inof on Joan Makes History :: essays research papers

What were after, of course, is stories, and we know that history is bulging with beauties. Having found them, we then proceed to dally with them to make them the way we want them to be, rather than the way they really were. We pee-pee it wrong, willfully and knowingly.But perhaps you could say that the very flagrency of our "getting it wrong" points to the accompaniment that all stories even the history "story" are made. They have an agenda, even if its an unconscious one. Perhaps there are many ways to get it right. The interesting parts of history are probably always whats non there. My own special area of interest about whats not in history is the women. As you would all know, by and large theyre sadly absent from the historical record. However, Im lucky to be the pass catchercustodian, even, if that doesnt sound too grandioseof a rich oral history handed graduate from my mother, who got it from her mother and so on back down the line. Shes told me family st ories from every generation since our family first came to Australiain the form of our wicked convict ancestor Solomon Wiseman, in 1806. Sol is supposed to have murdered his wife, and move his daughterpregnant to the riding-masterout of the house to starve. (But perhaps, the novelist in me thinks, she didnt starve , but went on to have, well, a story) There was "Uncle Willie with the red hair" who was "killed by falling arrive at a horse when he was eighteen and broke his mothers heart." There was her own mother, in love with a Catholic boya love as unthinkable as between a Montagu and a Capulet and was forced to marry a good Protestant boy. You should see the look on her face in the wedding photos.This oral history, handed down in a series of formalised anecdotes from mother to daughter, leaving rich areas for speculation in between is, I suspect, one of the things thats made me a novelist.http//www.nla.gov.au/events/history/papers/Kate_Grenville%20.htmlSOUL-SEARC HING about our past is the new literary fashion. It is the period in which the breast-beaters, the moral Pharisees, are driven to tell us how, unlike their predecessors, they have political and moral virtue. The Aborigines, women and ordinary people have become the goodies, and all those who do by them in their books or their teaching have become the baddies. The winds of change are blowing over the ancient continent.