Bulletin

Issue: July 2004

People

Making windows where there once were walls

'Stories are history's theatre. The trick is to tell them well, to hear the different voices, to see the agency they portray, to catch the freedoms they indicate. Above all, when the power is so violent and all pervasive and so de-humanising, the trick is to find the humanity - in the pain, in the laughter, in the dignity, in the trickster plays of the suppressed.'

Those words were among many tributes when La Trobe University held a special symposium to honour one if its most distinguished scholars, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Rhys Isaac.

They came from another celebrated historian and author, Greg Dening. At the symposium Professor Dening launched - or 'opened' - Emeritus Professor Isaac's latest book, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom.

The book has already been selected by the 20,000 member US 'History Book of the Month Club', guaranteeing it a huge readership.

For Professor Isaac, the book launch and symposium celebrated a career crowned by winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for his book, The Transformation of Virginia, making him the only non-American to receive this honour.

At the symposium, held on the University's main Melbourne campus at Bundoora in late June, ten leading scholars presented their own work - ranging from witchcraft in seventeenth century France to women workers in Victoria's rural north-east.

Professor Isaac, who has specialised in studying the American revolution, has held many visiting appointments at distinguished American institutions such as Princeton and the Smithsonian, often for extensive periods. But he is adamant La Trobe University launched and sustained him.

His new book is based on more than a hundred diaries written over twenty years by Landon Carter, an 'angry observer and participant' plantation owner who lived in Richmond County, Virginia, during the American Revolution.

Reviews have described it as a 'poignant' document on the 'collapse of an old world, mixed with learned commentary - an outstanding work of history'.

Professor Dening said Professor Isaac's book described the American Revolution 'at the ground level, away from the drama, out of hearing of all the speeches'. It made 'windows where there were once walls.'

'American readers will see their slave past and all that it means in a new light. Master and slave are bound together in ways that neither can change,' he added.

Historians like Rhys Isaac 'write not for the dead, though we respect them,' Professor Dening concluded. 'We write for the living in the hope that they will in some way change the world we live in.'

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