Academic Essay

History is a Matter of Interpretation; Therefore, it is Unacceptable for an Author to Tamper with Historical Facts.

By Meg Boxall

 

*Warning for readers. This essay mentions the names of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died.

 

History for humans is a fluid and contentious story of who we are and where we have been. It can be something which makes a country, never to be forgotten, or a shameful event which only the very brave or the sadists of the world wish to know about. As time moves ever forward, memories, facts, truths and reality become faded, questionable and easily re-interpreted by evolving generations. How authors interpret historical truths and facts creates problems with recording history. Indigenous Australians use oral history rather than written history, making it simple for authors to tamper and ‘re-write’, whereas Australian or British history has been documented in the written form. Throughout colonial history in Australia we have seen several reasons why authors may tamper with historical facts, to change details of native title during colonisation; to cover the horrific deeds of a particular person, group or nation; and diminish a person, group or nation. History is a matter for interpretation, but due to the ease with which cultures can be ignored and diminished it is unacceptable for the author to tamper with history and perpetuate false realities. All forms of history must be included from every available source, to ensure a fair and equitable recording of humankind’s journey.

Focusing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ endeavours to have their histories told in conjunction with colonial history, the aim of the essay will be to show that as malleable as history is, authors have a responsibility to the reader to not tamper with historical facts. When authors are recording history, their purpose should be to seek all the facts, and to respect and include truths from all participants in history. By including and respecting all forms of history — oral, written and artefactual — then our community stories will be kept with equity.

Historical facts and evidence are proof of human ingenuity, malice, bravery, determination, kindness, courage, selflessness, cruelty and love. We strive to ‘make’ history, as we conquer physical challenges like climbing Mt Everest (Bishop, n.d.). We want to ‘change’ history as we topple statues of slave-traders (Modhin & Storer, 2021). We also never want to ‘repeat’ history with the devastating bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (ICAN, n.d.). The need to chronicle our past in detail is a way in which we can teach our children and ourselves our achievements, and our failures. Recording history is important, but it must be noted that authoring of history can be interpreted in different ways. As Foucault states, ‘the modes of circulation, valorisation, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 117). To frame it differently, each author writes and interprets history uniquely and history’s discourse can be changed according to time, place and author. If history is tampered with to create an alternate reality, through alternate interpretations, will humankind learn and evolve from our mistakes and missteps?

Throughout Australia’s recent past the preservation of Indigenous perspectives has been authenticated by a colonial governance. The history that has been repeated and taught in school curriculums has been one of ignorance and denial — one of British dominance and Indigenous subservience. The media’s response to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre provides an example of the author tampering with history. The shooting was perpetrated by Martin Bryant, resulting in 35 people dying. Port Arthur has a complicated history. The Indigenous name for Port Arthur is Premaydena (MacDonald, 2020) and due to it once being a penal colony in the British Empire it was granted world heritage status (UNESCO, 2021.) It has seen its share of death and cruelty, but when the media worded their reporting on the shooting at Port Arthur as one in which Australia had never seen the likes of, it diminished the effects of the colonisation of Indigenous lands by the British. Banerjee and Osuri noted that the media coverage by authors from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian described the Port Arthur massacre as ‘surpass[ing] any other documented in Australia’s history . . . one of the worst mass shootings of all time’ (Banerjee & Osuri, 2000, p. 268). By focusing the attention of the population on the loss of life as the worst massacre that Australia has known, a re-writing of history has occurred, easily cancelling out any true historical facts.

Through the power of media and the manipulation of text, the slaughter of Indigenous Australians is inch by inch swept away from the memories of the population. Tasmania suffered huge losses of Indigenous life during the invasion and colonisation process by European settlers. The original Indigenous population of Tasmania had been approximately 15,000 people. From the first two recorded deaths of Aboriginals by French sailors in the first documented encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in 1772, the population through disease, warfare and executions resulted in one Aboriginal (Truganini (1812-1876)) remaining in Tasmania by the year 1876 (Pybus, 2020, p. 263). In just over a century the annihilation of a whole race of people had been successful (National Museum Australia, 2021). The authors of the articles written for The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia’s worst mass murder: up to 40 dead in gunman’s bloody rampage) and The Australian (Savagery erupts in afternoon of terror) have allowed history to be ‘sold’ as one fact, when the real facts have been available to those willing to remember that Australia has been inhabited for 60,000 plus years. With ignorant and hurtful statements made by people in positions of power like the one by Tasmanian premier Peter Rundle that, ‘Other massacres in Australian history would “pale into insignificance”’, (Simpson et al., 1996) how will history ever be truth and not a tampered interpretation?

What is not open for interpretation is that in a mere 233 years — since European colonisation of the continent occurred — just under three percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have survived (Hughes, 2021). Since the time of massacres of Indigenous peoples, the destruction of culture, beliefs, sacred sites and languages has been prolific. Introduced diseases, unsuccessful assimilation, murder, rape, mining and government laws have brought relentless impoverishment to Indigenous Australians. The near-successful obliteration of the Indigenous and traditional owners of Australia has been supported by the re-writing of history by authors. The dismissal of truth and evidence of habitation allows for the further subjugation of Indigenous peoples making it harder for progress to be made in equality, recognition, and reconciliation. As Gallois states, ‘Part of the moral obligation of historians to the world should be that the discipline sees itself as the protector and preserver of temporal traditions from such cultures’ (Gallois, 2017, p. 194). In other words, it is beneficial for the longevity and sustainability of First Nations peoples to have their culture and language respected and preserved by historians to prevent further degradation of traditions and Country.

History is important to all beings. It explores our progression of time and place and explains our triumphs and shortcomings. The way in which each of us reads history differs and it can be appealing to certain systems of power to erase historical events or periods to lay a foundation of ‘truth’ to their discourses. The European settlers were determined to carve out a new beginning for themselves. The presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was a nuisance to the colonisers. Throughout Australia’s ‘white’ history the need to rationalise and justify the near extinction of a whole race of people has been written. Indigenous Australians have been called ‘savages’ and thought to be much less sophisticated than Europeans (Buchan, 2001, p. 143). The ease in which the media can deride and forget Aboriginal massacres demonstrates how ‘authors’ repeatedly tamper with history — to the further exclusion of Indigenous Australians. McKenna and Wardle write that Australian laws have been re-written to account for the invasion and colonisation of Australia. ‘[The] legitimacy of the Australian legal system rests not only on the denial of Indigenous sovereignty, but on the re-writing of history through legal and political discourses developed by Australian judges and politicians (McKenna & Wade, 2019, p. 39). These ‘respected’ people in trusted positions of power become the authors of history, abolishing historical facts such as sovereignty of a nation. The result is Indigenous Australians are disadvantaged and unreconciled with their colonisers.

With the denial of sovereignty, the country’s Indigenous population teeters on the edge of reality. Government and court laws allow for possession and ownership of Country to people who have little to no historical connection to it. By diminishing ownership and rights to the original inhabitants of Australia, history is tampered with by the government bodies who should be protecting the rights of First Nations people. History has been tampered with since James Cook in 1770 declared that Australia was terra nullius (land belonging to no one) and took possession for British colonisers (Aboriginal Heritage Office, 2021). In their own way, colonising Europeans have re-written and tampered with historical events and truths to gain power and control of land and people. The authors of state and federal laws, acts and titles falsify the truth and tamper with history. With little respect or thought placed on Indigenous laws and customs, the authors (judges and governing bodies) indiscriminately wrote and continue to write Indigenous people and practice out of history. ‘With the stroke of a pen the laws practiced for tens of thousands of years by Indigenous people were declared invalid and illegal’ (McKenna & Wardle, 2019, p. 48).
Authors of Australian history have pushed Indigenous people to fight daily battles against racism, and discrimination. Fighting for equality and against discriminatory laws, Eddie Mabo, a Meriam native of the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait, decided to challenge the Supreme Court for native title of Mer Island (AIATSIS, n.d.). In 1982, he and several others claimed that the laws were racially discriminatory and needed to be changed. The idea that historically the area had been deemed to have no one living and occupying it was false. Through years of challenging the courts and state and federal governments, native title was granted to the Meriam people. When a country’s native peoples are diminished by authors, education, policies and ideologies are transformed to create new histories, that prove to be lies. These lies can become recorded fact, which transition into fictional writing, further confusing reality and falsehood.

Fictional writing has it place in society to entertain and educate people who ‘read’ to find meaning amongst the trivialities of life. Fiction can help remind or inform people of false histories. By re-telling the histories of subjugated peoples, authors can help prevent the continuation of segregation and racism. Fiction writer and Booker Prize winner (British Council, 2021) Peter Carey uses his authorial authenticity to include Indigenous history within his books. Using stories, characters and discourse he takes advantage of historical events. His ‘story-telling’ helps dispel notions of terra nullius, and a ‘new’ country only just discovered. The concept of educating readers through fiction may sound antithetical, but Carey sees it as a way to remind people who are ‘forgetful of the facts’ (Carey, 2001 as cited in Gaile, 2010, p. 140). Carey places emphasis on writing his fictional history in truth — namely that James Cook was not the first person to discover Australia, and that First Nations people did fight against invasion. His characters have difficult conversations about massacres and the lasting effects of ‘justified’ eradication of Indigenous peoples. In his novel Oscar and Lucinda, the narrator Bob discusses why a geographical area is named ‘Darkwood’. The narrator tells a story of how it got its name and how one of the character’s grandfathers and his mates ‘pushed an entire tribe of Aboriginal men and women and children off the edge’ (Carey, 1998 as cited in Gaile, 2010, p. 121). The grim descriptions of casual racism, forgotten battles and merciless killings allow the reader to become aware of Australia’s real history in a fictional narrative.

When authors base their narrative in a fictional world, how does the reader know what to believe and what to read as imaginary? Did James Cook believe his own history of being the first man to ‘map’ the east coast of Australia? Is this how an author of history transposes the truth, by ignoring the facts and believing their ‘story’? Aboriginal historian Frances Peters-Little writes that ‘Aboriginal history, since colonisation, has gone unobserved, forgotten or perhaps distorted by historians’ (Peters-Little., et al. 2010, p. 77). In other words, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have had their history and observations either ignored or authored in such a way that Indigenous history is tampered with to suit a white perspective. We might say that much of Australian history is fiction, since the discovery of artefacts dating back 65,000 years (Clarkson., et al. 2017) have proven that Indigenous Australians are connected to the land and have been for millennia. The inability for many historians to include an Indigenous narrative has found us in the year 2021 having made little progress for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s rights. The Australian Constitution still is a discriminatory document, with no recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples being the first inhabitants of Australia further propagating and allowing racial discrimination (Australian Human Rights Commission, n.d.).

The ongoing battle that Indigenous Australians have with discrimination and dismissal by the wider community can be disheartening. When authors interpret Australia’s historical past with a colonial eye, then not only does it diminish First Nations people, but it writes a false history which is doomed to repeat itself. Lorina Barker writes, ‘I believe Aboriginal histories and oral histories are intrinsically linked and for the most part have been largely ignored, misinterpreted or deemed as ‘mythical’ unreliable sources of knowledge by more traditionally text-based historians’ (Peters-Little, et al., 2010, p. 185). Put differently, if oral histories and traditions are rejected, then how will reconciliation of Australia’s peoples eventuate? The racial divide will increase, the inequalities will mount, and the unforgettable past will be dismissed as a minor discrepancy.

Documented facts of authors interpreting history to benefit their own beliefs, like those of the European invaders, or the repudiation of the magnitude of Indigenous massacres by modern media, or by the Australian government’s exclusion of basic human rights in the nation’s Constitution, have shown us that when history is ignored, falsified, or branded as truth there is always a form of disparity occurring. Indigenous Australians engagement with its past is not something that will be forgotten. History, regardless of how it is authored is linked to all of us in some way. By only ‘hearing’ or ‘reading’ one side of a story, we doom ourselves to repeat history, which for Australians — Indigenous or non-Indigenous— is something we cannot afford to do. The significant mishandling of documenting historical information by excluding oral and artefactual data has placed authors of Australian history in an unenviable position. Moving forward, recognition and recording of events in a way which is equitable and comprehensive for all communities must be articulated by our historical authors. Through evidence expressed here we have seen that past discrepancies have caused pain, anguish and a rift between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. The focus for authors so reconciliation can be achieved is not to tamper with history but include all historical facts.

 

 

References

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