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"Launching Words" by Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

Launching Words for The Barber Who Read History

by Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

On 15 December 2021, Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-De Rosa (University of Wollongong) launched The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, St Peters, 2021) by Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving. This is an edited version of her words on this occasion. 

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I would like to thank Rowan and Terry for permitting me the honour of launching their book – The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History – a book dedicated to our dear late friend, activist, colleague, Anthony Ashbolt.

 Let me start near the end of the book. In a chapter in Part 4, Rowan shared why he admired E. P. Thompson’s ‘eccentric’ study of the lifelong radical poet William Blake, a study entitled Witness Against the Beast. This was a book dedicated to investigating how radical faith was passed on across generations and centuries. In some ways, Rowan writes, this book is ‘a portrait of a historian at work’. ‘Biographically’, he continues, Witness Against the Beast ‘can be seen as the final personal summative statement by a major radical intellectual, about being a radical intellectual’.

In many ways, it can be said that The Barber Who Read History is an assemblage of portraits of two radical historians at work. It can likewise be said that, whether or not this is the ultimate, penultimate or pre-penultimate book that Terry and Rowan write together, it too can be seen as a personal summative statement by major radical intellectuals, about being radical intellectuals.

To understand the significance of this book, we first need to understand what Terry and Rowan mean by radical history. Let me take you to much earlier in the book, to their elucidation of ‘radical historians’:

Radical historians write about the struggles of disempowered people to stand up to their oppressors and exploiters, and to take control of their lives by attacking coercive authority and by socializing power. They tell stories of resistance and agency, not of ruling and maintaining order, which are the signs of ruling class history. Radical historians, secondly, are partisan. They write with a social purpose, and in doing so they draw on radical philosophies and methods. They write history as a political act. Thirdly, although writing about the past, they want to encourage people in the present to resist and rebel. Because the radical past was always being made anew their work is pregnant with possibilities, alerting their readers to the possibilities for action in their own situations. This has consequences for how they write. Readers must be given space to reflect on the present as well as the past. It is not enough to tell stories; the stories have to be shaped by theory, sharpened by the historian’s passion, and riddled with unresolved political questions. Moreover, whether writing for other radical intellectuals, engaging with scholarship and theory, or seeking a wider audience, radical historians place a high value on clarity of expression, avoiding like the plague the over-theoretical language of academic in-groups, and their self-aggrandizing citation of trendy thinkers.

Referring to Umberto Eco’s term ‘dumb’ books – books that are inaccessible and therefore cannot speak to readers and so do not incite action – our authors show a determination to be read…and to incite action. Whereas Eco’s ruthless librarians restrict access to knowledge, the modern academy places research behind paywalls. Not so these essays. And we are all the better for their determined refusing to be dumb or dumbed!

 A former teacher of mine, an American Studies Professor, introduced me to the study of social criticism. He drew my attention to the limitations of some of even the greatest social critics. Unless they offer blueprints for reform, their often-ingenious critiques of society’s ills remain impotent. Again, this is not the case here. For not only do these essays offer superbly robust and analytical critiques of our present and proffer visions of alternative radical futures, but they do so pragmatically. Under sub-headings like ‘What can be done?’, they suggest means by which we might create those futures. This book then is a meeting place – a place where intellectual critique, personal politics, political and ethical visions, and an earthly sense of pragmatism and agency all meet, mingle, merge to produce an agenda for change.

Put simply, that agenda is to radicalise, to refuse to be cowered into submission by institutional and industry dictates, to form radical collectives of academics, artists, archivists, activists and become a force for change – to set the knowledge agenda rather than to follow one which is already prescribed by those in power.

As lofty as these aims and ideals are, they do not deliver their insights in a pontificating manner. Far from it. They cultivate a spirit of generosity and sagacity by using complex layers of personal and professional experience to critique, analyse, suggest, guide.

 As many of you know, The Barber Who Read History follows the publication of their co-written book, Radical Sydney, published in 2010. These chapters were written during or after the writing of that book.

This 2021 collection is organised into 5 parts: Shaping Times; Labour History and Radical History; Thinking, Writing, and Engagement; Some Radical Historians; and, finally, Shaping Histories.

It is impossible to give you a cohesive overview of a book that roams over such varied, complex and diverse terrain – all held together by a commitment to furthering social justice through the democratisation of research and knowledge – so what I will attempt instead is to offer glimpses into what struck me as I read through.

Well, firstly, in countering any claim to an authoritative or non-partisan voice, Terry and Rowan generously allow us to see behind their historical writing through providing us with biographical chapters. There is none of Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ here. Here the author matters – their politics, position on social justice, experiences, privileges and limitations, they all matter. They are all declared.

In Terry’s case, growing up in a progressive-revolutionary household, he was encouraged to be a broad-thinker. Growing up with a ‘red’ mother and as a ‘commo kid’ with thinkers and talkers parading through, he ‘naturally equated politics with ideas, with intellectual activity’. It was a rude shock, he said, when he went to university and realised that not everyone did. More deflatingly, student politics showed him that even those who aspired to run the country, they did not honour the synergies here. [I have to say, that this observation resonated deeply and painfully with me. As a recent migrant in the 1990s from the Troubles in the North of Ireland, where politics was life or death, my brush with student politics in Australia revealed that strategy trumped honest politics, careerism triumphed over authenticity.]

Rowan shares with us that his household was conservative. He grew up in paradoxical times – when arcadia as exemplified by nature, friends, roaming, was juxtaposed to apocalyptical imaginings represented by nuclear threats. He plots the ‘accidental evolution’ of his political leanings away from those of his parents. He was, he said, ‘a middle-class rebel-in-waiting’ when he entered university. An anti-war student activist, conscientious objector, a trade union historian, he explains that a ‘wedge’ between himself, the academy and academic writing was forged when he started writing these public histories – the history of the Seaman’s Union for example.

 Secondly, here’s just a few snippets from the essays.

Terry recounts how he and Rowan came to write Radical Sydney. Their discoveries about 1840s and ‘50s Australia, he said, countered mainstream histories. Rowan’s and Terry’s history talked of violence and riots – of ‘ordinary’ people’s agency – stories, they said, were central to their approach to activism-scholarship as revealed through the Radical Sydney process. Stories offered a way to engage readers to adopt a radical perspective.

Here, I am reminded of a very recent exchange in the British press. Historian of black Britain, David Olusoga wrote that historians had become ‘unwilling conscripts in toxic culture wars, the focus of online hate and tabloid misinformation’. Their work had been perceived ‘not as an expansion of our national history but as a politicised assault upon it’. He was referring to the uncovering of slave histories and exposing the British empire’s complicity in those histories. He said, the media and the government attacked historians by rebranding them as ‘activists’, and claiming that ‘their scholarly detachment has been surrendered to ‘woke’ ideology’. Olusoga replied:

Historians should repeatedly point out that the ‘rewriting of history’ is not some act of professional misconduct but literally the job of professional historians. The phoney arguments at the heart of this phoney war have too often been allowed to define the debate. Historians, so skilled at reframing discussions and “problematising” debates, need to bring those skills to bear on those who would reduce public history to what Donald Trump’s infamous 1776 Commission termed ‘patriotic education’ – something as far away from history as an academic discipline as can be imagined.

This push back – this ‘rewriting of history’ – indeed, this being an ‘activist’ – is, Rowan and Terry say, our responsibility – uncomfortable as it is, well, for some.

Another remit of The Barber Who Read History, as Rowan says, is not just to challenge accepted narratives but to also unearth and shine a light on historical protagonists and ideas which have been forgotten or unfairly neglected. He cites Eric Fry’s 1983 collection, Rebels and Radicals, as a case in point. This book was neglected, he says, because it was ‘exploring a different way of writing dissident history, one not in accord with the traditional practice of academic labour history as it developed in Australia’. Fry, he says, reminds us that history is ‘never neutral’. This, Rowan writes, was new to some readers and a reminder to others.

This brings me back to William Blake who I talked about at the outset of my talk. In my third year undergraduate history essay on Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, I wrote about how his focus on childhood was 50 years before the middle class even brought the category of ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ before a sentimental audience. His lament for the suffering of poor children, working children, fell on deaf ears until long after his death when, with historic audacity, his insights – way before his time – were lauded. Being a step out of time does not bode well – resurrecting and bringing to new light those social justice thinkers who were a step ahead of time – more colloquially ‘way ahead of their time’ – the Eric Frys and more – bringing them into the light is a laudable remit.

 Ok, now to draw to something of a close…

The barber, after whom this book is named, reads ‘history’ and sees the future ‘cynically, alone, and without hope’.

Thankfully, this is not the feeling we are left with after closing the cover of this book.

‘Radical history’, our authors tell us, ‘has an emancipatory dimension, the power to move people to act’:

By studying the past, and movements and people over time, it can show that change is possible, that apparently powerless or humble organisations and people can overcome apparently insurmountable odds; it can heighten perceptions and understandings, enhancing the desire for change; it can show not what is inevitable, but what could and might be.

Those of us fortunate enough to be trained, to have access to time and outlets for disseminating knowledge, we should all aspire not simply to be ‘idea makers’, but also ‘idea users’. We should keep a copy of The Barber Who Read History close by to remind us of this potential – to inspire us to courage.

I offer my profound thanks to our activist-scholars – to Anthony, to Rowan, to Terry – for sharing their experience, wisdom, training, their ethical inclinations – for fighting this good fight.

 Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

15 December 2021.