Memory – Something Very Big

At one stage I was beginning my oral history interviews with what you might think is a fairly simple question.

“What’s your earliest memory?”

The idea was that this sort of open-ended question might act as a sort of portal to the past; a way to get my subject talking and kick-start their brain into thinking about their life and memories. It didn’t always have the desired effect, though; after a few such openings I discovered a tendency to take my question literally and try to work out which, of a thousand early memories, might be the actual earliest one. The interviewee spent so much brain power trying to choose which story to tell me that we were never able to dig beyond the superficial. We never quite achieved the ‘flow’ that might reveal the thoughts and memories that hid underneath.

In later interviews I ended up changing the wording to a more general ‘tell me about your early life’ sort of question, and that more often than not had the desired effect (I think the record was Arthur Atkins, a Lancaster pilot who started talking and didn’t stop for nearly two hours). But during the time I was asking other people about their earliest memories, I couldn’t help but try to answer the question myself.

So what is my own earliest memory?

Well, it’s very clear in my mind. I’m about four years old, and with my Dad, I’m standing next to some train tracks just outside Bowral in New South Wales. I hear the whistle of a train, and then it bursts out of the tunnel, pulled by not one, but two green steam locomotives: one is the famous Flying Scotsman and the other, the big streamlined NSW passenger engine known as 3801. For a young boy, the smoke, steam, speed and sounds are absolutely thrilling. I’m particularly amazed to see that the wheels of 3801 are taller than I am!

This story has always been at the heart of who I am. Green remains my favourite colour and I still have a soft spot for 3801. The story gets trotted out every so often and I tell it easily and fluently.

There’s just one problem:

That’s not how it actually happened.

My long-cherished memory is wrong.

I only realised this in the last couple of weeks, when I received a package of old photographs from my parents. In amongst the collection was one particular photo. It shows me, it shows my Dad, and it shows 3801 hauling a train. So far, so good.

But where is Flying Scotsman?

Yes, the British locomotive was out in Australia in 1988, on a tour for Australia’s Bicentenary. Yes, in 1988 I was four years old. But despite the image that is still in my mind, I did not see it go past that day. My memory is incorrect. (Oh, I’d always thought it was just me and my Dad who were there, but the photo clearly shows my two sisters as well, and I imagine the photo was taken by my mother.)

What happened here?

In the photo, 3801 carries a headboard that says ‘Bicentennial Train’. The back of the photo carries a caption in my dad’s handwriting, saying the photo was taken in December 1988. Now knowing something about the Flying Scotsman tour, I suspect that the train was probably on its way to Moss Vale, not far to the south of where the photo was taken, to meet up with Flying Scotsman and then run together, in parallel, back up to Sydney.

I might have been too young to properly comprehend that. But there’s another photo in an old album that might hold an explanation; it was sent to me by my grandfather (a lifelong train enthusiast), who lived in the Blue Mountains. It shows Flying Scotsman, in a double-header with 3801, on tracks close to Grandpa’s house. Yep, both locomotives. I was not there.

I think I’ve simply conflated my own memories of seeing a train going past with that photo from Grandpa, and put Flying Scotsman in my mind somewhere it never was. And once the false memory was seeded, by telling the story I’ve reinforced it. If you tell yourself something is true often enough, eventually you’ll believe it.

But it’s still a foundational memory for me. I remember the thundering noise, the smell of the oil, the sound of the whistle and the shaking of the ground. I remember the excitement as this big, green monster went past, and it inspired a lifelong love of steam trains – especially big green ones. That is all true. The important bits of what was it like remain intact in my memory, even if I don’t have all the details spot-on correct.

Human memory is an unreliable source. Oral histories probably aren’t very useful for exact details of the what and the when. But goodness, can they paint a picture of what it was like to be there.

Just make sure you check the records before relying on the details.

Oh, and those train wheels? Many years later Dad and I went on a heritage trip on 3801.

They’re still taller than me.

Author’s note, 5 June 2021: Since this post was published, several major Australian newspapers have printed serious allegations against the soldier it names, concerning his conduct in Afghanistan. While I make no comment on the veracity or otherwise of the newspapers’ claims, I acknowledge the possibility that the allegations add a different context to the soldier’s testimony as it’s quoted here,. However, because its central thrust is about how oral history needs to be taken with a grain of salt (rather than commenting on the actual incident described), my post remains valid and I’ve decided to leave it here unchanged (except for this note).

There was a quite interesting article in Good Weekend, the magazine that comes with the Saturday newspaper here in Melbourne, last week. In Afghanistan, a split-second decision separates life and death is an edited extract of a new book called No Front Line by Chris Masters, who as a journalist was ‘embedded’ with Australian Special Forces units in 2006.

The article (and I suppose the book, though I haven’t read it) looks at some of the troubling issues to rise out of Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan: the moral ambiguity, the culture of the Special Forces and the questions that remain over what actually happened there. It’s worth a read.

It was a little snippet contained within the article that really grabbed my attention, though. Much of the extract published in Good Weekend centres around one particular action that happened in early June 2006 in the hills around the Chora Valley, near Tarin Kowt (where one of the principle Australian bases was located). An Australian patrol made up of six men climbed up into the hills to establish a reconnaissance post overlooking the valley, which had recently been overrun by Taliban troops. “Later accounts of what occurred vary markedly,” Masters writes. Two soldiers who were involved in the incident recalled a young Afghan male, who carried nothing, approaching their position. He “looked past the OP, then walk[ed] on across their front from right to left.” Then he came back, this time carrying a bag. Sometime around here was when it was decided that the man was a danger to the soldiers at the observation post, and two of the soldiers stalked him and, in the euphemistic language of the later after-action report, “neutralised the threat.” Whether or not this shooting of an apparently unarmed man, who may or may not have been a civilian, was justified is one of the moral questions that often arises in war.

And this is where it gets interesting. One of the other soldiers involved in the incident was Lance-Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith (who would receive a Medal for Gallantry for this action, and later a Victoria Cross for another incident). He was interviewed by an Australian War Memorial historian in 2011 about what happened on the ridgeline. “A couple of blokes just walked up, literally,” he said, “probably about two hours before dark, walked straight up to the front of the OP, got about 30 metres to the front…”

Note Roberts-Smith’s first sentence: “a couple of blokes” [my emphasis]. The presence of two potential enemies rather than just one paints the incident in a rather different light. So here we have accounts from three eyewitnesses, all soldiers who were directly involved in the action, that differ over a quite significant basic fact. Adding to the confusion, in a different, later, interview, Roberts-Smith said “an armed insurgent walked to within 30 metres” – an. A sole individual.

Which was it, really? The post-action report, written later by the patrol commander in the aftermath of the incident, identifies a single person. That, the original two soldiers’ testimony and Roberts-Smith’s later interview all agree that there was just the one Afghan who approached the observation post, so it’s likely that this is the true number. So why did Roberts-Smith apparently get it wrong when talking to the War Memorial?

I reckon that it’s most likely simply because of the way the human mind works. Roberts-Smith wrote to the AWM after the interview, setting out a few factors that could explain it: Firstly, five years had passed between the incident and recalling it in an interview. In the interim, he had been sent to Afghanistan four more times. And the interview itself was more than two hours and 40 minutes long. “It would appear,” he wrote, “I have confused my many engagements.”

And finally we get to the point. Oral history depends on memories – indeed, oral history is made up of memories. But memories are volatile things. Time can dull the stories or even remove details entirely, and experiences can, perhaps, get muddled together in retelling – even more so when, as is my experience of collecting oral histories, those doing the remembering are nonagenarians dealing with events that took place more than seven decades ago. Memories can be manipulated, too: if you tell yourself often enough, intentionally or otherwise, that something happened, before too long you’ll believe it really did.

In short, oral histories are not particularly reliable for the bare facts of history. They remain extremely valuable sources because they are first-hand accounts of the time under study and can capture a feeling of what it was like. But make sure you check the facts against documented sources before taking them as gospel.

It’s nothing deliberate on the part of those being interviewed. It’s just the way the mind works.

Tag: Memory

What’s your earliest memory?

The perils of oral history