School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
-
ItemThe marks of want and care(McPhee-Gribble, 1988)It is not true that time heals all wounds. Some wounds linger on until the wounded die and their pain is forgotten. A generation of Australians harboured searing memories of the 1890s depression - of hunger, cold, bewilderment, humiliation and fear. But they are gone now, and their memories with them. If the depression is remembered at all, it is for the bank crashes of 1893, which produced panic among the propertied class. The working people and the unemployed who felt the chill most severely left few written records. Here, as in so many other areas of Australian life, the privilege of being remembered, being included in ‘history’, has been open to only a few. But why would anyone want to re-live the sufferings of a dead generation? Perhaps because so many of the institutions we take for granted began as attempts to do something about the effects of the 1890s crisis. Federation, state welfare, arbitration and the rise of the Labor Party all date back to that time. The crisis also ushered in profound changes in family life. As earlier chapters have discussed, the 1890s marked the beginning of the trend towards smaller families, with all that it implies for the way that people organize their lives. If the memory of the 1890s has gone, its legacy is still with us.
-
ItemMeatworkers' memories: the mnemonics of the nose(Department of History, University of Melbourne, 1994)It is entirely proper that I have travelled from Melbourne to Sydney to present a few thoughts on memory, history and smell. The first time I visited Sydney as an adult was at the end of a surfing safari along the coast from Melbourne. As we came into the metropolitan area four of us were in what might loosely be described as high spirits. I was driving, and the portable tape-recorder was probably playing one of those tuneful post-punk numbers that tended to be our favourites at the time. Elisa was the most excited of us all. She had spent some of her childhood in Sydney, and had not been back for many years. Going along one of the freeways that carve through the hills south of the city, I looked over to the passenger seat and was startled by a pair of legs. Elisa had not so much put her head out of the window as she was out the window, sitting on the door frame and hanging on to the roof-rack. She was laughing and sniffing and yelling, all at the same time. "Breathe . . . Breathe. Can't you smell it . . . can't you smell it!" Once we got her back in the car we agreed – yes, we could smell this place that for Elisa came with memories of smells and for us was a brand new sensation.
-
ItemHistories and collecting: museums, objects and memories(Oxford University Press, 1994)I want to explore the question of how we might understand the museum in relation to collection and memory. This is one approach to much more general issues around the rules, modes and rhythms of social memory. The capacity of institutions like the museum have, in general, been radically undervalued in thinking about memory.
-
ItemThe apron-strings of empire(McPhee Gribble, 1988)Historical discussion of Australia's relationship with Britain has generally concentrated on asking who won out. Was Australia, as Humphrey McQueen and others have argued, a 'willing, often over-anxious partner' in the British imperial endeavour, or was it a victim of British exploitation, as radical-nationalist writers have long maintained? Clearly the answers to these questions depend on the questioner's own set of values. There is plenty of evidence to support either case. But we also have to query whether the question is worth asking in the first place.