History

In the quick-scroll world of soundbites and ‘shorts’, academic professionals must pack their expertise into a concise form, writing ever shorter narratives. Sheila Fitzpatrick, an eminent Australian scholar of everything Soviet, delivers in shorthand. Her little book focuses on a single aspect of one person’s life with Joseph Stalin’s death.

The ‘bungalow’ of Living in Tin’s subtitle was a rough tin shed, erected in Mpwartne (Alice Springs) in 1914 to house Aboriginal children of mixed descent. Described by one observer as ‘a place of squalid horror’, it was managed first by Arabana woman Topsy Smith, and then placed under the supervision of a white matron, Ida Standley. The two women ran the Bungalow until 1929 but the institution survived until 1942. At least one hundred children were housed in the Bungalow over its lifetime, sleeping on the dirt floor of one room with no doors or windows, provided with meagre rations and only the most basic education.

We have had histories of Australian motherhood for decades. Fathers feature – sometimes as villains – in some of our best loved fiction: D’Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee (1955), George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), and Don Charlwood’s All the Green Year (1965) spring to mind. Rounded portraits of fathers have figured in memoir and autobiography. Examples by Germaine Greer, Manning Clark, Raimond Gaita, and Biff Ward stand out. But not so in works of history, where there is a strange silence.

Richard Reid’s tour de force begins with the story of a single road that ‘ran from the Indian Ocean coast, ascending the lightly wooded, elevated plateau of central-east Africa, through the small but perfectly positioned chiefdom of Unyanyembe, and then onward to the west until it reached Lake Tanganyika’.

The fence post was wrapped in old newspaper and kept in the shed. It was all that Aunty Loretta Parsley, Jimmy Governor’s great-granddaughter, had left to touch of his life. ‘His hands touching that,’ she told Katherine Biber, ‘that’s why I asked you to open it. Because you need to connect with this story.’ Overwhelmed, Biber felt the ‘immense responsibility’ entrusted to her.

Australians and New Zealanders loved Paul Robeson. Socialists, peace activists, and trade unionists held him up as their champion, the face of defiance amid Cold War harassment. Conservative theatre critics swooned at his golden bass baritone. Māori rugby players called him ‘brother’. Eastern European migrants wept to his song about the Warsaw Ghetto. Even an FBI informant could not deny he was a ‘great and superb artist’.

When American Verena Koehler and Russian Zinaida Duvankova swapped recipes for Mexican-style beef and piroshki in the early 1950s, it didn’t seem that either were aiming to spark a political discussion. The pen pals were curious about each other’s food and lives, and the everyday differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet they soon saw similarities. Koehler remarked on a woman’s need for simple, fast recipes when she both works and carries out domestic labour at home. Duvankova agreed – even as a Soviet state official, she completed a full day at work and returned home to all of the housework. As she wrote to Koehler, ‘You are a woman, and can well understand what it means to attend to a family of three.’

It is common today for historians to describe what they do as telling stories about the lives and events of the past, using the narrative techniques that they share with fiction writers: describing place, weather, clothes, the set of a leading character’s chin, and so on. But as a disciplined, evidence-based enquiry, history writing is also about argument and interpretation.

As Mark Twain tells the story in Following the Equator (1897), Cecil Rhodes, the future magnate and politician, was down and out in Sydney in 1870. Wandering along a harbour beach, he stopped to help a fisherman land and gut a shark – in whose stomach cavity he discovered a fragment of newsprint that, days in advance of sailing ships carrying the same papers, announced the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Galvanised by this intelligence, Rhodes convinced a local wool broker to lend him the money to buy up much of that year’s Australian woolclip, a purchase that helped the future poster boy of Empire get back in the game.