ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of EmotionsEurope 1100-1800

“THE PAST IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO

BE”A REFLECTION ON THE FUTURE OF THE HISTORY OF WESTERN

AUSTRALIA

Philippa Maddern

The most recent Australian Historical Association Conference

Index entries for Western Australia and Tasmania in Clark’s A History of Australia, vol II

Examples of Western Australian history ‘localising’ national histories.

Vera Whittington Gold And Typhoid: Two Fevers: A Social History Of Western Australia, 1891-1900 (1988)

J.S.H. Le Page’s, Building A State: The Story Of The Public Works Department Of Western Australia, 1829-1985 (1986).

What is a history of emotions?

• the history of how peole have felt/expressed familiar emotions (anger, love, fear) in the past? (Eg. Barbara Rosenwein, Robin Corey, Jean Delumeau)

• a history of what emotions have been taken to be-how they have been understood and analysed in the past? (Eg. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions (2003))

• cultural history of how emotions have been regulated or governed by social norms in the past (Peter Stearns and ‘emotionology’)

• an investigation of the ‘emotion work’ of the past—in politics, society, culture, even economics (cf.. Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear And Anxiety: Writing About Emotion In Modern History’, History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003), 111-133 .)

What sort of social and political ‘work’ can emotions do?

• divide a population into categories that may cross class, gender and ethnicity

• instigate and inscribe power-relationships

• cope with widespread social anxieties by replacing them with more directed fear or anger

Sharon Crozier-de Rosa, ‘Shame, Feminine Sacrifice And The Great War In British And Australian Anti-feminist Discourse’ (an AHA 2012 paper)

What sort work could histories of emotions do for Western Australian history?

• open up possibilities for WA to become not a local version, but an exciting and integral part, of Australian and world histories

• enable us to reach back to earlier eras than the formation of the Western Australian state

• enable us to make distinctive contributes to studies of how emotion inflects contact histories between first peoples and settler-colonists worldwide

• open up questions of emotion ‘work’ iimpacted on Australian Asian relationships through to the 21st century

• put Western Australian history in its true, and vital place in the great narratives of world history.