Trafficking in the Past

Six weeks after the First Fleet sailed for New South Wales Edward Gibbon completed The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Probably the finest example of the Western tradition of history as chronological and sequential, Gibbon’s work provided the Europe of his time with a panoramic background against which the achievements of modern civilization could be measured. The first generation of Australian settlers had no such background. It was impossible to accommodate the Aboriginal sense of the past by any European yardstick. The invaders could not annex the history of their predecessors as the Turks had annexed the history of Constantinople or the Normans in England took over where the Saxons left off. For more than 150 years white Australians considered that Australia had no history before 1788. But it was unsatisfactory for Australians simply to define themselves as heirs of the British legacy. The past in Australia was a divided country. In his wonderfully stimulating and impressively researched book, Tom Griffiths shows how successive generations of Australians tried to construct a past for themselves out of this intractable material. It did not take long for the post-1788 settlers to sense that memory alone was not enough to secure a convincing record of their antecedents. As early as 1822 Sydney citizens were trying to identify the spot where the Endeavour had touched at Botany Bay, beginning an ever-intensifying quest for the remnants of another day which would help to define what it meant to be Australian. Griffiths reminds us that those who took part in that quest were not on the whole academics – despite the importance of a few ranging from Baldwin Spencer to John Mulvaney – but devoted amateurs. He directs our gaze to figures such as R.E. Johns, clerk of courts and bower-bird collector of Aboriginal remains and artefacts; Joseph Archibald, father of the better-known Jules, who laboured to provide Victoria’s Western District with historical consciousness; the eager but opinionated A.S. Kenyon, and the writer Charles Barrett. He also offers new slants on twentieth century individuals such as Ernestine Hill, Albert Namatjira, and Hal Porter. In a sense Griffiths has become a hunter and collector himself, rescuing obscure but significant specimens from the neglect of posterity. But this is not all. Griffiths describes the antiquarian construction of the past as involving three processes: collection, possession, and preservation. Collection begins with the indiscriminate accumulation of anything old, evolves into a dogmatic assertion that some forms of collection should be privileged over others, and arrives at the multicultural present, where the cherished archaeological trophy of Anglo-Australian prehistorians might become the even more intensely cherished ancestral relic of a renascent Aboriginal community. Possession, psychologically the most interesting of the three processes, explores the attempts of white Australians to establish a sense of belonging in a continent where, quoting Judith Brett, ‘a continuing fear of invasion must be seen as a massive collective projection of the know ledge of white Australia’s origins’. Griffiths throws out some intriguing hints about the ways in which, a hundred years ago, those who sought to instil a love of nature study in the young were also consciously fostering the values which went into the making of the Anzac tradition. He also has some pertinent things to say about the fascination of the 1930s with Australia’s ‘red centre’, though he might have coupled this with the shift in emphasis among Australian landscape artists from the well-watered coastal strip to the arid landscapes of the young Drysdale. Preservation involves the self&shy;conscious re-examination of all that has been collected and possessed from the past, with all the controversy about what constitutes heritage. He subtly explores the competition between heritage -so often justified by its tourist potential – and the social and economic drives of the present. He reminds us that sometimes the greatest vandals have not been ignorant businessmen, but bodies such as the Anglican church which should have known better. Griffiths is especially good at teasing out the tensions and ambiguities which arise in trying to define a concept of her&shy;itage. A recent example is the debate over the Namadgi National Park in the ACT. Should grazing be continued in the Gudgenby area as ‘an outstanding example of a mountain valley used historically for grazing’? Or does a strict adherence to ecological principle insist that no grazing should ever be tolerated? The admirable John Mulvaney pointed out that Gudgenby was not untouched wilderness when the Europeans arrived, but had been worked over for thousands of years by indigenous hunter-gatherers manipulating the open grassy woodland. But some remained unconvinced. Conflict of interest reaches its most contentious over the question of Aboriginal relics. Griffiths discusses the demand by modem Aboriginal groups for the re-burial of human remains excavated in past years for archaeological research. Sometimes goodwill prevails, as in the case of the Lake Mungo woman, the oldest known human cremation. Her remains are now housed in a specially made repository at the Mungo site. Two keys are needed to open it, one held by archaeologists and the other by the local Aboriginal elders. At other times the conflict between the Aboriginal communities’ demand to take control of their past and the academic ethos has been less easily resolved. Griffiths notes how the Kow Swamp remains, surprising evidence for the survival of archaic human types to within 15,000 years of the present, have now been returned to the Echuca Aboriginal community and lost to scholarly access; and perhaps Aboriginal need for reparation takes precedence over curiosity about the origins of the whole human race. But his book went to press too soon to comment on the bitterest of these conflicts, when La Trobe University was stripped of its collection of non-human Tasmanian relics so that the Tasmanian state government could placate the Aboriginal lobby on the cheap. Considering that La Trobe prehistorians such as Jim Allen and Tim Murray had helped to demonstrate that Tasmania’s past went back for perhaps 20,000 years, this was scandalously graceless. We are in for many more conflicts over the ownership of the Australian past. My own view is that all commerce between the present and the past should be absolutely free. But anyone wishing to explore the complexities of the problem in depth would be well advised to start with Chapters 4 and 12 of Hunters and Collectors. Inevitably a reviewer will cavil about points of detail. To a Western Australian reader it might seem that Griffiths takes his examples too much from Victoria. There may be significant regional variations in the construction of Australia’s pasts. And it is disappointing that no reference is made to the development over the last thirty years of maritime history and archaeology as clues to understanding the construction of Australia’s national myths. But the book has many merits. Tom Griffiths has made a humane, wise, and stimulating contribution to the gathering debate on the making of Australian history and Australian self-concepts.

Geoffrey Bolton

From the New Issue

‘“Thin labourism”: How is the Albanese government travelling?’ by Frank Bongiorno

Fat Chance: Journalism poems by Kent MacCarter

A Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing by Hilary Mantel, edited by Nicholas Pearson

Our Moon: A human history by Rebecca Boyle

You May Also Like

Bad Company by Gideon Haigh & The Big End of Town by Grant Fleming, David Merrett and Simon Ville

Man from Arltunga by R. G. Kimber

Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian history and politics by Stuart Macintyre and Sheila Fitzpatrick

Skills, Outlooks and Passions: A psychoanalytical contribution to the study of politics by A.F. Davies