A Year of Anxious Historical Fantasies
I moved on from the fever-dream imaginary games of childhood and a teenage obsession for any-and-all Keira Knightly period dramas with the naive plan to spend adult life as a historian.
At seventeen, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts with a major in history. I spent the next three years bathing in the past through mass readings turned into long essays guided by professors whose voices echoed the lecture halls. The mystery of all that had ever happened could become known through structured academic rigour — or so I thought.
During my undergraduate degree, friends and family gifted me history books prompted by my obnoxious studiousness. But I didn’t know about Byzantium, Georgian daily life, or the lost gospel of Josephus — I knew the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the transatlantic Slave Trade. It felt irresponsible to dip into these random slivers of history sitting next to tousled gift wrapping.
I graduated from my degree with the realisation history jobs mainly existed in academia — as if all the adults in my life hadn’t already warned me that no history job was waiting on the other side of my dreams. I didn’t want to give my energy up to a career detached from public life, forever chained to university politics. I pivoted into the arts industry. Then, surrounded by peers fixated on contemporary art, my obligation to history lived back in my mind as the gifted history books sat alongside battered textbooks on the shelf.
As COVID-19 began to spread five years since graduation, the impending time at home opened space for self-indulgence away from responsibility. The gifted history books shined on the shelf, their spines still stiff, their timelines not yet in my periphery. Such an offering of connection was irresistible. I pulled out Istanbul by Bettany Hughes. I am a slow reader and the incoming, open-ended hours were prime to sieve its excess of 800 pages.
Istanbul is about the history of the city, from far back as we know until today. Covering such expansive time throws one back and forth with romantic energies grating against gruesome moments. Istanbul’s comprehensiveness in covering its long history places itself as essential to understanding the city. Within this broad sweep, often details were so unfamiliar I couldn’t envisage them within what I already knew. Hughes weaves everyone into the ever-evolving city fabric by covering not only rulers but the role of ethnic minorities, slave communities, sex workers, and women. In achieving this all-inclusive sense of place, the work is as much a literary pursuit as a historical one, with lines like:
Istanbul is a settlement that, in her finest form, produces, promotes and protects the vital, hopeful notion that, wherever and whoever we end up, we understand that although humanity has many faces we share one human heart- to know Istanbul is to know what it is to be cosmopolitan- this is a city that reminds us that we are, indeed, citizens of the world.
I spent months in Hughes’ vivid world. But it wasn’t fantasy; I knew I needed to stay vigilant and not fall in love. I read a page twice before realising it covered the Armenian genocide — a term not used to describe the Ottoman Empire’s brutality. With shame, I realised this was my first time studying Constantine the Great, the Crusades and the 1453 Fall of Constantinople. Slowly, I stitched together the city’s almost three millennia. But I wondered if I could read a similarly dreamy portrayal of another place, like London as an Australian living through the cultural consequences of the British Empire’s colonial pursuits, with starry eyes and little critique.
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During the brief suspension in lockdown in May, when I at least did not realise the pandemic would stretch years, I took the tram to my favourite bookshop and returned home with Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation by Roderick Beaton. The well-regarded work of scholarship surveys Greece coming into its own as a nation from 1718 until contemporary times. Unlike Hughes’ use of diverse characters and visceral prose, Beaton’s storytelling favours factual forwardness focussed on key uprisings, battles, and leaders. It is hard to know where he sits with an objectivity that is admirable yet isolating. I read it intervals when needing a break from Istanbul. But when humouring its informing tone reading in a park under the late afternoon sun, I would drift into spacious naps.
I never finished the book, but its frank account opened my mind. Obsession with ancient Greece by the West –known as Philhellenism — fuelled intervention in the Greek Revolution (1821–1832). The British, French and Russians assisted the Greeks in their fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire. After these countries came together in London and decided Greece was now an independent nation-state (so genourous of them), Bavaria sent over their Prince Otto to be the first king of Greece. Otto moved the capital to Athens, at the time a small town, and led an archaeological recovery of ancient Greece that all but destroyed its two thousand years of intervening “non-Greek” history. Within this account of Greece’s early modern days, Beaton contended that the new nation viewed its rebirth in a mirror of their former selves — their future blinded by a reflection of a bygone past.
I listed the book in a workplace social newsletter, and a colleague bought it and told me she ‘loves ancient Greece,’ even though it wasn’t about ancient Greece at all. Over many lockdown walks around my Greek-immigrant dominant suburb, I often passed an amateur mural of ancient Grecian vases.
“Ancient Greece proved so popular partly because it could be different things to different people,” writes David Mountain in Past Mistakes, the third history book I read over lockdown.
Mountain argues historical “mistakes” feed into public consciousness, and history becomes known through biases and a “collective colour blindness” to the past. “When we abandon an evidence-based approach to history,” he says, “our understanding of the past is liable to become skewed.”
Mountain posits a valid argument. Yet (and without blame) behind every public misunderstanding are people without time to study evidence. Instead, they rely on scattered facts and myths shaped into theories far from the truth.
“If we are to have history, philosophy, literature, and art as subjects, we must also have their symbolic languages and put up with some of their difficulties,” argued Medievalist Morton W. Bloomfield in 1974. “We must strive to open the humanities to the public, but we must remember that some of their territory is difficult and requires a specialisation that not all are ready to undertake.”
History and our minds are incongruent: an objective picture of the past can’t help but be replaced by short-sighted imagination.
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A memory came up on Facebook one day. “When you find a rare source after days of searching and shout, “YES!!” and then remember you are in a library and have a diameter of 10 or so students look at you quizzically,” my conceited self apparently wrote in 2015. “University: embarrassing myself one essay at a time. Oh good lord.”
Indulgent or not, I crave that student feeling of intellectual confidence. Now, years on, I am only part of the status quo. A degree taken in early adulthood can’t save me from blind spots.
“History, however, creates ambiguities in man’s mind. Man wishes both to repudiate and to embrace the past,” I re-read this line by Bloomfield over and over. I am captive to my wandering mind, striving to fill the gaps, and paranoid I can’t see what is most important. My days aren’t spent in libraries any longer.
A few years ago, my friends and I drove to the Billimina rock art site to see ancient paintings by the Jardwadjali, the traditional custodians of Gariwerd (also known as the Grampians). A deep ditch left us walking the final few kilometres of the road before trekking an overgrown path populated by side-eyeing kangaroos. At the site, a brief plaque sat beside a gaudy anti-vandalism gate. I cried, stunned, facing the 20,000-year-old creations. I reflected on a few nights earlier watching a prime-time television show with its host lauding a 100-year-old cottage as Australia’s important heritage. If the Greeks held up a mirror to the past, Australia gauged out its own eyes. In these crosshairs of cultural dissonance, I attempted to decipher the markings — is that an emu, a man?
Kamilaroi woman and academic Melitta Hogarth writes: Indigenous peoples know the western world. We have been subjugated to learning the ways of the coloniser since 1788…. the ignorance is not ours to bear… The truth must be told. Not a white-washed history of a nation built on the stolen lands of Indigenous peoples but the truth.
We filled out a rotting guest book and navigated our way out of the bush again. A year later, I read news that multinational corporation Rio Tinto expanded their iron ore mine at Juukan Gorge, Western Australia. Their blasts destroyed the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (Binigura) peoples’ sacred cave, obliterating the rock art it had housed since the Ice Age.
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After finishing Istanbul, I wanted to visually cement its contents and started watching the hit-Turkish show Resurrection: Ertuğrul. Each episode opens with the line “inspired by our history” as it proceeds to follow the 13th century narrative of Ertuğrul Bey- father of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire. In the series, the handsome Ertuğrul can do no wrong as he continuously saves his tribe from their evil enemies.
“Ertuğrul, as a flawless character (brave, pious, selfless, romantic, fearless, clever etc.) is presented as the leader of both the Kayı tribe and the Islamic world as a whole,” notes Turkish academic Burak Özçetin. The show was supported by public funds with Ertuğrul as a stand-in for President Erdoğan himself, with many sources claiming the show intentionally furthers the values of AKP, Turkey’s conservative ruling party. With Ertuğrul as its loaded figurehead, Özçetin stands that Resurrection is an “ahistorical and teleological reading of history” with its diluted past and brave men used as a tonic for political trajectories of a modern nation.
Mountain writes, “History is taught through the deeds of great individuals … as for the unheroic ‘dull millions’ our only duties are to worship these great men and record their achievements for posterity.”
Watching across the world, I didn’t pick up on the political nuances of Ertuğrul — a man we know little about anyway, a “blank slate with heroic overtones.”[1] But I was fooled by the production’s intentional nostalgic pull. I slipped into ignorance for entertainment’s sake, eating up the looks between lovers, dresses in the wind, tents catching the sunset light, bodies moving during a climactic swordfight. “Ertuğrul’s story is unimpeachably glorious.”[2]
Such cheap indulgences taste sweet in my failure to fold up history. Over lockdown, Saturday mornings involved YouTube videos called something like Top 10 Medieval Villages to Visit in Europe with glossy drone shots scanning crumbling structures. One week, I watched all of Netflix’s The Great, a hyperbolic account of Catherine the Great (played by Elle Fanning) juxtaposing fact with satirical anti-histories.
Journalist Ben Adams writes, “Absolute detachment, whether through attempted objectivity or distance of time, is both futile and a disservice to historical study.”[3] I tried to see through this vague line further, reading Maria Margaronis in History Workshop Journal:
We must both rest on what we know about the past and imaginatively extend the way we understand it. In this way, the no-man’s-land between fact and fantasy becomes fertile territory, a place to explore and perhaps to change the relationship between [history] and [our lives].
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I visited Diocletian’s Palace twice during a holiday in Croatia close to the end of 2019 when Istanbul sat unread on the shelf. The Palace is one of the most well-preserved monuments of Roman architecture: once a luxury villa, military camp, and space for government and religious ceremonies. The first time I came by it felt too hot to navigate in the company of Split’s heaving late-Summer crowds. I returned at dusk to detachedly observe the impressive designs, not knowing much about the Roman Empire in this part of the Mediterranean.
Busy market stalls and the close buzz of Friday night drinks overpowered any of the little museum-like text. The buildings appeared ageless whilst starkly opposed to the charade of modern life, but I knew little of Diocletian or his palace in the almost two millennia between us. My jet lag flared, and the palace morphed with my gloom and irritation. I grumbled at my boyfriend, and accused him of taking gross photos of me. But had I been more neutral, would I have been any closer to its truth?
After Croatia, we passed through Paris and purchased late-night tickets to the Louvre. I listened to feminist pop anthems through my headphones and drifted through the halls. I took a pleasure ride, swallowed by beauty, my visit an uncritical gaze preconditioned by the love we’re meant to have for European art. I could have been better behaved, but it was the last night of my annual leave. I was in the Louvre listening to Marina. I wanted to float.
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One night in October, I felt restless, angry at my slow reading and treading through my books so uselessly. I messaged my friend the thoughts keeping me awake, “It scares me that you can learn and learn but never know enough to piece it together. But we never had this responsibility before. People didn’t know much beyond their day to day. I have this access they didn’t, but I am so scared to not know and never understand.” He thought to be forever learning was an exciting problem.
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On New Year’s Day, I curled up in an armchair facing the garden in my new rental. I was whiplashed by the exit of months of lockdown, and I wanted to see no one. I picked up Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 for the twentieth time. I was only on page 30. I read a paragraph. I went on my phone. I locked my phone. I struggled through a page, trying not to speed read. Events, artists, politics were referenced with no elaboration or pause: “In Poland, where Strzeminskis avant-garde Neo Plastic Room at Museum Sztuki in Łódź was whitewashed over in 1950, a posthumous rehabilitation through exhibitions, as well as the publication of his Theory of Vision in 1958, was further evidence of the cultural thaw.” I couldn’t put the pieces together.
With little ambience, the authors, duo Maja and Reuban Fowkes, recite whatever facts deemed necessary — as is their job. Dense language packs every sentence to the brim, a paragraph drowns, but the hi-res pictures of art held my attention. I stared at a pigeon out my window, sipped my tea, tried to read again. I debated giving up but scolded myself instead: I don’t need a fun narrative. But if I can’t see, what’s the point? My phone died as I read a review.
“To write in dense, dispassionate prose on a subject as comedic, sad, spontaneous, beautiful, decrepit, selfish, and wrathful as humanity can never succeed in portraying the complexity of its many faces,” says Adams. “An immersion in a deep understanding of humanity within its context is the only way to write and read about the past.”
The lonely holiday drift from Christmas to New Years left my mind in need of an embrace. I climbed into the bath with Jenny Uglow’s In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815. The book builds up the Napoleonic conditions which shape the changing mood of Europe which begins Beaton’s Greece. Uglow’s social focus grasps the era’s atmosphere with evocative imagery, capturing everything from the thrill of reading newspapers, gasping at the sight of hot air balloons to women waving their handkerchiefs at departing military men. Her prose is straightforward like Beaton but with Hughes’ intrigue while eliciting a familiarity lacking from both. On the first page, she writes, “… the bullish, flamboyant figure of Napoleon came to dominate so strongly that the whole conflict was given his name and Boney became the bogeyman of children’s nightmares.”
A line mentions the Wesleyan movement. In eleventh grade, I convinced my underfunded country school to let me undertake a self-directed history class. Alone in a transportable classroom, I read my collection from the Book Shed — a second-hand seller with everything under $1. At the end of term, I handed in an essay on John Wesley. A decade later, I don’t feel any less like a child assigning myself texts in an unguided quest toward a more mature awareness. By the time my partner called me for dinner, I was on page 30, heart beating fast — 600 pages to go.
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In early 2021, I no longer needed to work from home — for a time, at least. During a stuffy week, I diverted on my commute home to the bookshop and reached for narrative-driven books. Biographies, no less, but not histories or essays. I began Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper when staying at Blue Pool during a long weekend. It’s a popular free campsite, but dig far enough on Google you can discover it’s on the traditional lands of the Braiakaulung, a people forcibly removed to Ramahyuck Mission Station in 1864. I read aloud to my partner, who nodded at Cusk’s descriptions of the French countryside and said it would give him good dreams.
The following morning, we ate breakfast by the water. I laid close to the shore before moving to the shade to keep reading as the area populated with families bobbing in their floaties across the deep lake into the narrow gorge. Cusk’s chapters turn into thoughts around Renaissance art and Italian village histories, and I realised it was no escape at all. She’s unfamiliar and talks about traversing remnants of the past with curiosity but without the caution that suffocates my thoughts on history.
By March, my history readings dwindled, replaced by an obsession with life unfolding again in random ways. Or maybe, I was defeated that I couldn’t crack open the world’s consciousness. A member of the dull billions, I ebbed into its gaze. One week, the gallery I work at had over a thousand visitors over an afternoon opening, and I said to my colleague that hardly anywhere would be experiencing busyness like this. Another day, I took an Uber with my manager to meet with a designer. We followed an assistant through a warehouse and emerged in the backyard of a mansion — “the boss’ place.” Sitting by the pool, the designer offered me a cigarette. A decade ago, at my scummy high school a thousand kilometres away, a friend was expelled for smoking in a toilet cubicle. I said no, thank you, and refocussed on the project management plans.
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Recently, I messaged my London-based brother asking why Brits call it reading history instead of studying history. He only sent a forum thread with someone else posing the same question. One response went down a linguistic rabbit hole, concluding that ‘rædan’, the Old English word for read, also meant to learn, understand and think. In a similar vein, Laura Saxton (from the Australian Catholic University’s School of Arts) argues that history is ‘not direct but textual,’ and facts can only be relayed through narratives using figurative language and literary techniques. Although, she argues, truth about the past always remains inaccessible.
I didn’t dent my shelf of unread history books after a year — as I battled it, it swelled. I wish the past was a concept, something categorisable. Its materiality lures me but then slips as I try to grasp it long after the fact. I am reminded of its intangibility again and again. It forms, a puddle of factual anecdote and fractured narratives, and personal circumstances. To quantify it is to make a meandering roadmap with no end. Despite curiosity, we can’t escape each other’s shadow.
Now, in days unknown whether we are teetering toward post-pandemic life or heading deeper into this crisis as ever, the present has again taken precedence in a timeline of my own perception. Where do I start and stop my imagination?
History will always be a compromised fantasy under this self-directed spotlight of mine — infiltrated, corrupted, alone. I remain a prisoner to its ghost, aimlessly seeking our mutual liberty.
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Texts mentioned:
Bettany Hughes, Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017).
Roderick Beaton, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation (London: Penguin, 2020).
David Mountain, Past Mistakes: How We Misinterpret History and Why It Matters (London: Icon Books, 2021).
Maja and Reuban Fowkes, Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2020).
Jenny Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815 (London: Faber & Faber, 2014).
Ben Adams, “History: The Study of the Subjective and Unimportant,” Philosophy Now, 2012.
Burak Özçetin, “‘The Show of the People against the Cultural Elites: Populism, Media and Popular Culture in Turkey,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 5–6 (March 11, 2019): pp. 942–957.
Josh Carney, “ResurReaction: Competing Visions of Turkey’s (Proto) Ottoman Past in Magnificent Century and Resurrection Ertuğrul,” Middle East Critique 28, no. 1 (April 2019): pp. 1–20. (footnote 1, 2)
Laura Saxton, “A True Story: Defining Accuracy and Authenticity in Historical Fiction,” The Journal of Theory and Practice 24, no. 2 (2020): pp. 127–144.
Melitta Hogarth, “The ignorance of our shared history is shocking. Morrison’s denial shows us time for truth-telling is NOW,” EduResearch Matters (Australian Association for Research in Education, June 22, 2020).
Morton W. Bloomfield, “Elitism in the Humanities,” American Higher Education: Toward an Uncertain Future 103, no. 4 (1974): pp. 128–137.
Maria Margronis, “The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century,” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): pp. 138–160.
