In the age of testimony: The stolen generations narrative, distance, and public history

Public Culture

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 75-95

  Attwood, Bain ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41149136153     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2007-017     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Jay Winter, "The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies," Raritan 21 (2001): 56, 66;
2. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), xiii, xv, 93, 97, 116, 119, 130, 142;
3. Annette Wieviorka, "The Witness in History," trans. Jared Stark, Poetics Today 27 (2006): 392.
4. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 4.
5. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, "Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time," History and Theory 41 (2002): 149.
6. Mark Salber Phillips, "Distance and Historical Representation," History Workshop Journal 57(2004): 124, 126. 127.
7. Phillips, "Distance and Historical Representation," 127.
8. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
9. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78.
10. Testimony has many forms, of course. The one I am discussing here is that of oral history and its variants, such as autobiography, rather than that of the courtroom. Moreover, the influence of any testimony depends enormously on the context in which it is performed.
11. Mark Salber Phillips, "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life," History Workshop Journal (forthcoming): 2, 10, 11, 12.
12. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 66.
13. See Bain Attwood, "'Learning About the Truth': The Stolen Generations Narrative," in Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand, ed. Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001), 244, 245n23.
14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Reconciliation and Its Historiography: Some Preliminary Thoughts," UTS Review 7 (2001): 10.
15. Paula Hamilton, "Sale of the Century? Memory and Historical Consciousness in Australia," in Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, ed. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 145.
16. Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 55-56.
17. Spiegel, "Memory and History," 152.
18. This is an example of what LaCapra has called a founding trauma (History in Transit, 57). This is probably the reason the stolen generations narrative became central to the historical consciousness of so many Aboriginal people. This in turn made it analogous to the victim narrative of white national history, which provoked an angry attack on it by vulnerable white Australians (see Ann Curthoys, "Whose Home? Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology," Journal of Australian Studies 61 [1999]: 1-18).
19. Patrick Hagopian, "Oral Narratives: Secondary Revision and the Memory of the Vietnam War," History Workshop Journal 32 (1991): 145.
20. Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound: The Return of the Stolen Generations (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999), 49, 219n1. Read's treatment of the separation of children in this report differed from his academic work in several respects, not least of which was the manner in which he framed the subject matter: the phrase stolen generations does not appear in his PhD dissertation, submitted in 1983.
21. For a discussion of this, see Attwood, "'Learning about the Truth,'" 247n31.
22. Read, Rape of the Soul, 71-72.
23. "Roots," Museum of Broadcast Communications, www.museum.tv/archives/etv/R/htmlR/roots/roots.htm (accessed March 15, 2007); Wieviorka, Era of the Witness, 87, 98, 102.
24. Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2006), 163, 166.
25. Rosenstone, History on Film, 16, 39, 74, 87, 118, 153, 159.
26. The argument made here in regard to film can also be made in regard to museum displays, living history museums, and heritage sites.
27. See the film kit prepared by Ronin Films, Australian Film Institute Library, Melbourne. Both Women of the Sun and Lousy Little Sixpence foregrounded in one way or another the testimony of Margaret Tucker, an Aboriginal woman who had been separated from her family as a child in 1917, and led to the reissuing of her autobiography, If Everyone Cared, which subsequently became one of the best-known stolen generations stories.
28. See, for example, Sally Morgan, My Place (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987);
29. Glenys Ward, Wandering Girl (Broome: Magabala Books, 1987);
30. Coral Edwards and Peter Read, The Lost Children (Sydney: Doubleday, 1989);
31. Archie Roach, "Took the Children Away," Charcoal Lane (1990);
32. Barbara Cummings, Take This Child... From Kahlin Compound to the Retta Dixon Children's Home (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1990);
33. Alice Nannup, When the Pelican Laughed (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1992);
34. Stuart Rintoul, comp., The Wailing: A National Black Oral History (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1993);
35. Tiddas, "Brown Skin Baby" (song written by Bob Randall), Sing about Life (1993);
36. Rowena MacDonald, Between Two Worlds: The Commonwealth Government and the Removal of Aboriginal Children of Part Descent in the Northern Territory (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1995).
37. At this time academic historians produced work describing government policies and practices whereby children were removed from their families (Peter Read, A Hundred Years War: The Wiradjuri People and the State [Sydney: Pergamon, 1988];
38. Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900-1940 [Fremantle: University of Western Australia Press, 1988];
39. Andrew Markus, Governing Savages [Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990];
40. Tony Austin, I Can See the Old Home So Clearly: The Commonwealth and "Half- Caste " Youth in the Northern Territory, 1911 -1939 [Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993]), but their studies had much less impact publicly.
41. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "History and the Politics of Recognition," in Manifestos for Historians, ed. Keith Jenkins, Alan Munslow, and Susan Gordon (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
42. Annette Wieviorka, "On Testimony," in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 24;
43. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 102;
44. Aleida Assmann, "History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony," Poetics Today 27 (2006): 261, 267, 269-71.
45. Spiegel, "Memory and History," 157.
46. Andrew Sharp, "History and Sovereignty: A Case of Juridical History in New Zealand/ Aotearoa," in Cultural Politics and the University in Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. Michael Peters (Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 1997), 160.
47. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia, 1997), 667-70.
48. Wieviorka, Era of the Witness, 108-9.
49. See Attwood, "'Learning about the Truth,'" 203.
50. See Haydie Gooder and Jane Jacobs, "'On the Border of the Unsayable': The Apology in Postcolonising Australia," Interventions 2 (2000): 238.
51. See The Stolen Children: Their Stories, ed. Carmel Bird (Sydney: Random House, 1998); the exhibition The Stolen Generations, Western Australian Museum; the documentary films Stolen Generations and Cry from the Heart; and the plays Stolen and Box the Pony.
52. See Lauren Berlant, "The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics," in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Thomas R. Kearns and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 49-84;
53. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 155, 160-63.
54. See Gooder and Jacobs, "'Border of the Unsayable,'" 239-43.
55. See David Carter, "Introduction: Intellectuals and Their Publics," and "The Conscience Industry: The Rise and Rise of the Public Intellectual," in The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia's Intellectual Life, ed. David Carter (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 1, 3, 15, 22-23, 34-35;
56. and Gillian Whitlock, "Becoming Migloo," in Carter, Ideas Market, 236-58.
57. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, 183.
58. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 213.
59. LaCapra, History in Transit, 118, 30-31.
60. See Attwood, "'Learning the Truth,'" 208-10. The matter of timing was crucial here. Once a historical event has been established as true by professional history or by common historical knowledge, the inaccuracy of testimony becomes less important, but in the case of the stolen generations the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of the subject did not appear until a few years after the narrative was challenged.
61. See Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800-2000 (Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).
62. The most severe historical and legal challenge to the stolen generations narrative was mounted by people who have been described as denialist. See Robert Manne, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right (Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2000).
63. Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations 69 (2000): 128-30, 135, 137-38, 144-45.
64. Klein, "Emergence of Memory," 130-31, 135.
65. Phillips, "Advantage and Disadvantage," 13-14.
66. The denial of the Holocaust has been countered in this way, as evidenced by the approach adopted by Penguin Books in the David Irving/Deborah Lipstadt libel case and by the United States Holocaust Museum for its permanent exhibition. In the former, academic research and argument, not testimony, was presented in court; in the latter, testimony has a limited role in presenting the story of the Nazi genocide.
67. See Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Random House, 2001).
68. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory and History (London: Verso, 2005), especially 27-28, 237-38.
69. LaCapra, History in Transit, 15, 103, 105, 140, 234.
70. LaCapra, History and Memory, 40-42, 206;
71. LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss," Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 722-23;
72. LaCapra, History in Transit, 192, 234.
73. Alan Atkinson, The Commonwealth of Speech: An Argument about Australia's Past, Present and Future (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004), chap. 2.