 On Damned Whores and Other WomenbyGillian Polack
Anne Summers’ face is now on an Australian stamp. This gives me the perfect moment to look at some important issues. The perfect books for looking at such issues happened to be in my possession already, and both the authors answered some questions for me. This means I’m in reflective mode. What I’m reflecting on is something I often think about: how do we make sure that the history we tell isn’t only about a small group of successful blokes? This question (expressed more nicely) has vexed historians for a few decades now. When I was an undergraduate, someone came up to me with a request to sign a petition. “We want a women's history course at Melbourne University,” she said. “I want women’s history to be in every course,” I said. “Just as I want my histories of Europe to include non-Christian Europe.” Choices like this for studying history ought not be difficult; they also don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Still, though, most general histories of a place or a time cover men more than women and men of certain backgrounds more than other men. The biases are big and real and mean that the histories we read are not our histories at all, in some crucial ways. In 1975, Anne Summers wrote Damned Whores & God’s Police. It was this book that led to that group of female undergraduates demanding that women’s history be its own subject, a few years on. It looked at Australia’s heritage and questioned what we knew about our history, focusing on the women. What’s more, it looked at how we came to those opinions, what assumptions framed our thoughts. The big questions that we were all asking was what sort of history we should be writing, how should we write it, and how do we include women in our portrayal of Australia’s past. We were questioning the assumptions that we had been presented, assumptions that described history and shaped the way we viewed ourselves. Assumptions we make about the past teach us how to think about it. The big change for Australian historiography was putting women squarely into the picture—admitting that they have a crucial part in our history (in fact, that it’s our history, not the history of one gender). Since then, many writers have put women in the centre of things. Today I’m briefly going to examine how two very different writers prepare their past for public use. Both writers focus on women’s history. They discover the past, however, from very different directions. Moreover, neither uses the same approach Anne Summers did in Damned Whores and God’s Police. Thirty years after she rocked our young universes, there has been much discourse and our understanding of women in history is quite, quite different. I won’t go into vast depths or wildly erudite discussion today, instead, I’ll return to the subject another day and add to it, bit by bit. My personal interest right now is in the aspects of the past that writers forget to question and forget to research and where they get their assumptions and their material from when this happens. I’ll explore this idea over the next little while. Right now, though, I want to introduce the subject. I asked two writers the same two questions. The writers were Deborah Swiss (author of The Tin Ticket) and Jenny Blackford (author of The Priestess and the Slave). They were entering their works from opposite directions –one has written a work of popular nonfiction and the other a novel. Both, however, had to translate history into something with far wider appeal than a textbook or scholarly monograph. Blackford had to balance the storytelling needs of the novelist with the publisher’s demand that the book be as accurate as possible. Swiss was writing for a wide US audience that knew nothing of Australian history. This latter is very important in how Swiss approached her task. It means that there are errors (from an historian's viewpoint) that were avoidable (for instance, kiwifruit on a Christmas table in 1869). The Tin Ticket, however, is not a scholarly history and the verve and life she brings to the subject is the key to understanding it, just as the way Blackford turns careful research into story is key to understanding The Priestess and the Slave. What were these two questions? How do they illuminate the differences and similarities between the writers? First I asked about sources: Where did you get your information about the period? What sources a writer uses is crucial to how they interpret the period. Summers changed the way many historians viewed the Australian past by adding to the list of respectable sources, and also though changing the way we viewed them. The information was always there; Summers gave us the tools to access it. This is the stuff of first year university history. It’s that important. What we look at, the directions from which we examine it, how critically we examine it, what assumptions we carry with us in our examination: all these are precursors to writing history into any kind of book. The second question was: Were there any sources that—retrospectively—were special? Can you tell us something about them? It’s impossible to write about the past without developing a relationship with it. Summers was a well-known feminist before she wrote Damned Whores & God’s Police. Her politics informed her relationship with the past. What relationships do Blackford and Swiss have with history? Learning what sources were special to the writer and why helps us work out those relationships and find out more about how we can read the book. How did the writers answer my questions? Where did you get your information about the period? Deborah Swiss: I ventured into the lush territory of primary sources, both because of the richness of details about the convict women and because, as an American, I wanted to make certain I got the facts right about this fascinating piece of Australian history. Staff members at the Archives of Tasmania and members of the Cascades Female Factory Research Group were incredibly helpful in my search for the description lists and convict records for the women in The Tin Ticket as well as for ship logs that describe their 12,000-mile journey from London to Van Diemen’s Land. Many nineteenth-century Australian newspapers are now available online and well worth the time it takes to do a bit of transcription from the “old” English. I was able to look up the weather for a given day and find clues about how free colonists viewed the women, most transported for petty theft but deemed “annoying and intractable animals” by Hobart’s Colonial Times newspaper. I learned that this newspaper referred to the Cascades Female Factory as the “Valley of the Shadow of Death” and printed the recipe for ox-head soup that the women were fed day in and day out. During my two trips to Tasmania (fell in love with the country and the people!), I visited every used bookstore I could find, and was delighted to find obscure books written during the nineteenth century that offer first-hand accounts of Hobart Town, Oatlands, Launceston, and other locations in what was then known as Van Diemen's Land. I even found an outback cookbook, written by a convict woman that included instructions on how to skin and cook a kangaroo. Essentially, Swiss was an outsider exploring a new land. Not only the country of Van Dieman’s Land, but the unexplored territory of the past. There was an immense amount of discovery in what she did. Jenny Blackford: Eric Reynolds, the publisher who commissioned me to write The Priestess and the Slave, was very keen for the book to be archaeologically and historically accurate. I spent a huge amount of effort researching the tiny details of daily life (food, pottery, schooling, medicine, etc.) for the novella, as well as double-checking the actual history that I used (which included the bizarre death of Spartan king Cleomenes). The best way to understand the 5th century BC Greek world is to read what the Greeks themselves wrote about it. My degree was in Classics (Greek and Latin), with an emphasis on Greek, so I had read quite a lot of Greek literature from the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries BC, including some of the world’s greatest historians (Herodotus and Thucydides), tragic poets (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) and comic poets (Aristophanes and Menander)—some of them in the original, and much more in translation. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, though they were written several centuries earlier than the time of the novel and some of the material dates back to the Bronze Age, were the basis of an ancient Greek education and pervaded the consciousness of the classical Greeks, so they were essential reading as well. I reread all these ancient Greek writers madly as I was researching and writing The Priestess and the Slave, trying to internalise the ancient Greek worldview, as well as trying to get straight all the little the details of ancient Greek daily life—and getting the actual history straight. Half of The Priestess and the Slave is set in Delphi, narrated by one of the three Pythiai who served Apollo in his temple there. Although Plutarch lived long after the events of my novella, he was a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and his writings on the oracle are indispensable for anyone who is interested in how it really worked. Pausanias’ Guide to Greece, a 2nd century AD version of a Lonely Planet guidebook, is a treasure-trove of religious and cultural data about Delphi as well as other places, and a lot of fun. I also used masses of secondary sources. Indeed, the first thing I did when Eric said he definitely wanted me to write the book was to order a terrifying number of books about Greek daily life, women in ancient Greece, Greek religion and the oracle of Delphi. Many of them were only available secondhand, particularly Martin P. Nilsson's brilliant works about Greek religion. As they arrived, I built up my mental database of ancient Greek life. This included spending many happy hours looking at diagrams of ancient house-plans and pictures of pottery, including even a reconstruction of an ancient potty-chair for babies. Blackford’s approach was almost the opposite to that of Swiss, even though they both did a great deal of research. Blackford was already more than acquainted with the place and the time, so her focus was on revisiting a once-familiar land and transforming it for the reader. Were there any sources that—retrospectively—were special? Can you tell us something about them? Deborah Swiss: Some source materials surprised me and delighted descendants of Agnes McMillan, Janet Houston, and Ludlow Tedder. While transcribing records at the State Library of Tasmania, we discovered the birth of Janet’s first son, a child who had been unknown to her descendants. His birth linked Agnes, Janet and Ludlow in the most poignant human terms. One joyful research moment took place in a little museum in Lismore, N.S.W. that’s only open a few hours every week. I happened to be on a day trip to the area and by luck stumbled in to take a look with Agnes McMillan’s family by my side. Tucked in the back was a small research room specializing in the town’s early history. Between the pages of a dusty well-worn file was a scrap of paper with the obituary of one of Agnes McMillan’s children. It confirmed that the family had been eyewitnesses to the Eureka Rebellion, a seminal event in Australian history—and the perfect place to end my book. The sources that touched my heart, and carried me through six years of research, were convict descendants who I’m honored to call my friends. I could sense the strength they had inherited from their resilient and determined ancestors. During my last visit to Australia, I had the pleasure of staying with descendants of women who wore the tin ticket. Together we followed their ancestors’ trails from tragedy at the Cascades Female Factory to freedom and family life—a journey in which ordinary women became extraordinary because of the times in which they lived. I can’t help but wonder if the exuberance for life and “mateship” that is so truly Australian finds some of its roots in the country’s convict history, where even today one in five Australians can claim convict heritage. This is an interesting answer. Swiss enjoyed the personal side of the past, both through genealogical research and through talking over family memories with contemporaries. This underlies her role as an explorer of new lands: in Australian history terms, she is still a novice, but an enthusiastic one, with much goodwill and energy. This brings excitement to her awareness of Tasmanian history excitement, but it also leads her into fragile territory regarding historical sources. Descendants are not always reliable sources for events and feelings a century or more ago. The past can be tangled with the present very easily, especially when one is relying on current oral testimony of events long gone. Swiss falls into this from time to time when she privileges her feelings for the modern women about her written sources for their ancestors. Balancing and weighing data and allowing for one’s own views is a problem we all face, however, writing about the past. History is never simple. Jenny Blackford: The French collection of academic articles titled The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks might have been the oddest, but it was quite fascinating. I also adored Diseases in the Ancient Greek World, by Mirko D. Grmek. The Oxford Classical Dictionary is a book for intermittent fact-checking, rather than reading straight, but it is invaluable to anyone with an interest in the Classical world. I used it many, many times a day while I was writing, checking about dates, kings, clothes, funeral practices, and so on. On the other hand, Andrew Dalby's Siren Feasts is a book to devour from cover to cover. Other books on ancient Greek food can be dry and difficult, but this is my favourite. Dalby is a classicist and librarian; he is charmingly erudite and always enthusiastic about the food involved. Siren Feasts gives an accessible, even entertaining, but still detailed and scholarly history of food in Greece, with useful information about foodstuffs in the archaeological record as well as an encyclopaedic view of any ancient texts that mention food. I am very fortunate to have a second-hand copy of a facsimile edition of Sir JG Frazer’s six-volume commentary on Pausanias’s Guide to Greece. It’s a masterpiece of erudition, full of extraordinary—and often useful—facts about history, landscape and much more. Robin Waterfield’s Athens: A History, which I found in the local library, surprised me: it looked light and “popular”, but it turned out to be a masterly synthesis of Athenian history and culture. It’s beautifully written and highly recommended. I can’t speak too highly of the scholarly works of Martin Nilsson on Greek religion. He had an uncanny grasp of the sheer strangeness of Greek religion, and its pervasive nature in the lives of the ancient Greeks. Walter Burkert is brilliant too, of course. Blackford’s approach to her sources reflects her background as much as Swiss’s new world discovery reflects hers. Blackford’s novel is not burdened by the past, but it is very densely informed by it, which is easy to see from Blackford’s answers and even easier to see from the novel itself. Underlying both women’s work is a realisation of the importance of women in the histories they write. In both books, women are the major drivers and the most important people. This is the bottom line. Two quite different works, in two quite different genres and the big question that we were asking in the late seventies and early eighties has to change. We have women’s history. It’s not consistent yet, and our understanding of women in history is still very patchy, but that’s an issue for another day. For today, it’s a moment to celebrate. Not only Anne’s head on a postage stamp, but also that writers like Swiss and like Blackford have made women’s history their history and, by doing that, have made it our history; that they have their own approaches and share their joy in the past. Anne Summers changed the world for historians like myself, but it’s writers who pen works targeted at wider markets, writers such as Blackford and Swiss, who carry the messages onwards. The shape of those messages varies from writer to writer. This is as it should be. Women don’t have just one voice or one history: we have many. Books mentioned in this column:
Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.
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