Attwood, Bain - In the Age of Testimony

8/17/2019 Attwood, Bain - In the Age of Testimony

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In the Age of Testimony:

The Stolen Generations Narrative,

“Distance,” and Public History

Bain Attwood

In the last few decades the nature of history making, espe-cially that regarding the contemporary era, has been transformed, changing not

only the pasts that are being related but the way in which many people relate to

those pasts. The shift in the nature of historical knowledge and historical sen-sibility owes much to both popular and academic forms of history; indeed, it is

largely the outcome of a convergence of the interests and approaches of elite his-

tory and culture with those of popular history and culture. Generally speaking,

history making has been democratized, but more particularly there has been an

unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testi-

mony. People who have experienced an event and bear witness to it have come

to be regarded as the most authentic bearers of truth about the past, indeed as

the embodiment of history, and their accounts are increasingly received by many

as a substitute for the history of the professional historian who seeks to record

and explain a past event. This phenomenon owes much to the fact that we live

in a global world in which an ideal of human rights has triumphed, a politics of

recognition calling for acknowledgment of the collective experience and identity

of minority groups has flourished, new institutions and technologies providing a

sense of immediacy have expanded, and a culture of intimacy has become domi-

nant in public institutions, not least in the media. Together, these changes haveplaced the personal at the center of public culture and put emotion on display; the

Public Culture 20:1 doi 10.1215/08992363-2007-017

Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press

I am indebted to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Miranda Johnson, and Mark Salber Phillips for their com-

ments on a draft of this article.


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individual and affect wield more power in representing the past than the intel-

lectual and analysis.1

The age of testimony reflects major changes in the discipline of history itself

but also presents a fundamental challenge to its authority and to the creation of

“historical knowledge” in the sense that Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses here. In

large part this is because of the way it renders the temporal relationships at play

in historical representation. As Michel de Certeau once stated, “Historiography

[in modernity] . . . is based on a clean break between the past and the present. . . .

Historiography conceives the relation [between past and present] as one of suc-

cession (one after the other), correlation (greater or less proximities), cause and

effect (one follows the other), and disjunction (either one or the other, but not both

at the same time).”2 Gabrielle Spiegel has described this as the discipline’s found-

ing gesture: “to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is consti-

tutive of the modern enterprise of historiography.”3 This clean break between past

and present has been fundamental to the way historians have done their work and

to the truth claims we have made for the historical knowledge we produce.

However, it might be more useful to express the temporal relationship at theheart of modern historiography in another way. It can be argued that “distantia-

tion” — the process of putting the past at a distance from the present — has been

the hallmark of historical work in modernity and so is central to what has been

called historicism. Temporal distance is, of course, inevitable in historical work,

since we relate the past after the event, yet it is also a construction on the part of

both the producer and consumer of history. (This has several dimensions, such as

the formal, the affective, the ideological, and the cognitive.) Consequently, there

are, in Mark Salber Phillips’s words, “a series of distances (or even distance-

effects) that modify and reconstruct the temporality of historical accounts, thereby

shaping every part of our engagement with the past.”4 Phillips has argued that

schools of historical work have long been marked by particular forms of engage-

ment with the past and that these can be understood in terms of their various

1. Jay Winter, “The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Raritan 21 (2001): 56,

66; Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 2006), xii i, xv, 93, 97, 116, 119, 130, 142; Annette Wieviorka, “The Witness in History,” trans.

Jared Stark, Poetics Today 27 (2006): 392.

2. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other , trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1986), 4.

3. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,” History

and Theory 41 (2002): 149.

4. Mark Salber Phi llips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” History Workshop Journal

57 (2004): 124, 126, 127.


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commitments to particular stances in relation to “distance” (by which he means

“the entire continuum from proximity to detachment”) and that in the history ofhistoriography significant change has been associated with reconfigurations of

“distance.” He suggests that the cognitive might be the most significant dimen-

sion of the various dimensions of “distance” and that the reworking of this realm

“can be expected to have larger, more disruptive consequences” than shifts in the

others.5

Since the rise of history as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century, its

work has owed much to an attempt to convey a sense that what happened in the

past was particular (or peculiar) to its time and was the result of circumstances

other than those of today. A sense of difference between past and present has been

a consequence, too, of history’s conception of human time as linear (rather than,

say, cyclical), and its understanding of history as a story of progress through time

in which the present breaks continuously with the past. The focus on the origins

of historical events, on causes and effects, has similarly increased the sense of dis-

tance been a past and a present. Most important, perhaps, any sense of proximity

between present and past has been diminished by the discipline’s founding idealof objectivity, with its assumptions that there was a sharp separation between

knower (the historian) and known (the past), that historical facts existed before

and apart from historical interpretation, and that truth was unitary rather than a

matter of perspective.6

Several reasons can be adduced for the rise of historical distantiation, but prob-

ably none played a more vital role than writing or, rather, the ideological claims

that historians came to make about the nature of writing: that the written word

made the past available as an object; that the written word helped create a pal-

pable sense of the past; that the written word revealed historians’ knowledge of

the past to be true, and that the written word was the best means of conveying that

knowledge. (In this process, any relationship that written modes of communica-

tion might have had to oral ones has tended to be erased, as Miranda Johnson

discusses in her article in this issue.) More generally, the historian’s authority and

power rested on the triumph of literacy in the institutions that dominated public

life in the West in the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth.However, during the last fifty or more years, this authority has declined in public

culture as the oral and the visual have acquired a new or, more strictly speak-

5. Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” 127.

6. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Histori-

cal Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).


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ing, renewed influence, such that historical knowledge and historical sensibil-

ity increasingly bear some resemblance to those of premodern times.7 The riseand reconfiguration of these old ways of remembering has been facilitated by

changes in many realms, not least the technological, which has seen the spread

of new forms of recording and transmitting the spoken and the pictorial and new

institutions such as television. This has had a profound impact on “distance” in

historical work.

The ways in which the production and consumption of history have changed

in recent decades are exemplified by the particular example of history making I

shall consider here: the “stolen generations narrative.” This claimed that an enor-

mously high percentage of Aboriginal children, perhaps as many as one in three,

had been separated from their families during the twentieth century; that separa-

tions had been forced; and that the principal purpose of the policy of removal

was to prevent the reproduction of Aboriginal people, so it amounted to a form

of genocide. This account, I argue, was less the outcome of the work of profes-

sional history, though it did play a role, and more the result of various forms of

historical work we can call public history. For the most part, the stolen genera-tions narrative arose as a consequence of being presented in, or projected onto,

a range of institutions that were not historiographical in nature but memorial,

literary, filmic, therapeutic, and quasilegal and that recognized and authorized

the narrative according to criteria that departed from those customarily used in

professional history. This occurred because these institutions constituted narra-

tive contexts with stances that emphasized historical proximity rather than his-

torical distance; and this was primarily so because of the dominant role assigned

to testimony, not only formally, ideologically, and affectively, but also, and most

important, cognitively.8 This article seeks to demonstrate the advantages and dis-

advantages of this way of relating the past and relating to the past, then argues for

the need for an approach that seeks to integrate the stances of historical proximity

and historical distance.

The emergence of the stolen generations narrative can be attributed in large

part to the democratization of history. This was initially the product of radical

political movements in the 1960s and 1970s concerned with matters of class, race,gender, and sexuality. In what came to be called “history from below,” professional

7. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78.

8. Testimony has many forms, of course. The one I am discussing here is that of oral history and

its variants, such as autobiography, rather than that of the courtroom. Moreover, the influence of any

testimony depends enormously on the context in which it is performed.


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historians sought to recover the pasts of peoples “hidden from history,” such as

the poor, migrants, slaves and indigenous peoples, gay men, and lesbian women.In doing so, they developed a strong interest in “experience,” and in pursuing

experience they placed increased emphasis on investigating feeling or emotion.

This served to expand history’s horizons: historians shifted their focus from what

had been regarded as the traditional historical task of providing a record of the

events of the past and an explanation of these events to describing what it felt like

to be there. In the work of many historians, there was a desire to reach beyond the

task of narrating and analyzing the past to one of more or less resurrecting it. The

shift from “things that happened” to “things experienced” focused attention on

the subjective states of mind and heart, and it encouraged, indeed required, a new

or, rather, renewed role for empathy or compassion in historical research. Taking

feelings seriously — others’ as well as one’s own — meant that affect became one

of the grounds for an interest in history. Paying attention to emotions in history

involved rejecting the objectifying effects of the positivist or empiricist methods

of the social sciences and turning to a hermeneutic approach in which the role of

both historians and historical subjects as interpreters became crucial.9More particularly, the basis for the stolen generations narrative was developed

in the context of what came to be called oral history. The perspectives of those

hidden from history, professional historians claimed, had seldom been recorded

in written sources, so it was necessary to interview these people in order to recon-

struct the past properly. At the same time, in keeping with the democratizing

impulse of “history from below,” oral historians actually incited the work of

memory by encouraging peoples “hidden from history” to remember their pasts

by participating in their recording projects. The practice of oral history contrib-

uted to the shift in the emphasis of professional history from anonymous struc-

tures to personal agency and from the national and the general to the local and

the particular, but most important, it promised a shift in the location of historical

power and authority from the professional historian, the elite, and the oppressors

to the oral interviewee or witness, “the common people” and the oppressed, who

were called “the voice of the past” (rather than “the voice of history”); in other

words, it had the potential to provide multiple perspectives of the past and wasthereby part of a struggle to make the world more democratic and multicultural.

In the beginning, though, the potential of oral history’s democratizing impulse to

constitute a radical challenge to the discipline of history or to historical knowl-

9. Mark Salber Phillips, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life,”

History Workshop Journal (forthcoming): 2, 10, 11, 12.


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edge was barely apparent, in large part because the champions of oral history

were most intent on asserting that it could provide a truer account of the past (bysupplementing and correcting the written record).10 This was the historiographi-

cal context for the emergence of the stolen generations narrative. Two graduate

students, Peter Read and Heather Goodall, researching the history of Aboriginal

communities in one Australian state (New South Wales) in the twentieth century,

undertook considerable archival research, but it was oral history or at least the

conjunction of their work with both written and oral sources that drew their atten-

tion to the separation of Aboriginal children from their kin.11 (Oral history work

such as theirs resembled the fieldwork conducted by anthropologists, and this

reflected the increasingly interdisciplinary approach adopted by historians.)

In time it became apparent that oral history had the potential to change the

nature of historical practice and hence the nature of historical knowledge. As

Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed, oral history proved to be the Trojan horse

through which “the soldiers of Memoryland” marched into historiography. With

the focus on what has been called “memory,” it became evident that oral his-

tory on the one hand and history (or historicism) on the other are not simplycomplementary to one another but actually have very different relationships to the

past.12 Oral history challenged historical distantiation in several respects. If his-

tory or historicism demanded a disconnecting of present and past, oral history has

demanded a connecting of past and present; “then” and “now” become entangled

with one another. The conjoining of past and present has led, more often than

not, to a greater emphasis on continuities and similarities across time rather than

discontinuities and difference, and more focus has been directed toward the after-

math of a historical occurrence rather than its cause. Most important, oral his-

tory has challenged history’s relationship to “distance,” because its very practice

brings the historian into closer proximity with the past.13 This has made it much

harder for the professional historian to maintain the detachment the discipline has

10. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1978), 66.

11. See Bain Attwood, “ ‘Learning About the Truth’: The Stolen Generations Narrative,” in Tell-

ing Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand , ed. Bain Attwood and

Fiona Magowan (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001), 244, 2 45n23.

12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Reconciliation and Its Historiography: Some Preliminary Thoughts,”

UTS Review 7 (2001): 10.

13. Paula Hamilton, “Sale of the Century? Memory and Historical Consciousness in Australia,”

in Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, ed. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (Lon-

don: Routledge, 2003), 145.


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regarded as necessary for critical historical practice, and it has placed consider-

able pressure on historical objectivity, not only as a goal historians have tried toattain, but also as an ideal to which they have sought to aspire. This has been

especially evident where professional historians have sought to play a practical

role in reference to their living historical subjects. This was the case with the

stolen generations narrative: Read, the historian primarily responsible for pro-

ducing it, was disinclined to separate his role as a professional historian from the

roles he assumed as social worker, psychological counselor, and political advo-

cate. The different temporal stances of oral history and history (or historicism)

became most pronounced, however, when it was realized that oral history was

peculiarly well suited to exploring the subjective realm, and professional histori-

ans increasingly paid more attention to historical experience rather than historical

events.

The changes that followed the shift in the means of historical production or/

and consumption from the written to the oral have been particularly obvious

where the subject matter of the past has been deemed to be traumatic. Trauma, it

has been argued, resists historicism’s organization of time into a chronologicallylinear schema of before-and-after or of “the past” and later “the present,” because

it intrudes into the present and does so repeatedly and repetitively. Dominick

LaCapra has argued: “The event in historical trauma is punctual and datable. It

is situated in the past. The experience [however] is not punctual and . . . relates to

a past that has not passed away. . . . In traumatic memory the past is not simply

history as over and done with. It lives on experientially and haunts and possesses

the self or the community (in the case of shared traumatic events).”14 The rise

of “traumatic history,” it has been suggested, has had another consequence for

historicism. The very nature of trauma means that such an event or experience

cannot be registered properly at the time it occurs but only later, often much later;

thus, retrospective rather than contemporary sources are often the truest archive

of the past.

The emphasis on oppression and suffering associated with the emergence of

history from below in general, and with traumatic history in particular, has con-

founded historicism’s temporal stances in other respects, of course. First, recallingthe destruction wrought by racism, colonization, slavery, patriarchy, war, and the

like has led to a loss of faith in modernity’s story of progress. Second, represent-

ing such pasts has brought into question historicism’s emphasis on change, since

14. Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2004), 55 – 56.


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the point of a good deal of this historical work has been to assert the continuity

of subaltern groups (“we have survived” or “we have always been here”). Third,remembering such pasts in a mode we might call memorial history, especially

where it occurs in commemorative contexts in which mourning takes place, chal-

lenges historical distantiation by seeking to re-member or revivify the past and

to fuse the people of the past and the people of the present into a single collective

body.15

If the foundations of the stolen generations narrative lay in the contexts I have

been describing, its actual creation took place in still other institutional locations.

It was produced initially by Link-Up, an agency founded in the early 1980s by

Peter Read and Coral Edwards (who had been separated from her kin as a child)

in order to reunite the members of Aboriginal families who had been separated by

the practice of child removal (though its focus was mostly on the children rather

than their parents). Its work was inevitably historical in nature but, rather than

accept historicism’s clean break or rupture between present and past, Link-Up

sought to reconnect a past to the present or the present to a past in order to help

the people who sought its assistance. Yet its historical work was ahistoricist in amore thoroughgoing way than this: by focusing on the traumatic and the thera-

peutic, it figured time as cyclical rather than lineal, thus presenting the prospect

of a return of the past and the redemption of that past. The narrative it constructed

was, of course, a form of identity or identification history: it sought to provide an

account of the past as the basis for an Aboriginal identity for those who had been

separated from their Aboriginal kin, and it called for recognition of this identity.

In constructing a sense of self informed more by the present than by any past, it

resembled other forms of identity history (such as national history), but it was

unusual (though not exceptional) in the sense that the roots of the identity that

were proclaimed lay, paradoxically, in the very past these people had arguably

lost.16

As a recognizing authority, Link-Up both called for and called up a particular

kind of narrator — the children who had been removed — and a particular kind

of narrative — oral history or testimony. At the same time, Link-Up influenced

15. Spiegel, “Memory and History,” 152.

16. This is an example of what LaCapra has called a founding trauma ( History in Transit , 57).

This is probably the reason the stolen generations narrative became central to the historical con-

sciousness of so many Aboriginal people. This in turn made it analogous to the victim narrative of

white national history, which provoked an angry attack on it by vulnerable white Australians (see

Ann Curthoys, “Whose Home? Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythol-

ogy,” Journal of Australian Studies 61 [1999]: 1 –18).


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those who told their stories, especially those who had the opportunity to tell

them in settler Australian domains. As narrators tell their stories to an institu-tion, the form and content of their accounts tend to be shaped by their knowledge

of what their audience expects to hear, but this is especially so in a narrative

context such as this. As one historian has observed, “A gradual negotiation and

shaping of themes takes place as narratives succeed and influence one another.

As these themes emerge and repeat themselves, in part through the ‘recognition

effect’ [i.e., what happens when a listener recognizes his or her experience in the

story of another narrator], the narratives become mutually validating and self-

confirming.”17

The making of the stolen generations narrative was furthered by Read’s work

in the context of “applied history,” an institution in which a professional historian

seeks to meet a brief provided by a public agency primarily concerned with mat-

ters of contemporary rather than historical interest. In 1980 or 1981 Read was

commissioned by a government body (the New South Wales Family and Chil-

dren’s Service Agency) to prepare a report providing historical background to

the contemporary phenomenon of child separation, and this was later publishedas a pamphlet by a government department (the New South Wales Ministry of

Aboriginal Affairs). This proved to be the crucible for the “stolen generations.”

Read’s report was originally titled “The Lost Generations,” but his partner, Jay

Arthur, a lexicographer, rejected this as euphemistic and instead suggested “The

Stolen Generations,” a phrase that, importantly, is more metaphorical than refer-

ential in nature and prompts an empathetic or emotional response.18 It is apparent

that the nature of the recognizing authority here — applied rather than academic

history — was responsible for this crucial act of naming and hence for the cre-

ation of “the stolen generations.” This is so because in this institutional context

the temporal fulcrum always at work in history is tipped more toward the present

and future than toward the past, and a premium is set upon historical judgment

rather than historical understanding. The term stolen generations soon took hold

as Read’s eponymously titled pamphlet was widely circulated, and its influence

17. Patrick Hagopian, “Oral Narratives: Secondary Revision and the Memory of the Vietnam

War,” History Workshop Journal 32 (1991): 145.

18. Peter Read, A Rape of the Soul So Profound: The Return of the Stolen Generations (Sydney:

Allen and Unwin, 1999), 49, 219n1. Read’s treatment of the separation of children in this report

differed from his academic work in several respects, not least of which was the manner in which he

framed the subject matter: the phrase stolen generations does not appear in his PhD dissertation,

submitted in 1983. For a discussion of this, see Attwood, “ ‘Learning about the Truth,’ ” 247n31.


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expanded when Read and Edwards told the story of the separation of children to

a conference of a federal government body (the National Aboriginal ConsultativeCouncil) in order to gain funding for Link-Up’s work.19

At the same time that Read formulated “the stolen generations,” the story of the

separation of Aboriginal children was told in yet another narrative context, that

of three documentary films ( It’s a Long Road Back , 1981; Lousy Little Sixpence,

1983; and Link-Up Diary, 1985) and a television docudrama miniseries (Women

of the Sun, 1982) featuring the subject, in which Aboriginal people were the prin-

cipals as they performed the roles of director, writer, narrator, character, actor,

and historical informant. These were made in the wake of the unprecedented suc-

cess of two landmark television miniseries, Roots (1977) and Holocaust (1978),

which commanded enormous audiences in the United States and consequently

created a considerable demand for personal stories among filmmakers and film-

watchers worldwide.20

Film had a profound impact on the production and consumption of the stolen

generations narrative in other ways. The medium of film is, of course, primarily

visual and aural in nature, rather than literary, and in historical films spectacle andmetaphor are more important than factual data and logical argument. This serves

to create what Robert Rosenstone has called “a different kind of work about the

past, history as ‘symbol’ rather than as ‘reality.’ ”21 Most filmic history, moreover,

tends to render the past proximate rather than distant as it seeks to make history

vivid and to make the viewer experience the past. Rosenstone points out:

Using image, music and sound effect along with the spoken (and the

shouted, whispered, hummed and cooed) word, the dramatic film aimsdirectly at emotions. It does not simply provide an image of the past, it

wants you to feel strongly about that image — specifically, about the

characters involved in the historical situations that it depicts. Portraying

the world in the present tense, the dramatic feature plunges you into the

midst of history, attempting to destroy the distance between you and

the past and to obliterate . . . your ability to think about what you are

seeing.22

19. Read, Rape of the Soul, 71 – 72.

20. “Roots,” Museum of Broadcast Communications, www.museum.tv/archives/etv/R/htmlR/

roots/roots.htm (accessed March 15, 2007); Wieviorka, Era of the Witness, 87, 98, 102.

21. Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, England: Pearson Long-

man, 2006), 163, 166.

22. Rosenstone, History on Film, 16, 39, 74, 87, 118, 153, 159.


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This is also true, of course, for documentary film.23 In this case, Lousy Little

Sixpence had considerable impact as it was screened in cinemas and shown ontelevision.24

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, what has been called ego history

played a major role in defining what constituted historical knowledge about the

separation of Aboriginal children from their kin. Much of the stolen generations

narrative was presented in the form of Aboriginal autobiographies, life stories,

autobiographical novels, and autobiographical songs.25 (This was encouraged by

the same democratizing impulse that informed the emergence of oral history.) In

large part these autobiographical narratives were verified and validated by print

media culture, a culture that comprised publishers, literary critics, and journal-

ists and used criteria that laid more emphasis on the narrative’s rhetorical quali-

ties than its referential ones.26 It was the former’s articulation of emotion and

its appeal to a sense of compassion and moral judgment that made the narrative

a persuasive one among its readers, who were primarily settler Australians (by

whom I mean all non-Aboriginal Australians).

The growing production of the stolen generations narrative in autobiographi-

23. The argument made here in regard to film can also be made in regard to museum displays,

living history museums, and heritage sites.

24. See the film kit prepared by Ronin Films, Australian Film Institute Library, Melbourne. Both

Women of the Sun and Lousy Little Sixpence foregrounded in one way or another the testimony of

Margaret Tucker, an Aboriginal woman who had been separated from her family as a child in 1917,

and led to the reissuing of her autobiography, If Everyone Cared , which subsequently became one of

the best-known stolen generations stories.

25. See, for example, Sally Morgan, My Place (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987);

Glenys Ward, Wandering Girl (Broome: Magabala Books, 1987); Coral Edwards and Peter Read, The

Lost Children (Sydney: Doubleday, 1989); Archie Roach, “Took the Children Away,” Charcoal Lane

(1990); Barbara Cummings, Take This Child . . . From Kahlin Compound to the Retta Dixon Children’s

Home (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1990); Alice Nannup, When the Pelican Laughed (Fre-

mantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1992); Stuart Rintoul, comp., The Wailing: A National Black Oral

History (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1993); Tiddas, “Brown Skin Baby” (song written by Bob Randall),

Sing about Life (1993); Rowena MacDonald, Between Two Worlds: The Commonwealth Government

and the Removal of Aboriginal Children of Part Descent in the Northern Territory (Alice Springs:

IAD Press, 1995).

26. At this time academic historians produced work describing government policies and practices

whereby children were removed from their families (Peter Read, A Hundred Years War: The Wiradjuri

People and the State [Sydney: Pergamon, 1988]; Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and

Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900 –1940 [Fremantle: University of Western

Australia Press, 1988]; Andrew Markus, Governing Savages [Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990]; Tony

Austin, I Can See the Old Home So Clearly: The Commonwealth and “Half-Caste” Youth in the North-

ern Territory, 1911 –1939 [Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993]), but their studies had much less

impact publicly.


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cal forms took place as testimony moved to the forefront of contemporary popu-

lar culture, especially when it was associated with trauma. In effect, as DipeshChakrabarty has pointed out, experience has become a form of commodity that

is marketed as a capitalist good.27 Most important, perhaps, as witnessing has

become the dominant mode for relating the past in the public realm, its role has

undergone a major change. Its putative function is no longer simply the acquisi-

tion of historical knowledge about pasts poorly known, which was one of the

original purposes of oral history; instead it has become much more that of the

transmission of pasts to future generations in a way that creates a sense of a

strong transgenerational link between the faces and voices of witnesses and those

who listen to them. In effect, the former become memorials of a past, and the lat-

ter (will) come to remember for them. This is especially so when testimony entails

the reenacting or even reliving of a past by the witnesses such that listeners effec-

tively become secondary witnesses.28 In this shift in the purpose of testimony, the

traditional historical task of explaining a past event recedes considerably and is

often deemed irrelevant.

Testimony’s authority lies, of course, in its promise of historical proximity,indeed in the impression or the illusion it creates of being the past or at least

closer to the past than the accounts of professional history. It is especially power-

ful when it comes in the form of the oral, and even more so when it is visual as

well: “I was there, and now and I am speaking of it to you and you can hear (and

see) me speaking.” As Spiegel has noted, with testimony there is “the promise of

a certain emotional and gestural vividness — a vividness strongly reinforced by

the customarily oral form of its delivery — that operates to transform [it] into a

virtually transparent form of transmission,” thereby implying that no act of rep-

resentation is involved.29

Between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s another institutional location emerged

for the telling of the stolen generations narrative: legal and quasi-legal inquiries

in the form of a royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in prisons (1988 – 91),

several court cases brought by or on behalf of Aboriginal people seeking repara-

tion for the suffering they experienced as a consequence of being removed from

27. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History and the Politics of Recognition,” in Manifestos for Historians, ed.

Keith Jenkins, Alan Munslow, and Susan Gordon (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

28. Annette Wieviorka, “On Testimony,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory,

ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 24; Dominick LaCapra, History and

Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 102; Aleida Assmann, “History,

Memory, and the Genre of Testimony,” Poetics Today 27 (2006): 261, 267, 269 – 71.

29. Spiegel, “Memory and History,” 157.


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their kin (Williams v. NSW , 1994 – 99; Kruger v. the Commonwealth, 1995 – 97;

and Cubillo and Gunner v. the Commonwealth, 1996 – 2000), and an inquiry intothe separation of children by a federal government agency, the Human Rights and

Equal Opportunity Commission (1995 – 97). Much of the history presented in this

context took the form of “juridical history” (which has been defined as a way of

“representing the past so as to make it available to legal and quasi-legal judgments

in the present”).30 Arguably, its primary interest, unlike that of academic history,

is to pass judgment on the past rather than to understand it. Moreover, its approach

to the past tends to be presentist rather than historicist, if only because its principal

tasks are oriented to the present and future more than the past; and it tends to wear

away the complexities and ambiguities of the past. In due course, the outcome of

the court cases served to challenge the stolen generations narrative as they sought

to prove what had created the wrong of removal, but prior to this the Human

Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry made the stolen generations

narrative a widely known public history in Australia. Significantly, it did not com-

mission any historical research but relied largely upon oral testimony by Aborig-

inal people and submissions by Aboriginal organizations (such as Link-Up).31 In particular, it encouraged those who had been removed to testify to their suffer-

ing. Here, as elsewhere, testimony was assigned a special function: it was a way

of obtaining knowledge about the past, but in addition, and most of all, it was a

means of transmitting the past in such as way as to enable those who bore its bur-

dens to be both heard and healed.32 This meant the inquiry’s proceedings resem-

bled not only those of a court but also those of the couch and the confessional. 33

In turn, the inquiry verified and validated the accounts it received according to

whether or not trauma was evident in a narrator’s testimony and whether each

testimony corroborated the others that were presented.

The inquiry’s report had an enormous impact largely because of its affective

presentation: it was titled Bringing Them Home; it included numerous extracts

from stolen children’s testimonies; and it insisted that settler Australians listen to

30. Andrew Sharp, “History and Sovereignty: A Case of Juridical History in New Zealand/

Aotearoa,” in Cultural Politics and the University in Aotearoa/ New Zealand , ed. Michael Peters (Palm-

erston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 1997), 160.

31. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Bringing Them Home: Report of

the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their

Families (Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia, 1997), 667 – 70.

32. Wieviorka, Era of the Witness, 108 – 9.

33. See Attwood, “ ‘Learning about the Truth,’ ” 203.


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and learn from the stories told.34 The release of the report prompted Aboriginal

people to produce more testimony, literary works, and documentary films35 butalso triggered a reaction among settler Australians, who adopted narrative devices

informed by what can be called the politics of sentimental feeling.36 First, many

sought to redeem the nation by means of a “mass apology” delivered through

a national “Sorry Day” and “Sorry Books” (and thereby earned themselves the

name of “the sorry people”);37 second, leading public intellectuals claimed an

authoritative role for themselves as moral arbiters of this past by fashioning an

authorial presence in such a way as to connect their own private histories of suf-

fering to this public history of loss.38 Arguably, both these responses amounted to

another form of testimony or witnessing. It undoubtedly contributed to the phe-

nomenon Elizabeth Povinelli has called “an experience of intimacy — intimate

holding, intimate understanding, intimate knowledge.”39

In the aftermath of Bringing Them Home the stolen generations narrative

became central to Australian historical consciousness as it assumed the form of a

myth. Indeed, at this time, the stolen generations became the symbol of the history

of relations between Aboriginal and settler peoples in Australia. Arguably, myth isanother form of historical narrative that is governed by the concerns of the present.

At any rate, it does not try to deepen historical understanding in the sense of grasp-

ing the ways in which times past might have differed from times present; instead,

it subordinates historical specificity by seeking out transhistorical meanings for

human events and human experiences.40 The slippage between the historical and

34. See Haydie Gooder and Jane Jacobs, “ ‘On the Border of the Unsayable’: The Apology in Post-

colonising Australia,” Interventions 2 (2000): 238.

35. See The Stolen Children: Their Stories, ed. Carmel Bird (Sydney: Random House, 1998); the

exhibition The Stolen Generations, Western Australian Museum; the documentary films Stolen Gen-

erations and Cry from the Heart ; and the plays Stolen and Box the Pony.

36. See Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics,” in Cultural Plu-

ralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. Thomas R. Kearns and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press, 1997), 49 – 84; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous

Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002),

155, 160 – 63.

37. See Gooder and Jacobs, “ ‘Border of the Unsayable,’ ” 239 – 43.

38. See David Carter, “Introduction: Intellectuals and Their Publics,” and “The Conscience

Industry: The Rise and Rise of the Public Intellectual,” in The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on

Australia’s Intellectual Life, ed. David Carter (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 1, 3,

15, 22 – 23, 34 – 35; and Gi llian Whitlock, “Becoming Migloo,” in Carter, Ideas Market , 236 – 58.

39. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, 183.

40. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1997), 213.


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transhistorical can prove especially compelling in the case of traumatic history,41

and this proved to be the case with the stolen generations narrative.By the mid-1990s the stolen generations narrative had slipped whatever his-

torical moorings professional history might once have provided it. It was, as I

have argued, primarily the product of narrative contexts in which testimony pre-

dominated, and the narrative had been verified and validated by authorities that

recognized it according to criteria shaped by a very different temporal orientation

than that of historicism.

The advantages that have accompanied the production of history in which his-

toricism has had little if any role to play are now taken for granted: the signifi-

cance of perspective has been recognized, the past of those hidden from history

has been recovered, the humanity of many has been restored, the identities of

minority peoples have been recognized, the inner or subjective aspects of the

human past have been recuperated, and some historical losses have been repaired.

These democratic outcomes are to be welcomed, of course. Yet it should be evi-

dent that there are some disadvantages to the decline of historicism and that these

could be said to be antagonistic to the functioning of democracy and to demo-cratic change.

The privileging of testimony has blurred the relationship between the personal

and the collective and between the particular and the general. Autobiography or

testimony cannot and should not be regarded as the same as history, yet in many

instances it has been charged with the role of not only transmitting the experience

of the past but also documenting and explaining the events of that past — a task

it can seldom be expected to perform and in fact often does not even try to do.

As a consequence of the stolen generations narrative being formulated largely in

narrative contexts that were not historiographical or historicist in nature, it was

extraordinarily vulnerable.42 When it finally encountered scrutiny, in the form of

positivist history and the law, much of its account of the past was discredited and

its influence diminished.43

41. LaCapra, History in Transit , 118, 30 – 31.

42. See Attwood, “ ‘Learning the Truth,’ ” 208 –10. The matter of timing was crucial here. Once a

historical event has been established as true by professional history or by common historical knowledge,

the inaccuracy of testimony becomes less important, but in the case of the stolen generations the first

comprehensive scholarly treatment of the subject did not appear until a few years after the narrative

was challenged. See Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800 – 2000

(Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).

43. The most severe historical and legal challenge to the stolen generations narrative was mounted

by people who have been described as denialist. See Robert Manne, In Denial: The Stolen Generations

and the Right (Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2000).


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Many of the disadvantages springing from the predominance of testimony are

a consequence of the influence of a more general phenomenon, namely “memory.”As several critics have remarked, “memory” has threatened to remake historical

discourse as its proponents have pitted it against “history.” The rise of “memory,”

Kerwin Lee Klein has suggested, is a function of its promise “to re-enchant our

relation to the world and pour presence back into the past.” Its appeal, he argues,

rests on its association with key words that connote immediacy, community,

affect, experience, spirituality, identity, and authenticity. In the schema of its pro-

ponents, “History is modernism, the state, science, imperialism, andocentrism, a

tool of oppression; memory is postmodernism, the ‘symbolically excluded,’ ‘the

body,’ ‘a healing device and a tool for redemption.’ ”44 Many of the criticisms of

this kind might be regarded as hyperbolic, but several cannot be ignored. For

example, “memory’ has been increasingly used to refer to the collective and to

what are deemed to be a series of practices (such as commemorations), institutions

(such as archives, libraries, and museums), and artifacts (such as monuments and

memorials) allied to it, and thus has come to bear names such as “social memory,”

“collective memory,” and “public memory,” even though groups, practices, insti-tutions, and artifacts, unlike individuals, do not actually remember;45 more to

the point, an intrinsic dimension of “memory” has been occluded. In most cases

it, like history, comes in the form of narrative. This means that memory, no less

than history but probably more so, is heavily influenced by discourses that are

not contemporary to the past being remembered. In short, much of it is no more

“first-order” than history is. By obscuring the mediating role played by narrative

and discourse in memorial forms of history such as testimony, too much has been

made of the past’s presence in these forms and thus of their claims to provide

historical knowledge.

Moreover, in seeking to bring the “past” close, testimony, like “memory,”

threatens to dissipate what is probably the most valuable characteristic of histori-

cism, namely its determination to uncover the past’s specificity, which is to say

its difference from the present. In other words, historicism, by seeking to put the

past at a distance, has a greater capacity than “memory” to provide other ways

of seeing the world. The sense of the past as a foreign country is the reason thatso many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, seeking to change the

world, have made a historical (if not a historicist) turn in recent times.

44. Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69

(2000): 128 – 30, 135, 137 – 38, 144 – 45.

45. Klein, “Emergence of Memory,” 130 – 31, 135.


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The most significant problem associated with the increasing dominance of

testimony in the public sphere lies, however, in the way its expression of emo-tion and an audience’s subsequent identification with the past endanger historical

knowledge by threatening to overwhelm the articulation of thought and analysis.

The solutions to this problem are by no means clear. In part, this is because some

commentators assume that the phenomenon is both new and a creation of popular

culture. Although there has undoubtedly been an enormous expansion in the insti-

tutions and technologies that promise a sense of immediacy to popular audiences,

it is worth noting, as Mark Salber Phillips has done, that this kind of engagement

with the past has a longer history, dating back, for example, to the invention of

the panorama in the late eighteenth century.46 It should also be acknowledged, as

remarked earlier, that the growing significance of emotion and empathy has not

only typified popular history but has come to be regarded as an important focus

of academic history. This means that professional historians might be able to

play a greater role in addressing the disadvantages of testimony than many have

assumed.

One approach might simply involve professional historians insisting on theneed to undertake the conventional empirical work of historical research in order

to provide sound accounts of what happened in the past (history as event),47 so

that memory or testimony is not required to conduct this work and so its role can

be more properly reserved to that of providing accounts of the impact of what

happened on participants and bystanders (history as experience). This historical

division of labor was used to good effect in the South African Truth and Rec-

onciliation Commission, as Deborah Posel suggests in her article here. Another

approach consists of the testing of memory or testimony in institutions such as

the courts, where it can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny in order to verify its

account of historical events. A further approach comprises interpretive work that

can reveal the ways in which a historical narrative in the form of memory or

myth might be false in factual terms but true in other ways, such as the meta-

phorical or symbolic. (There are many examples of work done in this spirit.)48

46. Phillips, “Advantage and Disadvantage,” 13 –14.

47. The denial of the Holocaust has been countered in this way, as evidenced by the approach

adopted by Penguin Books in the David Irving/Deborah Lipstadt libel case and by the United States

Holocaust Museum for its permanent exhibition. In the former, academic research and argument, not

testimony, was presented in court; in the latter, testimony has a limited role in presenting the story of

the Nazi genocide.

48. See Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E.

Woods (New York: Random House, 2001).


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More recently, another approach has been suggested that consists of tracing the

series of relationships between participants in historical events, those involvedin representing events, and the people who consume the accounts subsequently

produced, in order to grasp how the stories we receive about the past are shaped

by this process. The advantage of this approach, it is claimed, lies in the recogni-

tion it will bring that “the stories and images we receive about the past are shaped

by the ideas and interests of the people who communicate them, by the nature of

the media through which they are communicated, and by our own position in the

present.”49 Yet none of these approaches necessarily address either the problem

of how professional historians can better perform the analytical task of history

when they work in relation to highly charged testimony or the question of how

to check its influence in public domains, such as those of popular culture, which

tend to be unsympathetic to conventional presentations of the scholarly work of

professional historians.

In order to tackle the first task, it is helpful to take note of one of the insights of

psychoanalysis concerning the nature of relationships that usually shape historical

work. All professional historians, it can be argued, have a transferential relation-ship to the pasts that become their objects of study; in other words, we have an

emotional or empathic connection to something or other in the pasts we consider,

so we tend to be implicated in some way or other in our treatment of them. Trans-

ference will be especially intense with any past that is alive with emotion, and all

the more so where that past is the subject of contemporary debate. As we have

noted, the stance the professional historian has commonly adopted has been akin

to that of the putative innocent bystander or onlooker, which is to say that it was

actually a technique for performing the work of historical distantiation. This, of

course, will not answer to the demands made of historical work now. As Domin-

ick LaCapra has suggested, what is required is an approach that integrates knowl-

edge and affect. This, he argues, will meet the need for both accurate reconstruc-

tion of the past and working through the burden of that past.50 (LaCapra has been

specifically concerned with the special case of traumatic pasts, but his approach

can be applied more generally to the matter of historical distance.)

In order to acquire a stance of both proximity and distance and to be bothcompassionate and critical, LaCapra has recommended an approach whereby pro-

fessional historians begin their work by accepting their empathic or empathetic

49. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory and History (London: Verso, 2005),

especially 27 – 28, 237 – 38.

50. LaCapra, History in Transit , 15, 103, 105, 140, 234.


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response to the subject(s) of their work with whom they are most compelled to

empathize, whether that subject is, for the sake of argument, a perpetrator, a col-laborator, a bystander, a victim, or a resister. Indeed, he has insisted on what he

calls “empathic unsettlement” on the grounds that this provides the historian with

an experiential basis for working through the past. Yet LaCapra insists that the

historian must seek to counter the transference in order to realize the differences

between their position and that of the subject(s) with whom they have empathized.

To do this, he urges historians to try to empathize with the other subjects of the

past in order to grasp the ways in which they will probably have a relationship

with them too. By doing this, LaCapra suggests, the professional historian can

attain a more complex subject position than historians often acquire in their rela-

tionship to the past’s presence, and this can provide for what he calls objectivity

(though not in any transcendent, “third-person” sense).51

At the center of the work done by the professional historians who formulated

the stolen generations narrative as well as the public intellectuals who helped to

transmit it were the victims of separation or, to be more precise, a particular vic-

tim, the children, though resisters also figured. The historians allowed the processof empathic unsettlement to occur in respect of these subjects, and they sought

to relate, and to relate to, their plight and/or struggle. In this, they were very suc-

cessful, but their work by and large stopped there. There was little if any attempt

to perform the task of countertransference. As a result, these historians and public

intellectuals did not merely empathize with the Aboriginal victim and the set-

tler resister but actively identified themselves with these figures to a degree that

they seemed to fuse and confuse themselves with these figures. Moreover, there

was no substantial attempt to relate to the perpetrators, the collaborators, and the

bystanders, let alone to relate in a way that allowed for much if any empathy with

them. As a result of their identification with the position of the victim and the

resister, they treated those other subjects, especially the perpetrator, with enor-

mous antipathy, accusing them of the heinous crime of genocide.

As a consequence of this way of telling the story of the separation of Aboriginal

children, many settler Australians were compelled to identify themselves with the

Aboriginal victims of separation and to spurn any association with their forebearsor predecessors as the “perpetrators,” “collaborators,” or “bystanders.” This reac-

tion was especially marked among the so-called sorry people. This diminished

the prospect of settler Australians working through this past, and all the more

51. LaCapra, History and Memory, 40 – 42, 206; LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical

Inquiry 25 (1999): 722 – 23; LaCapra, History in Transit , 192, 234.


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so as they lacked historical knowledge as to why their forebears or predecessors

had sought to separate Aboriginal children from their kin. A historical approachcombining proximity and distance would have made clear that Aboriginal chil-

dren were not separated by governments pursuing a policy of genocide, which

was something the sorry people were readily able to consign to a “distant” racist

past, but were separated instead by governments pursuing a policy of assimila-

tion premised on the assumption that this was for the good of Aboriginal people,

an assumption that is still prevalent in much of settler Australian culture today.

Grasping this historical continuity and grappling with what amounted to an inti-

mately close relationship with the approach of their allegedly do-gooding fore-

bears or predecessors would have been more unsettling than the sorry people’s

distancing of their putatively genocidal ancestors. These settler Australians might

have realized that the past was in the present not only in the form of Aboriginal

people affected by being separated from their kin but also in the form of a white

mentalité we can call assimilationist. Understanding this could have provided a

means of working through this past in the present, since it would have pinpointed

the very ideas and attitudes that have contributed and continue to contribute tothe destruction of Aboriginal communities and the diminution of Aboriginality

by the settler society.

In order to check the undue influence of testimony in public contexts that are

often unsympathetic to the presentation of professional history, historians could

also make some changes in the forms in which they transmit their work. A small

number of professional historians have been able to participate in the making

of popular forms of history relying on oral and visual history, such as historical

films and museum exhibitions, but most will probably have to rely on writing to

convey their knowledge. Here historians might become storytellers by adopting

some of the techniques of the autobiographer, using a personal voice and situating

themselves thoroughly in the history they relate (though this will be problem-

atic unless they practice both transference and countertransference). Recently,

an Australian historian, Alan Atkinson, has pointed to the success of a handful

of professional historians in reaching large audiences when they have not only

adopted this approach but also practiced a form of rhetoric he calls vernacularhistory, which he describes as storytelling that draws on literate and oral patterns

of thought so that it amounts to a mixture of writing and speech and that has the

power to merge temporarily the speaker/writer and the listener/reader.52 These,

52. Alan Atkinson, The Commonwealth of Speech: An Argument about Australia’s Past, Present

and Future (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004), chap. 2.


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quite evidently, are forms of history in which the position of the professional

historian in relationship to the past comes to have some similarity with that ofthe witness, just as they are forms of history in which the way the professional

historians relates the past converges with the way the testimony of a witness does

this work. It can be a means of obtaining the advantages that spring from a sense

of the past’s proximity without courting the disadvantages that arise from a loss

of distance between the present and the past.


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Documents

Attwood, Bain - In the Age of Testimony