History

Charles Drazin tells us that his interest in French cinema began as a student at Oxford in the early 1980s, when he attended screenings at the Maison Française, an institution established after World War II to encourage cultural exchange between Britain and France. Some of the films were obscure, some better known; the audience comprised devotees and newcomers who never quite knew what they were going to see. The free admission, the 16 mm projector, the portable screen fixed to a tripod, even the scraping of chairs on wooden floors contributed to the sense of occasion for the young cinéastes.

The heroes and villains in Nick Dyrenfurth’s account of the early Labor Party are the cartoon figures in the labour press that he uses to explore its political rhetoric. The heroes are sturdy working men, sometimes in bush garb, sometimes industrial labourers. The villains take various forms: serpents, harpies, bloodsucking insects, menacing aliens, but above all the Fat Man, the swollen, grotesque embodiment of capitalist greed. Dyrenfurth observes that Mr Fat is a far more ubiquitous device in Australian radical iconography than its counterparts elsewhere. British cartoons used a variety of villains: aristocratic loafers, rapacious landlords, ruthless sweaters, mendacious press barons. Those in the United States were less likely to personify capitalism with a generic capitalist villain than to depict combines and trusts.

'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ said historian David Lowenthal in 1985, adopting L.P. Hartley’s famous opening line from The Go-Between. Most historians agree, proceeding from the premise that the past is remote and in need of discovery, and that there is no automatic link between people in the present and those in the past. It is a supposition in complete contradistinction to non-professionals’ ideas about the past, according to historians Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, directors of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. For most Australians, history takes place where they ‘feel at home’. That is, it is a domesticated pursuit, consumed in familiar surrounds, and more often than not related most intimately to family and genealogy.

Gwen Good’s migration to Perth in 1963 turned out well. She loved Australia, the climate that turned life into one long summer holiday, and the house that she and her family soon acquired. She was an active member of her church, and a contented wife and mother who revelled in her children. By the 1980s she was ready to give away the bundle of reel-to-reel tapes on which, decades before, the family had conveyed its early impressions of Perth in audio letters to be sent home to England. The letters had come back to her when, in turn, her parents migrated to join the Goods in Perth. They held a past that had blended so seamlessly into the present that it no longer seemed particularly interesting.

For historian Katie Holmes, researching and writing Between the Leaves was a journey of discovery and interpretation. In her examination of the records left by nine women – through their words and the signatures they left on the land – the author discovered some of the meanings that writing and gardening held for them. Holmes was also drawn to ways an individual’s story can illuminate a larger picture. Sites of women’s stories are also places where the nation’s stories can be found: ‘Within this book, women’s home and garden belong in history, rather than as a mere adjunct to it.’

When the United States recently announced its commitment to enforce a ‘no-fly zone’ in Libya, the State Department spokesman was asked whether the United States was now at war. He could only manage a floundering non-answer. The unfortunate spokesman’s difficulty with this apparently simple question is a reminder of the vast changes in the nature of military conflict in recent decades. Major conflicts are seldom a matter of one state formally declaring war on another, with a largely agreed set of rules on the conduct of operations (sometimes flouted in horrific ways) and with some generally accepted markers of victory and defeat.