SAVE: Tom Griffiths The Art of Time Travel

 

Prologue:

1. Each individual has their own personal measure of time that depends on where they are and how they are moving.
2. Historians are global storytelers.
3. Historians in this book build knowledge of the past. These  writrs are from all walks of life, for instance there is an archaelologist, poet, farmer, novelist and many more. They all have a craft …intellectual, artistic and technical skills.
4. Questions raised….will I learn the answers in this book?
5. How does writing of history differ from fiction?
6. What is the interplay of evidence and imagination?
7. What styles of art do we see in historical scholarship? (impress, still-life, pointillism, cubisim, magic realism?)  NOTE:  I never stopped to think of history in terms of art movements!)
8. History is sometimes sees as just dates and facts. Historians show us that the past is alive and shifting.

Chapter 1:  The Timeless Land: Eleanor Dark  (novelist)

1. Australia itself, the ‘timeless land’ seen through very different eyes.
2. Eleanor Dark had captured something of the mystery of the land
3. …the coming of time to a timeless land
4. … a sense of the impact of European arrival on both Europeans and Aboriginals.
5. The second novel in the trilogy, ‘Storm of Time’, ‘No Barrier’…
6. …seeing Australian history though slightly different eyes.
7. I looked on Goodreads and found this review:
8. The Timeless Land (first published in 1941)
9. is a work of historical fiction by Eleanor Dark (1901–1985).
10. It is the first novel in The Timeless Land trilogy, which is about the
11. European settlement and exploration of Australia.
12. The narrative is told from English and Aboriginal points of view.
13. The novel describes the first years of the colony,
14. the attempts by Captain Arthur Phillips to impose
15. European values and standards on the Aborigines.
16. It also describes the famine suffered by the settlement, and t
17. he devastating effects of introduced disease on the Aboriginal population.
18. The novel ends in 1792, but the epilogue returns focus to
19. Bennilong and provides a glimpse of
20. …how his life has been dislocated.
21. …Now I’m ready to read the  essay:
22. Eleanor Dark has been seen to be neglected
23. as a female writer, social critic, Australian novelist and
24. also as an historian. (see notes highlighted in Kindle)
25. I read that  ED most joyful moment was the 10 minutes after completion of her book
26. …short-lived before the next bug bit. Writing for ED was physically and mentally hard ( research). This remined me to Helen Garner….she too was physically and mentally burdened by her writing!
27. In her fiction ED was fascinated by  time, the uneven flow and fabric of it was mysterious.
28. Modern writers depict life in terms of fluidity, uncertainty rather than linearity and order.
29. Waterway (1938) ED played with the subjectivity of time…its capacity to stretch or intensify in individual experience. I felt this while biking UP Alpe d’Huez…14 km UP. I thought time would go on forever….never end.
30. I was curious how ED fared against TAstley on the survey ABR 2009 Australian best novels. 2 scored 2 while Eleanor Dark scored 4!!
31. ED female character:  believed in farming….and bravely advocating social change.
32. ED ‘s character Caroline Chisholm  The Peaceful Army ….she went into the heart of colonial history. Three shadows: treatment of convicts – emigrants – aborigines.
33. ED’s fiction was disciplined with referenced facts. Historical novels took over her life. She became a slave to her respect for past reality…past time.  ED wanted to write a more radical historical account, one from the inside looking out from her cave….
34. ED’s Aborginal people were primitive in a material sense and their conditions of life seemed like those of animals, but there was something noble in their spirit.
35. I found this book The Colony by Grace Karskens….it sounds very good…early history of Sidney! In her history the space between cultures was not a void…it was full of posibilites.
36. A World-Proof Life by ISBN: 978 0 9802840 2 7

    Marivic Wyndham…sounds great…but I can’t find it anywhere! Marivic Wyndham’s account of Eleanor Dark both runs parallel to and argues with  (1901-1985) Eleanor Dark: a Writer’s Life, the biography Judith Clark and I published in 1998. Dark was a major figure in Australian writing from the 1930s to the 1950s; her work incorporates elements of modernism, popular fiction, and historical saga. The house where she and Eric Dark, doctor, left-wing writer and activist, lived is now Varuna: the Writers’ House, thanks to Michael Dark. Our biography aimed to allow Eleanor Dark to speak for herself; this book wrestles its subject to the ground. It presents different perspectives, highlighting the privileged (‘world-proof’) aspect of Dark’s life. There were tensions between the austere but safe middle class life of Varuna (with Eric’s support and perhaps over-protectiveness) and her aloofness and ideas of engagement and community. Eleanor’s up there in the clouds, Jean Devanny said. This book began as a thesis and the writer labours her points. Her argument makes artificial distinctions – ‘the artist’, ‘the radical’ – and confuses ‘feminist interpretation’ with ‘victim’. But there are some lively, well argued interpretations of events in Eleanor Dark’s life, and admirable moments when she brings a deeply private woman to life.

Chapter 2: The Journey to Monaro: (1898-1988)  Keith Hancock  (historian)

1. Introduction to Hancock and like-minded writers. They wrote of regional history with a moral and evironmental edge: Margaret Kiddle – (Victoria’s  western plains) – George Seddon (the Snowy, Searching for the Snowy) – Keith Hancock (Monaro) – Eric Rolls (scrub, Pilliga A Million Wild Acres).
2. This chapter was not very intresting.

Chapter 3: Entering the Stone Circle: John Mulvaney (1925-2016) archaeologist

John Mulvaney applied objective scientific techniques to  the chronology of ancient Australia. At times important finds were claimed exclusive ownership by the Aboriginal people. Mulvaney argued that human remains found should be reburied…of course…but in a ‘Keeping Place’  managed by Indigenous people. He believed this option would have future benefits to Aboriginal as well as non-Aboriginal.

Mulvaney set out to use archaeological techniques and perspectives to humanise the past.  Mulvaney was often identified  as ‘the scientist’ bringing  objective techniques to a world dominated by conjecture and prejudice. Yet he was also an humanist educating the collectors and some of his professional colleagues to the human drama of ancient Australia. Rollright Stones in England that so impressed Mulvaney during his studies in England.

 

Chapter 4: The Magpie: Geoffrey Blainey (1930)

1. Blainey was always a loner. As an intelletual he championed people on the land. As a writer he took on the mante of speaking for ordinary Australians. As a literate man he celebrated their occasional illiteracy. He was a ‘public’ historian before his time.
2. His natural world is of landscapes, elements and resources. It is there for humans to use ofr their profit or neglect to their peril. According to Blainey…it was not the open sea that  shaped Australian civilisation, but the ecological reality of soil and climate.
3. Surprising to read that Blainey thinks the pendulum has swung too far with reference to climate science. The pendulum will swing back again. He percieves another brittle and extreme mood, another fashion about to recede. I had difficultuy accepting this after having read Feeling the Heat by Jo Chandler!

Chapter 5:  The Cry of the Dead: Judith Wright – oke…but not earthshattering

Chapter 6: The Creative Imagination: Greg Dening  (1931-2008)  (ex-Jesuit priest)

1. “The only way to fail Professor Dening…was not to take a risk”  (pg 100)
2. Researched is  characterized as heroic. Writing is instinctive. Creativity is unconscious. Insights are personal.
3. According to Greg Dening …research is collegial and require courage; imagination need not be fantasy; freedoms do exist in non-fiction; creativity can be collaborative and communal; true stories are entrancing.
4. Greg Dening urged his students to feel that all the arts of fiction were available to them in writing true stories, but alos aimedd to educate the public to a different understanding of the realm of imagination, to see the creativity in the telling of true stories. (Think or Helen Garner’s books!!)
5. What is history according to Greg Dening?
6. History is the discipline without a discipline, the one social science that aspires to represent the totality of human experience.
7. “Discorse is unending…Nothing is discovered finally.
8. The moments of understanding stand like sentences in a conversation.”
9. THE BEST CHAPTER….it gave me skin shivers when I read the last words.

 

 

Chapter 7:  The Frontier Fallen:  Henry Reynolds (1938)

1. Chapter in which I learned the most…about the ‘forgotten war’ and lawyer, historian Noel Pearson
2. The struggle between professional standards and political ends that shaped th kind of historian Reynolds is: empiricist, rational, highly structured, heavily evidenced, reinforcing and repetitive, professionally conservative, accessible to the courts. Reynolds has always been a ‘just-do-it’ historian. His style is lean, linear and logical and it is honed out of his engagement with passion, politics and power.
3. Forgotten War by H. Reynolds  (READ??)
4. Considered by many to be the current leading historian on ‘the great Australian silence’, Reynolds has written Forgotten War with a remarkably straightforward and erudite pen.  Reynolds does not depend on the lyrical, hyperbolic language sometimes used by Australian histories to evoke the brutality of the past. Reynolds has remained scrutinisingly close to the sources he cites, and in doing so, he has produced a book that is accessible for the expert and the novice alike.
5. Forgotten War is Henry Reynolds’ latest attempt to elevate the place of Aboriginal Australians in the national consciousness.  It is a broad and meticulously researched overview of colonial Australia’s treatment of Indigenous Australia, and worthy of our most scrupulous attention.
6. The Australian Frontier Wars were fought from 1788 to the 1920s between Indigenous Australians and an invading coalition of white settlers, militia, police, and colonial soldiers. Estimates of the total death toll range between 20,000 and 50,000 Aboriginal lives lost and between 2,000 to 2,500 Europeans.In a 5 year period the Aboriginals killed something like 250 settlers and no doubt many of them were killed but the ratio was much closer.
7. Now 250 settlers killed in short period of time in a small colony brings it close to many of the other small wars Australia has been involved in. So just in terms of the conflict, the number of people killed, the damage done the cost of the conflict, that conflict in Tasmania must be seen as a war.
8. Reynolds said that in the history departments he found no interest and people didn’t think it was a very decent or honourable thing to be researching (forgotten war). So there was resistance from people who didn’t want to know about this very terrible and brutal aspect of Australian history. 
9. I think the past is important. I’m a historian, that’s my profession but I think the past is important and I think that it is absolutely critical that we understand and appreciate and empathise with Indigenous Australians.

Chapter 8:  Disobedience:  Eric Rolls

1. Chapter 7 Eric Rolls  A Million Wild Acres….Tom Griffiths said this would  be THE book about Australia he would put in the hands of any visitor to his country to help them understand  it!
2. I just ordered Rolls’ book all the way from Australia!…can’t wait to read it!
3. Griffths thinks it is the BEST environmental history yet written of Australia!  Les Murray condsidered this book to be like an extended, crafted campfire yarn in which everyne has dignity of a name. TONE: discursive (rambling…) and  laconic (terse, concise)..like a saga ( Saga Land?)
4. Rolls enchants the forest….and presents us with a speak land….raucous with sound! The whole book reads as if the trees themselves are telling the story! That delighted me!
5. The central story is simple…it is in Rolls’ words….about the growing of a forest. Why was A Million Wild Acres so popular? It spoke directly to so many people.  “…it is unique and path-breaking yet represented an organic integrity and a common vernacular.” (ref: The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft, T. Griffiths, ch 8)

 

Chapter 9:  Voyaging South: Stephen Murray-Smith (1922-1988)

1. Antarctica – read enough about this in Feeling the Heat.

 

Chapter 10: History as Art:  Donna Merwick – ex nun, married to Greg Dening

1. Sorry, not even T. Griffiths could make this chapter interesting. :(

 

Chapter 11: Walking the City: Graeme Davison – so-so…learned what public history is!

1. Davison set out his professional credo in his Monash retirement lecture:
2. ‘To be a professor, to profess history, is to assume a responsibility, not just to practise one’s discipline, but also to advocate and defend it.
3. At Monash he created a new post-graduate program in Public History.
4. He aimed to train historians for employment outside the academy as commissioned historians and consultants.
5. He wanted to narrow the gap between academic and public history.
6. What is public history? Public history is deeply rooted in the areas of historic preservation, museum curatorship, and other related fields. The field has become increasingly professionalized.
7. Most common settings for the practice of public history are:
8. …museums, historic homes and historic sites, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, and all levels of government.
9. Davison studies not only cities….but also the decline of country towns
10. …surburban myths and rural ideals.
11. Graeme had long been interested in the city as a natural system. The city is both a machine and an organism. It has the tick of a clock as well as a heatbeat. Davison chose a clock and a car to reveal the inner workings of a city.
12. Clock seeks to master time.  Car seeks to master space. One is on your wrist….the other is in your garage. Both are personal, intimate, elegant accessories of our lives.

 

Chapter 12: History and Fiction:  Inga Clendinnen (1934-2016)

1. Clendinnen’s work focused on social history, and the history of cultural encounters.
2. She was considered an authority on Aztec civilisation and
3. …pre-Columbian ritual human sacrifice

Chapters: 13    Grace Karskens

1. Winner of the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction
   
2. The Colony is the story of the marvellously contrary, endlessly energetic early years of Sydney.
3. It is an intimate account of the transformation of a campsite in a
4. …beautiful cove to the town that later became Australia’s largest and best-known city.
5. From the sparkling beaches to the foothills of the Blue Mountains, Grace Karskens
6. skillfully reveals how landscape shaped the lives of the original Aboriginal inhabitants and newcomers alike.
7. Relationships between the colonial authorities and ordinary men and women broke with old patterns.
8. She uncovers the ties between the burgeoning township and its rural hinterland.
9. Grace Karskens teaches Australian History at the University of New South Wales.
10. She is the author of The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney

 

Chapters: 14

Mike Smith – Archaeology of Australia’s Deserts

1. 1. This is the first book-length study of the archaeology of Australia’s deserts
   2. It is one of the world’s major habitats and the
   3. …largest block of drylands in the southern hemisphere.
   4. Written by one of Australia’s leading desert archaeologists,
   5. …the book interweaves a history of research with archaeological data.
   6. For all its global significance and uniqueness, the story of Australia’s desert societies gets scant treatment in accessible science texts.
   7. A story that covers 60,000 years of development, change, growth and consolidation seems so important to understand.
   8. It is a compelling picture of societies responding to climactic conditions, changing technologies and social organisation to survive.
   9. Smith decided he wanted to be an archaeologist at the end of primary school!
   10. Smith has a gravediggers certificate!  Stratigraphy is a key concept to modern archaeological theory and practice. Modern excavation techniques are based on stratigraphic principles. The concept derives from the geological use of the idea that sedimentation takes place according to uniform principles. When archaeological finds are below the surface of the ground the identification of the context of each find is vital in enabling the archaeologist to draw conclusions about the site and about the nature and date of its occupation.