WEEK 2 TUTORIAL: Introduction – We're History

(15 March – )

Discussion of course outline and allocation of tutorial topics. One aim of the course is to further our understanding of ourselves as part of a historical process. Think about how you yourself are a product of historical developments that have taken place over the twentieth century. How much do you know about your family’s past? About how your parents met? About how your grandparents earned their living? About how war and depression touched their lives, in Australia or elsewhere? Has the family moved up or down the social scale over the last four generations? What have been the great journeys undertaken by your family? How have widening educational opportunity, shifts in the workplace and increasing urbanisation affected your family? What shifts have taken place in cultural, religious, national, ethnic identifications? How have shifts in gender relations, sexual identity and marriage patterns affected different generations? Over this century, what have been the gains and losses - material, social, cultural, spiritual - of your family? You might also think about the relationship between history and its more public uses in the present.

In this week’s tutorial you also need to make arrangements for next week’s exercise.

Essential reading

Richard White and Penny Russell (eds) Memories and Dreams: Reflections on twentieth-century Australia Sydney 1997 Introduction
Reminiscences of the 1950s by John Lack and Marian Quartly in John Murphy and Judith
Smart (eds) The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s
Melbourne 1997 (special issue of Australian Historical Studies 28(109) October 1997)

Additional reading

Darian-Smith, Kate and Paula Hamilton (eds) Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia Melbourne 1994 ch. 1
Davison G 'The use and abuse of history' Australian Historical Studies 23 (91) October 1988.
Knight S The Selling of the Australian Mind Melbourne 1990 pp 55-65