Australian History Now by Clark Anna;Ashton Paul;

Author:Clark, Anna;Ashton, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2013-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

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PUBLIC HISTORY

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Paul Ashton

[W]hat is the nature of history? Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability ...

SEBASTIAN BARRY, THE SECRET SCRIPTURE, FABER & FABER, LONDON, 2008, P 293.

When Duncan Waterson, then Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University – who was later to become my PhD supervisor – turned 50 in 1985, his colleagues held a barbecue for him on Macquarie’s rolling green campus. He and Maurice French had a few years earlier produced a pictorial history of the Darling Downs, published by the Darling Downs Institute Press. It sold brilliantly, going quickly into a second edition. Duncan recalled sitting in the display window of a furniture shop in Toowoomba with Maurice signing numerous copies of their book for admiring locals with huge appetites for the past. Now he and Maurice were working on another photographic history, this time of Queensland. It was subsequently published as From the Frontier (1987). This was a bit much for some of his colleagues, and Duncan’s fiftieth birthday gift from the Department was a pen set. It was hoped that this might bring him back to the written word, the purest medium of the craft.

Duncan had recommended me for my first job as a historian the previous year. But it was not an academic position. The largesse bestowed on universities by the Whitlam government which saw them thrive in the 1970s had vanished. Now, those seeking to begin a career in history had largely to look outside the academy for work. Duncan had been approached by a working group set up in the New South Wales Department of Agriculture to plan its historical contribution to mark the golden jubilee of the Australian Institute for Agricultural Science. At the interview, panel members asked me whether I’d like to write a history of agriculture in Australia in 12 months for inclusion in the Institute’s refereed journal. I said that I would not like to do this: the topic was too large for a journal article, there were insufficient secondary sources for such a project and there was not enough time. We compromised. I was commissioned to write an article on the history of the wheat-growing industry in New South Wales from 1930 to 1984 which would reflect broader trends in agriculture. (During the process I discovered that rust was not just an issue I was having with my car but a destructive disease of wheat.) I also suggested an oral history program with ageing wheat breeders which my research assistant, Fiona Stanton, eventually compiled. (I couldn’t believe it: they employed a research assistant for me and I’d only just finished my honours year. And then they bought us a top-drawer Marantz tape recorder for the oral

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