The Love Of Archives, Cricket & Eclectic Curiosities
- Gideon Haigh On Curious Worldview – Spotify
- Gideon Haigh On Curious Worldview – Apple
- Gideon Haigh On Curious Worldview – Youtube
A probe into Gideon Haigh’s worldview, someone I’ve anticipated interviewing ever since this podcast began.
Some highlights from the podcast…
- On cricket: “Cricket marches backwards into the future — always haunted by its past.”
- On Warne: “He had perfect superficiality and the gift of putting everyone at ease.”
- On journalism: “Legacy media has become mindlessly negative. If they can’t own it, they destroy it.”
- On new media: “It’s amazingly empowering to write something and press publish — no intermediaries, no gatekeepers.”
- On India: “India has become the gravitational centre of world cricket — a nation full of gods, and some of them play cricket.”
- On memory:“Memory is a slippery thing — journalists are constantly trying to pin it down, trusting it when it suits us, interrogating it when it doesn’t.”
Gideon Haigh is a veteran journalist, author and the most eclectic cricket writer alive today. He has prolific output. He’s published more than 50 books and thousands of articles scoping a gamut of topics. Work, bureaucracy, the office, Australian crime, banks, business, scandals, cricket, cricket history, cricket politics, media, journalism, biography, memoir, and too many more to rattle off.
You got to check out the video of this one (Spotify or Youtube). The decor is a very on the nose projection for Gideon’s aforementioned interests. Lining opposite walls are two imposing floor to ceiling bookshelves eyeing each down for Gideons attention. Behind him a shrine to cricket and across from him a shrine to the rest.
Gideon is also the co-host, alongside Peter Lalor, the wonderful Substack and podcast – Cricket Et Al.
If you like Cricket than you’ll love Cricket Et Al.
Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…
Gideon
Memory is a slippery thing and journalists are constantly sort of working at the margins, trying to pin it down, relying on it. Sometimes to a fault, we tend to trust firsthand recollection when it suits us, of course. We’re conditioned to approving of narratives that suit our purposes, but I’m also a skeptic of them. I think they deserve to be interrogated like everything else. For sure, yeah. I mean, every journalist historian uses a variety of sources and they have a kind of a hierarchy of trust.
Memories deserve to be interrogated.
I guess a lot of my work has been around using contemporaneous documentation, which I do tend to accord a certain primacy to. And while I’ve been an enthusiast for oral history, I’m always mindful of Gough Whitlam’s description of it as malice recollected in tranquillity.
Ryan
You lost me with the description.
Gideon
Yeah, contemporaneous documentation. Documentation that was created at the time. Sometimes with an expectation it will be read, sometimes it won’t be to first hand as well.
I have an imprint called the Archives Liberation Front. I publish short books about historical curios and often they involve delving into public records, the various archival offices in Australia, personal papers of individuals involved, a constant search for substantiating information. And I’ve got a pedantic obsession with getting dates right and places and names. Once you’re there, you know where you are and everything else after that can be regarded as kind of ornamentation or coloration.
Ryan
That imprint, that’s a publishing house.
Gideon
Yeah, it’s about 2020 I was involved in a campaign to secure emergency funding for National Archives. One day I was sitting at home on a Sunday night watching Senate estimates as you do. I love a good time. And I was watching Amanda Stoker testify about the decrepitude into which National Archives’ audiovisual collection had fallen and it was being claimed that the likelihood was that the audiovisual collection would disintegrate in the next two years. And she sort of said, well, know, easy come, easy go. It’s all part of the aging process. And I that’s someone who really, really just does not understand the integral nature of archival research to the creation of history. So I rang a friend of mine, Graham Davison, Monash Emeritus Professor of History on Monday. And I said, you know, we should do something about this.
And he said, well, why don’t we write a letter to the Attorney General?
I said, well, let’s write an open letter to the prime minister and let’s get lots and lots of people to sign it. So we got 150 prominent Australians to sign it. And the movement came to be known as the Archives Liberation Front. It was given that name by my friend Claire Wright, the historian from La Trobe University. And we did, in fact, secure $67 million worth of emergency funding for National Archives to put that audiovisual collection back together and to commemorate this successful work of public agitation. I was looking for a vehicle to publish some little short books on my own account and I got my daughter to design a colophon which is a manila folder with angels wings on it and it has the slogan in Latin files just want to be free. So I think I’ve done four books and I’m in the process of doing my fifth under that imprint.
