Paula Hamilton

Memory and history in twenty-first century Australia: A survey of the field

This essay surveys the fields of oral history and memory studies in Australia since the publication of the landmark volume Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia in 1994. It argues that the practice of oral history has been central to memory studies in Australia, and explores key texts relating to the memory and commemoration of war, colonialism, Indigenous histories, trauma and witnessing in Australian society.

Connecting with History: Australians and their Pasts

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), the famous American writer and humourist, visited Australia in 1895 as part of a moneymaking lecture tour around the equator. He was broke. Of the many things about the continent with which he was taken, one was its ‘picturesque history — Australia’s speciality’, as he called it.2 By this he meant in the then relatively recently established colonies the propensity of individuals and institutions to make convenient pasts that were usable in the present. History was everywhere to be found in public. Civic promoters gave a ‘capital of humble sheds’ the trappings of ‘the aristocratic quarters of the metropolis of the world’. Didactic monuments and memorials were scattered across the landscape. Tall tales but true were built around self-made men .3

Twenty Years On: feminist histories and digital media

As many scholars have remarked, the ‘conditions of the historian’s craft’ have changed dramatically over the last thirty years and continue to do so ‘in front of our very eyes’. In 2015 we reached the twentieth anniversary of the original feminist digitised archival projects conceived in the flush of a new digital ‘turn’ in scholarship in 1995: Orlando: women’s writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present; The Corvey Project on women’s writing of the romantic era; and the American based Victorian Women Writers Project, were all set up in the same year. They were followed in 1997 by the Perdita Project on early modern women’s manuscripts. Since then many other projects of differing scales have brought historical works written by women into the light of day for the first time and were characteristic of feminist scholars’ initial engagement with digital technologies. Feminist historians and literary scholars have built on the traditional paper-based tenet of the women’s movement to make women ‘visible’, to ‘recover women’s lives’ through the engagement with these new digital archives, although the methodological implications of this massive digitisation of print culture will take some time to be fully explored. Why then has the digital ‘revolution’ often been characterised as a ‘turn’, as though it were a fashion that will pass? There is no doubt that trends in feminist historical theory and practice do seem to be dynamic and changing rapidly; beyond the ‘digital turn’, the ‘transnational turn’, the ‘archival turn’ we are now experiencing the ‘participatory turn’, which has emerged partly as a consequence of the previous ones. Feminism, though, has not been called a ‘turn’ but rather has adapted since the 1970s to new ‘waves’. Limiting as these descriptive monikers are (and Kate Eichhorn amongst others has been critical of segregating feminism into generations and the reifying of feminist historiography through the wave metaphor), they nevertheless speak literally and symbolically about the fluidity of ideas in historical scholarship during these years, moving across geographical spaces and expressed in increasingly different forms. While some historians have treated the advent of digital technologies as though it were a pragmatic event—‘just new tools’—making research easier and more convenient, feminists in this volume are exploring both conceptual and methodological issues about what it means to extend the boundaries of the previously unknowable about the past. From theorists Foucault and Derrida to anthropologists and historians Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton and beyond, the confluence of digital technologies with theoretical reflexivity about the ‘archive’ has encouraged historians to explore the politics of the archiving and later the digitising process, analysing both its gendered and racially determined nature

A cultural history of sound, memory, and the senses

The past 20 years have witnessed a turn towards the sensuous, particularly the aural, as a viable space for critical exploration in History and other Humanities disciplines. This has been informed by a heightened awareness of the role that the senses play in shaping modern identity and understanding of place; and increasingly, how the senses are central to the memory of past experiences and their representation. The result has been a broadening of our historical imagination, which has previously taken the visual for granted and ignored the other senses. Considering how crucial the auditory aspect of life has been, a shift from seeing to hearing past societies offers a further perspective for examining the complexity of historical events and experiences. Historians in many fields have begun to listen to the past, developing new arguments about the history and the memory of sensory experience. This volume builds on scholarship produced over the last twenty years and explores these dimensions by coupling the history of sound and the senses in distinctive ways: through a study of the sound of violence; the sound of voice mediated by technologies and the expression of memory through the senses. Though sound is the most developed field in the study of the sensorium, many argue that each of the senses should not be studied in isolation from each other, and for this reason, the final section incorporates material which emphasizes the sense as relational.

Remembering Changi: Public memory and the popular media

Media arenas are increasingly the place where most of our negotiation over the meaning of the past is carried out. Indeed, many commentators argue that television plays a particularly central role in the shaping of social memory. This paper seeks to examine how the various forms of media are changing the relationship between personal (and often silent) memories and public ones by asking what happens when personal memories of experience, which are not passed on within families — or only in a limited way — finally become public. I argue here that television and the internet, as increasingly interdependent cultural forms, have an important role in mediating between the personal experience and the public memory of events, as well as between genders and generations. As a case study, I examine the audience response to the television series Changi, aired on the ABC in 2001, using comments posted on the Changi guestbook internet forum. From this example, I examine how technologies of popular culture — especially new digital media — interact to create new ‘publics’, thus both increasing democratisation and access for individuals and also encompassing much larger collectives than in former times.