Chapter 1: Introduction to Making Public Histories

Nikita Vanderbyl and Kat Ellinghaus

The urge to use history to define and consolidate national identity has never gone away, especially in the political sphere, and especially around moments of national celebration. We can, for example, detect this impulse in Prime Minister John Howard’s statements about the writing of Australian history in his Australia Day speech in 2006. Howard expressed his worries that Australian children were being taught too much about how the beginnings of this nation rested on stolen land and violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, instead of more positive stories about how Australia came to be. ‘In the end,’ Howard, said, ‘young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history. … Let us indeed celebrate our diversity. But we should also affirm the sentiment that propelled our nation to Federation 100 years ago – One People, One Destiny.’ Howard’s determination to affirm ‘One People, One Destiny’ led, in 2007, to the government convening a ‘History Summit’ that tried to promote and control the teaching of history within primary and secondary schools.^[1] Since that time the Australia Day national holiday has become the impetus for debates about national identity, settler colonialism and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and equality. In 2023, Matthew Bach, the Victorian shadow Minister for education, noted that these conversations were often marked by historical illiteracy, and complained about the sorry state of the history curriculum. ‘Victorian students, across the secondary years, simply aren’t being taught about our history,’ he wrote in the Guardian. Until Australians’ ‘current lack of basic historical knowledge’ was addressed, any discussions about Australia Day would be ‘tedious and divisive’.^[2]

But history-making itself is not seen as the answer by everyone. In recent years, there has been growing recognition that history is not a neutral discipline, that its foundations in European knowledge systems ignore other knowledge systems and ways of thinking about the world. Indigenous scholars make this point most powerfully. In 2008 Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote from a Māori perspective: ‘[T]he sense of history conveyed by [Indigenous epistemologies] … is not the same thing as the discipline of history, and so [she says] our accounts collide, crash into each other […] History is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others. It is because of this relationship with power that we have been excluded, marginalized and ‘Othered’.^[3]

Victoria Grieves-Williams, a Tasmanian and Warraimay historian, outlines a number of ways in which Aboriginal philosophy incorporates a very different theory and approach. Culturally, Grieves-Williams writes, Aboriginal people do not engage with history as a celebratory or foundational narrative. Indeed, history is not ‘in the past’ but is still very much in the present. She argues that for many Aboriginal people, any difficult history is not forgotten until it is dealt with – and then it is truly left behind. Stories are retained to ensure historical wrongs are addressed and when they are, they are no longer told. People with authority and knowledge lead the resolution of disputes, the wrongs are righted, including through ceremony, and then everyone can move on. The business of the past is then declared to be finished. Grieves argues that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will not belong to the nation state until their history and their ways of doing history are incorporated into the narrative of the nation and resolved.^[4]

Non-Indigenous historians are also grappling with new ways of writing history. Most recently Anna Clark’s Making Australian History has explored how Australian history has been written, revised, and reinterpreted by successive generations of historians.^[5] Her focus on key texts extends the scope of primary historical sources to include poetry and Indigenous rock art among others. Motivated by the capacity of history to draw attention to those whose voices have been marginalised, Stuart Macintyre’s Winners and Losers: the pursuit of social justice in Australian history drew attention to the significance of history in public life as a future-oriented discipline whose practitioners seek to make a difference. Connecting history to politics, Paula Hamilton, Paul Ashton and Tanya Evans have recently analysed public history in the context of ‘difficult times’.^[6] These authors are interested in what constitutes public history across the world, while also exploring new formats of history-making (including podcasting, Facebook and historical re-enactment). They draw attention to the role of the historian in disruptive times as being necessarily public, whose intention is to influence the present by contributing to public policy and advocacy. Questions arise as to the position of the historian as neutral, complicit, or embedded within the communities about which they write.

Making Public Histories: Australian history beyond the university is based on work produced at La Trobe University in the ‘Making History’ subject. This capstone subject of the History major aims to place students directly into debates about how public histories are, and should be, made. It explores how history manifests in parks, on webpages, in museums, in people’s homes and even on bodies. We start with weeks on the large institutional ways in which the public (broadly defined) encounters history: statues, archives, museums and schools. We then move onto more unofficial, ‘unregulated’, popular forums: such as film and television, Wikipedia, tourist sites, history as generated by communities and engaged in by family historians.

We also think about the many roles the past plays in our lives. How is history utilised by politicians? How is history used to inform debates about our future? And how does the present inform what we look for in the past?  Underpinning all this is a question about the ethics of the discipline itself: who makes history? Who tells these stories? And whose stories get left out?

The words we write as historians, and how we shape them, and the subjects about which we write – or don’t write – have power, and power beyond the time they were written. It goes without saying that good historians carefully analyse and critique their evidence, they provide and discuss points of view that are contrary to or challenge their ideas about the historical events they are discussing. They attempt to create an historical account which is as true and as objective as is possible from the historian’s particular perspective.

One of the dangers of treating objectivity as the primary way in which we judge ‘good history’ is that historians might go about their business of trying to write well-researched historical narratives with little thought about how their work reaches beyond the academy. They might research a subject simply because it hasn’t been researched before. They might treat archives as treasure troves waiting to be mined, with little thought about how those records got there and whether they contain sensitive information that might hurt people in the present day. They might only rarely reach beyond dusty archival records to engage with the living contemporary communities about whose past they are writing. Indeed, there is an increasing movement for historians to engage more with the communities which they research.^[7]

3. How can historical knowledge be co-produced with community input?

Historians work most often from archival sources – it is what sets the discipline of history apart from adjacent disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and political science. While many historians do oral history, and have relationships with the public, and through published research, history remains a discipline that rests on individual research, traditionally in archives and libraries, where the literal requirement for quiet or silence further precludes collaborative working. Historians sift through documentary sources to reconstruct and understand what happened and why, but usually as individuals, as lone scholars, who then publish sole-authored books and journal articles.^[8]

‘Making History’ asks students to explore what issues arise when historians do work in collaboration with communities. What happens when historians draw on perspectives that come from outside the archive, and what happens when they share their authority with stakeholders? How do public and community histories challenge and change the way historical research projects are conceived, researched, and written? Can blurring boundaries between historians and communities enable multiple voices to be heard in the historiographical record?

Making Public Histories: Australian history beyond the university presents new and innovative answers to these questions, expressed through fascinating case studies of the past. It is composed of examples of public history research investigating these themes and questions.

This Open Education Resource is divided into two sections, one showcasing student work and one showcasing the work of La Trobe academics. The major assessment in ‘Making History’ entails researching an Australian topic and presenting it in one of four formats for a public audience. Choosing between a Wikipedia page, a podcast, an illustrated essay or an exhibition display proposal, students inhabit the role of a historian and contend with the ethical imperatives this brings. As a third-year capstone subject, critically engaging with the world of history-making beyond the university is an essential focus.

By presenting their work to an audience beyond the history department staff, student-authors have the opportunity to disseminate and celebrate their work. The final week of each semester is dedicated to a mini conference celebrating their research achievements. This culminating experience means the authors in this book have gone from being a student of history to a history-maker.

Through a simulation of the challenges and activities undertaken by historians in many different approaches to history-making, students gain authentic experience which prepares them for their careers after university. ‘Making History’ becomes a space in which to test complex and challenging scenarios, including navigating the copyright and licensing requirements for publicly accessible presentations of their chosen topic, and unpacking the ethical implications of their role as the history-maker. Negotiating the research process, including working through archival materials and institutions, can be testing for every researcher; ‘Making History’ supports students as they gain independence in these tasks and pursue critical enquiry and creativity in their chosen projects. The subject forms a liminal space where students can inhabit the transition from inside to outside university walls, with the support of professional guides.

In the following chapters, student projects showcase the potential of the podcast, the Wikipedia page, the exhibition space and the illustrated essay as vehicles for public history. Ubiquitous and accessible, podcasts have emerged as a prolific field of history consumption. Not only breaking down the barriers between who produces and consumes history, they have also redefined the presentation and dissemination of historical content. Students have drawn from the audio-technician’s bag of tools to craft their audio histories, including thinking about sounds, transitions and narrative devices often previously reserved for the dramatic and fictional genres.

Wikipedia’s fortunes as a less-than-honourable reference in undergraduate assignments are put under the spotlight by projects in Making Public Histories. Students adopting this format must follow Wikipedia’s own rules – of engagement, referencing and accessibility of sources – which in turn provokes students to think differently about questions of plagiarism. Embracing the unique task of writing (potentially) for the entire English-speaking corner of the Internet, students explore knowledge-making in the public domain in ways that no other assessment format can allow.

Using objects to access the past enables a form of history-making that connects students with all that Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (or GLAM) organisations have to offer. Utilising the exhibition format requires students to construct narratives in three dimensions and to understand how different audiences from differing backgrounds and abilities might encounter their displays. Rather than requiring a physical display, students prepare a proposal for an exhibition. This has the added appeal of allowing students to situate disparately located objects together in a hypothetical dialogue.

Essays are a staple of academic writing; however, the illustrated essay requires the careful incorporation of images and multi-media material. This takes the format into an arena where readers might also find investigative long-form journalism with interactive videos, images, or sound included. Projects utilising archival material are also well suited to this format and complement an immersive reading experience.

The ‘Making History’ subject has evolved since its inception in 2015 and its current form builds upon the work of previous subject coordinators Adrian Jones, Ruth Ford, Roland Burke and Ingrid Sykes. From its very earliest inception in 2005 the subject focussed on giving students who majored in history the chance to reflect on their discipline, and to experience discussions and classes focussed less on content and more on developing the skills they wanted to develop. As the first coordinator, Adrian Jones, describes it, students were encouraged to “own” the role and title of “historian”. Video and illustrated essays formed the primary assessments from 2015 to 2019. Much of this work has been archived on a dedicated internal student blog. In 2020 the subject took on its current form and the desire to continue showcasing the work of students persisted until, with the assistance of the La Trobe Library and eBureau, this publication was born.

A sharper focus on licensing and audience accessibility emerged during the ‘lockdown’ research period of the pandemic, continuing through the era of opening up and ‘living with the virus’ in 2022/2023. Students and researchers alike confronted the challenges of completing research projects with limited access to archives until relatively recently. Clare O’Hanlon’s chapter ‘Plan your research for publishing public history’ takes its inspiration from these recent developments. It is an instructive ‘how to’ for researching and disseminating history publicly, drawing attention to important ethical considerations, and giving practical examples. As access has been restored, we are forced to think anew about when and how historians enter the archive and who their audiences are when they emerge. You, dear reader, might be a student or an amateur historian, you might be based inside a university or an historical society. In all cases you are accessing this text as a piece of open research, made available under license that allows the work to be shared, no profits are to be made from it and appropriate attribution to the authors must be made. It is not behind a paywall or shelved in a library, instead it can be read by anyone with the correct URL.

We believe the historical profession is at an exciting time, a time when we are questioning current and past practices and daring to offer new ways of thinking and working. ‘Making History’ asks students to be part of that change, and we are thrilled to be able to share the work of a new generation of historians in this publication.