July 10, 2024 • 53 mins
In this panel, staged by the History Council of NSW at the 2024 Sydney Writers Festival, three award-winning Australian historians discuss the dual art of crafting histories and captivating narratives for diverse audiences.
Our authors, Dr Margaret Cook, Dr Shannyn Palmer and Nicole Cama, explore the dynamics of writing and presenting histories that respond to questions and ideas with relevance to national or local interest, as well as seeking to tell stories that resonate with larger audiences. Chaired by A/Prof Jan Láníček, the authors delve into the nuanced artistry required to bridge the gap between academic excellence and accessibility.
Our esteemed panelists share insights into their approaches, discussing the challenges of balancing scholarly integrity with storytelling prowess. They explore strategies for making complex historical contexts accessible without oversimplification and maintaining authenticity while appealing to diverse reader interests.
Panelists:
Dr. Margaret Cook
As an historian, Margaret Cook is fascinated by water and its interaction with humans, animals and the environment over time. She writes about climate-related disasters with a particular focus on rivers and floods and is the author of A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods. Margaret is a Research Fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University and La Trobe University.
Dr. Shannyn Palmer
Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, cultural consultant and award-winning writer. She works with cultural institutions and communities to facilitate ethical community engaged practice and enable meaningful intercultural collaborations. She is particularly interested in community engaged practice as a methodology for disrupting settler colonial systems and knowledge. She has a PhD in History from the Australian National University and her first book, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History and the 2023 Northern Territory Chief Minister’s History Book Award.
Nicole Cama
Nicole Cama is an historian with the City of Sydney Council with experience in museums, heritage and public history. Her work has been published across a range of platforms including radio, websites, print publications, social media, mobile applications and exhibition displays. In 2023, she was awarded the History Council of NSW’s Macquarie University-PHA Applied History Award for her work, ‘Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst’, a digital history project mapping the people and places of the street from the 1840s to the 1940s using the City of Sydney Archives, produced for the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology Sydney.
Chair: Associate Professor Jan Láníček
Jan Láníček is Associate Professor in Modern European and Jewish History at UNSW Sydney. He received a PhD from the University of Southampton in Britain in 2011 and has published widely on the history of the Holocaust and Central Europe. He is currently completing a study of post-Holocaust judicial retribution in Czechoslovakia and also researches Jewish migration to Australia before World War II. Jan is also a member of the General Council of the History Council of New South Wales.
Thanks to the Sydney Writers Festival for enabling our participation in the festival, the State Library of NSW for providing the venue and audio recording services, and the NSW Government, through Create NSW for their funding support.
Music: Inspiring Classical by PineAppleMusic. License purchased from AudioJungle.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Catherine Shirley (00:04):
So hello and welcome from the History Council
of New South Wales to thisWinning Histories session.
My name's Catherine Shirley andI'm the Executive and Strategic
Development Officer at theHistory Council of New South
Wales.
Firstly, I'd like toacknowledge that we're meeting
today on the land of the Gadigalpeople of the Eora Nation, and
(00:26):
I pay my respects to the Elderspast, present and emerging and
celebrate the diversity ofAboriginal peoples and their
ongoing cultures and connectionsto the lands and waters of New
South Wales.
I also acknowledge and pay myrespects to Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoplejoining us today.
Today's session is acontinuation of the History
(00:51):
Council's support for andparticipation in many cultural
activities in New South Wales,including the Sydney Writers'
Festival.
So now I'm going to hand youover to the chair of our session
, associate Professor JanLanicek from the University of
New South Wales, who's also acounsellor on our General
Council and chair of our annualawards subcommittee.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (01:15):
Thank you.
Thank you for having the panelorganised by the History
Council of New South Wales onWinning Histories.
We have three great historianstoday who will talk about their
projects and about their journeywhile researching the project.
And I would say they achievedsomething that most of us, most
(01:40):
of their colleagues, includingmyself always strive for.
Not only that they win awardsand big money, which everybody
wants, but they receiverecognition that their research
is of value, that there's animpact, that somebody from their
peers, other scholars,recognize their work, but also
(02:02):
that the general public, as youcan see, is interested in their
work and want to hear more aboutwhat they do.
And just an example, MargaretCook, who I will introduce in a
minute but she sold about 3,500copies of the first edition of
her book on floods in Brisbane,first edition of her book on
(02:25):
floods in Brisbane.
That's updated now edition withnew floods and hopefully we
will need to update it anytimesoon.
But, based on the conclusion ofyour book, you probably
eventually will have to do that.
It's really interesting for me,as an historian of modern Europe
, to engage with a completelydifferent field of Australian
(02:48):
indigenous or local Sydneyhistory and basically I've been
thinking about how to approachthe panel, to link all the
papers, or the papers, the booksand research together research
on local street in Sydney, inDarlinghurst, that many of you
probably have visited or maybelive in.
(03:09):
Research on Brisbane, inQueensland, and then on Outback
in Australia, in centralAustralia, in northern
territories, and there are somecommon themes that emerge from
that which we shall discussthroughout the panel.
So, before we move on to thediscussion and the questions
(03:34):
that I prepared the topicstarting with Dr Margaret Cook,
a historian who is fascinated bywater and its interaction with
humans, animals and environment.
Over time she writes aboutclimate-related disasters and a
particular focus on rivers andfloods in southern Queensland
(03:56):
and the book on a river with acity problem a river with a city
problem, which I really like asa title A History of Brisbane
Floods.
Margaret is a Research Fellowat Australian Rivers Institute,
Griffith Institute and La TrobeUniversity.
Dr Margaret Cook (04:16):
Thank you very much.
My book, on the surface atleast, is about floods in
Brisbane, so I used thenarrative arc of three main
floods the 1893 floods, the 1974floods and the 2011 floods and
I'll come to the fact that thenwe had another flood in 2022.
So I then revised it and addedanother chapter, which is an
(04:36):
interesting thing we can perhapsdiscuss later.
So, on the surface, the book isactually just a narrative of
the floods, but it's not really,because what it is is that's
the tool that I use tointerrogate the way that people
relate to our environment andhow we relate to rivers.
So I wanted to think about howAboriginal people have thought
about rivers and how they'velived with the rhythms and
(04:59):
patterns of nature, but how,when settlers came here, we had
a totally different approachthat they would control the
river and tame it and use it asa resource and, rather than live
with the river, it's been a bitof an antagonistic relationship
where we've tried to tame itwith dams and levees and so on.
And, again, while it's a storyabout Brisbane and those
(05:21):
cultural attitudes that came onthe boats from Britain largely,
it's also a story thattranslates to a lot of imperial
rivers, if you think aboutBrisbane, we've got Wivenhoe Dam
and we've got Somerset Dam, andthat's been the way that we've
really thought about how wewould control the water.
And by controlling the water,my argument is that we've been
(05:42):
able to just have a bit of afree reign on the floodplain and
, as a result, we've created thehazard.
The problem isn't actually thefloods.
We always frame floods as aproblem, but in fact the problem
is is that we have built on thefloodplain, and that's what I
took for my title.
I was given this wonderfulquote while I was writing and
you know every writer has theseepiphanies and you go, wow, and
(06:06):
it's always framed as a floodproblem.
But in fact, the problem is isthat we built on the flood plain
, so it's actually a river witha city problem.
The river got there first.
It's been there for thousandsand thousands of years and when
humans leave this planet, theriver will still be there, and
so I really wanted to reframethe way we thought about that.
And for people in Sydney, youcan think about it like
(06:27):
Warragamba Dam.
There's always the discussionsabout raising Warragamba or
whatever.
But whatever you do, it changesthe way we think about the
environment and Warragamba givesSydneysiders a complacency that
we have controlled floods, andwhat happens is people then move
on to the floodplain, thinking,thinking ha ha, we're safe.
So I really wanted tointerrogate that.
(06:48):
And after the floods in 2011,there was lots of words buzzing
around like unprecedented, aword that historians have a
really big problem with, andalso it must be somebody's fault
, somebody must be to blame forthis.
So I wanted to interrogatethose myths that are deeply
embedded in floods and thinkabout who's to blame and the
(07:09):
naivety we've really got abouttrying to live in this
environment with which we live,and a changing environment at
that.
So that's sort of, in anutshell, what the book is about
.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (07:18):
Thank you, Then from Sydney.
Nicole Kammer is a historianwith the City of Sydney Council,
with experience in museums,heritage and public history.
Her work has been publishedacross a range of platforms,
(07:41):
including radio websites, printpublications, social media,
mobile applications andexhibition displays.
In 2023, she was awarded theHistory Council of New South
Wales Macquarie University PHAApplied History Award for her
work on Liverpool Street inDarlinghurst.
Nicole Cama (08:06):
So my project probably more unusual for Sydney
Writers' Festival you won't seea book out there.
My project is a website andit's at darlostoriesau.
I thought I'd choose a reallyeasy URL to remember.
The project is called LiverpoolStreet, darlinghurst, and it
(08:30):
was actually a digital historyproject just mapping the
development of the Sydney Streetover a century.
So the sources that I drew fromwere actually from the City of
Sydney archives and they'recalled the assessment books and,
for anyone who's unfamiliarwith them, they're an amazing
resource for the researcherbecause they actually cover all
(08:50):
sorts of details like landlords,the type of building
constructed, the materials used,the value, all sorts of.
It's just a sort of real boonfor the researcher.
So I based the entire project onthat data set and it actually
(09:11):
covered over 4,000 assessmentbook entries and that was
between 1848 and 1948.
So the website actually drawson all that data and at the
centre of the website isactually a map and a timeline
which maps some of that data andit also includes data
(09:32):
visualisations and actuallyseven long form feature stories
which I drew from thoseassessment books and basically
explored the people and theplaces of Darlinghurst.
And so the project was actuallysupported by the Australian
Centre for Public History, utsand the Paul Ramsey Foundation,
which is actually theheadquarters located on
(09:53):
Liverpool Street in Darlinghurst.
So the challenge with thisproject was to basically
illustrate that massive data setin a creative and accessible
way, and I really felt one ofthe most the easiest ways to do
that and most accessible ways isthrough a website and really
(10:15):
wanted to encourage people toexplore those records further
and maybe do their own researchand make their own discoveries.
So that's really the backgroundfor my project and the final
panelist, dr Shannon Palmer.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (10:34):
And Shannyn is a community-engaged
practitioner, culturalconsultant and award-winning
writer, and actually the list ofawards is very long and another
one was added already last week, as late as last week, so I'm
glad that we don't have it onFriday.
There'll be another one in themeantime.
So Shannyn works with culturalinstitutions and communities to
(10:59):
facilitate ethicalcommunity-engaged practice and
enabled meaningful interculturalcollaborations.
She is particularly interestedin community-engaged practice as
a methodology for disruptingsettler colonial systems and
knowledge.
She has a PhD from ANU inCanberra in history, and the
(11:21):
first book Unmaking Angus Downs,Myths and History on a Central
Australian Pastoral Station wona long list of awards, including
2023 Prime Minister's LiteraryAward for Australian History,
2023 Northern Territory ChiefMinister's History Book Award
and, most recently, the ErnestScott Prize as well.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (11:46):
Unmaking Angus Downs traces the history
of Angus Downs Pastoral Stationin Central Australia.
Angus Downs is located about300 kilometres southwest of
Alice Springs.
It's actually sort of smackbang in the middle of Alice
Springs or Mabantua and Uluru.
(12:07):
So if you've ever driven fromMabantua, alice Springs, to
Uluru, you will have driventhrough Angus Downs Cattle
Station and it sort of stretchesall the way out to Wataka, the
place now known as King's Canyon.
So if you've ever travelled outthere you will have also
travelled through AngerstownStation.
And so in using the station asa lens, it's not just a history
(12:32):
of Angerstown Station, it's ahistory of colonisation in that
part of central Australiathroughout the 20th century.
And in tracing the history ofthe station and colonisation it
also looks at how that cattlestation became country over half
a century.
I worked really closely with twoAnangal in particular.
(12:52):
So Anangal are Pitangarra,yankunjungarra, speaking people
from Central Australia Anangalis their word for personal
people and so I worked with twoAnangal with really deep and
abiding connections toAngostowns Chukki Pumpjack and
Sandra Armstrong.
And when I first met them theyevoked that cattle station as
Ngawra, which is the Pitangattaword for country.
(13:14):
But their ancestral homelandswere many hundreds of kilometres
away in the Peterman Ranges inthe Western Desert.
So the book sort of traces alsothe story of how animal came to
be living on Angostown StationIn the late 1950s, early 1960s.
There were upwards of 250animal living on the station at
(13:36):
that time and there was only oneof them employed in the
pastoral industry.
So in many ways it's a historyof a pastoral station.
It has very little to do withpastoralism.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (13:46):
So now there are two topics and we can move
from the first to the second one.
The first one, I kind of, wasthinking about some connections
and in Shannon's book you writethat it offers important insight
into changing the relationshipbetween people and space or
people and place.
And it feels like that allthree projects are dealing with
(14:10):
this kind of topic with thestreet, with the city and river
and, in Shannon's case, withdifferent groups of people
interacting together but alsowith the place, or space
interacting together but alsowith the place of space.
So if you could maybe tell usagain in a few, a couple of
minutes, how do you, how doesyour project deal with this
(14:32):
question of the relation betweenpeople and space across quite a
long time period of 100 yearsin each case, basically, or your
case a bit shorter, you couldmaybe engage with this topic and
then we move on to yourpersonal journey as scholars or
historians.
Nicole Cama (14:50):
Do you want me to start?
Okay, so, as I mentioned, withmy project I was sort of dealing
with really sort of large datasets which doesn't sound that
exciting sort of on the face ofit.
So one of the things I decidedto do was take a real thematic
approach with that data and lookat two themes.
(15:12):
And that was the social data,so the people that lived on the
street occupants, landlords andthen the built environment.
And I decided to then sort ofhave different research pathways
from that which then eachconnecting to those two themes,
and really those themes areabout people and place.
(15:32):
I suppose it's sort of adifferent way of saying that.
That complex and changingrelationship was the story of
Obed West and his family'sestate which they called Barkham
Glen.
He grew up basically on theland between Paddington,
(15:55):
darlinghurst and Rushcutters Bayduring the 1810s and it was the
1880s, I think that he recordedhis memories of that area
growing up at that time and itwas a time of real sort of not
just changes in the sort ofsocial and demographic makeup of
Sydney but also the builtenvironment.
(16:16):
Darlinghurst for a long timewas considered they sort of
called it.
I remember seeing in thenewspaper articles people called
it a pretty hamlet or you know,obed West himself called it a
sort of out in the countryhomesteads and farms in
Darlinghurst and it was that wayfor a very long time.
(16:38):
It wasn't until the 1850s,1860s and 1870s that that really
started to change 1850s, 1860sand 1870s that that really
started to change.
So his accounts reallydemonstrated what that place,
what Gadigal country, was likebefore those Victorian terraces
and commercial enterprisesstarted to encroach.
(16:58):
One of the things he describedwas sort of the undulating lands
and the fresh, clear stream ofwater which was Rushcatters
Creek, which flowed through thevalley and was basically over
time gradually quite sort ofterribly polluted, of course, by
(17:19):
all the sort of people movinginto the area and building.
And the other thing was hedescribed the mudflats which
were right in front ofRushcutters Bay where this sort
of aquatic birds sort ofgathered and also, how you know,
he used to sort of gathernative roses and waratahs on the
hills.
(17:40):
So it was a very different area.
And what happened over time isthat despite the the west family
staying in the area until about, I think, the 1910s, which was
a very long time to to stay onthat land, they could see the
the sort of inner city suburbdeveloping around them and
changing and polluting thatfreshwater stream.
(18:03):
So it really sort of was a greatway of displaying that changing
relationship between people andplace.
And I think you know there werea few other examples of that.
But what I tried to do withthat data was to really not just
sort of say, okay, so this landwas occupied by the West family
and it was worth this much.
(18:23):
I think it was just aboutdrawing out some of those
stories with first-hand accountsand things like that, trying to
make it a little bit moreinteresting.
Dr Margaret Cook (18:36):
My background was as a social historian, so
I've always been interested inpeople.
And then I worked as a heritageconsultant, so I looked a lot
of places where people play andwork.
And then I worked as a heritageconsultant, so I looked a lot
of place and places where peopleplay and work.
And then I discoveredenvironmental history and I
realised that a lot of what wedo is we talk about the human
action and the environment'sjust the stage on which it
performs, and I wanted to thinkmore about that stage had grown
(19:01):
from a very small city in the1890s, where there was only
100,000 people there, to a citynow that's two and a half
million.
How did we look backwards?
How did we get to the situationthat we're in now?
So to do that I had to thinkreally hard about a whole lot of
records I've never used.
I used a lot of engineeringreports and I have no science or
(19:22):
engineering and I mean noscience and so I had to talk a
lot to engineers and people andread things like learn the
language of cummix and all sortsof different languages.
So I had to use a whole lot ofrecords I hadn't used before.
But then because of mybackground with heritage and
social history.
I used a lot of newspapers andfirst-hand accounts and I
(19:43):
particularly wanted to capturethe stories of the people.
So I also drew a lot on oralhistory.
So it was to try and get thosedifferent threads and to
complicate a voice, because weoften get a very strong story of
the developer, say, or thehomeowner who got flooded.
I wanted to try and weave thosedifferent stories as much as I
could.
So it involved a lot ofthinking widely about how I
(20:08):
might find those stories.
And particularly the chance toturn it into a book was the
opportunity to people thathistory more, with more stories
and anecdotes, and Iparticularly enjoyed the
opportunity to do that.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (20:32):
So Place is really?
I mean, it was foundational tothe project that led to making
Angus Downs and in many waysthat project emerged out of my
questioning the discipline ofhistory itself.
As an undergraduate student atuniversity, studying history, I
was encountering stuff in mylate 20s that I hadn't learnt
growing up as a kid in Dja DjaWurrung country in central
Victoria.
I grew up not knowing that Iwas living on Dja Dja Wurrung
(20:55):
country until much later, and soI was encountering stuff as a
student, an undergraduatestudent, that you know I was
really troubled and confrontedby, and I also had this deep
love for the discipline ofhistory and I began to sort of
think deeply about the silencesand what Tom Griffiths calls
(21:16):
white noise that had sort ofdominated so much of our history
writing in the 20th century andbegan to think what is it?
Perhaps there's something inthe discipline of history itself
and the methods the historian'scraft that has created helped
to create these silences orgenerate this white noise.
The cornerstone of thehistorian's craft is the
(21:38):
documentary archive and verymuch a linear sense of time, and
that's just one way of knowingand being in the world and it's,
you know, first Nations,australians.
It's a really different way ofbeing and knowing.
And so I began thinking youknow, what does it?
What is possible?
When you're a historian in yourprivileged place you turn to
(22:00):
place as an archive and embodiedforms of knowledge and memory.
And so, to undertake thisproject, I moved to Central
Australia and in working withChukki and Sandra, I took out a
loan, got into a bit of debt andgot an 80 series land cruiser
cruiser and learnt that stationby travelling through.
(22:22):
We put about 80,000 k's on thatland cruiser over about four
years and Chukki and Sandraspoke the history of that place
to me and shared that with me.
In Pitindata, langwich, weworked really closely with a
woman called Linda Riv, awonderful Western Desert
language specialist whointerpreted.
She went on all the bush tripswith us and would interpret in
(22:44):
country and that was an integralpart of learning to understand
this place.
Angus Downs, pitindatta.
Language is intimately tied tothat place and so I mean, yeah,
it very much changed the way Isort of think about and research
(23:05):
and wrote history.
You know, for Anangu history issomething that is embedded in
place.
All of the stories that werebeing shared with me were being
recounted in country.
They were itineraries, journeysthat were punctuated by place
names.
Everything was oriented incountry.
They were itineraries, journeys, that were punctuated by place
names.
Everything was oriented incountry.
So you know, privileging place,turning to it more than a stage
(23:29):
in a sense, was really sort ofcritical, I think, to sort of
beginning to understand thatplace from a different
perspective.
Myths and histories ofpastoralism and pioneers have
really dominated the way wethink about history here in
Australia and my sort of beingimmersed in place I think was
pivotal to really sort ofuntangling or unlearning a lot
(23:53):
of those myths and histories.
And very much I think one ofthe biggest sort of revelations
was how much the desertlandscape shaped colonialism and
the relationships and thingslike pastoralism.
We have, you know BazLuhrmann's A Still Australia
that romanticises pastoralism inthe north, with these sprawling
homesteads and handsome cowboys, and you know lots of
(24:17):
Aboriginal people working on thestation In central Australia,
angostans.
They weren't even homesteads tobegin with.
They would drift, move fromwaterhole to waterhole.
They were ephemeral sites.
The whole camp would get up andmove after big rains and so
that was, yeah, a really sort ofplace is critical in that
(24:37):
relationship between people andplaces, really critical in the
work, critical in thatrelationship between people and
place.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (24:42):
It's really critical in the work With
Shannon.
What I was really stuck byreading your book is that you
really challenge this perceptionof the First Nations people as
being passive victims ofcolonisation, that they are
interacting with the owners ofthe pastoral station.
They are sharing theirknowledge of the space of the
(25:04):
country.
So there is interaction.
Is this something which you seeas one of the main
contributions, possibly to thefield of indigenous history or
Australian history?
With Margaret, what I was stuckby was forgetting.
You get the big flood thatdestroys everything and people
(25:27):
forget it won't happen again.
What does it tell you aboutpeople and mentality?
You still, despite all thecalamity or disaster that comes
every 50, then 20, then 10 years, they still say, well, we can
still tame the river, we canstill do that.
Let's forget what happened,let's move on, build new houses
(25:48):
exactly in the area that wasflooded several times and with
Nicole and this is partly myCentral European upbringing I
was fascinated by the skatingrink, the skating rink in
Darlinghurst, and by the imagesof ladies in long coats on these
(26:10):
roller skaters, kind oftrampling, falling and enjoying
a social life.
Could you maybe tell us a bitmore about that case study.
Thank you.
Maybe with Shannon, now we canstart from this side.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (26:24):
I mean definitely you know the
collaborating with Anangu andthe thing with when you focus on
place.
You can't write stories orhistories of places without
engaging with the people wholived in and made those places.
And so in engaging with Anangu,you know, with two people in
particular, I sort of came toknow that place intimately from
(26:49):
their perspective and you knowthey very much.
I mean they're a huge part ofthe reason why they had their
own agenda for our collaboration.
Absolutely, both Chukchi andSandra were older.
Chukchi was 85 when we startedworking together.
Sandra was in her 70s.
So Chukchi in particular wasreally aware, I think, that he
(27:11):
was coming towards the end ofhis life and he really wanted
his knowledge and his knowledgeof that place and his connection
to that place recorded, hisknowledge of that place and his
connection to that placerecorded.
And so in collaborating withthem, you know they were really
sort of demonstrating how, youknow, angus Downs was so much
more than a pastoral station.
(27:31):
We sort of have theseassumptions that are, you know,
sort of shored up by things likeBaz Luhrmann's Australia.
These myths of pastoralism andpioneers in particular, have
been so pervasive in terms ofhow we think of ourselves and
our history here in Australiaand then you know, collaborating
with Annal and really deeplistening over a period of years
(27:53):
really revealed to me how theywere very much active agents and
that they had actually.
Angus Downs was so much morethan a pastoral station.
It was country and it was homefor multiple families and
multiple generations of familiesas well, and all manner of life
(28:17):
was playing out and takingplace on that station.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (28:22):
Yes, thank you.
Dr Margaret Cook (28:23):
So your question was about complacency,
really, and why do we forget?
That's very central in my bookand it's partly because we want
to forget.
So I look very closely atvested interests.
Why do we forget You're talkingabout?
Why do we have these storiesabout Baz Luhrmann's story?
Because they're more palatableoften.
So it's very romantic.
It's very romantic and peoplein Brisbane don't want to know
(28:46):
that the city floods.
So if you live beside a river,that's not really what you know.
I did become known as thenuisance in the city council for
a while, about which I'mthinking of putting on a T-shirt
, so I'm not very worried, butit's really interesting.
I wanted to look at the vestedinterests.
Brisbane's different fromSydney or Melbourne in that for
(29:06):
a number of reasons, but one isthe real estate is really
important because we don't havesecondary industries or so on.
So the power brokers inBrisbane are the real estate
agents, and so I actually foundfantastic articles that said
we'll just wait till peopleforget and then we'll sell the
house to someone in Sydney Again, gold for an historian.
But the problem is is there isthis complacency and the media
(29:27):
cycle really doesn't help.
So we move because of ourclimate of droughts and flooding
, rains, we move on to that nextcycle of drought or fire or
COVID or whatever disaster it is.
There's a fantastic diagramthat came out of the Centre of
Research in America which isknown as the hydro-eological
cycle, and it is.
It's so that it rains and wethink about floods for a while,
(29:51):
and then we go into drought, sowe become complacent and then we
start panicking about waterbecause we're starting to lose
that water.
And then it rains and everyonerelaxes again.
And the problem for people likeme who are trying to work in
the disaster space of improvingthe outcomes each time, is that
window where we want to discussfloods is not very big, and
(30:12):
politicians particularly saynow's not the time.
They did that in the fire.
It's not the time to talk aboutclimate change.
It's not the time to talk aboutadaptation.
People are suffering.
When is the time to talk aboutclimate change?
It's not the time to talk aboutadaptation.
People are suffering.
When is the time?
Is the problem?
Because you move on to the nextthing.
So the complacency is deeplyembedded in our culture and our
politics and our economy, and sothat's what I tried to do as an
(30:33):
historian, is use again thosefloods to tell that story of the
values that we've got.
We make choices about whatvalues are important and the
decisions we've got.
We make choices about whatvalues are important and the
decisions we've made is thatliving on the floodplain is
really important, and we've nowgot a housing crisis, and so the
solution is to put more houseson the floodplain, and you know,
again as an example of a choice.
(30:53):
To finish, we spend 97% of ourmoney on recovery and 3% on
planning for disasters.
Now, it doesn't take I said Ihave no maths, but it doesn't
take a lot of maths to work outthat if you move that dial a
little bit, we'd get a differentoutcome in every flood or fire
or famine or whatever disasterwe're talking about.
(31:14):
We've got to start thinkingdifferently about how we live in
this country in the future,particularly as more and more of
us choose to live here.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (31:22):
Okay, Nicole , please.
Nicole Cama (31:24):
Yes, so I'm actually really glad you asked
me about the DarlinghurstSkating Rink.
It was one of my favouritestories to discover.
It was a building that wasbuilt in 1889, and one of its
frontages was on LiverpoolStreet, but it took up an entire
block and it was established asa skating rink.
So roller skating was actuallyreally popular in Australia from
(31:46):
about the 1870s, and so thisplace was actually styled to
emulate the Imperial Palace ofJapan and it took in something
like 2,000 to 3,000 people couldfit in this building.
It had sort of mirrors placedall around the walls so that
people couldn't watch themselvesjust skating around or falling
(32:10):
over, as Jan said, and alsothere was actually suspended
from midair in a sort ofcircular cage, was a bandstand.
Mid-air, in a sort of circularcage was a bandstand which would
just sort of play as peopleskated around and people would
have skate cards that you knowlike dance cards.
So it was a really interestingsort of study of how people were
(32:32):
sort of spending their leisuretime in Sydney at that time, I
suppose.
But it wasn't actually.
It was actually quiteshort-lived.
It closed the following year,so a hugely expensive
undertaking.
I think it took something like300 men to construct the
building in 10 weeks orsomething like that Really
(32:53):
interesting building.
And it sort of hosted a varietyof other events, like there was
a baby show which people sortof entered their children to be
sort of on display and getspecial awards.
So twins, I think, got 25pounds and triplets got 50
pounds, so something I think itwas something between 12 and
(33:14):
15,000 people attended this showover a two-day period.
So despite its popularity itwas just too.
It's almost like it's too bigto be successful in.
It's still a city, even thoughit was a booming population
happening at that time.
So it was then actuallyconverted into the Australian
(33:35):
Athletic Club, which essentiallyfunctioned as a boxing sort of
studio and stadium, so somethinglike 6,000 people could be sort
of seated watching these reallyintense boxing matches which
were actually quitecontroversial at the time.
One of the most famous boxersto appear was actually a man
(33:59):
called Albert Griffiths, orGriffo as he was known, and he
was actually Australia's firstworld boxing champion, I think
so he actually was.
He, I suppose, performed, boxedat this at this at this venue,
and ironically he it was duringone of his matches that sort of
(34:20):
spelled the end of the actualclub because it just descended
into sort of violent chaos.
I think he used to be a memberof a push gang and they weren't
happy with him facing off with asort of African-American boxer
called Jerry Marshall and itlooked like Jerry Marshall was
going to win and it sort ofdescended into chaos.
(34:40):
Was going to win and it sort ofdescended into chaos.
So at that point it was sort ofalso hosting things like giant
tug-of-war championships andthings like that.
A really interesting place, butagain short-lived, and it did
function as a wool store forquite some time before it was
sort of demolished and made wayfor housing.
(35:01):
Of course, in a block of thatsize it was inevitable that it
would be sort of demolished andmake way for housing, but it was
really, really interesting.
I suppose it's another sort ofexample of the changing nature
of people and place and theirrelationship to place.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (35:18):
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Any question you would like toask your fellow panelists?
Dr Margaret Cook (35:25):
I'm really taken by the fact about
immersion in the place thatyou're in, that you moved there
and you obviously know your areavery, very well.
I actually went kayaking on theriver because they kept talking
about this spot where the tworiver systems merge, so I had to
go and see it, and you can seerivers best when you're in the
river, because they kept talkingabout this spot where the two
river systems merge, so I had togo and see it, and you can see
rivers best when you're in theriver.
And I think that's aninteresting thing, because
(35:47):
there's that lovely quote abouthistorians need good boots, and
I think there's a thing about weoften, you know our tools are
the documents, the documents andthe archives and the libraries,
but with things that are deeplyembedded in place, I think you
have to go there.
Nicole Cama (36:05):
You have to see the place and walk the place,
because the other thing withDarlinghurst is that it's known
for it.
It's still actually quite hillyand there's sort of parts of
the streets that I think there'sa few streets that still follow
the original creek or one ofthe tributaries of the creek, so
it's sort of getting to knowthat place.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (36:23):
There's still sort of remnants of that sort
of time that you're researching,but yeah, yeah, it's such a
lovely thing to reflect onbecause the immersion is, the
immersion in a place is socritical and it was really sort
of fundamental to my own project.
And I can't even begin toimagine how you could go about
(36:43):
writing a history of a placelike Angus Downs in Central
Australia if you didn't spend asignificant amount of time in
that country in the desert,experiencing the distances,
developing a sense for water andhow critical it is and how that
dictates movements, and so,yeah, I can't even begin to
imagine how you go about reallysort of conceiving of a project
(37:05):
like that if you weren't sort ofprepared to go and immerse
yourself in the place.
And for myself, you know themobile sort of methodology as
well, the act of physicallymoving through country, because
mobility is such an importantpart of desert life as well.
So it was sort of another layerof how to sort of really come
to a much deeper understandingof this place beyond this sort
(37:28):
of symbolism of the pastoralstation.
And for myself, I think one ofthe richest things was that it
changed the way I read thearchives.
I think sort of people assumethat I did oral history and
therefore there wasn't sort ofmuch archival research, but
there's actually, you know it'sdeeply embedded in archival
research as well.
(37:49):
But being physically immersedin the landscape, travelling
through that country, the waythat you have to it, changed the
way I read the archives and Ibegan to see stuff in the
archives that I absolutely wouldhave missed and never would
have picked up on had I not beenimmersed.
And so I think it really justyeah, it just enriched my
(38:10):
historical practice at thatlevel as well?
Nicole Cama (38:13):
Can you give an example of what you sort of
never would have spotted in thearchive?
Dr Shannyn Palmer (38:19):
It was actually one of my favourite
parts.
I think it was one of myfavourite parts of the book.
There's a chapter called theItinerants, and so, as I was
sort of explaining when I firststarted working with Anangu,
there was a particular storythat would sort of get told
(38:40):
again and again.
Amangu would relay thistravelling from Ernabella
Mission to Arionga, which cutright through Angus Downs, and
they were constantly walkingbackwards and forwards between
these two stations and there'sdifferent reasons why, like
different families, kids hadgone to the missions, but
everyone's related, so theywould sort of travel between
these two places.
(39:01):
And so it just really sort ofstruck me that, like everyone is
talking about this walking fromAriongo to Urnabella, and they
would recount the journeys insuch rich detail.
And then, quite some time afterthat, it was sort of a
revelation sort of hearing thosestories, because it really
opened me up to there was thisparticular way of recounting
(39:21):
history which is embedded incountry, and in the archives I
came across a whole bunch ofdocuments that the welfare
branch had created in the late1950s and early 1960s, and the
subject title of each of themwas the itinerants, and the
subject title of each of themwas the itinerants and Arnalor,
(39:43):
by this stage in the late 50s,had taken on camels.
The farmers, pastoralists, nolonger needed them after the war
because they got the trucks andall the camels that they had
went to Arnalor.
So Arnalor became reallyskilled cameleers and the rate
at which they were travellingand they were also trading porno
with tourists at the timecatching dingo scalps.
(40:05):
But there's this pile ofdocuments that the welfare
branch wrote over a decade, thetitle of which is called the
Itinerants, which documentstheir concerted efforts to try
and get Unalong and the line.
The journey that they weretravelling was the same journey
between the two missions that Ihad been sort of told about from
Anangal.
(40:26):
And so these documents justyeah, sort of capture this, the
welfare branch sort of doingthemselves in tying themselves
in knots, trying to get Anangalto stop moving and to relocate
to the missions to take on jobsthat actually didn't exist,
(40:46):
because it was a bad look forthem basically to be sort of
travelling around and engagingwith tourists and so having, I
mean, I suppose it just kind ofothered that sort of.
I could actually sort of see inthis way the way in which
assimilation policy inparticular was operating at the
(41:07):
time, this kind of sort ofnarrative of like we've got to
get people into wage labour, wewant them in you know nuclear
family units, and so we've gotto get them to sort of stop, and
meanwhile they've got no sortof understanding of the route
that people are travelling, whythey're travelling this way.
There's a whole line of springsthat travel that existed between
(41:27):
the two missions as well, so itwas situated on a road that
they'd been travelling forthousands of years and
travelling between those twomissions visiting families, you
know.
They enabled them to carry onall kinds of social and cultural
practices, but no one in thewelfare branch could ever see
that, and so I think having,yeah, coming across those
(41:50):
documents enabled me to sort ofget at what was in them.
It sort of like became thisartifact of colonialism and
assimilation policy and ideologyin particular that I think I
just wouldn't have read in thesame way.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (42:03):
Okay, thank you.
I mean we can open the floorfor questions.
We have about 10 minutes, so ifyou have any questions, please.
Audience (42:15):
Thank you all very much.
It's been fascinating.
I'd like to ask Nicole aquestion how did you find the
accounts of the West Mr West?
Were they diaries?
Were they household records?
Nicole Cama (42:28):
accounts there.
Actually there is sort of.
I know that one of hisdescendants published it as a
sort of collection and they'reactually you can have a look at
them in this library.
But he also published them inthe newspapers and thank
goodness for the NationalLibrary's trove because they've
(42:50):
digitised quite a few newspapersand they're all in there.
So he actually wrote not justabout Darlinghurst but about all
parts of different parts ofSydney.
So they are a reallyfascinating document.
I have a question for DrMargaret Cook, please.
Did you face a lot of backlashafter you published your book?
Dr Margaret Cook (43:11):
That's a really interesting question.
I thought I would get a lotmore.
Maybe it's secret and I don'treally know.
I did get a little bit, but oneof the things that I did get to
do as a result of the book is Igot to talk to a lot of
different audiences, which wasreally fantastic, including some
radio stations I didn't knowexist.
There's a One Nation radiostation, for example.
(43:33):
I didn't know and I thoughtthat could be interesting.
But it's actually it's, andI've deliberately gone into
places where I'm uncomfortable,and I can sort of blame my
father, who's here, for that,because I did say to him oh,
when I was invited to some group, I said, oh, but you know they
might not like me.
And he said but if you keeptalking to the same people who
believe what you're saying, thenyou're only talking to the
(43:54):
choir, and why did you wasteyour time?
Basically, good point, dad, offI go.
So I have gone into the lion'sden a lot and it's really
interesting when you talk toengineers or flight
practitioners or real estateagents.
The guy I criticised the mostin the book I really did
criticise him came to a talk andI was terrified and he thanked
(44:15):
me and congratulated me becausehe said they'd never thought
about it that way.
Everyone looks at the worldfrom their own lens and their
own viewpoints and I think evenjust making them think
differently was enlightening.
Don't think the behavior'schanged and it's not, but even
that I can just make peoplethink differently.
I think that's that's worth.
(44:35):
That's one of what I wanted todo is to change the conversation
a little bit, and to do thatyou've got to rattle the cage a
bit, and I have a bit of a habitof rattling cages.
Thank you.
Audience (44:47):
I have a question for Nicole what's your connection?
There's two questions really.
What's your connection withDarlinghurst and now you've been
so successful with this project?
Which other part of Sydney haveyou got your eye on for
something similar?
Nicole Cama (45:04):
All of them.
No, I don't have a particularconnection with Darlinghurst,
but actually this project formedpart of a much broader project
which was focusing on thehistory of Darlinghurst.
So a book actually came out ofthis project called my
Darlinghurst, and there was alsoa sort of walking tour which
(45:26):
was actually published in theCity of Sydney's Culture Walk
app called Serenade If anyonehas a chance, please do it and
also an oral history project.
So this actually formed part ofa quite a sort of
multi-platform project.
And Darlinghurst, I think it'salways fascinated me.
It's such a fabulous area.
(45:47):
Darlinghurst, I think it'salways fascinated me.
It's such a fabulous area Interms of sort of thoughts of
other parts of Sydney.
I would love to expand theproject and do something similar
, you know, in Surrey Hills orin other parts of the CBD, but
at the moment it's sort of likeit's open.
I'm not sure yet.
(46:08):
Maybe one day.
Audience (46:10):
Thank you.
A question for Shannon Is thereanything in particular that led
you to Angus Downs in terms ofpicking a pastoral station to
work on.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (46:19):
It's a great question.
There's actually a book thatled me to Angus Downs Station.
A book that led me to AngusDowns Station.
There was an anthropologistcalled Frederick Rose who spent
four months on the station in1962.
Frederick Rose is a reallyinteresting character in and of
himself.
(46:40):
There's a great biography thatwas published a couple of years
ago called the Red Professor,and he had sort of started his
anthropological career on GrootIsland um in the 1940s and ended
up being.
He moved to East Germany.
He was living in Australia,born in England, wanted to come
back to Australia to finish offhis ethnographic field work and
(47:03):
the government had a huge ASIOfile on him so he couldn't get
into any of the settlements.
He really wanted to go out toYuin Dumu but the government
weren't having a bar of that,and so he was friends with a man
called Bill Harney.
Some of you may have heard ofhim, quite a large character in
Northern Territory history, andhe was friends with Bill Harney.
(47:24):
So Bill Harney sort of wrote tohim and said you should come
out to Angost Downs Station.
You probably won't get sort ofmuch in terms of traditional
ceremony or anything like that,but it's a great sort of example
of culture contact and so youshould come out.
And so he went out in 1962 andlived on the station for four
months and then wrote a bookcalled the Wind of Change in
(47:47):
Central Australia the Aboriginesat Angus Downs, and I came
across.
It's an incredibly rare book.
It was published in EastGermany.
It's really expensive to get acopy it costs upwards of $400,
$500 to get a copy and I saw Ihad spent time out there, I was
familiar with the area and cameacross the book, and photography
(48:08):
was a key part of Rose'smethodology.
And so in the back pages of thebook there were 150 black and
white portraits of all theunlawful who were living on the
station at the time.
They were numbered from one to150.
They didn't have names of theportraits but there was a page
that corresponded with each ofthose photographs.
And then there were also lotsof photographs of everyday life
(48:30):
on the station, so people havinghaircuts, people buying stuff
from the store, people playingcards, making punu, cooking
kangaroo, and so it was just themost unusual ethnography I'd
ever seen, especially from the1960s.
And looking at the photographsI knew that a lot of people in
those photographs would still bealive today and wondered if
(48:54):
they'd seen the book and numberone the person who was number
one in those photographs wasChuggy Pumpjack.
So he was number one out therein 1962, and he was still number
one when I went out in 2012,.
Because when I started askingquestions, everyone said if you
want to talk about Angus Downs,you need to go and find Tricky
Pump Jack.
(49:14):
So he was still number one then.
Sandra was in those photographsas well.
She was number 90.
And it started from there.
I became the conker with thebook.
Conker is picked out forunmarried woman.
So I was just the youngunmarried woman with a Greenland
cruiser who had the book andthey would see me and they'd be
like, hey, conker, you need toget that book.
And everyone would want to sitdown and go through those
(49:35):
photographs and they would gothrough them all and find
themselves, find their familymembers, tell me where everyone
was living.
And that's how it started.
People started talking aboutthe station and I cottoned on
really quickly that it was thisincredibly fascinating and
important place out there and so, yeah, that's how come Angus
(49:56):
Downs came to be the focus ofthe book.
Audience (50:00):
Thanks.
A question for Dr Cook.
You mentioned that you've donea bit of cage rattling and you
also mentioned that we don't seemuch change in attitudes After
all the work you've done.
Where is the best hope forchange?
Federal, state, localgovernments, city planners or
the real estate businesses thatseem to run most of Sydney, let
(50:23):
alone Brisbane?
I mean, how do you get to apoint where the rivers don't
have city problems anymore?
Dr Margaret Cook (50:32):
The interesting thing with having
gone back to write the morerecent chapter is I did actually
see a shift and that's reallyencouraging, particularly in
Queensland and needs to be inQueensland, because we actually
are the most flood prone state.
New South Wales is second.
Sorry to tell you that, but weactually have the Queensland
Flood Reconstruction Authority,which has now become federal.
New South Wales is getting oneoff the ground.
(50:55):
There are some moves towardsbuyback schemes and there is
some movement towardsredesigning homes.
So I am actually seeing achange.
What is going to happen iscapitalism is going to work in
that until recently, peoplewould be able to rebuild and
reinsure and just continuebusiness as usual.
(51:16):
We're not getting insurance,we're not going to be able to
rebuild, so unfortunately, we'regoing to have to make a change,
whether we like it or not.
So I'm trying to encouragepeople to be proactive and do it
when it suits them, becauseotherwise they will be doing it
kicking and screaming later,when they have to.
There are already climaterefugees in some parts of the
(51:38):
world that's the phrase they useand we are going to see that in
Australia.
So I can't solve the problemsof the past, but I'd really like
to stop making them.
So stop building on thefloodplain, start putting some
moratoriums down and stopbuilding where we shouldn't be
building.
We've got enough science.
We have enough knowledge nowthere aren't any more excuses.
(52:00):
So I am seeing a change.
I'm just impatient as well as acage rattler.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (52:09):
So, unfortunately, we are coming to
the end and I'd like to thankall our speakers Nicole Cama, Dr
Margaret Cook and Dr ShannynPalmer, for sharing their
expertise and insights intotheir work, and you can
certainly purchase their books.
They are very affordable, whichis really good for historians.
I also would like to thank ouraudience for being here and for
(52:35):
sharing these incredible storiesof research and publications To
the staff of the HistoricCouncil, catherine Shirley,
Amanda Wells and Laura Sayle,who do all this hard work behind
the scenes to make these eventshappen and being so enjoyable.
(52:55):
Thank you.
So hello and welcome from the History Council
of New South Wales to thisWinning Histories session.
My name's Catherine Shirley andI'm the Executive and Strategic
Development Officer at theHistory Council of New South
Wales.
Firstly, I'd like toacknowledge that we're meeting
today on the land of the Gadigalpeople of the Eora Nation, and
(00:26):
I pay my respects to the Elderspast, present and emerging and
celebrate the diversity ofAboriginal peoples and their
ongoing cultures and connectionsto the lands and waters of New
South Wales.
I also acknowledge and pay myrespects to Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoplejoining us today.
Today's session is acontinuation of the History
(00:51):
Council's support for andparticipation in many cultural
activities in New South Wales,including the Sydney Writers'
Festival.
So now I'm going to hand youover to the chair of our session
, associate Professor JanLanicek from the University of
New South Wales, who's also acounsellor on our General
Council and chair of our annualawards subcommittee.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (01:15):
Thank you.
Thank you for having the panelorganised by the History
Council of New South Wales onWinning Histories.
We have three great historianstoday who will talk about their
projects and about their journeywhile researching the project.
And I would say they achievedsomething that most of us, most
(01:40):
of their colleagues, includingmyself always strive for.
Not only that they win awardsand big money, which everybody
wants, but they receiverecognition that their research
is of value, that there's animpact, that somebody from their
peers, other scholars,recognize their work, but also
(02:02):
that the general public, as youcan see, is interested in their
work and want to hear more aboutwhat they do.
And just an example, MargaretCook, who I will introduce in a
minute but she sold about 3,500copies of the first edition of
her book on floods in Brisbane,first edition of her book on
(02:25):
floods in Brisbane.
That's updated now edition withnew floods and hopefully we
will need to update it anytimesoon.
But, based on the conclusion ofyour book, you probably
eventually will have to do that.
It's really interesting for me,as an historian of modern Europe
, to engage with a completelydifferent field of Australian
(02:48):
indigenous or local Sydneyhistory and basically I've been
thinking about how to approachthe panel, to link all the
papers, or the papers, the booksand research together research
on local street in Sydney, inDarlinghurst, that many of you
probably have visited or maybelive in.
(03:09):
Research on Brisbane, inQueensland, and then on Outback
in Australia, in centralAustralia, in northern
territories, and there are somecommon themes that emerge from
that which we shall discussthroughout the panel.
So, before we move on to thediscussion and the questions
(03:34):
that I prepared the topicstarting with Dr Margaret Cook,
a historian who is fascinated bywater and its interaction with
humans, animals and environment.
Over time she writes aboutclimate-related disasters and a
particular focus on rivers andfloods in southern Queensland
(03:56):
and the book on a river with acity problem a river with a city
problem, which I really like asa title A History of Brisbane
Floods.
Margaret is a Research Fellowat Australian Rivers Institute,
Griffith Institute and La TrobeUniversity.
Dr Margaret Cook (04:16):
Thank you very much.
My book, on the surface atleast, is about floods in
Brisbane, so I used thenarrative arc of three main
floods the 1893 floods, the 1974floods and the 2011 floods and
I'll come to the fact that thenwe had another flood in 2022.
So I then revised it and addedanother chapter, which is an
(04:36):
interesting thing we can perhapsdiscuss later.
So, on the surface, the book isactually just a narrative of
the floods, but it's not really,because what it is is that's
the tool that I use tointerrogate the way that people
relate to our environment andhow we relate to rivers.
So I wanted to think about howAboriginal people have thought
about rivers and how they'velived with the rhythms and
(04:59):
patterns of nature, but how,when settlers came here, we had
a totally different approachthat they would control the
river and tame it and use it asa resource and, rather than live
with the river, it's been a bitof an antagonistic relationship
where we've tried to tame itwith dams and levees and so on.
And, again, while it's a storyabout Brisbane and those
(05:21):
cultural attitudes that came onthe boats from Britain largely,
it's also a story thattranslates to a lot of imperial
rivers, if you think aboutBrisbane, we've got Wivenhoe Dam
and we've got Somerset Dam, andthat's been the way that we've
really thought about how wewould control the water.
And by controlling the water,my argument is that we've been
(05:42):
able to just have a bit of afree reign on the floodplain and
, as a result, we've created thehazard.
The problem isn't actually thefloods.
We always frame floods as aproblem, but in fact the problem
is is that we have built on thefloodplain, and that's what I
took for my title.
I was given this wonderfulquote while I was writing and
you know every writer has theseepiphanies and you go, wow, and
(06:06):
it's always framed as a floodproblem.
But in fact, the problem is isthat we built on the flood plain
, so it's actually a river witha city problem.
The river got there first.
It's been there for thousandsand thousands of years and when
humans leave this planet, theriver will still be there, and
so I really wanted to reframethe way we thought about that.
And for people in Sydney, youcan think about it like
(06:27):
Warragamba Dam.
There's always the discussionsabout raising Warragamba or
whatever.
But whatever you do, it changesthe way we think about the
environment and Warragamba givesSydneysiders a complacency that
we have controlled floods, andwhat happens is people then move
on to the floodplain, thinking,thinking ha ha, we're safe.
So I really wanted tointerrogate that.
(06:48):
And after the floods in 2011,there was lots of words buzzing
around like unprecedented, aword that historians have a
really big problem with, andalso it must be somebody's fault
, somebody must be to blame forthis.
So I wanted to interrogatethose myths that are deeply
embedded in floods and thinkabout who's to blame and the
(07:09):
naivety we've really got abouttrying to live in this
environment with which we live,and a changing environment at
that.
So that's sort of, in anutshell, what the book is about
.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (07:18):
Thank you, Then from Sydney.
Nicole Kammer is a historianwith the City of Sydney Council,
with experience in museums,heritage and public history.
Her work has been publishedacross a range of platforms,
(07:41):
including radio websites, printpublications, social media,
mobile applications andexhibition displays.
In 2023, she was awarded theHistory Council of New South
Wales Macquarie University PHAApplied History Award for her
work on Liverpool Street inDarlinghurst.
Nicole Cama (08:06):
So my project probably more unusual for Sydney
Writers' Festival you won't seea book out there.
My project is a website andit's at darlostoriesau.
I thought I'd choose a reallyeasy URL to remember.
The project is called LiverpoolStreet, darlinghurst, and it
(08:30):
was actually a digital historyproject just mapping the
development of the Sydney Streetover a century.
So the sources that I drew fromwere actually from the City of
Sydney archives and they'recalled the assessment books and,
for anyone who's unfamiliarwith them, they're an amazing
resource for the researcherbecause they actually cover all
(08:50):
sorts of details like landlords,the type of building
constructed, the materials used,the value, all sorts of.
It's just a sort of real boonfor the researcher.
So I based the entire project onthat data set and it actually
(09:11):
covered over 4,000 assessmentbook entries and that was
between 1848 and 1948.
So the website actually drawson all that data and at the
centre of the website isactually a map and a timeline
which maps some of that data andit also includes data
(09:32):
visualisations and actuallyseven long form feature stories
which I drew from thoseassessment books and basically
explored the people and theplaces of Darlinghurst.
And so the project was actuallysupported by the Australian
Centre for Public History, utsand the Paul Ramsey Foundation,
which is actually theheadquarters located on
(09:53):
Liverpool Street in Darlinghurst.
So the challenge with thisproject was to basically
illustrate that massive data setin a creative and accessible
way, and I really felt one ofthe most the easiest ways to do
that and most accessible ways isthrough a website and really
(10:15):
wanted to encourage people toexplore those records further
and maybe do their own researchand make their own discoveries.
So that's really the backgroundfor my project and the final
panelist, dr Shannon Palmer.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (10:34):
And Shannyn is a community-engaged
practitioner, culturalconsultant and award-winning
writer, and actually the list ofawards is very long and another
one was added already last week, as late as last week, so I'm
glad that we don't have it onFriday.
There'll be another one in themeantime.
So Shannyn works with culturalinstitutions and communities to
(10:59):
facilitate ethicalcommunity-engaged practice and
enabled meaningful interculturalcollaborations.
She is particularly interestedin community-engaged practice as
a methodology for disruptingsettler colonial systems and
knowledge.
She has a PhD from ANU inCanberra in history, and the
(11:21):
first book Unmaking Angus Downs,Myths and History on a Central
Australian Pastoral Station wona long list of awards, including
2023 Prime Minister's LiteraryAward for Australian History,
2023 Northern Territory ChiefMinister's History Book Award
and, most recently, the ErnestScott Prize as well.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (11:46):
Unmaking Angus Downs traces the history
of Angus Downs Pastoral Stationin Central Australia.
Angus Downs is located about300 kilometres southwest of
Alice Springs.
It's actually sort of smackbang in the middle of Alice
Springs or Mabantua and Uluru.
(12:07):
So if you've ever driven fromMabantua, alice Springs, to
Uluru, you will have driventhrough Angus Downs Cattle
Station and it sort of stretchesall the way out to Wataka, the
place now known as King's Canyon.
So if you've ever travelled outthere you will have also
travelled through AngerstownStation.
And so in using the station asa lens, it's not just a history
(12:32):
of Angerstown Station, it's ahistory of colonisation in that
part of central Australiathroughout the 20th century.
And in tracing the history ofthe station and colonisation it
also looks at how that cattlestation became country over half
a century.
I worked really closely with twoAnangal in particular.
(12:52):
So Anangal are Pitangarra,yankunjungarra, speaking people
from Central Australia Anangalis their word for personal
people and so I worked with twoAnangal with really deep and
abiding connections toAngostowns Chukki Pumpjack and
Sandra Armstrong.
And when I first met them theyevoked that cattle station as
Ngawra, which is the Pitangattaword for country.
(13:14):
But their ancestral homelandswere many hundreds of kilometres
away in the Peterman Ranges inthe Western Desert.
So the book sort of traces alsothe story of how animal came to
be living on Angostown StationIn the late 1950s, early 1960s.
There were upwards of 250animal living on the station at
(13:36):
that time and there was only oneof them employed in the
pastoral industry.
So in many ways it's a historyof a pastoral station.
It has very little to do withpastoralism.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (13:46):
So now there are two topics and we can move
from the first to the second one.
The first one, I kind of, wasthinking about some connections
and in Shannon's book you writethat it offers important insight
into changing the relationshipbetween people and space or
people and place.
And it feels like that allthree projects are dealing with
(14:10):
this kind of topic with thestreet, with the city and river
and, in Shannon's case, withdifferent groups of people
interacting together but alsowith the place, or space
interacting together but alsowith the place of space.
So if you could maybe tell usagain in a few, a couple of
minutes, how do you, how doesyour project deal with this
(14:32):
question of the relation betweenpeople and space across quite a
long time period of 100 yearsin each case, basically, or your
case a bit shorter, you couldmaybe engage with this topic and
then we move on to yourpersonal journey as scholars or
historians.
Nicole Cama (14:50):
Do you want me to start?
Okay, so, as I mentioned, withmy project I was sort of dealing
with really sort of large datasets which doesn't sound that
exciting sort of on the face ofit.
So one of the things I decidedto do was take a real thematic
approach with that data and lookat two themes.
(15:12):
And that was the social data,so the people that lived on the
street occupants, landlords andthen the built environment.
And I decided to then sort ofhave different research pathways
from that which then eachconnecting to those two themes,
and really those themes areabout people and place.
(15:32):
I suppose it's sort of adifferent way of saying that.
That complex and changingrelationship was the story of
Obed West and his family'sestate which they called Barkham
Glen.
He grew up basically on theland between Paddington,
(15:55):
darlinghurst and Rushcutters Bayduring the 1810s and it was the
1880s, I think that he recordedhis memories of that area
growing up at that time and itwas a time of real sort of not
just changes in the sort ofsocial and demographic makeup of
Sydney but also the builtenvironment.
(16:16):
Darlinghurst for a long timewas considered they sort of
called it.
I remember seeing in thenewspaper articles people called
it a pretty hamlet or you know,obed West himself called it a
sort of out in the countryhomesteads and farms in
Darlinghurst and it was that wayfor a very long time.
(16:38):
It wasn't until the 1850s,1860s and 1870s that that really
started to change 1850s, 1860sand 1870s that that really
started to change.
So his accounts reallydemonstrated what that place,
what Gadigal country, was likebefore those Victorian terraces
and commercial enterprisesstarted to encroach.
(16:58):
One of the things he describedwas sort of the undulating lands
and the fresh, clear stream ofwater which was Rushcatters
Creek, which flowed through thevalley and was basically over
time gradually quite sort ofterribly polluted, of course, by
(17:19):
all the sort of people movinginto the area and building.
And the other thing was hedescribed the mudflats which
were right in front ofRushcutters Bay where this sort
of aquatic birds sort ofgathered and also, how you know,
he used to sort of gathernative roses and waratahs on the
hills.
(17:40):
So it was a very different area.
And what happened over time isthat despite the the west family
staying in the area until about, I think, the 1910s, which was
a very long time to to stay onthat land, they could see the
the sort of inner city suburbdeveloping around them and
changing and polluting thatfreshwater stream.
(18:03):
So it really sort of was a greatway of displaying that changing
relationship between people andplace.
And I think you know there werea few other examples of that.
But what I tried to do withthat data was to really not just
sort of say, okay, so this landwas occupied by the West family
and it was worth this much.
(18:23):
I think it was just aboutdrawing out some of those
stories with first-hand accountsand things like that, trying to
make it a little bit moreinteresting.
Dr Margaret Cook (18:36):
My background was as a social historian, so
I've always been interested inpeople.
And then I worked as a heritageconsultant, so I looked a lot
of places where people play andwork.
And then I worked as a heritageconsultant, so I looked a lot
of place and places where peopleplay and work.
And then I discoveredenvironmental history and I
realised that a lot of what wedo is we talk about the human
action and the environment'sjust the stage on which it
performs, and I wanted to thinkmore about that stage had grown
(19:01):
from a very small city in the1890s, where there was only
100,000 people there, to a citynow that's two and a half
million.
How did we look backwards?
How did we get to the situationthat we're in now?
So to do that I had to thinkreally hard about a whole lot of
records I've never used.
I used a lot of engineeringreports and I have no science or
(19:22):
engineering and I mean noscience and so I had to talk a
lot to engineers and people andread things like learn the
language of cummix and all sortsof different languages.
So I had to use a whole lot ofrecords I hadn't used before.
But then because of mybackground with heritage and
social history.
I used a lot of newspapers andfirst-hand accounts and I
(19:43):
particularly wanted to capturethe stories of the people.
So I also drew a lot on oralhistory.
So it was to try and get thosedifferent threads and to
complicate a voice, because weoften get a very strong story of
the developer, say, or thehomeowner who got flooded.
I wanted to try and weave thosedifferent stories as much as I
could.
So it involved a lot ofthinking widely about how I
(20:08):
might find those stories.
And particularly the chance toturn it into a book was the
opportunity to people thathistory more, with more stories
and anecdotes, and Iparticularly enjoyed the
opportunity to do that.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (20:32):
So Place is really?
I mean, it was foundational tothe project that led to making
Angus Downs and in many waysthat project emerged out of my
questioning the discipline ofhistory itself.
As an undergraduate student atuniversity, studying history, I
was encountering stuff in mylate 20s that I hadn't learnt
growing up as a kid in Dja DjaWurrung country in central
Victoria.
I grew up not knowing that Iwas living on Dja Dja Wurrung
(20:55):
country until much later, and soI was encountering stuff as a
student, an undergraduatestudent, that you know I was
really troubled and confrontedby, and I also had this deep
love for the discipline ofhistory and I began to sort of
think deeply about the silencesand what Tom Griffiths calls
(21:16):
white noise that had sort ofdominated so much of our history
writing in the 20th century andbegan to think what is it?
Perhaps there's something inthe discipline of history itself
and the methods the historian'scraft that has created helped
to create these silences orgenerate this white noise.
The cornerstone of thehistorian's craft is the
(21:38):
documentary archive and verymuch a linear sense of time, and
that's just one way of knowingand being in the world and it's,
you know, first Nations,australians.
It's a really different way ofbeing and knowing.
And so I began thinking youknow, what does it?
What is possible?
When you're a historian in yourprivileged place you turn to
(22:00):
place as an archive and embodiedforms of knowledge and memory.
And so, to undertake thisproject, I moved to Central
Australia and in working withChukki and Sandra, I took out a
loan, got into a bit of debt andgot an 80 series land cruiser
cruiser and learnt that stationby travelling through.
(22:22):
We put about 80,000 k's on thatland cruiser over about four
years and Chukki and Sandraspoke the history of that place
to me and shared that with me.
In Pitindata, langwich, weworked really closely with a
woman called Linda Riv, awonderful Western Desert
language specialist whointerpreted.
She went on all the bush tripswith us and would interpret in
(22:44):
country and that was an integralpart of learning to understand
this place.
Angus Downs, pitindatta.
Language is intimately tied tothat place and so I mean, yeah,
it very much changed the way Isort of think about and research
(23:05):
and wrote history.
You know, for Anangu history issomething that is embedded in
place.
All of the stories that werebeing shared with me were being
recounted in country.
They were itineraries, journeysthat were punctuated by place
names.
Everything was oriented incountry.
They were itineraries, journeys, that were punctuated by place
names.
Everything was oriented incountry.
So you know, privileging place,turning to it more than a stage
(23:29):
in a sense, was really sort ofcritical, I think, to sort of
beginning to understand thatplace from a different
perspective.
Myths and histories ofpastoralism and pioneers have
really dominated the way wethink about history here in
Australia and my sort of beingimmersed in place I think was
pivotal to really sort ofuntangling or unlearning a lot
(23:53):
of those myths and histories.
And very much I think one ofthe biggest sort of revelations
was how much the desertlandscape shaped colonialism and
the relationships and thingslike pastoralism.
We have, you know BazLuhrmann's A Still Australia
that romanticises pastoralism inthe north, with these sprawling
homesteads and handsome cowboys, and you know lots of
(24:17):
Aboriginal people working on thestation In central Australia,
angostans.
They weren't even homesteads tobegin with.
They would drift, move fromwaterhole to waterhole.
They were ephemeral sites.
The whole camp would get up andmove after big rains and so
that was, yeah, a really sort ofplace is critical in that
(24:37):
relationship between people andplaces, really critical in the
work, critical in thatrelationship between people and
place.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (24:42):
It's really critical in the work With
Shannon.
What I was really stuck byreading your book is that you
really challenge this perceptionof the First Nations people as
being passive victims ofcolonisation, that they are
interacting with the owners ofthe pastoral station.
They are sharing theirknowledge of the space of the
(25:04):
country.
So there is interaction.
Is this something which you seeas one of the main
contributions, possibly to thefield of indigenous history or
Australian history?
With Margaret, what I was stuckby was forgetting.
You get the big flood thatdestroys everything and people
(25:27):
forget it won't happen again.
What does it tell you aboutpeople and mentality?
You still, despite all thecalamity or disaster that comes
every 50, then 20, then 10 years, they still say, well, we can
still tame the river, we canstill do that.
Let's forget what happened,let's move on, build new houses
(25:48):
exactly in the area that wasflooded several times and with
Nicole and this is partly myCentral European upbringing I
was fascinated by the skatingrink, the skating rink in
Darlinghurst, and by the imagesof ladies in long coats on these
(26:10):
roller skaters, kind oftrampling, falling and enjoying
a social life.
Could you maybe tell us a bitmore about that case study.
Thank you.
Maybe with Shannon, now we canstart from this side.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (26:24):
I mean definitely you know the
collaborating with Anangu andthe thing with when you focus on
place.
You can't write stories orhistories of places without
engaging with the people wholived in and made those places.
And so in engaging with Anangu,you know, with two people in
particular, I sort of came toknow that place intimately from
(26:49):
their perspective and you knowthey very much.
I mean they're a huge part ofthe reason why they had their
own agenda for our collaboration.
Absolutely, both Chukchi andSandra were older.
Chukchi was 85 when we startedworking together.
Sandra was in her 70s.
So Chukchi in particular wasreally aware, I think, that he
(27:11):
was coming towards the end ofhis life and he really wanted
his knowledge and his knowledgeof that place and his connection
to that place recorded, hisknowledge of that place and his
connection to that placerecorded.
And so in collaborating withthem, you know they were really
sort of demonstrating how, youknow, angus Downs was so much
more than a pastoral station.
(27:31):
We sort of have theseassumptions that are, you know,
sort of shored up by things likeBaz Luhrmann's Australia.
These myths of pastoralism andpioneers in particular, have
been so pervasive in terms ofhow we think of ourselves and
our history here in Australiaand then you know, collaborating
with Annal and really deeplistening over a period of years
(27:53):
really revealed to me how theywere very much active agents and
that they had actually.
Angus Downs was so much morethan a pastoral station.
It was country and it was homefor multiple families and
multiple generations of familiesas well, and all manner of life
(28:17):
was playing out and takingplace on that station.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (28:22):
Yes, thank you.
Dr Margaret Cook (28:23):
So your question was about complacency,
really, and why do we forget?
That's very central in my bookand it's partly because we want
to forget.
So I look very closely atvested interests.
Why do we forget You're talkingabout?
Why do we have these storiesabout Baz Luhrmann's story?
Because they're more palatableoften.
So it's very romantic.
It's very romantic and peoplein Brisbane don't want to know
(28:46):
that the city floods.
So if you live beside a river,that's not really what you know.
I did become known as thenuisance in the city council for
a while, about which I'mthinking of putting on a T-shirt
, so I'm not very worried, butit's really interesting.
I wanted to look at the vestedinterests.
Brisbane's different fromSydney or Melbourne in that for
(29:06):
a number of reasons, but one isthe real estate is really
important because we don't havesecondary industries or so on.
So the power brokers inBrisbane are the real estate
agents, and so I actually foundfantastic articles that said
we'll just wait till peopleforget and then we'll sell the
house to someone in Sydney Again, gold for an historian.
But the problem is is there isthis complacency and the media
(29:27):
cycle really doesn't help.
So we move because of ourclimate of droughts and flooding
, rains, we move on to that nextcycle of drought or fire or
COVID or whatever disaster it is.
There's a fantastic diagramthat came out of the Centre of
Research in America which isknown as the hydro-eological
cycle, and it is.
It's so that it rains and wethink about floods for a while,
(29:51):
and then we go into drought, sowe become complacent and then we
start panicking about waterbecause we're starting to lose
that water.
And then it rains and everyonerelaxes again.
And the problem for people likeme who are trying to work in
the disaster space of improvingthe outcomes each time, is that
window where we want to discussfloods is not very big, and
(30:12):
politicians particularly saynow's not the time.
They did that in the fire.
It's not the time to talk aboutclimate change.
It's not the time to talk aboutadaptation.
People are suffering.
When is the time to talk aboutclimate change?
It's not the time to talk aboutadaptation.
People are suffering.
When is the time?
Is the problem?
Because you move on to the nextthing.
So the complacency is deeplyembedded in our culture and our
politics and our economy, and sothat's what I tried to do as an
(30:33):
historian, is use again thosefloods to tell that story of the
values that we've got.
We make choices about whatvalues are important and the
decisions we've got.
We make choices about whatvalues are important and the
decisions we've made is thatliving on the floodplain is
really important, and we've nowgot a housing crisis, and so the
solution is to put more houseson the floodplain, and you know,
again as an example of a choice.
(30:53):
To finish, we spend 97% of ourmoney on recovery and 3% on
planning for disasters.
Now, it doesn't take I said Ihave no maths, but it doesn't
take a lot of maths to work outthat if you move that dial a
little bit, we'd get a differentoutcome in every flood or fire
or famine or whatever disasterwe're talking about.
(31:14):
We've got to start thinkingdifferently about how we live in
this country in the future,particularly as more and more of
us choose to live here.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (31:22):
Okay, Nicole , please.
Nicole Cama (31:24):
Yes, so I'm actually really glad you asked
me about the DarlinghurstSkating Rink.
It was one of my favouritestories to discover.
It was a building that wasbuilt in 1889, and one of its
frontages was on LiverpoolStreet, but it took up an entire
block and it was established asa skating rink.
So roller skating was actuallyreally popular in Australia from
(31:46):
about the 1870s, and so thisplace was actually styled to
emulate the Imperial Palace ofJapan and it took in something
like 2,000 to 3,000 people couldfit in this building.
It had sort of mirrors placedall around the walls so that
people couldn't watch themselvesjust skating around or falling
(32:10):
over, as Jan said, and alsothere was actually suspended
from midair in a sort ofcircular cage, was a bandstand.
Mid-air, in a sort of circularcage was a bandstand which would
just sort of play as peopleskated around and people would
have skate cards that you knowlike dance cards.
So it was a really interestingsort of study of how people were
(32:32):
sort of spending their leisuretime in Sydney at that time, I
suppose.
But it wasn't actually.
It was actually quiteshort-lived.
It closed the following year,so a hugely expensive
undertaking.
I think it took something like300 men to construct the
building in 10 weeks orsomething like that Really
(32:53):
interesting building.
And it sort of hosted a varietyof other events, like there was
a baby show which people sortof entered their children to be
sort of on display and getspecial awards.
So twins, I think, got 25pounds and triplets got 50
pounds, so something I think itwas something between 12 and
(33:14):
15,000 people attended this showover a two-day period.
So despite its popularity itwas just too.
It's almost like it's too bigto be successful in.
It's still a city, even thoughit was a booming population
happening at that time.
So it was then actuallyconverted into the Australian
(33:35):
Athletic Club, which essentiallyfunctioned as a boxing sort of
studio and stadium, so somethinglike 6,000 people could be sort
of seated watching these reallyintense boxing matches which
were actually quitecontroversial at the time.
One of the most famous boxersto appear was actually a man
(33:59):
called Albert Griffiths, orGriffo as he was known, and he
was actually Australia's firstworld boxing champion, I think
so he actually was.
He, I suppose, performed, boxedat this at this at this venue,
and ironically he it was duringone of his matches that sort of
(34:20):
spelled the end of the actualclub because it just descended
into sort of violent chaos.
I think he used to be a memberof a push gang and they weren't
happy with him facing off with asort of African-American boxer
called Jerry Marshall and itlooked like Jerry Marshall was
going to win and it sort ofdescended into chaos.
(34:40):
Was going to win and it sort ofdescended into chaos.
So at that point it was sort ofalso hosting things like giant
tug-of-war championships andthings like that.
A really interesting place, butagain short-lived, and it did
function as a wool store forquite some time before it was
sort of demolished and made wayfor housing.
(35:01):
Of course, in a block of thatsize it was inevitable that it
would be sort of demolished andmake way for housing, but it was
really, really interesting.
I suppose it's another sort ofexample of the changing nature
of people and place and theirrelationship to place.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (35:18):
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Any question you would like toask your fellow panelists?
Dr Margaret Cook (35:25):
I'm really taken by the fact about
immersion in the place thatyou're in, that you moved there
and you obviously know your areavery, very well.
I actually went kayaking on theriver because they kept talking
about this spot where the tworiver systems merge, so I had to
go and see it, and you can seerivers best when you're in the
river, because they kept talkingabout this spot where the two
river systems merge, so I had togo and see it, and you can see
rivers best when you're in theriver.
And I think that's aninteresting thing, because
(35:47):
there's that lovely quote abouthistorians need good boots, and
I think there's a thing about weoften, you know our tools are
the documents, the documents andthe archives and the libraries,
but with things that are deeplyembedded in place, I think you
have to go there.
Nicole Cama (36:05):
You have to see the place and walk the place,
because the other thing withDarlinghurst is that it's known
for it.
It's still actually quite hillyand there's sort of parts of
the streets that I think there'sa few streets that still follow
the original creek or one ofthe tributaries of the creek, so
it's sort of getting to knowthat place.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (36:23):
There's still sort of remnants of that sort
of time that you're researching,but yeah, yeah, it's such a
lovely thing to reflect onbecause the immersion is, the
immersion in a place is socritical and it was really sort
of fundamental to my own project.
And I can't even begin toimagine how you could go about
(36:43):
writing a history of a placelike Angus Downs in Central
Australia if you didn't spend asignificant amount of time in
that country in the desert,experiencing the distances,
developing a sense for water andhow critical it is and how that
dictates movements, and so,yeah, I can't even begin to
imagine how you go about reallysort of conceiving of a project
(37:05):
like that if you weren't sort ofprepared to go and immerse
yourself in the place.
And for myself, you know themobile sort of methodology as
well, the act of physicallymoving through country, because
mobility is such an importantpart of desert life as well.
So it was sort of another layerof how to sort of really come
to a much deeper understandingof this place beyond this sort
(37:28):
of symbolism of the pastoralstation.
And for myself, I think one ofthe richest things was that it
changed the way I read thearchives.
I think sort of people assumethat I did oral history and
therefore there wasn't sort ofmuch archival research, but
there's actually, you know it'sdeeply embedded in archival
research as well.
(37:49):
But being physically immersedin the landscape, travelling
through that country, the waythat you have to it, changed the
way I read the archives and Ibegan to see stuff in the
archives that I absolutely wouldhave missed and never would
have picked up on had I not beenimmersed.
And so I think it really justyeah, it just enriched my
(38:10):
historical practice at thatlevel as well?
Nicole Cama (38:13):
Can you give an example of what you sort of
never would have spotted in thearchive?
Dr Shannyn Palmer (38:19):
It was actually one of my favourite
parts.
I think it was one of myfavourite parts of the book.
There's a chapter called theItinerants, and so, as I was
sort of explaining when I firststarted working with Anangu,
there was a particular storythat would sort of get told
(38:40):
again and again.
Amangu would relay thistravelling from Ernabella
Mission to Arionga, which cutright through Angus Downs, and
they were constantly walkingbackwards and forwards between
these two stations and there'sdifferent reasons why, like
different families, kids hadgone to the missions, but
everyone's related, so theywould sort of travel between
these two places.
(39:01):
And so it just really sort ofstruck me that, like everyone is
talking about this walking fromAriongo to Urnabella, and they
would recount the journeys insuch rich detail.
And then, quite some time afterthat, it was sort of a
revelation sort of hearing thosestories, because it really
opened me up to there was thisparticular way of recounting
(39:21):
history which is embedded incountry, and in the archives I
came across a whole bunch ofdocuments that the welfare
branch had created in the late1950s and early 1960s, and the
subject title of each of themwas the itinerants, and the
subject title of each of themwas the itinerants and Arnalor,
(39:43):
by this stage in the late 50s,had taken on camels.
The farmers, pastoralists, nolonger needed them after the war
because they got the trucks andall the camels that they had
went to Arnalor.
So Arnalor became reallyskilled cameleers and the rate
at which they were travellingand they were also trading porno
with tourists at the timecatching dingo scalps.
(40:05):
But there's this pile ofdocuments that the welfare
branch wrote over a decade, thetitle of which is called the
Itinerants, which documentstheir concerted efforts to try
and get Unalong and the line.
The journey that they weretravelling was the same journey
between the two missions that Ihad been sort of told about from
Anangal.
(40:26):
And so these documents justyeah, sort of capture this, the
welfare branch sort of doingthemselves in tying themselves
in knots, trying to get Anangalto stop moving and to relocate
to the missions to take on jobsthat actually didn't exist,
(40:46):
because it was a bad look forthem basically to be sort of
travelling around and engagingwith tourists and so having, I
mean, I suppose it just kind ofothered that sort of.
I could actually sort of see inthis way the way in which
assimilation policy inparticular was operating at the
(41:07):
time, this kind of sort ofnarrative of like we've got to
get people into wage labour, wewant them in you know nuclear
family units, and so we've gotto get them to sort of stop, and
meanwhile they've got no sortof understanding of the route
that people are travelling, whythey're travelling this way.
There's a whole line of springsthat travel that existed between
(41:27):
the two missions as well, so itwas situated on a road that
they'd been travelling forthousands of years and
travelling between those twomissions visiting families, you
know.
They enabled them to carry onall kinds of social and cultural
practices, but no one in thewelfare branch could ever see
that, and so I think having,yeah, coming across those
(41:50):
documents enabled me to sort ofget at what was in them.
It sort of like became thisartifact of colonialism and
assimilation policy and ideologyin particular that I think I
just wouldn't have read in thesame way.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (42:03):
Okay, thank you.
I mean we can open the floorfor questions.
We have about 10 minutes, so ifyou have any questions, please.
Audience (42:15):
Thank you all very much.
It's been fascinating.
I'd like to ask Nicole aquestion how did you find the
accounts of the West Mr West?
Were they diaries?
Were they household records?
Nicole Cama (42:28):
accounts there.
Actually there is sort of.
I know that one of hisdescendants published it as a
sort of collection and they'reactually you can have a look at
them in this library.
But he also published them inthe newspapers and thank
goodness for the NationalLibrary's trove because they've
(42:50):
digitised quite a few newspapersand they're all in there.
So he actually wrote not justabout Darlinghurst but about all
parts of different parts ofSydney.
So they are a reallyfascinating document.
I have a question for DrMargaret Cook, please.
Did you face a lot of backlashafter you published your book?
Dr Margaret Cook (43:11):
That's a really interesting question.
I thought I would get a lotmore.
Maybe it's secret and I don'treally know.
I did get a little bit, but oneof the things that I did get to
do as a result of the book is Igot to talk to a lot of
different audiences, which wasreally fantastic, including some
radio stations I didn't knowexist.
There's a One Nation radiostation, for example.
(43:33):
I didn't know and I thoughtthat could be interesting.
But it's actually it's, andI've deliberately gone into
places where I'm uncomfortable,and I can sort of blame my
father, who's here, for that,because I did say to him oh,
when I was invited to some group, I said, oh, but you know they
might not like me.
And he said but if you keeptalking to the same people who
believe what you're saying, thenyou're only talking to the
(43:54):
choir, and why did you wasteyour time?
Basically, good point, dad, offI go.
So I have gone into the lion'sden a lot and it's really
interesting when you talk toengineers or flight
practitioners or real estateagents.
The guy I criticised the mostin the book I really did
criticise him came to a talk andI was terrified and he thanked
(44:15):
me and congratulated me becausehe said they'd never thought
about it that way.
Everyone looks at the worldfrom their own lens and their
own viewpoints and I think evenjust making them think
differently was enlightening.
Don't think the behavior'schanged and it's not, but even
that I can just make peoplethink differently.
I think that's that's worth.
(44:35):
That's one of what I wanted todo is to change the conversation
a little bit, and to do thatyou've got to rattle the cage a
bit, and I have a bit of a habitof rattling cages.
Thank you.
Audience (44:47):
I have a question for Nicole what's your connection?
There's two questions really.
What's your connection withDarlinghurst and now you've been
so successful with this project?
Which other part of Sydney haveyou got your eye on for
something similar?
Nicole Cama (45:04):
All of them.
No, I don't have a particularconnection with Darlinghurst,
but actually this project formedpart of a much broader project
which was focusing on thehistory of Darlinghurst.
So a book actually came out ofthis project called my
Darlinghurst, and there was alsoa sort of walking tour which
(45:26):
was actually published in theCity of Sydney's Culture Walk
app called Serenade If anyonehas a chance, please do it and
also an oral history project.
So this actually formed part ofa quite a sort of
multi-platform project.
And Darlinghurst, I think it'salways fascinated me.
It's such a fabulous area.
(45:47):
Darlinghurst, I think it'salways fascinated me.
It's such a fabulous area Interms of sort of thoughts of
other parts of Sydney.
I would love to expand theproject and do something similar
, you know, in Surrey Hills orin other parts of the CBD, but
at the moment it's sort of likeit's open.
I'm not sure yet.
(46:08):
Maybe one day.
Audience (46:10):
Thank you.
A question for Shannon Is thereanything in particular that led
you to Angus Downs in terms ofpicking a pastoral station to
work on.
Dr Shannyn Palmer (46:19):
It's a great question.
There's actually a book thatled me to Angus Downs Station.
A book that led me to AngusDowns Station.
There was an anthropologistcalled Frederick Rose who spent
four months on the station in1962.
Frederick Rose is a reallyinteresting character in and of
himself.
(46:40):
There's a great biography thatwas published a couple of years
ago called the Red Professor,and he had sort of started his
anthropological career on GrootIsland um in the 1940s and ended
up being.
He moved to East Germany.
He was living in Australia,born in England, wanted to come
back to Australia to finish offhis ethnographic field work and
(47:03):
the government had a huge ASIOfile on him so he couldn't get
into any of the settlements.
He really wanted to go out toYuin Dumu but the government
weren't having a bar of that,and so he was friends with a man
called Bill Harney.
Some of you may have heard ofhim, quite a large character in
Northern Territory history, andhe was friends with Bill Harney.
(47:24):
So Bill Harney sort of wrote tohim and said you should come
out to Angost Downs Station.
You probably won't get sort ofmuch in terms of traditional
ceremony or anything like that,but it's a great sort of example
of culture contact and so youshould come out.
And so he went out in 1962 andlived on the station for four
months and then wrote a bookcalled the Wind of Change in
(47:47):
Central Australia the Aboriginesat Angus Downs, and I came
across.
It's an incredibly rare book.
It was published in EastGermany.
It's really expensive to get acopy it costs upwards of $400,
$500 to get a copy and I saw Ihad spent time out there, I was
familiar with the area and cameacross the book, and photography
(48:08):
was a key part of Rose'smethodology.
And so in the back pages of thebook there were 150 black and
white portraits of all theunlawful who were living on the
station at the time.
They were numbered from one to150.
They didn't have names of theportraits but there was a page
that corresponded with each ofthose photographs.
And then there were also lotsof photographs of everyday life
(48:30):
on the station, so people havinghaircuts, people buying stuff
from the store, people playingcards, making punu, cooking
kangaroo, and so it was just themost unusual ethnography I'd
ever seen, especially from the1960s.
And looking at the photographsI knew that a lot of people in
those photographs would still bealive today and wondered if
(48:54):
they'd seen the book and numberone the person who was number
one in those photographs wasChuggy Pumpjack.
So he was number one out therein 1962, and he was still number
one when I went out in 2012,.
Because when I started askingquestions, everyone said if you
want to talk about Angus Downs,you need to go and find Tricky
Pump Jack.
(49:14):
So he was still number one then.
Sandra was in those photographsas well.
She was number 90.
And it started from there.
I became the conker with thebook.
Conker is picked out forunmarried woman.
So I was just the youngunmarried woman with a Greenland
cruiser who had the book andthey would see me and they'd be
like, hey, conker, you need toget that book.
And everyone would want to sitdown and go through those
(49:35):
photographs and they would gothrough them all and find
themselves, find their familymembers, tell me where everyone
was living.
And that's how it started.
People started talking aboutthe station and I cottoned on
really quickly that it was thisincredibly fascinating and
important place out there and so, yeah, that's how come Angus
(49:56):
Downs came to be the focus ofthe book.
Audience (50:00):
Thanks.
A question for Dr Cook.
You mentioned that you've donea bit of cage rattling and you
also mentioned that we don't seemuch change in attitudes After
all the work you've done.
Where is the best hope forchange?
Federal, state, localgovernments, city planners or
the real estate businesses thatseem to run most of Sydney, let
(50:23):
alone Brisbane?
I mean, how do you get to apoint where the rivers don't
have city problems anymore?
Dr Margaret Cook (50:32):
The interesting thing with having
gone back to write the morerecent chapter is I did actually
see a shift and that's reallyencouraging, particularly in
Queensland and needs to be inQueensland, because we actually
are the most flood prone state.
New South Wales is second.
Sorry to tell you that, but weactually have the Queensland
Flood Reconstruction Authority,which has now become federal.
New South Wales is getting oneoff the ground.
(50:55):
There are some moves towardsbuyback schemes and there is
some movement towardsredesigning homes.
So I am actually seeing achange.
What is going to happen iscapitalism is going to work in
that until recently, peoplewould be able to rebuild and
reinsure and just continuebusiness as usual.
(51:16):
We're not getting insurance,we're not going to be able to
rebuild, so unfortunately, we'regoing to have to make a change,
whether we like it or not.
So I'm trying to encouragepeople to be proactive and do it
when it suits them, becauseotherwise they will be doing it
kicking and screaming later,when they have to.
There are already climaterefugees in some parts of the
(51:38):
world that's the phrase they useand we are going to see that in
Australia.
So I can't solve the problemsof the past, but I'd really like
to stop making them.
So stop building on thefloodplain, start putting some
moratoriums down and stopbuilding where we shouldn't be
building.
We've got enough science.
We have enough knowledge nowthere aren't any more excuses.
(52:00):
So I am seeing a change.
I'm just impatient as well as acage rattler.
A/Prof Jan Láníček (52:09):
So, unfortunately, we are coming to
the end and I'd like to thankall our speakers Nicole Cama, Dr
Margaret Cook and Dr ShannynPalmer, for sharing their
expertise and insights intotheir work, and you can
certainly purchase their books.
They are very affordable, whichis really good for historians.
I also would like to thank ouraudience for being here and for
(52:35):
sharing these incredible storiesof research and publications To
the staff of the HistoricCouncil, catherine Shirley,
Amanda Wells and Laura Sayle,who do all this hard work behind
the scenes to make these eventshappen and being so enjoyable.
(52:55):
Thank you.
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