Today’s post covers a number of topics, all loosely connected by the theme of history in public.
At the moment, much of my spare time that might otherwise be spent on researching or writing history is being taken up by my current role as co-president of the Professional Historians’ Association of New Zealand/Aotearoa (PHANZA). In that capacity, I prepared a PHANZA submission on the Fast-track Approvals Bill. As most people will know, the Bill (which is currently before Parliament’s Environment Committee) gives a small group of Ministers extraordinary powers to approve infrastructure and development projects, and prioritises development over all other considerations. While much of the focus on the Bill has rightly been on its implications for the natural environment, PHANZA’s submission highlights the potential impacts on historic heritage sites. A particular concern is the potential impact on sites of significance to Māori, and the submission notes the long history of economic and infrastructure development taking place at the expense of Māori.
Also of great concern at the moment are the changes currently taking place at Archives New Zealand and the National Library. Historians are very concerned at the recent announcement by Archives that it will be ending its digitisation programme. This important programme has made archival holdings much more accessible to people living outside the main centres where Archives has its reading rooms, and to those who otherwise find it difficult to visit Archives in person. Moreover, Archives reduced its reading room hours several years ago, a decision that was explained in part by a reprioritisation towards digitisation. More recently, a project to build an archival storage facility in Levin was cancelled, with the explanation that ‘digital technological advances had … reduce[d] the demand for physical storage’. Now it turns out that the much-heralded digitisation won’t be continuing either. Meanwhile, the National Library is also reducing its staff as part of the Government’s public sector cutbacks.
During the week, Public Service Association members organised a protest against the ending of the digitisation programme and related cuts. If you share these concerns, please write to the Minister of Internal Affairs (the Minister responsible for Archives New Zealand and the National Library) and contact your local Member of Parliament about the importance of properly funding our national archival and library institutions. And on a lighter note, digitisation not only makes important research material accessible for historians but also allows the wider public to read about quirky stories from our past, as this entertaining piece by Hera Lindsay Bird in the the Spinoff shows.
The relationship between historical research and public understanding is the subject of a fascinating recent piece in the Guardian by historian Vincent Brown. Brown, the author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, describes his role in, and discomfort with, Jamaica’s public commemoration of Takyi or Tacky, a leader of resistance by enslaved people in 18th-century Jamaica. I strongly recommend the article, in which Brown describes his mixed feelings about the ways in which his work has been taken up by both the Jamaican state and some activists in their moves to commemorate Tacky. In particular, he discusses the oversimplification and selectivity that comes with commemoration, and the loss of complexity and nuance, while also recognising the importance of communities engaging with their history and the difference between the role of the historian and that of people engaged in the construction of public memory. Brown writes:
As a professional historian, I weigh documentary evidence and interpret the past with great confidence. I am less certain of my authority to make the past accountable to the needs of the present. …
Historians do not get to decide what to memorialise, or how, or where. The way societies choose to mark history depends on whose stories can command material support and whose sensitivities must be treated with care. … People fight over history not just to know the truth, but because stories about the past continue to shape the present. …
Likewise, monuments to past ordeals and triumphs – such as Admiral Nelson’s statue at Trafalgar Square in London, or a proposed tribute to the heroism of an African warrior – shape the present, and the future, in ways that are always uncertain. They could inspire future generations, or they might instead herald a chauvinism that impedes attempts to solve today’s problems. When a story that has been refused becomes the head cornerstone of state image-making, there is no guarantee of accommodation for all.
Nothing I’ve written is in the same league as Vincent Brown’s work, and my writing certainly hasn’t been influential in the way that his has. But having, in my own way, made tiny interventions in support of greater public recognition of the impact of the New Zealand Wars, I can recognise some of Brown’s ambivalence. Over the past decade, the public presence of the New Zealand Wars has grown enormously. This has undoubtedly been a good thing, but it also has its downsides. I worry that the public accounts of the New Zealand Wars focus too much on stories of battles, and too little on the impacts and aftermaths of the wars. I’m concerned, too, that we continue to focus so much on narratives of Great Men (and their shadow narratives of Great Villains), at the expense of the experience of ordinary combatants and civilians. And I wonder whether the focus on the wars is now starting to crowd out other, equally important stories from our colonial past.
Ultimately, though, I recognise that historians need to undertake their work with as much attention to accuracy and nuance as they can, while remaining humble about the extent to which they can shape either when or how the historical narrative enters the public sphere. I was reminded of this when someone circulated an article written by the New Zealand historian Ben Schrader, who died recently. Ben was a great historian of urban life and heritage advocate, and a very kind and supportive historical colleague. He wrote a piece in the PHANZA newsletter Phanzine in 2018 about his engagement with the history of the Lower Hutt suburb of Naenae, and with the present-day Naenae community. Ben concluded that ‘the public historian has an important role in informing the public, but then has no say over the moment the public decides that information is useful to them. I like that.’
And finally, I was delighted to see the Spinoff recognising, at number 29 on its Power List of ’50 New Zealanders You Need to Know’, the statue of the young Ernest Rutherford near Nelson. What the Spinoff rightly describes as ‘the terrifying statue of a four-year-old Ernest with the face of a grown man’ is the perfect illustration that you can never quite control or predict how the past will appear in the present.
PastWord 