Anzac Stories: Using Personal Testimony in War History

Engaging with war records: archival histories and historical practice

“…Thomson was guiding us towards witness accounts being at once sources for 'a history of past events, but also an essential part of that history of memory'. 17 Such encouragements indicated the need to move beyond a model of mutual ignorance and blindness, towards a more promising reality of collaboration, including recognition of the mutual production of pasts, and our capacity for repression of alternate histories. We are obliged now to expand our understanding of the creation of records, to ask why, in what context and by what means were records created, and subsequently ordered, used, and reordered.…”

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“…Thomson 2006. See also Thomson 2013 This is the standard account of Grant's rescue, published in newspapers, radio and secondary sources.…”