inof on Joan Makes History :: essays research papers

What were after, of course, is stories, and we lie with that history is bulging with beauties. Having found them, we then proceed to fiddle with them to crap them the way we want them to be, rather than the way they really were. We get it wrong, willfully and knowingly.But perhaps you could say that the very flagrency of our "getting it wrong" points to the occurrence that all stories rase the history "story" are do. They have an agenda, even if its an unconscious one. Perhaps there are many ship canal to get it right. The interesting parts of history are probably eer whats not there. My own special area of interest near 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 recipientcustodian, even, if that doesnt sound too grandioseof a well-fixed oral history handed obliterate from my amaze, who got it from her mother and so on back down the line. Shes told me f amily stories from every propagation 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 turned his daughter expectant 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) in that location was "Uncle Willie with the red hair" who was "killed by falling off 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 play 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_Grenvill e%20.htmlSOUL-SEARCHING about our past is the new literary fashion. It is the period in which the breast-beaters, the moral Pharisees, are driven to advertise us how, unlike their predecessors, they have political and moral virtue. The Aborigines, women and ordinary bulk have become the goodies, and all those who ignored them in their books or their tenet have become the baddies. The winds of change are blowing over the ancient continent.