Tuesday, August 20, 2019

inof on Joan Makes History :: essays research papers

What we’re after, of course, is stories, and we know that history is bulging with beauties. Having found them, we then proceed to fiddle with them to make them the way we want them to be, rather than the way they really were. We get it wrong, willfully and knowingly. But perhaps you could say that the very flagrency of our "getting it wrong" points to the fact that all stories even the history "story" are made. They have an agenda, even if it’s an unconscious one. Perhaps there are many ways to get it right. The interesting parts of history are probably always what’s not there. My own special area of interest about what’s not in history is the women. As you would all know, by and large they’re sadly absent from the historical record. However, I’m lucky to be the recipient—custodian, even, if that doesn’t sound too grandiose—of a rich oral history handed down from my mother, who got it from her mother and so on back down the line. She’s told me family stories from every generation since our family first came to Australia—in the form of our wicked convict ancestor Solomon Wiseman, in 1806. Sol is supposed to have murdered his wife, and turned his daughter—pregnant to the riding-master—out of the house to starve. (But perhaps, the novelist in me thinks, she didn’t starve , but went on to have, well, a story†¦) There was "Uncle Willie with the red hair" who was "killed [by falling] off a horse when he was eighteen and broke his mother’s heart." There was her own mother, in love with a Catholic boy—a love as unthinkable as between a Montagu and a Capulet and was forced to marry a good Protestant boy. You should see th e look on her face in the wedding photos. This oral history, handed down in a series of formalised anecdotes from mother to daughter, leaving rich areas for speculation in between is, I suspect, one of the things that’s made me a novelist. http://www.nla.gov.au/events/history/papers/Kate_Grenville%20.html SOUL-SEARCHING about our past is the new literary fashion. It is the period in which the breast-beaters, the moral Pharisees, are driven to tell us how, unlike their predecessors, they have political and moral virtue. The Aborigines, women and ordinary people have become the 'goodies', and all those who ignored them in their books or their teaching have become the 'baddies'. The winds of change are blowing over the ancient continent.

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