Abstract
In the Carrolup Native Settlement in Western Australia in the late 1940s, an art teacher encouraged his charges, children of the ‘stolen generations’, to respond artistically to occasional supervised rambles in the bush. The children produced ‘landscapes, some featuring traditional hunting and corroboree scenes that were striking in their original use of colour, composition and detail’ (p. 111). In attracting attention, however, these paintings led to the classes being stopped, art not being an appropriate outlet for Aboriginal children in the view of the authorities. But some of the children later resumed painting, and the Carrolup style survived to become a signature style of the art of the Nyungar people from which the children had been taken. The detail is from Anna Haebich’s very engaging essay, entitled ‘A Potent Space: Australia’s Stolen Generations and the Visual Arts’, which touches on several of the themes of the handsome volume under review.
The fourteen essays here originated in a series of workshops in Canberra in 2009 and Dublin in 2010, prompted by controversies relating to aspects of public history in the two countries concerned (which, of course, share some imperial legacies). Contributors considered a number of inter-related questions: how the pressure of the present has affected historical commemorations; how contested histories have been treated by film makers, fiction writers and visual artists; how legacies of the past have confronted policy makers in respect of whether to issue formal public apologies for institutional child abuse or famine neglect; and how to make restitution for forceful appropriations from indigenous peoples. Ireland and Australia, according to editors, Katie Holmes and Stuart Ward, are ‘often singled out for their peculiar brand of bitterly disputed remembrance’ (p. 2); and they go on to contend that because issues relating to remembrance and the elusive (and disputed) concept of ‘collective memory’ are universal, they are most usefully examined in a transnational context. Eight of the essays accordingly, are broadly comparative in approach, while the other six focus principally on one or other country. This is very much an inter-disciplinary endeavour, with contributions from historians, anthropologists and sociologists, as well as scholars of politics, literature and film. Within a short review, unfortunately, it is only possible to treat a few of the essays in any detail.
Both in the approaches to gathering testimony and with regard to public reactions, Christina Twomey’s comparative essay reveals a certain symmetry between the Bringing Them Home report (1997) into the institutionalization of Australia’s stolen generations, and the Ryan report (2009) into institutional abuse of children in Ireland. Elsewhere, Lindsey Earner-Byrne considers the industrial school system itself – a legacy of the imperial order – which retained vitality in Ireland long after it began to be superseded in Britain. Commenting on the class-based character of a system that, between 1936 and 1970, incarcerated more than 170,000 working class children (of a total population in independent Ireland of under three million), she quotes a leading politician of the 1940s: ‘none of these children are the children of rich people; no rich person would ever be treated this way’ (p. 61). Recent commentary on the scandal that was the industrial school system has tended to share the blame between the Catholic religious orders, sub-contracted by the state to run the schools, and the judicial system, thereby absolving the broader society which, Earner-Byrne argues, colluded in the systematic punishment of poverty.
In her contribution, Judith Brett delineates the world-views of the antagonists in the Australian ‘history wars’, and their relevance to the demands of Aboriginal Australians for an unqualified expression of ‘Sorry’ from the state – for breaking up families, for appropriating tribal lands, and other destructive interventions. For recent Labor governments and for the social forces they represented, official apologies and some measure of atonement were unproblematic; for Australian Liberals, accustomed to stressing personal responsibility and to thinking of the colonization process in benign terms, it was otherwise. According to former prime minister, John Howard, proponents of what he called ‘black armband history … portrayed Australian history since 1788 as little more than a disgraceful history of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination’ (p. 84). Is there not an echo in Howard’s comment of the attitudes that deprived Nyungar children of their paintbrushes in the late 1940s? Australia’s ‘history wars’ provide part of the background also for several other essays in the book: Mark Finnane on ‘The Politics of State Apologies’; Oona Frawley and Sue Kossew on ‘Irish and Australian Historical Fiction’; Felicity Collins on Australian cinema; John Coakley and Mark McKenna on ‘Images of the Monarchy in Ireland and Australia’. In the course of her own contribution, ‘Redeeming Landscapes: Ireland and Australia’, editor Katie Holmes highlights inherent contradictions in the federal ‘Landcare’ programme arising from its aspiration to reconcile attitudes towards land of settler-descendants and indigenous peoples.
The nearest Irish equivalent to the ‘history wars’ was the ‘revisionist’ controversy, named for the revisionist historians who, in the context of the post-1969 ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, challenged the nationalist interpretation of Irish history on the basis that it tended to lend legitimacy to the use of violence for political ends. In a reflective piece which surveys the arguments, Anne Dolan points out that, notwithstanding the dominance of revisionists in the academy, most Irish people continued to get their history from rebel memoirs or from films like Ken Loach’s Wind that Shakes the Barley. This is terrain which is further explored by Roisín Higgins in ‘Commemorating Anzac Day and the Easter Rising’, by Dominic Bryan and Stuart Ward in ‘The Great War Revival in Australia and Ireland’, and by Catriona Elder and Yvonne Whelan in ‘Tracing the Past in Dublin and Canberra: Memory, History and Nation’.
Exhuming Passions is a diverse collection – necessarily so, given the varied backgrounds of the eighteen contributors, and the range of endeavours affected by the ‘pressures of the past’. The overall richness of the result confirms the view of the editors in relation to the utility of a transnational approach to the study of remembrance.