I saw a documentary today.
Was it "First Australians", episode 1? I've seen that. I have the whole thing on DVD, but I haven't gotten around to watching the rest of the episodes.
That documentary made me realise how little I really know about my own country's history. I mean, in school you learn some of the important dates and you learn a bit about the societal structure and such, but what you don't learn about is the
people, and the real
feeling of the time. I mean, I knew that Arthur Phillip was the first Governor of New South Wales but I had no idea if he was good, bad or indifferent, pragmatic, idealistic, brutal, gentle, loved or hated. I just knew he existed.
I mean, here's the equivalent of what I knew about 18th-century Australia as applied to the 1960s: "There was a war in Vietnam, which Australia fought in alongside the Americans. Kennedy was president of the USA but he was killed, then Johnson was president, then Nixon. There was the Civil Rights Movement, which resulted in the outlawing of legal discrimination." And that's it. A lot of
facts are there, but the real
truth isn't. There's nothing there about what it'd actually like to live through it, to really
feel it.
History is a story -- or rather, many stories. The reason why people enjoy historical films or books or whatever is because they do more than just show you the stats of what happened when and where and how much: they tell a story -- a (preferably) true story -- about how it was for the
people of the time, how they lived or didn't live through that particular time period, what their
lives were like. And even with narratives on an epic or even global scale, it still comes down to people and human feelings -- the wills of the leaders, the feeling of the masses, why some course of action was taken or not. Most chapters of Look To The West are impersonal accounts of alt-historical events in one country or several that can span several years -- and yet each time we are given detail, motivation, execution and ramifications. Think how dull LTTW would be if it were nothing but a list, summarising important dates and events in bullet-point form.
Maybe if we were taught history as a story and not as a list, we would learn more from it.