My major project is a webpage I created for the Hills District Historical Society's existing website entitled: “A ‘NOBEL’ Place: Dogwoods, Sarsaparilla, and Patrick White’s Castle Hill”, along with an accompanying Twitter account, called “Dogwoods Chronicles,” and WordPress blog site entitled “Literary History”. 

I have established the Twitter and WordPress accounts in order to 1. Continue my own interests in my topic after the course and, 2. To attempt to bring new forms of media to my organisation and make the literary connection to Castle Hill’s history more attractive and accessible to more people.

The project grew from my work with the Hills District Historical Society for which I volunteered to research and collect archive material on the connection of Patrick White to the area.  The society’s past interest in White was limited to the author’s physical built remains.  I wanted to show the importance of this literary connection, what White’s novels and letters, written during his residence at his Castle Hill home “Dogwoods”, can add to local history, how literature and history interconnect, and how looking at one can inform the other. 

As I have written a “literary history” of Castle Hill it is my ultimate intention to show that literary representations of a locale are just as vital to historical understandings of “place” as physical built remains and what such representations can tell us about the dynamics of a location during a specific historical period. 

The sources I have used to aid in the creation of my webpage are predominantly primary source material, including selected fiction and non-fiction by Patrick White such as his novel, The Solid Mandala, written at and representing ‘Dogwoods’ and Castle Hill (or “Sarsaparilla”), published letters, and White’s autobiography, Flaws in the Glass.  Another primary source is a series of photographs I took of Dogwoods, which I am in the process of having linked to the webpage as a separate photo gallery.  I have also drawn on census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the period of White's residence in the area, and have provided an image of a postcard (sent by White) and brief memories from a family who lived across the road from White in Castle Hill.  From the National Archives of Australia I have purchased a copy of White's application on his partner’s, Manoly Lascaris' behalf supporting Lascaris’ immigration to Australia, which I will use in a blog post I am writing about White’s legacy within the LGBT community. Secondary sources will also be used to help construct the context of 1950s-60s anxieties over European immigration and sexual politics.[1]

The title of my project, as mentioned above, is “A ‘NOBEL’ Place” by which I hope to have encapsulated the themes of place as literary inspiration as well as pride in one’s local history.  Further themes I am trying to develop in my project are the presence of history and its potential loss: how easily history can be overlooked; and the importance of simplicity, which I hope helps to show that history does not only have to entail large-scale recorded events in history books but can also be made up of the mundane: reading about White’s very ordinary life in Castle Hill is just as significant as analyzing a major development.  Too often we raise well-known literary figures above "life" and fail to understand that stories are not born from some inaccessible place, but are formed from someone's quotidian life experiences.  I have provided the bare bones of the historical connection between White and Castle Hill to inspire other users to delve further and extract their own understandings of place.

By making this history accessible on the historical society’s website it is my hope that it will serve, primarily, as a source of education for the district’s schools, whom the society hopes to attract.  With little interest from local schools’ history departments in attending the society’s museum, I am hopeful that my project will help to generate interest, not just from a historical perspective but from a literary one as well.  As a format that could easily be linked to schools’ websites the interdisciplinary approach to local history should prove beneficial to both schools and the Hills District Historical Society.

The webpage I have created will be accessible to the general public and by linking Dogwoods Chronicles Twitter account and Literary History blog site to the webpage it will enable users to respond to my publications and create a dialogue surrounding the Patrick White/Castle Hill connection.  I have been utilizing my “Dogwoods Chronicles” Twitter account to advertise blog posts I have published to my “Literary History” Wordpress site.  It is my intention that, through the continuing development of these accounts as well as gaining followers (local schools and other literary/history groups), I will convince the society that multi-media formats will be beneficial to the marketing of their society and the museum.

I plan to continue the development of my Twitter and Wordpress accounts (both of which are slowly gaining followers).  Furthermore, I will continue publishing blogs on the more complex themes I wish to link between Patrick White and Castle Hill, such as the blog post I am currently working on exploring White’s contribution and continuing legacy within the LGBT community.  I will then continue to use the Twitter account to market both my “Literary History” blog site and the Hills District Historical Society.  I am also hopeful that generating interest in Patrick White will lead to my working with the historical society on a Patrick White exhibition at the museum.

— DARREN NASH

NOTES

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[1] These sources include Andrew Hassam’s, “The ‘Bring Out a Briton’ Campaign of 1957 and British Migration to Australia in the 1950s,” in History Compass, Vol. 3, Issue 3, May 2007, pp. 818-844; and Graham Willett’s, “The Darkest Decade: Homophobia in 1950s Australia,” in      Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 28, Issue 109, 1997, pp. 120-132.  These sources will be used for context material that help to frame my arguments about White’s homosexuality and Lascaris’ migrant status during a period of social anxiety over sexual and ethnic “otherness”, to wave the flag, so to speak, for Castle Hill by showing the acceptance the couple received by the community during this time.

Thank you to the Hills District Historical Society for being a Community Partner on this project.