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INGA CLENDINNEN HAS GIVEN the 1999 Boyer Lectures, in their 38th year -- 40th year, if you count the two ABC Lectures before they were re-named for the late Sir Richard Boyer, the chair of ABC who inaugurated them. The Boyer Lectures are a fine tradition. Some citizen who has made a mark on our cultural, social, scientific, artistic life is invited to tell us what is uppermost on her or his mind, and to open a public conversation with us about it.
It must be a daunting task to do so conscientiously, to discover what singlemost important thing one wants to say, and to have the courage to say it. And to do it on radio. The words flood out on radio -- but to whom? and to where? Probably to the edge of the universe that's where. All that talk-back and the Boyer Lectures on their million years voyage! In the beginning was the word. In the end was the word.
Radio listening is such a lateral pursuit -- for driving, gardening, cooking, washing-up. Radio listening is on the fringes of consciousness. Unless, of course, you are one of those walkers with a Walkman in your ear and a vague smile on your face.
Writing for hearing is a very different thing to writing for reading, too. The spoken word is so wasteful of time, and is so naked. The ear can't hear ahead, as the eye can read ahead. The eye absorbs so much more, even to the very structure of thinking in paragraphs on a page. The eye catches contexts whole, dances backwards and forward, finds meaning in a change of font, voices in a quotation, knows where there are lateral pursuits.
So Boyer-ing is a brave art. Inga Clendinnen is a brave artist, though, as anyone at LaTrobe University these past thirty years will tell you. While making her name on a world stage with two brilliant books (Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (1987) and Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991)) and writing several prize-winning articles in the most prestigious international journals, she has always been a feisty champion for creative education. She was a founding member of what was for a time Australia's most remarkably polyglot history department. 'Keep the bastards honest' was her motto long before the Democrats. She opened wide the small window of opportunity at the beginnings of education institutions when it is possible to do what works rather than what is presumed to work.
Her students didn't 'do' history. They wrote it. They grew within themselves by writing true stories out of as foreign a past as they had ever encountered. They weren't spectators to this past. They were observers with their cultural antennae at their peak, reading colours and shapes as much as words for their different meanings. They saw differences that way. The past was not themselves in funny clothes. The past they observed worked with other metaphors. Of course, they saw themselves reflected in their own observations. They learned to know their own plagiarisms, sensed that they must go out of themselves to see, caught their own tricks of the trade, knew the reach of their certainties and their doubts. They were being educated in their own 'narrative imagination'.
Inga Clendinnen modestly credits a philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, with the notion of how 'narrative imagination' promotes civic virtue. But long before Nussbaum, Inga was using narrative imagination -- true stories -- to promote responsible citizenship in a complex world by educating -- by educing -- 'an ability to critically examine oneself and one's traditions; an ability to see beyond immediate group loyalties and to extend to strangers the moral concern we 'naturally' extend to friends and kin; an ability to see unobvious connections between sequences of human actions, and to recognise their likely consequences, intended and unintended'.
'History' is a word that will defeat anyone who wants to say something unexpected about it. There are too many presumptions in everybody's minds about 'history' to be heard to be saying something different. Everybody knows too well what their 'history' is to be persuaded that it could be different or that it might have changed. It is hard to believe that any civic virtue will be promoted by the 'more history' cry that is to be heard at the moment.
Inga Clendinnen doesn't call for 'more history'. 'True stories' is her phrase. It is a phrase to listen to. True stories are experienced, not learned. True stories tell us who we are as much as who somebody else is. True stories don't reflect the world, they change it. To tell a true story is to gamble a little, to take a risk. It is a performance of a sort. True stories cost. We have to give up something of ourselves in true stories -- something of our gender, of our age, of our class, of our colour.
And true stories never end. You can't encompass true stories in a six volume History of Australia or an Oxford or Cambridge Companion to this and that. True stories are mysterious. There is no closure to true stories. There is always another true story to be told. Who can put an end to either the getting of wisdom or the getting of knowledge?
In the last sentences of her Boyer Lectures, Inga Clendinnen suggests that the endlessness of story-telling is not a progressive march forward. It is a 'crabwise approach, eyes swivelling sideways, backwards, forwards, with equal intensity, because while the past is past, it is not dead. Its hand is on our shoulder'. Her six Boyer Lectures are that sort of nervous sideways glance that we make as we feel a touch so personal as a hand on our shoulder.
They begin with 'An Incident on a Beach' in 1801 when the French scientific expedition under Nicolas Baudin came upon a pregnant aboriginal woman who freezes with fright under their gaze. That gaze is well meant but harrassing and harming nonetheless. Inga's unravelling of the unintended consequences of the encounter sets the tone for all her subsequent stories. The contradictory George Augustus Robinson, the aboriginal Protector in Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century, and the maverick anthropologist Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land in the near mid-twentieth century use their giving relationship with the aboriginal people to discern hidden significances of resistance and identity behind the public face of the First People.