constructed from the parts of our many cultures, ideas, institutions. david thelen provides an example: products that may appear to be american – cars, popular music, neighborhood life – may well be created and assembled by people and institutions they pick up in many places. of the $10,000 an american consumer paid general motors [in 1990] for a new pontiac le mans, $3,000 went to south korea for routine labor and assembly; $2,150 to japan, taiwan, and singapore for components; $750 to germany for styling and design engineering; $250 to britain for advertising and marketing; and $50 to ireland and barbados for data processing.15 while we may be more conscious now of the global nature of production and commerce that he describes, such activity has long been part of america’s complicated history. consider for a moment an object in nmah’s collections: a porcelain teapot from the 1760s, a rare ‘no stamp act’ teapot, made in england for sale in colonial america to protest english law – an intriguing example of the back and forth, layered intersection of commerce, politics and social customs in the atlantic world that defies easy notions of national history.16 writing about environmental history, richard white has drawn on the work of french geographer henri lefebvre to argue for recognizing complexity and scale in history – local, state, region, nation, world – and the intersections of those scales, pealing them back to see the interconnectedness of history.17 that ‘pealing back’ is what all museums do or should do, revealing the richer complexity behind the seemingly simple. collections are at the heart of what museums do. they are the foundation on which exhibitions and programs are built, so how a museum looks at its collections is critical to the agenda of ‘pealing back’ the layers of history. the nmah’s collections provide many examples of that interconnectedness that is too often overshadowed by a singular focus on nation. while other museums in different national contexts face different challenges, the nmah well illustrates the potential that all national museums share in recentering the narrative and recovering the stories obscured by the ascendancy of the national narrative. america’s history of crossing borders dates from well before the anglo-american relations illustrated by the teapot mentioned above. for centuries before, contact between european (not just english) explorers and settlers and native americans had been fundamentally transnational. moreover, the indigenous people of north america were not simply people inhabiting the land euro-americans coveted but autonomous nations with histories and thriving cultures, functioning in a multinational and transnational world long before the arrival of euro-american settler societies with ambitious expansionist plans. within nmah’s collections can be found the material culture of that contested relationship, including, for example: • a copper tajadero (spanish for chopping knife) – a form of money used in central mexico and parts of central america, made around 1500, about 20 years before spain began to colonize mexico.18 • a peace medal from 1801 carried by lewis and clark in their western explorations of north america – a figuratively and literally hollow promise of ‘peace and friendship’ from the new american nation to the native people they encountered.19 • from much later (1894), a drawing by a cheyenne military prisoner depicting one of the bloody battles that was part of the us government’s campaign of invasion, relocation and extermination of the tribes of the great plains.20 while the american southwest and west were not part of the atlantic world and not part of ‘the nation’ until the mid-nineteenth century, they were from the sixteenth century part of the larger transnational community that would later be claimed by the united states. the culture that developed – a flourishing hybrid of spanish, indigenous and anglo-american influences – did not end with us annexation. within the nmah collections is the material legacy of that long history of encounters: • a spur, reflecting the riding culture introduced by the spanish into mexico during colonization.21 • photographs by leonard nadel documenting the bracero program that brought guest workers from mexico to the us from 1956.22 • the first frozen margarita machine, mexican in origin but now part of mainstream american culture.23 each reflects a persistent transnational culture that continues to thrive along the us/mexican border today, a border that, borrowing language that cultural theorist david bunn uses in museum frictions in writing about south africa, is both hard and soft, both impenetrable and permeable at the same time.24 looking beyond ‘the states’ of north america to hawaii and puerto rico, the nmah’s collections include more rich and complex borrowings, reflecting histories of colonization, imperialism, and americanization. from hawaii: • a flag from the throne room of queen lili’uokalani—­originally commissioned by king kamehameha the great in 1816 and the official flag of the indigenous kingdom, the independent republic, the us territory and the state.25 • a painting of the city of tokio, the ship which brought the first japanese immigrants to hawaii in 1885 to work in sugar plantations.26 • a chinese-style abacus owned by kim dong kuen, a korean who immigrated to hawaii in 1906.27 from puerto rico: • a bomba drum, reflecting an afro-puerto rican music tradition that thrives in traditional centers not only in puerto rico but also in new york city.28 • a marimbula, an african-derived folk instrument found across the caribbean.29 • a wooden santo of st james the moor slayer, reflecting the transplanting to the americas of a spanish conflict between christians and muslims.30 consider another figure reflected prominently in the nmah collections: celia cruz, the queen of salsa, who defied all attempts at definition. an afro-cuban who fled her native land in 1960 after castro took power, she lived for a time in mexico and ended up a us citizen. her music combined puerto rican, dominican, cuban and other latin music traditions with the african influences that were also part of her culture. indeed her trademark cry of ‘azúcar!’ (sugar) linked the vibrant diversity of cuban culture to the violence of slavery in its sugar plantations.31 while she is certainly claimed by the latino community, might the african american community also have a legitimate claim? how does a museum sort out nativity, language, race and culture in a transnational context increasingly resistant to easy categorization? how does it deal with individuals with multiple cultural identities crossing multiple borders? but transnational history in national museums must be about more than conflict and colonization or cultural exchanges and borrowings. it must also grapple with troublesome issues such as human trafficking. human trafficking as a historical activity is embodied in the atlantic slave trade that linked africa, europe and the americas. the transnational nature of it is reflected in artifacts at nmah such as: • a model of the brig diligente – an american-built vessel sailing under english and portuguese flags in the transatlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century.32 • a cast bronze manilla or bracelet, one of many produced by the portuguese, british, dutch and french specifically for trade in west africa, including as barter for enslaved people in west africa.33 • shackles from puerto rico used to restrain enslaved people, representing the history of genocidal violence and physical exploitation across the americas.34 but human trafficking is also a contemporary issue that national museums must address. the nmah collections include, for example, one of the falsified passports used to smuggle thai workers into the country, where they were essentially enslaved until the el monte sweatshop raid in 1995.35 such exploitation is clearly a transnational rather than national story. many other examples of crossing borders, both literally and figuratively, abound in the collections: • a plain trunk that belonged to a dominican sister who took it with her as she joined the monastery of the blessed sacrament in france and then traveled to the united states in 1881 to join a dominican monastery there.36 • an acupuncture instrument set from the twentieth century that reflects how the practice has evolved into an east-west hybrid.37 • even a theater mask, created by an australian designer, based on nineteenth-century thai ceremonial headgear, for use in a ballet depicting the story of harriet beecher stowe’s uncle tom’s cabin as part of the broadway musical the king and i.38 the examples above are all from the national museum of american history, but comparable examples can be drawn from the collections of every national museum. while national museums are all limited to some extent by the collections that they have, by the often problematic intellectual agendas of their predecessors, they also have the opportunity and, arguably, the obligation to re-value and re-contextualize their collections, to look at them in new ways, to step beyond national narratives and notions of national exceptionalism. of course, transnational history is not without risks and challenges that public historians must grapple with: • are national museums prepared to do history that is more complicated, less ordered than neatly defined national history? • when a museum does so, is it really doing any more than just substituting one narrative for another? does whatever a national museum presents end up being seen by the public as some form of master narrative? how does a museum yield authority in a more fluid global context? • when a national museum explores transnational experiences, does it run the risk of a new form of imperialism – with the national museum’s narrative appropriating or drowning out the local voice? what is the museum’s responsibility to communities? • how does transnational history fit within the movement to decolonize museums? • do transnational perspectives weaken or undermine nation and citizenship? is a national museum that embraces transnational history still expected to fulfill its founding civic responsibility to the nation and its citizens? • is the reality that even geographic proximity and borders have little meaning in our increasingly digital world? historian sven beckert argues that transnational history is a different ‘way of seeing’: ‘transnational history focuses on uncovering connectedness across particular political units. seeing these connections should come just as easily to historians as seeing connections within more familiar frames’. that ‘way of seeing’ does not come easily to national museums wedded to their responsibilities for fostering national identity.39 in questioning the privileging of the nation state, transnational history arguably challenges the very purpose of national museums. but it also offers the potential for revaluing collections, for pealing back the layers to expose the complexity hidden by the simple. endnotes 1 darryl mcintyre and kirsten wehner, ‘introduction,’ national museums: negotiating histories: conference proceedings, national museum of australia, canberra, 2001, pxviii. available: https://archive.org/details/negotiatinghisto0000unse_l9g3 (accessed 27 june 2022). 2 smithsonian office of policy and analysis 2002, 21st century roles of national museums: a conversation in progress (online). available: https://www.si.edu/content/opanda/docs/rpts2002/02.10.21stcenturyrole.final.pdf (accessed 27 june 2022). 3 graeme davison, ‘national museums in a global age: observations abroad and reflections at home,’ in darryl mcintyre and kirsten wehner (eds), national museums: negotiating histories: conference proceedings, national museum of australia, canberra, 2001, p13. available: https://archive.org/details/negotiatinghisto0000unse_l9g3 (accessed 27 june 2022). 4 david lowenthal, ‘national museums and historical truth,’ in darryl mcintyre and kirsten wehner (eds), national museums: negotiating histories: conference proceedings, national museum of australia, canberra, 2001, p161. available: https://archive.org/details/negotiatinghisto0000unse_l9g3 (accessed 27 june 2022). 5 darryl mcintyre and kirsten wehner, ‘introduction,’ op cit, pxvi. 6 simon knell, ‘national museums and the national imagination’, in simon j. knell, peter aronsson, arne bugge amundsen, amy jane barnes, stuart burch, jennifer carter, viviane gosselin, sarah a. hughes and alan kirwan (eds), national museums: new studies from around the world, routledge, london, 2011, pp4-7. 7 about the museum (online). available: https://americanindian.si.edu/about (accessed 27 june 2022). 8 while nmaahc focuses on african american life, history, and culture, it also sponsors initiatives that encompass ‘african-descended people throughout the americas.’ see storytelling in the african diaspora (online). available: https://nmaahc.si.edu/storytelling-african-diaspora (accessed 27 june 2022). 9 robin d. g. kelley, ‘“but a local phase of a world problem”: black history’s global vision, 1883-1950,’ journal of american history, vol 86, no 3, 1999, pp1046, 1077. available: https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/86/3/1045/688491 (accessed 27 june 2022). https://doi.org/10.2307/2568605 10 roy rosenzweig and david thelen, the presence of the past: popular uses of history in american life, columbia university press, new york, 1998, pp13, 237. available: https://archive.org/details/presenceofpastpo0000rose/page/n1/mode/2up (accessed 27 june 2022). 11 david thelen, ‘the nation and beyond: transnational perspectives on united states history,’ journal of american history, vol 86, no 3, 1999, p965. available: https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/86/3/965/689596?login=true (accessed 27 june 2022). https://doi.org/10.2307/2568601 12 tony bennett, the birth of the museum: history, theory, politics, routledge, london, 1995, p141. 13 benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london, rev ed, 2006, p6. available: https://www.academia.edu/31607066/benedict_anderson_imagined_communities_pdf (accessed 27 june 2022). 14 ian tyrrell, ‘making nations/making states: american historians in the context of empire’, journal of american history, vol 86, no 3, 1999, p1018. available: https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/86/3/1015/688485?redirectedfrom=fulltext (accessed 27 june 2022). https://doi.org/10.2307/2568604 15 david thelen, ‘of audiences, borderlands, and comparisons: toward the internationalization of american history’, journal of american history, vol 79, no 2, 1992, p437. available: https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/79/2/432/802055?redirectedfrom=fulltext (accessed 27 june 2022). https://doi.org/10.2307/2080034 16 nmah collections: no stamp act teapot (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1320066 (accessed 27 june 2022). 17 richard white, ‘the nationalization of nature,’ journal of american history, vol 86, no 3, 1999, pp977-979, 985. available: https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/86/3/976/689602 (accessed 27 june 2022). https://doi.org/10.2307/2568602 18 nmah collections: aztec hoe money (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_835166 (accessed 27 june 2022). 19 nmah collections: indian peace medal, thomas jefferson, united states, 1801 (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1120857 (accessed 27 june 2022). 20 nmah collections: warrior killing a soldier (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_795061 (accessed 27 june 2022). 21 nmah collections: spur (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_675091 (accessed 27 june 2022). 22 nmah collections: braceros waiting at processing center (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1353080 (accessed 27 june 2022). 23 nmah collections: máquina de margaritas heladas (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1294740 (accessed 27 june 2022). 24 david bunn, ‘the museum outdoors: heritage, cattle, and permeable borders in the southwestern kruger national park,’ in ivan karp, corinne a. kratz, lynn szwaja and tomas ybarra-frausto (eds), museum frictions: public cultures/global transformations, duke university press, durham, 2006, p360. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw1hd.23 25 smithsonian asian pacific american center: this month in history: the annexation of hawai‘i (online). available: https://smithsonianapa.org/now/annexation-of-hawaii/ (accessed 27 june 2022). 26 nmah exhibitions: on the water: pacific crossings (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/on-the-water/ocean-crossings/liners-america/pacific-crossings (accessed 27 june 2022). 27 nmah collections: chinese-style abacus or suan-p’an, used by korean settlers in hawaii (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1804465 (accessed 27 june 2023). 28 nmah collections: barril de bomba (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_602469 (accessed 27 june 2022). 29 nmah collections: marímbula (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_601901 (accessed 27 june 2022). 30 nmah collections: st. james (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1060206 (accessed 27 june 2022). 31 nmah exhibitions: ¡azúcar! the life and music of celia cruz (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/azucar-celia-cruz (accessed 27 june 2022). 32 nmah collections: ship model, brig diligente (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_844185 (accessed 27 june 2022). 33 nmah collections: manilla, west africa, 19th century (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1067116 (accessed 27 june 2022). 34 nmah collections: slave shackles (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_601251 (accessed 27 june 2022). 35 nmah collections: falsified passport, 1990s (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_880937 (accessed 27 june 20220. 36 nmha collections: french horsehair trunk (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_678392 (accessed 27 june 2022). 37 nmah collections: acupuncture instrument set (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1143716 (accessed 27 june 2022). 38 nmah collections: the king and i mask (online). available: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1195008 (accessed 27 june 2022). 39 c. a. bayly, sven beckert, matthew connelly, isabel hofmeyr, wendy kozol and patricia seed, ‘ahr conversation: on transnational history’, american historical review, vol 111, no 5, 2006, p1454. available: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/111/5/1441/10247?searchresult=1 (accessed 27 june 2022). https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.111.5.1441 complicated pasts, promising futures: public history on the island of ireland public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) complicated pasts, promising futures: public history on the island of ireland ann-­marie foster northumbria university corresponding author: ann-­marie foster, marie2.foster@northumbria.ac.uk doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8376 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords public history; irish studies; difficult history; family history when writing about ireland, even the geographical region to which the name refers brings with it the need to discuss history. the island of ireland has a long history of colonization by its closest geographical neighbour, britain. in a simplistic retelling of a complex history, ireland was first colonized by anglo-­normans in the 1100s. british control tightened throughout the 1500s and 1600s, and was ratified through a series of legislature in the 1800s. unrest led to a series of ‘rebellions’, war of independence, and civil wars. after a series of escalations in the 1910s the irish free state was created in 1922. the creation of the irish free state (renamed republic of ireland in 1949) split ireland, and six counties in the north east of the island, northern ireland, remained under the governance of the british state. currently the island is comprised of the republic of ireland, which constitutes the majority of the island, and northern ireland, which remains under british control. in northern ireland, a violent period of conflict known as the troubles occurred between 1969 and 1998, inflamed by ideas of republicanism and nationalism with paramilitary organizations on both sides of the political divide, and the british army responsible for the deaths that occurred during this unrest. so not only does the island of ireland contain one postcolonial country, but a part of another country that is a post-­conflict society.1 public history is still a reasonably new concept across the island of ireland and public history as an academic discipline has only been articulated and cemented within the past ten years. academic historians across the island are highly active in disseminating their research to the public, primarily through television documentaries and newspapers. but as thomas cauvin and ciaran o’neill have noted, this does not mean that they regularly engage with the public in the way that public historians understand, that is, as equal participants in building historical knowledge.2 there are a range of courses which are teaching a new generation of historians how to be public historians (in the participatory sense) through ma degree courses in public history at queen’s university belfast (northern ireland), public history and cultural heritage at the university of limerick, and public history at university college dublin (both in the republic), in addition to an mphil degree in public history and cultural heritage at trinity college dublin, as well as several mas training new generations of museum practitioners and archivists. there is a steadily growing body of academic work which theorises public history on the ireland of ireland, notably by olwen purdue, who has pioneered the practice of public history in northern ireland, as well as by cauvin and o’neill.3 before this, little had been theorized about the nature of public history on the island, other than to express fears about its implications for academic historians.4 new work about public history on the island challenges ideas of a fixed idea of public history, with purdue challenging future public historians to engage with the ‘unique opportunities’ of trialing public history initiatives in northern ireland, where ‘the stories of the past continue to resonate so strongly in the present.’5 although there is a large interest in irish history, and a very keen public, public history as a way of ‘doing history’ is still in its relative infancy across the island. public history on the island of ireland is complex, and at times contradictory, but without a doubt overwhelmingly popular. this article takes a very broad definition of public history, including but not limited to history projects by members of the public, television shows, dark tourism, and the work of professional historians. family history is one of the key ways that irish people engage with their heritage, and the overwhelming popularity of this historical genre is testament to resources that heritage sites have made available to irish peoples globally. an increasing interest in technology can also be seen, with institutions turning to the digital to extend their networks and entice visitors. difficult histories are, given the postcolonial and post-­conflict societies present on the island, dealt with in a number of ways, and the penultimate section of this essay gives an overview of the ways ireland has dealt with its difficult pasts, with the final section reflecting on the ongoing decade of centenaries. overall, public history on the island of ireland is academically engaged and increasingly sensitive to the needs of its complex history. family history the island of ireland, like many other areas worldwide, has a passionate relationship with family history. interest in family history is particularly notable in the republic where genealogical research is supported by the department of tourism, culture, arts, gaeltacht, sport and media. it hosts a free website with digitized collections of family history research material.6 genealogical companies, such as the irish ancestry research centre, are popular, with some offering university accredited genealogical courses in addition to private research. in 2005 ciara breathnach established the first ma in the history of family, based at the university of limerick. historical societies, such as the genealogical society of ireland in the republic and the north of ireland family history society in northern ireland offer community support for genealogists and family history researchers. while there are more opportunities for genealogical research in the republic, when compared with the north, these initiatives largely point to a shared history, with resources which trace the history of pre-­twentieth century families accessible to all whose ancestors hailed from any part of the island. this interest in family history, and the wealth of digitized research material, services and societies is, in part, due to the large numbers of families who form the irish diaspora. according to the department of foreign affairs 70 million people worldwide claim irish heritage.7 the irish diaspora are vociferous consumers of public history. the magazine irish roots, which focuses on tracing ancestors, is costed for irish, british, us, australian and canadian consumers, reflecting the areas with the highest concentration of people with irish ancestry worldwide. opened in 1976, the living history site, the ulster american folk park, shows what life was like for emigrants to the us in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. the park is also home to the mellon centre for migration studies, established in 1998, which is a dedicated resource centre for the migration of irish peoples. the centre offers a large specialized library and hosts the irish emigration database which has digitized a wide range of sources about irish migration to north america (1700-­1950). this interest in diaspora history more broadly is also reflected in the recent success of the bad bridget podcast, created by academics elaine farrell and leanne mccormick, whose research project about criminal irish women in north america has been turned into a highly successful public history podcast.8 not only is there appetite for family history knowledge on the island of ireland, but outside of that, with people of irish ancestry in the usa, canada and australia helping to fuel state level, private, academic and grassroots public history initiatives. technology and public history the interest in digital technology hinted at through the digitization of family history material has been formalized in other areas of public history. dublin boasts the first fully interactive digital museum, epic: the irish emigration museum, which relies on digital technology to tell the story of irish people globally. instead of physical objects, the story of irish emigrants is exclusively told through interactive digital exhibits.9 this privately owned museum has been awarded a swathe of tourism awards, including europe’s leading tourist attraction in the 2020 world travel awards. the museum is unashamedly targeted at members of the irish diaspora. for st patrick’s day (17 march) 2021 the museum asked people to add their name to a new exhibition which projects the names of emigrants and the year they left ireland onto a wall in the museum.10 digital databases for historical research are also immensely popular across the island. the digital repository of ireland is a digital repository for humanities, social science, and cultural heritage data in ireland. they host open access collections of heritage data and offer training in online research methods. online archives more broadly are also becoming increasingly popular, with many documents digitized and made publicly available for the decade of centenaries. the conflict archive on the internet (cain) is a particularly important digital resource in northern ireland, with digitized resources relating to the troubles, and northern irish politics since 1968. threatened with closure over a lack of financing, the irish government recently donated funding through the department of foreign affairs’ reconciliation fund, designed to facilitate relationship building activities between northern ireland and the republic to ensure the archive’s future.11 this working relationship between north and south can also be seen in museums. the irish museums association adopts an all-­ireland approach to the development of museum professionals. this includes advice for collecting covid-­19 related material, based on collecting guidelines developed by the national museum of ireland. as many museums react to the new circumstances they find themselves in, museums have increasingly turned towards the digital, with online talks, exhibitions, and activities for children all made available over the past year. initiatives like #irishmuseumsonline have collated digital museum outputs to use on social media to create an all-­ireland touchpoint for web-­based museum content. however covid-­19 has likely increased the divide between museums who have the resources to provide digital content and those that do not. a 2016 report found that museum staff needed further training and additional resources in improving levels of digitization, including creating and implementing digital strategies.12 although social media outreach was, and is, still strong in irish museums, as the pandemic has continued, better financed institutions have been able to digitally engage audiences in more sustained manner.13 grassroots groups are also turning to semi-­digital initiatives to record their own histories in the wake of the pandemic. the northern irish history project ‘the troubles i’ve seen’, run by richard o’leary, asks people to find and record queer objects in their homes as a response to lockdowns hampering in-­person research plans.14 the project ‘archiving the 8th’ tracks the physical and digital archives of activist groups involved in the successful campaign for abortion rights as voted for in a 2018 referendum to allow legal abortions in the republic of ireland.15 although led by public historians, these projects involve academic historians and members of the public who want to volunteer, helping to formalize, fund and co-­ordinate public history projects across the island of ireland. difficult histories the island of ireland has a range of difficult histories, from civic violence to the abuse of women and children by the state. many of these historical events ended within the past thirty years, and represent a lived experience for many across the island, making public history on these topics difficult to mediate. purdue has emphasized the significance of academic historians working with others in a way which ‘challenges dangerous reductionist and partisan historical narratives, and allows space to face up to past trauma.’16 there are a range of public history projects which seek to explore the tensions of the past and build understanding among the communities affected, which range from academic led reports to the hit television shows. both the republic of ireland and northern ireland are in the process of understanding and redressing state enacted violence on women and children perpetuated through mother and baby homes. these homes were run by the state and had secular and religious (overwhelmingly catholic) dormitories. unmarried pregnant women, who were often not in a position to continue a relationship with the father of their child, were placed in the homes to give birth. after giving birth their children were taken away and raised in an institution or adopted. these homes were open until 1998 in the republic and 1990 in northern ireland. both the government of ireland and the northern ireland executive commissioned reports into the mother and baby homes, both of which were released in early 2021.17 the report in the republic was spurred by the work of the historian catharine corless into a number of unrecorded burials of children in the tuam home site. her research in the early 2010s caught public attention and ultimately, alongside pressure groups, led to the commission of a report into the homes. a campaign by the activist group mixed race irish led to the commission including research into the treatment of mixed race children in the report, although the conclusion of the report, that all unmarried mothers were discriminated against, fails to recognize the specific ways that race was discriminated against in the homes.18 professional historians were involved in both reports but it is clear that the northern irish report was led by historians, rather than being involved as part of a wider team of historians and legal experts, and as was the case in the republic. while both reports used witness testimony the northern irish report has been praised for its sensitive use of oral history and its empathetic and ethical use of the histories of those affected.19 in contrast, the irish report has been lambasted by prominent academics for its weak methodology and lack of nuance and for ignoring witness testimony.20 the historical and public implications of this stark difference between the reports are only beginning to be probed. what is immediately clear is that witness testimony in the form of oral histories taken by professional oral historians has, in the northern irish report, been publicly acknowledged as an empathetic and crucial way of understanding the past.21 what this means for future inquiries into the abuses suffered by women and children at the hands of the state remains to be seen, but marks an area where historians are actively engaged in supporting complex inquiries into the past. difficult histories are also being engaged with by a wider range of people, from grassroots groups to those in the media. in northern ireland, the troubles (1969-­1998), a period of conflict begun on the faultlines of national, ethnic and sectarian divides was caused by a complex interplay of various factors. the conflict resulted in the deaths of over 3,500 people and has left a legacy of trauma in northern ireland. it is still very much in living history and there was only a piecemeal and limited reconciliation process.22 various groups are still seeking reparations against other actors, in particular the british army. some public history projects seek to advocate on behalf of people targeted during the conflict, such as the museum of free derry, founded by family members of people killed on bloody sunday.23 echoes of the conflict still reverberate through northern ireland, where murals to victims of the troubles appear in both nationalist and unionist areas, and ‘peace walls’ still divide the city of belfast. there are a range of public history projects concerned with the troubles which seek to bring understanding and aid communities through healing. the independent group healing through remembering, established in 2001, has run a series of campaigns about discussing recent traumatic pasts, such as the ‘whatever you say, say something!’ campaign (2008-­2011) and the voyager project (2013-­2014) which focused on broaching difficult conversations among and between affected communities.24 in the digital realm, the prisons memory archive, an oral and video history project recorded the memories of those jailed and working in the maze and long kesh/armagh gaol prisons and made some of these available for public view.25 this project again focused on a shared and difficult past, highlighting experiences of loyalist and republican ex-­prisoners. a new project led by alison garden seeks to understand ‘mixed marriages’ from different communities, engaging with a range of public history professionals to understand how love has been contested, challenged and accepted across the island.26 one of the most popular public history outputs which makes reference to the troubles in recent years has been the television show derry girls. set amidst a backdrop of 1990s derry/londonderry, the comedy series follows the lives of four irish catholic girls and one of their english cousins. the show proved so popular that national museums northern ireland bought one of the props from the show which showed the comedic ‘differences’ between catholics and protestants which is now the basis of a new exhibition focusing on shared commonalities between northern irish communities.27 troubles sites have brought with them a wealth of dark tourists wanting to explore this painful past, although dark tourist sites are popular across the island of ireland. tourism is a key driver for the heritage industry across the island of ireland. in 2019 northern ireland welcomed 5.3 million tourists with the republic of ireland welcoming 11.3 million tourists during the same year.28 while not all of these tourists were cast in the role of dark tourists, there are a considerable number of people who will have engaged with the island’s past through heritage initiatives. dark tourism is rife in the cities of belfast and derry/londonderry. black cab tours, walking tours, and other monetized experiences, some of which are run by ex-­members of political organizations involved in the conflict, are highly popular visitor experiences.29 there is an ongoing debate about the benefits of this tourism to the northern irish economy, with fears that these sites will become places of pilgrimage which have the power to retrench, rather than bridge, what is still a raw history. dark tourism is also popular in the republic of ireland. private enterprises, such as the glasnevin cemetery museum, which has won national and international cultural awards, capitalize on ireland’s dark past.30 dark tourism is now such a given on the island that a new popular history book, written by academic and public historian gillian o’brien, explicitly examines ‘ireland’s places of famine, death and rebellion’.31 although there is a large appetite for dark history both from international tourists, the island of ireland contains some difficult history that it is not yet ready for consumption by tourists, and covers events that are only beginning to be discussed at a public level. while ireland was, in itself, a colonized country, irish people also played a distinct role in colonizing other, often non-­white, overseas territories. for example, in 1901 white irish settlers formed one quarter of the total settler population in australia. ireland is only beginning to come to terms with its colonial past. projects such as briony widdis’s exploration of colonial objects in northern irish museum collections, and new research into the colonial history of trinity college dublin, led by ciaran o’neill and patrick walsh, will begin to unpick the legacies of white irish power. despite these beginnings, it is clear that there is still a long way to go in addressing the complex role of ireland as a colonial actor. decade of centenaries one of the most visible sites of state-­led public history in recent years have been the commemorative events marking ireland’s twentieth century history. the decade of centenaries (2012-­2022) marks several key events which shaped the current island of ireland, from the signing of the ulster covenant in 1912, through the easter rising and the battle of the somme in 1916, to the civil war and partition of ireland in 1922. different centenaries have different implications for different communities on the island of ireland. for example, the easter rising is largely celebrated in the republic, whereas involvement in the first world war is now, although not historically, primarily remembered by unionist communities in northern ireland.32 the irish government is largely responsible for these commemorations – although northern irish representatives were consulted – and marks a clear area where the state is attempting to control public narratives of the past. state commemorations of the decade of centenaries aims to ensure that events are remembered ‘appropriately, proportionately, respectfully and with sensitivity … to promote a deeper understanding of the significant events that took place during this period and recognise that the shared historical experience of those years gave rise to very different narratives and memories.’33 events have ranged from restaging the events of the 1913 dublin lockout, with people in historically appropriate dress, to a pop up women’s museum which explored women’s (substantial) involvement in irish politics. 2016 posed a particularly difficult year of commemorations, as it held two politically polarized events, the easter rising and the battle of the somme. these events are now held as opposing points of a divisive history, with republicans claiming the easter rising and ulster unionists claiming the battle as key moments in their political awakenings. commemorative events in 2016 sought to complicate the simplistic narratives formed by each community, by showing that irish catholics were involved in the war efforts, and that commemorative events concerning the rising were inclusive and non-­partisan.34 despite these calls for inclusivity, there have been strong criticisms of centenary events. the anthropologist dominic bryan is highly critical of the involvement of historians in these commemorations, arguing that they are called upon to legitimize the importance of history in irish identity by those who are use remembrance for political reasons.35 oona frawley has highlighted how women’s histories have been excluded from the planning and delivery of the commemorative events of the past several years.36 despite over 40 years of academic publishing on irish women’s history, and a wealth of academic women to draw from, the irish government’s expert advisory group only contained three women (to seven men), rising to four women (to eight men), and with only one (male) representative for the whole of northern ireland. work by laura mcatackney, maeve casserly and eli davies shows that when women are shown in commemorative events they are likely to be those already well known by the populace, or, when new women are introduced into the historical narrative, are portrayed inaccurately, as passive bystanders instead of active participants in the events depicted.37 at the time of writing, the decade of centenaries is still ongoing, with 2022’s commemoration of the partition of ireland set to be a particularly difficult centenary to navigate. while events have become more inclusive as the decade advances, it remains to be seen if future commemorations will fall back on publicly accepted (male) tropes or whether a historically nuanced interpretation of events will be presented to the public. conclusions the decade of centenaries is perhaps a useful place to end this discussion about the nature of public history on the island of ireland. a series of public seminars (2020) which reflected on the commemorations has been marked by their inclusion of expert academics.38 in many ways the seminars are characteristic of irish approaches to public history. they were supported by both the government and rté (a national newspaper) and focus on trying to understand how ireland can remember its many pasts. while the public prominence of academic historians is important, it signifies their role as experts leading history in public. collaborative public history projects do exist on the island of ireland, but experts are still held in the highest regard. grassroots projects which allow community groups and public historians room to collaborate are on the rise, but public history as a radical method of ‘doing history’ is still in its relative infancy here. with the difficult histories at play across the island, it is easy to see why this reliance on experts is preferred, especially by the state, as recent conflict in northern ireland, and emotive centenaries across the whole island have the potential to reopen old wounds. but something is lost in not embracing collaborative history methods more broadly. public history across the island of ireland is academically engaged, aware of the benefits of digitization and digital access, sensitive to the needs of the irish diaspora and voraciously consumed by a historically curious public. endnotes 1 there is an active debate over where ireland fits within postcolonial studies. for overview and recent work see luz mar gonzález-arias, ‘postcolonial locations: ireland’, in john mcleod (ed), the routledge companion to postcolonial studies, routledge, abingdon, 2007, pp108-19; m. s. kumar and l. a. scanlon, ‘ireland and irishness: the contextuality of postcolonial identity’ annals of the association of american geographers, vol 109, no 1, 2019, pp202-222. for a more detailed introduction see stephen howe, ireland and empire: colonial legacies in irish history and culture, oxford university press, oxford, 2000; colin graham, deconstructing ireland: identity, theory, culture, edinburgh university press, edinburgh, 2001. my thanks to alison garden for sharing her knowledge with me on this point. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1507812 2 thomas cauvin and ciaran o’neill, ‘negotiating public history in the republic of ireland: collaborative, applied and usable practices for the profession’, in historical research vol 90, no 250, 2017, p813. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.12192 3 olwen purdue, ‘dealing with difficult pasts: the role of public history in post-conflict northern ireland’, in studia hibernica, vol 46, no 1, 2020, pp91-97. also see olwen purdue and leonie hannan (eds), dealing with difficult pasts: public history in ireland, routledge, abingdon, forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.3828/sh.2020.7 4 gearóid ó tuathaigh, ‘commemoration, public history and the professional historian: an irish perspective’, in estudios irlandeses, vol 9, 2014, pp137-145. https://doi.org/10.24162/ei2014-4028; john regan, ‘irish public histories as an historiographical problem’, in irish historical studies, vol 37, no 146, 2010, pp265-292. https://doi.org/10.1017/s002112140000225x 5 olwen purdue, ‘troubling pasts: teaching public history in northern ireland’, international public history, no 4, vol 1, 2021, p68. there is an enormous wealth of work on the effect of memory in ireland, in particular how it shaped ideas of nationalism, and the links between history and nationalism in ireland have been well probed in recent years. see guy beiner, forgetful remembrance: social forgetting and vernacular historiography of a rebellion in ulster, oxford university press, oxford, 2018; richard s. grayson and fearghal mcgarry, remembering 1916: the easter rising, the somme and the politics of memory in ireland, cambridge university press, cambridge, 2016; oona frawley (ed), memory ireland, syracuse university press, syracuse, 2010-2014; ian mcbride (ed), history and memory in modern ireland, cambridge university press, cambridge, 2001. 6 department of tourism, culture, arts, gaeltacht, sport and media, n.d., irish genealogy (online). available: https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/ (accessed 3 march 2021). 7 department of foreign affairs, n.d., heritage (online). available: https://www.dfa.ie/global-irish/heritage/ (accessed 3 march 2021). 8 the podcast reached #1 in the apple podcast history section in late 2020. 9 private museums are becoming increasingly popular across the island, with the titanic experience in the north a useful comparison to epic. 10 epic, n.d., the power of a name (online). available: https://dublin.epicchq.com/power-of-a-name (accessed 13 march 2021). 11 robbie meredith, 2021, the troubles: future of ulster university’s archive secured (online). available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-56092042 (accessed 13 march 2021). 12 emily mark-fitzgerald, ‘irish museums survey 2016’, irish museums association, dublin, 2016, p11. 13 this is in line with global trends. see, international council of museums, ‘survey: museums, museum professionals and covid-19’, icom, 2020, pp2; 9-13. 14 heritage fund, 2021, lgbt+ history month (online). available: https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/stories/lgbt-history-month-conserving-stories-northern-irelands-lgbt-heritage 15 archiving the 8th, n.d., about (online). available: https://archivingthe8th.wordpress.com/about/ (accessed 13 march 2021). 16 purdue, ‘dealing with difficult pasts’, p93. 17 department of children, equality, disability, integration and youth, ‘mother and baby homes commission of investigation final report’ (january, 2021); leanne mccormick and sean o’connell, with olivia dee and john privilege, on behalf of the inter departmental working group on mother and baby homes, magdalene laundries and historical clerical child abuse, department of health, ‘mother and baby homes and magdalene laundries in northern ireland’ (january 2021). both reports are available online. 18 for more on this campaign see mixed race irish, n.d., our history (online). available: http://www.mixedraceirish.ie/our-history.php (accessed 9 march 2021). 19 see the praise given by arlene foster, first minister of northern ireland, in her speech about the report in her ministerial statement about the report, 26 january 2021, https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ni/?id=2021-01-26.5.1&s=energy (accessed 11 march 2021). 20 ciara breathnach, 2021, a dark, difficult, and shameful chapter (online). available: https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/mother-and-baby-homes-report/ (accessed 09 march 2021). 21 see olivia dee’s research project ‘visible labour’ for more on the historical treatment of unmarried mothers. 22 for an early overview of this see christine bell, ‘dealing with the past in northern ireland’, in fordham international law journal, vol 26, no 4, 2009, pp1095-1147. 23 the museum of free derry (online) 2021. available: https://museumoffreederry.org/ (accessed 13 march 2021). 24 healing through remembering past projects, n.d., (online). available: https://healingthroughremembering.org/what-we-do/past_projects/ (accessed 10 march 2021). 25 prisons memory archive, (online), 2021. available: https://www.prisonsmemoryarchive.com/ (accessed 10 march 2021). 26 acts of union: mixed marriage in modern ireland, 2021 (online). available: https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/acts-of-union/ (accessed 30 june 2022). 27 national museums northern ireland, n.d., culture lab virtual exhibition (online). available: https://www.nmni.com/our-museums/ulster-museum/culture-lab-virtual-exhibition.aspx (accessed 10 march 2021). 28 tourism ni, 2019, summary reports jan-dec 2019 (online). available: https://tourismni.com/facts-and-figures/tourism-performance-statistics/ni-annual-and-quarterly-tourism-performance/ (accessed 13 march 2021); tourism ireland, 2019, facts and figures 2019 (online). available: https://www.tourismireland.com/tourismireland/media/tourism-ireland/research/ti_factsandfigures_2019.pdf?ext=.pdf (accessed 13 march 2021). 29 for more on troubles tourism see jonathan skinner, ‘walking the falls: dark tourism and the significance of movement on the political tour of west belfast’, tourist studies, vol 16, no1, 2016, pp23-39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797615588427; katie markham, ‘touring the post-conflict city: negotiating affects during belfast’s black cab mural tours’ in laurajane smith, margaret wetherell, gary campbell (eds), emotion, affective practices, and the past in the present, routledge, abingdon, 2018, pp163-178. 30 the glasnevin cemetery museum won best cultural experience 2015-16 at the irish tourism industry awards, the museum and heritage award for excellence in 2011. 31 gillian o’brien, the darkness echoing: exploring ireland’s places of famine, death and rebellion, doubleday ireland, london, 2020. 32 for an overview of commemoration of the first world war see ann-marie foster, ‘commemoration, cult of the fallen (great britain and ireland)’, in ute daniel, peter gatrell, oliver janz, heather jones, jennifer keene, alan kramer and bill nasson (eds), 1914-1918 online: international encyclopedia of the first world war, freie universität berlin, 2020 (online). available: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/commemoration_cult_of_the_fallen_great_britain_and_ireland?version=1.0 (accessed 11 march 2021). 33 department of tourism, culture, arts, gaeltacht, sport and media, 2021, about us – decade of centenaries (online). available: https://www.decadeofcentenaries.com/about/ (accessed 12 march 2021). 34 the government of ireland, n.d., about: ireland 2016 (online). available: https://www.ireland2016.gov.ie/about (accessed 12 march 2021). 35 dominic bryan, ‘ritual, identity and nation: when the historian becomes the high priest of commemoration’ in grayson and mcgarry (eds), remembering 1916, pp24-42. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781316550403.003 36 oona frawley, ‘naming names: countering oblivious remembering in the decade of commemorations’, in oona frawley (ed), women and the decade of commemorations, indiana university press, bloomington, 2021, pp1-21. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1ghv4bd.4 37 laura mcatackney, ‘1916 and after: remembering “ordinary” women’s experiences of revolutionary ireland’; maeve casserly, ‘exhibiting éire: representations of women in the easter rising centenary commemorations’; eli davies, ‘remembering the home and the northern irish troubles’ in frawley (ed), women and the decade of commemorations. 38 president of ireland, n.d., machnamh 100 (online). available: https://president.ie/en/news/article/machnamh-100-president-of-irelands-centenary-reflections (accessed 13 march 2021). articles (peer reviewed) navigating the politics of remembering peter meihana rangitāne, ngāti kuia, ngāti apa, ngāi tahu corresponding author: peter meihana, p.n.meihana@massey.ac.nz doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8231 article history: received 09/06/2022; accepted 15/08/2022; published 06/12/2022 this article is based on the te rangikāheke memorial lecture presented in november 2021 at the new zealand historical association conference. te rangikāheke was one of aotearoa’s first ‘public historians’. he was born around 1815 into the ngāti kereru hapū (clan/tribal subdivision) of ngāti rangiwewehi. in 1835, he attended the church of england mission in rotorua where, under the tutelage of thomas chapman, he was baptised, taking the name william marsh. it was here that he acquired the skills of reading and writing. te rangikāheke would go on to become one of the most prolific māori writers of the nineteenth century, producing 21 manuscripts, comprising 670 pages. one hundred pages from a further 17 manuscripts have been attributed to te rangikāheke. these manuscripts, along with letters and public addresses, amount to over 800 pages. they are now held in the sir george grey collection in the auckland central library.1 te rangikāheke and governor george grey had a working relationship. grey’s governorship of south australia led him to believe that a sound knowledge of the māori world was essential to governing māori and extending british authority. in the preface of his polynesian mythology, grey wrote that he ‘could neither successfully govern, nor hope to conciliate, a numerous and turbulent people, with whose languages, manners, customs, religion, and modes of thought i was quite unacquainted’.2 te rangikāheke was grey’s most important informant. grey was not the only british official to collect māori oral tradition. surveyor and protector of aborigines edward shortland collated the traditions of south island māori.3 john white, another official, collected many traditions from across the north island.4 the relationship between these collectors and their māori informants was not a case of the former simply extracting information from the latter. it is fair to say that the māori informants were driven by their own objectives. many informants were paid for their services. in the case of te rangikāheke, he lived with grey and his wife, during which time grey gathered much of the material for his own publications.5 public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: meihana, p. 2022. navigating the politics of remembering. public history review, 29, 44–53. https://doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8231 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 44 mailto:p.n.meihana@massey.ac.nz https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8231 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8231 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8231 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj te rangikāheke was unique in terms of output, but there were many others who narrated the traditions of their iwi (tribe) and hapū communities. the ngāti kahungunu scribe te whatahoro set down in writing the traditions dictated to him by te matorohanga and other tohunga (experts).6 in the manawatū, hoani meihana te rangiotu, of ngāti rangitepaia, convened a hui of 60 leaders in 1852 to discuss tribal history and whakapapa – some of this whakapapa was published in john white’s the ancient history of māori.7 in te waipounamu (south island), there were matiaha tiramōrehu, teone tikao and others.8 this article considers the legacies of informants and intermediaries, and, with reference to recent historical commemorations in te tauihu o te waka a māui (northern south island), how they can help shape future understandings of history. the article discusses the work of nineteenth century scribes from iwi to whom i belong – ngāti kuia, rangitāne and ngāti apa. these tūpuna (ancestors) invested much time and effort into recording whakapapa and tradition. successive generations have looked back to this work to guide them in the present. the building of a whare tūpuna (carved meeting house), treaty of waitangi claims and settlements, the carving of pou whenua (carved posts), and participation in commemorative events are all built on past actions, but repurposed and shaped to meet current concerns. in the posttreaty era, literacy became an essential requirement when engaging with crown processes. having learnt to read and write from methodist missionaries, meihana kereopa, a survivor of the ‘musket wars’, travelled throughout te tauihu attending gatherings with elders.9 with the assistance of his son, tahuaraki, he recorded genealogies in preparation for native land court hearings and commissions of inquiry.10 one of meihana’s key informants was ihaia kaikōura. kaikōura inherited the mantle of rangitāne leadership following the death of his father and uncle during the musket wars. despite this setback, he went on to sign the treaty of waitangi on 17 june 1840.11 another musket war survivor was eruera wirihana pakauwera of ngāti kuia. eruera and his father escaped the ngāti toa rangatira led invasion of the pelorus sound, which saw his grandfather die.12 as an old man, eruera was interviewed by polynesian society ethnographers elsdon best and stephenson percy smith. the result of his interviews with percy smith was a manuscript comprising waiata (songs), moteatea (chants) and karakia (incantations).13 more than 100 years later, the meihana and pakauwera manuscripts would provide valuable information for the kurahaupō iwi during their respective treaty of waitangi claims.14 from the middle of the twentieth century, māori began to move from their rural homelands to urban centres. in te tauihu, many families moved from native reserves to towns like blenheim and nelson. it should be noted that these socalled urban migrants were not moving to unknown places, they were in fact returning to areas that had long been occupied by māori. just outside blenheim, for instance, is one of aotearoa’s most important archaeological sites. at te pokohiwi o kupe (the wairau bar), in around 1280ad, polynesian ancestors established one of aotearoa’s first settlements. these first peoples were no doubt attracted by the area’s resources – argillite to make stone tools, protein in the form of moa and marine mammals, and a climate conducive to growing kumara.15 public and scholarly interest in te pokohiwi has grown since 2009, when 42 kōiwi tangata (ancestral remains) were repatriated back to their original resting place. the repatriation occurred at a time when rangitāne was in treaty settlement negotiations with the crown. as part of rangitāne’s treaty settlement, the area in which the kōiwi tangata were reinterred was returned to the iwi in fee simple title.16 as part of the repatriation, the university of otago undertook a series of research projects which have added greatly to our knowledge of these ancestors. some of the research was presented at the 2016 new zealand archaeological association conference held at ukaipō, rangitāne’s cultural centre.17 as part of the conference programme, participants visited te pokohiwi where members of the rangitāne community shared some of the traditional knowledge of the site. iwi members also had the opportunity to have their dna sequenced as part of a project titled ‘the longest journey: from africa to aotearoa’. led by professor lisa matisoosmith, the aim of the project was to trace migration histories of new zealanders. meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202245 many whanau were interested to know if they were connected genetically to the wairau bar ancestors. as it transpired, many were.18 the repatriation also presented an opportunity for rangitāne to present their side of the story. during the 1940s, excavations led primarily by canterbury museum’s roger duff saw kōiwi tangata and artefacts taken to christchurch. tribal elder hohua peter macdonald, the grandson of meihana kereopa, protested, but failed in his attempts to stop the excavations. duff argued that the rangitāne community was in no way connected to the human remains at te pokohiwi, asserting that the remains belonged to an earlier, unrelated people. furthermore, the removal of kōiwi tangata continued even after rangitāne had been reassured that only artefacts such as adzes would be taken. the return of kōiwi tangata back to te pokohiwi was a high point for rangitāne, but there remains some unfinished business: the return of taonga still held by canterbury museum.19 the māori history of the northern south island is recorded in carved meeting houses. the first such house to be built was opened in 1985 at omaka marae in blenheim. named te aroha o te waipounamu, the poupou (carvings), tukutuku (woven panels) and kowhaiwhai (traditional motifs) that adorn the walls and ceiling reflect the area’s geographic location. the wairau was traditionally a thoroughfare, a place of coming and going. since its opening, te aroha o te waipounamu has hosted many nationally significant hui. the ‘fiscal envelope’, the government policy that looked to impose a cap of $1billion on all treaty settlements, was discussed at omaka. it was at omaka, too, that the iwi of te tauihu voiced their opposition to the crown’s proposal to vest the foreshore and seabed in public ownership.20 and in 2010, rangitāne signed its treaty of waitangi settlement with the crown at omaka.21 a unique feature of te aroha o te waipounamu is the portrait that runs the length of the eastern wall. painted by brian baxter, the portrait depicts māori life from the arrival of polynesian ancestors up until the arrival of james cook. unlike te pokohiwi, which has only recently acquired national significance, cook has been well memorialised in the northern south island. in 1896, 2,000 acres of land at meretoto (ship cove) was reserved ‘in memory of its occupation by captain cook’. in 1906, following discussions initiated at a large picnic hosted at meretoto by the local rifle company, plans were put in place to build a cook memorial. seven years later, a large memorial was unveiled at the site by governor general lord liverpool. it was the second such memorial erected in aotearoa, the first being the obelisk at gisborne in 1906.22 the monument at meretoto comprises a truncated concrete pyramid surmounted with a ship’s anchor. positioned at the front are a cannon and two cast iron guns that were added to the monument in 1928. the monument also includes several plaques. on the northern and eastern sides are inscriptions dedicated to cook. on the western side is an inscription paying tribute to those who contributed to the construction of the monument. the monument is not completely devoid of a māori presence. on the southern side is a short welcome in te reo māori (the māori language).23 māori have also been involved in reenactments, first in 1970 for the bicentenary celebrations, and again in 1996 involving a replica of the hms endeavour and awatea hou, a waka built for the 1990 treaty of waitangi commemorations.24 in 2006, ngāti apa, ngāti kuia, rangitāne and te ātiawa worked alongside the department of conservation to redevelop the site. a bridge was built crossing the small stream that divides the reserve. on the southern side of the bridge stand two pou whenua. the pou on the seaward side represents the kurahaupō iwi (ngāti kuia, rangitāne and ngāti apa) while the other pou represents te ātiawa. a larger pou depicting the polynesian ancestor kupe now stands near the entrance to the reserve. meretoto, then, at least in terms of its spatial configuration, is now bicultural.25 increasing numbers of the kurahaupō community are visiting meretoto, in part due to the tuia encounters 250. the tuia commemorations marked ‘250 years since the first onshore encounters between māori and pākehā in 1769’.26 like other māori communities across the country, the kurahaupō approached the event with trepidation; a ‘cookfest’ was something we were not willing to participate in. however, meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202246 enthusiasm grew when the decision was made to pivot to a commemorative event that acknowledged polynesian navigation and the tahitian rangatira tupaia, who joined cook’s first expedition when it reached tahiti, where cook was tasked with observing the transit of venus.27 cochair of the tuia encounters 250 national committee hoturoa barclaykerr stated that ‘the commemorations captured the first encounter between pacific people and the land, later encounters between pacific people and those in new zealand, and captain cook’s landing’.28 the national committee was responsible for organising commemorations at four cook landing sites: gisborne, coromandel peninsula, bay of islands and meretoto (tōtaranui). at a local level, the tōtaranui 250 trust, which comprised iwi representatives, received funding and coordinated key events. the first on the calendar was a pohiri at meretoto to welcome a flotilla that included a replica of the hms endeavour, two waka hourua (voyaging canoe), including the tahitian fa’afaite, as well as the spirit of new zealand. waka tangata (single hulled canoe) crewed by ngāti kuia, ngāti apa and te ātiawa met the flotilla as it entered the bay. from meretoto the flotilla made its way to picton, where it was welcomed by 7,000 people. events were also hosted by rangitāne in wairau (blenheim), including a visit to te pokohiwi.29 kupe and tuia 250 trust members. from left, raymond smith, john hellstrom, and peter jerram. (photograph by keelan walker, loud noise media) in contrast to commemorations in other areas, there was very little, if any, protest during tuia tōtaranui 250. in tūranganuiakiwa, the past was very much part of the present. in 1769, cook and his crew killed nine men and boys, including the ngāti oneone rangatira te maro. that atrocity has not been forgotten by their descendants in 2019; indeed, tuia 250 brought to the surface the wounds inflicted by colonisation. the protests at gisborne and elsewhere took place eight months after a white nationalist killed 51 people in christchurch.30 prime minister jacinda ardern declared ‘this is not who we are’. but as moana jackson meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202247 reminds us, christchurch ‘was, sadly, only one of many dark days in this country’s history’ and ‘a failure to recognise that fact is not just to misremember history but to erase and silence it.’31 while protest was not a feature of tuia tōtaranui 250, the past certainly shaped and influenced the māori response, and in particular the response of the kurahaupō iwi: ngāti apa, ngāti kuia and rangitāne. over the last two decades, the settlement of treaty of waitangi claims has preoccupied the iwi of the northern south island. the claimssettlement process provided a forum for te tauihu iwi to present their claims before the waitangi tribunal, an independent commission of inquiry. the tribunal is primarily concerned with the acts and omissions of the crown in relation to its treaty obligations; however, it also addressed aspects of custom. it found that the kurahaupō iwi had, despite the raupatu (conquest) of the 1830s, retained rights in areas they now shared with others. moreover, rights continued to evolve after the signing of the treaty of waitangi.32 the kurahaupō iwi have a long association with the tōtaranui. according to tribal tradition, the kurahaupō waka landed at nukutaurua on the mahia peninsula in the fourteenth century.33 over generations, the descendants of whātonga, the captain of kurahaupō, migrated south to the lower north island. from the sixteenth century, ngāi tara, ngāti māmoe and ngāti tumatakokiri began to traverse raukawakawa moana (cook strait), stopping at tōtaranui and arapaōa island before moving west and south.34 ngāti tumatakokiri eventually occupied the area from rangitoto (d’urville island) to mohua (golden bay) and it was they who met abel tasman in 1642.35 further migrations of kurahaupō peoples followed. ngāti kuia, ngāti apa and rangitāne pushed their relatives west and south and, while conflict arose, strategic marriages insured peace was quickly established. when cook arrived in january 1770, he met a kurahaupō community.36 te ātiawa also have an association with tōtaranui. originally from taranaki, the iwi migrated to the lower north island in late 1820s. during the 1830s, having acquired muskets, te ātiawa and other iwi invaded and settled in the northern south island. the arrival of nga iwi hou (the new people) led to a change in the geopolitics of the area. for the kurahaupō iwi, the impact of the invasion was amplified in the decades after 1840. crown purchases and the decisions of the native land court reflected the crown’s view of the relative status of ngāti kuia, ngāti apa and rangitāne. deemed to be a ‘conquered’ people, they were denied title to lands they had traditionally owned. although such grievances were thoroughly dealt with by the waitangi tribunal, which posited a model of overlapping rights and interests, te ātiawa maintain that their rights through raupatu are exclusive.37 this, then, was the context that framed the kurahaupō response to tuia 250. it presented an opportunity for the kurahaupō iwi to reposition their histories. the killing of tobias furneaux’s ten men during cook’s second expedition stands out in the historical record. having separated from cook and the resolution, furneaux headed for tōtaranui in the adventure. once there, furneaux ordered ten of his crew to collect scurvy grass from wharehunga bay. it was at this time that the ten crewmen were killed and purportedly eaten.38 kahura, the chief held responsible for the killing, has been remembered in tribal whakapapa (genealogy). however, little detail of the event has been retained by the kurahaupō community. what has been retained is the memory of tupaia, and it was this connection that was foremost in the minds of the kurahaupō peoples involved in tuia tōtaranui 250. there is little in the european sources that indicates what discussions took place between our ancestors and the tahitian navigator. it is clear, though, that tupaia left a lasting impression. when cook returned to tōtaranui in 1773, news of tupaia’s death was met with great sadness, and, as was customary, a waiata tangi (lament) was composed. eruera wirihana pakauwera dictated the waiata tangi to stephenson percy smith 120 years later. during the pohiri (customary welcome) to welcome the crew of the fa’afaite, the descendants of those people who wept for tupaia once again remembered him through song.39 meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202248 the lament begins by asking what has become of tupaia, this ‘taonga nui rawa’ (great treasure)?40 reference is then made to ‘houmea’, a wellknown figure in polynesian mythology as a person with an insatiable appetite. houmea’s husband, uta, was a fisherman and she continually devoured his catch while laying the blame on others. on his return from a fishing expedition, uta finds houmea with severe stomach pains. after reciting the usual karakia to relieve her discomfort, uta discovers that his wife has in fact swallowed their children. uta is able to recover the children and decides to send houmea on an errand, giving them a chance to escape. when houmea returns she pursues the fleeing party, eventually catching up with them. she demands that the children feed her, which they do; but soon all the food onboard is eaten, including the fish they had just cooked. with little hope of satisfying houmea, the children decide to kill her by throwing hot charcoal from the fire into her mouth. the story of houmea is a comment on evil, greed and thievish behaviour.41 the shag is often considered to be a manifestation of houmea, however, according to eruera pakauwera, from whom the waiata is derived, houmea took the form of an ocean whirlpool.42 next, the lament mentions ‘paoahere’ and ‘te kura a awarua’. this part of the lament speaks to the political and religious situation in east polynesia prior to the migration of peoples to aotearoa. paoahere was a rarotonga high priest who helped transport a drum known as ‘tangimoana’ to rai’atea, where it was to be presented to the god ‘oro’ at the scared marae of taputapuatea. up until this time, the islands of east polynesia lived under a peace alliance made up of two broad groupings of islands centred on ra’iātea. ‘te ao uri’ comprised those islands to the east and south east, and included tahiti. ‘te ao tea’ took in those islands in the west, beginning with taha’a and porapora, and extending to rarotonga and the cook islands. over several generations, aristocratic pilgrims travelled to taputapuatea to discuss religious matters. these great meetings ended abruptly when paoahere was killed by a priest from te ao uri. paoahere’s kin retaliated and then made a sudden departure. they did not, however, leave via ‘te avamo’a’, the sacred pass in the reef through which they arrived, and through which they should have departed. rather, they made haste through ‘te avarua’ pass, breaching protocols.43 lastly, mention is made of tupaia’s relationship to ‘te whanau o putea’. this part of the lament accounts for tupaia’s recent past. in the years leading up to cook’s arrival, tupaia’s fortunes had fluctuated. he was part of the ra’iatean élite who trained as a priest specialising in star navigation. when raiatea was invaded by warriors from borabora, he was forced to leave for tahiti where he found refuge with the family of a local chief, amo, and his wife purea (putea). in time he became purea’s lover and one of amo’s key advisers. this position of privilege was shaken by the arrival of the british frigate dolphin in 1767. relations between the british and tahitians were at first cordial, but the british outstayed their welcome and were attacked by the locals. the british responded with cannon fire forcing amo to retreat. tupaia took this as an opportunity to negotiate with captain samuel wallis. following wallis’s departure, rival tahitian forces attacked amo and putea, once more placing tupaia in an uncertain situation. but again, tupaia managed to find himself an advisory role in the new ascendency, which, although not as prestigious as his former station, placed him in a useful position when cook arrived in 1769.44 tupaia’s lament, brought to life 250 years after its composition, suggests that our ancestors and tupaia were engaging in wananga (knowledge exchange). reference to houmea, paoahere, awarua and putea shows that connections were being made through recourse to a common history. indeed, this was as much the case in 2019 as it was in 1770. using pou whenua and other cultural icons, sculptures and art pieces has been useful in promoting and embedding histories and matauranga (knowledge) in our local community. as part of tuia 250, rangitāne led a publicly funded project to install a large steel and bronze canoe prow.45 ‘te tauihu o te waka a māui’ was wrought by master carver heemi te peeti (ngāti kuia, rangitāne, ngāti apa) and was erected in blenheim on land returned to the iwi as part of its treaty settlement. at one end of te tauihu stands māui, the polynesian hero figure who fished up islands, slowed down the sun and acquired fire for human use.46 māui also embodies our navigational heritage. at the other end stands tūkauāe, a descendant of whātonga, meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202249 who through his three marriages consolidated the relationships between the kurahaupō iwi of te tauihu. these marriages are represented in the main body of te tauihu, which also includes representations of the mountains and rivers that dominate the landscape.47 there are many benefits that flow from projects like te tauihu and pou whenua. they bring together cultural practitioners to help give physical shape and form to our narratives. iwi artists are given the opportunity to practice their craft. thought needs to be given to the narrative that helps inform the artist; this is where iwi historians can play a role. the various ceremonies that take place throughout the duration of the project allows our tohunga (cultural experts) to impart their knowledge and ensure that cultural standards are met. these kinds of projects allow us to reflect on the past, as well as set a platform for future interpretations. for instance, as new kaupapa appear, such as the introduction of new history curriculum in 2023, the idea that ‘māori history is the foundational and continuous history of aotearoa new zealand’ can be firmly grounded in the local.48 publicly funded projects can also have some unexpected outcomes. the construction of a new bridge at the northern entrance to blenheim presented iwi with another opportunity to retell their history. in this instance, waka kotahi, the new zealand transport agency, worked with local iwi ngāti toa rangatira, ngāti rarua and rangitāne, who commissioned the carving of a pou whenua named ‘kei puta te wairau’ to mark the entrance to the town.49 significantly, this was the first project of its type where iwi worked collaboratively. the decision to erect a pou was a relatively easy one, the more difficult question was what the pou should depict or represent. following robust discussion, the three iwi decided that it should tell the story of the wairau valley. the lower section speaks to the forces of nature that have shaped the land. the upper section represents the many peoples that have arrived since 1840 and will continue to arrive. ‘te tauihu o te waka a māui’. (photograph the author) meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202250 the middle section of the pou is dedicated to the treaty of waitangi and each iwi chose a treaty signatory who would be carved into the pou.50 rangitāne chose ihaia kaikōura, who was in fact the only rangitāne signatory. ngāti toa rangatira chose te kanae and ngāti rārua chose te tana pukekohatu. the second question, and the more difficult one, was where on the pou should each signatory be placed? the decision made by the iwi working group was, i believe anyway, the appropriate one. it averted the perennial debate about which iwi held the greatest rights by having te kanae look to the north, towards kāpiti island and kawhia beyond. this allowed for the retelling of the traditions related to the hekenga (migrations) that ngāti toa rangatira led in the 1820s. te tana pukekohatu looks to the west towards motueka, where his people resided before settling in wairau. ihaia looks south towards the ancestral mountains, tapuaeouenuku and te hau, and further south to the waiautoa river, the southernmost limit of rangitāne’s customary rights. ‘kei puta te wairau’. (photograph the author) ihaia was a remarkable person, and not unlike tupaia and te rangikāheke. his people were impacted by the musket wars, but his status in the new order quickly grew. with the advent of shore whaling in the 1830s, he moved to port underwood where rangitāne and ngāti toa rangatira supplied food and traded with whalers. by the time major thomas bunbury arrived with the treaty of waitangi in june 1840, he had become a leader of the mixed port community. three years later, ihaia and rangitāne stood alongside ngāti toa rangatira and ngāti rarua to confront the new zealand company at tua marino. the fight that ensued was the only armed conflict of the new zealand wars fought in the south island. ihaia was an important source of information for kurahaupō scribes during the midnineteenth century. and, while he has no living descendants, the pou whenua ‘kei puta te wairau’ ensures his legacy will not be forgotten. in the nineteenth century, kurahaupō tūpuna made the decision to commit their whakapapa to the written word. at that time land claims were utmost in their minds. they also saw the benefit in imparting meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202251 their traditions to ethnographers. in more recent decades, particularly in the context of settling treaty claims, these accounts have been revisited. although the claims have now been concluded, the traditions and whakapapa that underpinned them continue to inspire and guide. events such as the repatriation created space in which narratives, hitherto silenced or pushed to the margins, can be recentred. moreover, these narratives are now finding expression in materials such steel and bronze. and, as tuia 250 demonstrated, the priorities of the kurahaupō community were not constrained or overshadowed by james cook. tuia 250 will not be remembered because of cook, it will be remembered because of a relationship that was rekindled through song. endnotes 1 jenifer curnow, ‘wiremu maihi te rangikāheke: his life and work’, in journal of the polynesian society, vol 94, no 2, 1985, pp97148. 2 george grey, polynesian mythology and ancient traditional history of the new zealand race, h. brett, auckland, 1885, pvi. 3 edward shortland, the southern districts of new zealand: a journal, with passing notices of the customs of the aborigines, longman, brown, green, & longmans, london, 1851. 4 john white, the ancient history of the māori, his mythology and traditions, 6 volumes, government printer, wellington, 18871890. 5 curnow, j. 1990, te rangikāheke, wiremu maihi (online). available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t66/te rangikahekewiremumaihi (accessed 19 august 2022). 6 parsons, m.j. 1990, jury, hoani te whatahoro (online). available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1j6/juryhoani tewhatahoro (accessed 19 august 2022). 7 durie, m. 1990, te rangiotū, hoani meihana (online). available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t67/terangiotu hoanimeihana (accessed 19 august 2022). 8 harry evison, ‘matiaha tiramōrehu’, in tangata ngāi tahu, people of ngāi tahu, te rūnanga o ngāi tahu, bridget williams books, wellington, 2017, pp272277; o’regan, t. 1993, tīako, hōne taare (online). available: https://teara.govt. nz/en/biographies/2t43/tikaohonetaare/print (accessed 19 august 2022); te maire tau, ngā pikitūroa o ngāi tahu, the oral traditions of ngāi tahu, university of otago press, dunedin, 2003. 9 the ‘musket wars’ is the name given to the intertribal battles fought between 1807 and 1845. 10 the native land court was established in 1865 under the native land act. its purpose was to determine who held rights under customary title, which was then converted to individual title. this facilitated the process of alienation. 11 mīria simpson, ngā tohu o te tiriti, making a mark, the signatories to the treaty of waitangi, national library of new zealand, wellington, 1990, p76. 12 s. percy smith, ‘notes on the ngāti kuia tribe of the south island, n.z.’, in journal of the polynesian society, vol 26, no 3, 1917. 13 ‘notebook’, series 11 – deposited papers – stephenson percy smith, polynesian society: records, wellington, alexander turnbull library, 1894. 14 the waitangi tribunal heard the claims of te tauihu iwi from 2000 to 2004. 15 richard walter, hallie buckley, chris jacomb and elizabeth matisoosmith, ‘mass migration and the polynesian settlement of new zealand’, in journal of world prehistory, vol 30, no 4, 2017, pp351376. 16 peter n. meihana and cecil r. bradley, ‘repatriation, reconciliation and the inversion of patriarchy’, in journal of the polynesian society, vol 127, no 3, 2018, pp307324. 17 meihana, p. 2016, the wairau bar: making new connections with the past (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/ marlboroughexpress/opinion/81410071/thewairaubarmakingnewconnectionswiththepast (accessed 19 august 2022). 18 meihana and bradley, op cit, pp307324. 19 ibid. 20 aroha harris and melissa matutina williams, ‘tangata whenua, tangata ora, 19902014’ in atholl anderson, judith binney and aroha harris (eds), tangata whenua, an illustrated history, bridget williams books, wellington, 2014, pp466467, 478. 21 rangitāne settlement sign of rough times (online), 2010. available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/63548/ rangitanesettlement%27sign%27oftoughtimes (accessed 19 august 2022). meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202252 https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t66/te-rangikaheke-wiremu-maihi https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t66/te-rangikaheke-wiremu-maihi https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1j6/jury-hoani-te-whatahoro https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1j6/jury-hoani-te-whatahoro https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t67/te-rangiotu-hoani-meihana https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t67/te-rangiotu-hoani-meihana https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2t43/tikao-hone-taare/print https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2t43/tikao-hone-taare/print https://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/opinion/81410071/the-wairau-bar-making-new-connections-with-the-past https://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/opinion/81410071/the-wairau-bar-making-new-connections-with-the-past https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/63548/rangitane-settlement-%252525252527sign%252525252527-of-tough-times https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/63548/rangitane-settlement-%252525252527sign%252525252527-of-tough-times 22 kerryn pollock, ‘meretoto/ship cove/tōtaranui/queen charlotte sound’, heritage new zealand pouhere taonga report, january 2019, p17. 23 ibid, pp2124. 24 ibid, pp1718. 25 ibid, p25. 26 tuia 250 (online), nd. available: https://mch.govt.nz/tuia250 (accessed 19 august 2022). 27 joan druett, tupaia, the remarkable story of captain cook’s polynesian navigator, random house new zealand, auckland, 2011. 28 ranford, c. 2019, commemorations set for marlborough sounds (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/ national/110955276/captaincookcommemorationssetformarlboroughsounds?rm=a (accessed 19 august 2022). 29 tuia 250 report, (online), nd. available: https://mch.govt.nz/sites/default/files/projects/tuia_250_report_english_ digital.pdf (accessed 19 august 2022). 30 joanna kidman, ‘captain cook, tuia 250 and the making of public memory’, in joanna kidman, vincent o’malley, liana macdonald, tom roa and keziah wallis, fragments from a contested past, remembrance, denial and new zealand history, bridget williams books, wellington, 2022, pp1945 31 jackson, m. 2019, the connection between white supremacy and colonisation (online). available: https://etangata. co.nz/commentandanalysis/theconnectionbetweenwhitesupremacy/ (accessed 19 august 2022). 32 te tau ihu o te waka a maui, report on northern south island claims, volume iii, wai 785, waitangi tribunal report, 2008, pp13651367. 33 durie, m. and durie, m. 2017, rangitāne (online). available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/rangitane/print (accessed 19 august 2022). 34 atholl anderson, ‘emerging societies ad15001800’, in atholl anderson, judith binney and aroha harris (eds), tangata whenua, an illustrated history, bridget williams books, wellington, 2014, pp118119. 35 stephenson percy smith, the history and traditions of the maoris of the west coast north island of new zealand prior to 1840, polynesian society, new plymouth, 1910, pp427432. 36 te tau ihu o te waka a maui, report on northern south island claims, volume i, wai 785, waitangi tribunal report, 2008, pp167169. 37 ibid, volume iii, pp13551356; ranford, c. 2019, look who’s talking: te ātiawa o te wakaamāui (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/115470925/lookwhostalkingtetiawaotewakaamui (accessed 19 august 2022). 38 james belich, making peoples: a history of the new zealanders from polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century, penguin books, auckland, 1996, p122. 39 neal, t. 2019, cook’s endeavour, tahitian explorer welcomed at ship cove (online). available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/ news/temanukorihi/403917/cooksendeavourtahitianexplorerwelcomedatshipcove (accessed 19 august 2022). 40 ‘he waiata na ngati kuia’, polynesian society, ms papers 1187, folder 162, polynesian notes, volume 1, translations by takirirangi smith, ngati kuia archives, p55. 41 margaret orbell, the illustrated encyclopedia of māori myth and legend, canterbury university press, christchurch 1995, p69. 42 ibid, p55. 43 ben finney, ‘the sin at awarua’, in the contemporary pacific, vol 11, no 1, 1999, pp1213. 44 druett j. 2017, tupaia (online). available: https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/6t2/tupaia 45 rata foundation, nd, rangitāne (online). available: https://ratafoundation.org.nz/en/haporimaori/relationships/ rangitane (accessed 19 august 2022). 46 orbell, op cit, pp114117. 47 te tauihu o te wakaamāui (online), nd. available: https://www.rangitane.org.nz/tauihu/ (accessed 19 august 2022). 48 ministry of education, 2002, aotearoa nz’s histories (online). available: https://aotearoahistories.education.govt.nz/ contentoverview (accessed 19 august 2022). 49 ‘kei puta te wairau’ refers to the parting of the clouds through which the sun shines through; waka kotahi, 2020, waka kotahi and partners celebrate completion of sh1 ōpaoa river bridge project with dawn pou whenua blessing and unveiling (online). available: https://nzta.govt.nz/mediareleases/wakakotahiandpartnerscelebratecompletionof sh1opaoariverbridgeprojectwithdawnpouwhenuablessingandunveiling/ (accessed 19 august 2022). 50 on 17 june 1843, nine chiefs signed te tiriti o waitangi in port underwood. this was last the last treaty signing. meihana public history review, vol. 29, 202253 https://mch.govt.nz/tuia250 https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/110955276/captain-cook-commemorations-set-for-marlborough-sounds?rm=a https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/110955276/captain-cook-commemorations-set-for-marlborough-sounds?rm=a https://mch.govt.nz/sites/default/files/projects/tuia_250_report_english_digital.pdf https://mch.govt.nz/sites/default/files/projects/tuia_250_report_english_digital.pdf https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/the-connection-between-white-supremacy/ https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/the-connection-between-white-supremacy/ https://teara.govt.nz/en/rangitane/print https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/115470925/look-whos-talking-te-tiawa-o-te-wakaamui https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/403917/cook-s-endeavour-tahitian-explorer-welcomed-at-ship-cove https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/403917/cook-s-endeavour-tahitian-explorer-welcomed-at-ship-cove https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/6t2/tupaia https://ratafoundation.org.nz/en/hapori-maori/relationships/rangitane https://ratafoundation.org.nz/en/hapori-maori/relationships/rangitane https://www.rangitane.org.nz/tauihu/ https://aotearoahistories.education.govt.nz/content-overview https://aotearoahistories.education.govt.nz/content-overview https://nzta.govt.nz/media-releases/waka-kotahi-and-partners-celebrate-completion-of-sh1-opaoa-river-bridge-project-with-dawn-pou-whenua-blessing-and-unveiling/ https://nzta.govt.nz/media-releases/waka-kotahi-and-partners-celebrate-completion-of-sh1-opaoa-river-bridge-project-with-dawn-pou-whenua-blessing-and-unveiling/ articles (peer reviewed) channelling a haunting: deconstructing settler memory and forgetting about new zealand history at national institutions liana macdonald1,*, kim bellas2, emma gardenier2, adrienne j. green2 1 ngāti kuia, rangitāne o wairau, ngāti koata 2 new zealand pākehā corresponding author: liana macdonald, liana.macdonald@vuw.ac.nz doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8218 article history: received 04/06/2022; accepted 08/11/2022; published 06/12/2022 introduction the aotearoa new zealand’s histories curriculum is a landmark document through which national history must be taught to all year 110 students.1 the new curriculum is significant for a country that prides itself on a treaty partnership that purports to equally include māori and pākehā interests in government institutions.2 yet it fails to deliver equitable social outcomes for indigenous peoples in, for example, health, youth suicide and incarceration, as well as education.3 the content of the new curriculum presents an opportunity to get to grips with our nation’s history warts and all. there are hopes it will provide a more meaningful pathway towards reconciliation between pākehā and māori, and ways to build a society that is more in line with the intent of te tiriti o waitangi, new zealand’s founding document.4 like te tiriti, the new zealand wars were crucial in determining the course and direction of new zealand, but there is limited public understanding of these histories.5 teachers perceive that new zealand’s difficult histories are too controversial for the classroom and that students do not find them interesting.6 the new curriculum means that challenging topics like the new zealand wars must now be engaged with by all teachers. however, michael harcourt’s research finds that the small number of teachers who have taught histories of colonial violence struggle to articulate practical measures that make the past relevant and tangible to students in the present.7 there is an urgent need for innovative pedagogical approaches that engage with key curriculum understandings like colonisation, settlement and power to make the ongoing structuring force of colonisation visible. public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: macdonald, l., bellas, k., gardenier, e., green, a. j. 2022. channelling a haunting: deconstructing settler memory and forgetting about new zealand history at national institutions. public history review, 29, 142–155. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v29i0.8218 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 142 mailto:liana.macdonald@vuw.ac.nz https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8218 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8218 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8218 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj in this article, we present a model for challenging how power relations between settler and indigenous groups are constructed at national institutions. drawing on avery gordon’s sociological work on hauntings, channelling a haunting is a teaching approach that makes absent, silenced, and unresolved histories of colonial violence and indigenous oppression known and felt in the present.8 making past episodes of colonial violence relevant today supports school students to question how the public spaces and places they move through reinforce a view of national history that aligns with settler sensibilities. national museums traditionally play an important role in reflecting and determining how people view themselves in relation to the nation state.9 deconstructing settler memory and forgetting about new zealand history at national museums through challenging a haunting is an intellectual and embodied process that recognises how lovely and difficult knowledge about colonial history frames popular perceptions of national identity. in 2021, the authors of this article undertook a sevenweek project as part of a secondary school teaching qualification that examined how three new zealand institutions conveyed national narratives of history that are implicated in colonial power relations. aj, emma and kim were studying to be secondary school history subject teachers and liana was one of their history lecturers. this paper recounts the teaching and learning journey that they undertook to channel a haunting. we start by considering the nature of resistance to engaging difficult knowledge in settler societies. the second section relays the classroom process we undertook to critique how settler memory and forgetting is constructed at national institutions. the third section focuses on the experience of channelling a haunting at two national institutions: museum of new zealand te papa tongarewa and national library of new zealand te puna mātauranga o aotearoa. we finish by discussing the implications of the museum visits and how channelling a haunting compels action; a something to be done that motivates us to meaningfully rectify the false truth claims of settler memory in society.10 resisting difficult knowledge in settler societies difficult knowledge is a term that is generally attributed to american psychoanalyst deborah britzman, who distinguishes learning about and learning from difficult knowledge by explaining that the latter requires introspective reflection about how one is attached to and implicated in the construction of information.11 however, learning from difficult knowledge about the past is not easy, because it induces a sense of shame, discomfort or anger.12 scholars grappling with the teaching of difficult histories theorise the nature of resistance to difficult knowledge to propose ways of working through difficult emotions and trauma productively to effect societal change. for britzman, resistance to difficult knowledge is a ‘psychic event’ in which an individual ‘vacillates, sometimes violently and sometimes passively, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes shockingly, between resistance as symptom and the working through of resistance’.13 the view that resistance to difficult knowledge is primarily an internal battle is extended by michalinos zembylas, who considers how interrelations between discursive practices, the human body, historically situated emotions and affects, and social and cultural forces, have an impact how difficult knowledge is negotiated by learners and teachers.14 joanna kidman progresses an understanding of resistance to difficult knowledge further by showing how it is implicated in nationalist discourse. the signs of a nation exhibition at new zealand’s national museum, te papa, presents the signing of the treaty of waitangi as a birth of a nation story that: allows pākehā citizens to imagine themselves as partners with māori in the nationmaking quest. in this sense, it exists within nationalist discourse as a form of ‘lovely’ knowledge that permits people to visualize their role within the nation’s story as benign, altruistic and at times, even heroic.15 macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022143 kidman’s racially nuanced exhibition analysis reveals ways that settler institutions construct narratives of colonial history that appeal to settler sensibilities by excluding and silencing colonial violence. more recently, the role of affect has been theorised in relation to how exhibits can produce material and embodied pedagogies that influence how knowledge is negotiated by school visitors in museum settings.16 that knowledge emerges through a relationship between the body and the environment has been central to indigenous thought and ontology for centuries, whereby affect is not theoretical and the interconnectivity of all things is real. in australia, knowledge lives in country, and is generated through patterns of relationship to country, and paying attention to bodily responses produced through senses and emotions can be pedagogical.17 scholars from new zealand similarly map how māori have a feeling for place in which knowledge emerges through interacting with local environments.18 indeed, carl mika writes that acknowledging the multifarious and complex nature of relationships between the body and objects or things means that one never fully realises all the ways our environment contributes to conscious thought.19 māori are tied to the whenua (land) and all spiritual and physical phenomena through whakapapa, an ontology that privileges layers of intergenerational knowledge and relationships. whakapapa encompasses difficult knowledge, yet cognitive perception of relationships and connections to the past and to places, events and people may be severed by human design.20 a sense of connectedness and belonging to the whenua can be as important to settlers as it is for indigenous people.21 these senses can be tied to a sense of nationhood or regionalism within the new zealand psyche.22 settlers must create a sense of belonging that is on par with indigenous groups to legitimise the right to stay and feel at home in the postmigration homeland.23 in doing so, difficult knowledge about the nature of settlement – that is, the violent and brutal ways that the colonial invaders occupied tribal lands and established political, cultural, economic and social systems to sustain the subjugation of indigenous people – must be forgotten or, at least, be easily overlooked.24 julia rose writes that ‘difficult knowledge includes difficult histories and other knowledge that is upsetting, stressful, or too hard to bear’.25 therefore, difficult knowledge in settler societies can also be interpreted as modernday mechanisms of power and control that legitimise a settler presence on stolen indigenous territories. macdonald and kidman, drawing from the philosophy of jacques derrida, argue that a settler colonial crypt is a way of understanding the repression of traumatic knowledge associated with the colonial invasion and death of māori during the new zealand wars.26 iwi memories of colonial violence are supressed to cultivate a relationship to place that ‘reinforces a social and bodily orientation that aligns with the emotional and affective need for settlers to feel a sense of belonging to the whenua’.27 national institutions are places where the settler colonial crypt operates through exhibitions that forefront lovely knowledge and withhold aspects of difficult knowledge. settler memory and forgetting can be advanced through the way the environment is designed (physical spaces), narratives of history and contemporary race relations (ontological spaces) and attachments to the setting and a sense of national identity (emotional and affective spaces). in this article, we contend that channelling a haunting provides students with tools for deconstructing multiple spaces that uphold the settler colonial crypt. gordon argues that a haunting is when unresolved colonial violence comes into view, involving ‘instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction’.28 students can learn how mundane public places and spaces are not culturally neutral and are biased towards settler perspectives. it is the process of teaching students how to channel a haunting we turn to next. learning how to channel a haunting the ability to deconstruct settler memory in national institutions is based on letting oneself think and feel as though colonial violence has not between resolved and still matters today. the memory and ongoing legacy of historical colonial violence is still felt strongly by many māori people and communities who were macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022144 invaded by the british between 1843 and 1872. perceiving that difficult histories of unresolved violence have a presence despite their absence is key to channelling a haunting. indeed, ‘haunting recognition is a special way of knowing what has happened or is happening’.29 there are three key cornerstones to learning how to channel a haunting, to deconstruct the false truth claims of settler memory in national institutions, as the diagram below demonstrates. late in 2021, the authors of this paper undertook a sevenweek unit that focussed on how secondary school history students could be taught to consider the ways in which settler colonial power relations are constructed in national institutions. aj, emma and kim were under 25 years old and were studying to be secondary school history subject teachers as part of a oneyear master of teaching and learning qualification. they were placed in a school approximately two days a week, while another two days were spent at university in courses focussed on teaching theory and pedagogy. prior to the unit, the student teachers had designed and taught lessons and units of work with their classes about colonial conflict and used vincent o’malley’s work about the new zealand wars, in particular the wairau affray and the waikato wars.30 the first cornerstone to teaching the process of channelling a haunting is a broad intellectual understanding of difficult and silenced histories involving indigenous oppression. this is a necessary step towards being able to critique the narrative gaps and silences about national history presented at museums. the second cornerstone in the process is an awareness of the key tenets of settler colonialism and how collective memory can uphold settler power and privilege in society. in the four weeks leading up to their three field trips, the student teachers read literature about mechanisms of settler domination, historical amnesia, silencing and biculturalism, and settler/pākehā identity.31 work by indigenous and black scholars was prioritised because nonwhite bodies are more in tune with the ways that settler societies structure unequal and racialised power relations.32 the readings relayed several insights about the mechanisms of settler colonial power, including: • settlers are here to stay, so indigenous peoples must be displaced • settlers develop a strong attachment and sense of belonging to the adopted home • historical amnesia erases how territories were violently taken from indigenous peoples • framing settlerindigenous relations as an equitable and harmonious partnership legitimises a settler presence. to ground the relationship between settler colonialism, national identity and cultural forgetting in a museum context, the student teachers read kidman’s paper to examine how lovely knowledge is constructed in the signs of a nation exhibition. they noted that the layout of the exhibition reinforced a bifurcated, ‘two worlds’ view of māori and pākehā people, in which māori are presented as aligning with the natural world, while pākehā are ‘in tune with urban and built environments’. other features of the physical space, like the talking posts scattered at the front of the exhibition and the ‘high cathedrallike ceiling... comfortable seating and calm ambience’, were discussed in relation to the holiness and sanctity of new zealand’s birth of a bicultural nation narrative.33 the article analysis process we undertook emphasised how exhibitions can produce narratives of colonial history that are steeped in power relations. with more time, we might have engaged in a more nuanced analysis that considers the degree to which historians – both māori and pākehā – are involved in the creation of the exhibitions relative to other experts, such as architects, conservators, designers and educators. the third cornerstone for channelling a haunting is the ability to read and feel how settler memory is constructed in physical spaces and connected to emotion and affect. leading up to the field trips, emma, kim and aj engaged deeply in ethnographic thick description and the process of recording highly detailed macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022145 accounts of experiences in the field. liana showed the students her own field notes taken at sites associated with the 1846 battle of boulcott farm.34 the student teachers looked closely at how numerous elements, including objects, visible and missing text, layout and presentation of buildings and space, and visitors interact with each other at the boulcott’s farm memorial and boulcott’s farm heritage golf club to reinforce settler memory of historical events. difficult and silenced histories settler colonialism channelling a haunting ethnographic thick description settler narratives – biculturalism + partnership race, power and national identity collective remembering and forgetting intellectual understanding new zealand wars affective prompts (see, hear, smell, touch, taste) deconstruct the everyday the key cornerstones of channelling a haunting. (liana macdonald) after four weeks engaging with the three cornerstones through coursebased university work, kim, liana, aj and emma visited exhibitions housed in three national institutions: te papa, the national library and pukeahu national war memorial during the remaining three weeks of the unit.35 students were asked to compile field notes during their visits using a simple tchart where they recorded affective prompts (what they can see, hear, touch, smell, taste) and insights about layout, objects, text, space, people, buildings, etc, down the lefthand side of a field notes template, and some musings about how the affective prompts connected to settler memory of colonial history down the righthand side. due to ethical considerations, the student teachers were interviewed separately after the history course had ended and months after the visits took place. the field notes they had taken during the site visits helped to prompt their thinking, and their interview responses have been anonymised. deconstructing lovely knowledge at te papa the first national institution that the authors visited was te papa. many of the objects within signs of a nation, which was installed in 1998, and the layout of the surrounding exhibitions were discussed in relation to kidman’s idea of lovely knowledge. for example, it was noted that the size and the wording of the three articles on the english and te reo māori versions of the treaty replicas were equal sizes, to suggest they are of equal importance in society. legally we prioritize the te reo wording, but then in society we prioritize the english wording. we followed the articles and terms in the english version of the treaty, and now society today is trying to transition to the te reo māori version of the treaty. but [the equal size of the wording] in both documents really impresses the idea that it’s always been an equal partnership. [visitors] macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022146 may be encouraged to sit there and think that both versions have been prioritized in history when that’s not the case. the capacity for the objects in the exhibition to impress a harmonious and fairminded view of colonial history on visitors was enhanced by ‘airport seats’ that encouraged them to: sort of sit down, look up and soak up the treaty and the bicultural national myth. it sort of makes you feel really good about new zealand history, as opposed to thinking about the contested nature of it. view of signs of a nation with treaty of waitangi reproduced at centre, te papa, 2015. (photograph by norm heke. te papa (75177)) lovely knowledge about new zealand’s colonial history was further enhanced by the layout of the signs of a nation exhibition and how it directed visitors through a narrative of national identity that emphasised the progressive nature of aotearoa’s race relations. you walk under the treaty, then come out and see this huge union jack flag that is a replica of one belonging to busby or hobson or something, then to a small rātana exhibit squashed at the back. you look at all the artifacts that are underneath, and then you meet a curved or an angled window that has a big view of the city and waitangi park. so you’re directed to think, ‘oh, that’s right, we’re in the commonwealth’ and ‘oh, look, here it is the beautiful bicultural country with waitangi park’. so the museum is using oriental bay, you know, a very affluent gentrified area that is white and very wealthy, as part of the exhibition. people in this part of wellington are arguably some of the most insulated and live in a white liberal bubble so that view when you come out is interesting. macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022147 looking beyond signs of a nation and moving through and around the adjacent ‘level 4’ exhibitions at te papa encouraged the student teachers to critically examine the presentation of māori culture and identities. next to signs of a nation is an exhibition about european migration. the objects, images, layout and text were organised in ways that homogenised māori people and affectively pulled visitor bodies towards an impression that european migration was a positive event. there’s a detailed breakdown of recent migration to new zealand, but i didn’t get any distinction of different iwi or that māori came to new zealand on different waka. [the exhibition] made it clear that not all refugees are the same, but there was none of that for māori. they sort of connected the refugees to historic migration and the colonial ships used to settle new zealand but it’s not really the same thing. refugees fleeing persecution, and particularly refugees of colour, are not benefiting from the colonial system... the way it’s presented makes pākehā walking through go, ‘oh we’re just getting more and more diverse. oh, this is great! we started this whole migration of different peoples to new zealand.’ the student teachers also observed a lack of recognition of difficult histories on level 4. sitting on one side of the signs of a nation is an exhibition about settler/tauiwi (nonmāori) migration, and on the other side is an exhibition about a north island east coast iwi. the layout and exhibition content does not convey the ‘recognition of any kind of disagreement’ between māori and pākehā in history. how do māori and pakeha come together? how does that relationship actually work in practice? [the exhibitions] were very separate. there’s no coming together and i suppose because then that way, they would have to focus on things like the new zealand wars. and so it’s easier to tell these separate histories and have the treaty as the joining sector than focusing on the reality of it. yeah, that’s a bit of a deviation. moreover, moving through the exhibitions and focussing intently on the interplay of objects, sounds, and layout contributed to a disjointed and ‘disorientating’ narrative of colonial history. one student teacher felt ‘baffled’ when moving from the front to the back parts of signs of a nation by a significant narrative jump between events in new zealand history. i think it’s awesome that rātana is featured, because it’s something that i don’t know a lot about, and i don’t know if many people probably would. but it just, i found it really interesting why they chose rātana and chose to exclude everything else in that small section, then i became instantly disorientated. it’s kind of the end of rātana, but i had no idea where to go from there because there was this lack of flow. and the whole time i was walking through, i just heard what sounded like a british marching brass band. so i just come out of rātana, which i thought was meant to be a māori movement, but i’m left with this lingering sound of something that sounds very british, which i thought was really interesting. i went back to see where it was coming from. and i think it was like a rātana band. but the sensory experience was just a bit different from what i was reading.36 lars frers writes that ‘the concept of absence is often brought into play when borderline situations and experiences are analysed, when the uncanny growls in the dark corners of regulated and orderly places and social settings’.37 the narrative jump and juxtaposition of the treaty signing next to a religious and political movement that was critical of the crown and government made the student teacher feel out of place. this experience evoked an embodied response that was triggered by an understanding that these two disparate events and groups cannot easily sit beside each other. by channelling a haunting, the student teachers could bring their intellectual knowledge about new zealand history alongside the affective prompts assailing their bodies. this led them to question how settler memory of a benign and harmonious bicultural partnership is built into the construction of an exhibition, directing visitors to think and feel a certain way. macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022148 deconstructing difficult knowledge at he tohu he tohu is significantly smaller in size and scope than te papa’s level 4, yet it elicited a similar critique from the student teachers. as it opened more recently, in 2017, the student teachers thought that the exhibition would present updated perspectives and be ‘more impartial… as opposed to te papa which is kind of getting a bit naff ’. unlike te papa, he tohu does engage visitors with difficult knowledge about new zealand history. the centrepiece of the exhibition is a specially built document room shaped like a waka huia, a māori wooden treasure box, that preserves he whakaputanga declaration of independence (1835), several original versions of te tiriti o waitangi (1840) and the women’s suffrage petition (1893) documents within their own display cases.38 outside the room are written and visual forms of historical information that are pertinent to the three documents. some of this information acknowledges more challenging and contested narratives of new zealand history than what is on offer on level 4 at te papa. as for he tohu, the student teachers noticed gaps and silences in the way the exhibition constructed a narrative of colonial history. they noticed the information displayed outside the document box made it difficult for visitors to discern how the three documents connected. are there only three moments in time that make up new zealand history. what about the new zealand wars? the three documents were quoted in a lot of places and there was a picture timeline, and again it was sort of like who chose this [information]? and some of the documents and the photos were larger, and so that inherently makes one go ‘okay, well, these are the important ones.’ because most people don’t go into a museum and read every single plaque completely. outside view of the he tohu exhibition. (photograph by mark beatty, national library of new zealand) macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022149 inside the he tohu document room. (photograph by mark beatty, national library of new zealand) i thought the colours were really interesting, because they had a different colour for each document and its sort of like here’s the section and one chunk and this is one moment. we have he whakaputanga, and then te tiriti – what happened in the middle bit? the exhibition doesn’t encourage you looking in between the chunks and how it’s all connected. inside the document room, the student teachers noticed that the size, shape and juxtaposition of the three documents ensured that that treaty signing was at the forefront of visitors’ minds, placing more importance on the intent of an equitable partnership, as opposed to racial discord. there were three cases for te tiriti, and one for the [women’s suffrage] petition and one for he whakaputanga. even though the size of the petition and he whakaputanga may physically be bigger, the exhibition is saying here’s half this room taken up by te tiriti. three cases really put it up on a pedestal, compared to he whakaputanga which is just as important. there’s a sense of prioritizing the treaty in new zealand history. although he tohu presented a more contested view of new zealand history than signs of a nation, the students teachers relayed similar insights about how the design of the exhibition spoke to a harmonious view of indigenoussettler race relations in present times. there was like a strip of leaves as you walk in, and i remember thinking i don’t quite know how leaves relate to these three documents, alongside the natural wood and the curves and the natural fabric that was used. it made me think that māori are more in touch with the natural environment, and they’re just inherently more spiritual and that’s again sort of pushing them into the past or pushing them into a box. a literal box. the curved seats [in the wall] encourage people to sit and engage spiritually and bask in the glory of these documents... actually it’s the other more contextual information that you maybe want people to sit with [outside the room] the student teachers’ critique of how the document room cultivates a level of embodied racial comfort, raises questions about to what extent the environment contributes to the ability to ask critical and probing questions about national history. in he tohu, the students appeared to be considering how there are layers macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022150 of embodied messages that direct visitors towards a historically resolved view of new zealand’s difficult histories. the student teachers saw a relationship between he whakaputanga and te tiriti o waitangi as ‘documents that laid out an intention for the direction of the country’ but their connection to the women’s suffrage petition was less clear. the suffrage is quite different though because it’s typically a white feminist movement. the exhibition does mention māori woman and it went a little bit into the māori parliament, with meri mangakāhia, but the māori women’s suffrage movement was kind of separate i believe to the mainstream. i don’t know if i’ve got the facts right on that, but the exhibition didn’t really go how those racial dynamics play out in women’s activism and the suffrage movement wasn’t really there. they’ve got photos of māori woman who were taking out the petition as sort of an effort to include them, but it wasn’t much. the image of kate shephard on the money and how capitalism is intertwined with colonisation is interesting. i think the commercialisation of knowledge would be something interesting to talk about, but no one ever really does in a museum. most people know she’s on the $10 bill, so you wouldn’t really think they need to put that on the wall. the main reason i can think of to put it there is to say here’s how you know she’s really important because she’s on our money. money is a symbol of capitalism, which is one of the big things that pushes down and manipulates indigenous knowledge and indigenous peoples. the note shows we value a white woman who did some great stuff but wasn’t the only suffrage leader or woman of note in new zealand history. by channelling a haunting, the studentteachers could move past the physical, ontological and affective buffers, which cultivate a sense of comfort about contemporary race relations, to think critically about how colonialism intersects with the histories of other ethnic and social groups. placing understandings about settler colonialism and difficult histories at the forefront of thinking about māori and pākehā relations today encouraged the students to think about how objects on display can serve a celebratory cause and be implicated in mechanisms of colonial control. moreover, the ability to channel a haunting led studentteachers to critically evaluate the behaviours of other museum visitors and consider how they align to the function of the settler colonial crypt. a group of young adolescents moved through he tohu during the visit and their lack of interest in the exhibition highlighted the importance of going to national institutions with historical context and understanding under your belt. i remember listening to the pākehā teacher taking a group of school kids around, and they were just so uninterested. they wanted to be on their phones. the teacher wasn’t even doing anything to make them interested  – no extra information, nothing like that. it was like they didn’t know anything either which is a huge problem. although he tohu was not associated with lovely knowledge as obviously as signs of a nation, kim, aj and emma discovered that the embodied messages they received were in line with a comfortable and soothing view of colonial history that aligns with a need for settlers to reimagine that colonisation did not cause detrimental harm to indigenous people. rose writes that ‘learning from difficult knowledge asks something intimate of the learner, and it requires the learner to recognize his or her attachments that organize his or her selfidentity’.39 the organisation of information, objects, lighting and layout inside and outside the he tohu document room distances pākehā visitors from the shame, discomfort and anger associated with realising how historical and contemporary forms of colonial violence continue to impact māori today. macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022151 ghosts that demand their due haunting raises spectres, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. these spectres or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or prepressed or blocked from view... [a ghost] has a real presence and demands its due, your attention.40 in the passage above, gordon explains that hauntings and the unresolved trouble that ghosts represent are compelling and demand some form of action. the process of channelling a haunting at te papa and in he tohu challenged the student teachers’ thinking and evoked strong emotional responses: [the field trips] made me angry. i’ve come to realize over this year that a lot of what people perceive and want to believe about history has to do with where they’ve grown up and the communities where they’ve grown up… i can’t go to any site anymore and not think about what perspective it’s showing. te papa is very disconnected from the reality of new zealand’s history and that made me quite upset. i felt disappointed that this is what they’re relaying, and i probably wouldn’t go back. the student teachers spoke candidly about the longlasting effects of channelling a haunting, which included teaching school students how to critique settler memory and forgetting in mundane environments. aj took one of her classes to the petone settlers museum. she got her students to do field notes and noticed that they responded the same way she did during her museum visits. kim recounted how she spontaneously stopped her year 13 new zealand history class and got them to sit in silence, look around their private boys’ college classroom and consider the cultural bias in that space. finally, emma and kim reflected on the scaffolding process required to teach channelling a haunting to primary and secondary school students. scaffolding supports students as they learn and develop a new concept or tool, such as teacher modelling or breaking up the learning into chunks.41 emma thought you could start by teaching students to just notice things, like the natural fibre in the wood in he tohu and encourage them to ask, why is that there? kim thought students could start by looking at a visual text, then introduce aural elements through video, followed by a field trip to public places like civic square and cuba street in wellington which she described as ‘completely immersive’. the sevenweek unit was immensely rewarding for liana, who was excited by the student teachers’ shifts in thinking about how to engage their own students with history. channelling a haunting had shown aj, emma and kim that the past can be made meaningful in the present if they reframe what counts as historical understanding and difficult knowledge. one idea i later realized is that national institutions are like sources. because they’re places where historians have got all of their primary and secondary sources together and have compiled them – so i guess it’s like a history textbook in a way. and it’s interesting to see why they’ve done the things they’ve done and why they’ve laid it out the way they have. i think as history teachers, we need to be a little bit more aware of the fact that they are sources, and we can teach our students to look at the limitations, the reliability, and whether can we trust these sources. but, when it comes to sites of historical and national significance, i feel like we’re very much just accepting that they are the way they are, and that’s the nation’s history and we don’t come with this lens of scrutiny. but they are living exhibitions rather than information in a textbook. we just need to change the way we look at them and be more critical in doing that. macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022152 conclusion in this article, we have argued that secondary school students can be taught how to channel a haunting to deconstruct ways that settler memory and forgetting is integral to the presentation of new zealand history in national institutions. we have conveyed our own experiences to show how the teaching process supported students to deconstruct the way that museum exhibitions engage with lovely and difficult knowledge about national history. although he tohu engaged intellectually with new zealand’s difficult histories, a harmonious and historically resolved view of indigenoussettler relations was communicated through bodily senses, thus preserving the truth claims of historical amnesia where it is imagined that colonial violence was not really that bad and has not had a significantly negative effect on any group in society today. in settler societies, difficult knowledge can be attributed to cognitive understanding of historical colonial violence and environmental and ongoing mechanisms of colonial control. the settler colonial crypt is a structure that coddles settler groups, providing a false sense of reality that can impede the need to make widesweeping social changes that aim to deliver equitable outcomes for indigenous people. channelling a haunting provides students with tools to engage intellectual, emotional and embodied messages about national identity and consider how settler memory and forgetting is mediated at national institutions. the process engages key ideas outlined in the new curriculum, including colonisation, settlement and power, in meaningful and transformative ways. as one student teacher said, ‘once you know, you cannot unknow’. while this paper focusses on exhibitions, we believe there is potential to channel a haunting at other types of national institutions, in order to support students to further deconstruct how everyday landscapes and memoryscapes are shaped according to settler design.42 acknowledgements this work was informed by research carried out as part of a marsden grant awarded by the royal society of new zealand. endnotes 1 ministry of education, 2022, aotearoa new zealand’s histories (online). available: https://aotearoahistories.education. govt.nz/contentoverview (accessed 22 may 2022). 2 the treaty of waitangi (the english version) and te tiriti o waitangi (te reo māori versions) were signed in 1840 by many māori leaders and representatives of the queen of england to recognise collective māori ownership of lands, forests, and other properties, and gave māori the rights of british subjects. but whether māori ceded sovereignty of new zealand to the crown or sought to retain their chiefly status is one of many issues exacerbated by different versions of the treaty | te tiriti. 3 ministry of health, 2020, wai 2575 māori health trends report (online). available: https://www.health.govt.nz/ publication/wai2575māorihealthtrendsreport; ministry of social development, 2021, the social report 2016 – te pūrongo oranga tangata (online). available: http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/health/suicide.html; department of corrections, 2021, prison facts and statistics – march 2021 (online). available: https://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/ statistics/quarterly_prison_statistics/prison_stats_march_2021; ministry of education, 2020, school leavers with ncea level 2 or above. education counts (online). available: https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/indicators/main/ educationandlearningoutcomes/school_leavers_with_ncea_level_2_or_above 4 vincent o’malley, the new zealand wars | ngā pakanga o aotearoa, bridget williams books, wellington, 2019. 5 the new zealand wars took place between 1843 and 1872. these brutal conflicts between invading british forces and settler allies, and members of small māori communities defending their lands and ways of life, were not just about land and involved broader questions of sovereignty and authority. 6 mark sheehan and graeme ball, ‘teaching and learning new zealand’s difficult histories’, in new zealand journal of history, vol 54, no 1, pp5168; michael harcourt, teaching and learning new zealand’s difficult history of colonisation in secondary school contexts, phd thesis, victoria university of wellington, 2020. 7 harcourt, op cit. 8 avery gordon, ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. university of minnesota press, minneapolis, 2008. macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022153 https://aotearoahistories.education.govt.nz/content-overview https://aotearoahistories.education.govt.nz/content-overview https://www.health.govt.nz/publication/wai-2575-māori-health-trends-report https://www.health.govt.nz/publication/wai-2575-māori-health-trends-report http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/health/suicide.html https://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/statistics/quarterly_prison_statistics/prison_stats_march_2021 https://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/statistics/quarterly_prison_statistics/prison_stats_march_2021 https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/indicators/main/education-and-learning-outcomes/school_leavers_with_ncea_level_2_or_above https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/indicators/main/education-and-learning-outcomes/school_leavers_with_ncea_level_2_or_above 9 mario carretero, mikel asensio and maria rodriguezmonero, history education and the construction of national identities, information age publishing inc., charlotte, 2012. 10 gordon, op cit. 11 deborah britzman, lost subjects, contested objects: toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning, state university of new york press, albany, 1998. 12 joanna kidman, ‘pedagogies of forgetting: colonial encounters and nationhood at new zealand’s national museum’, in terry epstein and carla peck (eds), teaching and learning difficult histories in international contexts: a critical sociocultural approach, routledge, abingdon, 2018, pp95108. 13 britzman, op cit, pp119120. 14 michalinos zembylas, ‘theorizing “difficult knowledge” in the aftermath of the “affective turn”: implications for curriculum and pedagogy in handling traumatic representations’, in curriculum inquiry, vol 22, no 3, 2014, pp390412. 15 kidman, op cit, p105. 16 dianne mulcahy, ‘pedagogic affect and its politics: learning to affect and be affected in education’, in discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, vol 40, no 1, 2019, pp93108. 17 uncle charles moran, uncle greg harrington and norm sheehan, ‘on country learning’, in design and culture, vol 10, no 1, 2018, pp7179; neil harrison, fraces bodkin, gawaian bodkinandrews and elizabeth mackinlay, ‘sensational pedagogies: learning to be affected by country’, in curriculum inquiry, vol 47, no 5, 2017, pp504519. 18 alisa smith, ‘a māori sense of place? – taranaki waiata tangi and feelings for place’, in new zealand geographer, vol 60, no 1, 2004, pp1217. 19 carl mika, ‘the thing’s revelation: some thoughts on māori philosophical research’, in waikato journal of education, vol 20, no 2, 2015, pp6168. 20 hana burgess and te kahuratai painting, ‘onamata, anamata: a whakapapa perspective of māori futurisms’, in annamaria murola and shannon walsh (eds), whose futures? economic and social research aotearoa, auckland, 2020, pp205233. 21 avril bell, ‘dilemmas of settler belonging: roots, routes and redemption in new zealand national identity claims’, in the sociological review, vol 57, no 1, 2009, pp145162. 22 michael king, being pākehā now: reflections and recollections of a white native, penguin, auckland,1999; james belich, making peoples, a history of the new zealanders: from polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century, penguin, auckland, 2001. 23 eve tuck and wayne yang, ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’ in decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, vol 1, no 1, pp140. 24 joanna kidman and vincent o’malley, ‘questioning the canon: colonial history, countermemory and youth activism’, in memory studies, vol 13, no 4, pp537550. 25 julia rose, interpreting difficult history at museums and historic sites, rowman & littlefield, lanham, 2016, p32. 26 liana macdonald and joanna kidman, ‘uncanny pedagogies: teaching difficult histories at sites of colonial violence’, in critical studies in education, vol 63, no 1, 2022, pp3146. 27 macdonald and kidman, op cit, p5. 28 avery gordon, ‘some thoughts on haunting and futurity’, in borderlands ejournal: new spaces in the humanities, vol 10, no 2, 2011, pp121. 29 gordon, op cit, p63. 30 o’malley, op cit; vincent o’malley, the great war for new zealand: waikato 18002000, bridget williams books, wellington, 2016. 31 joanna kidman, adreanne ormond and liana macdonald, ‘everyday hope: indigenous aims of education in settler colonial societies’, in john petrovic and roxanne mitchell (eds), indigenous philosophies of education around the world, routledge, abingdon, 2018, pp228245; tuck and yang, op cit; o’malley, op cit; liana macdonald, ‘whose story counts? staking a claim for diverse bicultural narratives in new zealand secondary schools’, in race, ethnicity and education, vol 25, no 1, 2022, pp5572; liana macdonald and adreanne ormond, ‘racism and silencing in the media in aotearoa new zealand’, in alternative, vol 17, no 2, 2021, pp156164; bell, op cit; claire gray, nabila jaber and jim anglem, ‘pakeha identity and whiteness: what does it mean to be white?’, in sites, vol 10, no 2, pp82106; ngata, t. 2020, what’s required from tangata tiriti (online). available: https://tinangata.com/2020/12/20/whatsrequiredfromtangatatiriti/ (accessed 22 may 2022). 32 gloria ladsonbillings, ‘just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?’, in international journal of qualitative studies in education, vol 11, no 1, 1998, pp724; liana macdonald, silencing and institutional racism in settlercolonial education, phd thesis, victoria university of wellington, 2018. 33 kidman, op cit, p102. macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022154 https://tinangata.com/2020/12/20/whats-required-from-tangata-tiriti/ 34 liana macdonald, ‘notes from the field: visiting boulcott’s farm and battle hill’, in joanna kidman, vincent o’malley, liana macdonald, tom roa and keziah wallis (eds), fragments from a contested past: remembrance, denial and new zealand history, bridget williams books, wellington, 2022, pp4665. 35 te papa is new zealand’s national museum; he tohu is an exhibition of three iconic constitutional documents that shape aotearoa new zealand: he whakaputanga, te tiriti o waitangi and the women’s suffrage petition; pukeahu national war memorial park is a national place to reflect on new zealand’s involvement in war, military conflict and peacekeeping. 36 the rātana movement brought together many dispossessed māori tribes through religion and politics. the leader, tahupōtiki wiremu rātana, challenged the government about land confiscations and the british crown to honour the treaty of waitangi. 37 lars frers, ‘the matter of absence’, in cultural geographies, vol 20, no 4, p435. 38 he whakaputanga o te rangatiratanga o nu tirene: the declaration of independence of the united tribes of new zealand was signed by 35 predominantly northern chiefs in 1835. some māori movements look to the document as a basis for māori claims to selfdetermination. in 1893, the women’s suffrage petition played an important role in persuading the government to grant new zealand woman the right to vote. new zealand was the first country in the world to do so. 39 rose, op cit, p33. 40 gordon, op cit, pxvi. 41 lev vygotsky, mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes, harvard university press, cambridge, 1978. 42 toby butler, ‘“memoryscape”: integrating oral history, memory and landscape on the river thames’, people and their pasts’, in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), people and their pasts, palgrave macmillan, london, pp223–239. macdonald, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022155 the state we are in: uk public history since 2011 public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) the state we are in: uk public history since 2011 alison atkinson-­phillips*, graham smith newcastle university corresponding author: alison atkinson-phillips, alison.atkinson-phillips@newcastle.ac.uk doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8375 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords public history; funding; united kingdom; heritage introduction the last decade and a bit have been years of political turbulence for the united kingdom (uk) and its four constituent nations: england, northern ireland, scotland and wales. it has also been a rich time for public historians to work in which, however, despite increasingly obvious state interventions into representations of the past, the role of the state has remained relatively unexamined.1 this is particularly surprising given that much of the funding for public history work in the uk comes directly and indirectly from the state, the institutions of government, under political direction. since the late 1990s, governmental arrangements in the uk have become ever more complex. while the four nations have had different arrangements in the past – most notably scotland retained its own legal and education systems – devolution of uk state powers to the scottish parliament, welsh senedd and the northern ireland assembly have meant that the multi-­nations state has increasingly created multi-­states. the system that operates is a mix of devolved matters where decision making is delegated to the legislative bodies in scotland, wales and northern ireland and reserved matters that are decided upon by the uk parliament, even though they have effect in scotland, wales and northern ireland. the historical roots of the reserved powers model can be found in the growth of the british empire. just as they once differed across the empire, they now differ between the three countries with devolved responsibilities determined by the uk government in england.2 such arrangements are complex, inevitably produce tensions, and as we argue have allowed for a degree of direction by uk politicians and the uk or central state. for example, the devolution settlements include heritage, however, the uk politicians and their civil servants continue to exercise power over heritage and cultural decisions that can be justified as uk wide. the role of the central uk state became obviously visible when, in february 2021, the uk government’s then culture secretary, oliver dowden, sought to intervene in historical debate by ‘summoning’ twenty-­five of the uk’s heritage bodies to a summit on contested history in which, the times reported, they would be ‘reminded that public funds must not be used for political purposes’. dowden also told the press that he was concerned to ‘defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do britain down’. dowden like other conservative politicians in england, were partly responding to initiatives taken by the national trust. the trust, the largest heritage and membership organisation in england and wales, had commissioned research to better understand the historic links between the heritage sites it managed and britain’s slave trade.3 in response to the ‘summons’, the uk museums association, an independent advocacy body, released a statement expressing concerns that the government’s actions breached the ‘arm’s-­length’ principle of government funding.4 in this article, we explain why understanding the role of the central state in public history in the uk has become increasingly important over the last twelve years. in doing so, we begin with a brief overview of the political and public history contexts in the uk, including the enormous appetite for past-­talk that has facilitated the rise of non-­university based public historians who are working across a range of sectors, as well as the very recent rise of taught public history at postgraduate levels within the universities. we consider the cultural history wars that have raged in the uk over the last decade and look set to continue for some time to come. we also look at the possible links between this context and the promotion of wider heritage activities through state directed funding. the conservative party has been the ruling party in government in the uk since 2010 but rely almost solely on english votes. they have failed to secure a majority in scotland since the 1950s. wales has a long tradition of labour voting and the conservative party has never contested seats in northern ireland.5 while the conservatives came to power by forming a coalition with the centrist liberal democrat party in 2010, there was an early movement by the new government towards the political right, evidenced, for example, by the adoption of the ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy. this was against a background of the emergence of a new political consensus on the right of politics, unified around demands for greater national sovereignty and independence from the european union (eu). the 2016 eu membership referendum which came to be known as ‘brexit’ has widely been seen as an attempt by the then-­prime minister david cameron to placate the demands of the eurosceptic wing of his party. in line with the voting patterns outlined above, only england and wales voted decisively to leave the eu. while there has historically been a leftist argument against the eu, which sees it as undemocratic and capitalist, the brexit outcome was widely received as a victory for those on the right. the second half of the decade has seen the conservative party move further rightward with centrist members of the uk parliament resigning or removed. the political shift has not only included anti-­immigration policy, but also a revival of celebratory nationalism, with a series of political assaults on institutions perceived as oppositional, including heritage organisations, universities and the legal system. this in part has become known as britain’s culture wars. britain’s public history landscape the uk prides itself on a strong tradition of history from below, dating back to at least the 1960s with the emergence of the history workshop movement. while the term ‘public history’ began to be used in britain and northern ireland later than in some other places – notably the us – activities and approaches that we now recognise as public history have long been a part of the cultural landscape. not all uk public history is ‘history from below’. indeed, public appetite for history consumption can be seen across all parts of population and in all nations. nonetheless, there is a hunger for the stories of ‘ordinary’ people. for example, the wildly popular who do you think you are? television programme – a successful cultural export with ten international versions – mixes this appetite with celebrity culture. in each episode, a celebrity traces their ancestry, with the famous chosen to contribute to an overall aim of celebrating british diversity – of course, ‘shocking’ discoveries about the safely distant past also make for good television.6 the long-­running programme both indulges and encourages a widespread passion for family history research. another big television success, which made the transition to film in 2019, is the long-­running drama downton abbey. the series follows the inhabitants of a grand country house from the sinking of the titanic in 1912 to the turbulence of the 1920s. this fictionalise history spawned what has been described as the ‘downton abbey effect’7 – a significant and sustained rise in visitor numbers to stately homes in the last decade. however, work still needs to be done to fully understand what is driving this interest. named after the house in which the drama is set, it follows the aristocratic crawley family, but also the lives of the many servants who form their household. in a 2012 interview, the creator of downton abbey, julian fellows, suggested that his work has had a significant influence on the curators of historic houses, so that servants’ living quarters and experiences are now an important part of the story being told.8 stately homes are only one part of the uk’s very large museums and heritage sector, involving everything from small re-­enactment societies to historic sites, such as royal palaces, and the aforementioned national trust. in the last ten years those catering for the mass history audience for history are increasingly self-­identifying as public historians. the rise of these media public historians in the uk also points to the heterogeneity of this public history appetite. a look at three of britain’s ‘history influencers’ demonstrates this. david olusoga is a black british historian who also has training in journalism and began his career in television research and production, before presenting the world’s war in 2014. he has used his celebrity status to draw attention to black british history through television documentaries and books. in 2019 he was appointed professor of public history at the university of manchester. like olusoga, greg jenner started out in television working as a historical advisor on the popular children’s history-­comedy programme horrible histories. jenner has since developed a strong profile of his own including as a historian of celebrity. his bbc podcast you’re dead to me takes a comedic approach and applies it to history with adults. during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, jenner produced a new podcast, homeschool history directly aimed at home schooling children and their parents. our final example of public history ‘influencers’ who cross over into the academic sphere is suzanne alice lipscomb, a historian of the early modern era who started as a research curator at one of the royal palaces historic sites and then moved into academia. however, as an academic she continued to be widely sought after as a history authority in television, again mostly for the bbc, and continues to play a role in heritage interpretation. in 2019 she won the national trust awards for the ‘we are bess’ exhibition. more recently she has been developing a popular podcast. each of these three examples, along with others, have developed careers in public history that cross-­over into university teaching. jenner guest lectures with at least two public history taught programmes and takes students on placement to work on his productions. most significantly, they have all built significant media profiles while championing a public history that moves beyond grand narratives. alongside this new generation of popular historians, there has been a recent dramatic growth in the number of postgraduate taught programmes in public history in england, wales and northern ireland along with an increase in full-­time public history academics. there are currently taught courses in nine universities, more than double the four operating in 2015, as well as a growing number of undergraduate public history options. the postgraduate courses each have different approaches, specialities and balances between core and optional modules. queen’s belfast, for example, has focused on conflict and conflict resolution within its own historical context of northern ireland and the legacy of thirty years of ethno-­nationalist conflict. manchester metropolitan university has a strong heritage component with emphases on regional archives and museums such as manchester’s people’s history museum, self-­styled as ‘the national museum of democracy’. there is an evident overlap between taught heritage courses and public history across many of the programmes, although some british public historians are keen to disentangle the two. at newcastle university, the new public history ma programme, presented for the first time in 2021-­22, was only established after making a clear delineation between public history and longer established postgraduate programmes in heritage and museum studies at the university. the newcastle programme is imbued with a sense of public history as an international project while encouraging an engagement with history that matters to the public. at royal holloway, newcastle and queens programmes there is a substantial oral history presence underpinning the importance of understanding public receptions of history. all this increased activity has taken place against the backdrop of a greater emphasis having been placed on demonstrating ‘impact’ within the research excellence framework (ref), the current mechanism by which uk academics and their universities are assessed, ranked, and partially funded.9 as mark donnelly notes: it was no accident that public history was brought into the disciplinary mainstream around the same time that political pressure was intensifying for historians to justify their work – and hence their funding – in relation to the agendas of public engagement and vocational skills.10 the increase in taught ma programmes also corresponds with the 2012 increase in tuition fees in england and wales for both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, which is part of the move to justify higher education in terms of graduates’ employment outcomes. the fact that scotland has its own education system, and a different student fee regime, may be one reason that it is the only one of the four nations still to introduce a full public history programme. it would, however, be erroneous to conclude that performance metrics have been the only factor shaping the type of public history offered or practiced by uk universities. one of the longest running courses is at ruskin college, oxford, and the programme continues to maintain a political orientation first developed by the pioneering socialist historian raphael samuel and run by hilda kean for over a decade from 1996. the other veteran programme is at royal holloway, which has a strong oral history component and an orientation towards public reception of the past. it was founded by justin champion, amanda vickery, anna whitelock and graham smith, with significant media connections and a declared commitment to a civic responsibility that was frequently expressed by champion. in 2010, for example, champion publicly responded to niall ferguson’s criticism of history teaching in schools noting that, ‘having established that money rules the world, he [ferguson] now pronounces on the everyday experiences of schoolchildren and the competence of dedicated schoolteachers: “all junk” – too much martin luther king and not enough martin luther.’11 more broadly, and whatever political interpretation is made, it is our view that universities within the nations that make up the uk are more broadly developing their own approaches to public history. within and between the four nations there are therefore differing flavours of uk public history. wales, and in particular colleagues at bangor university, have led the way in terms of developing four nations’ history. in scotland, the university of glasgow has led on decolonisation, not only delivering taught modules and school-­based initiatives exploring scotland’s role in slavery but also providing £20 million worth of reparations through funding a joint centre for development research, which will also include history, with the university of the west indies. northern ireland, and particularly queens belfast, as noted above, has been specialising in conflict and resolution in both political conflict and in social justice issues. in england, royal holloway, since 2015, has celebrated the geographic connection to the magna carta with initiatives around social justice. in 2017, newcastle university commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of martin luther king’s visit when he was awarded an honorary degree by the university – the only uk university to do so. the commitment of public historians at newcastle and royal holloway is reflected in the historians for history blog that both have an interest in.12 state sponsorship through the heritage lottery fund britain and northern ireland’s most significant history sponsor is the national lottery heritage fund (nlhf, previously the heritage lottery fund), one of twelve distributors of the monies raised through the national lottery – a state sanctioned form of gambling. founded in 1984, the nlhf has since shaped a great deal of the public’s engagement with the past. it has also been used to underpin government ideology especially in relation to ‘our islands history’. this is the idea of the uk having a single history, which in the late 2000s attracted the attention of former prime minister david cameron. the inspiration was a children’s history book originally published in 1905 and republished in 2005,13 a book cameron said he had enjoyed as a child. the idea that history in the uk ought to celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in global history began to be propagated through heritage fund investment, as well as through the efforts of then-­education minister michael gove to introduce a national, that is only in england, history curriculum that would ‘celebrate the distinguished role of these islands in the history of the world.’14 from 2011 huge amounts of money were spent on projects that fitted this idea. indeed, the more the uk seemed to be fracturing, the more emphasis was placed on our islands’ story. and it was an initiative that through central heritage funding could reach into all four nations that make up the uk even if its original foothold had been posited for school teaching in england. in 2011, spending from the heritage fund was £249 million. this included £35 million granted by the fund to the national library of scotland for collecting letters and other materials relating to charles darwin, samuel smiles and david livingston into a new archive named after john murray. john murray was an edinburgh publisher who had published the work of those leading victorian thinkers. part of the 2011 budget, amounting to £43 million, was used to pay for the 2012 olympics opening ceremony, a historical extravaganza described as a love letter to britain. in celebration of the workers of britain, director danny boyle managed to sidestep issues of class and inequality, as well as other contentious parts of britain’s past, including slavery. a decade on one journalist was moved to ask if the ceremony had been ‘the last gasp of liberal britain’.15 however, state sponsored versions of the past were not easily imposed, and the result has been uneven. a year after the olympics had been held in london, michael gove was running into opposition from teachers and the general public and his attempts to introduce education reforms centred around the teaching of history were floundering. as a result of push-­back by educators and historians, the resulting legislation was much less proscriptive, with the perhaps unintended consequence that there is now little if any compulsory school teaching about empire, colonialism or black history in the english curriculum. as if to compensate, and in that same year, the government announced details of a four-­year plan of events commemorating britain’s involvement in the first world war. not all were celebrations of either british patriotism or victory. but most were imbued with a sense of national pride and a recognition of individual sacrifice in defence of imagined historic british ‘values’. between 2014 and 2018, vast amounts of state-­controlled funding were used on commemoration. this included £35 million pounds for refurbishing the imperial war museum’s first world war galleries; a battlefield tours programme for school students; and a youth engagement scheme with a £15 million budget. many of these programmes – particularly those directed at young people – included an expectation of outputs to communicate ‘heritage’ to an external audience. a £10 million cultural programme, 14-­18 now, was directed by jenny waldman, creative producer of the london 2012 olympic ceremony, with an additional 107 projects commissioned in more than 220 locations across the uk, along with a range of un-­funded, voluntary led local events. at the same time, there were less visible but nonetheless important commemorations marking the second world war. the british state also sponsored the magna carta 800 celebrations in this short period, presented as an expression of english liberty16 that was often conflated as british at the time. this conflation did not play out well in scotland.17 the culture wars as noted above, this investment in telling the history of an imagined british identity took place against a background of political upheaval and an existential threat to the uk, notably the scottish independence campaign and vote of 2013-­14 and the brexit campaign and ballot of 2016. these crises have not ended. indeed, the uk’s leaving of the european union on 31 january 2020 has precipitated new conversations and debates about how united the united kingdom really is, despite divisions being partially obscured by the covid-­19 calamity. after-­shocks from brexit have included the accelerating support for an independent scotland, the possibility of a united ireland, a new economic direction taken in wales and turmoil in england’s ruling party expressed in part with a run of leadership contests. in addition, debates about the meaning of empire are intensifying, partly driven by the conservative party’s post-­brexit orientation towards commonwealth nations.18 alongside this has been a counter-­narrative of decolonisation, including in heritage organisations and universities, which was highlighted by the re-­energising of the black lives matter campaign in 2020. having invested so much in a particular view of the past – an islands’ story that celebrated an invented uniqueness and unity of the uk as a global power – the reactions to public history by conservative politicians and partisan media outlets have been largely hostile. this has included criticism of heritage organisations and universities as ‘woke’ – a term co-­opted from african-­american vernacular and used to dismiss those who seek to become more aware of structural oppressions and the legacies of past injustice. indeed, the uk seems to be embroiled in a new battle over who owns the right to interpret the past. this has included open criticism of historical analyses that detract from celebrations of perceived past greatness. one conservative mp, for example has claimed: ‘defending our history and heritage is our era’s battle of britain.’19while the government’s education secretary urged schools to concentrate on ‘celebrating our great nation’s history and the important role that we have played in the world and shaping the world for the better’.20 in contrast, the political opposition has responded by demanding that black history be part of the school curriculums in the nations that make up the uk.21 this debate recently led to popular media criticism of historians and heritage organisations, many of whom argued that they were simply seeking to offer a more balanced view of that history.22 however, it is difficult to tell how serious the government is in making these criticisms. as some conservative critics have argued, state funding for heritage continues, including the parts that they do not like.23 public historians and public-­facing historians have made a broad spectrum of responses, ranging from concern that academic freedom is at risk through to a belief that the conservative government is simply playing to its right-­wing supporters, and attempting to use a cultural history war to detract from larger issues facing the uk. the latter reading usually sees such political expediency as sound and fury rather than as a serious threat. while agreeing that much government rage is confected and performative, directing attention away from economic and constitutional predicaments, we would also argue that such an approach seriously underestimates the pernicious way that the past is being used to promote anti-­history and to encourage social and political division, especially through tacit excusing of racism and misogyny. one marker of this is the ‘new normal’ in which heritage organisations and academics find themselves on the receiving end of hate-­posting across social media. another is the attempt to intervene in history teaching in higher education. the authors of the government policy paper higher education: free speech and academic freedom, published in february boldly asserts that, a head of faculty should not force or pressure academics to teach from a [sic] their own ideological viewpoint, or to only use set texts that comply with their own viewpoint. this applies equally to contested political ideologies that are not associated with a particular political party or view, such as ‘decolonising the curriculum’.24 whether public opinion is shifting towards a more sanitised version of the past has yet to be seen, but we suspect that this is polarising opinion rather than changing it. evidence for this can be seen in the responses to the report of the commission on race and ethnic disparities released in march 2021. the government report was commissioned as a reaction to the black lives matter protests of the previous summer including the toppling of the statue of the slave owner edward colson in bristol, england. the report, with its claim that the uk is not institutionally racist has simply entrenched existing positions. it also argues that imperialism, including slavery and military conquest, extended the benefits of britishness to people of colour. it restates opposition to decolonising the curriculum and calls for a more positive interpretation of the british empire. the report has been widely derided, including by health professionals, educationalists, sociologists, historians and public historians.25 at least equally concerning are the ways that state funding can be used to take potentially radical work and make it safe. this kind of influence is usually hidden, but there are hints. take the work of jeremy deller who is perhaps best known for his 2001 re-­enactment of the battle of orgreave, a civil conflict within the 1984-­85 miners’ strike. his most recent work, ‘we’re here because we’re here’, a collaboration with rufus norris, was funded as part of the 14-­18 now cultural programme as a commemoration of the battle of the somme. this is not to argue that all public history connected to war memory is necessarily reactionary. ‘we’re here’ certainly follows on from deller’s earlier work in its recognition of the role ordinary people play in history. nonetheless, as the title makes clear, the work works to smooth out the rough edges of war memory and to reinforce the idea that taking part in the war ‘effort’ was about fighting for some indefinable sense of britishness. conclusion the last two decades have seen an intensification of the uk state’s engagement with public representations of the past. the institutions of government have attempted to shape how the public see their past particularly through the selective sponsorship of national commemorative events. attempts to shape perceptions of the past – especially around a british identity – have also been made through education policy, if arguably less successfully. and when all else has failed, government ministers and their political outriders have cajoled and threatened those who refuse to follow the official line, including heritage organisation. in writing this piece we have indicated the importance of the uk’s changing relationship with the world, and primarily, europe, expressed most clearly through brexit, in celebrations of britishness in the past. however, we have also suggested that the last two decades have also witnessed a growing tension between the four nations that make up the uk. amongst public historians there is a growing awareness that we may be at a historical moment in what has become known as ‘four nations’ history’, and we have tried to reflect on that in this article, but in doing so we recognise that even this approach is now subject to the competing interests that exist within the landscapes of uk public history. in 1998 the pioneer of public history in the uk, raphael samuel, used the four nations approach to argue that the break-­up of britain would be potentially liberating.26 the old colonial power would be broken up with england no longer holding sway over the three other and smaller nations. more recently the historian and commentator david starkey has taken the four nations approach in a different direction and from a different political perspective. for starkey, recognising the distinctive difference within the four nations is a way of holding the uk state together. in doing so the uk past is seen as one that should be celebrated rather than appraised.27 this is therefore an especially interesting time for public historians in the uk. the time has passed for shoulder shrugging and expressions of disdain at political and public ignorance. what is required is empirical work that provides a better understanding of the ways history is being used to shape public perceptions of the past, and how that plays out in the present. there is a wealth of work ahead for us as academics within the uk public history community. another part of that work is to engage in dialogues like this special edition and beyond, that challenge us to turn a critical gaze on our own context. but public history also needs to move beyond the national frame. in part, this is the work that we are beginning at newcastle university, using international public history to encourage students to re-­consider their own context, and in the process building up the next generation of public historians who will push us in new directions. however, public historians continue to need to eat and pay bills, and while the state continues to be the biggest employer (both directly and indirectly), public history shaped by the uk state will need to be carefully navigated. to ignore the influence of state will not only be increasingly difficult as political polarisation continues and the debates become sharper but would also be a mark of poor public history scholarship. endnotes 1 a notable exception is the work of ludmilla jordanova. see for example, ludmilla jordanova, history in practice, bloomsbury academic, london, 2017. 2 for a history of reserved powers see david torrance, ‘reserved matters in the united kingdom’, in house of commons library, no cbp8544, june 2022. 3 matthew moore, ‘don’t airbrush british history, government tells heritage groups’, the times, 15 february 2021. see https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dont-airbrush-british-history-government-tells-heritage-groups-krpn5cztf. (accessed 29 july 2022). 4 there is an emerging literature critiquing the culture wars including hannah rose woods, rule, nostalgia: a backwards history of britain, random new york, house, 2022; peter mitchell, imperial nostalgia: how the british conquered themselves, manchester university press, 2021; ian sanjay patel, we’re here because you were there: immigration and the end of empire, new york, verso books, london, 2021. 5 in the uk, the prime minister is the partly leader that wins a majority of seats in a general election across all four nations, while wales, scotland and northern ireland also have separate governance structures, devolved responsibilities for a range of policy areas and different electoral systems that were created in the late 1990s through a series of acts of devolution. 6 anna green, ‘who do you think you are? the family in public history’, in paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally?: working with the past in the present, bloomsbury academic, london, 2019, pp 225–238. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350033306.ch-017 7 xuerui liu and stephen pratt, ‘the downton abbey effect in film-induced tourism: an empirical examination of tv drama-induced tourism motivation at heritage attractions’, tourism analysis, vol 24, 4 no 4, 2019, pp497-515. https://doi.org/10.3727/108354219x15652651367505 8 oliver cox, ’the “downton boom country houses”, popular culture, and curatorial culture’, the public historian, vol 37, no 2, 2015, pp112-119. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2015.37.2.112 9 for a more detailed account of public funding see graham smith, ‘oral history in higher education in britain, c1969-2021: historical perspectives, future challenges and opportunities’, in oral history, vol 50, no 1, 2022, pp104–14. 10 mark donnelly, ‘public history in britain: repossessing the past’, in paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally?: working with the past in the present, bloomsbury academic, london, 2019, p8. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350033306.ch-002 11 justin champion, ‘through the looking glass’, the independent, 16 june 2010. see https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/justin-champion-through-the-looking-glass-2002362.html (accessed 29 july 2022). 12 see historians for history, https://historiansforhistory.wordpress.com/ (accessed 29 july 2022). 13 this reprint was sponsored by civitas, a right wing think tank, and backed by the daily telegraph newspaper see https://www.civitas.org.uk/2007/07/20/our-island-story-triumphant/ (accessed 29 july 2022). 14 michael gove, hansard parliamentary debates, 15 november 2010, column 634, www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011 (accessed 29 july 2022). the other nations within the uk each have their own national curriculums. 15 steve rose, ‘“a jerusalem for everyone”: was the 2012 olympics the last gasp of liberal britain?’, the guardian, see https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/jul/16/danny-boyle-2012-london-olympic-opening-ceremony-feelgood-factor (accessed 29 july 2022). 16 graham smith and anna green, ‘the magna carta’, in james b. gardner and paula hamilton (eds), the oxford handbook of public history, oup, new york, 2017, pp387–402. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766024.013.21 17 h. macqueen, ‘magna carta, scotland and scots law’, law quarterly review, vol 134, no 1, part 3, 2018, pp94-116. 18 some of the funded first world war commemorations mentioned above included reclamation of commonwealth soldiers as british. 19 joe mellor, ‘“woke-washed” heritage groups “perverted by political posturing” of “militant blm,” says tory mp’, the london economic, 12 november 2020 see https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/woke-washed-heritage-groups-perverted-by-political-posturing-of-militant-blm-says-tory-mp-209431/ (accessed 29 july 2022). 20 faith ridler, ‘children should be taught “the good and bad about history”’, in the mail online, 22 november 2020, see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8974267/children-taught-good-bad-history-says-gavin-williamson.html (accessed 29 july 2022). 21 marsha de cordova,. ‘an open letter to gavin williamson on the black history that must be part of the national curriculum’, elle, 28 october 2020. see https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/a34449564/gavin-williamson-black-history-month-marsha-de-cordova/ (accessed 29 july 2022). 22 jamie doward, ‘i’ve been unfairly targeted, says academic at heart of national trust “woke” row’, the observer, 20 december 2020, see https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/20/ive-been-unfairly-targeted-says-academic-at-heart-of-national-trust-woke-row, (accessed 29 july 2022). 23 michael st george, ‘johnson’s phoney war on woke’, the conservative woman, 15 february 2021. see https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/johnsons-phoney-war-on-woke/ (accessed 29 july 2022). 24 gov.uk, ‘higher education: free speech and academic freedom’, 17 february 2021, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/higher-education-free-speech-and-academic-freedom (accessed 29 july 2022). 25 see for example alan lester, ‘comments on the report of the commission on race and ethnic disparities’, in snapshots of empire, 1 april 2021. https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/snapshotsofempire/2021/04/01/comments-on-the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/ (accessed 29 july 2022). and david olusoga, ‘the poisonously patronising sewell report is historically illiterate, the guardian, 2 april 2021, see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/02/sewell-race-report-historical-young-people-britain (accessed 29 july 2022). 26 raphael samuel, ‘british dimensions: “four nations history,”’ history workshop journal, vol 40, no 1, 1995, pp iii-xxii. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/40.1.1-s 27 david starkey, ‘uk’s four nations can be reinvented’, the critic, february 2020, see https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2020/the-uks-four-nations-can-be-reinvented-and-flourish/ (accessed 29 july 2022). the archival book as an experimental dialogue in public history public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) the archival book as an experimental dialogue in public history indira chowdhury centre for public history, srishti-manipal institute corresponding author: indira chowdhury, indira.chowdhury@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8378 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords archival book; india a book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. jorge luis borges, ‘notes on (toward) bernard shaw’ other inquisitions: essays 1937-1952 bringing the archives to the public historians, as terry cook, archivist and theorizer of the archives, reminds us, share a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with the archives that has remained unexplored so far.1 despite their shared intellectual and professional roots, historians consult the archives as resources for their work and barely reflect on the ‘history of the archives’. as cook puts it: ‘the archive(s) is a foreign country to many historians. of course, it is one that they visit as tourists passing through, focusing on their appealing views, but overlooking their surroundings, inhabitants about what they do, thus failing to understand the country’s real character and its animating soul.’2 public access to the archives has usually been through the works of the historian – where the archival material exists often as a fragment, already interpreted within the larger framework of a book. archival resources appear here as supporting evidence for a historical argument. the deepening interest in the creation of historical knowledge in postcolonial societies has seen the emergence of an interest in the archives that has been articulated mainly by historians.3 however, institutional archives in postcolonial countries like india are generally accessed by historians or by writers and hardly by the general public.4 india, like many postcolonial countries has inherited systems of archiving that focus on written documents that are official in nature. consequently, the practice of archiving has been functional and mechanical, transferring government records to the archives after thirty years. this routine, almost robotic way of archiving coupled with the difficulties of access have rendered archives invisible to the larger, general public in india. however, accessibility alone would not render visibility to the archives; history as a discipline of colonial origin, has also bequeathed an opacity to archival resources. the role of the historian, trained in interpreting the colonial archives has narrowed the scope of historiography in india too.5 the rich resources of orality, memory and visuality – both photography and older forms of the visual arts – have been traditionally assigned to different disciplines: literature, anthropology and art history. while in recent years indian historiography has witnessed a cultural turn that admits the analysis of literary texts, photographs and films as historical evidence, historical research remains confined to the analysis of archival documents and addresses academic audiences rather than the general public.6 therefore, apart from bureaucratic constraints, the idea that archives as specialist institutions that is unavailable for scrutiny by the general public is fairly well established in india. archives in india are not considered public spaces in postcolonial india. public history in india would therefore need to nurture informed professional and public opinion about archives addressing audiences beyond academia and at the same time undertake an exercise that is both intellectual and pedagogic in nature. public history in the postcolonial context, therefore, needs to ask what does the process of archiving tell us about our relationship to the past? in what ways had institutions that originated in the colonial period reinvent their identities post-1947? how do the colonial foundations of academic disciplines shape the way our archives and museums relate to the past through documents and artifacts they store? how might we re-understand the idea of collecting an archive and what are the critical ways in which we might interpret archival material for a general public? the ways in which archival documents could be displayed for the benefit of the general public has been a question that has perplexed archivists and public historians alike. while archivists in india, have often enabled scholars to create scholarly editions of unique and rare texts, their own engagement with archival resources are often focused on conservation, cataloguing and the technicalities of record keeping. by contrast, the task of the public historian who wishes to present archival material to the public who has not had any access to such records or is unused to ‘reading’ and ‘interpreting’ archival material, is a complicated one, it involves an interesting form of public pedagogy which this paper will attempt to describe. my earliest engagement with this predicament began when i took charge of setting up the archives of the tata institute of fundamental research (tifr) in bombay (now mumbai), india, in 2004. tifr was founded by homi bhabha, the architect of india’s atomic energy programme in 1945. the institute had planned to begin an archive in its fiftieth year (1995) but had not, even in 2002, managed to create a substantial archive of its historical documents. in 2004, i was invited to put together the archives of tifr. at that point, i had spent two years at the national centre for biological sciences, on a sabbatical from jadavpur university where i was professor in the english department.7 becoming an archivist was a humbling task. it meant operating from outside of the established academic hierarchy. but it also offered an opportunity to create new modalities of communicating a significant period of india’s contemporary history to a wider audience. the two years i spent on tifr campus (2004-2006) alerted me to the importance of dialogue and exchange with not only the scientific community but also the staff – administrators, peons, carpenters, glass-blowers, workshop staff, the cleaners, gardeners and cooks who contributed to institutional life. in order for this large community to grasp the significance of their institutional archives, it was crucial for them to view the many treasures and riches their archives housed. we began with exhibitions that explored different aspects of institutional life – the beginnings of molecular biology at what had until then been a physics institution, homi bhabha’s cambridge connection and the partnership between science and industry as exemplified in the relationship between the scientist, homi bhabha and the legendary industrialist, j.r.d. tata. as part of an attempt to reach out to the community, vrunda pathare (at that point the archival assistant and at present the head archivist at the godrej archives, mumbai) and i created the tifr archives bulletin board that presented an archival story with documents and photographs from the archives. the themes varied – from the early research on cosmic rays to correspondence between scientists, from tree transplantation to the institute’s legendary art collection – our hand-made archival bulletin boards displayed a story every month. the board was carried out of the archives and placed near the institute’s west canteen and soon became a place where students, scientists and scientific, administrative and support staff gathered to read and discuss the archival material presented. from the discussions we had with our audience across the institutional hierarchy, this simple display had a great impact on the community’s understanding of their institute’s past. in search of an archival book in 2008, as the institute prepared to celebrate the centenary of its founder, homi bhabha, the archives bulletin board inspired another public conversation. this time it took the form of what we later came to define as an archival book. the vision for the book was to narrate the story of homi bhabha’s life using archival material – documents, photographs and paintings. however, the style of the bulletin board could not be easily translated into a book. nor did a glossy coffee table format where the pictorial would dominate over text a satisfactory solution. my experience at the margins of a hierarchical scientific institution also made me aware that a scholarly edition of the homi bhabha papers would do little to raise general public awareness of archival material. as the archivist at tifr, i was excited by the possibility of showcasing photographs and documents that presented his scientific life as also the numerous letters that revealed the myriad shades of relationships bhabha had with scientists, artists, writers, friends and colleagues alongside a commentary about his life. that this was an unusual concept and one that was difficult to translate into book design came home to me when the publisher presented an initial design: the designer had focused on the layout and used fragments of the archival documents to ornament the pages. the core purpose of the book was lost, as in this form no reader would be encouraged to pay attention to the archival documents. thus, the archival book was first defined by what it was not: not a scrap-book that was similar in form to our bulletin board, nor a coffee table book; not a pictorial biography with photographs and archival documents placed within the chapters.8 the problem at the earliest stages of conceptualization can be summarized as follows: how to bring together the life of the scientist alongside his archive? it was at this stage, i realized that the project needed a designer who would see the archival material as substantially contributing to the content as well as to the design of the book. in fact, the archival material told us a lot about the scientist, his international network, his interests, and of course, about his times. the book design had to be appropriate for the task. the project needed a designer who would be able to transform the archival material into a book that communicated with the general public. sarita sundar, (at that time with the design firm, trapeze) welcomed the project and brought to it her deep understanding of book design, design history and visual communication. it was also at this stage that my co-author ananya dasgupta, editor and writer with a keen understanding of scientific communication joined the project. at that point, ananya had joined the tifr archives as an oral historian. our team configured and re-shaped what an archival book needed to focus on. the extra design cost was funded by arch (archival resources for contemporary history), the consultancy unit i had founded in 2009. although tifr archives did not fund the project directly, it generously made available the archival material used in the book. in gratitude, as authors we shared the royalty with the tifr archives. the collaborative nature of the project was clear from the beginning. framing the archives by the time we started work with sarita sundar, we already had a few things ready. we had written up the story of bhabha’s life in clear accessible language using anecdotes that would hold the attention of our audience. at the same time, we had for each of our chapters, archival documents, photographs and excerpts of oral history interviews about the scientist. but working closely with a designer, we soon realized involved an engagement with historical materiality at multiple levels. as sarita looked through the archival material, she printed out and arranged them on the walls of her studio and asked detailed questions about every bit of archival material. beyond that she was keen to see photographs of what bhabha’s office looked like. apart from questions about his institution’s large collection of modern indian art, she wanted to know what kind of objects did he have on his desk, what kind of chair he used, what he wore and the music he listened to. we concluded that the photographs, letters, paintings and sketches that the archives had all spoke of a man who was not only in tune with his times but also a man whose taste reflected a modernity that was ‘contemporary and european in its essence’.9 this understanding alongside bhabha’s deep commitment to the internationalism of the scientific endeavor made it possible for us to move away from the narrow nationalist way in which the life of many indian scientists had been presented. the larger international focus also allowed us to pay attention to different dimensions of bhabha’s life that the biographies written so far had not focused on.10 all these aspects led us to the design of the book that used design not as ornamentation but as an organic and integral part of the book by creating a narrative and a rhythm that defined the logic of the book’s unfolding. the conceptual trajectory of the design of this book began in our conversations about the material culture of the articles that the scientist had collected. when i had begun the process of setting up the tifr archives, my office was located in the auditorium foyer, adjoining the ‘replica’ of bhabha’s office which was on the fourth floor of tifr.11 i was fascinated and intrigued by the tulip chair – considered an icon of modern industrial design, in his office. designed by eero saarinen, the finnish-american industrial designer in 1955, the chair, as archival documents confirmed, was acquired by homi bhabha the same year as it became available commercially. what fascinates historians can open up other dimensions of understanding for designers. for sarita, the presence of the tulip chair confirmed what other archival documents were hinting at – the international reach of bauhaus, the modernist movement founded by walter gropius in weimar, germany that functioned from 1918 to 1938, prior to the rise of nazi germany. for sarita, ‘traces of the conceptual language that began at bauhaus’ were visible at bhabha’s institute – not only ‘in the paintings that bhabha acquired but in the architecture and the landscape.’ 12 the book design drew from bauhaus – using a colour palette associated with bauhaus, that used reds, blues and steel grey. her choice of typography and use of machine-derived fonts were also in keeping with modernist principles. it was sarita who gave our book a form that could bring together the history of design in a way that would let the archival material live and breathe through the pages. to quote the ‘design note’: ‘the design of this book grew out of an intimate dialogue between the archival material and the history and principles of design as it evolved in the mid-twentieth century.’13 the archival book then was one that had to be constructed visually within a historical frame. it demanded a very close collaboration between the historian, writer and designer. moreover, the archival material and book design had to be in conversation with each other. that is why the design of the book had to speak a language that reflected the archival material, both visually and aesthetically. this conceptualization enabled us to move away from the convention of representing the past through sepia-toned photographs that illustrated the text rather than photographs that engaged in conversations with the text. our book used a mix of black and white and a few coloured images always taking care to historicize them. the historical frame of the book looked at two aspects of the past in order to create a meaningful encounter with the archive: the history of science in india (which included homi bhabha’s archives as well as archival resources from his institution) and the history of design the elements of which could reflect the environment within which he worked to set up the institutions he created. design, therefore, was not just about ornamentation but was the very ground on which the archival book stood thus, enabling us to create a book that could open up the archives of the scientist to the public. annotating the archives for the public archival material is not self-explanatory. indeed, as kenneth foote as argued, different societies value different forms of collective memory: in one society, oral and ritual traditions may predominate, while in another society they may be allied with archival records, written documentation, and even elements of material culture such as monuments and memorials.14 in india, collective memory may reside in the cultures of orality that circulate widely. access to archival documents is the privilege of the literate. while historians are trained to pay attention to the specific nuances of documents from the past, a public historian needs to work hard to communicate the significance of each archival document to a public not used to looking at archival documents. our decision as researchers and writers was to present the archival material with notes that explained their significance. we also placed the documents alongside excerpts from oral history interviews with scientists, workers and relatives who spoke to us about the scientist. this strategy of juxtaposing archival documents and people’s reminiscences thus layered the memory embodied in the archival book in complex ways. bhabha’s balloon flight experiments undertaken at the indian institute of science in bangalore during the war years are discussed in letters he wrote to scientists – r.h. millikan and wolfgang ernst pauli, which we reproduced completely. we also included a group photograph taken during millikan’s visit in 1940 when he had conducted cosmic ray experiments in bangalore as well as a photograph of a later cosmic ray experiment using balloons from 1943 showing bhabha and his laboratory assistant, g.v. vasudevachar. later in the same chapter, we included a short excerpt from an interview with g.v. vasudevachar who recalled the context of the photograph and the pieces of lead that they had mounted in the payload of the balloon during that experiment. indeed, the reminiscence section included eminent scientists as well as family members, laboratory assistants and workshop workers. unlike, its glossy cousin, the coffee table book, the archival book enabled us to cut across social hierarchies and present hitherto unnoticed aspects of this eminent scientist’s life. aware that archival material needed interpretation, we annotated every document that we included, providing biographical details where it was required as well as historical context. for example, we included a note that contextualized john von neumann’s reply to bhabha’s letter dated 3 february 1948. (see the accompanying image of the two pages from the book.) later, in the same chapter, we included an excerpt from my oral history interview with rangaswamy narasimhan, who had designed india’s first general purpose digital computer, the tifrac in 1960: he said he would like to get a computer group started and asked what kind of background i had in computers, whether i knew the von neumann report, which was a classic. so i told him i had read all that. at the institute there was already a group of people who were building logical circuits … so we tried to put all this together and build a computer. after i arrived, bhabha first personally and officially got involved in the project when i gave a seminar on the logical aspects of computers and what could be done if the project was granted. it was taken for granted as a statement of what we hoped to do and could be done, and the seminar was attended by all the big shots.15 john von neumann’s letter to bhabha was reproduced in the book along with annotations. in order to fit the contents into the page, the letter was re-set in the font used in the book. the page design retained his signature and the letterhead of the institute of advanced study. (courtesy hanno; photograph manoj sudhakaran) our notes included on top of every page that reproduced an archival document brought together multiple narratives. in this particular case, it reminded readers of john von neumann’s exchange with bhabha (earlier in the book) in 1948, a year after indian independence, that concluded with: ‘if you think that it is of any use from the point of view of the use of such a machine in india, i will be very glad to write to you in more details about this subject and outline somewhat more specifically at least some of the things which might be done in the fields mentioned above.’16 the history of science in contemporary india had not adequately engaged with archival material and our attempt in this book was to present the larger socio-cultural milieu to which the scientist belonged as well as the international network that he drew on in his institution building practice. the multiple narratives that are embedded in the book set up a dialogue between our introduction and commentary, between the documents, photographs and oral histories. this constant flow of dialogue, we thought, suited the new form of the archival book, which we had set out to define. the multi-layered text allowed the lay reader to collate and compare the diverse anecdotes and narratives and enabled the formation of a mental image of the scientist and his life and times. the photographs used in the book were curated to add a visual layer to the narrative of the book. but the cover photograph of homi bhabha in front of the cascade generator (c1953) fulfilled an additional function.17 the scientist posing in front of the newly acquired machine that no other institute in india could boast of at that time, tells us about bhabha’s stature as a scientist who was respected and supported by the state. but from the design perspective, it shows us the man and the machine and speaks the same language of modernity as the book design inspired by bauhaus. the photographs in the book are rarely used as illustrations; sometimes the photograph adds a significant dimension to the narrative that the archival material misses. thus we included a spread that focuses on the bhabha family, their aristocratic demeanor, the parsi community he was part of, their way of dressing and the nuclearized family he belonged to. though the spread is placed within a chapter that focuses on bhabha’s childhood, it focuses our attention on a montage that includes photographs from 1910, 1920 and 1940 (his adolescence and his adult years) on the verso and a quotation about meherbai, bhabha’s mother by his second cousin, roshan rivetna on recto, forming a coherent unit. functioning as a narrative bundle, this unit enables us to present bhabha’s childhood alongside his adult years through the trope of family and intimacy (chapter 1: the house on little gibbs street, in a masterful spirit: homi bhabha 1909-1966, pp10-11). homi bhabha in front of the cascade generator, 1953 (courtesy hanno; photography manoj sudhakaran) throughout the book, such narrative bundles bring together different aspects of the impact socio-political life on the lives of scientists. in another spread, the book presents a photograph of the soviet premier, nikolai bulganin and party secretary, nikita khruschev looking at cosmic ray tracks on stacks under a microscope. the photograph taken during their visit to the institute in 1955 is presented alongside a quote from a letter written by bhabha to professor choksi of the tata trusts that he would like to visit the soviet union in the future. the quotation ends with: ‘as a high-level academic institution there must be as much intellectual freedom in the tifr as there is in any british university’. the facing page includes an excerpt from an article from the physicist bernard peters who had spent seven years at tifr when he became a victim of the witch hunts during the mccarthy era. this narrative bundle aimed to bring together science and the politics of the cold war era and draws our attention to bhabha’s open-mindedness in providing a refuge to a scientist like bernard peters who was being persecuted in the usa. (chapter 6: an institute is born, in a masterful spirit: homi bhabha 1909-1966, pp124-125). although the design of the book eschewed a scrap-booking approach, we used elements that are conventionally used in scrapbooking to enhance the pages. thus, the pages that reprinted bhabha’s correspondence used stamps and watermarks as well as cut-outs of addresses, post-cards and stamps as design elements that remained readable and meaningful even if their purpose was to embellish the pages. the diverse stories that the book presented were intertwined with a timeline of events in india and the world that ran on the top of most pages. the timeline included political events, scientific discoveries and cultural movements. our idea was to provide a ready historical context for the reader so that they could easily reference the narratives that appeared in the pages. we created this intentionally, offering the reader multiple entry points into the life of the scientist. the reading experience was also designed as a non-linear one, disrupting the conventional idea of reading sequentially from the beginning of a book to its end. this book could be begun at any point that formed the arc of the scientist’s life and the reader would still be able to contextualize the archival material and relate them to national and international events. the archival book we designed was thus able to enter into multiple conversations with its readers.18 unlike a scholarly edition of archival material that could be daunting for a general public, the archival book as we designed it, enabled the ordinary reader to experience the look and feel of archival documents and photographs and link these with the memories shared through excerpted oral histories. conclusion in india, history is a frequently contested battle that is carried out in the public space by politicians and the tools of the historian are rarely made accessible to the public.19 despite the public-ness of historical debates, the general public is rarely able to access historical documents. archives are open to writers, scholars and historians. scholarly engagement with the archives of scientist addresses historians of science and not the general public. it was precisely because india does not offer ready access to the archives to its general public that archival books of this kind should be viewed as significant public history interventions within the postcolonial context. our effort was therefore make archives accessible through a new genre of book making. our project was a collaborative one where designer, writer, historian and archivist worked together. the archive was not just the resource from which we retrieved elements of the past, it also functioned as a source of many conversations. we created through this new genre of book, an ‘axis of innumerable narrations’ as borges put it.20 indeed, the archival book, could continue those innumerable dialogues with our readers and add a myriad dimensions and layers of narratives to the book too.21 acknowledgements i would like to thank the tifr archives, mumbai, my co-author, ananya dasgupta, sarita sundar and vivek dhareshwar for insightful discussions. endnotes 1 terry cook, ‘the archive(s) is a foreign country: historians, archivists, and the changing archival landscape’, the american archivist , vol 74, no 2, 2011, p601. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.2.xm04573740262424 2 ibid, p.605. 3 see antoinette burton, archive stories: facts, fiction and the writing of history, duke university press, durham and london, 2005 and ann laura stoler, along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense, princeton university press, princeton and oxford, 2009. 4 archives, in the indian context, present a contrast to museums or heritage sites that are accessible and also frequently visited by large crowds. 5 subaltern studies that emerged in the 1980s in india began to analyze the relationship between dominance and hegemony within the colonial system using as resources documents in the colonial archives. only shahid amin among the subaltern historians used oral history as a resource with which to understand contemporary history. see shahid amin, chauri chaura, 1922-1990: event, metaphor, memory, university of california press, 1995. 6 sudeshna guha’s edited volume the marshall albums: photography and archaeology, mapin, new delhi. alkazi collection of photography ocean township, grantha, nj, 2010, looks at the ways in which photographs are used for creating archaeological knowledge is a significant example of a scholarly book published in the same year as the archival book being discussed here. 7 the national centre for biological sciences in bangalore is administratively part of the tata institute of fundamental research in mumbai. 8 when we started, we were not aware of ursula marx, gudrun schwarz, michael schwarz and erdut wizisla (eds), walter benjamin’s archive, translated by esther leslie, verso, london, 2007. this beautiful archival book that i saw for the first time in 2010, is in fact a well-designed scholarly edition of benjamin’s papers. it does not, however, use design to structure the narrative as the archival book i am defining here does. 9 sarita sundar and indira chowdhury, ‘design note’ in indira chowdhury and ananya dasgupta, a masterful spirit: homi bhabha 1909-1966, penguin, new delhi, 2010, p257. 10 see g. venkataraman, bhabha and his magnificent obsession, universities press, hyderabad, 1994 and chintamani deshmukh, homi jehangir bhabha, national book trust, new delhi, 2005). 11 after homi bhabha’s tragic death in an air crash in 1966, his office remained unoccupied for more than thirty years. in 1997, after professor s.s. jha became director, bhabha’s office furniture and other objects were moved to the museum area in the auditorium foyer of the institute. the office was ‘reconstructed’ with actual furniture and objects from his office and put on display. for a discussion see, indira chowdhury, growing the tree of science: homi bhabha and the tata institute of fundamental research, oxford university press, new delhi, 2016, pp225-228. 12 sarita sundar and indira chowdhury, ‘design note’, a masterful spirit, p257. 13 ibid. 14 kenneth foote, ‘to remember and forget: archives, memory, and culture’, the american archivist, vol 53, no 3, 1990, p380. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.53.3.d87u013444j3g6r2 15 chowdhury and dasgupta, op cit, p147. 16 ibid, p119. see photograph of the page included here. 17 the one million-volt cockcroft-walton accelerator (cascade generator) was installed at bhabha’s institute, tifr in 1953. the machine was purchased by the atomic energy commission (which homi bhabha also headed) but was housed at tifr. see photograph of the cover included here. 18 budgetary constraints and the categorization of the book as a popular non-fiction did not allow us to include an index or a bibliography. 19 see srijan sandip mandal, ‘public history: towards a credible engagement with the past’, lila-interactions, vol 3, no 2, 2020 available at: https://lilainteractions.in/the-marketplace-of-the-past/. 20 jorge luis borges, ‘notes on (toward) bernard shaw,’ other inquisitions: essays 1937-1952, p428. 21 since the creation of the book on homi bhabha described here, the center for public history, where i work, has created several archival books for institutions in india. these are written collectively and do not attribute authorship to a single author but to the centre. these are: citizens and revolutionaries: an oral history of iim calcutta, rupa publications, new delhi, 2012; looking back, looking forward: an oral history of imsc, institute of mathematical sciences, chennai, 2016; the lives of objects: stories from the indian museum, indian museum, kolkata, 2017; the story of sasha, sasha association of craft producers, kolkata, 2017; lessons in living: stories from the life of triguna sen, national council of education (bengal), kolkata, 2018. public history review vol. 30, 2023 © 2023 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: foster, a-m., wallis, j. 2023. the memorial afterlives of online crowdsourcing: ‘lives of the first world war’ at imperial war museums. public history review, 30, 89–104. https://doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8048 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj articles (peer reviewed) the memorial afterlives of online crowdsourcing: ‘lives of the first world war’ at imperial war museums ann-marie foster1,*, james wallis2 1 northumbria university 2 independent scholar corresponding author: ann-marie foster, marie2.foster@northumbria.ac.uk doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8048 article history: published 16/08/2023 keywords first world war; crowdsourcing; digital history; collective memory; museums; centenary ahead of the impending first world war centenary commemorations (2014-2018), beginning in the late summer of 2014, imperial war museums (iwm) announced the launch of an ambitious partnership venture with findmypast, a uk-based genealogy service company.1 the partnership eventually manifested as ‘lives of the first world war’ (‘lives’), an extensive digital database, a resource that became one of the pioneering achievements of the centenary commemoration period. the entire project ran from 12 may 2014 to 19 march 2019.2 during this period more than 160,000 people collaborated ‘to piece together the lives of people who experienced the conflict, through sharing anecdotes and digitising material that has been hidden away in attics until now’.3 individuals were able to upload digital copies of family relics and research the ‘life stories’ of family members or strangers. altogether, approximately 7.7 million individual histories were collected.4 over its duration, nineteen thousand users followed the ‘lives’ twitter handle, whilst a further fifteen thousand supported its affiliated facebook page. in march 2019 the website ceased allowing new uploads, at which point the ‘life story’ database, assets and stories transformed into a free-to-access, permanent digital memorial. one post-centenary report observed that ‘lives’ was the best example of a crowdsourced output in showing what was possible at scale.5 declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 89 mailto:marie2.foster@northumbria.ac.uk https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8048 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8048 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8048 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj a user and a volunteer interact with the ‘lives of the first world war’ database. © imperial war museums, reproduced under the iwm non-commercial licence. this article argues that ‘lives’ marked a significant contribution to first world war remembrance cultures when evaluating its success as an innovative public history project. but while we advocate that, for its scale and length of duration, the project was a remarkable undertaking operating beyond the physical boundaries of a museum, we want to query the extent to which it helped diversify and develop public understandings of the war more broadly. shortly after the initiative launched in 2014, james wallis suggested that ‘lives’ would ‘frame public memory of the conflict through personal stories’.6 now situated comfortably beyond november 2018, it feels appropriate for two first world war public historians to respond to that originally pitched notion by assessing how the initiative was delivered and advertised. further consideration of what its legacy now is (or may yet be) represents an important gauge for contemporary digital organisation-led community engagement, beyond any impact fostered regarding cultural memories of the first world war.7 the initiative’s intersection across digital and family history suggest important ethical and methodological challenges associated with the history harvesting of data collections en masse. in particular, we want to suggest that, as a methodology, large-scale data collection will, on its own, inherently replicate collection bias, unless married with specific collection drives – something that has widespread implications for cultural memories of events reliant on large institutional datasets. family history, museums, and the first world war over the past twenty years the development and sustained popularity of family history has been phenomenal. sociologist anne-marie kramer has posited how these practices have facilitated new relationships between identity and memory, arguing that people can construct identity-narratives based on their personal exploration of the past by tracing experience through the idiom of family.8 first world war family history has been the way that many have engaged with their, and other people’s, past. numerous episodes of the popular bbc television series ‘who do you think you are?’ have reached millions of viewers, telling emotive stories about varied individual combatant experience and grief encountered over the course of the conflict.9 the recent digitisation of war-era records has not only broadened accessibility to finding out more about the subject matter but has actively encouraged cross-user engagement to link up findings, facilitated through ancestry.com and other online software platforms. the fact that first world war bureaucracy left a relative wealth of archival material behind has allowed for a number of centenary projects to utilise these personal records. ambitious initiatives came to fruition to offer new historical insights via digital means, such as ‘operation war diary’, a five-year partnership foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202390 operating between iwm and the national archives.10 even before the centenary began, the western front association’s salvaging and subsequent digitisation of wartime pension record cards in 2012 was a decision made in the knowledge that these records held notable appeal in their ability to enhance existing historical understanding, delivered via the doings of existing communities of amateur or professional researchers.11 for individuals engaged in family history or biographical research, the focus of the centenary provided an unparalleled opportunity to uncover the stories of their relatives or related individuals. projects incorporated crowdsourced activities, from transcribing wartime diaries or letters, sourced from personal archives, for publication (sometimes via dedicated websites) to investigating the biographies of particular regimental or pals battalions (men who enlisted in local groups to volunteer alongside each other). many of the outputs from these were designed and presented in a way to showcase and evidence the impact of the first world war via a personal or local perspective, offering flavour to a familiar national narrative.12 this rise in interest in family history has been married with the ‘individual turn’ in both museum and first world war studies. since the 1980s, curators in war museums have increasingly used emotional human stories to connect with visitors.13 the individual turn is also evident within british first world war commemorative culture. as historian jenny macleod and archaeologist yvonne inall have argued, ‘the memory boom that emerged from the 1980s gradually served to reinstall individual stories at the heart of collective remembrance.’14 the popularity of family history and the individual turn have combined to produce interactive visitor experiences and face-to-face community ‘antiques roadshow’ collection drives. these ‘history harvests’ allow people with items pertinent to the event or community being investigated (such as the first world war) to visit a site with an object, which is then photographed and recorded for repository in a digital collection. the oxford university-led ‘great war archive’ first began these community collection drives for wartime items during the 2010s, hosting affiliated crowdsourcing events at sites across the uk. they proved a popular tool for archives and museums to engage local communities during the centenary.15 the collection drive we are discussing here is an online development of ‘history harvests’ that enables people to upload images of their family mementos. these have become almost ubiquitous since the covid-19 pandemic, something which forced many museums to think up new ways of interacting with remote audiences, although are a form of online crowdsourcing that constitutes a relative recent practice. the term itself is a slippery one when online crowdsourcing is written about, it usually refers to members of the public volunteering to help with research tasks, such as transcribing written text or providing metadata for images.16 what we describe here is the act of museums asking people to volunteer family items as a way of crowdsourcing knowledge.17 the material created from these drives is called ‘community generated content’ by the digital preservation coalition, which defines it as ‘digital materials produced and shared in and by ad-hoc community art and heritage projects, typically through digitization, where the creation of digital materials was a significant purpose of the initiative.’18 when ‘lives’ was initially conceived this was a relatively new element of museums’ digital community engagement strategy. previous large-scale projects which had asked people to donate personal items to form part of official datasets included the digital monument to the jewish community in the netherlands (2005) and the ibcc digital archive based in the uk that partnered with institutions in italy (2012).19 commenting on the former, serge ter braake draws attention to the tension within large scale digital projects which try to both provide a repository of ‘factual information’ while acting as a memorial for individuals and communities affected by the subject matter.20 the two goals can be difficult to reconcile, because they are both doing different public work; the former appeals to people who study the past whilst the latter works for people wanting to remember the event in question, perhaps not in the complex way the data suggests. ‘lives’ followed a similar ideological split – it tried to marry crowdsourced knowledge with remembrance initiatives, leading to an, at times, dislocation between the two objectives. foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202391 the creation of these datasets begs the question of their public reception. digital humanities scholars and historians with an interest in digital methods have been wary of complacently accepting digitised materials into the disciplinary cannon. as historian tim hitchcock has noted, the digitization of nearly exclusively western sources by the global north was, in 2013, creating a new western cultural hegemony of digital history.21 this has been slightly negated by the digitisation of some collections in non-western languages, and those based in the global south, but there is still a global imbalance. concerns about whose histories have been represented in the digital realm, and what this means for researchers, have been voiced by historian laura putnam, who has argued that the digitised turn has meant that historians, particularly in the global north, can now write histories on countries they know very little about.22 similarly, digital humanities scholar sharon howard has voiced concern that in making certain areas of history available for mass study, it obscures archives in other locations which are only accessible in-person.23 ‘lives’ is now a static resource – meant as a research collection and permanent digital memorial, however, we worry that without a clear appreciation of the ways that the data was collected, or an explanation of its inherent bias, that any future work using ‘lives’ as its sole source material will be in danger of reproducing hegemonic histories of the first world war. pioneering digital humanities scholar lorna hughes has advocated that the first world war now constitutes ‘the most digitally documented period in history, thanks not least to the vast amount of material on community websites’.24 these community websites are rich with historical material, often collected by historically othered groups, however, these are considered ‘critically endangered digital materials’ due to lack of funding and digital infrastructure.25 all that will survive in the long-term are well supported collections such as ‘lives’. what we are concerned about is the deliberate obfuscation of historical material that is caused by uneven collection policies and the effect that this has on cultural memory more broadly. as digital media scholar jenny kidd notes, there is not yet a cohesive framework for digital museum ethics, nor does it always form a part of institutional introspection.26 work examining digital crowdsourcing is only beginning to scope the importance of digitally crowdsourced collections that gather material for collection. using this case study of ‘lives’, we reason that current models of crowdsourced large databases are not yet inclusive enough, and suggest additional areas of awareness that can feed into future project design ahead of planning for upcoming anniversary events. lives of the first world war the premise of a large-scale database originated as part of iwm’s overall ambition to lead the national first world war centenary commemorations. pitched as their ‘flagship digital centenary project’, the intention was to enable a presence beyond the physical grounding of the newly-designed first world war galleries at iwm london that would open in july 2014.27 with an exhibition driven by a narrative of retelling the experiences and history of the conflict for a generation of visitors removed from living memory, ‘lives’ constituted a re-engagement with broader public interest in the first world war as a subject; its key messages being to act as the ‘official place’ for discovering ‘stories’, to ‘commemorate lives of individuals’ and ‘ensure people understand the impact of conflict’.28 what ‘lives’ essentially did was meld official and unofficial sets of data, thereby creating an online integrated database of people who had participated in the first world war. it included records relating to the different military services such as the royal navy and royal flying corps/royal air force but also the canadian expeditionary force, the australian and new zealand imperial forces, the indian army, conscientious objectors and workers on the home front. it featured people from british, commonwealth, and colonial countries who served in uniform or worked on the home front.29 significantly, ‘lives’ attempted to position the british experience of the first world war as a global one it emphasised the relationship foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202392 between commonwealth and metropole, although bypassed the issue of british colonial troops, despite those of them who fought being included in the dataset. what made the project unprecedented in the uk, at least at the time of its conception, was its ambitious desire to amass records and information housed from various collections and locations into a single interlinked resource. the onus on collaboration across institutions and publics established a collective premise to bring ‘material from museums, libraries, archives and family collections from across the world together in one place’.30 basic information was mined from seed record sets predominantly wartime military records, such as medal index cards or grave records as a way of identifying individuals who were all given a profile (‘life story’) based upon that data. members of the public then had the opportunity to supplement each individual’s ‘life story’ by adding more detail to their wartime experience, presented as bite-size, engaging, historical narrative. this was typically information derived from either census records, military records or battalion war diary entries, alongside uploaded family photographs. the premise of an ever-expanding database over the centenary in terms of new information being added or historical narratives being refined and worked on by its public users chimed with an existing familiarity and appeal of family history as a long-term (arguably never-finished) pursuit. meanwhile the user spectrum had to allow for those experts seeking specific or niche information alongside those exploring the site for the first time, curious to uncover wartime individuals sharing their surname. the project relied heavily upon public input to populate the site. language framed around the initiative accentuated a necessity for action over the commemorative period, encouraging contributors to ‘save stories’, to shape this ‘permanent digital memorial’ for preservation beyond 2018. the dc thomson family history platform stated that iwm needed help from members of the public ‘to explore documents, to link them together and to start telling the stories of those who served in uniform and worked on the home front’.31 by the project’s end in 2019, 161,141 contributors had helped to populate the 7,700,278 ‘life stories’ with 3,175,052 ‘facts’.32 the most prominent example of sharing took place in 2015, when researcher cyril pearce donated the records of more than 16,500 men who refused to go to war on religious, ethical, political or social grounds from his pearce register of conscientious objectors list to the ‘lives’ website.33 volunteers helped to draw together ‘communities’ of individual ‘life stories’ on the ‘lives’ website, for instance, the ‘trumpington men and women of ww1’ created by trumpington local history group, as well as war memorial-based research conducted by a library group based in powys.34 individuals and groups were encouraged to create their own personalised areas of the website to remember a particular family, regiment, or event. over 8,500 community groups were created, which have been kept as part of the digital memorial.35 an international community of 29 remote volunteers undertook administrative tasks and answered user enquiries. one shared their motivations for their involvement: within the group we have folks who have years of experience behind them in the fields of family, military and social history. we all share a two-fold commitment: the first is to ensure that information in lives is accurate and evidence-based; the second is to help other members to get the very best out of it.36 in 2018, the peak of activity for the site, volunteers answered almost 2,900 enquiries which resulted in an additional 10,500 individuals being added to the site.37 the platform also offered a means for existing researchers to either share or consolidate their findings, such as the ‘battle of jutland’ project which ended up featuring 2,500 life stories or examples of family historians who became inspired to uncover more about their relative’s regiment or those named on a local war memorial. the project also developed a schools-specific outreach programme. a dedicated teachers’ hub went live in june 2015, offering free resources tailored to the secondary curriculum. these resources focused on engaging students with the project through individual ‘life stories’ one example being a group of key stage three pupils from the mount school in york who used the ‘lives’ database to research women foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202393 from a local memorial.38 between the launch date and march 2019, the learning page was viewed almost 20,000 times.39 public events engaged approximately 1,500 students and teachers, with a further 61,000 schoolchildren were reached through participation in the online bbc live lesson on remembrance in november 2018.40 ‘lives’ had to strike a careful balance between mass accessibility as a free-to-access online venture with the commercialisation of genealogy. it meant confronting a reality where access to digitised historical records had to be delivered via a subscription model, mirroring existing platform approaches seen on ‘ancestry’ and ‘findmypast’. in total, 7.8 million records were made free-to-access but 10.5m military records and 469.5 civilian records (including census returns alongside birth, marriage and death indexes) required a £50 per annum or a £6 per month subscription package to view.41 financial costs for public users brought the debate over private companies and paywalls to the fore, not least because ‘lives’ was an endeavour seeking to bridge a perceived gap between professional and casual users (though to what extent these restrictions may have limited accessibility, in terms of users paying for digitised historical data, remains unclear). pitched to entice prospective users, initiative rhetoric emphasised the importance of individual experience situated within a broader collective. it was a task largely endorsed by its users; one external website saw ‘lives’ as a way of ‘…remembering that such a great effort was expended, and victory achieved – bit by bit – by individual people with individual stories’.42 website users responded to this felt sense of emphasis: by working together to uncover and tell these stories, contributions can be valued, comrades-inarms can be connected electronically, and forgotten details can be woven into vibrant personal and family histories to be saved and shared for generations.43 using technology to forge links, contributions became pitched as individual acts, echoing a sentiment that sat neatly alongside ideas of dedication and commitment to a cause. understandably, the emphasis over 2014-2018 pushed the message of content input, but the site’s functionality encouraged users to explore individual experience too, through broad search categories of name, unit or and service number. intention lay in not only emphasising the experience of individual combatants, but upon connecting these stories too. though ‘lives’ had secured the authority of an academic advisory board, granting it institutional credibility, the initiative still needed to accommodate differing levels of expertise, across sectors and backgrounds. this was most evident in the approach that all contributed ‘life stories’ were to be reviewed in-house by iwm staff. ‘life stories’ could also be open to challenge by external readers, if a lack of historical integrity was perceived. this went some way to gatekeeping the type of history that was perceived as acceptable to upload, and may have skewed data collection. overall, ‘lives’ functioned as a large and ambitious glam-led public history project. it merged institutional records with private ones, linking commercially available datasets with material produced or sourced by citizen users. it likewise encouraged individuals to digitally donate items or oral memories to an institutional database, whilst allowing others to establish dedicated commemorative groups of the dead. a small group of volunteers provided administrative and customer-facing support, giving hours of their time towards the project. a curatorial team engaged with schools through activities linked to the national curriculum, and public events and advertising raised awareness of the project more generally. there is no doubt that this was a highly ambitious programme, not least in its future-proofing efforts to anticipate how the site would function successfully post-first world war centenary, before the centenary had officially started. what the initiative did was help to cement individual memories of the first world war in the minds of the public, but on the other hand, it existed as a top-down initiative with associated financial costs for its citizen historians who wanted to engage on a deeper level. foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202394 interpreting ‘lives’ given the sheer numbers of people the site reached, beyond the quantity of ‘life stories’ collected, we do not seek to question the importance, reach or significance of ‘lives’, especially for individuals who dedicated their time, items, and personal histories. that withstanding, it remains imperative to determine how the initiative allowed for a broader understanding of the war. we suggest that, for complex reasons, the collection largely confirmed pre-existing collection biases. geoffrey rockwell, a humanities computing philosopher, argues that ‘crowdsourcing should be structured to maximise diversity, not to flatten it.’44 he also emphasises that these projects are ‘processes not products’ and that crowdsourced knowledge should not be kept in a static place, unable to be unedited.45 ‘lives’ has not only become a static resource, as it is no longer able to be edited by the public, but has had issues with the diversity of history it contains. ‘lives’ does not appear to have meaningfully engaged with diverse communities, conceivably because it had to compete with pervasive public understandings of what constituted appropriate war material. this builds on historian lucy noakes and one of the authors (wallis), whose research into the first world war centenary in britain found that people were unable to break away from pre-conceived notions of who the war involved and what it was like, which, we argue, highly influenced the types of memory ‘lives’ was able to collect.46 the memory of the first world war currently circulating in the uk is one that is white, male, and western front orientated. addressing british cultural memory of the first world war, a 2014 report produced by the british council highlighted that uk public knowledge of the war’s international aspects and its aftermath were limited, recommending that the centenary offered ‘an opportunity to share a fuller understanding of the war’.47 british perceptions of the first world war at the start of the centenary often failed to address the global scope of the conflict, and of the troops who were conscripted or enlisted from british colonial and imperial areas. a post-centenary report published in 2019 found that there was a rise in public knowledge about indian troops participating in the war (rising from 44% or the british public knowing of their involvement to 71% in 2018), though there was still little public knowledge of kenyan troops and their involvement (from 22% in 2014 to 38% of the british public being aware of this in 2018).48 despite these increases in the knowledge of global involvement, and britain’s role in this, general knowledge remains patchy, with the 2019 report recommending that awareness of the diverse background of soldiers needs to be increased in predominantly white areas.49 as memory studies scholar astrid erll notes, ‘families serve as a kind of switchboard between the individual memory and larger frames of collective remembrance’.50 digitally donated family items were inherently linked to collective conceptions of the war. but how can family memories of their first world war relatives withstand strong memory cultures in an institutional setting? on an individual level, families can tell narratives that go against received cultural understandings of war, but when asked by an institution to donate wartime items, pre-existing biases come to the fore.51 given the broader centenary landscape ‘lives’ was operating in, it seems important to query how inclusive ‘lives’ was more broadly, or indeed could ever be, due to the prevailing potency of existing memory cultures. whilst focus upon individual histories may have helped to diversify collections, other centenary outreach programmes run by imperial war museums were accused of centring white histories.52 without specific or targeted collecting initiatives, ‘lives’ was always unlikely to be able to represent a realistic history of the diverse people involved in the first world war. there was a racialised split in the ‘lives’ database, with white men overwhelmingly dominating the detailed ‘life stories’ recorded. the ‘life stories’ of british servicepeople of colour are sparsely populated when compared to their white counterparts. to some extent this is due to recordkeeping – race was not recorded on enlistment papers, for example. however, there is the question of who the ‘lives’ site was serving – it was predominantly the ancestors of white soldiers who fought who felt able to attach images of their ancestors, and more details about them. very rarely, more detail is given for black soldiers, such as with foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202395 the example of david louis clemetson, who is lauded as the first black officer in the british army, ahead of the oft-cited walter tull.53 the record sets mined for ‘lives’ included british troops and empire and colonial troops, which meant that there was an immense coverage in terms of the geographical and cultural backgrounds of the people whose lives had been recorded. this had implications for how individual histories were recorded. a gatekeeping element meant that contributed information had to be recognised through verification. this potentially posed problems for families of colonial troops, who may not have access to the type of information verifiable through the project. first world war historian santanu das has drawn attention to the different approaches needed to trace indian troops, who may not have left as rich a family legacy of diaries, memoirs, and letters as western troops, but whose memories exist in ephemeral fragments and oral histories.54 in the ‘lives’ database, anecdotes and information passed down orally through generations seem valued to a lesser extent than the archival records subtly reinforcing a hierarchy of historical contribution, despite many family historians striving to dismantle this. as such, reliance upon external verification or provenance may have meant that some families wanting to contribute would have struggled to do so, simply because the required material did not exist in a format suited to a standardised database. this lack of personalised information was a problem more broadly. the histories of black soldiers mentioned on the site are drawn into communities such as the ‘black poppies’ created by user yvonne27542, but it is striking how many commemorated individuals have flags representing their birth-countries, rather than photographs to identify them.55 and though the names of black, south asian, and east asian men (rarely women) who were in service during the war do feature on the site, their ‘stories’ and ‘additional evidence’ sections are sparsely populated when compared to their white-soldier counterparts. to us, this suggests that the families of people with black, south asian, and east asian heritage either chose not to engage with ‘lives’, could not engage because of the type of ephemera present within their family archives, or were unaware of it (or indeed, their family connection) altogether. there is also a gendered split in this histories offered on the site, which also falls along racial lines. women who worked in munitions factories throughout the war numbered over a million, whose voices are rarely heard. a search of ‘munition’ shows records for fourteen women, and the feminised term ‘munitionette’ returns 3 search results.56 no british women of colour who worked in munitions are mentioned, although it is known that they formed part of the workforces in liverpool, glasgow, and elsewhere in britain.57 there are communities for ‘munitions workers’, ‘wives and daughters – female deaths’ as examples, but again most accounts are sparsely populated when compared to their male counterparts. a focus on white male soldiers is another facet of the gendered understanding of war that continues to dominate british cultural history. historian lucy noakes has drawn attention to this gendered nature of wartime memory, arguing that older women are likely to describe male accounts of war when prompted about family experiences, obscuring the roles that women played in wartime because of the cultural perception of war as masculine.58 problems around the elevation of certain narratives appear pervasive within a number of first world war collection drives extended beyond ‘lives’. ‘the welsh experience of the first world war’, a crowdsourcing project run by the national library of wales, also found people tended to bring in information that largely focused on soldiers, despite their calls for information about the home front.59 in many respects, the very nature of the ‘lives’ project had to be self-selecting, given its premise of adding supplementary details to base information gleaned from military records. but the point becomes how this notion plays into ideas around who felt able to contribute personal details about any given individual, a thorny problem for an initiative designed as a collective memorial endeavour. gatekeeping practices were baked into the language of the project, not least in the chosen terminology of ‘family stories’ rather than ‘family histories’. this common pattern existed across many european first world war collection drives and were certainly not limited to iwm’s interactive offerings. one curator on the foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202396 europeana 1914-1918 collection drive, another online initiative which married crowdsourced and archival documents, explained, ‘the private contributions to europeana 1914-1918 by private individuals should be regarded as stories… this is because of the difficulties that surround narratives which have been passed down through families and as such should be approached with care in terms of a historical source.’60 this focus on archival and paper-based material is limited and limiting, given the wealth of nuanced histories written based on oral histories, family histories, and other non-official sources. as various digital crowdsourcing specialists have argued, the practice of crowdsourcing has the radical potential to diversity and democratise knowledge. however, within that potential, there is also the possibility for existing hierarchies to be reproduced, with people excluded from these institutionally-based arenas of knowledge creation.61 as with any public history project, power dynamics are usually embedded within the structure of the institution who is leading or funding the initiative. due to these broader restrictions on content and the nomenclature of individual contributions, questions remain about how valued individual contributions to the site could really be in practice. for all that ‘lives’ allowed members of the public to upload data relating to their chosen individual, these elements were tightly controlled by the museum; information had to be externally referenced before upload was permitted, though family anecdotes were permissible without external verification. it is also important to mention the digital medium of the project. during the early stages of the centenary, some donors to the 1914-1918 europeana project stated that they would have been unable to donate items without the existence of the in-person events, but more due to the fact that they did not have the sufficient digital skills knowledge, or access to required scanning equipment for digitisation.62 quite simply, we do not know how many people may have donated an item to an in-person event but did not to ‘lives’ because of its digital focus. similarly, the website is not the best-equipped for users with accessibility needs, in terms of issues with site accessibility, though we acknowledge that this constitutes a broader problem across the museum sector.63 for example, promotional videos contain only youtube-generated captions, which are a poor substitute for human-generated ones.64 only some links within the site have audio description, whilst navigation using a screen reader is sufficiently confusing that the majority of those reliant on them would, we assume, give up out of frustration. some letters have been transcribed, which is of great use, but in other areas, images lacking alt-text (alternative text) entries renders these visual additions void for any users reliant upon screen readers.65 as of 2019, iwm is auditing ‘lives’ against the web content accessibility guidelines (wcag 2.1) and, as the legislation requires, has communicated that it will publish an accessibility statement which outlines how and when they will fix any access issues (as of autumn 2021, that has still not been published).66 while museums do not legally need to make heritage items, such as scanned manuscripts, accessible under wcag 2.1 compliance, we suggest that an image uploaded as part of a database should integrate the addition of alt-text, situated within a broader understanding of improving museum accessibility.67 these policies would help potential users interact with he site, be that in a casual, research, or donor capacity. widespread calls for participation within future projects should be married with specific collection drives, encouraging people to donate their items to help redress gaps in the collection. collective guidelines, such as the ones published by the community and academic groups who built the student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc) digital gateway, should be looked to as ‘best practice’ examples of working with respect and care.68 naturally, not everyone will want to be involved or to give their personal collections to an institution, especially one which still retains the word ‘imperial’ in its title. we further recognise that the constraints of funding, time and workloads remain in place across the board, but would posit that large grants could work to support skills-rich national institutions. in turn, this would do much to support local community initiatives keen to research different histories, and perhaps through the process, helping them create new archives that complement or enrich existing collections. indeed, many community foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202397 archives created during the centenary designed to help promote future research into diverse and inclusionary histories of the war now fall at risk of digital death. expertly researched histories of marginalised global majority communities in the first world war exist, but without the infrastructure and financial backing to keep them online, it is only large institutional datasets that will benefit from long-term preservation, which has immense repercussions for how this data is used in future histories of war. digital remembrance and legacies the extent of widespread activities over the four-year centenary instigated an enhanced, unprecedented understanding of how large and small-scale history projects could be delivered online. yet legacy planning was not necessarily a part of the plan for online initiatives, though iwm did offer support for digital legacies from the first world war centenary. well before the centenary’s close, focus had shifted onto this wider lack of planning around preservation, especially how to retain or maintain projects with specific digital components.69 following its period of active collection, ‘lives’ became a permanent digital memorial, with the secondary goal of supporting future research. in constituting part of the modern memory of the conflict negotiated over the entire centenary period, planning for long-term legacy was categorised four distinctive phases. it included a dedicated period from june 2018 to june 2019 of cleaning and migrating data from the platform, in order to achieve preservation for future generations. the site now remains in situ as a ‘permanent’ memorial and database. digital remembrance subsequently lay at the heart of the ‘lives’ project. phrasing throughout placed notable emphasis upon individual experience, relatability, and understanding the varied experiences of individuals through an emotionally-led framework, one that bought into existing cultural memory of the first world war.70 ultimately, family histories could forge personal links to the subject matter. as wallis previously observed, these emotional elements could transform from a personal connection to a memorial presentation, translated into the digital realm via the ‘lives’ project interface.71 once the ‘lives’ site had gone live, visitors were able to click the ‘remember’ button on an individual ‘life story’ page to commemorate that individual. this function was disabled once the site was no longer open to additional contributions, so had an active remembrance phase of 5 years. this memorial interplay fed into popular digital remembrance initiatives for the recently deceased; web memorialisation is characterised by its social spaces that bring together family, friends, colleagues, and others to remember the dead in ways that they previously would not have interacted.72 throughout the centenary commemorations social media constituted an important element in delivering historical and creative content that could be easily transmitted, shared and made outward-facing.73 after the successful blood swept lands and seas of red installation held at the tower of london over five months in 2014, historic royal palaces (hrp) set up an online dedication portal ‘to enable people to get involved with the commemoration’.74 this allowed members of the public to dedicate a digital poppy to someone involved in the first world war. after analysing a portion of the more than nine thousand online dedications, creative producer and hrp researcher megan gooch commented upon the ‘richness and variety of family memory and brings to life the looks, achievements and sometimes even the personalities of those who are commemorated in a way that no official memorial ever could’.75 critiquing interactions with the artistic installations held at the tower of london in 2014 and 2018 respectively, gooch observed that ‘technology is enabling us to keep our dead amongst and part of our daily lives and conversations’ underlining the point that not only was this online technology allowing individuals to search historical records to uncover either forgotten or unknown information, but platforms including twitter and facebook were essentially functioning as prompts or settings for us to visibly remember, in this instance through public-facing photographic tributes. digital technologies researcher shanti sumartojo has similarly remarked on the role of social connections as participatory communication, in the sense that foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202398 ‘digital technologies make new forms of shared experience possible, including drawing together people from around the world in a collective, real-time schedule of events.’76 not only did this online technology allow individuals to search historical records to uncover forgotten or unknown information, but social media sites functioned as prompts or settings for people to visibly remember, in this instance through public-facing photographic tributes. what feels most significant about the ‘lives’ ’remember’ button is that it melded modern memorial techniques to people with whom those remembering had no living connection. this application of modern memorialisation techniques to the long dead is an innovative way of bringing the dead back into discussion with those alive today, though the treatment also forces an approach away from typical memorial patterns.77 individuals making up this collective of first world war dead have accordingly become elevated, far more recognisable than was ever possible before the advent of the internet. the capabilities of these technologies offered new, largely successful, modes of engagement for members of the public to interact with the legacy of the first world war, in a manner that placed as much (if not more) emphasis on presentation, imbuing what has become known colloquially as ‘creative commemoration’. in essence, the ‘lives’ project manifested as part of the first major commemoration of the historic first world war dead in the digital age. perhaps the most telling legacy of ‘lives’ can be contextualised when reflecting back on the stillcrystallising themes of the first world war centenary within britain. already, its oft-cited commonalities are those that were tangible, experiential or grounded in their representation; many being artistic-led installations, including the poppy display at the tower of london in 2014, the ‘pages of the sea’ tribute held across beaches around the uk on 11 november 2018, and two high-profile feature films showcased soon after that period, ‘they shall not grow old’ (released 2018, dir: peter jackson) and ‘1917’ (released 2019, dir: sam mendes). instead, ‘lives’ operated in a more ethereal, and out of sight, digital space. it acted more as a means for hosting than producing content, feasibly because the subject matter was being applied onto the technology. that drove a central concern of preservation, that whatever was generated had to be stored and maintained, if at a cost of enhancement or utility (understandable given the perpetuity remit of the organisation responsible for its upkeep). conversely, the impact of ‘lives’ could not match the visceral nature of an individual hand-crafted blood-red clay poppy, nor the cinematic magnitude of colourised historical footage both centenary re-imaginings of the first world war that relied on the conflict’s perception within existing cultural memory. conclusions iwm’s ‘lives of the first world war’ clearly picked up on numerous trends the surge in family history, the rise of digital memorials, and an interest in datasets related to the conflict all merged into this crowdsourced endeavour. but its premise was innovative volunteer engagement, inviting individuals to populate the site as they chose. there were sure intentions of wanting to diversify cultural memory, especially through highlighting the home front, lesser-known theatres of conflict and colonial and imperial contributions – themes that all coalesced over the course of the centenary. inevitably though, as a digital legacy of the centenary, ‘lives’ speaks to the modern cultural memory of the first world war in britain. a transition from active to passive platform signified a broader interest in the subject now that its major commemorative anniversary has passed, with the site itself now a forum of presented histories linked to bigger datasets. though the resource offers unparalleled future researcher value, in terms of identifying individual actors within broader communities of war experience, it also reflects traditions of white male centred conflict. the platform had originally sought to avoid perpetuating or reinforcing dominating cultural narratives and tropes. but its now-static nature invites concern about reinforcing understanding, because the drawing together of different narratives or engagement of diverse communities was not fully fleshed out during the collection-phase. without keen awareness of this, future foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 202399 work based on this freely available data set are at risk of perpetuating highly specific narratives of war, which have been encouraged as the accepted public and family history worthy subjects of history. ultimately, we wonder if laudable ambitions were set too high. by the time of launch, ‘lives’ had already needed to foresee and anticipate the tone and content driving the upcoming centenary, before then operating over a period of notable longevity. that day-to-day operation was happening on many different levels, being aimed at various user-groups including those with family ties to the war, local researchers, community groups, academic researchers and those teaching in schools. it was, at once, trying to be national, local, and familial, thereby risking confusion or limiting the potential success within each category. the sheer number of records preordained users having to carve their individual own pathways through the data, so it cannot be a surprise that this manifested in familial or local community narratives they felt affinity to. moreover, that cannot be uncoupled from the powerful popular remembrance of the conflict within britain. future mass calls for participation therefore need to align with direct calls for information from targeted groups, or direct support, including legacy hosting, for the research that is often done at community level by groups who may have reason to distrust large national museums. we recognise that this is not an easy challenge, and often taps into wider community relations and concerns about exploitative history practices. public history professionals should be encouraged to proactively refine the benefits and challenges of public engagement initiatives from a venture’s outset, rather than pursue easier retrospective criticism. we wrote this article as a way of beginning the conversation around how big databases which solicit items from the public might look, and how we might as users, researchers, and website creators build on these experiences working towards other large anniversaries. despite writing about a national collection, we do not necessarily advocate that history should be collected through institutions such as this – rich community-based archives exist outside of traditional structures and british cultural history would be all the richer if they were supported long-term. however, what we are concerned about is the deliberate obfuscation of historical material that is caused by uneven collection policies and the effect that this has on cultural memory more broadly. this piece is intended to be a starting point for discussions in organisations who wish to build these kinds of sites, where diversity of information and parity of historical evidence is considered at the outset. we hope that these reflections will spur deeper research into what are, for all of us, relatively new digital ventures. acknowledgements we wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and useful feedback. ann-marie also wishes to thank the centre for public history, queen’s university belfast, for inviting her to give a seminar paper which helped refine some of the questions addressed in this article. endnotes 1 the project was a partnership venture with brightsolid, the parent company of the ‘find my past’ and the ‘genes reunited’ websites. 2 house of commons digital, culture, media and sport committee (dcms), ‘lessons from the first world war centenary: thirteenth report of session 2017-19’, house of commons, london, 2019, pp69-70. 3 about the lives of the first world war (online), [2018]. available: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/about (accessed 5 january 2021). 4 dcms, op cit, p18. 5 lucy noakes, catriona pennell, emma hanna, lorna hughes and james wallis, 2021, ‘reflections on the centenary’ project report, p108 (online). available: https://reflections1418.exeter.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/reflections-onthe-centenary-of-the-first-world-war-learning-and-legacies-for-the-future.pdf, (accessed 18 december 2021). 6 james wallis, ‘‘great-grandfather, what did you do in the great war?’ the phenomenon of conducting first world war family history research’ in bart ziino (ed), remembering the first world war, routledge, abingdon, 2015, p31. foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 2023100 https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/about https://reflections1418.exeter.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/reflections-on-the-centenary-of-the-first-world-war-learning-and-legacies-for-the-future.pdf https://reflections1418.exeter.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/reflections-on-the-centenary-of-the-first-world-war-learning-and-legacies-for-the-future.pdf 7 digital community engagement (dice) is a term created by rebecca s. wingo, jason a. heppler, and paul schadewald in digital community engagement: partnering communities with the academy, university of cincinnati press, cincinnati, 2020, pp7-8. they define dice as a blend of ‘established digital humanities, public humanities, and community engagement practices.’ 8 anne-marie kramer, ‘kinship, affinity and connectedness: exploring the role of genealogy in personal lives’, in sociology, vol 45, no 3, 2011, p381; anne-marie kramer, ‘mediatizing memory: history, affect and identity in who do you think you are?’, in european journal of cultural studies, vol 14, no 4, 2011, pp428-445; katie barclay and nina javette koefoed, ‘family, memory and identity: an introduction’, in journal of family history, vol 46, no1, 2021, pp3-12. 9 see also maggie andrews, ‘mediating remembrance: personalisation and celebrity in television’s domestic remembrance’, in journal of war and culture studies, vol 4, no 3, 2011, pp357-370; michelle arrow, ‘‘i just feel it’s important to know exactly what he went through’: in their footsteps and the role of emotions in australian television history’, in historical journal of film, radio and television, vol 33, no 4, 2013, pp594-611; carolyn holbrook and bart ziino (ed), ‘family history and the great war in australia’ in bart ziino (ed), op cit, pp39-55. 10 operation war diary n.d. (online), https://www.operationwardiary.org/ (accessed 02 june 2021). 11 ancestry pension records n.d. (online), https://www.westernfrontassociation.com/ancestry-pension-records/ (accessed 02 june 2021). 12 for expansion on the subject of war legacies and gender, see lucy noakes, ‘‘my husband is interested in war generally’: gender, family history and the emotional legacies of total war’, in women’s history review, vol 27, no 4, 2018, pp610-626. 13 barton c. hacker and margaret vining, ‘military museums and social history’ in wolfgang muchitsch (ed), does war belong in museums? the representation of violence in exhibitions, transcript, bielefeld, 2013, p42; simon jones, ‘making histories of wars’ in gaynor kavanagh (ed), making histories in museums, leicester university press, london, 1996, p157. 14 jenny macleod and yvonne inall, ‘a century of armistice day: memorialisation in the wake of the first world war’ in mortality, vol 25, no 1, 2020, p64. 15 see lest we forget (online), [2019]. available https://lwf.web.ox.ac.uk/home (accessed 24 september 2021); also east belfast & the great war (online), [2018]. available: http://www3.qub.ac.uk/cdda/eastbelfastww1_archive/; europeana 1914-1918, [2011]. available: https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections/topic/83-1914-1918 (both accessed 24 september 2021). 16 for recent work on crowdsourcing as a participatory research action see alana piper, ‘digital crowdsourcing and public understandings of the past: citizen historians meet criminal characters’ in history australia, vol 17, no 3, 2020, pp525-541; mia ridge (ed), crowdsourcing our cultural heritage, ashgate publishing, farnham, 2014. 17 serge noiret mentions some examples of other publicly collected digital public history in his chapter ‘crowdsourcing and user generated content: the raison d’être of digital public history’ in serge noiret, mark tebeau and gerben zaagsma (eds) handbook of digital public history, de gruyter, berlin, 2022, pp35-48. 18 community generated content in arts and heritage (online). available: https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/ champion-digital-preservation/bit-list/critically-endangered/bitlist2021-community-generated-content (accessed 12 october 2022). 19 for more on the ibcc digital archive see greta fedele, zeno gaiaschi, heather hughes, and alessandro pesaro, ‘public history and contested heritage: archival memories of the bombing of italy’, in public history review, vol 27, 2020, pp1-18. 20 serge ter braake, ‘between history and commemoration: the digital monument to the jewish community in the netherlands’ in chiel van den akker and chiel legêne (eds) museums in a digital culture: how art and heritage became meaningful, amsterdam university press, amsterdam, 2016, pp104-106. 21 tim hitchcock, ‘confronting the digital: or how academic history writing lost the plot’, in cultural and social history vol 10, no 1, 2013, p9; 21. 22 laura putnam, ‘the transnational and the text-searchable: digitized sources and the shadows they cast’, in american historical review vol 121, no 2, 2016, p397. 23 sharon howard, ‘bloody code: reflecting on a decade of old bailey online and the digital futures of our criminal past’, in law, crime and history vol 5 no 1, 2015, pp13-14. 24 leo konstantelos, lorna hughes and william mcbride, glasgow, 2019, the bits liveth forever? digital preservation and the first world war commemoration (online), p6. available: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/191301/1/191301.pdf (accessed 04 january 2021). 25 ibid. 26 jenny kidd, ‘digital media ethics and museum communication’ in kirsten drotner, vince dziekan, ross parry, and kim christian schrøder (eds), the routledge handbook of museums, media and communication, routledge, abingdon, 2019, p194. 27 see james wallis and james taylor, ‘the art of war display: the imperial war museum’s first world war galleries 2014’ in james wallis and david harvey (eds) commemorative spaces of the first world war: historical geographies at the centenary, routledge, abingdon, 2017, pp101-114. foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 2023101 https://www.operationwardiary.org/ https://www.westernfrontassociation.com/ancestry-pension-records/ https://lwf.web.ox.ac.uk/home http://www3.qub.ac.uk/cdda/eastbelfastww1_archive/ https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections/topic/83-1914-1918 https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/champion-digital-preservation/bit-list/critically-endangered/bitlist2021-community-generated-content https://www.dpconline.org/digipres/champion-digital-preservation/bit-list/critically-endangered/bitlist2021-community-generated-content http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/191301/1/191301.pdf 28 key messages of the ‘lives of the first world war’ database (slide 6). courtesy of ‘reflection on iwm’s permanent digital memorial’ slideshow by public engagement officer catherine long, (online), 2017. available: https://www. slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/j8710sl9njqkaz (accessed 12 december 2021). 29 this means people from britain, newfoundland, the west indies, india, south africa, australia, and new zealand, and canada. britain also heavily recruited from african countries it colonised, including the gold coast (ghana), kenya, and (as the war went on) tanganyika (tanzania). 30 iwm, lives of the first world war (online), n.d. available: http://www.dcthomsonfamilyhistory.com/about/iwm-livesof-the-first-world-war/ (accessed 05 january 2021). 31 ibid. 32 lives of the first world war homepage (online), 2019. available: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/ (accessed 06 february 2021). 33 cyril pearce, uncovering the history of britain’s war resisters (online), 2015. available: https://www.heritagefund.org. uk/blogs/uncovering-history-britains-war-resisters (accessed 29 july 2021). 34 ystradgynlais library research featured by imperial war museum (online), 2020. available: https://en.powys.gov.uk/ article/9477/ystradgynlais-library-research-featured-by-imperial-war-museum (accessed 01 january 2022). 35 dcms, op cit, p70. 36 testimony extracted from slide 27 of ‘reflection on iwm’s permanent digital memorial’ slideshow by public engagement officer catherine long. 37 dcms, op cit, p70. ‘lives’ also received significant press coverage during its launch in the summer of 2014, arguably the most active period during the whole centenary. 38 catherine mailhac, lives of the first world war re-source evaluation (online), n.d. available: https://www.mailhac. org/learning-module-observations-for-iwm/ (accessed 27 july 2021). 39 dcms, op cit, p69. 40 ibid. 41 the platform was set up into different user categories – 1) ‘visitor’ for website browsers, 2) ‘members’ who could access seven million free records as well as connecting evidence and adding facts to ‘life stories’ and 3) ‘friend’ who could access the premium records. the premium records were pre-existing ones that had already been digitised by ‘findmypast’. 42 hadley duncan howard, remembering the lives of the first world war (online), 2014. available, https://www. familysearch.org/blog/en/remembering-lives-world-war/ (accessed 06 january 2021). 43 ibid. 44 geoffrey rockwell, ‘crowdsourcing the humanities: social research and collaboration’ in willard mccarty and marilyn deegan (eds) collaborative research in the digital humanities, ashgate, london, 2012, p148. 45 ibid, p149. 46 lucy noakes and james wallis, ‘the people’s centenary? public history, remembering and forgetting in britain’s first world war centenary’ in the public historian, vol 44, no 2, 2022, p58. 47 british council, ‘remember the world as well as the war: why the global reach and enduring legacy of the first world war still matter today’, university of exeter, exeter, 2014, pp3; 38. 48 james wallis, ‘capturing commemoration: reflections on the centenary of the first world war’, university of essex, colchester, 2019, p9. the yougov / british future opinion polling was conducted online in december 2018, with 2,008 adults sampled (available: the-peoples-centenary.final-report-2018.pdf (britishfuture.org), accessed 20 april 2022). 49 ibid. see also helen mccartney, the first world war soldier and his contemporary image in britain’, in international affairs, vol 90, no 2, 2014, pp219-315. 50 astrid erll, ‘locating family in cultural memory studies’, in journal of comparative cultural memory studies, vol 42, no 3, 2011, p315. 51 for more on how individual families can resist cultural understandings of war see roper and duffett, op cit, pp78-79; wallis, op cit, p25; ann-marie foster, ‘“we decided the museum would be the best place for them”: veterans, families and mementoes of the first world war’, in history & memory, vol 31, no 1, 2019, p100. 52 dcms, op cit, p14. 53 britain’s first black officer (online), [2014-2018]. available: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/story/18216 (accessed 24 september 2021). 54 santanu das, india, empire, and first world war culture: writings, images, and songs, cambridge university press, cambridge, 2018, p11. foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 2023102 https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/j8710sl9njqkaz https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/j8710sl9njqkaz http://www.dcthomsonfamilyhistory.com/about/iwm-lives-of-the-first-world-war/ http://www.dcthomsonfamilyhistory.com/about/iwm-lives-of-the-first-world-war/ https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/ https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/blogs/uncovering-history-britains-war-resisters https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/blogs/uncovering-history-britains-war-resisters https://en.powys.gov.uk/article/9477/ystradgynlais-library-research-featured-by-imperial-war-museum https://en.powys.gov.uk/article/9477/ystradgynlais-library-research-featured-by-imperial-war-museum https://www.mailhac.org/learning-module-observations-for-iwm/ https://www.mailhac.org/learning-module-observations-for-iwm/ https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/remembering-lives-world-war/ https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/remembering-lives-world-war/ https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/story/18216 55 black poppies (online), [2014-2018]. available, https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/community/2018 (accessed 24 september 2021). 56 ‘munition’ search of ‘lives’ (online), 2021. available, https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/searchlives/munition/ filter/type%3dagent/?page=4; ‘munitionette’ search of ‘lives’ (online), 2021. available, https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm. org.uk/searchlives/munitionette/filter (accessed 02 february 2021). 57 angela wollacott, on her their lives depend: munitions workers in the great war, university of california press, berkeley, 1994, p39. 58 lucy noakes, ‘‘my husband is interested in war generally’: gender, family history and the emotional legacies of total war’, in women’s history review, vol 27, no 4, 2018, p617. see also lucy noakes and james wallis (2022) ‘the people‘s centenary? public history, remembering and forgetting in britain‘s first world war centenary‘, the public historian (in press). 59 lyn lewis dafis, lorna m hughes and rhian james, ‘“what’s welsh for crowdsourcing?” citizen science and community engagement at the national library of wales’ in mia ridge (ed) crowdsourcing our cultural heritage, ashgate, london, 2014, p149. 60 jeremy jenkins, ‘the british library, europeana 1914-1918 and the memorialization of the great war’ in electronic british library journal, 2018, p1. 61 mia ridge et al, op cit, chapter 3. 62 ibid. 63 technically, all uk based museum websites should be wcag 2.1 compliant, but in practice, times between identifying accessibility issues and fixing them can be vast. 64 lives of the first world war (online), 2013. available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm4tkpduzfg (accessed 24 september 2021). 65 you can download the chrome screen reader extension and try the website for yourself. screenreaders struggle to understand the information contained on this page, for example: we remember alhaji grunshi (online) [2014-2018]. available: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/1492566 (accessed 16 september 2021); christmas letter (online), [2014-2018]. available: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/story/21299 (accessed 16 september 2021). 66 accessibility statement (online) 2019. available: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/accessibility-statement (accessed 16 september 2021). 67 for items exempt from wcag 2.1 compliance see central digital and data office, understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies (online), 2018. available: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirementsfor-public-sector-websites-and-apps#exemptions (accessed 16 september 2021). 68 see geri augusto et al, ‘learn from the past, organize for the future: building the sncc digital gateway’ in wingo, heppler, and schadewald, op cit for an excellent case study which highlights how communities and institutions can work together. 69 alongside ‘lives’, iwm delivered ‘mapping the centenary’ in 2019-21. this operated as a national portal designed to collate information about projects and activities which had marked the first world war centenary from 2014-19. it built upon an established network of external contacts and users by tasking them to record their work, in populating an interactive digital map. already, it is clear than many projects did not have digital legacy baked in, with broken links and disappeared websites. see, mapping the centenary (online), [2021]. available, https://www.iwm.org.uk/partnerships/ mapping-the-centenary; ann-marie foster, mapping the centenary – an academic’s perspective (online) 2021. available: https://www.iwm.org.uk/blog/partnerships/2021/03/mapping-centenary-academics-perspective (accessed 29 july 2021). 70 for an interrogation of recent commemorative practice, including the motif of individual sacrifice for national cause, see anthony king, ‘the afghan war and postmodern memory: commemoration and the dead of helmand’, in british journal of sociology vol 61, no 1, 2010, pp1-25; ross wilson, cultural heritage of the great war in britain, ashgate, farnham, 2013. on the theme of personalised narratives, see also christina twomey, ‘trauma and the reinvigoration of anzac’, in history australia, vol 10, no 3, pp85-108. 71 wallis, op cit, p32. 72 tony walter, ‘communication media and the dead: from the stone age to facebook’, in mortality, vol 20, no 3, 2015, p226. 73 for more on the role of social media and digital commemoration, see tom sear, ‘dawn servers: anzac day 2015 and hyperconnective commemoration’ in brad west (ed) war memory and commemoration, routledge, abingdon, 2017, pp69-88; silke arnold-de-simine, ‘between memory and silence, between family and nation: remembering the first world war through digital media’ in a. dessingué and j. winter (eds) beyond memory: silence and the aesthetics of memory, routledge, abingdon, 2016, pp143-161. 74 megan gooch, never forget: poppies and other symbols of remembrance (online), 2019. available, https://blog.hrp. org.uk/never-forget-poppies-and-other-symbols-of-remembrance/, (accessed 04 june 2021). 75 ibid. foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 2023103 https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/community/2018 https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/searchlives/munition/filter/type%3dagent/?page=4 https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/searchlives/munition/filter/type%3dagent/?page=4 https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/searchlives/munitionette/filter https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/searchlives/munitionette/filter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm4tkpduzfg https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/1492566 https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/story/21299 https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/accessibility-statement https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps#exemptions https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps#exemptions https://www.iwm.org.uk/partnerships/mapping-the-centenary https://www.iwm.org.uk/partnerships/mapping-the-centenary https://www.iwm.org.uk/blog/partnerships/2021/03/mapping-centenary-academics-perspective https://blog.hrp.org.uk/never-forget-poppies-and-other-symbols-of-remembrance/ https://blog.hrp.org.uk/never-forget-poppies-and-other-symbols-of-remembrance/ 76 shanti sumartojo, ‘reframing commemoration at the end of the first world war centenary – new approaches and case studies’ in shanti sumartojo (ed) experiencing 11 november 2018: commemoration and the first world war centenary, routledge, abingdon, 2021, p5. see also samuel merrill, shanti sumartojo, angharad closs stephens and martin coward, ‘togetherness after terror: the more or less digital commemorative public atmospheres of the manchester arena bombing’s first anniversary’, in environment and planning d: society and space, vol 38, no 3, 2020, pp546-66. 77 see aleida assmann, ‘transformations between history and memory’, in social research, vol 75, no 1, 2008, pp213– 214. foster and wallis public history review, vol. 30, 2023104 prosuming history in china: a paradigm shift public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) prosuming history in china: a paradigm shift na li east china normal university corresponding author: na li, linalarp@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8377 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords prosumption; public history; china; prosumer; paradigm; media technology; historical thinking; digital dictatorship introduction a dazzling range of public histories emerged in china at the dawn of the twenty-first century. consider the following: • a diverse group of professionals, including journalists, historians, museum curators, archivists, librarians, film makers, work with the historically conscious public to produce oral histories with cutting-edge audio-visual media. oral history at all social scales goes public. • ordinary people passionately build their family trees and meticulously trace their genealogies. previously strictly personal, private and intimate stories, memoirs, diaries, letters and family ephemera have become available, representing a shifting combination of history and memory and of the private and the public. family history has taken a populist turn. • a spectacle of modern people takes an imaginative leap into the past, and engage in dialogue with an ancient past in a strangely intimate way. history is performed and reenacted in dynamic genres, such as living histories, ritual reenactment, documentary films, festivals, pageants, parades and dramas. • legions of history aficionados play historical video games which have impacted their historical consciousness at a scale unbounded and unmeasured by any existing academic or professional standard. across china, we see a growing public co-created and co-curated exhibits with museum curators who devote their time and heart to working with archivists to build family history, oral history and local history archives. we also see a plethora of creative user-generated histories on new media platforms, including digital history, visual history, online commemoration and citizen walking maps. a handful of such activities have grown out from the established field of history, including oral history, family history and genealogy, though they remain at the fringe, shunned by most academic historians. an overwhelming majority, however, are not attached to any discipline: the past is everywhere and it defies pigeonholing. what threads these seemingly disconnected phenomena? what lies behind purely emotional or aesthetic satisfaction? more poignantly, why do such amateurish and mostly unpaid forms of history possess such a mobilizing effect upon ordinary chinese people? when the past is repeatedly and creatively reenacted, performed, narrated and explored in various ways, even the most conservative academics would acknowledge that the business of history is not business as usual any longer. public histories seem to have offered an ever-expanding space of dissidence and possibilities for historical inquiry; all seem to have initiated a profound change in how people see, feel and engage with the past. on the surface, these histories appear to be merely a passing fad, appealing more to emotion than to intellect. no wonder that most scholars in china choose to ignore such patently amateurish phenomena.1 some of the more serious scholars hastily discard them as empty rhetoric with no real intellectual substance. ‘is this history?’ one can easily recognize the contemptuous tone of such a comment. ignorance and arrogance naturally result in academic inertia. despite inspiring voices from the field, academic historians react slowly and ineffectively. historical research (li shi yan jiu), one of the most premier academic journals in the field, has so far published only one article about public history and that piece mainly discusses how public history originated and has since developed in the united states.2 the chasm, however, should not be automatically interpreted as the public lacking historical consciousness. quite the contrary: grassroots consciousness has evolved and matured over the past two decades partly because media technology has revolutionized the way that ordinary chinese people access information. the real issue is that folk-level historical consciousness rarely finds a legitimate space in the scholars’ ivory tower. academic historians may passionately advocate a more accessible version of hard-core historical scholarship, assuming that if the media professionals could streamline the dissemination, scholarly works could reach a broader public. it rarely occurs to them to involve the public in the knowledge production process. they remain the producers, the ultimate gatekeepers of knowledge, while the public passively consumes. this separation is unfortunate. what has gone almost unnoticed in china is that, rather than a cosmetic change in the patterns of participation in history-making, there has been a fundamental shift in the entire process of history-making. the public have become prosumers who actively engage with the production and consumption of history. at the core, a growing public is prosuming history. prosuming history in china works in a novel way. it is a new social fact, a consciously collective phenomenon and an intricate code system of signs. once various forces push the prosumption of history to the tipping points, they explode into a new model, reverse directions and initiate a paradigm shift in the field of history in china. prosuming history prosumption, a term coined by american futurist alvin toffler, refers to the interrelated process of production and consumption, the fusion of production and consumption. in his classic the third wave, toffler defines prosumption as ‘the principle of production for self-use, either by individuals or by organized groups’ and sees it as coexisting alongside production and consumption, as both production and prosumption are ‘forms of production’.3 situated in his grand scheme of social waves, toffler traces prosumption back to preindustrial societies, or, in his words, the ‘first wave’. this was followed by a ‘second wave’ of marketization that drove ‘a wedge into society, that separated these two functions, thereby giving birth to what we now call producers and consumers’.4 thus, the primordial economic form is neither production nor consumption, but rather prosumption. contemporary society is moving away from the aberrant separation of production and consumption and toward a ‘third wave’ that, in part, signals the two processes reintegration into ‘the coming prosumer explosion’.5 the essence of being a prosumer, in this light, is to prefer producing one’s own goods and services; this externalizes the labor cost, thus holds economic meaning as well. for much of recent history, especially since the industrial revolution, the popular and academic focus within the economy has been on production.6 more recently, especially after the end of world war ii, the focus has begun to shift to the increasingly dominant process of consumption.7 with waves of technological revolution, production and consumption have converged. much production takes place in the process of consumption, or rather, there is no consumption without some production. thus, prosumption subsumes production and consumption as a single generic process. in 1986, philip kotler urged business scholars to consider prosumers as a new market segment, but his voice was largely ignored for nearly twenty years.8 george ritzer’s work broke this silence around 2000. ritzer situates the concept of prosumption within the sociology of consumption and tries to break the production-consumption dichotomy. he argues that even during the industrial revolution, production and consumption were never fully distinct, and a wide range of processes existed along a continuum. the poles of the continuum involve production redefined as ‘prosumption-as-production’ (p-a-p) and consumption as ‘prosumption-as-consumption’ (p-a-c). ritzer’s extensive work on prosumption focuses on its significance for capitalism from a neo-marxist theoretical perspective.9 his ‘prosumer capitalism’10 as a new socioeconomic formation prophesies ‘the coming age of prosumers’,11 or the ‘new world of prosumption’.12 nevertheless, as academics keep adding footnotes to toffler’s visionary idea, they increasingly present prosumption in their own disciplinary jargon. this, counterintuitively, turns them away from the prosumers with whom they are trying to communicate, and leads to scholarship that risks losing the original analytical power of toffler’s idea.13 prosumption has so far received scant attention from the field of history, and this seems unsurprising. historians, who focus primarily on the past are more likely to close their minds prematurely to something futuristic, something with no archival records to substantiate. as mentioned earlier, various public history practices in china, though as old as the discipline of history, have suddenly gained immense popularity during the past two decades. the ways in which people relate to the past and the scale on which that happens have changed profoundly. the production and consumption of historical knowledge, bypassing political and academic bureaucracies, has gradually converged. this grand convergence has led to a changing relationship between raw materials of various formats and a newly emerged public equipped with new technology, skills and aspirations. it also reveals a fundamental dissatisfaction with the established order in chinese society, where a persistent need is palpably felt and waiting to be filled, yet academic historians are not prepared to answer the call. when the public takes this on, they tilt the balance between production and consumption, change the whole equation and become the prosumers of history. they ask new questions that often are less cumulative and linear; they draw different points of contact between newly available data; they question the status of existing canons. prosumers challenge, if not overthrow, the rules governing the prior practices of historical inquiry, which emphasizes chronology and archives. most of the subjects that grab their attention simply do not have a corresponding archive to start with; the public is prosuming what academic historians call ‘primary sources’, which is far more than an increment to an already articulated body of knowledge. rather than applying old rules to solve a puzzle, prosumption offers an analytical tool to redefine the puzzle. how to approach such a radical and rapid process of constructing, interpreting and disseminating historical knowledge? in democratic cultures, public historians praise user-generated history and encourage crowd-sourcing for audience participation, for authority sharing.14 in this light, the world of prosumption shares a similar logic with today’s user generated culture, defined as generated by individual users or peers that has the potential to create engagement and/or drive conversations. both involve the active participation of consumers in production: both unpaid, both externalize the labor costs and both favor participatory culture, making them networked and collective in nature. however, in cultures where authority is not supposed to be shared and history is highly controlled and censored, if we bring the core of presumption – a fusion of production and consumption – into a sharper focus, we will find that it offers a new reality and a new tool for analyzing that reality. deep fundamentals in the new era of media convergence,15 the line used to separate the producers and consumers of history is progressively blurring. the knee-jerk reaction from academic chinese historians is to incorporate public history into the established knowledge structure. thus, they are busy analyzing public history practices with traditional historical methodology or establishing public history programs within history departments. however, they soon realize that old methodologies, concepts and models do not accommodate these novel types of history. in the traditional model of historical inquiry, or what i call the old model, history is produced by a central agency, the state, or the state-sanctioned educated elites, then passively consumed by the public, mostly students. the official history, uniformed and legitimized by the state, enters the national compulsory educational system, first indoctrinated then constantly reinforced and legitimized through a vast invisible network of state-controlled agencies. the old model produces a tribe of salaried historians self-authenticating themselves as professionals. they serve primarily political and professional interests, which often mean the same thing in china. in this model, the rift between the production and consumption of historical knowledge is a norm. by contrast, in the perspective of prosumption, or what i call the new model, history starts outside institutional boundaries, and appears in lounge rooms, cafes, cars, airplanes and parks, to name but a few places. it originates and thrives as hobbies, drives, emotional pursuits or leisure; it takes place at one’s own pace, often outside of the monetary system, but carries tremendous tangible and intangible values; it works in a collective, cooperative, socially cohesive and efficient milieu. in short, it does not belong to any recognized academic category, nor is it merely an intellectual quest. this may not sound entirely novel. in some countries, such as britain, history in the public sphere has taken a radical trajectory, rooted in labor, local and community history. the history workshop movement, a popular movement to democratize history in britain in the late 1960s, represents a pioneering grassroots history. yet, a perspective of prosuming history rests on four key themes: goal, process, means and structure. they are interrelated and internegative. first, if the goal of historical inquiry is to acquire knowledge about the past, prosuming history aims for tacit knowledge of the past. for approximately two thousand years, chinese history chronicles what happened in the past through state-appointed or professionally trained historians. such knowledge, authoritative in both nature and process, has long claimed an indisputable official status. it remains external to the actual historical events, witnesses or people who have been involved. however, when history is prosumed, it is internalized. it is internalized to correspond not with the raw and hard historical data, but with an inner sense, ‘a congeries of psychiochemcial impulses.’16 prosumers are largely driven by a conviction that there are historical truths to be discovered. thus, they commit not only their time and money but also their creative energy and inner psychology to such a conviction. precisely because of this sympathy with the deep psychology of the public, for the first time, history acquires personality, and becomes tacit knowledge in many forms. for example, the recent waves of studies on the cultural revolution (referred to as cr, 1966-1976) reveal professional rigor, nuanced judgment and intellectual complexity. the chinese attitude toward the cr transformed from an uncritically accusatory attitude in the 1980s to a more sensible and rational approach in the 1990s. those who were middle-school students during the cr have become more mature observers. they have begun to publish their memoirs, recollections and stories. in 2006, a seminar to mark the fortieth anniversary of the cr took place in beijing and was well attended by many scholars and people who had witnessed the cr. shu he, a prominent local historian based in the city of chongqing, started collecting oral history from cr witnesses from 2011 to 2013. the project was organized by the culture and history committee of the chongqing people’s political consultative conference as a structured and systematic effort to collect the oral histories of cr eyewitnesses. his dedication continued after he retired from his position. he founded yesterday, a widely circulated on-line magazine dedicated to cr studies.17 with personal connections, prosuming history epitomizes a different kind of commitment, which goes beyond educational and occupational realms. one can neither formalize nor quantify this. here we see a nuanced transition from expertise to experience, in which a personal judgment is involved in seeking a historical truth, a reciprocal construction of identity and historical knowledge. as a result, historical knowledge is internalized, and points to a true knowledge of a theory that can be established ‘only after it has been interiorized and extensively used to interpret experience.’18 ontologically, such historical knowledge always involves a tactic dimension; epistemologically, such historical knowledge is acquired tacitly. it is acquired not through conventional venues such as books or in a specific location such as a classroom, but through a vast network of informal and freely available sources. second, prosuming history includes the process of co-creating values. popular forms of prosumption involve unpaid work, as we see in most user-generated history projects. does this work possess any value? if we differentiate values into two categories, values for use, and values for exchange, we realize that prosumers engage in a process of co-creating values, be it historical, social or monetary. here we come across one of the classic ideas in public history, shared-authority, a term coined by michael frisch that means a collaborative and dialogical process that engages both the scholars and the public.19 frisch has recently elaborated on the issue of ‘audience’, indicating that ‘the notion that in public history ‘we’’ – whoever that is – generate historical ‘products’ and ‘communicate’ these to ‘them,’ whomever they may be. this is certainly an improvement over the conventional assumption that it is normal –literally, the norm – for academics, professionals or intellectuals to talk exclusively to each other. but it is a limited and limiting notion of public history, with the flow of intelligence, information and insight understood as unidirectional – a one-way street. it is immaterial whether ‘we’ understand ourselves to be using history to uplift and socialize the masses, or rather to subvert elites and de-center dominant cultural frames. whether top down or bottom up, the always implicit and sometimes explicit assumption is similar: public history involves a unidirectional flow from ‘us’ to ‘them’.20 while prosuming history shares some fundamental elements with a shared authority, it is more than interactive, collaborative and sharing. out of the prosumption emerges a brand-new social bound, knitted together and sustained by collective intelligence in both physical and virtual space. the ideal of collective intelligence implies the technical, economic, legal, and human enhancement of a universally distributed intelligence that will unleash a positive dynamic of recognition and skills mobilization.21 it is constantly enhanced and coordinated in real time, and results in the effective mobilization of skills. within the vastly complicated yet almost invisible network of collective intelligence, knowledge of the past is more than shared: it is reciprocal, interpenetrating and self-generative; it creates and multiplies values. consider today’s wildly popular historical video games in china. as an odd admixture of imaginative, playful, interactive and immersive elements, they combine spatiality, virtuality and simulation. massive multiplayer online role-playing games (mmrpgs), for example, demonstrate a broader and deeper level of collaboration in the virtual space. the interactive nature of digital media reveals that grassroots creativity, authority sharing and empowerment converge. many chinese-style mmrpgs, such as new semi-gods and semi-devils (xin tian long ba bu), fantasy westward journey (meng huan xi you) and grand narrative of westward journey (da hua xi you), integrate history and morality into fun, and have attracted a growing crowd of users. the new media ecology, characterized mostly by digital but also by transmedia storytelling, has already stirred a multitude of minds and provided new possibilities for the past. consequently, a shared authority and a tangible sense of ownership in virtual collaboration become incredibly empowering. third, if prosuming history is so pervasive, taking root in such a myriad of forms, and seemingly unstoppable, what is the means of prosumption? one critical agent stands out: media technology. the convergence of the new and old modes of media provides a novel model of revealing.22 whether media technology is merely a neutral tool offering a neutral space, or possesses an intrinsic, autonomous power to shape and transform society remains debatable. but one thing is certain: if the emergence of new technologies, particularly new communications systems, is a result of complex interactions among technological, social, cultural, political, legal and economic forces, different cultures and different political regimes are experimenting and exploiting nascent technologies in radically different ways. chinese culture is no exception. yet ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological’,23 media technology in china empowers and enfranchises; it spurs creativity, sparks collective imagination, and cultivates collective intelligence; it has progressively redefined prosumers and their relationship to the past. the social consequences and psychological effects of these technologies are tangible. socially, with extensive use of the internet and creative experiments with digital tools and platforms, prosumers start to create and disseminate their own historical narratives. a virtual, disembodied community – history aficionados, practitioners, armature historians – directly engages with its own history, develops skills related to information management and preservation and builds up its own archives. virtual history, born in the era of digital media, possesses a renewed and active sense of identity, ownership and citizenship. the past adopts a plural form: how are diverse versions of the past expressed and how do they multiply? which version of the past gains public attention? psychologically, when prosumers start to access information from their personal digital devises, technology extends their consciousness. as marshall mcluhan brilliantly claimed more than half a century ago, the technological extension of human consciousness has altered the patterns of thought and valuation, or the sense-ratio of the psychic and social complex.24 this extension also collectively affects prosumers’ thinking process and their sense of history. however, one mystery remains: how have previous waves of technological breakthroughs failed to ignite such sparks while the most recent one has succeeded in reaching the tipping point? the answer lies in the nature of the interactivity of digital media. when information flows vertically, it is consumed uncritically. in china, until the era of digital media, communications technologies worked in a unidirectional, hierarchical, highly centralized and largely closed system. print media, for example, has long been controlled and censored by the state to build up what benedict anderson called ‘imagined communities’.25 however, when history flows horizontally, multiplied by audience interaction, as the popular social media has powerfully demonstrated, it becomes self-generative, and a liberal public space is released. this newly released space presents prosumers with infinite possibilities that the previous forms of media technology lack: interactivity sparks the pent-up democratic impulse in grassroots movements within an authoritative regime, unleashes an outpouring of fresh ideas about the past and provides practical venues and tools to quench the thirst for history. in such an evolving virtual space, if an inchoate anticipatory democracy is yet to take shape, a different public has already formed. last, prosuming history takes place in an open structure. it exists in an infinite continuum. this is directly related to the decentralized, participatory, recycling, efficient and accelerative nature of digital media. the structure of prosumption involves a strong spatial implication. from the tacit dimension of historical knowledge to the anthropological space of knowledge, or cosmopedia, the released space invites dynamic engagement with different types of expressions.26 for example, private museums in china are taking a lead in creating sites of prosumption. the shanghai propaganda posters art centre, a private museum in shanghai, presents a telling case. it exhibits posters from the maoist period of communist china. the gallery is located in the basement of an apartment building in huashan road, in the former french concession. it consists of only two rooms, but with a rich collection of rare last-piece posters. the owner of the museum, peiming yang, who started collecting the posters as a hobby in 1995, is keeping the posters as an art form, and uses the gallery as a storytelling space. the word, propaganda, implies china’s thinly disguised censorship. but the very pejorative tone latent beneath these posters reveals some indigestible history in a profoundly palpable fashion. these posters also show how state-appropriated and manufactured knowledge has impacted ordinary chinese lives. two caveats despite a visible amount of positive energy released from prosuming history, two caveats deserve further deliberation. the first concerns human psychology. the impact of digital technology on the human brain and on the thinking process is not all positive. when the knowledge of the past is mechanized, first through print, then through new media – and when it grows too fast and too vast – it simply cannot be thoroughly absorbed by the human intellect. graham wallas argued persuasively that creative thought was dependent on the oral tradition and that the conditions favorable to it – personal contact and a consideration for others – were gradually disappearing with the increasing mechanization of knowledge.27 when vast amounts of unidentified historical images become available through social media, they should, ideally, increase the possibility of original research and provide a novel model of revealing historical truth. unfortunately, in most cases, prosumers are overwhelmed by floods of information. yet they are poorly prepared to interpret the information critically and historically, much less engage in deeper analytical thinking and decision-making. the easy repeatability of unidentified visual materials through digital platforms dramatizes the ephemeral and the superficial, and simultaneously deprives social judgment and creative thought. it is one thing to be able to know and read more, yet it is quite another to think, analyze and judge. a reading public may not necessarily be a thinking public. when media technology loads us with a vast amount of undifferentiated information, it exercises ‘a benevolent tyranny over us’,28 and often cripples our capacity to think. benjamin barber reminds us that ‘spectrum abundance, the multiplication of conduits and outlets is not the same as pluralism of content, programming, and software. in an information age, technology may simply help reinforce the conventional wisdom, diversity.’29 more subtly, we experience a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity with the information cascade. wallace stegner laments that ‘bright as the media are, they have little memory and little thought … thought is neither instant nor noisy … it thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience.’30 let us take a closer look at a booming number of user-generated history projects in china. most of them are more information based rather than knowledge based. they often lack critical judgment,and they do not generally present a coherent historical narrative. they involve far too little actual thinking, especially historical thinking, which always requires an attentive and critical mindset. in other cases, when the subjects of inquiry are contested, unsettled or difficult, such as oral histories of traumatic events, they can become visceral and emotionally charged, arousing feelings and sentiments and avoiding genuine argument based on reasoning.31 sifting, analyzing, critiquing the information freely available from various digital platforms should be a critical component of prosuming history. this is precisely why public history skills need to intervene, a point i will return to in the final section. the second issue is more specific to chinese culture. when the cult of documents turns into the cult of amateurs, the social power of media can backfire. at first glance, digital technology, especially social media, has released some positive energy, representing a new social reality and presenting possibility for a new collective imagination and intelligence, as we have seen in many cultures. however, whether grassroots consciousness poses a serious challenge to the existing political and cultural structures, or even constitutes a viable alternative to it, needs further deliberation. one needs to ask: who is in actual control over the past? or rather, will an increasingly liberal access to abundant information inevitably lead to a more democratic ethos? the early media conveyed news, gossip, opinion and ideas within particular social circles or communities, with little distinction between producers and consumers of information; they were an earlier version of social media. the vertical distribution of news, from a specialist elite to a general audience, had a decisive advantage over horizontal distribution among citizens. the new technologies of mass dissemination can reach large numbers of people with unprecedented speed and efficiency, but simultaneously put the control of the flow of information into the hands of a selected few. though both types of information control lead to public ignorance, the earlier one is visible, expected and accepted, while the more recent one is invisible, pervasive, subtle and, ultimately, more effective. to better control its more resourced citizens, china has started an ambitious and systematic experiment of digital dictatorship at a massive scale. the social credit system, which monopolizes personal big data, aims to score not only the financial creditworthiness of citizens, but also their social and possibly political behaviors. despite two large technical hurdles, the quality of the data and the sensitivity of the instruments to analyze it,32 the system reinforces censorship and fuels nationalism. private internet firms have long played an important role in censoring the content they and their users produce. more recently, censorship from the bottom-up has appeared. increasingly, ordinary chinese citizens are joining in to help the officials look out for ‘harmful’ content related to several broad categories.33 pierre lévy has made a bold point in his claim that ‘totalitarianism collapsed in the face of new forms of mobile and cooperative labor. it was incapable of collective intelligence’.34 no centralized power can completely control and censor what is essentially decentralized digital media. even if such a power wants to, the attempts to do so will eventually fail. conclusion prosuming history has radically redefined the concept of history and altered the dynamics of constructing the knowledge of the past in china. it offers a creative space in which to integrate history into an interactive and communicative experience. in this space, time becomes less linear, and the very idea of historical knowledge takes on a tacit implication. also in this space, historical thinking is constantly affected and reshaped. but while the old model works at a snail’s pace, the new model has not yet to constitute a viable alternative. a new generation of trained public historians is critical for accomplishing that transition. historically and socially, the patterns and impacts of the prosumption of history in china at such an unprecedented scale have yet to be evaluated. while there exists a cultural lag–a lapse of time between the changes in the habits of many individuals when they use new inventions and the changes that occur in the organizations comprised wholly or in part of these individuals35 – the perspective of prosumption will be significant for projecting the technology-driven public history in china in the coming decades. the vast amount of newly released, created, curated and archived historical data has generated a new kind of freedom. rather than being oppressed by the feeling that the major work has already been done, the key documents have already been exhausted and the canon for interpretation already established, prosumers work in novel terrain. a collective sense of being on the verge of discoveries looms large. the perspective of prosuming history opens up some fascinating new potentials: it nourishes serious discussions about core values in historical research; it allows us to envision the possibility for change; it helps us detect some coherent patterns behind such a radical process of historical knowledge building. asking larger and fresher questions beyond history textbooks, or reframing old questions in a new light, is more than an intellectual curiosity. it concerns the future of china’s past. endnotes 1 the word ‘scholars’ in the chinese context generally means ‘academic scholars’. 2 wang xi, ‘who owes history: the origin, development and challenge of american public history’, in historical research, vol 3, 2010, pp34-47. 3 alvin toffler, the third wave, morrow, new york,1980, p289, p278. 4 ibid, pp265-266. 5 alvin toffler and heidi toffler, revolutionary wealth: how it will be created and how it will change our lives, alfred a. knopf, new york, 2006, p172. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5842.2006.00818.x 6 karl marx, capital, vol 2, international publishers, new york, 1884. 7 jean baudrillard, the consumer society: myths and structures, sage, london, 1970/1998; john kenneth galbraith, the affluent society, houghton mifflin, boston, 1958. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526401502 8 philip kotler, ‘the prosumer movement: a new challenge for marketers’, advances in consumer research, vol 13, 1986, pp510-513. 9 george ritzer, ‘the ‘new’ world of prosumption: evolution, ‘return of the same,’ or revolution?’, sociological forum, vol 30, no 1, 2015, pp1-17. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12142 10 george ritzer and nathan jurgenson, ‘production, consumption, prosumption: the nature of capitalism in the age of the digital prosumer’, journal of consumer culture, vol 10, 2010, pp13–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540509354673 11 george ritzer, paul dean, and nathan jurgenson, ‘the coming age of the prosumer’, american behavioral scientist, vol 56, 2012, pp379–398. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764211429368 12 george ritzer, ‘the ‘new’ world of prosumption: evolution, ‘return of the same,’ or revolution?’ sociological forum, vol 30, no 1, 2015, pp1-17. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12142 13 after ritzer, rarely a ground-breaking work on consumption appears to shock the public consciousness. 14 see bill adair, benjamin filene, and laura koloski, letting go? sharing historical authority in a user-generated world, pew centre for arts & heritage, philadelphia, 2011. 15 henry jenkins, convergence culture: where old and new media collide, new york university press, new york, 2006. 16 claude lévi-strauss, the savage mind, university of chicago press, chicago, 1966, p257. 17 yesterday (zuotian), which is published electronically, is officially banned in china yet it enjoys enormous popularity among cr researches and witnesses. it is organized around different themes, for example, truth and reflection (2013) and responsibility of the witnesses (2014). yesterday is available at yesterday, as well as a few other digital journals, are available online at http://prchistory.org/electronic-journals-archive/. 18 michael polanyi, the tacit dimension, anchor books, new york, 1967, p21. 19 michael frisch, a shared authority: essays on the craft and meaning of oral and public history, state university of new york press, albany, 1990. 20 michael frisch, ‘public history is not a one-way street’, keynote presentation at the inaugural conference of associazione italiana di public history, ravenna, italy, 5-9 june, 2017. 21 pierre lévy, collective intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace, plenum trade, new york, 1997, p15. 22 martin heidegger, the question concerning technology and other essays, harper perennial modern thought, new york, 1977, p12. 23 ibid, p4. 24 marshall mcluhan, understanding media, the extensions of man, signet books, new york, 1964, p33. 25 benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, verso, london, 1983. 26 pierre lévy, collective intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. plenum trade, new york, 1997, p215. 27 graham wallas, social judgment, george allen and unwin, london, 1934. see also graham wallas, the art of thought, solis press, dorset, 1926/2014. 28 henry jenkins, david thorburn, and brad seawell (eds), democracy and new media, the mit press, cambridge, 2003, p25. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2328.001.0001 29 ibid, pp34-35. 30 wallace stegner, the sound of mountain water: the changing american west, vintage books, new york, 2017, p278. 31 na li, ‘history, memory, and identity: oral history in china’, oral history review, vol 47, no 1, 2020, pp26-51. https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2020.1714452 32 china’s digital dictatorship, the economist, 17 december 2016, pp14-20. 33 the party’s priorities are, in order: ‘political’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘pornographic’. 34 pierre lévy, collective intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace, plenum trade, new york, 1997, p3. 35 william fielding ogburn, ‘how technology changes society’, the annals of the american academy of political and social science, vol 249, 1947, p84. https://doi.org/10.1177/000271624724900111 articles (peer reviewed) seeing differently: understanding pākehā constructions of mountain landscapes in aotearoa lee davidson corresponding author: lee davidson, lee.davidson@vuw.ac.nz doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8199 article history: received 27/05/2022; accepted 24/08/2022; published 06/12/2022 introduction throughout the nineteenth century, colonists made sense of aotearoa’s mountains according to familiar european cultural forms that helped to construct an image of a ‘new’ and yet somehow familiar country. embracing the ‘mythology of exploration’, pākehā (european new zealanders) viewed the mountains as untrodden and uninhabited, and therefore ripe for appropriation and exploitation.1 through landscape painting, photography and cartography, mountains were rendered known and iconic, and by ‘knowing them, they possessed them’.2 mountain imagery was initially used to promote european exploration, science and emigration. by the late nineteenth century, the development of tourism saw a proliferation of images that promoted european ways of seeing mountains, while the introduction of the national park movement further cemented mountains as a ‘scenic playground’ within the nationbuilding project. while māori were closely associated with the development and promotion of tourism in thermal regions in aotearoa, they were largely absent from iconic mountain images, except where they were included as an exotic element and their relationships to maunga (mountains) framed as quaint or romantic myths and legends. this article explores pākehā constructions of mountain landscapes as part of a process of cultural colonisation during the nineteenth century, whereby colonising the land was facilitated by ‘controlling its interpretation’.3 in focussing on how pākehā appropriated mountains as a cultural landscape, the article does not attempt to explore in depth a māori perspective on these processes, except to provide some limited context to demonstrate the extent to which pākehā constructions ignored or misrepresented māori relationships with whenua (land).4 it is, however, informed by, and aspires to complement, recent literature from māori scholars and public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: davidson, l. 2022. seeing differently: understanding pākehā constructions of mountain landscapes in aotearoa. public history review, 29, 96–113. https://doi.org/10.5130/ phrj.v29i0.8199 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 96 mailto:lee.davidson@vuw.ac.nz https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8199 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8199 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8199 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj others presenting an indigenous perspective on the historical and contemporary management of cultural landscapes.5 as the article is concerned with how we see mountains, visual sources are key to my analysis, including sketches, paintings, photographs and maps, as well as tourist promotional material, such as brochures, guides, travel books and illustrated volumes. i begin by exploring the early production and dissemination of mountain imagery in aotearoa through the intertwined purposes of advancing european exploration, science and emigration. this imagery provided a foundation for mountain tourism publicity, produced from the 1870s to attract travellers to the ‘switzerland of the south’, and focussed on recreation and scenic appreciation with little or no reference to māori. i then consider how this construction of mountains helped enable a system of managing them as national parks for recreation and tourism that further denied māori relationships and rights to their maunga, before exploring how tourism publicity and interpretation represented māori following the establishment of national parks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. this is followed by discussion of developments since the 1970s, which have seen iwi (tribes) make some headway in obtaining ‘cultural redress’ and reestablishing control over mountains as ancestral landscapes. there remains, however, ‘ongoing tension’ between māori and pākehā in relation to the different ways they identify with and speak about mountains, evident in the evolving ways that legislation and conservation management plans for mountain regions are attempting to balance these differing worldviews.6 by connecting the past with the present, my intention is to contribute to understanding the historical precedents that make cultural redress and new models of management for mountains imperative. the genesis of this article was my involvement in a collaborative, largeformat illustrated book that celebrated the imagery used to promote mountain tourism in aotearoa.7 as a lifelong mountain recreationist who had researched and written about both historical and contemporary mountain culture, it was a dream project for me to help celebrate this culture and make some of its history better known to the wider public. however, while researching and writing the text for scenic playground: the story behind new zealand ’s mountain tourism, i had to confront the extent to which this celebratory narrative about aotearoa’s mountain culture is implicated in processes of cultural colonisation, the legacy of which we are still working to resolve today. as ecologist geoff park has argued, if you understand a landscape’s history ‘you see it differently’.8 working on scenic playground, i not only began to see mountains differently and to question my own identification with this narrative, but, as a public historian, i also grappled with how i could help others to see differently, too. without claiming to have found any definitive answers, i see it as the role of public history practice in aotearoa to draw from the burgeoning critical scholarship by both māori and pākehā, and to help introduce into public discourse a more nuanced understanding of our history and relationships with mountains/maunga. mountain images in the promotion of exploration, science and emigration european explorers and surveyors were the first promoters of aotearoa’s mountain landscapes through the production of images and maps, which were framed by european artistic conventions, scientific paradigms and the ideology of colonialism. among them were many accomplished artists, and their work was widely exhibited and used to illustrate travel and science books of the day. the topographical style of landscape painting they favoured was considered a means of ‘meticulously’ describing the physical landscape, and they saw themselves as producing ‘visual aids to the geologist, surveyor, explorer, settler’, much like a map or a diagram.9 william hodges, official artist on james cook’s second voyage (177274), made the first topographical studies of the new zealand landscape in watercolour and pencil.10 dusky bay, new zealand, painted on davidson public history review, vol. 29, 202297 26 march 1773, captures the mountains of southwest new zealand that greeted the explorers after four months at sea.11 hodges’ work illustrated cook’s journal, the first publication to bring new zealand to the attention of the outside world, revealing a strong contemporary sense that such images conveyed what words could not express and were, in some respects, more reliable than verbal descriptions.12 decades later, the young draughtsman and trained artist charles heaphy arrived in new zealand, employed by the new zealand company to help identify resources and secure land for settlement. heaphy’s topographical watercolour mt egmont from the southward (1840), while likely intended as an accurate rendering of the physical landscape, deployed a ‘strict and unnatural symmetry’ marking it as an icon – something sacred and intended to be contemplated as a symbol of eternity – as was the vogue in european landscape painting of the time.13 similarly, john buchanan, draughtsman with the otago geological survey, did not consider his work as art. his milford sound, looking northwest from freshwater basin (1863) – retrospectively acknowledged as another icon of new zealand art – was first publicly exhibited at the new zealand exhibition of 1865 in dunedin under ‘education works and appliances’ in the subclass of ‘specimens and illustrations of natural history and physical science’. charles heaphy (18201881), mt egmont from the southward, [1840]. (c025008, alexander turnbull library, wellington, new zealand. /records/23173901) lithographed prints of mt egmont from the southward, along with similar landscapes by heaphy and others, were used by the new zealand company to promote emigration and illustrated contemporary publications, including heaphy’s own narrative of a residence in various parts of new zealand (1842). aimed at a european reading public eager to learn about farflung parts of globe, illustrated travel books were extremely popular in the nineteenth century. their illustrations assured wouldbe settlers not only of available and fertile land, but of romantic scenery that would feel familiar and help overcome an ‘otherwise threatening otherness’.14 far from being ‘disinterested records or objects for aesthetic pleasure’, writes art historian priscilla pitts, such images were ‘weapons of cultural conquest, soft missiles in the imposition of a powerful colonizing vision’.15 another popular art genre at the time was the sublime, of which mountains were a favourite subject, along with storms, avalanches, torrents and volcanoes – in fact, any landscape feature that could arouse feelings of terror, darkness and gloom, vastness and aweinspiring power, and solitude and silence.16 davidson public history review, vol. 29, 202298 surveyors, scientists and travellers were drawn to new zealand’s mountains in search of the sublime, and cast themselves as heroic explorers of a vast and ‘empty’ land.17 in the preface to his book travels in new zealand: with contributions to the geography, geology, botany, and natural history of that country, published in london in 1843, the naturalist ernst dieffenbach claimed ‘i have been over much untrodden ground. i was the first to visit or describe mount egmont.’ on 25 december 1839, he and his companion james heberley reached the summit of taranaki maunga, or mount egmont as they knew it. from the peak they surveyed the landscape with a ‘panoptic gaze’, commanding the land stretched out beneath them – north along the coastline to kāwhia and the waikato, inland to ruapēhu, and south towards cook strait.18 when this view was obscured by fog, dieffenbach set about calculating the altitude by measuring the temperature of boiling water. his matteroffact account of his climb, along with ‘unvarnished descriptions’ of geological features, flora and fauna, was intended to indicate its accuracy as a record of exploration.19 describing the topography, taking measurements and collecting specimens was a means of establishing symbolic ownership.20 he also viewed the scene with a romantic eye and appraised its future value as an aesthetic resource. ‘in future times,’ he predicted, ‘this picturesque valley, as well as mount egmont and the smiling open land at its base, will become as celebrated for their beauty as the bay of naples, and will attract travellers from all parts of the globe’.21 by making the deeply problematic assumption of being first, dieffenbach and others perpetuated the ‘mythology of exploration’, largely ignoring or trivialising existing māori connections with their maunga.22 though he had relied heavily on māori guides to make his ascent, dieffenbach wrote that they would accompany him only as far as the snowline and refused to go further due to ‘lively imaginations’ and ‘gross superstition’.23 he apparently failed to appreciate the extent to which mountains were both a ‘natural’ and spiritual landscape for māori – part of a ‘cosmoscape’ that combined biophysical knowledge and a culturally determined worldview, and ‘within which the place of humans is defined and their actions governed and regulated’.24 for māori, mountains are sacred tūpuna (ancestors). they possess mauri – a life force that pervades and connects all natural phenomena, including humans – meaning that any use or interaction with it must be respectful and appropriate, enhancing rather than diminishing its mana (prestige). they are in this sense ‘ancestral landscapes’, in which ancestors are ‘the original trustees and the centrality of trusteeship values guid[e] present and future generations’.25 for example, oral traditions tell of ancestors ascending taranaki maunga to lay claim to the surrounding landscape – not so different from what the europeans did in turn.26 by not venturing to the summit, dieffenbach’s guides were respecting a tapu (spiritual restriction) on subsequent ascents that protected the mountain’s mana and that of the iwi who were connected to it. while europeans portrayed mountains as ‘untouched’, archaeological records suggest that māori were ‘thorough explorers’, and that they travelled through mountainous regions and sometimes settled in areas such as the matukituki valley in the tititea/mount aspiring region.27 that māori were intimately familiar with alpine regions is demonstrated not only by the geographical knowledge, navigational and survival skills that made them indispensable guides for european explorers, but also by the specificity of the language they had to describe different types of snow, ice and glacier features.28 in fact, māori had a profound understanding of the geology and geography of the landscape they inhabited, which was conveyed through myths and stories. while many europeans dismissed these as naïve and quaint, the austrian geologist ferdinand von hochstetter who, along with german geologist and surveyor julius von haast, spent 1859–60 carrying out a survey for the new zealand government ‘was amazed at how well the maori [sic] knew their country. not only were plants and animals named but all water courses, mountains, hills, rocks, sinkholes and other features also had their specific tags, as well as some legend or other to explain their origins.’29 davidson public history review, vol. 29, 202299 along with visually capturing the landscape through sketching and painting, the key tasks of the surveyors were naming and mapping. cartography was another ‘imperial technology’ used to display and celebrate exploration.30 renaming was a strategy of cultural construction that involved making the landscape feel more familiar to settlers and, in conjunction with mapping, reinforced the notion of ‘empty space’ available for appropriation.31 european naming and mapping overrode māori conventions which encapsulated and preserved their preexisting relationships and histories. māori identity and worldview is ‘inextricably linked to land and place’, and emphasised in whakapapa (genealogy), which encapsulates layers of meaning about the world and their place in it.32 place names are: echoed in the tribe’s whakapapa and recounted through ancient and historical stories, waiata (song) and whakapapa recitations... across new zealand, each mountain represents a particular tribal group or hapū and the names recalled in stories symbolise the groups’ connections to the landscape.33 naming was critical to māori ‘mental maps’, through which biophysical knowledge was located in time and place, alongside layers of mythical, spiritual and historical information. this cultural landscape ‘acted as a mnemonic whereby knowledge of past events could be remembered and recalled by walking the land and retelling the narratives pertaining to that place’.34 the surveys of haast, heaphy and others created publicity for new zealand’s mountains, both at home and abroad. reports of their alpine excursions were published in local newspapers. in 1864, haast and james hector – then director of the geological survey of otago – presented papers to the royal geographical society (rgs) in london on their recent mountain exploration. haast enthusiastically informed his ‘wealthy and fashionable’ audience of potential scientisttourists that ‘a chain of such magnitude as the southern alps of new zealand… is probably without parallel in the known world’ and ripe for geographical exploration and scientific discovery.35 gaining entry to the rgs validated the exploration work of haast and hector and offered them opportunities for social mobility, career advancement, public recognition and financial reward. haast commissioned the nelsonbased artist john gully to produce twelve watercolours to illustrate his lecture. working from haast’s original topographical sketches, gully appealed to the aesthetic tastes of the audience by poeticising the scenes with picturesque foregrounds, spectator figures and atmospheric effects of clouds, light and mist.36 both papers were published in the society’s journal, along with a report of the survey work of james mckerrow in the lake districts of otago and southland and a map detailing their journeys, thereby further cementing a western cultural view of the mountains.37 professional artists soon followed explorers and surveyors in creating a visual framing of mountain landscapes in the conventions of the romantic and sublime. one of the earliest travelling artists was george french angas, an english settler in south australia, who made a sixmonth journey through the north island in 1844. his main subjects were scenes of māori life, and mountains often provided the background to his drawings and watercolours. however, there is no evidence that angas appreciated the cultural significance of mountains to māori. in his 1847 book savage life and scenes in australia and new zealand, he described a view of tongariro in romantic superlatives and declared he ‘wished there had been other than savages to have gazed with me upon its glories’.38 in framing māori culture as ‘savage’, angas anticipated its demise under the ‘civilising’ influence of european culture, providing further justification for the colonial project.39 his work was exhibited in london and reproduced as coloured lithographs in the new zealanders illustrated, published in london in 1847 as a limited edition of 200 copies. subscribers to this popular tenpart series included queen victoria and prince albert, along with other aristocrats and political figures. davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022100 later arrivals included melbournebased, europeantrained artists nicholas chevalier and eugene von guérard. in 1865, chevalier was sponsored by the otago and canterbury provincial councils to create a ‘pictorial survey’ in the hope of encouraging immigration. his work was widely exhibited in new zealand and abroad. chevalier’s visit coincided with the new zealand wars, fought between some iwi and the crown and its allies between 1845 and 1872. while several of chevalier’s landscape paintings included māori figures, his notes suggest he subscribed to derogatory stereotypes of māori prevalent at the time and supported their suppression by the government forces.40 von guérard, who visited in the late 1870s, produced oil paintings of mountain scenes at milford sound and lake wakatipu which starred at international exhibitions around the world over the next decade, becoming the ‘most widely exhibited new zealand paintings of the nineteenth century’.41 many local artists were also prolific producers of landscape art. among them was charles decimus barraud, a wellingtonbased pharmacist and amateur artist, whose work was popular and widely exhibited. in addition to his work for haast, john gully, one of the most successful new zealand artists of the period, royal geographical society (great britain), john gully (18191888), mt cook with the hooker glacier, from the mueller glacier [1862]. (c096011, alexander turnbull library, wellington, new zealand. /records/22912869) davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022101 produced many watercolours of south island landscapes, which were exhibited throughout new zealand, australia and europe.42 photography was also beginning to play a role in promoting and publicising the mountains in this period. displayed in public places and exhibitions and sold commercially, photographs reached a wider audience than landscape paintings and conveyed a greater sense of fidelity in documenting the landscape.43 nonetheless, photography was, like art, a means of picturing and appropriating places, as photographers selected and framed their scenes according to the prevailing ‘imaginative geography’.44 surveyor and photographer edward sealy took some of the earliest photographic images of the mount cook region during expeditions in the late 1860s and early 1870s, including an expedition in 1869 with haast. sealy’s alpine photographs were exhibited at various venues around christchurch, including the museum, and at international exhibitions.45 commercial photographers also catered to a public appetite for alpine imagery. the burton brothers, whose studio opened in dunedin in 1866, travelled the length of new zealand to capture images of the landscape in hardtoreach places, including fiordland in 1874 and the mueller and hooker glaciers in 1875.46 mountains were a key part of the imagery used at international exhibitions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct a visual narrative of how new zealanders saw themselves and how they wanted the world to see them, beginning with landscape painting, maps and scientific specimens, and later including photography.47 the catalogue for new zealand’s displays at the 1880 melbourne international exhibition, which attracted 1.3 million visitors, shows that scientific and exploratory work, along with art and photography, profiled the mountains as a key feature of the nationbuilding project. on display was the work of landscape artists charles blomfield, barraud and gully, and illustrations by buchanan. the survey department sent 100 photographic views and photo lithographs. haast’s report on the geology of canterbury and westland was there, along with hector’s geological reports, maps and models that he had created of the ‘topographical and geological volcanic system of ruapehu and tongariro’. the hokitika local committee sent photos of westland scenery, glaciers, and snowclad hills. other photographs depicted ruapehu, tongariro and panoramic views of the wakatipu district. promoting mountain tourism early surveyors and explorers, including dieffenbach, had predicted the potential for future development of mountain tourism, as did haast in 1862 when working for the canterbury provincial council. writing in a lengthy letter to local newspapers, haast extolled ‘the beauty of the southern alps’, envisaging the creation of a europeanstyle mountain resort at mount cook and predicting that ‘the time will surely come when pilgrims from all parts of the southern hemisphere will hasten to visit these mountains’.48 in the 1870s, the opening of the suez canal and a royal tour by prince alfred helped make tourism from europe a more desirable and practical option, at least for the wealthy.49 in the same decade, prominent new zealanders and overseas boosters began working together to nurture the idea of new zealand as an attractive place to travel. mountain scenery was envisaged as a key drawcard for prospective visitors, with promotion material emphasising romantic and sublime qualities, and the sense of accessible adventure, despite mountain regions remaining difficult to access for all but the most adventurous travellers. governor bowen (18681873) was one early influencer. he visited milford sound in 1871 and mount cook in 1873, after which he reportedly alerted the royal geographical society and the alpine club london to the ‘fresh field for exploration afforded by the mountains and glaciers of the southern alps’ and assured them of ‘every aid and encouragement from the colonial government’.50 in this, bowen was astutely aware of the potential publicity that might come from encouraging a relatively recent type of mountain tourist. davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022102 from the mideighteenth century, the sport of mountaineering had emerged in the european alps. by the 1850s, english climbers dominated the sport. although mountaineers were a minority in victorian society, their sport was wellaligned with the prevailing trends in art and science, as well as widely embraced nineteenthcentury values such as the desire to overcome difficulties cheerfully. mountaineering, they argued, also provided an antidote to the escalating moral decay of urban society.51 the first alpine club was established in london in 1857. by 1880, the english and their continental guides had climbed all the major peaks in the alps and began looking for fresh challenges abroad, thereby extending the colonial project as a new breed of explorers seeking out first ascents.52 the reverend william spotswood green arrived in new zealand in 1882, lured by photographs of the southern alps and haast’s geology of the provinces of canterbury and westland (1879) which, with its rapturous descriptions of the incomparable sublimity of the mountains, photographs by burton brothers and sealy and ‘wonderful map’, had created ‘considerable interest’ in the southern alps at home and abroad.53 although green was unsuccessful in achieving his main objective of the first ascent of mount cook, his visit helped spark an interest in mountaineering among the colonials during the 1880s. by 1891, the new zealand alpine club (nzac) was formed. many early new zealand climbers were also avid mountain publicists, taking photographs and writing books, newspaper articles, and pamphlets to encourage the wider public to view the mountains as spaces for recreation and scenic appreciation.54 illustrated publications featuring mountains began to address wouldbe tourists more explicitly during this period. new zealand: graphic and descriptive, published in london in 1877, repeated the bynow familiar comparisons with switzerland and asserted that ‘when the members of the alpine club become aware of the wonderful beauty of the new zealand alps, their almost virgin summits will be made as famous to us as the grand peaks of their swiss namesakes’.55 new zealand scenery, another collaboration by haast and gully, was published the same year. the impressive largeformat book featured chromolithographs of gully’s original watercolour drawings of mountain landscapes. in the accompanying text, haast accentuated both recent discovery and ease of access. playing the role of explorer, he enticed prospective travellers with engaging firsthand accounts and his trademark romantic superlatives: all at once a view of greater magnificence than the most enthusiastic imagination can conceive bursts upon the traveller as he ascends the high moraine that encircles the mueller glacier… the eye takes in at one glance the deep valley of the hooker glacier, bounded by the lofty and majestic pyramid of mount cook, which rises high into the clear sky, a towering mass of rugged crags of ice and snow… this portion of the southern alps, never before trodden by the foot of man, was first explored by the writer in 1862, who discovered a system of glaciers of larger dimensions than any hitherto known in the temperate regions of the world… they have since been repeatedly visited by european travellers, and are so easy of access that even ladies find little trouble in the ascent, as they can be reached without difficulty by riding up to their terminal face on horseback.56 alongside mount egmont, or taranaki, haast depicted māori relationships with mountains in terms of ‘wonderful legends… handed down from remote times’, and repeated the impression articulated by dieffenbach more than thirty years earlier that the ‘natives have a superstitious dread of approaching [mount egmont], as they look on it as a sacred mountain, and believe it to be the abode of the dreaded ngarara, a huge reptilian monster, endowed with some extraordinary power over their lives for evil’.57 from the 1880s, the government became involved in tourism promotion with the survey office producing tourist maps and brochures, which were a particular innovation in advertising material. their physical structure, often with folded frames combining text and images, was portable, ephemeral and easily disseminated. focusing on specific regions, they identified tourism sites and created desire using recognisable signs and symbols.58 the department’s series of brochures all included maps, information on transport and accommodation options, advertisements for thomas cook, and sketches of scenery. the davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022103 railways department also began promoting mountain tourism, with posters from around 189095 featuring exquisite line drawings of mountain scenes, alongside maps and information about combined rail and coach fares. t. brodrick and w. styche, nz dept of lands survey, map of the mt. cook dist: shewing the hermitage accommodation house, mountain ranges, glaciers, tracks, reserves, etc., 1903. (alexander turnbull library, mapcoll 834.47a 1903 47488) at the end of the 1880s, the development of new zealand’s infant tourism industry was put on show at dunedin’s new zealand and south seas exhibition, where 625,000 visitors were exposed to a concentrated effort to promote tourism, including the mountain variety. there were exhibits by the railways department, cook and sons and the union steam ship company, all distributing maps and pamphlets for various parts of the country and offering tickets from dunedin to queenstown, lake wanaka and mount cook. the walls of the railways exhibit were adorned with a map of transport routes, photographs supplied by the survey office and ‘a trophy of ice axes for alpine climbing’.59 the canterbury land office produced a map of the mount cook region, marking the routes of early surveyors and more recent mountaineering expeditions. the press was confident it would ‘attract considerable attention from visitors from australia and elsewhere’.60 the exhibition’s lakes district subcommittee commissioned the journalist and mountaineer malcolm ross to write a complete guide to the lakes of central otago: the switzerland of australasia. illustrated with sketches, some worked from photographs by professional photographers, and a survey department map, davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022104 the guide sought to ‘to place in the hands of tourists a reliable description of the magnificent scenery of wakatipu, wanaka, and hawea lakes, combined with all the necessary information regarding routes, accommodation, and expenses’.61 a panorama of mount cook and tasman glacier was displayed in an exhibition reading room. this photograph, which received a special award, was reportedly ‘pronounced by experts who have seen it to be one of the finest of the kind in the colony, and it attracts great attention, more particularly from australian visitors’.62 the press newspaper described the photographic mission to mount cook that produced this panorama as a ‘work of colonial importance’ for making: known for the first time, even to residents in the colony, the wonders in the way of peaks and glaciers which we possess almost at our doors, but of whose existence most of us have hitherto been profoundly ignorant. to the world at large they will show that new zealand possesses alpine scenery of virgin freshness and on a scale of majesty not to be surpassed in any part of the world. no better advertisement to attract tourists to this colony has yet appeared.63 tourism promotion at the dunedin exhibition was the culmination of a decade of more coordinated effort, alongside a growing perception that making the country’s mountains known to the new zealand public and attracting visitors from abroad was vital to progress and nationbuilding. while tourism publicity both shaped and reflected new zealand’s growing sense of identity, mountain scenes came to dominate other formats. the first postcard issued by the new zealand post office, in december 1897, featured four aorangi, new zealand; a picturesque sanatorium of the south pacific, n.z. survey dept, wellington, 1888. (ephdtourism188802, alexander turnbull library, wellington, new zealand) davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022105 vignettes of scenic landmarks, three of which were alpine scenes (and the fourth a geyser). over 300,000 were sold within seven months.64 alpine scenes also dominated the first set of thirteen ‘pictorial’ postage stamps, issued in 1898. a call for designs that would be ‘scenic and representative’ prompted a slew of submissions featuring mount cook, milford sound and mount taranaki, despite the significant challenge of representing expansive landscapes on a miniature scale.65 only the south island mountains made the final cut. a rural landscape design was also turned down – pointing to the centrality of ‘wild’ mountains as a symbol of new zealand’s emerging identity and adding a layer of official legitimacy to this position.66 the stamps were popular and profitable. in 1899 new zealanders sent 35 million letters by post, while thousands of stamps were snapped up by collectors. the overseas response was also extremely positive, with one commentator noting that they were evidence that ‘in mountain scenery new zealand is a serious rival of norway’.67 the national park movement thus, by the late nineteenth century, mountains were clearly framed as a tourism landscape in european cultural terms and in the work of promoting them to tourists as vital to progress and nationbuilding. as alpine regions became increasingly viable as tourism destinations, concerns were raised about protecting their scenic qualities. in the early 1880s, there were calls for the crown to purchase the three volcanoes of the central plateau from māori to exploit their scenic potential. at the time, paramount chief horonuku te heuheu tukino iv of ngāti tuwharetoa declined to sell his tribal land.68 in 1887, amid growing pressure from neighbouring iwi and concern that tongariro would be divided and sold ‘piece by piece’, te heuheu transferred his interest in the land around the three peaks to the crown for the establishment of new zealand’s first national park.69 in parliamentary debates on the establishment of the national park, tourism potential was a particularly persuasive argument, as it transformed what was seen as otherwise ‘unproductive scenery’ into an additional resource to add to the wealth of the young colony. protecting natural scenic areas from ‘inappropriate’ development was also a concern.70 after a sevenyear delay, tongariro was gazetted as new zealand’s first national park in 1894. te heuheu’s act, motivated by a desire to protect the sacred nature of tongariro and the mana of ngāti tuwharetoa for whom it was an ancestral landscape, has historically been referred to as a ‘gift’, and remains so in the department of conservation’s tongariro national park management plan.71 the ‘gift’ has become an enduring foundational myth for the national park movement in aotearoa, suggesting amicable bicultural origins. however, boast argues that this ‘benign, comfortable and useful’ story obscures the messy and complex nature by which the crown acquired the total land area that ultimately became tongariro national park.72 furthermore, the waitangi tribunal found in 2013 that the original intention was one of partnership with – rather than transfer of ownership to – the crown.73 mount egmont/taranaki, which had been confiscated under the new zealand settlements act 1863 in the wake of the taranaki land wars, was established as new zealand’s second national park in 1900, following concerns about extensive forest loss caused by european settlement. ownership of aoraki/mount cook had been assumed by the crown as part of a major land purchase in the 1840s, although the south island ngāi tahu iwi, for whom the mountain is a tupuna, protested that the sale deed never included the southern alps.74 the mountain first received protected status in 1885, although mount cook national park was not established until 1953. the national park concept, which had begun with yellowstone in the united states in 1872, demarcated landscapes as ‘untouched’ natural spaces from which signs of human habitation should be removed. this artificial separation of nature and culture meant that past cultural histories might be acknowledged, but ongoing relationships were downplayed. for example, although te heuheu was reportedly motivated by the davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022106 desire to protect the sacredness of the mountains to his iwi, in lake taupo and the volcanoes (1901), james cowan claimed that in handing them to the state to become a national park the tapu was removed, and they were no longer as sacred as they once were. what remained was the ‘halo of legendary romance… for they were as [s]acred ground in the eyes of maori until recently’.75 cowan interwove descriptions of the scenery with ‘quaint’ stories from ‘dim long ago’ to provide ‘human interest’, but a quarter century later, when he wrote the first official guidebook for the park, scenery and recreational activities were centre stage, and details about tongariro as a māori cultural landscape were confined to the back of the book.76 parliamentary debates at the time of the tongariro national park bill (1922) canvassed ideas on how to better acknowledge te heuheu’s original ‘gifting’ of the land. suggestions ranged from producing an illustrated book of māori legends, to constructing a monument to the chief or a māori village, which might also function as a tourist attraction.77 thus, by framing mountains as exclusively natural landscapes, the crown’s appropriation of mountain landscapes for national parks further erased māori cultural associations at the same time as protecting these spaces from commercial developments that might jeopardise their ‘natural’ qualities.78 māori in twentieth century mountain tourism publicity while māori were prominent in general tourism publicity, mostly in the form of a ‘poigirl hakawarrior’ motif, throughout the early twentieth century, mountain publicity continued to be largely devoid of images or reference to māori – perpetuating the nineteenthcentury blind spot on tangata whenua’s relationships with their maunga.79 a limited understanding of how māori voices might be included in a mountain narrative was also evident in the few examples of publicity where māori and mountains were intertwined. reflecting the ‘remarkably limited vocabulary of māori imagery’, the 1930s poster visit new zealand wonderland of the pacific featured a māori woman in the foreground, draped in a kahu kiwi (kiwi feather cloak) and with a bared shoulder, a geyser immediately behind her to the left, and the chateau tongariro and mountains in the distant background.80 the image also featured on the cover of the international magazine travel in september 1936 and was included in a set of poster stamps produced by the tourist department in 1937. while it was a rare combination of mountains and māori in tourism publicity, it represented an assemblage of the dominant symbols of new zealand tourism at the time, rather than an acknowledgement of a special relationship between māori and mountains. in a similar way, a set of photographs from the same era to promote the mount cook motor company positioned a tableau of three māori with the southern alps in the background. male and female figures are dressed in korowai (tassled cloaks) and another female wears a piupiu (waist garment) and pare (bodice). the women are holding poi. they gaze to the side. looking directly neither at the mountains nor the camera, they seem strangely disconnected from their setting. in the 1950s, an historical māori association with tongariro was still being used in promotion to add a touch of exotic thrill to a now domesticated scene. ‘the old maoris,’ informed the narrator of the film tongariro national park (1951), ‘say that in the long ago this district was inhabited by fairies and goblins and paid great respect to the gods of the mountain’, but now it is a setting ‘for fascinating and delightful’ gentle walks through bush with ‘the soothing distant swell of mountain streams’, and picnic lunches by waterfalls. glamorouslooking women in skirts, sundresses and lowheeled shoes clamber around ketetahi springs, which we are told many māori insist is peopled by ‘weird supernatural creatures’. on a steamer trip up the wanganui river, chateau guests receive a ‘friendly smile’ from local māori in canoes. the wild landscape and ‘savages’ encountered by nineteenthcentury travellers had been tamed. davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022107 on the terrace, chateau tongariro. mt. ngauruhoe in background. (photographer mr clark, archives new zealand, communicate new zealand collection item code r24459484, record number a66190) recent developments in the management of mountain landscapes the 1970s were a period of cultural and political revitalisation for māori, when protest movements challenged both popular narratives of new zealand as a nation and dominant interpretations of new zealand history.81 it was in this climate that the waitangi tribunal was established in 1975 to hear claims regarding breaches of the treaty of waitangi, which was signed by māori chiefs and the british crown in 1840 and is considered to be the founding document of aotearoa new zealand. since then, treaty settlements negotiated between individual iwi and the crown have included both commercial and cultural redress. cultural redress has included various measures to acknowledge iwi relationships with and rights to participate in decisionmaking regarding their maunga. under the ngāi tahu settlement (1998), the crown vested ownership of aoraki/mount cook in te rūnanga o ngāi tahu, which then gifted the mountain back to the crown to remain under the management of the department of conservation. renamed aoraki/mount cook, an ‘overlay’ of ngāi tahu values was placed over the mountain through the concept of a tōpuni, with the intention that these values be ‘recognised, acknowledged and provided for’.82 this included that the department avoid harming or diminishing these values, and encourage ‘respect for’ and an ‘accurate portrayal of ’ ngāi tahu’s association with aoraki.83 ngāi tahu’s cultural mapping project, kā huru manu, has subsequently recorded and mapped thousands of traditional place names and associated stories within the ngāi tahu rohe (tribal area), including the southern alps, in an effort to reassert their historical association and relationship with the whenua, and make it accessible to iwi members and the wider public.84 in 1978, mount egmont also underwent a process of vesting and gifting back, and in 1986, the mountain’s official name was changed to mount taranaki or mount egmont after much community debate. the crown and ngā iwi o taranaki are currently in the final stages of negotiating a collective cultural davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022108 redress package that includes restoring the mana of taranaki maunga by returning its original name and recognising it as ‘a living, indivisible whole’.85 in addition, egmont national park, which contains more than 100 sites of cultural significance to māori, will be renamed te papakura o taranaki, and potentially the mountain will be granted its own legal personality and protections under the law, following the precedent set by te urewera (2014). in 1986, tongariro national park was nominated for world heritage status as both a natural and cultural site. in 1990, unesco approved its listing as a natural site, but deferred its decision on the cultural listing because the criteria at the time required tangible evidence of cultural use. in 1992, following representations on the issue from new zealand, the world heritage commission agreed a major revision to their criteria for cultural sites. this accepted cultural landscapes as a new category, including the subtype of associative cultural landscape, being those where world heritage status is justifiable ‘by virtue of powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element rather than material cultural evidence, which may be insignificant or even absent’.86 the department of conservation submission to unesco in 1993 in support of tongariro national park’s listing as a site of universal cultural significance included this quote from an anonymous tuwharetoa spokesperson: we look upon [the maunga] with deep respect and reverence and a tinge of many other complimentary emotions, pride certainly being one of them. proud that they are ours (te ha o taku maunga ko taku manawa – the breath of my mountain is my heart), and proud that they are bequeathed to the nation who as nature lovers accord them their deep respect. our reverence for the mountains goes deeper than that in time, with the essence of our genealogies, all life forms originated from the same parents papatuanuku the earth mother and ranginui the sky father so that man and all other life forms are in harmony with one another in the bonds of kinship.87 the uniqueness of ‘the gift’ from an indigenous people, thereby establishing ‘a threefold bond amongst the land, maori and pakeha’, was also part of the justification presented by the department of conservation.88 the submission made note of the centenary celebrations of horonuku’s gift in 1987, including the opening of the whakapapa visitors centre in tongariro national park, the design and content of which, it argued, was ‘strongly evocative of the cultural and spiritual values of the mountains and of their connections to ngati tuwharetoa’ and had been developed with iwi involvement.89 in 1993, tongariro became the first site inscribed on the world heritage list under these revised criteria, and one of the first in the world to be given a dual listing.90 despite the progress that has been made, ‘cultural bias continues to be a point of contention’ in new zealand’s conservation management.91 most conservation legislation was enacted prior to the first treaty settlements and still embodies the original national park movement principles of preserving landscapes in their ‘natural’ state, rather than managing them as cultural landscapes.92 in this context, the legal personality framework has been seen as an opportunity to implement a ‘biocultural’ conservation approach, including recognition of the importance of the ‘connection of people to place, and of operating within a knowledge practicebelief complex’.93 while it is still a very recent and evolving approach to managing mountains, and not embraced by all, there is some optimism that it could lead to more effective cogovernance and help move conservation management beyond an outdated nature/culture dichotomy. conclusion early colonial visions of mountains were part of a process of claiming a land and building a nation by encoding them with the contemporary european conventions of science, exploration, art and tourism. but the construction of the new zealand landscape as ‘scenic’ and as a valuable tourism resource has obscured davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022109 other relationships, identities and ways of seeing mountains.94 most significant has been the way in which māori were alienated from their ancestral landscapes and largely excluded from aotearoa’s mountain stories. while much has changed since the colonial period, some things have endured. promotional formats and techniques may have evolved over time, but, as francis pound argued in frames on the land, the concepts embodied in eighteenth and nineteenthcentury landscape painting still shape the way we look at nature today. tourists come to new zealand ‘looking to see nature as pictures’ and many scenic subjects have changed little since the 1800s, illustrating the longevity of the mountain view established by european settlers in that century.95 seeing mountains as ‘untouched’ nature also remains central to conservation management in new zealand, although this is starting to change through the process of cultural redress and the introduction of legal personality and biocultural approaches. geoff park has argued for a ‘future landscape vision’, ‘in which the relationships between environment, place, nature and culture, territory, land knowledge and rights are discussed’.96 to achieve this vision, and to develop new models to care for treasured mountain landscapes, we need public history that acknowledges and communicates colonial constructions of mountains and their legacy, thereby evolving a national mountain narrative and ways of seeing mountains that are enriched by dual cultural perspectives. endnotes 1 simon ryan, the cartographic eye: how explorers saw australia, cambridge university press, cambridge, 1996, p61. 2 peter gibbons, ‘cultural colonization and national identity’, in new zealand journal of history, vol 36, no 1, 2002, pp1011. 3 ibid; giselle byrnes, boundary markers: land surveying and the colonisation of new zealand, bridget williams books, wellington, 2001, p5. 4 whenua is also the word for placenta, thereby evoking an ‘interconnected ecology to which people belong, rather than it belonging to them.’ see geoff park, theatre country: essays on landscape and whenua, victoria university press, wellington, 2006, p100. 5 see, for example, jacinta ruru, ‘indigenous peoples’ ownership and management of mountains: the aotearoa/ new zealand experience’, in indigenous law journal, no 3, 2004, pp11137; phil o’b. lyver et al., ‘building biocultural approaches into aotearoa – new zealand’s conservation future’, in journal of the royal society of new zealand, vol 49, no 3, 2019, pp394411, https://doi.org/10.1080/03036758.2018.1539405; mereana barrett, krushil watene and patty mcnicholas, ‘legal personality in aotearoa new zealand: an example of integrated thinking on sustainable development’, in accounting, auditing & accountability journal, vol 33, no 7, 2020, pp170530, https://doi.org/10.1108/aaaj0120193819; katherine sanders, ‘“beyond human ownership”? property, power and legal personality for nature in aotearoa new zealand’, in journal of environmental law, vol 30, no 2, 2018, pp20734, https://doi.org/10.1093/jel/eqx029; mihnea tănăsescu, ‘rights of nature, legal personality, and indigenous philosophies’, in transnational environmental law, vol 9, no 3, 2020, pp42953, https://doi.org/10.1017/s2047102520000217; catherine j. iorns magallanes, ‘improving the global environmental rule of law by upholding indigenous rights: examples from aotearoa new zealand’, in global journal of comparative law, vol 7, no 1, 2018, pp6190, https://doi.org/10.1163/2211906x00701004. 6 lyn carter, ‘naming to own: place names as indicators of human interaction with the environment’, in alternative: an international journal of indigenous peoples, vol 1, no 1, 2005, pp624, https://doi.org/10.1177/117718010500100102. 7 peter alsop, dave bamford and lee davidson, scenic playground: the story behind new zealand’s mountain tourism, te papa press, wellington, 2018. 8 park, op cit, p98. 9 francis pound, frames on the land: early landscape painting in new zealand, collins, auckland, 1983, pp17, 36. 10 ibid, p36. 11 roger blackley, two centuries of new zealand landscape art, auckland city art gallery, auckland, 1990. 12 john bonehill, ‘landfall and landmark: captain james cook and the crew of resolution at dusky bay, new zealand, in or about april 1773’, in landscapes, vol 7, no 1, 2006, pp3753, https://doi.org/10.1179/lan.2006.7.1.37. 13 pound, op cit, pp5658; blackley, op cit; hamish keith, images of early new zealand, bateman, auckland, 1983. 14 ryan, op cit, p61. 15 priscilla pitts, ‘the unquiet earth’, in mary barr (ed), headlands: thinking through new zealand art, the museum, sydney, 1992, p88. davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022110 https://doi.org/10.1080/03036758.2018.1539405 https://doi.org/10.1108/aaaj-01-2019-3819 https://doi.org/10.1093/jel/eqx029 https://doi.org/10.1017/s2047102520000217 https://doi.org/10.1163/2211906x-00701004 https://doi.org/10.1177/117718010500100102 https://doi.org/10.1179/lan.2006.7.1.37 16 pound, op cit. 17 byrnes, op cit. 18 ibid. 19 ernst dieffenbach, travels in new zealand: with contributions to the geography, geology, botany, and natural history of that country, j. murray, london, 1843, piii. 20 ryan, op cit. 21 dieffenbach, op cit, p161. 22 ryan, op cit. 23 dieffenbach, op cit, p156. 24 mere roberts, ‘mind maps of the maori’, in geojournal, vol 77, no 6, 2012, p748, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708010 93835. 25 merata kawharu, ‘ancestral landscapes and world heritage from a māori viewpoint’, in journal of the polynesian society, vol 118, no 4, 2009, p322. 26 graham langton, ‘a history of mountain climbing in new zealand to 1953’, phd thesis, university of canterbury, 1996. 27 w.a. taylor, lore and history of the south island māori, bascands ltd, christchurch, 1952, p141. 28 byrnes, op cit; barry brailsford, greenstone trails: the māori and pounamu, 2nd edition, stoneprint press, hamilton, 1996. 29 mike johnston and sascha nolden, travels of hochstetter and haast in new zealand, 185860, nikau press, nelson, 2011, p81. 30 ryan, op cit. 31 lawrence d. berg and robin a. kearns, ‘naming as norming: “race”, gender, and the identity politics of naming places in aotearoa/new zealand’, in environment and planning. d, society & space, vol 14, no 1, 1996, pp99122, https://doi. org/10.1068/d140099; byrnes, op cit. 32 berg and kearns, op cit, p107; te ahukaramū charles royal, ‘papatūānuku: the land’, in te taiao: māori and the natural world, david bateman, auckland, 2010, p47. 33 lyn carter, ‘the big “h”: naming and claiming landscapes’, in jacinta ruru, janet stephenson and mick abbott (eds), making our place: exploring landuse tensions in aotearoa new zealand, otago university press, dunedin, 2011, p62. 34 roberts, op cit, p747. 35 ryan, op cit, p33; julius haast, ‘notes on the mountains and glaciers of the canterbury province, new zealand’, in journal of the royal geographical society of london, vol 34, 1864, pp9091. 36 pound, op cit, p52. 37 ryan, op cit. 38 george french angas, savage life and scenes in australia and new zealand being an artist’s impressions of countries and people at the antipodes, smith, elder and co, london, 1847, pp12122. 39 leonard bell, colonial constructs: european images of the maori, 18401914, auckland university press, auckland, 2013. 40 ibid. 41 blackley, op cit, p41. 42 ibid. 43 barry hancox, ‘lasting images: photography and tourism publicity’, in peter alsop, dave bamford and gary stewart (eds) selling the dream: the art of early new zealand tourism, craig potton publishing, nelson, 2012, p76. 44 eric pawson and tom brooking, making a new land: environmental histories of new zealand, new edition, university of otago press, dunedin, 2013; see also jarrod hore, visions of nature: how landscape photography shaped settler colonialism, university of california press, berkeley, 2022. 45 ‘obituary: mr e p sealy’, timaru herald, 31 october 1903, p4. 46 christine whybrew, ‘the burton brothers studio: commerce in photography and the marketing of new zealand, 1866 1898’, phd thesis, university of otago, 2010. 47 ron palenski, the making of new zealanders, auckland university press, auckland, 2012. 48 julius von haast, ‘explorations in the neighbourhood of mount cook’, lyttleton times, 7 june 1862, pp45. 49 lydia wevers, country of writing: travel writing and new zealand 18091900, auckland university press, auckland, 2002. davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022111 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-010-9383-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-010-9383-5 https://doi.org/10.1068/d140099 https://doi.org/10.1068/d140099 50 ‘accidental interview’, nelson evening mail, 3 april 1873, p4. 51 william spotswood green, the high alps of new zealand, or, a trip to the glaciers of the antipodes with an ascent of mount cook, macmillan, london, 1883, p3; a.p. harper, ‘scrapbook’, loose newspaper cutting, and extracts from the spectator, 28 january 1897, and adelaide advertiser, 9 february 1897, pp24, 64, new zealand alpine club archive, hocken library, university of otago. 52 philip temple, the world at their feet, whitcombe & tombs, christchurch, 1969. 53 green, op cit, pp6, 72; freda du faur, the conquest of mount cook and other climbs: an account of four seasons’ mountaineering on the southern alps of new zealand, allen & unwin, christchurch and capper press, london, 1977, p17. 54 geraldine lummis, lyndon fraser and joanna cobley, ‘kinsey’s southern “wonderland of ice and snow”: new insights into early alpine photography’, in records of the canterbury museum, vol 35, 2021, pp21145; joseph kinsey and may kinsey, ‘mount cook and its glaciers’, press, 30 october 1897, special christmas number; alsop, bamford and davidson, op cit. 55 charles decimus barraud and w.t. locke travers (eds), new zealand: graphic and descriptive, sampson low, marston, searle and rivington, london, 1877. 56 john gully and julius von haast, new zealand scenery, henry wise, dunedin, london, 1877. 57 ibid. 58 jacqueline june naismith, ‘mediating the alpine archiscape: design and publicity for new zealand’s tongariro national park 19281984’, phd thesis, massey university, 2013. 59 ‘tourist arrangements’, press, 4 december 1889, p6. 60 ‘the glacier country’, press, 19 november 1889, p6. 61 malcolm ross, a complete guide to the lakes of central otago: the switzerland of australasia, geo didsbury, government printer, wellington, 1889. 62 ‘tourist arrangements’, press, 4 december 1889, p6. 63 ‘mount cook photographs’, press, 2 may 1889, p5. 64 howard robinson, a history of the post office in new zealand, r.e. owen, government printer, wellington, 1964, p166. 65 richard wolfe, it’s in the post: the stories behind new zealand stamps, craig potton publishing, nelson, 2010, p24. 66 palenski, op cit. 67 wolfe, op cit, p28. 68 jillian walliss, ‘transformative landscapes’, in space and culture, vol 17, no 3, 2014, pp28096, https://doi. org/10.1177/1206331213499470. 69 ruru, op cit, p122. 70 john j.d. shultis, ‘natural environments, wilderness and protected areas: an analysis of historical western attitudes and utilisation, and their expression in contemporary new zealand’, phd thesis, university of otago, 1991, p175. 71 kawharu, op cit; susan forbes, ‘nomination of tongariro national park for inclusion in the world heritage cultural list’, in conservation advisory science notes no. 68, department of conservation, wellington, 1994, https://www.doc.govt. nz/globalassets/documents/scienceandtechnical/casn68.pdf and https://www.doc.govt.nz/globalassets/documents/ scienceandtechnical/casn68a.pdf. 72 richard boast, ‘gift of the peaks: the origins of tongariro national park’, in susy frankel and alberto costi (eds), do cultural and property combine to make ‘cultural property’?, revised edition, association of comparative law, wellington, 2018, p86. 73 te kahui maunga, wai 1130, waitangi tribunal report, 2013; see also ruru, op cit; m.f. baird, ‘the breath of the mountain is my heart: indigenous cultural landscapes and the politics of heritage’, in international journal of heritage studies, vol 19, no 4, 2013, pp327340. 74 ruru, op cit. 75 james cowan, lake taupo and the volcanoes: scenes from lake and mountain and tales from maori folklore, geddis & blomfield, auckland, 1901, pp46, 55. 76 walliss, op cit; cowan, op cit, pp56. 77 ruru, op cit. 78 for a more detailed discussion of the ways in which the scenery preservation movement in new zealand disenfranchised māori from the indigenous landscape, see park, op cit. 79 mark derby, ‘selling maoriland: māori at the centre of tourism publicity’, in peter alsop, dave bamford and gary stewart (eds), selling the dream: the art of early new zealand tourism, craig potton publishing, nelson, 2012 p48. davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022112 https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331213499470 https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331213499470 https://www.doc.govt.nz/globalassets/documents/science-and-technical/casn68.pdf https://www.doc.govt.nz/globalassets/documents/science-and-technical/casn68.pdf https://www.doc.govt.nz/globalassets/documents/science-and-technical/casn68a.pdf https://www.doc.govt.nz/globalassets/documents/science-and-technical/casn68a.pdf 80 ibid, p50. 81 jacob pollock, ‘cultural colonization and textual biculturalism: james belich and michael king’s general histories of new zealand’, in new zealand journal of history, vol 41, no 2, 2007, pp18098. 82 ‘the concept of tōpuni derives from the traditional ngāi tahu tikanga (custom) of persons of rangatira (chiefly) status extending their mana and protection over a person or area by placing their cloak over them or it.’ aoraki/mount cook national park management plan 2004, department of conservation, wellington, 2004, https://www.doc.govt.nz/aboutus/ ourpoliciesandplans/statutoryplans/statutoryplanpublications/nationalparkmanagement/aorakimountcook nationalparkmanagementplan/. 83 ibid. 84 ngāi tahu, n.d., kā huru manu (online). available: https://www.kahurumanu.co.nz/ (accessed 20 october 2022). 85 nga iwi o taranaki and the crown, te anga pgtakerongo mo nga maunga o taranaki, pouakai me kaitake/ record of understanding for mount taranaki, pouakai and the kaitake ranges, 20 december 2017, www.govt.nz/ assets/documents/ots/taranakimaunga/taranakimaungateangaputakerongorecordofunderstanding20 december2017.pdf. 86 unesco, nd, cultural landscape (online). available: https://whc.unesco.org/en/culturallandscape/ (accessed 20 october 2022). 87 forbes, op cit, p15. 88 ibid. 89 ibid, p17. 90 boast, op cit. 91 lyver et al, op cit, p396. 92 the national park act 1952 and the conservation act 1987. 93 lyver et al, op cit, p401. 94 naismith, op cit. 95 hancox, op cit. 96 ibid. davidson public history review, vol. 29, 2022113 https://www.doc.govt.nz/about-us/our-policies-and-plans/statutory-plans/statutory-plan-publications/national-park-management/aoraki-mount-cook-national-park-management-plan/ https://www.doc.govt.nz/about-us/our-policies-and-plans/statutory-plans/statutory-plan-publications/national-park-management/aoraki-mount-cook-national-park-management-plan/ https://www.doc.govt.nz/about-us/our-policies-and-plans/statutory-plans/statutory-plan-publications/national-park-management/aoraki-mount-cook-national-park-management-plan/ https://www.kahurumanu.co.nz/ http://www.govt.nz/assets/documents/ots/taranaki-maunga/taranaki-maunga-te-anga-putakerongo-record-of-understanding-20-december-2017.pdf http://www.govt.nz/assets/documents/ots/taranaki-maunga/taranaki-maunga-te-anga-putakerongo-record-of-understanding-20-december-2017.pdf http://www.govt.nz/assets/documents/ots/taranaki-maunga/taranaki-maunga-te-anga-putakerongo-record-of-understanding-20-december-2017.pdf https://whc.unesco.org/en/culturallandscape/ articles (peer reviewed) ‘egmont, who was he?’ the debate over restoration of the name of taranaki maunga ewan morris corresponding author: ewan morris, historyewan@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8191 article history: received 19/05/2022; accepted 08/11/2022; published 06/12/2022 in recent years, the question of whether new zealand’s official name should be replaced by the māori name aotearoa has been the subject of public debate.1 this debate has shown the continuing power of place names to engage public interest, and to act as a focus for wider concerns about history, identity and culture.2 yet recent arguments over aotearoa versus new zealand seem relatively restrained compared to the intense contestation over a place name that took place more than 35 years ago, long before controversy could erupt on social media. in 1985, the taranaki māori trust board’s application for official recognition of the māori name of taranaki maunga was strongly resisted by many pākehā (new zealanders of european descent), who were determined to retain mount egmont as the name of the maunga (mountain).3 the controversy led to a compromise, which saw the maunga officially named ‘mount taranaki or mount egmont’ in 1986. it is only now, decades later, that recognition of taranaki as the sole name of the maunga appears imminent. the taranaki maunga settlement between the iwi (tribes) of taranaki and the crown is expected to be completed soon. the settlement, intended to provide redress for crown breaches of the treaty of waitangi, will reportedly change the official name of the maunga and recognise the maunga as a legal person.4 with further change to the official name and legal status of the maunga on the horizon, it is timely to look back at the debate that occurred in the 1980s. in this article, i will describe the debate and discuss the themes of history, identity, māori/pākehā relations and democracy that were central to it. i will also consider how the intensity of the debate can be explained and what pupils might learn if they examine the debate as part of the new requirement to study aotearoa new zealand’s histories in schools. public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: morris, e. 2022. ‘egmont, who was he?’ the debate over restoration of the name of taranaki maunga. public history review, 29, 114–127. https://doi.org/10.5130/ phrj.v29i0.8191 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 114 mailto:historyewan@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8191 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8191 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8191 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj the proposal to restore the name of the maunga as well as the name of the maunga, taranaki is the name of a large region (often referred to as a province) on the west coast of new zealand’s north island, centred on the maunga. in addition, taranaki is the name of one of the eight iwi of the region. the other iwi of taranaki are ngaa rauru kiitahi, ngāti ruanui, ngāruahine, ngāti maru, te atiawa, ngāti mutunga and ngāti tama. in 1986, taranaki’s population was 107,600, out of a total new zealand population of around 3.3 million.5 taranaki maunga is the region’s defining geographical feature. a dormant volcano, the maunga is coneshaped and relatively symmetrical. taranaki maunga is 2,518 metres (8,261 feet) high and (when not covered by clouds) dominates the landscape throughout the region. taranaki māori regard the maunga as their tupuna (ancestor), and the maunga features strongly in māori traditions in the region.6 taranaki maunga seen from the vicinity of waihī cemetery, near normanby in south taranaki. the cemetery is located near the remains of a redoubt built by colonial forces during the new zealand wars. (photograph by ewan morris) the taranaki region has a fraught history, having been one of the main sites of conflict over land and sovereignty during the new zealand wars of the 1860s. after the wars, large areas of land in taranaki were confiscated from māori as punishment for alleged māori rebellion, and most of this land was given by the government to pākehā settlers. the story of the contestation over the name of the maunga is inseparable from the wider history of colonisation and confiscation in taranaki.7 that history includes the 1865 confiscation of the maunga and the surrounding land by the new zealand government and the later incorporation of the maunga into egmont national park. it is also a history of continuing struggle by the eight iwi of taranaki to reverse the confiscation and gain legal recognition of their historical, spiritual and cultural relationships with the maunga.8 i cannot do justice to the broader story in this article, however. while the name is closely intertwined with the legal status of the maunga, i will focus on the naming debate, in the hope that it illuminates the larger history. it is generally acknowledged that māori have called the maunga by a number of names, but taranaki became the most widely used.9 captain james cook renamed the maunga egmont in honour of the earl of egmont, a former first lord of the admiralty, when the endeavour sailed past the taranaki coast in january 1770.10 the names taranaki and egmont for the maunga sometimes appeared together on official maps until as late as 1930, although ‘mount egmont’ became the name commonly used by pākehā.11 even morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022115 so, there were some pākehā who preferred the māori name. in 1938, the mayor of the taranaki town of hāwera, j.e. campbell, told a meeting of the aotea māori association that the name of the maunga was a ‘disaster’ and that ‘the old name of taranaki’ should be restored in time for the new zealand centennial in 1940. his view was supported by the rev paahi moke of new plymouth, who said that ‘taranaki always had been and will be the name for the mountain recognised by the maori race’.12 for much of the twentieth century, māori and pākehā each used their own names for the maunga. in the public sphere, however, the name mount egmont was used almost exclusively, because pākehā dominated public institutions. it was not until the 1970s that this situation faced significant challenge. a formal proposal to restore the māori name of the maunga was first put to the government in 1975 by the taranaki māori trust board, which included representatives of the eight iwi of taranaki. in october 1975, labour party minister of māori affairs matiu rata said the government had accepted in principle the trust board’s request to return the maunga to māori and to restore the māori name, calling the name egmont a ‘misnomer of the worst degree’. prime minister bill rowling, however, said that no decision had been made on the matter.13 the news that the name of the maunga might change was greeted with alarm by some. when the taranaki herald asked its readers ‘do you wish the name of mt egmont to be changed to mt taranaki?’, 908 were against and 99 in favour. there was also much opposition to the proposal in the letters columns of taranaki’s two main newspapers.14 with an election campaign under way, rowling sought to defuse the controversy. in november 1975, he said that the government was not going to ‘change things that are part of new zealand history without a very good reason’ or without public support.15 rata then stated that any decision about the name or ownership of the maunga would be postponed until after the election, to allow time to discuss it fully.16 the national party government that came in after the election announced, without first informing taranaki māori, that the official name of the maunga would remain egmont.17 the government focused instead on a symbolic return of the maunga to māori. in 1978, the maunga was vested in the taranaki māori trust board and then immediately gifted back to the nation as part of the national park, but the waitangi tribunal later found that there was no evidence that taranaki māori freely agreed to this arrangement.18 while the government hoped that the mount egmont vesting act, and related changes to the composition of the egmont national park board, had put māori concerns about the maunga to rest, for taranaki māori the struggle continued. a 1983 report on māori perspectives on the maunga noted continuing bitterness about the inadequacy of consultation on the mount egmont vesting act and said the grievance about the failure to recognise taranaki as the name of the maunga was deeply felt by māori.19 in 198384, the taranaki māori trust board again raised the issue of the name, and in march 1985 the trust board submitted a formal proposal for the maunga to be named taranaki.20 in its submission to the new zealand geographic board, the body responsible for assigning official place names, the trust board argued for the restoration of the name taranaki based on the history, mythology and deep spiritual significance to māori of the maunga.21 in august 1985, the geographic board voted unanimously that the maunga should ‘revert to its original name “taranaki”, but that the name egmont be continued as a secondary name in brackets’.22 gazettal of the board’s intention to assign the name ‘mount taranaki (egmont)’ triggered a threemonth period during which objections could be lodged. after that, the board was required to report to the minister of lands on any objections received and its final decision, which the minister could then confirm, modify or reverse.23 by the time the geographic board released its proposal, it was already clear that it would face strong pākehā opposition, particularly within taranaki province. noting the strength of feeling on the issue, a deputation of local mps and the chairman of the taranaki united council met with the minister of lands. they argued that the naming proposal should proceed more slowly, expressed concern that the debate was morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022116 stirring up racial division in the province, and suggested that the geographic board should visit taranaki to show that it was taking account of local viewpoints.24 support for this view came from an unexpected source: former minister of māori affairs matiu rata. rata phoned the geographic board to say that, while he strongly supported the naming proposal, the board’s decision should not take effect for two years, during which time the government should fund publicity on the history of the maunga. he also suggested that the geographic board should sit in taranaki to hear local perspectives, a suggestion the board did not take up.25 although the geographic board’s legislation at the time only allowed for submissions objecting to the proposal, it received submissions both opposing and supporting the proposed name. within the submission period, the geographic board received 127 letters of objection signed by 183 individuals; six petitions objecting to the proposal, with a total of 10,534 signatures; and 17 objections from community groups and 12 from taranaki local government bodies. most of these objections came from within the province of taranaki. another 42 letters of objection, representing 169 signatories, went to the minister of lands, although many of these people also lodged objections with the geographic board. in support of the proposal, the board received 57 letters with 427 signatures, and the minister received 31 letters representing 184 signatures.26 when the geographic board met in january 1986, it confirmed its original proposal but added the recommendation that ‘in view of the strength and nature of the objections, the name “egmont” be the alternative name’ and that the official form of the two names should be ‘mt taranaki or mt egmont’.27 however, the board subsequently received legal advice that, under its act, it could confirm its original proposal or uphold the objections and recommend no change, but could not put forward a new proposal.28 consequently, the report sent to the minister simply confirmed the board’s proposal of august 1985. it concluded that ‘“taranaki” is an original maori name, it has great historical and geographical significance to the earliest discoverers and settlers and it is an established name in local usage.’ the report noted that the board had taken account of local feeling by proposing the continuance of ‘egmont’ as a secondary name in brackets.29 minister of lands koro wētere sought further advice from the geographic board, which, despite the limitations in its legislation, recommended that taranaki and egmont be recognised as alternative names for the maunga.30 wētere accepted this revised recommendation and, on 2 may 1986, announced that the new official name would be ‘mount taranaki or mount egmont’. his press release explained that individuals or organisations would be free to use either name on its own, however maps and other publications covered by the new zealand geographic board act would be required to use the name ‘mount taranaki or mount egmont’, in that order.31 at the time of writing, this remains the official name of the maunga.32 wētere’s announcement was met with a mixed response, with some seeing it as a reasonable compromise and others as a confusing copout.33 a member’s bill introduced by new plymouth mp tony friedlander would have required the minister, before confirming a change to the name of mount egmont, to take reasonable steps to ensure that a majority of taranaki residents approved of the change. the bill was referred to a select committee but was allowed to lapse at the end of the parliamentary session.34 the public debate about the naming proposal the public debate about the name of the maunga started in 1983 and continued until 1986, reaching a crescendo in 1985. the issue was debated primarily within the province of taranaki, but people from other parts of new zealand also made their views known, partly because the maunga was seen as important to the nation as a whole, and partly because the debate was believed to have implications for place names elsewhere in the country. in addition to the submissions received by the geographic board, the minister of lands and the select committee considering friedlander’s bill, there were many letters to the editors of newspapers, particularly morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022117 the two main taranaki newspapers, the taranaki daily news and the taranaki herald. the electronic media also covered the issue: there were news reports on national radio and television, and the issue was extensively debated on local radio.35 the taranaki daily news undertook a ‘poll’ of its readers in february 1985, inviting them to return coupons printed in the paper and tick either ‘i favour the name mt egmont’ or ‘i favour the name mt taranaki’. additional space was provided in which to give reasons for supporting one name or the other.36 several weeks later, the paper printed the results under the headline ‘egmont, not taranaki: overwhelming “no” to change’. the newspaper reported that it had received 7,009 votes, of which 6,048 supported egmont and 961 supported taranaki. the poll, it said, should ‘lay to rest any doubts as to what the people of this part of the country really want’ and ‘wipe out any theory that those favouring the name taranaki (particularly maoris) feel more strongly about the naming controversy than do those who prefer the name mt egmont’.37 the unscientific taranaki daily news poll cannot be taken as representative of public opinion in taranaki, and undoubtedly did not represent māori opinion. however, the relatively high response rate does provide some indication of the strength of feeling on the issue. many official and voluntary organisations in taranaki expressed their opposition to the naming proposal. almost all the taranaki local authorities were opposed, as was the umbrella body, the taranaki local bodies’ association, and the regional authority, the taranaki united council. others opposed to the renaming included the egmont electric power board, the taranaki electorate division of the national party, and groups representing farming, business, historical, mountaineering and tramping interests. there was also a save mount egmont’s name committee, formed in august 1985 by cliff emeny, a longtime campaigner on the political right. the committee was responsible for a 5,747signature petition opposing the naming proposal.38 supporting the naming proposal, in addition to the taranaki māori trust board and a few local authorities, were the taranaki national parks and reserves board, the taranaki māori committee, several other māori representative bodies, and some environmental, feminist and antiracist organisations. those who took part in the debate were divided into two broad camps: egmont supporters, who were mainly more conservative pākehā, and taranaki supporters, who were mainly māori or more liberal pākehā.39 both views were well represented in the newspapers and in submissions received by the geographic board, although the views of māori were underrepresented compared to those of pākehā. the debate was often impassioned and, at times, had a nasty edge to it. the taranaki daily news reported that more than 200 proegmont voters in its poll ‘expressed sentiments either bordering on racism or well over the border’, while protaranaki comments ‘were comparatively gentle in tone’.40 on both sides of the debate, participants returned repeatedly to several key themes: belonging and identity, history, māoripākehā relations, and democracy. both māori and pākehā asserted the importance of the maunga to their senses of identity and belonging to place. for māori, the maunga was an ancestor whose proper name should be respected.41 one writer who affiliated to taranaki iwi wrote that her heritage was linked with taranaki maunga, and that by recognising the māori name ‘our lost mana (status or authority) will be restored’.42 for some pākehā, restoring the indigenous name would not only recognise the spiritual connection of māori to the maunga, but also contribute to the necessary replacement of a colonial british identity with one rooted in the land and the pacific region.43 opponents of recognising the māori name of the maunga frequently stressed that the emotional attachment of pākehā to the maunga was at least as great as that of māori. ‘no maori loves mt egmont more than my friends & i who tramp it, study it, photograph it, paint it, & write of it in all its moods’, wrote one objector.44 egmont meant ‘home’ to taranaki people, and changing the name of the maunga would mean a loss of identity and belonging; it would be like renaming a lifelong friend.45 for some, pākehā had an even stronger claim to the maunga than māori. a number commented that they often tramped, morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022118 skied or climbed the maunga but rarely saw māori there.46 for many local pākehā, the maunga was a place to actively explore with boot, ski and crampon.47 for māori, however, the maunga was an ancestor to be respected, not ‘a clump of dirt that’s there for people to tramp and climb all over in their weekends’, as syd kahu of the rangitaawhi marae trust put it.48 arguments based on identity and belonging were closely connected to those based on history. a key argument in support of the naming proposal was that māori had named the maunga taranaki long before cook arrived.49 the imposition of british names on a landscape that was already named was an act of cultural arrogance.50 another argument was that the maunga should not be named after an obscure british aristocrat who had never visited new zealand.51 ngāti ruanui kaumātua (elder) turangapito (sandy) parata later recalled gently challenging opponents of restoring the māori name of the maunga by asking: ‘egmont, who was he?’52 one response to such questioning was to assert that the name egmont should be retained because it had been bestowed by captain cook, an important figure in new zealand’s history.53 the name was also linked more broadly to european explorers and settlers seen as having built up taranaki and new zealand society.54 descendants of a pākehā family that arrived in taranaki in 1841 wrote that the maunga and the name egmont symbolised ‘the hardships and endurance of a sturdy race of people who… built the foundation of taranaki’ by clearing the forests and establishing farms that brought prosperity and peace.55 supporters of change were accused of trying to rewrite history by removing a name that was an important part of pākehā heritage.56 several egmont supporters argued that māori should accept some european place names in recognition of the benefits (said to include peace, civilisation and education) they claimed had been brought to māori by pākehā settlers.57 taranaki supporters disagreed and argued that restoring the māori name of the maunga was a form of redress for injustices suffered by māori, including war, land confiscation and the repression of māori culture.58 divergent views of taranaki’s history were also reflected in discussion of māoripākehā relations during the naming debate. supporters of the naming proposal declared that the debate had brought to the surface existing ethnic tension and cultural misunderstanding, rooted in a history of māori dispossession. above all, it had exposed a level of underlying racism within the pākehā community.59 for taranaki māori, it was hurtful but not surprising to encounter ‘the deepseated racism and prejudice that festers beneath a thin surface of racial harmony and respect in taranaki’.60 some egmont supporters argued that the debate was causing dissension between pākehā and māori, rather than reflecting existing tensions.61 the image of previously harmonious māoripākehā relations was, however, undermined by others within the proegmont camp who argued, often quite bitterly, that the naming proposal was another instance of māori being privileged at the expense of pākehā.62 some wrote in derogatory terms about māori people or culture, while others were convinced that an extremist anti european agenda lay behind the campaign to recognise the māori name of the maunga.63 for some taranaki supporters, recognition of the māori name of the maunga would be a positive step towards a bicultural or multicultural society.64 a few linked their support for the proposal with responsibilities under the treaty of waitangi, but references to the treaty were surprisingly infrequent, and almost absent on the proegmont side.65 for many egmont supporters, the naming proposal demonstrated that pākehā culture was not receiving equality of respect with that of māori. they pointed out that most place names in taranaki were of māori origin and argued that in a bicultural or multicultural society, pākehā culture and heritage deserved protection too.66 it was also argued that the status quo exemplified biculturalism, since the province had a māori name and the maunga a european one.67 one of the main objections to the naming proposal was that the process was undemocratic and was ignoring majority public opinion.68 objectors cited the taranaki daily news ‘opinion poll’ as evidence that morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022119 the great majority of people in taranaki wanted to retain the name egmont for the maunga. the maunga, they said, belonged to all new zealanders, not just to māori. at the same time, egmont supporters argued that the name should not be decided by national bodies or politicians, but by the people of the province. in reply, those who supported restoring the name taranaki commented that no democratic process took place when the name egmont was imposed on the maunga.69 they rebutted claims based on the newspaper poll, noting that māori were less likely to participate in such polls, which were not consistent with the face toface, consensusbased decisionmaking favoured by māori.70 explaining the intensity of the debate several factors help to explain the intensity of the debate over the name of the maunga: the symbolic power of place names generally; the huge importance of the maunga to māori and pākehā in taranaki; the still raw and unresolved legacies of colonisation in the province; and the period of enormous social change in which the debate took place. it may seem surprising that so much attention and passion focused on the symbolic issue of the name of the maunga, rather than on more practical questions of ownership and management. naming, however, is fundamental to identification with place: it is part of the process by which spaces become demarcated and knowable as places with which people can form emotional and spiritual connections. contestation over names may be symbolic, but it also points to deeper questions of power: whose names gain official or de facto public recognition, and how does this change as power relations shift over time?71 the intensity of the debate over the name of the maunga showed the depth of the attachment of taranaki people, both māori and pākehā, to the maunga. the maunga is the dominant feature of the taranaki landscape and is widely used as a tohu or symbol of iwi and provincial identity. for māori, as dennis ngāwhare explains: ‘the bones of our tūpuna (ancestors) are buried on the maunga and the mountain was named after rua taranaki, the eponymous forefather of our tribes. to the hapū and iwi of taranaki, the maunga is a tūpuna, our koro, our grandfather.’72 pākehā connection with the maunga is different, though no less real. the maunga has been a place of recreation and inspiration for pākehā, but also a source of material wealth due to the influence of the maunga on soil and climatic conditions conducive to dairy farming. pākehā identification with the maunga was reinforced by the use of the image of the maunga and the name egmont in commercial and organisational branding (a phenomenon the artist fiona clark aptly refers to as ‘egmontiana’).73 as ian wedde writes, ‘mount egmont’ became for pākehā ‘an ideal, a symbol of individuality, even of nationhood, appearing on the wrappers of butter, cheese, knitwear, and other products of the region, as well as in a great deal of art’.74 the continuing trauma, shame and silences arising from the very particular and brutal history of colonisation in taranaki undoubtedly also shaped the naming debate.75 the debate took place when taranaki māori were still waiting for the government to respond to their longstanding calls for redress of historical injustices, while many pākehā remained in a state of wilful ignorance about colonial history. for taranaki māori, the name restoration process was itself a contribution to righting colonial wrongs, but historical narratives that depicted colonisation in positive terms remained popular among pākehā. the 1970s and 1980s were a time of great change in taranaki, giving rise to tension and unease that found expression in the contestation over the maunga. economic, social and cultural change was enormously disruptive for māori and pākehā alike. in the face of change and uncertainty, people may cling more tightly to symbols like names that are seen to stand for stability and continuity with the past. the national government’s ‘think big’ era, which saw the expansion of the petrochemical industry in taranaki, was followed by radical economic restructuring and growing unemployment under the fourth morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022120 labour government.76 meanwhile, māori cultural renaissance and political activism flourished in taranaki and throughout aotearoa. in 1985, the waitangi tribunal was given jurisdiction to inquire into claims of historical breaches of the treaty of waitangi, and a bill to make māori an official language (enacted as the māori language act 1987) had its first reading only days before koro wētere announced his decision on the name of the maunga.77 there was also growing political recognition of māori environmental values, and a landmark 1983 waitangi tribunal report on a claim concerning the pollution of coastal reefs in taranaki strengthened the argument for better protection of the cultural and spiritual connection of māori to the natural world.78 for many pākehā, change was experienced as a relative loss of privilege and cultural authority, despite the continued dominance of pākehā culture and institutions.79 cultural insecurity was apparent in the views of those pākehā who complained during the debate that māori were getting everything their own way and were being privileged above the majority. one taranaki resident described the backlash against the proposal to restore the māori name of the maunga as ‘the rabid campaign to keep taranaki’s mountain pakeha’.80 for many pākehā participants in the debate, there was a palpable sense that displacement of the name egmont meant a loss of their claim to the maunga. māori who called for change based on their deep connection with the maunga were seen as stirring up trouble, while the strong feelings of many pākehā about names were viewed as normal and natural, a position nicely satirised in a cartoon by david fletcher. david fletcher, ‘the politician’ cartoon strip, published in new zealand times, 18 august 1985. (copyright: david fletcher, used with permission) other pākehā, however, took a different view. influenced by māori activism, global anticolonial struggles, the waning influence of britain and growing new zealand cultural nationalism, they welcomed the recognition of an indigenous name for the maunga as a move towards redressing historical injustice and promoting a sense of cultural identity that was unique to aotearoa. for māori, the economic restructuring of the 1980s caused significant damage, but political and cultural change in response to māori protest created new opportunities. taranaki māori were able to use mechanisms such as new zealand geographic board and waitangi tribunal processes to make progress in their long and patient campaign for redress of the loss they suffered when the maunga was confiscated from them. while the 1986 compromise on the name was only a small step forward, the naming debate provided an opportunity for māori connections with the maunga to be publicly articulated and recognised. morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022121 learning from and about the taranaki maunga naming debate in 1985, pupils in a new plymouth primary school class wrote individual letters to the new zealand geographic board, explaining why they supported either taranaki or egmont as the name of the maunga. i imagine their teacher initiating a class discussion on a topical issue of the day, writing up arguments for and against each name, and then setting an assignment of using these arguments in a letter. one student believed that changing the name from egmont would be confusing for visitors: ‘an australian might visit and well not lik[e]ly but it could happen. and he wanted to see mt egmont, he would never get to see mt egmont. on his map it would say egmont when the name was taranaki.’ but another thought that ‘people will still come to see the mountain whatever name it has. some other pakeha’s say the maori’s shouldn’t have changed it. but we never captain cook did. anyway the name suits taranaki.’81 today, any schoolaged children of the young letterwriters of 1985 may be able to study the maunga name debate not as current affairs, but as history. when the new curriculum content on aotearoa new zealand’s histories is introduced in schools in 2023, place names will be a key topic for one of the four historical ‘contexts’, ‘tūrangawaewae me te kaitiakitanga | place and environment’.82 in years 78, students will learn how māori ‘expressed their connection to place by naming the land and its features’, while in years 910 they will study how settlers ‘renamed places and features to reflect their own cultural origins’.83 year 910 students will be asked to consider: ‘who gets the right to name physical and cultural features? what do we do about people’s different perspectives on place names?’84 what might today’s school students learn by taking the contested naming of taranaki maunga as a historical case study?85 for a start, they could consider how names are placed and replaced, ignored and restored, as power relations shift over time. with colonisation and the supplanting of māori authority by pākehā, the māori name of the maunga was displaced. but as māori activism pressured the government to respond to māori grievances, and as some pākehā became more sympathetic to māori political and cultural demands, taranaki was given official recognition alongside egmont and gradually became the more commonly used name. this has been a long and highly contested process, but it is also remarkable that in only a few decades a change that was bitterly opposed by many pākehā has gained general acceptance. the challenge of explaining how this transformation came about could provide rich material for class discussion. students could also think about why māori and pākehā identified so strongly with their preferred names for the maunga, and what this tells us about their respective senses of identity, heritage and connection to place. an important feature of place names is that they usually endure across time, linking past and present generations and helping to create a stable sense of identity. what stories did people tell about the origins and meanings of the names of the maunga, and about their personal, family and community connections with those names? what did people feel they would gain or lose if the māori name of the maunga was, or was not, restored? finally, studying the maunga naming debate would allow students to reflect on the role of history itself in such debates.86 as discussed above, history was one of the resources drawn on by participants in the debate, while history also helps to explain the debate’s nature and intensity. historical arguments were mobilised in the debate, and at the root of these arguments were conflicting views of the legitimacy and consequences of colonisation in taranaki. the unresolved legacies of colonisation also explain the underlying social divisions that found an outlet in the debate. divisions and grievances resulting from colonisation still live on today. some of the attitudes towards history, māori culture and perceived māori privilege expressed during the naming debate are still found in parts of the taranaki pākehā community and have reemerged in recent debates over land issues and māori wards in local government.87 some pākehā also continue to disrespect māori cultural values in the ways in which they interact with the maunga.88 but there has been progress, too. the patience with which taranaki māori have asserted the importance to them of the maunga and the name taranaki is finally paying off. morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022122 some on both sides of the naming debate in the 1980s predicted that the dual official names for the maunga would lead to the gradual eclipse of the name egmont by taranaki. these predictions have been borne out, and use of ‘mount egmont’ has become increasingly rare in the decades since. now, the forthcoming taranaki maunga treaty settlement promises to give the maunga legal personality and to finally recognise taranaki as the sole name of the maunga. the grandchildren of the members of the 1985 primary school class may find themselves asking, not ‘egmont, who was he?’, but ‘egmont, where was that?’ acknowledgements much of this article was written while i was a visiting scholar at the school of history, classics and archaeology at the university of edinburgh in 201617, and i would like to thank the university for making its library and other resources available to me. thanks also to the staff of the new zealand geographic board ngā pou taunaha o aotearoa; the editors of this issue of public history review and the anonymous reviewers of my article; david fletcher for permission to reproduce his cartoon; and fiona lincoln and paul diamond for their help and encouragement. endnotes 1 manch, m. 2021, what’s in a name? aotearoanew zealand debate continues to simmer (online). available: https:// www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/126468227/whatsinanameaotearoanewzealanddebatecontinuestosimmer; morris, e. 2019, aotearoa and new zealand: history, politics and place names (online). available: https://pastword. blog/2019/02/06/aotearoaandnewzealandhistorypoliticsandplacenames. some māori from new zealand’s south island have reservations about the adoption of aotearoa as an official name for the whole country, noting that the name originally referred to the north island: marshall, a. 2021, aotearoanew zealand name change debate: ngai tahu leader says don’t rush name change (online). available: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/aotearoanewzealandnamechange debatengaitahuleadersaysdontrushnamechange/jnk43lp63nsnp3lj6tenmfrppy. 2 for broader context on māori and pākehā place naming, see taonui, r. 2008, tapa whenua – naming places (online). available: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/tapawhenuanamingplaces; mckinnon, m. 2008, place names (online). available: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/placenames. 3 some taranaki iwi prefer the spelling ‘mounga’ as corresponding better to pronunciation in the local dialect. pending completion of the taranaki maunga settlement and official recognition of the māori name, i have used the more common spelling ‘maunga’, which is used in the record of understanding between the iwi of taranaki and the crown. i also acknowledge that, due to differing cultural perspectives, the mountain formerly known to pākehā as mount egmont does not correspond exactly with the maunga (mounga) known to māori as taranaki. the record of understanding for the maunga settlement refers to ‘ngā maunga’ (‘the mountains’), and records that the iwi of taranaki view ngā maunga as a living, indivisible whole, incorporating the peaks of taranaki, pouākai and kaitake and the surrounding environs. ngā iwi o taranaki and the crown, te anga pūtakerongo mō ngā maunga o taranaki, pouākai me kaitake: record of understanding for mount taranaki, pouākai and the kaitake ranges, 20 december 2017, clause 3.4. 4 coster, d. 2020, taranaki maunga: settlement looms on horizon, with changes in the wind (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/poutiaki/123597917/taranakimaungasettlementloomsonhorizonwithchangesinthewind; harvey, h. 2021, what’s in a name? restoring the mana of taranaki maunga (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/ poutiaki/125720045/whatsinanamerestoringthemanaoftaranakimaunga; coster, d. 2022, talks continue around taranaki maunga settlement deal (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/poutiaki/129234713/talkscontinuearound taranakimaungasettlementdeal. at the time of writing, a deed of settlement for the taranaki maunga claims was expected to be signed by the end of 2022, with legislation implementing the settlement to follow. 5 population figures from new zealand official yearbook 198788, ch 5, digitised text at https://www3.stats.govt.nz/new_ zealand_official_yearbooks/198788/nzoyb_198788.html. for an overview of the taranaki region, see lambert, r. 2015, taranaki region (online). available: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/taranakiregion. 6 one wellknown māori tradition about the maunga is summarised at lambert, ibid. 7 the literature on the colonisation of taranaki province is extensive. a useful starting point is the report of the waitangi tribunal into breaches of the treaty of waitangi in taranaki: waitangi tribunal, the taranaki report: kaupapa tuatahi: muru me te raupatu, legislation direct, wellington, 1996. 8 māori perspectives on the history and significance of the maunga can be found in te miringa hohaia, ‘the foundation story: an account interpreted from manuscripts held by the taranaki iwi’, in te maunga taranaki: views of a mountain, govettbrewster art gallery, new plymouth, 2001, pp915; dennis ngāwharepounamu, ‘living memory and the travelling mountain narrative of taranaki’, phd thesis, victoria university of wellington, 2014. a pākehā history of the maunga is a.b. scanlan, egmont: the story of a mountain, a.h. & a.w. reed, wellington, 1961. useful context regarding the history of morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022123 https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/126468227/whats-in-a-name-aotearoanew-zealand-debate-continues-to-simmer https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/126468227/whats-in-a-name-aotearoanew-zealand-debate-continues-to-simmer https://pastword.blog/2019/02/06/aotearoa-and-new-zealand-history-politics-and-place-names https://pastword.blog/2019/02/06/aotearoa-and-new-zealand-history-politics-and-place-names https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/aotearoa-new-zealand-name-change-debate-ngai-tahu-leader-says-dont-rush-name-change/jnk43lp63nsnp3lj6tenmfrppy https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/aotearoa-new-zealand-name-change-debate-ngai-tahu-leader-says-dont-rush-name-change/jnk43lp63nsnp3lj6tenmfrppy http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/tapa-whenua-naming-places http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/place-names https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/123597917/taranaki-maunga-settlement-looms-on-horizon-with-changes-in-the-wind https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/125720045/whats-in-a-name-restoring-the-mana-of-taranaki-maunga https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/125720045/whats-in-a-name-restoring-the-mana-of-taranaki-maunga https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/129234713/talks-continue-around-taranaki-maunga-settlement-deal https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/129234713/talks-continue-around-taranaki-maunga-settlement-deal https://www3.stats.govt.nz/new_zealand_official_yearbooks/1987-88/nzoyb_1987-88.html https://www3.stats.govt.nz/new_zealand_official_yearbooks/1987-88/nzoyb_1987-88.html http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/taranaki-region the maunga and the national park is also provided by matalena tofa, ‘unsettling openings: collaborative environmental management and māori in taranaki’, phd thesis, macquarie university, sydney, 2010, especially ch 8. 9 other māori names for the maunga have included pukeonaki and pukehaupapa. hohaia, op cit, p9. 10 a.w. reed, place names of new zealand, revised by peter dowling, raupo books, auckland, 2010, p113. 11 new zealand geographic board (nzgb), report of nz geographic board to the minister of lands under section 13 of the nz geographic board act 1946 on objections received to the proposed name change of mount egmont, 1986, p3. 12 auckland star, 9 december 1938, p4. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for identifying the ‘rev. p. moki’ referred to in the auckland star as the rev. paahi (percy) moke. see also taranaki daily news (tdn), 17 january 1939 (in nzgb correspondence, vol 15, new zealand geographic board archives (nzgba), wellington; patea mail, 28 april 1939, p4; franklin times, 22 may 1939, p3. 13 taranaki herald (th), 21 october 1975, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, archives new zealand, wellington (anzw). 14 th, 10 september 1975, clipping in aans w5491 7613 box 495 np6/1/1/1 pt 1, anzw; th, 2122 october 1975, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw; departmental report to lands and agriculture committee on national parks amendment bill, 22 november 1977, afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 15 th, 3 november 1975, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 16 tdn, 8 november 1975, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 17 minister of lands, press release, 4 march 1976, afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw; ngatata love, taranaki māori trust board, to venn young, minister of lands, 11 march 1976, expressing disappointment that taranaki māori had not been informed of the decision before it was announced, and young to love, 30 march 1976, aans w5491 7613 box 495 np6/1/1/1 pt 1, anzw. 18 mount egmont vesting act 1978; waitangi tribunal, op cit, p299. the mount egmont vesting act describes the maunga as ‘mount egmont’, although the preamble to the act acknowledges that the maunga is ‘known in maori as taranaki’. 19 cheryl rei, te maunga taranaki: the maori viewpoint, 10 february 1983, afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 20 secretary, taranaki māori trust board, to commissioner of lands, new plymouth, 7 march 1983; minutes of special meeting of new zealand geographic board (nzgb) with maui pomare of taranaki māori trust board, 11 june 1984, afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 21 secretary, taranaki māori trust board, to secretary, nzgb, 15 march 1985, afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 22 minutes of nzgb meeting, 6 august 1985, nzgba. 23 new zealand geographic board act 1946, s 13. 24 note of meeting held on 24 october 1985 with deputation to minister of lands re change of name to mount taranaki, 15 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 25 note by k. j. twydle, secretary, nzgb, of phone call from matiu rata, 22 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 26 new zealand geographic board, report (cited at note 11), pp46. additional submissions were received after the end of the submission period. 27 minutes of nzgb meeting, 29 january 1986, nzgba. 28 minutes of nzgb meeting, 27 march 1986, nzgba. 29 new zealand geographic board, report, p9. 30 chairman, nzgb, to minister of lands, 25 march 1986, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 31 minister of lands, press release, 2 may 1986, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 32 new zealand geographic board, 1986, mount taranaki or mount egmont (online). available: https://gazetteer.linz. govt.nz/place/3830 (accessed 4 may 2022). 33 tdn, 3, 5 and 6 may 1986, clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw. 34 new zealand geographic board (mount egmont) amendment bill 1986, 151; new zealand parliamentary debates, vol 470, 1986, pp123248 (debate on 23 april 1986); select committee file on the bill, abgx w4536 box 21, anzw. 35 transcripts of radio new zealand morning report items, 7 and 8 august 1985; tv one 6:30 pm news item, 6 august 1985; tv2 eye witness news items, 5 and 6 august 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. local radio reported ‘a largely critical response to what is seen as an undemocratic & bureaucratic disregard of local values and interests’: chief surveyor, new plymouth, to k. twydle, secretary, nzgb, 8 august 1985, afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw. see also the reported response to radio taranaki’s decision to refer to the maunga as mount taranaki: tdn, 5 september 1985, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw. morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022124 https://gazetteer.linz.govt.nz/place/3830 https://gazetteer.linz.govt.nz/place/3830 36 tdn, 16 february 1985, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 37 tdn, 2 march 1985, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 38 tdn, 24 august 1985; tdn, nd (around 1415 september 1985); tdn, 11 november 1985, clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw. 39 the debate can fairly be characterised as one between taranaki and egmont supporters, even though the geographic board had recommended the inclusion of ‘egmont’ as a secondary name in parentheses, while some prominent opponents of the geographic board proposal supported recognising ‘taranaki’ as a secondary name in the same way. there were also some proponents of dual naming: for example, ‘maori pakeha’, tdn, 23 february 1985; ‘historian’, tdn, nd (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw); olive baldwin to nzgb, 20 august 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 40 tdn, 2 march 1985, clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 41 for example, sonny waru in tdn, 18 august 1983 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw); secretary, taranaki māori committee, to minister of māori affairs, 28 february 1985, afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 42 barbara whitehead to minister of lands, 14 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 43 for example, coordinator, taranaki women’s refuge collective, to nzgb, 20 november 1985; ken gorbey to minister of lands, 5 september 1985; raymond watemburg to nzgb, 1 october 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 44 e.p. topping to nzgb, 11 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. see also cardiff women’s division of federated farmers to nzgb, 25 september 1985; g.m. elliot to nzgb, 13 august 1985; doreen james to nzgb, 12 september 1985; g.n. reed to nzgb, 20 november 1985; audrey p. smith to nzgb, 14 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 45 for example, administration officer, hawera district council to nzgb, 24 october 1985; president, taranaki local bodies association, to nzgb, 21 may 1985; l.r. smith to nzgb, 15 november 1985; robin lethbridge mason to nzgb, 26 november 1985; heather shoemaker to nzgb, 10 september 1985; v.m. robertson to nzgb, 12 september 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 46 for example, shirley boyde to nzgb, 22 august 1985; heather shoemaker (identifying herself as ‘partmaori’) to nzgb, 10 september 1985; paul j. roberts to minister of lands, 8 august 1985; audrey p. smith to nzgb, 14 november 1985; colin allen to nzgb, 19 june 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 47 both the new plymouth tramping club and the mount egmont alpine club opposed the naming proposal. national alpine organisations, however, remained neutral, and the federated mountain clubs’ representative on the geographic board supported the naming proposal. 48 tdn, 23 august 1985 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); see also sonny waru, quoted in tdn 18 august 1983 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw). 49 for example, wanganui chronicle editorial, quoted in tdn, 21 august 1985 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); brenda muller and others to nzgb, 27 november 1985, and p.h.c. and k.j. lucas to nzgb, 19 august 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba; tony garnier in evening post (wellington), 13 august 1985 (clipping in l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba). 50 new plymouth city councillor muriel livingston quoted in tdn, 19 july 1983; ‘maori and proud of it’, tdn, 21 july 1983, clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1/ pt 1, anzw. 51 for example, ‘taranaki too’, tdn, 16 august 1985 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); edith h. hill to nzgb, 21 november 1985; j. ormond to nzgb, 30 october 1985; n.c. begg to nzgb, 23 october 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. the eleventh earl of egmont, a 71yearold canadian rancher, was approached for his views. as he was deaf, his wife spoke on his behalf, stating that the family objected very strongly to the naming proposal: ‘you don’t go changing generations of tradition.’ auckland star, 10 august 1985; sunday news, 11 august 1985 (clippings in l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba). 52 quoted in harvey, op cit. 53 for example, m.e. levesque to nzgb, 30 october 1985; g.l pearce to nzgb, 28 september 1985; secretary, taranaki branch, new zealand founders’ society, to nzgb, 12 september 1985; county manager, waimate west county council, to secretary for internal affairs, 19 september 1985; chairman, taranaki united council and taranaki local bodies association, to nzgb, 8 november 1985; a.j. treadwell to nzgb, 28 august 1985; colin allen to nzgb, 19 june 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 54 for example, leonard s. arrow to nzgb, 21 august 1985; cardiff women’s division of federated farmers to nzgb, 25 september 1985; e. hislop and j.r. hislop to nzgb, 9 november 1985; peter henderson to nzgb, 8 august 1985; meryl webb and l.r. webb to nzgb, nd, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 55 d.a. ferguson and heather ferguson to nzgb, 5 august 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. see also the submission on behalf of descendants of early pākehā settler thomas mason: robin lethbridge mason to nzgb, 26 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 56 ‘one race’, tdn, 16 august 1985 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); shirley boyde to nzgb, 22 august 1985; frances m. raye to nzgb, 17 august 1985; m. mcneill adams to nzgb, 17 august 1985; cardiff morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022125 women’s division of federated farmers, 25 september 1985; m. kerr to nzgb, 15 september 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 57 for example, tom bates, tdn, 3 september 1985, and cliff emeny, tdn, 14 may 1986 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); frances m. raye to nzgb, 17 august 1985; secretary, makaka country women’s institute to nzgb, 30 september 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 58 for example, diane bell, tdn, 13 august 1985; diana o’brien, tdn, 15 august 1985; j. ormond, tdn, 15 august 1985; ‘non racist comment for once’, tdn, 22 august 1985; ‘not proud to be a pakeha’, tdn, 28 august 1985; jennifer lawrence, tdn, 5 september 1985; ira m.c. matehaere, tdn, 8 may 1986 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); e.a. collins to nzgb, 15 november 1985; e.l. hondflavell to nzgb, 1 september 1985; philip tremewan to nzgb, 14 november 1985; l.h. shand to nzgb, 14 november 1985; w.r. sykes to nzgb, 1 december 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 59 for example, juliet batten, tdn, 2 september 1985; jennifer lawrence, tdn, 5 september 1985; report of taranaki māori trust board hui (meeting), tdn, 13 december 1985 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); greg w. mcmanus, th, 2 september 1985 (clipping in l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba); w.b. dörflinger to nzgb, 8 november 1985; e.l. hondflavell to nzgb, 1 september 1985; secretary, puketapu hapū trust to nzgb, nd (received 5 december 1985); brian bourke to minister of lands, 18 march 1986; r.j. watemburg to nzgb, 1 october 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 60 p.l. hond, tdn, 9 january 1986 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); see also hinerau white to nzgb, 5 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 61 this view featured particularly in submissions from taranaki local authorities. for example, administration officer, hawera district council, to nzgb, 24 october 1985; county manager, waimate west county council, to secretary for internal affairs, 19 september 1985; county clerk, stratford county council, to nzgb, nd; chairman, taranaki united council and taranaki local bodies association, to nzgb, 8 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 62 for example, ‘one race’, tdn, 16 august 1985; ‘proud pakeha’, tdn, 17 august 1985; ‘concerned with name change’, tdn, 27 august 1985 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); e.p. topping to nzgb, 11 november 1985; john a. batchelor to nzgb, nd; g.m. elliot to nzgb, 13 august 1985; r.w. o’byrne to nzgb, 21 september 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 63 examples of derogatory views about māori include, ‘one race’, tdn, 16 august 1985; ‘proud pakeha’, tdn, 17 august 1985 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); d.a. ferguson and heather ferguson to nzgb, 28 june 1985; e.p. topping to nzgb, 11 november 1985; chairman, egmont historical society, to nzgb, 27 april 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba; examples of alleging an antieuropean agenda include, sharon mcintee, tdn, 13 august 1985; save mt egmont’s name committee, quoted in tdn, nd (around 1415 september 1985) (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); audrey p. smith to nzgb, 14 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 64 for example, p.j. hall, tdn, 28 august 1985 (clipping in l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba); coordinator, taranaki women’s refuge collective, to nzgb, 20 november 1985; robert mcarthur for taranaki racism awareness group to minister of māori affairs, 31 october 1985; r.j. watemburg to nzgb, 1 october 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 65 len and bev henderson, th, 23 august 1985 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); p.j. hall, tdn, 28 august 1985 (clipping in l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba); e.a. collins to nzgb, 15 november 1985; philip tremewan to nzgb, 14 november 1985; secretary, otaraua hapū, to nzgb, 22 november 1985; r.j. watemburg to nzgb, 1 october 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. one objector argued that the treaty was not relevant because cook named the maunga before the treaty was in existence: d.g. spiers to nzgb, 15 may 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 66 for example, editorial, tdn, 7 august 1985; j. wheeler, tdn, 7 january 1986 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); g.h. browne to nzgb, 20 november 1985; m. mcneill to nzgb, 17 august 1985; e.j. and g.m. ormond to nzgb, 16 august 1985; s.j. stockman to nzgb, 19 november 1985; a.j. treadwell to nzgb, 28 august 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 67 for example, r.g.l., tdn, 13 august 1985 (clipping in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); t.t. bright to nzgb, 10 november 1985; chairman, taranaki united council and taranaki local bodies association, to nzgb, 8 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 68 for example, editorials, tdn, 7 and 12 august 1985; ‘bob’s bluff’, tdn, 13 august 1985 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); ‘stop it’, tdn, 23 september 1985 (clipping in l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba); senior pupils of pembroke school, stratford, to nzgb, 15 august 1985; county manager, waimate west county council, to secretary for internal affairs, 19 september 1985; v.m. robertson to nzgb, 12 september 1985; administration officer, hawera district council, to nzgb, 24 october 1985; county clerk, stratford county council, to nzgb, nd; administrator, taranaki regional development council, to nzgb, 17 september 1985; d.g. spiers to nzgb, 15 may 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 69 for example, lianne pokere, tdn, 16 august 1985; p.g., tdn, 16 september 1985 (clippings in afie w5717 22863 box 178 enp 24/1/1 pt 2, anzw); w.r. halliburton to minister of lands, 24 october 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 70 for example, report of rangitawhi marae enterprise trust hui (meeting) at pātea, wanganui chronicle, 22 august 1985 (clipping in l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba); hinerau white to nzgb, 5 november 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 71 ewan morris, ‘“h” is for history: uses of the past in placename debates in new zealand and northern ireland’, in history australia, vol 15, no 1, 2018, pp11329; laura kostanski, ‘toponymic attachment’, in carole hough (ed), the oxford handbook of names and naming, oxford university press, oxford, 2016, pp41226. morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022126 72 ngāwhare, d. 2017, ravaged by a viral storm (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranakidailynews/ opinion/92307715/dennisngawhareravagedbyaviralstorm. see also the sources cited in note 8. 73 vicente, m. 2020, interview with fiona clark (online). available: https://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/wpcontent/ uploads/2020/05/fionaclarkinterview_final1.pdf; fiona clark, ‘egmontiana’ exhibition, adam art gallery, wellington, 20192020, http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/pastexhibitions/aagattwenty/ (accessed 4 may 2022). on branding, see ron lambert, ‘topographically exact to geometrically precise: the mountain in applied art’, in te maunga taranaki: views of a mountain, govettbrewster art gallery, new plymouth, 2001, pp8283 (with examples in illustrations on pp5455 of the same book). 74 ian wedde, ‘translation and representation: a history of ferries’, in ian wedde and gregory burke (eds), now see hear! art, language and translation, victoria university press for wellington city art gallery, wellington, 1990, p98. on artworks, see william mcaloon, ‘views of a mountain’, in te maunga taranaki: views of a mountain, govettbrewster art gallery, new plymouth, 2001, pp1631. 75 these issues have been discussed from māori perspectives by writers such as rachel buchanan and peter adds, and recently from a pākehā viewpoint by richard shaw: rachel buchanan, the parihaka album: lest we forget, huia publishers, wellington, 2009 and ko taranaki te maunga, bridget williams books, wellington, 2018; peter adds, ‘te muru me te raupatu: the aftermath’, in kelvin day (ed), contested ground | te whenua i tohea: the taranaki wars 18601881, huia publishers, wellington, 2010, pp25577; richard shaw, the forgotten coast, massey university press, auckland, 2021, and ‘a tale of two stories: unsettling a settler family’s history in aotearoa new zealand’, in genealogy, vol 5, no 1, 2021, article 26. see also the recent personal exploration of taranaki history by pākehā journalist john campbell, 2022, from egmont to taranaki (online). available: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/09/21/johncampbellihavebeenaslowdullstudentof ourhistory/. 76 for an overview of economic and social change in taranaki in this period, see ron lambert and gail henry, taranaki: an illustrated history, reed books, auckland, 2000, ch 11. 77 for an overview of political and cultural developments involving māori during this period, see aroha harris with melissa matutina williams, ‘rights and revitalisation, 19701990’, in atholl anderson, judith binney and aroha harris, tangata whenua: an illustrated history, bridget williams books, wellington, 2014, ch 14. 78 mason durie, te mana, te kāwanatanga: the politics of māori selfdetermination, oxford university press, auckland, 1998, pp2425; alan ward, an unsettled history: treaty claims in new zealand today, wellington, bridget williams books, 1999, p28. 79 on pākehā backlash in response to political, cultural and historical challenge from māori, see angela ballara, proud to be white? a survey of pakeha prejudice in new zealand, heinemann, auckland, 1986, ch 27; tim mccreanor, ‘“sticks and stones may break my bones…”: talking pakeha identities’, in james h. liu, tim mccreanor, tracey mcintosh and teresia teaiwa (eds), new zealand identities: departures and destinations, victoria university press, wellington, 2005, pp5268; vincent o’malley and joanna kidman, ‘contested memory: rā maumahara and pākehā backlash’, in joanna kidman, vincent o’malley, liana macdonald, tom roa and keziah wallis, fragments from a contested past: remembrance, denial and new zealand history, bridget williams books, wellington, 2022, pp6690. 80 doreen bridgeman, quoted in jane dove, david hill and elizabeth smither, taranaki, hodder & stoughton, auckland, 1987, p43. 81 letters from students of room 3, marfell school, new plymouth, 14 and 16 august 1985, l & s 22/2605/3, nzgba. 82 for the background to the new histories curriculum content, see ministry of education, 2022, aotearoa new zealand’s histories and te takanga o te wā (online). available: https://www.education.govt.nz/ourwork/changesineducation/ aotearoanewzealandshistoriesandtetakangaotewa/ (accessed 4 may 2022). 83 new zealand ministry of education, aotearoa new zealand’s histories in the new zealand curriculum, 2022, p41 (see also pp7, 23, 31). 84 ibid, p31. 85 the maunga name debate is relevant not only to the history curriculum’s ‘place and environment’ context but also to the contexts of ‘culture and identity’ and ‘government and organisation’. it is also relevant to the curriculum’s ‘big ideas’ about māori history, colonisation and settlement, and the use of power: ibid, p2. 86 see morris, ‘“h” is for history’. 87 taranaki tensions rooted in pakeha collective amnesia (online), 2017. available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/ programmes/morningreport/audio/201839522/taranakitensionsrootedinpakehacollectiveamnesia; insight: is taranaki coming to terms with its colonial past?, (online), 2017. available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/ programmes/insight/audio/201839414/insightistaranakicomingtotermswithitscolonialpast. 88 wilkinson, j. 2016, cultural taboos on mt taranaki often ignored (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/ traveltroubles/75770991/culturaltaboosonmttaranakioftenignored; coster, d. 2017, how a playmate exposed the cultural chasm between maori and pakeha (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/92359296/thecultural dividebetweenmaoriandpakeha. morris public history review, vol. 29, 2022127 https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/opinion/92307715/dennis-ngawhare-ravaged-by-a-viral-storm 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https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/201839522/taranaki-tensions-rooted-in-pakeha-collective-amnesia https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/insight/audio/201839414/insight-is-taranaki-coming-to-terms-with-its-colonial-past https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/insight/audio/201839414/insight-is-taranaki-coming-to-terms-with-its-colonial-past https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/75770991/cultural-taboos-on-mt-taranaki-often-ignored https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/75770991/cultural-taboos-on-mt-taranaki-often-ignored https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/92359296/the-cultural-divide-between-maori-and-pakeha https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/92359296/the-cultural-divide-between-maori-and-pakeha public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: greensill, h., taito, m., pasisi, j., bennett, j. l., dean, m., monise, m. 2022. tupuna wahine, saina, tupuna vaine, matua tupuna fifine, mapiag hani: grandmothers in the archives. public history review, 29, 54–66. https:// doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v29i0.8225 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj articles (peer reviewed) tupuna wahine, saina, tupuna vaine, matua tupuna fifine, mapiag hani: grandmothers in the archives hineitimoana greensill1,*, mere taito2, jessica pasisi3, jesi lujan bennett4, marylise dean5, maluseu monise6 1 tainui, ngāti koata, ngāti porou 2 malha’a, noa’tau: rotuma (fiji) 3 mutalau mo hikutavake, niue; pālagi; ngāti pikiao; tahiti 4 dededo and barrigada, guåhan [guam] 5 amuri, aitutaki; fasito’otai, samoa 6 juju, pepjei: rotuma. asau, vaitupu: tuvalu corresponding author: hineitimoana greensill, hine.greensill@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8225 article history: received 07/06/2022; accepted 08/11/2022; published 06/12/2022 kia mau ki ngā kupu a ō tūpuna hold fast to the words of your ancestors this article is the culmination of many conversations we have had about our respective grandmothers in the archives. as a group, we were interested in how we might embody many of the values, knowledges and experiences of our grandmothers in a roundtable at the 2021 new zealand historical association conference. it is difficult to put on paper the friendship and hospitality that informed these scholarly conversations. however, in keeping with the conversational nature of our roundtable, the format of this paper recognises the depth, complexity and critical work that comes from working together as indigenous scholars. from our own sea, land and skyscapes to the diasporic realities of generations of movement, migration and contact with outsiders, we trace some of the stories and lineage, emanating from our grandmothers, that have led us into the archives and informed our research. our discussion was guided by two key questions that focused on the circumstances of finding our grandmothers in our research journeys and the limitations of institutional archives that emerge when we shed light on ‘whānau archives’ and other sites of knowledge. the questions also declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 54 •• · · mailto:hine.greensill@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8225 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8225 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8225 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj played the role of providing structure to our roundtable discussion and therefore will be presented below to achieve a similar signposting effect through our rich kōrero. where have you met your grandmother in the archives and what has this meant for your research? we felt that this question was a fitting way to open our talanoa about our grandmothers, because there is a certain appeal to a ‘how did you first meet’ type of story. when the meeting is between an unlikely pair of knowledge sources such as grandmothers and institutional spaces of archives, we anticipated that each of us would bring unique and engaging stories of finding our grandmothers in our research. we were not disappointed. one of us found her grandmother tucked under a pile of photographs and then later in microfilms at a public library. another found her grandmother in a tivaevae book kept at the alexander turnbull library. two of us have grandmothers who are still alive and therefore offered conversations that were both grounded in the present as well as in the past. our stories show that our encounters have convincingly changed, for the better, the attitudes and values we have placed on our respective research projects. mere taito: noa’ia ‘e mạuri. i am the second eldest granddaughter and grandchild of my maternal mapiga (grandmother) lily voi kafoa. i affectionately refer to my mapiga lily as my first storyteller and my first book, because she was literally a carrier and deliverer of hanuju (rotuman folklore) for her ma’akiga (grandchildren). my mapiga lily was born on 8 february 1931 in rotuma. she moved to fiji in the 1940s and lived there for about forty years before moving to australia, where she currently lives. she will be ninety next year. my aunts in australia tell me that she is doing well and still cheats at a game of cards. as a pacific person in aotearoa new zealand, i feel very connected to my mapiga lily’s travelling and traversing ways. mapiga lily in australia in the 1980s. (private collection) my creative practicebased doctoral research examines the writing of fäeag rotuạm taenglish multilingual poetry as acts of waywriting (writing discovery) and fäeag rotuạm ta language regeneration here in aotearoa new zealand. in this study, i will be producing a creative artefact, a collection of fäeag rotuạm taenglish poetry, and an exegetical analysis of this creative collection. a particular focus of the greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202255 creative process of writing is the reading of creative multilingual fäeag rotuạm ta text. my study positions reading and writing as symbiotic literary processes that ‘sustain’ each other. in the context of waywriting, i am constantly mulling over the prerequisite conditions for multilingual writing, one of which is a functional multilingual linguistic repertoire. in turn, this line of thinking has inspired me to consider the history of my fäeag rotuạm ta language learning. was my acquisition of fäeag rotuạm ta immersive? if so, who was responsible for this natural exposure? these reflections centre my mapiga lily as the historical source of my fäeag rotuạm ta learning: a process marked by seven years of language immersion in the 1970s in vatukoula, fiji. i imagine my mapiga lily lining the walls of my glottis like protective wallpaper with hanuju, prayer, songs, and everyday functional varieties, as if it were a final act of hanisi (love) before she emigrated to australia in 1980. introspectively, then, my research is not about meeting my mapiga lily in a temperaturecontrolled archive, because she does not exist in an archive per se, but rather about remembering, acknowledging, and honouring her in my use of fäeag rotuạm ta in the creative component of my research. acknowledging mapiga lily in my creative practice means that my research is meaningful and personal, because it engages my immediate and extended families, especially their memories of our lives in vatukoula. however, this research is not just about me and my family. it is also about community: how individuals, artists, and families contribute to the longhaul, intergenerational phenomenon that we call language regeneration. centring my mapiga, family and community also confirms that my decision to commence doctoral studies was not made on the whim of ‘doing a phd for the sake of doing a phd’, but rather on relevance and need. my research stands to bridge theoretical and practical gaps that relate to fäeag rotuạm ta language resources, fäeag rotuạm ta creative literature, and rotuman creativity theory. it also makes visible the critical role of grandparents, especially grandmothers like mapiga lily, in the intergenerational transmission of languages. it demands from me, as a researcher and creative practitioner, to explore the ‘firing up of language memory’ as a workable source of language regeneration. hineitimoana and her grandmother, tuaiwa, in whāingaroa (private collection) greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202256 hineitimoana greensill: kia ora tātou. ki te taha ki tōku whaea, ko tuaiwa hautai kereopa tōku tupuna wahine, ko james rickard tōku tupuna tāne. ko hineitimoana tōku ingoa. on my mother’s side, my grandmother is tuaiwa hautai kereopa rickard. the research that i am engaged with is an exploration of the intellectual and political work of māori women in the 1970s, focusing specifically on their writing. at the centre of my project is my grandmother, whose writing and political thought i explore as part of the broader whakapapa of māori women’s intellectual production in the late twentieth century. i consider my grandmother’s presence throughout my research journey, and the ways in which her story can be recast by working across both public and private archives. i also contemplate the deeper ways in which i have come to know my grandmother, and the unique role and responsibilities that i have as a mokopuna engaged in tupunacentred research. like mere, i have lots of memories of my grandmother, who passed away in december 1997. while these memories become more distant with each passing day, doing this research has brought me closer to her. it has enabled me to meet her again in letters, photographs, memoirs, interviews, and conversations. even just a momentary encounter with someone who knew my grandmother, or had witnessed her in action somewhere, has led me to unexpected, and sometimes quite extraordinary, places, deepening my understanding of who my grandmother was. in terms of the more intentional kind of research that i am doing, i have been looking at both a whānau archive – a collection of my grandmother’s things that our whānau have been kaitiaki (caretakers) of since her passing – as well as her presence in the public archive. as part of my research, i have been engaging with some of my grandmother’s letters; one of the interesting things i have found is that reading them is almost like hearing her speaking again. her written texts are constructed in a way that is so natural and so close to the style, tone and feeling of her spoken voice. i still feel her presence in the room when i read her writing and i still feel the impact of her words. when i first started to engage with her writing, i remember sitting down in the library and opening a box that had some of her letters inside. i pulled one out and started reading it, and right in that moment it felt like she was there; it was her voice, not mine, reading the words as my eyes followed the text across the page. that was the beginning of my project and the moment in which i met my grandmother again in the archives. as a mokopuna, having the opportunity to spend time with my grandmother in this way is such a taonga. i cannot help but think of how privileged i am to be doing this kind of work – to be able to spend hours poring over my grandmother’s writing, listening to her voice, pondering her actions, and imagining what she was thinking and feeling at different moments in time. being able to travel through time and space to different moments in my grandmother’s life and to relive those moments with her is an opportunity that others in my whānau may not have. had we, as mokopuna, lived in our grandmother’s time, we would have sat, as she once did, at the feet of our tūpuna listening to their stories. as a student, this is something that i get to do every day. i sit at my grandmother’s feet listening to her stories, while others in my whānau are working to provide for their families, engaging in hapū and community work, recording and transmitting cultural knowledge, and holding space for us on our whenua. knowing this makes me very much aware of my role as a connector of past, present and future imaginings of my grandmother’s story, and of the responsibility that i have as a mokopuna to do this work justice. jessica pasisi: ko e matua tupuna fifine haaku ko lela sialemata, ko e matua tupuna taane haaku ko matagi pasisi/patiti ko e matua taane haaku ko ben pasisi, hau au i tau maaga ko mutalau ululauta matahefonua mo hikutavake tamahatokula mahinatumai. ko e higoa haaku ko jessica lili pasisi. i am the granddaughter of lela sialemata (see figure 3) and the daughter of ben pasisi, and i belong to the villages of mutalau and hikutavake in niue. i also feel incredibly privileged to be able to do research that connects me to my grandmother and to think about the ways i may sit at her feet and feel her wisdom in the stories of my dad and in public archives. in my phd thesis that looked at niue women’s perspectives and experiences of climate change, i walked my research from management communication to pacific greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202257 studies, using pacific studies lenses and thinking to engage more critically with assumptions and theories in management, as well as creating space for an indigenousled thesis project that would uphold the mana of niue women and their experiences and knowledge. it was in this movement that i came across my grandmother’s image for the first time, tucked in a pile of family photographs. unlike the many photographs of my pālagi family, which were framed and hung on the wall, there were no images of my paternal grandmother growing up. as a child, i never questioned why this was. but the gravity of it hit me recently, and i’ve been thinking about the privilege and responsibility that comes with my growing knowledge of, and connection to, my grandma lela. i printed and framed that photo of my grandmother and gave it to my dad. it was a simple gesture, but it was perhaps more meaningful for him than anything i had done before. for him, it was the first time his mother had been welcomed into his home. since my doctorate, my dad and i have been as thick as thieves recounting stories of his youth, the challenges of coming to aotearoa, the challenges of marrying a pālagi woman and becoming part of her family, and what he remembers of his mother and life in niue when he was growing up. as i was unpacking the ways in which niue women experienced climate change in my thesis and the ways that these experiences can be reproduced in academic spaces, my dad and i would also unpack what felt like an ocean of memories and stories that had been stored away. the connections of these two spaces is something i’m still thinking about and engaging with in the research i’m currently doing on niue concepts of happiness and wellbeing. culturally, niue knowledge is often shared generationally, passed from grandparents or parents to their children. while i never got to meet my paternal grandparents, through my dad’s stories i still have a connection to both my dad’s childhood and his memory of his parents – the kinds of work they did in their family and community, where they lived, the sea or bush tracks they walked, how they came to aotearoa, what roles they had in the family. it’s sometimes surprising how relevant my dad’s recollections and stories have been in the ways i have been able to talk about climate change and the environment with people back home in niue. often my conversations would turn to what niue would have been like for people in older generations, and these stories from my dad have given me touch points that feed conversations and questions that cross different generations grandma lela sialemata, niue. (private collection) greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202258 ioatearetini. (private collection) a gift that surpasses the completion of my doctorate has been getting to know my grandmother through my dad. we have searched in libraries for her name and seen her birth certificate after hours of scrolling through microfilms of records that have since been washed away by cyclones. i have seen records of the children my grandmother had and a document showing that she had signed up as part of a christian congregation. my dad and i have pieced together who her birth and adoptive parents were and how they were related, as well as mapping out a wider family tree that now includes several generations. all the while, my dad shares memories of things she told him, things he saw her do, how she was an amazing niue woman. grandma lela had traditional medicinal knowledge, made cultural dress, was mother to eleven children, acted as a midwife, helped with sick children, and was wife to my grandpa – matagi patiti/pasisi. whether it was the first photograph of my grandma lela in a family archive or the subsequent trips to public libraries to find her in microfilm, this ability to be so personal in my research has dramatically changed the kind of academic i am and the kinds of research that i want to keep doing. it makes visible the many pathways into our history and cultures that are defined by who and where we are now and that are only made possible by the relationships that we have and take time to nurture. this research space also recognises that there are generations of questions. while i grapple with things i would like to know, my dad also has questions and through me asking mine, he gets to ask his, too. whether we get the answers we are looking for is not an end point in itself, because for us, part of the magic is having the time to ask these questions together. greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202259 marylise varena frankie dean: the research that i have carried out over the last year and a bit focuses on the female domestic labour migration scheme that spanned over several decades in the early to mid1900s.1 this research has an emphasis on the involvement of my grandmother in these schemes. the domestic schemes were utilised as a migration avenue for cook island women, as well as for women from the other realm nations of niue and tokelau. this research has taken me to all kinds of archive spaces. in one instance, i made a journey to the alexander turnbull library and met my grandmother, ioatearetini, in one of the books that showcases beautiful pieces of tivaevae, of which my grandmother was an absolute star.2 the consequences of this finding meant that i felt even more of an obligation to carry out this project. not in a burdening sense, but in a way that i felt it was my responsibility. and not to tell the entire story, but at least this part and at least to get the ball rolling. meeting my grandmother, almost two years ago and many times since then, has pushed me to complete this project. but it has not always been smooth sailing. knowing of her presence in the archives and thinking about what my project will inevitably do when it is published has given me extra motivation. as i have gone through the journey of writing my thesis and talking about my grandmother’s experiences of the domestic schemes, i have felt the obligation grow stronger and stronger. though her name may not have been explicitly mentioned in the research process, especially in the archives space, knowing that she was involved in these spaces gives me a similar sense of her presence as i get from seeing her name in print. through this journey, i have been able to see my grandmother in many of the experiences that women had in the domestic schemes – experiences such as labouring for wealthy european families and connecting with other domestic workers. some of the other workers would also be from the cook islands, which must have been comforting in a strange land. my grandmother maintained other peoples’ household with great precision and care. her precision and care can also be seen in her tivaevae work; the care that goes into choosing the patterns and the colours, and being careful while stitching. in some of the stories that have been told to me through my interview process, i have also seen another aspect of my grandmother in the archives. this is our family archive of stories that may not always be on paper but are definitely in a lot of our elders’ hearts. these stories have shaped their worldview and by continuing with my project and recording some of these stories, there is an opportunity to place them on shelves for future generations. afu’t a‘u‘ua se, ma ạfu’t fū se (as a generation takes their rest, another generation rises): susau marie and maluseu monise. (private collection) greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202260 maluseu monise: hanuj! storyteller’s call to attention! mā! audience’s heeding reply! (m. taito, 2021) hanuj’okia rogrog on otou mapiạg hạn ta, susau marie. it is my wish and honour to share one of the many hanuju (stories) of my grandmother, susau marie. i was told that a hanuju starts in the middle and ends in the middle. with this intention at the forefront, i wish to acknowledge the multiple entry points when grappling with the remembrance of our family’s matriarch susau marie. like mere, hineitimoana, jess, marylise and jesi, i met my mapiạg hạni in the archives. in 2019, our matriarch was laid to rest from sharing her love in this realm. in july 2019, i embarked on a master’s thesis to explore rotuman worldviews in kirikiriroa. this is where i encountered all these wonderfully gifted, generous, and intelligent scholars in pacific and indigenous studies at te whare wānanga o waikato. being surrounded by a village of thinkers, feelers and intellects that were not afraid to push the boundaries of pacific normality, invited me to step into a world of potentiality and possibilities beyond my imaginings. as i was navigating our rotuman literature canon, i crossed paths with two books by elizabeth kafonika fiu inia, fäeag ‘es fūaga: rotuman proverbs (1998) and kato‘aga: rotuman ceremonies (2001).3 in the acknowledgements of these books, i found mapiạg hạni’s name susau marie. although it was foreign to me to read and say her name aloud, a rush of memories and emotions waterfalled upon me. a river of remembrance gave way to her love for knowledge accumulation, sharing and exchange. remeeting mapiạg hạni in the digital archives of google books and a rotuman website offered a relation paradigm that was foreign, yet familiar in the ways in which the text and space encompassed a reunion and homecoming of sorts. both of elizabeth inia’s books traversed the significance of fäeag rotuạm ta (rotuman language) as a tē fakhanisi (gift) – a unique perspective and experience of the world as relational kin that evokes various rituals to embody, express and elongate the rotuman mäeavhanisi (modalities of love). hearing mapiạg hạni’s voice guide me through both texts has grounded my ability to reimagine how we converse. it has opened dialogue between my mother, brother and wider family’s fragmented memories, connecting and interconnecting our collective hanuju of mapiạg hạni. this recurring process has deeply shifted my perceptions of loss and sorrow as the remembrance and healing occurs when we share our hanuju. my research has offered a deeper understanding of the importance of our individual hanuju as fragmented memories or archives that add to the ancient puzzle of the collective rotuman story. this recognises how a rotuman worldview in kirikiriroa, waikato, aotearoa needs to be told, documented and retold for future generations to find our fragmented hanuju. jesi lujan bennett: håfa adai todus hamyo. i na’anhu si jesi lujan bennett, and my mother’s family is from guåhan (guam) in the mariana islands.4 i am the granddaughter of guadalupe garrido blas lujan, lovingly known to many as mama lou. when i am not facetiming my grandmother, mother, or sister (or wearing my great grandmother’s dress, cigarette burns and all), i am a lecturer in pacific and indigenous studies at the university of waikato. i often reflect on my diasporic chamoru identity and the ‘inbetweenness’ i felt being raised in the united states.5 i remember how the smell of cooked spam®, eggs, and fresh rice filled the morning air of my san diego, california, home as my mom hurried me and my sister to get ready for school. as i rushed out the door, my grandmother’s voice would cut through the hustle, ‘don’t forget to kiss your mama!’ i greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202261 would give her a hug goodbye as she whispered in my ear, ‘make good friends, and don’t forget, chamoru hao (you’re chamoru).’ i was born and raised in the continental united states, unlike my mother and grandmother who are part of a larger migration of chamorus who moved away from the mariana islands in the 1960s. as a child, i remember trying to make sense of my experiences in a chamoru household run by chamoru women alongside the realities of growing up in california. the staunch chamoru mothering from my multigenerational household often meant being one of only a few children in school that even knew an island like guam existed, beyond the footnotes of american history books on the spanish american war and world war ii. my research and the archival material i use are intrinsically part of my relationship with my grandmother. my chamoru upbringing led by my mother and grandmother is tied to a long history of chamoru women maintaining positions of power and authority within a matrilineal society. my dissertation addressed the repercussions of the united states’ militarization of the mariana islands and subsequent growth of chamoru diasporic communities. more recently, i shifted my focus on diasporic chamoru experiences to examine the importance of chamoru women’s stories in understanding the outmigration of my people. the mariana islands, the homelands of chamorus, have dealt with the onslaught of various waves of colonialism, often changing the routes of mobility available to chamoru families, like my own. my research grapples with the outmigration of chamorus under spanish and american colonial rule (though we have also dealt with japan and germany as colonising powers) through uncovering the oftenabsent experiences of our women and the ways they aided community building in these diasporic spaces. their organising and continued role as matriarchal figures impels new narratives about chamoru issues to deal with a historic lack of engagement with chamoru women’s stories. jesi lujan bennett and her grandmother, guadalupe garrido blas lujan, at the san diego international airport in san diego, california. (private collection) greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202262 considering the archival edges our conversations have demonstrated that the impact of finding and engaging with our grandmothers in our research have been quite varied. for all of us, however, there has been a clear sense of obligation and responsibility to seek out our research pathways with integrity and, as hineitimoana mentioned, ‘to do this work justice’. but perhaps carrying out our research mahi well and with integrity requires from all of us a good and clear understanding of what knowledge spaces such as family archives offer indigenous centred research that colonial archives cannot. all but two of us found our grandmothers in two different knowledge repository spaces: family and institutional archives. in the next and final question of our round table discussion, we explore further the spaces of family and colonial archives, particularly the limitations of colonial archives that come to light when we place them alongside whānau archives and other sites of knowledge. how would you describe the edges of the archives you work with, and what knowledge is visible in these spaces? hineitimoana: ngāti kahungunu legal scholar, grandfather and storyteller extraordinaire, moana jackson, talks about whakapapa, the interconnected web of relationships and stories that make us who we are, as ‘a series of neverending beginnings’.6 in reflecting on my own research journey and encounters with my tupuna in the archives, i find new beginnings to countless stories wherever i turn. sometimes those new beginnings are not what you expect, or where you expect them to be, but as alice te punga somerville reminds us, an archive is not confined to one particular location or type of object. an archive is not just a sterile, temperaturecontrolled building with security cameras and swipe card access that houses cardboard boxes and manuscripts: ‘archives are places where things, people and ideas come together’.7 archives are all around us. this is certainly something that i have found to be true in the work that i do. this kind of expansive view of what an archive is aligns with māori ways of viewing knowledge. our pātaka kōrero, our storehouses of knowledge, are not limited to written texts. they are in our carvings and songs, on our marae and in the stories of our tūpuna, our elders, grandparents and ancestors. in terms of the edges of the archive, i am not sure that there are any. what i have found, instead, is that the archive is constantly expanding and creating new beginnings for new stories, or for old stories that remain untold. another thing that i have been reflecting on is how our whakapapa, how those genealogical ties that we have to our tūpuna, enable us to do the kind of work that we do in a different way. these reflections have, in turn, informed a series of questions: what do the ways in which we know our tūpuna mean for our research? how is the presence of our tūpuna felt in the work that we do? what is the role that our tūpuna play in shaping our archival projects? how does our proximity to tūpuna create moments of tension? and how does it create opportunities to tell a more holistic story about our tūpuna and their lives? these are questions that i continue to wrestle with in my research. marylise: the more that i ponder on this question, the more i feel that the once clear distinctions i had formed were rather misguided. i have seen some overlap and connections in the different archival spaces, where the knowledges do not counter one another but rather add to the richness or shed a different perspective. i have learned many things about my grandmother through talanoa with family members in preparation for my masters thesis, and i see the inner workings of these stories of my grandmother in the academic archival space. one of my most prominent findings of my grandmother in the archives was through a book about tivaevae. to me it signified how highly skilled she was in this artform, which was reaffirmed in the talanoa that i had with family members; bringing the knowledge of her skills to the forefront and surpassing the knowledge i had of her before that. greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202263 mere: rekindling and firing up language memory finds me traversing three knowledge spaces: kạunohoga (family), puku ma fäega (rotuman language text and audio), and puk fạiva (creative text). in all these three spaces, my mapiga lily is ever present. she emerges in the kạunohoga space from memory objects like photographs, the sound of clanging aluminium buckets, the smell of a burning mosquito coil, and orange bingo pellets. the bingo pellets have raised the memory of me accompanying my grandmother to her bingo games at the rotuman hall in vatukoula. i would often rub the bingo pellets between my teeth because i enjoyed the squidgy sound it made when plastic rubbed up against enamel. my grandmother would demand i spit it out in case i choked. i can hear her saying, ‘äe se ania!’ (‘don’t eat it!’). these memory objects hold sounds and smells that return me to the place where my fäeag rotuạm ta was born. from the space of fäeag rotuạm ta audio and text, i find mapiga lily in the reading of hanuju such as ‘malol ta ma noa’ (noah and the flood) in the puk ha’a (the holy bible) and ‘kirkirsasa’ in titifanua and maxwell’s text.8 mapiga lily introduced my siblings and me to kirkirsasa’s bravery and her tattooed armpits during hanuju time; she was our first storyteller, our first book. it is impossible to ignore her hovering presence when reading fäeag rotuạm ta creative text. my preoccupation with finding mapiga lily in my research has also made me curious about how other pasifika poets have presented their grandmothers in their work. in the third space of puk fạiva, i discover albert tuaopepe wendt’s grandmother in the poem ‘photographs’: her name is mele.9 her photograph ‘has occupied the place of honour’ in wendt’s vaipe home and, even at the age of ninety, she ‘detested being called an old woman’. like mele once was, mapiga lily is now ninety and living a very comfortable life in australia. my aunt kamoe tells me that she can still call ‘trump!’ in a game of cards; her mind is sharp enough to cheat and recognise victory when she wins. and like mele, mapiga lily holds a place of profound honour in our kạunohoga (family). finding mapiga lily in these three knowledge spaces outside an institutional archive overturns the legitimacy of institutional archives as ‘authoritative’ and ‘definitive’ sources of historical knowledge. hineitimoana drives this point well: ‘archives are everywhere’. the pervasiveness of historical knowledge outside of institutional spaces enables indigenous creative practice scholars like me to draw from a wider pool of knowledge sources. i can find my mapiga lily in a bingo pellet. i can hear her in a clangy aluminium bucket. i can feel her in a poem and bible verse. all three sources invoke language memory. memory (individual and communal) can often be perceived as unreliable and unstable by eurocentric standards, but i argue that it is memory drawn from family archives and objects like photographs that enriches the archival research process. as marylise rightly mentions above, institutional and family archives should ‘not counter one another but rather add to the richness or shed a different perspective’. indigenous creative research, therefore, is not bound by eurocentric colonial archival text alone. when we are not held ransom to one source of knowledge, we are empowered to be creative and experimentative in our research methods and approaches. this is the research trajectory i intend to stay on for a very long time. jess: i am interested in what a whānau or magafaoa archive might be and mean for me. as i engage with more of this knowledge, and connect with tagata niue and other pacific scholars, like everyone on this roundtable, i feel like we get closer to understanding the spaces that our knowledge inhabits and the ways we can express this in our scholarly work and share it with our families and communities. in many ways, the edges of institutional archives feel limited by who and how they were set up and the mechanics and systems that maintain them, whereas a magafaoa archive moves and expands to the places where memories and stories originate, where they are found and remembered. when i write about where our family information is or how to get to it, it becomes a map. there is the physical, geographical and tangible side of this map, and then there are the parts that bring it into focus for my magafaoa archive. is an archive limited to geographic space? when we find things in conventional institutional archives, is there a way of claiming it or recognising that it fits in a bigger space of connection. greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202264 maluseu: the edges of the archives that i work within continue to move further and further away, like the moving horizons of my imaginaries. the conjuring of imaginaries that speak to our futures is well discussed and documented with only a handful of current scholarly work that address rotuman archival explorations as a source of clearing the path forward. an ancient knowledge transference that we experience as living histories. meeting mapiạg hạni online has regifted our family fragmented hanuju that routes to an ecosystem of hanuju. our sensory experience is the reason why i am explicit about meeting the archives from an imaginary capacity, which can bridge ecosystems of realities, truth and paradigms that reveal and heal wayfinding hanuju. we can observe how a hanuju finds a home in you. knowledge as hanuju can be a living, breathing, sentient being who finds and intersects multiple places of belonging. this is the essence of embracing hanuju as an ancient practise that continues to weave futures for rotuman mobility. a hanuju does seek to be right or wrong, but instead seeks its way back home like water trickling down a mountain side. our archives can then be seen as a living reality through the sharing and practise of honouring hanuju. our fragmented memories, stories, literature and orature are still finding their way back home just like us. which begs the question of me as an emerging scholar, how do i clear the path for the flowing hanuju to traverse their own homecoming? to be finally embraced by their kạunohoga (family) with a mamasa (rotuman welcome home ritual). jesi: even though chamoru women are prominent figures within our communities, there are few resources written about the experiences of our women, let alone those within the diaspora. my childhood during the 1990s and early 2000s was not particularly different from that of other chamorus, where those abroad now outnumber the chamoru population within the mariana islands. scholarly and literary engagement with the outmigration of chamorus from the marianas and their subsequent diasporic experiences is profoundly absent from larger discussions of pacific islander mobility. historical records of chamoru movement are predominantly written by european explorers and missionaries, often focusing on their interactions with chamoru men. chamoru men are given names, stories, and, at times, recognition of their contributions to events. chamoru women on the other hand are rarely mentioned in colonial writings. they remain silent, nameless figures, and often numbers or statistics without noted contributions to the islands’ rich past. chamoru scholars christine taitano delisle, anne perez hattori, and laura marie torres sauder, have taken on the task in their own work to discuss and celebrate the complex stories of chamoru women throughout our islands.10 i use my grandmother and her friends’ stories to address this notable void by initiating a deeper examination of the experiences of our women in diasporic spaces, and how their indigenous identity can be mobilised, incorporated, and inclusive in geographic and cultural contexts. it has been some time since i have dealt with the morning chaos of getting ready for school with my mother and grandmother. however, their stories continue to shape how i think about chamoru women as steadfast pillars in our families and diasporic communities. my grandmother is a longtime member of the sons and daughters of guam club in san diego and, depending on the year, she proudly serves as a board member. her stories, and those of the other women – all leaders in their own right – in the club, often come to me in conversations over the phone, slow texts, or over healthier chamoru meals (without our beloved and incredibly unhealthy spam®). they generously invite me in to explore photographs from family collections, read over newsletters and flyers saved from past chamoru events, and attend senior lunches at the guam club to reflect on the long journeys that brought them to san diego. once my grandmother sounded her metaphorical kulo’, or conch shell, to her friends, they began to share their archives full of rich accounts of creating and sustaining chamoru communities beyond the mariana islands. my grandmother’s archives matter and are necessary for considering chamorus diasporic experiences and the resilience of our women. uncovering and asserting the experiences of diasporic chamoru women is a greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202265 decolonial act to better understand chamoru movement and the specificities of how colonialism manifests differently in the lives of women. legacies of being a matrilineal society place chamoru women’s authority at the centre of the home, clan, and island life. i bring together these various chamoru experiences and historic accounts to highlight the bountiful stories of chamoru diasporic women that have yet to be fully engaged with. chamoru women abroad offer new and unexpected ways to understand centuries of struggle, adaptation, and resilience in the face of colonialism. chamoru women’s perspectives in the home islands and in the diaspora can also put forward new possibilities in thinking about chamoru identity and movements towards the true liberation of our islands. conclusion finding our grandmothers in our research – some more ‘archival’ than others – has enabled us to uncover and assert the experiences of chamoru women; reconnect fragmented rotuman stories online; rekindle and fireup rotuman language memory; explore magafaoa archive spaces and their potential to expand the places where niue memories and stories originate; discover family contributions to the new zealand domestic scheme; and uncover new stories and beginnings from the genealogical ties that we have to our tūpuna. tuaiwa hautai kereopa rickard, varena frankie dean, lela sialemata, lily voi kafoa, susau marie, and guadalupe garrido blas lujan have brought a humanness and a profound sense of community and familial relevance to our varied paths of archival research and knowledgemaking. archives need not be sterile institutional spaces. they are all around us. our grandmothers have shown us that. endnotes 1 from here on, this is referred to as the domestic schemes. 2 tivaevae is the art of quilting in the cook islands. it was heavily influenced by the wives of missionaries who were staying in the cook islands. 3 see elisabeth inia, fäeag ‘es fūaga: rotuman proverbs, institute of pacific studies, university of the south pacific, suva, 1998; elisabeth inia, kato‘aga: rotuman ceremonies, institute of pacific studies, university of the south pacific, suva, 2001. 4 in the chamoru language, guam is called guåhan. the mariana islands are also referred to as låguas yan gåni. låguas are the southern, populated islands and gåni refers to the northern islands in the archipelago; tiara r. na’puti, ‘speaking of indigeneity: navigating genealogies against erasure and #rhetoricsowhite’, in quarterly journal of speech, vol 105, no 4, 2019, pp49550. 5 ‘chamorro’ is often used in general practice, when writing in english, and written according to the commonwealth of the northern mariana islands’ orthography. ‘chamoru’ is used when writing in the native language. in 2017, guam’s kumision i fino’ chamorro (chamorro language commision) adopted ‘chamoru’ to emphasize that ‘ch’ and ‘ng’ are considered one letter and should be capitalised as such. i choose to use ‘chamoru’ to reference our indigenous language and be inclusive of the mariana islands as a whole. 6 jackson, m. 2021, decolonisation and the stories in the land (online). available: https://etangata.co.nz/comment andanalysis/moanajacksondecolonisationandthestoriesintheland/ (accessed 27 may 2022). 7 alice te punga somerville, ‘“i do still have a letter”: our sea of archives’, in chris andersen and jean m. o’brien (eds), sources and methods in indigenous studies, routledge, abingdon, 2016, pp121127. 8 see puk ha’a the holy bible in rotuman, bible society of the south pacific, suva, 1975, 1990, pp1012; mesulame titifanua and maxwell churchward, tales of a lonely island, institute of pacific studies, university of the south pacific, suva, 1995, pp8690. 9 albert wendt, photographs, auckland university press, auckland, 1995, pp7782. 10 see christine taitano delisle, placental politics: chamoru women, white womanhood, and indigeneity under u.s. colonialism in guam, university of north carolina press, chapel hill, 2022; laura souder, daughters of the island, university press of america, lanham, 1992; anne perez hattori, colonial disease: us navy health policies and the chamorros of guam, 18981941, university of hawaiʻi press, honolulu, 2004. greensill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202266 https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/moana-jackson-decolonisation-and-the-stories-in-the-land/ https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/moana-jackson-decolonisation-and-the-stories-in-the-land/ a new zeal for history: public history in new zealand public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) a new zeal for history: public history in new zealand alex trapeznik university of otago corresponding author: alex trapeznik, alexander.trapeznik@otago.ac.nz doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8380 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords new zealand; public history; historic places; heritage; museums; treaty of waitangi; māori public history is still a relatively unknown term in new zealand, an island nation in the southwest pacific with a population of around 4.6 million people. until the late 1980s it was rare for professional historians to practise their profession outside the academy. most of the few who did were public servants attached to institutions such as the department of internal affairs or the major museums. expanding work opportunities in the institutional, museum and historic heritage sectors have, however, fostered an increase in the number of freelance historians, some of whom are now participating in the identification, assessment, interpretation and management of new zealand’s historic places. in the ‘turf wars’ common to new fields of enterprise an ‘us and them’ approach has given way to a recognition that public and academic historians utilise the same skills in research, analysis and writing that are taught in universities.1 the establishment of the professional historians’ association of new zealand aotearoa (phanza) in 1994 has provided a forum for representing and advancing the interests of new zealand’s professional historians. the formation of the centre for public history at the university of otago in 1995, along with several course offerings at other universities, were concrete indicators of the growth of public history in this country.2 in the early 2000s victoria university began to offer a masters in public history, and in 2009 the waikato university centre for public history was established to facilitate and promote public history projects. however, by 2014 the victoria degree course lapsed and the waikato centre had changed its name to the public history research unit and has since become simply the history research unit. the new zealand context has shown that academic programmes in public history have only a small niche market and a limited shelf life. today the focus has turned to heritage and museum studies.3 a critical literature devoted to public history developed from 2000 with the publication of key texts such as common ground? heritage and public places in new zealand, (2000) and going public: the changing face of new zealand history, (2001) were complemented by many scholarly historical works, most of them supported by the state. as nancy swarbrick has observed, ‘alongside and underpinning this developing literature, there has been an increased demand for historians and historical analysis beyond the education sector. for some time, the waitangi tribunal and the history group of the ministry for culture and heritage have been major employers of historians and the historical method.’4 until 2000, this group had been the historical branch (previously the historical publications branch) of the department of internal affairs. in addition to the waitangi tribunal which investigates long-standing maori claims against the state, historians are employed in a number of other government organisations dealing with treaty of waitangi issues (the office of treaty settlements, the crown forestry rental trust and the crown law office). there is also a great deal of historical research conducted at the local level, in museums, archives and historical societies. in addition, there are many freelance and contract historians currently employed across new zealand on historical projects that speak to audiences beyond the academy.5 to enhance, stimulate and facilitate public history research in new zealand the electronic journal the new zealand journal of public history first appeared in 2011. it is published intermittently by the history research unit at the university of waikato and is devoted to the discussion, debate and dissemination of ideas about the practice of public history in new zealand.6 recent scholarship in the field evaluates the potential of a new method of public history by exploring the contemporary meaning of history and the relevance of history, historical knowledge and historical methodology for organisations through a novel adaptation of a consulting methodology, the ‘learning history approach’, to understand what individuals and communities say and do about history. this approach sits at the intersection of interdisciplinary research on historical consciousness, public history and ‘learning histories’ from organisational studies. it shows how an adaptation of the original learning history methodology can both fit within and challenge the conceptual frameworks of public history. raising historical consciousness and engaging more people with the historical discipline is vital for the health of the historical discipline. therefore the learning history approach can be an effective means of expanding participatory historical culture. this is because the approach draws participants into reflective and often transformational conversations about historiographical issues such as historical community and heritage. ultimately, this view reflects the need to build a more participatory historical culture and the active role of academic, professional historians in realising that culture.7 *** difficult communications for much of the nineteenth century made european settlement in new zealand highly localized, and strong regional identities and loyalties persist to the present day. early local histories were mostly celebratory and sentimental, applauding the achievements of the ‘pioneers’. from the late nineteenth century – when the country’s population was around 800,000 —­ jubilees of schools, churches and small towns nearly always produced publications, but these were often small-scale and amateurish by modern academic standards. publishers began to show interest in more serious works of local history in the 1920s and 1930s, many of which first appeared in serial form in local newspapers. the centenary of the treaty of waitangi in 1940 and subsequent provincial centenaries aroused greater public interest in local history. local and regional history are now well-respected genres of new zealand history. several important works appear most years, almost all of them well up to professional scholarly standards. since the late nineteenth century local and central government have sponsored many projects in both māori and pakeha (non-māori) history and the study of māori origins and culture. emerging, at first modestly, governmental backing of historical activities expanded significantly from the 1980s; for example, the official history of new zealand in the second world war 1939–45 is a 48-volume series published by the war history branch (and its successors) of the department of internal affairs which covered new zealand involvement in the second world war. the series was published during the period 1949 to 1986. some landmark government-sponsored history projects from the 1980s include the dictionary of new zealand biography, which was published in print in 1990 and digitally in 2001, and the bateman new zealand historical atlas, published in 1997. the latter drew on the expertise of a range of historians and archaeologists as well as cartographers, under the editorship of malcolm mckinnon of the historical branch of the ministry of internal affairs. the atlas ‘broke new ground in its spatial representation of history.’8 work on the pioneering reference website te ara —­ the encyclopedia of new zealand began in 2002, ten ‘themes’ being released sequentially until the ‘first build’ was complete in 2014. by then, the work comprised about a thousand entries making use of 30,000 resources, which included photographs, works of art, sound recordings, film, maps and interactive features. the general editor was jock phillips of the ministry of culture and heritage.9 ‘te ara’ in māori means ‘the pathway’ and this website offers many pathways to understanding new zealand. short essays and multimedia combine to present a comprehensive guide to new zealand’s peoples, natural environment, history, culture, economy and society. it was the world’s first ‘born-digital’ national encyclopedia. te ara is also a gateway to cultural information from other institutions, with links to the digital collections of libraries, archives and museums around the country. an important feature of te ara is its māori content. the māori perspective is presented prominently, and items with substantial māori content are available in te reo (the maori language). te ara also provides access to the 1966 encyclopaedia of new zealand and the dictionary of new zealand biography. museums began to employ trained historians as curators from the late 1960s. at the dominion museum for instance the impending bicentennial of james cook’s discovery of new zealand led to the appointment of the first ‘curator of colonial history’ in 1968. changes to the law governing historic places led to the wider employment of professional historians. often on short-term contracts, they researched management plans for historic reserves for the department of lands and survey from 1977 on. historians and archaeologists were also needed from 1975 to carry out research for the historic places trust’s new register of pre-1900 archaeological sites. the trust’s role in classifying historic buildings was formalised in 1980 and its regulatory powers extended in 1993. regional and local authorities were given greater responsibility for identifying and protecting historic places under the resource management act 1991, and they too often employed historians.10 defining public history is not simple. leslie h. fishel jr. admits that ‘it almost defies definition’ but offers ‘a stepping stone towards [a] greater understanding’ of this definition. for fishel, ‘public history is the adaptation and application of the historian’s skills and outlook for the benefit of private and public enterprises.’11 some may consider this too narrow. but whatever definition is used, all encompass two important elements. first, audience is important in public history. it might range from a wide and general one —­ for example, the audience for television programmes, museum labels or heritage trail guides —­ to a narrower one —­ such as an audience for tribunal reports, school centennial histories or government agency reports. nevertheless, the audience for public history will almost always be wider than that for academic research. secondly, public history is usually undertaken for a particular reason, for instance to mark a milestone in the history of a group, to promote public understanding of a little-known aspect of history, to advance the legitimacy of a social group or to schedule a historic place. that reason usually forms part of the commissioning process: the group or person commissioning the work will have specific questions to be answered, and specific features upon which focus is to be placed.12 on the other hand, many groups carry out the research and writing of histories themselves; jorma kalela has argued that public historians’ ‘prime role is to act as consultants who provide expert advice’.13 public historians seek to make history serviceable to the present and the future. they are interested in creating a forum where different elements or perspectives of the historical record, broadly conceived, can be presented and caused to produce their own synthesis. their products include official or government histories; histories of social movements; institutional and business histories; local, community or family histories; museum interpretation; websites; and historic building research and assessment. public historians are at the forefront in treaty of waitangi-related research. set up by the treaty of waitangi act 1975, the waitangi tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry that makes recommendations on claims brought by māori relating to crown actions which breach the promises made in the treaty of waitangi. since the treaty was signed in 1840, māori have made many complaints to the crown that the terms of the treaty were not being upheld. often these petitions and protests fell on deaf ears. in the 1970s, māori protest about unresolved treaty grievances was increasing and sometimes taking place outside the law. by establishing the waitangi tribunal, parliament provided a legal process by which māori treaty claims could be investigated. tribunal inquiries contribute to the resolution of treaty claims and to the reconciliation of outstanding issues between māori and the crown.14 as michael belgarve notes: ‘the historical work that has been undertaken for and by the tribunal since 1985 is substantial and significant. its nature needs to be much better understood, particularly by historians little versed in maori, race relations or tribunal history.’ 15 the reader, viewer or visitor of or to a work of public history is an integral part and participant in this synthesis of the historical record. local, community and family historians are ‘active agents’ in breaking down the perception of a ‘rigid demarcation between “historians” and “their publics”’.16 by concerning itself with the presentation of history to a wide audience, public history casts a wide net that covers not only history but also heritage in its many guises. this interrelatedness between history and heritage in a contemporary sense has forced history (and historians) into the marketplace as never before. nevertheless, instead of defending heritage in purely economic terms, historians, members of one of the few professional groups which studies the past for its own value, find themselves engaging the community as a central component in any synthesis of the historical record. in achieving this new synthesis, our material culture, or that part of it that is comprises historic sites and artefacts, should play a significant part as a source in documenting our past. in the early twenty-first century the most exploited and misunderstood word or idea in the field of public history is ‘heritage’.17 in a country where land-based heritage or historic places have largely monopolised the term, ‘heritage’ is widely used as a synonym for ‘historic place’. historic places include archaeological sites, wahi tapu —­ places sacred to the māori in the traditional, spiritual, religious, ritual or mythological sense —­ and natural features with significant human associations. definitions of heritage and opinions of its cultural value vary considerably. in its broadest sense, ‘heritage is the things of value which are inherited’18 whether on a personal or collective level. if definitions of heritage remain fuzzy, its move from the private arena to the public is sharply obvious. in its most basic and original form, the concept of heritage was simply conceived as private property, something that could be inherited, bought or sold. private knowledge and ownership was control. more recently, however, heritage has taken on a new meaning. ‘at first yours or mine’, david lowenthal observes, ‘heritage soon becomes inherently collective’.19 ‘heritage’, he continues, ‘more and more denotes what we jointly hold with others —­ the blessings (and curses) that belong to and largely define a group.”20 at a national level, collective identity incorporates commonly agreed-upon cultural values. with this sort of collective sense of identity we can speak of ‘our’ heritage or ‘national’ heritage. yet even such broad meanings of heritage are constantly being redefined and reshaped. there exists an ongoing national self-evaluation and introspection by a changing population base. the renaissance of māori culture, for example, the te māori exhibition was a milestone in the māori cultural renaissance of the 1970s onwards. featuring traditional māori artwork, the exhibition at first toured the united states in 1984 and was shown in new york, st louis, chicago and san francisco. moreover, and the māori language act 1987 was a piece of legislation passed by the parliament of new zealand that gave official language status to the māori language (te reo māori), and gave speakers a right to use it in legal settings such as courts, and this together with migration from continental europe, the pacific islands and asia, have altered perceptions of ‘our’ national heritage. in the most jarringly obvious example, the naval ensign no longer runs quietly up the flagstaff to close ceremonies marking the national anniversary, waitangi day. at waitangi and elsewhere a number of groups and communities have been asserting their identity within a national framework that has traditionally focused on a british heritage. also, new zealand has not been immune to recent developments abroad which have witnessed protests about memorials to explorers, imperial rulers, colonial officials and slave-owners across the globe. here as elsewhere there are questions around and responses to monuments that commemorate contentious aspects of the past and the issue as to whether these monuments should be deconstructed, reconstructed or destroyed. for example, the statue of the british naval officer john fane charles hamilton was swiftly taken down by the hamilton city council in response to calls from waikato-tainui leaders. there have been calls to remove a number of statues or memorials across the country and criticisms of the robbie burns and queen victoria statues in dunedin. the intersections between global protests and local histories was made clear with the graffiti inscribed on the james cook statue on the waikanae beachfront in turanganui/gisborne: ‘black lives matter and so do maori and ‘take this racist headstone of my people down before i do’.21 recently, the government government announced a school curriculum change, making it compulsory for all schools to teach ‘key aspects’ of new zealand history. the ministry of education was tasked with creating a new curriculum to ‘span the full range of new zealanders’ experiences… with contemporary issues directly linked to major events of the past.’ the draft curriculum has sparked heated debate and controversy amongst historians and the wider public. after 10 years (years 1-10) of compulsory study all students are expected to understand three big ideas: that māori history is the foundational and continuous history of aotearoa new zealand; colonisation and its consequences have been central to aotearoa new zealand history for the past 200 years and continue to influence all aspects of new zealand life; and the course of aotearoa new zealand’s history has been shaped by the exercise and effects of power. it proposes a shift, teaching the history of aotearoa not solely through a eurocentric perspective – but incorporating te ao māori, the environment and the students’ own whakapapa. an expert advisory panel was set up in march 2020 under the auspices of royal society te apārangi to provide an independent source of expertise to the ministry of education on the development of a core curriculum and it noted: ‘while no curriculum can be comprehensive in telling all of aotearoa new zealand’s histories, the effect of overly compacting the curriculum has led to major gaps, which in turn may make a good deal of the existing content partial or even incomprehensible.’22 why do we need to preserve the past, and for whose benefit and at what cost? opinions vary. ‘to celebrate their patrons’ regimes, renaissance historians ran down the past in favour of the present’, david lowenthal observes, ‘whereas antiquarians studying ruins and relics magnified past achievements to the detriment of the present.’23 preserving evidence of the past is central to individual and collective identity and existence, for it serves as a central point of reference, and contributes to providing life with purpose and meaning. in māori tradition: all elements of the natural world are related through whakapapa (genealogy). the maori world was created through the union of ranginui (the sky father) and papatua-nuku (the earth mother) … traditional maori attitudes to the natural world reflect the relationships created through rangi and papa: all living things are their descendants and are thus related. further, the sense of interrelatedness between people and nature creates a sense of belonging to nature, rather than being ascendant to it, as humans are born from “mother earth” and return to her on their death.24 māori see people, nature and the land as being inextricably intertwined. their view of history and heritage is based on a shared whakapapa in which ‘all things are from the same origin and … the welfare of any part of the environment determines the welfare of people.’25 another relevant term is taonga (treasured possessions), a concept which includes both tangible and intangible treasures and korero. h. m. mead asserts that to appreciate fully the meaning and cultural significance of taonga the word korero needs to be introduced. ‘all objects that are called taonga’, have korero attached to them … [it] means talk associated with creation and production of works of art and particularly with the stories and explanations given by artists and patrons to such works.’26 more specific places that are taonga include wahi taonga, wahi tapu and wahi tupuna. wahi taonga and wahi tapu have been described as places of special value and places of sacred and extreme importance.27 it is important to note that tangible objects that are fixed and non-living (the built environment) may include, and often do, intangible qualities. this approach towards understanding our built heritage is very much a pakeha view and is one that focuses on ‘humankind as separate from the landscape.’28 the māori notion of heritage sees it as an integral part of the landscape and something that is inseparable from daily life. aspects of this heritage are recognised as matters of national importance. in the end, despite statutory requirements and definitions that purport to be rigorous, thorough, qualitative and/or quantitative, the whole process is finally based upon a subjective judgment of significance or value. however, we can identify a number of factors for consideration, albeit tangible ones, that may influence a decision to register a building or building site. some factors determining significance include rarity, representativeness of building style, the architect, builders, cultural significance, significant owners or occupants, local or regional significance, materials, relative age, condition, integrity of landscape and history of use.29 indeed, it is possible to conclude that historic places offer one of the most promising avenues for public historians. the work of anthropologists and archaeologists has already opened many invaluable windows on the period before maori-european contact. without the scholarship of archaeologists and architectural and urban historians, many of the stunning plates of the new zealand historical atlas would not have been possible. the challenge for public historians will be to enter the heritage industry in sufficient numbers to ensure that new zealand preserves and presents the widest possible range of historic places and to strive to ensure that it clearly and honestly articulates their significance. as the art critic robert hughes said while surveying the mess that sydney has made of part of its historic waterfront, ‘the claims of the past do need to be heard.’30 *** yesterday’s ephemera are today’s treasures. relics of the past once consigned to eclectic local museums and antique shops now can be found throughout the entire country in a wide range of contexts. we take solace from the past and its buildings, relics and landscapes. they provide us with comfort and a source of collective identity in a globalized, internet-connected world where points of reference are sometimes obscured. there has been surge in the popularity of history in public, for example, historical and genealogical societies, history on the internet, biography, and history on film and television. but there has been at the same time general disengagement with this phenomenon on the part of the academy. on the internet, the main useful, informative sites are sponsored by the government. nz history is a website where one can explore new zealand’s culture and society, politics and government, and the impact of war in particular.31 digitalnz, launched in 2008, is aimed at making new zealand digital content easier to find, share and use. to date there are over 25 million digital items available to view from over 120 partner organisations. these include cultural institutions, government departments, publicly funded organisations and educational and research organisations, as well as the private sector and community groups. the contents of digitalnz include photographs, artworks, newspapers, books, other archival material, journal articles, music, film and data sets.32 ancestrydna is new zealand’s principal family history research site. there, genealogists can find collections of historical records, historical, and genealogical resources to help them trace their new zealand ancestors. new zealand’s government-sponsored first world war centenary programme has provided the shared ‘ww100’ identity for the variety of official, national, community and personal commemorations of new zealand’s role in the first world war from 1914 to 1919. formal government ceremonies have been organised at battlefields on the gallipoli peninsula, on the western front and in the middle east to mark the centenary of key first world war events. the official government legacy projects include sir peter jackson’s ‘the great war’ exhibition at te papa, the national museum and the pukeahu national war memorial park in wellington and the development of the auckland war memorial museum’s on-line ‘cenotaph’ database of new zealand service personnel. for those new zealanders visiting the battlefields of gallipoli or the western front, the nga tapuwae new zealand first world war trails project has provided site interpretation and information at battle sites and museums together with free apps and on-line resources. the ministry of culture and heritage is working with massey university, the new zealand defence force and the royal new zealand returned and services’ association to produce a series of centennial histories on new zealand and the first world war. the ww100 programme was supported by the new zealand lottery grants board, which made available more than $25 million between 2013 and 2016 to support community projects. creative new zealand, a government-funded arts council, provided $1.5 million to support collaborative arts projects to mark the centennial of the first world war. a landmark national exhibition, realised with the assistance of lottery grants board funding, is the $8 million te papa-weta workshop’s ‘gallipoli: the scale of our war’. eight new zealanders are depicted in key events during the campaign in 2.4 times life-size dioramas, and the exhibition has already attracted more than one million visitors. regional and local museums throughout new zealand continue to mark the centenary of the first world war with exhibitions and events featuring local stories. the toitu otago settlers museum’s exhibition ‘dunedin’s great war 1914–1918’ included a popular in-house documentary ‘the journey of the otagos’, and attracted 200,000 visitors in 2014 and 2015. the national army museum created the travelling exhibition ‘heartlanders: new zealanders of the great war’ which toured the country in 2016 while in the same year the aratoi wairarapa museum of art and history presented the popular exhibition ‘featherston camp 1916–2016: the record of a remarkable achievement’. the death of public-service broadcasting other than from maori television has meant the big growth in interest in history seen overseas – notably on pbs, bbc or the history channel —­ has largely passed new zealand terrestrial television by.33 the bbc history magazine, for example, lists a wide range of historical television and radio programmes that rarely make the screen here, and if they do, they are sometimes shown years late and of course are not about new zealand. a landmark in new zealand television was historian james belich’s five-part series of the 1990s the new zealand wars which took a new look at the history of māori versus pākehā armed conflict. this popular series reframed new zealand history. the new zealand wars was judged best documentary at the 1998 qantas media awards. unfortunately, there has been no follow-up series. occasionally, a foreign series incorporates something about new zealand. tony robinson’s tour of duty (2015) included a segment about new zealand – dunedin and auckland for programmes to mark the centenary of the gallipoli campaign –­ though it was mostly about australia. by default local museum curators have become engaged in historical documentary films. in june 2014, toitū curator seán brosnahan embarked on a journey to follow in the footsteps of the otago infantry battalion and otago mounted rifles during the first world war. the resulting documentary —­ ‘the journey of the otagos —­ was the first film ever to be made on solely on the otagos’ participation in the first world war. the eleven documentary episodes were shown in the ‘dunedin’s great war’ exhibition at toitū otago settlers museum. there is also his forthcoming documentary about chinese settlers and their rugged lives in the otago region.34 it helps to explain why dunedin has a chinese garden, and will be called ‘the journey to lan yuan’, after the gardens. bridget williams books is a publisher of historical works aimed at a wider public. some notable recent examples of books by academic historians include barbara brookes’ history of new zealand women (2016), andrew sharp’s new biography of samuel marsden (2016) and ben schrader’s ‘the big smoke’: new zealand cities 1840–1920. the one non-academic historical periodical, other than heritage new zealand’s heritage new zealand, is new zealand memories magazine, a unique and absorbing bi-monthly publication promoting new zealand’s heritage. the sort of public history festivals that attract huge numbers in the america and britain do not seem to have taken off in new zealand. some local examples include the annual tauranga medieval faire and events organized by various military re-enactment societies. history of technology is catered for by private groups. for example, the dunedin gasworks museum preserves the surviving part of the now closed dunedin gasworks, which was new zealand’s first and last gasworks which operated from 1863 until 1987. it is one of only three preserved gasworks museums in the world and is a significant local and world heritage site. another is auckland’s museum of transport and technology, which is new zealand’s largest transport, technology and social history museum. heritage is often confused with nostalgia, a view that equates the past with something that is intrinsically worthwhile and good. it is a view that is safe and secure and that accords with the past being considered a distinctly marketable commodity. good examples of heritage tourism and how history has become a marketable product are shanty town heritage park near greymouth constructed and opened in the early 1970s. it consists of 30 re-created historic buildings making up a nineteenth-century gold-mining town. ferrymead heritage park in christchurch, which features an early 1900s (edwardian) township, has exhibits such as houses, a picture theatre, school classroom, church, jail, railway station, lodge hall, post office, printers, tobacconist, general store and lawyer’s office. they promote a view of the past that is comforting and non-confrontational, disseminating a history without context and without people. when history becomes a product it often becomes alienated from the past, bearing no resemblance to what has happened to people in times gone by, yet of commercial necessity claiming to depict accurately all that has previously happened. *** monuments, markers, buildings, plaques and memorials play an important function in providing social cohesion. their shared stories help individuals within a society connect with each other and provide a shared community heritage. at a national level, collective identity incorporates cultural values that are commonly agreed upon. with this sort of collective sense of identity we can speak of ‘our’ heritage or ‘national’ heritage. for instance, jock phillips’ recent authoritative work on war memorials, to the memory (2016), builds upon widespread interest generated by the centenary of the first world war, whereas his pioneering publication on the subject, the sorrow and the pride, attracted relatively little public attention on its appearance in 1990.35 yet even such broad meanings of heritage are constantly being redefined and reshaped. a changing population base brings with it national introspection and continual self-evaluation. migration from europe and asia and the rise of maori culture have altered perceptions of national heritage. a range of groups and communities are now asserting their identity within a national framework that has traditionally focussed on a british heritage. new zealand retains a unique assemblage of places of cultural heritage value relating to its indigenous and its more recent peoples.36 many people feel a common responsibility in trying to safeguard our cultural heritage for present and future generations. moreover, many people are interested in conserving not only our built heritage but also in understanding their own family or whanau, local, regional and national histories. history is not the exclusive prerogative of the professional historian: the interested public can be ‘active agents’ in creating their own histories.37 the practice of public history, which deals with the public presentation of the past, takes many forms and accommodates varied perspectives and interests, but the goal of the professional public historian remains constant – to broaden the public’s appreciation and understanding of the past. as ludmilla jordanova states: ‘whatever the complexities of “public”, public history is a useful label, in that it draws attention to phenomena relevant to the discipline of history, but too rarely discussed in undergraduate courses.’38 endnotes 1 for a wider discussion of historians and the new zealand heritage sector, see gavin mclean, ‘it’s history jim, but not as we know it: historians and the new zealand heritage industry’, in bronwyn dalley and jock phillips (eds), going public, auckland university press, auckland 2001, pp158-74. 2 nancy swarbrick, ‘public history’, te ara: the encyclopedia of new zealand, updated 30-sep-14 url: http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/public-history/print (accessed 14 november 2016). 3 the university of auckland offers a master of arts in museums and cultural heritage, victoria university a master of museum and heritage studies, and massey university a master of arts in museum studies. 4 swarbrick, op cit, np. 5 ‘introduction’, new zealand journal of public history, vol 1, no 1, 2011, p.2 (accessed 14 november 2016). https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781316050873.001 6 http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/research/centres-units/hru/nzjph (accessed 11 september 2016). 7 m. s. smith, ‘using the past: learning histories, public histories and possibilities phd thesis, university of waikato, hamilton, new zealand. see also, mark smith, ‘“every brick a boy”. the invention of tradition and the use of history: preliminary observations from a “learning history” at southwell school’, new zealand journal of public history, vol 1, no 1, 2011, pp43-59. 8 swarbrick, op cit, np. 9 he also served as chief historian for the new zealand government. 10 swarbrick, op cit, np. 11 leslie h. fishel jr., ‘public history and the academy’, in barbara j. howe and emory l. kemp (eds), public history: an introduction, robert e. krieger, malabar, fl, 1986, p12. 12 based on unpublished seminar notes by bronwyn dalley, historical branch, department of internal affairs, wellington, 1997. 13 jorma kalela, making history: the historian and uses of the past, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2012, p161. 14 https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/about-waitangi-tribunal/past-present-future-of-waitangi-tribunal/ (accessed 14 july 2021). 15 michael belgrave, ‘looking forward: historians and the waitangi tribunal’, new zealand journal of history, vol 40, no 2, 2006, p231. see also ‘colonialism revisited: public history and new zealand’s waitangi tribunal’, in david dean (ed), a companion to public history, wiley, hoboken, nj 2018, pp.217-230. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118508930.ch15 16 hilda kean and paul ashton, ‘introduction: people and their pasts and public history today’, in paul ashton and hilda kean (eds), people and their pasts: public history today, palgrave macmillan, basingstoke, 2009, p.1. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234468_1 17 the office of the parliamentary commissioner for the environment’s (pce) landmark report, historic and cultural heritage management in new zealand, pce, wellington 1996, observed on page two that the word ‘heritage’ occurs in relevant new zealand legislation in several places, but its definition (where provided) and usage varies considerably. the pce accepted that most new zealanders understand heritage to mean historic places. 18 c. michael hall and simon mcarthur, ‘heritage management: an introductory framework’, in c. michael hall and simon mcarthur (eds), heritage management in new zealand and australia. visitor management, interpretation and marketing, oxford university press, auckland 1993, p.2. 19 david lowenthal, the heritage crusade and the spoils of history, cambridge university press, cambridge 1998, p55. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511523809 20 ibid, p60. 21 tony ballantyne, “reactions to statues help reframe national history”, otago daily times, 22 june 2020. 22 aotearoa new zealand histories. a response to draft curriculum. royal society te apārangi 17 may 2021, p7. 23 lowenthal, op cit, pp35-6. 24 manatu maori, he kakano i ruia mai i rangiatea – maori values and environmental management, department of internal affairs, wellington, 1991, p 2. 25 t. tau, a. goodall, d. palmer and r. rau, te whakatau kaupapa. ngai tahu resource management strategy for the canterbury region, department of internal affairs, wellington 1990, pp 3-4. 26 h. m. mead, ‘the nature of taonga’, in taonga maori conference – new zealand 18-27 november 1990, department of internal affairs, wellington 1990, p164. 27 tau, goodall, palmer and rau, op cit, pp.7-12. 28 hall and mcarthur, op cit, p.4. 29 ibid, p10. 30 robert hughes, ‘a history forgotten’, reflections, issue 3, 1998, p.9. 31 http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/ (accessed 14 november 2016). 32 http://www.digitalnz.org/ (accessed 14 november 2016). 33 radio also has a paucity of programmes devoted to history, two notable exceptions being the recently defunct jim sullivan’s sunday evening show “sounds historical” and jack perkins’ ‘spectrum’ on radio new zealand national. 34 from about 1866 until the 1870s, the hills near roxburgh in central otago were home to about 4500 chinese miners. 35 jock phillips, to the memory: new zealand’s war memorials, potter & burton, nelson 2016, a much revised and extended version of chris maclean, jock phillips and debbie willis, the sorrow and the pride: new zealand war memorials, gp books for the historical branch, department of internal affairs, wellington, 1990. 36 ‘preamble’, icomos new zealand charter for the conservation of places of cultural heritage value, icomos new zealand, 1993. 37 kean and ashton, op cit, p1. 38 ludmilla jordanova, history in practice, arnold, london, 2000, p141. articles (peer reviewed) consulting the past: creating a national history curriculum in aotearoa new zealand carol neill*, michael belgrave, genaro oliveira corresponding author: carol neill, carol.neill@aut.ac.nz doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8216 article history: received 03/06/2022; accepted 08/11/2022; published 06/12/2022 the politics of a national history curriculum developing new national history curricula tends to be politically controversial. this is hardly surprising, as a national history curriculum is a political document. as wils and verschaffel’s exploration of the belgian ‘history wars’ put it, debates over the history curriculum illuminate tensions between ‘the field of education, the world of politics, and… academic historians’.1 a new curriculum attempts to revise the historical consciousness of a society and give it an official imprimatur, all of which inevitably entrenches present and often contested values in an understanding of the past. these processes also reflect broader social contests. debates over cultural politics in the united kingdom, australia, the united states and canada have contributed to the development of ‘history wars’ and polarised conflicts between conservative understandings of the past, which emphasise nation building and progress, and broadly postcolonial interpretations, which focus on slavery and colonisation and their impact on indigenous peoples. this debate has become so heated in the united states that state legislatures have intervened to prevent schools and teachers from teaching ‘critical race theory’, to the increasing concern of historians and teachers alike.2 this article assesses the public impact in aotearoa new zealand of the introduction of the new curriculum, following the surprise announcement by prime minister jacinda ardern in september 2019 that it would now be expected that ‘all learners and ākonga are aware of key aspects of new zealand history and how they have influenced and shaped the nation’.3 in looking at the responses of teachers, academic historians, the community at large and politicians, we attempt to explain why the aotearoa new zealand debate has so far been professional rather than polemical. given the increasing influence of cultural politics elsewhere, developing the new curriculum had the potential for sparking some form of history war over its content and objectives. this was particularly so given that the new curriculum was clearly to have postcolonial overtones, in that it made māori history a significant, if not predominant, focus. moreover, the prime public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: neill, c., belgrave, m., oliveira, g. 2022. consulting the past: creating a national history curriculum in aotearoa new zealand. public history review, 29, 128–141. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v29i0.8216 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 128 mailto:carol.neill@aut.ac.nz https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8216 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8216 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8216 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj minister made her announcement at the unveiling in parliament of a plaque commemorating the new zealand wars and just prior to the observance of the first national day to mark that conflict, te pūtake o te riri, he rā maumahara. there were two curricula developed, one for māori medium schools and the other for most schools where the primary language of instruction is english. the public debate has focused almost exclusively on the curriculum for english language schools and this article is only concerned with that curriculum. despite the impact of the covid19 pandemic, the ministry of education made the development of the new history curriculum a priority – it was only delayed for twelve months on the eve of being finalised to reduce pressure on schools, particularly those in auckland, who had experienced another lockdown in the second half of 2021. the final curriculum was released on 17 march 2022. methodology and approach this article reflects on our learning from multiple avenues of research and consultation engaged in since 2019. we began by conducting research with five secondary schools across aotearoa new zealand. this focused on examining student and teacher views and interest in history, along with expectations and concerns about the new curriculum. we also conducted a 38item survey with 102 primary school teachers across 10 schools in the manawatūwhanganui region to gauge their experiences in history teaching at years 1 to 6, and views about the incoming history curriculum. this engagement across secondary and primary schools gave us a sense of school perceptions of the aotearoa new zealand’s histories curriculum in general, prior to the release of the draft curriculum. our engagement as historians and history education specialists with the development of the curriculum, and in responding to the draft curriculum, has also informed this writing. ardern’s announcement made it clear that historians would be consulted in the development of the new curriculum, and one of the authors of this article was directly involved in that consultation. he was coconvenor of a panel of historians brought together by the royal society of new zealand te apārangi as a consultative committee established to advise the ministry of education. the panel commented on an early version of the curriculum draft and provided an independent response to the draft curriculum published for consultation in february 2021. alongside the royal society panel, several senior historians also made independent submissions. these were collated by the new zealand historical association and have also informed this analysis. the published and reported views from the ministry of education’s consultation on the draft curriculum have also been incorporated into these reflections. the ministry called for submissions on the draft and established an online survey to collect and statistically analyse these responses. separate written submissions could also be made during the consultation period that extended to 31 may 2021. there were 4,491 responses, and 488 individuals and organisations wrote submissions independently of the ministry survey.4 the report on the ministry’s consultation by new zealand council for educational research (nzcer), published in early 2022, has been a valuable source of wider responses to the draft curriculum, given that the ministry did not provide a direct way of providing more discursive responses. we have not had access to the original data, or to the individual submissions. our reading of the ministry’s consultation outcomes has been complemented by an investigation of media reporting, online blogs and discussions, and publicly shared submissions on the consultation. content was gathered from online publications, including mainstream and social media, from the day of the prime minister’s announcement in september 2019 until april 2022. only articles containing interviews or direct quotations of teachers’ or community members’ opinions were selected. finally, we have sought the views of future teachers of the histories curriculum through a survey of 105 kaiako pitomata (student teachers) of massey university’s graduate diploma of learning and teaching programme, all of whom will implement the new curriculum from 2023. thirtyeight student teachers were neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022129 surveyed in march 2021, just after the release of the first draft of the aotearoa new zealand’s histories curriculum, and a further 67 were surveyed in march 2022.5 this article has arisen, therefore, from the research we have conducted since the announcement of the aotearoa new zealand’s histories curriculum, and how we have interpreted the multiple discourses that have emerged from it. essentially, we have looked to understand both what has been agreed as the importance of the new curriculum and what has been argued should be done about it – in effect, exploring concerns about how the past is, or should be, used.6 drafting the curriculum that aotearoa new zealand had no national curriculum to teach its history may come as a surprise. this was not due to a neglect of the subject, but rather an effect of how social sciences and other disciplines have been delivered in this country’s schools. since the 1940s, history learning in primary schools has been positioned within the social studies curriculum, originally brought in after the 1944 thomas report.7 while social studies originally focused on history and geography learning, its disciplinary reach was widened in the 1960s so that history became just one of many subject areas in its curriculum. specialists blamed the broad social studies focus for the demise of history learning in schools.8 the 1993 new zealand curriculum framework, which provided a high degree of flexibility in the social sciences learning area, continued history’s low profile.9 the 2007 new zealand curriculum, currently also under review, placed some historical topics into the social sciences learning area, but because schools have had wide discretion on what they teach, there has, in reality, only been patchy aotearoa new zealand history learning across the country’s schools.10 the ministry of education was still holding to a flexible curriculum weeks before the curriculum announcement, telling a parliamentary select committee that it did not favour increasing the level of prescription. however, the prime minister had other ideas. as she explained in her announcement, ‘variation in delivery means too much is left to chance in the teaching and learning of this history’.11 that prescription was indicated by the identification of seven topics likely to become compulsory: • the arrival of māori to aotearoa new zealand • first encounters and early colonial history of aotearoa new zealand • te tiriti o waitangi/treaty of waitangi and its history • colonisation of, and immigration to, aotearoa new zealand, including the new zealand wars • evolving national identity of aotearoa new zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries • aotearoa new zealand’s role in the pacific • aotearoa new zealand in the late twentieth century and the evolution of a national identity with cultural plurality.12 the early stages of the curriculum’s development involved a broad range of actors. whereas in the past historians and history teachers dominated curriculum development, this time only a handful of the members of a large steering group, te ohu matua, were historians. a much smaller writing group had two historians, both māori historians, whose responsibility was to ensure the centrality and quality of māori history in the curriculum. there were two education academics specialising in the teaching of history and several highly experienced history and social studies teachers. academic historians contributed through an independent panel, put together by the royal society, who reviewed and commented on the draft; once before it was finalised, and then on the draft released for public consultation. the ministry established other consultative neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022130 groups, but te ohu matua, which was meant to oversee the process, was considerably marginalised by the inability to meet during much of the covid19 pandemic. the draft curriculum, released for consultation from 3 february 2021 to 31 may 2021, had three elements: understand, know and do. the understand element identified three ‘big ideas’: 1. māori history is the foundational and continuous history of aotearoa new zealand 2. colonisation and its consequences have been central to our history for the past 200 years and continue to influence all aspects of aotearoa new zealand society 3. the course of aotearoa new zealand’s history has been shaped by the exercise and effects of power.13 the know element also had three parts: whakapapa me te whanaungatanga, which focused on ‘how the past shapes who we are today’; tūrangawaewae me te kaitiakitanga, dealing with contested relationships with natural resources; and tino rangatiratanga me te kāwanatanga, which examined ‘contests over authority and control’ and specifically mentioned the guarantees of te tiriti o waitangi. finally, the do element focused on historical methods and approaches: ‘identifying and using sequence’; ‘identifying and critiquing sources and perspectives’; and ‘interpreting past decisions and actions’.14 although this was a national curriculum, it was to be interpreted locally, allowing schools to retain significant discretion in how they related the curriculum to their own communities. māori history was to the fore. the limited range of topics presented within the know elements emphasised studies of the comprehensive impact of colonisation.15 in the do element, there was an emphasis on ‘paying deliberate attention to mātauranga māori sources and approaches’, showing an underlying assumption that there were missing māori voices, which would provide a way of critiquing existing narratives. in the final do element, students were to be empowered to ‘make ethical judgements concerning right and wrong’, although this was heavily qualified by acknowledging hindsight, recognising that present values differ considerably from those of the time, and admitting the need to factor in the situations facing people in the past. arguably, these characteristics made it an unashamedly postcolonial history. the public responses there was a generally positive public response to the curriculum’s announcement and development. in the early period after the announcement, media reporting highlighted support for the curriculum and confirmed a preexisting view that aotearoa new zealand must confront its colonial past and the place of māori in society. news articles focused on the background lobbying that had led to the decision, described how different actors across schools, academia, the heritage sector, and māori communities welcomed the curriculum, and speculated on how the curriculum might be rolled out, rather than questioning the decision itself.16 the nzcer analysis of the ministry’s consultation on the draft curriculum showed high levels of support overall, but it was evident that teachers and kaiako comprised the greater proportion of those expressing positive support. the public responses also reflected how perceptions of the curriculum were shaped by identity and citizenship perspectives. respondents expressed excitement at the new curriculum, noted that it had been a ‘long road to get to this point’, and asserted that it was ‘a hugely important step towards building a better, more equitable and fairer new zealand into the future’.17 from the consultation’s public responses, it was evident that higher proportions of positive responses came from māori and pacific peoples. those that agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘i think the content reflects the stories our young people need to know’ were 44 per cent from all respondents, compared neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022131 with 60 per cent of māori, 56 per cent of pacific peoples and 55 per cent of asian peoples. likewise, māori, pacific and asian respondents also responded more positively that they believed the content ‘reflects our bicultural history as a nation’ and ‘will encourage more diverse local stories to be acknowledged and learnt’.18 māori and pacific respondents expressed the hope that the history curriculum would evoke ‘a deeper cultural understanding of aotearoa new zealand’ and ‘a greater sense of identity and belonging’.19 some māori were more specific in expressing their expectation that it would provide their tamariki (children) with pride in their identity, and ‘remove negative stigmas attached with māori stories and ways of looking at things… it will open up acceptance and subsequent proliferation of māori stories and art forms/creativity’.20 however, māori and pacific peoples also expressed the greatest concerns about teachers and kaiako with a lack of historical knowledge and/or biases. moriori on rēkohu (chatham islands) expressed concerns about exclusion, concerned that their history may be ignored given that the draft curriculum mentioned them only once. moriori representatives argued that there was a need for a ‘lot of unravelling’ to tell the real moriori history, as the indigenous people of rēkohu.21 māori respondents, noted in the nzcer report, expressed fears that teachers would not know enough to teach the history, or that they may distort historical explanations or, indeed, bring a racist view to that teaching.22 for indigenous and minority peoples, therefore, the draft appeared to represent hope for the future development of aotearoa new zealand society, even if there were concerns about how it might be taught. however, a common criticism was that ‘other’ histories should be incorporated more explicitly, especially of pacific, chinese, indian and other asian peoples. the desire for children to see themselves in aotearoa new zealand history was an important aspect of those responses. for example, a pacific community member expressed that ‘kids need to see themselves and how local historical events relate to them and their lives, shaping who they are and how they may become.’23 chinese communities were particularly vocal in calling for their histories to be more explicitly included.24 chinese author helene wong wrote in a stuff article that ‘180 years of chinese nz history appear to count for nothing’, asking where acknowledgement of chinese and other migrant groups, such as dalmatians, greeks, italians, muslims, jews, and other ‘asians’, was in the curriculum draft.25 chinese historian manying ip also voiced her concern that the curriculum fell well short of the opportunity it presented, and risked ‘continuing this unfortunate legacy of treating chinese new zealanders as perpetual migrants, a label not applied to the british people who have settled in aotearoa’.26 similar feeling was obvious in asian peoples’ responses in the nzcer report. ip argued that the history curriculum needed to be ‘everybody’s story’ and better recognise the diversity of the country’s population, past and present.27 asia new zealand foundation head simon draper also argued on behalf of asian communities that ‘new zealand has been connected to the asian ports and trade routes since european contact – and contact with asian peoples likewise dates back to this period’.28 he highlighted that indian and chinese stories especially were important in aotearoa new zealand’s nineteenth century history. despite the high support levels evident across different communities, some detractors took exception to the postcolonial nature of the curriculum. however, this criticism did not gain a high profile in mainstream media, or in the nzcer report. the report acknowledged that some respondents had rejected the importance of māori history, or its validity, and had argued for a more ‘one nation’ focused approach.29 such views tended to be diverted into other debates over the name aotearoa, or other cultural issues. the detractors’ voices were most strongly presented in blog posts by the rightwing hobson’s pledge and democracy action groups, where the history curriculum was presented as part of a wider decline of education in new zealand, and incorporated into what they saw as the ‘smug attitude of general compliance with the leftwing treaty based cultural identity ideology’.30 both hobson’s pledge and democracy action provided template submissions to the ministry consultation, encouraging their members to argue that the curriculum was ‘seriously flawed, therefore must be rejected in its entirety’, especially because of ‘distortions’ in its nature and in the historical accounts it suggested.31 neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022132 political parties the reactions of political parties to the curriculum draft were relatively mild. opposition parties supported the need for a national curriculum, even if they had concerns about the draft’s detail and approach. the centreright national party, for example, engaged critically with the detail of the curriculum rather than its intent. the party’s response came from education spokesperson paul goldsmith, who was a historian prior to entering parliament in 2011. his submission did not challenge the focus on māori history and the impact of colonisation, acknowledging they are ‘massive themes in our history’. however, he expressed concerns about the curriculum turning children off history, having too narrow a focus, failing to acknowledge the successes in aotearoa new zealand’s history and imposing political rather than historical objectives on the teaching of history. but there are other massive themes, like the steady extension of the reach of governments into our lives, from our bank accounts to our bedrooms, for better or worse  – or the emergence of a truly national identity independent from britain – or the need for kiwis to make a living far from markets, with entrepreneurism and innovation jostling with the everpresent fear of being shut out by protectionist big countries  – or the desire to defend the freedoms we have inherited and painstakingly developed from the threats of fascism and communism – or the impact of waves of immigration from a variety of cultures into what has become a melting pot.32 goldsmith feared that a curriculum that was too political risked continual interference as ‘successive governments will feel the need to change it, furthering a sense of politicised curriculum. that is in no one’s interest.’33 however, the whole tenor of his submission was more to argue for balance and a degree of political neutrality than anything else. the rightwing act new zealand party, in parliament with ten members due to receiving eight per cent of the vote in the 2020 election under the mixed member proportional system, presented the most obvious attack on the curriculum. act has a libertarian economic message that has also become heavily complemented by conservative populism, including getting tough on criminals and attacking measures for māori which it decries as ‘separatism’ and ‘special privilege’. perhaps unsurprisingly, act had fewer qualms about attacking the curriculum on cultural grounds, although even here act did not launch a wholesale attack on the inclusion of colonisation or the importance of māori history. on the three ideas that framed the curriculum, act’s criticisms were more strident, but they still accepted that māori history was important and even that colonisation was an important part of aotearoa new zealand’s history. the first ‘big idea’, that māori history is the ‘continuous history’ of new zealand, excludes the many peoples who have travelled from the furthest points of the globe, brought their histories and cultures with them and worked to give themselves, their families and this county and better future [sic]. the second, that colonisation ‘continue[s] to influence all aspects of new zealand society’, is depressing and wrong and neglects the elements of our society that are untouched by colonisation. the final big idea, that power has been the primary driver of our history, creates a narrative of oppressors and oppressed, and leaves out the many forces that have propelled our past, including scientific discoveries, technological innovations, business, and artistic creativity.34 when the final curriculum was released in 2022, act did no more than recycle its submission made twelve months earlier as its press release, ignoring the changes which had taken place, despite those changes addressing many of their concerns. the māori party, which in 2020 was returned to parliament with two neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022133 seats by winning one of the seven seats allocated to māori who are on the māori electoral roll, described the curriculum as long overdue. the green party, sitting to the left with ten seats and in government with labour, placed the curriculum firmly in a postcolonial setting, applauding ardern’s decision as a way of giving justice to those affected by colonial oppression.35 despite the political posturing of different parties to their constituencies, their responses to the curriculum showed a surprising degree of consensus about potentially more contentious issues. all the political parties acknowledged the emphasis on māori history and the recognition of the impact of colonisation on māori in aotearoa new zealand society. both national and act suggested that the curriculum could be more balanced by acknowledging the experience of diverse groups in aotearoa new zealand and better recognising this country’s economic and business history. unsurprisingly, they thought that the absence of economic and business history was significant, and that there was a degree of ‘political correctness’ in the curriculum that went beyond what they would consider appropriate; but these were niggles at the edge of political debate, especially when compared to such debates in other countries. this political consensus has been built over the last thirty years, as both major political parties have attempted to resolve differences between iwi and the crown over aotearoa new zealand’s colonial past, and has become deeply ingrained in this country’s political culture. historians’ responses a similar political consensus has been reflected in academic circles. while there was some debate at the beginning of the century about the waitangi tribunal’s uses of history, this remained academic. at that time, don brash, leader of the national party opposition, attempted to call a halt to any special recognition of māori needs and public policy. but even here, brash still supported the waitangi tribunal’s investigation into historical claims and subsequent treaty settlements. opposition to the work of the waitangi tribunal, or to postcolonial history as a result, remained on the marginal extremes of political opinion. michael bassett, a onetime member of the waitangi tribunal, was the only historian who applied the cultural language and approach of the history wars to attack the curriculum. bassett’s ‘“bleeding” versions of our history’ came closest to invoking the attack on australia’s ‘black arm brigade’.36 stuart smith, national mp for kaikoura, drew on bassett’s views to argue that ‘there is a narrative running through modern new zealand that says, prior to colonisation aotearoa was a land of paradise and freedom and when the british arrived it turned to anarchy and chaos’.37 one of bassett’s commentaries was withdrawn by the northland age, and he was vociferously attacked by commentators and not supported by other historians.38 his views nonetheless became fodder for the cultural warriors of the right on social media.39 one of bassett’s major arguments focused on the curriculum’s apparent absence of coverage of the musket wars, where during the 1820s and 1830s intertribal warfare accounted for the deaths of up to 20,000 people. ironically, the royal society panel was concerned that the penultimate draft, which it commented on in late 2020, had too much content on the musket wars, to the extent of overwhelming the curriculum’s treatment of the new zealand wars after 1840. bassett was the only historian who attempted to mobilise political opinion against the curriculum, but this did not mean an absence of major concerns among other historians. while the general debate was only loosely connected to the detail of the draft, historians were very concerned with what was in the curriculum, what was missing, and the underlying approach to teaching the past and its understanding of historical method. this more detailed scrutiny led to some anxiety, as expressed in the royal society’s independent advice and in the commentary by some of the country’s most experienced and respected historians. however, none of this concern challenged the central place of māori histories in the curriculum or the inclusion of a broad coverage of colonisation. nor did it undermine historians’ delight and enthusiasm neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022134 for the government’s intention to finally do something about the absence of a systematic programme of teaching aotearoa new zealand history in schools: the panel strongly commends key features of the curriculum: to place māori history central to new zealand’s historical experience, both as histories of hapū and iwi on their own terms, and as hapū and iwi histories influenced by the impact of colonisation and responses to it. the emphasis on multiple narratives is timely.40 the panel was also enthusiastic about the determination to view this national curriculum through local lenses. nonetheless, the panel was concerned about the ‘brevity, fragmentation, and, therefore, coherence of the curriculum draft’.41 mirroring the public response, the panel had concerns about the degree to which the diversity of migrants to aotearoa new zealand was acknowledged, explaining that the draft curriculum: does not specifically recognise the diversity of new zealand society and the very different experiences based on ethnicity, gender, religion, or social status. aotearoa new zealand’s society has also come to include migrants and ancestries from english, irish, and scots origins; those from dalmatia, bohemia, scandinavia, and croatia; jews and other europeans; the different waves of chinese and indian migrants; and the specific experiences of samoans, tongans, niueans, tokelauans, and other pacific peoples.42 paul moon drew attention to the thinness of precontact history.43 manying ip’s concern about the absence of chinese history has already been highlighted. but it was not just the absence of explicit references to different groups that was a concern, the panel also felt that the relationship between these groups after arrival – ‘the whakapapa relationships that are formed here, the transformation that takes place through interactions within social groups, and with aotearoa new zealand’s environment, economy, and political systems’ – also needed more attention.44 it also felt that community agency was ignored. history had become too much what was done to people, rather than what they did themselves. as far as the topics were concerned, historians argued there was just too much missing, too much focus on the nineteenth century, and little explicit mention of women, welfare, precontact history, labour and economic history, environmental history, inequality and poverty, disease and demographic history, political conflict, popular culture, and aotearoa new zealand’s role in international affairs. perhaps the most important absence was aotearoa new zealand’s connection to the world, recognising that this country’s history was largely shaped by events taking place beyond our shores. of many of the other topics that were explored in depth by the panel, the limited approach to pacific history and the impact of pacific peoples in aotearoa new zealand was particularly important. the panel certainly appreciated the extent to which students were to be introduced to the methodology of history and not just provided with a series of narratives, but they had reservations about how the do element described this methodology. too much of the curriculum, they felt, was aimed at demonstrating fixed conclusions, rather than being based on open enquiry. they were also concerned that while the do element recognised different interpretations of history, there was a need to develop students’ skills to discriminate between these narratives. in an age of fake news and fake history, students should be able to not only know that histories can come from contested frames of reference, but be able to test alternative narratives on the basis of the evidence they use and the conclusions they draw from them. it is vital that students are introduced to the richness and strangeness of the past and that they have the chance to explore it, learn how to use different types of evidence, and how to build arguments and express those in writing or verbally.45 neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022135 the historians also looked uneasily at the curriculum’s intent to make ethical judgements about the past, to determine what was right and wrong. historians who made independent submissions, such as anne salmond, jock phillips and erik olssen, shared many of these concerns, some of which were also published. above all, historians worried that a curriculum that was so rooted in problematic pasts and that clearly expressed conclusions about the past could be counterproductive.46 historians feared that a curriculum that was so earnest would not only fail to capture the enthusiasm and passion of children, but also turn them off history entirely. they felt that it was possible to deal with difficult histories, but at the same time develop a curriculum that was exciting, engaging and even fun. teacher responses teachers’ highly positive responses to the draft curriculum reflected findings from our research prior to the draft’s release. some teachers expressed similar concerns to those voiced by the public and politicians, yet, overall, they were more focused on the challenges they foresaw in implementing the curriculum rather than on its content. that teachers were positive about the idea of the curriculum may be partly explained by the leadership shown by the new zealand history teachers’ association, which had lobbied prior to ardern’s announcement for learning about the new zealand wars in the history curriculum. media reports following the announcement included positive quotes from teachers who emphasised the importance of learning the country’s history, and their view that the teaching of colonisation and its effects starting at primary school would enable students to ‘reflect on who we are and how we’ve evolved over time, you know, the bicultural history of our country’.47 teachers who felt that they were not ‘taught anything at all in primary or intermediate’, and that secondary history learning had only been ‘from a colonial viewpoint’, looked forward to delivering a more comprehensive aotearoa new zealand history education.48 the place of local history also pleased teachers, who looked forward to the possibility of new connections with local hapū’.49 by studying ‘lessons from our own history’, such as ‘kupe and the doublehull waka arriving in aotearoa’, they expressed hope that students might increasingly appreciate new zealanders’ achievements; not going to ‘marvel comics for a superhero because we’ve got our own superheroes’.50 from the start, teachers exhibited commitment to ensuring that the curriculum was interesting, meaningful, and appropriate to students’ levels of learning. however, they also expressed fears that curriculum writers and experts might lack understanding of primary school needs and priorities. several respondents emphasised their wish to have access to ‘ageappropriate’ learning resources, which needed to be ‘written in child speak’ and attentive to ‘developmental appropriateness of topics’, as well as ‘practical, simple and digestible’ to students. unlike the historians, details about content did not worry teachers so much as the format in which this content would reach schools.51 many teachers and students in our research talked about ‘treaty of waitangi fatigue’, complaining that learning about the treaty had been ‘introduced’ year after year, but in ways that not only turned students off the treaty and māori history, but also aotearoa new zealand history generally. both students and teachers feared that making aotearoa new zealand history compulsory would isolate aotearoa new zealand from wider histories and make it difficult to see the links between these.52 teachers were also concerned to build their own knowledge and capabilities in teaching aotearoa new zealand history. except for the treaty of waitangi, the majority of primary teachers we surveyed did not feel competent to teach the historical topics originally suggested for inclusion by the prime minister.53 however, while some identified a need to build their knowledge of the histories, most equally believed they had sufficient pedagogical training to teach any historical topic, including ‘difficult’ ones, provided they received a ‘consistent plan’, a ‘very “prescribed” structured curriculum’, ‘clear guidance’ and ‘step by neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022136 step in detailed guides’. what they would need, they said, was to have adequate guidance, support and professional learning and development that would provide ‘support from consultants/facilitators to grow both teacher knowledge and pedagogical skills for teaching history’, as well as access to experts who were ‘available for direct consultation’.54 such concerns were also expressed through news reporting, and were linked to concerns about upcoming curricular changes in other areas.55 some scepticism was expressed by veteran teachers, based on their previous experiences, as to the ministry’s willingness or ability to provide appropriate support for teachers.56 despite such worries, teachers have been proactive in their public responses to the new curriculum, such as in calling for more partnership between educators and mana whenua to enable responsive approaches to māori histories.57 teachers have taken initiative in using the new curriculum’s placebased and bicultural focus to strengthen connections between schools and ‘the local hapū’, and to ensure that local tangata whenua are at the centre of ‘discussions on how history is taught’.58 teachers have also used the context of the launching of the new curriculum to draw attention to colonisation, and the need to tackle controversial themes from the early years of schooling.59 schools also took the nationwide discussion about history as an opportunity to remind the public that they were teaching aotearoa new zealand history – especially local histories – long before the release of the new curriculum.60 the positive responses of experienced teachers were amplified in our survey of massey university’s kaiako pitomata (student teachers), suggesting the next generation of teachers see genuine opportunities in the new curriculum. most expressed passionate support of the new curriculum they will begin to implement from 2023. to many, this was an overdue document that ‘should have been done a long time ago’. others felt that the new curriculum’s content was not only relevant, but also ‘has been missing in mainstream education for a long time’ and that they looked forward ‘to be a part of bringing this new curriculum into the classroom’. while they expressed similar concerns to experienced teachers about having adequate resourcing, incorporating multiple perspectives, delivering the curriculum in ageappropriate ways, and ensuring their own knowledge was adequate, their enthusiasm for the curriculum and its novelty was very evident. one comment that ‘it is so different from the history that i learned in schools, and i absolutely love it’ captured much of the student respondents’ enchantment with the new curriculum.61 the different responses to the curriculum for a history war to emerge, major political parties must see political capital in stoking conflict, whether through commitment to an ideal or for political expediency. in australia, the ‘history wars’ were coopted in the battle between labour’s paul keating and the coalition’s john howard, while in the united states, approaches to history clearly divide republicans and democrats. academic divisions between historians also have the potential to contribute to broader social conflicts, feeding into political ruptures. conflict in australia was initiated by new historical scholarship on australia’s treatment of indigenous people and an attack on this work by more conservative nationalist historians.62 however, in aotearoa new zealand, rather than a history war, an earnest consensus has been apparent, despite the wideranging interpretations and views expressed. across the wide range of responses to the aotearoa new zealand’s histories curriculum, perceptions of history have been expressed from multiple angles: history as informing identity and citizenship that invokes politicised responses; history as an academic subject representing specific intellectual skills; and history as something to be framed and resourced for teaching. the public and political responses most obviously presented expressions of aspirations for aotearoa new zealand society, culture and identity. belonging, or a longing for belonging and inclusion, were apparent in many of the responses. the strength of calls for inclusion in the curriculum is possibly the main reason that no history war emerged. neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022137 expressions of what, how and why history should be learned differed most markedly between historians and teachers. those differences can to some extent be explained by the distinctive ways history has been understood and taught in universities compared with schools. in universities, history is taught primarily in the humanities, whereas in schools, history is part of the social science curriculum, where it is strongly focused on the skills of citizenship and emphasises the contribution of the social sciences to understanding the present.63 these presentist objectives sit uneasily with historians’ understanding of the primacy of finding out what happened and why, before assigning responsibility. this does not mean that historians ignore ethical questions, but these are not the primary or ultimate objective of historical research; even research that is undertaken for the waitangi tribunal does not make judgements on the crown’s actions in the past. over recent decades, the teaching of school history has developed its own intellectual and methodological principles, emphasising the development of ‘historical thinking’ skills.64 the curriculum writers, academics and teachers were wellgrounded in this literature, as well as being experienced in applying this thinking to the specific needs of a settler society, and to the needs of māori and pacific students. many of the developments in school history have taken place beyond the consciousness of academic historians, where the focus is still more research driven. while historians, and many of the general public, saw the curriculum as an incomplete lattice, teachers were much more able to look at the curriculum and see how it could be expanded to cover the very topics historians found absent. this reflects the way teachers have engaged with the liberal aotearoa new zealand curriculum over recent decades. the final curriculum the final curriculum was much larger than the draft. the ministry had listened and broadened the scope to respond to many of the concerns that were raised. some of the additions addressed the absence of women, nonbritish migrants, economics and aotearoa new zealand’s place within broader international history. the most substantial change to the final iteration of the curriculum was the inclusion of the fourth big idea, relationships, which clearly connects aotearoa new zealand history to the wider world. in this case, the big idea was a highlevel aspect of the curriculum and embedding it more obviously was clearly a response to criticism. however, this expanded curriculum did not require substantial rewriting. the 2021 draft released by the ministry was intended to be a simple, straightforward curriculum, not too complicated, not too detailed, and hopefully easily navigated by teachers. to do this, whole sections of the earlier draft were left out of the material that was released for public consultation. it is not clear how much of this was a deliberate attempt to limit content creep within the curriculum, or simply a response to pretesting with teachers, who were reportedly overwhelmed by the size of the curriculum. in responding to criticism, the ministry was able to reinclude material that was already there anyway. nonetheless, the expanded scope enabled more detail – and therefore more perspectives – to be shown. conclusion to date, the development of the new aotearoa new zealand’s histories curriculum, characterised by a strong postcolonial focus, has not sparked any history war. neither the historians nor the political parties, with very few exceptions, were prepared to turn the technical aspects of creating a new curriculum into an outandout cultural battle. in explaining this, we emphasised some degree of aotearoa new zealand exceptionalism – the extent that māori inclusion in society, mmp and the work of the waitangi tribunal has become deeply ingrained in aotearoa new zealand’s political society. however, this study is retrospective, and should not necessarily be seen as predictive of the future. there may also have been quite short term and specific influences on our conclusions. the ministry managed the process well by containing debate to the content of the curriculum and making it difficult for that debate to flow over into neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022138 other cultural issues. this was easier in the first part of 2021 than may be the case in the future. the prime minister’s popularity was riding high, and the development of the curriculum did not attach itself to other cultural conflicts. this may no longer be quite so easy if such a postcolonial curriculum becomes linked by its critics to other government initiatives that seek to dismantle colonial structures and provide for greater māori governance, autonomy and rights. only the future will show whether the relatively relaxed way in which the country responded to the curriculum was a sign of its resilience on such issues, or an anomaly. endnotes 1 kaat wils and tom verschaffel, ‘longing for the present in the history of history education’, in paedagogica historica, vol 46, no 6, 2012, p793. 2 james grossman and beth english, ‘aha and oah join coalition to combat misinformation’, in perspectives on history, 15 september 2021, https://www.historians.org/publicationsanddirectories/perspectivesonhistory/october2021/ ahaandoahjoincoalitiontocombatmisinformationtheintegrityofhistoryeducationisatstake; jacqueline jones, ‘abstract and uninformed: adding facts to the critical race theory debates’, in perspectives on history, 12 august 2021, https://www.historians.org/publicationsanddirectories/perspectivesonhistory/september2021/abstractandill informedaddingfactstothecriticalracetheorydebates; history curriculum author defies his critics to find bias (online), 2008. available: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0%2c25197%2c2449254213881%2c00.html; david b. macdonald, ‘canada’s history wars: indigenous genocide and public memory in the united states, australia and canada’, in journal of genocide research, vol 17, no 4, 2015, pp411431. 3 ardern, j. and hipkins, c. 2009, nz history to be taught in all schools (online). available: https://www.beehive.govt. nz/release/nzhistorybetaughtallschools. 4 nzcer, aotearoa new zealand’s histories: findings from the public engagement on the draft curriculum content, nzcer and ministry of education, wellington, 2021. see page 6 of the report for more detail of the ministry’s consultation process. 5 participation for the student teachers was voluntary and included students across the primary and secondary programmes. 6 anna clark and carla l. peck, ‘historical consciousness: theory and practice’, in anna clark and carla l. peck, contemplating historical consciousness: notes from the field, berghahn, new york, 2018, pp115. 7 carol mutch, philippa hunter, andrea milligan, roger openshaw and alexis siteine, ‘understanding the social sciences as a learning area: a position paper’, february 2008, https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/content/ download/2609/34003/file/sspp%20final%2031%20july%2009%5b1%5d.doc 8 marcia stenson, ‘history in new zealand schools’ in new zealand journal of history, vol 24, no 2, 1990, pp168191. 9 mutch et al, op cit. 10 see, for example, mark sheehan, ‘a matter of choice: controversial histories, citizenship and the challenge of a high autonomy curriculum’, in curriculum matters, no 13, 2017, pp103114. 11 ardern and hipkins, op cit. 12 aotearoa nz’s histories in our national curriculum – consultation open (online), 2021. available: https://www. education.govt.nz/news/aotearoanewzealandshistoriesinournationalcurriculumnowopenforconsultation/; cook, h. 2021, government releases the new zealand histories that will be compulsory in schools from 2022 (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300220613/governmentreleasesthenewzealandhistoriesthatwill becompulsoryinschoolsfrom2022. 13 aotearoa new zealand’s histories in the new zealand curriculum, draft for consultation (online), 2021. available: https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/content/download/169209/1249015/file/co2716_moe_aotearoa_nz_histories_a3_ final020.pdf. 14 ibid, p.2. 15 although, even here, the māori topics were limited. 16 see, for example: leaman, a. 2019, “constellation of factors” behind move to make nz history compulsory in schools (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/115791728/constellationoffactorsbehindmove tomakenzhistorycompulsoryinschools; long, j. and mitchell, r. 2019, history on repeat how compulsory teaching in nz might work (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/117319034/historyonrepeathow compulsoryteachinginnzmightwork; leaman, a. 2019, championing the past: how the battle to get nz history taught in all schools was won and what it means (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/117888349/ championingthepasthowthebattletogetnzhistorytaughtinallschoolswaswonandwhatitmeans. 17 survey response, community member, nzcer, op cit, p49; p11. 18 57 per cent of māori and asian and 49 per cent of pacific respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the curriculum reflected new zealand’s bicultural history, compared with 43 per cent of all respondents. nzcer, op cit, pp10, 82; 67 per neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022139 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2021/aha-and-oah-join-coalition-to-combat-misinformation-the-integrity-of-history-education-is-at-stake https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2021/aha-and-oah-join-coalition-to-combat-misinformation-the-integrity-of-history-education-is-at-stake https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2021/abstract-and-ill-informed-adding-facts-to-the-critical-race-theory-debates https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2021/abstract-and-ill-informed-adding-facts-to-the-critical-race-theory-debates http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0%2c25197%2c24492542-13881%2c00.html https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nz-history-be-taught-all-schools https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/nz-history-be-taught-all-schools https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/content/download/2609/34003/file/sspp%20final%2031%20july%2009%5b1%5d.doc https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/content/download/2609/34003/file/sspp%20final%2031%20july%2009%5b1%5d.doc https://www.education.govt.nz/news/aotearoa-new-zealands-histories-in-our-national-curriculum-now-open-for-consultation/ https://www.education.govt.nz/news/aotearoa-new-zealands-histories-in-our-national-curriculum-now-open-for-consultation/ https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300220613/government-releases-the-new-zealand-histories-that-will-be-compulsory-in-schools-from-2022 https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300220613/government-releases-the-new-zealand-histories-that-will-be-compulsory-in-schools-from-2022 https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/content/download/169209/1249015/file/co2716_moe_aotearoa_nz_histories_a3_final-020.pdf https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/content/download/169209/1249015/file/co2716_moe_aotearoa_nz_histories_a3_final-020.pdf https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/115791728/constellation-of-factors-behind-move-to-make-nz-history-compulsory-in-schools https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/115791728/constellation-of-factors-behind-move-to-make-nz-history-compulsory-in-schools https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/117319034/history-on-repeat--how-compulsory-teaching-in-nz-might-work https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/117319034/history-on-repeat--how-compulsory-teaching-in-nz-might-work https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/117888349/championing-the-past-how-the-battle-to-get-nz-history-taught-in-all-schools-was-won-and-what-it-means https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/117888349/championing-the-past-how-the-battle-to-get-nz-history-taught-in-all-schools-was-won-and-what-it-means cent of māori, 61 per cent of pacific and 60 per cent of asian respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the curriculum would allow more diverse local stories to be told, compared with 51 per cent of all respondents. nzcer, op cit., pp10, 83. 19 57 per cent of māori and 53 per cent of pacific respondents identified a deeper cultural understanding as important learning, compared with 42 per cent of all respondents. nzcer, op cit., pp22, 48, 65; 45 per cent of māori and 44 per cent of pacific respondents identified a greater sense of identity and belonging as important learning, compared with 35 per cent of all respondents. nzcer, op cit, pp22, 48, 65. 20 survey response, parent/caregiver, nzcer, op cit, p50. 21 gerritsen, j. 2021, moriori fear their history will be left out of new school curriculum (online). available: https:// www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/443236/moriorifeartheirhistorywillbeleftoutofnewschoolcurriculum; moriori and the national history curriculum (online), 2021. available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/queensbirthday/ audio/2018798692/morioriandthenationalhistorycurriculum. 22 nzcer, op cit, pp5455. 23 survey response, community member, nzcer, op cit, p66. 24 ip, m. 2021, the new zealand chinese experience is unique and important – the new history curriculum can’t ignore it (online). available: https://theconversation.com/thenewzealandchineseexperienceisuniqueandimportant thenewhistorycurriculumcantignoreit160782; ip, m. 2021, chinese in nz: the part of our history the new school curriculum completely ignores (online). available: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/chineseinnzthepartofourhistory thenewschoolcurriculumcompletelyignores/nirligoyqvh3ygydqr5poquxfe/. 25 wong, h. 2021, 180 years of chinese nz history appear to count for nothing (online). available: https://www.stuff. co.nz/national/education/125010885/180yearsofchinesenzhistoryappeartocountfornothing. 26 ip, m. 2021, the new zealand chinese experience is unique and important – the new history curriculum can’t ignore it (online). available: https://theconversation.com/thenewzealandchineseexperienceisuniqueandimportantthe newhistorycurriculumcantignoreit160782. 27 ibid. 28 draper, s. 2021, contribution of asian communities to our economy is often overlooked (online). available: https:// www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinionanalysis/300228235/contributionofasiancommunitiestooureconomyisoften overlooked. 29 nzcer, op cit, p7. 30 new history curriculum – thumbs down from some (online), 2021. available: https://www.democracyaction.org.nz/ new_history_curriculum_thumbs_down_from_some; see also bassett on the history curriculum (online), 2021. available: https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2021/02/bassett_on_the_history_curriculum.html; submit against draft history curriculum (online), nd. available: https://www.hobsonspledge.nz/school_curriculum_submission. 31 the new zealand histories curriculum (online), nd. available: https://www.democracyaction.org.nz/new_zealand_ histories_curriculum. 32 goldsmith, p. 2021, submission on aotearoa new zealand histories (online). available: https://www.national.org.nz/ nationalsubmitsonnewzealandhistorycurriculum. 33 ibid. 34 act releases submission on nz history curriculum (online), 2021. available: https://www.act.org.nz/act_releases_ submission_on_nz_history_curriculum 35 aotearoa history to be taught in all schools (online), 2019. available: https://www.greens.org.nz/aotearoahistorybe taughtallschools. 36 bassett, m. 2020, teaching history about early new zealand (online). available: http://www.michaelbassett.co.nz/ columns.php?id=274&yh=2021&yl=2020. 37 learning history not only teaches us our past it makes us think critically and look at the way in which those stories are told (online), 2021. available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/300230149/learninghistory notonlyteachesusourpastitmakesusthinkcriticallyandlookatthewayinwhichthosestoriesaretold 38 jensen, k. 2021, response to michael bassett’s ‘racism on a grand scale’ (online). available: https://www.nzherald. co.nz/northlandage/news/responsetomichaelbassettsracismonagrandscale/ftqy4niuvl2zmzxmrrma2bkeku/; graham adams: don’t mention the musket wars! (online), 2021. available: https://democracyproject.nz/2021/03/11/ grahamadamsdontmentionthemusketwars/. 39 michael bassett: centralising everything (online), 2022. available: https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/02/ michaelbassettcentralisingeverything.html; mackenzie, f. 2021, draft curriculum designed to foster ethnic division, to breed resentment and foster guilt (online). available: https://www.hobsonspledge.nz/fiona_mackenzie_draft_ curriculum_designed_to_foster_ethnic_division_to_breed_resentment_and_foster_guilt. 40 royal society te apārangi expert advisory panel, ‘aotearoa new zealand’s histories: a response to draft curriculum’, 2021, p4. neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022140 https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/443236/moriori-fear-their-history-will-be-left-out-of-new-school-curriculum https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/443236/moriori-fear-their-history-will-be-left-out-of-new-school-curriculum https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/queensbirthday/audio/2018798692/moriori-and-the-national-history-curriculum https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/queensbirthday/audio/2018798692/moriori-and-the-national-history-curriculum https://theconversation.com/the-new-zealand-chinese-experience-is-unique-and-important-the-new-history-curriculum-cant-ignore-it-160782 https://theconversation.com/the-new-zealand-chinese-experience-is-unique-and-important-the-new-history-curriculum-cant-ignore-it-160782 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/chinese-in-nz-the-part-of-our-history-the-new-school-curriculum-completely-ignores/nirligoyqvh3ygydqr5poquxfe/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/chinese-in-nz-the-part-of-our-history-the-new-school-curriculum-completely-ignores/nirligoyqvh3ygydqr5poquxfe/ https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/125010885/180-years-of-chinese-nz-history-appear-to-count-for-nothing https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/125010885/180-years-of-chinese-nz-history-appear-to-count-for-nothing https://theconversation.com/the-new-zealand-chinese-experience-is-unique-and-important-the-new-history-curriculum-cant-ignore-it-160782 https://theconversation.com/the-new-zealand-chinese-experience-is-unique-and-important-the-new-history-curriculum-cant-ignore-it-160782 https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/300228235/contribution-of-asian-communities-to-our-economy-is-often-overlooked https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/300228235/contribution-of-asian-communities-to-our-economy-is-often-overlooked https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/300228235/contribution-of-asian-communities-to-our-economy-is-often-overlooked https://www.democracyaction.org.nz/new_history_curriculum_thumbs_down_from_some https://www.democracyaction.org.nz/new_history_curriculum_thumbs_down_from_some https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2021/02/bassett_on_the_history_curriculum.html https://www.hobsonspledge.nz/school_curriculum_submission https://www.democracyaction.org.nz/new_zealand_histories_curriculum https://www.democracyaction.org.nz/new_zealand_histories_curriculum https://www.national.org.nz/national-submits-on-new-zealand-history-curriculum https://www.national.org.nz/national-submits-on-new-zealand-history-curriculum https://www.act.org.nz/act_releases_submission_on_nz_history_curriculum https://www.act.org.nz/act_releases_submission_on_nz_history_curriculum https://www.greens.org.nz/aotearoa-history-be-taught-all-schools https://www.greens.org.nz/aotearoa-history-be-taught-all-schools http://www.michaelbassett.co.nz/columns.php?id=274&yh=2021&yl=2020 http://www.michaelbassett.co.nz/columns.php?id=274&yh=2021&yl=2020 https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/300230149/learning-history-not-only-teaches-us-our-past-it-makes-us-think-critically-and-look-at-the-way-in-which-those-stories-are-told https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/300230149/learning-history-not-only-teaches-us-our-past-it-makes-us-think-critically-and-look-at-the-way-in-which-those-stories-are-told https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northland-age/news/response-to-michael-bassetts-racism-on-a-grand-scale/ftqy4niuvl2zmzxmrrma2bkeku/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northland-age/news/response-to-michael-bassetts-racism-on-a-grand-scale/ftqy4niuvl2zmzxmrrma2bkeku/ https://democracyproject.nz/2021/03/11/graham-adams-dont-mention-the-musket-wars/ https://democracyproject.nz/2021/03/11/graham-adams-dont-mention-the-musket-wars/ https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/02/michael-bassett-centralising-everything.html https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/02/michael-bassett-centralising-everything.html https://www.hobsonspledge.nz/fiona_mackenzie_draft_curriculum_designed_to_foster_ethnic_division_to_breed_resentment_and_foster_guilt https://www.hobsonspledge.nz/fiona_mackenzie_draft_curriculum_designed_to_foster_ethnic_division_to_breed_resentment_and_foster_guilt 41 ibid, p5. 42 ibid, pp78. 43 moon, p. 2021, new history curriculum off to a worrying start (online). available: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/new historyofftoaworryingstart. 44 royal society, op cit, p8. 45 ibid, p14. 46 gibson, n. 2021, battles over the past: one historian’s solution (online). available: https://www.nbr.co.nz/ node/229772 47 gerritsen, j. 2021, teachers hope curriculum will close ‘woeful’ gaps (online). available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/ news/national/444039/teachershopecurriculumwillclosewoefulgaps 48 mohi, m. 2022, how we should be treating the treaty: perspectives from history (online). available: https://www.stuff. co.nz/poutiaki/127664720/howweshouldbetreatingthetreatyperspectivesfromhistoryteachers 49 gerritsen, j. 2021, the schools walking the treaty talk (online). available: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/ 447962/theschoolswalkingthetreatytalk 50 kowhai, t. r. 2022, new history curriculum welcomed by principal, māori historian (online). available: https://www. newshub.co.nz/home/newzealand/2022/03/newhistorycurriculumwelcomedbyprincipalmorihistorian.html 51 findings from our survey of manawatū teachers prior to the draft curriculum release. see genaro vilanova miranda de oliveira and matt kennedy, ‘learning in and from primary schools: teaching aotearoa new zealand’s histories at years 1 to 6’, in curriculum matters, no 17, 2021. 52 carol neill, rachael bell, michael belgrave, peter meihana and geoff watson, ‘what for the future, from learning the past? exploring the implications of the aotearoa new zealand histories curriculum’, in new zealand annual review of education, vol 27, no 5, 2021, pp5-24. 53 oliveira and kennedy, op cit. 54 ibid. 55 see, for example, gerritsen, teachers hope curriculum will close ‘woeful’ gaps. over the next five years the ministry of education is undertaking a refresh of the national curriculum for schooling. the aotearoa new zealand’s histories curriculum marks one of the first steps towards these major curricular changes. 56 long and mitchell, op cit. 57 secondary schools work with māori on new approaches to history (online), 2021. available: https://www.nzherald. co.nz/kahu/secondaryschoolsworkwithmaorionnewapproachestohistory/6ete42rtmgk47guitpasxbpxzm/ 58 gerritsen, teachers hope curriculum will close ‘woeful’ gaps; ward, s. 2022, new aotearoa history curriculum ‘great’ even if it has taken a ‘wee while’ (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/300543688/new aotearoahistorycurriculumgreatevenifithastakenaweewhile 59 teacher’s suggestion for treaty of waitangi lesson sparks online debate (online), 2021. available: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/teacherssuggestionfortreatyofwaitangilessonsparksonlinedebate/ rol7ieuwr2jlmejpacbn3jnrsi/ 60 harvey, h. 2019, taranaki school is ahead of the game when it comes to teaching new zealand’s history (online). available: https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranakidailynews/news/115772627/taranakischoolisaheadofthegamewhenit comestoteachingnewzealandshistory 61 response in student teacher survey, massey university. results not yet published. 62 keith windschuttle, the fabrication of aboriginal history, volume one: van diemen’s land 18031847, macleay press, sydney, 2002; anna clark, ‘history in black and white: a critical analysis of the black armband debate’, in richard nile (ed), country: journal of australian studies, no 75, st lucia, uqp, 2002. 63 ‘social sciences’, te kete ipurangi, 2014, https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/thenewzealandcurriculum/social sciences/learningareastructure 64 see, for example: sam wineburg, historical thinking and other unnatural acts: charting the future of teaching the past, temple university press, philadelphia, 2001; peter seixas, the big six historical thinking concepts, nelson education, toronto, 2013. neill, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022141 https://www.newsroom.co.nz/new-history-off-to-a-worrying-start https://www.newsroom.co.nz/new-history-off-to-a-worrying-start https://www.nbr.co.nz/node/229772 https://www.nbr.co.nz/node/229772 https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/444039/teachers-hope-curriculum-will-close-woeful-gaps https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/444039/teachers-hope-curriculum-will-close-woeful-gaps https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/127664720/how-we-should-be-treating-the-treaty-perspectives-from-history-teachers https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/127664720/how-we-should-be-treating-the-treaty-perspectives-from-history-teachers https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/447962/the-schools-walking-the-treaty-talk https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/447962/the-schools-walking-the-treaty-talk https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/03/new-history-curriculum-welcomed-by-principal-m-ori-historian.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2022/03/new-history-curriculum-welcomed-by-principal-m-ori-historian.html https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/secondary-schools-work-with-maori-on-new-approaches-to-history/6ete42rtmgk47guitpasxbpxzm/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/secondary-schools-work-with-maori-on-new-approaches-to-history/6ete42rtmgk47guitpasxbpxzm/ https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/300543688/new-aotearoa-history-curriculum-great-even-if-it-has-taken-a-wee-while https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/300543688/new-aotearoa-history-curriculum-great-even-if-it-has-taken-a-wee-while https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/teachers-suggestion-for-treaty-of-waitangi-lesson-sparks-online-debate/rol7ieuwr2jlmejpacbn3jnrsi/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/teachers-suggestion-for-treaty-of-waitangi-lesson-sparks-online-debate/rol7ieuwr2jlmejpacbn3jnrsi/ https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/115772627/taranaki-school-is-ahead-of-the-game-when-it-comes-to-teaching-new-zealands-history https://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/115772627/taranaki-school-is-ahead-of-the-game-when-it-comes-to-teaching-new-zealands-history https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/the-new-zealand-curriculum/social-sciences/learning-area-structure https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/the-new-zealand-curriculum/social-sciences/learning-area-structure articles (peer reviewed) interpreting history through fiction: three writers discuss their methods thom conroy*, joanna grochowicz, cristina sanders corresponding author: thom conroy, t.conroy@massey.ac.nz doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8241 article history: received 16/06/2022; accepted 08/11/2022; published 06/12/2022 introduction in november 2021, professor emerita barbara brookes (university of otago) chaired us – thom conroy, joanna grochowicz and cristina sanders – for a session of the new zealand historical association conference entitled ‘learning history through fiction’. the online session was organised as a conversation in which professor brookes posed questions to us while we also quizzed one another. an extended q & a followed, during which we had the opportunity to engage with a range of queries from conference participants. we panelists subsequently transformed the session into the article that follows. as we found that the conversation format challenged our thinking in productive ways, we opted to retain it in the article. while we continued to consider history and fiction and the possibility of learning history from a creative text, as we planned our conversation over a series of zoom meetings and emails, it became apparent that we were itching to expand the parameters of the discussion. in the article that follows, then, we range over a series of questions related to the intersection of history and fiction, including navigating the fact/ fiction balance in creative historical writing, exploring concerns about the potential for harm in historical fiction, interrogating our motives for adopting a creative approach to history, and examining hilary mantel’s readerly ‘contract’ in historical fiction.1 we did not strive for consensus in our conversation, nor did we try to answer every question we put to one another. in what follows, we have retained contradictions and disagreements to give a sense of the fluidity of the original discussion, and, more importantly, to hardwire our collective feeling of openendedness into the conversation. the questions that shape our dialogue below remain poignant and active enquiries for each of us, and our answers, likewise, remain as provisional and contingent as the genre in which we write. public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: conroy, t., grochowicz, j., sanders, c. 2022. interpreting history through fiction: three writers discuss their methods. public history review, 29, 195–206. https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj. v29i0.8241 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 195 mailto:t.conroy@massey.ac.nz https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8241 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8241 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8241 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj the conversation if we agree that ‘historical fiction’ means a narrative set in the past that is a blend of factual research and fictional creativity, how do you find your fact/fiction balance? joanna grochowicz ( jg): as a writer of narrative nonfiction, my desire is to employ the narrative form to portray historical figures and events. i draw heavily on archival material –diaries, letters, drawings and photos, official journals, firsthand accounts, and speeches, as well as secondary sources such as published histories, the work of polar scholars and researchers. dates, events, ‘characters’, and locations, the immutable facts as recorded in official narratives can ‘take care of themselves’; where my work departs markedly from nonfiction (and perhaps this is where i am likely to attract the greatest scrutiny) is in my reimagining of dialogue. this is where writers and historians often part ways because a certain amount of invention must take place. however, given the sources i draw on, i feel confident that my version of particular episodes and historical characters is as close to the ‘truth’ as is possible. i’m not so much a fillerin of blanks as an arranger of known facts. if there is no evidence to support a detail, i will not include that detail in my work. by and large private diaries provide a level of candour and honesty. thoughts are expressed in a more direct, uncensored fashion than they would be in an official expedition narrative or correspondence, and reflections contained within their pages can offer a solid basis for an imagined inner monologue. sometimes it is possible to find two people writing about the same episode from different points of view. when materials allow me to ‘triangulate’ – that is, pinpoint a discussion more accurately from multiple known points – then i feel as if i’ve hit the jackpot. for me, this is as close to achieving verisimilitude as i can come as an author. this makes for a very labourintensive research phase. i feel the need for my work to carry historical validity, partly to adhere to my own code of conduct, partly to ensure my readers’ historical understanding is not contaminated, and partly because i feel a responsibility towards the individuals depicted in my work (and their descendants) to avoid misrepresentations. cristina sanders (cs): in his 1982 review in the new york times, paul zweig comments that thomas keneally’s brilliant schindler’s list ‘reads like a novel… its scenes are so vivid they appear to result from a kind of ventriloquism’.2 this is a lovely description of hitting the right balance between fact and fiction. keneally himself, in an interview with reviewer sue lawson, admits that in his 2020 novel the dicken’s boy he messes about with the details of his real characters, adding scenes to fit the plot. when challenged by a critic that he stretched facts, he replied, ‘well that is the truth… where the facts are missing, i wasn’t slow to supply them’.3 these gaps between the facts are a novelist’s job to fill. sometimes, though, it is the accepted facts themselves that i find problematic. unlike joanna, who has good reason to believe the veracity of records left by her famous characters, i have jerningham wakefield as the hero of my novel jerningham.4 his glorious journals about the first colonial settlement of wellington are my source material, but they do need sifting for truth. he was a highly opinionated man characterised by selfaggrandisement. and if he didn’t let the truth ruin the telling of his story, why should i? in mrs jewell and the wreck of the general grant i tell the story of a woman castaway on a subantarctic island for eighteen months with fourteen men.5 the testimonies of the survivors mention her only once, merely stating she was ‘the wife of joseph jewell’. what would she say if given a voice? there are many missing facts in her story but, in the spirit of thomas keneally, i haven’t been slow to fill in the gaps. women also are the heroes in my story displaced, all invented characters as their reallife equivalents are historically silent.6 because much of history is recorded by the powerful, it is unusual to find complete records of those with less agency: minorities, women, children. those stories, missing from our histories, can conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022196 be recreated from an interpretation of surrounding evidence, building a forensic recreation of a life and – because it is fiction and you can – skipping the boring bits. thom conroy (tc): i think each creative project establishes its own terms, and these terms are connected to the subject matter, the conversation around the themes that you tackle, the form of the creative work, and your own goals. my historical novel the naturalist, for example, recounts the life of the historical figure dr ernst dieffenbach.7 dieffenbach was born at giessen in the grand duchy of hesse in 1811. exiled as a university student for participating in a revolutionary group espousing democracy, he earned a medical degree in zurich, and eventually ended up in london where he signed on as a member of the new zealand company’s colonial expedition in 1839. during the eighteen months he spent in aotearoa new zealand, dieffenbach became fluent in te reo māori, made the first european ascent of a coastal mountain called taranaki, explored much of the north island of new zealand, and joined a delegation acquiring signatures for the treaty of waitangi, the founding document of bicultural aotearoa new zealand. upon his return to london, dieffenbach published travels in new zealand, a twovolume book composed of a travel narrative of his time in aotearoa new zealand, a māori ethnography, and the first nonmissionary māori grammar and dictionary.8 unfortunately, dieffenbach’s forwardthinking views on the absolute equality of māori and european marginalised his influence and consigned him to a footnote in new zealand history. my original aim in turning to dieffenbach, as the subject of an historical novel, was to elevate him out of the footnote and into the body text. i also aspired to add the example of dieffenbach to conversations around new zealand history and national identity. for a book like the naturalist, i took a strict line on historical accuracy. dieffenbach’s own travels in new zealand provided me with a chronology and a set cast of characters for the novel. since i judged that the conversation on national identity in new zealand was both significant and increasingly robust, i wanted to get every detail about dieffenbach’s time in aotearoa new zealand correct. luckily for me, dieffenbach’s travels did not wax poetic about the author’s personal life. in fact, at one point he says directly that he had ‘a great disinclination to describe personal incidents’.9 this disclination, in turn, provided me with an in as a novelist. while i was determined to get all the historical details correct, i was equally determined to rely on my own imagination to manufacture the personal aspects of his story that were missing. cs: thom, i applaud your elevation of this modest and intelligent man into our modern debates about identity in aotearoa new zealand. dieffenbach’s travels give a frame of reference to the era that was missed by those with a more commercial agenda. dieffenbach’s travels in new zealand in 1843 and jerningham’s adventures in new zealand in 1845 cover some of the same years in new zealand, yet are very different works: the former careful, measured and, as you point out, light on personal incident, whereas jerningham put his heroic deeds front and centre. we each have rendered these men into works of fiction using their own journals tempered by many other sources that support or contradict their stories. you may have coloured in dieffenbach’s personal life while i toned jerningham’s down, but we have both come to a similar place on the continuum that is historical fiction. jg: i’m intrigued that neither of you would consider using the term ‘narrative nonfiction’ nor ‘creative nonfiction’ when referring to the naturalist or jerningham, as to my mind we are all doing the same thing – writing about the lives of historical figures and drawing on documentary evidence and nonfiction sources. and yet you both insist on the term ‘historical fiction’. where does one draw the line? is it a question of proportionality or degrees of truth or invention? conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022197 thom, you say ‘i wanted to get every detail about dieffenbach’s time in aotearoa new zealand correct’. that assertion aligns perfectly with my approach of adhering to historical accuracy. you even go so far as to source the cast of characters from dieffenbach’s travel narrative, although there is naturally a requirement to round them out with invented characteristics and physical attributes. where we differ is in your decision to embrace dieffenbach’s reluctance to include personal material as an opportunity to recreate this side of him. is this what nudges the work into the realm of ‘historical fiction’ for you? did you ever experience a sense of unease when indulging in something dieffenbach was so reluctant to do himself ? tc: this question of experiencing ‘a sense of unease when indulging in something dieffenbach was so reluctant to do himself ’ strikes me as addressing one of the key issues some readers have around historical fiction: how should authors manage the fabricated aspects of the narrative? personally, i had no qualms in manufacturing the personal bits in the naturalist, as i come to writing from a background in writing and teaching fiction, and inventing psychologies is second nature. for me – and i know you may disagree, joanna – an invented story cannot be distinguished in any absolute sense from a narrative scrupulously pieced together from facts. both are premised on our pleasure in narrative experience; and narrative, in and of itself, distorts. narrative is crucial to how we experience reality, but this experience is always ‘untrue’ on some level. which is not to say that we don’t have an obligation to be forthright with readers, but i think this obligation is a duty predicated on overlooking the inevitable distortion that narrative lends to language as well as lived experience. are you worried that some readers may accept your fiction as fact, and does this mistake have the potential for harm? cs: history, back in the days before it became ‘history’, was ‘experience’ for someone with a bias or dodgy eyesight, possibly stressed or sleepdeprived, or simply not in full control of their limited faculties. their experience is then misinterpreted, reimagined, discussed, altered and retold by others until a historian gets their hands on the source material and manipulates the story to fit the parameters of an historical publication. finally, a film is made featuring mel gibson. the blurring of fact and fiction has the potential for enormous damage, but i think a fiction writer has two ‘outs’ for this transgression. firstly, the packaging of the work must be clearly identifiable as fiction. secondly, if the writer feels there is potential damage through such confusion, they must identify what they have fictionalised (and why) in an author’s note. jg: writing about a period in history that is welldocumented, and individuals who have been thoroughly examined by scholars, i’m operating within welldefined boundaries. there is always the temptation to massage the truth, dishonour the material, to ‘improve’ the truth in the interests of making the narrative more exciting or enjoyable. however, i do not want to leave myself open to criticism of fictionalising real people. i must make triple sure that i have evidence to support any claim i make within the narrative. with my latest book, shackleton’s endurance, i asked two subject experts to read over my manuscript and identify areas where disputes might arise.10 i want my readers to trust me implicitly. i never felt that i had the freedom or the right to invent. however, this conviction is being sorely tested in the case of my current project, the barren grounds, an adult novel which examines the lives of sir john and lady franklin. whereas my three previous novels recount events which take place over the course of 18 months, the barren grounds covers a period of 50 years. this extended timescale is certainly challenging my convictions! of course, even writers who wish to adhere strictly to historical fact cannot deal in absolutes. there are many incidental elements that must be recreated; interiors are a classic example. while it may be possible to visit locations where a particular episode took place or to observe a particular building and describe built conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022198 environments, chances are that the rooms will have changed greatly since victorian times and must be restaged in the writer’s imagination. sometimes photographs from the period can be used and research can help establish what is close enough to the truth with auxiliary details such as furnishings, clothing, food and drink.  it is not my job to invent or replace history. perhaps what i do is ‘colour in’. i think my novels have been wellreceived because they contribute details that have been passed over in more conventional historical accounts – the more human aspects of a story that convey the lived experience. personal feelings, reflections, fears, doubts and motivations are perhaps more at home in a narrative setting than they are in a nonfiction text. tc: joanna, you say you don’t feel as if you have ‘the freedom or the right to invent’. but you also acknowledge that there are elements to the story that must be recreated: ‘interiors are a classic example.’ i must ask why you allow yourself the freedom to recreate interiors only? i understand that these interiors are rarely put down in the historical record, and so there is a practical necessity to invent them. but why do you feel at liberty to give yourself this one freedom, and this freedom alone? arguably, misrepresenting the personal feelings, reflections, fears, doubts and motivations of a historical figure is a greater ethical misstep than mispresenting a place name or a detail. for me, getting a historical detail wrong – the kind of carriage used, for instance – is a low stakes error. a careful reader will notice the error, and i can correct it in a second edition, or let it stand as a testament to my poor research skills. getting the interiority of a historical figure wrong, however, strikes me as high stakes. with the stroke of your pen, a reader might feel repelled when they ought to feel attracted. a reader might be drawn to the charm you put into the mouth of a character or misread the easy quip of a character as a damning commentary and, as a result, end up misinterpreting a crucial scene. it’s conceivable that an imagined scene of interiority could sway a reader’s judgement in a serious way. jg: i agree, thom. misrepresenting the thoughts and feelings of historical figures is high stakes while getting incidentals wrong by comparison is of relatively little consequence. but i do believe there is real worth in persevering to get both right. i have sidestepped any discomfort i might feel in trying to recreate the interior life of my historical figures in my previous novels. the wealth of personal ‘testimony’ contained within archival material has allowed me to present with confidence an individual’s thoughts or feelings when necessary to advancing the narrative. i also realise what a luxury it is to tell a story from multiple points of view and not be constrained from a single individual’s standpoint. what lurks behind your compulsion as writers of historical fiction? why are you drawn to fill in gaps in our knowledge of history? cs: i don’t think i’m the only writer who follows historic characters home in my imagination, wondering if they play with their children and pat the dog, or take off the wig and collapse into a wellstuffed armchair with a bottle of port. i feel a fervent need to uncover motive and character to help explain history. i remember an ‘aha!’ moment when reading the private letters of lady eliza grey, wife of new zealand’s third governor. she is not always kind about george, and their stormy marriage obviously contributed to the man’s complexities. if he’d married someone else, perhaps new zealand’s early colonial history might have had a different tenor. history becomes more complex and interesting when you imagine the personal relationships behind real characters. conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022199 jg: for me, voyeurism motivates! it is fascinating to ‘experience’ the private lives of historical figures. however, presenting the inner world of historical figures in literature is nothing more than a thought experiment, wishful thinking on the part of an author. yet most readers are more than prepared to suspend their disbelief for the reward of voyeuristic entertainment. while writing my first book, into the white, i had an odd experience.11 i truly hoped that robert falcon scott, edward wilson, and birdie bowers would survive the return journey from the south pole. it seemed that their fate was not yet sealed and that there still existed the possibility that they could get back to cape evans alive. i think my optimistic mindset comes through in the narrative, because i have heard from many readers over the years that they hold out great hopes that tragedy can be avoided – right up to the final pages. tc: joanna, i can relate to your ‘odd experience’ of hoping for a different outcome for robert falcon scott, edward wilson and birdie bowers. this feeling of hoping against history is amazing to me – a liberating experience of possibility in a situation where we know perfectly well that there is no possibility! when writing the naturalist, i felt a sense of authorial panic about trapping my characters – most of whom were authentic historical figures – in the frozen lake of the past. it seemed a meanspirited way to treat them, as if my narrative shut down what author grace paley calls ‘the open destiny of life’. hilary mantel in her reith lectures suggests ‘a reader knows the nature of the contract. when you choose a novel to tell you about the past, you are putting in brackets the historical accounts – which may or may not agree with each other – and actively requesting a subjective interpretation.’ to what extent are we entering into such a contract with readers and how permissible is it to ‘play fast and loose with the truth’?12 jg: i think any author of historical fiction who would play fast and loose with the truth because there is an expectation that the reader will fill in the missing research is either doing something very clever or very stupid. to wilfully blur fact and fiction to highlight the shifting sands of memory might offer an interesting comment on the human condition or add to our understanding of history and how we fit into it. i acknowledge that this may result in a brilliant novel. on the other hand, if an author takes shortcuts with research to produce work quickly or because they see historical accuracy as being extraneous to the plot, then i believe that is both irresponsible and an unfair burden to place on the book’s editor. cs: personally, i am happy to be accused of ‘playing fast and loose with the truth’ in my novels, but i don’t ever want it assumed that this is indicative of a lack of comprehensive research, or some sort of lazy manipulation on my part to hit readers’ buttons. i like to investigate other ways of looking at our accepted accounts of history, to see how events might have looked from another viewpoint. absolutely it is a subjective interpretation. i try to come at a different truth through fiction. tc: i’m not sure that playing fast and loose with the truth in a work of historical fiction is always unethical. mantel talks about the nature of the contract, but i would argue that the contract is fluid. a work of historical fiction such as kate grenville’s the secret river, for instance, took what many readers assumed were historical incidents and shaped them with a level of detail and veracity that historians like inga clendinnen argued was an attempt to ‘frame fiction as history’.13 this charge as it relates to the secret river is worth considering in more detail. in one scene in the novel, the protagonist, william thornhill, slaps a dharug man’s shoulder for attempting to steal a spade. it turns out the scene was based on a historical report from arthur phillip, the first governor of new south wales. conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022200 in phillip’s dispatch, the incident occurred years earlier and twentyfive miles further downstream. it also occurred between the governor and a man he had met years earlier who ‘greeted him with a dance and a song of joy’.14 at the time of the secret river’s publication, historian inga clendinnen found grenville’s transformation of the incident unacceptable. of grenville’s changes to the historical material, clendinnen wrote, ‘the book’s shape is made completely different by that kind of casual transposition. it makes the novel not only not history but, in my admittedly very austere view, antihistory’.15 that is, for clendinnen, grenville’s ‘shortcut’ was evidence of the fact that she saw historical accuracy as extraneous – or at least secondary – to plot. to brand a historical novel ‘antihistory’ because it borrows a detail from the historical record and reimagines it in a creative work seems almost to disregard the main purpose of historical fiction, which is to enable us to relive the past in a visceral, emotionally grounded way. reading the secret river was what sparked my interest in australian history, and details such as william thornhill slapping the dharug man’s shoulder awakened my sense of the lived experience of this past. to my mind, this ‘playing fast and loose with the truth’ was a responsible authorial choice. while the historian’s critical distance and scrupulous accuracy may have been put at risk, grenville’s decision to put the plot of her novel first allowed her to open up a new history for me. she connected me with the daytoday experience of racism in colonial society in a way that governor’s phillips dispatch could never have accomplished. cs: like thom, above, i was drawn into australian history by the secret river. my assumption was that the ‘set piece’ incidents described (many with shocking implications), were based on a true history, with details changed as necessary to accommodate the narrative. that’s the ‘contract’ of fiction. unfortunately, i believe grenville broke her readerly contract with me in a later novel, a room made of leaves.16 here, grenville purports to have discovered letters and documents from the wife of a lieutenant in colonial australia that reveal a truth missing from the official history. i was sceptical of the confessional tone of the letters and realised pretty early that much of the writing was, in fact, of grenville’s own invention, but this ruse made me question my trust in her as a historical novelist. an author must have a clear motive to invent source material; this was just a trick. in his 1978 tropics of discourse, historian hayden white famously argued that history cannot escape literature: ‘in point of fact, history – the real world as it evolves in time – is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears to be problematical and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is a familiar, form. it does not matter whether the world is conceived to be real or only imagined; the manner of making sense of it is the same’.17 what are the implications of white’s position for those who write both ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ narratives on historical subjects? jg: history is storytelling, and so neither historians nor novelists can escape the narrative form when endeavouring to engage their readers. the degrees of freedom within the narrative form vary widely when it comes to presenting material in a particular way. supposition and speculation are as at home in straight historical texts as they are in fiction. the difference is in how this material is framed or prefaced. historians might introduce an idea or advance an argument with the addition of a disclaimer or a qualifying statement, such as ‘it is widely assumed that…’,‘some argue that…’, or ‘there is evidence to support the view…’. it’s an elegant way of covering risky ground, and historians are undoubtedly constrained by the risks of misrepresenting the past. conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022201 tc: i think the safest response to this question – and to the blunter rendition of it: ‘is history fiction?’ – is usually a qualified ‘no’. as joanna says, it’s ‘an elegant way of covering risky ground’. in my view, however, these statements don’t necessarily cover the ground we might believe they do. in response to ‘it is widely assumed,’ for instance, we might ask, ‘by whom?’ this answer takes us on the journey of unmasking some of the biases, gaps and omissions that are native not only to the discipline of history, but also to language and culture. historians may be constrained by selfawareness, but they may not be nearly constrained enough! that is, the selfawareness may not lead them to back away from the authority that the word ‘history’ implies. cs: in the small but fanatical world of shipwreck and treasure hunters, into which i have recently plunged with my novel about the wreck of the general grant, this idea of using narrative to construct both actual, as well as imagined, reality is problematic. with the lack of physical evidence of a wreck – iron anchors, chains, or golden sovereigns glittering in the water below the sea cliffs – nearly all we have of this fabulous legend are the testimonies of the survivors. for over 150 years, these testimonies, from traumatised and likely unreliable castaways, have been repeated and published. the wreck site is even marked on the official chart according to the contradictory reports, but i have spoken to divers who can confirm that the ship is not there. while wreck hunters of today plead for factual information, the reporters of the nineteenth century promoted the humaninterest angle. some reported the ship tacked north, and some recorded her with squared sails and sailing southeast. one version published in harper’s magazine had the captain ‘on the mizzentopmast crosstrees waving his handkerchief ’ as the ship went down in a cave.18 these stories have merged to become accepted record, the drive to create a compelling narrative solidified into an inaccurate ‘history’. thom mentions above ‘the authority that the word “history” implies’. i’m wary of any source that claims to be an authority on history; there is no arbitrator to determine such a thing. can readers learn history from fictional characters in works of historical fiction and narrative nonfiction? jg: yes, readers learn from fictional characters. in reading historical fiction, we seek to understand history in a personal sense, which allows for a more nuanced, nonjudgemental appreciation of events. perhaps this is the ‘safest’ way to write about history; the label ‘fiction’ prevents the reader from being misled. however, there is still vast scope for inaccuracies and misrepresentations if we consider a fictional story must still take place within a factual context. there is still scope for an author to rewrite history – either intentionally or simply by failing to be sufficiently rigorous in their research. i think historical novels with fictional characters can raise interesting historical questions because they can explore dangerous territory, those grey zones where some historians may not dare to tread. moral ambiguity, unpopular or widely discredited political views can be more easily examined when they form part of a fictional character’s viewpoint.  cs: an invented character living inside a history of real people gives an opportunity to explore issues or perspectives that might not be possible if a writer is rigorously wedded to recorded details. in jerningham, for example, i wanted to investigate the recklessness of colonial wellington. this task i decided was best served by an invented character whom i could manipulate to be the eyes and ears at the action points of the story, and who could also engage with and illustrate all the main characters. conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022202 john boyne’s novel the boy in the striped pyjamas is used to teach about the holocaust in schools.19 for a teacher, having a child protagonist in the invented bruno is a way into a difficult subject. philippa gregory invents hannah green in the queen’s fool to explore the intrigues of the tudor court.20 these stories are not meant to be definitive histories, but to spark an interest in a subject or era that can be extended with other sources. ‘is it true?’ is a starter a good teacher can take almost anywhere. tc: i want to learn about the past through the dual act of imagining the fears, desires, doubts, motives and joys of people in the past and then permitting myself to experience real feelings of empathy for invented characters. i guess that for me history is really about the present, and i readily acknowledge that the people and events of the past are less important to me than my understanding of the current moment. while imagined, the act of historical empathy is, in many ways, the main lesson i take from history. i think this lesson applies across divides that come between us today. if we can convince ourselves that we’re reliving the sensations and emotions that make us human across centuries, i think we can apply this experience of invented empathy to the way we interact with those who happen to share the earth with us now. so, to my mind, learning history is probably more about learning to cultivate a kind of creative empathy. cs: i like thom’s point here about feeling empathy for historic characters. empathy is not just about an author making a character likeable. it’s inviting a reader to live in the mindset of a character in the context of their times and realise that a person’s decisionmaking process is based on their specific frame of reference – wildly different to ours. in her article on the idea of presentism (the view that only present ideas exist) in perspectives on history, lynn hunt says: presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and selfcongratulation. interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the greeks had slavery, even david hume was a racist, and european women endorsed imperial ventures. our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our presentday standards… [and] we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline’.21 an empathetic understanding of how our place in a continual history determines our thoughts and actions must, at the very least, humble us. at best, it develops our minds so that they can remain open for the challenges that the present always brings to our most steadfast beliefs. epilogue what this discussion has revealed is the highly charged field in which our intentions, perceptions and principles come into play when we write creative narratives based on or associated with historical incidents. broadly speaking, our approaches to history as creative authors may be arranged across a spectrum of motives and guiding principles that draw attention to nuances of response to both narrative and history. recent relevant publications on the intersection of history and fiction in general include: camilla nelson and christine de matos’s ‘fictional histories and historical fictions’; alfred j. rieber’s ‘a tale of three genres’; ann curthoys’ ‘harry potter and historical consciousness’; john demos’s ‘notes from, and about, the history/fiction borderland’; and ann curthoys and john docker’s is history fiction?22 for joanna, verisimilitude is the aim of her work, and strict historical accuracy is the guiding principle. her devotion to the detachment often associated with the historian is unmistakable. ‘if there is no evidence to support a detail’, she explains, ‘i will not include that detail in my work’. while joanna acknowledges conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022203 that ‘a certain amount of invention must take place’, she makes it clear that in her nonfiction narratives the prevailing aim is get as close as possible to the truth of historical incidents and characters. in describing herself ‘not so much a fillerin of blanks as an arranger of known facts’, joanna locates her approach to story as not dissimilar from the traditional historical approach, which relies on critical distance and thorough research to provide us with the most authentic sense of history narrative can offer. over the course of this discussion, however, joanna expresses concerns that her most recent project, the barren grounds, may be putting some pressure on her principle of ‘never [feeling] that [she] had the freedom or the right to invent’. sources that have been important to her own research on the intersection of fiction and history include max jones’s, ‘what should historians do with heroes?’ and geoffrey cubitt’s, ‘heroic reputations and exemplary lives’.23 thom’s intentions in using history to write creative narrative are tied to the particular aims of the project in question. in the case of the naturalist, for instance, his purpose was to elevate the historical figure of ernst dieffenbach out of a footnote and enrich the historical record of bicultural dialogue in aotearoa new zealand. his primary allegiance, however, seems to be to story itself, to the ‘lived and visceral experience’ that arises from an act of ‘creative empathy’ that historians such as clendinnen have called into question. in our discussion, thom revealed that, in contrast to joanna, one of his main concerns is not around historical authenticity, but around writing fiction in which the characters based on historical figures can become liberated from ‘the frozen lake of the past’. sources related to his own conceptions of the intersection of history and fiction include his article ‘adaption as salvage: transcoding history into fiction in the naturalist’; hanna meretoja’s ‘fiction, history and the possible’; kalle pihlainen’s ‘rereading narrative constructivism’; hamish dalley’s ‘postcolonialism and the historical novel’; and kalle pihlainen’s ‘the confines of the form: historical writing and the desire that it be what it is not’.24 for cristina, the aim of creative historical accounts is closer to an interrogation of accepted historical incidents for the purpose of reclaiming lost or marginal voices. arguing that ‘it is the accepted facts themselves that i find problematic’, she explains her reluctance to accept incidents in the historical record at face value. in the case of jerningham wakefield, the main character of her novel jerningham, cristina relies on the man’s historical journals as a primary source with full knowledge of fact that the material is marred by selfaggrandisement. she is also suspicious of the gaps in our histories: ‘because much of history is recorded by the powerful, it is unusual to find complete records of those with less agency: minorities, women, children.’ it was this motive, for instance, that sparked cristina’s interest in the historical incident behind her latest novel, mrs jewell and the wreck of the general grant. in this book, she tells the story of a woman who was a castaway on a subantarctic island for eighteen months with fourteen men. the historical record offers little detail of mrs jewell’s experience, but cristina’s fictional recreation of the historical figure offers us a chance to reclaim a voice that would otherwise be lost. her interest in fiction to reclaim women’s voices is well discussed by jenna barlow, in ‘women’s historical fiction after feminism’.25 hannah furness, in ‘hilary mantel: women writers must stop falsely empowering female characters in history’ is also provocative on this topic, referencing the second of mantel’s reith lectures in which mantel argued that women writers must stop rewriting history to make their female characters falsely empowered and asked, ‘if we write about the victims of history, are we reinforcing their status by detailing it? or shall we rework history so victims are the winners?’26 greer macallister extends the debate in ‘how can historical fiction be feminist?’, arguing that mantel offered a false choice on presenting women in history and proposing instead that one can be both historically faithful and feminist.27 in our attempts to interpret history through fiction, we have discovered and discussed our different tolerance levels for imagination in narrative, and have argued around the principles that dictate the degrees of freedom we ought to allow ourselves in our work. in this article, we have not worked toward consensus, but rather agreed to meet in the grey zone where historical fact meets fiction. in the end we will continue, each in our own way, to encourage people to reimagine and question the past, read widely and remain open conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022204 to reinterpretations of what might have been. we each acknowledge that history is a complex discipline with room for conflicting perspectives, and we believe that there are as many ways to tell a historical story as there are reasons to do so. our discussion, like history, is not yet over. endnotes 1 mantel, h. 2017, the day is for the living (online). available: https://medium.com/@bbcradiofour/hilarymantelbbc reithlectures2017aeff8935ab33 (accessed 11 march 2022). 2 thomas keneally, schindler’s list, simon and schuster, new york, 1993; zweig, p. 1982, a good man in a bad time (online). available: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/keneallyschindler.html (accessed 18 december 2021). 3 thomas keneally, the dickens boy, penguin random house, melbourne, 2021; in conversation: tom keneally – the dickens boy (online), 2020. available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gdwi5tdwuc (accessed 15 february 2022). 4 cristina sanders, jerningham, the cuba press, wellington, 2020. 5 cristina sanders, mrs jewell and the wreck of the general grant, the cuba press, wellington, 2022. 6 cristina sanders, displaced, walker books, australia, 2021. 7 thom conroy, the naturalist, penguin books, new zealand, 2014. 8 ernst dieffenbach, travels in new zealand, john murray, london, 1843. 9 overall, personal detail and sentiment are almost completely absent in dieffenbach. ibid, p198. 10 joanna grochowicz, shackleton’s endurance, allen & unwin, australia, 2021. 11 joanna grochowicz, into the white, allen & unwin, australia, 2017. 12 mantel, op cit. 13 kate grenville, the secret river, text publishing, australia, 2005; barnwell, a. 2016, the secret river, silences and our nation’s history (online). available: https://theconversation.com/thesecretriversilencesandournationshistory56878 (accessed 15 march 2022). see, for example, inga clendinnen ‘the history question: who owns the past’, in quarterly essay, 23, 2006, pp79. 14 sullivan, j. 2006, making a fiction of history (online). available: https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/ makingafictionofhistory20061021ge3dpn.html (accessed 17 march 2022). 15 barnwell, op cit. 16 kate grenville, a room made of leaves, text publishing, australia, 2021. 17 hayden white, tropics of discourse: essays in cultural criticism, john hopkins university press, baltimore, 1978, p98. 18 h.d. jarvis, ‘shipwreck of the general grant’, in harper’s magazine, march 1869, p536. 19 john boyne, the boy in the striped pyjamas: a fable, vintage books, london, 2012. 20 philippa gregory, the queen’s fool, simon & schuster, new york, 2004. 21 hunt, l. 2002, against presentism (online). available: https://www.historians.org/publicationsanddirectories/ perspectivesonhistory/may2002/againstpresentism (accessed 11 march 2022). 22 camilla nelson and christine de matos (eds), ‘fictional histories and historical fictions: writing history in the twentyfirst century’, in text, special issue website series, no 28, 2015; alfred j. rieber, ‘a tale of three genres: history, fiction, and the historical detektiv’, in kritika: explorations in russian and eurasian history, vol 15, no 2, 2014, pp353363; ann curthoys, ‘harry potter and historical consciousness: reflections on history and fiction’, in history australia, vol 8, no 1, 2011, pp722; john demos, ‘afterword: notes from, and about, the history/fiction borderland’, in rethinking history, vol 9, no 23, 2005, pp32935; ann curthoys and john docker, is history fiction?, university of michigan press, ann arbor, 2005. 23 max jones, ‘what should historians do with heroes? reflections on nineteenth and twentiethcentury britain’, in history compass, vol 5, no 5, 2007, pp17521760; geoffrey cubitt, ‘introduction: heroic reputations and exemplary lives’, in geoffrey cubitt and allen warren (eds), heroic reputations and exemplary lives, manchester university press, manchester, 2000, pp126. 24 thom conroy, ‘adaption as salvage: transcoding history into fiction in the naturalist’, in casie hermansson and janet zepernick (eds), where is adaption? mapping cultures, texts, and contexts, john benjamins publishing company, amsterdam, 2018, pp1530; h. meretoja, ‘fiction, history and the possible: jonathan littell’s les bienveillantes’, in orbis litter, vol 71, no 5, 2016, pp371404; kalle pihlainen, ‘rereading narrative constructivism’, in rethinking history: the journal of theory and practice, vol 17, no 4, 2014, pp509527; hamish dalley, ‘postcolonialism and the historical novel: epistemologies of contemporary realism’, in the cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry, vol 1, 2014, pp5167; kalle pihlainen, ‘the confines of the form: historical writing and the desire that it be what it is not’, in kuisam korthonen (ed), trope for the past: hayden white and the history/literature debate, rodopi, new york, 2006, pp5567. conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022205 https://medium.com/@bbcradiofour/hilary-mantel-bbc-reith-lectures-2017-aeff8935ab33 https://medium.com/@bbcradiofour/hilary-mantel-bbc-reith-lectures-2017-aeff8935ab33 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/keneally-schindler.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gdwi5tdwuc https://theconversation.com/the-secret-river-silences-and-our-nations-history-56878 https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/making-a-fiction-of-history-20061021-ge3dpn.html https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/making-a-fiction-of-history-20061021-ge3dpn.html https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism 25 barlow, j.e. 2014, women’s historical fiction after feminism (online). available: https://core.ac.uk/download/ pdf/37421282.pdf (accessed 2 september 2022). 26 furness, h. 2017, hilary mantel: women writers must stop falsely empowering female characters in history (online). available: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/31/hilarymantelwomenwritersmuststopfalsely empoweringfemale/ (accessed 2 september 2022). 27 macallister, g. 2017, how can historical fiction be feminist? (online). available https://themillions.com/2017/07/how canhistoricalfictionbefeminist.html (accessed 2 september 2022). conroy, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 2022206 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/37421282.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/37421282.pdf https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/31/hilary-mantel-women-writers-must-stop-falsely-empowering-female/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/31/hilary-mantel-women-writers-must-stop-falsely-empowering-female/ https://themillions.com/2017/07/how-can-historical-fiction-be-feminist.html https://themillions.com/2017/07/how-can-historical-fiction-be-feminist.html public history education (peer reviewed) niue fakahoamotu nukutuluea motutefua nukututaha: critical discussions of niue history in and beyond aotearoa new zealand jessica pasisi*, zoë catherine lavatangaloa henry, ioane aleke fa’avae, rennie atfielddouglas, birtha lisimoni togahai, toliain makaola, zora feilo, asetoa sam pilisi corresponding author: jessica pasisi, j.pasisi@gmail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8230 article history: received 09/06/2022; accepted 15/09/2022; published 06/12/2022 introduction niue fakahoamotu nukutuluea motutefua nukututaha. these are the names of our homeland, given by our ancestors, marking the journey made and work done to make this place a home for our people. in naming this article, we honour and acknowledge ancestral history. this particular telling was shared by ioane aleke fa’avae, who received it from matafetu smith, harry jackson and vaiole apeu. our creation stories believed that the origins of tagata niue niue people belonged to three realms or heavens. fonuagalo underworld was where the first tau tupua demigods came from to lagi tua taha first heavens/upperworld and lagi tua ua skies and endless light. they were fāo and huanaki, then followed by talimainuku or fakahoko, lageiki and lagiatea. they were chased out of fonuagalo because they were unwilling to contribute to any tasks or ceremonies. fāo was the first to come up to lagi tua taha and decided to create niue, but his work was incomplete. huanaki followed fāo and saw that the motu island was not finished so he completed the task. once completed, huanaki and fāo named the newly formed land: nukututaha land that stands on its own, nukutuluea or nukutukulea land that was pushed up by earthquake, fakahoamotu cocreated land, and motutefua land with no offspring. these are the narratives of niue nukututaha nukutuluea fakahoamotu motutefua. these are the names that we use proudly as descendants of these ancestors.1 public history review vol. 29, 2022 © 2022 by the author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. citation: pasisi, j., henry, z. c. l., fa’avae, i. a., atfield douglas, r., togahai, b. l., makaola, t., feilo, z., pilisi, a. s. 2022. niue fakahoamotu nukutuluea motutefua nukututaha: critical discussions of niue history in and beyond aotearoa new zealand. public history review, 29, 67–77. https://doi. org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8230 issn 1833 4989 | published by uts epress | https://epress. lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/phrj declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no  financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. 67 mailto:j.pasisi@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8230 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8230 https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v29i0.8230 https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/phrj each of us has been engaging in a range of historical work relating to niue. what has found its way into this article are some of the critical discussions we have had from our two tagata niue roundtables at the 2021 new zealand historical association conference, a niue history panel that was held as part of vagahau niue language week 2021, and several fono (meetings) over the last couple of years. this article has been formatted to keep the conversational nature of our discussions and to emphasise the distinction of each person’s experiences and expertise. working collectively upholds important cultural values that have been practiced in the work of tagata niue who have come before us, and reflects our hopes and expectations for future tagata niue to collaborate in this space.2 the stories of niue history cannot be told without tagata niue. while an exhaustive list of relevant niue texts is beyond the scope of this article, there are some key texts by tagata niue that have influenced our work. often, access to these texts requires more than a cursory search on an online database and may only come into view from conversations with elders or knowledge holders who have their own archives. it is important to get names on the page in the bodies of articles, and to create citable spaces for future niue generations to continue engaging in this work. we work to expand our academic sight by including family and community contributions that are at the foundation of niue ways of thinking, knowing and being. we seek to think creatively and critically about how we can honour the complexity of niue knowledge and knowledge forms. throughout the nineteenth century, a number of niue knowledge holders contributed to missionary publications such as talahau niue, with occasional articles on niue history. some of these articles would later be republished in the tohi tala, a bilingual periodical that came out of the community development office of the resident commissioner from new zealand to niue in the early 1950s. for jess pasisi and toliain makaola, working with these texts inevitably raises questions of who is doing the writing and how they are connected in a larger network of niue thinkers. in 1901, pulekula, a teacher at tamahaleleka, liku and mohelagi of alofi, made significant contributions to a text on niue history and culture. mohelagi’s part was titled ‘ko e tala ki niuefekai’ – this history of niuefekai and pulekula’s section was titled ‘ko e tohi he tau tala i niuefekai’ – the traditions of niuefekai. this work was ultimately published as an appendix in the journal of the polynesian society, though it only references pulekula.3 in thinking about niue history, origins, knowledge and political relationships it is difficult to go past the 1982 book niue: a history of the island, which was coauthored by 12 tagata niue authors: terry chapman, ikinepule etuata, maihetoe hekau, vilisoni kumitau, leslie rex, ofa tafatu, fifita talagi, tahafa pope talagi, pitasoni tanaki, ianeta joylyn tukuitoga, hafe vilitama and young vivian.4 the book came out in the decade following niue’s move to independent government and in the blurb the authors wrote that the text had been ‘written by leading citizens of the country itself ’. terry chapman’s earlier text the decolonisation of niue gave some background on niue’s history as part of the context of how and why niue gained national independence in free association with the state of new zealand in 1974.5 three years later, land tenure in niue was published by tagata niue authors solomona kalauni, lagi tuhega, nora ofaligi douglas, and tongia pihigia, alongside two nonniue contributors, ron crocombe and gary leonard.6 this book reflected on the land tenure system in niue. as rennie atfielddouglas explores in his own research of niue sovereignty and political independence, there are always connections to and issues with the ownership and use of land. there are, of course, many more texts in these spaces, and a particular archive which has had limited consideration in scholarly conversations are housed in niue’s department of education.7 birtha lisimoni togahai’s many and varied roles as a lecturer and convenor for graduate and postgraduate courses on niue language, and as a director for education in the government of niue, have seen her engage with and publish on many niue topics. these sources influence birtha’s work, which explores important questions of niue history, identity, positionality and genealogy, while maintaining connections with community led interests. ioane’s work has engaged with ko e fonoaga he tau aga fakamotu, which was developed pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202268 from a fono (meeting) on niue history and heritage that occurred in 1977.8 the formidable list of niue contributors to this particular document includes: robert rex, young vivian, tukutama togalea, iki etuata, terry chapman, ofa tafatu, solomona kalauni, hafe vilitama, folituki talima, heleni tamatoa, tuliki ikinepule, margret folau, sala papani, lagavalu haioti, pokotoa sipeli, ataloma misihepi, makaola hukui, ahetoa aue, frey head, maihetoe hekau, tahafa talagi, togia viviani, frank rex, pitasoni tanaki, r. r. rex, malua jackson, tiva togatule, malaetolu salatielu and fifita talagi. it makes sense to have an abundance of niue scholars and thinkers at a new zealand history conference, in part to highlight the complete lack of niue and pacific academics in the history discipline, but also to promote history as told by tau tagata niue (niue people). zoë catherine lavatangaloa henry, with a master of arts in history, is the only one in our group with academic ties and formal training in history. in thinking about her shift to pacific studies for her doctoral thesis, she has contended with the tensions of her history training that does not move far from its traditions. despite niue’s lengthy colonial ties to the new zealand state, there is an embarrassing void in literature or curricula that recognises the place of niue in new zealand history. while conventional archives carry some niue texts, zora feilo’s work on vaka (canoe) histories considers how these archives may meet tufuga (expert knowledge holder, craftspeople, makers) in the past, present and future and who owns this knowledge. importantly, this kind of work challenges what is considered to be historical evidence, shifting the colonial tendency to prioritise written texts. this work also bridges different forms of knowledge and how it may be made accessible to future generations of tau tagata niue. for instance, hiapo: a collection of patterns and motifs by coraallan lafaiki twiss (formerly wickliffe) carries niue knowledge in another way, by presenting memories and stories from her grandmother, fotia lafaiki, alongside images of printed hiapo (bark cloth) patterns.9 niue artist john puhiatau pule has also engaged with hiapo in contemporary artforms that reflect the sensory experiences of this niue tāoga in museums and other colonial institutions.10 these are just a few valid examples of the diverse forms of niue knowledge. there is a need to develop spaces that attend to the diversity of our knowledge forms and knowledge holders, including, but not limited to, an urgent rethinking of current referencing practices within history and the wider academic sphere. in this article our diversity in position, gender, village affiliation/s, age and expertise reflect the nuance and specificity we each bring as tagata niue with vested interests in the progression and success of niue knowledge and futures. we come from different backgrounds, the amount of time we have spent in niue differs; some of us have never been to the island and most of us predominantly reside in aotearoa. asetoa sam pilisi further grapples with this by using takalo (warcry, challenge, prewar dance) and connecting with niuebased tufuga as a way of deconstructing the ideas of masculinity and the imagery of ‘savage island’. presenting this article in the same way we presented at the conference is an intentional act in decolonising the academic spaces we all work in and centring niue ways of building and sharing knowledge and stories. further to this, we often provide an approximate meaning of vagahau niue (niue language) in english. the meaning of words shifts with different contexts, but not all tau kupu (words, phrases) are translatable. some kupu also have variations in spelling and, while consistency can be important, we seek to acknowledge those differences that exist even in the words we use. there are a few cases in this article where kupu are deliberately left untranslated. the intention is not to exclude readers, but rather to encourage those who understand both languages to draw deeper meaning and understanding. roundtable discussion as a collective, we describe our connections, processes and tensions as tagata niue doing niue research within the academic sphere. we begin by establishing our connections to niue and the stories that have pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202269 inspired our work, and we comment on the spaces that we work in as well as our hopes for the future as tagata niue. one of the key questions we have thought about in this group is: how do we reflect our positionality in relation to our topics – who are we to our research? jess pasisi: my connections to niue are through my father, ben pasisi, my grandmother, lela sialemata, from the village of mutalau, and my grandfather, matagi patiti/pasisi, from the villages of hikutavake and makefu. some of my family now reside in alofi; the pasisi family of my late uncle uhotau and his wife, my aunty noeline. while uncle uhotau returned to niue, my dad and the rest of his siblings moved to aotearoa, mainly residing in the waikato. my current research is a health research council of new zealandfunded project on niue health and wellbeing through the lens of happiness. it’s part of a wider focus for me as an academic to bring different perspectives of tagata niue into scholarly conversations. in my doctoral research looking at niue women’s perspectives and experiences of climate change, i moved through the phases of despair at not being able find much niue literature, then to excitement as i started to find niue texts hidden away obscurely in different archives, and then to anger at the treatment of niue literature and tāoga, as if it was less than other knowledges. i guess i’m at a state of resolve now, to change the academy so that niue voices may be made more visible. i continue to be drawn to niue texts, often because even our own people think that we have not published anything. but i’m also interested in the stories these texts tell about the lives and futures that those before us experienced and imagined. growing up in the niue diaspora means a lot of different things in the kinds of research that i do; from the questions that i ask to the methodology that i developed that reflects my position, which has a lot of similarities to other tagata niue in my generation – born in aotearoa, working class and lowincome family, large family, western education, limited vagahau. none of these are detrimental to the quality of academic i am, nor does being born outside of niue make me less of a tagata niue. academia provides a space for me to ask basic questions about what experiences tagata niue have. it is important to know this, because our experiences are so often full of the knowledge that has been passed down and shared across generations. early on in my phd, i was advised to imagine that there were lots of tagata niue researchers i could be in conversation with – while they might not show up in simple database search engines, they are there. from 195456 there was a recurring theme of niue origin stories by tagata niue in the tohi tala, a bilingual newspaper on the island. niue contributors writing to this topic included patutaue, talagi, tohovaka, ikinepule and tauehetagaloa.11 but even in 1956, there were still calls from niue teachers, such as malama head, asking for niue elders to write about niue histories and stories of old, so that students would get to learn about their heritage.12 niue knowledge is complex, vast, and enduring, and there are so many questions that we are only just beginning to ask. but it’s important to remember that we come from generations of writers, thinkers and educators who have also wanted to know, learn and share this kind of information. toliain makaola: fakaalofa lahi atu kia mutolu oti, ko toliain makaola e higoa haaku. fanau au i alofi, niue ti ko au e tama fakahiku he tau mamatua ha mautolu, ko laua ko luavasa mo luisapati. o mai a mautolu he maaga ko mutalau ululauta matahefonua. ko e maaga ne tutupu hake ai au mo e haaku a tau lafu to fenoga mai ki okalana, niu silani. fakaaue lahi au he tupu hake he motu ti moua monuina e au e aga fakamotu. ko e mena ia ne fiafia au mo e mauloto e au ke hoko mai ke he aho nei. my passion for niue comes from my upbringing and my mother’s fakaako (teaching and learning). although our family has lived in new zealand for most of my life, my mother’s experiences of boarding school in new zealand gave her a strong sense of the importance of aga fakamotu (culture, traditions, customs) of our homeland, and she passed those on to us. vagahau niue was predominantly spoken in the home, which contrasted to the english and te reo māori i was used to at school. the balance of maintaining the aga fakamotu was difficult with the lack of community relations like on the motu. my mother reinforced this fakaako with our travels home to visit the magafaoa (family), who live the aga fakamotu 24/7. the sharing of our knowledge pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202270 as tagata niue was through verbal communication with people at home: tutala ke he taha mo e taha (conversations person to person), ai mahani e tagata ke totou e pepa ke moua e aga fakamotu he tau tagata ha niue. there has been very little literature written and published by tagata niue on our cultural practices, which makes some of our knowledge hard to share with future generations. the new zealand secondary school curriculum, which is also taught in niue, often relies on published texts but this is not the only way we understand or express knowledge. oral knowledge sharing was and is still prevalent for our people. i still call or visit my mother to find out about particular people, she will invariably tell me about their family, what background that family has, their village, and how they are connected through other people we know. my mother also guides me to the best people to talk to about certain topics. in working for dr jess pasisi, i have been drawn towards all the visual and audio archives of interviews or speeches from prominent tagata niue in history, as well as family home movies. the words spoken hold a greater meaning to me. i can see the people of our motu; i see the change of our traditional culture from native wear to colonial dress. the lack of accessibility for much of the archived history of our people in foreign institutions saddens me. i hope with this work that we can create a place for tau tagata niue to find and share their knowledge, just as my mother does with our magafaoa. ioane aleke fa’avae: fakamonū atu ke he lilifu he aho. ko e higoa haaku ko ioane aleke fa’avae. hau au he maaga ko mutalau ululauta matahefonua. i am currently an academic development lecturer at unitec, and a lecturer of vagahau niue at manukau institute of technology. as a tufuga of oratory and a choreographer, it is vital to understand mataohiaga/matohiaga (genealogical sources). mataohiaga is sacred knowledge of lived experiences in time and space that connects tagata niue to their cosmological origins. by acquiring that knowledge, one is better able to approach and express underlying narratives within the mataohiaga. it is the epitome of tagata niue. the sacred knowledge of mataohiaga is shared only by those of significant status in a magafaoa. mataohiaga is the core narrative of niue history that speaks to magafaoa (family), maaga (village) and motu (land). it is often recited during the passing of loved ones or at family celebrations and is utilised as evidence in niue land courts. zora feilo: ko e higoa haaku ko zora felola osikai feilo, hau au i tau maaga ko alofi, avatele mo tamakautoga. i am the mother of three children, kirsten, zethan and allexander, whose partner candice has also become part of the family. i have two grandchildren, eva and rosa. my parents are leotau vitamini osikai and elsa manatagaloa feilo. my grandparents are masini and silofa tukuniu and joe feiloakihetau osikai and evalina mohemata puleoti. i work with niue youth and families through tupumaiaga niue trust, and i also work in auckland council. my current research is about the history of vaka in niue. i have three generations of men who were tufuga in vaka making and in fishing. i grew up with my grandfather, masini tukuniu from tamakautoga. i also had a grandfather and great grandfather from alofi central and alofi north, joe feilo and havilimotu pokitoa osikai, who were both master vaka makers. when i was small, i would watch my grandfather masini make model vaka. as i got older, i saw him make a very large vaka that was displayed in a museum in wellington. he would take his model vaka to the western springs pasifika festivals and sell them. another vaka memory i have is when i went up to the hakupu house in grey lynn and i saw one of my grandfather’s vaka displayed on the wall. different people make different styles of vaka, and i could tell his style. i asked one of the ladies whose vaka it was, but she was not sure. i didn’t want to take it; i just knew it was my grandfather’s work. but the immediate response was that i could not take it. knowing the stories of niue tāoga is important, even when we cannot take them back to niue or bring them to our family homes. i did not just choose this topic, it presented itself to me and was something i have always been interested in. there is not a whole lot of written work about the niue vaka. however, there is a lot of knowledge about vaka in the wider pacific and i am excited to contribute writing in this space for niue.  pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202271 asetoa sam pilisi: my name is sam, based here in auckland, i have been in education for a long time, tertiary education that is, and have just moved into health research. i am currently completing a phd with the university of auckland. my topic is twofold, it is looking at niue masculinity and at ‘savage island’ or savage imagery as evoked by captain cook’s encounter with niue. specifically, i am looking at niue masculinity in takalo; i see these areas as interrelated. i am new zealand born but i was one of those ‘well behaved’ kids whose parents sent them on ‘scholarship’ to the islands. i think it is called corrective behaviour techniques. i could have been traumatised, but i came out alive, so i guess it turned out well. now, that is some of my privilege, it was a big cultural experience when i went as a sevenyearold for around a year. i went many, many times after that, but it wasn’t the same for my siblings or my first cousins. in fact, i took my sāmoan father and my brothers only a few years ago for their first time. i am a polyfest kid, which is big for a lot of our pacific youth here in auckland, and particularly for niue youth, considering that we do not have many other platforms for cultural expression. i went to an all boys school, and looking at the interconnections of takalo, the story of captain cook and savage imagery, some people carry this expression of culture with a lot of pride. i find myself now as an accidental takalo practitioner alongside ioane, although ioane has been working in that space for a very long time. we are quite active in a project at the moment to uplift niue men with cultural narratives. i am keen to bring niue voices to the forefront – tagata niue who are strong in oral history, tagata niue who are also tufuga around takalo – and asking how niue takalo is shared and how this practice may be seen as a manifestation of what it means to be a niue man. zoë henry: ko e higoa haaku ko zoë catherine lavatangaloa henry. ko au koe tagata niue, hau au he maaga ko makefu. ko ngāpuhi me ko ngāti kahu ngā iwi. ko pakanae te marae. ko mangonui te maunga. i am currently a phd candidate in pacific studies at the university of auckland, researching and storying indigenous conceptions of punishment and how these were interrupted by christianity and colonisation in the pacific. the way i came into my topic and making the move from history to pacific studies was really a result of conversations with my dad. my mum is māori/pakeha, and my dad is tagata niue from makefu. i’ve never been to niue; i didn’t grow up as much around my niue side, so i’m really behind on the vagahau niue journey. but in conversations with my dad, in between finishing my master’s and starting my phd, he would tell me stories about my grandparents and about his grandparents. i have my dad’s grandma’s name, lavatangaloa. he would tell me stories about her, and about my nana, and about hector larsen, a new zealand resident commissioner to niue from 1943 until his murder in 1953. in one of these stories, i found out that one of the men who murdered larsen was latoatama, who is my nana’s brother. as you can imagine, this was a bit of a brain explosion for me to know that my history, my whakapapa, included a defining point in new zealand’s relationship with niue. this also taught me and defined for me how i wanted to research and do history differently. i wanted my topic and research to be connected to who i am and to my communities. i moved to pacific studies after doing my master’s in history. as part of my master’s research, i explored mātauranga māori in relation to christianity and medieval studies and when i finished, i felt i had reached my limit. i knew that i could keep going in history and medieval studies, and i could keep doing the research that i was doing. but i felt a calling to learn about my niue side and i thought, since i was pretty good at research and working through complex stories and relationships, this could be my way to connect to my niue culture and knowledge. this gave me the chance to story with my dad and for him to pass on the knowledge and stories he grew up with, which really drives my work. rennie atfielddouglas: as a mature student, i have had to balance the daytoday priorities of working full time with working on my academic journey part time. after finishing my undergraduate degree, i did not see myself in an academic career. however, over the last four years, i have felt compelled to contribute pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202272 toward niue research. one of the things that really interests me is the concept of sovereignty for niue people, in relation to niue’s association with new zealand. i want to explore niue perspectives leading up to the signing of the niue constitution act 1974. this document solidified the ongoing relationship between new zealand and niue, yet many questions can be raised around why niue people chose free association and what people think of it today. government in free association irrevocably tied niue to the new zealand state and is what ultimately led to my family moving to aotearoa. i am a niue person born and raised outside of niue. my understanding of niue ontology is from the context of someone who has grown up in the niue diaspora. this leaves me with questions about what would have happened if niue had chosen full independence. would my family have ended up in new zealand? there are limited recordings of niue perspectives from this period. there are some recordings from sir robert rex, the first premier of niue from 19741992, and from terry chapman, a niue administrator and secretary to the government of niue from 1974 until his retirement, but not many others. what did the people in niue think during this period? what was the rationale behind them choosing to head down the path of free association with new zealand rather than full sovereignty and independence, especially when there were other alternatives? a contribution that i make is bridging the space between academic and indigenous knowledge. not all indigenous knowledge is academic, but indigenous knowledge seems to have to do more to become ‘legitimate’ in western dominated academic systems and spaces. writing into this space as tagata niue contributes to wrestling the colonial hangover that purports to already know our history, whilst simultaneously obscuring our voices from it. birtha lisimoni togahai: as an educator living and working in niue, i am passionate about many topics relating to niue peoples, language, culture, identity, genealogies, entrepreneurship and history. growing up in niue you learn vagahau niue, etiquette, customs, cultural protocols, nuances and so forth, and this cultural knowledge determines who you are in relation to your family, village, motu and the wider niue diaspora. when you meet people older than you and they do not know you, their first question will be ‘ko hai e tau mamatua/tupuna haau?’ (who are your parents/grandparents?) that is how you are identified as a niue person by and through your ancestors. that is one of the reasons why all children must learn and be familiar with their own matohiaga (genealogy). many people know the matohiaga of their extended families to their grandparents only. most recently, i have met a few third and fourth generation tagata niue returning home to search for their roots. this is very reassuring, because these are the generations who will have a vested interest in learning about their extended families back to their main tupuna. in addition, niue fonua/kelekele (land) is magafaoa owned and once you decide to title your family land, the whole extended tribe must be informed so you do not have difficulties when you go to the land court. in the past, many families adopted children, especially those who had all girls who would adopt a boy from another family to be a brother for their daughters. that was an honourable system of niue customary adoption. however, once adoption became a legal process, adopted children were granted the same rights to the land as biological children. that fact is a real area of contention for many families because they resent adopted children having the same land rights. land laws also need to be reviewed to suit the times and niue’s development context. vagahau niue is also strongly tied to the land, especially traditional conservation methods, protection of the environment, and people’s right to enter particular areas. there is so much to learn in terms of having a deeper understanding of vagahau niue and how customs and cultural protocols are changing overtime. many generations left niue taking with them much of the cultural knowledge of practices like canoe building, carving, weaving, hunting, and so forth. as we are all aware, we have an oral culture where the communication of protocols, totofa and hataki (discipline) are sustained by the elderly of the village. as they sit around the pine delonix regia in the village green, the elderly will debate issues relating to the livelihood and wellbeing of the village, ensuring that everyone is fed and happy. the limited population of 1700 pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202273 currently residing in niue is too small to sustain the vagahau, cultural knowledge and customs. there is an urgent need to strengthen ties with the niue diaspora in aotearoa new zealand, australia and beyond. ioane aleke fa’avae: my knowledge of mataohiaga has been acquired from my magafaoa (family) through different forms and shared sacred spaces. these sacred spaces include tasks, celebrations, and ceremonies that connect to the fonua (land), moana (sea) and lagi (sky/heaven). these knowledge spaces also extend to tufuga and different secondary sources from archives stored at the auckland city library, oral traditions recorded by tagata niue authors in vagahau, and niue informants for outside writers during the mission era and colonial period. the knowledge shared in these spaces is sacred, and it belongs to different authorities or realms of knowledge holders. collectively, this knowledge belongs to either a specific group of magafaoa, maaga (village), motu (nation), tribes, or a combination of all four. as materials are often recorded in vagahau niue, some archives require specific knowledge and understanding of the language to access and unpack what is recorded. as the number of fluent language speakers declines, there is an everincreasing urgency for people to engage with these archives and share these stories. it is crucial that our narratives and worldviews as tagata niue living in the diaspora are heard and discussed in platforms such as the new zealand historical association conference. it is an opportunity for emerging and established academics, knowledge holders and artists to share their expertise with one another. we can mentor each other and contribute towards building researching and teaching capacity when we share through tūtala (conversation). by collaborating and partnering with tangata whenua, we empower ourselves to share and tell our stories through indigenous lenses. zora feilo: in terms of the tufuga for my vaka topic, the knowledge belongs to them because they are the ones who are making those vaka. i’m the same as everyone here, interested in where things belong. when i go to niue, they have vaka races and competitions that include women. but in terms of women going out to fish using vaka, i’ve not seen that. it’s a traditional area that remains the domain of men, but there are some changes. taumafai fuhiniu is a vaka master in niue, but he doesn’t have any sons. he has four daughters so he will have to pass his knowledge onto them, unless he has a soninlaw who he trusts with that knowledge. when i was researching this topic, i got information from carmen fuhiniu, taumafai’s wife. she was the one communicating with me about it. i’ve talked to taumafai facetoface in niue, but with emails i was communicating with her. and then when i was asking more questions, i was communicating with his daughter, bella. so, for me, the people holding particular knowledge shifts as circumstances change. jess pasisi: i’m interested in how we recognise niue knowledge, the people who put forth that knowledge, and how it is presented in various archives. i’m based in pacific studies and health with my current research on concepts and understanding of niue happiness, but of course it has elements of history, as nearly all our work does. one thing i’m finding important is to see and acknowledge the different spaces we are working from and to reflect that into the work we do. i think even though we might be tied to a discipline or creative space, our knowledge works a little like a smorgasbord in that we get bits and pieces from the places that make sense to the work we are doing. but through working in transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary ways, there are collective movements we can make that set precedents for how niue writing and niue people are treated in particular academic spaces. in the 1860s, a pālagi reverend wrote in his diary about a niue woman who was being held captive by a pālagi captain whose ship had recently docked in new zealand. the entry gives no details about the woman’s name but includes reference to her having been likely kidnapped against her will and used as sex slave by the pālagi captain. the reverend wrote that in conversation with the captain he found this particular woman would soon be sold. no horror or sorrow is recorded by the reverend; an event that warrants a pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202274 diary entry but invites no further consideration or reflection. one might be tempted to reflect that this was common for the time or not outside the norm. but who defines what is common and what is the norm? as a tagata niue scholar, i think it’s possible to do more. i think there is space for us to establish vagahau kupu that provides this niue woman, who has been written about but given no agency, no name, no recognition of her family and connection to our motu, with the ties inherent in all niue people and tāoga. while history may record her only by the reverend’s words, there is both a responsibility and opportunity to use the power of niue language to reflect the values we have always afforded our people. in doing so, this woman’s story is not only marked by some pālagi writing about her, but also by people who are writing for her, people who can see her as someone with family, connected to an island that will always be her home. this type of action doesn’t distort history. instead, as sam suggests, it provides more perspectives. it is a reminder that there is not a singular view of history, there are many. the process of developing appropriate kupu requires time, it requires having the right tagata niue in the room, and it requires patience, respect, and resourcing from disciplines that for too long have been complicit in maintaining myopic views of what history is, particularly in relation to the new zealand realm. asetoa sam pilisi: the ownership of what it means to be a niue man and to present takalo or other narratives, first belongs to niue men, niue toa (warriors). for niue men to hold the pen, so to speak, and write down this knowledge and embed it into the form of takalo lyrics is a history in itself. in reference to what rennie and toliain said, i think it’s important to acknowledge that lived experiences in niue are different to those in new zealand. i’m keen to bring forward the voices of niuebased tufuga (cultural experts), because to date, little to nothing has been documented regarding how they see takalo as a living artform and a vehicle for representing niue masculinity. i’m mindful that there is, particularly amongst our niue youth born in new zealand, some strong attachments to savage imagery. it’s important to think about who owns knowledge around takalo, about what it means to be a niue man, to bring forward new zealand born perspectives, and to weave those in with the perspectives of people from the island; we need to ask these questions widely. zoë henry: in planning my project, it was really important for me to create a history project that was different from a project i would have done in history. my supervisor, dr. marcia leenenyoung, who is rennie’s supervisor as well, pushed me to do history differently. the way i’ve designed my project is that there are archives in it, but there’s also the element of storying with our knowledge holders. when i’m learning and when i’m trying to connect with vagahau niue, our niue histories, i am leaning towards our oral traditions. i rely quite a lot on the community here in our niue academic network to connect and to understand. my first point of call is what i can learn from our communities, from our people, and from my dad when he tells me i’ve learnt things the wrong way. one of the things i’m most excited about when i’m working on this project is trying to connect these stories and figure out these complexities; what is said about us in the archives, how we’re presented in the archives, and what we say about ourselves and how we’ve viewed things in the past. there’s a distance between them and trying to negotiate that space is difficult. but i feel that my positioning in trying to negotiate that space and negotiate my identities, makes me that person to sit in the middle of the complexities. it’s a beautiful place to be, between our stories and between the archives, but it is really emotionally laborious, too. when working with our knowledge holders, and particularly in terms of how i’m presenting their knowledge in my thesis, the way that they’re going to be cited is as knowledge holders – as valid forms of knowledge and history, in the exact same way i’d reference a book, because our stories are just as valid as written history. our current speed bump is thinking about how to present those stories in the thesis. i know when we have oral traditions in a thesis, it’s usually referred to or referenced as ‘personal communication’ pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202275 within the footnote, and that’s something i really would like to move away from. thinking about some of the recent articles that have also grappled with this issue, the footnoting practice doesn’t really capture the entirety of our oral tradition. how would we cite the place and space in which we’re having the conversation? how do we describe the relational spaces that exist between me and a knowledge holder? all these things are incredibly important and unique to us as pacific researchers, yet the academy’s obsession with footnotes and references further marginalises the way that we build and hold knowledge. but now that we are doing this work and trying to find new ways of bringing our communities with us, how can we do this differently? how do we indigenise footnotes? at the end of the day, the knowledge that is shared by knowledge holders belongs to them and to their community. the second part of my project, once i get past the thesis, is thinking about the archive of stories from our knowledge holders and working with them to decide what we’re going to do with it, and where the information is going to sit. is it going to go back to the community or to the national archives? ultimately, this is knowledge i get access to but doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to the people who share it. and so, i need to do the work to make sure that this knowledge is stored correctly as the tāoga (treasure) that it is and as valid forms of history. rennie atfielddouglas: this is a challenge that we as a collective could work together on. the niue contribution could be front footing this conversation. we know that this conversation is already happening in other indigenous communities – for example, in te ao māori – in terms of legitimising the knowledge that is held. there is scope to be inclusive with other indigenous groups to work out the way forward, so we can record this information in a way that has academic rigour but can also be seen alongside or in relation with the stories and the narratives of other indigenous peoples. asetoa sam pilisi: to echo what rennie and zoë have been saying, in trying to frame and put some pillars into how niue men have understood who they are from the historical accounts, everyone is referencing white authors. but all these authors had niue informants – niue people who shared their knowledge. in line with what has been said, we need to find ways to put mana back with these niue people, because text wouldn’t be on the page if it weren’t for them. it’s nice to have these resources and texts for our tau fuata niue (niue youth) to look at and read, but i think it’s a bit of a job half done when we are left to just reference these white names. there are niue names like pulekula, mohelagi and uea who have been key knowledge holders identifiable in texts that are ultimately claimed by a pālagi author. jess pasisi: i think as a group we are all working towards and building a space where we might not come up with things that are perfect the first time, but we contribute something that others can add to and refine. we are fortunate to have had birtha and sonny liuvaie guiding us throughout this process as two people with expertise and knowledge in niue history, culture, language, and practice. great care is necessary in the work that we are doing. often what might seem like an easy fix or simple contribution has to go through many layers of cultural scrutiny and feedback. but the time and energy to do this work cannot always be reflected in the published outcomes or in welldefined processes. the nature of our people is dynamic and diverse, of course our knowledge is the same. conclusion niue history is more than books, more than a roundtable discussion, more than eight people; it is embedded in the stories our ancestors tell, the ways they have chosen to tell them, and the ways we, as their descendants, interpret and engage with those stories today. we endeavour to create spaces where we see ourselves and where our knowledge, in all its vastness, can thrive. it is crucial that our knowledge building is collaborative, critical, and accessible to a wider audience of tagata niue. we are both arguing for and pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202276 dreaming about more than what the current systems allows for or could possibly even imagine. we will continue working in and with niue communities, naming and acknowledging the abundant network of tufuga, knowledge holders, experts, people, and family who have and continue to influence our work. as academics and writers, we push ourselves to ensure that our work brings our communities with us so that generations of tagata niue – whether they are in niue, aotearoa or further afield – may find new questions and pathways forward. no matter what field, discipline, or workspace we find ourselves in, it is clear that the stories of niue history cannot be told without tagata niue. endnotes 1 ioane aleke fa’avae, ‘niue fakahoamotu nukutuluea motutefua nukututaha roundtable’ at the new zealand historical association conference, 2021. 2 see terry magaoa chapman et al, niue: a history of the island, university of the south pacific, suva, 1982; atepana siakimotu (ed), tau tala tuai, faahi gahua fakaako, niue, 1993; maru talagi (ed), tau tala tu fakaholo ha niue, institute of pacific studies, university of the south pacific, suva, 2001. 3 pulekula, ‘appendix: the traditions of niuefekai/ko e tohi he tau tala i niuefekai’, in journal of the polynesian society, vol 12, no 1, 1903, pp2231. 4 terry magaoa chapman et al, op cit. 5 terry magaoa chapman, the decolonisation of niue, victoria university press, wellington and new zealand institute of international affairs, 1976. 6 solomona kalauni, lagi tuhega, nora ofaligi douglas, tongia pihigia, ron crocombe and gary leonard, land tenure in niue, institute of pacific studies, university of the south pacific, suva, 1977. 7 atapana siakimotu, snow touna, iris lui and niu togakilo, vagahau niue ma e aoga tokoluga: tohi fakatokatoka gahue mo e lagomatai faiaoga, faahi gahua fakaako, department of education, niue, 1991. 8 ahetoa aue et al, ko e fonoaga he tau aga fakamotu, niue: faahi fakaako, halamahaga, 1977. 9 coraallan wickcliffe, hiapo: a collection of patterns and motifs, little island press, auckland, 2020. 10 john puhiatau pule and nicholas thomas, hiapo: past and present in niuean barkcloth, university of otago, dunedin, 2005. 11 patutaue, ‘fisigaulu of niue’, in tohi tala niue, vol 4, no 17, 1956, p1; p. talagi, ‘the origin of the name “niue”’, in tohi tala niue, vol 2, no 39, 1954 p5; p.l. tohovaka, ‘local interest’, in tohi tala niue, vol 2, no 5, 1954, p4; ikinepule, ‘hair cutting’, in tohi tala niue, vol 2, no 5, 1954, p6; tauhetagaloa, ‘an old story’, in tohi tala niue, vol 2, no 32, 1954, p4. 12 vaiola kerisome malama head, ‘traditions of niue’, in tohi tala niue, vol 2, no 23, 1956, p3. pasisi, et al. public history review, vol. 29, 202277 public histories in south africa: between contest and reconciliation public history review vol. 30, 2023 articles (peer reviewed) public histories in south africa: between contest and reconciliation heather hughes lincoln university corresponding author: heather hughes, hhughes@lincoln.ac.uk doi: https://doi.org/10.5130/phrj.v30i0.8374 article history: published 30/03/2023 keywords legacy project; post-apartheid memorial complex; struggle narrative; rehumanising heritage introduction public history refers to the purposeful search for a usable collective past. it includes a broad range of practices, participants and places. it has begun to dissolve old oppositions between ‘history’ and ‘heritage’ and ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’ and has encouraged a widespread curiosity about the past. it is also a complex arena of contested interpretations, where history and memory become entangled and where stories and silences compete.1 this article presents a critical survey of the multiple characteristics of public history in south africa since the coming of majority rule in 1994. its emphasis is on public history at built sites (or tangible heritage) including, importantly, the way they are interpreted. interpretation, together with performance and commemoration, is often considered an instance of intangible heritage. this article argues that there is a strong interplay between tangible and intangible; indeed, exploring this interplay is a strength of public history. officially at least in south africa, ‘heritage’ itself refers to (tangible) sites and objects.2 the discussion begins with a brief account of public history in south africa pre-­1994, before focusing on its deliberate reorientation since then. one section examines the making of a post-­apartheid narrative through the commissioning of a host of new sites of memory. this is followed by another which considers the various ways in which older memory institutions have been harnessed in the interests of a broader project of ethnic diversity and inclusion. the making of public histories in south africa public history has a long lineage in south africa. yet in a deeply divided society in which the black majority experienced centuries of oppression at the hands of a white minority,3 and where monuments, memorials and museums have been strongly associated with state formation and nation-­building, the content, methods and purposes of, and audiences for, public history have always been multiple and contested. from the early twentieth century, afrikaner historians were extremely active – to the extent that they ‘cannot be seen in isolation from their community’4 – in disseminating a version of the past that cast afrikaners as having brought ‘civilization and prosperity to a land that was theirs by god-­given right’.5 a key moment in consolidating their claims came in 1938 and the staging of a re-­enactment of the so-­called great trek of one hundred years earlier. in 1838, several groups of boers (forebears of those who came to identify as afrikaners) departed the british cape colony and struck out for the interior, a movement that culminated in the establishment of two boer republics. the re-­enactors travelled by ox wagon from cape town to pretoria, where huge crowds gathered for the culmination of the event: the laying of the foundation stone for the voortrekker monument. the monument became the most potent symbol of the birth of the afrikaner nation: it was completed in 1949, the year after the afrikaner national party came to power, inaugurating forty years of apartheid rule.6 as well as promoting afrikaner interests, the national party made strenuous attempts to foster a broader white identity and used symbolic moments – the initial dutch east india company’s settlement from 1652, for example – and heritage sites such as the castle of good hope, built in 1666, to achieve this.7 on the 300th anniversary of the castle in 1966, every white schoolchild in south africa received a copy of the publication bastion of the south, a celebration of white power in the african subcontinent, recalling ‘our history from a new angle … of the advances and technical triumphs’.8 this was a time when many african states were achieving independence. the main influence in the founding of libraries, archives and museums was another section of white society, closely aligned to the british world and the british imperial project. in the colonies of the cape and natal, knowledge institutions had been central to the emergence of a white, middle-­class identity in the nineteenth century.9 after the south african war, which brought the boer republics under british control, the settler elite actively pursued a vision of modernity imported from the metropole. they assembled collections of european art and artefacts, built new public institutions and actively encouraged a (white) visiting public, in the interests of civilisation and moral upliftment.10 as if to underline the sense of modernity, early museum collections also focused on the natural wealth powering south africa’s industrial revolution of gold and diamond mining, as well as the flora and fauna that had been assimilated into a european classificatory system.11 indigenous people were treated as part of nature rather than culture. not only did this approach legitimise the alienation of their land, thus releasing the labour required for the mines; it also underpinned western thinking about so-­called ‘race science’. to this end, most museums kept collections of indigenous human remains, such as bones, and displayed these, as well as casts of indigenous bodies, in their ‘nature’ sections.12 rich oral traditions – the main means of communicating history through the generations in indigenous societies – were not considered of any value and were largely ignored. an oppositional public history emerged in the newspapers and night schools of black political organisations and trade unions, particularly from the 1940s, evidence of a growing awareness that ‘memory is a weapon of the oppressed in negating efforts to routinise their lived realities’.13 this tradition later continued in educational initiatives such as learn and teach and khanya college in the 1980s and workers’ college in the 1990s, where a critical pedagogy incorporated the collection of oral history and the publication of alternative histories of indigenous societies.14 an influential development within this critical tradition was history workshop, founded at the university of the witwatersrand in johannesburg in the late 1970s. a loosely-­based group of professional historians committed to the spirit of the original history workshop in oxford, the johannesburg offshoot was strongly committed to an interdisciplinary ‘history from below’, making use of oral testimony to research the lives of ordinary people and marginalised groups. it disseminated its work through open events and publication of popular histories.15 it also trained a number of ‘barefoot historians’ in collecting oral testimony and writing history. the achievements of history workshop have been considerable, from popularising a reinterpreted south african history to prompting the introduction of public history/public culture courses in universities.16 however, it has also attracted criticism. at least until the 2000s, participants were almost exclusively white, far removed from the everyday experiences of those whom they studied, and there was little reflection on their positionality or on the absence of black scholars, who had largely been driven into exile.17 oral testimony tended to be mined for evidence rather than approached as constitutive of a memory complex. history workshop was also very largely a one-­way affair: the work of professional scholars disseminated beyond the academy, rather than an exercise in shared authority.18 finally, several academic historians, including within history workshop, seemed reluctant to engage with the rise of heritage – or indeed any form of public history initiated beyond the academy – as majority rule approached.19 some of its members have, though, viewed new opportunities as a positive development for public history.20 post-­apartheid and anti-­apartheid narratives the government that swept to power in 1994 following the first democratic elections was presided over by nelson mandela and dominated by the african national congress (anc). it was also a government of national unity, tasked with drawing up a new constitution and devising the machinery of state to process both material and symbolic reparations, following centuries of oppression of the black majority. from the perspective of a country seeking to come to terms with its violent past in a spirit of reconciliation and building the so-­called ‘rainbow nation’ of multiple ethnicities, the truth and reconciliation commission (trc) was of foundational significance.21 established to hear evidence of gross human rights violations during the preceding era (1960-­1994), it set parameters for memory and forgetting, of rescuing deeply traumatic experiences of political struggle while silencing accusations of systemic injustice. in ‘recomposing’ the turbulence of the past,22 it was the flawed compromise upon which the new settlement depended. the trc was the ‘most ambitious historical project ever undertaken’ in south africa.23 for two years, 1996-­1998, the commission collected some 20,000 statements from victims. these and other trc records, including audio-­visual recordings of public hearings, were subsequently deposited in the national archives in pretoria, in the hope that they would be a freely accessible ‘people’s archive’ relating to the birth of democracy. for one reason and another, however, they remain inaccessible. instead, the south african history archive (saha), an independent initiative founded during the freedom struggle, has largely been responsible for making available some of this material, as well as alternative documentation related to the trc. it has also used freedom of information requests to access the main collection in pretoria.24 this example of the state’s stalled delivery is emblematic of many aspects of public history practice in the country since 1994. another outcome of the trc was a proposed portfolio of legacy projects, addressing heritage that had been neglected or marginalised before 1994 and intended to underpin the identity of the new nation. the initial list, published in 1998, was a pastiche of proposals related to the anti-­apartheid struggle (‘patriots’ and key events), social groups such as workers, women, missionaries and the khoesan, a slave trail, war graves, the precolonial past and colonial wars: the centenary of the south african war was imminent.25 this list underwent several changes but twenty years on, even some of those identified as ‘flagship’ projects were incomplete. the department of arts and culture, which was responsible for initiating them, cited the lack of overall policy guidance, as well as infrastructure challenges and contractual disagreements among the reasons.26 successfully completed legacy projects include those considered cornerstones of the new democracy. some were repurposed as museums at symbolically important sites, such as robben island museum in table bay, cape town and constitution hill in johannesburg. the former is best-­known as the prison where mandela and many other leaders of the anti-­apartheid struggle were incarcerated. discussions about the future of robben island predated the trc. its reincarnation as a museum in 1997, and subsequent listing as a world heritage site, emphasised the triumph of the human spirit over suffering. yet as with so many of the sites under discussion here, the relationship between political-­commemorative and tourist-­commercial purposes remains uneasy.27 constitution hill was similarly a former political prison; it was the site chosen for the country’s new constitutional court and incorporated a notable art collection and museum. again the symbolism is clear: ‘the remaking of the prison as a place of freedom, of inverting the site from one that is hidden and dreaded to one that is open and accessible’.28 away from the main metropolitan centres, another legacy project marked an attempt to reinterpret, in multicultural spirit, an event which had always occupied a central role in afrikaners’ symbolic claims to ownership and control of land. in 1838, one of the great trek groups clashed with the army of the zulu king dingane at the river ncome, near present-­day dundee in kwazulu-­natal. although vastly outnumbered, the boers won the battle with their deadlier weaponry. they renamed the site blood river. there had long been a museum and memorial at blood river, presenting the afrikaner version of the battle and its sacred significance. the legacy project involved constructing a new museum on the other bank of the river, telling the ‘zulu’ story. for many, this project appeared to appeal to a narrow ethnic nationalism. violent conflict between the inkatha freedom party (the main vehicle for zulu nationalism since the 1970s) and the anc, both in the kwazulu-­natal region and in many townships near johannesburg, had almost derailed the constitutional talks in the early 1990s. the new ncome museum perpetuates an oppositional militarism, its content recalling stereotypical warriors of the past and its architectural features challenging the afrikaner monument, rather than engaging it in dialogue.29 the intended bridge linking the two sites has never been built, further entrenching the symbolism of failed reconciliation. by far the most ambitious legacy project, freedom park, has been developed on a new site on the outskirts of south africa’s administrative capital, pretoria. initiated after the 1999 election, when the victorious anc was freer to pursue its own sense of history and memory, freedom park was closely connected to incoming president mbeki’s vision of an african renaissance.30 completed in 2013, the park incorporates a memorial complex and museum and situates itself as the nation’s most significant gesture of reparation – a site of liberation, rather than mourning. yet it also demonstrates how difficult and disputed the concept of ‘reconciliation’ remains, with its trustees declining to record the names of former apartheid defence force personnel killed in the guerrilla wars that helped to end the old regime.31 there are echoes, too, of the ncome scenario: freedom park is located on a hill in close range of the voortrekker monument, whose trustees defiantly erected memorial walls containing the defence force names. very deliberately, several smaller legacy projects, often steered to completion by local government initiative, have been sited in black townships and former homelands. the geography of apartheid meant that black urban dwellers were forced to live on the outskirts of towns and cities, in racially defined and tightly controlled areas, with only the most basic amenities. in rural areas, black people were confined to overcrowded so-­called ‘homelands’ that comprised less than 13% of south africa’s total land area. two of the mandela museum sites are in the former transkei homeland and cata museum and heritage trail is in the former ciskei homeland.32 almost from their inception, townships became flashpoints of struggle against the apartheid regime and many of the new legacy sites tell the stories of key moments: the adoption of the freedom charter in kliptown in 1955, the anti-­pass protests at sharpeville and langa in 1961, the soweto youth uprising of 1976, the massacre of protesters in bhisho, duncan village, boipatong and athlone, for example.33 yet bitter disputes have accompanied the installation of many of these new museums and memorials. partly this is to do with the anc’s appropriation of struggle narratives. some events have been notably absent from those considered worthy of memorialisation.34 furthermore, not all of the events or individuals memorialised were associated with the anc or its allies at the time; some were the work of rival organisations. for example, the anti-­pass campaigns of the early 1960s were led by the pan africanist congress, and the black consciousness movement played a significant role in raising youth awareness of injustice in the 1970s. there is another kind of appropriation that causes resentment: memorials often fail to relate to local memories of how things happened, representing instead a more abstracted version of struggle and liberation. local alienation is further compounded by the anger of many township communities over government failure to deliver services since 1994.35 some sites of considerable significance have been developed by private interests. the leading example is the apartheid museum in johannesburg, the site to understand the history of apartheid, as well as the struggle to end it. it is owned by gold reef city, the business consortium which built it as a public service component of its large casino and entertainment complex nearby.36 the apartheid museum also operates mandela house in soweto and the mandela capture site in kwazulu-­natal. (the country’s main mandela museum, distributed over three sites in the eastern cape, including the two noted above, is state funded.) another private initiative of importance was the liliesleaf farm museum near johannesburg, where virtually the entire high command of the underground south african communist party and anc were arrested in 1963. the site was managed and part-­financed by a trust but received substantial public support. it closed indefinitely in 2021, amidst accusations of financial mismanagement.37 there is a notable characteristic about much of this memory work, whether publicly or privately funded: the power wielded by professional architects and exhibition designers. it is they who have been entrusted with developing memorial narratives and voices, rather than members of a client local community, invested with a strong sense of how voices and narratives should be articulated. these professionals have generally consulted with public historians and members of local communities, but the fact remains that they are the most powerful agents in the process, who tend to ‘usurp’ the role of knowledge workers and the keepers of community memory.38 frequently they are content to tell a broad anc version of events, in order to secure contracts in the first place: the struggle narrative is in many ways a creation mediated by commercial interest. in addition, the strategic plans and annual reports of the national heritage council, the agency within the department of arts and culture tasked with the development of legacy sites, make clear that a strongly transactional approach dominates its ethos of heritage-­making.39 there thus seems to be something of an authenticity vacuum at the heart of the ‘post-­apartheid memorial complex’.40 it is inimical to the emergence of what one might call ‘slow curation’ – an often painstaking, always iterative process of deep meaning-­making for those whose stories are surfaced, sifted and shared, as well as sustaining an active, engaged audience. even though most south africans alive today were born after 1994, there are still strong living links to most of these events; they have not passed entirely into the realms of memory. the district six museum in cape town is an exception that is often held up as an exemplar of what an ‘engaged’ museum should be. district six was a long-­established, ethnically mixed neighbourhood, predominantly of those identified as coloured, located close to the city centre. in the 1960s the apartheid state declared it a white area, forcibly removed the 60,000 inhabitants to townships on the bleak cape flats 25 kilometres away and demolished the buildings. the museum emerged from a community movement campaigning for restitution and opened in 1994. its purpose was, and continues to be, to keep alive the memories of district six and displaced people everywhere as a vehicle for advocating social justice, as a space for reflection and contemplation and as an institution for challenging the distortions and half-­truths which propped up the history of cape town and south africa.41 housed in a disused church on the border of the old district six, it has always depended on private and philanthropic donations and income from visitors and events. from the start, the museum’s permanent and temporary collections, both tangible and intangible, were inscribed with meaning by the people whose lives it aimed to represent. as it has evolved, its restitution advocacy has become more significant. tellingly, it is one of the few new heritage attractions in south africa with an engaging web presence, reflecting its core values.42 district six museum’s origins lie outside the formal legacy project framework, as do many other smaller sites of memory across the country that have appeared since 1994, the vast majority of which relate to the anti-­apartheid struggle. a small number commemorate other forms of past pain, such as the very heavy toll of the hiv/aids pandemic. most of them are nevertheless included in the national heritage council’s plans for a resistance and liberation heritage route, established with the support of unesco in 2005.43 there have also been notable developments in digital public history since 1994. digital innovation south african (disa), funded by the andrew w. mellon foundation, began in 1997. disa bring together national repositories and universities, with the aim of digitising and curating content related to the anti-­apartheid struggle. in its first phase it made available a number of serial publications produced by the liberation movements. this was followed by the addition of archival content. it has faced many challenges, ranging from the management of complex partnerships, access to digital platforms, the ramifications of digital copyright and access to content, to social and political debates about memory in digital space.44 south african history online (saho) began in 2000 and now claims the title ‘the largest public history project in south africa, if not the continent’.45 one of the country’s most accomplished social documentary photographers and a veteran of the anti-­apartheid struggle, omar badsha, initiated saho with few resources and little interest from professional historians. he always envisaged this online resource as building bridges between exhibition and classroom, history and heritage, archive and library, experiential and instructional. 46 over the past two decades, saho has grown enormously in size and scope, as well as in the number of staff who run it, and has attracted funding from the south african education authorities, philanthropic foundations and other large donors. it has partnered university history departments in south africa and abroad in creating both born-­digital and digital surrogate resources and training public historians, and has won awards for its role in a ‘global movement for the production of free scholarly and educational content about africa and by africans’.47 the five hundred year archive (fhya), a project of the archive and public culture programme at the university of cape town, responds to a renewed interest in the history of south africa before the arrival of the first european settlers in the seventeenth century.48 it grapples with the fundamental memory/history challenge that all knowledge of this long ‘pre’ history has been refracted through the oral traditions, writings, art forms and so on, produced over the past five hundred years of colonial/postcolonial history. it also confronts issues to do with the identification/misidentification of material remains. importantly for digital public history, fhya has in addition questioned the cultural biases of existing archival platforms’ algorithms and seeks to overcome these in the development of a new content management system. renovating the old heritage estate on the eve of majority rule, some 97% of listed heritage sites were devoted to the achievements of the white minority.49 in the interests of reconciliation, all these sites, which included the nation’s museums, were protected in terms of post-­apartheid heritage legislation. they have all had to confront uncomfortable truths about their past, in the context of a heightened awareness of their association with conquest and the act of appropriating objects as a form of ‘systemic violence’.50 those sites in receipt of public funds have been forced to reconsider their practice, from the content and management of their collections to the nature of their displays and audiences, in support of ‘the creation of a national identity inclusive of all citizens’.51 a most important process, ideologically and symbolically, has been redefining the distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, thus reconceiving colonially styled ‘ethnographic collections’ as cultural artefacts belonging to the rich traditions of the subcontinent. for example, in the 1970s the old africana museum in johannesburg had relocated its ‘ethnographic’ collection to the former produce market in the newtown area of the city, retaining the ‘proper’ museum at its site in the public library building. the two collections were reunited and completely reinterpreted at the newtown site, which opened as museumafrica in 1994.52 yet ‘culture’ itself remains a troublesome concept for two reasons. the first is the difficulty of finding a vocabulary for discussing cultural diversity without resorting to the divisive, essentialist ethnic categories of the past. the second is that the concept of multiculturalism itself, on which the new nation has been constructed, is something of an ascribed, ‘unfree’ form of identity.53 a related ethical predicament facing museums has been their collections of human remains. in 1997, the mcgregor museum in kimberley invited two historians from the university of the western cape, martin legassick and ciraj rassool, to participate in an exercise in museum transformation.54 in the process, they discovered a connection between the origins of the museum and the early trade in human skeletons; in turn, as noted earlier, there was an inextricable link between these remains and the rise of race science/scientific racism in western memory institutions. around the same time, negotiations were underway for the repatriation of the remains of sara baartman, a khoesan woman who had been the victim of extreme colonial violence. taken to europe in 1810 and exhibited in the most degrading of circumstances as a specimen of the primitive, she died in paris in 1816; the muséum national d’histoire naturelle retained her body parts for study. her remains were repatriated in 2002 and she was given a proper burial.55 legassick’s and rassool’s study was thus an important intervention in a growing debate about respect, restitution and reburial, which had international ramifications.56 it should be added, however, that some south african institutions have been markedly reluctant to return remains.57 another practice which perpetuated racist classifications, as mentioned earlier, was the display of body casts. in 1960, the south african museum in cape town (now part of the iziko group of museums) placed a group of khoesan body casts in a diorama showing ‘normal life’ – timeless, peaceable, with no hint of dispossession or social exclusion, for the gaze of a white visiting public. following a concerted campaign, which included the temporary exhibition miscast, in which visitors were unavoidably made complicit in silencing and stereotyping, the casts were removed from display in 2001.58 the experience revealed the complexities of contemporary claims to representation and identity in a country with such a troubled ethnic legacy: some khoesan groups were deeply offended by miscast, for example, and saw no problem with the diorama.59 a further dimension of the rehumanising of heritage has been the greater prominence accorded to sites of ancient settlement. this story was suppressed under apartheid, as it ‘directly contradicted the [afrikaner] myth that black south africans arrived in south africa at around the same time as the whites’.60 thus archaeological sites such as the cradle of humankind, thulamela and mapungubwe have not only provided black south africans with a deeper sense of attachment to this land but have also helped expand south africa’s world heritage site listings.61 slavery was a feature of everyday life at the cape for nearly two hundred years. its slave heritage was similarly ignored under white rule, as it did not fit comfortably in the civilising narrative.62 an added complexity was that descendants of slaves sought a separate accommodation in the emerging twentieth-­century state structures by distancing themselves from the black majority. the diversity narrative of the rainbow nation has allowed the reinsertion of slave heritage in public memory, and given it additional legitimacy through international efforts, such as unesco’s, to create slave legacy routes. museums have addressed areas of obvious neglect in several other ways. some merely added on to existing displays – the strategy adopted at the south african military museum, for example, where displays of guerrilla warfare coexisted uneasily alongside the dominant military narrative. many have attempted a more thoroughgoing change, for example initiating dialogues with previously dispossessed communities about how to represent artefacts of incomplete provenance. this kind of relationship, however, is still at an early stage of development.63 others extended their remit. in the dying years of apartheid, the durban local history museums acquired the site of the former ‘native administration’ building and transformed it into kwamuhle, telling the story of the black working class -­ one that does not have prominence in the national diversity narrative. the national cultural history museum in pretoria inaugurated tswaing, billed as the country’s first eco-­museum. the site of a meteorite crater and former salt mine, its interpretative scheme featured the oral histories of those who had worked at the old salt factory. yet they were heavily mediated; conflicts surrounding ownership of and access to the site were silenced in the process of tswaing’s inscription into the national heritage estate.64 some sites placed themselves beyond this extensive transformation process. the outgoing apartheid authorities, fearing for the future of the symbols of afrikaner power, removed the voortrekker monument and the blood river heritage site, together with generous public funding, to the heritage foundation, a not-­for-­profit company. the sites claim that they remain popular with visitors.65 it should be noted that other prominent afrikaner sites have remained in the public estate and have become more inclusive. for example, the women’s monument in bloemfontein, which was unveiled in 1913 to commemorate the suffering of white women and children in british concentration camps through the south african war, now remembers the black people who were held in such camps, too.66 a few of the statues inherited from the era of minority rule, such as those of the architects of apartheid and leaders of the former ‘homelands’, were removed as the new government took power. several that remained in situ became flashpoints for contests over representation, identity and belonging.67 the best-­known case occurred in 2015 when students at the university of cape town attacked a campus statue of the arch-­imperialist cecil john rhodes. their #rhodesmustfall protests were directed at the slow pace of higher education transformation, rather than at official heritage policy; other rhodes statues were not touched.68 their actions nevertheless sparked an international campaign questioning the persistent iconography of colonialism and slavery in public spaces. conclusion since 1994, south africa’s terrain of memory has been deliberately transformed in the interests of a new kind of nationhood. there have been two principal means to achieve this aim: the creation of new sites, most of which contribute to a grand narrative of anti-­apartheid struggle, and the renovation of south africa’s older heritage estate in the interests of ethnic diversity. by displacing and relocating white minority heritage narratives, post-­1994 initiatives have resulted in a far more inclusive national public history. yet this paper has shown that the process has also constituted an extremely ‘disputatious field of engagement’.69 struggles over representation continue, and the fashioning of a new, usable past remains somewhat extractive. there is still a way to go before public history in south africa may be considered more genuinely ‘bottom up’. endnotes 1 these qualities of public history are explored in paul ashton and alex trapeznik, ‘introduction. the public turn: history today’, in paul ashton and alex trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally?, bloomsbury academic, london and new york, 2019, pp1-8. 2 republic of south africa, national heritage resources act, 1999, accessed october 1, 2021, https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201409/a25-99.pdf. 3 in a public history context, it is important to explain how terms referring to race and ethnicity are used. too often, these are treated as fixed and self-evident, whereas they have long been disputed in south africa, a country composed of a large number of indigenous polities and immigrant communities. the racial and ethnic categories that successive pre-1994 states attempted to impose on south africans sometimes coincided with the ways they self-identified, but more often were bitterly contested. in addition, resistance movements developed their own designations to indicate aspirations to nationhood. in post-1994 south africa, official race classifications have fallen away but identities remain contested (for example, who is entitled to call themselves ‘african’). any deployment of these unavoidable terms must therefore acknowledge inconsistencies and uneasy compromises. that is why scholars often use racial terms in inverted commas; however, this practice can seem demeaning to those referenced in such a way. in this contribution, then, black is taken to mean all south africans who were oppressed by the white minority regime – in this sense, black and white are ideological categories, signifying historic powerlessness and power. in certain places, it is necessary to refer to particular groups of black people, such as coloured; the context will hopefully make the reasons clear. afrikaner refers to those whites who identified culturally and ideologically with the exercise of apartheid rule, 1948 to the early 1990s. the terms european and african are used in a geographic sense. 4 albert grundlingh, ‘social history and afrikaner historiography in changing south africa, problems and potential’, collected seminar papers of the institute of commonwealth studies, university of london, vol 45, 1993, p1. 5 nigel worden, ‘public history in the new south africa’, perspectives on history, february 1, 1996, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-1996/public-history-in-the-new-south-africa. 6 elizabeth delmont, ‘the voortrekker monument: monolith to myth’, south african historical journal, vol 29, november 1993, pp76-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582479308671763 7 ciraj rassool and leslie witz, ‘the 1952 jan van riebeeck tercentenary festival’, in leslie witz, gary minkley and ciraj rassool (eds), unsettled history: making south african public pasts, university of michigan press, ann arbor, 2017, pp52-76. 8 eric rosenthal, bastion of the south 1666-1966, wynberg commando, cape town, 1966, p5. 9 saul dubow, a commonwealth of knowledge: science, sensibility and white south africa, 1820-2000, oxford university press, oxford, 2006. 10 anitra nettleton, ‘arts and africana: hierarchies of material culture’, south african historical journal, vol 29, 1993, pp61-75. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582479308671762; marion arnold, ‘visual culture in context: the implications of union and liberation’, in marion arnold and brenda schmahmann (eds), between union and liberation: women artists in south africa 1910-1994, routledge, arbingdon, 2016, pp1-32. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315096445-1 11 james gore, ‘a lack of nation? the evolution of history in south african museums, c1825-1945’, south african historical journal, vol 51, no 1, 2004, pp24-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582470409464828 12 martin legassick and ciraj rassool, skeletons in the cupboard: south african museums and the trade in human remains, 1907–1917, south african museum and mcgregor museum, cape town and kimberley, 2000. 13 jimi adesina, ‘bernard makhosezwe magubane (1930-2013): an intellectual appreciation,’ south african review of sociology, vol 44, no 3, 2013, pp87-88. https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2013.817051 14 the author trained as an educator for learn and teach and served as programme coordinator at workers’ college in durban, 1992-4. the latter was modelled on ruskin college, oxford, which initially validated workers’ college qualifications. 15 see for example luli callinicos, gold and workers 1886-1924, ravan press, johannesburg, 1980; luli callinicos, working life: factories, townships and popular culture on the rand 1886-1940 ravan press, johannesburg, 1987; leslie witz for sached trust and history workshop, write your own history, ravan press, johannesburg,1988. 16 belinda bozzoli, ‘intellectuals, audiences and histories: south african experiences, 1978-1988’, radical history review, vol 46, no 7, 1990, pp237-263. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1990-46-47-237; cynthia kros, ‘heritage vs history, the end of a noble tradition?,’ historia, vol 48, no 1, 2003, pp326-336. 17 sifiso mxolisi ndlovu, ‘a tribute to bernard magubane’, safundi, vol 16, no 2, 2015, pp213-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2015.986384 18 gary minkley, ciraj rassool and leslie witz, ‘oral history in south africa: a country report’, in witz, minkley and rassool (eds), unsettled history, pp27-51. 19 christopher saunders, ‘the transformation of heritage in the new south africa,’ in hans erik stolten (ed), history making and present day policies: the meaning of collective memory in south africa, nordiska afrikainstitutet, uppsala, 2007, pp183-195. there were notable exceptions, including the leading history workshop figure, phil bonner. 20 patrick harries, ‘from public history to private enterprise: the politics of memory in the new south africa’, in mamadou diawara, bernard lategan and jörn rüsen (eds), historical memory in africa: dealing with the past, reaching for the future in an intercultural context, berghahn, new york and oxford, 2010), pp121-143. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781845458379-008; julia c. wells, ‘public history in south africa: a tool for recovery’, in ashton and trapeznik (eds), what is public history globally?, pp131-144. 21 antjie krog, country of my skull, random house, johannesburg, 1998. 22 ingrid de kok, ‘cracked heirlooms: memory on exhibition,’ in sarah nuttall and carli coetzee (eds), negotiating the past: the making of memory on south africa, oxford university press, oxford, 1999, p61. 23 philip bonner and noor nieftagodien, ‘local truths in kathorus’ [unpublished paper] 1, accessed march 20, 2021, http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/8119. 24 piers pigou, ‘accessing the records of the truth and reconciliation commission’, in kate allan (ed), paper wars: access to information in south africa, wits university press, johannesburg, 2009, pp17-55. 25 department of arts, culture, science and technology, ‘the portfolio of legacy projects: a portfolio of commemorations acknowledging neglected or marginalised heritage, january 1998’. a satisfactory term for south africa’s first (known) inhabitants is elusive, as virtually all those in use have been conferred by other, more powerful groups and have carried negative connotations. each small group of ‘original’ hunter-gatherers had its own name; in later encounters with incomers – africans from the north from at least the 5th century ce, and europeans from the 17th century ce, they suffered extensive disruption and dispersal. there was also considerable intermixing. 26 department of arts and culture, ‘national legacy projects,’ accessed 4 april 4, 2021, https://www.gov.za/speeches/arts-and-culture-national-legacy-projects-24-jun-2017-0000; mcebisi ndletyana and denver webb, ‘social divisions carved in stone or cenotaphs to a new identity? policy for memorials, monuments and statues in a democratic south africa’, international journal of heritage studies, vol 23, no 3, 2017, pp97-110. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2016.1246464 27 harriet deacon, ‘remembering tragedy, constructing modernity: robben island as a national monument,’ in nuttall and coetzee (eds), negotiating the past, pp161-179; myra shackley, ‘potential futures for robben island: shrine, museum or theme park?’, international journal of heritage studies, vol 7, no 4, 2001, pp55-363. https://doi.org/10.1080/13581650120105552. see also neo lekgotla laga ramoupi, noel solani, andré odendaal and khwezi ka mpumlwana (eds), robben island rainbow dreams: the making of democratic south africa’s first national heritage institution, best red, pretoria, 2021. 28 elizabeth delmont, ‘south african heritage development in the first decade of democracy’, african arts, vol 37, no 4, 2004, p32. https://doi.org/10.1162/afar.2004.37.4.30 29 scott schönfeldt-aultman, ‘monument(al) meaning-making: the ncome monument and its representation of zulu identity’, journal of african cultural studies, vol 18, no 2, 2006, pp215-234. https://doi.org/10.1080/13696810601106127 30 heather hughes, ‘rainbow, renaissance, tribes and townships: tourism and heritage in south africa since 1994’, in sakhela buhlungu et al (eds), state of the nation: south africa 2007, hsrc press, cape town, 2007, pp266-288. 31 gary baines, ‘site of struggle: the freedom park fracas and the divisive legacy of south africa’s border war/liberation struggle’, social dynamics, vol 35, no 2, 2009, pp330-344. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533950903076428 32 leslie witz, gary minkley and ciraj rassool, ‘sources and genealogies of the new museum: the living fossil, the photograph and the speaking subject’, in witz, minkley and rassool (eds), unsettled history, pp177-203. 33 on the significance of kliptown, see raymond suttner, ‘talking to the ancestors: national heritage, the freedom charter and nation-building in south africa in 2005’, development southern africa, vol 23, no 1, 2006, pp3-27. https://doi.org/10.1080/03768350600556570; karel anthonie bakker and liana müller, ‘intangible heritage and community identity in post-apartheid south africa’, museum international, vol 62, no 1-2, 2010, pp48-54. on anti-pass protests and associated memorial sites, see ali khangela hlongwane and sifiso mxolisi ndlovu, public history and culture in south africa: memorialisation and liberation heritage sites in johannesburg and the township space, palgrave macmillan, cham, 2019, chapter 3 and on the soweto uprisings see chapters 4 and 5. 34 for example, in a night of extreme and confused violence during the defiance campaign of 1952 in duncan village, east london, an irish nun and up to 200 black people were killed. this would make the episode the single bloodiest in the history of anti-apartheid struggle, yet for their different reasons, the anc and police had an interest in downplaying it. further, it did not fall within the trc’s timeframe (1960-1994). mignonne breier, bloody sunday, tafelberg publishers, cape town, 2021. 35 ndletyana and webb, ‘social divisions carved in stone’; sabine marschall, ‘the memory of trauma and resistance: public memorialization and democracy in post-apartheid south africa and beyond’, safundi: the journal of south african and american studies, vol 11, no 4, 2010, pp361-381; sipokazi madida, ‘troubling statues: a symptom of a complex heritage complex’, in anitra nettleton and mathias alubafi fubah (eds), exchanging symbols. monuments and memorials in post-apartheid south africa, sun press, stellenbosch, 2020, pp85-119. https://doi.org/10.18820/9781928480594/04 36 georgi verbeeck, ‘structure of memory: apartheid in the museum’, in hans erik stolten (ed), history making and present day politics, pp217-226. 37 mpho sibanyoni, ‘liliesleaf farm museum shuts down after funds run dry’, accessed october 1, 2021, https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/business/2021-09-01-liliesleaf-farm-museum-shuts-down-after-funds-run-dry/. 38 hlongwane and ndlovu, public history and culture, p107. 39 see for example national heritage council, 2020/21-2024/5 medium term strategic framework (pretoria: national heritage council, no date), accessed april 13, 2021, http://www.nhc.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/nhc-medium-term-strategic-framework.pdf. 40 gary minkley, ‘“a fragile inheritor”: the post-apartheid memorial complex, a.c. jordan and the re-imagining of heritage in the eastern cape’, kronos, vol 34, no 1, 2008, pp16-40. authenticity is used here in the sense not of an essence but a quality to be reached or produced, a process of authentication. see duane jethro, heritage formation and the senses in post-apartheid south africa, bloomsbury academic, london, 2020. 41 valmont layne, ‘the district six museum: an ordinary people’s place’, the public historian, vol 30, no1, 2008, pp53-54. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2008.30.1.53 42 ‘district six museum,’ accessed april 3, 2021, https://www.districtsix.co.za/. 43 gregory houston et al, the liberation struggle and liberation heritage sites in south africa, human sciences research council, pretoria, 2013. 44 michelle pickover, ‘the disa project: packaging south african heritage as a continuing resource – content, access, ownership and ideology’, ifla journal, vol 34, no 2, 2008, pp192-197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035208092177; disa portal , accessed march 30, 2021, https://disa.ukzn.ac.za/. 45 jill e. kelly and omar badsha, ‘teaching south african history in the digital age: collaboration, pedagogy and popularizing history’, history in africa, vol 47, 2020, pp299. https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2020.6 46 the author worked with badsha on saho’s initial conceptualisation and on fundraising to set it up. 47 kelly and badsha, ‘teaching south african history’, p313. ‘south african history online’, accessed april 14, 2021, https://www.sahistory.org.za/. 48 the fyha project is explained at ‘archives and public culture’, accessed april 3, 2021, http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/apc/research/projects/five-hundred-year-archive. it is one outcome of an influential, long-term project to engage critically with the nature of the archive in south africa. see for example carolyn hamilton and nessa liebhammer (eds), untribing the archive [2 volumes], university of kwazulu-natal press, pietermaritzburg, 2016. 49 ndletyana and webb, ‘social divisions cast in stone’, p101. 50 njabulo chipangura, patrick bond and steven sack, ‘critical representations of southern african inequality: transcending outmoded exhibition and museum politics’, development southern africa, vol 36, no 6, 2019, p769. https://doi.org/10.1080/0376835x.2019.1709046 51 rooksana omar, ‘meeting the challenges of diversity in south african museums’, museum international, vol 57, no 3, 2005, p53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0033.2005.00529.x 52 sarah byala, ‘the museum becomes archive: reassessing johannesburg’s museumafrica’, social dynamics, vol 36, no 1, 2010, pp11-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533950903561171 53 shahid vawda, ‘cultural policy as utopia: the case of south africa’, in rooksana omar et al (eds), museums and the idea of historical progress. papers of the icmah-comcol annual conference, iziko museums and icom south africa, cape town, 2014, pp31-48. 54 martin legassick, ‘reflections on practicing applied history in south africa, 1994-2002: from skeletons to schools’, in stolten (ed), history making and present-day politics, pp129-144. 55 sadiah qureshi, ‘displaying sara baartman, the “hottentot venus”’, history of science, vol 42, no 2, 2004, pp233-257. https://doi.org/10.1177/007327530404200204 56 legassick and rassool, skeletons in the cupboard; ciraj rassool, ‘re-storing the skeletons of empire: return, reburial and rehumanisation in southern africa’, journal of southern african studies, vol 41, no 3, 2015, pp653-670. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2015.1028002 57 mail and guardian, johannesburg, july 8-14, 2005, p10. 58 patricia davison, ‘the politics and poetics of the bushman diorama at the south african museum’, icofom study series, vol 46, 2018, accessed april 3, 2021, http://journals.openedition.org/iss/921. https://doi.org/10.4000/iss.921 59 steven robins, ‘silence in my father’s house: memory, nationalism and narratives of the body’, in nuttall and coetzee (eds), negotiating the past, pp120-140. 60 a. goodrich and p. bombardella, ‘what are statues good for? winning the battle or losing the battleground?’, koers, vol 81, no 3, 2016, p2. https://doi.org/10.19108/koers.81.3.2272 61 shadreck chirikure et al, ‘unfulfilled promises? heritage management and community participation at some of africa’s cultural heritage sites’, international journal of heritage studies, vol 16, no 1-2, 2010, pp30-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527250903441739 62 nigel worden, ‘the changing politics of slave heritage in the western cape, south africa’, journal of african history, vol 50, no 1, 2009, pp23-40. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853709004204 63 elizabeth crooke, ‘dealing with the past: museums and heritage in northern ireland and cape town, south africa’, international journal of heritage studies, vol 11, no 2, 2005, pp131-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527250500070329 64 witz, minkley and rassool, ‘sources and genealogies’, pp186-7. 65 see https://vtm.org.za/en/home/. 66 pieter labuschagne, ‘the women’s monument and memorial complexity in the context of political change: from memorial exclusivity to monument(al) inclusivity’, south african journal of art history, vol 29, no 2, 2014, pp30-43. 67 sipokazi madida, ‘troubling statues’, pp85-119. 68 carolyn holmes and melanie loehwing, ‘icons of the old regime: challenging south african public memory strategies in #rhodesmust fall’, journal of southern african studies, vol 42, no 6, 2016, pp1207-1223. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1253927; sabine marschall, ‘targeting statues: monument “vandalism” as an expression of socio-political protest in south africa’, african studies review, vol 60, no 3, december 2017, pp203-219. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2017.56 69 leslie witz, gary minkley and ciraj rassool, ‘south africa and the unsettling of history’, in unsettled histories, p15.