2004: Making Connections Symposium - Institute for Public History

Session One: Families making history: the Halls, the Hungerfords and the Hassalls

Marian Quartly (Monash); Anna Clark (Melb); Peter Sherlock (Melb)

What do Australian genealogists do, and why do they do it? Each speaker is investigating his or her own family history in order to address this frequently overlooked question. All three are academic historians - so what happens when family histories are rewritten in the light of broader historical debates and knowledge? What might family historians and academic historians learn from each other? In this session, the histories of the Hall, Hungerford and Hassall families are studied. Quartly examines how women have acted as custodians of family traditions, Clark investigates what is passed on, and what is forgotten by white Australian families, and Sherlock questions the idea of the 'pioneer' as a way of understanding emigrant ancestors who moved around the British empire.

Session Two: Family circumstances: Considering Ethnicity and Gender

Carolyn Landon (writer and co-author of Jackson's Track,Memoir of a Dreamtime Place) - Silences: drawing out, listening to and hearing the Aboriginal stories about Jackson's Track

In 1996 Daryl Tonkin decided to break a long silence and tell his story of life on Jackson's Track. What were the historical and cultural reasons for his silence in the first place and what gave him the courage to finally begin talking? What is the impact of his act of storytelling? And what will follow? How will the way Tonkin has constructed his story influence the stories of others who experienced the same events? How can the differences be reconciled? What is my role - the interviewer/writer's role - in all of this?

Liz Rushen (RHSV) - Tracking the invisible: re-constructing lives of C19th women.

During the years 1833-1837, just under 3000 women arrived in Australia as part of the first scheme to address the imbalance of sexes in the colonies. Who were these women? What were their motivations in coming to Australia? What records remain of their lives? What do their stories tell us about their translocation experiences? The role of family historians in piecing together the evidence.

Session Three: 'Creating the family'

David Garrioch, (Monash) Birth Control or Self Control? Birth rates and family size in history

One of the first things most genealogists encounter is amazing variations in family size: sometimes large numbers of children, sometimes only one or two. Drawing mainly on 17th to 19th century European material, this talk looks at the reasons why family size varied so much. It puts child-bearing into the context of social and medical conditions, and asks how families coped. It also raises some questions about the uses of birth control in the past, and how historians have approached this most private area of family life.

Peter Sherlock (Melb) Inventing ancestors: the politics of genealogy in England, 1550-1750

In early modern England, thousands of elite families produced elaborate pedigrees, family histories and monuments to their ancestors. Local historians spilt much ink on the descent of land from one generation to the next, and the heralds travelled the kingdom interviewing the landed gentry to authorise or discredit their claims to bear a coat of arms. Many of these family histories involved fabrication and downright deception. So what did all this activity mean? What prompted this widespread interest in genealogy, and what was the purpose of researching and circulating a family history? What might this tell us about the popularity of family history today?