Themes vs topics in history

I am sorry for the delay in posting here. I have continuing computer problems.

One of the things that I have been mulling over in the context of my general history of New England is the question of themes versus topics.

I was reading some material on New England architects. I need this because I need to be able to explain details of the built environment. However, I don't want to devote a separate section to architects as such. Rather, I want to build the material into the general discussion.

It's not that architects and architecture are nor important, they are. It's just that in a broad history I don't want to focus on them as such. This led me to make a distinction between themes and topics.

To my mind, a theme is a broad unifying element that crosses time. By contrast, a topic is something that supports a theme, but which may appear in different forms with different themes and may cross themes.

Squatting is a theme. As they became established and more secure, they built big houses designed in many cases by architects. From this perspective, architects are a topic that links to one or more themes.

All this may seem a bit arcane, but I am struggling with the best way of organising a mass of material.

Having overrun my original target for completing the book by a considerable margin, I have now set a new first draft completion date of 20 December. To do this, I need to be far more organised than I have to this point!

Writing multi-layered history

In history as in other subjects, the form of writing depends upon purpose. In my case, I have been thinking about what I call multi-layered history, histories covering broad topics or geographic areas where the challenge is to tell a multi-faceted story in circumstances of choice in selection of topic, examples and evidence.

While this topic is not new here, it's fresh in my mind because over the weekend I read Fiona Capp's My Blood's Country (Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2010). The book is subtitled on the front cover but not elsewhere "A journey through the landscapes that inspired Judith Wright's poetry". In a way that's right, although the core of the book is really a memoir on the relationships between Judith's poetry, landscape and life.

Fiona met Judith first through her poetry and then personally late in Judith's life. This is a view looking back, seeking to discover and understand a much lover author.

I don't think that I ever met Judith, but I have known of her all my life because of connections between the Wrights and my own family. After I first read Generations of Men, I actually went and found the remains of the house that Judith referred to in that book.

There are very special issues involved in writing a history that involves people you know or know of, especially where those people are subject to multiple interpretations. The people acquire can a life of their own independent of your perceptions of them and their life; they become multiple people, separated by perception. They are there as you knew them, but then they also exist as creations in other peoples' minds. They are the same, but then they are not.

There is an odd dissonance here that I will write about in a little more detail on my personal blog. For the moment, I want to focus on Judith Wright as a figure in New England history and, more importantly, in the writing of New England history.

As a family, the Wrights form one thread in the general history of New England. Judith's father PA and brother Peter had a very direct impact on aspects of New England life, including the establishment and growth of the University of New England and the new state cause. Judith herself left New England to go to Brisbane , but her writing is a resource on aspects of New England life and fed back into New England history. The Wrights as a whole in some ways mirror the rise and fall of New England.

Because Judith Wright is such a well known literary figure, because she retained connections with New England in a way that, say, Patrick White did not, because so many people have written about her, it would be very easy to use her as major unifying figure in the history of New England in the second half of the twentieth century. Her own changes in views, her changing views on land and family, her distress at the loss of the family properties, all lend themselves to dramatic presentation.

The temptation is almost irresistible. Her own turn of phrase, the views of others including Fiona, provide a huge resource. Yet to focus on Judith would, to my mind, be an error. There is a balance question, for others had different views.

Let me link this back to the opening idea of multi-layered history.

Judith Wright's views were formed by the combination of personality and experience. They were unique to her. They provide a special perspective on New England history, and can be used to layer the New England experience. From my perspective this is very important, because one of the issues I am conscious of is the need to show that what I am writing about is important.

At one level, this shouldn't matter. History is history. To argue that New England history is in some way important beyond the simple history of an area is to risk falling into the equivalent of a regional variant of the big man in history concept. Yet we live in a world where changing fashions have effectively relegated the history of the area that I am interested in to the dust-heap of Australian history, a simple footnote in a broader story. The local sound and fury is relegated to what, nothing?, in that broader story. I can't accept that view.

In these circumstances, I am sure that you can see my temptation to, in a sense, misuse Judith. Fortunately, I have so much material that I can balance Judith with the views and experiences of others.

Now I want to make an apparently self-evident point.

We live in an internet world. The internet is a wonderful tool. I couldn't write what I do sitting in a quiet Sydney suburban street without it. The internet provides a free-lance writer like me with access to information that I could not otherwise see. Yet the internet is very much a creature of fashion. Much of the information I need is not on the internet.

Behind me as I write is a bookcase on New England history. I have been buying these books for more than thirty years. You won't find any of them on the internet.

The books vary in quality. Some are the stories of properties, others personal memoirs, some local histories, some novels or books of poetry. Between them, they are critical to me in presenting my overlays.

I do not know that I can achieve my dream of writing a properly textured history of New England. I am always behind. Still, the fascination of people, culture and landscape holds me. I strive to tell a story, to re-create a past world, to hope that I can show something of the fascination of this particular slice of Australia's past.        

Dates for early Aboriginal settlement in the Hunter

I have bogged down in preparing New England's Aborigines stocktake May 2011. I was going to leave it as the front post until complete, but that was on the basis that I was updating it regularly. In the meantime, other things pass the blog by.

In 6500-year-old heritage junked, the Newcastle Herald reports on the results of a dig on Newcastle's Kentucky Fried Chicken site. This found carbon-dated evidence of Aboriginal occupation dating back between 6716 and 6502 years – the oldest evidence of human settlement in Newcastle.

I don't want to comment at the moment on the detail because I am leaving for Canberra in a little while, just record it for later reference.

New England's Aborigines stocktake May 2011

Over on the New England Australia blog I have started bringing up a series that looks at New England Aboriginal life and mixes past and present. The entry point for the series is here.

It is quite some time since I have done a consolidation of the various posts I have written on the history of New England's Aboriginal peoples. There are quite a few now.

Over the next week or so, I am going to use this post as a consolidation point. I will keep it as the front post until I have finished. So please drop back from time to time until I have finished.

Please note that there is some replication between the posts. That's inevitable in the blogging format.

Please note, too, that my views have changed over time. I have put the posts in date order so that you can see the changes.   

Historiography

• This post from 25 June 2007, Towards a Course on the History of New England- The Colonial Period, looks at how a school course might be structured, including the approach as I saw it then to the integration of Aboriginal history.
• 5 October 2009, Sandra Bowdler on Bora sites
• 19 October, 2009, Bibliography of Aboriginal dreaming stories
• 6 April 2010, Anne Curthoy's Freedom Ride.
• 1 June 2010, Unrecognised and now almost unknown: explorations through the history of the broader New England
• 27 December 2010, Social Change in New England 1950-2000 11: the Aborigines
• 13 January 2011, Discovering Aboriginal New England

Aborigines & the Changing Environment

• 17 August 2010, Aboriginal populations and sea level change

Biography

• 2 March 2008, Aboriginal midwife - the mystery of May Yarrowyck
• 23 May 2009, May Yarrowyck - an update

Language

• 17 December 2008, New England's Aborigines - The work of Professor Peter Austin on linguistics.
• 7 November 2009, Impact of State Boundaries on Aboriginal Language Groups
• 15 January 2011, Environment and the distribution of Aboriginal languages in NSW
• 2 May 2011,Introduction to New England's Aboriginal languages

Warfare

• 25 February 2011, Introducing warfare in Aboriginal Australia

NEH Blog Performance April 2011

The graph on the right shows traffic (yellow) and page views (yellow plus red) on this blog to the end of April.
The most popular posts in April were:

• Hunter Valley Aboriginal Groups 157 page views
• NSW Aboriginal Languages Map 84 page views
• Geography of New England - Introduction 61 page views
• Social Change in New England 1950-2000 11: the Aborigines 47 page views
• How fast do horses travel? 43 pages
• Environment and the distribution of Aboriginal languages in NSW 35 page views
• Clarence Valley timeline 31 pages
• New England's Aboriginal Languages 25 pages
• The importance of dates in history 25 page views
• New England Australia - Hunter River catchment map 23 page views

Round the history blogs 11 - Australian focus

It's been over three months since my last history blog round-up! Today, I want to focus on Australian history blogs.

Springwood Historians is a new blog focusing on the local history of Springwood in the Blue Mountains. These local history blogs are very important because they give people like me a base to build from in writing broader histories.

Gordon Smith's Old News from Armidale & New England continues to provide sometimes random excerpts from old newspapers. I love the serendipity of it all. His Impersonation at Exam provides a 1943 example of alleged exam cheating that made the courts. His Death Of Mr. E. C. Sommerlad records the death of a New England pressman who had national reach.

ART and ARCHITECTURE, mainly continues to record details of the visual past. I remain of the view that this is one of Australia's best history blogs. It doesn't always deal just with Australia, and that's one of its strengths.

Looking up — Sydney's history from a new angle is a new blog from the Dictionary of Sydney. Its very good and well worth a visit. However, here I want to express a gripe.

On pure population ratio terms, the history of the area that I write about, Northern NSW or the broader New England, should get a third of the money going to support Sydney history. It doesn't. It would be lucky to get 5%. This actually distorts the writing of history.

I found the new Sydney blog through Archives Outside's April link roundup post. this, too, is worth a read.

In How I work with my material- Access, the Resident Judge of Port Phillip deals with the question of how to order research material. I must admit to feeling a sense of helplessness here. As an independent researcher, I neither know nor have access to the type of things she is talking about.

In The deployment of Allied land forces in 1942, Nigel Davies responds to criticisms about his analysis of the deployment of Allied Divisions in 1942.

I read this post quite carefully because I think that Nigel's argument is important. Essentially, he argues two things. First, you have to get your statistics right.  Secondly, in making judgements you have to look at the overall flow of the war. What might happen is really more important than what did happen in considering deployments.

Why do I say that this post of Nigel's is important? Surely his arguments are self-evident? Not so.

Here in Australia we have a very strong tendency to focus just on Australia, not Australia's position in what was a global conflict. This actually distorts judgements.

Further, war is about what ifs. What if the Germans had deployed resources south and east instead of getting sucked into street fighting in Russia? If they had seized Middle East oil supplies then the outcome of the war could well have been different. British planning had to take this into account. 

All for now. 

NSW, exhibitions & confusions

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.        

How to manage the Wars in regional history

I am struggling to post here because of the pressures of my other writing. Today, just a brief post triggered by two other posts that I have written.

On my personal blog, ANZAC Day, national identity & the power of images is a general post on ANZAC Day. As always with my posts, I have tried to build in a little bit of history. Then at the other end of the spectrum on the New England, Australia blog, A New England family war story is a purely personal short piece on my own family's history.

From my viewpoint, these two posts raised a question in my mind: how best to handle global events and especially the First and Second World Wars in local or regional histories? I am not posing this as an especially complex question, simply the latest that I am considering.

The usual approach is to focus on the home front, the purely local reaction to the event. Sometimes that's okay, yet when you get an event like the wars that took so many people away, can you write a proper history without reflecting on their experiences?

I think that the answer's clearly no, but then you have a problem. How do you localise the event?

I found that when I was writing my biography of David Drummond's life up to 1942 I had to do a fair bit of research on both World Wars in order to define events and set a context. However, my focus on the man helped, because it determined what should be included.

New England is more complex, because now we are dealing with a much bigger area in geography and population. My feeling is that I need to identify and focus on those military forces that were especially recruited from Northern New South Wales. While I have some feel for the First World War, my overall knowledge is quite inadequate. I just don't know.

Something else to research. Sigh!             

Fly paper & chip heaters

My last post, Maslyn William's New England, introduced this writer. Later, I extended my analysis in a post on my personal blog, Problems with literature & locale.

In William's story of his life near Tenterfield in the 1920s there are references to day to day things now gone.

I wonder how many Australians now remember fly paper?

In sheep country like Tenterfield or Armidale, flies are common. Hiking through open country as a scout, the flies would gather around the back of the packs attracted by the salt. In houses without screens these flies were a constant problem. Fly paper - in our case a long yellow sticky paper hanging from the light or ceiling - was one answer because it attracted flies who then stuck.

Another thing now largely gone were chip heaters. Wikipedia describes them in this way:

The chip heater is a single point, tankless, domestic hot water system popular in Australia and New Zealand from c1880s until the 1960s. Examples of this form of domestic water heating are still in current use.

The chip heater consisted of a cylindrical unit with a fire box and flue through which a water pipe was run. Water was drawn from a cold water tank, circulated through the fire box and when heated was drawn off to the area where it was used typically in a bath or shower.

The fire box was relatively small and fed by newspaper, with pine cones, small twigs and chips from the wood heap. There often was an ash box under the fire box which also allowed air under the fire as well as various dampers in the flue. The use of chips from the wood pile gave the heater its name – chip heater.

Water was run in at a trickle otherwise it did not get very hot. The rate of combustion was controlled by the flues and the ash box. With lots of fuel and the flues open the water could be quickly boiled which was not a desirable result. With practice the correct combination of fuel, flue settings and water flow could result in a decent hot shower or bath in about 20 min.

We had a chip heater in the bathroom when we were young kids. There was a real excitement in lighting it and then keeping it fed while we waited for the water to heat for our bath!

Maslyn William's New England

While in Armidale to deliver my paper on social change in Australia's New England 1950-2000 I went book shopping. One of the books I brought was Maslyn William's His Mother's Country (Melbourne University Press, Carton, 1988). Answers.com describes his life in this way:

Maslyn Williams (1911-1999), born England, grew up in NSW on rural properties in the New England and Southern Highlands districts, after the deaths of both his parents. His early interest in writing, music and films led to a career in film-making. He was appointed as writer-producer to the Official War Film and Photographic Unit in 1940 and served in the Middle East and the Pacific. He subsequently made films in Europe, Australia and New Guinea, gaining several awards, including a gold medal at the Venice Biennale. In 1962 he gave up film-making to concentrate on writing and is the author of several books on China, Cambodia, Papua, New Guinea and Indonesia. He wrote four novels, The Far Side of the Sky (1967), The Benefactors (1971, published as Dubu in the USA), Florence Copley of Romney (1974) and The Temple (1982), and an autobiography, His Mother's Country (1988). In 1988 Williams won the FAW Christina Stead Award and the Douglas Stewart Prize in the 1989 State literary awards for His Mother's Country. Written in the third person, the autobiography describes both his experiences in 1920s New England, the lives and personalities of numerous individuals he encountered, and the distinctive identity of the landscape which ultimately claimed his loyalty. Williams was an emeritus fellow of the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

I knew of Maslyn Williams as an Australian writer and film maker, but had no idea of the New England connection. While there are elements of the book that I disagree with,  regional directors of education in NSW came later, it is a wonderfully evocative account of rural life on the Northern Tablelands in the 1920s.

Knowing the people and area in the way I do, I kept on adding bits to his story as I read!

The book is long out of print, but if you can find a second hand copy, I really would recommend that you read it. Like all good books, you don't need to know anything about the area to enjoy it. It stands completely self-contained.