excerpts from Paula Hamilton’s discussion of the relationship between memory and
history
Hamilton, Paula ‘The Knife Edge: debates about memory and history’, Memory and
History in 20th Century Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994
excerpt one
In company with many of the recently published explorations of historical memory I
want to argue for an integral relationship, an essential interdependence between memory
and history, despite claims of great tension and conflict. Luisa Passerini asserts that the
research work in oral history reveals that each one forgets ‘crucial aspects of the society’s
pasts’ and therefore ‘reciprocal critique and elaboration is essential’. Memory is
gradually lost and here the historian steps in to tell the stories that people forget—the
‘gaps’ in the collective remembering. Just as the people do remember what the historians
forget. In any society therefore the historian’s role is an ideological and political one, as
Starn and Davis eloquently remind us:
The explosive pertinence of a remembered detail may challenge repressive or
merely complacent systems of prescriptive memory or history; memory like the
body, may speak in a language that reasoned inquiry will not hear.
The case of Australian historiography and indigenous peoples provides an illuminating
example here. One of the most powerful myths that dominates the Australian historical
landscape is that this is a new country (the corollary of Britain as the old country, home);
and that we have such a short history. Indeed, travellers to Australia from the nineteenth
century onwards would often comment that they perceived it as a place without history.
This idea of a historical tabula rasa is of course a settler story, a British migrant story,
told by several generations of English and European migrants to each other. Memories of
invasion and death of indigenous peoples could more easily be erased, or at least
attenuated, by the migrant experience. Those who came were not ‘burdened by the past’;
they saw opportunity afresh, an empty landscape, lives that could be renewed.
But in the last thirty years there has been a huge shift in our understanding of what
constitutes an Australian past, aspects of which are now fairly well outlined. We have
begun to perceive organised structures of forgetting in relation to the Aboriginal people,
structures which the historians both helped to erect, and many years later, to break down.
Jacques Le Goff, a French historian, says that where societies are predominantly oral, the
shift to the written collective memory offers the best chance of understanding the struggle
for domination over remembrance. For the purpose of this discussion, the importance of
Le Goff’s observation lies in the complex interplay between an oral and a literate culture
to contest the dominant historical narratives, and an even more complicated weaving of
memory and history. There is, for instance, the sustaining of Aboriginal memory through
community and culture (despite attempts to break it down); we also see its re-invention
through memory writing and other cultural forms—autobiographies, novels,
reminiscences, films. In addition, oral histories have been significant, particularly to both
black and white historians, anthropologists, linguists: and so has the music and Songs of
Aboriginal singers. One of the dominant motifs in the urban Aboriginal memory in
particular has been the taking away of children by the State authorities. The separation of
families in a systematic policy of racial destruction did not end in some States until 1969.
These actions provide a focus of considerable emotive power for the politics of memory
in contemporary Australia: ‘They took the children away’ sings Archie Roach in a
popular ballad; the repeated images of children sent away stands in for the painful loss of
a heritage, the journey now to re-unite the families, find the past.
Here memory and history have ‘nourished each other’, as Le Goff would say. In this
instance, memory has successfully challenged history and in the process of that challenge
a white Australian population repeats again and again ‘we had no idea’—a rhetoric of
revelation, a shift in historical consciousness. In some, the search for a new authenticity
leads to the finding of Aboriginal forebears (in the same way that many searched for a
convict ancestor in the 1970s); somewhere in a personal past they search for a black
heritage that makes them not all white, not all oppressors. The Prime Minister, Paul
Keating, has decided to adopt a policy which internalises a shameful past, and his use of
pronouns in the speech to launch the 1993 International Year the the World’s Indigenous
People is pertinent:
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the
diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their
mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion... Imagine if non-Aboriginal
Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history
books.
This speech was written by Keating’s speechwriter, the historian Don Watson, and it is
instructive for the way in which memory has transformed the public discussion about an
Aboriginal past. Many now accept the destruction of Aboriginal society as the dominant
narrative of Aboriginal history, though accepting responsibility and mourning is another
matter. Certainly in this instance memory has successfully ‘unsettled the past’, leaving
the questions unanswered about what else has been strategically ‘forgotten’.
excerpt two
In 1993, partly as a reponse to the public emergence of the POW experience, Prime
Minister Keating opened a new memorial to Australian prisoners of war who died in
North Borneo. At the opening ceremony he said:
Australia should know the truth about its history. A nation is stronger for its
knowledge of shared experience and the experience of these men
should be engraved in the national memory.
This is a tacit acknowledgement that the POW experience had previously been
‘forgotten’ as part of Australian history. However, also part of the reconciliation rhetoric
in the speech is the idea that shared experience’ should be part of the ‘national memory’,
despite our knowledge that it was a traumatic experience, but not in fact shared by all of
us. Who then, is the ‘we’ of the nation? How do I relate to a ‘national memory’?
Defining groups or nations always necessitates a dual process of inclusion and exclusion
and remembering the past is a central mechanism of that process. Many have noted that
forgetting is one of the most powerful forces that shape national remembering. This
socially organised amnesia is not a problem peculiar to Australia. The transmission of
memories in countries such as the United States is, as Michael Kammen says,
problematic in a society which values modernity and all things new, rather than tradition.
The recent revelation that Alex Haley’s literary story of black heritage, the race memory
called Roots was in fact ‘invented’, does not deny its political importance in a climate
that needed to reinvent a past previously suppressed, or carried on only in oral form. It
reveals the need to create a continuity backwards from a present where the politics of
identity are central.
The American historian Kammen has identified several features relating to the politics of
memory at the national level. Though there is a struggle for memory in all countries, it
will emerge as contested in different countries at different times. Also, within each
country various versions of the past circulate simultaneously on varying scales and levels.
As Kammen says, ‘We arouse and arrange our memories to suit our psychic needs’. But
the study of memory often reveals, for instance, a tension between local and nationalist
traditions. In each country, Kammen identifies factors which affect the specificity of the
process and the form that the remembering takes. The first is the role of the government
as the custodian of public memory. In the United States, for example, no Ministry of
Culture exists, unlike Australia, where there is increasing centralisation and a tradition of
strong government involvement in many areas of national activity. On the other hand,
various American government education authorities have at times had an active censoring
role in the interpretation of the past, and how it is remembered in the schools, just as they
have in Japan. In Australia, the various States have differing, school programmes and
there is no national curriculum.
A second factor is the extent of discussion about the contemporary politics of culture and
the degree to which historical issues are publicly contested. This will to a certain extent
involve the role of the press and the cultural authority of the ‘memory specialists’ such as
historians and journalists who bring discussion and debate to public attention. In
Australia of the 1990s, the Prime Minister employs a historian as his major speech writer
and both have attempted to use collective memory for political advantage, facilitating a
sense of historical self-consciousness in order to work towards becoming a republic. The
recent claim by Prime Minister Keating for example, that during the Second World War
Britain had ‘abandoned’ Australia to the war in the Pacific, attempted to draw on popular
myth and anti-British feeling rather than any formal interpretation of events. In fact, this
issue is a matter of debate between historians and judging by the heated public
controversy which ensued, it is also clearly a matter that remains unresolved in popular
memory. Thirdly, the degree of centralisation affects negotiation over memory. There is
often a tension between local memories and a public nationalist rhetoric, a tension
heightened if the national ‘imagined community’ becomes too circumscribed. Gillis calls
the conflict that arises between the local and national traditions a ‘diaIectical’
relationship. For example, local communities may appropriate the material forms of
national commemoration such as war memorials but not necessarily the content, bending
the expression of memory to local concerns.
Reproduced with the permission of the author, Paula Hamilton.