Reading and suffering

Why do we read what we read? Bookshelves groan with biography, travel, social theory far left corner, cultural studies creeping up the front, Baudrillard in the back door and out the front. Some people’s books get featured in the weekend papers, others go straight into the back of the car and the second-hand shops. Love, sweat and tears … what’s it all for? As Chris Wallace-Crabbe lamented recently across these pages, poetry seems to be one victim of the times. Social theory, and social science writing is similarly unloved, as though it were somehow unwriterly. History writing seems to escape some of this oblivion because, whatever Lyotard might say, we do still indeed tell narratives and like also to read them. So the crossover between history and biography prospers – family history and biography still attract. Perhaps it is narcissism which explains this. History writing, at least, still takes place within the humanities rather than the social sciences, so it remains writerly in its aura, prominent and highly praised. Whatever else has changed, history remains somewhere closer to literature. These are some of the issues that strike me as I sit down with this brace of books. They span the states or colonies, they cover the two centuries that have passed since white occupation. They each presume the significance of history, though some do so more self-reflexively than others. They each speak of experience, time, place, and generation. The Petrie family, their historians tell us, built colonial Brisbane. Brecht would have said no, their labourers did, but then Brecht was an operator too. The volume is co-published with a reprint of Constance Campbell Petrie’s rendition of her father’s reminiscences. As Mark Cryle indicates in his thoughtful preface to Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences (UQP, $18.95 pb), this is a text both fascinating and peculiar, the too modest father’s reminiscences mediated through the prose of his dutiful daughter. The author here is therefore absent from his own story, and at the same time the author is absent from hers – her story has no place here, for this is a show where Constance pulls Tom Petrie’s strings. The content of the book is most notable for its pioneering ethnological observations – Tom Petrie effectively went native, working with the Brisbane Aboriginals and defending them against some of the more wicked slanders. As with some of the other books here under review, a good part of this story is also the story of things, catalogues of animals and vegetables and their uses, ‘Emus – Scrub Turkeys – Swans – Ducks – Cockatoos and Parrots – Quail – Root and Other Plant Food – How it was Prepared – Meals – Water – Fire – How Obtained – Signs and Signals’, string dilly bags, tomahawks, beeswax and its uses. Petrie’s daughter’s tribute thus takes on both the significance of a historical document and becomes a source of its own way of seeing. The Petrie Family (UQP, $16.95 pb), its sibling, is a less complicated piece of writing, a catalogue of achievements. One cannot tell from the books themselves, but there is also the puzzle here of relatives apparently writing about relatives – the Petries and the Cryles. The Petrie story is part of J.D. Lang’s project, to stock terra nullius with good prots who could lift their game and elevate colonial culture. As they did, not least of all through building, in Moreton Bay, Wide Bay, on Bribie Island, and in Brisbane City, their legacy left in stone. Bob Reece brings together some different early stories in Exiles from Erin (Macmillan, $29.95 pb). His brief is simple. A third of all convicts transported to Australia were Irish, yet the stories involved have traditionally been subsumed under the bigger picture of the white man’s arrival, forgotten, like the stories of the Tolpuddle martyrs, in the rush to be rich. So here, for example, Keith Johnson and Michael Flynn tell the story of the convicts of the Queen, which anchored in Sydney Cove on 26 November 1791, who they were, how their crimes were constructed. Much of this is the kind of stuff people of my age would associate with the work of Edward Thompson, older folks with the books by the Hammonds. So for example does Niamh Brennan relate the tale of the hundred men who on 7 September 1815 gathered in the hamlet of Ballagh in order systematically to dismember tyranny by dismantling the public buildings where unjust tithes were expropriated. Theirs was also the long road to New South Wales. Reece holds most of the book together, himself contributing half of the chapters. But the grandest narrator tells the last tale of all – Geoffrey Bolton’s sonorous tones echo through the closing pages with both authority and conviction. Bolton takes a slice of history and turns it into a yarn – it’s a good read. Stuart Piggin and Henry Lee tell perhaps the saddest tale in The Mt Kembla Disaster (Oxford/Sydney University Press, $49.95 hb), though it would have to be said that one theme holding all these volumes together and symbolising labour history itself is the centrality of suffering. On 31 July 1902, the Mt Kembla mine exploded: ninety-six men were killed. This remains the worst disaster to occur on land in Australia’s written history. In the midst of transforming class struggles and industrial relations, however, virtually nothing happened by way of response, notwithstanding the predictable proliferation of inquiries and inquests, commissions and commiserations. This book must be one of the bravest under consideration here, for it crosses over the humanities divide into social sciences, not least of all in its endeavour to make sense of the phenomenon of disaster itself. Disasters have all the attributes of a modern ritual, where fate/accident strikes, tragedy occurs, there is grieving, seeking to learn, to blame, to avoid recurrence, to cooperate more fully than before, and all this serves to throw modern human activity into some kind of anthropological relief. The earth opens and innocents are swallowed up. How can the locals make sense of this? Piggin and Lee detail the story with infinite care, casting it as a saga which unfolds from act to act with no sense of improvement or supersession. The Mt Kembla Disaster is really a quite remarkable work, for it is poignant as well as tragic, probing as well as testifying, angry as well as sympathetic, both finely researched and thoroughly crafted. Geography, political economy, geology, and sociology are all brought together here in symbolic analysis of the event. Hauling the Loads (MUP, $29.95 hb) is a different kind of enterprise. Big format, its cover is embossed with a recommendation from R.M. Williams, its text anticipated by a few words from Geoffrey Blainey. Plainly the logic of the enterprise is a history of transport, for these were the ways in which the colonies were held together until motorisation, so that the history of the horse and bullock is indeed one angle on the history of modern Australia. Kennedy’s is a careful and enthusiastic study, a clever idea well executed. Hauling the Loads is another contribution to doing history laterally. At least since the work of the Annales School, of Braudel and Ladurie, of Norbert Elias and even of Foucault, has it become more obvious that history is also the history of things, artefacts, institutions. So increasingly Australian history writing picks up on the vernacular, on architecture, furniture, items from everyday life, ashtrays, badges, and posters. And the history of horses and bullocks, not exactly a self-evident fascination, now also becomes a form of social history. But then we are now, today, somewhat detached from what are derisively referred to as horse and buggy ways; people now tell us we’re not even Fordist, but post-Fordist. The idea of a Fordist economy, coined by Antonio Gramsci, remains incredibly suggestive. Mass production necessitates mass consumption; so the conveyor belt brings with it not just a new work rhythm, but a new culture. The Sydney History Group works right across this field in All Our Labours (NSWUP, $24.95 pb). It’s a very interesting book, relying heavily on the use of oral evidence from tram workers, yarnspinners, maids and nurses, policemen and prostitutes. All Our Labours is a theoretically sophisticated book. It tilts against the postmodern cliché for which consumption replaces production by reminding readers of the centrality of work. It also labours the necessity of memory: ‘Let those who drink the water remember those who dug the well.’ John Shields’s introduction actually echoes some of the larger themes hung up by Marx, reminding us that the world of commodities is, in the final instance, itself the product of human activity, reinstating action and process as properly prior to the product. All Our Labours, he says, ‘seeks to open new windows on working life in twentieth century Sydney’. The oral evidence and testimony martialled here are thus dropped into more elaborate explanatory frameworks by writers such as Lucy Taksa, Drew Cottle, Roberta Perkins, and Andrew Moore. This is the kind of writing that rightly identifies bibliographical fashion as its enemy, for it is labour history at its best, blending issues of gender and class, evidence and interpretation, focussing on both change and continuity in everyday life. Perkins’s essay on prostitution, for example, simultaneously manages to suggest something of the transformation of heterosexual practices across the period from 1970 to 1990. The message may be unfashionable, but it is again suggestive of both humour and stoicism, and of suffering and domination. So why do we read what we read? Too often, perhaps, to escape or at least to evade the sordid realities that surround us. But there is no escaping the fact that we suffer, we learn, and we die.

Peter Beilharz

From the New Issue

No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton

Three recent short story collections

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

Thunderhead by Miranda Darling

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