In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance,” and Public History

Abstract

In the last few decades the nature of history making, especially that regarding the contemporary era, has been transformed, changing not only the pasts that are being related but the way in which many people relate to those pasts. The shift in the nature of historical knowledge and historical sensibility owes much to both popular and academic forms of history; indeed, it is largely the outcome of a convergence of the interests and approaches of elite history and culture with those of popular history and culture. Generally speaking, history making has been democratized, but more particularly there has been an unprecedented rise in the significance attributed to experience and thus to testimony. People who have experienced an event and bear witness to it have come to be regarded as the most authentic bearers of truth about the past, indeed as the embodiment of history, and their accounts are increasingly received by many as a substitute for the history of the professional historian who seeks to record and explain a past event. This phenomenon owes much to the fact that we live in a global world in which an ideal of human rights has triumphed, a politics of recognition calling for acknowledgment of the collective experience and identity of minority groups has flourished, new institutions and technologies providing a sense of immediacy have expanded, and a culture of intimacy has become dominant in public institutions, not least in the media. Together, these changes have placed the personal at the center of public culture and put emotion on display; the