What Is Public History Globally?

Working with the Past in the Present

Paul Ashton, Alex Trapeznik, Paul Ashton, Alex Trapeznik

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350033276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Across the globe, history has gone public. With the rise of the internet, family historians are now delving into archives continents apart. Activists look into and recreate the past to promote social justice or environmental causes. Dark and difficult pasts are confronted at sites of commemoration. Artists draw on memory and the past to study the human condition and make meaning in the present. As a result of this democratisation of history, public history movements have now risen to prominence. This groundbreaking edited collection takes a comprehensive look at public history throughout the world. Divided into three sections - Background, Definitions and Issues; Approaches and Methods; and Sites of Public History - it contextualises public history in eleven different countries, explores the main research skills and methods of the discipline and illustrates public history research with a variety of global case studies. What is Public History Globally? provides an in-depth examination of the ways in which ordinary people become active participants in historical processes and it will be an invaluable resource for advance undergraduates and postgraduates studying public history, museology and heritage studies.

Part I

Background, Definitions and Issues

1

Public History in Australia: History in Place

Lisa Murray and Mark Dunn

Australia is a country haunted by its history. In mid-2017 this was brought vividly to life with a graffiti attack on two statues in Sydney’s Hyde Park: one of Captain Cook erected over a hundred years ago and one of Governor Macquarie barely five years old. Inspired by the removal of statues commemorating the Civil War in America’s south, the tagged colonial markers in Sydney reignited, if only briefly, the raging debates about Australia’s past that had fuelled the history wars in the early 2000s. For a nation, where a common lament is that we have very little history, scratching at the scab of the colonial past quickly put paid to that. The story of public history in Australia is one of highs and lows, as Australians grapple with the legacies of the British colonial enterprise. Public history in Australia has been shaped by the different dynamics and by initiatives and organizations of each state, so that it is sometimes hard to give a sense of a national agenda or narrative for public history.

The assumption of history’s value or benefits underlies the work of all historians, but particularly public historians. The benefits of history are many. The past is frequently invoked by public institutions for the lessons it teaches. Understanding our history can guide us, tells us where we have been, how we have got to where we are, and if we understand this, can help the community in planning for the future. History can confirm and enhance identity, while also challenging it. It allows people to acquire and sustain roots, it can inspire, console and condemn.

History can also be a burden. While it can reinforce traditions and social values, history can also be a form of cultural amnesia. People often lament: ‘Why didn’t we know?’; ‘Why wasn’t I taught this?’ History can sometimes work to help us to forget, rather than remember. History can also be oppressive and stifle innovation. The misuse of history, even its abuse, can be a threat. Public historians in Australia often get embroiled in local or national politics and need to remain vigilant and critical.¹

A public historian in Australia may be narrowly defined as a professional, trained historian who often works outside the academy and whose historical skills are utilized producing histories for a general audience, rather than exclusively for their academic peers. And these histories are consumed and discussed in the public realm of our communities, rather than being exclusively a conversation between academics. There is a strong contingency of freelance historians, especially in the eastern states of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria. Their clients are private as well as public and professional institutions. The output of professional historians can also feed into work that is not necessarily directly for public consumption, but influences decisions that affect the public more broadly. Historians engaged in heritage projects, in policy-making, in court work, in land titles and land claims and other institutional applications all produce work and reports that influence decision making around historical issues.

But public history in Australia may be conceived in wider terms. British historian John Tosh has described public history as a broad umbrella that covers the varied ways historians make a public impact, raise the profile of the profession with the public and contribute to the level of historical knowledge in society.² This statement is as true for Australia as it is for Britain. You will find public historians in Australia working in museums and libraries, archives and government departments, in broadcast radio, film and television, as well as in the allied fields of archaeology, heritage and historic conservation. In this broader definition encompassing community-led historical production, public history has been practiced for over a hundred years. The Royal Australian Historical Society (RAHS) was formed in 1901; Charles Bertie, the first city librarian in Sydney, was appointed in 1909 and contributed historical articles to newspapers; and Charles Bean, a journalist, was writing Australia’s First World War history from 1919. Professional historians are also increasingly becoming involved with community history groups as well as long established historical societies such as the RAHS. This chapter charts the development of public history as a profession in Australia.

The emergence of professional historians

Public history developed as a recognized form in Australia, as it did in the United States, Britain and elsewhere in the later 1970s and early 1980s. Although historians had been producing work for the public since long before this, the application of the term reflected the way that historians outside of the academy sought to professionalize their work in the late 1970s and 1980s. In Australia, it was the formation of the Professional Historians Association (PHA) that was a key step in this process. South Australia was the first to establish an association in 1981, followed four years later by NSW, with the other states following over the next decade or so.³ The PHA sought to define the professional skills of public historians and increase the visibility of their work and their contribution to historiography. The setting of fees, model contracts and accreditation levels provided a form of collective bargaining on a state level that pursued institutional recognition and professionalization. The federation of the state professional associations in the mid-1990s encouraged cross-state dialogue, however with an uneven distribution of working historians in NSW and Victoria compared to the remaining states, it has done little to support the development of public history in Australia.⁴

Public history practice has also been shaped by various courses offered at universities in the different states. Among the earliest were public history master’s programs at Monash University in Melbourne and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), both established in 1988. These courses explored the practice and theory of public history through oral history, museum and exhibitions, heritage, media and the use of digital and traditional source material. Graduates were well placed to take advantage of increasing opportunities for historians in the capital cities. Both these coursework degrees have since closed, leaving some cause for concern over the training of public historians in the future. Nevertheless, the Australian Centre for Public History (established 1998) continues at UTS and Macquarie University launched the Centre for Applied History in 2016, so there is some room for optimism. Undergraduate semester courses in public history also survive at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne.

An important industry that supported the professionalization of public historians was the heritage industry. From the early 1970s, the passing of a series of Commonwealth and State heritage acts established a framework for the development of a heritage industry within which historians were to become a central component. Heritage legislation began to appear in each state from the early 1970s.⁵ These acts introduced a new government agency – a Heritage Council – with historians included as members in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland.

At the core of each of these pieces of legislation was a system of assessing heritage with history identified as an essential element. Although in the early years of this process considerable weight was placed on the architectural significance of the built environment, as the industry matured the space for professional historians to work within it expanded as more complex sites and issues were brought forward for consideration.⁶ The influence of social history, oral history and ‘history from below’ has seen increasing numbers of ‘ordinary’ places be accepted onto heritage registers. Factory sites, fibro houses, railway bridges, miners’ camps, woolsheds and corner stores have all been added to state heritage registers through the process of careful historical research, coupled with community involvement. Heritage sites and their associated interpretation is how many people within the Australian community connect with public history.

It was the growth of the heritage industry, particularly in the capital cities, that led to a growing confidence among historians that they might be able to support themselves professionally outside of academia. This growing confidence, in turn attracted more historians to the field, which stimulated historians to push the boundaries of how history can inform the heritage estate. The approach in assessing many heritage sites encouraged multidisciplinary teams of historians, architects, archaeologists and other related professionals to work together. Although cross-disciplinary studies are still in its infancy with many academic historians, it has long been a staple of public history practice in Australia.

Other key moments in the 1990s demonstrate the growth of public history profession in Australia. The founding of the journal Public History Review in 1992, through the support of the PHA (NSW) and other practitioners, provided a national forum in which public and professional historians could debate, discuss and reflect on public history practice, as well as providing a platform for publication and academic discussion. The establishment of the History Council of NSW in 1996, a first in Australia, brought together professionals and institutions practicing history under the one umbrella, to advocate for history in our cultural life, and build the capacity of the history sector. The History Council, through its promotion of History Week, the community and academic history festival first held in 1997, as we...