At the beginning of October this year, I completed a read of the ‘Selected Writings of Inga Clendinnen, edited by James Boyce [published 2021; 392 pages]. I’d not previously read anything of this historian and writer and after reading this publication, regretted that fact.
My attention was drawn to the book by a review [written by Tom Griffiths] which appeared in the June 2021 issue of the Australian Book Review. Griffith is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Griffith’s introduction and the topics covered in the selection drew this reader right in. He wrote:
‘It is wonderful to immerse oneself for days in the precise, elegant, passionate words of historian Inga Clendinnen (1934–2016), as this welcome collection of her writings enables one to do. Clendinnen’s distinctive voice comes through: warm, confidential, witty, and driven by a fierce intelligence. All her major writings are here – essays, articles, lectures, memoirs, and extracts from her books – deftly selected by James Boyce, a historian thirty years younger than Clendinnen and himself a highly original thinker and writer. As Boyce observes in his perceptive introduction, ‘Clendinnen’s subject was nothing less than human consciousness’.
I obviously didn’t take that quotation in completely, as it wasn’t until after I’d finished the book, that I realised Inga was no longer with us, having died in 2016!
As for the subject nature of her writings in the selection [of which there are various topics included] those which attracted me initially related to the early encounters of Australia’s Indigenous people’s with the authorities [and convicts mainly] who arrived on the First Fleet in 1788; the early European conquests and encounters with the Mesoamerican Aztecs, early Mexican ‘natives’, and the crisis of those times in the Yucatin; and thirdly, her writings on Nazi Germany, especially in relation to the purpose of, and operations of the Nazi concentration and death camps.
Clendinnen has been described as one of Australia’s greatest writers and thinkers, an internationally celebrated historian and highly original thinker, who through her writings, and lectures, compelled readers or listeners to re-examine accepted histories from new angles, and that aim quickly becomes evident in the subjects mentioned above. Her writing has been described by numerous reviewers and book publishers in terms of an ‘attractive conversational style, with Clendinnen treating her readers as confidants, even collaborators, as she muses over historical dilemmas’. And as she worked through those ‘dilemmas’, she addressed her readers or listeners as equals, as though they were working with her to solve and explain the mysteries of the past. In one of Clendinnen’s own statements, she’s quoted – “I … think my readers are as enthralled by the tough issues as I am,” she writes. “ ‘Popular history’ need not mean – must not mean – dumbed-down history.”
Having said that, I must admit that at times ‘she lost me’ – she was moving too fast, or perhaps introducing so many different and varied ideas in a short space, that I occasionally had difficulty keeping up with her’! Though that is more likely a refection on myself, rather than Inga’s style of communication!
Clendinnen’s work focused on social history, and the history of cultural encounters. She was considered an authority on Aztec civilisation and pre-Columbian ritual human sacrifice. She also wrote on the Holocaust, and on first contacts between Indigenous Australians and white explorers. Interestingly, she didn’t learn to read until she was 8 years old, and also came to writing late. After years of successful academic studies, Clendinnen would hold the post of senior tutor of History at the University of Melbourne from 1955 to 1968, was a lecturer at La Trobe University from 1969 to 1982, and was then a senior lecturer in History until 1989.. She was forced to curtail her academic activities after contracting hepatitis in 1991, and began working on her memoir, Tiger’s Eye, which focused on issues of illness and death.
In his review, James Boyce wrote that Clendinnen’s ‘ability to write serious history for a general readership was unrivalled in this country … Her writings are an enduring testament to the truth that while we might “live within the narrow moving band of time we call the present … the secret engine of our present is our past, with its plastic memories, its malleable moralities, its wreathing dreams of desirable futures”.’
A comment from the Sydney Morning Herald, in May 2021 noted that “ At first glance, Inga Clendinnen’s career as a historian is disorientatingly diverse. Having distinguished herself as a specialist in Meso-American studies, she shifted her focus to Australian history, her personal experience of illness, and then to the Holocaust. This selection of her writings [by James Boyce] captures the underlying principles that were constants in all her work – the importance of emotion, imagination and ethics in illuminating the past, and the belief that history can be conducive to “civic virtue”. The opening piece is a dazzling master class in her method. We are invited to witness an encounter between a pregnant Indigenous woman and a group of French explorers on a beach in 1801, and to enter into the colliding realities and worldviews that still reverberate in our understanding of ourselves as Australians.
On that latter instance, the explorers meant nor did any harm to the woman [or so they believed] who had been deserted by her countrymen when the explorers arrived – they examined her, realising she was pregnant, and attempted to give her presents, afterwards, reporting back to France on the innocence of their encounter with the woman, who when they realised how frightened and crying she was, took leave of her, and watched as she crawled back into the bush, leaving behind the gifts they’d attempted to give to her. Clendinnen asks us to consider the following:
‘What is terrifying is that we do not know, even as we watch her press herself into the sand, as we watch her crawling away. We see her body, but we do not see her mind. What did she think was happening as she felt the hands of these very material apparitions? What did she think was happening to the child in her belly, the child she was desperately trying to protect from their sight and touch? And later, when she crept back to her people, how was she received? Was she received at all? Was she shunned? Was she killed? They would have been watching what happened. They would have seen her hanging in those strange bleached hands. What did they think had happened to the child in her belly? Did they decide to kill it, too? And the man who fled in terror, abandoning his pregnant woman to the strangers. Where would he find his manhood now? We don’t know the answer to any of these questions. All we do know is that no harm was intended, and that harm was almost certainly done…..We don’t know the woman’s story at all…” [p.16-17].
That’s a brief example of Clendinnen’s questioning of history – some other areas covered in this selection include:
- Why did a group of Indigenous people suddenly spear Governor Phillip, a man with whom some of them were on decidedly friendly terms?
- How was Cortés able to conquer Mexico so quickly with only a handful of soldiers?
- What motivated the Auschwitz SS to conduct elaborate parade drills with inmates they’d already reduced to living skeletons?
- She also examines from a personal perspective, her own illness and liver transplant [in the early 1990s], both before, during and post-surgery, and the trauma of organ transplants waiting lists in general from the recipient’s experience. Griffiths notes that at that time that ‘As she lay in a noisy shared hospital ward waiting for a liver transplant, her writing became a desperate means of escape and survival, a kind of private therapy. From that traumatic transformation, she unfolded herself from a chrysalis into a new state of being’.
Incidentally, when Clendinnen became the recipient of a liver transplant, she expressed great faith in the fact that in Australia “it’s strictly democratic … you can’t buy your way into the queue.” She had to wait for that liver like any other potential recipient!
I include here another quotation from the selected writings. In a house in Elsternwick, Melbourne, there is [or was] a constructed model of the Treblinka Nazi camp. This camp, described by one observer as ‘Nazism in full flower’ had a short life – one of four Nazi camps exclusively dedicated to ‘murder’. It was the last to be built, the first to be closed, and afterwards was completely ‘obliterated’, the earth ploughed and a farm house built on the site. ‘Treblinka received its first transport [from the Warsaw ghetto] on 23 July, 1942 and its last in October of 1943. In its brief life of fourteen months, the Treblinka camp processed 900,000 living bodies into smoke, grease and ashes’ [p. 246].
In her usual style of questioning, Clendinnen writes:
‘What the model shows most clearly is how easy mass murder is when emptied of human scruple and emotion. Except for the jocular attempts to deceive the more gullible among its victims [the arch above the station entrance read ‘Rehabilitation and Work-Camp for Jews’], Treblinka might as well have been an abattoir.
Chaim Sztajer’s model reveals only externals. It cannot show us the horror behind wood and metal; what happened inside the trains, what happened inside the buildings. Deportees were brought to the camp in sealed trains, Western Jews typically in ‘normal’ if overcrowded carriages, easterners crammed into cattle trucks with the doors nailed shut and every residual aperture stuffed with barbed wire. They were given no food or water for the duration of the passage, there were no sanitary provisions, and these trains, with nil priority on the track, travelled slowly. The journey from Warsaw, normally a two-hour trip, could take up to twelve hours when the cargo was Jews and the destination Treblinka. We do not see what happened inside the trains. We do not see the frantic haste of the team of work-Jews scouring those incoming cars of the filth of their human cargo to make way for the next set. [The camp siding could only take twenty cars at a time: most trains pulled sixty].
The model shows us a token litter of clothing and possessions in the sorting yard. We do not see the mountains of clothing and boots, blankets and foodstuffs which rose up with the arrival of the richest trains. We do not see the desperate intricacy of the lives lived inside the oblong wooden boxes labelled ‘Living Quarters for Work-Jews’, or the very different lives lived within the boxes named ‘For Ukrainian Guards’ and ‘SS”. We do not see inside the undressing barracks – the bewilderment, the humiliation of nakedness, the mounting dread. We do not see the numb waiting inside the gas chambers, or the clambering, choking, panic. We do not hear the screams..’ [p.248-49].
One could go on with that and/or the other subjects which Clendinnen peruses – the Sydney Morning Herald described her as “both a moralist with an intense psychological feeling for the inflections of cruelty and the reality of human suffering and someone who saw something like the artistic impulse as central to every human and social enigma. To read her is to encounter an intelligence, at once impassioned and fierce, which is a bit like a great critic who has somehow, as if in a dream, found that no book or painting, but the world itself, is her text”.
In her lengthy treatises on the Mesoamerican explorations, she takes us not only into the motivations of the Spanish ‘invaders’, but examines the historical conflicts and cruelties and sacrificial practices between and within the Aztec and native Mexican peoples of those lands – comparing the incomprehensible refusal of the Aztecs to accept defeat, while in contrast, the native Mexicans accepted dominance and suppression by the Europeans as a normal course of their life cycle – admittedly, that’s a very basic and simple description of Clendinnen’s long discourses on those subjects!
Griffiths reminds us that Clendinnen inducted her readers into the wonders of historical thinking. He also suggests that “There are also clear correspondences between her studies of the Aztec Empire’s confronting culture of human sacrifice and her reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust. Clendinnen constantly fought against the sickening of curiosity and imagination in the face of bureaucratic brutality and systematic murder. Empathy and intuition failed her as a means of accessing such past experiences”.
While much of what Clendinnen writes [as far as this selection indicates] could be described as horror stories, which in many cases they are at different levels, I believe it’s clear that a more precise reading, particularly of her books, are worth following through on. Apart from various essays and articles, those books are:
- Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517-1570 (1987)
- Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991)
- Reading the Holocaust (1998)
- True Stories (1999)
- Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir (2000)
- Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (2003)
- True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality (2008) (2nd ed.)
- The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society: Essays on Mesoamerican Society and Culture (2010)
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