Nick Brodie’s Kin frames Australian history in family tree

Kin is good history and good family history — a discipline that was frowned upon just a few decades ago.

Nick Brodie’s aims at ‘a national history drawn wholly from the diversity within my own family tree’.

Following a sample of people has proved to be one of the best ways to research Australian history, and not just because personal stories can be so interesting.

Real people keep you grounded. Their actions often contradict official pronouncements, exposing the discrepancy between what is said to have happened and what really happened.

In Kin, Nick Brodie’s sample is his family. The Hobart historian hit upon the idea of relating Australian history through the generations of his family. He does so by following each branch of his family tree. And it works. Brodie’s ancestors guide us through most of the significant events in Australian history since the Europeans arrived.

I particularly like the story of grandmother Daphne, whose life illustrates how women’s roles expanded during World War II. She told her grandson the women’s job ‘‘was to free up the fighting men for overseas service’’, adding she had served first as a member of a Voluntary Aid Detachment, then as an officer in the regular army. She was reticent about revealing any more: Brodie had to go through old newspapers on Trove, the National Library of Australia’s online database, to discover a youthful Daphne’s lively past in print and on stage.

Brodie’s aim is to write ‘‘a national history drawn wholly from the diversity within my own family tree ... that reveals the way in which people make a place their home, and becomes an explanation for why I feel a strong sense of belonging to an entire land. It is not an argument that being Australian is about length of occupation. As far as I’m concerned, there is no room for a hierarchy of belonging when it comes to being ‘Australian’.”

Although some of his claims are too sweeping, his ancestors support his arguments, for example that ‘‘a familial approach to history helps redress Australia’s complex racial history’’. Down the centuries Brodie family members interacted with Aborigines in diverse ways that, albeit not the full story, ‘‘reveal that relationships continued past the moments of first contact and intense conflict and often operated at more personal levels than is often allowed”.

Kin is good history and good family history, representing a transformation that has occurred in recent decades. Less than 40 years ago, few researchers were more despised than family historians. A handful of enlightened academics, Alan Atkinson for example, recognised the potential of family history and encouraged its practitioners, but they were exceptions. Today, senior historians such as Graeme Davison and Penny Russell use family history to examine Australia’s past more broadly.

Brodie had a stroke of luck — a moment of jubilation that many researchers would recognise. One of his ancestors, Joshua Higgs, was determined to get his personal story on the record. He was an old man when he marched into the office of his local newspaper, and the editor took the time to listen.

As well as confirming details in ‘‘the less poetical convict sources’’, Joshua’s memoir revealed the development of the wider district through the eyes of an ex-convict. Unknowingly, he also ‘‘spoke’’ to his descendant several generations on.

His account “reveals him to have been quite a character’’, Brodie writes. ‘‘When I first read it, I could not help but like the old fellow.’’

Joshua explained how he came to be transported in 1826: ‘‘Did I have a free passage? Yes, but I got into trouble in a simple way. My father was a small farmer and dealer near Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge. One night as I was going home from market I met a man driving some three or four head of cattle. The man said he would give me a shilling if I would help him.

“I went with him glad enough, like most boys at home, to earn a little money. But, before we had gone far the constables took us in charge for cattle-stealing. I and the man were sent to Winchester gaol and cast for death, but our sentence was commuted and I was sent out here.’’

Brodie has read widely across two centuries and, in most instances, Kin is informed by the latest research, which makes its analysis of his family context pertinent and valuable. Despite his intention, however, ideology creeps in. His dismissal of Australian egalitarianism, for example, is shaped by a Marxist prism of class and the old trope of the convicts as brutalised victims, both of which views underrate the prisoners — as his ancestors’ stories attest.

The book’s illustrations are well chosen. Turning the pages, readers may have the feeling of sharing a family album of people they have come to know personally.

Babette Smith’s latest book is The Luck of the Irish.

Kin: A Real People’s History of Our Nation

By Nick Brodie

Hardie Grant, 304pp, $29.95