Paths of history: stories we choose to tell, by Gillian Polack

This July I'm considering the different ways we can research for our fiction. I know I've done this before and I know I will do this again. It's not my fiction-writing side that pushes me to find more explanations and better explanations. It's my academic side. I’ve been examining how Germans view their Jewish past pre-1700, and comparing that with the fiction we read and wondering how we can beat our own biases. I explored one approach in person, imagining a town as a museum and discovering the stories it told and what the stories missed.

The town is called Eden, and I’m writing from an apartment near Aslings Beach. Eden was named after the first Earl of Auckland. It has a twofold bay, where the waves argue with each other. One set of waves dominates and roars, the other growls. If you listen closely, the soundscape is as complex as the history the people remember and much simpler than Eden’s real history.

Eden almost became the capital of Australia. Before the Europeans arrived, it was the land of the Yuin people, who are still here. How do I know they are still here? A family of them caught the bus with me the day before yesterday. A young family, with possibly the cutest child in existence. I was going to the Killer Whale Museum. That bus trip and that museum reminded me that towns can be a lot more complicated and interesting than the books written about them. Whether this is a story of the family I saw on the bus, Old Tom, a killer whale who bossed a whaling fleet, a Jewish whaler, or the white Christian men the town celebrates (the Imlays, Mr Boyd, Mr Logan, the Davidsons) depends on how you walk down the street, how you interpret the museum, and whether our own biases can be used to redress those in the sources we use for our research.

The Yuin were in what is now Eden long before Cicero wrote about the Antipodes in the Somnium Scipionis. They’ve never left. The Yuin people have an excellent council, and I need to look at what that Council does and maybe ask some questions to delve further into their history before I can understand who they are and what they have done since the first arrival of Europeans here in the 19th century. Why do I say carefully "I need to delve"? Yuin folks are depicted in the Killer Whale Museum and in the street heritage notices as a secondary part of the town’s history. This is a shabby description of ancient history. If you walk the heritage trails, there is better treatment. It’s like Twofold Bay – stand in one place and you will hear something quite different to standing just a kilometre away.

This stranded history where the strands don’t always touch, it hides stuff. Only one man died from whaling in all the decades Eden was a whaling centre. The low death rate looks as if it may well be due to locals sharing their expertise with Imlays and the Davidsons. But was the expertise shared as between equals, or even willingly? This knowledge can’t be gleaned from looking at how history is presented publicly.

Except… when it is. The Yuin are in the museum in photographs of boats in Twofold Bay, but school history, food history, council affairs (except the specific council for Indigenous locals), the management of the town and the life of locals is depicted as white. Even the Jewish residents (not quite white, in Australian tradition) shadow white male history, which is curious, because there are Jewish graves in the local cemetery, an important early shop was set up by someone Jewish, and Solomon Solomons, of a particularly important regional family, was a Jewish whaler.
Now I wonder how many Jewish whalers there are, and whether it's simply that no-one talks about them. There were Jewish pirates and Jewish politicians – why should there be no Jewish whalers? And why do so many fiction writers assume we are all involved in matters financial? Mr Solomons was a vast local importance and his family was of regional importance, so his absence from the Killer Whale Museum is curious. More curious, however, is the absence of most Yuin people in the main history of the region. They have history, and it’s shown, but separately, as if the European-origin culture cannot talk to the Indigenous. The depiction of women in the museum too, makes them secondary to the Really Important People. This is modern Australia in miniature. We set up the history we want to live with and create a past that echoes ourselves. When historical fiction writers use this as a base for writing, the circle is complete.
How to move out of this closed circle? One of the bus drivers of Eden solved this as he explained what happened to the Greenseas Tuna Factory. “You need to ask the right people the right questions,” he said. Why is this not so easy in Eden? The current population of Eden is mostly older people who migrated from elsewhere. They wanted to retire to a lovely town on the coast and they have no knowledge of what came before. The desk person at the Killer Whale Museum demonstrated beautifully how new knowledge is acquired in the region: she is passionate about the Mr Logan who built Edrom Lodge. She is determined to make him visible, because she sees him as unseen. My clever bus driver and the schoolteacher on a stall at the community market both knew her and her passion. It’s a small town: everyone knows those with passion. And so the fascination with one person is reinforced and the wider story of the townsfolk says different things depending on where the story is focused. I have a list of names of people who will know more: I will return sometime and ask them my questions. Time and work break down that circle, and the clever asking of questions.
We seek stories of people like us, for the most part. When I asked about the local inhabitants and their work with killer whales, no-one I spoke to could answer my questions beyond the answers the museum gave. Each of them was focused on what they knew, and on people they thought were like themselves. Sometimes, however, the answers are in sight. I will need to speak to the local Land Council, for example, and the Jewish Historical Society.
I can (and did) also ask different questions. I can look for people who are not quite like others.
In the case of Eden, the most obvious person is Old Tom, a killer whale of great significance. The Killer Whale Museum chronicles his life and his personality and why he was named. His stories show that the real cultural force in the whole whaling industry was not those who sold whale products and made much money: it was the Indigenous whalers who worked alongside the Killer Whales. We know how Old Tom handled his team of orcas to bring whales in for the kill. We know how he let the whalers know they needed to get in their boats and do their bit. We know how he mocked whalers who would not do their share of the work or did not leave Tom and his folks their part of the kill. We even know how he was patted. We also know, mainly from the pictures at the museum, that it was not the white Australians who worked with Old Tom. They were exceptionally skilled people. There was a great deal that was different in Eden to whaling elsewhere, from the number of whales killed (maintaining a population) to the collaboration between human and killer whales and the number of people who died whaling. One. Just one human death. Over decades. Look at an exhibition from a different point of entry and it is as if the whole past shifts and changes and suddenly makes sense.
Whether a writer chooses one strand or two, whether they only see the official history and follow the path of the Imlay brothers down the main street (the Princes Highway, the #1 road in Australia, which becomes Imlay Street as it passes through Eden) or whether the writer challenges standard history and starts to think of the locals who never left ... this rests on the type of story the novelist wants to tell. Most will tell stories that link to known heroes and established figures and will echo the sound of the larger bay. Their research will echo the interests of the new locals, who retired to Eden and don't know its deep history. Their story will reinforce the standard one and will resound and be seen and valued because it echoes what we already know. Other writers will echo the smaller bay and query Old Tom. Rare writers will look at history from somewhere else entirely and will bring us something very special indeed.

Rethinking history with the help of K-drama by Gillian Polack

 

I started watching K-drama because I realised that, when I watched US, UK, or Australian television or read most books, I sympathised with the hero. This was not because I had anything in common with the hero, or because the hero had earned my sympathies through their charming personality or sad circumstances. Even when the hero was intensely dislikable, I cheered them on. This is one of the results of the cultural acceptance of the chief protagonist as being someone who requires that level of audience support in our society. Because I live in a culture that looks for a hero to be the core of so many stories, I have been trained to support anyone who is positioned in a story as a hero.

My personal likes and dislikes were less important than where the character stood in the narrative. This centrality of the hero and the audience need to cheer them on, and our tendency to (also culturally) only allow some kinds of people – white and male, often young – to take that hero role are two of the reasons I have, myself, written heroes are are not male and white, and who manage illness or disability. Knowing that, why was I unable to stand back and decide, early on in a story, that this hero was hurting everyone around him or that hero should be replaced by another? Why did I fall into the path of cheering these heroes on, regardless?

I knew the theory: that it was the place in the story path the hero took. That I wasn't cheering that hero on, but accepting the validity of that narrative path. Given that the hero was seldom from any background resembling my own, it meant that I gave a privilege to that hero (normally, as I said, white and male and quite young but in many types of story also someone who would celebrate Christmas and who had a British or US accent) that I never give myself. I wanted to know what I was not seeing when I followed the hero’s path and cheered him along.

The hero path in K-drama is very similar to that in US television of related kinds. The stories use similar beats and plot points. The main difference is that the hero in K-drama is Korean, not from particular English-speaking countries. This is not a vast difference, but I did not need a vast difference to start to grapple with why I simply accepted heroes – I just needed to see that whenever I watched a TV show I automatically sympathised with the hero, regardless of whether this was a good idea or not. I needed to be able to choose when I cheered the hero on, and that small cultural distancing (Korean heroes rather than American or British) opened that choice up to me. 

Right now, I’m working on both fiction and non-fiction that includes Jewish history in ways we are not used to including them. We have structures for putting Jews in novels, and… I’m breaking those structures. When I began my research (as an historian, initially, and about the same time I started watching K-drama) I saw the use of a set of simple structures informing us that, historically, Jews were mainly money lenders, or were only recent part of European history, or were never fully settled in this place or that, or had earned expulsions, or didn’t exist for hundreds of years in places where they had clearly lived for hundreds before. There were set dates and event by which most popular accounts of Jews in Europe swore as accurate… and very little evidence used to back those opinions. I saw many amazingly good historians simply ignoring European Jews, or giving the same descriptions of European Jewish history and that these same descriptions could be traced back to a single author who themselves had not done any significant research. I saw vast amounts of nineteenth century research ignored. I saw, also, that hate rested comfortably on these same ‘facts’ and narratives. I also saw that most novels reflected this and that Jews were seldom in the novels at all, much less acting as protagonists. The big exception to this was Holocaust novels. It was OK for Jews to be protagonists if they suffered more than any human should have to suffer. This, the fiction and the non-fiction alike, informed the way we see Jews discussed in the press, and in cafes. For me, because I’m Jewish, it’s affected my whole life. Right now, it’s a bit scary to be Jewish in Australia. For twenty-five years I worked with other people to help a whole range of folks to emerge from discrimination and to be treated fairly. I had to leave that environment because of Molotov cocktails and related events. I wrote a little of my experience into The Wizardry of Jewish Women – I was living the history at that point. It’s ironic that what I spent twenty-five years working with others to improve is the exact knowledge I need for my own everyday.  This is why I decided to use fraction of my work for the non-fiction book here (with a few modifications, like this sentence) and share it with all of you. 

Fiction writers and historians have useful perspectives at times like this and I count myself very fortunate to be both. When I realised that I needed to know why all this was so and what wood we were missing by looking at three trees out of an entire forest ,I had the tools to work it out. At that point K-drama merged with popular history. I went to Germany and, thanks to Deakin University and Heinrich Heine University, was able to spend five weeks asking all the questions. I began climbing out of a deep and unhappy hole.

What did I find out? Some of it was blindingly obvious. For instance, the patterns others see or fail to see rest on certain historical understandings, for instance, which gave Christian dominance over interpretations of the past, or that did not see how who knew whom and how dominates the evidence we have and whose past it actually reveals. For some aspects of history this Christian dominance lay at the heart of how a given historian might interpret Jewish history. In these cases, often the focus is on what happened to Christians, without any questions about whether this applied only to Christians or whether minority cultures and religions were also considered. Then the explanation talked about “history of the Rhineland” for example, when it really should have said “Christian culture in the Rhineland” or “Christian history in the Rhineland.”

Other historians focus on written sources (which is most certainly the simplest approach to our complex pasts) without considering who had access to the culture in these sources. Close-knit Jewish communities were influenced by the work of the rabbis and Talmud scholars. But what of Jewish farmers? What of those working in trade or craft who traveled to other countries and even hallway across the world? What of those Jews who were not literate or who turned up to synagogue but led an everyday life where they did not connect with the learned who give us most of our sources? What of those Jews who do not appear in records of customs and tariffs, of law and of politics?

What I learned from this was bleedingly obvious: knowledge is not universal and it is fairer to track it from its source and to see how it spread than to assume a universal similarity of all lives. The concept of a ‘universal Jew’ blinds too many people from seeing the uniqueness and interest in the personal lives of historical Jews. Just as there is no single model for a hero in real life, Jews are as diverse as other humans. They are simply not often depicted this way in historical fiction.

Inherent in this ‘universal Jew’ and other constructs that blind us from seeing the bleedingly obvious is how culture and knowledge are shared. Who we know matters to how we share culture and how we live our lives now, but it mattered far more before the intense communication we assume is standard today. Even printing and affordable books were not available prior to the latter part of the fifteenth century. K-drama was not available in Australia until the rise of streaming services. If we look at broadsheets and chapbooks from the early sixteenth century we can begin to see shared culture and know that it cut across more boundaries, but even then, most people lived in small communities and only some of these communities are visible to twenty-first century folks. Sharing of knowledge usually operated more like chatrooms that contain a few friends than like social media.

Christian-based sources are those most commonly used to interpret western European history. They influence how we describe Europe’s past in general. The fact that only a part of society had been explained is missing from so much of what we think we know. Did you know, for instance, that Charlemagne’s confessor converted to Judaism but still remained close to Charlemagne? Jews are usually invisible unless there is a pogrom, persecution, or a particularly notable individual that not even Christian-origin sources can ignore. It’s a bit like histories that are all about the doings of the good and great and forget that without peasants, most of the Medieval good and great do not have the income or even the food to do the things they do.Peasants also have interesting lives and also are difficult to find out about.

In some regions of Germany, where the Christian majority excluded the Jewish minority from everything important, it may be that the overall stories we tell of those places are as we read them. However… we cannot assume that this is the case. We cannot assume that the story of any majority culture or dominant gender in any place or time is the story of that place and time.

To return to my hero metaphor, heroes may follow similar paths in story, but that is the path of that type of story. It does not reflect other kinds of stories. 

What’s more, the hero’s journey has a very curious and strange relationship to both history and to how we see history.Once upon a time, I attended a workshop at an Arthurian conference: it introduced the hero’s journey. All the key elements of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey were explained in detail. The participants were then given a list of the main attributes of the hero, and the core elements of their journey. The presenter walked us through major heroic characters (King Arthur was his favourite example) and ticked off all the places where the hero’s journey matched the story of Arthur as told by Mallory.

Quietly, I kept my own list. I checked the story of the medieval romance of Alexander, and what we know about the life of Queen Elizabeth I, the life of a famous saint, and two other major historical figures. Between the lecturer’s examples and my own, Elizabeth’s most closely followed the hero’s journey.This is, I suspect, one of the reasons she is so treasured in popular memory. We recognise the path her life followed and transcribe it into popular story. 

It’s very difficult to do this for Jewish history, because very few Jewish lives are explained using that standard story. Even when, as with Elizabeth, the way we see a life might match the hero-journey narrative, very few writers or historians choose it for Jewish history or for the lives of historical Jews. We assume that Jewish stories should be told differently, in other words. Our most common stories about Jews are those of Shylock and Fagin and of victims murdered by hate. We carry these stories into our thoughts about the history of Jews. Every time Oliver! is played in Australia, I see an upsurge in antisemitism.

When friends of mine began to explore Jewish everyday life through looking at accounts and charters and many documents that have never been invisible but that were not looked at closely as sources of Jewish history for those places, I began to wonder about whether I needed to challenge my own view of Europe the way I’d challenged my own view of TV heroes. 

And so we come full circle. I’m almost at the stage where I can look for a publisher for this book. I have a bunch more understanding of why we’re in such a mess right now, politically and socially. Thank you, K-drama, historical novels and Charlemagne’s confessor.

Fighting bad months with metaphor - by Gillian Polack

Some months are created to try us and my August was one of those months. Early on, I knew precisely what I was going to write for History Girls for September. I don’t remember what the topic was any more, but I remember being struck by its lucidity and clarity and logic. Then August struck.

One of the happenings that caused me to forget my absolutely superb plan for this post was a simple burglary. Over 1200 of my books were stolen. Much fiction, some reference, over a hundred cookbooks and several boxes of scholarly history are on the market somewhere, crying to the world to give them an equally loved home. This created such a neat metaphor for how we see the past and why historical fiction is such a wonderful thing. 

It wasn’t the theft alone that created the metaphor. Let me be honest, the theft alone caused me the gnash my teeth and tear out my hair and to forget to eat on one day and to overeat the next. I settled myself down by (in between dealing with all the other events life through at me in August) looking at pictures.

Those pictures explain everything. Maybe. Let me talk about them. 

Think of a marsh. No people. Constant currents pulling at the verges and constant changes to everything. A marsh is stable largely because of its instability. What we see of it is that microsecond only, and the next microsecond we might see something else and the next day, that glimpse we had of overgrown weed might have been dragged somewhere else and the bank it was next to may have crumbled entirely. Or not. Here, have a picture of a microsecond:

If we add people to the marsh, things change. A boat goes down the same path, time after time and so that path is more likely to remain and more likely to actually be upkept. 

Someone sees a crumbling edge and forcibly restrains it. It lasts longer. You can look at it from a boat and say, “I know what this is.”  That bit of the marsh has a story.

The next time you look off to the side on your boat trip, you add the presence of humans to what you see and you read that landscape differently.

Some people do more than reinforce banks or prevent crumble. Some people take that ground they’ve kept stable and build on it. That bit of the marsh has a story we can all understand.

If the marsh is the past, then historians and archaeologists and scientists are the one who make it possible for us to see it for more than the microsecond we move through it. They reinforce banks and make paths for boats and even build the boats. 

Without historical fiction, though, a large percentage of those looking at the past will find tables of data or scholarly interpretation of important documents...but won't see much from them. For some of us, these things are boats through water and commentaries and we can see and understand. Others, however, understand and enjoy more when they’re shown a boat, ushered onto it, and told stories about the surroundings. 

Even on the boat, there are different types of stories for different types of readers. Some like historical fiction that’s as close as it can be to the discoveries and interpretations made by historians. Others want invented names and life dreams given to the houses they can see from the boat.

 

The bottom line is that historians and historical fiction writers might act as if we are at odds, but in cultural terms, we work together. Our memories of the past aren’t wild marsh; they’re formed and contain stories. 

Let me admit, it’s a bad metaphor. But it was a bad month. The pictures I took at the Hortillonages (marsh once, but an important part of the history of Amiens for so very long) will hopefully make up for it.

On History and Medieval Cosmetics - Gillian Polack

I asked my readers for suggestions for this month’s post, and I’m torn between telling you about Esther Abrahams and medieval cosmetics. Of the suggestions, those were the two that have the most interesting stories. 

I chose cosmetics. Not because I can give you chapter and verse on them (which I won’t today), but because in research terms, they’re fascinating. We don’t know much and we can’t know much and yet what we know opens so many doors for us and shows us how women lived. Next month I’ll talk about sources for cosmetics and for other aspects of medieval life: that’s when I’ll point to where to find out more. Today is all about us, and how we see history. Cosmetics are my excuse for talking about my favourite subject.

First, the stereotypes. 

I often feel that I can’t talk about the Middle Ages without breaking down a thousand walls of false assumptions. We all own the Middle Ages. It’s one of the most popular periods in Western history. Owning it doesn’t mean we understand it. Owning it doesn’t mean we know it.

How does this relate to cosmetics? 

We filter our interpretation of evidence about medieval cosmetics through several vectors. One is what we think historians have to say about them. 

Why do I say “What we think”? This question is because I’m full of rhetorical questions today. Obviously I got out of the rhetorical side of bed this morning: the rhetorical side of bed is the side that doesn’t face the wall, it’s the one that forces you to go in that direction. And my brain is a butterfly brain, and it would be helpful if I stayed on topic.

"What we think" refers to the fact that we all carry mental images of the work historians do. There is overlap between these mental images and the actual work historians do, but sometimes that overlap is less than we realise. Kelly Gardiner discusses this in her analysis of the debate from the Historical Novel Society’s Australasian conference recently. She quotes me as saying quite straightforward things because it was a debate and we were all full of soundbites, but the reality is more complicated and can't be summarised in soundbites. The baseline however, is that only a very few people can keep up fully with current debates on what history actually is to us and what cultural functions it serves. These people can often be found between the pages of journals such as History and Theory and Rethinking History, their ideas pressed flat to meet the pages halfway. Most people think history is something simpler and grander. Those who like stability in how they see history (for the theory is constantly changing) are likely to fall into following a particular path of historical thinking. One of those paths is a rather nineteenth century variety. I encounter this latter one a lot, which is why I used it as an example at the debate.

The reason I encounter it a lot is because it’s much easier to relate to historical fiction than the  new histories are. It produces narratives and story without too much angst. It’s straightforward and it has emotional appeal. 

It assumes a static past, where facts can be proven and where we know where we stand. We can argue “Richard III was innocent” or “He was guilty” much more easily using this model, for instance. It’s a popular one because of this. The values system implied by simply demanding that innocence or guilt be proven is part of this way of thinking about history. It’s much easier to interpret history when we can use our own judgement.

The trouble is that history is more complicated than this.

Surely cosmetics aren’t complicated? (I want a live audience so that I can ask someone to ask me this. Then it will be obvious when I’m asking rhetorical questions.) The trouble is that everything’s complicated. We’re reconstructing the past to make sense of it for ourselves. We’re using available evidence. And evidence can include value judgements and our interpretation of evidence can include value judgements.

The ‘fact’ I’ve seen quoted in various places that all medieval women used lead-based paint to make their cheeks white and beautiful, for instance, seems to come from just one source and that source is the same one that hates women for using urea and fish scales (which we still use in makeup:  urea softens things and fish scales make them glitter). The descriptions of cosmetics in his writing is part of a statement about what women ought to be doing and just how mucky things are. The (male) writer is trying to present negatives, and so of course he uses the less enticing methods of beautification. His view of the world colours how he described female beauty, and so does the underlying position he took in this particular piece of writing. Polemic shades the way we all see cosmetics when we read his work unless we recognise it and say “I know what he’s doing” and make allowances or find other sources, or both.

The same applies to statues and paintings. We’re seeing the artist’s interpretation of what they want to carve or paint. In the Middle Ages this was mostly ideal beauty, so we know more about the ideal than about the everyday. The ideal female beauty in portraits and carvings matches very closely to the way a fairy is described in twelfth century French literature, so this is how I teach it. We have Hollywood and advertising. They had Arthurian romances and knights discovering their dream woman: beautiful and rich and powerful and somewhat magic.

Then, elsewhere (in recipes and formulae for medicines) we get an inkling of some of the makeup people actually used. We have toothpaste recipes and we have eyeliner and… we don’t know who used these recipes, or how often or under what circumstances.

Elsewhere, we hear that prostitutes use too much rouge and too much powder and paint their eyes. The implication is that bad women are identifiable and that cosmetics are an important tool for such identification. I’ve wondered for a while whether the warning is to identify prostitutes because they’re providers of services, or because they should be avoided, or because they’re quite possibly a really solid source of local gossip. I think it depends on the viewer. I also think that there are more options than these three. Which one we choose as our own depends on how we read the source, or how we read the information taken from the source and places elsewhere (in a modern text). There are many medieval readings of medieval texts, and there are at least as many modern readings. 

Consensus can be forced. If we agree that only prostitutes wear makeup from that evidence then some late medieval paintings of noble women are of prostitutes. One source isn’t enough to understand a society.

The reality of understanding any object or practice in any period isn’t through one source. It’s not the fairy’s beauty or the “Thou shalt not decorate” of the conservative. It’s all of these and a whole heap more. Historians discuss continually. Interpretations are a moveable feast. It isn’t one interpretation. It’s a series of linked interpretations over time, some feeding into each other and supporting a strong common view and some standing bravely alone.

Fifty years ago we knew almost nothing about medieval cosmetics. Now we are gradually reaching the stage (though we’re not there yet) where we know enough to trace changes over time and place and maybe begin to form some kind of consensus. This is what those changes in the way we view history have given us. We can include archaeological work into our voyage of discovery, and understand how important medieval values are to interpreting evidence, and how important the values of earlier historians are to the way evidence has been interpreted and we can draw our own conclusions from bringing it all together.

This is where I bring things together myself and admit that I chose cosmetics because it’s a good excuse to talk about how wonderful historical study is and how complicated and how important it is to question our own stance at every point. We can’t interpret history unless we have a narrative for it and we can’t have a narrative for it until we understand the narratives we give ourselves. Unless we question the very ground we stand on, our narratives are always linked to consensus narratives. 

I have personal codes for reminding myself of these things. Mine for this is “Not all medieval women who wore makeup were damned.” This is because so many of our assumptions concerning the Middle Ages forget that religious condemnation of makeup wasn’t universal. The code reminds me that I don’t have answers yet, just many questions and a bit of data. That’s why I love history: one never stops learning.