Public and Popular History

Jerome De Groot, Jerome De Groot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135709433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This interdisciplinary collection considers public and popular history within a global framework, seeking to understand considerations of local, domestic histories and the ways they interact with broader discourses. Grounded in particular local and national situations, the book addresses the issues associated with popular history in a globalised cultural world, such as: how the study of popular history might work in the future; new ways in which the terms 'popular' and 'public' might inform one another and nuance scholarship; transnational, intercultural models of 'pastness'; cultural translatability; and the demand for high-quality work on new technologies and history.

A wide range of international contributors consider a broad selection of locale and media, from American television and Canadian heritage to the representation of history in contemporary Chinese culture. They consider the way in which the study of public or popular texts invoke multiple historiographies, and demonstrate our need to think about public and popular aspects of the past in new, 'emerging' locales, such as China, Eastern Europe and South America.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Rethinking History.

The Making History initiative and Australian popular history

Michelle Arrow

Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia

In 2004, the Australian Liberal–National Party Coalition Government promised that, if re-elected, they would commission Film Australia to produce ten documentaries on Australia’s history. The fruit of this promise was the Making History initiative, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast the resulting ten documentaries during 2007–9. The Making History initiative represented a significant funding boost to the documentary sector, and to history television in particular. The films were distinctive in their presentation of a largely masculine narrative of public achievement as Australia’s past. Yet they were also noteworthy for their reliance on dramatization: like much of history on television, the Making History films offered audiences the possibility of ‘knowing’ the past through emotions, empathy and images, rather than through the expertise of the historian. This paper explores the genesis and development of the Making History initiative in its industrial, televisual and political contexts. It argues that, in order to understand why interpretation of the past has become so contested in contemporary Australia, one needs to pay close attention to the ways in which popular histories communicate and understand the past. Dramatization has the potential to offer an emotional connection to history, and while this might make historians uneasy, its centrality to the popularity of television histories requires close analysis.

During the 2004 Australian federal election campaign, the Liberal Government had a surprise in store for the Australian documentary sector. They promised that if re-elected, they would ‘commission Film Australia to produce a ten-part series of high-quality documentaries on Australia’s history’ (Liberal Party of Australia 2004). Funds of AU$7.5 million were awarded to Film Australia in 2005 to create the Making History initiative, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) broadcast the resulting ten documentaries during 2007–9. The Making History initiative represented a decisive moment in Australian popular history for several reasons. It was the largest single government grant ever given to a television project (Balint 2009) and it was significant because no definitive ‘history of Australia’ has yet been made for television: the closest equivalent was First Australians (2008), an Indigenous history of Australia. The initiative was shaped by Australia’s ‘history wars’: indeed, the films arguably reflected the Howard Liberal–National Government’s attempts to shape a public history of national achievement. While many historians have documented the history wars (see Macintyre and Clark 2003; Curthoys and Docker 2005; Bonnell and Crotty 2008), the role of television histories in these debates remains largely unexplored. Finally, the films are noteworthy in their shaping of an intimate, emotional way of understanding the past, achieved through their insistence on understanding history through individuals and a reliance on dramatization. The Making History films, like many historical documentaries, offered audiences the possibility of ‘knowing’ the past through emotions, empathy and images, rather than through the expertise of the historian.

Many Australian historians, like their overseas counterparts, have been highly critical of the presentation of history on television, and some have called for historians to take a more active role in shaping television histories (McGrath 2009; Balint 2009). Ann McGrath complained that ‘except as talking heads, the historians undertaking the latest research are rarely consulted’, arguing that this revealed ‘an arrogant undervaluing of historical expertise’ (McGrath 2009). Historians are notorious for their criticism of television history’s failure to do what academic history supposedly does: despairing of its reliance on narrative, its intolerance of ambiguities and its tendency towards emotion, rather than reason. Contemporary history television visualizes the past, evokes emotions and creates figures of identification for audiences. These are qualities it shares with other popular histories, including historical fiction, popular textual histories, historical drama and acts of popular memorialization (see Pinto 2010; Scates 2006). Television histories appeal to the emotions as sources of understanding: Corner argues that they ‘involve connection with the moods and subjectivities of the past’, and that ‘the combination of “distant” materiality and forms of subjectivity at once both alien and familiar … is one that television has been able to articulate more powerfully than any other medium’ (Corner 2010, 26–7). The extensive use of dramatizations in the Making History films rendered this combination of the alien and familiar even more potent. The sense of emotional connection popular histories aim to evoke – the idea that the viewer can know what those in the past thought and felt – runs counter to most historians’ notions of historical understanding: in her critique of historical fiction, Inga Clendinnen argued that ‘however seductive they might be, the “insights” of empathy are untestable’ (2006, 27). Yet empathy and emotion are central to contemporary popular histories, and the Making History films offered the possibility of knowing the past through dramatized encounters with well-known figures from Australia’s history. As Robert Rosenstone noted, documentary ‘wants you to feel and care deeply about the events and people of the past’ (2006, 74). These films wanted us to care and feel deeply for a group of powerful white men, which, in the light of the anti-revisionist challenge at the heart of the history wars, appeared to suit the conservative mood of the times. Yet in their dramatization of key moments in these men’s lives, they also offered a potentially unstable, contingent version of the national past. Many of the figures in these films are revealed to have very human frailties – mental illness, strained marriages, arrogance – complicating their depiction of heroic, white masculinity. Historians who dismiss these films outright as ‘bad history’ miss the point: these are works of television, rather than textual history, and ought to be evaluated as such. Such critique also fails to recognize the very real industrial, political and financial limitations within which television histories usually operate.

This paper explores the first tranche of films produced by the Making History initiative: the three-part series Constructing Australia (The bridge, A wire through the heart and Pipe dreams), Mawson: Life and death in Antarctica, Infamous victory: Ben Chifley’s battle for coal, Menzies and Churchill at war, The Prime Minister is missing, Monash: The forgotten Anzac and the two-part series Rogue nation. Such an examination will demonstrate the ways in which an analysis of popular history is vital to understanding contemporary ideas about history, national identity and national belonging: indeed, popular histories are spaces where ‘imagined communities’ of nation are constituted. Ownership and interpretation of the popular past have become increasingly contested in contemporary Australia, and this contest has often been framed in the emotional language of ‘shame’ and ‘pride’. The Making History films, so dependent on dramatization, also engaged with the past in emotional terms: while they aligned with a resurgent, albeit contested, discourse of history as a narrative of national achievement, the promise of emotional access to history offered the potential to complicate and even undermine this discourse. The Making History films have been criticized as ‘bad history’ (see Eklund 2008; Balint 2009), and they can also be regarded as yet more fallout from Australia’s history wars.

Yet in order to understand why television histories construct the past as they do, one needs to understand the ways in which are produced (indeed, to be aware of the limitations in which filmmakers must work) and to assess them as televisual, rather than textual histories. Understanding popular histories such as these can help one understand how and why ownership and interpretation of the past have become increasingly contested in contemporary Australia.

The Making History initiative

Following the confirmation of funding after the Liberal Party was returned to government in 2004, in 2005, Film Australia (later to be merged into Screen Australia) announced that British television producer Alex West would lead the initiative, with responsibility to commission the documentaries in the series. The ABC was also confirmed as the broadcaster of the films (Film Australia 2005b). West announced his ambition of improving Australian screen histories and taking history to a broad audience: ‘the history project is a fantastic opportunity to raise the bar in Australian factual filmmaking while producing a legacy of films that show audiences at home and overseas just how powerful and fascinating this history is’ (Film Australia 2005a). There was also an assurance that West would be working ‘collaboratively with an advisory panel of eminent Australian historians, including Film Australia board member John Hirst’ (Film Australia 2005a). This promise of both technical and scholarly innovation was reiterated in Film Australia’s annual report, which proclaimed that the Making History documentaries would ‘draw on the latest scholarship and use innovative television techniques … to present the story of Australia’s origins, its development and its distinctive character. (Film Australia 2006, 21) To this end, Film Australia invited British producer Liz Hartford (who worked on Simon Schama’s History of Britain) to conduct master classes for filmmakers on producing dramatizations and re-enactments (Hartford 2005). The master classes also included a panel of historians discussing current trends in Australian historical research (Hirst 2005; Arrow 2005; White 2005).

Prior to the selection of the subjects of the films, historians had been invited to contribute to the intellectual scaffolding of the series, albeit in the limited way outlined above. Yet only John Hirst went on to play an active role in his capacity as Film Australia board member. A highly respected, conservative historian, Hirst has served on government committees and boards of public institutions under both Labor and coalition governments: he was also a member of the council of the National Museum of Australia. Hirst saw the potential of the Making History initiative to tell stories of Australian achievements (especially the forging of democratic rights and freedoms) through television, and he shaped the initiative in several ways. He was part of the selection committee which appointed West, impressed by West’s knowledge of current historiography and his outsider status, which to Hirst meant he was ‘free from the history wars’ and brought a fresh perspective to Australia’s history (Hirst 2010). Apart from Hirst, no other historians were invited to help develop the themes for the series: Hirst argued against an advisory panel of historians because he felt, probably correctly, that what filmmakers believed would make a good documentary and ‘what historians think ought to be done are two different things’ (2010). However, he did push for greater political balance in the selection of biographical subjects for the films, noting that, before he successfully argued for a film on Chifley, ‘for a long time there was no-one from the Labor party or the left at all’ (2010). While he found little evidence of direct political interference in the initiative, Hirst reports that it was well known at Film Australia that Arts Minister Kemp was keen to see a documentary made about Monash, to counter what he saw as the dominant narrative of Australia’s ‘failure’ at Gallipoli. This throws doubt on Film Australia Daryl Karp’s assurances to journalist Michael Bodey, who wrote:

In the middle of the culture wars, the Federal Government acceded to a Film Australia funding request to make a documentary series on Australian history. Surely there would be strings attached? […] Daryl Karp denied any interference, saying ‘We put to government that we should be doing something on significant Australians, significant events or significant icons and there’s been absolutely no shaping of it whatsoever’.

As Bodey noted, ‘whether the series has second-guessed itself is a matter of debate’ (2007), and when one considers the environment within which the series was developed, it was inevitable that caution would guide the initiative’s choice of subjects. The Prime Minister had articulated a consistent critique of Australian historians and history institutions over the term of his leadership (1996–2007), and displayed a willingness to intervene in debates around history to promote an affirmative, conservative vision of Australian history. Understanding this vision – and the climate it created for production and broadcasting organizations – is crucial to contextualizing the Making History initiative.

History in the Howard era

Australian history has recently been one of the most contentious areas of cultural, political and media debate: successive Australian prime ministers have used history to define their vision of national identity (Clark 2010). These narratives were shaped in response to the reworking of national history that emerged in the 1970s. These revisionist accounts – derisively dubbed ‘black armband’ histories – were deemed corrosive to national identity: upon his election in 1996, Howard stated that to teach children ‘that we’re part of a sort of racist and bigoted history is something that Australians reject’ (in Macintyre and Clark 2003, 137). In the late 1990s, a series of charged public debates around conflicting interpretations of colonization, labelled the ‘history wars’, animated national historical debate (Macintyre and Clark 2003; Curthoys and Docker 2005). In his book The fabrication of Aboriginal history, independent historian Keith Windschuttle argued that Australian history had fallen prey to an academic orthodoxy which had deliberately distorted frontier history to tell an exaggerated story of white violence which was designed to provoke guilt (2002). An increasingly shrill debate raged around Windschuttle’s claims in the press: historians were dismissed as biased ‘fabricators’ (Ryan 2003) and their authority to speak about Australian history was challenged. Prime Minister Howard’s pronouncements on history emboldened and implicitly endorsed the approach of the antagonists in the history wars, and his actions revealed a desire to influence public presentations of history. Bonnell and Crotty argue that Howard sought to use history to advance his political agendas in two ways:

to contest the supposed hegemony in public debate of an unpatriotic and negative liberal-left intelligentsia in universities and the media; and to assert a positive, nationalistic view of Australian history that would enable Australians to feel ‘comfortable and relaxed’ while they endured more potentially unsettling economic reform. (Bonnell and Crotty 2008, 152)

To undermine ‘uncomfortable’ histories would thus remove their power to unsettle contemporary understandings of nation, and pave the way for a positive picture of the national past. By 2006, Howard could note with pleasure that ‘compared with a decade ago, fewer Australians are ashamed of this nation’s past’ (2006) and several historians have argued that his prime ministership saw the rise of a sentimental nationalism rooted in a broader militarization of Australian history (Lake et al. 2010). Ann Curthoys argued that the Howard Government valued history that stressed ‘achievements rather than difficulties’, and it had ‘little time for social history, for women’s history, for environmental history, or for Indigenous history, when it actually has implications for action in the present’ (Curthoys 2006, 8). The Making History films shared a similar vision of Australia’s past, paralleling Tristram Hunt’s observation that British television histories offered a ‘clear, national narrative of becoming’ (2006, 844).

As the Prime Minister made his views on history clear, his government attempted to influence cultural debate, cutting funding for universities and public broadcasting and making politicized interventions into cultural instituti...