Sharon Bulkeley:

Yuma, and good evening everyone. My name is Sharon Bulkeley and I'm the Assistant Director of Public Programmes here at the National Library of Australia. I'm also a born and bred Canberran who loves this place very much and all that it has to offer. So very excited about tonight's lecture. But with that thought, I would like to first acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this land and through them all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The library sits on the beautiful lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people who have over 65,000 years of history here. They have protected, cared for, worked, and enjoyed this beautiful land that we today know as Canberra, and they continue to do so today. I thank them for their ongoing care and commitment to country. And I ask all of you to consider what you do every day in your words and actions to make this place that we live even better.

We are all so lucky to live here. We are also incredibly pleased here at the Library to once again partner with the Canberra District and Historical Society's annual oration. The Library is full of history, including Canberra history. So this event is always a highlight of our calendar, and we're thrilled to see so many of you to come out tonight to support it. It's my pleasure tonight to welcome Dr Richard Reid, President of the Canberra and District Historical Society. Gary Kent, Junior Vice President, you, the members and our guests, and of course, tonight's speaker, the always impressive Frank Bongiorno. Please join me in welcoming Dr Richard Reid to the podium.

Richard Reid:

Thank you, Sharon. Gary, what can I say? It's been done publicly. Good evening, everybody. You've been introduced to me as the current President of the Canberra District Historical Society. I was just thinking as I was driving in this evening down Adelaide Avenue, what a glorious evening it was, and the flag was flying over Parliament House. It was really kind of fantastic Canberra day, a fantastic national symbol. Before I give a short general introduction to the oration, I think a lot of you here this evening would appreciate the current President of the society, that's me, giving a short tribute to a remarkable Canberran who gave so much during her nearly a hundred years of life to Australian history, Canberra history, and to our society. The late Dr Patricia or Pat Clarke. As you can see from how I've captured this image of Pat from the National Library collection, Patricia Clarke made an extraordinary contribution to our national life.

You can read all about that in detail from her lengthy and highly impressive entry in the Australian Women's Register online. From the perspective, simply of the Canberra District Historical Society, you get an idea of her contribution from my image caption. One small but telling point about Pat's dedication to Canberra history and the Canberra District Historical Society. She remained on our council until 2024. Unable to attend in person, Pat received the minutes of all our monthly meetings and would inform us quickly if she thought it appropriate. Vale Pat, we will not forget you. And a full tribute to Pat will appear from the Canberra District Historical Society in due course. So to the Canberra Day oration. Thank you.

Yes, thank you for that. That's highly appropriate that we should acclaim Pat in that way, obviously. So to the Canberra Day oration. The society has been supporting the study and presentation of Canberra district history since its foundation in 1953. In 2002, we reintroduced this event. I say reintroduced because such a narration was started by the Department of the Interior on Canberra Day 1961 and lasted in some shape or form, according to the Canberra Times, until at least 1994, perhaps longer. The Times is only on Trove to that point and I've not researched the hard copy. From 2002, we've had the wholehearted cooperation of the National Library for the venue and general public organisation for this event. I extend the Society's sincere thanks as always to the Library because without it, we would have found great difficulty in making the occasion the success it has always been.

The oration commemorates, recognises that day, 12 March 1913, when Gertrude 'Trudie' Mary Denman, Baroness Denman, wife of the then Governor-General Lord Denman, third Baron Denman. I love giving all that stuff, particularly as an Irishman, officially named Canberra on a spot not far from where we sit tonight. Given the eminence of these personages and the importance of that day for our city, it is appropriate that we call this not an address or a presentation, but an oration. Is this not a word equal to the significance of the occasion? The Cambridge Dictionary, and I don't want to frighten tonight's orator, calls it a formal public speech about a serious subject. I'm sure that tonight's oration by arguably Canberra's currently most eminent and best known historian will be serious. To introduce Professor Bongiorno, I call in one of our two Vice Presidents, CDH Council Member Gary Kent. Before Gary speaks, I would like to say that I know our eminent orator well before he got to where he is today. When he was a mere strippling historian, struggling through his doctorate studies, as I was, at the Research School of Social Studies at the ANU, way back in those times more friendly to the study of history in the 1980s and 1990s.

If you are impressed, by the way, with tonight's proceedings or interested in joining the society, we have membership forms and information brochures available and even better, free back copies of our distinguished journal and elegantly edited, by Gary at the moment, and produced newsletter. Over to you, Vice President.

Gary Kent:

Thank you, Mr President. Now I've been given two minutes. How do we discuss Frank in two minutes? I will do my best and try not to go over time. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Frank Bongiorno AM. Frank is a distinguished Australian historian who I am sure will be known to most of you through his books or his participation in the cultural life of Canberra. And I'm sure many of you here tonight or watching online will have been taught by him at some time. Originally from Melbourne, Frank's academic career includes sojourns at the University of Cambridge, the University of Texas, King's College in London, Griffith University, and the University of New England. Frank returned to Canberra in 2011, having previously worked and studied here. From then until last year, he was a Professor at the Australian National University. He recently joined the University of Canberra as the Donald Horne Professor of History and Public Ideas.

He is the inaugural Director of the Vice Chancellor's Centre of Public Ideas. I hope I got that right. Frank has written half a dozen books, 'The Eighties'. They include, 'The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia', 'The sex lives of Australians: A history'. I'm the only one to go into two editions, which is interesting, isn't it? I happen to notice that. I'm not sure what it says about the audience, but ... And 'Dreamers and schemers: A political history of Australia'. My favourite book is Frank's first book published in 1996, which is a history of the Labour Union Movement in Victoria. Scarcely a week goes by in Canberra where Frank is not launching a book, participating in a panel discussion, or otherwise speaking on some aspect of Australian history, which he brings to life in his own special way. He is a current President of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Humanities.

In 2017, Frank was awarded an AM for his significant service to tertiary education as a historian and author. We are delighted that Frank has accepted our invitation to deliver what I'm sure will be a stimulating and thought provoking address worthy of the long tradition of the Canberra Day oration. Please join me in welcoming Frank to the podium to speak on the subject. Does history have a future in Canberra? Thank you.

Frank Bongiorno:

Well, great. Thanks so much for such a generous introduction, Gary, and thanks to Sharon and Richard, and of course, to the Canberra and District Historical Society for the invitation to speak tonight. I feel very honoured to have been invited to deliver this year's Canberra Day oration. So thank you, Richard, for the reminder of its solemnity. I hope I can live up to that. I begin by associating myself with the acknowledgements to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri and paying my respects to elders, people and country. And I too use this opportunity to pay a tribute to Patricia Clarke, to Pat, who passed away this week, one of Canberra's finest scholars. And of course, as we've heard, a longtime member of the Canberra and District Historical Society, her life of researching and writing history and biography is a reminder of the centrality of these enterprises to the city, which is my theme tonight. And she epitomised its very best traditions of history making.

Now, Canberra has always been, for me, a place of history. I was first here as a 10 year old in early 1980s. My family made their way back to Melbourne from a holiday in Sydney. We visited the Australian War Memorial. I even found a postcard from 1981 online. And I remember sending one, actually, we still sent postcards in those days. So visited the War Memorial, and I think that was a time before its more recent glitzy splendour, but like so many visitors before me and since, I was enraptured by those dioramas. Now, what did I know of Australia's experience of war at the age of 10? Probably not much more than I picked up from 'The Sullivans', a long running Australian television serial set in World War II. But war was in front of mind even for a 10 year old.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had begun just a few weeks before, following hot on the heels of the Iranian Revolution with its hostage taking and violent mayhem. Might these crises not bring on another World War. As a child, I recall looking on those dioramas through a lens of the present that I found a little frightening, but I must admit that I was also worried about Sydney funnel-web spiders, a form of darkness, totally unknown south of the Murray. That's as far as I was concerned. When I returned to Canberra to do research as an honours student, a fourth year BA student, almost exactly 10 years later in January 1990, the massive flag that Richard just mentioned on the New Parliament House dominated the skyline that of course hadn't been there on the previous trip. But I was again here to practise history. I made for the Archives of Business and Labour, now known as the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the Australian National University, and then of course for the National Library.

My own supervisor, the late Stuart Macintyre, was then on the Library Council, and it happened to be sitting while I was here doing my work. Now, my stocks probably rose a bit in the building when people realised that that connection existed, but I'm confident it actually made no difference to the helpfulness of Bill Tully, a veteran librarian who treated you with the same warmth, whether you were an eminent professor or like me, a newbie starting out. A year later, as Richard has just mentioned, I was enrolled in a PhD at the Australian National University. Now that was a less common journey than it had once been for budding historians. The history department in that old research school of social sciences had functioned almost as a seminary for the Australian historical profession. The ANU itself had several of the country's most esteemed and famous historians. It was where WK Hancock had been professor, although he died in 1988, but the university was most obviously associated in the mind of someone like me, with Manning Clark, who seemed to be everywhere in the 1980s, the country's celebrity historian par excellence.

Then and now, of course, he has his detractors, but he gave Australian history a romantic aura as we contemplated its creation in that [unclear], his study at the top of the ladder over in Tasmania circle. In retrospect, it's bizarre surely that those six volumes of 'A history of Australia' redolant of the narrative histories of a previous century would be written in a Robin Boyd designed home in a modern planned city. They remain surely among the most remarkable of Canberra's exercises in history making on a grand scale. I recall laying eyes on him just once after my arrival here in early 1991 when he turned up for a seminar paper being delivered by a former colleague. Clark died shortly afterwards, but that didn't quite mean that he was entirely gone. A controversy sparked by some hard words written by his former publisher, Peter Ryan in 'Quadrant', broke out a couple of years later.

I followed the back and forth in the press with fascination by now, of course, being familiar with some of the warriors on each side of that particular salient, I guess, in the history wars. Again, Canberra was evidently the place to be. Now, Canberra was never intended by its founders as a town that would evoke a local history. Most white Australians of the early 20th century did not regard the history of First Nations peoples as a very old one, or even as real history as they understood it, which was the chronicle of civilisations that practised agriculture and writing. Some anthropologists in the decades around Federation did attribute a kind of generalised antiquity to Aboriginal people, as the historian Amy Way has shown, but that idea was in retreat by the time that the parliament came to Canberra in 1927. When Wiradjuri elders, Jimmy Clements and John Noble arrived at the opening of the provisional parliament house in Canberra in May of that year, observers regarded them in racist terms as kind of residue of a doomed race being washed away by the tide of history and progress.

These people's deep history, which included millennia of self-government, formidable cultural creativity and successful social and economic adaptation to a changing environment, could not form a part of the celebrations, which marked the progress of British civilisation in Australia. Parliamentary democracy was now taking its place alongside those other agents of Empire, the Merino sheep on the limestone plains of Canberra. Now, that British pastoral industry was already about a century old in this part of the world in the 1920s. Canberra had a settler history etched in the landscape and in the memory of two peoples. But as Sylvia Martin shows in a new book published by the National Library, when Eirene Mort, who was related to the Crace family, produced sketches of old Canberra for the occasion of the opening of parliament in 1927, the authorities rejected them as unsuitable. The determined Mort instead organised for them to be shown in Sydney.

Canberra was a new city for a new nation. It should not look like a museum devoted to preserving the memory of what had come before. A colonial life now superseded by a modern nation with its modern planned capital. Other more recent aspects of that settler history, a story written by men about men had greater legitimacy in those early days and the full backing of the state, even when the state was rather broke. The greatest historical enterprise of the interwar years, the multi-volume 'Official history in the war of 1914 to 1918' was headquartered at the otherwise vacant Tuggeranong homestead, where Charles Bean and his team in the company of various crates, boxes, and cabinets containing the records of the Australian Imperial Force, carried on their work from 1919, keeping a few sheep, horses, and cows on the side, a nice little side hustle, I guess, that turned a small profit and kept up their supply of meat and milk.

They had a cook and a maid who were sisters and a handyman. There was even a piano, a billiard table and a tennis court to wile away the hours when they were not being spent at the desk. The 'Official history' team mixed socially with the old families among their neighbours, such as the Cunninghams of Lanyon and the Campbells of Woden. And the first volume on the Gallipoli campaign appeared in 1921, the second in 1924. The work continued until 1925 when the project moved to Sydney. Bean had been advised after the removal of one of his kidneys that icy Tuggeranong winters were not good for the health.

Ken Inglis, in an address in 1964 to the Australian and New Zealand Association for the advancement of science titled 'The Anzac Tradition' that was later published in 'Meanjin', complained that students of Australian society had paid so little attention to the man who had, as Inglis put it, published more words and reached more readers than any other Australian historian, CW Bean. The World War I official histories were the greatest Australian historical enterprise of their time, or indeed perhaps of any time. And there is something deeply right about the earliest volumes having been written and edited in sheep country, as well as the budding National Capital. Bean's history, like the wool industry that he'd written about before the war, also the Federation of the Australian Colonies, the creation of a national capital, these served as contributions at this time to nation building. Bean explained how the demographic, social, political and environmental conditions of Australian life had produced, he thought, an ideal type, a vigorous masculinity that had been tested on the battlefields of the Ottoman Empire and the Western Front.

There's no little irony to, in Inglis, then an academic at the Australian National University, having revived interest in Bean and his work at a conference in Canberra in the mid '60s. Historians now trace the beginnings of the modern Anzac revival to Inglis' paper and article, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign. Inglis would spend a great deal of the remainder of his very productive life as a historian, much of it of course spent here in Canberra in researching the cultural meaning and memory of Anzac culminating in his monumental 'Sacred places: War memorials in the Australian landscape' published in 1998. An ANU doctoral thesis on Australian soldiers during the First World War completed by a student hailing from the Riverina, who would later work with Inglis, of course, at the University of Papua New Guinea would also contribute powerfully to the modern Anzac revival.

Bill Gammage's work based on diaries and letters in the Australian War Memorial, as well as other places, would be published by the ANU Press as 'The Broken Years' in 1974, later appearing in a popular Penguin edition. Gammage was historical consultant on Peter Weir's 1981 film, 'Gallipoli'. In such ways, I think, did the making of war history in this city in Canberra extend well beyond the lecture hall and the tutorial room. Now, Canberra would also host later war and war related official history projects, the 22 volumes on World War II with Gavin Long as general editor, who had in fact been recommended by Bean for that job. There were further projects on the Korean War, the Southeast Asian conflicts, peacekeeping, humanitarian and post Cold War operations, and still in progress, Australian operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Timor, East Timor, under the stewardship of Craig Stockings. I say in progress, but it's notorious that despite the hard work of Stockings and his team, only one of the volumes has so far been published, and even that, only after a three year delay after completion, due to a reluctance on the part of Australia's authorities to provide the necessary approvals.

Now, Stockings has courageously criticised the attempted censorship of the project, while the general editor of an earlier official history series, Peter Edwards, has supportively criticised the worsening habit among officials of attempting to control official history, not on genuine grounds of national security, but to save people and nations from embarrassment. I'll have reason to return to the wider issue of the impact, sorry, on the future of history in Canberra of this growing and disturbing taste for secrecy, that retreat from a culture of open government and freedom of inquiry before I finish tonight, but it needs to be recognised here, however, that official histories have been in the front line of the problem in recent years, with a project on the intelligence agency, now known as the Australian Signals Directorate, also coming to grief, in that case, coming to grief entirely.

Now, Home Affairs Minister King O'Malley's introduction to a glossy official publication produced to mark the foundation of the city in 1913 predicted the chronicler of the future will look back upon the 12th day of March, 1913, as marking an epoch in the affairs of the Commonwealth of Australia, second only to the historic occasion of the landing of Captain Cook. Now, O'Malley, not known for his restraint in rhetoric or other matters, perhaps except drinking, I don't know, [unclear] certainly temperance. He erased any sense of Canberra here as a place with a history. It was a clean slate, almost virgin country, to use his own phrase. The gendered indeed sexualised imagery took flight as one of the great enthusiasts of his time warmed up. There is no wilderness for the pioneer to conquer with years of weary toil and none of the faults of the haphazard growth of a city to rectify.

There is the broad expanse of country clothed in pristine beauty, smiling its welcome with its hills and valleys, slopes, and watercourses, and the man has a free hand to utilise its comely features and fashion them to the most modern ideas of city building. The reality, of course, would be less comely, two world wars with a depression in between ensured a rather slower course and a more modest reality. When Frederick Watson, editor of 'Historical records of Australia', produced his, 'A brief history of Canberra: The capital city of Australia' in 1927, his was a local history, typical in many respects of what Graeme Davison has called pioneer history. These tell a story of settler progress from so-called discovery, settlement, the growth of towns, the coming of the railway, and other firsts through to Federation and sometimes beyond it. First Nations peoples are usually left somewhere back early in the book, often in chapter one, in the case of Watson's, they're there in the second chapter where, [unclear] I quote, "As elsewhere, they disappeared rapidly before the advance of civilization." He assured readers that virtually nothing remains to indicate the former existence of the Aborigines except a few place names, and he goes on to record a few of those place names.

After that brief interlude, Watson's able to return to the main business of narrating the story of the colonist progress, the carving up of the land by men with names such as Moore, Ainsley, Campbell, with a bit of colour being provided by bush rangers and the gold rushes up in the snowy mountains. No Indigenous people disturbed the party. Watson himself, of course, moved to Canberra buying Gungahlin reputedly in the hope of being appointed government archivist. He lived there possibly in disappointment until 1940.

Now, there'd been a call for a local historical society as early as 1935, but it was not until 1953 that such a society would indeed be formed. William Blewitt was a grazier at Brindabella, who'd also been a journalist as well as in other occupations. His October 1953 letter to the Canberra Times was given the heading, 'Why Not An Historical Society for Canberra?' "The history of men and nations is built upon the foundations of the past", he grandly begins. "Whether it be sermons and stones or the picture of times mirrored by an old bullock dray, the past is there for our instruction, possibly for our veneration and our endeavour." Blewitt then goes on to name check various individuals or white men, connected with the history of the district and the many splendid pioneering families culminating in that man in a million, William Farrer and Major General Bridges.

He appears to have seen the major purpose of such a society being the national service of gathering data on the old families. The idea, however, caught on. While Blewitt at the public meeting that formed the society in December, 1953, reiterated that the main interest should be, again, I'm quoting "the early settlers who made our city ready for the people who decided it should be the national capital". He also advocated that the new body should gather any information it could on Canberra's Aboriginal people. And indeed, when the society met for the first time, Blewitt would present on that very topic and indeed the full text of that survives. As Malcolm Allbrook has shown, there was substantial academic involvement in the formation and early history of the society. Laurie Fitzhardinge, a classicist originally, but a historian in the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU was elected president.

Other inaugural committee members included Manning Clark and Oskar Spate, respectively Professors of history and geography, and Lindsay Gardiner, who would make a career as a professional historian. She was married to a lecturer in Manning Clark's history department at the Canberra University College. An examination of the early papers presented at society meetings discloses a mixture of speakers, including ANU academics and students, PhD students, official war historian, Gavin Long, who I've mentioned, Clark of the House of Representatives, Frank Green, and Canberra Times owner, AT Shakespeare. There was a teacher, an architect, a businessman, a geologist, a police commissioner, a senior army officer, and a clergyman. There was a place for the academic, the professional, and the amateur for the compilation of records and the recording of oral histories for historical research and heritage preservation, for study and for commemoration. They pressed for a role of pioneers, but also for the preservation of Aboriginal rock paintings.

And they campaigned for the annual recognition of the 12th of March as Canberra Day. Now, there's a longstanding impression that the consolidation of history in the universities, and there was much of that consolidation going on here in Canberra in the 1950s and 1960s, produce an alienation between the enthusiastic amateur and the trained professional. Now, that notion has been questioned in recent years. The categories themselves are, of course, highly questionable, I'd say laughable, and it's certainly not supported by the early history of the Canberra and District Historical Society. The ivory tower of the university would eventually come, but it's been driven more by the demands of the modern enterprise or neoliberal university with its premium on high impact publication, preferably in international journals or with prestigious overseas academic presses. I mean, university leaders still talk about the importance of community engagement, but their real priorities speak through the structure of you know kind of incentives and rewards that we find in universities.

What universities look for in applicants for academic appointment and promotion, for instance. And it's an aim of the venture that I'm currently leading, the Vice Chancellor's Centre of Public Ideas at the University of Canberra, if I can slip an ad in there to try to break down as many of those barriers as possible.

Okay. So in the last part of this oration and leaving aside that particular initiative, I'd like to briefly examine the wider outlook for the future of history in Canberra. Let me for a moment identify some of the players. I've already talked about the Canberra and District Historical Society, but there's also Family History ACT. It began its life as the Heraldry and Genealogy Society of Canberra. Interestingly, it's inaugural meeting on the 20th of October 1964 was convened by the Pacific historian, Niel Gunson, and held in the Coombs building at the ANU. There were a dozen members at the outset. In 1986, it could boast 1,630 of them, a success that nicely expresses the rising popularity of family history in Canberra as elsewhere, and particularly, I think, in the lead up to the bicentenniary of 1988. Organisations such as Family History ACT and the Independent Scholars Association have been well served by the national cultural institutions on the whole, contributing to concentrations of formidable scholarly expertise and rich networks of relationships, and indeed, in some instances, acting as volunteers within those institutions, such as the National Archives of Australia.

Family history in particular is one of the spaces, I think, where academics and community members meet. And when they do, they not only find that they have much to learn from one another, but that they have common interests in advocating for adequate government support for what is essentially shared research infrastructure. Think of Trove, for instance. And there's been significant advocacy concerning both the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia in recent years, especially over Trove, and governments of both stripes have apparently listened and acted, however, reluctantly.

Nonetheless, the problems remain, and here I need to declare a more direct interest in these matters. I'm a member of the National Archives of Australia's Advisory Council, so I don't speak on its behalf or on behalf of the council, but I point out that there remain significant problems of access for researchers to open period documents, that is predominantly those more than 20 years old. Many files are referred to the originating agencies or government departments, for instance, for advice about whether the documents concerned can be consulted by researchers in full with exceptions or not at all. Now, while the archives has ultimate responsibility under the Archives Act for ensuring that open period documents are made available within 90 working days, in practise, it has limited sway over those originating agencies who've been known to allow years to pass without making a decision. Researchers also worry about the growing habit of redaction, of chopping bits out of ... They cover them over of documents, those long black slabs of death, with which researchers have become all too familiar.

Now, you might think that I'm now digging down into the weeds or perhaps getting a professional gripe or two off my chest, but these problems have a real impact on our historical scholarship in this city, and also I think on our democracy. Funding bodies such as the Australian Research Council, for instance, have rigorous processes and low success rates for academics who apply for funding. Yet historical researchers who do succeed, they sometimes find themselves with projects deemed to be of sufficient national importance to be well-funded, sometimes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a highly competitive environment, but then find that they're unable to lay their hands on the documentary record that they need to be able to do their work and indeed aquit their grants. Contemporary history, defined broadly as the history of the recent past, or perhaps sometimes as the history of living memory, depending on how old you are, I guess, is weaker in Australia than it is in the United States or Britain.

And I think one of the problems and one of the reasons for that has been access to the documentary record, and especially the official documentary record. The 1990s were three decades ago, and yet show me a history or a historiography of that era. It barely exists. Politics and culture have also sometimes been unhelpful. The Australian War Memorial has tended to do rather well in federal budgets compared with some of the other institutions, such as the Archives, this library, National Museum of Australia, and the Museum of Australian Democracy. Let us not begrudge it its success. History in Canberra and nationally benefits from the generous funding of the Australian War Memorial. The AWM is, after all, one of the institutions that's generated original historical research and its own collections are indispensable to historians of Australians at war. But it's not the only custodian of Australia's war history, of Australia's war stories.

Most service records are to be found in the National Archives, as are the often remarkable repatriation records, as well as administrative records of the relevant government departments. Needless to say, the National Library, of course, is also a significant custodian of Australia's war stories, while the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's long-running documents on Australian Foreign Policy Project conceived by Paul Hasluck more than half a century ago, indeed, almost 60 years ago, and that's another of my former employers I should mention, publishes records concerned with a variety of Australia's international relationships, a focus on foreign and security policy, whether in times of peace, hot war or cold war. And it was designed not only for scholars, but for those involved in making policy.

The cultural prestige of Anzac has ensured that collections related to war and society, wherever they're located, attract public funding and private philanthropy that would not be forthcoming in other contexts and for other kinds of records. And we should, I think, be reflective on the choices that are being made in such instances and their broader consequences for how we engage with the Australian past. Which stories, for instance, are not being told? A decade ago, the government threw literally hundreds of millions of dollars at the Anzac centenary, yet the centenary of one of the key moments in Australian Democratic history, the conscription crisis of 1916-17, received barely any notice in this city other than from the local branch of the Labour History Society. The centenaries of the living wage in 2007 and the age pension in 1909 passed almost without notice. Historical scholarship is fundamental to our democracy.

From the 1960s, there was a movement in this country, as well as many other Western nations associated with open government. The basic concept was that unaccountable power, whether political or administrative, was inconsistent with genuine democratic government and with human rights. Freedom of information laws were one product of that moment, and Australia's Archives Act, very liberal in its day, back in 1983, was another product of it. It might sometimes be hard to imagine when we work our way through a box of documents on the first floor of the National Library here to joy that we're back on the first floor after a sojourn elsewhere, that we're engaged in democratic practise. We are probably more likely just to think it's old-fashioned research, or if we like the more highfalutin term scholarship. Democracy is about voting, we might think, or perhaps attending a march or demonstration if we're still allowed to, but the scope for open historical practise may well be as integral to healthy democracies as voting and protesting.

Certainly, we can be sure that the erosion of one will be a prelude to the erosion of the other. As historians, we're dealing with matters of the deepest gravity for how we live with one another and in relation to political authority. Even when history is taken up as a hobby or an interest, it functions as something more than just that. Each act of making history becomes a small part of the fabric of what makes societies like ours free, and it helps to keep them that way. The despots of our own day, much like the despots of the past, I've been reading a lot of Tacitus lately, I might say, puts me to sleep at night, but they make a particular project of creating authorised histories that seek to legitimise their power and violence. You might recall Vladimir Putin's half hour history lesson in an interview with Tucker Carlson seeking to justify his efforts to wipe Ukraine off the map.

The MAGA movement in the United States and its chieftain, Donald Trump, rely heavily on a pseudo history in which there was a golden age of American peace and prosperity before it was destroyed by free traders, Democrats, 'Renos', Republicans in all but sorry what were they called 'Republicans in name only' is the term, immigrants and assorted varieties of woke. There are now whole ecosystems online devoted to producing disinformation, including fake histories, and designed to justify extremist ideologies and violent activities by state actors, as well as terrorists and other extremist organisations. Now, history can seem a poultry thing in the face of the kind of power for deception associated with the modern algorithm and the deep fake, backed by the techno feudalism of those corporate giants who now seem to dominate our lives online. Now, while the tech companies are almost completely unaccountable, even waving the flag of history at governments that have to face electors every few years can also sometimes seem a fruitless exercise.

As demonstrated by their attitude to freedom of information requests, Australian governments have become increasingly preoccupied with preserving secrecy in a way that undermines democratic accountability. Much decision making, moreover, seems to occur without any sense of the historical hinterland that both constrains and enables even the most powerful politicians and bureaucrats. Institutional memory, which at its best can be good practical history making, is underestimated in a milieu where it's fashionable to treat every challenge as if it's completely new or just another occasion for situation management or perhaps another opportunity for a lucrative consultancy. Now, it might be that in contemplating history's future, there's a parallel with what Winston Churchill said of democracy, the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. History that is informed by authentic historical records, and I borrow a phrase from the early history of the Canberra and District Historical Society, history that's driven by the good faith of the scholar, committed to weighing up the available evidence and arriving at the truest version of the past that's available, history that's serious-minded and nuanced, and yet accessible to ordinary citizens and not only to trained specialists.

It seems to me that these remain some of the weapons with which democracy might, just might be successfully defended. We certainly won't find out unless we try. So thank you. Great. So I gather we now have about 10, 12 minutes, I guess, for questions. So we have microphones circulating.

Richard Reid:

I've got to take prerogative president [unclear]

Frank Bongiorno:

President's prerogative.

Richard Reid:

[unclear] District Historical Society, Frank

Frank Bongiorno:

It's good to be the king, as Mel Brooks said.

Richard Reid:

Indeed. Thank you, Frank. That was amazing, Frank. Thank you very much for that. As you're very familiar with the fact that the biggest sponsored history in Australia has been the war effort in the money given to the war memorial to write Australian military or war history, whichever way you like to look at it. You did mention that you were on the advisory board for the National Archives, right? Can you imagine therefore the government giving money to the National Archives to sponsor the writing of history? Would you like to speculate a little bit about what kind of things you as a member of that board might think about in relation to a different form of government sponsored history? Because I think the war stuff is about the only ... I mean, DVA has had its official history written, things like that, but it's been that sort of thing in departments. Anyway, open to you.

Frank Bongiorno:

It's a good question. Of course, the National Archives of Australia, like the National Library, does sponsor history in various ways. I mean, some conventional histories. We saw David Headon's most recent prime ministerial biography launched recently, and that was a partnership with the National Archives, but also of course through its public programmes. I mean, they have obviously a large vigorous exhibition effort, if you like, both on site here at East Block, but also travelling exhibitions. So there's a sense in which the National Archives, like a number of the public institutions in Canberra does produce history. It produces historical narratives and interpretation in a whole range of ways, but it is admittedly different from the kinds of official history that you're talking about in relation to the Australian War Memorial. I mean, this issue did come up in relation to the historical project section at DFAT, which I talked about.

I mean, traditionally, initially that was very much about producing volumes of documents with some interpretation in them. Of course, there would be an introduction, there'd be explanatory notes that did enter the realm of interpretation, but they have produced histories over the years, although not official histories. There's sort of, there's an arm's length approach there so

Richard Reid:

[unclear] So, sensitive stuff, like say a history of the depression that dealt from the National Archive Record. You see something like that, which is more [unclear]

Frank Bongiorno:

You could see that happening. I mean, and you could certainly see the Archives having an exhibition, for instance, perhaps with an accompanying interpretive booklet that basically dealt with records in the collection that illuminated the depression and what could be done with them by historians. So I think there's a lot of history created across these various domains that is not on the scale and not as lavishly funded as what you're describing, but nonetheless is happening. Yeah.

Audience member 1:

Frank, hello. Michele Rainger, President of Family History ACT. So thank you for the plug, and you've clearly read our book, which is wonderful. I just wanted to ask you to make a comment on what I would call citizen histories, where people like us, ordinary everyday people write histories and contribute to the narrative and to the story. What do you think of those and where do you think they can head in the future?

Frank Bongiorno:

Well, yeah, I mean, my argument's been that they are very much a part of the fabric of history. As a historian in a university, I rely on histories produced by a whole range of different people by ... Yes, I mean, people who haven't perhaps had a formal training in history, but nonetheless write family or local history that will often reach a very high quality, of course, and is very important. Often individuals in family history societies, in local historical societies have very deep forms of expertise in the sources. They have a feel for the topic that's often based on long association with a particular place, with the dynamics, the social and family dynamics of a particular locality. We'd be, I think, ill-advised to somehow maintain what I think is an unhelpful distinction between the amateur and the professional. And the most famous articulation of it in Australian historiography was by a professor at the ANU, John Lenos, writing at the end of the 1950s, in which he talks, I think rather disparagingly at one point about amateur enthusiasts putting on local historical exhibitions or some line along those.

And I think that was kind of the apogee of that kind of thinking from professional historians in universities. I think we've come a long way since then, but the pressures exist. The modern enterprise or neoliberal university, it's not primarily interested in supporting relationships with communities and with community history. I mean, it'll go through the motions, but a lot of the energy of that really has to come from individual academics and from the work they do, and of course, the members of those societies. But I think it's a very important part of the fabric that I've been talking about today.

Audience member 2:

Thanks very much, Frank. Can you give some examples of where governments have learnt from history?

Frank Bongiorno:

Well, they learn from history. They don't always learn the right lessons. Oh, look, it's a tough question. I mean, there is some taste in government today in Australia for historical advice or advice from historians. I won't give anything away. I've done it in a couple of instances over the last three years in relation to particular things being done. So there is some taste for that. If you're asking about the broader issue of whether governments learn from history, well, they do. I mean, the way Western countries fought the Second World War was deeply influenced by a particular understanding of what had happened in the First World War, they knew that their populations, those Western countries, this was very different on the Eastern front, but those Western countries knew that their populations were going to be deeply intolerant of the kind of profligate use of the bodies of young people, which had been such a feature of the Western front, particularly in the First World War.
So it's possible to think of those kind of examples. But yeah, if you're asking, do governments today pay enough attention to good historical interpretation? I'd probably say no, not enough. I think that it's been one of the feats often called the new public management that kind of came in in the 1980s, and it tends to be rather ahistorical. It's very technocratic.

It essentially treats every problem as a kind of puzzle to be solved in the present, but without much reference, I think, to what's been tried in the past. The example I use, I mean, you might remember two or three years ago, there was a bit of a debate going about things like, should there be rental caps? I think we have them here in the ACT, don't we? But should caps be placed on rent when it was going through the roof, I think the greens supported that. And it struck me as I listened to that debate, you would imagine that there'd never been a history of doing that in Australia, but it went on for years during the war and then for years afterwards into the 1950s. If we'd had good historical research around that issue that was a part of the debate, people would have had a much stronger sense of what had worked on the previous occasion, what hadn't worked, what appropriate cap might be if you're going to have one.

There were a whole series of lessons that probably could have been learned from the previous experience of doing that back in the 1940s and early 1950s by state governments, essentially.

Audience member 3:

Hi there. This is maybe a follow-up from the first question. Obviously, academic work is important in writing and such, but noting case in point events like the 50th anniversary of the dismissal and the upcoming centenary of Old Parliament House, how can sort of events and sort of community forums be used to encourage that dialogue between citizens and their history?

Frank Bongiorno:

Much a part of the ... Is that going to work? Sorry, I knocked that off. I presume that's still going to work, is it, without that? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, look, I think that's a really good question. I think it makes fora like this and the role of public institutions such as the National Library, the National Archives, the whole range of them, all are more important because they are the places where these kinds of meetings happen. It is unfortunate, I think, that many of the societies I've been talking about tonight have a much richer history of those sorts of engagements in their early years. So in the case of Canberra and District Historical Society back in the 1950s and '60s than they probably do today. And I think that is a measure of the way ... I don't think it's actually the fault of the societies, these organisations.

I think it's actually the fault of universities, which have gone down a different path, which has steered their effort away from those sorts of involvements. That said, I think there's still a lot of work being done by individual academics in this line. I mean, a great enterprise here in Canberra as elsewhere is the university of the third age. And of course there are other similar organisations doing adult education and they're wonderful exercises in leadership and self-management, if you like, by the communities that run them. But of course, they also do depend for at least some of their input on expertise coming from universities on a whole range of things, everything from the natural sciences, history, politics, whatever. So I think organisations like that have a really important role to play, but yeah, I mean, I think it's something we need to work on. We need to restructure the incentives within a university sector that's paid for, partly at least by the taxpayer, so that it is doing that kind of work and it has the incentive, the motivation, indeed the funding to actually undertake that sort of critical community work.

In a world where people are going to retire and live great lives for decades afterwards, universities should be a resource for them as well, not only for 17, 18, and 19 year olds. They also need to be there for people in their 60s, their 70s, their 80s, their 90s, and beyond.

Audience member 4:

Hi, I guess slightly similar sort of theme, but when we talk about governments paying attention to history, governments are just staffed by people. Do you think there's something about the way history is perceived in general by the public that's maybe a little bit too sort of, I don't know, dry or sort of it's not seen as a valid place to go looking for lessons broadly, not like in society. And I guess you've already touched on some of these things, but what can we do to push things in the right direction there?

Frank Bongiorno:

Yeah. So one of the things about history is it doesn't yield straightforward lessons, does it? So the economists are able to produce models which purport to tell you what's going to happen. Now, historians have experimented with that, believe it or not. There was some flirtation with that kind of concept, early Cold War, 1950s particularly, but we know that that's not what history can actually do. If it yields lessons, they're often subtle ones. They require significant levels of creativity and imagination in terms of what you compare, because false analogy is a huge problem in public debates, political discourse, and indeed in even professional forms of history. Think of the way in which the lessons of appeasement of the 1930s have been trotted out again and again and again, always yielding exactly the same lesson. Oh, we must go to war. If we don't go to war, it'll simply be an encouragement to our enemy and you end up with a quagmire like Vietnam, for instance, or indeed some of the stuff we're seeing at the moment.

So part of what historians have to do is guide people, if you like, towards appropriate comparison, meaningful comparison, rather than superficially attractive comparison. And I think that is a problem for policymakers and others because naturally the tidy models of economists and others are more appealing in their kind of world.

Audience member 5:

Thank you, Frank, for that. Could I ask you to share your ideas, noting your relatively new position of the strategies you are going to use in the new Vice Chancellor's Centre to perhaps progress and implement some of the ideas that you've spoken about tonight?

Frank Bongiorno:

Yeah, look, it's a good question. And I guess one of the things we've seen in recent years is some surprising media emerge. For instance, the popularisation of history that we might not have predicted a generation ago. Think of the rise of the podcast, for instance. Now, I imagine we will do some of that kind of work. I wouldn't have predicted the great success of that particular medium. When I started out, well, we sort of were thinking those days of radio as kind of being superseded by more glamorous media, weren't we? But what does a podcast do? It does kind of radio, but not in real time. So I mean, we'll obviously be looking to work with partners, I think's really important because networks are immensely important when you're trying to have impacts. So there is a particular network that has helped to form the audience here tonight.

The room is not full of 17, 18, and 19 year olds. That's not a bad thing, but that is in the nature of the network that the Library in this instance, the Canberra and District Historical Society will draw. So we need, I think, to partner different kinds of organisations that will give us access to different kinds of networks for those discussions and audiences that I think will be very important. So that's a part, I think, of what I'll be doing. It'll be very small centres, so we'll necessarily need to cooperate with probably larger organisations in order to have any impact.

Sharon Bulkeley:

Well, thank you, Frank, for that very illuminating case, and thank you everyone for those well thought out questions. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but if you've enjoyed tonight's lecture or you think you know someone who would, you can access it online on the Library's YouTube channel and the Canberra District and Historical Society will also have a copy that they'll be able to make available. So thank you so much for coming out on a beautiful Canberra evening and supporting the Library and the Canberra District Historical Society. We hope you've enjoyed yourself and we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you.