I suppose that this short post is a bit of a gripe, one that I would normally put on New England Australia. However, it does have a historiographical point.
In writing German internees, Evocities, skills & Academy Games, I spent some time digging around checking back facts. In doing so, I found a new on-line exhibition Belongings at the NSW Migration Heritage Centre.
One of the difficulties involved in writing a history of a place like New England that does not formally exist is that its history always gets submerged. This makes it much harder to put the pieces together.
NSW, by contrast, exists in a formal sense, so you get official entities like the Centre writing about NSW. There is nothing wrong with that, but it can make it very hard to then disentangle the New England specific elements.
Belongings has just two specific references to New England, Tingha and Trial Bay, both of which I have written about before. Much of the material is state wide, which actually makes it quite useless from my perspective since there is nothing there that I can use.
Just a gripe.
No comments:
Post a Comment