Opening Speech
Seamus O’Hanlon
School of Historical Studies
Monash University
It is a great honour
to launch this exhibition tonight. I have been a fan of ephemera in
both a personal and professional sense for some years now. As a
would-be punk and then (second generation) Mod living in Adelaide in
the early 1980s I was fascinated by the music, styles and ephemera
(clothes, posters, record covers, badges etc) of the London punk
scene of the mid-1970s, but also of the Mod movement centred on
Carnaby Street and Chelsea both in the 1960s and as it was then
reincarnated through groups such as the Jam, the Specials and others
in the late-1970s and early 1980s. I still have some of these things
I collected in those days. I should probably consider donating them
to a museum or library at some stage, but I suspect my reluctance to
do so is related to a concern that I don’t want to be considered an
historic relic at the grand old age of 43! I must say though, that
it is very disconcerting to see many of my current students dressed
in similar styles as I wore then or listening to similar music as I
was into. That is the problem with history I suppose, it catches up
with us all!
As I say my interest
in ephemera is professional as well as personal. When researching
Melbourne's interwar flats for my PhD thesis and first book I
stumbled upon the wonderful Williams real estate collection at
Melbourne University. That collection - boxes and boxes of
advertisements for then new and exotic household appliances such as
fridges, telephones, irons, even electric heaters, as well as floor
plans, rent rolls, rent demands, and letters of complaint about
tenants, neighbours and landlords - brought to life Melbourne’s
rapidly developing flat world in ways that government reports or
newspaper accounts could never do. These things show us that
ephemeral items, which might at first glance look like rubbish or at
best nostalgia or novelty, can become important and enlightening
entrées into the past.
As some of you may
know I have recently co-edited a book on Melbourne in the 1960s, in
which I have perhaps gone back to my teenage years to uncover the
world of Mods, Sharpies, Hippies and Surfies, although this time
those based in Melbourne, rather than London. In Go! Melbourne in
the Sixties I drew on music magazines, posters and concert
programmes to uncover the history of vibrant youth cultures and
music scene in Melbourne in that decade. What these ephemeral
sources can open up to us is the ways in which social and
demographic change, when combined with technological advancements,
can alter the most basic ways in which we live. A history of the
1960s that didn’t recognise the impact of the music and youth
industries, would be as absurd as one of today that didn’t recognise
how the internet and the mobile phone has changed our world 40 years
on.
Other contributors to
the book draw on pub and restaurant menus, newspapers and magazines,
food and drink advertisements, photos, even record covers to
illuminate the history and culture of the 1960s. But in doing so
they tell us more than just about what people were eating, drinking
and reading. They also tell us about the impact of migrant groups on
our society, the changing status of women, and even the slow moves
away from a British-influenced to a more American (or possibly
global) sensibility, especially amongst the young.
In my latest project
on the economic, social and cultural changes seen in Melbourne since
the 1970s, I hope to again use similar (possibly off-beat) sources
to attempt to capture life as it was lived in the everyday, as
people attempted to cope with and adapt to the problems and the
opportunities brought about by the move from a industrial to a
post-industrial, multicultural society. I am already speaking to
Richard Overell about possibly using some of the images and objects
we see before us here tonight as part of that project.
As Graeme Davison
notes in his introductory essay for this exhibition, for a long time
historians shied away from ephemera as a reliable source, perhaps
because it was too ordinary, too everyday to be the stuff of real
History (that is History with a capital H). These days we can’t seem
to get enough of ephemera in our work, but, who knows, if we move
towards some form of official or approved history curriculum we may
find ourselves back relying solely on Hansard or Cabinet minutes to
get a sense of the past. That may be no bad thing, but we can only
hope that those who come after us will recognise that while good
History requires a big picture and a strong narrative to succeed, it
also requires recognition of, and empathy for, the daily lives of
people from all walks of life. We need to recognise that is often
the most familiar things that help us to understand the past, and
more often than not it is these things that help us to keep History
alive and make it interesting and relevant to future generations.
This is the beauty of ephemera and what makes collecting these
things so important.
My congratulations to
Richard and his team for this wonderful exhibition. I commend it to
you and I am pleased to declare it open. |
