Contemporary Australia and its Jewish Past, by Gillian Polack

 I’ve been explaining Jewish Australia to many people recently. This is because the antisemitism here is hurting.

Why is this emerging right now?

At the special memorial event at the Opera House on the Day of Mourning (yesterday, from where I’m typing), many Australians were shocked when they heard the perfectly normal (for Jewish Australia) reminder not to hang around and chat, to keep an eye out, to leave quickly. Until that moment, I think everyone thought their Jewish friends lived as freely as they themselves did. On top of the murders at Bondi Beach, this was an eye-opener. Why was it an eye-opener? 

Jewish Australians have not been treated well for a while now.

Bigots are saying that Jews should leave Australia. We’re not considered Australian. A new migrant said that to me personally last week. That they're working towards citizenship makes them more Australian than my five generations of family. I love it that they are becoming citizens, but my father’s mother’s family were citizens at Federation, and were here decades before then. They don’t know this. It’s not actually conceivable to them that any Jews might be born in Australia.

When someone tells me this, I talk history. History helps lead into a discussion of what is Jewish Australia and what its origins are. It also helps us understand that narratives about Jews in Australia help support the bigotry.

So what is the Jewish history of Australia?

It began in 1788 with the First Fleet and the initial colonisation of Australia by the British. There were a number of Jewish convicts on the first Fleet and at least one Jewish free settler.

That free settler was a baby, Roseanna or Rosanna. Her mother was a 15 year old convict, Esther Abrahams. Esther fell into an arrangement with Major George Johnston, one of the leaders of the Rum Rebellion and they became one of the power couples of the colony. To put the rebellion into perspective of British history, the governor they deposed was Bligh, the same Bligh who suffered the mutiny on the Bounty. Bligh’s daughter kept the rebels at bay with a parasol, but that’s another story. 1808 was an exciting year for the colony.

Eventually Esther married George, but they had children together before that. Those children were baptised, but their older half-sister remained Jewish, to the best of my knowledge. When Johnston was on trial in the UK for his role in the rebellion, Esther managed his holdings and pretty well managed the whole of the colony of NSW, to boot. A friend once drove me down a wide road and announced, “This is the road Esther used to race on.” She raced carriages, of course, and I cannot think of a better start to Jewish life in Australia than Esther winning her carriage races.

I was going to give you a proper potted history, but the carriage racing has led me astray. I’ll tell you about just a few of the more interesting people. I shall eschew chronology and wander wherever I feel like… until I reach the point I intend to eventually make.

First, let me wander back to the UK. A book was published there in 1890. It brought English fairy tales to life and it was written by Joseph Jacobs, who wasn’t an Australian citizen - he was a subject of the British Empire, since Australia didn’t exist at that time - but he was born in 1854 in Sydney. He wasn’t the only Jewish writer from Sydney (not by a long way), but he was one of the most influential. He gave so much of the world their standard versions of English fairy tales. He had a splendid career as a folklorist, and he also spent much of his life fighting antisemitism. He died in New York in 1916, from memory.

I don’t know why I must move from a renowned teller of fairy tales to orcas, but I must.

Last year I spent a week in Eden, exploring several subjects for my fiction. Eden is a beautiful town in the very south of NSW. It was a whaling town for a long time, since before European settlement, I suspect. Why do I suspect this? Its whaling process included locals from old Yuin families. Teams of orcas work with teams of humans. The death rate of humans in this type of whaling was phenomenally low and the orcas punished the humans if the humans didn’t behave and… I need to find out more. While I was exploring, I discovered… one of the whalers was Jewish. His name was Solomon Solomons and I am currently trying to work out if one of his relatives married one of mine.

The important aspect of Mr Solomons was not the whaling. That’s just a curiosity. His importance was that he represents a number of families who, when they came to NSW or to Victoria, set up shops and trade and even hotels in the new country towns. Without these Jewish families (including mine) Australia would have been an entirely different country. From the 1820s through to the 1930s, a single large family would help hold together a whole region. Smaller families (my mother’s grandfather’s, for instance) would connect two or three towns. Colonial Australia was all about farming, and the farmers needed goods. Not all goods were provided by Jewish traders, but that connectivity was terribly important.

It led to bright young Jewish men being brought up rurally, who then went to the Big Smoke and made it big. One of these men was Isaac Isaacs, from Yackandandah, who helped bring about the White Australia Policy (where Jews were never quite White) and who was also Australia’s first home-grown Governor-General.

Jews were not considered White in Australia under the White Australia Policy, but individual Jews were given a kind of honorary status under it. Sir John Monash (who is the main reason many in Australia’s military right are not antisemitic) didn’t benefit from this. When I chatted with locals in the Somme region a few years back, they were very surprised. They had no idea that he was Jewish. 

He nearly didn’t get the job that saved all those lives because of those lobbying against a Jewish solder becoming a general and leading at such an important time.

How did this antisemitism operate? How does it still operate)?

Violent antisemitism used to be much rarer in Australia than it is now. The quiet discrimination against individuals, even those as acclaimed as Monash, was far more typical.

There was some violence (a letterbomb led to a cousin of mine being unable to walk half a century ago, for instance), but mostly it was graffiti, and snark and discrimination. The nicer side of antisemitism was “Keep your differences to yourselves and avoiding being to obvious and we’ll accept you.” This is why so many people were surprised by the closing comment at the memorial: they had no idea that our everyday was different to theirs.

I always describe this as a Gentlemen’s Agreement variety of antisemitism, because it has a fair amount of overlap with the style depicted in Hobson’s novel. It goes right back to the early colonial days. It meant that Jews were accepted in places and professions, but not all. My great-uncle was unable to join the same golf club as his friends, for instance, and, years later, I was told, “You don’t have the right background” for certain other activities. This is a deep current in Australian culture, and still applies. Chanukah on the Beach, the event where so many people were murdered, was criticised just last month because “If Jews hadn’t been out there, celebrating, they could not have been killed.” We’re denied speech in this place and that right now because, “It won’t be safe.”

I can’t help but thinking that this would be a lovely element in an historical novel. That small thing, that trifle, that can change a whole plot. However… while it’s easy to write about the famous people in Jewish history. It’s not so easy to write about the rest of us. We’re not in historical novels. In fact, not even the famous Jewish Australians are in most historical novels. I did some research into Jews in novels by Australian historical fiction writers years ago, and there were few and none of them were major characters. No Esther Abrahams, no Rosanna, not even John Monash.

This is part of the hiding. Historically, some events expose us and make us visible. The Holocaust was one such thing. Bondi Beach in December was another. Yet the work of Linda Phillips to get Australian singers known and to compose and to give cheek to the very misogynistic journalists she worked with is only known to her family. How I know it, in fact, is because she was my father’s first cousin. She lived across three centuries and changed the world around her… but she was Jewish.

I will be writing more about our history, I think. There’s so much fodder for novels… but not if it’s hidden alongside most of Jewish Australia.

T

Seasons

The history of seasons isn’t always what we think it is. Using the Australian summer as a baseline, when I was a child the Christmas cards all had snow on them. The pavement melted with heat and yet we were expected to believe that snow was going to fall. 

 

During the last forty years, Australia has finally come to expect that summer falls when summer falls, and that Christmas and New Year are warm. An interesting effect of this is that some people have asked “How were the seasons described in Australia prior to European settlement?” In my region, there were six seasons and those six seasons changed when certain plants bloomed, or when rivers filled, or when animals and insects were on the move. 

Because the seasons were described by set events rather than by fixed dates, they're a lot more precise than the European seasons translated to Australia. Some of our more recent popular beliefs work with the six season description, too. For instance, in Canberra, we say that heaters go on every year on ANZAC Day (25 April). Winter doesn’t begin until June: the imported seasons don’t match the calendar, so local customs act as a corrective. 

Jump back to England in the Middle Ages and this kind of discrepancy abounds. Chaucer describes April showers, but one of the key moments in the year isn’t in April, but on 25 March. The key dates for new year, tax, in fact, for most things were linked to key religious moments in the Christian calendar. One has to look at records of weather to find when the seasons changed, and one of the records of weather patterns is in literature. 

I should sit down and look at the studies of weather patterns for a region, and compare the literary and other documentation that show how people saw seasons, and compare them with that Christian calendar and the way it shaped peoples’ lives. Then I can see just what the differences are between the way I live the seasons and how they are described for my own life and compare that to the Middle Ages. 

I don’t have time for this, unfortunately. My research is in quite different fields right now, and I don’t even have the excuse that it will help my next novel. I suspect that this post is my reminder to myself that, one day, when I have time, I want to do this. It’d take a week, for I already have the resources and… I really want to know. What gaps were there between the documented seasons and the way people lived in the seasons in, say, thirteenth century England? 

This post was brought to you by a long summer’s night in the middle (of course) of a heat wave. January is not a cold month where I live.

Following in the Footsteps of Dirk Hartog by Rosemary Hayes

In October 2016 I went on a month long trip promoting my shipwreck books in Western Australia and taking part in the celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Dutch mariner, Dirk Hartog, in Shark Bay, 500 miles north of Perth.

My fascination with the 17th and 18th century Dutch voyages began eight years ago when I visited the Shipwreck Galleries in Fremantle for the first time.

I was aware of the powerful Dutch East India Company (the VOC), its establishment of headquarters throughout Asian countries and, in particular, its hugely profitable trade in spices: during the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ a handful of nutmegs was so valuable that it was worth more than the price of a house and just a single nutmeg would buy you a horse! But what I didn’t know was that, by 1617, all the great VOC trading ships were required to adopt the new Brouwer route, sailing South from the Cape in South Africa before turning West to pick up the ‘Roaring Forties’ winds and then North towards the East Indies, parallel with the coast of Western Australia or, as it was called at the time, ‘The Unknown Southland’.

The Shipwreck Galleries were a revelation and as soon as I entered I was hooked. As I stared at the salvaged hull of the doomed ship Batavia, at the stone blocks destined for the castle gate in Java and all the rescued artifacts and then read about the mutiny, the shipwreck, the massacre on the Abrolhos Islands, the eventual retribution and the marooning of two young mutineers in 1629, I knew that this was a story which would haunt me and that some day I’d have to write about it.

Why had I never heard of this appalling event in Australia’s history? What if those two young men, Jan Pelgrom, a cabin boy of 18 and Wouter Loos, a soldier of 24, had survived and integrated with the coastal aborigines? If they had, then they would have been the very first European settlers in Australia, nearly 150 years before Cook sailed into Botany Bay!

Since then, I’ve been on quite a journey. I have written two books about the early Dutch shipwrecks off the West Australian coast, ‘The Blue Eyed Aborigine’ (about the notorious Batavia’ shipwreck) and  ‘Forgotten Footprints’ (about the wreck of the Zuytdorp which disappeared in 1712, dashed against remote cliffs, but with evidence of survivors) have visited the Abrolhos Islands where all the Batavia horrors occurred, toured schools in the Eastern States, flown over the Zuytdorp cliffs, travelled by boat parallel with Red Bluff, South of Kalbarri, from which so many early Dutch mariners took their bearings, given the Batavia lecture at the Maritime Museum in Fremantle and, most recently, had an unforgettable trip from Yallingup in the South of the State up to Shark Bay, speaking to schools and other groups about my books and about the rich maritime history of Western Australia and shadowing the voyage of the Duyfken, a replica of the smallest ship of the first fleet to set sail from Amsterdam in 1595.

The replica Duyfken took nearly three months to sail from Bunbury in the south of WA, calling in at ports as she made her way north, with a fantastic exhibition about the Dutch traders and welcoming thousands of school children and others on board, finally arriving in Shark Bay in time to mark the 400th anniversary of the landing of Dirk Hartog at Cape Inscription.

I felt very privileged to be part of the celebrations, to attend the moving opening ceremony, watch the procession of cardboard boats made by local children, admire the costumes for the 17th century ball, crawl over the Duyfken and travel across to Dirk Hartog Island and see the new commemorative plaques and the cleft in the rock into which Dirk Hartog had rammed his original post, with a flattened pewter plate attached. On the plate he had scratched a record of his visit to the island. Its inscription (translated from the original Dutch) reads:

1616 On 25 October arrived the ship Eendracht, of Amsterdam: Supercargo Gilles Miebais of Liege, skipper Dirch Hatichs of Amsterdam. on 27 d[itt]o. she set sail again for Bantam. Deputy supercargo Jan Stins, upper steersman Pieter Doores of Bil. In the year 1616.

The day I left WA to return to the UK, I was able to fit in a visit to the newly opened exhibition at the Maritime Museum in Fremantle – ‘Travellers and Traders in the Indian Ocean’ and see the original of the Dirk Hartog plate (on loan from Holland and having just been brought over by the Dutch King and Queen) and to learn that the very latest research will soon be available into whether Western European DNA found in some Aboriginal coastal tribes can be traced to pre-settlement days.

And yet, whenever I go into Australian schools and ask the question: ‘Who was the first recorded European to set foot on Australian soil?’ nine times out of ten the answer is still ‘Captain Cook.’

Our thanks to Rosemary Hayes for posting this while Celia Rees is delayed in Italy by Ryanair

Vanished: The Most Mysterious Missing Children Cases from History – By Anna Mazzola

Missing children make headlines: Madeleine McCann, Ben Needham, Jaycee Lee Dugard, Mary Boyle. They also line our bookshelves: The Girl in the Red Coat; What She Knew; Local Girl, Missing; Then She Was Gone.

While we often think of the preoccupation with lost children as being a modern phenomenon, it is in fact an age-old fear, one that is reflected in the lost and abandoned children in fairy tales and myths – Persephone, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Snow Queen.

Here I look at some of the infamous cases of missing children throughout history, focussing on cases that remain unsolved or shrouded in mystery.

1. The Lost Children of Hamelin

1592 painting of Pied Piper copied from the glass window of Marktkirche in Hamelin

Many of us remember the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Few are aware that the legend came from a true story, one that is one recorded on the walls of a 16th century building in Hamelin now called The House of the Piper: ‘In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were seduced by a piper, dressed in all kinds of colours, and lost at the calvary near the koppen.’

The earliest mention of the Pied Piper, in the 1300s, was on a stained-glass window in the Church of Hamelin, which showed a man dressed in colourful clothing leading away a line of children. The earliest written record is from the town chronicles in an entry from 1384 which states: ‘It is 100 years since our children left.’

Although much research has been conducted over the years, there is no agreed explanation as to what happened to the children. Some believe they died of natural causes, were drowned in the nearby river, or were killed in a landslide, with the Pied Piper representing the figure of death. Others say the children may have died of the Black Plague (though the Black Plague didn’t reach Germany until later) or that the story represents mass emigration. Maria J. Pérez Cuervo explores the various theories in her excellent blog piece here.

What is clear is that there were no rats in the original story. They were first added into the story in a 16th century version, and are absent from earlier accounts.

2. The Princes in the Tower 

Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury were 12 and 9 when their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had them locked up in the Tower of London in 1483. This was supposedly in preparation for Edward's forthcoming coronation as king. However, they were taken into the ‘inner apartments of the Tower’ and then were seen less and less frequently. In July 1483 an attempt to rescue them failed. Then they disappeared altogether.

Richard took the throne himself, becoming Richard III, and many believed he had the princes killed in order to secure his hold on the throne. Certainly that was the complexion Shakespeare put on the story. But there are many other potential murderers including Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, or Henry VII. Some have suggested that the princes survived. In 1487, Lambert Simnel initially claimed to be Richard, Duke of York. From 1491 until his capture in 1497, Perkin Warbeck claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, having supposedly escaped to Flanders.

In 1674, workmen at the Tower dug up a wooden box containing two small human skeletons. King Charles II had the bones buried in Westminster Abbey, where they remain, untested. In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth Woodville (the parents of the lost princes) discovering a small adjoining vault. This vault was found to contain the coffins of two unidentified children. However, no inspection or examination was carried out and the tomb was resealed. The fate of the princes remains unknown.

3. Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony

Virginia Dare was born in 1587, the first English child born in the New World. Her family was part of a group of 120 Englishmen and women who settled on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now Dare County, North Carolina. A few days after Virginia was born, her grandfather, Governor John White, left for England to obtain more provisions. When he finally returned three years later, Virginia and the entire colony had vanished. Only one clue remained: the word ‘CROATAN’ had been carved on one of the settlement's posts, leading many to believe that the Croatan tribe had kidnapped or killed the settlers.

Governor White and his men continued to search but never found any trace of Virginia or the other settlers. Roanoke Island became known as the Lost Colony.

4. The West Ham Vanishings

During the 1880s and 1890s a series of children and young adults disappeared from the East End of London. The first to vanish was Mary Seward, 14. The second was Eliza Carter, 12, who was reported to have been terrified of a man, or of returning home. The blue dress she had been wearing was recovered from West Ham Park, all of the buttons sliced off, but she was never seen again. The third to disappear was her friend, Clara Sutton. The fourth was Amelia Jeffs, 15, who lived on the same street as Mary Seward. However, Amelia, or “Millie” was found, violated and strangled.

In a 2016 book, Rivals of the Ripper, author Dr Jan Bondeson put forward the theory that a builder named Joseph Roberts, a key suspect in the murder of Amelia Jeffs, was responsible for both the West Ham vanishings and another series of horrible crimes against young girls in Walthamstow in the 1890s.

Others have suggested that, given reports of several strange individuals, including women, in the West Ham vanishings, the abductors may have been human traffickers. No one, however, was ever convicted, and most of the girls were never found. The story was partly the inspiration for my novel, The Story Keeper. 

5. The Strange Case of Bobby Dunbar 

Four year old Bobby Dunbar went missing on a family fishing trip to Swayze Lake, Louisiana, in 1910. After an eight-month nationwide search, investigators believed that they had found the child in Mississippi, in the hands of man called William Cantwell Walters. Dunbar's parents immediately claimed the boy as their missing son. However, both Walters and a woman named Julia Anderson insisted that the boy was in fact Anderson's son. Julia Anderson could not afford a lawyer and had three children out of wedlock, making her an unworthy witness in the eyes of the court, and they eventually found for the Dunbars. Percy and Lessie Dunbar retained custody of the child, who lived out the remainder of his life as Bobby Dunbar.

However, in 2004, DNA profiling established that the boy found with Walters and ‘returned’ to the Dunbars as Bobby had not been a blood relative of the Dunbar family. The fate of the actual Bobby Dunbar remains unknown.

6. Walter Collins: ‘The Changeling’

Nine-year-old Walter Collins was abducted from his home in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, in 1928. His disappearance received nationwide attention and the LAPD came under increasing public pressure to solve the case.

Five months after the disappearance, a boy claiming to be Walter was found in DeKalb, Illinois and the police organised a public reunion. However, at the reunion, Christine stated that the boy was not her son. Despite the fact that dental records proved the boy was not Walter, the police had Christine Collins committed to a psychiatric hospital for her refusal to say that the child was her son. Only after the boy admitted he was Arthur Hutchins Jr., a runaway from Illinois, did the police release Christine. She went on to win a lawsuit against Captain Jones of LAPD, but he refused to pay up.

Walter Collins, left
Arthur Hutchins Jr, right

Walter was later determined to have been murdered by Gordon Stewart Northcott in what was known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. However, Northcott repeatedly changed his account, and seemed not to know what Walter had been wearing, or the colour of his eyes, leading Christine to believe that her son was still alive. He was never found.

The story formed the basis of the 2008 film Changeling.

7. The Sodder Children of 1945

On Christmas Eve, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder home in West Virginia. George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and four of their children escaped. However, the bodies of five other children – Maurice, 14; Martha 12; Louis, 9; Jennie, 8; and Betty, 5 – were never found. No remains were located in the ashes the morning after the fire.

Throughout their lives, the Sodders believed that the five children had survived. They disputed the fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical. They believed that they had been the victims of arson, leading to theories that the children had been taken by the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps in retaliation for George's criticism of Mussolini and the Fascist government of his native Italy. There were various alleged sightings of the children, including a woman who claimed to have seen the missing children peering from a passing car while the fire was still raging, and another woman who said she had seen the children a month after the fire ‘accompanied by two women and two men, all of Italian extraction’.

The Sodder family converted the site of the razed house into a memorial garden to their lost children. Until the late 1980s a billboard remained at the site showing pictures of the five dark-eyed children and offering a reward for information. The Sodder’s one surviving daughter, along with their grandchildren, have continued to publicize the case and to search for answers. See Karen Abbott’s fascinating piece in the Smithsonian for more.

8. The Beaumont Children: Australia’s Lost Family

At 10am on January 26, 1966, Nancy Beaumont kissed her three children  - Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4 – before they boarded the bus for a short trip to Glenelg beach near Adelaide. She never saw them again.

Witnesses confirmed the children had made it to the beach and reported seeing them with a ‘tall, blonde, thin-faced’ man in his mid-30s. The last known sighting of the children was at 3pm, when they were seen by a postman they knew, walking up the main road in the general direction of their home. They were holding hands and smiling. They were alone.

The search for the children attracted wide media attention, with various suspects, hoaxes, and theories emerging over the years, and still making headlines over 50 years on.

Neither the children nor any of the items they were carrying have ever been found. For many years, their parents, Jim and Nancy Beaumont, remained at their Somerton Park home, hoping that the children would return. However, they later divorced and are now living separately, away from the public gaze. They still believe that their children may be alive.

9. Megumi Yokata: Kidnapped by North Korea

In November 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota went missing while walking home from her school in Niigata on the Sea of Japan coast. Twenty years later, her family were told she had been kidnapped by North Korean agents. In 2002, North Korea confirmed that it had operated an abduction program, stealing people from Japan and forcing them to teach Japanese language and culture to Pyongyang agents.

Five of the kidnapped were released. However, North Korea claimed that another seven abductees had died of illness or in accidents, and that four others had never entered the country. They said that Megumi had committed suicide in 1994, and been cremated.

However, according to Japanese officials, DNA testing on the cremated remains that were sent to the Yokota family showed that they did not belong to Megumi. Further, her death certificate appears to have been falsified.

To this day, her family, and those of the other abductees, are fighting for answers.


__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, will be published on 26 July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Pictures of the Past

I get to talk about history a lot. One of my favourite moments is when people show their emotions about the past. So many of us care about a period or a moment and that passion comes out in conversation. Because I’ve been working on theory (again) I want to talk about this at a vast and deep cultural level. It’s not vast and deep that brings out that passion, however. 

This month you get a few scenes from my photo collection, and I’ll tell you just a little about why I took the picture. I’ll share joy instead of theory. And if any of you want to share things you love about history (places, people, periods) I’d love to hear about it in the comments. This is a difficult year for many of us, and happiness is worth sharing.

Near Melbourne, 1976. Photograph: Gillian Polack

Hopetoun, Vic. 1977, Photograph: Gillian Polack

At Versailles, 1986. Photograph: Gillian Polack

Ueno, Japan, 1986. Photograph: Gillian Polack

Peterborough, 1986 Photograph: Gillian Polack

The first picture is friends discovering the town of Emerald and the Puffing Billy train. My friends were new to Melbourne and this was the day they looked at each other and said "Yes, we all belong."

The second is a school excursion to the Mallee in Victoria in my teens. This is when I realised how powerful photographs were for memory.

My visit to Versailles was when I was doing work for a doctorate. I wondered if there was a way of  taking the pcitures so that you couldn't see anything modern in them. This was that experiment. The Ueno picture is from earlier that year when I was on my way to England and France to Sydney, just to give you a picture of the young photographer.

For the last picture, we've gone forward again. My first cloister garden. Since then I've taken thousands of pictures of medieval buildings. With each one I understand the Middle Ages just a little more.

And I'm sorry for the delay in getting the comments up - I was unexpectedly in Exeter.

A conference! Australia and historical fiction, by Gillian Polack

My special event for September was the Historical Novel Society of Australasia’s conference. Every two years it happens and every two years it’s very special. I had to skip the evening events, because my life is just a bit fast-paced right now. Over coffee the following mornings I found out how splendid they were. The round table was particularly good, I heard, with people talking about diaspora and change. This set much of the conference up for how fiction and how history fed into the society we know. They’re not independent from our lives. 

Opening ceremony, HNSA, Photo courtesy HNSA

During my first masterclass, this approach came up a lot. We talked about silencing and about what responsibilities writers had and how to be ethical and still write the amazing fiction one dreams of. I seem to be teaching this a lot recently, which is good. 

I love it that so many writers care about living in a better world and don’t just say “This is my dream novel – I’m not interested in finding out how it affects others.” These days more and more writers are asking “How can I know what goes into my fiction. How do I understand what baggage I’m carrying and how do I make active choices to write responsibly?”

It wasn’t just my masterclasses. It was most of the panels I attended, and it was one of the academic sessions, and it was one of the subjects that many people chatted about during breaks and over drinks in the evening. Being a fiction writer has cultural consequences and so many writers are saying “I can write my best work and still be aware of those consequences.” This is one of the reasons I respect writers so very much. Not all writers. Some are still shuttered in a closed world. But so many of the ones I’m working with admit that fiction is an active part of creating culture and that we all have a part to play in the way the world works.

Over the weekend there was a lot of attention paid to developing good writing. Some people donned mail and helmets. Some checked out costume (and Rachel Nightingale wore one of the costumes, for she was the one doing the teaching). There were craft workshops and subject-matter workshops, and manuscript assessments. I brought in some of my teaching objects and we used them in my masterclasses and even in one panel. 

I delivered a paper, photo courtesy HNSA

Linking up the physical world with story is a complex business and it was fascinating to see how different writers reacted to different objects. A group of audience members for that panel were romance writers. When we sat round after the conference had finished and they said “We would’ve reacted differently.” I brought the items out again, and we explored them from a new angle and it was fascinating to see how each writer had perfectly useful approaches to transmuting an object into a part of a story: all of them were valid. For one writer a potsherd wasn’t useful at all, and for another it became a whole story.

What was really interesting was the number of non-writers attending panels that I’d mentally assumed were mainly for writers. Someone asked a question of my panel from the audience and prefaced it with “As a reader…” Australian readers love finding out how writers think and what techniques writers can use.

Discovering history over food, photo courtesy HNSA

We’re living in a difficult historical moment. This kind of thought and questioning give me hope. This conference was very good for my sense of what the future might be if everyone keeps the levels of inquiry and questioning this high. What’s particularly important to me is that novelists and their readers (both!) are taking on this understanding that history is not static. That we interpret the past all the time. That not all interpretations are equally safe for all of us. The interpretation we each choose matters.

This is where organisations like the HNSA make a difference. 

They’re publishing most of the academic papers in November or December, by the way, so you’ll be able to explore some of the topics for yourselves. All the best of the discussion was ad hoc, so my recommendation is that you have a dinner party. I would say that, for I’m back into historical food. Pity my friends…