The organisation English Heritage has launched a new campaign called History Matters, which aims to find out whether or not – and why – people in the UK care about history.
Setting aside critical questions of Britishness, the campaign has drummed up an impressive line-up of celebrities and historians (and some who are both) to support its aims, and get debate underway. The not-too-subtle message behind the campaign, of course, is that history matters very much, but that it’s important to understand why.
Good question.
The campaign’s declaration reads:

We believe that history matters. A society out of touch with its past cannot have confidence in its future. History defines, educates and inspires us. It lives on in our historic environment.
As custodians of our past, we will be judged by generations to come. We must value it, nurture it and pass it on.

Value it, nurture it, pass it on intact and explored by all means. Search it out. Protect and illuminate it.
But the definition of us by our history is a much more complex matter. Who does history define? How? Does British history define its recent immigrants? No. Does English history define the Scots? Try having that argument in a pub in Edinburgh. Does military history define its survivors? Possibly, but each is marked in his or her own way.
Of course there’s also the much recycled position of Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s true, and also not true enough.
“History is what makes us human,” suggests campaign supporter Dr David Starkey (Tudor and general monarchy expert). “It is collective memory and the country that has lost its sense of history has ceased to be itself.”
Another campaign supporter, actor Gryff Rhys-Jones appeals to the heart: “History matters because of the emotions it evokes. You just can’t measure the importance of how history makes us feel.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. History matters a great deal to me. I read about it all the time, write about it, even dream about it.
But here’s the thing: in the UK, or here in NZ or in Australia, and almost everywhere there are many histories. There’s your top-level kings and queens and chiefs and battles and dates history. There’s military history and economic history and oral history and imagined history and colonial history and anti-colonist history, the stories of the dispossessed, the stories of the unheard, the children and the women and the paupers and cut-throats and sailors and legionaries and firemen and warriors. History is a mongrel.
I’m a mongrel. What’s my history, then? In my family, we can only trace back about a hundred years. Two at the most. Even that’s mongrel. Australian now. But before that Irish, English, Scots, and nobody knows what else. A mixture of faiths, trades, deaths, births and marriages – not necessarily in the correct order. Marks in spidery ink in the pawn shop register (Hegarty, one linen tablecloth, one shilling, redeemed two weeks later, pawned again the next month). A few lines in the Captain’s log. A dusty certificate. Ship registers. News clippings.
Sometimes people say to me – or the limitation is implied in funding criteria or book awards – we must write about our own history, our own landscapes. We shouldn’t write about the history of places on the other side of the world.
But mongrels can be promiscuous, undefined. Should we be limited by geography, by some definition of our cultural ownership or particular histories? Should anyone? And when do we cross the line into appropriation?
Australia’s convict past, for example, is fascinating, but is it more my history than the London or Dublin from which they were sent? No.
Bushrangers? No more than highwaymen or pirates. Possibly the potato famine – but then, that happened in a country on the other side of the world I’ve never visited (yet). It affected my ancestors – does that make it mine?
Maybe one day I will write about my own history: about the wharf, and Port Melbourne, the strike. Maybe one day I will write about my great aunt Madge, the smallest suffragette. Or a stretcher bearer in the Boer War.
Or dancing on the bar in a Sydney pub in the crazy days before the world was affected by AIDS. Before we all grew up.
But the history in my blood is such a mixture that it seems just as right to write instead about pirates in the sea off Malta, or printers in Amsterdam, or the London Blitz. Or dinosaurs. Or football. Or Siberia.
History isn’t just history, after all. It’s also imagination. And that’s partly why it matters.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
~ Herodotus (The “father of history”)

What the hell kind of country is this, with no live tennis coverage on TV?
You can watch netball in prime time and dog trials at the weekends but not the Tour de France. You can watch two full hours of Coronation Street, but only ten seconds of the women’s final on the news – if you’re lucky.
(Of course, you can pay for it by subscribing to Sky Sport, but then you’d be forking out for year-round rugby union replays interspersed with the odd other sport every so often, when there’s a break in the rugby. Instead, this household subscribes to Sky movies, so that we can watch silly Will Smith movies all afternoon purely out of resentment that there’s no BLOODY TENNIS.)
At least we get the FIFA World Cup.
But I never realised until last weekend’s quarterfinals (at 6am) that there aren’t any ads on TVNZ on Sunday mornings – that’s so Presbyterian. I didn’t realise because I never watch it and you can guess why without me resorting to any more unseemly capital letters.
So if there ever was such as thing as free to air coverage of the world’s greatest sporting events, we wouldn’t miss a second of it.

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
~ James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

I’m reading at seven libraries this week, as part of the kids’ holiday program. Here are a few of the highlights, all of which, of course, come from the audience – much more interesting than the author:

– Where’s Anthony Browne?
– Don’t be stupid. Girls aren’t pirates.
[and then, following assurances of historical fact, “That’s not even true.”]
– Nana, I love you [“I love you, too,” said Nana from the rear of the room, “now sit down and listen to the story”.]
– What’s that great big thing on your head? [It’s a mole. And it’s coming off next week, but thanks for pointing it out.]
– Are you Margaret Mahy?
– Pirates are really ugly, aren’t they?
– I’ll swab the deck. That sounds good. What’s swab?
– No, let’s not read that book. Let’s read a different book.
– They better not feed ME to the sharks. I’d just eat those sharks right up.
– How do you find the pirate treasure?
– Can you read three more books? OK, two. And then another one.

(That’s all quite apart from the girl who asked if I used to wear my eye patch when I was a pirate)
We’ve made treasure maps and pirate hats, we’ve dressed up, we’ve even played pin the parrot on the pirate’s posterior, we’ve eaten quite a bit of treasure, and we’ve read pirate stories until we’re hoarse.

Now we need a cup of tea and a good lie down.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerers and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”
~ Virginia Woolf (1932)

The Hegarty clan has a new member: Eve Ferrier, born yesterday morning in Melbourne, weighing in at a svelte 8 pounds 4 (we don’t do things by halves in my family).
Welcome Eve. I’ll be over there to read Olivia to you in a couple of weeks.
I’m sorry your parents have not bowed to the intense lobbying to name you after me, but maybe next time. I’ll start the campaign as soon as they wake up.
If your great-grandfather were still here, he’d be singing, “Thank heaven for little girls” all over the hospital, as he did when I was born, and when your mother was born. If you hear a faint song on the breeze, that’ll be him.

One of those silly quizzes, this time on topic (as opposed to “Which B-grade country and western star are you?”). It also features quite funny questions, in a pirate kinda way. And, as you can see, they even cater to those concerned about gender neutrality.

Apparently, I am … wait for it … A Pirate!
Oh good. I love a plunder.
Take the quiz: What Type Of Swashbuckler Are You?

In The Times, Amanda Craig reviews two time-slip novels for young readers I’ve been anticipating with some relish: Gideon the Cutpurse, by Linda Buckley-Archer, and (ring the bells and deck the halls) Jeanette Winterson’s first children’s book, Tanglewreck:

What is particularly interesting is that, where adult novelists such as Audrey Niffenegger and Liz Jensen have recently used time travel to explore romantic love, these children’s authors use it to explore the moral debt adults owe children – a challenging preoccupation that guilty parents will recognise all too well. The special nature of childhood rests on having the luxury of time, as Dylan Thomas’s great poem, Fern Hill, recognises.
Tanglewreck, like Gideon the Cutpurse and Kate Thompson’s The New Policeman, is partly a satire on our current perception that we all have too little time due to a change in the nature of reality, rather than our own greed and impatience.

Love a good cutpurse story – I have a hankering to do a highwayman novel, meself. Someone’s also recommended Charley Feather by Kate Pennington.
I’m less keen on timeslips, with some notable exceptions (such as Stravaganza), but find myself in the middle of writing three of the buggers so it must get into the blood somehow.
Been out on the North Shore reading at two libraries today. As there are little kids there I have a secret cache of pirate picture books in case they get bored with mine, which is for 9 to 12 year-olds and gets a bit scary for young ‘uns.
I wasn’t so impressed with Cornelia Funke’s Pirate Girl when I read it, but can report it goes down a treat – if you ham it up enough and read it with your eye-patch on. Now I think it’s hilarious.
One girl asked me: “Did you used to wear that eye patch when you were a pirate?”
What can one say to that but: “Of course”?

Woke up this morning at six knowing it was the 90th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the day on which more soldiers died than on any other day in British (and Commonwealth) military history: 20,000 souls in a matter of hours.
The numbers have so many noughts as to be almost mind-bogglingly meaningless: 420,000 British casualties for the entire mess known as Somme, which dragged on until November 1916; 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans. That’s over a million people killed, wounded or ill from trenchfoot, gas poisoning, tuberculosis, shell-shock.
All those men – and the women in the support services – woke up on this morning ninety years ago knowing they were about to be thrown into something momentous, purgatorial, unprecedented. But even they had no idea what was about to descend upon them. Imagine waking up that morning, in the dark – if you’d slept at all. Imagine crouching in a hole in the ground as the greatest artillery storm the world has ever known flies over your head – hopefully. Imagine climbing up out of the hole to greet the bullets.

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air…

Alan Seeger’s rendezvous came on July 1. An American poet who had lived in Paris before the war and fought with the French Foreign Legion, he was 28.
Whole villages were effectively wiped out in minutes as the Pals Battalions, men all recruited from the same area, walked or ran or crawled into the machine guns. The haemorrhage didn’t stop for another two years.
The end result was that the Allied front line moved forward six miles, ground lost later in the great German push of 1918.
I meant to be there, on the other side of the world today, but then remembered that battlefields are best visited alone. I went to Gallipoli alone. I certainly wouldn’t want to be there with a million other people. And the stretch of countryside around Albert and Baupaume, the fields near Pozieres, the little towns and the memorials: for all of those I need time and solitude.
Half a world and a lifetime away, I feel like I know it already, that unconsecrated ground. I’ve spent years with my head wrapped in the Somme for a book I once wrote, that has never seemed quite finished or quite good enough.
But this morning, in the dark, I suddenly realised what’s wrong with the manuscript and how to fix it, and had to get out of bed urgently and scribble. We all pay tribute in our own ways.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.
~ Walter Raleigh, History of the World