Agent Of Change: Clare Wright
“Sometimes feeling held in all your messy humanity is more important than feeling better. ”
Award-winning historian, Professor Clare Wright OAM, is the author of four books, including the Stella Prize-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka. She is professor of history at La Trobe University, hosts the ABC Radio National history series, Shooting the Past, and co-hosts the LTU podcast Archive Fever.
What’s the most startling thing you have found in researching the history of Australian women?
When you read most accounts of the past, it is as if only men were within cooee of the action. But there are very few stories in which women did not have some part to play. Court records, newspapers, travellers’ journals, letters, government files, they are all full of the names and actions of women – Sometimes colluding with, sometimes contesting the men in their lives; sometimes asserting their rights independently, sometimes fighting for other peoples’ rights. Writing history is about the questions you ask of the past. If you ask the right questions — or even just one question: what were the women doing? — you will find the answers. The problem is, for the most part, it is men who have written history and they have left the ambitions, ideas and achievements of women out of the story. This is why I say I don’t write women’s history, I write Australian political history with the women put back in.
You’ve written about women’s role in key events such as the Eureka Stockade and the fight for suffrage. Where else have women been neglected in Australian history?
Everywhere, women are everywhere you look. Women churning the butter and baking the bread and mending the fences and birthing the babies and hiding the fugitives and riding the horses and milking the cows and digging the yams and digging the minerals and healing the wounded and climbing the mountains and fishing the seas and leading the protests and abetting the murders and aborting the babies and tending the fires and lobbying the politicians and being the politicians and changing the nappies and changing the laws and writing the books and painting the pictures and building the communities and raising the funds and educating the children and leading the charge and taking the risks and fielding the blows; and defending the country and discovering the secrets and patenting the formulas and preaching the gospel and seeding the future and singing the past. Everywhere you look there are women. Just keep looking.
It’s been a big news year, with bushfires, floods and COVID-19. Which important story was under-reported?
Good news story: The renaissance in Indigenous storytelling in Australia. First Nations writers have been at the forefront of literary achievement in 2020, with Tara June Winch, Tony Birch, Bruce Pascoe, Melissa Lucashenko, Stan Grant, Natalie Harkin, the Gay’wu Group of Women from North East Arnhem Land, Thomas Mayor, Tyson Yunkaporta, Ellen Van Neerven, Claire G. Coleman, Alexis Wright and Aileen Moreton-Robinson dominating awards and sales. In April, as a response to COVID isolation, lawyers Teela Reid and Merinda Dutton started the Blackfulla Book Club on Instagram to share their love of blak literature. To date it has amassed almost 25,000 followers and now hosts online events. In her acceptance speech for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, Tara June Winch said that “our healing is bound with your learning”. I reckon our learning starts at @blackfulla_bookclub.
Bad news story: While it is cutting funding to the ABC and throwing universities to the wolves by denying them access to JobKeeper, the Morrison government has steadfastly pushed ahead with spending on the twin extravagances of military hardware and military remembrance – $270 billion in defence spending over the next decade; $500 million in an expansion of the Australian War Memorial that not even the architects of the Australian War Memorial think is necessary. Meanwhile people — disproportionately women — are going to starve, and miss out on education, and lose their homes, and be abused and murdered in their homes, because we continue to define “national security” as defending our borders from alien encroachment.
Have recent events changed your view of the world for the better or the worse?
I am a glass half-full kind of gal. I tend towards optimism, cheerfulness and trust. (In fact, my psychiatrist once told me she’d never met a more Pollyanna person … I don’t think it was a compliment.) My career as a historian tends to reinforce my positive world view: we live in a fundamentally safer, kinder and fairer era than past generations. In the West at least, we live longer. Eat better. Rarely die in childbirth. Educate our girls. Have legislated out slavery and voted in universal suffrage. But yeah, a global pandemic and resultant economic crash is a good way to dampen your spirits. I fear that gender, racial and income disparities will widen. I fear for the hopes and dreams of our young people. And I fear that the climate crisis will be overshadowed by the economic one. But I also see the hot fury of the Black Lives Matter movement as a kind of silver lining. People are aggrieved and grieving and sometimes it takes a “nothing left to lose” moment in time to challenge the status quo sufficiently so structural change, not just cosmetic reconstruction, occurs. And Donald Trump will probably lose, reinforcing my view of the world that bad things ultimately happen to bad people.
What has been the most hopeful thing to happen lately?
I’m pretty certain that the way that professional people work is going to change forever. Women have been crying out for decades for more flexible and family-friendly workplace cultures and regulations. Up until four months ago, it’s been, “no, no, we couldn’t possibly schedule remote access meetings so that you can drop off your kids at school” or work from home when your kids are sick and still be able to participate in corporate or institutional decision-making processes. Zoom has made us all realise that the technology is there so that women and men can blur the boundaries between their domestic and professional responsibilities without being perceived as less committed or productive workers. The downside of four months’ worth of wall-to-wall online connectivity is, of course, that we are all Zoomed out and dying to have IRL staff meetings and office drinks.
And the most disappointing?
The willingness of the Morrison government to use the pandemic to opportunistically continue its ideological attack on the arts and higher education has been breathtaking. But by the far the most distressing thing to emerge from COVID-19, however, is the readiness of some sectors of our media to target and vilify certain communities as human agents of mass destruction. Race – and class-based profiling, blaming, scapegoating and hating – is a time-honoured method of dealing with social dislocation and economic stress. It’s not simply disappointing, it’s downright reprehensible, that our leaders refuse to denounce those who reach for the tools of discord. Too often, it’s the leaders themselves casting aspersions, whipping up fear and loathing.
What is one skill you are still trying to master?
Not checking my phone when I’ve told myself I’m not going to check my phone. I decided to take a break from social media earlier this year in order to focus on writing my next book, free from the endless distraction and short concentration span that mobile phone addiction creates. I lasted a full three months and then COVID struck and the world fell off a cliff, and I reached for my phone like it was a parachute that would give me a softer landing. It hasn’t, but every time I’ve tried to break up with Twitter I’ve not quite managed the final goodbye. (NB: I’ve not yet tried to master the skill of trapeze, but one day I will. I want to learn how to fall, gracefully, and with a net!)
What novel, film or album do you turn to when you want to feel better?
Joni Mitchell’s Blue is the album I play on loop when I am feeling off-kilter. It doesn’t exactly make me feel better, but it allows me to feel soulful or torn to shreds or melancholy or wracked with longing or self-obsessed or hideously pre-menstrual or delightfully alone. Sometimes feeling held in all your messy humanity is more important than feeling better.
Which memory do you return to again and again?
Have you got a sealed section?
Interview_ Ute Junker
Photo_ Miguel Bruna/UnSplash