Category Archives: Blog

Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners: BBC’s award-winning TV series

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Ip02x1x3dn 2015, the BBC in Britain screened Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, a 2-part documentary series, presented by David Olusoga. The series won a BAFTA TV award in the ‘Specialist Factual’ category in 2016.  The documentary was produced in conjunction with the team at University College London who created the Legacies of British Slave Ownership database. This database has been very useful in my own research, and I’ll write more about it in another post.

Britain abolished slavery in 1834—’abolition’ as it’s called, is an event which is celebrated as a defining moment in Britain’s history, and rightly so. But abolition came at a price. The government of the day introduced a compensation scheme – not for the slaves, but for the slave-owners who lost ‘property’ (i.e. their slaves, who they counted as assets). The compensation scheme paid out £17 billion in today’s money to 46,000 slave owners. The slaves received nothing. The British bureaucracy responsible for the compensation scheme kept meticulous records, which are today held in The National Archives in London.

The TV series uses the records of the compensation scheme as a starting point to examine the development of slavery in the British world. Olusoga travels to Barbados and to the counties of Britain, exploring the human and financial impact of slavery. The series is well-researched, and provides an excellent overview of Britain’s links with slavery, particularly as it drew to a close in the nineteenth century. The research of the UCL academics featured in the programme, and Olusoga’s work translating this history for the screen is so important—Britain’s slave-owners and their enslaved Africans are so often forgotten in the rush to congratulate the abolitionists and emancipationists in Britain’s past.

Although the documentary aired in 2015, it is still possible to download both episodes from the BBC for a very small fee. Follow this link: Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners Video Download.

This is a link to the programme page for the documentary, which has more information and links to other useful resources.

 

Long weekend in Dublin

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I returned from a long weekend in Dublin a week ago – I was delighted to be able to attend a symposium at Trinity College organised by David Dickson: ‘Ireland and the Caribbean in the Age of Empire.’ The 5-day round trip from Sydney was somewhat crazy but the symposium was so well put-together, with so many ‘big’ names in this emerging field, that it was well worth the jetlag. Many of those of us who presented have been inspired by Nini Rodgers’ Ireland, Slavery and Antislavery, so it was wonderful that she could be at the gathering—in closing proceedings she told us how delighted she is by the direction research is taking in this area, and is amazed at the array of sources scholars are drawing together. I was also rather chuffed that she recalled our chance meeting 18 months ago in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast.

It was wonderful to see papers presented by (among others) Jenny Shaw, Matt Reilly, Jonathan Wright and Orla Power – all of whom I have already cited in my in-progress PhD thesis. There were so many other interesting papers covering Irish connections with the Caribbean in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. A handful of fascinating papers also touched on interactions with the Spanish empire in the Caribbean. I have dreams of reviving my Spanish skills and exploring those connections in the future.

Many papers took a biographical/microhistorical approach, as I’m doing. A stand-out for me was a paper by Tom Truxes on the value of the British National Archives’ High Court of Admiralty Prize Papers—anyone who’s read the Bordeaux-Dublin Letters 1757 will have an inkling of the type of documents available in the collection. Truxes explained that there are over 4,000 boxes of mostly uncatalogued court records, personal correspondence, commercial documents, shipping papers etc at Kew… so potential dissertation-writers without a topic and with access to Kew—go check out the prize papers! I would if I lived in London.

I presented my work-in-progress on my merchants and planters chapter. I discussed John Black of Ulster/Grenada/Trinidad, and James Watt of Ramelton/Barbados/Jamaica. I was followed on my panel by Jonathan Wright who also presented on Mr Black, and then David Fleming who spoke on Eyre Coote, a Governor of Jamaica. Both papers were excellent, and really helped me think about my approach as I write up my second chapter.

Next week I’m off to my first Irish Studies Australia/NZ Conference, to present much the same paper as I did in Dublin. I’m looking forward to getting the lay of the land in Irish Studies in Australia & promise to report back soon.

References:

Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery:1612—1865 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad, edited by L.M. Cullen, John Shovlin and Thomas M. Truxes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

 

 

 

 

 

Going on a bear hunt

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BearsParents out there, and maybe some younger readers, will recognise this line: “We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, Oh no! we’ve got to go through it!” The line has been going around and around in my mind the past couple of weeks.  On a global scale, my challenges are miniscule – but nonetheless they have ebbed away at my steady PhD research-and-writing habits so that I find myself almost entirely out of the way of working now. I can’t quite believe I’ve let it get to this stage.  I really need to get words on the page. I find myself forcing my way through excuses – I’ve just got to go through it. I wish I could summon up the energy and drive I had as I studied for all those law exams so many years ago – I remember making clear sacrifices back then (not going to footy matches for a few weeks before exams, not going out on Friday nights – I remember those ones!), but I now find making sacrifices very very hard. I’ve just got to go through it.

My aim by the beginning of December is to finish my draft introduction and literature review, and a second chapter on plantation/merchant life which I’ve almost finished researching.  Perhaps putting that aim in writing on this blog will impel me towards the finish line! I really want to have some proper, guilt-free time off over Summer.

I’ll end this post with a quote I heard from Ira Glass on the Happier podcast this week. This hints at the “we’ve got to go through it” sentiment, but with a positive promise of better things to come…

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

The Possibility of Small Revolutions

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The digital revolution and the practice of history: what’s changed and what hasn’t changed? This was the question posed by Dr Tim Sherratt in his keynote address at the History teachers Association/Macquarie Uni Headstart to Extension seminar this week.

Sherratt describes himself as a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. As well as an academic post at the University of Canberra, he’s currently half of the Trove management team at the National Library of Australia.  My favourite line from his keynote was that he wants “to mobilise our cultural collections into the spaces people already inhabit.” That is, I think, what public history is all about.

The study of the past has already been transformed by digital technology: Trove’s 190,000,000 newspaper articles is just one example of this. But Sherratt demonstrated that digital technology means more for the practice of history than ‘simply’ digitising documents. Through the course of his keynote, Sherratt demonstrated a number of digital tools which can help historians think about and analyse primary sources in different ways; and he showcased a number of projects which utilise digital technology to help us see people, places and events in the past in a new way.

But back to the question—what’s changed and what hasn’t changed? We must continue to be sceptical of our sources. Just as students of history are trained to think about the assumptions and forces which shaped individual primary sources, so we must also think about the assumptions and forces which shape digital collections. Funding priorities, significant anniversaries and curatorial agendas are just some of the forces which dictate which documents are digitised, and how the collection is presented. For example, Trove (which draws from other digitised collections around Australia) returns significantly more digitised newspaper articles for 1914. This is the result of the priorities of the state libraries around Australia, which have focused on providing sources in relation to World War I during the current 100 year anniversary.

Understanding the forces and assumptions that drive the creation of digital collections should in turn lead the historian to consider the age-old questions of what isn’t there, just as much as what is. Absence is just as important as presence when considering an archive. As Sherratt noted, it’s important to guard against the “sense of completeness” in the digital age. Just because something isn’t in google, does it mean it doesn’t exist?

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I can’t take credit for discovering the Roosevelt on a moose picture. Refer to Dr Sherratt’s slides for more on this.

Sherratt also drew attention to the presence of fake and unattributed historical pictures which seem ubiquitous online. But the well-known fake picture of Teddy Roosevelt riding a moose was actually created in 1912. New technology may make it easier to share fakes, but as Sherratt pointed out, this technology also makes it easier to learn about—and from—those fakes. For example, @picpedant tweets attributions and calls out fakes, and digital tools such as Tin Eye enable anyone to analyse whether an image has been doctored. The fake historical pictures may drive pedants mad, but they do generate discussion.

The slides from the keynote are available online here and include links to many exciting digital history projects, and the tools I’ve mentioned in this post.

I’m really excited about the possibilities for accessing and analysing sources, and communicating historical findings, which digital technology is bringing to the practice of history. Much of the audience at the keynote yesterday was students in their final year at school. My hope is that Sherratt inspired some of them with the desire to see where technology can take their historical practice in the future—in Sherratt’s words, “the possibility of small revolutions.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women’s memoirs of the West Indies

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My PhD research focuses on connections between Ireland and the British West Indies from about 1770 until 1830. I hope to be able to weave the voices of some Irish women who had connections with the region through my work, but I suspect this will be a challenge. I found a few (very few) letters written by Irish women who lived in the Caribbean during my research at PRONI in Belfast, and am now looking for published (or unpublished for that matter) memoirs. I’ve found a number by women travellers from England, Scotland and north America, as well as a handful of works by non-white women. My search for a work by an Irish woman, however, continues. This list is not exhaustive and I may update it as I go. I haven’t done much secondary reading on this topic yet, but the most helpful work by far has been Evelyn O’Callaghan’s Women Writing the West Indies, 1804—1939, “A Hot Place, Belonging to Us” (Routledge, 2004).

Any recommendations or comments from you, dear reader, would be most welcome!

Perhaps the best-known published journal is that of Lady Nugent, wife of Sir George Nugent, who served as Governor of Jamaica at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is a link to a published copy of her journal Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805.

Anne Powers, the author of A Parcel of Ribbons: The letters of an 18th Century Family in London and Jamaica, has reviewed two memoirs by female visitors to Jamaica in the nineteenth century: Martha Jefferson Trice’s A Lady in Jamaica 1879, Link to Powers’ Review and Diana Lewes’ A Year in Jamaica, Memoirs of a girl in Arcadia in 1889, Link to Review

I used the journal of a Scottish traveller, Janet Schaw, during my Masters research, for her description of the bustling island of St. Eustatius in the 1770s: Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776

The Fate of the Fenwicks, Letters to Mary Hays (1798-1828), which (excitingly!) is available in digital form via the National Library of Australia here.

As for the writing of non-white women, O’Callaghan notes that the generally agreed chronology commences with the writings of Anne Hart Gilbert and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites (The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals, edited by Moira Ferguson (University of Nebraska Press, 1993)), followed by the History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself  (1831), and concludes with Mary Seattle’s autobiographical Wonderful Adventures (1857). There is then a gap until the twentieth century. O’Callaghan notes (pp.2-3) that although very few texts by non-white women appeared, that does not mean that there was no women’s writing from the West Indies—although it seems that for a long time, academics did argue that such a void existed. The book goes on to discuss what O’Callaghan terms “narratives of the West Indies by women.”

We can hold more than one story in our heads #anzachistories

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As History Week draws to a close in Sydney, this is a summary of the Symposium held to explore public and popular histories of Anzac. The Symposium was put together by Associate Professor Michelle Arrow, and was supported by the Modern History, Politics & International Relations Department, and the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University. These are my (possibly somewhat random) thoughts on the day. I hope not to mis-represent any of the arguments advanced during the day, and welcome comments from anyone who was there, or who would like to know more.

The day was a success, with some great presentations, excellent questions, and thought-provoking discussions. For the students in the audience, there were many hints from the speakers about areas crying out for further research (a history of the RSL anyone?)  I always think it’s well worth the price of admission to attend these sorts of events as listening to researchers and commentators invariably sparks creativity and questions, and avenues for further research.

The day opened with keynote addresses from Carolyn Holbrook and Anna Clark. Holbrook’s book Anzac the Unauthorized Biography was a joint winner of this year’s prize for an Australian First World War History, part of the NSW Premier’s History awards. Holbrook addressed the question of how we account for the change in attitude about Anzac from being a point of protest about war (the position for much of the last century), to today’s reverence for the sacrifice of naive young men, which seems to takes on more and more the mantle of a civic religion? Given the attachment of today’s Australian politicians to the ‘Anzac legend’ and the supposed un-Australianness of questioning it, can we blame politicians for the revival of the legend? Holbrook argued that no, the roots of the revival lie not in high politics, but rather in popular life. She noted Bill Gammage’s ground-breaking study of Australian WWI soldiers in The Broken Years, an approach which has been taken up by family historians, shifting the focus away from the military aspects of the War, towards the voices of the soldiers. Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli has something to do with this too.

Anna Clark addressed the question of Anzac and everyday historical consciousness, drawing on interviews undertaken with a variety of ‘ordinary’ Australians in her current research project Private Lives, Public History. Clark noted the “quite nuanced” views her interviewees expressed about Anzac, including conflicting, complicated thoughts and emotions, even for those with a personal connection to Anzac. Clark concluded by noting the complexity of vernacular historical consciousness. This resonates with me, and was a theme which emerged throughout the day. It is so easy to simplify thoughts and reactions to history—in this case Anzac—but history is never as simple as one uncomplicated story.

The panel on Anzac Fictions included a discussion of the history of Anzac in Australian cinema by Daniel Reynaud, Fay Anderson’s assessment of Deadline Gallipoli, and Kylie Flack’s fascinating review of representations of Anzac in Australian junior historical fiction since 2000. I mean to follow up Reynaud’s claim that the footage we often see on Australian TV of the landing at Gallipoli is genuine, but rather is from The Hero of the Dardanelles, a 1915 movie filmed at Sydney’s Tamarama Beach!

I chaired the Selfies and Diaries panel. Tom Sear discussed the ‘hyper-connective commemoration’ pf Anzac Day 2015, including Woolworths’ infamous ‘Fresh in their memories’  campaign/PR disaster, which was live for all of eight hours on 15 April this year. Maggie Patton then discussed the State Library of NSW’s exhibition of WWI diaries in ‘Life Interrupted.’

The final session was Q&A style, run by Dr Michelle Arrow, with a panel comprising Christopher Lee (screenwriter: Gallipoli), Andrew Anastasios (screenwriter: The Water Diviner), Lisa Scott (Producer: Anzac Girls), and Rachel Landers (Director) and Kate Aubusson (Presenter) for ABC’s Lest We Forget What? The panel canvassed many issues, but a theme which had emerged earlier in the day was taken up, which is the power of Anzac to engage Australians emotionally, something the writers and directors drew upon in their screen work. All the panelists expressed their essentially anti-war motivations. Lee channelled this into as realistic as possible a depiction of the violence and ugliness of war in his Gallipoli—a stark contrast with Weir’s version, which contains virtually no combat. I would do the panellists a disservice if I tried to sum up their discussions in a paragraph, so will leave their work to speak for itself. But as with the speakers I heard during the 2013 Presenting the Past Symposium on History and the Media, I was struck by the amount of research writers undertake, and the care with which they approach their subject.

I’ll end with a quote from Kate Aubusson, which epitomises for me why the study of history remains crucial, and has so much to offer society… “We don’t have the memory of mice, we can hold more than one story in our heads.” Anzac is complicated.

PS. a number of attendees tweeted about the day via the hashtag #anzachistories

History Week #Anzachistories

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September 5 — 13 is  History Week in New South Wales, and this year’s theme is ‘War: Nationalism & Identity.’ I must admit to being a bit underwhelmed by the theme when I first heard it, as I’ve definitely suffered from Anzac fatigue in 2015, and rather enjoy exploring history through lenses other than war. On reflection however, I think the History Council’s line-up of events will stimulate discussion which goes deeper than simply drawing a straight line between the battlefield and nationhood, and I hope will draw in other stories around war and nationhood beyond the ‘baptism by fire’ narrative.  The Council explains on its website that the theme of the week “will focus on the history of nation building, nationalism and national identity as the products of both peaceful and violent processes.” Click here to go to see all the events planned for History Week.

Along with two fellow PhD students, I’ve been assisting Michelle Arrow in organising a public Symposium, sponsored by Macquarie University, entitled Public and Popular Histories of Anzac The programme focuses on what ordinary Australians think about Anzac, and what sorts of stories about Anzac circulate in popular and consumer culture. The speakers include Australian screenwriters, journalists, film/TV directors and producers, academics and writers and will discuss everything from films, TV shows, children’s books, literature and social media. The symposium is designed for the general public – it’s certainly not just for scholars and the media. This is a link to the symposium’s website and programme: Symposium Details

If you can make it to the State Library of NSW for all or some of the sessions, I encourage you to Book Now! If you can’t be there in person, and are a twitter-type, follow #anzachistories for a taste of what’s being discussed on the day.

Of course, you can always follow up the Symposium with the Annual History Lecture,  to be given by Professor Bruce Scates this year: Anzac Amnesia: How the Centenary Forgot the War I’ll be going if I can get some babysitting in place!

Irish archives at PRONI

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I’ve just completed my initial archival research for my PhD, which involved a very long trip from Australia to Ireland. After a couple of days in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, I ventured north to Belfast. My aim in this blogpost is to provide some information about carrying out research at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland—PRONI for short.

IMG_3164PRONI is housed in a modern, light-filled building in the Titanic Quarter, a twenty-minute walk from City Hall in the centre of Belfast.  PRONI is a repository for archives from all over Ireland, and holds a diverse collection of official and private documents.

Obtaining a reader’s card was simple – no academic reference was required, just photo ID, and the card was produced on the spot. As is the norm with archives, researchers cannot take bags, coats/jackets or pens into the reading room—a plastic bag is provided to carry in your pencils, laptop, purse etc with you. The rest can be left in a free locker for the day (although you need to insert a £1 coin which is refunded when you finish with the locker).

Most visitors to PRONI seemed to be people researching their family history, and from what I observed, the staff were enormously helpful and patient with these visitors. I heard accents from America, Canada, Australia, England and New Zealand—PRONI clearly generates a fair amount of tourist revenue for Northern Ireland.

As an academic researcher spending more than just a couple of days at PRONI, I encountered some stumbling blocks, and having chatted with others doing similar work, I realised I wasn’t alone. Time was of the essence for my trip, I couldn’t be away from home for long so a leisurely trawl through the archives was out of the question. My aim was to locate and photograph as many potentially useful documents as possible, then catalogue and review them on my return home.  I hope that by writing about my experiences, I can help future researchers better prepare (logistically and financially) for research at PRONI. This is by no means a criticism of the archives or its staff, as I found them all to be friendly, welcoming and helpful. It was lovely to be greeted by name as I arrived for ‘work’ in the morning!

Bulk ordering documents: The PRONI catalogue is marvellously detailed. The online catalogue is good, but PRONI’s onsite catalogue (which cannot be accessed unless you are onsite) is far more detailed. This onsite catalogue breaks down each collection into individual items, for example, I wanted to review the collection of 18 letters exchanged between James Blair and his family in the 1770s. The collection is broken down into the 18 individual letters. As PRONI only permits readers to order 5 items at a time, this meant I was ordering 5 letters, then returning each as I finished reading or scanning, then ordering the next one—wasting precious time. The reading room staff eventually put me in touch with the manager of the document-ordering department, who gave me permission to make a ‘bulk order,’ so that I could order an entire collection. I couldn’t put that order in the system myself, this had to be done on my behalf by a member of staff. During my time at PRONI, some staff members would require me to fill out a form before placing a bulk order, others would call the head of the document-ordering department, and others just took my word for it that I had permission to do so. So while bulk ordering solved the problem of time-wasting for me, it was still a bureaucratic process.

My advice to future researchers is to contact PRONI ahead of your visit to request permission to place bulk orders, or at least to make contact so they can set you up with the necessary permissions as soon as possible.

Photographing documents: As I was in Belfast for a limited period, my aim was to photograph as many documents as possible, then catalogue and read them later. I had contacted PRONI to check I could photograph documents in the archive ahead of my visit, but I hadn’t understood the subtleties of the rules! They differ from any other archive I’ve ever visited…

Basically there are two options. Option 1 is to use your own camera. PRONI charges £10.50 per hour for camera use, and they require you to give advance notice in writing of exactly which documents you will be photographing. Your camera will be held behind the counter in the reading room until you begin using it, and then the clock will start running to calculate the price you need to pay. For example, if it takes you 10 minutes to do your photography, you will be charged £1.75.  Option 2 is to use PRONI’s scanner to photograph documents. You do not need to give notice of what you will be scanning, but it does cost 30p per image. Copy cards can be purchased at the reading room, and you need to bring your own USB stick to save the scanned images to. The scanner is easy to use and the scanned images are excellent quality, but this is an expensive exercise if you wish to take a lot of pictures, which I did!

If I’d grasped the complexities of PRONI’s photographing/copying rules, I would have incorporated copying costs into my funding request from my university. I did feel rather taken advantage of in this respect, particularly as other archives and institutions (the National Library of Ireland and Linen Hall Library in Belfast, to name two) permit researchers to photograph documents with smartphones. I happily scanned a number of documents in both these places at no cost.

Eating & Drinking in the Titanic Quarter: As I already mentioned, PRONI is located in the Titanic Quarter. I didn’t take long breaks for lunch but found a couple of interesting options if you want to get out. Alternatively, if you pack your own lunch & want to stay at the archives, there are comfortable tables and chairs just inside the building’s entrance where you can eat. There is also a cafe in the building, but frankly, there are better options a short walk away! Dock Cafe

Cast and Crew is a fairly new restaurant from well-known Belfast restauranteurs, 5 minutes walk from PRONI. It’s only open during the day, but they do great lunches (and presumably great breakfasts too). You can eat-in or take-away, and the coffee was great. The restaurant is so-named as it’s opposite the Titanic Studios where Game of Thrones is filmed. I wonder if I tag ‘game of thrones’ for this blogpost I’ll get a huge spike in readership 🙂

The Dock Cafe is a 2 minute walk from PRONI. It is a charity-run cafe which operates on an honesty-box system, so you pay however much (or little) you wish! They have excellent soup (after 12.30pm), tea, coffee, and the ubiquitous Irish scones & traybake offerings. They’re also more than happy for you to bring your own food to eat in the cafe.

All the best with researching at PRONI. Overall I had a great time discovering the wealth of archival material available, as well as exploring further afield in Belfast and County Antrim.

* The header image for this blogpost shows some of the glass frontage of the PRONI building, which features script from the archives. It also features some blue sky in Belfast!

Google Street View, c.1872: Hill End

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The cover photograph for my blog was taken by my husband at Hill End, a  designated ‘Historic Site’ in country New South Wales.  It’s a fascinating place, well-known to anyone who grew up in Sydney and traipsed out there on a school excursion.  The township sits high in the Central Tablelands, 300km northwest of Sydney. We visited Hill End for the second time a couple of years ago, and I wrote this review as an assessment for my Masters unit ‘Making Histories Public.’

Hill End Historic Site owes much to the Holtermann Collection—the photographs taken by Beaufoy Merlin and and his assistant Charles Bayliss, who were later employed by the successful gold miner Bernhardt Holtermann. Merlin and Bayliss’ work has been compared with Google’s Street View; they travelled through Victoria and New South Wales in the 1860-70s systematically photographing every building in towns “of any importance.”(1) In 1872, Hill End was reputedly NSW’s largest inland settlement, boasting a population of over 10,000.

The starting point for a visit to Hill End is the Museum & Visitor Centre, housed in what was once the Hospital. From the Museum, visitors can either follow the signposted walk into town down Hospital Lane, and along tree-lined Byers Avenue to the centre of the township, or make the short drive there. Parking is easiest outside the Royal Hotel at the top of Clarke Street, and the large map is a good starting point for the walk around town. Clarke Street was the commercial hub of gold rush Hill End and is the focus of the displays; few buildings remain on either side of the street, but there are plaques placed along its length, each with a photograph of the building which stood on that spot in 1872.  In some cases nothing remains, but in places the outline of foundation stones peek through the weeds, or occasionally an entire building remains (as in my cover shot), usually in a state of disrepair.  There’s very little interpretative labeling on the plaques, which simply contain the photograph and name of the establishment. The handful of plaques with more information are written in a light tone, such as this outside a hotel,

“It’s true…there really was an oyster salon here in 1872. Fresh (?) oysters were brought up from Sydney in lead lined cases…would you have been game to try them?”

While the photographs successfully bring to life the short boom period in Hill End’s past, the fact that the visitor experience to the town is so bound up with the photographs tends to highlight above all else the sense of loss associated with the boom and bust story. What of the sense of loss of the original Wiradjuri inhabitants? The over-riding narrative at the Site reflects the historiography of Hill End—that of the short-lived gold rush and the subsequent sense of loss when the rush moved elsewhere.(2) But Hill End’s history is more complicated than simply telling one story. The Site misses the opportunity to tell the other stories.

A walk around Hill End today is an evocative experience. The fact that the exhibition is the town means the visitor walks around in the outdoors, exposed to the elements just as the gold-rush miners were, with the soundtrack of buzzing flies and the occasional dog barking. The almost eery quiet of the town accentuates the sense of loss evident from juxtaposing photographs of a bustling, booming town with vacant blocks and derelict buildings.  Visitors are not roped off from the exhibit—free to tramp over foundations, or to pick up a rusty nail that once held two beams together.  It was this raw quality which attracted Australian post-war artists including Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale. Drysdale’s “The Cricketers” (1948) sets three figures against the backdrop of Hill End; it was a thrill to round a corner in the town and come across this most famous of brick walls!

A trip to Hill End is well worthwhile. It’s an immersive experience for adults and children alike, plus there’s the added bonus of a nearby river where it’s still possible to pan for (specks of) gold.

Russell Drysdale, ‘The cricketers’, 1948. Private collection, © Estate of Russell Drysdale.

Russell Drysdale, ‘The cricketers’, 1948. Private collection, © Estate of Russell Drysdale.

(1) Alan Davies, “The Greatest Wonder of the World: Exhibition Guide”, State Library of New South Wales, 2013.

(2) Alan Mayne, Hill End: An Historic Australian Goldfields Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003): 39-43.

For more information on Hill End or the Holtermann Collection:

Keast Burke, Gold and Silver: An Album of Hill End and Gulgong Photographs from the Holtermann Collection. Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1973.

http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/society_art/photography/holtermann/

http://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/hill-end-historic-site

PhD: 5 weeks in

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Inter-library loans also make a handy display stand for Easter decorations—courtesy of my daughter!

Inter-library loans also make a handy display stand for Easter decorations—courtesy of my daughter!

I’ve officially been a PhD student for five weeks now and frankly, I don’t feel as though I’ve got a lot to show for it! Sure, I have a lovely fresh blue Moleskine notebook, a new (v.big) computer screen for my home office, and a growing pile of books on my desk and on my kindle. I also have a spreadsheet with a detailed three-year plan (let’s see how that evolves over time!) and a Scrivener project entitled ‘PhD’. That reminds me, I did spend about an hour a day of Week 1 in an online Scrivener course.* Oh, and I sat through almost a day of ‘induction’ for newbie PhD students.  On a more inspiring note, I made it to a wonderful presentation by Prof Simon Newman from Glasgow about 18hC Jamaica (thanks Sydney Uni US Studies Centre for being so welcoming), and two excellent in-house Macquarie history seminars. And my first conference abstract has been accepted, so I’ll be presenting some of my MRes findings at the NewMac postgrad conference in July!** This in addition to supervision meetings, having my parents over to visit from the other side of Australia, then nursing a sick daughter at home for the past week…I guess I have been rather busy!  But given that my first goal was to nail down some primary sources for a chapter of my thesis—which I’ve not yet done—I don’t feel a great sense of achievement.

I’m starting on primary sources rather than a literature review because the work I did in my Masters of Research last year gave me a head-start on the Irish historiography. My PhD will investigate links between Ireland and the British Atlantic around the turn of the nineteenth century…so my first research efforts will build upon the stellar work of Nini Rodgers, as well as the fantastic resource that is the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database. It’s a slow process though. More than once already I’ve wished I was back in our Islington flat, so I could just pop down to the British Library or Kew and have a nosy around. I’m sure that will be a recurrent thought, but perhaps (?) my distance from the archives will force me to be thorough and focused in my prep so that when I do get to the archives, I’ll know exactly what I’m looking for.

* I highly recommend this: Scrivener Courses: Gwen Hernandez

** NewMac 2015!