The Beliefs Series, Clare Wright

ABC Ident  
on ABC Listen, podcasts, radio news, music and more.

James Valentine  
Just a heads up that this episode does contain some strong language

Hi, I'm James Valentine Welcome to headroom, the belief series, what does someone believe because of what they do, and how does what they do shape what they believe? These are questions I believe that are worth asking. And in this series, I'm trying to find people whose answers you'll find riveting. I also believe that unless we really understand how someone thinks, how their actions are shaped by their beliefs, then we don't really know them. And in a time when many seem to be not listening to anyone else at all. I'm hoping this series may encourage us to ask different questions and listen in a different way.

Claire Wright is professor of history and Professor of Public Engagement at Latrobe University in Victoria. She is a good choice for both roles, as she's a first class historian and has been engaging with the public her entire career. Her book The Forgotten rebels of Eureka won the stellar prize, and it along with you Daughters of freedom. We're both shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award. She co hosts the podcast herself called archive fever appears as she says anywhere there's a microphone, but he's also the founder and CO convener of a monument of one's own and nationwide campaign to address the inequality of representation in our monuments and statues to smash the bronze ceiling as their website says. They recently celebrated their first success with the unveiling of a statue of trailblazing feminist, Zelda, dishonor. Claire started talking as soon as I press record, after expressing some doubts. 

Clare Wright  
Actually, I don't actually think I believe the thing I just said.

James Valentine  
I believe she has changed her belief, mid sentence! 

Clare Wright  
I'm prone to doing that, believe me. 

James Valentine  
She picked up on something I'd said while she was making his tea, about how I think we often assume that most people believe more or less what we believe, I was thinking in relation to believing that everybody believes what you believe, because you believe it.

Clare Wright  
And I'm thinking about the way that social media in particular probably perpetuates that belief. Because we get into the bubbles of our communication realms. So it looks like you've got a wide range of maybe a wide audience or you know, some you've you've got your your following seven zillion people and seven zillion people following you. And therefore it's kind of out in the world. It's not just what the people on your street think. But actually, the way the algorithm directs us all these days, is into a stream. Like we're kind of all streamed into a place that the algorithm thinks we belong. So he thinks, thinks we're gonna believe so I'm mixing two things there. I'm mixing social social media with the algorithm. That's okay. Let's take this

James Valentine  
time the same thing. Do you believe that that's, that's different to other historical times that that there's a, that we tend to be more, we think that what that everyone believes a we believe, because we're only in the bubble,

Clare Wright  
I think there's probably always been a sense of that. I mean, if you go to church, I'm not a church church goer. But let's just take the church as an institution of belief. I assume that if you go to church, and you're part of a congregation, that is being ministered to by a particular priest or Reverend, that you are going to, more or less assume that everybody in the room or under that roof believes what you believe. So that's a kind of bubble. But it is a fairly contained one, and it's a self selecting one, it's a very obviously self selecting one, you are choosing to turn up at Mass at 10am on Sunday morning at that church. Whereas I think that the way that social media and the algorithms work, give you an illusion that you're part of a much larger world, or perspective, but I'm not sure that you actually are. So you can be tweeting out there. And you know, you might only have three people who reply to your tweet, but those people are largely going to be the people who already believe what you believe, because they're already following you. And therefore that kind of reinforces your belief, because generally, they're gonna say something quite positive. Yeah, most of the unlike kind of Google reviews about restaurants, most people who reply to your social media, particularly on Instagram, maybe not so much Twitter, are gonna say something reasonably positive and affirmative. So you're sort of affirmed in your beliefs if that's what they are. Even if you only believe that your avocado sandwich that you've posted on Instagram is the best avocado sandwich that's ever been.

James Valentine  
always put lemon it's so much better than lime. suggested I couldn't see much difference between the religious or class bubbles of the past and the online bubbles of today. She disagreed.

Clare Wright  
No, I'm saying that there have always been bubbles, and there still are bubbles. But we're prone to believe that the bubbles, we live in bubbles, because they appear to be so much existing on such a wider platform. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So you know, if you turn on Netflix, you think, oh, there's all of these choices, but the algorithm is actually streaming you apparently to only a tiny little selection of what's actually there based on your last choices. So you feel like you're actually swimming in a great big ocean of belief. But actually, you're probably just still in a little pond?

James Valentine  
Do you think the world is sort of working on you now? Do you believe that it's, do you believe that you're not really in control of your your choices? Whether it's Netflix or the kind of tuna you buy?

Clare Wright  
Well, choice is an interesting word. Because you know, choices worked on different factors did you choose to go to that church that you that you went to and if you chose not to go to that church that your parents went to in your grandparents, does that mean that you actually had to be cast out of the entire congregation? So I'm sure there were a lot of people who were sitting on those pews who didn't really want to be there. But the social implications of stating that they had a different belief system. You know, there are actually real consequences to that. And you see that when people say, you know, I, they talk about it in terms of I left the church, or I'm married out, Jews say that all the time, I'm married out, I did that I'm married out, I'm Jewish, and I'm married out. So there's, you know, that expression that is very symbolic of the kind of borders and boundaries that keep you in places. So I'm loath to say that we are more that we have more or less choice than we have. I just think that that I think that we have an illusion of choice. Again, I would come I would come back to that it appears that we have wide networks and multiple platforms and endless stream of choices. But quite possibly, we are being played

James Valentine  
in a really, you know, philosophically fundamental way. Are you a free willed person. I love that sound. That is the sound of someone going maybe I should have thought about this.

Clare Wright  
Maybe I should have read the rest of the research notes. And prepared for the interview. No, that that was my ROI. Growl from from Ted. So that's the that's the Roi. Roi camp. That's the ROI camp growl. Do I really have to answer that question? Am I a Free Will person I don't think I'm a free will person I think we all exist within a vast stream of obligations and duties and responsibilities. I think that we are all playing with the cards that we've been dealt very early on in life. I think that if you take a kind of bio psycho social model, which we're learning so much more about in terms of the effects of childhood trauma on the way that your neurobiology shapes your later decisions that you make in your life in terms of the relationships that that you have. I'm I'm not sure that any of us can claim that we are the recipients of freewill. I think that we're all shaped by the forces, not least the historical forces that are played upon us. You know, the the so called choices that I have today? Well, obviously they're vastly different from the choices that if I had have been born in this country, even as a white middle class woman would have had to make a century ago. I think there's a lot in terms of a woman that I've studied enormously in my career vitae, Goldstein, who was born a flat 100 years before me, she was born in 1869. I was born in 1969. I'd like to think that if we sat down at the dinner table, we'd have quite a lot of things in in common with each other. Her father was Jewish mom was Jewish. They both came from Poland. She was middle class and wide and educated and as as I am, and have been, and in in that sort of way with kind of the top of the pile. And yet she was born 100 years before me and so she had to battle for the things that I take for granted today. Most specifically in VITAS case, the vote, you know, and she had To make choices and she did deliberately make choices between leading a public political life, which is what she wanted to do, because she wanted to change the world for all women, and having a family getting married and having a family, she saw that choice as being one that would severely restrict her capacity to work and labor towards other aspirations that she had. And that's not the choice that I've ever felt that I had to make. I've had to deal with the consequences of it. It's not easy thing to do, to balance work and family with with a working life. But so, you know, my free will is different from VITAS freewill in that regard. So, you know, with my historian hat on, I would say that, no, we're shaped by the historical and social forces. And with my latest reading in Bessel, Van der cults, you know, the body keeps the secrets and all that stuff, you know that all of that I mean, the trauma studies that are going on now, about that, that our bodies are actually controlling our minds to degrees, that we are actually incredibly unaware of all of the time, because so much has been shaped so formatively in our early lives,

James Valentine  
Claire is referring there to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk book, The Body Keeps the Score. Dr. Van der Kolk is a psychiatrist whose life's work is studying the effects of trauma. He looks at the latest work in neuroscience, and suggest that trauma reshapes the brain and the body, which unless understood, will undermine a person's capacity for full engagement with life. Claire, like all great writers, and academics draws from all kinds of sources. We talked about the other sort of science she relies on. And this led to a discussion on gender bias in all research.

Clare Wright  
Yeah, and for women, this is has a whole takes on a whole nother realm as well, because reproductive and sex hormones play into all of this as well and women have, you don't have to talk to many women to know that women are very influenced by their hormones and hormonal fluctuations, because of fluctuations and levels. But most of the science and most of the research is based on men as being the typical human. And, you know, we see this in all sorts of realms of researching and Carolyn criado. Perez is work on on data collection, and even the way the algorithm works and the bubbles and streams that we were placed into, are based on on male assumptions and participants in research.

James Valentine  
The very microphone you're talking is designed by man, which is why one of the reasons that in a lot of early recording there to the women's voices sounds strange. It wasn't designed to pick up women's pitch, it was designed to pick up lower pitch.

Clare Wright  
I mean, the greatest one for that was was the people who designed seatbelts and the crash test dummies, were all average height and weight white men. And so they were like scratching their heads about why are so many more women getting killed in cars. And they have now this has come out about BMI as well, you know, this measure that was supposed to have the body mass index that's supposed to tell us whether we're healthy or obese, and then all the other social implications that go along with that, not only for treatment and access to health, but all of the social vilification that goes along with that, again, is was completely tested and based on white male bodies,

James Valentine  
it was time to talk history, Claire has written the Forgotten rebels of Eureka, the story of the women at the Eureka Stockade, you Daughters of freedom, Australian women and the vote, and even a book on Australian female publicans beyond the ladies lounge. So what are her fundamental beliefs about history? Why study it? What are we meant to learn from it? What do you believe? I gotta say this so broadly, that almost doesn't make any sense. What do you believe about history? And so I asked Richard violet this question, yeah, he's written, yes. He has histories himself as from history. What do you believe would How is a study of history shaped your understanding of humans and what humans are like what people? Okay.

Clare Wright  
I tell I'll tell you what, I don't believe having studied history. I don't believe that the value of studying history is so that we won't make the mistakes of the past all over again. That's often something that's, you know, considered to be the value of history, education or any interest in history are doomed to repeat. I think that that is rubbish. I think that we, we will make mistakes over and over again, because we we are near puny humans, and we are shaped by forces that other than our rational beliefs that are based on evidence. The other thing I want An essay about history is that the past is a time concept. But history is a social construct. History is only what we make what we people make of the past. It's about how we construct a story about what happened in the past. So the history that is made by white European men is different even from the history that is made by white European women. Because we look for different things that happened in the past, you're filtering, the the archive the sources, the evidence, through a completely different, not always completely, but potentially substantive bleed different lens, even the places that you're going for those sources even than what you consider to be the archive. And, and so out of that you find different questions, or sorry, out of those different questions that you might ask, you come out with a different series of answers, which is what allowed me to write a book about the Eureka Stockade? After there had been multiple accounts of that event already. And many people, many men said, well, what could you possibly write that hasn't been written before? But because I went back to the archive with a whole different set of questions, I found different answers, because I found things that nobody had looked for before. And lo and behold, you know, there are women there there are women being killed there, the you know, all the things. I don't have to go through that story here now. So history is not

James Valentine  
had a chance to read it, you should?

Clare Wright  
Oh, absolutely. Because it is please listeners go and buy the Forgotten rebels of Eureka, at all good bookstores.

James Valentine  
So as you said, I don't believe that history repeats I don't believe that's what it is. I don't believe it's this linear story. What do you believe?

Clare Wright  
I believe that people make history, I believe that nothing about history is inevitable. Okay, so this is where we get into language as well. So if I can refer to another of my books that you'd orders of freedom about the Australian suffrage movement, and then what the Australian software just did on the global stage after that, a phrase comes up time and time again, in the suffrage literature. It came up at the time it took comes up now in the way people talk about women. And the vote. They say, women were given the vote. Women were given the vote in Australia in 1902. Women were not fucking given the vote. Women fought tooth and nail for the vote. It sounds like there's inevitability to that. You know, it got to the point where it became a benign gift of the nation to give women this cherished price. Sounds like

James Valentine  
we looked up from the desk we being as mustachioed medicine. Oh, sure. Would you like it? No trouble.

Clare Wright  
I'll just check my watch. It seems to be time to give you the vote.

James Valentine  
I'll do the women want the vote? Is that anybody? All right, fine. Drink good. I know. That wasn't dead.

Clare Wright  
Where if you look at the sources, what you see is that women fought for decades and decades against staunch opposition and vilification and at great personal cost to win the vote. So we all know that Australia won the America's Cup. Do you whoever he is, as you say, Australia was given the America's Cup? Yeah, by America. Yeah. Or by the ocean or by the gods or by the universe? They we,

James Valentine  
we all know that we'd lost Anzac, we lost Gallipoli, but we don't sit around and go. It's amazing that you women of that time, won the vote for the first time in the world.

Clare Wright  
I'll give you another example of that. My when I was publishing the Forgotten rebels of Eureka, one of the titles that was floated, the publishing company was the Lost rebels of Eureka. And I said, Nina, last implies that the silly Sheila's wandered off, like Picnic at Hanging Rock style, and they wandered off and got lost to history. They didn't get lost. They knew exactly what was happening. I mean, there were women who were at Eureka in 1854, who in the 1880s, when they were starting to celebrate anniversaries of the time, and articles were being written in this pre Federation era of nationhood, about the brave rebels of Eureka, and they started to be used as a kind of tradition that the that nationalists could hang a hat on, and an articles and poems and Henry Lawson wrote one about Eureka and it was all about the blokes and women were writing to the newspapers, the women who had been there And they were saying, hang on, we were there. It wasn't just the blokes, this is our story too. And yet, that hasn't been the way that this story was told. And you can talk about the reasons why women are left out of history. But it is a very deliberate act of forgetting a nation forgetting certain people who have played certain roles in nation building. And, and we can see this in many different places. So I think language is really important here, because it does suggest a kind of inevitability about things happening in so called history, or a complicity in not including certain things that happened in history. So what I very much believe is that it's important to bring those stories back into public consciousness and in into the national discourse, a national narrative about what has happened in our past, in order for people of current generations to go, oh, the women weren't given the vote, they fought for the vote. So if I can see there's something wrong going on in my times. Now, if there's still shady things that are going on, that don't make me feel good, that are wrong, that are that are immoral, that are unethical, that are illegal. Well, I can't just wait until they're inevitably fixed these problems, I have to do something about it just as all of these people in the past just as these women who I can name because historians have written about them. And I can go to this and access that or I can see their statue and our city streets. And I can know that this is the person who fought for this thing to happen and I can possibly stand on the shoulders of that person.

James Valentine  
Claire has been involved and is now a veteran of what we often refer to as the culture wars debates about our past, which may well decide our future. Course our indigenous history has been at the forefront of this. Many resisted mightily the notion that there was ever a frontier and a killing of the first Australians. And then there's events that we might regard as being settled, which often change considerably with a fresh perspective. I want him to know how she believed Australian history was being regarded at this point. Are we close to a shared notion of our past?

Clare Wright  
It's still contested. I mean, we saw that recently. You know, in the last discussions about the with the in the Morison government, I remember dantian, who was then the Education Minister was cranky that Anzac was being put on the national curriculum as a contested notion. He wanted to take that idea that you can contest the centrality of ANZAC and Gallipoli to its birth of the nation status. You won't find a historian in the country that will say that it's not contested in some way, all history is contested. All storytelling is contested. Look at any family again around a table, and try to get them all to remember that picnic that happened down at Apollo Bay that Christmas five years ago and tell the story of that and everybody around the table is gonna have a slightly different version of that narrative. So every story is going to be contested.

James Valentine  
Those who say it shouldn't be contested, will say, No, but it is history. See, CW being told us that this was the spirit of ANZAC and this is how it went down. And it is there in the archive we don't, we almost don't need to check. We built a war memorial to that. And that's, that's what we've always believed, because that's because we were there because we were told that and then that has been passed on so what's this contesting at all?

Clare Wright  
Well, you've you've marked up a number of things they're all marked into that statement a number of things and that's exactly what people do. So you use the phrase the spirit of ANZAC where is the historical evidence where's the data? Where are the facts that give you an evidence base for the spirit of ANZAC that is a belief system that's a mythology, then you then you're getting into the realms of, of spiritualism or or religion when you start talking about a spirit. It's the same with the idea of the Australian character, or what is quintessentially Australian. There can be no contesting certain facts about Gallipoli. I mean, you can name the ships that arrived on at the peninsula on and what day they arrived and how many men jumped off the side of them and how many of those were killed when the bullets came flying at them and how long they were in the bunkers and what happened on the day that they left and pulled out. And, and that is, those things are uncontestable or those are the facts of of the past of those events. And you can find them out by going to the documentary sources when you start to talk about the spirit of ANZAC or whether deliberately was is the birth of the Australian nation. And you start to talk about it in those conceptual or ideological terms, which then get mixed in with politics. And certain arguments that particularly politicians want to have about the role that Australia might then play in subsequent wars. That's when the terrain gets much murkier. I mean, you know, for me, there's obvious parallels between the amount of money that the Howard Government poured into Gallipoli remembrance and wartime remembrance during the years that Howard was also setting Australia to fight in overseas wars. So once you turn those men of Gallipoli, those fallen heroes, those, those people who served our nation and you you start to us all of those concepts. And believe me, I'm not saying that there that it wasn't a time of extraordinary national grief, that each one of those lives meant something that that there is trauma for not only the people who fought, but the families who had to care for the broken men who came back and the intergenerational trauma that was caused by that. Those are all things that can be studied and a worthy stories and worthy subjects, for study and for research. But when you use these headline grabbing really meaningless headlines, like the spirit of ANZAC, or like our fallen heroes, in order to bolster contemporary political objectives, well, then we're waiting into something much different from history, then we're talking about politics and belief.

James Valentine  
In this series, I also want to ask people, some things that have nothing to do with their work as such, but put some of those notions that are often a part of our self belief. Things like being a good judge of character. People say this about themselves don't they are reckon I'm a pretty good judge of character. That's clear.

Clare Wright  
I actually do believe I'm a good judge of character. And I think that's because I am an empath. And I think that I have quite good instincts. But I will also say that I am a complete glass half full person. My cycle once said that I was the most Pollyanna person that she had ever met. So I will I will always see the silver lining, and I probably have a tendency to turn red flags green.

James Valentine  
Okay, that's quite good. Isn't that sounds like a good thing?

Clare Wright  
Well, I think that makes me a nice person. But I don't. And I don't think it makes me a bad judge of character. But I don't tend to be hurt by people. I don't think that I'm a victim of bad people. Don't feel like I've made mistakes in the friendships or the relationships that I've had, I just tend to get along with most people.

James Valentine  
Let's go on. Do you believe you're a good friend?

Clare Wright  
Yeah, I think I'm a good friend. I think that my friends would probably say that I talk too much. I could possibly give them a bit more of the mic. But I also turn up with chicken soup when they're sick.

James Valentine  
As we're wrapping up, we discuss the forthcoming referendum on the voice to Parliament for future listeners. This was recorded in June 2023. And she made a powerful statement about a national belief.

Clare Wright  
I think that if the Constitutional Referendum doesn't get up, if it is not a yes vote, then I think that any idea that Australia any belief in Australia as an egalitarian nation, has to be finally scrapped. I think there are a lot of indicators that the belief that Australia isn't the egalitarian nation. We should already be questioning that belief with all of our skeptics and our scientific hats on but I think that that we would once and forever have to put that little myth to bed.

James Valentine  
Clear right? Up been a failed on the belief. You've been a beautiful conversationalist. Thank you so much for being part of the series. Is there anything, any beliefs we didn't touch on the anxious to to record?

Clare Wright  
I believe that cats are better than dogs. Oh, you're the neck that territory. And I really love dogs and I have two cats and I have two dogs. So it is very I also have five chickens and six rabbits. So it's a very ecumenical household in that regard. But I think at the end of the day, cat videos are so much funnier than dog videos.

James Valentine  
Of course, she has a view on that Claire right is so engaged with life. She emanates a powerful energy, and as I said, it was a wonderful conversation and her books, essays and podcasts are all worth reading and hearing. In the next episode of the belief series, you'll hear from The man who brought us Mad Max filmmaker George Miller

George Miller  
in 95, we were among the first people who got into digital filmmaking, particularly with the movie babe where we waited 10 years for the digital dispensation where we can actually make peace talk.

James Valentine  
Of course, he bought us so much more than that. Lorenzo's Oil, the Witches of Eastwick Happy Feet and most recently 3000 years of longing. I hope you enjoyed listening to this as much as I'm enjoying making it. I hope you're still listening and you're telling your friends all about it.

This podcast was written and produced by me with production work from Chloe McKenzie and grant Walter. Original Music Roy Valentine.

ABC Ident  
You've been listening to an ABC podcast discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC listen app.