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or open to the future, to recognition of solidarity or community with others? On a further note, it is
necessary to imagine my great‐grandmother as a fully realised sexual entity – something that is not
normally thought of when remembering your relatives. Children just appear – the process is not
discussed, and sexually activity is even less conceived of.
When considering the material for writing the biography of Big Liz, I was struck by the amount of
public records available. However, though these document help to increment our knowledge of the
past, it does not enhance our understanding of it. No set of given events attested by the historical
record documents constitutes the complete and finished story. This is true for the individual, or for
the institution or a nation. In writing my biography the individual and the nation are intertwined as
one provides the context and determining forces that drive the other. Lives are not lived as stories,
even if they are retrospectively given meaning by being transmitted as stories. In casting lives as
stories the variety of interpretations on historical events and the choice of inclusion or exclusion of
data by the storyteller are bewildering. 2 In choosing to focus on one life within this multilayered
historical framework, I am clearly giving a biased vision of general history. These are variations which
deal with the same country, period, and the same events – events whose reality is scattered across
every level of a multilayered structure.
One way of dealing with this is by focussing on local history. Local history gives grounding to the
events that took place in that context at that given time. This is privileging micro‐history over macrohistory.
Place supplies individuals with their spirit and sense of home (or in Big liz’s case, a point of
contrast) what was there about her life in Dicken’s London that shaped her and forged her
determination.
Early 20th‐century Italian historian Benedetto’s Croce’s proposed that “all history is contemporary
history.” Accordingly, the past of places must forthwith be rewritten in light of the multi‐fold and
universal revolution of modernity, which is defined by unprecedented transformations in all realms
of human experience.” 3 Amato claims that this has made the condition of the ordinary, which rests
on the relative stability and repetition of life, extraordinarily uncommon and justifies a reexamination
of the purpose, value, and forms of local history. 4
Localities are as rich in meanings as they are problematic to write about. However they do
provide opportunities to exploit that exemplify general conditions. Two of Big Liz’s children, (the first
and the last born) were claimed as the first white babes born on the respective goldfields, My Lyell
and Thanes Creek. This claim highlights the absence or exclusion of the traditional peoples. Further
the original name for Pratten, the district where her family finally settled, was Darkies’ Flat, so
named after massacres of aborigines who had lived there. This locating of the biography in the micro
makes local history real, which in itself is a microcosm of the national experience.
However, writing my great grandmother’s biography opens up the problem of working with local
history; in that there are many histories, many localities. To discover Liz I need to discover place. And
to do so I must depend on oral history to fill out the historical data. As no written document by her is
known to exist, I must depend on family history and myth. In interviewing the first, second and thirdhand
history tellers, care must be taken to check the veracity of the information. Also care must be
taken with the oral histories because of the situated‐ness of speech acts. One testimony of a
deathbed confession of a crime was denied because I was writing down the information as the
person spoke. This confession had been confirmed to me and another person previously, but the
visual impact of the recording of this confession was too much.
Matching the oral testimony to the events in the historical record means some editing because
the records provide the context and the testimony, the experience. The “overall coherence” of any
given “series” of historical facts is the coherence of the story, but this coherence is achieved by a
tailoring of the “facts” to the requirements of the story 5 . The story can never thus escape from myth.
Most historical sequences can be plotted in a number of different ways so as to provide them with
different interpretations and to endow them with different meanings. This is the mimetic aspect of
historical narratives. 6