Milestones 2013-4

That by the time of the 2014 PHA (Qld) Annual General Meeting:

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David Greenberg. That Barnes & Noble Dream (Entry 1), Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 (Entry 1), and Wednesday, May 18, 2005 (Entry 2), in Slate Online Magazine.

https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_book_blitz/features/2005/that_barnes_noble_dream/academics_historians_vs_popularizers.html

It is an important experience to hear what people actually say about history and historians, instead of what they want you to hear, knowing your role as a professional history. It is not that difficult to prod some honest answers if you know where to look.  And so it came to pass that I read this comment in the Association of Personal Historians’ social networking site: “Historians tend to write in a style that reflects the archives or lecture hall–somewhat turgid and dry.”

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One of the prejudices I struggle with are judgements about generation.  Perhaps it is the stage of my life. I am in the thick of it; a cross-point between family relations that are very young and very old.  My partner and I are looking after one child who at primary school and nurturing a young adult daughter.  In the other direction our eyes are on elderly parents in their eighty. We have already experienced the loss of one parent from disease in their senior years. So it is understandable to make generalisations based on age.

Talk of generations, however, I find is over-generalising. As if because a person was born at a certain year, they must have the same outlook in that same cohort. If you think about it for one minute, you realise this is utter nonsense, and yet the journalistic-style books on generational shifts sell well. One of the important lessons you learn as a discipline-trained historian is don’t assume an era can be reduced to one set of behaviours or codes. You look for subtle movements of changes, conflict, and shifts against the tide.

And yet, what I see – or want to see — is that, the younger generations, Y, X, and Z (what happens after “Z”?), have little patience with things historical. My youngest daughter thinks I am boring and stupid because I say too much about things in the past. My eldest has some sympathy, but my history-making is just not cool. “Too much detail!” they say. On the other hand, my post-WWII generation parents speak well of history, but still don’t understand and don’t really want to understand – that is, to understand at a level of engagement.

I have thought of about this. Most of my clients were the generation of young adults in the immediate post-WWII years. If you are involved in a local history group you know that the medium age is usually over 60. The largest portion of this generation never went to college or university. Often they sacrificed themselves in their menial jobs to give their children a higher education. The twist in the history is that this generation don’t often have the patience with their children’s literary engagement simply because they have never had the luxury to be exposed to that level of reading.

Nevertheless, the literary tastes for history, as well as other historical engagements, are more complex and developing than the simple generalization provides. As historians we know that people who lived in the same era were all very different, shaped in the judgements other than age; in categories of class, gender, race or ethnicity, politics, and nationhood (“Australian”) or statehood (“Queenslander”).

There is a pertinent point here for the professional historian.  We need to think inter-generationally in our work. Age still does have relevance, among everything else.  The demand in the market is with the older generations. Sometimes it is really frustrating to work with older people who have just discovered “history.” You have to remind yourself of the naturalness in the process. Most people don’t care about history until much later in life when they starting to think about their own mortality. (more…)

By Neville Buch

There are different approaches to history practiced in this state. Family history is very popular. Many of our members are practitioners of local history, as am I. A few get the opportunity to break open a field that cast the research across Queensland.  A number of historians do well in heritage studies, and house or property history. And there are arrays of topics that cover the horde of ways Queenslanders live their lives – education, heath, law, transport, employment, gender, children, aging, dying, and so forth.

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The year is racing past. We blinked and the editor failed to get the April edition of the e-Bulletin out. Hence we are now up to the May edition. It is time to get out there.

This month the big event to get out to, if you are in the neighbourhood, is our regional meeting on Saturday morning, 25 May, at Ipswich Grammar School. We hope that we might see a large gathering of members in the effort to connect ourselves better across the state.

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Emeritus Professor John Robert Laverty passed away on Thursday evening, 25 April, after a short illness. He was well-known as the authority on Brisbane’s municipal history.  His scholarly contribution to the field has been described as monumental. He was an early member of the Queensland Historians Institute Inc., and then a member of the successor organisation, the Professional Historians Association (Queensland) until 2004. He was also a foundation member and a former President of the Brisbane History Group. He was a foundation member, councillor and chairman of the Australian Institute of Urban Studies.

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1.00pm – 4.30pm Saturday 23 February 2013 National Archives of Australia, 16 Corporate Drive Cannon Hill, QLD 4170 Exploring the Multiverse of Societal Provenance Seminar Flyer

The verb ‘capture’ implies both acts of preservation and of restraint. In his novel The Collector, John Fowles explores this duality, implying that the paradox of art is that “in signalling the importance of freedom, [it] inaugurates another kind of imprisonment.” In The Collector the imprisoned Miranda believes “when you draw something it lives and when you photograph something it…