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From Local History to the History of Place:

A Brief History of Local History in Australia

Frank Bongiorno

King’s College London

Victoria County History (VCH) International Symposium

Institute of Historical Research

6-8 July 2009

I

There is a moment in Bill Bryson’s account of his travels in Australia, Down Under

(2000), when he comments, with a mixture of surprise and wry amusement, on the

extraordinarily large number of Australian local histories that he encounters in second-

hand bookshops. They ‘never fail to amaze’, he reports, ‘if only because they show you

what a remarkably self-absorbed people the Australian are. I don’t mean that as a

criticism. If the rest of the world is going to pay them no attention, then they must do it

themselves surely.’ He continues: ‘There were hundreds of books ... about things that

could never possibly have been of interest to more than a handful of people. It’s quite

encouraging that these books exist, but somehow faintly worrying as well’. Bryson does

not explain any further why it worries him, but he then goes on to review with genuine

admiration a book he found among these volumes: a photographic history of Surfers

Paradise on the Queensland Gold Coast.1

Less casual observers of Australian historiography offer nonetheless strikingly similar

views on the fecundity of Australian local history production. Graeme Davison, a

leading Australian urban historian, suggested in an essay published at the beginning of

1 Bill Bryson, Down Under, Doubleday, London, pp. 126-7.

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this century that more volumes of local history had probably appeared in the previous

couple of decades than in the 180 years of European settlement that preceded them. For

Davison, ‘[i]n a world dominated by transnational corporations, where even nation-

states seem reduced to impotence, the little communities of family, neighbourhood and

locality acquire renewed significance < Even those who act globally, as servants of

transnational corporations, sometimes also think locally, investing some more intimate

part of themselves in a place they can somehow call their own.’2 Globalisation, far from

eradicating local and regional identities and creating an homogenous citizenry, is being

accompanied, in the words of Phil Wood, ‘by the ‘re-emergence of the local as a seat of

influence and identification. More and more people might be wearing Nike and

drinking Coke but they are also getting more interested in those things which make

their community, their city or their region different from anyone else’s’.3

Yet, at the same time as local history writing thrives in Australia, within the academy

the future of history is increasingly re-imagined as transnational. In this emphasis, of

course, Australian historians are part of a much larger global trend in the historical

profession, but there is something approaching a zealotry in the transnationalism of

antipodean historians as they possibly repent of nationalist sins past. And whatever its

intellectual merits, it is easy enough to account for the enthusiastic embrace of

transnational history among historians of and in Australia. Just as in colonial times,

belonging to an empire – and, by extension, writing imperial history – could reassure

those on the margins that they were connected by race and culture with the centre and

2 Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards (NSW), 2000, p.

197. 3 Phil Wood, ‘Think Global Act Local: looking forward to The Creative Region’, Keynote Speech to the

Conference: The Role of the Creative Industries in Local and Regional Development, held on 12 February 1999,

hosted by the Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber, and the Forum on Creative Industries

(FOCI).

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therefore with the main dynamics of world history, modern transnational approaches to

history allow for the readmission of Australian history into an international

mainstream, as well as the re-entry of historians of Australia into various international

conversations after several decades of talking among themselves in the wilderness of

national history. Transnational history also chimes in with the modern, mobile and

cosmopolitan identities of many academic historians, who like to think of themselves as

part of a global community of scholars, now linked not only by the air routes that have

increasingly facilitated their rapid international travel, but also by the imagined

communities facilitated by the web. The distance of Australia from the main centres of

scholarship need not imply the banishment of Australian history to an intellectual

backwater.4

So where does this transnational drive leave Australian local history? It’s quite possible

to reconcile these two impulses. Consider, for instance, the new imperial history, with

its rhetoric of webs, circuits, networks and nodal points. The work of scholars such as

John Darwin, Catherine Hall, Tony Hopkins, Alan Lester, Tony Ballantyne, Kirsten

McKenzie and Zoë Laidlaw has been suggestive of how a transnational history of

empire might draw on the techniques of local history, enriching our understanding of

both the history of empire.5 According to Lester and David Lambert, both historical

4 For transnational history in Australia, see Ann Curthoys, ‘Does Australian History Have a Future?’,

Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 118, 2002, pp. 140-52. 5 John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: the dynamics of territorial expansion’, English Historical

Review, Vol. 112, June 1997, pp. 614-42; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: metropole and colony in the

English imagination 1830-1867, Polity, Cambridge, 2002; A.G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: from national

history to imperial history’, Past and Present, No. 164, August 1999, pp. 198-243; Alan Lester, Imperial

Networks: Creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain, Routledge, London and New

York, 2001; Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Palgrave, Basingstoke,

New York, 2002; Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815-45: patronage, the information revolution and colonial

government, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2005; Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in

the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town 1820-1850, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2004.

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geographers, in the new imperial history ‘places are not so much bounded entities, but

rather specific juxtapositions or constellations of multiple trajectories ... of people,

objects, texts and ideas’. ‘The differences between places’, says Lester, ‘are the result of

the trajectories intersecting in varied ways across the surface of the earth.’6

Now, I do not wish to trivialise a significant and fruitful body of scholarship but this

kind of work seems to me most unlikely to underpin the future of local history;

certainly not in Australia, at any rate. As I shall suggest in greater detail in a moment,

among the most powerful impulses behind the writing of local history has been the

desire to know one’s own ‘place’, to uncover its hidden stories, to gain a greater

appreciation of what makes it distinctive; and, in seeking answers to the last question,

neither those who write it nor those who read it are likely to be satisfied with the

answer that ‘The differences between places are the result of the trajectories intersecting

in varied ways across the surface of the earth’, however satisfying that explanation

might be to historical geographers or imperial historians. The dynamism of Australian

local history has come not so much from its capacity to forge alliances with academia,

but from its ability to do so while also resisting an easy assimilation to orthodox

academic practice. In the brief overview of the development of Australian local history

that I offer here, I want to suggest that the current tension between the transnational

and local is part of a long-running and unresolved set of conversations about how to do

local history in Australia in which, for want of a more meaningful set of categories, the

‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’, the ‘enthusiast’ and the ‘academic’, the ‘antiquarian’

and the ‘historian’, are involved in a constantly evolving set of relationships and

shifting practices.

6 David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial spaces, imperial subjects’, in Lambert and

Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 13-14.

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II

In the nineteenth century, Australian local history was often written by ‘pioneers’ who

had been involved in the events they described — and celebrated. This kind of history

was an amateur affair, whose practitioners frequently drew on their own memories of

events. It often found its way into the columns of local newspapers, and it combined

elements of rumour and folklore. Similarly celebratory and not entirely distinct from

this first category were the municipal histories written by journalists and local

enthusiasts who had not been ‘pioneers’ themselves. These were less reliant on personal

memory, but no less interested in celebrating ‘progress’, and especially the debt that

modern society owed to the hardy, self-sacrificing pioneers of the early days. They were

especially dependent on a casual trawl of the newspapers, often conveniently located on

the shelves in the journalist-turned-historian’s office. These histories often presented the

history of a locality as a series of firsts: the first explorers, the first white settler, the first

white child born in the district, the first pastoral run, the construction of roads, bridges

and buildings, the establishment of local government, the coming of the railway, of

electricity, and so on. They were full of local worthies – typically, bearded men – and

were heavily slanted towards the early years of settlement. They aped the emphases of

the professional history of the day, which was in the late-nineteenth century beginning

to emerge in Australian universities. It, too, was concerned with the business of

exploration and settlement, a story presented within a teleology of imperial progress.7

Some early university professors of history were involved in the local historical societies

7 Davison, Use and Abuse, pp. 199-205. For an example of the latter variety of local history, see Gunnedah

Municipal Jubilee, Back to Gunnedah Week: 30th September to 6th October, 1935, Official Souvenir, The

Northern Daily Leader [Printers], Tamworth, 1935. For the ‘pioneer’ in Australian mythology, see John

Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, Historical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 71, October 1978, pp. 316-37.

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that promoted this form of history — and both historical societies and university

professors concerned themselves with preserving the documents of the past. Scientific

history, after all, depended on acts of preservation as much as amateur local history

depended on them.8

A more obviously professional local history practice emerged in the 1950s and 1960s,

influenced by the expansion of the universities and the rise of social history.9 For

instance, of the first three doctoral candidates at the new Australian National University

in Canberra, which was the first in Australia to offer a PhD, two were concerned

primarily with social history. One of them, Russel Ward, researched nineteenth-century

a rural history, tracing the ethos of the Australian pastoral worker. The resulting book,

The Australian Legend (1958), inaugurated Australia’s own social history revolution, an

antipodean version of ‘history from below’ almost a decade before the phrase was

coined by E.P. Thompson.10 Local history itself, however, continued to be written

mainly outside the academy, and was still dominated journalists and amateurs whose

work was shaped by the pioneer legend. Yet there were signs of change. A young

graduate of the University of Melbourne, Geoffrey Blainey, writing in the Australian

historian profession’s flagship journal in 1954, drew on R.G. Collingwood to criticise

what he called ‘Scissors and Paste in Local History’, arguing that there was little to be

gained from histories that did no more than reproduce in new combinations various

bits and pieces picked up here and there from previous historians.11 Blainey worked

8 For the emergence of professional academic history in Australia, see Stuart Macintyre and Julian

Thomas (eds), The Discovery of Australian History 1890-1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic.,

1995. 9 Davison, Use and Abuse, pp. 205-11. 10 R.B. Ward, The Ethos and Influence of the Australian Pastoral Worker, PhD Thesis, ANU, 1956; Russel

Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1958; E.P. Thompson, ‘History from

Below’, Time Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966, pp. 279-80. 11 Geoff. Blainey, ‘Scissors and Paste in Local History’, Historical Studies, Vol. 6, No. 23, November 1954,

pp. 339-44.

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outside the university as a commissioned historian in the 1950s and early 1960s, and

would produce a history of a Melbourne suburb among various company and mining

histories of high-quality before accepting an academic appointment.12 Other more

academic histories of Australian suburbs and towns, some of them originating as theses

and a few commissioned by municipal councils, began appearing from the early 1960s.13

By the mid-1970s younger historians were turning to ‘history from below’ and,

influenced by the new social movements, attended to gender, race, sexual preference

and – with declining enthusiasm – class. There is, as yet, no satisfactory account of the

rise of Australian social history but a casual glance reveals that it was a remarkably

localised affair, in which those who sought to contribute to a national conversation

about the past drew inspiration from local circumstances, and often turned their

attention to local history. It is barely an exaggeration to suggest that, for the first

generation of the new social historians in Australia, all history was local history.14 There

was, for instance, a group of Brisbane-based historians centred on Kay Saunders and

Ray Evans, whose early work explored race as an axis of power and exploitation, and

whose oppositional project was nourished by their dissent from the authoritarianism of

a long-serving and corrupt conservative government in that state.15 Further north at

James Cook University in the regional centre of Townsville, Henry Reynolds and Noel

Loos were re-writing the history of Australian frontier conflict from the perspective of

‘the other side of the frontier’, but with a very strong emphasis on Queensland

12 Geoffrey Blainey, A History of Camberwell, Jacaranda in association with the Camberwell City Council,

Brisbane, Qld, 1964. 13 See, for instance, Weston Bate, A History of Brighton, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962. 14 I am especially indebted to Professor Alan Atkinson for his insights on this point. 15 See, for instance, Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and

Extermination: race relations in colonial Queensland, Australia and New Zealand Book Co., Sydney, 1975.

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sources.16 They also worked closely with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

community in the town; both Reynolds and Loos were close friends of Eddie Mabo,

who worked as a gardener at the university, and whose struggle for land rights against

the government of Queensland would ultimately overturn the doctrine of terra nullius

and establish native title in 1992.17 Meanwhile, in Perth, historians such as Tom

Stannage and an early-modernist, Patricia Crawford, were influential in shaping local

practice.18 Stannage was recalled by one historian then based in the west as ‘standard-

bearer against the Royal WA Historical Society and all it represented in privileging the

old establishment, landowners and public servants, as the makers of the colony’.19 Here

was a direct challenge by younger social historians to a latter-day version of the pioneer

tradition in local history. A local and regional stimulus was also important at the

University of New England in the northern New South Wales town of Armidale, where

Russel Ward had spent most of his academic career, and a younger group of social

historians led by Alan Atkinson developed a distinctive form of social history with a

strong emphasis on rural life, the colonial period and gender relations. Atkinson was

deeply influenced by the family, demographic, frontier, women’s and ethnographic

histories being produced in Britain and the United States, as well as by the Annales

school’s preoccupations with time, space and mentalité and Foucault’s history of

institutions. The Armidale School’s efforts to write a rural ‘history from below’ was

shaped by their engagement with the past and present of their own rural community.20

16 Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia,

Penguin, Ringwood (Vic.), 1982 [1981]; Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European relations on

the North Queensland frontier, 1861-1897, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1982. 17 Noel Loos, ‘Edward Koiki Mabo: The Journey to Native Title’, Journal of Australian Studies, Nos. 54-5,

1997, pp. 108-19. 18 Laura Gowing, ‘Patricia Crawford’, Obituary, Guardian, 26 May 2009, p. 34. 19 Alan Atkinson, personal communication, 4 May 2009. 20 For a discussion of some of these historians, see Angela Woollacott, ‚Russel Ward, Frontier Violence

and Australian Historiography‛, Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. Vol. 10, No. 2, 2008, pp. 32-6.

9

Yet it is also significant that Atkinson had earlier been based in Perth, from where he

had been influenced by Stannage and Crawford.

The development in the universities of social history — the history of everyday life or

‘history from below’ — prompted academic historians and their students to apply the

methods of ‘scientific history’ to local history. This enterprise produced local histories

with all the sophistication of other types of academic history: a wide range of sources

which were thoroughly evaluated, detailed referencing and bibliography and an effort

to set local events in broader national contexts. New sources — such as rate-books, used

to reconstruct the social structure and geography of a local area — were employed in

these professional histories. Many were commissioned by municipalities but the

authors were not necessarily ‘insiders’: they were sometimes bright university

graduates who came from outside the local area to write its history. In some cases, the

local boy or girl made good, armed with a university degree or perhaps even some way

into an academic career already, would go home to write the town’s history.21

In more recent decades, this type of academic local history has become increasingly

sophisticated, drawing more self-consciously on the social sciences and on oral

testimony. At New England, for instance, historians such as Atkinson and John Ferry,

produced major nineteenth-century studies — in Atkinson’s case of Camden (1988) near

Sydney, and in Ferry’s, of Colonial Armidale (1999) itself — that drew on a massive

international literature in the fields of history, demography, anthropology and

sociology. These books also involved vast amounts of labour-intensive research,

including, for instance, the kinds of family reconstitution pioneered by the Cambridge

Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which they synthesised with

21 Davison, Use and Abuse, pp. 205-11.

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more traditional sources and themes. Both Atkinson and Ferry won national prizes for

their books. Yet, it is sometimes difficult to know what local people themselves made of

it all. Both Atkinson and Ferry are fine story-tellers, and the books could easily be

mined for their tales of bygone days. But whether their participation in international

scholarly conversations was of similar interest outside the walls of the academy must be

considered doubtful.22 It is perhaps this tension that has given rise to some interesting

developments in a field sometimes called community history: within one book, you

might find highly professionalised academic history and reminiscences of the type we

might otherwise associate with the earliest pioneering local history; an attempt,

perhaps, to transcend categories like the ‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’, the ‘academic’

and the ‘enthusiast’.23

III

If the major influence on the 1960s-1980s generation of Australian local history was

social history, from the 1990s the new cultural history came increasingly into its own.24

Richard Waterhouse has recently complained that with so many subjects still to explore

using the methods of social history, ‘Australian historians nevertheless abandoned the

chase’.25 All the same, he underestimates one positive trend in recent local history

writing: the emergence of an Australian history of ‘place’. I’m thinking here of

historians such as George Seddon, Peter Read, Mark McKenna, Tom Griffiths, Rebe

Taylor, Robert Kenny and Lorina Barker, the last-mentioned a young Indigenous

22 Alan Atkinson, Camden: Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales, Oxford University Press,

Melbourne, 1988; John Ferry, Colonial Armidale, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1999. 23 Davison, Use and Abuse, pp. 214-20. 24 For the new cultural history in Australia, see Ann Curthoys, ‚Labour History and Cultural Studies‛,

Labour History, 67, November 1994, pp. 12-22. 25 Richard Waterhouse, ‘Locating the New Social History: transnational historiography and Australian

local history’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 95, Part 1, 2009, pp. 1-17.

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historian, who have drawn on the techniques of ethnohistory in order to an often

intensely personal, multi-layered kind of local history.26 A major influence on several of

them has been the Melbourne School of ethnographic history, centred on the late Pacific

historian, Greg Dening, and the renowned Australian historians of the Americas, Inga

Clendinnen and Rhys Isaac.

I can do no more than sketch the main features of this new form of local history in

outline. Whereas much Australian local history has seemed not to know what to do

with the reality that those hardy pioneers were pioneering land that belonged to

someone else, these historians place relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous

people at the centre of their consideration. While earlier local histories had deployed a

range of ‘ingenious’ if not terribly attractive or historically-sound narrative strategies

for dealing with the inconvenient presence of Indigenous people, as Aboriginal people

and the injustices they had suffered became more visible nationally in the 1960s and

1970s, professional local histories turned more attention to their historical experiences.27

The new histories of place, however, go further in seeing interaction of Indigenous and

non-Indigenous people as one of the central dynamics of Australian history. And by

exploring these relations within a particular local setting, they seek to illuminate the

larger question of how the descendants of the colonisers and the colonised can be

26 George Seddon, Landprints: reflections on place and landscape, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

and Melbourne 1997; Peter Read, Returning to Nothing: the meaning of lost places, Cambridge University

Press, Melbourne, 1996; Read, Belonging: Australians, place and Aboriginal ownership, Cambridge University

Press, Melbourne, 2000; and Read, Haunted Earth, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2003;

Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: an Australian history of place, University of New South Wales

Press, Sydney, 2002; Tom Griffiths, Beechworth: an Australian country town and its past, Greenhouse

Publications, Richmond, Vic, 1987; Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: the antiquarian imagination in Australia,

Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996. Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: the Aboriginal Tasmanians of

Kangaroo Island, Wakefield, Kent Town (SA), 2002; Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael

Pepper & the ruptured world, Scribe, Melbourne, 2007; Lorina Barker, ‘‛Hangin’ Out‛ and ‚Yarnin‛:

reflecting on the experience of collecting oral histories’, History Australia, Vol. 5, No. 1, April 2008, 09.1-

09.9. 27

McKenna, Looking, pp. 65-78.

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reconciled. In other words, these histories explore a past assumed to be intimately

connected with the concerns of current politics and identity. As Mark McKenna has

remarked in his Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (2002), a study of the south-coast of New

South Wales:

The difficulty today for the local historian is to build a sense of pride in the

community’s past and at the same time acknowledge that their town was

founded on the violent theft of Aboriginal land. But the historian needs to go

beyond acknowledgement and explain why such injustice demands a

recasting of settler history. In other words the historian must try to explain

how our history and their history are not separate histories, but part of the

continuing story of post-1788 Australia. The local dilemma is the national

dilemma.28

In this way, the local is distinctive, yet at least in respect to the question of relations

between colonist and coloniser, it also comes to stand for the nation. Historians such as

McKenna are concerned with the ethical and practical problems of ‘belonging’, to a

place, and to a country, that has already been owned by someone else; indeed a place

forcibly taken from its rightful owners, and re-inscribed with new meanings by the

invader.

These histories are profoundly personal, even emotional and spiritual. The writer

herself will make regular appearances in the text, and each history seems to have been

provoked by the particular historian’s attachment to a particular place. In the case of

McKenna’s book, it is his purchase of an eight acre property that leads him to an

28

Ibid., p. 95.

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investigation of the history of settler-Aboriginal relations on the NSW south coast. Rebe

Taylor’s exploration in Unearthed (2002) of the complex and intertwined histories of

Indigenous and the non-Indigenous people on Kangaroo Island near Adelaide was

provoked by annual family holidays on the island, and she is present throughout much

of the story as a kind of history-detective, inviting the reader along with her in the quest

to uncover the stories of white racism and Indigenous survival hidden in the island

landscape. Lorina Barker’s work is focussed on her own Aboriginal community in

western New South Wales, thereby combining autobiography with family and local

history. These historians’ own emotional attachment to particular places are then recast,

as they uncover a history that radically challenges earlier, and often rather anodyne,

pioneer histories that celebrate the superiority of the colonisers’ civilisation.

The new local histories are concerned with memory. Often relying heavily on oral

history and on the cooperation of the communities being researched, they explore what

has recalled, what has been forgotten, and what that forgetfulness might mean in

historical terms. They seek to explore rather than discipline memory, to investigate

what the remembered past might mean for the communities doing that remembering,

as well as tracing the reasons for, and effects of, forgetting on the people whose

histories have been erased in conventional local histories.29

Although frequently honoured in Australia among those who hand out history prizes,

the new local histories will not please everyone. But they have helped revivify local

history by demonstrating its relevance to both local communities and to the ‘imagined

community’ of the nation. This kind of history does not sit outside or above the

community, but depends for its liveliness and credibility on its connectedness with local

29

Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, p. 218.

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lived experience. It is evidence of Australian local history’s capacity to draw sustenance

from commonly agreed understandings of the meaning of professional historical

practice, while also managing somehow to exceed the boundaries that they seek to

impose, and so re-define what it means to ‘do history’.