Switch 2016 - Two Highlights
Caroline Overington
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conference
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Deng Adut
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education
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libraries
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research
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Switch 2016
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As I was typing up the notes I’d hurriedly scrawled down during
the presentations that Chris N, Amy R and I (Steph B) had attended at the
recent Switch 2016 NSW Public Libraries Conference in Ulladulla, I noticed a
few words appearing again and again – knowledge, experience, diversity,
challenge, innovation, accessibility, information, inspiration and (rather
interestingly) justice. Some of these words we’d perhaps expect to hear from
library workers when discussing new technologies, events and projects they’ve
been involved with, but when used by people like the extraordinary Deng Adut,
Jennifer Byrne, Matt Finch, Gill Hicks, Richard Morecroft and Caroline
Overington to describe the importance of libraries to their work and, indeed,
their very lives, it makes an impact on an audience. A big impact.
As Chris and Amy have both already written in their blog posts, we
were incredibly lucky to have attended the Switch Conference (despite the
rather abysmal service encountered at the motel!) and to have had the
opportunity to hear firsthand from such a varied and informed group of speakers
on how public libraries enrich, stimulate and even transform the lives of
members of our communities.
I’ll be writing another blog post shortly with a brief update on a
handful of the presentations, but for now I wanted to write about two of the
speakers who were nothing short of inspirational – Deng Adut and Caroline
Overington. During both of their presentations these outstanding speakers
highlighted the intrinsic value of libraries which goes beyond quantifiable key
performance indicators such as number of books borrowed, attendance numbers and
computer bookings, etc.
Deng Adut - The Transformative Power of Education
If you haven’t yet heard of Deng Adut, you will. Deng was born in
the small village of Malek in South Sudan to a local fisherman and his wife.
This modest background coupled with a Christian upbringing meant that Deng’s
educational opportunities were always going to be limited. But when, at just
six years of age, Deng was taken from his family and forced into the army to
fight as a child soldier, he lost everything – his family, his freedom and a
childhood he can never reclaim.
Miraculously, Deng not only survived unspeakable wartime horrors, but
after many years separated from his older brother, John (each thought the
other was dead), the two were reunited and together managed to make their way to
Australia as refugees. During his presentation at Switch, Deng enjoyed retelling
stories of several cultural misunderstandings he encountered when he first
reached Australia. These included the time he put a can of Coca Cola into a microwave to
heat it up (you can guess the result); the occasion he almost cooked himself when
using an electric blanket for the first time; and his shock at being told on
arrival in Australia that he and John were to be taken to a place called
Blacktown!
Deng could not read or write when he came to this country, but
he did have a wealth of life knowledge gained through brutal wartime experiences
and a determination to succeed. Deng started his formal education at Blacktown
Tafe and not only learnt to read, but fell in love with books. The library
became his second home. Deng felt like he’d been given a “new beginning” and was
“hungry for learning and education”. After Tafe, Deng enrolled to study for his
Bachelor of Law at Western Sydney on the advice of his brother, John, who told
him he’d make a great lawyer as he was “always fighting" and a "free thinker”.
Deng found the law degree very difficult but knew that the only way to learn is
to “fully commit.” For four years Deng slept in his car at the university, not
because he was homeless, but because he wanted to be at the library from the
second it opened in the morning until the moment it closed at night. John also completed
degrees at Western Sydney University. Tragically he was killed in 2014 after
returning to Sudan.
Deng, now a successful lawyer with his own law firm in Sydney’s
western suburbs, works to “achieve justice”, which he feels is the “highest
achievement possible” and one which is “only possible with education.” Deng
wants to be the “most visible Australian” and aims to visit every school in NSW
by 2018 to tell his story and to stress to Australian schoolchildren the
importance of education and the value of including and respecting people from diverse backgrounds because, as he said at Switch, “this is what being
Australian is and it’s what I learnt in libraries.”
Last month Deng Adut was named NSW Australian of the Year and is
now shortlisted for Australian of the Year. After hearing him speak it’s
difficult to imagine a more worthy nominee.
Deng Adut's new book, written with Ben McKelvey, is Songs of a War Boy.
Caroline Overington - Spreading The Word... About Women's History
Caroline Overington was the final speaker of the Switch Conference
– a big ask in anyone’s book - especially after two full days packed with
impressive, thought-provoking and animated presentations. But for me, Switch
2016 saved the best till last.
Caroline Overington is an awarding winning Australian journalist
and the author of eleven books including Last Woman Hanged, a “forensic history of a 19th Century criminal
trial”, which won the Davitt Award for True Crime Writing in 2015. It was the enterprise of writing this book and the questions which arose from her research which
Caroline focused on in her fascinating and (for me) timely presentation.
One of my favourite quotes about the process of historical
research was written by Australian historian, Stuart Macintyre, in his 2003
book, The History Wars…
‘The historian goes to the archives with a hypothesis… But you
never find precisely what you’re looking for, or if you do it bodes ill for the
project. The sharpest excitement comes when you open a file and are confronted
by some unexpected evidence…. Historians reach new conclusions because they ask
new questions.’
And so I was absolutely delighted to hear Caroline speak so
enthusiastically about how she had utilised the primary resources available at
the Mitchell Library and NSW State Records to go beyond merely uncovering the
story of the criminal case of Louisa Collins, the last woman hanged at
Darlinghurst Prison in 1889, and to question and analyse why it was that this
woman had been tried not once, but a record four times before being found
guilty and sent to the gallows. And of course one question always leads to
another. How could they hang this woman? What was the context of the time and
place of these events? Like all women of her day, Louisa had no power to vote
or make the law (much like a child today), and yet when put on trial before an
all-male judge and jury she was treated as an adult and faced the repercussions
of their verdict, a verdict which compelled many women at the time to come out
in protest. “This was a story about justice,” explained Caroline at Switch, “and who gets it.”
There’s that word again. Justice.
Some of you may know that last month I conducted a presentation at
Cronulla Library on researching convict ancestry. In preparation for the talk I spent quite some hours at the Mitchell Library trawling through historical
records and so it's probably no surprise that Caroline’s presentation resonated
so much with me. Fundamental to researching her book, Last Woman Hanged, was that the necessary historical records not
only exist, but that librarians and archivists have collected, catalogued, preserved
and made these documents accessible so that future generations of historians and researchers, like Caroline, can uncover these stories for themselves. As Caroline herself
said at Switch, “Librarians are the guardians of our nation’s history – including women’s
stories”.
These were two exceptional speakers and it was such an amazing experience to hear both Deng Adut and Caroline Overington share their stories and articulate so beautifully the role that libraries have played - and continue to play - in their lives.
I promise my next blog on Switch will be much shorter!
Steph B.
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