Alison Dellit: 

Good morning everyone, and welcome to the National Library of Australia. I'm Alison Dellit, the new Director General at the Library. And it is my pleasure to open this new chapter in a partnership that means a great deal to us. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gather today. 

I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples joining us today. This always has been and always will be Aboriginal land, a place of stories, knowledge and deep cultural practice. I particularly want to acknowledge and pay tribute to the power, the resilience and the strength of Elder women who have cared for Country and people here for millennia. 

Today marks the beginning of a four year collaboration between the library and She Shapes History, an organisation that is ensuring more Australians encounter women's history on our streets, in our archives and increasingly, in our national imagination. This partnership is based on a shared belief that history becomes powerful when people see themselves in it, and when stories that have been long left out of the textbooks are given light. 

The Library holds a rich collection of women's history: diaries, court records, photographs, oral histories, manuscripts, union files, objects, and more. But as many of you know, a collection will only achieve meaning as people engage with it. And we are all too aware that for so many reaching our collections is difficult. That's why this partnership matters to us. Over the next four years, across 12 talks will be working closely with She Shapes History so you can create meaning through our collections. 

Together, we're not only showcasing extraordinary speakers and stories, we're creating a digital hub of research tips and reading lists that will make these histories easy for anyone to discover by the end of the series. This is about empowerment, not just education. We have such a wonderful crowd here today, and I know many of you are joining the library for the first time. 

I particularly want to acknowledge the presence of the Minister for Finance, Katy Gallagher, and the absolutely extraordinary Elizabeth Reid, the world's first female Advisor to Women's Affairs and one of the many magnificent collections that we hold at the Library consists of her papers. I also want to acknowledge the hard work of the Library staff to make this happen. 

Putting this program together has drawn on our diverse experts from curators and oral historians, our digital specialists, Public Programs staff, Education and Lifelong Learning team and Marketing professionals. Together, they ensure our stories are presented with care, with accuracy and with depth. It is a reminder that telling history is always a collective effort. And of course, we are honoured to be working with with Sita Sargeant the founder and CEO of She Shapes History. 

The irrepressible Sita has already transformed how thousands of Australians engage with history, and her vision for this series is exciting, it's ambitious and it's very timely. Her mission to make history accessible, engaging and inclusive is inspiring to us and aligns perfectly with our purpose. So thank you for joining us at the start of this journey. Whether you end up only attending this event or you come to all 12, we hope you leave with a sense of curiosity, a sense of connection, and a sense of just how much is waiting for you in the library's collections. I'm now going to ask you to welcome Sita Sargeant, to the stage. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Hello! Thank you so much Alison, for that really wonderful and generous introduction. I'm Sita, the CEO and founder of She Shapes History and I could not be more delighted to be here with all of you. And I'd like to say welcome to Senator Katy Gallagher and the incomparable Elizabeth Reid. I also wanted to acknowledge that we're on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging and I would like to extend that respect to any First Nations people joining us today. 

The National Library has a collection of over 11 million items, and I just learned today that it's being expanded by two kilometers every single year, which is kind of outrageous to think about. And so many of these items relate to women, What's hidden in these walls, and in two offsite storage facilities, because they can't fit it all in this building, is this really extraordinary collection of women's history, one that most people don't know exists or how to access. 

And that's why I really wanted to work with the National Library on this series. So every quarter we're going to be diving into a different aspect of Australian women's history. We're going to host a talk. We're going to curate a reading list, and we're going to pull together some digital resources that show you what's in the collection when you really start looking, so that this partnership can live on for a long time after each talk ends. 

And for the first one, I wanted to start with a question that I remember, like quite distinctly asking five years ago. And it's one that I still ask a lot, and it's where my own personal journey with Australian history began. And the question is, why didn't anyone ever tell me that Australian history was actually interesting? And I've brought together three speakers who will speak to exactly that. 

But first, I worked with the National Library and particularly the incredible Susannah Helman and her team. Yeah. 

To pull together this reading list that gives you a glimpse of what you can find when you go looking in the collection. Although I don't think that that many people probably have a team of incredible librarians to help them, that I did, because I think it makes the case far better than I could ever, that Australian history is interesting. 

So I'm going to introduce you to a few items, and then we're going to dive into a conversation. So the first one is the first item is a diary of a 1920s actress. Can you picture anything more glamorous than that? Well, I can almost guarantee that the image that you're picturing in your head right now is different to the woman that I'm about to introduce you to. 

And that's part of why I love this story so much. In January 1924, a 44 year old Australian born woman of Chinese heritage who had been born and raised in Melbourne, who had been working as a public servant since she was 18, got on a ship and sailed to England to become an actress, which I think shows it's never too late for any of us. 

Her name was Rose Quong and she wrote about the day she left like this: My great adventure begins a day of glorious Australian sunshine. She went on to perform with people like Dame Ellen Terry and a young Laurence Olivier, and the Library recently digitised all of her papers, including that diary. And the thing that I, there's a few things I love about this story. 

One is that the collection, Rose's papers, came to the Library through her flatmate. Her flatmate had for kept all of this and gave it to the Library. And when we picture an Australian actress in the 1920s, I think we all have a very particular image of what that looks like in our heads. And I think that image is very heavily shaped by the white Australia policy and what we thought of as who was in this country and Rose Quong shadows it completely. 

You know, she's Chinese Australian. She was living through this policy and she ends up having one of the most extraordinary careers of her generation as an actress. And her story was always there, you know, we just didn't know to go looking for it. As a queer woman, I absolutely love this next photograph. It's a photograph of two women, the artist Irene Mort, and the other artist, Nora Kate Weston. 

Irene worked across design, applied arts and teaching, and was one of the organisers of the Australian Exhibition of Women's Work in 1907, and the library holds all of these papers relating to her life and work, and what makes this photo significant, and I think really interesting is what we don't know about it. Irene and Nora lived and worked together for decades, and to their family it was described as companionship. 

But recent scholarship has revisited it with this queer lens and looked at their partnership in life and in art. And this photograph is one of a collection that sits really at the center of that conversation. It also brings up a lot of questions, you know, why is there an axe and a woodworking plane? A tripod used as an easel? I think the archive doesn't always give us these clear answers, but sometimes the questions that it raises are the most interesting part. So this one okay, so this one might just be my favorite. I think that we all know that zines are very trendy right now, but this is probably the oldest one that you'd be looking at. 

In 1904 and 1905, a group of admittedly quite well to do teenage girls in Sydney began publishing a monthly handmade magazine. They called it The Kookaburra, and in it we see this really wide array of content, including short stories, satirical cartoons, poems, social pages, travel and theater reports, book reviews and illustrations. And one of my favorite pages includes this pasted in photograph, captioned as the first motorcar from Blackheath to the Gentleman Caves. 

And it's this young woman's kind of dispatch from this world that is just changing around her in real time. The Kookaburra was capturing the voices and dreams, the feelings and friendships and the secrets, fears and fantasies of these teenage girls in their own words. And it's this incredible artifact of children's history and their perspective on how history is changing. 

And creative work by young women almost never survives. You know, it's often ephemeral, personal and very informal, and it often gets thrown out. The fact that this didn't and that it's here tells us something really important that the inner lives of teenage girls were worth keeping, and that they can be this really incredible historical resource. So I'm going to go back now. 

So this is a Christening jacket. And it was made for a baby girl named May Kwong, who was born in Australia in 1901, that same year that the White Australia Policy came into law and her father, Kwong Sue Duk had arrived in a show in 1875, he ran a general store in Darwin. He had 24 children and at least I know it. 

So many. I really didn't stop at that. Yeah, like I'm one of five and I always felt like that was a lot. And there are at least 800 of his descendants now living around the world. This jacket is this tiny, really exquisite object. And it's this really direct rebuttal to this story this country tried to tell us about itself in 1901. 

The White Australia policy was designed to make people like May's family invisible. And this jacket proves that it didn't quite work and that Chinese Australians were always here. They were having children, making clothes, building lives and leaving things like jacket behind for us to find. And it's stories like this one, and like roses and like Irene's that make me so excited to dive into the collection. 

And I think that this is probably one of the this is such a significant piece that's in the National Library's collection. So, so much of what sits in the archives that has been written about has been written about First Nations people, not by them. And what makes this collection so significant is that it does something that sounds really simple, but is actually far too rare. 

It's oral history of First Nations people telling their own history in their own terms. And between 1998 and 2002, the National Library recorded 340 interviews with families and individuals who were affected by Australia's forced child removal policies. People from all over the country came in and told their stories, and the collection is called Bringing Them Home after the report. 

And to me, this represents this real, you know, like active trust of people entrusting their most painful stories to this institution and the Library holding that trust really seriously. And it's such an important collection and a real turning point in how we engage with Australian history. And it's something that I'm really excited for. Jacinta, who's worked really closely with the collection to speak more of during the conversation. 

And then my final piece, so this photograph was taken in November 2024 at a fashion boutique in Harris Park, Sydney, and it's part of the series that the National Library commissioned documenting the Little India precinct. And the woman in the photograph is a fashion assistant named Aarju Neupane. And I really wanted to include it because I think that it's important not just to think about what that NLA has in its collection that relates to what happened, you know, 100 years ago, but what it is actively collecting in this moment in time that is responding to who we are today and so that it will be there in a hundred years to help tell this forever story about who we are as Australians. So this is just a glimpse into what's in the National Library collection. And it's not even the full reading list that the National Library of have had to this talk, which will send you along with some of the commentary afterwards. 

This is a conversation, though, so I am going to introduce you to the three incredible speakers that we've got joining us. We have Jacinta Mackay, who is a Wiradjuri woman, a nurse, a researcher, and she's someone who has been an oral history documenter as well as research for the National Library. And she's currently finishing her PhD, which is exploring how we can use history to make to make nursing more culturally safe for Aboriginal communities. 

We also. Yeah, Jacinta. Do you want to come out? Okay. First one okay. If you want to sit closest okay. We then have Harini Rangarajan who is a Chennai-born Canberra-raised storyteller, archivist and musician who has built this incredible online audience by making South Indian history, linguistics and culture accessible to contemporary audiences. So if you could help me welcome Harini. 

And last but definitely not least, we have Santilla Chingaipe who is a Zambian-born filmmaker, historian and author whose work explores settler colonialism, slavery and contemporary migration in Australia, and her book Black Convicts, which I think is a must read, traces nearly 500 people from African descent who were transported here as convicts and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. So if you can join me in welcoming Santilla. Awesome. Just at the end. 

Oh gosh. That was a real dive down. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you for that. So my first one and this is going to be a short and sweet. When you were growing up what did Australian look like in your head? Jacinta?  

Jacinta Mckay: 

Yeah, Australian history for me looked very male centric and very separated. I think of the two things. So when I was in primary school and learning about history for the first time, it was kind of the First Fleet Aboriginal people had clap sticks and coolamons and kind of those things. And then World War One, World War two, and these really separated chunks of history. And I think when I started to look into history, I was very surprised by the interplay and the connection between all of these things. 

You know, obviously the First Fleet and Invasion have a big relationship, but then also Aboriginal people going off to World War One while the Stolen Generation is happening and coming back to their children having been taken. So I think history for me growing up looked separate and was very focused on men, and I found that not to be the case in my adult life. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah, amazing. Thank you. Harini, what did it look like for you?  

Harini Rangarajan: 

Unfortunately for me, actually, fortunately, I grew up in Chennai, which is a city in South India. So Australia for me was what my young 20 year old mother had experienced when she was here. Initially in my infant days, she would tell me about First Nations stories. She would tell me about things that she found in the library. 

And when I came back to Australia when I was 14 years old, history looked like Imperial history and war history and about blokes fighting each other. So as colonised people, we didn't really find. We didn't really see ourselves in Australian history because it was quite separate to our identity. So yeah, I think it was very much we were quite checked out of history at that point. 

Sita Sargeant: 

So thank you. Santilla?  

Santilla Chingaipe: 

Exactly the same. I don't think I can add anything more to that. It was, you know, predominantly white blokes, military history, imperial history, pretty much it.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah. I think that that is such a standard experience of history growing up. And I think that if we went around and polled and asked everyone, I, I feel like we'd probably have similar experiences. 

Santilla your research has uncovered so many people of African descent in Australia, and I think it is really shifted how we think about the history of this country. I know that it has for me, you've found so many people who were always there in a record that wasn't really explicitly designed to include them. I would love to hear a bit more about when did you first start engaging with Australian history, and what made you start looking for those stories? 

Santilla Chingaipe: 

Gosh, that's a very big question. I think I've always engaged with Australian history. I think I've always had questions around who gets to write history, who gets to tell history, who gets to record it and document it. But it wasn't until and I wrote this in Black Convicts. It wasn't until I went to the, I'm from Melbourne, I went to the National Gallery of Victoria in about 2018. 

There was an exhibition there that was telling the story of Australians, Australia's colonisation, and there were two perspectives on view. There was the First Nations perspective, which was on the ground on the third floor, and then there was a European perspective which was on the ground floor. And so the way the exhibition was arranged, we kind of had to begin with the European perspective before you got to the First Nations perspective, which is a whole conversation in in of itself. 

But when you walk through the European perspective, at the beginning, there was a there was a label, you know, that told the story that we all get told at school about the First Fleet, the arrival, and how most of the convicts had arrived were British and Irish. And right at the bottom there was a line that said, and some were African, Armenian and I think Jewish was the other line. 

I don't remember thinking African on the First Fleet? I did not know that, you know. And so I start working through the exhibition, hoping to find something about these individuals. I'm like, who are they? And there was nothing else. That was the reference, was it? And so I went home and I started researching. And initially the research was to identify the individuals and then verify them. 

And then at the time in Victoria, we had a, a very convenient political narrative that was happening around so-called African gangs. And so, so much of my thinking around that time was, how do you challenge some of these very racist narratives about a marginalised community that are factually not true? I mean, people of African descent have quite literally been here since, at the very least, the arrival of the First Fleet. 

So I wanted to identify them and verify them for the purposes of challenging that narrative and through the process of identifying and verifying them. I then came to uncover more and more. And the minute you look at one record, it leads you down another path and then you find more and and so then I really got immersed in working with the archives, the Tasmanian archives, in particular the New South Wales State Archives, the archives here, which incredibly helpful, as well as the archives in Kew, so that's kind of the journey to working with archives and writing history. Where when did you start seeing women kind of appear in that journey? Well, women in convict history generally underrepresented because most convict women because to be transported for certainly this is for the case for people of African descent, you had to commit serious crimes. 

And so most of the so most of the convicts went up here who are of African descent, were enslaved. So this was a time when slavery was in place across Britain's empire. And so many of them come from present day Jamaica, Barbados, the United States and everywhere else, including Britain as well. And because and many of them were convicted for their opposition to their enslavement, so they were leading protests, etc., etc., and these were seen as very, very serious crimes. For the women in order for women to be transported, of African descent, their crimes had to be incredibly violent. And so for many of them when they show up. So I've got about 30 that I write about in the book. It's usually cases of sexual violence where they are fleeing someone who has tried to inflict harm on them, and they've, through an act of self-defense, murdered someone. And so then they're tried. And, you know, transportation was the highest form of punishment after the execution.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah. Thank you. Jacinta, you are an ICU nurse turned historian, and you're really actively using oral histories, in particular, to make nursing safer for Aboriginal patients today. What sparked your interest in history and what made you kind of like really reach for it as a way of solving and engaging with a contemporary clinical question? 

Jacinta Mackay: 

Lots in that question. So if I get lost, remind me. I first became interested in History as student, so I started just in nursing, not just I started a singular nursing degree. And in that time I had some tutors and lecturers explained to me that nurses have a lot of responsibility. Shocking. So nurses, I think the main thing that stuck with me was that if you gave a medication that the doctor had prescribed wrong, even if it was the correct you gave the what was prescribed, you would you would get in trouble for that because it's negligence. 

You need to know and keep your patients safe. And as an 18 year old, I went, oh my God, I'm not old enough or wise enough for this. And I wanted to stretch out the degree a little bit. And I'd always loved English in school, so I transferred to a Bachelor of Arts / Masters of Nursing at the University of Sydney, started with an English major, and then fell in love with History and went to there. 

So I had my kind of formal historical training. And as a Wiradjuri woman, I'd always been interested in my own family's history and in my own culture's history. My family was affected by the Stolen Generations, so history was a way for us to uncover that mystery of our own story. And then working as a nurse, I was an ICU nurse all throughout COVID. 

I worked in tertiary ICUs throughout the pandemic, and I realised that I felt I was a much better nurse for knowing history. I really felt that I was more empathetic and I could understand the people I was caring for much more easily. Because I had this historical knowledge. I was also really aware that I was living through a historical moment. 

I was working at a lot of different places. I screened passengers at the Sydney airport and was like climbing into planes and doing all sorts of things during COVID while also working in ICU. And I was so aware that this was something people would talk about in 50, 100 years, however many years. And I think that knowledge really helped me as well to, okay, I need to I need to act by the book. 

I need to do everything correctly because people will be talking about this. And that evolved then into a very burnt out ICU nurse. Post-COVID I thought, I need to do something different and relaxed, so I thought I'd role in a PhD. So that's what people do to relax! So a different sort of stress. And I knew I wanted to investigate how history can inform nursing. 

And for me, the Aboriginal and First Nations perspective was the obvious answer. Literature and evidence tells us that historical determinants are very important for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples social and emotional well-being, and we also see a really large number of discharge against medical advice. We have our large health gap and historical determinants, I believe in literature supports are a key factor in keeping people safe in hospitals. 

To elaborate a little bit, if we can put ourselves in First Nations people's shoes, if you're not a First Nations person, imagine that you are very sick. You've had a heart attack. You're you're really scared because this is a life threatening thing. And you are put in a institution, in a hospital where you were taken from your mother and your mother was forcibly sterilized while they were there. Now you're sick, you're vulnerable. Are you going to want to stay in that? I think it's really simple. It's like when you really spell it out, obviously not. Obviously, as soon as you're feeling better, you want to get out of that. And that's not every Aboriginal person's experience, but it is some Aboriginal peoples’ experience. 

So I think the historical literacy for nurses and teaching them those stories, I call it like putting the puzzle pieces together or connecting the dots, as in if someone's family have been treated poorly in an institution, if they have been abused in an institution by nurses and by doctors, like, let's not pretend that hospitals, nurses and doctors weren't key parts in the Stolen Generations. 

People were very often taken to or from hospitals. So it was a really clear area where I thought, this investigation is really needed to highlight to nurses and midwives why knowing history is really important, not just knowing how to safely administer a medication, but also knowing how can I make someone and help someone to feel safe and to stay, and to hopefully improve patient outcomes and health outcomes in in the bigger picture. 

Sita Sargeant: 

is History being taught as part of the, because you are a lecturer at University of Sydney in the School of Nursing, is history being taught for all students as part of it? Like will it be?  

Jacinta Mackay: 

So as of 2019, First Nations history is taught as part of a cultural safety journey. So we teach students they need to have an ongoing reflective journey. They need to think about themselves. They need to think about others and First Nations history as part of that. So that's really exciting. My thesis and my research is around an area that has a really high Aboriginal population. And there are the majority of nurses were trained before 2019. So there is a big group of people who are required to be culturally safe and required to have that historical knowledge, but have received no formal training to actually be able to do that. 

So while it is required and why we do teach some history, I think we could teach a lot more that nursing school might not agree, but I think we could do a lot more history. And I also think nurses who were trained before 2019 need that kind of go back and have a think about History and think about cultural safety. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Oh, 100%. Thank you so much. Harini, I would love to hear a bit more about your journey getting into history, and particularly what then inspired you to start creating content that shared that history.  

Harini Rangarajan: 

So I'd probably say that I have like the shortest journey with history, as you know, given my age and everything. And but the journey actually begins from a very young age for me. My parents were always people who were like old souls. They had this dream of like going back to where we come from, trying to figure out what our roots are and everything that led us to go live by the countryside that we refer to as like the Kaveri Delta. So the delta is pretty much like the end of a river. 

So it's a very highly fertile region. And it was also the heart of the ancient Chola Empire, which was probably one of the only Indian empires that went outside of India. They ended up going all the way from India to Indonesia to South Korea to Myanmar to a lot of southeastern Asia. So it was one of the earliest imperial empires. And being in the heart of the empire, I was able to discover ancient temples. I was able to look at the inscriptions on the wall, trying to decode what they say, teaching myself like rudimentary epigraphy, to try to piece together what's going on, to try to understand like a full picture of what life and civilization used to look like in that region. 

And my parents were very supportive of that. I barely went to school in that time. My parents believed that education needs to be outside, would need to be teaching the young children what our own histories are. And so, yeah, so I barely went to school, I was exploring temples. I was pretending to be Indiana Jones and Lara Croft as a child. 

And yeah, and that's manifested into me rekindling my interest in History. So I think sometime earlier last year, I decided that towards the end of my Bachelor's in Finance at the ANU, which is completely unrelated, I come to the pressures of, you know, stable office life and corporate success and progression. But I realised that this is what I truly wanted to do. 

So I started posting little videos online about the things that I would research for myself, and they ended up going a little bit viral, if I can say so myself. Yeah. So I'm very grateful for the traction that that has, mainly because of the fact that when we talk about Indian culture and Indian history, there's a very predominant narrative, especially that's being presented to the West. 

We think about Bollywood, we think about like a certain kind of like a certain strain of what it means to be South Asian. But there are so many cultures that are underrepresented. And a part of that is the world of South India or the, the southern part of the peninsula, which is often underrepresented because, yeah, I guess, like there aren't as many immigrants in the West from that region. 

So yeah, my job at that time, like I wanted to make sure that I'm spotlighting my culture, making sure that everybody knows that India is not a monolith, South Asia is not a monolith, and show people that history can look quite different.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Amazing. Thank you. I think that you were someone that I was so excited to be able to get onto the panel. I’m someone who's half Tamil, you’re full Tamil, I'm half, obviously the cooler half. Yep! And I have been thinking about my like Tamil identity a lot because it's not something that I really engaged with and I always identified as just being an Australian. And the thing that made it feel very front of mind for me recently was I went into a play with my mother as part of Melbourne's RISING festival, called The Supposed To Be, and it was the first time that, you know, she's someone who's been in Australia since the early 90s, that she had ever seen a Tamil experience on the stage, and it was in 2026. 

And, you know, it was the first time for me that I had seen a story like that reflected. And I think it is because I agree with you. You know, when we talk about Indians in Australia, it's often North Indians.  

So I think that what you're doing is amazing and I'm really interested in why. And you can be very honest here. This is a safe space. You don't feel like the National Library has been an accessible space for you to come and do research and engage with, particularly as someone who's so clearly loves history and research and engaging with it.  

Harini Rangarajan: 

Yeah, of course, I think my relationship with the National Library was probably when I was in Canberra Girls Grammar when I was 15, 16, skipping school and chilling at the library down here at the at the cafe. 

But yeah, I didn't know that I there's like a wealth of knowledge in the Library itself, mainly because of the fact that I think as immigrants, we feel like a lot of these large cultural institutions aren't really catered for us or inclusive of us as well. So and we had no idea that there was so much knowledge within these institutions. 

So I never truly felt like this was like a place that I could approach. I'm actually making, I'm directing and producing a film, a documentary film about a group of trans women who derive their gender identity from a specific god. So typically in the West, gender identity often and like feeling conflicted with the gender that you were assigned comes from distress or dysphoria. 

These people attain, I mean obtain their sense of identity from a spiritual experience. And the key text for that, which was a book by Evelyn Meyer written in 1987, which was completely inaccessible to me from the internet. I realised that there's a copy here at the National Library, but when I so when I knew that, like coming into the library and reading wasn't an option, it was too expensive for me to get copies of it. 

So yeah. So that lead was pretty much closed at that point. It would have been like an amazing resource for me. But yeah, I truly I think that there's like a bit of hesitation for people from my community to approach these large cultural institutions that seem like a little daunting for us. 

Sita Sargeant: 

I think that that leads really well into, Santilla, you were here yesterday doing some research at the National Library for a project you're working on, and I would love to hear, how do you go about actually finding stories in the collection and what how do you know what's there and what is that experience like for someone who, like Harini or who or like so many people just wouldn't even know where to start? 

Santilla Chingaipe: 

Yeah. I mean, I come at it from a very different perspective because I do have the training. So I do know how to approach an institution like this. I do know how to ask questions. I do know, I do know how to go looking for the things that I need. But I think Harini touches on something that's really, really important and really worth underscoring this idea around access, because that access also leads to a very big a point that I'm always trying to make about who gets to write History. 

You know, when I was making my way here today, my Uber driver was Egyptian and he was talking about how much he loves the National Library. But he was like, I'm very distrustful of history because it's always written by the victors. And it was a very interesting kind of conversation that he was having with me around this idea, around who history is for and what it's saying, and this feeling of not being part of that story. 

Because historically, a lot of communities have been left out of the narratives, and they do become distrustful of certain narratives. And so even accessing institutions, there's a sense that, you know, there is nothing in the institution that could speak to them or their history or their stories. And yet there is so much in here. I mean, one of the things that I find very interesting about the National Library collection in particular is someone that that writes histories of empire from Australia perspective, is how much empire was capturing from here, as opposed to all the other colonies. 

You know, Australia has so much capture in our archives. That tells us a lot more about how Britain was operating, not just here but in other territories, but also helps us understand what we've then inherited as a result, through various institutions, whether it's judiciary and everything else, and even just even the treatment of First Peoples. Because you see how Britain was going colony after colony after colony, particularly in the West Indies, massacring First Peoples there, then bringing in indentured labor, then bringing in trafficked Africans and building the system that's then being taken to every other colony. 

So by the time Australia is colonised about 180 years later, it's essentially the same template. It's the same governance, it's the same people in all of these places who are creating racial hierarchies, the language, everything we've inherited. Basically, in order for us to understand that, we have to understand what Empire was doing. And the collection is quite revealing because it tells you a lot about the certain places that Empire was. 

So you can get a sense of parts of India, for example, if you are able to access the archives. But I think the process of opening up institutions is a very important one. How do you create access for people from communities who might not think that their story is part of the collection, what it actually is, and I think that's an ongoing conversation that has to be had, because it's a very important one, because it continues to because if that doesn't shift, it means that the dominant narrative around history will always be written from one perspective. 

And we need multiple perspectives to be able to understand the truth of history.  

Sita Sargeant: 

I would love to hear from your perspective, like, how do you think we can create that access? What would that look like? 

Santilla Chingaipe:  

I think there are many ways I do a lot of work with Museums Victoria, and one of the things that we're doing at Museums Victoria with the particular African collections that I'm working with. 

So these are collections. There's probably about over 9000 objects in there, and many of these objects haven't been looked at in like 50 years. So it's a lot of work that's going to have to be done to be able to figure out the provenance and also begin processes of whether or not some of the objects are returned to communities, etc., etc.. 

But one of the other things that we're actively working at is how do we bring community in? How do you get people to come in to engage with the objects, to respond if they're artists, if they're writers, if they're, you know, are schoolchildren coming into Museums Victoria to be able to kind of have that experience with objects that might that speak to their story? 

And I think that's one way of doing it. I think one way, another way is, you know, making it easy for people to understand that reading archives, it's there's there's an art to it and there is a skill to it. But most people can access Trove, like Trove, is a very useful tool in being able to figure out a certain story. 

You can pick up a newspaper from the past, and that can give you clues to parts of stories that are missing from our national narrative. But I think it is just constantly trying to kind of revisit ways in which you make these sorts of things accessible to people who might not otherwise think that they they have any stake in it. 

Sita Sargeant: 

I was wondering Jacinta, if there's anything you'd like to add?  

Jacinta Mackay: 

Can you repeat the question? 

Sita Sargeant: 

I just think, you know, you are someone who, similar to, has very deeply engaged with archives and collections, particularly the oral histories, the kind of like more broadly. And I would love to hear kind of like your perspective on how you go about actually diving into that and how someone could start.  

Jacinta Mackay: 

Yeah. So when I started here, so I was a scholar at the National Library in 2024, and my project here worked within my PhD. So looking into the history of nurses, healthcare and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Shoalhaven on South Coast, New South Wales. So I wanted to find everything that I could, and even though I have a history degree and I was enrolled in a PhD, that doesn't mean you know what to do or how to do it. 

So I just started by searching one thing, you know, I wanted maybe the Shoalhaven Hospital, so I would search that and find some different things. And then I wanted First Nations perspective. So I would search Jerrinja and Wreck Bay, Wandi Wandian and all those kind of key First Nations terms for the area. And within the things that I found, you would then find the other keywords that were also included. 

So I found a lot of different things that I probably wouldn't have initially thought to search, but they were common keywords and all the sources that I was using. So then I would go down that rabbit hole, and then I found the oral histories as well, which were just such a wealth of knowledge, and it was very hard not to get distracted and to to stay on my path of, this is what I'm looking at, something I think I'll definitely be coming back to see as DET BES collection of oral histories on Aboriginal nurses across Australia.  

But there were so many. I think the oral histories was such a wealth of knowledge for me because it gave that First Nations perspective, which not in all of them, but in most archives across Australia, we just don't have. And we're so lucky that First Nations culture has that oral history, tradition and culture where stories that may have been lost before have been told to descendants and to cousins and to grandchildren, who now are sharing them in the Oral History Collection in the Library. 

So I found a real wealth of knowledge here. And also, I think the Bringing them Home collection. So a collection that was sent after the Bring Them Home report to collect those oral histories of people affected by the Stolen Generations, collected not only First Nations people's experience of the Stolen Generations, but also the non-Indigenous people who were involved. 

So in the Shoalhaven there's a really interesting for me, but also devastating collection of sources where the welfare officer who took children has done an oral history here. So we have his perspective of what he was doing and how he felt about that. He felt he was doing the right thing, that the community really valued him, and that he was just doing what was best for them. 

And then we have an oral history from a boy who was taken by him. So we have his perspective of this man was terrifying, and we were all scared of him because we all knew he would take us. We all ran from him. We all hid from him. So those sources were just an incredible wealth and a devastating thing to listen to. 

But. And then you just, you just end up going down that rabbit hole, and it's kind of like a really good internet stalk of, like someone you used to go to school with you, you go down the rabbit hole and you click all these different areas and you end up in this weird place finding something really valuable. But I think with how many sources are here, there's there's so much to find. 

Sita Sargeant: 

I think that topic of oral histories. I would love to hear more about your experience as someone who has been a recorder for quite a few of those.  

Jacinta Mackay: 

Yes. Recording the oral histories with the National Library is the best job. You get to sit with someone and just ask them their story from birth to now. And it is so special.  

Some of the really great ones I've done recently have been around Australian food culture and First Nations food and native foods, and I get to meet incredible people and ask them, you know, we start with, where were you born? What was your first memory? What's your family story? And we work all the way up to now, and I think it's such a privilege to get to talk to people about their life and to get to collect that history for the National Library. 

And I also think oral history is a wildly underrated form of of historical collection. If we look at it historically, I think oral histories are seen as soft or different, you know, not something that a proper historian would use. But I really disagree. I think oral histories and if we think about written history and why they're valued in that ivory tower of historical academia, they're valued, I think, because of we go all the way back to the Reformation of who could read and who had access to these texts. 

And that's why a lot of our history is written by wealthy white males, because they are the people that could read and write, and they are the people that could have access to these texts. And as we move forward, obviously, oral histories are a First Nations tradition here in Australia, and I really believe that they were disregarded for a long time because of that. 

They didn't fit the academic historical mould that people wanted them to fit. So I really try my best to decolonise my work and to value those oral histories, in some cases more than those written works. You know, if I have a written letter from a colonist in Berry or an oral history from an Aboriginal family of their story with that person, I really try and flip the historical narrative on its head and go, let's listen to these people, rather than, yeah, sure, whatever this guy wrote, you know, because, like, why do we value that? 

I could write in a diary today and be like, Sita is 90ft tall and has green hair and like all these things that are not correct, but because it's written down, we take it as fact. It's so I think oral histories are really important for that. And they also give you a feel of the person you have those little background noises of like their dog at their feet, or, you know, they're getting a delivery and you hear the doorbell go, but you really get a feel for the human being behind the story. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Oh that's fabulous. Harini, I would love to know a bit more about how and where you find stories and evidence to make South Indian history engaging and relevant.  

Harini Rangarajan: 

You know, as someone who was born in the 2000s. I am truly a child of the internet. One of the best things that my parents did for me was to give me unrestricted internet access, which was both a good and a bad thing, I think, in ways. 

And yeah, so my my journey obviously started by being in, in the, on the ground going up where history was. But once I moved back here to Australia, to Canberra again, I was sort of feeling a little disconnected from my homeland, from the people, from the music that I practice. I am also like a classical musician. I play the violin and I sing. 

I do South Indian classical. It's like a very complex of music that's very mathematical and very theory based. And since I felt quite disconnected from all of that and I sort of went to my safe space, which was the internet, I very quickly learned the art of looking things up, the art of using algorithms to find things that worked for you, using connections and narratives to understand what the broader picture was. 

So having resources in the initial days, having free resources, as someone who didn't have university access was very valuable to me. I would go out to friends and I would ask them to retrieve certain works for me, certain journals or like articles or research papers that I didn't have access to. I would go out there and be like, can you get me this particular one from this journal? 

I don't have access to it. I can't pay for it. So, yeah. So my my knowledge building was very much through community, through exploring the internet in a myriad of ways. And I think over time the knowledge base sort of accumulates and you sort of know in which corners of the internet, certain pieces of information exists, and that becomes very helpful because that allows you to unearth things that previously wouldn't have been accessible for people like me. 

So the internet has sort of democratised who gets to read what kind of information. And that's part of the reason as to why I'm using the internet again, to put it back into the world so people can access it in a more equitable way. Where are some of the women in the stories that you've kind of found? The women are everywhere. 

But again, with written history, the since the writers are usually white and male, they're often left behind. When I think about women in History, I think about this really interesting story. In the 1700s under the Tanjore Maratha king. So in classical music there is a, there's like a specific set of works called Padams, which is pretty much like a composition that is used for classical dance, for Bharatanatyam, if you would have seen, you know, like the dancers who were dressed up in the saris and then have like the fun, like hand positions and all of that. 

So those are compositions that go with the dance pieces. Oftentimes these pieces are left uncredited. We don't really know who wrote them. So by default, they all sort of decided that we're going to create like a fictitious male character and attribute all of these compositions to someone who didn't even exist. We don't even know if that person existed, but that person is a male, apparently. 

But something really interesting that I found was in the 17th century. There was a poet known as Muddupalani. This is a woman who wrote something quite scandalous, and at one point the British tried to ban, censor and destroy this piece of work. It was an erotic piece of literature. It's called the Radhika Santhanam. So it is a retelling of the story of the god Krishna, who you all probably know, and his lover Radha. 

Except it's kind of like a fanfiction from like the 17th. Yeah, where Radha is actually a much older woman than Krishna and she's pining for this young, attractive man who was Krishna. And since there's social stigma between them and they can't actually be together, she instructs her niece Ila to court Krishna and she teaches her how to pleasure him, how to please him, how to be in love with him so that she can vicariously experience Krishna's love through her niece. 

And this was very shocking, because female pleasure and female sexuality is the line that Victorian morality did not want to cross. They were offended, scandalised. They were completely overwhelmed by this. This woman was written, this incredible piece of work. And when they after they tried to censor it, they realised that it was not just because it was a woman, it was the fact that she was also a sex worker at the at the court. 

So here's a woman who doesn't come from a place of privilege, was highly literate, who has this incredible wealth of knowledge, was created this incredible piece of poetry demonstrating that, you know, people in literature and people in poetry don't have to be privileged men. And it can be about things that matter to women, like pleasure and sex and sexuality. 

And yeah, and knowing about Muddupalani actually lets us know that a lot of these compositions that have been attributed to this man were probably also written by women as well, given the contextual clues. So I think it's very interesting that women are part of the story as well.  

Sita Sargeant: 

What a fabulous story. Have you come across any stories, maybe from our region of Oceania, that you'd like to share about women specifically? 

Harini Rangarajan: 

Not yet, but South Indian people have been in this part of the world for a very long piece of time, for I was talking to Sita about a discovery that they had in New Zealand in the 1800s, when one of the colonialists was traveling in New Zealand. He noticed some Maori women cooking in a very strange looking pot. 

Upon closer inspection, it was a bell from a Tamil ship, from a South Indian ship who had traveled all the way from the south of India to New Zealand on a trade ship. And on it it said, this is the bell of Moideen. It was an Islamic trader from Tamil Nadu who had ended up in New Zealand, and these Maori women were using it to boil potatoes. 

So yeah, so cultural continuum and human migration has existed between the south of India and Oceania for a really long period of time. In fact, one of the things that we first noticed when we moved here in the early 2000, was that a lot of the Aboriginal place names sounded like it was like a little too easy for us to pronounce it. 

My mom would like found a point at the sign that said I like the suburb, and she would go, that sounds like a Tamil word. That sounds like something that we would say, and that's not a coincidence, because a lot of the the syllables that Aboriginal languages use, such as the retroflex syllables, ‘arna’s the ‘arla’s they do have a bit of a coincidence because there's a lot of shared history. 

When there were folks from Africa in the during the Out of Africa migrations, they moved from Africa to the south of India and traveled to Australia. So there's a lot of shared linguistic connection as well.  

Sita Sargeant: 

So I love that you said that your mum was saying that my mum would say the exact same thing. (laughs) the experience of Tamil mothers in Australia. 

So I'm aware that I want to leave time for the audience to ask questions. And I've got a few more and then we're going to turn it over as I start thinking. But Jacinta, when the archive was kind of, you know, originally built by people who didn't see your community as worthy of recording, what's the work of repair? 

Like what does that actually look like? You know, is this adding new material, you know, reading the existing material differently? Is it both? I would love to hear what that looks like in your experience and in your view.  

Jacinta Mackay: 

Yeah, I think it's important to think about Truth-telling. Obviously it's quite a buzzword. Lots of people are talking about it. 

But I think when you ask people what is Truth-telling, not a lot of people actually could tell you. They would say it was History, but it's a bit different from History. Whereas History is our study of of humans in the past and society in the past, Truth-telling spans from the past all the way through to the present and into the future. 

So, so Truth-telling is looking at the past, how it affects our future. It's also telling the truth of the future and right now as well. So pointing out where First Nations people aren't identified, pointing out where people need to do better. So I think it really is a Truth-telling process that needs to happen. And that is happening here at the library. 

I think it's also important to highlight that the things we have in the past aren't perfect, even to bring them home. Oral histories, which I love and really use. It's important to acknowledge that the people who were affected by the Stolen generations, you know, there is a specific group who would be comfortable to sit with a government institution like the National Library and tell their story. 

And there is a big group that probably wouldn't feel comfortable doing that. So I think the from a First Nations perspective, there is truth in what has been collected, and we need to look at it in a critical way. We need to look at the gaps and say, what isn't here and why isn't it here? How can we fill those gaps and how can we talk to those gaps now to really tell the truth of institutions? 

I think apart from the National Library, every institution should have a Truth-telling process. Watch this space. You know, give me an institution and I'll do something. But something really interesting I found in in my work here was there is an oral history from the mission manager's wife in Rosby Park in Nowra, in the Shoalhaven, and she talks about where her husband was trained. 

And he received his training at the University of Sydney. And I work at the University of Sydney. And I went, how have I never known this? How have we never talked about this? So I think there's little truths scattered throughout the archives, and there are things that need to be investigated and things that need to be brought to attention, and that's an ongoing process, telling, telling this truth in the archive and outside of the archive. 

The more you look them, or there is to say, and the more you find, the more avenues there are to tell that truth. And I also have a lot of faith in the Library. When I was here, I remember speaking with the Indigenous Engagement team quite a bit about the sources I was finding. And, you know, how could we work with those sources? 

How could we work with community to make sure that those sources were doing the things that they needed to do? So I think it's an ongoing process of Truth-telling, of consulting with community and also, you know, working with community, not just for community. For a long time, Aboriginal people have been the subject of research, whereas now we're definitely moving into a time where that's an unacceptable thing to do. 

Aboriginal people need to be involved in leading research and involved in and leading these truth telling notions and movements for institutions. What does that look like? That looks like funding it, I think, is the first thing in all institutions that is always the barrier is funding these projects and also committing to them long term. A lot of the times you might get funding for six months, 12 months, but ensuring that this is an ongoing thing and it also feels very tokenistic to community when something is funded for six months, when you go, oh, this great things happening, let's do it, you kind of the wheels are just getting moving and then funding is cut and you lose it and it's like what's, what's the point in this? So I think community really need a commitment to a long term strategy and then actual action and evidence and involvement around that.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Thank you. So, Santilla, you've said that the official story of Australia has been told by a narrow group about a narrow group, which I think is something that we can all agree on. What changes when that stops being true, what does that open up? 

Santilla Chingaipe: 

I think I might answer it by picking up on something just into said earlier. Jacinta, you mentioned that, you know, sometimes when you're engaging with the archive, you're sort of read a document that a colonial official wrote, and the interpretation is just because it's written, therefore it's true. And one of the interesting things about Historical Inquiry is that and this is, you know, one of the reasons why we have to look at history as something that is not fixed. 

It is constantly evolving. It is, it is it is certainly not linear. And one of the interesting things about archives, particularly I work with Colonial Archives. And as someone that looks like me, who comes from a marginalised community where the archive has not always recorded, documented people like me with a sense of agency, with a sense of autonomy. 

So I approached the archive with suspicion. And because there is suspicion, it doesn't mean that I'm not engaging with the archive. I think we absolutely should engage with the archives. I think this material exists for a reason, but it's not the only part of the story. And I think good History writing does take that into consideration. I think for a very long time in this country, we've sort of bought into this idea, and I have many reasons as to why that our history is done and we don't have to keep revisiting it, we know the story and that's it. And any good History always recognises that there are pieces to the story that are always missing. And those perspectives lead us closer to what is the truth. And I think the perspectives that become useful are perspectives like oral histories and various ways of kind of going. So one of the things that I do whenever I look at the archives, when I first started working with archives, I naively went in thinking, it's written, therefore it's true. 

And then halfway along the way, I realised, oh, but who's recording this? And do they have any sympathy for the people that they're recording? Or does it serve them as people who are in positions of power? And most of the things that we get in colonial archives are written from perspectives of people who are authorities. It's governors, it's officials, and they are not sympathetic, particularly the convicts, for example. 

And so you can't take their word as the absolute truth. You have to ask questions around that. And that context helps, helps frame the events. And so you can use that information and it becomes useful in being able to understand the way events work. But you cannot just see that piece of evidence as the only way to understand that story. 

And that's where we begin to fail audiences when we do not tell the truth about history. And we just go, because this person said so, therefore that's the only perspective and that's the story. And so always asking questions, always being critical, I think, is a very important part of understanding History, but also recognising that there's so many communities as a result of who was recording history, aren't captured by the archives. 

And so one of the challenges that I had with black convicts was there's very little evidence where these convicts are speaking with agency, where you get to hear their own voice. They're being written about by colonial authorities. They're being, you know, some of them, when they end up in court, uneven witnesses in their own trials. Right. And somewhere along the way, I have to make sense of who are these human beings? 

Who are they? What's the what's their story? And part of that becomes incredibly frustrating because, you know, these are there's an access there that I will never have and I will never be able to know that story. Right. However, asking that question, even if it is in the story, enables us to sort of think about the context and the complexity of that history fully, rather than just going, well, you know, this person wrote in their journal, therefore that's who this person is, like, how do we know? 

And I think that was a very interesting point that Jacinta said, I think we take the word of these governors as the final point in the story, when in actual fact, it's a part of the story, and it invites us to sort of engage with and think about things that we wouldn't otherwise think about because they have documented it. 

But it's not the end of that story. That should only be the beginning. And I think Australian history writing needs to do better in that sense. You see this extraordinary work being done, particularly with First Nations history in this country and First Nations scholars have for a very, very long time been bringing attention to the fact that our history is not fixed, it is constantly evolving, it is rich, it is diverse. 

And yet the history that we still get in the mainstream is stuck in a very 1970s version of how we tell history, which is pretty extraordinary. And it's extraordinary that we don't engage with Empire, for example, which I always find to be incredibly fascinating because we just feel like it's like we're an island that just popped up in the middle of nowhere. 

And then all of a sudden, history began in 1788. It's that's crazy. Like if you really think about it intellectually, it is just it's astonishing that we seem to think that that is where the beginning of the story begins on this continent. And yet we have all this knowledge that tells us that it stretches the millennia, and even that is complex and rich. 

And, you know, Harini only talked about the exchanges with trade. I mean, that is an incredibly exciting area of history that's emerging in this country of the trade that was happening between First Peoples and other groups, particularly in Asia. What an incredible inheritance we have. Like, we need to be thinking about this and talking about this a lot more and not just, you know, being fixated on a very short, incredibly consequential for all of us, period of British involvement on this island. 

But yeah, anyway, I keep going. But that's I'll end it there.  

Sita Sargeant: 

I yeah, I'm 100% with you. How do you think that we can get more people engaging with that side of Australian history, engaging with Empire and like digging into those stories, like, how does that happen?  

Santilla Chingaipe: 

I think it's conversations like this. I think it's getting young people to know that Australian history is incredibly rich and exciting and interesting and also going, you know, you can write history. 

I give a lecture and I always at the start of the lecture, I do this thing the night before, I'll go and Google images, and I will put in historian and I'll take a screenshot of the images. And it's generally old white men. It hasn't really changed. And I think for a lot of people, that still seems to be the idea of who a historian is. 

And I think when people feel like they have access and entitlement to a story, I think they, they, they feel that they can have an ownership to it. And so I think having conversations, raising awareness, encouraging people to sort of go there, other aspects of the story and of history, engaging with content that is making online, for example. 

I mean, there's all these things that are that are happening that are sort of, you know, kind of showing that there is a richness out there that yeah, yeah, I am at that point on Googling historian and seeing, you know, a page of white men is quite an interesting one, because even if you all do it after you leave the event, just put it in Google. 

I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you and I, that is a big, because even for me I, I remember the thing that made me a historian was I was sitting on a panel and we were talking about Australian history, and I was the only person of color. I was, you know, only woman on the panel. 

And there were these men who were sort of white men who were sitting on the panel and were talking about Australian history, and they were sort of kind of like telling me, you know, like they were like, yeah, yeah, okay. But we know Australian history, like, you don't know, we know Australian history. Like stick to the diversity thing that you're for, right. 

And I remember feeling really angry about it. I'm like hang on a minute. I am entitled to Australian history. I like that's also part of my story. And the process of working now as a historian has really also been a very interesting one in challenging that narrative of who gets to write history, what they look like, and also going, I have authority, I have expertise, and I also have every right to write history, you know, and I know that that gets challenged. 

I know that that gets scrutinised because it is unimaginable in so many ways that I can be an author of a certain history. Right? That I should only stick to certain kinds of stories and certain kinds of things.  

Sita Sargeant: 

But yeah, it's something that I thought about a lot because I felt so uncomfortable using the word historian to describe myself, and I still feel really uncomfortable using the word. Like, I would describe myself as a social entrepreneur and as a tour guide, and as someone who kind of like, works in this space. But I feel so deeply comfortable with the phrase historian. And I think that it's in part because when we have the face of a historian shown to us, it's not faces that look like us in this country. 

So I think the work of what you're doing is amazing.  

Santilla Chingaipe: 

And do you know what’s even crazy, is that when you scrutinise a lot of that history, it is deeply problematic. Like, I don't know why we take this as the authority. I don't know why we take it as the authority. You know, we have to keep asking questions like, it's just not like it's 2026! 

Harini Rangarajan: 

And with people who look like us, history is always seen as something that is done to us, done upon us. People have record, we become subjects. We become things that we study in labs. And when colonialists came to India, they took pictures. They measured skull sizes. And that's what we know about South Asian ancestry and migration now. 

But I think it's high time that we've become a part of history, that we become participants and not subjects. So I think it's really important to think about those power dynamics and those inherent privileges that reside within the people who are taking pictures of you, who are entering your villages and asking you questions, who are exploiting from your culture. But when do we get to be a part of our own histories?  

Sita Sargeant: 

100%. And on that note, I might open it up to the room if anyone has any questions. Okay, maybe around the front. 

Audience Member: 

Firstly, thank you for the panel. That was really, really great. Talking about the sort of modern political climate where there's definitely been like this sort of reaction against this being like telling these more diverse stories, talking about, you know, for like a better term, how History actually happened. Have you found that sort of trying to share these stories has become harder, like the fight has gotten a bit like rougher, I guess. 

Or have you found that? What is it? This is sort of just a general like this is part of the step, you know, first they fight you, then you win sort of thing? 

Santilla Chingaipe: 

I would say from my work, what's really been surprising in the best way is Australian audiences are very curious. I think people know that they were told that they weren't told the full story when they were at school. And so I find that whenever I talk about this particular part of convict history, audiences are engaged and they do want to know more. And if anything, they're going, why isn't there more of this? But also, I deal with archives. So, you know, the evidence is there. I'm not this is not revisionist history. I'm not going in to sort of color the First Fleet. Like these people were actually on the First Fleet. These stories exist, and the footnotes are there. So you can trace it all the way to the archive. 

I'm not making anything up. And I think that is part of what I think been exciting for a lot of people is that the fact that they I think people are aware that, you know, the Australian story is a complex and complicated one that we've inherited a lot, and we still are yet to reconcile that inheritance. And I think people are just genuinely curious to sort of go, how do we fit into this story and these perspectives? I found audiences to be very receptive to these histories.  

Sita Sargeant: 

I wonder if anyone just there's anything you want to add.  

Jacinta Mackay: 

I've had, I guess, was a little bit of like political pushback. You could say. recently Sita and I and also like academically, we've written quite a bit about how Florence Nightingale was a racist. Which she was. So we've gotten a little bit of pushback, both in like comment sections. It's really interesting to see the comment sections on different platforms. I don't know if you've seen this, but I think there's different groups of people on different platforms. So we get very different comments on each one. But we also get some emails back from the academic things we've published around this as well, kind of questioning our integrity and if we've interpreted sources correctly and things like that, which we have. 

And yeah, I think when you pose a different story to what people have accepted, and oftentimes, particularly with Florence, I think a lot of Australian nurses see themselves in her. So when you say, well, actually she was quite problematic and racist, people, I think, I'm assuming, feel almost kind of personally offended that you're putting that label on them as well, because they see themselves in her. 

So there's been a little bit of pushback, but there's also been a lot of really positive things and people going like, yes, you know, say more. We need to hear these things. So it's all in the process. I think you expect a bit of both.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Yeah, I think that for us, like we, as She Shapes History has kind of become more and more visible, like we've definitely seen a huge increase in the amount of comments in particular that we get of people just saying, like, this didn't happen. You know, there's a reason why women haven't been recognised, that's because they didn't do anything, which is just like, clearly not the case. And I think it just shows how deeply like women have been erased from history in this country, that people respond that way and respond with just shock that they are. Awesome. I think we've got a… 

Audience Member: 

Hi, thank you so much, everyone for sharing pieces of your work with us. I just wanted to comment and also ask all four of your wisdom in. I know this room isn’t the perfect sample of Australia, but I think we all have a responsibility of infiltrating the spaces that we have with whatever we consume. And I think the dominant colonising cultures are obsessed with consumption of History. Because when I was back home, I used to think of History as a white people's thing, like they do History, I live, I do the thing that needs to be done now. But coming to Australia, I found dominant culture is doing with History, but for the sake of consumption. And that's where it ends. Like you guys are saying, how do you think we can all encourage and gently push everyone, including ourselves, to critically engage with what we consume? 

Because there's a big gap there. I know a lot of us love reading, and I've seen a lot of my white friends and family that love reading and are obsessed with the numbers of books they really are, but they don't share the content of it with anyone, and it ends there. And I think that's part of the problem. I'll stop speaking. I can never end if I keep going. But please share your thoughts, please.  

Harini Rangarajan: 

Yeah. I think for me, as someone who's on the internet, that's always been like a bit difficult to grapple. My sort of Instagram does a really good job of recommending me to the people who are already familiar with these topics and these ideas. 

So it's not like I'm penetrating like new areas and new circles. I kind of have an echo chamber, and sometimes I do feel a little distressed about the fact that this information is being consumed for entertainment. And a lot of people's like lived histories and stories are often reduced to something that one can just consume and someone can just be amused by. 

We were even talking earlier about how a lot of like, marginalised people are only valued for what entertainment they can bring. We were talking about boxes, and we were talking about how athletes are often just completely dehumanised and reduced to the thing that they do, which is sport. And similarly, I think that's actively happening in history as well. 

In the age of virality and content, everybody wants to know a cool fact, but they struggle to truly resonate with and think about the human element of it. So think about what the person behind that story was experiencing, and which is part of the reason as to why I want to make an effort to bring my side of the world, to bring my culture to somewhere that's completely unfamiliar with my culture. 

Like when we think about India, even in the collection, when I was looking through the the array of South Indian artifacts that they had brought out, I found myself quite unrepresented. There was a lot of media about Punjabis and North Indians and what it means to be an Australian Indian immigrant, but what wasn't in there was people who looked like me, people who spoke languages like me, people who have unique cultural experiences like mine. 

So I think it's important to be sort of retroactively and proactively bring these ideas into new spaces and. Yeah, and have like a moment of reflection.  

Jacinta Mackay: 

Yeah. I really saw the lack of critical thinking that you're talking about in our, you know, no and yes vote campaigns for First Nations people. And then AI came into it, which is scary. 

But there was a lack of critical thinking in, in people saying an Aboriginal person has said they're voting yes or no. Therefore all Aboriginal people must think that. And I find that a lot as well. I probably should have prefaced here. As an Aboriginal person, I don't speak for every Aboriginal person. I speak for myself in the way that in every other culture people think and feel different things. 

And I think that that lack of critical thinking, as you say, is so concerning, because people can see anything, they can create anything with AI, and some people will see it and think that it's fact. I, I really think that that things and content creation like She Shapes History, is a great way to get people thinking critically. I really hope when people see your videos that it then gets them thinking when they see one about the First Fleet or whatever it is, they go where the women? 

I've never thought about that before, but like where were the women? So I hope that the content that, like the amazing people in this lounge are creating helps in that critical thinking and kind of is something that's consumed in a critical way and educates people in that. But it also is hard because like if you if you make a video or something going, let me teach you how to critically think people are going to scroll in a second, but they're not going to be interested in that. So you have to be very clever in how you do it, which I think She Shapes History does do.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Thanks Jacinta. Santilla, is there anything you'd like to add?  

Santilla Chingaipe: 

Yeah, I thought it was a really great question because it's sort of like on the one hand, I think it is everyone's responsibility in a democracy to be informed. I think people should be reading, engaging, part of the reason why I write books, the reason why I make films, is to sort of go, here's information, and hopefully it helps shape how you move through the world. But then the other area that I think about a lot is also the work that institutions need to do. And a lot of institutions in this country are so behind in lifting a lot of this load. 

I think it's normalising a lot of these stories, normalising these histories so that, you know, for a lot of people, it's not necessarily this thing that it's a new discovery. It has to be part of how we move, how we breathe. And it begins with within institutions. It can't be an afterthought. And for so long, a lot of these histories have been an afterthought, and they remain an afterthought. 

You know what I mean? Like, you know, I think about someone who's of African descent, you know, being part of multicultural Australia. I think it's Harmony week or Harmony day. That becomes the day where it's almost like this one acknowledgment of these stories, these histories, and it's like, why does it have to be this one day? Why is it not 365 days a year, in the same way that First Nations histories also have to be 365 days a year, in the same way that European perspectives of 365 days, you know what I mean? 

Like, it's sort of like all these things can coexist, all of these truths can coexist. It's not one or the other. And I think the more we start getting these institutions to sort of shift that and center that, I think it lifts a lot of that responsibility from individuals, because it's very difficult to sort of get people to change their behavior. 

I'm just always excited whenever people engage with things and are critically thinking, particularly now more than ever, more so than ever. It's very important to ask questions and to think and to read. But I'm also very, very mindful of the fact that that is not a responsibility that individuals should carry on their own. I think institutions have to do a lot of the lifting. 

Sita Sargeant: 

Amazing. We might go for one more question, and then we're going to two more questions, and then we're going to have a round up.  

Audience Member: 

When I read history, I often think, what will history be like in 50 years, 100 years time, given that we can all tell our stories now? So I'm interested to hear, do we think it could be different to what we're experiencing now? 

Santilla Chingaipe: 

It could be if the archival processing is equitable and my argument is probably no the biases that we already see in the archive will probably still be perpetuated in 50 years. So we'll probably will still be seeing the same erasures and silences. And again, this is the kind of work that still that needs to be done, that needs to be embedded within institutions where you're sort of very aware of who's recording history, who's being recorded, what perspectives are being captured so that future historians have that to deal with, and they're not getting the gaps. 

So I'm not as optimistic in thinking that the histories will be drastically different. It's also access to archives, knowledge, being able to write history. I mean, these things all come with so many structural barriers as well. Reading archives is not an easy thing. You have to be skilled at it. And that already creates so many barriers for people from marginalised communities to be able to access. 

So I'm not optimistic that it's going to be vastly different, but I hope that many more perspectives are revealed in the next 50 years.  

Sita Sargeant: 

Do you want to maybe add to that Jacinta?  

Jacinta Macky: 

Yeah, I'm interested in what will have access to, as you say, like if someone had access to all social media, you would get some really interesting views and it would then be the job of discerning what is accurate and what isn't. 

And how do you do that? But I, I suppose I'm concerned that these places that are collecting all of this data, all of these videos, comments, commentaries are owned by private companies, like what is Meta going to do with all this data? What is Elon Musk going to do with X? That's a scary concept, but there's a lot of control in those platforms that we don't have control of. 

The libraries and archives don't have control of. So I think we have an abundance of data, but whether it's accessible, whether it's usable and what it looks like, I think will be a very interesting thing to say. And particularly over COVID I, I think there was so much happening. And as a historian, I remember sitting there taking photos of all these health documents that I probably shouldn't have because I was like, this will be so interesting. 

We changed our basic resuscitation, which has never been done. If anyone's done a first aid course, right, so it's like Danger Response Airways Breathing. Airway got cut out for New South Wales Health and for all health organizations because it was protecting the safety of nurses and things. But that's huge. That's a massive historical thing. And, you know, will we have access to those things? 

We will. Because, you know, I'll give them to people. But once I'm not registered anymore. But how do we get access to those sorts of things? And who now has the ownership to these digital things as well? I think is a really interesting question, and I hope it is equitable and great and amazing. But you just you never know. 

Sita Sargeant: 

I, I want to say that I'm very optimistic. Like, I think maybe in kind of a contrast, that I'm really optimistic that the Australia that will live in 50 years and how we engage with history will be so different to how it's happening today. And I think the thing that has made me feel really, really optimistic is, you know, this is a space that I'm actively working to create, like employment opportunities in the space of like women's history. 

I'm working with so many incredible institutions like the National Library of Australia who are saying, we want to work with you to make this possible. Like we know that there is this huge gap here. Like we want to fix that, and we know that it's going to be a long journey, but let's walk it together. So I feel really optimistic, and I think it's because I'm part of the solution. 

And I feel like, you know, people, like all of us are part of that solution. And I think that things are changing. So I'm feeling good. I feel like I've got to be I feel like, you know, I do long hours every week. I feel like I kind of feel good about the future. Otherwise I'll be living in a hole. 

Harini Rangarajan: 

And I think young people and I think, like, you know, as someone who's 22 young people really have a hunger for knowing what the truth is. I feel like we're very committed to finding out what the actual undercurrent story is, because oftentimes in times like this where we have, you know, big systems that are pressing us, it's become impossible for us to like, live and have like a decent standard of living. 

We have so many crises going on. We have humanitarian issues all over the world. We have to look back upon history to find solutions for the present. We have to look back on the stories that were manipulated, the stories that were incorrectly represented. And yeah, I think, I think I'm feeling very optimistic as well as a young person, since it seems like me and my peers were quite committed to figuring out what the real story is. 

Sita Sargeant: 

And on that note, I think we'll bring Alison up to round us out. 

Alison Dellit: 

In bringing this one to a close, I wanted to start by thanking our panel for their generosity and their insight. There'll be a few more things, but we can do plenty of rounds of applause. And I want to thank you for the vision that you've brought to the table for the power of history and the power of collections, and therefore the power of who gets access to those collections. We share your passion for broadening those who have access to telling and sharing Australia's stories. 

And I want to say the National Library is deeply committed to making our spaces physical and virtual, welcoming and comfortable for people that they have not been. So with Senator Gallagher in the audience, I do want to particularly thank the government for the ongoing funding for Trove, which has been one of the ways that we've been able to do that. 

But I want to note that Trove only provides access to approximately 10 to 20% of our Australian collections, and that opening the remaining 80 to 90 (We're not very good at counting, but we're good at collections) to audiences through programs like this remains important. I think we all felt today that this partnership is going to be an important step in moving us forward on a journey of making that history able to be accessible and told from others. 

And if we can't make You can write History one of our slogans, I would be very upset about it. And finally, I want to give a very strong thank-you to Sita. I think the passion and the sense of vision that we've brought to the table for the fact that history is powerful, history is fun, history is fascinating, and history can change. The country that we will become is something that we are so excited to explore over the next 11 talks in this series. Can we thank Sita and the panel once again? And as Sita likes to say, keep shaping history.