History is not just a subject, it’s a responsibility.
When I first became aware that you could choose your own elective subjects at high school here in Australia, I was about 15 years old. It seemed like a delicious entry-point into the beginnings of adulthood: choices I can make for myself! Ways I can define who I am!
I was already a card-carrying humanities student, but without really thinking about it, I took the first steps back then to veer away from history, and towards literature.
Literature felt rich to me, playful and open; unencumbered by tiresome facts and details. Plus there could be romance! Drama! Tension! And characters you could fall in love with or despise.
History, on the other hand, seemed more straight; more serious. More reliant on remembering events, dates, and important figures. And then interpreting all of that? It all seemed too hard and onerous.
As I continued on my pathway through school and into university, I was comfortable with the fact that I simply wasn’t as interested in understanding how the world worked. I was more curious about how I — and others — felt about the world. Personal stories, narratives and ideas. Fiction over non-fiction.
I was priming myself to become a person who read the weekend columns of newspaper magazines, rather than the hard news. I would soon swoon over quaint bookshops and favourite author’s new releases; enjoy well written movies. If complex global discussions came up in conversation, I’d happily admit that I was “not really that political”.
And that was that.
Until things started to change for me.
It started with my teenage daughter. By the time she was in middle high school herself, it was clear that she not only had a thirst for understanding how the world worked, but why. It was also increasingly clear that I was not up to the task of supporting her in this.
One day, as I was leaning against her bedroom doorway having a chat with her, she asked me to respond to a fact she had just read about, something unjust and troubling. I tried to wave her concern away, telling her that thinking about that kind of stuff was too confronting and depressing for me. Too heavy. I’d prefer to read a novel.
“Wow Mum,” she said, clearly disappointed. “I guess you’re lucky you’re not living it.”
In that moment, I saw myself through her eyes. It was utterly privileged to choose to ignore the things happening in the world that impacted others, but not me. It was the start of a gentle correction for me, back towards history.
I started to read more deliberately online; more consciously. I tried to learn alongside my daughter as she studied history at school — her favourite subject.
In 2017 a historical image appeared on my Facebook feed showing rows and rows of Aboriginal men, shackled by the neck. The article shared the horrific, hidden history of a place called Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, Western Australia. My family had visited there when I was a kid, and I had a picture taken of me with a quokka, the cute little Australian animal that famously lives there.
I learned that Rottnest Island had been a prison for Aboriginal Australians, long before before it had became a playground for white Australians to take quokka selfies.
I shared the post on Facebook, adding my thoughts; a subtle alteration of my own algorithm and a diversion from the usually light content I posted from the bubble of my suburban, Melbourne life.
In 2019, The Guardian Australia published a series of articles that uncovered the sites of Aboriginal massacres in Australia.
Again, I was shocked into sharing it on my social media.
This series of articles really stopped me in my tracks.
I was taught as a kid in school that Australian Settlers were heroes, stoic battlers who forged the “lucky country” Australia came to be known as, through grit and determination. And yet all this time, I was living on, walking on, working on, celebrating my life on Indigenous graves. Sites of massacres. Murder. Genocide. We were not taught about any of this in school. That the whole country was soaked in Indigenous Australians’ blood.
I continued to steer myself into my own country’s history, and further back, to England, our “mother country”.
I read about the wealth that England amassed through plantations, the sanitised way they described their version of slavery. Plantations off-shored slavery: it was out of sight, but no less cruel, rotten; evil.
The fact that the UK only finished paying off debts to slave owners in 2015 left me spinning. These wrongs were not only ingrained, they were excused and compensated for.
In 2018, I took my daughter to Europe for the first time. We visited London, Paris and Rome, with a few other stops and detours.
For the first time in my life, I stood face to face with the wealth, the monuments, the statues and intricate buildings we are trained to think of as beautiful, as symbols of our success and bravery and fortitude. Instead, I saw the death behind them. I saw the blood, the pain, the toil, the crushed lives, the robbing of freedom, the silencing of voices; the quashing of hopes and futures. I saw how history masquerades itself. I saw the brazen propaganda in it all.
These famed centres of Western “civilisation” were built with a giant knee to the neck of the people deemed subjugates. Worst of all, this past hides in plain sight, carved into stone; embedded into the very fabric of the cities themselves.
On that trip to Europe, I saw the power an unexamined past gives to those in power.
I also saw that if I am privileged enough to see history as a subject I can simply choose to learn, then I have a duty to learn about it and understand my own privilege.
I never used to see myself as “white privileged”. I didn’t really understand the term for a long time. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up compared to other families I went to high school with. Our family on Dad’s side traces back to humble farmers from one of the poorer counties in Ireland.
But I see things differently now. Poor Irish immigrants — even convicts — could still rise above class discrepancies in Australia over a few generations without too much trouble.
History never stomped on our necks, or soaked the blood of our ancestors into its soil.
I was born into a Colonial world, but that doesn’t mean I have to particpate in it’s mythologies anymore. I now see I have an important role to play, as I continue to shed my “not really that political” past.
I need to get better educated. I need to understand our Indigenous history, and history in general. I need to speak up when I witness casual racism, or privileged assumptions, or a complete lack of awareness about what Australia must feel like to its Indigenous people. I need to keep up with my daughter, who is already a role model to me! I need to imagine what the world looks like when history is addressed, and acknowledged, and deeply understood.
When statues of colonial heroes around the world began toppling this year following the Black Lives Matter protests, I felt the power in that. I felt the correction, the small steps in a new direction. I felt the joy, and the pain, and the incredibly powerful symbolism.
I can’t wait to see what new statues might be erected one day. Statues of true heroes, true survivors, true leaders. I want to be part of that world.
When my daughter insisted that the Black Lives Matter protests in Melbourne were too important to miss, even in a pandemic, I was incredibly proud of her.
I see now that history is not just a subject, or an interest or a topic for quizzes. History is our responsibility to learn and understand, so that we can truly stand with the minorities who have been pushed down so that others could rise, and begin to right those wrongs together, to create a fairer, better world.