Our Story: Rediscovering Australian History

Originally published in The Horn Book Magazine November-December 2002

Australian children, so the accepted wisdom goes, aren’t interested in history. They don’t read historical fiction, they’re especially not interested in Australian history, and they just won’t read about it. So don’t bother publishing it, because the libraries won’t buy it, because the kids won’t read it. Anyway, Australian history’s pretty boring, really. Don’t blame the kids for not wanting to read about it.

I first began hearing this refrain in the late 80s, when I was a new teacher and I was (and still am) utterly bemused by it. It didn’t seem that long since I’d been an Australian child myself, and I loved historical fiction, as did many of my friends. The history we read in the 70s was predominantly British, it’s true, but at that time in Australia there was a growing interest in exploring our own (white) past (the recognition of an Indigenous history was yet to come — and is still fully yet to come). In the 1970s, Australian cinema was dominated by the costume drama, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli. Historical TV mini-series and dramas also topped the ratings — they were based on events such as the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 (the first group of convicts and military sent by the British Government to establish a colony in the place then known as New Holland), on the goldfields in the mid-nineteenth century, or based on the exploits of bushrangers such as the romantic, doomed Ben Hall. One of the most successful on-going television series of the 70s and 80s was The Sullivans, which explored the experience of a Melbourne family during WWII (there were, conveniently, three sons, so there was plenty of drama to be had). All these shows and movies were as popular with young audiences as they were with adults.

But somehow a perception took hold that Australian kids didn’t want to read Australian history. It’s impossible to tell where this notion came from; Australian audiences were certainly growing tired of period drama, and began demanding movies and television which portrayed the contemporary Australian experience, so perhaps the assumption came about that children, too, would only want to read contemporary, realistic fiction. Yet the perception about kids and history is not borne out by the books that were published, sold successfully and won awards up to and beyond the mid-80s. Certainly in the late 80s, the realist novel as typified by John Marsden’s So Much to tell You gained popularity, yet in 1986 a historical novel set in the post-WWII period, Thurley Fowler’s Green Wind won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) Book of the Year Award. Nadia Wheatley’s The House that Was Eureka, a complex novel aligning the experience of Depression-era unemployment and evictions with that of contemporary young people was Commended in the CBCA awards in the same year, won several other literary prizes and reprinted four times in three years. Published in 1987, Wheatley and Donna Rawlins’ My Place, a picture book which takes the reader back a decade every two double page spreads, from 1988 (non-Indigenous Australia’s bicentennial year) to 1788, just prior to the arrival of the First Fleet, won numerous awards and sold 50,000 copies in hardback, an extraordinary number given the comparatively small Australian market. In 1992, Gary Crew’s YA novel Strange Objects, which drew on the shipwreck and subsequent bloody mutiny of the crew of the Batavia off the coast of Western Australia in 1629 won multiple awards. “No-one looked at those books and said, ‘Oh, look how well they’re doing despite being historical,’ ” says Wheatley.

Yet despite all of this, the “kids aren’t interested in history” refrain gained momentum, and the self-fulfilling prophecy took hold; “they won’t read them” became “we won’t write/publish them”, and for the past ten years or so, young Australian readers have had little access to stories about our past told with the vivacity, veracity and passion the best historical fiction and non-fiction can offer. But thankfully the tide has begun to turn, and books for children about Australia’s recent and distant past seems to be making a comeback — and guess what. They’re eating them up. History’s back in fashion.

It’s interesting in context of this discussion to observe that from the late 1980s on, just as the “kid’s aren’t interested in history” notion took off, the annual ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Day remembrance services around Australia began to attract large numbers of children and teenagers for the first time in decades. ANZAC Day, April 25th, marks the anniversary of the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli, in Turkey in 1915. As a military campaign, it was a disaster. As Australia’s first trial by fire on the international arena, the Gallipoli landing become inextricably linked with our sense of nationhood, and ANZAC Day developed almost quasi-religious overtones. Then came the 1960s and the anti-war movement, and ANZAC Day started to look decidedly anachronistic. Throughout the 60s, 70s and into the 80s, ANZAC Day ceremonies and marches were low-key, poorly attended events, as people came to feel that the day had become a celebration of war rather than a memorial to the fallen.

Now young people attend ANZAC Day ceremonies in record numbers, standing in the pre-dawn crowds as the increasingly old and frail soldiers pass by, and walking proudly in the place of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Gallipoli itself has become a popular destination for Australian backpackers, eager to visit the place whose name has such resonance for Australians of all ages and, increasingly, of diverse cultural backgrounds. No longer an anachronism, ANZAC Day has become a way for young (and older Australians) to acknowledge our past without the trappings of overt nationalism that Australians, by and large, find discomforting.

In April last year Penguin Books Australia published Soldier Boy: The True Story of Jim Martin, the Youngest ANZAC by Anthony Hill. Hill says he was struck by the large number of young Australians who make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli, and this in part inspired him to write Soldier Boy. Hill has taken the known facts about the youngest-known soldier to serve in the Gallipoli campaign — Jim Martin was 14 when he lied about his age in order to sign up, and still 14 when he died of typhoid on a hospital ship anchored off Anzac Cove, Gallipoli — and crafted a simply stated, deeply moving account of Martin’s short life. Martin’s face gazes steadily, passively from the cover of the book. In sepia tones, in his slouch hat and uniform he’s ageless, timeless, and yet so very, very young. Hill tells his story without embellishment — there’s no need to embellish such a universal tale of naïve courage — and the novelist’s techniques he’s had to employ to fill in the gaps in the known facts of Martin’s story are woven in seamlessly. Hill calls Soldier Boy a biographical novel, and has included in the book extensive notes about his sources, and the assumptions he’s made about those “gaps”. Hill says the measure of the success of Soldier Boy is “how well the book convinces young readers that Jim Martin was once ‘one of them’.” The young readers I’ve met who have read Jim Martin’s story would say that Hill has indeed achieved that aim. Soldier Boy has been shortlisted for the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books in this year’s CBCA awards, and recently won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award Ethel Turner Prize for Literature for Young Adults, this coming just a few short weeks after the death of Alec Campbell, the last remaining veteran of the Gallipoli campaign.

A particular difficulty we’ve had to come to face about the writing of Australian history for all readerships is how efficiently Aboriginal Australia has been misrepresented, misunderstood, or just plain left out of our history books. A new picture book offers an alternative view of Australian history to the dominant white version. Papunya School Book of Country and History, written and illustrated by the students of the Papunya School, is the history of Central Australia from the point of view of the Anangu — the People. A multi-narrative text, Papunya School Book explains the history of Anangu from five different language groups, their life before the coming of white people and the invasion and theft of their land by explorers, pastoralists and Government. The main narrative is supported by break-out boxes of timelines and oral history text, illustrations by students at the school, historical and contemporary photographs, hand-drawn maps and diagrams. The book gives young readers a clear understanding on how the arrival of non-Indigenous people changed the life of the Anangu forever, and indeed changed the very land they live in and learn from forever too:

In the 1870s, Anangu started to see more Tjulkura (white people) riding into the desert on strange animals. When the newcomers camped at a spring, they could use up all the water in a day. The Anangu needed that water to survive until the next rain. And so they sometimes attacked the camps, to send the explorers away.

Australian children’s publishing is seeing an increasing number of books by Indigenous writers, including picture books like Elaine Russell’s A is for Aunty, a memoir of her childhood growing up on a mission in the 1940s and 50s, and Boori Pryor and Meme McDonald’s novels about the contemporary lives of Indigenous children and teenagers. There are many others, of course, and Papunya School Book, with its alternative view of Australian history, is a timely and welcome addition to the literature. Papunya School Book has also been shortlisted for the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books in this year’s CBCA awards.

But what of historical fiction? Non-fiction was always going to be published, if only to meet the demands of school curricula, but the steady flow of Australian historical fiction slowed down to a bare trickle through the 90s. It may be premature to make predictions, but at the very least I’m hoping that the success of the new Scholastic Australia series “My Story”, based on the UK series of the same name, and rather more loosely on the “Dear America” books, might encourage more writers of fiction to explore the past for young Australian readers.

Despite the success of “Dear America” and its spin-offs, and of the UK “My Story” series, Scholastic Australia did not initially intend to publish an Australian version. According to author Libby Gleeson (The Rum Rebellion: The Diary of David Bellamy, Sydney Town 1807-1809), it wasn’t until the suggestion arose that the UK publisher of the “My Story” series was going to include Australian stories in the series that Scholastic Australia decided that if Australian stories were to be told, then Australian writers were to tell them. Thus in 2001, the first four Australian “My Story” books were published.

Like “Dear America”, the “My Story” books are fictional diaries of a young person (male and female) living in a key period in Australia’s history. It’s fascinating to note that the original flyer promoting the first Australian “My Story” books reads: At Last. A collection of books specially crafted to make Australian history more interesting to young people. Warning, warning, there’s still that pesky “Australian children don’t like history” rumour to hurdle! But hurdled it has been, and with resounding success — there are now ten “My Story” books available, with several of the earlier titles going into multiple reprints. One of them, A Different Sort of Real: The Diary of Charlotte McKenzie, Melbourne 1918 by Kerry Greenwood, which tells the story of a young nurse during the influenza pandemic at the end of the Great War, has been shortlisted for this year’s CBCA awards. Young readers are collecting the series, and unlike other “baseball card”-type book series, are reading them, and reading them for pleasure, not school assignments.

The series to date is satisfyingly eclectic in the periods it covers — there are the predictable moments in Australian history such as the early years of the first colony in Sydney and the goldrush of the 1850s, but less obvious historical moments have been covered as well. Jenny Pausacker’s A Tale of Two Families: The Diary of Jan Packard, Melbourne 1974 is set against the background of the feminist and anti-war movements. This “My Story” is particularly successful because it suits the diary form perfectly; what could be more believable than a teenage girl keeping a diary in which she records the personal turmoil she and her family experience during one of the most socially volatile periods in recent Australian history? Other books in the series have had to work a little harder to find a convincing reason for their character to keep a journal. Christine Edwards, the author of On Board the Boussole: The Diary of Julienne Fulbert, Lapérouse’s Voyage of Discovery 1785-1788 for example, has had to come up with a believable reason why a ragamuffin stowaway, a girl posing as a boy, could write at all, much less keep a journal. Edwards’ solution is that Julienne is the amnesiac (due to a blow to the head) daughter of a noble couple murdered by enemies of King Louis. It sounds far-fetched, but Edwards makes it work well enough for the reader to just get on with the story, and just as well, because the Lapérouse expedition, which arrived in Botany Bay just days after the First Fleet, is a fascinating and little-known aspect of Australia’s history. On Board the Boussole is nevertheless a good example of the inherent limitations the diary form imposes on the series. We are never, for instance, going to have the pre-1788 diary of a young Indigenous Australian.

We do, however, have Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 by Anita Heiss. Mary is one of the Stolen Generations, one of thousands of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families under paternalistic government policy. In Mary’s case, her removal was because of her fairer skin; she was to be one of those “lucky” children adopted by white families, given the chance to become “white” Australians. Heiss, an Aboriginal woman from the Wiradjuri nation of western New South Wales, has had some interesting and provocative things to say about the false distinctions made between “Australian” and “Indigenous” history. “Indigenous people are only allowed to own the negative moments in Australian history”, she says, “so the Myall Creek massacre is Indigenous history. But the Myall Creek massacre was a massacre of Aboriginal people by white Australians. Doesn’t that make it part of Australian history? Isn’t it time white Australia owned all of its history, good and bad?” As does Papunya School Book, Who Am I goes a long way towards demonstrating to all young Australians that Indigenous history is part of Their Story too.