A couple of days ago I sat in on what I expected to be a “history class” for adults. I had expected to find deep discussions of problems arising from researching primary sources, or from how one should construct a narrative to present one’s findings. I was seriously disappointed.
What I encountered was a couple of dozen persons happily listening to presentations about historical figures that we had all learned about in Primary School. The first was about the career of John Flynn (founder of the Royal Flying Doctor Service) Flynn of the Inland, the pioneer of the Royal Flying Doctor Service who established the life-saving (medical, educational, social) aerial services to the outback; the second was about those (in)famous and ill-fated explorers, Burke and Wills.
The Flynn presentation was given by a distant relative of Flynn, and the narrative was just as heroic, inspiring, and proudly nationalistic as we had first learned it in primary school. The Burke and Wills expedition is widely taught as a combination of tragedy and folly, but our new presenter converted it to a comedy of misfits finding themselves way out of their depth: we laughed at the foibles and “rogue characters” involved, but our initial interest had been generated by the story of a tale of heroism and tragedy.
I had expected to be among serious historians. Rather, I found myself among aging school children who had never learned that what they had been taught were comforting myths.
As I listened to the well-known story of “Flynn of the Inland” (though supplemented with many new details for the older audience) I began to wonder about how many other ways the same story could be told. What other histories could be manufactured from the sources?
What if one were to position oneself above the globe for a moment and look down on the imperialist adventures of one portion of the European races finding ways to support white adventurers in the outback of Australia, establishing homesteads to support white run cattle farms on land once assumed to be the homes of the aboriginals. From that perspective we could see Flynn as part of an imperialist program to dispossess the aborigines and paint more of the globe that proud British pink or red.
Or what if we took the viewpoint of Flynn’s spiritual or church backers — those who struggled in vain to rein in their wayward son who began his career with devout intent to convert the indigenous population to Christianity but gradually came to prioritize personal ventures that would redound to his, not God’s, glory?
The “postmodern” perspective of historian Hayden White came to mind. The traditional story of Flynn was here being repeated. It was a glorious tale of adventure, struggle against great odds, recovering from setbacks, doing great things for the white settlers out in those far away “outback” desolate regions. That story was a nationalist romance. But as I suggested above, the story could have been written as a tragedy, as a part of a program that contributed to the displacement of the First Nations. Or a drama of conflict between the spiritual religious roots of Flynn and the final materialistic accomplishments.
And how would we work on verifying the claims of the various sources in our quest to write any of the above episodes?
Similarly for the Burke and Wills story. This one is well known to all Australians. It is told as a tragedy. But our presenter had us laughing at the personal foibles and careless decisions of authorities that led to the “misadventure”. Why do we tell the story in those ways? Why not relate it with a solid dose of outrage at the class snobbery, of disgust at the egotistical proclivities of the authorities and leading members of well-to-do society of the time, of horror at the way bullying egos were ultimately responsible for the deaths of all but one of their party.
My point is that there are different ways of narrating historical events. There are different perspectives through which to see any human actions. There are different attentions to particular moral issues, different ideologies, different personal, social and economic viewpoints.
Someone was telling me recently how different a Japanese novel was from a typical Western one: we are used to plots having resolutions of conflicts at the end but the Japanese work she read did not do this: it finished as it had been read throughout: a world of different perspectives and points of view with no merging of the two or victory of one over the other. The same “historical events” can be written as nationalistic romances, as human tragedies or horror stories, as farcical comedies, as meaningless chronicles.
That’s not how most of us were taught our history in school. We were taught to lionize our heroes, to honour our sacred myths. As a result we often came to deplore other perspectives if ever we encountered them at all.
