Getting Into History:
the Problem with People in Historical Re-enactments

abstract

"Audiences are surrounded by the action and, ultimately, caught in the crossfire as the battle rages," promises the website for Blood on the Southern Cross, an evening sound-and-light show put on six days a week at Sovereign Hill in Ballarat, Victoria. So-called "living history" museums such as Sovereign Hill, an outdoor tourist attraction 90 minutes outside of Melbourne, have in the past few decades reclaimed performance as a popular strategy to transport audiences to the "interior" moment of history. Tapping into the special ability of human bodies to learn by doing and by physical experience, Sovereign Hill invites tourists literally to "walk into" a colonial gold-mining town as it is performed around them. While costumed employees act out scenarios on the dusty streets and shopkeepers sell traditional wares made on site, paying visitors are meant to feel as though they are actually a part of the action around them, "getting into" history as it happens.

Throughout my travels to tourist and historical sites around Australia, I have been subjected to a wide range of interpretive strategies. Many of these museums have begun to employ creative performance techniques to engage the body of the visitor with a version of history. In this paper, I will look at three ways that historical displays position the interpreting body relative to the historical moment. Examples of tourist sites from around Australia will illustrate the use of third-person, second-person, and first-person interpretation, and I will pay special attention to the points at which the visitor's body interferes with or actually endangers each of these interpretive techniques.

At Sovereign Hill, the attempt in their production of Blood on the Southern Cross to avoid the complications that bodies cause by removing them altogether from the "re-enactment" generates other problems. I will conclude this paper by discussing the merits and disadvantages of the innovative techniques used in Blood on the Southern Cross in the context of the special demands and expectations placed on living history institutions.

D. Ross, University of Michigan