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2010 HISTORY FESTIVAL: WRITING THE PAST
Saturday 13 March 2010, 9.30am - 5pm
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History, and historians, can be riveting, entertaining, and richly informative. Even funny. History can explain the world and place us in a better position to deal with the future.
Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath
How to Write History that People Want to Read (UNSW Press, 2009) |
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“Writing the Past” is the name of the 2010 History Festival and it’s a deceptively simple one. It is certainly a good definition of the broad genre of history writing, but we could hear this title in another way. Perhaps as “Righting the Past”.
All writers can be said to be making the world right. Telling a story their way, making their world, introducing characters and a situation and then making it “turn out right”. Even a sad ending can be the right one, for that story, for that writer and her readers. Perhaps all writers are therefore, in their individual ways, creating the “right” story.
Doesn’t this also apply to history writing? Isn’t it also “righting the past”, trying to tell a story, a true story, in the right way? Doesn’t it show the reader how a particular piece of the past should be seen — this person’s life, that story of a nation, a crime in high or low places, the tale of a city or of a local community? But immediately problems arise. Which voices to choose? Whose perspective to write from? What research to select, and what to discard?
These and many other questions will be asked at this the 2010 History Festival. A wide variety of writers will be on board to help. Some are professional or academic historians, others are novelists. All will be able to advise and inspire history writers.
MARK ROSSITER, Festival Coordinator
New in this festival ...
On the Veranda
Come and join us on the veranda for post-festival drinks from 5pm to 6pm.
Find a Fellow Writer
Or a writing group: pin a card on the board with your project details and contact information.
Download a PDF of the festival program here.
PROGRAM
| 9.00am-9.30am |
REGISTRATION |
| 9.30-11.00am |
 Opening: Writing the Past
An Indigenous storyteller and her dramaturge, a historian who has published on history writing, and an Australian freelance historian talk about what writing the past means to them.
Peter Cochrane, Cathy Craigie, Leanne Tobin, Ann Curthoys
Chair: Paula Hamilton |
Opening Panel in Double Room |
| 11.00-11.15am |
MORNING TEA |
| 11.15am-12.45pm |
Local/Community
 Important history isn’t always “big” and “somewhere else”. Stories worth telling and hearing can be right next door, within our own communities. Our local historians discuss how to find them.
Bruce Carter, Mark Dunn, Lisa Murray
Chair: Sue Rosen |
 Crime and Politics
A true crime writer now researching a C19 gang rape outrage, a political novelist and a writer on the Cold War and Soviet espionage spill secrets on the gritty business of writing crime and politics.
Tom Gilling, David McKnight
Chair: Camilla Nelson |
| 12.45-1.30pm |
LUNCH |
| 1.30-3.00pm |
 Sydney Stories
A fascinating mix: early C20 crime photographs, tales of Aboriginal Sydney, capturing the whole city in a dictionary and a very personal story of Sydney.
Peter Doyle, Shirley Fitzgerald, Peter Read
Chair: Delia Falconer |
 Biography
There is properly no history; only biography. So said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Our panellists, who have written about writers, politicians and other historians, compare notes.
Meenakshi Bharat, Jacquie Kent, Mark McKenna
Chair: Paul Ashton |
| 3.00-3.15pm |
AFTERNOON TEA |
| 3.15-4.45pm |
 Historical Fiction
Begging, borrowing or stealing from real history to make fiction. Hear our novelists talk about their art.
James Bradley, Ashley Hay, Catherine Jinks
Chair: Tom Gilling |
 Memoir & Individual
This panel investigates that most intimate form of writing, one’s own history, the memoir. How can individual voices be captured and held for posterity in the rush of our everyday lives?
Margo Beasley, Gabrielle Carey, Robert Gray
Chair: Shirley Fitzgerald |
| 5.00-6.00pm |
"On the Veranda"
Come and join us on the veranda for post-festival drinks. |
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