Article By William: Brisbane Times, April 20th, 2007
The Stories of Our Past Belong to Us All
William McInnes
The immaculately groomed and eerily unblinking federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, wants us all to know more about history - especially the "us" who are that floating group known as young Australians.
"Young Australians should study the past to understand the present, so that they can make informed decisions for the future," she is reported to have said.
Fair enough, but history comes in all shapes and sizes. There's the history that gets people all hot and bothered; from the supposed fibs of Manning Clark, to Geoffrey Blainey, to the roads to Damascus of Robert Manne, and even the revisionist tea cup-rattling of Keith Windschuttle. These are people who are historians. Their business is history.
But there are others. While I was dressed up as John Curtin, pretending to be a man who gave his life in service to this country, I walked around an old RAAF base complaining loudly into a mobile phone in my best disgruntled customer's voice about a holiday I was trying to book over lunch.
My bleatings got the better of some of the film crew who pelted me with a few hard-boiled eggs and the advice "Shut up and get over it, Mr Prime Minister".
The unblinking Bishop should appreciate this: first a Labor PM, even a pretend one, being pelted by eggs, and our history being told in the form of an entertainment broadcast out across the nation and beyond. The unblinking one is, after all, the federal member for the seat of Curtin. John Curtin's story belongs to us all. But is it a prescribed history that we should be taught? Remember, history is many things.
While driving through south-western NSW on a family holiday recently I was extraordinarily moved by the sense of time and achievement since European settlement. I felt proud of the achievements of our shared history, of things such as the Flying Doctor Service and the work of Flynn of the inland.
At the bottom of a 400-metre mine shaft in Broken Hill I listened with my children to the history of three old miners. Where once the economy of this nation was ripped from the earth, now a group of tourists listened to the histories of these battered and noble Australians.
"You need mates down here, you know," said Bob Murphy. "And a mate is basically someone you trust. You may not understand them, they might not look like you, you may not even know them that well, they may talk different to you - but if you trust them and they can trust you, then they're mates."
Never has that concept been better described to me.
And then on the rolling dunes of Lake Mungo I smiled while my children and a few other kids roared with laughter as they rolled down the silk soft sand hills.
Perhaps other Australian children, indigenous children, had done these same childish things here thousands of years ago. Is that not our history, too?
Should we not also share the stories of these Australians? Or does history have a simple and efficient start date that fits in with a curriculum?
We stopped in a small country town for lunch in a park and it seemed no different to all the other country towns we had stopped in. Just like all our histories. No different. The same cenotaphs with the names of those who'd given their life in service to their country. Just names, but they were all the lives of sons, brothers, friends and husbands and they all had stories. Some of those names may have belonged to good people and bad people, their deaths may have been good or ill. And why the lives were lost, will that ever really be known? Their stories will never be told. History is many things. Sometimes it is silent.
There was a bird cage in this particular park. A great white cockatoo clung to the wire and croaked hello to anyone who came near it. My daughter stood staring at the bird. She didn't touch her lunch. It was time to go. I called and she looked torn. The bird called to her again. She turned and waved softly to the cocky in the cage.
She cried for a while in the car. The bird was alone. She didn't want to leave it.
"It just does that because it's been taught to," I said.
"It talked to me," she said.
History is many things. For every listener it can be a different tale, just told with the same characters. But it mustn't be bent and shaped to serve the purpose of those who decide that history must be taught.
It can be like a caged bird. Taught to mimic words as a trick. But my daughter is right. History, like that bird, will always try to talk to you. The least we can do is listen.
William McInnes appears as John Curtin on the ABC tomorrow at 8.30pm. His latest book is Cricket Kings (Hachette Livre).
William McInnes
The immaculately groomed and eerily unblinking federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, wants us all to know more about history - especially the "us" who are that floating group known as young Australians.
"Young Australians should study the past to understand the present, so that they can make informed decisions for the future," she is reported to have said.
Fair enough, but history comes in all shapes and sizes. There's the history that gets people all hot and bothered; from the supposed fibs of Manning Clark, to Geoffrey Blainey, to the roads to Damascus of Robert Manne, and even the revisionist tea cup-rattling of Keith Windschuttle. These are people who are historians. Their business is history.
But there are others. While I was dressed up as John Curtin, pretending to be a man who gave his life in service to this country, I walked around an old RAAF base complaining loudly into a mobile phone in my best disgruntled customer's voice about a holiday I was trying to book over lunch.
My bleatings got the better of some of the film crew who pelted me with a few hard-boiled eggs and the advice "Shut up and get over it, Mr Prime Minister".
The unblinking Bishop should appreciate this: first a Labor PM, even a pretend one, being pelted by eggs, and our history being told in the form of an entertainment broadcast out across the nation and beyond. The unblinking one is, after all, the federal member for the seat of Curtin. John Curtin's story belongs to us all. But is it a prescribed history that we should be taught? Remember, history is many things.
While driving through south-western NSW on a family holiday recently I was extraordinarily moved by the sense of time and achievement since European settlement. I felt proud of the achievements of our shared history, of things such as the Flying Doctor Service and the work of Flynn of the inland.
At the bottom of a 400-metre mine shaft in Broken Hill I listened with my children to the history of three old miners. Where once the economy of this nation was ripped from the earth, now a group of tourists listened to the histories of these battered and noble Australians.
"You need mates down here, you know," said Bob Murphy. "And a mate is basically someone you trust. You may not understand them, they might not look like you, you may not even know them that well, they may talk different to you - but if you trust them and they can trust you, then they're mates."
Never has that concept been better described to me.
And then on the rolling dunes of Lake Mungo I smiled while my children and a few other kids roared with laughter as they rolled down the silk soft sand hills.
Perhaps other Australian children, indigenous children, had done these same childish things here thousands of years ago. Is that not our history, too?
Should we not also share the stories of these Australians? Or does history have a simple and efficient start date that fits in with a curriculum?
We stopped in a small country town for lunch in a park and it seemed no different to all the other country towns we had stopped in. Just like all our histories. No different. The same cenotaphs with the names of those who'd given their life in service to their country. Just names, but they were all the lives of sons, brothers, friends and husbands and they all had stories. Some of those names may have belonged to good people and bad people, their deaths may have been good or ill. And why the lives were lost, will that ever really be known? Their stories will never be told. History is many things. Sometimes it is silent.
There was a bird cage in this particular park. A great white cockatoo clung to the wire and croaked hello to anyone who came near it. My daughter stood staring at the bird. She didn't touch her lunch. It was time to go. I called and she looked torn. The bird called to her again. She turned and waved softly to the cocky in the cage.
She cried for a while in the car. The bird was alone. She didn't want to leave it.
"It just does that because it's been taught to," I said.
"It talked to me," she said.
History is many things. For every listener it can be a different tale, just told with the same characters. But it mustn't be bent and shaped to serve the purpose of those who decide that history must be taught.
It can be like a caged bird. Taught to mimic words as a trick. But my daughter is right. History, like that bird, will always try to talk to you. The least we can do is listen.
William McInnes appears as John Curtin on the ABC tomorrow at 8.30pm. His latest book is Cricket Kings (Hachette Livre).
posted by WilliamWatch at 6:01 PM
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