Winter 2004

Talking History

So you want to write history?

GREG DENING has spent most of his academic lifetime trying to persuade would-be writers of history to become storytellers, true storytellers. Living is story, he says. So is history. All of us make history. Now read on.

It might seem a bit silly to claim that living is story. It might even seem a little threateningly post-modern, as if I were saying living is just story. It is a far more modest insight of mine, though. Our experiences of living, I am saying, are in the moment-after of our ongoing consciousness. We sentence, paragraph, chapter living in the moment-after by stories of all sorts—our angry or pleasurable replay in our mind of what has happened; our dinner table chatter; our explanation to the policeman, the judge, the taxman; our eulogies over the grave. We tell, we dance, we paint and we play these stories. We write diaries, we send letters, we fill in forms. We create moments when we want to focus our attention on these stories—in ritual, in theatre, in social dramas of all kinds. Some of these expressions stay on—not by chance, but by ordered archiving. Some blow away on the breath of our talk.

In all these stories, we are very adept in knowing what they mean. We know that every word we speak has different meanings for the occasion in which it is said, the persons to whom we say it, the tone of our voice and the look on our face. We have a fine sense of the poetics of these stories. We know gossip from legal evidence. We know journalistic reportage from the op-ed page. We don’t think we are lying when we tell the littlies about Father Christmas. We don’t think we are lying when we find a truth in our sacred texts beyond their literal meaning.

So living is story. And story is living. We make gender, age, class, peace and war in these stories. They are our present. For me the greatest privilege of my life as an historian has always been to go to those millions of pieces of paper where these stories are given some permanence. Some of these pages almost tremble with love or hatred. Some are stained with blood and tears. They all freeze a present moment still fresh from the experience. It is that moment that I, the historian, like to enter. Not some hindsight moment. Hindsight makes us blind.

Some of us write history. More of us teach history. All of us make history. Fifty years ago I made a discovery that changed my life. I discovered that I wanted to write the history of ‘the other side of the beach’, of indigenous Pacific island peoples with whom I had no cultural bond, of Natives. And on ‘this side of the beach’, my side as an outsider, as Stranger, I wanted to write the history of people whom the world would esteem as ‘little’. I wanted to write history from below. Not of kings and queens. Not of heroes. Not of writers of constitutions, saviours of nations. ‘Little people’, those on whom the forces of the world pressed most hardly. I wanted to celebrate their humanity, their freedoms, their creativity, the ways they crossed the boundaries around their lives.

Both these indigenous island peoples and these ‘little people’ don’t leave much paper in their lives. Institutions do. Institutions baptise them, marry them, gaol them and tax them. They register their births and deaths. The otherness of Natives doesn’t much come from them. They are ‘discovered’, described, observed. The artefacts in which they imbed their stories—their carvings, their tattoos, their tools and ornaments are hard to read. I thought I needed a reading skill— anthropology—to see the system behind whatever agency I could discover in these two groups. I’m not sure whether I would advise young people to do anthropology to write history these days. These days we are all anthropologists. We have to be to survive culturally.

Fifty years ago I thought the past belonged to those who had the skill to read it. Now I know that not to be true. The past belongs to those on whom it impinges. The past impinges most harshly on those we call First Peoples. It has never been truer that living is story, sad story, terrible story. We will only know the truths about our First Peoples in the theatre of their stories.

For 40 of these past 50 years, I have tried to persuade young people that if they would write history, they must become storytellers, true story tellers. It is my mantra, my academic grand-parenting mantra. Here is what I tell them when they come to me.

Storytelling

I would like to persuade you that you are writers. Now and for the rest of your lives. Writers! Not ‘doers’ of theses. Not ‘doers’ of history. Writers of history. Writers intrigue and engage readers. Your examiners and lecturers are paid to read you. They aren’t really ‘readers’. Writers aren’t saying all the time, ‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’ Writers are there.

So I would like you to write me a true short story. A true short, short story. Four hundred words. A page at the most. Take an event out of your research that is in some way critical for your thesis or part of it. Or a person or a place or an idea or an image or whatever. Transform it into a story—in whatever tense, whatever person, whatever voice you want. Gamble a bit. It is not going to cost you anything. Write it with the directness of a novelist, the choosiness of a poet, the rhythm of a musician, the colour of an artist. It might make a prologue to your thesis or a chapter of it.

Some advice. Charles Dickens: ‘Make them laugh; make them cry; above all make them wait’. Greg Dening: ‘Be mysterious. Be experiential. Be compassionate. Be entertaining. Be performative. Be reforming. Change the world in some way with your story’.

When we finish a book or an article, we reduce its thousands of words to just a few that say what it means. We do the same in the foyer after a play or a movie. Leave some space at the bottom of your page to say in one quite brilliant sentence what your short story really means, what it really, really means. Make it short; write it with style and passion. Don’t make it a description of your topic. Say something that is important to you.

One more gamble still. Maybe you will be asked to read your story out aloud. To perform it. Do that reading out aloud for you first. Catch the rhythm. Savour your silences. Above all, cut your sentences.

‘Living is story.’

Greg Dening is adjunct professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au