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    The Case For Ordinary People In National History: Towards New Narratives Of Australia’s Past
    The Case For Ordinary People In National History: Towards New Narratives Of Australia’s Past
    The Case For Ordinary People In National History: Towards New Narratives Of Australia’s Past
    Ebook58 pages46 minutes

    The Case For Ordinary People In National History: Towards New Narratives Of Australia’s Past

    By Justin Cahill

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    About this ebook

    The settlement of Australia and New Zealand were among the most ambitions experiments in social engineering ever attempted. But the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who made it happen are often absent from the standard histories.

    This is my case for including ordinary people in national history. It describes an emerging genre of history known as the ‘new history from below’, which focuses on individual experiences to give agency to those left out of the history they helped to make. This approach to national history, I believe, will provide us with a more accurate account of our past and help resolve the corrosive impact of the ‘History Wars’.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJustin Cahill
    Release dateJan 21, 2015
    ISBN9781310155284
    The Case For Ordinary People In National History: Towards New Narratives Of Australia’s Past
    Author

    Justin Cahill

    Welcome to my Smashwords profile.I am a New Zealand-born writer, based in Sydney. My main interests are nature and history.My thesis was on the negotiations between the British and Chinese governments over the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. It was used as a source in Dr John Wong’s Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, the standard work on that conflict.I wrote a column on the natural history of the Wolli Creek Valley for the Earlwood News (sadly, now defunct) between 1992 and 1998.My short biography of the leading Australian ornithologist, Alfred North (1855-1917), was published in 1998.I write regular reviews on books about history for my blog,’ Justin Cahill Reviews’ and Booktopia. I’m also a regular contributor to the Sydney Morning Herald's 'Heckler' column.My current projects include completing the first history of European settlement in Australia and New Zealand told from the perspective of ordinary people and a study of the extinction of Sydney’s native birds.After much thought, I decided to make my work available on Smashwords. Australia and New Zealand both have reasonably healthy print publishing industries. But, like it or not, the future lies with digital publishing.So I’m grateful to Mark Coker for having the vision to establish Smashwords and for the opportunity to distribute my work on it.

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      Book preview

      The Case For Ordinary People In National History - Justin Cahill

      The case for ordinary people in national history

      Towards new narratives of Australia’s past

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2015 Justin Cahill

      Discover other titles by Justin Cahill at Smashwords.com

      Please direct all inquiries to Justin Cahill at

      PO Box 108, Lindfield, 2070

      New South Wales, Australia

      or e-mail to jpjc@ozemail.com.au

      Remarks to the Canterbury and District Historical Society

      27 January 2015

      "One of the very great drawbacks of generalizing social-science history, with its reliance

      on averages and statistics, was its virtual elimination of the individual human being in

      favour of anonymous groups and trends. To reduce every human being to a statistic, a social type,

      or the mouthpiece of a collective discourse is to do violence to the complexity of human

      nature, social circumstances and cultural life."

      - Richard Evans, In Defence of History, Granta Books, London, 1997, p.189.

      "…I never found the answer to the relationship between the characters in the front of the stage and the backdrop. I was weak on backdrop…. If I had the time over again I would try to do more, look more at the interconnection between the material structure of society and the characters."

      - Manning Clark in Max Crawford, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, Making History,

      McPhee Gribble Publishers Pty Ltd, Fitzroy and Penguin Books Australia Ltd,

      Ringwood, 1985, p.65.

      Cover: Watercolour attributed to Edward Close entitled The Costumes of the Australasians, painted between about 1817 and 1840. It is a rare contemporary record of what ordinary people wore in early to mid-nineteenth century Sydney and an even rarer record of what convicts wore - the man dressed in yellow is a convict. ‘Edwards Close, NSW Sketchbook’, Mitchell Library, PXA 1187.

      Preface

      We are all here this evening as we are devoted to history. But when we read accounts of Australia’s past, the views we are often presented are those of governors and prime ministers, the clergy, wealthy merchants or celebrity criminals. We often get what David Hainsworth called the " …‘Government House verandah’ point of view’ ".

      Ordinary people living their day-to-day lives are generally absent. When they are mentioned, their treatment is usually cursory. They are passed over with bland generalisations or lumped together and reduced to a broad series of social or economic trends. At best, they are described as ‘public opinion’. At worst, they are ‘the mob’ or ‘the rabble.’

      This omission is difficult to understand, especially in Australia - and New Zealand. Both countries resulted from unprecedented, largest-scale social experiments that involved hundreds of thousands of individuals from all walks of life. A colony was established here for the specific purpose of transporting convicts and sourcing timber and flax for the Royal Navy. Other settlements were established in Adelaide and Canterbury under Wakefield’s theory of ‘systematic colonisation.’

      But while there are many books on the transportation of convicts to Botany Bay and the efforts to re-create English society in New Zealand, ordinary people are rarely included in the national history they helped to make.

      Why this has happened is difficult to explain. There is no shortage of primary sources. They range from archaeological remains, surviving buildings and structures and everyday artefacts to land and parish records, civil registration and census returns, shipping records, diaries, letters, newspapers, trial reports, petitions included among the Colonial Secretary’s records, paintings, photographs and memoirs and oral history recordings. These sources are readily available in archives, libraries and museums throughout Australia and New Zealand.

      Many are freely available on-line. They include the Old Bailey transcripts and Bruce Kercher’s early NSW law reports: both are jam-packed with details of the lives of ordinary people.

      Some historians have used these sources to provide an insight into the lives of convicts, traders or early settlers. But their works

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