At the same time, another idea of history was taking shape. All those stories our parents told; about having to walk six miles to school through the bush in the stinking heat, about bread and dripping, about how a great day out in town included a pie and sauce and a pot of tea for three. They were wonderful stories, cautionary tales, a bit of legend-spinning. I wish I had known then that one of my mother’s ancestors was a convict who escaped by leaping overboard from a ship and swimming twenty miles to land through treacherous seas. That kind of information came later when cousins on both sides began the fascinating task of tracing family trees. We were tickled pink to unearth a connection with the famous Kelly family on my father’s side.

I was well away of those who grew up in Australia after the last world war, of the immense distance covered in the space of a single generation. With a good whiff or the pioneering spirit still hanging in the air, we were flying around in jet planes. I wonder how much this kind of awareness accounts for the growing interest in local history and the boom in family trees.

History, like so many other disciplines, has been forced in recent years to give over some of its ground to the amateur. Nevertheless, amateur historians are not simply mums and dads playing historical detectives, but ordinary people who see themselves as history.

From this point of view, Wendy Lowenstein’s book, Weavils in the Flour, which recorded interviews with a wide range of people who had lived through the Great Depression, has emerged as one of the pivotal works in the growing literature of Australian history. No longer are politicians, soldiers, explorers, businessmen, sporting stars, and top-notch artists, mostly men and mostly of British descent, the only people worth remembering. Lowenstein wasn’t working in a vacuum. Her work simply expressed, in a popular and accessible way, changing ideas about what really happened in the past and about how history should be written. So did Anne Summers in Damned Whores and God’s Police, with her reassessment of the roles of women in the colonies and the seemingly impossible lives they led.

With the 1980s rolling inexorably towards the Bicentennial in 1988, Australians are being geared up for a feast of historical publications. But whether it turns out to be just a good old wallow down in the hollow of history, or a proper sit down and think about where we’ve come from and where we’re off to in such a screaming hurry, will largely depend on the enlightenment of the various authorities dispensing grants to approved projects.

This year Victorians are enjoying a taste of what’s to come as the State celebrates the 150th anniversary of white settlement. One of the projects designed to mark the occasion is Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years, edited by Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly for Penguin Books and researched and written with the assistance of the Victorian 150th Anniversary Publications Sub-Committee. In this case the taxpayer’s pennies have been well spent, my only major criticism being that the majority of contributors are academics.

Double Time consists of biographies of fifty Victorian women, linked in sections with a little, but not too much background supplied by the editors. Some of the subjects are relatively well known, but many are ordinary women, whose achievements against appalling odds didn’t always amount even to survival. The earliest is Eliza Batman who arrived in Port Phillip in 1836, just a year after her husband, John had ‘bought’ the land from local Aborigines. Eliza was an ex-convict who came up in the world, only to decline later into destitution before she was finally murdered in 1852. The last is Soriya Suong, born in Phnom Penh in 1960. After the harrowing experience of life under the Khmer Rouge, escape and separation from her family, she eventually came to Australia. Sonya is lucky she speaks Khmer, French, English, and a little Vietnamese. She now works with other immigrants, helping them to gain the skills they will need to make a new life. But nothing can dissolve the horrors of the past or make up for the cruelty of anti-Asian graffiti in the streets, or the alienation she now feels to traditional expectations of her role as a woman. Like so many women in the long history of migration to this country, she has had to challenge her own traditions, often at great emotional expense.

For Victoria’s women, it has been a history of adjustment, loneliness, determination and struggle, often just to live and support families, sometimes to make a public impact on a society which, from the beginning has suffered many ills. They have survived the full force of a political system which denied them the vote until the turn of the twentieth century, an education that fitted them out for life as an inferior class of human being, a workplace which still discriminates against them, and which for many of those years kept female labour cheap.

The great achievement of this book is that it will help to solidify the idea that there are profoundly different ways of looking at history. Australian history has been just as much the· story of women as of Australian men, of obscure women as much as of those few who managed to make it in a man’s world, which, of course some of them did, but never on terms set by themselves.

As political creatures the subjects of these biographies represent the whole range from arch conservative to radical left-winger, some representing a mixture which might seem strange to modern readers – Eva Hughes, for instance, second president of the Australian Women’s National League, under whose dominance (1909–1922) the League become ‘the most organised and most consistent exponent of conservative thought in Victoria’. But Hughes, described as a ‘militant conservative’ took the rather radical view that women should be educated in politics, and devoted a large part of her life to that end.

The overwhelming impression left by this book is of women deeply divided between a recognition of themselves as worthwhile human beings with a contribution to make and a right to equitable treatment on the one hand and as wives and mothers on the other. The alternatives no longer seem so incompatible as they once did, but the debate still rages. Babette Francis, best known for her work with Women Who Want to be Women, is the modern embodiment of that tension – a mother of eight who spends a lot of her own time out of the home trying to convince other women to return to it.

Again and again, one is struck by the absurdities of the kind of arguments based on ignorance and vested interest which have plagued women down the years. There are some stunning examples, like the Vicar-General who said of Mother Ursula Frayne, (indefatigable protector of desperate children) that she was ‘too clever … too self-sufficient and above all counsel’, qualities which he found ‘inappropriate’ in a woman, especially a religious one. Then there was Max Meldrum, at one time Clarice Beckett’s teacher, who declared that ‘There will never be a great female artist and there never has been. Woman has not the capacity to be alone; nature has decided that for them at childbirth. Every great painter has to be able to walk out under the stars alone, with no companion, no guide and just go along his chosen path. No woman can do this’.

But the vast majority of the women in this book have known exactly what it is to be alone. That has been the crux of their muggle. Max Meldrum and the Vicar General here provide us with made-to-order examples of that ignorance breeding misery which I had discovered in history as a child. Modern women now realise, of course, that ignorance is not confined to the past. Many of the absurd arguments in favour of keeping women ‘in their place’ are still widely current, and many women are still torn between the desire to be an all-round person and the demands of home and kids.

The lives I was most touched by were women like Alice Anderson, garage proprietor, born in 1907 (the year the first American-built car, the Hertel, was introduced to Victoria). Alice was doing very well in premises in Cotham Road, Kew as mechanic cum chauffeur employing several other women when she accidentally shot and killed herself in 1926. Then there was Olive Rowe who took up dancing in her sixties and at the age of seventy-five won the Supreme Award of the International Dancing Masters’ Association.

But so many of these stories are tragedies, like Clarice Beckett, the artist who never had so much as a studio of her own. After she died in 1935 her work was quickly forgotten, and by the time 2000 of her canvasses were found in an open-sided barn near Benalla in 1971, rats, possums and the elements had destroyed all but a few. Probably most tragic of all have been the Aboriginal women, here represented by ‘Nanny’ and ‘Queen Aggie’. Nanny, whose husband was killed by a white settler in 1843 survived at least until 1882, long enough to see most of her people die. By the time Queen Aggie was born in the 1870s, the death rate among Aboriginal tribes along the Murray far outstripped the birth rate. With a combination of traditional skills and adjustments to the white way of doing things, Aggie herself survived, but when she died in 1928 it was as ‘the Last of her Tribe’.

The approach to researching and writing Australian history is undergoing extensive

renovations. The current ‘Blainey debate’ might have blown over in a week if it had not touched a nerve whose roots go right to the core of our history, and had it not involved some deep questioning about the role of the historian in society. Now the whole body of Geoffrey Blainey’s work has been called into question, not just because of those few words he had to say about immigration, but because it represents an approach to history which is now a little less certain of itself.

It is in this atmosphere of uncertainty and debate that we now await the deluge of historical material that will hit the market for the Bicentennial. The biggest problem for publishers, editors, authors and funding bodies will be how to ensure that we are all accorded a place in that history – Aboriginal people (who can hardly be expected to approach the 200th birthday celebrations with glee), migrants, children, gay people, old people, country people and city people, as well as that other fifty per cent of us who are women.